The Evil That Men Do

by Michael Blair

  “That’s a bit easier,” he said. “But you still need the right equipment and access to the cellular networks. And it’s not very accurate.”

  “What if the phone’s off?”

  “Well, the NSA is supposed have a firmware hack that prevents a phone from being turned off completely, but it has to be uploaded to the phone, which needs to be specifically targeted. I suppose that’s why bad guys in the movies are always taking the batteries out of their phones. Otherwise, I don’t think even Jack Bauer or those MI5 spooks can track a cellphone that’s fully powered off.”

  “How does Apple’s Find My iPhone service work?”

  “Good question,” he said. “Let’s see.” He was silent for a few seconds, thinking about it, I presumed, or Googling it, then said: “It uses the Internet. But the service has to be activated on the phone and the phone has to be connected to the Internet via WI-FI or the cellular network.”

  “Did you activate it on the phone you lent me?”

  “No. You need an iCloud account.”

  “What about GPS?” I was grabbing at straws. “Aren’t most cellphones these days equipped with GPS?”

  “GPS receivers are passive. To track a phone, you need to install GPS location-reporting software on the phone you want to track. What’s this all about, anyway?”

  “I’m just doing some legwork for Roche-Desjardins,” I told him. “Nothing very exciting. Trying to track down a witness. Thanks for your help.”

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  I finished my coffee and left the café, leaving the newspaper for the next customer. Earlier that morning Louise Desjardins had told me that she’d tried and failed to get a court order for Terry’s phone records. Until an official missing persons report was filed with the police, there were insufficient grounds. No grounds, in fact. She’d also contacted BMW to request that the BMW Assist tracking centre activate the GPS tracking system in Thomason’s car. However, she said that without a police report it would probably take a few days, perhaps as much as a week, to get BMW to agree—if they agreed at all. Meanwhile, any time I spent on the case would have to be off-book. There wasn’t much I could do except keep trying Terry’s cellphone in the hope that she’d turn it on and answer—or at least return my call.

  A few doors from my mother’s house, the iPhone began to buzz. I experienced a momentary rush when I saw Terry’s name and landline number on the screen, but it was Lionel Keynes.

  “Have you heard from her?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But someone called our landline a few minutes ago from a 778 area code. I looked it up. It’s a British Columbia area code. No name, just the number. Whoever it was hung up when I answered. Do you think it could have been Marie-Claire Cloutier calling back?”

  “Give me the number,” I said. He did. I fumbled for a second before I brought up the keypad. I keyed the number into the phone, but couldn’t find a way to save it.

  “Are you still there?” I heard him ask.

  “Yes, I’m here,” I said. “I’m going to try calling the number. I’ll talk to you later.”

  I ended the call, brought up the keypad again, which still showed the number Lionel had given me. The phone had automatically added the long-distance prefix. I pressed the call button. The phone rang and rang and rang as I let myself into my mother’s house. It continued to ring until the call was automatically disconnected. I tried again, with the same result. I called Nina.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  I told her about the call to Terry’s landline, gave her the number, and asked her if she could do another reverse directory lookup.

  “Sure, hang on.” A few seconds later she said, “No joy with Canada 411. Let me try White Pages.” I waited some more. “No joy there, either.” She tried two more sites, but with negative results from both. “I guess you’re just going to have to keep trying it, hope someone answers. It’s a Vancouver cellphone exchange, though.”

  I called Gil Maxwell.

  “Cellphone numbers can be pretty hard for the public to trace,” he told me. “You can find the general location easily enough, with the area code and the exchange, but it’s hard to get the owner’s name unless you’re willing to pay for it. Even then there’s no guarantee.”

  So I started calling the number, alternating between my mother’s landline and the iPhone, letting it ring at least six times before hanging up and trying again ten or fifteen minutes later. On the fifth or sixth attempt, a recorded message informed me that the mobile phone I was calling was no longer available. Perhaps I’d run the phone’s battery down, or annoyed the owner with calls from numbers he didn’t recognize, and he’d turned the phone off. I was stalled until the phone was recharged or turned back on. I called Nina again.

  “Gil told me there were commercial services for tracking cellphone numbers,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Nina said. “I found one that cost five bucks per search. Louise okayed it, but it was a waste of money. There was no listing for that phone number.”

  “Gil said it could be iffy.”

  “As a benchmark I tried Terry’s, Rebecca’s, even mine. Nothing for any of them. Iffy is an understatement.”

  I continued to call the number every half hour or so, but kept getting the message that the phone was offline. Then, around three in the afternoon, when I called using the iPhone, the number rang. And on the third ring a man answered.

  “You bin trying to reach my phone half the fucking day. I don’t know this number. Who the hell are you?”

  “My name’s Riley. What’s yours?”

  “You bin calling me for fucking hours and you don’t know my fucking name?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “Around 7 a.m. your time someone using your phone called a number here in Montreal.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me. I don’t know anyone in Montreal.”

  “Who else has access to your phone?”

  “You a cop or something?”

  “Or something,” I said. “I’m an investigator with a law firm. Can you answer my question?”

  “Why should I?”

  “It’s either me or your local police.”

  “Well, I guess maybe it could’ve bin Jackie.”

  “Jackie who?”

  “Kimball.”

  “And you are?”

  “Mace McKenny.”

  “What’s your relationship to Jackie Kimball,

  Mr. McKenny?”

  “She’s a sort of girlfriend, I guess.”

  “Do you think I could have a word with her?”

  “She’s not here right now.”

  “Where’s here?” I asked.

  “Vancouver,” McKenny said. “The Harbour Authorities Marina in False Creek. I live on a boat.”

  I knew the marina. It was in Kitsilano, between the north end of Granville Island and the Burrard Street bridge. “Can you describe her?”

  “Jackie? Well, she’s about thirty, I guess. Dark hair. About five-five. Pretty good rack, but I don’t think they’re real.”

  “What colour are her eyes?”

  “Kinda dark brown.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “A few months, I guess. Four or five.”

  “And she’s the only other person you can think of that could have used your phone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me something, Mr. McKenny. Despite her English name, is it possible Jackie is French?”

  “Y’know, maybe. She speaks pretty good English, like no accent or anything, but every so often she uses funny words. She called a convenience store something that sounds like entrepreneur. I don’t remember exactly … ”

  “Dépanneur?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. And she writes sevens with little crossbars. A friend of mine told me that’s a French th
ing.”

  I write them that way, too. I don’t remember where or when I’d acquired the habit. In elementary school, I presume. Zeds too, but the zed crossbar is a mathematical thing, so that in hand-written formulas zeds are distinguishable from the numeral two.

  “She wouldn’t happen to be married, would she?”

  “She’s got an old man, anyway,” McKenny said. “Dunno if they’re married.”

  “Could you describe him?”

  “I only seen him once. He’s older than her. Fifty at least. Not bad looking, I guess, but built kinda like a penguin.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Y’know, narrow at the top, wide at the bottom.”

  “Do you have a phone number for Jackie? Hello? Mr. McKenny?” The call had been disconnected. I called back, but the phone had been turned off or had died again. But I had what I needed.

  Part III

  Chapter 23

  It had been sixteen years since I’d spent any time in Vancouver, although I’d passed through a couple of times. As I drove north along Granville Street toward downtown, nothing seemed to have changed, although I knew much probably had. Still, there was a comfortable familiarity about the city that I hadn’t felt upon returning to Montreal. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the main route downtown from the airport was a surface road through mixed commercial and residential neighbourhoods, a much more welcoming aspect than the decaying concrete expressways into Montreal.

  Before reaching the Granville Street Bridge over False Creek, I exited Granville, swung down to 4th and drove under the bridge, past the entrance to Granville Island. After a few more turns, I parked the rental Ford in front of the office of the False Creek Harbour Authority/Fisherman’s Wharf Marina. As I got out of the car I was assailed by the smells of salt, seaweed, and fish.

  “Geez, what a stink,” Zach Jardine said over the roof of the car, nose wrinkling.

  “I like it,” I said.

  “I never did like fish.”

  When I’d told Louise Desjardins that Mace McKenny’s “sort of girlfriend” was almost certainly Marie-Claire Cloutier, she’d agreed that the age was right, the eye colour was right, that she could have reverted to her natural hair colour, and perhaps invested some of her ill-gotten gains in breast implants. However, she couldn’t see her way clear to sending me to Vancouver on what could prove to be a wild goose chase: even with her parents’ help Terry was having trouble paying her legal fees. Zach Jardine, however, had agreed to finance the trip, on condition that he could go along. Guilt, I’d reckoned, for blaming Terry for the loss of the country house. We’d caught a 1:30 p.m. Saturday flight out of Trudeau. It departed on time, but due to some serious headwinds touched down nearly an hour late. It was after 5 p.m. local time when we walked into the marina office.

  The handsome middle-aged woman behind the counter smiled at us and asked how she could help. On a big whiteboard on the wall behind her was a map of the marina, with thick black lines representing the floats and finger docks, and hand-labelled magnetic strips representing the boats. I asked her where we could find Mace McKenny’s boat.

  Her smile faltered. “Are you police?”

  “No,” I said. “We work for a law firm in Montreal.” I handed her a business card, newly minted with my name and title: A. C. Riley, Senior Investigator. I also showed her my Quebec investigator’s permit and ID. “We just want to ask Mr. McKenny a couple of questions. Is there a problem?”

  “No, I guess not.” She pointed to a magnetic strip at the top of the map, about midway along the longest of the floats. “That’s where his boat is moored. If it’s still afloat. It’s called Skipjack.”

  I took a photograph of Marie-Claire Cloutier out of my jacket pocket and handed it to her. It was a printout of an image from a website, a head-and-shoulders shot of a blonde woman in her late twenties. Her shoulders were bare. The rest of her might have been bare, too, judging from her mischievous smile.

  “We’re looking for this woman. She may be a friend of his.”

  The woman held a pair of reading glasses to her eyes and examined the photo. She shook her head and handed the photo back. “I don’t think I’ve seen her,” she said. “She’s not one of our regular people, anyway.”

  “Is it all right if we go out to McKenny’s boat?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  “Is he aboard?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. He usually is.”

  Zach Jardine and I walked to the north end of the marina. As we descended the ramp to the float, I told Zach I hadn’t liked the vibe I’d gotten from McKenny on the phone, or that the woman in the office thought we might be cops. “There’s not likely to be any trouble,” I said, as we walked along the float past mostly recreational craft. “But stay alert, okay? And if things start to go sideways, just get out of the way.”

  “Sideways how?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just be careful.”

  The Skipjack was a 38-foot C&C, at least as old as it was long and sadly neglected.

  “Christ, what a piece of crap,” Zach said. “No wonder she thought it might have sunk.”

  The Skipjack sat lower in the water than it should. The sail covers were torn and stained with mildew and bird droppings, the chrome was peeling, the decking spattered with more droppings, and the hull green with algae and crusted with salt scum. One of the shroud anchors had pulled out of the gunwale and was tied down with a length of yellow poly rope, frayed and bleached almost white.

  I walked out along the narrow finger dock, leaned over the boat’s railing and knocked on the top of the cabin. Curtains were drawn over the cabin portholes.

  “Hello, anyone aboard? Mace McKenny?”

  The curtain in one of the portholes was lifted to reveal a face, obscured by the grimy Plexiglass.

  “Mr. McKenny,” I said. “I’m Riley. I called you yesterday from Montreal. This is my associate, Zach Jardine. We need to speak to you about your girlfriend. Can we come aboard?”

  “No. Go away,” McKenny said, voice muffled and

  distant.

  “We can’t do that, Mr. McKenny. We don’t want to involve the police, but we will if we have to.”

  McKenny stared out through the porthole. After a moment, he said what looked like “Okay, fine,” and

  lowered the curtain.

  The Skipjack rocked as I stepped into the cockpit, hull scraping against the fenders. Zach followed. Most of the varnish had peeled from the teak of the hatch, and the wood was grey and water-stained. A lock rattled. The hatch opened and the hatch cover slid back. A musty stench wafted up from the dark cabin.

  “Come down,” Mace McKenny said from the shadowy interior of the boat.

  “Can we talk out here?” I said.

  “Yes, please,” Zach muttered.

  “No,” McKenny said. “If you wanna talk, we talk below, or not at all.”

  I turned to Zach.

  “Stay here till I tell you it’s okay to come down,”

  I said.

  I descended the short companionway into the main cabin. The cabin was roomy but cluttered and dirty, smelling of unwashed clothes, unwashed people, old cooking, stale beer, and marijuana. The chemical toilet hadn’t been emptied in a while. I could get used to the stink in a year or two, I thought. A muscular man in a grimy T-shirt and grease-stained jeans stood on the far side of the chart table, by the hatch to the master stateroom in the bow. He was in his mid-twenties, about five-ten, with long, sun-bleached hair, a black eye, and a split lower lip. The injuries looked recent.

  “You can come down,” I called up to Zach. “What happened to you?” I asked McKenny, as Zach sidestepped down the companionway.

  “A guy came by this morning,” McKenny said. “He said he wanted to ask me some questions. I didn’t like his attitude and told him to piss off.” He gingerly
touched his mouth with the tips of his fingers.

  “What time this morning?”

  “I dunno. Nine. Ten. Early, anyway.”

  “Was this guy about my size, sort of dark and slick, broader shoulders than me?”

  “Sounds like him. He wasn’t a fighter, though, hurt his hand when he hit me.” It seemed to be a point of pride with him that he’d done some damage to his opponent with his chin.

  “What did he want?” As if I had to ask.

  “He showed me pictures of people who looked like Jackie and her old man and asked me where they were. I told him I didn’t know. He didn’t like that either.”

  Mace McKenny flinched as I reached into my jacket.

  “Relax,” I said. “I just want to show you some photos.”

  I held out the photos of Marie-Claire Cloutier and Chaz Brandt. McKenny reached over to take them, keeping his distance. He turned on a lamp above the starboard settee.

  “Is that the woman he was looking for?” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s Jackie,” McKenny said, examining the photo by the lamplight. “Her hair is darker, but yeah, that’s her.”

  “The other one, is that your girlfriend’s husband?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Like I said, I only saw him once. His hair is longer now, though, and kinda blond.” He handed the photos back.

  “What name is he going by?”

  “Andrew Kimball. What do you mean, ‘going by’?”

  “His real name is Charles Pearson Brandt. Hers is

  Marie-Claire Cloutier. Did you tell Thomason where to find them?”

  “Thomason? That’s the guy who did this?” He touched his mouth again. “Yeah, I guess I did. I told him address of the condo, anyway. After he left I called Jackie and told her someone was looking for her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s staying on her old man’s boat. It’s at the Harbour Ferries Marina in Coal Harbour. That’s—”

  “I know where it is. You didn’t tell Thomason

  about it.”

  His chest expanded. “No way, man.”

  “What’s it called?”