Honour Among Men. Barbara Fradkin
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MacPhail shone his flashlight at the victim’s nose and mouth. Pinpoints of red dotted her eyelids and some water clung to her upper lip and the corners of her mouth.
“Drowning?” Green ventured.
MacPhail frowned as he probed the woman’s neck. His tone was distracted. “Possibly. I need to get her on the table to be sure. Paquette’s taking samples of the water to compare with her lungs, and I’ll need a thorough tox screen. From the looks of her, I’d say she hasn’t been putting too many healthy things into her body for the last while.”
Green studied the woman’s clothing. Her long, narrow feet were encased in a pair of worn leather boots, and her faded jeans fit neatly over her thin hips, as if they’d been made for her. Only the jacket, a man’s khaki parka which hung down over her fingertips, looked out of place.
“I guess she probably picked up that jacket from one of the missions. Or traded another one for it.”
MacPhail was bagging the hands and he barely paused to glance at it. “That’s military issue for both men and women.”
Green perked up. A lead. “Any idea what regiment?”
MacPhail moved the hood aside. “No sign of a regimental insignia, but it’s standard army. Mind you, it’s known some years. It could have been passed around like a paper bag at a temperance rally, so it’s pretty cold as trails go.”
“Still, it’s a trail.” Green turned to find Sue Peters at his elbow, clipboard in hand.
“You want me to contact the military, sir? See if they have a soldier gone AWOL from CFB Ottawa?”
“No.” Green scrambled for a safer assignment to occupy her. With only a few months of Major Crimes under her belt, Peters still had all the subtlety of a charging rhino, and Green shuddered at the thought of the military in her sights. Spotting Paquette, he gestured towards him. “As soon as Ident gets a good photo of the deceased, start showing it around on the streets, including the shelters, Byward Market and the Rideau Centre. Someone should have seen her.”
“Do you want me to ask about pimps too, sir?”
Green bit his tongue. Jeez, she was going to screw up even that. “Stick with the victim, Peters. Find someone who’s seen her, or knows who she’s been associating with.”
“Who should I report to? I mean . . . are you running the case?”
Green hesitated. As he stood at the edge of the crime scene, breathing in the scent of excitement and the urgency of death, watching the ident officer combing the grounds and the pathologist circling the victim, he felt the old passion for the hunt. People suffered, people died, and all he’d ever wanted to do was to track down the tormenters and bring them to account. Nothing thrilled him as much as making the bad guys pay. But now, in the larger, amalgamated police service, he was a middle-management bureaucrat, trapped between the field officers who wrestled with flesh and blood suffering and the senior officers, whose main battlefield was the committee rooms and ledgers of Elgin Street Headquarters. He’d stopped off here because he couldn’t resist the call of the field, but he belonged, even at this moment, in Barbara Devine’s office.
Yet there were elements in the case that could use an inspector’s touch. He dredged up his best bureaucratese. “Not directly. It’s Gibbs’s case. He’ll keep me apprised.”
MacPhail straightened as he watched the redhead bound eagerly towards the road. Merriment shone in his eyes. “Not directly? You’ll be getting your nose indirectly in, then?”
Green laughed. “Well, inquiries with the military can be delicate. Those army guys love their ranks.”
January 15, 1993. Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Man, it’s cold out here. The wind whips off the prairie like a nor’easter coming off the sound, so cold we can hardly do manoeuvres. We’re mostly doing weapons training and PT, and the sergeant major’s working us so hard my legs feel like they’re going to fall off. He says we only got two months to get in shape, and there’s going to be some of us won’t make the cut. There are guys here from all across the country, a lot of them weekend warriors like me, really excited to be on their first tour. My platoon commander’s a captain from the Princess Pat regulars who they call the Hammer, because he comes down hard if you mess up. They put Danny and me in the same platoon, but we’re in different sections so we won’t get to work together much. Your section’s kind of like your family, you rely on them.
My section commander’s a sergeantfrom Winnipeg on back to back rotations to Yugoslavia. He’s been telling us horror stories about the shelling and the sniping going on all the time. But that’s mostly in Sarajevo, and we’re going to be escorting convoys and protecting civilians in Croatia, which is a little horseshoe-shaped country that curves through the mountains and down the Adriatic Sea. Maybe Danny and I can go to a Greek island on our leave. Far cry from the North Atlantic. This is our first taste of real action, and I sure hope we both make the cut.
THREE
Green was already formulating a battle plan for the military as he walked back towards Gibbs’s car, but at the last minute he detoured over to have a quick word with Twiggy. The uniformed officers had obviously decided they had gleaned all the information from her that they could, for they’d left her sitting on the ground by herself. Some thoughtful officer had brought her a cup of hot coffee and a cigarette, which hung from the corner of her mouth. She cradled the coffee and pretended to be engrossed in her paper, but she was rocking slightly as if to soothe herself. At the sight of him, her lips stretched around the cigarette in a jagged but affectionate smile.
He extended his hand. “How are you doing, Twiggy?”
She squinted up at him through the smoke. “Well, well, Mr. G,” she said, her voice rattling through the phlegm in her throat. “Been awhile. What is it now? Superintendent? Chief?”
He feigned horror. “God forbid! Inspector, and that’s as high as I plan to go. I have a fear of heights.”
She chuckled, thrusting her thick tongue through the gap in her teeth. It seemed to Green that she’d lost a few more since he’d last seen her. “I don’t see your buddy around much any more either. Sully. He retired or something?”
“Just off on another assignment. And we got a great big city to take care of now, so we don’t get down onto the street as much as we used to.” He eyed the soggy ground beside her. She had spread out some of her newspapers to sit on. Without hesitation, she laid out the one she was reading, and he eased himself gingerly down beside her. The reek of booze and body odour almost made him gag, but he kept his expression friendly.
“So,” he said gently, “this must have been an unpleasant surprise for you.”
Twiggy shrugged. Green had known her since she’d first hit the streets, and he knew the reason, yet only a slight wobble in her chin betrayed the pain she must have felt. For Twiggy, like himself, dead bodies stirred up one memory too many.
“Not the first time,” she said. “Won’t be the last. Some day it’ll be me.”
He didn’t insult her by arguing. In truth, he was surprised she was still around. She was an alcoholic, a smoker and a diabetic. The only reason her heart and lungs hadn’t collapsed beneath the abuse was that she’d inherited the constitution of an ox. And the bloody-mindedness to match.
He stuck to the facts. “Did you know the woman?”
Twiggy’s eyes peered shrewdly through folds of fat. “Didn’t get a good look first time round, and wasn’t about to take another.”
“Still . . . did she look familiar?”
“Like you said, it’s a big city.”
“But you’ve