Stray Bullets (6 page)

Kennicott knew Greene assumed they’d all been working behind the counter when the shooting happened and probably didn’t have much valuable evidence to give, so he was giving him the assignment more for the experience than anything else.

Goes to show, you never know what you’ll find. He’d spent the night following up on what he’d learned and was glad was when Greene finally called.

“Any luck with the employees?” he asked.

“Yes. There’s more to the story than we realized,” Kennicott said.

“Okay, come on over. You still in uniform?”

“No, I changed.”

“Good. The press are crawling all over this place, looking for coppers in police cars. Just walk down, and they probably won’t notice.”

It was cold out, even though the sun was coming up, but Kennicott was glad to be outside. The fresh air felt good. He counted six television trucks parked across the street from the doughnut shop, nose to nose, like cattle at a trough. Technicians were outside, setting up their cameras and lights.

Overnight a spontaneous shrine of cut flowers and cards of condolence, many of them clearly handmade by children, had burgeoned on the sidewalk and a tentlike police canopy had been erected to protect them from the elements.

Greene must have been watching for him, because when Kennicott approached the big police mobile unit, he walked outside.

“Let’s get out of here before the press sees us.” He blew warm air into his bare hands.

“I brought you a hot tea, extra-large,” Kennicott said. He knew Greene didn’t drink coffee.

“Thanks,” Greene said, cradling the paper cup. “You hungry?”

“Sure, but—”

“If we’re not going to sleep we need to eat,” Greene said. “We’ll walk and talk. How did you do with the employees?”

“Four staff were working when this happened. Three were serving customers and didn’t see anything. Fourth was a baker in back named Jose Sanchez. He didn’t stick around.”

Greene stopped in his tracks. “He left?”

“Gone.” Kennicott had been a cop long enough to know that it was highly unusual for people to not stay to help the police when something horrible like this happened. Especially employees.

“Any idea where he went?”

Kennicott shook his head. “No. I interviewed the owners of the Tim Hortons, a Chinese couple named Yuen. All their employment files were in the office. I got Detective Ho to retrieve them for me. This Jose Sanchez only gave one phone number. A cell.”

“And?”

“Line’s out of service. One of those cheap throwaway phones like all the drug dealers use. He could have bought it anywhere. Impossible to trace.”

“Address?” Green started walking again, east from the hospital down an alley by a parking lot.

“He gave the Waverley Hotel.”

“Great.” The Waverley was a flophouse that rented rooms out weekly, for cash. “Let me guess, the hotel has no record of a ‘Jose Sanchez.’”

“None.”

“Does Tim Hortons pay his salary into his bank account?”

“I asked that. He just takes a check.”

“Which he cashes at some money mart. Could be anywhere. Jose Sanchez. Sounds like John Doe to me.”

“He’s probably illegal,” Kennicott said.

“And wants nothing to do with the cops. Top priority, we have to find him. You get a description?”

“Thin, dark hair, about five-seven. According to his file he’s twenty-five years old. Everyone mentioned he had a small birthmark beside his left eye, about the size of a thumbnail.”

“Any of them know him personally?”

“No. They said he was friendly with a server who worked there named Suzanne Howett. Used to go out back and smoke with her all the time.”

They headed south on McCaul Street. The air filled with the smell of baking bread. Kennicott felt his stomach churn. An involuntary reflex.

“Where is she?” Greene asked.

“Her shift had ended. She has a boyfriend named Jet. Sounds as if he’s the real possessive type. Drives her to work and picks her up every shift, here and at her other job she’s got at a gas station. Owns an old Cadillac. One of the staff saw her run across the parking lot to him before the shooting. The car took off as soon as the shots ended.”

“You get in touch with her?” Greene asked.

“I checked her out on the police computer first. Twenty-two years old, doesn’t have a record, but a few years ago she was charged as an accomplice in a late-night robbery. Allegation was she was the getaway driver. The two young guys who went with her pled guilty, and the charge against her was dropped.”

They walked by a long brick building, where the words “Silverstein’s Bakery” were written in flowing red script over the first-floor windows. Greene turned at a beat-up orange door with a sign that said A
UTHORIZED
P
ERSONNEL
O
NLY
and yanked it open.

“Where we going?” Kennicott asked.

“I thought you were hungry,” Greene said.

Inside, they descended a few concrete steps and Greene directed Kennicott to the baking floor, where loaves of bread were cooling on a huge, circular metal rack. The smell of yeast filled his nostrils. Out of the wind, the air was luxuriously warm.

A tall, balding man looked up from his clipboard and smiled when he saw Greene. “Ari, what can I get you?”

“Brian, this is Officer Daniel Kennicott,” Greene said.

“You have to work with this guy?” Brian asked, shaking Kennicott’s hand.

Kennicott smiled. “Sometimes.”

“We’re on the Tim Hortons shooting around the corner,” Greene said.

“Un-fucking-believable,” Brian said. He hauled up a handful of bagels from a deep plastic bin and tossed them into a paper bag. “City’s going to rat shit. Take these for the crew, they’re hot.”

Greene gave him a five-dollar bill.

Brian shook his head, took the bill, and rang up five dollars on the old brown cash register by the wall. Underneath a handwritten sign that said C
ASH
O
NLY
. He looked at Kennicott. “Only known this guy
since we were on the basketball team together in high school. Do you think he’ll let me give him a stupid bagel?”

Outside in the wind, they both ate. The bagels let off steam in the cold air.

“Tell me more about this robbery,” Greene said. “You have the names of the two co-accused.”

Kennicott swallowed down a chunk of fresh dough. “Happened at a pharmacy late at night. I saw the press release you put out a few hours ago. Larkin St. Clair was one of them. The other was named Dewey Booth.”

Greene let out a loud whistle. “Booth was almost certainly the other guy there last night, but I’m not releasing his name yet. What did the report have on the getaway car?”

“An old Cadillac. There was a license number. It’s registered to a James Eric Trapper.”

“Jet,” Greene said.

“Pardon me?”

“His first initials, they spell Jet.”

“I didn’t see that.” Damn, Kennicott thought. “He’s got a minor record. Mostly fencing stolen goods. One possession-of-a-gun charge. Lives in an apartment in the Beaches with a woman named Rosie Lazar. She had a baby five months ago and he’s on the birth certificate as the father.”

“Jet’s a busy fellow,” Greene said. “This means Larkin and Dewey knew Suzanne.”

“Especially Dewey. I contacted Kingston Pen, where he spent the last three years, and dragged the records guy out of bed. She visited Mr. Dewey Booth for the first year and a half he was there, then stopped.”

Kingston Penitentiary was the oldest and nastiest jail in the country. Kennicott had gone there often to visit clients when he was a lawyer.

“That last visit Dewey beat her up real bad,” Kennicott said. “She snuck in some cigarettes for him and apparently he burned the baby finger on her left hand with it.”

“He sounds like a lovely young man,” Greene said, shaking his head. “So she takes up with Jet. Same old story. Guy goes to prison and some other guy moves in on his girlfriend. First guy is pissed, big-time.”

“It’s even worse. Jet isn’t just some guy. The three of them grew up together on Pelee Island, down in Lake Erie.”

They turned onto Elm Street. The TV hosts were getting ready for
their live reports at the top of the hour. The men were having their makeup applied, the women were putting on lipstick.

“That would make Dewey even angrier,” Greene said. “You should be able to get Suzanne’s phone and cell number from the Tim Hortons people. Set up a tap on it.”

“I’ve done it,” Kennicott said.

“Anything useful yet?”

“No. Just a lot of ‘OMG I can’t believe this happened’ to a girl who sounds like her best friend.”

“Good work,” Greene said.

In the five years he’d known Greene, Kennicott could count on one hand the number of times he’d given him a compliment. There was a complicated history between them. They’d met the day after Kennicott’s older brother, Michael, was murdered. Greene was the officer in charge of the case and after a year, when it looked to be going nowhere, Kennicott quit his promising legal career to become a cop and help solve the crime. Gradually, Greene had become his unofficial mentor, but the unsolved homicide hung heavy between them.

Officer Ho was waiting for them across the street from the Tim Hortons. Greene gave him a bagel.

“My parents were from Shanghai,” he said. “They used to buy bagels on a string and put them over their bicycle handlebars,” he said.

“Take the whole bag for everyone out here,” Greene said.

“Thanks.”

“The little boy didn’t make it,” Greene said.

“I heard.”

“What have you got?”

Ho had hand-drawn a diagram of the lot. A large rectangle divided into four quadrants with the doughnut shop in the back-left quarter and the high-rise buildings on the sides. Exactly as it looked from their vantage point.

“We got four bullet hits. First mark is here.” He pointed to a spot on the walkway around the corner from the front door, on the parking lot side. “Direction of the shot is almost straight down, fired from close range.”

“How can you tell?” Greene asked.

“The dimensions. It’s wider at the top and tapers down. Plus there are burn marks right on the cement. I’ve sent scrapings off to be analyzed.”

“Second bullet?”

Ho pointed to the high-rise building on the side of the lot farthest from the doughnut shop. “There’s an indent about twenty feet up. Bullet just missed a window. Angle is on a rise, about sixty degrees.”

“Third?” Greene asked.

“The side wall of the Tim’s. Behind the spot where that first bullet went into the walkway. This one is also at an angle, rising up.”

“And the boy took the last one,” Greene said.

Ho looked down at his drawing. “The little boy was almost at the front door.”

“Find any shells for comparison?”

Kennicott knew that smart shooters had learned to pick up their shell casings, so they couldn’t be traced back to a specific weapon.

“Only recovered one but it was crushed,” Ho said.

This was another trick criminals used. Smash the shell and they were no good for a comparison with a gun.

“After the autopsy we’ll have the bullet in his brain,” Ho said.

There was a grim irony here. Because the boy had died they’d be able to recover the shell and have a much better chance of proving their case. But why would a shooter grab some of his shells and crush others? Unless there was more than one shooter.

“Where was the crushed shell?” Kennicott asked.

Ho pointed to the corner of the lot, farthest from the doughnut shop. “Down there.”

“That’s where the witnesses put Jet when he picked up Suzanne in his old Cadillac,” Greene said.

“Look at this.” Ho placed a ruler on his sketch. “If you draw a line from where the shell casing was found to the spot in the wall of the Tim Hortons where the bullet hit, it’s straight.”

The implication of all this was clear. There’d been one shooter beside the doughnut shop and a second one down at the end of the lot.

Before anyone could say anything Greene’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out and looked at it before answering. “Excuse me, this is headquarters,” he said.

Kennicott and Ho exchanged glances.

“Greene,” he said into his phone. “What have you got? When? Just now. Good. We’ll be there in ten minutes. Put him in the video room on the third floor. And whatever you do, don’t let him wash his hands.”

He hung up and looked Kennicott right in the eye. “Larkin St. Clair just walked into police headquarters.”

Ralph Armitage was smiling so hard his cheeks hurt. This had happened every morning for the last nine years that he’d awakened next to his wife, Penny Wolchester. She was without a doubt the most beautiful woman he’d ever dated, and he had gone out with plenty of attractive women. That all came to an end on his thirty-fifth birthday, when his four older sisters took him out for dinner and, as they now joked, read him the “Ralphie, it’s time to grow up” riot act.

He slid over to the side of their new, eight-thousand-dollar, horsehair-filled organic mattress and silently swung his legs onto the floor. Something stirred behind him, and a moment later he felt the light touch of a hand on his broad back.

“Best day ever,” Penny whispered. Her long fingers felt good on his skin.

“Best day ever,” he whispered back.

Since their fairy-tale wedding—on a crystal-clear evening in late June, with five hundred people assembled on the back half of the Armitage family estate north of the city, the vast backyard where as a boy Ralph dammed streams, built forts, and found secret hiding places—they’d said the same words to each other every morning upon waking and every night before falling asleep.

Best day, best wife. As usual, everything was perfect in the life of Ralph “Hey, everyone calls me Ralphie” Armitage. His mother and his older sisters all said that he was born grinning and never stopped. He’d spent his summers at the same all-boys camp his father and grandfather had gone to and, like them, had worked his way up to head counselor. In so many ways his life had always been a boyish, endless summer.

Now he had the best job, as the new head Crown Attorney in the sprawling downtown Toronto office, presiding over forty-seven lawyers, the busiest prosecutors in the country. “Crime Central,” he called it, keeping his ever-present grin in place through the endless tales of drugs and violence and injury and death.