Ice Lake (23 page)

“Right.”

They shifted Stettler a little, until they were certain that he wasn’t stuck.

“Bastard,” Honigwachs said, still emotional. “He blew the whistle on us.”

“Organized crime, my ass. He was weak. He found out his friend was being treated so he blew the whole operation, then tried to finesse his way out. I still say the dumb prick fell in love.”

“Don’t take that organized crime thing too lightly, Camille. The last thing we want is to have those guys breathing down our necks.”

“It’s the perfect crime, Werner. Nobody can look at you for this.”

“Hope so.”

Camille stood and picked up the bait bucket half-filled with water. Ice had frozen on the water’s surface and she broke through it with several light taps of the crowbar, then slid the minnows into a bowl. She stood the candle alongside the bowl to help keep the water warm.

“What did you do that for?” Honigwachs asked.

“I need the bucket.”

“What for?”

“Wait and see.”

The cold had penetrated the cabin, and it was colder still beneath the floorboards, where the ice in the ears, mouth, nostrils and lungs of Andrew Stettler continued to expand. Scant blood was evident, and what there was had congealed in the frigid temperature.

“All right,” Honigwachs announced. “Let’s get it done.”

Together they hoisted the dead man up, and dropped him feet first into the lake, through the hole they’d
cleared by removing the block of ice. His head bobbed in the opening. Using a plastic serving spoon, Camille held his hair and the top of his coat against the bottom of the ice, long enough for him to freeze in place.

“This way,” she said, although they had already been through this, and she was merely confirming their agreement, “nobody will suspect I did it, not in my own shack. But that tramp Lucy will fear this. Fear she’s next. That fancy cop they’re bringing in, he’ll have his hands full with this. He won’t get around to much else.”

“Imagine. Andy ordered him killed. A cop! He never consulted me. Wouldn’t even listen to me when he told me about it.”

“The cop might die anyway,” Camille reminded him. “Andy being dead might not stop that. Not that I mind.”

“Who knows? But we’re not connected to it and we don’t care. Not any more, that’s for sure.”

“Only Andy could betray us.”

“He can’t now,” Honigwachs brayed.

“That’s right.” She stood beside him, holding his arm. She whispered, “We had to do this, Werner. You gave Andy the extra drugs for Lucy. He tied you to this. He was going to kill that cop and lord it over you. He was going to make your life miserable, squeeze the life’s blood out of your company. What did he say to you about that?”

“ ‘Get it straight.’ That’s what he told me. ‘Remember who’s really in charge.’”

“Intimidation.” She tugged his arm. “Who did he think he was? He was a sexy guy but, come on, he was a punk. Everything you’ve worked for should go to him? You’re supposed to charge him an administration fee and be happy with that? That’s a shakedown. That’s not right, Werner. We had to do this. We had to test enzyme accelerators in order to discover their preferred script, and we had to do
this.”

Honigwachs nodded. “Funny. His last words were about you.”

“Oh yeah? How romantic. What were they?”

“I can’t remember. Something … I don’t know.”

“Come on. Relax. Think.”

Honigwachs moved his arm around her shoulders and pressed her against his side. “Something about … that … there’s more to your story than you told us. About your brother and your benefactor and all that. Something like that.”

Camille put her arms around his waist. “I don’t know what he meant.”

Honigwachs sighed. “Andy could’ve made a link,” he said, as though he still needed to justify the deed once again. This event put him close to the action. He was no longer safely ensconced in his suite while others performed his handiwork. “You know how cops make crooks talk. They threaten them with more jail time and the dickheads cough up everything they know.

“Once upon a time,” Camille assured him. “Not any more. He’s dead. He got what he deserved.”

“He’s out of the picture, that’s the main thing. The one person nobody could trust is gone. We’re in the clear.”

“All the way, baby.”

Satisfied that Andrew Stettler’s corpse would not be floating away, Camille turned around. In a drawer she kept a hammer and chisel that she often used to chip away at the ice, and she did so now, down on her knees, this time to remove a coating of blood, hair, and frozen flesh. She gathered the contaminated shards of ice together in a heap, and used a cup to pick them up and drop them into the lake. Using the serving spoon again, she guided them under the ice-pack, away from the body.

She decided that the bullet must have gone straight down the ice-hole, as it was nowhere in evidence.
Good.
Standing again, Camille worked on the block of ice dangling above the cabin floor, cleaning it of incriminating material and removing the shards. Then, with Honigwachs, she lowered the block back into place.

They sat on the benches, admiring their achievement.

Stettler’s head bobbed in the dark aperture.

Camille stood at last and visited the minnows again. “I can use these tomorrow, make it look like I came here to fish. It’s okay if they freeze. Once I put the stove on they’ll thaw out.” She slid them from one bowl into another, moving the water to stop it from icing just yet. Then she retrieved the bucket and leaned over the hole in the ice and, edging Stettler’s head aside, filled it about a third full of water. She slowly poured the cold water over the old ice, filling the gouges she’d created to clean the surface of blood. She dug snow out from under the cabin floor and pressed that into the cracks as well, creating an old-looking patina. The fresh surface was smooth and quick to freeze. She and Honigwachs pulled the boards back into place and covered the corpse.

“That’ll be some meeting tomorrow,” Honigwachs imagined.

She kissed him.

Residual warmth continued to emanate from the stove, so Camille returned the minnows to the pail, which she then left on the stovetop. She’d let the candle burn itself out.

She took down the chain and packed the tools.

Having walked onto the ice, Honigwachs intended to walk off. First he’d mix his steps with hundreds of others. Camille would leave by snowmobile, so that neither person’s identity or presence—nor Stettler’s absence—would be noted by anyone, not in the dark, not out on the lake.

The last job in the cabin for Werner Honigwachs
was to take the pistol that he had used to shoot Andrew Stettler and wipe it clean of prints on a hand towel. When he was done, Camille, wearing her snowmobile mitts, took it from him. “They’ll look for it underwater. I’ll take it away from here.”

She started up her Ski-Doo and roared off into the night, heading across the lake toward home. Knowing that she was defeating others—Lucy and Charlie and this new cop coming on the scene—gave her a sense of achievement, as though outwitting her foes was justification in itself. Charging across the lake under the bright winter moon she raised a fist in the air, shaking it with savage fury.

Approaching the far shore, in a part of the lake where the current was strong and where the ice broke up first every spring, she stopped her machine and buried the pistol deep in the snow. When the ice melted, the weapon would sink to the bottom of the lake. Until then, it would be well hidden.

Driving on, her satisfaction immense, and yet assailed by quirky spasms of guilt, Camille Choquette knew enough to kick off the negative feelings. She had planned a perfect murder. Honigwachs had done his job, even if he had missed slightly. At least he had pulled the trigger. Even better, Andrew Stettler had confessed to knowing associates familiar with the situation concerning her father and dead brother. That alone made her happy he was dead. He had said there was more to her story. Well, death had shut him up. “Yes!” she shouted under the roar of her engine. “There’s more! You bastard! There’s more!” Upon the pristine white of the frozen lake she was riding freely under an immaculate sky, observed only by the moon and stars.

Rather than dealing with the complication of hiring a babysitter, she had given her child a mild sedative and put her to bed with a brood of dolls, many of
which were aged, raggedy and patched, left over from her own childhood and sewn together. Arriving home, Camille would have nothing more to do than tuck herself into bed and dream the dreams of the blessed. She was, she believed, home free.

She roared on.

THE INFLUENCE
OF DARK MATTER

9
JELLY ROLL

The next day, after midnight, Monday, February 14, 1999

Some fourteen hours following the discovery of Andrew Stettler’s murder, a blizzard that blew along the Ottawa River Valley into Quebec crisscrossed the Lake of Two Mountains and assailed the island city of Montreal. Undulating like sand dunes, snow formed ridges along the highways, where only the big rigs travelled at that early-morning hour, and bore down upon the Mohawk territory at Kanesetake and upon the horse farms of St. Lazare. In the lakefront community of Hudson, yachts in their winter cradles lay buried under a foot of fresh snow. Drifts swept across the parking lots of empty shopping malls in the sleepy outlying towns, and the storm advanced across the flat suburbs of Montreal’s West Island into the city proper. Wind raged over Mount Royal, swirled above the steep escarpment on the edge of downtown and along the asphalt corridors between office towers, where the homeless hunkered down next to heating ducts. Snow scudded over the sloped rooftops of the English living rich in Westmount and the affluent French asleep in Outremont, blanketing the poorest streets of the southwest and the East End. The storm played its brash danceinstreetlights, snow blanketing cars, piling
along sidewalks and over stairs, a nocturnal island city under siege.

Cinq-Mars slept peacefully in his country home, his wife beside him, their dog below the foot of their bed. If horses whinnied or stomped in their stalls they’d not be heard above the wind snapping at the outbuildings and trees and rooftops. Only the dog would look up as a gust shook a window for entry or yowled like the spirit of an ancestral canine in the chimney. Surfeited with their lovemaking, warm in one another’s arms under a cosy duvet, the couple could only have been jarred awake by something as intrusive as a telephone’s harsh jangle.

Which is what they heard.

As usual, Emile Cinq-Mars struggled up to answer.

He refused to keep a phone by his bed these days, having learned that the violence of calls in the middle of the night rattled him too deeply. He did not want the callous world in which he lived to also snooze alongside him. Cinq-Mars preferred to leave the room to take such calls, and now he was moving slowly, half-awake, staggering with the dog at his shins as if he were a blind man in need of guidance, shunting from one room to the other in a clumsy shuffle.

He cradled the phone to one side of his face, rubbing whiskers with his free hand, and sniffed his nasal passages clearer. “Yes?” he growled.

“Please. Detective—Cinq-Mars?—Sergeant? Help me.” A woman’s voice, faint, frightened, vaguely familiar, speaking English.

“Yes, this is Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars. Who’s calling, please?” He and his wife used the small side room as a combination of office and study, a place to relegate bills that could tolerate delayed payment, scribble shopping lists or address Christmas cards. The walls had required no further decoration than shelves with books, and over time the space had acquired a worthy
contribution of junk—maps, receipts, letters, to-do lists for the farm, paper clips, pencils, piles of magazines.

Faint, breathless, the woman was in distress. “I’m sorry. I’m so scared. I didn’t know.”

Wide awake now, he recognized the caller’s voice. She was the woman whose anonymous, cryptic message had called him down to the lake during the daylight hours with an offer of information. “You never showed up, after promising you would.”

“I was waiting for someone who never showed up either! Then cop cars were all over the place. Oh God. The guy I was waiting for, he’s the dead man! I never thought he’d be killed! I just heard his name on the TV news.”

“The late-night news, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“That was hours ago. You took a while to call.” Cinq-Mars stifled a yawn with his fist. He didn’t know if he was grilling his caller about anything of substance but, out of habit, he persisted.

“I had to drive home first.”

“So you know the dead man.”

“I do.”

“Who are you? First tell me who you are, then tell me how you got my home phone number.”

“That’s so complicated.” Her tone suddenly changed from a whispered whimper to an expression of rage. “I’m scared, don’t you get it? I’m scared!”