Mild consternation arises when a motor disrupts the peace of the meadow and forest, blotting out the symphony of an easy breeze through the leaves and the ocean’s wash a great drop below them. Émile Cinq-Mars gazes across the bay, as if a fishing vessel has floated into the sky. He’s been fooled by an ATV, its muffled roar echoing off a string of trees along the shoreline, and seeing it bound over a hillock he responds with a moment’s elation. His wife’s abductors are either unbelievably stupid to have returned or so filled with remorse that they feel compelled to surrender.
No such luck, he notices seconds later.
“I called him,” Louwagie explains. “He can take you out.”
The vehicle is driven by his constable, Réjean Methot, and while Émile’s fantasy is dashed, he’s delighted to see the second Mountie. He can use the ride out, and make good use of the time saved.
He grouses, “Ah, you couldn’t’ve called him sooner? Spared me a heart attack running in here?”
Louwagie finds his complaint amusing.
“What?” Cinq-Mars barks back.
“Émile, I did call sooner. Back in Dark Harbour. This is how long it takes to fetch the machine, get organized and out here ASAP. Or would you prefer we’d left your wife dangling over the edge until now?”
Cinq-Mars concedes a grin. Once again, the Mountie has shown capability under pressure. He gathers that they’ve both been afflicted with a kind of giddiness after Sandra’s rescue, and Louwagie, having found a person tied up and eviscerated in recent days, is relieved down to his toes to have located the next victim high, dry, and alive, albeit tied up and emotionally distraught. Sandra, he notes, is coping well. Better than he is. As if, as she implied, she’s experienced this sort of thing before.
The ATV is a two-seater. Sandra can settle onto Émile’s lap, and Louwagie is content to walk out. The retired detective nixes that arrangement.
“Wade, can’t you drive this thing instead?”
He can, but that doesn’t seem fair to his officer, to make him walk out.
“Obviously, Réjean can give us a lift,” Émile explains, “but I need you to drive me around after we drop Sandra off. Not just because I don’t have a car.”
“Why,” Sandra asks, “don’t you have a car?”
As shaky as her condition may be, his wife doesn’t miss a beat. Nor can she be she fooled easily. She catches a glance between Louwagie and Roadcap and knows that something’s up. Yet how much grief can she bear? To let her know that their car has been incinerated, that the two of them have been attacked not once, but twice—and before noon, Émile wants to say, although there’s no logic to the thought—is more than he’s willing to get into at the moment.
“Later on that one. Let’s just say that the roads on this island can be risky.”
“Oh, Émile.” Better to have her annoyed with him for reckless driving than frightened more deeply by the truth. At that moment he has a sudden notion—he appreciates the range and capabilities of his unknown adversary. He and Sandra have been simultaneously attacked on two fronts, which took planning and manpower, expertise and coordination. Daring, too, although his gut feeling tells him that since neither attack was necessary, except to bolster his resolve, they were instigated by fear and possibly panic. Who, then, has he managed to scare?
As well, these provocations were ordered. Given that they took place at the same time, different people were involved in each incident, so the actions were either independent of one another—highly coincidental, therefore unlikely—or one and probably both required people to follow instructions. Both events were meant to threaten, unlike Lescavage’s murder, where there had been no known threat, only the execution. Émile is familiar with a modus operandi from his days dealing with violent biker gangs. Those gangs never—never—made threats, at least not any they meant to carry out. If and when they killed someone, they did so without the victim being alerted ahead of time. If they did issue a threat, that meant they had no intention of carrying it out. If these people operate in similar fashion, and he suspects they do, then he and Sandra are probably safe, for the perpetrators did nothing with their opportunity to inflict serious harm. All this tells him that whoever organized the day’s threats controls underlings—someone has a gang—but that individual is neither foolish enough nor powerful enough to have ordered them killed. Nor were the underlings willing to do more than threaten—in the greater scheme of things, a car fire and strapping someone to a tree, with one of the most impressive views on earth, caused no one bodily harm. And the events were in keeping with island tradition. Here, rough boys might be cajoled into doing such things as long as a line was not being crossed. Sandra had fallen, initially, getting cut in the scuffle, but she was never punched or bruised. Émile gleans from this that when a murder needed to be committed, at least in the killer’s mind, the perpetrator operated alone, without help, unable to order anyone to either carry out or aid and abet so ruthless a crime. He considers that today’s troublemakers may not have connected their actions to the murders. They might even have been hoodwinked into thinking that something else was at stake.
Having hunted professional killers and organized gangs all his life, Émile Cinq-Mars can detect when he is dealing with amateurs. Not that amateurs, he reminds himself, aren’t equally as dangerous and lethal. With their spotless records and obscure motivations, at times they can be more difficult to root out.
“As I was saying, Corporal, I need you with me. I may require the loan of your authority. Remember what I asked you for? About following the money, the will? Ask Réjean to look into that when he gets back to town. I need you with me.”
“You think it’s that important right now, the will?”
Sometimes, in the greater scheme of things, go by hunch, and sometimes go by the numbers. Following the money will fulfill both obligations, as it is both by the book and a wholesale hunch. Still, Louwagie’s question stands as a good one, for which Émile doesn’t have an equally good answer. “Who knows? I want to find out if Orrock anticipated anything. He controlled so much. Did he control his succession? If so, how? I’m grasping at straws here, but somebody is turning the wheels in this scenario and somebody else is greasing them. If there’s something about power and money to be found out, I need to find that out. Better quickly than too late.”
“Sure thing, Émile. I don’t mind driving this thing. Hang on. It’ll be bumpy.”
“Try bumpy,” Sandra pipes up, “when you’re tied up and gagged with a hood over your head. That’s how I got here. Now that is bumpy.”
The others must walk. They do so knowing that the western sky is threatening, that they might only just make it, or get soaked, before leaving the ridge. One man, though, Aaron Roadcap, lags behind, as though he doesn’t fear, and possibly might welcome, the storm. As if it means nothing to him to be out on a cliff in weather or to be struck by lightning.
* * *
His wife in his arms and on his lap, Émile hangs on for the wild ride. He loves the intimacy of the moment, her cheek upon his shoulder, her mouth by his neck, the weight of her jostling on his thighs. Safe for now, they speed away, bouncing under the sun. He finds her soft, involuntary grunts when they hit the bigger bumps hilarious. He’d love to kiss her and for their lips to linger awhile, except that the act would either be hilarious also or knock out their front teeth.
They might even swallow their tongues.
While Louwagie may have claimed the ability to drive the ATV, he’s showing no particular expertise, and seems adept at finding every rock and hole embedded along the route. He slows down, in Cinq-Mars’s opinion, when he should be gunning it, and speeds up when it’s time to take care. The officer seems to know that he’s flubbing this performance, but insecurity breeds self-consciousness, which breeds a whole new generation of tactical errors. Yet they survive, and make it off the ridge in one piece, though admittedly with loosened joints.
They pile into Louwagie’s cruiser. Émile and Sandra sit in the back together behind the protective mesh, not wanting to let go of the other’s hand for an instant.
“Maddy Orrock’s house,” Émile instructs the officer, only to have Sandra nix that idea immediately.
“I want out of these clothes. I’d burn this blouse if I didn’t like it so much. I also want a shower, for obvious reasons.” When her husband gives her a look, she tacks on, “Émile, he put his hands inside my bra. That’s all he did, but Jesus Me. Apparently, he had a job to do—he couldn’t have restrained himself? I want this fucker caught.”
She so rarely swears.
“Get used to it,” she says, and Émile takes her meaning.
“All right,” Cinq-Mars instructs the Mountie, “our cottage first. Let Sandra shower and change, then up to Maddy’s.” He’d rather get to work, but he isn’t going to deny her anything for a while, and maybe not ever again.
After calling Maddy Orrock to update their arrival, he rings Sandra’s mobile phone, not for the first time since her abduction. On the first occasion, her abductor answered and told him to find her on Seven Days Work. On the second attempt, the phone just rang. The phone was reported off-line on the third call, and he receives that notice again. “Sorry,” he tells her now. “If your phone shows up again, it’ll be because it landed in a lobster pot.”
“You think they tossed it. If it’s in the sea, I’m hoping it went down with a boat and those fuckers were on it.”
Language, Cinq-Mars is thinking, but he has to let this phase play out.
Louwagie waits in the car as the couple enters the cottage, and Émile stays downstairs while Sandra goes up. He’s pretty sure that the spot of blood on the floor is hers, but he knows better than to tamper with evidence. A few minutes later, though, when he’s stepping around the spot, he gets annoyed, and in a fit of pique, he finds a cloth and wipes it clean. Nobody’s bringing out a forensic team to test a blood spot that’s probably from his wife’s forehead anyway, so what difference does it make? He stands in the room then, listening to the shower upstairs and to an echo of the tumult that occurred here earlier, this violence against his wife that really was directed against him.
And gauges a violence of his own, latent in his bloodstream.
The terror she must have felt. He’s suffering a kind of emotional whiplash, fiercely angry now, and all that tempers his rage is his own contrition for bringing it upon her. He knows he should keep her safer. Since his retirement, it seems that she’s been exposed to more risk than ever.
Waiting, Émile wanders out to the porch, where he finds notes on the table that Sandra inscribed in doing exercises in numerology. He’s not terribly interested, but with his work in limbo for the moment he tries to figure out what she’s been up to. Without having her references, her calculations resemble secret code, and he tries to break it without cheating, without checking her book. He idly passes the time this way when suddenly, straightening at first, then bending his shoulders over the pages, his interest clearly piques. Sandra finds him in that posture, hunched and concentrating. She’s dressed in a yellow print dress, looking pretty, still fluffing her hair with a towel.
“How did you find these birth dates?” he wants to know.
“The Reverend Unger. He’s a doll. I mean that literally, by the way. I think he’s a porcelain doll.”
“Everybody’s names. Middle names, too.” He’s impressed.
“You need the full name for numerology. The minister showed me how to check birth and town records for local people online. But Maddy already knew a lot of them, the names anyway, and she helped, too. Why?”
“It’s curious.”
“Why? Don’t tell me you’re interested in numerology. That, I won’t believe.”
“I believe in local knowledge. This is local knowledge.”
“How so?”
Rather than answer, he smiles. “Let’s get you up to Maddy’s. I’ve got to track some people down.”
She’s willing to go right away, but first she has a question. “Émile? When this started, remember? You said you knew who did it. Or thought you did. How’s that panning out? Were you right back then? Or not?”
His reaction, and the scratch he gives his protuberant nose, strikes her as more humble than his usual investigative cockiness. He’s willing to take himself down a peg, although only a single peg. “I said then that local knowledge is key. It still is. As far as naming names goes, I have to keep an open mind. If I believe too much in my first instinct, I might miss something, or condemn the wrong person, or miss the best path. I might prove myself right, or trip up and be wrong, but as I said, I have to keep an open mind.”
“Could be that our lives are at stake. Certainly our Jeep’s life is. So get on it, boy. Stop all this pussyfooting around.”
As if he’s the one who just took time off for a shower and a change of clothes.
* * *
They wait at the roadside in Louwagie’s cruiser while Sandra goes up the long walk, and only when Maddy answers and sends out a cheerful wave does Émile give the nod to get moving.
Going down the eastern seaboard of the island to Woodwards Cove, he and Louwagie have no view of the western sky, the height of the island blocking it off. For all intents and purposes, this is a fine sunny day. They know better, and expect rain, but Émile, in the shotgun seat, not having to drive, can appreciate the seascapes, the picturesque coves, and the rocky shore as they travel on. Then they’re off the main highway and heading down a gravel road to Pete Briscoe’s house.
He’s home.
Warily, he greets them through the screen door.
“Can we come in, Pete?” Louwagie inquires.
“That’s okay. The place is a mess. I’ll come out.”
He’s putting on a shirt as he does so.
“What’s going on?” Briscoe asks. The door clicks shut behind him.
“Just getting up?” Cinq-Mars probes.
“Changing my shirt. Hot day. I got sweaty is all. How’re you guys doing?”
“Top-notch,” Louwagie tells him. “You?”
“It’s all good,” Briscoe says. Once his buttons are done, he tucks the hem into his jeans. “So what’s going on?” he presses them again.
“If you don’t mind, I want you to show me your dead dog’s grave site,” Cinq-Mars replies.
“I mind.” Briscoe understands now that this is not a particularly friendly visit. “Why?” he asks.
“That’s really not your concern, Pete,” Louwagie informs him. “Detective Cinq-Mars has his reasons and that’s all that’s necessary here.”
“That makes no sense to me,” he argues. “You’re supposed to be the law here, Wade. You’re the Mountie. He’s what? Retired? A mainlander.”
“I’m also a mainlander, Pete. Mr. Cinq-Mars is helping me on the case,” the Mountie explains, but Cinq-Mars is done with being delayed.
“Where’s your dead dog buried?”
“What’s it to you? Seriously, it’s a private place. I’m not going to take you there. Maybe I can’t even find it. In the woods. You know.”
“I don’t know,” Cinq-Mars attests.
“You saw.”
“I didn’t see. I saw you. I didn’t see your dog. What’s her name again?”
“What do you care really? It’s Gadget. What do you care?”
“We’re the ones who get to ask the questions, Pete,” Louwagie explains again.
Cinq-Mars supposes that Louwagie is being the caring and attentive cop, if not entirely the good cop. He can work with that.
“You get to answer,” Cinq-Mars warns Briscoe. “If you don’t, we drag you in and make you.”
“Make me what?”
“Stop wasting my time. You’re in deep enough without wasting my time. That only makes things worse. You haven’t guessed that?”
“You come here, ask me where my dead dog’s buried, and you’re saying I’m wasting your time. You sure you got that straight?”
Logically speaking, he has a point. Émile isn’t going to concede anything today. “Where, Mr. Briscoe, do we find your dead dog? This is the last time I’m asking politely. Next time will be at the station where I speak to you privately.”
Briscoe’s defiant. “I can take you.”
“Does that count for something? This isn’t a wrestling match. You can dump that little fantasy in the trash for now. So, do we go down to the station?”
Louwagie helps out by extracting a pair of handcuffs from his belt. Briscoe can’t believe this shift in his fortunes and fidgets on the porch.
“Okay. Look. It’s nearby, all right? Between the house and the water. What’s the big deal? It’s above the tide line. It’s legal that way. It’s just not my property, see. That’s why I’m reluctant to tell you. It’s not my property.”
Cinq-Mars looks over the lay of the land. He already has Briscoe dead to rights on several counts. “Then why,” he asks him, “did you put Gadget on the front seat of your pickup? As if you were going to cart her some distance? You can’t drive toward the water from here. Putting her in the truck didn’t help you.”
“I changed my mind is all. I planned to bury her someplace else.”
“Why did you change your mind?”
“I just did,” Briscoe maintains.
“Where’s your shovel?” Cinq-Mars asks next. A new tack. Always keep the man you’re interviewing off guard. Not only will he not know where you’re coming from, he’ll soon be disoriented and confused as to which questions are important and which are, in the vernacular of the sea, red herrings.
“What do you mean by that? What shovel?”
“Haul him down to the station,” Cinq-Mars tells Louwagie. “Save us time and trouble.”
“What do you mean?” Briscoe protests. “What shovel? I don’t have a shovel.”
“You buried your dog with your bare hands?”
“No, I—”
“What? I saw you up on Seven Days Work with a shovel!”
“I borrowed it. All right? I borrowed a spade, if that’s what you mean. It wasn’t my shovel.”
“Who from?” Louwagie asks, exercising a patient voice as counterpoint to Émile’s aggression. “Where is it now?”
“What do you care? It’s only a, you know, a spade, a shovel. I’m not being a hard-ass, but seriously, what do you care?”
“Ask one more question,” Cinq-Mars warns him, “one more, and we haul you in. You won’t enjoy it. I will. You won’t.”
If Briscoe is a legitimate tough guy, his threat is meaningless, even laughable. The tough guy would already have won this contest of wills. Cinq-Mars doesn’t believe that Briscoe is the tough guy he pretends to be, and he’s sure the man has virtually no clue what he might be in for. Which gives him a huge advantage.
“Where’s the spade you had up on Seven Days Work? Who’d you borrow it from? Where is it now? We want to know,” Louwagie stipulates, less patiently now.
A long, low rumble is heard from beyond the nearest hills, and a darkening of the sky comes into view on this protected lowland.
Pete Briscoe’s eyes skip back and forth between the two men, as though he’s trying to choose his safer fight. “I returned it,” he admits.
“To whom?” Louwagie presses him with mock sarcasm.
Briscoe hesitates.
“Pete,” Cinq-Mars adds, “word to the wise. If you’re arrested, I’ll interrogate you night and day. My wife was abducted a few hours ago. She’s safe now, thank God, but I’m after anyone and everyone who had anything to do with that. You want to exonerate yourself if you can. I’m pissed now. You don’t want to go toe-to-toe with me while you’re handcuffed to a steel bed for hour after hour. Or do you? Do you?”
“I don’t know anything about that! I had nothing to do with that! I don’t know about your wife. I didn’t do nothing!”
“Sure you did. You said so yourself. You borrowed a long-handled spade. I saw you digging with it.”
“I’m allowed to borrow a spade. Holy mackerel! This guy makes no sense!”
“You know what?” Cinq-Mars asks. Then warns him again, “Don’t answer with another question.”
Briscoe doesn’t know how to respond and so keeps mum.
“I know what you were digging up on Seven Days Work.”
He sighs, as though this talk is torture. “Of course you know. I was trying to bury my dog.”
“That’s a lie and a half. That’s a whopper. I’ll remember it when we’re together in our interrogation cell and you’re strapped to the steel bed. I’ll remember how you just lied to me for no good reason. I might go into that room with a hammer.”
“Pete,” Louwagie reminds him, “you just told us you buried Gadget nearby.”
“Oh yeah,” Briscoe says. “What was I doing, if you think you know?”
“That’s a question,” Cinq-Mars points out to him.
The fisherman goes silent then, and Cinq-Mars stands more closely in front of him, staring down his lengthy beak at the much shorter man.
“You weren’t burying a damn thing. Certainly not your dog. You were retrieving that long-handled spade from the murder site. That was your job for the day. Admit it. Don’t tell me another lie. You took the shovel away from the scene of the crime, where it was up by the forest, and so the cops never saw it. You carried it away and took it to another location. What were you doing with it? Don’t answer, because that might come out as another question and you’ll be sorry then. You were wiping the blood off it, Pete. Wiping the blood off.”
The pupils of Briscoe’s eyes have grown huge, but Louwagie is also perplexed, and intrigued. He’s evaluating the fisherman under different light. He assessed him as a possible material witness, not someone who committed a serious crime. Now he’s not sure. He doesn’t know where Cinq-Mars is going with this, but he can tell that Briscoe is busting to elude him.
“Pete,” Émile goes on, “you were tampering—this is a serious crime by itself—you were tampering with the evidence. You wanted to get the blood off. After I went by and we saw each other and you came running to me with some cockamamie tale about burying your dog a whole day late, after that you did more than just wipe the spade through the grass to get the blood and the tissue scrapings off. You started digging to make it look good. Because I saw you there. That’s the only explanation for what you were doing up there. So—and be careful now, because I’m about to ask you a question and I don’t want another question in return, and trust me, you don’t want that, either—where is the shovel now, Pete? Who did you return it to? Who did you borrow it from? Don’t take your time with this. For your sake, because you’re already in serious trouble for tampering with the evidence, just answer the questions.”
As straightforward as the path has been laid out for him, Briscoe still doesn’t know how to take the first step. Instead, he tries to get around Émile.
“I had nothing to do with any murder. You can’t think that. That’s crazy.”
“Except to tamper with evidence.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Okay. Maybe that. But I didn’t know I was doing that.”
Cinq-Mars backs off a moment. He goes over to the porch railing as another, yet still distant, thunderclap rolls across the sea.
“I’m a big-city cop,” Émile says to him, looking out toward the water now with Briscoe at his back. “You’ve heard the stories about me, I’m sure.” He looks back over his shoulder to see if he’ll respond, and Briscoe does nod yes. Émile turns, intertwines his arms over his chest, and leans his butt against the railing. He decides to make use of his exaggerated reputation. “Do you think I cracked the Mafia apart in my home city and took down the Hells Angels by being Mr. Nice Guy? Tell him, Officer. He listens to you. If he comes down to the station, you won’t interfere with what I do.”
“I’m not interfering,” Louwagie says. “Sorry, Pete, but this is serious business, murder is. Things aren’t normal anymore.”
Cinq-Mars likes this, the conviction in his voice, the logical explanation to deter Briscoe from assuming that the old guy is mere talk, no action.
“You won’t protect him,” Émile states.
“I’ll go home, sir. Leave you two alone.”
That’s when Pete Briscoe confesses although he might not know it. “I borrowed it from my girlfriend. Okay? The spade.”
Cinq-Mars stares him down. Briscoe’s a challenge, as his near unibrow somehow gives him a place to hide his eyes by tilting his forehead down a few degrees, as if his mind and his reactions are hiding in the bushes. Yet Émile has much confidence, gained from long practice, in the ferocity of his gaze, and when the man’s eyes do quick little shifts, from holding his look to measuring the mountain that is his nose, and then feeling self-conscious about that, tries to regain a hold on his eyes again after it’s too late, the former cop has him right where he wants him.
“Never make me wait this long again for an answer. Understood?”
Briscoe appears to accept this altered structure to his universe, and nods.
Cinq-Mars asks, “Where were you the night Orrock was killed?” Keeping him off guard again, going on to a different subject altogether.
“Killed?”
Cinq-Mars scarcely moves, but ever so slightly his pupils expand.
“Sorry, that’s not a question. I thought he died is all. Old age.”
“Killed,” the older man confirms. “I told you that already. This is not news.”
“I just forgot.”
“Who can forget that? Selective memory? Now answer my question.”
“I was out fishing.”
“Not possible,” Cinq-Mars states.
“Sure it is,” Briscoe protests. His voice is weak and his eyes scurry around.
“You’re not a real fisherman.”
Cinq-Mars can tell that the man is trying to ask a question but has to warn himself not to do so. “Sure I am,” Briscoe says at last, but he clearly has his doubts.
“You’re a fish farmer. That’s different.”
“Yeah, it’s different. There’s more money in it. A better life, too.”
“I understand,” Émile says, and there’s genuine sympathy to be gleaned from his tone. He knows that old ways sometimes change and people adapt. “What it means, though, is that you weren’t fishing that night. Because you don’t fish, do you, Mr. Briscoe? You don’t fish, and I know exactly, very precisely, where your boat was moored. Under the Orrock mansion.” Pete Briscoe so much wants to ask a question that Émile takes pity on him and answers it himself. “You left your AIS on. That’s how I know. I’ll give you credit. You didn’t want anyone to crash into you. Where you were moored, that was possible, even probable, if anyone was making harbor that night. So at least you exercised good seamanship, I’m giving you credit for that. You weren’t out fishing and you weren’t out at the fish farms. You were moored where you had no business being moored, and you weren’t on your boat, because why would you moor there if you wanted to stay on your boat? You’d have gone into the harbor. On to a safer place. The question is—and remember, I don’t want you wasting my time, so answer right away—where were you, Pete?”
Pete has begun to cooperate, and Émile needs to keep bringing him along, to help him feel more at ease divulging secrets. Once he says something to implicate himself or others, there will be no turning back. The whole shebang will come out. Louwagie at that moment moves over to an Adirondack chair on the porch and sits down, and both Cinq-Mars and Briscoe observe him do so. They’d both like to be that comfortable, that free. Louwagie looks up, waiting to see how this plays out.
“Here,” the young fish farmer answers.
“Who with?” Cinq-Mars fires back.
“Ora. We had a date. We arranged it, see.”
“Where was your dog all this time?”
This part hurts him. “I took Gadget in the dinghy. In the waves, in the storm, she put her paws up on the gunwales at the wrong time. She might’ve been able to stay in the boat, but she loved the water, and when she lost her balance, she kind of leaped. She half jumped, half fell into the waves. After that, I stayed out there looking for her.”
“Looking,” Cinq-Mars says.
“She was black, and there was no light in that storm. I saw her for like ten seconds then lost track. The waves moving me around, moved her around. We separated really quickly. I stayed out there looking for her, but I never saw her again until you showed up in your Jeep.”
Cinq-Mars crosses his arms, removes the fury of his gaze from Briscoe to give him some breathing room and enough latitude to fall overboard himself. “Why risk it, Pete? Coming ashore. Why bother anchoring your boat?”
At first, he shrugs. He doesn’t want to say. Then admits, “For sex. What else? Been a while. I was horny as—Ora was always with Orrock on account of he was sick all the time. She never got away. When she did, I was usually out at the fish farms. It was building up, you know? So we made a date. Then that damn storm blew up. That wasn’t going to stop me, was it? Ora wasn’t going to be stopped, either.”
“Why anchor off? Enter the harbor.”
He doesn’t want to say. Then relents. “I get paid by the hour. For the fish farm. If I get caught out in a storm, I get paid for that. If I’m seen in the harbor, no pay.”
“You quit trying to save your dog and came here instead, just to get laid.”
“No! It wasn’t like that. I came ashore. I was hoping Gadget would swim ashore. Or, if she was out there trying to get to me and the dinghy, and she could see me, then she’d follow me and come ashore. After I landed, I walked up and down the water’s edge looking for her. I don’t know for how long. For a long time.”
“Yeah, but Pete, you were on the radio.”
“That was later. I needed people to know I was out there. To get paid.”
“You’ve lied to me again. You told me you were here in your house. Now you say you weren’t here at all. You were all alone on the shore. Walking up and down where not a soul saw you. Not even your dead dog.”
“Yes. Okay? I lied. I told you the truth this time.”
“You didn’t see Ora that night,” he continues, and Briscoe responds with silence. “Why won’t you say so?”
“I’m not supposed to,” he replies, and at that Louwagie and Cinq-Mars share a glance. They’ve got him now. Cinq-Mars has been looking for men in the hire of a boss, and Briscoe has let on that he is one of them.
Very slowly, Cinq-Mars asks, “Pete, you’re not supposed to what?”
Briscoe dips those big eyebrows right down, so that his eyes are totally concealed. When he raises his head again, he chooses to cast his gaze out to sea. “I’m not supposed to say.”
“Where was Ora, Pete? As I’ve warned you, I am willing to take you in. We can go on all day and night like this and play by nobody’s rules except my own. You understand that, right? I’m not a cop. I don’t have to follow the law. I have no boss to keep me in line. Not a soul.”
Involuntarily, Briscoe checks with Louwagie, who makes a gesture with his lips as though to say that he doesn’t get it, either, but whatever the man is saying is how this will play out. Briscoe bites his lip a moment.
“You’re going to tell me anyway, Pete. I know that. Corporal Louwagie knows it. More important, even you know that. Tell me now rather than later, Pete. That’s my best advice. At this stage, you want to be helpful.”
The man seems to accept what he’s being told, but he attempts to lay out the ground rules for his capitulation. “It wasn’t Ora,” he contends.
If that’s what he needs to believe, Cinq-Mars will let him. “Of course not, Pete. Who could ever think such a thing? Where was she? If she’s innocent, and, like you, I presume that she is, the truth won’t hurt her. It’ll only protect her.”
Briscoe takes a deep breath. “She was here. Where she was supposed to be. Waiting for me. Except I let her down. I was looking for Gadget instead.”
“How do you know she was here if you weren’t?”
A simple man’s emphatic shrug. “She told me she was. We talked on our phones. And then, she was still here when I came by in the morning. Only she was asleep.”
“Then you had sex.” Cinq-Mars doesn’t believe that a man who’d just lost his dog would do that, but tests Briscoe anyway.
He’s shaking his head. “Too tired,” he says. Then he looks out to sea again. “Too upset. I forgot about sex. I just forgot.”
Having stepped away from him to give him a sense of space, Cinq-Mars now moves closer to him to choke off whatever his exit plan might be, and asks in a low, commanding voice, “Okay, Pete, tell me, who asked you to fetch the shovel?”
He can almost hear the man ask “What shovel?” Briscoe has learned to swallow that response. Now whenever he’s confused or needs time, rather than ask a question, he opts for silence.
“Who was it, Pete?” Cinq-Mars presses him, no longer permitting any maneuvers. “Who wouldn’t risk going up to Seven Days Work to fetch it herself?”
His eyes go wide when Cinq-Mars infers that it’s a woman, and he insists more vehemently than ever, “It wasn’t Ora.”
“I didn’t think so, Pete. I still don’t think so. But you need to tell me what I already know. Who was it, Pete, who sent you for the shovel?”
Louwagie stands again, and also comes closer. The two men, both much taller than the fisherman, stand firm against his desire to elude them somehow.
“Pete, I’ve seen the photographs of the crime scene, of Reverend Lescavage’s body. He was a nice guy, wasn’t he? Were you a member of his church?”
Briscoe wags his head no.
“You bumped into him from time to time. In the winter, everybody bumps into everybody else, right?”
He nods yes.
“Quite a guy, by all accounts. Terrible what was done to him. Precise parallel incisions, like this.” Cinq-Mars traces two lines over Pete Briscoe’s stomach to form the top of a triangle meeting just under the base of his sternum. “Most likely cut with a sharp knife. A knife anyone who cuts fish would use. Or anyone who cuts dulse for a living would carry with him. Then the bottom of those two lines are connected by another slice of a knife.”
Briscoe nods to indicate that he understands.
“The thing is, Pete, the center portion of that bottom slice, right here”—and Émile shows on the man’s own stomach a slice the length of his hand that cuts below the belly button—“was messy. From a more blunt instrument. Something less sharp. Corporal Louwagie didn’t notice this detail because he’s a sensitive soul, and such an ugly scene, that kind of horror, doesn’t interest him at all.” Briscoe looks at the Mountie as though he’s willing to sympathize. “I, on the other hand, studied the photographs. The middle part of the lower incision wasn’t inflicted by a sharp knife, but by a dull blade, and the shape of it, and the fact that it was rammed into the body several times in the violence of the moment, suggests the business end of a spade. Possibly a long-handled spade. Whoever sent you up to the ridge, Pete, sent you there to retrieve the murder weapon. The person couldn’t find it in the dark on the night in question, couldn’t risk hunting for it later. Whatever sick story you were told—and you’re gullible enough to believe it, aren’t you?—that story was a fib. Tell me who, Pete.”
While his eyes dart between the two men, they also seem to bear inward, and he’s rabbit-like now beneath his furry unibrow, trapped and panicky.
“Name her, Pete. Tell me what I already know. Name her.”
“You keep saying ‘her’. But I keep telling you, it wasn’t Ora. No way.”
“I know that, Pete. So name her. Name who it really was. Remember? You didn’t want to tell me that you didn’t see Ora until the morning. Because, you said, you weren’t supposed to tell me that. Somebody wants you to tell the other story, that you were home with your girl. I know you’re supposed to be Ora’s alibi. Who says she needs one? If you want, if it helps you, it’s the same person anyway, just tell me who coached you on what to say or not say. Who told you to lie? Who sent you for the shovel? Pete?”