Ice Lake

by John Farrow

  As the SQ, escort beat it, the ice-bridge manager trundled out of the warm police cruiser and, determined to have his say, expressed displeasure at being rousted from bed. “At least you got a four-wheeler there. Jean-Pierre, he goes across with you. We didn’t plough yet. Don’t get stuck. You go off course, hit a soft spot, me, I won’t be responsible.” He was a broad, short man who kept his hands stuffed in his pockets yet continued to gesticulate, flapping his lower coat.

  “What’ll Jean-Pierre do for me?” a sceptical Cinq-Mars asked.

  “Plough. He’ll clear the road ahead of you. He’s got the keys to the gate on the other side. Me, I want to know who pays this bill.”

  “You’re charging me?”

  The owner shrugged. “What’d you expect?”

  “You had to plough this road anyway,” Cinq-Mars argued.

  “Not this time of night. Jean-Pierre, he’s gotta plough it again by morning. All this big raid does is cost me money.”

  “I didn’t ask for the ice-bridge to be ploughed. I have a four-wheel drive. You’re providing a service I never requested.”

  “Don’t be so goddamn cheap! It’s not your money! Me, I’m ploughing the road. The City of Montreal pays. That’s that!”

  “Fine. Send me an invoice. I’ll get you a card from my car.”

  The three men drifted that way, the wind at their backs. A fourth, Jean-Pierre, on hand to operate the plough, sat slumped in his truck, his head over the steering wheel, looking dead to the world.

  “Ready, sir?” the Hudson cop asked.

  “Five or ten. My partner’s on his way.”

  They waited then, Jean-Pierre in his cab, the ferry manager in the police cruiser where he tallied a bill, the cop beside him, and Cinq-Mars in his Pathfinder awaiting Bill Mathers. Heat from their idling engines kept them warm, but they were unable to keep tabs on one another, as snow masked the windows. Emile Cinq-Mars did not see Bill Mathers turn too quickly onto the unploughed drive, skid to his left, steer into the spin, right himself and pull over. The young detective locked up his car and came across to the Pathfinder, bent to the fierce wind.

  “I heard you called in an XYZ,” Mathers said, clambering inside.

  “Who told you that?”

  “I called the office myself while I was thinking about something.”

  “Thinking about what?” Cinq-Mars spoke in his usual gruff tone.He rolled his window down and waved the truck on ahead of him. When that didn’t work, he flashed his lights and honked.

  “Booked tomorrow morning off. If I have to be out all night, I’m not going in early. So is it true?”

  Cinq-Mars nodded briefly. “Some dickhead tried to wire my car. Can you believe it? I got shot at for intruding on his handiwork.”

  “No kidding.” Mathers cleared his throat and rubbed his hands in front of the heater. His head was mussed, he wasn’t clean-shaven—an unusual look for him. “Serious news, Emile. What’s the story?”

  “Hang on.”

  Jean-Pierre was climbing down from the cab of his truck. As he walked past the Pathfinder Cinq-Mars noticed the flare of the man’s cigarette. The detective rolled down his window, admitting the blizzard, and scrubbed snow from his outer mirror. He rolled his window up again and watched Jean-Pierre go behind them and lock the gate after the cop car. As the man passed by on his return, Cinq-Mars opened his door to address him.

  “How do I get back?” he asked in French.

  “I’ll wait for you.”

  “I might be awhile.”

  “I get paid by the hour. Not that it’s worth it. This is a sonofabitch. I got to unlock the gate on the other side anyhow, so I’ll wait for you until it’s time to open up for the public. After that it won’t matter.”

  “Well, you have a good night now.”

  “That’s funny. Ha-ha. I’m laughing.”

  “Sorry about this. But it could be a matter of life and death.”

  “Yeah? Well, all right. Let’s get you across.”

  Cinq-Mars filled Bill Mathers in on the scant details as they headed onto the lake behind the plough. It didn’t take long to repeat what was pertinent, and after that both men were quiet. The events bothered them, and initially made them solemn, their reticence enforced by the eerie dimension of the drive. They were out on the lake, driving on ice, following the plough with its revolving lights, the storm arrayed against them. They had to let the truck go farther ahead as it churned up an avalanche of snow and blew it onto their windshield. Winds funnelled down the lake without obstruction, rocking the car, the snow flying horizontally in a swirling maze. The Pathfinder had entered another dimension, passed through a time warp. Adrift upon an ice cap, isolated and cut off, suddenly the men landed upon the opposite shore.

  Cinq-Mars hailed Charles Painchaud on the cellular and was guided down the main road in the direction of the house. He crossed onto Indian land, but in the blizzard nothing could be seen. He had to find a driveway, and that seemed impossible, until he was aided by a Mohawk Peacekeeper waving a flashlight. What must have been difficult for Painchaud was simplified for Cinq-Mars. He and Mathers arrived amid a convoy of police cruisers and stepped out of the car into the hostile company of Indian cops. One accompanied them upstairs, to an attic above a garage, where the alleged crime had taken place.

  Painchaud greeted Cinq-Mars as he and Mathers kicked snow off their boots. “Sergeant-Detective,” he said.

  “Sergeant. What’ve we got?”

  “No victim.”

  “No? What else?”

  “Check this out.”

  Painchaud and Mathers crouched down together to survey the wood floor of the apartment. Cinq-Mars preferred to get an overview first. A quick glance confirmed that the room was well lived in, the tenant being neither a notable, nor an atrocious, housekeeper. Magazines—particularly Vogue and Elle and old TV Guides—textbooks, a clutter of knick knacks and a scatter of clothes lay gathered here and strewn there, indicating someone at ease in her surroundings. A sense of cleanliness worked through the contained muddle. Whoever lived here had one large room, with the kitchen at the far end flowing into the dining and living areas. A bed was positioned along one side, next to a door that led to the bathroom. The kitchen sink and counter spaces were clean. The dining table was tidy as well, with a candlestick in the centre and a pewter incense-holder in the shape of a toad at one corner. A stick of incense had burned down, with only the ash remaining in a thin grey line on the tabletop. A desk between two windows sheltered a mishmash of papers along an upper shelf, although the surface of the desk was in reasonable order. The aging furniture appeared to have been well built in its day and to be comfortable still. The yellow-and-brown material for the sofa and large chairs was a tad threadbare and old-fashioned, but the cushions were holding up. There were two TVS, one aimed at the bed, another at the sofa. On one wall hung a banner that said “this is Indian land,” while on the wall opposite, with its four corners stretched taut, hung the flag of the Mohawk Warriors, a defiant golden male face on a red field. Cinq-Mars juggled conflicting impressions—controlled chaos opposed by a flimsy sense of organization. He was unsure which was the dominant sentiment.

  “Sir?” Painchaud wanted him to study the floor. The stained oak showed a relatively clear area surrounded by a dusty, scuffed border.

  Cinq-Mars stated the obvious. “A carpet was down.”

  “Until very recently,” Painchaud concurred. “These foam bits look like particles of underpadding.”

  “If she was shot here, next to the phone, with the shooter coming in through the front door, blood and tissue might spatter—”

  “—across the carpet,” Mathers put in.

  “Then they rolled the carpet up and carted her body away in it,” Cinq-Mars concluded.

  “Could be,” Painchaud agreed.

  “My wife heard them over the phone. They were moving furniture, that’s what it sounded like to her.” The men were quiet awhile, regarding the floor. “Roughly,
” Cinq-Mars judged, “a fourteen by eighteen. A carpet that large, plus the underpadding, makes for a heavy roll, even if the material’s not thick. Difficult to bend. I’d look for a van, or a large station wagon.”

  “Let me introduce you,” Painchaud suggested as both men resumed an upright posture.

  Coming over was an officer in the blue uniform of the Kanesetake Peacekeepers. His name was Constable Roland Harvey. Painchaud undertook the introductions, and the man nodded.

  Cinq-Mars told him, “Probably the woman was carted off in a van or a truck, bundled in a carpet. Can your people keep an eye out?”

  “Not so many vehicles on the road tonight.” The man, in his thirties, spoke with a deep throatiness at a measured pace. “We’re stopping anybody going through the reserve. We ask them what they’re doing out tonight. We check their trunks.”

  “Thank you. That’s good. That’s great.”

  The officer carried a considerable paunch. His face was pockmarked and quite dark—a wide, square Mohawk face. His was particularly distinguished by drooping jowls, and Cinq-Mars found him difficult to read.

  “Her name was Lucy Gabriel,” the Peacekeeper told him. “She lived here.”

  “What can you tell us about Lucy, Roland?”

  “Good girl. Smart. She’s Mohawk, but Lucy always blended.”

  “Excuse me? Blended?”

  “With whites. She has a good job, everybody says. Drives a nice car. A Honda. An Accord, I think. It’s still in the garage downstairs. She was on the barricades when we had that war.”

  One side’s crisis was another side’s war, Cinq-Mars noted. “Ever had any trouble with her?”

  “No trouble, no. A few times we talk to her about her boyfriends.”

  “What about them?” Cinq-Mars could tell that Painchaud was hanging back, taking this in. Roland Harvey was more inclined to talk to a Montreal cop, such as himself, than to someone from the Sûreté du Québec.

  “Nothing special. Those boys were all right. She dated white guys.”

  “Does that make it police business?”

  “If they visit here, that’s okay. That’s up to her. They can stay overnight if she wants. If they move in, that’s different. White people can’t live here no more on the reserve. If you want to marry a white person, that’s okay, all right, but you got to move off the reserve.”

  “She didn’t want to move off?”

  “Her boyfriends weren’t that serious. That’s what she told us. They weren’t moving in.”

  Cinq-Mars nodded and paced a short distance. His demeanour made it clear that he had further questions on his mind, and the others waited for him to speak again.

  Before he did, the senior cop caught a glimpse of his colleagues. In this light, at this hour of the morning, with a couple of them having been awakened from their beds, they appeared disgruntled and bleary-eyed. Mussed hair, whiskers, a poor choice of clothes, puffy eyelids. He was reminded that one problem with chasing down criminals was that the bad guys didn’t always cooperate by working the same shifts as their pursuers. Seeing his cohorts, Cinq-Mars was prompted to yawn—a gesture that expanded and took its own time. He imagined that he was their mirror image—maybe worse, given that he was the oldest.

  “All right, sir, tell me, did she have a good relationship with the Peacekeepers? Did you get along, or was she afraid of you?”

  “Got along, yup.” Neither his blank expression nor his monotone speech gave anything away.

  “Because she called me, you know. In the middle of the night. If she thought she was in danger she could have called you. You were closer. You were awake. You or one of your colleagues would’ve been on shift.”

  The cop nodded. “I don’t know why she’d do that. I’d get here sooner.”

  “No doubt about it. Which tells me two things. She really didn’t think anybody would be walking through the front door, and her troubles probably don’t originate on the reserve. They got started off the reserve. She didn’t expect local trouble or she would’ve called you. That being the case, I hope you don’t object to our being here.”

  The officer looked rather slowly from Cinq-Mars to Painchaud and then back again. “Nobody wants SQ snooping around. What good does that do? Nobody’s gonna talk to SQ. Ask the chief. He’ll tell you we don’t want SQ walking around.”

  Unsure whether he meant the Chief of the Peacekeepers or the Chief of the Grand Council, Cinq-Mars chose to hold his peace. The point had been made that the SQ was not welcome to investigate on the reserve, and if they came anyway, they’d be ineffectual.

  “All right. Listen, Roland, we need your help here. We need you to talk to her friends. We need to know what her carpet looked like, what colours were in it, what was the design. We need to know whatever you can find out about her boyfriends. We need you to hunt the reserve for a girl rolled in a carpet, for a carpet tossed off by the side of the road somewhere. Lucy might have a gunshot wound. Something else, Roland. We need a forensics expert to scan this apartment with a microscope and a fine-tooth comb. You can’t provide us with one of those, I don’t imagine. I understand that you don’t want the SQ. But if I clear it with Sergeant Painchaud, will you allow a forensics examiner from my department on the premises? I’ll guarantee that the report will be shared around to everybody.”

  “Montreal cops.” Roland Harvey mulled the news.

  “No uniforms. No cruisers. Plainclothes and plain cars all the way, and your people can be on hand.”

  “They have to be,” Harvey said. He didn’t explain himself, but Cinq-Mars assumed that even Montreal cops would need local protection. This was going to be a tough working environment.

  “Desperate measures, Roland. We believe that Lucy’s been shot. She could be badly hurt. She may be one of your own but she could be anywhere. We’ll have to scour Quebec. Off the reserve and on. Across the border to Ontario. Maybe down to New York State. We need to rely on you and you on us if we’re to get a handle on this. Lucy is one of yours, Roland, but her troubles probably got started off the reserve.”

  Roland Harvey gave a nod. “Sure, yup. Bring your people on. No SQ.”

  “Deal,” he said. Cinq-Mars turned to Painchaud. “Deal?” he asked him.

  Painchaud didn’t have a problem with the arrangement. He understood the situation. Cinq-Mars liked him more by the minute, liked him almost as much as he was puzzled by the guy. He was not accustomed to SQ officers willing to take a back seat in the interests of an investigation. “Done,” Sergeant Painchaud agreed.

  “Emile?” Bill Mathers had wandered over to the missing woman’s desk and returned with a photograph and a check stub. Cinq-Mars took the picture, examined it, and showed it to the native officer.

  “This her? In this photograph she looks native.”

  “That’s Lucy. She’s wearing her number-one tan in that one. I didn’t say Lucy don’t look native. She blends in with whites is all. She’s got their culture, the way they talk.”

  “English or French?”

  “Both. English for sure.”

  “Pretty girl. What else?” Cinq-Mars asked.

  Mathers held up the stub. “Hillier-Largent Global. She makes a decent salary, with benefits.”

  The senior detective studied it for himself. Lucy Gabriel’s paycheque bore marked similarities to his own. Suddenly the modest premises seemed odd. “What is this place, Roland? A garage? Is there a house that goes with it?”

  “Used to be, yup. Burnt down years ago. Lucy’s folks owned it. Lucy already lived here by herself from the time she was eleven years old, about. Her folks’ house was thirty feet away. The foundation’s still there, but that’s all.”

  “She lived on her own from the age of eleven?”

  “Not all the time since then, no. Her parents, they died in that fire. White people took her in after that. A doctor living on the reserve back then, he became her dad, but at one point he took her off the reserve. Lucy kept the garage as her private place. It’s her pro
perty. Moved back when she was old enough for that.”

  “What does Lucy do?”

  “Biologist,” Roland Harvey explained.

  “Excuse me?” The surprise Cinq-Mars expressed had more to do with Lucy’s profession causing him to think about the laboratory at the head of the lake, BioLogika, and not, as Roland Harvey perhaps assumed, that a young native woman was a professional scientist.

  “She educated herself,” the Peacekeeper specified, his pride noted.

  “A biologist. Is Hillier-Largent a pharmaceutical company, do you know?”

  Harvey shrugged. Cinq-Mars flipped the check stub over several times in his hands.

  “No address. Bill, find out where the company’s located and its business.”

  “On it.”

  “Have you found anything, Roland, that can help us?”

  “Bullet hole over here.” The Peacekeeper nodded toward the far wall.

  “Show me.” Cinq-Mars followed him around the perimeter of the room to the kitchen, Painchaud trailing behind. A door under the sink stood open.

  “We found it like this. The door ajar. But the door was closed when the bullet went through it. It went through the garbage can after that, then lodged in the wallboard. It’s not so thick. Looks like it got buried in the insulation. Either that, or the shooter went and pulled it out already.”

  “These guys were probably looking to get it back, judging by the way they cleaned up. Let’s hope they failed. Anything else?” When Roland Harvey shook his head, Cinq-Mars pushed him further. “How do you think this went down?”

  “No forced entry,” Harvey mentioned. “No big surprise. Probably she never bothered to lock up. Not here, on the reserve. Not on a night like this one.”

  “She told me she had to get home after the evening news. Which means she must’ve been in the city, that accounts for the time. A slow trek on a night like this. Somebody might have followed her home, or they were waiting for her.”

  “So they walked in and shot her,” Painchaud concluded, shaking his head.

  “I doubt they came here to shoot her,” Cinq-Mars told them, which caused both men to jerk their heads up. How he could be promoting theories with nothing to go on struck them as odd. “If that’s true, they’d have left her where she lay. I think they sneaked in here, their arrival camouflaged by the storm. Probably turned their engine off and coasted down the grade to the house. Lights off, for sure. I think they came here to abduct her. When they heard her on the phone, about to say something, that’s when they shot her.”