by Jason Mason
Still, as he looked himself in the mirror preparing for bed, shaving any stubble that grew up through the day off so that he would be clean first thing in the morning, he believed he was doing the right thing. Not the ethical thing, or what the law society would have him do. But that he was doing the right thing for both Connie, Mary, and the women of Edmonton in general.
It was the first night he slept well in years.
Chapter 12
Capture
As he walked into the police detachment first thing Friday morning, sweet Caroline Tucker gave Baker a strange look when he told her who he was here to see. She may be kindly, but she’s not stupid. Nevertheless she took him to a small meeting room where he can speak to his client, Mac Gladue. Her suspicions were definitely raised, and he could be sure that Detective Jones would know that he was Gladue’s lawyer within a matter of minutes.
“Mac, what are you doing here?” Baker asked the man as he walked into the meeting room.
“The police arrested me again last night,” he replied holding back tears. “They showed me a picture of a car that looked like mine and they said that I know where all those missing women are.”
“What changed?” Baker interrogated.
“The police told me they received a tip from a woman last night. Mr. Desjardins, you have to believe me…”
“I believe you,” Baker lied. “But the important thing is we have to know how strong their case is, if we want any chance of getting you out on bail.”
Baker definitely did not want this man out on bail. Mary’s life may depend on it.
“Well, they came to my house last night and showed me this warrant they were carrying,” he said. “I told them this wasn’t right, and that I didn’t do anything wrong but they still arrested me anyways.”
“Did they search your house?” Baker asked.
“They didn’t, well they kind of did, but not really.” Mac muttered.
“What do you mean?” Baker asked.
“Well my grandmother told me they searched her house last night. I know that because she came in to talk to me this morning and is actually just across the street at the coffee shop waiting to see if she can bail me out. Of course they didn’t find anything.”
“Do you live with your grandparents?” Baker asked.
“No, not really.” Mac responded. “They live out on the reserve and that’s where I get my mail and where my driver’s licence says I live, but I don’t live there. I don’t want to be a burden to them so I live out in the woods up north in an old cabin my dad built. He and my mom don’t live there anymore, but it was my home growing up so that’s where I live now.”
“Is it still on the reserve?” Baker continued to probe.
“It is, but it’s not in the community if you know what I mean? It’s out there off one of the range roads,” he responded.
“I do,” Baker chose his next words carefully. “We are in an isolated room here, Mac. The police can’t hear anything you tell me or I tell you, so you have to be honest with me here. If the police were to go to your real house, would they find anything?”
Mac averted his eyes and refused to make contact with Baker.
“Nothing,” he replied quietly.
“Nothing?” Baker asked suspiciously.
“Well…” Mac responded. “They can’t go there, or I will go back to jail.”
“Why is that?” he asked.
“Because,” Mac started as he made the briefest eye contact. “Because I have some Oxys there.”
“Oxys… As in Oxycodone?” Baker asked. “Why in the world do you have Oxycodone at your house? You know you’re only on parole right now, right? The police would send you right back to jail in a heartbeat for it.”
“I know that,” Mac responded eyes averted. “I messed up, okay? If I get out of here I’ll flush them right down the toilet as soon as I get home. I was just feeling depressed and bought a few. I know I shouldn’t of.”
“Mackenzie,” Baker started using his best fatherly voice. “You have to tell me the truth. Are the pills the only reason you don’t want the police there, or is there something more?”
“Honest, Mr. Desjardins. The pills are the only thing there. The only things bad, anyways.” Mac replied.
Baker’s been in this situation before, where he knows his client is guilty but they refuse to tell him so much. Often it helps him prepare defences, where if he knew for certain his client was guilty he couldn’t mislead the court, but if he was ignorant then many more defences arose. All else being equal in this situation he could credibly suggest that someone else might be the actual kidnapper, but if he knew they couldn’t be (because Gladue was) he would get in trouble with the law society for breaching his responsibility as an officer of the court if he tried.
“Ok Mac,” Baker said. “From speaking to the police it seems like they have pretty strong reasons not to release you on bail. You’re entitled to another hearing, and I can represent you, but I’ll tell you right now with your record and four missing women your chances are slim. I would recommend consenting to not being released, at least for now. If you get convicted these days spent in remand will count two for one on your sentence.”
“If you think that’s best,” Mac replied.
An innocent man wouldn’t agree to remain locked up, Baker thought.
“I have to go now, the police have just sent the disclosure package to my office. I’ll look through that and see how strong their case is. I’ll be in touch soon, Okay?”
“Okay, Mr. Desjardins,” Mac replied, still without making eye contact. “I’ll wait for you to get back to me.”
◆◆◆
Twenty hours of video tapes, fifteen transcripts, countless hundreds of surveillance pictures and a few dozen screen shots of texts constituted the evidence in the police’s case against Mac. All of this is circumstantial, Baker thought, and the police will not be able to get a conviction with this. But they may be able to piece together that Mac doesn’t actually live with his grandmother and get to his house before it’s too late. Then they would have all the evidence they need. And hopefully it wouldn’t be too late for Mary or any of those other girls.
“Damn it,” Baker yelled throwing his pen across the office, hitting the far wall. Ashley heard the outburst but knew well enough to ignore it.
Baker knew there was a public safety exception to his solicitor/client privilege, where he would be able to tell the police about Gladue’s other house. But he didn’t have enough information to invoke it just yet. All Mac told him was that he had a different home, crucially he didn’t tell him that he committed the crimes he was accused of, though Baker was beyond a reasonable doubt in his mind right now. More importantly, Baker could only reveal this information to the authorities if somebody’s life or safety is at stake and as long as Mac’s incarcerated that wouldn’t be the case.
Giving a little bad advice about bail was one thing, breaking the attorney-client privilege is a whole different matter. Doing something like that would get him disbarred for sure and Baker needed this job to pay his bills. He wasn’t coming from old oil money.
“I’ve got to find something,” Baker told himself as he started watching the surveillance tapes at three times the normal speed. While that was going on he was flipping through the pictures, doing his best job of multitasking. He sipped on his coffee slowly so as not to get all jittery from the caffeine and be able to focus on the task at hand.
A few hours later, and still having not found anything either exculpatory or inculpatory, Baker left his office to go to the small break room and refill his coffee. Sam was in there already reading a news article on his tablet. He was really engrossed in whatever he was reading, and that piqued Baker’s curiosity. Still he said nothing until Sam looked up and acknowledged his presence.
“Hey Baker, it’s almost five o’clock,” Sam said looking up from his device. “I take it that means you’ve just started for the night.”
“Ye
ah, I’m just here to make some coffee,” he replied grabbing the tin of coffee grounds from the top shelf. It was nearly empty… whose job was it around here to buy more anyway? It wasn’t his was it? No, that didn’t seem like a partner task.
“What do you have this time?” Sam asked breaking Baker’s internal monologue.
“It’s a murder trial, well, they’re not even sure if there was a murder,” Baker replied. “You know all those missing girls from around the city?”
“Yeah,” Sam answered.
“Well I have the guy that took them,” Baker said resigned to his fate of defending a monster. “He’s in remand right now, didn’t bother going for bail. I just got the disclosure package from the prosecutor this afternoon.”
“If you just got the disclosure package that means the trial is going to be months away,” Sam said. “Maybe even years. Don’t stay up all night working on this one, okay?”
“Easy for you to say,” Baker remarked. “But now that I have a new full pot of coffee and I’m ready to go all night like I did when I was in college. And you’re going home so you can’t stop me!”
Sam laughed, then shook his head and went back to reading his tablet. He left for his house about fifteen minutes after the conversation, and by then Ashley was long gone too. Once again Baker was the only one left at his office, even the articling student had gone home. That was just the way he liked it.
◆◆◆
It was about ten thirty when the breakthrough happened. Having already isolated the surveillance footage individually to where the four women – including Mary and the new girl that was just reported missing last night… Andrea something – entered into the Uber it was obvious that it was the same vehicle in each one. The driver wore a ball-cap with an orange brim making it impossible to determine his identity in any of the videos. None of the cellphone pictures the police were able to locate shown a face either. He was like some sort of ghost.
While there wasn’t much to go off of, there was nothing preventing Mac from being the driver of that vehicle. Nothing made him look like he couldn’t be the driver, though there was nowhere near enough to positively say he was.
The police had provided him with the driving records of Mac and sure enough he was working each night there was a kidnapping. And also sure enough, there were times that he was driving without charging any fares, indicating to Baker that he was imputing that a customer was a no-show but charging them cash to be driven around anyways. There were signs, though nothing definitive, that Mac was either doing or selling drugs in his vehicle too.
Mac’s 2018 Black Toyota Camry was seized by the police and searched thoroughly after he was arrested. Results were not yet in, but preliminarily there were no signs of struggle or blood in the vehicle and it appeared to be recently cleaned. As he was going through the evidence line by line, picture by picture, and frame by frame, everything seemed to support his belief that Mac was the kidnapper. Everything except for one picture taken at a different angle then the rest that the police must have obtained from one of the patrons of the bar the day Christine Rivers was taken.
Damn Jones did a good job here, Baker thought.
It was a side angle, and it took Baker another fifteen minutes of online searching to confirm, but the vehicle that picked up Ms. Rivers could not possibly be a Camry. From that angle the car was unmistakably a Corolla. Mac Gladue, who drives a Camry, couldn’t possibly be the perpetrator unless he happened to own two similar but not identical cars. Which was fairly unlikely for someone who was just released from prison and working for Uber for a living.
But if Mac isn’t the kidnapper, that means the perpetrator is still out there. And if he’s still out there, then Mary might still be alive. It’s a lot of ‘ifs’ but it was all Baker had to go off of.
As Baker sat in his chair thinking about his next moves (one of the first would have to be to provide the police with this information in the hopes they would let Mac out of jail and ease his own guilty conscious) he was about to put on his coat and head to the detachment when his desk phone rang. He looked at the clock on the wall which told him it was midnight. He would probably have to wait for the morning to let Mac out anyways.
Who would call me at this hour, he thought. It wouldn’t be Connie, she would use my cell.
“Allen and Desjardins Defence Attorneys, this is Baker Desjardins,” he said suspiciously into the phone.
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Who is this?” Baker demanded. Still there was no response. On the caller ID display all that showed up was unknown number which probably meant it came from a payphone. As he was about to hang up the phone he heard a voice speaking but wasn’t able to decipher what was said with the phone away from his face. He put the phone back to his ear.
“What?” he asked impatiently.
“I said she’s already dead,” the rough gravelly voice on the other end of the line repeated.
“Who is this?” Baker asked.
There was a silence on the other end of the line for a few seconds before the voice spoke again.
“Stop looking. She’s already dead.”
Then the line went dead.
Chapter 13
A Killer Strikes Again
Stacey was more than just drunk, she was white girl wasted. So wasted that one of the bouncers escorted her out of the bar, but of course only after speaking to her friends who made sure they called her a ride first. She wasn’t dressed for the weather at all, being twenty degrees below zero, and her stylish skin tight leather jacket was not keeping her warm. She knew that she missed her Uber when she was trying to sneak back in the bar, and now that her phone was dead (it loses battery so quickly in this cold) she was trying to wave down a taxi but there were none stopping for her. There was one car with an Uber sign on it, but it definitely wasn’t the one she ordered.
“Hey are you looking for an Uber?”
“Yeah,” she replied in a slurred voice. “But he drove off already.”
“What a coincidence,” the driver said. “I just cancelled on my ride after waiting at Smoky’s a few blocks back. The guy never showed up. Need a lift?”
She thought about this for a minute. It was freezing cold and she really had no other options but to take this man up on his offer, even if the idea sketched her out a little bit. She wasn’t exactly on top of the local news scene so she didn’t hear any of the police warning strongly against doing what she was about to do. To her it was just some stranger in a black car who’s authorized to give rides, offering to give her a ride.
“Sure,” she said opening the back door. “But my phone is dead so I can’t do the thing with the app.”
She got in the car and sat down, exhausted and happy to be warm again. The man looked back at her with dark piercing eyes, examining her carefully.
“Do you have any money?”
“I think so,” she answered rummaging through her purse. “Yeah I have a ten dollar bill here and some change.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just up to Oliver,” she replied. Oliver’s Square was not far from downtown, probably only a ten minute drive from where they were.
“Yeah I can do that,” the man replied shifting his engine into gear. “Want me to charge your phone?”
“Sure,” she answered. “Can you charge an iPhone?”
“Absolutely,” the man responded reaching his hand back to grab the phone. After having it handed to him, he tossed it onto his centre console without any intention on plugging it in. Still keeping an eye on the woman he turned the heat up to maximum and rolled down his window a crack.
Within minutes she was passed out and her phone was sitting on top of the ice covering the North Saskatchewan River. Ideally, it will get covered with snow and then fall into the water that spring before the snow melt reveals it, but by the time it’s found it would be far too late to help her anyways.
“Where are we going?” Stacey asked from the bac
k, still half asleep but looking out the passenger window that she was curled up and lying against.
“There was construction by the bridge so I had to go the long way. Don’t worry, it’ll be the same price,” he reassuringly responded.
“Ok,” she muttered falling back asleep.
“Why are we still doing this?” the man asked after several minutes. “She isn’t right.”
Stacey was in no shape to respond to the allegation.
You took her to fix Sophie. You saw how Sophie reacted after you cut up the other one in front of her.
“So what am I going to do with this one?”
Make her an example to Sophie. She will become right.
◆◆◆
She had no idea what time it was when she heard the garage door open and the car drive into the house. It woke her, but it usually did anyways. Normally it meant Mister was coming back downstairs to call her Sophie and talk about whether she was right or not. He was such a weird person, she was still terrified of him but she was also compelled to know what was making him do the things he did and treat her the way that he does. It wasn’t Stockholm syndrome so much as morbid curiosity that drove this compulsion.
Of course, after seeing what happened to the other woman something changed inside Mary. This was no longer just a scary situation that she knew she would get out of eventually. This was now life or death. He killed that woman at some point, maybe even while Mary was still in the house so there’s no reason why he wouldn’t kill her. Why he hasn’t yet was still a mystery to do. Was she doing something right or was she just lucky?
Maybe the only way she could stay alive was if she could convince him she was right, whatever that meant. That’s what he always talked about so maybe that was what she had to do.
Upstairs she heard a woman screaming, which was new. Then she heard a loud thud which stopped the screaming. She then heard nothing for a few minutes until the man came down the stairs alone and turned the lights on. The light blinded her as it always did.
