Deadline (4 page)

Colin cut to the right, past the entrance, and hopped over a narrow drainage culvert. If his calculations were correct, he should pop out only a few yards from the main path. He crept carefully up a short rise and peeked around a large maple tree.

Yep. There they were. He could see the cops in their bulky hazmat suits moving around in the trees only about 30 feet away. Moving carefully, he pulled out his camera and began taking a few shots. He didn’t have a telephoto lens attached, just a standard 35 to 70 mm, so he wasn’t able to get as much detail as he would have liked. Still, it was better than nothing. Some of the staff reporters just used cell phone cameras, which Colin considered handy for taking blurry pictures of embarrassing behaviour to be posted on social networking sites, but absolutely useless for news photography.

He zoomed in as much as he could, panning around and working the focus to try to get an idea of what they were looking at. He was paying so much attention to the cops that he almost missed the image on the tree. The red stood out so sharply on the bright white bark, however, that he immediately stopped and panned back.

He could only see part of it. It looked like part of a circle. Whatever it was, the cops had certainly noticed it, too. Three of them moved into position directly in front of it, blocking Colin’s sightline.

“Shit,” he hissed, angling his head to try and get a better view. He wasn’t going to get it from here, though. The stupid hazmat suits they were wearing were too damn bulky. Colin looked to see if there was anywhere he could move that would offer a better angle, but the cops had the whole thing blocked off and showed no signs of moving. The only way he’d be able to see whatever it was would be to get into one of those red suits and sneak up there himself.

Unless…

D
etective Francine Giordino’s phone rang while she was in the shower.

A predictable amount of noise and self-congratulatory back patting had happened when she had been named the first female homicide detective for the Westhill police department only five months before. The department and indeed the city in general didn’t have the best record when it came to hiring women and minorities. A similar experiment in hiring the first female fire fighter two years before had led to accusations of repeated harassment, stress leave and a lawsuit that had been quietly settled out of court.

The police department didn’t do much better when it came to crime, either. Its 22 per cent closure rate for violent crimes placed it dead last in the province and third worst nationwide. In Westhill, people committed crimes with the knowledge that they had at least a 78 per cent chance of never being caught. And, of the ones who were, the odds didn’t exactly nosedive: only 34 per cent of arrests led to convictions.

Giordino had no illusions about changing that, certainly not single-handedly, but she was determined that her numbers would be different. Her first case had been a fairly open and shut drug killing. A leadership vacuum had been created when an ordinary patrol car had tried to pull over the leader of a west side drug gang for speeding. Said leader had 75 kilos of heroin in the trunk at the time and decided that he didn’t want to be pulled over, so he took off, lost control on wet roads and challenged the physical law that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time by ramming into a tractor trailer going the other way at a combined speed of 215 kph, instantly killing himself and the woman with whom he was travelling. One of the contenders for the freshly vacated CEO position decided to narrow the competition by breaking into the apartment of his nearest rival and putting 17 bullets where most of his frontal lobe used to be. In the process, he was seen by no fewer than eight witnesses, left fingerprints all over the scene, and used the same weapon he had discharged during the commission of a liquor store robbery only two weeks earlier. Giordino had tracked him down and put him in lockup almost before his victim’s body had been transferred to the morgue.

The second one hadn’t been quite such a dunker. A retired widow had burned to death in her townhouse due to what preliminary findings seemed to indicate was a cigarette that hadn’t been properly extinguished. The woman was on prescription sleep medication and painkillers due to recent hip replacement surgery and had probably nodded off in a stupor before stubbing out her final puff. The investigation took an interesting turn when they found out she didn’t smoke. Never had, in fact. But her son did. Her son who owed $175,000 after his drywalling business tanked. Her son who was the sole beneficiary on her life insurance policy and hadn’t been getting along with her so well lately since she’d refused to bankroll his next great entrepreneurial idea: a combination tanning salon and tattoo parlour. Her son, after a lot of legwork and 14 separate forensic reports, was now sharing living accommodations with a child pornographer and a former grow-op baron while awaiting trial.

Of the three others she had investigated, two had been ruled accidents (or “death by misadventure” as the coroner liked to put it) and one was determined to be a suicide.

Her mother was the reason she had become a cop. Nathalie Giordino had worked as a claims investigator for an insurance company. Listening to her mom talk about all the strange and twisted schemes people concocted—staged accidents, phony medical records, imaginary rehab centres—had been her first exposure to the criminal element, and she was immediately hooked. Even at ten years old, her sense of moral outrage was sharp.
What made people think they could get away with things like that?

She majored in criminology and law at U of T before going through the hiring process with the Westhill PD, which had taken a year. Her time as a patrol constable had been an eye-opening experience for both sides. Any perp who thought she had been hired to fill out a quota and that the five-foot-four-inch woman with blonde hair and steely grey eyes was an easy target quickly learned that she didn’t spend three nights a week studying mixed martial arts for nothing.

Her department bosses were slower on the uptake. When she had become a detective, they had paired her with George Betts, a lazy Neanderthal of a man one special investigations unit probe away from forced early retirement. Betts had been the ostensible lead investigator on all of the cases she had worked so far, but, as far as Giordino could tell, the only investigating Betts had done was looking for loose change under the front seat of his cruiser.

Giordino jumped out of the shower, grabbed a towel and padded into the bedroom to grab the phone, careful not to slip on the uneven hardwood floor. Her condo building had been converted from an old appliance factory that had been closed for ten years before the builder had started work. She liked the fact that it was close to downtown, but there had been something of a rush to get it ready on time and some of the finishing details left a lot to be desired. Her husband, Paul, was an elementary school teacher who also coached the school hockey team, which meant he was out the door most mornings at five. Today was supposed to be her day off. She was planning to call the builder to see if they ever planned to install the front-loading washer and dryer that was in the sale agreement and then go to the salon for a pedicure after lunch. Between spending most days on her feet and the MMA sessions, she was starting to develop calluses large enough to file their own independent disability claims.

When she saw the number on the call display, however, she had a feeling that the builder and her feet were going to have to wait.

C
olin pushed himself further out on the tree branch and reached carefully around for his camera.

He estimated that he was only about 15 feet off the ground, but it felt much higher. Colin had never been crazy about heights. He had only climbed one tree when he was a kid and had fallen out of it and sprained his elbow, after which any sense of fun or novelty had evaporated. It was like rock climbing. He didn’t understand why anyone would put themselves in a position where a moment’s inattention would be enough to get them killed.

The branch swayed and creaked under his weight. It looked solid enough, but he also knew that an environmental assessment had found that half the trees in the forest were infected with some sort of bark-rotting fungus. He had no idea if that made them more brittle, but the thought of it wasn’t filling him with a calming, peaceful feeling.

He brought the viewfinder up to his eye and did his best to focus with one hand while sort of gripping the branch between his elbows. He had a better view of the cops, but still wasn’t high enough to see what they were looking at.

Shit
.

He twisted and looked up at the branch above. It was about ten feet higher and barely thicker than his wrist. No way on earth was he going to trust his weight on that. Besides, there were hardly any leaves on it. If he climbed up there, he’d be totally visible to the people he was trying to spy on. It was bad enough that he already felt like a tabloid paparazzo trying to sneak a topless photo of a sunbathing royal; it would be far more embarrassing if he were caught doing it. Colin groaned and looked back through the lens.

At almost the same moment, one of the cops in a bulky red suit moved to the side. When Colin saw the image painted on the tree, he was so stunned that he almost forgot to take a picture. So stunned that he almost fell out of a tree for only the second time in his 24 years.

Colin quickly snapped off three pictures before the image was blocked again, this time by a large screen that some of the crime scene techs were moving into place to block the scene from view by the ECE centre, which was only a little further down the path. The kids in there were probably curious about all the commotion, If they looked out the windows, they’d see the police in red suits and probably think that aliens were sneaking through the forest to get them.

Colin scrambled quickly back down the tree to review the pictures. The first one was blurry, but the second one was better and the third was perfect. There was no mistaking what he was looking at. It was an image of a cross surrounded by two interlocking circles of what looked like barbed wire.

Exactly the same image painted on the box that was currently sitting on his desk.

Colin felt a jolt of adrenaline. He was suddenly breathing in short gasps. Whatever this meant, he wasn’t going to figure it out standing in the middle of the forest. Without another thought, he turned and ran at full speed back to the arts building.

By the time he reached the newsroom on the third floor, he was breathing so hard that he thought he might pass out.

I really need to get more exercise
, he thought.
Or any exercise at all.

The package was still sitting on the desk where he had left it. He hadn’t been imagining things, either. The image on the top was the same as the one painted on the tree.

He took a step towards the package and then stopped. Now that he was here, he wasn’t sure what to do. What he probably should do was not touch the thing, head straight back down the stairs and inform the cops that there was something up here they should probably take a look at. This was, after all, evidence. If he opened it, he could get himself into serious trouble.

Except they can’t prove that I know it’s evidence
, he thought. They had blocked off the scene. Officially, he had no way of knowing what had been painted on the tree. As far as they knew, this was just another weird package sent to the editor of a college newspaper. If he called them in now and handed it over, he’d probably never find out what was inside. It would disappear from view like every other part of the investigation. This would be their only chance to get the inside track on the case.

He took a cautious step forward. The image of the cross and wire was the only thing he could see on the outside of the package. There was no address and no postage. That meant it had been hand delivered. Colin felt a cold shiver. Whoever had done whatever it was that had cops combing through the woods in hazmat suits had also coolly strolled into the continuing ed office on the first floor and dropped this package in the newspaper’s internal mailbox.

Maybe I shouldn’t open it
, he thought.
This was sent here by somebody who is probably dangerously unhinged and apparently able to stroll these very hallways in total anonymity.

Exactly
, piped another voice.
And who are you going to rely on to track that person down? The cops? In this town? Now who’s the unhinged one? Most of the cops in this city can’t find their own cars in the police parking lot.

Colin vacillated back and forth for almost a minute before his natural curiosity got the better of him.

“Fuck it,” he said, reaching into the top drawer of the editor’s desk and pulling out an X-Acto knife. He picked up the box and examined it carefully. He didn’t see any wires or any white powder leaking out of it, so it probably wasn’t anthrax or a bomb. Besides, who would go to the trouble of a biological or explosive attack on a college newspaper? Especially
this
college newspaper. The fact that anyone would be angry enough with the
Westhill Sentinel
to attack it was so laughable that Colin couldn’t even bring himself to consider it. The only person he knew of who felt that way didn’t have to bomb the place—he had the authority to shut it down. Which he was already planning to do.

Holding the box in place with the knuckle of his left index finger, Colin cut an opening along three sides of the lid and then used the tip of the knife to flip it open.

Inside was a human hand that had been severed neatly at the wrist. It was ghostly white, which only made the tattoo on the back of the wrist stand out more sharply: a flaming eagle with a red star in the middle of its chest.

Colin staggered back and sat down heavily in a chair.
Oh my God
, he thought. He had seen that tattoo before. He knew who the hand belonged to.

S
halene Nakogee had come to Westhill from the Attawapiskat First Nation because she was interested in radio.