LITMIR.BIZ

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complete their job, Green entered a short note on his own disk. Sullivan watched him in silence, and Green was grateful he made no comment. He needed no reminder how fragile a limb he was climbing out on. He looked up at the remaining detectives.

      “Next, we need to keep track of Weiss while we get all these pieces in place. Wallington and Connors, I want you to locate him and keep him in your sights at all times. And whatever you do, don’t tip him off till we’re ready to bring the bastard in.”

      After the two had left, Green looked across at Gibbs, who was now alone with Sullivan in the room. Gibbs was looking at him expectantly.

      “What’s the news on Sue?” Green asked.

      “The nurses say she’s the same. But I think she knows I’m there. I’m sure she squeezed my hand.” Gibbs flushed and shifted his lanky frame restlessly. “What’s my assignment, sir?” Gibbs looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. In his time off, he’d kept a vigil at Peters’ bedside, never giving up hope that she’d open her eyes. Green knew he should send the young man home to bed, but he also knew Gibbs needed to be here, fighting on Peters’ behalf. Green told him about his fruitless conversation with Ian MacDonald’s mother. “After you send the OPP Weiss’s photo, I want you back on the computer finding out the name and location of every member of Blakeley’s sweep team. Soldiers, medics and police. We need to confirm the connection between Weiss and MacDonald, and if possible find out what the hell happened over there.”

      * * *

      Results began to pour in very fast. First to report in were Charbonneau and Leblanc, so excited with their success that they phoned in from their car outside Hassim Mohammed’s house.

      “He nailed him, sir!” Leblanc exclaimed. “Took a good long look at each one, hesitated only a few seconds, and picked out Weiss.”

      “Even with the sunglasses?”

      “Even so. It was the wide forehead and the cheekbones, he said.”

      Green felt a peculiar surge of emotion. Part triumph that they were closing in on the culprit, part outrage that he was proving to be one of their own. He realized that he’d been hoping against hope that Weiss would be exonerated, and that it would prove to be just one of those crazy coincidences that plague detective work from time to time. But there was no imaginable reason why Weiss would be inquiring about Twiggy unless he was somehow connected to the case. Moreover, Weiss was the only one of their suspects who would have known that Twiggy was a potential witness to the murder, because he had seen her at the scene that morning, giving her statement to the police.

      “What did you do with her, you bastard?” Green asked himself after he’d thanked the detectives. Twiggy had apparently dropped off the face of the earth. The uniformed patrols had turned up no sign of her, and the questioning of street people at her favourite haunts had yielded nothing. Among her usual hangouts, the only place she could have gone without anyone seeing her was the art gallery, because no one had dared return there since the murder. It was the one place she would have gone to wait for Green. It was also the one place, however, where Weiss would have known to look for her.

      Green cursed the twist of fate that had intervened to prevent him from meeting her. If he’d gone there Friday at sunset as she’d asked, she would be safe today. On Friday Weiss was in Petawawa, his whereabouts accounted for until well into the night. Therefore, if he’d snatched her, he had not done so until some time Saturday morning. When the bastard had called in sick and was supposedly at home recovering from his trauma.

      The trauma of setting up his partner to be killed.

      The call from the Petawawa OPP came in fast on the heels of Leblanc’s call. The convenience store owner remembered Weiss coming in to ask questions about a woman, whom the store owner claimed he never saw, then using the payphone on his way out. Asked about Weiss’s demeanour, the store owner said he seemed distracted, and he’d glanced out the window several times during the interview. The phone call was brief, no more than two minutes, after which he had headed next door to the pizza restaurant.

      To his credit, the OPP investigator had pressed for further details about the call. Had Weiss known the number by heart, or had he looked it up? If so, in what? The store owner recalled that he’d consulted a piece of paper from his breast pocket, which was hardly surprising, Green thought, since it was a private cell number not found in any book. Had Weiss made more than one call? No, the owner assured him. A two-minute call, tops, and he’d gone on his way.

      Two minutes was plenty of time to tip someone off and set the assault in motion. Green still had that nagging suspicion that Weiss was merely a bit player, a conduit whose strings were being pulled by the real villain in the case. Who? And why was Weiss cooperating? What did the killer have on him that he could coerce an otherwise dedicated officer to betray his oath of service and the very colleagues he worked with?

      In less than an hour, Wallington and Connors phoned in to report on their surveillance efforts at Weiss’s home. Green already feared what they were going to say. The curtains were drawn, the doors were locked, and the pick-up truck registered in his name was missing from the drive. Weiss was not there.

      Of course he’s not, thought Green in frustration, because he’s gone into hiding somewhere. The question was whether he had Twiggy with him, or whether her body had already been dumped.

      “We’ve checked with the neighbours on all sides, and no one has seen him since early Friday morning,” Connors said. “One of the neighbours phoned his home and his cellphone at our request and got no answer.”

      “What about mail in the mailbox?”

      “It was empty, sir.”

      So either he received none on Friday, or he picked it up sometime after returning from the hospital Friday night, Green thought. Had he received orders to snatch Twiggy at that time, or had he been trying to find her since Thursday and had struck it lucky at the art gallery on Saturday morning because she’d still been waiting for Green?

      Stop going there, he chided himself. It serves nothing but to cloud your objectivity, which is already clouded enough.

      “Do you want us to set up a stake-out, sir?”

      Wallington’s question stopped his spiralling thoughts. Weiss had to be found, even if they had to look under every rock. “Yes. Get that neighbour’s cooperation to do surveillance on the QT from his place, and interview all the neighbours again to see if any of them know where he might go to get away from things. Relatives, a fishing lodge, a cottage...anything like that. Also work up a list of known associates. I’ll put some guys on that from this end as well.”

      “And if Weiss comes back?”

      Green thought about that for less than five seconds. Weiss had proved too elusive to risk losing him all over again, along with all chance of finding Twiggy and catching the other players in the game. “Apprehend the bastard and bring him in.”

      “On what charges?”

      “I’ll be working on that.”

      After he hung up, Green sat at his desk a moment, pondering that very question. He was about to arrest a fellow police officer and bring him in. All hell would break loose at that moment, from the police chief and Barbara Devine on down to the Police Association. He needed to know what was going on before he committed himself to an action that would be dissected for months, possibly years to come. He needed to know whether Weiss was the ruthless mastermind, or some small player caught in a web way beyond his control.

      Green had always prided himself on his intuition, and after twenty years in the trenches, he’d witnessed human distress in all its varied guises. Weiss’s behaviour at the hospital on Friday had been unusual in its extreme, but his distress had seemed real. Only a very gifted actor could summon up the pallor, the trembling and the tears on cue.

      Whatever part Weiss had played, however willingly he had played it, something was tearing him up inside. He was not the cold, calculating person Green had imagined the killer to be. He was conflicted, desperate and unpredictable, which

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