Cape Diamond Read online

  Cape Diamond

  A Frank Yakabuski Mystery

  Ron Corbett

  For John Owens

  True Gen writer and good friend

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. All places and characters are imagined. While the story takes place somewhere on the Northern Divide, there are no literal depictions of any city or town on the Divide.

  Prologue

  It happened during a lost season. The murders, the kidnapping of a little girl, the riots in Springfield. A season that was neither autumn nor winter but something in-between, with days of white sun and little wind, the hardwood trees carrying dry, sickly leaves and the rivers running low and black, a season where all the colour in the world seemed to have bled out.

  Frank Yakabuski thought the lost season had something to do with what happened that week. When the proper reference points get lost, when the seasons up and walk away on you, he was of the opinion bad things would follow. Not everyone agreed. Those with a causation view of how the world worked thought it would have played out the same, nothing would have changed, because there was a plan and there was a goal and both had been set long before the lost season descended upon the Northern Divide and the first man was murdered.

  But Frank Yakabuski also believed cause-and-effect people had little sense of place, that they lived in vacuums, connecting dots, forever disappointed in the sum of their actions. As a young cop, Yakabuski had worked peripherally on a case that seemed to involve obvious cause and effect. It brought him to High River in early spring, when the rivers were running wild, and you had to be careful where you trod in case you were swept away and never seen again, which could happen in High River. He had come to take custody of a mother charged with the murder of her only child, a four-year-old boy she had drowned in a bathtub.

  The mother was young, only a teenager, and the evidence against her was damning. She was poor and had a crippling meth addiction. The boy had been taken out of her care by Child and Family Services twice before. On the day of his death, the mother had told several people she no longer wanted the child. The only mystery to the High River cops, and it did not seem like much of one as the mother was again high on meth that day, was why she had called 911 to report the child had drowned.

  Yakabuski had taken her from her cell, and as they were walking to the squad car for the drive to Springfield, the girl stopped. She was a slight girl, with long black hair and a face that would have been pretty before she got high one night and took a razor to it. They stood in the parking lot behind the High River RCMP detachment for a long moment, Yakabuski not wanting to drag her the rest of the way. Eventually she said, “Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Listen.”

  Which he did, and after a few seconds he heard it clear enough. The sound of water coursing its way through the forests and over the streets of High River, down the creeks and tributaries leading to the Springfield River, water running in circles and turning on itself and wondering which divide to tumble over, which watershed to fill, so much coursing water in High River that spring there was a hum in the air that sounded like a faucet running.

  “Why not the river?” the girl said, and after she said it, she started crying.

  When they got back to Springfield, Yakabuski contacted the coroner and asked her to take one more look at the young boy’s body. That’s when they found the ruptured aneurysm in the child’s brain. The mother was released a few days later.

  Place matters. It is even possible the events of that lost season had more to do with place than they ever did with money, crime, vengeance, or any of the other explanations given at the time. For one week, the reference points vanished; the city of Springfield roiled around untethered, and a strange, deadly world came to visit.

  Chapter One

  The first ones to cross Filion’s Field that Monday morning were shift workers heading to the O’Hearn sawmill on Sleigh Bay. The field was on the west end of an escarpment that soared high above the Springfield River, and each worker would have left a high-rise apartment, lunch pail and coffee thermos in hand, then taken the shortcut across the sports field to be standing at the Sleigh Bay bus stop by 5:45 a.m.

  The sun appeared that morning at 6:41, and so the men walked in the dark. Likely they walked with their heads down and eyes to the ground, in no hurry to greet the day, as they were shift workers heading to the O’Hearn sawmill on Sleigh Bay.

  They could have missed it. When the workers were tracked down by police later that day — there were nine in total, all men — not one was interviewed for more than five minutes.

  Next to cross the field were early-morning workers on their way to the city of Springfield: file clerks and security guards, dishwashers and parking lot attendants, construction labourers and split-shift bus drivers. By the time these workers crossed, the sun was in the sky, a winter sun that would have been more white than yellow, that would have shone through the birch and spruce at the edge of the escarpment and the canyon openings between the high-rise apartment buildings, casting shadows that would have lain directly in their path. Police were able to track down twenty-two of these workers. Each was interviewed at length. No one remembered seeing anything unusual about the east-side fence of Filion’s Field that morning.

  The last to cross were children, taking another shortcut, this one leading to a cut-opening in the fence and beyond that a trail through the woods that brought them to Northwood Elementary School. It was hard to get an
accurate number for the children. Police estimated there could have been as many as thirty.

  During first recess, a half-dozen boys returned to Filion’s Field and that was when a police officer spotted them, throwing rocks at something tied to the fence, a target of some sort. The rocks arced in the air. The boys laughed. By then, the sun had risen high enough to be shining directly through the chain-link fence that surrounded the field, casting geometric shadows on the soccer pitch that replicated the metal mesh.

  The cop’s name was Donna Griffin, a young cop who had come to the North Shore projects to serve a family court warrant. She watched the boys, trying to figure out what game they were playing. Eventually, she started walking toward them. When she was spotted, the boys turned as one, like a herd of deer spotting a hunter. Then they took off as one, heading toward the hole in the fence and the path beyond.

  The cop knew better than to give chase, as there was no way she was going to catch those boys. A couple of them had looked fast enough to make All City. She watched them disappear into the woods, and before the last child’s back vanished, she realized no boy had turned to yell at her. Not one jeer or taunt when it was obvious she was not giving chase. A half-dozen boys. From the North Shore projects.

  She kept walking. Was halfway across the pitch when the object tethered to the fence began to take shape, began to occupy time and space and become a thing defined. She stopped fifteen feet short of the object. The shadows fell across her, not in the pattern of chain-link, but as two large intersecting lines. She stared up at the fence and found herself wishing she had chased those boys.

  Chapter Two

  Frank Yakabuski sat in the kitchen of a bachelor apartment near the Springfield River. He was waiting for the teenage boy in front of him to speak. He had been waiting ten seconds and knew it was going to take more time.

  He looked around the boy’s kitchen. It was small and had a bad smell, but there was a window that would have overlooked a city park, except the boy had hung a Bob Marley towel there in place of the drapes he was never going to buy. Yakabuski felt pretty confident Bob Marley would have left the window open. Trees across the street. Good mid-morning sun. Yes, he would have done that.

  What can you say about homage when it gets twisted around like that? Kid didn’t know any better? Kid was given the towel? He sat and tried to figure it out. Eventually the boy said, “I fell, Mr. Yakabuski. Off the roof. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  Yakabuski turned away from the window.

  “That’s the story you’re sticking with? After everything I’ve just shown you?”

  “I was tripping on acid. I went to the roof of my apartment. I thought I could fly. That’s what happened.”

  Five weeks ago, the boy had been found on the sidewalk outside his apartment building, beaten so badly he was still wearing a leg cast and an arm cast and, according to a doctor Yakabuski had spoken to earlier in the day, about to lose most of the vision in his left eye. The boy owed money to the Popeyes motorcycle gang. Many sources had confirmed it.

  But his story, when he was interviewed in hospital, was that he had been high on acid and fallen off the roof of his apartment building. He had been released the day before and Yakabuski, the senior detective with the Springfield Regional Police Force, had come to the boy’s apartment with his medical files to explain how the story was impossible.

  When they had finished examining the x-rays he said, “So, maybe you can get these injuries from falling off the roof of this building, like you say. Problem is, you’d need to climb right back up and jump off three or four more times.”

  That’s when Yakabuski had started waiting. The boy had dirty blond hair and doleful blue eyes, scabs on his forearms that bled from time to time, little trickles of blood that he wiped away, sometimes without looking. He was nineteen, and his name was Jimmy O’Driscoll.

  “Unless you inherited some money when you were in the hospital, you’re making a bad mistake,” said Yakabuski. “You have the same problem that got you beat up in the first place.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “How much do you owe them?”

  “Not a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “You have no criminal record, Jimmy. What you have is a serious meth addiction. Everyone can see that. Tell me what really happened, and we’ll protect you. Get you some help.”

  “You can protect me? From the Popeyes?”

  Yakabuski looked at the boy with sadness. Not frustration. Not disappointment. A familiar sort of sadness. He was watching how desperate people make stupid decisions. Jimmy O’Driscoll may as well have been a train wreck backed up ten seconds.

  “There are no guarantees in this world. You’re right about that, Jimmy. But don’t you think some protection is better than nothing at all?” he said.

  The boy didn’t say anything. Yakabuski didn’t say anything. They waited a little more.

  But the cop saw soon enough how it was going to play out. Beads of sweat rolled down the boy’s forehead, but then his body went rigid, the sweat disappeared, and a sneer worked its way onto his face. He was going to man-up. It would all be acting after this. Nothing genuine or worth noticing.

  Maybe the boy had even convinced himself — in the short time it often takes desperate people to believe in impossible outcomes — that the Popeyes would reward him for his loyalty, for his refusal to turn on them, even after they had maimed him for life. At the very least, they would give him more time. Yakabuski began to gather the medical files.

  “I’ll need an explanation for the report,” he said.

  “An explanation?”

  “An explanation for how you fell off a two-storey house and sustained the injuries you did. I need to write something down, Jimmy.”

  The kid thought about it. Scratched his arms. Thought some more. After a while he said, “It was really good acid.”

  Yakabuski wrote it down. He was about to push one more time when he received a text from the day-duty sergeant at the main Springfield police detachment, telling him he needed to get to Filion’s Field.

  Chapter Three

  Springfield was built on the southern edge of the Great Boreal Forest, at the junction of three great rivers, and the north shore of the largest of those rivers, the Springfield, was always considered the outskirts of town. The North Shore was the place you could find what all cities pushed to the outskirts: cheap bars and cheaper housing, junkyards and one-bay auto shops, bad drunks and hucksters, thieves and junkies. It was French mill workers and Métis shantymen who first settled on the North Shore, coming in the early nineteenth century, in the heyday of square-timber logging in the Springfield Valley. After that it was Cree and Algonquin, more Métis, all displaced by the giant lumber companies that came in the late nineteenth century and needed the rivers to power their pulp mills, their sawmills, their matchstick factories.

  By 1930, the shantytown on the North Shore was nearly the size of the incorporated city of Springfield directly across the river. Every night people in Springfield would hear the sounds of fiddles and washboards drifting across the river, the barking of tinkers and shamans and rum-runners, the songs of drunken men stumbling in and out of the many taverns. Every morning, they would look across the river and see cookfires and smudge pots burning, and a slow-rising river mist that twirled around the cedar lean-tos, the bark-slab cabins, mist out of which would step voyageurs with their bright red sashes; crazed bushmen with long hair and leather britches; black-clad preachers as thin as lepers; boys with bowler caps and brightly coloured suspenders; temperance women from Springfield brought by boat, walking with hand-painted parasols and heavy gowns; everyone milling and jostling, disappearing and reappearing out of the mist and smoke that never seemed to leave the North Shore.

  In 1936, the shantytown was razed by the city of Springfield in order to build a bridge. Becau
se no one living on the north shore had deeded land, city workers simply showed up early one August morning with three barges of bulldozers and cement mixers, followed by another barge containing the sheriffs from Springfield, Perth, and Buckham counties. The sun was just barely above the treeline, the mist still heavy on the river, the cookfires not yet burning when the barges arrived.

  The sheriff of Springfield County walked to the centre of the village and fired his rifle. In the quiet and hesitation of that morning, it made an empty boom, a sound without echo or reverberation that disappeared immediately. Yet it was enough to bring people from their beds, to awaken the men sleeping on the corduroy road outside Les Filles du Roi, and when enough people had gathered, the sheriff told the crowd they needed to be gone by noon.

  When the men objected, the last barge arrived, filled with Irish thugs from Springfield, members of a street gang known as the Shiners. While the sheriffs kept their rifles trained on the crowd, the Shiners began to empty the homes, throwing belongings onto the mud road, taking whatever caught their fancy, setting fire to the homes when they were empty. Anyone who tried to stop the ransacking was beaten.

  Some children were taken back to Springfield, where priests from St. Bridget’s and some of the more devout members of the Temperance League were waiting to claim them. Everyone else gathered what was left of their belongings and marched away. Some marched right into the unincorporated townships and were never seen again. Most though, having some connection to the city of Springfield — whether by work, crime, or drinking habit — hiked up the escarpment that overlooked the North Shore, put down their belongings, and began to build another shantytown.

  Thirty years later, the city came back to raze the second village. Not to build a bridge this time, but to build social housing for the lost souls atop the escarpment. It was mid-’60s idealism run amok, but before the city could be stopped, before anyone on the North Shore could be asked, eight high-rise apartment buildings had been built on the escarpment, seven thousand apartments altogether, with another two hundred row homes connecting the buildings like a charm bracelet. Though as far as Yakabuski could recall, there had never been anything all that charming about the North Shore.