by Scott Cook
He grabbed his cellphone and climbed into the paid-for Volvo, not sure what the day was going to hold. Sam Walsh had been covering the trial up till now (and doing a boring-ass job of it, in Alex’s not-exactly-unbiased opinion), but Alex assumed Bill Vogt, the publisher, would probably want some first-hand account of the ordeal from him pretty soon. Maclean’s magazine was also interested in a piece, and they paid a hell of a lot better than the Chronicle. Chuck Palliser had suggested he write a book about it, an idea Alex’s literary agent had also considered. The story of himself, Tom Ferbey, and Rufus Hodge would probably sell much better than The Devil’s Wristwatch, if only because this time, he had witnessed the murder himself. He was an active part of the story. He might even have an American-style bestseller on his hands, the kind that buys not just Volvos, but beach houses in Florida.
Traffic was pretty tame for the lunch hour as he made his way up Deerfoot Trail freeway to the Chronicle building in the northeast. On the Volvo’s CD player, the Tragically Hip, those great inscrutable poets of Generation X, sang about how courage hadn’t come, but it didn’t matter.
If only he could write about Gregory Larocque’s daughter! That had HBO movie written all over it. But even now, in hindsight, he knew that was a rock that could never be overturned. It would mean an instant appeal for Hodge and, once the media blew the lid off the story, he’d be out of prison and on the street within days.
Of course, it was pretty much a Mexican standoff. Hodge had nothing to gain by going public, unless it was absolutely impossible to trace the attack back to him. The odds of that seemed pretty slim – if Hodge was that clean, Diane Manning would have screamed blue murder and run straight to Barb Foster, the Talking Tits, with her story.
Thinking of Foster reminded Alex that he had to talk to Chuck Palliser sometime before the end of the week about profiling him for the Chronicle. He knew the story would go over like gangbusters: veteran undercover cop spends years sleeping with the enemy, then has the guts to go public and take down one of the country’s biggest and most dangerous organized crime figures. The bastard would be up to his badge in horny cougars by the weekend. Watch for the movie starring Ed Harris.
The midday heat mixed with his hangover like sour milk with Southern Comfort, so Alex hit the air-conditioning and thought about nothing much until he arrived at the Chronicle twenty minutes later.
#
The first face Alex saw as he entered the newsroom was the last one he wanted to see: Sam Walsh was walking toward him with a stride that said there was serious shit to be discussed. Alex was in no mood for serious shit.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Walsh barked. “Why didn’t you answer your cell phone?”
Alex sidestepped Walsh and waved a dismissive hand. “Last time I looked at my paycheck, your name wasn’t on the signature line, so feel free to go find a rope and piss up it.”
Alex expected a smartass comeback from Walsh, but all he got was a blank look. “Whatever, man,” Walsh said with a shrug. He turned and stalked back towards his cubicle.
Alex reached his desk and sat down, wondering what kind of bullshit Walsh was up to now. He was always trying to one-up Alex, had been ever since The Devil’s Wristwatch was published. Was Shippy mad that he’d shown up late? If so, he could go fuck his hat – Alex would have been well within his rights not to show up at all today.
He barely had time to boot up his computer before he heard Bob Shippobotham calling out from his office across the newsroom. “Dunn! Get in here now!” He glanced up from his screen and saw Walsh leaving Shippy’s office. What is this, some kind of schoolyard tattling? “Boss! Boss! Alex is being mean to me!”
Alex rubbed his eyes and sighed. He was usually up for playing the maverick reporter, busting his editor’s chops and doing his own thing, but not today. “Just let me get a coffee,” he said, annoyed.
Then Shippy did something Alex had never seen: he leapt up from his desk and crossed the newsroom in three seconds flat. His basset hound face was as serious as Alex had ever seen it as he grabbed Alex’s elbow and pulled him from his chair.
“Now,” Shippy said quietly, with a look that reminded Alex of Chuck Palliser’s cop face.
“Sure thing, boss.” As they made their way to Shippy’s office, Alex could feel the eyes of the other reporters and editors on him. He wondered for a brief moment whether he was about to be fired. It was like being hauled away from the schoolyard by the principal.
Shippy guided him into his corner office, depositing him in one of the ancient, mismatched chairs that passed for office furniture on the second floor of the Chronicle building. His boss closed the door behind them and drew the ratty vinyl shade in the window that he used to keep an eye on his staff. Alex had been working for the Chronicle for seven years and had never seen the managing editor act this way. In light of what he’d been through since October – not to mention the single-copy sales he’d generated in those eight months – he felt justified in being a little bit pissed.
“Listen, Ship . . .” he began, but stopped when Shippy sat down across from him. Face to face, Alex could see his boss wasn’t angry; his face was pale, and his greasy black hair was even messier than usual. He looked the way Alex felt.
“What the hell is going on?” Alex demanded.
“You’ve been off the grid since Hodge’s verdict yesterday afternoon,” Shippy replied. It was a statement, not a question. “I’m not trying to bust your balls, Alex, but you picked a really bad time to go dark.”
“I think I earned a little time to myself, don’t you?”
“Look, Alex, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to come right out.” He put a hand on Alex’s shoulder. The bags under his old hound dog eyes looked like they were loaded with cement. “Chuck Palliser was murdered around two o’clock this morning.”
Alex blinked. “What?”
“Someone blew up his car with him in it. Right in front of his goddamned house. The overnight kid, whatsisname, Henderson, got it off the scanner. Didn’t have enough time to get it in the second edition, but it’s been all over the radio and social media this morning. I’ve got Walsh on it.”
Alex felt like he was in free-fall, as if someone had hit a switch and dropped the floor right out from under him. You can’t kill Chuck Palliser, he thought stupidly. The guy makes Dog the Bounty Hunter look like Mister Rogers, for Christ’s sake.
“No,” he said quietly. “It’s got to be a mistake.”
Shippy leaned forward so that his face was only a few inches from Alex’s. Under normal circumstances, the coffee and cigarette smell on the man’s breath would have been enough to make Alex’s hungover stomach turn upside down, but now it barely registered.
“I wish it was,” he said. “Not for his sake, but for yours. I mean, Palliser knew the rules. He painted a target on his back the minute he surfaced from undercover and let his face get out there. You, though – you’re innocent in all this.”
“But . . . but Chuck said the Wild Roses couldn’t take a shit without Hodge . . . ”
“The cops said Palliser’s car was stuffed with so much plastic explosive that it was nothing but a slag heap by the time they finally got the fire out. Took out windows up and down the street and toasted two cars parked next to it. Henderson said the cops told him off the record that if the warehouse explosion was just overkill, then Palliser’s car was a message. A loud one.” Shippy saw the look on Alex’s face and softened. “Sorry, son. I guess you know more about the subject than I do.”
Alex leaned farther back in his chair and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. It was just so . . . wrong. The Roses were supposed to be over, finito. Life was supposed to get back to normal. He was supposed to write another “bestseller” and go out with Chuck Palliser for drinks every couple of months. That’s what friends do, and they were friends. Alex had never thought of a cop as a friend before – he drank with them sometimes at the Cuff and Billy downtown, talked off the re
cord, understood where they were coming from – but none of them were really friends.
Except Chuck. Staff Sergeant Charles MacRae Palliser. Don’t-Fuck-With-Chuck.
Alex let out a shaky sigh while Shippy soldiered on, trying to keep himself together. Alex had worked under the man long enough to know that, as far as he was concerned, public displays of emotion ranked right up there with public testicle shaving.
“Walsh is following a lead on who might be behind it,” said Shippy. “He called out to Calgary Remand to find out who’s been visiting Rufus Hodge in lockup. Turns out there’s one guy who’s been spending a lot of time with him.”
Alex was impressed in spite of himself. That was a pretty inspired move on Walsh’s part. He had to admit he, himself, probably wouldn’t have thought of it. “Has this guy got a name?” he asked.
“Eveybody’s got a name,” Shippy answered curtly. It reminded Alex of a staff meeting once, where the boss had gone on a tirade over the term “unnamed source.” He reminded them that all sources have names. They’re unidentified, not unnamed. Alex had crooned, Well, I been through the desert on a source with no name until everyone cracked up and Shippy adjourned the meeting in frustration.
“So who is it?” he asked.
“Did Palliser ever mention a guy named Jason Crowe to you?”
“He’s one of the Roses. Why?”
“Walsh says none of the other members has been to see Hodge. Just Crowe.”
Alex ran a hand over his stubble. “Maybe Hodge is running the show through Crowe now. Chuck never really talked about the pecking order in the Roses, just that Hodge was the ruler and everybody knew it.”
“It’s worth following up, anyway,” Shippy said. “I’m going to let Walsh run with this, see what he can dig up.”
Alex rubbed his neck, suddenly exhausted. “Whatever,” he said. “Look, Ship, this has been a shit afternoon. I’m gonna –”
“We’re not done yet,” Shippy interrupted. “I’m afraid it gets worse.”
“Christ, now what?”
“They found Richie Duff dead in his living room this morning.”
“What?” Alex had thought at this point he was ready for anything; he was wrong. “What the fuck happened?”
“That’s the interesting part,” Shippy said with a malicious gleam in his eye. He was nothing if not a consummate newsman. “His mother found him about three hours ago when she came home with her groceries. His tongue had been cut out – ”
“What the fuck?”
“– but that’s not the worst of it. Whoever did it rammed a giant hunting knife up under his chin and all the way through the inside of his skull. Cut the tongue off at the base from the inside.”
Alex blinked at the floor. He wasn’t surprised to discover he was trembling. “Execution style.”
“Still not the worst of it,” said Shippy.
“What could be worse than that?” Alex croaked. He wasn’t sure whether he was asking out of morbid curiosity or sheer terror.
“His mother found him with five thousand dollars worth of twenties stuffed in his mouth. His severed tongue was on his chest in a rose-shaped blood stain.”
Alex felt the sour tickle of vomit rising in the back of his throat, but before anything could escape, his Blackberry began to chirp. He hit the green answer button without checking the caller ID.
“Hello?” he said weakly.
“Dear boy!” Leslie Singer’s voice blared through the speaker. “Thank God you’re all right! I need to see you immediately!”
CHAPTER 5
The sound of Leslie Singer’s voice usually had a calming effect on Alex. Talking with the old bird reminded him of his days at Carleton, where he’d whiled away many an afternoon (and more than a few jugs of draft) with his professors at the campus pub, delving into the mysteries that only undergrads and their instructors could hope to understand.
That wasn’t the case this afternoon. This afternoon, all Alex could think about was his own imminent death.
He was sitting in an oversized armchair in the oversized study of Singer’s oversized house. It was a sixty-year-old Tudor with servants’ quarters, and a cobblestone driveway wide enough to fit her Lexus, her husband’s Mercedes, and the pristine 1982 Bentley that they took for the occasional spin when the mood struck. All of it screamed old money from the east, especially in comparison with the huge, bleak McMansions that had grown up like weeds in Calgary’s new subdivisions in recent decades. Like the one he had spent his own teen years living in.
Singer had met him at the door with a motherly hug. Her wobbly old husband had politely excused himself shortly after meeting Alex; apparently, the murder of one of his wife’s colleagues and the possible demise of his wife herself at the hands of one Jason Crowe wasn’t quite as fascinating as a rerun of The Dog Whisperer.
Singer handed him a glass of some clear liquid that Alex thought might be aquavit – whatever it was, he hoped it would relieve his hangover, which seemed to be getting worse as the day wore on. Singer raised her own glass in a toast.
“To Charles,” she said gravely. “A man of singular character.”
“Hear, hear.”
Alex drained his glass quickly. He guessed he didn’t have long before Singer would be safely ensconced inside a bottle; he needed to get as much out of her as he could, and fast.
To Alex’s surprise, Singer took only a small sip before setting her glass down on the elegant glass end table. “We need to talk, Alexander.”
“That we do, Leslie.”
“First, I hope you can forgive me, and, in absentia, Charles.”
“Forgive you for what?”
“For not giving you the full perspective of the situation.”
“You mean for not telling me about Jason Crowe?”
Singer slumped in her chair. She looked even older and more like a worn out cushion than she had the day before, if that was possible. Alex felt bad for thinking the worst of the old girl – she was probably as scared as he was, maybe even more so.
“So you’ve heard. I always said you were an exceedingly clever young man.”
“All I know is he’s been visiting Hodge a lot in prison, and that no one on the fringes of the Wild Rose empire will talk about him. Sounds like he’s Hodge’s catspaw on the outside.”
“Mmm,” Singer said thoughtfully. “Had we been dealing with one of the eastern gangs, Charles would have had the advantage of firsthand knowledge, as well as years of investigative work by provincial police and the RCMP for reference. But the Wild Roses were an unknown commodity; very little is known about them because they’re relatively new. Crowe was Charles’s Bay of Pigs.”
“What do you mean?”
Singer smiled like one of his old professors right before they started pontificating. “When Kennedy invaded Cuba, he did so with poor intelligence, and he paid a high price. I believe the same happened in this situation. Charles knew about Crowe, of course, but it appears he severely underestimated him. It would seem Charles paid the ultimate price for his mistake.”
Alex thought about that for a moment. Maybe his blind faith in Chuck Palliser had been misplaced. Alex had been looking for someone to kick ass and take names when Tom Ferbey was killed. His outrage as a witness, as a journalist – hell, as a human being – demanded that someone take charge of the situation and make sure that Ferbey hadn’t died in vain. To see that justice was done. To reassure him that the world worked the way it was supposed to, that bad guys got what they deserved, and that decent folk could sleep easy at night, knowing that they were protected.
Chuck had been given the case the day after the murder. He was seconded to the Organized Crime task force after more than ten years undercover. When Alex told police what he’d seen – Rufus Hodge pulling the trigger on Tom Ferbey in cold blood – Chuck had been the one who took the single blurry, dark photo that Alex had managed to snap and enhanced it to corroborate Alex’s description. Chuck was the one who painstakingly unco
vered the meth distribution system that started in labs near the oilfields up in Fort McMurray, and tied them to the Highland Storage Yard in Calgary, which was the hub of distribution. From there it went as far east as Winnipeg, as far south as the U.S. border, and as far west as Banff. Chuck was the one who had investigated Richie Duff, had browbeat him and slapped him with evidence until he finally broke down and admitted that Hodge had been nowhere near his house on that fateful October night, and that he had lied on the stand for money and status within the Wild Roses.
But now . . . now Alex was left with the very real possibility that maybe Chuck wasn’t the all-powerful super-cop that he had wanted him to be. Maybe, when the bullet hit the bone, he was just a guy, like everybody else. A guy who made mistakes like everybody else. Except Chuck’s mistake had cost him his life.
And it could very well cost me mine, too.
“Look, Leslie, I need to know everything you know about Crowe.”
Singer nodded. “Yes, you do.”
“Really? Just like that? You’re not going to pull the ‘ongoing investigation’ card on me?”
“Alexander, your life is in danger, as is mine. We don’t have the luxury of following the constraints of jurisprudence and media relations.”
“Speak English, Leslie.”
“Fuck the system, is what I mean. We must speak freely, and of many things, my boy. First, Jason Crowe. I hate to admit that we know very little about him other than the fact he spends a great deal of his time with Rufus Hodge. According to his admittedly short paper trail, he was born in Quebec. He is thirty-eight years old and has lived in Calgary for the past two years, has never been arrested and, according to his tax records, is a mechanic. Before that, he was a professional student at half a dozen universities, again, according to his tax records.”
“What’s his actual status in the gang?”