by Giles Blunt
“No.”
She used the voice that had worked fine with her tricks. “I’ll make you come like you’ve never come before, honey. You just lay back and let me suck your huge cock and blow your mind.”
“God, Nikki, you’re going to make me cry. That is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”
“You made me feel good. I want to make you feel good. Why can’t I?”
“Because you already make me feel good. Just by being part of this family.”
“You had sex with Lemur.”
“I went through an exercise with Lemur. It was something he needed and the family needed.”
She rolled away from him. “You think I’m ugly.”
“That’s exactly wrong, Nikki. The reason I don’t want to have sex with you is because you are beautiful and perfect just the way you are. I curse the world that taught you the only way you can be nice to someone is to have sex with them. Sit up, now. Pull that cushion up off the floor and get under the covers, but you keep a good foot between us. Respect my space the way I respect yours.”
She did as he said.
“People have harmed you all your life with sex, Nikki. Remember what I told you the first night I brought you home? That I would never harm you? I never will. Not even if you ask me to.” He let a little silence go by. “What? What are you thinking? I can see thoughts crossing that perfect little face of yours.”
“I’ve never been in bed with a man who didn’t want sex. I wasn’t trying to be bad. I just wanted to pay you back. For what you did this afternoon.”
“You let me wash your feet. It gave me a lot of pleasure, so you can consider me pre-thanked. You owe me nothing. What’s this, now? Are you crying?”
She shook her head and folded her arms and couldn’t speak. He asked her again what was wrong and she started to bawl and turned away. He put a box of Kleenex on her lap and lay back and waited for her to settle down.
When she spoke, her voice sounded strange to her. Deeper and more mature. “You don’t know how good you made me feel. No one ever made me feel that good.”
She cried a little more and he waited, in the patient way he had. Not ignoring, just waiting. She turned on her side to face him and said, “Are you Jesus?”
The smallest of smiles played over his features. “What do you think?”
“I think you might be. You wouldn’t even have to know it, necessarily. You could be like a reincarnation or something.”
They didn’t speak for a time. Outside, the sound of the Range Rover pulling up and the door slamming. A minute later, Jack’s big footsteps crossing the kitchen. He went to the bathroom and ran the water and brushed his teeth, and then the sound of his bedroom door opening and closing.
“That’s Jack,” Nikki said. “Lemur still isn’t back?”
“No.”
“What’s so special about the bunkhouse? The other day I was just on the porch over there and Lemur yelled at me to get away. Actually yelled at me. I wasn’t even looking inside.”
“There’s material in the bunkhouse that doesn’t concern you. It’s better for you not to know about it. I want you to trust me on this and keep away.”
“I will. I’d do anything for you, Papa. I honestly believe I’d do anything you asked me to.”
“None of what we do is about me. It’s about the family. Our survival. You know, I was lucky. I had a good family, growing up. Unfortunately, they died when I was very young-not much older than you-and I vowed that one day I would try to re-create the happy family I had known. It’s become something much bigger than that, of course, something much more important, but it’s still my family. Our family. And it makes me happier than I can say to have you with us, Nikki. Happier than I can say.”
–
Nikki woke early. There wasn’t even a hint of sunrise outside her bedroom window. Nothing out there but darkness lit by scattered stars. Darkness and forest, the boughs of the trees weighed down with snow so that they almost touched the ground. A radio muttered from the kitchen. Nikki closed the curtain again and got out of her pyjamas and into her clothes.
She opened her door, listened to the radio for a moment-it was going on about hockey-and closed the door behind her. She went down the three stairs to the dining area. Papa was sitting at the head of the table with a shotgun across his lap and his hands resting on it.
“Good morning,” he said. His voice sounded strange, detached somehow, as if it worked independently of Papa himself. “You’re up early, considering.”
“I couldn’t sleep. Something woke me up.”
“Fix yourself some breakfast. Stuff’s on the counter.”
Nikki poured herself a bowl of cornflakes and skim milk. She got a glass out of the cupboard and a pitcher of orange juice and poured a glass and put the pitcher back in the fridge. Then she took the cereal bowl in one hand and the glass of juice in the other and sat at the end of the table opposite Papa.
He watched her eat.
“What’s up?” Nikki said. “What’s with the gun?”
Papa looked down at his lap then back at Nikki. “Your brother is dead.”
Nikki went still, her spoon in mid-air, milk dripping from it and splashing into the bowl below.
“Lemur is dead. He was shot last night. While he was working.”
Nikki lowered her spoon to the bowl. She stirred her cereal a little. An unexpected emotion was gathering inside her chest and she felt the prickle of tears. “How did it happen?”
A bedroom door opened and shut. There were footsteps and then Jack was in the kitchen.
Papa stood up and levelled the shotgun at him. Jack was pouring himself coffee and wasn’t even aware of it until he turned around and faced the dining area. He took a sip from his coffee and his eyes went to the shotgun. “What’s that for?”
“Did you kill Lemur?”
“What?”
“Did you kill Lemur? Yes or no.”
“No. What happened to him?” Jack started toward the table, casual about it, taking another sip from his coffee.
Papa pumped the shotgun, pointed it again at Jack’s chest. “Where were you last night?”
“I went into town. To a bar. Had a few beers. Listened to a band couldn’t even play in tune. Came back.”
“Prove it.”
“How am I supposed to do that? Subpoena witnesses? Stop pointing that thing.”
“I could end your life right now.”
“If the family just lost a man, it’s probably not real smart to lose another.”
“Getting rid of a traitor is pure gain.”
“I’m not a traitor.” Jack set his coffee mug down on the table. “Put it down, Papa.”
“What time did you get back?”
“I don’t know. Two-thirty. Three. What difference does it make?”
“Lemur was killed around nine.”
“I can’t do nothing about that, Papa. You neither.”
“I could blow your head off.”
“Well, you’d best do it, then. Because if you don’t, I’m gonna rip that shotgun out of your hands and bust your skull in with it.”
Papa took three quick steps and hit Jack one sharp blow in the head with the butt of the shotgun. Jack fell sideways out of his chair. His mug twirled to the floor in the opposite direction, and the aroma of coffee blossomed around them.
25
Friday morning, Delorme asked Staff Sergeant Flower to check if any tickets had been handed out in the neighbourhood of Roxwell and Clement. The boy would almost certainly have driven there, and yet there had been no suspicious cars parked in the strip mall lot, or on the street. He had gone into the alley, presumably to get to his car, which should therefore have been parked on Clement Street. So he must have parked somewhere else and they just hadn’t found the car. Twenty minutes later Sergeant Flower came back with the answer: Yes, one car had been towed. An irate citizen had called about some idiot parked in his driveway. Right in his driveway, for Pete’s sake. Fo
r this he pays taxes? Location: third house from the mall.
Delorme put in a call to the city towing service. The man who answered chose to liven up a boring job by speaking in the manner of a Marine on a vital mission.
“Clement Street?” he said when Delorme asked. “That’s an affirmative.”
“What number on Clement Street?”
“Hold on a second…” A distant clicking of a keyboard as a log was consulted. “Number twelve. That’s one-two. Number twelve Clement.”
“Could you give me the VIN number and plates on that?”
“Plates are Alpha-November-Foxtrot-Charlie-two-eight-niner.”
Delorme wrote it down, and then he gave her the much longer and even more military-sounding vehicle identification number. She thanked him and he said ten-four. She typed the VIN into the Ministry of Transport’s database. The car, a silver-grey Mazda 3, was registered to Dr. and Mrs. T. J. Walker of Barrie, Ontario. It had been reported stolen two weeks previously from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. The plates didn’t match.
Delorme took the information into Chouinard’s office and got permission to have Ident tow the car into the police garage for fuming. An hour later she put on her parka and went down to the garage. The garage door was wide open-a necessity when fuming an entire vehicle.
Even with the door open, the place reeked of superglue. Fingerprints had taken the form of ghostly white smudges all around the Mazda’s door handles, and over the dash, and on the insides of the doors. They had found prints on the radio and on the rear-view.
“Found a whole bunch of stuff that’s probably not related,” Arsenault said. “A whack of old parking slips from Barrie, couple of discs full of medical lectures, a Cat in the Hat toy. Problem number one is we don’t know what we can rule out until we get prints from Barrie. The doctor and his wife agreed to go in and get printed down there, but we don’t have them yet.”
“And what about our dead thief?”
“No matches so far.”
“Come on,” Delorme said, and gestured with a sweep of her arm at all the white dots. “In all that? A two-bit mugger maybe sixteen years old doesn’t leave a single print?”
Arsenault shook his head. “We’ve checked inside and out.”
“What about that?” Delorme pointed to a Welch’s grape soda can lying on the floor on the passenger side.
“Haven’t got to it yet.”
Collingwood picked up the can in gloved hands and took it to a small Plexiglas box. He put it inside and closed the lid and turned on the fumes. He squatted so his eyes were level with the box. After a minute he turned off the machine, opened the lid, took out the soda can and held it up to the light. He handed it to Arsenault and said, “Thumb.”
Arsenault held it up to the light and squinted at it. “Triple tenting in the arch.”
“Which means what?” Delorme said.
“It matches the prints we took off your dead ATM artist.”
“It’s a start, I guess,” Delorme said. “Too bad he doesn’t have a record.”
“We got something better than that,” Collingwood said.
An outsider would not have noticed, but Delorme had known Collingwood for going on ten years. For him to utter so many syllables in a row amounted to excitement bordering on hysteria.
“What have you got, Bob?”
He crooked a finger and she followed him over to the counter at the side of the garage. He pointed. Four white arcs of plaster were laid out, each in its own plastic bag. Interspersed with these were four more white plaster arcs, not in bags.
“You made moulds of the tires?”
Collingwood nodded.
“And the ones in plastic are from Trout Lake?”
“You got it.”
“Don’t tell me we’ve got our killer.”
“Fingerprints don’t match but the tires do. Prints on the gun at the ATM show he’s a right-hander. The Trout Lake killer is left-handed. But this car was definitely there.”
Cardinal’s first duty of the day was to apprehend Randall Wishart. “Wish I could come with you,” McLeod had said. “Hate to miss a pleasure like that.”
Cardinal drove up to Carnwright Real Estate and waited for Wishart’s client to leave. In contrast to McLeod’s sense of fun, Cardinal found the business depressing. Preventing harm to a girl like Sam Doucette was unquestionably a good thing. He could recognize that this was “serving and protecting,” as Chouinard liked to put it. But a pleasure?
When he snapped the cuffs on him, Wishart’s face turned paper white, and Cardinal thought for a moment that he might faint. He led him through the outer office under the shocked gaze of Lawrence Carnwright and their receptionist, and knew that his action, although just and necessary, was catastrophic to this family. Yes, Sam would be safer, but he took no pleasure in yanking the loosened thread of a young man’s unravelling life.
Even a lawyer of Dick Nolan’s calibre couldn’t keep Wishart from spending a day and night in jail, not with the information Cardinal had amassed from Troy Campbell and Sam Doucette. The Crown would not go for a charge of attempted murder-Campbell had never laid a hand on her-but obstruction of justice and uttering threats were not going to pose a problem.
When that was done, Cardinal went to D.S. Chouinard and asked that a safe house be provided for Sam and her mother.
Chouinard’s flat-out no was for him an unusually decisive response. “I don’t even understand why you’re asking,” he said. “Wishart wanted to shut the girl up to save his job and his marriage. But that cat is well and truly out of the bag, so he has no motive to attack her again.”
“It’s not Wishart I’m worried about. It was the killer, not Wishart, who chased her and shot at her car. And she lost her cellphone at the scene. It has her picture, her name, her address.”
“If we were sure he had her cellphone, I would not hesitate. There’s been no activity from her number.”
“No, but it’s still pinging. Which means it isn’t frozen or dead. If someone picked it up, why aren’t they using it?”
“They want to change the SIMM card. I don’t know. But I also don’t know that the killer has it. We don’t know that he caught her licence plate. But we do know that he chose not to chase her. So on the whole, I’m not inclined to think she’s in danger.”
“I don’t think that’s a bet we can afford to make.”
“Luckily, it’s not your decision.”
“Uh-huh. And what happened to serving and protecting?”
“Let me tell you something off the record, Cardinal, and I mean no disrespect, but fuck you.”
–
Cardinal brought Sam and her mother down to the station for a formal statement, which he videotaped. Sam sat across the table from him, her mother at her side. The girl had lost the passionate, excitable manner of the other night. Her words were matter-of-fact as she described Troy Campbell coming after her, but when she related how Randall had kept telling her not to go to the police, her tone became more and more depressed.
Her mother, neatly dressed in skirt and blazer, stayed quiet until Sam was finished. “A married man,” she said softly. “What could you possibly have been thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Sam said. “I was feeling.” She pulled a strand of dark hair away from her forehead with thumb and forefinger and hooked it behind a perfectly formed ear.
“The story’s been all over the news,” Mrs. Doucette said to Cardinal. “I’m terrified someone’s going to come after her again.”
“We’ve talked to the local media-they’re not going to run Sam’s name or picture-but I can’t promise anything once other places get hold of it. Unfortunately, shooting someone with a crossbow isn’t a great strategy if you want to remain anonymous.”
“I know. Indian shoots white man with bow and arrow.” She turned to her daughter. “Sweetheart, you probably just set us back a hundred years-but I’m glad you did it.”
“It’s Randall I shoul
d shoot,” Sam said. “I still can’t believe it. I know it’s true and I just can’t get my head around it.”
“I hope you’re planning to keep that man in jail,” her mother said to Cardinal.
“I’ll certainly try.”
“You know, if a bear wanders into town and hurts somebody, they kill it.”
“Mother, please.”
“Bears don’t have the right to due process,” Cardinal said.
He turned the focus to the night of the murders and took Sam slowly through it, starting from when she got to Champlain’s, to Randall’s call, to the drive out to Trout Lake. She gave him every detail he asked for and volunteered many he didn’t. She emphasized again, as she had in her anonymous phone call, that the man who had spoken to the Bastovs did not have a Russian accent. As she spoke-she hadn’t put her finger on it at the time-she realized that the man might be from the South. The American South.
“Why do you say that?”
“He said you-all a couple of times. And the way he pronounced a couple of things. He said nass instead of nice. Maht instead of might. Stuff like that. It wasn’t really strong, but it sounded kinda South to me.”
“And he was trying to sell the Bastovs on buying the house?”
“He showed them the bathroom. The bedrooms. Pointed stuff out. Switched the lights on and off. He talked about the view. How he’d have to get them out there in daylight to see it. I wondered about it, because I know Randall and Mr. Carnwright are the only two men in the company.”
Sam was precise on the time the shots were fired, and detailed in her description of other sounds-the man sounded tall, fairly heavy, big boots-but she wasn’t going to be able to identify him: a glimpse in the night, a man’s form silhouetted against a lit room. She described the chase, and the bullets hitting her car.
Sam’s mother spoke up. “How are you going to protect Sam from this animal?”
Cardinal tried to repeat Chouinard’s reasoning as if he believed it himself. “Maybe you have some relatives you could stay with,” he added. “It might be good if Sam could be out of town for a while.”