Inger Wolfe - The Taken

“No, no,” said Wingate, starting forward. He offered his hand, but instead of taking it, the superintendent gripped Wingate on the shoulder and pulled him into a hug. Hazel saw the look on the man’s face and it surprised her: his officious bluster hid a heavy heart.

“Welcome back whatever the reason,” he said. He released Wingate and offered Hazel his hand. “Peter Ilunga,” he said.

“Superintendent.”

He held her hand a beat too long; the gesture silently asserted his control. “I gather you two are here to find something we missed.”

“It’s not like that,” said Hazel.

“Yes it is.” He smiled easily. “Just be careful and remember we live and die here by our clearance rate. If you’re going to move something from one side of the ledger to the other, you better be sure.”

“I understand.”

He turned to Wingate. “Does she?”

“We do, Sir.”

“Detective Constable Toles is eager to be out on the streets detectiving,” he said, shooting the new dick a friendly look, “but he’s here to be of service to you. However, at the first sign that you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, we turn back into a fortress and the two of you can return to fining people who have too many trout in their coolers.”

“Understood,” said Hazel.

At last, Superintendent Ilunga stood aside and gestured to Toles to leave. “Then the room is yours.” Toles left and Ilunga, leaning in to close the door, said to Wingate, “Come and see me when you’re done here, will you? You know the way.”

“I do.”

“Good luck,” he called over his shoulder.

Toles had left a handwritten key to the files on the table. It said, “Blue=suicide; Brown=death by misadventure; Purple =anything that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Purple usually=bad smell. ½ get reactivated w/in a year, get solved, other half are black holes. Good luck.”

“Okay,” said Hazel to Wingate. “Maybe we should begin with the blues?”

“Sounds about right,” said Wingate.

Hazel separated out the blue files and placed the pile between them. “What was that with Superintendent Ilunga?” she asked him.

“What?”

“Come on, James. He held you like a long-lost son. You should have seen his face.”

Wingate took the top folder off the pile and opened it in front of him. It told the story of a subway suicide. “Yeah, that,” he said.

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know, Skip. It’s a long story.”

“Maybe later, then.”

“Yeah,” he said, “later.” He closed the file and pushed it to one side. “Subway. Don’t look at the pictures.”

“I won’t.” She opened the next one. “Jumped from a window.”

They started rifling the piles faster. “Sleeping pills.”

“Same here.”

“Hanged himself.” He turned one of the scene-of-crime pictures on its side. “That’s disgusting. How could anyone do this to themselves?”

“I hear it goes wrong most of the time,” Hazel said.

“Well, not this one. He about tore his own head off.”

“Thanks, James.”

They continued through the files, shaking their heads and muttering causes: razors, guns, overdoses, bridges. Carbon monoxide, suicide by car, by cop. Even within the litany of despairing deaths, there were those that stood out: one man had beaten himself to death with a hammer (his fingerprints were all over the handle and forensics determined the blows to his forehead had come from waist-height), and in another case, a girl of ten had stabbed herself in the stomach with a kitchen knife. The autopsy report in that file revealed a twenty-week fetus inside the girl. There had been three drownings as well: these they set aside.

They moved on to the “death-by-misadventure” pile: there were stories here as horrifying as those in the blue pile, reports on people who’d bumbled their way off the planet. At least half of the files involved cars: people in them, people under them. It never stopped amazing Hazel the different ways people could screw up their relationship to a machine weighing a ton and a half. In these files they found the boating accidents as well: crashes and drownings. They added five more files to the watery-grave pile.

In the undefineds they found the electrocutions, the accidental falls, the unwitnessed deaths that forensics failed to solve. Here there were no drownings at all, drownings, by definition, being less mysterious than a man who turns up behind an after-hours gambling den, face up, eyes open, and dead as a nail, as one of the files reported. The SOC pictures in that folder were particularly surreal: a man lying on his back staring up at the stars.

So they had eight drownings between January 1 and August 31, 2002. They laid them out in a row and stared at them. Three men, five women. They set the men aside. Hazel held up one of the women; she’d come out of the “misadventure” pile. “Janis died in her bathtub,” she said, spreading two photographs on the table between them. They were colour pictures that showed clearly the gradations of colour on the woman’s swollen face. “That strikes me as a real challenge, don’t you think?”

“To make it look like a suicide, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

He took the file from her. No signs of a struggle, the woman had been found alone. Blood alcohol of.17. Coroner ruled it accidental. “Someone could have gotten her drunk and stuck her in the tub,” he said.

Hazel thought about it and nodded. She put Janis on the maybe pile.

Georgia Marten had died going through the ice on Grenadier Pond. Her husband, who’d been taking a walk with her, had been ruled out as a suspect. Misadventure.

The next two had both drowned in Lake Ontario in the summer months. The first, they’d concluded, had jumped from one of the island ferries. There’d been a receipt for a ticket in one of her pockets. Lana Baichwell, thirty-two, single, no criminal record, no history of depression or drugs, lived with her mother. “I like her,” said Hazel. “She fits. She doesn’t look like a candidate for suicide. Someone could easily have pushed her over the side of the ferry.”

“Those ferries are full in the summer,” said Wingate. “No witnesses to some guy forcing a woman over the railings?”

“But what about no witnesses to a suicide?”

“If she wanted to do it, there are ways to slip over quietly. But you’d think someone would have heard the screaming if someone was pushing her.”

Hazel looked more closely at the file. “It happened on the last ferry of the night. Eleven-fifteen from the city. How many people could have been on the boat?”

He nodded. “Okay. Well, put her with the bathtub then.”

The next one had stolen a rowboat from one of the docks on the island side, out of her skull on Ativan and alcohol, a bad combination at the best of times. They’d found the boat bumping up against the south shore of Centre Island and her body in two feet of water at the edge of one of the island channels. Brenda Cameron, age twenty-nine, been brought in many times on drug charges in the four years before her death; she’d been a regular in the part of town known as the Corridor. Fined a bunch of times for drug misdemeanours – most for crack, but a few pot busts too – and, as the file said, “known to police.” History of depression.

“What do you think?” said Wingate.

“Possible,” said Hazel, “but she sounds like a suicide waiting to happen.” She flipped through the folder. The coroner had found a mark in the middle of her forehead where he figured she struck it on the edge of the boat, but the skin hadn’t even been split. Hazel could picture the girl, completely blotto, trying to get one leg over the rim of the tilting boat and then the other and barking her head on the gunwale.