Fall from Grace (22 page)

In that second, I remembered his advice and felt the damp towel on my lap. I snatched it up and pressed it against my face, the cool wetness dispelling the heat. I put the towel over my head, my body cooling slightly, and then held it in place so that part of it hung over my face. I bent over, ignoring the pain in my back as I stretched to get as low as possible. It was still hot down there, but the intensity of the heat was reduced. I peered up and could see the rocks glowing a soft red, but that was all. I cocked my head and found the locations of the others in the lodge by listening to their breathing. The sounds were even and steady, as if they were sleeping.

I felt a wave of embarrassment rise over me because compared to them I must have been as noisy as a colicky baby. But I tried to push the embarrassment away, telling myself that these men were elders with countless years of sweats behind them and I was just a virgin. And whether they were judging me was not something I could control; I could only control how I felt, and I was now pleased to have things under some control and felt ready to face the rest of the sweat.

I took a deep breath, slow and soft so as not to overtax my body, and then sat up, wiping the sweat from my face with the towel. It was no longer cool so, as quietly as I could, I poured some fresh water from the bottle over the towel. When I had the bottle closed and back underneath my knee, I held the damp cloth against my mouth and nose and took in several wet, cool breaths. I held that posture and then they started singing.

It started with the drum, soft distant thumps that seemed to spring from the forest outside and around the yard. At first I thought it was a two-step rhythm, one heavy, one soft, like a heartbeat. It was, in fact, simpler, one beat over and over again. It circled the lodge for several rounds and then moved toward us, the tentative footsteps of a shy creature.

For a long time, it felt like the drumming would stay outside forever, the sounds curious of our presence but uncertain of our intentions. But suddenly, without warning, it charged forward, breaching the walls of the lodge, moving among us like another invited guest to the sweat. The drumming echoed all around, pounding off the walls, filling the space with sound and penetrating our skin, flowing back and forth through our bodies with every beat of our hearts.

27

There was a voice mail for me Monday morning, short and to the point.

“I saw your stories about the serial killer and I thought you might be the guy to help. I’m a retired member of the EPS and I got some info you might be interested in.” He gave a number and that was that. Intriguing as hell, and if he had something new that would bring the story back to life for a few more days, then all the better.

I immediately called him back.

Retired detective Mike Gardiner lived in a quiet neighborhood that was probably on the northern outskirts when it was first built in the fifties, but would now be considered a central neighborhood.

He greeted me at the door with a smile and a military handshake, a strong grip that lasted exactly one and half seconds. He wore a pair of plaid shorts and a light brown cardigan opened to reveal a white muscle shirt underneath. He may have once been a cop but those years were long behind him. There were a lot more lines of his face and gray hair when compared to the constable photo that I found in the morgue at the paper, along with about thirty to forty pounds of additional weight. He had been retired for almost twenty years so that was to be expected.

After a brief introduction, Gardiner invited me into his home, a typical three-bedroom prairie range bungalow with the living room in the front, kitchen in the back, and three bedrooms down the hall. He pointed at a well-worn, floral-patterned chesterfield backed against the front window for me, and then took a seat in the matching armchair set next to a fake fireplace.

There was no artwork in the room, just a few well-cared-for plants and a timeline of photos, either on end tables or hanging off walls, that started at the edge of the mantel and made a clockwise circuit of the room. The early ones were easy to spot, yellowed with time and showing a young Gardiner and wife, a leggy brunette, smiling in their wedding clothes, and then successive additions, three kids it seemed, first as infants then progressing through the years all the way to graduation.

Then the cycles started to repeat, with another wedding shot, and some new photos of a couple of infants growing into toddlerhood. And that’s where it ended because that’s probably where Gardiner’s life sat at the present. I also noticed that somewhere after the high school graduation section, the photos of one kid, a boy, stopped appearing.

“Sorry about not dressing up for ya,” Gardiner said in a scratchy voice, bringing me back to the now. “It’s been a while since anybody paid me a visit because of police reasons. Besides, I was never one for pomp and circumstance and all that, even when I was on the force. Don’t get me wrong, I kept my uniform clean and pressed but I figured since we were all cops, part of the same team, I never really got why the ‘sir yes sir’ was such a big deal.

“ ’Course that got me in trouble a few times, kept me from getting a couple of promotions because—what the hell did they call it once? Yeah, ‘At times Constable Gardiner shows a discourteous attitude toward superior officers’ which meant I told a couple of supervisors to fuck off. But anyway, you didn’t come here to hear an old cop reminisce about the old days, did you?”

I couldn’t help but smile at the old cop, projecting myself in his life, but knowing that when I reached his age there would probably be no photos on my walls and end tables, just empty spaces and, maybe if I was lucky and strong, with my career to fill in the blanks. “You’re the one who called me, remember?” I said, and while he nodded to show me that he heard the question, he didn’t answer.

“I can tell by the way you were checking out my living room, running through the photos, that you were adding more to the file, building the character that sits in front of you and wondering if that will help you make a connection in the interview.” He turned his chair on a swivel to point at a spot on the wall directly across from me, just above the console TV. “And I noticed that you stopped here for a second and you probably wondered why there are no more photos of the boy.”

“And you retired from the service when, Detective Gardiner?” I asked, trying to keep things light. “ ’Cause when I checked, there was an announcement fifteen years ago, but from the way you’re talking, it seems like last week. You wanna be the good cop or bad cop in this interview?”

He chuckled but there was also a flash of grief and something else. Anger? Embarrassment? “The answer to that conundrum is simple: drunk driver.”

Anger. That was the addition. Anger at a drunk driver for killing his kid.

“I’m sorry, it must—”

He waved my concern away. “Don’t give me your pity, ’cause despite our jocular attitude so far, we hardly know each other. Just let me ask you this, before I let you get on with your interview, you have any kids?”

I first thought about lying but he would see through that. “Yeah. I have a son and daughter. They live with their mother.”

“Thought so. So you know you better be prepared for the worst because despite the odds, bad things can happen and do happen. And even though cops like me did our darnedest to educate people and kids in school about the evils and stupidity of drunk driving, there are always those few idiots who never learn.” He again pointed to the teenager smiling in his high school graduation gown. “And my son was one of those idiots. And even though I loved my son to pieces, I just thank God that his was a single MVA so that he didn’t kill anybody else.”

Shame. That’s what that extra look was. Not anger, but shame. Shame toward his son and shame for himself because of his son. Must have been tough for a cop to deal with, his son driving drunk and killing himself. I wondered if his retirement came close after the accident, but then I pushed the thought aside because we already knew who killed his son. We didn’t know who killed Grace Cardinal and that’s why Gardiner had called me here, to possibly help with the story.

Maybe sensing my desire to move on, Gardiner cleared his throat. “So enough reminiscences from an old ex-cop. As you said, I called you and I’m about to tell you why.”

I pulled out my notebook and flipped to the page where I had written down the info he had given me over the phone. Gardiner sat up straight at the sight of my notebook. Despite the differences in our professions, there are similarities, such as the use of a notebook. From his reaction, I could tell that he missed the job. “Yeah, you said it was an investigation you undertook about twenty years ago? Pretty vague ’cause you must have undertaken many investigations in your career.”

“Yeah,” he said, taking a sip of his beer. “I’m sorry I was so vague on the phone but as you’ll discover pretty quick, I have my reasons. First off, I have to tell you that I am no longer a serving member of the Police Service, haven’t been for, as you said, fifteen years, and am not representing that Police Service. Also, some of the information I may give you comes from an official investigation file which should be in the archives of the EPS but, for reasons I won’t tell you, isn’t.

“And because there are possibly one or two illegal acts here, I am demanding, not requesting but demanding, that my name not be used in your story. You can call me an unidentified retired member of the EPS but you cannot use my name, badge number, or even my rank in your story. Do you understand?”

“I can see you’ve got the ability to pique one’s interest because that’s a hell of a thing to ask, especially since you called me and I haven’t seen any of this information you are talking about.”

“I don’t give a fuck. You either agree to what I’m asking or leave my fucking house right now. Empty-handed. Do I make myself clear?”

It’s not really a good policy for reporters to make deals like this, especially before they have an idea of what the story is about. I could have walked out right then. Could have shaken the old cop’s hand, thanked him for his interest in my story, and moved on with my life. But the way he was talking, I couldn’t resist.

The potential for a good story was big, but even if there wasn’t a story here, I couldn’t pass up the chance to learn what was in the possibly illegally obtained file and why this old ex-cop was so concerned about having other people not know that he was the one who had given me the information. “We have a deal. If this file is interesting enough for a story, then I won’t tell anyone who or where I got it from.”

“Not even your boss, your editors. No one knows.”

“I hate to tell you that if there is a story here and if I write something about one of your old investigations, chances are someone will be able to figure out where it came from.”

“I don’t give a fuck if somebody figures it out,” he growled at me, in a tone that made me glad I hadn’t been on the receiving end of attention from this guy when he was a cop. “You can’t use anything that can identify me in this story or tell anyone where you got the file from.”

I waved my notebook at him. “Okay, nobody will know, not even my editor who will be pissed, but I can deal with him,” I was lying because there was no such thing as a Deep Throat source that journalists didn’t share with their editors. The days of backing up a story with a nondisclosed source were long gone. You could write that in a story—the same way I did when I didn’t mention Whitford’s name as the guy who let me into the crime-scene tent—but you’d better make sure that when your editor asks you who that unnamed source is, you tell them.

“However, if this story results in legal problems for me,” I added, “and I’m faced with the choice of going to jail or giving up my source, I can’t promise I won’t tell. I’ll do my best not to give you up but if they push, I’ll have to give in.”

Gardiner leaned back in his chair with a short laugh, all the anger and tension gone. “Relax, Mr. Desroches. I don’t think anyone is going to threaten you with jail time. You may take some heat from the fuzz when you run this story, and you will run this story because I know you won’t be able to resist it, and there will be a bunch of cops who would love nothing more than to find a reason to run you in, but you should be fine.

“Even though I’ve been retired for a while, I know how the old boys work. And for the most part, they are a bunch of old dogs who bark but have no teeth. They’ll complain to your bosses, maybe file a grievance with the press council and get the police union to write a nasty letter to the editor, but you’ll be fine.” He stood up and I expected him to pull a file from underneath the cushion of his chair but he just motioned to me to stand up and follow him down to the basement.

28

The furniture in the main area of the basement was new, that modern Ikea style of wood and soft fabric. It fit the room. This part seemed newly renovated, white drywall along the walls and the ceiling, with a soft gray Berber carpet along the floor. There was a wood-burning brick fireplace along one wall and a large flat-screen TV along the other.

We walked past this room through a door into the rest of the basement, which was unfinished and housed the laundry facilities along with furnace and hot water heater. I followed Gardiner through here, stepping around piles of clothes organized by color and material, till we got to a thick wooden door with two heavy-duty dead bolts keeping it locked. Gardiner reached into his shorts pocket and pulled out a couple of keys, opened the doors and, before we stepped in, reached around the corner to flip a light switch.