LITMIR.BIZ

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who had taught Trick how to use a computer. Within the hour they were seated side by side as Trick watched Evan work. The young man was tall and skinny with greasy brown hair and a bad case of acne. In minutes, his grubby fingers flying over the keyboard, Evan had determined that Mahmoud Khan was a client of The Clifton Group, whose offices could be found in strip malls all across North America, and that he was hundreds of thousands of dollars in the red. He had invested heavily in a condominium complex in British Columbia that had been condemned because of soil contamination, as well as in a number of new Canadian stocks that had stumbled out of the starting gate and never recovered. Among his assets, Khan listed his farm, Dot Com Acres, its buildings, machinery, and livestock, and his Internet business, whose fortunes, according to the graph Evan accessed, were on the wrong side of the mountain.

      Trick was propelling himself past Wheeler’s desk towards the elevator when she said, “I just phoned Fingerprinting to find out when we’ll get the lab report on the crowbar, and Wicary said, ‘What crowbar?’”

      Trick’s heart almost stopped. He thought for a moment. “It must still be in his van.”

      A phone call was made to the hospital. A nurse was sent to Young’s room to ask him where he had parked his minivan when he drove himself to Emergency. When she came back to the phone, she said that Young couldn’t remember.

      After several more phone calls and a short search, the minivan was discovered on a side street adjacent to East General Hospital. Two parking tickets were tucked under the passenger-side windshield. The crowbar in its plastic bag was found on the floor under the driver’s seat.

      Young still looked like a truck had hit him: his incision was covered by a large white bandage freckled with bloodstains; his navel was stapled shut and protected by a dark red crust of scab; an intravenous needle lay against his arm like a poison dart; the plastic tube ran from his nose to a small wheeled machine called a GOMCO—about the size and shape of a pull-around vacuum—on the floor beside his bed; and his eyes were vacant, the bags beneath them dark and heavy.

      “Hi, Daddy,” Debi said.

      Young’s eyes flickered and focused, and he became aware that his daughter was standing at the foot of the bed. His eyes moved to another shape beside her, and there was his grandson, his jaw hanging, his eyes wide with horror.

      “How are you feeling?” Debi asked, her voice shaking.

      Young understood that he had been asked a question and was expected to answer it. He tried to think of what to say. He licked his dry lips with his tongue, but all that came out when he tried to speak was a sound like the one the old Vauxhall he had owned as a teenager used to make when he turned the key but the battery was dead.

      He opened his eyes again and slowly focused. Jamal had vanished behind his mother; his arms were wrapped around her legs.

      Wheeler had all the reports assembled on the desk in front of her. She began to read through them.

      Trick thought Stirling Smith-Gower an unlikely suspect. “Some of these do-gooders,” he wrote, “can be real screwy, even dangerous, but not this one. Even though I haven’t met him yet, the impression I get is he’s not one of these militant types who kill doctors to save babies. His secretary, Consuela Martin, seemed helpful, and she’s going to ask Mr. Smith-Gower to phone me as soon as he returns from South America. Although the timing of his trip—so soon after Shorty’s murder—looks suspicious, my guess is he’s clean.” On the other hand, he felt that the money-strapped Mahmoud Khan should be high on their list: “How the death of Shorty Rogers could benefit him I still don’t know, but he bears watching. I haven’t met him yet, either, but I know he’s dug himself in pretty deep financially, and my guess is he’s looking for some way to climb back out.” Of Percy Ball he wrote: “This guy is a piece of work, and my money says he has his hand in somewhere. I don’t expect he was the brains behind the operation, but he might have done the dirty work. He may be small of stature, but that doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.”

      She looked at Big Urmson’s report next. He described his visit to the racetrack and briefly outlined the theories people had offered to explain Shorty’s murder: money owed, the Russian Mafia, divine retribution. He also made mention of someone called The Butcher.

      “The Butcher?” Wheeler said aloud.

      Big Urmson had written, “A young black groom with irrigated hair told me The Butcher whacks horses for a living.”

      The research Tony Barkas had done on Richard Ludlow was more conclusive: “Smart businessman,” Barkas wrote, “not so smart about sex life. But is he killer? No way, unless better motive than plain greed shows up. True, with Shorty out of inheritance picture, Ludlow might have easier time getting hands on Morley’s land, but Ludlow already stinking rich. Not smart enough to keep pants on, but way too smart, as his secretary said, to lose money or go to jail. Not enough motive to kill Shorty. What about Khan? What about Buckley (who might have killed him in order to sell Someday Prince)? What about old man himself? What about housekeeper?”

      Wheeler pursed her lips in thought. She didn’t regard Mr. Rogers as a legitimate suspect. Despite his dismissive attitude towards Shorty on the videotape, he hardly fit the profile of a killer. As far as Khan was concerned, Wheeler took him very seriously, although Trick’s research suggested that Khan did not have the funds to get himself out of debt, let alone buy Mr. Rogers’ property. Doug Buckley certainly had motive, as Barkas mentioned, but he also had $8 million. Unlikely. Miss Sweet, on the other hand, was another story.

      On Thursday, Wheeler had put out a nation-wide inquiry on Myrtle Sweet, and when she returned from lunch twenty-four hours later there was a response from the Quebec Provincial Police on her desk. Sweet was Myrtle’s maiden name; she was thirty-five years old and had grown up in the fashionable Westmount section of Montreal, the daughter of an investment banker and his socialite wife; she had quit McGill University in 1981 to live with a student radical, a French Canadian; she was legally disowned by her parents a year later; after two years of living on a commune in Rivière du Loup, she gave up a baby girl for adoption and acquired a restraining order, citing physical and psychological abuse, against her boyfriend; she was married briefly to a chartered accountant named Raymond Leclerc of Valleyfield, Quebec; since the dissolution of her marriage, she had been arrested twice for fraud and once for tax evasion, using the aliases Marcelle Sauvage, Marguerite Savory, and Monique St. Louis; she had served a total of four years and three months in federal penitentiaries, satisfied the conditions of her parole in November of 1993, and disappeared not only from the province of Quebec but also, so far as anyone knew, from the face of the earth.

      In her summary of the reports, Wheeler wrote, “Best bets: Myrtle Sweet, Percy Ball, Mahmoud Khan. Continue to check out Doug Buckley, Richard Ludlow, Stirling Smith-Gower, Summer Caldwell; follow up on Ronald Outhouse, Trinidad Grant. Find out more about Favors Bros. & The Butcher. Need to see Mr. Rogers’ will. Need results of lab test on crowbar.”

       Saturday, June 17

      Young was becoming familiar with the various nurses who tended to him—not by name, but by action. The day nurses were talkative and laughed a lot and moved through his room like whirlwinds. The night nurses were silent and humourless and slow to respond when he rang for them. In the daytime the ward was a noisy, busy place, but at night it was like a museum after dark, with just the thin sound of the radio at the nurses’ station to suggest that anyone except Young was there. Young felt like a mummy, unable to move or speak. He couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds and rarely turned on the television Debi had rented for him. Mostly, he just lay on his side in bed with his eyes closed, conscious of the tube through his nose and the irritation it was causing at the back of his throat. He hardly thought about anything at all, and he wasn’t aware of the passage of time. One night he was startled when he heard a nurse shriek and then in an angry voice say, “I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own home, Mr. Christiani, but that sort of behaviour will not be tolerated here!”

      One of the night nurses was especially nasty. She was a blonde woman

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