“Yes?”
“Once we’re through this —”
“There’s no getting through this, there’s only, you know, living with it.”
He wanted to ask her to marry him. He didn’t really want to ask her to marry him. He wanted to declare he would always look after her. He knew he could not always look after her. He wanted to tear her pain out by the roots. Without hurting her. He wanted to feel better about himself for having let this happen to his partner.
“Morgan, what is it?”
She was his friend. The best thing he could do was get on with the case.
“Nothing’s turned up about the man formerly known as Philip Carter,” he said. “We’ve checked with the Mounties, with the FBI, INTERPOL. Nobody’s heard of him, there’s no match for his prints. Total blank. One of over seven billion people on the planet.”
“Yeah,” said Miranda. “Not any more.”
“You okay with that?”
She almost laughed. “Well, no,” she said. “Not okay! On the other hand, maybe I am. If he wasn’t dead, I’d want to kill him.”
Morgan felt restless. He wanted to be doing things, not because he gave a damn about Miranda’s dead lover, whoever he was, but for Miranda herself, to get her life back so they could be partners again.
He wanted to help her, but he didn’t know where she was hurting.
Was it the horror? That would haunt the strongest of people, waking up beside a corpse with its guts spread over the mattress. Was it terror? That there might be a sequel, that she was a target? It seemed unlikely, not that it could happen but that she would let fear take hold. Was it grief for the death of her lover? He didn’t think so. Whatever grief there might have been was subsumed by anger. Was it rage for Philip having used her, even if she did not understand how? Was it revulsion, loathing for Philip or misplaced contempt for herself, for the depraved sexual abuse she had endured?
Miranda sat back in her chair and then projected with a sibilant hush her deepest desire. “The son of a bitch, the one I didn’t know, he’s the one I want dead.”
“We’ll get him.”
“I want him, Morgan.” She leaned forward. “I want him.”
Morgan had never heard Miranda talk this way. She had a cool intelligence that eliminated the emotional and the extraneous. Her mind was precise, and after three years with the RCMP following university and a decade working together on Homicide in Toronto, she knew how to use it with awesome dexterity.
“Dead won’t help. We want him caught.”
“Whatever. I want him dead. This is about me, not him.”
She wanted to tell Morgan to let himself go, that she needed the same passion he risked on inanimate things; she needed his ardour and fury, not spoken but felt deep in her heart and the depths of her mind.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re in this together.”
“Not quite. I’m the one waiting for the HIV results.”
“You okay?”
“Morgan, will you stop asking if I’m okay. Okay?”
Morgan felt helpless. He explained that the superintendent had given him his head, so that on the books he looked active. As for her suspension, apart from having had to turn in her semi-automatic, a pro forma procedure since it was already being held as material evidence, she was effectively on paid leave. And they were still partners.
“Rufalo’s turned us loose,” he said.
“And Spivak?”
“He’s good. Spivak will follow up whatever leads he can get. He’s promised to keep us informed. He’s not a small man, we’re not in competition.”
“About 290 pounds of not small. With his new partner, that gives us nearly a quarter of a ton of detective on our side. And what are we up against? I’ve been fucked and fucked over by phantoms.”
“Don’t make it worse —”
“Worse! You don’t like the word ‘fucked’? Does it make you squeamish? Jesus, Morgan, that’s what — I’ve been fucked. If ever a word was appropriate, that’s it, that’s what happened.”
Neither was prone to using vernacular. Kick ass, let’s roll, just do it wasn’t them. Fuck was a word they avoided, both feeling contempt for lazy diction, both alive among words too much to lean on stupid expletives.
Miranda got up and walked over to order two more coffees, this time not cappuccino. Often when Morgan was alone he had double-double, but with Miranda he always took black, no sugar. He actually preferred it that way. He could taste the coffee.
“So,” she said when she sat down again, “I’ve been ruminating for three days, perseverating, cogitating.”
“Which?”
“All three. Going over and over the details. Trying for the larger picture, waiting for something to emerge. So far, nothing but details.”
“Tell me things I don’t know.”
“Okay.” She paused. “He could have had an accent?”
“Who? Philip?”
“Yeah, we’ll call him Philip until something better comes up. It wasn’t so much an accent as an absolute lack of inflection. It was a little unusual. You know how sometimes Europeans speak English better than we do. Germans, especially. Like that. Except he wasn’t European.”
“What then? How do you know?”
“He spoke about Europe as an outsider —”
“And about Canada as home?”
“Canada and the States. It was strange. There wasn’t a border — Canada and the U.S., it was all the same. None of the usual Canadian edginess — benevolent antipathy — when he talked about Americans. And none of an American’s blithe indifference to difference when he talked about us. I remember thinking it seemed like a borderless sensibility and that it was strange, then I got used to it. I kind of liked it. I didn’t want to know too much. I didn’t want the emotional risk. He could have been either Canadian or American.”
“Or neither.”
“Perhaps. He was very cosmopolitan.”
“He knew good wines. I wonder where the Châteauneuf-du-Pape came from? I’ve never seen a label like that in Ontario — maybe the States. Could he have been Israeli?”
“Because he knew wines? An interesting connection! And no, definitely not.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Morgan! A lady knows.”
“Yeah, okay, so, not Jewish.”
“Not Jewish. Let’s see, what else? Afghani? No, the Taliban never came up. So who does that leave us?”
“Where did that come from?” asked Morgan.
“What, the Taliban? I don’t know, whenever I think of relations between the sexes these days, I think of them. I mean, Morgan, watch the newscasts. Countries in that part of the world treat women like a different species. Crowd scenes, throngs in the streets, and no women. A sea of beards and burnooses, and impotent fists throttling the air — and not a woman in sight unless under a shroud. And don’t give me the freedom of religion crap — freedom for whom? The normalization of hatred for women, that’s what we’re seeing; fear and hatred of women. Even by women themselves. Especially by women themselves.”
“I wasn’t going to say a word. We live in parallel realities, get used to it.” He paused, curious about the