“Most people liked him.”
“Well, there was that police officer,” Leanne said.
Green leaped at the remark. “Who?”
Blakeley gave her a sharp look, but she ignored it. “The one you told me about. It may be important, John.”
“It’s ancient history, honey. A trivial disagreement, that’s all.”
“Didn’t you say they disagreed about a cause of death or something?"
“Or something.”
“Whose death?” Green interjected.
“I don’t recall.”
Blakeley shook his head grimly. “God knows there were enough deaths to argue over.”
“Still,” she said, “if the police think there’s a connection, and if people are still getting killed, then maybe—”
Abruptly Blakeley stood up. “No. This is a fishing expedition, and I will not continue this speculation any further. Innocent people are being maligned.”
“Innocent people are being killed,” Green retorted.
“I need the police officer’s name, Blakeley. Was it Jeff Weiss?”
Blakeley strode to the apartment door and yanked it open without a word. As Green and Sullivan rose to go, Leanne moved quickly to their side. “He was from Ottawa, I know that much. You can figure it out.”
TWENTY-TWO
"Bastard!" Sullivan exclaimed as soon as they were in the elevator out of earshot. “If that sonofabitch did that to Peters, I’ll personally string him up by the balls!”
Green leaned against the faux marble wall and looked across at him, puzzling over the final moments of the interview. “Which sonofabitch?”
“Weiss, of course! That’s obviously the cop the wife was referring to. He was the one MacDonald had the beef with.”
“But he wasn’t in a position to cover up anything. He was a civilian cop, he had no power over MacDonald.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re fishing in the dark here, Mike. All we know for sure is that something upset MacDonald. It could have been Weiss accusing him of some wrongdoing, which got under MacDonald’s skin. Then, when he killed himself, Oliver accused Weiss and got killed for his big mouth. Weiss had the strength and the training to deliver the blow, and we know he had the temper. He thought he got away with it, and then ten years later along comes Patricia Ross threatening to blow the lid off.”
The elevator stopped, and they headed outside towards the Malibu. As he scrambled to keep pace with Sullivan’s purposeful stride, Green weighed the idea dubiously. “But why would Hamm cover for Weiss? Hamm is a military bigshot, Weiss is nothing but a low-level cop. And where does Atkinson fit in?”
“Maybe nowhere. Maybe his story about the military contact in supplies is the truth.”
Green snorted. “And Hamm?”
Sullivan yanked open the door. “I don’t know, Mike. Maybe he and Weiss have a history somewhere.” He started the car and revved the engine impatiently. “I say we bring Jeff Weiss in and lean on him.”
“But he’s a cop, Brian. We can’t go accusing one of our own when we’re still missing half the pieces.”
Sullivan pulled a U-turn and squealed the car back down Laurier Avenue towards the police station. “But maybe he can give them to us. He’s the weakest link here. Weaker than Blakeley or Hamm.”
Privately, Green knew he was right, and usually it was he who was itching to plunge ahead and Sullivan who was the voice of restraint. But at the moment, Green’s mind was elsewhere; not with Weiss and his betrayal of his badge, but with Blakeley and his peculiar behaviour during the interview. Of all the men on their list of potential suspects, Blakeley had means, motive and opportunity in spades. He had the most to lose if his complicity in war crimes, or his murder of Oliver, ever came to light. Not just his hard-earned reputation but his promising future at the very centre of government. He was a decisive, physical man trained to size up a threat and eliminate it. He was skilled enough to kill Oliver and Patricia Ross with his bare hands. And with his frequent commuting between Ottawa and Petawawa, he could easily have come to Ottawa to kill Ross, returned to Petawawa to attack Peters and come back in Ottawa to abduct Twiggy.
He made a damn compelling suspect, and his demeanour during the interview had been decidedly suspicious. He had spent the first half giving a campaign speech and the second half dancing evasively around Green’s more pointed probes. When that failed, he had pretended offence and abruptly terminated the interview.
Yet it was his behaviour rather than his words that puzzled Green. At the beginning he had been chatty and collegial when lecturing them on the pitfalls of peacekeeping, but when Oliver’s death was mentioned, he suddenly lost his hearty charm. As the names of more recent victims piled up, he became visibly shaken and distracted, as if the news had shocked him.
Yet if he was the killer, why the shock? Why not a defensive parry or the well-practised evasion he had displayed earlier? Even odder than the shock was his wife’s behaviour. It was astonishing enough that she had interrupted her husband’s meeting with the police in order to come to his rescue, but even more astonishing that he allowed it. Furthermore, at the end of the interview, she had essentially handed them Constable Weiss over the protests of her husband. This was not a stupid woman. She had a reason for what she’d done, and she had obviously thought giving up Weiss would help her husband, whether he wanted it or not. The question was—why?
By the time Sullivan pulled into the parking lot of police headquarters, Green still had no answers, but at least he had a plan. He glanced at his watch, which read noon. No time to spare. He jumped out of the car before Sullivan had even brought it to a stop.
“Okay, we’re going to lean on Weiss,” he said. “But first we’re going to make sure he’s got no room to weasel out. So I want you to round up all the available detectives in the squad room and meet me in the incident room in ten minutes.”
Sullivan smiled. “Are you going to tell Superintendent Devine about this? Otherwise, she’ll have your balls.”
“I know. That’s partly what the ten minutes is for.” He started for the door.
“It’ll take more than ten minutes!” Sullivan yelled.
“Just watch me!” Then he sprinted inside the building, took the stairs two at a time and was dialling his office phone in less than thirty seconds. Kate McGrath was not at her desk, and he wasted several minutes badgering the duty clerk before remembering that he had her home number in his book. She picked up on the second ring.
“I need you to check one last thing before you come,” he said.
“I’m just packing to go, Mike. My taxi will be here in half an hour.”
“I’m emailing you two more photos. Just check them out with the Lighthouse bartender.”
“But I’ll miss—”
“No, you won’t. Have you got a laptop at home? I’ll send them directly to you, and you can bring your laptop by the Lighthouse on your way to the airport. Ten minutes, tops.”
“It won’t be a proper line-up.”
“So I’ll email you a whole photo array. Kate! We’ve lost another person up here, this time an innocent old lady.”
She fell silent, and he could almost hear her calculating the time. Then she rhymed off her email address. “Just make it quick, Mike, and pray the bartender is there. It’s Sunday.”
After he’d sent the photo array, he grabbed his address book again and flipped through it for another number. While he waited for the MacDonalds to answer