by Ron Corbett
O’Toole’s head shot up. “It’s the same guy?”
“That’s a good question, Chief. What do you think, Detective Yakabuski? Is it the same guy?”
“What I’m thinking is you better start telling me why you’re here.”
“A little defensive? Well, I can’t blame you. The guy you threatened to hunt down one day seems to be heading your way. Killing people along the way. So I don’t want any games from you, Detective, and I don’t want any bullshit old-school vendettas. I need you to tell me everything you know about this motherfucker, and I need you to tell me right now.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Yakabuski rubbed his temples and looked again at the map spread out on O’Toole’s table. Whoever was driving that campervan was heading north. A straight road trip. He could have been going to Chicago. He could have gone east or west once he reached the cloverleaf in Cooke County. Or he could have stayed on the line he was travelling and come where everyone thought he was coming.
Evans had left the map on the table but taken the rest of his files and left. O’Toole had given him a desk to work at in the general pool area of Criminal Investigations. No one was going to make him feel welcome, a Mountie from Toronto working a case that had nothing to do with a missing girl from the North Shore. Evans didn’t seem like the kind of cop that would care all that much.
“He thinks there’s been some sort of back channel communications between you two,” said O’Toole, sitting behind his desk now, his feet propped on his windowsill, staring out his window. “There hasn’t been anything like that, has there, Yak?”
“No.”
“This guy hasn’t been in touch with you, made threats, anything like that?”
“Nothing. I have no idea who he is.”
“Well, he’s a murdering motherfucking bastard is who he is. He killed two of my officers. Or he had a hand in it. Just like Sean Morrissey had a hand in it. I wouldn’t blame you for going after the guy, Yak, if you had some way of doing that.”
“I don’t.”
“All right. So what the fuck is he doing? He threatened to kill you, if I recall that phone conversation properly. Could this be payback time?
“For Ragged Lake? That was nearly two years ago. Why come now?”
“That’s what I was thinking. Does it have something to do with this war that’s breaking out between the Shiners and the Travellers?”
“It must. The guy was a business partner with Sean Morrissey. We know that. One of the few things we do know about this guy.”
“Extra muscle? Things are getting a bit dicey, so the Shiners put in a call and brought him up. Is that what he is?”
“It can’t be. The timing is wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“If the FBI is right, he crossed the border at Brownsville at the same time we were finding Augustus’s body hanging from that fence in Filion’s Field.”
O’Toole had yet to turn away from his window. He tilted his head, as though pondering what Yakabuski had just said. Beneath his window Highway 7 could be seen, just starting to fill with morning commuters. At this time of year, the highway should have been a line of cold exhaust smoke roiling through the heart of the city, winter mist and fog filling in whatever wasn’t covered by exhaust fumes, so you couldn’t see the cars and the city appeared as peaks and spires sticking out of a cloud. Should have been. Instead, there was an unobstructed view of the traffic. Another cloudless sky. Temperature twenty degrees above normal. The joy most people in Springfield felt a month ago when winter chose not to appear was long gone. People were restless now. Ready for the seasons to change. Unable to do anything to make that happen and so there was a surly frustration settling in.
“You’re right. He was already on his way,” said O’Toole as he looked away from his window. “So what the fuck is going on, Yak?”
Chapter Thirty-Six
The explosion had lit up the late afternoon sky like an emergency flare. An eruption of fire that ensnared the helicopter flying over the campervan and sent it twirling to the ground, little more than a seared metal frame by the time it crashed. Cambino watched it happen through the binoculars he had taken from his packsack.
He watched for several seconds as hot metal fell to the earth, as the flames grew higher, black smoke starting to rise and then the secondary charges he had hidden in the commercial-sized freezer went off, sending what was left of his campervan soaring into the air one more time. When there was nothing more to look at, he put the binoculars away and started walking past the line of cars backed up behind the barricades. As he walked, he disassembled the driverless car control, throwing the parts away under idling cars. Not a person on the Interstate was looking in his direction.
It had been smart to keep the body of the state trooper. An old trick his father had taught him. Bodies did not need to be hidden right away. Not always. Sometimes they were good things to keep around; to send a message to your enemies at a later date, to confuse the police. A body had many uses. Strapping one into the seat of a driverless car was just one more example of how useful a dead man could be.
Cambino walked down the Interstate until he reached a small town, where he went to a 7-Eleven and purchased bread and sliced meat, some anti-freeze, a bottle of water. Then he started to walk north on a county road that he soon left, to walk through farmers’ fields and down hydro-line corridors, keeping the Interstate to the left of him, fires burning as darkness fell.
He passed many abandoned farms and outbuildings, but it would be a mistake right then to put himself behind walls, and so he slept that night under leaves, on an old deer bed he found deep in the woods. He was up before dawn, his clothes wet from the dew, and he continued walking. With the sun just starting to appear he made his way to a county road and stole a newspaper from a mailbox. By the banks of a dried-up creek bed he made himself a sandwich and read the paper.
The Chicago Sun-Times had six pages on what had happened out on the Interstate. Police suspected the driver was wearing some sort of suicide vest he detonated when they tried to open the door of the van. There were a lot of photos. A sidebar with the names and short profiles of the dead. An editorial asking if the police were right to try to enter the van. The driver was trapped. Why not wait him out? Why endanger so many people?
It seemed a silly editorial to Cambino. Cops confront criminals. They didn’t set up lawn chairs and wait for them to surrender. He threw the newspaper away and continued walking. Shortly before noon, he heard the dogs.
. . .
The barking was faint and hard to hear at first. The dogs must have been miles away. But it meant the cops were no longer deceived. Cambino stopped walking and opened his packsack, took out the second loaf of bread he had bought at the 7-Eleven, along with the plastic jug of anti-freeze. He poured the liquid over the bread, took out a topographical map from the pack, and stared at it a moment. When he stood up he changed his direction and headed back into the woods. He walked for more than an hour, breaking off chunks of bread every fifty yards and throwing them as far as he could. When he reached the banks of the river he had seen on the topo map, he turned and walked back the way he had come.
He listened carefully to the barking, and when he figured the dogs were no more than a half-mile away, he found a tall pine and climbed it. Twenty minutes later he saw the first dog come running down the trail he had been walking, a police officer running behind, holding tightly onto the twenty-foot lead line. Within a minute, there were a dozen other dogs and police handlers running down the trail.
The dogs, as Cambino had suspected, were hounds and German shepherds, dogs that tracked by scent. A couple of them already looked sick and he knew they had found the bread. The cops should have brought field retrievers. A field retriever would have worked a grid and would have found him. But cops only used field retrievers when they were looking for bodies. Not when they were sea
rching for armed killers.
So Cambino watched in safety as the dogs and cops passed him. He knew when they reached the river the cops would assume he had gone in the water, to try to hide his scent. In a few hours, that river would look like a beach in Normandy in 1944.
He waited until he no longer heard the dogs. Then he climbed down the tree and made his way back to the Interstate. Inside the restaurant at a Chevron station, he talked a truck driver heading to Detroit into giving him a ride, explaining his car was badly damaged in the explosions on I-57 the day before.
“You were there?” the truck driver said.
“Close enough to have my car totalled.”
“Shit, that was something. A suicide vest. What is happening to the world?”
Cambino didn’t answer. A half-hour north of the Chevron station, they passed a group of cops standing by the side of the Interstate. Two German shepherds were standing near them, throwing up on the gravel shoulder.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Donna Griffin found Yakabuski in his office shortly after 9 a.m. She told him about the surly Toronto cop that had shown up that morning, sitting at the general pool desk right beside her, looking at every other cop in the squad room as though he wanted to hit them. Yakabuski filled her in on John Evans and the purpose of his visit.
“So there’s a Ragged Lake connection to all of this?”
“Might be. We don’t know at the moment.”
Yakabuski thought back to that phone call. The man who answered the untraceable phone number sounded middle-aged at the start of their conversation, although by the end he wasn’t as sure. He told Yakabuski not to pursue the murders of two Springfield police officers, forget what happened far up on the Northern Divide — “Consider Ragged Lake your lucky day.” That’s what he had said. When Yakabuski said a better idea might be to track him down and piss in his mouth, the man had laughed. Then he had threatened, in a voice as sweet and gentle as a telephone prompt, to kill Yakabuski’s father and sister if he ever tried to find him.
You hear threats like that from time to time. Coming from the back of squad cars. The holding cells. The front steps of the courthouse. The phone conversation didn’t rattle Yakabuski that much, although it was the first time he could recall thinking the person making the threat might not be a one-hundred-percent bullshit artist.
“So how’s the search for Katherine Morrissey going?” he asked.
“You’re not going to like it,” said Griffin. “I can find no record of a Katherine Morrissey, in the age range we’re looking at, ever living in Springfield or anywhere on the Northern Divide. I am at the absolute dead end of all known databases. There is nothing left for me to search.”
“As for Sean Morrissey, who should have his mother listed on his birth certificate, he has no birth certificate. That’s the long and the short of it. He has a passport, Social Insurance Number, all sorts of government-issued business and tax numbers, and they’re all legitimate, but he has no birth certificate.”
“How can you get a SIN without a birth certificate?”
“Baptismal certificate. That was allowed until 1988. Morrissey’s certificate comes from St. Bridget’s. Signed by Father Joe Maloney. Augustus is the only parent listed.”
“The parish priest. That’s amazing.”
“It gets better. All the documents I’ve found for Morrissey have the same birth date. May 24, 1974. That date never changes. So I went to the Grace Hospital and asked to see the original birth certificates for May ’74. April and June as well.”
“That was smart.”
“Thank you. But get this — the Grace had the original birth certificates for every day in those three months except one. And I’m talking perfect records. Nuns are good at that sort of thing, I guess. The missing day was May 24.”
“Someone took his birth certificate.”
“That’s what I said. But the nun in the records room said, no, that couldn’t be right; there had never been a mistake in the birth records at the Grace Hospital. She said it meant there were no births that day. So I asked if we could look at a few more months, just to confirm. Turned out she was right. There were days when the hospital had no births.”
Griffin was smiling so broadly, Yakabuski wondered if her face was starting to hurt. He decided to do her a favour and play along. “But?”
“But the other days were still recorded. The official notation is ‘no live births on shift.’ The only day missing was May 24.”
“So someone did take his birth certificate.”
“Only thing that could have happened. Whoever Sean Morrissey’s mother is, someone has gone through a lot of work keeping her a secret.”
. . .
A successful murder investigation should move fast. It shouldn’t meander or send you miles down a blind rush. The rhythm of a good investigation was the same as the rhythm to a Bo Diddley song, or an all-night road trip; it was the left-hand lane and the jingle jangle morning, intense and fast and about as right feeling as a thing can be in this world — the truth revealing itself.
Yakabuski sat at his desk after Griffin had left and was forced to admit this current investigation was none of those things. Five days after discovering the body of Augustus Morrissey, he was no closer to knowing who might have killed him than he was the morning he saw him hanging from a fence at Filion’s Field. Same way he was no closer to knowing why a million-dollar diamond had been shoved into his mouth. Or who killed Tete Fontaine. Or where an eleven-year-old girl named Grace Dumont might be at that particular moment.
An investigation should always move forward, and this one had stalled. He had a company commander once who used to say, “When in doubt, sit it out.” The man was a true-blue, live-to-fight-another-day guy, and he retired a two-star general, five years past his pension date and after a lifetime of too much sitting and absolutely no fighting.
Yakabuski never liked the argument. Moving things forward — acting when in doubt, rather than sitting down and stroking your chin — normally had good results for him. Those first few months after he went undercover, when Papa was having trouble accepting him, didn’t he hang the Apache by his heels over the tenth-floor balcony of a condominium in Laval, annoyed that the meeting was entering its seventh hour and the questions were starting to repeat?
Fuck it. Let’s move this thing along.
And in Bosnia, when a Croat general arrived at his checkpoint with an armoured company behind him, demanding entry into a Muslim village under UN protection, didn’t Yakabuski refuse? Thirty minutes later, the general was still demanding to be let in, while posing at the same time for photographs that would appear later that month in a Zagreb military magazine. Tired of the charade, Yakabuski took his C-15 and fired a burst between the general’s legs.
All right, what are we doing here?
Not everyone agreed with this approach. The world seemed to be run by close family members of that gutless commander, and there were certainly people in the upper offices of the Department of National Defence who said Yakabuski was wrong to fire his gun that morning, that it started a two-day battle with the Croats, five of whom were wounded, one badly, and DND had to call in every media favour it had just to bury the story.
Others will tell you that Croat general never got within ten kilometres of that Muslim village.
Sometimes you needed action, even if you weren’t sure why, or what form it should take; just knew it was time to move things along. Time to rattle a few people, blow up a few schemes, and get a clear vista in front of you. Wasn’t it Mike Tyson who once said: “Everyone has a plan. Till they get punched in the head.”
Yakabuski laughed when he remembered the old quote. A few seconds later he laughed again, realizing who he needed to punch.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Mission Road was in a gated community fifteen miles south of Springfield. The guard in the hut re
cognized Yakabuski and waved him through without even asking to see ID. He drove down the curving streets, still lined with hardwood trees in almost full foliage. Although the leaves on the elms looked like shrivelled appendages, and the ones on the maples were yellow and translucent looking. He couldn’t decide if the trees looked sick or just hungover.
The lawns were a deep green, though, and he wondered if the homeowners were still fertilizing. Mid-December, but nothing would surprise him anymore about this lost season. He drove until he reached a large Tudor midway down a crescent street, pulled into the driveway, and parked his Jeep.
He knocked on the door and waited. Before long, Tyler Lawson opened, sheaves of paper in his hands as he was working at home today, something Yakabuski already knew. Lawson opened the door wide for his brother-in-law and was smiling broadly when Yakabuski punched him.
. . .
Lawson went back peddling down his foyer, both hands clasped to his nose, but that wasn’t enough to stop blood from oozing through his fingers. Yakabuski took two giant steps into the foyer and hit him again. Square on the knuckles. When the fingers moved away in pain he hit Lawson one more time on the nose.
When his brother-in-law had fallen to his knees, Yakabuski turned away and closed the front door. He stood in the foyer and stared around. There was an open staircase, curving up to bedrooms on the second floor, and on the wall behind the staircase were family photos and awards, a vanity wall for dinner guests to gaze upon as they were removing their coats. Photos of his niece and nephew when they were babies, his sister giving a speech at some chamber of commerce event, a framed newspaper with a front-page story about Lawson getting a couple of Shiners acquitted of murder charges because of what the newspaper called tampered evidence. Yakabuski gave his neck a slight roll and took a handkerchief from his pocket. He started cleaning blood from his knuckles.
