Do or Die. Barbara Fradkin
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She breathed deeply to collect herself. “Actually, he did seem tense. Distracted. He poured juice into his cereal.” A smile trembled on her lips. “I asked him if anything was wrong, but Jonathan is a private person. He’s used to solving his own problems—a casualty of having a busy mother, I guess. If something was troubling him, he became even quieter until he’d worked it out.” She cocked her head thoughtfully. “In fact, he’s been quieter the whole past week or so.”
“Did you get the impression something was troubling him?”
She pressed her large, coarse hand to her lips. A faraway look had crept into her eyes. “I think he was going to tell me. The night before he died. He came downstairs from studying about eleven o’clock, and he asked me if I wanted tea. I said I was going to bed, so he went back upstairs. But…he looked upset. Oh, God.” She put her face in her hands.
Green hated tears. He panicked at the thought that he might have to provide solace. Watching her quiver on the brink, he plunged ahead.
“Do you have any idea what it might have been? Was there anything going on in his life that might have been on his mind?”
She rallied with an effort and rubbed her eyes on her sleeve. Green glanced around the room for a kleenex, but the tables held nothing but china figurines. He wondered what room they really lived in.
“I don’t know,” she replied when she could speak. “He’s been working very hard in his lab, but he loves his work. Jonathan leads—” she stumbled, chin quivering “—led a quiet life. He just had his studies, a small circle of friends, cycling on the weekend. I worried it was too quiet, too restricted a life for a young man. He takes after his father that way, not me.”
“Any girlfriends?”
“Not now, but Jonathan attracts girls. Partly his money, but also his gentleness. And he’s a very handsome man. He’s always been a little bewildered by what his looks do to women.”
“Any recent break-ups? Any vengeful women?”
“A fairly recent break-up, yes. But I believe it was amicable. I can’t imagine Vanessa being vengeful, she’s far too bright. Too much her own woman.”
He sensed an edge, but perhaps it was just natural maternal jealousy. His own mother had never considered any of the many girls in his youth good enough for him either. Of course, considering the girls he had picked…“Vanessa?” he probed gently.
“Vanessa Weeks, one of his classmates. They’d been dating for almost a year, but they broke up last month. I don’t know why, actually, because I had the feeling Jonathan still cared for her.”
“Maybe it was her idea.”
“I don’t think so.” Mrs. Blair drew her brows together. “She called here one night a few weeks ago looking for him, and we talked. She seemed very fond of him. Said he was shutting her out, and she was very worried about him. I’d say she was upset, but certainly not angry. Jonathan is so nice he’s hard to get mad at.” She looked rueful. “Something else he gets from his father.”
“Where is his father?”
“Vancouver. Jonathan hasn’t seen him in some time.” Her voice was flat, but she reddened slightly, and Green sensed a surge of hidden feeling. Bitterness? Fear? Or something else.
“Mrs. Blair, do you have any enemies, anyone who might want to send you a warning or punish you for something?”
“Punish me?” Her eyes widened as the connection hit her.
“You’re thinking of Jonathan’s father? Ridiculous. Henry adored Jonathan, would lay down his life for him. I am by far the less important person in Henry’s life.”
Something else, Green decided. Maybe regret. He filed the observation away. “How about other enemies? Disgruntled business associates, psychotic artists?”
A shadow passed over her face, gone before he was even sure it was there. She squared her shoulders and jutted out her chin. “Sure, I have enemies. You can’t deal in money without angering someone. Peter Weiss handles them.”
“Anyone threaten you? Threaten your family?”
She scowled, the softness of a moment ago quite gone. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Inspector. I can be abrasive, but no one hates me that much.”
“Believe me, Mrs. Blair, there are all kinds of nuts out there. Would Mr. Weiss even bother to tell you?”
Her eyes hardened, and she stared at him for a moment. Then colour suffused her face. “If he didn’t, there would be hell to pay.”
Weiss hustled back into the room, paper in hand. Green had heard no footsteps approaching on the marble and wondered if Weiss had been listening at the door all this time.
“Peter!” she snapped. “Have there been any threats against Jonathan that you haven’t told me about?”
Weiss stopped in his tracks. “Certainly not, Marianne. Our investigators don’t tell me all the details, of course—”
“Bullshit!”
Weiss coloured. “But I’m sure anything as important as that—”
Mrs. Blair swung on him, eyes blazing. The fighter had returned. “I want you to tell this officer everything! If I find out you’re withholding information that he needs to find my son’s killer, you’ll be pumping gas in Flin Flon!”
The sight of Weiss’ face was repayment enough for the pompous aide’s earlier disdain, and Green was hard put to keep a smile off his own. Returning to more neutral ground, he spent ten minutes trying to trace Jonathan’s movements on the three days before his death. He learned that Marianne Blair knew very little about her son’s daily life, a discovery which distressed her but did not surprise him. How much had he let his own mother know about his activities in the years before she died?
Afterwards, Weiss showed him upstairs so that he could search Jonathan’s room. It took little time. The small room contained nothing but a single bed, dresser, desk, computer and shelves and shelves of books. His closet held a modest collection of conservative but expensive leisure clothes, as well as two dress suits and a Harris tweed sports coat. His desk was crammed with notes, articles and papers, but there was no diary, address book or appointment calendar to shed light on his activities. If Jonathan Blair kept any personal records, he kept them elsewhere.
On the desk lay a computer printout of a complex statistical analysis which Jonathan had obviously been studying. Red underlinings and asterisks peppered the pages. Was this what Jonathan had been working on the night before his death, when he had come down to his mother, upset and wanting to talk? Green examined the printout curiously but could make little sense of it. He had been forced to confront statistics for his forensic science course at the police academy as well as his masters thesis in criminology, but he had avoided them when possible ever since.
He was puzzled, however, by the array of numbers on the desk of an English literature student, and became even more so when he turned to the books on the shelves. He expected Chaucer, Dickens and an entire shelf of Shakespearean plays. Instead, he found formidable tomes on disorders of the limbic system and the neuropsychology of memory. Suddenly he remembered Marianne Blair’s use of the word ‘lab’ and cursed himself for failing to pick up on it. In the excitement of Sullivan’s tale earlier, they had both made the leap from the place where Jonathan was stabbed to the subject matter he was studying. A rookie’s error in logic, which neither should have made.
Pulling out the nearest book on the brain, he headed back downstairs and found Marianne Blair on the phone in the living room, looking all business.
“What was Jonathan working on at the university?” Startled, she swung on him and pressed her hand over the receiver. “He was doing his Masters in cognitive neuroscience, conducting research on auditory channels in the brain.”
“Does he have an office at