by Craig McLay
Colin wiped his face and kicked at the metal pole, sending it clattering into the pool. Whoever had hit him would be long gone by now.
“Why did you come here, Devane?” he asked no one in particular. “Half the cops in the country are looking for you and you come back here? In the middle of the night? Why?”
Colin’s gaze drifted back towards the change room. What had Devane been doing in there when Colin interrupted him? What was the source of that weird blue light?
Colin pulled open the door and walked back past the showers. He didn’t bother to avoid them. It wasn’t like he could get any wetter than he already was. Besides, the water had actually warmed up a bit.
He entered into the change room and stepped over the massive bulk of the locker that had almost crushed him. Lying on the floor was a small Maglite next to a green garbage bag. The garbage bag appeared to be full of oddly-shaped objects and a pool of blood had formed underneath it.
Colin had no intention of looking in the bag. Instead, he looked up and saw a familiar symbol painted on the front of one of the lockers: a small cross inside two interlocking strands of what looked like barbed wire.
Or thorns, Colin thought. Although Devane didn’t exactly seem like some sort of religious nut.
Colin opened the locker and gasped, not so much in horror as in surprise. The face staring back at him was one he had seen before but had never met. The eyes had been removed, but he was easily recognizable from the bisected spider web tattoo on his neck.
It was Terrence Devane.
-18-
Giordino yawned and sat down at the interview table. It felt like she had spent most of the day in here and now she was going to spend most of the night as well.
She had just gotten back from the rec centre, where the crime scene unit officers were still busy pulling body parts out of lockers in the women’s change room. In less than twelve hours, Terrence Devane had gone from prime suspect to victim number two. At the moment, the only connecting thread she had between the two of them was sitting across the table from her and he wasn’t at all happy to be there for the second time in as many days.
Colin’s clothes were still wet from his drop in the pool. A damp blanket hung across his shoulders. Betts, who was standing near the door, had jokingly suggested that, if he wanted to change, they had an orange jumpsuit that was about his size. Colin was not receptive to the suggestion or the humour. He was damp, tired and bored out of his mind. All they had given him in the last two hours was a can of Coke and the blanket, which smelled like the floor of a drunk tank. He was not at his sunny best.
“Now Mr. Mitchell,” Giordino said, suppressing a yawn. “I’d like to go over your story one more time…”
Colin shook his head. “No.”
Giordino looked up, surprised. “Excuse me?”
“I’ve been in this room for six hours out of the last 24,” Colin said. “I’ve been over my story, as you call it, eight times with three different people, including Detective Betts over there, who kept recording the details incorrectly in his notebook. Whether that was just incompetence or some sort of cunning attempt to make it look like I was contradicting myself in various versions, I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter, really, because I recorded all three versions on my own digital recorder. Which is, remarkably, still working despite its dip in the pool. I’m sure you have recording equipment running in these cosy little rooms, too. If you want to hear it again, I suggest you back it up and give it a listen.”
“I didn’t get anything wrong,” Betts grunted.
“I tagged the spots,” Colin said, pulling the recorder out. “Would you like to go through them in chronological order?”
Giordino decided to take a different tack. “You say you went in there because you heard a noise and somebody attacked you, but you didn’t get a look at this person.”
“That’s correct,” Colin said. “I was under a row of lockers the first time and underwater the second. By the time I pulled myself out, whoever it was had gone.”
“I understand that you had just left the campus bar where, according to this copy of your receipt, you ordered five beers in just over three hours?” Giordino pulled the page out of the file in front of her and slid it across the desk. Colin glanced at it to make sure it was the one he had paid.
“Looks like it,” Colin said.
“Then you stopped in the receiving area to urinate where you just happened to hear a sound that caused you to enter the building where you picked up a sledgehammer and found a person or persons unknown stuffing the remains of Terrence Devane in a locker?”
“Once again, correct. I don’t make a point of urinating in public, but I was, for want of a better expression, caught extremely short.”
“You didn’t like Devane, did you?”
Colin smiled. “Are you suggesting that I somehow chopped him up with a sledgehammer, tossed myself in the pool for good measure and then called you? Is that your working hypothesis?”
“No,” Giordino said. “Not with a sledgehammer, maybe. All I’m suggesting is that you didn’t like him very much.”
“I never met him,” Colin said. “Unless you count tonight, of course. I wasn’t able to get any good quotes out of him, however. He was a tad decapitated.”
“There’s almost a 40-minute gap between when you left the bar and when you called us,” Giordino said.
“As I’m sure you’ve surmised, the cell phone reception in that building is not the best. I had to walk all the way out to the access road before I could get a working signal.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Betts said from his spot next to the door. “Once we get the security footage from the cameras in there, we’ll know what really happened.”
Colin looked over at the big policeman, who smiled back under hooded lids. “Does that work?”
Betts frowned. “What?”
“Lying,” Colin said. “I’ve never found that works terribly well as an interview technique. There are subtle differences between an interview and an interrogation, of course.”
Betts clenched his beefy fists and took a step forward. “Fuck you talking about?”
“There are security cameras set up in that building, yes,” Colin said. “But they’re not connected to anything. The company that installed them is the same one that did some of the re-wiring when they renovated the tech wing. Only they didn’t do such a good job and ended up frying $200,000 worth of industrial robotics. The college is suing them for incompetence; they’re counter-suing the college for non-payment. You know how it goes. The upshot is, they’re obviously not going to finish the camera job in the rec centre until the whole thing gets settled, which will probably happen sometime after everyone involved dies of old age. And the college is too cheap to pay anyone else to finish the job in the meantime.”
Betts looked at Giordino. “How the hell you know all that?”
“I wrote a story on it,” Colin said. “It is sort of what I do, being a reporter.”
“Well that’s kind of convenient, don’t you think, Mr. Mitchell?” Giordino asked.
“How so?” Colin asked.
“The fact that you would know that nothing that happens in that building is being recorded,” Giordino observed.
Colin sat back. “Well, you’ve got me there. Me and everyone who reads the paper, that is. Which, I grant you, is not a multitude. We’re not exactly the New York Times. But then, neither is the New York Times these days.”
“Do you have a problem with police officers, Mr. Mitchell?” Giordino asked.
“Of course not, detective,” Colin said. “I won’t say that some of my best friends are police officers any more than you would be inclined to say that some of your best friends are reporters. Reporters don’t generally make for great friends. It’s no fun to have a friend that’s always finding fault. I don’t imagine if I were in your shoes, that I would care to have it pointed out that the department has the lowest closure rate for violent crimes in the entire
province. Or that your very own chief of police has seen 13 corruption allegations, two conflict of interest charges and one harassment complaint against him dismissed without a hearing in the last two years alone.”
“Little peckerhead,” Betts growled.
Giordino shot Betts a warning look. She didn’t want to have to kick him out of an interview with the same subject twice. He rolled his nicotine gum to the other side of his cheek and went back to leaning on the wall next to the door. Giordino reached into the file and pulled out a photo. Colin recognized it as a close-up of the image that had been painted on the tree and drawn on the box that had been delivered to the newsroom. They probably didn’t have any shots of the one from the locker yet.
“And you’re sure you’ve never seen this image anywhere before?” she asked.
“Positive,” Colin said. “As I stated repeatedly earlier, I had never seen that image before I opened that box yesterday morning.”
“Are you aware of any other enemies Mr. Devane may have made?”
“Are you kidding?” Colin said. “You’ve seen his website. There are only about 200 or so women out there he drugged and raped who might just have a teeny little bit of an axe to grind. If I were one of them, I would have given serious thought to sawing his head off myself. Not the one on top of his neck, though.”
“Do you know any of them we could contact?” Giordino asked.
“Just the one whose hand showed up in that box I opened this morning because your fat partner over there decided her life wasn’t worth an hour of his precious time.”
Betts pushed himself off the wall and charged towards the table. Giordino had to jump up to stop him from grabbing Colin by the neck.
“You little asshole!” Betts yelled. “I think you did it, yeah? I think maybe we should hold you overnight downstairs with the gangbangers and the junkies. See how much of a smartass you are after that!”
Giordino shoved Betts back towards the door and told him to go get himself a cup of coffee. Betts’s face was flushed red and he was breathing like a charging rhino. He gave Colin one last furious look and then ripped the door open and slammed it shut behind him. Giordino took a moment to allow the temperature in the room to return to normal.
“That was…not helpful,” she said.
“If we’re talking about not helpful, he just left,” Colin said.
Giordino sat back down. “This is important, Mr. Mitchell. Any one of these women may be a potential suspect or a victim. Whoever is doing this already killed Shalene Nakogee. He may move on to one of them next.”
“Even if I did talk to one of those women and knew her name, she would be entitled to protection as a confidential source,” Colin said. “Take me to court. Throw me in jail for contempt. I still wouldn’t tell you her name.”
Giordino sighed. “I believe you, Mr. Mitchell. I’m afraid that’s part of the problem.” She tucked the loose papers back into the file. “I think we’ve gone as far as we can with this tonight. I’ll arrange for someone to take you back to your apartment.”
Colin rubbed his forehead. “Well that would be spiffing. Anyone except Detective Betts, of course. Otherwise the next dismembered body you’re called in on will probably be mine.”
The hell with it, Giordino thought.
“You know what?” she said, pulling her keys out of her jacket pocket. “Where do you live? I’ll drop you there myself.”
-19-
It took Colin a while to realize that the pounding he heard was not coming from his head but his front door.
He naturally assumed that it was the police coming to arrest him, so he just stayed where he was and waited for them to break down the door. It needed to be repaired anyway and the landlord had been dragging her feet. It was a crummy basement apartment and he hadn’t been forced to cough up a security deposit, so, as far as he was concerned, the cops were welcome to have at it with their battering rams. He wasn’t going to resist, but he wasn’t going to get out of bed voluntarily, either. He had gotten a grand total of four hours’ sleep in the last 48 hours. At least in jail he’d be able to catch up on all those hours he had missed.
So he was a little surprised when the pounding continued, replaced intermittently with repeated doorbell ringing. His curiosity was starting to get the better of him. That wasn’t the cops, so who the hell wanted to talk to him so badly?
He rolled out of bed and staggered to the front door. As soon as he had gotten home last night, he had peeled off his damp clothes, spent five minutes in a scalding hot shower and then collapsed. According to the clock on the dresser, it was 8:15 a.m. That meant his collapse had lasted a grand total of two hours and ten minutes.
He yanked on the door, which took a couple of pulls to open. Standing on the landing was not Giordino and an army of tactical response officers in body armour, but it certainly wasn’t anyone else he would have expected to see out there, either.
“Janice?”
Janice Yu covered the student association beat for the Sentinel. She was a couple of years older than Colin and had a university degree in something he couldn’t remember off the top of his head. Sociology? Something like that. Her research was always impeccable, but she was inherently shy and disinclined to do a lot of interviews. Colin distinctly remembered at least a couple of occasions where he’d asked her to go out and get more opposing viewpoints to some of the Westhill Student Association initiatives. She seemed to be a natural conflict avoider, which, in Colin’s mind, meant she had no business working as a reporter.
“Hi Colin,” she said. Colin noticed she was wearing a heavy-looking backpack over one shoulder and carrying a cardboard takeout tray with two large coffees in it. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to wake you up, but this is kind of important.”
Colin looked down and realized that he was wearing only boxer shorts. An old pair of boxer shorts where the button was missing on the fly, in fact. If he crouched down or bent over, there wouldn’t be a lot that Janice wouldn’t know about him. He debated what to do. Invite her in or tell her to call back later?
Ah, fuck it. “That’s okay,” he said, motioning her inside. “Just give me a sec.”
Janice stepped into Colin’s small living room area while he went back into the bedroom and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. “How did you know where I live?” he asked through the door.
“CJ told me,” she said, looking around. The place was neater than she’d expected, with surprisingly modernist furnishings. It stood in sharp contrast to most student apartments in that the couch didn’t look like it had been scavenged from a curb side and the kitchen looked like somewhere a professional chef might settle in with only a few reservations. She took in the copper saucepans hanging from the racks, the carbon steel knife set and the crystal wine glasses with a raised eyebrow. There was evidently more to this guy than he presented at the newspaper every day.
“I got you a coffee,” she said as he emerged from the bedroom. “I didn’t know what you took in it, so I just got a double-double.”
“Thanks,” Colin said, taking the coffee and motioning her towards the kitchen table. “So what can I do for you?”
The two of them sat down. Janice immediately opened her backpack and started rummaging through it, pulling out a textbook that looked larger than a medieval version of the King James Bible. Colin noted the title: The Crusades (1095–1270)—Origins, History & the Foundations of the New Europe by somebody named Zenit Olgcharanov.
“I wasn’t there,” Janice said as she flipped to a bookmarked page. “CJ tried to describe it to me, but you’re the only one I know who saw it for sure.”
Colin frowned and sipped the coffee. It was bitter and had the metallic taste of sweetener. He thought about pouring it down the sink and making himself a cappuccino instead, but that would be rude. He would wait until Janice left and then do that. He put the coffee back down and leaned forward. “Saw what?”
Janice found the page she was looking for and flipped the book aro
und on the table so Colin could see it. She was pointing to an illustration on the inside corner of page 605. Colin pulled the book towards him so he could see it more clearly. It was a crudely drawn illustration, but there was no mistaking that it was the same one he had seen three times in the previous day: a cross inside two interlocking strands.
“Wow,” Colin muttered.
“Is that the symbol that was on the package with the hand in it?” Janice asked, making no effort to disguise the urgency in her voice.
Colin nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“Somebody said it was in the forest somewhere, too,” Janice said. “But the cops have blocked that entire area off.”
“It was there,” Colin said. “I saw it painted on a tree close to where they found the first body. It was also painted on the locker where I found Terrence Devane’s severed head in the rec centre last night. What is it?”
“That,” said Janice, “is the official seal of the Knights of the Holy Thorn.”
“Okay,” Colin said. “And who are they when they’re at home?”
“They were formed in Antioch in or around 1192,” Janice said, speaking quickly in her excitement. “Just after the fall of Jerusalem.”
Colin took a sip of coffee. There was nothing else to drink and his throat was suddenly dry. “Wait a minute. Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you just say eleven ninety-two?”
Janice nodded.
“As in, almost a thousand years ago.”
Janice nodded again. “Do you know anything about the military religious orders that arose during the Crusades?”
Colin was having trouble keeping up with all this on so little sleep. The coffee, despite being terrible, was helping slightly. “The what now?”
“There were dozens of them,” Janice said. “Maybe hundreds. You’ve heard of the Templars? The Hospitalers? The Teutonic Knights?”
“I’ve heard of the Templars,” Colin said.
“Most people have,” Janice said. “They started what basically turned into the modern banking industry. The Knights of the Holy Thorn didn’t do anything like that.”