“Which would make me the prime suspect, wouldn’t it?” she said. “I killed Patrick so I could have the money and my lesbian lover both.”
“That works too,” Shoe said.
Victoria’s brief smile was sour. “Let me ask you a question,” she said.
“Sure,” Shoe said.
“Was Patrick having an affair with Sandra St. Johns?”
“What do you think?” Shoe replied.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t blame him if he was. We haven’t been very close lately.” She shook her head, ponytail swishing from side to side. “No, I don’t think he was. Patrick was never very good at deception. He was a terrible liar and an awful poker player.”
Shoe hoped she was right, but he didn’t think she was. Sandra St. Johns wasn’t a very good liar either, and Patrick may have been a better one than Victoria thought.
“Can I take a look at Patrick’s home office?” Shoe asked.
“Sure,” Victoria said, standing. “It’s upstairs.”
Patrick’s home office was a small bright room at the rear of the house. It was neat and well organized, but there wasn’t much in it. A new Apple iMac computer sat on the desk, a small printer beside it, a flatbed scanner beside that. The shipping boxes still stood against the wall by the door. The furniture also looked new. The two-drawer filing cabinet was wood-grained, matching the desk. A bookcase, also matching, contained mostly software packages, some still shrink-wrapped, and a couple of black and yellow “For Dummies” books on computers and the Internet.
“He’d only had the computer a few days,” Victoria said. “The police looked at it but said there was nothing on it but the stuff that came with it. They checked the Internet browser history, but they said he visited mostly e-commerce sites. They seemed disappointed that he wasn’t surfing kiddie porn sites,” she added with a flicker of a smile.
Shoe opened the drawers of the desk and filing cabinet. The desk contained nothing of interest—hardly anything at all—and all he found in the filing cabinet were a few files pertaining to the purchase of the computer and the office furnishings. A small paper shredder stood beside the desk, similar to the one in his Hammond Industries office. Shoe examined the mound of colourful strips in the collector bin. It appeared that Patrick had tested the shredder by shredding printouts from the printer: computer spec sheets and photographic quality prints of tropical birds and beaches.
Shoe drove back across the Lions Gate Bridge and downtown. Leaving his car in the underground garage of the Hammond Building, he walked the few blocks to the restaurant near the Waterfront SkyTrain station. He didn’t expect to learn anything helpful from a visit to the scene of Patrick’s murder, nor did he. The manager refused to speak about the incident and none of the staff on duty had been working on Monday. As he emerged from the restaurant, though, Sergeant Matthias and Detective Constable Worth were waiting for him on the sidewalk, leaning against the front fender of a blue Ford Taurus.
“We need to talk,” Matthias said.
“All right,” Shoe replied.
“Let’s get some coffee somewhere.”
“As long as it’s not this place,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder at the entrance to the restaurant in which Patrick had died.
“Not a problem,” Matthias said.
They got takeout coffees, Matthias’ treat, and took them out onto the Canada Place promenade overlooking the harbour, where they found an unoccupied bench. Matthias and Shoe sat on the bench while Worth leaned against the railing.
Mathias prised the lid from his coffee cup, saying, “You want to tell me what the hell you think you’re up to?”
“I’m conducting an internal investigation into Patrick O’Neill’s murder,” Shoe said. “At Mr. Hammond’s request.”
“Oh, swell,” Matthias said. Then he said, “Wait a minute, I thought you’d been fired.”
“I’ve been temporarily reinstated,” Shoe explained.
“And O’Neill? He’d resigned too, hadn’t he?”
“He had,” Shoe said. “But Mr. Hammond hadn’t accepted his resignation, so technically he was still an employee of the company when he died.”
“You know you’re a goddamned suspect, don’t you?”
Detective Constable Worth raised a finely shaped eyebrow at her partner’s language.
“Yes, of course,” Shoe said agreeably. “What’s my motive again?”
“The wife, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“We did some checking on you,” Matthias said. Shoe waited, blowing on the coffee, sipping the hot brew carefully. “You remember a cop named Henry Trumbull?”
Yes, I remember him,” Shoe replied. He and Hank Trumbull had graduated from the academy together and, for a time, had worked out of the same downtown Toronto station.
“He’s an inspector now,” Matthias said. He took a mouthful of coffee, seeming oblivious to the temperature. “When we interviewed you,” he said, “you told us that you’d been discharged from the Toronto police service for striking a superior office. In actual fact, you resigned after your partner, one Ronald Mackie, assaulted you in the locker room with his nightstick and you fractured his cervical vertebrae taking it away from him.” Shoe sipped his coffee and waited for the other coin to drop. “He claimed you were sleeping with his wife.”
“Former wife,” Shoe corrected him. “I knew her as Sara Rosen. When I met her, she and Mackie had been divorced for a year and a half.”
“She was a cop too?”
“That’s right,” Shoe said.
Shoe had met Sara at someone’s retirement party, he didn’t remember whose. She’d been twenty-seven then, three years older than Shoe. She worked out of another station, and they’d been seeing each other for a month before Shoe had learned that she was Mackie’s ex-wife. Over the years, Shoe had asked himself many times if he’d have gone out with her that first time if he’d known. The answer was usually yes, despite the fact that Mackie had talked incessantly about “his ex,” certain they’d eventually get back together. According to Sara, though, there was no chance of that. Mackie knew Sara was seeing someone, he’d told Shoe, another cop. He didn’t know who, some suit, probably, he’d said. He’d find out soon enough, though, and when he did, the guy had better watch out.
“What else did Trumbull tell you?” Shoe asked.
Matthias looked up at his partner. Her strong, solemn face was expressionless.
“He said Sara Mackie died in the line of duty a few weeks later.”
Shoe was constantly surprised that even after all these years the memory of it still hurt. “She was killed when a drunk driver
