Dream Chasers. Barbara Fradkin
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chance to catch our breath, read, take lazy walks and teach Tony to swim,” she’d promised, with a dreamy glow in her eyes that he could not refuse. So far, the ancient beds, battered kitchenware and screaming crows did not seem worth the eight hundred dollars she had shelled out for the week of summer paradise, but then the price of paradise was high in the Rideau Lakes area, which was less than two hours drive from Ottawa.
He stepped onto the rickety dock and contemplated the surroundings. There were cottages on either side, pressed uncomfortably close but still empty this early in the season, with blue tarps over their boats and plywood over the windows. Weeds choked the shoreline and poked up through the rotting planks on the dock.
He perched on the edge of the dock, sipped his coffee and eyed the lake. It was glassy calm in the pink light of dawn. Wisps of mist drifted over its surface, and in the distance he could see the silent hulls of small boats. The serenity was almost scary.
Green knew nothing about the country. The summer holidays of his youth had been spent running up and down the back alleys of Ottawa’s Lowertown, playing marbles in the dusty yards and tossing balls back and forth between parked cars. He was approaching his quarter century mark with the Ottawa Police, most of it in the gruesome trenches of Major Crimes, but before his marriage to Sharon, his summer holidays could be counted on one hand. Occasionally in a misguided spirit of pity, colleagues and friends had invited him up to their cottages for weekends. He had tried to enjoy the fishing, the camaraderie and the simplicity of country life, but inwardly he had chafed. No radio, no TV news, no take-out deli sandwiches at midnight, no wail of sirens or crackling of radios...
I’m a crime junkie, he thought, as he gazed out over the peaceful lake. A whiff of breeze rustled the trees, and far out, the plaintive trill of some bird echoed over the water. Sharon’s right, he thought, I have to learn to relax, to appreciate silence, nature and the simple pleasures of my family’s company. Maybe here, in this rosy magic dawn, I’ll make a start.
That optimism lasted all of two minutes, before the first mosquito whined in his ear. At first he tried to ignore it, but then its friends arrived. Swatting and brandishing his arms in vain, he sloshed half his coffee down his crotch.
“Fuck this,” he muttered and headed back up to the cottage. The swarm of mosquitoes escorted him. Inside, miraculously, Sharon and Tony were still sleeping. After changing his pants and replenishing his coffee, he sneaked up to the car with Modo at his heels again. She leaped in ahead of him and settled in her favourite spot next to Tony’s car seat. Green turned the key to activate the radio, then fiddled with the buttons until he found an Ottawa station with a strong enough signal to reach this rural backwater. The cheery patter of the morning DJ filled the car.
Cradling his coffee, Green sank back in the passenger seat with a sigh of delight. Just in time for the six o’clock news.
He listened through the thumbnail reports of suicide bombings in Israel, tornadoes in Kansas and a minor earthquake in Indonesia before the local news came on.
“Ottawa Police have stepped up their search for a local teenager first reported missing early yesterday morning. Seventeen-year-old Lea Kovacev told her mother she was getting together with friends Monday evening, but when she failed to contact her mother or return home by midnight, her mother became concerned. Police do not suspect foul play but ask anyone with any knowledge of her whereabouts to call them.”
Green’s instincts stirred. Just over thirty hours had passed since the girl’s disappearance. By her own account, she was getting together with friends. Seventeen-year-old girls dropped out of sight temporarily for all sorts of reasons. An impromptu trip, excessive partying, an undesirable boyfriend, or just the impulse to shake off the parental bonds for a while.
What was different about this case? What had caused the police concern, despite their official denial of foul play?
He reached for his cell phone, then hesitated with it in his hand. As the head of Crimes Against Persons, Missing Persons fell under his command, but a missing teenager was routine, even if the police had stepped up their efforts. There was an entire Missing Persons’ squad with the power to ask for extra resources or support should the case merit it. They didn’t need his meddling. He was on holiday.
He pictured the mother sitting frantically by the phone, waiting for the police or her daughter—anyone—to call. He thought about the other young women who had disappeared in Ottawa in recent years, about the desperate searches and ultimate heartbreaking discoveries. Was that why the police were concerned? Were there signs too eerily similar to those earlier cases?
Then he thought of his own daughter, so defiantly confident and invincible. A little shiver ran through him. Hannah was also seventeen, and because school wasn’t quite finished, she was staying in the house alone for the first time since she’d come to live with them a year ago. Green had been reluctant to go without her, but in truth more out of distrust of her motives than fear for her safety or desire for her company. When Hannah had challenged him on it, Sharon had sided with her. Distrust her, and she’ll make you pay, Sharon said. Trust her, and she’ll try to live up to it.
Easy for you to say, Green thought now as he toyed with his phone, fighting the urge to call her and satisfy the ridiculous fear that had threaded through him at the news of the missing teen. Was Hannah safely at home, or was she out at one of those starlight parties she loved so much? He didn’t delude himself. She had arrived on his doorstep at sixteen, defiantly trying to be thirty. He knew she smoked dope, slept around and probably flirted with the wrong side of the law. But did she know where to draw the line? Did she know how to heed her instincts for danger and keep herself safe?
In the end, he settled on a third alternative. He phoned Brian Sullivan. Sullivan was back as acting staff sergeant of Major Crimes now that Gaetan Laroque had gone off on stress leave. Sullivan would have no direct knowledge of a routine missing persons investigation, but if the police feared something worse, then the Major Crimes detectives would be working the case too, at least on the sidelines. Sullivan was Green’s oldest friend on the force and could be trusted to understand his reasons for calling. There were not too many cops Green felt he could lean on, but Sullivan was the first in line. Besides, he had a teenage daughter of his own.
Sullivan answered his cell phone on the fourth ring, and to Green’s surprise, he didn’t even bother to tease him for checking in on his first day of vacation. “I was hoping you hadn’t heard,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I want you to enjoy your holiday, you turkey. Your wife and son deserve that, even if you don’t.”
Green digested the implications. An early morning chill hung in the air, and he shivered. Hugging his fleece around him, he curled deeper into the seat. “It’s that bad?”
Sullivan paused. “It doesn’t look good. This is a nice girl, a good student just finishing Grade Twelve at Pleasant Park High School in Alta Vista. Never gave her mother any trouble, and she hasn’t been heard from in thirty-six hours.”
“Shit,” Green muttered. Sullivan didn’t need to say more. Alta Vista was the neighbourhood Sullivan lived in, Pleasant Park the school his own daughter attended. It was a dignified family neighbourhood of leafy old trees and sprawling splitlevels, not some crime centre of the city. Green knew Sullivan was thinking of the other young women from similar neighbourhoods whose deaths they had investigated together in recent years. In too many cases, their only crime had been to be young, attractive and alone.
“Officially we’re calling it a simple disappearance,” Sullivan said, “and we haven’t ruled that out. The mother is the overprotective type, so the kid may have just run off with some boy, and she’ll get in touch with her mother when she comes up for air.”
Green could hear the roar of traffic in the background and the sound of Sullivan drinking, probably his morning coffee. He’d caught his friend on his way to work. “You don’t sound convinced.” “Well, her friends say she’s not the type to let her mother worry like this. We know she lied to her mother about where she was going, said she had a play to rehearse, but there was no such thing. So she may have gone to meet