The Devil's Dust (13 page)

“We should string up some tape to close off a perimeter on the scene,” McKelvey suggests. “The OPP find the place wide open like this, your coroner digging through the scene in his hip waders, they'll have all of us removed from the investigation.”

“You got some yellow tape in your truck, Eddie?” Gallagher asks.

“Shit,” Nolan says, “I think we ran out a while back. Pete was supposed to order some more.”

Gallagher shakes his head and sighs. His breath taints the air with an almost visible cloud. It is the strong and sour smell of liquor half-digested on an empty stomach. McKelvey looks at Nolan and Nolan looks at McKelvey. The younger man looks pained, perhaps let down by this father figure.

“Listen,” McKelvey says, “if you guys want to take Dr. Nichols back to the station and get ready for the briefing, I can run and pick up the investigator at the airport. When is he due to arrive?”

Gallagher glances at his watch. “Twelve twenty. Just under an hour.” He scratches his cheek and neck, which is covered with white stubble that adds a decade to his age. He looks like a man who has not slept in a day and a half. “I'll take you up on that offer, McKelvey. I need some time to get my head on before I meet this provincial asshole. And in case you boys haven't heard the good news, there's a fucking storm heading in.”

Gallagher gets up out of the truck, stretches, and moves a hand to his lower back. He straightens and walks over to Dr. Nichols, who is still bent at the waist and staring into the debris.

“Hey, Doc,” Gallagher calls. “You done fishing? We need to head back into town to get our story straight.”

McKelvey uses the moment to turn to Nolan.

“Make sure he eats something and brushes his teeth,” he says. “He smells like a fucking distillery. Does he have a problem with the booze?”

Nolan looks like a kid left disappointed by a weekend father.

“Hardly ever touches it,” Nolan says. “He has no tolerance for the stuff as far as I can tell. You know, a few swigs here and there on a special occasion. He seems really stressed lately, out of sorts, ever since this Celluci guy came up from Detroit, selling his landfill paradise.”

“Well, his timing for a breakdown is impeccable.”

Nolan digs into his coat pocket, pulls out the keys to the cruiser, and hands them to McKelvey. “The OPP contact is Inspector John Churchill.”

“I'll take the scenic route back, buy you some extra time.”

“There's only one way to Saint B from the regional airport.”

McKelvey smiles. “I'll drive slowly.”

M
cKelvey enjoys the open space on the highway and the time alone, but most of all he enjoys being behind the wheel of a police cruiser again. He knows he will never admit the fact to anyone, but once he has cleared the town limits, he glances in the rear-view to check for traffic and then he hits the lights. He scans the dash console and finds the switch for the siren, too, and lets it wail for a few seconds before deactivating. The sound of the siren and the strobe of the lights does something to his insides — like electrodes hooked to his heart, the amperage shocks him back to life, real life, the here and the now, the stuff that matters.

He sits up straighter, grips the wheel with both hands, and the first thing that crosses his mind is his duty here to help Nolan, and even Gallagher, however he can. (And he can't get Peggy's goddamned Prayer of St. Francis out of his head. He is neither religious nor particularly spiritual, so he is left wondering if he is going soft as he contemplates illness and loneliness and an end he has for so long now convinced himself he will embrace.)

The second thought to cross his mind concerns Caroline and the call he owes her. He is an asshole, to be sure. That much has not changed, at least, whether in sickness or in health
. Oh, Caroline, sweet Caroline
…

He is enjoying the freedom of the wheels rolling beneath him when it swings back and hits him with the force of a sucker punch: this rising tidal surge snaking through his intestines, cold chills that make him shiver with an instant malevolent fever. He clenches his teeth and rides the nausea that makes his mouth water, and he thinks for a moment it is possible he may need to pull over to the side of the road. To shit or vomit, it's a coin toss. But he swallows the wave of malaise, takes a deep haul of air. He glances in the rear-view and sees the sheen of sweat shining on his forehead.
Fucking pills
. The throat-clutching, ball-kicking strength of this stuff. And for the first time in a long time — perhaps not since the day of the shootings at the harbour — McKelvey is truly afraid of what lies in wait around the next corner.

He shakes the unease and gets his mind back on the situation at hand. While the latest developments would seem to indicate a neat and tidy closure to the issue of meth in Saint B, McKelvey knows from experience the mistake of making assumptions before the last card has been placed face up on the table. If the body found at the trailer is indeed identified as that of Wade Garson; if Garson was indeed manufacturing the drug in his trailer, which led to the explosion and his own death, then chances are good Nolan and Gallagher have found the root cause of this recent surge in crime. With the key producer and dealer out of the picture, the local cops will be free to implement an enforcement program and an educational campaign going forward to ensure meth does not again find a foothold in the town.

The question is, did Wade Garson act alone?

Is the dead body Wade Garson or someone else?

If Garson didn't act alone, the root problem still exists.

If the body isn't Garson, then who is it?

A ways to go yet before Nolan will get to stamp
CASE CLOSED
on this one, McKelvey thinks as he spots the highway sign for the airport: five kilometres ahead and to the right. He is slowing to take the turn as he hears and then sees the small passenger plane coming in from the southwest for landing, this graceful steel bird that seems to simply get swallowed by the treeline. McKelvey is lost in thought, scanning the woods for sight of the plane, when the radio squawks. The sudden trill of white noise causes him to startle and he jerks the wheel a little, almost hitting the snowbank that wants to suck the vehicle into its unforgiving mass.

“Base to McKelvey, over.” Nolan's voice fills the cruiser.

McKelvey keeps a hand on the wheel and fiddles with the mic.

“McKelvey. Over.”

“I took the Chief home like you said. He lay down on his couch and fell asleep right away. He said he'll catch up with the investigator after he gets some rest. I poured a bottle of rye down the kitchen sink. He had an empty one and a mostly full one out on the table with a gift card from Celluci. Over.”

“That's good, Nolan. Looks like the flight just landed. I'll give you a call when we're fifteen minutes from the station. Listen,” he says, and pictures this woman he has never met, Shirley Murdoch, listening to their every word as she sits at her kitchen table dressed in a housecoat, dispatching police business from the comfort of her home. “Never mind. I'll talk to you offline. Over and out.”

He hangs the mic back in its clasp. As the cruiser rounds a curve, the woods open up to reveal the regional airport. Located about half an hour south and west of Ste. Bernadette, it is a single swath of clear-cut forest serving the nearest four municipalities. There is a large hangar built of gun-metal grey siding, three or four garages and sheds painted orange, a three-storey air traffic control tower, and a terminal about the size of two family bungalows pushed together.

McKelvey pulls up to the front of the terminal where six or seven cars are parked at an angle. He leaves the cruiser running out of habit from his years in a patrol car. They had it drilled into them to keep the car running when you stepped into a coffee shop, just in case you had to take a call. Nowadays this is frowned upon because the hundreds of vehicles in the Toronto Police fleet running around the clock collectively produce enough greenhouse gas emissions to end all life on the planet. He steps outside and stretches. The day is growing warmer. It could be early March, and he wonders if the storm will pass them by. He makes his way to the front doors and reaches into his coat pocket for the piece of paper that Nolan handed him with the name of the OPP investigator.

Inspector John Churchill
, the note reads in Nolan's neat block printing.

But as he comes through the doors, as he lifts his head, it is not Inspector John Churchill he sees crossing the terminal with a garment bag slung over one shoulder and a thick black briefcase clasped in the other arm. In fact, it's not a man at all, but a woman of perhaps forty-five. McKelvey stops. She looks around the terminal, empty save for a young man reading a paperback at the only airline counter. She looks at McKelvey. He can't see her hair beneath the OPP black sheepskin trapper hat, and her form is well concealed beneath a black heavy parka with yellow flashing and insignia. It matters not that she is wrapped from head to toe, that only her face and clear eyes are visible. McKelvey knows that she is beautiful.

Perfect
, he thinks
. Just what I need
.

McKelvey is putting the investigator's bags in the back of the cruiser, taking his time, wondering if it is really possible that she does not remember him after all. Her face betrayed not even a hint of recognition. Perhaps he is a victim of his own grandiosity, this notion that she would certainly recall having worked together, albeit briefly, when the bank robber D.J. Chasson wound his way from Toronto up through Barrie and then Orillia, eventually holing himself up in a highway motel in the Muskokas. It was in Barrie that he worked with this woman for about a week. He believes she had just made the Major Crime Unit on that growing city's force, and she was green but steady and had a good instinct for the work. He is not mistaken, for her name is unique — Euphenia Madsen, but she “goes by Finn,” as she would always say. He closes the back hatch and gets in the cruiser where she is fiddling with a cellphone.

“I can't get any service,” she says.

“Comes and goes,” he tells her. “Out on the highway you might catch a signal.”

He sets them in motion. She rummages through the thick black briefcase at her feet, riffling through papers, pulling out file folders, and he sees from the corner of his eye that her bag is a mess. It looks like a teenager's school backpack in there. She pulls a paper from the quagmire and smoothes the wrinkles.

“I've got a few questions I wrote down on the flight, if you don't mind running through them. Are you the lead up here?”

He turns and looks at her, really looks at her. She has removed the ball of sheepskin from her head and unzipped the parka. Her hair is shorter now, and perhaps even a different colour, a deeper chestnut. He can't recall the specifics. It is driving him crazy that she doesn't remember him at all, as though he could be so utterly forgettable. Or perhaps he has become one of those people he likes to mock, the sort who pretend they are not balding or gaining weight. But more likely, he realizes, she has no reason to place him up here in the Far North, a thousand miles and years removed. The context is all wrong.

“You don't remember me, do you?” he says. He feels better right away. Like opening a valve. He can feel the pressure leaving his body in a slow and silent leak.

She looks at him and squints. And then she smiles a little and shakes her head.

“Sorry,” she says. “Should I?”

And so he tells her about his visits, two of them, to her small city on the lake. Seven or eight years ago now. The over-achieving bank robber D.J. Chasson, who robbed twenty-six banks in eighty-four days, two of them in Barrie, and his last in Orillia. How it was the guy's M.O. that got him snagged in the end.

“He was obsessive-compulsive, had this thing about jacking the same colour of car before every heist,” McKelvey says. “We set him up with a navy blue Ford Escort we had wired so we could track him. Found him holed up in that crappy motel out on Highway 69.”

“That was my first serial bank robber,” Madsen says. And she looks at him again. She squints as though she is trying to read the words on a sign that is too far away. And then her eyes light up.

“Oh my God,” she says. “
Yes
. You were the Toronto cop. The Hold-up Squad. Oh my God, I'm so embarrassed. I'm sorry. McKelvey, you said. Of course. Yeah, I remember. God, what are you doing up here?”

“I grew up in Saint B. This is a temporary assignment, you could say.”

“Sounds like the local guys could use all the experience they can get. Three times in a week this little place came across the provincial wire. Police officer assaulted, kid stabbed, and now a suspected meth lab blown up. The body, it was in pretty bad shape?”

“It'll be a dental ID. They've got a good cop, Nolan. He's on the ball.”

“And the chief? This Gallagher?”

McKelvey has lived and breathed the Blue Code so long that his response comes instinctively. The same response he would provide to the Special Investigations Unit or Professional Standards. He doesn't say a word.

He looks down at the speedometer and eases off the gas. He is bringing them back to the station too quickly. Nolan needs the time to straighten things out, get Dr. Nichols on the page, and let Gallagher freshen up. “So you switched from city force to provincial, eh?”

“Nine years with Barrie, I had an opportunity to try out for the OPP's Criminal Investigations Bureau. Pay increase, better pension. And anyway, I like the uniform pants. The yellow stripe really does it for me.”

She smiles at him. And then she frowns. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Oh, sure,” he says, and he glances in the rear-view and sees his face is blanched.

His palms curl into the wheel as he swallows down another rivulet of this torment.