“Don’t jiggle it so much.”

“Why is it called jigging, then?”

“Is it? You want the other half of that?”

“You’ve been putting it away, lately. You eating for two, by any chance?”

“Shut up. Mind your own business. Pass it over. And, no.” Rangel took the peanut butter and strawberry jam half-sandwich and munched happily. Wiping her mouth with the back of her gloved hand, she looked down at her parka. “Does this make me look fat?”

“Yes,” said Mitman, jiggling his line.

“I know.”

“Who cares? No one in this house, certainly,” he said. They both looked at the walls of the popup shelter. Puffs of vapour followed all of their words, as if they were smoking.

“Can you imagine if we were sitting on, you know, a bucket or something out in the open?” Rangel hugged herself. “My dad says that’s how he used to do it. I think he’s lying.”

“You cold?”

Rangel took off a glove and pushed some stray hair back under her hood. “Not really. It’s just the ice everywhere.”

“Thank god, because we’re suspended over twenty eight feet of heart-stopping water. But let’s not think about that.”

They listened to the slight hiss of the Little Buddy propane heater and to the occasional cracking and moaning of the ice.

“We haven’t caught anything,” Mitman said eventually.

“We could move operations and drill another hole,” said Rangel.

They thought about that for a while and then Mitman said, “Nah.”

It was mid January. The ice on Plain Lake was twenty two centimetres thick beneath them. And from where they were they could see Niassa Lodge, shuttered for the season, but still a welcome sight with its dark brown, red-trimmed wood in the otherwise pure white prospect of snow and birch.

Mitman had augered two holes, had widened them with the chisel to Rangel’s directions, obtained from a book. He was using a jigging rod and an imitation minnow, hoping for walleye. Rangel was eating, drinking tepid hot chocolate from a thermos bottle, and waiting for the flag on her tip-up to pop. She was using a spoon — bought it because of the name: Swedish Pimple — and was hoping she caught nothing in fact, content just to be at a peaceful remove from the wriggle and necessity of everyday life.

“So,” said Mitman some time later, “what’s the story with” —he nodded his head in the direction of the lodge— “Dennis. You and he seeing each other at all? ‘Cause I thought it was all Alan, all the time. But here we are on his doorstep. I have to know these things if I’m to . . . function with an adequately calm mind.”

Rangel said, “Hmm.” And then, after a bit, “He’s in Mozambique. Where it’s hot right now. He’s also there to find his wife, he said. Planning to get a divorce.”

Now it was Mitman’s turn to say, “Hmm.” He jiggled his line a while, then said, “You think he’s the one?”

Rangel started to speak a couple of times, and then eventually said, “You know? I’m kind of liking this embarrassment of riches. Is that a bad thing to say?”

“Girl, welcome to my world.”

“For a while, at least.”

“Speaking of a while, we going to stay in the gravel biz much longer?”

“I’ve told Gladys I’ll give it till spring, then she’ll have to find a proper CLO. I’m not cut out to be an in-house counsel.”

“The pay’s good, though.”

“Greedy guts.”

“I think I’ve got a fish.” Delivered conversationally.

“Pull up, pull up!”

And Mitman got to his feet, drawing his rod with him. “Whoa, what do I do now?”

Rangel got to her knees beside Mitman’s line, gripped it with gloved hands, and hauled it up, hand over hand. “Take up the slack,” she called over her shoulder. “Wind it around those prongy things.”

And a fish head appeared in the opening, mouth agape, working. She kept it there suspended for a moment. “Oh hell,” said Rangel, and she reached in behind its gills and pulled it from the ice water.

Mitman said, “Oh my god, look what I did. Just look at that. It’s got to be twenty pounds if it’s an inch.”

Rangel laid the fish on the ice floor and they watched as it slowly stopped flipping its tail. Rangel walked hand spans down the length of the fish. “Sixteen inches, say. Whatever that is in metric. Look at that golden yellow. Sander vitreum. Walleye to you.”

Mitman, still standing, said, “We have to take it home?”

“We do now,” said Rangel. “I’ll clean it and cook it for us.”

“Sander whatsis. Weird, huh?”

“I was thinking that too.”

They began to pack up. The day was suddenly over, complete. As he was pulling out the stakes that held down the shelter, Mitman asked her, “You spoken to Sanders?”

“No,” she said. She was loading stuff on the snowmobile pull-behind sled. “Don’t think I will. Yet. Got a thank-you from him, though, via his lawyer, Peter Main. I’m passing it on to you.”

“But they’re not killing the appeal.” Mitman straightened up, holding the stakes, his foot on the collapsed shelter because a wind had come up. “I saw the latest papers yesterday.”

“Not yet. Keeping all the options open. I would, too. But there’s a big conference scheduled with the case management judge and half the criminal bar, by the sound of it. I’m invited. It’s about how best to proceed, overturning the conviction based on the new evidence, Ziff’s confession. It’ll break right. You’ll see. I’m not worried.”

Mitman took the folded shelter and stacked it on the sled, strapping it down with a bungee cord. “Can I drive?” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “Let’s go home. I’m hungry.”
 

FINIS

On Saturday, two days after the shootout at Backton Aggregate, Nancy Tomasini knocked on Rangel’s door. Rangel answered it in sweats with a piece of peanut-buttered toast in her hand and a bite of it in her mouth. “Hey,” Tomasini said. “I come in?”

Rangel struggled to swallow. “Uh huh,” she said. Tomasini followed Rangel into the kitchen, accepted the offer of coffee, and turned down a slice of toast.

“Couple of things,” said Tomasini. Rangel nodded, waiting, chewing. For some reason she’d been voraciously hungry the past couple of days. Tomasini took a careful sip of coffee. She put the cup down and adjusted it. Then she looked up. “Advice?” she said. “For me, I mean.”

Rangel shrugged. “Sure. What’s up?”

“See,” said Tomasini, “thing is I need to make a decision and I’m torn.” She took a deep breath. “There’s an offer on the table for me to join the provincials, organized crime division even. No worries. I know you and Inspector Bodley are close. I’m not interested. In him, I mean.”

Rangel assumed a bland smile.

“This is pretty much what I’ve dreamed about,” said Tomasini, rotating her coffee cup and staring down into the ripples.

“And?” said Rangel.

Another deep breath. “Ronnie’s quitting,” she said. “He was . . . too easy with Nabel. Couple of other things beyond easy, maybe. Either resigning or there’s going to be an inquiry, so he chose the soft landing.” Rangel made a noncommittal noise. “So the interim mayor’s asked if I would agree to be chief.”

“Congratulations,” said Rangel. “This is a pretty sweet dilemma.”

“Yeah, well,” Tomasini said.

“Ah,” said Rangel, seeing it. “You’re leaning to the chief side and you wonder if that’s a stupid move.”

Tomasini’s face cleared. “Exactly,” she said.

Rangel smiled. “And you thought that maybe I’d be able to give you some reasons to stick around in a small town even though the big city’s a possibility. Because why am I here, right?”

“Shit, I really am transparent, aren’t I?”

“Well,” said Rangel, stretching out the word. “There’s this, for example,” and she waved a hand at the table and then everything beyond. “You walk over to a friend’s house and drop in for coffee. Might not be possible in a condo.”

Tomasini grinned. “I drove.”

“Of course you did,” said Rangel.

“Friends,” said Tomasini. “That’s a thing.”

“You’d make new ones.”

“And lose old ones.”

“Have you thought about your cars? How many do you have?”

“Four. Well, three and a chassis. Work in progress.”

Rangel got up from the table and poured herself another coffee. “I’m a gut person,” she said. “Didn’t used to be. But always leading with my head didn’t work out so well. So now I’m a gut person on big things. What does your gut say?”

“Would you call me ‘Chief’?”

“I wouldn’t salute you, though.”

Tomasini put two hands on the tabletop. “Thanks,” she said, tapping the wood.

“The other thing? You said a ‘a couple of things.’?”

“Yeah, yeah. The other thing is that Dean Nabel wants to see you.”

Rangel frowned. “What for? I can’t represent him,” said Rangel.

Tomasini frowned. “I don’t think it’s that.”

Rangel shrugged. “When?”

“Now?”

Rangel looked down at her sweat suit. “Give me a small town minute,” she said.
 

---

 

VINH LOOKED A HUNDRED years old. The silk suit hung on him as he were merely an armature for a human being, a quick sketch of a person. A fine vibration seemed to blur his hands as they hovered just above the K-54 on table in front of him. The handmade wooden grips identified the pistol as Vinh’s sidearm from his time in the North Vietnamese Army. But everyone’s eyes were on the ugly little olive drab egg beside it. The fuse was still in the grenade but the pull ring was turned towards Vinh.

Phang felt calm, serene even. He let his eyes wander around the table, simply noting the fear and anger in the faces of his countrymen, who were doing their best to disguise these feelings. He heard Vinh as if from a great distance going on about honour and shame, cursing those responsible for the débâcle at the gravel mine, which had stained the honour of them all. Phang had no doubt that Vinh was about to give them a last blessing of redeeming face, if only for the two or so seconds after the pin was pulled.

In his mind Phang sang himself the Song of the Thirteen Postures . . .
 

. . . Pay attention to the waist at all times;
completely relax the abdomen
and the ch’i rises up.
When the tailbone is centered and straight,
the shen goes through to the headtop.
To make the whole body light and agile
suspend the headtop. . .

With the correct-mind intention, Phang executed the t’ai ch’i ch’uan move known as parting the wild horse’s mane. In his altered state it flowed from him with exquisite slowness. As his right hand passed his left side it collected his Ruger .22, drawing it and its long suppressor out of his belt in a smooth eternity of time. Vinh’s eyes met his, and Phang shot him in the forehead.
 

---

 

Tomasini delivered Rangel into the presence of Commander Ian Finch, Bodley’s boss, who had colonized a corner of the waiting room on the ICU with papers and two computers. He shook her hand. “That was a pretty stupid thing you did the other day,” he said. “Gutsy but stupid. You could have got your friend killed.”

“Yes,” said Rangel. “I know. We’ve talked.”

“Good thing you called us, though. Alan would have got there. He was on his way. But he might not have arrived in force. Knowing you were at the mine made him raise a posse.” At the mention of Bodley’s name, Rangel looked around for him. “Gone back to the Castle,” Finch said. “Enough paperwork to keep him busy for quite a while. He’ll be in touch, I’m sure. Shall we sit?” And with that he waved her into a chair across from his makeshift work station.

“Dean Nabel,” Rangel said. “He wants to talk to me?”

“He does,” Finch said. “We’ve interrogated him as much as possible and I think we’ve got all we’re likely to get from him, unless he makes a remarkable recovery.”

“He’s dying?”

“Mmm. So they tell me. Lots of femoral damage. But I wanted to impart one or two things to you before you go in there.” Finch nodded in the direction of the hall. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that Jared Willoughby is dead.”

Rangel gasped even though she’d prepared herself for this. “It was him.”

“Yes, it was. We’ve confirmed it by dental records and just this morning by DNA results.”

“What — ?”

“Well, this is how we see it. From what Nabel has told us and from . . . one or two other sources we’ve questioned. Seems Nabel planned all along to have Jared Willoughby killed. He waited for, what was it, a year after he’d bought the interest from . . . Schantz? He was already well into business otherwise with the Calabrians. So he arranged with them to have them remove Jared. And it seemed to him that he’d been successful. Now, here’s the odd bit. The guy the Calabrians gave the contract to was Timoteo Nisticò. He’s — he was — Donato Nisticò’s brother, who is a somewhat ageing kingpin in the local ‘ndrangheta. He’d done some work as a hit man for them before, over the years. Bring the little brother along, throw him bones every now and then. That sort of thing. What I guess nobody realized — Timoteo wouldn’t advertise it — is that he was going soft, maybe always was, getting more and more involved with the church. Experiencing lots of remorse we imagine. He couldn’t pull the trigger on Jared. Literally. Maybe because the kid was a cripple. Ach! I mean disabled. Maybe because he found out that Jared liked, what are those little accordian things? Whatever the reasons, he scooped up Jared to take him out of play, but he kept him at his place. Not exactly under lock and key. Stockholm syndrome eventually, no doubt. And, of course, Jared must have been pleased to find that his kidnapper made musical instruments as his day job. And that’s how it went. For a dozen years.”

Rangel shook her head. “What a pity he was killed now. Poor Gladys.”

“You should know that the bullet did not come from Nabel’s gun. I don’t know if that’s relevant to your business with Gladys Tremaine or not. That’s up to you. Nabel will almost certainly be found to have killed others, if that’s important.”

Rangel rubbed her brow. “Well, because Jared was in fact alive all this time, Gladys should get all the profits from the land since Nabel took it from her. If he’d killed Jared, he likely wouldn’t be allowed to profit from that wrong, in which case she’d get the remainder — his interest — too. I’ll have to see if the same would apply in his case. He’s guilty of enough offences all of which are tied in varying degrees to his murder.”

“Yes,” said Finch. “A great many offences.”

The two of them sat there in the quiet of the waiting room for a minute or so, saying nothing. The distant pings of monitors and the rattle of carts up distant hallways were oddly comforting sounds.
 

---

 

RANGEL COULD SEE THAT the ICU nurse was conflicted. The woman’s sworn duty to care made Rangel’s presence in the chamber — you couldn’t call the tiled, overbright, device-hung area a room — distressing and probably an error. At the same time the nurse regarded Nabel with ill-disguised contempt. She sat herself in a chair against an unoccupied portion of wall and crossed her arms over her chest, while Rangel moved to the bedside.

Nabel had his eyes open but unfocused. Rangel felt heat rising from his body. “Fires,” Nabel said. He wasn’t looking at her.

“Fires?”

“You.”

“Oh, the fires that burned my office and my truck.”

“Me.”

“I see.” Rangel thought for minute. “What was the point?”

“Anger.”

“Because Gladys was my client”

Nabel tried to shake his head and gave a small cry of distress. Rangel stepped back a pace and looked over at the nurse, who declined to meet her eyes. Nabel swallowed convulsively a couple of times. “Sanders,” he said.

“Because I represented Sanders?”

“Yes.” A series of unreadable expressions passed across his face. “I was . . . molested.”

“As a boy.”

“Yes. Cripples . . .” Nabel panted for a while. “Cripples can’t run.”

“I know,” said Rangel. She had to think about whether she wanted to say she was sorry that he’d been abused. Before she could make up her mind, Nabel spoke again, this time with a little more ease.

“I know what happened. Cops. Everything.”

“What happened with Jared?”

“Yes.” Nabel closed his eyes. “I have no family,” he said. Rangel waited. “Give everything to Gladys. Write up something, I’ll sign it.”

“Let me consult with her.”

“No time. Write it up now.”

“The gangs . . . organized crime.”

“She’s tough. Gutsy. And they . . .” A hand rose under the blanket and lifted it a fraction. “Hurry,” he said. And then he opened his eyes and looked at her. “Before I run away.” A small smile. “Run,” he said again. “Away.”
 

---

 

RANGEL FOUND GLADYS Tremaine in the front room of her old house, moving slowly from object to object, just touching things, becoming reacquainted. She stopped with her hand on a small framed photograph. “No more tears. I haven’t any more tears. I’ve cried for Jared, poor Jared, for a long, long time. And now I’m . . . dry.” She looked with a kind of defiance at Rangel. “Which is good. Because no matter how sad the poor boy’s life was, he is gone and my tears won’t help him one iota.”

Rangel simply stood there, being with the woman, not needing to say anything.

Tremaine held up the photograph she’d had her hand on. “My Harold,” she said, and she looked into the picture, putting it back carefully after a moment. “Thank you,” she said to Rangel. “You did what I asked of you and I am deeply grateful to you.”

Rangel shook her head. “I wouldn’t —” she began.

Tremaine cut her off. “I would. And I do.” With that a briskness in her manner returned. “Come,” she said to Rangel. “Sit down. It seems I must continue to live, so I might as well make myself useful. Let us talk about what we’re going to do with that rock farm I seem to have acquired.”

“Yes,” said Rangel. “Let’s.”

The odour was complex, an olio of scents now uncommon. All the woods: sweet cedar, rosewood with its attar, dark and mossy mahogany, cherry, walnut. Then the fungal, metallic tang of the old steel machinery and tools against the peculiar aroma of horsehide glue. Beneath it all there was the smell of sweat, because this was a workshop where men laboured. Once laboured. Now it was empty.

Even with two fresh corpses in attendance it was empty.

The best part of a company of armed and armoured men milled about in the street out front and in the alley behind, chivvied by loudspoken orders and the urgent high crackle of static. Inside, where it was unnaturally still, two armadilloed men and another man in nothing more than a suit and tie stood over the bodies, which lay as if arranged by an artful fate snugly side by side and head to toe. Both had been small men. Short, slight, made of rope and bone. They might have been brothers, except for the fact that one was Asian in appearance and the other was Caucasian. Even so.

“Oh boy,” said one of the two SWAT men. He didn’t mean the killings. He had seen enough killings not to be affected anymore by violent death. He meant the fact that they’d arrived unannounced only to find the birds had flown.

The other armoured man grunted in agreement and poked at a half finished instrument on the bench beside him, a violin, looking vulnerable as a newborn, pale, naked, full of curves, its ultimate lineaments only suggested. “Yes,” said Bodley. “I’m afraid so.”

He touched the cheeks of the corpses with the back of his hand. Hard to tell if they were still warm.

“I don’t get it,” said the first man, pulling off his helmet.

Bodley nodded. He stood up. “Why?” he said, looking around. “At least now we know for sure we’ve sprung a leak. Or two. Or more.”

“Good luck with that,” said the man who had grunted.

Bodley spoke into his phone while the other two set up perimeter guards to wait for the forensic people. When Bodley switched off, he crouched once more beside the bodies and examined the Caucasian as closely as he could without further contaminating the scene. Something one of the men had said while he was on the phone danced at the edge of his awareness. He checked his immediate area to make sure that he hadn’t altered anything or missed anything obvious. At the door out of the workshop, the one that led into the residence at the front, he turned and looked around once more. He looked down at where the bodies lay behind the big workbench, seeing only a man’s head and another man’s feet. And it came to him: ‘. . . gone to ground.’

Ground.

He was on his phone even as he ran to his car, trying not to shout.
 

---

 

RANGEL CAME INTO THE motorhome with a decadent double-double from the D-Lux across the road. They were out of beans in Mitman’s increasingly elaborate drinks setup. And besides, there was only 2% milk and artificial sweetener in the kitchen, by order of the quartermaster. Who happened to be still in her office doorway when, after some chit-chat and half her morning syrup, she played her messages on the speaker.

The caller talked in a hushed voice that made him hard to understand at first, not a whisper, but something out of a hoarse, constricted throat.

“Ms. Rangel? Ms. Rangel? I . . . I think . . . I think you ought to, I don’t know . . . There’s a shitload going down here. Bad stuff. Like it’s all fucked. Bunch of us holed up in pit nine. But I could make it to the gate. Aw, geez —.”

“Withers,” said Rangel.

Mitman said, “Your Tom.”

They looked at each other. Mitman reached behind him to the hooks on the wall to his right, took off Rangel’s keys, and tossed them to her. She put down her coffee, giving it a last regretful glance. “Jackets,” he said, as they moved, always the mother.
 

---

 

“WHAT’S HAPPENING?” Mitman asked him. Withers was cowering, so both Mitman and Rangel found themselves crouching a little too. They were up tight against a behemoth of a vehicle that was quaking with the effort of an idling motor. Withers had driven it right up to the fence. He would have pushed it down if the gate hadn’t been open.

Withers spoke to Rangel. “I don’t know. I’m sorry I called you. We should all just get out of here right now.” The fear on his face made Rangel pale.

She shook her head impatiently. “Tell me. What?”

“I . . . really don’t know. Van drives up. Two vans and a bunch of cars. I didn’t see them, but Solly’s working flagman and he, he told me. On the Cobra.” He tapped the walkie-talkie in his shirt pocket. “Now I’m up on ridge four and I see them for myself. Everybody piles out. I mean a whole gang of guys. A whole mob shoving each other around and they go into the crusher shed.”

Rangel pushed. “I don’t get it, Tom. What’s the big deal?”

He said, “Right. Right.” And he swallowed. “So, okay.” He swallowed again.

Now Rangel put a hand on his shoulder. “Talk to me, Tom.”

Incongruously, he grinned, but with no humour in his eyes. “Bad shit,” he said. “Bit later another bunch of cars show up and some guys get out, only these are, like, Chinese, right? And, and, here’s the thing. They got guns. I mean guns. One guy, he’s packing this assault rifle, I guess it is. But you could see the other guys had like handguns.”

Rangel withdrew slightly, seemed to scrunch down. Mitman was becoming angry, his way of dealing with fear. “For god’s sake, why didn’t you call the cops?” he shouted at Withers.

“That’s the thing,” said Tom in a shrill protest. “Cop car’s already there. And Sully says he saw the chief go into the admin.”

Rangel pulled out her phone and punched Bodley’s number. It went to straight to message and she was succinct: “Sounds like some serious difficulty at Backton Aggregate. You’d better get people here quick.”

The three of them looked at each other for a moment. There was something comforting about nestling up against this trembling pachyderm. The hot air from the engine, the brown noise of the rumble, the rocking . . .

Rangel stood up straight. “Take me down to where I can see?” she said.

“Hey,” said Mitman. And he squared off against Rangel.

Withers darted his eyes back and forth between the two of them a bunch of times.

Mitman said to Rangel, “I don’t think . . .”

“Yeah,” said Withers. “Fuck it. Okay. Get in.”
 

---

 

It might have been a still life. Dead quiet, once Withers killed the engine. Swatches of vague hues were spread out in front of them, bleeding into each other like water colour washes. Nothing moving at all. Nature exhausted after being pulled, twisted, set. Posed.

Rangel set off walking towards the admin building. Mitman called to her, “Gregoria!” She didn’t turn and he went after her.

Fifty meters off they saw Nabel and Ronnie Dabord come out and head towards the shed beside the admin building. There was something awkward about their progress, and then the two men disappeared into the shed. Rangel altered direction to aim for the large, corrugated steel hangar that seemed to leap in size with each step closer. Rangel stopped but only for an instant at the side door that Nabel and Dabord had used. Then she pulled it open and stepped through.

Her first thought was that this was a freshman dance in the gym at high school. At the bottom of the great arching space, two lines of people stood facing each other across an emptiness, tense, poised, uncertain. Dabord and Nabel had positioned themselves more or less in the middle, their backs to Rangel and Mitman.

She walked towards them. All heads turned toward her and Mitman. Dabord and Nabel spun around. “What the hell . . . ?” from Dabord. Nabel’s face was trying to show a dozen emotions all at once.

Rangel was like someone who has woken up on an I-beam suspended over New York, her mind and her body separating. With a curious objectivity she scanned the Italian line of perhaps a dozen men. Yes, she thought. It could be. Dear god, alive after all this time. One man was writhing where he stood, his gaze fixed on a smaller, much older man in a work shirt and jeans. The smaller man held an automatic pistol, his arms folded loosely over his middle. Half of the men in the Italian line were clearly armed, the other half were trying to recede into the wall behind them.

“Ronnie,” said Rangel, hearing her voice from afar. “This looks tricky.”

“Get out,” he said. “Go now.” He shouted. There was a noise, sharpened by the quick echo.

Dabord drew his gun.

Someone fired.

Clattering sounds, and ear-splitting bangs. People diving, falling. Bullets whanged off great iron machines suddenly in view as bodies fled for cover.

Rangel was down with Mitman spread on top of her. She smelled the concrete of the floor. Through fat ringing ears she heard Mitman weeping. Someone else was crying. Something ticked like an irrelevant clock. Nothing. A burst of machine gun fire. More nothing.

Suddenly the side wall behind the Vietnamese caved in with an unholy grinding and screeching, and two massive bulldozers ground slowly into the room, jerking left and right like a beasts in agony. A man trapped under a tread screamed and stopped. A couple of men fired at the lead machine and the blade went up and came crashing down banging and banging like a quake.

Rangel heard some shouting and then, as the Vietnamese ran, sirens screamed towards them. The bulldozers continued to turn and turn and smash at the ground as if in frustration.
 

---

 

“He’s dead. If it’s him.”

Rangel cried. Bodley was dabbing at her scraped face with a pad of gauze wet with alcohol. It stung like hell. “How many?” she asked.

Bodley sighed. “Five dead. Hold still.”

Rangel gently pushed his hand away. “I was afraid it would be more than that. Way more.”

“These mopes can’t aim. People get the wrong idea. You know, that every bullet is a death. War like this is a crazy adrenaline blur. All over in fifteen, twenty seconds. Guns jerking around.”

“So we’ll never know.”

“What?”

“Who killed him. If it is . . . Jared.”

“Oh, we will. We’ve got everybody. Match up the guns to the slugs. Take a while but we’ll get there.”

Rangel tried to get up from the box she was sitting on. Her legs wobbled, gave way, and she sat again. She felt nausea. When it passed, she said, “Dabord? Nabel?”

“Alive,” said Bodley. “Nabel’s one of the wounded. Might have shot himself accidentally.” Rangel frowned at him. “He was carrying an old TEC-9 in his lap. You wouldn’t have seen. Barrel was still hot.”

Mitman came up and she reached and took his hand, squeezing it. He stroked her hand.

“Can we go?” he asked Bodley.

“Oh god, yes. We’ll take statements later today. This evening, maybe. We’ve got a bunch to do here.”

“Gladys,” said Rangel. “We’ve got to see Gladys. She’s got to . . . have a chance to see Jared.” Weeping again.

“Quite the firecracker, our Nancy,” said Alan Bodley. He and Rangel were walking down Orchard Street, away from her office and toward the rise where Millbrook Lane cut across.

A little early snow was experimenting with the afternoon, the sparse fat flakes testing sidewalks and melting away but finding patches of dirt and the occasional parked car more receptive. Both walkers wore heavy coats and both had their hands thrust deep into warm pockets. Their strides were long. It felt to Rangel as though, beneath the gentle touch of snow, the town was under tension, coiled. Bodley must have felt it, too, she thought, because it was he who suggested they stretch their legs.

“Well, she’s your Nancy, really,” Bodley was saying. “But she wants up and out.”

“And who could blame her?” Rangel said. “Backton is hardly the place to be if you want to make a big bang. If a tree falls and there is no forest . . . That sort of thing. Someone once called Backton a hotbed of tranquility.”

“Ah,” said Bodley, “that’s one of those whatchermacallits.”

“Don’t give me that just a humble cop crap,” said Rangel. “So what’s our Nancy been up to? Apart from climbing the ladder.”

Bodley stopped by the bench in front of Celia’s Knit Shop and tried to scoop up enough snow from the slats to make a snowball. He managed something the size of a walnut and then lobbed it into the street. “What about you?” Bodley said, wiping his hands on his coat. “Don’t you want to make a big bang? An audible report at least?”

“Not so much,” said Rangel, after a moment’s silence.

“Huh,” said Bodley, consideringly. And, “Huh,” once more. He started moving again. “Nancy’s been banging on us about looking harder for your missing man. I keep telling her we’re all about organized crime and not disorganized individuals. She is unimpressed. And, to be honest, I think there’s merit in her insistence that your man —”

“— Jared.”

“Yes,” said Bodley, in a warmer voice, “Jared might be in some way at the . . . corner of all of this.” He paused to stomp his feet, knocking snow of his Brogues, looking at them for a moment to see if they were surviving this skirmish with bad weather.

Rangel stopped and turned back to him. “So?” she said.

He looked up, with something of a grin. “I’m embarrassed to say that we’re about to hunt down a . . . coincidence. Nancy’s fancy, you might say. But I’m prepared to back her, for reasons that I can’t quite make clear to my bosses. Or to myself, if it comes to that. I hate having an intuition that won’t go away. Still, if we keep it low key, we might justify it as a form of stirring the pot, otherwise known as harassment. Always a plan when things have gone off the boil.”

“What coincidence?” Rangel had moved to stand right in front of him. He had acquired epaulettes of white and she resisted the urge to brush the snow off his shoulders.

He took her hand and swung them back into walking, even quicker now, with real energy. “Nancy’s been babysitting Gladys while she’s at the safe house. When Gladys needs some of her things, Nancy goes over to her house to fetch them. Clothing. Cheque books. Who uses cheques anymore? And the occasional keepsake. The safe house is looking like a retirement village. Knitting everywhere. But she, Nancy, has a lot of time on her hands and she uses it to talk to Gladys about Jared. That got Gladys missing some of the stuff that reminds her of him, so Nancy was sent to get a few things. Among them was —”

“— A concertina,” said Rangel. Bodley looked at her quizzically.

“That’s right,” he said. “How did you know?”

Rangel just shrugged. “I had a feeling.”

“So a couple of days ago Nancy’s going over some lists we had lying around. One of our people lost a stripe over that. Anyway, she sees this run of Italian names with some bio about them. Calabrians. On our watch list. And there’s this Timoteo Nisticò, ‘instrument maker.’”

“Jared?”

Bodley shook his head. “No, no. A real Calabrian. Brother of a big cheese. A really hard cheese. This Timoteo seems to have steered clear of the dirty work so far as we know. Almost certainly he’s living off the avails of the family business, though. Runs a small workshop. Turns out accordions, some cheap violins, mandolins. We’re going to pay a social call tomorrow. Rosin up his bow, put the ‘f’ in his f-holes, that sort of thing. See if he sings.”

“There’s more to it than that, though, isn’t there?” Rangel said, thinking.

Bodley sighed. “Yes,” was all he said.

Millbrook Lane cut across Orchard at an angle, as if it wasn’t a proper street, or even really there. No street sign marked the corners. Now the lane was a pure white stripe in both directions through the trees, and Rangel felt reluctant to mark the perfect carpet with their feet. As they stood there, a perverse afternoon sun popped free of the cloud and sparked off the falling flakes. “See?” said Rangel.

“Sort of,” said Bodley.

The town knife-sharpening truck rounded the corner from Albert Street and came chugging and clanging up Orchard, its bell ringing insistently. They watched it crest the rise and go off into the distance. “Tintinnabulation,” said Bodley, with some evident pride.

“See?” said Rangel.
 

---

 

DUC TU VINH HAD sequestered himself in his private quarters, which occupied the two top floors of an undistinguished four-storey concrete block building in the middle of what everyone in the city called simply Chinatown. He had been there, alone, for three days now. Toai Phang and two of Vinh’s other lieutenants sat around a table one floor below the boss’s sanctuary, sweating over the best approach to a growing problem. Every so often one of them would look up at the ceiling, particularly when they could hear a rhythmic thumping noise from above.

Phang had been the one to take up food for Vinh, the only person Vinh allowed in. And he was beyond worried now. The pressure was on from the police in a big way and Vinh was either doing hundreds of prostrations before a Buddhist altar — though one marred, in Phang’s opinion, by a large number of Mahayana icons and amulets — or pitting himself mercilessly against a roomful of exercise equipment. One of the machines was banging on the floor as Vinh pushed it beyond its limits. At least, Phang supposed that was the cause of the thumping. If Vinh’s prostrations were making the noise, the end was even nearer than he had thought.

“I don’t see a way out of this mess,” said the man to his left yet again. “Not without a good deal of loss.”

The man to his right, seeking unclaimed space in the conference, said, “It is surely a matter of careful action, precise action. Above all things, we must remain steady, resolute.”

For Phang, this was useless nonsense, all of it. They had been around and around the problem like something circling the drain. He felt himself drifting out of his body. “Do you ever wish you were home?” he asked the men in a quiet voice.

They looked at each other, uncertain of the right answer. The banging from over their heads had stopped. “I wish the police would back off,” said the left-hand man. “That’s what I wish. Have we not paid enough? How much of their greed can we tolerate.”

“It’s a scheme,” said the other. “Can’t you see that? Having drawn the line from all the executions so that they point to us, they are now squeezing us to see what happens, to make us step wrongly.”

“I wish I were home,” said Phang, not caring what the others thought of him, of the weakness in that wish.

In the silence that followed this remark, they heard a meditation bell strike three times from over their heads, the sound rippling away, painfully beautiful.

“Ah,” said the left-hand man. And then he looked down, embarrassed.
 

---

 

“I WANTED THEM TO blindfold you,” said Tomasini, laughing. It was a night without a moon or even stars. Even so, Rangel knew where they were. Twenty minutes out of Backton a developer had for years been hopefully constructing a battery of things called homes. She had driven past the project many times but hadn’t looked at it in ages and had never actually gone into the development. She saw that some lights were on in two of the dozen or so structures.

Tomasini pulled up into a driveway beside an unlit house. “I guess this means things are shifting,” said Rangel as they unclicked seatbelts. “Letting a visitor in,” she added.

“Could be,” said Tomasini, clearly relishing the opportunity to be non-committal, demonstrating her secret knowledge.

She pushed the button at the side door and pushed it again. Old-fashioned ‘ding-dong’ chimes reached them through the wood. Inside, lights were on everywhere, and Rangel saw that the windows were blacked out by ugly strips of stick-on paper.

Tremaine was ensconced in an ugly comfortable chair in her bedroom, knitting on the floor beside her, a book open upside down on her lap. She was asleep. Rangel crouched down beside her, hesitating to wake her. Eventually, she placed a hand over Tremaine’s folded hands, holding it there gently until the old woman opened her eyes.

“Gregoria,” said Tremaine.

Rangel smiled. “None other,” she said. “I think,” she said, “things might be . . .”

“Drawing to a close,” said Tremaine.

Rangel shook her head. “Coming to light,” she said.

As it happened, Mitman didn’t get around to snooping until the next day. Sanders’ office had been on the second floor of what everyone called the Base Building, although Base Metals, the original ground floor hardware store, had shut its doors five years ago when Joe Base left to open up a fly-in fishing lodge somewhere in the boonies hundreds of kilometers to the north. Now the street-level space was split between Sweeties to the north, a store selling penny candy, lottery tickets, and under-the-counter native cigarettes, and LOL Cats to the south, a mostly closed pet supplies shop.

Mitman stood across the street and studied the building with a newly curious eye. It was one of the more recent constructions in town, a detached, rectangular, brick three-storey shoebox, with a narrow laneway on the north side and a mere two feet or so of set-back to the south. He could see that the brickwork was only a veneer — no stretcher courses that would be necessary if it had been solid brick. This could be a good or bad sign, depending on what the bricks covered. If the building was basically concrete it might mean that wifi signals would have a hard time travelling into it or from floor to floor. But if it was a wood frame structure, a signal would penetrate much further.

He took out his phone and checked the settings, looking for networks. He found four, all of which were password protected. He couldn’t tell from their names where they originated. He crossed the road and saw that the number of available networks had doubled. The entranceway between Sweeties and LOL Cats led to a small lobby with an elevator and a signboard listing tenants. Inside he counted twelve wifi networks. Wood frame, he reckoned. This was looking good.

Sanders had occupied suite 203, one of five sets of rooms on the second floor. The signboard showed a listing for 201, 202, 204 and 205. The space where 203 had been was empty, now only a stripe of background plastic darker than the rest. Mitman took the stairs. The door to 203 had a frosted glass panel, through which he could see nothing. He listened and heard nothing. He hesitated.

He wasn’t big on breaking and entering. Not since he’d turned fifteen. Before that he’d done a few garages and once a back door. It was his coming-of-gay period, when a bunch of things were done by his body without the active participation of his mind.

A sliding credit-card and a little bit of firm but gentle forcing did the trick. He was in.

All the furniture and dental equipment had been removed and only less dusty rectangles on the floor showed how things had been. He took out his phone again and activated its local hotspot function. He then placed the phone on the floor in the middle of the inner room and, after listening for footsteps, left Sanders’ office as quietly as he’d entered.

He fished out a second phone, one he’d kept after his recent upgrade, and used it to look for wifi networks. After logging into his personal hotspot, he put the second phone back in his pocket and retrieved a piece of paper on which the names of the other tenants in the building were written. None bore any evident connection to the list of members of the Buffaloes’ Backton Lodge. Even so, Mitman went methodically to each and every office on the second and third floors, entering on some pretext and checking his phone when inside.

An hour later he had determined that it was possible to obtain a wifi signal from Sanders’ office in all but two of the other suites on the second and third floors and from both stores on the ground floor.

“Not a lot of help,” he told Rangel over lunch in the motorhome.

Rangel, her mouth full of a cheese and pickle sandwich, disagreed with a noise and a shake of her head. She could tell he was hiding something. She swallowed. “It makes interference possible, goes to reasonable doubt. Doesn’t get us — him — all the way there, but it moves the center.”

Mitman busied himself with his salad. Then she suddenly knew where he was about to go. “And?” she said, urging him on with her chin.

He sighed and let a smile of satisfaction spread across his features. “I thought about the next door neighbours,” he said. “Sanders in 203 is on the north side, so I checked the north side first, across the alleyway.” He took a forkful of salad and chewed thoughtfully.

Rangel let the image of Larch Street unreel through her mind. “Brake repairs?”

Mitman nodded. “Pilchard’s Auto. And a single mother living upstairs. That must be fun. That racket from the compressors and impact wrenches. Anyway, she’s been there four years. An okay signal, but some of the mechanics’ computer equipment screws it up occasionally. So no go.”

Rangel tried to hurry him on with her eyes. “South side?” she said, and she frowned. She couldn’t picture the building there.

“Hydro,” said Mitman.

“Hydro?” Mitman nodded. He was still smiling. “Oh,” said Rangel after a few seconds. “Right, right. One of those fake buildings hiding a transformer. I’ve got it now. Mock Victorian.” And then she said, “Oh,” again, in a different way this time. She got her laptop and tapped up Google Earth’s view of Backton, fiddled with the trackpad, and looked up at Mitman, serious now. “Behind,” she said.

Mitman nodded slowly.

“Not direct,” he said. “More kitty-corner, one to the north. Clear line of sight through the small laneway to Sanders’ window. Nice strong signal.” He snapped the lid on his container of salad and wiped his mouth on a piece of paper towel. “And you know what?”

Rangel waited, looking at him.

Mitman said, “I ran into Ronnie Dabord just as I was going up that laneway to the back. I must have looked really surprised. Probably because I was feeling guilty about my B&E. Anyway, first thing he says is, ‘I’m not stupid, you know.’”

Rangel was back at the laptop poking at the thing to get a street view of Beech, the street behind Larch. Mitman waited. Rangel grunted. “Can’t tell from this,” she said.

“Wouldn’t be proof positive,” said Mitman.

“Of course not,” she said. And, “What did Ronnie think?”

“He was pretty upset. I think he knows something else as well. You know, like a third vector, and it crosses right at the point the other two do.”

“Buffs, proximity, and . . . what?” said Rangel. Mitman continued to fuss with clearing up after lunch. “You going to tell me,” she asked him, “or do I have to beat it out of you?”

“Leslie Franche,” said Mitman. “Accountant. Got a small office in the back corner of that rooming house on Beech. Clear line of sight, like I said.”

“He didn’t admit it, did he?” Rangel held herself perfectly still.

Mitman shook his head. “Wasn’t in. Woman downstairs, owns the building, she let Ronnie in and I tagged along. I had to explain how I knew for sure that a strong wifi signal would pass between Franche’s place and Sanders’. Ronnie wasn’t too impressed. He was by the signal, but not by the B&E.” He shut the door of the small refrigerator and went to rinse his hands at the sink. “Don’t think I’ll do any jail time, though.”

“Still isn’t proof positive,” said Rangel. “So you’re right. Ronnie must know something for him even to be interested.”

“We leave it to him?”

Rangel pulled out her phone, checked the directory, and tapped the screen. “Jeannie, it’s G.R. Is Ronnie around? I’d appreciate a word.” She drummed the fingers of her free hand on the table. “Ronnie? Can I —.” She stopped drumming, listened, smoothed out the tabletop with her palm. “When?” she said, after a bit. She closed the connection. “Now,” she said to Mitman. “He’s called in Franche. Going to interview him now. He’ll talk to me right after.” She got her coat and Mitman picked his jacket off the hanger. “Just me,” she said. “You’re being punished.” Mitman shrugged and hung his jacket up again.

“Got work to do anyway,” he said. But Rangel was already out the door.
 

---

 

JEANNIE PASTOR SAID, “And how’s that hunky Dennis Abudo?” Rangel smiled, blushed a little, and mumbled something. Pastor put a coffee in her hands and, without saying anything further, placed a straight-backed chair just to the left of the chief’s closed door. She grinned conspiratorially.

From where she sat, Rangel could hear muffled talk. She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. Now she could make out some of what Dabord was saying, because he was almost shouting. “— the fuck you think you were doing . . . goddamn insanity . . . computer . . .” Nothing that Franche replied made it through the wall.

Some moments later the door banged open and Franche staggered out, his hand pressed over his mouth. He looked around wildly. Pastor merely pointed. And Franche ran off to the bathroom. Pastor made a sour face and shook her head. Rangel got up, gave her full coffee cup back to Pastor, and turned to Dabord who was filling the doorway, looking as swollen as though he might explode. He jerked a hand at Rangel and turned back into his office. Rangel went in, closing the door behind her.

“We’re fucked,” said Dabord loudly, throwing up his hands. “The whole fucking town is fucked. Might as well burn it down. Christ on a crutch! What is wrong with people!”

Rangel took the chair opposite his desk, still warm from Franche’s presence, she imagined. She shuddered.

Dabord dropped heavily into his chair.

“His computer?” Rangel asked.

Dabord looked at a spot on the floor beside his chair. “Leroy’s picking it up now,” he said, subdued. “Sealing it up in a big bag and nobody’s going anywhere near it except the forensic people.”

“But,” she said.

He shook his head rapidly. “Won’t find dick. Was all put on Sanders’ machine. Out fucking sourced it.”

“Did Franche admit it?” She held her breath.

“Claimed he didn’t know squat.”

“But —” said Rangel.

Dabord looked at her. “Oh, it gets better.”

Rangel’s mind was whirring. “Who?” she said.

Dabord gave a single nod. “Good. Old. Charlie. Ziff.”

Rangel frowned. “So Franche knew? Were they, like, in it together?”

Dabord looked as though he might hit something. He went to stand up and changed his mind. He pressed a thumb and a finger hard against his eyes. He was calmer when he spoke. “Franche says he thought Charlie was having an affair. Why all the secrecy. He would use his, Franche’s, computer at night when the office was closed. That was the deal. According to Franche. Supposedly sending emails or chatting or whatever with —.” He closed his eyes and pressed them again. “Just so happened that Franche got a bunch of the town’s accounting work. Thought it was tat for tittie.”

“What did Franche think when Sanders was charged?”

“Oh he knew then, I’m convinced of that.”

“And he let Sanders go down for it?”

Dabord’s expression was one of disgust. “Seems the boys had a hate on for Brother Julius. Some of them, at least. Julie was — is — an asshole, apparently, though I’ve always found him to be just a dentist. And that was enough. That and the whole ‘not my responsibility’ thing. Oh, and the accounting work from the town.”

Rangel was still thinking. That third vector. Previous convictions, maybe. “But there’s something else. Am I right? You knew something, otherwise you wouldn’t be so . . . certain. Because right now it’s speculation. Good, sensible speculation. But just that. No tangible evidence. Some shifty, creepy stuff. Some technical . . . opportunity.”

Dabord ignored her. “I’m bringing everyone in on this. Provincials, feds. And I’m going to hang it around the neck of some Crown attorney who can carry it until it gets as right as Jesus. This will not get fucked up.” He looked at her. “Again.”

Rangel said, “Just thinking. Any chance of mapping out the times when Ziff was using Franche’s machine and comparing them with login times from Sanders machine. There was a list of session times. I’ve got it if you can’t find yours. Might be useful.”

“Noted,” said Dabord, and he actually wrote something on a pad of paper. “Thanks. Now that’s it. You’re out of the loop on this. In fact, you were never in it, right? Tell that . . . Mitman. I catch either of you poking around and screwing this up, I’ll —.”

“Noted,” said Rangel.

“Oh,” said Dabord. “I almost forgot. Here’s Mitman’s phone. I found it on the floor. Somewhere.”

“We’ve got a pretty good picture of it now,” said Alan Bodley. There was coffee in china cups. Bodley put his down on the saucer with that gentle click that said real porcelain. The cup had a fluted edge and a floral design.

The Commissioner caught him looking. “My wife,” he said. “Civilizing. Or something.”

The Deputy Commissioner flicked a cryptic glance at a uniformed supervisor sitting slightly behind the Commissioner. She dropped her eyes and struggled not to smile.

Bodley stretched out a grey-suited leg and considered the shine on his oxblood Brogue as he spoke. “The ‘ndrangheta used to run the drug and prostitution businesses in that part of the province, but competition came along about five, six years back. Now it looks like ‘ndrangheta’s pretty much out of the rural and small town game. Pushed out. Gambling was the wedge.”

Commander Finch felt the need to be seen and heard. “Vietnamese,” he said. “Curious mix of online gaming based way offshore and hyperlocal stuff — basement, backroom dens, high-stakes poker, blackjack, and a ton of half-legal video slots for the truly stupid. Play with debit cards, credit cards, highly portable machines. Disappear them quick at the first sign of trouble.”

Bodley waited to see that Finch had delivered himself of his portion. Then he went on. “A deal got struck, Vietnamese and Calabrians, but it was never going to last. And it’s evidently come completely undone. The Italians have pretty much bowed out.” He leaned forward, tucking his legs under the chair. “The head man, Vinh, has been moving to put resources more and more into legit business. Well, apparently legit business. Not a hell of a lot more corrupt, shall we say, than your ordinary high profit businesses.”

The supervisor said, teasingly, “You’re not suggesting that capitalism is organized crime, are you Alan?”

Bodley smiled. “Heaven forfend,” he said. “Occupational hazard. Man with a hammer, and all that.”

Finch stirred. His turn again. “We’ve discovered that this Vinh is going into aggregate production in a big way.”

The Commissioner asked Bodley, “Aggregate?”

“Sand, gravel, crushed rock. The underpinning of everything. Selling dirt back to the people.” Bodley shrugged. “Backton Aggregate is one of their operations. Nabel, Dean Nabel, is the nominal owner. Legal owner on paper. But —” He shrugged again.

The Deputy Commissioner asked Bodley, “What was the point of trying to kill this Tremaine woman? I was at her place and I’ve got to say I can’t think of a less likely criminal mastermind.”

Bodley smiled. “The Calabrians took some initiative and tried to please Vinh. They saw her and her beef with Nabel as a threat to Vinh and, so, a threat to their own small, remaining foothold in the area. It hasn’t worked out well for them. Seems Vinh is a real tetchy kind of guy and was so irritated by their clumsiness he just about decimated their soldiers.”

The Commissioner asked, “So she’s irrelevant?”

“Yes,” said Finch decisively.

“Anything important in that missing son of hers?”

“More like a grandson,” said Bodley. And, “Difficult to say. If Nabel killed him to get at the land, it’s going to be harder than hell to prove after a dozen years. But I’ve got someone looking into it, just in case.”

“And that lawyer woman?”

Bodley went back to contemplating the shine on his shoes. “Rangel,” he said. “She’s just what she appears to be. Smart. Honest. Struggling lawyer.”

“Good looking,” said the DC. Everyone laughed.

“That, too,” said Bodley. “And more important, she’s got a hot car.” Laughter again.

The Commissioner persisted. “So what’s all that arson about?”

Bodley said, “That we don’t know. But we’re persuaded it’s got nothing to do with our people of interest. It’s in the hands of the local police.”

“Huh,” said the Commissioner. He turned to Commander Finch. “Update your standing memo on —” he waved his hand “— all this. See if we can get this thing going.” He sighed. “And it’s time to talk to the minister about the nitty gritty dirt business.” He picked up his coffee cup and put it down again. “For all the good it will do,” he said.
 

---

 

“NICE LITTLE PLACE you got here,” said Ronnie Dabord. He was standing in the small reception area, moving his cap from hand to hand.

“That’s right,” said Rangel. “You haven’t been here.”

“And you’ve had it for what? All of two weeks?”

“Is that all? How time flies. You’re forgiven, then.”

“Your other place, I guess it is, is coming along fine. I was down there yesterday. Stuff gets built lickety split nowadays. Going to be a handsome addition to the town.”

Rangel said, “I’m getting kind of attached to this space, though. Cosy.”

“Like camping, only you don’t have to go out of the tent to . . .” He trailed off.

“What’s up, Ronnie? Or is this just a social call?”

“I wish. But I’m whipping around like a flag in a gale. Thanks in no small measure to you.” He grinned and then gestured at her office. “Can we?” he said.

They settled. Dabord fitted his cap on to one of his knees. “I’ve sent the para cord off to the provincial lab,” he told her, serious now. “See if they can do some batch identification.” He shifted in his seat. “Trouble is, even if we match it to the stuff that they use at Nabel’s, it’s not going to get us very far. I mean, it’s not under lock and key there like the dynamite. Any of his dozens of workers could have grabbed hold of a reel of the stuff pretty much any time.”

“Motive?” Rangel asked.

“Yeah, well,” said Dabord. “Got to figure it’s all about the Sanders case. Your role. Unless you’ve pissed off someone I don’t know about.”

Rangel made a hmph noise. “Could have something to do with Gladys’s affairs.”

Dabord scratched his head with a careful finger. He nodded. “Possible,” he said. “The provincials are taking a run at locating Jared or at least trying to rule out that he’s still alive. So in a way that’s out of our hands now.”

Rangel lifted her hands slightly from the desktop and looked at them.

“Yes,” said Dabord. And, “Well.”

Rangel looked up at him.

“Sanders,” he said. She waited. He sighed and seemed to deflate with the out breath. “I guess I should say thanks for the information about Dom and his eavesdropping. I’m speaking to him myself this afternoon. But —” He sighed again. “I’d hate to think that we got the wrong man,” he said, coming it at another way. “Sanders has been convicted by a court. That’s got to count for something. A lot. It makes it really unlikely that we got it wrong. No? I mean, you’re a lawyer. You tell me. All that . . . evidence, all that stuff that you people do . . . cross-examination, beyond a reasonable doubt . . . What are the chances?”

“The chances? It’s not really a matter of odds, Ronnie. I agree: it’s not easy to overturn a conviction. It’s really hard in fact. Or to get a new trial based on new evidence. But I was his counsel. And although I’m long gone from the record, I don’t think I can just sit by and ignore the sort of thing that Dominic Archer was telling me.” She tilted her head and looked into his eyes searchingly. “And nor can you, I would think.”

“The . . . Buffaloes,” he said, giving the word an unpleasant spin. He shook his head slowly. “I mean, the mayor, good old Charlie Ziff. And a handful of what passes for movers and shakers in this little burg. I’ll be frank. I wouldn’t want to be seen as making allegations of this sort. Word gets around. Reputations get ruined, because gossip loves ruination. You of all people should know it does. Could be a disaster. And all for what?”

“Justice?” said Rangel sharply.

Dabord snorted. “Right,” he said. “As if.” He shook himself and put on his cap. Then he took it off again. “Look,” he said, “I know this has been hard on you. Really hard. But I wonder how much your — I won’t say ‘guilt’ — let’s just say ‘anxiety,’ is driving this.”

“You will look into it,” Rangel said. It was not a question.

Dabord met her gaze. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, with no intonation at all. He put on his cap and took his time settling it, getting it just right.
 

---

 

MITMAN CROSSED HIS LEGS, knee over knee, and perched a steno pad on the upper joint. He licked the point of a Dixon 3B pencil and held it hovered over the pad. He looked at Rangel with his brows arched, expectant.

Rangel couldn’t help it: she laughed for a solid minute. Wiping her eyes, she said, “Thank you.”

“I don’t know what you mean, I’m sure,” said Mitman, but he’d uncrossed his legs.

“I need you to do some things for me, Wally.” she said. “Call Tom Withers and check that Nabel has followed through on his promise to pay the workers for last Thursday. He told me he’d have it done by yesterday.” Mitman began to scribble.

“Then get in touch with Serge Antipov. I need to talk to him about the possibility of new evidence in the Sanders matter. Oh, and call that number Nancy Tomasini gave me to get in touch with Gladys. See if you can talk to her, make sure she’s okay. See if she needs anything, if there’s anything we can do for her.”

She tapped a pen on her desk as she thought. “If,” she said, “you have a moment. You might wander over to Sanders’ old office and double check on who’s got the offices above, below, and beside. I think I can recall, but it’s not the sort of thing I want to have any doubts about.”

Mitman made a strong black mark with his pencil. “Within wifi range,” he said. He turned the mark into an arrow.

Rangel nodded. “I’ve read what you put together based on Sanders’ appeal material. I think I understand the basics enough to assume that someone could have parked the pornography on his drive if they were close enough physically. That it’s a realistic possibility. And now that we’ve got some names to consider, we’ve got a second vector, as it were. Let’s see if it crosses the proximity line.”

“I’m on it,” Mitman said.

“And we should probably start thinking about moving back to the office, the old office I mean. Give it a month more at the outside.”

“I can go by and get an updated estimate from the construction crew,” Mitman said.

“Do that,” she said. “Please.”

Dominic Archer looked to be one of the hearty sort — tall, plump, rubicund, moving with a bounce. His bald head shone under the spots in the motorhome like an outsize incandescent light bulb. But he had a nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth and his fingers fluttered sporadically for no reason. A tyler keeps things in, Rangel thought. Keeps things in order. That’s what a tyler does. Keeps out the idly curious, the interloper, the invader. Makes safe.

“Let’s go outside,” she said to him. “I could use some air. We can talk while we walk. How’s that?” For all her bluster to Mitman earlier in the day, she was getting creeped out by the thought that her office might be bugged.

Relief showed on Archer’s face. “Yes,” he said. “It’s gotten cold,” he added, “you’ll need to bundle up.” Rangel smiled and thought of a big sheepdog. Make safe, keep safe.

They ambled for a couple of blocks in silence, until they had found a comfortable matching of strides. Archer had been right about the weather: it was scarcely above freezing, and the occasional gust made it feel even colder. Rangel put on her gloves and popped the collar of her coat. Archer seemed glad of the chill. He kept rolling his shoulders and flapping his open jacket.

“You know, of course,” said Rangel in a matter-of-fact voice, “that I represented Julius Sanders at his trial. And you know that Alexandre Goncourt talked to me a little bit about Sanders and you and himself as members of the Buffaloes. Without putting words in his mouth, I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Goncourt expressed some doubt about Sanders’ . . . involvement in the child pornography. Merely an intuition, perhaps.”

“I . . . I . . .” said Archer. And stopped.

Rangel simply nodded. They continued walking. Archer now had his hands thrust into the slash pockets of his jacket, and his chin was dropped almost to his chest. After a bit, she said in the same matter-of-fact tone, “You can see how distressing this would be to me, to say nothing of the potential injustice to Dr. Sanders.” It was the first time since the trial that she had used his professional title. “If the authorities have made a terrible mistake, I mean. And then there’s the equally disturbing possibility that a child abuser is still at large.”

An alarm bell rang for a few seconds, cutting through the autumn torpor like a blast of summer sunlight, and Rangel realized that she had led them past the schoolyard. Recess began and children boiled out of the banging school doors, shrieking and shouting with abandon. Archer noticed. Rangel thought she heard him groan.

She stopped and he turned back to face her. It occurred to her at that moment that he might have been — might still be — a guilty participant in the abuse. It seemed impossible that she hadn’t thought this before. Was he about to confess to her?

“I . . . I . . .” Archer managed again.

“Unburden yourself,” said Rangel quietly, surprised at her choice of the old-fashioned, almost religious phrase.

But it seemed to work, because Archer squared his big shoulders and his face became calm. “I’m meant to keep secrets,” he said. “That’s my duty. One of my duties. Not that there are any real secrets about what the Buffs do. But telling tales, well it goes against the grain. My grain, at least.” He peered at Rangel to see if she understood. Rangel gave a small nod. Her collar was cupping the wind, which was starting to freeze the tips of her ears. She stayed still.

“So anyway,” Archer said, “I’m standing in the cupboard at the Lodge, right? The cupboard’s what we call the small . . . room, I guess it is, where we keep the analecta, um, the books of wisdom gathered over the years. But the thing is they couldn’t see me and I wasn’t making any noise.” He cleared his throat, ran a hand over his pate, and darted a glance left and right. “I heard two of the guys talking. They weren’t whispering but they were talking really low. And anyway when you’re in the closet, even if the door is open, everything is muffled. This is after the trial is over, right? And Julie is locked away. And one of the guys says how bad he feels that Julie took the fall and the other guys says something about how Julie probably deserved it anyway, for, like, other stuff he’s probably done. And the first guy says, he actually says, ‘It was you, wasn’t it? All along it was you.’ And the other guy says right back, didn’t miss a beat, ‘Don’t go there. Not even in your dreams.’ Then it’s like he says it’s more than the first guy’s job is worth. I think he said ‘job’. A threat anyway. But all just smooth, like he’s giving you a phone number or something.”

The school bell shrilled once more. Recess was over. And, like leaves in a gust, the children were swept back into the waiting open doors. Silence was restored.

Rangel asked, “Who were the men you overheard?”

Archer shook his head. “I don’t know. I swear. I came out of the cupboard but there was no one there. So I just don’t know. But I mean, there’s only six of us if you don’t count me.” He thought for a moment and abruptly zipped up his jacket. “That’s all I know,” he said. And he walked away.

 

---

 

“WHAT IS THIS PLACE?” Toai Phang kept his arms close to his sides and let disdain show on his face. He was standing in the middle of room 225 of The Hub Motel, located at the 77 kilometer ‘milepost’ on General McNaughton Parkway. It was as far away as he could get from the scuffed and grubby bits of furniture. A forty-watt bulb under a crooked, fake-parchment shade made it look like something sticky had been spilled everywhere. A faint bleach smell tainted the air.

The other man in the room was enjoying himself. He was sprawled on the bed fully clothed, an arm behind his head, every inch of him saying how little he cared about Phang’s discomfort or even his authority. His name was Harry Vu and he was Duc Vinh’s man at Backton Aggregate, the new yard boss. As far as Vu was concerned, he and Phang were both merely tools in Vinh’s hand. Wearing a jumped up suit didn’t get you any further off the ground. One chopstick was as good as the other, was his view: they were equally easy to snap in half.

“Welcome to the Hotel California,” said Vu, moving the exchange to English. “Such a lovely place.” Phang frowned for a moment. Vu had been born in Canada, where Phang had not. Moreover, Vu was of mixed race. Phang believed that these characteristics gave Vu access to local knowledge, a kind of secret knowledge, that he, Phang, lacked; and at the same time they made Vu a naturally inferior being. The combination was exasperating.

“Report,” said Phang.

Vu sighed, letting go of the game. He swung his legs off the bed and sat at the edge, twisted, looking at Phang. “It’s under control.”

Phang waved an impatient hand, wanting more.

Vu got to his feet, put his hands in his pockets, and went to stand at the grimy window. There was nothing to see out there, almost literally nothing: the ground outside the window dropped quickly away into a swale that was intended to carry off flood water. On the other side of the deep, broad ditch, the sky plunged down to oppress the earth. He kept his back to Phang. “The men have come into line. There was some restlessness after the gino was taken out.” Without realizing it, he copied Phang’s gesture as he stirred the air, summoning up the name. “Gio, that’s it. Funny huh? A couple of his buddies tried to kick up a fuss. Ginos. I sorted that. And the rest of the crew could give a shit.”

“Loose ends?” Phang asked.

Vu, perhaps tired of his display of impertinence, turned around and said, more or less seriously, “No. When you work in a mine, there are always ways to clean up loose ends. Access to those crushers alone would make the master’s whole project worthwhile. All by itself.”

Phang got a pained expression on his face, as though it was somehow sacrilegious for Vu even to be referring to the organization’s enterprises. “Keep things going smoothly. It may be necessary to take full control, but it is not time yet for that.” He stood still, wanting to say other things. “Don’t phone,” was all he said eventually.

Vu grinned. “Yeah, yeah, I know. But let me give you a bit of advice.” He pointed past Phang to where the parking lot would be. “Don’t flit into town next time with that white, titty-twisting Mercedes. Sticks out like my dick in a whorehouse. Go down market. Way down market. You can do it. Do you good.” His grin got wider and more cruel. “Chào. Or should I say ciao?” Vu chuckled.

Phang closed his eyes and breathed out, expelling as much of this as he could. And then he turned on his heel and left.
 

---

 

“NO, BUT I FOUND THIS.” Jim Alleyne held out a wound coil of orange string on his blue nitrile rubber palm. Tomasini, Mitman, and Rangel crowded in to look.

“Antenna?” said Tomasini.

“Good guess,” said Alleyne. “But no cigar. In fact, no cigar anywhere near this, please. It’s detonation cord, a happy little tube filled with PETN. Snugged up against the gas tank.”

Rangel and Mitman stepped back. Tomasini moved closer. “Explosive?” Rangel asked, in a small voice.

Alleyne closed his hand over the cord. “Yes and no,” he said. “I could set fire to this and it would smoulder. No bang. But with the right ignition and some compression, say from a small shock wave, hit it with a hammer, say, and you’d get a pretty good explosion along the length of the cord in a fraction of a second. This stuff is quick. Think of it as a fuse with attitude.”

“But dangerous,” said Mitman. “Just by itself?” He was thinking back to the night, a week before, when an intruder had made the alarm go off. He had crawled under the van but hadn’t spotted this.

“No. Well, not really. That’s what I’m saying. You do need that ignition-compression source.”

“And you didn’t find that?” Tomasini asked.

Alleyne was about to hedge his bets, but he decided not to. “I know motor vehicles, all the nooks and crannies” he said. “Better than I know my wife’s.” Tomasini looked up. “Who went home to her mother three years ago. So that’s not surprising, I guess. What I’m trying to say is I’m 95 percent certain that unless somebody hid it there before you got the RV, it isn’t there. There’s only so much you can access under a vehicle that isn’t up on a hoist or jacks. And I accessed it. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good just stuck anywhere. It’d have to be in proximity to the cord.”

Mitman said, “So either a stupid arsonist or one who could only manage half the job.”

“Seems like,” said Alleyne.

“Who,” said Mitman, “ . . . who has access to that stuff?”

“Oh,” said Alleyne, “it’s not hard to come by. Mining, it’s used in mining. But farmers use it to cut trees. You wrap it around the trunk, set it off, and zap! One garotted tree.”

Rangel was poised between anger and vertigo. “Bring in Bodley,” she said to Tomasini. “No, wait. Take that . . . thing and give it to Ronnie. This is his business. You can tell Bodley, though. And tell him about not finding any bugs. No bugs — but a snake,” she said.
 

---

 

“ZIFF, HUGGANOT, UPTON, Franche, Stempel,” Rangel was ticking the names of on her fingers. She closed the full hand and stuck a thumb up from the other. “And Goncourt,” she added.

Mitman made a moaning noise. It was late. Just the two of them in her office, an office that seemed so small, so fragile now. “Could it be?”

“Pedophiles don’t come with labels,” she said. She rubbed her eyes and gave her head a shake. “He’s a client. And his name’s over our door.”

“It’d be a catastrophe. Therefore, it’s not possible.”

“I wish.”

“What to do?”

“Again, I think it has to be Ronnie Dabord. If he wants to bring in the provincials, that’s his call. But the Sanders investigation was his. Then, unless Ronnie tells me there’s some problem with it, I’ll want to talk to Sergei Antipov. I think Sanders’ lawyer should know but I can’t go anywhere near him. Or Sanders.”

She got up and put on her coat. Mitman rose and did the same.

“That’s what to do,” she said in a solemn voice.

And they left, locking the door behind them.

Nancy Tomasini was almost in uniform. But instead of the regulation peaked hat she wore a navy watch cap done up in an accordion double fold. A wind had come up, and some lumpy gloom in the morning sky made it look like rain was on the way again. Which was why she wore the watch cap: she hated how you had to put that stupid plastic shower cap thing on the peaked hat when it rained.

She squared her shoulders and then banged gently on the motorhome door. It rattled in the frame a little. Rangel pulled it open.

“Got a moment?” Tomasini asked.

Rangel stepped back to let her in.

“Inspector Bodley asked me to come by with a report,” Tomasini said, pulling off her cap and making hat hair.

“Ah,” said Rangel, all caution now. “That explains why I couldn’t get hold of you yesterday. You’re in on this safe house thing.” She gestured at the kitchen nook. “Coffee?”

Tomasini shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ve gotta run,” she said. “Just a messenger.” But she smiled as she said it, obviously pleased with the hands she’d been dealt over the last few days. “First off, they didn’t find any bugs in your place. Which is good news, right?” She shuffled her feet a little and looked at the corners of the small cabin. “He, uh, he wants to check out this place as well. If you don’t mind, of course.”

Rangel frowned and began to shake her head.

“Just think about it, okay?” said Tomasini quickly.

“It’s a law office,” Rangel said. “I practice criminal law among other things. I can’t have police roaming around in here.”

“I know, I know. He knows that, too. But the thing is, there’s not much point in clearing your house if your office is bugged. Right?” Rangel continued to shake her head slowly. Tomasini hurried on. “Ms. Tremaine — I gotta call her Mrs. Tremaine, you know? — she’s fine. Taking it easy. Teaching the guys how to play canasta. If you need to see her, just call me or Alan, er Inspector Bodley. They’re putting all calls through a central switchboard to make sure they can’t be traced back to the safe house.” She raised her voice: “So if anyone’s listening, tough . . . whatever.” She flashed a quick smile at Rangel. “And that’s it. Oh yeah, we’re liking your idea of going back into Jared Willoughby’s disappearance. It ties a bunch of stuff together.” She rotated the watch cap in her hands, sought out Rangel’s eyes, and said, “Think about . . .” and she waved the cap at the room.

And then she was gone, the door closing Rangel in with a metallic click. She stayed stock still and silent for a minutes or two, imagining that someone could hear her, maybe even see her.

---

THE FAMILIAR NOTE OF a particular car’s engine entered the motorhome and, like someone released from a trance, she began to move again. Checked the time. Not yet nine. Checked her desk phone. No messages. Came out of her office and poured a coffee, turning with it in her hand as Mitman came in.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey to you, too.”

“Good weekend?”

“Busy,” he said, and paused. He shrugged out of his windbreaker and hung it on the coat rack using a hanger. “Can we talk for a bit?”

“Uh oh,” said Rangel, her face tightening. She felt anxiety scrape at her insides. “There’s another problem? I couldn’t take another problem, Wally.”

“Let’s go sit down,” he said. “It’s not so much a problem as a . . . thing.” He herded her gently into her office.

“First I should tell you,” she said, sitting heavily behind her desk, “that the police think this office may be bugged.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Well, there were big doings over the weekend.” Rangel tried to keep reproach out of her voice but didn’t quite manage. That wasn’t fair, she told herself immediately. Wally didn’t owe her any of his time on the weekend. And they didn’t have that kind of duty-bound understanding of things anyway. She found a more neutral tone. “The provincials found a bug in Gladys’s place, so they’ve moved her to a safe house.”

“Where?”

“No idea. And that’s the idea, of course. So they wanted to search my house too and I let them. Nancy Tomasini was just here to tell me that they didn’t find anything — and that now they want to clear this place.”

Mitman frowned. She suddenly saw how tired he looked. He said, “Maybe we shouldn’t talk here then.”

“Sod that for a game of soldiers,” she said with heat, an old Belfast boyfriend’s favourite angry expression falling out of her mouth. “I will not run and hide.” They were silent for a moment. “And I will not have the police poking into my law office, no matter how, how . . . mobile it may be.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“No.”

Mitman wriggled for a moment, then shrugged. “Your call, girl,” he said lightly. And after a deep breath, “So where was I this weekend, you ask.”

“I don’t. Didn’t.”

“But you were thinking it. You’re an open book to me, Gregoria Rangel. A good read, I might add. Well, most of the time. So let me explain.” And then abruptly he ran out of words. This surprised him. He’d kept so much in his head, where it had seemed perfectly clear. But now that he wanted to share his work, his findings, he realized he hadn’t picked the words to couch it all in. And it needed couching.

“I . . . I’ve been worried,” he started. “Worried about this business of Sanders’ appeal.” He held up a palm to stop her from interrupting; he’d started and now he had to get it all out. “My fear is that I slipped up somehow, didn’t . . . give you the right advice.” The palm again. “About the computer, I mean. And about, well, the computer expert we used. So anyway I checked. No, no, it’s okay. I was careful. Really really careful, okay? Let’s just say a little bird responded to encouragement and told me. It turns out that our Professor Gampel is being looked at askance now. Hindsight is still focusing and isn’t quite twenty-twenty yet, but the impression seems to be that he was — there is no other way to put this — careless in his opinions, um, much of the time. Turns out there’s a wee substance abuse problem.”

“Oh dear god.” Rangel felt her skin shrink. She held herself rigid.

“The mitigating factor — well, mitigating for us — is that he has done most of his work for the Crown. After all, that was our big qualifying element, why we picked him. So if anyone’s screwed the pooch, it’s the big city PPS people. But the bottom line is that a bunch of stuff is about to come unwrapped.” Mitman, having delivered his bad news slumped in his chair and let his exhaustion show.

Rangel’s mind was racing. “This doesn’t mean necessarily that the conviction is wrong.”

“Absolutely not.”

“But —”

“It might be.”

“Shit. Who could have had access to his computer? That’s the question, right?”

Mitman shook his head wearily. “Anyone could, I suppose. We looked at that. Park his junk on Sanders’ machine. Either use it like a hidden storage depot or —”

“— dump it there to frame him.”

“Someone on the local network, more likely. We did think about all of this.”

“We need to think about it again. I have to call Antipov.”

Mitman nodded. “But let’s do the thinking part first. I mean, formally we’re out of it. And we can’t exactly tell him we’ve been — I’ve been — poking around in things that might affect the appeal.”

“Think,” said Rangel to herself. And then to Mitman, “Thank you, Wally. Now go home. Get some rest.” Mitman nodded, and did as he was told.

---

RANGEL SAT, LOST IN thought, for an uncounted time. Then she got up and paced within the confines of the motorhome. When this proved to be too constricting, she went outside and was two blocks away before the cold wind forced her back to get a coat. After half an hour of unaware wandering she found herself standing outside her burned out office, where a crew was busily at work banging and setting up a racket with screaming machines.

The sight of all of that effective industry acted like a lens through which her various anxieties came into focus and found resolution or, at least, resolve within her. In ten minutes she had made the decisions that the contractor needed and a couple of changes that he was persuaded to accept. That left merely the future to be tackled.

Rangel felt refreshed, powerful. “Yes,” she thought. Just that: yes.

---

AT THE OFFICE RANGEL phoned Nancy Tomasini. “Here’s the deal,” she said. “Just between you and me, can you find me someone not in the police to sweep this place? I’d be happy to share the results with Inspector Bodley.”

There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the line. Then Tomasini said, “Yeah. I think so. A . . . government employee who might be persuaded to do some moonlighting.”

“But not a cop.”

“No.”

“Can you set it up for me, as soon as possible?”

“I’ll call you back.”

Rangel fished around on her desk until she found the slip of paper that had Dominic Archer’s phone number on it. He answered after the first ring. “Mr. Archer,” she said, “I’d like to meet”

Archer made uncomfortable noises. “I’m not sure where I am on this,” he said eventually.

“No matter,” she told him briskly. “I can come to you, if that’s more convenient.”

Dead air for a moment. “Yes,” he said, trying it on for size. “Yes, all right. I suppose it’s okay.”

“Where are you?” He told her and she made a note. “This afternoon? Say two o’clock?”

She dialled once more. Sergei Antipov was his usual cheery self. “At last we connect,” he said. “It’s only to give you a heads up that the appeal has been filed. We’ll email the stuff to you later today. And a case management judge has already been appointed, which is unusually quick. Our take is that somebody up there thinks highly of you. So I suspect he’ll want to meet with the parties very soon. Conference call. Not in person. We have some experience with him — it’s David Wang, by the way — and he has in the past arranged for trial counsel to listen in.”

“I see,” said Rangel. “I appreciate this. Let me know when I’ll need to talk to your E&O counsel.”

“Will do.”

And that was that. She checked herself. No chills, no collywobbles, no jitters.

She sat considering her next move. For some reason, her mind played back a phrase that Mitman had used: ‘A little bird told me.’ And then she remembered the small bird’s head carved by Jared that Gladys had given her.

Concertinas, she thought.

Giving her head a shake, she told herself: ‘Focus.’

Rangel woke knotted in the bed sheets, struggling out of a dream in which she was escaping danger through a very narrow passage. She lay there for a moment, letting the fragments of life precipitate out of the confusion, gathering identity. Cold. It was time, past time, to change the covers to the winter duvet. Neat, tidy. If only everything could be snugged into its proper place. Dennis, Bill, disturbing forces. Prospect. Trouble coming, uncontrollable, late, she was late, overslept.

And with that she leaped out of bed, knowing it was Sunday but, even so, feeling dismay at having wasted the morning. Shivering, she examined the world through the east window. It was a silver day, with the light perfectly diffused through universal cloud and the bare sentinel birches along the property line shining quietly. She remembered her new yellow car and had a sudden impulse to run away in it.

Instead, she shed her nightgown and hurried into a hot shower, letting it run and run, well past the point that her normal, frugal self would have allowed. If this was running away, she thought, it was for a very short distance in the disobedience stakes.

Later, flushed pink and swathed in grey sweats, she found her phone and checked the time, discovering that she’d panicked without a reason, because it was all of eight in the morning. Clearly she needed to find a way to come down to earth, to harmonize her internal and external lives. She needed to remind herself that there was no point in wasting effort applying body English to things that were out of her grasp and in motion; trying that would only get her bent out of shape. This was a hard lesson to learn if you were earnest and dutiful.

Her nature was to be earnest and dutiful, of that she had little doubt. And then she had the sudden vision of being a mother and watching her child move away through life unprotected, vulnerable, a mother wishing, hoping, worrying for that body out of her grasp and in motion, a mother always writhing in a vain attempt to influence the fates. How would she manage motherhood?

Perhaps being a lawyer was trouble enough in this life, she thought.
 

---

 

COPS WORKED ON SUNDAYS, Rangel decided, especially those combating organized crime, which, she imagined, rather like some creature in Dante’s seventh circle of hell, never took a moment’s break from its boring, sordid drone. So, once fortified with a rather protestant breakfast of shredded wheat and warm skim milk, she felt no guilt about phoning Alan Bodley.

“Let me come to you,” he said.

“There’s nothing here but shredded wheat and dry toast,” she told him.

He said that would have been better than the cornucopia of Timbits and double-doubles that propositioned him from the tables in the old Delisle drugstore. But since he’d already indulged, would simple black coffee be possible?

She considered slipping into something less comfortable, but quickly abandoned the idea.

He showed up at her door ten minutes later, the same man in a different suit, this one soft grey and as well made as the last. Was it a good idea, Rangel wondered, to have your organized crime fighter decked out in better-than-decent Hugo Boss? And, she noted, Italian shoes. His light blue shirt had an English spread collar from which a softly busy Liberty print tie dangled by a neat and modest knot. Harmony indeed.

She felt dowdy. Had she even brushed her hair?

For his outfit alone Bodley merited the front room, but because she was feeling wrong-footed by this dandy she led him into the kitchen. There she laid out for him the Gladys Tremaine story as she knew it and her involvement with it. She explained Jared Willoughby’s central role and the need to search for him and to use police resources to do that, if only to eliminate a possibility, but more likely to determine a death and perhaps a killing.

He nodded here and there, sipped at his coffee, and stayed quiet: she knew how to keep a tale orderly, relevant. When she was done, she discovered that she’d been raking her hand through her hair. She took her hand down. “By the way,” she said, “I tried to get hold of you yesterday. Well, Gladys, really, but when I couldn’t find her I tried you.”

Bodley held up a warning finger and then put it to his lips. He got to his feet, crooked his finger, and made a ‘follow me’ gesture, leading her down the short hall and out the front door. “What?” she said, when they were standing in her front garden.

“A search revealed a hidden microphone and transmitter at Ms. Tremaine’s house. There may be more but it’s taking some time to examine all the possible hiding places. It’s a very old house. But because her house has been . . . compromised, we’ve decided to move her to a safe house.”

Rangel started running her hand through her hair again. Things kept splitting, problems multiplying. “It’s worrying — alarming — that you think it’s necessary. I mean, a ‘safe house’?”

Bodley made a skeptical face. “Someone has tried to kill her, remember.”

Rangel sighed. “Yes. Of course. I . . . keep wanting that not to be true.” She looked at Bodley. “I’ll need to have access to her, need to see her, of course.”

“I understand,” Bodley said. “Let’s talk about that . . . later, if we may.”

She frowned, understood suddenly why she was outside. “You think my house is bugged?” She could feel anger building, pointing it at him, who was merely the messenger.

He shook his head. “We don’t know, can’t know. But I couldn’t take the risk of talking to you about the safe house in there. We’d like to examine your house to determine whether there is anything there, though. It wouldn’t be too invasive. No tearing down of walls.” He smiled at her, trying to lighten the message.

“No,” said Rangel, akimbo. “Yes, all right.” And, changing her stance, “It depends.”

“On what?” Bodley asked.

“Oh I don’t know,” said Rangel, her anger cooled to mere annoyance now. “Go ahead. Just . . . I don’t like the thought of some stranger —” She just shook her head.

“Thank you,” said Bodley. He had his phone out. “We will take care. I promise. I’ll supervise the search.” And then he looked over her shoulder. “Oh,” he said. “Ah.” And he strolled across to her driveway, where the Mustang’s tail was poking out from beside the house. “Yours?” he said, putting a hand on it and turning to look at her?

“For the nonce,” she said — and then thought how lawyerish that sounded, how foolish. “A loaner.”

Bodley took his hand off the car and snapped his fingers. “Of course, the fire with the blue truck.” He looked back at the car again, and then nodded at her with obvious approval. “Some loaner,” he said. “Nice.”
 

---

 

DEAN NABEL WORKED his wheelchair back and forth a couple of times, adjusting his position at the table until he had it perfectly right. “Thank you,” he said again, looking across at Rangel. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.” He had a shock of brown hair that kept falling onto his forehead and being pushed back out of the way. He was pale as the tablecloth and the white skin of his parting looked like a scar on his head.

Rangel said, “I’m not sure that there’s much I’m able to help you with, Mr. Nabel.” She moved the silverware beside her plate until it was lined up properly. “I can tell you that Gladys Tremaine is my client and consequently our interests are conflicting. But even more conflicting is the fact that —.”

Nabel held up his hands to halt her, to say that this was going faster than it needed to. “We have some time,” he told her. “And the food here is better than you might imagine.”

They ordered, Rangel choosing a poached chicken breast and a salad of bitter greens, Nabel taking the lamb tagine. Rangel sipped at her bubbly water and thought about rubber-gloved police officers fingering the things in her bedroom drawers. Maybe Bodley would do that himself. She shivered.

“Perhaps,” said Nabel, putting down his wine, “I might start by expressing my distress at what happened to your truck. The aggregate business is not . . . well, it’s a rough affair, uneducated men who are used to physical solutions to perceived problems. I’d like to give you whatever it would cost to replace your vehicle. It’s the least I can do.”

Rangel shook her head. “That’s a generous offer,” she said, “but not one I can accept. Insurance will take care of my loss.”

“As you wish,” said Nabel. “But if you change your mind, the offer still stands.”

“And besides,” said Rangel, “the police aren’t at all certain that it was your workers who set the fire.” Nabel tilted his head in skepticism.

They ate a little, talking of nothing in particular, and then Rangel said, “I’ve been asked by some of your employees to look into a problem with their pay, particularly for last Thursday when the operation was shut down.”

“Oh yes?” said Nabel, almost managing to suppress a spurt of hostility. He shifted his position in his chair, drank some wine, pushed away the disobedient hank of hair, and said, “Merely an administrative screw up. It’s already being remedied. No one appreciates more than I how important a daily wage is to labourers.”

Rangel said, “That’s good news. So I can tell my clients that they will receive their back pay packets . . . ?”

“By Monday noon,” said Nabel. He sipped more wine, and then said, “Now that we’re getting down to the nitty gritty, I need to try to impress upon you the fact that whatever else may have happened to him, I had nothing at all to do with the disappearance of Jared Willoughby. As you’ll know, it took seven years and a court order before the remainder came into my possession. My conduct in this matter is self-interested, of course. I am a businessman and I do enjoy commercial success. But everything that I did was above board and managed, indeed, by members of your own profession.” He held his hands palms up in surrender. “I don’t know what more I can do to convince you that the only dirt on me is gravel dust.”

Rangel put down her knife and fork. “I don’t doubt that the legal work is sound. I have no evidence that it’s otherwise. And I appreciate that you have a straightforward business motive, business interest. But there is a peculiar, how shall I put it . . . circumstantial cloud forming above Backton Aggregate, and that isn’t just gravel dust. Anyway, it’s gone well beyond my remit, now that the police are involved.”

Nabel sighed and shook his head sorrowfully. “Dreadful business, the attack on Ms. Tremaine. Just makes no sense. What would be gained? I’ve racked my brains and can’t understand what that would be.”

“Yet, here you are persuading me that you’ve had nothing to do with Jared’s disappearance, presumably trying to get my client to let go of the matter.”

“No, no, this is different. It’s a matter of, well, of peace of mind. It distresses me to think that there’s someone here in Backton, or anywhere, come to that, who has such dark thoughts about me, who is hostile to me to this extent. I just want the air to clear and to go about my business.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of you as so thin-skinned, Mr. Nabel.”

“It’s a hard business, but that doesn’t mean I’m an insensitive man. I’ve known what it is to suffer loss, believe me.”

“Yes,” said Rangel after a silence. She imagined that he did know.
 

---

 

At home, Rangel went through the house from top to bottom, looking for evidence of cop clumsiness, police poking, detective disturbance. And finding nothing beyond three or perhaps four things that were slightly out of place. A scribbled note told her they had removed the battery cover of her laptop, looking for a keystroke logger. It said they had made no attempt to examine the computer’s digital contents. The note was signed by Alan Bodley, and she realized that she trusted him. Anyway, it was locked with a two-step verification that wouldn’t yield easily.

Upstairs she imagined that she could see that there’d been a search of her underwear drawer, though there wasn’t anything she could pin point. She felt herself blush and with the accompanying heat she pictured Alan Bodley. Oh god, no!, she thought. Not another one. Two was already one too many — maybe two too many. Things were . . . jumping categories, refusing to stay still. Confusing.

The sun would rise at one minute after seven on that October Saturday in Backton. But half an hour earlier, Rangel had an applewood fire going in the little fireplace and a pot of coffee on the drop-leaf pine table that lived, awkward, in the very middle of the front room. And by the time the tardy sunlight seeped through front window of her house, she had her work for the day laid out in a neat corona beyond her laptop.

Too early to call Mitman, and unfair besides on a Saturday, so with a smile of affection she dismissed him to his weekend pursuits, drew the cloak of duty close around her, and got stuck in.

She went over once again, and two times now line by line, word by word in places, the trust document she had created for Gladys Tremaine to deal with the possibility that Jared Willoughby had survived and, consequently, that there would be profits due her estate. It would do the job intended. Now to get it into the hands of the proposed bank trustee. Logically the existence of the trust would mean that there would be little or nothing to be gained from killing Tremaine; her estate would go to a motivated trustee instead of into the government limbo where estates could go when there were no heirs. But logic alone wouldn’t really help here: you couldn’t exactly publicize the trust with an ad in the paper. Could you? She scribbled a note for the file about publicity.

She squared the papers, seated them in their folder, and closed it, moving it slightly up and out of alignment: done for now.

More coffee and an unnecessary poke at the fire.

An hour’s work at some deeds of gift for Alexandre Goncourt came next, and when that was done and she reached for more coffee she discovered the pot was empty. Stretching, she stood up and shuffled into the kitchen for . . . a change of pace. And, as it turned out, two fried eggs, one of which broke — “Your egg broke,” she heard her mother say — a fried tomato, and some toast laden with strawberry jam rescued from beneath a disposable layer of something whitish and fuzzy. Finished, she put the dishes in the sink, ran a little water over them, and then checked the kitchen clock. Ten minutes after nine. One after 909, she thought. Her dad loved everything by the Beatles, but she and he would do air guitar to that one together. The rocking rooftop concert version, not the slower early sixties one. Her dad would watch the video and his expression would soften almost to tears when Paul and John smiled at each other. Maybe for the last time.

…I said move over once, move over twice / Come on baby don’t be cold as ice…

She hadn’t been cold last night, she told herself. She’d been careful. He was married. Still had a wife in Mozambique who had stayed put and wouldn’t emigrate. No children, he said, but he hadn’t bothered with a divorce. Hadn’t found it necessary. That was how he’d put it. Necessary. And then he’d looked at her. Necessary how? Necessary why?

She dried her hands on the dish towel and went back to work, promising herself more coffee later as an incentive.

Back at the work table she looked at two hot pink sticky notes. Sighing, she unstuck the first and dialed the number on it.

“This is Gregoria Rangel,” she said to the woman who answered, “I’m returning a call from Dean Nabel.”

“Just a moment,” said the woman and some top forty station began broadcasting at her.

But not for long. Nabel came onto the line. “Ms. Rangel,” he said. “Thank you for returning my call.”

Rangel rubbed at her brow with the forearm of her left hand. “I’m prepared to meet you, Mr. Nabel,” she said. And then she heard herself say, “Would tomorrow be all right?”

“Tomorrow would work well, Ms. Rangel. If you agree, we can chat over lunch. They have a private room that might make sense.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s fine.”

“Noon?”

“At noon, then. I’ll meet you there.” And they both closed the line with no further ado. Rangel entered the appointment into her online calendar, though she was unlikely to forget it. But it might be wise to create a record that was clear and complete, she thought.

One hot pink sticky note got moved up and out of the line of duty. She peeled off the second note and looked at it, stuck to her fingertips. Giving a shrug she didn’t really mean, she dialed and with four dull trills reached Sergei Antipov’s voice mail. Feeling relief and irritation at the same time, she thanked him for his call and apologized for calling on a Saturday. She would try again during the work week. Of course they’d be nine to five, five days a week, she chided herself. Another error on her part, muttered a mutinous part of her mind. She gave it a raspberry and stuck the note back in place, then unstuck it again and pressed it down in the outer, “done” ring.

A pale blue sticky note was next. This was the fun one. And twenty minutes later she sat back and smiled. You can’t high five yourself, she reflected, not really. Disappointing but true. Neither could you pat yourself on your back properly, which suggested that nature was actually as smart as she’d always suspected. She was ready to reward herself with a fresh mug of coffee. Small victories, and all that.

She had the coffee in the kitchen with milk, a packet of Splenda rooted out from the back of a cupboard, and some mild guilt. She should be committed wholly to the demands of practice today. That was the plan, the understanding she had with herself. And yet, here she was grinning foolishly at the fact that she’d just got Curry Davison at Penton Ford to loan her a Mustang. Until her next purchase. Because she was such a good customer. Because he’d heard about the . . . well, the problem with her beautiful truck. And he was sure the insurance temporary vehicle replacement money, meagre as it might be, would do fine. Not cover the cost of the loaner, mind. But for such an important client, blah blah blah.

Oh, oh, and he’d deliver it himself. Right away. It might just be a hardtop Fastback, because he didn’t think they had any GTs on the lot at the moment. Would that be okay?

Returning to work, Rangel opened the electronic copy of the Dabar file, one of the longest running cases she had. The paper had been burned and soaked in the office fire and its dousing, but Mitman’s religious backing up to the cloud had saved everything, her bacon included. Even so, she’d started a fresh folder of printed documents despite Mitman’s irritation. She wasn’t sure quite what it was, but for her paper was preferable to digital files most of the time. After the better part of two hours, she closed her laptop and the folder.

She stood up, stretched, and sat down again to return the phone call from Dominic Archer. She was curious and a little apprehensive about his reason for calling her. What had Alexandre Goncourt called him? The “tyler”; that was it. A kind of sergeant-at-arms for the Buffaloes. She shook her head at the silliness of it all. Still, she couldn’t think of them now without automatically calling to mind Julius Sanders, and that presence was anything but silly.

The number rang and rang. And rang and rang. Who didn’t have voice messaging? She looked up his name online to see if there was another number, but she came up dry.

She heard a soft “toot” from outside and looked up. Someone was coming to the door. She recognized Curry Davison’s peculiar lurching gait. She was at the door as he rang the bell, seeing over his shoulder a bright yellow car. Davison was grinning. “It’s a GT,” he said. “A demo. Just came in. Triple yellow. There’s a blue you would have liked. Deep impact blue. But —” he shrugged “— they didn’t send us any in that color.” He was leading her out to the car. “Six speed manual transmission. Kind of chows down on the gas, but it’s only for a bit, right?” Rangel, slightly mesmerized, nodded. “It’s a sweet ride,” Davison added, and he dangled the keys. “Drive me back?”

Rangel nodded again and took the keys. “Oh, man,” she said.

Elated in spite of the grey and working day, Rangel swept by Mitman’s place, after dropping Davison back at the dealership, to tempt him into a ridiculously dangerous but exhilarating, eight-cylinder-powered sprint up the straight and lonely stretch of county highway 32 out by the county forest. But he wasn’t home.

Rangel revved the massive engine a few anti-social times and then floated homewards at a sedate pace. This took her by the motorhome office, where she happened to see a man standing irresolutely at the base of the concrete block steps. It took her a moment — and a drop down into growling second gear — to recognize Tom Withers from the gravel pit. She parked the Mustang just past the D-Lux, got out, and went over to him.

“Hey,” she said.

“Oh.” Withers looked almost guilty. “You weren’t in,” he said. “There,” gesturing at the motorhome door. He seemed to realize that he was floundering and said, “I wanted to . . . talk to you about some stuff.”

“Sure,” said Rangel, curious. “Look, I’m working at the house today. Come back and we can talk.”

“Yeah,” said Withers. “Yeah. Right.”

“Give you a lift?” she asked him?

Withers looked at her like she was crazy. How did she think he’d got here, the look seemed to say. Walking? What he actually said was, “Thanks. I’m good. Got the truck.”

Rangel gave him the address and basic directions, which was always a kind of affectation in Backton, and then she cruised away, all yellow and sedate.

It turned out that the police had quickly realized he’d had nothing to do with the torching of Rangel’s truck — he’d been well away, in lots of company, when the arsonist did the dirty. The timing didn’t work. “So what can I do for you?” she asked him. He was seated in a wooden spindle-back chair in the kitchen holding a mug of well-sugared tea.

He coughed. “They never did pay us for Thursday.”

There was a silence. “I could look into that,” said Rangel. “I’m not a labour lawyer, but I’d be glad to see if there’s a clear answer to the problem.”

“Yeah,” Withers said. “And it’s, there’s kind of a, I don’t know, a change there. I get bad vibes.” He looked askance at this new age confession. He went to wave away his statement, and he slopped tea over his hand and onto the floor. “Oh shit,” he said, and then he coloured even more.

Rangel simply ignored the spill. “What do you think gives you that feeling?” she asked, serious.

Withers put the mug down on the little table between them. He licked the tea off his hand. “New yard boss,” he said. “That’s one thing. Gio’s gone. Holiday maybe. Dunno. And this new guy, he’s, I don’t know, not stupid but he knows SFA about crushing rock.”

“Huh,” said Rangel, staying serious, interested.

Withers flushed again and stood up abruptly. “No big deal,” he said.

Rangel stood up too. “So,” she said, “would you like me to look into the business of your wages for Thursday?”

“We can pay you,” Withers said. “The guys took a whip round.”

Rangel nodded. “That’s great.” She escorted him to the front door. “It’ll take me a day or two. Can you give me a number to get in touch with you?”

Withers said, “Lost my phone. How about I call you?”

“Fine,” said Rangel. “Tuesday. Call me Tuesday if you get a chance, and I’ll have an answer for you then.”

“Right,” Withers said and he disappeared out the door.

Rangel wandered back into the kitchen, distracted, thinking. She ate an apple and then some cheese. She put Withers’ tea mug into the sink.

Back at her desk she saw that the message waiting light was blinking. Sergei Antipov had returned her call. She dialled his number only to get his voicemail again. Enough phone tag for the day.

For no reason she could pinpoint, she decided to call Gladys Tremaine. There was no answer at her house. That meant, she reasoned, she was still in the hospital. But the hospital told her she’d been released early that morning. She phoned the police station and got a message telling her to leave a message and if it was an emergency to call 911.

Was it an emergency?

She phoned the provincial police detective, Bodley. Straight to voicemail. With a more agitated tone than she’d intended, she asked him to call her back as soon as possible. No please and thank-you.

Where was everybody?

Dennis Abudo was waiting for her when she got to the hospital lobby. He put down the Cottage Life magazine, gathered up the detritus from his coffee, and dumped it in the Tim’s trash bin. “Why is there no apostrophe in Hortons?” he asked her.

“Terrorism,” she said, taking his arm without even thinking about it. “For years now a secret group has been stealing apostrophes from their homes and inserting them in the wrong places.”

“Ah,” said Abudo, guiding her into the big revolving door. “This will be a sect of the evil society that has for centuries now been . . . fouling English spelling.”

“The same,” Rangel said, attaching herself to him again outside.

“Now,” said Abudo, “tell me. How is your deadly friend?”

“Tough as old boots.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I’m not sure I’d be so . . . resilient if I had just killed someone.”

Rangel looked up at him and had a fleeting sense that this might not be true. “What brings you to Brackton?” she asked.

They’d arrived at his SUV in the parking lot. The chill wind from earlier was even colder now and carrying some fine rain. They stood beside the Range Rover. “Just a small shopping expedition. I need a few things. I’m closing up the lodge for the season at the end of the month and there are always things that need replacement or repair before then. But I wanted to say hello.”

“Hello,” said Rangel, suddenly self-conscious.

Abudo smiled. “I won’t take time out of your working day,” he said, “but if you’re free, I’d very much like it if you’d have dinner with me.”

“Oh,” said Rangel. And, “Yes. Thank you.”

At which point two things happened at once. The clouds ripped open, releasing a torrent of rain; and William Otis, Rangel’s firefighter, came running through the parking lot. He stopped when he saw Rangel and Abudo. “Oh,” he said. Rain was streaming down his face. “I wanted to see how Gladys was doing.” He had to shout to get over the noise of the downpour. “And you.”

Rangel, feeling now like a drowned rat, shouted, “Bill, this is my friend Dennis.” Shouting at Abudo, “Bill’s a friend who helped me out when my office burned down.” The men shook wet hands. There was a brief moment, and then Otis said something and took off running towards the hospital door. Abudo had the SUV door open. Rangel shook herself and got in, still hearing a roaring in her ears.

 

---

 

“TOWELS? SINCE WHEN the hell did we have towels?” Loud. She was loud.

Mitman had handed her a large, fluffy, white, Turkish towel as soon as she’d crossed the threshold of the motorhome. She was now frantically applying it to her head. Mitman said, “Had a bit of set-to with the boys in black, did we? They said were looking for you.” He took the wet one from her and came up with a second dry towel.

Rangel knew she was stirred up. “Sorry, Wally. This is a godsend.” With the second towel around the back of her neck like someone who’d been working out, she kicked off her wet shoes and padded into her office. “Seriously,” she said, “where did you summon these from?” She took the towel from around her neck and spread it out over her desk chair before she sat.

Mitman made a self-depreciating face. “Rain?” he said, pointing up at the drumming roof of the motorhome. “You out on the street like a working girl? I was sure you’d just make a mess of the paper towel or —” he gave a fake delicate shudder “—the tea towel. And then I remembered the winter white sale at Boodles, just round the corner. Bit early for winter, if you ask me. Eighteen ninety-five for a bundle of three. They’ll absorb better once they’re washed a few times. But you can’t have everything.” He took the second towel from Rangel, who had pulled it out from beneath her. “Enough of this idle chat. Tell me all about your first trick this morning, girl. We can save the good stuff for later.”

Rangel laughed and gave him an account of everything up to the parking lot, while he sat in the client chair folding the wet towels.

“I don’t see where we go from here,” he said. “It’s as I told you way back when — let’s see, a whole — eek! — ten days ago. Is that all it is? In that short time my hair’s gone grey and I’ve got six new lines in my forehead. Honestly, though, we’re not a detective agency. We’re not even a great big rich law firm so we can hire somebody. You can barely pay me what I’m worth. What can we do for Gladys that we haven’t already done?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Rangel, who discovered even as she spoke that, indeed, she had. “We’ll let the police search for him. Again.”

Mitman looked off into the middle distance, thinking.

Rangel said, “Look, we’ve got two police forces in town at the moment, both of them are paying attention to Gladys’s situation. Which is directly related to Jared’s fate, at least financially. So I work to fire them up about his still unexplained disappearance. I’ve cleared it with Gladys that I can talk to them about her concerns. It really is a police matter — even more now than it was back then.”

“So Nabel killed Jared to get to the land quicker than he otherwise would. That’s the thinking?”

Rangel nodded. “It’s one possibility. A strong one. He benefitted.”

“He murders Jared and then waits seven years? That’s one patient plotter, boy.”

“Some people plan. It takes, what, five or six years for a grapevine to really produce. Takes six, ten, twelve years to become a fully fledged neurosurgeon. The question is what was he doing in the meantime? Maybe he wasn’t ready to move into gravel mining. That’s something we could look at. What was he doing just before he bought the interest from Schantz?”

“Or maybe he was already into the aggregate business and this was just some cheap, or relatively cheap, flyer to add to his portfolio of properties.”

“That’s it. Something like that.”

“Hmm.”

Mitman thought. Rangel tapped a pen on her desk. “It’s the way we’re going,” she said after a minute. “I’ll call that provincial detective. Bodley. Got his card here somewhere, if it hasn’t dissolved in rainwater. And I think I’ll deal with Nancy Tomasini from the local force, instead of Ronnie. She looked keen and she’s part of the protection team for Gladys.”

Mitman stood up. “Right,” he said. And then, as he was leaving the office, he pointed at the phone. “You’ve got messages. Let me know which ones you want me to deal with. Life goes on.”

Rangel thought that sounded ominous. She took off her damp jacket and arranged it across the back of the empty client chair. Then she looked again at the phone on her desk, where, sure enough, a red light was still winking insistently.
 

---

 

“MS. RANGEL? HI. It’s Serge, Serge Antipov. Errors and Omissions? I hope you’re well on this fine day. Listen, give me a call, would you? No rush. Just when you have a moment. Six six five twenty nine hundred. Have a good one.”

“Ms. Rangel? My name is Dominic Archer. Alexandre Goncourt may have mentioned me to you. I wonder, Ms. Rangel, if I might make an appointment to see you. Not so much a professional matter. Well, not exactly personal either. Anyway, I’d appreciate it if you could get back to me at your convenience. You can reach me most reliably on my mobile. Five nine nine eighteen eighteen. That’s five nine nine one eight one eight. Thanks.”

“Um. It’s Tom Withers. I think this is the lady lawyer’s office, right?. Your friend gave me your card. Anyways, Ms. Rangel I think it is, I need to talk to you. I’ll call back later. I’ve got your number.”

“Oh hi. It’s Delvin Construction? I just spoke to a . . . Mr. Mitman earlier. I hope that’s right, Mitman. We’re working down at your place, your office. The fire? And things are coming along just fine. We’ve got a couple of decisions to make about the reconstruction. I explained it to Mr. Mitman, but he thought I should let you know, so I’m leaving this message. Now, we’re not working today, the rain and all, and we’ve got this other job — but — . It’s the weekend coming up. But if you could drop by Monday, we can go over the plans and get you back in as soon as possible. Thanks and have a nice day.”

“Gregoria? G.R.? How odd that I’ve not used your first name before. Ah, this is Dennis Abudo. We didn’t have a chance to set a time and a place for dinner. Perhaps seven. Would that work? I’d be glad to pick you up at your home, if you’d give me that address. And as to place, Backton presents something of a problem, if you’ll permit me to say so. Perhaps you’ll leave it with me and I will cudgel my brains for a fitting solution. Call me to let me know where you live or if you want to do things differently, of course. Six six five, six six five five, the new 397 area code. I’m looking forward to the evening.”

“Ms. Rangel? Good day. This is Dean Nabel of Backton Aggregate. I wonder if you and I might meet for a discussion of certain recent developments. I’m generally available. It might be most convenient for both of us if we met at a third location. I’m mobile but I doubt I could manage your temporary office. And I understand you’re currently without transportation. I’m going to suggest the Lambton Arms Hotel, the date and time to be of your choosing. I can be reached at Backton Aggregate. Thank you.”
 

---

 

“SEVEN,” SAID TOAI Phang. He did his best to hide the awful fear he felt at what he was about to do. It was irrational, he told himself. There was no self to be lost and so there was nothing to be feared. “The latest three were in a single automobile accident.”

Duc Tu Vinh nodded fractionally. Phang could see him calculating how many were still to go.

“I must speak,” Phang heard himself say. Vinh met his eyes. “It is time to stop this . . . punishment. The authorities are paying close attention. Up till now we have managed to stand hidden in the reeds, but they are not fools and will undoubtedly fix on the source of the killings if we keep moving. This would only bring unhappiness to our enterprise.”

Vinh reached into his jacket and Phang felt his bowels start to loosen. Vinh drew out a cigarette case, flipped it open, and offered it to Phang.

Phang took a cigarette, as did Vinh. They smoked in silence for a moment.

Phang inhaled deeply and let smoke dragon out of his nose. He was committed. There was no point now in half measures. “It is possible that we could deflect their attention or use our assets there to distract them somehow. But more troubling still is the impact that continuing would have on our partners-to-be.” He wanted to say that no one would get into bed with a mad man, but —

Vinh sniffed a couple of times and ran his tongue over his front teeth. He looked at Phang quizzically. “You think our Calabrian friends now rue their carelessness?”

“I do,” said Phang. “For all their crudity, they are practical people. They do not have the assets to start a war with us here in the city. And though they are numerous, they have grown careless, as you say, about many things and lack rigor, discipline. If we stop now, they will forgo vengeance.” Phang silently committed his consciousness to the void. “This is my advice to you.”

They were civilized about it. The right amount of please and thank-you. Calm. Prompt with the reassurances. Clearly, Rangel thought, some brains were at work here. It made her suspicious.

“Coffee?” A question with a smile from a man in a suit.

They were in the vacant Delisle Drug store space, now tricked out with a few retired school desks and chairs, a pristine whiteboard, and the ubiquitous coffee maker.

Rangel shook her head. “No thank-you,” she said. And then, “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me now what this is all about.”

The man in the suit sat down opposite her and relieved the tension on the legs of his pants by plucking at his calves. He saw her watching him do it. “A lesson I was taught many years ago by a tailor,” he said. “If you pull at the creases in the front you can weaken the fabric. And trousers catch at the calves anyway, so that’s where you should apply the remedy.”

“Catch and release,” said Rangel almost solemnly, making his smile go suddenly genuine. “Now tell me why I’m here. A matter of professional deformation, I’m afraid, but I find that chat about material isn’t . . . material.” Despite herself, she was curious, though.

“I’m Alan Bodley. I work under Commander Ian Finch. We and my colleagues are the Dutch boys who try to plug the holes in the dikes containing organized crime in the province. Only it’s not a matter of breaches anymore. The water’s rising and it’s starting to come over the top.” He shrugged, waited a moment. “My problem. Not yours. Unless . . . ?”

Rangel had moved to the front of her seat in readiness for standing up. “Unless what?”

“Ms. Rangel, have you been retained by”— he made a show of looking at a note —“Gladys Tremaine?”

Rangel waved a hand impatiently. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

“But if you weren’t you could say so, no?”

Now she stood up. “Please. Don’t fool around with silly logical nonsense.”

Bodley coloured but kept his smile in place. He stood up too. “Ms. Rangel, Gladys Tremaine was attacked and almost killed by a hit man from a criminal organization. We find that . . . remarkable. You have been the object of two arson attacks. Somewhat less remarkable, perhaps. Even in a small town there are pyros. But — and here’s the problem — the second attack took place outside Backton Aggregate, which was, until very very recently, the employer of a number of compatriots, shall we say, of the hit man.”

He gestured at her chair. Sighing, she sat; and he did as well.

“It’s not as clear as it ought to be,” he continued, “what is going on. A turf war? Likely. But why target an old woman?” He waited expectantly for a contribution from Rangel. When nothing was forthcoming, he said, “We’ve learned that she was once the owner of the land on which the gravel mine now operates, or at least the owner of an interest in it. That moves everything beyond the bounds of coincidence, does it not?” Without waiting for an answer this time, he continued, “So we would be immensely grateful for any help you can give us in clarifying the situation.”

Rangel stayed silent.

Bodley held her gaze. “It might or might not come as a surprise to you that organized crime makes effective use, shall we say, of lawyers, some of whom are thoroughly enmeshed in their criminal activities.” He leaned forward. Rangel could see a small patch on his jaw where the razor had missed. “I will say that you do not fit the profile of these lawyers. But then I ask myself: would that not be a smart move by an organization? Work through a truly unlikely attorney. One in a — you should pardon my bluntness — no-account small town.”

Rangel frowned. “You have got to be joking,” she said.

Bodley sighed, shook his head. “No, not joking. Just speculating. Seeking patterns. World building. And sharing my thinking with you.” He sat back, buttoned up his suit jacket and then undid it again. “Unless you’ve got a pile stashed away somewhere, the Caymans, Luxembourg, your lifestyle doesn’t suggest that you are a mob mouthpiece, I admit. But what would really take our attention off you would be if you opened up and cooperated with us in trying to figure out what the hell is going on here.” Now he was the one who stood up. He held out his hand for her to shake.

She got to her feet and ignored the offer.

Bodley went to the door and held it open for her. She went through it. “Ask your client for permission to share with us. Will you?” he said to her back.
 

---

 

THE SUN HAD HIDDEN, the way it often did, coy, in October. Rangel turned up the collar of her jacket against the cold breeze. She tried to be angry, indignant at the pressure from the provincial police. But it didn’t work. The truth was that she and her client were caught up in something larger and more dangerous than a simple fuss about a vested remainder and a forlorn measuring life.

And it was also true that there was little if any value in refusing to do as Bodley had asked and get permission from Gladys to talk to him about her business. For all she knew, Gladys may already be pouring out her heart to the cops that, she assumed, were standing guard at the hospital.

She checked the time on her phone. Early morning, still. When she’d visited Gladys at the hospital, she’d call Wally and then they would try to pull some of these threads together into a shape that made sense.

It occurred to her only then that she had no ride. And it was quite a hike to the hospital. With that, the weight of having to deal with insurance and replacement yet again settled on her shoulders.

But first things first: Gladys.

Backton had once had a taxi, but that went the way of so much else in the last recession. Puzzled for a moment as to how to proceed, she suddenly stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and stuck out her thumb.
 

---

 

Mitman answered Dennis Abudo’s knock on the office door. “Goodness me,” Abudo said, taking in the motorhome’s interior.

“Well, yes,” said Mitman, grinning. “It’s not up to your standards, I’ll admit, but it’s cosy.”

“When I asked for her new office and they told me, I wasn’t sure. But now I see it, I’m impressed. It’s ingenious.”

“I’m afraid G.R.’s not here at the moment,” Mitman told him.

“A pity,” said Abudo. “I was in town and wanted to say hello. Nothing important.”

Mitman had his phone out and was thumbing a text already. “I’m letting her know you’re here,” he said without looking up. His phone pinged a moment later, and he chuckled. “She’s trying to hitch a ride out to the hospital to visit a client,” he said.

Abudo said, “Hitch?”

Mitman demonstrated the hitchhiker’s thumb. “Asking for a ride from a stranger.”

Abudo said, “Yes, I know what hitch means. An early form of Uber X. The main form of travel in my home country. But she has that lovely truck. ‘Lurid’ is the word, I think.”

Mitman explained about the recent disaster. Abudo’s face fell into seriousness. “This is a run of very bad luck. Very bad.” He hesitated. “It’s not my place to ask, but is there anything I can do to help?”

Mitman thought for a moment.
 

---

 

RANGEL HAD REMEMBERED from a brief period of misspent youth how you did it, how you had to walk backwards, facing the oncoming traffic, your right thumb out, giving it a slight waggle every now and then. And how the cars whizzed by, uncaring. Except that in Backton, now that the morning rush moment was over, there were precious few cars and no whizzing at all, just the occasional sullen, neglectful crawl past.

She was about ready to pack it in, when a big, grey Land Rover pulled up beside her. The driver leaned over and popped the passenger door. “Hop in,” said Abudo.
 

---

 

GLADYS TREMAINE WAS IN her element, Rangel observed from the doorway. There were three police officers in her hospital room, two provincials and Tomasini, and she was lecturing them on the ills of current-day society. To judge by the expressions on their faces, they were enjoying the experience. As Rangel watched unnoticed, she reflected that there was something deeply reassuring about a grandparent’s social scolding, the way it bound you across the years to a world that was both yours by birthright and yet unreachable, a little like the worlds in the the fairy tales you were read at bedtime.

She coughed. Everyone looked at her with what she thought was a mix of annoyance and guilt, children caught having fun. “Gladys,” she said, “might I have a word?”

And as though someone had pressed ‘play,’ things started moving briskly. The police officers would wait outside; Tomasini would fetch coffee for Rangel; Gladys raised then lowered the head of her bed; Rangel took off her jacket, closed the door, and took the chair beside the bed.

Fifteen minutes later, she had her client’s permission to tell the police as much as they wished to know. And she had a tearful client who was full of remorse at what she’d done, though it saved her life, full of remorse, too, at having, as she put it, raked up the past for no good reason other than her own satisfaction. What a fool she had been, she declared, to have imagined that Jared was still alive, to have imagined that things could be different than in fact they were.

Rangel decided not to tell her about the burning of her truck. “Where will you live?” she asked eventually.

Tremaine looked at her levelly. “I’m going home,” she said.

Rangel nodded. “You’ll have police protection.”

“Bah!” said Tremaine. “Closing the door after the horses have bolted.”

Rangel said, “We don’t know that, Gladys. You might still be in danger. This is unknown territory. Big city criminals.”

“If you think I should, I’ll drop the whole thing. Right now. That’s what I’ll do.” She wiped her eyes with a corner of the sheet, saw what she’d done and said, “Tscha!”

“You want me to stop? Looking for Jared, I mean?”

Tremaine’s gaze lost focus. “I don’t know,” she said to herself. “Maybe.” She fussed with the bed covers. “I started out so full of hope and indignation. But that’s pretty much gone now. Hope. Indignation.”

“I’m your lawyer,” said Rangel. “I’ll do just as you wish.”

“Not yet, then” said Tremaine. And she laid a comforting hand over Rangel’s. “Not just yet.” She gave Rangel’s hand a squeeze. “Let’s see if we can learn a little more of what this is all about, first, shall we? And hand me that box of Kleenex, would you?”

A small town early on a fine fall morning. Friday.

A lone dog barking sporadically somewhere out past the abandoned Bethel granary. Wanting in. Wanting out. Either way pointing up the precious stillness that lies around all things.

A little mist back among the trees and down in the low spot where the sinking, tarred-over CN tracks run through. What must it have been like when passenger trains came and went? Or a hundred years ago when the Dominion Electric Railway took tourists from the city on day trips all the way past Backton to Hightop Point? When the place was prosperous, a centre. There were mills then and seven churches within a block of the intersection of Chestnut and Gothic, still called to this day ‘Church Corners.’

The pasts interpenetrate and then wisp away.

The honey smell of a neighbour’s failing sweet alyssum as it releases a long dying breath. That towering sycamore across the street also perfuming the morning with its gentle aroma of tea. Grass greener than it should be, in the indirect and long low morning light. All things fey, to use the Scots word, foredoomed and knowing it, febrile and urgent in these last hours left to autumn.

Sitting on the stoop, caped in a blanket, not thinking. Not waiting.

Complexity can absent itself for a while, observer and observed as close as ever may be. 

And the world is aware and membranous. The crow who has flapped her way into the beech next door gives out with a rattling sound. Another crow answers, or so it seems, with a cawing companion call. In an instant the sun tops the Richford house down the street and swells on up the road, touching everything eagerly all over like a blind mother returning home. Electrified, a lone cicada, surely the last of the season, sends out some high pitched static. Things get the message and begin to move.

And connect.

No longer any general store or hardware store and precious few Friday fish dinners at the church to act as gossiping places. Knowledge still accumulates, though, and must be discharged. Which is why the phones and tablets come out even as the coffee is brewing. And here’s a curious thing: in a town so small that you and I will likely know each other and could meet and chat as easily as do our crows, news now traffics between us via routers in Delhi and Dubuque and Dubai. All distance is annulled with no earthly reason, certainly none that we understand or even care to know about. Thus, unshaven or ill-dressed, unsmiling or mid-dalliance, faceless you write your books a dozen times each day for me to read, perhaps with like to let you know that five by five I read your prose and passionate emojis.

So who connects on this warming October Friday?

Young Benjamin Yarker texts the somewhat younger Madison McKnight, the hard to impress fire chief’s daughter, who is oh so worth the effort:

[hauled the burned pickup to collision centre yesterday. where were you last night?]
[talked to your dad. i think he likes me]
[sealed it for the investigators. truck I mean]
[investigators coming GTR]
[text me]
[pls]

Cars are fired up, coffee on the dashboard, phone slotted into the place where the ashtray used to be, or held, precious, between thighs, sited for vibration and some illicit manipulation, because hey, good buddy, we got us a convo. And the first of them head out for hospital or the 7-11 or the laundromat before everyone gets the big machines. 

Or for the first shift at the gravel mine, having shared the news that it’s back to normal: talk about the daily grind. Hungry goliath stone slingers already rumbling in an obedient line outside the gates quite dwarf the figure in the wheelchair, who has put himself where he can be seen by the gathering workforce as they arrive. Normal. Back to normal. Move along, move along. Nothing to see here except the boss. And, of course, the crumbling coliseum where body and bedrock contest under a fat sun.

In town the sun is merely irritating, bleaching out the screens, which are never shaded enough by bent heads. (Information wants to be indoors.) Prayerful children amble to school, flicking occasional gazes at the oncoming world, thumbing their sleepy way through the dictionary of their day, the cyclopedia of their contacts, their loopholes on the excitingly dangerous world beyond the walls of here and now, unconscious — except for the three who are dealing — of the unusually large number of provincial police cars creeping the streets. 

Comes a tall, not really skinny woman, weaving her way through the Brownian motion of children. Not striding, as she might, to judge by those long legs. Just moving forward, looking around, devolving a benign smile on unknowing heads below her. Peaceful. As you might be were the flipped coin to land with a head gazing up (‘We are all on the ground, but some of us are looking at the sky.’): the universe is lightening your load: a building gone, a truck gone, clients gone.

And with that in her head, her tail shows up. 

The cop car was one of those stealth vehicles with the matte black finish and the secret writing on the side that awaits artificial illumination to crow ‘Ta-da! You’re busted!’. You could actually hear the hum-hiss of the window sliding down. “Ms. Rangel,” said the man in the passenger seat.

She stopped. Frowned. Felt a stab of fear: what now? Bent to look at him. “Yes,” she said.

“I wonder if you’d join us. We’d like to have a word.”

Oh god, she thought. Gladys was dead. Or something had happened to Wally.

“Ms. Rangel?” He was out now, holding the front door open for her.

She slid in and turned immediately to the man as he got into the back. There was a metal security mesh between her and him. “What’s happened?”

The communicator in the car crackled and emitted some unintelligible noise.

“It’s murder.”

“Take it easy, Nancy. Simmer down.” Ronnie Dabord moved the plastic stirring stick through his coffee in desultory circles.

Tomasini, wired as usual, said in a rush, “Dr. Mukhuti took another look yesterday and I got the call today. He sent it on to the big leagues. He wouldn’t do that unless he had a good basis for it.”

“And got some artful prodding too, maybe.” Dabord let go of the stirring stick and it made a half turn on its own before falling against the side of the paper cup. He pulled himself upright in his chair, like a man come to a decision. “How long before we get the forensic pathology results?”

Tomasini shrugged. “Could be as long as a couple of weeks, I guess. But it’s gotta mean that the fatal head wound came from the back and that the impact with the windscreen was intended to cover that up. You know: whack the kid in the head and then pose him in the car and make it ram into a tree. Mash things up so it looks like a frontal impact. That and the stick we got that was used to jam the accelerator mean it was deliberate. Murder. It’s all about coup and contrecoup, right? Figuring out which injury to the brain was —”

“— I know what it means, Nancy. I’m not stupid.”

“God, no, sorry Chief.” Tomasini had the grace to blush. “It’s just that I get . . . ” She slowed to a stop.

Dabord nodded. “Yeah, I know. Carried away. It’s one of the things I like and don’t like about you.”

“So what do we do?”

“What’ve you got on Jevvers’ recent activities?”

Tomasini frowned. “Not a helluva lot. He quit — or got fired from — his job at Cross Corners. Just stopped showing up. His mother says he spent a lot of time in his room doing nothing. She thinks he was scared of something. I looked at his cell phone. It’s a real cheapie so there’s not much on it. Couldn’t even text on his, you know, pay-as-you-g0 plan. Found a couple of numbers that called him that trace back to two different Petro-Canada burner phones. City area code, though. So it looks like the boy was into something on the fringes of the big time. Drugs most likely.”

“You know,” said Dabord, slowly — he pulled out the stirring stick, sucked the coffee off it, flexed it, and shot it into a corner of the room — “I’m thinking it’s tied up with this attack on Gladys. I don’t know how. But we’re not talking about impulse crimes here. This is planned. Both were planned. And that’s way too much planning for a small town. Even for a coincidence.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Tomasini, coming to the edge of her seat. Charging up again.

“Go spend some time with Gladys. The provincials took the investigation away from us, but she’s a citizen of our town and she needs protection.”

“Babysitting?” Tomasini’s face fell.

Dabord looked displeased. “Serving and protecting,” he said with some emphasis. “It’s what we do.”

“But they’ll have already put a detail on her. And they’ve got the resources for round the clock. We’ve got you, me, and Leroy. And sometimes what’s-his-name.”

“Franklin. And he’s on stress leave, which you know damn well. So don’t give me that shit.”

“Right, Franklin. So why bother?”

“Because they can’t stop us from providing what limited protection for one of our own we’re able to within our budget.” Dabord waited for the filament over her head to start glowing. “And if it happens that —”

“— We learn something —”

“— Well that’s just the way it goes.”

“Yes. Yes. Right. I’m on it. Yes. Right.” She was up out of her seat. Practically hopping.

Dabord pushed his chair back from the desk. “Nancy.”

“Huh?”

“How to put this?” Dabord ran a hand over his thinning hair. “I hear things. It’s my job to . . . stay in touch.” He found her eyes and held her gaze. “I don’t want you to leave us. You’re a really good cop. You’ve got a future here. I know we’re small town. That’s what we are. And I wouldn’t stand in your way if you really wanted to go . . . up to the show.” He sought more words and gave up, shrugging. “Just that,” he said.

He watched her bounce out of the room on springs. And then he reached for the phone and dialled the number he had for Dean Nabel.
 

---

 

RANGEL BANGED ON THE DOOR in the main building. When that did nothing she tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. She walked along the front and went up on her toes to peer in through both the grimy windows, seeing nothing. Mitman had his phone out and was hunting up the number for Backton Aggregate. He dialled and they heard the phone inside make a faint ringing noise. Some standard message came on and he clicked off.

“Try his home phone,” said Rangel. She had a large streak of dirt down one side of her face.

“Unlisted.”

“Stupid idea anyway. The whole thing.” She rubbed her face and spread the streak around.

“Well, it’s pretty clear,” said Mitman, “that he’s central in some way. Cue the boner, as we say.”

“Cui bono,” said Rangel, not really paying attention. “But that’s just it. He benefits from Jared’s death, sure. But not so much if Gladys dies. I mean, she’s going to die sometime soon anyway. Likely.”

Mitman saw that dusk was creeping up on them. “Can we have this thinkfest after I have a shower and a beer in my hand?”

“Sure,” said Rangel, tired and a bit absent. She looked around at the bleak scene. “Sorry about the . . .”

“Snipe hunt?”

“Snark hunt, more likely. There was a barrister in that, wasn’t there?”

“There was,” said Mitman, smiling. “Here goes, Mr. Godson — my fantastic grade ten English teacher.” He cleared his throat theatrically: “‘They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; They pursued it with forks and hope . . .’ If you’re the Barrister, I’m the Beaver. The Beaver makes lace, you know.”

Rangel gave a wan smile and shook her head as if to clear it. “Let’s go,” she said. Which was when they heard a soft, far-off ‘whump.’ They looked at each other. “Someone working the site?” Rangel said.

Looking in the direction the noise had come from, they now saw a column of black smoke rising into the air.
 

---

 

“NOT FAULTY WIRING this time,” said Rangel. A crowd stood around contemplating the scorched mess that had once been an electric blue pickup truck.

Fire Chief McKnight had caught the call. “No,” he said. “Arson, pure and simple.”

They looked over at the man being held in cuffs. He was shaking his head and talking insistently to Ronnie Dabord.

“What’s going on?” McKnight asked Rangel, who shrugged.

“Someone doesn’t like me,” she said softly.

“Him?” McKnight nodded his head towards the man in custody.

“Tom . . .” said Mitman. “The man I gave your card to.”

“Withers,” Rangel supplied. “Tom Withers. Could he be that stupid?” Rangel asked no one.

“Not our Tom,” Mitman said. “I think our little snark hunt has found more than it wanted. ‘For the snark was a boojum, you see.’”
 

---

 

THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE provincial police were located next to the highway about an hour outside the city in an agglomeration of concrete structures done in the brutalist style, a legacy of the 60s, and known locally as the Castle. As might be expected in a severely hierarchical organization, the king of the Castle had a suite of offices on the top floor that opened out onto a patio of sorts, offering a fine view of a thin slice of sky above a high privacy wall that sported all manner of antennas, repeaters, and dishes. At the moment, the Commissioner was out on the patio having an illegal cigarette in the corner that shielded him best from the wind. The various electronics above him set off a collection of humming noises that he found quite soothing.

The Deputy Commissioner and Commander Finch, the organized crime specialist, slid open the glider and joined him, forming a huddle. “We were right,” said Finch. The Commissioner lifted his eyebrows. “Gang war. Two dead in Watford.” Watford was a suburb of the city where over the last decade monster homes had sprouted from modest bungalow lots.

“‛Ndrangheta?” asked the Commissioner, not bothering to try for anything like a proper pronunciation. Organized crime didn’t deserve it, he figured.

The DC and Finch both nodded. “We go inside, Jack?” said the DC. The Commissioner flicked his cigarette away. Finch made to walk over and step on it but stopped when he realized that nothing anywhere near them could possibly burn. He hurried after them.

“Who’s the other side?” asked the Commissioner, as they went for their appropriate chairs.

Finch said, “That’s the thing. We’re not sure. We’ve ruled out the triads, who were never in contention with ‘ndrangheta anyway.” He gave it the Calabrese pronunciation, using a zed where the ‘dr’ should be. “We’re looking at the Punjabis and some new combo of a branch of the Serbian mafia and the Macedonians. And the Vietnamese too.”

“What’s the connection with the trouble up in . . . ?” The Commissioner palmed some paper around his desktop, looking for a report.

“Backton,” said the DC. “And we don’t know.”

“Some little old lady, right?” asked the Commissioner.

“Right. And we just got a report of what looks like a second arson attack on a local lawyer there.” The DC flipped open his small notebook. “Gregoria Rangel.”

“Connected?” asked the Commissioner.

The DC and Finch looked at each other. “We don’t think so,” said Finch. “This last thing, about an hour ago — someone torched her truck — looks like labour unrest. Bunch of pissed off workers shut out of a gravel mine. Figured her for the lawyer for the owner, maybe.”

“We’re looking into it,” said the DC. “She’s a better bet for a connection. Little old ladies are scary but lawyers and organized crime, well, that’s a fit.”

“Huh,” said the Commissioner.

Mitman drove her electric blue truck.

In the passenger seat Rangel had her head still buried in a couple of files, going over things. And over and over things. Muttering to herself. Mitman kept looking across at her as he took them through the turns.

“Too bad you didn’t get a manual gearbox on this thing,” he said.

“Not an option,” she replied without looking up.

Mitman said, “Huh.”

They hit a red at the junction of Larch Street and Davis Boulevard, which was no boulevard at all. He tapped the steering wheel impatiently until the light went green, and then he stomped on it, chirping the big back tires. Rangel lurched and had to rescue a sift of papers. She stayed bent to her task. He felt like one of those boy mahouts atop the head of a great Asian elephant.

“Been thinking,” he said, “I should have checked the truck before, you know, I started it. We should get a remote starter. And maybe one of those British army mirrors-on-a-stick things for looking up skirts.”

“Shut up,” Rangel murmured. She leaned back, looked at the roof of the cab, and closed her eyes. It was one of her standard thinking poses. When she did that, he thought of her as having withdrawn into an imaginary spot a few inches above her head. Somewhere in the useless part of his mind he confused that with the notion of Tinkerbell.

Mitman honked the horn at the dull blue Chevy sedan ahead of them, whose driver seemed to suffer from narcolepsy. “Idiot,” he said, and he swung out ostentatiously and roared past. This was all theatre, all about going nowhere powerfully fast, a mission of release, of action; because something needed to be done right now, and nothing could be done — at least not now. Mitman’s rough handling of the truck was intended to embody this sense of urgency, to give it expression as safely as possible. Otherwise, he feared, Rangel would burst at the seams.

They’d spent the bulk of the day going over all documents that might give her some clarity about her client’s predicament, some avenues to pursue, something to do. They had worked through, again and again: the file that Jeannie Pastor had given them detailing — if such a generous word was appropriate for the actual record — the steps that the police had taken in their fruitless search for the missing Jared Willoughby; the court records of Nabel’s application to have the life tenant declared dead; Gladys Tremaine’s few family documents and the plans that she and Rangel had just drafted; and as well a bunch of material from the internet about the gravel mine and about aggregate mining generally. All of that to no avail. Or, at least, leading to no clear course of action.

So, mindful of the fate of Leacock’s Lord Ronald who, under enormous pressure from the Earl, flung himself outside and into the saddle only to ride madly off in all directions, they flung themselves into the truck and drove, carefully madly, to a single target picked pretty much at random.

Mitman took the turn onto ‘General M’ too fast and, after a look in the various mirrors, accelerated all the way to the highway. “Have you thought about where she’ll live?” He had to raise his voice to get over the drone of the tires on the concrete roadway.

Rangel stopped playing with paper and strained forward against the locked seatbelt. “She’s staying with me,” she said.

“Her things . . .” said Mitman, sweeping into the left lane even though the turnoff was a mere kilometre and half from where they’d got on. The big engine was happy to be called on like this and roared with satisfaction.

“No,” she said, “ you’re right. It’s not fair to expect her to move house. I’ll go and stay with her.”

Mitman now had to cut off a panel truck, which objected loudly. He braked, chose not to salute the panel truck with a finger, and caught the exit just in time. “It’s a crime scene,” he said. “And anyway, a fat lot of good you’d be, come the next mafia hitman. No more pillows next time.”

Rangel deflated beside him, slumping in her seat, finally being as tired as she looked. And suddenly the mad dash was over and they were gliding at a sedate rate on the low-noise exit ramp, making a gentle curve. Rangel peered out the window as though they’d arrived in another country. She said to the glass, “Better than no one.” She turned to look at Mitman. “She’s got nobody,” she said.

Things were quiet now, almost eerily so. The motor burbled softly. Some bird made itself known by calling. Mitman signalled right at the T-junction, the steering column tick-tocking in the cab, and, looking left and right and left again like the star pupil in a driving school, he made the slow turn. “You’re her lawyer,” he said. “It’s not a friend thing. Not supposed to be, right?”

“I know that. But still.” She thought for a moment. “There’s Khadr and Edney.”

“Hmm,” said Mitman. This was a difficult example; both of them thought that Edney’s commitment and single-minded persistence were admirable.

And then they were at the gravel mine. It was closed off by a high, chain-link fence set about three metres back from the roadway. The fence marked a severe boundary: on the road side there was a verge of still greenish grass and weeds, decorated with the occasional white styrofoam cup and silver-glinting beer can, the wildflowers of civilization; beyond the fence a swath of small boulders gave way to a field of beige dirt and stone that seemed to stretch forever.

A chain and a padlock closed a pair of broad gates at the end of the stunted driveway. Mitman put the pickup almost nose to the gate and he hopped out. He jiggled the locked chain, the way he’d seen people do it in the movies. It didn’t fall undone. Off to the right there was a wooden telephone pole sporting a worn, blue-painted metal box with the image of an old telephone handset stamped into the cover. He pulled it open and picked up the phone inside. There was nothing to dial with, so he just listened to the hum and waited.

Eventually a voice came on, crackling over the hum: “We’re closed.”

“Hello, hello,” said Mitman. “I can’t hear you.” The voice said a few more things, all of which Mitman ignored. “Hello,” he said again, “ — for — Nabel — important — .” He waited a couple of seconds and then said hello again, this time in a different tone, the one you use when you know you’re talking to yourself and a dead line. The phone gave a click and then there was only the hum. Mitman put the handset back and shut the door on the box.

Rangel came to join him, and they stood around scuffing their shoes and being silent. After a bit, Mitman looked at his watch. “We’ll give it five minutes,” he said.

Three minutes after that, two worn pickup trucks raced up to the gate from the road side, followed a couple of seconds later by a dusty Grand Prix. Men got out. Doors slammed. The men became a group and the group moved toward Rangel and Mitman.

Rangel touched Mitman’s arm and set off with him toward the men. The two groups met a few feet behind her truck. “Gentlemen,” she said, composed.

“Who’re you?” asked the man who had wound up at the front of the small mob. He was trying for belligerence and getting half way there.

“Gregoria Rangel,” she said, and she put out her hand for him to shake. “And you are . . . ?”

The man responded reflexively and found himself shaking hands with her. She smiled at him. “Tom Withers,” he mumbled. He wore dirty jeans that hung low on his waist, held up by a belt that might once have looked like leather but now resembled cardboard. Over his T-shirt he had a black cotton jacket stuffed against the winter that hadn’t yet arrived. It opened as he reached for her hand and she saw ‘Sons of San-’ on his shirt.

“Good to meet you, Tom. What’s happening?” she said.

“Well . . .” He was now somewhat abashed.

One of the other men shouted, “You management?”

“City truck,” shouted another.

There was some shuffling of feet.

Rangel kept smiling. “Girly truck,” she said to Tom, but loud enough for everyone to hear. One of the guys laughed a little. “And no,” she said to Tom, “we’re not management. We have no connection at all with the mine. We’re here to speak to Dean Nabel about a private matter.”

“We come to work,” one of the men shouted.

Tom found his voice. “We showed up this morning and the place was shut down. Says temporary. But we don’t trust them. We showed up to work and to get our pay and now we’re out here with nothing. No work, no pay. Fifty of us, down by gate four.”

“More ‘n a hundred,” said the man behind Tom.

“Shit,” the guy at the back called out, “Tom couldn’t count the beers in a twenty-four.” This caused general laughter.

Rangel heard Mitman say quietly, “G.R.”

She said, “Excuse me,” to Tom and turned to see that a security guard had come to the gate and was beckoning Mitman, who stayed resolutely a good three metres off. She moved to where Mitman was and he wandered back to the group of men. Eventually the guard grew tired of his gestures and, reaching through the gate to undo the padlock, slipped the chain off and stepped toward Rangel. Now she moved to intercept him.

“No one is allowed in,” the guard said to her. She felt Mitman appear at her side.

“That’s all right,” she said quietly, as she moved deliberately past him, Mitman following. “We’re lawyers.”

And with that lingering non-sequitur, she and Mitman eased themselves through the opening and strode off into the grounds of the mine. The guard called after them, but caught between ejecting the law and keeping out the mob, he wisely chose the latter; and by the time he’d re-locked the gate, Rangel and Mitman were well on their way — to being lost.

“You didn’t,” said Mitman, as they trudged on.

“I did,” said Rangel, happily.

“You actually flashed your wallet at him — ”

“Just like the FBI, yes.”

“I hope it was at least your CBA card you showed him.”

“I think it was my coffee card.”

They walked on. “That works,” said Mitman after a while. And then, “Speaking of cards, I slipped yours to the gang of seven.”

“Is that how many there were.”

“Gave it to to your boyfriend, Tom.”

“Wonder if that was wise.”

Mitman kicked up some dust and pretended to cough. “Any idea where we’re headed?” he asked.

“Nope,” said Rangel.

“Wonder if that’s wise.”

The Jack Russell, whose full name was Vicar of Swimbridge and who answered, some of the time, to Vickie, would not stop barking. A surly Reg Bettleman hauled his sorry ass out of bed in one of the wee small hours — without bothering to put on his spectacles he couldn’t nail down which until later — to go and see what all the fuss was about, fully expecting to find Vickie in a tizzy because of some brazenly mating racoons.

She wouldn’t stop even when he took her line off the stake, reeled her in, and tried to calm her. Her attention, her agitation, was all aimed over at the Tremaine house. So that’s where Reg and Vickie went, he clumping in untied workboots, she thrusting on the line, rising into the air at times like a kite in following gusts.

It took him a good twenty minutes to persuade himself that he should enter and then that he should climb the stairs, even though his halloos were met with ominous silence. He knew it would happen one day. He would have to find her dead. Who else would do it? But he shied away from the task.

Not so Vickie.

And so it was that Reg called 911 in a lather while Vickie sat up like best of breed, all proud and unmoving on the floor by the bed, silent while Gladys Tremaine cried.
 

---

 

“SHE’S FINE.” AN exhausted ER nurse coming off night duty put on a reassuring face for the trio: Constable Leroy Stetch, Rangel, and Backton volunteer firefighterWilliam Otis. It was 6:35 according to the wall clock in the waiting room. The sun wouldn’t be up for another hour and more. Weariness abounded.

“She’s sleeping,” the nurse said. “The doctor gave her something just now. There was a lot of blood to clean up. None of it hers. She has a small tear in her right hand where the yarn bit into it at some point in her . . . struggle. And we were concerned about shock, though that seems to be past. We’ll keep her sedated for a bit yet, see if we can’t get her vitals to come just a bit closer to what we’d like.” The nurse wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his blue scrubs. “We’re not worried. That’s the best way I can put it.”

Stetch moved forward half a pace. “When can we talk to her, do you think?”

The nurse sighed. “You’ll have to ask the doctor. Doctor Wawrzyniec.” The name came out as vahf-ZHIN-yets.

“How are you spelling that?” asked Stetch.

Rangel went to sit down on one of the plastic chairs. A yellow one. She thought they were uncomfortable. She was wearing the first thing she’d put her hand to when she’d got the call from Jeannie Pastor. The pants were silk and she slid around on the seat. The firefighter followed her and hesitated a bit over the pink chair next to hers, before dropping into it. The metal rivets in his chinos clicked against the plastic. She took his hand. And then she let it go.

In a while Stetch left the nurse and came to tell them more about the genuine, period piece, plug-in IBM wall clock and about the very chairs under their butts, which, he’d already announced, with some wonder, were real Eames side chairs with the stacking base. Although he wasn’t a hundred percent certain because of something about the base. He stroked the purple one and talked about fiberglass.
 

---

 

“A SIX MILLIMETER steel Inox Prym. Single point. Sucker’s about a foot long.” The provincial cop held his hands wide apart as though he were a young man at a bar, boasting.

The other provincial cop lit a cigarette, sucked on it, and rubbed the back of his vest up and down against the nearby tree, going for an itch. He’d just arrived in the third wave of officials, authorities, support personnel, and media, all of whom now crowded a few safe rooms in the Tremaine house.

The two cops were in Tremaine’s back yard, standing in a patch where the sun, still hostage to the horizon, had managed to dry some of the dew on the grass. “That’s a size ten in the US system,” added the knowing cop.

“Manitoba maple,” said the other cop, turning to look briefly at his scratching post and needing to contribute some knowing to the exchange. “Weed tree. Stinks.”

“Oh yeah? I never noticed. So anyway, these puppies are pretty sharp-pointed. And the steel?”

“You have to cut ‘em down or they’ll just blow down in a good wind. Fall on your house.”

“Are you listening, asshole? Steel on that thing’s really shiny, highly polished and slipperier than hell. I guess so that the yarn gets on and off it easy. Gimme one of those,” he said, pointing to the late-comer’s cigarette.

“You knit, Stan?” said his buddy, flicking his ash downwind and then hauling out the pack, tapping out the head of a fresh one.

Stan took it, lit it, managing to talk all the while. “Go fuck yourself. Got it from an EMF chick. Piece of fucking luck for the old lady, let me tell you. He had her head under this plastic bag with his down jacket in it. So anyway, her arm comes up. Like a reflex, right? And, bingo, the point hits the sweet spot.” He tapped his belly just below the sternum and slightly to one side. They both smoked and frowned quietly for a moment, reflecting perhaps on life’s various sweet spots. “Asswipe had this cheap shirt. Anyway, gaping at the buttons. Too much of the good life. And the damn thing gets right at the skin, you know? Slips in easy as you like between strands of muscle. And then he falls and hammers it home.”

“Still,” said the other, wincing a little, “could’ve just, you know, put a hole in his gut. Takes a while to bleed out like that. Hurts bad. But takes a while.”

“Mmm,” his friend agreed, busy drawing on the cigarette. Exhaling in a cloud, caught and backlit by the low sunlight. “That’s the thing,” he said with smoke. “Hit the wha’d’you call it aorta. Thu . . . thra . . .”

“Thoracic,” the other man supplied. “Descending thoracic aorta.” They were square now.

“Never could say that word,” said the first man. “Boom. Blowout. He’s out of juice. Flat tire. Dead.”

A metallic screeching noise and the cop facing the back of the house said, “Oh, shit,” and dropped his cigarette in a hurry. The screen door shut with a bang and a small aftershock. “Fuck, it’s the DC.”

And indeed it was. “Gentlemen,” said the Deputy Commissioner, Making his way slowly down the rickety wooden steps. He came up to them in no particular hurry — it’s never wise to charge the rank and file — and pulled a silver cigarette case out of a pocket. The officers had their lighters out in a flash. “Something of a curious case, wouldn’t you agree?” said the DC, leaning forward slightly. Stan, the knit-knowing cop, lit him.
 

---

 

VINH HAD GONE SO cold that the air around him seemed to gel. Phang shivered and felt his skin turn to gooseflesh. There was a ghost standing beside Vinh, Phang was certain. Not the ghost of the dead Calabrian. That piece of excrescence wouldn’t be allowed within a thousand miles of this place, would spend eternity as a perpetually unsatisfied hungry ghost, was damned. No, this was someone powerful, someone who had been — was — even harder than Vinh, so hard he would squeeze the life out of the Buddha if he felt it would gain him even some small advantage. Alas, there was no shortage of such terrible ghosts in Vietnam, thanks to the decades of constant war.

“All of them,” said Vinh and the ghost in unison.

Phang hesitated. Not because it would be difficult to carry out the command, but because carrying out the command would run the risk of creating further, perhaps intractable, problems. Karma was like that. Many-armed, sticky. Yet, you didn’t challenge the command of a ghost. “If I may,” said Phang, “I say it is my great honour to be permitted to do as you command. If I may further, I would . . . enjoy a methodical, deliberate approach, rather than a sudden scattershot solution. Fear will increase. It will be most satisfying.”

Vinh, who was no fool at all, saw the wisdom in his lieutenant’s veiled correction. “As you wish. But all of them.”

Phang bowed and backed away from the ghost. He had the thought for the first time, perhaps, that he was glad he was not Vinh.
 

---

 

“MAKES NO SENSE,” said Dabord, for the umpteenth time. “A Mafia hit man coming after Gladys? It’s got to be some kind of mistake.”

“Not Mafia. ‛Ndrangheta. Calabrian.” The organized crime specialist from the provincial police kept correcting Dabord.

“Same diff,” the chief snapped. They were all gathered in the largest space in the Backton PD building, an area formed from the locker room and a couple of adjoining supply rooms with their double doors propped open. It smelled of feet and A535 muscle rub. “Doesn’t make any sense whatever name you give it. Are we sure it’s not some crazed sex maniac from . . . from . . .”

“Reggio?” the specialist proposed.

Dabord let show the wisp of a grim smile. “I was thinking more of Seminara,” he said. The specialist’s eyebrows rose fractionally, and he gave Dabord a small nod of his head: message received; assessment revised.

The DC’s aide said, “We’re a hundred percent sure. He was there to kill. And it seems certain he knew who his target was. That she was an old woman, I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dabord conceded. “Plastic bag. Asphyxiation. Wanted it to look natural.” He got up and put more coffee into his cup from the big box provided by the Tims out near the highway. “Jesus,” he said, straightening up. “What a thing.” He looked at all the provincial cops in the room and settled his gaze on the Deputy Commissioner, who was keeping his counsel in a corner, leaning back under an old Don’t Drink and Drive poster that someone had altered to read Don’t Think and Thrive, which no one understood. Dabord tasted the coffee still on his tongue. Then he announced, “I’ll say it one more time. Gladys Tremaine is a fine, upstanding citizen of this town. She could no more be involved in criminal activities than any of your sainted mothers or grannies.”

A number of people in the room reflected evidently on whether their mothers and grannies could in fact be absolved of criminal tendencies.

“You think it might be the business with . . . with . . .” The DC snapped his fingers softly a couple of times.

“Dean Nabel,” said his aide.

“Nabel?”

Dabord gave a reluctant, expansive shrug. His coffee slopped over a bit.

The DC tapped his right thigh. “We’ll take this, Chief,” he said.

Dabord shook his head. “Be my guest,” he said. “Be my . . . guest.”

The District Commissioner stood up, which made everyone else get to their feet. Dabord, still shaking his head, sat down and looked into his coffee.
 

---

 

“WAKE UP, WALLY, we’ve got some work to do.” Rangel had the phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear. She was pacing in her small office, sorting furiously through papers in a file as she talked. Her tone was sharp, her motions jerky, abrupt.

“Good morning to you, too.” Mitman was puffing into the phone. He sometimes ran in the mornings, often came in late on Thursdays. “What’s up?”

“Get here ASAP. I’m . . . mad as hell. I’m . . . freaking out. Someone tried to kill —” She stopped, hearing dead air. He was on his way already. Releasing her pent-up fury and fear, she hurled the file and its contents across the small space.

Paper is not so easily bullied. Sheets settled gently like gliding birds. Rangel panted for a moment and contemplated pitching her phone at the wall. But then, rolling her shoulders, she bent to the methodical task of picking up the pages.

Thinking: she needed to shower, change her clothes.

Feeling: her muscles flex and draw power to themselves.

Setting her jaw.

 
© Simon Fodden