The Unquiet Dead (11 page)

In the car, Rachel said, “A blonde, sir? Really?” And left it at that.

 

10.

Easily predictable events have been proceeding inexorably in the cruelest, most atrocious fashion.

For more than a week now, Rachel had been asked to do nothing further on the Drayton investigation. She'd resumed her regular workload with Dec and Gaffney, saying little about the previous week's excursions, wondering when Khattak would show up at their downtown office again. She had a few ideas about what they should do next and found Khattak's silence troubling. Had he ruled out the idea that Drayton was Dra
ž
en Krstić? If so, based on what evidence? Or had he found something that cemented his certainties? Was he even now reporting to his friend at Justice? He'd told her to keep the letters, and she'd spent her evenings digging into the history of the Bosnian war, trying to find out more about Krstić.

Initially, she'd thought that the letters spoke from the perspective of a survivor of the war with a very specific axe to grind, but Khattak had been right. The letters weren't just about the massacre at Srebrenica. They were far more wide-ranging, as if the letter writer was making a darker point, outlined in blood.

Sarajevo, did you hear my warning?

The sun on your face looks like blood on the morning.

She hadn't been able to trace either the letters or the source of those words. The only prints on the letters had been Drayton's. The words she had just read were conceivably from a translated poem or song. And Sarajevo wasn't the only name she had found in the letters. There were others, all of them, apart from Srebrenica, unfamiliar to her. Gorazde, Bihac, Tuzla, Zepa.

She'd looked them up. All six cities had been UN-designated “safe areas,” under United Nations protection. All six had come under siege, repeated bombardment, the destruction of religious and cultural monuments, and the recurrent targeting of water, electricity, and food supplies.

The letter writer encompassed it all.

Today a funeral procession was shelled.

Charred bodies lie along the street.

The whole city is without water.

Srebrenica, like Sarajevo, had suffered a three-year siege. In Srebrenica, civilians kept alive by a trickle of UN aid ultimately became victims of genocide. In less than twenty-four hours, safe area Srebrenica had been depopulated of its Muslim inhabitants: women and small children forcibly evacuated under the eyes of the Dutch battalion stationed there, men and boys murdered in their thousands.

Nearby Zepa escaped the massacres but suffered the same depopulation.

All at the hands of the logistically efficient killing machine known as the VRS or Bosnian Serb Army, supplied materially and in all the other ways that mattered by the reconstituted Yugoslav National Army.

We will not reward the aggressor with the carve-up of Bosnia, redrawn along ethnically purified lines.

And yet they had.

Many of the post-1995 online commentators on Bosnia used the satiric term
unsafe area Srebrenica
. Rachel couldn't fault them. It was a compelling history lesson: how quickly the violent ideals of ultranationalism led to hate, how quickly hate to blood. If Drayton had been Dra
ž
en Krstić, his hands were bloodier than most.

The letter writer wanted to remind him of this. More than anything, he or she intended to disrupt the idyllic latter stage of life Drayton had constructed for himself: peaceful home, lovely garden, voluptuous fiancée, made-to-order family.

Had there been a ring on Melanie Blessant's finger? Rachel couldn't remember.

Another line of inquiry to follow up. There was the will to consider, the insurance policies—if Drayton hadn't yet made a bequest to Ringsong, it was possible that his will left everything to Melanie. If Melanie had known as much and if the wedding was slow to proceed—if Mink Norman was somehow seducing Drayton's wealth to fund what she had called a passion project—Drayton's death might have nothing to do with the identity of Dra
ž
en Krstić at all.

The letters may have been intended merely as torment, the need of a clever and isolated individual to maintain control over Drayton.

She made a list of things to check out: the disposition of the will, whether the wedding had been confirmed, Drayton's relationship with Mink Norman, the identity of the letter writer.

She was ready to chase down all possible leads as to Drayton's true identity, including a visit to view the body: she was waiting for Khattak's call.

She glanced up from her desk to the glass doors of his office. Still empty. She could see his bookshelves on the wall, nearly all police business except for a few personal selections, one of which was
Apologia
. Would he notice if she borrowed it?

She slipped into his office and helped herself to the book. Its black and white cover held an undertone of midnight blue. It featured a wrought-iron bench shaded by a tree in a desolate garden. Singularly uninformative.

She flipped through the first few pages until she found the dedication.

To EK, whose friendship I valued too little, too late.

Her intuition had been right. There were deep waters to traverse between Esa Khattak and Nathan Clare. She slipped the book into her bag, closed the lights, and made for home.

 

11.

All my joys and my happiness up to then have been replaced by pain and sorrow for my son …

She walked up the porch steps to their dark two-story in Etobicoke. She noticed, as she always did, that the stairs needed sweeping and that the paint on the porch was peeling badly. Her Da was retired from the service, but he spent most of his time in front of the television, often cursing at it. In the evenings, he went to the local pub where he traded the same war stories that had been doing the rounds for the last thirty years. He was a heavy drinker. His drinking had defined her whole childhood: it had made a victim of her mother and driven her brother, Zachary, to the streets while still a teenager.

Zach had been fifteen the last time Rachel had seen him.

Ray and Zach, they'd been to each other during those good days. Ray-Ray, she'd been when Zach was little. A seven-year age difference had separated them, but Zach had been the light of her world, the baby she'd done her best to raise. Her father's rages and her mother's efforts at making herself disappear had been successful. There'd only been Rachel for Zach. And that less and less, as Rachel put herself through school.

She and Zach had shared the same dream. She'd get an education and a job, and she'd make a home for herself and Zach. A home away from the paralytic rages of Don Getty and the helpless murmurings of Lillian, his wife. No matter how much she longed for closeness with her mother.

But as Zach had shot up and filled out, it had been harder and harder for him to wait. He'd fought back against their Da, usurping Rachel's role as his protector. Her Da had been prepared to use his hands on his boy. Rachel, he'd never touched. She'd been the one to calm him down, usually with a dose of sharp-tongued humor.

When Rachel was the protector, Zach had gone untouched.

When Zach stood up for himself, everything had changed.

She'd called the cops round a couple of times, but the men who'd come by had been friends of Don Getty, friends who knew his wife, and when asked by them if everything was all right, Lillian had flapped her hands at her sides and apologized for calling them out. No one had mentioned Rachel.

As a child, she had judged her mother for it and held her accountable. As a police officer with years of training behind her, she knew no one was more to blame for the turmoil in their home than Don Getty.

“You better watch it, Da,” Rachel had said. “You'd better not touch Zach again.”

“He's just a boy,” her mother had felt brave enough to add.

“He's got a man's fists. If he uses them, he'll get what a man's got coming.”

In some twisted way, had Zach been proud of that? His father finally acknowledging him? Rachel didn't know. All she knew was that the decision had hardened inside herself. All over the city there were families like hers, kids like her and Zach who needed help and were scared to end up at Child Protective Services. The cops were supposed to help kids like her and Zach. They weren't supposed to look the other way when one of their own used his fists on his kid.

She wasn't going to be that kind of cop. She was going to be the kind that stood in the way of the fists, the kind who took on a guy twice her size, soaked in alcoholic rage, the kind who beat him down, cuffed him, and offloaded him into her car. The kind who talked to vulnerable women who couldn't protect themselves and kept the promises they made to help them.

She'd told all this to Zach, but he hadn't understood.

“You want to be like Da?” he'd raged at her, already a foot taller than she was, betrayal in his copper-brown eyes.

“I want to be the exact opposite. I want to do good things with my life, Zach. I want to help kids, if I can. Kids like you and me.”

Two days later, Zach was gone.

*   *   *

She'd seen the blame in her mother's eyes every day after that. What they'd had wasn't perfect, but it had been a family. The best kind of family her mother could manage under the pressure of her husband's outbursts. That's what Rachel's actions had destroyed. She and her brother living together under their parents' roof. A roof that provided little in the way of shelter for her mother or her brother, but she'd promised she'd never leave as long as Zach lived there. Rachel pitied Lillian, but she hadn't been able to understand the chains that bound her parents together. It was no kind of life for them. It had been no kind of life for Zach. And when Zach had left, Lillian Getty hadn't shared Rachel's introspection or her inner struggle. She'd blamed her daughter for the absence of her son.

I didn't make him leave, Mum. It was Da's belt and your silence that chased our precious boy away.

Zach hadn't lived in this house in seven years, which raised the question as to why Rachel was still there, living under the same roof, drinking the same poison night after night.

She hadn't stopped searching for her baby brother and she never would.

One day Zach would turn up.

And she'd be here when he did. Waiting for him to forgive her. Waiting for him to love her again, the one person in the world who did.

*   *   *

She bypassed her parents in the living room. Her Da was in for the night, his glazed eyes watching
World's Worst Police Chases
. Her mother sat quietly in a corner, carefully folding down magazine pages to avoid any telltale rustle. Neither greeted her.

She took the narrow wood stairs to her bedroom, set down her bag, hooked her jacket over the back of a chair. There was no game tonight, and she was too tired to play if there had been. With dragging movements, she turned her computer on.

She'd given the Drayton case less than half her attention, pushed Khattak much less than she normally would have, for a single, pressing reason. She'd turned up a lead on Zach.

After all this time, she'd been looking in the wrong place. Halfway houses, homeless shelters, rehab centers, addiction programs. All the things she'd imagined could happen to a boy fending for himself on the streets. She had a friend in every division in the city and she'd called in a lot of favors. Zach's image was on posters and flyers she'd circulated year after year.

She'd tried bus stations, train stations, other metropolitan areas. Zach's friends, his school, everyone who'd ever met him. Even the cops who'd come to the house.

There'd been nothing. Just seven years of silence.

And a folder of e-mails to a long-defunct address that he'd stopped accessing seven years ago.

How would a kid on the streets get e-mail, after all?

And now this hit, from a friend in North York who had a daughter in the arts program up there. A student exhibit at a gallery inside the university.

Her friend had sent her the list of five exhibitors, five students in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program.

Four of them meant nothing to her.

The fifth was Zachary Getty.

*   *   *

It was maybe her brother, maybe not. She'd chased down leads like this before, only to end up with nothing, coming home to her mother's silent, reproachful eyes.

Because Lillian knew.

She knew why Rachel had joined the service. She knew why Rachel's temper had quickly derailed her career—she knew where that temper came from, and what fostered Rachel's constant need to prove herself.

She hadn't said,
“Sweetheart, it's all right. What happened with Zach wasn't your fault. We miss him too. We're searching too.”

They hadn't searched.

Zach dead or Zach alive was all the same to them.

All they needed was each other and their mutual dysfunction.

Lillian Getty had certainly never said to her,
“Forgive yourself, Rachel.”

Was it because her mother couldn't forgive her? Was that why she withheld her grace and her guidance? Was it the reason for her silence? The conversations that tapered off, the half starts, the eyes haunted by secret knowledge?

What had happened to Lillian Getty?

Had Don Getty happened?

Had there never been any more to her mother than martyred sighs and silent compliance? Had it become Lillian's choice in the end?

Rachel remembered another woman altogether. A woman with a bright spark in her eyes when Rachel had rescued a broken-winged bird on their porch, or played her mother's records. A woman whose loving hands had stroked Rachel's hair when she had cried herself to sleep at night, after her father had turned on Zach again. A woman, who despite Don Getty's strictures, had packed little treats in their lunch, along with notes that reminded them of her love.