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  “That’s the thing,” said Darryl. “I have absolutely no fucking idea whatsoever.”

  “You’ve never seen it before?”

  “Nope,” Darryl said. “The one thing I can tell you—that’s a document reference.”

  “A document?”

  Darryl nodded. “They have this byzantine protocol for naming all their municipal documentation. They all look like a variant of that.”

  “How do you know?” Colin asked.

  Darryl rolled his eyes. “Ugh. My company’s been dealing with city bureaucracy forever. Believe me, I know. After a while, you start to see this shit in your sleep.”

  “Okay,” Colin said. “So if it’s a document, how do you call it up?”

  “Can’t,” Darryl said. “You see the second part? The SCCPD part? That means it’s a secured document. You can’t just open it up on any workstation and look at it.”

  “So where would I find it?”

  Darryl thought for a minute. “They would probably have an actual paper copy of it in the records department at city hall,” he said. “But only authorised individuals would be able to look at that, too.”

  Colin drummed his fingers on the desk and stared at the screen. “Thanks Darryl. There’s just one more tiny thing I need you to do.”

  Darryl looked suspicious. “What?”

  “If you can, send me a list of every name in the database associated with that file. Use an anonymous email address like you did back in college.” Colin started walking to the door.

  “Are you kidding?” Darryl said. “Do you—”

  “One of the names attached to that file has killed three people already,” Colin said. “I’m sure of it. And I have a feeling they’re not done yet. This could be our only chance to catch them.”

  “But—”

  Colin cracked the door open and checked the hallway to make sure it was clear. “Thanks, Darryl. I owe you one. I’ll see you around.”

  Colin slipped out and closed the door behind him. Darryl sighed.

  “Actually, Colin,” he muttered. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  -48-

  Westhill city hall had been built prior to the repeal of a bylaw that prevented the height of any structure in the downtown core from exceeding that of the twin spires of the gothic Church of Our Lady, which sat on a hill at the top of Seville Street.

  Before it was built, city employees were spread out over numerous rented properties all around the city. The council used a county courtroom. The planning department was located in an old hockey arena. The bylaw enforcement unit occupied what had at one time been a former massage parlour that had been shut down after the city passed an ordinance requiring all therapists to be registered.

  The new building was designed to bring all of those departments together under one roof. The problem was, the footprint allotted for the new building, when combined with the height restriction, created only about a third of the needed space.

  That was when somebody had the genius idea to modify the plan so that most of the building would actually sit underground. As a result, only five stories of the building’s eleven were visible from the street. People started nicknaming it “the iceberg”. City employees tended to be easy to pick out in a crowd. Since most of them rarely saw the sun, they had a waxy, vampiric appearance.

  The records office was at the bottom of what Colin rather amusingly thought they referred to as “tower two”. Rather than wait for the one functioning elevator in the lobby, he pulled open the door and jogged down the echoing metal stairs.

  The records office looked like a dentist’s waiting room. The walls were a dull white with a couple of worn chairs, on one of which sat a Reader’s Digest with Kate Middleton on the front. A desk at the far end had a sliding glass panel designed, Colin guessed, to make sure no one could just vault into the back and start paging through garbage collection schedules and pool water inspection reports. The overhead fluorescent bulbs gave everything a greenish tinge that was unsettling. It was like stepping into the dream sequence of a David Lynch movie.

  Colin approached the glass. The chair on the other side of the desk was empty. There was no bell or buzzer that he could see. He thought about pulling the panel open, but that would seem presumptuous. On the other side of the desk were rows and rows of storage shelves that reached from the floor to the ceiling.

  “Hello?” he said, tapping on the glass.

  There was a slight commotion in the back and then a young woman appeared. She had, like most city hall employees, pale white skin that was offset violently by her bright red hair. Colin guessed that she was his age or slightly younger. Her nametag identified her as Nadine.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, sliding the panel back.

  Before Colin could say anything, he was interrupted by a booming male voice from the back.

  “Nadine! How many times I gotta tell you to keep the blueprints separate from the engineering schematics? They come in here and can’t find them again, that means I’ll get in shit again! Which means you’ll be in shit! Again!”

  Nadine closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m with somebody right now, Jerry!” she shouted back, then turned her attention back to Colin. “Sorry.”

  Colin smiled sympathetically. “My boss is the same way,” he said quietly. “I misfiled one of his account records once and he acted like I just reversed over his first born.”

  “He’s always like that,” Nadine whispered. “I just started. The last girl quit after five days. I’m starting to understand why. Anyway, how can I help you?”

  Colin took out his notebook and spun it around, pointing to where he had written down the name of the document Darryl had found. “Actually, I just need to see that one right there.”

  Nadine looked at the notebook and started typing the file name into the computer on the desk next to her. Once she had entered it all, she hit enter and the computer started its search. The search seemed to take a long time.

  “Okay, here it is,” she said, evidently proud of herself for locating it. “Huh.”

  “What?” Colin asked, trying to pretend that he had not been anticipating this.

  Nadine squinted at the screen. “I think this means it’s a restricted document,” she said, tapping her chin.

  “What does that mean?” Colin asked.

  “I think that means it’s only accessible to the signatories,” Nadine said.

  “Crap,” Colin said. “My boss sent me down here to pick it up. If I come back without it, he’s going to shoot me in both feet and say I stepped on the gun.”

  Nadine noticed Colin’s pen, which had the Westill College insignia on the side. “Did you go to Westhill?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Colin said. “Still do.”

  “I went there for business administration!” she said brightly. “How that led to a job in here—”

  The voice from the back interrupted again. “Nadine! Are you gonna leave me to do this by myself? I still got half of last year to do!”

  “I’m helping somebody, Jerry!” she yelled back, then added under her breath: “More than he ever does.” She turned back to Colin. “Did you say you work at Westhill?”

  Colin’s mind scrambled with how best to answer the question. Would a yes improve or destroy his chances?

  “Peter Devries is one of the signatories,” she said. “Is he the one who sent you to get it?”

  “Uh…yes!” Colin said. “That’s him! Unfortunately.”

  “I met him once at graduation,” Nadine said. “His eyes were really bloodshot. Like he’d been doing drugs or something. He was pretty spaced out.”

  “That’s him on a good day,” Colin said. “Those are rare.”

  Nadine continued to tap the screen, thinking. “I can’t let you take it out of here,” she said, looking back over her shoulder. “But I could maybe let you look at it for a few minutes. If you didn’t tell anybody. Would that help?”

  Colin pretended to think about it. �
�Yeah…I could probably get what I needed that way.”

  “Just a sec,” Nadine said, sliding the glass panel closed and disappearing into the stacks. Colin turned around and was surprised to find himself looking at a large model sitting on the table to his left. He had been so focused when he came in that he had walked right past it without even noticing it was there.

  Colin walked over and crouched down to look at the model more closely. It was about six by six and sat on a metal table with folding legs, one of which was slightly bent. The model itself depicted a building that looked more like a fortress: there were guard towers, walls topped with miniature rolls of razor wire, spotlights and even a miniature corrections transport van parked in the yard.

  It was a prison.

  Even at a small scale, Colin could tell that it was a large prison, much larger than the 35-cell holding facility the city currently used, which adjoined the courthouse. The level of detail was impressive. Colin could see motion-sensing lasers on the perimeters, miniature guards patrolling with a lunging German shepherd, and even the bank of controls inside the tower of the main command center. On the side was a cutaway of the foundation showing concrete pilings driven deep into the ground under the walls, which Colin supposed were designed to discourage tunnelling.

  The model must have cost a fortune. It certainly looked too expensive to be sitting on a rickety metal foldout table.

  And if the model was expensive, Colin had no doubt that the real thing would cost hundreds of millions. Could, in fact, possibly even top a billion by the time all the overages, delays and interest payments were factored in.

  Colin looked up from the model to a large poster mounted on the wall behind it. The legend at the top identified it as “Proposed Site For Federal Maximum Security Incarceration Facility #27658-5001C”. The poster was a large aerial view of the city with the main streets and ward districts identified by green and red lines. A large blue box in the top right was marked off to indicate where the prison was supposed to go.

  Colin knew the site. It was a farm property about three kilometres from the city’s eastern edge. The farm site had been bought up by the federal government six years earlier as a potential site for a new natural gas power plant. That government, however, had lost the next election to a party that had campaigned hard on an anti-crime platform. Once the dust had cleared, the new administration canned the power plant at a loss of $350 million and announced that the site was going to be re-purposed for one of eight new super prisons they wanted to build across the country to hold all the people they planned to lock up as a result of their tough new “guns, gangs and drugs” laws.

  The announcement that the gas plant was going to be replaced with a prison had not changed the minds of the small but vocal group of NIMBYs who came out of the woodwork to oppose the idea. Both were equally objectionable. Despite the fact that the east end was the heart of the city’s former industrial core and, as a result, its most economically sluggish sector, its residents were not crazy about the idea of living next to the country’s most dangerous collection of murderers, rapists, arsonists and drug dealers (even though many of them probably lived there already). Not swayed by rosy promises of jobs or “collateral benefits”, they took every opportunity they could find to let representatives know they wanted the project canned.

  And, indirectly, it looked like they might have gotten their wish. The government saw two members leave caucus to sit as independents after an acrimonious cabinet shuffle and suddenly found itself in a minority situation. They had to scramble for votes to get simple budgets passed, so a lot of their most contentious or divisive items, like the anti-crime bill and the resulting tidal wave of money for new prisons, were put on hold. The prison project had disappeared into legislative limbo, possibly never to return,

  City council had been strongly divided on the issue, too. The east end was already the site of a waste processing facility and a quarry, so it wasn’t exactly a hotbed of residential development. No builder was interested in acquiring any of that land, a lot of which had been subjected to years of agrichemical runoff and would require millions in remediation before it could be rendered habitable. If we aren’t going to use the site for anything else, they reasoned, why not a multi-million dollar federal government facility. A lot of city business leaders and other movers and shakers had lined up in favour of the project. The budget impasse, however, seemed to have left most of them dangling in the wind.

  “Hello! Is this what you’re looking for?”

  Colin snapped his head around to see that Nadine had returned to the window. She was holding up what looked like a thick report with a fancy black cardboard binding. Colin practically ran over to the panel and reached out for it, but she lifted it back out of his grasp.

  “Now you can’t take it out of this room,” she whispered, looking nervously back to where her boss was working in the back.

  “Okay,” Colin nodded.

  “And I can only let you look at it for a couple of minutes,” she said. “My boss was supposed to be taking lunch, but he’s putting it off until we get the planning documents filed.”

  “Sure, right.”

  She handed Colin the report. He took it quickly and flipped it around in his hands to see the title:

  FRESH START EDUCATIONAL REHABILITATION

  COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP PROGRAM

  (FSC5001-SCCPD)

  Developed By

  WESTHILL SUPERMAX DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATION

  [ SECURED DOCUMENT ]

  [ SIGNATORY ACCESS ONLY ]

  Colin flipped the cover open and found the list of signatories. Devries’s name was on the list. So was the mayor, the chief of police, the local MPP and the current justice minister.

  “Holy shit,” he said, unable to contain himself. He flipped to the summary pages and started reading. The more he read, the wider his eyes got.

  Nadine stayed at the window. She evidently didn’t trust him with the document alone. “Is that what you were looking for?”

  Colin nodded. “Oh yeah.” It seemed like he had only been looking at it for a few seconds when the voice of Nadine’s supervisor barked from the back.

  “Nadine! Where did you put the conditional zoning stuff?”

  Nadine reached for the report. “Sorry. I need it back now.”

  Colin clutched the report and gave her his best desperate face. “Two more minutes?”

  Nadine looked conflicted. “Well…”

  “Nadine!”

  She sighed. “Okay. Two minutes. Just don’t run off on me!”

  Colin gave her what he hoped was his most trustworthy smile. “Of course not.”

  Nadine closed the window and headed back into the stacks. Colin waited until she was out of sight, then stuffed the report under his jacket and ran out of the room.

  -49-

  Colin’s phone buzzed almost as soon as he stepped through the doors and onto the city hall rotunda.

  It was starting to spit rain. The office workers who had been sitting at the benches and picnic tables around the fountain were hurriedly packing up their containers and tossing their fast food packaging to head back inside. The temperature had dropped noticeably and the wind was picking up. He could see the jazz festival banners on the light posts whipping sharply.

  It was Janice.

  “Colin! Where the hell have you been?” she almost yelled. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last half hour!”

  “I was in the basement of city hall,” Colin said. “It’s like a copper mine down there as far as cell reception. Listen, though. You’re not gonna believe—”

  “Colin!” Janice interrupted. “You’re all over the news! The cops are looking for you!”

  Colin stopped next to the fountain. “What?”

  Janice’s voice was just a notch below hysteric. “They’ve issued a warrant for your arrest!” she said. “They’re saying you should be considered armed and extremely dangerous!”

  Colin laughed.
She had to be joking. He had to admit, though, that her panic had seemed totally genuine. “Yeah, right! Listen, I was just—”

  “Colin, I’m not kidding!” she said. “They said they found something at your apartment linking you to the murders! Your picture is all over the news!”

  Colin realized that she wasn’t joking. “Found something? What the hell did they find?”

  “They didn’t say!” Janice said. “But whatever it is, it must be serious enough that every cop in the city is looking for you right now!”

  Colin racked his brain. He hadn’t thought Giordino was serious about wanting to search his apartment. Certainly not serious enough to go out and get a search warrant to do it, anyway. But what in the hell could they have found? There was nothing of much value in the place except for his coffee maker. His first thought was that Betts had planted something. That would almost make sense. But what?

  Colin pushed that question out of his mind. He would deal with that later. His immediate concern was what he was going to do right now.

  The square was emptying out pretty quickly, but it was still a public space full of people who might have seen the noon news. Drawing attention to himself was not a good idea. He tucked his head down and started moving down the steps to the street. He was parked four blocks over. If he could just make it to his car, maybe he could make it out.

  “Listen, Janice,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I think I know what’s going on. Stay where you are. Lock the door and don’t open it for anybody else. Even if the police threaten to break it down.”

  “Colin, I’m freaking out in a pretty major way over here,” she said. “I was looking at some old land transfer records when your face suddenly popped up on a news alert and—”

  “I don’t know what they found or say they found at my apartment, but I haven’t killed anybody, I promise,” Colin said. “I know how that sounds, but it’s the best I can do. Just sit tight and I’ll be right there.”

  “Colin—”

  “I just have one more interview to do first,” Colin said. He hung up and stuck the phone in his pocket. The rain was starting to fall harder now. It was awkward walking with the binder under his jacket, but he didn’t have anywhere else he could keep it where it wouldn’t get soaked. It was too thick to roll up and stuff into one of the pockets of his leather jacket.