LITMIR.BIZ

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glimpsed a lanky figure on his knees beside the victim, his wild white mane of hair tumbling into his eyes. Green’s pulse quickened. Dr. Alexander MacPhail was the region’s senior forensic pathologist. What had prompted Gibbs to call in the big guns?

      Green took a quick breath to steel himself before heading over for a closer look. He loved the thrill of the hunt, but quailed at the gut-churning stench and gore of death. Images of splattered brains and amputated body parts crowded his subconscious, clamouring for memory whenever he approached another death. Three years behind a desk had not improved his defences either.

      To his relief, the victim looked almost peaceful curled upon her side on the cold stone bank. Her eyes were half shut,and she had no apparent marks on her. A working girl, Peters had concluded, but at first glance Green didn’t think so. She looked thin and sick, as if she’d taken a beating from life, but her clothing had been chosen for warmth rather than titillation, and her porcelain-white face had not a trace of make-up. Crow’s feet were beginning to tug at the corners of her eyes and her matted blonde hair was shot with grey.

      MacPhail was bent over her, inspecting her face with a powerful flashlight.

      Green crouched as close as he dared. “What can you tell me?”

      MacPhail cast him only the briefest glance of surprise.“This is an interesting one, laddie,” he announced in his customary Scottish boom. Green had never known the man to whisper, even in the presence of the most heart-wrenching death. MacPhail waved his beam. “See the colouring on this side of her face?”

      Green forced himself to study the woman’s face carefully.Where the frost had melted, beads of moisture clung to her lashes and to the down on her cheeks. But beneath the waxy pallor of death, he saw what MacPhail meant. Faint red blotches discoloured one side of her face.

      “She’s been moved some time after death,” he said.

      “Aye. Now the lass who found her..." MacPhail cocked a brow towards a group of people clustered at the base of the graffiti wall. In the middle sat a familiar figure with a mop of stringy grey hair and a paramedic’s blanket draped around her massive frame. Calling her a lass seemed a stretch. Nonetheless, MacPhail continued with no trace of irony.

      “She says she tripped on her last night in the dark.”

      “That would be enough to dislodge her, certainly.”Considering the weight differential, Green thought.

      “Aye.” The pathologist’s blue eyes twinkled briefly. “But not to roll her over. I’ll know more when I can check the lividity in the rest of the body. However, my considered opinion, based on having seen a few corpses in my day, is that she was dumped.”Green glanced at MacPhail sharply.

      The pathologist madeno attempt to suppress the broad smile that cracked his features. So that was why Bob Gibbs had called in the big guns. Sharp boy, Green thought with a twinge of pride. “So we’re talking what?” he said. “Murder?”

      “Or a simple cover-up. She could have OD’d, and her friends didn’t want the police snooping around their hang-out, so they brought her out here. Pretty isolated this time of year.”

      Green glanced around at the surroundings. MacPhail had a point. Lebreton Flats had boasted a colourful history of sex and wild times since the years when fur traders and lumbermen first ran their goods down the Ottawa River in the late 1700s. But in the past fifty years, the area, which sat virtually in the shadow of Parliament Hill and constituted some of the choicest urban real estate in the country, had gone to seed while politicians and bureaucrats bickered about what to do with it.

      During that time, street people and squatters had filtered in, bringing sex, drugs and booze to the decrepit shores of the abandoned aqueduct. Recently, though, construction had begun to clean up the Flats for fancy condos and museums,and now the Flats were crisscrossed with construction fencing.Heavy machinery sat idle amid piles of dirt, and in the middle sat the old stone pumphouse through which the aqueduct ran.But above the pumphouse, tucked in below an old wall and invisible from the street, a little pocket of trees still formed a natural hangout. In summers past, the area had been popular with transients and street artists, who had painted the wall with huge, colourful images. At this time of year, however,with the ice barely gone from the shoreline, the street trade would be nonexistent. Whoever brought the woman here had probably hoped she’d go undiscovered for days.

      “Can you give me a preliminary cause of death?”

      MacPhail shone his flashlight at the victim’s nose andmouth. Pinpoints of red dotted her eyelids and some water clung to her upper lip and the corners of her mouth.

      “Drowning?” Green ventured. MacPhail frowned as he probed the woman’s neck. His tone was distracted. “Possibly. I need to get her on the table to be sure. Paquette’s taking samples of the water to compare with her lungs, and I’ll need a thorough tox screen. From the looks of her, I’d say she hasn’t been putting too many healthy things into her body for the last while.”

      Green studied the woman’s clothing. Her long, narrow feet were encased in a pair of worn leather boots, and her faded jeans fit neatly over her thin hips, as if they’d been made forher. Only the jacket, a man’s khaki parka which hung down over her fingertips, looked out of place.

      “I guess she probably picked up that jacket from one of the missions. Or traded another one for it.”

      MacPhail was bagging the hands and he barely paused to glance at it. “That’s military issue for both men and women.”

      Green perked up. A lead. “Any idea what regiment?”

      MacPhail moved the hood aside. “No sign of a regimental insignia, but it’s standard army. Mind you, it’s known some years. It could have been passed around like a paper bag at a temperance rally, so it’s pretty cold as trails go.”

      “Still, it’s a trail.” Green turned to find Sue Peters at his elbow, clipboard in hand.

      “You want me to contact the military, sir? See if they have a soldier gone AWOL from CFB Ottawa?”

      “No.” Green scrambled for a safer assignment to occupy her. With only a few months of Major Crimes under her belt,Peters still had all the subtlety of a charging rhino, and Green shuddered at the thought of the military in her sights.Spotting Paquette, he gestured towards him. “As soon as Ident gets a good photo of the deceased, start showing it around on the streets, including the shelters, Byward Market and the Rideau Centre. Someone should have seen her.”

      “Do you want me to ask about pimps too, sir?”

      Green bit his tongue. Jeez, she was going to screw up even that. “Stick with the victim, Peters. Find someone who’s seen her, or knows who she’s been associating with.”

      “Who should I report to? I mean...are you running thecase?”

      Green hesitated. As he stood at the edge of the crime scene,breathing in the scent of excitement and the urgency of death,watching the ident officer combing the grounds and the pathologist circling the victim, he felt the old passion for the hunt. People suffered, people died, and all he’d ever wanted to do was to track down the tormenters and bring them to account. Nothing thrilled him as much as making the bad guys pay. But now, in the larger, amalgamated police service,he was a middle-management bureaucrat, trapped between the field officers who wrestled with flesh and blood suffering and the senior officers, whose main battlefield was the committee rooms and ledgers of Elgin Street Headquarters.He’d stopped off here because he couldn’t resist the call of the field, but he belonged, even at this moment, in Barbara Devine’s office.

      Yet there were elements in the case that could use an inspector’s touch. He dredged up his best bureaucratese. “Not directly. It’s Gibbs's case. He’ll keep me apprised.”

      MacPhail straightened as he watched the redhead bound eagerly towards the road. Merriment shone in his eyes. “Not directly? You’ll be getting your nose indirectly in, then?” Green laughed. “Well, inquiries with the military can be delicate. Those army guys love their ranks.”

      *

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