The Night Bell (7 page)

Jack Deacon, coroner at Mayfair General and OPS Central’s chief forensic pathologist, entered by the front
door and Hazel led him into Interview 2. Ray Greene stood to greet him, but he received no response from the doc. Deacon was silent all the way in to the room.

He sat down at the head of the table. She and Ray joined him on his left and right, and the doctor pulled a resealable bag out of his coat pocket. Sundancer’s bone was inside it. “The vertebra I’m not done with yet, although I am about ninety per cent sure it’s human.” He unzipped the bag and shook the bone out gently onto the tabletop. “
This
,” he said, standing back from it as if it were radioactive, “I’m a hundred per cent sure about. It’s the iliac crest of an adolescent boy. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen.”

“What is –”

“The top ridge of the pelvis bone, Commander.” He showed them on his body, pulling his lab coat up and cocking a hip at them. “This. Been gnawed at by animals or hacked at, from the look of it.”

“Which do you think it is? Gnawed or hacked?”

“I’d put my money on steel over teeth.”

They all looked at it in grave silence.

“A boy,” Greene said. “How do you know?”

“We’re shaped differently.” Deacon ran his finger along the outside curve of the bone. “The male pelvis is taller, thinner, the iliac curves inward more. The female is broader and deeper. This is a boy.”

“Not a man.”

“No.”

“So is it from a grave?” Hazel asked. “Is there an old graveyard?”

“Impossible to say. But it would be strange for a single bone to turn up if it was a graveyard. Even with machines turning the dirt over, you’d think there’d be much more.”

“Maybe there is more,” said Hazel.

“And that’s why they stopped work on the golf courses,” Ray said, flashing on an idea. “Who wants to risk their well-heeled clients swatting some kid’s skull out of a sand trap? That’s why they’re building low-rises instead.”

“Cover it up, literally, with buildings,” Hazel said. “But Oscar Fremont said they stopped construction three months ago. Maybe management knows it has a problem. They erected fences to keep people in their houses and not out hiking and stumbling across bits of Buddy.”

Greene leaned in to get a closer look at the fragment of iliac crest. “I bet there are a lot of people involved in Tournament Acres who wouldn’t want it defined as a crime scene.”

“If we go,” said Deacon, resuming his professorial air, “with the theory that the marks on the bone are from its being chopped, hacked, stabbed, or otherwise butchered, then we must conclude that the wounds are post-mortem and the body was broken down by accident or on purpose.”

“Well, you know where it was found.”

“Certainly. You also see that this amount of knife work is overkill for the purposes of murder. So the cause of death is so far a mystery.” Jack Deacon was bloodlessly professional.
Hazel liked that about him, but she doubted outside of work that he was a barrel of monkeys either.

“How old is it?” Greene asked.

Deacon picked the bone up and put it back into the evidence bag. “It’s not recent. I only have a UV in my lab; I have to send this down to Toronto for nitrogen and amino analysis. But it’s at least … thirty years old? Forty? Two hundred? We’ll know in a couple of days.”

Constable Dietrich “Kraut” Fraser entered, out of breath. “Sorry.”

“You get your toilet paper for your soft bottom?” said Hazel.

“Jack,” he said. Ignoring her and offering his hand.

“Dietrich.”

“It’s a kid’s bone,” Hazel said. “Around fifteen years old. Top of his pelvis –”

“Iliac crest,” said Deacon.

“A kid,” she repeated. “Fourteen, fifteen. Hacked up.”

Now Fraser sat. “Jesus.”

“A heavy blade chopped through it here,” said Jack Deacon, “and here. And these marks are hacks that didn’t break bone. Could be when it got tossed through a combine maybe –”

“A combine?”

“The field, Kraut,” Hazel said. She gestured impatiently at Deacon. “Continue.”

“This bone could have been ploughed up any number of times and moved all over.”

“Right. Is it possible it’s from a buri –”

“He doesn’t know,” said Hazel. “But he thinks it’s unlikely. We’re going to need to sweep that field.”

“God,” said Fraser, taking the bag from the pathologist. He held the bone up to his eye. “How do we know it’s human, though?”

“He knows,” said Hazel. “We need a team. There’s more out there.”

“You’re going to need a dozen people,” Ray said.

“It’s twenty hectares. We’ll need more than a dozen.”

“I’ll see who I can get from Mayfair.”

“Call Barrie,” Hazel said. “I’m going to call Brendan Givens. How much do you want to bet Honey Eisen and the Fremonts aren’t the first people to uncover a bone in that place. Maybe he’s got a whole skeleton in that desk of his.”

Fraser nodded sagely. “I bet that’s why they stopped building the golf –”

“Get here on time, Sergeant,” she said, “and you can take part in the cogitating.”

They tasked fifteen uniforms to sweep the field. There was no use in complaining. Willan had sent six Mayfair officers, including Victoria Torrance, and two of his scene-of-crime officers. A few other bodies came in from other detachments and Hazel had two other SOCOs apart from Fraser: sergeants Gerry Costamides and Melvin Renald. Macdonald had begged to be included, but after his last appearance at Tournament Acres he didn’t put up a fight when Hazel told him he was staying home. They’d be eighteen in total. They took two vans out of Port Dundas.

Over the phone, Brendan Givens had been apoplectic. Why didn’t they come back on Monday, when there would be fewer people around to upset? Hazel told him they’d be there in two hours.

She rode in the van with Costamides and Renald. Costamides hated Renald’s driving and spent the ride glaring at him. Hazel bounced around in the back seat. “You think you can slow down?” Gerry said. “The only unit that doesn’t have to drive fast, but Heavyfoot here thinks there’s no speed limit.”

“I’ve got things to do later today,” said Renald. “How big is this place?”

“Keep your eyes on the road, Mel. A number of acres.”

“We don’t have kliegs,” he said. “We’ll work to sundown, then I’m out.”

“You’re out when I say you’re out.”

“I’m out when Ray Greene says I’m out. It’s a waste of resources to dig in the dark.”

Hazel wasn’t terribly fond of Melvin anyway, but now he was really getting on her nerves. It was no secret his marriage was ending, nor that it was probably time to reassign him, but the threat of the downsizing that was coming with amalgamation had been inspiring him to keep it all under control: the drinking, the depression, his on-duty behaviour. He’d been in the OPS for thirty years – bouncing around detachments and grinding out his days to retirement. He arrived at Port Dundas in 2002, dragging a sheaf of warnings and citations behind him, but he’d been a pretty good cop. She’d only noticed him slipping in the last couple of years.

Brendan Givens met them on the stone porch of the clubhouse. Gaston Bellefeuille stood behind him by the door,
his arms crossed over his chest. “I warned you about this,” Givens said to Hazel. “People are muckraking.”

“Well, we’re going to have to do the same now,” she replied. Renald and Costamides were unloading their kits as the second van pulled up. At the sight of it, Givens blanched and looked over at his security guard, who shrugged.

“Ask ’em if they have a warrant.”

“Of course we have a warrant,” Hazel said. “We’re rather organized about these sorts of things.”

Givens, aghast, watched more vans arrive. “Why do you need so many people?”

“We need them to make a grid on your unbuilt golf course and make sure there aren’t any more surprises out there.”

“I’ve walked the land for that second course a hundred times,” he protested. “It’s cornstalks and good Canadian Shield, that’s what it is. You’ll see for yourselves.”

“I guess we will. How many more bones have you locked up in your desk, Mr. Givens? I presume you’ve disposed of them.”

“What bones?”

“Why didn’t you get rid of the vertebra?”

His face coloured. “I liked it.” Hazel shouldered past Bellefeuille, and he followed her in. “We’re dealing with enough bad publicity as it is,” Givens said urgently in her ear. “People shouldn’t be taking matters into their own hands! That’s why we have a shareholders’ committee, a board of directors … there’s a time and a place for everything.”

“It sounds like your various committees and shareholders have no power over locals armed with office supplies.”

“Forget about Honey Eisen!” He stopped her with a hand on her arm. “And you don’t think the Fremonts aren’t up to butchering a chicken and then claiming they found human remains on their property? Oscar Fremont fashions himself a muckety-muck.”

“It’s not a chicken.”

“Do you
know
who Fremont is?”

“No.”

The others had stopped. “Insurance,” said Givens. “Home, life, car, injury, you name it. He’d insure your toenails if you wanted him to. He owns his company. They have two floors in Yorkville in Toronto. You know what these people are good at? Not paying.”

“I don’t see the angle, Brendan.”

“They want out. They’ll default, sue, and then others will follow. I know he’s talking to people.”

“Did he put seventy-two-year-old Honey Eisen up to cracking your kneecap with a pen holder?”

“Maybe,” he said, pressing his lips together. There was one big bead of sweat forming in his right eyebrow. When his face got tight he looked like Jimmy Durante. What
was
that kind of nose called? Spoonbill? Bulb? “Just do what you have to do, and when you
don’t
find anything out there, I want to talk to you again. We have as much right to your protection as anyone else.”

“Who’s we?” asked Fraser, coming past with a bundle of hockey-stick shafts bound up with velcro straps.

Givens ignored him. To Hazel he said, “The businesspeople who keep Westmuir County in the black, that’s who. Those of us who are working hard to pump up the economy in a part of the province where soybeans aren’t worth what they used to be!”

“I’ll keep your good works and that of the Ascot Group in mind as we poke around, OK?” she said.

They were shown through the main part of the clubhouse to the restaurant, and out onto the long patio that faced what was supposed to be one of the golf courses, but which was enclosed by a slatted wood fence seven feet high. On the inside, it was hung with pretty planters, and stained a warm, dark colour. Hazel guessed the fence hadn’t been in the original plans.

Patrons and guests enjoying a late lunch in the shadow of this fence looked up at the appearance of so many uniforms. Givens was instructing the waiters to busy themselves with their customers. He led the search party to a locked gate in the fence, but Hazel stepped onto a wooden bench partway there and peered over. It was a wasteland beyond, with unstained versions of this same fence creating an unbroken border around about three-quarters of the development. To her right, houses ranged up along the
15th Sideroad (now Pebble Beach Boulevard). The completed ten holes were to her right as well, and looking to the north, there was a mix of trees and bramble where the earthmovers had stopped carving out the final eight holes of the first course. From where she stood it was forty football fields of neglected land hemmed in by fences that were designed to keep it from view. “Pretty country,” she said.

“If you’d rather not jump over,” Brendan Givens replied dolefully, “you can come through this gate.”

She stepped down and took one of Renald’s cases from him. “Don’t lock it behind us. No telling what might happen.”

“I know what’s going to happen,” said Givens, downcast, but he said nothing else. They passed through the gate onto the field’s verge.

“Someone’s worried about his job,” said Renald. Behind him, sixteen more uniforms flowed out into the afternoon sun.

They spread out, twenty metres apart, and began to sweep. Their sticks moved back and forth in front of them through the wet stubble, lifting the sodden corn stalks up and tossing them aside. Rotted corncobs were mashed underfoot. There hadn’t been live corn in this field for at least two summers: they were walking on a layer of compost. It smelled like sweet, wet mould.

Every fifty metres, the SOCOs pushed a red plastic marker into the earth and looped a yellow ribbon into the open catch at the top. Each officer performed their task alone, only dimly aware of the others moving at a stately pace up the field. When they got midway, Hazel looked behind herself and saw some of the patio diners looking over the fence. She imagined Givens was drinking in his office by now. She would be.

They kept to a special channel and reported their finds. Sergeant Costamides found some broken glass. One of the Mayfair team called in a condom, another found a shoe. They trekked forward like a slow-moving wave, examining every bit of ground in front of them. In three hours, they reached where the houses on Fuzzy Zoeller Way stopped and the land went all the way up to the empty boys’ home and Concession Road 7. When they got to the road, they shifted five metres to the east and started back down.

Hazel looked over her shoulder at the back of the old Dublin Home for Boys. It sat heavily on its plot, its gateless front pillars still facing Concession Road 7, aka Augusta Avenue. The orphanage was made of blocks of grey, local stone. Cheap when it had been built eighty years ago, it now had a fashionable brutalism to it that would make it an interesting building to convert into the promised second clubhouse, in front of which the world’s second-largest wave pool was to be installed, also as promised.

Orphanages like Dublin Home no longer existed. There were no Victorian workhouses like the ones she’d read about in school. The places like the one her brother had spent the first decade of his life in were now demolished or abandoned, but they still bred secrets. Society doesn’t like to talk about its abandoned children. Behind every orphan or homeless kid is a hard story: a dead parent, an addicted parent, a poor parent, a rape victim, an act of passion or carelessness, a story of abuse. Imagine being a child in that world, she thought, passed from hand to hand with no guarantee of kindness.