Foul Deeds: A Rosalind Mystery (16 page)

The thug startled Harvie and let him have it with a good punch in the face. Harvie went down fast, but grabbed Scarface's leg on the way down and knocked him off balance. They wrestled and punched and made a lot of noise. The fight was fierce and I could hear Molly barking from downstairs. I was relieved when she finally stopped—I didn't want her to get into the fray. Harvie was valiant but he didn't stand a chance. As the thug hauled him to his feet and slammed him against the wall, I was horrified to see blood running down from a nasty cut under his eye. This had gone far enough. I started making sounds that were as close to “OKAY” as I could, attempted to stand, then banged the chair back down on the floor. Scarface was winding up to hit Harvie again, but he stopped and looked at me. I nodded vigorously.

“You'll turn over the file?” he asked.

I nodded again.

He untied my hands, and as I stood up I indicated the gag and grunted. He pulled that off too. He pushed Harvie into my chair and roughly tied his hands to the rungs, using the sash that had been wrapped around my mouth.

“Okay, let's go,” he ordered.

Feeling shell-shocked, I stepped into the hall and moved towards my bedroom. He was following me at about three paces. I turned into my room and walked over to the closet where I had hidden the file earlier. I opened the closet door, bent down and started to move my shoes and boots around. He stood right behind me, towering above me and breathing hard, “I don't see it,” he grunted. “Where is it?”

“It's under the floor here,” I replied. I was shaking.

“No tricky business. Hurry up!”

In the next moment there was a commotion, a loud crack and he crashed to the floor so close to me I covered my head with my hands. I heard a familiar voice saying, “Down you go, pal. Now we're even.” I turned and looked up.

“McBride! Thank god!”

I started to laugh and cry at the same time.
The cat, who had been attempting to get her beauty sleep during the fracas, jumped down off the bed, walked over and sat down beside me. She looked at the motionless Scarface lying halfway in the closet, face-down in my shoes and boots, and then up at me. It was oddly comforting.

The doorbell rang, startling me into action. I jumped up and ran into the spare room to untie Harvie, who had heard the commotion and was relieved to see me still alive and well.

“What happened in there, Roz?”

“Just a second. That's gotta be Arbuckle. I have to go let him in.”

I sprinted down the stairs and opened the door, just as he was ringing the bell for the second time.

“Let's go!” he said.

“I've got a present for you first, courtesy of McBride. Come and take a look.”

McBride had given Scarface such a good crack on the head that he was down for the count. Arbuckle didn't waste any time and called an ambulance, which arrived within three minutes. In the meantime, Harvie introduced himself to McBride and was filling him in on the night's events as the paramedics got the patient onto a stretcher. Scarface was taken to the hospital, followed by a couple of police officers who would keep careful watch over him. Harvie decided to go along in the cruiser to have the cut under his eye tended to.

McBride, Molly and I, accompanied by Arbuckle and his team, drove down the hill to the excavation, where we were to meet up with a project manager from the sewage treatment plant's engineering firm. Climbing out of his enormous SUV as we pulled up, Rich O'Toole was clearly not pleased to be gotten out of bed before dawn on a Sunday for what he considered an unfounded whim.

“First of all, you're twenty minutes late. Didn't you tell me this was urgent? And secondly, if there was a body or a prisoner down there, I would bloody well know about it.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “If Sophie is down there, she would have been taken there just this afternoon or rather yesterday afternoon.”

“That's ridiculous! The place is very well secured—” he fairly snapped at me. “No one gets in here on the weekends.”

“Look,” Arbuckle said, taking the engineer aside. “We know this is an uncommon situation, but better to be safe than sorry. We have some indications that the girl might be down there, and we're going to search the place and find out. We need your help. Now do your best to co-operate and try to think of any and all possibilities. It's a huge site and she's not going to be in plain view.”

Arbuckle had the bit of material from Sophie's skirt, and the wrangler had brought their best tracker dog, a lanky German shepherd named Speed, who, like a true professional, was managing to ignore Molly. As for Molly, she was so delighted to be with McBride again that she wasn't allowing for any distractions.

The engineer typed a code into the electronic lock on the gate and as we walked through it, we were greeted by the night guard, who was dressed for the weather in a standard issue winter coat, heavy gloves and a hat with fur flaps that came down well over his ears. O'Toole grudgingly explained what the police were doing there in the middle of the night and asked him if he'd seen or heard anything. The guard said he'd just finished doing the rounds of the site and had seen nothing unusual. He added that he'd been on a double shift and that everything had been very quiet.

O'Toole shot a hostile look at Arbuckle. “You see? You're wasting your time.”

“Look, we're going down there, O'Toole. Now let's go,” Arbuckle said.

The guard led us over to a lift platform that would take us down about sixty feet. As the others got a little ahead of us, McBride said to me: “I feel like I've met the guard before—possibly he's one of the men who escorted me out of City Hall the other day.”

We all descended into the depths. Because the elevator was just an open cage, it was possible to see all around and below, and to feel the frigid air surging past us as we descended.

When we disembarked, O'Toole walked over to a pole and pulled down a large lever, turning on a system of bright overhead work lights. The wind was swirling snow and sleet down into the site; it was a cavernous place and bitter cold. If Sophie has been down here all this time, I thought, she could well have succumbed to hypothermia. I pulled my wool scarf up and shoved my gloved hands into the pockets of my down jacket and tried to hope for the best.

“First of all,” Arbuckle said, “let's have a look at any enclosed spaces.”

The guard turned to O'Toole and suggested the access hatches along the tunnel.

“Good thinking,” said O'Toole. “This way.”

The team followed O'Toole through a maze of steel partitions and it seemed to me we were heading south, in the direction of downtown. The site narrowed into a three-metre-wide round tunnel located twenty-odd metres underground. I had heard about this tunnel on the radio—how it extended a full kilometre in length crossing the downtown area to Sackville Street, where it would eventually pick up the sewage that was carried down to that point from all over the city. While the sewage had always gone straight into the harbour, it would soon be diverted through the new tunnel to the treatment plant, where the “floatables” would be removed. There had been considerable controversy over the fact that the expensive and long overdue plant provided for “primary” treatment only. The several access areas the guard had referred to were located along the distance of the tunnel so it could be reached from external points if necessary. Each of these access points had a kind of hatch opening onto the tunnel; with O'Toole's help in releasing the sealed doors, we began to look inside these hatches. About halfway along the tunnel, I turned back to speak to McBride, only to discover that he and Molly had broken off from the group and were no longer following us. I looked back along the tunnel but couldn't see them. Typical McBride, I thought, but was relieved that our manpower was being spread out. Finally we inspected the last hatch near the end of the tunnel, which was blocked off at the point where it would be joining into the Sackville Street sewage pipe. We had found nothing. We began to retrace our steps, walking the kilometre back to the open site.

* * *

McBride, impatient with the hatch theory, decided to do a little investigating on his own. He quietly left the group. As he and Molly re-entered the open excavation site from the tunnel, he heard noise above. Looking up, he saw that the lift was rising—he could just see the top of the guard's hat as it moved higher. He quickly looked around. Across from where he stood was the small makeshift office that the security staff used. The door was open and the light was on. He was sure it hadn't been previously—he would have noticed the office if the light had been on. As the lift reached the top, about sixty feet over his head, there was a ruckus and at that
instant something flew down from the lift platform into the site. Molly began to bark sharply and took off like a bullet, as though the object were a duck that had been shot out of the sky. She had some retriever blood in her for sure. Within moments, she brought her prize to McBride.

He stared in disbelief as he took the object from her. He immediately sprung over to the elevator controls, but discovered that the guard had locked it off at the top. McBride would need either the code or a key to bring it down. Looking around he spotted a steel ladder attached to the concrete wall on the far side of the excavation. It appeared to go all the way to the top.

“Molly! Take this to Roz,” he commanded, pointing in the direction of the tunnel. Molly barked sharply. “Go! Take it to Roz.” She took the item in her mouth and ran towards the tunnel while McBride sprinted to the ladder and began climbing upward as fast as he could.

* * *

The distant sound of Molly's sharp bark echoed into the tunnel. Speed, the tracker dog, responded with a low woof and his hackles went up. He hauled on his leash and, as though we were suddenly one person, all of us began to run. We were just nearing the point where the tunnel widens into the excavation site when Molly appeared, clearly on a mission, racing towards me with something in her mouth. We stopped and I stepped forward.

“Drop it, Molly!” I commanded, reaching down. She let the object go into my hand.

It was a short, tan-coloured leather boot and I recognized it immediately. “Oh, my god, this is Sophie's boot.” I looked with alarm at Arbuckle.

Everyone rushed past me into the excavation area while I just stood there staring at the boot in my hand. What did this mean? Suddenly I could hear their raised voices—“Up there! On the ladder. Somebody's escaping.”

“This is a warning. Stop now!” I heard Arbuckle shout.

I turned and bolted into the open site. Looking far up on the opposite side, I could see what they were all focused on. The German shepherd was at the bottom of the metal ladder barking loudly.

“For god's sake!” I screamed at Arbuckle who had taken out his revolver. “It's McBride. He must be following someone.” Arbuckle lowered his gun and the wrangler shouted a command at Speed, who immediately dropped away from the ladder. McBride disappeared over the top as the wind whistled down into the cold chasm where we all stood shivering and staring upwards.

O'Toole was at the elevator controls now. “It's bloody locked off up there. This makes no sense,” he said. “I need the damn security guard. I need the code for this. Where the hell is the fucking guard?”

At that moment Speed began barking sharply. “He's got the scent!” the wrangler said to Arbuckle. Turning to the sound we saw that the tracker dog was in the little security office.

Led by O'Toole we hurried across and entered the office.

“Christ Almighty! What's this?” O'Toole exclaimed.

Screwed into the side of the desk were two lengths of chain. A padlock was lying on the floor by a small electric heater, and the cement floor was splotched with what appeared to be vomit. Arbuckle knelt down and reached under the corner of the desk— another torn piece of Sophie's skirt. Possibly she had used it to wipe her mouth or perhaps she'd left it behind on purpose. Clearly this was where she had been confined and probably interrogated.

As I stared at the disturbing evidence in the security office, I suddenly realized who the night guard really was. He was the one who had followed me in the dark blue Dodge—the one I had named Matrix-man because of his fancy sunglasses and the one who was at the wheel the night McBride was knocked out. McBride had indeed recognized him, but hadn't been able to place him because his heavy winter coat and the security guard hat with fur flaps that covered much of his face had proved an excellent disguise. No wonder Sophie had been brought here. Spiegle, in his position as supervising planner on the sewage treatment projects, would have control over security on the site, and since no one was working here on the weekend it would make for a handy little torture chamber. This guy must be on Spiegle's payroll—his lackey, his bodyguard, his thug.

“The guard has taken her,” I said to Arbuckle. “He was keeping her down here, and now he's on the run. I think he and the thug who attacked me tonight are working together.” I felt the panic rising. I knew that things could now take a turn for the worse. Matrix-man was fleeing with Sophie and she would be a burden, not an advantage.

Arbuckle immediately tried his cellphone, but there was no signal at this depth. There was a land line on the desk and O'Toole—confused and angry, but now compliant—shoved it towards him. Arbuckle had the station put out an all-points bulletin.

“He's possibly driving a dark blue Dodge Shadow. The plate has ‘CSV' in it,” I said quickly to Arbuckle, who added this information to the bulletin.

When he hung up, he said, “O'Toole, get us out of here. Now!”

As O'Toole got on the phone to Elevator Emergency Services, Arbuckle looked at me with disconcerting intensity and pulled me aside. “You always seem to know more than you've let on. If you want to save your friend, you have to tell me absolutely everything!”