about this guy? Find out if he’s missed any appointments or left word about his plans?”
She paused with her coke can to her lips. “Subtly?”
“Okay, forget subtle. Find out who his therapist is. Find out what kind of guy this Matt Fraser is.”
She raised one eyebrow slowly in silent rebuke that he would ask her to violate patient confidentiality. He raised his palms in a classic Yiddish shrug which said it was the furthest thing from his mind. Both of them dealt with confidential material all the time, and he knew no further words were necessary. She would make casual inquiries about Matt Fraser at the hospital, and if, in her judgment, anything suspicious or worrisome emerged, she would quietly pass it on to him.
In the meantime, because curiosity had always been one of his greatest failings as well as his greatest asset, he decided that when he got bored in the morning, he would pull the police file on Matt Fraser and see what he could learn.
* * *
The file on Fraser’s old case proved to be voluminous, suggesting that although the man had only had one criminal charge, it had been a complicated one. It was all on microfiche in the records department, and over the phone, the records clerk implied that Green shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for her to print it out.
After he’d hung up, Green eyed the clutter on his desk and the list of unread emails stacked up in his electronic inbox. A rooming house fire in Vanier during the night had claimed at least one life and drawn a team of Ident officers and Major Crimes detectives out to the scene, including Brian Sullivan. The Staff Sergeant in Youth wanted a meeting to discuss the rise of swarmings in Ottawa’s south end, and Superintendent Adam Jules had asked him to review the agenda for yet another meeting. The last thing Green needed was fifty pounds of microfiche print-outs dumped on his desk as well.
He drummed his fingers on his desk as he considered other approaches. Barbara Devine had been the lead investigator on the Fraser case. Plain Detective Devine back then, Inspector now. After her stint in sex crimes, she’d made the rounds through the departments on her way up the ladder and was now ensconced in an office one floor closer to the gods than his, pushing paper and keeping company with the senior brass. Backroom gossip held that she’d once been an idealistic, hardhitting detective who’d soured on the nobility and purpose of what she was doing and turned her attentions instead to the cause of her own advancement. Although he’d never worked directly with her, she was a contemporary of Green’s with a string of relationship disasters that eclipsed his own. Currently, having burned her way through three husbands, she’d set her sights on Superintendent Adam Jules, the austere and resolutely celibate chief of CID . The thought made Green’s lips twitch irrepressibly.
Counting on the lure of an old case to draw her into his quest, he grabbed his notebook and headed up the stairs to her office. Devine owned an array of power suits from Holt Renfrew, and today she had packaged herself in dark red with fingernails and lips to match. The door to her spotless office was ajar, and he could see her typing furiously away at her computer. She scowled at him dubiously as he strode in. Probably afraid I’ll want her to do some actual police work, he thought and cut off any incipient protest by dropping into a chair and tossing his notebook on her desk.
“Barbara, I need to pick your considerable brain. Remember Matthew Fraser?”
She sat back, her fingers still poised over the keyboard and her eyes slitting warily. “Certainly. One of the most frustrating and disappointing cases I’ve ever worked. Why do you ask?”
“His name’s come up. Tell me about the case.”
“What’s he done? Offended again?”
“No, he’s been reported missing.”
“In that case, good riddance,” she said, brushing nonexistent dust from her desk and straightening a stack of reports. “I wouldn’t waste too much energy on it.”
He grinned and propped his feet on the edge of her pristine desk. “That’s why I’m here. The file is going to be several truck loads, so I’m looking for an executive summary before I put any manpower on it.”
She eyed his feet in silence for a moment, her red nails tapping the desktop, and he could almost see her weighing how much to cooperate. “You must remember the case, Mike,” she said eventually. “Two of our officers quit the force after the trial. They had little children themselves, and they couldn’t stomach working for a system that gives the villains all the breaks.”
Finally the penny dropped. Matthew Fraser had been an elementary school teacher accused and ultimately acquitted of sexual abuse, and Green could still recall the bitter divisions the case had engendered not only within the school and community but within CID itself.
“Did you think he was guilty?” he asked.
Her eyes flashed and her mouth grew hard, but she restrained herself. “I’d never have brought the case forward if I’d doubted that. I was the one who took the girl’s initial statement. I watched her face that first time in the station, I heard her crying and saying ‘I just want him to stop.’ She was very credible before the lawyers and the Children’s Aid got into the act, and the whole courtroom circus froze her up.”
“So she recanted on the witness stand?”
Devine shook her head vigorously. “If I had dropped all the cases where the abuse victims had second thoughts, I’d have had precious little work to do. But Rebecca Whelan didn’t really recant. She just got confused, the defence chipped away at her recollections, and the judge was ‘See no evil, hear no evil’ Maloney, who wouldn’t recognize sexual abuse if it was—” She pressed her lips together as if to prevent further indiscretions from escaping.
“Shoved up his ass?” Green said. “Was there any other evidence? Any other complainants?”
“You’re not the only one on the force who knows how to build a case, Mike. We had plenty of circumstantial evidence. I had doctors and abuse experts who swore she had all the classic signs, I had other little girls who alleged touching or grooming types of activity, but it was either too vague or the parents wouldn’t let them testify. So in the end, what it boiled down to was this six-year-old all alone in the courtroom, sitting on a telephone book so she could see over the witness box, with the judge staring down at her and the high-priced lawyer from the teacher’s union hammering away at her every word. She crumbled.”
Green made a face, inwardly grateful that he had resisted the pressure to do his turn in sex crimes. Adults killing each other were bad enough. “What was Matthew Fraser like?”
“He was one sick bastard,” she replied, her discretion lost in the heat of her recollections. Her lips formed a harsh red slash of emotion across her carefully made up face. “One of those quiet, unreadable types. You know, the type who plots murder without ever changing his expression. He acted so concerned for the little girl, but he put her through six weeks of active trial while he paraded all his teacher friends across the stand one after another to say what a great guy he was. Of course, I hear they all dropped him like a hot potato afterwards. For the cameras it was union solidarity rah, rah, and all that, but out of the public view, that was another story.”
“He apparently told a friend he was being followed recently. Any threats on his life after he was acquitted? I imagine there were people in the girl’s family who would have liked to see him suffer.”
“And half a dozen guys on the force eager to do the job for them,” she countered. “But it’s been
