A Change of Heart: MacKay - Canadian Detectives, #3

By Roxana Nastase

A lazy detective, a beautiful immigrant with some strange talents, a horrible case, and paranormal events

 

With a bruised heart and pride, disillusioned, Mark stopped expecting much from his life lately. He is just doing his job like an automaton, counting the hours until he gets to go home.

 

Mark's got the habit of making himself scarce when there is a lot of work, but fate throws a horrific human trafficking case in his lap.

 

What will he do when he must take over the case all by himself?

 

And what could go wrong?

 

Will Mark stop feeling sorry for himself and fight for the weak? Will the detective bring the guilty to justice?

 

What if Soledad, a beautiful South-American woman with the ability to steal his heart, crosses his path? Will she destroy the walls Mark has built around himself, or will she leave behind the shell of a man when the case is over?

 

Well, find everything out by reading the third book in the series MacKay - Canadian Detective. Will you root for Mark?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scarlet Leaf Publishing House
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393030478

Roxana Nastase

Roxana Nastase has been teaching English for over seventeen years, ranging in level from kindergarten to college. She specializes in English Grammar and has had several books issued throughout the years. Her books were used with much success in schools in Eastern Europe for teaching English as a second language.

Book preview

SCARLET LEAF

2021

© 2021 by ROXANA NASTASE

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, with the exception of a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

All characters in this book are fictive, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, places or events is coincidental.

The book doesn’t portray the Canadian police system.

Toronto, Canada

To Ica, a good, reliable, truthful, and fun-loving friend

Thank you! I always can count on you to tell me the truth and not sugar-coat anything.

PROLOGUE

Stray sunrays broke free through the gray of the sky and reflected into the glass of the wide window, blinding Jose for a few seconds at a time. However, he didn’t mind. The wind didn’t seem as strong as the other day, so the twenty-four-year-old man enjoyed his job for a change.

That morning, in the mild breeze, floating above the city on his window washing platform, the man could believe himself the king of the world. Whenever Jose looked down, the other mortals looked like tiny ants running here and there at the street level.

The other day, the man had experienced the feeling of a leaf caught in the whirlwind of air, and he had cursed his job and his willingness to do it. It seemed pretty different now.

Satisfied with himself and his work, Jose started whistling in the rhythm of the song pouring in his ears through the earbuds.

He made a whopping twenty-two dollars an hour, after all. The man was the first to admit that he made much more than some of his friends. They toiled in an airless factory almost ten hours a day for a little more than a half of that.

Jose knew that he had it good even though he grumbled now and then. But then, who didn’t complain about work? It was in the man’s nature to find something to whine about in anything. The more people had, the more they lamented.

Pondering on his luck motivated Jose to work harder, standing on tiptoes to reach higher and bending his knees to cover more of the glass panel. If someone had watched him from afar, they would have thought that the man had lost his mind. His disjointed movements resembled a weird ballet.

Still, besides a seagull, no one bore witness to his zealous hard work. The bird clonked and cried out, put out by the display, but the man didn’t hear it over the blast of rap in his ears. With a last disgusted cry, the seagull chose to look for something to eat and left the scene.

Thinking of the twenty-two dollars an hour gave Jose the strength to finish the window. The man braced his hands on his hips and breathed deeply.

Damn, if he didn’t deserve that money. The surface of those glass panels could haunt a soul, and he had to make them shine. He couldn’t afford another complaint. HR had already written him up after the debacle with one of the customers last month.

The man breathed in and out a couple of times and then glanced at his watch. The digital display told him that the time for lunch had come, so Jose sat down on the platform, crossing his legs, and took a sub out of his backpack.

He unwrapped the sandwich and sniffed it. Yep, he had hit the right combination when he put it together in the morning, and that wasn’t too bad for a mamma’s boy, as that snotty Isabel girl had called him.

Jose had broken up with Isabel more than a year before. Still, that didn’t mean that the man had forgotten all those hurtful things the woman had hurled at him. Some things stuck with a person long after their expiration date. Whenever something unpleasant happened, Isabel’s words also popped into his head.

However, the young man had already met the woman of his dreams, so Isabel belonged into the past. He had even decided to ask that woman to marry him.

Alicia didn’t mock him, and she didn’t try to belittle him. Jose had only waited for his pay check to invite her somewhere special and to ask her to be his wife. And the day had come. It was payday.

Jose wiped his fingers off his sweatpants and took out his phone. The man checked his bank account, and when his eyes fell on the deposit made that morning, he smiled. Oh, yes, the day had come.  

He couldn’t wait to see Alicia’s surprise at his choice of venue. Jose had already made reservations to one of the fanciest restaurants in Toronto, and a well-thought ring waited for him at home. He needed only to buy some flowers, and the evening would kick off the rest of his life.

To make sure that there would be no glitch, the man sent a text to his girlfriend, ‘Don’t forget, at six at our spot.’

Jose didn’t have to wait too long for her reply. The sight of all the oxoxoxox displayed on the screen made him chuckle. Girls turned out to be so silly sometimes!

Jose gulped some water and put the sandwich wrap back in the backpack. With a satisfied sigh, the man maneuvered the platform to the next set of windows and started wiping them.

It would have been fun if he could see through the windows inside, at least. However, the tainted glass didn’t allow him a glimpse of what was happening on those floors. The man shrugged. At least he could imagine what would happen that night when he would ask the question. Jose had a good imagination, and he knew Alicia would be so happy that she would cry. While the man pictured her crying and kissing him, a wide grin perched on his lips.

When the sharp pain struck his heart, Jose cried out, but no one could hear his shout over the noise of the traffic below. For a second, with disbelief, the young man wondered if he suffered a heart attack. However, the thought seemed way too farfetched.

Then, the man fell backward, and, with a last conscious thought, he tried to catch the safety bar to hold on, but he missed. The feeling of flying over the handrail overwhelmed the man's brain, which still fired messages down the synapses, even though a bungled bullet had already stopped his heart.

Lifeless, the man dangled in his harness at the mercy of the mild wind. The sky turned grayer, and the wind started picking up, but Jose was way beyond the material plane.

CHAPTER ONE

The smell of stale coffee hung in the air, tickling his nostrils, and Mark cocked his nose with disgust. Someone should have emptied the coffee pot and make a new one.

Mark looked around the office with a critical eye, and his heart sank to his boots at the sorry sight. Yep, he needed to do something about that room, and soon. Leah MacKay, the lieutenant, was supposed to be back at work in about a week, and she would chew him a new hide for letting her office grow so sickening.

The truth was that Mark proved contemptible housekeeping skills. He never saw what lay around if he didn’t feel someone’s breath behind his neck. Only then, the man’s eyes started noticing what was amiss.

Leah had left Mark in charge of her office and the detectives’ squad while she went on her honeymoon for a couple of weeks. She didn’t leave too many instructions with him. Still, it was implied that Mark shouldn’t ruin her office while she was away. Unfortunately, that was what the man had done.

‘Anyway, I still have a few days before I need to worry,’ Mark pursed his lips for a couple of seconds. Then, dissatisfied with the prospect of putting the office to rights, the man threw his pen on the desk and turned his eyes toward the window.

A scowl on his face, the detective watched the patch of horizon visible through the glass, and the corners of his mouth turned down. The gray of the sky bummed his spirits some more, although he didn’t think that would have been possible.

Mark contemplated the spot of gray a couple of minutes and then shrugged. Blue or gray, it was the same thing for him. At least, it didn’t snow or rain.

The man was sick and tired of braving the elements day in and day out. That winter had seemed longer than usual that year. Consequently, Mark had already reached the end of his rope, and that was interesting. The man had spent most of his life in the Province of Quebec, after all.

Snowing out his car every morning for an entire week had left him despondent. Even at night, Mark dreamed that damn shovel, and he couldn’t get a good night of sleep.

The shadows under his eyes had been getting darker and darker lately. The detective had the feeling that he had turned into a raccoon every time he watched at his reflection in the mirror.

However, there was some hope. Distant hope, but spring was in the air. Or, at least, that was what the man had felt that morning on his way to work.

A few months back, his heart would have sung with joy at the briefest glimpse of the sun. Mark would have thought of finally getting out somewhere, to the park or to a pub to have a beer on a terrace, filling his lungs with the crisp air of the season. Now, the beer sounded well enough, but he couldn’t gather enough enthusiasm to pass muster.

Since Jen left him, Mark had sunk into a dark depression. The man had thought that their almost-three-year relationship meant something for the woman, only to discover that he had lied to himself and got a hyperactive imagination.

The woman strung Mark enough until she had found something better. Mark didn’t have a chance to compete with a seven-figure portfolio. His pay check trotted far behind.

Sick of his introspections, Mark glanced at his watch and grimaced. It was barely eleven. Lunch wouldn’t have been a satisfactory excuse to leave the office, and the man had already taken a coffee break only thirty minutes before. Still, he felt that he couldn’t breathe, caged there in the room, and needed to go out.

Mark knew that he should have read a few reports but couldn’t bring himself to open the files. Besides, Anna and Josh had proved their efficiency in the past, so Mark didn’t think that they needed his supervision right then. Nothing seemed urgent enough to shake him from his passivity, so the man continued to wallow in his own melancholy.

The detective leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on the desk, happy that Leah wasn’t there to slash him with her sharp tongue. The man closed his eyes, thinking that at least he could nod off for an hour or so. Anyway, no one entered that office without knocking first, so he had the time to put his feet back on the floor if anyone had come.

His hands folded on his stomach, Mark dozed off, happy that the noise from the detectives’ hall didn’t penetrate through the walls to disturb him. Unknowingly, the man whistled through one of his nostrils every time he breathed out, the sound keeping company to the low buzzing coming from the computer.

Vivid dreams