of the victim’s family, he thought. Or of the little girl herself, who would be almost seventeen by now. “Do you know what happened to the girl?”
Devine’s face darkened abruptly, further marring her studied Holt Renfrew finish. “That man put her through hell. The doctor said the abuse had happened repeatedly, but the bastard pleaded not guilty, virtually accused the girl of lying, and then dragged the case through the system for over two years. Two years of motions and postponements on every technicality in the book, two years that little girl had to hang in limbo, with everybody whispering about her. She had to change schools and move to a new neighbourhood, so she lost all her old friends. I did my best, but...” She threw up her hands. “Damn, it still gets to me!”
Her passion and moral outrage surprised him—even attracted him—and she moved up a few notches in his esteem. “Yeah, you do this job long enough, and there are always a few that stick with you. But think of it this way, Barbara, if it still gets your blood boiling after ten years, how does the family feel?”
Her anger cleared as she weighed his question. “They hate him. That will always be there. But I think you should be looking for more recent victims. Believe me, men like Fraser don’t stop once they get a taste.”
He shrugged easily. “I’m just exploring ideas here, Barbara, not putting anyone on trial. What was the family like?”
She played with her left earring as she considered his question. “Her family was right in the thick of things, but they were basically good people. Mother, father, stepfather. Even her grandparents showed up for the verdict.”
“Any worrisome signs?”
“Nothing you wouldn’t expect. I mean, a lot of people despised the man. Even some of the other parents, who were afraid he might have abused their children too. Fraser had a classic pedophile profile, Mike. Soft-spoken, shy, liked to hang around with children, and he had this gentle manner that hooked them right in. Children couldn’t see the manipulation behind his overtures, so I couldn’t get anything more solid than a twisted feeling in my gut. Who knows, maybe if I had, the guy would have been put away where he belongs, instead of out roaming the streets, where he’s probably raped three dozen other little girls in the time since.”
* * *
That unsettling thought stayed with Green after he returned to his office. It lent a greater urgency to the mysterious disappearance than did a ten-year-old settling of accounts. Perhaps there was a more recent score to settle, or a more recent danger to flee. Shortly after eleven, telling himself he’d earned a decent lunch break after weeks of car seat dining, he headed out.
For a man who lived in fear, Matt Fraser had chosen to reside in an unsavoury part of town. Built upon the vacant lumber yards of J.R.Booth’s old empire, Carlington had once been a modest, house-proud working-class neighbourhood first settled by World War II vets returning to civilian life. It was now a hodge-podge of post-war shanties, welfare townhouses and massive high-rises, a neighbourhood where new refugee families were sandwiched in with drug dealers, blue collar retirees and the working poor. Petty crime flourished, and bands of youth prowled the streets with restless contempt. Green suspected that poverty, not preference, had dictated Fraser’s choice.
Fraser’s apartment was on the third floor of a squat brick low-rise, surrounded by decrepit parking lots. Weeds sprouted through the broken asphalt, and against one wall were the rusted shells of two cars. The apartment’s security was a paranoid’s nightmare—a row of buzzers just inside the front door, which had been propped open with a stick to encourage some flow of muggy air. Inside, the odour of onions mingled with a stench of rot in the fetid air. After much knocking, Green roused the building super from his midday siesta in his basement apartment. The TV was blaring, and the man opened the door wearing nothing but a scowl and rumpled boxers hitched high over his sagging gut. But one flash of Green’s badge sent him shuffling back inside for a pair of overalls and a set of keys to Matt Fraser’s apartment.
“Nice guy,” the super observed two minutes later as he laboured up the narrow staircase. “Wish all the tenants were as good as him.”
Green peered at him through the gloom. New light bulbs were evidently not part of the landlord’s budget. “What do you mean?”
“No noise, no late-night visitors, fixes everything hisself. Won’t even let me in to do the repairs. Even the dog’s quiet. Big bugger, and quite a few people are scared of it, but it wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
“Does he get many visitors?”
“None that I seen. Sticks to hisself. Why, what’s he done?”
“He’s missing. When did you last see him?”
The man grunted at each step with the effort of lifting his bulk. “Not in a few days. But he’s usually out really early walking his dog, then again late at night. You think something’s happened to him?”
“I’ve no idea. Did you notice anything or anyone unusual—say, in the last six days?”
“Unusual? Well, yesterday, yeah—” The super broke off as he reached the third floor, and he groped for the wall, chest heaving. “Fuck, it stinks up here. What the hell? Is he dead?”
“No, I believe the apartment’s empty.”
The super tried the door with obvious trepidation, and it swung open, unlocked. Both men stepped back as the stench hit them.
“Fuck!” The super hustled over, snapped up the blind and tried to open the tiny window, which was crisscrossed with spider webs. “Fuck! He’s nailed it shut. Must drive him crazy in this heat.” He turned, and his pig-like eyes rounded in shock as he noticed the mess for the first time. Books and newspapers were scattered everywhere, flung haphazardly over the floor as if by a rampage. “Fuck! Who is this guy?”
Green slipped on nitrile gloves and moved rapidly through the rooms checking for intruders and obvious signs of trouble. Twenty years of police work had inured him to most human oddities, but even he found the crammed bookshelves unnerving. Any possibility that Fraser had simply been a nice, normal guy wrongly accused of child abuse vanished from his thoughts. Barbara Devine was right. This was one sick bastard. Not the shy, vulnerable man Janice thought she was drawing out of his shell, but a man whose whole life had but a single focus—the subject of the hundreds of books and newspapers which were catalogued along every wall.
“I’m going back downstairs for a hammer to get those nails out,” the super muttered, tripping over himself in his haste to get out the door. Left alone, Green continued his search. All the windows were nailed shut, but in the bedroom he found a small air conditioner, which he turned on gratefully. It would take several hours to cool the place adequately, but at least it might soon be tolerable.
In the kitchen, he noted that Janice hadn’t even attempted to clean up but had left a note for Fraser on the kitchen table to explain that Modo was safe with her. Apart from the halfeaten food and open newspaper on the kitchen table, Matt Fraser kept a fastidiously tidy kitchen. His fridge gleamed white inside and out, full of food in neatly labelled rows of Tupperware containers. Sliced carrots, diced peppers, chopped lettuce, boiled rice and single-serving portions of left-overs. A health nut too, to top it off. Not a processed cheese slice or frozen dinner in sight. The cupboards were the same. No empty potato chip bags or lidless ketchup bottles, no duplicate boxes of Cheerios to give Green a sense of kinship. The man was seeming less human by the moment.
Yet he clearly had left the scene without bothering to clean up. Without even bothering to finish his food. This
