Deadline (7 page)

“Two fifty,” Devries grunted.

The man reached forward and poured them both a glass of water from a pitcher on the table. “Less than a third of what you owe us, Mr. Devries.”

Devries waved away the offered water. His hands were so sweaty that he was sure he’d drop it on the floor. “Yes, I know.”

The man looked around the room. “I don’t enjoy being sent to places like this,” he said. “It’s not what you might call my natural habitat.”

“I can get it,” Devries said. “But it’s a lot of money. You’ve gotta give me more time.”

The man didn’t appear to be listening. “You know, when I was watching the news earlier, they said there was a 40 per cent chance of rain this afternoon. I wondered: what does that even mean? Something either happens or it doesn’t. It’s not like I can bring 40 per cent of an umbrella with me, now is it?”

Devries shook his head. What in the hell was this guy talking about?

“I prefer certainty myself. Those are the only terms worth dealing in. The minister is quite nervous that recent developments may interfere with the noble work we are trying to accomplish.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Devries said. “That was just some Indian chick who pissed off her boyfriend. The cops are looking for him right now. We’ve got guys on the inside who’ll make sure nothing damaging leaks out.”

The man smiled and took a sip of his water. “Let us hope not. It would be a shame if we had to terminate this arrangement prematurely. Particularly if it jeopardized significant future developments. The minister asked me to put particular stress on that final point.”

“Don’t worry,” Devries whispered. He didn’t like having these conversations out in the open. He looked nervously over at the front desk, where a tall blonde woman with a red travel case was checking in. “We’ve got this thing under control.”

The man put down his water. His face was unreadable. Devries couldn’t tell if the guy believed him or not.

“This man the police are looking for,” he said. “He was part of the program?”

Devries nodded. “He was, but not anymore. There’s no way they’ll be able to trace him back to us, I guarantee it.”

The man picked up the briefcase and rose from his seat. “Just as I’m sure you will be able to guarantee delivery of the remainder of the funds owing by the end of the week. Have a pleasant evening, Mr. Devries.”

Devries watched the man stroll through the lobby and out the front door. He yanked his tie loose and gasped for air. His plans to take the rest of the week off were dead and buried. He desperately hoped he wasn’t going to follow suit.

C
olin stood in the entryway for a moment, holding the door open with one hand and the hammer with the other. He heard a click as a locker door was closed somewhere on the other side of the room. He spotted a light switch on the wall and flicked it on. The room was suddenly bathed in blinding white from the overhead banks of fluorescents.

“Campus security!” he yelled. “We have you surrounded, so just come out quietly!”

Colin stood there, heart pounding, and waited.

Nothing happened.

Had he imagined the sound of the locker door closing? He stepped into the room and let the door swing shut behind him. Better that he could see someone coming than to have someone sneak up on him from behind, he thought. His mind was going a mile a minute.

We have the place surrounded? Did I really just say that? Who the hell do you think you are? John Wayne in
Rio Bravo
? You’re gonna get yourself killed, you stupid shit!

He heard a low metallic groan. He was so keyed up that he almost didn’t notice that it was coming from the row of lockers on his right. A row of lockers that were starting to tilt in his direction. By the time he did notice, it was too late to get out of the way.

Colin dropped the sledgehammer and threw himself to the floor. There was an ear-splitting crash as the lockers hit the wooden bench and knocked it over. The lockers continued their forward momentum and would have squashed Colin flat if the bench hadn’t acted as a fulcrum to prevent them from coming all the way down to the floor. Colin felt something whack his left ear as a combination lock on one of the lockers on the top row spun sideways and hit him in the side of the head.

Colin opened his eyes and saw a small triangle of light at the end of a black tunnel. Between the lockers over his head and the bench on his right, he suddenly found himself in an impromptu cave with less than an inch of clearance on top. He saw a pair of feet race past the opening and disappear through a door on the other side.

The fear that had gripped him was suddenly gone and replaced by something more motivating—rage.

You tried to kill me, you son of a bitch! Now allow me to return the favour.

Colin dragged himself forward in a commando crawl and pulled himself out from underneath the collapsed row of lockers. He pulled open the door on the opposite side of the change room and raced through it blindly.

As soon as he stepped through the door, he was hit with a gush of cold water from the left. He had entered the shower room. They were all on motion sensors and whoever had gone through before him had turned them all on. The water was freezing cold, but Colin barely noticed. His eyes were fixed on another door just up ahead—a door that had just swung shut as he came in.

Colin pulled open the door and raced through it. No sooner had he taken two steps than he felt something heavy connect with the back of his head and suddenly he was flying through space. He felt himself flying head over heels. He braced for impact and was surprised when he hit water instead of concrete.

Colin opened his mouth to yell and immediately swallowed a lungful of chlorinated water. His arms and legs flailed wildly as he tried to figure out which way was up. Colin had never learned how to swim and was now convinced he was about to die in the most ironic manner possible.

He opened his eyes, but everything was darkness. He clamped his mouth shut and tried to swing his arms and legs in every direction at once. His left foot connected with something solid. He pushed against it and was amazed to feel his head break the surface of the water. He was so surprised, in fact, that he immediately tipped sideways and slipped back under.

I’m in the shallow end!
he thought.
I am not going to die!

Colin managed to get his feet back under him again and stood up out of the water, coughing and spitting and trying to suck in huge swallows of air at the same time. He could see moonlight reflected on the surface of the pool from the massive overhead skylights. The edge of the pool was only six or seven feet away. He waded towards it and pulled himself out, scanning the deck for any sign of who might have knocked him in.

Lying on the deck only a few feet away was one of the large extendable aluminum poles used to fish objects out of the water. That must have been what whomever he had been chasing had used to knock him in. Colin felt the back of his head and could already feel a lump rising at the base of his skull. An inch or two lower and they would have hit vertebrae instead, so he figured he was lucky, in a way.

The door leading to the outdoor filtration unit was open. The unit had an eight-foot chain fence around it, but that thing wouldn’t be too hard to climb. On the other side of that was about 30 feet of forest and then the access road.

Colin wiped his face and kicked at the metal pole, sending it clattering into the pool. Whoever had hit him would be long gone by now.

“Why did you come here, Devane?” he asked no one in particular. “Half the cops in the country are looking for you and you come back here? In the middle of the night? Why?”

Colin’s gaze drifted back towards the change room. What had Devane been doing in there when Colin interrupted him? What was the source of that weird blue light?

Colin pulled open the door and walked back past the showers. He didn’t bother to avoid them. It wasn’t like he could get any wetter than he already was. Besides, the water had actually warmed up a bit.

He entered into the change room and stepped over the massive bulk of the locker that had almost crushed him. Lying on the floor was a small Maglite next to a green garbage bag. The garbage bag appeared to be full of oddly-shaped objects and a pool of blood had formed underneath it.

Colin had no intention of looking in the bag. Instead, he looked up and saw a familiar symbol painted on the front of one of the lockers: a small cross inside two interlocking strands of what looked like barbed wire.

Or thorns
, Colin thought.
Although Devane didn’t exactly seem like some sort of religious nut.

Colin opened the locker and gasped, not so much in horror as in surprise. The face staring back at him was one he had seen before but had never met. The eyes had been removed, but he was easily recognizable from the bisected spider web tattoo on his neck.

It was Terrence Devane.

G
iordino yawned and sat down at the interview table. It felt like she had spent most of the day in here and now she was going to spend most of the night as well.

She had just gotten back from the rec centre, where the crime scene unit officers were still busy pulling body parts out of lockers in the women’s change room. In less than twelve hours, Terrence Devane had gone from prime suspect to victim number two. At the moment, the only connecting thread she had between the two of them was sitting across the table from her and he wasn’t at all happy to be there for the second time in as many days.

Colin’s clothes were still wet from his drop in the pool. A damp blanket hung across his shoulders. Betts, who was standing near the door, had jokingly suggested that, if he wanted to change, they had an orange jumpsuit that was about his size. Colin was not receptive to the suggestion or the humour. He was damp, tired and bored out of his mind. All they had given him in the last two hours was a can of Coke and the blanket, which smelled like the floor of a drunk tank. He was not at his sunny best.

“Now Mr. Mitchell,” Giordino said, suppressing a yawn. “I’d like to go over your story one more time…”

Colin shook his head. “No.”

Giordino looked up, surprised. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve been in this room for six hours out of the last 24,” Colin said. “I’ve been over my story, as you call it, eight times with three different people, including Detective Betts over there, who kept recording the details incorrectly in his notebook. Whether that was just incompetence or some sort of cunning attempt to make it look like I was contradicting myself in various versions, I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter, really, because I recorded all three versions on my own digital recorder. Which is, remarkably, still working despite its dip in the pool. I’m sure you have recording equipment running in these cosy little rooms, too. If you want to hear it again, I suggest you back it up and give it a listen.”

“I didn’t get anything wrong,” Betts grunted.

“I tagged the spots,” Colin said, pulling the recorder out. “Would you like to go through them in chronological order?”

Giordino decided to take a different tack. “You say you went in there because you heard a noise and somebody attacked you, but you didn’t get a look at this person.”

“That’s correct,” Colin said. “I was under a row of lockers the first time and underwater the second. By the time I pulled myself out, whoever it was had gone.”

“I understand that you had just left the campus bar where, according to this copy of your receipt, you ordered five beers in just over three hours?” Giordino pulled the page out of the file in front of her and slid it across the desk. Colin glanced at it to make sure it was the one he had paid.

“Looks like it,” Colin said.

“Then you stopped in the receiving area to urinate where you just happened to hear a sound that caused you to enter the building where you picked up a sledgehammer and found a person or persons unknown stuffing the remains of Terrence Devane in a locker?”

“Once again, correct. I don’t make a point of urinating in public, but I was, for want of a better expression, caught extremely short.”

“You didn’t like Devane, did you?”

Colin smiled. “Are you suggesting that I somehow chopped him up with a sledgehammer, tossed myself in the pool for good measure and then called you? Is that your working hypothesis?”

“No,” Giordino said. “Not with a sledgehammer, maybe. All I’m suggesting is that you didn’t like him very much.”

“I never met him,” Colin said. “Unless you count tonight, of course. I wasn’t able to get any good quotes out of him, however. He was a tad decapitated.”

“There’s almost a 40-minute gap between when you left the bar and when you called us,” Giordino said.

“As I’m sure you’ve surmised, the cell phone reception in that building is not the best. I had to walk all the way out to the access road before I could get a working signal.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Betts said from his spot next to the door. “Once we get the security footage from the cameras in there, we’ll know what really happened.”

Colin looked over at the big policeman, who smiled back under hooded lids. “Does that work?”

Betts frowned. “What?”

“Lying,” Colin said. “I’ve never found that works terribly well as an interview technique. There are subtle differences between an interview and an interrogation, of course.”

Betts clenched his beefy fists and took a step forward. “Fuck you talking about?”

“There are security cameras set up in that building, yes,” Colin said. “But they’re not connected to anything. The company that installed them is the same one that did some of the re-wiring when they renovated the tech wing. Only they didn’t do such a good job and ended up frying $200,000 worth of industrial robotics. The college is suing them for incompetence; they’re counter-suing the college for non-payment. You know how it goes. The upshot is, they’re obviously not going to finish the camera job in the rec centre until the whole thing gets settled, which will probably happen sometime after everyone involved dies of old age. And the college is too cheap to pay anyone else to finish the job in the meantime.”