Ice Lake (46 page)

The use of the word “sir” impressed Charles Painchaud, and he proceeded to the opposite side of the table in the dull room where paint was peeling off the walls, and he put his coffee down, spilling some more. He seated himself, his chair scraping the floor. He looked from one Montreal cop to the other. “What’s going on?” he asked tersely.

“You tell me,” Cinq-Mars suggested.

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes you do.”

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

Cinq-Mars signalled to the officer behind the one-way mirror to roll the tape recorder. “We’ll record this conversation, if you don’t mind.” He looked back at
Painchaud, who appeared ashen and stunned. “I can start you off, Charles. However, it would be better all around if you just told me everything.”

The younger man folded his arms across his chest. The gesture did not seem particularly defiant, rather, the man appeared to be settling in, as though he assumed that this was going to take a while. “Start me off, Emile, because I don’t know where you are.”

Cinq-Mars identified himself and the other two men in the room for the sake of the recording. Then he declared that, “Andrew Stettler was killed in the fishing hut where he was found—”

“He was?”

“—a fishing hut that belongs to your girlfriend, Camille Choquette.”

Gradually, his chin fell, his gaze shifted downward. When he lifted his head again, he did not make eye contact. He looked higher, over Mathers’s head, as though scanning his brain for thoughts. “If I’m not under arrest—” he said finally.

“Not yet,” Mathers qualified.

“—then we are in this room as equals. As fellow police officers.”

“That could change in a hurry,” he was warned.

“Until it does, I have a proposition for you.”

“What’s that?” Cinq-Mars was willing to give him a little latitude, as the man had not denigrated himself either by denying the charge or offering up an inane lie.

“I will tell you something pertinent to this case that you don’t know, and then you will answer a question of mine.” He looked at Cinq-Mars. “You can cut off the discussion if you decide you’re not interested.”

The deal was a good one. “All right,” Cinq-Mars began. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I put you on this case.”

The older cop checked with his partner to see if this made any sense. Mathers shrugged.

“You know yourself that I could have blown you off the ice the day that we found Andy. And incidentally, Andy was a friend of mine. Did you know that?”

Cinq-Mars spoke slowly. “You knew the victim and you’re telling me that that information is incidental?”

“Think back, Emile. I allowed you to stay on the lake. For what it’s worth, I was behind getting you to be there. After that, I allowed you to stay in touch with this case. I fed you information.”

“What information?” Cinq-Mars corrected him. “You left out pertinent facts!”

Painchaud tilted his head as though to concede that much. “What I’m trying to tell you is, I was the one who told Lucy Gabriel to call you. How else do you think she got your home number? I used my connections to get it. I’m the one who put you on the ice that morning.”

The two men stared at one another. Mathers’s gaze drifted between the two.

“Why?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“It’s time for you to answer a question of mine,” Painchaud determined.

“Don’t push my buttons, Charlie. I might be charging you with murder today.”

“Answer my question. How could Andy die in the hut and end up under the water?”

Cinq-Mars sat back. To answer the question was to put Painchaud on a different plane, removing him from the status of a suspect and restoring him to that of cop. He didn’t like the shift, but believed that he could move him back at any moment. “Ice was cut out and raised using a block-and-tackle attached to the roof beam, which was stout enough. Stettler’s body was tossed in. The human debris and blood was scraped off the surface, then the surface was re-formed, and the ice was frozen back into place.”

Painchaud mulled the information awhile. Maintaining one arm across his chest, he rubbed his face with his
other hand. Interestingly, for Cinq-Mars, he rubbed the side of his face that was paralysed, as though trying to awaken something that had atrophied within him. “How did Andy get in?” he asked. “He didn’t have a key.”

“Maybe not, but he has a background. I checked his record. It wouldn’t have been the first lock he’d ever jimmied. Or, you let him in. Or, Camille let him in. Or, he had his own key.”

“I asked Camille. She told me he didn’t have a key. So maybe you’re right. He has a background. Maybe he didn’t need a key.” He seemed dazed.

“Camille’s your girlfriend?” Mathers wanted confirmed.

As a small man, Painchaud felt somewhat compromised behind the large table. He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table and folding his hands together. “You have to start with this one point, Emile. I brought you onto this case. Andy Stettler, Lucy Gabriel, Camille Choquette and me, we were ail working together, and together we brought you onto this case.”

Cinq-Mars copied his posture, except that he raised both his forefingers to form a point, steeple-like. “All right,” he told him. “I’ve got that. I admit that it’s interesting. Now I need you to sell me on it. I need you to tell me why.”

“I was involved in a case I couldn’t handle by myself.”

“Why not invite the SQ, to join you?”

“I can’t trust my department. Not with something so big, or, from my perspective, so sensitive. My colleagues don’t trust me any more than I trust them. If I had suggested to someone that I wanted to spare my girlfriend, I’d probably have been arrested along with her on the spot. Even if I’d found people I could trust and who would trust me, we’d probably still have
botched it. I needed somebody good, Cinq-Mars. I needed you.”

A compliment wasn’t going to weaken his aggressive approach. “Why keep your relationship with Camille Choquette a secret?”

“For starters, I’ve had one friend murdered and another abducted. I kept Camille a secret because I believed that her life might depend on it. Also, and this is not a small point, she’s in trouble with the law. The law doesn’t know it. I’ve protected her to give us time to get at the real culprit in a terrible conspiracy.”

“Lovely.” Cinq-Mars let his hands fall hard upon the table. “Just what I need. A conspiracy theory. Is the world in danger, Charlie?”

The smaller man would not accept the abuse. He continued to stare at Cinq-Mars, and he did not relent until the other man did so first.

“Who’s the real culprit?” the detective asked at last.

“Werner Honigwachs.”

Cinq-Mars looked across at Mathers. “Bingo,” he said.

“Your lucky day,” Mathers replied.

“All right,” the senior cop decided, addressing Painchaud. “Convince me.”

To his increasing astonishment, Sergeant Charles Painchaud managed to do so. He had been brought into the fray because Camille Choquette and Lucy Gabriel were in trouble, and the nature of that trouble horrified him. Painchaud had a story to tell, and the pair of Montreal policeman absorbed it all with trepidation. If the SQ, officer was wiggling out of things, he was doing it awfully well.

The three men sat in the stillness of the room awhile, each gazing at the table or at a wall, until Cinq-Mars finally signalled the recording to be stopped. He made a cut sign with his hands to indicate to the officer in the
booth to leave them in peace, and a moment later he asked Mathers to check that they had been left alone. When Mathers came back with the all-clear, Cinq-Mars addressed Painchaud.

“Tell me more,” he demanded. “Details.”

Painchaud told him Lucy’s story about the motel clerk in Paramus and that Camille had said that she had found him dying. He had died in her arms. He told stories of the men who were Lucy’s friends, and that Camille had reported on which ones had lived and which had died, and that Lucy had wept at the recital of names.

“I’ll need to speak to Camille,” Cinq-Mars pointed out.

“She’s not the one we’re after,” Painchaud attested. He took a sip of coffee.

“I need to talk to her.”

The officer conceded as much. “All right.”

“You both live on the other side of the lake. I’ll pick you up this evening, after her working day is done, let’s say seven, then we’ll drive to her house.”

“We can meet at her house, if you like. Or she can come to mine.”

“No. I’ll pick you up. I’ll have a few more questions for you by then.”

“All right.”

“You don’t know what’s happened to Lucy Gabriel?”

“Not a clue. I fear for her.”

Cinq-Mars nodded.

“We have to protect the two women, Emile. They’re not innocent, but they were both used as pawns in this.”

Cinq-Mars continued to nod. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I had to involve you, Emile. I had to get you onside. I couldn’t say to you, here’s Camille Choquette, she’s
partly responsible for the deaths of forty-two people. That’s the final body count, as far as we’ve been able to determine. The woman you’re hunting, Lucy Gabriel, she administered the drug cocktails. So I tell you that, and then I’m supposed to say, ‘Oh, by the way, I want you to watch out for these women, and look after them, and see that they go free.’”

“No one’s been granted their freedom yet,” Cinq-Mars emphasized.

“I had to involve you in the ramifications of this case first, Emile. I’m sorry about that, but I had to work you. I had to arouse your interest.”

The older man clenched his fists and tapped them on the table lightly. He had to reprogram his thinking. One part of him was judgmental, but that attitude warred against a part of him that understood the benefits of compromise and the need for mercy. “You can go,” Cinq-Mars said. Painchaud left without saying goodbye, and several minutes later Mathers tapped his partner on the shoulder to break the spell, to draw him out of his trance.

“What do you think?” Mathers asked.

“When we go onto Indian land, what do we do?”

The answer surprised him. His partner had moved on to a different subject, it seemed. The younger man had to think about his response. “We notify the Mohawk Peacekeepers.”

“What do you think the bad guys do?”

Mathers thought about that. How the question was connected to the matters under discussion he did not know. Again, he had to think hard before answering, and even then posed his reply as a question. “Do they call the Mohawk Warriors?”

“I don’t know, but it makes sense to me. I’m going out to the reserve before heading home. I’ll pick up Charlie as planned this evening. After we talk to Camille, I’ll give you a buzz. We’ll thrash this through.”

“What do I do in the meantime?”

“Do what you do best, Bill. My dirty work.”

“Meaning?”

“Follow me out there. I’ll take the ice-bridge to Oka. I want you to take the land route around. Arrive ahead of me in some beat-up old crate. Wear grubby clothes. As soon as I find out where my meeting takes place, I’ll let you know. After I leave the meeting, tail whoever’s behind me. Find out where he goes, stay on him until he moves again. Very important, Bill. You’ll be on Indian land, so don’t get caught. As a precaution, I’d take your badge out of your pocket. Hide it under your seat. But keep your gun.”

Mathers nodded. “What are we looking for?” he asked.

“Knowledge. It’s been in short supply around here lately.” Cinq-Mars patted his shoulder as they vacated the room. “Better get down to the costume room, Bill.” Mathers nodded but didn’t appear to be in any great rush, as though the news of the afternoon had left him stunned. “Hickory dickory,” his senior admonished him.

14
COMMEMORATION

The same day, Tuesday afternoon, February 15th, 1999

Crossing the lake under a bright glare intensified by the sparkling snow, Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars put in a call to Constable Roland Harvey of the Mohawk Peacekeepers. Even in broad daylight, and driving an unmarked car, he preferred to cross onto Indian land with the acquiescence of the local constabulary—and preferably with their protection. He and the constable arranged to meet at Lucy Gabriel’s house, and Cinq-Mars told him that he would be there shortly.

He then put a call through to Bill Mathers, who confirmed that he was deep in a driveway, buried in the woods, but with a sightline to Lucy’s house. He had already seen Constable Harvey drive onto the property. Cinq-Mars warned him to stay alert.

While listening to Painchaud’s story, Cinq-Mars had grown increasingly convinced that he needed Lucy Gabriel alive. He was desperate to find her. If she still walked among the living, he had to make contact. But how could she have been allowed to live while in possession of such terrible knowledge? What had impressed Cinq-Mars in the story’s detail was the involvement of Mohawk Warriors providing access to and from the United States. If they’d been involved at
one stage, they might have continued to play a part. Whoever had abducted the young woman had wanted her alive, presumably for questioning, and after the interrogation had taken place in Old Montreal they had not left her corpse behind. On the contrary, a physician had attended to her. Why? Had Warriors intervened? Had the bad guys thought to make contact prior to an incursion onto Indian land? That would have been the wise thing to do. Had a deal been struck? Could Lucy’s life have been a concession granted to the power and, ultimately, the authority of Mohawk Warriors on Indian land?