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Overview
Cape Diamond, the second book in the Frank Yakabuski Mystery series, is atmospheric and action-packed. Set near the Northern Divide — as was the first installment, Edgar Award nominee (Best Paperback Original), Ragged Lake — the book opens with Yakabuski called to investigate a gruesome crime scene. A body has been left hanging from a schoolyard fence. On closer inspection, Yak finds a large diamond in the murder victim’s mouth.
Two criminal gangs — the Shiners and the Travellers — are fighting with each other, and Yakabuski turns to his father, a now-retired detective who has a long history with the gangs, for advice in the interrogation. Is the conflict over the murder of two men? The kidnapping of a little girl? Or, possibly, the diamond found in Augustus Morrissey’s mouth? As if this weren’t enough for one detective, a serial killer is taking a deadly road trip through the United States, heading towards the Northern Divide.
Ron Corbett weaves the various strands together with ingenuity, making Cape Diamond a brooding, suspense-filled story of hubris, betrayal, and evil deeds; his writing is sparse and taut, compelling the reader to follow the action and gang conflict to a surprise ending.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770413955 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 10/23/2018 |
| Series: | A Frank Yakabuski Mystery , #2 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 815,831 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Ron Corbett is an author, journalist, and broadcaster living in Ottawa. He is the author of seven nonfiction books; his first novel, Ragged Lake, the first book in the Frank Yakabuski Mystery series, received rave reviews and an Edgar Allan Poe nomination by the Mystery Writers of America for Best Original Paperback. He is married to award-winning photojournalist Julie Oliver.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The first ones to cross Filion's Field that Monday morning were shift workers heading to the O'Hearn sawmill on Sleigh Bay. The field was on the west end of an escarpment that soared high above the Springfield River, and each worker would have left a high-rise apartment, lunch pail and coffee thermos in hand, then taken the shortcut across the sports field to be standing at the Sleigh Bay bus stop by 5:45 a.m.
The sun appeared that morning at 6:41, and so the men walked in the dark. Likely they walked with their heads down and eyes to the ground, in no hurry to greet the day, as they were shift workers heading to the O'Hearn sawmill on Sleigh Bay.
They could have missed it. When the workers were tracked down by police later that day — there were nine in total, all men — not one was interviewed for more than five minutes.
Next to cross the field were early-morning workers on their way to the city of Springfield: file clerks and security guards, dishwashers and parking lot attendants, construction labourers and split-shift bus drivers. By the time these workers crossed, the sun was in the sky, a winter sun that would have been more white than yellow, that would have shone through the birch and spruce at the edge of the escarpment and the canyon openings between the high-rise apartment buildings, casting shadows that would have lain directly in their path. Police were able to track down twenty-two of these workers. Each was interviewed at length. No one remembered seeing anything unusual about the east-side fence of Filion's Field that morning.
The last to cross were children, taking another shortcut, this one leading to a cut-opening in the fence and beyond that a trail through the woods that brought them to Northwood Elementary School. It was hard to get an accurate number for the children. Police estimated there could have been as many as thirty.
During first recess, a half-dozen boys returned to Filion's Field and that was when a police officer spotted them, throwing rocks at something tied to the fence, a target of some sort. The rocks arced in the air. The boys laughed. By then, the sun had risen high enough to be shining directly through the chain-link fence that surrounded the field, casting geometric shadows on the soccer pitch that replicated the metal mesh.
The cop's name was Donna Griffin, a young cop who had come to the North Shore projects to serve a family court warrant. She watched the boys, trying to figure out what game they were playing. Eventually, she started walking toward them. When she was spotted, the boys turned as one, like a herd of deer spotting a hunter. Then they took off as one, heading toward the hole in the fence and the path beyond.
The cop knew better than to give chase, as there was no way she was going to catch those boys. A couple of them had looked fast enough to make All City. She watched them disappear into the woods, and before the last child's back vanished, she realized no boy had turned to yell at her. Not one jeer or taunt when it was obvious she was not giving chase. A half- dozen boys. From the North Shore projects.
She kept walking. Was halfway across the pitch when the object tethered to the fence began to take shape, began to occupy time and space and become a thing defined. She stopped fifteen feet short of the object. The shadows fell across her, not in the pattern of chain-link, but as two large intersecting lines. She stared up at the fence and found herself wishing she had chased those boys.
CHAPTER 2Frank Yakabuski sat in the kitchen of a bachelor apartment near the Springfield River. He was waiting for the teenage boy in front of him to speak. He had been waiting ten seconds and knew it was going to take more time.
He looked around the boy's kitchen. It was small and had a bad smell, but there was a window that would have overlooked a city park, except the boy had hung a Bob Marley towel there in place of the drapes he was never going to buy. Yakabuski felt pretty confident Bob Marley would have left the window open. Trees across the street. Good mid-morning sun. Yes, he would have done that.
What can you say about homage when it gets twisted around like that? Kid didn't know any better? Kid was given the towel? He sat and tried to figure it out. Eventually the boy said, "I fell, Mr. Yakabuski. Off the roof. How many times do I have to tell you that?"
Yakabuski turned away from the window.
"That's the story you're sticking with? After everything I've just shown you?"
"I was tripping on acid. I went to the roof of my apartment. I thought I could fly. That's what happened."
Five weeks ago, the boy had been found on the sidewalk outside his apartment building, beaten so badly he was still wearing a leg cast and an arm cast and, according to a doctor Yakabuski had spoken to earlier in the day, about to lose most of the vision in his left eye. The boy owed money to the Popeyes motorcycle gang. Many sources had confirmed it.
But his story, when he was interviewed in hospital, was that he had been high on acid and fallen off the roof of his apartment building. He had been released the day before and Yakabuski, the senior detective with the Springfield Regional Police Force, had come to the boy's apartment with his medical files to explain how the story was impossible.
When they had finished examining the x-rays he said, "So, maybe you can get these injuries from falling off the roof of this building, like you say. Problem is, you'd need to climb right back up and jump off three or four more times."
That's when Yakabuski had started waiting. The boy had dirty blond hair and doleful blue eyes, scabs on his forearms that bled from time to time, little trickles of blood that he wiped away, sometimes without looking. He was nineteen, and his name was Jimmy O'Driscoll.
"Unless you inherited some money when you were in the hospital, you're making a bad mistake," said Yakabuski. "You have the same problem that got you beat up in the first place."
"Don't know what you're talking about."
"How much do you owe them?"
"Not a clue what you're talking about."
"You have no criminal record, Jimmy. What you have is a serious meth addiction. Everyone can see that. Tell me what really happened, and we'll protect you. Get you some help."
"You can protect me? From the Popeyes?"
Yakabuski looked at the boy with sadness. Not frustration. Not disappointment. A familiar sort of sadness. He was watching how desperate people make stupid decisions. Jimmy O'Driscoll may as well have been a train wreck backed up ten seconds.
"There are no guarantees in this world. You're right about that, Jimmy. But don't you think some protection is better than nothing at all?" he said.
The boy didn't say anything. Yakabuski didn't say anything. They waited a little more.
But the cop saw soon enough how it was going to play out. Beads of sweat rolled down the boy's forehead, but then his body went rigid, the sweat disappeared, and a sneer worked its way onto his face. He was going to man-up. It would all be acting after this. Nothing genuine or worth noticing.
Maybe the boy had even convinced himself — in the short time it often takes desperate people to believe in impossible outcomes — that the Popeyes would reward him for his loyalty, for his refusal to turn on them, even after they had maimed him for life. At the very least, they would give him more time. Yakabuski began to gather the medical files.
"I'll need an explanation for the report," he said.
"An explanation?"
"An explanation for how you fell off a two-storey house and sustained the injuries you did. I need to write something down, Jimmy."
The kid thought about it. Scratched his arms. Thought some more. After a while he said, "It was really good acid."
Yakabuski wrote it down. He was about to push one more time when he received a text from the day-duty sergeant at the main Springfield police detachment, telling him he needed to get to Filion's Field.
CHAPTER 3Springfield was built on the southern edge of the Great Boreal Forest, at the junction of three great rivers, and the north shore of the largest of those rivers, the Springfield, was always considered the outskirts of town. The North Shore was the place you could find what all cities pushed to the outskirts: cheap bars and cheaper housing, junkyards and one-bay auto shops, bad drunks and hucksters, thieves and junkies. It was French mill workers and Métis shantymen who first settled on the North Shore, coming in the early nineteenth century, in the heyday of square-timber logging in the Springfield Valley. After that it was Cree and Algonquin, more Métis, all displaced by the giant lumber companies that came in the late nineteenth century and needed the rivers to power their pulp mills, their sawmills, their matchstick factories.
By 1930, the shantytown on the North Shore was nearly the size of the incorporated city of Springfield directly across the river. Every night people in Springfield would hear the sounds of fiddles and washboards drifting across the river, the barking of tinkers and shamans and rum-runners, the songs of drunken men stumbling in and out of the many taverns. Every morning, they would look across the river and see cookfires and smudge pots burning, and a slow-rising river mist that twirled around the cedar lean-tos, the bark-slab cabins, mist out of which would step voyageurs with their bright red sashes; crazed bushmen with long hair and leather britches; black-clad preachers as thin as lepers; boys with bowler caps and brightly coloured suspenders; temperance women from Springfield brought by boat, walking with hand-painted parasols and heavy gowns; everyone milling and jostling, disappearing and reappearing out of the mist and smoke that never seemed to leave the North Shore.
In 1936, the shantytown was razed by the city of Springfield in order to build a bridge. Because no one living on the north shore had deeded land, city workers simply showed up early one August morning with three barges of bulldozers and cement mixers, followed by another barge containing the sheriffs from Springfield, Perth, and Buckham counties. The sun was just barely above the treeline, the mist still heavy on the river, the cookfires not yet burning when the barges arrived.
The sheriff of Springfield County walked to the centre of the village and fired his rifle. In the quiet and hesitation of that morning, it made an empty boom, a sound without echo or reverberation that disappeared immediately. Yet it was enough to bring people from their beds, to awaken the men sleeping on the corduroy road outside Les Filles du Roi, and when enough people had gathered, the sheriff told the crowd they needed to be gone by noon.
When the men objected, the last barge arrived, filled with Irish thugs from Springfield, members of a street gang known as the Shiners. While the sheriffs kept their rifles trained on the crowd, the Shiners began to empty the homes, throwing belongings onto the mud road, taking whatever caught their fancy, setting fire to the homes when they were empty. Anyone who tried to stop the ransacking was beaten.
Some children were taken back to Springfield, where priests from St. Bridget's and some of the more devout members of the Temperance League were waiting to claim them. Everyone else gathered what was left of their belongings and marched away. Some marched right into the unincorporated townships and were never seen again. Most though, having some connection to the city of Springfield — whether by work, crime, or drinking habit — hiked up the escarpment that overlooked the North Shore, put down their belongings, and began to build another shantytown.
Thirty years later, the city came back to raze the second village. Not to build a bridge this time, but to build social housing for the lost souls atop the escarpment. It was mid-'60s idealism run amok, but before the city could be stopped, before anyone on the North Shore could be asked, eight high-rise apartment buildings had been built on the escarpment, seven thousand apartments altogether, with another two hundred row homes connecting the buildings like a charm bracelet. Though as far as Yakabuski could recall, there had never been anything all that charming about the North Shore.
* * *
Once he was over the North Shore Bridge, Yakabuski turned right and followed a service road that ran beside the escarpment. When the road dead-ended at a municipal garage, he cut up LaPierre Street and made a right on Tache Boulevard. This was the main commercial street on the North Shore: thirteen blocks of taverns and corner groceries, nail parlours and dollar stores, all the businesses sitting in day-long shadows because of the high-rise apartment towers running parallel to the street.
The apartment buildings were lettered and identical in every way except for the graffiti. Yakabuski took an alley that ran between Buildings G and H and saw the patrol car. Then he saw a young police officer standing a hundred metres away from the vehicle. She had her cap in her hand and was staring at the east-side fence of Filion's Field.
Yakabuski slowed his Jeep to a crawl and leaned over the steering wheel to look at the upper-floor windows of Buildings G and H before popping the curb and driving across the soccer pitch, leaving the patrol car behind in the parking lot. When he reached the fence, he parked broadside to the apartment buildings, so the driver's door was facing away. He got out of the vehicle slowly, took one last look at the upper windows of the apartment buildings, and then motioned for the patrol officer to join him.
When she was standing beside the Jeep, he said, "How long have you been standing here?"
"Twelve minutes."
"Right here the whole time?"
"I have not left the crime scene, Detective Yakabuski."
She knew who he was. Yakabuski was no longer surprised by this. He had been with the Springfield Regional Police fourteen years, the first few years seconded to a joint task force with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Sûreté du Québec, working undercover during the Biker Wars. He had befriended the head of the Popeyes motorcycle gang, Papa Paquette, and later testified against him in court, helping to send the biker to the Dorset Penitentiary for twenty years. He was well-known in Springfield after that.
But then two winters ago, he was sent to the remote town of Ragged Lake, high up on the Northern Divide, to investigate the murders of a squatter family. What he discovered when he got there was a secret meth lab owned by the Popeyes and the Shiners. The Battle of Ragged Lake was what the media came to call the events of the next three days. A journalist from Springfield had written a book with that title, and there was now talk of turning it into a movie. Yakabuski could not go anywhere in Springfield these days without being recognized. He leaned against his Jeep, looked at the fence, and said, "Where are you from, Constable?"
Donna Griffin looked confused. "Where am I from?" she stammered.
Yakabuski kept looking at the fence. He was staring directly into the sun, and he twisted his head to the right then far to the left. He shielded his eyes and stepped closer to the fence. Then he stepped back.
Tethered to the fence was the body of a man. A large man, dressed in an expensive three-piece suit. His legs were pinned together, his arms were outstretched, and his head hung down, touching his chest, so his face was obscured.
"What do you think happened to his head?" he asked.
"I'd say someone put the boots to him," answered Griffin.
"You've got a bad angle. I'll give you that."
"Detective Yakabuski, if I have done something wrong, please tell me what it is."
"You never told me where you were from."
The look of confusion came back to Griffin's face. She couldn't follow the narrative track of this hulking, Polish cop standing beside her. He was changing direction too often. Keeping her off-balance. Before she could answer, Yakabuski said, "I know you're not from around here for a few reasons. One, you're standing outside your patrol car in the North Shore projects with your back turned to those two apartment buildings. How long did you say? Twelve minutes? There are men living in those buildings, Constable, who would consider that a free shot."
"Detective Yakabuski, I'm aware of the dangers on the North Shore. It's the reason — "
"The second reason I know you're not from around here is because you've been doing all this while standing in front of Augustus Morrissey, who for some reason is tied to this here fence."
The young cop's face went white. She stared up at the dead man. "Are you sure?"
"Oh, I'm sure all right. Want to know the worst part?"
"All right, now I know you're having a go at me. How can there be anything worse than that?"
"It's worse because Augustus hasn't been given the boots. He's had his eyes cut out."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Cape Diamond"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Ron Corbett.
Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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