Ice Lake (2 page)

Cinq-Mars shook his head no, and spoke into the phone, requesting the number for the local police for Vaudreuil-Dorion.

“Why them?” Mathers asked as soon as he’d signed off.

“Their fishing hole.”

“Murder, Emile. They’ll have to turn it over.”

“They’ll remain an informed party. A small-town police chief might appreciate being let in, enough to share the news back again. Give it to the SQ right off the bat and we’ll be cut out, that’s for certain.”

“Do we want to be cut in?”

“Like you said,” Cinq-Mars told him in a whispered murmur, and this came as a surprise, “it beats fishing.”

Mathers waited for Cinq-Mars to finish his second call before asking, “Emile, why’d we come out here today? Were you tipped on this?”

“Don’t you know? We’re here for
doré,
Bill. What you English call walleye. If I happen to hook a whale instead, should I let it get away?”

Mathers guessed that his chain was being ceremoniously yanked, although with Cinq-Mars it was hard to be sure. “What now?”

“Smile. You’re on Candid Camera.”

At that, the handsome younger man looked up. A video camera perused the premises through the frosty rear window, zooming down for a close-up of the dark fishing hole where the ice-encased corpse gently bobbed, then pulling back to once again include the cops.

“Tonight, partner,” Cinq-Mars warned him, “you’ll be on the evening news.”

“I’ll spring for the popcorn if you buy the beer.”

Cinq-Mars returned outside again. Although the big man he’d conscripted had managed to keep most of the curious back, the cameraman and a few others were incorrigible. He thanked the man for his phone and returned it to him, then stood off to one side. The detective had a little more breathing room now and he used the space to look around, take in the scene, get a feel. Gusts chased snow-hares onto shore. The huts of the fishing village, mostly decorated with wild colours, their chimneys gently smoking against the backdrop of snow and ice, made for a colourful view in one direction. In the other, above the steep bank at the waterside, mostly new homes and a small strip mall were a blight, crowding out the few old farmhouses that still remained. Behind a set of brick condos at the edge of the bay, an office tower dominated the skyline, a dozen floors of concrete and glass, the tallest building for seventy miles west. North, hedged by rolling hills, the
frozen landscape could be any large lake where winter held court. To the east, the curvature of the earth and trees on the opposite shore concealed the island city of Montreal.

It was not just any lake, anywhere, Cinq-Mars acknowledged with a certain grim understanding.
Lac des Deux-Montagnes,
the Lake of Two Mountains, was close to home, marking this death, this corpse in the water, as being in his own backyard. Jurisdiction or not, a murder at his favourite fishing hole had captured the city cop’s attention.

He was a famous detective, one of the old breed. At least, that was how the media liked to portray him. When he himself thought about the “old breed,” he envisioned cops from the Night Patrol during Montreal’s heyday as a centre of vice, during the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. Those guys would bulldoze a brick wall to bust into a prostitution warren, or careen through skylights into gambling dens. They’d engage in wild shootouts with equally notorious mobsters. He supposed that he was likened to those guys because he was independent, and did not fare well within a system which relied heavily on teamwork, computer analysis, statistics and science. He preferred to get into the heads of criminals, figure them out, trap them by anticipating their behaviour. He had made the style work for him, and he’d benefitted over the years as well from crackerjack informants. While he didn’t smash and raid and jump down skylights if he could help it, he did have a reputation for the surprise thrust, the pivotal, deft exploit.

Fame was a tool, he’d learned. People who might be reluctant to inform on crooks because they were scared, or because the crooks were neighbours or family, or simply because they didn’t like cops, opened up to Cinq-Mars because they enjoyed being in proximity to a legend. Speaking to a famous cop was different, it provided an incentive that some required. Many cops
resented his ever-expanding reputation, and Cinq-Mars agreed that the situation wasn’t fair. When you’re dying for a break, you can’t buy one, and when you’ve already received a hundred breaks, fate reaches into its grab-bag and tosses you a hundred more. His early career had been difficult, a slow plod. Now, information flowed, often without prompting.

Being a celebrity cop also had its downside. He had tried to explain to his fellow officers that his reputation drew nutcases to his side like cockroaches flushed from the woodwork, and he had tried to convince them that the kooks wasted a huge chunk of his time. His colleagues dismissed his difficulties as minor. They’d trade problems with him any day, and Cinq-Mars could guess their reaction to this latest episode. Today, the woman who had phoned and coaxed him down to the ice had been a no-show, and yet she had placed him in close proximity to a murder. A mysterious voice. She had sounded intelligent, youthful, concerned, intense. Somehow, she had known his home number. He’d been enticed. Now this. Johnny-on-the-spot. Pure luck. Reason for his fellow cops to hate him all over again.

Around the hut, fishermen huddled in the bitter cold. They pounded their feet on the ice and slapped their hands together to keep them warm. Breath chugged in the cold like the vapour of automobiles stalled in winter traffic. A talkative, spirited bunch, primed with alcohol despite the early hour, they did their best to draw the policeman into conversation. Distracted, Cinq-Mars declined. Along the shoreline, squad cars were racing, cherries flashing, coming his way.

So it begins,
he was thinking.
Just like always.

Oddly, he could not shake the sensation that this time was different. This time, he’d been on the scene—almost next door at the moment the body was being discovered—and, truth be told, he had been invited to the scene, something he had yet to admit to Mathers.

While it was not true, to his knowledge, that the murder had gone down under his nose, he could not alleviate the sensation that somehow, in some way, his nose was being rubbed in this death. The geography and the timing, not to mention his invitation to the rendezvous, had conspired to make this personal.

At a strip mall a half-mile away, Lucy Gabriel paced and fumed. She’d been back and forth between the donut shop, for coffee, and her car, a Honda Accord, six times, and still the person she had arranged to meet had not shown up. Inside the donut shop, a friend, a slim young man, was keeping the same vigil, only he was far more relaxed.

Lucy burst through the shop’s door once more and stormed across to their table. “What do you think? Maybe Andy went straight there.” She kept her voice low, hushed, urgent as she stood over him. “He could be talking to Cinq-Mars right now! Let’s check it out.”

“Andy knows he’s meeting us here, Luce. If he’s not here, I can promise you that he’s not there.” He sipped his hot chocolate.

“Then where is he?”

“That,” he stressed, “I don’t know. If he is on the lake, then I can guarantee you that he wants us here. No closer than here. Come on, Lucy. Sit down, warm yourself. Your teeth are chattering.”

“This isn’t working,” she grumbled as she slid into the booth. “Cinq-Mars won’t wait forever. If Andy doesn’t show—”

“—we’ll find another time. Andy’s not the most reliable guy on the planet, plus he’s working both ends against the middle. You know what that means.”

“No, what does that mean?”

She was finally wearing down his outer reserve. “Luce, if Werner Honigwachs crooks his little finger, Andy has to run, and we’re automatically postponed.

He wouldn’t be able to let us know. I expected something like this to happen. Give it another half-hour, after that we’ll call it a day. And Lucy—”

“What?”

“No more coffee. You’re wired, girl. You’re way too jumpy.”

“I got a bad feeling.”

“That’s what comes from drinking coffee by the barrel. Relax!”

She lasted about twenty seconds before wanting to bolt. “I’ll just go down to the shore. I won’t step on the ice. I’ll take a look around, make sure Andy’s car’s not there. How can that hurt?”

The young man sighed. “Tell you what. You stay here. I’ll go.”

“Why you?”

“Because you can’t be trusted. You’ll charge onto the ice and have your own powwow with the great white cop. I’ll check things out and be back in a flash. If Andy shows, just drive him down to the lake and we’ll continue as planned. Okay?”

Reluctantly, she consented to the compromise. At least they were doing something.

“Remember, Luce. About the coffee. Just say no.”

A widening of the Ottawa River, the Lake of Two Mountains is shaped somewhat like a dancing woman with a flared skirt. At its western head the river passes over and around a hydroelectric dam and gracefully swims downstream through an elongated neck, then fills at the bodice and narrows again at the waist. The lake dramatically broadens as the skirt spreads outward and then separates, about seven miles downstream from the bonnet, into two legs. One becomes what is known unofficially as the Back River, creating the north shore around the island of Montreal. The waters
of the other plunge through rapids at its foot into the St. Lawrence River, forming the south shore.

Land around the lake is thinly populated. An Indian reserve, apple orchards, villages and two small towns, vast grounds for a monastery and an expansive provincial park occupy the north side. Homes poke out amid the canopy of trees along the southern embankment, until the trees yield to farmland at the eastern tip. On winter weekends, the lake is active with skiers, snowmobilers, and fisherfolk, and with those content to drive to a shack on the ice to drink and gab.

The Chief of Police for the Town of Vaudreuil-Dorion arrived in a squad car and descended the steep ramp from the road to the lake on foot. From a distance he struck Emile Cinq-Mars as being athletic, hale. Barrel-chested, he possessed good muscle tone for his age and took to the snow with a graceful lope. That he had chosen to leave his car on the road seemed worth evaluating. The Ford, a rear-wheel drive, likely would skid on the ice and the ramp’s steep pitch. The man had exercised due care, meaning either that he had profited from experience—a good sign—or that he was remarkably cautious, a quality of indeterminate value.

Cinq-Mars returned to the shack where Mathers had remained with the dead man, partly for the warmth, as the stove-fire was blazing now, but principally to make himself difficult to dismiss when the chief went about his business. He produced his badge the moment the officer arrived, in case the fellow tried giving him the boot.

“Cinq-Mars,” he stated,
“MUCPD.”
Announcing that he was a member of the Montreal Urban Community Police Department would not earn him brownie points with a small-town chief, but there was no getting around that. “My partner, Detective Bill Mathers.”

“You put in the call?” the chief asked.

“I did.”

“How’d you get here?”

“We were fishing. Practically next door. Off duty.”

“Émk
Cinq-Mars?” the chief probed. Younger than him, about forty-five, he spoke with a gruffness born of self-doubt Cinq-Mars worried that he’d made a mistake. He had hoped for a savvy small-town cop happy to have a significant crime to track down, but he ran the risk of landing a mayor’s shoddy cousin, or some such.

“Yes, sir.” At that moment, Cinq-Mars noticed the minnow bucket, where ice remained attached to the edges. The little fish hardly swam at all in the cold, but why was the water not frozen solid when the cabin was not yet fully warmed by the stove? A bucket of solid ice would take a while to thaw.

The chief shot him a glance and uttered a sound inside his chest, a cross between a harumph and a belch. “Chief Jean-Guy Brasseur. This is not your case.”

“Did I say it was?”

“Have you disturbed anything?”

“When we first showed up, the body was on the cot. For safekeeping, we put him underwater.”

“Your press clippings don’t mean squat to me, smartass. All you city cops are crooked anyways.”

Cinq-Mars could hear Mathers chuckling behind his back, enjoying his senior’s predicament. “Country cops are bumpkins. Now then, we’ve insulted each other. What does that prove? Are you interested in this crime, or not?”

“The SQ will take it over.”

“Give them a call. You might need them to blow your nose.”

“Don’t get smart with me, bud. What do we got here, anyways?”

“Thanks for taking an interest. There’s a man under the ice, Chief. A bullet hole through his throat.”

“A fishstick?”

Cinq-Mars was familiar with the reference to frozen corpses. “Pretty much.”

The Chief did not kneel to have a closer look. He gazed down at the victim for a moment, then glanced about the shack. “How’d he get down there?” he asked.