A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller) (21 page)

And back to my skulking—thirteen floors worth of stairways, checking every few feet with the mirror. The odds of running into a security guard were pretty low, they probably patrolled once an hour or so and as long as I was quiet I should be safe. By the time I reached the seventeenth floor I was bored to tears but I went into the bathroom, jimmied the lock again and climbed into the closet.

When I’d been there earlier I’d noticed that the seventeenth floor had hanging ceilings like most office buildings did and that meant I didn’t have to worry about the doors to Reynolds and Lake with their serious locks.

It was a personal motto—over, under, around or through. I kept trying to translate it into Latin with no luck.

However, it gave me the answer to the kickass locks Reynolds and Lake had. I would just go over.

There were strong shelves on the sides of the closet. I moved most of the cleaning supplies and then I used the shelves to climb up to the ceiling and push through the sound-dampening panels into a three-foot-high crawl space full of dust, hanging wires and other junk. The key light served to light it up quite well and I looked around and tried not to sneeze.

I reached down and picked up one of the industrial rolls of cheap garbage bags and started to lay them out in front of me in the general direction of the offices. It took a while but I had to move slowly anyway and laying the bags down encouraged precision and silence. The bags served three purposes: they kept me fairly clean; they allowed me to measure the exact distance, as each bag was thirty inches long; and as a bonus they gave me a route back to the bathroom. As I went I taped them together.

Throughout I was very careful to stay on the iron supports that held up the panels themselves. Those were wired into the ceiling and as long as I spread my weight over three of them I’d be fine so I placed my weight on toe, knee and hands and moved along.

In thirty minutes I covered the 120 feet and reached the corner of the building which meant, in theory, that the offices of Reynolds and Lake had to be beneath me.

I pulled open the last panel and held the mirror down so I could see.

I expected to see a room full of cops with drawn guns.

But there was nothing.

T
he ceiling was two feet above a bookshelf, which gave me a nice route down to the floor, almost like a ladder. It only took a second to wrap tape around my hands and pick up most of the dust off my clothes and then I climbed slowly and carefully down and went to work.

There was lots of light streaming in through the windows to let me work and the first thing I did was check the whole office out, an inch at a time. It was a nice space, oak furniture and bookshelves, dark leather on the furniture, good quality bindings on the books and a nice thick-weave carpet. The desk was huge, oak as well, with a green felt blotter protecting the top and an expensive-looking laptop on top of that.

“Qosmio X305-Q708?” I said quietly. It looked fast and pricey and I ignored it and opened the drawers, looking to find out whose office I was in. Most of the drawers were locked but one that wasn’t was full of boxes of business cards I recognized, ones for Alastair Reynolds.

Past experience told me I should check out the rest of the office before I started work so I did and found a central waiting room with a desk for a receptionist, a nicely appointed bathroom, a second office almost as nice as Alastair’s and a tiny kitchenette with fridge, microwave and a complicated machine that seemed to make coffee. It had an Italian name I couldn’t read so I assumed it was for coffee and left it at that.

While I was in the second office the security guard came by—I heard the elevator door open and froze in place and watched through a door open a crack while a large kid in a white shirt and black pants checked all the doors by the light of a big flashlight. Then he left and I went back to Alastair’s office.

The desk was ticking me off. I hate locked doors and drawers, unless I lock them. In all other cases they’re just a professional challenge.

I found a pair of brass paper clips in one of the open drawers and used my needle-nose pliers to straighten them out. Then I flattened one end of one of them and bent it. That went into the tight grip of a big-jawed spring clip and I had my tension bar. The second paper clip I bent two or three millimetres from the end and I had my very own rake.

First I inserted the tension tool into the base of the keyhole and turned it to the side to put pressure on the pins. Then I slid the rake back and forth across the pins, pointing upwards and shuffling them into position. After about five brisk passes I pulled the rake out and finished twisting the lock with the tension bar and it was open.

I was disappointed in its contents; it was full of random legal papers I had no time to read. The second drawer held marginally more interesting stuff, notebooks and address books. However, I still had no time to read them so I put them back and checked out the third.

In that drawer was a heavy-framed, multi-barrelled pistol. The gun was a four-shot monstrosity from some American company called a
COP
, which stood for Compact Off Duty Police. It was made of blued steel with black rubber grips and I lifted it out cautiously and cracked it open to find it loaded with four .357 magnum hollow point rounds. Also in the drawer was a box of sixteen extra shells.

It was nasty, inaccurate and fairly useless at any long range.

But up close it would wreck someone’s day entirely. The hollow-point bullets wouldn’t penetrate too many walls and staring down four third-of-an-inch-wide barrels at the same time would cause most people to reconsider their options.

I left it there but took a few seconds to open the side plate and use the pliers to twist the firing pin a little off centre. With luck that would mean he’d get misfires if he ever tried to shoot the damn thing.

Once everything was locked away again I fired up the laptop and was pleased to find it wasn’t password protected. If it had been I would have had to search for the code but I was sure it would have been written down, it always was somewhere handy. Generally on a back page of an address book or on a piece of paper hidden in a book or under a blotter or even taped somewhere handy. But in this case I got a cheerful loading page and I was in.

First things first. I went to the start menu and then connected and disconnected the Internet. Apparently the office ran off a password-coded wireless router somewhere. But that wasn’t important right now; first I had some work to do.

There were two forms in a file labelled legal forms, one a generic letter with Reynolds’s name, address and so on designed to be cut and pasted into an email to a target. It ended with the typical: “This communication, including its attachments, if any, is confidential and intended only for the person(s) to whom it is addressed, and may contain proprietary and/or privileged material. Any unauthorized review, disclosure, copying, other distribution of this communication or taking of any action in reliance on its contents is strictly prohibited …”

Then a second letter, this one more formal and designed to be attached. It began with a rude little:

Attention: (insert name)

Dear Mr./Mrs./Ms. (insert name)

Re: (Action—Defamation/Libel/etc.)

Please be advised that we are counsel for Mr./Mrs./Ms. (client).

We are informed by Mr./Mrs./Ms. (client) that you have been … etc.

And then lots and lots of space for whatever incomprehensible legal mumbo-jumbo was necessary. It ended with:

I trust that this formal notification shall suffice to prevent any … etc.

Yours truly,

Reynolds and Lake
LLP

Per:

Alastair Reynolds

(in a fake computerized signature and then typed) and CC at the very bottom.

This was going to be easy.

First I copied the letters a few dozen times and then I opened up Alastair’s address book and cut and pasted until my fingers were sore. Now each letter was addressed to one of Reynolds’s business associates and clients and claimed they were defaming Cornelius Devanter. With that done I fired up the Internet Explorer and cut and pasted email messages and attached letters to them for another hour.

Each time I hit “send” and each time the Explorer did not send as it was not connected to the Internet. But it stored each letter and attachment.

And as soon as the Internet was fixed the letters would all go out.

And the shit would hit the fan.

So much fun.

I shut down the computer and put it back in place. Then I tossed the secretary’s desk and found her list of passwords in a file neatly labelled “Pass Codes” in her desk. The code for the wireless connection was “Beelzebub” so I memorized it and put everything back where it belonged. Only then did I climb back into the ceiling and make my way to the closet. There I settled in uncomfortably to wait.

At 7:00 the guard came into the bathroom and peed.

Thirty minutes later two young men came in and I could hear them arguing about who had gotten more drunk the night before. When they left I pulled off my stocking mask and came out of the closet to find the coast was clear. I was at risk for a few seconds while I rearranged the cleaning supplies I’d moved but then I was done. In the farthest toilet stall I pulled off both pairs of gloves and cleaned myself up with wet paper towels and duct tape and stuffed everything into another garbage bag. I put that garbage bag into my shirt to give me a fat belly.

Then I left, heading back through the garage and fixing the door with one hand as I went.

I
got minor grief from Claire and Elena who were both sitting in my kitchen, drinking coffee and chatting about nothing in particular.

“Hey-hey, the missing link returns.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“You first.”

I kissed Claire and hugged Elena and they both wrinkled their noses. Elena said, “You smell foul.”

I had changed back into my normal clothes in the alley after retrieving my wallet and so on. She was right; I did smell foul from having my clothes lying in the garbage. “Meetings with business people. Too long without a shower.”

“Ah.” She pulled a sheet of paper towards her and wrote, “
Anything?
”

I shook my head and said, “That’s where I’m heading. What about Fred?”

Claire answered, “Veronica is bringing him to work with her.”

Elena got up to leave. “Work calls. Thanks, Claire.”

She smiled and it was lopsided. “Anytime.”

I went into the shower and scrubbed off the filth. Then Claire joined me and that worked better than coffee at waking me up.

Because I had to work though I also chugged a pot when I was finally dry.

Brenda, Dean and I hit the west end of the city. More walking and talking. More worries about rising crime rates and rising taxes and no one wanted to hear that the crime rates were falling. And no one wanted to know I could do nothing about the taxes.

Every little while Brenda or Dean would go make phone calls and once I did a radio interview via cell phone while sitting at a park bench, eating a smokie dog with relish and mustard. At my feet a narrow creek ran towards a bigger one and a dead fat-headed fish caught in bulrush stems swayed in the current. Clustered around its eyes and anus were a legion of crayfish and water beetles eating their way in to where the good stuff was located.

“My opponent is too close to the police. Over the past five years, since he’s retired, he’s attended …” Dean mouthed the number eight to me. “Eight police funerals around the country. He is a member of four fraternal police organizations and still banks at the Police Credit Union. Do you expect him to be dispassionate when it comes to his brothers in blue?”

The interviewer yammered on for a while and then I got my turn. “Actually, ‘brother’ is his term. And it’s good that he still has that loyalty. But a police commission requires a dispassionate, logical and doubting point of view. And that Mr. Illyanovitch does not possess. Hell, he’s refused to testify against fellow police officers three times in the past for various reasons.”

Dean nodded vigorously. He was good at finding out information, very good indeed.

“My final message is vote for me. Vote for change.”

The host thanked me and hung up and I went back to more walking and more talking.

At six a four-door sedan without whitewalls and with way too many antennas showed up and Sergeant Osserman got out. For a second I just stared at his skull face and puppy-dog brown eyes and wanted to kill him or main him but the feeling passed.

“Mr. Haaviko.”

“Hello, Sergeant Osserman. And how are you?”

“Good. Can we talk for a bit? Maybe in the car? The mosquitoes are biting something fierce.”

They were. I was still getting used to Manitoba mosquitoes. They seemed more persistent than any others I’d run into over the years. But a rule with cops is never to get into a car with them, never to get into any space they controlled, so I suggested we talk right where we were.

“Just wondering about the bracelet. Any more packages from the guy?”

“Not a one. Have you found out anything new?”

His bland little brown eyes focussed on mine and he lied, “Nothing, nothing at all.”

Osserman had nothing else to say and he stood there on the sidewalk and looked off into the distance. I wondered how he had found me and decided he could have called either Dean or Brenda or he could have had me followed. I didn’t really have a third option.

Finally I turned to him. “Mr. Osserman, I never had a chance to ask you; what do you think of me running for the commission?”

Osserman shrugged. “Not much. I’m not political.”

“No opinions on it at all?”

“Not really. I’m not sure how much the commission actually does. But I wish you luck.”

“Really?”

He gave a tight-lipped smile. “Yes, really.”

Then he left and I stood there and finally decided I believed him. Brenda and Dean had kept about ten feet away during the conversation and now they wandered back slowly.