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No kidding. Especially the torture part.

“What did you find?”

Kara snickered. “A lot. There was a huge
safe. Took a while to get through, and a lot of tools. Warren was keeping
accounts in there, everything from shipping records to inventory and profits,
to a list of all the players and their roles. More than enough for the warrants
we needed. Davidson had started years ago, and when he moved to Toronto as
Inspector he stayed on the payroll. He was apparently still helping to move the
product through the Toronto area, as well as keeping tabs on people.”

She reached over to the left side of her
desk and moved some papers. There was a new copy of the Toronto Star newspaper
under the pile.

“We checked his logs, he was the one that
got into your file. Into the Jeffries case.”

She handed me the paper and there I was
above the fold. It was an OPP photo of me, in uniform, taken a couple of years
ago. And above it was the headline: “Celebrated OPP Officer Responsible For
Decades Old Murder”.

Oh well, there was little I could do about
it. I’d take a look at it later, see if they at least got their facts right.
But it wasn’t a murder, it was a killing.

There was a difference.

Kat looked aghast but I gave her a simple
look that said not to worry about it. It would be a little while before we’d
have to explain it to the kids, and we’d have time to figure out how best to
word it.

“What’s that?” I said. A pile of documents
with FBI letterhead had gotten my attention.

“One of the people on Warren’s list was an
Ohio State Trooper, Jeremiah Dawson. He was found shot to death six months ago
but it was never solved. He was marked on the list as being a ‘procurer’—it was
his job to locate the drugs and guns that would be shipped across the border.
There were a few other American cops in there too.”

“You think one of our guys killed him?”

“I think it was Warren. I checked with CBSA
and he was the only one who crossed the border at that time. Went over at the
Windsor-Detroit crossing the day before, came back the night of the killing.”

Canada Border Services Agency. Paired with
the US border patrol, they were responsible for the almost nine thousand
kilometres of borders—not to mention handling international airports as well as
seaports.

“I’m trying to remember, but doesn’t Ohio
still have the death penalty?”

Kara smiled. “Exactly. We may need to have
a chat with Warren, see if he might want to strike a deal instead of facing
death row. But first, we have some warrants to execute.”

I looked at Kat who’d been following along
somewhat. “I need you to stay here. You’ll be safe. Call Chen and have him pick
you up once he’s released from Vic. You guys can find us a place to stay.”

Kat nodded. “Be careful, Lincoln.”

I almost said ‘always’, then I realized
just how much of a lie that would have been.

* * *

“You’re sure about this?”

“Definitely, Simpson won’t be home. We can
at least take down Templeton.” It was a tough choice, a cop killer versus a
corrupt judge, but I knew Simpson was long gone.

We’d find him later.

“Alright,” Kara said, apprehension in her
voice. “I can’t believe we’re arresting a judge. He’s tried a few of my cases.”

“Mine too. Seemed like one of the more reasonable
ones. But with what Warren’s got, he was cutting loose any of the criminals
they were paying. Or anyone who knew what was going on.”

Silence was easily bought for a seriously
reduced sentence or no sentence at all. Warren’s records were meticulous,
despite the fact that keeping them was his downfall. It was his insurance
policy, a pile of information to bargain his way to a lighter sentence.

There were a number of names of people set
free by Templeton. It didn’t take long to verify the records and see that most
had been given a stay of proceedings—basically a stalled trial that would never
be restarted.

We were ready to move. Templeton’s home was
only a couple of minutes away from our staging area. We set into motion, Kara
and I in an unmarked car, two OPP Constables, an OPP Staff Sergeant and a
London Police Staff Sergeant. Templeton’s house was in London, in the north end
with a number of other homes worth more than I’d ever see.

We arrived out front at 11:59am, ready to
move in. The three warrants—Templeton, Simpson and Davidson—were all set to be
executed at the exact same time, two by us with London’s assistance and one by
Toronto OPP with the help of the Toronto Police Service.

Our arrival had already been noticed. The
front door had been open when we pulled up but was closed almost immediately
followed a few seconds later by the upstairs blinds. A slight gap was visible—we
were being watched.

Kara and I approached the door while the
two Constables went to the rear of the house. We had two warrants, one to
search the residence and seize evidence and one to arrest. The arrest warrant
was Feeney endorsed—thanks to some bad case law involving an accused named
Feeney, we now needed a special warrant to be able to enter a person’s home to
arrest them. With the endorsement we could kick down the door if we needed to.

I knocked loudly on the door.

“Ontario Provincial Police.”

There was no response and the door was
locked.

“We have a warrant to enter.”

Still nothing.

I leaned back and prepared to breach the
door when a gunshot stopped me dead in my tracks. It had come from an upstairs
bedroom.

“Fall back,” Kara yelled, already a few
feet behind me.

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t meant for us.” I
repositioned myself and drove my foot into the door just below the handle. The
door creaked and cracked but didn’t open. A second kick sent it swinging
inward.

Kara already had her gun drawn and mine
soon followed. We cleared to the sound of the gunshot, moving carefully up the
stairs. The hallway was empty and it didn’t sound like there was anyone else
home. Only one room had a light on and we moved toward the source.

The door was ajar and as I peeked in I saw
what I had been expecting—the Honourable Justice Peter Templeton, lying on his
bed with a pistol in his hand, blood and brain matter dripping from the ceiling
above him.

“I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE IT,” she said, her
hands buried in her face.

“I’m so sorry, Grace. If I’d known it would
have ended up like this, I would’ve done things differently.”

She lifted her head and looked into my
eyes, her own red and wet from crying. “I know, Lincoln. He really respected
you, did you know that?”

I nodded.

“And I know you respected him, too. I never
would have thought, not in a million years, he’d be doing something like this.”

I looked around the house at the expensive
artwork and furniture, the ginormous plasma TV mounted on the wall, the XBOX
360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii below it, and the massive surround sound
system—7.2 judging by the number of speakers.

There was an espresso machine on the
counter, high-end stainless steel appliances in the kitchen. My eyes and
palette were now focused on the liquor cabinet, one of the ones with the
fold-out service tray. The tray was down, crystal lowball glasses ready for use
sat in front of a four hundred dollar bottle of scotch—Glenfiddich Speyside
Single Malt, aged thirty years.

Grace must have seen me looking as she
stood up and poured a small amount into the bottom of a glass—neat, just the
way I liked it. There was a possibility the bottle could be considered proceeds
of crime, if it had been purchased with dirty money—but there would be no way
to prove that. And there’d likely never be another chance for me to try such an
expensive scotch.

I swirled the glass and inhaled, scents of
orange rind, berry and oak filled my nose. The first sip was incredible, oak
and malt with hints of treacle and honey. It was something I would likely never
taste again.

“Did you wonder where George was getting
the money for all of this?”

“I asked him, but he said he was doing some
hire-ons—usually Friday nights.” The nights the shipments came in. “And he was
really good at online poker.”

I was floored. George? Good at online
poker? We’d played a few games with some of the other detectives here and there
and George was always the first one out. He was a terrible player with an
obvious tell—biting his lower lip. Maybe because it was online and no one could
see him, maybe that’s why he’d done well.

Except there was that one time he cleaned
us out, but everyone including George marked that one down as a fluke.

“Where does he keep his credit card
statements?”

“I’m not sure. He has an office upstairs.
There’s a file cabinet in there, but it’s locked.”

“Do you mind if I take a look?”

She nodded and gestured toward the stairs.
I hadn’t been to the house in a couple of years but I still remembered it well.
Although the last time I was here, the decorating was Spartan in comparison. I
made my way upstairs to the office and sat down in George’s chair. The room was
well-kept and ordered, nothing out of place.

The desk was decorated with a number of
family photos, George and Grace on an anniversary cruise, and a number of the
whole family—Toby, short for Tobias, and Carla, their son and daughter, were
both living in Toronto now, Toby was in med school and Carla in business. I
noticed another picture, partially obscured by the others. It was in a simple
black frame, less ornate than the ones that held the family photos. When I
lifted it I was surprised to see who it was of.

George and I, a fourteen-pound walleye
dangling from a hook between us. It had been a well-earned trip after a long
and arduous murder investigation four years ago. We decided on a trip to the
Kawartha Lakes area for one of the most famous fish in Ontario. Nothing beats
cooking a walleye on an open fire. And when George caught that fish, anglers
from all around us were cramming in to take a look. It was pounds short of the
record, but still one hell of a fish.

I felt so guilty sitting in that chair, a
picture of us in my hands. George’s death wasn’t my fault, but I shouldered the
blame anyway.

“Find anything?”

Grace was at the door looking in.

“Not yet.”

She smiled. “He loved that picture. Always
talked about how great a time he had on that trip. I kept telling him to do it
again and I knew he wanted to, but it wasn’t long after that he got promoted
and transferred back to the street.”

And that was about when George and I lost
track of each other, except for the occasional run-in in the hallways. I needed
to change the subject before I too was reduced to a pile of tears. The file
cabinet was tucked beneath the desk and a quick tug backed up what Grace had
said—it was locked.

“Do you have any bobby pins?”

She looked surprised but pulled one out of
her hair and handed it to me. I slid it into the keyhole and hoped that the
lock was as cheap as it looked. It was something I’d done once before when I’d
lost the keys to my Sentry safe at home.

A little pressure upward against the pins
and some clockwise tension, then a jiggle here and there. After a minute or so
the lock turned and I pulled the drawer open. The files were as organized as
the rest of the room and it didn’t take me long to find what it was I was looking
for.

Financial records. I leafed through a
number of files and documents. Grace stood in the doorway, too far away to see
the fine print.

“Did you and George deal with the finances
together?”

“No, he took care of everything.”

I hated to be the bearer of bad news, but
better from a friend than a cold and heartless banker.

I handed her a stack of papers. “These are
his credit card records. It looks like he had four credit cards and each one
was maxed out, about fifty grand between them.” Every line was the same—epoker.com.
“He wasn’t winning Grace, he was losing.”

She shook her head and her sorrow turned to
anger. “That son of a bitch, how was he paying for everything then?”

The statements showed a lot of money being
spent but a few times George had paid off cards in one fell swoop. Maybe he was
winning, just a lot less than he needed to be. The next pile of documents I
handed her were worse.

“These look like they’re for your savings
account,” I said.

Grace dropped to the floor, tears streaming
from her face. “How could he? It’s all gone.”

I stood up and stepped toward her, putting
my hand on her shoulder.

“There was over two hundred thousand
dollars in there, from when my mom died. It was to pay for school for Toby and
Carla. How am I going to pay for it now?”

There was nothing for me to say so I just
stood there, my hand resting gently on her shoulder as if that was enough to
comfort her.

“He wasn’t a bad person, Grace. He just had
an addiction. That’s how these guys work, whether it’s crooked cops or organized
crime. If they can find a decent cop who needs money for whatever reason, they
can use that to recruit them.”

She nodded but didn’t say a thing.

I stepped back to shut the file drawer and
noticed something that had been hidden before—the files I’d pulled out had
revealed it.

Pill bottles. I reached in and pulled them
out then looked at the labels. Valium, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Prozac, Clonazepam.
Some were recent, some expired.

“What are they?”

The dates ranged from having been filled
last week to over two and a half years ago. “Anti-depressants and anti-anxiety
meds. He’d been on them for a long time.”

The tears came back. “God, how could I not
have known?”

“He must have hid it well. George was never
the type to show any sort of weakness. The depression might have triggered the
spending sprees, then he might have started gambling to try to win the money
back, and then…”

I didn’t need to finish the thought. It was
obvious what the gambling had led to.

“When are the kids going to be here?”

She looked up, sniffled and wiped her
tears. “Later today. They’re taking the train. They were going to rent a car,
but I didn’t want them driving. They’d be too distracted.”

“Do you want me to stay until they get
here?”

“It’s okay, I know you have more work to
do.”

“I can stay, Grace. I don’t mind at all.”

“No, go back out there. Get them for this,
okay? And Lincoln, please don’t blame yourself. He made his choice.”

She was right. And did George know I was in
there, being tortured before they intended to execute me? I wanted to believe
that he didn’t, but he must have known. Before I closed the file drawer I
noticed a small device that had been hidden by the pill bottles—an electronic
voice changer.

It had been George that called me—he’d
tried to get me to back off. For both of our sakes.

* * *

“Any leads on Simpson?”

“What? No hello?”

“Sorry, but not in the mood, Kara.” I had
just made it back to the detachment and everything was still weighing heavily
on me. “I was at George’s.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Link. I didn’t know.”

“How could you? I didn’t tell you, I didn’t
tell anyone. I just took off as soon as I could after Templeton’s.”

“You shouldn’t even be here, not after what
you’ve been through.”

She was probably right. My left hand was in
a cast, my neck stitched and bandaged along with my chest and thigh, I swore I
could still smell the burnt flesh left behind by the Taser—and my balls still
ached occasionally. Stairs were the worst.

“I have to see this through…”

For George, for me, for Kat, for Link and
Kasia, for you Kara, your mother, and for Carter and Laura and their now
fatherless son. The dead didn’t suffer—at least not that I believed. It was the
survivors that suffered, the guilt and the loss tore at them in ways they could
never imagine. Even little Noah, who would never even remember his father, he’d
never escape what had happened. So many lives had been destroyed and for what,
money? That’s all they were getting out of their schemes.

Money.

Along with the nearly four hundred guns we
seized from the warehouse—pistols, shotguns and rifles—were hand grenades,
three kilograms of cocaine, one of heroin, seven of marijuana, half a key of
crack and over a thousand tabs of ecstasy. And then there was the hundred and
seventy-five thousand dollars in cash—Canadian and American—found in Warren’s
safe.

With London facing the worst unemployment
crisis in years—one of the worst of major cities in Canada—there were soon to
be a lot more unemployed people now that a major cartel had been shut down. Of
course I didn’t feel too badly about drug runners losing their source of
income. And a lot of them were soon to be in custody thanks to Warren’s record
books.

“Lost in thought?”

“What? Yeah, sorry.”

“It’s all right, said your name twice but
got nothing.”

I gave Kara a weak smile.

“We’ve got nothing on where Simpson could
be. His house was empty and there was nothing there to go off of. We’ve got a
BOLO out on his car but so far no one has seen it.”

I was about to tell Kara we’d find him
eventually but her phone ringing interrupted me.

“Detective Jameson. Yeah. Okay. Really?
Only me? I don’t know about that. It’s a major conflict. Everything? Okay, I’ll
be right there.”

She hung up the phone and looked at me with
more apprehension than I had ever seen in her eyes.

“Warren’s lawyer. He wants to give us a
full confession, everything on the record.” She paused. “But he’ll only talk to
me. His lawyer said he’s going to plead to everything and the lawyer has no
issue with me taking the statement.”

“Trying to avoid a death sentence in the
States?”

“Probably.”

“Is he out at EMDC now?” The
Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre. Where accused criminals sat to await trial.
Kara nodded. “Then let’s go.”

* * *

We were at the EMDC twenty minutes later.
We showed our IDs at the door, locked up our weapons and were buzzed inside.
Warren was already waiting for us in an interview room. Kara didn’t say a word
to him as we stepped in, just went about setting up the video camera we’d
borrowed from the station.

“Him too?” Warren said, his eyes fixed on
me.

“You have a problem with that? I’m not
sitting in here with you solo.”

“The guards are right outside, he can wait
with them.”

Kara looked at him and didn’t blink. Warren
was first to break the stare. “He stays or I leave,” she said.

Warren thought for a moment then lowered
his head. “Fine. Let’s just get this over with.”

Kara turned on the video camera and went
through Warren’s right to counsel, caution and secondary caution as well as the
obvious fact that everything was being audio and video recorded. The rights
were simple, right to speak to a lawyer, caution was his right to remain silent
and the fact that anything he said could be used in court, secondary caution
meant that nothing was to influence him into making a statement. As a former
cop, he knew all of this already. But we had to cover it off, legalities and
all.