Ice Lake

by John Farrow

  “No!” she cried out. “No no, no!”

  He continued to drip acid around her head. She jumped each time the countertop burned. Then he held the test tube of scalding acid above her face. One of the others gripped her hair and made her look up at the tube of acid. She could see a drip, on the edge of it, trickle down.

  “Think about this now. Don’t answer too quickly.” She was kicking her feet. Flailing her body. “Do you know who did? Did one of your friends kill Andy? You can tell me. You can save yourself here.”

  He was holding the tube above her face and she squirmed in the hands of the men holding her. She was making desperate little cries and she believed that her face was about to be scalded and she’d be scarred for life, and the pain, the pain would drive her mad. A large drop was forming at the base of the tube, preparing to fall.

  “It’s okay,” the man soothed her. “Tell me who it was.”

  Lucy Gabriel looked right at him, right into his eyes. “I don’t know who did it!” she screamed at him. She was desperate to believe that they wouldn’t have arranged for the doctor to fix her arm if they were planning to maim her. That drop was going to fall. “I don’t know who it was!”

  The man continued to stare at her. He met her gaze. He poured a little of the acid just away from her neck and a speck of the stuff splashed up and seared her skin, and Lucy began to buck and kick on the countertop with all her strength and fury.

  “You can tell me,” he said. “Tell me, Lucy.”

  She reared up from the surface in the grip of her captors with her neck muscles straining and rage violent in her eyes and screamed at her tormentor, “I don’t know who did it! I just found out about it tonight, you asshole!”

  The man backed off, putting his test tube down.

  Lucy kept after him. “Go ahead! Burn me! Burn me, you asshole! I don’t know who did it!”

  The man nodded to someone she couldn’t see. She heard footsteps coming her way. She believed that whatever was imminent would be worse, worse than acid and worse than death, because death would be merciful now. She was trying to look up over her head to see who and what was coming.

  “Nobody’s gonna burn you, Lucy,” a voice said, a familiar voice, an Indian voice. “That’s not the deal. Come home with me now. We’ll get you out of here.”

  Just like that, she was being rescued from oblivion.

  This time she was not rolled in the carpet when she left in the van. The carpet had been tossed aside in an alley. Her wrists and ankles were tied, but she was permitted to sit on the floor of the vehicle. She could feel the miles clicking away, and believed that she was going home. At the very least, she was being driven by an Indian, and while she hated him and despised being tied down, she at least believed that her life was no longer in danger.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

  “Need-to-know basis,” the driver responded.

  “I need to know.”

  He chuckled. “All right then, this works on a need-to-tell-you basis, and right now I need to tell you squat.”

  “Some days,” she baited him, “I’m sick to death of Mohawk Warriors.”

  “This is not one of those days,” the man told him. His name was Roger, she remembered, but she had never had much to do with him. They’d never dated.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Lucy told him.

  They were on a highway, driving fast.

  “You think you’d be alive right now if it wasn’t for the Mohawk Warriors?”

  “Is that true?” That her captor might also be her protector was a difficult notion to grasp.

  “You think you wouldn’t have a burned-off face right now?”

  Lucy challenged him on that. “I didn’t hear you speaking up for me.”

  “You were spoken up for,” the Indian told her. “You were spoken up for in advance. You’re a pain in the ass, Lucy Gabriel. But you’re still one of us, and some of us figure we still owe you. Just don’t count on that forever.”

  She sat quietly while being jostled around in the back of the van. Road bumps shook her. “I’m not going home, am I?” she asked after a lull in the conversation.

  The driver shrugged. “Need-to-tell-you basis,” he said.

  10

  THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

  The same day, Monday morning, February 14, 1999

  Contrary to his own expectations, Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars fell asleep after he’d taken the trouble to lie down a little after four in the morning. By six he was up again, chased awake by Sandra’s alarm. She had horses to feed and for safety’s sake wanted to shovel the stable doors clear, front and rear, pending the arrival of their snow-removal man. A barnfire wouldn’t wait for the exits to be clear first. Catching her husband forcing himself out of bed, she reproved him gently.

  “Stay put, Emile. I can handle things. You’re absolutely not working today.”

  “Who says?” He seemed genuinely disoriented. “Since when?”

  “Me says. Since last night. Emile, rest!”

  At four, he had crawled under the covers, craving sleep and hoping his adrenaline would wind down. That he had slept soundly since then, dreamlessly, seemingly without twitching a muscle, amazed him now.

  “Not a good night,” he conceded.

  “So you said.” As she recalled the reason for his nocturnal expedition, her voice quieted. She conjured again the fright of the woman on the phone, the bullet’s pop, the sudden, surprised gasp at the other end of the line, and her own heartfelt terror. “You never found the girl?”

  Cinq-Mars nodded with solemn emphasis. “She’s missing. Could be she’s all right—that’s feasible. In any case, we didn’t find a body.”

  Wearing a silky, sky-blue nightdress, Sandra was standing in the bedroom with a brush in one hand, hair tumbling down the left side of her face. Next to the snow-blasted window, her farm clothes had been carefully laid out across an oak chair, in case she had had to dress in the dark without disturbing Emile. Denim coveralls, a cotton undershirt, a man’s heavy plaid shirt, a mauve woollen sweater, thick grey socks, but also a low-cut bra and high-cut panties. Decked out to shovel manure she preferred feminine underthings, and she moved so gracefully from one environment, and one fashion statement, to another, that Cinq-Mars never failed to marvel.

  With violent strokes, Sandra commenced brushing her hair.

  He waited.

  “Emile, are we under attack?” Holding her hands high thrust her breasts upward against a lacy fringe, the tops visible to him.

  “We don’t know for sure. Let’s take precautions, okay?”

  “Meaning what? Do I go back to carrying weapons around the house? Do we hire Wells Fargo to take my dry cleaning into town?”

  Cinq-Mars had envisioned a more drastic plan. “Sandra—” His voice caught in his throat.

  She moved across to sit on the bed beside her brooding, naked husband. “Emile, as your other partner might say, run it down for me.”

  He still didn’t speak, but took her right hand in both of his.

  To Sandra, the solemnity of his mood struck her as being carefully deployed. She couldn’t stand it, and gently slipped a hand down his thigh and indelicately squeezed his testicles. He bent double, laughed, hugged her, kissed her temple.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she whispered.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Happy Valentine’s to you. Sweetheart,” Cinq-Mars suggested, “we can farm out the horses. You can return to New Hampshire for a while, spend time with your cousins and your old pals.”

  “Oh, like that’s an option. No, Emile. No. As you say in French, point final.”

  Cinq-Mars nodded, getting the message. “All right then. This next part is not negotiable. I want you under guard. Until we find out who was behind last night’s assault, officers will be posted around the property. Most of the time you won’t notice them. Take a bodyguard to town, whenever you go. If you need to pick
up the dry cleaning, send a cop to do it.”

  This time, she took one of his hands in both of hers. “How bad is it, Émile?”

  He lowered his head, his shoulders already slumped. “I’m in the dark. I honestly don’t know what’s going on.”

  After the trauma of the previous night, Sandra was not inclined to argue. She took a deep breath and consented to the loss of privacy. She nodded. “Emile, do we get through this?” Her eyes searched his for at least a measure of the truth.

  They kissed gently, as though to give one another courage. Sandra lifted her nightdress over her head and was about to return to the bathroom when Cinq-Mars stood up behind her and pulled her against him. He nuzzled her soft brown hair. He whispered that it might not be wise to step beyond the bedroom door without first putting something on.

  “How come?”

  “Bill slept over. He’s on the couch downstairs.”

  “Emile! Good job you told me! I might’ve gone down there!”

  “So? I’m tempted to show you off.”

  “Beast!” She was wriggling out of his grasp. He loved her youth at times like this, the slipperiness of her skin and the lithe wonder of her. Seventeen years his junior, she’d always be young to him.

  Tickling him, Sandra fended her husband off, laughing. To allow their worries to slide for a moment felt good, restorative, optimistic. She threw on a lavender silk housecoat while Cinq-Mars stretched and yawned and pulled on a ratty old maroon one. When he stepped out to the hall, Sandra was standing by the front window at the head of the stairs wearing a quizzical expression on her face. The sun had not yet risen. She was looking down on their front yard illuminated by the exterior lamps of the front porch and barn. She saw only Mathers’s car there.

  “Emile?”

  “What?” he grunted.

  “Where’s the Pathfinder?”

  Standing in the doorway, he explained, “The ambulance got stuck in a snowdrift so I let the medics use the Pathfinder.” The night had gone from bad to increasingly worse. For a while he’d thought he’d never make it home.

  “What ambulance?” she asked. “Who needed an ambulance?”

  “The snowplough driver. Long story. I’ll tell you over breakfast. Wake up that lazy, good-for-nothing detective downstairs, will you? Tell him to milk the cows or something.”

  “Emile, we don’t have cows.”

  “Does he know that? Wake him. Tell him. Put the fear of God into him, where it belongs.” Cinq-Mars leaned over the banister and shouted downstairs. “Bill! Wake up! The cows need milking! Bill! The cows!”

  Smiling, Sandra went on down the stairs. Cinq-Mars heard his partner ask her, “What’s he bellowing about?”

  “The cows, Bill,” she said. “Emile thinks you should milk them.” Knowing that she could not keep a straight face for long she skipped through to the kitchen to start the coffeemaker.

  “Cows?” Bill Mathers was asking.

  Cinq-Mars rustled up breakfast, adding hash browns and rye toast to four eggs and five strips of bacon apiece. Mathers eyed his feast as though gazing upon an ethnic cuisine unfamiliar to him. “Is this what country living does to you?”

  “No appetite?”

  “My limit is two eggs a week.”

  “Hold on!” Cinq-Mars boomed in his rowdiest early-morning voice. “Are you telling me that you’re already conscious of your cholesterol level and you’re only thirty-five years old?”

  “Emile, the idea isn’t to get interested after it’s too late. But that’s not the point. I can’t eat so much. I’ll bust a gasket.”

  “Did you sleep last night?” trumpeted Cinq-Mars.

  “No more than you.”

  “It’s one or the other. Eat or sleep. No sleep? Then eat, it’s the only remedy. We’ve got a day ahead of us, me and you.”

  Obediently, Mathers dug in, and to his surprise managed to clean his plate. “Must be the country air,” he concluded.

  “For me, it’s getting shot at,” Cinq-Mars countered. “That’ll do it. Adds to my caloric intake like nobody’s business. I’ll gain ten pounds. Don’t be surprised if I polish off a tub of ice cream before lunch.”

  They said goodbye to Sandra as she was returning from the barn, and in the wind Cinq-Mars kissed her. He could feel the tension on her lips. He watched as she gave Mathers a hug also and warned him to take care. “Look out for each other,” she whispered, squeezing his elbow.

  ‘“We will. Try not to worry,” Mathers said.

  The two men remained quiet as they drove down Highway 40 with Mathers behind the wheel. Snow-ploughs had done an admirable job but the wind kept the conditions treacherous. Although he nodded off a few times, Cinq-Mars was sufficiently on the ball to direct Mathers to take the cutoff to Vaudreuil-Dorion.

  “We’re not going fishing,” Mathers stipulated.

  “Head for that tall building, Bill. BioLogika.”

  When they pulled up at the gate and flashed their badges, they found their authority unchallenged. The guard merely required that they register and declare whom they’d come to see. With the guard sitting up high in his glass booth, Cinq-Mars, on the passenger side, had to duck low and talk across his partner’s lap. “What’s the name of your president?”

  “Mr. Honigwachs, sir. Werner Honigwachs.”

  “Write it down,” he instructed Mathers.

  “In case you forget?” His partner’s incapacity to absorb names that were not French never failed to amuse Mathers, as did his irritation on the subject.

  “Is he in?” Cinq-Mars snapped at the guard.

  “His car went through twenty minutes ago, sir. You here about Andy?”

  Carrying weight compatible with his years, which must have been about sixty, the guard possessed an extravagant white moustache wound to waxed points and a broad, reddened forehead. They were speaking French, but he had the rugged look of a Scottish high-lander, which might easily have been part of his heritage. The cross-fertilization of Scottish, British and Irish soldiers with farmer’s daughters centuries earlier had influenced the lineage of many French in Canada. “You knew Mr. Stettler?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why of course?” Cinq-Mars countered. “This is a big company.”

  “He’s my boss.”

  “How was he your boss?”

  “What do you mean? Andy’s in charge of security. Ah—was in charge, I should say.”

  Cinq-Mars sat up straight then, mumbling something to himself that nobody caught. He asked Mathers, “Did you get the spelling on that name?”

  While it was being verified, Cinq-Mars surveyed the grounds. The twelve-story building appeared immense, being the only structure of more than two stories for miles around. Its black glass, grey concrete, and monolithic posture made it appear aggressively imposing. The stance of the building was reinforced by the chain-link fence, crowned with barbed wire, that defined the acres of property. Maples and a few evergreens had been planted close to the buildings and drives, but the vast expanse of the perimeter had been cleared of trees. No one could leave or enter the premises without either breaking through the fence and crossing the open exposure, or announcing himself at the front gate.

  Outbuildings—one a low sprawl that covered about five acres—had been constructed next to the tower and were identified, in large block letters, as labs. The fence, the moat of open property, the guards at the gate and doors, video cameras positioned like gargoyles to ward off whatever version of evil spirits the modern age spewed forth—all this indicated that security was an issue at BioLogika. Especially so, Cinq-Mars imagined, now that the Head of Security had been murdered.

  They drove around to the back of the building and Mathers parked in the massive lot there, which was only spotted with a few other vehicles. “You got a plan?”

  Cinq-Mars remained mute a moment and rubbed his freshly shaven chin. In the end he chose to state only the obvious. “I’m so tired. I’m wiped.”

  “Me too, partner.”
>
  “Do you know what happens when I get tired?” the senior officer demanded. He slouched down in the car seat as though intending to snatch an impromptu nap. “I grow irritable.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “It’s hard to believe, I know, but I grow irritable. I become crabby.” Cinq-Mars folded his hands across his stomach and burped. “Excuse me. I ate too much. That’s what happens when I get crabby and irritable, I eat too much. This is wrong, Bill. The bad guys should not be out hunting cops. The bad guys should be the ones in hiding, not me and my wife.”

  “Can’t say I’ve noticed any difference to your irritable nature, Emile. You seem like your usual self to me.”

  “Very funny. You won’t be laughing as time goes by. This is wrong, Bill, that’s what I’m saying. We should not be the ones running and hiding. I’m taking offence. I’m way down the road to being royally ticked off.”

  “I’m with you there, partner.”

  Cinq-Mars sprang the door latch but still didn’t move. He yawned, and the great gape of his mouth remained open awhile. Mathers noticed how truly worn down he was. He had to remind himself that his friend had at least twenty years on him, and what was tough enough for him was certainly more wearing on Emile. The older man conducted himself with an erect bearing, a sense of eminence, which gave the impression that he was immune to fatigue or boredom. Mathers reminded himself that that could not always be true.

  “I’ll take on the president,” Cinq-Mars announced. “What’s his name again? Hog-walks?—works? Hoggin-works?”

  “It’s easy. Honigwachs. Here’s the spelling.” Mathers tore off a page from his notebook for him. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Locate Andrew Stettler’s office. Look through his desk. Check out his staff. Learn what’s there to be learned. Snoop your ass off, but keep in mind that we have no right to be here. The next time we come back we probably won’t be admitted, so this could be our only chance. At some point, go where you should not go. Find out what level of security responds. I’d be interested in that. Generally, make a pest of yourself.”