Deadline (36 page)

Mike stared at him. “So you don’t know what you’re looking for.”

“No,” Jack said. “Not really. I don’t know what I’m looking for. You’re right.”

“Because it’s sad, eh, for me to get talking about it,” Mike said, avoiding Jack’s gaze. “I mean, Rena. Maybe you should talk to my dad, eh? He is more used to talking to reporters and that. For an interview. Maybe you should talk to him.”

“I’d like to do that,” said Jack. “I read some articles about him. He sounds like quite a man.”

The microwave dinged.

“There’s my supper,” said Mike. He got up and took out his dinner.

“My dad made this,” he said. “Moose stew. Want a taste?”

Jack was going to say no thanks, but changed his mind.

“Jeez, it does look good,” he said. He got a plastic fork from the counter and took a bite. It was rich and the moose meat was tender and falling apart.

“Damn, that’s good. It’s been a while since I had moose stew,” he said. “My old man makes it too. Adds salt pork.”

“My father cooks it with bacon and adds a bit of wine, eh,” said Mike.

Jack pulled out his notebook. “I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to lose your sister. I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “I won’t quote you, or use your name without your permission. If I do write a story, I’ll interview your father for any quotes. All I want is to know what happened. There are no court documents, since the guy who killed her never made it to trial.”

“That was the Indian Posse,” said Mike.

“Indian Posse?” said Jack. “What’s that, a gang?”

Mike looked at him as if he were dumb. “Yeah,” he said. “Big gang. Operates in Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Saskatoon, Winnipeg. They’re on every rez in western Canada.”

“They killed this Chinese guy, Ling Cho Wi? Why? ’Cause he killed a native girl?”

Mike laughed. “Man, they don’t give a fuck,” he said. “No. My cousin runs with them in Edmonton. He told me they got a contract to do it. Couple of Chinese gangbangers from Vancouver came to Edmonton, paid the Posse to kill the Chinese guy.”

“Why would they do that?”

“My cousin didn’t know why.” Mike shrugged. “Posse doesn’t care why.”

“You don’t know who the Chinese guys were?” said Jack.

“You not gonna say I told you this, right? I can’t talk about any of this shit in the paper.”

“No,” said Jack. “No. No. No. No way. Don’t worry.”

“Okay then. I don’t know who the Chinese guys were. I bet the Indian Posse doesn’t know either. Chinese guys with money. That’s who they were.”

“What happened to Rena?” Jack asked. “The newspaper stories don’t say anything about the crime.”

Mike put down his fork. “It’s sad, eh? We thought she was turning her life around. She was, too, but every now and then she’d want to party. Loved to party, rez-style, all the fucking way, man.” He bit his lip and looked away. “She didn’t have no pimp or nothing. She’d just decide she had been a good girl too long and she needed to have a party, and she’d go down to the Oilman with some of her bad girlfriends.”

He stared right at Jack. He wasn’t touching his stew.

“So she picked this guy up at the Oiler. They have a few drinks, go back to his room. It looks like she did him, right, and then he wanted her to go. She wanted more money than he gave her. That is what the cops think. And my sister, boy, you don’t fucking fuck with her if she’s been drinking and try to rip her off. She was a tough lady with a bad temper. So I guess they started to fight or whatever. He probably tried to slap her around, and then she went fucking bananas, and it got out of hand. He was all bruised, like she got in some jabs, eh? But he stabbed her twice, once in the arm and once in the eye. She died right away. Was all bloody in there, eh?” He spoke in a flat, mechanical tone. Jack could see a vein in his temple throbbing and his jaw muscles working but his face was expressionless.

“How do you know all this?” asked Jack.

“The Mounties, Gushue and Brecker, they told me and Dad some, but after Brecker left the force, started working down Showgirls, he told my cousin the nasty stuff.”

“Same cousin?”

“No,” Mike said, and laughed again. “I got lots of cousins.”

“Who’s Brecker?”

“Dwayne Brecker, was a Mountie until last year. He left the force and went to work down at Showgirls, the big strip bar here. I think he got in trouble, eh, and had to get out. Drugs or something.”

“And now he works at a strip bar?”

“Showgirls, baby!” said Mike. “Big deal up here. Owned by the Hells Angels.”

“This guy used to be a Mountie and now he works for the Angels? He investigated your sister’s murder?”

Mike picked up his fork. “Yeah,” he said. “Funny, eh?”

Flanagan transferred half the video files – the more recent ones – to Ashton’s laptop, and they moved to a conference room and started watching them, trying to figure out what they had.

There were thirty files, dating back over six months, roughly one a week. Most of them were long recordings – more than eight hours, sometimes longer – with static shots of the empty bedroom, or the darkened room with Ed and Sophie sleeping. The angle never changed, and there was no sound. In most of the recordings there was a single sexual encounter before they turned out the lights and went to sleep, then, near the end of the recording, footage of them getting ready for work.

Flanagan and Ashton sat side by side, clicking ahead through the videos.

“It looks like he turns it on before they go to bed and turns it off in the morning,” said Flanagan. “Probably while she’s in the shower.”

“I think she was being honest with us,” said Ashton. “I don’t think she had any idea he was recording this stuff. Look at this.”

Ashton had found a recording where Sophie went into the room by herself, lifted her skirt and inserted a tampon.

“I don’t know how far to believe Mlle. Fortin,” said Ashton. “I don’t like the fact that she won’t tell us who her gentleman caller was. But there’s no way she knew the camera was there. I don’t think a girl would ever do that if she knew she was being recorded.”

Flanagan looked at the scene.

“Christ,” he said. “Poor thing. She picked a winner. Secretly taping himself with his girlfriend so he can admire himself later and jerk off. Little fucker.”

“If I found out some guy I was seeing was secretly recording me, I’d cut off his nuts,” Ashton said. “With a butter knife.”

Ashton’s jaw was set and her eyes were hard as she watched Sophie tidy up the bedroom.

“So what are we looking for?” said Flanagan. “There are what, a hundred hours of video here.”

Ashton turned from the screen. “We should make a catalogue, a list of all the recordings, watch them all on fast forward, note the times that anything happens, see what we have.”

Jack had to wait in a line to get into Showgirls, shivering and smoking on the sidewalk in the glow of the flashing neon sign. In front of him were three young men in ball caps and ski jackets, chatting in thick outport accents about how much money they were making, and how much they wanted to get laid. “My son, the crack of dawn better watch out around me,” said one of them.

Before long, a group of very drunk men came out the door and staggered to their trucks. The bouncers let Jack and the baymen into the bar, where they paid five bucks each for the coat check and stepped into the steaming main room. There were a couple hundred men inside, sitting at cheap tables covered in drinks and spilled booze. Waitresses carrying loaded trays, and strippers in tiny outfits moved through the crowd.

Jack squeezed up to the bar, ordered a beer and leaned back against the bar to take in the scene.

A statuesque black girl was finishing her dance on the stage, naked, sprawled on her back, touching herself to a rap song.

“Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Crystal,” said a muffled voice over the loudspeaker. Jack clapped.

A stripper in a florescent blue bikini smiled at him. “Hi,” she said. “Where you from?”

“Ottawa,” he said. “How about you?”

“I’m from Edmonton. What’s your name?”

“Jack,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Carrie,” she said. “Want a dance?”

She was in her early twenties, with a lithe, athletic body and bright blonde hair, but her eyes were glassy, with enlarged irises, and her smile came out of a pill bottle. She put her hand on his shoulder and rubbed her breasts lightly against him.

“How much is it?” he asked.

“Thirty dollars a dance.” That was ten dollars more than at Pigale.

“Jeez,” he said. “You girls must be making out pretty good up here. How much of that do you get to keep?”

She frowned, pulled away and glanced at the back of the room, to the entrance to the VIP room, where dancers and customers did their private dances.

“Hey, how long you been in town?” asked Jack. “Do you know Rena Redcloud?”

She smiled at him vaguely and wandered off to approach a group of young guys at a nearby table. She was soon sitting on one guy’s knee.

Jack took his beer and walked back to the entrance of the VIP area, where a massive, bearded guy in a T-shirt and leather vest stood guard.

“How’s it going?” Jack said to him. He had to holler to be heard over the music, and lean into the guy.

“Very good sir,” the bearded guy said. “You looking for a dance? You have a girl in mind?”

“No,” said Jack. “I’m looking to have a chat with Dwayne Brecker.”

The guy’s smile froze. Jack took in his massive arms and chest, and the tribal tattoos on his forearms, and the ghost of an old scar on his cheek. Jack was standing close enough to smell him.

“If it’s about business, you should call during business hours to make an appointment,” the guard said.

Jack smiled and nodded. He stood beside the guy, looking at the room. A new girl – a curvy blonde – was on all fours, stripping out of her thong and leering over her shoulder at a row of guys sitting next to the stage.

Jack leaned in to talk to the guard again, and tucked a twenty-dollar bill into the breast pocket of his leather vest. “Tell you what, I’d really like to talk to Dwayne tonight if possible,” he said. “I’ll go have a beer at the bar. You tell him a guy named Jack Macdonald is here to see him about Rena Redcloud. Mike Redcloud sent me. If he can find a minute, I’ll be at the bar. If he can’t, I’ll call tomorrow. Okay?”

The bouncer looked at him for a minute and nodded. “Don’t hold your breath,” he said.

Jack laughed and walked back to the bar. He ordered another beer and tried to drink it slowly. When a gap-toothed brunette in lingerie came up to chat with him, he said, “No thanks. No dance for me. Tell me, do you know Rena Redcloud?” She left quickly.

Jack watched the dancers, and the knots of drunk men in their party shirts. The girls would approach them, flirt a bit, then lead one off to the room at the back. Jack tried to amuse himself by guessing which guy would go for which girl, but it was a depressing spectacle. The customers and dancers all pretended to be interested in each other as people, when they were all engaged in a base, impersonal exchange of money for a pale imitation of sex.

He was not immune from desire, himself, and pondered taking one of the girls into the back. Maybe he could see where Brecker’s office was. While he was thinking about that, the best-looking stripper he’d seen all night walked up to him. She was wearing stilettos, a miniskirt and a black silk top that left her midriff bare. Her breasts were high and plump, and her stomach taut but slightly rounded. He found it hard to tear his eyes away from the top of her miniskirt, where the irresistible slope of her belly inclined to her groin. She smiled at him coolly from a distance and tossed her hair back. She didn’t look stoned.

Yes, I will have a dance, thought Jack, smiling at her.

She leaned in to him and said, “Jack Macdonald? You want to see Dwayne?”

He nodded and followed her swaying hips to the back of the room. They walked past the enormous bearded guard, into the hallway to the VIP room. She pressed a buzzer next to a heavy steel door and waited. The man who opened the door was tall and rugged-looking, with a salt and pepper goatee and shoulder-length hair. He was wearing a black sports jacket, black jeans and an open-necked white dress shirt. The jacket looked wrong on him somehow, because his upper body was so large, even though the cut was right, it gave him a boxy, exaggerated look. His brown eyes were hard. His mouth was a narrow slit.