The Delicate Storm (18 page)

“We like to be thorough.”

Cardinal made his way down the rocks with extreme care, wary of the icy glaze, thinking, this could be a gold mine. Finally the luck might be turning his way.

The car lay on its back, nose-first in about three feet of water. Most of the roof had been crushed level with the rest of the body, and one wheel was missing entirely.

“Looks promising,” Arsenault said. “We can see an exit mark where a bullet went through the passenger-side door.”

“What about the interior?” Cardinal said. “Has the water destroyed everything?”

“Way it stands now, the water’s barely into the cabin. We don’t want to get too close, though, in case we shift the weight and tip it over. Water may have washed away some hair and fibre, but if there’s any blood by that exit mark, it should still be dry. The hard part’s going to be getting the car out. Tow truck’s not going to work.”

Cardinal looked from the wreck up to the top of the cliff, a distance of at least seventy-five feet that consisted almost entirely of jagged granite. “Don Deckard,” he said. “He’s the only guy.”

They heard the crane before they saw it. First there was a rumble in the earth, and then the grinding of gears, and finally the sound of a massive combustion engine straining to conquer a hill. Then the machine itself appeared, a colossal vehicle consisting almost entirely of huge wheels. On its back it carried the steel columns of the crane, now folded up like a boy’s construction toy. It stopped at the crest of the hill and Don Deckard jumped down from the cab.

He looked like a dinosaur from the 1960s who had somehow been propelled against his will into the next century. He wore black jeans with studs up the outside seams and a beaded buckskin jacket with an elaborate fringe. His greying hair was tied back in a ponytail, and his eyes were bright red as if he’d just smoked a joint.

“Hey, man.” He gave Cardinal a high-five; they’d worked together a few times over the years. “Long time no see. What have you got for me?”

Cardinal led him down toward the car.

“Where does he live?” Szelagy said to Arsenault. “Woodstock?”

“You don’t know Deckard? This guy’s a legend. See that little item there?” Arsenault pointed to the crane. Even folded up, the thing looked the length of a small high-rise. “It’s worth about half a million dollars. Sank in Lake Superior ten years ago—I forget what they were doing with it. Anyway, the company that owned it wrote it off as a complete loss. Even the insurance company wrote it off. But Deckard went out there with about six guys and a barge and hauled that thing out of three hundred feet of ice-cold water.”

It took Deckard just under an hour to get his crane set up and in position. Then the beam swung out over the quarry and lowered a steel cable with a canvas sling on the end. Giant air bags intended for use in raising sunken vessels were wedged between the car and the rocks and then inflated to stop the car from shifting. The sling was slipped into position and a few moments later the car was pulled high into the air above the gorge.

In the cab of the crane, Deckard pulled his levers and spun his wheels until the car settled, still upside down, on the back of a flatbed truck.

Deckard stepped out of his cab, and all four cops applauded. He bowed deeply and jumped down from the crane. He gave Cardinal another high-five. “Piece of cake, man. Piece of cake.”

Arsenault and Collingwood were already on the back of the flatbed. Using a “jaws of life” machine they pried open a space between the crushed roof and the seats.

“Windows were all open when it went over,” Arsenault said. “Clearly, the guy thought he was going to sink it. Probably came here at night and sent it over the cliff, thinking the water was deeper.”

Arsenault and Collingwood found several items of limited interest: a blurry rental agreement in the name of Howard Matlock, a pair of aviator clip-on sunglasses, and an empty Coke can still lodged in the cup holder. These and the entire car would be fumed for prints when they had dried off.

“It’s actually the passenger we want to focus on,” Cardinal said. “We know a fair bit about the victim and nothing about who killed him.”

Collingwood was going over the back of the passenger seat with a pair of tweezers. He turned to Cardinal and emitted a single word: “Blood.”

“On the passenger side? You’re sure?”

Collingwood didn’t reply. He pulled a carpet-cutter from his tool kit and peeled away the seat cover, exposing the padding. There was no mistaking the brownish stain beneath.

“We don’t want to wait ten days for DNA results,” Cardinal said. “Is there any way in the meantime we can be sure this is from the passenger and not the driver?”

“We can type them right now,” Arsenault said. “It’s possible they’re the same type, but it’s worth a shot, no?”

Arsenault retrieved a hand-held device from the ident van. For the next fifteen minutes he and Collingwood laboured over the stains. Cardinal waited, staring across the lake at the leaden sky. Mountains of cloud were massing on the horizon, threatening even more rain, which would mean even more ice.

Arsenault came up behind him, footsteps crunching on the ice. “Driver’s O-negative,” he said.

“And the passenger?”

“We’ve got the passenger too. AB-negative.”

Cardinal whipped out his cellphone and called Delorme. “Didn’t you tell me the blood you found in Dr. Cates’s office was AB-negative?”

“That’s right. We got it off the paper from the examining table.”

“This could link the two cases,” Cardinal said. “The killer shoots Shackley, but he gets shot too. The bullet’s still in him, but he can’t go to a hospital because they have to report gunshot wounds. So he grabs Dr. Cates and forces her to treat him.”

“Then kills her to keep her quiet. It’s looking good. And I’ve got some other news for you.”

“Oh?”

“Musgrave stopped by. You’re not gonna believe who Shackley was calling.”

Chouinard listened to Cardinal’s proposal with no sign of excitement or even of interest. When Cardinal had finished laying it out, he responded in the tranquil tones that made him sound so much more intelligent than he was.

“Clearly, you have to go to Montreal, no question about that. I’m not so sure about Delorme, though.”

“Detective Delorme,” Cardinal said, “how would you rate my French?”

“What French? I’ve heard you, and it’s not French. It’s more like a kind of Frankenstein sort of—”

“What are you so worried about, Cardinal? Everybody in Montreal speaks English, you know.”

“That’s not true,” Delorme said. “That’s not even close to true.”

“Well, maybe it’s changed since the last time I was there. Take a dictionary with you. I’m just not persuaded your two cases are the same killer.”

“D.S., think about it,” Cardinal said. “Cates is the second dead body in the woods in three days. Shouldn’t we assume it’s tied to the Shackley murder until there’s some reason to think otherwise?”

“We’ve got lots of reasons to think otherwise,” Chouinard said. “One body’s a man, the other’s a woman. One’s eaten by bears, one not. One’s a visitor, one lived here in town …”

“Wait a minute,” Delorme said. “What are the chances of two killers in a town this size having AB-negative blood?”

“Blood type is not a positive ID.”

“Suppose he shoots Shackley and gets wounded himself,” Cardinal said. “A small wound. There wasn’t much blood on the passenger side.”

“I get that. He needs a doctor. But why feed Shackley to the bears and not the doctor?”

“There’s a number of possibilities. Number one: I think we can agree it’s unlikely that Dr. Cates was murdered because of any mob involvement. If she was killed by the same person, that means Bressard wasn’t hired by Leon Petrucci to dispose of Shackley’s body, he was hired by someone else pretending to be Petrucci. Petrucci’s well known in this town. A lot of people know he can’t talk, that he writes notes. It all came out when Bressard was on trial for assault years ago—it was all over the
Algonquin Lode
. Maybe our killer figures he can’t fool Bressard twice. Maybe he doesn’t want to pay him twice.”

“In any case,” Delorme said, “he gets wounded Saturday night in the altercation with Shackley. Maybe he thinks he can tough it out. Maybe he thinks he can live with it. By Monday it’s hurting like hell, or maybe it’s still bleeding. Now he knows for sure he needs a doctor.”

“Why Dr. Cates?”

“We don’t know that yet,” Delorme said.

“But you’ve checked out her patients. You’ve checked out her colleagues.”

“Which is why I should go to Montreal with Cardinal. Two of us will be able to follow up on those phone numbers faster than one. And if we find out who Shackley was after, we’ll know who the killer is.”

“God, I hate decisions,” Chouinard said. “Wait till you have to worry about budgets and you’ll know how it feels.”

“So I go too, right?”

“Don’t you dare spend one minute longer than necessary.”

19

RCMP HEADQUARTERS, C DIVISION
, Montreal. The atmosphere calm and businesslike, everyone polite. Cardinal wondered if he had wandered into the wrong building by mistake. He and Delorme had just come from checking in at the Regent Hotel—a tiny concrete box utterly without character next to the expressway—and the comparatively plush interior of C Division was a welcome change.

“This place is more like an insurance company than a police station,” Delorme said.

They’d been given a small interview room for their first meeting with Sergeant Raymond Ducharme. Cardinal figured Ducharme had to be sixty-five if a day, what with all the lines in his ruddy face. He had the body of a swimmer and the head of a philosopher—wide brow, sharp features and thin, sarcastic mouth. His teeth looked too good to be real.

“So, you’re friends of Malcolm Musgrave,” Ducharme said. His French Canadian accent was bracing. “I’ve known him since he was that high.” He made a gesture slightly above knee level.

“Really?” Cardinal said. “I can’t imagine Malcolm Musgrave that high.”

“For sure,” Ducharme said. “I used to work with his dad, eh? Back in the good old days. His dad was one of the best. Please, have a seat. Can I get you something to drink? Coke? Coffee? You’re sure? All right. Now, I’ve had a chance to take a look at the photograph you sent me, but let me start by asking how much you remember about the October Crisis.”

“October 1970,” Cardinal said. “A couple of guys were kidnapped by the FLQ. Raoul Duquette, a provincial cabinet minister, was killed. That’s about it.”

“I was seven years old,” Delorme said. “I don’t remember anything.”

Sergeant Ducharme raised a pedagogical finger. “Time for a refresher, then.”

Cardinal took out his pen.

“It’s La Belle Province, late 1960s. We’ve got strikes left and right: the cab drivers, the students, even the cops, they go on strike. Some of the demonstrators, they get out of hand and heads get broken, one or two individuals get killed. Out of this anarchy rises a group known as the Front de libération du Québec, or FLQ for short. The FLQ starts putting bombs in mailboxes in Montreal and Quebec City. What do they want? They want Quebec to separate from Canada and become its own country.

“Other organizations want the same thing. The Parti Québécois, for example. The difference is that the PQ aim to do it through the democratic process. The FLQ don’t give a damn about the democratic process. They want their own country now, and they’re going to get it by violence.

“So, bombs start going off. Mostly they’re small, and mostly no one gets hurt. But cases of dynamite keep getting stolen from construction sites around the city. In fact, a lot of the dynamite came from the construction of Expo 67, which was supposed to celebrate a hundred years of Canadian nationhood. Some people, they thought this showed the FLQ had a sense of humour. What it really showed was that some of the FLQ worked in construction.

“Anyway, they start putting bombs in mailboxes. Some in Quebec City, some in Ottawa, but mostly they put them in mailboxes on the charming streets of Westmount, home of the wealthier Anglos in Montreal. Also the home of yours truly:
RCMP
C Division.” He waved a hand at the window, where sparse flakes of snow drifted over the green slope of Mount Royal.

“But then people start getting killed or maimed. One of the men on our bomb squad had both his hands blown off trying to defuse a bomb. And a security guard died at a building the FLQ thought was empty. Champions of the working class, they call themselves, but I don’t think the security guard’s widow would agree. Anyway, by now we’re going all out to catch these bastards.

“October fifth, 1970. The home of British trade consul Stuart Hawthorne. Doorbell rings, the maid answers. There’s a man at the door with a long package. ‘Birthday present for Mr. Hawthorne,’ he says. The maid moves to open the door and suddenly four men are in the hallway, the box is open and a machine gun is pointing in her face. They drag Mr. Hawthorne out of the bathroom where he’s shaving, and less than five minutes later he’s blindfolded in the back seat of a car.

“Communiqués are sent, demands are made. The so-called Liberation cell of the FLQ has a lot of demands, but the biggest ones are freedom for twenty-three so-called political prisoners, $500,000 in what they refer to as a voluntary tax, and safe conduct to Cuba for the kidnappers and the freed prisoners. Anything less will result in the execution of Mr. Hawthorne.”

“Why did they kidnap someone from another country?” Cardinal asked. “Why not go for someone closer to home?”

“That’s exactly what other members in the FLQ asked themselves. The federal government is still putting together its kidnap task force when another cell strikes, the Chénier cell. This time they kidnap Raoul Duquette, provincial minister of education.

“The government stalls for time. I was with the Security Service back then, and we set up a Combined Anti-Terrorist Squad—the
CAT
Squad—made up of Mounties, the Quebec provincial police and the Montreal police. Within forty-eight hours we knew who the kidnappers were. What we didn’t know was where they were. I was convinced then and I’m convinced today that if we’d had another couple of days, we could’ve found them. But people were panicking.

“The federal government—Pierre Trudeau—is ready to call in the army. Literally. All he needs is a letter from the mayor of Montreal and the premier of Quebec asking for help dealing with an ‘apprehended insurrection.’ Those are the actual words required by the War Measures Act. Well, he has a minister dictate the letters and, sure enough, they have the signatures two hours later. That night, October sixteenth, 1970, at midnight, he declares war measures in force.

“Suddenly we don’t need warrants anymore. We don’t have to lay charges for thirty days. We round up everybody—and I mean everybody—from cab drivers to nightclub singers. Anybody who ever said anything nice about separation. We lock ’em up and we ask ’em who they know.

“The embarrassing truth is, they don’t know anybody. Of the 540 people we rounded up, only thirty were charged with anything, and only a dozen were convicted, mostly for stupid weapons offences. We did not find any huge cache of arms, we did not find any gigantic network of terrorists.”

“Suspending civil rights?” Delorme said. “The Americans didn’t even do that after September eleventh. For immigrants, maybe, but not for citizens.”

“You’re right,” Ducharme said. “The Trudeau government wanted to send a message to the terrorists that violent acts would cost them far more than they could possibly be worth. The Chénier cell understood it differently. They understood it to mean that all the negotiations of the past few days had been completely phony. They gave their answer the next day: they murdered Raoul Duquette.”

“But you got the diplomat out,” Cardinal said. “Stuart Hawthorne?”

“We got Hawthorne out. It took two months, but we got him out alive. His kidnappers went to Cuba, then to Paris, and eventually most of them came back here and served some time—not much—and then settled down.

“The people who killed Duquette were caught and sent to prison. Unfortunately, we couldn’t prove which one of them did the actual killing, so they only did twelve years.

“Which brings us to your photograph.”

Ducharme held up the group photograph Cardinal had found in Shackley’s files.

“The one on the left with the curly hair is Daniel Lemoyne, leader of the Chenier cell. The young man in front is Bernard Theroux. In his initial confession he said that he held Duquette down while Lemoyne strangled him. He later recanted this confession, and his lawyer got it thrown out of court.”

“What about the young woman?” Cardinal said. “She looks like a teenager.”

“She must have been a fringe member, if she was a member at all. I don’t have anything on her yet. Same with the other young man, the bearded one in the striped shirt. I know the faces of the major players by heart, but these two …”

“They’re not members of the Chénier cell?”

“I don’t think so. Not that I recall. I’m sorry. Normally, we’d be able to come up with that information right away, but this was long before the age of computerization here, and the files are in transit back from Ottawa.
CSIS
grabbed them a while back. It’s like the Kennedy assassination, you know—every five years some wiseacre decides it’s time to revisit the October Crisis. We should have everything back in a day or two, and then you’ll get your IDs.”

“It’s hard to believe this stuff,” Delorme said. “It seems so crazy now.”

“Really?” Sergeant Ducharme said. “Just in the past year we’ve had the French Self-Defence League putting bombs in front of coffee shops and restaurants because they have signs in English. Passions run high, even today.”

“And the other photograph?” Cardinal pointed to a picture of Miles Shackley circa 1970. Musgrave had sent it to him and to Ducharme. When Cardinal had asked how he got hold of it, Musgrave had said, “I’m a Mountie, Cardinal. I have superhuman powers.”

“Miles Shackley was an American who worked here around the time of the crisis. We had a few CIA people working with us on the
CAT
Squad. Well, don’t look like that, it was perfectly natural. They had the Black Panthers and the Weathermen to deal with, and terrorism was becoming an international problem. It would have been stupid not to have them involved.

“Personally, I didn’t care for Shackley. Not that it mattered—I was very low on the totem pole. He was working with Lieutenant Fougère and Corporal Sauvé. Fougère died a few years ago, unfortunately, but no doubt you’ll be talking to Sauvé. They were the top guys, the three of them, and they got along fine. I don’t remember anything else about Shackley, and the file is of course with the others, but I hope to have it back in a few days.”

“What was Shackley’s function in the
CAT
Squad?” Cardinal said.

“Liaison, probably. Maybe more, but I don’t know. He would have given us help tracing financing, tracing connections between various groups. Oh, and I believe he was following a particular Black Panther who was hiding out up here. The FLQ were getting guns from the Panthers in return for sheltering them when they came up here on the run.”

“And Musgrave told us about the phone numbers,” Cardinal said.

“Yes, the phone numbers. Now, there it gets interesting.”

Compared to what was happening in Algonquin Bay, Montreal and environs were enjoying a normal winter. The snow looked about three feet deep, and at corners and intersections it was heaped so high that Cardinal had to nose the car out into the intersection to see what was coming down the street.

But it was getting warmer here too. The branches hung heavy and the icicles dripped, and as Cardinal drove along Highway 10 toward the Eastern Townships, the light snow turned to drizzle. The damp painted the trunks of the trees deep black, so that the landscape, once he was beyond the city limits, was at once both wintry and misty, the blacks and whites stark. The sky was so dark it gave the day a feel of twilight, even though Cardinal had just finished lunch.

He and Delorme had divided the work between them: Delorme had headed into town to talk to a former FLQ member, and Cardinal was on his way to interview Robert Sauvé, former second-in-command of the
CAT
Squad. Sauvé’s was the first number Shackley had called from New York, and he had called it several times.

“Here’s what you have to know about Sauvé,” Sergeant Ducharme had said. “A few years after the October Crisis, on June thirteenth, 1973, to be exact, about three-thirty in the morning, the citizens of Westmount were woken up by a loud blast. A bomb had gone off outside the home of one Joseph P. Felstein, founder of Felstein supermarkets. Blew out windows along the entire street.

“Police arrive and find a hole in the ground, still smoking, and a trail of blood leading them to a car parked half a block away. Slumped in the front seat they find a guy with his hands torn up, half his face blown away and his guts hanging out.

“They take him to hospital and the guy goes into surgery. For a while it looks like he isn’t going to make it, but call it a miracle of Montreal medicine—the guy lives. Of course his jaw is wired up, fingers are missing, his left eye is gone, but he’s alive. Unfortunately, he isn’t talking. Won’t even tell anyone his name.

“It doesn’t take the Montreal police long to find out. The car was a rental, but they trace it to Corporal Robert Sauvé of the Combined Anti-Terrorist Squad. You remember when the Mounties got hauled on the carpet by the Keable Commission? We burnt a barn the FLQ was using for meetings, we raided René Lévesque’s offices for mailing lists, planted illegal wiretaps. Very bad boys, the Keable Commission said.”

“I remember,” Cardinal said. “It was on the news every night for months.”

“Corporal Robert Sauvé was the reason it happened. If it hadn’t been for him, the Mounties would still be running the Security Service in this country.
CSIS
would never have been invented. For weeks Sauvé doesn’t say anything. The Montreal cops charge him with everything they can think of and still he doesn’t co-operate.