“Jeez,” he said. “You girls must be making out pretty good up here. How much of that do you get to keep?”
She frowned, pulled away and glanced at the back of the room, to the entrance to the VIP room, where dancers and customers did their private dances.
“Hey, how long you been in town?” asked Jack. “Do you know Rena Redcloud?”
She smiled at him vaguely and wandered off to approach a group of young guys at a nearby table. She was soon sitting on one guy’s knee.
Jack took his beer and walked back to the entrance of the VIP area, where a massive, bearded guy in a T-shirt and leather vest stood guard.
“How’s it going?” Jack said to him. He had to holler to be heard over the music, and lean into the guy.
“Very good sir,” the bearded guy said. “You looking for a dance? You have a girl in mind?”
“No,” said Jack. “I’m looking to have a chat with Dwayne Brecker.”
The guy’s smile froze. Jack took in his massive arms and chest, and the tribal tattoos on his forearms, and the ghost of an old scar on his cheek. Jack was standing close enough to smell him.
“If it’s about business, you should call during business hours to make an appointment,” the guard said.
Jack smiled and nodded. He stood beside the guy, looking at the room. A new girl – a curvy blonde – was on all fours, stripping out of her thong and leering over her shoulder at a row of guys sitting next to the stage.
Jack leaned in to talk to the guard again, and tucked a twenty-dollar bill into the breast pocket of his leather vest. “Tell you what, I’d really like to talk to Dwayne tonight if possible,” he said. “I’ll go have a beer at the bar. You tell him a guy named Jack Macdonald is here to see him about Rena Redcloud. Mike Redcloud sent me. If he can find a minute, I’ll be at the bar. If he can’t, I’ll call tomorrow. Okay?”
The bouncer looked at him for a minute and nodded. “Don’t hold your breath,” he said.
Jack laughed and walked back to the bar. He ordered another beer and tried to drink it slowly. When a gap-toothed brunette in lingerie came up to chat with him, he said, “No thanks. No dance for me. Tell me, do you know Rena Redcloud?” She left quickly.
Jack watched the dancers, and the knots of drunk men in their party shirts. The girls would approach them, flirt a bit, then lead one off to the room at the back. Jack tried to amuse himself by guessing which guy would go for which girl, but it was a depressing spectacle. The customers and dancers all pretended to be interested in each other as people, when they were all engaged in a base, impersonal exchange of money for a pale imitation of sex.
He was not immune from desire, himself, and pondered taking one of the girls into the back. Maybe he could see where Brecker’s office was. While he was thinking about that, the best-looking stripper he’d seen all night walked up to him. She was wearing stilettos, a miniskirt and a black silk top that left her midriff bare. Her breasts were high and plump, and her stomach taut but slightly rounded. He found it hard to tear his eyes away from the top of her miniskirt, where the irresistible slope of her belly inclined to her groin. She smiled at him coolly from a distance and tossed her hair back. She didn’t look stoned.
Yes, I will have a dance, thought Jack, smiling at her.
She leaned in to him and said, “Jack Macdonald? You want to see Dwayne?”
He nodded and followed her swaying hips to the back of the room. They walked past the enormous bearded guard, into the hallway to the VIP room. She pressed a buzzer next to a heavy steel door and waited. The man who opened the door was tall and rugged-looking, with a salt and pepper goatee and shoulder-length hair. He was wearing a black sports jacket, black jeans and an open-necked white dress shirt. The jacket looked wrong on him somehow, because his upper body was so large, even though the cut was right, it gave him a boxy, exaggerated look. His brown eyes were hard. His mouth was a narrow slit.
“Jack Macdonald?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Macdonald, stretching out his hand. “Dwayne Brecker?”
He ignored the hand and nodded to the girl, who smiled, nodded back and turned and walked elegantly away.
“All right,” he said. “Come on in. Pull the door shut.”
The room was furnished with a heavy oak desk below a window with one-way glass that looked out into the barroom. Next to it was a bank of flat-screen TVs, with scenes from throughout the building: the front entrance, the bar, several angles on the VIP room, the parking lot, the street. There was a heavy safe on the floor, and what looked to be a gun locker, a coffee table and leather couch against the other wall, and another steel door, which likely led to the parking lot.
“So,” said Brecker. “You want to talk to me.”
“Yes,” said Jack. “About Rena Redcloud. I just came from talking to Mike, her brother. He told me you were on the case. I’m a reporter. Came here from Ottawa to look into it.”
“Who do you work for?” said Brecker.
Jack dug out a card. “The Telegram,” he said. “The daily in Newfoundland.”
“Why should I talk to you?” Brecker said. “Why should I give a fuck?” He fixed Jack with an unblinking stare, totally relaxed, bored-looking.
Jack puffed out his cheeks and thought for a minute. “First of all, because you have nothing to lose,” he said. “I undertake never to tell a soul I’ve even talked to you, if you want. When I make a promise like that I keep it. In your case, I have extra motivation, because I have a, uh, healthy respect for your associates in the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. I think if anything ever comes back on you, you could arrange for them to make me sorry.
“Secondly, I suspect there is more to the story of Rena Redcloud than anyone knows, and I think you know some things that the public should know. I don’t know what those things are, but I have the idea they’re important.”
Brecker stared at him.
“Okay,” he said after a few seconds. “I might talk to you, but I want you to know I don’t work for the Angels. I wouldn’t work for them. That’s an organized crime group, and I am a former officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I work for a private company in a legal business. It’s not in anybody’s interest – least of all that company’s owners – to allow anything illegal to happen here that would jeopardize a profitable company.”
Jack smiled. A sickly smile. “Okay.”
Brecker smiled back. It was not friendly. “You’re right. If there’s anything I don’t like in what you write, you could easily find yourself getting a visit from some associates of mine in Ottawa, or wherever the fuck you are.” He stood up and stuck out his hand. “All right?” he said. “We got a deal?”
Jack shook Brecker hand and met his eyes, then pulled his hand back, wincing. “Easy,” he said. “That’s my typing hand.”
Brecker sat down. Jack stood, shaking out his hand.
“Okay,” said Brecker. “No recording but you can take notes. I’ll tell you the story. I don’t care if people guess it came from me, but you can’t use my name. All right?”
“I won’t use your name,” said Jack, and he took his notepad and pen out of his coat pocket. “I’ll refer to you a source close to the investigation.”
“Fine,” said Brecker. “Call me that. But don’t use my fucking name.”
“I won’t,” said Jack. “We have a deal.”
“Alright,” Brecker said. “It was August 13, 2008. Sergeant Earl Gushue and I were called to a disturbance at the Great Western Motel. Dispatch had several calls from guests and the guy working the front desk. They all said the same thing. Screaming and yelling. Sound of furniture breaking, then one terrible scream, from a woman, then quiet. We get there, about five minutes after the first call.
“We pound on the door, no answer, so I kick it in,” he said. He was staring at the coffee table as he spoke, reciting the story carefully. “Sergeant Gushue had his sidearm drawn. The room was dark. We switched on the light. It was like an efficiency unit, with a
little living room. Redcloud was on the carpet, with a knife sticking out of her eye. She was prone, on her back, blood all over the place, furniture overturned. TV screen broken. Bottles and broken glass all over the place. Cigarette butts. The place smelled of liquor. Coffee table was broken. There was nobody else in the room.
“Gushue steps in with his sidearm drawn, looking down the little hallway to the other rooms. Calls out. ‘Come out with your hands up. This is the police.’ I check on Redcloud. She has no pulse. She’s dead. One eye staring, the other with a knife buried in it to the hilt. There is no point giving her CPR.
“There is no sound from the other rooms. I draw my sidearm. We both have our flashlights out. We move down the hallway. I turn on the light. We hear something from the bedroom. Gushue calls out again. No answer. I open the bedroom door. The perpetrator – what was he called, Ling Wing? – was sitting there, little Chinese guy in his underwear, blood all over his hands, sitting there at his desk, working at his laptop.
“We come in, he looks up. ‘She try kill me,’ he says. ‘Bitch try kill me. Sef defence. Sef defence.’
“I put the cuffs on him, and Sergeant Gushue reads him his rights. He kept babbling. ‘She rob me. She try kill me. Sef defence.’ It was ugly. I got her blood all over me.
“So I take him out to the cruiser and Gushue goes back in to see what he was doing on the laptop. His email program was open. Bunch of messages in Chinese. But Gushue checks the Deleted Items folder, there’s a bunch of emails in there in English. Looked like the Chinese guy just deleted them but didn’t empty the folder.”
He looked up at Jack, who was scribbling frantically. “You following me?”
Jack nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “We take the laptop back to the station and while I’m processing the guy, Gushue is reading the emails he was trying to delete, and loading a backup onto a memory stick. Later on, he shows them to me.
“It was an email exchange, between the Chinese guy and an unknown party,” he said. “It had to do with their project here, with a decision by the Canadian cabinet to approve or reject the project. This little Chinese guy was getting reports. They were memos, descriptions of who said what at a cabinet meeting. Said some of the cabinet members thought the Chinese should get the okay, some said no. There were a series of messages like that, and for every message, there was a reply, from the Chinese guy, with details about a wire transfer to an account in Panama, each time $100,000 U.S.”
Jack stiffened and stopped writing. Who were the messages from?”
“That’s the thing,” said Brecker. “They were from a Hotmail account. I can’t even remember the address. A random bunch of numbers and letters.”
“Do you have the emails?”
“No,” said Brecker. “I never did. They were in the file on the case. It was more Gushue’s interest than mine. It bothered him. He said someone had violated the Security of Information Act. Said, basically, there was a spy in the cabinet. Told me to keep my mouth shut about it, but he started a new file, starting working it, wrote to Hotmail, looking for the IP address of the person who set up the Hotmail account. And he reported it up the chain of command.”
Jack looked up from his notepad. “And?”
“And very quickly two guys came in from Edmonton, senior guys. Inspector Duncan Wheeler and Assistant Inspector Emil Dupré. Brass. They call us in, tell us this is a national security investigation, way above our pay grade, point out that we would be violating the Security of Information Act ourselves if we ever said a word. Said that senior Mounties and CSIS agents would take over the investigation and we did a great job, and congratulations, and that was it.”
“Fuck,” said Jack.
“A couple months later, cabinet approves the project. Was a big story up here. Now they’re building it,” he said. “And I never heard anything about any arrests. If you check the records, you’ll find that Gushue, Wheeler and Dupré all got big promotions. Gushue got promoted to Ottawa. Wheeler was made deputy commissioner, and yours truly got pushed out the fucking door.”
“Why were you pushed out?” asked Jack.
Brecker laughed. “Is that for your story?”
“Well, I can find out, but I’d rather hear it from you. I don’t want to go around asking about you.”
Brecker narrowed his eyes.
“They didn’t like the way I handled a cocaine bust,” he said. “Okay? Is that good? We had a disagreement over the whereabouts of some cocaine and some cash. That dispute ended with me leaving the force very quietly and moving down here, where I make a shitload more money.”
Jack nodded at him.
“That’ll do ’er,” he said. “What was Gushue like?”
“Good Mountie,” said Brecker. “Great Mountie. Old school. A believer. When he was posted up north, he’d have all the Eskimo kids playing hockey, get gear donated from down south. The league he set up is still going. You remember Andy Mahonik, Eskimo kid cracked the AHL? Scored some goals for the national junior team? He’s one of the kids Gushue coached. Jesus, he was a good Mountie. He’d go visit crime victims, criminals, years after he handled their cases, see how they were doing.”
Brecker’s eyes had softened. Jack was suddenly looking at a very different person.
“I was glad he was gone by the time I had my little trouble,” Brecker said. “He was good to me, and I wouldn’t have liked to face him when …” All the warmth suddenly vanished from his eyes, and he was standing. “Got enough? Ready to go bother somebody else?”
“Yeah,” said Jack, and he made for the door. “Thanks so much. You did the right thing telling me this shit. I’m onto something here, something weird, and I’m going to do my best to get it out.”
He was at the door. Brecker pressed a buzzer and it unlocked.
“And don’t worry about getting dragged into this,” Jack said as he stepped into the hallway. “I’m not going to ever mention your name to anybody.”
“You’d better fucking not,” said Brecker. And he slammed the door in his face.
After a couple of hours in front of the computers, watching Sophie and Ed have sex, Flanagan found something interesting. It was on one of the last recordings, dated just a month ago.
It was obvious from the beginning that something was different. While most of the recordings started with an empty bedroom, or sometimes while Sophie was undressing, or in bed waiting for Ed, in this recording, she was on her knees, in her underwear, performing fellatio.
“Hey,” said Flanagan. “That’s not Sawatski.”
Ashton slid her chair over and looked at the screen.
“Holy fuck,” she said. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Flanagan. “It just started. You can’t see his face.”
The man was wearing nothing but an unbuttoned blue dress shirt. He was significantly heavier set than Sawatski, a bit pudgy around the middle. He was sitting on the edge of the bed nearest the camera, and his face wasn’t visible on the screen.
The screen showed the back and side of Sophie’s head, which was bobbing quickly up and down. After a few minutes, Ed stepped into the doorway, a strange smile on his face. Sophie pulled her mouth away from the man on the bed and looked toward him, still holding the man’s penis in her hand. She smiled and said something. Ed responded and she turned back to caressing the other man with her mouth.
“Holy fuck,” said Flanagan. “This is some kinky shit. Look at the dude, standing there watching his girlfriend with another guy.”
“People do some funny things when they think nobody’s watching,” Ashton said. “Check it out, he’s getting into it.”
Ed was staring from the doorway, apparently mesmerized. He rubbed the front of his pants.
Sophie stopped again, and turned to look at Ed, speaking to him, smiling and laughing, and Ed started to undress as she turned back to the other man. When he was naked, Ed walked toward the bed and stood there, touching himself in front of her. Ashton and Flanagan
could no longer see his face.
Sophie pulled away from the stranger and reached for Ed’s penis. She spoke to him, smiling.
“I wonder if we could get a lip reader to figure out what she’s saying,” said Ashton.
“Geez,” said Flanagan. “We’d need a pretty open-minded lip reader.”
“Is this bugging you?”
“No. It’s no big deal, but she seemed like such a nice girl when we interviewed her.”
“You might be surprised at some of the things nice girls get up to, Devon.”
“I might be,” said Flanagan, nodding at the screen.
Sophie was now performing oral sex on Ed, and masturbating the other man’s penis at the same time. Then she switched back.
“We still haven’t seen his face,” said Ashton. “Maybe we can do a printout of his unit. Show it around the Hill. See if anyone recognizes it.”
Flanagan frowned and looked at her over his glasses.
“Just saying,” said Ashton, grinning. “Look. He’s moving. Maybe we’ll get to see now.”
The man stood up from the bed, and took off his shirt. Sophie looked up at him, and then at Ed, and took off her bra.
The man tossed his shirt aside, toward the camera, and suddenly the screen was filled with a closeup of a blue cotton weave.
“Fuck,” said Flanagan. He jabbed at the remote and clicked forward. An hour farther in, the shirt was removed from the shelf as the man got dressed. But he got dressed off-camera. The screen showed Ed and Sophie under a sheet on the bed. They were talking and laughing, obviously engaged with the man as he got dressed.
Then Sophie jumped out of bed and stood naked close to the camera, so the screen was filled with a closeup of her pale, slim belly. She turned as the man’s body came into view, they embraced and she remained standing there as he left the room, her ass blocking the view of him as he passed by the camera. Then she jumped back into bed and snuggled up with Sawatski.
Flanagan clicked ahead. The recording ran through the night and finished after the two of them got up in the morning.
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