A Door in the River

She thought about it for a moment. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll give you my number.” She wrote it down. “Is there anyone else coming?”

“It’s just the two of us.”

She didn’t want to press him. She’d always known that Wingate had depths and secrets she knew nothing about. She hoped she’d have a chance to learn more about him. She realized, as she left the hospital and emerged into the dull morning light, that in the brief period of time he’d been with the detachment that she’d come to care for him a great deal. In fact, she realized, she loved him like a son. And then she sat behind her wheel and wept for him.

She showered and changed and went into work. The detachment was quiet. She entered through the rear door, but as soon as she was inside, she realized she had nowhere to go. The door to her office was closed and she heard voices within. She crossed the hallway and went into the kitchen to fix herself a cup of coffee. The Wiest bird – christened Willan, née Beedle – was still in its cage against the wall. They were going to have to call Cathy some time in the next few days and arrange to bring it back to her once she was comfortable enough to return home. She poured her coffee. It seemed the bird was getting used to everyone. It looked on her with a bored expression.

“I hear they named him after me,” said a voice behind her. It was Commissioner Willan. “He seems pretty laid-back.”

“Maybe they chose the name because he deserves to be in a cage.”

“I’m happy to see you looking well, Hazel.”

“I only look well, Commissioner. I gather you’ve heard about DC Wingate?”

“I have,” he said.

“A lot of paperwork if someone dies in the line of duty, huh?”

He twitched his head to the side. “Not to mention the grief,” he said.

She had no response. This was not the day to discover that her surfer-dude commissioner also had a heart. “In any case, I’m well enough to give you and Inspector Greene a full report when you’re ready for one.”

“Superintendent Greene.”

“Right. Sorry. He abandons ship eight months ago, then goes and takes the exam, and now he’s back, crowned in glory.”

“Something like that. Can we live in peace?”

“What’s that?” Hazel said.

He smiled mildly at her. “You know the new regional HQ is going to be here, Detective Inspector. The province is going to put twenty million dollars into straightening out the 41. Port Dundas is going to get a bigger dot on the map.”

She lived among obliterators. “You straighten out the highway, Commissioner, traffic bypasses the town. You turn it into a backwater.”

“Not if at the new exit there’s a terrific new mall with stores people will visit, and the new Westmuir Police Headquarters is right there on the other side of it. Then you turn it into a gateway. The gateway,” he said, leaning forward with a finger raised, “of all of Westmuir. You’ll be top dick in the whole county.”

“After Ray.”

“Well, you can think of Ray however you like.”

There was no point in responding. Willan could carry on a conversation with himself at a di

“I think he prefers seeds,” she said.

“If there were crackers in the wild, they’d never eat seeds again.” He brushed the crumbs off the front of his suit and held his arm out toward the hallway. “Shall we?”

] 37 [

Tuesday, August 16, late morning

The meeting took two hours. Howard Spere was present. Greene and Willan asked them to run down the entire investigation, from the discovery of Wiest’s body in the smoke shop’s parking lot to Spere’s report on the body they found in Carl Duffy’s house. The body was Duffy’s, and his relatives, trickling in from parts distant, were being briefed on the circumstances surrounding his death by Roland Forbes in one of the interview rooms.

The squad cars that had staked out the Eagle the night before had found it abandoned; Hazel remembered Bellecourt asking her where she thought Earl Tate had been. They’d now determined he’d been the one to drop the dynamite into the steel pipe. Then he’d vanished. Finally, Travers was lying on a metal bed in a drawer in the Mayfair General morgue. He’d died of his wounds, but the cause of death was Larysa. Hazel didn’t say that part, however, when it came her turn to speak.

Her superiors listened with interest, and occasionally one of them took notes. After an hour, they dismissed Spere but asked her to stay. Step by step, they walked through her decision process during the investigation and took more notes. Her erstwhile office began to take on the atmosphere of a courtroom, and she wondered now if her “promotion” and the respectful nature of their questioning tone wasn’t the framework for a gallows of some sort. But at the end of another hour, Willan thanked her and said, “That should do it.”

“Do what?”

“Complete our records.”

“Of what.”

Willan smiled. “You know, Hazel, there was a regime change in the middle of this case, some unusual tactics were used, some jurisdictional irregularities were noted, and there are five dead bodies, plus, as you tell it, an unknown number of other bodies that I presume will not be turning up anytime soon. Then, in the hospital in Mayfair, we have a member of your force clinging to life, and a woman who was kidnapped, sexually abused, and regularly assaulted, who needs to see her consul but who is currently in a state of shock. We have a store licensed by the province of Ontario to sell native cigarettes that was the portal to an illegal casino that in turn was intimately tied to the rape and torture of kidnap victims. And Ray here let you spend a lot of money. Oh, and did I mention that you kept a witness and possible suspect – you never ruled Cathy Wiest out, did you? –”

“Oh come on, now – ”

“But you didn’t and she lived in your home. With you.”

“Where is this heading, Commissioner? What’s it about?”

He stood up, and she remained where she was. She’d save standing up for when it would have the most effect. He said, “What it is not about, Inspector Micallef, is just you.”

“I know that.”

“What happens if this girl kills again?”

“She’s finished. She got everyone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“How. How can you be sure?” he asked. His tone had become ever so slightly heated and it was frankly disconcerting.

“If you had investigated this case, Commissioner Willan, you would have drawn the same conclusion.”

Silence.

“Am I fired?”

“What about future charges?”

“What future charges?”

“How many warrants were issued? Who was notified that a covert investigation out of our jurisdiction was being undertaken?”

“This was too serious to a

“It was,” he said. “I agree.”

“We acted with the best information we had.”

“You’re right. I’m here to say you did a good job.”

“What?”

“Even though there is the matter of whether the man who shot Lydia Bellecourt also beat the crap out of her from inside his car, twenty feet away.”

She’d gotten to the point where it felt unwise to speak at all.

“Any of this could be a problem at some point, Hazel. If you need to be covered, I’ll cover you. And if there’s anything I don’t already know, I need to know it.”

He offered his hand. She screwed up her eyes and looked at Greene. He chucked his chin toward Willan. Shake the man’s bloody hand. She shook. Tentatively. He pumped.

“Thank you, Commissioner,” said Ray Greene because she hadn’t.

“Yes, thank you,” said Hazel.

“Do it again, though,” he said to both of them, “and it won’t be difficult to fire either of you. Or suspend you without pay, definitely or indefinitely, retire you, reassign you to deskwork, send you on a teaching mission to Kapuskasing. My options are actually almost endless. Superintendent?” Greene stood. “You’re her boss now.”