The Night Bell (34 page)

“Yeah. Look it over. You’re probably the only person on the planet who can read my handwriting. Where is he? What’s his next move? Maybe we can cut him off before he makes any more rash decisions with one of our own.”

“I don’t know. Where are you now?”

“Driving as fast as I can, north.”

“Should you call an ambulance? Is she really hurt?”

“She’s made of some kind of material you can’t get anymore,” Wingate said. “She’ll be fine.”

Hazel passed the sign for Caplin – forty kilometres to go – and she was seeing things. Flashes of light in her field of vision, tiny pale stars that were hollow in the middle. “You don’t look so good,” Gloria said into the back seat microphone. “Maybe you should pull over.”

“You’re pretty blasé for someone who’s going to spend the rest of her life behind bars.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if either of us is going to make it back to Port Dundas. To judge by your driving. You should get a couple of corks for those holes in your head.”

She’d soaked through the wad of napkins. Maybe it was blood loss, this feeling she had of becoming lighter and lighter even as the road elongated in front of her. She heard Gloria at a distance say, “Oh shit –” and then Hazel saw the side of the road coming toward her, and beyond it, flashing lights. Broken, half-mad James Wingate to the rescue.

James Wingate marched Gloria Whitman into the back of the station house. Ray Greene came out of his office, and then most of his colleagues in the pen stood up and watched him emerge from the rear corridor, one hand holding onto the cuffs behind Gloria’s back. No one said a word when he took her past Hazel’s office and down the hallway to the cells.

“I want all hands on deck at four o’clock,” Ray said returning to his office. “By then, we better have something on the whereabouts of Melvin Renald. Detective Inspector Micallef will brief us on progress in the case. I’m clearing overtime for anyone who wants it.”

Greene closed himself in his office and called the reporters he’d promised the rest of the scoop to. It paid to keep a
couple of decent journalists on your side, to ensure a proper flow of information. To Ray Greene, the press was an extension of the police, if used properly.

“Headline,” Ray said to each of the reporters in turn. “
Family Murder Spree Solved
. Lead:
Port Dundas OPS say they have identified the culprit in the murders of more than twenty young men at the Dublin Home for Boys. The murders, which took place over a ten-year period from 1951 to 1960, are believed to have been committed by a former Port Dundas citizen, Dr. Dale Whitman, now deceased. According to police, the doctor’s daughter, Gloria Whitman, was also involved. Today the Port Dundas detachment of the OPS announced the arrest of Ms. Whitman on first-degree murder charges in connection with the 1957 disappearance of local girl Carol Lim. Lim’s body was discovered yesterday at the site of the Gateway Plaza, immediately after a groundbreaking ceremony meant to inaugurate construction. We believe that Miss Lim was murdered
.” He listened for typing. “You can write the rest yourself.”

Hazel accepted a total of nine stitches in the two gashes in her face, no anesthetic, but she wouldn’t take a gauze bandage around her head, nor a painkiller. One of the paramedics that attended to her was Mira, who’d come to the house, and she gave Hazel a hairy eyeball. “You’re a handful, too,” she said. “As bad as your mother.”

“No,” Hazel said. “She’s as bad as I am.”

She went to lie down in her office. The full briefing was scheduled for four o’clock. Her head was swimming with pain and information, much of which was settling now as hard fact.

She closed her eyes and listened to the life of the station house. There was a calm that came before announcing a dreadful truth. She listened to Melanie Cartwright’s printer spitting out sheets of paper. Briefing materials. The matter out of which the story gets stitched together.

She went back in her mind to the day she and Gloria had taken their walk up the bluff. She saw the sky again, its zippers of white cloud. Felt the twigs underfoot and smelled the sunbaked leaves on the ground. She walked along the path that followed the edge of the bluff to the Lion’s Paw and she encountered Carol Lim there, standing looking out over the country below them. She said nothing to Hazel, but handed her the battered pewter flask and began to climb down. Hazel went to the edge and watched her as she gingerly picked her way down the rock face. When she was partway down, she slipped one leg, and then the other, into a space between boulders as big as cars, and disappeared into the dark. Then a bell chimed and she woke up. It was ten to four.

Hazel stood at the back of the pen and called for quiet. The room settled. She thanked everyone. “Now, I have a
number of important announcements to make. First, as you know by now, the body found in the rubble of the Lion’s Paw has been positively identified as Carol Lim. She vanished in October of 1957 and was never found, although it was until now impossible to prove that she was dead. As a department, we have offered our deepest condolences to the extended Lim family, who have waited a long time for an answer.”

“What happened to your head, Hazel?” came a voice from the room.

She touched her stitches with a finger. “Please save your questions until later. You will be aware of an ongoing – albeit until recently stalled – investigation by the OPS concerning unidentified remains found on the grounds of Tournament Acres. Now that the crime site has been reopened by our friends at the RCMP, you can expect to be sent back out there with finer-toothed combs.

“We will be releasing the names of boys who are shown to have been taken in at Dublin Home, but whose names never appear afterward in any public record. Among those names, we believe, will be the names of the murdered children, and we are going to ask you to contribute to finding relations of these boys, no matter how distant, so they can give their remains proper burials.

“Today we have arrested Gloria Whitman, sixty-four, originally from Port Dundas, and charged her with first-degree murder in the death of Carol Lim. We believe that
her father, a well-known physician and prominent member of the community, is the person who orchestrated the abductions and murders of boys at Dublin Home.”

Murmurs arose in the pen like a shudder. Hazel called for quiet again, but the unrest was spreading. Some officers had risen at their desks and were looking in the same direction: the front of the station house. Right in front of Hazel, at the back of the pen, Constable Eileen Bail put her hand on her holster.

“What’s going on?” Hazel said. Half her officers were standing and blocking her view. She heard Sean Macdonald’s voice: “Drop your weapon!”

Hazel shoved her way forward and got to the front counter as Leon Cutter came through the front door of the station house, pushing Sergeant Melvin Renald in front of him with a pistol against his temple. The sergeant looked enervated; his face was dirty and his eyes sunken, as if he’d been kept in the dark.

“I’m keeping my word,” Cutter said. “Here’s your boy.”

He shoved Renald toward the arms of his colleagues.

“Now give me our killer,” he said.

The day went by in a blur to Detective Sergeant James Wingate. The sight of Hazel with the side of her face gashed open had set his nerves jangling, and as soon as Gloria Whitman was locked up behind bars, he left the station house and drove back to his apartment with his head blaring. Michael came out of the office, surprised to see his brother back, and then his look turned from one of surprise to alarm. James looked like he was going to collapse.

Michael took him into the bedroom and removed his jacket and shoes. “You look like shit,” he said.

James lay there breathing slowly, but not slowly enough. “I just locked up Gloria Whitman,” he said, smiling weakly. “What have you got to show for your afternoon?”

“Something that is going to blow your mind, actually.
But I’m not telling you anything until you have a Xanax in your system. You’re coming apart.” He went into the bathroom to fetch the pill.

They gave Renald water and an OPS jacket to keep warm. He shivered and hacked into his fist. “You fucking animal,” Hazel said to Cutter. “Was this really necessary?”

“Put him somewhere safe, before I change my mind,” Cutter replied. He kept his gun trained on a single person: Macdonald. The rest of the detachment had their guns trained on Cutter. Hazel put Melvin Renald in her office.

“You’re OK now, Mel. You’re home.” She took him inside and left him on her couch. He looked shell-shocked. “You’ll be safe in here, OK?”

Back in the pen, Ray was trying to talk Cutter down. “You’re holding a gun on an officer in a police station. You must know every unit in the area is racing toward us. Don’t let this end badly, Leon.”

“What are you going to do for me? For us?” Cutter asked, the gun shaking at Macdonald.

“I can assure you that justice – as much as it is possible – will be our goal for you. But you can’t get it this way. You have to surrender.”

“We don’t need the OPS to get us justice. Where were you in 1956, when he took three of us in one month alone? How come nobody knew?”

“It was a different time,” Ray said. In the distance, the shrill whine of sirens was forming. “Come on, Cutter. Put the gun down.”

“Give me the bones,” he said.

“I can’t. Every effort will be made to repatriate the bones to family members and if that fails, then a dignified burial.”

“What family members do Deasún and Shearing have?” he asked before spitting out the answer: “None!”

“Eloy Maracle is back with his brother. The same is possible for all of these missing dead.”

“If you won’t give me the bones,” said Cutter, “then give us the woman who’s locked up in that cell back there.”

“How do you know who’s locked up or not locked up here?”

“News travels fast. Give her to us and we’ll see what we can do with
her
bloodline. That’s the kind of justice we can accept. Symbolic justice.” The words
end his line
rang in Hazel’s head, but they were cut off by sirens. A white light flashed through the room. Tires screeched and doors slammed.

“They’re coming,” said Greene, imploring Cutter.

“
WE HAVE THE BUILDING SURROUNDED
.” A giant voice shook the station house. “
LOWER YOUR WEAPONS AND EXIT THE BUILDING WITH YOUR HANDS UP
.”

Hazel said: “They’re waiting for you, Leon. Don’t make a mistake.”

The hubbub on the other side of the room intensified. Someone was coming in through the rear parking lot door. It was Wingate. But not James. Michael Wingate.

“Sorry to interrupt! Can I come in?” He was crouched down, inching toward them and holding a piece of paper high in the air. “He was in Dublin Home for seven years!” he said.

“Who?” said Hazel. “Where is your brother? What are you doing here?”

“Ronald Melvin. He was born Ronald Melvin!” Wingate said.

She snatched the paper from James’s brother. Cutter began to laugh. She scanned the information. It was a legal name change record. In 1977, Ronald Melvin had changed his name to Melvin Renald and joined the academy. Her jaw locked in a half-open position. “Oh, shit,” she said. She spun to see her office door was already wide open.

“Ten-minute head start,” Cutter said, placing his gun on the countertop. Macdonald leaped over and cuffed him.

Hazel ran down the corridor to the cells. Gloria was gone.

“
THIS IS SUPERINTENDENT MARTIN SCOTT OF THE RCMP. WE WANT TO NEGOTIATE A PEACEFUL END TO THIS SITUATION
.”

Hazel ran out the front of the station house waving her hands. “Find Renald!” she yelled. Beside his car, Scott looked at her, perplexed. “He’s been working with Cutter
the whole fucking time. He has my prisoner!” Greene and Fraser ran past her.

“We’re going to fan out,” Ray said to her. “Bail, Macdonald, Wilton, and Windemere are already on the road.”

“Call Victoria Torrance!” she shouted.

“Already did!” His cruiser was parked in front. He and Fraser jumped into it. Hazel ran into the road and waved Superintendent Scott into his cruiser.

“Get me to Tournament Acres,” she said.

Martin Scott drove his cruiser at 165 kilometres an hour. “By permission of Her Majesty the Queen,” he said. Hazel sat in the passenger seat holding on to the dashboard. The road sped by under them. “Why do you think he’s gone back to the home?” he asked her.

“You didn’t hear Cutter. They’re after poetic justice now. Dublin Home’s got to be the backdrop.”

“I can go faster.”

“This is fast enough,” she said.

He put on the cruise control and focused on weaving in and out of lanes. Normally, such wild driving would have made her sick, but she trusted Scott, and as fast as he could go was the speed she wanted to go. She wondered where Wingate was if he’d had to send Michael. He was going to get another commendation if she had anything to do with it.

“Who killed the Fremonts? Are you going to tell me it was Willan?”

“He didn’t do the killing. Bellefeuille did.”

“Givens?”

“Same.”

“Willan had these people
executed
?”

“He claims Bellefeuille was acting on his own. You should hear what Bellefeuille claims.”

The mileage signs for Dublin ticked down. “So, are you married?” he asked her at the ten-kilometre sign.

“Divorced,” she said. “You?”

“Inevitably.” He turned onto Concession Road 7. They stopped speaking until the old boys’ home came into view. Hazel saw Renald’s cruiser parked under the gnarled apple trees.

“Cover me,” she said, getting out of the car.

“Can we have a drink afterward?” he asked her, taking the safety off his sidearm.

“Maybe you
are
going too fast.” She moved forward lightly on the tips of her toes and came into line with the door of the home. The plywood barricade had been prised off and it was open a crack. Scott trailed behind her at fifty paces. She waved to him to stay farther back.