Middlemen, page 5
[12]
MacNeice’s phone rang. “Sir, Ryu’s left the Parkway. The dogs are out heading along Golf Links Road. I’ve called in another traffic unit to lead us through, ’cause we’re heading into a residential neighbourhood.”
“We’ll be there soon,” MacNeice said.
The radiophone burped. “Steiner, sir. Just got word from Jordan Harbour. Uniform said there was no answer at Evan Moore’s. But Betty Woodworth, his neighbour and bridge partner, says Jack and Moore are inseparable and Moore is a highly disciplined creature of habit. She was worried enough about the silence to call it in to Missing Persons. The only thing she knew was that he’d been on a field trip.”
“Field trip?”
“Yes, sir. Apparently he’s a birder. I thought that meant he hunts birds. She said that was true, but only with a camera. Every year he heads off to Point Pelee during migration.”
“But that’s not in August . . .”
“She said that too. He’s got a network of fellow birders who spot this bird or that, and off he goes to see them. She made it clear that Evans never failed to call if he couldn’t make it to bridge.”
“Any family?”
“He’s a widower. He has a marine biologist son, David Moore. He’s in New Zealand studying — let me get this right — the impact of acidification on coral communities.”
“Reachable?”
“Yes, sir. She corresponds with him — he checks up on his dad by talking to Betty. We have his cell number and email address.”
“Did Woodworth notice anything unusual around Moore’s house in the last few days? People or vehicles she’s never seen before? Did she give us a description of Moore’s vehicle?”
“Nothing unusual. It’s a quiet neighbourhood, so she would have noticed. He drives a blue Subaru Forester, maybe eight or nine years old.”
When the call ended, Aziz shook her head. “A birder. What are the chances?”
“A birder with a dog . . . how does that even work?” MacNeice remembered seeing duck hunters up north cruising by in shallow aluminum camo boats, dogs standing in the bows like figureheads on man-of-wars.
“Penny for your thoughts?” She turned in her seat and leaned against the door.
“Oh . . . just that we started following this trail where it ended, and now we’re speeding toward the beginning. And considering Jack’s wounds and loss of blood, his hours-long journey was Homeric.” He took a deep breath and looked her way.
His cellphone rang again. “Kendrik, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
“We’re almost at the dead end on Golf Links Road. Wilson Street and Jerseyville Road are on the other side of an island of houses to the right. Ryu thinks the dog probably stuck to the main roads. He’s over there now.”
“We’re about five hundred yards behind you.”
“Welcome back to the parade, sir. Ryu cut through some yards; just texted — Got tracks on Jerseyville. Follow my right turn, sir. Over.”
Aziz shook her head. “I like your reference to Homer. It’s difficult not to see this as an odyssey when you consider the distance.”
“The distance — wounded and bleeding — and we’re still not where he began.” MacNeice checked the time on the dash: 2:34 p.m. He took out Redsell’s card. “Fiza, can you dial this number and put it on speaker for me?”
She set the phone down as it rang. “Redsell Veterinary, can I help you?”
“Carole?”
“Yes, who’s calling?”
“Detective Superintendent MacNeice, I’m —”
“Oh, I know, sir. Jack’s asleep beside me.”
“Well, you see, we’re still following his tracks. And right now we’re out by Ancaster, still not at the beginning of the trail.”
“Oh my . . . the poor thing, eh? He musta been so frightened to run that far.”
“It’s hard to imagine. So —”
“I know, you’re calling to say you’ll be late.”
“Yes . . .”
“No problem, dear, you just come when you can — long as you’re here before six-thirty.”
[13]
A hundred yards shy of the Paddy Greene intersection, the blood tracks left the highway and veered into a cornfield. Ryu was on the road squatting next to his dogs, while Kendrik and a traffic cop peered like tourists down rows of corn taller than they were.
The dogs strained at their leads; Ryu nodded toward the field. “Your dog came through there, sir.”
“You think the trail takes us to that forest on the other side?”
“I do.” He pointed to the intersection. “Power Line Road’s at the end of Paddy Greene. According to the map, there’s a trail entrance to the forest north on Power Line. Once the dogs have taken off, we can follow them on the tablet.”
“On your command, Sergeant.”
Ryu unsnapped the leads; the dogs leapt over the ditch and disappeared into a row. The sergeant leaned against his vehicle, watching the tablet as two red dots moved upwards on a bright beige field. The top of the screen was dark green.
As the dots raced through the corn, the screen adjusted; the beige field kept shrinking until the screen was entirely green. “They’re in the forest, sir. I think it’s time we hit that trail.”
For a minute or two, Ryu, MacNeice, and Aziz watched the tablet in silence, until Ryu pointed to two stationary dots. “The boys have stopped. Now they’ll wait.”
“Meaning they’ve found something?” Aziz asked.
“The starting point of the trail.”
When they’d relocated to the trail’s entrance off Power Line, MacNeice studied the ground around them for tire tracks or foot or paw prints. There was no shortage of them, but all had been made when the ground was wet. Now it was bone-dry. “It hasn’t rained in a while?”
“No, sir. Hot and dry for a few weeks.”
“Right.” He looked down the path. “Aziz will accompany me. Ryu will take us to the dogs — put your boot baggies on.” He looked over at the traffic cop’s name tag. “Constable Hernandez — thanks for running interference. You and Hendrik remain here and restrict access.”
Entering the forest, they stayed off the path, stepping over branches and around small shrubs to avoid disturbing any fresh prints. Following the dots on the screen, Ryu said, “At the fork ahead, we go left.” He added that the dogs hadn’t moved but would soon pick up his scent.
As soon as Ryu turned onto the left fork, both dogs began calling. They were somewhere ahead.
“Does this trail have another exit?” MacNeice asked, ducking under a branch.
Ryu stopped to manoeuvre the map. “There’s another entrance a few hundred yards or so beyond the one we took . . . and another that comes out near the community centre. It’s called the Headwaters Trail and it wanders all through the forest.” He returned to the position locator and added, “The boys are about ninety yards in front of us — it’s just too dense to see them.”
“That program you’re using, has it recorded the entire route Jack took?” MacNeice didn’t want to lose the entirety of what the dog had accomplished, in part because he was so impressed by it.
“From where I picked up — yes, sir. I’ll provide it on a usb when we’re done. Right now, we’re off to the left of the path your dog took. He missed this trail altogether when he was shot and likely just bolted.”
“Back on the road, could you estimate how fast he was running?”
“Not precisely, no. But just as you said, the distance between the blood drops got greater the closer we came to this place. I understand he’s a Lab-whippet mix — so he probably lit out of here doing twenty-five, thirty miles an hour.” Ryu stepped over a fallen tree. “Scared as hell . . . or just pissed off.”
Somewhere in the canopy above came a rapid, high-pitched call, a sustained cackle. MacNeice stopped in his tracks and listened. Aziz, who was several yards ahead of him, turned back, “A blue jay?”
“A hawk — just letting us know that it knows we’re here.”
“A welcome greeting . . .”
“Likely not, but keep in mind Moore is a birdwatcher.”
Hoarse barking replaced the bird call, followed by clear-throated yapping. “First one’s Benny, the other one’s Poirot — they want their treats.” Ryu closed the tablet and followed the sound. “Not far, thirty yards or so.”
With still no sight of the dogs, Aziz and Ryu focused on the ground, trying to avoid the rocks and stumps and clotted vegetation that might trip them up.
When they’d covered what they thought was half the distance to the dogs, MacNeice heard a low, muffled phu-wumph . . . phu-wumph . . . phu-wumph and looked up as a hawk flew over his head and arced swiftly toward Aziz, talons splayed.
“Aziz, duck!” he screamed.
She did better than that. Startled, she turned around, tripped, and fell. As she was falling, an immense shadow crossed her face. “Bloody hell!”
The hawk sliced the air, dodging trees and branches, before landing on a high limb, where it stopped to study them. Ryu laughed nervously. “Jesus — it was going for your head, like a frickin’ gunship from Star Wars.” He helped her to her feet. “Tip to tip, those wings musta been four feet across.”
MacNeice focused on the bird as it nonchalantly began grooming the small feathers on its chest. “Too big for a Cooper’s hawk . . . and way too aggressive.”
“What the hell is it, and why’d it attack me?” Aziz was truly frightened. “I mean, I love birds.”
“That’s a raptor . . . a bird that rips apart the birds you love, Fiza. See all that fine grey banding on its chest? I’m pretty sure that’s a northern goshawk — isn’t it gorgeous?”
“Sorry, I’m just not ready for admiration.”
“It would have planned that attack twenty or thirty yards away. They’re so fast, it could get to you and disappear before you blinked. I think it’s a female, just warning us . . .”
Instinctively, Ryu and Aziz crouched as they walked. MacNeice smiled at the absurdity of their posture but completely understood the reaction. He watched the hawk for a moment as it lifted its grey head, peered down at him, and returned to grooming — all as if nothing had happened. Under his breath, he said, “You’ve made your point.”
It was his first sighting of a goshawk in Canada, and only the second time he’d ever seen one. The first had been in Suffolk. Long after that he had read a book by a woman whose father, and subsequently she, had raised and trained goshawks. That had interested him, because the woman was doing it as a way of dealing with the loss of her father. After reading it, he’d wondered — only for a moment — if that could help him recover from the loss of Kate. It was a romantic but absolutely impossible idea. He was too attached to the sparrows, songbirds, field mice, and rabbits that surrounded his cottage to invite a raptor into the mix.
Ryu approached the dogs — their paws dancing happily — sweeping his gaze over the area. “Good job. Good job.” He gave them their treats — gristly sticks of dried meat — which they devoured enthusiastically.
MacNeice and Aziz scanned the area, trying to spot a body — or body parts. At first the afternoon sun raked the trees and covered the ground in bright dappled light that made the shadows appear darker. As their eyes adjusted, they could see the individual roughed-up dead leaves of the forest floor. MacNeice took a fallen twig and pierced a leaf that looked darker than the rest; as if he were checking a roasted marshmallow, he brought it closer.
The leaf was lacquered in blood. He held the stick out to Aziz, but she was already pointing to a large patch of blood-soaked leaves.
“Do you have a flashlight, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir.” Ryu handed it to MacNeice.
The clearing was small, which made the blinding effect of sunlight more dramatic. However, using the flashlight as a second sun, MacNeice reduced the shadows. What hadn’t soaked into the muddle of ground cover lay in dried pools on dead leaves. Some were scuffed up — likely from a struggle, maybe the violent thrashing of a victim.
Ryu walked to the far side of the patch and crouched. “Sweet Jesus.” He jumped up. “There’s more than one, sir; lotsa blood over here.” He pointed to another patch of leaves off to the side. “And a partial shoe print . . .”
MacNeice stepped around the bloodied ground cover to study the trunk of a paper birch. He found a cluster of small holes, too low and too identical for a woodpecker. More telling, though, each had stained the trunk’s white satin paper with blood. He continued over to where Ryu was and found a second blast cluster, which had shredded the bark of a young maple.
“Shotgun. Two blasts. Two victims.” Picking at one of the holes in the trunk, he retrieved a pellet. Rolling it in his hand, he couldn’t tell the gauge. Forensics could.
“Another print here as well, Mac.” Aziz was at the edge of the clearing. “Looks like they came and left through here . . .”
“The bodies appear to have been dragged out in bags or tarpaulins,” Ryu said. “See the way the leaves have been ploughed heading back along this path? It’s so worn in the middle you can’t make it out, but you can over here.”
MacNeice wondered why anyone would enter a forest at night, kill two people, then remove the bodies. “Let’s spiral out from here. Perhaps they’re buried nearby.” While that didn’t make any sense, he couldn’t ignore the possibility. “Careful as we go; don’t mess up any evidence. Look for pieces of clothing, roughed-up ground, heel marks where bodies were dragged, cigarette butts — anything that didn’t grow in the forest.”
“How wide a circle, sir?” Ryu was already moving.
“Fifty yards in diameter from this spot.”
As he made his way deeper into the forest, MacNeice heard the goshawk’s call. It sounded insistent, but whether it was a distress cry or just calling its mate, he didn’t know. As long as it kept calling from a distance . . .
The dry vegetation crackled underfoot, releasing a musty but not unpleasant odour. It took him back to hot summers on Georgian Bay, where it had been so parched that the star moss was as crispy as the lichen clinging to rocks.
Something rustled in the nearby ground cover. “Keep your head down, friend, for your sake and mine.”
“You say something, sir?”
“Just talking to myself, Sergeant.”
Paris had drifted away overnight, like sun dots on water — here, then gone — lost altogether. The more he walked, the more he was convinced they wouldn’t find the bodies there. Something about that bloody clearing suggested a botched execution, and the reaction was to remove the bodies and get out fast. But why? Even without Jack’s trail back to this place, to anyone who might wander by, the evidence would suggest something awful must have happened.
He was about to turn around when he noticed a huge maple; its trunk had to be five feet wide. Stepping closer to admire it, he looked up at the great circular spread of its canopy. Beyond it, a white pine stood even taller, a hundred feet above the forest floor. Through its branches, he caught a glimpse of a large clot of twigs and leaves: the hawk’s nest.
MacNeice froze and cast a cautious eye around the forest. Other than the hollow sound of a woodpecker working a dead tree, it was uncomfortably quiet.
He moved closer to the maple, thinking that a diving goshawk would have to negotiate a hard turn to avoid slamming into the trunk. That’s when he saw camouflage netting draped over a large shrub hidden behind the tree.
MacNeice lifted the netting and stepped inside to find a small folding table and a chair. On the table was a Thermos, logbook, file folder, and pen, a narrow box of pencil crayons, night-vision goggles, field binoculars, and a 35mm Canon with a telephoto lens. MacNeice slipped on his latex gloves and opened the folder. He scrolled through dozens of photos printed twelve to a page: goshawk in flight; with its partner; nesting alone; feeding the nestlings through to adolescence . . . and quite a few of a happy Jack.
On the ground beside the table was a metal bowl of water and, beside it, a small plastic cooler. Positioned at the edge of the netting was a tripod. Its head mount was tilted almost vertically, waiting for the camera. He opened the logbook where a maple leaf served as a bookmark. It was gridded with dates, times, locations, and a wider section of comments followed by initials. Judging by the entries, there appeared to be two observers — E.M. and C.G. — working in eight-hour shifts. Six a.m. to two p.m. and eight p.m. to four a.m. E.M.’s final entry, at 2:45 a.m., read: Last adolescent, hasn’t returned — assume it won’t. Female staying in or nearby nest . . . male not seen this shift. On the left-hand page, there were pencil crayon sketches of the female: detailed drawings and notes about her colouring, the shape of her tail, the dark cap and white stripe on her head.
Though the drawings were naive, they’d been rendered with intelligence and care. They bore no resemblance to Venganza’s park sketches from his last case, other than the recording of details — because it was important to do so.
He flipped back a few pages to C.G.’s entries, where the sketches were more refined and similarly annotated. C.G.’s last entry that day was: At end of shift, only one adolescent returned to nest. Assume other two gone for good.
MacNeice turned to the first page; the names Colin Gleadow and Evan Moore were printed in capital letters, followed by their telephone numbers. He punched Gleadow’s into his phone but didn’t press Call.
Inside the cooler was an empty plastic container of soup, a sandwich still neatly wrapped in wax paper, and zip-lock bags of kibble and dog treats. Moore’s Thermos of tea was still warm.
He checked his watch, to determine when he needed to leave and collect Jack. Would the vet have a leash? He looked around the blind for a leash, and, seeing none, assumed Moore might have left it in the car. He took out his cell and called Kendrik.
“Yes, sir.”
MacNeice’s phone rang. “Sir, Ryu’s left the Parkway. The dogs are out heading along Golf Links Road. I’ve called in another traffic unit to lead us through, ’cause we’re heading into a residential neighbourhood.”
“We’ll be there soon,” MacNeice said.
The radiophone burped. “Steiner, sir. Just got word from Jordan Harbour. Uniform said there was no answer at Evan Moore’s. But Betty Woodworth, his neighbour and bridge partner, says Jack and Moore are inseparable and Moore is a highly disciplined creature of habit. She was worried enough about the silence to call it in to Missing Persons. The only thing she knew was that he’d been on a field trip.”
“Field trip?”
“Yes, sir. Apparently he’s a birder. I thought that meant he hunts birds. She said that was true, but only with a camera. Every year he heads off to Point Pelee during migration.”
“But that’s not in August . . .”
“She said that too. He’s got a network of fellow birders who spot this bird or that, and off he goes to see them. She made it clear that Evans never failed to call if he couldn’t make it to bridge.”
“Any family?”
“He’s a widower. He has a marine biologist son, David Moore. He’s in New Zealand studying — let me get this right — the impact of acidification on coral communities.”
“Reachable?”
“Yes, sir. She corresponds with him — he checks up on his dad by talking to Betty. We have his cell number and email address.”
“Did Woodworth notice anything unusual around Moore’s house in the last few days? People or vehicles she’s never seen before? Did she give us a description of Moore’s vehicle?”
“Nothing unusual. It’s a quiet neighbourhood, so she would have noticed. He drives a blue Subaru Forester, maybe eight or nine years old.”
When the call ended, Aziz shook her head. “A birder. What are the chances?”
“A birder with a dog . . . how does that even work?” MacNeice remembered seeing duck hunters up north cruising by in shallow aluminum camo boats, dogs standing in the bows like figureheads on man-of-wars.
“Penny for your thoughts?” She turned in her seat and leaned against the door.
“Oh . . . just that we started following this trail where it ended, and now we’re speeding toward the beginning. And considering Jack’s wounds and loss of blood, his hours-long journey was Homeric.” He took a deep breath and looked her way.
His cellphone rang again. “Kendrik, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
“We’re almost at the dead end on Golf Links Road. Wilson Street and Jerseyville Road are on the other side of an island of houses to the right. Ryu thinks the dog probably stuck to the main roads. He’s over there now.”
“We’re about five hundred yards behind you.”
“Welcome back to the parade, sir. Ryu cut through some yards; just texted — Got tracks on Jerseyville. Follow my right turn, sir. Over.”
Aziz shook her head. “I like your reference to Homer. It’s difficult not to see this as an odyssey when you consider the distance.”
“The distance — wounded and bleeding — and we’re still not where he began.” MacNeice checked the time on the dash: 2:34 p.m. He took out Redsell’s card. “Fiza, can you dial this number and put it on speaker for me?”
She set the phone down as it rang. “Redsell Veterinary, can I help you?”
“Carole?”
“Yes, who’s calling?”
“Detective Superintendent MacNeice, I’m —”
“Oh, I know, sir. Jack’s asleep beside me.”
“Well, you see, we’re still following his tracks. And right now we’re out by Ancaster, still not at the beginning of the trail.”
“Oh my . . . the poor thing, eh? He musta been so frightened to run that far.”
“It’s hard to imagine. So —”
“I know, you’re calling to say you’ll be late.”
“Yes . . .”
“No problem, dear, you just come when you can — long as you’re here before six-thirty.”
[13]
A hundred yards shy of the Paddy Greene intersection, the blood tracks left the highway and veered into a cornfield. Ryu was on the road squatting next to his dogs, while Kendrik and a traffic cop peered like tourists down rows of corn taller than they were.
The dogs strained at their leads; Ryu nodded toward the field. “Your dog came through there, sir.”
“You think the trail takes us to that forest on the other side?”
“I do.” He pointed to the intersection. “Power Line Road’s at the end of Paddy Greene. According to the map, there’s a trail entrance to the forest north on Power Line. Once the dogs have taken off, we can follow them on the tablet.”
“On your command, Sergeant.”
Ryu unsnapped the leads; the dogs leapt over the ditch and disappeared into a row. The sergeant leaned against his vehicle, watching the tablet as two red dots moved upwards on a bright beige field. The top of the screen was dark green.
As the dots raced through the corn, the screen adjusted; the beige field kept shrinking until the screen was entirely green. “They’re in the forest, sir. I think it’s time we hit that trail.”
For a minute or two, Ryu, MacNeice, and Aziz watched the tablet in silence, until Ryu pointed to two stationary dots. “The boys have stopped. Now they’ll wait.”
“Meaning they’ve found something?” Aziz asked.
“The starting point of the trail.”
When they’d relocated to the trail’s entrance off Power Line, MacNeice studied the ground around them for tire tracks or foot or paw prints. There was no shortage of them, but all had been made when the ground was wet. Now it was bone-dry. “It hasn’t rained in a while?”
“No, sir. Hot and dry for a few weeks.”
“Right.” He looked down the path. “Aziz will accompany me. Ryu will take us to the dogs — put your boot baggies on.” He looked over at the traffic cop’s name tag. “Constable Hernandez — thanks for running interference. You and Hendrik remain here and restrict access.”
Entering the forest, they stayed off the path, stepping over branches and around small shrubs to avoid disturbing any fresh prints. Following the dots on the screen, Ryu said, “At the fork ahead, we go left.” He added that the dogs hadn’t moved but would soon pick up his scent.
As soon as Ryu turned onto the left fork, both dogs began calling. They were somewhere ahead.
“Does this trail have another exit?” MacNeice asked, ducking under a branch.
Ryu stopped to manoeuvre the map. “There’s another entrance a few hundred yards or so beyond the one we took . . . and another that comes out near the community centre. It’s called the Headwaters Trail and it wanders all through the forest.” He returned to the position locator and added, “The boys are about ninety yards in front of us — it’s just too dense to see them.”
“That program you’re using, has it recorded the entire route Jack took?” MacNeice didn’t want to lose the entirety of what the dog had accomplished, in part because he was so impressed by it.
“From where I picked up — yes, sir. I’ll provide it on a usb when we’re done. Right now, we’re off to the left of the path your dog took. He missed this trail altogether when he was shot and likely just bolted.”
“Back on the road, could you estimate how fast he was running?”
“Not precisely, no. But just as you said, the distance between the blood drops got greater the closer we came to this place. I understand he’s a Lab-whippet mix — so he probably lit out of here doing twenty-five, thirty miles an hour.” Ryu stepped over a fallen tree. “Scared as hell . . . or just pissed off.”
Somewhere in the canopy above came a rapid, high-pitched call, a sustained cackle. MacNeice stopped in his tracks and listened. Aziz, who was several yards ahead of him, turned back, “A blue jay?”
“A hawk — just letting us know that it knows we’re here.”
“A welcome greeting . . .”
“Likely not, but keep in mind Moore is a birdwatcher.”
Hoarse barking replaced the bird call, followed by clear-throated yapping. “First one’s Benny, the other one’s Poirot — they want their treats.” Ryu closed the tablet and followed the sound. “Not far, thirty yards or so.”
With still no sight of the dogs, Aziz and Ryu focused on the ground, trying to avoid the rocks and stumps and clotted vegetation that might trip them up.
When they’d covered what they thought was half the distance to the dogs, MacNeice heard a low, muffled phu-wumph . . . phu-wumph . . . phu-wumph and looked up as a hawk flew over his head and arced swiftly toward Aziz, talons splayed.
“Aziz, duck!” he screamed.
She did better than that. Startled, she turned around, tripped, and fell. As she was falling, an immense shadow crossed her face. “Bloody hell!”
The hawk sliced the air, dodging trees and branches, before landing on a high limb, where it stopped to study them. Ryu laughed nervously. “Jesus — it was going for your head, like a frickin’ gunship from Star Wars.” He helped her to her feet. “Tip to tip, those wings musta been four feet across.”
MacNeice focused on the bird as it nonchalantly began grooming the small feathers on its chest. “Too big for a Cooper’s hawk . . . and way too aggressive.”
“What the hell is it, and why’d it attack me?” Aziz was truly frightened. “I mean, I love birds.”
“That’s a raptor . . . a bird that rips apart the birds you love, Fiza. See all that fine grey banding on its chest? I’m pretty sure that’s a northern goshawk — isn’t it gorgeous?”
“Sorry, I’m just not ready for admiration.”
“It would have planned that attack twenty or thirty yards away. They’re so fast, it could get to you and disappear before you blinked. I think it’s a female, just warning us . . .”
Instinctively, Ryu and Aziz crouched as they walked. MacNeice smiled at the absurdity of their posture but completely understood the reaction. He watched the hawk for a moment as it lifted its grey head, peered down at him, and returned to grooming — all as if nothing had happened. Under his breath, he said, “You’ve made your point.”
It was his first sighting of a goshawk in Canada, and only the second time he’d ever seen one. The first had been in Suffolk. Long after that he had read a book by a woman whose father, and subsequently she, had raised and trained goshawks. That had interested him, because the woman was doing it as a way of dealing with the loss of her father. After reading it, he’d wondered — only for a moment — if that could help him recover from the loss of Kate. It was a romantic but absolutely impossible idea. He was too attached to the sparrows, songbirds, field mice, and rabbits that surrounded his cottage to invite a raptor into the mix.
Ryu approached the dogs — their paws dancing happily — sweeping his gaze over the area. “Good job. Good job.” He gave them their treats — gristly sticks of dried meat — which they devoured enthusiastically.
MacNeice and Aziz scanned the area, trying to spot a body — or body parts. At first the afternoon sun raked the trees and covered the ground in bright dappled light that made the shadows appear darker. As their eyes adjusted, they could see the individual roughed-up dead leaves of the forest floor. MacNeice took a fallen twig and pierced a leaf that looked darker than the rest; as if he were checking a roasted marshmallow, he brought it closer.
The leaf was lacquered in blood. He held the stick out to Aziz, but she was already pointing to a large patch of blood-soaked leaves.
“Do you have a flashlight, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir.” Ryu handed it to MacNeice.
The clearing was small, which made the blinding effect of sunlight more dramatic. However, using the flashlight as a second sun, MacNeice reduced the shadows. What hadn’t soaked into the muddle of ground cover lay in dried pools on dead leaves. Some were scuffed up — likely from a struggle, maybe the violent thrashing of a victim.
Ryu walked to the far side of the patch and crouched. “Sweet Jesus.” He jumped up. “There’s more than one, sir; lotsa blood over here.” He pointed to another patch of leaves off to the side. “And a partial shoe print . . .”
MacNeice stepped around the bloodied ground cover to study the trunk of a paper birch. He found a cluster of small holes, too low and too identical for a woodpecker. More telling, though, each had stained the trunk’s white satin paper with blood. He continued over to where Ryu was and found a second blast cluster, which had shredded the bark of a young maple.
“Shotgun. Two blasts. Two victims.” Picking at one of the holes in the trunk, he retrieved a pellet. Rolling it in his hand, he couldn’t tell the gauge. Forensics could.
“Another print here as well, Mac.” Aziz was at the edge of the clearing. “Looks like they came and left through here . . .”
“The bodies appear to have been dragged out in bags or tarpaulins,” Ryu said. “See the way the leaves have been ploughed heading back along this path? It’s so worn in the middle you can’t make it out, but you can over here.”
MacNeice wondered why anyone would enter a forest at night, kill two people, then remove the bodies. “Let’s spiral out from here. Perhaps they’re buried nearby.” While that didn’t make any sense, he couldn’t ignore the possibility. “Careful as we go; don’t mess up any evidence. Look for pieces of clothing, roughed-up ground, heel marks where bodies were dragged, cigarette butts — anything that didn’t grow in the forest.”
“How wide a circle, sir?” Ryu was already moving.
“Fifty yards in diameter from this spot.”
As he made his way deeper into the forest, MacNeice heard the goshawk’s call. It sounded insistent, but whether it was a distress cry or just calling its mate, he didn’t know. As long as it kept calling from a distance . . .
The dry vegetation crackled underfoot, releasing a musty but not unpleasant odour. It took him back to hot summers on Georgian Bay, where it had been so parched that the star moss was as crispy as the lichen clinging to rocks.
Something rustled in the nearby ground cover. “Keep your head down, friend, for your sake and mine.”
“You say something, sir?”
“Just talking to myself, Sergeant.”
Paris had drifted away overnight, like sun dots on water — here, then gone — lost altogether. The more he walked, the more he was convinced they wouldn’t find the bodies there. Something about that bloody clearing suggested a botched execution, and the reaction was to remove the bodies and get out fast. But why? Even without Jack’s trail back to this place, to anyone who might wander by, the evidence would suggest something awful must have happened.
He was about to turn around when he noticed a huge maple; its trunk had to be five feet wide. Stepping closer to admire it, he looked up at the great circular spread of its canopy. Beyond it, a white pine stood even taller, a hundred feet above the forest floor. Through its branches, he caught a glimpse of a large clot of twigs and leaves: the hawk’s nest.
MacNeice froze and cast a cautious eye around the forest. Other than the hollow sound of a woodpecker working a dead tree, it was uncomfortably quiet.
He moved closer to the maple, thinking that a diving goshawk would have to negotiate a hard turn to avoid slamming into the trunk. That’s when he saw camouflage netting draped over a large shrub hidden behind the tree.
MacNeice lifted the netting and stepped inside to find a small folding table and a chair. On the table was a Thermos, logbook, file folder, and pen, a narrow box of pencil crayons, night-vision goggles, field binoculars, and a 35mm Canon with a telephoto lens. MacNeice slipped on his latex gloves and opened the folder. He scrolled through dozens of photos printed twelve to a page: goshawk in flight; with its partner; nesting alone; feeding the nestlings through to adolescence . . . and quite a few of a happy Jack.
On the ground beside the table was a metal bowl of water and, beside it, a small plastic cooler. Positioned at the edge of the netting was a tripod. Its head mount was tilted almost vertically, waiting for the camera. He opened the logbook where a maple leaf served as a bookmark. It was gridded with dates, times, locations, and a wider section of comments followed by initials. Judging by the entries, there appeared to be two observers — E.M. and C.G. — working in eight-hour shifts. Six a.m. to two p.m. and eight p.m. to four a.m. E.M.’s final entry, at 2:45 a.m., read: Last adolescent, hasn’t returned — assume it won’t. Female staying in or nearby nest . . . male not seen this shift. On the left-hand page, there were pencil crayon sketches of the female: detailed drawings and notes about her colouring, the shape of her tail, the dark cap and white stripe on her head.
Though the drawings were naive, they’d been rendered with intelligence and care. They bore no resemblance to Venganza’s park sketches from his last case, other than the recording of details — because it was important to do so.
He flipped back a few pages to C.G.’s entries, where the sketches were more refined and similarly annotated. C.G.’s last entry that day was: At end of shift, only one adolescent returned to nest. Assume other two gone for good.
MacNeice turned to the first page; the names Colin Gleadow and Evan Moore were printed in capital letters, followed by their telephone numbers. He punched Gleadow’s into his phone but didn’t press Call.
Inside the cooler was an empty plastic container of soup, a sandwich still neatly wrapped in wax paper, and zip-lock bags of kibble and dog treats. Moore’s Thermos of tea was still warm.
He checked his watch, to determine when he needed to leave and collect Jack. Would the vet have a leash? He looked around the blind for a leash, and, seeing none, assumed Moore might have left it in the car. He took out his cell and called Kendrik.
“Yes, sir.”
