21

Caro opened the door and stood aside, looking on the small collection of law enforcement on her front porch with an expression verging on disgust. Hazel had to wonder what her face looked like when she needed help from the same professionals she obviously held in such contempt. “I’m not being quoted in any report, I’m just telling you that now,” she said.

“Hold on,” said Childress, getting out her PNB. “Let me just write that down… not being quoted. Okay, great. You can go back to your apartment now.”

Caro made haste up the stairs. Hutchins had his flashlight out. “Okay, we’re going to take it from here,” he said. “You two can wait upstairs or on the verandah.”

“All due respect, Officer -”

“Yes,” he said. “All due. We’ll make full disclosure afterwards.”

“Please,” said Hazel.

Hutchins and Childress traded a silent communication. “You have a gun?” asked Childress.

“They do arm us in the OPS.” She turned her hip to them.

“He has to stay,” Childress said.

“Oh, I don’t want to go,” said Andrew, and she narrowed her eyes at him and then threw a glance to her partner. He shrugged.

The entry to the basement was beside the door that led to the upper apartments. Hutchins took the lead, but he kept his gun holstered. She wanted to say something about that, but decided to stay silently grateful that she was invited along on her own ambush. And that Hutchins was in front of her.

The basement door wasn’t locked, and Hutchins opened it on a set of dark stairs. He tried the light on the wall, but it didn’t work. Hazel felt her insides go a little liquid as she recalled her terror at Bellocque’s house. Her breath came in short bursts. Hutchins turned to his partner and whispered, “This is where one of us breaks through a cracked step and lands in a pile of bodies.”

“I saw that one, too,” said Childress. She passed him her flashlight off her belt. It directed a powerful white beam of light into the space in front of them. The stairs were concrete. “So much for that theory.”

“Anyone down here?” called Constable Hutchins. There was no answer. Not much of an ambush, thought Hazel, but she realized as well that the space below them was completely silent. They went down the stairs, the beam of light juddering around in the dark, catching dust and webbing here and there. The basement was cool. Hutchins flipped the switch in the wall at the bottom, and they were standing in a large, single room that ran the length and width of the house. On one wall, standing nakedly against the grey concrete, were the house’s washer and dryer. A fragile drying tree was to one side with three bras hanging from it. There were five badly constructed wooden storage lockers at one end of the space and they went over to inspect them. Behind the flimsy wood-and-chicken-wire doors, four were empty, and one had a bike in it. Hutchins half-heartedly tried the doors of three that were padlocked. He turned to Hazel. “Nothing here, Detective Inspector. Not much reason here to do anything but turn around and go home. Or take in a show.”

She smiled, a little defeated. Hutchins got out his card and handed it to her. It gave his first name as Kevin and his division as Twenty-one. She snapped it against her hand. “I don’t suppose you know James Wingate?”

“Who?” said Hutchins.

“He came to us from Twenty-one. Last fall.”

“We’re, like, two hundred and fifty men and women at Twenty-one,” he said. “It’s the largest division in the city. Two guys could earn their pensions ten feet from each other at Twenty-one and never meet.”

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.