Do or Die. Barbara Fradkin

in the Shakespeare section of the university library. Not your average street punk’s stomping ground. That’s why dispatch screwed up so badly on the 911 call, by the way. Sergeant Jones says ‘Who the hell expects a stabbing in a library, for God’s sake! If the call had come from a parking lot in the Byward Market, we’d have sent four experienced teams down there right away. Not one poor rookie.’ And it’s not the kid’s fault, after all. There was a lot of blood around, and he just wanted to save the boy’s life. I’d have forgotten all the procedural shit myself fifteen years ago.”

      Sullivan pulled the Taurus to a halt behind a police van near the entrance to the library, and the two jumped out. A police officer was posted at the entrance to the library and another at the elevators. One elevator had been commandeered for use in the investigation, and the fourth floor button had been taped on the other elevators. Students gathered in whispering clumps, gawking curiously.

      Sullivan led Green into the elevator and punched four. “Looks great now, doesn’t it? Everything according to procedure, every ‘t’ crossed. The Ident team has cordoned off the entire fourth floor, and they’re probably still there.”

      The elevator door slid open, revealing yellow plastic tape across the exit. They logged in with the uniform on guard, and ducked under the tape. Ahead of them, half a dozen men were crawling around on the floor with magnifying glasses.

      “Yes, they’re still here.”

      “And we’ll probably be here till Christmas,” came a gravelly voice from behind a bookcase. An instant later the senior Identification Officer, Sergeant Lou Paquette, emerged around the corner, red-faced from crawling. “We haven’t found a damn thing yet.” He peeled off his latex glove and held out his hand to Green. “Glad to see you, Mike.”

      “You’ve got nothing?” Green echoed in dismay.

      “Oh, we’ve got tons of shit. Fingerprints, hair, fibres, bloodstains. There’s blood all over the place. The witnesses tracked it around, the paramedics tracked it around. The only thing I can’t tell is if the killer tracked it around. And this is a public place. There could be fingerprints and fibres from half the city of Ottawa here. The half that doesn’t have prints on file downtown.” Paquette grinned at his own attempt at humour. His mustache quivered. “I’ve sent a guy to collect the shoes from every fireman and paramedic who was at the scene. That’ll be fun.”

      Green took out his notebook. “Can you tell us anything?”

      Paquette sighed and grew sober. “As far as I can tell, there was no struggle. No books were pulled down, nothing kicked out of place. It’s a narrow space. It would be hard to fight without knocking the bookshelves.”

      “And the young woman who found the victim heard no sound of an argument, no screams,” Sullivan added. “Libraries are pretty quiet. She would have heard a violent scuffle.”

      “Did she see anything unusual that evening? Anyone suspicious or out of place?”

      “Nothing that she remembered, but she was pretty shaken up. She got covered in blood, and all she could think about was getting cleaned up. After the preliminaries, I let her go home.”

      Green nodded. “We’ll get to her later.”

      They had walked to the far end of the library along the path Ident had laid out and now stood in front of the large, browning pool of blood where the body had been.

      “The victim was stabbed once in the abdomen,” Sullivan said. “According to the emergency room surgeon, the weapon pierced the stomach and lacerated the liver, nicking an artery as it went by. It sounds like a horizontal thrust directly forward, made by a knife held at waist level.”

      “I suppose nobody took photographs of the wound before they sutured it all up?”

      Sullivan grinned. “You got it.”

      Green looked up from his notes with a snort. “Jesus. Jules said the case needed me, but what it really needs is a goddamn miracle.”

       *

      The two detectives stayed at the scene another fifteen minutes reviewing the meagre forensic harvest. No murder weapon, no signs of disturbance or misplaced property, hundreds of latent fingerprints which would take days to analyze and could not be tied definitively to the murder anyway. Blood had been tracked up and down the aisle leading to the elevator as well as the two aisles on either side, but the traces were consistent with bloodstained shoes rather than with drops of falling blood. The only spilt blood was the large pool where the body had been and a fine spray of arterial blood on the bookshelf nearby.

      “The perpetrator would have got blood on himself, without a doubt,” Paquette said. “On his hand and sleeve, probably also on his shirt, pants and shoes. The body fell forward. The perpetrator would have had trouble jumping out of the way in time, especially since he was trying to pull out his knife. Some of these bloody footprints may be his, once I eliminate all the other assholes who were on the scene.”

      Green sketched the scene, noting the rows of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves which effectively blocked any overview of the area. Jonathan Blair’s killer had trapped him in a remote corner, where the chances of anyone witnessing the crime were even fewer. By luck or design?

      Green glanced at his watch. “Brian, I want to meet with the mother before she calls the Chief again, and I need you to tell me what else you’ve got. Come on, I’ll buy you a coffee. I missed having mine this morning.”

      Seated over two mugs of scalding coffee at Harvey’s, Green mustered a smile for his weary colleague. There was no one he respected more. The two had been friends since they started together on the streets twenty years earlier, and although Green had risen further through the ranks, placing strain on the friendship in sensitive moments, he secretly considered Sullivan the better cop. The Deputy Chief was right. He, Green, was only good at detective work. Sullivan was good at everything, paperwork and organization as well as handling people and crises. And in the middle of a case, you couldn’t ask for a more careful, thorough investigator.

      “How did you finally identify him, by the way? You didn’t get that far in your depressing tale of professional incompetence.”

      “His mother called in, finally. Actually, her personal assistant called in, guy by the name of Peter Weiss. Apparently the victim was the quiet type, no wild parties, no late nights, a bookworm. Never stayed out all night. Maybe he’d have one drink with friends after the library closed, but he was usually home by midnight. Certainly by two. So when his mother woke up at five in the morning—she’s some kind of early morning freak—and saw he never came home, she heard on the early morning radio about a stabbing in the library, and she got worried. So Weiss called the station. By then Blair was dead. He died at three fifty-six a.m. without regaining consciousness. When the assistant called I was just trying to wake MacPhail and get him down to the hospital to take over the body. I let him have all the beauty sleep I could spare, but I didn’t want the ordinary doctors screwing up the evidence any more than it already had been.”

      Sullivan took a sip of coffee and cradled his chin in his massive hand. Some life suffused his reddened eyes as he grinned. “That old Scot is a bugger to wake up. I always have to hold the phone two feet from my ear when I call at night. But he came through for us. He got to the hospital in half an hour, reeking of whiskey but at full steam. He ranted up and down about the suturing, but after he’d examined the body and looked at the medical records, he came out with his theory. Sharp, smooth-edged knife, at least six-inch blade, he guessed about an inch to an inch and a half wide. He’ll know more after the autopsy. One smooth horizontal stroke in and out.”

      Green whistled. “Neat job.”

      “Yup. And into the middle of all this, without any warning, just as MacPhail is loading the body bag into the elevator to go down to the morgue, along comes the little rookie again wanting us to unbag the body so mummy’s assistant can have a look.”

      “In the middle of the hospital hallway?”

      Sullivan laughed. “That was my reaction.