Ice Lake (5 page)

“Why don’t we just tell him everything? We were going to talk to him anyway.”

“Andy’s death complicates things. You knew him. He’s dead in your hut. Andy held so many keys that could have helped you and Lucy. Now he’s dead. That’s trouble. Lucy’s in trouble. You are, too. I need time to think this through.”

She began to breathe heavily, and tears welled. “Charlie, Charlie, they’ve killed Andy! Andy’s dead!”

“Shhh, shhh,” he whispered, both cautioning and soothing her.

“How did he get under the ice in my hut?” The mystery of it seemed to make her frantic. “Is that some kind of warning? Do they know about me, too? Are they going to kill me next?”

“Don’t panic, Camille. It’s a coincidence. They would never warn you first.” That seemed of slight comfort, so Sergeant Painchaud moved across to the bunk on which Camille was sitting and took her into his arms. He rocked her and urged her not to worry, but he knew that there was much to fear, and much that was left unexplained. Eventually, the woman who had crossed the ice on a Ski-Doo that morning only to find a friend dead beneath her fishing hut calmed herself.

“Where’s Lucy?” Camille Choquette inquired.

“She’s gone into the city. To blow off steam, I imagine.”

Camille looked up at him, astonished.

“No!” he hastened to add. “She doesn’t know about Andy.”

“Oh my God. Charlie!”

“I know,” he said. “I know. It’s going to be rough on her.”

They held one another in the stark, warm comfort of the shack.

That night, Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars snoozed toward the end of the movie he was supposed to be watching with his wife, missing the romantic bits. He struggled to wakefulness when she got up to snap the tape out of the VCR and switch the television to the news. Groggy, he had a difficult time pushing himself farther out of the sofa’s deep cushions. Clips from an earthquake in Colombia were depressing, and yet another uprising among Palestinians contributed to a sombre mood. They were watching a station out of Vermont, as his wife was American and preferred to catch the news from home.

“If we switch to the local channel you might see your husband in action,” Cinq-Mars remembered.

“Why’s that?” Sandra asked. She was much younger than him. She was sitting with her knees up, encircled by her arms.

“Some lout with a video camera was on the ice. He probably sold me off to the highest bidder.”

“Then switch!” Sandra Lowndes enthused. “I never get to see you on the job.”

A local French station was also finishing up the international news, but the lead story when they turned their attention to home was a murder on the Lake of Two Mountains.

“There you are!” Sandra cried out, seeing her husband peering down into the cavity where, the audience was told, floated a dead man’s head. “Did you
touch him with your bare hands? Talk about a body gone cold.”

“Bill did the touching.” The sad-sack Chief of Police from Vaudreuil-Dorion received two seconds of airtime. Much of the report was devoted to the amazing coincidence of star detective Emile Cinq-Mars being, once again, in the right place at the right time.

Included in the report was information Cinq-Mars did not know. The victim had been identified as Andrew Stettler, an employee of a pharmaceutical company known as BioLogika. When the company’s name was mentioned, the camera panned the tall building at the head of the bay that overlooked the ice-village.

Following her husband’s thirty seconds of continued fame Sandra switched back to the American channel, while Cinq-Mars mulled the news that the dead man had worked near the spot where his body had been recovered.

Sandra punched off the tube with her remote control, stretched and yawned. She fluffed her brown hair back, then leaned way over and kissed her husband. She was a handsome woman with lively eyes and a quick smile. She had a soft, full mouth and gentle lines across her forehead created by perpetually arching her eyebrows. She jumped up, grasped his hand and pulled her man to his feet.

“You are not going to think about this all night, Emile.”

“That might not be possible.”

“Wanna bet?”

Movie romance had her in the mood, and the detective was not about to pit himself against the bright twinkle in her eye. They departed the den in their country home clasped in one another’s arms, and Cinq-Mars stretched out his free hand to turn out the lights.

2
ROLL CALL

Approximately two months earlier,
Wednesday, December 8, 1998

Depending on the nature of the experiment, lab rats at Hillier-Largent Global Pharmaceuticals, Inc., were paid up to a thousand dollars for a weekend of their time and the indiscriminate use of their bodies. Applicants agreed to be inoculated, or scratched with a vaccine, or given drugs orally, or sprayed with decongestants, or plied with laxatives, and consented also to spending a weekend, Friday night to Monday morning, in the lab under observation. In a few experiments they were deprived of sleep, in others they were prohibited from leaving their beds except to urinate or defecate in pots, their urine and feces retained for study.

In any economy, stagnant or prosperous, a shortage of candidates rarely occurred. If the company advertised for healthy twenty-year-olds, non-smokers, with no record of prolonged alcohol abuse, the line of university students needing cash for spring break circled the block. If the company required octogenarians with a known history of heart disease, applicants were dropped off by relatives. They shuffled into line behind their walkers, checking pacemakers and pulse, sneaking a smoke to calm their nerves prior to the interview. If the company
requested men with a previous history of heroin addiction, ex-convicts released from prison a few days earlier responded, as polite as choirboys, happy for three more days of detention, and they were joined by skid-row vets hoping to earn a dollar.

Inside the laboratory, where visitors’ blood tests were conducted, a poster, out of the lab rats’ sight, repeated a variation on an old adage: “Life is Shit, Then You Croak.” The sign was meant to cheer up the technicians.

Lucy Gabriel, generally, did not require cheering up, although she had been responsible for erecting the sign. Affable and fun-loving, she was bright, eager and talkative, and took considerable pride in her work. She’d been chosen to interview the applicants who lined up for the Wednesday morning roll calls because of her natural affinity for the destitute. She treated them in a cordial and sympathetic manner. Being native didn’t hurt. The poor suspected that she had known hard times herself, which eased their embarrassment at being there. Those who recognized her as an activist for Indian rights, someone who had spent time on the barricades during an explosive period in the history of her reserve, believed that they had placed themselves in good hands.

Men, of course, were delighted to discover themselves in the care of a beauty.

An aspect to conducting the interviews was keeping an eye peeled for special people. That Andrew Stettler caught her attention was no surprise. He had come on strong. She knew the type. Men of his ilk treated the program as a joke, a bump on the road, a story for the boys back at the bar.

As was the case with most lab rats, Andrew Stettler was down on his luck the day that he showed up. Lucy had no problem with that. She didn’t judge people by their troubles. She still lived on the Kanesetake Reserve, where being down on your luck was common-place,
where hard times never ended. On occasion, she might grow impatient with men who chose to be boisterous about being broke, or who dismissed bad decisions as rotten luck, but she understood that people had a right to deal with misery in their own way.

Andrew Stettler’s way was to be the life of any party going.

“Choose me,” he demanded, wearing a wry smile upon entering her office. He had long black hair, curling where it rested on his shoulders, an engaging grin and a discernible brightness to his eyes. Sitting down in the chair in front of Lucy’s desk, he splayed his big hands across the pale oak veneer. “Rich veins. You won’t have to drill for my blood. I admit, the last time I bled, the colour was black. Alien ancestors, I’m guessing. Maybe the bullet poisoned me, who can explain it?” His chin was pointy, his neck longer than most, and his Adam’s apple was particularly prominent. “For you, sugar, I’ll bleed red. Looking at you makes me feel like a red-blooded American boy, which I’m not. I’m local talent. Canadian. A Montrealer, born and bred. Chances are decent I’ll die here, too. I don’t get around much anymore, but who can blame me? So many lovely beauties, how can I leave even one behind? Speaking about dating—”

“We weren’t,” Lucy interjected.

“Details,” he said, waving a hand as though to dismiss her point. “We’ll use the grand your company’s paying me to take an enema—or whatever you got in mind—and we’ll have ourselves a night on the town. Good food. Catch a movie. Drinks someplace. What do you say?”

“Name, please,” Lucy asked. His smile had already snared her. The slight turn at the corners of his mouth expressed mischief, fun, buffoonery and an inclination, she supposed, for the erotic. She liked the darkness in his eyes.

“Call me Andy.”

“What does your bank call you, Andy, in case we write a check?”

“Ah! That’ll be Andrew Stettler. Since I don’t see my name on a check too often, make it out to Andrew R. Stettler. A nice honky ring, don’t you think?”

“If you say so.”

“You’re not white,” he said.

“You’re not blind,” she murmured, and pretended to mark his form.

“Might’ve been. Half-blind anyway, until I saw you. Women in uniform never looked good to me before, but you’ve turned me right around on that one.”

Her white lab coat did not constitute a uniform, but she wasn’t going to argue the point. “Are you clean, Andy?”

He sniffed both armpits. “Lord God Almighty, I think I did take a shower this morning. Shaved, too. I smell like a cross between Irish Spring and Right Guard. So no, I don’t stink, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I think you know what I’m asking.” She typed his name into her computer.

He flashed that dark-eyed smile again. “What’s your name, sugar?”

“Lucy Gabriel.”

“Please to meet you, Lucy. I believe in a drug-free America, so I do my part by living in Canada. Seriously, though, I stay away from that shit. Bought me too much trouble in life. Lost me too many friends. Sample my blood, if you want.”

“I’ll do that, Andy. I positively will do that. But you can save us both time and trouble by answering honestly.”

He brushed his big hands over the surface of the desk, smiled. “Clean for how long?” he asked.

“Six months would be nice.”

“Next question. Clean of what, exactly?”

“Heroin. Crack. Cocaine. Amphetamines,” she stipulated.

“Marijuana? Hash? Angel dust?”

“It’d be nice if you could give me six months from my list and six days from yours.”

He stuck out his hand. “Agreed. Can I come back next week?”

“Ah …”

“Kidding!” He laughed. “I’m clean! I’m not saying it’s been entirely voluntary, but I haven’t toked up up since my last job. Your list never interested me. I’m one of the few guys alive who went to prison and actually came back a rehabilitated soul. I’m a walking, talking miracle, Lucy.”

She had a backlog of applicants waiting in the corridor outside, but was in no hurry to finish with him. “Under occupation, what do I write? Miracle man? Religious nut? Jailbird?”

He laughed. “Funny you should ask. Let me talk to you about it. Any jobs with this company, Lucy? Real, permanent-type jobs, not this guinea pig stuff?”

She shrugged a shoulder. “You’d have to apply at Personnel.”

“Drug company, right?” he went on. “I come here, I see video cameras in the lobby. I see employees showing photo I.D., punching in passwords. I’m thinking, they got security problems here. I can help with that.”

“Try Pinkerton’s.”

He laughed again, as if she’d cracked a joke. “I can’t be bonded, Lucy. But someone like me, I know things that would pin back the ears of a Pinkerton guard. If you have problems, I’m your man, the guy with solutions.”

She decided on the spot to take him seriously. “All right, Andy. I’ll give you a problem. Provide me with a solution.”

For the first time, he sat back in his chair, cocky and cool. “Shoot.”

“Let’s say I wanted you to steal a truck. How would you go about it?”

Andy whistled. “Whoo-ee, aren’t you the action figure! Are you serious?”

She smiled. “No, I’m not. It’s a test. Are you all talk, or do you know things?”

He nodded vigorously, as if to indicate that the ground rules seemed fair enough and that he was only too eager to rise to the challenge. “All right. Let’s see. The gangs, there’s your problem. You don’t hijack a truck anywhere close to the city without the approval of organized crime, not unless you want your clutch foot lopped off. Either you make a deal with a gang, or …” He seemed to suddenly lose himself in thought.