Ice Lake (27 page)

“No doubt about it. Which tells me two things. She really didn’t think anybody would be walking through the front door, and her troubles probably don’t originate on the reserve. They got started off the reserve. She didn’t expect local trouble or she would’ve called you. That being the case, I hope you don’t object to our being here.”

The officer looked rather slowly from Cinq-Mars to Painchaud and then back again. “Nobody wants SQ snooping around. What good does that do? Nobody’s gonna talk to SQ. Ask the chief. He’ll tell you we don’t want SQ walking around.”

Unsure whether he meant the Chief of the Peacekeepers or the Chief of the Grand Council, Cinq-Mars chose to hold his peace. The point had been made that the SQ was not welcome to investigate on the reserve, and if they came anyway, they’d be ineffectual.

“All right. Listen, Roland, we need your help here. We need you to talk to her friends. We need to know what her carpet looked like, what colours were in it, what was the design. We need to know whatever you can find out about her boyfriends. We need you to
hunt the reserve for a girl rolled in a carpet, for a carpet tossed off by the side of the road somewhere. Lucy might have a gunshot wound. Something else, Roland. We need a forensics expert to scan this apartment with a microscope and a fine-tooth comb. You can’t provide us with one of those, I don’t imagine. I understand that you don’t want the SQ. But if I clear it with Sergeant Painchaud, will you allow a forensics examiner from my department on the premises? I’ll guarantee that the report will be shared around to everybody.”

“Montreal cops.” Roland Harvey mulled the news.

“No uniforms. No cruisers. Plainclothes and plain cars all the way, and your people can be on hand.”

“They have to be,” Harvey said. He didn’t explain himself, but Cinq-Mars assumed that even Montreal cops would need local protection. This was going to be a tough working environment.

“Desperate measures, Roland. We believe that Lucy’s been shot. She could be badly hurt. She may be one of your own but she could be anywhere. We’ll have to scour Quebec. Off the reserve and on. Across the border to Ontario. Maybe down to New York State. We need to rely on you and you on us if we’re to get a handle on this. Lucy is one of yours, Roland, but her troubles probably got started off the reserve.”

Roland Harvey gave a nod. “Sure, yup. Bring your people on. No SQ.”

“Deal,” he said. Cinq-Mars turned to Painchaud. “Deal?” he asked him.

Painchaud didn’t have a problem with the arrangement. He understood the situation. Cinq-Mars liked him more by the minute, liked him almost as much as he was puzzled by the guy. He was not accustomed to SQ officers willing to take a back seat in the interests of an investigation. “Done,” Sergeant Painchaud agreed.

“Emile?” Bill Mathers had wandered over to the missing woman’s desk and returned with a photograph
and a check stub. Cinq-Mars took the picture, examined it, and showed it to the native officer.

“This her? In this photograph she looks native.”

“That’s Lucy. She’s wearing her number-one tan in that one. I didn’t say Lucy don’t look native. She blends in with whites is all. She’s got their culture, the way they talk.”

“English or French?”

“Both. English for sure.”

“Pretty girl. What else?” Cinq-Mars asked.

Mathers held up the stub. “Hillier-Largent Global. She makes a decent salary, with benefits.”

The senior detective studied it for himself. Lucy Gabriel’s paycheque bore marked similarities to his own. Suddenly the modest premises seemed odd. “What is this place, Roland? A garage? Is there a house that goes with it?”

“Used to be, yup. Burnt down years ago. Lucy’s folks owned it. Lucy already lived here by herself from the time she was eleven years old, about. Her folks’ house was thirty feet away. The foundation’s still there, but that’s all.”

“She lived on her own from the age of eleven?”

“Not all the time since then, no. Her parents, they died in that fire. White people took her in after that. A doctor living on the reserve back then, he became her dad, but at one point he took her off the reserve. Lucy kept the garage as her private place. It’s her property. Moved back when she was old enough for that.”

“What does Lucy do?”

“Biologist,” Roland Harvey explained.

“Excuse me?” The surprise Cinq-Mars expressed had more to do with Lucy’s profession causing him to think about the laboratory at the head of the lake, BioLogika, and not, as Roland Harvey perhaps assumed, that a young native woman was a professional scientist.

“She educated herself,” the Peacekeeper specified, his pride noted.

“A biologist. Is Hillier-Largent a pharmaceutical company, do you know?”

Harvey shrugged. Cinq-Mars flipped the check stub over several times in his hands.

“No address. Bill, find out where the company’s located and its business.”

“On it.”

“Have you found anything, Roland, that can help us?”

“Bullet hole over here.” The Peacekeeper nodded toward the far wall.

“Show me.” Cinq-Mars followed him around the perimeter of the room to the kitchen, Painchaud trailing behind. A door under the sink stood open.

“We found it like this. The door ajar. But the door was closed when the bullet went through it. It went through the garbage can after that, then lodged in the wallboard. It’s not so thick. Looks like it got buried in the insulation. Either that, or the shooter went and pulled it out already.”

“These guys were probably looking to get it back, judging by the way they cleaned up. Let’s hope they failed. Anything else?” When Roland Harvey shook his head, Cinq-Mars pushed him further. “How do you think this went down?”

“No forced entry,” Harvey mentioned. “No big surprise. Probably she never bothered to lock up. Not here, on the reserve. Not on a night like this one.”

“She told me she had to get home after the evening news. Which means she must’ve been in the city, that accounts for the time. A slow trek on a night like this. Somebody might have followed her home, or they were waiting for her.”

“So they walked in and shot her,” Painchaud concluded, shaking his head.

“I doubt they came here to shoot her,” Cinq-Mars told them, which caused both men to jerk their heads up. How he could be promoting theories with nothing to go on struck them as odd. “If that’s true, they’d have left her where she lay. I think they sneaked in here, their arrival camouflaged by the storm. Probably turned their engine off and coasted down the grade to the house. Lights off, for sure. I think they came here to abduct her. When they heard her on the phone, about to say something, that’s when they shot her.”

Painchaud appeared sceptical, his head bobbing around.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s a possibility, sir. But I don’t know how you can put that together.”

“They shot her, and never said a word after that. Two men. They didn’t have to discuss what to do next. They rolled her in a carpet and hoisted her out of here and never said a word. My wife told me they were mute. Probably they taped her mouth to keep her quiet as well. If she was conscious. Question: how did they know what to do without talking? Answer: they had planned that part ahead of time. They expected to come in here and find her in bed. Or, if they had either followed her or waited for her, they expected to find her getting ready for bed. That’s why they waited awhile. They expected to tape her mouth, tie her up, wrap her in the carpet and haul her out. Because they came in here and found her on the phone, they shot her first instead. They needed her instantly mute. They weren’t going to cross the floor to hang up that phone.”

Painchaud shrugged. “It’s a possibility.”

Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars had a matter of tricky diplomacy to conduct. He motioned Painchaud over to a corner and placed a fraternal hand upon his shoulder. “Charles, I want to thank you for granting me some leeway here.”

“No problem, sir.”

“You know that I don’t have jurisdiction—”

“Sir, I’m not that kind of cop.” He had that wonky mouth, and his words carried a slight inflection caused by the distortion of his lips. “Keep the lines of communication open, that’s all. I don’t want to look bad. It’s clear to me you’re involved. People call you up, next thing you know, they’re a missing person. That’s more important than jurisdiction. This moves around you, so I want your input. Besides that, we both appreciate that I can’t operate on the reserve without you. You’ve got your problems with the SQ—”

“There’s been some history,” Cinq-Mars acknowledged in a confidential voice.

“—but I’m just a cop trying to do the best job I can.”

“I can see that, Sergeant. Speaking of which, how did you make the
ID
on that body in the water so fast? Was he carrying a wallet?”

Painchaud smiled, his mouth showing its deformity again. The left side of his lips seemed paralysed. “We got lucky, sir. Down deep in the hip pocket of his jeans was an old credit card slip, for gas. Under a microscope we got a read on the name and number. We ran it down, visited his place in the city. That confirmed it was our guy. Andrew Stettler.”

“Good work.” Cinq-Mars straightened, as his weariness and the late hour had caused him to stoop. “Sergeant, we need to find this girl. Dead or alive. If she’s dead, she could be anywhere by morning. We need the SQ to cover the countryside. We need Peacekeepers to scour the reserve. I’ll get my people to hunt Montreal.”

“Do you think she’s in a ditch?”

“It’s possible, but I have my doubts. If they wanted to dump her, why take her away from here? Shoot her, get it over with, beat it. If she’s dead, they wanted the corpse for a reason, and I can’t imagine what kind of reason
would qualify. Why would they want to take a corpse? They knew she’d been on the phone. They knew somebody heard her die, so they couldn’t keep this a secret. They knew cops would investigate. Why roll her up in a carpet and haul her away with them? That’s high risk. A risk that big has to give them a reward. For the life of me, I can’t think what it could be.”

“She could identify them.”

“There’s that. But only if she’s not a corpse and they have no intention of making her one.”

Painchaud nodded. “Makes sense. Okay. Let’s assume she’s alive. What do you want to do in here?”

“Nothing. I’m too afraid to disturb the dust. They didn’t hang up the phone. That tells me they did their best to touch nothing. They opened the cabinet door to get at the bullet hole. So they tried to retrieve it, and they probably succeeded. They showed an interest in cleaning up. There won’t be much to find so I don’t want to mess what’s here. It’s not like we’ve got anything to go on. Let’s seal it, have the Peacekeepers sector it off. Wait for the crime scene technicians to do their thing. Then give the Peacekeepers first crack.”

“That’s political.”

“I suppose it is.”

Painchaud gave it some thought. He failed to arrive at a worthwhile alternative.

“I guess we go home now,” Cinq-Mars decided.

“No argument there.”

First, Cinq-Mars gathered his colleagues for a summation. He cleared his dry throat. “Gentlemen, why would they want to dispose of a corpse? Most killers have no use for the body unless they want it hidden, but this shooting was done while she was on the phone, so it was no secret. Why, then?

“My first guess,” Cinq-Mars continued, before anyone had a chance to answer, “—and maybe I’m only being optimistic:—is that this girl is not a corpse.
Alive, she’s worth something to someone. She was peddling information. Somebody took an interest in what she had to say and to whom. So let’s agree. There’s a good chance that a young woman is out there wrapped in a rug bleeding from a bullet wound. With that in mind, let’s do our jobs well. Make sure our respective departments are aware and active. Gentlemen, thanks. Good night.”

Outside, Bill Mathers clambered into the Pathfinder beside his partner. He’d been on the phone awhile. “The firm—Hillier-Largent Global—is located in Saint-Laurent,” he told him, referring to a suburb of Montreal north of downtown.

“Thank goodness. Finally! We have a piece of this on our own turf.”

“Their business is pharmaceuticals and biotechnology.”

Cinq-Mars was letting that sink in when he yawned hard and realized that his body temperature was dropping fast. He turned on the ignition and let the engine warm up before blasting them both with heat.

“So,” Mathers suggested, “do we start tomorrow at Hillier-Largent?”

His partner shook his head. “BioLogika first. Then there.”

“Why BioLogika?”

“Get there before anybody figures out we don’t belong. We want to be the first cops to show, not the second or third wave. You might want to think about sleeping at my place tonight.”

“Sounds good, actually. You’re closer.”

Cinq-Mars put the car in gear. Wipers, front and rear, strained to clear a patch of visibility.