by John Farrow
He tried again to pin him down, to scrape a nick from his shell.
“How was the weather when you left? So-so?”
Dreher looked over at him with evident caution.
“When you flew out? Cold?”
Agent Rand Dreher removed his gray leather gloves from a coat pocket. He permitted a smile to touch the edges of his lips and considered whether or not to reply. He conceded, “Forty-five, give or take. Fahrenheit, of course. Cloudy. So yeah, so-so.”
“Had to be Fahrenheit,” Cinq-Mars noted, “down there at nine-three-five.”
Fishing, he was referring to 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. The agent smiled broadly this time, if not altogether warmly. “Émile, does it make a difference? Yes. I’ve come up here from down there.”
“Merely curious,” Cinq-Mars demurred. “Pleasant flight?”
“Routine. When you fly as much as I do, nothing can be more pleasant than that. Have you been there?”
Cinq-Mars returned the look. “Washington? Or FBI Headquarters?”
“I meant the city. But either? Both?”
“The city, for cherry blossom time, and to your headquarters in other seasons.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I’m sure the record exists. This isn’t the first time you guys have tried to recruit me.”
“Not recruit.” In the cold, Dreher pulled on his gloves and deeply exhaled, his breath visible. “Just seeking your help and advice, Émile. Plain and simple. The good counsel of a famous detective. Shall we go in my car?”
“I’ll drive my own.” His guest, by lifting his abundant eyebrows, raised the obvious question, so he explained himself. “It’s a bit of a hike. More or less back toward Montreal. If I take my car, then when we’re done you can carry on, skip the long detour driving me home again.”
That made sense, so Dreher and Mathers started off ahead of him and Cinq-Mars fell in behind in his Jeep. He had things to think about—Sandra’s reaction, for one—and welcomed the solitude. “Go, Émile,” she insisted. “Go.” Almost shooing him out the door. Tacking on, “It’s in your blood, there’s no denying that.”
He expected her to acquiesce, but her enthusiasm took him by surprise.
Émile wanted to argue the point, but as his guests were pulling on their boots in his vestibule it was neither the place nor the appropriate time. Was he really failing that badly as a retiree that she was willing to shove him right back into the line of fire after, for so long, extolling the virtues of quitting? He enjoyed many aspects to retirement, and if not for his bout with pneumonia and the time on his back with cracked ribs, he might have discovered more. He guessed what was being implied here, that she cottoned on to his own dismay. Sandra might disagree, but the old job was not something he needed. He didn’t miss it. What he did miss was using his brain, and so much—too much, he’d say—of his work with horses was strictly physical. He didn’t mind the activity, he reveled in it, actually, but the lack of intellectual stimulation was beginning to gnaw at him. He felt impoverished for real human puzzles, not the crossword variety, which he was lousy at anyway, and twice he caught himself carving patterns in straw to create some unfathomable maze that only he could then resolve. He wasn’t sure at such a moment if he was searching for cosmic clues or suffering from onset Alzheimer’s. When they visited friends for an evening he covertly delved into their secret lives in ways that would have ended the meal abruptly had his wonderments surfaced. Knowing him so well, Sandra may have concluded that he needed the mental stimulus of the job, and perhaps she determined that this was a way for him to get his fix: to confer, to analyze and suggest, yet free from the stress, and particularly from the danger, that came with carrying a gold shield and a Glock.
Thinking that way, a suspicion roused in him. Had she herself contacted Bill Mathers? Was she behind this? Had Sandra suggested to his former police partner that if any out-of-the-loop dalliance came up he should consider including his old boss? The coincidence nagged him and the thought took hold, though he doubted that she ever intended for him to become involved in the investigation of a double-cop murder that was half a quadruple murder. That part came under the rubric of getting more than anyone ever imagined or bargained for.
Or, and the thought caused him to feel grim, did she think that getting him back to being a detective would assist her out the door, ease her conscience, should she choose to leave?
Cinq-Mars followed behind the odd couple of Dreher and Mathers, noticing the occasional drift of snow kicked up by their tires, the hardtop otherwise dry. To improve his mood he speculated on whether or not Bill smartened up about the shenanigans that occurred among various forces. The FBI agent would be pumping him for information on the SQ, on Montreal crime, on Cinq-Mars and his history in the Montreal Police Department, and if Bill remained as gullible as always he’d not know to censor his tongue, words might cross forbidden frontiers. He didn’t want to think ill of Bill, and was confident that his old partner took his new responsibilities seriously, but he probably remained inept when it came to trapdoors and secret codes and dirty tricks in the company of an intraforce colleague who wanted something out of him, especially when he didn’t know that he had a thing to give. By the time Dreher had filched keys to a vault of knowledge from his hip pocket and siphoned the juiciest bits from the nether parts of his cranium, Mathers would probably still not know if he just made a new best friend for life or was suckered into a sinister duel in which he was doomed from the outset.
Poor guy. He should have driven with him maybe.
Dreher, though, would notice that he was protecting him and merely bide his time. So Cinq-Mars reminded himself that he was formally and officially retired, so none of it really mattered anymore.
Or, at least, it shouldn’t.
He drove on.
He gauged the distance to the crime scene as being thirty kliks from his home, what the American would count as about twenty miles. Canadians were funny that way. In converting to the metric system, the populace had settled on its own hodgepodge system, part metric, part standard, part imperial, part hybrid, so the retired cop commonly judged distances in kilometers now, and would compare prices for a liter of gas, yet if he was buying a car he’d want to know how many miles it got to the gallon. A dichotomy that had become entrenched in the culture. He bought his beef by the kilogram, but he needed the weight of a perpetrator to be reported only in pounds. The distance between a murder victim and the murder weapon might be six meters, but the height of the victim had to be stated as six feet, or four foot ten, whatever it was, otherwise, who would know? Provide a person’s height in centimeters and no one of his generation would have a clue how tall the individual might be. Every year when he received his driver’s license renewal form he noticed his own height recorded in meters, then promptly forgot it. He was six foot three, still, in feet and inches, although these days he needed to consciously make an effort to straighten up to get close to that height. His driver’s license now lied. He’d shrunk, although his osteopath’s exercises were getting him to stretch himself out to his full length again. Partly because both miles and kilometers were provided by the speedometers of cars purchased in Canada, even though odometers registered kilometers only, he and his compatriots successfully negotiated miles into kliks and back again, but doing so with respect to temperature was always a non-starter. He, like everyone he knew, now understood Celsius and used it to communicate the temperature out-of-doors, while converting back to Fahrenheit, despite having grown up with it, seemed to require a degree in astrophysics. Unless, of course, he happened to be cooking, in which case the Fahrenheit scale prevailed.
All a perpetual muddle.
On the detective side of his mind, he calculated that if he ever wanted to discern if someone was really a Canadian or an impostor from, say, Delaware, the metric system might serve as a shibboleth. Sooner or later, the American would get it wrong, either by being too officially metric or too casually standa
rd.
Twenty miles—thirty-two kilometers, according to his odometer—zipped by. Although close to home, Cinq-Mars was not familiar with this particular county road, which was just far enough out of the way that he rarely had reason to travel down it and had done so less than a dozen times over many years. Yet as he descended onto the plateau he was struck by how closely it shared the look and geography of the general area, and that’s when the eeriness of such a vile crime occurring, essentially, in his own backyard and among his rural neighbors, overcame him. Those poor people, slaughtered in their quiet, isolated home. Those poor cops who had gone—or so the couple, if given the chance, might have surmised—to their rescue.
Millions of other homes enjoyed similar comforts around the world and an equivalent solitude, but a more serene, quieter, or relaxed setting for a country home could not be imagined. The distant white fields sweeping up to a rim of woodlots were as still as stone, yet in their own way as majestic as a sea.
Mathers and Dreher were waiting as Cinq-Mars stepped from his car.
“How’d you know how to get here?” he asked.
“GPS,” Mathers said.
“Ah.” As his former partner gave him a skeptical glance, he added, “Yes, Bill, I know what that is. Sandra takes one on horseback rides. She can explore new trails without worrying about getting lost.”
“They are a marvel,” Rand Dreher concurred and removed the instrument from his coat pocket, admired it, then put it back.
“Do you think he used one?” Cinq-Mars inquired.
“Excuse me?”
“Our killer. He arrived in a storm, I hear, then left on a cloud. Navigating through a winter storm without landmarks is not easy. Finding your way perfectly snow blind? Impossible. Even house lights won’t guide you, not through a blizzard that intense. If he walked in under those conditions, he must have had a GPS to guide him.”
“You’re probably right,” Dreher acknowledged.
“That’s why I hate technology. For all the good they do, the bad guys use those gadgets for evil.”
The agent seemed to be perpetually evaluating the man he’d brought along. “You seem to be a good-and-evil kind of guy,” Dreher said.
He gave out a laugh. “Is that why you asked me here?” He knew that Dreher would never understand the question, so he explained himself right away. “It’s become an American trait, don’t you think? Breaking the world down into good and evil. Where else in the world do you have politicians willing to mention Satan?”
“Iran,” Dreher answered.
“True enough. You got me there. But that’s my point. Yes, I will mention good and evil. But no, I’m not like that. God has better things to do in my estimation than answer a quarterback’s prayers for a tight spiral, and so does Satan have better things to do than attack American institutions.”
“Santorum,” Dreher muttered.
“Yeah. That guy.”
“Me, too,” Dreher admitted, but as Cinq-Mars didn’t follow his thread, he explained himself. “He’s driving me nuts, that one. Mind you, I have my issues with the man whose job he’s after.”
“I didn’t think you guys were allowed to discuss politics.”
“We’re not supposed to,” the agent agreed. “But—”
Cinq-Mars finished his sentence when Dreher did not. “You’re out of the country. You’re wandering around aimlessly. You’re among friends.”
“All that. Plus, I was baited.”
Cinq-Mars acknowledged his culpability with a slight bob of his head. He took a breath. “So this is where it all transpired.”
“You don’t talk like a cop, do you?”
“I hate the lingo. You?”
Mathers, Cinq-Mars noted, was smirking.
The American tucked his hands under his armpits and hugged himself as a breach against the cold that, while not anywhere near extreme, had a bite today. “I’ll try to watch my words, Émile. So. The premises, we know, were contaminated the moment more police and an ambulance showed up. So there’s some leeway, but very little, in the exterior study of the grounds the day of the murders. Around three sides of the house, really through an arc of three hundred and thirty degrees, not a footprint could be found in the fresh snow. Obviously, the officers who were killed drove up to the house. The next vehicle was a cop car, and those officers swear that their car was only the second one to drive down that long road.”
“How would they know for sure? Another car could have followed in the same ruts, no? They wouldn’t be driving up to the farmhouse trying to notice that detail.”
Dreher agreed with him, to a point, and jumped into the conversation. “True, Émile. But their report convinced me. In part because they were trying to follow the exact track themselves, simply because it was easier to drive through deep snow that way. They commented to each other, long before they knew that it mattered, that only one car had gone ahead of them. The other thing they noticed was that the tire tracks led straight to the dead officers’ car. Had there been a second vehicle, it would have had a second destination, no? Or a separate point of departure.”
Cinq-Mars conceded the strength of that argument. “Still, the original cop car could have followed a footpath, for instance, covering it up as it drove along.”
Dreher looked to Mathers to pick this up. “Could have,” Bill agreed. “Except the roadway was scoured from beginning to end. No footprint was detected. You’d expect to find at least one misstep. As well, not a single footprint was found once the investigators got to the highway. If due to some unfathomable fluke the squad car perfectly covered up prints on the driveway, that would still not be possible on the highway. So where were those prints? Even if they only show somebody getting into a car, where were they?”
“A mystery,” Cinq-Mars concurred. He couldn’t deny his old partner’s point of view. His blood, the blood his wife had mentioned, was warming to this challenge.
“GPS in a snowstorm gets our guy here,” Dreher summed up, “but how did he escape after the storm without leaving a trace?”
“That’s what has the SQ—and me—stumped,” Mathers acknowledged. He was saying one thing but looking at Cinq-Mars in an odd way. He seemed smug.
“What?” the older man asked.
The jacket he wore, which went down just below the waist, was fluffy with a bright tan nylon shell. Mathers reached out and tugged on the sleeve.
“That’s down. Is that down?”
“So sue me. I don’t wear heavy wool topcoats anymore. Cop coats, I call them. Are you really surprised?”
“It’s just that I’ve never seen you wear anything else in the winter. Sharp, Émile. I like the look.”
“For one thing, I don’t have a gun to hide anymore.”
“I’m serious. It’s spiffy.”
“It’s unbelievably light and warm. So take your spiffy and go to hell.”
“Shall we go inside first?” Dreher interrupted, and proceeded to lead the way. He’d been loaned a key, which sprung open the back door. The entryway in front, he explained, was busted down by the policemen first on the scene, it was assumed, and only a crude repair effected since then kept the weather out. The door was no longer operable. They went in via the kitchen where the men removed their overshoes on a mat. For Cinq-Mars, that left him in socks, but he didn’t mind as he surveyed the cosy home.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay what?” Mathers asked.
“It’s not a grow-op.” Indoor operations to grow marijuana were common in the area, but these rooms in his visual range were tidy.
“No indication, according to the SQ, that the victims were anything but legit. They weren’t real farmers though. They didn’t work the land themselves. They rented it out. They just lived on it.”
“What about the victims’ families?” Cinq-Mars inquired.
“Childless,” Dreher told him. “As far as we know. Old enough in their fifties not to have parents who are still alive, that can be expected, but no
siblings have shown up either. No family pictures were found on the premises. The thing is, not much is known about these two. They seem to have come from the Maritimes originally, according to neighbors, about four years ago. The SQ is trying to track down their histories. We don’t know where they came from exactly.”
“Or why,” Cinq-Mars noted.
“Excuse me?”
“Why come here? Nobody—I mean nobody—leaves the Maritimes to live on a farm in Quebec. Not with our taxes. To go to the big city, sure, it’s exciting. But here? When there’s other places? Why would anyone do that?”
“Peace and quiet,” Dreher suggested.
“Who wants that? Most people only think they want it until they get it. But the point is, they could have found peace and quiet in the Maritimes. Besides, look what it bought these two.”
Glancing into small, main-level rooms, the three men slowly made their way to the front of the house. In the living room they came upon a chalk mark that outlined the position of one victim.
“This is a key to the killer’s modus operandi south of the border. It’s what caught the attention of my people,” Dreher revealed.
Cinq-Mars silently studied the outline as though he wasn’t listening, then asked, “What is? What’s his MO?”
“The husband or the boyfriend is always shot or knifed to death downstairs. That happens first. Then the wife or the girlfriend is killed upstairs.”
Cinq-Mars stared at the scene awhile. “What was his name?”
“Morris Lumen,” Mathers told him.
“Morris. Like Maurice, but English?”
“That’s right. His wife’s name was Adele.”
“Morris and Adele. That sounds quaint. So there’s always a dead guy?” Cinq-Mars asked Agent Dreher.