by John Farrow
Painchaud appeared sceptical, his head bobbing around.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s a possibility, sir. But I don’t know how you can put that together.”
“They shot her, and never said a word after that. Two men. They didn’t have to discuss what to do next. They rolled her in a carpet and hoisted her out of here and never said a word. My wife told me they were mute. Probably they taped her mouth to keep her quiet as well. If she was conscious. Question: how did they know what to do without talking? Answer: they had planned that part ahead of time. They expected to come in here and find her in bed. Or, if they had either followed her or waited for her, they expected to find her getting ready for bed. That’s why they waited awhile. They expected to tape her mouth, tie her up, wrap her in the carpet and haul her out. Because they came in here and found her on the phone, they shot her first instead. They needed her instantly mute. They weren’t going to cross the floor to hang up that phone.”
Painchaud shrugged. “It’s a possibility.”
Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars had a matter of tricky diplomacy to conduct. He motioned Painchaud over to a corner and placed a fraternal hand upon his shoulder. “Charles, I want to thank you for granting me some leeway here.”
“No problem, sir.”
“You know that I don’t have jurisdiction—”
“Sir, I’m not that kind of cop.” He had that wonky mouth, and his words carried a slight inflection caused by the distortion of his lips. “Keep the lines of communication open, that’s all. I don’t want to look bad. It’s clear to me you’re involved. People call you up, next thing you know, they’re a missing person. That’s more important than jurisdiction. This moves around you, so I want your input. Besides that, we both appreciate that I can’t operate on the reserve without you. You’ve got your problems with the SQ—”
“There’s been some history,” Cinq-Mars acknowledged in a confidential voice.
“—but I’m just a cop trying to do the best job I can.”
“I can see that, Sergeant. Speaking of which, how did you make the ID on that body in the water so fast? Was he carrying a wallet?”
Painchaud smiled, his mouth showing its deformity again. The left side of his lips seemed paralysed. “We got lucky, sir. Down deep in the hip pocket of his jeans was an old credit card slip, for gas. Under a microscope we got a read on the name and number. We ran it down, visited his place in the city. That confirmed it was our guy. Andrew Stettler.”
“Good work.” Cinq-Mars straightened, as his weariness and the late hour had caused him to stoop. “Sergeant, we need to find this girl. Dead or alive. If she’s dead, she could be anywhere by morning. We need the SQ to cover the countryside. We need Peacekeepers to scour the reserve. I’ll get my people to hunt Montreal.”
“Do you think she’s in a ditch?”
“It’s possible, but I have my doubts. If they wanted to dump her, why take her away from here? Shoot her, get it over with, beat it. If she’s dead, they wanted the corpse for a reason, and I can’t imagine what kind of reason would qualify. Why would they want to take a corpse? They knew she’d been on the phone. They knew somebody heard her die, so they couldn’t keep this a secret. They knew cops would investigate. Why roll her up in a carpet and haul her away with them? That’s high risk. A risk that big has to give them a reward. For the life of me, I can’t think what it could be.”
“She could identify them.”
“There’s that. But only if she’s not a corpse and they have no intention of making her one.”
Painchaud nodded. “Makes sense. Okay. Let’s assume she’s alive. What do you want to do in here?”
“Nothing. I’m too afraid to disturb the dust. They didn’t hang up the phone. That tells me they did their best to touch nothing. They opened the cabinet door to get at the bullet hole. So they tried to retrieve it, and they probably succeeded. They showed an interest in cleaning up. There won’t be much to find so I don’t want to mess what’s here. It’s not like we’ve got anything to go on. Let’s seal it, have the Peacekeepers sector it off. Wait for the crime scene technicians to do their thing. Then give the Peacekeepers first crack.”
“That’s political.”
“I suppose it is.”
Painchaud gave it some thought. He failed to arrive at a worthwhile alternative.
“I guess we go home now,” Cinq-Mars decided.
“No argument there.”
First, Cinq-Mars gathered his colleagues for a summation. He cleared his dry throat. “Gentlemen, why would they want to dispose of a corpse? Most killers have no use for the body unless they want it hidden, but this shooting was done while she was on the phone, so it was no secret. Why, then?
“My first guess,” Cinq-Mars continued, before anyone had a chance to answer, “—and maybe I’m only being optimistic:—is that this girl is not a corpse. Alive, she’s worth something to someone. She was peddling information. Somebody took an interest in what she had to say and to whom. So let’s agree. There’s a good chance that a young woman is out there wrapped in a rug bleeding from a bullet wound. With that in mind, let’s do our jobs well. Make sure our respective departments are aware and active. Gentlemen, thanks. Good night.”
Outside, Bill Mathers clambered into the Pathfinder beside his partner. He’d been on the phone awhile. “The firm—Hillier-Largent Global—is located in Saint-Laurent,” he told him, referring to a suburb of Montreal north of downtown.
“Thank goodness. Finally! We have a piece of this on our own turf.”
“Their business is pharmaceuticals and biotechnology.”
Cinq-Mars was letting that sink in when he yawned hard and realized that his body temperature was dropping fast. He turned on the ignition and let the engine warm up before blasting them both with heat.
“So,” Mathers suggested, “do we start tomorrow at Hillier-Largent?”
His partner shook his head. “BioLogika first. Then there.”
“Why BioLogika?”
“Get there before anybody figures out we don’t belong. We want to be the first cops to show, not the second or third wave. You might want to think about sleeping at my place tonight.”
“Sounds good, actually. You’re closer.”
Cinq-Mars put the car in gear. Wipers, front and rear, strained to clear a patch of visibility.
The partners drove down the small highway that would take them back through the Indian reserve to Oka. A snowbound night. Bill Mathers raised their department to sound the alarm about the missing girl. After he was done, Cinq-Mars told him what Charles Painchaud had said, and asked what he thought of the other man, given that they were both about the same age.
Mathers mulled the question awhile. Hauled out of bed by the events of the night, he carried himself differently than usual. His attention to grooming thwarted, he seemed less composed, less in control of himself. Often he was overly concerned with how his opinions were being received. He was a man with a resident softness to his body and limbs, despite his broad shoulders and deep chest. He was not a man to bulk up, which disguised an above-average strength and a strong constitution. He preferred to look serious, responsible. On this night, with spiky hair and bristles and droopy eyelids, he was failing, and somehow that let him throw caution to the wind, speak more freely.
“At first, I thought he was cooperating to see what that did for him. That’s all he’s got to trade—cooperation, nothing else. God knows it’s a rare commodity. I thought he might be coattailing you. We’ve seen that before. Now, it sounds like he’s making a contribution. I might come around to your side, Emile. Maybe he’s a cop who wants to get the job done.”
Emile Cinq-Mars uttered a gentle grunt. He generally concurred, but he would have preferred being beaten off that position. “I heard he’s connected, moved up through the ranks that way. We don’t have time yet, but when we do, I’d like him checked out.”
“Meaning by me?”
“Preferab
ly.”
“You’re the one with the insider connections, Emile.”
“That’s why I’m asking you. I want to know if he’s left a clean trace, or if his story’s been buried.”
“All right. I’ll do your dirty work. Nothing unusual there.” He wasn’t complaining. He was content whenever Cinq-Mars trusted him with a specific duty.
At the edge of the lake, Jean-Pierre, the snowplough driver, was nowhere in sight. The engine in his vehicle was not running. This was not a night for him to be taking a stroll, or going far for a pee.
“Check the cab,” Cinq-Mars told his partner, “maybe he’s sleeping.” He had an odd, eerie feeling. Drivers didn’t turn off their diesel engines in weather this cold. He watched as Bill Mathers climbed up to the cab and opened the door, but he could not determine what he was doing in there.
Mathers came running back, lumbering through the snow, and threw open the passenger door. “He’s unconscious, Emile.”
“What!”
“Bleeding from the back of the head.”
“He’s alive?” Cinq-Mars opened his car door.
“No question. Looks like he was pistol-butted, something like that.”
“This means whoever it was waited for us to cross over, then they crossed back.”
“I’ll call for an ambulance,” Mathers said, squeezing himself into the seat.
“Do that. Then alert all forces on the other side. I’ll go have a look.”
Hands in his pockets, head bowed to the wind, Emile Cinq-Mars walked through the blizzard to the truck, where the groggy driver was beginning to stir. He already assumed that the man had seen nothing of significance—given the weather, it was unlikely that anyone would have been able to provide a useful description of anyone else. He felt that way himself, an indecipherable shape in an immense void, weary of this world, ghost-walking. The wind was particularly severe around the truck, as if nature herself was incensed by all that prevailed in this place and in these times.
Worse than being shot was being mummified in the carpet.
Her arms had been pinned to her sides. As she grew more conscious, Lucy was sure she’d suffocate, and she inhaled each dust-filled breath with desperation. It hurts! Her mouth was taped. She could not shout warning, she could not indicate that she was losing it. She had only one choice. Breathe. Don’t vomit.
Room light, between her feet. Down there, at that end—air. Breathe. Then she was being bumped around as they got her out the door, and the carpet bent to her shape as they jostled her down the stairs. The men dropped her a couple of times, jarring her bones. Breathe. Keep breathing. Slow breaths, don’t hyperventilate. It hurts! Don’t panic. Breathe. Come on. Slowly. Breathe. Please don’t panic. Oh!
They dropped her down on another hard surface. Shoved her forward.
Car doors slammed. A van. The engine started up. The voices were indistinct. Between her feet—space, light, air.
She warned herself to stay calm. Just breathe. That’s it. If she panicked she knew that she would never recover. She’d lose her mind.
She fought to stay calm as the van worked its way up the small valley of her property, climbing her driveway. She heard and felt the wheels on the snowy road.
Breathe. Slowly. Just breathe.
The van stopped and the men had a serious argument and Lucy listened. One was being blamed for shooting her. He had panicked, the other two were saying, and they were pissed off and even, Lucy thought, frightened of a reprimand.
Being shot had been a mistake, and Lucy took some comfort in that.
A long delay, then they were on the move again. The next time they stopped the men discussed attacking a snowplough driver. “Don’t shoot anybody this time,” one man was told. Lucy wanted to scream, shout warning, do something. When the man came back he said it had been easy, “He’s out like a light,” and apparently he had been vindicated because they didn’t argue any more and drove on in silence.
Then they were stymied by a gate. “All right,” a man said. “Now you can shoot something, if you’re so goddamned trigger-happy. Shoot that fucking lock off.”
She heard the shot, the retort muffled by the roaring wind. After that they drove for a long time.
When the van stopped and the motor was shut off it was still dark out. Cold air came up from between her feet. Rather than unroll the carpet, the men grabbed her ankles and yanked her out. Lucy Gabriel slid on her own blood. Other men were there to greet her, tough guys, one with a knife at her side, another with a pistol, and they made her walk between them out of the alley and across the street under the lights and over the deep snow that was still swirling, and she bled all the way to a door, her mouth still taped. She stumbled on the step and fell and she saw the drip-trail of her blood behind her. She did not know exactly where she had landed but the architecture placed her in Old Montreal. The men took her through the broad doors of a rundown office building, and together they climbed the stairs.
Her heart hammered in her chest. Lucy kept swallowing, her mouth dry, terrified that she might soon vomit.
They brought her into a large, open, empty room—a space that once might have accommodated a few dozen desks—and led her down to one end. A heavy, big-bellied man with the stench of stale liquor on his breath and an unlit stump of a cigar in his mouth introduced himself as a doctor and demanded to see her arm. Lucy sat in a chair by a kitchen island as he ran the taps and cleaned the wound. She wouldn’t look at her arm as he worked on it. The slightest exertion caused him to breathe more heavily. He hadn’t shaven and had probably been shaken from his sleep and looked as though he belonged in bed. And yet, he worked on her arm with tenderness. He examined the wound and gently assured her that it was no big deal. His fingers were pudgy and dirt rimmed his fingernails. He placed the gauze and bandage over her wound with a deft touch, and when he was done he smiled.
It hurt. Her fear had masked the pain, but when she looked at the bandage she was suddenly aware of her injury again and the pain stabbed her, and Lucy moaned.
After that the doctor accepted a cash payment from one of her captors and left. Lucy immediately felt less safe.
A big man with long hair that was thinning on top, a gold stud earring in one lobe, and small, black eyes began the interrogation by punching her—once, hard—in the stomach. She lay on the floor for several long minutes trying to catch a single breath, gasping, holding her tummy. The big man was talking to her. “You see the trouble you caused here? You think we didn’t notice? You think you don’t pay for that? Bitch. Whore! You pay for everything in this world. Nothing’s free. You think you can walk away from this, you skinny bitch? Eh? You think so? Well, change your mind in one fucking hurry! We’re not done with you. We haven’t even started.”
When finally her lungs worked again and she had all the air in the room, she still couldn’t breathe. She was too afraid.
The man leaned over her, pulled her hair back and whispered in her ear. “One fucking little shit lie out of you, sister, I’ll finish you off personally. I will take my time. Understand me? One tiny shit lie out of you. I want complete answers, you got that? You fucking hesitate and I’ll fucking tear your eyes out. Understand me?”
He still had not asked a question about anything material and she was unsure about everything he was saying to her. She just wanted to catch a breath so she could fight back.
Then the big guy made her sit on the countertop on the kitchen island in that large empty room in Old Montreal and he leaned into her with his hands on either side of her thighs and she could smell his sour breath, and a voice behind her and to her left asked, “Lucy? Tell us. What do you know about Andy?”
She couldn’t speak. Her mouth was still covered with tape.
She gurgled.
The big man took out a hunting knife and sliced her gag away, then he gripped her jaw from underneath and the man behind her repeated the question.
“Nothing!” she claimed. “I heard he’s dead. It’s on th
e news.”
“You know him?” asked the voice from behind.
“He’s a friend of mine. So?”
Her answer caused two other burly men to grab her by the shoulders and they forced her down on the countertop. She kicked her feet and she thought they were going to rape her and she wanted to scream but she was too scared.
They turned her head sideways.
“Watch this,” the voice from the man she hadn’t seen yet said, and she could see him now. He was a pointy-faced man with a tan. He had deep ridges in his forehead and black hair that looked fake. Either it was heavily dyed or it was a toupee. He opened a test tube and held it above the plastic countertop, just held it there, and then he spilled a little of the fluid that was inside and it burned a patch of the plastic. She was overwhelmed with terror. She thought she was screaming but no sound was coming out of her, and she thought that she would vomit and her stomach convulsed but instead she only gagged.
“I’m going to ask you a question. You’ll tell me the truth about it. If you lie, I get to splash your face with this stuff. Lie to me twice, I start on your body. First your breasts, then low down. Do I have to explain to you what I’m saying?”
The burly men holding her renewed their grip, pushing her shoulders down and each one clasped a thigh, and she was flat on her back and thrashing her head, turning her face away, then back, wanting not to see, then needing to see what was happening or what would happen next.
Lucy Gabriel could only gasp for breath. She could not answer.
“ ‘Cause what I’m saying is, go ahead and lie ‘cause I don’t mind.”
He dripped the acid around the perimeter of her head. She heard it sizzle as she turned her face away. “Did you kill Andy Stettler?”