Unexpectedly, the phone rang, sending a spike of fear and excitement racing through him. At this hour, a phone call almost always meant trouble.
“Inspector Green?” It was a woman’s voice, curt and authoritative. “This is Sergeant McGrath of the Halifax Regional Police. Sorry to disturb you at home, but the detective down at your headquarters insisted you’d want to be informed.”
Green bolted upright, wide awake and rooting on the side table for a pen. Years of hounding the duty desk had paid off. “Yes, Sergeant?”
“Good news. I believe we’ve identified your Jane Doe.”
SEVEN
The next morning Green waylaid Barbara Devine the moment she arrived at her office.
“Good timing,” she said as she swept past him through her door, her plaid cloak trailing. She headed for her closet. “You were the first item on my agenda.”
“I need to go to Halifax.”
She whirled around, her cloak in hand. “Why?”
“Because Halifax has a tentative ID on our aqueduct murder, and it may be connected to a cold case of their own.”
“So get them to fax the file.”
“It’s several boxes. And I want to re-interview the witnesses myself, in light of our case.”
She finally hung up her cloak, then paused to look at herself in the mirror. She patted her helmet of hair, denting it slightly, then moved behind her desk with exaggerated calm. Only then did she meet his gaze. “Well, you can’t. You’re needed here. Send Detective Gibbs, he’s the lead investigator.”
“Gibbs has to stay here to coordinate things at this end. Besides, he hasn’t the experience to handle this on his own, and I can’t spare two officers.”
“Then get the Halifax detective to do the interviews for you.”
“It’s our case, Barbara.” He restrained his irritation with an effort. Like it or not, he needed her cooperation. He held out the travel requisition. “I’ll be there and back in forty-eight hours, guaranteed, and I’ll keep in constant touch by phone and email.”
He’d already packed and tentatively booked himself on the eleven a.m. flight to Halifax, but by the time he emerged from her office with her signature on the requisition, he had little more than an hour to make the plane. Barely time to brief Gibbs on the newest development in the case and to tell Frank Corelli that if his mystery woman phoned, he was to work through Bob Gibbs on the meeting.
Only once he was up in the air, heading east over the farmland of Quebec, did he have a chance to reflect. The truth was, he should have given the trip to Gibbs. It was his case, his chance for glory, but the lure of an unsolved homicide had proved too strong for Green. He could hear the excitement in Sergeant McGrath’s voice when she talked about it. For her too, this new development, despite its tragic outcome for Patricia Ross, breathed new life into her case and gave her a chance to catch the bad guy who had foiled her for so long. She sounded like Green’s kind of detective. Driven, determined and exhilarated by the hunt.
Her gruff tone on the phone had prepared him for a square-shouldered matron in a dour suit and sensible shoes. He was surprised when he emerged from the arrivals gate at Halifax airport to see a tall, slender woman wearing a tailored navy pant suit and holding a sign saying “Inspector Michael Green”. She had fine silver hair and deep-set blue eyes that widened with equal surprise as he approached. He knew his deceptively youthful air and bargain basement polyester confounded a lot of people, but he wondered what she’d expected an inspector from the nation’s capital to look like. A balding, fiftyish pencil pusher with a poker up his ass?
He smiled broadly as he extended his hand, thinking this forty-eight hours was going to be even more interesting than he’d anticipated.
She gave his hand a brief, formal shake. “I’ve arranged for lunch to be sent up to the incident room, sir,” she said as she led him toward the exit. “I expect you’ll want to get a look at the files right away.”
Despite her formality, the mischief of Newfoundland still clung to her speech in her flattened vowels and Irish lilt. Green winced at the prospect of police cafeteria sandwiches and wilted celery sticks eaten within the windowless, airless ambiance of a police incident room. “Actually...” he said. “I’ve had a rushed morning and a cramped flight. What I’d really like is a proper lunch in a real restaurant, while you tell me about the case in your own words.”
She looked dubious as she approached the unmarked car sitting at the curb in the pick-up zone. “Inspector Norrich of Special Investigations is planning to join us, sir. At least initially.”
Green smiled. Policing has its protocol. One inspector deserves another, even though he suspected Norrich knew nothing about the case and had much better things to do.
He tossed his bag in the trunk and climbed in beside her. “Tell Inspector Norrich that I’m in good hands and don’t want to put him to any trouble. I’ll drop by to keep him apprised after our meeting.”
Her lips twitched, and her stiff posture eased. “Your first time in Halifax?”
He nodded. “First time east of Montreal. That’s shameful, I know.”
“It is. You like seafood?”
He hesitated, picturing scaly fish with dead eyes staring from the plate. “Does pickled herring count?”
She actually laughed, a musical trill that almost erased his hunger pangs. “There’s a place down on the harbourfront that serves terrific crab cakes. Worth a barrel of pickled herring.”
She drove for what seemed like hours through a wooded countryside dotted with lakes. Once they hit civilization, Green was struck by the bright colours of the woodframe houses. The sun shone in a cloudless cobalt sky and glistened off the harbour below. She wove past shabby warehouses and shipyards to the historic downtown waterfront, parked the car and led him onto a wooden boardwalk. She headed straight for a white woodframe restaurant at the edge of the wharf, where the owner greeted her with a huge grin.
“Crab cakes to go, Kate?”
She shook her head. “I’ve got a newcomer from Ontario with me, Jim. Have you got a table overlooking the waterfront?” He led the way through the restaurant and peeked out the back door. Outside, the patio adjoining his restaurant was drenched with afternoon sun. “If you’re brave, I can open up the patio for you.”
A brisk breeze blew the scent of salt, fish and diesel fumes in off the harbour. Ice crystals still clung to the water’s edge, but already the gulls were circling and the shops were setting out their tourist wares. McGrath cocked a questioning eyebrow at Green, and, not to be branded a wimp, he nodded.
Her formality slipped away as she settled into her seat. She waved away the menus Jim brought and ordered them both crab cakes with organic greens on the side. When they came, Green was relieved to see no fish heads. The cakes were exquisite, breaking up in his mouth like a feather light mousse. She waited until the magic of the first morsel had passed, then sat back and took a deep breath. Suddenly, she was all business again.
“Patricia Ross was the fiancée of a mechanic named Daniel Oliver.”
Green reacted to the name with surprise. “Fiancée? Are you sure she wasn’t his wife? She registered as Patti Oliver in Ottawa.”
She shook her head. “They never got to the altar, unfortunately. Daniel was from down Cape Breton way originally, but he’d come up to Halifax in the mid nineties to find work, and he met Patricia here. But employment was sporadic