Hazel held the door open for Paritas, who peered into the room uncomfortably before entering it. She snapped on the overhead and gestured to the back of the room. There, now dried out but still faintly stinking, lay the mannequin on its tarp. “Recognize that?” Hazel asked.
Paritas stood over it, looking at the mannequin with an expression of blank surprise on her face. “Is this it? This is what I caught?” She turned to look at Hazel and Hazel nodded. “I thought you said you hadn’t found it?”
“We found it.”
“So Pat did take you there.”
“It was weighted down to the bottom of the lake.”
“Why?”
“So it would stay down. Or so it could be easily found.”
Paritas studied her face. “So you really do think I deliberately fished this stupid thing out of the lake? Do you have a theory why I’d want to?”
“Do you know Colin Eldwin?”
“Who?”
“Do you read the Westmuir Record?”
“The what?” Paritas was getting really exasperated now. Hazel felt the walls closing in. There was a man in a room somewhere either injured or dead and her only lead, so far, was a woman so desperate for companionship that she’d come to Westmuir County to find it. She’d even gone fishing for it. Hazel cast one more look at the strange, bereft form on the shelf and held her arm out to indicate to Paritas that she was free. She stepped out into the hallway.
“I can go?” Paritas asked.
“You can go.”
“I’ve never been questioned before,” she said. “It’s really not very pleasant.”
“It would have been worse if you’d actually done something.”
“And you’d have been able to tell? By browbeating me into contradicting myself or something?”
“Something like that,” said Hazel, leading her through the pen to the front of the station house.
“Nice to know the police have so much faith in the average citizen,” said Paritas, “that they have to trick them into telling the truth.”
“Would you trust the average citizen, Ms. Paritas?” Hazel asked her.
Paritas thought about it. “More than the police?” She smiled tightly and pushed the door open.
She was halfway to the sidewalk when Hazel asked, “What kind of name is Paritas?”
“Woman-stuck-in-traffic,” said Gil Paritas, smiling.
Hazel went back into her office, and Wingate was still there, watching the screen and absently signing reports with one hand. Hazel sighed and ran her hand through her hair. “Anything?” she asked him.
“No. Well, nothing else. I’ve got a knot in my stomach watching this guy get attacked over and over again. Although I take your earlier point – why hint at things? What do they want us to think of this?”
“We should be careful what we wish for.”
“What did you find out from Paritas?”
“She’s a tourist. She’s got no clue what it is she hooked on the lakebed. But I think she’s afraid her boy-toy might. So I have to go up and see this Bellocque guy.”
“You want company?”
“No. I’m going to go in the morning, when I have more energy. In the meantime, we have to have eyes on this screen twenty-four hours a day in case something changes.”
“She’s sure Bellocque is accounted for?”
“He’s big and bearded, so he’s not the man in the chair. Too bad we didn’t see the face of the knife-bearer.”
“That would have been accommodating of him.”
She sat heavily in the chair. “Listen, James -”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Your first week back, you deserved something easier than this.”
“It’s still not an excuse. I’m sorry I blew up at you.”
“It’s okay,” he said, and he seemed to mean it. “You should go home, Hazel.”
“Yeah. I feel a little…” A night of sleep would be a good idea, especially if any of this blew up further. “I do need to lie down. But you’ll call -”
“If anything even slightly interesting comes up.”
“You ran Claire Eldwin?”
“Yeah. Nothing.”
“Well, keep on her. If hubby’s not back soon, I think we have a problem.”
He agreed, and reassured her he’d keep on top of everything. She went back out into the pen. Almost all of her officers were out on calls, dealing with citybound traffic after the long weekend. You wouldn’t know from the look of it that the station house was dealing with what seemed at least to be an abduction or perhaps a murder. She was hoping they wouldn’t have to leap into high gear, but she was ready to bet against it.
She thought she might try to walk home, but she was well past anything like a walk. PC Kraut Fraser was playing Tetris on his computer when she went past. “I seem to lack certain spatial talents,” he said.
“Can you keep a car on the road? I need a lift home.”
He seemed relieved to switch off the computer. “We’ll take the long way,” he said. “Kill some time on this holiday Monday. Time-and-a-half isn’t worth it, I’ll tell you, Skipper, not when I could be with my kids.”
“Then take the short route,” she said.
“They’re down in Toronto with their mother.” He grimaced for her. “I got all the time in the world.”
They got into his cruiser, and he backed out of the lot and started driving north along Porter Street. “You weren’t kidding about the long way.”
“Unless your back is really bad.”
“No,” she said, “it’s a nice afternoon, and I could use a drive to clear my head.”
“Any ideas on what’s going on in this mannequin case?”
“Too many for any one to be useful. You?”
“Feels like the tail’s wagging the dog a little.”
“That’s the life of the investigator, isn’t it, Kraut? You only get the tail at first and then you hang on for dear life and try to crawl up to the head.”
He took her up north of the town and then turned onto one of the smaller highways leading to one of the little lakes that fed into Gannon. This one was called Echo Lake. A banner promising fireworks dated the night before had fallen down onto one of the little beaches. Fraser turned down onto the verge and faced the water. In the distance, pleasureboaters zipped back and forth over the surface of the lake. He turned off the motor. “In a couple of hours it’ll be peaceful out here again,” he said.
“It’s peaceful now.”
“I can always handle a little more quiet.” He powered down a window. It smelled of pine and wet earth outside. It had rained heavily overnight. “So listen, I know you got a lot to think about right now, but I felt I should give you a heads-up.”
“Oh-oh. I thought this drive had an ulterior motive.”
“The new guy at OPS Central, Commander Mason’s replacement?”
“Chip Willan?”
“Yeah. Well, we all got questionnaires.”
“Questionnaires.”
He reached into an inside jacket-pocket and took out a folded sheaf of papers and handed them to her. She opened the papers up – it was a fairly detailed document with the title Ontario Police Services Central Region Work Environment Survey. The first page was mainly demographic stuff, followed by a couple of pages asking the respondent various questions about resources, clearance rates, prevalence of certain kinds of crime in their jurisdiction, job satisfaction, and so on. She said, “This is pretty standard. In fact, it’s good to know he’s sending these around. Maybe it means he’s serious about making things better.”
“Look closer. Page five.”
She turned to that page and Fraser indicated question thirty-six with his index finger. It read, “If you were redeployed to another detachment within OPSC, which one would be your first choice?”