by Peter Kirby
“Good. Tell him it’s urgent. Lives are in danger. I want to go in this evening. Overnight if we have to. Make sure the warrant allows that.”
“Yes, sir.” She stood up and grabbed for her crutches. She realized she couldn’t talk on the phone and walk with crutches at the same time, and sat down again to call Laframboise.
Vanier looked over at her. “You okay to drive like that?”
“I said I’m fine. Only thing I can’t do is dance.”
“Or run,” said Laurent.
She ignored him, grabbed her crutches and moved to the door, faster than most people walked.
“I’m going down to Whole World.” Vanier yelled over to Laurent. “I’m going to park myself outside the building until the warrant arrives. The fire inspection probably spooked them, and I don’t want them moving people out. You need me, call me.”
Vanier had been sitting in his car for hours watching the parking lot at the Whole World building. It was eleven o’clock, and they still didn’t have a warrant. It had been quiet since he had arrived. All he had been doing was sitting and watching, and thinking. He knew finding a connection to Luna was going to be a long shot, but he still wanted to go in. He wanted to shut the place down.
He pulled out his phone and punched Saint Jacques’s number again.
She answered immediately. “I’m still waiting for Dubois to finish the paperwork. He says he needs another hour. Then we’re going over to the judge’s house. Dubois says we could have the warrant in about two hours.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do to speed it up?”
“I wish there were, boss. But he’s slow. He’s doing the typing himself. And he keeps telling me he’d rather be home.”
Vanier was frustrated, but there was nothing to say. The Crown prosecutors worked at their own speed, and that was that. He changed the subject. “Remember you once said that nothing on the Internet disappears, that everything exists forever?”
“It’s not my idea. It’s the way it is,” said Saint Jacques.
“I’ve been thinking. Luna’s computer has disappeared, and Essence cleaned up everything from Lepage’s computer.”
“You mean have someone go through Lepage’s computer to reassemble what was deleted?”
“No. Could you even do that? I was thinking of the email provider.”
“Google?”
“Yeah, Google, or whoever his email is with.”
“Wait a second.” Saint Jacques put him on hold and did a search for Lepage’s email on her phone. He had sent her an electronic copy of the invoice after the meeting. “He’s got two email addresses, one tied to the website. The other’s a Gmail address. You want me to get Google to turn over the records?”
“It’s worth a try, no?”
“We’d need a warrant, I think.”
“Or consent. What if Lepage consents? We could ask for a search without a warrant.”
“I suppose. I’ll send him an email.”
“Wait a second. There’s movement at the gates.” Vanier could see Pavlov’s minder, pumpkin-head, opening the gates to the parking lot. Inside the lot, a large white van was waiting to leave.
“Shit, Sylvie. I think they’re leaving.” Vanier watched as pumpkin-head pulled the metal gates back. The white van pulled out of the parking lot. “Sylvie, I’m going to follow them. You keep working on the warrant, and execute the search as soon as you get the warrant. Don’t wait for me. My guess is they’re moving people out.”
Vanier turned on the ignition and pulled out. It didn’t take long to figure out that the white van was heading for the highway. He checked his gas; he had almost a full tank.
Following the van on the 401 was not difficult. The highway was flooded day and night with trucks ferrying containers between Montreal and Toronto. He spent the first hour and a half behind large trucks, occasionally pulling out into the fast lane and speeding up to make sure the van was still in front. He figured they were going to Toronto, and he could hold back to avoid being seen.
Somewhere outside of Kingston, he lost them. When the van didn’t show up two trucks ahead of him, he roared down the highway for fifteen kilometres. The van was nowhere to be seen, and he realized it must have taken an exit without him noticing. It was fifteen minutes to the next exit. He took the bridge over the highway and got back on, towards Montreal.
He called Saint Jacques. “I lost them. I’m just east of Kingston, and they must have taken the last exit. Any news on the warrant?”
“We’re at Whole Earth now,” Saint Jacques said. “The place is empty. It’s been cleaned out. The only one here is the son, and he’s saying nothing.”
“Did you find anything on him?”
“Nothing, just the usual, credit cards, ID, scraps of receipts from ATM machines. Wait, there was something, an address and phone number on a notepad. I think Laurent already boxed it. Give me two seconds.”
Vanier held his breath as he sped eastwards along the highway.
“I’ve got it. I have a phone number. It’s a 613 area code. Where is that?”
“Ottawa. That’s not going to help. What’s the address?”
Saint Jacques read the address. It meant nothing to Vanier.
“Let me check it, boss. I’ll call you back.”
The line disconnected. She called back two minutes later. “Two things: 613 covers Kingston as well as all the territory up to Ottawa. Second, the address is not far from where you are. What was the last exit you passed?”
“I turned around. I’m heading east. I got on at exit 632, and haven’t passed another since then.”
“Okay. According to the map, at the next exit, you’ll be maybe fifteen minutes from the address.”
Saint Jacques relayed the instructions, and Vanier followed. Twenty minutes from the highway he was there. The house was in darkness. Vanier parked on the road, and walked towards the house on the grass, staying off the gravel in the driveway. It didn’t take long for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He moved around the house, looking in the windows. If anyone was home, they were fast asleep upstairs. When he got around to the back, he saw the dock. He pulled out his phone and called Saint Jacques.
“I need you to look up a phone number for me.”
Twenty-four
Katya had been sitting in the back of the van for about two hours with three other women and a boy barely out of his teens. At first, there was no conversation, each of them imprisoned in recent memories. Finally, one of the women turned to her neighbour and asked, in Russian, “What did they tell you?”
“Nanny. I was going to be a nanny, looking after rich kids. I would work one year, maximum. Earn some money to send home and the rest to pay the cost of coming to Canada. After that I would be free.”
“I was going to work in a language school,” the boy said. “A tutor for Russian. Same thing, one year, that was it.”
“Liars,” Katya said.
They fell into silence again. “Where do you think we’re going?” the boy asked.
“The firemen. I think we’re being moved because the firemen came and checked. They want to hide us.”
“It’s a long way,” said another woman.
The conversation was stilted. None of them wanted to talk about what they had been through. None of them knew anything about where they were going. And they were all scared—their entire landscape was a prison.
After what seemed like two or three hours, the van slowed down to take a curve. They could see out the back window that they had left the highway. Half an hour later the streetlights ended, and there was only the blackness of the country and the brief lights of small villages. Eventually, they came to a halt, gravel scratching beneath the wheels. They waited, listened as the driver’s door opened and slammed closed. The back door of the van opened and the man called Makar gestured them out
side.
They stood on the gravel, stretching and staring around in the night. They were in the driveway of a large house that sat on its own in the gloom. The only light came from a single bulb above a garage. Beyond the building, the darkness had a different character, freckled with grey spots that appeared and disappeared at random. The night was loud with crickets, and Katya remembered how good fresh air could taste. She sucked it in and tried to imagine where she was.
“A river,” one of the girls whispered, nodding to the darkness beyond the building.
The front door of the house opened and they turned in that direction. Katya could make out two figures coming down the steps, carrying flashlights, the beams of light pointed straight ahead at the group in the driveway, the gravel crunching as the men approached.
Katya listened hard to distinguish words in the mumbled conversation between the two men and Makar, but could understand nothing. Then the three men broke like sheepdogs around the group and herded them up the driveway along the side of the building. Soon they were walking on grass, and the river came into view. They were led to the edge of the river, onto a wooden dock. One by one, they were hustled onto a boat. Makar stayed on the dock. There was another brief conversation between the three men, and Katya watched as Makar returned to the van.
One of the men led them into a small cabin and motioned for them to sit on a bench that ran along the wall. He left, and they heard the door being locked shut. Katya stood up and looked out through a porthole, but there was nothing to see beyond the small circle of light coming from the boat. She jumped when the boat’s motors exploded into life and they pulled away from the shore. Seconds later the lights on the boat went out. Katya kept watching out the porthole, leaning her hands against the wall to steady herself. The shoreline disappeared quickly.
In the dark cabin, the boy broke the silence. “America. The river is the St. Lawrence. It’s the border. We’re going to America.”
All five of them stood, peering through the portholes, but there was little to see except the occasional pinprick of light in the blackness. In fifteen minutes the boat had passed through a series of islands. It looked like they were on the open sea.
Almost imperceptibly at first, they heard the noise of another motor. It seemed to be getting louder, coming closer, until there was no mistaking the noise of a helicopter. It was directly over the boat, and its heavy, pulsing noise was the only thing they could hear. Night turned to day as the boat was bathed in light from the helicopter, then turned back to darkness when the boat swerved violently, and began weaving across the water in tight curves like a skier descending a mountain. Katya and the others had to sit down to be to avoid being pitched to the floor of the cabin. They heard a rattling and the door was flung open. A man played a flashlight into the cabin as though checking that they were still there.
“Out. Fast,” he shouted, gesturing them to follow him.
The boat was speeding across the waves in wide curves to avoid the helicopter. They filed out of the cabin like drunks, grabbing at anything to keep their balance, following the beam of the flashlight on the floor, and climbed the staircase leading to the deck. Katya was the last one to start climbing. When she was halfway up, the flashlight clicked off. The man was behind her, pushing her to move faster. On deck, Katya watched the helicopter trying to keep up with the speeding boat. Every few minutes the helicopter’s light swept across the deck. Each time, the boat changed course, and the light was lost.
At a loud hissing sound, Katya turned. It was an orange dingy, inflating on the deck. The man grabbed a rope, lifted the dingy and pitched it over the side, holding the rope. The dingy landed upside down and the man struggled at the rail to right it. He turned back to the five passengers and pointed to a ladder that led down to the water.
Someone screamed. “No. We will die. Please.”
The man yelled to be heard over the noise. “Into the fucking boat. All of you.” He pointed at the boy. “You first. Climb down the ladder and turn the boat up. Then you get in.”
The boy didn’t understand. Out of nowhere, the man suddenly had a gun in his hand. He pointed it at the boy and waved towards the ladder. The boy pulled himself along the boat’s rail to the ladder, holding on desperately to avoid being thrown over the side as the boat rose and crashed through the waves. He put one leg over the rail and started down the side of the boat.
The man watched him go, and then turned back to the women. He waved the gun again, pointing at one of the women. “You next. Faster.”
She pulled herself along the rail towards the ladder and looked down into the water. The boy was perched on the ladder as the boat ploughed through the waves. One second he was at the water line, and the next second, a metre above. The man on the deck pulled on the rope to manoeuvre the dingy towards the boy. The boy reached out and grabbed the rope, but he couldn’t manage to turn the dingy right side up. He hooked one leg over a rung on the ladder and used both arms to right the dingy. As it settled right side up on the water, they were bathed in light from the helicopter. The boat swerved violently, hit a wave and lurched out of the water before slamming back down. The impact dislodged the boy’s leg from the ladder, sending him into the water. Katya screamed. She watched the boy surface, already far behind the boat, watching the dingy being pulled away in the night. The woman at the top of the ladder froze. The man on the deck pushed her in the back with the gun.
“Okay, now you.”
She climbed down the ladder and half-jumped, half-fell into the dingy. As she did, another woman was already climbing down the ladder. She tried jumping for the dingy but missed, her hands slipping on the plastic sides before she managed to grasp the rope that ran around the side of the dingy. She held on, her body trailing behind in the wash. The third woman froze on the ladder, riding it up and down in the swell, unable to leap into the dingy. The man screamed at her. “Jump. Jump!”
She kept looking back and forth from the man to the dingy but she couldn’t find the courage to jump. The man put his leg over the rail and climbed down two rungs. He leaned down. “Jump!” he screamed at her. “Jump, I said. Fucking jump!”
She froze on the ladder even as he brought his heel down on one of her hands. He did the same to the other hand. Still, she kept her grip on the ladder. He tried harder, six or seven times on each hand until finally she let go. She dropped into the water and was lost in the swell. The man climbed back into the boat, pointed the gun at Katya. “Now you,” he screamed over the noise. “Move it.”
If she stayed high enough on the ladder, Katya thought, she could leap over the woman clutching the rope on the side of the dinghy and then be able to pull her to safety. She waited for the right moment and jumped. At the same time, the boat swerved violently and the dinghy fell into a trough. Katya landed on her belly on the rubber side. The impact dislodged the woman’s grip on the rope, and Katya could only watch as the woman disappeared into the blackness. She pulled herself onto the dinghy. The other woman was vomiting, half into the dinghy and half over the side. They were still being pulled alongside the boat, and Katya looked up to the deck. The man caught her eye as he let go of the rope. The dinghy stopped moving and settled in the water as the boat roared off.
Katya lay on her back looking up into the blinding light of the helicopter. At least she wasn’t going to die, she thought. Then she felt coldness at her feet. A growing puddle of water gushed in through a rip in the floor.
Twenty-five
The steel door closed behind Vanier and locked with a metallic finality. He was standing in a neon-bright cell looking at a shivering girl perched on a fold-down metal bed attached to the wall. She hadn’t looked up when he came in, or at the noise of the door closing behind him. She was staring at the floor, huddled under a silver hypothermic blanket, her legs drawn up to her chin.
“I’m Luc.”
No response.
She looked
fragile, like he could have tipped her to the floor with a slight push and she would have tumbled and shattered into pieces. Water had pooled around her on the metal ledge. He noticed a flash of yellow beneath the silver blanket. She was still wearing the clothes she had been wearing when they pulled her out of the St. Lawrence. He reached over and pulled at the blanket around her.
“You should take the wet clothes off, just keep the blanket.”
Again, no response. He turned back to the door and rapped it with his knuckles.
The door opened with the noise of grinding steel, and Vanier stepped into the hallway. “She’s freezing. She’s still wearing her damned clothes,” he said to the uniformed officer.
“I was told to wait for a female officer to come on duty. We don’t have anything to give her.”
Vanier didn’t slow down to listen, pushed past the uniform. “Give her a proper blanket at least,” he yelled over his shoulder as he strode off. “I’ll be back.”
Thirty minutes later Vanier returned, carrying two plastic Walmart bags. He took them into the cell. The girl was curled in a fetal position on the ledge, wrapped in a coarse brown blanket, her clothes and a towel in a wet pile on the floor. She was still shivering.
“It’s me again. Luc. I got you these.”
She was staring blankly into some middle distance. He put the two bags on the floor in front of her and pulled clothes from the bag—underwear, a shirt, jeans, a thick sweater, gloves and a woollen toque. He took the toque and pulled it onto her head.
“Put the clothes on, you’ll feel better. I’m going to get a coffee. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Can I get you something?”
He rapped on the door again. As it opened he heard a small voice. “Coffee.”
He turned. She hadn’t moved.
“Cream and sugar?”
“Sugar,” she said.
When he came back with two coffees, she was dressed and sitting with her back to the wall. He pulled the lid off one and offered it to her. She reached out and took it, clasping it in her hands, blowing on the surface and sipping at the same time. He put his own coffee on the floor, gathered the wet clothes into an empty plastic bag and sat down on the floor, his back to the wall.
