The Cardinal Divide (34 page)

Cole grinned back. “You don't happen to have a bandage, do you?”

“No.”

“Would you mind going to see if Tracey has one?”

“I don't know, you seem like a good candidate for flight from custody,” smiled
JP
.

“Isn't that what you want? Me to get my butt off the mine property?”

“Boss said something about the
RCMP
.”

“Look,” said Cole, and dabbed at his chin. “If you want, I'll march right over to the constable at the mill and turn myself in. Make it easier for me to press assault charges. I even have you as a witness.”

JP
shrugged. “I'll go get you something for your chin.” He stepped out of the bathroom.

“Thanks,” said Cole. He bent toward the mirror and pressed his fore and index fingers around the cut. He dabbed at it with another paper towel and reached for more, but the dispenser was empty. “Great,” he said, and flipped open the lid of the paper towel holder. Nothing. He used the blood-soaked towel in his hand to clean up his chin. The bleeding slowed. Cole figured a couple of Band-Aids might help, and reached into his pocket to see if there was anything there that might fit the bill. He tugged at something that felt like a Band-Aid and pulled it out, spilling a wad of papers, money, and six deck screws onto the bathroom floor.

“Mother of Pearl,” he muttered, and discovered that all he had for his efforts was a crinkled gum wrapper. He stuffed it back into his pocket and bent over stiffly to scoop up some of what had fallen to the floor. On his knees he chased down a dime from beneath the sink, looked up, and stopped cold.

Under the counter, dry and dark red and unmistakable, was blood, sprayed in tiny droplets against the bathroom wall.

Cole was still on his knees when
JP
opened the bathroom door. The door hit Cole's feet.

“What the hell are you doing down there?”

“Dropped something,” he said, and picked up the last of the rubbish that had spilled from his pockets. He let the image of the blood burn into his mind. It was sprayed in a pattern more than three feet wide. A terrible image formed in Cole's mind as he hunched on the floor: the last brutal seconds of a man's life.

He stood up and steadied himself on the counter, sick to his stomach. He'd seen plenty of blood in his life, mostly his own, but this was different. Where he stood now Mike Barnes had last stood alive.

“You
OK
?” asked
JP
.

Cole said nothing. He saw the door to the bathroom open and well-dressed Mike Barnes walked in. He saw him step into one of the bathroom stalls and flush the toilet. He heard the throaty sound of the flush. Barnes stepped to the mirror to examine himself while he washed up. Then the bathroom door opened. Or did the assailant hide in the other stall? Cole could not know. Wherever it came from, the attack was swift. A piece of drill steel or a baseball bat, swung hard and wide. The bathroom was large enough that a man could swing a bludgeon at full arm's length. Had Barnes turned at the last moment to ward off the attack? Had he seen the attack coming and tried to defend himself? Or did it happen so quickly that he was clubbed in the side of the head and dead before he hit the floor? His head connected with the ground with such force that blood from his wound, and from the new one made where he hit the ground, sprayed around the wall under the counter. Cole opened his eyes.

“You
OK
?”
JP
asked again.

“I'm
OK
,” he said. “Just a little light-headed.”

“I got you a Band-Aid,” said
JP
and handed Cole a couple of butterfly bandages. Cole ripped one open and applied it to his chin.

Mike Barnes had been killed in this bathroom. Cole could see that plainly. What he could not see was the face of the man, or woman, who had done the deed.

“You ready to go?” asked
JP
.

“Sure,” said Cole, and turned to leave.

They walked back to the stairwell and passed Barnes' office.

“Hold on a minute,” Cole said.

“You fixing to get me fired?”

“Just a second,” Cole said, and poked his head into the office. “Nice face,” said Tracey.

“Thanks for the Band-Aid.” Cole tried to muster a grin, but couldn't. “Listen, how long has the one stall been out of order in the men's room?”

Tracey looked at him, thinking. “I don't know. About a week.”

Cole said, “Seems like a long time to go unattended.”

Tracey shrugged. “No men left on this floor,” she said, her eyes reddening.

“Right,” said Cole. “See you.”

“Bye,” she said, and returned to the papers on her desk.

They stepped out of the building into full sunlight. To the west Cole saw clouds piled high over the mountains, above them a bright blue sky. The kind of day when Cole missed living in Vancouver.

“Where's your car?” asked
JP
, squinting in the sunlight.

“Right over there.” Cole pointed at the Toyota.

“Seen better years,” said
JP
.

“Haven't we all?” said Cole.

“This place sure has,” said
JP
and looked around.

Cole nodded. “Let's go for a drive.” He said it on impulse.

“What, you and me?”

“Why not?”

“You really are trying to get me fired. Look, if Henderson saw us driving around I'd be out on my ass. I've got three years to go until retirement, and I need this job to put enough away to get by in my golden years.”

Cole looked at the ground and kicked a stone. “
JP
,” he said. “Can I call you
JP
?”

“It's my name.”

“
JP
, I've got a little problem with the official version of events from the night Mr. Barnes was killed.”

The watchman was silent. He squinted at Cole.

“First, I don't believe that Dale van Stempvort killed Mike Barnes. You probably think, of course I'm going to defend him.” Cole waited for
JP
to say something, but he was quiet. Blackwater
continued, “I don't know who did it, but I'm convinced of Dale's innocence. I also don't think that Barnes was killed in the mill.”

“Where do you think he was killed?”

“I'm not sure,” he lied, “but it wasn't the mill. No doubt you found him there, but he wasn't killed there.”

“What's that got to do with us taking a drive?”
JP
asked warily.

“The cops say you saw him alive after my meeting with him.”

“Yeah, he was in his office. I walked by and said ‘Evening Mr. Barnes' and he said, ‘Evening
JP
.' Same as most nights.”

Cole nodded. “Then you found him on your rounds. I want to know what might have been going on around here before you came across Barnes.”

The watchman looked up at the red brick office building. “If Henderson sees us, my ass is grass.”

“I hate to tell you this,
JP
, but this mine isn't long for the world, and it ain't us environmentalists you need to be worried about.”

“You're bullshitting me.”

“I wish I was. Look, the company isn't going to dig another mine. Not right now. Maybe in five or ten years, when the price of coal makes it worth their while. What they are going to do is string this town along until they get their permits, sell lots of stock or trust units or what have you, and then take their money and run. Run straight to Indonesia or Brazil or wherever they can dig without having to pay you union wages.”

“Or worry about your ducks.”

“That too.”

JP
sighed. “
OK
,” he said. “Get in.”

They drove the route that
JP
made once every two hours throughout the night, a wide circle around the outside of the mine, slow but steady, so that the guard could shine his flashlight into windows and look between buildings. At this time of the day he stopped from time to time to chat with someone. After making the sweep of the perimeter,
JP
drove between the buildings.

“Why are you doing this?” the watchman asked Cole.

“Doing what?”

“Well, sort of sticking your nose where it doesn't belong.”

“You mean, trying to find out who killed Mike Barnes?”

“Yeah. I mean, it's not going to bring the man back to life.”

“No, but another man's life is at stake.”

“We don't hang ‘em in Canada anymore.”

“Twenty-five years in prison and you might as well.”

“Fair enough.”

“There's also the fact that Barnes' death is going to make it pretty hard for my colleagues to save Cardinal Divide. Public opinion runs against convicted killers, and Dale, like it or not, is part of the gang trying to stop the mine.”

“You said it's not long for the world anyway.”

“Yeah, but it's going to destroy Cardinal Divide before it's done.”

Cole regarded the security guard. He figured him to be in his mid-fifties. He was trim and neat and close-shaven. His left arm, injured years ago, was thinner than the right, but he looked strong and capable, steady. There were a thousand men like him in the community: regular, everyday guys who watched hockey on Saturday night, took their kids to practice at six in the morning, spent evenings in the basement woodshop, worked for thirty-five or forty years and retired. Went fishing.

“There's another reason,” said Cole.

JP
looked at him.

“It's people like you,” he said.

“Oh,” said
JP
, slowing the truck and looking between two buildings. “And what do people like me got to do with it?”

“You deserve a future. You deserve a future that is dignified. When this mine closes, then what? Are you going to work at McDonalds?”

“We got a Wendy's too,” said
JP
, smiling. “I got options.”

“You deserve real options. All your life you've been told that mining is what this community is built on. And there's no doubt about that. Mining is what built this community, and what sustained it for the last fifty years. But mining is not its future. The world is changing, and this town has to change too. You've been backed into a corner by the Hank Hendersons and Mike Barnes of the world.”

“What's that got to do with solving this murder?”

“Everything, and nothing I guess.”

“Speak plainly, man.”

“Well, it's got everything to do with this town's future. I believe
Mike Barnes was killed because he was here to engineer the closure of the mine. If I figure out who killed him, this town might have some options. If Dale goes to prison, and the company continues to pull the wool over Oracle's eyes, then the mine will close and your options will be few. Cardinal Divide will have a hole in its side, and yahoos on
ATV
s will be using the haul road and rail line to get into the wilderness up against Jasper Park. But if we can prove that Dale didn't kill Barnes, and in fact someone else did because of Barnes' plans for the mine, then maybe folks around here will wake up in time to remake their future. One way or another, things are going to change. The question is, will the people working in the mine today be a part of that change, or will they be observers, left on the sidelines?”

“Nice speech,” said
JP
, and waved to some men coming off shift. “You said there was another theory about why Barnes was killed.”

“A skirt.”

“That will do it to you every time,” said
JP
. “Look, we're coming up to the mill. What do you want me to do?”

“Just what you did before finding the body.”

“It's a little different during the day.”

“Well, can you do what you do at night?”

He looked at this watch. “Shift is just ending, so I think I can.”

He drove the truck up to one of the sets of doors, left the engine running, and stepped out. Cole looked at his watch.
JP
fished a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked a box on the wall, opened it, and flipped a switch. He then stepped to the doors, unlocked them, and pulled them open. As the doors swung open, the darkness inside the mill was illuminated by the headlights of the truck.
JP
pegged the big doors down with long bolts that anchored into the cement pad that led to the doors. He stepped back into the truck. Cole looked at this watch again. “About a minute,” he said to himself.

“It's not a race,” said
JP
.

“I know, but timing is important.”

They drove into the mill, toward the coking ovens, in a wide sweep through the building. Cole looked at the speedometer. Dead slow: 5 km/hour.

“You always drive about this speed?”

“Yeah, inside I do. Can't hear anything if you're going faster.” Cole noticed the big building was very quiet without the mill operating.

The back wall of the mill came into view and there were the double doors leading to the storage area. Cole saw the pallets of bits and steel.

“Where were you when you saw Barnes?”

“I didn't see him at first. I saw the pallets knocked over.”
JP