Black Rock (20 page)

He wondered if this was the kind of place where Ruth Garber would be comfortable.

Then he thought he should call her and ask her out on another date but realized it would have to be tonight, before he started a couple of weeks working nights. Who would go out with a guy the same day he asked?

Maybe Ruth Garber.

So he called her and when she answered and recognized his voice she said, “Oh, did you find out about any more missing girls?”

“No, I'm still looking into that.” He paused then, unsure about this, but then he said, “I was wondering if you'd want to get together tonight, maybe have dinner?”

“I have some leftovers.”

“Oh. Maybe a movie?”

She said, “There's enough, why don't you come over?”

“Okay.”

He hung up the payphone, thinking he couldn't tell if he'd just asked Ruth out on a date or not, but when he got to her apartment she'd set the table and, he thought, got dressed up a little.

After they ate the lasagna and the garlic bread (which now Dougherty was thinking she'd gone out and bought after he'd called), Ruth got a newspaper and opened it to the movie listings.

“
Il était une fois dans l'Ouest
?”

Dougherty said, “I saw it as
Once Upon a Time in the West
, but if you want to see it in French that'd be fine.”

“
Hello, Dolly!
?”

They were sitting on the couch in the small living room, Ruth holdng the paper open so they could both see it and Dougherty said, “I'm surprised they're still showing
Airport
after the plane crash.”

She said, “Oh look, a double bill,
I Am Curious (Yellow)
and
I Am Curious (Blue)
.”

“Are you really that curious?”

Ruth was smiling then, moving a little closer to Dougherty, and she said, “
The Role of Sex in Society
— they're always trying to make them sound classy and scientific.”

“Isn't that what you do in Sociology?”

“Yeah,” she said, “we sit around all day watching skin flicks.”

“I'm surprised we haven't busted you.”

She turned to him then, sat up a little and said, “Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?” Then she swung a leg over and sat on his lap facing him, and he was thinking, Yeah, this is definitely a date.

He said, “Yeah, I would.”

They never made it to a movie, just into the bedroom.

chapter

eighteen

Dougherty led the two bomb squad guys, Vachon and Meloche, down the lane, telling them, “It's still on the front seat.”

Vachon was wearing his new bomb suit, thick arms and legs and chest protector that looked like an umpire's. He could barely walk, and the metal helmet looked like a welder's.

“I can't fucking see,” he said.

Dougherty said, “Here,” and stopped in front of a Volkswagen Beetle.

The lane was barely wide enough for the car, and Vachon said, “How the hell did you get in?”

“Squeezed in the driver's side. There's enough room.”

Vachon said, “Yeah, for you,” and took off the ­helmet and looked back down the lane to Notre Dame Street and then started taking off the rest of the bomb suit. Meloche said, “What are you doing?”

“They can't see in here,” Vachon said, motioning to the other cops and the reporters, all waiting on the street at the end of the lane. Then he looked at Dougherty and said, “Don't let them come down here.”

“I don't think you have to worry about that,” Dougherty said.

Meloche said, “What are you doing here, Dougherty? You don't work around here, do you?”

“No, but there was something at City Hall and something else somewhere, I don't know. Anyway they were short, so I got sent over here. Been here since Tuesday.”

Meloche aimed his flashlight up the stone walls on either side of the lane, more like a tunnel as over the last hundred years the buildings on either side had put on additions that joined about ten feet up. “What is this, a bank?”

Dougherty said, “One on each side — Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank, I think. Maybe Bank of Nova Scotia.”

“Why did you come in here?”

“I saw the car, I thought it was stolen and dumped here.”

“It probably is stolen.”

“So, you know, I got in it and looked in the glove box for the VIN and the registration and I heard the ticking.”

Vachon was out of the bomb suit then and he said, “It must have been loud in this tunnel,” and Dougherty said, “Yeah, once I was sitting still, it was loud.”

He watched Vachon take out his nail clippers from the little leather pouch he always wore on his belt and squeeze through the driver's side door of the Beetle.

Once he'd heard the ticking, Dougherty had reached under the passenger seat, where the noise was coming from, and pulled out a rolled up green garbage bag covered in tape — the same set-up as the other hundred bombs planted in the last six months — and then he left it on the seat, squeezed out of the car and ran back to the street, where he found a call box.

Now Meloche was leaning up against the back of the car, looking through the small rear window watching, Vachon cut the garbage bag and revealed five sticks of dynamite and an alarm clock.

“The usual?”

Vachon said yes and cut the wires to the detonator. “Still just the wires, no booby trap
.
” Then he held up his hand and said, “Wait.”

In the quiet of the tunnel they could hear ticking.

Vachon reached under the seat and came up with another taped-up garbage bag.

“Holy shit,” Dougherty said, “another one.”

“They may not be any better at making the bombs,” Meloche said, “but now it seems they know they aren't good at it.” He smiled at his own joke but then he took on a serious look,
“Hey Gilles, le siège arrière.”

Dougherty leaned closer, looking past Meloche into the back seat of the Volkswagen and saw the wooden crate.

Vachon was cutting open the second garbage bag and he paused for a moment, reached into the back and gently pushed the crate. Then he said, “Fifty pounds.”

Dougherty said, “It's full of dynamite?”

“The bombs under the seat must have been the trigger,” Meloche said. “The crate probably doesn't have a detonator.”

“Probably?”

And it didn't. When Vachon had cut the wires on the second five-stick bomb in the front seat he got a closer look at the crate and saw the nails on it had never been pried open.

The lane was too narrow to get the doors on the Beetle open far enough to get the crate out, so Vachon got Dougherty and a couple of other beat cops to push the car out of the lane while he sat in the driver's seat holding the steering wheel straight.

When they got to the street, Meloche said, “Good, you didn't wet your pants,” and the other beat cops glanced at their own crotches.

Dougherty just looked at Meloche. “Did you?”

“Not this time. I'm not saying it never happens.”

“The trunk is in the front, right?” Vachon said.

“Yeah.”

He opened it and said, “I thought so.”

Two more crates.

Vachon handed Meloche the garbage bags and said, “These two, all they would have done is blow up the car,” and Meloche said. “But the
150
pounds, that would have been something.”

And as he passed Dougherty, Vachon winked and said, “Something, for sure.”

The reporters followed Vachon to his unmarked station wagon, and Dougherty went over to the bomb squad truck, where Meloche was putting the dynamite from the two small bombs into a steel safe box.

“How did he know?”

Meloche lit a cigarette and said, “There was a theft from a construction site in St. Joli last week —
250
pounds of dynamite.”

“So there's still a hundred pounds out there?”

Meloche took a drag on the cigarette and then started for the Volkswagen to get the crates. “You be careful.”

“You, too.”

Meloche laughed and said,
“Toujours.”

Always.

Later that week Dougherty was pulled from a dream in which he was making out with a woman. They were kissing and groping each other, and there was a bell going off. They were in long grass in a field, and Dougherty's squad car was parked beside them, and he thought that was where the bell was coming from. Then he realized it was his phone ringing, and he woke up alone in his own bed and just as he did he realized the woman he was making out with in the dream was Arlene Webber.

He sat up and shook his head, and took the two steps to his kitchenette and picked up. “Hello?”

“Is this a bad time?” It was Ruth Garber.

Dougherty looked for his watch and asked, “What time is it?”

“Three thirty.”

He'd finished his shift at eight that morning and been asleep since about ten o'clock when he'd finally gotten home. Not bad.

“No, this is fine, what's up?”

“I had a good meeting with Dr. Pendleton and I thought you'd want to know about it.”

“Is there news?”

“Some very exciting refinements to our theory.”

Dougherty said, “Oh, okay,” and got a cigarette out of the pack on the kitchen table, where he'd dropped it earlier that morning.

Now Ruth was saying, “I have a couple more questions. Maybe we could get together?”

Dougherty said, “Sure, I don't have to be at work until later tonight.”

“Could you come by my office?”

“Sure.”

A few minutes later Dougherty got into the shower, wondering why he'd dreamt about Brenda Webber's older sister.

Ruth's office was on the sixth floor of the Leacock building, an almost-brand-new ten-storey concrete slab on the corner of MacTavish and Dr. Penfield, right beside a building Dougherty figured must be over a hundred years old.

He'd gone through the lobby and past a student lounge, where a couple of kids — well, as he passed them he realized they were about his own age but with their long hair and jeans and t-shirts they'd always be called “kids” by the newspapers — looked up and dismissed him as a cop, even though he was wearing jeans himself, and stuck their noses back in their books.

The sixth floor looked like pretty much every office building Dougherty had ever been in. He found room
635
easily enough and knocked on the open door.

Ruth came out from behind a desk. “Come on in.”

“Nice place you have here.”

The office was small and crammed with boxes of files, every inch of the place covered with some kind of paper. Ruth lifted a stack of files off a chair. “Thanks for coming.”

“Well, I'm dying to hear about this new theory.” Dougherty was still being sarcastic.

“We're calling it ‘progression.'”

“You are?” Dougherty took a step towards the chair but stopped when a man came into the doorway of the office, and Ruth said, “Oh, here's Dr. Pendleton now.”

He was younger than Dougherty expected, and he wasn't wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows or smoking a pipe — he had on a turtleneck and was smoking a cigarette. He was probably in his late thirties but seemed younger. Dougherty figured he was one of those cool profs he ran into at the demonstrations, the kind who stood with the students.

“You must be Constable Dougherty.”

They shook hands and Dougherty said, “Nice to meet you.”

Ruth said, “I was just telling the constable about our theory.”

Dougherty thought he saw something from the professor, a tiny smile maybe, and the guy said, “Yes, our theory,” and then he let go of Dougherty's hand and turned to look at Ruth.

“The progression.”

She said, “Yes, the way the killer is progressing from one type of victim to another.”

Pendleton said, “Up until now we were just thinking of them as women.”

Dougherty said, “Which they are.”

“Yes,” Pendleton said, “but remember the triad.”

Dougherty said, “How could I forget the triad.”

Pendleton looked at him and Dougherty thought for second he might call him on the sarcasm, but the professor let it go. Maybe there was a slightly superior dismissive look, but then Dougherty thought maybe he was just feeling out of his depth in the office and intimidated by the prof, like he was by the whole campus.

“Well,” Pendleton said, looking from Dougherty to Ruth, “I have to get ready for my trip to Oregon. I'm sure you can fill in the constable on what we need?” A quick nod to Dougherty and the professor was gone.

“He's going to interview Jerry Brudos,” Ruth said.

Dougherty got out his cigarettes and lit one. “Who's that?”

“A man who killed four women.”

“Four?”

“That we know of.”

It was quiet for a moment and then Dougherty said, “Okay, what do you need from me?”

“More information about the victims.”

“What for?”

“To see if there's a progression. You see, the first violence is against animals. Usually dogs and cats but it can be any kind of animal, really.”

“Usually?”

“Yes, but it's the violence that's the key. And the ­progression.” Ruth got out her own cigarettes and lit one, dropping the match in a big glass ashtray on her desk. “With the cruelty to animals, it starts slowly with whatever animal he has access to; mice, squirrels, stray dogs or cats, and it usually starts with just a little violence, throwing stones, kicking.”

Dougherty said, “Okay.”

“But in many cases it progresses to more hands-on violence, stabbing, strangulation. And it often progresses from strays to a family pet.”

Dougherty said, “More personal,” and Ruth said, “Exactly.”

Then she said, “So now I'm wondering if these men are making the same progression from women who are available, like prostitutes, to someone more personal.”

“These men,” Dougherty said. “How many are there?”

“More all the time.”

“Wow,” Dougherty said, “you really are doing some research here.”

“Yes, we are,” Ruth said. “What did you think we were doing?”

“I don't know, it just seems like a … tough way to spend the day.” He motioned at the piles of files all over the office.

Ruth said, “It's important.”

“Oh, for sure.”

She paused a little but then got back to business. “In some cases where we have enough information we've seen that the first victims tend to be prostitutes.”

Dougherty said, “Availability.”

“They would be women who would get into cars with men they don't know.”

“And hitchhikers.”

“Yes,” Ruth said, “we've seen that, too. But as we see more cases we see the progression.”

Dougherty was getting the feeling that it was much more Ruth's theory than Dr. Pendleton's, but he didn't say anything.

“We've seen other men move from prostitutes to more personal victims and we think that's what's going on here.”

Dougherty said, “We're not sure Sylvie Berubé was a prostitute.”

“That's what I was hoping you could look into.”

“Me? Shouldn't that be the detectives?”

Ruth tapped her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, and Dougherty noticed for the first time she seemed a little nervous. He watched her wave her hand around a little, the smoke trailing behind, then she said, “The thing is, we've spoken to the detectives quite a bit.”

“Yeah.”

“And, well, they've answered a lot of our questions and given us access to a lot of the investigation.”

“Yeah.”

“And this theory is really at the early stages.”

“So,” Dougherty said, “this isn't between Dr. Pendleton and the detectives, this is between you and me? So if the theory doesn't pan out we look bad and not the higher-ups?”

“Theories don't look bad,” Ruth said. “They have to be tested, if they don't pan out, as you say, that isn't wrong, it's part of the process.”

“Sure,” Dougherty said, “but I can imagine the conversation, talking about limited resources and where they would be better spent and how you can chase this theory but you're on your own.”