home and tell them you’re worried. It will be up to them to call you if they want.”
Green bit back his frustration and scribbled his cell number on his card. The wait was going to drive him crazy, but it was probably the best he could hope for without dragging in subpoenas, justices of the peace and the rest of the heavy artillery of the state, for which he had not a whit of justification.
* * *
By five o’clock in the afternoon, the Ottawa Police headquarters on Elgin Street was normally winding down, the day shift and administrative staff heading home and the evening shift already out on the streets. Today, however, as Green came off the elevator from the parking garage, a crackling energy gripped the second floor, where the major crimes squad was housed. Every desk was occupied, and several detectives were clustered around the corner conference table, hunched over their laptops. They looked up as he passed by, but no one registered surprise at his presence there during his supposed holiday. After almost fifteen years in CID , I guess I’m a fixture, he thought. For the fifth time since leaving Hannah’s school, he checked his cell phone for messages, on the remote chance he had failed to hear its ring through the rush hour noise. Nothing.
Brian Sullivan was not at his desk, but Green spotted Bob Gibbs in the corner. The lanky young detective sat with his phone jammed between his ear and his shoulder, while his slender fingers raced over his keyboard. His fine brown hair stood in harried tufts, and his eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue. Gibbs was a committed, meticulous detective who would sleep at his computer if it helped solve the case faster. If anyone besides Sullivan knew the latest details about the missing girl, he would.
Green was just heading over towards him when the door to the stairwell flew open and Superintendent Barbara Devine swept in. She was dressed today in a surprisingly conservative navy suit, her flair for drama limited to a red silk scarf at her throat to match her crimson nails. Her eyes raked the squad room like a hawk searching for prey until they lit on Green. She skewered the air with a manicured nail.
“Mike! Just the man I need!” A muffled snigger drifted across the room from an unknown source. Green turned toward her in dismay.
“I’m just in here checking...” He hesitated. Devine didn’t need to know about his domestic tribulations. As her subordinate, he operated on the principle that the less she knew, the better. “Something in my office, Barbara. I’m on vacation, remember?”
She waved a dismissive hand. “This will only take half an hour. Mrs. Kovacev is camped outside my office, demanding an update on her daughter’s case. I don’t have time. I’m late for an appointment already.” She glanced at the elegant gold watch on her wrist as if to drive home the point, then her eyes took in his jeans and rumpled Bagelshop golf shirt. Her arched eyebrows shot higher. “Good God, Mike. I need a senior officer, but what kind of impression—”
“I’m on vacation,” he repeated. “Besides, I don’t know the case. Staff Sergeant Sullivan is the man to see.”
She barely glanced around. “But he’s not here, is he?”
“Then Detective Gibbs—”
“Gibbs!” She snorted. “I don’t have to tell you the media is >all over this case, Mike. We need a respectable profile. We can’t have Mrs. Kovacev and all the other tearful mothers of teenage darlings filling up airtime on the six o’clock news. Which I guarantee will happen if she walks out of this station dissatisfied. You don’t have to actually know anything, Mike. Just hold her hand awhile. You’ve done that so often, you can do it in your sleep.”
Green ignored the hidden innuendo, choosing to assume she meant his kindness and not his seductive prowess. Even so, practice hardly made perfect when it came to his handholding skills. Faced with the tears and anguish of relatives, he always felt clumsy and inadequate. There was nothing he could do to ease their pain, except go out and catch the perpetrator responsible.
But before he could rally further protest, Devine pivoted on her stiletto heel and stalked back down the hall. “Get a tie on and wait by the elevator. I’ll send her down.”
Green did keep a tangle of well-worn ties in his desk drawer for surprises like this, but even a tie wouldn’t salvage the golf shirt. Besides, he had more important worries at the moment. He dashed over to Gibbs, who’d witnessed the exchange, along with half the squad. Gibbs’s lips twitched in a faint smile, which he quickly brought under control.
“Any breaks in the Kovacev case?” Green demanded urgently.
Gibbs shook his head. “Neighbours saw her leave the house around four in the afternoon, and a bus driver on the #149 bus recalls picking her up at the corner of Pleasant Park and Haig. According to the bus schedule, that would have been 4:15. He thinks she got off at St. Laurent and Walkley, probably to transfer buses, but we have no further sightings of her. We checked—”
Hearing the hum of the elevator, Green jumped in. “How many officers do we have on the case?”
“Between Uniform, General Assignment and our squad, thirty. Plus volunteers. The whole neighbourhood and several schools in the area are pitching in. If she’s still in the city, we’ll find her.”
The door to the elevator slid open, and Green hurried over to greet the frantic mother. Whatever picture of grief and desperation he was expecting, his first reaction was one of surprise. Lea Kovacev’s mother stepped off the elevator with her broad shoulders squared and her blue eyes clear. Even before he could speak, she extended her hand. “Inspector Green? I’m Marija Kovacev.”
She was a tall, regal woman with silvery blonde hair swept into a bun at the nape of her neck and high, sculpted cheekbones that hinted at Slavic blood. Even devoid of make-up, her skin was porcelain-smooth, and only a faint charcoal bruising beneath her eyes betrayed her recent ordeal. If the daughter had inherited even half her mother’s looks, Green thought, she’d arouse the fantasies of just about every red-blooded male who crossed her path. Under the circumstances, not a comforting thought.
Her handshake was firm and her stride unfaltering as she accompanied him back to his little alcove office. He unlocked the door, trying to remember how clean he had left it. Inside, his phone message light was blinking furiously, and a dozen memos spilled over his desk. Only two days away, he noted wryly, and already a week’s worth of paperwork had piled up. He swept the memos into a stack and gestured her to the small chair that was squeezed between his desk and the door. She perched on the edge and propped her purse on her knees as if preparing to do battle.
“Mrs. Kovacev, I can imagine how worried—”
“My daughter Lea is a good girl.” The woman had a soft, lilting, Eastern European accent that reminded him of his own parents. He nodded.
“I know. I want to assure you we’re doing everything we can—”
“You asked if she took drugs, or if she has a boyfriend. You think she ran off with him because I am too strict. This is impossible.”
He wondered how blunt Ron Leclair had been. It was the obvious theory for police to operate under, and more often than not, it would be true. But Marija Kovacev was in no mood to hear it, so he held up a soothing hand. “We don’t know anything, Mrs. Kovacev. I know how scary this is, but when a teenager goes missing, we look at all possible explanations. It doesn’t mean we believe them, but we don’t want to rule out anything that might help us find her. We have dozens of officers out looking for her. We’ve been tracing the bus route she took, tracking down her friends—”
“I
