Open Season (Luc Vanier)

by Peter Kirby

  Plante was disappointed. “Very careless. And against the rules.”

  Laurent grabbed Plante by the shoulders and moved him back from the door, pulled his gun. With his back against the wall, he gently nudged the door open with his foot. He took a quick look into the office and then walked in, holding the gun in front of him. He saw what Vanier had seen the night before: a mess of file folders, papers, and books on the floor, every drawer open. He did what Vanier had done, hoping to find the two pages with Luna’s personal details. Then he got Vanier on the phone.

  “Vanier.”

  “Hey, boss. There’s nothing here. The place has been turned over. Looks like they went through everything.”

  “Get an SOC team over there. Maybe they can get prints.”

  “You don’t sound surprised.”

  “Surprised?”

  “About the search.”

  Laurent knew. He also knew that Vanier would never admit it.

  “We’re just turning into the hospital now. Maybe there’s something else Bélair can tell us. I also tracked down the Delaney woman. Saint Jacques and I will go see her as soon as we’re finished with Bélair.”

  “Okay. Let me know.”

  Laurent clicked disconnect and turned to see Plante sitting, shaking in a chair.

  “Mr. Plante. You need to get some air.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he mumbled.

  “I know, sir. It’s traumatic. Come on, I think I noticed a coffee shop downstairs.”

  The choice parking spots in front of the entrance were full, so Vanier again parked in an empty taxi space. Two taxi drivers came rushing over to protest and he waved his cardboard Police sign. They stopped running. He dropped the sign on the dash.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” said Saint Jacques.

  “What?”

  “The sign. You just made that yourself, didn’t you?”

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

  At ten o’clock in the morning the emergency room was as hot and crowded as it had been the night before, and Vanier recognized some of the same people still waiting for their turn, forever being bumped to the bottom of the list by someone sicker, someone closer to death. The same family members hovered over the same beds as Vanier led the way up the hallway to Bélair’s bed. He was asleep. The cop, Roberge, was asleep too, sitting on a folding metal chair with his head resting against the wall.

  “Mr. Bélair,” Vanier said as he approached the bed. Something was wrong. “Shit.”

  The cop opened his eyes and immediately stood up, looking sheepish.

  Vanier reached out two fingers and felt for a pulse on Bélair’s neck. “Shit.”

  The sole of his shoe was sticking to the vinyl floor. He looked down. A dark pool beneath the bed was slowly spreading outwards. As he looked down to get a better look, another drop fell and splashed into the pool, viscous, like oil. Vanier pulled back the blanket. A folded towel lay over Bélair’s chest. He pulled it back to reveal a small stab wound over the lawyer’s heart. The towel had been keeping the blood away from the top blanket. It would have taken some time before anyone noticed Bélair had been stabbed.

  Vanier looked for the bag that Bélair had had on the bed. It was gone. So were Bélair’s clothes. Vanier turned to the cop, trying to decide whether to lash out at him, or just tell him to get the hell out.

  “You. Write down every fucking minute you were gone from the bedside. Taking a piss, having a smoke, looking for a coffee. Every minute. When you were sleeping too. Write that down too.”

  Roberge stood with his mouth open at the head of the bed, staring down at Bélair’s blood-soaked chest. He looked like he was about to say something, but nothing came out. There was nothing to say.

  Vanier turned to Saint Jacques.

  “Sylvie. Get a team in here. Right away. We need witnesses.”

  “Right.” She pulled her cellphone out.

  Vanier was gone, running towards the triage station, where a woman was holding a screaming baby up to the glass and shouting questions into the hole. The nurse looked like she was at the tail end of a shift in hell and was mumbling back the same words she had probably said a hundred times already.

  “I said, go over there and wait. Someone will call your name.”

  The woman backed off. The baby kept screaming. Vanier leaned into the hole. “Who’s in charge?”

  “Of what?”

  “This place. The emergency room. I want to see whoever runs this place, right now. There’s a man dead in the bed over here.”

  She looked up at him with tired eyes, as though it were just another ploy to jump the queue. Vanier held up his police badge before she could ask any more questions. “A man’s been killed and I need someone in authority, right now.”

  The nurse lifted herself out of the chair with both arms and leaned forward, trying to look up the hallway. Then she leaned in towards the hole. “It’s Dr Cohen. I’ll page him. But it could be a while. Everybody’s busy.”

  “Then get his deputy. Keep going down the list until you get someone.”

  “I’ll page him.”

  “Say it’s important.”

  “He’s dead, you said?”

  Vanier wondered what would qualify as important. Maybe dead meant there was no rush. He turned and saw a guy in his late twenties leaning against a wall, wearing an oversized white coat, a stethoscope draped around his neck. He was breaking the first rule of emergency medicine: never stand still in an emergency room, the sick will start forming a line to talk to you. Vanier walked over to him. “Doctor?”

  The young man looked up without answering, breaking the second rule. Don’t acknowledge someone calling you doctor.

  “You’re a doctor, right?” Vanier asked again.

  “Yes. Well, a resident, actually. But look, you need to wait until your name’s called. Somebody will see you in a few minutes.”

  Vanier flashed his card again. “There’s a dead man in one of the beds over here. He’s been murdered. I need someone to take charge.”

  The doctor looked in the direction of Vanier’s finger, but didn’t move. Vanier put his hand on his shoulder and motioned him over to Bélair’s bed. Saint Jacques was still on the phone. Roberge had disappeared. The resident pulled the blanket back and lifted the bloody towel out of the way. He put the stethoscope to his ears and listened to Bélair’s heart. “He’s dead.”

  “Genius. He wasn’t when he came in here.”

  “Wait here. I’ll get someone.”

  This time the resident didn’t need encouragement. He turned and ran down the hallway, disappearing through a set of swinging doors. He was back seconds later with two more doctors, not the white-coated kind who don’t want to get body fluids on their suits, but trauma specialists dressed for action in short-sleeved green surgical suits. Without a word to Vanier, they grabbed Bélair’s bed and wheeled it back down the hallway and through the swinging doors. Vanier tried to follow but was stopped by a beefy nurse. “They’ll try to revive him.”

  “Some hope,” Vanier replied, turning back to the doorway. “I suppose that’s one way to jump the line in this place though.”

  “What?”

  “Die.”

  The atmosphere in the emergency room had changed. Two uniformed cops had arrived and were listening to Saint Jacques. Vanier approached. She was telling them what to do. She wanted names, addresses and phone numbers of everyone in the place. Had anyone seen someone approaching Bélair’s bed? Vanier scanned the room looking for Roberge, but all he saw was a room full of people, numbed by hours of waiting, now alert, watching the show.

  Saint Jacques turned to Vanier. “The uniform left. Didn’t think he’d be welcome.”

  “Damn right.”

  “He left the list of times he left Bélair alone
.” Saint Jacques pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket. Vanier reached for it and read the scribbled notes. “He took a fifteen-minute break every goddamn hour.” Saint Jacques said nothing. Vanier pocketed the paper. “Okay. Let’s start getting names and addresses. Someone must have noticed something.” Vanier scanned the room again and noticed a security guard standing off to the back, uncomfortable with real cops invading his space. “I’m going to talk to him.”

  The guard was in his early twenties, with a pencil-thin goatee and short clipped hair. He had accessorized the security guard uniform to make it more intimidating, with a black canvas vest that looked like bullet-proof Kevlar from a distance, but close up seemed more like a fishing vest, all pockets and flaps, filled with pens, a notebook, a pocket flashlight. He had tucked his trousers into his shiny black Doc Martens boots, and an assortment of black leather accessories hung from his belt. He wasn’t wearing a name tag.

  “Your name?”

  “Gaston Hade, sir.”

  “So, did you see anything?”

  “No sir. But maybe it didn’t happen on my shift. I saw him. He’s been lying in that bed since I got on duty. That’s eight o’clock this morning. He didn’t move all the shift.”

  “And you didn’t see anyone approach the bed?”

  “No, sir. Nobody that I saw.”

  Hade had nothing to offer, so Vanier asked him where the cameras were monitored.

  “In the Central Security Office. I can take you there.”

  Vanier gestured to Saint Jacques to follow. Hade led them through a labyrinth of hallways, walking with the swagger that uniforms give some people. Finally, he led them through an unmarked door, and they were in a windowless room with banks of screens on the wall and a large control console on a raised deck. Hade pointed to a portly guy sitting at a desk. “The sergeant’s in charge.” Hade turned to the sergeant. “Sarge, there’s two police officers to see you.”

  The sergeant turned in his swivel chair and gave Vanier and Saint Jacques the once-over. Then he turned to Hade. “Okay, Gaston, back to your post. I’ll take things from here.”

  “But Sarge, maybe I can help. It could be important.”

  Before the sergeant could respond, Vanier said, “Let him stay. I need him.”

  Hade grinned, but dropped the grin when nobody responded.

  Vanier walked across the room. “A patient was killed in the emergency room sometime between two-fifteen this morning and half an hour ago. He was in a bed in the hallway and I want to see the videos.”

  “I would have heard. If someone got killed. I would have heard,” the sergeant said.

  “You’ve just heard. I’m in a hurry. I need to see the footage.”

  The sergeant slowly raised himself out of the chair and led them over to the control desk, where a bored, middle-aged man was monitoring thirty screens.

  “This is Ken.”

  Ken grunted to acknowledge the two cops and pointed to the screens.

  “Look at screens eighteen and nineteen.”

  Ken typed some commands, and each screen showed a different view of the emergency room. The first was from a camera mounted over the main door, showing face shots of people leaving and the backs of those arriving. The second was a camera mounted in a corner of the waiting room, with a good view of most of what was going on in emergency.

  “Those are the only two angles we have for emergency.”

  Vanier pulled out the list of times Bélair’s guard had been missing. There were five time slots. “Okay,” Vanier said. “Start with the room. Go back to two-fifteen and go forward from there.”

  The controller typed, and the date and time appeared at the bottom of the screen. They watched the video unfold in real time for a few minutes. “Ken, can you speed it up?” Saint Jacques said.

  “A little.” Ken looked around to make eye contact with Saint Jacques.

  The image sped up. At first it was hard to follow, but once you got used to following what was going on, patterns emerged from the chaos.

  They went through two of the time slots without noticing anything except Roberge walking outside to have a smoke. Two minutes into the third time slot, Saint Jacques stopped the controller.

  “Go back.”

  Ken put the image in reverse.

  “Stop. This guy.”

  Ken punched a key and the screen froze. Saint Jacques pointed to a figure on the screen. “Watch him.”

  Saint Jacques was looking at a guy in an Adidas tracksuit, with a cap pulled down low on his head. He was sitting, like all the others. In the background, Roberge was frozen on his way to the exit, his hand pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

  “Ken, go back thirty seconds and then go forward slowly.” She turned to Vanier. “Watch.”

  On the screen, the roomful of people looked like they had been anaesthetized. Then Bélair’s protector appeared, walking towards the door. Nobody seemed to care, except the guy in the Adidas suit, who sat up and followed the cop with his eyes. When the cop had disappeared, Adidas got up and walked in the direction of the hallway.

  “Fast forward for a few minutes,” Vanier said. The time on the screen sped up, until this time it was Vanier’s turn to interrupt. “Stop.”

  The Adidas man reappeared around the corner of the hallway, walking slowly towards the exit. He was carrying what looked like a bundle of clothes and Bélair’s plastic bag. His cap hid his face as he turned for the door. The two cops stared at the screen, knowing they were watching the man who had just killed Bélair walk calmly through the emergency room, carefully avoiding the camera. Vanier turned to Saint Jacques. “Good catch, Sylvie.” Saint Jacques almost broke a smile.

  Vanier asked Ken to switch to the camera covering the entrance. It wasn’t hard to find the man walking to the door, but still no headshot. The baseball cap was low over his eyes. All they had was a guy in a blue Adidas suit, maybe in his thirties.

  Vanier was already on his feet. “We need these images, both cameras from two-fifteen to five a.m.” Then he realized that any half-assed defence lawyer could sell reasonable doubt to a jury with hours of missing tape. “On second thought, everything from eleven last night to right now.”

  “We’ll get them on DVDs for you,” Ken said. “I can email them too. Hour by hour. Okay?”

  “Soon as you can.” Vanier handed him a business card.

  Vanier knew that if they made the image of the Adidas man public, they might get something. You could pick people out of crowds just by the way they carried themselves, a distinctive gait or a piece of clothing. It might be worth a try. They didn’t have much else.

  “What next?” Saint Jacques asked as they were walking to the car.

  “Sarah Delaney. Bélair told me that Luna got his name from one of his clients, Sarah Delaney.”

  Sarah Delaney’s address was on Oxford Street in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a leafy enclave of family homes on postage-stamp lots that barely had room for front gardens. The neighbourhood had once been the starting point for upwardly-mobile anglophones searching for the middle-class dream, professors from the nearby campus of Concordia University, young professionals, and media types. Even today, it remained anglo at its core, but too many kids had left for Toronto, where speaking English was considered normal. A new middle class was moving in, bilingual francophones, circling the aging population of abandoned parents, waiting for them to die or get pushed into retirement homes.

  Delaney’s house had four separate doors lined up on the front porch. The house would have started out as a single-family home with only one door; now it was four apartments. Two old maple trees crowded the house for control of the lot, and the trees were winning. Saint Jacques took the porch steps two at a time and pushed the buzzer marked Delaney. A door opened just as Vanier walked up, and a woman in her late forties looked out at them. Vanier did a double take. H
er long hair was black as a raven, and piled in a mound at the top of her head, the fierce blackness clashing with a bloodless white face. Pure Irish. She looked at them guardedly. “Yes?”

  “Police,” said Vanier. “Sarah Delaney?”

  “Yes.” She stepped out onto the porch.

  “We’re here about your friend Madame Luna.”

  “Sophia? I can’t help you. I have no idea where she is.”

  “We believe she’s been kidnapped.”

  “Just because you can’t find her doesn’t mean she’s been kidnapped. Look, I can’t help you. Go find her yourself.” Her gaze left them as she looked across the street. Vanier turned and saw two neighbours staring back at them.

  “Ms. Delaney, Sophia Luna was snatched off the street last night, kidnapped. She had been meeting with Roger Bélair on your recommendation. So we either question you here or bring you in for questioning.”

  Startled, the woman stepped back into the hallway. “You’d better come in.”

  They followed her into a large living room. Even though the sun was blazing outside, the room was dark, the light blocked by the trees outside. Delaney looked like she belonged in the dark.

  “I’m sorry. I misunderstood,” she mumbled. “I thought you were from immigration. They’re looking for her, you know.”

  She offered them coffee, and Saint Jacques declined for both of them. Vanier sat in a high-backed chair and said nothing, leaving the questions to Saint Jacques. Delaney sat on the sofa, and Saint Jacques pulled an ottoman over and sat on it facing her.

  “Can you tell us why Ms. Luna was meeting with Maître Bélair?”

  Delaney was only half listening, distracted, obviously shaken by the notion of a kidnapping. She looked up at Saint Jacques. “What? I’m sorry. What were you asking?”

  “Why was she was meeting Maître Bélair? She asked you to recommend a lawyer. Did she tell you what it was about?”

  Vanier had all but disappeared into the background as the two women spoke face to face.

  “No. Well, not really. Sophia was very careful with information. I suppose you get that way if you’re trying to avoid deportation. She just asked if I knew a trustworthy lawyer, and I gave her Maître Bélair’s name. She was having bad luck with lawyers. Who doesn’t? I went through three lawyers before I found him. What is it about lawyers? Anyway, I used him when a contractor sued me, and I was happy with him.”