by Mel Bradshaw
“Don’t tell me the Web address led to a recipe for meth,” said Ted. “That would be just too tidy.”
“For ecstasy, actually—MDMA. And I can’t help it if it sounds tidy. It’s true. I have a cousin at McMaster University, someone really into the rave scene. She doesn’t do Adam any more, but she knows one of the pusher boys that collects twenty-five to thirty dollars a pill from these kids—a rock star look-alike, she says, or used to be. Last week she saw him with several stitches closing a cut through his lip and his ear bandaged up. She wormed it out of him that he was warned to buy only from established wholesalers in future and to be ‘afraid of the dark’.”
Ted let the dramatic pause extend between them. He noticed that a rash had broken out on the back of Melody’s hands and that two of the spots on her forehead had been scratched raw and were bleeding. At the same time, her face glowed with pride.
“Look, Melody,” he said, “I’ve had zero success up to now persuading you to stop pursuing this, but I don’t want you to get hurt and, believe me, not just because it will make the university look bad. If I find you a detective that handles biker crime, will you please just leave the whole mess to him or her?”
“Personally, I think it would make a great article for The Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. But let’s talk again when the dossier is complete, and I promise to take whatever advice you have to give. I just have to know first where the Dark Arrows’ kitchen is. I heard a striker named Thorn ask Walter Weed why he’s never around the clubhouse any more. Scar told Mr. Inquisitive to shut up, and from the glares that went around the table, I get the impression the Dark Arrows won’t be voting him into the org anytime soon. Assuming Walter is the cook, his absences could mean he makes the pills somewhere else.”
“Or in a part of the clubhouse a striker wouldn’t have access to.”
“Then I doubt if they’d let the striker into the clubhouse at all. Besides, I don’t see room on the floor plan. My guess is there’s a cabin somewhere in the woods.”
“Somewhere in the woods?” Ted let his exasperation be heard in his voice and be seen in his wry face. He wasn’t yelling, but he was pretty intense. “Now you want to go stalking bad guys through the undergrowth, like some commando. For Pete’s sake, drop it.”
“Okay,” she said, clearly startled.
“Don’t keep any of this ‘dossier’ on your computer. Don’t keep any hard copy in your desk.”
“Okay, I’ll drop it. I won’t try to find out where the cabin is. Just don’t call the cops on me, okay?”
Ted waved her out the door, and to his relief she went meekly. Then he added a record of the meeting to his Dark Arrow disk. That night Ted slept poorly. When Karin asked what was wrong, he blamed a hot dog he had picked up on campus, but next day he dropped in on his colleague Graham Hart and partially unburdened himself. He told Graham he had acquired some information on a holdout biker gang, and he wasn’t sure what to do with it. For one thing, he had no way of verifying its accuracy. For another, publication might lead to bloodshed. Although he had no intention of appropriating her work as his own, he took the precaution of not mentioning Melody, either by name or under the description “one of my students”. Should he, Ted asked, hand the data over to the Biker Enforcement Unit? Should he sit on it until things cooled down? Or should he destroy the disk?
Although intrigued, Graham discreetly did not press Ted to reveal his source. He advised Ted to continue to collect what information he could and choose his moment to publish.
In the days following, Ted wondered if he shouldn’t go to the police after all. While ecstasy was not in itself a lethal drug, it was an illegal substance with which deaths had been associated. Allowing the Dark Arrows to continue peddling MDMA could be dangerous. On the other hand, that risk had to be weighed against the risk that the police would not be able to protect Ted and Melody from biker gang reprisals. The two of them and their families. Ted shuddered to think of playing those unknown odds.
As long as he kept the data, which he was confident he could do securely, he retained the option of involving the cops later if circumstances changed. If, for example, the DAs’ ecstasy started killing people or if all-out, bloody war erupted between the holdout gang and the Hells. In the end, Ted concluded that Graham’s advice had been sound.
Chapter 5
When Markus came out of the room where they’d laid Karin’s body, Ted was sitting in the hall opposite the police sentry. Ted thought it was a different constable than the one he had first found in the room, but he couldn’t say he’d noticed when the substitution had been made. Time passed while he stared dazedly at his shoes, the brown loafers he’d buffed up with a Kleenex before chairing the discussion, many years ago. He’d slept a bit in the room before Markus’s arrival and now could not even say whether he was tired. He was nothing.
A haggard Markus planted himself before Ted and looked down at him with bloodshot eyes. “Are we going back to your house?”
“Can’t. It’s off limits while they look for evidence.”
“How long is that going to take?”
“They say they don’t know. It’s the long weekend.”
Markus softened. “We’d better go to my place then,” he said gently.
“You’re exhausted. Let me drive.”
It was proof of Markus’s exceptionally low spirits that, instead of dismissing the suggestion with characteristic manly contempt, he wordlessly passed Ted the keys. From the two stalls it sprawled across in the hospital parking garage, Ted guided the battleship size, black SUV down Erin Mills Parkway and onto the eastbound ramp of the six-lane Queen Elizabeth Way. Markus lived in the near corner of Toronto, one where the north-south streets had numbers for names and the houses tended to be either twenty-first century and large or mid-twentieth and small. Markus’s figured among the latter. It hadn’t been Quirk’s childhood home, a spacious suburban sidesplit Ted had seen only after it had been sold and only from the outside. Markus said that a two-bedroom brick bungalow was all a widowed empty nester needed. By the time Ted reached his father-in-law’s drive, he was wishing he were back in the hospital room with Karin, but of course they’d have taken her body to the morgue by now. Maybe the pathologist was already sawing it open.
Markus mounted the porch steps slowly, just as the last tattered shreds of night were lifting, but he assured Ted he wouldn’t be able to sleep yet. Instead, he suggested the two of them go into the living room and do some yoga-type relaxation exercises.
Dimly Ted recognized tools the professional counsellor would use to combat stress. They seemed miles from anything he could relate to or even politely decline. Should he say that tenseness wasn’t what he was suffering from, thank you, or that he didn’t want to relax? He lay on his back on the leather sofa while Markus sat cross-legged in the middle of the oriental carpet.
Ted didn’t think he would sleep either, but presently he was dreaming about Karin. He was listening to her play Bach’s first solo cello suite, the work celebrated in Toronto’s Music Garden. He always found the Prelude sexy, and doubly so when she played it, grinning at him, knowing what he was thinking. After announcing itself, the cello bobbed along for about a minute and a quarter at a brisk, steady rhythm through a characteristic Bach series of non-repetitive repetitions. Then came a break. Just over half a minute of what Ted thought of as sweet noodling led at last into the insistent beat of the forty-second-long coda. Now Quirk’s left hand slid down the neck of her instrument, drawing from it higher and higher notes, while her right bowed with a sense of unstoppable purpose towards the release. She was half a note from it when Markus’s voice broke in—
“Right, Ted. How about a drink?”
It was light outside now, probably between six and seven. The only time Ted had ever had a drink at such an hour was when Karin had brought him bubbly and orange juice in bed on his last birthday. He followed Markus into the kitchen, and they sat on either side of the table with a
bottle of Scotch and a pitcher of water between them. Markus got up again for glasses. He seemed, for the moment at least, to have found a fresh source of energy. His eyes showed clear grey in the dawn light. The deep laugh lines at their corners didn’t look out of place under present circumstances, suggesting rather character behind his sorrow.
Markus poured two fingers of whisky into each glass. His fingers were thick. “Drink up,” he said.
Ted took a sip, then added water. Markus waved the pitcher away.
“She was on the 400 headed north,” said Markus. “What did she go back home for?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
Markus’s jaw seemed to tighten. He drank.
“Did you know she was dead when the ambulance took her away?”
“I thought there was still a chance,” said Ted. “Medicine can do so much now—with strokes, with severed limbs—if you get attention soon enough.”
“By the time they diagnosed Harriet’s cancer, it was too late to treat. That didn’t stop them trying, but they did their best to reduce expectations down to zero, so when their experiments failed, they could always say they told us so. Karin and I got our hopes up anyway.”
Ted had, of course, heard before about the death of Karin’s mother. He wondered if Markus were trying to bond with him as a widower.
“We were crazy about each other,” the older man went on. Then he flashed a grin as he remembered something Ted had not heard. “And sometimes just plain crazy. Harriet was in the hospital for the last time over Hallowe’en. She had Karin bring her a gorilla mask. When I walked in the door of her room that day, the bedclothes were pulled right up to the rubber chin. She said something like—and you have to imagine this voice coming through a gash in the latex—something like, ‘I think this chemo has a few side effects we weren’t warned about.’ She was dead by Remembrance Day.”
Ten years ago, Ted believed. Could be a difficult anniversary coming up.
“I still grieve for her!” Markus declared, defensive perhaps on account of all his happy moments in the interval. “To lose the love of your life is terrible, Ted, and it will never be anything but terrible, so don’t think I don’t know where you’re at. But—” Markus poured himself another drink, not so carefully measured. “But I’ll tell you this: what you’re going through, my friend, and what I went through and go through on account of the death of a spouse is nothing compared to the pain of losing a child. Take that from me and hope you never learn first hand. Death of parents—bad, but always to be expected. Death of a wife—bad, especially if she dies before her time, but one of you has got to go first. So the odds are no better than fifty-fifty. Death of a child—should never happen, and therefore insupportable. That’s why I understand your pain, but you have no idea of mine.”
Ted stared down at his drink, unresponsive, but he hoped Markus wouldn’t ever read the autopsy report. Eventually, he stood up and went to the sink.
“I’m going to make some coffee,” he said, managing to wash his face under cover of filling the carafe. “How did you get into a career in anger management, Markus?”
“Why are you asking?”
“I’d guess it’s all just a matter of deep breathing, isn’t it? In—out. In—out. Right?”
“To a point. Breathing, imaging, cognitive restructuring—if you want to get technical. But, as I always tell my clients, sometimes there’s a place for anger.”
“You mean after Denial?” said Ted. “Before Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance?”
“No, forget all that mechanical stages-of-grief thing. Anger can come at any stage. I see it as a sign that you haven’t worked out how to respond to a situation. I knew a counsellor who got angry because her client wasn’t experiencing the stages of grief in the ‘right’ order. What this colleague’s anger was telling her was that she had to devise a more flexible paradigm. I see the management of anger as a matter of channelling your angry energy into action, whatever action absorbs it—whether that means going on a pilgrimage or playing a practical joke. Do you think we should hire a private detective?”
“No,” said Ted—adding quietly, “Not yet, at least. Let’s see how the police investigation goes.”
While Markus and Ted were downing their second large cups of coffee, Detective Nelson phoned to ask if he and his partner could come over. Ted left voice mail with various members of his department to the effect that a family emergency would prevent him from attending the remainder of the “Punishing Homicide” conference.
The detectives didn’t get over to the bungalow till after nine in the morning. They had a short private interview with Markus before asking Ted to accompany them to 11 Division, where he could give a proper videotaped witness statement.
The divisional headquarters stood at the intersection of two multi-lane suburban avenues in western Mississauga. Ted was driven in the back of an unmarked black sedan to the side entrance of a bunker-like concrete square with only one above-ground storey. The interior spaces received natural illumination only through skylights and a frieze of windows too high to afford views in or out. He was bundled off to an interview room furnished with one camera, one table, and some basic office chairs. Contrary to what he had seen on U.S. television, there was no one-way glass.
The session began with Ted relating once more under what circumstances he’d last seen Karin alive, what he had understood about her plans for the weekend, what time he had returned home Friday night, what he’d found when he got there, and which of the couple’s possessions appeared to be missing from the house.
Then Nelson asked some new questions.
“Mr. Boudreau, do you have any idea who could have been responsible for what happened last night?”
“I have to admit I was responsible—”
“Hold it there, sir,” Nelson interrupted. “Are you saying you weren’t at that Faculty Club reception and you weren’t on that 10:43 commuter train you told us about?”
Ted blinked. He hadn’t been thinking in terms of establishing an alibi, but his criminological training kept him from being shocked. Women were most often killed by their husbands or boyfriends. It was simply the first hypothesis to eliminate. Well, he had witnesses if anyone cared to check: Lionel Kerr could put him at the club and Rose Cesario on the train.
“No,” he said. “I was there—both places. But was my wife killed that early?”
“Preliminary estimates put the time of her death between nine forty-five and ten forty-five.”
This news dropped into Ted’s consciousness with a sick thump. So Quirk had already been dead for over half an hour by the time he had found her. He thought back to the deluded urgency of his 911 call. It bewildered him that he hadn’t known.
“Mr. Boudreau,” Rodriguez asked, “what did you mean by saying you were responsible?”
“I meant,” he said, “responsible in part. I never had the alarm reconnected and the account switched into our names after we bought the house.”
Detective Rodriguez scratched her scalp with a short, orange fingernail. “Who knew,” she said, “that there was no working alarm?”
“Anyone either of us brought to an empty house would have noticed we didn’t have to disarm the system on entering. Similarly, anyone present when we left the house empty might have noticed we weren’t arming it. There aren’t many people in either of those categories. It would take some thought, but I might be able to draw you up a list. Otherwise, I never told anyone.”
“Might your wife have told anyone?” Rodriguez asked.
“She might.”
“As I understand it, Mr. Boudreau,” said Nelson, “you and your wife had originally planned to leave the city for your father-in-law’s cottage before dark on Friday evening and not return till the holiday Monday. Is that right?”
“That was the plan,” said Ted. “Then on Wednesday morning a colleague asked me to substitute for him at a conference this weekend. Karin was still supposed to leave for Muskoka
before dark yesterday evening, and the house would have been empty till I got home after eleven.”
“Did you tell anyone when the house would be empty?” asked Nelson.
“People in the criminology department knew.”
“Neighbours?” asked Nelson.
“I didn’t tell any of them.”
Rodriguez repeated her earlier question.
“Might your wife have told anyone?”
“She might.”
“Okay, Mr. Boudreau,” said Nelson. “Who might your wife have spoken to about the alarm and about the house being empty?”
“I don’t know. Neighbours, musical colleagues, people in shops.”
“She was a chatty person?” suggested Rodriguez, as if she understood and rather liked chatty people herself.
Still the characterization nettled Ted. “No, I wouldn’t say so. But it wouldn’t occur to Karin not to tell a person she thought she knew. She wasn’t so much talkative as open and trusting—until people proved unworthy of her trust.”
“Would you like to take a break, Mr. Boudreau?” asked Rodriguez.
“No, I’d like to get on with finding this guy.”
Find the criminals, Martha Kesler had said, barely thirteen hours ago. Find them so we can help them not to be criminals. Ted choked on the memory. Help them not to be, more like. Not since about age fourteen had he been visited by the desire to do personal violence. This morning, he believed it would be easy to slit a throat. He saw in the faces of the detectives that he was doing a poor job of hiding his feelings.
“Right,” said Nelson, rummaging in his fanny pack. “Here’s a package of Kleenex, never been opened. I’ll make a couple of calls, and we’ll pick this up again in five.”
“Do you have a washroom?”