Mist Walker. Barbara Fradkin
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waste too much energy on it.”
He grinned and propped his feet on the edge of her pristine desk. “That’s why I’m here. The file is going to be several truck loads, so I’m looking for an executive summary before I put any manpower on it.”
She eyed his feet in silence for a moment, her red nails tapping the desktop, and he could almost see her weighing how much to cooperate. “You must remember the case, Mike,” she said eventually. “Two of our officers quit the force after the trial. They had little children themselves, and they couldn’t stomach working for a system that gives the villains all the breaks.”
Finally the penny dropped. Matthew Fraser had been an elementary school teacher accused and ultimately acquitted of sexual abuse, and Green could still recall the bitter divisions the case had engendered not only within the school and community but within CID itself.
“Did you think he was guilty?” he asked.
Her eyes flashed and her mouth grew hard, but she restrained herself. “I’d never have brought the case forward if I’d doubted that. I was the one who took the girl’s initial statement. I watched her face that first time in the station, I heard her crying and saying ‘I just want him to stop.’ She was very credible before the lawyers and the Children’s Aid got into the act, and the whole courtroom circus froze her up.”
“So she recanted on the witness stand?”
Devine shook her head vigorously. “If I had dropped all the cases where the abuse victims had second thoughts, I’d have had precious little work to do. But Rebecca Whelan didn’t really recant. She just got confused, the defence chipped away at her recollections, and the judge was ‘See no evil, hear no evil’ Maloney, who wouldn’t recognize sexual abuse if it was—” She pressed her lips together as if to prevent further indiscretions from escaping.
“Shoved up his ass?” Green said. “Was there any other evidence? Any other complainants?”
“You’re not the only one on the force who knows how to build a case, Mike. We had plenty of circumstantial evidence. I had doctors and abuse experts who swore she had all the classic signs, I had other little girls who alleged touching or grooming types of activity, but it was either too vague or the parents wouldn’t let them testify. So in the end, what it boiled down to was this six-year-old all alone in the courtroom, sitting on a telephone book so she could see over the witness box, with the judge staring down at her and the high-priced lawyer from the teacher’s union hammering away at her every word. She crumbled.”
Green made a face, inwardly grateful that he had resisted the pressure to do his turn in sex crimes. Adults killing each other were bad enough. “What was Matthew Fraser like?”
“He was one sick bastard,” she replied, her discretion lost in the heat of her recollections. Her lips formed a harsh red slash of emotion across her carefully made up face. “One of those quiet, unreadable types. You know, the type who plots murder without ever changing his expression. He acted so concerned for the little girl, but he put her through six weeks of active trial while he paraded all his teacher friends across the stand one after another to say what a great guy he was. Of course, I hear they all dropped him like a hot potato afterwards. For the cameras it was union solidarity rah, rah, and all that, but out of the public view, that was another story.”
“He apparently told a friend he was being followed recently. Any threats on his life after he was acquitted? I imagine there were people in the girl’s family who would have liked to see him suffer.”
“And half a dozen guys on the force eager to do the job for them,” she countered. “But it’s been ten years, Mike. That’s not exactly heat of the moment.”
Ten years is nothing in the life sentence of the victim’s family, he thought. Or of the little girl herself, who would be almost seventeen by now. “Do you know what happened to the girl?”
Devine’s face darkened abruptly, further marring her studied Holt Renfrew finish. “That man put her through hell. The doctor said the abuse had happened repeatedly, but the bastard pleaded not guilty, virtually accused the girl of lying, and then dragged the case through the system for over two years. Two years of motions and postponements on every technicality in the book, two years that little girl had to hang in limbo, with everybody whispering about her. She had to change schools and move to a new neighbourhood, so she lost all her old friends. I did my best, but...” She threw up her hands. “Damn, it still gets to me!”
Her passion and moral outrage surprised him—even attracted him—and she moved up a few notches in his esteem. “Yeah, you do this job long enough, and there are always a few that stick with you. But think of it this way, Barbara, if it still gets your blood boiling after ten years, how does the family feel?”
Her anger cleared as she weighed his question. “They hate him. That will always be there. But I think you should be looking for more recent victims. Believe me, men like Fraser don’t stop once they get a taste.”
He shrugged easily. “I’m just exploring ideas here, Barbara, not putting anyone on trial. What was the family like?”
She played with her left earring as she considered his question. “Her family was right in the thick of things, but they were basically good people. Mother, father, stepfather. Even her grandparents showed up for the verdict.”
“Any worrisome signs?”
“Nothing you wouldn’t expect. I mean, a lot of people despised the man. Even some of the other parents, who were afraid he might have abused their children too. Fraser had a classic pedophile profile, Mike. Soft-spoken, shy, liked to hang around with children, and he had this gentle manner that hooked them right in. Children couldn’t see the manipulation behind his overtures, so I couldn’t get anything more solid than a twisted feeling in my gut. Who knows, maybe if I had, the guy would have been put away where he belongs, instead of out roaming the streets, where he’s probably raped three dozen other little girls in the time since.”
* * *
That unsettling thought stayed with Green after he returned to his office. It lent a greater urgency to the mysterious disappearance than did a ten-year-old settling of accounts. Perhaps there was a more recent score to settle, or a more recent danger to flee. Shortly after eleven, telling himself he’d earned a decent lunch break after weeks of car seat dining, he headed out.
For a man who lived in fear, Matt Fraser had chosen to reside in an unsavoury part of town. Built upon the vacant lumber yards of J.R.Booth’s old empire, Carlington had once been a modest, house-proud working-class neighbourhood first settled by World War II vets returning to civilian life. It was now a hodge-podge of post-war shanties, welfare townhouses and massive high-rises, a neighbourhood where new refugee families were sandwiched in with drug dealers, blue collar retirees and the working poor. Petty crime flourished, and bands of youth prowled the streets with restless contempt. Green suspected that poverty, not preference, had dictated Fraser’s choice.
Fraser’s apartment was on the third floor of a squat brick low-rise, surrounded by decrepit parking lots. Weeds sprouted through the broken asphalt, and against one wall were the rusted shells of two cars. The apartment’s security was a paranoid’s nightmare—a row of buzzers just inside the front door, which had been propped open with a stick to encourage some flow of muggy air. Inside, the odour of onions mingled with a stench of rot in the fetid air. After much knocking, Green roused the building super from his midday siesta in his basement apartment. The TV was blaring, and the man opened the door wearing nothing but a scowl and rumpled boxers hitched high over his sagging gut. But one flash of Green’s badge sent him shuffling back inside for a pair of overalls and a set of keys to Matt Fraser’s apartment.
“Nice guy,” the super observed two minutes later as he laboured up the narrow staircase. “Wish all the tenants were as good as him.”
Green peered at him through the gloom. New light bulbs were evidently not part of the landlord’s budget. “What do you mean?”
“No noise, no late-night visitors, fixes