by Ian Rogers
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Copyright Page
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I
The old warehouse stood at the edge of the water like a sentinel watching the lake. A darkhouse instead of a lighthouse, its purpose not to guide ships in safely but to warn them away on penalty of death, destruction, and even worse fates.
The car pulling onto the property heeded no such warning. The people inside were used to ignoring cautions of this type. It was, in fact, their job.
Charles was behind the wheel, while Sally sat next to him in the shotgun seat. Toby sat in the back, slumped down, tapping his hands against the back of Charles’s seat to a rhythm only he could hear. Charles was about to tell him to put his hands down or he was going to lose them, but it was pointless now. They had arrived.
The security guard who had pulled the gate open for them was now dragging it back into place as they swung around and parked in the large lot, empty except for the guard’s SUV.
In its heyday, the North Water fish processing plant had employed five hundred people. The building and the parking lot together occupied some of the most prime waterfront real estate in the city. It was a mystery to local developers why the land hadn’t been sold for condos or some lakeside attraction. But the current owners of the property had no interest in such things. They were in the business of mysteries.
Charles, Sally, and Toby got out of the car and went over to meet the guard. It was a dismal gray day with a heavy fog hanging in the air. The city looked like a smoker’s dirty lung.
“You guys with the insurance company?” the guard said.
Charles thought he sounded nervous—a perfectly normal reaction when speaking with someone from an insurance company. He imagined how much more unsettled the man would be if he knew exactly what kind of insurance company he was dealing with. Not that the man needed another reason for his current state, considering what he had been through. And what he had found.
“My name is Charles Courtney,” he said. “I’m an insurance investigator with the Mereville Group. These are my associates, Sally Wakefield and Toby Klein.”
Charles gestured at his companions. Sally gave a demure nod while Toby waggled his fingers. Charles groaned inwardly and pictured himself breaking those fingers one by one.
He knew they made an odd trio. Charles was in his late forties, while Sally and Toby were in their early twenties. Charles was dressed in a charcoal suit with a fine chalk stripe, a white oxford shirt, and a gold-and-silver tie. Sally was also wearing a suit, a black Donna Karan, with a pair of matching pumps. While Toby, a recent addition to the Mereville Group, was wearing a brown corduroy jacket, jeans, a raglan baseball shirt, and a pair of scruffy Converse sneakers that looked like they’d been stolen off a hobo.
“I already spoke to the cops,” said the guard, whose nametag said VOORMAN. “I don’t know what else…”
“We’d like to go over the details of the incident with you,” Charles said.
“I don’t know…” Voorman glanced over his shoulder at the warehouse. “Maybe I should talk to my boss … or my union rep.”
“As the employer of your employer, I can assure you that anything you divulge will remain among us.”
Charles looked to his companions to back him up. Sally gave another small nod, along with an equally small and conspiratorial grin, while Toby pantomimed running a zipper across his mouth. Again, Charles imagined performing painful tortures on his nettlesome colleague.
Voorman let out a sigh that seemed to deflate his entire body. He was a short, round-shouldered man with receding hair, jowly cheeks, and a nest of chins that appeared to be propping his head up. He wore a navy bomber jacket with the name of his firm, Eveready Security, in small block letters over the left breast. His white button-down was so transparent from too many trips through the washing machine that his undershirt was visible through the material. A clip-on tie hung crookedly from his collar, and part of his shirt was untucked from his polyester slacks. A black leather belt was holding up his belly the way his chins were holding up his head. Attached to it were a long-barrelled Maglite and an empty holster that once held a radio.
Charles knew why the radio was missing. It was for Voorman to keep in contact with his partner, which was no longer necessary. His partner was dead.
“You’re here because of Frank, right?” Voorman said. “Frank Budden?”
“He was your partner?” Charles said. He already knew this to be true, but found it useful when speaking to a witness to start with the easy questions and then work his way up to the hard ones.
Voorman nodded, his chins folding inward like a fleshy accordion.
“Were you friends?”
Voorman considered the question, then shrugged. “We didn’t hang out or anything outside of work, but yeah, I guess you could say we were friends. You get pretty close to a guy when your entire job is standing around keeping watch on a place, just the two of you.”
“How long have you been working at this location?”
“About four months. The company usually puts us on a six-month rotation for a site like this, where there’s not much to do except make sure no one breaks in. Not that anyone would break into this place. It’s empty.”
“How do you know that?” Charles said.
The words came out a bit more bluntly than he intended, and Voorman recoiled as if Charles had snapped a punch at him.
“I, uh, went inside when I was looking for Frank. I was … I was the one who found him.”
“And he was deceased?”
Voorman nodded again, rapidly this time, sending his chins bouncing. “Oh yeah. He was big time dead. Real bad dead.”
That’s one way of putting it, Charles thought. Another would be to say the man had been ripped to bloody pieces.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, Mr. Voorman, but it was my understanding that the orders for this location were that no one, not even the on-site security, was to enter the warehouse.”
The colour drained from Voorman’s face. It was like watching a pitcher of Kool-Aid being made in reverse. His lips began to tremble.
“Yes, sir, that’s correct, sir. We never went into the warehouse before. I swear it on my mother’s name.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Charles said. “Just tell me what happened.”
“It was a shift like any other,” Voorman said. “Frank and me was on nights—midnight to eight o’clock. What usually happens is we sit in one of our cars, shooting the shit, drinking coffee, and take turns walking the perimeter, every hour on the hour. That’s the way we’re supposed to do it, by the book.” He held up his hand, palm outward.
Charles motioned for him to continue.
“At three in the morning it was Frank’s turn to walk the block—that’s what we call it—but he never came back. It usually takes about fifteen, twenty minutes to do
our rounds, ’cause we’re supposed to do more than just walk around the site; we’re also supposed to check to make sure no one’s cut holes in the fence or busted any windows in the warehouse, even though most of them have already been smashed out.”
Charles twirled his finger: Keep going.
“So I waited and I waited and Frank was still a no-show. I thought he’d stopped at the Porta-John to take a leak, or maybe a dump.” Voorman flushed and smiled apologetically at Sally, who stared back at him blank-faced. “After he’d been gone about forty minutes or so, I went out looking for him. I checked the whole site—including the Porta-John—but I couldn’t find any sign of him. His car was still in the parking lot, locked up tight. I knew he hadn’t left the site because it’s fenced all the way around. I mean, except for the lakeside, but I didn’t think Frank had gone swimming.” He gave a nervous chuckle. “I did check just in case he had fallen in—it’s dark out here at night and we’d joked before about accidentally walking off the edge while on patrol—but I couldn’t see nothing in the water. I started to get scared and went around the building again, shining my flashlight all over the place, thinking maybe Frank had a heart attack and was lying on the ground somewhere. That’s when I noticed one of the doors to the warehouse was open.”
“Open,” Charles said, like the word was alien to him. “Standing open? Or do you mean it was unlocked?”
“Unlocked and standing open,” Voorman said.
“And you went inside?” Charles said.
Voorman stared at him like he wasn’t sure what kind of answer Charles wanted. “Yes,” he said meekly. “There was nothing else I could do.”
Charles could think of at least one thing Voorman could have done—should have done—but he kept it to himself. Instead he made the twirling gesture with his finger again.
“So I went inside and started waving my flashlight around. I couldn’t believe how big the place was. I mean, I’d seen it from the outside every time I came to work, but it seemed, I dunno, bigger on the inside. Does that make sense?”
It didn’t, Charles thought, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
“Anyway, I was wandering around in there, calling out for Frank, and I could hear this low swishing sound. It creeped me right out. It sounded like a bunch of people shushing me at the same time, like they was telling me to stop shouting. There was a breeze in there and it was chilling the sweat on my body. I shined my light where the swishing sound was coming from, and I saw the three big doors that open onto the lake. They were for the boats to come right into the building and offload their catch. The swishing sound was water coming into the channels under the doors, where the boats would sit. I saw something over there, on the floor in front of one of the channels, and went to check it out. I didn’t quite make it because I tripped over something on the way.” He licked his dry lips. “It was Frank. Or … it was part of him. I shined the light over the floor and there were pieces of Frank all over the place.”
“He’d been dismembered?” Charles said.
Voorman gawped at him. “Dis-what?”
“Chopped up?” Toby said, and made a two-handed hacking gesture with an imaginary axe.
“Yeah,” Voorman said, then he shook his head. “No. No, it weren’t like that. It was … messier. More like Frank had been mangled by some big machine.”
“Then what happened?” Sally asked.
“I got the hell outta there,” Voorman replied. “I called the cops and they came and got Frank’s body. They asked me a bunch of questions, then told me to stick around. Said some people from an insurance company were coming by to talk to me. That’s you?”
“That’s us,” Charles said.
“The cops didn’t stay very long.” Voorman looked over at the warehouse. “I was kinda surprised, actually. They didn’t put up any yellow tape or nothing. It wasn’t like on TV where they spend hours working a crime scene. It was more like they couldn’t get outta here fast enough. Strange, huh?”
“Strange,” Charles agreed.
“And no press. That part seems even stranger. You’da thunk this place would be crawling with reporters, but it’s almost like it didn’t even happen.”
Charles said nothing. None of what the man told them surprised him. For the Mereville Group, it was standard operating procedure for an incident of this type. The Group had a number of clients, and the City of Toronto was one of them. As such, they had an arrangement with the metropolitan police. Especially when it came to certain properties.
The truth was, Charles was already aware of the details of the incident involving Frank Budden. He’d been briefed by his superiors before he’d arrived. Having Voorman retell the story was more for the benefit of Sally and Toby, and also because Charles knew it was always better to hear the story straight from the horse’s mouth. He often learned things that couldn’t be found in any report.
“I thought I heard one of the cops say Frank had been killed by some sort of animal.”
Charles perked up. “An animal? Here in the city? You shouldn’t listen to rumours, Mr. Voorman. They’ll keep you up nights.”
“I think I already got that problem. For plenty of nights to come.”
“Go home,” Charles told him. “You have the rest of the week off—with pay. Your employer will be in touch with you.”
Voorman looked stricken. “Am I being fired?”
“No,” Charles said. “But this is the last you’ll see of this place.”
“That’s fine by me.”
Voorman jammed his hands in his jacket pockets and walked slump-shouldered to his SUV.
Toby opened the gate for him, then closed it again after he drove through. He came back to join the others, and Charles rubbed his hands together.
“Okay, folks. Let’s get to work.”
II
Charles walked around the perimeter of the building with his two colleagues trailing behind him. They did this in deference to his seniority—both in age and his position within the Mereville Group—but also because they knew Charles expected it when he was about to hold forth on some subject or another. Even Toby, who’d only been with the Group a few months, had already developed an almost instinctual reaction to Charles’s idiosyncrasies.
“What do you notice about this property?” he asked them in a light, passing-the-time sort of way.
Sally sighed inwardly. So this was how it was going to be. Charles was going to quiz them first. Toby she could understand. He was new and seemed kind of … well, dumb. But her? Seriously? She’d been working with Charles for the past three years and he still felt the need to educate her. As much as it irritated her—partly because she usually did end up learning something—she supposed it could’ve been worse. Charles could’ve gone full Sherlock Holmes and worn a deerstalker and smoked a clay pipe. The thought of being seen in public with someone like that was almost as scary as what had happened to Frank Budden.
“Speak up,” Charles prompted them. “Come on. What’s the first thing you notice about this place?”
“It’s a dump,” Toby said.
Charles stopped walking and turned to face them. “Anyone with eyes can see that, Toby. What else?”
Toby sighed and made an effort to look around. Sally didn’t know what to make of their new colleague. He was a scruffy-looking guy, with his unshaven cheeks and too-long hair, but she felt it was less a sign of physical neglect than a look he was trying to affect. The blasé rebel, perhaps, or the grizzled badass.
“Okay,” Toby said. “Using my keen investigative abilities, I’ve reached the conclusion that this place isn’t a dump. It’s a complete and utter shithole.”
Sally rolled her eyes. “The fence.”
Charles and Toby looked at her.
“This place is a shithole,” she said. “The parking lot is cracked in a thousand places and the warehouse looks like it could fall down if someone breathed on it. But the fence is practically brand-new.”
The trio turned in un
ison to the cyclone fence surrounding the property. It was twelve feet tall and topped with concertina wire, solidly built with nary a tilt or a sag. The type of barrier popular with correctional institutions, but less often used to prevent ingress to empty, dilapidated buildings.
“Correct,” Charles said. “And can you tell me: What is the inherent problem with a security measure of this type?”
Toby made a show of looking at the fence with a critical eye—from the diamond-shaped links of metal that started at the bottom to the coils of razor wire strung across the top.
“Rust?” he answered.
Sally let out a deep sigh, but to her surprise, Charles gave a small golfer’s clap of approval.
“Very good,” he said. “I assume you were pointing out the lack of rust on the fence. While the erstwhile North Water fish processing plant has continued to fall into decrepitude lo these many years, the fence itself looks fairly new. In point of fact, it was installed only last year. Or rather, it replaced the previous fence, which had been in place for the past ten years. This is the time frame the Group decided was appropriate for replacing the fence, barring any other damage or disturbances.” He held up an imperious finger. “But! There’s another problem I was referring to, and I won’t take up any more of our valuable time by asking you to figure out what it is.”
Toby grumbled under his breath, and Sally shot him a look.
“The problem,” Charles continued, “with a security fence around a property such as this—namely one that doesn’t appear to necessitate such a measure—is it sometimes has the opposite effect. Instead of dissuading potential trespassers, it ends up attracting them. You may have noticed there are even signs to this effect on the fence itself.”
Sally had seen them when they first drove up. They were the standard red-on-white metal signs—PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING—spaced out every thirty feet or so.
“The Group could’ve electrified the fence to further dissuade trespassers, but they didn’t for the exact same reason. Doing so would’ve been counterproductive and only ended up drawing more attention to the site. As for the decedent, Mr. Budden…” He let out a tired sigh. “While the coroner may come up with a more specific cause of death, the truth of the matter is the man killed himself.”
