Twenty
McCabe double-checked that she was parked in front of the right house. She was expecting something different.
Her recollection of Yorkton Hill Police Detective Giles Maitland, before he took his retirement, was that he was a meticulous,
detail-oriented cop. His yard said otherwise. What parts of the lawn weren’t overtaken by weeds didn’t look as though they’d
been mowed in weeks. The disintegrating webbing on the folding lawn chair by the front door didn’t look safe to sit in. There
was mail sticking out of the box, suggesting it hadn’t been brought in for a few days.
She hoped he wasn’t dead, and not just because that would be a terrible thing. She really wanted to talk to him.
McCabe went up to the front door and rang the bell. When she didn’t hear a chime, she figured it wasn’t operational, so she
tried knocking. Rapped on the door a couple of times, waited, then rapped again.
“Hold your horses!” someone inside shouted.
Seconds later, the door opened a foot. McCabe recognized Maitland, but he had seen better days. He was heavier than the man
she remembered seeing around the station. And he wasn’t in a suit and tie anymore either. He was wearing gray sweatpants and
a black pullover shirt and was peering at her through a pair of grimy reading glasses.
“Yeah?” he said.
She showed her badge. “Janice McCabe,” she said. “I think we ran into each other occasionally back in the day.”
He squinted. “I remember you. But you hadn’t made detective.”
“No, sir. I was still in uniform.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I’d like to talk to you about a case you worked on.”
“Oh yeah? What case is that?”
“May I come in?”
He opened the door wide and stepped back. McCabe noticed a foul smell she couldn’t quite identify. Cabbage? Dirty socks? Spoiled
milk? A blend of the three?
Maitland led her into the living room, cleared some newspapers off the couch so she could sit. Before he dropped into a recliner,
he asked if he could get her something. A coffee? Soft drink?
“I’d offer you a beer but you’re on the clock.”
“I’m good,” she said. “So, how long’s it been since you retired?”
“Seven years,” he said.
“Seems to suit you,” she said, actually wondering to herself what she meant by that. It just seemed like the right thing to
say. “I heard your wife had passed away. My condolences.”
“Chandra, yeah, four years ago,” Maitland said, nodding toward a picture on the mantel of the two of them. “So what’s this
case?”
“I’ve been reading up on it in just the last few hours. There may be a connection between something you investigated and an
incident here in town yesterday. A murder-suicide. Maybe you saw something about it on the news?”
He shook his head. “Don’t watch the news much. Still get the paper, though. Gets thinner every day.”
“This was an open-unsolved back in ninety-nine. Woman in her midthirties, shot, body dumped at the side of the road north
of—”
Maitland raised a finger. “When was this again?”
“Ninety-nine.”
“Right, okay, go ahead.”
“The case you were investigating was of a woman who’d been found in a ditch at the side of the road. Thirty-six years old, about five five, white, blondish hair. She’d been shot in the back. Like she was running away at the time.”
His eyes closed briefly. “That’s starting to come back to me. This was on the road that went up past the drive-in, before
they went out of business, tore it down. Her clothes were in disarray, pants pulled down, blouse ripped open, as though sexually
assaulted, but no evidence of rape. Yeah, I remember wondering whether it had been staged, but that was only a feeling.”
“Yeah.”
“There was alcohol in her system. We thought maybe she’d met someone in a bar, got in a car, things went bad.”
“You’ve got a good memory.”
Maitland sighed. “Some you don’t forget. The ones you never solve, they kind of haunt you.”
“You one of those detectives, when he retires, he takes all these files home with him, the open cases he had over the years,
figures he can still solve them?”
“Like in a Michael Connelly novel or something?” Maitland said. He shook his head. “When I quit, I quit. I didn’t want to
pretend I was still on the job. Won’t lie, though. Thought about it.”
He closed his eyes again, thinking back. “We found her car. A little sports car. Convertible. It was parked down the road
a few miles from a bar. Trying to remember which one.”
“The files say it was the Village Idiot.”
“Right. So we spent a lot of time interviewing men who were there that night. Checking credit card receipts. No one could
remember seeing her come inside, but we thought someone might have had a run-in with her before she took a seat. We brought
one guy in for questioning.”
“Rufus Block?”
“Yeah, right. I’m not good remembering names, but I remember that one.
Rufus Block. He frequented the Idiot—I couldn’t have imagined him going anyplace else—and he had a sheet.
A sexual assault conviction from a few years earlier.
Not a rape, but a groping, and his excuse was that he was drunk, didn’t know what he was doing.
A couple of minor assaults, getting into it with other dim bulbs who’d had too much to drink.
He’d been at the bar that night, left around ten.
But he had a girlfriend who lived with him, said he got home around half past ten, and we couldn’t break down the alibi.
No physical evidence to tie him to the victim or the scene or her car.
And no physical evidence putting her in his truck. ”
“There’s something in the report about a gun.”
“He owned one. We got warrants to search his truck, his home, even where he worked, which was . . . help me out here.”
“The Toyota dealer,” McCabe said, adding, “curiously enough.”
“That’s right. He was a mechanic there. Still could be, for all I know. We did find a weapon at his home, seized it, tested
it, but it wasn’t the gun used to kill the woman. So, there wasn’t enough there to go to the Crown attorney with. And my gut
was telling me at the time that it wasn’t him. Why’d you twig to the Toyota dealer?”
“Had a word with someone there yesterday in relation to something else, but not the same guy.”
Maitland slowly shook his head. “We had theories. Maybe her car had broken down and someone stopped, like they were going
to help her but had other ideas. But the car was mechanically sound, not even a flat tire. Doesn’t mean she couldn’t have
been standing by it, someone came along, asking if everything was okay. But here’s the thing. I don’t think she was killed
there. I’d always thought she was killed someplace else and her body dumped there, that maybe someone moved the car too. There
was some mud on her face that didn’t match anything in the area where she was found.”
He thought of something else. “There was a packed overnight bag in the car. Had the trunk in the front, bag was in there.
No idea where she was going, though.” He smiled to himself. “Can’t believe how much of this I remember. Everything except
the poor woman’s name.”
“Evelyn Corby.”
Maitland snapped his fingers. “That’s it. I think she worked in pharmaceutical sales. That company with the funny name.”
“Wiffel-Smith.”
“Bingo. Yeah.”
“Anyone you were interested in that didn’t make the report? You know, you get a feeling about someone but there’s not enough
to justify writing it down?”
“No. No husband, no boyfriend. A couple of women in her past. We interviewed a niece who was staying with her.”
“Yeah, I saw her name in the file.”
“And Corby had a nephew who overdosed on that drug Wiffel-Smith got in so much trouble for, eating it like buttered popcorn.
Once it all came out, the company paid millions in fines, settled with thousands of families for millions more. Had their
names erased from various museums and foundations. Got all those people addicted so they could buy their yachts and mansions
and trips to the French Riviera and not one of them served a single day in jail.”
“Maybe Wiffel himself might have, if he hadn’t taken a header off the top of his corporate headquarters.”
Maitland sighed. “Coward’s way out, killing himself. Point is, you got enough money, you can buy your way out of anything.
Even mass murder, because, let’s face it, that’s what it was. Anyway, nobody we talked to knew if Corby was planning to go
anywhere. All there was, was a note on the kitchen table saying she’d be back in a couple of days.”
“Did you ever talk to a Brent Chartwell?” she asked. “He ever come to your attention?”
“Chartwell?”
“Yeah. At the time, he’d have been early forties.”
“I don’t think so. Name doesn’t ring any bells. Who is he?”
“He was a retired business consultant but back around the time Corby was murdered he also worked in pharmaceutical sales for Wiffel-Smith.”
Maitland’s eyes narrowed. “I’m pretty sure I never talked to him. Should I have?”
“I don’t know. But yesterday Chartwell shot a woman who was not his wife, a woman by the name of Leah Kennard, in his bed
then turned the gun on himself. And here’s the kicker. The slugs from both of them matched the one taken from Evelyn Corby
more than two decades ago.”
Maitland thought about that for a moment. Finally, he said, “I guess we should have talked to him.”
McCabe smiled. “No one’s second-guessing.”
“You’re lucky they were able to make the match. Late nineties was when all that evidence started being stored on the computer.
I do recall talking to her employers. Went to the corporate office, in the northwest part of Toronto, near the airport. The
Wiffel guy.” He nodded, remembering. “He was shook up, said she was one of his top salespeople.”
“Talk to any of her colleagues?”
“Just those who were at the HQ at the time, not anyone who might have been on the road. I suppose it’s possible I talked to
this Chartwell guy and don’t remember.”
“This murder-suicide looked like something I thought I could put down in a hurry, but it opens the door to something in the
past.”
“Too bad Chartwell shot himself. If he’s your guy, be nice to get a confession out of him. Might have wanted to get this off
his chest after all this time.”
“There’s still his wife. She might know something. I’ll have another chat with her.”