Deadline (15 page)

Colin flipped through the pages. Most of them were dense blocks of text. Even if he could read Latin, which he couldn’t, the quality of the image was so poor it was impossible to make out most of the words. The illustrations, however, were a different matter. What they lacked in artistic skill, they more than made up for in gruesomeness. The one he was looking at was a six-panel cartoon depicting a man being nailed to a cross, his genitals coated with pitch and set on fire before being amputated, and then a large spike inserted into the wound. The spike was driven up by an elaborate set of pulleys and winches until the tip emerged from the top of the victim’s head. The rest of the images were worse.

“Yeesh,” Colin said. “No wonder you wanted to wait until after we ate.”

“Yeah, some of it is pretty nasty stuff,” Janice agreed.

“So you think whoever’s out there right now also has their hands on this handy little guide?”

“It’s possible,” Janice said. “It’s not just floating around out there, though. At least, not that I could find. I was only able to find it because I had research access to the archives. I got the account in university and kept it active after I graduated. Not really sure why.”

“You’re not able to translate any of this, are you?” Colin asked, gesturing to the text.

“Unfortunately, no,” Janice said. “I took one Latin class and all I remember from that is
ipsa habet gigas ubera
.”

Colin frowned. “What does that mean?”

“
She has giant tits
,” Janice said, giggling with embarrassment. “It was kind of a class joke. It was the last class of the day for most of us, in a building right next to the pub, and our prof was a, um, quite well-endowed woman. One of the guys learned it. We used to use it for toasts all the time.”

Colin laughed. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

“There aren’t any translations of this that I could find,” Janice said. “I don’t know that anyone’s gone to the trouble of doing it. Like I said, they were a pretty obscure group. I can try doing some of it myself, but the reproduction isn’t the best. It’s really hard to make out a lot of the words.”

Colin continued flipping and found another illustration that depicted a woman having her fingers pulled out at the knuckles. He closed the manuscript and put it down on the table.

“If our killer is using this, translation is probably a moot point,” he said. “The illustrations are pretty clear. If he can put together an Ikea sofa, he can do this.”

A
n Ontario Provincial Police cruiser tagged a black Dodge Charger with the same licence plate as the one registered to Charles North getting on to the eastbound QEW just outside of Burlington.

Instead of waiting for backup, however, they lit up the deck and tried to pull the vehicle over. Instead of complying, the driver of the Charger accelerated to a speed in excess of 180 kilometres per hour and tried to make a run for it. The chase lasted for just under ten minutes before the Charger tried to swerve around a minivan in the passing lane, lost control and ran through a construction barricade. Fortunately there was no one working on the site at the time as most of the construction was happening at night and the crew had yet to arrive.

The vehicle spun out, hit a temporary concrete divider on the passenger side and flipped sideways, rolling eight times before coming to rest against the blade of a parked bulldozer. The fire department was on the scene within ten minutes, by which time most of the vehicle and its contents were already carbonized by the resulting fire.

Giordino was standing in North’s empty living room when she heard about it. They had executed a search warrant on the address on North’s driver’s licence, but North wasn’t there and the house appeared to have been vacant for at least the last three months. The place was a mess. Most of the ductwork and a lot of the plumbing and electrical had been ripped out to convert the place into a basement grow op, but all of the plants and hydroponic gear had evidently been moved out. The only thing left in the place was an expired container of Greek yogurt in the refrigerator, a broken camper chair with a beer logo on the back, and a lot of black mould.

“Well, he’s toast,” Betts said, strolling in. “Flipped his car on the QEW.”

“Who?” Giordino said, pulling her head out of the closet.

Betts quickly filled her in. Giordino was furious.

“What the hell were they doing?” she yelled. “Is he alive?”

Betts shrugged. “Only if you think of charcoal as a living thing. Car caught fire. Guy was a matchstick by the time they got there.”

“So it may not even have been North in the car,” Giordino said.

“Forensics’ll confirm that,” Betts said. “Hey, look on the bright side. We got this thing tied up.”

Giordino gestured around the room with her arms. “You see any torture devices here, Betts? Knives? Chainsaw? Giant nails? No one’s even been in this place for months. We just wanted North for questioning.”

“Well, you can ask, but I don’t think you’ll get much out of him,” Betts said. “Not unless you got a Ouija board and some candles.”

Giordino took a deep breath and did her best to contain her fury. She was pretty sure she was going to need it for later.

C
olin and Janice had moved into the living room and on to their second bottle of wine.

“So you know what I’m doing here,” Janice said from her position on the couch. “What are you doing in Westhill journalism?”

Colin contemplated his glass. “I’ve tried other things,” he said. “Just wasn’t any good at them.”

“Like what?” Janice asked. “What do your parents do?”

“My mother’s a lawyer,” Colin said. “She works for TD. My dad was an engineer.”

Janice frowned. “Was?”

“He was killed in Iraq a few years back,” Colin said. “His company sent him out there to help get the oil production going again. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their motorcade was ambushed by some group of insurgents and everyone was killed. I think there were almost 20 of them altogether.”

“I’m sorry. That’s terrible.”

“He went to a lot of unpopular tourist destinations over the years,” Colin said. “Venezuela, Sudan, Iran, Jordan. He wasn’t home very much. Well, neither of them were.”

“Any brothers or sisters?”

“I have a younger sister in Chicago,” Colin said. “She went to Northwestern on a swimming scholarship. She spends all of her time training for the next Olympics. You?”

“Nope,” Janice said. “I think that one-child policy really got into my dad’s head. You never answered my question, though. How did you end up here?”

Colin smiled. “That’s a long story.”

Janice held up her glass. “I got time. Long as the wine holds out, of course.”

“My parents really wanted me to get something practical,” Colin said.

“Sounds familiar,” Janice said, sipping.

“I didn’t particularly like high school. It felt like being trapped in a prison exercise yard with calculus. When I finished, I got an English degree from U of T.”

“And then what?”

“My mother pulled some strings and got me an internship with the company she was working for at that time. They handled reinsurance for school boards. I was a glorified data entry boy.”

“That sounds like a thrill a minute,” Janice observed. “How long did you last there?”

“Up until I figured out one of the directors was padding the claims and pocketing the difference.”

Janice’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

Colin nodded. “I was just a file clerk, basically. But I got pretty good at figuring out how the system worked. Most of those large financial companies use antiquated software because of the risks associated with upgrading to a faster but potentially less-stable platform. Because of my job, I had to have access to everything. They didn’t think anything of it because I was just a dumb kid grateful for the job, right? There was no way on earth I would figure out what was going on. Or so they thought.”

Janice sat up. “So what happened?”

“I started keeping track of what he was doing,” Colin said. “Printouts and everything. Once I had assembled a more or less airtight case, I took it to my boss.”

“And what did he or she say?”

“She was shocked,” Colin said. “The guy doing the stealing was her boss. He was vice chairman of the local AIDS committee. Even coached one of her sons in midget soccer. She took it to the vice president, who took it to the internal audit committee.”

“So he got fired?”

Colin smiled. “Nope. Last I heard, in fact, he was running the place.”

“How?”

“Pretty simple. He just denied it. The way their system worked, it was, theoretically, possible for anyone to have entered those transactions. They could have brought in a team of forensic accountants to try to trace the money, but the cost would have been prohibitive. In the end, it essentially boiled down to my word against his. They didn’t dare fire him. The allegations were the only cause, and unless they were willing to pursue them, they might as well not have existed. So he stayed. The following year, the VP retired and he moved into that slot. A couple of years after that, he got the top job.”

“Was he still stealing?”

Colin shrugged. “I have no idea. I was long gone by then.”

Janice was infuriated. “But that sucks! He just got away with it!”

“He did,” Colin said. “I thought about taking it to the cops, but they’d never be able to make sense of that system. When I found out they weren’t going to do anything, I quit. There weren’t a lot of other options. I had just called the guy a crook. My career prospects there were limited at best. I didn’t care. I had been there long enough to figure out that office work was not for me.”

“I worked in an office one summer,” Janice said. “It was a wildlife charity. A friend of mine had worked there and put in a word for me. It was awful. The manager almost never talked to anybody or came out of his office. If you did something wrong on Monday, he would type up this little memo and leave it sitting on your chair for when you came in on Tuesday morning. It really made my day to walk in and sit down only to pull a piece of paper out from under my ass reminding me to respect the scent-free policy and not use a certain kind of shampoo. When I asked him about it, he said it was important to maintain documentation of infractions from a human resources standpoint and that he didn’t like to embarrass people with face-to-face confrontations. This from a guy who used to ride around on a boat that rammed into whaling ships on TV.”

Colin laughed and topped up their glasses. “Being elevated to mid-level management does strange things to some people. I worked with a guy who used to masturbate at the urinal. This is not just a single urinal, either. It was a wall of three. He would stand in the middle. And he wasn’t quiet about it.”

Janice made a face. “Oh come on! You’re making that up.”

Colin held up a hand like a witness swearing an oath. “On your honour. Every day at 11:55 a.m. sharp. We used to call him Tugger. He went on to get himself elected as an MPP. He still pops up every once in a while on parliamentary TV, sitting alone on the backbenches with his hands nowhere to be seen.”

Janice giggled. “So what did you do after you quit?”

“Worked in retail briefly. The hours were lousy and the pay was terrible, but it was probably better than starving to death. Probably. I just happened to be working one day when a guy I used to know in high school came in. He was taking journalism at Ryerson and that got me to thinking.”

“I can’t imagine you working in retail,” Janice said. “Or as a waiter. Anything where you are forced to be nice to people who treat you like shit.”

“You did that, too?”

“I worked as a waitress a few times,” Janice said. “Morning breakfast shifts were the worst. Seniors are the worst tippers in the world. The frat boys weren’t so bad, comparatively. They’d get drunk and stare straight at your tits without shame, but they almost always left 20 per cent or more on the bill. So bumping into this guy made you want to be a reporter?”

Colin shrugged. “It certainly made me think about it. I knew I didn’t want to work in an office for the rest of my life. Doing that little under-the-table investigation was the only thing that seemed to fully engage my brain. I thought if there was a chance I could do something like that on a daily basis, I might not go out of my mind.”

“Well I think you found your calling, if I can use such a term,” Janice said. “You’re the best investigator I’ve ever seen. If journalism doesn’t work out, maybe you should try being a cop instead.”

“No thanks,” Colin said. “I’m allergic to authority figures.”

Janice finished her wine and looked at the bottle, which was empty. “We just ran out of wine! What are we gonna do about it? I demand alcohol!”

Colin stood up. “Relax, Withnail. I think I have some more on the rack.”

“You just keep thinkin’, Butch,” she said. “That’s what you’re good at.”

Colin grabbed another bottle off the rack and pulled open the drawer in search of the corkscrew. “It occurs to me, Miss Yu, that it would not be safe for you to drive home in your present condition.”

Janice cocked an eyebrow. “Why, Mr. Mitchell. What exactly did you have in mind?”

J
anice heard clicking. She opened her eyes and saw the light on in the kitchen. A dull ache was already starting behind her eyes. She hoped Colin had some extra strength painkillers somewhere, because she was going to need them to ward off the tsunami-level hangover that was now sweeping through the night to make her morning a floating misery of debris.

She leaned across to look at the clock. 3:35. How long had she been asleep? An hour or two at most. She got up, pulled on her shirt, and padded to the bathroom, where she found some migraine-strength Advils in the drawer. She swallowed two, peed, then washed her hands and splashed some water on her face before strolling into the living room to see what was going on.

Colin was sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop open in front of him. She draped her arms over his shoulders and squinted at the page he was looking at.