Chapter 19

Search warrants had been obtained for the home of Glen Frederick and for his business, GF Autobody & Sales on nearby Mountain Road.
Codiac RCMP Special Investigations had been surveilling the Frederick home by remote camera for a month.
The search warrants were based on video of Frederick coming in and out of the home, on several occasions, carrying a handgun and possibly equipment to make counterfeit license plates.
The video constituted evidence toward a charge of carrying a prohibited weapon and perhaps vehicle registration fraud.
Codiac RCMP was pretty sure Glen Frederick was involved in a local car theft ring that sold stolen cars under VIN numbers copied from cars registered legally in the United States.
It was all pretty weak, but it got Digby inside the door, and that was all she cared about.
The Codiac RCMP surveillance also indicated that Glen Frederick and his teenage son Derek did not come home on the night of the firebombing.
Glen Frederick and Nicole King were placed in separate interrogation rooms at Codiac RCMP headquarters.
Digby had 24 hours to either extract a confession from him or find enough damning evidence at his house and garage to lay an arson or attempted murder charge.
Officers quickly uncovered a number of improperly stored firearms at the Frederick home, which at least gave Digby some leverage.
Frederick kept a Kreighoff big game rifle in a case in his van, laid right beside the driver’s seat. The Kreighoff was a monstrous, ornate hunting gun, undoubtedly used for show more than anything else, but it looked like it could bring down a charging rhino.
They also found two 9mm Smith & Wesson 5946’s upstairs in the master bedroom, and a Glock 9mm in a kitchen cupboard.
Cop guns.
The handguns would be tested through Ibis to see if they were clean of previous crimes.
In the meantime, Sgt. Digby and Glen Frederick sat alone in a three-metre square interrogation room, no bigger than a gas station bathroom. It contained one table and three ugly chairs. The walls were covered with perforated acoustic tile and were completely bare, except for a two-way mirror on one wall and a metal light switch on the other.
A slight humming noise rained down from the trays of flouroscent lights above.
“I understand why you’d drag me in here,” Frederick said in a booming voice, breaking along silence. “’Cause I’m a nigger. Trust me, I get arrested a lot. But what do you need my wife for? What’d she do?”
Digby looked him over with her big curious eyes, keeping a pleasant, open look on her face.
“Mr. Frederick, my name is Sgt. Biz Digby. I’m an investigator from the South Western region of Nova Scotia. The Annapolis Valley. We have some evidence that suggests your wife may have been involved in a serious crime in Nova Scotia.”
She gave a little shrug. “But I know you’re really the one involved, Glenny, not her. Or should I call you Snow?”
He looked monstrous in the weak light of the room, but he spoke politely and kept a calm demenour. He even seemed to have genuine warmth and humour in his voice.
“Call me Snow what?” he joked. “Snow Black?”
Digby kept her face serious and said nothing.
“Are you formally charging me with anything or are we just talking?”
“We’re talking. I was hoping you could help me. But we could charge you with three counts unsafe storage of a firearm. And you are under arrest, for questioning under suspicion of arson. Would you like to talk to an attorney about those potential charges?”
Frederick laughed in a booming voice. His laugh sounded like Count Dracula: “Ah-ah-ah. So what crime could you charge my wife with then? I’m really curious. She’s never not paid a Jesus parking ticket.”
He saw that Digby knew of Nicole’s criminal record and added a disclaimer: “The only thing she ever did was clean her house after I kicked some raghead’s ass. Big deal.”
Digby said nothing and tried to read the man’s responses. Was he saying he was guilty? Did he like her?
Frederick sat across the table, leaning slightly to the side. He had massive, piled-up round shoulders. He definately used steroids.
There were flecks of gray in his short black afro. His skin was a light coffee colour. His bone structure made his face look scary looking, like the ugly people in that Twilight Zone episode where everybody in the world is ugly. But he looked relaxed, like he didn’t give a rat’s ass that he and his wife had been so heavy-handedly arrested.
She watched his hands, they never twitched. She watched his skin colour, it never changed. He never broke a sweat. She watched a shallow vein in his bulging neck as it faintly beat his pulse. His pulse never quickened or skipped a beat.
“Do you know where your wife was on Saturday night, early Sunday morning? Specifically at or about three-thirty a.m. to four a.m.?”
His massive eyebrows flickered as he processed the times.
Digby caught a gleam of warmth in his eyeballs. He was curious, but not necessarily worried yet.
“We were downtown, in Moncton, Mexi’s then the Drome. We went to a boozecan after last call. We didn’t get home ‘til five or so.”
“Did anyone call you? You or your wife while you were there at the Dome or the boozecan?”
“Calls? Like our cell phones?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you have your cell phones with you?”
“Probably. It’s my phone ain’t it?”
“Did your wife have her phone with her?”
“It’s her phone. Why don’t you ask her?”
“Did anyone see her or you at the Drome that night, or at the afterhours club?”
“I can give you five names right now of people who saw me,” he grinned.
“Good. I’ll call them right now.” She looked at him straight-faced. “What are their names?”
He blinked. “I’ll have to think about that for a minute.”
He pulled himself upright and rested his powerful forearms on the table.
He was wearing a white RCMP T-shirt Digby had given him, several sizes too small. “What is it you think she did anyway? My wife? She don’t belong or hang out with nobody in my motorcycle club, which is the whole reason you think I’m guilty. Because I belong to some tiny biker club of me and my buddies from high school. Ah-ah-ah. She’s not the one you’re looking for, Biz. You even said so yourself- except it’s not me neither. You know- you said your name was Biz?”
“Biz Digby. That’s correct.”
”-Biz, if you tell me what we’re here for, maybe I can help you. I know a lot-a lot of people. I hear a lot. I even thought about turning informer before, you know?”
Digby chuckled at his obvious con. “For me?”
“That’s right, honey, if the money’s right. I got kids to feed you know. I’m a small businessman in troubled times.”
Frederick’s smile dropped from his face slightly. “What about my young fellas?”
Digby feigned sympathy. “Someone from Children’s Aid is with them. They’ll be fine. They’ll be looked after until we get this all cleared up.”
She detected a brilliant flare of rage in Frederick’s eyes at the words: ‘Children’s Aid.’
He, no doubt, had some experience with social services.
She knew the threat of putting Frederick’s kids, the young one especially, Mathias, into the system, even for 24 hours, would be a powerful lever to help pry the biker’s mouth open.
She moved in with a jab. “You and Nicole might get a bail hearing in the morning. Do you have any relatives who could look after Mathias for a while?”
He was still grinning. Digby knew he didn’t have any relatives in the city worth a damn.
“I’ll be out after tonight,” he said, acidly. “You have 24 hours. What happened Saturday night at three? What am I arrested for? What am I going to be charged with? I don’t know. And my lawyer’s name is Brinsmead Jones. 506-388-9991.”
Digby paused and said nothing. It was not an explicit request to contact his lawyer. She stood up and began to slowly walk the tiny room with her hands in her pockets.
They were almost the same height, with him sitting in the chair and her standing up.
She sat down again and gave him her most emotion-filled eyes, face-to-face. Her eyes were watering.
“Glenny, while you say your wife was at the Liquor Drome, Saturday night, her cell phone was travelling to the Annapolis Valley, in Nova Scotia and stopped at the community of Ellershouse, Hants County.”
She stopped talking and stared at Frederick’s impassive eyes, trying to read the subtle changes in his eye area. A slight-slight ashen colour drained into the puffy circles under his eyes, like a fish that had been thrown on land and was starting to get starved of oxygen.
“Yeah,” she continued, again using a sympathetic, emotional voice. “We can prove that. It’s in the cell tower records. How do you explain that? How do you think she’s explaining that in the other interview room? Her phone contacted a cell tower within a kilometre of an arson on a jail guard’s home, within minutes of the incident. Three people, Glenny, including two little girls, children, were injured. I have some photos, I think, of the injuries. They’re sickening. Do you want to see them?” She reached under her chair and picked up a large black purse from which she removed a manila folder. She spread a set of three glossy photos on the tabletop. The images were of a pair of unbandaged arms that looked red, black, crusty and yellow, mangled by burns.
“This woman leaves a ring of mucous and skin behind her in the bathtub,” Digby said. “Do you feel guilty when you see this? This is terrible, Glenny. Can you imagine what it must have felt like? She was sitting in her living room, watching TV. Her husband was at work. Her kids upstairs. And a fireball came through the window and exploded on the table in front of her, causing her arms to catch fire.”
Frederick looked sympathetic. “Jezz, that looks painful,” he said, wincing. He was probably being sarcastic, but he did a good job acting.
“I know you saw this on the news, Glenny. You like to keep up with current events, don’t you? This woman’s husband is a jail guard at Burnside. Who do you think would burn-out a jail guard like that?”
Frederick reclined in the stiff wood and steel tube chair. “I get it. Must be a nigger, right?”
“-You know how mad people are in law enforcement?” Digby continued. “Every day I talk to someone at the Law Courts, from a judge down to a fat Sheriff’s deputy. Every one of them is pissed off, at you. The Crowns, the judges, they all want three counts attempted murder.”
“Ah-ah-ah,” Frederick shook his head in disbelief. “Attempted murder? You’re a strange cop, Biz Digby. And if that’s a threat, this whole thing will get tossed out the window right now. And I hope you’re recording this, Biz. You’re not allowed to threaten me.”
“I’m not threatening you,” Digby said. “I don’t need to. We have your wife’s cell phone. It’s pretty hard to explain, is it not? Especially now that you said you and your wife were at the Drome or an afterhours club. We have lies now, Glenny, do we not? The Crown attorney loves that. Lies are so convincing. When you start lying, you don’t last too long.”
“Another threat. My lawyer will love this. For the record, I’m definitely feeling threatened right now.”
He didn’t change his body position. He was grinning, but nevertheless Digby thought he looked mildly disturbed now. The smirk that protected his emotions from plain view, was forced. Something had drained the smugness from his face.
What?
Digby wondered how she had broken through so quickly. Did he not know about the cellphone? How could he not?
She decided to stick with the cell tower record. It was not conclusive, since it didn’t link him directly with the crime, but at least he lied about it, which was a start.
“We called the number from the receipt, and it rang. It’s definitely the same phone. What was it doing in Ellershouse at three-thirty a.m. last Saturday?”
It took Frederick a long time to concoct a new story, several seconds, but when he did speak, he sounded self-assured and not the slightest bit embarrassed.
“I said ‘I thought’ she had her phone. Why wouldn’t she? But it’s possible her phone was stolen and used by someone else that night. Some little nigger.”
Digby winced her eyebrows slightly.
“Okay… Like who?”
“I don’t know. Some idiot. I can’t tell you, but in the course of your investigation it will come out that it was not my wife who used her phone that night.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Glenny. We seized the phone in your home. It was recovered. We even asked Nicole if she recently lost her cellphone, and she said ‘no.’ She’s being honest, and maybe you should take a lesson. Maybe she doesn’t want to go back to Nova Institution?”
He let out a long sigh. He was not happy. “Maybe I will call my lawyer. If you’ve already got your mind made up. It seems likeyou won’t even listen to reason.”
“He lives right next to the cop shop, doesn’t he? You know you don’t have to answer any questions you don’t want to, Glenny You’re not stupid, but I can still keep you here for 24 hours, and I intend to.”
Digby asked all her questions, even the smart-ass ones, with the same tone of genuine curiosity.
“Just make sure you call him.”
“I almost forgot. We got a description of your company van at the scene of the firebombing. What about that? Did some unidentified little N-word steal your van too?”
Glenny smiled again, showing most of his large, white teeth. “Ah-ah-ah. Was it my van or some other white van, Biz? There’s a lot of white vans in the world.”
“They don’t all have the same license plate.”
Frederick gave a hand-job motion with his right hand. “Oh, you got a plate number? Why didn’t you say so?”
He put his hand back down on the table and turned serious. “What you should do is pull up the registered owner on Motor Vehicles. There’s your man right there.”
“We’re working on it.”
“Ah-ah. I bet you are. You can’t put one past you guys.”
“Maybe your wife is telling us everything we need to know. She already said you weren’t with her on Saturday night. She says you went somewhere with your son, Derek, and didn’t get back ‘til the next day.”
Frederick winked at her. “I won’t confess to a crime I didn’t commit, even if you blackmail me by falsely arresting my wife. I don’t believe in lying.” He pointed a huge finger at her. He was getting mad. His finger looked like a barbeque sausage.
“You guys ginned-up some phone thing on my wife to blackmail me into confessing, I get it. It’s a really shitty thing to do. Leave it to a fuckin’ Iraqi to pull a trick like that. But I won’t confess to a crime I never did. You can hang my wife. So fuck you.”
“Will you take a lie detector test?”
He didn’t answer.
“Will you take a polygraph test?”
“This is Canada, Biz Laden. It’s a free country. No lie detector.”
“Why not take it? If you don’t take it, it makes me assume you’re hiding something. Then I’m gonna spend all my energy on you, just ‘cause you refused it.”
Frederick put two spread fingers up to his mouth and flickered his tongue between them, miming cunnilingus.
It was something a high school student would do.
Digby chuckled, in disbelief. “You’re not even taking this seriously? Are you kidding me? You have to admit, you’re going to have to explain a few things if you want to clear the air.”
He refused to speak or answer questions after that.
He asked flat out to see his lawyer again and Sgt. Digby got up and left the room.
Within a half-hour, local criminal attorney Brinsmead Jones had arrived at the station and demanded to be let in.
They let Frederick confer with his lawyer in privacy, with the video camera and speaker shut off.
Brinsmead left after twenty minutes and advised Sgt. Digby that he’d instructed his client not to answer any more questions, period.
The lawyer left and Digby sat for an hour outside the interrogation room, just watching Frederick through the mirror.
At one point, he stood up and turned over the table, then picked up each wooden chair, one after the other, and splintered them to bits on the concrete floor. His face was purple and contorted with fury.
“He’s in a complete rage,” Digby pointed out to another interrogator, sitting nearby. “Do you guys have a TNT squad?”
TNT was cop lingo for “Tonfa ‘n’ Telephone book,” which was a goon squad that could rush in the room and teach Glen Frederick some manners with a pair of nightsticks or ‘tonfa-sticks’ and a phone book.
The fact that Frederick was trashing the interrogation room meant they could rush the room and ‘subdue’ him.
The Codiac RCMP interrogator stood up. “I’ll see if I can cobble one together.”
A few minutes later, three large enforcer-type constables rushed the room in full body armour.
The constables were former Moncton city police officers, Digby was told, notorious for their tuning abilities.
They took Frederick down to the ground, quickly, after cornering the big man around the remnants of the table and grappling him. Digby made sure the tape was not recording and the camera was off. She watched through the mirror glass as the constables took turns laying the fat Moncton-Dieppe phone book on Frederick’s back, legs, stomach and ribs and beat on it with their tonfa sticks. Whacking him through the phone book would deliver a painful beating without leaving stick marks.
They beat Frederick for ten minutes.