Last of the Independents. Sam Wiebe

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      Dedication

      For my parents, Al and Linda,and my brothers, Dan and Josh

      Acknowledgements

      Thanks to my editor, Laura Harris; everyone at Dundurn and the Crime Writers of Canada; Jess Driscoll; Mercedes Eng; Mike Stachura; Andrew and Lauren Nicholls; and Mel Yap.

      All errors are mine, all resemblance to real people or events entirely coincidental.

      “It is the struggle of all fundamentally honest men

      to make a decent living in a corrupt society.”

      — Raymond Chandler

      I

      Business Is My Trouble

      The younger Thomas Kroon leaned forward on the clients’ bench and said, “There’s no real polite way to say this, Mr. Drayton. Someone’s fucking our corpses and we’d like it to stop.”

      “The sooner the better,” his father added.

      I stared at them across the table that served as my desk, past a half-eaten sandwich and a cold cup of tea, past the keyboard, past the day’s filing and the week’s accounting, and over the mountainous sinkhole of despair that was the Loeb file. The two Thomas Kroons wore identical broad-lapelled suits with the same gold, silk diamond-patterned tie. They had the same mahogany-coloured hair, though I suspected the senior Thomas Kroon’s was the result of chemical treatment. Neither looked too encouraged by the furnishings of my second-floor Hastings Street office. When one of them shifted on the cinder-block-and-plank bench, the other had to hurry to find a new equilibrium.

      At the word “fucking,” my assistant, Katherine Hough, stopped typing. I waited for her to resume before I said, “This has happened multiple times?”

      “Four,” Kroon the Younger said.

      “Three that we’re sure of,” his father corrected.

      “And how did you deduce that this wasn’t some sort of …,” I struggled for the word, “…indigenous secretion?”

      “I know what ejaculate looks like, Mr. Drayton.”

      “It’s not exactly easy for us to sit here admitting this,” the younger Kroon said. I’d started to think of him as Thomas Junior, even though he’d prefaced our consultation by stating that he wasn’t named Junior, hated being called Junior, and anyway it was inaccurate because he and his father had different middle names. “Like the Bushes,” I’d said. The comparison hadn’t been well-received.

      “The first one was just over two months ago,” Elder said. “The 27th, a Monday. I normally open by myself during the week, but Thomas was with me. We came in early that morning to get started on draining a young woman who had arrived Sunday night.”

      Kroon the Younger added, “Draining fluids for embalming, he means.”

      “We found ejaculate on the outside of the bag, and when we opened the bag up, more ejaculate in the woman’s oral cavity.”

      “Which wasn’t there when she arrived,” Younger said. “I was there when the Removal guys dropped her off Sunday night. The bag was pristine.”

      I took notes. “What was the woman’s name?”

      “Ethel Peace,” Elder said.

      “And what’d you do?”

      “Cleaned her up, of course.” Elder indignant.

      “He means did we call the cops,” Younger said to him, turning to me for a nod of confirmation. “We wanted to, but I felt, if that kind of thing ever gets out, we’re finished. Bad news travels at warp speed in the funeral business. So we put up a camera over the freezer, figuring next time we’d catch this person.”

      Elder inclined his head toward his son. “Someone kept forgetting to turn it on at the end of the day. Two weeks later, Violet Thorvaldsson, same modus operandi, as you folks say.”

      Us folks. I said, “Did you get footage of the other incidents?”

      “There was only one other attack,” Elder said. “Two days ago. Maureen Lennox. Some of the ejaculate happened to land on an adjacent bag.”

      “You don’t know that,” his son said.

      To me the father said, “Think it’s safe to say he wasn’t interested in both Mrs. Lennox and Donald Peng.”

      “But there’s no video of the incident or incidents?” I said.

      “The cameras were on,” Younger said. Anticipating his father’s interjection he added, “I set them, I’m sure. They’d been switched off from the office. Someone entered the password and exited the program, then restarted it about an hour later.”

      “How many people know the password?”

      “The two of us alone,” Elder said, readjusting his weight on the bench so that Younger had to scramble to stay poised on the edge.

      “Well, he says that,” Younger said. “But our tech guy Jag has it, and I’m sure Carrie, our secretary, has it, which means it’s probably written down somewhere, which means anyone in the office could find it.” He snorted. “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and how the secretary does it. I’m sure you deal with the same thing.”

      Without looking up, Katherine said, “I’m not his secretary.”

      Younger shrugged, whatever. “There’s about eight people in the office. Some of them know. We want to pay you to put a stop to this.”

      “You could just change your password and leave the cameras running 24/7,” I said.

      “To give you the straight deal, Mr. Drayton, we don’t know what to do when we catch this person. If it comes out we didn’t report the first four —”

      “First three,” Elder corrected.

      “— we’d be put out of business. We can’t turn this person over to the police.”

      “But he must be made to understand this can’t continue,” Elder reaffirmed.

      “You want me to find him and give him a stern talking to?”

      “Or geld him,” Younger said. “Whatever keeps him from fucking our corpses.”

      “I don’t geld,” I said. “But I’ll find who he is and confront him with the evidence, if that’s what you want.” Nods of affirmation from both Kroons. “Three hundred dollars a day plus expenses and equipment fees.”

      “Sounds equitable,” Elder said.

      I dredged up a contract СКАЧАТЬ