Downfall Read online

  “I can’t.” The shooting pain made him wince and grit his teeth.

  “Stay still.” She jumped up and rushed into the trees by the river.

  He lay back, looking up at the sky, hoping to see another bird winging its way back to its nest. But none flew past. Imagine if he had died, he thought. Poor Babita, her parents killed in the civil war, left alone with the twins.

  Soon the woman was back with two large branches, one in each hand. He saw perspiration forming on her forehead. She laid the branches down and then held his leg.

  “I’m going to move your leg,” she said, all business. “Breathe.”

  She eased his lower leg down until it was straight. He felt better.

  “You have strong legs,” she said.

  “I played soccer at university. Now I play here with my friends on Saturday mornings,” he said. Why was he telling her this? His mind was racing everywhere.

  She didn’t seem to hear him, though. She laid the branches on either side of his leg and then took off her top shirt. Working swiftly, she used it to wrap the branches firmly around his knee. She pulled a cell phone out from somewhere within the folds of her clothes. “I’ll call 911 when I get out of the valley. There’s no reception down here.”

  “Thank you,” Roshan said.

  The woman bounded back up.

  “Wait,” he said. “Your coat.”

  She stared down at him. “Who is Babita?”

  “My wife.”

  “Give the coat to her.”

  She walked toward the hill he’d tumbled down.

  “Wait,” he said again. “What is your name?”

  She looked at him, shook her head, and like a mountain goat that knows its way up a steep cliff, disappeared into the trees.

  3

  Nancy Parish sat up in bed, pulled the sweaty T-shirt she’d slept in over her head, and tossed it on the floor.

  She looked out the bay window of her second-floor bedroom. Damn it. The sky was getting light. Bad news. That meant it was morning. She’d spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, forcing herself to lie still, dozing off, jerking awake, and then doing it all over again. Now the sun was coming up, and she wasn’t in any mood to meet the day. She flipped over her pillow and plunked herself face-down into it. But it was hopeless.

  Every criminal lawyer had these kinds of sleepless nights. Usually it was after they’d lost a trial and had to watch their client being led away in handcuffs. For Parish, the nocturnal pattern was always the same. Her mind rolling over an endless loop of self-recriminations: What if I’d asked that question? Why didn’t I think of that sooner? and How could I have been so stupid?

  This night had been different. It was worse: she couldn’t sleep, not because of a trial that she’d lost but because of the one she knew she was going to lose in court today. The problem was that one of her best friends, Melissa Copeland, was also her client. And, sadly, had been for years.

  After she graduated from law school, Parish got a highly coveted articling job working at one of the city’s most prestigious law firms. She was one of fifteen students and only three were women. The other two were Melissa and Melissa’s best friend from childhood, Lydia Lansing. The two had grown up next door to each other in a wealthy neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, had gone to the same private schools and summer camps, had hung out at each other’s cottages, and even belonged to the same golf club. For Parish, who came from a small town and didn’t really know the city, at first this pair of super-self-confident young women was intimidating.

  But being the only three women amongst all the ultra-competitive men, they supported each other through months of hellishly long hours and pedal-to-the-metal stress.

  Only six articling students were hired back by the firm, and “the Three Amigas,” as they were soon called, all made the cut. Each had a particular skill. Lydia was the business lawyer. Her family owned a large publicly traded pharmaceutical company, and she was a whiz at merger deals. Parish was the litigator, destined to spend her life in the courtroom. But Melissa was the star. She had an incredible head for statistics. She practically memorized the Canadian Tax Code, and she was a workhorse. After only three years she was putting in more billable hours than any other lawyer at the firm.

  Tall and fit, funny and dynamic, Melissa attracted people wherever she went. She adored designer clothes and soon was doing work for major international fashion, perfume, and cosmetic companies. They loved her combination of swagger, style, and smarts.

  She was also a superb athlete and the first one to get married. Her husband, Karl Hodgson, was a wealthy investment banker and top golfer she’d met at “the Club,” the name they gave to the Humber River Golf Club, which was practically their second home. They’d invited Parish there a few times, and whenever she went she always felt underdressed, awkward, and out of place.

  In the Amigas’ fourth year at the firm, Melissa and Karl had a daughter, Britt. Much to Parish’s surprise and delight, she was named her godmother.

  Melissa only took one month off for her maternity leave and soon was back at it. The Three Amigas all worked killer hours, pouring themselves into the taxis that lined up outside their office at one, two, sometimes three in the morning. One night a week Parish’s mother would drive into the city with a homemade lasagne or casserole. Lydia’s father had an executive assistant named Rachel who’d worked for him for years. When the three women’s workload got really crazy, he would send Rachel in with a “medicine chest” of pills from the company to stymie their headaches and settle their heartburn, and, for Melissa, uppers when she had to work until dawn to close a deal.

  Then there was Karl. Despite his heavy schedule, at least once a week he’d bring in a catered meal and the baby. Often Melissa was too busy working to eat very much, Karl would be on his cell phone, and Parish would play with Britt. As she grew older, Britt loved to help Parish photocopy and use the binding machine, but by far her favourite thing was the paper shredder and the crunch, crunch, crunching sound it made.

  Then, bit by bit, everything went sour. Melissa would be up all night poring over contracts, working all weekend preparing briefs, sleeping on the floor of her office for nights on end. Karl’s catered-dinner visits tailed off and, by the time Britt was four, he stopped showing up. Melissa kept working, often, Parish thought, to avoid going home.

  A year later Parish left the firm to practice criminal law, and six months after that Lydia went to work in the family business. Melissa, alone now at the firm and with no friends, practically barricaded herself in her office. Often she’d call Parish late at night and want to talk for hours about some obscure point of law she’d stumbled upon. Whenever Parish asked about Britt and Karl, Melissa would sigh and change the subject.

  Very late one night, Parish got a call from the police. Melissa had been arrested for assault with a weapon. She’d gotten into a fight with Karl and cut his arm with a kitchen knife. Worse still, their now seven-year-old daughter had heard the commotion, rushed into the bedroom, and witnessed the whole thing.

  Parish went to court the next morning and got Melissa bail with strict conditions: she wasn’t allowed any contact with Karl and only supervised access to Britt. She couldn’t go near the family home and had to get a psychiatric assessment.

  Melissa went to one session with the psychiatrist and walked out. At her visits with Britt, Melissa would slip her secret notes that Britt would later give to the social worker. The notes were almost-incomprehensible rants about how she now realized that the game of golf, which she had once loved, was destructive. That golf courses were playgrounds for the rich at the taxpayers’ expense. They ate up valuable land that should be used to house the homeless. And that Britt, who at seven under her father’s tutelage was already a budding golf star, should immediately stop playing the evil game and dedicate herself to volunteer work for the less advantaged.

  Six months later, Karl filed for divorce, applied for full custody of Britt, and won. Over
the next few years, Melissa kept getting arrested for harassing her now ex-husband. Parish kept bailing her out on stricter and stricter bail conditions until even her supervised access to Britt was cut off and she wasn’t allowed within four blocks of what had once been the family home.

  Too smart for her own good, Melissa became obsessed with finding technical ways around every term of her bail, and miraculously, in case after case, Parish managed to keep her out of jail.

  Until the bottom fell out. Karl married Lydia, who had become president of the family drug company and was making millions. For Melissa, it was the ultimate betrayal by her former amiga. Even worse, Karl and Lydia hired a high-priced family lawyer and went to court to completely cut Melissa’s contact with Britt.

  Melissa spent too much money fighting them. With her terrible track record in criminal court, her obsessive, erratic behaviour, and her steadfast refusal to attend any type of counselling or get any other kind of help, she lost.

  Cut off from Britt, unable to go near her old home, and furious at Lydia, she couldn’t focus at work. Her late-night calls to Parish grew longer and more rambling. Karl became more and more obsessed with his daughter’s golf career, and soon Britt was winning junior tournaments. Her results were reported online, and Melissa scoured the accounts for every detail. She’d write long letters to Karl with suggestions on ways Britt could improve her game, but he never responded.

  Melissa became unglued at work and a year after Karl remarried, she was fired. Six months later she turned up at Parish’s door. She’d been evicted from her condo and had no place to live. Parish took her in and even convinced her partner, Ted DiPaulo, to give her a small office at their law firm. Melissa was on her best behaviour for about a month.

  Inevitably, she began to unravel. After a chaotic few weeks in which she would turn up at the office at all hours and not come home for days, one night she disappeared. She left Parish a confusing yet touching note: “I need to go work with the homeless to fight against the oppression. The assassins. The heartless corporate killers. Thank you so much Nance. You couldn’t have done more.”

  That was two years ago. Since then Melissa had lived on the street, under bridges, in valleys, occasionally checking in to a shelter. Ted, being Ted, insisted that they keep her office open for her because “a lawyer needs an office.” Melissa kept what remained of her high-fashion clothes and designer makeup there and would show up from time to time, never with advance warning. Sometimes she’d stay for a few days and do excellent research on files. Then she’d disappear again, always secretive of her whereabouts.

  She kept in contact with Parish, sporadically sending her long texts: diatribes about systemic corruption of the medical profession, the establishment’s war on the poor, and serial murder conspiracy plots. These were sometimes mixed with cogent analysis of Britt’s latest golf triumph and heart-wrenching notes about how she longed to see her daughter.

  Three months ago, Melissa had been at it again, testing the limits of her most recent restraining order. She’d been caught walking on the lawns of homes on streets at the edge of the four-block boundary circumscribed by her bail conditions. She’d done it for three days in a row, wearing different clothes each time.

  Luckily the Crown Attorney, Albert Fernandez, who’d been assigned to her first case, was sympathetic to a lawyer such as Melissa who had fallen on hard times. Every time she was arrested, Fernandez took the unusual step of handling the case himself because he understood the dynamics. Melissa was lucky he did. But now even Fernandez was fed up. Last week he warned Parish that if Melissa went ahead with the trial and lost, he would ask for jail time. To make matters worse, the assigned judge, Winona Tator, was a no-nonsense fitness nut who didn’t have a bone of sympathy in her ultra-sculpted body. The joke about Tator was that she had never put the word not in front of the word guilty.

  Parish’s problem was Melissa. Stubborn as ever, she wouldn’t make any kind of deal and was insisting upon having this disastrous trial.

  What was the point in trying to sleep, Parish thought as she sat back up, ran her fingers through her hair, and rolled out of bed.

  Her cell phone buzzed. A text was coming in. Here we go again. This would be from Melissa. No doubt she would have been up all night and had come up with yet another brilliant idea for her defence. Parish shook her head as she looked at her phone.

  “Nance, I warned you, but no one would listen,” Melissa had just written. “The killings continue. There is no justice. No one is immune.”

  4

  Despite the cold wind, Alison Greene undid the top two buttons of her overcoat. She flicked back her long, straight blond hair and held the mic up below her mouth, the way she’d been trained. She nodded an okay to Randy Krevolin, the cameraman standing in front of her, and waited for the green light on top of his camera to go on.

  A moment later it lit up.

  “Good morning. This is Alison Greene from T.O. TV News reporting live from the edge of the Humber River Valley, where for the second time in just two days the body of a homeless person has been found in what police say is a possible homicide.” She turned from the camera and swept her arm to her side. “As you can see, they’ve set up a barrier to protect the crime scene.”

  She looked back at the camera. “Local residents tell me they have been complaining for years about the tent cities housing the homeless that have sprung up in this river valley. They say the situation keeps getting worse. Down the road from where I’m standing is the Humber River Golf Club, which has had well-documented fights with these homeless people. The police have told us that they will be making a formal statement soon. We will cover it as it happens. Reporting live from the scene, this is Alison Greene.”

  She put on her sternest-looking face and waited for the green light to turn red. The moment it did, she unhooked her mic, passed it to Krevolin, and buttoned her coat back up.

  “Not bad for a rookie.” He was a crusty old pro and Alison knew that from him “not bad” was a real compliment.

  “Thanks for driving me out here so fast.”

  Half an hour earlier, she’d been finishing the Sunday-night graveyard shift back at the TV station. Standard grunt work for a new reporter. She’d been up all night, her fifth boring night in a row, and predictably nothing had happened. As she was about to pack up, she’d scrolled through the computer one more time, and the alert popped up: “Police have received an anonymous 911 call. Person found VSA in Humber Valley near local golf course.”

  Wait a minute, Alison thought. The alert rang a bell. What was it? There. The Humber River Valley was the same place where a homeless man had been killed in what sounded like a drunken brawl two days ago.

  She’d hustled up Krevolin and they rushed out to the station’s mobile unit van. He was a good driver and even though by the time they arrived the police tape was up, they’d beat out the competition and parked the van in the best location, closest to the scene. The police were tight-lipped, but all the commotion had attracted a crowd of local residents, and Alison was the first reporter to talk to them.

  They told her about all the trouble the homeless people in the valley had caused them. The noise. The litter. People being harassed on the street. Their children finding needles in the nearby park.

  “We used to love going down to the river,” said a middle-aged man who said he’d moved there twenty years ago. “No one dares go down there anymore.”

  “The murder on Saturday morning really scared us all,” a young woman holding a baby in her arms said. “Now this? We keep calling the cops about the problems but no one does anything about it.”

  An old woman, who said she’d been born in the house across the street she still lived in, told Alison that a bike rider had been hit by a car and fallen into the valley and found the dead body.

  “Where’s he now?” she asked.

  “The ambulance has already taken him away,” she said. “My goodness. Imagine riding along here in the dark. I saw t
hem bring him out on a stretcher. Can you believe it? The fool wasn’t even wearing a helmet.”

  Three other TV vans soon showed up, as well as a radio journalist and a handful of print reporters. They were swarming the scene trying to get an angle for their stories.

  Even though she was inexperienced, Alison had one advantage over her competitors. Her father, Detective Ari Greene, was the new head of the homicide squad. She’d been a reporter for more than a year and had never asked him for any inside information on a case. But she’d never been the first reporter on the scene of a possible homicide.

  This could be quite a story. With the second murder of a homeless person in such a short time in virtually the same location, she wondered, could there be a serial killer on the loose?

  “I’ll be back,” she told Krevolin.

  She slipped through the crowd, ducked down into the valley, and secreted herself behind the trunk of a large tree. The riverbank was steep and she heard the sound of the rushing water roll up from below and smelled the sweet scent of pine trees. Something she’d never smelled back in England where she’d grown up.

  She pulled out her cell phone and pushed the pre-set speed dial number. Her father picked up on the first ring.

  “Greene here.”

  She was taken aback. She knew that her name came up on his cell display, and he always answered, “Hi, Allie.” A few months ago, she’d told him that Allie was her nickname and now he used it all the time.

  The fact that he answered her call like this must mean that he wasn’t alone.

  “Hi,” she said, not calling him Dad the way she always did. “I’m on assignment at—”

  “I saw you on TV a minute ago. Good work.”

  “Thank you.”

  She waited for him to respond, but he didn’t. In the year and a half since she’d moved from England to live with him in Toronto, Alison had learned that her father could be silent for long stretches of time.

  “Police have everything cordoned off,” she said.