by Dave Butler
“I’d like that,” said Liang, sliding a business card across the table with one pink-tipped finger.
He picked up the card but didn’t immediately look at it. There was strange logic at work here that did not make sense to him. “Allow me to ask you a question, Suzanne. If you are concerned about my funds, and about what you heard from Matt, rightly or wrongly, why did you ask to meet with me today? I’m sure there are many possible investment avenues for you.”
“That’s a perceptive question, Stafford.” She moved forward in her chair and lowered her voice. “I can only say that the Canada Revenue Agency has been asking questions about … one part of our business … and I would prefer that some of our money be moved to investments that can’t be touched, that are perhaps somewhat less visible to those searching for them, at least in the short term.”
Now that she was closer, with only an arm’s-length separating them, the smell of her perfume reached Austin’s nose. It was sweet, slightly musky, almost animal-like, with a hint of vanilla. It raised his heart rate a couple of beats. She regarded him with slightly raised eyebrows. This was not the answer he had anticipated, and it was certainly not an answer he would expect from an undercover investigator. His worries began to recede.
“I see,” he said, his thoughts racing, his voice barely a whisper. “Then perhaps we’re not so different, you and I. Perhaps we can do business that will benefit us both.”
“That’s what I was hoping you would say, Stafford.”
“How much would you like to invest?”
“For now, I have two million that I have to move quickly. If this works out, there will be more. Will that amount pose a problem for you?”
Austin hoped that his reaction wasn’t obvious to Liang. It was no longer her perfume that was raising his heart rate. Two million dollars would solve his immediate cash-flow challenges and give him enough breathing room to implement his exit plan. It was almost too good to be true, and the timing could not have been better. For a moment, the worry returned. This was too good to be true. But he could check out her story before he made any moves. He felt like he had a cartoon angel on one shoulder encouraging him not to do it, and a devil on the other, urging him to go ahead. Austin made his decision. “That’s not a problem at all, Suzanne. If you decide to proceed, I will put that money to very good use. I’m sure you’ll be pleased.”
“Excellent. And remind me of the interest rate you’ve been paying to your investors?”
“As Matt may have told you, we’ve been averaging 13 percent per annum over the last twelve months. We pay that out quarterly.”
“That is very attractive. Given my situation … and yours … I’m comfortable with that for now. We can always renegotiate in future.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
Liang moved forward in her chair. Both elbows and her pink bra rested on the table, the contents of the bra pushing upwards enticingly. Inexplicably, Austin found that her perfume had a subtly different scent now, one that raised his anxiety level slightly. A hint of adrenalin mixed with high notes of fear. He unconsciously moved his upper body back from her.
“Let me make one thing very clear, Stafford,” said Liang, her voice quiet yet steely. She slowly turned and looked across the room. Like a man under hypnosis, Austin followed her gaze. Two unsmiling men, one wearing sunglasses, both very large, sat watching them from a far table. Austin turned back to Liang. Her subtle smile had returned. But now Austin saw no warmth there.
“Those are my brothers,” she said. “I mentioned that the money we’ve spoken about comes from a family business. I require your personal guarantee that our family will have immediate access to that money whenever we may request it. You must understand that we will not accept any delays. Failure to get the money to us upon my request will have significant negative implications for you. Do you understand?”
Austin stared at Liang, the ambient sounds of the restaurant drowned out by the rushing of blood that echoed in his ears. If this woman was an investigator, either with the Securities Commission or some police force, then she was extremely good, nothing like any of the bumblers he’d previously dealt with. She’d woven a story that was unexpected, compelling, and very different from anything he’d heard before. She could be setting him up for a very big fall. If he agreed to work with her, particularly now that she’d made the oblique suggestion the money might not be 100 percent legit, he was heading down a path of no return.
However, if she wasn’t in law enforcement, and if she did have two million dollars to invest with him, then he’d hit a lucky break when he needed it most. If that was the case, however, she was far more dangerous than any investigator could ever be. He had no idea what the Liang family was involved in, but suspected that the products they were buying and selling didn’t appear in local stores, and the Liangs would never be profiled in B.C. Business magazine. He understood that this could be a deal with the devil … a devil that would hunt him down mercilessly if she didn’t get her money back. If that happened he’d lose more than just his soul. But he had no choice. He desperately needed cash for the final stages of his plan, and this might be his last opportunity to obtain it.
“I understand,” Austin said, his voice weak, shaky. “Let me know when you’re ready to proceed.”
CHAPTER 36
APRIL 23, 10:30 A.M.
“Case dismissed.” The judge’s gavel banged on the bench like an exclamation point concluding a sentence. But in this case, there would be no sentence. And no $4,000 fine.
The federal Crown prosecutor stood, sighed, and began returning files to her briefcase. Across the courtroom, the accused and his lawyer celebrated with high-fives. Seated in the front row, behind the prosecutor, Jenny Willson hung her head in disappointment. She’d been unable to help convict a young Alberta man of illegal possession of fossils from the world-famous Burgess Shale. Reluctantly relying on weak evidence gathered by a young Yoho warden, Willson and the prosecutor had failed to prove that this man had possession and control of the fossils, as opposed to one of the other two men who’d also been in the truck when the warden pulled it over on the road from Takkakaw Falls. Willson rose from her wooden chair, wondering if she should have pursued the case at all, whether lack of sleep was clouding her judgment. She had spent the last three nights driving the roads around Golden, looking for the truck used to abduct her mother. And while sleep was highly overrated at a time like this, it pissed her off that she’d let exhaustion get the better of her in the courtroom.
For Willson, it was scant consolation that a pair of rare lace crab fossils was back in the government’s hands. And she felt no joy in knowing that the accused man had lost his chance to sell them for big money to a private collector.
“Warden Willson,” said the judge, pulling his reading glasses from his face and staring directly at her, “the evidence you’ve brought in front of this court is usually more compelling.”
“My apologies, your honour,” said Willson. “I’m somewhat distracted. It won’t happen again.”
“The local officers have advised me of your … personal situation. I was expecting a request for an adjournment, and would have granted it. But I wish you the best of luck.” The judge offered her a warm, fatherly smile, then turned his attention back to the courtroom. “Next case.”
Willson walked out to the hallway, preoccupied, angry at herself for making a rookie mistake. She turned left but looked right to watch the accused and his two friends smoking in the light rain outside. Not looking where she was going, she again bumped into Ben Fortier. His long, strong arms grabbed her.
“Geez, Ben. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” But then she noticed the serious look on his face. “What?”
“They found the truck, Jenny.”
“Where? Did they find my mother?”
“Not yet. One of our highway patrol guys found it parked on an abandoned logging road off the Trans-Canada, a few kilometres west of Donald. There was no one
in it but he says there were two pairs of footprints in the mud heading away from it, up the road.”
“Holy shit. Did he follow them?”
Instead of answering, Fortier grabbed Willson’s elbow. “Let’s talk and drive, Jenny. I need you over at the detachment.”
He slammed open the front door of the courthouse and they both sprinted to the police car. The gear on Fortier’s belt clinked and bounced.
“And in answer to your question,” said Fortier, as he sped along 10th Avenue North, “he didn’t follow the tracks, and that’s a good thing. Now that we think we know where they may be, we need to do this right. The officer is parked down on the highway watching the truck in case they try to leave.”
When they reached the newly built detachment, Willson noticed a large blue van parked outside. Several black-uniformed officers piled out of the back. “What’s this?” she asked.
“RCMP Emergency Response Team for the SE District happened to be running a training scenario near Invermere today. I spoke to the on-call critical incident commander about the situation, so he sent them up here. They just arrived.”
Willson opened the car door and put one leg on the pavement. But instead of getting out, she turned to Fortier. “I want to go to the site now, Ben. I need to know that my mum’s okay. It’s great that these guys are here, but let’s just go, please. I’m fucking tired of doing the right thing, tired of waiting.”
“Jenny, I know you want to help … and you will. But we can’t just charge in there like a pair of cowboys. We know Trueman’s armed, and based on what we heard from her husband, she’s unstable. That’s a combination that could go very bad for everyone involved. We’ve got the access road covered, and we’ve got the pros here, so let’s take advantage of them.”
“This goes against what my gut’s telling me to do, Ben,” she said, reluctantly climbing out of the car. “I’ll trust you for now, but my patience isn’t limitless. That’s my mum out there with that wing nut.” She knew Fortier was right to hold her back, but that did nothing to quell her anxiety or her desire to race off and save her mother.
When they reached the small boardroom that was quickly and noisily being transformed into an ERT command centre, Willson didn’t know whether to feel relieved or anxious. On the one hand, she saw a team of the fittest police officers in this part of B.C. — men and women who’d been selected, trained, and equipped to deal with everything from covert surveillance and rural tracking to high-risk arrests and barricaded suspects. But realizing that this expertise and weaponry had only gathered here because her mother had been abducted by an armed and clearly troubled woman bent on revenge caused her heart to race. This was as serious as things could get, and there was no way to guess how it would turn out.
Willson noticed a tall staff sergeant, dressed in a black uniform like the others, who appeared to be leading the planning. Fortier whispered in her ear: “He’s the operational team leader.” Willson saw the four gold upward-facing chevrons on his arm.
“Okay, folks,” the staff sergeant said, “Gather round. Google Earth images show a trapper’s cabin three kilometres beyond where the truck was found. I just sent a member to the airport to fly over it in a fixed-wing aircraft. The cabin’s in the trees, so I’m not sure if they’ll be able to see anything, but I asked them to do only one pass so as not to spook anyone on the ground. They should be reporting back in a few minutes to let us know if they spotted any activity, tracks, or other vehicles. As you all know, we’re dealing with at least one suspect, Sandy Trueman, and one abductee, Anne Willson.” He pointed to pictures of both women that had been taped to the opposite wall. The enlarged driver’s licence photos, like all government identification, made them both look equally guilty of something. Their faces were dark and unsmiling in the grainy black-and-white reproductions. “You’ll all get copies of these so you’ll know who is who. For now, we’re assuming these two women are at the cabin. There could also be other individuals there who we don’t know about. We need to plan how we will approach the site to see what’s happening, and if they’re there, the tactics we’ll use to free the hostage and peacefully arrest the suspect. Because it’s so close to the highway, we will stop traffic in both directions until we know what we’re dealing with.”
Willson nervously observed the proceedings. These were trained professionals, and while she was comforted by their careful planning, her anxiety remained on a knife’s edge. The shock of seeing her mother’s unsmiling picture on the wall heightened her fears.
Willson felt her phone ping with an incoming message. For an instant, she wondered if it was from her mother, but then remembered that her mother had left her cellphone and purse at home. She stepped away from the long boardroom table, leaned against the wall, took her phone from her pocket, and looked down at the screen. It was a text from Mike Berland.
Jenny, sorry to hear about your mother. I hope she’s okay. What’s going on? M.
“You slimy son of a bitch!” said Willson, enraged, realizing too late that she’d spoken out loud. She looked up at a room full of questioning faces. “My apologies,” she said, flushing.
“Anything we need to know about?” asked the staff sergeant.
“No. Sorry. Please continue.” She knew the only reason she was being allowed to stay in the room after her outburst was that she was in uniform.
The officer turned back to his team and continued laying out the plan. Willson snuck a look at Fortier standing beside her. His face expressed concern.
“Are you okay?” he whispered. “Do you want to go outside and talk?”
Willson showed him the message. She’d told Fortier about the way the reporter had left the country and exposed her investigation. She hadn’t, of course, told him about the empty space Berland had left in her heart.
“What the hell does he want?”
“I’m guessing information for another fucking story,” Willson said, struggling to keep her voice down. “Jesus. What a dick. This whole thing is his fault, and then he sends me a text like we’re still buddies? Does he think I’m fucking stupid?” She slid her finger angrily across the screen, deleting the message.
Thirty minutes later, Willson and Fortier, now in a police SUV, turned onto the Trans-Canada at the north end of Golden. With two police cars ahead of them and one behind, Fortier drove well above the speed limit with his red-and-blue emergency lights flashing. Like the others, his siren was silent. They did not want to announce their approach to the remote cabin.
“You okay, Jenny?” asked Fortier, his eyes on the vehicles ahead of him.
“I want my mother back, safe and sound. Having to watch someone else take control drives me crazy. When I know she’s safe, I’ll be fine.” But Willson knew her mother wouldn’t be fine. Far from it. Even if she hadn’t been physically harmed by Trueman, the emotional toll on her already fragile psyche could be devastating.
She stared out the window at trees and houses and billboards flashing by as they raced north, then she raised both hands to the back of her head, interlaced her fingers, rested her head against the headrest, and stared at the roof of the police car.
“I fucked this up, Ben,” she said, her heart pounding, her guts churning. “And my mother’s paying the price.”
“This is not your fault, Jenny,” said Fortier. “We’ve got the best of the best involved now. If your mother is at that cabin, we’ll get her out safely.”
Willson dropped her head and noticed that they were passing a line of stopped cars. Fortier’s highway patrol colleagues must have stopped the westbound traffic at the truck weigh-station at Donald. She stared at the faces in the car windows as they passed. Wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, they stared back at her and the quartet of police vehicles flying by them, fast and silent.
“It is my fault,” she said. “I should never have let that fucking journalist into my life … into our lives. I may not ever see him again, but if I do, I’ll kick his spineless ass from here to the border and back again.
”
“Hold that thought, Jenny,” said Fortier with a chuckle. “I have no doubt you’ll do exactly that if given half a chance. But perhaps do it south of the border so you’re out of my jurisdiction?”
A minute later, they crossed the new bridge over the Columbia River near Donald and raced up the long hill toward the wide curve in the highway that brought them close to the trapper’s cabin. Fortier pulled in to the temporary staging area set up at the junction with the old forest road. Around a slight corner to the right, they could see Trueman’s truck parked twenty metres ahead on the rough gravel road.
Willson jumped out and began moving toward it.
“Hold on,” said the staff sergeant. “You’re not going anywhere.” He was standing in front of a table that had been set up beside the blue ERT van. The table was covered with various maps, photographs, and radios. “In fact, I don’t like that you’re here at all,” he added, glaring at Fortier, “but since you are, you’ll do exactly as I say.”
Willson felt Fortier’s hand gently come to rest on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. “My mother’s in there,” she said to the staff sergeant, stepping closer. “I’m not going to stand around here with my thumb up my ass when she might be hurt or in danger.”
Willson saw that the officer wasn’t fazed at all by her aggression. “You either stand here like I tell you to,” he said, still leaning on the table with his head turned toward her, “or Corporal Fortier will put you in cuffs in the back of his car. It’s your choice.”
Willson again felt Fortier’s hand, now less gentle.
“All right, all right,” she said, arms out, palms up. “But what’s happening? It looks like you’re all standing around doing nothing, wasting time.”
“For your information, we have a pair of two-man teams moving in to observe the cabin. They’re close, but I won’t do anything until I get a full situation report from them. And you won’t, either. I have to know what we’re dealing with.”