Murder in Focus

by Medora Sale

  Before her reply could drift up to the second floor, he was in his room. He sat down on the bed and pulled a small black notebook out of his shirt pocket. After a moment’s thought, he drafted a brief report and cast it into this week’s simple code—one designed to foil nothing more sophisticated than the curiosity of telephone operators and innocent bystanders. He thrust the notebook into the pocket of his work pants, gathered up some clean clothes, and headed into the bathroom to take a shower.

  Hot water gushed over his aching shoulders and then slowed to a trickle. Bloody Miranda and her ancient plumbing. As he waited for the water to reappear he found himself trying to figure out how long it would be before he could contact Betty again. The ache in his shoulders transferred itself to an ache in his loins. He leaned forward, one hand on the mildewed tiles, his head bowed under the faint drip, drip from the shower head, and wondered for the third time that day whether the job was worth it. Suddenly a flood of rusty water, cold this time, drenched his dull black hair. He jumped back out of range and waited. There was a thump and a clang and steam poured up from the nozzle once again.

  This assignment shouldn’t take that long, he thought more cheerfully: maybe he’d be back in Ottawa by next week. He picked up the soap and stepped under the shower one more time. Whoever had been hanging around the workers at the construction site last week, asking odd questions, should turn up again soon enough. And when he did, it was just a question of playing him a bit—leading him on, finding out why he was interested, snatching him, and getting who was behind him. Routine stuff. Maybe he could risk calling Betty from the restaurant after he reported in. He jumped out of the tub, winced as a blister banged against the stool, and began drying himself vigorously.

  Chapter 2

  Monday, May 15

  In Toronto, Monday morning’s rising sun shone in Inspector John Sanders’s red and gritty eyes as he tried to make out what was happening on the top of the apartment building across the street. Twenty minutes before, he had been slithering backward across the same roof in a burst of gunfire before dropping feet first through an open trapdoor. Someone had already called for the Emergency Response Unit, which had been waiting, bulletproof vests on and snipers poised, for him to get the hell out of their line of fire. Pity. The stupid fool was going to try to shoot his way out of this mess, and that would be the end of him. If he had put down that goddamned arsenal of his and come out peacefully when Sanders had finally tracked him down, he would have been found unfit to stand trial. Six or eight years making leather wallets and he’d be free again. Instead of ending up with his face ground into a gravel-and-asphalt roof. Sanders turned away. He didn’t want to watch. Yawning, he headed back to the car, where Ed Dubinsky, his partner, was already sitting, massive and patient, waiting for him.

  “You’re supposed to call in,” he said. “Want some coffee?”

  “Naw,” said Sanders, too tired for coffee. “What the hell for?”

  “Something about packing your bags and heading off to Ottawa this morning. Flanagan’s sick again—it’s that seminar the Mounties are running on how to catch terrorists.”

  “For chrissake, it’ll take me all morning to do the paperwork on this thing,” Sanders said, nodding in the direction of the silent apartment building.

  “I’ll do it,” said Dubinsky, reaching forward to turn on the ignition. “I’ll make like you wasn’t even there, boss.”

  “Layoff, Dubinsky.” Sanders let his head drop forward as far as it would go in an effort to ease his aching shoulder muscles. It didn’t work.

  “Besides, it’s those guys over there that are going to have to write out the reports, anyway.” Dubinsky nodded at the square yellow van parked across from them, out of which the Response Unit had poured.

  “Goddammit! I don’t want to go to Ottawa. I want to go home to bed. Jesus!” Sanders swore as he reached for the car radio.

  Sanders shifted irritably in the driver’s seat. A hot, needling pain stabbed his right knee, the long muscle running down the right side of his back was beginning to knot up, and he could feel a frozen immobility starting up in his left shoulder that presaged a stiff neck and a rotten temper. Above him the sky was a deep, impossible blue; sun poured down on the road, bleaching the gray concrete to blinding white. The car thumped monotonously over the black joints in the road surface. Trees on either side of the wide, almost empty highway afforded no relief to his burning eyes. They were at worst completely bare, at best outlined with only a faint, ragged web of pale green or reddish budding leaves. What in hell was he doing heading north in May? In Toronto you could be reasonably sure that winter was over by now. In Ottawa, with his luck, it would snow.

  Up ahead a toy truck, its back end painted a hazy red, floated dreamily along the shimmering road. He fixed his heavy-lidded eyes on it and yawned. Without warning it leaped into focus, huge and solid, right in front of him. As his foot smashed down automatically on the brake pedal he jerked the wheel over and then accelerated again, lurching crazily back and forth in the left lane. A horn screamed in his ear. In his rearview mirror he saw a small Mercedes sitting right on his back bumper. No doubt it had been about to pass him when he had swung into its lane, and he could feel the righteous wrath of its driver burn through the windshield. With deliberation he flicked on his turn indicator and moved neatly back into the right lane. The Mercedes shot past with another blast of its Teutonic horn. The slow-moving truck faded into the distance behind him.

  “Christ almighty,” he said aloud. “This time I damned near got spread all over the road.” The words sounded peculiar, echoing, isolated, in the padded interior. Where in hell was he? He glanced at his watch. He had been driving for almost three hours and couldn’t remember having passed by a single landmark since he left the industrial tangle of the outskirts of Toronto. Wherever he was, though, if he didn’t stop soon and get out of this damned car, he’d be driving into Ottawa in a meat wagon. At that point a road sign promised an exit for Highway 2 leading into Brockville in five hundred meters. He grabbed it before it got away on him, passed a motel with a coffee shop before he had slowed down from highway speeds, braked—but not soon enough—to make the turn, took a right through a nearby gas station, bumped over a strip of empty field, shot in and out of a parking lot, and slithered to a halt by the front door.

  The coffee shop turned out to be a bar that also served food. Originally conceived by an enthusiastic architect to take advantage of its hilly, shrub-filled location on the St. Lawrence River, it soared airily above Sanders’s head, all dark beams, potted plants, and shaded glass. The owners were obviously not the dark beam, shaded glass, and fern sort; the room had been cozied up with plaques and posters advertising beer, an assortment of garishly decorated video games, a pool table, and a large-screen television. There was a noisy group crowded around two tables pushed together near the bar. Construction workers, probably, to judge by their boots and coveralls. He looked at the massive collection of bottles on their table and shuddered. He hoped they weren’t trying to build anything complicated.

  Sanders headed for a table in the far corner and folded his long frame into a chair with its back to the room. He glanced suspiciously at the grubby menu propped on the table and ordered coffee and a club sandwich from the harried-looking waitress. His head still roared and thumped with the sound of the road, and he tried—unsuccessfully—to ignore the raucous laughter coming from behind him.

  “Jesus,” said a whining voice, separating itself at last from the general noise, “this country’s turning into a goddamn fast, uh, fash—”

  “Fascist?” said a helpful voice.

  “Yeah, whatever, state, eh? First they tell us that fucking stretch of road’s gotta be finished in three days—three days! Three weeks is more like it. And the other day when I go in the woods to take a leak this fucking Mountie bastard comes racing over and says he’s gonna arrest me if I don’t get the hell outa there.”


  “What’s in the woods?” said the helpful voice. “Besides the RCMP?”

  “Nothing, that’s what.” The whine was getting louder now, and belligerent. “Nothing but fucking Mounties and trilliums. Mounties guarding trilliums, that’s what. We spend billions of dollars so the Mounties can keep people from pissing on trilliums.” He guffawed and repeated his witticism softly. “Pissing on trilliums.” The voice paused as if its owner had suddenly realized some dreadful truth. “Hey, Doreen. We’re dry here. Bring us another beer, eh?”

  “Look, Don, we gotta get going. It’s getting late. You mind riding in the back? Joe’s knee is real—” This was a new voice, reasonable and sober-sounding.

  “I’m not riding in the fucking back of no truck all the way to Smiths Falls. You crazy or something? In with all that equipment and garbage in there? You tell MacDougall to go screw himself. I’m not . . .” His voice faded away as he tried to remember just where he was in his protestation.

  “I’m driving up to Carleton Place,” said the helpful voice. “I can drop, uh, Don off in Smiths Falls on the way. But you people sure do go a long way to eat lunch. It must be forty miles.”

  “We didn’t come here just to eat lunch,” said the new voice seriously. “We had to pick up some equipment in Brockville, and get Joe. He was seeing the doctor.”

  “Besides, we’re not going to—” Another voice, deep and hesitant, inserted itself into the discussion.

  The sober voice sliced through authoritatively. “Anyway, thanks for the offer of a lift,” he said, “but we don’t like to put you out.”

  “No trouble. I like company when I drive. You ready, Don? You’ll have to tell me where to go. This really isn’t my country around here.” Something about the voice irritated Sanders. It was too smooth; its lapses into the local dialect were too mannered and isolated. Slimy urban bastard trying to be one of the boys. He swiveled around in his chair to watch them leave.

  From where he was sitting, he could see only backs, and they all looked pretty much the same to him. Before they got out of the room, however, one of the last two lurched and crashed into a chair, grabbed the elbow of the man beside him, and then turned around to go back to the littered table they had just left. He was a big, dirty-looking man, deeply tanned, with lank black hair, thick black brows over bright blue eyes, and a gaunt rawboned face. His eyes swept rapidly and sharply over Sanders, as if he were memorizing him for some future contingency, and then he looked, puzzled, down at his old table. He shook his head. Whatever he had forgotten would remain forgotten, and he walked unsteadily back toward the door. His companion stood in the doorway and watched the pantomime. He, too, was a tall man—almost as tall as Sanders himself—and wore his workmen’s coveralls as though they had been designed by an Italian couturier. His face was arrogant and almost handsome, thin, with high cheekbones, deep-set intensely dark eyes, and a full mouth. The symmetry of his thick and arched eyebrows was spoiled by a thin white scar that ripped through his tanned face from eyelid to temple. Handsome, except for that, but not pleasant looking. As the two men started walking again, a fading but familiar whine drifted back to Sanders from the scruffy one.

  “Just a minute, you guys. I gotta go to the can.” So that had been Don.

  Scarface stopped and allowed Don to get ahead of him before turning back toward the bar. He looked around, apparently for the waitress, then reached over and picked up the receiver of a telephone hanging in the darkness against the back wall. Whatever he had to communicate was quickly said, and he was back out in the hall long before Don could have emerged from the washroom.

  Sanders turned back to his food. The sudden silence in the room was overpowering. The waitress, still frowning nervously, emerged from the kitchen and drifted by to refill his coffee cup. When he admitted he didn’t want anything else, she dropped his bill on the table and disappeared.

  Just as he was biting into the third quarter of his sandwich, a piercing whistle tore through the silence. Sanders whirled around in his chair. The remains of the soggy toast and cold bacon crumbled onto plate and table as his hand flew into his jacket and stopped. Nothing. He was alone in the bar. With his heart pounding, unable to catch his breath. Then the same whistle, just as loud. He peered into the dimly lit recesses at the end of the bar beside the telephone and noticed for the first time a large brass cage. He looked again and then laughed out loud. There was a mynah bird standing on a perch in the cage behind the bar, looking at him, its head cocked to one side. At least he hadn’t tried to shoot it. A new set of sounds, vibrating and varied in pitch and length, but not nearly as loud, filled the empty spaces in the room. It took Sanders a few seconds to place them. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered. The bird was moving slowly back and forth from foot to foot while it thoughtfully imitated the sound of a push-button phone being dialed. When I was working on wiretap, Sanders thought, I could have told you what number they’d been calling when the bird was listening in by those sounds. The bird cocked his head meaningfully at Sanders and uttered his introductory whistle one more time; then he slowly and gracefully segued into the dialing sequence. This time a series of numbers crystallized out of Sanders’s tired brain, and with a self-deprecatory grin he jotted them down on the receipt portion of his bill. Neat, he thought, looking at the number that resulted, and considered asking the waitress—who had poked a resentful-looking head out of the kitchen—if she had dialed it recently. Don’t be a stupid ass, he told himself, let a couple of bills flutter down onto the table, and walked slowly out.

  The stranger unlocked the door on the passenger side of a dark red Toyota in the parking lot and gestured impatiently for Don to climb in. In seconds he jumped quickly into the driver’s seat, started the car, and turned it rapidly onto the highway in a shower of gravel. “This the fastest way to Smiths Falls?” he asked, as he turned north onto a deserted two-lane road. By now they had left the rest of the road crew a good two or three minutes behind them.

  “Huh?” Don seemed to be sinking fast into a little world of his own. “Oh, yeah. I guess so.” He pulled himself upright and looked at the driver. “You never said t’other day what your name was, didja?” he said, abruptly suspicious.

  “Green,” said the driver laconically. Then, thinking better of it, “Rick Green. You told me yours yesterday, I think, but I forgot what it was.”

  “Don,” said his passenger, “Don Bartholomew,” and lapsed first into apathy, then somnolence.

  Green drove rapidly and steadily. His eyes, constantly alert, flickered back and forth from road to rearview mirror to his sleeping passenger. When they finally reached the sign that announced their arrival in Smiths Falls, he slowed abruptly. “Where to?” he asked.

  “Huh?” Don jerked upright. “We here already? Jesus! Where are the others?”

  “Oh, I think we’re ahead of them,” said Green. “I don’t suppose they drive that truck as fast as I push this little car of mine along. Where shall I drop you off?”

  “Well, jeez, I dunno.” Don’s eyes narrowed with cunning, and he glanced sideways at the driver. “D’ja say you’re going to Carleton Place?” He pronounced it Kerlton, in the manner of the native born. “’Cause if y’are, you can let me off there, eh. The guys are gonna drop Joe off to home here. We gotta work s’afternoon.”

  Green smiled. “Sure. No problem. You just tell me where to go,” he said, negotiating the car out of the town traffic and back onto the highway. “Your work site right in Carleton Place?” he asked casually. “Because I’m actually going to a place on the other side of town, visiting a friend out in the country. Maybe I can let you off right where you’re going.”

  Don looked at him suspiciously. “Yeah? Well, maybe. This is one of them government secret projects like. Yeah, secret projects, you know what I mean?” He burst into a fit of laughter. “Anyway, it’s a couple, three miles th’other side of Carleton Place—near Mooreton.”
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br />   “No kidding!” said Green. “What a coincidence. My friend said his place is just past Mooreton.”

  “One of them places on the river,” said Don enviously.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. So which way do we go when we get into town?”

  “Naw, don’t go into town. Turn at Highway Seven and I’ll show you where to go from there. This sure beats sitting in that fucking truck,” Don said, looking around with satisfaction at the shiny newness of the car.

  The red Toyota sped through the sunny countryside, moving from highway to paved secondary road to narrower road, and from grassy fields to woods to thickly forested landscape. “This really is in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?” said Green.

  “Just about there,” said Don. “Slow down, it’s that left turn up ahead. You can just leave me off there. Keep on to the next crossroad, take a right and then a left, and you’ll be in Mooreton.”

  Green pulled smoothly up onto the shoulder and looked across at a newly paved road that lost itself in the forest. “That’s really something,” he said. “Does it go anywhere?”

  Don’s deep-set eyes studied Green under their half-lowered lids for a few moments. “You’re damned right it goes somewhere,” Don said at last. “You should see the place. Used to be someone’s house, all run-down, like, with a crappy road. Now they’ve gone and done it all up with lawns and flowers and big fences and stuff like that. And that road. The old gravel road ain’t good enough for all the rich bastards coming out to use this place.”

  “I’d like to look at it,” said Green, putting the car back into gear and beginning to turn into the road.

  “Jesus! You can’t do that! The fucking Mounties’ll be all over you. You wanna look at it? I’ll show you where to go.” He gave Green a sly look. “There’s this little path, see, and a place you can leave the car. I’ve been up to look at it lotsa times. It’s a nice place,” he said wistfully. “I’d like a place like that.”