The Cardinal Divide (43 page)

He muttered to himself. He hadn't considered this, then remembered that Perry Gilbert had asked that the washroom be put off limits. He leaned his head against the door and felt weary. He took a sharp breath, turned on his heels, and walked to Mike Barnes' office. He stopped before reaching the open reception area and checked for any sign of Hank Henderson. He saw and heard nothing, so he stepped in.

Tracey was on the phone, and when she looked up her eyes were as big as saucers. “I've got to go,” she said and hung up the phone.

“Cole, what in God's name are you doing here? If Hank Henderson finds you he's going to have you arrested for trespassing.”

Or worse, Cole thought. “Tracey, I need your help.”

“Cole, he told me to call him if you showed up. He's my boss now.”

“He's not inside Mike's office?”

“No, he still uses that rabbit warren downstairs, but he comes up here every hour or so to ask me for something. Cole, he said I should call him.” He could see her hand poised to reach for the phone.

“Please don't Tracey. Please. I'm trying to find out who killed Mike, and I can't do that if you don't help me. Please.”

“Cole, the police say they have Mike's killer.”

“Well, they don't. You've got to trust me. Please.”

She lowered her hand. “What do you need?”

“Keys to the men's washroom.”

She looked at him. “Mike was killed in there, wasn't he?”

“Yes.”

“And you figured that out?”

“Yes, and I told the
RCMP
. They've got the murder all wrong, Tracey.”

“Why do you need to get in there?”

He explained quickly. She curled up her nose. Then she disappeared into Mike's office and returned with a key ring. “This is the master key,” she said. “It opens every door in this building. And this is the master key for all the other buildings on the site.”

“What's this one?” he asked taking the keys.

“Master key for all the padlocks.”

“Who else has these?”

“Lots of people. Hank does for sure. People who work in different buildings have different keys. The padlock key is so old half the town of Oracle probably has it.”

Cole smiled. “I'll get these back to you,” and he trotted down the hallway, shoulder checking as he went. At the bathroom door he slipped the key in the lock and stepped inside.

The room was as he remembered. He flipped on the lights and looked under the sink. The speckles of blood were still there. He saw where the crime scene officers had lifted a sample. And there was a place on the floor where they had looked for the mark of boot prints, and Cole imagined they had dusted for fingerprints all around the room. What kind of killer, Cole wondered, didn't wear gloves? The kind that wasn't planning on doing any killing, Cole guessed.

He went to the stalls. The one that had been closed was no longer locked. He pushed it open with his elbow and looked inside. He couldn't tell if it was still plugged, so he got down on his knees to take a close look. Sure enough, something was wadded up in the drain of the toilet. The water was otherwise clear, for which Cole was deeply grateful. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeve, and plunged his hand into the cold water.

The cold water stung his arm, but he ignored the discomfort and reached his hand down into the blockage at the bottom of the toilet. What did Mike Barnes' agenda look like? Eight inches by ten, with a plastic black cover, the kind any office supply store sold. He grabbed hold of whatever blocked the toilet and pulled. He extracted his hand and found it full of dark, wadded paper towels. He grumbled in disappointment. He dumped them on the floor and plunged his hand back in. He came up with more towels, and more. He emptied the drain. When he was done, a soggy mountain of towels oozed on the floor. The mess was darkly stained. Cole stared at the blood. Mike Barnes' blood.

Whoever clubbed Mike had cleaned up after himself and stuffed the towels in the toilet, flushing as he went. But he stuffed a few too many into the toilet and it backed up. Running out of time the assailant panicked. He'd tried to engineer a disappearance, rather than a murder. But he was sloppy, failed to dispose of the body at the mill, and left behind the blood that Cole had discovered here in the bathroom.

Despite these gaffs by the killer, Cole Blackwater was no closer to finding Mike Barnes' appointment book, and no closer to learning who met with Barnes after Cole on that fateful night.

Cole leaned against the side of the stall, his hand dripping, his arm numb from the cold water.

If George Cody had taken the agenda, it was likely long gone. George could have easily slipped it into a bag of garbage and hidden it among the trash from the Rim Rock and The Quarry.

If David Smith had taken the agenda, he might have hidden it in his office, but more than likely it was long buried in the landfill.

If Hank Henderson had taken the agenda, he might have thrown it out with the trash, or placed it on the conveyor at the mill, intending, perhaps, to pulverize the agenda in the mill's machinery along with the corpse. But
JP
foiled that plan, forcing the killer to stuff the agenda into his pocket for disposal later. If Hank killed Mike, he might have taken the agenda home for disposal, or he might have brought it back to his office. Hank Henderson was a pack rat. Maybe the agenda could be found in a filing cabinet or a drawer, rather than the trash. That was plausible, wasn't it? Cole
stood up and closed the stall door behind him, leaving the sodden towels on the floor.

He regarded himself in the mirror. He was pale and his face looked like he'd undergone plastic surgery that had failed miserably. The stitches should come out in the next few days. Otherwise they would start biting into his skin and leave small pock marks of their own. He took off his cap, ran his hands through his hair, and replaced the cap. He had peeled the bandage from his chin this morning; the cut there had begun to heal.

He intended to do something about this miserable shape he saw in the mirror. He would definitely do something about it. He washed his hands up to the elbow, dried them on his pants, rolled down his sleeves, and put his coat back on.

He peeked out of the bathroom to establish that the coast was clear. Cole locked the door behind him and listened intently to the sounds down the hall. Tracey was on the phone again, but no other voices were discernable.

He made his way to her office and stepped around the corner. Again she hung up. “Anything?”

“No Day-Timer.”

“What did you find?” she asked, holding her breath.

“A lot of paper towels.”

She stared at him, eyes pleading.

“With a lot of blood on them.”

She put her face in her hands and began to cry again.

“Tracey, I have to get into Hank Henderson's office.”

She looked up, tears smearing her mascara. “You think that Hank?...”

“I don't know. It's possible. I need to case his office for Mike's Day-Timer.”

“Oh Cole, I don't know.”

“I have to, Tracey.”

“If he catches you ...”

“I know.”

They formulated a plan. Cole would hide in the empty office next to Mike's. When Hank came upstairs next, Tracey would stall him as long as she could, while Cole slipped downstairs and into his office. When Hank left her office, she would call his extension, let it ring twice, and hang up. That would be Cole's signal to get
out. He figured he'd have less than a minute to clear Hank's office and hide before the acting manager returned.

“It's a big risk,” she said.

“I'm a big boy,” he said. But his stomach turned over at the prospect.

He waited in the empty room beside Barnes' office for half an hour before he heard Hank's voice. That gave him a lot of time to think. It gave him
too much
time to think.

Things didn't turn out as planned very often in Cole Blackwater's life. If someone had predicted, during the heyday of his time in Ottawa, that in a few years he'd be trying to solve a murder at a mine in a backwoods town in the eastern slopes of Alberta, rather than end poverty or stop climate change, he would have laughed. If they had told him he'd be elbow deep in a toilet, he would have cried.

So he laughed. Eyes closed, shoulders moving up and down against the wall, belly contracting, he laughed silently. He sat with his back to the wall next to the closed door and laughed at the sheer stupidity of everything that had happened in the last four years. And the laughter turned to tears.

Before he knew it, tears rolled down his grisled cheeks, stained his face, and got caught in the scar on his chin. The laughter was now bittersweet. He never imagined being here. Even when things went completely sideways in Ottawa and then turned for the worse, far worse, on that dark night in the barn on the family ranch, even then, during his darkest moments, he never imagined he'd be trying to solve a murder.

It was half an hour before Hank Henderson left his office to snarl at Tracey. Cole bet that Mike Barnes never did that. Hank angrily demanded where College Boy filed the monthly financials. When Cole was certain Hank was out of the hall, he slipped out of the office and padded toward the stairs.

He checked his watch. Tracey had promised to keep Hank for five minutes at least, but he couldn't count on it. He reached the third floor and found that hallway clear. Luck was on his side. He slipped into Hank's office and shut the door. The room was dark and cluttered. First he cased Henderson's desk, opened the drawers and looked beneath stacks of paper. His heart skipped a beat when he found a Day-Timer, but it was Henderson's. On the off chance
that Hank had marked down his appointment with Barnes, Cole scanned the previous week. He caught his breath when he read that Henderson indeed had an appointment for eight o'clock that night. It didn't say with whom; all it said was “Finalize E.A.” Cole read that as finalize Environmental Assessment.

Cole returned the agenda and quickly moved to the row of filing cabinets on the opposite wall. They were ancient units, heavy and solid, the kind that would come in handy during a nuclear blast or some other apocalyptic event. They squealed when he opened the drawers. Cole looked quickly through the files and stacks of papers, desperately hoping that he would find what he was after.

The phone rang.

He froze.

It rang a second time.

His heart raced. He was about to slam the cabinet shut when it rang a third time.

It wasn't Tracey.

He hoped. They had agreed on two rings. What if she had forgotten?

Then his name was mud.

He continued his search. Nothing but paper. He removed a wad of files to search beneath and dropped one on the floor.

“Sweet mother of pearl,” he muttered.

The phone rang.

He scooped up the file and jammed it back into the drawer.

The phone rang again.

His heart beat louder than the phone.

He waited for the next ring, but it never came.

He made a dash for the door, knocked the table as he went, upset several giant drill bits, and bruised his leg. He groaned. He reached for the door handle when he saw, through the opaque bevelled glass, movement down the hall. Henderson. Caught. The adrenaline coursed through his ears.

He searched for a place to hide in the room and spotted the windows with their dust-laden vertical blinds. He had only seconds.

Then he heard a female voice. “Mr. Henderson, I found them!”

He watched the doorknob slowly turn to open the door, and
then stop. He could see Henderson's outline through the glass. He wondered if he himself was as plainly visible.

“Mr. Henderson!” It was Tracey. The door remained closed. Cole scrambled through the drapes to the windows. He knocked a cloud of dust into the air as he pushed his way through, careful not to cough or sneeze or make a racket. He found the latch to the four-foot high window, pushed it open, and lifted himself out onto the sill.

The Buffalo Anthracite Mine's administration building was rectangular, four storeys high, and made of red brick, trimmed modestly with wide cement windowsills. Cole found himself twenty-five feet off the ground standing on such a sill. He closed the window behind him and prayed for the first time in his life, hoping that Hank Henderson had not seen him step out into this ledge.

The ledge in question was about eight inches wide, and the window was four feet tall. Cole's toes hung over the edge and he had to press his head into the brick above the window to balance. He took a deep breath. When he was younger he and his older brother Walter had often gone into the Highwood Range, west of the family ranch, to scramble in the mountains. He had been in a number of tricky situations in those days, and heights hadn't bothered him much then. But now, middle-aged and out of practice, Cole closed his eyes against the long drop to the ground below.

He forced himself to breathe. His lungs relaxed as moist air, still cloaked in cloud, still wet with rain, entered on a deep breath. He grew calm. And calmly he assessed the situation. I'm caught on a ledge three storeys above the ground, outside the office of a man who very likely killed his boss and took his job, a man who hates me. A man who threatened to kill me if I was seen on the mine property again. Cole suppressed a laugh. I'm in plain view of anybody who wanders by. This is not good.

Cole looked down. Behind the administration building was the two-storey-tall maintenance building that he had seen when he clambered over the fence. Below him were the wheelbarrow and other assorted tools, carelessly left in the rain.

He looked to his left. He could make his way along this ledge and, if he could turn around without falling, step to the next window, which he figured must also be one that looked into Hank
Henderson's office. Three feet of red brick separated the two windows. Could he turn around, and then make the awkward, off-balance step to the next window, somehow holding onto the brick as he did? And then what? Repeat it half a dozen more times to get to the end of the building. There was a stout-looking drain spout, not the cheap aluminium eavestroughs that were installed on homes today, but a solid iron affair that Cole thought might hold him. But he had to get to it. Then he could tackle the problem of what to do. Maybe his fleeting luck would hold and one of the empty offices would have an open window.