He dragged the hand that was attached to the IV up to his chest.
A nurse entered the room. She made a disapproving noise in her throat, taking Youssef’s hand and placing it back under the sheet.
“His blood pressure’s rising. Whatever you’re doing, it’s time for you to stop. He shouldn’t be disturbed.”
Her French was plain enough for Esa to understand. He answered her in English.
“I’m sorry. I need to ask him something else. It won’t take me a minute. Could you wait outside?”
She reached over and patted Youssef’s curls. Murmuring to the boy in French, she asked, “Do you want me to get rid of him? This is the last thing you need.”
Youssef managed a tired smile. “C’est bon. I can answer.”
The nurse flounced to the door, quivering with primness. At the door she turned and said, “Inspector Lemaire is waiting for you outside.”
When she’d gone, Esa turned back to the boy.
“Youssef. This is important. Can you tell me about Amadou? Can you tell me what you remember about Amadou?”
The nurse had lowered Youssef’s bed, and now his head sank deeply into the pillow. Tears slipped down his face through lashes as thickly tangled as his curls.
“It felt like I was alone for a long time. But I had a sense that the shooter was still at my side—I’m not sure why. I must have passed out, because I don’t remember how long I lay there. But when I became conscious again, Amadou was holding on to me. He was trying to bandage me up. He must have saved my life.”
“But he wasn’t with you during the shooting?”
“No. He had a meeting with another friend, so he didn’t want to wait around. He must have heard the shooting and come back.”
Such a narrow window, Khattak thought. Between Amadou’s departure from the mosque, the shooting that had begun in the basement, and the all-out assault in the main prayer space. How quickly the assailant must have moved.
But at least part of Amadou’s statement was borne out by Youssef’s recollection. Why would Amadou have come back to save someone he’d just shot? If Amadou was the shooter, why risk being found at the scene?
He needed to ask Youssef the question point-blank.
Leaning closer so Youssef could hear, he said, “Was it Amadou you saw, Youssef? Was Amadou the shooter?”
Youssef coughed, tears watering his eyes.
“No—no—I told you. Amadou came back to save me.”
Cursing himself for doing so, Khattak pushed a little harder.
The boy’s eyes were closing, he was almost asleep, but Khattak needed to be sure.
“How do you know, Youssef? How can you be sure it wasn’t him?”
The boy’s hands relaxed on the bedsheet, his breathing evening out. He closed his eyes without speaking. Khattak waited another few moments, hoping for a change. It didn’t come until he was at the door.
Youssef struggled against the effects of the medication, pushing himself up on his elbows. Panic shone through his eyes.
“‘Ya Allah, ya Allah,’” he recited.
Esa took his hand. “What is it? You mustn’t upset yourself, Youssef.”
“It wasn’t Amadou; it wasn’t.”
“Did you see the shooter’s face?”
Youssef’s eyes were wide with horror, the realization new.
“It was a woman who shot me. She looked at me when she was done.”
“You saw her face?” Khattak gripped his hand.
“I couldn’t. No one could see her face. She was wearing a black abaya.”
21
“Any news?”
They were in Lemaire’s car headed to the team briefing, where a fully functioning incident room was in the process of being organized out of offices loaned to Lemaire’s team by the mayor of Saint-Isidore. Khattak had also requested that Paul Gaffney, Community Policing’s cybersecurity expert, be added to the team, and Gaffney was en route now, though he wouldn’t reach Saint-Isidore in time to make the meeting.
Khattak answered Lemaire’s brusque request by giving him the essence of Youssef Soufiane’s statement. Lemaire whistled out loud. He shot a glance at Rachel in the back as he turned down the main road.
“What do you think?”
Rachel appreciated the fact that he was seeking her input. Many senior officers didn’t.
“One, I think you need to release Amadou Duchon. Soufiane confirms his story, which makes Amadou a hero. There’s no reason he should be under guard, except for his own safety.” She’d grown a bit more politically savvy since her time at Community Policing. She wasn’t oblivious to the racial undercurrents in Québec. “Think about the optics. You release a white man at the scene found with the weapon in his hand. But you put a black paramedic who was trying to save lives under arrest. I don’t think you appreciate the shitstorm you’re calling down on your head, sir.”
“Lemaire.” He made another turn, pulling into a parking lot and usurping a spot at the front. “You don’t frame it as a matter of justice, I notice. You think a Québécois cop isn’t susceptible to that kind of appeal?”
Rachel caught the smile that Khattak quickly suppressed. She glared at him. He was used to her lack of tact; he was probably happy that it was Lemaire’s turn to get a taste of it. He didn’t interfere, leaving her to talk herself out of what she’d just said.
“Nothing to do with you or the Sûreté, sir. Happens in every jurisdiction, including ours. I take it as a matter of justice every single time. Not everyone I’ve worked with does. Not like Inspector Khattak.”
Lemaire didn’t seem pleased by the endorsement. Neither agreeing nor disagreeing with Rachel’s assessment, he said to Khattak, “You’re sure about Duchon?”
“I’ll accept all responsibility for the decision to release him.”
Lemaire slammed out of the car. “Not necessary. My choice, my responsibility.”
They stared each other down in the parking lot.
“We only have a few minutes,” he warned. “You’re worried about Duchon. What about when I announce that the suspect was wearing a burqa? What do you think will happen? They’ll connect it to Duchon. Then it explodes and goes national.”
“Yes.” Khattak’s response was dry. “I could write the headlines myself.”
“Sirs.” Rachel’s sharp interruption drew both men’s eyes to her. “You’re making an assumption. Just because Youssef Soufiane saw a woman dressed in a robe doesn’t mean that’s who the shooter was.”
“No? I’m not following.”
Isabelle Clément was waiting at the top of the stairs. She signaled to Lemaire and he nodded. Feeling the pressure of the time, Rachel made it quick.
“It’s the easiest disguise in the world. It stirs up the kind of trouble Saint-Isidore has been trying to keep under wraps. It explodes the whole Charter of Values debate. And it targets a community that some in Québec are all too happy to demonize. As Inspector Khattak could tell you, it’s not all that different in Ontario. You should have seen what happened when a local politician tried to table an anti-Islamophobia motion.”
She wanted Lemaire to believe that she possessed no innate anti-Québécois prejudice. That wasn’t who she was or what she stood for. If she believed otherwise, she wouldn’t be Esa Khattak’s partner.
“I did.” Lemaire’s hostility eased. “It wasn’t pretty. Neither was Saint-Isidore’s Code of Conduct.” He motioned to Isabelle Clément that she shouldn’t wait for them. The press liaison turned on her heel and disappeared inside the building, unflustered by her dismissal.
“What exactly happened with the Code of Conduct here? What inspired the need for it?”
Lemaire stretched out his back and sighed. “They have quite a lot of foreign students at the university. It raised the profile of … certain activities.” He flicked a glance at Khattak, indicating that he should explain.
It was Khattak’s turn to sigh. “Observing the month of fasting, and so on. The ordinary things t
hat make up to day-to-day life.”
Lemaire cleared his throat, sounding a little embarrassed. “So at a town meeting here, someone protested these … foreign practices. And it was moved that newcomers needed to be warned.”
“Not against Ramadan,” Khattak corrected. “Nor against the mosque. No, the Code of Conduct was meant to address the fear that Muslims in Saint-Isidore might take it into their heads to start cutting off hands or stoning women. The Code was meant to warn them off.”
Rachel knew Khattak’s poker face quite well. Despite the seriousness of the subject, she caught the quick twitch of his lips.
“Put like that, it does sound rather ridiculous. They didn’t spell it out when they were drafting the Code—they didn’t come out and say ‘we don’t want Muslims here.’” Lemaire sounded fed up by the fact that he was splitting hairs. “But that’s, in effect, what it came to. Islam is seen as a danger to the secular values of Québec. And someone took that lesson to heart. My team will be working for weeks to solve this, and nothing they do will be right.”
He spared Khattak a brief glance of commiseration.
“You’ve been through it, eh? You know what I’m talking about.”
It was an oblique reference to the parliamentary hearing where Khattak had been compelled to clear his name of suspicion. It told Rachel that in the little time Lemaire had had available since the shooting, he’d found it necessary to do a little digging.
But the place of sympathy he’d arrived at shattered another of Rachel’s assumptions.
“Okay,” Lemaire said to Rachel. “You’ve made some good points. We can’t leap to conclusions just because the shooter was wearing an abaya. But we do have to consider whether the shooter may have been a disaffected member of the mosque. Someone with a personal grudge. We can’t ask the imam. But Père Étienne or Rabbi Avner might have heard something through their interfaith group. We should follow that up.”
“We should also ask Alizah,” Khattak suggested. “She and Amadou were involved in the mosque. If there’s something to what you’re saying, Alizah won’t have missed it.”
“No,” Lemaire agreed, with a decided lack of enthusiasm. “Your young friend pays very close attention to everything that happens in this town. She never fails to remind me of things I’ve overlooked.”
“I can follow up with Alizah, if you’d prefer.”
A droll note in his voice, Lemaire answered, “Yes. I’m sure you make an entirely different impression on the mademoiselle than I do.”
Khattak’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t respond. Rachel rushed in to fill the silence.
“Youssef’s testimony does give us something, though. It explains a hell of a lot about how no one had time to escape.”
“Go on.”
With Lemaire’s blue eyes fixed on her face, Rachel swallowed.
“The shooter entered through the women’s entrance dressed in an abaya. The abaya concealed the guns. So whoever was wearing it was able to take them by surprise.”
22
It was five in the morning now. Everyone was edgy and desperately in need of sleep. But their INSET team would be working through the next few days without snatching more than a few hours of rest here and there.
Rachel’s ponytail was beginning to hurt. Slinking down into her chair and waiting for Lemaire to begin the briefing, she released it from its rubber band and gently massaged her scalp. Lemaire gave her one of his penetrating looks, making a quick survey of her face and hair before turning to one of his aides. If it had been her former boss doing it, Rachel would have found an excuse to leave the room.
But Lemaire had only looked; he hadn’t leered. And then he’d looked away.
She combed her fingers through her straggly hair, pondering this. Was she getting a vibe from Lemaire, or was her lack of sleep affecting her otherwise incisive thought processes? He didn’t look her way again, so she rubbed her eyes, wondering how Khattak was faring without rest. He was standing at the front of the room with Lemaire, leaning against a whiteboard, his hands in his pockets, letting his gaze range over the material the team had collected.
Crime scene photographs were still being processed and tacked to whiteboards. There appeared to be some confusion as to what to prioritize. Most of the investigators and technicians had come in from Montréal, along with an experienced team of pathologists. The local police were not equipped to deal with a crime of this scope, yet they didn’t appreciate being muscled out. Unlike Khattak, who was scrupulously polite when asked to advise on a case, Lemaire wasted no time smoothing ruffled feathers. In one way, Rachel admired it. In another, she knew that the person who would bear the brunt of the local cops’ displeasure wouldn’t be Christian Lemaire—it would be Esa Khattak.
Lemaire nodded at someone she couldn’t see. Rachel turned to look behind her. At the back of the room the premier’s press liaison stood with her briefcase in hand, still as smoothly poised as she’d been hours before. She’d changed her clothes and was wearing more practical footwear—but other than that, everything about her appeared the same.
Khattak’s charisma had had no impact on Isabelle Clément. She was entirely focused on her job. She gave off an air of chilly competence and Rachel sympathized. Clément was an attractive woman in a nearly all-male environment. Whether at City Hall or among police officers, she would be guarded against giving anyone she worked with what they perceived as an opening. Perhaps the rhetoric that reached her ears was more sophisticated than what Rachel so frequently dealt with, but it amounted to the same thing in the end. Unwanted, unwelcome attention that hindered a woman’s performance of her job.
Not to mention the uncounted cost of prolonged psychological stress.
She glanced at Clément’s hand for a wedding ring, even as she knew that a ring on a person’s finger made no difference to a would-be harasser or to anyone who thought he was entitled to personal attention.
Maybe she was constructing an artificial sense of solidarity with Clément because she was so often the lone woman in the room, just as Khattak was nearly always the sole senior investigator who was also a person of color.
Here the INSET team was uniformly white, including the officers seconded from the Sûreté. Rachel’s mouth quirked as she realized the senior pathologist was a woman of South Asian background, neatly rounding out a stereotype. She looked impatient and frazzled, wearing a lab coat with the kind of pocket protector that had been popular decades ago, rammed with pens and highlighters. She was tapping her foot impatiently, as though counting the minutes until she could return to where she was needed. She didn’t look as though she suffered fools gladly. Like Clément, she looked entirely capable of handling Lemaire, Khattak, or anyone else who thought about obstructing her work.
Lemaire invited the pathologist to speak first. He introduced her as Dr. Sunny Agarwal.
“English or French?” she snapped, a question that summed up the language politics of the province.
Lemaire nodded at Khattak, a gesture of respect.
“English. For now.”
One of the doctor’s assistants handed out a one-page summary of her findings. She didn’t go over the number of dead and wounded; it was there for them to read. She did explain that two different guns had been used at the scene—one a 9mm handgun, the other the AR-15. She was also able to give them a sense of how many shots had been fired from the handgun and how many from the assault rifle. Casings were still being recovered from the scene.
“I won’t waste your time with the details. We’ll have a reconstruction model for you by the morning, so you’ll know exactly where the shooter or shooters stood. There wasn’t a lot of movement or panic on the shooter’s part. No one got close enough to intercept him, though we are still testing for DNA. There is one thing, though, that stands out.”
She motioned to her assistant for a whiteboard.
She tacked a sketch onto it. Every officer in the room leaned forward to peer at it. Watching them, Dr. Agarwa
l made an exasperated noise. She took a black marker and drew a set of three large black dots that even those at the back could see.
“I spoke to the surgeons who worked on Youssef Soufiane. He was shot three times in the back, but not with the assault rifle. He was shot with the handgun. And he was also stabbed.” She shook her head at herself. “No, sorry. I don’t mean stabbed. He was marked.” She put a photograph up on the board beside the three black dots, showing a faint tracery on Youssef Soufiane’s back.
When no one in the room responded, she clicked her tongue. She took up the marker again, this time tracing a pattern between the dots.
Rachel bit back a gasp.
Because what the shooter had done was quite deliberate.
He’d marked Youssef Soufiane with an emblem of Québec.
In this case, the fleur-de-lis.
* * *
When Dr. Agarwal was finished, Lemaire spoke next, then Khattak. A private conference between the two men and Clément yielded the decision to immediately release Amadou, while keeping him under watch. Clément would make it clear in her statement that there were no eyewitnesses to the shooting and that there was no one who could identify the suspect. The information about the black abaya would not be released, though it broadened the scope of their search.
Lemaire addressed the room, this time in French.
“So now we are looking for three things: the handgun, the knife, and the abaya. It is for certain that the shooter will find the possession of these items too hot. They will either be destroyed or discarded. And if it is the latter, we must determine where. Do we have anything on the assault rifle or the handgun?”
The ballistics technician stepped forward. He held a report in his hand that he passed to Lemaire.
“Nothing on the handgun, sir. But we’ve gathered some information on the AR-15.”
“That was quick,” Lemaire said.
A Deadly Divide Page 9
