Not A Clue

by Janet Brons

  “My dear sister,” he said viciously, “was a good Muslim girl. Then she starts thinking about going west. I know what Western women are,” he said with an ugly smirk at Liz. “She already had Western ideas. Already being”—he spat out the word—“with Rasul.” He shook his head in disgust.

  “She abandoned her faith. Sure, she still called herself a Muslim, but her life was a blasphemy. Leaving home with a man not her husband? Laila was an infidel. A whore. They were both …” Here his English failed him, as he tried to find the equivalent word for a man and came up empty-handed. “Whores!” he said furiously.

  Gavrikov was leaning across the table now. His clenched fists sat square on the table. A muscle was working hard in his jaw and dark blue veins stood out on his temples. Ouellette continued to take notes but was on high alert.

  “They deserved to die,” said Gavrikov angrily. “Laila disgraced our family. Thanks to God, there were no children.”

  The liaison officer and Ottawa police constable watched the interview nervously from the other side of the mirror, realizing they might have to intervene at any moment but awaiting a signal to act.

  “So,” said Liz. “You came to this country bent on killing your sister and her husband because you thought they were adulterers.”

  Gavrikov shook his head.

  “Actually,” she said, “we know that you did this.”

  Gavrikov turned a lighter shade of grey but said nothing.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know how we know?”

  Ouellette, writing quickly, was very curious to know how Liz knew that this man had killed the Daudovs. Or was she trying something out?

  Meanwhile, Gavrikov glared defiantly at Liz.

  “Well,” she said quietly, leaning across the desk, “we found the AK-47 in your apartment earlier this evening. Doubtless it has your fingerprints all over it. And Ballistics is comparing it with the bullets found in both Laila and Rasul. You know they will match.”

  Ouellette knew they had done no such thing and was tempted to grin at the audacity of his boss, but kept his head down and continued writing.

  Finally Gavrikov erupted. “Oh yes,” he cried. “Clever, clever bitch! Yes, I killed them both. And I feel good,” he said, nodding his head and squaring his shoulders. “Very, very good. I did what was right in the eyes of God.”

  Liz nodded slowly, trying not to manifest the relief she felt. In her experience, gambles like this rarely paid off, but she hadn’t had a lot of choice.

  “What I want to know, though,” she said, “is if you acted alone.”

  Gavrikov, thinking of his friend or, well, his handler in Etobicoke, shook his head. He knew that the group that claimed his loyalty had plans, big plans, and he was not about to give away anything that would jeopardize the jihad. “No,” he said, “it was just me.” And he stuck to that story for the rest of the interview.

  They left the interview room with Gavrikov, sullen but placid enough, in handcuffs. The liaison officer, interpreter, and Ottawa police constable followed in silence, the constable carrying Gavrikov’s black, puffy ski jacket.

  Suddenly a fair-haired man in a well-tailored suit stood up from a chair close to the entrance of the station. The duty constable didn’t have time for formalities, as the young man announced, “I am Artur Zhakarov, First Secretary of the Consular Department at the Russian Embassy. I am here to offer any assistance …” He got no further, as Gavrikov spat for the third time that evening but not, this time, at the floor.

  As Liz and Ouellette drove through the silent streets, Ouellette said, “So it was, as you suspected, a so-called honour killing?”

  “I wanted to be wrong.”

  “What madness is that?” muttered Ouellette, steering carefully around an icy corner. “His own sister?” He suddenly felt a desire to call his own sister, Josée, in Trois Rivières. “Do you think he’s crazy?”

  Liz looked over at her sergeant. “I don’t know,” she said. “It can be hard to tell with zealots. Not our call.”

  “But what started you thinking it might be Bula?” The squad car skidded slightly to the left.

  “Simply because he was, well, the only piece of the puzzle who wasn’t there, if you see what I mean.”

  The sergeant had to concentrate on his driving but said, no, he wasn’t sure he knew what she meant.

  “Well, he was central to the story. The whole case revolved around the disappearance of Bula Gavrikov. And he was the only one I couldn’t account for. So when you dug up that information at Immigration on the three refugee claimants, it started to come together—in my mind, at least. Of course there was no proof. When I saw him tonight, I was sure that I had seen him before. It was in the picture that Laila was carrying during the demonstration, before she was killed. He looks a lot older now, though.”

  Ouellette nodded and turned the heater down a notch. “What about the other refugee claimants?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. In fact, let’s find out what the OPP found out about the other two claimants in Ontario. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some connection with at least one of them.”

  Liz noticed Ouellette taking a surreptitious glance at his watch. It was late and the adrenalin had long since evaporated.

  “Not tonight, Sergeant. It’ll keep. Anyway, the OPP has them both under surveillance.”

  Ouellette smiled wryly and nodded. It was already past one o’clock.

  SIXTEEN

  Canada

  During the meeting of the task force, which took place the following afternoon, Liz’s superintendent looked as proud as if he had, personally and without assistance, delivered twins. His ruddy face was glowing and he was puffed up to a greater extent than usual as he congratulated Liz, Ouellette, and the other members of the team for a job well done.

  Liz briefed the team on the previous evening’s activities. Gavrikov was currently being held by Ottawa police while further inquiries were made, but she had no doubt that they had their man; he had said as much. But a case had to be built for the courts, and the police would be busy for some time.

  When Gavrikov’s motel room had been searched early that morning, an AK-47 was in fact found, as Liz had suspected. It had been dusted for fingerprints, and one set matched Gavrikov’s. This seemed sloppy to Liz, but she guessed that the Chechen had used gloves for the crimes, but hadn’t thought to do so if he was moving the gun around in the room. There were also a couple of partial prints on them, which had not yet been identified. Other personal belongings amounted to nothing more than a couple of T-shirts, one of them with the name of an American football team emblazoned on it, some underwear, and a small, battered suitcase.

  “Sometimes,” Liz said to the team, “weapons are smuggled in pieces and assembled here. Or the rifle might have been purchased here in Canada. We haven’t come up with any leads on that yet, but we’ll have to continue investigating.”

  “So,” asked a young constable, “is he just a nutter, or had he become radicalized or something?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe a bit of both. This radicalization business isn’t a subject I know a lot about. Perhaps CSIS has a better line on this,” she said, shooting a quick look at Fletcher, but the CSIS man remained silent.

  “It’s a new area to me,” Liz continued, “but clearly Gavrikov somehow turned from a loving little brother into some sort of extremist. Daudov told us that Gavrikov ‘liked to travel,’” she said, making quotation mark signs in the air. “Maybe on his travels he met some radical types who were interested in recruiting naïve young men. Or women, I guess,” she added doubtfully.

  “Anyway, all that I know is that some Islamic radicalization is taking place in South Asia, in parts of Afghanistan, and in Pakistan. I believe sometimes it takes place farther to the north in some of the new states created after the fall of the Soviet Union—and maybe parts of the Middle East. I’m quite out of my depth here.” She paused and again looked at Fletcher to see if he had anything to add, but he wa
s busy taking notes.

  Sighing inwardly, she went on. “Whatever ‘training’ or brainwashing took place, Gavrikov ended up with excellent weapons skills and a fierce hatred of the West and anything that resembled it. Including the so-called adulterous relationship between Daudov and Gavrikov’s older sister, Laila.”

  Ouellette entered the room, looking tired but excited.

  “Gilles?” enquired Liz.

  “I just got off the phone with the OPP. They’ve had this other refugee chap, Limonov, of Etobicoke, on their radar for a while. He’d been under surveillance because the OPP has connected him to some sort of funny business concerning weapons. He seems to have quickly become the ‘go-to’ guy for firearms, according to some gang plants in the Toronto area. A lot of disreputable people were coming and going from his place at all hours.” He consulted his notes. “Yeah,” he continued, “weapons supply, assembly, upgrades, that sort of thing.”

  “Like maybe putting together a disassembled AK-47?” asked Liz, trying to hide her excitement.

  “Well, yeah, I suppose so,” said Gilles, raising his eyebrows. “Anyhow,” he continued, “When I told the OPP we wanted to talk to this guy, they told me he’d already been brought in on weapons charges.

  “From what the OPP said, this Limonov comes across as quite irrational—much like our Gavrikov. In any event, they’ve made the link between the two men; Limonov has said that he knows Gavrikov, although he may well be trying to make Gavrikov the fall guy for everything, including the weapons charges. But they seem to have enough on him to make the charges stick to him like glue.”

  “So,” said Liz, thinking aloud, “we don’t yet know exactly what their association was and to what extent they were aware of one another’s activities. We’ll follow up with Limonov later in the day. We need to know their movements and when and where they met up. Have you told the OPP we’ll be down?”

  “Yes,” replied Ouellette. “I told them they can expect us this afternoon.”

  Liz nodded. “Meanwhile, I think we can be pretty sure that Limonov was the guy who furnished Gavrikov with the weapon that killed both Laila and Rasul Daudov. In fact, I’ll bet the partial set of prints on the gun are from Limonov. With any luck we can wrap up a lot of those details today.

  “But I wouldn’t be surprised if their connection goes a lot deeper than that. Limonov might even have been Gavrikov’s ‘handler,’ or at least a resource for Gavrikov as he carried out his plans.

  “Actually,” she said, switching gears, “the AK-47 is a very reliable weapon but not usually terribly accurate. I was always a bit surprised that it would be the weapon of choice for what were, essentially, two sniper-style attacks. Maybe this Limonov was able to improve the accuracy of the weapon destined for Gavrikov. In fact,” she mused, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t come across more of these rifles in future. There are a lot of them floating around since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

  “Private enterprise,” interposed Ouellette.

  “Exactly,” said Liz with a grim smile.

  Greg Gibson had been listening to the discussion with great attention, drumming the fingers of his right hand rapidly on the table before him. He asked, “There was a third refugee, wasn’t there, who arrived about the same time as Gavrikov and entered at Pearson? Does it look like he was involved as well?”

  Ouellette shook his head. “No, this …” he consulted a piece of paper, “… Volodin … didn’t appear to have anything to do with anything and had documented his movements in great detail in hopes of having his refugee claim accepted. His movements and contacts check out. Poor guy was apparently terrified the police thought he was involved in the murders and that he’d be deported. But so far it looks as though he’s in the clear.”

  “Gavrikov didn’t have much of an exit strategy, did he?” asked Gibson.

  “No,” agreed Liz. “He may have thought he wouldn’t get away with the murders in the first place. Or he was just so blinkered by his conviction that his so-called family honour had been tarnished that he didn’t really think through what would happen afterwards.”

  Her thoughts took another turn and she suggested, “Possibly ‘Limonov of Etobicoke’ was supposed to help him get out of the country, until Gavrikov made the stupid mistake of shoplifting.”

  “Although you were already staking out his motel,” added the Super, beaming ever more broadly.

  Liz smiled back. “It was worth a try. And it could conceivably have paid off for him if he’d learned we were on to him, except that he decided to celebrate with some shoplifted caviar.”

  “I wonder if the family even cared about the ‘honour’ thing,” mused Ouellette. “We have no way of knowing, at least yet, if the family even knew about—let alone condoned—Gavrikov’s sick plan. They may just have been happy that their daughter had managed to escape a war zone and start a new life with a man she loved.”

  “So, then,” said a young female officer, hoping that she wasn’t asking a stupid question, “these three men came in as refugees. Do we know if that’s how the others in the Chechen community came in?”

  Liz regarded the eager young officer. She reminded Liz, just a little, of her own, younger self.

  “Some of them were legitimate refugees,” Liz nodded. “Although there is no official record of some of the others—including Rasul and Laila Daudov—entering the country. There seems to be some sort of people-smuggling organization operating in Central Asia and moving these people to North America and Western Europe—at a very stiff price, no doubt.

  “There also seems to be a roaring trade in high-quality fake documentation, including Canadian passports and visas. We don’t know how large the operation is or where it’s headquartered, and it will be difficult to get much information from those who came to the country via that route. This is out of our hands, anyway, so it’s not anything that we’ll be involved with investigating.”

  “Why not?” the young officer asked, chagrined.

  “That part of the investigation will start with our Immigration and Passport Branch.”

  Ouellette sighed. He knew that particular branch of the RCMP was small and underfunded, staffed by a small group of solid, seasoned veterans, all of whom looked as though they hadn’t slept in weeks.

  Liz said, “They probably already have some notion of where fake documents are being produced and they will be in touch with the relevant embassy’s liaison officer. The investigation will start from there and will probably involve everyone from the local authorities to the Passport Office at External Affairs, Immigration and, of course, our good friends at CSIS. It will doubtless be pretty messy in terms of jurisdiction.” She shot Fletcher a wry smile, which was not returned as Fletcher had his head down and was rapidly taking notes with one hand and scratching his nose with the other.

  Ouellette was also looking at Fletcher. While Ouellette had joined the RCMP some years after the creation of CSIS, he was acutely aware of the continuing lack of trust between the two agencies. CSIS had been created in 1981, as a reaction to RCMP “dirty tricks” in the fraught aftermath of the national crisis involving the so-called Front de la libération du Québec. Ouellette always cringed a little, internally, when reminded of the FLQ. Although he had only been a boy in 1970, during what became known as the “October Crisis,” he was aware that his black sheep uncle on his mother’s side, Daniel, had been an FLQ sympathizer at the time.

  Many in the RCMP still regarded CSIS with suspicion and considered its agents to be bogus police officers believing themselves a cut above their opposite numbers in the RCMP. Most annoying was CSIS’s ongoing refusal to share information with other agencies and its tireless invocation of the convenient excuse, “need to know.”

  Ouellette was roused from his ruminations about the spooks in CSIS when he heard a female constable ask, “So what was the role of Independence United in this? Anything?”

  Liz was happy to open the floor to Ouellette, and he was more than happy t
o tell his colleagues exactly what he thought of that small group of activists.

  SEVENTEEN

  Canada

  Liz was immensely relieved that the murders of Laila Daudova and Rasul Daudov had been solved. She’d finally had a good night’s sleep and was starting to feel like a real human being again. Major crimes, especially homicides, became all-consuming for her, relegating everything else in life to second place. Except, perhaps, Rochester. And, to Liz’s surprise, Detective Chief Inspector Stephen Hay. She had wondered on several occasions during the investigation how he might approach certain things; she admired his detached, intensely methodical approach to his work. She doubted that he would ever rely on “hunches” or gut feelings. Rather, Hay tended to take a big-picture view of a crime. At the same time, no detail was too small to notice. At least this was the impression she had developed of him during their work together in London.

  She wanted to see him again. She had enjoyed talking to him and missed his comfortable presence. Liz hadn’t thought along these lines for a very long time. She wondered if this might finally be something special.

  At present, she was taking a long walk through the dim, frozen streets of Aylmer with Rochester trotting along happily and sniffing delightedly at anything that looked remotely disgusting.

  Liz finally concluded that she should do something about it. She decided to call Hay and make a concrete suggestion that they meet somewhere for a few days, even though the idea was alien and deeply unnerving. She had never in her life asked anyone for a date, let alone to go on a holiday. Enough men had been interested in her—at least until they learned of her profession—for her never to have wanted for male companionship.

  She found first dates more trouble than they were worth anyway and didn’t seek out potential companions, let alone partners. On Saturday nights, her preference was to curl up on the couch and watch an old black-and-white movie on TVo. If her line of work didn’t deter her from wanting a permanent relationship, her previous marriage to a controlling and manipulative charmer did. Loads of personality and no character; she never wanted to go through that again.