“Anything pressing?”

“Maybe one.” She handed Hazel a pink sheet. The message said: Stop at A & R Electronics on your way out of town. GP.

She crumpled the note. “Jesus. She knows when I’m going to take a piss, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind. Get me Wingate.”

He appeared in her office a moment later. “Was that Ray Greene?”

“Don’t suffer future pain,” she said. “I want you to call your people again.”

“My people?” He watched her, noting how upset she seemed. “What did Ray tell you?”

“He congratulated me for being up the creek with a paddle.”

“That doesn’t sound like Ray.”

“That’s not exactly what he said. But it did trigger a thought for me. I think we’ve been squinting our eyes a little too much. We should have seen this clearly a long time ago.”

“I’m not following you.”

“The mannequin in Gannon Lake? The story in the paper… the body in the tarp? We’re looking for a drowning, James.”

He thought about it for a moment. “We might be, yeah.”

“Twenty-one has most of the waterfront, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. And the harbour as well as the Islands.”

“It could fit. I want to be there first thing in the morning.” She looked at the laptop on her desk, and the site was still dark. For the first time in a week, she closed the computer. “Call your people and set it up,” she said.

24

The huge stone and glass building that was Twenty-one Division occupied half a city block between John and Simcoe streets on Richmond Street West. Its jurisdiction was tiny: only six square kilometres of downtown, plus the waterfront and the Toronto Islands, and yet it served a population of over three hundred thousand residents and another two thousand transients. A baseball or hockey game could increase its catchment by ten percent. It went out on over fifteen thousand calls in an average year, fielded two hundred and thirty officers and twenty detectives, and was justifiably proud of its clearance rate.

Detective Constable James Wingate hadn’t passed through Twenty-one’s glass doors in almost a year. Since his leave, he’d been in and out of the building in his dreams, but not in the real world. The prospect of entering it again was not one he’d entertained since moving to Port Dundas (a rare out-of-force transfer), and as he and Hazel pulled in behind the building, he felt a fist clenching in his guts. He pulled his OPS cap down hard over his eyes and walked behind her as she went around the front of the building, but keeping his head down and staying in her shadow could not lessen the pull the place had on him. He felt, all of a moment, as if the last six months of his life – months in which he thought he might even heal – had never happened and someone had snapped their fingers to bring him out of his trance.

“James?” She was standing now a few paces in front of him, looking at him. He hadn’t realized he’d stopped in his traces. “What’s going on?”

“Smog,” he said. “Makes me dizzy.”

“Well, get out of it, then,” she said. She strode up to the doors and held them open for him. “The air’ll be better in here.”

“I guess.”

“Think anyone will remember you?”

“I doubt it,” he said.

They were inside a bright atrium. “These are your old stomping grounds,” she said. “Lead on.”

They crossed the floor toward the intake desk, where a sergeant was talking to a young woman. The sergeant offered Hazel his flat, all-purpose gaze and then returned to the woman in front of him. “He’s got a permit for the street, Ma’am?” he said, and she agreed that “he” did.

“But he’s my ex, ” she said. “He doesn’t even live in this part of town. What does it sound like to you?”

“It sounds like he enjoys parking on your street.”

“Doesn’t he have to live on the street to get a permit?”

The sergeant stared dully at the sheet. “You have a point.”

“Thank you.”

“But unfortunately, unless he tries to enter your property, this is a job for City Hall.”

“What?”

“Parking office. If his permit isn’t valid, they’re going to have to deal with it.”

“But -”

“Next,” he said, and he turned his face to the OPS officers. He offered them an expression that said he’d heard everything, many times, and that all of it bored him, bored him to death, and here was your chance to change all that, to tell him something new. He looked back and forth between them, staring dully at their uniforms as if he were looking right through them. “You two selling cookies?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Hazel said, trying to start off on the right foot, “you want chocolate or vanilla?”

“I like funny people,” he said, his mouth making a line as straight as a knifeblade.

Wingate stepped forward. “Hi, Carl. We’re here for DC Toles.”

“Oh, hey there, Jimmy.” It was as if Wingate had just stepped out for a coffee, not left the force a year ago. “He expecting you?”

“Yeah.”

“All right then,” said the sergeant named Carl. He picked up his phone. It had at least fifty buttons on it. “Detective? I’ve got a couple OPS here at the front desk.” He listened for a moment and then laughed. “Okay then.” He hung up and his face reverted to its deadened expression. “The newbie’s coming out to get you.”

Hazel nodded. Wingate was slowly trolling the posters on the wall opposite. What was it with him? Was it this hard to be back in his old division? She’d have to ask him about it later.

“You want to know why I laughed?”

It was Carl talking to her. “Sure,” she said.

“Detective Toles asked me if you were dropping breadcrumbs behind you.”

“That’s funny.”

“That’s why I laughed,” he said. “Toles’s going to fit in here just fine.”

“How new is he?”

“He’s still wearing the coat hanger his jacket came on.”

A door behind the sergeant’s desk opened and they got a glimpse of the busy squad room behind: men and women walking around half in a hurry, cops leaning over computers, cops talking on phones. The man who came through was tall and held himself so he extended to his full height. He wore square black-framed glasses over brown eyes and looked more like an art director than a detective. Then the door closed behind him and it was strangely quiet again. He came over and shook hands. “Danny Toles,” he said. He chucked his chin in the sergeant’s direction. “Carl tell you any good ones?”

“A couple,” said Hazel.

Toles led them through a door at the end of the foyer and down a hallway to a set of stairs. Twenty-one seemed bigger inside than it did from outside. Every person she passed, sitting in either an office or a cubicle, seemed busier than any one of her people. The interior of the building was a din of human voices, a multitude of doors opening and closing, phones ringing, laughter.

The sound of the phones reminded Hazel of what was in her pocket. They’d stopped, as the message had told them to, at A & R Electronics, one of the newer stores in the chain of big box stores that continued to spring up behind the town. She gave her name and the man behind the counter passed her a box in a bag. It was a “Mike,” he explained: a closed-circuit radiophone. Not much call for them, he said, what with all the newfangled cellphones. She took it reluctantly and turned it on: it was the second handheld talking device she’d been bought in less than a year, and the first one was rotting in a landfill somewhere now. The little window glowed dully in her hand and she’d left it on ever since, but no one had called.

Toles led them up a flight of stairs to the second floor, which was given over to meeting rooms and evidence rooms, various offices and lounges. Hazel presumed the cells were in the basement. “Thank you for setting this up,” said Hazel. “I know you folks must be busy.”