“Where?” I asked after a moment’s hesitation.
“An old jail, abandoned. It is on Rue Cliff, near the gorge. You find this?”
“I have a map.”
“It is near Rue Winter, at the corner. You will see steps to a porch and a door. Go in and we talk.”
“Or go in and have my head blown off.”
I could sense his exasperation as he cursed in French and then added, “Why? You can stop this. Lacombe is your friend. You will talk to him.”
“Call him yourself,” I suggested.
“He will not see me alone, and I do not trust them with him. Only you.”
“I’ll think about it,” I finally said.
“One hour. You be alone, or people die.”
The phone went dead.
I replaced the handset and lay in the dark, thinking. It sounded plausible. The Angels had been blamed for Tessier’s death-maybe they had proof of their innocence and even of someone else’s guilt. Given my suspicions about most of what had fallen into our laps up to now-from Christophe Bossard as Tessier’s unlikely killer to Marcel’s conveniently safeguarded ice pick-I found the nature of this phone call almost irresistible.
Which was probably the whole point.
At home, the solution would have been obvious-round up some backup, get to the site early, and proceed with caution. Here, with suspicions ballooning about the case and the people investigating it, I found myself uncomfortably at sea. I was an organization man, as used to teamwork as a fish to water, and since arriving in Canada, I hadn’t been shut out and information hadn’t been withheld from me. I’d had no complaints.
So why this debate?
I got out of bed, conscious of the one-hour deadline, and turned on the light over the desk by the window. I opened a map and located the address I’d been given. It was north of the gorge, midway along its length, at the bottom of a three-sided, horseshoe-like block of streets. Cliff Street paralleled the gorge.
Still unsure of my actions, I began to dress.
It wouldn’t be the first time a generations-old crime family had found its way into a local police force, however discreetly. Some of the caller’s reserve might even have stemmed from simple paranoia rather than any knowledge of corruption. He was apparently sticking his neck out, indulging in covert diplomacy, hoping to keep the peace between two illegal organizations. It stood to reason he might be a little twitchy, with an old pro like Jean-Luc Tessier being knocked off with such ease.
Especially since Christophe Bossard-the unlikeliest of suspects-was being prosecuted for that crime.
I finished dressing and stood looking down at the map. I had no fear for myself despite the concern I’d voiced to the caller. It didn’t make sense that I should be anyone’s target, and nothing suggested this whole thing wasn’t as simple as it looked. Some guy from their side had something of value for someone neutral from our side. And I was that someone.
I scooped up the map and left.
Cliff Street was in the heart of the Vieux Nord neighborhood, which explained why most of the streets had Anglo names-Island, High, Court, William, even London. There was a shoved-together intimacy to the buildings, as if they’d moved imperceptibly closer to each other as the town had grown up around them.
I drove across Queen slowly onto de Montréal, looking for where High Street would take me one block south to Cliff. My headlights slid along dark, quiet walls and over empty, snow-covered lawns. Traffic was nonexistent at this hour.
The setting helped make me feel better about what I was doing. Had it been a warehouse district, or some industrial wasteland on the edge of town, I would have been more apprehensive. But this was as settled an area as Sherbrooke had to offer-something my anonymous caller had probably understood when he’d chosen it.
A row of trees loomed up ahead and High Street t-boned into Cliff. I turned left and parked. As I killed the engine, I could hear the dull rumble of water cascading through the gorge just beyond the screen of woods. It sounded cold and ominous, undermining my efforts to feel good about being here.
I got out of the car. Across the narrow street, the old jail stretched up into the night sky. Four or five stories tall, built of featureless gray stone, it appeared to have a separate warden’s quarters glued to its side-red-bricked and equipped with windows. But it, too, seemed abandoned and forlorn despite the efforts to make it look homey.
I saw the steps the caller had mentioned leading up to the front door. Flashlight in hand, I tentatively climbed to the concrete porch and laid my hand on the doorknob. There were no lights and no sounds from within.
The door was unlocked and opened without protest. Now thoroughly doubting my wisdom, I stepped into an empty, dusty room with a counter running across it. Playing the light around, I could tell where bars or metal meshing had once run from counter to ceiling, and guessed that the house had been remodeled from warden’s home to front office before being abandoned altogether, presumably to linger in perpetuity on the local historical society’s list of things to restore.
I’d done what I’d been told to do and was now suddenly at a loss, vaguely disappointed after all my misgivings to be merely standing alone in a cold and empty room.
“Hello?” I finally called out tentatively.
Nothing greeted me in return.
I walked through a gap in the counter and discovered a heavy iron door on the other side connecting the house to the jail itself. It was half open. I slipped into its dark embrace, hearing my footsteps echo off hard, unyielding surfaces all around, grit and debris crunching underfoot.
Before me was a long, high-ceilinged stone hallway, lined with open doors. My flashlight revealed no colors whatsoever-just the sliding scale of a black-and-white photograph, looking a hundred years old.
“Hello?” I tried again.
I followed the reverberation of my own voice down the hall, pausing at each doorway to check where it led, mostly into narrow cells, each one fitted with an arched and shuttered metal-barred window.
At the far end of the corridor was a steel spiral staircase. Though less apprehensive as my confidence grew that I was alone, I still wasn’t inclined to head for the basement, so I climbed instead, making an unholy racket as shoe leather hit metal.
The second floor resembled the first, except for a wider area halfway down the corridor which might have once served as a dayroom. I approached it cautiously, still pausing at each doorway, but again only surrounded by sounds of my own making.
In that open, central area, however, my isolation finally ended-replaced by something far more tangibly grim. A man was sitting, legs sprawled before him, propped up against the wall, his eyes still open and his throat slit wide.
Although slowing down, his blood was still pumping all over the front of his denim Hell’s Angels jacket.
He’d been killed while I’d been in the building.
I stood absolutely still, frozen as much by that sudden realization as by the overwhelming evidence that I’d committed a fundamental and potentially fatal mistake. Instead of wondering how and why this man might’ve died, I was seized by a double dose of anger and fear.
The clear sound of a shoe scraping the floor behind me snapped me out of it, and the anger won over, fueled by the guilt of having been so stupid. I turned, yelled, “Stop-police,” and ran headlong down the cold, dark hallway, now in pursuit of clattering footsteps half falling down the metal staircase.
It was no more reasonable than having come here in the first place, of course. Alone, unarmed, and with no radio or backup, I should have stayed put, let whoever it was escape, and then found a phone to summon help. But impulse was driving me now-along with a furious need to take back control and make some sense of all these riddles. I knew I couldn’t actually catch the man ahead of me, and that to succeed might earn me a knife in the chest, but I wanted to at least get a glimpse of him, if for no other reason than to partially offset my embarrassment.