by Jason Mason
Connie slowly but surely was able to find the link in the history of the web browser and was happy to see that Mary’s account was still active when the page opened.
“I’m in, now what?”
“Ok, look at the menu. See that feature, find my phone?” Baker was tapping the screen as he spoke. “Click on that.”
Connie clicked on the link and then clicked on another link that searched for the iPhone that she knew her sister had just bought a few months earlier. Immediately a map opened up with a small icon pinpointing exactly where the location of the phone was. To whatever degree of accuracy, Baker didn’t know, but it was a start.
“There it is!” excitedly shouted Baker. His excitement quickly dissipated as soon as he noticed where the pin was.
The phone was down in the Mill Creek ravine, a small wilderness area location just across the river from downtown. There are no houses there, there’s no buildings, it’s just wilderness. Baker’s mind immediately thought of the worst possibilities and after looking over at her, he could tell Connie’s mind was as well. He tried to reassure her.
“Hey look, that’s just where her phone is right?” he said as optimistically as he could. “We can go over there and look to see what we can find, and from what I’ve heard these phone tracking things aren’t the most accurate pieces of technology in the world. They could be off by as much as 500 meters. Or she could be at a friend’s house in that area and dropped it while hiking in the ravine. That would explain why she didn’t call either.”
But Baker’s words didn’t reassure himself. He’s dealt with enough murderers in his profession to know that he’s not just going to the ravine to look for a phone. Few people are going to be hiking in that area with the weather the way it is, which is probably why the location was chosen. It’s a pointless place to hide a phone which you could just as easily have tossed in a dumpster. So it’s unlikely that he’ll only be searching for a phone there.
He’ll be looking for a body as well.
◆◆◆
As Baker pulled his car in to one of the few parking spots near the northern trailhead to the ravine the parking area was bright with the nearly full moon looming huge in the sky. It was still dark with the sun going down around 5 PM these nights, and it was cold, but at least where the tree cover didn’t block the sky they would be able to get some moonlight to guide their way. There was only a few flakes of snow falling this evening so it could be a lot worse. While some people come to the ravine in the winter to snowshoe, that was mostly done during the day and there were no other cars in sight so they likely had an empty woods to themselves.
The Mill Creek ravine is a swatch of land that cuts straight through the south-side of Edmonton, created by a small brook that dug a trench two hundred feet deep into the bedrock over the course of tens of thousands of years. There were walking trails on either side of the creek and off to the sides of the trails were abundant numbers of trees (as there always is in the valleys), with rabbits, grouse and coyotes making their homes within it. The ground was too unstable to construct anything in the ravine, so it became a wildlife preserve accessible to all.
And also a great place to hide a body, Baker thought.
“Ok Connie, there’s a path in the woods down there and it looks like maybe four or five hundred meters down it we’ll be right around the area where we saw the phone on the map.”
God I hope it’s not here, he thought. Just be wrong, Apple. For once, just be wrong.
Connie and Baker pulled out their cellphones and turned their flashlights on to light up a few feet of the trail ahead of them. The remainder of the trail was dark except for small patches far enough away from the trees to let in the moonlight, and they had to be cognisant of the ice patches on the hard-packed snow as they walked in silence. Eventually they came to a steep incline where during the day it appeared children had went sliding on and inched down the hill one behind the other with Connie slipping a few feet from the bottom and taking out Baker with her. Once they stopped sliding Baker helped her up.
“Are you all right?” he asked as he pulled her to her feet.
“Yeah I think so. It was pretty snowy and a soft landing where I fell. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine, too. I just have to look around and get my bearing again.” Baker responded. He’s jogged these trails a lot in the summer, but like most people in the city avoids them in the winter where everything looks very different, especially at night, than the way the popular trails look in the summer. They were at a trailhead which met up with one of the two main trails skirting the river and just ahead was a small clearing.
“Look!” Connie exclaimed, grabbing Baker by the arm and pointing towards the brook.
No more than twenty feet away from them, two coyotes that were drinking from an opening in the ice were alerted to their presence by the loud noises of their fall. As one of the wild dogs followed them with his eyes, clearly visible by reflecting the moon light, the other howled to alert any other nearby coyotes of their presence. The coyotes were far more active at night than during the day and were not used to humans in their territory at this hour.
“Just keep your distance and they’ll leave you alone,” Baker reassured her. “They’re like bears, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”
“I once saw a grizzly bear when I was hiking in the mountains,” she rebutted. “And I can guarantee you I was far more afraid of that bear than she was of me. It was not even close.”
Baker laughed as she grabbed his arm and walked closely beside him. She may have done it partially because she was scared of the coyotes but it also helped them both avoid slipping on the sheer ice that pot-marked the trail wherever the snow had melted away. Either way grabbing his arm made her feel safer.
While walking, Baker kept a close eye on the GPS on his phone. When he noticed they were nearing the location where the phone was supposed to be left, he stopped abruptly causing Connie to nearly slip and fall and take him down with her again.
“We’re close,” he told her. In revenge for making her nearly fall again she shoved him, causing him to fall backwards into the soft, snowy hill on the side of the trail.
“Hey, what was that for?”
“If you stop like that you’re going to make me fall, Baker!” she told him, not all too upset. Apparently pushing him into the snow satisfied her need for revenge,
◆◆◆
which was about as painless and without malicious as possible so she was no longer upset about her near fall.
“OK, fair enough,” said Baker as he reached out his hand for Connie to pull him up this time.
“Where should we look?” she asked after he brushed the snow off himself.
Baker pointed up the steep ravine cliff side that was about two hundred feet long and at least fifty feet high. Of course, to make any searching more difficult for people the hill was densely covered in trees, both barren ones and evergreens. It wouldn’t be quick to find anything here with good light in the summer, let alone in the winter at night.
“Up there?” Connie asked incredulously.
“Yeah up there,” Baker laughed. “Didn’t you take me geocaching a few times before? Well it’ll be just like that, only this time we’re looking for a phone and not some Tupperware containers.”
And hopefully not a body, Baker left unsaid.
Splitting up they each took their own phones out scanned the ground in front of them as they scaled the hill which was steep enough to be considered a cliff in some places. Baker had to grab onto trees to prevent himself from falling back down as he progressed up.
“Hey, Connie. I’m going to go up to the top of the hill and get to that little roadway there and try to see if I can see anything from that vantage point, alright?” he yelled out.
“Sure, but why didn’t we just park at the top of the hill there to begin with then?” Connie yelled back.
It was a good question. He could have easily parked on the side of the
road near to where the phone was and walked down from there.
“Because I never thought of it…” Baker yelled back.
They both laughed, and Connie actually made a snowball to toss at him as he was running up the hill. It got him square in the back. He scooped some loose snow up to fire back but missed her entirely. She dodged, but it was completely unnecessary as he hit a tree a few feet to her left.
He struggled to make it to the top of the hill, falling on his butt more than a few times and once when sliding backwards during a fall he had to grab an exposed root to prevent him from slipping down the hill even further. Eventually, with great effort he made it to the top of the hill and up to the roadway. After checking his GPS again to ensure he was in the right general area, he walked up and down the road looking for signs that a body might have been tossed out of a car and down into the ravine. It hadn’t snowed very much at all since Mary went missing so if there were any signs he’d be able to see them from up here.
After pacing up and down for five minutes he didn’t see any indication of a slide where a body might have been tossed and the only footprints he saw belonged to either himself or the coyotes. That didn’t necessarily mean that the body wasn’t taken into the bush from the same direction he came from but it was a good sign anyways that there wasn’t a body there. It’s not as if whoever might have got to Mary had a helicopter or anything like that.
He was still scanning the ravine from the top of the road, looking at potential areas that someone might toss a cellphone into, when he heard Connie excitedly screaming from further down the hill.
“Baker! I found it! I found it!”
He immediately stopped looking and rushed down the hill to where Connie was and linked up with her. He slid about as much as he walked but managed to stay on his feet the whole time anyways so it was almost like snowboarding without the board as he went down the decline.
She was holding and staring at a small iPhone with a black and white case on it. The battery was obviously dead, but the case itself was a dead giveaway that the phone was Mary’s. Connie looked up at Baker with her eyes lit up and a big smile on her mouth, despite the frost starting to build up on her eyebrows.
“Where exactly did you find it?” he asked, steadying himself on a tree.
She pointed to a patch of snow in front of her with a small rectangular hole and two footprints in front of it. They were Connie’s footprints of course, and were too fresh to be anything else. He looked around and didn’t see any other footprints in the snow but his and hers which told him that there had been nobody else down here since Mary went missing. He stood right over the hole and looked up to the road and sure enough there was a clear line of sight from where he was to the side of the road. It could have easily have been thrown out a car window.
“She must have tossed it out of the car,” Baker said.
“Why would she have done that?” Connie asked following Baker’s stare up to the road.
There were two scenarios that he could think of for why she did it. First was that she was trying to get a message across, knowing that someone would be looking here for her when they traced her phone’s GPS. Secondly, was that she tossed it out because she didn’t want her ex-boyfriend to be able to call or text her anymore… which meant that she really did go on that vacation. As he was trying to figure out which was more likely the final and most logical explanation hit him.
“She didn’t. Whoever took her threw it away right here.”
◆◆◆
The man started his car up, after the lawyer and Sophie’s sister got into their fancy rich car and drove away. He waited long enough to make sure that they couldn’t see his vehicle from theirs before he turned over the ignition and started blasting the heat. He had been sitting in his car and freezing for the last half hour.
As he was making his usual rounds tonight he noticed a Silver Mercedes parked at the entrance to the ravine. That was the same ravine that he tossed Sophie’s phone into, which (looking back) he really should have thrown into the river. With that new technology you can apparently track those things, even when the battery is dead. Or so the internet told him. It was not as if he was up to date on technological advancements at all. He only knew just enough to get by. But seeing Sophie’s sister and that damn lawyer here was too much of a coincidence for his liking, since nobody goes into the ravine at night. Especially not by someone with a car that nice having to risk parking it in this area of town.
Having earlier pulled his car back into an unknown driveway and hoping the owners wouldn’t come out, he sat and waited for the silver vehicle’s driver to come back to his car. Instead, he saw a man emerge from the steep side of the ravine onto the road with his flashlight going and a little later he emerged again, but this time with a woman beside him that looked like an older version of Sophie. He was close enough to see the man’s face, and he instantly recognized him from all of those legal ads around town. Baker something, a criminal defence lawyer. And while he was not savvy with the internet he was still aware enough to do a Facebook search on Sophie under her old name to see if anyone would be looking for her. The woman that emerged from the woods was someone named Connie - Sophie’s old sister.
After the Mercedes disappeared from eyesight he flicked his cigarette butt out the window which landed in a snowman built on the front lawn of the house.
What do they want?
“I don’t know. Why would they be in the woods there? Maybe for Sophie’s cellphone?”
They want to take your Sophie.
“Nobody will take my Sophie.”
The voice in his head was silent as the man drove home. He decided to abandon his hunt for the night. It gives him another chance to see if Sophie was right anyways.
Chapter 10
Speak of the Devil
“Mr. Desjardins, your 11:00 appointment is here,” Ashley said over the speakerphone.
“Send him in,” Baker replied realizing he was close to falling asleep at his desk. What did he even do for the last hour? Nothing, he realized… he was too tired from working late the night before. What he needed was a good night’s sleep but that won’t be coming anytime soon.
He also wasn’t expecting to have an appointment like this today. Late last night one of the firm’s junior associates was called from the Edmonton remand centre by a man named Mackenzie Gladue who was arrested by the police last night on the in relation to the missing women the police were investigating. There were four missing women at this point, including Mary, but there were no bodies leading the local press to suspect that they were isolated incidents or domestic squabbles.
However, it looks like Detective Jeff Jones finally got off his ass and started shaking down leads and arrested this Mac Gladue fellow. But they didn’t have enough evidence to keep in in jail – the police had to release him on bail first thing in the morning on the order of a justice of the peace. And once he was released he looked up criminal defence attorneys on the internet and nobody in town was rated higher than Baker’s firm. So that’s why one of the junior associates were in the Edmonton remand late last night talking to him.
Of course a case this high profile (with the media picking up the story in a few empty exposés) wasn’t going to go to a junior associate, because Allen and Desjardins Criminal Defence LLP is one of the (in Baker’s opinion just the) best criminal defence firms in the country. Baker looked quickly at the notes on the file and sure enough Gladue was an Uber driver. He had a long criminal record which included domestic violence against former girlfriends and fights with strangers. Apparently, with the jail time he received from those cases, he didn’t trust his former attorneys to represent him in this case with much bigger stakes.
Out of curiosity, Baker moved his curtains to see what kind of cars were parked in the outdoor lot in front of his building. Sure enough there was a black Japanese looking sedan that didn’t usually park there. It looked a lot like the car that Mary got into on Thursday night.
And of course this was all predicated on him being the actual person who picked up Mary, which there was no proof of yet. But he seems like he could be. There were no easy answers.
“Mr. Desjardins?” Mackenzie Gladue stood in the entryway of the office.
Six foot nothing, with a bit of a hunched appearance and a wispy moustache he sure looked like he was descended from the ancient first nations tribes that lived in the area, but he surely didn’t act like them. At least not what Baker envisioned the Indigenous people to have acted like back before the white man colonized Canada. He was nervous almost to the point of being scared and his words came out timidly without eye contact. He was acting like a guilty man, and Baker had a lot of experience with guilty men.
“Mr. Gladue, please come in and sit down,” Baker told the man, motioning to one of the chairs across from his desk.
“Call me Mac,” he replied as he took a seat and finally looked up at Baker, who was sitting in his expensive leather lawyer chair. All the things in his office were purchased and designed to give an aura of luxury, which you can afford only if you’re the best. Subconsciously, the nicer his office looked the more confident a prospective client was that Baker could win him the case.
“So tell me why you’re here today, Mac,” Baker said as emotionlessly as he could. “I hear from Adam that you spent the night in remand.”
“I did,” Mac nodded. “I was driving my car for work when the cops pulled me over and brought me in to the station.”