by Richard Cain
Nastos knew that like most crime journalists, Grant was always looking for the story that would make for a compelling breakout book. The Toronto news market, even the Canadian market, was small. A book deal might get her closer to the American job market or help out when she renegotiated her contract here. Maybe Ann Falconer looked like a contender.
Nastos saw that Chapter Five started at the three-hour mark. Karen pressed Play and the screen went momentarily black.
It began with the woman in a dark room, the background draped with black sheets, her face illuminated by a small lamp on the table beside her. She was thin with wavy hair held back in a ponytail. The frame jostled and there was the sense of movement off camera. The floor creaked and the woman’s eyes tracked to a new place. She lit a cigarette. Karen spoke from off camera, “Tell me about the night that eventually brought you to me.”
Ann Falconer glanced at the digital clock on the end table. The red LED display was extra-large and could be read from the most encrusted and tired sliver of an eye. It said exactly midnight. The first thought to cross her mind was, welcome to a brand-new day. Walker hadn’t heard the alarm. His breathing was still regular, rattling in his throat. He only stopped snoring when she pushed him off of her. Since they had come together, he always had to be touching her to sleep properly. It didn’t make her feel crowded even though she would have imagined that such a thing would. It was just different. She was used to them leaving right away, after the sex. She had never had a real boyfriend. Her parents wouldn’t have approved.
As he lay next to her, still grinding through sleep, still touching her, if only with a lazy leg resting on hers, it felt comfortable in a way. It had been three weeks of this and it was beginning to feel too much like hope.
She sat up and took a long sip of water from an orange plastic child’s cup from the bedside table. As she returned the empty cup to its resting place she thought to herself, Tonight is going to change everything for us.
She woke him, shaking him more aggressively than she had intended. “It’s time.” She shook him again more gently.
His eyes clenched hard and he stretched out slowly, vibrating like a cat does, then suddenly fell slack. “God, already?” His eyes opened, one then the other. Blue, deep, the most beautiful thing about him aside from his tenderness, she decided. It was definitely alien the way he made every effort to please her and hold on to her as if she was the most valuable thing in his life, even while he slept.
Walker sat up and rubbed his eyes while Falconer turned on the lamp by clicking the switch the wrong way then having to reverse it. The light was dim and unsatisfying. Walker turned on the bathroom light, going in and closing the door behind him. She stood up and dressed, feeling a cold nervous sweat on her underarms that she wiped away with a soiled T-shirt from the hamper. Jeans, a dollar-store bra, shoes from Goodwill and the shirt she wore out of prison. Walker swung the door open, having transformed himself into his usual jittery, amped-up self. He had run the tap and slicked his hair back. There were still beads of water clinging to his shaved chest distorting the tattoos and lines of his ribs.
He took her by surprise with a tight hug, lifting her up in the air. “This is it, baby. After tonight we’re going to get the hell out of this place.”
She found it hard to believe his optimism, but the enthusiasm was infectious. She laughed as she pushed him away and threw a shirt at him.
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
He ratcheted tight his bootlaces, tying them off, and pulled on a shirt that hung loose. He tightened his belt an extra notch to hold them over his protruding hipbones, and checked himself out in the mirror. He looked cancer thin as he twisted from side to side. He said that he had once been fat but she didn’t believe him.
She felt sad, seeing how he had been starving himself to save the money faster so they could get out of there. She tried not to cry at the sight of him, saying, “Come on, let’s go.”
Falconer drove while Walker counted the money. Desperation was a feeling that some might understand as a temporary way of life but for Walker and Falconer every hour of the past three months of their lives was ruled by it. Deciding whether to eat or to save money, fighting the itch for alcohol or drugs to stave off hopelessness of life on the margins, the fear of being robbed increasing as their savings grew. Living in a filthy, bedbug-infested apartment with drug addicts and foreign gangsters.
It occurred to her, as she drove through the dark city streets, that she had never doubted Walker’s loyalty to her. His car was a black Ford Focus hatchback that he said was good on gas. It was stolen, the plates found at the side of the Gardiner Expressway with a sticker that expired six years ago. It was one of the few times she had driven in Canada; the last time was when she was arrested with guns and drugs.
It would be a lie to suggest that Rob relaxed once he determined that the seventeen thousand dollars was all accounted for. They had been eating garbage bags of recovered bagels and pastries stolen from the garbage bins from downtown donut shops, canned goods stolen from dollar stores, all while the comparative fortune slowly accumulated from petty drug deals, welfare fraud and Falconer’s prostitution.
Walker heaved the black duffle bag from his lap onto the back seat and exhaled. The engine sputtered and the interior lights grew dim, then something caught in the engine and the car came back to life.
“Alternator,” he said. “That’s what that grinding sound is.”
“Will this get us —?”
“We’re gonna make it, Ann, I promise.”
She drove to the designated place, Trinity Bellwoods Park on Queen Street, which was just a block down the street from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. The south gate was open and the parking lot near empty except for a lone black Honda Accord. The car was gently rocking, the interior green light barely visible behind steamed-up windows.
She had never been here before but it would have been a good place for her to work. A large open area, subtly rolling hills with isolated trees backlit by lampposts casting shadows through a condensing fog. To the north there seemed to be a steep incline, but it was hard to tell from this distance. Thick air smelling of heated asphalt and burnt marijuana filled her lungs, reminding her of prison.
Walker had chosen this place because most of his clients had spent time inside the Addiction Centre. They were the easiest sales, the ones who were trying to get clean, and he had little sympathy for them. This time was different. This time they were looking to buy.
She parked the car and turned off the headlights. Walker opened his door a crack but turned to her before getting out. “Freedom. When I come back, we’ll pack then get the hell out of here.”
“Bracebridge,” she said, the word still sounding awkward.
“Bracebridge. We’ll gram it out, pick up another kilo every month. In a year we’ll go straight. No looking back.” Again the infectious optimism. He fumbled for the handle to open the door. He was fidgety, full of nervous energy, like a little boy who couldn’t get to the theme park fast enough.
The duffle bag slung over his shoulder, he walked through the park, disappearing into the shadows. Her decision to get out of the car and follow from a distance was a mistake that became evident to her only much later.
While many women might have been afraid of the night, Falconer lived there. Having worked as a prostitute, she’d been beaten, once attacked with a knife, threatened with death, choked unconscious. These abuses she suffered came from the street hustlers who became self-appointed pimps and from the clients, everyone from Bay Street lawyers looking for excitement in their boring lives to men fresh out of federal penitentiary where sex had come to them only after beatings and torture. Girls like Falconer did all they could to avoid suffering vicarious revenge as the ex-cons tried to reclaim their manhood.
After the time she spent a night locked in a damp crawlspace because a con
vict took some magic mushrooms and thought she was a zombie trying to eat his brain, Falconer feared nothing.
She moved through the trees between the drug users and punks trying to look dangerous to the secluded area where Walker had gone. Her eyes began to adjust to the dark. In the distance she observed the Rec Centre. There was a dark-coloured pickup truck parked against a long, plain brick wall. Walker was just taking a seat in the passenger side. The windows were tinted, too dark to see inside, so when he sat down and closed the door it was as if he was enveloped by a black void.
She thought the transaction would have gone much faster. How long did it take to count the money and take the drugs? Walker, even if the kilo looks light, just take it, she implored. She glanced east and west. There were stray people walking around but none near this truck. For the first time she noticed that parked further south was an SUV. It pulled close to the pickup, close enough to make her take a harder look. The passenger’s phone screen lit up and she saw that there were two men inside, rough looking, humourless. The one playing with the phone kept running his fingers through his blond spiky hair. The other glared at the truck ahead of them.
She felt more than heard a deep thud, then another, coincidentally at the same time as flashes of light from the inside of the pickup shot into the dark like sheet lightning. She was confused and honestly didn’t know then that he had been shot. It was like she had completely forgotten what a gun was or what one sounded like.
Later she would say it was like her life began in the darkness of the woods. That she felt like a child who had never been anywhere or seen anything before. She felt as if she had just come to exist as she stood there in the shadows, surrounded by thick, humid air.
She realized that she was moving toward Walker, part of her knowing what had happened, part of her having no idea. With a click, the passenger-side door opened. And she realized that she was on the asphalt, in front of the pickup. When the door closed she saw him lying on the ground. The pickup drove past her at a high rate of speed but she gave it no attention until it screeched to a stop in front of her. She turned, seeing two men inside, the driver white, the passenger black, an expression of fear on his face. The white man barked something, maybe “Do it, come on!” but she couldn’t make it out; the language had become foreign to her. She began to repeat them in her head, to translate them when the passenger pointed a gun at her.
The weapon began to tremble in his hand. She stared impassively as if she were watching a movie, then suddenly they were gone. The driver had hit the gas and the car lurched onto the lawn, through the trees where it lifted and dropped through the fog-laden field, the tail lights bouncing and fading until its tires caught pavement and it screeched into the night.
All she could think about was Walker. She noticed that the people in the park were now gone, leaving nothing between her and Walker. She ran over to him. He was already dead. Pale, still. So skinny, if it had not been for the blood over his hands and stomach it might have looked like he had starved to death.
The SUV was gone. Falconer noticed a man next to her, dog leash in hand. He leaned over Walker, examining him. He said something to her in English and the language was slowly returning to her but she said nothing to him and turned back to what was left of Walker, looking into his half-closed eyes. When he died he had taken her future with him. Frustrated by the confused look on her face he took out his phone and dialed a number.
She had been around a lot of bad people since coming to Canada. The enslavers who swindled her here, drug dealers, the meathead bouncers in the clubs. Walker, she knew, was shot by policemen. The other men, they were well dressed, no visible tattoos, they weren’t street hoodlums. They were professional men, both the ones in the car and the ones in the SUV. The blond man in the passenger seat of the SUV had stared at her. Lifeless black eyes, emotionless. It was an expression she knew well. It was the way they scowled at you before they beat and raped you. Judging by the stakes, this time she knew it might be worse than a beating, worse than rape.
She turned back to Walker, whose eyes had glazed over, his mouth hanging slack. All she could think was that he was dead and so was her only hope of a better life.
She turned and ran without uttering one sound of remorse or surprise for the murder of her man. She squeezed her hands into fists, gouging herself with the car keys, barely feeling a thing. Tunnel vision, the sound of leaves and garbage crinkling under her feet, thick air filling her lungs. She had never run so fast in her life. Running away was a luxury that she took full advantage of, not slowing until she made it to the car.
She fumbled with the keys to get in the door, and had the gas pedal floored before the engine turned over. She tore through the south gate at eighty kilometres an hour and never looked back.
4
“I knew they would come after me. I saw the faces of the men who killed him. I can’t go to the police, they are the police. So I came to you.”
Karen stopped the video. When the screen went dark there was still some light leaking in from around the curtains. Carscadden turned the small knob at the bottom of a table lamp, making it brighter without having to turn on the overhead fluorescents.
Hopkins asked, “How long did they hold her prisoner?”
“Over a year.”
Hopkins mulled it over. “All she had to do was get to a police station.”
Grant crossed her arms on the table. “I’ve spoken to girls like this a few times over the years. I’ve watched Falconer’s story a dozen times. They kept her close, they used violence and intimidation. I think it’s impossible to understand the grip that fear can have on a person unless you’re living it. If she had never been arrested and held in custody she might never have been rescued.”
She turned from Hopkins to appraise Carscadden. “So you’re the legal mastermind behind the Nastos acquittal, Nastos’ financial settlement, the Viktor Kalmakov acquittal . . .”
Carscadden was wearing a typical wrinkled trial lawyer suit, one level better than drab. At Hopkins’ insistence he was sporting a bit of stubble to diminish the baby face. He said, “And you’re his former partner from Sexual Assault. You were before Jacques Lapierre, right?”
Grant shrugged. “Yes, those were the days. It’s a different kind of career, there’s nothing else like it.”
Nastos didn’t want Grant to talk about the past. She was sure to mention something that he’d wish she hadn’t. “I’m not sure they were cops. Squared barrels, that could be a dozen different pistols. Glocks retail for seven-fifty all in; on the street they aren’t much more. You can rent them for the weekend for a few hundred.”
Grant had a ready answer. “The vehicles, most of the guys were white, two were well dressed. These aren’t gangbangers, Nastos.”
He shrugged, knowing that she was right. The condescending way that she said it bothered him. He had taught her everything she knew about investigating and now here she was, treating him like he was stupid.
She stifled a smile, obviously enjoying how easily she made him angry.
“Karen, I don’t have to tell you that drug cops don’t operate like this. If these were cops —”
“If these were cops, Nastos, they weren’t on company time. A police shooting, there’d be the Special Investigations Unit, the media, press releases . . .” Grant disconnected the USB from the player and put its tip protector back on. She slid it over to Carscadden. “Here, for safekeeping. I have another copy.”
Carscadden picked it up. “Gee, thanks.” He seemed to be mulling something over. “So Falconer is in hiding somewhere?”
“Yes.”
“Like a hotel room on Kingston Road, paid-in-cash kinda hiding, or in your spare bedroom hiding?”
Nastos noticed the way Grant hesitated to answer and in doing so, confirmed Carscadden’s guess. Don’t take in a stray that you wouldn’t want to keep forever, Karen.
“Ann Falconer is in a safe place. What I need is the identity of the dead man, his real name. I have reason to believe that he was in Witness Protection. Falconer thinks that it was a hit by the cops. Now I’m not sure it was cops, but this doesn’t sound like a random shooting either. I’d like you guys to at least get his name for me. I want to keep a low profile for the time being.”
“And you know the name in the media is wrong how?”
“Falconer.”
Nastos read through the notes he’d made during the video. “Carscadden and I did that missing girl investigation last year, the Bannerman case. One thing we learned was how much information a cell carrier can get from a smart phone. GPS, eavesdropping . . . Falconer was given a phone by her Witness Protection handler. What was she in protection for?”
“She was going to testify in a trial. They put her in that scummy motel where they seem to hide everyone.” Karen seemed reluctant to answer, which to Nastos meant that she didn’t know the answer but wanted to sound like she did. She continued. “That’s why I think Walker was there too. Most other people who rented there seemed like refugee claimants waiting for their rejection letters.”
Nastos considered what she had said. “I guarantee that Protection will ping her phone from time to time. If she’s at your place, get rid of the phone. Witness Protection is a tough program to qualify for, so she must be bracing to testify against some bad people. I’d consider getting her out of your place tonight.”
Karen raised a defiant chin. “Who’s going to protect her?”
Nastos put his hands up in surrender. “Karen, honestly, who’s protecting her now? Nobody. You’re relying on the fact that they don’t know where she is, but they might. Get her in a nice hotel and tell her to stay out of trouble.”
“What about identifying Rob Walker?”
“We’ll do that, but first there’s the issue of who killed him in Trinity Bellwoods Park. Fourteen Division is within walking distance of there. You said Falconer gave a good description of the shooters in subsequent interviews? I’m going to make some phone calls. Once we are sure that Walker was not killed by local cops, she can get in touch with her Witness Protection guy and you won’t need us anymore. We’ll try to identify Walker and that should be the end of it.”
