Without Blood

by Martin Michaud

  “That’s a birch. Next to it is a Colorado blue spruce. To the right, you can see a Norway maple and, behind the maple, an Austrian black pine.”

  We crested a low hill and approached a series of vaults that had been built into the sloping earth. Miles approached one of them, its stone façade decorated with four columns. He read aloud the inscription emblazoned on its iron door.

  In memory of

  Thomas D’Arcy McGee

  The most eloquent voice of

  The Fathers of Confederation

  1825–1868

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  “One evening, he made a passionate speech in the House of Commons in support of national unity. When he got home that night, he was shot on his doorstep.”

  “Did they find the killer?”

  “Yes. He was hanged.”

  We walked to the cemetery’s main avenue and turned north. When the avenue split into narrow paths, Miles went a few steps ahead of me and stopped in front of a monolithic gravestone.

  “Do you like poetry?” he asked.

  “I don’t really know much about it,” I said.

  He cleared his throat and recited:

  “The lakes are ice-locked, silent, dead.

  Where do I live? Where shall I go?

  My soul is ice-locked, silent, dead,

  Another Norway, deep in snow,

  From which the golden skies have fled.”

  “That’s lovely,” I said. “Did you write it?”

  “No,” Miles answered. “He did.”

  He stepped aside so I could see the name on the stone.

  Émile Nelligan

  Poet

  1879–1941

  “Is this what you wanted to me to see?”

  “No. We’re almost there.”

  I closed my eyes and let the soft wind caress my face. I felt relaxed, serene. The surroundings were deeply soothing.

  The peace was immense, the tranquility absolute.

  In this place, only memories lay ice-locked, silent, dead.

  I was enjoying Miles’s company. The worries I’d experienced earlier, when he asked me to spend the day with him, had dissolved. There were no feelings of embarrassment between us, no awkward silences.

  He led me to a modest headstone in the shape of a cross.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  I read the epitaph.

  Étienne Beauregard-Delorme

  1993–1998

  My heart stopped. I began to shake.

  “You knew him?” I asked, feeling my emotions rise.

  “No.”

  I was struggling not to burst into tears.

  “Who sent you to find me?”

  His answer came without hesitation.

  “No one.”

  I hadn’t been in touch with anyone since running away a few months after the boy’s death. As a precaution, I had leased my apartment under my mother’s last name. I had cancelled my credit cards, closed my bank account, and deliberately failed to renew my passport, health insurance card, and driver’s licence. My cellphone number was confidential. I’d gone off the grid. Disappeared from circulation. Or so I had believed.

  “Was it Stefan? My father?”

  Miles was looking into my soul. His expression was desolate.

  “No one sent me, Simone. No one.”

  He was speaking the truth. I couldn’t say how, or why.

  But he knew.

  Leaning against a tree, I stared into the distance. The tear stains were probably still visible on my face.

  Hoping, perhaps, for comforting words from Miles, I had revealed my secret to him. I had shone a light into the dark place where I’d been hiding for too long.

  Was I right to confide in him?

  As I spoke, he simply nodded, not saying a word. It was only when we started walking again that his hand touched mine, gentle as a butterfly.

  The daylight was starting to fade.

  A bird was singing somewhere, by rote, without conviction.

  We came out through the gate on Camillien-Houde. We hadn’t seen a living soul during the entire walk.

  I felt vaguely nauseated, disoriented, unsteady on my legs. I was finding it hard to get over the shock I’d just experienced. My mind was reeling, struggling to assemble explanations. I didn’t know what to think. I needed to understand.

  “Miles, when you talked earlier about the thin line between a good decision and a bad one, did you really mean that?”

  He looked at me with intensity. “Yes.”

  “And the headstone you showed me — you’re not going to claim that was synchronicity.”

  He bowed his head. “No.”

  Night had fallen. A large scarlet moon was sailing across the sky like a fiery balloon. We walked under the overpass and came back to the apartment.

  “Everything I just told you about that little boy … you already knew, didn’t you?”

  3

  For Detective Sergeant Victor Lessard of the Montreal Police, it was shaping up to be a good morning.

  He had sent off his reports at 8:00 a.m., then he’d participated in the patrol officers’ briefing, giving directives and reviewing unsolved cases.

  Apart from a car-theft ring that was proving hard to track down, things were generally going well at Station 11 in the Côte-des-Neiges district.

  He answered his phone messages in a hurry, leaving himself time before lunch to go online and learn more about Banff National Park. He had closed his office door deliberately. He didn’t want to be disturbed.

  As he clicked on his web browser, he was aware of how much better he was feeling. He hadn’t touched a drop of liquor in three months. Okay, yes, there was alcohol in his mouthwash, but ever since his teenage years, he’d been careful not to swallow the stuff.

  He still needed to lose a little weight, but overall, his life was back under control. He was working out again: a half-hour jog first thing every morning, followed by a short weight-training session. He’d even signed up for a salsa class.

  Little did he realize that the events of the next few days would plunge him back into hell.

  The hardest part, even now, was living without Marie and the kids. He’d stopped in front of the house the previous evening. Through the kitchen window, he’d seen his ex-wife and his daughter laughing as they went about their tasks. As usual, his son, Martin, wasn’t around.

  He bitterly regretted having pushed her.

  Marie had put up with all kinds of misbehaviour in the past, wanting to support him in his time of trouble. But that evening, he had stepped over the line. Despite the flowers, the gifts, the numerous pleas for forgiveness, and the attempts to blame everything on the professional trauma he’d been through, she was implacable. If he didn’t move out, she’d press charges. Worse still, she had forbidden him from having any further contact with the kids until he’d been dry for a year.

  And she was right.

  He’d been dragging them down with him. His influence on his children’s development had become harmful. These days, he knew nothing about them, though he did occasionally follow them to find out who they were spending time with. There were so many traps they could fall into. Especially Martin, who was just emerging from adolescence.

  When Marie realized that he was spying on the kids, her outrage had prompted him to promise that he wouldn’t do it anymore. But there were evenings when he couldn’t help himself.

  The salsa class he’d joined was helpful: it alleviated his solitude. The idea had come from a woman he’d talked to at an AA meeting. But he never mentioned it at the station. It might have raised questions about his masculinity.

  It saddened him that, even today, he was forced to hide his vulnerability for fear of being marginalized. Others might see things differently, but he believed the police force still harboured a deeply macho culture.

  And he had paid a steep price for that culture. It was only when he’d hit rock bottom and Marie had thrown him out
of the house that he’d finally made up his mind to consult the police psychologist.

  He hadn’t yet forgiven himself for the deaths of two of his men the previous year. But he had gained a clearer sense of how powerfully that event had affected him, and, above all, of why he had sought refuge in alcohol. He was still fragile, of course, but now he felt better equipped to deal with situations that might trigger him.

  At forty-three years old, after a dark time in which he had even contemplated suicide, he was finally making plans for the future again. When July came around, he would have a talk with Marie.

  Whether or not he’d been dry for a year, he would insist on joint custody. And at the end of the summer, he and the kids would go camping in the Rockies.

  He took a sip of coffee.

  He was about to launch a Google search when he heard a knock. Nadja Fernandez appeared in the doorway.

  “Sorry to bother you, Victor.”

  “Mmm?” Lessard growled, not looking up from his screen.

  “Dispatch is reporting a hit and run on Côte-des-Neiges Road.”

  “Any deaths or injuries?”

  “I don’t know. Apparently there’s a witness at the scene.”

  “Patrol cop.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Send a patrol cop, Fernandez.”

  “Nguyen’s on a domestic violence case. Chagnon’s in the east end dealing with a detainee transfer, and Thibodeau’s giving a crime-prevention talk at a school in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. That leaves only Vinet for emergencies. Everyone else is helping out on the Jacques Cartier Bridge.”

  “Fathers for Justice again?”

  “Yep. There’s a huge traffic jam.”

  For the third time since the beginning of the year, a man in a superhero costume had climbed the bridge and was holding law enforcement officers at bay in the name of the militant paternal-rights group. Despite his own strained family situation, Lessard felt no sympathy for the group, whose tactics he disapproved of.

  The real problem, he thought, had deeper roots. It was too hard to raise kids in Quebec these days. Driven by globalization, people’s work schedules had followed the American model and become inhuman. Jobs were being lost to countries where production costs were lower and workers were exploited. Lessard had closely followed the last provincial election campaign, two years earlier, during which the struggle to balance work and family had become a political issue for the first time.

  As far as he was concerned, the heart of the problem lay there. If he hadn’t been so caught up in his work, he might have had more time to devote to his family. Quebec needed radical changes. Everyone was always talking about health and social programs. But what did any of that matter, if nobody paid attention to society’s nucleus, the family? The good intentions had ebbed away when minimal concrete measures were taken in the wake of the election.

  Although values on the police force were evolving, Lessard didn’t generally talk about these things. But he’d recently surprised his colleagues on the detective team by coming to the defence of Chris Pearson, a young cop on the squad. Pearson had become the father of a baby girl at the beginning of the year, and his late arrival at a meeting had prompted sarcastic comments from Detective Sirois. In response, Lessard had said that they needed to give more thought to family issues at union meetings. Coming from a guy who was widely known to be an inveterate workaholic, this declaration had provoked an awkward silence.

  “Send Pearson or Sirois.”

  “Their shift starts at one o’clock,” Fernandez said.

  “Damn.”

  “Do you want me to transfer the call to another station?”

  “No!” he said, his voice rising.

  The Station 11 team would handle its own calls. The last thing Lessard wanted to do was give Commander Tanguay an excuse to deliver another of his sermons on honour and integrity.

  There were times when Lessard ran out of patience with the latest methods. Police work had been tough enough under the old system. Nowadays, with neighbourhood stations in place, he got the sense that maintaining customer relations counted for more than getting results. The higher-ups were too concerned with the force’s public image, and not enough with sound investigative work.

  He wasn’t a politician or a bureaucrat, for God’s sake. He was a cop! He’d been trained to catch bad guys, not to reassure city councillors or comfort senior citizens’ groups. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? Especially now, when he had to deal with staff cuts.

  “Another pain in my ass,” he muttered, standing up and grabbing his black leather jacket.

  “Thanks, Victor, you’re a doll,” Fernandez said, smiling.

  “Mmm.”

  The man who had witnessed the accident was very old. He had a dog on a leash. His glasses were so thick that Lessard wondered whether he could see anything more than a few metres away.

  Perhaps he’d imagined the whole thing. Too often, solitary elderly people called the police simply because they were starved for human contact.

  The detective sergeant approached the man and shook his hand.

  “Victor Lessard, Montreal Police.”

  “Hilaire Gagnon.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I was walking my dog. Butor has a bad leg, but he still needs to get out regularly.”

  Lessard backed away from the animal, a yellow Lab. It ignored him. He couldn’t stand dogs.

  “I was strolling along the sidewalk when I heard a car moving fast behind me. Then I heard a noise of crumpling metal. That’s when I turned around.”

  “What did you see?”

  “A black car, driving at full speed. It raced around the corner with its tires squealing. Then I saw someone lying on the ground.”

  “The victim?”

  “The young woman, yes. I went to her. She looked like she was asleep. I put my ear to her mouth. She was breathing.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Other people came over. One young man called an ambulance. Another young fellow covered her with his coat. The ambulance took her away a few minutes before you arrived.”

  “And then?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Did you hear the car hit the brakes before the impact?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get the licence number?”

  “Sorry, no. My eyes aren’t as good as they used to be. But it was a luxury car, I’m sure of that. Probably a Mercedes. My grandson has a Mercedes. He works for a bank. Acts like he owns the world. Young people these days, they think they know everything.”

  “A Mercedes. Are you sure?”

  “I think so,” the old man said. Lessard suppressed his impatience. He wasn’t going to get much out of this witness.

  “Recent model?”

  “Fairly.”

  The detective sergeant sighed. He wrote the information down in his notebook.

  “What about the headlights? Were they round? Rectangular?”

  “Now that I think about it, maybe it was a Lexus.”

  Impatiently, Lessard handed his notebook and pen to the man and asked him to write down his contact information.

  While the old man complied, the detective sergeant approached the spot where the impact had occurred. No blood, no skid marks. Strange.

  Probably another drunk driver.

  • • •

  As he was jotting down notes in front of the café, a panic-stricken young woman came up to him. She was speaking so fast he could barely make out what she was saying.

  “Calm down, miss. Take your time.”

  She took a deep breath. “Was that Simone they took away in the ambulance? Was there an accident? Oh, God …”

  Lessard rubbed his chin.

  “Simone?”

  “Simone Fortin. My best friend. I had to go back up to the office for a few minutes. We were supposed to meet in the café. But she wasn’t there. Then I saw the ambulance drive away. Tell me she isn’t dead!”
<
br />   “What does she look like?”

  The young woman gave him a quick description: age, height, weight, hair colour.

  “And your name is?”

  “Ariane Bélanger.”

  She looked at him anxiously. He would have liked to be able to reassure her. But what could he say? He knew nothing so far.

  “A woman was just hit by a car, Ms. Bélanger. I don’t know her identity.”

  Ariane put her hand to her mouth, horrified.

  “Is she …”

  “Dead? No. But for the moment, I don’t have any other details.”

  The young woman began to cry. Lessard put a hand on her shoulder. At that moment, he wished he could be anywhere else, but his voice was reassuring.

  “It may not have been your friend who got hit. That often happens with missing persons. Everyone thinks they’re dead, then they turn up safe and sound. Your friend may already be back at the office by now.”

  Ariane called the Dinar receptionist. Simone hadn’t returned. Regretting that his attempts at encouragement had failed so quickly, Lessard pulled out his notebook.

  “Where do you live?”

  He took down her address on Doctor Penfield Avenue.

  “Phone number?”

  Lessard was old school. He’d never gotten used to the obligatory standard-form incident reports. When working on a case, he had preserved the habit of scribbling down whatever he could: impressions of the scene, contact information for witnesses, weather conditions — anything that caught his attention.

  He hesitated. “I’ve forgotten your first name.”

  A lock of hair had fallen in front of her eye. She blew it aside. “Ariane.”

  Lessard wrote it down, then called Fernandez. As he brought the phone to his ear, he dropped his notebook. A man wearing sunglasses who was standing at the nearby bus stop bent down to pick up the notebook and handed it to him. The detective sergeant gave him a wave of acknowledgement.

  “Nadja, I spoke to the witness. He says the ambulance left a few minutes before I got here. Call Urgences-santé and find out which hospital the victim was taken to. White female, early thirties, red hair, about five foot five, a hundred and twenty pounds. Her name may be Simone Fortin. I’m with Fortin’s best friend, who’s trying to locate her.”