Victim Impact. Mel Bradshaw

one of them wasted away first, it would have been too soon.

      But this—death untimely and unnatural. The killing of a woman of thirty-two, still at the height of her loveliness. Karin had so much promise unfulfilled—as artist, mother, lover. Now she lay cold with a cold embryo inside her. Because of a crime committed in her own house, where she had most right to expect shelter.

      Ted let go Karin’s hand and staggered blindly towards the door. Somewhere down the night-lit halls he found a washroom where he splashed handful after handful of cold water on his face. What was he to do? Ted had generally thought of himself as navigating life’s waters on an even keel, cool and contained. Others spoke of him this way. He simply didn’t recognize the foundering, leaky barque he’d become. Coping mechanisms would have to be invented from scratch. Short hours ago, he’d have considered his present condition shameful. Now, though, he was too panicked to feel shame. He didn’t dare look in the mirror.

      At length, he took himself out into the summer night to find a patch of grass where he could sit and let his eyes dry under the stars. He tried to focus on what had to be done. Discouragingly, however, all he could think was that he had to break the news to his own father and mother, who had four children and no grandchildren. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

      Ted was back in the room on a stool by the window when his father-in-law arrived. It was going on two thirty a.m. A nurse had looked in at some point and turned the lights down. Ted let his eyes close. He opened them to see Markus in the doorway, his beard standing out in blond spikes while his eyes remained in the shadow of his jutting forehead. He wore blue jeans and a denim vest over an olive T. He’d once earned his bread as a performing musician and taking command of a stage still seemed second nature to him. He walked straight to the bed without acknowledging Ted.

      “What the hell!” Markus clapped a hand over the lower half of his face. Presently Ted heard him draw air in loudly through his nose.

      “Shall I leave you alone with her, Markus?”

      “How did it happen?”

      “Have a seat.” Ted indicated the armchair.

      Markus said he’d stand, and the two men stood, on opposite sides of Karin.

      “The message you got tells us she started for the cottage,” said Ted. “But she must have come back for something. I don’t know what. When she entered the house from the garage, a burglary was in progress. It looks as if, instead of running away, the intruder went to confront her. Some kind of struggle must have occurred in the back vestibule, the upshot being that she either fell down or was pushed down the cellar stairs.” Ted didn’t show Markus his photos or share his thoughts about Karin’s hair.

      “They catch the guy?”

      “Not yet.”

      “Shit.” Markus sniffed again loudly and wiped his nose. “Did you ever hear of my girl hurting anyone? Because I didn’t, not ever—not once. Did you?”

      “Markus—she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

      The older man scowled. He plainly wanted the universe to make more sense than that.

      “Yeah,” he said eventually. “You’d better give me a few minutes with her, Ted. Thanks.”

      Chapter 4

      Ted had first become aware of the Dark Arrows by accident. An accident with deep roots.

      He’d grown up on the west island of Montreal. As a suburban kid, he’d depended on his bicycle both for transportation and for a sense of freedom. Independent and small for his age, he was the kid that didn’t play hockey. He lived for the summer riding season and dreamed of engines more powerful than his short legs to let him bike faster and farther. He liked to listen to his Uncle Luc, who owned a country store in the Laurentians, talk about the Triumphs and Indians, the Hondas and Harleys he’d gassed up at his pumps. Then—as the years went by—more and more Harleys, and fewer of anything else.

      Ted had been young during Canada’s first experience of biker gangs. He’d been ten when the Hells Angels had patched over the Popeyes to establish in Montreal the first HA chapter in the country. He’d been seventeen when the Sorel Hells had purged the leadership of the Laval Hells, zipping their brothers’ bodies into weighted sleeping bags and dumping them in the St. Lawrence River. He’d been eighteen when the first round of biker trials started. Biker gangs were the new face of organized crime, more murderous and reportedly more powerful than the Mafia. Far from being hedonistic users and losers, the Sorel crew were disciplined dealers—dependent not on substances they ingested but on pagers and spreadsheets. Here, for a keen and impressionable young McGill University freshman, was a subject worth studying. Socially important, and spiced with a paradox: how had the motorized two-wheeler, so suggestive of the open road under an open sky, become the symbol of a paramilitary troop of conformist bullies?

      It didn’t escape Ted’s notice that biker gangs were not the safest subject to research. So when he’d come to the University of Toronto in 1989 to do graduate work in criminology, he chose a thesis topic that would not necessitate contact with criminals. Instead, he surveyed and analyzed the public’s attitude to sentences handed down by criminal courts. Much of his subsequent work had been on the youth criminal justice system, but organized crime remained a strong interest, and a subject on which he taught courses. And he never quite lost sight of the biker gangs. In 1995, during the war between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine, a bomb in Montreal accidentally killed an uninvolved child only three years younger than Ted’s younger brother Patrick. Again, in 2000, Ted’s thoughts were drawn back to his hometown, when Dany Kane, a police informant against the Hells, was found dead in his garage and when—not long after—Journal de Montréal writer Michel Auger was shot six times in the back for writing about the gang.

      Meanwhile, Ted had started riding motorcycles of his own, including the modest Yamaha that had carried him to the 1998 recital where he’d met Karin. He’d owned other bikes since, his most recent—bought in April of last year—a gently used Kawasaki Ninja.