by Mel Bradshaw
Ted turned to another essay in the volume. This one—called “Are the Judges Listening?”—took a different line against Victim Impact Statements and, though less dismissive in tone, depressed Ted a good deal more.
After a thorough study of the literature, a researcher from the University of Ottawa concluded that fewer than fifteen per cent of prosecutors believe that judges consider harm to victims in their sentencing decisions. Further, the author could discover no evidence that the filing of impact statements by victims resulted in harsher sentences, or indeed had any effect at all on sentences handed down. With one exception. When—despite expectations—the victim recommended lenient treatment for an offender, the judge was more apt to be influenced by the submission.
Ted’s brooding was cut short. A glance at his watch told him he had to get downtown and meet with one of his doctoral students. Before coming back to university, Steve Nishimura had been a computer engineer, code writer and security expert. That background gave Ted the glimmer of an idea.
Chapter 12
Steve Nishimura was anxious at the start of their October 24 meeting. It was their first since the murder, and he plainly didn’t know how much to say. Ted surprised him by cutting short his stammering condolences with a question. Could Steve hack into a smartphone or personal digital assistant in such a way as to make it seem in every way to be off when it was on? Steve confessed that he’d never thought about it. What would be the point? Ted told him the point was to mess up the biker gang behind his wife’s murder. That caught Steve’s interest, and the next day the two of them went shopping for a likely device. Ted had set money aside to take Karin to the Caribbean between Christmas and New Year’s, intending to buy the tickets in late August. The cash—unspent at Karin’s death—was now available for a grimmer indulgence.
Over the following week, while Steve got started on the technological problem, Ted made it his business to locate Walter Weed’s home: Melody had listed only the biker’s gang moniker and workplace. To make enquiries at Spinners Doughnuts where he worked would attract too much attention. On October 25 and 26, Ted did manage to survey the employees’ parking lot at Spinners, but there was no Harley parked there either day. Melody had said Walter had no car. If that were still true, he likely took the bus to work and back. Still, to try shadowing the drug cook home from the plant gates, even if Ted managed to identify him from Melody’s description, would be to risk detection or worse.
There had to be another way.
Ted racked his brains in the course of a five-kilometre walk by the Credit River and afterwards sat stewing at his kitchen table late into the night, before his eye lighted on the phone directory. In the end, the solution was ridiculously simple. The man known in gang circles as Walter Weed, Ted hypothesized, might have a related last name. Alliterating, synonymous, or—simplest of all—rhyming. Because of the familiar speech impediment that substitutes W for R, he started with Reed and Reid and checked first the address most convenient to public transit.
On Friday, October 27, Ted watched Walter Reid come home and, after changing into his leathers, take his hog from the garage. For six more days, Ted studied Walter’s movements. Not the safest occupation for a surveillance amateur, though at least he had the protection of his car. In the two months since the break-in, moreover, the Dark Arrows had made no further attempt against Ted or his property. He dared hope that they had by now discounted whatever rumour they had originally heard about him and no longer believed they were objects of his study.
Walter had many grievances, starting with the handle Weed. What did the brothers expect? The steroids made him so irritable that toking was the only thing that seemed to settle him down. He’d experimented with H, but the leadership were dead against it. Scar had just about throttled Layla when he’d found her rig. Vigilance was the Dark Arrows’ watchword, and “a vigilant junkie is a contradiction in terms.” Yeah, yeah, Walter knew. As for unwinding with sex, forget it. With the doses of stanozolol he was injecting, he simply couldn’t get it up. When he hung out with girls, it was just for show. He plied them with treats for playing along, and with threats of what would happen if they ratted him out. Relaxing it wasn’t. Still, without the ‘roids, he’d have shrunk back into the skinny runt of his pre-biker years. Then he’d have been called Weed for a different reason.
If keeping up appearances in the gang was tiring, work was exhausting. At the end of September, the cops had raided a Hells Angels’ lab and scooped up, among other goodies, fifty thousand tabs of ecstasy. Worth as much as one and a half million dollars retail. Ever since, Walter had been scrambling seven days a week to fill the gap between the diminished supply and the rave scene’s demands. Quality had suffered. Short of sassafras oil, he’d had to use more than the usual amount of adulterants. Appearance also had been compromised. He liked to turn out nice clean-looking pink tabs with a heart stamped on them. Girls thought they were cute, which sold them to boys too. But Walter hadn’t had time to replenish his preferred shade of food colour and had been producing pukey-looking olive drab lumps. Depressingly, they sold just as well.
The worst of it was that in addition to the hours at the lab, he was working five full shifts a week at Spinners Doughnuts. During the summer riding season, he’d used up all the vacation time and unpaid leave they were willing to give him. Chuckles, who called Walter’s day job zero-making, advised him to quit. But Walter felt the need of a cushion of savings, however thin, and of a straight job to fall back on. These boom times for the lab were all fine and good. At the same time, if the Hells could get busted—well, who could ever say they had enough muscle?
The Hells bust had set Scar on edge too. His nagging insistence on security made one more hefty contribution to Walter’s stress levels. Yes, he insisted, he varied his route to the lab every day. No, he had told no one where it was. Jesus Christ, he didn’t want to go to prison. Freedom to ride was what Walter lived for.
When he got out of Spinners at four, he’d take the Dundas bus home to the Applewood Heights neighbourhood of Mississauga. The unsupervised factory parking lot was no place for his customized hog, which had a parking stall of honour in the garage of the semi-detached house where he rented a room. There’s more than one way to modify a Harley. Walter had no interest in the low-slung chopper that risked bottoming out on any obstacle higher than a speed bump. All the changes he made were in the direction of cross-country ruggedness. So when he changed each day from his factory jeans to his leathers and wheeled his machine into the drive, he was able to take advantage of an escape artist’s bagful of shortcuts—of sidewalks, hydro corridors, parks, forest footpaths and railroad rights of way. From time to time, a chain link fence would be installed or repaired across his chosen path, but for such occasions he carried twelve-inch bolt cutters. No cage driver could follow him on routes like these. Any tail would have to show his face and travel on two wheels, not four. He might meet a jogger, walker or mountain bike rider, but most stood aside without comment, and those that yelled about no motorized vehicles being permitted were soon eating his dust. Only once had a foolish old codger tried to block his way. Walter had grabbed the man’s coat collar and given him the scare of his life by dragging him ten metres on his heels before letting him drop in a convenient mud puddle.
By late October, the pressure on the Dark Arrows’ ecstasy cook had eased. Other suppliers had moved in with product. The Hells themselves were likely manufacturing at another location. Meanwhile, the DAs had done well, and Walter—though he still rode out to the kitchen every day—felt entitled to a little reward. Something beyond beer and marijuana.
Such was the mood in which he found the cellphone on the evening of November 2. It lay where it must have fallen, not far from his home. The route he always took cut across a vacant lot, a parcel of real estate with a long history as the future site of some sort of distinctive collection of fabulous dwellings. He hadn’t read the sign too carefully. Walter was as usual enjoying the way his Dunlops spi
t up the loose gravel, when something bright among the white-grey pebbles caught his eye. He was sure it hadn’t been there the day before.
He bent down without dismounting and picked up the orange leatherette case. It turned out to contain much more than a phone. Out slid a brand new silver candy bar loaded with buttons and the biggest display screen he had ever seen on a personal digital assistant. An inscription in slanting characters screamed, “5 megapixels.” Six hundred retail, he guessed, minimum. How could a company charge that much and not make available anything better to carry it in than this flimsy sleeve with a loose belt clip? For organized crime, electronics companies had bikers beat. He wondered whether he’d seen this Day-Glo rig on the waist of one of the joggers or mountain bike riders he’d encountered in the past week, but they rarely came here. No, he couldn’t place it. It felt warm to the touch, as if it had been on only recently. Well, finders keepers. He could use the camera, a video camera it looked like, but that wasn’t the half of it. Multimedia player, Web browser, e-mail—this baby was loaded with features beyond the basic contact and appointment management functions of his old PalmPilot. With luck it would have no more than basic password protection, and the Dark Arrow they called Virus could show him how to do a hard reset that would let Walter in at the negligible cost of erasing the previous owner’s data. A PDA wasn’t the status symbol a bike was, but Walter could still count on turning the brothers a little green. Surely his hard work over the past month had earned him that much.
He wondered briefly whether to take his find back home before heading off to the lab, but he wasn’t afraid of losing it as its last owner had. He zipped it into a cosy inside pocket of his black leather jacket before resuming his circuitous crosscountry path to the house where his chemicals and pill press sat waiting.
From 4:45 on, Ted’s Corolla was parked in a shopping plaza in Applewood Heights. His eyes were glued to a map on the screen of his cellphone. There it was, the bait PDA just where he had left it in the vacant lot.
Five o’clock, and the marker still sat at the same map coordinates. Whichever route he took subsequently, Walter always seemed to pass this spot. With reason. Bouncing over the rough—in places muddy—terrain behind the chain link fence would effectively shed following cars right away.
It hadn’t been easy to decide what colour the case should be. The more conspicuous, the greater the danger that someone would pick it up before Walter got to where Ted had dropped it. The more muted the shade, the greater the danger that Walter himself wouldn’t see it. The sun was setting early these days, just after five, and a drab colour would be easy to miss in the twilight. In the end, Ted had bet on the loneliness of the spot at that hour. Joggers preferred the parks and footpaths.
At five past five, the marker still hadn’t moved. Even if Walter picked it up, he might not take it to the lab. But why not? If he was at all suspicious that the device was equipped with a global positioning system, he should still feel confident that the GPS was inactive so long as the juice was off. Off was exactly what it appeared to be. On was what it was. Using the power button would restore or suppress all the expected lights and sounds—Steve had seen to that brilliantly. An elegant bonus: Steve’s handiwork would expire in a few hours with the current battery charge, leaving no trace for the bikers’ computer nerd to discover tomorrow. What Steve had of course not been able to do was to keep the device from generating heat as it transmitted its position. If the temperature made Walter suspicious, he might drop the gizmo back in the gravel or shy it into the bushes.
At 5:08, the marker started to move. Ted rubbed his eyes. The orange dot crept out of the lot and down the creek lane, depositing a trail of yellow breadcrumbs between it and its original position. Was it Walter who had taken the bait?
At 5:15, the cellphone was heading north on Cawthra Road. The dotted trace line ran through two paths too narrow for cars, but the marker had travelled too far too fast to be with a jogger or anyone on a pedal bike. Walter—it had to be. Ted turned the key in the Corolla’s ignition, slid the shift lever into drive, and pulled out of the parking lot. As darkness fell, he followed the breadcrumbs up Cawthra and to the east, checking his phone’s display only as traffic allowed. The 5:45 check revealed no change from 5:40. The marker had come to rest in a subdivision northeast of Pearson Airport. Ted drove around and wrote down the address of the townhouse complex. The GPS transmitter wasn’t precise enough to tell him which unit it was in: a police stakeout would have to deduce that from the traffic. For their secret drug kitchen, the Dark Arrows had chosen not—as Melody had suggested—a cabin in the woods, but rather a blindingly ordinary dwelling in the jungle of Toronto’s sprawl.
Ted closed his eyes in the parked car and felt a moment of joy for the first time since August.
“Hello, Ted. Good to hear from you.” Detective Rodriguez’s voice came through the ether with a friendly warmth. “That sounds like traffic noise where you are. You’re not phoning and driving, are you?”
“No, I’ve pulled over.” Ted pushed down the accelerator a little further and swerved around a black Audi. Traffic on the westbound Queen Elizabeth Way was moving well for once. Pity to waste the momentum. “Look, I’ve got something on the Dark Arrows. I haven’t been able to get a hold of Nelson.”
“Yeah? The Crown has something for you too. A deal.”
“A deal on what?” The needle was crowding 130. Better slow down.
“A plea bargain. Someone from Mr. Szabo’s office is supposed to be calling you, but since I’ve got you on the line . . . Shawn’s pleading guilty. There won’t be a trial. You won’t have to go on the stand and go back over that night for the benefit of a jury.”
There were red brake lights up ahead, but still far in the distance. Time to get past this bus taking all the gamblers to be cleaned out in the Niagara casinos. Meanwhile, Rodriguez sounded pleased, and that was good, but Ted still didn’t understand exactly what she was saying.
“Pleaded guilty to first degree murder?” he asked.
“No, manslaughter.”
“That’s bullshit, Tracy.”
Shawn was a murderer. A confession to having caused Karin’s death sealed it for Ted. He braked late and hard to avoid rear-ending the Ford Focus in front of him and got a three-second blast from the Audi’s horn. Okay, it was time to pull over.
“They call it a plea bargain, Ted. Each side gives a little. He’ll still go to jail.”
Ted’s car came to rest on the paved shoulder, only just out of traffic. A four-metre high wall protecting a subdivision from highway noise prevented his pulling over any farther. The Corolla rocked in the wind every time an eighteen-wheeler passed. If Ted had tried to open the driver’s side door, it would have been sheared off and booted past the next interchange. He clicked on his four-way flashers. The pulsing arrows on the dashboard pointed in both directions at once. The sky was dark.
First Karin had been taken away. Now the hope of justice was being taken away too. Manslaughter? The medical evidence must be lining someone’s birdcage. Ted felt ill.
“Are you still there?” asked Rodriguez.
“Detective,” said Ted, “have you read the post-mortem?”
“The Crown makes these deals, Mr. Boudreau, not the police.”
“I thought I heard applause from your end.”
“Could have something to do with closing one case so I can work on two others and come home here to my daughter before she goes to sleep. Look, I understand you’re acquainted with Mr. Szabo. If you don’t like what he’s done, I suggest you talk to him.”
“Okay,” said Ted. He fancied he could hear childish warbling in the background.
“So what was it you called me about?”
“What? Oh, sorry. Nothing important.”
When Ted got home at six thirty, there was a phone message from Markus asking if he could drop in during the evening. Ted ordered in a large pizza. On locating a bottle of good Valpolicella Karin had bought one sunnier autum
n, he drew the cork to let it breathe. He thought he might get Markus mellow before breaking the news of the plea bargain, then found himself blurting it all out as soon as his father-in-law walked through the door.
Markus professed not to be surprised. “It’s not about justice, Macduff. It’s about clearance rates. Productivity.”
Over supper, they tried to talk about music. Markus had brought a cassette he’d made of Karin playing her own transcription of the stirring anthem “Va, pensiero” from Nabucco. “Fly thoughts, on golden wings”: a song of banishment and longing—for the land of Israel within the context of the opera, for a future single nation in Verdi’s fragmented Italy. Ted recalled a concert performance of Nabucco, at the end of which this chorus had been repeated as an encore. The singers put their whole hearts into it. He’d been close enough to see in their faces radiant belief in whatever promised land each held most dear. Karin had been in the pit, her face hidden, but Ted saw it too—then and now—as he heard her play. “My homeland so beautiful and lost.”