normally ruddy Irish farm boy face was white with fatigue, and new lines were beginning to pull at the corners of his eyes. It seems like yesterday we were rookies together, Green thought, but look how this job has battered him.
Green’s first wife had stomped off in disgust with their baby in tow after only three years of marriage, leaving him without ties or obligations for nearly ten years, but Sullivan had married his first love, had three children in rapid succession, and now struggled to keep his life compartmentalized. He was too much of a professional to bring his home worries onto the job, but sometimes, as now, the stress seeped through. As they inched over the Pretoria Bridge across the Rideau Canal, stuck behind a line of cars doing an illegal left turn onto Colonel By Drive, he drummed his fingers and cursed. Green wondered what else was eating at him.
“Does it get any worse?” he asked gently.
“Can it get worse?” Sullivan countered. “Put it this way. It doesn’t get better. I leave Lou Paquette and his Ident team to get what they can from the mess in the library, and I rush off to the hospital, but the victim’s in surgery. No instructions to anybody to listen for dying declarations. And worse, the guy has no ID on him. Not even a library card!”
“His wallet was probably lifted.”
“I figured that.” Sullivan broke off long enough to accelerate around a red Honda waiting to turn left. The car beside him blasted its horn, and he raised his middle finger. “Unless of course it fell out while the guys were moving him. Anything is possible in this fiasco. But as a result, we didn’t know who the John Doe was. I ran a description through missing persons and checked recent reports, but it was only a bit past midnight by then, and who the hell reports a fully grown man missing at that hour? Probably not even at four a.m. Anyway, the victim comes out of surgery and into recovery, but he hasn’t regained consciousness and it doesn’t look like he will in a hurry, so I post a uniform by his bed and I go back to the scene. No—first I checked his clothes. Expensive, so I know the guy’s not starving. Conservative, so I figure he’s not a punk, but that’s no surprise. He was stabbed in the Shakespeare section of the university library. Not your average street punk’s stomping ground. That’s why dispatch screwed up so badly on the 911 call, by the way. Sergeant Jones says ‘Who the hell expects a stabbing in a library, for God’s sake! If the call had come from a parking lot in the Byward Market, we’d have sent four experienced teams down there right away. Not one poor rookie.’ And it’s not the kid’s fault, after all. There was a lot of blood around, and he just wanted to save the boy’s life. I’d have forgotten all the procedural shit myself fifteen years ago.”
Sullivan pulled the Taurus to a halt behind a police van near the entrance to the library, and the two jumped out. A police officer was posted at the entrance to the library and another at the elevators. One elevator had been commandeered for use in the investigation, and the fourth floor button had been taped on the other elevators. Students gathered in whispering clumps, gawking curiously.
Sullivan led Green into the elevator and punched four. “Looks great now, doesn’t it? Everything according to procedure, every ‘t’ crossed. The Ident team has cordoned off the entire fourth floor, and they’re probably still there.”
The elevator door slid open, revealing yellow plastic tape across the exit. They logged in with the uniform on guard, and ducked under the tape. Ahead of them, half a dozen men were crawling around on the floor with magnifying glasses.
“Yes, they’re still here.”
“And we’ll probably be here till Christmas,” came a gravelly voice from behind a bookcase. An instant later the senior Identification Officer, Sergeant Lou Paquette, emerged around the corner, red-faced from crawling. “We haven’t found a damn thing yet.” He peeled off his latex glove and held out his hand to Green. “Glad to see you, Mike.”
“You’ve got nothing?” Green echoed in dismay.
“Oh, we’ve got tons of shit. Fingerprints, hair, fibres, bloodstains. There’s blood all over the place. The witnesses tracked it around, the paramedics tracked it around. The only thing I can’t tell is if the killer tracked it around. And this is a public place. There could be fingerprints and fibres from half the city of Ottawa here. The half that doesn’t have prints on file downtown.” Paquette grinned at his own attempt at humour. His mustache quivered. “I’ve sent a guy to collect the shoes from every fireman and paramedic who was at the scene. That’ll be fun.”
Green took out his notebook. “Can you tell us anything?”
Paquette sighed and grew sober. “As far as I can tell, there was no struggle. No books were pulled down, nothing kicked out of place. It’s a narrow space. It would be hard to fight without knocking the bookshelves.”
“And the young woman who found the victim heard no sound of an argument, no screams,” Sullivan added. “Libraries are pretty quiet. She would have heard a violent scuffle.”
“Did she see anything unusual that evening? Anyone suspicious or out of place?”
“Nothing that she remembered, but she was pretty shaken up. She got covered in blood, and all she could think about was getting cleaned up. After the preliminaries, I let her go home.”
Green nodded. “We’ll get to her later.”
They had walked to the far end of the library along the path Ident had laid out and now stood in front of the large, browning pool of blood where the body had been.
“The victim was stabbed once in the abdomen,” Sullivan said. “According to the emergency room surgeon, the weapon pierced the stomach and lacerated the liver, nicking an artery as it went by. It sounds like a horizontal thrust directly forward, made by a knife held at waist level.”
“I suppose nobody took photographs of the wound before they sutured it all up?”
Sullivan grinned. “You got it.”
Green looked up from his notes with a snort. “Jesus. Jules said the case needed me, but what it really needs is a goddamn miracle.”
*
The two detectives stayed at the scene another fifteen minutes reviewing the meagre forensic harvest. No murder weapon, no signs of disturbance or misplaced property, hundreds of latent fingerprints which would take days to analyze and could not be tied definitively to the murder anyway. Blood had been tracked up and down the aisle leading to the elevator as well as the two aisles on either side, but the traces were consistent with bloodstained shoes rather than with drops of falling blood. The only spilt blood was the large pool where the body had been and a fine spray of arterial blood on the bookshelf nearby.
“The perpetrator would have got blood on himself, without a doubt,” Paquette said. “On his hand and sleeve, probably also on his shirt, pants and shoes. The body fell forward. The perpetrator would have had trouble jumping out of the way in time, especially since he was trying to pull out his knife. Some of these bloody footprints may be his, once I eliminate all the other assholes who were on the scene.”
Green sketched the scene, noting the rows of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves which effectively blocked any overview of the area. Jonathan Blair’s killer had trapped him in a remote corner, where the chances of anyone witnessing the crime were even fewer. By luck or design?
Green glanced at his watch. “Brian, I want to meet with the mother before she calls the Chief again, and I need you to tell me what else you’ve got. Come on, I’ll buy you a coffee. I missed having mine this morning.”
