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 showed 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.”
“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 arrival, 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.
Then more gunshots, which he heard strike his woodpile and the garage at his back.
He punched the emergency number on his cellphone and quickly went through the drill, not waiting for a response. “X-ray Yankee Zulu. Cinq-Mars. Cinq-Mars. Officer under fire. Officer under fire. Crank it up. Crank it up. Out.”
He heard a snowmobile’s start-up roar then, muffled by the rabid wind, and it seemed to come from the same direction as the gunfire. Had it been four shots, five, six? It seemed to Cinq-Mars that he had actually felt a bullet miss him, then strike the garage, all before the sound of the blast had registered. He told himself that he must have imagined it. He thought to fire the shotgun in the general direction of the roaring, invisible snowmobile but feared that that might panic his wife even more. The last thing he wanted was to find her out in the storm searching for him.
Then a roar, and a faint blur, crossed to the front of his house, and Cinq-Mars moved from his hiding spot. He unfastened the double safety on the shotgun he’d had retrofitted for Sandra’s sake.
Two shells to fire. Two triggers. His one chance to massacre these bastards.
Their escape route was away from his position and, cleverly, on a line passing between the corner of his house and his vehicle. Cinq-Mars had to scamper to the Pathfinder and crouch by the front tire there, listening to the diminishing bedlam of the machine. The snowmobile had been specially rigged to travel with its lights off, which was not normally possible. He still had a shot, but he worried now that his vehicle might have been wired so that the explosion could be triggered by remote control. What if the intruders were out there waiting for a sign that he was standing alongside it, breathing his last breath next to dynamite?
Having nothing more than retreating noise to fire upon, Cinq-Mars cracked the shotgun.
He jogged back around, collected Sally, and beat a full retreat into his home. He locked the doors behind him. Leaving the lights off, he ran upstairs, with the dog at his heels. In the side-room where he had left her, Sandra stood limply in silhouette, the phone in her hand held waist-high.
“Sand?” he queried.
She did not respond.
Cinq-Mars jumped to the window and pulled the curtain across. Only then did he consent to turn on a table lamp.
Before him his wife leaned against the edge of the desk with the phone in her hand. She was looking at him. At first she seemed shocked, dazed, but as her eyes focused, her expression turned to one of terror. “Emile,” she said, as tears sprang up.
“Sand?” He took the phone from her and spoke into it. “Hello? Hello?”
Dead air on the other end, and his wife was shaking her head.
“They killed her,” Sandra said.
“What? Who?”
“Somebody shot her. I was talking to her on the phone. Emile, I heard a pop. Like a shot. This small sound—a gasp—then her body hit the floor. I heard it!”
He moved across to his wife and held her, stooping to bury his face in Sandra’s neck, kissing her gently. Cinq-Mars took a step back. He put the shotgun down on the desk and touched her face with his right hand while the fingers of his left located the digits to press on his cellphone.
“X-ray Yankee Zulu. Cinq-Mars. Turn me over.”
Seconds later he heard, “Cinq-Mars, ETA two minutes. Status.”
“Attack thwarted. Intruders, at least two, fled southwest by snowmobile. My vehicle could be wired with explosive. Haven’t checked in the dark. Officer safe. Repeat, officer safe, intruders repelled.”
“Wait.”
Cinq-Mars hung on while the information was dispatched to the officers speeding toward his home at that moment.
“Roger that.”
“Action—my home phone line is open to an outside number. Party at the other end believed to have been shot. Injured or dead. Find out the address of that location.”
“Roger that.”
“Give me a call-back on my mobile. Over for now.”
The computer would give the officers his phone number, just as it had given them his address. Sandra hung on to his sleeve while he punched another number on his cellular.
“Hello?” The voice was croaky with sleep.
“Bill? Emile. Ready on. We’ve got something. I’ll be back with the details.”
“You all right?”
“Long story. Call you back.” Punching that call off, he promptly sent another. “It’s Emile,” he said, upon receiving a sleepy response. He listened to the other person rouse himself with complaint and vitriol. When it seemed as though the other party was sufficiently awake, he said, “Forget about all that. Just tell me what’s known about an SQ, sergeant named Charles Painchaud.”
Cinq-Mars was informed that not much was known but that the sergeant was considered to be a good man. Something was murky. Not much. Vague rumours about connections. Possibly, his rapid advancement was related to nepotism.
“That’s the worst thing said about him?”
“So far.”
“I need his home phone, ASAP. Call me back on my mobile only.”
While he waited for information to come his way, Cinq-Mars held his wife in his arms. “What else did you hear?” he whispered.
“I couldn’t tell. Odd sounds. Like they were moving furniture.”
“They?”
“No voices, but I heard more than one set of feet. At times, they might’ve been on different sides of the room simultaneously. I heard heavy breathing, grunts, as if men were exerting themselves.”
He reached behind her to pull the curtain open, and behind himself he switched off the table lamp. In the distance, at the edge of his property, Cinq-Mars spotted the flashing blue and red cherries of a squad car. The cruiser’s slow speed suggested that the storm had completely obscured the driveway.
“Take it easy. It’ll be all right,” he tried to assure Sandra.
“She said her name was Lucy. She didn’t give me a last name.”
As much as she endeavoured to stifle her tears and sniffles, not much worked, and in the end Sandra slid down from her husband’s embrace and clasped Sally by the neck. She sat on the floor and squeezed her dog instead. After kissing the top of her head, Emile Cinq-Mars returned downstairs, switching lights on along the way.
Fearing dynamite connected to the ignition, a method of execution favoured by local gangs, the detective was unwilling to start his Pathfinder. The young officer from the St. Lazare Police who’d been first to arrive on the scene volunteered to check it out for him and soon pronounced the car safe.
“How much do you know about bombs?” Cinq-Mars drilled him.
“Not a whole bunch.” A red-haired, freckled, affable man, mildly plump, the officer stood in the mudroom with the outside door open at his back. Snow blew inside. The cold air mixing with the warmth of the house made the breath of the men visible and frosted the windows.
“Is it your particular area of expertise?” Cinq-Mars continued to press him.
“No, sir.”
“They go boom, right? Do you know much more than that?”
The cop was accepting the inquisition with a sense of humour that Cinq-Mars could not quash. “Sir, your car was entered by the side door. Slick entry. Either that or your door was unlocked. Was it?”
“Could be.” Cinq-Mars jutted his chin as if to accept a blow earned by his carelessness.
The officer nodded, gaining confidence. “The snow under the car is undisturbed, sir. On this side, there’s the imprint where you crouched down. On the other side, it’s easy to see where he got in and out by the passenger door. He was hoping you’d step into the car on the driver’s side without noticing his tracks. Either that, or he expected the storm to smooth them over by morning.” His words were underscored by a cockiness he didn’t wish to hide, as though he wanted to impress upon the senior cop that he would not be intimidated by his reputation. “I checked under the door, sir, just to be safe. I checked under the car and around the wheel wells. I checked the motor. I checked the ignition and under the dash. I looked below the seats. Nothing’s been disturbed. The trunk’s clean. There’s no bomb. No loose wires. You must’ve intercepted him before he had the chance to do anything. In the cold, in the dark, he was working slowly. When he ran, it’s a good guess that he took the bomb back with him. If there was a bomb.”
“A bomber, on the run, in the dark, takes his dynamite away with him?”
The cop shrugged. “Valuable stuff. His choice.” He then coughed, and deliberately repeated himself, as though to introduce an alternative theory. “If there was a bomb.”
Cinq-Mars wasn’t interested in hearing any other suggestions. He’d felt a bullet whiz by his head. Five or so had been fired at him. That an intruder had dared penetrate his property, with the intention of killing him, had him more enraged than frightened. Keeping himself under control was a battle. This was a new level of combat and he did not welcome the escalation.
“So,” he asked, relenting somewhat, “you believe my vehicle’s safe?”
“Yes, sir, I do.” The cop was a handsome young man, probably in his late twenties. Women loved him, Cinq-Mars suspected. He didn’t look the type to marry young, or if he did, he wouldn’t fare well in the role. He was a risk-taker, that kind of cop, not a homebody.
Cinq-Mars held up his keys. “Are you volunteering to start it yourself? Just so you know, you don’t have to.”
The cop laughed and accepted the keys from his superior’s hands. “I’ll be back in a minute, sir.”
“Make a point of it.”
Cinq-Mars watched. As confident as the officer had been with his preliminary investigation, now that his own life was at stake he double-checked everything. In the end he sat up in the driver’s seat with a determined grin, stuck the key into die ignition, and boldly gave it a twist. The engine kicked over immediately, and the young cop revved it up high before turning the vehicle off.
By the time he came back to the house, other policemen were following the first set of tire tracks up the long drive. Local cops, Sûreté du (Québec, and Montreal Urban Community Police converged. Without a Ski-Doo of their own they had no hope of trailing the culprits, and Cinq-Mars told them not to bother calling for one. Snowdrifts would hide the trail during the delay, and shortly the bad guys would connect to miles of intersecting trails, where their tracks would be indistinguishable from hundreds of others being covered over by the blizzard. Cinq-Mars asked instead that the SQ give him an escort, that the Montreal officers stay put to guard his wife until his return, and that the local cops drive the country roads and report any suspicious activity. All agreed.
Cinq-Mars returned upstairs to apprise his wife of the situation, to hold her, and to say goodnight. Although disturbed, Sandra was not fragile, and they hugged one another as though the strength of their squeeze was sufficient to ward off the world. He loved her and loved the scent of her, loved that they were getting along so well these days, and hated this turn, for marital pressures inevitably followed such an episode.
Back downstairs, he strapped on his holster and issue and retrieved his wallet and shield. Before he left the house he made and received several calls, including one to his partner and another to Sergeant Painchaud, now that he had his number. A call came in with the trace on the phone call, and he was given an address for a Lucy Gabriel, near Oka. Then he was outside in the blizzard again, starting his new vehicle for himself. He followed the flashing lights of the SQ, cruiser onto the country road and, eventually, eastbound along the highway.
On the passenger side of the Pathfinder, snow carried in on the boots of the intruder slowly melted away, a reminder of his trespass that made Cinq-Mars angry all over again. Only as the cab warmed up and the snow vanished did he feel that he was alone in his vehicle, speeding behind the cruiser, headlights shining on the ferocity of the storm. The highway was difficult to discern. He drove hard. He assumed that if the cruiser ahead of him hit the ditch, or rammed a pole, that that would be his cue to swerve, brake, or prepare to crash.
Driving actually gave his nerves a chance to settle—he could reshuffle his anxieties, concentrate on the road—and he had time to think things through.
The cumulative effect of the events of the past fifteen hours indicated, if nothing else, that he was missing something. Apparently there was a gap in the spectrum of his knowledge that could be lethal. A woman had called offering information. He had travelled to the rendezvous. A man in the vicinity had been found dead, shot and submerged under ice. The woman had not shown up, but had telephoned again and, during the conversation, possibly or probably, had been gunned down herself. His property had been invaded, he’d been fired upon, his vehicle had been entered. No bomb had been planted on the Pathfinder—presuming that the brave young cop hadn’t been duped in some way, that no remote-controlled plastique was under his rump at that very moment. But a bomb was still his first choice when ascribing purpose to the trespass. Most of the really bad guys on his turf, notably the biker gangs, were bombers. The woman had cited his fame as her primary reason for choosing to call him and not just any cop—whatever it was that she knew had gotten one man killed and perhaps her own life snuffed—but none of that explained a sudden interest the bad guys might have to want him dead.
Unless they assumed, or were worried, that the unknown woman, or Andrew Stettler, the floating corpse, had managed to divulge their secrets to him. Cinq-Mars followed the cruiser off Highway 40 onto Côte St. Charles Road, which led into the town of Hudson. The route took him past farmland dotted with old and handsome rickety barns, then into an area of modest cottages on large properties. Before leaving home, he had arranged for others to meet him in different locales, and now he got back to Bill Mathers. They were travelling from opposite directions.
“What’s your ETA, Bill?”
“Fifteen, twenty. I’m behind a plough. Which beats being in front of it.”
“I’m ten, maybe fifteen minutes in this snow. The gatekeeper is being dragged out of bed as we speak. See you soon.”
The street ended, and he turned east along Main Road. Here the homes were larger and occupied expansive waterfront properties. His cellphone rang. Charles Painchaud, coming from the northeast, was already on the opposite side of the Lake of Two Mountains, as he lived over there. “Trouble,” Painchaud warned.
“What’s up?”
“I’m searching for the house. I’ve left Oka. I’m now on Indian land.”
Cinq-Mars swore under his breath. “Are you in a cruiser?”
“Personal vehicle, sir. Thank God.”
“Uniform?”
“Civvies,” Painchaud assured him. “Nevertheless.”
“Right. Better call it in.”
“Will do,” Painchaud said. “See you when I see you.”
So far, Cinq-Mars had four police departments involved in this escapade, MUC cops were guarding his house. St. Lazare Police were trolling the countryside, looking for a shooter and a mad bomber on a snowmobile. The provincial police were providing his escort, and Painchaud, also a member of that force, was operating on the opposite side of the lake. He had asked the Hudson Police to alert the gatekeeper for the ice-bridge. Now there’d be a fifth police force involved. The Kanesetake Mohawk Peacekeepers would not take kindly to foreign officers on their territory.
Something was going on. He couldn’t quite smell it, he couldn’t put any of it together, but his intuitive and intellectual senses were definitely being stirred.
He drove hard, keeping the lights of the cruiser ahead of him in view. Main Road in Hudson took him through the commercial centre of the village, then dipped and swerved as it ran alongside the Lake of Two Mountains. Earlier in the century, many of the homes here had served as summer cottages for the affluent of Montreal. Now, with the advent of fast cars, adequate bridges and express highways, the town was a bedroom community for those who commuted the other way and in all seasons. For more than a century, the lake had been circled by the three founding peoples of the country, native, French and English. Hudson was peculiarly English, and Emile Cinq-Mars was feeling like an obvious outsider.
At a quiet junction, he spotted the revolving blue light of a police cruiser where an officer from Hudson awaited his arrival. In summer, a ferry service operated from this location, small tugs shunting vehicles on barges between the towns of Oka and Hudson. In winter, the ferry operator used his private access on both sides of the lake to maintain an ice-bridge. The local police had awakened an employee to open the gate kept locked overnight. In turn, he had summoned a snowplough operator. The three men were waiting for Cinq-Mars as he pulled onto the property and stepped from his car into the teeth of a gale.
“Sir,” the Hudson cop greeted him, in French. He seemed an amiable man, no doubt a job requirement in such a nice town. “Great night to be out for a drive.”
“Couldn’t have picked it better. Thanks for your help on this.”
“No problem, sir. I have to warn you, though, the gatekeeper’s feeling ornery.”
At that point, the Sûreté du Québec escort who had followed Cinq-Mars from his house joined them. “Might as well call it a night,” Cinq-Mars advised the SQ officer. “I’ll take it from here. Thanks for everything.”
“I don’t mind going across with you, sir,” the tall young man maintained.
“Think so? Turns out we’re headed for a house on Indian land. Are you sure you want to drive a flashbulb cruiser over there?”
He was immediately less certain.
Apart from cheap American smokes, inexpensive contraband liquor and reserve-grown marijuana, native criminals had one other product they brokered with success. They provided armaments procured in the United States to interested parties. Grenade-launchers. Submachine guns. Automatic pistols. Rifles. Dynamite. The reserve was no place for outside cops.
As the SQ, escort beat it, the ice-bridge manager trundled out of the warm police cruiser and, determined to have his say, expressed displeasure at being rousted from bed. “At least you got a four-wheeler there. Jean-Pierre, he goes across with you. We didn’t plough yet. Don’t get stuck. You go off course, hit a soft spot, me, I won’t be responsible.” He was a broad, short man who kept his hands stuffed in his pockets yet continued to gesticulate, flapping his lower coat.
“What’ll Jean-Pierre do for me?” a sceptical Cinq-Mars asked.
“Plough. He’ll clear the road ahead of you. He’s got the keys to the gate on the other side. Me, I want to know who pays this bill.”
“You’re charging me?”
The owner shrugged. “What’d you expect?”
“You had to plough this road anyway,” Cinq-Mars argued.
“Not this time of night. Jean-Pierre, he’s gotta plough it again by morning. All this big raid does is cost me money.”
“I didn’t ask for the ice-bridge to be ploughed. I have a four-wheel drive. You’re providing a service I never requested.”
“Don’t be so goddamn cheap! It’s not your money! Me, I’m ploughing the road. The City of Montreal pays. That’s that!”
“Fine. Send me an invoice. I’ll get you a card from my car.”
The three men drifted that way, the wind at their backs. A fourth, Jean-Pierre, on hand to operate the plough, sat slumped in his truck, his head over the steering wheel, looking dead to the world.
“Ready, sir?” the Hudson cop asked.
“Five or ten. My partner’s on his way.”
They waited then, Jean-Pierre in his cab, the ferry manager in the police cruiser where he tallied a bill, the cop beside him, and Cinq-Mars in his Pathfinder awaiting Bill Mathers. Heat from their idling engines kept them warm, but they were unable to keep tabs on one another, as snow masked the windows. Emile Cinq-Mars did not see Bill Mathers turn too quickly onto the unploughed drive, skid to his left, steer into the spin, right himself and pull over. The young detective locked up his car and came across to the Pathfinder, bent to the fierce wind.
“I heard you called in an XYZ,” Mathers said, clambering inside.
“Who told you that?”
“I called the office myself while I was thinking about something.”
“Thinking about what?” Cinq-Mars spoke in his usual gruff tone.He rolled his window down and waved the truck on ahead of him. When that didn’t work, he flashed his lights and honked.
“Booked tomorrow morning off. If I have to be out all night, I’m not going in early. So is it true?”
Cinq-Mars nodded briefly. “Some dickhead tried to wire my car. Can you believe it? I got shot at for intruding on his handiwork.”
“No kidding.” Mathers cleared his throat and rubbed his hands in front of the heater. His head was mussed, he wasn’t clean-shaven—an unusual look for him. “Serious news, Emile. What’s the story?”
“Hang on.”
Jean-Pierre was climbing down from the cab of his truck. As he walked past the Pathfinder Cinq-Mars noticed the flare of the man’s cigarette. The detective rolled down his window, admitting the blizzard, and scrubbed snow from his outer mirror. He rolled his window up again and watched Jean-Pierre go behind them and lock the gate after the cop car. As the man passed by on his return, Cinq-Mars opened his door to address him.
“How do I get back?” he asked in French.
“I’ll wait for you.”
“I might be awhile.”
“I get paid by the hour. Not that it’s worth it. This is a sonofabitch. I got to unlock the gate on the other side anyhow, so I’ll wait for you until it’s time to open up for the public. After that it won’t matter.”
“Well, you have a good night now.”
“That’s funny. Ha-ha. I’m laughing.”
“Sorry about this. But it could be a matter of life and death.”
“Yeah? Well, all right. Let’s get you across.”
Cinq-Mars filled Bill Mathers in on the scant details as they headed onto the lake behind the plough. It didn’t take long to repeat what was pertinent, and after that both men were quiet. The events bothered them, and initially made them solemn, their reticence enforced by the eerie dimension of the drive. They were out on the lake, driving on ice, following the plough with its revolving lights, the storm arrayed against them. They had to let the truck go farther ahead as it churned up an avalanche of snow and blew it onto their windshield. Winds funnelled down the lake without obstruction, rocking the car, the snow flying horizontally in a swirling maze. The Pathfinder had entered another dimension, passed through a time warp. Adrift upon an ice cap, isolated and cut off, suddenly the men landed upon the opposite shore.
Cinq-Mars hailed Charles Painchaud on the cellular and was guided down the main road in the direction of the house. He crossed onto Indian land, but in the blizzard nothing could be seen. He had to find a driveway, and that seemed impossible, until he was aided by a Mohawk Peacekeeper waving a flashlight. What must have been difficult for Painchaud was simplified for Cinq-Mars. He and Mathers arrived amid a convoy of police cruisers and stepped out of the car into the hostile company of Indian cops. One accompanied them upstairs, to an attic above a garage, where the alleged crime had taken place.
Painchaud greeted Cinq-Mars as he and Mathers kicked snow off their boots. “Sergeant-Detective,” he said.
“Sergeant. What’ve we got?”
“No victim.”
“No? What else?”
“Check this out.”
Painchaud and Mathers crouched down together to survey the wood floor of the apartment. Cinq-Mars preferred to get an overview first. A quick glance confirmed that the room was well lived in, the tenant being neither a notable, nor an atrocious, housekeeper. Magazines—particularly Vogue and Elle and old TV Guides—textbooks, a clutter of knick knacks and a scatter of clothes lay gathered here and strewn there, indicating someone at ease in her surroundings. A sense of cleanliness worked through the contained muddle. Whoever lived here had one large room, with the kitchen at the far end flowing into the dining and living areas. A bed was positioned along one side, next to a door that led to the bathroom. The kitchen sink and counter spaces were clean. The dining table was tidy as well, with a candlestick in the centre and a pewter incense-holder in the shape of a toad at one corner. A stick of incense had burned down, with only the ash remaining in a thin grey line on the tabletop. A desk between two windows sheltered a mishmash of papers along an upper shelf, although the surface of the desk was in reasonable order. The aging furniture appeared to have been well built in its day and to be comfortable still. The yellow-and-brown material for the sofa and large chairs was a tad threadbare and old-fashioned, but the cushions were holding up. There were two TVS, one aimed at the bed, another at the sofa. On one wall hung a banner that said “this is Indian land,” while on the wall opposite, with its four corners stretched taut, hung the flag of the Mohawk Warriors, a defiant golden male face on a red field. Cinq-Mars juggled conflicting impressions—controlled chaos opposed by a flimsy sense of organization. He was unsure which was the dominant sentiment.
“Sir?” Painchaud wanted him to study the floor. The stained oak showed a relatively clear area surrounded by a dusty, scuffed border.
Cinq-Mars stated the obvious. “A carpet was down.”
“Until very recently,” Painchaud concurred. “These foam bits look like particles of underpadding.”
“If she was shot here, next to the phone, with the shooter coming in through the front door, blood and tissue might spatter—”
“—across the carpet,” Mathers put in.
“Then they rolled the carpet up and carted her body away in it,” Cinq-Mars concluded.
“Could be,” Painchaud agreed.
“My wife heard them over the phone. They were moving furniture, that’s what it sounded like to her.” The men were quiet awhile, regarding the floor. “Roughly,” Cinq-Mars judged, “a fourteen by eighteen. A carpet that large, plus the underpadding, makes for a heavy roll, even if the material’s not thick. Difficult to bend. I’d look for a van, or a large station wagon.”
“Let me introduce you,” Painchaud suggested as both men resumed an upright posture.
Coming over was an officer in the blue uniform of the Kanesetake Peacekeepers. His name was Constable Roland Harvey. Painchaud undertook the introductions, and the man nodded.
Cinq-Mars told him, “Probably the woman was carted off in a van or a truck, bundled in a carpet. Can your people keep an eye out?”
“Not so many vehicles on the road tonight.” The man, in his thirties, spoke with a deep throatiness at a measured pace. “We’re stopping anybody going through the reserve. We ask them what they’re doing out tonight. We check their trunks.”
“Thank you. That’s good. That’s great.”
The officer carried a considerable paunch. His face was pockmarked and quite dark—a wide, square Mohawk face. His was particularly distinguished by drooping jowls, and Cinq-Mars found him difficult to read.
“Her name was Lucy Gabriel,” the Peacekeeper told him. “She lived here.”
“What can you tell us about Lucy, Roland?”
“Good girl. Smart. She’s Mohawk, but Lucy always blended.”
“With whites. She has a good job, everybody says. Drives a nice car. A Honda. An Accord, I think. It’s still in the garage downstairs. She was on the barricades when we had that war.”
One side’s crisis was another side’s war, Cinq-Mars noted. “Ever had any trouble with her?”
“No trouble, no. A few times we talk to her about her boyfriends.”
“What about them?” Cinq-Mars could tell that Painchaud was hanging back, taking this in. Roland Harvey was more inclined to talk to a Montreal cop, such as himself, than to someone from the Sûreté du Québec.
“Nothing special. Those boys were all right. She dated white guys.”
“Does that make it police business?”
“If they visit here, that’s okay. That’s up to her. They can stay overnight if she wants. If they move in, that’s different. White people can’t live here no more on the reserve. If you want to marry a white person, that’s okay, all right, but you got to move off the reserve.”
“She didn’t want to move off?”
“Her boyfriends weren’t that serious. That’s what she told us. They weren’t moving in.”
Cinq-Mars nodded and paced a short distance. His demeanour made it clear that he had further questions on his mind, and the others waited for him to speak again.
Before he did, the senior cop caught a glimpse of his colleagues. In this light, at this hour of the morning, with a couple of them having been awakened from their beds, they appeared disgruntled and bleary-eyed. Mussed hair, whiskers, a poor choice of clothes, puffy eyelids. He was reminded that one problem with chasing down criminals was that the bad guys didn’t always cooperate by working the same shifts as their pursuers. Seeing his cohorts, Cinq-Mars was prompted to yawn—a gesture that expanded and took its own time. He imagined that he was their mirror image—maybe worse, given that he was the oldest.
“All right, sir, tell me, did she have a good relationship with the Peacekeepers? Did you get along, or was she afraid of you?”
“Got along, yup.” Neither his blank expression nor his monotone speech gave anything away.
“Because she called me, you know. In the middle of the night. If she thought she was in danger she could have called you. You were closer. You were awake. You or one of your colleagues would’ve been on shift.”
The cop nodded. “I don’t know why she’d do that. I’d get here sooner.”
“No doubt about it. Which tells me two things. She really didn’t think anybody would be walking through the front door, and her troubles probably don’t originate on the reserve. They got started off the reserve. She didn’t expect local trouble or she would’ve called you. That being the case, I hope you don’t object to our being here.”
The officer looked rather slowly from Cinq-Mars to Painchaud and then back again. “Nobody wants SQ snooping around. What good does that do? Nobody’s gonna talk to SQ. Ask the chief. He’ll tell you we don’t want SQ walking around.”
Unsure whether he meant the Chief of the Peacekeepers or the Chief of the Grand Council, Cinq-Mars chose to hold his peace. The point had been made that the SQ was not welcome to investigate on the reserve, and if they came anyway, they’d be ineffectual.
“All right. Listen, Roland, we need your help here. We need you to talk to her friends. We need to know what her carpet looked like, what colours were in it, what was the design. We need to know whatever you can find out about her boyfriends. We need you to hunt the reserve for a girl rolled in a carpet, for a carpet tossed off by the side of the road somewhere. Lucy might have a gunshot wound. Something else, Roland. We need a forensics expert to scan this apartment with a microscope and a fine-tooth comb. You can’t provide us with one of those, I don’t imagine. I understand that you don’t want the SQ. But if I clear it with Sergeant Painchaud, will you allow a forensics examiner from my department on the premises? I’ll guarantee that the report will be shared around to everybody.”
“Montreal cops.” Roland Harvey mulled the news.
“No uniforms. No cruisers. Plainclothes and plain cars all the way, and your people can be on hand.”
“They have to be,” Harvey said. He didn’t explain himself, but Cinq-Mars assumed that even Montreal cops would need local protection. This was going to be a tough working environment.
“Desperate measures, Roland. We believe that Lucy’s been shot. She could be badly hurt. She may be one of your own but she could be anywhere. We’ll have to scour Quebec. Off the reserve and on. Across the border to Ontario. Maybe down to New York State. We need to rely on you and you on us if we’re to get a handle on this. Lucy is one of yours, Roland, but her troubles probably got started off the reserve.”
Roland Harvey gave a nod. “Sure, yup. Bring your people on. No SQ.”
“Deal,” he said. Cinq-Mars turned to Painchaud. “Deal?” he asked him.
Painchaud didn’t have a problem with the arrangement. He understood the situation. Cinq-Mars liked him more by the minute, liked him almost as much as he was puzzled by the guy. He was not accustomed to SQ officers willing to take a back seat in the interests of an investigation. “Done,” Sergeant Painchaud agreed.
“Emile?” Bill Mathers had wandered over to the missing woman’s desk and returned with a photograph and a check stub. Cinq-Mars took the picture, examined it, and showed it to the native officer.
“This her? In this photograph she looks native.”
“That’s Lucy. She’s wearing her number-one tan in that one. I didn’t say Lucy don’t look native. She blends in with whites is all. She’s got their culture, the way they talk.”
“English or French?”
“Both. English for sure.”
“Pretty girl. What else?” Cinq-Mars asked.
Mathers held up the stub. “Hillier-Largent Global. She makes a decent salary, with benefits.”
The senior detective studied it for himself. Lucy Gabriel’s paycheque bore marked similarities to his own. Suddenly the modest premises seemed odd. “What is this place, Roland? A garage? Is there a house that goes with it?”
“Used to be, yup. Burnt down years ago. Lucy’s folks owned it. Lucy already lived here by herself from the time she was eleven years old, about. Her folks’ house was thirty feet away. The foundation’s still there, but that’s all.”
“She lived on her own from the age of eleven?”
“Not all the time since then, no. Her parents, they died in that fire. White people took her in after that. A doctor living on the reserve back then, he became her dad, but at one point he took her off the reserve. Lucy kept the garage as her private place. It’s her property. Moved back when she was old enough for that.”
“What does Lucy do?”
“Biologist,” Roland Harvey explained.
“Excuse me?” The surprise Cinq-Mars expressed had more to do with Lucy’s profession causing him to think about the laboratory at the head of the lake, BioLogika, and not, as Roland Harvey perhaps assumed, that a young native woman was a professional scientist.
“She educated herself,” the Peacekeeper specified, his pride noted.
“A biologist. Is Hillier-Largent a pharmaceutical company, do you know?”
Harvey shrugged. Cinq-Mars flipped the check stub over several times in his hands.
“No address. Bill, find out where the company’s located and its business.”
“On it.”
“Have you found anything, Roland, that can help us?”
“Bullet hole over here.” The Peacekeeper nodded toward the far wall.
“Show me.” Cinq-Mars followed him around the perimeter of the room to the kitchen, Painchaud trailing behind. A door under the sink stood open.
“We found it like this. The door ajar. But the door was closed when the bullet went through it. It went through the garbage can after that, then lodged in the wallboard. It’s not so thick. Looks like it got buried in the insulation. Either that, or the shooter went and pulled it out already.”
“These guys were probably looking to get it back, judging by the way they cleaned up. Let’s hope they failed. Anything else?” When Roland Harvey shook his head, Cinq-Mars pushed him further. “How do you think this went down?”
“No forced entry,” Harvey mentioned. “No big surprise. Probably she never bothered to lock up. Not here, on the reserve. Not on a night like this one.”
“She told me she had to get home after the evening news. Which means she must’ve been in the city, that accounts for the time. A slow trek on a night like this. Somebody might have followed her home, or they were waiting for her.”
“So they walked in and shot her,” Painchaud concluded, shaking his head.
“I doubt they came here to shoot her,” Cinq-Mars told them, which caused both men to jerk their heads up. How he could be promoting theories with nothing to go on struck them as odd. “If that’s true, they’d have left her where she lay. I think they sneaked in here, their arrival camouflaged by the storm. Probably turned their engine off and coasted down the grade to the house. Lights off, for sure. I think they came here to abduct her. When they heard her on the phone, about to say something, that’s when they shot her.”
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.”
“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?”
“Preferably.”
“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 the 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?”
“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.