Open Season (Luc Vanier)

by Peter Kirby

  Acclaim for Peter Kirby’s Luc Vanier Novels

  The Dead of Winter

  Shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Book

  “A powerful ride through the dark and raw of Montreal.”

  − Kathy Reichs

  “Taut. Claustrophobic. Compelling. A chilling tale – in ever sense of the word. Peter Kirby’s story of murder and its machinations tightens around the reader like a noose.”

  − Will Ferguson, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize for 419

  “Saints, villains, the homeless and the powerful are held in winter’s suspenseful grip. In a riveting new series, Peter Kirby reveals Montreal at the worst of times, its underbelly exposed and dire forces at play.”

  − John Farrow, author of River City

  “Gripping. Compelling.”

  – Montreal Gazette

  “Vanier reveals himself as a worthy series detective.”

  – National Post

  With comparisons to Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, and John Brady’s Matt Minogue, “Irishman Kirby joins John Brady and Peter Robinson in the ranks of the best English and Irish expat crime novelists living in Canada.”

  – Nuacht

  “Colourful and gritty. Kirby puts Vanier through his paces chasing a killer in a book that’s fast-paced and enjoyable.”

  – Maclean’s

  “Luc Vanier is likely to join the ranks of Canada’s enduring sleuth figures.”

  – The Toronto Star

  “A writer to watch”

  – The Globe and Mail

  Vigilante Season

  One of 5 Best Crime and Mystery Books of 2013

  – Quill & Quire

  “This novel is one for our times. I suggest you pour a glass of Jameson, as would Luc Vanier, then sit back and enjoy a good read. Peter, you’ve done it again!”

  – Nuacht

  “More than a simple tale of the worthy few against the corrupt many. The author, himself a lawyer, provides bold heroes, but he also explores how corruption can be self-sabotaging… A promising follow-up to 2012’s lauded The Dead of Winter.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “Vigilante Season is a fine tale that can hold its own with the best of what’s out there. Kirby’s writing has become even more assured … An ability to capture the atmosphere of various districts of Montreal in all their glory or squalor, coupled with a believable storyline drawn from the headlines, lends Kirby’s books an immediacy that will keep the reader enthralled.”

  – Montreal Review of Books

  OPEN SEASON

  OPEN SEASON

  A Luc Vanier Novel

  PETER KIRBY

  .ll.

  Copyright © 2015 Peter Kirby

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incident are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Prepared for the press by Katia Grubisic

  Cover design by Debbie Geltner

  Cover image by Julien Roumagnac

  Book design by WildElement.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kirby, Peter, 1953-, author

  Open season / Peter Kirby.

  (A Luc Vanier novel)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927535-78-3 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-927535-79-0 (epub).--

  ISBN 978-1-927535-80-6 (mobi).--ISBN 978-1-927535-81-3 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Kirby, Peter, 1953- Luc Vanier novel.

  PS8621.I725O64 2015 C813’.6 C2015-9018595

  C2015-901860-9

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and of SODEC.

  .ll.

  Linda Leith Publishing Inc.

  P.O. Box 322, Victoria Station,

  Westmount Quebec H3Z 2V8 Canada

  www.lindaleith.com

  To my brother Jim and my almost-brother Frank. And to my sisters Esme, Carol, and Lisa. I love you all.

  One

  Katya Babyak was lying on a steel bed in a dilapidated three-storey public housing unit in Rotterdam. The room was small and unheated, furnished with only the bed and a small dresser. Her battered suitcase lay open on the linoleum floor. She spent all her time on the bed, shivering under a threadbare blanket that made no difference in the damp cold. Three days so far, three days inside a locked room, waiting.

  She had waited in Kiev too, waited until they told her it was time to go, and put her and four others in the back of a truck, hidden behind cardboard boxes piled to the roof. The drive from Kiev to Rotterdam had taken two days, with stops every now and then to allow her and the others to go to the toilet in desolate service centres just off the highway. At each stop they gave her water. Once, they gave her a sandwich and a coffee.

  Now, in the room in Rotterdam, a daily routine had already been established. Just after sunrise the same small man unlocked the door and let her out to use the bathroom. He never said anything, just leered and gestured to where she had to go, as if he hadn’t given the same instructions the previous day, and the one before. If she took too long, the small man pounded on the door to hurry her along. Afterwards, he watched her walk back to her room. He locked the door, and then she could hear the same routine repeated in three other rooms. When everyone had finished with the bathroom, the man would start a second round, opening Katya’s door to hand her a plastic-wrapped sandwich, the kind you get from vending machines in bus terminals, and a bottle of water. Sometimes there was a bag of potato chips. That would be the end of any contact until the man came back, about two hours after it got dark.

  Nobody told her what was happening. She knew she just had to wait. They had promised to take her to Canada and they had taken her this far. However long it took, she would wait. She had tried to shout to the people in the other rooms. The small man came running. He opened the door and slapped her across the face. “Quiet. No noise. You understand?”

  She nodded at him, her cheek burning from the slap.

  She spent the time lying under the thin blanket, flipping through an English phrasebook. When the intricacies of I would like to have breakfast, please, and How much does this cost? became too difficult, she did what everyone with nothing but time and no distractions would do. She retreated into her thoughts, reliving memories, the only things of value she had.

  Katya began to catalogue her life, putting everything she could remember into chronological order. The early memories were nothing but fragments, like broken pieces of coloured glass that hint at what they once were, or snapshots that force you to imagine what was happening before and after the moment they were taken.

  Her earliest memory was the colour and taste of a glass of lemonade that someone, probably her mother, had poured from a large bottle. She knew this had happened at the seaside. The lemonade was a shade of yellow she had never seen since, a yellow that even now made her mouth water, a yellow as clear as sunlight. The lemonade tasted of summer fruit, tart and sweet at the same time. She tried to build on the fragment of memory, inventing more than remembering the before and after that might have surrounded the taste. She reconstructed a family outing to the coast when she and Stephan were still very young, when th
eir parents were still alive. She knew her father would have been there. Her mother had kept a photograph of a visit to the coast. Katya was a baby, sitting on his knees as he beamed into the camera. That wasn’t the lemonade day. She was too young in the photo to drink lemonade, and Stephan was not yet born, and on the lemonade day, the whole family had been there, her mother and father and Stephan, she was sure of it.

  She remembered sitting with Stephan on the brown couch in the living room of their first apartment, her mother crying in the armchair while two large policemen yelled. They wore dark uniforms that made creaking noises when they moved. Katya couldn’t remember the words, just shouting and rumbling growls from the men, and the sobbing from her mother. After that, her father’s absence had become just another fact, like a crack in a window that had always been cracked, that had always let in the cold.

  She probed the memory the way you probe a cracked tooth with your tongue. The policemen’s voices had been accusatory, delivering bad news, as though whatever had happened was Katya’s mother’s fault. Her mother accepted everything, not arguing with the policemen, nodding her head as she cried.

  After that, they had lived with her grandmother, an angry, dried-out husk of a woman who spread misery thick enough to eat, and in all those years, there wasn’t a single good memory.

  Her mother’s death was another blur. From one day to the next her mother had simply disappeared. Now, Katya realized there must have been an illness, and it must have lasted weeks or even months. But she remembered no hospital visits, nothing, just a void where their mother had been. One morning, sometime after their mother disappeared, their grandmother dressed Katya and Stephan in formal clothes and led them across Poltava to the crematorium.

  They were sitting in a huge room, just the three of them. At the front of the room a cheap wooden casket was mounted on what looked like a ladder lying flat. Her grandmother pointed at the casket. “That’s your mother. She had bad blood.”

  Then, the sound of machinery, and the casket was drawn along the steel rails towards the curtains. The curtains opened to receive the casket, and then closed.

  That was the last Katya had seen of her mother.

  Two

  There’s something special about walking down the street with a woman who looks like she’s three leagues out of your own. She gets the looks from passers-by, then they look at you, and you’ve just scored a point. For Roger Bélair, this was one of those walks—a warm June evening when everything seems right with the world. The woman walking beside him was good-looking by any standards. Bélair wasn’t going to be having supper alone for the first night in weeks, and he was beaming.

  It wasn’t a date. She was a client who had turned up late for a meeting. Bélair was hungry, so he suggested a working supper. She accepted, probably felt sorry for keeping him waiting.

  The sun had just set, but it wasn’t yet dark. Bélair could see the light from the large bay windows of the restaurant illuminating the street, beckoning to them. When they reached the doorway, he stopped on the narrow sidewalk and gestured like a hotel doorman.

  If he hadn’t been so distracted he might have seen the huge SUV speeding towards them, its wheels half up on the narrow sidewalk. He noticed nothing until the driver’s door opened directly into him and sent him flying forward to the ground. He lay on the pavement for a few seconds before rolling slowly onto his back, struggling to sit up. The woman was being manhandled into the back of the vehicle by two men. Only when the doors slammed shut did he register her screaming. She had been screaming the whole time, but now it was quiet.

  Bélair struggled to get up, but only managed to make it to his knees. The SUV was already speeding away on Saint-Paul. The licence plate was covered by a rag or paper, he wasn’t sure. Turning to see whether anyone else had been watching, he felt the searing pain from his arm. It was bent back at an unnatural angle and blood was seeping from his sleeve.

  Immediately, people converged on him.

  “Call the police. Somebody call the police,” he shouted to no one in particular. Several people raised cellphones to their ears.

  The owner of Les Pyrénées stepped out of the doorway. “Maître Bélair,” he said. He took Bélair’s good arm and placed it over his own shoulder to help him off his knees. “Come inside. The police will be here soon. And an ambulance. We called an ambulance.”

  “These people,” Bélair said, gesturing to the crowd, “they saw it. They’re witnesses. We need to get their names.”

  The owner turned slowly, with Bélair’s arm still draped over his shoulder, and said in a loud voice, “Please wait for the police to get here. It’s important. And I will serve a cone of pistachio sorbet for everyone who waits. I’ll send someone out now.”

  In Montreal, there aren’t many things that convince people to wait around for the police, but on a warm June evening, a pistachio sorbet will do it.

  Anjili Segal was sitting across from Luc Vanier, absent-mindedly scanning the menu. She closed it and looked across the table. “Does the thought of moving in with me scare you that much, Luc?”

  As a conversation opener it was a showstopper, one that promised a difficult supper.

  Vanier liked to say they that he and Anjili had met over a dead body. It was true. One of Montreal’s busiest coroners, Segal made dead bodies give up their secrets. The first time they met, the victim had been stabbed and shot, but Segal ruled that he had drowned; he had been alive when he was thrown in the river. Vanier was impressed. After crossing paths professionally a few more times, Vanier had asked her out. Now, three years later, they both agreed that moving in together was the next step.

  “I don’t know why you say that, Anjili. We just need to find the right place.”

  She leaned down and pulled glossy folders out of her bag. Six in all. One for each of the condominiums they had visited. But after two months of looking, a pattern was developing. Vanier would point out the obvious drawbacks, while she focused on the good, increasingly ready to settle for anything. Now they were sitting on a pizzeria terrace on Phillips Square, two blocks from their last visit.

  “I know you’re nervous, Luc. But that’s all it is.” She paused. “I hope. We’re good together, and we’d be better living together.”

  “I know. And I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be great. But we need the right place.”

  She managed a tired smile. “So we keep at it. Until we find the perfect place?”

  He reached for her hand. He couldn’t tell her that he was nervous. The more places he looked at, the more he realized that it might actually happen. He had been on his own for years. Even when Alex was living with him, it had been Vanier’s place and Vanier’s rules, and none of the rules applied to Vanier. He wasn’t sure if he could make the inevitable compromises that living with Anjili would mean. But he couldn’t voice his doubts. They were his problem, not Anjili’s.

  “Don’t look so glum,” she said.

  “I’m not glum. We’ll find the right place. Soon, I promise. And if we don’t, we’ll settle for almost right.”

  The waiter appeared and she looked up at him, ready to order. Vanier continued reading the menu, rubbing the muscles in the back of his neck.

  The waiter left.

  She tapped the pile of folders. “So which was your favourite?”

  Vanier closed the menu. “That’s the problem. They all looked great.”

  Wrong answer. The smile was gone.

  “I can’t work with that. Here,” she tapped the pile again. “I’ve put them in order. My order. What do you think?”

  Vanier gulped a mouthful of the house wine and puckered. It tasted homemade. He reached for the first folder, a high-rise on McGill College. Their condo would be on the thirty-sixth floor, looking north.

  “This one had great views. I liked it. And the furniture was good.”

  “Lu
c, it was a showpiece. We’d put our own furniture in there.”

  “I know. But I liked it. I mean with the furniture and all, it looked good. I liked it.”

  “That’s it? It looked good? I liked it?”

  “It’s great. No, it’s not great. It’s good. Lots of space, great views. The balcony was a bit small, though, barely room for two chairs and a table.”

  “Okay. What else didn’t you like about it?”

  “You sure you want to know?”

  “I’m sure. You’re going to be living there too.”

  “It was sterile. Like living in an office building. No character.”

  “Okay. I know what you mean. Like living in a hotel.” She reached over and took the folder out of his hands. “Right, number two.” She placed another folder before him.

  He opened the folder and tried to remember which one it was. Six places in one day had blurred in his memory. Beautiful kitchens, small bedrooms, living rooms that looked like they came out of some German decorating magazine, and all the time he was wondering where he’d put his stuff, or even if he would be allowed to bring his stuff. Bad thoughts, he knew. But he didn’t know how to stop them.

  “Good. No, better. This one was better. It seemed to have more space.”

  “You guys ready to order?” The waiter picked up the carafe of wine and refilled Vanier’s glass. Anjili’s was still full.

  Vanier ordered a seafood pizza. Anjili, goat cheese and prosciutto.

  “Luc, if this is too hard on you, you’d better tell me now.”

  “It’s not that, Anjili. I want to live with you. I also want you to be happy, more than anything. But I have yet to see a place where we wouldn’t be rubbing shoulders all the time. You and I both need to have space.”

  “Rubbing shoulders?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m trying to find out. What is it that you’re looking for?”

  “A place with lots of room. It could be an old place, doesn’t have to be modern. But lots of room.”