The Taken

her footfalls on the floor, sat up stiffly in the chair and turned his face, his eyes gleaming wide in terror. They saw the dark red chasm in the side of his head, and when Paritas pressed the severed ear back into place, Eldwin began to scream. She turned back toward the camera. “I think he’s alive,” she called. “What do you two think?”

Hazel and Wingate were standing behind the desk, unable to speak or move as Colin Eldwin continued to struggle, crying out incoherently, the chair bumping sideways, its feet shrieking against the floor like fingernails on a chalkboard. Paritas pulled the ear off the side of Eldwin’s head and looked at it, a string of thick liquid still connecting it to him. “They make excellent paintbrushes,” she said, coming back toward them. She walked past the table, dropping Eldwin’s ears on top of what she was writing, and continued directly toward the camera. “Now let me ask you: do I have your attention?”

Hazel’s breath was coming in short bursts. “Yes.”

“Good,” said Paritas. “You’ve already heard what you have to do next. Figure it out and we’ll talk again. Make yourselves worthy of my attention.” Her gaze went beyond the lens now, to behind it, as if she were staring through the wall they now stood against. “Dean?” she said, and the screen went black again and the green transmission icon vanished.

They dispatched a car to Gilmore anyway, but Bellocque’s house was dark and locked up tight. She knew a warrant to force entry would get them nowhere, but she put it in motion and left it with Sean MacDonald. He’d go in and check every meaningless inch of that cluttered mess of a house and she knew he’d find nothing. They discussed keeping a car on the site, but Hazel remembered Paritas’s words: if they could find them through the internet and in the streets of downtown Toronto, they were probably smart enough not to go back to Bellocque’s.

She put Forbes on the Paritas name and told him to spend the rest of the afternoon unravelling it whatever way he could. A simple search of the telephone book and then county records confirmed, as they presumed, that there was no Gil Paritas anywhere in Westmuir, and Hazel kept her own rueful counsel on that fact, recalling the toss of Paritas’s head when she asked her what the name meant. Greek for woman-stuck-in- traffic. And Hazel had watched her flounce down the steps to her car. Not for one instant had Paritas worried that Hazel would not do exactly what was expected of her: she played good-cop/bad-cop all by herself, she laid a bluff, got called, and then showed Paritas her whole hand. And the woman had practically walked out of the station house whistling. Idiot, thought Hazel. You’ve been made to order.

Forbes was waiting at her office door with some handwritten notes. He reported that web searches on the word had finally brought him to a Latin translation page that gave “paritas” to mean “equal.” But one site offered a more tantalizing translation: we are the same.

“As what?” Hazel wondered aloud. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Her and Bellocque? Her and Eldwin?” said Forbes.

“Maybe.”

She went to find Wingate. “We have to tie Eldwin to that house. That’s our next move.”

“I’ll call Childress back. See if she has anything for us yet. And I think it’s time we should get back in contact with Claire Eldwin. She has a right to know.”

“Don’t tell her about the hand,” Hazel said. “Or the ears.” She thought for a second. “Don’t give her any details at all.”

“I’ll handle it.” She seemed to be studying his face. “Skip?”

“Three stories, Paritas said. We know two of them. The third is ‘already written.’ What is that third story, James?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what can you save the dead from?”

There was a long silence, as if they were watching something take shape in the air between them, and then Wingate said, “A lie.”

“A lie.”

He’d already picked up the phone. “If I call and Childress has something we can use, we’re going to have to get into bed with Twenty-one. Are we sure we want that?”

“Will they help? They’re your people.”

“They’ll help, but no one likes to be wrong. If something went south in their own backyard…”

She thought about that for a moment. Then she said, “I don’t care. Make the call.”

23

Sunday, May 29

Childress got back to Wingate at the beginning of her next shift, Sunday morning. It came through as a handwritten fax, a dated list on Childress’s notebook paper. The fact that it was off her PNB and not on a piece of scrap paper meant the matter had entered Twenty-one’s caseload on some level and they were already on the division’s radar, whether they wanted to be or not.

There were twenty names covering all five apartments from 2000 to the present. Most of the tenants were long-term and their start and end dates were in full-year increments. Three rental terms ended prematurely, but there was no Colin Eldwin or Nick Wise or any other name that could resolve to Eldwin. But one of them was a “Clarence Earles,” and it seemed as good a place to start as any. Wingate called Mrs. Eldwin to give her an update and to take the opportunity to ask if her husband ever used pseudonyms.

“That’s why you’re calling?”

“We need to tick off all the boxes, Mrs. Eldwin. I’m sorry.”

“Shouldn’t you be out there trying to find him?”

“This is part of it.”

“Why would he use a pseudonym?” she asked. “He’s never published anything anyway.”

“What about when he gets hired to write something?”

“You mean How to Use Your New Garage Door Opener? I don’t think those ‘texts’ get signed, Officer.”

“Okay,” he said, trying to calm her down. “Can I ask you if the name Clarence Earles means anything to you?”

“Clarence Earles,” she repeated, flatly. “Does it mean anything to you?”

“They’re his initials, Mrs. Eldwin.”

“ That’s your lead, Detective? You found his fucking initials? Did you find them carved on a fucking tree?”

“Mrs. Eldwin, please -”

“Why don’t you put out an APB for Clint Eastwood, then? Or Carmen fucking Electra? Surely a girl with tits that big must be hiding something.”

He forced himself to continue over the sound of her furiously sucking on a cigarette. “Ma’am, did you ever live on Washington Avenue in Toronto?”

“Yeah, I did. For ten years with Chris Evert. You know, the gay tennis player? Did you know I led a whole secret life with a lesbian tennis star who shares her initials with my husband? Hey, with me as well. Isn’t that something?”

“Mrs. Eldwin,” he said firmly, but she interrupted him.

“FIND MY HUSBAND!” she shouted. “Don’t call me with code words, addresses, trails of breadcrumbs, or smoke signals until you know where he is, do you hear me? That’s your job. You fucking… useless… piece of -”

He hung up.

He found Hazel feeding Mason a sunflower seed through the bars of his cage. “Um, I don’t think she knows anything. Claire Eldwin.”