“What’s the apartment like?”
“Honestly?”
That didn’t sound good. Maybe INTERPOL hadn’t wanted to spend much money.
“That bad?”
“No, Lincoln, it’s beautiful. We’re right near the park, not far from headquarters either. This is a beautiful city. The kids are so excited. They can’t wait to go to the park tomorrow. The agents that brought us here and that are guarding the place told us there’s a zoo there.”
“Yeah, I chased Crawford through it.”
“Oh, that was where you were? Okay, kind of creepy now. And these guards… are we always going to have them? It’s a little unnerving.”
“I know. We’ll catch him soon, I hope, and that’ll be the end of it.”
She hesitated. It was a question she hated to ask because it implied failure. “Any closer to catching him?”
I wanted to lie to her, just to give her some comfort, but she would see through that. Kat was a human lie detector, something the kids and I had learned early on.
“No, we’re not. And he’s still toying with us. He was here in Japan watching us. I don’t want the three of you going anywhere without those guards, okay? I don’t trust this guy at all. He’s taking huge risks to follow me. It seems like it’s bordering on obsession.”
That thought hadn’t crossed my mind before but I quickly saw how true it was. Crawford was stalking me, he was watching my every move, learning about my past. It was an obsession, a fixation, and I couldn’t help but think that wouldn’t bode well if we weren’t able to stop him.
“I’m worried, Lincoln. Saunders went after Kara, what’s to stop Crawford from coming after you?”
“I’ve been sleeping with my gun, if that helps.”
“Not the way you sleep, Lincoln,” Kat said, stifling a laugh. She was trying to remain serious, but she was right about my sleeping habits and the humour couldn’t be denied. “You’d either sleep right through the whole thing or you’ll end up shooting yourself in your sleep.”
“I’m not that bad. Maybe for sleeping through things, but I’m not that uncontrolled in my sleep.”
I had a tendency to roll, toss, turn, sprawl and perform just about every other acrobatic movement there was. Then there was the jerkiness. I’d hit and kicked Kat in my sleep, knocked my cell phone off my night stand, and tipped my fan and/or lamp over more times than I could count; pulling a trigger on a pistol wasn’t much of a stretch. Kat on the other hand could style her hair at night and wake up with it still looking perfect the next morning.
“Has he threatened you at all?” She was really worried, not that I could blame her.
“No, he just won’t leave me alone. I don’t get the vibe from him that I need to watch my back. It seems more like a fascination than something that could turn violent.”
“I hope you’re right, Lincoln.”
That makes two of us.
“Are the kids still up? Wait, what time is it there?”
“Almost one in the morning, so no. They took a while to get to sleep though thanks to the time change and everything. A lot of excitement too.”
I could only imagine. And poor Kat had been left to deal with it on the flight by herself. Julie was there as well with Aidan and Anya so they could’ve tag-teamed the childcare to some degree. I wondered if Chen was receiving a similar phone call from Julie right about now, assuming wherever he was had reception.
Or was he already back in France? His cases had been much closer together geographically than mine - they were at least on the same continent. I had no idea what day it was or what time it was back in France. Everything had melded together somewhere between Finland and Japan.
“How were they on the flight?”
“They were really good. It was nice having Aidan and Anya for them to play with. Several hours beside your sibling never bodes well. Aidan and Link spent most of the time playing their Nintendo thingies and Anya and Kasia were colouring and playing with dolls. It was nice, gave Julie and I a chance to catch up.”
“And talk about Chen and I, of course.”
Kat laughed. “Obviously. Mainly we talked about how stupid you two can be and wondered if you were going to go and get yourselves shot this time.”
“You don’t have to worry about us, Kat. I promise.”
A long pause. “I hope so. Your track record lately is pretty bad.”
“I know. I’m being careful, Kat. I promise.”
“I hope so. I need to call it a night though. Guaranteed they’ll be up really early. Always takes them a while to get their sleep patterns back to normal after a flight.”
“All right. I won’t be home for another, well probably a day. This is a brutally long trip.”
“At least you got to go, I know how much you’ve been wanting to.”
“Would’ve been nice though to have spent some more time here, and to not have been digging up graves the majority of the time.”
“True. We’ll get there for a vacation at some point. I promise.”
“And I’ll hold you to it. Hey, are Chen and Kara back yet?”
“I don’t know, they were supposed to be in late tonight. Probably are by now, but I haven’t talked to Julie in a few hours.”
“Wonder how things went for them.”
“You’ll find out soon enough. Should I tell him to call you if I see him or if I talk to Julie?”
“Yeah, that’d be good. Thanks, babe. I’ll let you go though, you should get to sleep. I love you, and tell the kids I love them and I’ll see them soon.”
“I will, and I love you too. Have a safe trip.”
“Don’t worry, I will,” I said. “See you soon.”
“Bye.”
I put my phone back in my pocket and looked at the window as the world rushed by at top speed. My eyes strained to focus on anything they could but the objects they’d see would whip past too fast to ever really get a good lock on. The train glided on the tracks, barely bouncing or buffeting in the wind. If I closed my eyes for a moment I could barely tell we were moving, just a slight hum and the occasional bounce reminded me that we weren’t at a standstill.
If I closed my eyes long enough, if I let the world keep on moving by, would this all be over when I opened them?
I opened my eyes to reality once more and tried to force them open. There was no point in falling asleep now, our journey was long and the train ride was just a short leg of it. I figured I should try to save up my tiredness and sleep for most of the flight from Tokyo to Lyon. That was the long flight, the one I was least looking forward to. Although, there would be complementary beer; at that altitude a couple drinks and I’d be sound asleep.
I’d have to clear the plane first though, make sure Crawford wasn’t ballsy enough to book a flight home with us.
When I realized I wouldn’t put it past him I knew there was a problem. We needed to catch him. We needed to nip this in the bud before it got any further out of control and before Crawford took his brazenness to unspeakable levels.
“Lincoln, wake up.” Eddie was shaking me, his hand on my shoulder.
“What? Are we there already?”
“No, nowhere near actually. You’ve only been asleep for two hours. We aren’t even over mainland Asia yet.”
Then why was he waking me up? Just let me sleep. I had already grown sick of flying and prayed it would be the last time.
“What’s so important, Eddie?”
“I figured it out, what you had asked me too. It took some time until I clued in, but I got it.”
“Okay… start over. I’m lost. What did you figure out?”
Eddie held my phone up and waved it back and forth. I patted my pocket, wondering how he had gotten it.
“You left it on your lap.
Sorry, but I had an idea.”
“About what?”
“How he’s been tracking you. That e-mail he sent, the very first one that told us where to find the remains of Jennifer Plimpton, the e-mail that was addressed directly to you-”
Out with it, Eddie. “Yeah?”
“There was a worm in it. A really good one. I don’t know if he coded it himself or what, but it took over your phone’s GPS system and used your e-mail address to send out your GPS co-ordinates. It was set to update him every ten minutes.”
I knew nothing about how this stuff worked. “You can do that?”
“Honestly, you can do just about anything these days. It’s quite a sophisticated program, everything was designed to operate in the background so you would never even know it was there. Even the e-mails weren’t kept longer than it took to send them, cleared right from the cache. It made it rather difficult to find it.”
“How did you?”
I shouldn’t have asked that. It came as a surprise when he didn’t even try to tell me. “Would you even understand if I told you?”
“Good point. All I need to know is you did it. Are we in the clear?”
“I think so,” he said. He didn’t look so sure though. “I’ve deleted it from the phone, or at least I’m pretty sure I got it all. These things can be like cancer, you think you got it all but there was a second iteration running below that one. Best case scenario, just get a new phone when you get back to Lyon.”
“We’re clear now though? Not that it matters, I guess. Not much he can do to follow us right now.”
“Yeah, I’m almost certain it’s gone. But now that we know where the problem was, it’d be kind of dumb not to get rid of the phone just in case.”
“Will do. Send the bill to INTERPOL, right?”
“Sounds like a plan. And make sure you get something nice, like the new Z10 or something. No point in buying something that’s already beyond obsolete.”
“Think they’d notice if I got a nice case for it as well? Maybe something sparkly, you know, just so I don’t lose it.”
“Right, so you don’t lose it. Whatever you say, Lincoln.”
“My daughter may have influenced me more than I’d like to admit.”
Najat, who up to this point had been silently sitting on the opposite side of Eddie with her face buried in a book, looked over with a smile.
“Having a girl can do that. You seem like the type of parent who wouldn’t have a problem with putting on a tiara and playing dress-up.”
“You’ve read me well. I may have been forced to play princess on a few occasions.”
“Just a few?”
“Are you trying to embarrass me?”
“Sorry, no, I’m not,” she said, taken aback.
“I was kidding, Najat, I’m cool with it. Sorry, just having some fun with you.”
“Oh, okay. I tend to miss things like that sometimes.”
“No worries,” I said. Time for a change of topic. “What are you reading?”
“Nothing fun, just a book on anthropology. It’s for a research paper I’m working on.”
“You’re a hard worker, aren’t you?”
“I have to be. Good grades don’t come as easily to me as they do to some people. I have to work very hard, study for a long time, memorize everything. I wish I could just remember it all right away, the first time.”
“I was the same way, don’t worry. I would take the most detailed notes I could in class, writing down everything the Professor put on the board or said. When I got home, I’d rewrite them and colour-code parts of them for easier studying down the road. It was a way for me to lock in everything I’d learned but it was also because for me to write everything the Prof covered I had to write fast and sloppy. If I left the notes too long, I’d never be able to decipher my own writing.”
Najat smiled. “I have the opposite problem, I take too long to write things out because my handwriting has to be perfect.”
“Yeah, I don’t have that problem.”
“Dr. Heinlen said you were one of his students before?”
“About fifteen years ago now. I had a few classes with him and did a couple of digs in the summer during my undergrad.”
“What was your degree in?”
“Biological anthropology.”
She shook her head slightly, trying to understand. “And now you’re a police officer? Dr. Heinlen said you were one of his best students.”
Did I just blush? “I had taken a couple of criminology courses that kind of steered me toward policing. And my wife and I had met during our undergrads and we both wanted to get started with a family. So I decided not to pursue a Masters degree or anything else.”
“He tried to talk you out of it though, didn’t he?”
“He did. But it was a lost cause. Kat and I were madly in love and the thought of several more years of school was more than I could bear. She was almost done as well, then just one year of teacher’s college. And I didn’t like the idea of spending the summers away on digs and everything once we had a family.”
“I think that would be hard. Dr. Heinlen seems to make it work though.”
“I don’t know how he does it. For starters, Kat would kill me since she’s off all summer, and secondly, I couldn’t stand being gone from the kids that long. Although I know Samuel started bringing his kids once they were old enough, assuming the place they were going was safe.”
“They’re past that age now. Both are off at university themselves now.”
“Really? They must be. I guess I forget how long it’s been. His kids were really young when I started taking classes with him. How long have you been a student of his?”
“Just this past year. I did my undergrad at Carleton in Ottawa then my Masters at NYU.”
“And how many times has he told you to call him Samuel?”
“At least once a day. I just can’t do it. It seems wrong.”
“I was the same way then with professors. It’s funny because now in the OPP I don’t have much regard for the use of rank. Things change I guess. Or it’s different when I’m the one being addressed formally.”
“I think I’ll have a hard time being called doctor or professor, assuming I finish my Ph.D. some day.”
“You will.”
“The more of this I do, the less sure I am that I want to continue. This is fascinating, and I feel like I can help people this way. Even if I can’t help the person who died I can help their family get closure and I can maybe even help stop the same thing from happening to someone else. I can’t do that searching for evolutionary gaps in Africa.”
“Get your Ph.D. first. You’re already working on it. There will always be murders and we’ll always need people like you to help us solve them.”
“What you said though, Najat, that’s one of the reasons I joined the OPP,” Eddie said. “Wanted to do something good with everything I’d learned. I wanted to make a difference. Sometimes I think I’d rather be out doing what Lincoln does, actually working the cases and seeing the difference you make, but at the same time, I’m not sure I’m cut out for that.”
“And with the skills you’ve got, Eddie, it would be a waste of your talents to have you pushing a cruiser around all day.”
“Thanks, Lincoln. I just think it would be a lot more exciting.”
Najat nodded. “You must have so many stories.”
“I have a ton, but that’s over almost fifteen years of policing. Most days are really boring. You might spend your twelve hours just stopping speeders and waiting for something to happen. It can get extremely boring. But when the shit hits the fan and the adrenaline starts pumping, it’s intense.”
“So it isn’t like on TV?” Najat looked so innocent, the big br
own doe eyes and the youthful face looking at me. She was naïve, there was no escaping that, but it seemed to be a curable condition caused by a lack of exposure. I’d met the opposite, the people who no matter what happened to them or what they saw, they always seemed to maintain this naïve view of the world. It was the rose-coloured glasses phenomenon or, in some cases, a matter of wearing blinders.
“When we get a call for a robbery or a shooting, then yeah, it can be a lot like that. Most of the calls are taking reports for a stolen car or a break and enter that happened hours ago. Other times it’s dealing with family troubles and domestic violence. Then there are the noise complaints where we become a different OPP – the Official Party Poopers.”
“That has to suck sometimes, eh? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t had a party shut down.”
“With the way you listen to music, Eddie, I’m not surprised. It sucks, but then there are the times where the partygoers are just complete and total idiots. Those parties can be fun to shut down.”
“Asshole tax, right?”
I burst out laughing. I guess Eddie was in the know enough as a forensics guy. Najat looked confused.
“It’s, umm, what we call the extra tickets we lay on people. If I pull you over for speeding and you’re being a complete and total asshole about it, I’ll find other things to ticket you for. Forgot your driver’s licence, permit or insurance? Expired validation on the plate? Validation tag in the wrong spot? There are so many ways to nail people should the need arise.”
“So, you’re saying be nice?”
“Basically just be a decent citizen. If I pull you over and your speeding, feel free to tell me you weren’t. Most people either don’t know how fast they were going or they do and won’t admit it. That’s fine. But when you start screaming and swearing at me, telling me you hope I crash my car and die, I’m going to make your day hell. If I come to your house because the music is too loud, give you a warning and as I’m getting back in the cruiser you crank it back up you can expect a ticket.”
Death By Degrees Page 13
