she could pursue in her search, but both the Health Department and Revenue Canada would not be accessible until business hours in the morning. She was just about to give up for the evening when her phone rang. It was one of Daniel Oliver’s old friends, for whom she had left a voice mail message earlier. He had a deep drawl with a hint of Cape Breton in his vowels.
“I did run into her a year or so ago, and we had a couple of drinks for old times. Never found out where she lived, but she seemed a regular at the Seaman’s Watch. They might know.”
McGrath glanced at her watch. It was just past eight o’clock—peak time in the Halifax bar scene. She dived for her jacket, clipped her gun and phone onto her belt, and went in search of a partner. The Seaman’s Watch was a well-known sleaze bar on Gottingen Street just a few blocks north of the police station. It attracted a prickly mix of sailors and students, as well as the whores who serviced them and the petty thugs who thought there was money to be made. McGrath knew better than to walk in there alone. She commandeered a beefy young constable who was just coming in to write up a traffic accident. Minor, he said, no injuries. It can wait, she replied and led the way to the car park.
At nine o’clock on a Tuesday night, the Seaman’s Watch was already crowded. The yeasty stink of beer and sour bodies choked her as they walked in, but she stifled her grimace. A lively, inebriated band was banging out drinking songs at the end of the room, and the audience was singing along. Ignoring the leers, McGrath sought out the bartender and drew him close so that she could shout in his ear. She gave him a vague story about needing to locate Patricia for her own safety. Once he’d deciphered her request, the bartender’s brow furrowed.
“Yeah, she comes in here regular like, but I haven’t seen her the past couple of weeks.”
“Do you know where she lives?”
He hesitated, then glanced at the table nearby, where a group of sailors were roaring lustily. “A few of the lads have taken her home, like, you know, not a regular thing, but from time to time. She’s kind of a sad case, is our Patti.”
You don’t know the half of it, McGrath thought to herself as she signalled her bodyguard towards the table. Five minutes later, they were back out in the crisp, salty night air, armed with a street name and number. They drove slowly up the street, scanning house numbers until they came upon a tall, narrow clapboard house perched near the top of the hill. It was impossible to be sure of the colour beneath the peeling layers of grime, but McGrath suspected it had once been robin’s egg blue. She rang the top buzzer. It had no name, but the sailors had said she lived on the top floor.
No answer. McGrath rang again. Still nothing, although she could hear the abrasive buzz reverberate inside. Her sense of foreboding grew.
It took an hour to locate and summon the landlord to open the apartment door. He was a familiar figure to the police, a low-level drug dealer who laundered his money through several of the less savoury properties in the downtown core. He fumed as he stomped up the stairs to her floor.
“She’s one of my most reliable tenants. Clean, quiet, always pays on time. Fuck, she better not have done a runner. She knows I need a month’s notice.”
McGrath didn’t even dignify his whining with a response. As he unlocked the door, she shoved past him into the room. It was almost bare. Only a bed, table and chair, dresser and an ancient TV with rabbit ears. On the bed were neat stacks of old letters, photos and a folded Sunday Herald. In the closet, jackets and pants hung on three forlorn hangers, and the dresser itself was half full of clothes. The cupboard above the sink in the tiny kitchenette still held crockery and pots. McGrath ducked into the bathroom. The shampoo and soap were still by the tub, but her toothbrush was gone. So was her purse.
Patricia Ross had gone away, but she had intended to come back again.
McGrath returned to the main room to find the landlord rifling through the Sunday Herald. “Don’t touch that, please!”
He tossed the papers down sulkily. “Just seeing if she left me a note.”
The papers fell open to an inside page, half of which had been torn off. McGrath looked at it curiously. Page 10, which was full of local news. She hunted briefly through the rest of the paper, but there was no sign of the missing page. “Did you tear this?”
He scowled as if affronted. “It’s two weeks old! The kid downstairs probably took it. They fought all the time about that.”
He could be right, she thought. A torn page didn’t mean much, although it might be interesting to check its contents. “When was the last time you saw her?”
He scanned the room, then shrugged. “She brought April’s rent to my office three weeks ago.”
McGrath unfolded the photo of the dead Jane Doe and held it out. “Do you recognize this woman?”
The landlord glanced at the photo and to his credit, he blanched visibly in the dingy apartment light.
SIX
April 6, 1993. Zagreb, Croatia.
Dear Kit . . . We’re in the airport waiting for our ground transport, so this is my first glimpse of the country. Zagreb airport looks like any other modern airport. I don’t know what I was expecting—snipers, tanks and big craters in the ground from mortar fire. But there’s nothing but wall to wall peacekeepers in the pouring rain. It’s wet and cold, but everybody’s excited.
April 10, 1993. Pakrac, Sector West, Croatia.
We’re at our position now and getting dug in. Our section house is a bombed out farmhouse in the middle of a field. There’s mud everywhere from the winter rains. We’re all pitching in, learning the jobs from the 3 Pats who are leaving. Today I did six hours at the hot dog stand. That’s what they call a checkpoint. It can be boring you sit there and search each vehicle that comes through, write down the licence plate, who’s in it and where they’re going. Sector West is a UN protected area with a Serb side and a Croat side, and the ceasefire line in between runs right through the Canadian Battalion’s area of responsibility. The CO says they put the Canadians in the toughest spot because we’re the only UN peacekeeping battalion that has the equipment and the training to do the job.
Anyway, there aren’t supposed to be any weapons inside the UNPA, but both sides are always trying to sneak them in, and it’s our job to stop them. Sometimes we have a translator but a lot of times we just use hand gestures and it can get pretty funny. Us pointing go back and them pointing forward. There’s a Muslim kid Mahir from the nearby village who knows some English, so we use him when he’s free.
April 15 1993, Sector West, Croatia.
Dear Kit . . . The past couple of days we’ve noticed this dog hanging around the woods near the hot dog stand. She looks like a border collie and shepherd mix with sores on her legs and her ribs sticking out. Mahir says she belonged to a Serbian family who abandoned their farm. She was so spooked it took us three days to coax her to come near. Today we got her in the APC and took her back to the section house, and tomorrow we’ll build her a dog house. She’ll probably end up sleeping with us, but Sarge says when the Hammer’s around, she’d better stay in her kennel. Rules are rules, after all. I’m looking for a good name for her.
May 1, 1993. Sector West, Croatia.
Good things and not so
