The deadly trade, p.1
The Deadly Trade, page 1
The
Deadly
Trade
Barbara Kyle
Woodhall Press | Norwalk, CT
Woodhall Press, 81 Old Saugatuck Road, Norwalk, CT 06855
WoodhallPress.com
Copyright © 2022 Barbara Kyle
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages for a review.
Cover design: Jessica Dionne
Layout artist: L.J. Mucci
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN 978-1-954907-70-6 (paper: alk paper)
ISBN 978-1-954907-71-3 (electronic)
First Edition
Distributed by Independent Publishers Group
(800) 888-4741
Printed in the United States of America
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ALSO BY BARBARA KYLE
The Man from Spirit Creek
The Traitor’s Daughter
The Queen’s Exiles
Blood Between Queens
The Queen’s Gamble
The Queen’s Captive
The King’s Daughter
The Queen’s Lady
The Experiment
Non-Fiction:
Page-Turner:
Your Path to Writing a Novel that Publishers Want and Readers Buy
This book is dedicated to
Stephen Best and Liz White,
whose advocacy gives voice
to those who cannot speak.
1
I was trying hard to think of toys to keep my mind off death.
A plush bunny or a classic teddy bear, which would a two-year-old like? I had no clue about toys. Or kids. But planning what to get my nephew Liam for his birthday eased the sorrow that had darkened my night. Darkened all of February, in truth, since my sister’s death five weeks ago, and now we were grinding into an icy March.
The plush yellow bunny, I decided.
Thoughts of my sister’s sweet little guy didn’t help much, though, as I made my way on foot up the slope from Craigmuir’s frozen river. Liam, motherless, cared for by my grieving parents since we lost Julia. Then, yesterday’s sickening fire at the stable.
Such a killing winter.
Spring, I thought with a yearning heart, could not come soon enough.
I was on my way to Paul Leblanc’s house with Julia’s border collie, DuPre, who had come to live with me. She shivered on her leash. Last night the temperature had plummeted during a downpour, freezing the rain, and now, at sunrise, the world was sheened in ice. It sheathed trees and phone poles and wires and made the road treacherous underfoot.
Crazy to come so early. If I’d waited an hour the sun might have thawed the crust enough to let me and DuPre get up the slope without slipping. But I couldn’t lie awake any longer. With the smell of stable smoke still in my hair, I’d found sleep impossible, and Paul’s anxious call just after midnight had sealed my insomnia. I needed to talk to him face-to-face.
The road curving up to the rich homes of Riverview Ridge was Saturday-morning quiet, the residents nestled under their duvets. No one out but me and DuPre, straining now at her leash.
“Take it easy, sweetie. Almost there.” She was as impatient as I was to crest the hill and relax our tense muscles on the flat, but I held her back. Her four feet could slip as easily as my two.
“Natalie, come tomorrow, first thing,” Paul had said, his voice low, troubled. “It’s about Julia.”
I couldn’t imagine what he meant. My dazzling big sister, thirty-three, her fame as a cellist just flowering, had taken her own life. Paul had been one of her many fans, so I’m sure he’d been shocked to hear of her suicide, but what could he possibly have to say now? Before I could ask, he’d hung up. I’d come this morning to find out.
My boot skidded. I caught myself before I went down on my ass, but the misstep sent a skip to my heart and a tremor to my splayed legs. Black ice: that gloss on the asphalt that tricks you. Worse if you’re driving, the pavement looking so clear you think you’re safe. My tires skidding here could’ve sent me slewing right back down to the river. It was still frozen, but in March, who knew how solid? Which is why I’d parked at the foot of the hill and walked, stiff-legged on the ice, cautious as an old lady.
The road was hemmed on both sides with massive old oaks, naked except for the ice carapace that glittered as the sun rose at my back. My noisy footfalls sent a crow flapping up from a bough. Branches disturbed by its takeoff clattered, clickety-clack. Like teeth chattering, I thought. It was that cold. I wondered, not for the first time, why my piss-poor Scottish ancestors had immigrated here to plough the cold stony soil of southern Ontario when they might just as well have gone around to sunny Australia.
The road leveled out. DuPre and I relaxed a bit. We rounded the bend, nearing Paul’s house, which rose beyond its barrier of blue spruce trees ranged like sentinels. A municipal truck lumbered out from the adjoining road and rumbled past us, spitting rock salt to thaw the ice. The pea-size granules gave me traction, which was a relief, but I knew they burned DuPre’s paws, and I hated to see her in pain. She flinched but carried on, head high with that stoic canine spirit that shames us whiney humans.
“Hold on, sweetie.” I tugged the leash to stop her, pulled off my mitten with my teeth, and used my fingernail to pick salt crystals off her forepaw’s tender pad. Its leathery softness was warm against my chilled fingertips. The faint sun glinted off the tag on her collar. My mind flashed back to the rough nylon rope, obscene fluorescent yellow, tight around my sister’s throat.
DuPre suddenly whimpered as though in distress. A cut on her paw? No, her focus wasn’t there but on the evergreens screening Paul’s property. She jerked forward, straining again against the leash.
“Yeah, good idea, let’s wake him up.”
We reached the edge of Paul’s property. The brittle mat of grass crunched underfoot like fragile glass. The house was oriented sideways to the road, with a wide back deck overlooking woods that led down to the river. I was heading for the front door, but DuPre’s focus was on the rear. Barking in sudden alarm, she jerked against the leash, causing my boots to slip on the grass. In the slack moment of righting myself, I loosened my grip on the leash. DuPre bounded away, barking, heading for the undergrowth behind the deck. What had she seen? A deer?
“DuPre! Come back!”
I couldn’t let her take off into the woods. But I didn’t want to shout again, waking Paul’s neighbors. I hurried after her, hoping to snatch the trailing leash. She disappeared into the dark space beneath the deck, still barking. I followed her into the shadows cast by the wooden overhang. There was plenty of headroom. Paul was having the deck extended, and I smelled the damp fresh wood overhead. The contractor’s crew would be back after the weekend. I side-stepped the rubble of hunks of sawn boards and clumped sawdust.
I reached DuPre. She was barking crazily, looking up. I followed her gaze, our breaths steaming in the cold air. At the far end of the deck, deep in the shadows, a dark shape hung, suspended. My breath snagged.
A man. Upside down. His torso like a forked branch, one leg stretched taut, his foot caught in wire from the deck, the other leg splayed. His arms hung down. Still as death.
Paul.
I bolted toward him. A spear of sunlight through the deck glinted off him.
I froze. He was completely encased in a film of ice.
2
It had all started exactly twenty-four hours earlier when I received a tip-off in an early-morning phone call. The tip would eventually lead me to Paul Leblanc, very much alive then, but the twisty path took me first to the cries of frightened baby monkeys.
I’d just come back from a dawn jog with DuPre. My phone chimed as soon as I walked in the door and let her off the leash.
“Natalie? It’s Cheryl. I just landed, and I’ve seen something.”
Cheryl Ainsworth was an Air Canada flight attendant who lived a few blocks from me and commuted to Toronto Pearson International. She told me she’d arrived from Johannesburg, South Africa, and spotted cages. Smelled them first, she said. I’d met Cheryl two years ago when she walked into my office at All Creatures Great and Small to ask about our Forever Homes program: finding homes for abandoned and abused pets. She had two problems: her deceased mother’s cat and her own cat allergy. We settled the golden-eyed Persian in his new, forever home with a cheerful stock analyst, and Cheryl became a grateful supporter of my scruffy but efficient little nonprofit group.
“Thanks, Cheryl,” I said after she filled me in. “I’ll check it out. Go get some sleep.”
I filled DuPre’s bowl with kibble and another with water, then called Trevor Wapoosh. DuPre watched me, wary about this early-morning disruption as I grabbed my backpack. I caressed her shaggy ear. “Back soon, sweetie.”
I drove in fog to pick up Trevor, and an hour later, as the rising sun was trying to warm Toronto’s gray sprawl, we were following a mud-spattered white cube van down the airport arrivals ramp.
“There ! Don’t lose him.” Trevor pointed, keen as a hunting dog, at the red taillights turning right, getting fainter in the fog.
I was trying to maintain some space, not stick right on their tail. If these guys suspected they were being followed, they could speed away.
Trevor, though, was zealous as only a newbie can be. He was my greenest volunteer, just three weeks in the office. He was twenty-seven, four years younger than me, and I was pretty sure the only hot pursuits he had engaged in as a graduate epidemiology student involved hunting microbes under a microscope. But what he lacked in experience he made up for in enthusiasm. On the day he’d volunteered, offering several hours a week to help out my nonprofit, I’d given my usual spiel to quell any romantic fantasies about animal rescue adventure, telling him he’d just be doing grunt work in the office and he’d said, “No worries. I’ll stuff a thousand envelopes if it keeps one bear cub or fox out of a leghold trap.” I’d liked him immediately.
The paradox did cross my mind that his Ojibway people had been hunting and trapping for centuries, but I have found that people take up the work we do for very personal reasons. Today, I was glad of his commitment. I didn’t know exactly what the cages in that white van held—Cheryl hadn’t been close enough to see—but her description gave me a good idea. Still, because I wasn’t sure, all I’d told Trevor was that we were tracking some mistreated animals.
We followed the van south on Highway 427. The city traffic was light at this hour, but the fog kept me tense at the wheel, even more so as it thickened the closer we got to Lake Ontario. The van peeled off the highway at the Brown’s Line exit and entered a drab industrial warren. It pulled into the narrow parking area in front of a two-story building of cinderblock and brick with the modest sign: “Superior Sails.” I slowed, watching the van turn the rear corner of the building. I parked on the quiet street, and Trevor and I got out. He was one stride ahead of me, all eagerness as we headed for the back of the building where the van had disappeared.
As we reached the corner of the building, I grabbed Trevor’s elbow to stop him. I peeked around the edge. The van had backed up to a wide loading door. The vehicle’s rear door had been thrown open sideways and almost touched the wall, obscuring the activity behind it. I couldn’t see what was going on, but I heard thin, high-pitched screeches, like babies screaming. It turned my stomach.
“Bastards,” Trevor growled.
I turned to him and pointed to an outside staircase we’d passed that led to the second floor. “Let’s check that out,” I said quietly.
He rushed for the staircase. His eagerness was now making me a little nervous. It might have been smarter to bring one of my more experienced people instead, but many of them weren’t known for classy wardrobe choices, and if we encountered any citizens anxious about wild-eyed radicals, I thought Trevor’s ironed shirt and buzz-cut good looks might allay their fears. I grabbed his arm again to slow him as we walked, and told him firmly, “After me.”
“Right boss,” he said with quiet glee. He followed me up the metal steps. At the top was a steel fire door. I tried the handle. Unlocked. Trevor grinned.
“Remember,” I told him, “we’re just observing. If we can, be ready to video.”
We went in silently. The room seemed to be a manager’s office: desk, computer, bookshelf, bulletin boards with schedule printouts. On the far side, a broad window half the length of the office overlooked the shop floor. We both went to the window. The view below was of a space with the feel of a warehouse, windowless and lit by fluorescent panels. Huge rolls of fabric, each one as long as a car, lined one wall. Spread out along the entire length of the floor was a vast triangle of white synthetic sailcloth.
So, I realized, Superior Sails was a sail loft. I used to race a Laser dinghy on Lake Ontario and once accompanied a yachting friend to a loft like this to check on a repair to his mainsail. Looking down now at the expanse of sailcloth, I could make out the dimple in the fabric that loosely covered the small pit beneath that held the sewing machine and operator’s stool. The sunken platform could be raised so the sail remained flat as its edge passed under the machine’s needle.
Three men hustled across the shop floor, carrying cages in from the van. I counted thirteen cages already stacked in the far corner, with more coming.
“Colobus monkeys?” Trevor whispered as we peered through the glass.
I nodded. “And Barbary macaques, over there. And at least five red-eared guenons.” Babies. Each no bigger than my little nephew when he was born. None looked more than a few weeks old. In the wild, their mothers would have been shot to make snatching the babies easy. So heartbreaking.
I forced my thoughts to the smugglers. This place was near the lakefront. Did they plan to load the babies onto a boat and power across to the States?
The three men were swarthy, and all were young, younger than Trevor, and skinny, underfed. Faded shirts, scruffy jeans, badly cut hair. Likely hard-up immigrants. They certainly wouldn’t be at the top of the smuggling chain, more like the bottom link, hungry guys glad of any gig work they could find. Even this shitty job.
They stacked more cages with a hurried, heedless clatter that left the little orphans screaming and leaping in panic. A colobus monkey gripped the cage bars, and the long white hair surrounding its little brown face trembled. The terror in its huge brown eyes pierced my heart.
“Video,” I whispered to Trevor. He pulled his phone from his pocket. I pulled mine out too and raised it to start recording.
“Too far away,” Trevor muttered, frustrated. “And the glass distorts.”
Before I could stop him, he was opening the door that led down to the shop floor. I held my breath, eyes on the men below. Looked like they hadn’t heard the door. Making too much noise themselves.
Trevor crept out to the staircase. The steps were open, with just a railing. Trevor crouched on the top step. He shot me a sly grin then lifted his phone to video the animals.
That’s when one of the men, wiping sweat from his neck and throat, turned and looked up. Right at us. He went rigid and shouted something at the others, foreign words. He pointed at Trevor. Trevor froze.
Damn it.
I unslung my backpack and yanked out my wallet, re-shouldered the pack and bolted out, passing Trevor. As I ran down the stairs I raised my wallet ID and yelled, “Stop right there! Police!”
I reached the bottom step and halted. The three men gaped at me. I forced myself to walk toward them slowly, pretending the confidence of authority as I lowered the ID. My driver’s license.
Insane. What now? Spin some line about calling into the station to report them, then collect Trevor and get the hell out? But could they even speak English? We stared at one another. My heart banged in my chest. I had no idea what to do.
They did, though. They were plain scared. I saw it in their eyes. They couldn’t afford to be caught. They instantly took off, all three. Hope jumped into my throat as I watched them disappear out through the loading door. I heard the van’s engine roar to life. Tires squealed. Then . . . silence.
“Wow!” Trevor ran down the steps, excited, laughing. “That was so cool!”
I wanted to smack him. This could have gone so badly. But part of me was excited too, and not just from the flush of victory. Now we could help these poor orphaned babies. Several continued to scream, more panicked than ever. I tucked my wallet and phone into my pants pockets, and Trevor and I both hurried to the cages.
“Look at this little guy,” he cooed. He got down on one knee, eye to eye with a macaque. Its distinctive pink face was incredibly endearing, but its tiny fingers were balled into frightened fists.
I gazed at the rows of terrified faces, feeling sick at their distress. The cages stank. I imagined the horrors the little creatures had endured: first ripped from their mothers, then suffering the transatlantic flight from Africa with no food, no water, no light, no warmth in the frigid hold of the plane. I had almonds in my backpack, but these were babies; a nut might choke them.
