Enter, Night

O’Toole’s tonight and make amends. Maybe even bring flowers. Perhaps flowers would seem like a better idea once the sun had gone down.

Elliot sighed again, thinking in abstract terms that having a conscience was a burden he hadn’t had to consider until very recently, and one he could happily do without.

He got back into the cruiser and drove to the station as quickly as he could, realizing that nearly two hours had passed since his encounter with Christina Parr and Billy Lightning, and he was going to have to think on his feet if he was going to come up with a plausible excuse for Sergeant Thomson as to where the hell he’d been all morning.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sergeant Thomson was sitting at his desk, talking on the telephone, when Elliot walked through the door of the Parr’s Landing police station. He looked up irritably and motioned with his hand for Elliot to sit down. The gesture pushed Thomson’s coffee cup perilously close to the edge of the desk. Elliot lunged forward and grabbed the coffee cup just before it pitched over the edge of the desk. Pleased with himself for this act of minor heroism, he grinned and mimed relief. Elliot whispered, “Whew!” but Thomson was jotting down notes on a pad of paper and didn’t even look up.

“You say the yard was secure? Right, of course. Well, you know how some dogs are. What kind did you say he was? She, sorry. A Lab? Well, was she in heat? Spayed. OK, I see. Well, maybe… no, I don’t know. But we’ll definitely keep an eye out. Of course. No, I wouldn’t worry. Yes, we’re going out a bit later. We’ll do a loop of the town and take a look. Yes, I promise. Of course. Yes, it’s hard. Had one myself when I was a boy. Yes, they do, don’t they? All right Mrs. Miller. Thanks. We’ll let you know. All right. Bye, now.” Then, to Elliot: “Where the hell have you been? The phone has been ringing off the hook. What the hell happened last night? Was it a full moon?”

“Sorry, Sergeant,” Elliot lied, thinking fast on his feet. “Someone thought they heard guns up at the lake. I thought, hunters. Didn’t see anything.”

Thomson was brusque. “Never mind, I don’t care. OK, aside from the call I just took from some woman about her son’s lost dog, I also had a call from the mother of that waitress from O’Toole’s-Donna something. Donna Lemieux.”

Elliot froze. “What about Donna Lemieux? What happened to her?”

“What happened? Nothing, probably. Her mother went to her house this morning and she wasn’t there. I told her-nicely-that it’s not suspicious for someone not to be at home during the day. Her car was in the driveway, too, according to her mother, so she probably went out with friends or something. Her mother said she had ‘a feeling about it’ and wanted us to know. Mothers, Jesus.”

“We all have them,” Elliot said automatically, treading water. “Did she say anything else?”

“Just that she went into her daughter’s house and said it didn’t look like she’d slept there last night.”

“But the car…”

“That’s what I told her. The car is in the driveway. All we can do is wait and see what develops. I’m sure it’ll be nothing. It’s too early to raise the panic alarm at this point. Besides, we have other things to think about. Early this morning I was talking with my contact at the RCMP in Toronto. Surprise, surprise-Dr. Lightning’s story about his father’s murder and the fact that he thinks it was committed by that student of his father’s-the crazy one, Weal-just got a bit more complicated.”

“Oh, yeah? How so, Sergeant?” Elliot hoped that the forced neutrality of his tone had effectively camouflaged his relief at the fact that they had moved on, away from the minefield topic of the possible disappearance of Donna Lemieux.

“According to the RCMP, Richard Weal is dead,” Thomson said. “Has been for a bit less than a year now.”

“Dead?”

“Dead as a damn doornail,” Thomson said. To Elliot, he sounded more satisfied than bemused. Maybe the Indian had pissed him off, too, more than Elliot had realized. “Car-over-the-cliff crash, apparently. Suicide. In January of this year. A car went off the Scarborough Bluffs in Toronto. They found a pile of clothing and Weal’s identification. Neat little folded pile, just like a crazy person would do on a bloody cold winter night. He must have gotten into the car naked and just driven it over the edge, right onto the beach. Metro Police in Toronto said the body inside the wreck was pretty burned up, but the I.D. was right there on top of the pile of clothes. Old I.D.,” he added. “From the time when he was locked up in the loony bin, years ago. But it was definitely him. Metro said it was an open-and-shut case, once they contacted the nuthatch where he’d been locked up. His doctors said they weren’t surprised.”

Elliot said, “So where does this leave the Indian’s story?”

“Well,” Thomson said. “I’m thinking we can pretty much put the notion of Richard Weal running around committing murders in Gyles Point and roaming around Parr’s Landing to rest. Whoever did that to that old man on the Point, it wasn’t Richard Weal.”

Elliot paused for a moment. “Sarge?” he said.

“What?”

“Sarge, the other day I was out at Bradley Lake looking around.”

“So?”

“So,” he said. “I think I saw something.”

“You think you saw something? You think you saw something, or you saw something?”

“No, I did see something,” Elliot said firmly. “Up by the cliffs. It was a man, I think. Prowling up on the ledges. I thought it was a kid, or some hikers or something. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time.” Not strictly true, Elliot admitted to himself. It spooked me something fierce. “I’m just wondering if…”

“If what?” Thomson said impatiently. “Come on, McKitrick, get to the point.”

“Well, in light of this new development, my question is, why is the Indian in Parr’s Landing, and isn’t it kind of a coincidence that he arrives here with some story about a guy who just so happens to be dead, right around the time that somebody commits a murder a few miles from here?”

“Still nothing solid connecting Billy Lightning to what happened at Gyles Point,” Thomson said. “And the assumption is that there was a murder, but we can’t rule it a murder since there’s no body,” Thomson said. “The dead man wasn’t connected with either Lightning, his father, or Weal-Weal, who we now know to be deceased. As far as the law is concerned, Billy Lightning may be an odd duck, but he’s not a criminal. Not yet, anyway.”

“Something doesn’t add up here,” Elliot said stubbornly. “I just feel it. I feel it in my bones that there’s something wrong here.”

“There could be something wrong, but until there’s some evidence, there isn’t anything I can do. Look, Elliot,” Thomson warned. “I know you don’t like Dr. Lightning, but I don’t want you jumping any guns, or making any accusations you can’t back up that are going to come back and bite you-or me-in the ass. The man’s a professor; he’s not just some random vagrant. Be careful.”

“But-”

“If you find something solid, we can move on it,” Thomson said with finality. “Until then, hands off. I don’t want any problems.”

Elliot remembered Lightning’s threat to him that very morning and kept his mouth shut.

Thomson’s own instincts, honed over many more years of police work than Elliot’s, signalled to him that there was something going on, not with Billy Lightning, but with Elliot himself. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a couple of days, and there was a sullenness and a tension to the younger man that was entirely alien to his character as Thomson knew it. Disappearing for two hours under some bullshit pretext of looking for illegal hunters wasn’t like Elliot McKitrick at all. He wasn’t dating anyone in particular, as far as Thomson knew, which more or less ruled out woman trouble. But then again, who knew? Something was very clearly bothering the younger man.

Thomson said, “McKitrick, is everything all right?”

“What do you mean, Sarge?”