Ice Lake (48 page)

The question was trickier than it might have sounded, for to answer in the affirmative Roland Harvey had to agree on some level that Lucy Gabriel was in hiding and was not being held against her will. Cinq-Mars would not have pilloried the man had he missed that subtlety, but the constable appeared to be giving his reply all due consideration, which suggested that he might be fully cognizant of the ramifications. Constable Harvey said, “Sure.”

Cinq-Mars lightly patted his shoulder.

In his car again and driving away from the meeting, Cinq-Mars called Bill Mathers on his cellular. “Track him, Bill. And listen up, we’re looking for a relatively late-model Honda Accord. I don’t recall the colour. It’s missing from Lucy’s garage. I’ll get that information and a plate number for you. Lucy could be mobile.”

That was interesting, he was thinking. If Lucy Gabriel was driving around, what would she be up to? Mischief, most likely. From all that he knew about her, she wasn’t a woman to be kept down for long. As a captive, she wouldn’t make a model prisoner, and if she had chosen to be in hiding, probably she stunk at it. Either scenario, Cinq-Mars mused, suited him.

Sergeant Charles Painchaud was feeling excited and confident. All along, he’d planned to coax Cinq-Mars onto the case, keeping him interested long enough to learn the players and draw the right conclusions. He’d succeeded in that. The celebrated detective had made no promises, but he seemed inclined to adopt a favourable attitude. He sympathized with the women
and reviled Honigwachs. Now, he had only to wait for the detective at home, and they’d be going over to Camille’s house, where his girlfriend would continue the eminent police officer’s education.

Charles Painchaud’s life and career had been an ongoing frustration to him. As a child, he had been regarded as unpromising. People thought less of him because he had fallen victim to polio and his mouth was partially paralysed. Early in his life, dyslexia had been wrongly diagnosed as a lack of aptitude. That he was too small to compete with his older brothers in anything athletic confirmed that he would be the underachieving, ordinary son. By the time that he was ready for university, his reading disability had been diagnosed, and Charles successfully clawed his way through classes by recording lectures and playing them back until he had them all but memorized. Although reading remained a chore, he managed some plodding improvement, enough to graduate, but Charles would not be able to prove himself by following his brothers into law, or his father into politics. Law enforcement interested him, however, for surely he’d be looked upon differently in a uniform.

Diminutive, Charles had to lean on his father to coax the police department to make an exception to the rules. The process was humiliating on several levels. He had to plead with his father. He had to listen to his father get on the phone to beseech high-ranking officers in the department. When he was finally awarded a hearing, he had to point out to a panel of officers that the SQ was finally hiring women, and that many of the women were no bigger than he was. It seemed a mortifying position to take—
my daddy’s power-fid and I’m no smaller than most girls, and they’re no stronger than me
—but he so desperately wanted in.

Promotions would come at regular intervals—no one could say for certain why, but most officers were
willing to guess, and the word went around that Charles Painchaud was connected. His old man looked after him. Having begged his dad to get him onto the force, he couldn’t suddenly ask him to butt out, and the young man was obliged to accept promotions he knew he did not wholly deserve.

Happy enough being a cop, he was happier still that the khaki-green uniform had brought Camille Choquette into his life. They both lived on the same side of the lake, she in a small village, he in the countryside. From time to time she had noticed him shopping for himself in a local supermarket. She had discerned the bachelor traits, particularly a predilection for frozen dinners to augment a diet of chips and beer. Camille made the first move.

“It’s not that I love cops,” she cooed. “I don’t know any cops. It just seems to me that a man who straps on a gun to go to work in the morning has to be more interesting than some toad who checks to make sure he has his comb and calculator.”

Painchaud was not going to argue the point. Accepting his elevated status above mere toads, he smiled, and conceded that she might be right.

Camille made the relationship amazingly easy for him. Initially wary, he understood the situation soon enough. He was no prime catch, but she was an unwed mother, which limited her options and opportunities. Everybody carried baggage, and if he possessed liabilities—not too tall, not particularly charismatic, a wonky smile—well, so did she. Love was a guessing game for him. Camille made him happy, and he offered her the convenience of an established man with a regular job and a natural affection for children. He was someone to take her to dinner and a movie on a Saturday night. Love? Maybe. She offered him intermittent companionship—she didn’t seem to want him around
too
much—and aggressive sex. They were a fit.

Painchaud showered, shaved, and put on his uniform. He’d pulled a half-shift in the morning and planned to record his meeting with Cinq-Mars and Camille as being his second half-shift of the day. As he geared up for the meeting, his excitement intensified. His purpose in all this was to save Camille, and that thrilled him, for it would make him look good, possibly heroic, in her sight. He also hoped that he could save Lucy. While his primary interest was to help the two women, he knew that if he succeeded he’d reap personal benefits. If he continued to work alongside Cinq-Mars and crack this case, his own reputation within the department might soar. Suddenly, he’d be looked at differently. He did not require the adulation that consistently befell Cinq-Mars, but he was hoping that, finally, he might earn simple respect from his colleagues.

That would be nice.

Emerging from his bedroom, Painchaud heard the cranky buzz of his doorbell and checked his watch. Too early for Cinq-Mars. He crossed through his small living room to answer the door and neither saw nor heard either of the two men who emerged behind his back, crouching, moving silently forward, one from the kitchen, the other from behind a bookshelf. Opening the inside door, he saw the back of a man’s head outside the locked storm door, then white light as a blow to his scalp drove him to his knees. Too late, he resisted, grasped a leg, but he had lost his bearings, his strength was gone, his coordination. Vaguely conscious, he remained unresponsive while he was dragged back across the living-room floor. He wanted to kick, or flail, but he could not. Through his daze he tried to make out the man who had rung the bell and who had been admitted into his house, and at first he saw only that he wore a suit and tie. Something was wrong with the guy’s face. It looked grotesque.
Suddenly, Painchaud understood, and he was terrified. This attack was not the work of drugged thieves or juvenile hooligans. The man who had entered through the front door was wearing a nylon stocking over his face.

Simpler to blindfold him. Simpler still to knock him out cold. Apparently, the men in his house wanted him to see what was coming next, and so had disguised their identities.

Mathers stayed behind Roland Harvey at a safe distance. The rolling, wooded terrain allowed him to catch sight of the squad car ahead of him through the trees or on the crests of hills while simultaneously providing camouflage. In his rickety wreck he remained inconspicuous on Indian land.

They crossed into Oka, then left that town behind.

Suddenly, he lost him. The road skirted a hill with broad views of the valley sweeping down through parkland to the lake. The vehicle was no longer ahead of him on a straight run. Mathers did a U-turn and slowly headed back, watching for side roads and drives. This time he spotted the squad car as he passed the Oka Monastery.

He continued on by and turned again, and he was passing the monastery a third time when he pulled off into a visitors’ parking lot, close to the store where the monks sold their cheese, maple syrup and sundry farm products. Famous for their cheese, the monks had sold their operation to Kraft, but they continued to maintain small cottage industries. From the lot, Bill Mathers strolled down through the snow and the trees to lower ground, and there, in a much smaller parking area, were two cars—Roland Harvey’s squad car, and a blue Honda Accord.

His cellphone vibrated in his pocket. Behind a maple tree, Mathers answered. “Hello?”

“Bill?”

“Emile, give me the number.”

“Excuse me?”

“The license plate for Lucy’s car, do you have it yet?”

“Hang on.” Cinq-Mars read the plate number back to him.

“I’ve found her, Emile. The car, anyway, but I bet she’s here. I bet she’s in the east wing of the Oka Monastery. Harvey led me right there. How about them apples?”

His partner whistled at the news.

“What should I do?”

“Beat it. Don’t be seen. Knock off for the day. I’ll call tonight.”

“Take care, Emile.”

At the monk’s store he purchased a pound of cheese, then headed back to the city. Along the way Mathers passed Charles Painchaud’s house—out of curiosity, he’d looked for it on the way out—and noticed, beside an SQ, squad car and a Dodge Neon, a white stretch limo parked in the front yard. Some cops, although not too many, lived charmed lives. Mathers assumed that Painchaud’s big-shot father was paying his son a visit, and he continued the drive around the frozen lake toward home.

The impact of the first blows to his gut was thunderous, robbing him of air and strength, and Charles Painchaud was reduced to gasping on the pinewood floor. As a skinny kid he’d been bullied often, and he knew that he had to keep his mind together, he couldn’t panic, he’d have to start talking soon. But this was already different, he felt paralysed, he couldn’t breathe and he was scared for his life. The men were waiting for him to recover, and nobody had pulled a knife or a gun. That gave him hope. Then a big man commenced beating him again, raising his fist back and smashing
whatever part of him Painchaud could not protect, and the policeman cried out and groaned.

The gorilla started methodically kicking him. Painchaud buckled with each blow and he was moaning now continuously as blood filled his mouth and nostrils and a horrendous pain in his groin made him scream, and he was spitting blood when he was skimmed off the floor and thrown against one wall and picked up again and thrown against another. He crashed through furniture and blood blinded him and suddenly he was tossed back up on the arm of his sofa.

“Sit up,” a voice instructed him.

Painchaud groaned and held his arms wrapped across his chest as though holding himself together, and he tried to concentrate on breathing.

He looked up through the blood in his eyes.

The three men who faced him wore nylon stockings over their heads.

“Sergeant Painchaud,” said the man who had been at the door, as he put on a pair of leather gloves, “call me Jacques. I answer to that name if you speak to me in a civil tongue.”

“What do you want, Jacques?” Painchaud’s own voice was faint, breathless, it sounded far away to him. Breathing hurt. One of the punches had probably cracked a rib and the pain had begun to overwhelm him now. He saw that the goon who had done most of the damage had huge hands and wore a massive set of brass knuckles that dripped blood. His blood.

“Explain to me why you killed my good buddy, Andrew Stettler.”

“I didn’t.”

That was the wrong answer. A fury of blows drove him over the side of the sofa onto the floor again where he was kicked and stomped and the policeman sheltered his eyes in the crook of an elbow and curled up to protect his groin. Painchaud was spitting up blood now
and he was delirious, wanting to get away, wanting to be released from the hammering punches and the scrum of boots, and when it was finally over he wanted to crawl away but he could not, he could only curl up with the pain and moan.

His assailant pulled him off the floor again as if he were weightless and propped him up on the sofa’s armrest once more.

He could see through only one eye now and breathing caused sharp pains in his chest.

“Now that’s a shame,” Jacques commented. “I was hoping we could get along. You’re a professional, I’m a professional, I thought we could conduct business in a professional manner. In a practical way. You know what I mean? If you killed Andy Stettler, say so. I’d like to discuss that with you. Find out what happened. Just don’t bullshit me, Sergeant. That’s all I’m asking of you right now.”

He wobbled on the armrest. He tried to look at his inquisitor, but had trouble raising his head, and when he did he only glimpsed that nylon stocking through his one undamaged eye.

“So I’ll ask you again. Why’d you whack Andy?”

To answer honestly would be to receive another drubbing. In his misery he was tempted to lie, to confess to the crime. He had to believe that they were beating on him because they were not sure of their facts and wanted things confirmed. If he was going to prove his innocence in this courtroom, he would have to convince the judge and jury through the crucible of punishment.

“I didn’t do it,” he said.