The Dead of Winter

by Peter Kirby

  The Dead of Winter

  Peter Kirby

  Peter Kirby

  The Dead of Winter

  PART ONE

  ONE

  DECEMBER 15

  10 PM

  Mary Gallagher was cold. She was drifting in and out of sleep on a concrete ledge beside the entrance to a parking garage, the fitful half-sleep that was all she had known for years. She had stuffed newspapers next to her skin under layers of clothing to ward off the cold, and her wool toque was pulled down low over her face. Cocooned in a sleeping bag she got from the Salvation Army three weeks before, and with only her mouth exposed to the damp night, she still shivered.

  She sensed the approaching figure before he arrived. The concrete ledge was almost six feet off the ground, and his face was level with hers. He reached up and gently pulled the toque back from her eyes and, so tightly was she wrapped, she couldn’t resist even if she had wanted to. She didn’t recognize him, but he was dressed in black like a priest, and that gave her a sense of comfort.

  “Mary,” he said. “Wake up. They asked me to come and get you. We’ve found a safe place for you. But you must come with me now.”

  “But, Father, I’m comfortable here. Let me stay. Please. I’m not bothering anyone. I need to sleep.”

  “I know, Mary, but it’s dangerous out here. We have somewhere safe for you, safe and warm.”

  “Not a shelter. I can’t go to the shelters.”

  “Not a shelter, Mary. It’s somewhere where you can be yourself. Come along, Mary. Lower yourself into my arms, and I’ll help you into the van.” He was already unzipping the sleeping bag.

  “But, Father, why can’t you let me sleep here?”

  “Because we love you, Mary. Come. It’ll only take a few minutes, and then you’ll be able to sleep comfortably. I have a van, you see it?” He turned and pointed to the van parked at the curb, its engine still running. “Just there, it’s not far.”

  She raised herself up on an elbow and looked towards the white van, snow already sticking to its roof.

  “It’s warm and comfortable, Mary. And it will only take a few minutes. Come.”

  She knew it was pointless to argue. She always had to do what people said. It was only on her own that she could decide. She had no fight in her. When the zipper on the sleeping bag was fully open, he flipped the fabric back. She pulled her legs out and swiveled them over the ledge, grimacing with the pain from worn-out joints. He reached for her, and as she leaned forward over his shoulder, he lowered her to the ground. It had been many years since any man had supported her weight.

  With one arm around her back to support her, he used the other to lead her by the hand. They walked slowly to the curb, her joints screaming with pain as she shuffled forward, leaning into him for support.

  “We’ll get you settled in the van, and I’ll come back for your stuff. You have a choice Mary. You can sit up front with me, or you can lie down in the back on the mattress. Your choice.”

  “A mattress sounds good, Father. I haven’t seen one in months. If it’s OK, I wouldn’t mind lying down on the mattress.”

  “Perfect,” he said, as he opened the back door of the van. She peered inside and felt the warm air escaping. It looked inviting. The back of the van was filled with a mattress, pillows, and a couple of heavy-looking blankets. She crawled in on all fours and pulled the pillow under her head.

  “I’ll just go back and get your stuff.”

  In a few minutes he returned, opening the back door to drop two overstuffed garbage bags beside her.

  “My things, Father. My things.”

  “All here, Mary. Don’t worry. I’m looking after you.”

  “God bless you, Father.”

  “You just relax, Mary. But before you doze off, I have a soup for you.” He twisted the top off a thermos flask and poured out the soup, handing it to her. She reached out and took the steaming cup. “Careful, it’s hot,” he said.

  He settled himself into the driver’s seat and turned to look as she drank the soup, wiping her lips with the back of a filthy hand. A change was coming over her. She was relaxing. She finished the soup and lay back on the pillow. He waited for a while before driving off.

  It was still snowing, and it took about half an hour to reach the Old Port. Big leafy flakes of snow were settling everywhere, and the expanse of the port was a white field disturbed only by the tracks of the van, tracks that disappeared in minutes under the snow.

  The Old Port had been converted to parkland and open spaces where Montrealers could stroll along the edge of the St. Lawrence River. In the middle of a December night, it was deserted, and he parked the van close to the metal and concrete railing that marked the river’s edge. Then he turned in his seat and leaned back to check her neck for a pulse. There wasn’t one.

  He was surprised at how difficult it was to get her out of the van. She seemed heavier than when he had helped her down from her perch, and her bulky clothing made her difficult to handle.

  He had imagined this moment many times, carrying a weightless angel in his arms, and he cursed himself when all he could do was drag her out feet first, letting her shoulders and head take the brunt of the fall to the pavement. Air escaped from her lungs with an animal grunt, and for a second he feared that she wasn’t dead. He checked for a pulse again, then dragged her to the railing and stood her up, holding the back of her neck to stop her falling. He wanted the river to take her home. He let go of her neck, and she pitched forward. Then he bent down, took hold of her legs at knee height, raised her feet off the ground, and let her slip over the edge.

  He cursed himself again when he heard a thud but no splash and looked down at the dark pile below him. The harbour water was frozen solid, and she lay motionless on the snow-covered ice with a dark trickle of blood spreading out from her head. He knelt down and began mumbling prayers for the dead as she gradually disappeared under the falling snow. In half an hour she was invisible. He went back to the van and drove away.

  TWO

  DECEMBER 24

  11.45 PM

  Patsy Cline was singing in the dark of loss and despair while Vanier sat half-listening, his thoughts wandering off on long tangents and then returning to the song. The ring-tone shook him, and he had to focus to find out where it was coming from. He saw the blinking green light of the cell phone on the floor, rose from the armchair, and picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Sorry to disturb you this time of night, sir, but they’re collecting bodies down here.”

  Vanier reached for the glass of Jameson and listened to the familiar voice. He didn’t tell Detective Sergeant Laurent that he had been awake, sort of, or that he was glad to have some contact on Christmas Eve.

  “Explain.”

  “They’ve found five bodies tonight. That beats all the averages. Street people by the look of it, all sleeping rough. Two at Atwater, one at McGill, and they just found the last two at Berri. That’s where I am now. I think you should come down here. If you can get away, that is, sir.”

  Crime doesn’t take a holiday. It changes costume for the season, and Christmas is the season for domestic violence. Too much pressure to deliver the perfect gift, and not enough money. Too little to say, and too much alcohol encouraging confessions. Never enough love or imagination to deliver the dream. Christmas murders are usually a simple matter; the victim lying in a pool of blood, stabbed, shot, or bludgeoned with whatever comes to hand, the assailant not far away, sitting under the tree crying and sobering up, or in a bar trying not to. They’re easy cases, and good ones for a new officer to cut his teeth on. Even the non-domestics were supposed to be easy. Street people die all the time in Montreal’s brutal winter, but randomly and alone in the lon
g nights of January and February, and not five a night.

  “No, no. It’s not a problem, Laurent. I can be there in fifteen minutes. Berri, you said?”

  “Yes, sir. When you get to the entrance, one of the uniforms will tell you where I am.”

  Vanier was happy to get out of his apartment. He had been holed up too long pretending the festive season didn’t exist. Patsy Cline, whiskey, and Christmas are a depressing combination.

  He drove slowly out of the garage into the Montreal night. Winter had come early, and the second storm of the season had just drifted east after dropping twenty centimetres of snow on the city. A large winter moon hung low in the clear sky. The car was warm, one of the luxuries of parking inside, and the window lowered at the touch of a button, letting in a flood of cold fresh air.

  He turned right out of the garage to descend Redpath, a steep street running down to the city from a high ridge on the mountain that dominates the Montreal skyline. The snow-covered pavements were deserted except for the occasional parka-bundled figures leaning forward into the cold as they staggered home from late night reveillons.

  At the Berri Metro, the snow had been plowed and piled in high banks on both sides of the street by city crews and contractors earning triple time for working Christmas Eve. They were already beginning the long job of clearing it. Vanier parked opposite the station entrance, but had to walk to the corner to find a spot to cross the snow bank. Uniformed officers who were milling around the station entrance looked up as he approached, their breath making clouds in the frigid air. One went to stop him before another, recognizing Vanier, held him back.

  “Bonsoir, Inspecteur, et Joyeux Noel!” said one of the officers, touching the peak of his cap.

  “Joyeux Noel, les gars,” said Vanier, without stopping.

  He pulled open the heavy door and made for the escalator. It was shut off, so he took the stairs down to the main concourse. At the bottom, a uniformed officer pointed to the motionless escalator that led down to the westbound Green Line platform, and Vanier took the stairs again; the risers on a stopped escalator are higher than on ordinary stairs. He went down slowly, facing the 500-foot wall of white tile opposite. Like much of the metro system, Berri had been dug rather than tunneled. Engineers blasted a cathedral-sized hole in the rock and built the station in the hole, encasing it in walls of concrete when they had finished. Then the hole was filled in, enclosing a complex of massive internal galleries inside an underground concrete box.

  Vanier was breathing hard at the bottom of the stairs.

  About two-thirds of the way down the westbound platform, three uniformed police officers and a metro security officer were gathered around Laurent, looking up at him. At six foot four, with a shaved head and the build of a defensive linebacker, Laurent towered over the group. The three police officers were dressed for the outdoors, holding their fur hats in their hands; Laurent was talking to the security officer. They all turned as Vanier approached down the platform.

  “Thanks for coming, sir. What a night. I thought it would be a quiet shift. Instead we get this shit. She’s behind the grill,” said Laurent, gesturing to a large hole in the wall covered by a steel grill.

  Vanier moved over to it. The grill was hinged at the top, and the metro officer pulled from the bottom and lifted it up, exposing a massive ventilation shaft that sucked air from the street into the station. Vanier peered in. The shaft went in flat for eight feet and then rose up like a chimney. On the flat surface, two small feet protruded from a pile of blankets and coats. Cold air from the street wafted down through the shaft carrying the smell of the sleeper, a grimy mix of smoke, damp, greasy food, booze, and human leakage.

  Laurent was behind Vanier, looking over his shoulder. “After they found the first body at McGill, word went out to check all the stations, and apparently this is a usual sleeping spot. Easy entry and warm enough to spend the night. This officer found her and tried to wake her,” said Laurent, gesturing to the officer. “He climbed inside when she wouldn’t move. We’re waiting for the Coroner’s people before we pull her out.”

  Vanier turned to the metro officer. “How often do you find bodies in the system?”

  “Often enough that we have a policy. If there’s no sign of violence, we call in an ambulance, and they get a medic to confirm death. Normally, a thing like this would be natural causes, and the Coroner wouldn’t be involved; we’d just hand her off to the funeral home for her last car trip. Only tonight we found three in the system, two here and one at the McGill Metro. Your guys found another two outside at Atwater.”

  “That’s a big number, sir. That’s why I thought I should call you,” said Laurent.

  “You were right,” said Vanier, touching the young officer’s elbow. “Make sure the crime scene people take it seriously, have them go over the spot thoroughly.”

  Vanier turned back to stare into the shaft, looking beyond the feet, the bundled body, and several bags at her head. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle. She looked like she was asleep.

  “You’re sure she’s dead?”

  “Yes, sir. Checked her myself.”

  Vanier nodded to the officer that he could lower the grill. “She wasn’t in a sleeping bag?”

  “No, sir, it looks like blankets rolled around her body.”

  Vanier looked up at Laurent. “You said there were two here?”

  “The other one’s down on the Orange Line, northbound. The trains were running until half an hour ago, and then the whole system shut down because of some electrical fault,” said Laurent.

  “Lead on.” The pair walked off in the direction of the Orange Line, another level down.

  “Good thing they did have to shut it all down,” said Laurent, “or we’d have the Mayor’s office breathing down our necks for holding up traffic. The other body’s in a utility room at the far end of the platform. Someone gummed up the lock, and since then it only looks like it’s locked. Same situation as here, bedded down for the night and never woke up.”

  A small area of the Orange Line platform was yellow-taped off, and a metro officer was standing guard, leaning against the wall. He straightened up as the two detectives ducked under the yellow tape. The door of the utility room was open, and inside, below the sink, another bundle lay up against the wall. This one had been peeled open to reveal an old, bearded man, his head resting on gloved hands. His face was peaceful despite deep wrinkles, and his eyes were closed as though in sleep.

  Vanier held the doorjamb and surveyed the small room. Again, there were no obvious signs of violence, no blood, not even bruising, just the normal wear and tear of a life on the street. It was like looking at a moment captured in a photograph. A yellow bucket on wheels supported a mop leaning upside-down on the wall, an extra-wide broom was propped against the opposite wall under a shelf full of jars of industrial cleaning fluids, and two half-filled garbage bags stood next to the broom. Vanier felt that if he were only to yell loud enough, the sleeping man would wake. But he knew there was nothing to do. The crime scene guys would do more. That was their job. His was to look and to remember, to notice anything strange or out of place. But all he saw was a homeless man finding shelter in a utility closet.

  He turned back to Laurent. “So what do we know?”

  “Not much. We’ve had five similar deaths tonight. All older street people sleeping wherever they could find a spot, all bedded down for the night, only they don’t wake up. Two women, three men. No signs of violence, and none of them froze to death. The first was found at the McGill Metro, just after ten o’clock, and they were all found in the last two hours. You’ve got these two here, two more at Atwater, and the McGill guy. The Atwater bodies weren’t inside the station, one was at the entrance in Cabot Park, and the other was sleeping on a ledge outside a parking garage. The way this is going, there may be more, sir. Maybe we haven’t found them all yet.”

  Vanier looked up at Laurent, “Well, for the moment, we treat them all as suspicious. Forget
natural causes unless the autopsy results tell us something different. In the meantime, let’s do what we can to place these people, put names on them. Have someone collect their possessions and bring them to headquarters. Get someone to look at the CC footage. There are cameras all over the metro as well as outside. When did they come in tonight? Did they talk to anyone? I want everything. Also, get photos of each of them, and have someone shop them around the hostels and shelters, the Old Brewery Mission, the Sally Ann, Dans La Rue, the drop-in centres, all the places street people go. Someone knows these people. Someone saw them tonight. Let’s find out who they were.”

  Laurent was busy taking notes, but hardly needed to. In three years with Vanier he had learned the drill. Vanier’s mantra was connections and history. Know the victim, find the paths he walked, and you will cross paths with the murderer. He had seen Vanier go through the same drill countless times.

  “Chief, you think they were killed?”

  “Laurent, I haven’t got a clue. But until we know differently, let’s assume they didn’t just slip away peacefully. Let’s get them identified and as much history as possible. These people have families that need to know what happened, even if their families don’t give a shit. I want everything we can find on them.”

  “Oh, and this one,” Vanier said, pointing into the cleaning closet at the bearded corpse. “I gave him five dollars last week outside the Sherbrooke Metro. He grinned at me and said, Merci monsieur, merci. I want to know who he was. Now, I’m going home. Call me anytime after six tomorrow morning.”

  He turned to leave and caught a fleeting look in Laurent’s eyes and realized his mistake.

  “Oh yeah, you’re off tomorrow. Find out who’s on duty in the morning and leave your notes with him. Enjoy Christmas, and we can talk later. And give my best wishes to your wife and those beautiful children. This is a time for family, Laurent. Enjoy it.”