blurred windshield it looked like a large white rag streaked with red dangling on the gate. It wasn’t until he stepped from his car into the rain and the night that he was sure it was Niki. His cry was filled with anguish and fear.
“No!”
A large spike had been driven through the dog’s neck, pinning her to the top bar of the wooden gate. Most of the blood had been flushed away by the rain, but her once-beautiful snowy coat was still streaked with red.
Niki, Dog of the North (as her registration papers identified her), had been a much loved member of the family since she arrived nine years ago, a present for Lee Henry’s third birthday, a tiny ball of bouncing, whirling, tumbling, fluffy white Samoyed.
Listeners to the nightly Grant Henry syndicated open line radio talk show were often amused by the stories he related and invented about her, but as horrified as he was at the sight of the sad, limp bundle dangling grotesquely on the gate, the terror exploding inside him, sucking the breath from his lungs, had nothing to do with the family pet.
Frantically, he lifted the metal latch and threw his shoulder into the gate, jolting it partially open. The limp torso swung violently on the spike. As part of his fitness regime, Grant had jogged that gravel lane countless times and knew it was almost half a kilometre to the house. Driving would have been faster, but for reasons he would later have difficulty explaining, he abandoned the car, motor idling, door flung open, headlights blazing, and ran.
As he approached the corner of the sprawling house faintly discernible in the glow of the distant car lights, his heart racing, lungs on fire, he began shouting.
“Lee! Lee! Madame Gratton!”
He wrenched open the kitchen door and plunged into thick darkness.
“Lee! Honey, where are you? Madame Gratton, are you all right?”
Moving from memory now, in suffocating blackness, room to room; breath, sobs of desperation.
At first he thought the electricity was out again, something, which occurred with maddening frequency in these Quebec hills a few kilometres north of Ottawa. The crunch of broken glass beneath his feet revealed the truth. Every light in the house had been smashed – except one. A faint sliver of light splashed the carpet beneath the door to his office. Cautiously, he pushed the door open and recoiled in horror. A blood-soaked cloth had been draped over his office desk lamp, which projected a narrow rectangle of light. Centered in the grisly, muted spotlight was a familiar piece of metal. Its numbers had been very carefully painted over, but clearly visible was the fleur-de-lis and the word Quebec across the top. Along the bottom was the provincial slogan: Je me souviens.
He recognized it immediately: The licence plate, which had disappeared from his Lexus two nights ago, removed from the car sitting in his driveway as he slept only a few metres away.
But of his twelve-year-old daughter, Lee Tracy Henry, and their housekeeper, good friend and neighbour Therèse Gratton, there was not a trace. They had disappeared into the rainy October night.
Ottawa, 12:14 AM • DAY ONE
Jack (Jake) Barr would not have been on duty that night if he hadn’t broken his staff sergeant’s arm. As the chief complained bitterly during the subsequent disciplinary hearing, it wasn’t so much the broken arm as the fact that it happened during a charity hockey game. “Did it ever occur to you to take it easy, to slow down a bit for Chrissakes?” the chief had asked, shaking his head in exasperation. Jake only stared at him. After cleaning pigpens on a prairie farm for most of the first twenty years of his life, Jake Barr had a lot of living to catch up on. The thought of taking it easy, of slowing down for anything, never entered his mind.
The price was paid. Jake was yanked from the youth services section where he had been the bright (if not so young) rising star, and ordered back into uniform. He was behind the wheel of an unmarked Dodge, cruising the market area on hooker patrol when he got the call from dispatch.
“Jake, your buddy, Grant Henry, the radio man?
“He just phoned...frantic...looking for you. Sounded like he’d just had the shit kicked out of him...wants you to phone him at home right away. Geez Jake, sounds like he’s got one big problem. I don’t like the smell of this one at all. Think I should give the boys across the river a call?”
Jake’s response was emphatic. “Don’t say anything to anybody until I find out what the hell is going on up there. Hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah, okay Jake, whatever you say. Just let me know what happens and listen, if you get yourself into a pack of shit up there in froggy land don’t say I didn’t warn you. He says you got his cell number.”
Grant answered the first ring.
“The bastards got Lee, Jake. Therese Gratton too it looks like.” He sounded frightened and angry. “They killed Niki. Nailed her to the gate!” He was almost shouting now. “For God sakes, get up here as fast as you can and Jake...listen, whatever you do, be careful. I think they’re still out there! And,” his voice calmer now, almost a whisper... “Let’s keep the Quebec police out of this as long as we can. Right now, I’m telling you, I don’t trust a damn soul...especially not on this side of the river!”
12:21 AM • DAY ONE
The rain pounded down harder than ever as the Dodge crossed the Ottawa River, left Ottawa and Ontario and climbed into Quebec’s Gatineau Hills. It was four lanes most of the way, traffic was light and twenty five minutes later Jake whipped in behind Grant’s still-idling car and braked.
“What the hell...!”
He’d been sitting at a desk or behind the wheel of a car for most of the past eight months, but his reflexes were still good. He dove out the car door onto the gravel and in the same motion, yanked his service revolver from its holster. For just the briefest of moments, he’d caught a glimpse of what he was almost certain was a rifle barrel glinting dully in the headlights.
Jake was rolling in the mud and the gravel away from the car and its lights, when he saw the gun again. This time there was no mistaking it. There, just to his left, no more than twenty metres away, at the top of the knoll, which guarded the laneway.
He saw the flash, heard the crack, jumped to his feet and darted to the rear of his cruiser where he crouched, his heart flip-flopping wildly. He couldn’t return fire without revealing his position and had no idea how many were out there anxious to put a drain in him, or where they were. He was trying to quiet his breathing when, from the direction of the house, he heard Grant shouting.
“Jesus, Grant,” Jake muttered to himself under his breath, “freeze your ass just where she is. These sonsabitches mean business.”
He was about to vacate his position of safety and make a dash for the house when, from the knoll almost directly to his left, someone shouted in a deeply accented voice.
“Fucking Anglais.”
Jake whirled and snapped off three quick shots at the sound. In the same motion, he dove to the ground, rolled several times to his right and skidded down a small embankment onto Grant’s front lawn where he lay as still as his heavy breathing would allow, listening. For what seemed an eternity, but was really no more than two or three minutes, he heard nothing but the murmur of the idling cars just above and
