Deadline (5 page)

She had done some work for the local community radio station. In the beginning, it had just been answering phones and running errands, but she had worked her way up to the point where they actually let her co-host one of the weekly call-in shows. The program manager had advised her that if she wanted to go any further, she’d need to get some sort of professional education, so she’d applied to three different schools. Westhill was the only one that had said yes and even offered a special grant that would cover most of her tuition.

Her parents certainly weren’t going to do it. Her father had been killed in a construction accident building a winter road for the Victory Mine. Her mother had a small part-time job sweeping floors at the water treatment plant. Her older brother had fried most of his brain inhaling solvents with his friends, two of whom had died in a fire the year before. She wanted a ticket out and was pretty sure that this was the best one she was going to get.

It was quite an adjustment to come from a place where most places didn’t have heat or even running water to a city the size of Westhill. Shalene had never been off the reserve before. She had never seen a real shopping mall, let alone one with a parking lot almost larger than her home town. She’d never ridden on a city bus. Or eaten at a fast food chain. Or gone to a campus pub night.

Which was where she met Terrence Devane.

Terry, as he called himself, was supposed to be enrolled in the automotive program but hardly ever seemed to go to any actual classes. He spent most of his time hanging out in his apartment, which was in the basement of a rundown triplex in the north end of town. There he would drink, smoke a seemingly endless supply of pot, and tinker with his video setup. He said he was working on a series of short films that he would upload to the internet. He said a few of them had gone “viral”, whatever that meant, and that it wouldn’t be long before they made him rich.

He had seemed nice at the beginning. She’d never had a real boyfriend before. Candidates back home were pretty thin on the ground. He bought her a small silver necklace. It was just a chain, but it was still nice. He took her to a real restaurant, then out to her first movie in a real movie theatre, where she had to wear 3D glasses and ducked and screamed when objects came flying out of the screen.

She had no idea that he was videotaping her when they had sex. Or that it was the primary subject of the short films he was putting up on the internet for the whole world to see.

She found out in the worst way possible. One of the other students in her class somehow found the video and emailed it to practically everyone else. She was humiliated. She complained to the head of the department, but all that happened was that the student who emailed the video was given a warning not to do anything like that again. Her classmates seemed to think the whole thing was hilarious, nicknaming her “Deep Throat” and “Fuckahontas” behind her back. She could barely bring herself to go in to school.

When she confronted Terry with it, he got nasty.

He said she had probably known all along and was just pretending to be upset because people had found out about it. He said he would tell her department head and she would lose her grant and be kicked out of school and be forced to move back to the reserve. He said he had friends who could make her just disappear because no one would care about another dead Indian whore. She was terrified, so she kept her mouth shut.

And, of course, he kept doing it.

He specialized in picking up girls at campus pubs and sometimes from the bars in town. He’d drop something into their drinks, bring them home, film them when they were barely aware of what they were doing, and then kick them out the next morning. Most of them had no idea they had become part of his growing porn empire.

Shalene was forced to watch all of this with a growing sense of dread. Sometimes, if the girl was so far gone that he didn’t have to bother hiding it, he made Shalene run the camera. Sometimes he did the filming and demanded that she get involved, which was the worst.

She started researching the most painless way to kill herself. Almost anything was preferable to a life like this or the one that was waiting for her back on the reserve.

And then the reporter showed up.

He had heard about the sex clip that had been circulated through her class and the fact that the department head had done nothing about it. Somehow he’d managed to track her down and asked if she wanted to tell her side of the story. No one else seemed to want to listen, so that was exactly what she did.

O
f course, the story never saw the light of day.

Shalene had told Colin everything. She showed him Devane’s hidden video camera setup, provided him with a link to the website, and even showed off her so-called boyfriend’s secret stash of Rohypnol and other “encounter enhancers”. Colin had managed to track down three of Devane’s other victims, but none of them wanted to talk. Most of them preferred to pretend that the whole thing had never happened. Why was he writing a story about it? In their opinion, that would just draw attention to the whole sick affair. It was none of his business. One of them even threatened to sue if he used her name.

Thanks to Shalene, however, he had everything he needed to write it up.

Don’t worry
, he had even promised at the time.
This guy’s Larry Flynt days are done. Once this story hits the front page, he’ll have bigger things to worry about.

Except the story never made it that far.

Watterson had stepped in and pulled it. His excuse was a flimsy legal one: the police were supposedly getting involved and Colin’s story might be prejudicial to the investigation. It was all bullshit, of course. The bottom line was that the story would be horrendously embarrassing to the school and Devries had leaned on Watterson to make sure that it didn’t get out.

The cop who investigated was a fat moron named Betts, who Colin knew was an old friend of Ludnick’s from the days before the school’s security chief had “retired” from active police duty. Colin hounded Betts for days on the status of the case. Betts informed him that none of the other women wanted to talk. The hidden camera setup and drug stash had mysteriously vanished. The plug was temporarily pulled on the website. Colin showed him the photos of Devane’s hidden camera setup and drug stash, but Betts said they were inadmissible because they had been obtained without a warrant.

Worst of all, he didn’t think Shalene was a credible witness. She was, as far as Betts was concerned, “just another dumb squaw who’d be better off going back to her tepee and sticking her head in a glue bag.” Colin had recorded that comment so he could reference it later.

The investigation was shut down and no charges were filed. The only punishment Devane received was to be kicked out of the automotive program, which he’d never bothered going to anyway. It only took him 24 hours to get his website back up and running and a new girl into his basement.

Shalene disappeared. Colin spent a lot of time trying to track her down, without success. There were rumours that she had been spotted at one of the drop-in centres downtown, but the general consensus was that she had probably gone back to the reserve. Betts just laughed when Colin suggested that the police should be looking for her. She had never been reported missing, so as far as Betts was concerned, there was nothing to investigate.

Three days after Colin’s conversation with Betts, Devries had parked his car in a loading zone and Colin had snapped. People like Devries just floated above it all with no idea how much misery they caused for everyone else, and Colin had thought it was about time that elitist asshole got a taste of it for himself, even if it was just his stupid car.

There was no doubt about what had happened to Shalene Nakogee now. Her left hand was sitting in a box on his desk and the rest of her was, presumably, scattered in the woods in front of the building.

Colin had an excellent memory for details. Not eidetic by any stretch—he didn’t remember everything—but he seemed to have a knack for remembering the small things that turned out to be important later. It was a useful skill to have when he was sitting down to write a story and his notebook was missing something he needed.

Shortly after he had met Shalene, he had noticed the tattoo and commented on it. She told him that she had gotten it when she found out that she got into the broadcasting program. It was supposed to be a phoenix rising from the ashes, but the tattoo guy didn’t really know what a phoenix was supposed to look like and had drawn an eagle instead. The star was indicative of the fact that she planned to be one someday by hosting her own drive-time show in the morning or afternoon in someplace big, like Toronto or Vancouver. The tattoo was there to remind her that things could only get better.

Colin pulled out his phone and dialled a familiar number. When the voice on the other end answered, he did a remarkable job of keeping the emotion out of his voice.

“She’s dead, you stupid bastard,” Colin said. “Now get your fat ass down here and try to explain to me why this isn’t your fault.”

C
olin emerged into the lobby of police headquarters six hours later trying to get the ink stains out from under his nails.

They had taken his fingerprints for elimination purposes when they dusted the package. He had never been fingerprinted before. It wasn’t a horribly unpleasant experience, but it was an unsettling one. They had told him that his print card would be destroyed when the investigation was concluded, but he had his doubts about that. Colin was not predisposed to have an overwhelmingly positive and trusting perspective on law enforcement.

After being printed, he’d been forced to sit and wait for three hours in one of the windowless interrogation rooms until he could explain his story to the lead investigator. Fortunately, it wasn’t Betts. The lead detective on the case was a short, blonde woman named Giordino, and Colin got the distinct impression that she was none too pleased with being stuck with Detective George Betts for a partner.

In fact, they had only gotten 15 minutes into the interview before Giordino calmly but firmly asked Betts to leave because he kept interjecting and cutting off Colin’s responses. Colin’s radar had perked up at that point. Maybe he wasn’t the only person who thought Betts was a useless sack of shit.

Colin patiently explained the story of Shalene Nakogee at least six times before Giordino was satisfied, taking notes as she went. When he was done, she told him that an armed response unit had hit Devane’s apartment, but there was no one there. Devane’s face was going out on the news and every police department in the province was now looking for him. She told Colin to let them know immediately if he had any contact with Devane or remembered something that might be useful. Colin promised that he would. He got the impression that she didn’t entirely believe him when he told her that he’d opened the package without any knowledge of what might be inside and figured there was no point pissing her off if she was mulling an obstruction charge.

Colin walked over to the desk sergeant to sign out. He’d been brought here in the back of a patrol car (another first). His own car was still parked back at his apartment. He needed to get back to school.

“Who do I talk to about getting a ride back to the college?” he asked as he signed his name.

The desk sergeant was a massive bald guy who looked like he inhaled steroids with the very air he breathed. His neck alone was thicker than his head. His black nametag identified him as “SGT PETROVSKI”.

“City cab,” the desk sergeant grunted, pointing back over Colin’s shoulder. “From any one of those pay phones outside.”

Colin gave him a
you’ve got to be kidding
look. The desk sergeant responded with the kind of condescending smile that indicated that telling average citizens to go piss up a flagpole was one of the only satisfactions that his job afforded.

“Christ,” Colin muttered as he turned around. “Really pays to be a good citizen.”

He turned towards the front doors and pulled out his phone. The battery was almost dead because he had forgotten to charge it last night. How much would a cab cost to take him from here to the college? He had no idea. He only had $15 in his wallet. Did they take credit cards? Some did, but some didn’t. If they didn’t, he was going to have to go to the bank machine to get money out first. The nearest bank branch was three blocks away. What a pain in the ass.

He was standing in front of the doors trying to decide what to do when he heard a familiar voice call out from behind him.

“Colin?”

Colin turned around to see Darryl Harrington coming towards him across the lobby, carrying what looked like a box of electrical wire in his arms. Darryl had been in his last semester of a network engineering course at Westhill when Colin had started on the newspaper. The two of them had known each other peripherally in high school, but it had been Darryl’s help with Colin’s first big story that had really cemented their acquaintance.

“Hey Darryl,” Colin said. “What are you doing here?”

Darryl shrugged with the box to indicate that he couldn’t shake hands. “Got a job with Westhill SecuriNet,” he said. “We got the contract to re-network this place and city hall after that big system failure they had last year.”

Colin knew that the system failure Darryl was talking about had resulted in the police department losing all of their incident reports for the last three years. The incident reports were an electronic record of every situation where a police car was dispatched to a particular location. Even if no arrests were made, it was useful to have a record of how many times they had been somewhere, particularly for domestics and for use by third-party agencies, like Children’s Aid.

Darryl glanced down at Colin’s fingers. “Shit man, what’d they bust you for?”

Colin stopped rubbing his fingers and stuck them in his pockets. “Nothing. I just handled some evidence, that’s all.” He was keen to change the subject. “So your company got the contract on this place? That’s a pretty big deal.”