Spiked

by Randall Denley

  After hearing it all, Farrell stroked his beard and seemed lost in thought. Finally, he said, “So if I am going to help you, there have to be some ground rules. We never met, I didn’t help you and if anyone asks, I don’t even exist. No quotes, no off the record, no deep background. I might be able to act as a guide, point you in the right direction. After that, you’re on your own.”

  “This is all under the radar on my end anyway,” Reilly said. “Kris, those rules work for you?”

  “Sure.” What did I have to lose? A shady mercenary wasn’t exactly a top on-the-record source anyway.

  “The last couple of years I was with CSIS, I worked mainly on Chinese files. I understand how those fuckers think. They play the long game. They hack into any business or government computer they can, looking for technology and intel. What they can’t steal, they buy or get through pressure. Canada is prime money-laundering territory for the gangsters who run the country. Take some shady dollars, offshore them and invest in a nice Canadian company, preferably in natural resources. All the while, they are sucking up to gullible political leaders, acting like their best friends. Think of a snake wearing a puppy dog costume.

  “So let’s break it down. The girl is a Chinese national, true name unknown. She’s an interpreter at the embassy, which means either they trust her or they control her. She dies on the roof of an apartment building after a struggle. Maybe she was thrown off or maybe it was just a desperate jump. Either way, there is a question mark. If the Chinese wanted to get rid of her, why make such a mess of the killing, then create an incident to get the body back? They had her in their power. If they wanted her gone, she’d simply have disappeared.”

  “Right,” Reilly said. “The Chinese are woven in here somewhere. One of the units in the building where Mae died is rented by a Chinese shell corporation, by the way. Still, I doubt they killed her.”

  “More like someone sending a message to the Chinese,” Farrell said.

  I decided to sit back and let the two of them go at it, without taking notes. Farrell would be more comfortable with Reilly.

  “Or to someone the girl was associated with,” Reilly said

  “This joker Champagne, maybe.”

  “Maybe, but all we’ve got to tie her to him is video of him going into her building. He could have been going there to see anyone.”

  “From what I know of Champagne, he’s a skirt chaser. What if the Chinese were using Mae Wang to get a hold on him? The honey trap is the oldest gambit in the espionage game.”

  “That seems farfetched, but let’s say it’s true. Who benefits by getting rid of her?” Reilly said.

  “The guy is the foreign affairs minister. If he was hooking up with someone working for the Chinese, that’s a huge problem for the government. The RCMP clearly knew something about this and I’m sure my old buddies at CSIS did, too.

  “If they got wind of it, our allies would worry about what secrets might have been getting out. That brings in any country that’s part of the Five Eyes. Certainly the Americans. Maybe the Brits.”

  “Excuse me guys,” I said. “That’s a hell of a story if true, but I don’t live in spy world. What’s Five Eyes?”

  “It’s a co-operative intel arrangement between the Brits, the Americans, the Kiwis, the Aussies and us,” Farrell said. “We share what we learn. So they say anyway. It’s a big back door into American intelligence efforts. Some countries see Canada as an easy point of entry, especially the Chinese. Those Chinese files I mentioned? That’s what I was working on.”

  “What made you quit?” I asked.

  “Too much bureaucracy and bullshit. I reached the point where I was only sticking around to boost my pension. It was time to get out. No offence, Reilly.”

  “None taken. My pension is maxed out. I just stick around to piss them off.”

  “Good a reason as any,” Farrell said.

  Farrell seemed like he knew what he was talking about, but if he was right, the scope of this story was a lot broader than I had imagined. Mae Wang’s killer could be any one of a number of murky bad guys who would be hard to bring to justice. Assuming we were even on the right track.

  “So what next?” I asked.

  “I’m going to make some calls to people who are still in, see what I can find out.”

  “Won’t that put a flag on our investigation?”

  Farrell smiled for the first time. “Give me some credit. These are people I talk to regularly. I’ll just tell them I’m working for a client. There is a network of people who get the Chinese problem and want to act. I do them some favours, they do some for me.”

  “How long do you think this will take?”

  “Probably not long,” Farrell said, putting his chipped white coffee mug back on the pine table. “Now, security measures. Reilly, your phone is probably secure. Kris, yours is not. All this stuff you’ve been reading about Quebec police tapping in to journalists’ phones is not a one-off. You need to assume that someone could be monitoring every key stroke on your computer, every text and e-mail you send, and every call you make. They can use the GPS in your phone to track your every move. That’s why I asked that you bring no electronics here.”

  When Reilly had told me that the guy we were seeing would only meet us if we had no phones or computers, I took him to be a bit paranoid. Now, I wasn’t so sure. I certainly wasn’t naïve enough to think that government and its many agencies were the good guys.

  Farrell got up, pulled open a balky kitchen drawer, and took out two experienced-looking cell phones. “These are burners I got cheap on Kijiji. When I find out something, I will contact you that way.”

  I wondered what Reilly thought about all of this. Like me, he was a skeptic by nature, but he said, “All right. Thanks. Best to assume we’re dealing with serious people here.”

  “We know the Chinese are in play,” Farrell said, “so yeah, about as serious as they get.”

  I began to worry just a little bit more about what I had gotten myself into. I was used to bad, even dangerous, people but most of them were after sex, money or drugs, not me. The people Farrell was talking about were in a whole different league, and I felt like I had painted a target on myself.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was just after 1 p.m. by the time Reilly got back to the Major Crimes squad room at police headquarters on Elgin Street. The room was empty, except for the usual stacked up cardboard boxes and squeezed-in desks. His squad had too few people to do the job, but too many to fit into the space. Right now, the other detectives were out working cases, or maybe just at lunch. Not everyone was as work obsessed as Reilly.

  He had said that he was taking the morning to pursue a lead, without specifying the case. He was glad there was no one there to quiz him about it. With his workload, there was no way to justify his personal Mae Wang crusade, but hopefully he wouldn’t have to.

  When you were the staff sergeant in charge, you had quite a bit of latitude, but his inspector still expected results. Larry Ferguson was a decent guy, but he was one of the many Ottawa officers with acting-rank status. Ferguson had to make his mark if he wanted permanent promotion and it had made him obsessed with stats. Right now, the squad’s stats weren’t good. Ottawa already had eight homicides for the year and five were unsolved. Reilly was carrying three personally, all Somalis, all involved with the drug trade and in every case, no one was willing to come forward with information. That was understandable. Ratting out a drug gang member who had already committed homicide could be a life-shortening experience. It made his job difficult, though. Most days, he felt like he was pushing three big rocks up a very steep hill.

  Reilly settled in behind his desk and fired up his computer. His inbox was jammed. He seemed to spend half his life sending case updates in all directions to create the illusion of progress. Sometimes that seemed harder than progress itself.

  At least the drive out to see Farrell had not been the wild good chase that Reilly had feared. Farrell sounded like he was
still well plugged in. Reilly wondered exactly what kind of hairy shit Farrell did for a living these days. Judging by the armaments he had on display, it didn’t just involve putting on a suit and advising corporations about computer security. Reilly was sure that what he could see in the gun case was just a fraction of Farrell’s personal armoury. The really good stuff would be kept well out of sight, although probably not far out of reach.

  He hoped that Farrell would produce some results, because the case wasn’t getting much traction despite Kris’s efforts. It was frustrating not to know who Mae Wang actually was and how she fit into the big picture. For that matter, what was the big picture?

  The case kept coming back to Luc Champagne. The fact that Champagne was showing up at the building on Tuesday nights and Mae Wang almost certainly stayed in that same building Tuesday nights was extremely unlikely to be a coincidence. What was Mae’s connection to Champagne? The idea that she was some kind of Chinese spy trying to woo secrets from Champagne was plausible, but he couldn’t support it yet with any hard evidence. He’d love to sit Champagne down for a chat, but that would never happen until he had something ironclad, something solid and incriminating enough to get it past his own bosses.

  There was still the problem of Mr. Thursday. Who the hell was the hefty guy in the oddball winter hat? He had been showing up regularly, too, and his timetable overlapped with Mae’s just as well as Champagne’s did. Maybe the guy was just some schlump paying for sex but that theory would fly only if Mae was a hooker, and there was no evidence of that.

  No, Mr. Thursday had to be part of the puzzle, but Reilly literally did not have clue one about who the guy was beyond the fact that he was Caucasian, at least six feet tall and owned a bad hat with earflaps. There were probably at least 10,000 guys like that in Ottawa.

  Reilly had thrown out his own similar hat after Kris’s comment about a guy wearing a hat like that never getting laid. Not that it had changed his luck in that regard. The problem was more serious than his hat choice.

  Reilly thought about Suzy, as he did several times most days. He had stopped asking Kris about her because she was either unsympathetic or on Suzy’s side, but that didn’t mean he was any less thirsty for information about his former lover. He did know that she was working some angles of the Mae Wang story, and that worried him. If Farrell thought there was danger in this case, then there was danger, and Suzy hadn’t been warned. Whoever was behind Mae’s death obviously considered homicide a solution when facing a problem. Were her computer and phone being monitored?

  Suzy had always been irritated about the way Reilly worried when she was putting herself in risky situations. Sure, that was her job, but she just didn’t see the dangers the way he did.

  Work was what broke them up. When they had started up, they had talked about ground rules and Reilly had thought a police reporter would understand a cop’s job nearly as well as a fellow cop. She knew that he couldn’t lay out all the details of his cases for her, but she got pissed when he held back on her.

  She had a driving ambition to become a big media star, someone who appeared on the national news every night. Reilly had ambition himself, back when he was her age, but you either got your break or you didn’t. Blowing up your life over work just didn’t pay off.

  As they went on, things got worse. It all came to a head when he caught her trolling through his work phone. He felt he had to draw a line, but she stepped right over it and out the door.

  When it was good between them, though, it was the best connection Reilly had ever had with a woman, even better than with his former wife, Jenny. Suzy had a formidable ability to focus and on those occasions when all of her attention was on him, Reilly had felt like the centre of the world.

  Then there was the whole younger woman thing. At first, it had been exciting, non-stop sex of the kind that he hadn’t had in years. Maybe it was a generational thing, but Suzy had no inhibitions and treated sex like a particularly enjoyable sport. When Reilly had been young, women like that didn’t seem to exist.

  Then the novelty wore off, as it always did. Being 20 years older, Reilly could never admit to so much as an ache or pain for fear of looking like an old man. Every morning, the first thing he did was to see if his jaw line had gotten softer or his hair greyer. He worried about the time when he would really be old and Suzy would still be middle-aged.

  Well, not his problem now.

  Maybe it had all been wrong from the start. What kind of man steals his son’s girlfriend? Reilly used to justify it to himself with some kind of “it was just meant to be” crap, but that didn’t wash any more. Karma could be a bitch.

  If there was a bright side, it was that he had spared Sean from a relationship that wouldn’t have worked out. Suzy just wasn’t a long-term girl. Or maybe Sean would have made it work. Already an inspector and well-regarded in the senior ranks, he had played his cards better than Reilly had. It made Reilly proud. Too bad he never had the chance to tell him.

  Kris Redner reminded Reilly of Suzy in some ways, but she seemed to have mellowed out a bit. She never talked about whatever it was that had happened to her last year, but she seemed less cocky and overconfident than she used to.

  Reilly sometimes wondered if he had a chance there. Kris wasn’t bad looking, if you didn’t mind them bony, and they seemed to have found a natural rhythm working on the Mae Wang story. He’d see how it went once the story was over. That would be the test of whether he was someone she had a connection with or just a handy guy to know.

  Reilly’s train of thought was interrupted by the arrival of Pete Dombrowski, an old-school detective who used to be Reilly’s partner. Pete looked like a basset hound in a fedora, a hat style so out of date that it had become retro. Despite his unlikely appearance, Pete was a damned good cop.

  “Hey Reilly, you getting anywhere with your dead skinnies?”

  Reilly winced. Pete had a derogatory term for every racial group there was. He could zero in on the way people looked, like the slim Somalis, or their colour or their race. In fairness, he called himself a Polack. Reilly was just glad that Pete didn’t understand how to use social media. Reilly had enough problems as it was. The last thing he needed was to get caught up in some kind of racial sensitivity issue.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I sank into the baggy couch in my borrowed apartment, put my feet up on the glass coffee table and scratched behind Ranger’s ears while managing a piece of pepperoni pizza with my left hand. The local CTV news recounted the day’s tally of shootings and car crashes, but I didn’t find it engaging. Normally, I always had my antenna up looking for column angles, but between the Sandhu trial and the Mae Wang story, I had my hands full.

  Ranger rolled over on his side so I could scratch his belly. It had taken time, but we had developed quite a rapport. I would probably miss him when I handed him and the apartment back to the real owner. He lifted his chin up and I gave him a little rub there, too. I tried not to dwell on the fact that I was a single woman on the brink of middle age who was spending Friday night at home alone with her pet. It was probably a warning sign that I was moving toward crazy cat lady status. Maybe I’d check online later and see.

  I reached for the bottle of beer that was propped between my legs and then had one of those thought sequences that comes out of nowhere. First, I thought it had been a long time since I had had anything between my legs, then I thought of Farrell. Dr. Freud would have had fun with that.

  My first impression of the semi-retired spook was that he was yet another hairy woodsman, a type I knew well from my youth. It didn’t take long to figure out that he was a smart guy with strong opinions who had been in some tough spots and walked out alive. There was something else, though. Charisma wasn’t the right word, exactly. It was some blend of confidence, calmness and strength. He was the kind of man you found yourself thinking about hours after you had met him, like he was still present in the room. In that way, he reminded me of a mature version of L.T., the young cop
I had gotten tangled up with last summer in the Adirondacks. I hoped that I wouldn’t bring Farrell the kind of luck that I had brought L.T.

  Or maybe I just liked the look of him with his shirt off. It was a reminder that I needed to get laid, but I seemed to have gotten myself into a spot where that was impossible. Colin was available, of course, but I couldn’t get back into bed with him without setting off a whole chain of emotional complexity that I just couldn’t handle right now. For just a moment, I considered going down to the Red Dart to see if I could get lucky, but then I remembered those two dickwad American salesmen. Some things were worse than celibacy. I just hoped I didn’t shrivel up before the problem resolved itself.

  Farrell had given me a feeling of reasonable confidence that Reilly and I were going in the right direction on the Mae Wang story, but what he said scared me, too. When Reilly dropped me off at my place, I had immediately started digging into stories about the Chinese regime. Farrell might be paranoid, but he was spot on about the Chinese. They were ruthless when it came to furthering their national interests and the laws of other countries didn’t slow them down at all. The news was full of stories about people detained and tortured, or dragged in front of a “justice” system that had a 99.5-per-cent conviction rate.

  I still didn’t see them as the ones behind Mae Wang’s death. It appeared that she was working for them, willingly or otherwise. Her messy demise didn’t appear to further their interests. If not them, then who?

  I wiped my greasy fingers on my jeans and picked up my cell phone. It had been two days since I had heard a thing from Suzy. Either she was striking out completely or she was holding back whatever she found. I knew which option I would put my money on. I brought up her number in my contacts and tapped it. The phone rang four times, then went to voice mail. Had she seen that it was me calling? “Hey, it’s Kris,” I said. “I’ve found out a few things. Wondering what you’ve got. We should get together, compare notes. Call me.”