Crime Machine (32 page)

In Firearms, it was Cornelius Venn’s conviction, expressed with his patented mixture of paranoia and hostility, that the recovered slugs had been fired from a Browning Hi-Power nine-millimetre—the same make and model as the gun that killed the Bastovs, but not the same individual firearm. It was, however, the same weapon that was used to kill the boy at the ATM.

Half an hour later, they were driving up the 427 toward the airport.

“We know the kid was with whoever killed the Bastovs. And whoever killed him also killed Mendelsohn, making it likely it was either the guy who helped him steal the car from the airport or someone else who joined them later. But why would he or they kill him while he was robbing a cash machine?”

“Thieves fall out,” Cardinal said. “It happens all the time.” He changed lanes and made the turnoff to the airport.

Delorme continued thinking aloud. “How did this person or these persons even
know
about Mendelsohn?”

“Well, they’re not dumb,” Cardinal said. “Obviously, they know how to find people. I didn’t tell you, but the other night that American reporter was followed—or at least thought she was—by a guy in his mid-fifties.”

“She was? When did she tell you this? And why wouldn’t you mention it at the morning meeting?”

“Because she admitted she was probably just being paranoid. She’s been writing about the Russian mob, and maybe the horror stories got to her.”

“How would they even know about her? It’s not like she’s Diane Sawyer.”

“She’s been following the Bastovs. Following the fur business. She’s tenacious, same as Mendelsohn. Maybe these characters knew the two of them were closing in. Maybe they were even interviewed by them at some point—who knows? The Bastovs were at least partly connected to Russian organized crime, and those people kill cops and journalists whenever they feel like it.”

Delorme pointed to the sign for rental returns, and Cardinal drove into the underground lot. He parked under the Avis sign and an attendant trotted over to take their mileage. While they were waiting for him to print out a receipt, Delorme said, “I still don’t see why you didn’t tell me about Donna Vaughan being followed.”

“I have no explanation, Lise. Maybe I was just overwhelmed with Scriver.”

“You haven’t spent five minutes on Scriver since this case hit the fan.”

“Lise, I was
kidding.”

“Ouais, ouais—t’es bizarre, tu sais?”

“I do know what that means.”

“Good.”

—

The Peel Regional Police, Airport Division. Cardinal had arranged to meet Rob Fazulli in Terminal One. He took them into his office, which managed to be glass-walled and claustrophobic at the same time. Flight announcements echoed beyond the walls.

“Funny thing,” Fazulli said. “I was convinced I would hate working at an airport. But you know what? Airports are great places when you don’t have a flight to catch. You truly get to watch the world go by.”

He put a disc into a player and turned on the monitor. The image was surprisingly sharp: a line of travellers with shoulder bags and carry-ons in postures of weary resignation.

“Passport control,” Fazulli said. “Terminal Two. Twenty-seven minutes before your suspect vehicle was stolen. Note the guy with the hoodie and the backpack. Parking lot image was too low-grade for facial recognition, but he could be one of your perps, right? Guy who jimmied the car?”

“Could be,” Delorme said. “But lots of people dress like that. Practically everyone under twenty dresses like that. Certainly can’t tell from this distance.”

Fazulli looked at Cardinal. “She always this impatient?”

“Always.”

Fazulli hit fast-forward. Now the kid was before the immigration officer, maybe four feet from the camera.

“It’s him,” Delorme said.

“Such certainty all of a sudden,” Fazulli said.

“We’ve seen him up close,” Delorme said. “He got himself killed robbing an ATM. That’s definitely him.”

“I don’t suppose you have the flight number,” Cardinal said.

“You seem to have forgotten what an ace crime fighter I am,” Fazulli said. He picked up a folder, opened it and read aloud, “Liam Rourke. Age sixteen. American Airlines flight 592, La Guardia to Toronto.”

“Fantastic,” Delorme said. “You guys’re better than TV cops.”

“Better-looking, too,” Fazulli said.

“This is great, Rob,” Cardinal said. “Now all we need to do is look for two single male passengers on that flight who purchased their tickets probably at the same time.”

“We already did that. And it’s a good thing we did, because we could never have matched up the images from that parking lot video. I’ve been pushing for new equipment over there, but car theft is not exactly a priority with the TSB. Here’s what we got.” He switched the video to another image. A man in his fifties, salt and pepper hair, close-cropped. Handsome and fit.

“Facial recognition any good on this one?” Cardinal said.

“Totally useless. So much for TV cops. Those guys can extract DNA from a postal code. But almost as good—same flight, same ticket purchase. This is Curtis Carl Winston, fifty-eight.”

“Winston?” Cardinal said. “Winston sounds kind of familiar.”

“I believe there was a British prime minister by that name. Fat guy with a cigar?” Fazulli handed over the folder with a flourish. “Sir? Madam? Thank you for using Peel Regional Police, Airport Division. We accept MasterCard, American Express and most forms of alcohol.”

Cardinal thanked him. “And listen, Rob. Next opening comes up in our department, I’m starting a Draft Fazulli campaign.”

“Appreciate it, but I could never live up north. Too much crime.”

—

“Is there something going on with you, John?”

They were sitting at the Air Canada gate, waiting for their flight to board. Cardinal watched a little boy stumble toward the window, gripping a teddy bear. He told her he was fine.

“You seem distant.”

“This case is taking up a lot of mental space.”

“But suddenly you’re not talking to me, you don’t want to watch videos together, you’re not calling. And when I call, you’re either too busy or you don’t answer. Have I done something to upset you?”

“I’m just preoccupied with the case, that’s all.”

Delorme pulled out her BlackBerry and scrolled through her messages. After a while she said, “I know we’re just friends, but we see each other a lot—twice a week usually, outside of work. We’ve been doing that for, what, nearly a year now? But suddenly you change the rules, and you won’t even talk about it. Just because you’re seeing Donna Vaughan doesn’t mean you have to stop talking to me.”

“I haven’t stopped talking to you.”

“Is she the jealous type? Wants you all to herself?”

“There’s nothing for her to be jealous of. I haven’t even mentioned you.” Cardinal felt bad before he had even finished saying it.

Delorme looked at him, scanned his face once and looked back down at her BlackBerry. She pressed the dial button and put the phone to her ear, got up and walked over to the window.

L
LOYD
K
REEGER WAS TALKING TO
him, but Papa was not paying a huge amount of attention. He was writing a murder story in his head. Setting pen to paper had never interested him, but he took an authorial pleasure in the orchestration of violence. His victims and perpetrators may have been real people, but they had no more knowledge of his intentions than characters in a book.

“Here’s my proposal,” Lloyd said. “Why don’t you do this?” The old man was in the rocking chair, rocking in a manner that Papa would have described as overwrought. Obsessive, even.

Papa was lying on the couch, flat on his back with his feet raised at one end. It was his belief that this posture offered certain cardiac benefits. “I had a proposal for you once, Lloyd.”

“It’s not the same. That was just a business proposition. This is—”

“What’s your idea, Lloyd?”

“You could secure me somehow in the bathroom. Leave me enough food so I wouldn’t starve. A mattress. And you could arrange it so someone was alerted two days later. Doesn’t have to be the law. Just someone who will let me out.”

Papa was outlining in his head a very different scenario. The old man
lying in bed asleep. Nikki sneaks in, dead quiet, and shoots him under the jaw. Does it in such a way that it could be suicide. Of course, that would require that the weapon be left behind.

“Are you listening?” Lloyd stopped rocking. “It would give you time to get away. Lots of time. Two days, you could be in Paris, Rome, Mumbai—how’s anyone going to catch you?”

An amateur—your average spouse-killer, say—would put the gun in the deceased’s hand. No, thanks. Papa had a rule never to leave a gun behind. He was not a superstitious man, but he had an almost mystical relationship with the Browning HP nine-millimetre, and he was not about to hand one over to the enemy.

A typed suicide note? That would raise immediate suspicion. On the other hand, that could be exactly the point: make it
look
like some amateur was trying to make it
look
like suicide. Layers within layers.

“What I’m saying is, it’s not essential to kill me.”

Papa turned his gaze from the ceiling to Lloyd. “Nobody said anything about killing you.”

“You killed Henry. Why would you kill him and not me?”

“Henry made threatening remarks.”

“That’s highly unlikely. Henry was the most gentle man I ever met.”

“Maybe that’s what got him killed.”

“Well, now you’re contradicting yourself.”

“Life contradicts itself all the time. Rosy sky at dawn, lightning at noon. Snow in the middle of May. A quiet postal employee suddenly slaughters his colleagues. A mother kills her daughter. Any man who speaks the truth is going to contradict himself.”

“One minute Henry’s making threatening gestures, the next minute he’s too gentle to live. Why can’t you just admit you killed him? Clearly you’re not ashamed of it.”

“I never killed anyone.”

Papa liked the idea of the inept amateur up to a point. But what if they bought it? It was boring; there was no wit to it. Suppose Nikki were to put a
different
gun in his hand, some run-of-the-mill street weapon. The cops would know pretty fast that it wasn’t the murder weapon. Then it would look
really
amateurish.

“… could alert my lawyer two days later. You’re safely out of the country.”

“We’re not worried about getting out of the country.”

“Maybe you should be.”

“We’re not.”

What would make it really clever, what would make people sit up and take notice, would be if Nikki didn’t leave
any
gun. She could make it look like a suicide in every way but not leave the gun. Then—assuming the cops wouldn’t theorize that some thief came in later and stole it—they would have to know the whole scene was constructed. Designed. You go to all that trouble and then you undercut it. They couldn’t ignore that. They would know this was a crime with an author—a controlling but invisible hand—and intelligence outside it, beyond it, directing the whole thing. And yet above it.

Lloyd was still talking, trying to force alternate endings.

“Lloyd,” Papa said, “I’m not going to kill you.”

—

When Papa asked Nikki to meet with him alone, in the basement, she knew what was coming.

“You’ve been with us a while now, Nikki.”

“It doesn’t seem that long.”

“That’s good. The time’s going fast?”

Nikki shrugged.

They were each sitting in an armchair angled toward the basement fireplace. Like an old married couple, Nikki thought.

“Do you see yourself ever going back to your former life?” Papa didn’t look at her. He kept his eyes on the flames.

“Never. Hustling again? No way.”

“You want to stay with the family?”

“Well, yeah. I’ve never been this happy in my entire life.”

“To stay with the family, you have to be loyal to the family. Loyal to the family above all else.”

“I know that. I’m loyal.”

“Nothing comes before the family. Not love, not hate, not the law. The family always comes first.”

“Cool. That’s exactly how I feel.”

“Are you ready for an assignment?”

“I’m ready.”

“Mr. Kreeger is not part of the family. He is an enemy of the family. A danger to the family. As soon as we leave this place, he’ll go straight to the police and give them everything they need to put all three of us away for a very long time—possibly for life. The time will come—and it’s going to come soon—when he will have to be killed. Are you prepared to do that?”

“Oh, man, I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Well, not a hundred percent. I don’t want to get in over my head. I don’t want to make a mistake, mess everything up.”

“It’ll be for the safety of the family. Lemur was going to do it. He volunteered, in fact. But Lemur’s not with us anymore. Jack could do it, obviously. Or I could. But I’d like you to do it. That way your loyalty is proven, and you have a home for life.”

A
T HOME—IF YOU COULD CALL
this overheated, jungle-humid apartment any kind of home—Cardinal was finding it difficult to focus. For one thing, there were three women in his head. Delorme, with that impassive look in her brown eyes, the look she had given him in the airport. A look that said he was not the man she had thought he was. And Donna Vaughan. The remembered heat, her intensity, kept reaching into his mind in a way that stirred him physically.

And Catherine. Would there ever come a time when he would close his eyes and not see Catherine’s face? Their life together flashed before him every night. And every night, as if he were an obsessive accountant gnawing at a statement that refused to balance, he found his own contribution to that life wanting. “I did my best,” he said aloud, and his words echoed off the window, the fridge, the kitchen table cluttered with the creased and dog-eared Scriver file.

He had dug Scriver out again for one reason: the name Winston. He was sure—well, almost sure—that he had come across the name in the stack of folders with their faded type, their broken rubber bands. Winston. Not exactly a rare name, but not common either. There were no Winstons listed in the Algonquin Bay telephone directory; he had checked.