The Taken

the truck and carried it down the path and laid it on the broad granite step in front of a heavy oak door. Dale took a note out of his breast pocket and, with a fishhook, attached it to the tarp. Then he rang the doorbell and the two men walked in a leisurely fashion back down the path. “What the good goddamn?” said Hazel Micallef. Wingate was looking at his copy and held his finger up. He was a slower reader. He was sitting across from her in her office, the first time she’d tried to occupy that chair since the end of March. She realized, a little surprised by the thought, that she was finally on the uptick. After a minute, Wingate laid the newspaper against her desktop.

“I didn’t see that coming,” he said.

“Is this Eldwin character back yet? I want him in here, like now.”

“I did try him again, this morning, but his wife doesn’t expect him back up until this afternoon.”

“Did she say where he went?”

“ Toronto. He had meetings, she said.”

“He writes three chapters of this thing, all hell breaks loose, and he’s in meetings in the Big Smoke? Who is this guy? Call his wife back. Tell her we want to talk to him. Now.”

“Okay -” He flipped open his PNB and found Eldwin’s number. “You want me to do this here?”

“On speakerphone.”

He dialled and a woman answered. “What is it?”

“Um, Mrs. Eldwin?”

“Speaking.” She sounded mad as hell.

“This is Detective Constable James Wingate calling again.” “You called this morning.”

He and Hazel traded a look. “That’s right, Ma’am. I was hoping your husband was home. You said you were expecting him.”

“‘Expecting’ is the wrong word to use in relation to my husband.”

“So he isn’t home?”

“Wow, you are a detective.”

Hazel bent over the phone. “Mrs. Eldwin,” she said firmly. “This is Inspector Detective Hazel Micallef. I’d advise you to drop your tone.”

“Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Eldwin muttered. “What did he do?”

“Why do you think he did something?”

“Well, you’re bloody eager to get him on the phone.”

“We just need to talk to him,” said Wingate. “Clear a couple of things up.”

The unmistakable sound of ice tinkling in a glass came over the speakers. “Let me ask you something, detectives. What do you know about PIs?”

“I’m sorry?” said Wingate.

“Do they even exist?”

“Private investigators?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Eldwin -” he began in an effort to get her back on track, but Hazel interrupted.

“Are you considering hiring a PI? Do you think something’s happened to your husband?”

Eldwin snorted derisively. “God no. At least I hope not. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to him before I got my hands around his neck myself.”

“What is going on here, Mrs. Eldwin?”

“He goes to town Friday, saying he’s got meetings and research – who has meetings on the May long weekend, huh?”

“Well, some people -”

“- and then calls and says he’s stuck in town until Monday. And then he stops answering his phone. What does that sound like to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “What does it sound like to you?”

She swallowed something lustily. “It sounds like the same old story to me.”

“Is he not the kind of person to have meetings?”

“He’s the kind of person to penetrate other women.”

“I see,” said Hazel. “So you think he’s having an affair. And you want to hire a PI to catch him in the act?”

“So how much?” Eldwin asked.

“How much what?”

“How much for a PI? And do I have to pay expenses too?”

Hazel was getting frustrated, but she could tell this Mrs. Eldwin wasn’t going to turn out to be willing, so Hazel was going to have to be careful if she wanted to get anything useful out of the conversation. “I’d say a hundred a day is fair,” she said. “But you could save that money.”

“Oh yeah? You guys going to offer me a twofer?”

“We’ve got resources private eyes don’t. We might be able to track him down for you. But we need somewhere to start. Do you know the names of any of his associates in Toronto? What about the number of the person he went down to meet?”

“Look in the gutters,” she said. “Back alleys, whorehouses, dingy bars, that sort of thing. You’ll find him sooner or later. Let me know when you do.”

She took another big long drag on a cigarette and hung up. There was a pause and then a dial tone. “Wow,” said Hazel, “did you run her through CPIC?”

“I will.”

“Okay, so Eldwin’s gone to ground for whatever reason, his wife is drinking before noon, and we still have two amateur anglers at large. Where are we with Bellocque and Paritas? Do we have addresses?”

“Nothing for this Paritas woman, so I assume she and Bellocque live together.”

“How can there not be an address attached to her number?”

“Maybe it’s a cell.”

“Aren’t cells registered?”

He looked at her, a little sadly, she thought. “Well, they can be but you can also walk into Loblaws, buy your groceries, a bunch of flowers, and a prepaid cell with nothing but a handful of cash.”

“Fine. But you have an address for this Bellocque?”

He put his finger on it. “It’s a Gilmore address. You know where that is?”

“Yes, James. I live here, remember?” She shook her head. “Jesus, it’s been three days and we still don’t have a single statement. What the hell ever happened to the police called, call back as a working notion?”

“I’m sorry. I should have been more active yesterday, but the truth is, with this thing not changing much” – he gestured at the laptop – “and most of our primaries out on long-weekend DUIs and fender-benders, I guess I just thought some of this could wait until today.”

“There’s a man tied to a chair somewhere, James. A man we were pointed to by a broken, drowned mannequin. What about that seems not urgent?”

He breathed slowly to get his heart to stop pounding. “I hear you, Skip. But the truth is, we don’t know if that man is ‘tied’ to a chair, or if he’s in any danger, or even if what we’re seeing is real. And the truth is…”

“What? What is the truth?”

“The truth is, I’m not sure who’s the lead on this now. Is it me? Because if it is, I think you need to trust me to run it my way.”

She looked at him flatly, but he saw the fire behind her eyes. “Thirty-six hours have passed in idleness over a question of chain of command? Is that why you’ve been sitting on your ass?”

He stilled his face. She’d never spoken to him like this before. “I should go run Mrs. Eldwin through the database. Is there anything else you want me to do?”

“Go see Burt Levitt and show him a picture of the mannequin. See if it means anything to him. Ask where a person could buy one or find something like it.”

“Fine,” said Wingate, and he left without another word. The space he’d been standing in seemed to be buzzing. She had an instinct to call him back in and apologize right away, but she let him go. She’d been itching for weeks to come back to work, but now that she was here, she wasn’t sure her head was right.

She’d spent much of Sunday in Glynnis’s office with the door closed, reading the newspaper and keeping an