MARTELLO wheeled into the property around 10 a.m. I had been fiddling with the Riley in my garage. He jerked his Lincoln to a stop and rolled down his window.
“Get Cooke out here,” he said.
Tony did not look happy.
Cooke was already on his way down Isabelle’s front steps by the time I reached the same spot. We walked together to Martello’s car window.
“Conn, get in. Dennis, you’re staying here. There’s no one available to relieve you right now, so just hang tight and look sharp, okay?”
Cooke gulped a little but just nodded like the good soldier he was.
I jumped in the passenger side of Martello’s Lincoln, barely managing to close the door before Martello stomped the gas, booting the vehicle around in a circle partly over Isabelle’s newly greening lawn and back onto the driveway to exit the property.
Martello turned left onto the Prescott highway, cutting off a pickup truck heading north into town. The offended driver blasted his horn as he jammed on his brakes. I stole a glance in the passenger side mirror and could see the truck driver accelerate to a very short distance behind Martello’s car, apparently intent on making an issue out of being cut off.
Martello glanced in his rear view mirror. He flipped a switch under his dash, which activated pulsing red and blue lights front and back of the car. I glanced behind me again using the passenger mirror. The truck driver had dropped farther behind.
“Idiot,” Martello murmured.
“What’s up Tony?” I asked.
“All hell’s breaking loose. We can’t find Phillips anywhere. We found his car in Lebreton Flats, parked on Primrose in the visitor’s lot of a townhouse complex: Short’s address that John and that PW guy Tate tracked down.
“We’ve been through Short’s place top to bottom, and there’s nothing. Fair amount of dust everywhere, papers and mail piled up, so it looks like Short’s been away for a while. Superintendent there says he hasn’t seen Short for some time. Phillips’ car is clean, locked when we found it. The super said he never saw Phillips and was wondering what to do about his car in the visitor’s slot, since even a moron could see it was an unmarked police car.”
By now we were zipping past the Colonnade exit to the industrial park complex west of Prince of Wales Drive. Other cars were getting out of our way promptly.
“Where are we going?” I asked Martello.
“To ‘A’ Division. But first we’re going to pick up your secretary. Tate is bringing a couple of guys with him from Public Works. They’ve got a photo of this guy Short for you two to look at. Your secretary must’ve got a good look at him when he brought the Jag into your shop in January, and you might have glimpsed him on your girlfriend’s street and during your bumper car road race the next day.”
We retraced my usual route past Hog’s Back, swept onto Carling past Dow’s Lake, but this time Tony took his own route past the Natural Resources complex after wheeling the Lincoln left onto Booth, then zigging and zagging through short streets to Cambridge Street and Britfit the back way.
“I’ll wait in the car – don’t dawdle,” Martello said as he pulled up in front.
At this hour, just after 10:30 a.m., everyone seemed hard at it. Dougald and Reg were bent over the engine compartments of the 150S and bigger Mark IX respectively. Marjorie was typing away at her computer in her office, Jerry lying at her feet. JP was presumably out on errands or down in the basement.
I paused in the open doorway to the building, wishing this mess I was in was over so I could get back to my business with my little band of colleagues.
I walked into Marjorie’s office, and she turned from her screen and grinned. “Oi, he’s back!”
Reg and Dougald lifted their heads and walked over.
I waved Reg and Dougald off.
“A flying visit only guys … Everything okay?”
They both nodded.
“Marjorie, Tony Martello, my Mountie friend, is waiting for us outside. There’s a photo of a man who may have been the one who brought that S-Type to the shop in January when I was in Arizona. He needs us to look at the photo.”
“Right, right, I’ll just close this down, Conn.”
Wearing a yellow linen pantsuit on this gorgeous spring day, Marjorie looked absolutely terrific. She shut down her computer, grabbed her purse, and we both waved our goodbyes to Dougald and Reg.
“We’ll send her back as soon as possible,” I called out.
Martello already had a back door open for Marjorie. I jumped in the front passenger side and he wheeled the car south on Cambridge to Powell.
“Where’s JP?” I asked her, turning my head over my left shoulder.
“Oh, he’s picking up tires from Costco for a Daimler coming in. But he’s quite anxious to talk to you, Conn, about that old car in the basement.”
“I’ll talk to him later, Marj, but meanwhile, you’d better buckle up.”
Clearly preoccupied with Phillips’ disappearance, Tony had barely glanced at the fetching Marjorie as she trotted to his car. This was out of character for him. Now he booted the Lincoln along Powell to Bank, and picked up the Queensway eastbound from Isabella, heading for the Vanier Parkway.
Sensing the mood, and perhaps unnerved by Tony’s driving, Marjorie kept quiet.
Eyes constantly darting to his mirrors, Martello explained that adding to today’s problems was a major demonstration on Parliament Hill by various immigrant aid groups protesting government immigration policy, thanks to the unrelenting publicity about the Permanent Resident card scandal. Although the CIC Minister and press people were trying to control the damage in the Commons under fierce questioning from the Opposition or media scrums throughout cities across the country, the story wasn’t going to go away quickly.
So far, reports still hadn’t linked Morrison to the sale of the PR cards.
“So we’re stretched. The crowds are really growing down there. We’ve got people combing Short’s townhouse complex for signs of Phillips or Short. What a mess.”
“What about the gray Chev I told you about?” I asked as we curved north onto the Vanier Parkway.
“The super at Short’s townhouse says he’s never seen a car like that there. He said Short had a Toyota Corolla; we’ve got an APB out on that since last night. Short had to provide a licence plate number to the townhouse management like everyone else there.”
We passed RCMP Headquarters, and leapfrogged through several lights down a few blocks to McArthur Avenue, which we passed through, then turned a hard right into ‘A’ Division’s parking lot.
This, the main RCMP field detachment in Ottawa, was housed in a nondescript six-floor building at 155 McArthur in the heart of Vanier, or the French Quarter, as the real estate agents were now calling it, to add a little cachet, so to speak.
Tony trotted up the outside steps at a speed belying his bulk, and we were shortly in a conference room on the second floor. Tate was already there with his colleague from Public Works, visitors’ tags on their jacket lapels, both being babysat by a uniformed corporal.
Tate, who didn’t look entirely happy to be in the same room as me but blushed pink at the sight of Marjorie, introduced a tall, slim, gray-haired figure in a black suit as Roch Seguin, a director of security for Public Works at their Gatineau office headquarters.
Clearly impatient, Martello was drumming the fingers of his right hand on the table as Marjorie and I seated ourselves across from Tate and Seguin.
“You’ve got a photo of this Short guy?”
Seguin opened his briefcase and pulled out an envelope and a digital camera. He opened the envelope and handed over a five by six colour print.
“Oui, Robert Short, he is on the right of Jacqueline, the woman in the blue dress,” Seguin explained as Tony grabbed the photo. “It was a going-away party for Jacqueline; she is going to our office in …”
Tony cut him off.
“I don’t care who she is or where she’s going. Are you sure this is Short?”
He pointed his thick right index finger at the man on the woman’s right in the photo, holding it up to Seguin’s eye level.
Seguin had paled, but nodded quickly.
“Absolument, that is Robert …”
Tony passed the photo to Marjorie, who took a quick glance, looked up, and nodded back to him, then passed the photo to me. Clearly taken at some kind of office function in an office boardroom, the print showed three people – a woman between two men – all smiling at the camera. In the background were tables of people holding coffee cups and little plastic wine glasses frozen in mid-gesture.
“’Cause, thing is,” Tony was saying to Seguin, and not in a pleasant manner, “our guy Phillips, who was with you guys the other day, said your own internal files are a bit sketchy on this Short guy, your own employee. Like no security clearance, no criminal check for example.”
Seguin and Tate exchanged a glance, and Seguin sighed.
“You are right, Sergeant. His classification file is virtually empty. We don’t know how or why …”
While Seguin tried to explain how a government employee could have a virtually empty personnel file, I was studying Short’s photo more closely.
He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and blue-striped tie. He looked to be about average height, early fifties, quite broad across the shoulders, with neatly trimmed salt-andpepper hair. He peered at the camera through large round glasses. Where the collar of his shirt met the left side of his neck, there seemed to be a red half-circle on his skin about the size of a dollar coin.
Meanwhile, Tony was pointing a finger at the digital camera lying on the table in front of Seguin.
“Does the flashcard in there have this photo?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good, hand it over.”
Tate now spoke up for the first time.
“We’ll need you to sign …”
He stopped on seeing the look on Tony’s face.
Seguin waved his hand, dismissing the flashcard issue, and presumably the danger of all photos of Jacqueline’s party being lost somewhere in the bowels of ‘A’ Division. He opened the camera, levered out the card, and handed it over to Martello.
Tony thanked Seguin and Tate, who took the hint, stood up, and prepared to leave with the uniformed constable.
“Hang on a sec,” I said.
I showed Tony the red mark visible on Short’s neck.
“Thanks Conn, I must be losing my touch,” Tony grimaced.
“Does this guy have a birthmark, or any other distinguishing marks? Anything else you can tell us about him?” he now asked Tate and Seguin, who both slowly sat down again.
“Yes, that’s right, a, how you say, birthmark? On his neck, mostly not visible. Other than that …”
Seguin spread his hands and looked over at Tate.
“No one really got to know him,” Tate said. “He left the department in March, early in the month. Said something about a new job, driving. With us, he just did his job, as a procurement agent, mostly. Didn’t really make any friends or anything.”
Tony handed Seguin his business card, asking him to call if Public Works had any more details to give about Short. He told the uniformed constable to see the visitors out and return to the boardroom when he had done so.
We all looked at the print again. Tony pointed again to the red mark on Short’s neck and raised a querying eyebrow to Marjorie.
She shook her head.
“He was bundled up wearing a scarf around his neck when I saw him in our office. It was January, after all. In fact, now that I think about it, he was sitting in my office for quite a while and didn’t take any of his winter clothes off, though it was quite warm in there.”
I made a mental note to have the shop’s furnace checked.
The uniformed constable returned.
Tony handed him the flashcard and five by six print, murmured some instructions I couldn’t quite hear, something about “Q,” and waved the constable to the door.
“Q?” I asked Martello.
“Our head of technical support – the guys who fix us up with all our tricky gizmos for surveillance and so on. They like to think they’re in a James Bond movie. You know, Q, the old guy who gives Bond his bazooka pens, exploding talcum powder, stuff like that. I’m sending them the image to be enhanced.”
“So then you’ll circulate the enhanced photo of Short throughout the police network?”
“No. First I want to know who he really is. That constable will be able to compare the photo on the flashcard with our rogues’ gallery electronically. If he has ever been arrested and booked, we may get a match on the photo. He’ll also do a search using ‘birthmarks’ as a key word. These are long shots, but since we don’t have any fingerprint records, thanks to Public Works …”
“In their defence, Short could have doctored his own records somehow – cleaned his own file,” I said. “He obviously knows how to use gloves, too, in setting up Morrison’s suicide and dealing with Archambault.”
Tony sighed.
“I know, I know. It’s just frustrating. I have a very bad feeling about John Phillips.”