“Great.”
Dougherty said, “Yeah, great,” and was looking forward to it.
Getting anything positive done these days was starting to feel like a big deal.
After he dropped Tommy off, Dougherty headed back over the bridge into Montreal without stopping to see his parents. He knew the house would be tense, dishes dropped hard on the table, doors slamming and the only talking would be muttering. Not the way to spend his day off.
When he was coming off the bridge and “One Tin Soldier” finished (“Go ahead and hate your neighbour, go ahead and cheat your friend, do it in the name of heaven, you can justify it in the end”), the news guy came on CKGM instead of the DJ to say there had been a plane crash in Toronto. A flight from Montreal to Los Angeles was making a stop and crashed near Malton airport. Early reports were that all 109 people onboard were killed.
Then the news guy said that there wasn’t much information yet but it was bright and sunny with excellent visibility in Toronto and they were checking into the possibility the plane had been hijacked or that a bomb was onboard.
Dougherty decided this would have been a good day to sleep through but there was no way he’d be able to do that now, so he parked near his apartment and walked to Station Ten.
The weekend desk sergeant, McKinney, putting in the last few months until retirement, was reading the sports section at the back of the Sunday Express tabloid when Dougherty walked in.
“You’re not working today.”
“No, but I’ve got things to do,” Dougherty said. “What did you hear about the plane crash?”
“I heard everybody onboard died.”
“They said on the radio it might have been hijacked or maybe there was a bomb?”
McKinney never looked up from the Expos box score, he just shook his head. “You really think these idiots could bring down a plane?”
“A bomb’s a bomb — they figured out how to set those.”
“Well, this is just plain old mechanical failure.”
“They know that already?”
“Oh, there’ll be a long investigation, don’t worry,” McKinney said, “but that’s the way it looks.”
Dougherty said, “Okay, thanks.”
McKinney shrugged and said, “Don’t mention it,” clearly having no idea why Dougherty would come into the station on his day off.
Jean Way’s apartment had been only two blocks from Station Ten, but instead of walking up to Lincoln Street, Dougherty walked east on de Maisonneuve to Guy.
It had been a year and a half since the riot at Sir George Williams University, and Dougherty looked at the Hall Building on de Maisonneuve between Bishop and Mountain and wondered if anything had changed. He couldn’t remember why the students had taken over the new computer rooms on the top floor, something about racist professors or a racist institution. He remembered people saying at the time that it was just a lot of kids who wanted to be like the Americans and have a protest on campus, but the Hall Building wasn’t anything like Dougherty imagined a campus would look like — it was just an office building, a modern-looking steel and glass building. Concrete and glass really, ten storeys high on a downtown intersection. The main floor lobby looked like the waiting room at the airport, with rows of plastic seats bolted to the floor and people sitting around waiting. Even on Sunday there were a few people sitting on the plastic chairs and reading books.
The campus of Sir George was spread over the neighbourhood a little, into the old three-storey brownstones on Mackay and Bishop. Dougherty wondered if Bill could be a student, showing up in his 1966 Lincoln and disappearing into the crowd.
He spent a few hours walking the neighbourhood, stopping people and showing them the picture of the Lincoln, but no one could say for sure if they’d seen the car. Dougherty was starting to wonder if it really was better to be doing something, anything, rather than nothing.
After the lunch crowds thinned out, Dougherty descended a couple of steps into the Café Prague, not the kind of place he’d ever go in uniform, so he was glad he wasn’t wearing one. It was more of a student hangout, with overflowing ashtrays on every table and serving strong coffee and sandwiches on dark rye bread.
He wondered if this was the kind of place where Ruth Garber would be comfortable.
Then he thought he should call her and ask her out on another date but realized it would have to be tonight, before he started a couple of weeks working nights. Who would go out with a guy the same day he asked?
Maybe Ruth Garber.
So he called her and when she answered and recognized his voice she said, “Oh, did you find out about any more missing girls?”
“No, I’m still looking into that.” He paused then, unsure about this, but then he said, “I was wondering if you’d want to get together tonight, maybe have dinner?”
“I have some leftovers.”
“Oh. Maybe a movie?”
She said, “There’s enough, why don’t you come over?”
“Okay.”
He hung up the payphone, thinking he couldn’t tell if he’d just asked Ruth out on a date or not, but when he got to her apartment she’d set the table and, he thought, got dressed up a little.
After they ate the lasagna and the garlic bread (which now Dougherty was thinking she’d gone out and bought after he’d called), Ruth got a newspaper and opened it to the movie listings.
“Il était une fois dans l’Ouest?”
Dougherty said, “I saw it as Once Upon a Time in the West, but if you want to see it in French that’d be fine.”
“Hello, Dolly!?”
They were sitting on the couch in the small living room, Ruth holdng the paper open so they could both see it and Dougherty said, “I’m surprised they’re still showing Airport after the plane crash.”
She said, “Oh look, a double bill, I Am Curious (Yellow) and I Am Curious (Blue).”
“Are you really that curious?”
Ruth was smiling then, moving a little closer to Dougherty, and she said, “The Role of Sex in Society — they’re always trying to make them sound classy and scientific.”
“Isn’t that what you do in Sociology?”
“Yeah,” she said, “we sit around all day watching skin flicks.”
“I’m surprised we haven’t busted you.”
She turned to him then, sat up a little and said, “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Then she swung a leg over and sat on his lap facing him, and he was thinking, Yeah, this is definitely a date.
He said, “Yeah, I would.”
They never made it to a movie, just into the bedroom.
chapter
eighteen
Dougherty led the two bomb squad guys, Vachon and Meloche, down the lane, telling them, “It’s still on the front seat.”
Vachon was wearing his new bomb suit, thick arms and legs and chest protector that looked like an umpire’s. He could barely walk, and the metal helmet looked like a welder’s.
“I can’t fucking see,” he said.
Dougherty said, “Here,” and stopped in front of a Volkswagen Beetle.
The lane was barely wide enough for the car, and Vachon said, “How the hell did you get in?”
“Squeezed in the driver’s side. There’s enough room.”
Vachon said, “Yeah, for you,” and took off the helmet and looked back down the lane to Notre Dame Street and then started taking off the rest of the bomb suit. Meloche said, “What are you doing?”
“They can’t see in here,” Vachon said, motioning to the other cops and the reporters, all waiting on the street at the end of the lane. Then he looked at Dougherty and said, “Don’t let them come down here.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Dougherty said.
Meloche said, “What are you doing here, Dougherty
? You don’t work around here, do you?”
“No, but there was something at City Hall and something else somewhere, I don’t know. Anyway they were short, so I got sent over here. Been here since Tuesday.”
Meloche aimed his flashlight up the stone walls on either side of the lane, more like a tunnel as over the last hundred years the buildings on either side had put on additions that joined about ten feet up. “What is this, a bank?”
Dougherty said, “One on each side — Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank, I think. Maybe Bank of Nova Scotia.”
“Why did you come in here?”
“I saw the car, I thought it was stolen and dumped here.”
“It probably is stolen.”
“So, you know, I got in it and looked in the glove box for the VIN and the registration and I heard the ticking.”
Vachon was out of the bomb suit then and he said, “It must have been loud in this tunnel,” and Dougherty said, “Yeah, once I was sitting still, it was loud.”
He watched Vachon take out his nail clippers from the little leather pouch he always wore on his belt and squeeze through the driver’s side door of the Beetle.
Once he’d heard the ticking, Dougherty had reached under the passenger seat, where the noise was coming from, and pulled out a rolled up green garbage bag covered in tape — the same set-up as the other hundred bombs planted in the last six months — and then he left it on the seat, squeezed out of the car and ran back to the street, where he found a call box.
Now Meloche was leaning up against the back of the car, looking through the small rear window watching, Vachon cut the garbage bag and revealed five sticks of dynamite and an alarm clock.
“The usual?”
Vachon said yes and cut the wires to the detonator. “Still just the wires, no booby trap.” Then he held up his hand and said, “Wait.”
In the quiet of the tunnel they could hear ticking.
Vachon reached under the seat and came up with another taped-up garbage bag.
“Holy shit,” Dougherty said, “another one.”
“They may not be any better at making the bombs,” Meloche said, “but now it seems they know they aren’t good at it.” He smiled at his own joke but then he took on a serious look, “Hey Gilles, le siège arrière.”
Dougherty leaned closer, looking past Meloche into the back seat of the Volkswagen and saw the wooden crate.
Vachon was cutting open the second garbage bag and he paused for a moment, reached into the back and gently pushed the crate. Then he said, “Fifty pounds.”
Dougherty said, “It’s full of dynamite?”
“The bombs under the seat must have been the trigger,” Meloche said. “The crate probably doesn’t have a detonator.”
“Probably?”
And it didn’t. When Vachon had cut the wires on the second five-stick bomb in the front seat he got a closer look at the crate and saw the nails on it had never been pried open.
The lane was too narrow to get the doors on the Beetle open far enough to get the crate out, so Vachon got Dougherty and a couple of other beat cops to push the car out of the lane while he sat in the driver’s seat holding the steering wheel straight.
When they got to the street, Meloche said, “Good, you didn’t wet your pants,” and the other beat cops glanced at their own crotches.
Dougherty just looked at Meloche. “Did you?”
“Not this time. I’m not saying it never happens.”
“The trunk is in the front, right?” Vachon said.
“Yeah.”
He opened it and said, “I thought so.”
Two more crates.
Vachon handed Meloche the garbage bags and said, “These two, all they would have done is blow up the car,” and Meloche said. “But the 150 pounds, that would have been something.”
And as he passed Dougherty, Vachon winked and said, “Something, for sure.”
The reporters followed Vachon to his unmarked station wagon, and Dougherty went over to the bomb squad truck, where Meloche was putting the dynamite from the two small bombs into a steel safe box.
“How did he know?”
Meloche lit a cigarette and said, “There was a theft from a construction site in St. Joli last week — 250 pounds of dynamite.”
“So there’s still a hundred pounds out there?”
Meloche took a drag on the cigarette and then started for the Volkswagen to get the crates. “You be careful.”
“You, too.”
Meloche laughed and said, “Toujours.”
Always.
Later that week Dougherty was pulled from a dream in which he was making out with a woman. They were kissing and groping each other, and there was a bell going off. They were in long grass in a field, and Dougherty’s squad car was parked beside them, and he thought that was where the bell was coming from. Then he realized it was his phone ringing, and he woke up alone in his own bed and just as he did he realized the woman he was making out with in the dream was Arlene Webber.
He sat up and shook his head, and took the two steps to his kitchenette and picked up. “Hello?”
“Is this a bad time?” It was Ruth Garber.
Dougherty looked for his watch and asked, “What time is it?”
“Three thirty.”
He’d finished his shift at eight that morning and been asleep since about ten o’clock when he’d finally gotten home. Not bad.
“No, this is fine, what’s up?”
“I had a good meeting with Dr. Pendleton and I thought you’d want to know about it.”
“Is there news?”
“Some very exciting refinements to our theory.”
Dougherty said, “Oh, okay,” and got a cigarette out of the pack on the kitchen table, where he’d dropped it earlier that morning.
Now Ruth was saying, “I have a couple more questions. Maybe we could get together?”
Dougherty said, “Sure, I don’t have to be at work until later tonight.”
“Could you come by my office?”
“Sure.”
A few minutes later Dougherty got into the shower, wondering why he’d dreamt about Brenda Webber’s older sister.
Ruth’s office was on the sixth floor of the Leacock building, an almost-brand-new ten-storey concrete slab on the corner of MacTavish and Dr. Penfield, right beside a building Dougherty figured must be over a hundred years old.
He’d gone through the lobby and past a student lounge, where a couple of kids — well, as he passed them he realized they were about his own age but with their long hair and jeans and t-shirts they’d always be called “kids” by the newspapers — looked up and dismissed him as a cop, even though he was wearing jeans himself, and stuck their noses back in their books.
The sixth floor looked like pretty much every office building Dougherty had ever been in. He found room 635 easily enough and knocked on the open door.
Ruth came out from behind a desk. “Come on in.”
“Nice place you have here.”
The office was small and crammed with boxes of files, every inch of the place covered with some kind of paper. Ruth lifted a stack of files off a chair. “Thanks for coming.”
“Well, I’m dying to hear about this new theory.” Dougherty was still being sarcastic.
“We’re calling it ‘progression.’”
“You are?” Dougherty took a step towards the chair but stopped when a man came into the doorway of the office, and Ruth said, “Oh, here’s Dr. Pendleton now.”
He was younger than Dougherty expected, and he wasn’t wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows or smoking a pipe — he had on a turtleneck and was smoking a cigarette. He was probably in his late thirties but seemed younger. Dougherty figured he was one of those cool profs he ran into at the demonstratio
ns, the kind who stood with the students.
“You must be Constable Dougherty.”
They shook hands and Dougherty said, “Nice to meet you.”
Ruth said, “I was just telling the constable about our theory.”
Dougherty thought he saw something from the professor, a tiny smile maybe, and the guy said, “Yes, our theory,” and then he let go of Dougherty’s hand and turned to look at Ruth.
“The progression.”
She said, “Yes, the way the killer is progressing from one type of victim to another.”
Pendleton said, “Up until now we were just thinking of them as women.”
Dougherty said, “Which they are.”
“Yes,” Pendleton said, “but remember the triad.”
Dougherty said, “How could I forget the triad.”
Pendleton looked at him and Dougherty thought for second he might call him on the sarcasm, but the professor let it go. Maybe there was a slightly superior dismissive look, but then Dougherty thought maybe he was just feeling out of his depth in the office and intimidated by the prof, like he was by the whole campus.
“Well,” Pendleton said, looking from Dougherty to Ruth, “I have to get ready for my trip to Oregon. I’m sure you can fill in the constable on what we need?” A quick nod to Dougherty and the professor was gone.
“He’s going to interview Jerry Brudos,” Ruth said.
Dougherty got out his cigarettes and lit one. “Who’s that?”
“A man who killed four women.”
“Four?”
“That we know of.”
It was quiet for a moment and then Dougherty said, “Okay, what do you need from me?”
“More information about the victims.”
“What for?”
“To see if there’s a progression. You see, the first violence is against animals. Usually dogs and cats but it can be any kind of animal, really.”
“Usually?”
“Yes, but it’s the violence that’s the key. And the progression.” Ruth got out her own cigarettes and lit one, dropping the match in a big glass ashtray on her desk. “With the cruelty to animals, it starts slowly with whatever animal he has access to; mice, squirrels, stray dogs or cats, and it usually starts with just a little violence, throwing stones, kicking.”
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