The Night Bell (25 page)

Greene spoke. “Yeah … Uh-huh … OK, thanks. I’ll come out and talk to you in a couple of minutes.” He hung up. “He’s been logged on remotely since the night of his disappearance.”

Fraser began to offer excuses right away for why no one had thought of it. “It couldn’t have occurred to any of us that they were
using
Renald –”

“MacTier is going to log him off and change his password.”

“You don’t think that could put him in danger?” Hazel asked. “You don’t want to make Mel unnecessary.”

They all thought about that for a minute.

“We can get MacTier to redirect his logon to a dummy site and falsify its updates,” Ray said. “And, just to be safe, we should all switch to another secure channel when we’re discussing our movements. MacTier will find us a frequency. Do everything else on the regular channels.”

“Should we feed some false information down those channels?” Fraser asked. “Maybe match it up to the bogus updates?”

Ray held up his hand:
STOP
. “MacTier will call you with the new channel. And Hazel?”

“Yes?”

“Send Wingate home.”

ChemLab Forensic in Toronto had two more unnamed bodies for them based on their DNA testing of the bones.
This brought the total to eighteen victims. The Maracle DNA was still being run. By three in the afternoon, all the weekly reports were done. Eileen Bail had gone down to the cacophonous dispute involving the music school and explained to both parties the importance of getting along. Maybe so-and-so could do this, and so-and-so could do that, and everyone would be happy. She reported that both took her advice, but not without one more verbal lashing from each of them trying to get the last word. “Men,” she said.

Yoshida didn’t answer his phone.

Wingate got ready to leave, finally, at four – four hours after his shift ended, and two hours after Ray had told Hazel to get rid of him. He insisted on an update before he went home. “So I can keep thinking about auctions at home this weekend.
Actions
,” he spat, trying to correct himself and failing.
“Options.”

“Those are fairly limited right now,” she told him. “Dale Whitman died in 1965. I’ve ordered the certificate, but I have the listing. I can’t find Peter Lynch. Whitman had a daughter and she’s still alive. She’s a hairdresser.”

“Why are we not actively looking for Leon Cutter? Every hour that passes keeps Sergeant Renald in danger.”

“We’ve talked about this,” she said. “We’re assuming a wait-and-see attitude over the weekend. It’ll give me time to talk to this Hibiki Yoshida first, I think.”

“When are you going?”

“As soon as buddy answers his phone!”

“
Hibiki
is a strange name,” he said. “How does he spell it?”

She laughed. “I imagine he spells it the way all the Hibikis spell
Hibiki
.” She spun her computer screen around so he could see. “But he goes by Hiro.”

Hazel did her normal Saturday shift, but the case was quiescent, as if lying in wait, saving its strength for the next wave. Cutter was silent now and Yoshida unreachable. She had an urge to go up to Dunneview anyway. Yoshida didn’t know what she’d discussed with Eppert and Clemson; that information was only in her notebook. Unless Cutter had wired their houses. Unless they were all in on it. How many people might it take to stay ready for fifty years, to see justice done? His or their methods suggested justice wasn’t enough. They had raised the bones to the status of holy relics: sacred objects that could not be touched except by a priest. Or the police. The murders of innocent homeowners were ritualistic in this way, cleansing and vengeful.

It was becoming increasingly clear why and how the boys’ killer had chosen his victims. He was practising the ultimate form of birth control: removing genes from the gene pool. What did the three identified dead boys have in common? The younger Maracle was an Indian possessed of uncommon strength; perhaps he had been an easy choice. Deasún was a simple boy, of Slavic or Irish origin, based on her searches. Big as well. Shearing was dark enough to look black and maybe that was enough to get you crossed off this person’s list. It was pure eugenics. Their release into society would likely have meant the continuation of their line.

She felt some relief that Dale Whitman was dead. Lynch was probably dead, too. Or he would be in his nineties.

If any of the other doctors were living and findable, she hadn’t turned them up. However, on Thursday Wingate had tracked down one of the nurses who’d worked at both Charterhouse and Dublin Home. Frances Kelly was living in Toronto. James had had no trouble getting her on the phone, but she’d declined to discuss Dublin Home right then, saying she had her hands full with her sister, who was dying of MS. She offered to call after her sister was asleep. But she had not called Thursday night, nor Friday, and James had turned her name and number over to Hazel.

Wingate wouldn’t be in again until Monday. Recently, he’d been protesting how infrequent his shifts seemed; this case had made him hungry to get back and he was raring to go. Hazel promised she’d talk to Ray about it, but this
was just to put him off for a while. She knew he wasn’t ready. It wasn’t just his cognition (as evidenced in his malapropisms) or his physical deterioration. She recognized a drug addiction when she saw one. She’d had her own battle with painkillers, and she knew he was living on pills. It showed in his eyes, which were sometimes merely tired, but at other times glassy. (Michael may have had him on organic vegetable juices, and who knows what other supplements. Whatever it was, was it any worse than the pills
– plural
– she saw him popping into his mouth almost every day?) She knew Ray was aware of the changes in his detective sergeant. He wasn’t going to clear James for normal duty until he was cleaner than he was now.

Cleaner
. That was an achievable goal. She’d stopped taking painkillers because, eventually, they’re something you have to give up completely. But she still drank. Not a lot, but she drank. So did Ray, and so did Geraldine Costamides and Dietrich Fraser. First you saw things, then you drank. She was still of a mind to give James the greatest amount of slack possible – to let him do whatever he needed to do – and to trust Michael to keep an eye on him. She wanted to spend more time worrying about James, but her mind was trained on dead children.

Sunday, she stayed at home. Emily watched
Thelma and Louise
. For supper, Hazel made a chicken casserole with
toasted Ritz crackers on top. Emily had a few hearty mouthfuls before running out of appetite. Hazel piloted her back in front of the television and turned on Discovery for her to watch
MythBusters
. After a while, Emily’s head drooped. Hazel turned the volume down and listened for her mother’s breath. She was still breathing.

She took out Frances Kelly’s number and went into the dining room. They hadn’t used it in more than two years. It had been a long while since she’d heard the voices of her mother’s friends cackling over cards in here. She dialled, and after a few rings a woman’s voice answered.

“Miss Kelly?” Hazel said.

“This is she.”

“I believe you spoke to a colleague of mine, Detective Sergeant James Wingate. My name is Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef. Do you have a few minutes to talk about the Dublin Boys Home and Charterhouse? You worked at both facilities in the fifties and sixties, correct?”

“That’s correct. I’m sorry I didn’t call back, but my sister has taken a turn for the worse and we were busy with her all weekend.”

“I hope she’ll be OK.”

“She won’t,” said Miss Kelly with calm finality. “She’s dying now. In and out of hospital. You’d put a dog down that was as sick as she is.” She sighed and sniffed back tears. “We are a cruel species.”

“I wish you and your family well,” Hazel said. “Is now a good time?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me: what were your tasks at the two homes, and were you employed by any others?”

“I worked a tick at the Fort Leonard Home, but most of my time I was at Dublin Home and Charterhouse.”

The name of Fort Leonard sent Hazel into a moment of dark reverie. That had been Alan’s home before he came to Port Dundas and became a Micallef. A good name, a trusted name in a small place, in a time when that was everything.

“How would you describe Dublin Home? When you were there in the late fifties?”

“Things were different then, as you probably can imagine …”

“I’ve lived in Port Dundas my whole life. I know things were different then. How were they different at Dublin Home?”

“I don’t want to give you the impression we were completely unenlightened. I worked in the infirmary, and I did my overnight shifts, as we all did. I can’t say everyone who lived there was happy – a lot of our boys came to us from real trouble, and there wasn’t enough money in the system back then, same as now. Society’s least gets least of its bounty. They squirrelled them away – the old folks, the unwanted kids, the natives and the mentally ill.

“From birth to age ten, it wasn’t unusual for some children to see the insides of five institutions. And some of them were born broken and some of them were special cases. Every child, if you want to know the truth, was a special case. I wanted to put each and every one of them in a warm house with a mother and father and maybe a sibling or two.”

“What happened if one of the boys died?” Hazel asked. “It must have happened.”

“Of course it happened. Boys weak to begin with sometimes succumbed, for instance if there was a flu or meningitis outbreak. We suffered our share of epidemics. If whooping cough came through it might take one or two with it. There were polio scares. And earlier on, before I did my RN, I heard they’d dealt with TB a number of times. Those old government homes incubated germs.”

“Were there ever any unusual deaths or suspicions of foul play?”

“Not that I was aware of.”

“Did you ever hear rumours that sometimes children disappeared in the night?”

Miss Kelly took a moment. “I don’t pay attention to rumour. It is almost always wrong.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Suddenly Miss Kelly’s voice was raised. “I’ll be there in a minute, dear! Yes, this is my house, dear. You are sleeping in my house.” Hazel heard the phone being muffled. She
imagined Miss Kelly had pressed the receiver against her clothing. Then she was back. “There was a boy one time who made it onto the roof and slipped on the stone slate and tumbled to his death. That’s the only time something like that happened, if you are looking for something unusual.”

“Do you recall when that was?”

“New Year’s of ’58 or ’59.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Not his last name. He was called Valentijn. A simple boy, big and playful. Covered in hair by the age of thirteen. The other boys liked him, but he was trouble.”

“You saw this Valentijn? You saw his body?”

“No, I wasn’t on shift, but I came in the next morning and all the children were upset, talking among themselves.”

“What did the children think had happened to him?”

“They were worked up about it,” Miss Kelly said. “Especially the younger boys. They were sure Old Father Crumb had come in the night.”

“Old Father Crumb?”

“It was a ghost story,” she said. “Something the older boys terrorized the little ones with. If you heard the night bell, it meant Old Father Crumb had come in the night. It was a sort of campfire story, you see? I never met a person named Crumb though, but that day they were buzzing with it.”

“Where was Valentijn buried?”

“Back then, I’m afraid, if you had no next of kin to take your body, you were just buried in a potter’s field. I think
there was one in Mayfair. No names, no markers. Poor boy he was, and now no one knows he walked the earth.”

“You know,” said Hazel. “And I do, too.”

The new week began with an email message from Cutter that came in the form of a jpeg. It was a photo of Renald beaten black and blue. He was holding a piece of card on which was written:
THIS IS NOT MY HALLOWEEN COSTUME
.

Hazel looked away. “Jesus, Ray. Don’t spread that.”

“What do you want to do?”

“What’s the email address?”

“Tell me what you want to say.”

Something about the tone of his voice. “Why? Show me.” She went around his desk and looked. The sender was named
[email protected]
. She grabbed the keyboard away.

She clicked reply and wrote:
If you harm him any further
,
I’ll make sure you never go to trial
.

“Hazel!”

She pressed send.

“Is there anything that pops into your head you ignore?”

“I mean it, too,” she said.

Cartwright appeared at the office door. “Sorry to interrupt, but you just got a call from ChemLab Forensic in Toronto. It’s a match.”

“Is he still on the line?”

“Nope. He just said there was a 98.9 per cent chance that Mr. Maracle is related by blood to the sample you provided. That was it. He said it was a yes or no proposition, and I was to tell you yes, although if you want more certainty than that, it’ll take another week. But –” she looked down at the note she was holding “– he also said that there was only one chance in forty-six billion that it was a false positive.”

Hazel and Greene looked at each other. “That closes the circle, then,” she said. “Eloy Maracle. We know one of our victims now.” She got up.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to deliver the news to his brother in person. And I think I’ll have a couple of new questions for him.”

“In the meantime?” he asked.

“Keep Wingate working the records. Let him stay as long as he wants.”

Hazel was in Toronto by 9:30. Claude Maracle’s address was in Mimico, down by the lake, the southeast corner of Etobicoke. An old enclave of the city. There was no answer at his door. She went over to Lakeshore Boulevard and had a coffee.

ChemLab had faxed their report. She went over it again. Its stark math was certain: Claude and the bones shared the same parents. Fate had divided them, but science had made them brothers again.