Mist Walker. Barbara Fradkin

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      “Yeah, he was walking fast. Usually he kind of slinks along, never looks at you, you know? This time it was like he knew where he was going. Plus he didn’t have that ugly dog with him.”

      “Did you see him return?”

      She shook her head. “But he did. I heard him later. Six locks make a lot of noise, and that time he wasn’t quiet about it.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “I mean he slammed the door and banged all the locks real quick.”

      “What time was this?”

      “I don’t know,” she whined, wiping her nose. “All these fucking questions. Six, maybe? “Much MegaHits” was on, so what time was that?”

      Unfortunately, the hectic pace of both Sharon’s and his lives left little room for television, but the music channel’s broadcast schedule would be easy enough to check, and if the show aired at six, the timing was interesting indeed. Six o’clock was close to dinner time. “Did you see or hear anyone else come just before or after him?”

      “Well, I don’t spy on him, you know. My TV was on, and my daughter was talking to me.”

      “Did you hear the dog bark?”

      Her pinched face cleared. “Fuck, yeah. A few minutes after the guy got home. Just about shook the walls down. Then it didn’t shut up for days!”

      And you didn’t bother to check why? Green thought but knew better than to ask. In Crystal’s world, it didn’t pay to be too curious. He held her gaze in an effort to keep her focussed. “Did you see anyone else hanging around outside or in the hallway?”

      She was edging back toward her own door, which she’d left open. “Look, that’s all I know. I mind my own business, take care of my daughter, and I figure what other people do—”

      “Are you talking about Matt Fraser or someone else you saw?”

      She scowled and stepped backwards through her doorway. “I didn’t see anyone. Not then.”

      He thought of the time span between Janice’s visit and his own, during which someone had apparently ransacked the place. “Some other time? Last night or this morning maybe?”

      “I was half asleep. I can’t swear to anything.”

      He pressed his advantage. “But you did see someone. A glimpse at least.”

      “A glimpse is no good in court, I know, and I don’t need the aggravation. I gotta go. That’s all I can say. Maybe someone else saw more.” She swung her door shut and left him standing on her doorstep, staring at the peeling paint. But there was no sound of footsteps from within, and he sensed that she was watching him through the peephole. Merely curious, or something more?

      He jotted down the interview, making a note to catch her again when she was more mellow. Crystal’s “glimpse” might be the only solid lead he found. When he returned to Matt Fraser’s apartment, it smelled none the sweeter for the fifteen minutes of fresh air. Now he began to snoop in earnest. In the bedroom he found a sparsely filled closet of bulky, styleless clothes, among them a navy suit and a handful of skinny polyester neckties, but no grey suit. The dresser contained rows of jockey shorts and neatly rolled black socks, as well as stacks of the shapeless sweatshirts and T -shirts Crystal had described. On his bedside table was an empty glass and a tape recorder but no sign of bedtime reading.

      With his pen tip, Green pressed the play button and heard the soothing strains of harp music and a hypnotic voice inviting the listener to close their eyes. Recognizing it as a relaxation tape not unlike the one Sharon sometimes used after a hard day, he turned it off.

      In the bathroom, the man’s compulsive neatness astounded him. One toothbrush, not the half dozen elderly ones sprouting from the glass that he and Sharon shared in the bathroom. One tube of toothpaste rolled from the bottom, folded towels and a shelf of the latest herbal remedies like ginseng and Vitamin K, plus a half full prescription bottle labelled Zoloft. Green tipped one of the pills into a small evidence bag from his pocket and jotted down the prescribing doctor’s name.

      In the kitchen, the fridge door was pristinely clear, and the wall calendar was blank except for weekly appointments on Tuesdays. Presumably that was his therapy group. But in a drawer, Green finally found something out of place. Or at least oddly placed. He was searching the drawers hoping to find the man’s stash of personal papers—letters, bills, bank statements or even a wallet or day book. He found linens, cooking utensils, tools and then unexpectedly, a small black book, curled and grimy with age. It was peeking out from under the tray in the cutlery drawer as if it had been hidden deliberately. Green pulled it out and flipped through its pages, which were filled with names and addresses in a small, neat hand. He slipped it into another evidence bag, put it in his pocket and continued his search.

      The man had to have some personal papers. There was no sign of a filing cabinet anywhere, but surely a man as paranoid as Janice described would hoard everything and probably squirrel it away in some secret hiding place. To search the whole living room would be a mammoth task. Papers could be hidden in plain sight, mixed among the newspapers, or hidden behind some volumes in a dusty, unlit corner. It would take a search team hours to comb this place, and that for a case that was not even his. In fact, not really a case at all.

      He flicked on the computer and waited as it hummed and clicked slowly to life. Not exactly state of the art, Green observed, but then the man had little to spare for extravagance. Windows eventually appeared on the screen with a prompt for a password. Green groaned. He should have known that a privacy fanatic like Fraser would use that feature. On a hunch he tried Modo. Invalid. Quasimodo. Also invalid. He pondered his chances of plucking the right name or code from the air with almost no knowledge of the man’s life or interests. He made one last try—Hugo—and to his astonishment the screen lit up with icons. Pulling up a chair, he hunched forward and began to search. It was a short search. Other than his internet browser, Fraser had no software beyond an oldfashioned word processing program and a database. The application files were in place, but there was not a single data file in either program.

      Curious to see who the man communicated with, Green connected to the internet and pulled up his email screen. Not a single email in his inbox. Same story with his “sent” box and his “trash”. Green was astounded. What mere mortal had a completely empty email account? Certainly no one in his acquaintance. Either this man stored all his files in a secret place, or someone who knew computers had wiped his entire system clean.

      Green clicked through subdirectories in search of hidden files, uncovering mostly folders with recognizable program names. Under “web”, however, one folder name stood out from the rest. Mistwalker. Eagerly he clicked on it. Wiped clean. Green sat back in puzzlement. Mistwalker was a peculiar word. Even mysterious, and certainly whimsical for a man as obsessive and analytical as Fraser. But tantalizing as the puzzle was, Green was stymied, for he’d exhausted all his admittedly primitive computer skills. This was a job for the younger guys on the force.

      Yet his snooping had paid off some dividends. He now had the little black address book and, with it, access to the people in Fraser’s life. On his way out, Green paused at the door to examine the locks. Crystal had exaggerated; there were only five. Plus a peephole. Each was sufficient to keep out an unwelcome caller, and two of them could only be locked and unlocked from the inside. There were no scratches or chips to suggest that any of them had been forced. If Matt Fraser had had a caller that night, after he’d arrived home and barricaded himself СКАЧАТЬ