A Door in the River (23 page)

“Did you get what we need?” He passed her a metal-barrelled penlight. “Let’s go over here.”

He followed her into a supply closet. “I don’t think this looks very good, you and me walking into a closet together.”

“Shut up. Turn off the light.” He did, and she snapped the penlight on and took the Arsenault ID out of her pocket. “There was a texture on the surface of the laminate,” she said, and she shone the light over the card.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing I can see. But there’s something there.” She passed the card to him and he ran his fingertips over the laminate.

“I think it’s just the texture of the plastic.”

She turned off the flashlight and they were both silent in the darkness for a moment.

“I wonder if the cafeteria here takes big bills,” she said. She opened the door and light flooded the little room. One of the nurses was turning a corner and saw them
standing there, in the near dark. “We were playing with our two-way radios,” she told her, and the nurse pulled her head back on her neck and continued on her way.

They took the elevator down to the cafeteria and went directly to the cashier. “What are you doing?” Wingate whispered.

“Watch this,” she said. She went up to the cash. “Excuse me, but do you take large bills?”

“We do,” said a lady with a hairnet.

“Do you check them?”

The lady noticed Wingate was in uniform. “We’re supposed to. Do you have a bad bill you want me to check?”

“Yes,” said Hazel, and she dug out the ID again. “Check this.”

The woman looked at the ID, perplexed, but then she did what she was told and removed a little handheld device from a drawer below her cash register. Hazel took it from her. It was a banknote verifier with a UV light in it. Hazel switched it on and slipped the ID under the light.

“Oh,
well
,” said Wingate.

“Look at that.”

Struck out in ghostly purple, the image of a sparrow in flight floated over the printed data on the card. And below the form of the animal were five characters:

.info

] 27 [

Early afternoon

Hazel and Wingate went to visit Cathy Wiest at Ursula Greene’s B&B. She was ensconced on the patio, sitting at a wrought-iron table and sipping an iced tea under a clear sky when they appeared. She froze at the sight of them. “It’s okay, Cathy.”

“Do I have to go home?” Her eyes darted back and forth between them.

“Not yet, not if you don’t want to,” Hazel said. “Ursula says you can stay as long as you like.”

“Okay,” she said, and she visibly relaxed.

It was terrible to see this proud woman reduced to a state of numbness, as terrible as it was to watch her mother begin to give up the ghost. So much of life was contingent. No one could tell you it wasn’t, nor that you wouldn’t suddenly
be subject to its contingencies. Cathy Wiest’s nerves were shot. It was going to take a long time to bring her back to the world.

Hazel hadn’t wanted to come up and disturb her further, but they’d agreed that the prior connection between Jordie Dunn and Henry Wiest had warranted it. They had to know what Dunn had meant when he said that Henry was trying to help the girl they now knew as Kitty. How did Henry come into contact with her? Was Henry just another client of Sparrow’s, one who had a change of heart? Or had he and Kitty somehow made contact with each other another way? Through Dunn, for instance?

They knew they were going to have to go back into that terrible place. But whether Wingate went in as René Arsenault or they just busted it wide open depended on what their options were. Maybe there was another way, a way Dunn had shown Henry Wiest.

Hazel sat down at the patio table beside her and put her hand on Cathy’s. The grief-stricken woman looked at it like she’d never seen a hand before. Wingate stood a few feet away, trying to give them some privacy.

“We’ve made some progress,” Hazel said. “We think we know what Henry was doing at the smoke shop in Queesik Bay.”

“Oh?” A flicker behind her eyes.

“We think he was trying to help someone. A young
woman who had been … mistreated. The woman who came to your house.”

“The girl who killed him?”

“Yes.”

“Why did she kill him if he was trying to help her?”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“Are you sure he was trying to help her?”

“No,” said Hazel quietly, sorry to have to tell Cathy Wiest the truth as she so far understood it. The truth was, they still couldn’t tell the victims from the perpetrators. And it was possible, as it was always possible, that Henry Wiest had not been who he’d seemed.

Cathy’s gaze tracked over Hazel’s shoulder to Wingate. There was a low, gentle breeze playing in her hair. She looked like an old woman to him. “Have you caught her?” she asked him. “Is that why you’re here? To tell me you’ve caught her?”

Hazel squeezed the woman’s hand, bringing her back. “We don’t have her yet. But we’re getting closer. We just need to ask you a couple more questions.”

She pulled her hand out from under Hazel’s. “How is Beedle?”

“Beedle?”

“My bird?”

“Oh. Beedle is fine. He’s at the station house.”

“She,” Cathy said distantly. “Beedle is a girl.”

Wingate stepped forward and took the seat on the other side of her. “Cathy,” he said, “do you know Jordie Dunn?” They had decided not to tell her that Dunn was dead, or that she was going to have to stay here, secluded, until the case was wrapped up. There was no point in upsetting her any further.

“Yes. Jordie worked for Henry. Sometimes.”

“Did they know each other well? Would Jordie have shared confidences with Henry? Were they friends?”

“I don’t know.”

“So they didn’t know each other socially then?”

“Maybe they saw each other at the bar, or a party or something. I just don’t know.”

“And Jordie didn’t come up at all in conversation in the few weeks before …”

“No, I told you no.” She pushed her chair back and stood. “I want to lie down.”

They let her go back into the cottage. Ursula Greene was there, and she put an arm around Cathy. These were small-town graces, and Hazel was glad that the community had come together to support Cathy in her hour of need. But they were in their hour as well, and no help was coming. René Arsenault could go back to those dreaded rooms any time he wanted to now, but the phantom shooter on the roof of the Forty Winks Motel in Kehoe Glenn suggested that more eyes were on them than they strictly wanted.

“What if whoever killed Jordie Dunn is trying to keep our attention while they deal with their missing person on their own?” Hazel asked him in the car. “Clean up their own mess and keep an eye on us at the same time?”

“You must have been seen going into the Lorris Arms. They waited until you came out.”

“It would have been hard to shoot Jordie in his apartment.”

“But not hard to take a shot at him when he got back, or at you when you went in.”

“Maybe not.” They angled out onto the highway that led back to Port Dundas. “So they wanted us both, is what you’re saying.”

“Or him. And they just wanted to send you a message.
Stay away
.”

“I wish them luck with that,” she said.

They drove in silence for a while, each lost in their own thoughts. Then Wingate said, “Do you think it’s possible they know who I am?”

“How?” she asked. “You haven’t been down to the reserve on official business once since you came to Westmuir. Nobody knows you down there. But if you think you’ve been compromised …”

“No,” he said.

“We can work another angle if you want. We just raid the place. Go in hot.”

“Those girls in there die if you do that.”

“Maybe not. And you don’t.”

“This can’t wait,” he said. “You have to send me back in tonight. Before they decide it’s time to cover their tracks.”

“Let me think about it,” she said.

Wingate buzzed through on the radio just as they were pulling in. Howard Spere was waiting for them in the Port Dundas station house. He put his hand on Hazel’s shoulder as she came into what was still, apparently, her office. “I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” he said.

“Thank you, Howard. What have you got?”

“A leap forward. We stuck
sparrow.info
into a browser and got nowhere, so then Austin Franks – do you know Austin?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“You’d like Austin. He’s a nice young guy. There’s word that Willan might be moving him to the new HQ.”

“Keep going, Howard.”

“Anyway, Austin’s got a good head. He tried a bunch of things: ‘sparrow’ in French, in German, in Polish … nothing. Then he asked some local birding association what kind of sparrow was on the chip.”

“It’s a house sparrow.”

“How’d you know that?”

“I know what a house sparrow looks like. Don’t you know what a house sparrow is? James?”

“I know what a house sparrow is.”

“Fine,” said Spere. “It was a house sparrow. So Austin looks at the Latin name.
Passer domesticus
. He puts that into a browser, and …”

He was done talking, and Hazel spun quickly to her desk. Wingate and Spere stood behind her, watching. She typed in
passerdomesticus.info
. The screen went blank, and then the image that had been on the casino chip faded up on the screen. Superimposed on it was a simple two-item toggle:

Ο Male

Ο Female

She looked behind herself and Spere made a gesture with his hand that said
carry on
. She clicked the second choice. The next screen said:

Please create an email account
in the name of
Fiona Emery
at hushmail.com.
Click here when you are done.

She slid her chair away. “Do it,” she said to Spere, and he leaned forward and hurriedly began typing in another window, one that had already been set up to take the name. In a matter of a minute, she was in the brand-new
mailbox for Fiona Emery. There were two emails: one from Hushmail, welcoming her, another from [email protected].

Pick up your membership card from member services after 3pm today. Deactivate your hushmail account now.

“Jesus,” Hazel said. “That’s it. Now the question is, how do you get an invite?”

“If someone goes down there this afternoon …,” said Wingate.

“There should be an ID waiting to be picked up by a woman giving her name as Fiona Emery.”

She sent Wingate to fetch Ray Greene. He came into her office and closed the door. Hazel explained what they’d found to him. He came around the other side of the desk and looked at the browser windows that were open.

“Wow. That’s a hell of an operation,” he said. “We better send Bail or Jenner down to get that ID.”

“Well, I can’t go in there again,” Hazel said.

“But you can send René Arsenault back into Sparrow’s,” Greene said.

Wingate nodded. “I can get in.” Hazel looked at him. “There are two girls in there.”

“But you need money.”

“Fifty-four hundred.”

“I’ll clear it with Willan. When we get the false IDs at the Five Nations, we’ll authenticate that it’s the same production as the others, and then we’ll shut it down.”

“The whole casino?”

“Until we have everyone who’s on the inside there, yes. When it’s locked down, we’ll bust the operation on Ninth Line. With you inside, we can communicate the timing of the bust.”

“I had no reception down there.”

“Can the signal be boosted, Howard?”

“I think so,” said Spere.

“And what about Commander LeJeune?” Hazel asked.

“What about her?” Greene said.

She smiled at him. She couldn’t help it.

] 28 [

Afternoon

This was how it would go down: Jenner, who was naturally more settled a person than Eileen Bail, would go down to the casino and walk calmly up to the pickup window at about five o’clock in the afternoon. There she would give the name Fiona Emery and see if it resulted in getting the ID. If it did, she would signal to Hazel, who would be in an unmarked van up on Church Bay Road, behind the Five Nations Casino, with Spere and Greene, and the operation would go live, with Wingate entering Thurlow’s cab as Lupertans again, complete with Lupertans’s ID. If it was possible, they were going to release the door in the riverbed from a distance with Fiona Emery’s magstripe paired to a remote that could communicate on the same frequency as the lock and send three officers in. They were
to secure the casino and leave one man there while the other two went deeper in to reconnoitre with Wingate, who would be “arrested” with the rest of the gamblers and the staff. Wingate had the number of employees at five, but he knew logically it had to be more. The forward group could neutralize the man who opened the door for him, as well as the hostess, and perhaps Ronnie, depending on his location. The guard named Gene would have to be taken down and whatever other guards might be present with the other girls. Wingate seemed sure there were only two. Another detail would take the Eagle simultaneously. There was also at least one other person in the Five Nations casino allowing the IDs to be distributed.

By four, there were unmarked cars in position at both ends of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth lines, as well as on RR26 at the entrance of the reserve, and Sideroad 1, above the Fifth Line. They were cutting off all avenues of escape. Wingate’s tracker had been replaced by a device that would get a signal boost from a location a kilometre away from the grove. Willan signed off on it. It was going to be the largest police operation of its kind in Westmuir County, ever. There were a lot of moving parts, and much room for error.

By 4:30 p.m., everyone was in place. Wingate confirmed that Thurlow was driving and got into the man’s cab in front of the Eagle. Cassie Jenner, in a pair of baggy pants and a golf cap, walked into the casino at 4:35. She got into a lineup that was three people long and waited her
turn. There was no sense at all that anything more illicit than people wasting their money was going on here. The woman at the membership intake desk was all smiles and efficiency, and the woman behind the little Plexiglas porthole, the one who was fulfilling the memberships, seemed just as warmly businesslike. The two ID employees were in identical casino uniforms. Cassie reached the front of the line and gave them the name, as she was instructed. With no acknowledgment or fanfare of any kind, the woman handed the ID over. “Good luck,” she said.