The spire in the fog was what passed for an official apology. The replica of the Seaview African United Baptist Church was built a few years ago after the mayor told a room jammed with TV cameras the city was sorry. Halifax is still a racist city; it just hides it better now.
I turned to look at the container terminal on the opposite side of the dump. I figured the victim had nothing to do with our ugly history. I hoped he wasn’t connected to the billion-dollar flood of goods that rides the tides into the city every year. A murder outside the port is just a murder. If it’s linked to what happens inside, it’s an international incident. I wanted a case to work, but not that case.
The scream of steel on steel cut through the fog. Intermodal containers dotted seventy acres of concrete and asphalt below. All of them, it seemed, in motion. Ship-to-shore cranes lifted boxes from the decks of two ships. Forklifts hauled them away as soon as they hit the dock. Each one rushing to the trains and trucks that would feed them to the waiting Walmarts of North America.
I looked at the fence wrapped around the terminal. The towers standing sentry above it held cameras, lights, motion detectors, even heat sensors. All the gadgets a paranoid society needs to sleep at night. How did a dead guy land beside such a secure bit of real estate? There’d be hell to pay for that. Might be mine to pay. On the upside, that dead guy had me back in the real world.
I turned back to the vic and saw my partner, Blair Christmas, heading my way. I pulled the buds from my ears and stuffed them in my pocket. At six four, Blair pushed the scales to 260. None of it jiggled. I fought as a middleweight, but I walk around in light-heavyweight shape. Still, my partner has me by 50 pounds. When we spar, I feel it. Blair moved with long strides, his black shoulder-length hair swinging with each step, a middle finger raised to the lazy cops who blame him for their stalled careers. They call him a quota cop. His badge just a check in a box on some affirmative-action spreadsheet. They ignore the spreadsheet showing the cases he’s cleared. Blair claimed his Mi’kmaw heritage gave him the right to wear the traditional hairstyle. The white shirts didn’t argue the point. We both knew he didn’t care much about heritage. He just liked long hair. I ran a hand through the curls on the back of my head, felt them brush my collar. I also felt the scar back there and wondered when some asshole with rank would order me to chop off the curls and sport a regulation cut. I don’t care about long hair, just don’t like answering questions about the scar.
Blair’s deep-set eyes scanned left and right as he walked. Brilliant white teeth blinked through a broad smile. I’d seen men mistake that smile for softness. They were left picking up their own teeth. My partner was not subtle.
He looked down at the port. “Never seen it from up here,” he said.
“Me either. Someone might make an issue of that now,” I said.
“Can’t see it. We keep the guns and bombs out of the containers. What happens out here, not our problem.” He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and turned his gaze to the body below.
He was probably right. Unless the dead guy was sprinkled with anthrax or sporting an Al Qaeda Rocks tattoo, he probably wasn’t going to be our problem. I didn’t want him to be a terrorist, but I did want him to be our problem.
“Let’s just play cop a bit. Find any clues?” I asked.
“The dockworker who found the body is in the clear, and I got us a timeline. That help?” The smile again.
“Let’s have it.” My kind of quota cop.
“Okay. I talked to Billy Oikle; you remember him. He found our recently departed.” He nodded toward the body. “Billy’s a head case. Worked thirty-five years down there before retiring last month. Now, he spends his time prowling the fenceline keeping an eye on what he calls the slackers inside. You believe that? Guy needs a hobby,” Blair said.
“He mean us?”
“Nope. The guys on the cranes. He says we’d have to do some work before he’d call us slackers. Means it, too.”
“Bull work or no work.” We’d heard it from the longshoremen for two years.
“Yep. Anyway, he says he left at sunset last night. Came back at four-thirty this morning to watch one of those fat-ass post-Panamax boats. Security guys at the gate say that fits his pattern,” Blair explained.
“They see him leave last night? They see anything?”
“Patience, partner, they weren’t here last night. The night-shift guys are on the way back in to talk to us. Anyway, I called Billy’s wife, and she says he came home about nine o’clock and didn’t leave again until this morning. He tells me there was no dead guy when he left last night, so there’s our timeline.”
Carla Cage walked up the hill toward us. A beauty in a baggy blue bodysuit and booties. A matching hood covered her hair and most of her face. Crime-scene couture. Ravishing. We almost had a thing once. She let me know she was interested. I walked away. Sometimes I regret that.
“Hi, Blair. Nice to see you. Cam, the body’s free now. Medical examiner will give you an exact cause, but I can tell you he was strangled and stabbed. No sign of either weapon. If they’re here, we’ll find them.” She nodded toward two police dogs leading officers around the dump.
“Hey, Sarge. Great to see you.” Blair’s smile broadened. He’s like that.
“Thanks, Sergeant,” I said.
“Good luck, gents, you’ll need it on this one.” She touched my arm, her smile broader than Blair’s. She turned and walked away. Go figure.
The first rays of sunlight cut over the city, chasing the fog from the dump. Time to visit the star of the show. The dead guy looked to be in his late fifties. Hard to tell for sure, but even with the rigor his skin sagged, and he wasn’t fat. I squatted low beside the body as Blair moved around to the other side. I needed time with the victim; so did he. We fell into the old pattern easily. Tomorrow we would have crime-scene pictures and notes, but nothing beat a fresh corpse. This guy had a story to tell. We were here to listen.
Opaque plastic flex-cuffs locked his wrists together. The kind the cowboy cops in the public-protection unit use. We used to call it the riot squad, but that’s frowned on now that PR suits dictate police policy. The cowboys resent the name change, but they still get to carry batons and bust heads, so they stay quiet about it. Electricians carry similar ties for bundling cables, so I wasn’t going to haul in the protection squad. They were probably good for a few crimes, but maybe not this one.
I pulled a pen from my pocket and tapped it on the plastic. Tight, no wiggle room. The victim’s right hand was above his left, both palms up. His arms were locked straight back, hands at the base of his spine. The sun glinted off a gold band. A newly minted widow would get the next-of-kin notification. Bruises filled his upper back and shoulders. Lividity. More bruises and scrapes covered his elbows. I pulled out my notebook and jotted a line. He’d been on his back with his arms pinned beneath him at or near the time of death. The scrapes told me someone dragged his body. The ME would have the final word on that, but I like to note my first impressions. Darker marks ran across the back of his neck. I could feel my shoes sink into the mud as I leaned forward to check them out. His head was turned to the right, toward Blair. I could see the marks on the back of the neck changed from bruising to cuts as they moved to his throat.
“Well, shit.” Blair stepped away from the body.
“What’s up?”
“I think we should go chase terrorists. Now.”
If I didn’t know him better, I’d say the big guy was afraid of something. I moved around the body.
“Blair, that’s not—” I swallowed back the name.
“Like to say it’s not, but I do believe we’re looking at Pastor Sandy Gardner. The great man himself. The saviour of the lost children and all that crowd-pleasing shit,” Blair said.
“Fuck.” I moved away and joined Blair.
“Well said.”
I recognized Gardner’s face, even dead and coated in dried mud. The bushy brown moustache, matching eyebrows, that famous dimpled chin. The small L-shaped scar on the right cheek sealed it. I turned toward the squad cars at the bottom of the hill. Gardner’s face smiled back from a billboard across the street. Nice tan, no mud. The bigger-than-life Sandy Gardner was surveying his domain from above. The billboard text invited wayward souls to come home to his Church of Salvation.
Gardner worked the Bible-thumping big leagues. He ran his Halifax based adoption agency with an evangelical zeal. He sliced red tape with a Jesus-powered lightsaber. Bringing Third World orphans to new homes in North America with little or no delay through his Little Maria Foundation, named for the first orphan he rescued. Pastor Gardner’s televised services drew a global audience. Donations poured in, and the orphans kept coming. The healing power of TV. I caught Carla’s eye. She smiled. Cute.
“Relax, Blair, this one is too hot. The major-crime guys won’t let us near it.” Maybe I didn’t want this vic after all. Hell of a case if we could crack it. Permanent proof for the assholes who say we are sub-par cops, if we couldn’t.
“Sure, partner. I can see the line forming now. This town's gotta be lousy with cops wanting this one.” He gestured at the late pastor.
“Hmm,” was all I had for him.
I walked over to Carla, hoping I didn’t look as sick as I felt. No point in ruining my frosty rep.
“You better break out the tent poles and canvas, Sergeant. Cover him up; we won’t be moving him any time soon.”
“Expecting rain, Cam?”
“Some kind of storm, yeah.” I swallowed.
“Locusts would be biblically appropriate, I guess. Probably with long lenses, too,” she said.
The smile again. I thought punching her in the nose would be a little too much, so I headed back to join Blair and Sandy Gardner.
I looked down at the body. Blair stood beside me. We both pulled on purple latex gloves.
“Let’s see what he says.”
“Sure. But let’s be clear. We want to shake this case,” Blair said.
We circled, looking down.
“Oh, sure. Just curious,” I said. “We go back to the task force when reinforcements arrive.”
“Exactly.” Blair moved to Gardner’s head. I knelt on a dry rock near the dead man’s feet. “Take a look at this: bruising around his ankles.”
Blair crouched beside me.
“Looks like cuff marks.”
“Yep.”
“So, why remove them and leave his wrists bound?” Blair took a closer look at the plastic ties holding Gardner’s hands behind his back.
“Not sure. Marks look fresh. Maybe the cuffs are still with the killer or where he was killed.”
I didn’t think he was murdered in the dump. Not enough evidence. Naked guy in the mud, that’s it. No blood, no clothes, not much of anything turned up by the crime-scene team. This was looking like a real whodunit.
“You figure a body drop?” Blair moved back to the cuff marks on the ankles. He took a pen from his pocket and held it lengthwise along one of the bruises.
“Yep.” I watched as Blair took the pen and held it to the plastic cuffs on the victim’s wrists.
“Ankle bruises don’t match. Too wide. Real cuffs maybe,” Blair said. “The poor slobs who catch this file can sort it out. You have any idea why they called us out?”
I lowered my right cheek and tried to see where the ankle bruising moved to the front of the legs. A sour smell rose from the mud.
“I figure they want us to have a look because he was found beside the terminal. See if it’s connected.” I raised my head. “Fun playing cop, though. I kind of miss the real thing. You?”
“Sure, fun for a minute or two. Sandy Gardner is not in the shipping business, though. This should be a fast toss back to the rock stars in major crime,” he said. “We both know a famous vic is poison, right? Too many people watching, second-guessing, and micromanaging. We don’t want that, even if we do miss the real thing.”
“Absolutely.” I moved back on my haunches and looked toward the main road and the entrance to the Fairview Cove Container Terminal. Why here? I looked across the street.
Just beneath Gardner’s smiling billboard was the Satan’s Stallion compound. The Stallion is Halifax’s toughest motorcycle club. My father founded it, and in another life I rode under the Stallion colours. A body this close to an outlaw clubhouse would bring the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang unit out. Perfect. The club wouldn’t dump a body so close to home, but the OMG team would link it to the Stallion if only to justify the fat budget that comes with fighting the big bad bikers.
I figure the OMG guys were behind the chief’s decision to sideline me in the anti-terror unit. Well, that and the three men I beat into the ER from the courthouse steps. They started it. I ended it. Trouble is, nothing ends that easy in this town. Halifax is a city of world-class whiners, and Twitter is their town square. We are a provincial capital filled with government workers. We have a fast-growing international finance sector and five universities. A whole city full of big brains who know everything about everything. Even if they haven’t actually done anything.
The Twitterverse exploded with opinions about the outlaw biker and cage fighter who carried a badge and beat people bloody in their pretty city by the sea. Every twit had an opinion. Online petitions calling for my badge flew across the web. Facebook echoed the cry for my blood. Never mind that the three guys were hard-core dealers flooding the streets with crack. Never mind that I stepped in when they were threatening a witness outside a courtroom. I was an asshole, and they were victims, no room for debate.
The fight did get me some credibility on the force for a while. Other cops pushed their chests out; suddenly I was one of them. I was proof the uniform must be feared and obeyed. Of course, my uniform got pulled. I was stashed out of sight. First, the chief stuck me with Blair in major crime. Hands down my best three years as a cop. I felt like a real investigator, not some reformed thug-turned-military-hero. A trophy badge the chief kept in his collection. I’m no hero, but I did give up the thug life. The OMG guys didn’t like my new assignment. They work under the major-crime flag, and no way would they share that with a former Stallion. They kept hammering at the chief. Blair heard they built a file with informant statements saying I’d beaten the crack dealers to protect Stallion turf. Like the club needed me to do that. Finally, the chief folded, and I was off to the port. Blair raised a little hell, and they tossed him in with me.
This case could be our ticket back. It had leprosy, though. Best-case scenario: a sex crime involving a prominent preacher. That’s a bad best case. A Stallion link would take it to a whole new place. No sane cop would want this mess. I wondered how sane I was. Languishing in an anti-terror squad on the waterfront wasn’t working for me.
“Hey, take a look at this.” Blair moved crab-like from Gardner’s feet to his torso.
“What have you got?”
“Tattoo. Here at the hip. Let’s roll him over,” he said.
“Better wait for the ME. He should be here by now, anyway.” I looked toward the parking lot. “Like you said, the second-guessing desk jockeys will be all over this, so let’s keep it by the book.”
Blair dropped into a push-up stance next to the dead hip, keeping his clothes out of the mud as he tried for a better angle.
“Anything?”
“Well, I can’t be sure, but it looks like a horse,” Blair said.
“Let me have a look.” I crouched low as Blair moved aside. “Could be. Can’t be sure, with that mud smeared around it.”
“Hope the ME gets here soon. I’d like to have a look before we hand this thing off,” Blair said.
“Yep, me too. Just to see what it is. Tattoo on a preacher. I could see a cross maybe, but a horse? Might mean somethin
g.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Blair said.
The A. Murray MacKay Bridge climbs skyward from Africville. It arches across the narrows to the Dartmouth side of Halifax Harbour. The four-lane span dumps an endless flow of commuters into the North End of the Halifax peninsula. The steady whine of rubber marked the start of the morning rush. The hacking and spitting of Jake Brakes mixed in as truckers slowed big rigs bound for the container terminal.
Engine popping and banging of another kind pulled my attention from the late Sandy Gardner. The familiar symphony stirred something deep inside. I turned to see Snake Howard lead a Satan’s Stallion formation toward the club compound. I was ten the first time I saw and heard an outlaw formation, seventeen the first time I rode in one. Something about it still pulled hard. I knew better now, but it still made me twitch.
For me the outlaw life wasn’t so much an anti-social statement. It was the only option I had, at least I thought so then. My old man was the original Stallion, and the only role models I had were his bros. My father didn’t give a shit about me or anyone else, but the club’s co-founder, Grease, took me in. I spent more time in the shop with him than I did in school. Just as well. In school, there were two kinds of kids: those who avoided me because their parents said I was trash and those who wanted to fight me to prove something. I preferred the fights. The teachers weren’t any better, either afraid or disgusted by the outlaw’s kid. My older brother, Gunner, had it just as bad, so he dropped out in Grade 10. I never would have made it through high school if I hadn’t met Glenda. I just followed her to school, and by the time we were eighteen we were married. Thinking about her still hurt. She believed in me the way no one else did, not even me. I was bigger, better with her, and I let her down. I went off to war to play hero, and the wrong one of us ended up under a headstone. Glenda was born with a bad heart; I knew it, she knew it. We ignored it, and it killed her. I headed to Afghanistan and left a beautiful wife behind. I got my dumb ass captured and never saw her again.
Disposable Souls Page 2