"So that's it? Guilt by association?"
"Not just any association. Don't you get it? Dante Ryan is the kind of man I live to put away. Day in, day out, I work this job of mine. I see kids being shot by other kids because they gave them the wrong look. Husbands who kill their wives because the pork chops burned. And men found in the trunks of their cars because they got involved in organized crime. Dante Ryan kills people-not in passion or anger or on the spur of the moment-but for money, plain and simple, and if I had anything to say about it, he'd be doing life in Millhaven, not running a restaurant that I almost took you to."
"If you knew the truth…" And then I had to cut myself off, because there was no way I could tell her the truth about Ryan and me without including the nasty ending in the Don River Valley.
I'm not sure what would have happened next-would she have walked out on me? — because her cellphone rang. She un-clipped it from her belt, drawing a dirty look from people at the table next to us, and answered with a terse "Yes?" Pause. "Hey, Gregg."
McDonough, her throwback partner. I was glad he couldn't see us. He would have had a hoot if he knew who was sharing her table.
"Where?" she said. "How far away are you? No, I'm closer. I can be there in fifteen minutes. All right. See you there."
She snapped the phone closed. "I have to go."
"You were leaving anyway."
"I'm sorry, Jonah. Can you at least understand why I have to be careful?"
"We all have to be careful when we meet someone we like," I said. "You were the first door I opened in a long time. I didn't expect everything to be easy between us. But I was willing to try."
"I still have to go."
"Where?"
"Church and Wellesley," she said. "A man was beaten to death."
The heart of the gay village. "A bashing?" It wouldn't be the city's first but doing it in the heart of the village was beyond audacious.
"I'll see what the scene has to say when I get there."
"Let me drive you."
"I don't think so."
"Please. It's ten more minutes out of your life. What if there was something I could tell you that would help us get over this hump?"
"I can't imagine what that would be." I took Adelaide across the lower part of the city, through the deserted financial district, tension filling the car like secondhand smoke.
"There's a lot I can't tell you about Ryan," I finally said, "for your sake as well as his, but I can say this: we came together because he was trying to make good on something and he needed my help to do it. He was trying, believe it or not, to save a life. Not to take one, Kate. To save one. He was trying to prevent something truly horrible from happening. Whatever you might think about him, he was trying to do something good, and he did. And I helped him. I paid a price for that. A high one. And I've been paying for it ever since. But I'm not sorry he came to me, and I'm not sorry about what we had to do. The only thing I am goddamn sorry about is that it came between us tonight."
We were heading north on Jarvis, which had more lanes and less traffic than Church. When we got to the corner of Maitland, Hollinger said, "Drop me here, please."
"You sure?"
"I have a crime scene to work and I need to arrive there on my own. I don't want to be teased or distracted by anyone or anything."
I pulled over and shifted into park. She snapped her seat belt open and put her hand on the door handle. Then she paused. She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead, but her voice seemed to warm a bit when she spoke. "I'm sorry if I seem paranoid about this. I was so ready for a nice evening with you, Jonah. I really was. I thought because the Di Pietra cases were all closed, the time was right, but hearing about Ryan-knowing his association with that crew-it threw me."
"No kidding."
She turned to me and surprised me with a smile. Nothing that lit up the night, but a smile. "Give me some time to process this. Maybe after I've slept on it, it won't seem so bad. If it doesn't, then maybe I'll give you a call."
Two maybes. Hardly ironclad.
She got out of the car and walked toward the alley that ran south off Maitland, where a man's life had ended. I drove one block farther south and parked. I didn't want to crowd Hollinger, but I was curious to see her work a crime scene. I put on a ball cap from my trunk, slipped an old raincoat over my blazer and walked back to the alley.
It was brightly lit-unnaturally so-by halogen lights mounted on stands. Crime scene investigators on TV might walk around with dinky penlights, but in real life they tend to flood scenes with light so as not to miss anything. A crowd had gathered outside the tape that crossed the mouth of the alley. I stood at the back where Hollinger couldn't see me. She was squatting beside the body of a blond male in a grey overcoat, talking to a uniformed officer, probably the first on the scene. After noting how the body had been found, she snapped on a pair of latex gloves and reached carefully into the dead man's pockets. From the breast pocket of his jacket she withdrew a wallet, examined the contents, made a few notes in a spiral notebook, and put the wallet back. A medical examiner came over and lifted the man's head and showed her something at the back. She frowned and touched the area gingerly. The tip of her gloved finger was bloody when she removed it.
She sighed and got to her feet and nodded to two men waiting with a body bag and a gurney. They laid the bag on the ground and unzipped it. One knelt by the victim's head, the other by his feet. When they lifted him over the bag, his head flopped forward and I got a clear look at his face. I gasped loud enough to make people around me turn.
Good thing I was standing near the back.
The dead man was Martin Glenn.
CHAPTER 10
World Repairs pays handsomely to subscribe to a variety of databases, one of which is called BizServe. I logged on remotely to the office server from home and read everything it had on EcoSys then moved on to the company's own website. Between the two of them, I got a pretty good picture of the work that Glenn had done.
He was an engineer by training and had worked for more than a decade for the Ministry of the Environment, helping it define and develop its site assessment policies. At the height of his career, he did what many civil servants do: resigned so he could offer the same services back to the private sector at a consultant's rate, instead of as a modestly paid government drone. Glenn and his associates helped clients assess the level of groundwater or soil contamination of their property and whether it was worth the cost of reclamation. If so, they would create a remediation plan. Restore soil to levels that matched samples taken from non-polluted sites. Build underground barriers to prevent toxins from seeping into or out of the site. Treat ground-water so polluted you wouldn't use it to put out a fire. Guide clients through the maze of government ministries that might be involved in a large project: the Ministry of the Environment, of course, but also Natural Resources, if a project posed an ecological risk to wetlands and other sensitive areas; and Finance if there were potential tax breaks to be had.
EcoSys would take clients through every step they needed to get a clean Record of Site Condition that met all criteria under ministry guidelines and the federal Environmental Protection Act.
Most of the time, according to the website, the ministry would review the RSC and audit the process to ensure all requirements had been met. "But when a trusted partner like EcoSys has done the work," the site boasted, "with all the necessary skills and judgment, clients can rest easy that the RSC process will be approved in a timely manner."