Mist Walker. Barbara Fradkin
“Does he get many visitors?”
“None that I seen. Sticks to hisself. Why, what’s he done?”
“He’s missing. When did you last see him?”
The man grunted at each step with the effort of lifting his bulk. “Not in a few days. But he’s usually out really early walking his dog, then again late at night. You think something’s happened to him?”
“I’ve no idea. Did you notice anything or anyone unusual—say, in the last six days?”
“Unusual? Well, yesterday, yeah—” The super broke off as he reached the third floor, and he groped for the wall, chest heaving. “Fuck, it stinks up here. What the hell? Is he dead?”
“No, I believe the apartment’s empty.”
The super tried the door with obvious trepidation, and it swung open, unlocked. Both men stepped back as the stench hit them.
“Fuck!” The super hustled over, snapped up the blind and tried to open the tiny window, which was crisscrossed with spider webs. “Fuck! He’s nailed it shut. Must drive him crazy in this heat.” He turned, and his pig-like eyes rounded in shock as he noticed the mess for the first time. Books and newspapers were scattered everywhere, flung haphazardly over the floor as if by a rampage. “Fuck! Who is this guy?”
Green slipped on nitrile gloves and moved rapidly through the rooms checking for intruders and obvious signs of trouble. Twenty years of police work had inured him to most human oddities, but even he found the crammed bookshelves unnerving. Any possibility that Fraser had simply been a nice, normal guy wrongly accused of child abuse vanished from his thoughts. Barbara Devine was right. This was one sick bastard. Not the shy, vulnerable man Janice thought she was drawing out of his shell, but a man whose whole life had but a single focus—the subject of the hundreds of books and newspapers which were catalogued along every wall.
“I’m going back downstairs for a hammer to get those nails out,” the super muttered, tripping over himself in his haste to get out the door. Left alone, Green continued his search. All the windows were nailed shut, but in the bedroom he found a small air conditioner, which he turned on gratefully. It would take several hours to cool the place adequately, but at least it might soon be tolerable.
In the kitchen, he noted that Janice hadn’t even attempted to clean up but had left a note for Fraser on the kitchen table to explain that Modo was safe with her. Apart from the halfeaten food and open newspaper on the kitchen table, Matt Fraser kept a fastidiously tidy kitchen. His fridge gleamed white inside and out, full of food in neatly labelled rows of Tupperware containers. Sliced carrots, diced peppers, chopped lettuce, boiled rice and single-serving portions of left-overs. A health nut too, to top it off. Not a processed cheese slice or frozen dinner in sight. The cupboards were the same. No empty potato chip bags or lidless ketchup bottles, no duplicate boxes of Cheerios to give Green a sense of kinship. The man was seeming less human by the moment.
Yet he clearly had left the scene without bothering to clean up. Without even bothering to finish his food. This suggested two things. First, something very urgent and compelling had taken him away, and secondly, whatever it was, it had occurred at a meal time.
Had he gone on his own, or had someone forced him?
Green’s eyes fell on the dog dishes on the kitchen floor. A big bugger, the super had said, surely capable of making any intruder think twice about breaking in, and capable of making enough racket to rouse the dead if he did.
When the super came huffing back into the room with his toolbox under his arm, Green turned to him. “Have you heard the dog barking any time in the past few days?”
The super wheezed as he bent over to paw through his toolbox. He seemed to be thinking, and Green gave him time. Finally the man shook his head.
“But I’m way down in the basement. I don’t hear much that goes on up here.”
Especially with your television on full blast, Green added silently. “How long has Mr. Fraser lived here?”
The man found a hammer and straightened up, his face dangerously red from the exertion. Sweat poured down his temples and disappeared into the folds of his chins. He squinted as if that would help him muster his thoughts.
“Three, four years?”
“What does he do for a living?”
On this the super was no help. He knew nothing of the man’s private life beyond that he rarely went out except to shop or walk the dog, and he had no visitors.
“None at all?”
The super started to shake his head, then paused, sweat flying. “Recently, yeah. There was a lady come yesterday—I seen her hanging around before. Outside, like. And I think someone else came last week. I didn’t see much, just heard them go up to the third floor, and they didn’t go to Crystal’s place. Crystal probably seen them, though.”
“Crystal?”
The super fidgeted, his pig-eyes squinting almost shut. “The woman next door. She’s the only other tenant on the third floor.”
Green made a note to get to her later. Since she lived next door, she might have some useful information about Fraser’s habits or recent visitors.
The super swept away the cobwebs and pried all the windows open, billowing humid air into the already stifling room. Looking eager to get away, he asked Green if he were still needed. When Green declined, the super handed over the key with relief.
“Lock up when you’re done,” he tossed over his shoulder as he hustled out the door.
Green stood in the living room, trying to soak up Fraser’s presence. From what he could see, the man lived an existence entirely without comforts. No television, no CD player, not even a comfortable arm chair. Just a computer, a desk with utilitarian chair, and a hard vinyl couch whose main purpose seemed to be for spreading out papers. There were endless shelves of articles and text books on law and psychology, but not an action thriller or hobby book among the lot. Nothing that might engender joy.
As if the man were doing penance. Perhaps he was.
Once Green’s eyes grew accustomed to the bizarre character of the room, he realized the incongruity between the various rooms. The kitchen and the bedroom, apart from the rotting food and the dog mess, seemed meticulously ordered, indicating that the man kept a neat house. Even the organization and labelling of each shelf attested to a fastidious mind. Yet in the living room everything had been turned upside down; books and papers had been pulled out and impatiently cast aside.
Janice Tanner had made much of the rotting food and the abandoned dog, but had not mentioned a ransacked living room. Surely this would not have escaped her notice. Could someone have been here since yesterday? Fraser? In Green’s house, it was not uncommon for him to turn the place upside down for something he’d misplaced, but Fraser seemed as if he’d know where every slip of paper was. Had someone else been here? Whoever they were, whatever they were looking for, they’d been in a hell of a hurry. Or a hell of a temper.
Intrigued, Green examined the books that lay on the floor. The Child and Family Services Act, which detailed the law governing child abuse, as well as its predecessor. There was a heavy tome called Child Witnesses, and another with the lurid title of Breaking the Silence. The latter looked well thumbed, with pages dog-eared and passages underlined. Green began to read.
“Fuck! What stinks!” The querulous shriek came from the hallway, and Green glanced up just as a young woman stumbled into Fraser’s doorway, shielding her eyes from the daylight and clutching a man’s extra large cotton shirt over her scrawny frame. She recoiled slightly at the sight of Green, and glanced down as if to ensure the shirt covered her crotch.
“What the fuck is that stink?” she repeated.
Green took a guess. “Crystal?”
Her eyes slitted warily. “Who the fuck are