Deadline (17 page)

“I’m sure of it,” said Mrs. Sawatski. “A mother knows her son.”

She led Jack over to the bed. Jack tried to smile down at his friend’s blank face, which he found terribly difficult to do. The fact that Ed’s eyes were open made it worse. There was no light in his eyes. He didn’t look like someone sleeping, but as blank and unmoving as a mannequin or a crash test dummy. Jack fought the urge to grimace and flee for the hallway. He felt the eyes of Sophie and the Sawatskis on him as he struggled to smile at his friend.

“Hey honey,” said Mrs. Sawatski. “Look who’s here. It’s your friend Jack.”

“Hey buddy,” said Jack. “What are you at?”

Ed blinked but his eyes showed no flicker of recognition.

“See,” said Mrs. Sawatski. “He blinks. That’s how you can tell that he’s hearing us. Tell him what you’ve been doing.”

Jack smiled at Mrs. Sawatski and glanced at Sophie, who looked back at him blankly.

“Well, b’y,” he said. “I hope they’re treating you all right in here.” He looked up at Sophie and Mrs. Sawatski, who nodded encouragingly. “You’ve got some tunes, eh, b’y? Tunes from home. That’s just great.”

“It was Mrs. Sawatski’s idea,” said Sophie. “She sent Mr. Sawatski to buy the stereo and got me to bring in Ed’s iPod today.”

“It perked him right up,” said Mrs. Sawatski. “Ed loves music.”

“He sure does,” said Jack. He turned to his friend. “Remember when we saw Great Big Sea on George Street? By Jesus there was some crowd of ol’ drunks out for that, eh? Thousands of people, all jumping up and down, singing along with every song. That was a time, eh?”

Ed blinked.

“See,” said Mrs. Sawatski. “He’s saying yes. He does remember. Don’t you Ed?”

But Ed didn’t blink again.

“You’d better get better soon,” said Jack. “Because it looks like your guy Donahoe is going to need all the help he can get. I think he’s in the race, but people think he’s likely already fallen behind that arsehole Mowat.”

Jack remembered who Sophie worked for and frowned at her in apology.

“Whoops,” he said. “I guess I’d better watch what I say in front of your girlfriend, here. Sorry, Sophie. I was just kidding with Ed here. Ed likes a joke, don’t you, b’y?”

He babbled on for a while longer, telling Ed what little Hill gossip he could think of but he found it painful. When a nurse came in to feed Ed his lunch, Jack took it as his excuse to leave.

“Well, Ed, I got to get back to the Hill,” he said eventually. “You hang tough, okay? I’ll come back to see you as soon as I can. You get better, now. I got plans for us to have a bit of fun, all right.”

When Jack took Ed’s limp hand in his to shake hands goodbye, he pulled up his sleeve to have a look at the fading bruise on his wrist.

As he said his goodbyes, promising to visit again soon, he thought about asking the Sawatskis if they had anything they wanted to say for his story, but he couldn’t make himself do it.

There was a good crowd in the press gallery for Question Period, including a gaggle of reporters fresh from the Auditor General’s lockup. They had filed their initial stories on the report into the wasteful and possibly corrupt federal prison-building program, and were now keen to watch how the government would cope with the Opposition’s attacks.

Jack didn’t know what was in the report, and his paper would rely on Canadian Press copy for stories about it, but he still wanted to watch the action. He tucked in his earpiece and opened his notebook just as Pinsent got to his feet to deliver the first question.

“Mr. Speaker,” said the Liberal leader. “When will this government realize that its approach to fighting crime is wrong? Mr. Speaker, let me tell you what the Auditor General found. I quote: ‘Billions were spent without appropriate controls.’ The government relied on private prison contractors with links to the government and now it can’t show how the money was spent. How can the prime minister explain this?”

The Liberal MPs nodded as Pinsent spoke, and when he finished they rose to their feet and applauded enthusiastically. The report was damning and the government was on the hook for it. Finally a scandal that might damage Stevens had fallen into their laps.

Stevens rose calmly to his feet, his hands clasped in front of him. “Mr. Speaker, the Auditor General’s report has identified some administrative problems with the Correctional Infrastructure Renewal Program. The Auditor General’s opinion and ours is different on some details of the public-private partnerships. Departmental officials have already taken the steps recommended by the Auditor General to provide a more complete accounting in the future. That’s what we will do. What we won’t do is go back to the bad old days, when the Liberals ran our justice system with a revolving door for criminals. This government will not turn back.”

The Tories rose to their feet and applauded the prime minister; when Pinsent stood again, they jeered.

“Mr. Speaker, the Auditor General has found that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent without basic accounting. I quote: ‘The contracts with service providers did not have elementary mechanisms to allow the government to ensure that money was spent appropriately.’ One of these firms, SecuriTech, employs the prime minister’s former chief of staff. It won $440 million in contracts. How does the prime minister explain the stench of corruption?”

The Liberals rose to applaud their leader, and the Tories shouted and heckled. Stevens sat with a small smile on his face while the Speaker rose to quiet the screams and catcalls.

“Mr. Speaker, the Liberal leader is right,” said Stevens, calmly. “Our party is tough on crime. He would prefer that we follow the Liberal policy, of allowing violent criminals off with a slap on the wrist. He would rather that gangs be free to terrorize law-abiding citizens, that seniors live in fear. Well, that may be what the Liberals want, but it’s not what Canadians want, and this government won’t ever apologize for being tough on crime! Never!”

The Conservatives rose to their feet and applauded and stomped their feet.

The next question was from Eileen Cross, the Liberal justice critic. It was to the point.

“Mr. Speaker, the Auditor General identifies dozens of contracts that were let to a handful of private prison construction companies for services that the contracts define so vaguely that the auditors could not determine that taxpayers received any benefit. Can the government provide this House with what it failed to provide the auditors: an explanation of where the money went?”

Greg Mowat stood to answer. He smiled at the Speaker and said quietly, “Mr. Speaker, in 1997, when the Liberals were in power, a drug dealer named Ivan Baldwin was released on parole after serving only four months of his two-year sentence on three counts of aggravated assault. He was released under a Liberal community sentencing program. Do you know what happened next? He killed a six-year-old child a week later in a drive-by shooting. That is Liberal justice, Mr. Speaker. This government will not stand by while children are murdered in the street!”

Cross rose again.

“Let’s try again,” she said. “The Auditor General identified one $8-million contract that went to SecuriTech. The prime minister’s chief of staff used to sit on the board. The contract was for security consulting. The Auditor General found that departmental staff could provide only, and I quote, ‘vague generalities,’ to describe the services performed. Mr. Speaker, where did the $8 million go?”

Mowat smiled as he rose to answer.

“Mr. Speaker,” he said. “Liberal justice is not justice. Consider the case of Daman Winston. In 2002 the young man was released on probation after serving only six months of a three-year sentence for sexual assault. He had received a three-for-one bonus for the time he had spent in remand. That was Liberal justice. Do you know what happened? He sexually assaulted five more women before police apprehended him. That is Liberal justice, Mr. Speaker, and the honourable member should have the guts to stand in this place and apologize to the women who were assaulted by Daman Winston!”

The Conservatives applauded as he sat down, and heckled Cross. “Apologize,” they shouted. Stevens was reading though a stack of documents on his desk, but he allowed himself a small smile.

Ashton sat at her desk in the investigations unit at the Ottawa Police Service headquarters, working on the timeline of the events in the Sawatski case, and making a list of leads to pursue. After a day and a half of investigation, she and Flanagan hadn’t made much progress. They had no suspects, no motives and no compelling evidence that a crime had even taken place, except for some bruises on the victim’s wrists, and some inconclusive videotape.

It wasn’t looking good.

She was staring at the paperwork when her phone rang. It was Captain Wayne Zwicker, the director of criminal investigations. He wanted to see her in his office.

He was waiting for her with the door open, sitting at his big oak desk, a tall, athletic man in his fifties with a bit of a pot belly that barely showed under his thick blue uniform.

“Detective Sergeant,” he said, standing as she arrived. “How’s it going?”

“Good, Captain,” she said. “Working this Sawatski case.”

He gestured for her to sit down. “That’s what I want to ask you about,” he said, his face neutral, his blue eyes unblinking. “Fill me in.”

“We’re working our leads, trying to reconstruct the hours before Sawatski ended up in the water. Flanagan’s over in Gatineau, at Pigale, trying to see if any of the staff remember anything.”

“Do you have a working theory?” asked Zwicker.

“There’s a blank spot beginning at about 3:50 a.m., when he said goodnight to his friend and headed home in a taxi. An hour later, he was found floating face down in the canal, barely alive, with handcuff bruises on his wrists. We think someone snatched him, put the cuffs on him and held him under until he stopped struggling. They thought he was dead, removed the cuffs and let him float away, but his heart was still beating.”

“Got any suspects? A motive?”

“So far, no,” said Ashton. “The victim is a political staffer with no ties to crime that we’ve been able to find. Neither his girlfriend nor the friend he was drinking with would seem to have a motive to do him in.”

“Has it occurred to you that he might have fallen into the canal?” asked Zwicker.

“Well, yeah, Captain,” said Ashton. “We’d be happy to mark it down as an accident, but there are a few things that make us think that’s unlikely. For one, the kid was once a life guard. Even if he was drunk, it’s unlikely that he would end up drowning in two feet of water. Then there’s the handcuff bruises, and we have a video. It seems to show him walking under the bridge by the canal with another man shortly before we think he went into the water.”

He looked down at a notepad on his desk.

“So, tell me about your meeting today with David Cochrane.”

Ashton didn’t expect that. “What, the guy in Donahoe’s office?”

Zwicker wasn’t making eye contact. “Yes.”

Ashton shrugged. “I thought I should get some idea of what kind of work Sawatski did. I guess I was, you know, looking for clues.”

“Do you have any reason to think somebody tried to drown the kid because of his work as –” he looked down at his notes “– a policy adviser to the minister of justice?”

“I don’t know why somebody would want to drown him,” said Ashton.

Zwicker put the tips of his fingers together and looked away from Ashton. “I’m told you asked for access to the files the kid was working.”

Ashton nodded at him. “Looking for clues.”

“Okay,” said Zwicker. “I’m told that you need the kind of security clearance that nobody in this office has to see those documents. I’m told we need a good reason before we start pressing the office of the minister of justice to release secret documents to us.”

Ashton shrugged.

“They suggest that we would likely have to have our lawyers talk to the Justice Department’s lawyers before any such documents would be forthcoming,” he said. “And, I didn’t know this, but they tell me that in the future any visits you make to Parliament Hill should be cleared with the office of the Speaker of the House of Commons, or the Speaker of the Senate, depending on where the office is.”