People had always come to Toronto to seek their fortunes: from towns up north where industries die out; from Down East where the fishery has been exploited beyond renewal; from reserves that offer Natives little besides unemployment and abuse. Someone should tell them this isn’t Toronto the Good anymore, that it’s a city feeding on itself like a man on a hunger strike, devouring runaways, the mentally ill, the luckless, the reckless, anyone who can’t move fast enough to get out of its way.
Someone else was going to have to repair this part of the world. I had my hands full with the Silver family.
When the light changed, I fished a quarter out of my pocket, then another, and dropped both coins in the hat at the feet of the karma girl.
“Make mine a double,” I said.
CHAPTER 23
No homicide detective likes outside interference. They are not given to providing confidential information to private individuals. They do not like being second-guessed by amateurs, and when it comes to murder, that’s what most of us are. In five years at Beacon, the closest I’d come to investigating a homicide was the week I spent working for a wealthy Rosedale woman who was sure her husband’s apparent suicide had been staged to cover up his murder. Fine. If that was what she believed-had to believe-she could afford to indulge it. My first three days convinced me there was no evidence to support her contention or refute the official finding of suicide. Four more days with my client-who had all the charm of a magpie-not only convinced me that her husband had in fact killed himself but that I would likely have done the same had I woken up married to her.
Nonetheless, after leaving Winston Chan’s office, I presented myself at the Toronto Police Service Homicide Squad, housed in police headquarters at 4 °College Street, and asked to speak to the lead investigator into Kenneth Page’s death. I was told to find Detective Sergeant Hollinger.
Hollinger-first name Katherine-was in her mid-thirties, with glossy black hair and hazel eyes, the hair pulled back, though not severely, and held in place by a clip inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She wore a navy suit over a white blouse and no jewellery apart from pearl studs in her ears. Her partner was Detective Gregg McDonough, built like a defensive back and dressed in a grey suit, white shirt and pale pink tie. He was about forty, with thick red hair finger-combed high off his forehead and a red chin beard salted with streaks of white.
“You have information about the Kenneth Page murder?” Hollinger asked.
“More like questions.”
“Whoa,” McDonough butted in. “You with the media?”
“No, I’m a private investigator.” I held out my photo ID but McDonough ignored it.
“A rent-a-cop,” he rasped, in a voice that probably had been coarsened by years of yelling at people in bars, arenas and interrogation rooms. “A cupcake.”
Hollinger took my ID and looked it over. “Why does Beacon Security have questions about this case?”
I hoped none of this got back to Clint, since he’d have no idea what I was doing here. “Is it still being looked at as a carjacking?”
“We’re kind of busy, creampuff,” McDonough said. “Or maybe you haven’t heard a girl named Kylie Warren got killed.”
“I heard.”
“And yet you’re still here.”
“What’s your interest in Mr. Page?” Hollinger asked. Her voice was a pleasant alto, far easier on the ears than McDonough’s aggressive bark. She smelled better too. “Do you represent his family? We’ve been in contact with them and they haven’t expressed any concerns with the investigation.”
“Which has yielded?”
“You don’t get to ask questions yet.”
“Come on, Kath,” McDonough said. “If we need a useless appendage hanging around wasting our time, I’ll call someone in from Corporate Services.”
Hollinger rolled her eyes and handed back my ID. “Come on,” she said to me. “You can buy me a coffee downstairs.”
Upon closer examination, I realized that Katherine Hollinger’s eyes were not hazel. They were a golden honey colour and looking into them was painless. We were sitting in the lobby of 4 °College drinking coffees I’d bought at a Starbucks concession. She was inspecting the marks left on my face last night by Dante Ryan. “What happened to you?”
“Bumped into a door handle.”
“With knuckles on it?”
“A German design.”
She levelled her eyes at me. Pretty much levelled me too. “Why are you asking about Kenneth Page?”
I sifted through a combination of lies, omissions and half-truths, looking for the most plausible to present, then said to hell with it and started with the truth, or some of it. “We’re investigating a nursing home on behalf of a client,” I said. “He thinks they were shorting his mother on medication before she died. I’ve been doing a little research into prescription medicines and I came across the name Kenneth Page in connection with illegal exports to the U.S.”
“You’ve been to the pharmacists’ association?”
“Right before I came here. Are you still treating his death as a carjacking?”
“Have you got something better?”
“The papers said his car was found at the airport the night he was killed. Who kills a guy for his car only to dump it an hour later? I know public transit has deteriorated but that’s extreme.”
“It’s possible the killer didn’t plan to use force and panicked.”
“How many times was Page shot?” I asked.
“Twice.”
“In the head?”
“Yes.”
“Front or back?”
“Back.”
“Contact wounds?”
“Not quite.”
“But close.”
“Yes.”
“No one heard the shots?”
“No.”
“Any signs of a struggle? Defensive wounds? Skin under the nails?”
“No.”
“So the killer was calm enough to shoot Page twice in the head from close range, possibly with a silenced weapon, but he panicked when he got what he came for?”
“People,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
“Is it safe to assume you’re exploring other avenues of investigation and the carjacking angle is all you’re showing to the public?”
“Is any assumption safe?” she asked.
CHAPTER 24
I got back to the office shortly before noon. Fucking Franny hadn’t rolled in yet. I felt like a Finn in one of those wife-carrying contests, with Monsieur Paradis playing the role of the two-hundred-pound bride. I tried to turn down the slow boil building in me and put in a call to Mark Palmer, manager of stock operations at Meissner-Hoffmann Pharmaceutical, one of Canada’s largest drug manufacturers. Winston Chan had suggested him as a possible contact. Meissner-Hoffmann’s office was in an industrial park north of the city in Vaughan, so I phoned rather than subject my aching side to the rigours of driving an hour in each direction.
The way Palmer guarded info at first, you’d have thought the company made weapons-grade plutonium. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”