Seven Days Dead (33 page)

Cinq-Mars touches a hand to the man’s shoulder, then suggests that they move on. “I want to get Sandra away from here. After that, I’ve got work to do.”

“Émile. I know you don’t trust me a whole bunch. That’s okay. I don’t trust you, either. Big deal. I’m saying you shouldn’t trust Maddy all the way. She’s paying you, and that puts you in a jam.”

“She’s not. Paying me. Who told you that? I told her that I won’t be hired, in case I have to convict the one who’s signing the checks. If I help her out, I’ll send a bill. If I put her in jail, it’ll be hard to collect on my invoice. I won’t bother trying.”

“Well,” Roadcap decides, and Cinq-Mars is impressed with him once again, “you don’t have to bill me. I’ll help any way I can.”

“Thanks. As far as trusting you goes, I just trusted you with my life. Nobody would’ve said boo if you let me drop.”

“I thought about it,” Roadcap says, but under the surface he’s smiling, which Cinq-Mars can spot in his eyes.

They shake hands in a formal way, a moment that falls naturally upon them at the outset, until both men suddenly retreat, as though realizing that the circumstances oblige them to remain wary of each other. They return to the group. The sky may be darkening in the west, but the meadow glows with light—to Émile’s eye, lit by both the sun and Sandra’s relieved smile.

TWENTY-FOUR

Mild consternation arises when a motor disrupts the peace of the meadow and forest, blotting out the symphony of an easy breeze through the leaves and the ocean’s wash a great drop below them. Émile Cinq-Mars gazes across the bay, as if a fishing vessel has floated into the sky. He’s been fooled by an ATV, its muffled roar echoing off a string of trees along the shoreline, and seeing it bound over a hillock he responds with a moment’s elation. His wife’s abductors are either unbelievably stupid to have returned or so filled with remorse that they feel compelled to surrender.

No such luck, he notices seconds later.

“I called him,” Louwagie explains. “He can take you out.”

The vehicle is driven by his constable, Réjean Methot, and while Émile’s fantasy is dashed, he’s delighted to see the second Mountie. He can use the ride out, and make good use of the time saved.

He grouses, “Ah, you couldn’t’ve called him sooner? Spared me a heart attack running in here?”

Louwagie finds his complaint amusing.

“What?” Cinq-Mars barks back.

“Émile, I did call sooner. Back in Dark Harbour. This is how long it takes to fetch the machine, get organized and out here ASAP. Or would you prefer we’d left your wife dangling over the edge until now?”

Cinq-Mars concedes a grin. Once again, the Mountie has shown capability under pressure. He gathers that they’ve both been afflicted with a kind of giddiness after Sandra’s rescue, and Louwagie, having found a person tied up and eviscerated in recent days, is relieved down to his toes to have located the next victim high, dry, and alive, albeit tied up and emotionally distraught. Sandra, he notes, is coping well. Better than he is. As if, as she implied, she’s experienced this sort of thing before.

The ATV is a two-seater. Sandra can settle onto Émile’s lap, and Louwagie is content to walk out. The retired detective nixes that arrangement.

“Wade, can’t you drive this thing instead?”

He can, but that doesn’t seem fair to his officer, to make him walk out.

“Obviously, Réjean can give us a lift,” Émile explains, “but I need you to drive me around after we drop Sandra off. Not just because I don’t have a car.”

“Why,” Sandra asks, “don’t you have a car?”

As shaky as her condition may be, his wife doesn’t miss a beat. Nor can she be she fooled easily. She catches a glance between Louwagie and Roadcap and knows that something’s up. Yet how much grief can she bear? To let her know that their car has been incinerated, that the two of them have been attacked not once, but twice—
and before noon,
Émile wants to say, although there’s no logic to the thought—is more than he’s willing to get into at the moment.

“Later on that one. Let’s just say that the roads on this island can be risky.”

“Oh, Émile.” Better to have her annoyed with him for reckless driving than frightened more deeply by the truth. At that moment he has a sudden notion—he appreciates the range and capabilities of his unknown adversary. He and Sandra have been simultaneously attacked on two fronts, which took planning and manpower, expertise and coordination. Daring, too, although his gut feeling tells him that since neither attack was necessary, except to bolster his resolve, they were instigated by fear and possibly panic. Who, then, has he managed to scare?

As well, these provocations were
ordered.
Given that they took place at the same time, different people were involved in each incident, so the actions were either independent of one another—highly coincidental, therefore unlikely—or one and probably both required people to
follow instructions
. Both events were meant to
threaten,
unlike Lescavage’s murder, where there had been no known threat, only the execution. Émile is familiar with a modus operandi from his days dealing with violent biker gangs. Those gangs never—
never
—made threats, at least not any they meant to carry out. If and when they killed someone, they did so without the victim being alerted ahead of time. If they did issue a threat, that meant they had no intention of carrying it out. If these people operate in similar fashion, and he suspects they do, then he and Sandra are probably safe, for the perpetrators did nothing with their opportunity to inflict serious harm. All this tells him that whoever organized the day’s threats controls underlings—someone has a gang—but that individual is neither foolish enough nor powerful enough to have ordered them killed. Nor were the underlings willing to do more than threaten—in the greater scheme of things, a car fire and strapping someone to a tree, with one of the most impressive views on earth, caused no one bodily harm. And the events were in keeping with island tradition. Here, rough boys might be cajoled into doing such things as long as a line was not being crossed. Sandra had fallen, initially, getting cut in the scuffle, but she was never punched or bruised. Émile gleans from this that when a murder needed to be committed, at least in the killer’s mind, the perpetrator operated alone, without help, unable to order anyone to either carry out or aid and abet so ruthless a crime. He considers that today’s troublemakers may not have connected their actions to the murders. They might even have been hoodwinked into thinking that something else was at stake.

Having hunted professional killers and organized gangs all his life, Émile Cinq-Mars can detect when he is dealing with amateurs. Not that amateurs, he reminds himself, aren’t equally as dangerous and lethal. With their spotless records and obscure motivations, at times they can be more difficult to root out.

“As I was saying, Corporal, I need you with me. I may require the loan of your authority. Remember what I asked you for? About following the money, the will? Ask Réjean to look into that when he gets back to town. I need you with me.”

“You think it’s that important right now, the will?”

Sometimes, in the greater scheme of things, go by hunch, and sometimes go by the numbers. Following the money will fulfill both obligations, as it is both by the book and a wholesale hunch. Still, Louwagie’s question stands as a good one, for which Émile doesn’t have an equally good answer. “Who knows? I want to find out if Orrock anticipated anything. He controlled so much. Did he control his succession? If so, how? I’m grasping at straws here, but somebody is turning the wheels in this scenario and somebody else is greasing them. If there’s something about power and money to be found out, I need to find that out. Better quickly than too late.”

“Sure thing, Émile. I don’t mind driving this thing. Hang on. It’ll be bumpy.”

“Try bumpy,” Sandra pipes up, “when you’re tied up and gagged with a hood over your head. That’s how I got here. Now
that
is bumpy.”

The others must walk. They do so knowing that the western sky is threatening, that they might only just make it, or get soaked, before leaving the ridge. One man, though, Aaron Roadcap, lags behind, as though he doesn’t fear, and possibly might welcome, the storm. As if it means nothing to him to be out on a cliff in weather or to be struck by lightning.

*   *   *

His wife in his arms and on his lap, Émile hangs on for the wild ride. He loves the intimacy of the moment, her cheek upon his shoulder, her mouth by his neck, the weight of her jostling on his thighs. Safe for now, they speed away, bouncing under the sun. He finds her soft, involuntary grunts when they hit the bigger bumps hilarious. He’d love to kiss her and for their lips to linger awhile, except that the act would either be hilarious also or knock out their front teeth.

They might even swallow their tongues.

While Louwagie may have claimed the ability to drive the ATV, he’s showing no particular expertise, and seems adept at finding every rock and hole embedded along the route. He slows down, in Cinq-Mars’s opinion, when he should be gunning it, and speeds up when it’s time to take care. The officer seems to know that he’s flubbing this performance, but insecurity breeds self-consciousness, which breeds a whole new generation of tactical errors. Yet they survive, and make it off the ridge in one piece, though admittedly with loosened joints.

They pile into Louwagie’s cruiser. Émile and Sandra sit in the back together behind the protective mesh, not wanting to let go of the other’s hand for an instant.

“Maddy Orrock’s house,” Émile instructs the officer, only to have Sandra nix that idea immediately.

“I want out of these clothes. I’d burn this blouse if I didn’t like it so much. I also want a shower, for obvious reasons.” When her husband gives her a look, she tacks on, “Émile, he put his hands inside my bra. That’s all he did, but Jesus Me. Apparently, he had a job to do—he couldn’t have restrained himself? I want this fucker caught.”

She so rarely swears.

“Get used to it,” she says, and Émile takes her meaning.

“All right,” Cinq-Mars instructs the Mountie, “our cottage first. Let Sandra shower and change, then up to Maddy’s.” He’d rather get to work, but he isn’t going to deny her anything for a while, and maybe not ever again.

After calling Maddy Orrock to update their arrival, he rings Sandra’s mobile phone, not for the first time since her abduction. On the first occasion, her abductor answered and told him to find her on Seven Days Work. On the second attempt, the phone just rang. The phone was reported off-line on the third call, and he receives that notice again. “Sorry,” he tells her now. “If your phone shows up again, it’ll be because it landed in a lobster pot.”

“You think they tossed it. If it’s in the sea, I’m hoping it went down with a boat and those fuckers were on it.”

Language,
Cinq-Mars is thinking, but he has to let this phase play out.

Louwagie waits in the car as the couple enters the cottage, and Émile stays downstairs while Sandra goes up. He’s pretty sure that the spot of blood on the floor is hers, but he knows better than to tamper with evidence. A few minutes later, though, when he’s stepping around the spot, he gets annoyed, and in a fit of pique, he finds a cloth and wipes it clean. Nobody’s bringing out a forensic team to test a blood spot that’s probably from his wife’s forehead anyway, so what difference does it make? He stands in the room then, listening to the shower upstairs and to an echo of the tumult that occurred here earlier, this violence against his wife that really was directed against him.

And gauges a violence of his own, latent in his bloodstream.

The terror she must have felt. He’s suffering a kind of emotional whiplash, fiercely angry now, and all that tempers his rage is his own contrition for bringing it upon her. He knows he should keep her safer. Since his retirement, it seems that she’s been exposed to more risk than ever.

Waiting, Émile wanders out to the porch, where he finds notes on the table that Sandra inscribed in doing exercises in numerology. He’s not terribly interested, but with his work in limbo for the moment he tries to figure out what she’s been up to. Without having her references, her calculations resemble secret code, and he tries to break it without cheating, without checking her book. He idly passes the time this way when suddenly, straightening at first, then bending his shoulders over the pages, his interest clearly piques. Sandra finds him in that posture, hunched and concentrating. She’s dressed in a yellow print dress, looking pretty, still fluffing her hair with a towel.

“How did you find these birth dates?” he wants to know.

“The Reverend Unger. He’s a doll. I mean that literally, by the way. I think he’s a porcelain doll.”

“Everybody’s names. Middle names, too.” He’s impressed.

“You need the full name for numerology. The minister showed me how to check birth and town records for local people online. But Maddy already knew a lot of them, the names anyway, and she helped, too. Why?”

“It’s curious.”

“Why? Don’t tell me you’re interested in numerology.
That,
I won’t believe.”

“I believe in local knowledge. This is local knowledge.”

“How so?”

Rather than answer, he smiles. “Let’s get you up to Maddy’s. I’ve got to track some people down.”

She’s willing to go right away, but first she has a question. “Émile? When this started, remember? You said you knew who did it. Or thought you did. How’s that panning out? Were you right back then? Or not?”

His reaction, and the scratch he gives his protuberant nose, strikes her as more humble than his usual investigative cockiness. He’s willing to take himself down a peg, although only a single peg. “I said then that local knowledge is key. It still is. As far as naming names goes, I have to keep an open mind. If I believe too much in my first instinct, I might miss something, or condemn the wrong person, or miss the best path. I might prove myself right, or trip up and be wrong, but as I said, I have to keep an open mind.”