“I remember.” I struggle to keep my voice even as the memory of my anguish washes through me.
“Right at the end of my first year at U of T both my parents died in a car crash on the Gardiner Expressway.”
“I had no idea. I am so sorry.” I turn towards her but she signals me to look away. I turn back and feel my sympathy turning to a growing anger. Why didn’t she come back to Vancouver? I would have helped her through her loss. Her parents were well off, she could have afforded it. Then it all deflates, it’s all water under the bridge.
“When it came to settling the estate, I got a nasty surprise. I discovered that my father had gambled away everything. I’d had absolutely no idea. The house was mortgaged to the hilt and when it was sold, it yielded just enough money to pay off the bank loans he’d taken out. He’d even cashed in his insurance policies. There was nothing. When the dust settled, I was left with an inheritance of seven thousand, three hundred and twenty-one dollars.
“I was devastated. There was no way I’d be able to afford to go back to U of T or anywhere else for that matter. I called my best friend from class and told her the whole story. To my amazement, she said she thought she might be able to help me out. She told me to meet her for dinner in an expensive restaurant in Yorkville, her treat. So I did.
“Melissa was one of the cool girls on campus and she was as sharp as a whip. She drove a Mercedes and was always amazingly dressed. Over dinner she told me that she knew what I was going through because her parents had never had the funds to send her to school but that she had paid her own way. When I asked her how, she told me about this agency she worked for. She told me that she earned eight thousand dollars a month, which was a small fortune for a university student in nineteen-ninety-seven. When I wanted to know more she told me that it was a ‘very discreet, very respectable’ agency for rich men who liked to date intelligent, beautiful, young women. She told me that all she had to do was go on three or four dates a week. She said she wasn’t forced to sleep with anyone but if she wanted to she could and that would increase her revenue per date a lot. What was strange was that I wasn’t even shocked. It was probably a measure of my desperation.
“Long story short, I put myself through U of T’s law school as an escort. It was, as Melissa said, all very discreet and I was never once pressured to sleep with anyone but most of the men were nice and a lot of them were attractive, so I, well… made a lot of money.” She takes another drink. “I sold my body then so that I can sell my brain now.” There is a certain defiance in her tone of voice.
“Can I look at you now?” I ask.
“Sure.”
I turn towards her. “I’ve never told anyone this. My mother swindled landlords out of thousands of dollars so she could put me though university, so I’m not about to criticize anyone for doing what they had to do.”
She smiles and the defiance is gone. “Thank you, Cal. You were pretty much a law-and-order kind of guy in first year, I wasn’t sure you’d understand.”
“So. Let me make a couple of guesses, one: Melissa was the one who introduced you to this new client and two: the envelope David Fox sent you was full of comprising photographs of you.”
“Two for two.” She gets up and heads for the minibar and opens the door. “Another?’ she asks. I shake my head. She looks at the glittering display of liquor and overpriced snacks, then looks back at me. After a moment, she closes the door with an air of finality and comes to sit beside me again.
“The photos were accompanied by a note. It said simply. Here’s the deal. I pay you $1,000 an hour for your legal services and your husband and the partners at your law firm never get to see these pictures.
“And what did he want you to do for him?”
She tells me every detail.
It’s worse than I ever could have imagined.
“Thirty-one hours,” I say.
“What?”
“I’ve known you for thirty-one hours and here I am in your home being served lamb vindaloo which, by the way, smells fantastic.”
“Yes, well, helping someone through a withdrawal crisis, you learn more about each other than in a month of small talk.”
“Indeed. Thank you for that. Last night, it was so bad I couldn’t have got through it without you.”
“No prob,” Tina says it casually. But it was no small thing. She sat with me, talking me through some sort of meditation process that got me through the horrors of withdrawal. She stayed until I finally fell asleep. When I woke up this morning she was gone.
As she serves the food, I watch the litheness with which she moves. “Do you do yoga?” I ask.
She laughs. “Can’t get by without some small talk can we?” She serves the curry beside the rice on my plate and says, “No, I’ve tried it but it’s not really my thing. Why do you ask?”
“Last night you were talking me through that meditation, I just thought…”
“That was a mindfulness meditation. It’s very effective in giving people the tools to overcome addiction.” She sits down opposite me and lifts her wine glass. “Welcome to my home and thanks for the wine.” We clink glasses and drink. The pinot noir is more expensive than I usually buy but it’s wonderful and worth every penny.
“How about some more small talk,” I say. “Tell me what it’s like working for the Daily News Hound dot com.”
“Oh, the Hound is great.” As she tells me about her job I see something that I haven’t seen in a woman since I first met Sam. She has joy in what she does; digging for the truth is as big a passion for her as tracking down a criminal is for me.
Shock, pleasure, anticipation and a touch of fear all combine, as I realize that she could easily become a big part of my life.
Cal
Friday
Ghost seems no worse for wear from yesterday’s drunkenness and Tommy Connor is positively chipper. It may be because of the large Ovaltine Café breakfasts I’ve bought them, which they are scarfing down with relish. They are sober, happy and co-operative. Jen Halley and I are sitting opposite them with coffee and Jen has a laptop open in front of her. She is using composite sketch software to create an image of the ‘big guy’ who came into the Balmoral and left with Wily a.k.a. Denis Lamarche. As she questions them, I am struck by how the human mind is able to recognize and remember faces so easily, yet we don’t have adequate language to describe them.
She turns the screen around so that they can see the latest iteration of the image.
“Yeah,” says Tommy. “That’s more like him.”
“Except he was fatter and a bit more squinty,” adds Ghost.
Jen rotates the laptop and fiddles away some more. I would normally be interested in how she uses the software but other women are on my mind: Susan Grey and Tina Johal. The shock of Susan’s revelation, about what she is doing for the crook who calls himself David Fox, is weighing on my mind. I mull over various ways by which I might extricate her from her predicament without her husband learning about her past.
And Tina—
“That’s him,” Tommy yells. “That’s him for sure, eh Ghost?”
“Fuckin’ A!” Ghost agrees.
Jen gives me a big grin. She spins the laptop back. The hard face staring out from the screen sends an unpleasant shiver down my spine. Jen taps away. “I’m sending it to a friend at CSIS. We’ve got some software that tries to match composite sketch images to photos. It’s leading edge but still not that good. It only gives a decent result about twenty-five percent of the time but it’s worth a shot. She’ll do it without telling anyone it was from me. Now we just have to wait.”
An idea hits me.
“I don’t like waiting,” I say as I grab my phone. “You guys want to earn some cash?” I ask.
Their mouths full of food, Ghost and Tommy just nod enthusiastically.
Stammo is not a happy camper. “We’ve got to tell him, he’s our client, not her.”
I wash my painkillers down with a cup of Adry’s coff
ee. “How can we do that? It will kill their marriage but won’t get Susan out of the problem she’s in.”
“She can go tell the police.” His voice echos his exasperation. “She must have enough evidence to put that sack of crap behind bars.”
“She can’t do that. He said that if she goes to the cops, he will make sure she and her husband die horrible deaths. On top of that she would have to give evidence. She’s committed crimes by working with him. Sure, she’d get immunity from prosecution, but almost certainly she’d lose her licence to practice law.” I’m almost shouting at him.
“Guys, guys. Calm down. You’re smart enough to find a way out of this,” Adry chimes in. We look at her, then at each other and the anger deflates; blessed are the peacemakers, indeed.
She continues, “Susan’s been blackmailed into working for this guy David Fox, who’s a dealer in illegal weapons. He’s made her set up and manage an international network of companies to hide the transactions and launder the money he makes, right?”
“Good summary,” I say. Stammo just grunts.
She smiles. “Sooooo, there must be some way a couple of clever guys, like you, can use information she feeds you to catch this guy out, without him knowing she was the one who gave you the info in the first place.”
Silence.
More silence as we mentally kick it about.
I frown. “I like the idea but how the heck would we do that?”
“Tell me everything she told you,” says Stammo, “and don’t leave anything out.”
I do as he asks.
After I finish there are long seconds of silence; then Stammo laughs. “The trouble with you Rogan, is you’ve just got no imagination.” Then he starts humming the one Scott Joplin tune that every movie buff knows.
My attempt at a question is interrupted by Jen Halley walking into the office. There’s no smile on her face. “There was no match between the sketch images and anyone in the system. It was only a one-in-four chance but I was hoping… Anyway Cal, our only hope now is that your Plan B works.”
“There might be a Plan C,” says Stammo, face serious again. “And maybe it should be Plan A.”
I know what’s coming.
“I’m all ears,” says Jen.
“When you phoned me from the Ovaltine, I did what you asked. But then I got to thinking. We’ve probably got a good likeness of a killer. Don’t you think we should hand it over to VPD and let them take it from here?”
“No,” Jen and I say in unison.
Stammo fixes his best stare on her. “I know why Rogan doesn’t want to do it; he wants to be the one to find the killer and show he’s better than Vancouver’s finest. What’s your objection?”
“National security,” she says. “If Denis Lamarche’s murder is connected to his sister’s death in the bombing, we don’t want the local police muddying the waters.”
“Huh!” Stammo grunts. He masticates her response for a bit. “OK, Rogan. I guess we can’t stand in the way of the nation’s security can we.”
He’s acting grumpily but I know him. He wants us to find the killer before VPD does, every bit as much as I do. Jen just gave him the excuse he needed.
The new sandwich shop in our building has done it again. Stammo and I are enjoying eight-inch-long meatball subs and Adry and Jen are eating something healthy. “Let’s brainstorm for a few minutes,” Jen says. “Denis and Annalise die on the same day. We’re assuming they are connected, right?” We all nod. “We can’t do any investigation of her death because it’s under a national security blanket. But let’s look some more at his death. Cal, you said he was beaten to death?”
“Yes and he was tortured first. I couldn’t figure why a homeless man would be tortured by anyone but when we found the memory card in his box of stuff, I guessed he was being tortured to make him give up the memory card.”
“What box of stuff?” she asks. “You told me about the memory card but never mentioned the box.”
“It was in a box he kept buried underneath the tent he shared with Ghost and Tommy.”
“What else was in it?”
“Just an old bible in French. It might have been valuable, it looks old.”
“Can I see it?”
I take the pink box out of my desk and hand it to her. She takes the box out of its plastic bags and takes out the bible. “It’s beautiful,” she says. She opens it to the front cover then turns the page. “His parents were Samuel and Clarisse. Maybe we should find out what we can about them?” She turns a few pages then holds the book, spine up, over the desk and riffles through the pages. A piece of paper drops out and flutters down onto the desk.
I reach forward.
“Don’t touch it,” Stammo says. “It might be evidence.”
“Do you guys have any nitrile gloves?” Jen asks.
“Yeah, that’s another thing we bought when we started the company but I don’t think we’ve ever used them.” He wheels over to the stationery cabinet and gets out the box.
Jen dons a pair of the purple gloves and picks up the paper. She unfolds it once, twice and scans it with her eyes. “It’s a letter from Annie to Denis. It’s dated Sunday, November twenty-fourth. That’s four days before the bombing.” Her eyes scan some more then she starts to read out loud, “My dear Denis, I hope all is well with you and that you are remembering to take your meds every day. I really need you to be on your meds because I need you to do something very important for me. Do you remember I told you that I have been having an affair with my boss, Neil? You told me Daddy wouldn’t have approved. Haha. Well, I was at his town house last night and I woke up in the middle of the night with a terrible headache. I got up and crept into his study because he always keeps Extra Strength Tylenol in his desk drawer, only this time the drawer was locked. His desk was a mess, it always is, and as I was rummaging around to see if there were any pills there, my arm must have touched the mouse because his computer screen lit up. He couldn’t have had a password set for waking up from sleep mode, he’s very careless about that sort of thing. I knew I shouldn’t but I couldn’t resist looking. There were some documents on the screen that really worried me. I think I need to talk to someone about them. They are illegal, very illegal. I found the folder where they were kept and there were others too. I was really worried. There is something terrible going on. I didn’t know what to do so I emailed the documents to myself with a copy to you. I was just about to delete the email after I’d sent it, when I heard Neil coming down the hall calling me. I just managed to close his email program in time and pretend to still be searching his desk for the pills when he walked into the study. I don’t think he suspects anything but if he checks his Sent folder he’ll know what I’ve done. Denis, I need you to open that email, encrypt all the files and save them for me while I work out what to do. Please, my darling brother, I need you to do this. Your loving sister, Annie. P.S. If anything should happen to me, I need you to get those files to my friend Sally Hyde at CSIS.”
We sit in stunned silence until Stammo puts it into words. “Ho-ly crap!” he says.
“This Neil guy must have found her emails,” I say. “He must have arranged Denis’ death. If she hadn’t been killed by that terrorist, he might well have silenced Annalise somehow. We need to find out who the hell he is.”
“No we don’t.” Jen’s face is white. “There’s only one man in the upper management of DND with the name Neil. It’s Neil Harris, the Minister, one of the most powerful men in the Federal Government.”
“Holy crap squared!” says Stammo. “What are you going to do Jen?”
She shakes her head. “I’m not a hundred percent sure. If the Minister of DND is involved in something criminal who knows who else might be involved? I need to think about this.”
I can almost see the wheels turning in her mind. Annie’s letter has taken this out of our hands; this, as they say, is way above our pay grade. Jen will have to take it back to her bosses in Ottawa.
“Before I do
anything, I need to see those documents. I want to find out what’s going on and who’s involved.” She turns to me. “Cal, do you want to check in with your buddy, see if he’s cracked the encryption yet?”
I do.
He hasn’t.
“Then we need to find the encryption key. I’m not going to do anything until I see what’s in those damn documents.”
How the hell do we find what key a schizophrenic, alcoholic, homeless genius would have thought up when our only clue is the word ‘garter’?
We all dwell on our own thoughts until Adry says, “This probably isn’t relevant but can someone explain to me how you send a letter to a homeless man?”
They all look at me and I shrug. “That’s a very good question,” Jen says.
9
Nick
Rogan really wanted to come with me to this meeting and, to tell the truth, I’d kinda like him to be here, as backup, if nothing else. I went home and picked up my Glock; it’s in the side pouch on my wheelchair, but I still feel a bit uneasy doing this alone. Still, there’s no way I want Rogan in this meeting. He might just hear too much. I couldn’t stand the shame of him knowing.
As I pull into the handicapped parking spot, my phone rings. I press the button on the steering wheel. “Nick Stammo.”
“Mr. Stammo, Etienne Grey here.”
Oh crap. “Good afternoon.” What the hell am I going to tell him?
“I was expecting progress reports on your investigation into my wife’s activities. We met on Monday, it’s now Friday and I’ve heard nothing.”
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.” Since we started the business, I’ve never lied to a client, but here I go. “We followed her on Wednesday night but unfortunately we lost her. But, right now, I’m following up a lead, which I think will give us some useful information.” The last bit’s almost true.
Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 4, 5 & 6 (Box Set) Page 31