“We’re going to find some way to let him know we’ve gotten ourselves off his hook. And hopefully we’ll find Eldwin before Goodman kills him.”

“Don’t sweat it if you can’t,” said Ilunga. “One less piece of shit on the planet won’t make a difference. And frankly, if Goodman gets satisfaction, maybe I’ll never see him in my rearview mirror again.”

She turned to Wingate. “Well?”

“Well, what?” he said angrily.

“Let’s go.”

“You’re kidding me.”

She didn’t answer him and he left the office without another word. Hazel extended her hand to Superintendent Ilunga. “We were just trying to do our jobs, Sir,” she said.

“Do them elsewhere,” he said, smiling again. “And call ahead if you need anything next time.”

She laughed good-naturedly and closed the door behind her.

She had to speedwalk down the hall to catch Wingate. “Slow up,” she whispered hoarsely to him.

“For what? You got other asses to kiss?”

“James.” Her tone made him stop. “You don’t fight little Napoleons like Ilunga. You go along. They’re deaf to any subtlety if you flatter them a little.”

“Is that what you were doing?”

“He doesn’t know how far we’ve gotten. He thinks we’re trying to read tea leaves. Let him sit and stew in there – in the meantime Toles is working for us and if he gives us half a reason to reopen the case, Ilunga can shout all he wants, but we’ll have carte blanche.”

“And if the lab comes back a bust? That thing’s been in a bag for three years.”

“Then we’re done down here.”

“And Colin Eldwin is a dead man.”

She waited for two constables to pass behind them. “The results don’t matter, James. If Goodman wants to know what we find out from CFS, he’s going to have to show himself. And we’ll be back on our own turf when he does.”

“It doesn’t sound like a plan, yet.”

“Have some faith, James. We’ve gotten this far.” She looked at her watch. “In the meantime, I’ve got to track down Toles and make sure he’s as green as he looks. We’re not going to get this all done in one day.” She looked back toward Ilunga’s door and then quickly stole forward to Room 32. She went in and out quickly. “I hope you weren’t planning on sleeping in your own bed tonight.”

“Skip?”

“I mean get us a couple of rooms somewhere, Detective.” She grinned at him. “I like you, James, but I just don’t think it would -”

“- I knew what you meant.”

“I know you did.” She started off down the hallway and then spun on her heel and walked backwards a couple of paces. “You should have seen the look on your face, though.”

28

Hazel called in first thing in the morning and got Monday’s report from Costamides. As she’d expected, nothing had appeared on the website, in fact, the feed was dead. She salted this away: with both Goodman and Cameron in Toronto, that suggested the basement they were looking for wasn’t in the city. That bird was going to have to be killed with another stone. Costamides told her the Record had done as instructed: both of the missing chapters of “The Mystery of Bass Lake” had appeared in the Monday edition. Hazel wasn’t sure what value appearing to follow instructions would have now, but the abductors had threatened more bodily damage to their victim if the chapters didn’t run, and Hazel hoped they would keep their word, at least for the time being. The least powerful impression she’d formed over the last twenty-four hours was the one concerning Eldwin’s guilt. Whether he’d committed a murder or not, she was intent on bringing him out of that basement alive. If he was a killer, then he could stand trial; she would not let Goodman or Cameron mete out their own brand of justice. That would constitute the ultimate failure on her part.

She thanked Costamides and got Toles at his desk. He’d been able to work his charms: the results of the examination of the sweater would be ready sometime before lunch. Hazel thanked him copiously and then suggested that since he’d messed with CFS protocol, it might be a good idea for them to get his friend to fax her results somewhere unofficial. “Cover your tracks in case someone thinks ill of a new DC jumping the queue on his own say-so.” Toles saw merit in the suggestion. He called back half an hour later to say that his contact was faxing the results to the Kinko’s on University, above Dundas. He’d told her to use a cover sheet addressing the pages to “D. Hammett.”

“Good one,” said Hazel.

“The whole escapade is costing me dinner at Lucy Than’s new restaurant. Not that I’m complaining,” he added.

“Dinner’s on Westmuir County, Detective. With our thanks for a job well done.”

She waited until noon and then, under dark skies, she walked from the hotel to the Kinko’s Toles had told her the fax would be waiting at. The geniuses behind the desk searched through a pile of papers and insisted there was nothing for a Mrs. Hammett. Hazel went around the corner for a coffee, thinking perhaps Toles’s connection at CFS had a later lunch than most people. Wandering down Dundas toward Yonge Street with her hot coffee, she found herself thinking of Hammett and his heavily alcoholized detective Nick Charles: she knew why she felt the kinship. She’d always loved the elegance of The Thin Man, despite the sheer level of stupefaction in it. She hadn’t read it in years and wondered if Wingate had ever read it: she could repay his Dickens with something she loved. There was a used bookstore just down the street she’d seen wandering the day before and she went in and perused the crime section. No Hammett. But she browsed a bit longer, thinking if she was going to have to stay over another night in Toronto, she might want a book to read. A paperback with the title Utter Death caught her eye and she brought it to the counter to pay. “Is he very popular?” she asked.

“People like him,” said the guy at the cash. “We can’t keep him in stock.”

She put the book in an inside pocket of her jacket and returned to Kinko’s. This time there was something for D. Hammett. The document, with its cover sheet, was three pages long. She studied it, standing in the open doorway of the copyshop, and then folded it in three and returned to the hotel.

Wingate sat in his cramped hotel room with a plate of fries and a half-eaten burger in front of him and read the pages. “Wood and varnish on both the inside and outside of the sweater and within the fibres as well,” he said. He put the papers down and spread them across the desk. “Being in the water for any length of time could explain the varnish migrating through the sweater,” he said to her, “but not the wood fibre trapped inside it. It has to have been ground in.”

“Now, look at this.” She put her finger on one of the lines in the report. “‘The debris field comprises two strips – wood and varnish mixed together – transverse across the back of the sweater, each about four inches wide.’ What do you think of that?”

“I have no idea.”

Polarized light microscopy had separated the wool fibres from the varnish and the wood. There were at least two hundred tiny wooden shards, ninety percent of which were facing the same direction, like iron filings drawn by a magnet, or grass laid down in a footprint. “I’m drawing a blank. Maybe this all happened post-mortem.”

“They had to drag her out of the water, maybe they pulled her up on a dock in the channel?”

That made sense to her. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she felt the door finally closing on their speculations. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said. “A body sodden with water, she weighs double. They hook her out and pull her over the side of a dock, drag her over two planks. Four inches wide.”

“Combine that with the hemorrhaging in the lungs, calcium and potassium levels through the roof, massive heart failure, you name it. No scrapes, bruises, defensive wounds… where does it get you?”