Green smiled at her. He loved the light in her eyes, the unorthodox insatiability of her mind. He loved especially that she had been listening to him. “Shine away, detective. We don’t know what this is yet.”
She left his office with a new bounce in her step, giving her dreary computer the finger as she yanked her coat off the rack and headed home for some much-needed rest. Green’s final words seemed to reverberate forever in his tiny office. We don’t know what this is yet. True, but the alarm bells were getting louder. Tips and reports of sightings had been pouring in all day but all had proved useless.
So far, Li’s cautious probing into Brandon Longstreet’s background had turned up no dark side. Despite his silver spoon birth and Ashbury private school education, the young man seemed to take his commitment to the common good seriously. As the end of his family medicine residency drew near, he had rejected more lucrative private practice offers across Canada in order to join an international aid team. He was a card-carrying member of the Green Party and had never received so much as a speeding ticket. Even his ex-girlfriends thought he was a gem. No temper, no wild side.
Perfection made Green nervous. It was time to find out what Adam Jules knew about the mystery.
He had phoned Jules’s East Division office that morning when Sergeant Li first told him about the missing woman. To his surprise, Jules had not yet called him back. Green had also sent an email update to which Jules had not replied, although his clerk assured Green that he was at the station. Green suppressed his annoyance. First the man had waylaid him with a cryptic request about hit and runs and people unaccounted for, and now he was ignoring all Green’s attempts to contact him.
But if Jules knew something, the investigation had to be informed.
Opening his address book, Green looked up Jules’s private cell phone number and picked up his phone. The cell phone went to voice mail after two rings, leaving Green nearly speechless. Jules was screening his calls! Not only ignoring him, but actively avoiding him.
Whatever the hell this was about, Green could keep the investigation low-key no longer. A young woman was missing, and the early darkness of another frigid night was closing in.
Something more had to be done, he thought, picking up his phone again to call the duty inspector.
Within an hour, a full-scale ground search was underway, and although the duty inspector pulled out all the stops, he was not optimistic.
“The goddamn city is more than 4500 square kilometres, Green, and that’s assuming she even stayed in the city and isn’t sunning herself on a beach in Cuba.”
“At least we know that’s unlikely,” Green replied. “There’s no record of her leaving the country.”
“But in case it escaped your notice, we got forty centimetres of snow since she disappeared and more coming down as we speak. We could be standing on top of her and not know it. Plus the rivers aren’t frozen yet, and if she thought she could take a short cut across the Rideau River, she could be on the bottom somewhere.”
Green was silent. Inspector Doyle was just sounding off. The two of them were in the communication centre, and Doyle was merely saying in private what he would never say on the record.
Somewhere in this dark, frigid city, a young woman was lost and no one had a clue where to look. Officers were still piecing together her final day, which according to her parents had started normally enough. She had taken Monday off work to run errands for the wedding, and after her usual breakfast of yogurt and granola, she had set off on the bus for downtown. She’d been a bit vague about the errands, and her mother had not pressed her. Meredith had always liked her independence, she’d said, and she was getting a little tense as the date drew near.
The bus driver remembered her getting off at the Westboro transit station, but from there she was swallowed up in the crowds of commuters and Christmas shoppers heading downtown.
Using “Elena’s fucking to-do list” which Gibbs had taken from the house, officers were tracking down each of the businesses involved, from florist to travel medicine clinic, but by eight o’clock that evening there had not been a single confirmed sighting. Whatever Meredith had done that day, she had not made a dent in the fucking to-do list.
She had phoned her friend Jessica at 5:45, but from her cellphone, so she could have been anywhere. Jessica remembered chatter and Christmas music in the background, so volunteers had been dispatched with her photo to all the malls between downtown and Bayshore.
“But it’s a goddamn needle in a haystack,” Doyle said. “Every two-bit corner store plays Christmas music. So does the radio. I heard ‘Sleigh Bells’ a hundred times today alone!”
Meredith’s description was on every radio station, her photo on every television channel and in every patrol car. Taxi drivers had been alerted. “Something will break,” Green said. “Now that it’s caught the public eye, someone will remember seeing her.”
Doyle eyed him grimly. Both men knew there would be a thousand sightings, and nine hundred and ninety-nine would be false.
By the time Green finally left the station at nine p.m., however, that one useful lead had not materialized. Snow was falling thickly again, blanketing sound and snarling pre-Christmas traffic on the slippery roads. Red tail lights stretched solid along the Queensway in both directions as cars crawled out towards the suburbs. Turning his back gratefully on the gridlock, Green steered his Subaru along Catherine Street towards his Highland Park home. On his quiet residential backstreet, Christmas lights caught the snowflakes and glistened like rubies and emeralds on the freshly fallen snow. For a moment he forgot how much he hated winter.
He was reminded again when he reached his house to find ten centimetres of fresh snow waiting for him on the driveway. The double furrow of tire tracks from Sharon’s car was fading under new snow. His wife had long since gone to work, leaving Hannah in charge of Tony and dinner.
The television was blasting “So You Think You Can Dance” in the living room and the teenager and the five-year-old were sprawled on the floor eating chips and laughing. The only one to notice his arrival was Modo, who padded into the hall wagging her tail shyly. Modo was a humane society acquisition who even after two years in their home still acted as if she feared she was unwelcome. He ruffled her ears as he glanced at the mail Sharon had left on the hall table. Nothing but Christmas flyers.
A commercial came on, and Tony leaped to his feet and came running into the hall. He laughed when Green swooped him up into the air. “What are you still doing up, buddy!”
“Hannah said I could watch instead of a story.”
Green glanced at Hannah, whose expression said “I’ve fed him and entertained him. You want to make something of it?” Not tonight, sweetheart, he thought. Not when we have other things to talk about. At least Tony was in his pyjamas. With a final hug, Green set him down. “As soon as that’s over, then. You’ve got school tomorrow.”
He went into the living room to drop a kiss on his daughter’s head before heading into the kitchen to see what he could scrounge. The remains of pizza sat congealing in the fridge. Pizza had been ordered in for the teams in the central command post at the station, and he had snagged two slices while he and the duty inspector reviewed reports. Now he bypassed the pizza in favour of chocolate cake. No sooner had he taken his first bite and found the Sudoku in the morning paper when Tony came flying into the kitchen, ricocheting off walls as he imitated the latest contestant. Hip hop. Green shuddered.
“You want Tom Sawyer, or are you going to read your own book?”
“I