Deadline (8 page)

Betts looked at Giordino. “How the hell you know all that?”

“I wrote a story on it,” Colin said. “It is sort of what I do, being a reporter.”

“Well that’s kind of convenient, don’t you think, Mr. Mitchell?” Giordino asked.

“How so?” Colin asked.

“The fact that you would know that nothing that happens in that building is being recorded,” Giordino observed.

Colin sat back. “Well, you’ve got me there. Me and everyone who reads the paper, that is. Which, I grant you, is not a multitude. We’re not exactly the
New York Times
. But then, neither is the
New York Times
these days.”

“Do you have a problem with police officers, Mr. Mitchell?” Giordino asked.

“Of course not, detective,” Colin said. “I won’t say that some of my best friends are police officers any more than you would be inclined to say that some of your best friends are reporters. Reporters don’t generally make for great friends. It’s no fun to have a friend that’s always finding fault. I don’t imagine if I were in your shoes, that I would care to have it pointed out that the department has the lowest closure rate for violent crimes in the entire province. Or that your very own chief of police has seen 13 corruption allegations, two conflict of interest charges and one harassment complaint against him dismissed without a hearing in the last two years alone.”

“Little peckerhead,” Betts growled.

Giordino shot Betts a warning look. She didn’t want to have to kick him out of an interview with the same subject twice. He rolled his nicotine gum to the other side of his cheek and went back to leaning on the wall next to the door. Giordino reached into the file and pulled out a photo. Colin recognized it as a close-up of the image that had been painted on the tree and drawn on the box that had been delivered to the newsroom. They probably didn’t have any shots of the one from the locker yet.

“And you’re sure you’ve never seen this image anywhere before?” she asked.

“Positive,” Colin said. “As I stated repeatedly earlier, I had never seen that image before I opened that box yesterday morning.”

“Are you aware of any other enemies Mr. Devane may have made?”

“Are you kidding?” Colin said. “You’ve seen his website. There are only about 200 or so women out there he drugged and raped who might just have a teeny little bit of an axe to grind. If I were one of them, I would have given serious thought to sawing his head off myself. Not the one on top of his neck, though.”

“Do you know any of them we could contact?” Giordino asked.

“Just the one whose hand showed up in that box I opened this morning because your fat partner over there decided her life wasn’t worth an hour of his precious time.”

Betts pushed himself off the wall and charged towards the table. Giordino had to jump up to stop him from grabbing Colin by the neck.

“You little asshole!” Betts yelled. “I think you did it, yeah? I think maybe we should hold you overnight downstairs with the gangbangers and the junkies. See how much of a smartass you are after that!”

Giordino shoved Betts back towards the door and told him to go get himself a cup of coffee. Betts’s face was flushed red and he was breathing like a charging rhino. He gave Colin one last furious look and then ripped the door open and slammed it shut behind him. Giordino took a moment to allow the temperature in the room to return to normal.

“That was…not helpful,” she said.

“If we’re talking about not helpful, he just left,” Colin said.

Giordino sat back down. “This is important, Mr. Mitchell. Any one of these women may be a potential suspect or a victim. Whoever is doing this already killed Shalene Nakogee. He may move on to one of them next.”

“Even if I
did
talk to one of those women and knew her name, she would be entitled to protection as a confidential source,” Colin said. “Take me to court. Throw me in jail for contempt. I still wouldn’t tell you her name.”

Giordino sighed. “I believe you, Mr. Mitchell. I’m afraid that’s part of the problem.” She tucked the loose papers back into the file. “I think we’ve gone as far as we can with this tonight. I’ll arrange for someone to take you back to your apartment.”

Colin rubbed his forehead. “Well that would be spiffing. Anyone except Detective Betts, of course. Otherwise the next dismembered body you’re called in on will probably be mine.”

The hell with it
, Giordino thought.

“You know what?” she said, pulling her keys out of her jacket pocket. “Where do you live? I’ll drop you there myself.”

I
t took Colin a while to realize that the pounding he heard was not coming from his head but his front door.

He naturally assumed that it was the police coming to arrest him, so he just stayed where he was and waited for them to break down the door. It needed to be repaired anyway and the landlord had been dragging her feet. It was a crummy basement apartment and he hadn’t been forced to cough up a security deposit, so, as far as he was concerned, the cops were welcome to have at it with their battering rams. He wasn’t going to resist, but he wasn’t going to get out of bed voluntarily, either. He had gotten a grand total of four hours’ sleep in the last 48 hours. At least in jail he’d be able to catch up on all those hours he had missed.

So he was a little surprised when the pounding continued, replaced intermittently with repeated doorbell ringing. His curiosity was starting to get the better of him. That wasn’t the cops, so who the hell wanted to talk to him so badly?

He rolled out of bed and staggered to the front door. As soon as he had gotten home last night, he had peeled off his damp clothes, spent five minutes in a scalding hot shower and then collapsed. According to the clock on the dresser, it was 8:15 a.m. That meant his collapse had lasted a grand total of two hours and ten minutes.

He yanked on the door, which took a couple of pulls to open. Standing on the landing was not Giordino and an army of tactical response officers in body armour, but it certainly wasn’t anyone else he would have expected to see out there, either.

“Janice?”

Janice Yu covered the student association beat for the
Sentinel
. She was a couple of years older than Colin and had a university degree in something he couldn’t remember off the top of his head. Sociology? Something like that. Her research was always impeccable, but she was inherently shy and disinclined to do a lot of interviews. Colin distinctly remembered at least a couple of occasions where he’d asked her to go out and get more opposing viewpoints to some of the Westhill Student Association initiatives. She seemed to be a natural conflict avoider, which, in Colin’s mind, meant she had no business working as a reporter.

“Hi Colin,” she said. Colin noticed she was wearing a heavy-looking backpack over one shoulder and carrying a cardboard takeout tray with two large coffees in it. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to wake you up, but this is kind of important.”

Colin looked down and realized that he was wearing only boxer shorts. An old pair of boxer shorts where the button was missing on the fly, in fact. If he crouched down or bent over, there wouldn’t be a lot that Janice wouldn’t know about him. He debated what to do. Invite her in or tell her to call back later?

Ah, fuck it
. “That’s okay,” he said, motioning her inside. “Just give me a sec.”

Janice stepped into Colin’s small living room area while he went back into the bedroom and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. “How did you know where I live?” he asked through the door.

“CJ told me,” she said, looking around. The place was neater than she’d expected, with surprisingly modernist furnishings. It stood in sharp contrast to most student apartments in that the couch didn’t look like it had been scavenged from a curb side and the kitchen looked like somewhere a professional chef might settle in with only a few reservations. She took in the copper saucepans hanging from the racks, the carbon steel knife set and the crystal wine glasses with a raised eyebrow. There was evidently more to this guy than he presented at the newspaper every day.

“I got you a coffee,” she said as he emerged from the bedroom. “I didn’t know what you took in it, so I just got a double-double.”

“Thanks,” Colin said, taking the coffee and motioning her towards the kitchen table. “So what can I do for you?”

The two of them sat down. Janice immediately opened her backpack and started rummaging through it, pulling out a textbook that looked larger than a medieval version of the King James Bible. Colin noted the title:
The Crusades (1095–1270)—Origins, History & the Foundations of the New Europe
by somebody named Zenit Olgcharanov.

“I wasn’t there,” Janice said as she flipped to a bookmarked page. “CJ tried to describe it to me, but you’re the only one I know who saw it for sure.”

Colin frowned and sipped the coffee. It was bitter and had the metallic taste of sweetener. He thought about pouring it down the sink and making himself a cappuccino instead, but that would be rude. He would wait until Janice left and then do that. He put the coffee back down and leaned forward. “Saw what?”

Janice found the page she was looking for and flipped the book around on the table so Colin could see it. She was pointing to an illustration on the inside corner of page 605. Colin pulled the book towards him so he could see it more clearly. It was a crudely drawn illustration, but there was no mistaking that it was the same one he had seen three times in the previous day: a cross inside two interlocking strands.

“Wow,” Colin muttered.

“Is that the symbol that was on the package with the hand in it?” Janice asked, making no effort to disguise the urgency in her voice.

Colin nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“Somebody said it was in the forest somewhere, too,” Janice said. “But the cops have blocked that entire area off.”

“It was there,” Colin said. “I saw it painted on a tree close to where they found the first body. It was also painted on the locker where I found Terrence Devane’s severed head in the rec centre last night. What is it?”

“That,” said Janice, “is the official seal of the Knights of the Holy Thorn.”

“Okay,” Colin said. “And who are they when they’re at home?”

“They were formed in Antioch in or around 1192,” Janice said, speaking quickly in her excitement. “Just after the fall of Jerusalem.”

Colin took a sip of coffee. There was nothing else to drink and his throat was suddenly dry. “Wait a minute. Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you just say
eleven
ninety-two?”

Janice nodded.

“As in, almost a thousand years ago.”

Janice nodded again. “Do you know anything about the military religious orders that arose during the Crusades?”

Colin was having trouble keeping up with all this on so little sleep. The coffee, despite being terrible, was helping slightly. “The what now?”

“There were dozens of them,” Janice said. “Maybe hundreds. You’ve heard of the Templars? The Hospitalers? The Teutonic Knights?”

“I’ve heard of the Templars,” Colin said.

“Most people have,” Janice said. “They started what basically turned into the modern banking industry. The Knights of the Holy Thorn didn’t do anything like that.”

Colin’s curiosity was piqued. “So what did they do?”

“Well,” Janice said. “A lot of these groups organized themselves around holy relics. They were a big deal in those days. They gave you power and attention. Sort of like Hitler trying to get his hands on the lost ark of the covenant in that movie.”

“
Raiders
.”

“Right. Well, the Knights claimed to have the original nails used during the crucifixion,” Janice continued. “There were a lot of pieces of the so-called ‘one true cross’ floating around, but only one set of nails. Those are the ones you see in their symbol. They supposedly kept them in a special, three-sided box. Each side was supposed to represent one part of the trinity, if you believe in that stuff.”

Colin didn’t, but she was on a roll and he didn’t want to interrupt. “Okay.”

“Now, the Knights never got an official papal charter, which technically meant that they couldn’t really call themselves a holy order. Well, that’s one story. The other is that they got one, but the church rescinded it and then denied ever having issued it in the first place.”

“Why?” Colin asked.

“There are a few theories on that,” Janice said. “The Knights preached quite actively against corruption in the church and in other, more powerful orders, which wouldn’t have made them many friends. But that wasn’t such a big deal. Practically everybody was doing that back then. I think it probably had more to do with their charter.”

Colin nodded. Janice reminded him of certain interview subjects who were filled up with so much information that all you had to do was ask one simple little question and then they sort of exploded.

“The Knights believed that sin could only be expiated through great personal suffering,” Janice said. “For them, pain was the only passage to salvation. And they made it a point to practice what they preached.”

Colin took another gulp of his coffee. It actually wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. “Sort of like the Flagellants?”

Janice shook her head. “Not exactly. The Flagellants were like holy masochists. They punished themselves for the sins of man. They walked through villages whipping themselves because they thought it might ward off God’s judgement of the plague and what have you. The Knights were more like holy sadists. They tortured anyone they considered to be wicked or even insufficiently devout. Which was just about everyone. Blasphemy, usury, sodomy, apostasy…you name it, they had a customized torture for it. They actually invented some of the torture devices and techniques that were later used by Torquemada during the Inquisition.”

“Jesus,” Colin muttered. “So what exactly is this symbol doing painted on a locker in a women’s change room almost a thousand years later?”

Janice leaned over and pulled a small notebook out of her backpack. She was so excited that she could barely sit still. “Well, I’ve been doing some research and there may be a connection. Most of the military religious orders were wiped out by the church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Crusades were over and Rome was worried that some of them were starting to become too powerful. Even to the point where they were moving into a position where they could challenge the church itself. So it stripped them of their titles and confiscated their lands. Many of the orders disappeared, but some of them went underground and morphed over the centuries into different organizations.”