by Jason Mason
“Hands behind your back,” the man directed her.
Obediently she obliged, unsure of what was taking place upstairs. It would be pointless to struggle so she turned around and offered her hands to him, neck still restrained in the collar.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.
The man didn’t respond, he just latched the handcuffs onto her wrists and undid the lock keeping her attached to the support beam. He then led her upstairs, like he did when they watched TV during the day but she was never handcuffed to do that before. And she also was never aware of another woman being in the house with her either.
As he dragged her up the stairs he led her straight past the living room, through the kitchen and into the laundry room in the back of the house that she walked through to go outside the day before. There he attached one end of her chain-leash to a steel cylinder he had recently affixed to the wall for this very purpose. Mary had a couple of feet with which to move but was very limited as the room was barren except for the coats hanging on a hook on the wall, boots loosely on the floor by the door, and a very old washer/dryer combination pressed up against the unpainted drywall.
“Why am I here?” she asked timidly.
“Sophie,” the man replied slowly and deliberately. “I think you can be right. But you’re not now, are you?”
“Yes, yes. I’m right, I’m right!” she pleaded in response.
She’s lying.
“You’re lying,” he said calmly. “But that’s only because you’re not Sophie yet. You still have some of that other woman left inside of you.”
He went to the kitchen and came back with a knife from the kitchen drawer and held it up to her face, smiling. She backed away into the washer as best she could, but was unable to keep the cold steal from touching her face.
Good, make her scared.
“No, I promise I will be good,” Mary begged in tears, unable to defend herself. “I promise.”
“I know you will be, Sophie, once I’m done. There’s still another woman inside of you and she wants to control you.”
Mary just cried as the knife was taken away from her face.
“Do you know who that woman is?” he asked.
“W-w-who?”
The man didn’t immediately respond, but he walked over to the back door and switched the outside light on, then opened the blinds so Mary could see into his backyard. As she approached the glass window she saw a woman, chained around the neck, with her hands cuffed together behind her back. She looked terrified sitting on top of the logs that the man was cutting the other day. Her clothing was similar to how Mary was when she left the bars, but with only a very tight strapped blouse that didn’t cover any of her shoulders, capris, and no shoes on. As she turned her head to look over at the door Mary could see that she was bleeding from the nose and would soon develop a black eye. Black gun tape was tightly wrapped around her head, keeping her mouth closed.
“You see Sophie,” the man said finally. “That is the woman inside of you. She is all that is not you, she is all that is not right about you. As she dies, so will everything that is not right about you.”
Mary screamed at the woman to get her attention. The woman started to look back at the doorway when Mary was hit by a backhanded blow across the face with enough force to knock her to the ground. The man glared down at her.
“Shut up,” he ordered.
Mary looked up at him and flinched. When another punch wasn’t immediately coming she nodded back at him, accepting that there was nothing she could do. At least while he was still there.
“Good,” he smiled. “I’m going to bed now. If you make any noise at all, I will come back here and then I may not be so gentle. I think you can be right but if you can’t be, I will find someone who is.”
As he left, Mary immediately ran back to the window again to watch the poor woman outside. The woman looked back at her, desperately pleading for help with her eyes. She couldn’t speak but she was shivering rapidly, and while Mary wasn’t sure what the temperature outside was, she knew it was well below freezing with the snow and that this woman would die of hypothermia within minutes. There had to be some way to help her!
She frantically looked around the room, and could only see the coats and the boots that were well out of her reach. She was able to reach the door, though with her hands immobile behind her back there was little she could do.
Looking back through the window at the girl she mouthed the word ‘wait’ as she knelt down and undid the deadbolt using the side of her face. The handle was more difficult to operate using her cheeks but after a few repeated attempts she was able to twist it enough that the latch bolt popped out of the housing. Grabbing the deadbolt knob with her teeth she was able to open the door a tiny crack.
Kicking the door open the rest of the way with her foot, she stuck her head outside to see the woman, and searched around for anything more she could do. But there was nothing.
“You have to try to get free,” she whispered at the woman.
The woman turned as best as she could to show Mary the handcuffs she was wearing and the chain attached to her neck. She started pleading at Mary with her eyes.
She wants you to scream for help, Mary realized.
“I can’t scream or he’ll wake up,” she whispered as loud as she dared. “He’ll kill me if I scream…” she trailed off.
Desperately she looked back inside the laundry room to see if she could reach any of the boots or coats but she was still feet away from doing so. As the only article of clothing she was able to remove were her socks, she kicked them off her feet and attempted to throw them using her toes towards the woman. Neither landed anywhere near the fear-struck young lady.
Panicked, the woman shook and tried to shake the chain off of her neck, bringing herself to the ground and nearly choking herself to death in doing so. It was all futile. The woman realized this and crawled her way back on top the woodpile, so at least her feet wouldn’t be on the freezing cold ground anymore. She stared up at Mary with tears in her eyes as her panic turned into grief and hopelessness. Her head down, it appeared to Mary that she was beginning to pray but this might have been nothing more than a reaction to the cold.
The bitter cold was now beginning to take its toll on Mary too, as she began to shiver. She started to regret throwing her socks away as her feet were the coldest part of her body right now and she was starting to lose feeling in her toes. Looking back at the woman, she could see her looking back at Mary with tears in her eyes. The eyes still seemed to be begging her to scream, or to do whatever she could to help. Maybe if she screamed loud enough a neighbour or passing car would hear and they would be saved.
Mary couldn’t help it and she began to cry too.
“I’m sorry,” Mary told the woman between her tears. “I can’t help you.”
“I can’t help you.”
She pulled her head back inside the room and as she repeated those four words over and over, until it became a mantra to her. At first she whispered it so quietly that the neither the woman nor the man in his bed room could hear the line as she closed the door with her foot. She was crying too much to stand up and see the woman inside of her, the part of her that wasn’t Sophie, outside freezing to death in the bitter Alberta winter. She knew the woman was slowly and painfully dying, but she couldn’t help her.
Instead she just pushed herself against the washing machine, and kept repeating her last words to the woman to herself over and over. It didn’t comfort her, it didn’t console her. But regardless Mary couldn’t stop whispering it.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I can’t help you.”
Over time, the mantra changed slightly. One word was added.
“I can’t help you, Mary. I can’t help you. I can’t help you, Mary.”
As Stacey took her last breath, Sophie lay on the floor apologizing quietly and explaining her inability to act to Mary who froze to death alone and scared outside. Sophie was st
arting to feel like she didn’t know Mary anymore, but still felt bad for her nonetheless. While she absolutely felt bad for the tragic death of the young woman, she knew Mary had to die. Regardless of how terrible the death was and how much the poor girl suffered, she had to die.
Because Mary wasn’t right.
Sophie was right.
Chapter 14
A Wrong Righted
“It doesn’t matter that he didn’t apply for bail, I’m looking for habeas corpus here, Frank,” Baker said into his phone. “Look I’ll be right down, meet me at the station. I know it’s Saturday, this will just take fifteen minutes. Yeah, if you don’t let him out after seeing this I’m going to recommend he sues the police department for false imprisonment and you know he’s going to win that. Okay. I’ll see you there.”
He hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair. Having spent the night in the office again, he had called the prosecutor’s cellphone every half hour since seven AM, leaving a message each time. Finally, a little after eight, his call was picked up and he was able to convince the prosecutor to meet him at the detachment to talk about the Mackenzie Gladue matter. He’s been up against Frank Smith before in court and he knew he was an honourable man, even if he didn’t win as often as Baker did. Regardless, if Mac was truly innocent Frank would want him released.
Driving quickly to the police station, his conscience weighing on him at every turn, Baker rushed in to the meeting room and spread out his documents and pictures. There was no escaping it now, Mac would be out on the street within the hour.
“Mr. Desjardins,” Frank said as he walked into the room. “It’s good to see you again, and I needed to get out of the house so I could miss my daughter’s hockey game, anyways. What do you have for me?”
“Look at this picture,” Baker replied pointing at the cellphone image, expanded and printed on an 8 by 11 inch sheet of paper. “The one that shows the grill of the Uber vehicle the kidnapper drives. Now look at this printout from the internet. There is no way that this vehicle is anything but a Corolla.”
“So?” the prosecutor asked as he sipped his coffee.
“So, Mackenzie Gladue drives a Toyota Camry. Not a Corolla. Look at his vehicle registration.”
Frank peered down at the photocopy and sure enough, Mac was the registered owner of a 2018 Toyota Camry. Which is similar but distinctly not a Toyota Corolla.
“Maybe he has both?” Frank asked as he leafed through the documents.
“He’s a poor aboriginal man living on the reserve, and I think his grandfather gave him the money to buy that car. Do you honestly think he owns two brand new cars?”
“No…” Frank said pondering this new information. “But how do we know it’s the same car at each bar?”
Baker was ready for this. He pulled out three screenshots, each showing the car as the woman got into the vehicle and each with the front bumper obscured for whatever reason. He pointed at the first one.
“See this crack in the upper windshield? It’s small but you can see it in every one of the pictures. It’s right there in the top passenger side of the windshield,” he said.
“Yeah I see it,” Frank replied. “And I take it you can see it in the cellphone picture too?”
“It’s right there, clear as the grill. The only unfortunate thing about this picture is the glare on the windshield makes the driver unidentifiable. Maybe your computer guys can work on that?” Baker contributed. “But in any event, the police have Mac’s car impounded and you and I could go out right now and look at it, but I guarantee you it doesn’t have that crack.”
“No need,” the prosecutor responded as he held two pictures up next to each other to compare.
“Well damn,” he realized. “That is definitely the same car. And that can’t be Mr. Gladue, he was very open about what he drove and there is no way this is his vehicle. I’ll tell the booking officer and he’ll have your guy out as soon as we get the paperwork done. Do you want me to bring him in here so you can tell him the good news in person?”
“Please,” Baker responded. “You can have these documents, I have copies back at the office.”
“Thank you,” the prosecutor responded. He didn’t leave the room.
“Baker… I got to tell you something, because I know that you were talking to Detective Jones about this file on one of your friends.”
He started to protest but Frank put his hand out to shut down any conversation.
“Now, I’m not here to tell you how to do your job. Why you represented this man under those circumstances is your own burden to bear. That’s not what I wanted to talk about.”
“What is it then?” Baker asked.
“Have a seat Baker,” Frank waited until he did to continue. “We’re going to make an announcement in the early afternoon but I’ll tell you this first. We found a body.”
“What?” Baker asked immediately rising to his feet.
“Yes, it wasn’t Mary’s though. It was a woman named Andrea Slye, she was the one taken from Smoky’s pub the other night. Some snowmobilers found her body in a hole in the North Saskatchewan River about an hour east of the city.”
Baker’s heart sank. If the man that was kidnapping these women were killing them, then any hope of finding Mary alive was as good a lost. Frank walked over and put his hand on the defence attorney’s shoulder, giving whatever comfort he could at this time.
“I’m sorry Baker, but we’re not after a kidnapper anymore. We’re after a killer. And if that killer isn’t Mackenzie Gladue, we don’t have any idea who it could be.”
As he walked out, he turned and looked at Baker, head in his hands.
“I’ll send in Mr. Gladue. You can tell him the good news.”
◆◆◆
“Mr. Desjardins, one of the ladies told me to come in here and see you,” Gladue muttered not looking Baker in the eye again.
“Have a seat Mac,” Baker began. “I have some very good news for you.”
News he wouldn’t need if you had just done your job, he thought to himself. Mac then looked up at him wide-eyed. He was very curious as to what this highly paid attorney was going to tell him. His grandfather spent a large sum of his savings hiring the best lawyer in town, and maybe he would finally be showing some results.
“You were telling me the truth this whole time, weren’t you?” Baker asked the man.
“Yes I was,” he responded. “I thought you believed me?”
“No, I didn’t Mac. I’m sorry, but doing what I do you can’t be too trusting. Of anyone.” Baker said, this time averting his eyes.
“Oh, I understand,” Mac replied looking disappointed.
“But, that’s neither here nor there,” Baker said. “The good news is that you’re going home. Today.”
Mac jumped out of his seat, obviously excited.
“Really, Mr. Desjardins? That’s amazing!”
“Yeah, I was looking through the police files and I… well let’s just say they missed something very important that proved your innocence,” Baker said.
“Thank you so much,” Mac replied and without Baker having a chance to do anything to stop him gave him a huge bear hug, lifting him right off the ground. Baker went down to his knees immediately when he landed. Mac was probably stronger than he knew.
“Ooof,” Baker cried out as he tried to get his wind back. “You’re welcome, they still need to do some paperwork and get your car out of their lock-up but once that’s done you’re a free man.”
“I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Desjardins,” Mac said eagerly, then the smile left his face. “Oh, but will that retainer I paid your firm be enough to cover all of this?”
After brushing his suit off to unwrinkled it as much as possible, Baker smiled and reached out his hand to shake Mac’s.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll return your retainer to you and do this pro bono on one condition,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“When you get home, you flush tho
se Oxys down your drain and you never buy any more again,” Baker ordered. In his mind he figured not going to the law society and getting him disbarred would also be an unspoken part of this trade-off.
“Absolutely I will!”
They shook hands and Baker picked up his materials to take back to his car. On his way out he checked, and found out Mac was only half an hour away from being released and heading back to see his grandparents again. He really hoped that Mac would flush those damn pills and make some changes to his life. That would be the best result in this whole tragedy.
Pulling out his phone, Baker saw that he had a text from Connie.
He called me. He said Mary was dead.
Shit, she got the same call that he did. He replied back:
Stay there, I’ll be right over. We won’t let this sicko get away with this.
Whether Mary was dead or alive was not in Baker’s control anymore. Whether the killer of Andrea Slye would be brought to justice was.
This time, for the first time in his entire career that wasn’t by accident, Baker was going to help put a criminal in jail.
Chapter 15
Failure to Plan
As he approached Connie sitting sullenly on the park bench in the dark, the bitter cold air forming puffs of steam out of her mouth as she breathed, Baker could tell that she had finally given up any hope of seeing her sister alive. The phone call probably did it, but he didn’t know if she had also heard about Slye on the radio. He took a seat next to her and put his arm around her. That was all she needed to let her guard down as she turned and cried onto his shirt as he held her tight.
“How could someone do this to Mary?” she asked once the tears slowed down enough to allow her to breath.
“I truly don’t know,” Baker responded. “I just know that real evil exists in this world. And whoever took your sister is a big and terrible part of that evil.”
