by Ron Corbett
“Can you tell me anything about the crime scene?”
“Let’s see,” he said, and Yakabuski heard more paper being rustled. It lasted longer this time and when the sergeant spoke next, he said, “There are a few oddities. There were no signs of struggle inside the office. And all the blood found at the scene belonged to Dumont. For a killing this violent, I’ve never seen that before.”
“Could Dumont have been drugged, or passed out?”
“Anything is possible, although Dumont was known to us, and he didn’t have a reputation for being a drug user. Or as someone that could be easily tricked.”
Yakabuski thanked the sergeant again for phoning and hung up. He sat at his desk with his eyes closed. When he opened them, he reached for his phone and started making calls.
His first two calls were brief, but the third lasted nearly fifteen minutes. Halfway through, he took a steno pad from his desk drawer and started taking notes. When he was done the call he stood up, took his coat from the couch where he had thrown it, and left the detachment. He phoned O’Toole from the parking lot, as he was backing up his Jeep.
“I’m out for a few hours.”
“Where are you going, Yak?”
“Going to bring in Sean Morrissey. And we can stop looking for Gabriel Dumont.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Grace Dumont was released at 1 p.m. She’d had a dreamless sleep the night before, fallen asleep right after her captor gave her a hot chocolate, awoken with the sun nearly full in the sky, and been taken back to the Dakota pickup truck. The man who had held her captive the past three days drove over the North Shore Bridge and then down the service road behind Filion’s Field.
The truck stopped. The young girl pushed open the passenger door. Before stepping out, the man placed something in her hand.
She watched the truck make a three-point turn and take the service road back the way it had come. When she could not see the truck anymore, she counted to one hundred, as the driver had told her. She looked around while she counted. On the western horizon she could see high cumulus clouds. For the first time in many weeks, the sky was not a light blue. It was cobalt and getting darker.
When she reached one hundred she began the short walk to her home. She cut across the soccer pitch and entered the rear door of Building H. Rode the elevator with an elderly woman who stared at her strangely but never spoke. It was mid-afternoon, and she was surprised to find her mother at home, sitting in the kitchen, and when Rachel Dumont heard the door open she ran to her daughter with tears streaming down her face. The little girl also started to cry. She was picked up in her mother’s arms, kissed on the cheek, the mouth, the nape of her neck, her mother saying nothing more than her name for several minutes. Then the girl was put back down, and her mother looked closely into her face.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Did anything happen to you? Did anyone harm you?”
“No. I did what you always tell me to do, Mommy.”
“What’s that?”
The girl looked up at her mother in surprise. She hadn’t been gone that long. She put her hands on her hips, gave her little body a twist, and doing a poor impersonation of Rachel Dumont, said, “Get through the tough days, Grace. Tomorrow will be different.”
The mother’s tears came rolling down her cheek. What a child she had. What a remarkable, smart, tough, you’re-going-to-be-all-right-up-here little girl.
Grace looked at her mother and remembered what she had brought home. “I have something for you.”
“Something for me?”
“I think you’ll like it.”
The girl unclasped the hand she had been holding tightly clenched since stepping out of the pickup truck. Shoved in her pocket for the walk across Filion’s Field. Balled up while she rode the elevator. She unfurled her tiny fingers, and there in her palm was a diamond.
“The man said we could have this.”
. . .
Yakabuski took Highway 7 to the turnoff to Buckham’s Bay and then headed west, travelling beside the Springfield River. The temperature had begun to drop, and he could see high cumulus clouds on the horizon. The radio said snow was in the forecast. A storm of about twenty centimetres, coming tomorrow morning, although Yakabuski knew, by looking at those clouds, that it was coming earlier than that.
He drove through Buckham’s Bay, and then the tiny hamlet of La Toque, where there used to be a voyageur portage past a set of bad rapids. The rapids were no longer there, but an old cemetery was still by the shore, where they used to bury the drowned. Past the cemetery the river widened, and for a time Yakabuski could not see the far shore. The hardwood trees he drove past were black and the last leaves were finally falling. When the far shore came back into view it came as a black line sitting atop grey water.
When he reached St. Bernard he stopped at the post office and asked for directions, as the place he was seeking could not be found on his GPS. The postmaster wrote the directions on the back of an envelope, saying he used to drive a rural route that took him past that place every day. Did Yakabuski have family there?
“No.”
“Well, it’s a lovely place,” said the postmaster, and handed him the map.
The turnoff was five minutes outside St. Bernard, poorly marked as the postmaster had warned. A secondary road that turned quickly to gravel, the stones just starting to freeze into place so the driving wasn’t bad. Yakabuski drove past hoarfrost fields and crystallized vegetables missed in the harvest, corn and wheat mostly, the stalks looking like icicles that had fallen and impaled the earth. Drove past abandoned homesteader cabins with timbers black and cracked, the off-centre door long gone, nothing but a black hole the wind rushed through. Drove until he reached an wrought-iron fence with a gate announcing he had just arrived at Ste. Anne Cemetery.
He parked and let the car idle. In the northwest corner of the cemetery stood Sean Morrissey.
Chapter Fifty-Five
The wind was getting strong, and leaves were twirling around the tombstones as Yakabuski began walking down the row that would take him to Morrissey. Dark brittle leaves that had finally been torn from their branches, with edges so sharp they could cut a person if they blew across their face. Morrissey turned once to see him approach, then turned away. There was a wheelbarrow near the tombstone he was standing in front of, and two men sat near it, smoking cigarettes.
When Yakabuski was standing beside him, Morrissey said, “How did you find me?”
“Your uncle is buried here. After your dad made sure he couldn’t be buried anywhere in Springfield. Were you close to your uncle, Sean?”
“Not really.”
“Close to your mother though.”
“Is that a question?”
“I reckon not.”
The tombstone on the freshly dug grave read: Katherine Anne Morrissey, August 15, 1954–September 10, 1986; May She Forever Rest in Peace. The two men stared at the tombstone. The men smoking cigarettes looked at them and then looked away.
“You figured it out just from that?”
“No. Last night I started thinking your mother was probably dead. I phoned some of the memorial companies this morning. Robertson’s was my third call. They told me you’d ordered the tombstone last Monday. Needed it to be here today. Not a day before. Not a day after. Where did you find her body?”
“Miller’s Crossing. Off a trail in the conservation area.”
“On the way from Cork’s Town to the airport.”
“That’s right.”
“Is that how you got the date for the headstone?”
“No. He told me.”
He told me. Yakabuski shuddered. He could just imagine. “They were legally married?”
“Private ceremony at home. Father Joe did it. I was there too. Just the four of us. I still don’t know
why he did it.”
“Maybe he loved her.”
“He never loved anything. He possessed a great many things. I think that’s how he saw it.”
“So you waited thirty years to kill him.”
“Don’t believe I’ve said that.”
The leaves were now falling so fast and in such numbers they had begun to obscure the sightlines to the river. The wind seemed to be coming from many directions. Yakabuski knew that if you were out on the river fishing right then, it would be a bad wind. A lost season always ended with bad wind. It was why the best guides in High River refused to work during one.
He looked over at Morrissey’s Cadillac, parked next to the workmen’s pickup truck at the end of the row and said, “Got any diamonds in that car, Sean?”
“Would you like to search it?”
“I’m sure someone will. I’m thinking I have better things to do.”
Morrissey didn’t say anything. Bent down and wiped some leaves away from the tombstone.
“Your mother wasn’t from Belfast, was she? She was from Cape Diamond. She was Cree. That’s why she had that ring. Probably the reason your dad kept her a secret.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, Yak.”
“Why not keep the diamond? I can’t figure that part out.”
“Speaking hypothetically, and with no knowledge of this crime, maybe it needed to be returned.”
Yakabuski looked back at the tombstone. Tried to think of a follow-up question. Nothing came to him and so he said quietly, “I’m wondering where you go from here, Sean. I can follow everything up to now. I can see the scheme you and Gabriel hatched. Start a war as a distraction to a jewellery heist. You both need to have skin in the game, so you sacrifice a father; Gabriel sacrifices a cousin and kidnaps a granddaughter. Might be about even. But you’re a Shiner and a thief, so that wouldn’t be good enough. You needed to add a rip-off to the back end. And you brought that lunatic up here to get rid of Gabriel for you.”
“Another interesting theory of yours, Yak. And the proof of this would be?”
“I’m not trying to prove anything today. I’m just trying to get ready for what’s coming.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember what I said in your office about schemers? How they always go too far? That’s what you’ve just done, Sean.”
“You’re speaking in riddles, Yak. Why don’t you just tell me what you want to say?”
“Cambino Cortez. He’ll be coming for you. You’ve brought him right to Springfield.”
Morrissey didn’t speak right away. Cocked his head a few times, as though lost in thought. Eventually, he said, “We need to stop talking, Yak. There will be plenty of time to talk when I get back to Springfield. Have you called it in?”
“Soon as I saw you.”
“Then come see me in the holding cells. Bring a coffee. That would be friendly.”
“You’re going to need some friends, Sean. The Travellers aren’t going to like the way they just got played. I doubt if the Popeyes are going to much like you becoming rich with a scheme you never told them about. And I don’t think those are even your biggest problems.”
“What makes you so sure he’s coming?”
“Because you’ve got one-point-two billion dollars in stolen diamonds stashed somewhere. Because Cortez was seven hours from here last night. Do you really think he’s taking his cut and going home?”
The wind was now strong enough to be pulling leaves from the trees and sending them out over the river in funnel formations. Spiralling lines of frayed colour that twirled for a moment and then were blown away. In the distance they heard police sirens and Morrissey looked up the road, waiting for the cars to appear. Yakabuski reached behind his back for the handcuffs.
“Turn around, Sean, left hand on your shoulder,” he said, and when Morrissey turned to look at him, saw the handcuffs, he did as he was asked. Yakabuski put the cuffs on and started leading him down the row of tombstones. When the first police car arrived, two cops jumped out, their guns drawn, but when they saw Yakabuski they holstered their weapons and stood by the car waiting. Just as they reached the gate, a light snow started falling.
Epilogue
The snows had come and gone, and it was now spring. Cambino Cortez had never seen snow and so he had stayed for the season. For the new sensations it offered. The brace of cold air on his skin. A sun that travelled flat across the sky. A new world.
He journeyed far that winter, never staying in the same place more than two nights. Walked through forests with pines so large and towering he could not see the upper branches when he stood beneath them. Walked the girth of one tree and counted twenty-three paces. Walked a frozen lake that creaked and groaned beneath him, as though a thing trapped.
He followed a grey jay that brought him to a ridge of high land, where he stood for most of the day, letting the wind pass over him. The high land ran east to west and he could see it easily, unfurling in either direction, a raised spine of rock that separated the water. He walked upon the Divide for many days, before following a river that led him to the bay of a giant ocean. Once there he saw men in boats made from the hides of animals, fishing far out in the bay. He watched them until the sun fell and the world became dark. The boats never came ashore.
He travelled through storms he had never imagined, never dreamed, snow falling so heavy it was like a curtain had been dropped, separating one world from another. It felt like a physical passage, walking not through air, not through wind or rain, but something as palpable as walls. The sky hidden. The ground swirling. It was a world that tried to push you around. One night, in one of those storms, he heard a wolf howling, and he wondered what sort of animal would venture outside during a storm like that. Not hunker. Not hide. Howl into the maw of the storm. Such disdain for the physical world. Such power and confidence the animal had.
He kept walking and the days lost distinction. Time slid off his back. He saw frozen bays the size of small seas and mountains with not a tree growing on any flank. An elemental world. Nothing superfluous. Just what was base and strong and forever. The migratory birds returned when the snow was still deep on the ground and Cambino guessed that meant it had been a long winter. He had no way of knowing. The birds flew in circles. Bright colours that spun in the sky. Many looked familiar. The birds that arrived in Heroica during the Festival of Lights, when sculptures of a baby and a virgin mother were carried on poles down crowded streets.
Soon after the birds arrived, the snow started to melt, and the world became pooled water and mud. Trees started to talk to him, late at night and early in the day, the juice beneath the bark burbling and oozing and making small child sounds. He saw black bears and white geese. A patch of blue appeared in a sheet of ice one day, and he sat and watched as a lake materialized. Creaking and snapping and moaning as the ice broke apart. The labour of nature. He had only seen it before with animals.
When it was time, he returned to the campervan.
. . .
Cambino hit the rewind button on the laptop computer and watched the video one more time. It had been several months, and he wanted to confirm his memories were correct.
The tape had been purchased from an old business associate of his father’s, a Shiner who had managed to get a message to Cambino, saying the tape was for sale. A high price had been asked but Cambino did not haggle; information about your business partners, knowing what they wanted to keep secret, was usually worth the asking price.
He watched a boy’s bedroom come into focus. The camera was shooting from above, hidden in a light or a ceiling fan probably. The old Shiner had been head of security, and he had bugged the bedroom without the knowledge of his boss, he told Cambino during their one phone conversation. Just doing his job, but when he told his boss about the tape, he knew he had made a mistake. He left Springfield the same day.
The boy looked at his father and said, “She just left us?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“She didn’t say anything to you, before she left?”
“No.”
“Didn’t leave anything behind?”
Cambino hit the pause button. Leaned in so he could take a close look at Augustus’s face. There was no mistaking it. His memories had been correct. There was fear in the man’s eyes. He hit play.
“No, she didn’t leave anything behind, Sean.” When Augustus said that the boy leaned back on the bed and slid his arm beneath one of the pillows. Left it there a second. When the hand reappeared, it was holding a wooden box.
“What do you have there, lad?”
“You know.”
“And where did you find it?”
“In your safe.”
“You’ve been in my safe, Sean?”
“Took me less than ten minutes.”
Augustus gave his son a hard look. But the boy did not turn away. Rather, he opened the lid of the box and held it out so his father could see inside. The small arm as solid as a beam, not a quiver to it, the box held out like a communion offering.
“Why would she leave this behind?” he said.
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask her, Sean.”
“She always wore this ring.”
The pause button was hit one more time. Cambino leaned in to look closely at the boy’s face. After a few seconds he smiled and nodded. Then he looked at Augustus’s frozen face. Not needing to lean in this time. Seeing it clearly. There was still the glow of fear in his eyes, but there was something new there as well: a look of hatred, the unbalanced twitch of combat. It was a look he had never seen a father give a son.