A Door in the River

The OPS and the QBPS had each sent a forensic team into those underground rooms on Wednesday afternoon. The two forces worked together. They’d found a basement that had been lowered and enlarged, like a giant tomb. There was a body there; later it was determined that this was the Ronald Plaskett that Wingate had earlier identified. He’d been shot dead. A long white wall with four doors in it ran against the longest wall. Each door had opened on a tiny eight-by-four “room,” with a dirt floor and at least one dirt wall, the one at their backs. Most of the chambers had a foam mattress and a blanket or two. The heavy door still stood in the north wall of the crushed room beyond it.

Volkov’s stories filled the space with suffering bodies and whispering voices. The rooms had been freezing cold, even in the summer, and they discovered that it was warmer sleeping on the dirt itself, especially if you could loosen it up a bit. You could also loosen the dirt in the back walls and there were sometimes bits of sharp rock that were good for digging with. But at this depth underground, digging through the dirt with a little stone was like trying to scrape a hole in the sidewalk with your fingernail. “We make a broken telephone, you know? Before I am taken away from my home, in that place, the girls before us make a system for talking. They have make small holes in the dirt at the end of the wall, where the wall touches. Always, you make these holes filled with dirt, but every week, same time in the middle of the night, anyone who want to talk, digs open the hole.

“And then we say short things. We learn names. When a new girl comes, someone shows how to use telephone.” She said something in Russian, and Lenkov translated it.

“ ‘This is how we got to know our neighbours.’ ”

“Neighbours,” said Volkov. “Yes, our neighbours in hell. This is how we know our names, where we are from, what we did there, how it happens to us that we are bring to this place. That men rent us for a week.”

“Did Larysa ever talk?”

“She was there shortest. But she is alive?”

“James told you that?”

“Yes.”

“You got to know him a little.”

“I only see him twice, but yes, I know him now. He is also …?”

“He’s alive. He was badly injured when the roof of that room fell in.”

“Where is Larysa?”

“I don’t know. But she’s alive. I know she’s alive.” Volkov went into herself, her eyes tracked down. “It must have been just as hard to choose to go on,” Hazel said.

“I wanted to live to thank …” she broke off and put her forehead in her hands. Then, a moment later, composed: “And to know about Bochko …”

“Bochko?”

“Big boss.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“Yes. Big man with muscle.”

That was him. “His name was Lee Travers,” Hazel said. “He’s dead now.”

“Good.”

“Larysa … Kitty … killed him.”

Katrina didn’t say anything. After a moment, she withdrew her hand from Hazel’s and used it to press the button that lowered her bed. Her eyes were closing even as it went down. But a very faint smile played on her lips.

Hazel left the room and started for the ICU, where James was still under heavy sedation. She and Emily had come the day before and sat with Michael in James’s curtained nook full of machines. In the intervening twenty-four hours, part of the investigation had begun to focus on who Travers was, and already details were coming in. They traced him back to Michigan and discovered that it had been true that he’d taken casino management at U of M. But his picture, and not his name, had confirmed this for them. He’d taken his degree under the name Judson Carmichael, and he’d matriculated in 1994. He’d worked in other casinos. Each employment lasted fewer than four and a half years. Some were less than a year. They had only just started to disseminate the details of their case to other agencies when the phones began to ring. In Perrysville, Maryland, Carmichael had gone by the name Harvey Kellog. He’d been an assistant manager in the casino there, and his boyfriend had met with a suspicious end. Kellog had left the state, and six months later, a man seeding his field had found a pile of partially burnt women’s clothing. That had led to a terrible discovery in a derelict barn. That was after just one day of spreading the information. They dreaded what else would come up. Ten years was a long time to be a freewheeling psychopath.

Now, on Thursday afternoon, she entered the cordoned-off space where Wingate’s body was still being operated from without and said hello to Michael. After half an hour of silence, he said, “I can tell you a little about myself, if you want.”

“Only stuff I could find out by Googling you,” she said. “I don’t know what the rules are here.”

“That’s fair. Google would tell you I’m a props master for film and TV. I handle all mechanical props, like appliances, weapons, devices – ”

“Devices?”

“You know, the box with the switch and the light on it that’s in every other episode of 24?”

“I don’t watch TV.”

“Anyway, I make that box.”

“Okay.”

“And I live in New York, and I have for thirteen years.”

“And you are … married? Single? Kids?”

“You wouldn’t find that on Google,” he said, and he offered her a conciliatory smile.

They sat on either side of Wingate’s bed for half an hour after that, not saying much. The machines breathed for him, and the monitors watched him, and it felt like it would take a long time before anyone could tell her what his fate might be.

Normally, she’d just have taken it. But she was going by the books now: she requisitioned it out of evidence. Then Greene had asked her about it and told her he’d have to check with Willan. He told her to come back after lunch. She had two hours to kill then, and she decided to use them wisely: she decided to take in the late August air and try to settle her jangling nerves. She had the thought of driving somewhere and just sitting and watching the leaves move around in the wind. But instead she stayed in town and walked down Main Street a ways, and then up, north, into the oldest residential streets of the town. She’d known that part her whole life, and she looked at some of the houses she’d been inside. On some streets, she’d been in all of the houses; she’d known the names of successive generations, successive owners. It was like she could pass through the very walls. Although some of these houses had been the homes of childhood friends, most of her experiences within them were adult ones. After thirty-five years on the force, she’d had cause to be in many of these houses.

After her walk, she went back down to Main Street to The Station House Grill for lunch and let herself have a BLT. She’d eaten lunch in the Station House at least a thousand times. It had been on this same spot for eighty years, forty years more than the now-demolished train station it had been named for. It had never changed. Dmitri Agnostopolis had opened it, his son Jim took it over, and Jim’s daughter-in-law, Grace Wong, owned it now. Grace made a coconut cream pie almost as good as Cathy Wiest’s.

But the Station House and the houses in the old part of town were among the few things that weren’t changing here. Not only were the crimes Port Dundas was seeing becoming more serious, but the outside world was truly infecting it now. When she was a kid, no one particularly cared for this part of the province in the summer, with its bug-infested waterways and its tiny towns with nothing to recommend them except for a few guesthouses on the water for fishermen. It changed slowly at first. The urban middle class learned how to swim. Motorboats became affordable. The moneyed crowd figured out it was prestigious to have a summer place in the same province they made their money, a place of their own they could go to all summer, forever.