Deadly Decisions (15 page)

The final diner had just arrived and was handing his trench coat to Isabelle. When I saw his face my jaw dropped in surprise.

“V
OUS!”

It was not one of my more adroit openers. I shot Isabelle a “just wait till later” look, which she ignored.

“
Oui.
You are surprised, Tempe?” She beamed. “I said you two had met in an informal way. Now I will officially introduce you.”

The journalist extended his hand. This time it held no mike, and his look was friendly, not the stunned surprise I remembered from our encounter outside the Vipers’ clubhouse.

“Tempe, this is Lyle Crease. I’m sure you’ve seen him on television.”

I could place the face now. He was an investigative reporter with CTV.

“And, Lyle, I know I don’t have to tell you Dr. Brennan’s name. We call her Tempe. That’s with the long ‘e’ at the end. People do have trouble with that.”

When I allowed Crease to take my hand, he leaned close and kissed me first on the right cheek, then on the left, in traditional Quebec fashion. I stepped back and mumbled something I hoped he’d interpret as cool but polite.

Isabelle introduced Crease to the others, and he shook hands with the men and kissed the ladies. Then she raised her champagne glass in Kit’s direction.

“I think in honor of this handsome young Texan, tonight we should all practice our English.”

Glasses shot up as everyone cheerfully agreed. Kit looked enormously relieved.

“May I help you with dinner?” I asked in frosty English, eager to get Isabelle alone to share some thoughts with her.

“No, no. Everything is ready. Please, everyone, come to the table. There are little cards beside each plate.”

Shit.

Isabelle retreated to the kitchen while the rest of us gathered around to ascertain the seating arrangement. As I’d suspected, I was next to Crease. Kit was on my right.

There were seven in all. An elderly actor sat on Kit’s other side. I’d met him on a previous occasion, but couldn’t remember his name and hadn’t caught it when introduced. I was unfamiliar with the other two guests. It turned out they were a couple, the wife an antiques dealer, the husband a film producer.

We made small talk as Isabelle shuttled plates from the kitchen. The actor had just finished a run as Polonius in a French production of
Hamlet
at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert. Crease recounted his most recent assignment. The story concerned a sixteen-year-old hacker who had broken into an U.S. Army network, then phoned the RCMP wanting to be caught.

“The kid wanted recognition,” said the actor.

“He could have tried out for football,” my nephew offered.

Not bad, Kit.

“And what have you two been up to?” Isabelle asked the couple as she circled the table pouring wine.

When she came to Kit she paused and looked at me. I nodded. What the hell. He was legal in Quebec and I was driving. Kit accepted with enthusiasm.

The producer’s name was Claude-Henri Brault. He’d just returned from a three-month shoot in Ireland. His wife, Marie-Claire, ran a shop in Old Montreal and had spent the time buying antiques in Provence. She rambled on about the kingdom of Arles, the Angevin dynasty, and at least a dozen Louis, describing how each had changed the face of the furniture industry. Between bites of veal I stole
peeks at Lyle Crease. His hair and teeth were flawless, his creases as sharp as I remembered. The only imperfection I spotted was a sprinkling of dandruff across his collar.

And Lyle was a good listener. He kept his eyes on Marie-Claire, nodding intermittently, as though the aesthetics of fabric and cabinet design were the only thing that presently mattered.

When Marie-Claire paused for breath Isabelle stepped in, redirecting the conversation like an air-traffic controller with several flights on her screen. Though I had to admire her skill, I didn’t appreciate the direction she chose.

“Tempe has been working on these dreadful gang murders. Can you tell us something about them?”

“The bikers?” asked Claude-Henri.

“Yes.” I wanted to glare at Isabelle, but decided it would be rude. I also wanted to strangle her, which would be still ruder.

“Were you involved in the discovery I read about in today’s paper?”

“Yes. But as Isabelle knows”—I smiled icicles in her direction—“I can’t—”

“What are you doing with bikers, Aunt Tempe?”

Kit’s interest had wandered during the furniture design lesson, but he perked up at the new topic.

“You know that I work for the provincial medico-legal lab.”

He nodded.

“Last week the director asked me to look at some murder cases.” I mentioned nothing about my role with Opération Carcajou.

“How many?”

“Quite a few.”

“More than the Bee Gees?” he persisted.

“Five.”

“Five people iced in one week?” Kit’s eyes were huge. Everyone else at the table had gone quiet.

“Two of them were killed in 1987. We recovered their bodies this week.”

“That’s what I read about,” said Claude-Henri, pointing a fork in my direction. “
C’est ça.
That was you in the photograph.”

“Who were the others?” Kit pressed on.

Now I wanted to strangle my nephew.

“Two were bomb victims. One was a little girl accidentally killed during a drive-by shooting.”

“Mon Dieu,”
said Marie-Claire, abandoning the commitment to English.

I reached for my Perrier, desperately wishing I’d paid attention to her so I could dodge with a question about Renaissance veneers.

“Are you counting the young woman whose bones were found in St-Basile-le-Grand?”

I turned at Crease’s question. Though his voice sounded casual, his eyes had a glint I hadn’t noticed before. If he had hopes of a story, he wouldn’t get it from me.

“No.”

“Have you identified her?” He reached for his wine.

“No.”

“Who are you talking about?” Kit asked.

“Near the grave of two of the bikers we also found some other bones. It’s a young woman, but we don’t know who she is, or if she’s connected with the Vipers. Her burial could predate their ownership of the property.”

“Is that what you think?” Crease.

“I don’t know.”

“Who are the Vipers?”

I was fast restructuring my opinion of my nephew’s social skills.

“They’re a puppet club for the Hells Angels.”

“No way!”

“Yes, way. And they and their brothers in arms are responsible for almost one hundred and twenty deaths in this province over the past five years. God knows how many others have disappeared.”

“The bikers are killing each other?”

“Yes. It’s a power struggle for control of the drug trade.”

“Why not just let them?” asked the actor. “View it as a form of sociopath self-regulation.”

“Because innocents like Emily Anne Toussaint, who was nine years old, get caught in the cross fire.”

“And maybe this other girl?”

“Maybe, Kit.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to prove that?” Crease.

“I don’t know. Claude-Henri, please tell us about your film.”

As the producer spoke, Crease picked up the Chardonnay and reached for my empty glass. I shook my head, but he continued. When I placed my hand over the rim, he laughed, lifted it off, and filled the goblet.

Seething, I pulled my hand free from his and leaned back in my chair. I cannot tolerate people pressing liquor on those who don’t want it.

My nephew’s voice brought me back to the conversation. Isabelle had turned her spotlight on Kit.

“Yeah, I went with my daddy. He’s in the oil business. We drove up from Texas in a big old Winnebago. Pop’s idea. He wanted to do this bonding thing.

“We swung by here to drop off Auntie’s cat, then east and into Vermont at Derby Line. Pop had this trip planned better than the invasion of Normandy. That’s why I remember all the names.

“Anyway, we camped near this town called Westmore and fished the Willoughby River for salmon. The salmon are landlocked, and when they run in the spring it’s a big deal. I guess real fishermen view it like some kind of holy place.

“Then we gunned south to Manchester and fished the Battenkill, and my daddy bought all kinds of crap at the Orvis factory. Casting rods, fly rods, and other stuff. Then he motored on to Texas in the ’Bago, and I dropped in on my aunt the biker buster.” He raised his glass to me, and everyone followed suit.

“It’s kind of weird,” Kit continued. “Because my daddy bought me a motorcycle about a year ago.”

I was dismayed but not surprised. Howard was my sister’s second husband, a West Texas oilman with more money than sense, and a defect on the double helix that made him incapable of monogamy. They’d divorced when Kit was six. Howard’s approach to fatherhood was to lavish toys and money on his son. At three it was ponies and motorized toy cars. By eighteen it had changed to sailboats and then a Porsche.

“What kind of motorcycle?” asked Isabelle.

“It’s a Harley-Davidson. Pop’s really into Harleys. My bike is a Road King Classic and he’s got an Ultra Classic Electra Glide.
Those are both Evos. But Pop’s real love is his old knucklehead. They only made those from 1936 to 1947.”

“What do those terms mean?” asked Isabelle.

“They’re nicknames that refer to the design of the engine head. The Evolution V2 motor was first produced in the early eighties. Originally it was called a blockhead, but that tag never really stuck. Most folks refer to it as the Evo. A lot of the bikes you see today are shovelheads, made from 1966 to 1984. From 1948 to 1965 it was panheads, before that flatheads, which came out in ’29. It’s easy to identify the era of production by the design of the engine head.”

Kit’s interest in bikers was nothing compared with his ardor for bikes.

“Did you know that all modern Harleys descend from the Silent Gray Fellow, the first bike to roll off the line in Milwaukee back at the turn of the century? The Silent Gray Fellow had a one-cylinder twenty-five-cubic-inch motor capable of three horsepower. No hydraulic tappets, no electric starters, no V-twin engine.” Kit shook his head in disbelief.

“A modern Twin Cam engine displaces upwards of eighty-eight cubic inches. Even an old ’71 FLH, at seventy-four cubic inches, has an engine compression ratio of eighty point five to one. And today they’re pushing nine to one. Yeah, we’ve come a long way, but every hog on the road today can trace its bloodline back to that old Silent Gray Fellow.”

“Aren’t there other motorcycle manufacturers?” asked the actor.

“Yessir,” Kit agreed, his face and voice showing disdain. “There are Yamahas, Suzukis, Kawasakis, and Hondas out there. But they’re just transportation. The British made some good bikes, Norton, Triumph, BSA, but they’ve all gone out of business. The German BMWs were impressive machines, but for my pesos Harley is the only show in town.”

“Are they expensive?” Claude-Henri.

Kit shrugged. “Harley doesn’t make low-end cycles. It’s not cheap equipment.”

I listened as my nephew talked. He had the same reverence for and knowledge of motorcycles that Marie-Claire had for furniture. Perhaps the timing of his visit was fortunate. He could help me understand this strange world I was entering.

•    •    •

It was almost midnight when we said good-bye and pressed for the elevator. I felt ready for bed, but Kit was still wired, yammering on about engines and critiquing the evening’s guests and events. Maybe it was wine, maybe youth. I envied him his stamina.

The rain had stopped, but a strong wind blew off the river, bouncing branches and shrubs, and swirling wet leaves across the ground. When Kit offered to get the car I carefully appraised his condition, then turned over the keys and waited inside the lobby.

In less than a minute he pulled up, then got out and circled to the passenger side. When I’d settled behind the wheel he tossed a brown envelope into my lap.

“What’s this?”

“Envelope.”

“I can see that. Where did it come from?”

“It was on the windshield, stuck under a wiper. You must have an admirer.”

I looked at the envelope. It was a padded mailer, stapled at one end, with a pull-tab on the back for easy opening. My name appeared in red Magic Marker.

I stared at the letters, an alarm sounding deep in my brain. Who knew I would be on the island tonight? Who could have recognized my car? Had we been followed? Watched?

Gingerly, I prodded the contents. I could feel the bulge of something hard.

“Well!”

I jumped at the sound of Kit’s voice. When I turned his face looked eerily pale, his features dark and distorted in the faint yellow light seeping from the lobby doors.

“Goddammit, Kit, this could be . . .” I stopped, unsure where the thought was going.

“Could be what?” Kit leaned sideways and draped his arm over the back of the seat. “Go on. Open it,” he needled. “I’ll bet it’s a prank. One of your cop friends probably spotted the car and left something stupid to creep you out.”

That was possible. Anyone on the job could have run the plate. And I
had
been the butt of jokes in the past.