by John Farrow
“Once upon a time,” Camille assured him. “Not any more. He’s dead. He got what he deserved.”
“He’s out of the picture, that’s the main thing. The one person nobody could trust is gone. We’re in the clear.”
“All the way, baby.”
Satisfied that Andrew Stettler’s corpse would not be floating away, Camille turned around. In a drawer she kept a hammer and chisel that she often used to chip away at the ice, and she did so now, down on her knees, this time to remove a coating of blood, hair, and frozen flesh. She gathered the contaminated shards of ice together in a heap, and used a cup to pick them up and drop them into the lake. Using the serving spoon again, she guided them under the ice-pack, away from the body.
She decided that the bullet must have gone straight down the ice-hole, as it was nowhere in evidence. Good. Standing again, Camille worked on the block of ice dangling above the cabin floor, cleaning it of incriminating material and removing the shards. Then, with Honigwachs, she lowered the block back into place.
They sat on the benches, admiring their achievement.
Stettler’s head bobbed in the dark aperture.
Camille stood at last and visited the minnows again. “I can use these tomorrow, make it look like I came here to fish. It’s okay if they freeze. Once I put the stove on they’ll thaw out.” She slid them from one bowl into another, moving the water to stop it from icing just yet. Then she retrieved the bucket and leaned over the hole in the ice and, edging Stettler’s head aside, filled it about a third full of water. She slowly poured the cold water over the old ice, filling the gouges she’d created to clean the surface of blood. She dug snow out from under the cabin floor and pressed that into the cracks as well, creating an old-looking patina. The fresh surface was smooth and quick to freeze. She and Honigwachs pulled the boards back into place and covered the corpse.
“That’ll be some meeting tomorrow,” Honigwachs imagined.
She kissed him.
Residual warmth continued to emanate from the stove, so Camille returned the minnows to the pail, which she then left on the stovetop. She’d let the candle burn itself out.
She took down the chain and packed the tools.
Having walked onto the ice, Honigwachs intended to walk off. First he’d mix his steps with hundreds of others. Camille would leave by snowmobile, so that neither person’s identity or presence—nor Stettler’s absence—would be noted by anyone, not in the dark, not out on the lake.
The last job in the cabin for Werner Honigwachs was to take the pistol that he had used to shoot Andrew Stettler and wipe it clean of prints on a hand towel. When he was done, Camille, wearing her snowmobile mitts, took it from him. “They’ll look for it underwater. I’ll take it away from here.”
She started up her Ski-Doo and roared off into the night, heading across the lake toward home. Knowing that she was defeating others—Lucy and Charlie and this new cop coming on the scene—gave her a sense of achievement, as though outwitting her foes was justification in itself. Charging across the lake under the bright winter moon she raised a fist in the air, shaking it with savage fury.
Approaching the far shore, in a part of the lake where the current was strong and where the ice broke up first every spring, she stopped her machine and buried the pistol deep in the snow. When the ice melted, the weapon would sink to the bottom of the lake. Until then, it would be well hidden.
Driving on, her satisfaction immense, and yet assailed by quirky spasms of guilt, Camille Choquette knew enough to kick off the negative feelings. She had planned a perfect murder. Honigwachs had done his job, even if he had missed slightly. At least he had pulled the trigger. Even better, Andrew Stettler had confessed to knowing associates familiar with the situation concerning her father and dead brother. That alone made her happy he was dead. He had said there was more to her story. Well, death had shut him up. “Yes!” she shouted under the roar of her engine. “There’s more! You bastard! There’s more!” Upon the pristine white of the frozen lake she was riding freely under an immaculate sky, observed only by the moon and stars.
Rather than dealing with the complication of hiring a babysitter, she had given her child a mild sedative and put her to bed with a brood of dolls, many of which were aged, raggedy and patched, left over from her own childhood and sewn together. Arriving home, Camille would have nothing more to do than tuck herself into bed and dream the dreams of the blessed. She was, she believed, home free.
She roared on.
THE INFLUENCE
OF DARK MATTER
9
JELLY ROLL
The next day, after midnight, Monday, February 14, 1999
Some fourteen hours following the discovery of Andrew Stettler’s murder, a blizzard that blew along the Ottawa River Valley into Quebec crisscrossed the Lake of Two Mountains and assailed the island city of Montreal. Undulating like sand dunes, snow formed ridges along the highways, where only the big rigs travelled at that early-morning hour, and bore down upon the Mohawk territory at Kanesetake and upon the horse farms of St. Lazare. In the lakefront community of Hudson, yachts in their winter cradles lay buried under a foot of fresh snow. Drifts swept across the parking lots of empty shopping malls in the sleepy outlying towns, and the storm advanced across the flat suburbs of Montreal’s West Island into the city proper. Wind raged over Mount Royal, swirled above the steep escarpment on the edge of downtown and along the asphalt corridors between office towers, where the homeless hunkered down next to heating ducts. Snow scudded over the sloped rooftops of the English living rich in Westmount and the affluent French asleep in Outremont, blanketing the poorest streets of the southwest and the East End. The storm played its brash danceinstreetlights, snow blanketing cars, piling along sidewalks and over stairs, a nocturnal island city under siege.
Cinq-Mars slept peacefully in his country home, his wife beside him, their dog below the foot of their bed. If horses whinnied or stomped in their stalls they’d not be heard above the wind snapping at the outbuildings and trees and rooftops. Only the dog would look up as a gust shook a window for entry or yowled like the spirit of an ancestral canine in the chimney. Surfeited with their lovemaking, warm in one another’s arms under a cosy duvet, the couple could only have been jarred awake by something as intrusive as a telephone’s harsh jangle.
Which is what they heard.
As usual, Emile Cinq-Mars struggled up to answer.
He refused to keep a phone by his bed these days, having learned that the violence of calls in the middle of the night rattled him too deeply. He did not want the callous world in which he lived to also snooze alongside him. Cinq-Mars preferred to leave the room to take such calls, and now he was moving slowly, half-awake, staggering with the dog at his shins as if he were a blind man in need of guidance, shunting from one room to the other in a clumsy shuffle.
He cradled the phone to one side of his face, rubbing whiskers with his free hand, and sniffed his nasal passages clearer. “Yes?” he growled.
“Please. Detective—Cinq-Mars?—Sergeant? Help me.” A woman’s voice, faint, frightened, vaguely familiar, speaking English.
“Yes, this is Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars. Who’s calling, please?” He and his wife used the small side room as a combination of office and study, a place to relegate bills that could tolerate delayed payment, scribble shopping lists or address Christmas cards. The walls had required no further decoration than shelves with books, and over time the space had acquired a worthy contribution of junk—maps, receipts, letters, to-do lists for the farm, paper clips, pencils, piles of magazines.
Faint, breathless, the woman was in distress. “I’m sorry. I’m so scared. I didn’t know.”
Wide awake now, he recognized the caller’s voice. She was the woman whose anonymous, cryptic message had called him down to the lake during the daylight hours with an offer of information. “You never showed up, after promising you would.”
“I was waiting for someone who never show
ed up either! Then cop cars were all over the place. Oh God. The guy I was waiting for, he’s the dead man! I never thought he’d be killed! I just heard his name on the TV news.”
“The late-night news, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“That was hours ago. You took a while to call.” Cinq-Mars stifled a yawn with his fist. He didn’t know if he was grilling his caller about anything of substance but, out of habit, he persisted.
“I had to drive home first.”
“So you know the dead man.”
“I do.”
“Who are you? First tell me who you are, then tell me how you got my home phone number.”
“That’s so complicated.” Her tone suddenly changed from a whispered whimper to an expression of rage. “I’m scared, don’t you get it? I’m scared!”
“Are you in danger?”
“Yes! I mean, I think so. They killed Andy, didn’t they? If they know about me I might be next. I know as much about everything as Andy does … did. Maybe more. Maybe less, I don’t know.”
Listening, Cinq-Mars knotted his brow and spoke in a tone that was lower, and even more stern. “Who will kill you? Who killed Andy?”
“You don’t understand!’” she cried out. “Nobody knows for sure. I can take one mighty good guess, but I can’t believe he’d do something like that.”
“Calm down, all right? First things first. Tell me who you are.” Cinq-Mars picked up the phone-set in his free hand and paced toward the window. He had to snap the cord to guide it around a table leg. For the first time, he noticed the blizzard, the fierce machinations of the wind, the snow flying horizontally to the ground. Outside, the porch light and the spot above the stable door illuminated the snow swarming over his brand-new vehicle, a Pathfinder, parked in the barnyard.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“I have to be careful right now. I can’t be seen with you! If they think I’m talking to a cop … Oh God. I’m so scared, and I don’t scare easily. We have to meet in private.”
“Why did you choose to call me in the first place?” The agitation in her voice convinced him that he had not taken her fears seriously enough, and his voice softened as he sought to gain her confidence. “How’d you get my number?”
“That’s a secret. I can’t tell you right now. We had it because we were planning to talk to you.”
“Why?” Cinq-Mars pressed his mystery caller.
“Because you’re famous! We heard about you. We thought you could help. We thought we could trust you, maybe.”
“I’m sorry, I meant, what was it that you were planning to tell me?”
The woman paused, as though to consider if she should speak her piece now. In that moment of quiet Cinq-Mars stopped listening. He moved to the side of the front window that overlooked his horse farm and peered carefully out, concealed by the dark and by the curtain.
“I’m so scared now,” the woman was saying, sounding as though she needed encouragement to proceed.
Cinq-Mars had covered the mouthpiece. “Sandra!” he called back into the house. “Sandra!”
Propelled by the urgency in his voice, his wife was quickly on the move. She hurried into the room, wrapping her robe around herself. “Emile?”
“Take this.” He held out the phone to her.
“Who is it?” His alarm spurred a rampant fear of her own.
“I don’t know. A woman. Keep her on the line. She’s frightened. Try to calm her down. Get whatever information you can.”
“Émile?”
“Stay away from the window!” he told her as he bolted from the room. “Keep the lights off!”
Sandra Lowndes picked up the phone, asking tentatively, “Hello?” As she had seen her husband do, she peered around the edges of the curtain to observe what interested him so much, to see what had suddenly made him fearful.
The family dog, Sally, a mix but largely a Labrador retriever, was excited by this rare nighttime expedition by her master and leaped around as Cinq-Mars dressed hurriedly in the dark. This was not a season to be out chasing bad guys without dressing properly. He would have to put on his winter duds or be seriously disadvantaged. Possessing the element of surprise, he did not want to neutralize that benefit by being underdressed for the blizzard.
His passionate collapse into bed with Sandra did not serve him well now. Cinq-Mars had to operate in the dark, and finding socks and shoes, pants and a shirt, all merrily tossed off earlier, was difficult. Damn! This was not supposed to be how middle-aged married people made love! He hadn’t even brushed his teeth. To his dismay, he discovered that he still wore a drooping condom. He peeled it away and tied a knot at the top, felt for the wastebin and tossed it in. Cinq-Mars ruffled through his closet and dresser drawers to find darker clothing, wanting to wear whatever might camouflage his presence in the night. Although—he already knew—the intruder wore white, to conceal his advance across the pasture of blowing snow.
Cinq-Mars heard his wife uttering soothing phrases as he worked his way downstairs with the dog. The dark was more pressing there. He riffled through a cupboard, identifying objects by touch and pushing them aside. Back in the days when his situation with motorcycle gangs had been highly volatile, he had armed his wife with a shotgun for her protection while alone on the farm. That was his weapon of choice now. Cinq-Mars located the gun and pulled it from its lair, knocking over a collection of brooms and mops as he did so.
Shells were elsewhere, well hidden.
Down on his knees on the kitchen floor, Cinq-Mars had to keep pushing Sally off him while he reached behind the lazy Susan in a corner cupboard for the secret cache, knocking over spices and soup cans in the process. Finally, he grasped the box of ammunition and pulled it out.
He moved from the kitchen to the den.
Cinq-Mars blindly explored a side table for his cellphone, certain that he had left it there, close to the TV. His hand finally retrieved it and his thumb hit the power button. Green lights glowed in the dark. Cinq-Mars punched the quick-dial number for his own office, loading the shotgun at the same time.
“Operations,” a woman’s voice replied.
“X-ray Yankee Zulu,” Cinq-Mars chanted in an emphatic whisper.
In an instant a man’s voice came on. “Identify.”
“Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars. Intruder on the perimeter.”
“Number?”
“One known. Firepower unknown.”
“Intention?”
“Intervention.”
“Cinq-Mars, negative.”
“He’s wiring my car! He could blow my house!”
“On the way.”
“Out.”
Cinq-Mars quickly scampered from the den and back through the kitchen to the rear mudroom, where he encountered a problem.
His winter clothes hung in the closet there, but opening the door to fetch them would automatically turn on the closet light. The light also had a chain, but he would still have to spring open the bifold doors, reach very high, perhaps jump, and snare the chain on his first try. A momentary blaze of light could not be prevented, and he could only hope that the outside intruder wouldn’t notice. Fat chance. He prayed that whoever was messing with his car was so preoccupied with planting dynamite that he would not see him awake and on the prowl.
Cinq-Mars counted down from three. He yanked the doors open and jumped. In that prolonged moment he felt himself hang in the air, as if suspended, while his fingers found, then lost, then relocated the chain. As he fell back to the floor, the light was switched off and blackness again stood fast.
Blackness, and the snow-white raging of a nocturnal winter storm.
Sally was jumping on him, wanting to wrestle.
Cinq-Mars snapped the shotgun closed.
He listened at the door. Heard only the wind’s whistling clamour.
The dog posed a dilemma. She was a good watchdog for Sandra in the sense that she’d announce a stranger’s arriva
l, bark an alarm. But in the uproar of the winter storm, with the windows sealed, she had detected no intruder, and if she spotted one she’d only prance about and yap, perhaps beg to play. Sally would not attack and responded to no such command. If he let her romp outside, she’d probably get herself shot. On the other hand, if he kept her inside and left the house without her, she’d bark to be let out, putting him in jeopardy.
At the closet, Cinq-Mars threw on his outerwear and boots. A John Deere baseball cap, gloves, a big eiderdown coat. By the time he was ready he’d made a decision about the dog. He located her leash by feeling around in the dark closet and fastened it around her neck. Sally was wagging her tail now. He’d take her out the back way, make her think they were off for a stroll in the blizzard, then tie her up. By the time she realized that she was about to be left alone, and protested, he’d be around the corner of the house. No intruder would expect him to be there, even after Sally commenced a ruckus, and he’d have gained an angle of attack.
With Sally firmly clutched, shushing her constantly, Emile Cinq-Mars departed the rear of his house and made his way around to the side. A stout maple there, about a foot in diameter, served as a hitching-post.
The wind was fierce and the cold bit into them. Sally was growing less enthusiastic about this excursion. The dog was unaware that she’d been tied until her master turned the corner of the shed. Then she started to fuss and whimper, and soon she was barking.
Cinq-Mars moved quickly to gain position. He slipped around the woodpile and was headed to the front of the house when his advance was met by a retort from way off to his left. Gunfire? Cinq-Mars was stunned and had to fight with himself to react. He didn’t believe what was happening. He stumbled in his half-hearted retreat, rolled in behind the woodpile, and crouched down there in the snow in shock and amazement. He’d been ambushed. He took a chance to look up but saw nothing, only the white snow shooting sideways and beyond that, blackness. Sally was uproarious now and he believed that he heard, from way upstairs, Sandra caterwauling his name.