The Weight of Stones Read Online Free PDF Page B

pushed the limits of a life, real or imagined...in this way did you fail your son...
    â€œMorning, Detective.”
    McKelvey looked up from the cup he was stirring and stirring, endlessly stirring, and he smiled at the youthful face of the administrative assistant who had been hired just a short while ago. Amy—he couldn’t remember her last name. She was standing in the hallway, a stack of files clenched under an arm. She was a striking young woman dressed in a form-fitting skirt and blazer combination. The guys were always giving her a hard time, kids in a playground. They disguised their lust for her behind jokes and pranks, and McKelvey believed she didn’t mind the attention.
    â€œGood morning, Amy,” he said. “You look nice today.”
    And she did. She was beautiful and young. She was perfect. And McKelvey felt a twinge of sadness for something he had lost within himself somewhere along the way.
    â€œThank you, sir,” she said, and McKelvey thought she blushed.
    Sir . That’s what she called him. It stung, but he was pleased with the show of respect.
    â€œI’m just on my way to see the boss,” he said. “Is she in a good mood this morning?”
    Amy smiled, rolled her eyes, and continued on down the hallway without a word. McKelvey took his coffee to Aoki’s office. Her door was always open. She was talking on the phone when he popped his head inside. She motioned him in, and he took a seat across from her, sipping his coffee. The office was small and unglamorous— beige —but he knew she wouldn’t inhabit it for long. She would be heading up Detective Services before her hair began its turn toward grey, that was his bet.
    â€œMorning, Charlie,” Aoki said, setting the phone down.
    â€œYou look pissed,” he said.
    She shook her head, leaning back in her chair. “These prosecutors, they think we can just pull evidence out of our assholes. They say ‘is that all you’ve got?’ and I feel like saying ‘no, we thought we’d keep some of the good stuff until we get to court’.”
    Aoki made him smile. She was wiry, all sinewy muscle, her dark hair cropped short. And she swore like a longshoreman. It was as though every movement, every mannerism was aimed at destroying the myth of her diminutive stature. She had confided in him over a drink a couple of years earlier about how her father had been interned at a camp on the west coast during the Second World War. She spoke of how he hadn’t been angry with his new country for assuming he was a possible collaborator, saying instead that “everyone has a role to play when their country is at war”. McKelvey believed she both admired and detested this vein of deep stoicism within her father. Knowing Aoki, she wouldn’t have taken it on the chin for king and country.
    McKelvey was anxious, and he caught himself chewing at his ragged thumb. In a matter of weeks, the Crown would kick off the trial of a bank robber, drug dealer, extortionist, suspected killer and known biker named Pierre Duguay. The trial was attracting media attention due to Duguay’s alleged connections to the Blades, an upstart Quebec biker gang with roots in the southern United States and South America. The Blades had battled the Hell’s Angels in Quebec for a few years at the closing of the nineties, fighting to control the lucrative drugs, prostitution and fraud rings. The body count was high. Car bombings, pipe bombs, shootings. The Angels were too big, too well-entrenched, too well-organized and managed, so the war eventually ran out of steam, and a large faction of Blades patched over to their rivals rather than face certain annihilation. But there remained a faithful few who drifted from Quebec in search of new frontiers out west and up north in the mining towns, places like Sudbury and Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, but like all pioneers, they stopped somewhere to catch their breath,