Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (161 page)

“Except there’s that damn cellphone call to Weiss’s wife. No, Brian, someone is after Weiss. I agree Twiggy is a question mark, but I’m damn sure Weiss is a target. I just wish I knew who. And why.”

“Well, our list of suspects is shrinking. Blakeley’s in jail, and if Weiss is the target, that only leaves—”

A blur of grey flashed in front of the car. Sullivan slammed on the brakes and the tires screamed as he fought to keep the car on the road. Green barely registered the deer before it leaped gracefully over the roadside ditch and disappeared into the trees. In its wake, Sullivan shook his head, his knuckles white as he eased forward on the gas again.

“Holy Mary, that was too close. I forgot this is prime deer hour.”

Green’s heart gradually slowed, and they pressed on in tense silence, focussing on the road. When they reached the end of the autoroute, Sullivan slowed to navigate the turn onto the two-lane highway that followed the Gatineau River up towards Low. Green chafed at the narrow, twisting road.

“Brian, we have to go faster.”

Sullivan scowled as he pressed the accelerator cautiously. “One near fatal encounter not enough for you, Green? How about I do the driving, and you keep your eyes glued to the shoulders of the road up ahead.”

They drove in silence again, past the scattered settlement on either side of the highway. A gas station, a building store, a lone house... Green’s thoughts drifted back to their list of suspects. Who would they meet at the end of the road? Hamm was his greatest worry. He was a professional soldier trained in tactics and combat, tough and disciplined, perhaps to a fault. But that very professionalism gave Green pause. Hamm had three generations of war heroes to live up to. Would he disregard the military tradition and chain of command he revered so much, simply to protect a colleague’s name?

Atkinson, on the other hand, had shown himself to be the king of expediency and sleaze. John Blakeley was his meal ticket, and there was no telling how high Atkinson’s own star would rise if Blakeley got himself into the Liberal cabinet. Atkinson would waste little regret on the likes of Patricia Ross or Sue Peters if they got in his way. But the question was whether he had the physical savagery to actually kill them himself. Green wished he had met the man; old-fashioned instinct often told him more than a dozen well-crafted reports.

That instinct played a large part in his assessment of their third suspect. Gibbs’s background report on Leanne Neuss had painted a picture of a strong, capable woman used to taking charge and getting the job done. With her mother dead from cancer and her father addicted to backroom politics, she had run his household and raised her four younger brothers almost singlehandedly. All of this had certainly been good training for her role as a saviour wife, but on the face of it, not for cold-blooded murder. Yet Green had met the woman and seen first hand her strength and her protectiveness. Had she inherited her father’s passion for power as well? Blakeley was her mission, whether as a wounded warrior in need of healing or as a promising star of the Liberal Party. Could she assault two women with her own bare hands, if his future was at stake?

Green’s cellphone blasted into the middle of his thoughts. It was Fortin again, announcing that another unit had been dispatched and that he himself was on his way to the farm.

“What about the first unit?” Green demanded.

Fortin’s cellphone crackled ominously. “Not yet arrived, sir. But it should be any time.”

Not yet arrived, Green thought, glancing at his watch. What were they driving? Horse buggies? He peered outside at the passing landscape. On his right lay the broad silver ribbon of the Gatineau River, and on his left the rugged rock face. No lights winked through the pallid dawn, no signs of life. Nothing but pasture and scrub, blurred in places by a pale mist that hung over the ground.

“Where are we?” he asked Sullivan.

“Some navigator you are. I think we must be almost at Brennan’s Hill. Keep an eye out for a restaurant on the left. That’s the entrance to McDonald Road.”

McDonald Road, according to Eleanor Weiss’s directions, was a long, winding dirt road that led deep into Quebec farmland. A side road branched off it about ten kilometres inland, followed by another ten kilometre stretch to the Theriault farm. Even at a risky sixty kilometres an hour, they were probably still twenty minutes away. Too long!

He turned his attention back to Fortin. “When do you expect to arrive?”

“I’m just on Chemin McDonald now. Maybe fifteen minutes?”

“We’re right behind you. When you get to the farm, proceed with caution. Check with the farmer for signs of strangers before making a move. We need to know what we are dealing with.”

“No problem,” said Fortin. “I’ll handle this, sir.”

After signing off, Green turned to Sullivan. “Step on it, Brian. Our Quebec colleague sounds a little too sure of himself.”

A cluster of buildings emerged from the gloom up ahead, and a small highway sign announced “Brennan’s Hill”. At the last minute, Green spotted a narrow road snaking up behind a building on the left.

“That must be our turn!” he shouted. Sullivan executed a rapid emergency turn, swerving the car with a shriek of rubber and heading onto the side road. The tires thudded over potholes and tossed a shower of stones in their wake as he stepped on the gas again. The sky had lightened almost to white, and Green could see the silhouettes of village houses bleached pale grey with the dawn. But mist hung thick over the passing fields and swirled in the headlights up ahead, forcing Sullivan to slow even further.

“This is great,” Green muttered. “Now we’ve got fog to complicate things even more.”

“Yeah, but remember, it’s more difficult for our bad guy as well,” Sullivan replied, jerking the wheel to avoid a large pothole in the road. The Malibu fishtailed on the crumbling pavement, but Sullivan wrestled it under control with an expert hand. They drove in silence through the rolling countryside past squat little homes and desolate farms. Puffing chimneys poked up through the fog, and the scent of wood smoke and manure clotted the dank air. An endless ribbon of rocks and grass swept by in their headlights. After a few minutes, the pavement gave way to bone-rattling gravel.

Occasionally, Green caught a glimpse of red taillights in the fog far ahead. “That could be our man,” he said.

“Or the Sûreté,” Sullivan said. “Either way, it’s good news.”

For the first time, Green relaxed a little in the seat as he scanned the passing signs for the side road on Eleanor Weiss’s map. Chemin Lyons, Chemin Murray, Daly...

“Gee, Brian, you’d be right at home around here.”

Sullivan grunted. “It was probably settled by the same tough Irish peasant stock as the Ottawa Valley. Same hardscrabble life too, from the looks of it.”

They turned north and followed the side road deeper into green, rolling pastureland. Ten minutes farther along, a small laneway cut into the cedar brush on their left. Sullivan skidded to a stop, and Green eyed it dubiously.

“There’s no road sign,” Green said.

“But it’s the right distance, and it’s the only road around.” Sullivan climbed out and went to peer at the muddy ground at the entrance. When he returned to the car, he nosed it into the lane. “There are several fresh tire tracks. This is it.”

They proceeded cautiously down Theriault’s drive, which became little more than a wagon track rutted by tires and awash in mud. The third time the Malibu bottomed out on a rock, Sullivan winced and slowed to a crawl. They lurched across a cow pasture, through a copse of scruffy cedars and into another clearing. Finally up ahead the tall stack of a silo loomed out of the fog, followed by a barn, several out buildings and a rambling old stone farm house. A dog barked as they slithered to a stop behind two Sûreté du Québec SUV s parked haphazardly in the mud outside the house. Four men stood on the porch, surrounded by excited dogs.

A lean, wiry
SQ
sergeant bulked up by his vest and utility belt leaped off the porch and strode towards them. Beneath the peak of his cap, Green could see sharp blue eyes and a pencil-thin mustache. He and Sullivan climbed out of the Malibu, casually letting their jackets fall open to reveal their guns. They knew that technically, they had no official standing in Quebec, and if Fortin wanted to be a hard-ass, he could disarm them and park them in the farm house for the duration of the operation. Fortunately, the sergeant took one brief look at their Glocks and gave a barely perceptible nod before extending his hand in greeting.

“Gilles Fortin,” he said cheerfully. “I was just getting information from my uncle.”

He led the way to the porch, where a shrivelled old man stood leaning on a cane. He had sunken cheeks, a tattered eyepatch and no teeth, but his one good eye danced like a young boy’s. He began to rattle away in French incomprehensible to Green, waving his claw-like hands excitedly towards the far side of the barn. Green held up both hands to halt the flow.

“Speak more slowly,” he said.

The man rattled away again, the absence of teeth making all his consonants dissolve into f ’s. After a bewildered moment, Green appealed to Fortin, who was laughing. Fortin then proceeded to speak for the first time in accented but fluent English.

“He says the owner of the trailer went down there on Saturday, which was a surprise this early in the season. There’s a back lane down to the river. He’s still there, my uncle thinks.”

“Did he have someone with him? A woman?”

Fortin posed the question and Theriault erupted into another flurry of hand gestures and incomprehensible French.

“My uncle says he saw his white pick-up in the back pasture Saturday afternoon, and there was no one else in the cab with him.”

But a pick-up has plenty of room in its truck bed to hide a person tied up, Green thought. Or dead, for that matter. “Has he seen anyone else around?”

Theriault had been watching Green shrewdly through the web of wrinkles that encircled his good eye, and Green wondered how much English he really understood. Now he began to speak again, shrugging his bony shoulders expressively. This time Green managed to decipher
“sheh pas”.
I don’t know.

Once again, Fortin obliged with the full translation. “There are six trailers down there, but normally no one goes at this time of the year. However, he thinks he heard a vehicle in the far field when he went out to milk the cows this morning. His dogs barked, but there were no headlights, and he couldn’t see anything through the fog.”

No headlights... Green didn’t like the implications. On this rocky, unpredictable terrain, driving without headlights was suicidal unless stealth and surprise were paramount. “How recently?”

The old man shrugged and gestured to the sky. Green didn’t need a translation to know that the farmer judged time not by a clock but by the rhythm of the day. Green knew enough about cows to know they were usually milked by dawn. Which could mean a mere five minutes ago, or as much as an hour ago. Green’s heart sank. An hour was plenty of time for their bad guy to set up his ambush, kill Weiss and make good his escape. But then another thought struck him. Given that time frame, surely the man would have encountered Green and Sullivan coming along Chemin McDonald the other way. But they hadn’t met a single car since turning off the main highway.

He felt a dawning of hope and excitement. “I think the bastard’s still here! Either he’s biding his time waiting for a chance to get by us, or he still hasn’t accomplished what he came for. Maybe Weiss has managed to hold him off. We may still have a chance to save him.”

He scoured his brain for everything he knew about emergency tactical response, which was limited to a few videos and powerpoint presentations by the Tac Team over the years. Combined with whatever expertise Fortin could offer about
SQ
procedures, it would have to be enough. There was no time to reconnoitre the surroundings or develop a sophisticated system of signals to coordinate an attack. Somehow, they had to storm the trailer, overpower the killer and secure everyone’s safety, all within the shortest time possible.

He sent Theriault into the house to draw a quick map of the trailer camp, and while the old man was busy, a third
SQ
cruiser bumped down the lane. Green looked on while Fortin gathered the officers to check out their equipment, training and radio systems. Between them, the
SQ
had their four service revolvers, plus two semi-automatic rifles and long-range field binoculars in the back of their
SUV
s. The two Ottawa detectives pocketed an extra ammunition clip and pulled their body armour out of the trunk. It wasn’t a tac outfit, but it might keep them alive.

Leaving Fortin to ready his officers and discuss the operation, Green hurried into the house to examine the map the old man had drawn. After only a brief glance, a rough plan of attack began to coalesce in his mind.

TWENTY-EIGHT

September 17, 1993. Medak, Sector South, Croatia.

I’m dead on my feet. I’m sitting out here in the woods with
my shovel. I said I needed to take a shit, but the truth is I
needed a break. The stink here is unbelievable. Rotting bodies,
gunpowder, smoke, burning cows... I don’t think I’m ever
going to barbeque again.

So much has happened the last day, I don’t know what to
write. Yesterday the Croats finally let us in to take over the
Serb villages, and what a mess we found. The Croats had
blown up or torched everything to hell. We were still looking
for a place to dig in when Danny tells me I’ve been assigned to
another unit to take care of the Serb civilians we liberated.
Temporary, and if I don’t want to go, he’ll try to fix it. I figured
maybe it would be a nice change to do some good instead of
fighting with assholes, so I tell him I’m good to go.

They pair me with this reservist from Regina and assign us
a section of houses to look for survivors. We’re walking along
watching for mines and calling out that it’s safe to come out.
But nobody comes. It’s eerie. We know there are two, three
hundred Serb civilians in the area, but all we find are dead
animals. Cows, goats, horses. Shot, set on fire, thrown into the
wells to poison them, or just left to rot. By the end of our shift,
the only people we find are these two dead Serb soldiers shot
through the eye like an execution.