She checked the screen on her desk again and watched the feed from the beginning of the pan. Now that she knew how it ended, just the sight of the waterstained back wall of the space was enough to get her heart pounding. She stared at it, willing it to show her something new, and her phone rang. She jumped.
“Jesus,” she said into the receiver.
“No, Spere.”
“Tell me you’ve got something for me, Howard.”
“Nothing good,” he said. “The DNS number resolves to gobbledegook. Not even a provider we can trace comes up. It’s just out there, beaming in from outer space, for all we know.”
“What about those pictures James sent you? What are they?”
“Just badly exposed snaps, I’m afraid. I’ve sent them to Allen Barry, our imaging guy, but he’s in Toronto, so it might be a while before he weighs in.”
“Thanks for nothing.”
“A pleasure as usual,” said Howard Spere.
8
Burt Levitt’s store was still called Micallef’s; it had been the town’s largest clothing store since 1890, and no one was ever going to change its name. It had been sold to Levitt after Hazel’s father died in 1988, and when people came in asking for Mr. Micallef, he presented himself without correcting them. In small towns like Port Dundas, the forces of multinational retail had been successfully held at bay for a long time, but now the tendrils of Walmart and Mark’s Work Wearhouse and other bottom-liners were reaching further and further, and a cornfield to the south of town had been asphalted over and planted with big box stores. Levitt was feeling it, but not as badly as the mom-and-pop grocery stores, the few that had survived on the main drag. His time was coming, he knew it, but there were still enough of the older generation who were loyal to him that he could keep going.
James Wingate had never seen the store in its heyday. The ceiling was still wired with the capsule and pulley system that had once been used to shoot cash from various departments to the cashier, who sat at the back of the store, receiving payments and making change, which would be ferried back across the ceiling to the customer. Hazel could remember the sound of the little compartments zipping over her head and the squeak of a wooden cup being unscrewed to disgorge its contents. Micallef’s was the only store in Ontario to still have its original cash trolley.
Now the system was dusty and rusted in places and the various departments had been collapsed to make a single room. Levitt had cut employees back from the five who came with the store in 1988 to three, including himself. James had never been inside the store before now, and it had never occurred to him, in his six months in Port Dundas, to go in. But crossing its threshold, he was reminded of the Simpson’s store at Yonge and Queen streets in Toronto that his mother had taken him to to shop for a suit when he was nine. It smelled the same way and the fixtures looked the same. He had the instinct that Levitt would know something about mannequins.
Levitt, now almost eighty, came around from the cash desk and shook Wingate’s hand. “I’d heard rumours about new blood during that nastiness with poor Delia Chandler, but I admit this is the first time I have proof of your existence, Sir.”
“I guess it’s a good sign that you rarely see a detective in the shop.”
“Not necessarily,” said Levitt. “Even detectives have to buy underwear.”
Wingate smiled sadly and made a mental note to come to Main Street next time he needed something. He unsnapped his dossier case and pulled out three pictures of the Gannon Lake mannequin. His walkie buzzed; it was Hazel. He said, “I’m where you told me to go,” and he turned it off. He held the pictures out to Levitt. “Hazel sent me over to show you these. It’s of something we found. We’re wondering what you make of it.”
Levitt took the pictures from Wingate and retreated to his cash desk, where he spread the pictures out in a row and put his glasses on to look at them. “Rather beat up, isn’t she?”
“Where would a person get something like this?”
Levitt took his glasses off. “Oh, there’s all kinds of places you could buy a mannequin. Or steal one. You can even buy them online now. This girl is rather old, though – not quite as old as mine, but not exactly up to date.”
“Would you know if you were missing one?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “But I’ve never had anything like this. I’d guess she was at least twenty years old. The new ones now are much more realistic, and you can get them Chinese, overweight, black, short, voluptuous, whatever you want. You’d think you were shopping for a mail-order bride from looking at the manufacturers’ catalogues.”
Wingate looked around the store. All of Levitt’s mannequins were headless. He realized he preferred headless mannequins to the headed ones: mannequin faces sent a chill down his spine. He recalled a horror film he’d seen in his teens where store mannequins came to life. Had the person who’d sunk their mannequin seen the same film? “Is there a place where unloved mannequins go? Like some kind of mannequin dump?”
“Yeah,” said Levitt. “It’s called eBay.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. So we have little or no chance of figuring out where this one came from.”
“Even if your girl still had a mouth, I doubt she’d be able to tell you anything.”
Wingate thanked Levitt and went back out onto the sidewalk and started back toward the station house. Then he stopped and took his PNB out of his pocket and wrote “Headless also = mouthless. Silenced.”
It was coming up to three o’clock. She walked out into the pen and looked around at the only place that was really her domain anymore. She went in to the dispatch and put her hand on PC MacTier’s shoulder. “Might be the time to get some rubber on the roads, don’t you think?”
“At least one step ahead of you. I’ve got one car here in reserve and one more in Kehoe River; the rest are waiting on the grass at various exits across this great county of ours.”
“Anything yet?”
“Not much happens at thirty kliks an hour, but something will come up, you know it will.”
“I’m putting twenty on it involving a motorcycle.” “No one will take that action, Chief.”
She went back out into the pen and sat at PC Julia Windemere’s desk. She’d taken the long weekend to visit her mother in the Kawarthas and wasn’t back until Wednesday morning. She switched on Windemere’s computer and dialled up the site. Nothing had changed. She switched it off and opened her notebook to the two numbers they’d spent all weekend calling. Bellocque’s number performed its strange ringing followed by the bleat of a busy tone. But to her surprise, Gil Paritas picked up after two rings.
“Hello?” said a surprised-sounding voice.
“Is this Gil Paritas?”
“Yes.”
“Do you check your messages much, Ms. Paritas?” “I’m sorry, who is this?”
“This is Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef of the Port Dundas OPS. We left you at least six messages over the weekend which you saw fit not to return. Is there a reason you’re reluctant to talk to us?”
“Oh, god, I’m sorry – we had the cell off all weekend. It was so nice out – we never even checked.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me and Dean. This is about that thing in the lake, right?” The sounds of a car radio came in clearly over the line.
“What about your experience Friday afternoon felt like it could wait three days, Ms. Paritas?”
“It’s not like that. It’s just Pat Barlow said she’d handle it.”
“That’s what she said.”
“Yeah. Did she not call?”
“She called. She came in. But I don’t think it’s up to Ms. Barlow to decide who’s obligated to talk to the police and who gets to turn their phone off and drink gin-and-tonics with hubby all weekend.”