Dos Equis (15 page)

JP was full of piss and vinegar by the time we returned to the house. He thought he recognized one of the websites on the list provided by Onya, and was anxious to check it out. After taking the dogs for a quick walk in weather that was once again taking a turn for the worse, we did just that.

For hours. We sat in companionable silence—and frustration— in my den, me at my computer at my desk, JP at his on the

couch, spending time in the bleak world of suicide.

After a couple of fruitless hours on
www.theendsociety.com
, and needing a break from the gloom, JP switched back to

searching for obituaries that might have been in the MOM file. I stayed at it, paying particular attention to the associated chat rooms. During a case I had a few years back, I became quite familiar with chat rooms. And the danger that can lurk within

them. The End Society website was exactly what Onya had described to us. It was an online community for people wanting to

end their lives. I still had no idea how this tied in with murder or Frances Huber, but JP was adamant that this website figured prominently in the information Lynette Kraus had collected in her MOM file.

It was some time after I’d prepared a platter of finger food in lieu of a sit-down dinner—Asian dumplings,
pakoras
, cheese, and bread—when JP suddenly exclaimed: “Hey!”

I turned to look at him. “You find another one?”

“No, but I’ve been thinking.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“The website is called The End Society, right? Do you remember the accounting spreadsheet I told you Lynette had

prepared? From the total inheritance she expected to get from her mother’s estate she deducted something called FHEnding

Fee.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Ending, as in ending a life, right? A death. Supposed FHEnding was actually F-dot-H-dot-Ending Fee and FH stood for…”

I finished the thought. “…Frances Huber.”

“Frances Huber Ending Fee! A fee paid to Frances Huber to end her mother’s life.”

“JP, that’s good. You could be right.”

“Russell,” he said, his voice sinister. “We really need to find this bitch.”

Revitalized, we went back to work, as if the impressive anger of nature, once again raging outside, was feeding our resolve

to track down our quarry.

Within an hour, JP tracked down a second and quickly thereafter a third obituary that he was quite certain had been in the

MOM file. Neither mentioned Frances Huber, but JP recognized the pictures of the deceased. One of the deaths took place near Seattle, Washington, the other in St. Paul, Minnesota. Both were women in their seventies. Just like the death in Kentucky. Just like Hilda Kraus. It was as if Lynette had collected the obituaries as references for Frances Huber’s services. Services which, I was disturbed to realize, she was providing throughout both Canada and the United States.

Within the hour, we struck gold again when I became engaged in a conversation in The End Society chat room.

We finally had the rest of the story.

I’d begun each of my conversations with dwellers in the chat room much the same way. I’d ask if they knew how I could

contact Frances, because I needed to speak with her
again
. Most of the chatters either ignored me or stated they didn’t know anyone who frequented the room named Frances.

Until BlackPetals911.

I had engaged the dark side.

When BlackPetals911’s eerie first line appeared on my screen, I felt as if I’d just swallowed a shadow, and its darkness

was threatening to consume me from within. “How did it go last time?”

“JP,” I whispered, as if BlackPetals911 could somehow hear me. “Come here.”

JP pulled up a chair next to mine and studied the screen. “Holy shit,” he whispered.

“Perfectly,” I typed.

“Anyone suspect?”

“No. You too?”

“Yes.”

My heart was racing. For a moment I didn’t know what to do. For whatever reason, I sensed that BlackPetals911 was

female. If I wasn’t mistaken, she’d just told me she’d used Frances Huber to murder her parent. How do you move on from

that?

I slowly picked at the keys to type: “How?”

For a moment there was nothing. Had I lost her? Had I gone too far? Did she somehow guess I wasn’t who I was pretending

to be?

Then: “A fall.” A second later came: “You?”

I decided to go with what I suspected happened to Hilda Kraus. “Poison.”

“Did you get what you hoped for?”

“Yes. You?”

“Peace,” came the chilling answer.

JP let out a low whistle. We weren’t aware of it at the time, but we were each sitting on the edge of our seats, staring almost without blinking at the unthinkable drama unfolding on the computer screen in front of us.

“Money,” I typed back.

I waited a few seconds more, then added, “I need Frances again.”

The response was jarring. “Does she do fathers?”

“Oh god,” JP groaned.

“I need to find out.”

“Money?”

I thought about this, and decided to appeal to a common desire. I wrote: “Peace.”

“Good luck.” And with that, BlackPetals911 was gone.

“No! No! No!” I screamed so loud, Brutus jumped up from where he was sitting near our feet, letting out a startled “woof.”

“Don’t go! We need you to tell us how to reach Frances!” JP beseeched the lifeless screen, knowing it was too late.

I threw myself back in my seat. I rubbed my computer-weary eyes for a good long time, moaning with exhaustion and

aggravation. “Come on,” JP said, taking my hand and pulling me up off my chair.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re going for a walk.”

Barbra understood and was at our side in an instant.

“Are you crazy? It’s almost ten at night. Not to mention that with the wind chill it’s probably minus forty. And, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s snowing like mad out there.”

“Perfect!” By this point he had me in the hallway, half way to the front closet. “It’ll be good for all of us. The dogs too.

We’ve been cooped up in here all day. We need a break, Russell. We need to rethink this. There’s got to be a better way to get to Frances Huber. We’re both exceedingly intelligent men, me in particular…” He shot me a quick grin as he pulled our jackets out of the closet. “We just need a vacation from the computer. We need to give our brains a chance to percolate on this without all the pressure from us, the Internet, or BlackPetals911.”

He was right. I fished out a couple of balaclavas, and the extra warm Vancouver Olympics mitts my friends Jan and Paul had

given me for Christmas a couple of years ago. Once we were suitably suited up, and the dogs were attached to their leashes,

we headed out into the frosty fray.

We managed to get three blocks away. The wind was howling. There wasn’t another soul on the streets. Not a single vehicle

was moving within eyesight. And Barbra and Brutus were doing the Lipizzaner Stallion prance, which told me that ice was

gathering underneath their nails and between their toes. We looked at each other through the frosted slits of our balaclavas, and nodded consensual agreement that we’d best hightail it back home.

Although short-lived, the late night icy adventure was just what we needed. The four of us ploughed through the mountainous

range of snowdrifts that had accumulated in the front yard just in the short time since we’d been gone. We were falling over each other, scrambling to be the first to the door, the dogs yipping in playful delight. JP and I were laughing uncontrollably.

Somehow the four of us squeezed through the front door at the exact same time, falling into a heap of parkas, scarves, and fur, in the gratifyingly toasty warmth of the foyer.

“Hot chocolate,” the words came out sounding brittle through JP’s near-frozen lips.

“With Kahlúa,” I added. “God, what I wouldn’t give to be back in…”

As the unbidden thought hit me like a punch to the brain, I stopped speaking.

“Russell?” JP asked, perching himself up on one elbow. “What’s the matter? Frozen solid?”

“Why didn’t I think of this before?” I yelled as I jumped up and ran for the den, not even bothering to discard my snowy

boots.

All I could hear behind me was a trail of “What? What? What?”

By the time JP caught up with me, I was back at my desk, my eyes digging through the list of hundreds of Frances Huber’s JP

had obtained from Elena Petrokovich’s assistant.

And there it was.

“Russell,” JP pleaded as I stared at the page. “You have to tell me what’s going on. Otherwise I’m going to make you go

back out there.”

Slowly my eyes rose to meet JP’s. “When Jane called to ask me for help, I was in Zihuatanejo.”

“I know,” JP said. “You told me that already.”

“She said: Quant, you are the only one who can help me.”

“Yeah. So?”

“I thought it was weird she was calling
me
for help. And it was. That wasn’t like Jane. She was a do-it-yourself kind of gal.

Even hiring you must have been painful for her.”

JP gave a slight nod, but said nothing, intent on hearing what was going to come next.

“But what was even weirder, was that she was calling me for help while I was in Zihuatanejo.”

“I don’t get it.”

“JP, Jane wasn’t calling me for help in Zihuatanejo. She was calling me for help
because
I was in Zihuatanejo.”

“What? How can you possibly know that?”

I placed the piece of paper I’d been looking at in JP’s hand. He looked down. Then he saw it too. About half way down the

page. Frances Huber number one-hundred-and-twenty-three. Place of residence: Zihuatanejo, Mexico.

We’d found our murderer.

Part Two

Chapter 11

Some years ago, during a particularly fascinating dinner party, attended by some deep and weighty thinkers, someone asked this profound question: What do you wish you could un-know? At the time, my response was sadly uninspired and moribund;

something about nearly running over a kitten with my bicycle when I was a boy. I didn’t fully appreciate the question.

But now, I do.

There were times, during the past five weeks, when I deeply regretted my decision to catch Frances Huber. I wished I could

turn my back, run away, and un-know her and all the terrible things she’d done.

Jane Cross was shot to death in her office by Lynette Kraus. But someone else was ultimately responsible for that death, and, as it turned out, many others. That someone was Frances Huber. As JP Taine and I laboriously sorted through sordid details

and began to uncover the wicked ways of Ms. Huber, it became chillingly obvious that we’d found that thing that many believe only exists in fairy tales. We’d found a monster.

And so, I made a promise to myself.

I would do whatever it took to bring this monster to justice.

I knew it would take a great many resources. Particularly money and time, both of which I’d already been using up like

water in a desert. Yet, in a way, this felt very right to me. There was a certain poetic justice to the fact that, after spending a year of nurturing myself, with this promise, I would pay the price.

So, no, it was not the giving up of time, or money, or any other sacrifice, now or in the future, that I regretted. What I

regretted was becoming embroiled in the ugly, sad, unapologetically immoral particulars of Frances Huber’s life.

The saying “knowledge is power” is no more true than when you are a detective planning a caper against a bad guy. Five

weeks ago, JP and I had hastily pieced together bits and pieces of the events that we believed led up to Jane Cross’s death, and Frances Huber’s involvement in those events. But none of it constituted proof. The only potential proof had disappeared with the MOM file that was created and, we suspected, later destroyed by Lynette Kraus. I needed new information. I needed solid

information. It was time to go into serious research mode.

It was also time to go into serious fundraising mode. If I was going to do this, I needed cash. To get cash, I needed work. My life for the next several weeks became focussed on two things only: making money and doing research. JP returned to Regina to deal with an increasingly difficult situation between his sister and Jane’s family. He also reported back to his part-time job at Duncan’s Shoes.

Although non-stop work and research may not sound exciting and glamorous to some…well, to most…those weeks turned

out to be amongst the most creative, stimulating, and intense of my professional
and
personal life. I was crackling. I was making things happen with the satisfying, precise clicks of puzzle pieces fitting together with startling regularity. I was on fire.

And not just when it came to life and work, but with the love stuff as well.

JP and I began to navigate the whitewater of a brand new relationship. This was done mostly via Skype, Facebook, e-mail,

and good old SaskTel. None of which was without its trials. But as each stumbling block or seemingly impenetrable wall

presented itself, I simply knew what to do to overcome it. Where did this wisdom come from? This strength? This unshakeable

confidence? If this was what turning forty was all about, I pity those poor twenty-and thirty-somethings.

Over those weeks, I amassed several thick Frances files. Now fifty-four, Frances had been born and spent most of her adult

life in Edmonton, Alberta. She never married. From the photographs I was able to collect, I would not say she was

unattractive, but pleasantly plain looking. In candid, unposed pictures, her hair was usually a longish mass of unruly curls. She used little if any makeup. Her chin was weak, but her nose and cheeks were full, giving her the appearance of a self-satisfied chipmunk. Her wardrobe was unflattering. It consisted of clothes that were either much too loose or much too tight. Nothing fit just right, or at all complimented her figure. There were two or three posed, studio shots on Google image. They were taken to mark the launch of a short-lived career in real estate—and in those, a completely different Frances Huber emerged. The hair