The hair on the back of her neck was prickling, and she turned around to look behind her. The bare wall at the back of the basement was a smooth concrete surface. She turned back to Hutchins. “He’s a detective. Wingate.”
“Oh, well that’s the other side of the building, Ma’am.”
He shone the light toward the stairs. She kept waiting for something to catch her eye, but all the smooth grey surfaces were blurring together. She held her finger up and walked over to the concrete wall and stood close to it. It was a bare wall, no sign of human fluids on it at all. She smelled the wall, knowing how ridiculous she must look. “Are you a building inspector in your spare time?” Hutchins asked her.
“Not quite. There was blood on the wall in the video. I just wanted to see.”
The officers joined her at the wall, and they all inspected it together. It was a fairly smooth surface, but not so smooth that a recent bloodstain wouldn’t be worked into the small pocks. There was nothing. “If this had been recently cleaned,” said Childress, “we’d smell it. You need bleach to get that much blood out.”
“Why are we here?” said Hazel quietly. “I’m sure he wanted us to come here.”
“Maybe he wanted you here so you wouldn’t be there.”
She snapped around to the female officer, and her heart started pounding again. “Shit.”
“What could be happening back in Port Dundas with you occupied in Toronto?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
The officers shared a look, and then Hutchins held his hand out to show the way back to the stair.
When they got back to the main floor, Hazel could see Andrew through the door sitting on the top step on the verandah. “Do you mind if I harass this Miss Caro one more second?”
“Be my guest,” said Hutchins. “She seems to delight in the company of the police.”
Hazel knocked, and after a moment, the door opened again. “Haven’t I done my duty for the day?” said Gail Caro.
“There are two empty lockers downstairs. Does that mean there are two empty apartments?”
“People come and go, Officer. And it’s the end of the school year.”
“You’re still here.”
“The university doesn’t only rent to students.”
Childress stepped forward. If Hazel had met her on the street, she would have assumed this strapping woman was a volleyball pro. “You didn’t answer her question.”
“The ground floor just turned over,” said Caro, rolling her eyes. “And the apartment beside me is empty. I don’t have the dope on anyone else in this sad shitbox, okay?”
“Who moved in down here?”
“I forgot to bring a cake over, so I didn’t meet him.”
“Him?”
“Or her,” she said. “I didn’t meet them.”
“What number is the empty one upstairs?”
“Three,” she said.
They thanked Caro again and she huffed back up the stairs. Andrew stood when they emerged from the house.
“You find the temple of doom down there?”
“Just actual dirty laundry,” she said.
“I guess that’s preferable to the alternative.”
Hutchins had squared to them, his hands on his hips. “The alternative was no bras on the line. I don’t think your guy wants to give up his hideout yet.”
“But he wanted us to see this house.”
“That’s what you say,” said Hutchins. “But you might want to entertain the possibility that you followed what you thought was a trail to something that doesn’t mean anything.”
“You read those chapters, Officer. Something’s going on.” She went down the steps behind him and stood on the lawn. There was an alleyway between thirty-two and thirty-four leading to the two backyards. “Just wait here for a second,” she said. She walked down the paving stones that forked to two gates and tripped the latch on the right-side one with the string that hung between the slats, as Nick Wise had done in the story. There was a small patch of garden behind the house with a couple of tomato plants doing poorly in the chestnut’s shade. A beaten-up plastic chaise lay to the side of the door that led from the house to the yard, and behind it was a stack of empty clay flowerpots. Their contents had not been transplanted to the garden: someone had long ago given up on growing flowers back here. She walked the perimeter of the garden looking for disturbed or sunken earth, anything that looked like it might be worth digging. She kicked at dry clods and pushed the toe of her shoe into patches, moving the earth around, but she realized if she was going to be serious about it, she’d need a reason, and so far, she didn’t have one. A feeling wasn’t going to win her a warrant to dig this place up.
She went back out front. Hutchins was standing on the lawn now, looking faintly amused. “See… the difference between us beat cops and you dicks is we’re led by our feet and you’re led by your nose. We just keep walking, you know, to see what’s what, but you ‘know’ there’s something at the end of the trail because you’re sure you smelled smoke.”
“I’m not sure I get you,” said Hazel.
“If I see smoke, I know I’m not imagining it,” he said. “But my taste for the here-and-now is what makes me what I am, right?”
“Does that mean you don’t look for what you can’t see, Officer?”
“It means we beat cops have enough on our hands with what’s right in front of us.”
“Well, that’s the difference, isn’t it?” she said, ignoring the little voice reminding her she’d gone into the backyard on a hunch. “We need both of us if we’re going to get the job done, though, don’t we?”
“Sure,” he said, and he sounded friendly, but she knew there were those police out there who saw the art of investigation as only one step above voodoo and she thought Hutchins was probably one of them.
“Anyway, speaking of the here-and-now, I better call in, see what’s going on back home.” She turned away from the other officers and made contact with the station house. Her nerves had been jangling ever since Childress had made the suggestion that she was here in Toronto in order not to be there, in Port Dundas. She got Wingate on the line. “Tell me it’s business as usual, James.”
“More or less.”
“Meaning?”
“The video changed again.”
“Shit.” Childress shot her a look. “What is it now?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s basically black. There’s a sound though.”
“A sound?”
“A scratching sound.”
“So you can hear now?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean by ‘basically black’?”
“It’s black, but there’s a small green triangle in the bottom left corner of the screen now. Like a ‘play’ button on a VCR.”
She wondered what that might mean and couldn’t come up with anything that calmed her guts. “Mute the mic, James.”
“Already done.”
“Now, what about Anonymice?”
“They’re in Grand Cayman.”
“Great.”
“I’ve made contact with the Royal Cayman Police Force. I’m waiting for a call-back.”
“You make sure they understand this isn’t about money laundering. We’ve got a crime in progress. A man’s life depends on their assistance.”
“Got it,” he said.
Childress was looking at her watch. “Detective Inspector, I can get in touch with the housing office on campus this afternoon. See if there’s a list of past tenants. Maybe something will crop up.”
“I’d appreciate that,” said Hazel. There was a strange hesitation, and then Hazel realized that Childress was waiting for her to pass her her card. She hoped she had one on her, but she didn’t. “Uh,” she said. “I’ll just tell you my number.”