Ice Lake

by John Farrow

  ICE LAKE

  JOHN FARROW

  far my mother, at go

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  COCKTAILS FOR THE DEAD

  1 A BODY, AFLOAT

  2 ROLL CALL

  3 EYE TO EYE

  4 HEARTLAND

  5 A FIST AT THE SKY

  6 CLOSE WATCH

  7 HOMECOMING

  8 DARK IS THE GRAVE

  THE INFLUENCE OF DARK MATTER

  9 JELLY ROLL

  10 THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

  11 A BLOOD TRAIL

  12 PERILOUS LIAISONS

  13 PICKING BONES

  14 COMMEMORATION

  15 MISSING MATTER

  16 DARKLING STAR

  BLOODWORK

  17 KNOWLEDGE IN A PARTICULAR TIME

  PRAISE FOR CITY OF ICE

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  COCKTAILS

  FOR THE DEAD

  1

  A BODY, AFLOAT

  Sunday, February 13, 1999

  Ensconced in an ice-fishing hut on the Lake of Two Mountains, northwest of Montreal, Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars was gazing through a frosty pane of glass as a red Ski-Doo, paced by a brisk wind, crossed the snowbound lake from the east and veered toward a broad bend in the shore. A child was clinging to the driver’s waist. The two appeared to be headed for the same community of fishing shacks where he was holed up waiting for a stranger to arrive.

  Roaring, the machine doffed a squall of snow in its tracks.

  Along the perimeter to the ice-village, the Ski-Doo throttled down and followed streets on the snow marked by discarded Christmas pines. The driver was a woman, her body shape now evident in a snug-fitting snowmobile suit. A woman had called him down here. Cinq-Mars kept an eye on this one, but she did not approach his shack, stopping instead beside an orange shanty where her daughter leapfrogged off the seat. The child sprinted about ten steps before her mother called her back. She skidded to a halt. Grasping her helmet and pulling her head out from under it, the girl shook her brown curls and fidgeted while her mother braved the cold with bare fingers, yanking up the girl’s hood and tying a bow under her bright-red chin. Free at last, the seven-year-old scampered loose to knock on a nearby door.

  The woman shut the machine down. She flipped through a key-ring, then snapped open the padlock on her shack, and Émile Cinq-Mars returned to fishing.

  Inside her hut, the woman dropped her own and her child’s helmet onto a bunk, then pinned her mittens to a line. Unzipping to the waist, she extracted her arms from the sleeves of the snowmobile suit, the upper portion collapsing behind her like a second skin not wholly sloughed off. She removed her minnow bucket from the stovetop and put it on the floor, then set about striking a fire.

  She ignited newspaper, kindling and logs in the cast-iron stove.

  Then awaited warmth.

  The woman gazed out the window upon winter, at the white, barren lake spotted with Ski-Doos and the colourful spinnakers of ice-sailors, shining under the sun. In her thirties, she was not one to wear makeup on a daytime outing. Her low, abruptly raked forehead, the chiselled cut of her cheekbones, and the thrust of her nose seemed to have been carved as much by life as by birth and genetics. The features suggested a strong constitution and a body accustomed to stressful labour apart from the demands of motherhood. She wore her light-brown hair in a buzzcut with longish tufts at the nape of her neck.

  The shack was primitive and small. Plywood over two-by-fours, the windows and doors salvaged from a job site, the hut included the critical necessities—a pot to pee in, another for washing up, a stove for both cooking and warmth, a mattress that, when thawed, cushioned the tumult of bodies and comforted them for a short rest afterwards. Similar to other huts in the neighbourhood, hers had been coloured with leftover paint others had discarded. While many shacks were rented by the day or the weekend, hers was leased for the entire season, which allowed her to keep cutlery and pans, dry goods that could bear being frozen, extra clothes, blankets and children’s toys on the premises, as well as her own fishing tackle.

  To occupy the time she broke the surface ice in her minnow bucket and baited a hook in the cold. She opened the floorboards to reveal her fishing hole. She’d been up to the shack the night before, so the hole hadn’t frozen much—with a heavy steel bar she put a crack in it. She tapped all around the circle to loosen new ice, breaking the block into pieces, a familiar routine. The dark patch at the surface was difficult to discern in the shade. Her eyes were not fully accustomed to the dimmer light of the cabin and the greater dark within the cavity. Only when she tried to push the chunks under the thick ice of the lake did she encounter a problem. Something she could barely see—a sort of floating debris. Finally, she got down on her knees and raised the chunks of ice up, placing them on the surface of the lake below the cabin floor.

  In the circle of the fishing hole, pearls of ice clung to a knotted tangle of hair.

  A head lay afloat, face down in the lake.

  Later she would not be able to explain why she did this, why she had to touch it, as if to be assured that a body remained attached. Only when she was certain did she commence a rapid series of gasps followed by a spectacular array of upper-register screams.

  Emile Cinq-Mars was lost in thought while observing miniature, diamond-like crystals wicking higher on his line. All morning long he had ignored his partner, Detective Bill Mathers, often fixing his gaze instead on a vertex where the ascending beads of ice on his line met the shack’s smoky warmth, a point he could manipulate by bobbing his hand.

  Both city cops, one significantly older than the other, had spent most of the morning slumped inside the ice-fishing hut over an opening sawed between their boots. A wood fire that should have kept them warm crackled in an iron stove. On one side was a bench sufficiently long for a man as tall as Cinq-Mars to stretch out on. The one opposite, on which Bill Mathers sat, had been cut short to accommodate the door. A thin line of smoke leaked through a joint in the stovepipe and every ten minutes or so one man or the other opened the door to circulate fresh air, inadvertently releasing the cabin’s heat and keeping them both well chilled.

  Mathers sat with his shoulders hunched as though he’d never been warm in his lifetime. He had no clue why he was there. Cinq-Mars had not told him, and he couldn’t believe it was only to fish. In the finest of seasons he cared little for fishing, and to be baiting hooks in the dead of winter under the onslaught of a twenty-knot nor’wester rattling the rough-hewn, plywood hut, out on a frozen lake he believed might crack apart and immerse them, combined what he perceived as an exercise in futility—fishing—with a regimen of discomfort—fishing in February—that bordered on misery. He was waiting for his partner to reveal himself, but his patience was ebbing quickly.

  Before he’d made up his mind to confront Cinq-Mars, he was distracted by a frantic shriek outside. Glad for the interruption, he was first to the door to investigate the racket.

  “Emile,” he said, not liking what he saw.

  “What’s that caterwaul?”

  Out on the frozen lake, a woman was wailing and calling for the cops. She’d fallen to the ice on her hands and knees, having fled a shack in too big a hurry to pull up the top portion of her snowsuit. Helped by an equally frantic neighbour, she struggled to her feet again, shouting for the police.

  Oddly, she was half crawling and sliding in their direction, as if she knew where cops might be found.

  “Looks like we’re on the job,” Mathers commented dryly.

  “Not exactly our jurisdiction,” Cinq-Mars pointed out, but he was rising to have a look for himself and retrieving his line.

  “Beats fi
shing,” Mathers said.

  Both men took the time to don their winter garb before venturing onto the ice. Others were running over to check on the fuss, and Cinq-Mars and Mathers walked across and showed their gold shields to bully their way through the gathering throng. At the sight of their badges, the stricken woman perked up considerably. In French, “This way! Come quickly, I’ll show you! There’s a dead guy in there! He’s dead!” Whatever horror she had viewed was supplanted now by a need to impress upon the authorities the depth of her distress.

  The cops walked quickly behind her.

  Bill Mathers entered first. He crouched down on the cabin floor. “Emile.”

  Cinq-Mars peered over his partner’s shoulder. The circular ice-hole was partially filled with water. A few inches below the surface floated the back of a human head, the long hair beaded with ice, the face plunged into the frigid lake. Mathers pulled the victim up by the hair, raising him a few inches. The condition of the neck was the only evidence Cinq-Mars required—shock-white, the skin bulging where ice had frozen and expanded within the corpse, causing lumps. “Make sure,” he instructed.

  On the floor, a hooked minnow flapped, obviously just baited by the woman. Cinq-Mars took a folding knife from his pocket and, over the ice, gave the little fish a quick deep cut across the throat.

  Mathers pulled the head as far out of the water as he could. He had to reach down, as the surface was about two feet thick, and kneel way over to get a look at the face. Swollen, white, and bloated with ice. The eyes frozen. Ice bulged from the mouth and points glistened within his nostrils where they caught sunlight refracted through the smudge on a side window. A man’s face, which Mathers returned to the water, the death confirmed.

  “Secure it somehow.”

  Cinq-Mars needed to create a barrier around the shack. The curious were bumping in behind him. He was helping the woman pull on her snowsuit and instructing a neighbour to take her inside somewhere else when her daughter came running up and promptly stuck to her mother’s leg. The bond seemed habitual, the woman scarcely noticing the bulky appendage. Cinq-Mars ordered others out of the shack and away from the door, which didn’t stop them from gathering at the windows and peering inside.

  Offered the use of three cellphones, he accepted one from a tall, plump man, then asked a second favour of him. “Would you mind keeping people away from the hut? It won’t be easy.”

  The man checked out the gathering, considering whether the task was worth the hassle. He chuckled and shook his head. “I can try,” he agreed.

  “Thanks.” Cinq-Mars returned inside, where Detective Mathers splashed his fingers in the water. “What’ve we got?”

  Mathers had looped strands of high-test fishing line through buttonholes on the dead man’s jacket and shirt and tied the free ends to the feet of the cast-iron stove. “He didn’t fall through here. He’s not coming out this hole either unless we open it up.” The head pretty much blocked the entire cavity. His shoulders would never pull through.

  “There can’t be that many places to fall in. He could’ve drifted for miles, poor bugger. Probably he went through on a snowmobile, out where the current’s fast and the ice is thinner. That’s awfully surprising, though, in this weather.”

  “Would you care to consider the facts first, Emile?” Mathers vigorously rubbed his freezing wet hands.

  “Such as?”

  “Your theory doesn’t explain the bullet hole.”

  He looked at him then, and the younger detective nodded that he was serious. He pointed to the back of his own neck. “In here, out the front. Low down. Here.” Mathers indicated the soft spot at the base of his throat.

  Cinq-Mars punched a number into the phone.

  “SQ?” As Montreal Urban Community cops they were off their island, away from their professional turf. On major crimes in which a coroner became involved, La Sûreté du Québec, the police force for the province, would be granted jurisdiction over any small-town department.

  Cinq-Mars shook his head no, and spoke into the phone, requesting the number for the local police for Vaudreuil-Dorion.

  “Why them?” Mathers asked as soon as he’d signed off.

  “Their fishing hole.”

  “Murder, Emile. They’ll have to turn it over.”

  “They’ll remain an informed party. A small-town police chief might appreciate being let in, enough to share the news back again. Give it to the SQ right off the bat and we’ll be cut out, that’s for certain.”

  “Do we want to be cut in?”

  “Like you said,” Cinq-Mars told him in a whispered murmur, and this came as a surprise, “it beats fishing.”

  Mathers waited for Cinq-Mars to finish his second call before asking, “Emile, why’d we come out here today? Were you tipped on this?”

  “Don’t you know? We’re here for doré, Bill. What you English call walleye. If I happen to hook a whale instead, should I let it get away?”

  Mathers guessed that his chain was being ceremoniously yanked, although with Cinq-Mars it was hard to be sure. “What now?”

  “Smile. You’re on Candid Camera.”

  At that, the handsome younger man looked up. A video camera perused the premises through the frosty rear window, zooming down for a close-up of the dark fishing hole where the ice-encased corpse gently bobbed, then pulling back to once again include the cops.

  “Tonight, partner,” Cinq-Mars warned him, “you’ll be on the evening news.”

  “I’ll spring for the popcorn if you buy the beer.”

  Cinq-Mars returned outside again. Although the big man he’d conscripted had managed to keep most of the curious back, the cameraman and a few others were incorrigible. He thanked the man for his phone and returned it to him, then stood off to one side. The detective had a little more breathing room now and he used the space to look around, take in the scene, get a feel. Gusts chased snow-hares onto shore. The huts of the fishing village, mostly decorated with wild colours, their chimneys gently smoking against the backdrop of snow and ice, made for a colourful view in one direction. In the other, above the steep bank at the waterside, mostly new homes and a small strip mall were a blight, crowding out the few old farmhouses that still remained. Behind a set of brick condos at the edge of the bay, an office tower dominated the skyline, a dozen floors of concrete and glass, the tallest building for seventy miles west. North, hedged by rolling hills, the frozen landscape could be any large lake where winter held court. To the east, the curvature of the earth and trees on the opposite shore concealed the island city of Montreal.

  It was not just any lake, anywhere, Cinq-Mars acknowledged with a certain grim understanding. Lac des Deux-Montagnes, the Lake of Two Mountains, was close to home, marking this death, this corpse in the water, as being in his own backyard. Jurisdiction or not, a murder at his favourite fishing hole had captured the city cop’s attention.

  He was a famous detective, one of the old breed. At least, that was how the media liked to portray him. When he himself thought about the “old breed,” he envisioned cops from the Night Patrol during Montreal’s heyday as a centre of vice, during the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. Those guys would bulldoze a brick wall to bust into a prostitution warren, or careen through skylights into gambling dens. They’d engage in wild shootouts with equally notorious mobsters. He supposed that he was likened to those guys because he was independent, and did not fare well within a system which relied heavily on teamwork, computer analysis, statistics and science. He preferred to get into the heads of criminals, figure them out, trap them by anticipating their behaviour. He had made the style work for him, and he’d benefitted over the years as well from crackerjack informants. While he didn’t smash and raid and jump down skylights if he could help it, he did have a reputation for the surprise thrust, the pivotal, deft exploit.

  Fame was a tool, he’d learned. People who might be reluctant to inform on crooks because they were scared, or because the crooks were neighbours or family, or simply because
they didn’t like cops, opened up to Cinq-Mars because they enjoyed being in proximity to a legend. Speaking to a famous cop was different, it provided an incentive that some required. Many cops resented his ever-expanding reputation, and Cinq-Mars agreed that the situation wasn’t fair. When you’re dying for a break, you can’t buy one, and when you’ve already received a hundred breaks, fate reaches into its grab-bag and tosses you a hundred more. His early career had been difficult, a slow plod. Now, information flowed, often without prompting.

  Being a celebrity cop also had its downside. He had tried to explain to his fellow officers that his reputation drew nutcases to his side like cockroaches flushed from the woodwork, and he had tried to convince them that the kooks wasted a huge chunk of his time. His colleagues dismissed his difficulties as minor. They’d trade problems with him any day, and Cinq-Mars could guess their reaction to this latest episode. Today, the woman who had phoned and coaxed him down to the ice had been a no-show, and yet she had placed him in close proximity to a murder. A mysterious voice. She had sounded intelligent, youthful, concerned, intense. Somehow, she had known his home number. He’d been enticed. Now this. Johnny-on-the-spot. Pure luck. Reason for his fellow cops to hate him all over again.

  Around the hut, fishermen huddled in the bitter cold. They pounded their feet on the ice and slapped their hands together to keep them warm. Breath chugged in the cold like the vapour of automobiles stalled in winter traffic. A talkative, spirited bunch, primed with alcohol despite the early hour, they did their best to draw the policeman into conversation. Distracted, Cinq-Mars declined. Along the shoreline, squad cars were racing, cherries flashing, coming his way.

  So it begins, he was thinking. Just like always.

  Oddly, he could not shake the sensation that this time was different. This time, he’d been on the scene—almost next door at the moment the body was being discovered—and, truth be told, he had been invited to the scene, something he had yet to admit to Mathers.