False Witness Read online

  Tom wondered who the man was talking about as he fished the pen from his shirt pocket. He finished his updates with a remarkably steady hand. “Heah.” He held the book, pages up, into the flashlight’s corona.

  “Nice work, Tom!” The Voice exclaimed. “Gold star for penmanship, too.”

  Tom preened in spite of himself. He felt a sudden lightness throughout his body, like some of the damage had been miraculously repaired. As if reading his thoughts, The Voice curled an arm around Tom’s torso. Tom could feel steel cable muscle in that arm as The Voice lifted Tom’s considerable bulk to his feet. He listed a bit, but The Arm kept him from falling over.

  “Separate your feet, Tom,” The Voice instructed. “I can steady you, but you’ll need to be able to walk on your own. Can you do that?”

  Tom nodded carefully. Pain still permeated his head, but it seemed less urgent now, a message light on the answering machine instead of a ringing phone. The more he moved, the better the muscles in his legs felt, and he managed to shuffle a few steps forward. The Arm was still around him but was no longer holding him up.

  “Atta boy,” said The Voice, which was now coming from beside him instead of above. The flashlight was trained on the concrete path that criss-crossed the labyrinth of warehouses. “Just keep walking until I tell you to stop. It won’t be much longer now.”

  Tom shuffled faster, buoyed by The Arm and his own sense of relief. It was almost over. He’d have to get to the hospital, of course, and Kathy and Josh would have a sleepless night for sure. He’d be off work for at least a few days, and he was probably going to need dentures, both of which would set them back a bit financially, but it didn’t matter; all that mattered was that he was alive.

  I think I’ll be looking for another line of work, too, he thought, without a trace of regret.

  Tom heard Voice No. 2’s boots clocking ahead of them on the path as he shuffled along with The Arm. For no reason in particular, the image of his watchman’s clock flashed in his head. He didn’t know where it was. He must have dropped it somewhere. He wondered if he should tell the Voices about it; it was clear they were trying to make it seem like they’d never been to the Highland Storage Yard. And Tom was eager to help them finish whatever the hell it was they were doing.

  Before Tom could speak, Voice No. 2 stopped abruptly ahead of him. “He’s here!” the guy hissed. They were stopped at the north end of the compound, just around the corner from the main entrance.

  The Voice, now at Tom’s ear: “This is where we part ways, Tom. There’s a guy coming through the front gate right now. I want you to walk around this corner and head towards him. He wants to talk to you.”

  And I want to talk to him, Tom thought. If he’s got a cell phone, he can call an ambulance and get ahold of Kathy and Josh and tell them to meet me at the hospital. Foothills is probably closest.

  He turned the corner and sure enough, there was a man near the entrance. The guy was wearing a sport coat and jeans, and carrying some kind of shoulder bag. A camera, maybe? Why would he have a camera?

  The arc-sodiums cast hard shadows on the man’s face, but Tom could make out that he was probably in his early thirties. The man was looking around as if searching for someone. Tom guessed rightly that he, Tom, was the one the guy was looking for, and he shuffled out of the shadows and into the lighted area of the entrance. Tom was about fifty yards away when the guy finally caught sight of him and turned to face him.

  “Tom?” the man shouted. “Tom Ferbey?”

  Tom had just enough time to wonder How does everybody know my name? before a .44-caliber hollow-point slug entered the back of his skull and exited through the front, expanding on impact and erasing the lion’s share of his face in a cloud of red mist and bone fragments. He dropped like a pile of bricks for the second time that evening.

  Tom Ferbey would never see another of his son’s hockey games. He didn’t even get to see the explosion that happened next.

  CHAPTER 1

  Alex Dunn was doing his level best not to smoke. He paced, dug his hands into his pockets, fingered his keys and change, and drummed out a minor tattoo on the top of the rusted blue Dumpster next to the stairs. Nothing worked. It didn’t help that he was in an alley doorway, that great gathering place for smokers of all socio-economic backgrounds, where they could get together, have a puff, and share the silent burden of being the only acceptable pariahs left in modern North American society.

  Finally he gave up and went to work on the pacifier that had taken the place of cigarettes a little over a year earlier: the ragged nail on his right middle finger. He’d almost picked up a pack of DuMauriers last October, on the night he watched Tom Ferbey’s head explode not fifty yards from where he, Alex, had been standing. Then the warehouse had vaporized in a ball of orange heat, like something out of a Michael Bay movie. That was enough to send his body into heavy shock, and for a while he had felt like he’d never be able to get himself under control again. In the end, though, it wasn’t so much will power that had kept the smoke out of his lungs as it was confusion and exhaustion. By the time he’d finished his statement to the cops, and the fire crews had finally wrangled the flames from the warehouse explosion, and the other reporters had finished fishing for quotes that they should have known they weren’t going to get, Alex had simply forgotten to buy a pack on his way home.

  That night had been the beginning of everything that led to him standing in this alley, not-smoking and wondering what the hell was going to happen next.

  As it turned out, what happened next was that Leslie Singer, all five feet of her, suddenly swung the heavy door open so hard it bashed into the brick wall behind its hinges, startling Alex so badly that he was pretty sure he let go a couple of drops of urine underneath his good blue suit pants.

  “Jesus!” Alex yelped, clutching the railing next to the stairs to keep himself from pitching onto his head on the asphalt below.

  Singer poked her round head into the alley, eyeing Alex through comically oversized glasses as if he was some strange new species she’d just discovered. Once again the old gal reminded Alex of Judi Densch’s M in the James Bond movies, although he was pretty sure the MI5 director’s nose wasn’t covered in the telltale gin blossoms of a veteran alcoholic.

  “What in the world are you doing out here?” Singer asked, sounding both baffled and indignant. “Get inside this minute. Justice is afoot!”

  Alex blinked three times in rapid succession. He was still gripping the railing in a white-knuckled fist. “What do you mean, justice? Why can’t you just talk like a normal person?”

  “The verdict is in, my boy!” Singer cried. With that, she spun on her heels like a round little top and strode back the way she’d come, into the halls of the downtown Calgary courthouse, her prosecutor’s robe billowing behind her blocky frame like a black sail.

  Alex stood in the doorway a moment to process this. How could the verdict be in? Closing arguments had wrapped up less than an hour earlier. His own testimony had played a major role in the arguments of both the prosecution and the defense, and he’d watched the morning’s summations with the uncomfortable feeling that his ass was trying to eat his underwear.

  He finally decided to follow Singer into the courthouse. Despite her stubby legs, she had a major head start, and Alex had to jog to catch up. As he did, he tried to puzzle out the turn of events: This had been one of Calgary’s highest-profile murder cases in recent memory, and they’d drawn Gregory “Let-‘Em-Walk” Larocque as their judge. Larocque was famous for being a liberal judge in the grassroots conservative stronghold of Alberta, where even the communists drank Old Style Pilsner and preferred George Strait to Leonard Cohen. Larocque berated prosecutors over what he saw as civil rights violations, and had a reputation for being soft on defendants who had been through the foster care system, or who had grown up with a father who drank, or who had ever been bullied, yadda, yadda, yadda. Alex was pretty sure that Rufus Hodge – organized crime figure, bike gang l
eader, executioner of security guards, and all-round psychopath – could tick off a check mark in any number of those categories.

  It was possible that Larocque had rejected the prosecution’s first-degree murder charge in favor of manslaughter, which meant there would be a chance – a tiny one, certainly, but when it’s your life on the line, tiny chances tend to look as if seen through a microscope – that Hodge could walk out of the courthouse with a suspended sentence. If that was the case, Alex might as well go out and buy a bucket of paint and slap a big red bulls-eye on his jacket.

  He caught up to Singer outside the courtroom that had served as the trial’s home for the last three weeks. Alex was glad to see Chuck Palliser was already there, watching the media outside the building with his trademark smirk as they struggled to get into position. They were obviously caught as flat-footed as Alex was by the quick verdict. As usual, the TV and radio people were frantically searching for someone to stick a microphone in front of. Alex saw Barb Foster, an aging but still pretty reporter from one of the local news affiliates (Chuck liked to call her “the Talking Tits”), fixing her makeup in the side mirror of the station’s mobile van.

  The print guys had a somewhat easier job of it – they just needed to follow the scrum with their digital recorders and then hightail it back to the newsroom for some phone interviews. Alex wondered if any of those calls would come to him. He was the star witness in the case, but he was also their competition. During the month-long trial itself, the Herald and the Sun had referred to him as “a Calgary writer and author of the bestseller, The Devil’s Wristwatch.” (The word “bestseller” always made Alex laugh. This was Canada; he had made just enough from the book to buy a five-year-old Volvo SUV that he didn’t particularly like, but thought was the kind of car a bestselling author might drive). Neither of them mentioned he was a reporter for the Chronicle, mainly because neither paper was willing to admit that any other news media existed in the city.

  The Chronicle, of course, had been playing the story to the hilt, splashing nearly life-size photos of Rufus Hodge’s menacing scowl on the front page half a dozen times. Bob Shippobotham, the rumpled old managing editor, had fought to maintain some semblance of dignity for the paper, but he was constantly overruled by the Chronicle’s hyperactive young publisher, who wanted the term “hero reporter” used in headlines and subheads as often as possible. Sam Walsh had been covering the trial for the Chronicle. The two weren’t friends – Alex had graduated at the top of his class at Carleton, while Walsh had worked his way up from a community paper in some shitsplat town near the U.S. border – but they had a grudging respect for each other.

  Chuck caught Alex’s eye and strolled over, looking happy to leave the media crew behind the floor-to-ceiling windows. As far as Alex was concerned, Chuck Palliser was the only person in this whole mess who deserved the title of hero. Without him, Alex probably would have taken a nosedive off the Calgary Tower into some poor sap’s nachos on one of Stephen Avenue’s trendy patios.

  Chuck smiled and clapped a hand on Alex’s shoulder. He was wearing a dark green suit that clashed with the blue spider-web tattoo that reached from Chuck’s wrist to the middle knuckle of his index finger, a remnant of his days undercover. Alex suddenly heard his mother’s voice in his head, admonishing him that “blue and green should never be seen,” and he had to fight to stifle a manic laugh.

  “What a clusterfuck,” Chuck muttered, missing Alex’s expression. “Funny, eh? The only reporter who could do a decent job of covering this thing is the one guy who’s not allowed to.”

  “Flattery will get you a beer later,” said Alex, trying to sound cooler than he felt. “Assuming Hodge doesn’t walk out of here a free man and look up my address. If that’s the case, I’m pretty sure I’m booked for a radical tonsillectomy via my rectum tonight.”

  Chuck slapped a handful of knobby fingers off the back of Alex’s head. The look on Chuck’s face was one Alex had seen often during the trial and the weeks leading up to it – that look said Sgt. Charles MacRae Palliser was in hardass cop mode, and all bullshit was to be set aside immediately.

  He pointed a finger at Alex’s nose. “What’d I say?”

  Alex sighed. “That I’ve got nothing to worry about?”

  “Don’t say it like that, like you don’t believe me. I told you, Hodge is going down. Period.”

  “Look, Chuck, no disrespect, I owe you a lot, but it’s easy for you to say there’s nothing to worry about – you carry a gun. I carry a pen, and contrary to what a certain proverb might lead you to believe, it’s really not mightier than a sword. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty goddamn flimsy.”

  Palliser opened his mouth to answer but Singer spoke first. “I agree with Charles,” she said distractedly. “The verdict is guilty. But now is not the time to be discussing the matter.” She extended a pudgy arm and gently moved Alex and Palliser back towards the wall as the crowd of reporters parted.

  Singer had seen what the other two hadn’t: four heavily fortified guards were escorting Rufus Hodge to Courtroom One to learn what the Queen, via her servant Gregory Larocque, had up her dusty old sleeve for his future. Alex felt his pulse quicken and tasted the coppery tang of adrenaline in his mouth. This was the closest he’d ever been to the man who had executed Tom Ferbey right in front of him. Even now, months later, Alex would pitch upright in bed in the middle of the night, a silent scream hissing out of his dry throat, the image of Ferbey’s vaporized face etched indelibly into his mind’s eye.

  Time slowed in Alex’s mind as Hodge and his entourage came within easy striking distance. He heard Chuck bark something about the guards being stupid motherfuckers, but it seemed as if the sound was traveling through water instead of air. The sense of time moving like molasses deepened as the guards pulled Hodge by his arms to the other side of the hallway.

  Hodge swiveled his head to face Alex. He’d seen the killer’s face a hundred times before, but never this close; at this range, Alex could see the relief map of scar tissue on Hodge’s high forehead, the deep furrows under his eyes and on his cheeks, the pock marks and pits that whispered “you should see the other guy.” His shoulder-length rat-brown had been pulled back from his high forehead in a ponytail for the occasion.

  Hodge locked his gaze with Alex for only a moment, but it was enough to slide a rusty blade of fear into his belly. Hodge’s eyes were the color of lead. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, Alex thought, this guy’s got a nuclear winter blowing through the spot where his is supposed to be. Hodge finally turned to face front again, but before he broke eye contact, Alex thought he might have seen something in that gray gaze – but what?

  Before he could give it any more thought, Chuck was ushering him into the seating area of the courtroom while Singer shuffled over to the prosecutor’s table. Hodge was led to the prisoner’s dock, where he could watch the proceedings behind a wall of Plexiglass.

  Chuck gave Alex a wink and chucked him lightly on the shoulder as they sat down.

  “Look sharp,” he said with a grin. “It’s showtime.”

  #

  Bike gang leader gets life for murder

  Hero reporter pleased with sentence for man who shot security guard in front of him

  By Sam Walsh

  Exclusive to The Chronicle

  Alex Dunn will sleep easier tonight knowing that Rufus Hodge, the leader of Alberta’s largest motorcycle gang, will be behind bars for at least a quarter of a century.

  Hodge, 38, leader of the Wild Roses and believed to be the largest organized crime kingpin in the province, was found guilty Tuesday of first-degree murder in the execution-style shooting of Calgary security guard Thomas Ferbey last October. Justice Gregory Larocque handed Hodge life in prison without possibility of parole for 25 years – the maximum punishment for such an offense – in an unusual same-day sentencing.

  Dunn, the Chronicle’s long-time crime reporter and author of the bestseller The Devil’s Wristwatch, was an eye-witn
ess to the slaying. He said the verdict and sentence were “justice served” and that he hopes it will bring some peace to Ferbey’s widow, Katherine, and their 14-year-old son, Josh.

  “I’m just glad this is all over,” said Dunn. “I hope now we can all get some sleep, knowing that Rufus Hodge is off the streets for good.”

  Katherine Ferbey was not available for comment. She did not attend any of the three-week trial and has not spoken to the media since her husband’s death.

  Tom Ferbey was killed last Oct. 10 after uncovering a huge cache of methamphetamine in a warehouse at the Highland Storage Yard in the city’s southeast corridor. Ferbey, who worked as a security guard at the site, had called Dunn several times in the evenings leading up to Oct. 10, saying he had a hunch that one of the warehouses was being used for illicit purposes.

  Dunn said he initially thought Ferbey was overreacting, but decided to investigate after the guard called to say someone had entered the compound without authorization and was skulking around a particular warehouse. Shortly after arriving at Highland, Dunn watched in horror as Rufus Hodge shot Ferbey at point-blank range, killing him instantly.

  Dunn described the event in his testimony last month as “something no one should ever have to see. That single moment will be with me for the rest of my life.”

  The chaos didn’t end there, however. Within moments of Ferbey’s death, the warehouse containing the drugs was destroyed by what forensic investigators determined to be C4 military-grade plastic explosives. The resulting blaze caused more than $2 million damage to the Highland compound before firefighters got it under control four hours later.

  RCMP Sgt. Charles Palliser testified that the storage unit had been rented by a shell corporation owned by the Alberta-based Wild Roses, believed to be the most powerful outlaw motorcycle gang west of Quebec. Palliser, who spent many years working undercover for the Quebec Provincial Police before joining the interjurisdictional Western Canadian Organized Crime task force two years ago, told the court that the explosion had destroyed any evidence, but he believes the building likely housed as much as a ton of methamphetamine. The drug, commonly known as meth, crystal or crank, was cooked in Wild Roses labs located deep in the extensive bush country between Edmonton and Grand Prairie.