Shit. Touché. Keller raised her hands in surrender. “I’m as okay as I can be. I promise.”
“Okay.” Philby’s look was probing. “If you’re up to it, I’d like to talk about the night you were assaulted.”
“I’m not sure ‘assaulted’ quite covers it.”
“I’m not either,” Philby said, and Keller saw the mask fall, saw frank sympathy and even sadness in her face. “If there is one word that covers what happened to you and those girls, I’m not sure I want to know it.”
“Thanks.” Keller swallowed hard. She’d texted Robin in the parking lot before coming in and even now was itching to check her phone.
“You can start anywhere you want,” Philby said.
“Most of it’s in the papers.” Keller stared out the window, knowing she looked like someone seeking escape because that’s just what she was. “In fact, pretty much all of it.”
“None of the important stuff.” Philby offered a small smile. “Nothing about you, and what was going on for you.”
Keller sighed, eyes closed. She’d done this several times without any really satisfactory results, vomiting up 18A-rated retellings of that night in disjointed dribs and drabs, first to the RCMP GIS guy Ressler and then dozens of times more in the months since, but the concussion—concussions, probably—had left misty areas in her memory, though sometimes she felt the act of recounting that night had cleared the fog a little.
“I was driving… Jonas was asleep. I saw something in the road. It turned out it was a fourteen-year-old girl named Teela Sullivan.”
“So, if you hadn’t seen her, none of what followed would’ve happened. How does that make you feel?”
That was close on target. “Kind of the same as a lot of things that didn’t happen.” Philby’s expression went flat and Keller sighed. “Sorry, I’m kind of an asshole today.”
“I know this isn’t easy,” Philby said. “Don’t feel you have to apologize every time you get irritated, or swear, or cry. It happens.”
“Right, well… Jonas would be alive, I guess. If I hadn’t seen her, I mean. But Jonas was a decent guy”—her voice broke—“I’m pretty sure he would’ve wanted us to see her. Would’ve wanted us to try and save her.”
She bent over, head in her hands. “Oakes shot him right in front of me… His head exploded.” She wiped at her eyes. “He was gone, just gone. Just a mess on the road…” She wrapped her arms around herself.
“I’m so sorry, Ash.”
Through tears, she went through the rest of it. Captivity. Escape. The fentanyl in Oakes’s whiskey. The fire. Getting the girls out.
“Did you think about what would happen when you put the pills in that bottle?”
Keller looked at the ceiling, her tears drying against her cheeks. Remembered Oakes banging his ring against the chair, calling her a cunt. Palace cunt. Why did that stick in her mind? A bad concussion was like an explosion. Some things were gone forever while others stuck to the walls like blood.
“It’s jumbled in my head. Sometimes it’s like that night is a jigsaw. Not all the pieces fit and some are missing.”
“That’s pretty normal after a bad concussion,” Philby said.
“I guess I didn’t think much past putting him to sleep, but I suppose that’s just a fancy way of saying I didn’t care. I wanted to live.”
“Did you, Ash? Are you sure?”
Keller frowned. “What does that mean?”
“You risked getting caught… you risked your captor’s anger. Then when you could’ve gotten free, you risked getting killed by going deeper into a building that was on fire.”
“Jesus Christ.” Keller held up a hand. “I’m not saying I was a hero. Bullshit on that. But I’m kind of holding onto the idea I might’ve been brave.”
“You were brave. There’s no question about that. What I’m concerned about, though—always—is you.” Philby leaned forward and put a hand on Keller’s arm. “It’s a myth that cowards kill themselves, Ash. I worry about you because you were dancing around with fentanyl, then with your kidnapper, then with a house on fire.”
Keller finally saw it. Saw it all, and laughed. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t even know what she was laughing at. Because it was such a stupid idea? Or because it was so obviously true?
Philby let her go with it, waited it out. Only when Keller was spent and catching her breath did the psychologist continue. “I’m worried about you relapsing, sure. But I’m more worried you don’t care if you live or die. And that—that night, at least—you were leaning toward option number two.”
“I told you before. I like seeing the sun come up.”
“Want to know what the bravest thing you did that night was? In my opinion? The thing that makes me think you do like seeing the sunrise?”
Keller blinked at her, suddenly tired of talking.
“You told the cops it was your fentanyl.”
Keller leaned back, letting the pain of it all flow through her. Her own pain, the pain of the pills—of knowing she needed them and couldn’t give them up—and the pain of Jonas’s death.
“Those girls, getting them out of the house.” She steepled her hands in front of her face. “All that time I was taking fentanyl, it was like I was sinking, sinking in a big black ocean, even if it was a peaceful one. Those girls brought me to the surface.” She whispered it, halfway to herself. “I just didn’t want it anymore.”
“The fentanyl?”
“The nothingness…” She rubbed at her neck. “When I crushed those pills into that man’s whiskey, it felt a little like passing along a curse. Like in some B movie.” She cupped one hand under her mouth and blew into it, as if blowing dust away. “It was like it moved out of me at that moment.”
Philby’s mouth twisted. “I think you might be looking for extra reasons to be hard on yourself.”
“Or maybe I just watch a lot of bad movies.”
“I sort of got that from our earlier session.” Philby flipped through a file folder. “You passed your last urine test.”
“Studied all night.”
“I think you’re ready to go back to work. Do you?”
Keller gripped the arms of the chair and sat up straight. “I thought I was still fucked up.”
Philby lifted an eyebrow, letting a trace of amusement show. “Only so much one therapist can do.”
It took Keller a moment to get over the shock, and then a laugh tore out of her. Well goddamn… Do I want this?
“All right.”
Seemed she did.
Thirty-One
Arcand turned when the ting of the alarm went off on the black PC, the one trawling the depths of the dark web.
One of these lines was cast deep in the Alberta Health Services EMS scheduling system, monitoring for the appearance of a certain name, and now here it was. Ashleen Keller was going back to work, reporting for a day shift at the AHS EMS Stonegate facility in Calgary’s far northeast.
Not precisely where Arcand wanted her, but there’d be time to fix that. AHS EMS used a fairly impressive software AI program called Proxima to direct available ambulances into unmanned areas of the city. It employed sophisticated adaptive learning algorithms to improve itself and was thoroughly firewalled, but like everything else in the world, it was hackable given time and patience.
He walked over to the corner of the room where he kept his kit. The pistol was cleaned and oiled and loaded, ready to go, along with disposable gloves and booties, ropes, and of course the bolt cutters.
His trawler program had pulled up a screen shot of Keller’s schedule as well as her photo ID, and Arcand stepped back to the computer and touched the digitized pixels, tracing the line of her cheek.
“Thank you, Ash. You gave me such a present. I really hope you’ll like mine just as much.”
Thirty-Two
October 9
Being suspended had meant endless days of shorts, sweats, and T-shirts. It had been months since Keller had felt the crisp p
olyester of a uniform shirt against her skin, and it felt strange. And as long as she was complaining, her feet felt heavier, too, her toes confined again by steel-toed boots instead of the sandals she’d worn the last few months.
But those were only the outermost reasons for her discomfiture as she strode into the immense Stonegate EMS facility and an obligatory meeting with her platoon supervisor, Grainger.
Number one was the headline in the Herald: Body Found in Kananaskis Confirmed Murder Victim.
So far, no name had been released, but Keller knew it was only a matter of time.
Number two was her. Her uniform had always felt like a second skin, evidence she was smart and skilled and was employing those qualities in the best of ways: to help others. Now it felt like a sham, a costume everyone around her could see straight through, into the soul of the addict and killer beneath.
This feeling had been reinforced by her last stop prior to arriving at Stonegate. The health clinic three blocks away, designated by AHS as an approved drug-testing site. Keller waited ten minutes in a cold foyer before entering a spartan office manned by an expressionless grey-haired nurse, who looked less than impressed to be handing a paramedic a urine cup. She followed Keller wordlessly into the washroom to ensure she didn’t substitute smuggled-in urine for her own.
Great beginnings.
Then Stonegate. Stonehenge to those working EMS, to better differentiate it from its too-closely named brother Southgate, at the opposite end of the city. Finished with her first shame of the day, Keller prepared to be stared at or shunned as she made her way between cubicles toward the supervisors’ offices. And there were people who turned their faces away from her, who pretended to be busy with their phones or who suddenly became intensely curious about the yellowed announcements pinned up on the noticeboards, but they were in the minority.
She passed an old-timer who had taught Keller on her very first shift how to properly fold a blanket and drive a stretcher. He nodded and smiled, winking at her as she passed.
“Good to see you, Ash.” This from a supervisor on the opposite shift coming off-duty. A devout churchgoer, Keller knew, though she had never taken the time to get to know which church. He leaned in and shook her hand. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”
Keller stammered an okay, startled and a little ashamed. She’d always assumed the man would be judgmental of the least of the bad things she’d done.
There were others coming and going in the hallway, all of them busy, but most had at least a smile and a nod, if not some murmur of greeting or encouragement.
Her phone pinged, and a message from Robin sent her heart up into her throat.
Heard about staci. That poor girl she deserved so much better. I hope they catch the fucker. I’m okay laying low hiking lots with friends and planning big trip. And might go back to school. Got a friend in nursing but need some upgrading. You make sure you lay low too. Give em hell.
Keller smiled. “Give ’em hell.” Worth a try.
She carried on toward the supes’ office and felt familiar tension in the air. Nothing new about that. It could be that Keller herself was the source of it, or that she was the only one feeling it. But she didn’t always think so. AHS EMS managers were the people who had to take a system that was straining to hold itself together against a rising population, an inadequate budget, constant resourcing challenges, and still sell that system as a well-oiled machine ready for any eventuality, both to a suspicious public and to employees who knew the grim truth.
In the ’90s the Alberta government had “fixed” the Calgary health care system’s budget problems by slashing funding and closing hospitals, even demolishing the old General Hospital, as if intentionally burning bridges. Subsequent governments had fumbled with health care as if it were a greased pig—a lot of noise, but no real grip on it. The latest regime seemed destined to make similarly devastating cuts. At best a morale killer, certainly a service killer, maybe even a patient killer, Keller thought.
The creation of more long-term-care beds might have saved the system, but this was punted down the road again and again, creating chronic patient overpopulation in every hospital, the cascade effect causing constantly overcrowded emergency rooms and ambulance crews who were stuck in the ER caring for patients they could not off-load because there was simply no place to put them.
No wonder desperation lingered in the air here. Those working here were mostly immeasurably talented and caring people, frantically trying to keep the blood flowing through a broken system.
Not Grainger, though. Long before Keller had started salting her after-shift drinks with a grain or two of opioid, long before the pain and the dreams had become so bad she couldn’t sleep without it, Grainger had been a grade A asshole, judged a prick by everyone who ever worked with or for him. A judgment personally verified by Keller when he assaulted her.
“A little prick too,” Lang had said once, with a salacious grin. “And really, isn’t it the little pricks that always cause the most grief?”
Grainger had only just managed to graduate from paramedic school, drawing a final practicum preceptor who, god bless her heart, felt everyone deserved second chances. His classmates, most of whom worked Calgary Metro, were uniformly less sanguine. “Five foot one, IQ of none” was the moniker he wore behind his back. Grainger was more like five foot four, truth be told, but what the hell did that rhyme with?
Grainger routinely disciplined people for even minor infractions, while most other supervisors, with bigger fish to fry, chose to let little things slide. Not Grainger. He’d written up one medic for being five minutes late during a blizzard after said medic stopped to help at a motor vehicle accident a block from the station, and he’d written up another for taking a phone call during a transport when his wife was expecting a report on her chemotherapy.
And he’d gleefully written Keller up for using her ambulance’s fire extinguisher to put out a fire one day.
“You should’ve stayed back, stayed safe. Called fire—”
“We did call fire. You get a complaint from them?”
“Yes.”
The consensus from Grainger’s oh-so-brief career on the street was that he was a lousy medic. Privately some speculated that his promotion away from the sharp end of a needle had saved countless lives. But worse, at least with regard to his current job, he was a lousy liar.
“Can I see it?” she had asked.
“Confidential.” Grainger had gotten up and closed his office door. He liked leaving it open a little when he was dishing out the shit, but only if the recipient was accepting it silently. Keller wasn’t.
So, no complaint. More likely, Grainger was looking for reasons to drag her through the shit ever since he’d assaulted her so that if she ever decided to come forward and lodge a complaint against him, he could claim she was simply being vengeful.
God, I should’ve called the supervisor, should’ve called the police, the second it happened.
“We parked well back, it was a small fire, and I shot it down in half a minute,” Keller had said.
“Still shouldn’t have done it. You had a patient to take care of.”
“The patient had a burned hand. Lang was taking care of him. He had three thousand dollars of computer equipment in his trunk. He thanked us for saving it. I still have the card he sent.”
“You just can’t bring yourself to take a reprimand, can you, Keller?”
Keller should’ve bitten her lip, should’ve taken the bullshit, but it wasn’t in her nature.
“That whole thing took fifteen damn minutes and we were back on the street. Fifteen minutes. You called us in for this? Made us wait till you were good and ready.” She had waved at the clock above his door. “That’s an hour out of service, easy. You fucking dipshit.”
Keller had walked out of Grainger’s office. He hadn’t bothered calling her back for the second reprimand, occasioned by her use of the word dipshit. He’d let the head of Calgary Zone lay that on he
r a week later.
Thomas Wong was Grainger’s polar opposite in every way. Six feet tall, thin and wiry, a perpetually friendly and inquisitive expression. He’d greeted her with a smile and a handshake, even though they both knew the desk in the meeting room was commonly known as “The Table of Tears.”
“You’ve got an incompetent running C shift,” Keller had said after Wong had dressed her down as gently as he could. “Things are bad enough out there without…”
Without managers who think they can perform impromptu breast exams on rookie partners? Tell him, why don’t you?
Wong had waited for her to continue but pressed on when she didn’t. “I know he’s not the best. It’s not easy holding things together, you know?”
“I get that.”
And Keller did. In her mind, prehospital care in Alberta had been dancing along the edge of a tipping point since 2009, when the government took EMS over from local municipalities. While the earlier system sometimes resulted in asymmetric service levels, it also meant the average citizen could walk into their local town council and possibly effect change that provincial entities were mostly immune to.
Now, ambulance crews in larger municipalities might wait hours in clogged ERs before transferring patients while dispatchers drew in backup for the resultant empty streets from surrounding rural areas, leaving them deserted and vulnerable to horrendous delays in ambulances response.
“Even if I did agree about Grainger, you know how hard it is to get rid of shit on your shoe.” He’d lifted an eyebrow at Keller’s look of surprise. “You never heard me say that.”
She’d sighed in exaggerated frustration. “Fine.”
“This is going to sound stupid, but I really need people like you out there. People like you keep the system human.”
Keller had rolled her eyes. “You were always so good at shining people on.”
“I mean it. Besides”—he spread his arms and grinned at her—“shining them on is what management’s all about, right?”
The Beast in the Bone Page 15
