Chapter 143

When Sgt. Digby arrived home she drove straight from the airport to New Minas detachment.
The first person she called was Det. Sgt. Smith.
He answered at his desk, at Oxford Street.
He sounded depressed. Talking to him was awkward in a way it had never been before.
“We’re bringing in Kurtis Missions,” she said. “We have a positive ID. He was the last person seen with a homicide victim, in Montreal.”
“Montreal? I don’t understand. Who?”
“Her name’s Heather Dominie. We’re going to bring him in and question him. Montreal is going to let me sit in.”
“Heather Dominie?”
“Everything okay?” she asked.
He didn’t say anything. There was a long, awkward pause.
“What’s going on?” Digby asked.
“Ffffff,” he sighed, but it was almost as if he wanted to say ‘Fuck off.’
“What’s wrong? What is it?”
“Kurtis Missions… My source,” he said. “My responsibility.”
Digby felt a quiver of sickness pass through her gut. “What did you say?”
“My source, my responsibility.”
“He’s an informant? He’s a fucking informant?”
“A little bit.”
“A little bit? How many people know he’s a source? How long has he been one?” Her first instinct was to protect Smith, but then anger overpowered her. “I can’t believe this shit.”
Smith blew out more air, over the phone. He seemed to be fighting back tears. “It doesn’t surprise me, I guess. I knew he had mental issues. I knew he was up to something. For a while there, he’s been skirting calls. Using drugs.”
Digby couldn’t shake a feeling of deep dread. “Bob, I need you to tell me everything, right now. How much of an informant was he?”
Smith chuckled, as if darkly relishing the chance to explain his burdens to a fresh pair of ears. “Did you look up his criminal record?”
“Of course. One hit for some b and e’s. No jail time.”
“We’ve been trying to get his dad, for a while. Wid Missions Junior. God, we wanted his dad, real bad. Once we had his dad, we could turn him on Dee Lee. Can you imagine? When they picked up Kurtis for the b and e’s, we swooped in. He had a bunch of coke with him, too. We turned him, in exchange for no jail time, some spending money. He’s supposed to be gathering information on his father. We were testing him. Testing his loyalty. He’s not a police agent yet, just a source, a coded source, with me as handler. When his dad disappeared, we threw him into witness protection, with new ID and everything.”
“You did what?” Digby’s voice raised in volume.
Smith laughed. “He told me that Dee Lee had found out he was ratting and was going to start killing everybody with the last name Missions in the Nova Scotia phonebook. He came to me in honest-to-God tears, Digby. Then Wid Missions Junior disappeared, and I figured it was Dee Lee, so we put him in the program. We put him in a safe house, but he took off.”
Digby sat, speechless.
All this time.
She couldn’t even think, off-hand, how many times Smith must have lied to her face.
So swallowed. “You’re saying, Kurtis Missions, right now, is technically, in witness protection?”
“Except we don’t know where he is. He went AWOL, and we stopped paying his living allowance payments.”
“Does he have any money? Have you paid him any lump sums?”
“No. Nothing. He didn’t deliver anything, Digby. He’s was basically in the testing stage.”
“What about Darroll Missions?” Digby thought about the fake ID Darroll Missions had in his possession when he died. “Was Darroll Missions a coded source?”
“They were working together.”
“Holy Fuck. What about Kurtis’ FPS sheet?” She was asking if his fingerprint-based records had been changed in police databases, if so, it meant a scan of his fingerprints would bring up his new ID in the system, not his old ID, which had an open arrest warrant attached to it.
“All changed,” Smith said. “Sorry.”
“You’re really making my job easy, aren’t you Bob? You couldn’t tell me this a little sooner?”
“It’s confidential.”
“Actually, it’s not confidential, Bob. Not if he broke his informant contract by committing murder. Three murders.”
“His status as a source is not really the issue. If he committed murder, he’s subject to prosecution, like anybody else. And I didn’t really keep any pertinent information from you, because I honestly didn’t know where he was.”
“Except you’ve been trying to shy me away from looking at him, as a suspect, all this time, Bob. You’ve basically been obstructing my investigation. I should fucking file a complaint.”
“I haven’t been obstructing you, Digby. Not consciously. I’m sorry.”
“Every time I brought up the name Kurtis Missions, you changed the goddamn subject!”
“No-“
“Just tell me his new name. And quit wasting my fucking time.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Tell me his name!”
“John Dee.”
“J-O-H-N, D-E-E?”
“Yes.”
“Will you show me all his notes and his complete source file?”
There was a long pause. “I’m not sure I can do that. No.”
“Are you going to fire him immediately, as a paid source?”
Another pause. “That’s not up to me. That’s up to the superintendent.”
“Where was his safe house? Where was he last located?”
Another pause. “You have every right to be mad.”
“Tell ME!” she hollered.
“I just need to know what you’re going to do.”
Digby scoffed. “What do we usually do when a police source goes on a killing spree and rapes a four-year-old? Give him a pay raise?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Where was the safe house?”
“Christ. He raped a four-year-old?” Smith’s usually bold voice sounded very quiet.
“He did. That’s a real star informer there, Bob. A murdering pedophile.”
Digby frowned, unable to express her anger and disappointment. “I’m so fucking speechless...”
Smith began to softly cry over the phone. “I’m thinking about the big picture, Digby. This is going to embarrass us all. Deal or no deal. This is it for me. They’re going to bury me for this… A kid diddler. Hahahaha… That’s it, it’s all over. They’re going to put me on the fucking Musical Ride, for life.”
“Well…?” Digby was too angry to muster a shred of sympathy. “Are you going to tell me where he was last located, or not?”
“I can’t do that. But I can give you some advice.”
“What?”
“Look for his old name, Kurtis Missions, in his federal government records, in the database.”
“I did already.”
“Do it again. I’ve been doing database searches every day or two, trying to find him. He recently updated his address, with Service Canada, under his old name.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Cause he’s an idiot. He’s trying to get pogey. He updated his address with Service Canada, so they’d send his pogey checks to him. That’s his last known location.”
“Well, thank you for that, I guess.” Digby said, frantically pulling up Query on her computer. It would only take a matter of minutes to search for the new address. “Well, I should go. I have to catch a triple murdering child molestor, who’s halfway in witness protection. So, is anyone else looking for him?”
Smith ruffled around on his end of the phone. “… No. Not as far as I know. I gotta go too. Sorry for everything. I mean it.… I wanna try to get out of here early. I’ve had a shitty day.”
He hung up.
Digby buried her face in her hands, but only for a second.
She searched Service Canada files for Kurtis Dale Raymond Missions, 18, then called Cst. Keith, someone she felt she had formed a kind of trust relationship with on the Lee case. He picked up at his cell phone number.
“Yello?”
“I need to vent.”
“Sgt. Digby. Good. Maybe I do too.”
She told him everything Smith had told her. How he had kept secret the fact that Kurtis Missions was a paid police source with an RCMP witness protection program ID.
“Next time I see that Smith, I’m going to fuckin’ kill him,” Cst. Keith said.
“Thank you. That’s all I needed to hear. Is that too much to ask?”
He laughed. “Unbelievable, the balls on some people.”
She felt better. “Anyway, you can tell your reporter buddy, if you want, about the arrest warrant. It should be out to the press by tomorrow sometime anyway. But not about Kurtis being a coded source, obviously. We’re keeping that bit of info to ourselves for now. We want his picture in the paper, though, absolutely.”
“Yeah… Rawle Powder,” Cst. Keith sounded antsy suddenly. “I- sort of- don’t know where he is anymore, to tell you the truth. He’s disappeared or something. He might be up to something weird, I don’t know.”
“Like what?”
“Ah… He dropped his dog off at my place, a while ago. He was supposed to go down to see his wife and kid on the South Shore, but then I called his wife and she said he wasn’t there. She wouldn’t tell me where he was, and it sounded like she didn’t know.”
Digby thought for a moment. “The last reporter in the valley bureau of the Gazette has disappeared. Two reporters are dead and the last one fled the province?”
Her results in Query came up.
Kurtis Missions’ Employment Insurance file was on her computer screen. His mailing address was listed as a post office box, in Jasper, Alberta.
“I found Rawle’s car at an impound lot,” Cst. Keith said. “I paid his ticket, but why would he leave his car where it would be towed? And I found a bunch of bloody clothes hidden in his trunk. Like he was hunting or something.”
“Bloody clothes?”
“Yeah. Like he gutted a deer in the woods and never even got around to washing his clothes. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll do a bank account check. See if I can locate him.”
“Hmmm…” Digby was barely listening. She was getting more and more pumped up about the Kurtis Missions warrant. She wanted to bring him down, so badly.
She got off the phone and called Staff Sgt. Keetch at home, begging him to come into the office, right away.
When he got there, they worked together on drafting the warrant affidavits, sending a memorandum to the local Crown prosecutor’s office, and extending Kurtis Mission’s outstanding arrest warrant to a Canada-wide warrant, including the added counts of murder and child sexual assault.
When they were done, they read over the paperwork carefully, several times to make sure every ‘t’ was crossed.
Keetch got up to leave. “It’s going to make a splash.”
The next day, Digby organized a conference call with McCreath, his Ops NCO, plus Staff Sgt. Keetch and Inspector Palipschuk.
No mention would be made to the press about the fact that Kurtis Missions a.ka. John Dee was as a paid police source at the time of the offenses. No mention would be made of the fact that Jack Lee had been poisoned, in the weeks prior to his murder.
The poisoning would eventually be written off as an entirely separate crime, believed to have been committed by Kyle Verryn, deceased. Case closed.

When the warrant was signed, Keetch sent it out, along with an offender profile, fingerprints and mug-shot poster, as a bulliten to every law enforcement agency in the country, RCMP, municipal, provincial police force, customs and border security, who would now have the duty to spot, detain and arrest John Dee, a.k.a. Kurtis Missions, last known address Jasper, Alberta.
A short time after the bulliten was released, a press release was sent to a press liaison officer at Oxford Street, where it would be screened for the names of policitians and their children.
The screened press release would then be put out on a national media fax and email list.
The net would soon be cast.
It would only be a matter of time.