The Grey Zone Page 4

  “Surgery? I thought he was in shock!” David yelled. “What’s happened to him?”

  Hawkins motioned for them to follow him to an alcove away from other people.

  David grabbed him by the sleeve. “What’s going on? Is he … Is he going to … Tell me!”

  “He was found staggering down a street with his eyes and mouth duct-taped. His wrists were taped behind his back and, uh, his hands were in a plastic bag also taped to his wrists.” Hawkins swallowed. “Inside the bag, his right hand was taped up in a fist. Four of his fingers have been chopped off.”

  “No!” Jia screamed.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood, but his life isn’t in jeopardy,” Hawkins hurried to say. “He’ll survive.”

  Jia burst into tears. David put his arms around her and they consoled each other. Her eyes met Alicia’s. “How could you let this happen to our little boy?” she moaned.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On a mid-May Monday morning, Alicia walked into the Major Crimes Unit and sat down.

  “Hey, you’re back,” Bradley noted. “How was it? Are you officially a trained undercover operator?”

  Alicia had been away for six weeks. “Yup, I made it. One of the toughest and most gruelling courses I’ve ever had. They worked us day and night. Hardly got any sleep. The course ended Friday, and I flew back from Halifax on Saturday.”

  “Welcome back. Although I expect I-HIT will scoop you up now so you won’t be around, regardless.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Alicia replied.

  The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team was part of the Major Crimes Section. Up until now there had been only one trained undercover operative in the entire office. That was Constable Barry Short. He was good at what he did, so he was seconded by I-HIT to work on priority cases. This resulted in his spending most of his time testifying in court, leaving their office shorthanded.

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad with two operators … providing I-HIT doesn’t get you transferred over to their unit entirely.”

  “Maybe,” Alicia responded.

  “Speaking of I-HIT, did you hear Connie Crane got her third stripe?”

  “I didn’t know. So it’s Sergeant Crane now. That’s great! I’m happy for her.”

  “A bunch of promotions came through last week,” Bradley said as he walked away.

  Alicia entered Connie’s office a minute later. “I hear congratulations are in order.”

  Connie smiled. “Thanks. You missed the party, but I’d be glad to buy you a beer.”

  “I’ll hold you to it.”

  “How was the course?” Connie sang part of the Secret Agent Man theme song.

  Alicia giggled. It was actually true; to protect the identity of undercover operatives, headquarters assigned them numbers to be used instead of their real names in all reports. “Yes, I’m officially an HQ number. A bona fide secret agent.”

  “Congrats to you, too! We’ll catch up over that beer later in the week.”

  As Alicia turned to leave, Connie again started signing.

  “Ooh, don’t quit your day job, Connie,” Alicia teased.

  “You witch! There’ll be no beer for you!” Connie said, grinning.

  Back at her own desk Alicia nodded a polite hello to a colleague at the next desk who was talking on the phone, then pulled out a well-worn file box from under her desk and sifted through its contents.

  It’ll be two years tomorrow, and we’re still no closer to solving it.

  Alicia came to Tommy’s statement. She knew it by heart. Not a day went by that she didn’t think about it.

  He’d been hog-tied with tape the whole time, including over his eyes and mouth. He guessed that he’d been driven for an hour or more in the van, including a long stretch of time without stopping, the only noise the sound of cars and trucks.

  Highway 99, or maybe the Trans-Canada? Those are only two of several possibilities, she thought, asking the same questions she’d asked herself repeatedly until her brain begged for them to be expunged, if only temporarily.

  Once they’d arrived at their destination, Tommy was led into a building and put inside a trunk — he’d remembered hearing a lock snap shut. He wasn’t given any food or water. Nobody spoke to him, but he sometimes heard a dog barking. It sounded like a big dog. He’d lain there in his own urine and feces until he was taken out.

  God, how could they have done what they did to an innocent eight-year-old kid? She went over it again in her mind. Blindfolded, he was led down a porch, across a yard and into another building. He was told to hold on to a bench, with his thumb underneath the surface. He remembered the sound of crunching bone and the pain that followed as he tried to scream. He’d obviously lost consciousness, because his next memory was of being back in the van. When it stopped, someone cut the tape from his ankles, then tossed him onto the road.

  Forensics matched paint and scratch marks on the back of Jia’s car to a white Ford cargo van that had been stolen and abandoned. The interior had also been torched, so Forensics found nothing that could identify the culprits.

  Alicia had also obtained copies of security footage from closed-circuit television cameras in the numerous locations where David had been sent with the ransom. Thousands of licence plates that appeared in the footage were checked out, as well as hundreds of pedestrians. Some had criminal records, but those leads eventually came to dead ends. Some pedestrians — who didn’t have criminal records — could be seen talking on cellphones. Could they have been doing countersurveillance? Most of them, too, were eventually cleared.

  The unmarked station wagon she’d been driving was visible in some of the footage, though never close to where David was. Still, she cringed at the thought of having being spotted.

  She appreciated the support Hawkins had given her. An internal investigation into the handling of the case had focused on possible ineptitude or overzealousness on her part, but Hawkins’s report had made it clear that Alicia was an extremely forthright, honest officer who followed policy as if it were gospel. Furthermore, he stated that he’d had a bird’s-eye view of all the surveillance vehicles and was absolutely certain that everyone had followed his orders explicitly. He also noted that the kidnappers had referred to the driver of the station wagon as male. Hawkins suggested that they had seen someone in a similar car and that Alicia was being falsely accused.

  It was good of him to say this, but in all the camera footage there wasn’t another car that looked like the one Alicia had been driving. It had to be me. I know it … and so do David and Jia.

  There was another issue that haunted Alicia. The kidnappers had told David they were making an example of him. An example to whom? Are they planning on doing more kidnappings? Maybe they intend to put other victims in touch with David to find out what would happen if they went to the police?

  Alicia had hoped to make amends with David and Jia and tell them of her concern that the parents of other kidnapped kids might be coming to their door, but they had refused to talk to her or any other investigators.

  Later she had been notified by Internal Affairs that the Chungs were suing the Force, and they had named her in particular. All investigators had then been ordered to stay clear of them.

  Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap. The noise repeated.

  Alicia glared at her colleague. He was still holding the phone to his ear, but he appeared to be on hold; he was absentmindedly drumming his fingers on the desk.

  “Cut that out!” Alicia snapped.

  He looked at her in surprise.

  “I can’t focus with you doing that!” she added.

  The sight of my own whole, unmutilated fingers makes me lose focus — I sure as heck don’t need yours to remind me of my failure, too.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jack Taggart was putting his lunch dishes in the dishwasher Monday afternoon when his doorbell rang. Here we go. How ticked off will she be when she finds out?

  He limped to the f
ront door and let in Laura Secord.

  Both Jack and Laura were trained RCMP undercover operatives assigned to the Intelligence Unit in the headquarters building in Vancouver. Officially, Jack was Laura’s boss, but the two of them together had looked death in the face too many times over the years to be simply boss and subordinate. The fact that they were both still alive was a direct result of how well each knew the other. Their closeness was rivaled only by their relationships with their spouses.

  Part of their mandate was to develop high-level informants within organized crime factions, then pass on information to appropriate RCMP sections or other law enforcement agencies as they saw fit. Their informants were involved in a variety of criminal activities including, at times, murder.

  It was a recent murder that Jack had been brooding about. While Laura had been away on holiday, a biker informant of theirs had committed a murder after Jack had covertly given him the nod to do so. Their informant had introduced Jack as a trusted associate to a gun smuggler by the name of Erich Vath. Jack was investigating a white supremacist group. Unfortunately, his cover got blown. Vath’s death ensured their informant’s safety.

  Dealing with informants was a perpetual balancing act. They had to ensure that the information they received was more valuable than the crimes being committed by their informants. Protecting informants from discovery by criminals and police officers alike was a delicate matter. The trust their informants had in Jack and Laura was vital. Often, informants would introduce them to criminal associates as trusted friends. To this end, Jack and Laura rarely went to court or took part in arrests. Their job was to remain in the shadows whenever possible.

  “Hey, welcome back!” Jack exclaimed as Laura stepped into the foyer. “You look tanned. And relaxed.”

  “I should be. Two weeks in Hawaii … it was wonderful!” She hugged him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “You miss me?”

  “Actually, to tell you the truth, I did,” he replied.

  “Oh? That sounded serious. Are you okay?”

  “I took last week off. Felt like I needed to unwind.”

  “You, unwind? That has to be a first. Were you that hungover from celebrating your promotion?”

  Laura’s tone was joking, but he caught her look of suspicion. Yeah, something happened. I’ll get to it in a minute. He forced a smile. “Natasha and I did have an olive soup to celebrate. How about you?”

  “It was too hot for martinis, but after you called, my hubby brought a pina colada down to the beach for me.”

  Jack grinned. “I figured you wouldn’t mind my interrupting your holiday to tell you we’ve both been promoted.”

  Laura looked at him with curiosity. “I never asked — why the afternoon shift? I thought with our new high and mighty ranks we’d be working more day shifts.”

  She was fishing to find out what was wrong. First things first. “About your promotion. Congratulations, Corporal Secord. I can’t think of anyone more deserving.”

  “Likewise, Sergeant Taggart,” Secord replied, pretending to sound official. She smiled and looked past him into the house. “Is Natasha home?”

  “No, she’s working an early shift at the clinic. One of the other doctors is undergoing another round of chemo, so she’s been filling in more than usual.”

  “That’s too bad. How are the boys?”

  “They’re good. Looking forward to summer holidays in six weeks. I told them we’d go camping.”

  “Okay …” Laura raised an eyebrow.

  “Come into the kitchen and I’ll fill you in on what happened while you were gone.”

  Laura took off her shoes and followed Jack. “Hey, what’s wrong with your leg? Did you slip and fall on a wayward olive pit?”

  “Grab a seat,” Jack said, pulling out a kitchen chair for himself. His sombre expression dried up any levity Laura had felt.

  “What’s going on, Jack? What happened?”

  Jack grimaced. “The gun smuggling investigation you and I were working on went sideways.”

  “Sideways?”

  “Remember my friend Ferg?”

  “The U.S. Customs agent? Yes, we met the day before I left for Hawaii. I talked to him and his wife at the border for a couple of minutes. They seem like a nice couple.”

  “He was murdered.”

  “Oh, my God!” Laura’s mouth gaped open. “How? What —”

  “He was killed by the same gun smugglers who we were trying to identify.”

  Laura closed her eyes and put her hand to her face for a moment. When she lowered it, her eyes flashed anger. “When you called me, you said everything was okay! You told me the gun smugglers were arrested in the States.”

  “I didn’t say that everything was okay. I said arrests had been made and the investigation was over.”

  “You should’ve told me!”

  “I’m sorry. I thought about it, but I didn’t want to ruin your holiday. There was nothing you could do.”

  Laura appeared to think about it, then took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “So the people who murdered Ferg were all caught and arrested?”

  “There were four bad guys in the States —”

  “They were the ones supplying guns to Erich Vath in Canada?”

  “Yes. Two of them died in a truck after trying to run over me. One of them was the man who shot Ferg, and the other was his adult son. The other two men were arrested. They were already wanted by the FBI for other murders.”

  “So is that how you hurt your leg, when these guys tried to run over you?”

  “No, it happened earlier, when they opened up on me with an AR-15. I was in a lookout tower. I had to use my belt to slide down a guy wire and sort of crash-land. It tore the ligaments in my knee.”

  “You slid down a wire to escape from a lookout tower?” Laura exclaimed.

  “This white supremacist guy had set up his own survivalist camp on top of a mountain in Washington state. Had security cameras and sensors all over the place, as well as a lookout tower.”

  “And you were there undercover.”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you find out who they were and get in with them?”

  “Our friend introduced me to Vath as a member of the club. Then Vath took me to the States and introduced me to his suppliers. He returned to Canada while his associates took me to this compound where their main cache of guns was stored.”

  Laura knew that by “our friend,” Jack meant their informant, Lance Morgan, president of the Westside chapter of Satans Wrath Motorcycle Club in Vancouver. For safety concerns, they never used his real name in conversation.

  “So our friend really came through for us,” Laura noted.

  “Yes … but later my cover got blown, and things got hot.”

  Laura was quiet for a moment. “I thought your voice sounded funny when you called to congratulate me. When you told me the gun suppliers were arrested, I presumed it was on your info. You didn’t even tell me you were involved in a UC.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “I knew I shouldn’t have gone on holiday before the investigation was over.”

  “Then you’d never get a holiday. We’re always investigating something. Besides, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Ferg still would’ve been killed.”

  Laura looked glum as she eyed Jack. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay. It’s Ferg’s wife who’s hurting.” He glanced at his watch. “Come on, let’s head to the office. This is too depressing to be rehashing.”

  “Do you know when the two new constables will be arriving?” Laura asked on their way out the door.

  Jack shook his head. “No. Neither one has even bothered to call our office.”

  “They’ll be of little use, from what I hear. It seems one of them is too obese to leave the office and the other is on continual medical leave for a bad back. They’re being dumped on us out of spite.” Laura sighed. Her reference was clear: their former boss, Quaile, had been transferred due to incompetence in his handling of
a file Jack and Laura had worked on. Unfortunately, Quaile was now a chief superintendent in Staffing and doing his best to screw over their unit.

  Jack shrugged. “That’s life. We’ve always handled things on our own. That’s not going to change.”

  “No, but it would’ve been nice to get some extra help,” Laura lamented. “We can only do so much on our own.”

  “True.” Jack placed his hand on Laura’s shoulder. “Don’t get in your car yet. There’s something I need to tell you.” She turned to face him. “Erich Vath was shot and killed while I was wrapping things up in the States.”

  “Okay … that’s good, isn’t it? He was supplying guns to our local gangs.”

  “A Walther PPK was left at the scene.”

  Surprise registered on Laura’s face. “The same type of gun our friend once offered to give us.”

  “Nobody else knows that. When I got back from the States, Rose met me at the border to question me about the murder. I suggested a white supremacist could have been responsible, as it was Vath who introduced me to them.”

  Staff Sergeant Rose Wood was their boss. Jack liked her, and sometimes he felt the need to protect her from knowing things that could land her in trouble.

  “Let’s hope she trusts you enough to swallow that. If it was our friend who left his piece at the scene, he would have known we’d recognize it as his. And yet he didn’t bother trying to hide it.” Laura paused. “You gave him the green light to do it, didn’t you?”

  Jack frowned. “I taught you better than to ask questions like that.”

  “It wasn’t a question. I was only thinking out loud.”

  “Learn to keep some thoughts to yourself.” He paused. “There was an element of risk in our friend introducing me to Vath, so I told him that if I nailed whoever killed Ferg, he’d be cut free. The plan was that once I discovered who killed Ferg, I’d tip off the U.S. My true identity would never be known. But then my cover got blown. If Vath blabbed about me — which he definitely would have done once he heard who I was — our friend would’ve been in jeopardy. I gave him my word that I’d protect him to the end.”