Honour Among Men. Barbara Fradkin
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peacekeeping battalion that has the equipment and the training to do the job.
Anyway, there aren’t supposed to be any weapons inside the UNPA, but both sides are always trying to sneak them in, and it’s our job to stop them. Sometimes we have a translator but a lot of times we just use hand gestures and it can get pretty funny. Us pointing go back and them pointing forward. There’s a Muslim kid Mahir from the nearby village who knows some English, so we use him when he’s free.
April 15 1993, Sector West, Croatia.
Dear Kit . . . The past couple of days we’ve noticed this dog hanging around the woods near the hot dog stand. She looks like a border collie and shepherd mix with sores on her legs and her ribs sticking out. Mahir says she belonged to a Serbian family who abandoned their farm. She was so spooked it took us three days to coax her to come near. Today we got her in the APC and took her back to the section house, and tomorrow we’ll build her a dog house. She’ll probably end up sleeping with us, but Sarge says when the Hammer’s around, she’d better stay in her kennel. Rules are rules, after all. I’m looking for a good name for her.
May 1, 1993. Sector West, Croatia.
Good things and not so good. Our dog’s been gaining weight steadily and the platoon medic treated her sores with antibiotics. Sarge swore him to secrecy. I swear she’s the smartest animal I’ve ever met. She knows about fifty English words already, more than the Croatian kids we’re trying to teach. I’ve named her Fundy. The guys tease me about my new girlfriend, but I don’t mind. She’s no competition for you, but she reminds me of home.
Today our section did patrol, which is more interesting than the hot dog stand. We drove all around the countryside in the APC checking for weapons caches and looking for troop movement. The countryside’s green and beautiful, but a lot of the villages are destroyed, and hardly anyone lives there any more. Everything is bombed to hell. One of the patrols came across this Serb village where there were no people, just stuff left on the ground, like sneakers and kids’ clothes. Word is there’s a mass grave there, but we’ll never know. Kind of creepy, that only half a klic away, everyone’s just carrying on.
After Gibbs had sent his priority request to Halifax earlier that day, Green dispatched him to meet up with Peters at the train station. Peters had proved that she had more detective instincts than Green had initially thought, but he didn’t trust her not to get carried away when those instincts took her on the hunt. He recognized the danger signs of over-exuberance bordering on obsession, because he’d been there.
Besides, if she was going to go poking around in the low-cost accommodation facilities in Vanier, she’d better not go alone. Vanier had proud, francophone working class roots, but like many inner city neighbourhoods, it was now an uneasy mix of immigrants, transients, drug addicts and the working poor. Crack houses stood side by side with the modest woodframe cottages of the founding families.
Green himself spent the rest of the day managing the developments in the Byward Club investigation, which was fast deteriorating into a circus of lying teenage brats, irate parents, and their threatening lawyers. Fortunately, they kept Barbara Devine so busy that she had little time to agitate about the murder of an unknown, unlamented Jane Doe. Not even the women’s groups seemed interested in taking up the cause.
By five o’clock, Green’s patience was expired, his head ached, and he knew he still faced several more hours of diplomacy and hard work once he got home. He was just returning to his office from his third lawyer meeting when Gibbs and Peters came off the elevator from the basement car park. Gibbs moved at a purposeful lope, and Peters had to hustle to keep pace. Spotting Green, they changed course to intercept him.
“Let’s get a coffee,” Green said, steering them towards the stairs to the police cafeteria, although they both looked as if they’d already overdosed on adrenaline. Green bought them coffee and muffins before sitting down opposite to listen. They sat side by side, he noticed, looking very comfortable with each other.
“Any news from Halifax?” Peters asked as she added three packages of sugar to her coffee.
Green shook his head. “Did you have any luck with the porter at the train station?”
Gibbs nodded proudly. “Sue hit the jackpot on that one. Y-you tell it, Sue.”
She clasped her hands and leaned forward on the table, her coffee forgotten. “Marier Street. That’s the street our Jane Doe was looking for. So we drove down there and canvassed every house and building on the whole street. We found her at #296. It calls itself a motel, and it’s one of those long, two-storey 1950s buildings where the clients either stay an hour or a week. She’d booked in for a week on April 11th, and she paid another week on the 18th.”
“How did she pay?”
“Cash. And she registered under Patti Oliver from Sydney, Nova Scotia. There are two Olivers listed in Sydney, but neither of them have ever heard of a Patti.”
“We c-could find no such person listed anywhere in Nova Scotia,” Gibbs added. “Although we’ve still got some calls to make.”
“Did she at least provide the motel with a phone number or a contact name?”
Gibbs shook his head, but before he could untangle his tongue, Peters jumped back in. “Cash, no questions asked, works fine for these guys. But we got the motel manager’s permission to search the room. We found the duffel bag the porter told me about, mostly full of clothes and food. There was food on the dresser—bread, juice, tea, canned soups and beans—low-cost stuff. Everything was healthy, and her clothing was mostly clean, even if it was old. It looked like she tried to take care of herself and watch her money.”
Green was again pleasantly surprised by her perceptiveness. “Any scotch?”
“No, she must have bought that at a bar.”
“Or someone bought it for her. Any clues to suggest who she was or why she was here?”
Peters glanced over at Gibbs as if in silent invitation, which he accepted. “Just one small thing, sir.” He reached into his jacket pocket and handed over an evidence bag. Through the transparent plastic, Green could make out a small leather box. Slipping on latex gloves, he opened the box. Nestled inside was an embossed silver disk attached to a red and blue striped ribbon. On the front was a maple leaf inside a wreath, and on the back were engraved the words “Bravery—Bravoire”.
“There’s a little card underneath, sir,” Peters burst in, unable to contain herself. She plucked the card out and began to read. “This Medal of Bravery is awarded to Corporal Ian MacDonald for acts of outstanding heroism in hazardous circumstances, September 10, 1993.”
“Ian MacDonald. Have you checked this out?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “It was awarded on a peacekeeping mission in Croatia, where he was serving with the Second Battalion of the Princess Patricia Light Infantry Regiment.”
Green saw the suspense in their eyes as they waited for him to digest that information and to ask the obvious question. “So did you track down this Ian MacDonald?”
“Well, that’s the thing, sir,” said Gibbs, so excited he didn’t even stutter. “Corporal Ian MacDonald died September 10, 1995, and we can’t get anyone in the military to talk to us.”
It was now past six o’clock, and Green was unable to rouse anyone official at DND. He left an urgent message on Captain Ulrich’s voice mail to phone him the instant he got the message. Then he turned his attention back to the two detectives, who had followed him hopefully back to his office. Both were beginning to sag as the adrenaline wore off. Peters, he recalled, had now been on the job at least twelve hours.
“Okay, good work, you two. Assign the follow-up work to someone on the night