Asian — Vietnamese, Dion believed — only shrugged, signing that he wasn’t up on his English. He was, however, able to explain that the elevator was out of order.
“See the way he looked at me?” Torr said as he and Dion climbed the stairs to four. “Looked at me like I’m the invasive species. Blatt won’t be home, I guarantee you. We’re doing ten miles of stairs for nothing. Fuck you.”
The fuck you wasn’t up to Torr’s usual standard. Maybe it was the exertion of the climb. They arrived, damp and winded, at the door of apartment 416. Dion was out of shape from lack of exercise, and Torr was a body builder, not a mountaineer. Torr flapped his elbows to air the sweat, then knocked on the door, two loud thumps, predicting again that nobody would answer. Nobody did.
“It was worth a try,” Dion said, as he and Torr exchanged angry looks. He got on his phone and called the number from his notebook. Again, nobody picked up. Was Sigmund Blatt missing along with Lance Liu? He let it ring, and heard a cellphone tweedling, a distant, eerie, echoey sound, as if from outer space. Torr walked down the hall and pushed open the fire door, looked down the stairwell, and held up a hand for silence. The tweedling was coming from below, rising slowly.
Dion disconnected, and the tweedling stopped. They waited on the landing, and a minute later, a man appeared, plodding up the stairs. He was burly and red-faced, with bristling blond hair. When he noticed their presence he didn’t flinch, but kept climbing until he stood facing them on the landing. He wore jeans, a well-worn black leather jacket, and heavy-duty workman’s boots. Torr said, “Sigmund Blatt?”
“That’s me.”
Torr showed his ID and said, “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“Didn’t recognize the number.”
“Not a great business model, is it?”
“It’s my personal cell. My partner does sales. What’s the problem?”
Like the building manager, Blatt latched suspicious eyes on Torr and ignored Dion.
“Your partner is the problem,” Torr answered. “Lance Liu. Where is he?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself. Trying to get a hold of him. No answer. No answer at his home, either. Weird.”
Torr gave Blatt a heavy stare, maybe challenging him to figure it out, that something was terribly wrong; why else would two cops be standing here wanting to talk? The staring contest grew edgy, till Blatt brushed past them, out of the stairwell, and into the corridor. The two cops trailed after him. He stopped at 416 and fished for keys. “Guess you better come in,” he said.
Dion followed Torr into the apartment. The place was messy and musty. Over by the window a big white bird, some kind of parrot, muttered and squawked from a cage. Unlike the apartment, the cage appeared to be clean and well tended. Sigmund Blatt flung clothes and shopping bags off a sofa set and indicated they should sit, if they cared to, but nobody was in the mood.
Dion watched Torr arranging his face to break the news, a professional blend of sympathy and suspicion. “Mr. Blatt,” Torr said. “I’m sorry, but we’re here because Mr. Liu’s wife and daughter were found dead in their home this morning. You know Cheryl Liu, do you?”
Blatt had taken a step backward. His mouth dropped open. His eyes narrowed, then widened. “Oh no,” he said, and to Dion the surprise seemed genuine. So did the shock, and then the slow surge of grief. This man knew the family well. He had maybe been there through weddings, births, Christmases, barbecues. They were dear to him.
“Cheryl?” Blatt said, hands to his face. “Rosie? Dead? No. Joey?”
Dion knew who Cheryl was and could assume who Rosie was, but the third was a mystery. Torr seemed to still be mentally counting off bodies, so he asked, “Who’s Joey?”
“Their kid, the boy.” Blatt’s hands left his face, a face that was visibly paling. Dion watched for more subtle clues, maybe a telltale flash of fear, the sickness of guilt. Back when he’d been a keener, before the crash, he had been the detachment’s go-to interrogator. Looking at Blatt now, he knew he was seeing something below the surface, a mystery emotion buried in shock and grief. He tried to put a name to it and couldn’t. Just couldn’t get a grip on the right words.
Blatt was back to answering Torr’s questions. The sense of a clue almost within reach was gone, and Dion found himself looking at the parrot — if that’s what it was — instead of the suspect. He noticed the white bird with its punk hairdo was bobbing its head to the conversation, trying to get a word in. A bit of a power struggle was being waged now between Torr and Blatt, with Torr fielding questions instead of asking his own. Dion lost the thread of their dialogue, and without the thread there was no fabric.
He focussed on Blatt again when Blatt swore on his grandmother’s grave that he didn’t know where Lance was. “All right, sir,” Torr said, and finally Blatt was free to sink onto his sofa and bury his face in his arms.
Only on the stairs did it come to Dion, the perfect description for Blatt’s reaction. Misplaced confusion. He stopped to capture the words in his notebook. Torr kept stomping down, griping as he went. The stairwell was a vertical tower of concrete and iron, and every sound within it rang bell-like. Even Torr’s griping had a musical resonance as it floated back. Dion stood with notebook open, startled off task by déjà vu. A different stairwell, but the same effect. Voices and boot thuds echoing up and down. The boom of Looch’s laughter.
Out of sight now, Torr bellowed up, “Hey, what’s up?”
It was a good question, and it brought Dion back to where he was, on somebody’s stairwell, notebook open in his hands. He looked at what he’d scribbled there — confusion — and couldn’t for the life of him think why.
Five
The Crumbling Shores
Over the last several hours Leith had crossed the road from detachment to hospital more than once, anxious not to miss the cabinet kid’s first words. The cabinet kid’s name, he’d discovered through the team’s research, was Joseph Liu. Joseph had suffered a panic attack in the examination room and had been given a mild sedative. Now he was asleep. Leith had posted JD Temple at the boy’s bedside to be there when he woke.
But not knowing JD well enough to know how far he could trust her vigilance, he continued to check in from time to time. It irked her, he could tell. “What, you think I’ll forget?” she said, looking up from some kind of pencil puzzle.
She was in an armchair, backlit by fuzzy spring sunlight. She wasn’t only as snarky as a man, but dressed like one, too, in easy-fit canvas trousers and a fleece vest over a grey hoodie.
“You’re looking at your magazine there,” Leith pointed out. “Not Joseph here.”
“I’m looking at both,” she said. “People don’t just pop awake and start chatting. I’ll notice that he’s stirring when he’s stirring, if that’s okay with you.”
Leith felt like he’d just been peppered with rubber bullets. “Anyway, I was just passing by,” he lied. He stood by the bed, looking down at his greatest hope right now, the living witness. Joseph seemed unharmed. His clothes had been bagged as evidence. Maybe he wasn’t just asleep, but had sunken into a deep freeze to escape the horrors of what he’d seen and heard. Maybe the deep freeze
