The Dogs of Winter

by Ann Lambert

  He peeled away the last photograph on his wall. Of Rosie Nukilik, lying on her back, her head resting on her arm like she was just having a rest, frozen solid. He dropped her into the fire as well. He felt terribly, terribly deflated and sad. But he had no choice. His…behavior could be misconstrued. Once you make a mistake, you pay forever. Or they make you pay forever. This is what Isaac had learned. He had already been punished once for something he hadn’t done. He was not going to let that happen again.

  Forty-Nine

  ROMÉO WAS SUPPOSED TO ACCOMPANY Steve Pouliot to interview Travis Hall, the survivor of the most recent attack by the “homeless killer.” But as Roméo was on his way to the Montreal General hospital, he got a call from Marie. Joel and Shelly her “next door” neighbors (who lived a good fifteen-minute walk from her house in Ste. Lucie) had called to tell Marie that her little house in the woods had been broken into. Again. They had been snowshoeing the trail behind her place when they heard the alarm. When they arrived, they saw that her front door was smashed in and a snowdrift had gathered inside the foyer. They assured her that they’d shoveled out the snow, nailed a piece of plywood to the doorframe, and called the local police. But Marie needed to get up there as soon as possible, and Roméo had offered to drive her because Ruby had borrowed Marie’s car to go to a study break retreat in the mountains near the Vermont border.

  Now Marie and Roméo were on their way “up north” on highway 15, with about forty-five minutes to go, just passing the gargantuan shopping mall in Blainville (or “Blandville” as Ruby called it), that ran alongside the highway, identical to every other shopping mall the world over. Marie gazed out at the sky, which had been a luminous blue all day, but was now already deepening into a deep cobalt as the afternoon wore on and the sun began its slow descent on the horizon. They passed a billboard with a giant close-up of Danielle Champagne’s handsome face and her upraised index finger demanding an end to conjugal violence with a ÇA SUFFIT! Marie thought it was a brilliant campaign. She knew that despite her great success, Danielle Champagne herself had been a victim of domestic violence, documented in horrifying detail in the wildly popular autobiography she’d published a few years earlier. Good on her for using her influence and success to try to do something about it, Marie thought. They were just coming up to St. Jerome where Roméo had his precinct office when Marie took his hand and pressed it gently.

  “Thanks for this.”

  Roméo nodded and squeezed Marie’s hand in response. “Il n’y a pas de quoi.”

  Marie watched the box stores of St. Jerome clustered along the highway fall behind them. “Who do you think it was? It can’t be the Thibodeau twins again. They’re still in jail, aren’t they?”

  The Thibodeau twins were part of a local and legendary family of criminals who earned a living breaking into the houses of rich weekenders in the upper Laurentians. They famously had escaped the law for many years, until two years earlier when they finally got caught red-handed. Marie’s house had been a target in that criminal shopping spree as well.

  “They’re still in jail, but I heard their younger cousins from Rawdon are in the business now. They seem to have passed their family values on to the next generation. It’s quite heartwarming, isn’t it?”

  “Those fuckers. It’s not like I have anything left to steal.” The twins got Marie’s TV, a few bottles of scotch, and an old laptop the last time they’d robbed her.

  “Who knows? Maybe this will lead to something really positive.”

  Marie looked at Roméo balefully. “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  He glanced at her for a second and then returned his eyes to the road ahead. “Like…meeting the love of your life.”

  Marie and Roméo met for the first time when her house was broken into, and Roméo came to investigate. It was certainly unusual that a Detective Chief Inspector with the Sûreté du Québec would investigate a local B-and-E, but there had been a murder in the area, and Roméo thought they might be related. As it turned out, they weren’t. Marie’s involvement in that case involved a connection to the victim that dated back to her childhood growing up on the West Island of Montreal.

  Roméo could still palpably remember the feeling the first time he saw Marie. She was crawling out from under her bed where she had hidden some precious jewelry that, as it turned out, the thieves did not find. When she looked up at Roméo with those brown eyes that just penetrated right through him, he had what could only be described as a coup de foudre—love at first sight. Marie also later admitted that when he took her hand to say goodbye that day, she hadn’t felt anything that electric and erotic since high school.

  Marie took his hand again. “I guess I should thank the Thibodeau twins for bringing us together, right?”

  “You can always do it in person—I think you can find them in the Bordeaux prison. You could be one of those women who writes to inmates and ends up falling in love with one.”

  They continued along in silence for a few more minutes, each lost in the delicious memory of that first encounter. A distance sign for Ste. Agathe loomed on their right and disappeared.

  Marie released a deep sigh. “I really miss Louis, you know?” Louis Lachance, the local homme à tout faire who charged next to nothing, did solid work, and was totally reliable had once come to fix her burst pipes on Christmas day.

  “I felt like I always had someone looking out for the house. And for me, too of course—when I’m alone up there. At least if he was in the home in Ste. Lucie he could hang out with my mom.” Marie’s mother, Claire, had been moved to a residence in Ste. Lucie so Marie could visit her more easily. She was now in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

  Roméo raised an eyebrow. “Your maman and Louis?”

  “Why not? Old people fall in love.”

  Roméo decided not to remind Marie that her mother couldn’t even recognize her much of the time, let alone Louis Lachance.

  “Of course. Look at us.”

  Marie punched him gently on the arm. “I mean very old people. Elderly. I love the idea of them sitting on the porch, holding hands, drinking tea, chatting about this and that.”

  Marie was sometimes acutely aware that she was ten years older than Roméo, who looked ten years younger than he was. It sometimes made her feel very insecure, like the entire glorious ride they were on could be cut short at any time. Roméo glanced at her for a moment and then asked, “Have you heard from your student?”

  “No. Nothing. And I’ve left several messages.”

  “I wanted to tell you that Nic—Detective LaFramboise—may have…found something on him—”

  “WHAT? What do you mean?”

  “Nothing is at all confirmed yet, and it’s very speculative, so don’t get too excited about—”

  “That fucker. Michaela has to come forward—for her own healing—and we have to nail him—”

  “Marie. Listen. Michaela has to go through a very difficult process here—she may not be ready—”

  Roméo was interrupted by a ping on his phone. A text message. From Ti-Coune Cousineau. I’m with that girl Nia—with the dead boyfriend. She lost her dog. We think we found it at this shelter—in l’Épiphanie. We’re here. My phone’s about to die.

  Ti-Coune had attached the Google map coordinates to the text.

  “What is it? Anything important?”

  Roméo showed her the message on his phone. “I wonder how this happened.”

  “He sent the directions to this place.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “What? No, I’ll drop you at your place, and I’ll maybe go check it out on my way back to the office.”

  “Roméo. What if it is the missing dog? What if there’s some connection to the killer here? We should go now and check it out.”

  Roméo laughed. “We? There’s no we here. I’ll drop you off
at your house, and then I’ll meet you up there later.” He hesitated. “I will go, if I decide there’s merit, okay?”

  Marie narrowed her eyes at Roméo. “No. Not okay. You’re going, and I’m coming with you.”

  Roméo raised his hand in protest and shook his head.

  “Marie, I am not allowed to bring you with me. It’s protocol. Pas de question. I’ll drop you off at the precinct in St. Jerome, then. We’re five minutes away. I can get one of the officers to drive you to your place.”

  Marie turned and glared at Roméo. “Rosie had a dog. Christian had a dog. This last victim had a dog. You know there’s something going on here. What if this is connected to Rosie’s murder? I’m coming. I’m part of this too, you know. Let’s go.”

  Roméo muttered something softly and abruptly steered his car into the U-turn lane reserved for police in the middle of the divided highway. He stopped to attach the cherry light to the top of his car and then pulled into the southbound lane right back in the direction they’d just come from.

  It took them some time to find the place. Like Ti-Coune, Roméo drove right past the obscure La Crèche sign to the shelter and had to backtrack to find the right road. Roméo finally directed his car down the long and narrow snowy lane. He hadn’t said a single word to Marie since they’d turned around near Sainte Therese, still furious with her for insisting on coming along. They both saw the house up ahead at the same time and pointed it out to each other simultaneously. Roméo pulled his car as close to the building as he could without risking getting stuck in the deep snow. He turned off the engine, took the keys, and turned to Marie.

  “This is police business that you have no part of. You will sit in this car until I come back for you. Under no circumstances are you to leave this car. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Promise me you will stay here until I return.”

  “I promise.”

  He looked directly into her eyes for one long moment, and then pulled open his door. Roméo breathed in the frigid air, infused with the smell of woodstove smoke. He realized how much colder it had gotten—the tiny hairs stuck to the inside of his nose as he inhaled, a telltale sign of well below zero temperatures. He pulled his hat lower over his ears and as Marie watched his progress through the windshield of the car, Roméo trudged through the snow towards the front door of the house.

  Fifty

  STEVE POULIOT WAS USED to the other cops asking him to retrieve something they had deliberately placed out of his reach, so he’d have to use a chair or ladder to get it. Then they made sure the ladder disappeared, so he’d have to ask a taller cop for help, while his Neanderthal colleagues chuckled in chorus. Some of the older ones made fun of his neatly trimmed beard and mid-fade crew cut—the requisite rookie look. One of Cauchon’s buddies just referred to him as la tapette or pansy, an old Quebecois slur. Pouliot was reminded again and again that homophobia was alive and well in the SPVM despite all the sensitivity training they’d all been forced to take.

  Several just referred to him as le nain—the dwarf. They also enjoyed dreaming up other ways to torment him—including old chestnuts like ordering a dozen extra-large pizzas for the precinct on his credit card that they’d snuck out of his wallet, or each taking turns urinating in his locker. Pouliot was used to bullies—his diminutive size and implacable nature had made him the object of much cruelty over the years. That was why he had trained since he was eleven years old in the various martial arts, earning a black belt in both Karate and Krav-Maga—the martial art that has no concern for an opponent’s well-being, favored by the Israeli Defense Forces. When a colleague imaginatively called him a gay dwarf in the parking lot of the precinct, Steve forced him into a snowbank by twisting his arm within a millimeter of breaking and made him swallow a great big mouthful of yellow snow—another favorite “prank” of bullies past. That had kept everyone at the station quiet for some time.

  So he was a bit surprised to open a gift box on the seat of his cruiser that morning to discover a reeking pile of what was clearly human shit with a little note attached: Un petit cadeau pour tes amies Esquimaux! A little gift for your Eskimo friends. Steve took a photo on his phone of the attached note and the contents of the box, and then deposited it in a trash can. Then he entered the precinct office to the obvious stares and snickers of his colleagues as he headed towards his desk, saying absolutely nothing and betraying no emotion whatsoever on his face.

  Roméo Leduc had texted him earlier to say that something urgent had come up and he would have to delay the interview with Travis Hall until later that afternoon. Steve decided to wait for Roméo. Meanwhile, he had a couple of hours to kill and brooded over how best to use them. Should he try to figure out which of his colleagues had put that gift in his car? He would probably learn their identities soon—idiots had a way of betraying themselves and each other. It was just a matter of time. Instead, Pouliot decided he would do everything in his power to catch the fucker who’d run over that poor girl in the tunnel and left her for dead. No one else here gave a flying fuck about the fate of Rosie Nukilik. No one had had even bothered to double check the work done on the hit-and-run, so Steve decided he would reexamine the CCTV footage of the tunnel. Even though Cauchon himself had said it was hopeless, Steve Pouliot wasn’t so sure.

  Less than three hours later, he had a hit from the CCTV data he’d sent off to a friend in Toronto. According to the coroner’s report, he figured the estimated time of death was at the most two hours after the collision, so he narrowed down the traffic to about two dozen cars. Then he whittled away at that list down to the cars whose plates could be read more clearly by the LPR technology his friend had run the data through. That left five. A Dodge Ram pickup, a Subaru Forrester, a Toyota Rav 4, a Hyundai Elantra, and a Lexus Infiniti. He decided to check the Infiniti first for no other reason than it was by far the most expensive of the vehicles. It was registered in the name of Danielle Champagne, which seemed very familiar to him. When he looked her up online, he was reminded that she was some kind of feminist fashion maven and author. The chances were very remote that she was his “man,” but as Steve Pouliot wrote her information down, he decided he would pay Madame Danielle Champagne a visit first thing in the morning.

  Fifty-One

  THEY HAD NOTHING LEFT. No voice. No strength. No warmth. Nia and Ti-Coune had shouted, screamed, demanded, pleaded, and finally kicked the fence repeatedly for over three hours, to no avail. Nia was convinced someone would hear them sooner or later, but Ti-Coune knew how very remote this place was. Very deliberately so, he guessed. Now they were both squatting on their haunches in the snow, back-to-back, keeping an eye out and trying to stay warm. Nia could no longer really feel her feet, and Ti-Coune’s fingertips were frozen. He hadn’t even worn gloves.

  “Jean-Michel? We’ll freeze to death if we don’t keep moving. Let’s keep walking.”

  He nodded and struggled to his feet. Then he pulled Nia up, and started pacing the length of the fence, swinging his arms back and forth to force some circulation to his fingers. He watched Nia’s shallow breaths dissipate in the frigid air. The sun was almost down, and the temperature would soon plummet. They were in a dangerous situation now, and Ti-Coune felt like an idiot. Why the hell did he allow himself to get talked into this? Did he think he was playing the fucking hero for this girl he hardly knew? What kind of a loser does something like this?

  He looked over to the next enclosure where they’d first spotted Hamlet. Even Hamlet had given up pacing the fence with Nia and had retreated to the warmth of his doghouse. Ti-Coune could just make out his face, resting on his paws, his eyebrows twitching as he followed Nia’s every move.

  “They can’t just leave us here. Like this. I mean, someone is gonna come. Right?”

  Ti-Coune smiled wanly. “Sure. I think so. Maybe Roméo will get my text.”

  Nia searched his eyes for any reassurance and found none
. She knew they were in trouble, too.

  “Maybe that…person at the house will come back here. She didn’t seem like, like a killer. Like she wanted to kill us. Right?”

  When Ti-Coune didn’t respond, Nia started jogging around the perimeter of the enclosure, pausing to stamp her feet every few seconds. She was trying very, very hard not to cry. So was Ti-Coune. Suddenly, she stopped and turned to him excitedly.

  “Maybe we should dig a snow cave. Don’t those insulate you? Protect you?”

  Ti-Coune lifted his frozen hands to her. “What should I dig with? My elbows?”

  Nia jogged over to him and looked into his face. His eyebrows, lashes, and scraggly beard were coated with frost. The snot on his thin moustache had frozen into small white icicles.

  “I’ll dig. And then we can get inside it and use our body warmth to keep our core temperature up. I saw it on Naked and Afraid.”

  Ti-Coune looked at her, confused. “You saw it on what?”

  But Nia had already moved to a corner of the enclosure and started frantically digging at the snow like a dog digging for a bone. Hamlet continued to watch her.

  “Now you know what it feels like.” The disembodied voice came out of the whisper of wind, somewhere near the locked gate. Ti-Coune turned to the sound of the voice. It was close. But he couldn’t see anyone. Nia stopped digging, panting from the exertion, and got shakily to her feet. She peered into the direction of the voice but could see nothing.