now.”
He brushed past Dan and headed back to the building. Dan followed.
“How can I find out if this is my guy or not?”
Officer Bryson halted. “Mr. Sharp, sir, you need to leave the site immediately.”
“Sure, but who can I talk to once the identification is made?”
Bryson gave him a dismissive stare. “If you don’t leave now, I’ll have to charge you with trespassing. Or I could take you down to the station for a formal briefing. Do you want that, Mr. Sharp?”
“No.”
The officer softened a bit. “There’s no identification on the body. It could take a while. Maybe if you brought some dental records for your guy to the coroner’s office tomorrow, you might get an answer.”
He turned and entered the slaughterhouse. Dan didn’t wait for a second invitation to leave.
Two
The Vanishing Point
It was nearly three o’clock by the time Dan got back in his car. He’d been at the slaughterhouse almost two hours, most of that time with the officers. Now, heading east along St. Clair Avenue, he reviewed the facts in his mind. Three days earlier, he received a call from a woman claiming her brother had been missing since the previous afternoon. Was that too soon to declare him missing officially? No, Dan said. Not if she felt his disappearance was suspicious or unusual. In which case it was better to act sooner than later.
The woman, Darlene Hillary, had been frantic. Dan waited till she settled down before pressing her. Why did she think his disappearance was suspicious? That was easy: her brother, Darryl, almost never left the house and when he did he always left a note. Agoraphobe, Dan concluded. That morning, Darlene continued, when she was on her way to work, her brother hadn’t said anything about going out. When she returned, he was gone. Could he be anywhere else? No, not that she could think of. Was it possible he got delayed somewhere and found himself unable to get in touch? That, too, was unlikely, she said. Nor had he taken any personal belongings, leaving out the possibility of an extended trip.
The answers were not encouraging. Worse, Darlene said her brother had received a threatening note and several disturbing anonymous calls over the past few months. He hadn’t wanted to talk about them, but she wheedled it out of him when he began acting strangely, obsessing over locking doors and keeping the windows closed and the curtains drawn at all times. Clearly he believed the threats were real, though he hadn’t told his sister what they were about. Dan listened with careful gravity. If someone was serious enough to make threats, then whoever it was might be serious enough to carry them out, though a final verdict was premature.
Almost all of Dan’s questions hit dead ends. Darryl hadn’t held a job in five years and therefore had no work colleagues, past or present, to question. He hadn’t fraternized with neighbours, frequented pool halls or movie houses, so there was no one to ask about the last time they’d seen him socially. His sister worked at an old age home and was often gone for the better part of the day or night, depending on her shift. As far as she knew, her brother spent most of his free time watching TV in his bedroom or outside in their backyard. That habit ended suddenly when the calls started. The one possible lead that held out hope for Dan, as slim as it might seem, was that Darlene’s brother was an occasional dope smoker. She’d admitted that after much hesitation, seeming to think it a grievous liability. “It’s not that unusual,” he reassured her.
Finding the drug dealers in any given neighbourhood was a shell game. Ask the right questions at the right time and you’d hit a mainline of information. The wrong questions asked of the wrong person on the wrong day, and you were almost guaranteed to see everybody’s heads disappear, like a beach full of crabs at low tide. Lots of holes, but nothing showing aboveground. Once they got spooked, they could stay that way for months. Nobody forced these small-time dealers to sell their wares. For most of them, it was part-time work you did on top of your regular job as an underpaid garage mechanic or counter clerk at a late-night donut shop. A little moolah to ease the pain of whatever life didn’t provide naturally. Selling crack to pay off the Mafia or to fund your own addiction was another matter, of course. There was often urgency there, but Dan doubted he was chasing that kind of animal.
“Darryl’s a gentle man,” his sister insisted.
A guitar player and a poet, as it turned out. In other words, the kind of guy who picked up a little weed in the neighbourhood then came home and smoked it in the solitude of his garage, with nobody the wiser. Only in this case it seemed he’d somehow got mixed up with the wrong crowd.
Darryl Hillary was beginning to sound a little weird. He was also one of the most reclusive, introverted young men in the city. According to his sister, almost no one knew of his existence. But even poets must have friends, Dan thought. And apparently an enemy or two, as well. Then again, weren’t writers and journalists the first to be silenced? An uncensored poet could be a dangerous thing indeed. But in that case, if the body turned out to be his, why cut off an ear? Why not a tongue instead?
Dan sent in the usual requests for background checks. Nothing arrived on Friday and everything slowed down by the weekend. It was now going on sixty hours since the call with Hillary’s sister. In that time, Dan had managed to find the local pusher, the one who supplied the neighbourhood weed. He repaired motors at a small appliance store. No glamour there. Clearly not a big-time dealer. The man was wary when Dan approached, no doubt worried about a bust. He loosened up when Dan flashed the picture and explained why he was looking for Darryl, while assuring him he wasn’t a cop. The man admitted to knowing Darryl — Dan was careful not to ask in what context — but sounded convincing when he said he hadn’t seen him in several months. Which likely meant that Hillary had scored big the last time they’d been in contact, though he wasn’t about to ask for details of the transaction or to wonder if he was keeping proper sales tax records. Dan left his card and a request to be in touch if Darryl contacted him.
Heading downtown now, he wondered if it was this contact that had netted the call from the fast food outlet earlier in the evening. Dan was even reasonably sure which diner it was — there was only one open late in that neighbourhood, at the corner of Lansdowne and St. Clair, not far from the former abattoir. If he drove past now it would still be open, though his anonymous caller would long since have wolfed down an order of fries and a burger and bolted.
He turned south and headed east on College Street, past Yonge and over to Church. Despite the hour, the hookers were still on their corners, long-legged and ever optimistic that Daddy Warbucks would be cruising in their direction any minute. Got the time? Your place or mine? It was more than two decades since Dan had seen anything from that side of the fence, but there was a period in his teenage years when he’d needed to support himself. He’d done that by standing on a downtown corner until he met the man who would take him away from all that, briefly, before getting onto the straight-and-somewhat-narrow in his early twenties after finding himself the father of a young boy.
At seventeen, however, Dan had been desperate to escape his claustrophobic, dysfunctional background and his abusive, barely communicative father. He’d left the old man to drink himself to death, a task Stuart Sharp had accomplished quickly and efficiently once he got down to the business at hand, one of the few successes in his otherwise un-noteworthy life. Dan’s mother’s early death due to pneumonia was something he preferred not to dwell on, if he could avoid it.
In fact, when he considered his beginnings, Dan felt he’d been lucky overall. Life had its surprising twists and turns, but somehow his had turned out all right, where other people’s hadn’t. He was never more aware of this than
