to peruse later, if he still needed to — which he was beginning to doubt — and went back out to the porch.
He was holding off, but the call had to be made. The hardest part of his job was letting a client know of the death of a loved one. Dan’s task was to locate people who had gone missing, not guarantee them safe passage home, especially if they were already dead before he came looking. He also knew the possibility of death must have occurred to most, if not all of the clients who hired him. There had to be long, dark nights when the knock never came at the door, when the phone failed to ring or the letter didn’t fall into the post box. There had to be empty hours sitting and wondering: What if…? At some point you would have to sit back and ask yourself: Was my missing mother, father, sister, brother, husband, wife or child still out there? It had to occur to them.
There were plenty of times when Dan wondered how much of what his clients told him was the truth. All of it? Half? Or just the bare minimum they felt he needed to track someone down? What wasn’t he being told by the obese, balding man covered in tattoos
asking him to find his wife? What was the story behind the anorexic-looking mother wanting him to
locate her teenage daughter? Often the tales were notably devoid of personal details. Darryl Hillary’s severed ear, for instance. What did it signify? Had Hillary overheard something that cost him his life? Could the missing ear be a warning to future snitches to think twice before opening their mouths? What had he known? On the other hand, it might be the trademark of a gang slaying, a mutilation branding this as the work of a particular group anxious to leave their mark in more ways than one. Then again, the guy was hardly gang member material. His sister had said he was a pothead, but he was also a poet. That didn’t spell anger and violence, unless his poetry turned in the realm of gangster rappers.
Behind all this, Dan’s greatest fear was that he might inadvertently return someone to a scenario that would lead to further harm on the missing person’s part. What if the reason for running away was to escape abuse? What if restoring someone to his or her family led to suicide or murder? What if, what if, and again what if? These were the questions that haunted him.
Dan knew he wasn’t the only one with such thoughts weighing heavily on him. Similar doubts clouded the minds of some of the best police officers he’d met and worked with. They lived with the knowledge that locating a missing person in time could mean the difference between life and death. All too often the crucial hours slipped by because of negligence of one sort or another. Paperwork not done in time, messages not forwarded, subtler clues overlooked in favour of more obvious ones that led nowhere. Sometimes an outdated photograph meant a face wouldn’t be recognized immediately. Or it might be the neighbour not questioned soon enough to prevent a twelve-year-old from being suffocated and stuffed into a green garbage bag inside a refrigerator in a rooming house on the street where she’d vanished a week earlier. It was the stuff of nightmares come alive: lions prowling in the streets, tanks rolling down hills into your village. There was always a fear that the one thing overlooked, the simplest effort not made, or the question left unasked meant someone would die or that a killer would escape. That was not far off the truth.
He’d talked to such cops. “There is no such thing as closure,” they’d told him. “You can dehumanize things on the surface, but not deep down. You want to cut off the feelings, but you can’t.” They talked of vics and perps, not real people. They obsessed over physical details and tried to forget the names and faces, but their own faces marked them as haunted. Dan saw it. “You have to detach yourself,” they told him. “You have to look at things objectively.” But not one ever told him they’d been successful at it.
These bustling, over-exuberant tough guys and gals were all live-wired inside. Scarred by what they’d seen, their emotions caught in a precarious tightrope over an abyss, they walked and sometimes they fell. Like Constable Brian Lawrie, who left the force ten days after pulling the body of Sharin’ Keenan Morningstar from the refrigerator of a rooming house in the Annex. For him it was “one crime scene too many,” after being struck by how shiny her hair was when he found her stuffed in that garbage bag. Or his partner, Detective Mike Pedley, who followed the trail of her killer for years, always feeling himself just one step behind until he threw himself under the wheels of a subway train at Rosedale Station on an otherwise bright, upbeat sunny day.
Dan knew the men and women who worked on child murder cases were a breed apart, to use a cliché still deserved in many ways. “It’s the living you have to worry about, not the dead,” they said, if only to convince themselves. They referred to human remains as “trash” in an effort to make it less hurtful. “No offence intended to the deceased,” they said. “We just can’t take it personally.” Dan understood. It was the language they used, but it was slight as far as armour went. He thought about the boy he’d been, the one who grew up tortured because he didn’t know what to feel on hearing of his own mother’s death, hating himself because at four he’d been calculating the advantages he might gain in sympathy from others rather than feeling sorry for her. There was always that particular brand of torture.
Dan’s other great fear was of making the opposite kind of mistake. Of declaring the wrong person dead or, worse, speaking too soon and declaring the wrong person still alive. His gut instinct told him he’d found Darryl Hillary rather than some other unfortunate as he stared up at the body hanging from a meat hook, but logic told him not to jump to conclusions. In this case it might simply mean delaying the delivery of bad news another day, if bad news it turned out to be. One more day for Darryl Hillary’s sister to live in hope. Was that such a bad thing? Sometimes not seeing was believing. Often, the relatives of victims preferred not to learn the truth, to go on believing their loved one was still in the land of the living even when all the evidence, forensic and otherwise, told a different story.
He took a last sip of coffee and looked down at his phone, his thumb rolling through the listings till he found the number for Darlene Hillary.
She picked up on the first ring.
“Ms. Hillary?”
“Darlene, yes.”
“It’s Dan Sharp.”
He heard a sharp intake of breath. “You found Darryl?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m calling.”
The voice turned hard. “What does that mean?”
“It means the man I found hasn’t been identified yet.”
“I don’t understand. Oh, you mean he’s ...”
Dan felt the weariness overtake him. “A body has been found, but no identification has been made.”
“He’s dead then.”
The voice sounded like a sack of wet cement hitting the ground. Dan sensed the instinctive clenching, the withdrawal that occurred when the news was bad. She was remarkably contained.
“I prefer not to jump to conclusions. We don’t know for sure, so there’s still reason to hope.” He paused to let that sink in. “I was wondering if you would know the name of Darryl’s dentist. I’d like to get his dental records to see if we can rule out the possibility that it is your brother.”
There was a hesitation. “I’m sorry, I can’t think straight. You want to know Darryl’s dentist’s name?”
“Yes, if you know it.”
“I don’t think he had one. Not in Toronto.”
A total recluse, Dan thought.
“What
