A Deadly Divide

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  “Then you’d better marry me quickly, hadn’t you?”

  She took his hand in hers, tracing the outline of his stitches. His pulse pounded beneath the careful touch.

  “God, Sehr, this is torture.”

  “No,” she said huskily. “Torture is when you vanish without a word. It’s watching Rachel call you and you not answering your phone. It’s finding out she’s called an ambulance because something terrible has happened.” She blinked the tears from her lashes. “I’m used to waiting for you, Esa. That doesn’t mean I hate it any less.”

  Fear stabbed through his thoughts. Sehr had often protested the dangerous nature of his work. It was one of the reasons he was reconsidering his job.

  “Do you want me to stop what I’m doing? Do you want me to leave this job?” His grave eyes were steady on hers.

  Sehr drew a shaky breath, the sound tearing at his defenses. She reached forward to take his face in her hands—hands that were slender and strong.

  “You’ve been asleep most of the day,” she said. “So you don’t know what’s happened. You don’t know about the leak of the footage or the way that everything’s changed—the way they’re looking at us now.” She brushed his lips with hers, whispering the words into his mouth. “So no, Esa. I don’t want you to stop. I want you to save us all.”

  43

  Late in the day, Rachel, Gaffney, and Benoit sat at the desk in Lemaire’s office. He’d given up his office to them so they’d have complete privacy to examine the material from the envelope Khattak had found. Lemaire himself had a more imperative concern. Despite his warnings to the contrary, someone on the inside had leaked the footage of the woman in the abaya to Pascal Richard. Richard had not only made the footage available through his blog; he’d made it the only subject on his program. As a predictable result, the tenor of the national response to the shooting had altered, yielding to a firestorm of hate. Lemaire was stuck in meetings addressing this latest crisis.

  A set of photographs were spread across the desk. They were copies. The originals, along with the envelope they’d been in, were at the lab. Rachel had insisted on receiving copies of the photographs, disturbed by Lemaire’s admission about the infiltration of the Sûreté by elements of the far right.

  The investigation was plagued with additional leaks that made their job much harder. Who was to say that the envelope wouldn’t be made to mysteriously disappear? She’d logged it into evidence herself, making sure both Gaffney and Benoit were in attendance.

  Now they studied the photographs together. Benoit’s eager desire to please was palpable, whereas Gaffney was merely thoughtful, making observations about the type of lens used and the framing of each photograph, laying out the context clues.

  His ability to be so calm secretly infuriated Rachel, whose stomach was a twisted mass of worry and suspicion. She’d been popping anti-acid pills to keep a lid on her emotions. She and Khattak had had some bad moments in the past—she expected them as part of her job. But the photographs presented a new and unknown form of menace. She’d waited for Lemaire to act, to respond to Khattak’s suggestion regarding the profiler, and when he hadn’t she’d made the decision herself, putting a call through to Superintendent Killiam to get the help she needed. And reiterating to Killiam her theories on Lemaire’s reluctance to act.

  They’d never had an investigation dissolve into shambles like this. They needed immediate course correction, so Rachel had plunged ahead.

  “Two years,” Gaffney said upon a thorough examination of the photographs.

  Rachel frowned at him, a signal to elaborate.

  “As best as I can tell, the photographs go back two years. Khattak will have to confirm it, of course, but I’d say that’s pretty close.”

  Rachel swallowed. Hard.

  Each photograph on the table depicted a moment in Khattak’s life—taken without his awareness. They weren’t photographs of his public life, the press conferences he’d given, the accounts of the resolution of various CPS cases—nor even of the Drayton inquiry that had been reported so widely in the press. The photographs were personal, deeply intimate, prying into the corners of Khattak’s private life, a grossly personal intrusion.

  Many were moments Rachel recognized, moments she had been a part of.

  She ran them down one by one, explaining them to the others.

  A photograph of Khattak at a bus station. He was standing on the steps of the bus looking down at a young woman wearing a loose black head scarf, sadness and regret in his eyes. The photograph had been taken in Esfahān, a city in Iran.

  A photograph of Khattak exiting a mosque in Izmir with a young Syrian man at his side, his face calm and reassuring, his hand gripping the young man’s shoulder.

  A photograph of Khattak and Sehr on a terrace behind a small Greek hotel, clasped in an intimate embrace.

  A photograph of Khattak at his father’s clinic in Toronto, taken with a long lens through a window. In the photograph, Khattak was holding a bundle of letters in his hand.

  There were other photographs, too. Khattak poised on the edge of the Scarborough Bluffs, rain streaking his face, as he made an impassioned plea. There were also deeply disturbing close-ups taken of the people who mattered most to Khattak. His mother, Angeza Khattak. His sisters, Ruksh and Misbah. His oldest friend, Nathan Clare, and Nathan’s younger sister, Audrey.

  But there were three photographs on the table that disturbed Rachel more than all the rest.

  One was of herself. She was lying on the ice at Algonquin Park as Khattak tried to resuscitate her, anguish distorting his features. The second photograph showed Rachel recovered from her near drowning, Khattak’s arms wrapped around her, a poignant relief on his face. She swallowed at the sight of it, at this proof of how much he valued her—of what he was prepared to risk for her, just as she’d been so frantic to rescue him last night. Blinking back furious tears, she pushed the photograph away.

  It was the third and final photograph of the group that sent a chill down Rachel’s spine.

  It was a photograph of Sehr taken when Sehr was alone. But not at her office in Toronto or near the duplex she owned just north of the downtown core.

  The photograph had been taken on Lesvos, Greece. Sehr was at the Mytilene airport waiting for a flight to come home. Four days ago she’d been in Greece.

  And someone had been following her there.

  * * *

  When Lemaire finally walked into the room, Rachel was brooding over two of the photographs with an expression of deep abstraction. They were the ones of Rachel held fiercely in Khattak’s embrace. Lemaire’s eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t share his thoughts. Instead, he told her about his appointment at Pascal Richard’s station.

  “We need to take immediate action. We have to find out who leaked the footage to Richard.”

  “I’m coming with you to the studio.”

  She gathered up the photographs, rattling off her theories about the attack on Khattak all the way to the car.

  “There are two very clear-cut possibilities here. One, it could be that the Allegiance has had its sights on Khattak for some time. They lured him to that building to work him over, maybe as a warning. Maybe the shooting at the mosque was meant to draw him to Québec.”

  Though Lemaire didn’t agree, he waited for the rest.

  “Two. The incidents are unconnected. What happened in Saint-Isidore is connected to the angle you’ve been working. The infiltration of politics and law enforcement by white supremacist organizations. The photographs left for Inspector Khattak—the assault on his person—they represent something else. Something twisted and frankly terrifying. The Wolf Allegiance logo was just a smoke screen to throw us off the scent.”

  Lemaire glanced over at her. Though her summary encompassed two equally drastic scenarios, she couldn’t hide her enthusiasm and interest. She loved police work, no matter how dark its parameters.

  She caught him looking and was genuinely puzzled.


  “What?”

  He looked at her a little longer, then cleared his throat before he answered.

  “Where do you allot the text messages? To the first scenario, or the second?”

  Gaffney and Benoit had thus far been unable to dig up anything on the origin of the messages. They’d stripped Khattak’s loaner phone of its delivery applications, trying to force his correspondent into another means of contact.

  Rachel tipped her head to one side, her ponytail swinging across her cheek. Lemaire reached over and brushed her hair from her face. A stilted silence fell between them. Rachel inhaled sharply, speaking with a catch in her breath.

  “I’m convinced the text messages belong to the second scenario. The photographs go back too far—they suggest a long and disturbing fascination with my boss. It feels like the shooting here was incidental to those pictures—just one more thing they recorded about his life.”

  “Why lure him to the warehouse then? Why harm him but leave him alive? We’ve pulled no forensic evidence from the scene. The wall he told us about—the window where the envelope was found. They have only his fingerprints. He talked about a sign near the door. There’s no sign there. No chair in the room, no mural on the wall.”

  She paused, thinking it through for herself. Another ten minutes passed before they reached Pascal Richard’s studio, where Lemaire had made an appointment. Rachel wondered if Richard had summoned a lawyer to attend. Whatever she and Lemaire put to Richard now would be broadcast on tomorrow morning’s program, making the interview trickier than most.

  She charged a little ahead in her eagerness, reaching the entrance to the studio first. Lemaire caught her up, detaining her with a hand on her elbow.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Turning back to look at him, she tackled his question head on.

  “Doesn’t the fact that the scene didn’t match Inspector Khattak’s description of it make things seem more ominous? To me it seems like someone was playing with him—making him think it was about the Allegiance when in fact it wasn’t? And you have to admit that this seems far beyond the capabilities of Maxime’s gang of thugs. So maybe whoever took these pictures knew where their home base was, and was devious enough to make use of it.” She shifted the packet of photographs, checking to make sure they were secure in her pocket. He knew she’d requested a second set because she didn’t trust his team.

  “There’s a possibility you haven’t considered yet, Rachel. Maybe there was no mural. No chair in the room, no flashlight on the floor, no footsteps in the dust. We didn’t find evidence of any of these things.”

  Rachel’s thick eyebrows shot up. “You’re saying he was hallucinating?”

  “I’m saying your partner may have his own reasons for painting this scenario. It’s no secret that he’s been a vocal critic of the failures of policing when it comes to minority communities.”

  Rachel took a step back. She opened and closed her mouth without speaking. Gold flints of rage set fire to her eyes.

  In a furious voice, she gritted, “You think my boss made this up? That he manufactured his injuries and sold you a pack of lies to get himself some publicity? Did you see him?”

  “It isn’t impossible for the injuries he sustained to have been self-inflicted. In fact, it’s rather easy.”

  Rachel’s fury at Lemaire reached such a peak that he let go of her arm.

  “You don’t see anything but race, do you? If you’re not pure laine, you’re inferior.”

  He made a quick gesture of surrender, holding up his hands.

  “No, no, Rachel. That’s not why. You’re misinterpreting my motives.”

  “I’d say they’re pretty clear. I doubt you’d accuse a member of the Sûreté of such a reprehensible offense.”

  Lemaire’s response derailed her.

  “Inspector Khattak said he hadn’t touched the envelope that was stuck between the boards. He waited for the crime scene unit to take possession—isn’t that correct?”

  Rachel gave him a wary nod. “So?”

  Lemaire sighed heavily. “The only fingerprints found on the envelope and on the photographs are his.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true.”

  Rachel chewed her lip, her mind working furiously.

  “He was unconscious for some time,” she pointed out. “No reason whoever attacked him couldn’t have pressed his fingers to the contents of the envelope without him being aware of it.”

  “Why would they?” he asked simply.

  “To create this doubt in your mind.” She fingered the tight knot of her ponytail. “To distract you from the matter at hand. It’s pretty consistent, actually.” She nodded to herself, convinced of her conclusion. “Just like the footage from the camera. The woman fleeing the scene in an abaya. It’s intended as a distraction, to keep us from tracking these crimes to their source. It hides what’s really been happening here in Saint-Isidore.”

  “And what is that, Rachel?”

  She watched him flinch from the judgment in her eyes.

  “You know the answer to that. Because you’re part of the problem.”

  44

  Lemaire knocked on Richard’s door. The radio host was alone, unencumbered by a legal representative who would have hamstrung the interview before it could begin. He waved them both to a chair and took his own seat, rocking back in it, flushed and genial with triumph. His program on the footage had been a coup. He’d called it “Twisted Sister” after the woman in the abaya, and supporters of the Allegiance had jammed his lines.

  Rachel couldn’t begin to imagine how dispirited the families of the dead were feeling now—how shocked they must be by the news that a woman wearing an abaya had fled the crime scene with a gun.

  Lemaire glared across the desk at Richard, not bothering with small talk.

  “Who was the leak, Richard?”

  Richard grinned at Rachel. “Maybe it was the pretty lady at your side.”

  Lemaire didn’t take the bait, waiting Richard out.

  Rachel did the same. She’d swallowed her anger at Lemaire’s allegations against Khattak and now she radiated patience—a dullness that was designed to set Pascal Richard at ease.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you, Christian,” Richard said easily. “As a journalist, I must protect my sources.”

  “A journalist is supposed to present the facts. That’s not how I would characterize the elements of your show.”

  Richard leaned forward, addressing himself to Rachel.

  “My duty is to the citizens of this province. They have a right to be informed of jihadists in their midst—a right to defend themselves, if necessary.”

  Rachel palmed her notebook and unhurriedly rifled through its pages, until she found the spot where she’d summarized Khattak’s comments on his interview with Richard.

  “Oh, I completely agree, sir.” Her tone was warm and confidential. “But I’m seeing here that when Inspector Khattak spoke to you about the shooting and suggested that the Wolf Allegiance might be behind the shooting at the mosque, you called them ‘disenfranchised young men who’ve been bearing the burden of reverse racism for too long.’ Were those your words?”

  His chest swelling, Richard affirmed, “I stand by them.”

  Now Rachel pinned him with her gaze. “So if a white man shot up the mosque, he’d be a disenfranchised youth, whereas if a Muslim woman did it, she’d be a jihadist? Is that right?”

  Richard’s eyes narrowed. He spluttered a little. “That’s not what I said, Sergeant.”

  Rachel stared at her notebook, pretending confusion.

  “You just said that you did. I’m a little curious. Do the people of Québec have the right to be informed of neo-Nazis in their midst?”

  Pascal’s jaw snapped shut. “You’re using the wrong term. The young men of the Wolf Allegiance are not Nazis—they should be called the alt-right. Or white nationalists, if you will.”

  Quite amiably, Rachel respon
ded, “I won’t. I think when you’re advocating the removal of a group of people by violent means and when you throw around the term ‘white genocide’ it’s pretty safe to assume we’re talking about white supremacists and to call them neo-Nazis.” She lowered her voice, mock confiding. “Some of them are actual Nazis. They even have swastika tattoos.”

  Lemaire followed this up. “You had callers cheering on the shooting today, Richard. The families haven’t even had the chance to bury their dead. You have a responsibility as a public broadcaster.”

  Richard was unfazed. He lit a cigarette without asking them if they minded that he smoked. Rachel got up and opened the window that opened on to the lake. She stood there for several minutes, breathing in the fresh air. She was tempted to walk out onto the terrace.

  It wasn’t the cigarette smoke she found polluting. It was Richard himself.

  “The CRTC hasn’t revoked my license. And they would be in the best position to know. Federalists, aren’t they?” he said, with a knowing little smile. He’d referred to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and the standards that broadcasters were required to adhere to.

  “I’ve been monitoring the comments section on your blog. I’ve no doubt you’ll be getting a call from the commission quite soon.”

  But Richard was undaunted by the warning, his complacency at odds with the precariousness of his position. He blew smoke in Lemaire’s face, a gleam of smugness in his eyes.

  “Your assault on freedom of expression is most pernicious. You’re playing fast and loose with Québec’s most sacred values. I can assure you that no amount of religious accommodation will permit you to silence voices of dissent. The people of this province will not stand for it. And after all, there is no relevant law you can hold up as a shield.”

  “There’s the Criminal Code, which has specific provisions against inciting hate,” Lemaire rebutted. “As federal legislation, it’s more than enough.”