The Taken

waiting on the grass at various exits across this great county of ours.”

“Anything yet?”

“Not much happens at thirty kliks an hour, but something will come up, you know it will.”

“I’m putting twenty on it involving a motorcycle.” “No one will take that action, Chief.”

She went back out into the pen and sat at PC Julia Windemere’s desk. She’d taken the long weekend to visit her mother in the Kawarthas and wasn’t back until Wednesday morning. She switched on Windemere’s computer and dialled up the site. Nothing had changed. She switched it off and opened her notebook to the two numbers they’d spent all weekend calling. Bellocque’s number performed its strange ringing followed by the bleat of a busy tone. But to her surprise, Gil Paritas picked up after two rings.

“Hello?” said a surprised-sounding voice.

“Is this Gil Paritas?”

“Yes.”

“Do you check your messages much, Ms. Paritas?” “I’m sorry, who is this?”

“This is Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef of the Port Dundas OPS. We left you at least six messages over the weekend which you saw fit not to return. Is there a reason you’re reluctant to talk to us?”

“Oh, god, I’m sorry – we had the cell off all weekend. It was so nice out – we never even checked.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and Dean. This is about that thing in the lake, right?” The sounds of a car radio came in clearly over the line.

“What about your experience Friday afternoon felt like it could wait three days, Ms. Paritas?”

“It’s not like that. It’s just Pat Barlow said she’d handle it.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Yeah. Did she not call?”

“She called. She came in. But I don’t think it’s up to Ms. Barlow to decide who’s obligated to talk to the police and who gets to turn their phone off and drink gin-and-tonics with hubby all weekend.”

“Dean’s not my husband.”

“Okay,” said Hazel. “The point still stands. I find it hard to believe you thought you were free and clear.”

“It was bad judgment on our part,” Paritas said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I can hear you’re in traffic. You’re heading home?”

“I am.”

“And where’s home?”

“ Toronto.”

“Is that where hubby lives?”

There was a pause on the other end. “What are you suggesting?”

“I guess I don’t know much about modern mores. Fill me in on one more thing: Do they leave crime scenes down there in Toronto?”

“Well, Detective, just a minute now. I explained what happened. I should have checked my messages, but I didn’t have any reason to think I’d left a crime scene.”

“You reeled up a body in Gannon. What’s your definition of a crime scene, Ms. Paritas?”

“I never saw a body. That was Miss Barlow’s story. I have no idea what it was.”

Hazel waited to see if she’d say anything else. “How far south are you?” she asked.

“Oh for gosh sake,” she muttered. “Are you serious? I’m on the other side of Mayfair. It’s taken me two hours to get here.”

“It should only take you half an hour to get to us. You know how to get to Port Dundas?”

“It wasn’t a body, Detective, I’m telling you.”

“I’ll expect you here by four at the latest.” She hung up without allowing Paritas another word and she smiled. She got Wingate on his walkie and told him she’d raised Paritas; he was welcome to sit in. He told her curtly he was already following orders and hung up on her. She realized she was going to have to apologize. She hated apologizing.

She’d had lunch, but the prospect of moving this case forward even an inch made her hungry again. She sent Melanie out for a club sandwich. While she waited, she watched the filmed sequence on the site a few more times, once writing down every detail she could see in it. There wasn’t much beyond carpet, wall, waterstain, and leg. You couldn’t count a shadow as a thing, could you? Although discounting shadows was an elementary mistake in her line of work.

She was midway through a viewing when the screen flickered too early in the camera movement and the image failed. Then it returned, but now it was totally different: a field of blurry black and white. She dropped the pen to her desktop and turned the computer screen face on to her. Someone was pulling something away from the lens to bring it into focus. It was the front page of a newspaper. It was the Record: today’s. Her heart sped up and she felt paralyzed. How to record this? The newspaper dropped below the frame and ratcheting into focus behind it was the figure in the chair, the whole figure, a man, but unidentifiable because someone had tied a width of cloth around the upper half of his face. But it was a man. His mouth was moving, and he struggled in the chair, his arms secured behind it. He listened to a voice, his head tilted sideways toward it (the voice seemed to be coming from the right) and then he shook his head ferociously in the negative. Hazel leaned in toward the laptop and spoke into it – “Hello?” she said into the microphone in the lid. She wasn’t sure her voice was being transmitted, but as soon as she spoke, the form in the chair became totally still.

“Hey!” she called. “I can see you! If you can hear me, nod your head -” But the trapped figure did not nod, rather, it shook its head from side to side in terror and the image was blotted out and went black. Hazel held her breath, wondering if now the sequence would repeat with the newspaper again, but she realized, seeing the play of shadow in the image, that she was looking at a person’s back, a person who now approached the man in the chair. “I can see you!” she shouted. “Stop what you’re doing! This is the police!”

But the figure moved slowly toward the chair and finally the masked face was visible again over its shoulder and it was shouting desperately and trying to push away. An arm flew out and struck the man on the side of the head and Hazel leapt up muttering oh fuck, and the man, still bound to the chair, was thrown sideways to the floor. Melanie was in the doorway.

“Skip? Did you say something?”

“Get Wingate back here. Call him in!”

“I have your sandwich.”

“Just get him!”

The figure loomed over the man tied to the chair and then Hazel saw the knife.

9

Cartwright was standing outside her boss’s door, as if to guard it. “What happened?” Wingate asked her.

“She only wants you.”

“Fine, then let me past.”

Cartwright opened the door, and Wingate saw Hazel behind her desk, staring intently into the laptop. She glanced at him only fleetingly and waved him over to her side of the desk. “This is unbelievable.” He saw the screen as the newspaper was being drawn away from the lens. “You better brace yourself.”

She gave him her seat and watched his face. His lips parted and then pursed. He sat completely still. “Holy god. What is he doing?”

“If you can figure it out, let me know.”

They watched it again. The figure with its back to the camera had shown a knife in a flash of light and then fallen on the stricken man in the chair. But before any motion could define what was happening, the picture warped, went black, and then the blurry newspaper appeared again.

Wingate turned slightly in the chair. “Did Spere’s people find any way to trace this?”