LITMIR.BIZ

      RendezVous Crime

      an imprint of Napoleon & Company

      Toronto, Ontario, Canada

      www.napoleonandcompany.com

      Printed in Canada

      14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      For Abby

      –

      Who never ceases to amaze me.

      CONTENTS

July, 1995

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

       Five

       Six

       Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       Eleven

       Twelve

       Thirteen

       Fourteen

       Fifteen

       Sixteen

       Seventeen

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       Twenty-One

       Twenty-Two

       Twenty-Three

       Twenty-Four

       Twenty-Five

       Twenty-Six

       Twenty-Seven

       Twenty-Eight

       Twenty-Nine

       Thirty

       Thirty-One

       Thirty-Two

       Thirty-Three

JULY, 1995

      A farm field outside

      Kravica, Bosnia-Herzegovina

      The men—although to say “men” is inaccurate, for many of them are just boys—stand in rows, stripped to the waist. Their flesh is stark white except on their faces and arms where the sun has touched. They are terrified of the unknown—or worse, the expected—their chests working like bellows as they try to sort out what comes next, how this works. As though the logistics matter. The bus ride offered time to think, too much time, and it seemed it was true after all, how your life really did flash before your eyes. Or at least these bits and pieces. Moments of happiness, tears, first sex and first cigarettes, the simple pleasure of a smile induced at a moment when needed most, a bottle raised in celebration. Sons, daughters, wives. Fathers, mothers, holidays, and smells of cooking, of home. All of the small gestures we take for granted across a lifetime.

      Even as they are coming off the bus, they hear the gunshots. The crack that breaks across the skyline. Pungent cordite hanging in the air. The stink of death is unmistakable, sweet sickness wafting in the light summer breeze. For they all know what death smells like after these years of war, neighbour to neighbour, street to street, house to house. My god, the things we have done to one another…

      This one thinks briefly of trying to make a run for it—perhaps there is something nobler in being shot while attempting to flee. But there is no time. Their captors are efficient, mechanical, managing this as though it were a line in a factory. Drill here, move the thing down the line. Drill. Next. Drill. Next…

      The shots report, and the men jump, expectant. Tense. Blindfolded. They wait. Hear the jagged breathing of the men in front and behind, the whimpering of these big men you schooled with and lived with and drank with, and the shots make you jump, and there is no dignity to be salvaged in this place, not here, not now.

      Hear the bodies folding to the ground like dropped bags of chicken seed.

      You’re crying, too, and you don’t want to give them this final piece of your possession.

      To face this chin up, shoulders back, is all you want to do. But it is hard, the hardest thing you have ever done in a life that has never been what you would call easy—though right now you would trade the worst day of your past for one more tomorrow.

      Even to will your legs to move ahead takes energy, focus.

       Crack!

      And it will be your turn now to anticipate the slow recoil of the final shot.

      I should be dead by now, but there is work to do.

      - Czeslaw Milosz

PROLOGUE

      He was sitting on a bench at Queen’s Quay watching the late-summer tourists stroll along the Toronto harbourfront with their cameras and their holiday smiles, just sitting there with a soft-serve ice cream cone melting down the side of his hand, when he heard the screams for help. A girl’s voice, shrill. He sat bolt upright, turning his head to decipher the location of the distress. A flash of movement, a commotion within a gaggle of people gathered on the dock beside one of those tourist charter boats that charged a fortune for a two-hour putter around the harbour. McKelvey dropped the cone, closing the distance in a dozen fast strides.

      He came to the dock area just short of the

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