Mist Walker. Barbara Fradkin
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“No, I thought maybe the guilt had been eating at him for ten years, until he’d finally gathered up the courage to tell me. So when I hung up on him, maybe it was the last straw. You see, I’ve always thought that some day, when he finally faced what he was, my brother was going to kill himself.”
* * *
Green was driving down the Queensway, halfway to Rideau Psychiatric Hospital, when he remembered Brian Sullivan’s rooming house death in Vanier. He cursed. Sullivan had wanted him to look at the scene before the body was removed and use his fabled intuition to see if he could detect anything amiss. The staff sergeant had already dismissed the case in his own mind and urged his subordinate to do the same. Death by misadventure. Specifically, setting your bed and yourself on fire by smoking while intoxicated—a tawdry but common enough end to a vagrant’s life. But obviously Sullivan was not so sure.
Brian Sullivan and he had been rookies on patrol together over twenty years ago and had remained friends ever since, despite their differences in temperament and rank. Where Green was impulsive and fanciful, Sullivan was practical and meticulous. Green made wild intuitive leaps, while Sullivan steadfastly filled in the gaps. In the past, before the changing face of police work and Green’s promotion to the senior ranks had drawn him further and further from the trenches he loved, the two had made a perfect investigative team. Now, Sullivan and his colleagues from Major Crimes conducted all the routine investigations without need of Green’s input, while he sat on planning committees and chafed with frustration. Sometimes he bulldozed his way onto a case out of sheer boredom, or the fear that no one else on the force knew what they were doing. Occasionally, Sullivan took pity on him.
Perhaps Sullivan was simply taking pity this time, but he had sounded as if he really did want Green’s opinion, and a request from Sullivan was not to be taken lightly. Green glanced at his watch. It was almost two-thirty, which meant that after this detour he wouldn’t reach Rideau Psychiatric until after four. That was cutting things close, but still within the realm of possibility. Surely most of the doctors and therapists on the day shift would still be at work at four.
He took the next exit ramp off the Queensway and headed back east, deftly skirting around road construction and through side streets on his way deep into the city’s shabby east end. Historically, Vanier was the home of Ottawa’s francophone working class community, with roots back in the lumbering days, and it had retained a strong French Catholic flavour. Like much of the inner city, however, it had become an uneasy mix of indigenous French, transients down on their luck, aboriginals from up north, and immigrant families from
all over the Third World. Proud shanties stood side by side with cheap apartments and rooming houses which saw a constant turnover of tenants with uncertain pasts and even more uncertain futures.
On a dingy side street off Montreal Road, Green spotted Sullivan’s unmarked blue Taurus parked outside a structure that ought never to have passed its building inspection. The ancient, three-storey rooming house squatted in a patch of sodden weeds, its mottled grey bricks steaming in the midafternoon heat. The only evidence of its recent fire was some blackening around the second storey window and a thorough soaking from the fire hose. In a line behind Sullivan’s car were the red fire marshall’s vehicle, the Forensic Identification van, the black coroner’s van, and another police-issue Taurus which Green suspected belonged to the arson squad. Sullivan has really called out all the troops, he thought as he pushed through the crowd of curious locals, logged in with the uniform on guard, slipped paper shoes on his feet and ducked under the police tape.
The reek of burnt chemicals and charred flesh assailed him even before he stepped over the threshold, and involuntarily he covered his nose. In the street, the afternoon heat had been oppressive, but inside it was a sauna. Within seconds, he was damp with sweat. He could hear voices and footsteps milling throughout the building, but he followed the boom of a familiar Scottish brogue up the stairs and into the front room on the second floor. The room was bare except for a partially burned crate under the window and a mattress on the floor whose charred springs poked through the residue of blackened cloth. Three men were bent over the mattress, conferring in low tones and affording Green only a brief glimpse of burnt sneakers hanging off the edge of the bed.
Sullivan was a big man, and his shoulders seemed to fill the tiny room. He’d left his suit jacket in the car, and his white shirt was drenched with sweat. Above the collar, his neck and face were an unnatural crimson that Green hoped was only from the heat. Drawing in a cautious breath, Green stepped through the door. At the sound, Sullivan swung around and a smile of relief lit his florid face.
“Mike, about time! Dr. MacPhail was about to give up on you and take the body away.”
The tall, rangy Scot laughed and clapped Green on the shoulder with his gloved hand. “Worse luck, lad! I’m still here, trying to get some ideas from what’s left of the poor bugger.”
The Ident Unit had turned a strong spotlight on the bed, and Green recognized one of their senior officers bent over his camera, photographing every section of the body. The bright light spared nothing. Curled fetus-like on the bed was the remains of something human of indeterminate age, sex or even colour. Most of the body was charred beyond all recognition, and on the upper body not a scrap of skin nor a single hair was left intact. The rank stench of burnt meat was choking.
Black spots laced Green’s sight, and he forced shallow breaths to fight down the bile in his throat. Dead bodies had never been his forte, but he was determined not to give the pathologist further fuel to mock him. MacPhail had spent the last twenty-two years awash in corpses and whiskey, and his sense of humour was decidedly off-kilter. Green forced his attention to practical details.
“Have you got an ID ?”
Sullivan shook his head. “Still working on it. It’s an adult male, MacPhail’s guess is medium height and weight, but he’ll know more after the autopsy. As usual, nobody’s talking in the building here, at least not to the cops. This is a rent-by-the-week room, cash in advance, no questions asked. Nobody knew who he was, and he didn’t talk to anybody. He just signed in last week under the name Jake, but that’s all we’ve got to go by. We’ll be checking missing persons reports and canvassing the street, but it will probably come down to dental records or DNA once we get some possibles. Not much left of the fingers.”
Green heard the weary resignation in Sullivan’s voice, and he sympathized. This was a pointless and unlamented end to what had probably been an aimless life. They’d both seen them countless times before, life’s losers who drifted from one dive to another and from one high to another, until fate and their own stupidity stumbled upon each other, leaving the police force with the job of mopping up. Perhaps, even after all their hard work, they would never identify this one, and worse still, perhaps no one would even care.
Yet Sullivan had clearly not called him here to offer his sympathies. Green turned away from the body briskly. “Let’s go outside, and you can fill me in.”
To his dismay, however, Sullivan shook his head. “I want you to look at this body carefully and tell me what you think.”
Green sighed. The request was vague, but he knew it was not trivial. Sullivan thought the body was telling them something, and he wanted to know if Green saw it too. Green forced himself to turn back to survey the scene. Even through the water and soot that covered everything, Green could see that the room was almost bare. On the floor lay a few blackened objects, one of them recognizable as a glass bottle. The remains of the bed sat in the corner, burned away to bare springs. On it, the body was curled on its back, grotesque but almost peaceful in repose. The skin and clothes were burnt away, leaving nothing but a blackened shape. Smoke and flame damage was extensive around the body, but quite limited in the rest of the room.
Green was not an expert in fires, but he sensed what was bothering Sullivan. Something seemed unnatural. He’d seen bodies burned to death before, and usually they were found huddled on the floor by the door, making a last desperate effort to escape. Even drunks who passed out in bed and lit the mattress on fire usually woke enough to try to get to the door. Green pointed this out dubiously, but Sullivan was ready for him.
“We do see it sometimes, Mike. The guy