RANDALL DENLEY
SPIKED
A Kris Redner Mystery
Ottawa Press and Publishing
Copyright © Randall Denley 2019
ISBN (softcover) 978-1-988437-18-7
ISBN (epub) 978-1-988437-19-4
ISBN (mobi) 978-1-988437-20-0
Cover, design, composition: Magdalene Carson / New Leaf Publication Design
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency) 320 – 56 Wellesley Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2S3
www.accesscopyright.ca.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Spiked / Randall Denley.
Names: Denley, Randall, 1951- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190080477 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190080485 | ISBN 9781988437187
(softcover) | ISBN 9781988437200 (Kindle) | ISBN 9781988437194 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8607.E637 S65 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Contents
OTHER TITLES BY RANDALL DENLEY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
FORTY-EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY-ONE
FIFTY-TWO
FIFTY-THREE
FIFTY-FOUR
FIFTY-FIVE
FIFTY-SIX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER TITLES BY RANDALL DENLEY
The Situation
One Dead Sister
The Perfect Candidate
Necessary Victims
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank veteran Ottawa criminal lawyer Michael Edelson and his former law partner, Vince Clifford, for their invaluable assistance with the details of the trial that is central to this story. Michel Juneau-Katsuya, the former CSIS officer and co-author of the book Nest of Spies, was one of the first to detail the insidious effects of Chinese espionage. His work was the genesis of Spiked. Thanks also to Magdalene Carson for her usual outstanding job on the cover and Deborah Richmond for her detailed edit. Special thanks to my reading group for their support and ideas about how to make this book better. Linda, Cathy, Cynthia, Ray, Susan, Roger, Vern and Emma, you did a great job.
ONE
When I woke up, a dream about Sonny Sandhu was still fresh in my mind. I was interviewing Sandhu, which made sense because I am a newspaper columnist, but why were we drinking white wine at a restaurant beside a lake? The lake looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure if it was from real life or other dreams. It was a hot day with a stiff breeze and power boats were bobbing and clunking against the docks of the marina that the restaurant overlooked. Gulls circled overhead.
I didn’t remember a word Sandhu had said in the dream, just how he looked. He was a striking man with intense eyes, skin the colour of dark chocolate, perfect white teeth and hair that had been carefully mussed, then gelled in place. Sunglasses were perched atop his head and he wore a white linen shirt. When he reached out and ran his hand slowly along my forearm, I awoke.
I lay in bed, not quite wanting to let the dream go, although I found it disturbing. I was flushed, as if the moment had been real. I had never met Sandhu and now I was having a borderline sex dream about the guy, and this on the day when I was going to be covering his trial.
When I was on a major story, I often felt like the characters invaded me, took over my mind, and lived with me 24 hours a day. Although today was my first official day back at work, I had spent weeks researching Sandhu, reading every word written about him and looking at every picture and video clip. They told a story that was perplexing and totally out of sync with the mess Sandhu found himself in now.
Sonny Sandhu was about as far as one could get from the kind of deadbeats and losers I usually covered in the Ottawa courts. The member of Parliament from Brampton had been a media star and the new face of the Conservative Party. Sandhu was charming, quick with a quote, an entrepreneur and an immigrant. He was a pollster’s dream and it didn’t hurt that he looked like a Bollywood star. Conservatives saw him as a saviour who could rescue Canada from the charming Liberal prime minister.
And then Sandhu had stepped in shit of a very surprising kind. In Ottawa, when a politician got into trouble, it was usually because he had expensed too many limos or made a drunken pass at a colleague. Sandhu was accused of taking money from a couple of business guys to grease the path to federal grants for a windmill project that sounded like a scam from the get go. The mystery was why he did it, if he did. Sandhu was a rich guy and all of this was over twenty-five grand.
The trial on influence peddling charges promised to offer the kind of entertainment that had been attractive to the public since the days of the guillotine. My job was to make sure that it did. I was guaranteed front-page play in the Ottawa Citizen every day, but I hadn’t written a word in months and now I would be churning out stories on deadline. Somehow I was supposed to once again become Kris Redner, star crime columnist. Colin, the editor, had told me it would be like riding a bicycle. I wasn’t so sure.
I shook my head to clear away the remnants of the Sandhu dream. At least it was a welcome change from my normal dream, the one where men with guns were chasing me through gloomy woods. I always awoke from that one just before they caught me. Too bad it hadn’t worked that way in reality.
I rolled out of bed and automatically reached to the night table for my cigarettes, then remembered that I was trying to quit. I had gone six days without a smoke. Not exactly a record, but a small step. For the last eight months, small steps had been the only ones I had taken. After 20 years of covering crime in Toronto and Ottawa, I had thought I was tough, maybe even invincible. Then I went back to my hometown in the Adirondacks in a quest to get some justice for my sister Kathy, who had been murdered when I was still a child. I found that my little town had been taken over by men of overwhelming ambition, men who considered me an irritant to be eliminated. Let’s just say that things didn’t end well, and I had spent the last eight months figuring out if I could still be me.
I stepped into yesterday’s shorts and pulled on a T-shirt, then padded to the living room, the hardwood floors of the apartment cold on my feet. As usual, Ranger was whimpering at the door. The dog had a bladder the size of a thimble. If I didn’t jump to it the minute he started to complain, he just let loose on the rug. He was an ugly little runt, too. Ranger combined the rat face and bat ears of a chihuahua w
ith the elongated black and brown body and stubby legs of a dachshund.
Like the apartment, Ranger was a loaner. Both belonged to my friend Caroline Malloy, a CBC reporter who needed someone to house sit in a hurry when she had been posted to Syria. Never having owned a pet, I didn’t quite understand that it was like having a child, another choice I had never made. When Caroline had offered me the opportunity to move in, it had seemed like a quick and graceful way to stop living with Colin. Ranger had been the only hitch. At the time, exchanging a troublesome lover for a troublesome pet had seemed a good swap, but I hadn’t taken into account Colin’s superiority in the area of continence.
The only upside was that, during my worst times, Ranger’s regularity had gotten me out of the apartment on days when I knew I wouldn’t even have gotten out of bed. I would take him for a walk today before heading to court, but I had to pull myself together first. I walked across the apartment and opened the door to the tiny balcony. Ranger followed, sticking his nose out and sniffing the fresh May air. I figured that if he was really desperate, he could go on the balcony and I could discreetly wash it off later.
I headed to the bathroom to see if I could start to make myself look human, and to assess the damage from last night’s bottle of cabernet sauvignon. I knew I should stop drinking, but I had already given up smoking and, apparently, sex. I had to keep at least one vice.
I relieved myself, then stood and looked in the mirror. I saw a 40-year-old woman with garish, dyed-red hair cut short enough so that I could run my fingers through it and be ready to go. It was my new look. I certainly wasn’t cute or pretty, but I had sometimes been called handsome. I had never been sure if that was a good thing. I pulled at the little lines that were starting to form around my eyes, hoping that the skin would bounce back. Maybe after a shower.
For now, I would settle for a strong black coffee. I filled the stainless steel kettle and put it on the gas stove top, then measured out the coffee from a bag I had bought at the Bridgehead shop on the ground floor of my building. The coffee was called Bytown Boom and the bag assured me that it was both organic and fairly traded. I didn’t care as long as it had caffeine.
Once the water was boiled, I poured it through an old Melitta drip, then tossed the used coffee filter in the sink, where several of its predecessors were composting. I would have preferred the ease of a Keurig, but Caroline was one of those types who thought that the world could be saved one unbleached coffee filter at a time. She bought into the whole save-the-whales world view. It must be comforting to have so much certainty about right and wrong.
I’d met Caroline while covering courts. Not even the parade of crooks, losers and amoral shits that we saw every day had dimmed her sunny view of life. But then, Caroline was 25. Let’s see how a couple of decades covering human behaviour would affect her.
Despite the powerful smell of the fresh coffee, I realized that the kitchen had developed a bit of a pong, perhaps due to the rotting bananas on the counter and the two-day old pizza box on the glass kitchen table. Pong. That was one of Colin’s words. Sleep with a Brit and you eventually start talking like one. But that was all past tense now. I was pretty sure of that. Colin had a different idea.
I took my coffee out onto the balcony and settled into the single plastic chair. The air was still cool for May and I thought about going back into the apartment to get the fluffy white robe I had boosted from the Royal York, back when Colin and I used to meet there for sex. I would appreciate the warmth, but not the memories. I really should throw the thing out.
I noticed that Ranger had left a wet spot on the corner of the balcony. That was one problem solved. I sipped my coffee and looked at the scene six storeys below me. I found that the world always looked best when I was looking down on it from above, observing it but not really part of it. I saw a placid early spring Ottawa morning, sunny, full of hope, the trees just starting to green. People sat on the Bridgehead patio, sipping coffee and looking at their devices.. A girl in a grey sweatshirt leaned in to kiss her boyfriend, who had long, red hair and was wearing a baseball cap. On Elgin Street, office workers headed purposefully past the bars, restaurants and small shops that lined the street, going downtown to do something they thought was important. Good for them. In an hour or two I would try to pretend I was one of them.
I had just brought the coffee to my mouth when I saw a woman’s face right in front of me, followed by flailing arms. For a splitsecond, she stared straight at me, a look of horror in her eyes, her mouth open in a silent scream. Long black hair streamed behind her. I jumped to my feet, the coffee cup falling from my hand and shattering on the balcony.
By the time I understood that she had fallen from the apartment building’s roof just above me, she was gone. Peering over the railing, I could see she had landed on the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the building, grotesquely impaled like meat on a fork. The woman hung limp, a rag doll with an arm and a leg on either side of the fence.
I stood paralyzed with shock. In the little world below, it was as if time stood still while people registered what had happened. Then it turned to chaos. People were crying and screaming. Some were climbing the fence in their rush to get away. Across the street, bystanders were pointing and shooting pictures with their phones.
No one was coming to her assistance. What if she was still alive? I had to do something. I stepped into a pair of sandals, stuck my phone in my back pocket and ran for the apartment door. I glanced at the building’s ancient elevator. There was a guy waiting there, looking impatiently at his watch. I quickly noted a square jaw, the usual two days’ growth of beard, jeans, ball cap, tan jacket, sunglasses. There was no time to wait. I raced down the claustrophobic stairwell, a gloomy passage with cracked plaster walls painted institutional green, a shabby red carpet and stale cooking smells.
When I reached the front door, an obviously terrified young blond woman in a grey and maroon University of Ottawa sweatshirt was pounding on it, as if she didn’t know how to open it. The young lover from the coffee shop, I realized. The woman was crying and screaming like she’d lost her mind. Some of the coffee shop patrons clustered on the sidewalk, looking on in horror. A heavy man in a grey suit used his briefcase like a scythe, clearing his path to safety. Jesus, did he think there was going to be an avalanche of falling bodies?
On the patio, heavy metal tables and chairs lay overturned, one glass table top shattered, the shards glistening in the morning sun. As the crowd cleared, I saw the woman and registered a series of quick images: a red silk blouse, one high-heeled shoe, glossy black hair, Asian features, and several silver bracelets. Blood poured from her upper body and glistened on the metal of the fence.
As I ran toward her, I saw that the vertical spikes had pierced her torso in several places, driven deep by the impact of the fall. Her head was on my side of the fence and was twisted so that she was looking at me. She opened her mouth to speak and blood began to drip from it. Her voice was weak but her words were clear. “Help me,” she said. Then her eyes closed.
What could I do? I looked around and saw several people on their cell phones. Surely one of them was calling 911. I felt for a pulse, and thought I detected a faint one. I had to do something. I wasn’t sure whether getting her off that fence would help, but it looked like the woman didn’t have long to live. I decided that the best thing would be to get her down and put pressure on the worst of the wounds. I couldn’t do it by myself, though.
The only other person who hadn’t run was an exceptionally tall guy in his early 20s with long bushy, red hair, and a Blue Jays cap. The boyfriend.
“You, get over here,” I said. “We’ve got to get her off that fence.” Looking relieved at being told what to do, he rushed to the fence. “Grab her shoulders and lift.”
I took the woman’s legs. She was surprisingly light. No sweater or coat, even though the morning was cool. Almost certainly a jumper. You didn’t worry about staying warm when your priority was suicide.
&n
bsp; We laid the woman on the patio stones, but that didn’t seem right. “Your coat,” I said. “Put it under her.”
The guy hesitated for just a second. I could see him registering that his black, North Face jacket was going to be a write-off. “Just do it,” I said.
We moved her onto the coat and I quickly assessed her wounds. The worst one was in her abdomen. It pulsed with blood every time her heart beat.
“Your T-shirt,” I said to the kid. “Take it off and put pressure on that bleed.” This time he didn’t hesitate, stripping off his shirt, balling it up, and holding it over the wound. Her breathing was shallow and irregular, then I couldn’t detect it at all. Blood had stopped flowing from her wounds. I started chest compressions, pushing down as quickly as I could. I had taken a CPR course at work years ago and vaguely remembered that you were supposed to do 30 compressions, then two breaths. They kept changing the procedures, but I was sure that anything would be better than nothing. The woman was dying in front of me.
Putting my lips against the other woman’s was eerie, like kissing the dead. I could taste the cherry flavour of her lipstick and smell her jasmine perfume. This wasn’t exactly my first dead body, but I had never had to get intimate with one.
I kept frantically pushing down on the woman’s chest, not sure if I was accomplishing anything but not willing to give up.
It seemed like far longer, but I guessed that no more than two minutes had elapsed before an ambulance pulled up out front, lights flashing. A stocky, grey-haired paramedic got quickly out of the vehicle and rushed towards us, followed closely by a dark-haired woman who looked too young and small for the job.
“We’ve got it from here, ma’am,” the male paramedic said, and quickly set to work.
I stepped back and wiped my face on my sleeve. Despite the cool day, I was sweating. I looked down and saw that I had blood on both of my hands.
The older ambulance attendant looked at his partner and shook his head. The urgency went from their movements and the woman headed back to the ambulance, no doubt to get the stretcher.
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