Blackfly Season

36

THEY PUT A WATCH ON the Viking Riders’ house by the French River: two fishermen in a small boat much plagued by blackflies. And two repairmen on a telephone pole who got bitten even worse. They watched for four hours and saw nobody enter the house or leave it. There were no motorcycles or cars parked outside.

Still, they took precautions. Four cars, not including ident, and all of them with shotguns and body armour. They sweated like pigs. Upon breaking down the front door, they did a quick survey room-to-room and established that the house was empty. When they finished, they were standing in the kitchen, which looked as if it had been gone over by professional cleaners. Appliances, sinks and countertops gleamed.

“These guys can come over and do my housework any day,” Delorme said. “As long as I’m not home.”

The house was clearly not a residence, not even a part-time one. There were three bedrooms, minimally and cheaply furnished with cots that looked like something from army surplus. Closets and cupboards were empty, reeking of Windex and Fantastik. The parquet floors bore chips and scuff marks, legacies of serious boots. In the fridge were containers of jam, yogourt and curry paste, and these proved after much probing to contain nothing more than jam, yogourt and curry paste.

Cardinal went down to the basement. He could smell the lake and the river, a sense of their blue- and white-water power, and hovering beneath and above all this, smells of concrete and drainpipe. The floor was enviably level compared to the lunar terrain of his own basement. He looked under the stairs, as well as behind and inside the dusty washer and dryer. A country of mould and dust and spiders’ webs.

An Ikea dresser yielded one dark blue T-shirt with NYPD in large letters on the back.

“At least they have a sense of humour,” Delorme said.

“You have to ask yourself,” Cardinal said. “Why would a group of red-blooded Canadians like the Viking Riders have a nicely situated cottage like this and not be using it?”

“Maybe they don’t like blackflies,” Delorme said. “Me, I never understood all the fuss about cottages, anyway. You go out to the cottage, it’s noisier than Main Street.”

“I know,” Cardinal said. His own house was mostly a quiet refuge, but it was often plagued by snowmobiles, motorboats, Sea-Doos and every other variation of the internal combustion engine known to man.

“It’s so clean here, it’s almost like they were expecting a raid.”

“Yeah, I had the same thought,” Cardinal said. “Or they could just be being careful. One of their brothers was murdered, after all.”

He lifted up the corner of a copy of the Algonquin Lode. The front page had a weeks-old story about a man who had won an annual contest by guessing what day the ice on Lake Nipissing would break up.

“On the other hand,” Cardinal said. “Maybe they just don’t use this place because it’s too hot. I mean, if they’re running dope through this house, none of them is going to want to live in it. Whoever stayed here would take the heat if the place got busted.”

Arsenault’s voice echoed through the empty house, calling them.

They found him on hands and knees, inspecting a closet. He had removed a baseboard.

“I’m coming up with quite a bit of white powder back here. Enough to analyze anyway. Stuff drifts everywhere no matter how much they try to clean up. My guess is they stored a lot of it in here. At lots of different times.”

“So we know for sure they ran dope through here,” Delorme said. “I’m shocked. Shocked”

“They left the shipment here with only Wombat in charge. That says what?”

“It was a regular thing. They did it a lot.”

“Right. They felt totally confident. Then someone comes along and not only rips them off, but kills Wombat and cuts him apart. So who’s likely to do that?”

“A rival gang, maybe?”

“What rival gang, though? There aren’t any biker gangs closer than Toronto, and if they’d been in town we’d have known about it. Hey, Szelagy!” Cardinal called out toward the front room. “What did we hear back from ViCLAS on Wombat?”

Szelagy’s massy form filled the doorway. “Negative. No links to nothing.”

“Not even to any unsolveds?”

“Solved, unsolved, they came up empty.”

“Did you have them run it without the hieroglyphics?”

“Yeah, sure I did.” Szelagy looked wounded. “I asked them to run it both ways. I put the report in your inbox this morning.”

“I can’t believe they didn’t come up with anything,” Delorme said. “An MO that unusual.”

“Let’s think about the gun,” Cardinal said. “We know Wombat stole it over a month ago.”

“But he couldn’t have attacked Toof after he was killed.”

“Right. So probably whoever killed Wombat also took the liberty of removing his gun. He or she then used it to attack Terri Tait and then Toof. All of them were connected to the drug trade in one way or another—Terri through her brother. But other than the bullets, we don’t have anything solid linking her with Toof and Wombat.”

Delorme’s brow was creased in thought.

“What?” Cardinal said. “What are you thinking?”

“Assuming the Riders are telling the truth—that they were ripped off by someone else and they didn’t kill Wombat—it would have to be a pretty heavy brand of criminal, don’t you think? Not a person someone like Terri Tait or even Toof would be likely to run into in the normal course of events. This guy has killed two people in a very short period of time. And tried to kill three. That’s extremely violent, even by drug-dealing standards—almost as if he’s looking for opportunities to kill.”

“I know. Which would mean he’s probably still on the hunt.”