“As what?” Hazel wondered aloud. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Her and Bellocque? Her and Eldwin?” said Forbes.

“Maybe.”

She went to find Wingate. “We have to tie Eldwin to that house. That’s our next move.”

“I’ll call Childress back. See if she has anything for us yet. And I think it’s time we should get back in contact with Claire Eldwin. She has a right to know.”

“Don’t tell her about the hand,” Hazel said. “Or the ears.” She thought for a second. “Don’t give her any details at all.”

“I’ll handle it.” She seemed to be studying his face. “Skip?”

“Three stories, Paritas said. We know two of them. The third is ‘already written.’ What is that third story, James?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what can you save the dead from?”

There was a long silence, as if they were watching something take shape in the air between them, and then Wingate said, “A lie.”

“A lie.”

He’d already picked up the phone. “If I call and Childress has something we can use, we’re going to have to get into bed with Twenty-one. Are we sure we want that?”

“Will they help? They’re your people.”

“They’ll help, but no one likes to be wrong. If something went south in their own backyard…”

She thought about that for a moment. Then she said, “I don’t care. Make the call.”

23

Childress got back to Wingate at the beginning of her next shift, Sunday morning. It came through as a handwritten fax, a dated list on Childress’s notebook paper. The fact that it was off her PNB and not on a piece of scrap paper meant the matter had entered Twenty-one’s caseload on some level and they were already on the division’s radar, whether they wanted to be or not.

There were twenty names covering all five apartments from 2000 to the present. Most of the tenants were long-term and their start and end dates were in full-year increments. Three rental terms ended prematurely, but there was no Colin Eldwin or Nick Wise or any other name that could resolve to Eldwin. But one of them was a “Clarence Earles,” and it seemed as good a place to start as any. Wingate called Mrs. Eldwin to give her an update and to take the opportunity to ask if her husband ever used pseudonyms.

“That’s why you’re calling?”

“We need to tick off all the boxes, Mrs. Eldwin. I’m sorry.”

“Shouldn’t you be out there trying to find him?”

“This is part of it.”

“Why would he use a pseudonym?” she asked. “He’s never published anything anyway.”

“What about when he gets hired to write something?”

“You mean How to Use Your New Garage Door Opener? I don’t think those ‘texts’ get signed, Officer.”

“Okay,” he said, trying to calm her down. “Can I ask you if the name Clarence Earles means anything to you?”

“Clarence Earles,” she repeated, flatly. “Does it mean anything to you?”

“They’re his initials, Mrs. Eldwin.”

“ That’s your lead, Detective? You found his fucking initials? Did you find them carved on a fucking tree?”

“Mrs. Eldwin, please -”

“Why don’t you put out an APB for Clint Eastwood, then? Or Carmen fucking Electra? Surely a girl with tits that big must be hiding something.”

He forced himself to continue over the sound of her furiously sucking on a cigarette. “Ma’am, did you ever live on Washington Avenue in Toronto?”

“Yeah, I did. For ten years with Chris Evert. You know, the gay tennis player? Did you know I led a whole secret life with a lesbian tennis star who shares her initials with my husband? Hey, with me as well. Isn’t that something?”

“Mrs. Eldwin,” he said firmly, but she interrupted him.

“FIND MY HUSBAND!” she shouted. “Don’t call me with code words, addresses, trails of breadcrumbs, or smoke signals until you know where he is, do you hear me? That’s your job. You fucking… useless… piece of -”

He hung up.

He found Hazel feeding Mason a sunflower seed through the bars of his cage. “Um, I don’t think she knows anything. Claire Eldwin.”

“Okay,” she said, watching the mouse eat.

“She might be crazy, that one.”

“You think so?”

“She thinks Chris Evert was gay, for one.”

Hazel squinted at him. “She wasn’t?”

“No. It was Martina Navratilova. Evert was straight.”

“They weren’t lovers?”

He sighed. “No, they weren’t. Evert married another tennis player. I think.”

“Why do you know this?”

“Tennis fan,” he said. “Anyway, she never had a place on Washington.”

“When was this Earles person in that apartment?”

Wingate unfolded the fax from his pocket. “January to August 2002.”

She took the sheet from his hand and studied it. “The rental was for eight months.”

“So?”

“So Earles moved out the beginning of September 2002.”

She waited for him to cotton on, but she’d lost him.

“That’s when the Eldwins moved to Mulhouse Springs. He rented that place for eight months and then got out of town.”

“How can you be sure it’s him?”

“Paritas sent us there for a reason. And the initials, the time frame… it all fits. That, or we’re being shined on for no reason at all.”

“That’s a possibility,” he said.

“Even so, between the choice of acting on what we think we know and doing nothing, what choice do we actually have?” She cracked a sunflower seed between her teeth and took the kernel out to feed the mouse. He took it from her between the bars with his tiny, pink paws. When he sat back on his haunches, he looked like a little old man eating a sandwich.

“So,” he said. “January to August 2002. That’s our starting time frame.”

“Right. We have a house, a picture of a sweater, and an eight-month window.”

“There must have been thirty homicides in Toronto in the first half of 2002.”

“No,” she said, and she came away from the cage. “It’s not a murder, James. That’s why we’ve been deputized. We’re investigating a murder, but whatever it was in 2002, that’s not how it was ruled. You get it? It was something else.”

“But some of this is pretty contingent, Hazel.”

“Something you can see right in front of your eyes doesn’t require a leap of faith.”

Wingate pulled a chair out from the desk behind him and sat. He stared at the mouse cage. “So it looked like a natural death,” he said. “Or an apparent suicide. Or maybe it was an accident that wasn’t an accident – someone messing around with the brake cables, you know? It’s not hard to set it up. Someone falls out a window, leaves the gas on, tips over a candle.” He disappeared into himself for a moment. “We’re not talking about a missing person here though, because that suggests foul play and there’d still be an open file. If I kill someone and then want to get married and move away, I don’t want anyone asking questions. I want to be sure the body is in the ground and the file is closed.”

“That’s right. So we have to find that file and reopen it.”

“That’s a needle in a haystack, Skip.”

“At least we have it narrowed down to a haystack.” She pushed herself off from the coffee table. “Let’s get back down to Toronto. Make an appointment to see them first thing tomorrow and sit down with them, show them some respect, get them onside.”

“We’re the ones who’re going to have to get onside,” Wingate said. “If there’s a case, it’s theirs.”

“Maybe I’ll let you do the talking.” He smiled uncomfortably at her. “Being the prodigal son’s got to be worth something,” she said.

Cartwright was waiting in the hallway by Hazel’s office door. The door was closed. As Hazel approached, her secretary seemed to move to block her. “Skip?”

“Melanie?”

“I just want to say I asked him to wait somewhere else, but he insisted on going into your office.”