Chapter 10

Det. Sgt. Smith’s friend, the guard captain, Caleb Chega, met them at the front entrance of Burnside Jail.
The blue walls of the warehouse-style building and pyramid-shaped front entrance constructed aout of triangles of tinted glass, made the facility look more like an upscale Lowe’s than a provincial correctional centre.
The investigators signed-in at the admissions desk, and checked their guns and then walked down a long shiny white hallway to South Unit where Perry Paul Spalding’s jail cell sat packed in a cluster of nine others.
Smith had requested in advance that the biker be removed from his living quarters and placed in a private room in Isolation Ward, with no canteen.
The officers would not be able to interview him without his lawyer present. Smith expected he wouldn’t get squat from Spalding, especially with Alan Lee’s legal team there, cutting every sentence. Interviewing him without clear evidence of wrongdoing would be a waste of time.
For now, he was more interested in tossing Spalding’s two-by-four metre jail cell, reading his mail and looking over any transcripts of his phone calls to see if anything could tread water.
Phone calls the gang leader made were all monitored and recorded, except calls to his lawyer, which by law could not be recorded, and calls to his mother.
The cell had a solid, off-white steel door with a tiny vertical slot for a window.
Chega heaved the door open after signaling a floor guard to buzz the lock.
“Some of the guys listened to a call between Spalding and his mother,” Chega mumbled as they filed into the cell. “You’ll be pleased to hear that- she’s what? 70? She’s been patching gang members into her calls with her son, using three-way calling. In the one phone call we listened to, she patched in two different gang members. Bill Tiffen and a biker named Fernand Boudreau, from Quebec City.”
“Jesus Christ,” Smith whispered.
“Yeah. Mom and son talked for a minute or two, then all of a sudden she puts him on hold and calls up Bill Tiffen. He comes on the line and Spalding’s mom sets her end down and goes off to do her knitting and Spalding and Bill Tiffen talk about dressing a bunch of boys up as RCMP tactical troop officers or something and sending them to Christine Harold’s house in the middle of the night. To silence her and say ‘guess what? Perry Spalding has friends in the RCMP. They can’t protect you from him.’”
“-Holy mother.”
“Yeah.”
Christine Harold was a minor witness in Spalding’s upcoming murder trial. “Did you get anything on tape?” Smith couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Did you record the call?”
“You’re missing the point. On our end it was an ordinary call to his mom. We don’t record calls to his mom. She patched the other line in on her end. There’s no way we would know. We just happened to pick up part of the call by mistake. We didn’t get anything on tape.”
“Un-frigging-believable.”
“Next time, we’ll be recording.”
“You’re right you will be,” Smith hissed. “And how many unmonitored calls has Spalding made to gang members this way?”
Chega shrugged. “How many murders has he ordered on the Department of Public Safety phone bill?”