The Taken

“What is it?”

“Blood,” said Bail. “It’s blood, I think.”

The zoom out took a full two minutes, revealing a number of shapes as it went. When the image was revealed, it was seven letters about fifteen inches high, and they spelled out the words SAVE HER. The letters were slowly flowing down the wall. They watched the image repeat a number of times. Hazel felt sick to her stomach. “Are you sure it’s blood?”

“I don’t want it to be,” said Bail. She waved Sergeant Renald over. He was a trained SOCO officer. “What do you think?”

He stared at the display. “‘Save’ who?” he asked.

“Tell us if you think it’s blood,” said Wingate.

Renald put his face close up to the screen. “The top edges are hardening as the fluid is washing down,” he said. “See the darkening line at the top of that round shape?”

“Paint would do that,” said Hazel.

“Paint dries,” said Renald. “Blood clots. Look at the lumps forming.”

She wanted to puke. “Jesus Christ.” There was a whirring, ti

“So, ‘save’ who?” Renald repeated.

She pulled her head away from the computer but she still saw the letters bleeding down the wall in a basement somewhere. “That’s it,” she said, talking to the room. “I’m getting heartily sick of being the dog wagged by the tail. I want control, people – let’s everyone get working on what’s happening here. This town can go without parking tickets for a while until we figure this out.”

Bail said, “I don’t think any of us know where to start.”

“Begin by thinking it through. By the end of the day, I want one good idea from each of you… does everyone… what the hell is that sound?”

The irregular, metallic noise was coming from somewhere behind her. Without another word, she pushed into the back of the pen and went in the direction of the sound. It wasn’t a fan, it was too loose, too rattly. No one stopped her as she made her way to the coffee station behind Windemere’s desk. There, beside the creamers sitting in their little plastic tub of ice, in a cage, and spi

Wingate was standing beside her. “Do you think someone is asking us to raise the dead?” he asked.

She put her hand into her pants pocket and pushed past the little pill-shaped ball of tinfoil between her thumb and finger to her car keys. She passed them to Wingate. “Go see Claire Eldwin. Right now.”

“On my own?”

“On your own. And come back with some answers.”

14

Claire Eldwin lived thirty kilometres away in a town he’d never heard of, Mulhouse Springs. There were so many small towns in this part of Ontario that he figured you could live here for thirty years and not find them all. He was driving along Highway 79, to the west, below Ga

The disco

Only in the neighbourhoods where there was enough money and white skin to presume a kind of harmony did crime ever surprise you. Although not enough: there was always someone breaking down, a domestic that went ugly, someone craving silverware. Even so, his life at Twenty-one Division was truly clockwork: a drug bust at ten, a stolen bike at noon, a gunshot at two, high-school students threatening more than mere unrest at the Eaton Centre at exactly three-fifteen.

But here, here in Westmuir County, everything had a fugitive nature. You couldn’t read those closest to you, and this was because everyone’s guard was down. (Well, except for Hazel. He felt naturally closer to Hazel than anyone, precisely because she was slightly paranoid.) And because it seemed no one had anything to hide, and not even the police lived in a state of alert suspicion, it was possible to run the kind of plot they were caught in now: someone using a lake, a newspaper, the internet, and colourfully wrapped packages to tie a leash around an entire police force and tug it in the direction they wanted it to go in. It made him wonder if someone had specifically chosen Westmuir to bring all this stuff to life. It was worth a thought.

He’d called Eldwin’s house again on the way up and found the wife at home. She didn’t seem particularly surprised that he wanted to see her in person, just gave him proper directions and rang off. That only confirmed his theory. In Toronto, the police don’t call ahead, and what’s more, if they did, both sides of the conversation would hang up and immediately begin forming dire anticipations. Claire Eldwin, he found when he arrived, had put on the kettle.

She came to the door in a shiny gold housecoat with pale blue jeans underneath, and she was smoking a handrolled. Out of habit, he sniffed the smoke and checked off the tobacco box mentally. She blinked at him in her doorway, looking him over with interest and gripping the doorframe like she was going to twist it out of the wall.

It was a big house for two people, he thought, but it looked small because it was stuffed with furniture and knick-knacks. Either Eldwin or his wife collected obsessively. Cloth flowers, paperweights, small busts of famous composers, colourful replicas of birds in tiny gold cages. It all crowded in, making the rooms seem darker. She led him to an oval dining room table in wood that looked out onto a big garden full of larger, but equally extraneous, baubles. Cement arches, birdbaths, four little doghouses scattered along the serpentine flagstone paths that wound toward a stone fountain in the middle of the yard from its edges, looking as stranded as a ship run aground. There wasn’t a dog to be seen anywhere. He stood at the window as Mrs. Eldwin made tea. “It’s a quiet week,” she said. He looked at her quizzically. “You’re wondering why I have so many empty doghouses, aren’t you?”

“It occurred to me.” There was something strange about that yard, he thought. It wasn’t just its busy emptiness, it was something else…

“I sit dogs,” she said. “It was crazy busy over the long weekend, but there’s no one now. I had a St. Bernard, a Brittany spaniel, and a chihuahua for three days.”

“Sounds like a Disney film.”

“It wasn’t.”

He turned away from the window. She was pouring hot water into a teapot. “How long have you lived in Mulhouse Springs, Mrs. Eldwin?”

“You don’t look like your phone voice,” she said. “You sound like a small man on the phone, but you’re not.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I think.”

“It’s a compliment.”

He sat, accepting tea from her. “Well, thank you. You didn’t answer my question.”

“We moved a year after the wedding.”

She was at the very least extremely drunk. He could tell she’d been drinking when he spoke to her on the phone. A drunk interview could be good, but if you needed any of it later in court, someone might argue that the statements were unreliable. Still, he needed to know the basics. “And the wedding was when?”