“Who died this time?”
“No one, I don’t think. Janice Boulanger’s shop and home were burgled, and the safes blown.”
That brought me fully awake. I still didn’t have my eyes open, but I sat up. “Blown?”
“Yeah. Plastic explosive.”
“Bloody amateurs,” I grumbled as I fought my way free of the covers and tried to find the floor with my feet. “The boutique lady? Morgan’s lawyer friend?”
“Yeah. You don’t have to come,” Wil said, turning on the light on his nightstand.
“Right. Just call in your other expert on safes and jewelry.”
I managed to find most of my clothes. My filter mask and one shoe were under the bed, but my panties had somehow managed to land on the top of the bedpost. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I was still a bit tipsy. Two hours of sleep weren’t enough.
Figuring that Wil probably wasn’t much more sober than I was, I made him use the autopilot in the car. On the way, he put his phone on speaker.
“Another one of Morgan’s close friends,” I said, “and also his personal lawyer. If I knew him, I’d be paranoid.”
“Cops got the call about the break-in at the shop about two-thirty,” said the Chamber investigator on the other end of the phone call. “Ms. Boulanger was at a party or something, and the security company alerted her. We got here about the same time she did, and then the call came about her house.”
“What’s the situation there?” Wil asked.
“How did they get in?” I asked.
“Kicked in the back door, which set off the alarm, blew the safe, and it looks like they did a quick tour of the filing cabinet.”
“Should we go to the shop or to the house?” I asked before Wil could say anything.
“We have the situation covered here,” was the response, “and there are about thirty cops here.”
Wil changed the autopilot’s directions.
Boulanger lived in an upper-middle-class enclave near the base of Mont Royale. Her house was a cute little bungalow I estimated to be about twice the size of my townhouse in Toronto. Not at all ostentatious, but plenty of room for a single woman to knock around in. I scanned the security setup as we walked up the driveway. Contacts on the windows and doors, and dual cameras under the eaves at the corners.
Once again, the back door had been kicked in. The burglar showed absolutely no trace of subtlety. A cop led us to a room that looked like a combination of an office and a TV room. A gaping hole in the wall contained the remnants of a wall safe.
“Plastic explosive?” I asked one of the forensic technicians.
He nodded and showed me the safe door. The door was two-feet square and heavy. A ring of plastic explosive had been molded around the combination lock and detonated. Then a crowbar was jammed into the opening, and the door pried off. Clumsy and amateurish, yes, but also enlightening. I doubted seriously if I had the strength to pry that door open.
“Anything disturbed anywhere else in the house?” Wil asked the cop in charge.
Janice Boulanger walked into the room at that moment wearing a pale-blue evening gown and enough diamonds to open her own store.
“Director Wilberforce. What a surprise,” she said, not sounding at all surprised. “No, I don’t think anything else was bothered.”
“And what was taken?”
She shook her head. “As far as I can tell, nothing.”
Wil cocked his head. “What was in the safe?”
Boulanger shrugged. “A few pieces of jewelry I inherited from my grandmother, and personal papers.”
“What about at your store?”
“Nothing there, either. Other than my inventory, I don’t keep any valuables at the store.”
I sidled closer. “What exactly do you keep in your safes?”
She hesitated, then said, “Documents, mostly. You know, contracts, deeds, loan documents, that sort of thing. Some on paper, most on computer chips.”
“And nothing is missing?”
“That seems to be the case,” she said. “I don’t know what they were looking for, but as you can see, I’m wearing my best jewelry. There were some lesser pieces in the safe, but it’s all still there.”
She seemed a little too cool and calm for someone who had just suffered two burglaries. She had two safes, and so obviously had something she considered valuable, but tried to give the impression she wasn’t concerned about someone blowing them up. I would be going crazy if I was wearing her designer shoes.
Boulanger walked out and down the hall, turning once to see if we followed. The room she entered was a bedroom. She went to a dresser and opened a jewelry box, then stood back. I could see the box was filled with earrings, a couple of brooches, a few necklaces and bracelets. Some gold, a lot of silver, mostly set with cabochon turquoise, star rubies, amethysts, and other less precious stones.
“This is what I wear on a daily basis,” she said. “As you can see, whoever was here didn’t bother with any of it.”
From Boulanger’s home, we drove to her shop where the situation was very similar. The safe in her office was blown, a filing cabinet ransacked, but the showroom and storerooms were untouched.
Wil talked with the cops and his people for half an hour, then we headed back to the hotel.
“Do you keep many paper documents?” I asked Wil.
“Almost none,” he said. “We get some paper we have to process, but we scan it all and store it electronically. We have warehouses where we keep some of it, but for the most part we shred it and recycle it. Even the historical documents entrusted to us were scanned decades ago.”
“Yeah. I don’t keep anything on paper,” I said. “Especially things such as contracts, deeds, and loan documents. I don’t think banks even use paper anymore.”
“That’s what surprised me about the documents Sonia Morgan showed us. Everything was on paper,” Wil said.
I leaned back in my seat and tried to relax, hoping I could go back to sleep when we reached the hotel.
“Wil, can you get the video from the security cameras sent to us so we can look at it in the morning?”
“Sure. I’ll have it sent to your inbox.”
“And the forensic analysis on all the explosives,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve seen this many bombs since the mutant uprising in Chicago.”
“Pretty crude,” he said.
“No patience and no skill. Seriously, I can’t even imagine where I’d go to buy plastic explosives.”
“Demolition work,” Wil said. “It’s also used by Chamber SWAT forces, but there aren’t many legal applications. It’s not used in mining or road building, or anything like that. Terrorists use it. I would think crooks would use it, but no?”
I shook my head. “Most people use safes to store jewelry, precious stones and computer chips. The last thing I would want to do is shatter a fine diamond with an explosion. Sort of negates the reason for opening the safe.”
We were almost back to the hotel when I said, “The thief changed his or her modus operandi.”
Wil asked, “In what way?”
“Janice Boulanger is still alive.”
Chapter 16
Over pancakes and sausage, washed down with strong black coffee, I reviewed the security camera videos from Boulanger’s shop and home. One of the things I was anxious to see was this mysterious thief “kicking down” a steel door at her shop and a heavy, solid-wood door at her home.
The thief crept through the alley behind the boutique wearing black pants and a charcoal hoodie that shielded her face. I was willing to give Wil his due. The figure certainly looked like a woman to me. When she got to the boutique’s back door, she extended a long pole and jabbed it at the doorknob.
The resultant explosion was muffled, but also spectacular in that the door burst open.
“Interesting,” Wil said. “That sort of delivery mechanism was used in twentieth-century warfare.”
“Did your people or the cops find the pole?�
�
“Not that I know of, but nobody was looking for it. It could be lying in the alley in plain sight.”
In the video, the thief disappeared inside, where there weren’t any cameras. I fast-forwarded the vid until I caught movement at the back door again. When I stopped it, it was a cop coming through the door with a drawn weapon.
“What the hell?” Wil leaned toward the screen. “You must have missed her.”
I played the vid backwards at a slower speed, looking for any kind of movement. Nothing. Forwarding to the cop coming through the door, we scanned another ten minutes of film, and only police, and one Chamber investigator, came through the door.
I switched to the front door cameras, starting with when the intruder blew the back door. No one came out before the cops showed up and used their master override to enter the shop.
Wil gave me a side-eye.
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “You know exactly where I was last night.” Although my dad and I suspected there were other chameleons running around the world, I had met only one, and he was dead.
I slowly scanned the vid, watching cops come and go, for another twenty minutes before I stopped it. Reversing the vid for a couple of minutes, I played it forward in slow motion.
“There,” I said. “See her?”
“Wearing a cop uniform?”
“Yeah. The blonde. Same height, same body type. I’m willing to bet if you check with the cops, they didn’t have an officer there last night that fits her description.”
I froze the vid. The quality wasn’t good, grainy and poorly lighted, and the person in the vid only turned part-way toward the camera. But I was willing to bet the woman was Sonia Morgan.
“No, that’s not her,” Wil said when I voiced my suspicion. “I admit she looks like Sonia, but too thin. Besides, Sonia was at the club last night. She left about two o’clock with that real-estate developer.”
I didn’t ask what real-estate developer. Wil did that to me all the time in Montreal, assuming, of course, that I knew everyone in town because he did. I also didn’t tell him that men made the best alibis, and I wouldn’t trust hers any farther than I could carry her. Late at night, after a few drinks, it took very little chloral hydrate or other soporific to knock someone out until morning. But I tried not to discuss the intricacies and techniques of my trade with Wil unless it directly applied to what he was paying me for. It tended to make him uncomfortable.
But thinking of Sonia as a pro was at odds with the use of explosives and setting off security alarms. Unless she was another kind of pro. Obviously all the break-ins were done by amateurs, and none of the murders had the marks of a professional hit. That might be clouding my judgement. The complexity of what we were looking at, the layers and levels of confusion, could be the work of a professional grifter—a confidence man, or woman in that case.
Sonia inspired suspicion, not least because other than a twenty-year-old marriage certificate, none of her claims could be verified. Yes, the marriage license appeared real, but I couldn’t find evidence of it being issued. I knew how easily a good hacker could plant a document, and Sonia had the funds to pay a good hacker. Her story about being paid surreptitiously by Morgan’s company in her maiden name also checked out. But Morgan’s computers had been hacked at least once, and there wasn’t anything that linked the Swiss account for Sonia Kensington to our Sonia Morgan except her word. I couldn’t find any record of real estate, in North America or Europe, owned under either name.
That line of thinking led to the question of why would Sonia be breaking into people’s businesses and houses, and why would she be murdering them? And that led back to the biggest mystery of all, who murdered Morgan?
I loaded the vid from Boulanger’s home. The shop break-in happened at two-twenty in the morning. The blonde cop walked out the front door at two-fifty-five. The alarm at the house triggered at three-fifteen. I checked a map, and the distance was doable in a car, but just barely.
The camera in Boulanger’s backyard showed a person going to the back door and kicking it three times until the doorknob broke, then entering the house. The person was short, wearing black pants and a charcoal hoodie. Fifteen minutes later, the same person emerged and walked away.
Wil said, “Take a look at the forensics analysis on the explosives.”
I called that up. After looking it over, I said, “I don’t understand.”
“The explosive used at Jacques Savatier’s home and that used in the break-ins is different. Made by two different companies.”
“Yeah, I got that part.” I thought for a minute. “We might have two different bombers.”
“That’s the conclusion I came to,” Wil said.
“Papers.”
“Huh?”
I pushed away from the computer. “We keep looking at jewelry, but all of these break-ins seem to be about paper. Maybe she’s taking data chips, and since we don’t know the chips existed, we’ve been missing the point. And when Boulanger says ‘papers’ she may not be talking about paper at all, but chips. A lot of people still refer to papers and paperwork, because they signed something. But then what’s the first thing you do with the papers? Just like you do at the Chamber, scan it and shred it. So, what kind of papers would the thief be after?”
“If we’re right, and all these murders and break-ins are tied to Morgan’s murder,” Wil said, pouring himself another cup of coffee, “then something to do with Morgan. We’ve never found a will.”
“The thief seems a bit frantic,” I said. “Possibly looking for something incriminating? Could someone have been blackmailing our thief?”
Wil shook his head. “I have no idea. I can’t put any of it together, and then this thing with the explosives.”
I thought about that, then said, “That might help us figure things out, or at least untangle them. Suppose we have two different issues. Or maybe three.” I held up my hand and ticked items off with my fingers. “One is Morgan’s murder. Two is the explosion that took out Savatier, and the whole theft ring he and Leslie and Eileen and Ricard were running. Three is the break-ins and blowing the safes looking for something.”
Wil cocked his head, then said, “Both of the last two triggered by Morgan’s murder, but entirely separate issues.”
“Exactly. Did you ever ask Boulanger if she knew about Sonia?”
With a shake of his head, Wil said, “No. We asked her about Michael, but not Sonia.”
I turned back to my computer and set to doing a series of searches. After fifteen minutes, I turned back. “Sonia is from Saguenay, about a hundred and twenty miles north of Quebec City, and I find a record of her graduating high school. She spent two years at the university here in Montreal, then nothing. No jobs, no further education. It’s as if she just disappeared. I searched Canada, then North America, then Europe.”
Wil said, “You know how easy that is to do if you don’t go to work for a corporation. A lot of small employers, especially restaurants and bars that aren’t members of the Chamber of Commerce, don’t report their employees.”
What he didn’t say was that a lot of mutants weren’t welcome in the corporate society that ruled the world. And just because Sonia didn’t look like a mutant, didn’t mean she didn’t feel like one, or identify with muties. Morgan had a mutie fetish, and I suddenly wondered what Sonia looked like with her clothes off, though her mutations might be more subtle than that.
“You’re really fixated on Sonia Morgan, aren’t you?” Wil asked.
“I can’t shake the feeling that she’s the key to either Joseph Morgan’s death, or the break-ins, or both.”
Chapter 17
Wil got a call about a situation in San Francisco and flew out the following morning. That coincided with the beginning of Nellie’s three days off, and she wanted to go shopping. Tom begged off and assigned one of his team named Billy to accompany us. The weather continued to be nasty, so we took the metro to one of the underground malls.
Long before the oceans melted, Montreal was subject to extreme weather. Bitter cold and massive snowstorms were common, and as a result the natives did what they could to stay inside. Almost every metro stop on the main island had a large underground shopping mall. The mall we went to had four stories above ground and four stories underground, with shops carrying almost anything a person could spend money on.
But after two hours, Nellie hadn’t found a single thing to buy. My feet hurt, and Billy was getting irritated. Over lunch, I suggested that we try a different kind of store, and so we braved the elements for three blocks to walk from a metro stop to Janice Boulanger’s boutique.
One of the shop girls met us at the entrance and practically squealed, “You’re Nellie Barton!”
Nellie, of course, lapped it up, smiling and preening a bit. Mademoiselle Boulanger came over to see why her entire staff had suddenly converged on one customer, and found Nellie signing autographs.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “My friend can’t seem to find anything that she likes at the larger stores, so I suggested trying your shop.”
Boulanger raised an eyebrow, then took in the quality of Nellie’s clothes, gave me a smile, and said, “Thank you.” She sent all her girls except one away, then showed us to one of the little tables. Billy and I accepted coffee, but Boulanger poured Nellie a glass of champagne.
As Boulanger and her assistant showed Nellie everything from blouses to dresses, to purses and shoes, Billy and I sat off in the corner drinking our coffee and watching.
“Hey,” I said to Billy, “wipe the sour look off your face. We’re sitting down, the coffee is good, and these little cakes are tasty and free. Life could be worse.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. What does that girl need with more clothes? What she has doesn’t fit in her closet now.”
“That means O’Malley needs to get her a bigger closet,” I said.
Billy rolled his eyes. “The big problem is, I’m going to have to carry all the crap she buys.”
I shook my head. “Not in a place like this. They’ll deliver it all to the hotel.”
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