Page 23 of A Life Betrayed

Mathias gave him a stern look. “Don’t ask for things I can’t give you.”

Rayan sighed, defeated, and eased himself off Mathias’s lap.

“So, you and my mother…” Mathias stood and began buckling his pants. “You really are a sucker for punishment. She said you came by every month while I was in Hamilton.”

“Right.” Rayan gave a quiet laugh, refastening the front of his jeans. After meeting her that first time, he’d been compelled by a strange sense of pity. “She seemed lonely.”

“She is lonely,” Mathias said with a frown. “Always has been. It’s her defining characteristic.”

Rayan recalled the way the woman’s face would startle when their conversation reached a natural lull, as though dreading the space that rose in between. “That must have been hard.”

“I know what you’re doing.”

“Then I shouldn’t have gone?” Rayan pivoted.

“You need a hobby,” Mathias said, reaching for the top button on his shirt. “You obviously have no idea what to do with your time.”

“I can think of a couple things.” Rayan looked up, catching the man’s eye.

Mathias’s fingers stilled. “You’re pathetic, you know that?” But his mouth tweaked, and he lowered his hands, letting his shirt fall back open.

Rayan tried to keep the stupid smile from his face. “You have no idea.”

With how hard it was proving to get dirt on Mathias, Frances had reached out to Transport Canada and added his plates to their automated recognition watch list. This way, if he crossed provincial lines, she’d know about it. Truman was still playing hard to get, so she figured she’d try to gather her own evidence of the two of them working together.

The opportunity presented itself sooner than expected. Earlier that week, she’d received an alert that Mathias’s car had left Quebec and later been clocked through the toll on Highway 407, heading into Hamilton. She’d called in a favor with Stan Redford, a former colleague who had started his own PI firm after leaving the RCMP and was only too happy to take a stab at tailing Mathias. Granted, it was a little unorthodox, but Ontariowas her old stomping ground. Out there, she had a greater selection of resources at her disposal, while in Montreal, she had a sneaking suspicion that she was being deliberately left in the dark.

Stan managed to locate Mathias’s car parked outside a dump of a dive bar on the outskirts of the city. It wasn’t a location Frances recognized from the list of known Reapers establishments. Before Stan had a chance to get out of his car, Mathias emerged from the bar, so there was no way of knowing who he’d met with. Stan followed Mathias as he drove out of the parking lot and onto the highway. But instead of heading back in the direction of Montreal, he’d crossed Burlington Bay and continued north to Toronto. Not one to back down from a challenge, Stan tailed him to a sleepy neighborhood downtown, where Mathias had pulled his car into an underground lot beneath a block of apartments. From there, Stan lost track of him.

When Stan had relayed all of this to her over the phone, she’d been certain they’d stumbled onto something. Perhaps Mathias kept a woman in the city. It was common among the mafia elite and had proven many a man’s downfall. In her experience, these women were the ones the men confided in—certainly not their wives or, as Mathias had made painfully clear, the interchangeable girls who worked at the clubs. Mathias had built his life carefully, leaving very little in the way of open doors, but this had the potential to be that opening. If they could find the woman, Frances could start putting pressure on her. She’d instructed Stan to return the following morning and spend three days photographing everyone who entered and exited the apartment building.

Frances sat at her computer—the Montreal office was deserted on a Friday evening, since everyone had gone home to dinner with their families or out with friends—and scrolled through thefile of images Stan had sent her. She was looking for a younger woman, polished and beautiful with expensive taste. She’d narrowed it down to a few candidates when she clicked through to the next photo and paused.

The shot was of a man of ambiguous ethnicity, in his early-to-mid-twenties, with tousled black hair. He looked Hispanic, or possibly Middle Eastern, and was athletic in build but dressed casually. She flicked through a few more photos and found him again, this time arriving back at the building in the evening, the collar of his winter coat pulled up against the cold.

Why does he seem so familiar?He wasn’t on her map and hadn’t been plotted out among the ranks of family soldiers. But she had an eye for faces and couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen him somewhere before. She flipped through the folder on her desk, not finding him among the stack of printed bios. Then she strode down to the filing room and pulled out a box of images from Giorgio Russo’s funeral. HQ had sent over a photographer to capture everyone in attendance so as to assemble an updated record of the group. Much had been speculated about the men at that funeral and what had happened afterward.

She scoured each photo. There were over a hundred of them, with names and known ranks recorded on the backs of the images. When she came to Antonio Giraldi, she stopped, her eye catching on the blurry profile of a man standing behind him. She held it up to her face. He was out of focus, the target of the image being the old man in front, yet the resemblance was unmistakable. She trawled through the remaining archive of figures, from lowly drivers all the way up to Giovanni Bianchi himself, but the dark-haired man hadn’t been categorized—he’d been omitted from the record. Or he’d been removed entirely. Purposely erased.

Frances reached for another box, which was dated several years prior to the funeral, when Mathias Beauvais was only just beginning to come up on the RCMP’s radar. She scanned the index and then thumbed through it, finding images, documents, and whole sections missing.

“The fuck…?” she muttered.

Someone had done a number on this—a full-scale clean-up job. She picked up the box and hauled it back upstairs to her desk, where she took everything out and went through each piece of paper with a fine-tooth comb. People were fallible. If the mob had someone on the inside, they were bound to have removed the evidence in a hurry to avoid getting caught. And when someone was in a hurry, mistakes were made. Her hand fell on a photo of Mathias in discussion with a large, gruff-looking man, and there, almost cropped out of the frame, was the young man from outside the building. Gone were the tousled hair and the casual clothes. Here was a slicked-back soldier in black, his face a blank mask.

That’s right. Before Jacques Laberge, there was someone else…After she’d accepted the transfer to Quebec, Frances had dived deep into the records of the family’s purported activities in Montreal and remembered coming across a mention of another subordinate who had worked with Mathias.What was his name?For the life of her, she couldn’t remember. And it seemed someone else wanted to ensure he was forgotten.

But why?Frances took the photo and held it up beside the image on her computer screen. Then she picked up the phone and called Stan. She hadn’t found the woman Mathias was seeing, but this coincidence was too jarring to ignore. She would have Stan follow the man in the photo and find out who he was.

Chapter Ten

Frances watched as the young man shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and strode across the icy quad at the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. Rayan Nadeau. The admissions office had him registered as Rayan Ayari. She hadn’t found any record of that name in her subsequent searches, but the name Nadeau had brought up a plethora of information in the system that seemed to stop dead right around the time the man had turned eighteen.

She knew about the numerous group homes he’d cycled through and the foster family who’d backed out after Rayan refused to be separated from his brother. He had no living relatives except for an estranged father who’d been deemed negligent by the courts and stripped of his parental rights. She’d seen the photos that child protection services had taken of Rayan as a young boy, detailing his bruised face and lacerated neck, which had accompanied the petition for divorce filed by his mother. The divorce was never finalized—several years later, the woman had committed suicide in the apartment where she lived with her two sons. There was a clinical psychologist’s report prepared before the custody hearing for the boys, which described Rayan as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative tendencies. The assessment also noted he was hyperlexic and an autodidact, intelligent beyond his years. Then there was his criminal record, which detailed a handful of summary offenses committed in his teens and one auto theft conviction that was later dismissed before trial.

Frances followed Rayan with her eyes as he passed by where she stood outside the student union building and headed toward the gates on College Street. From the information the admissions office had sent through, he maintained a 4.0 average and had condensed a four-year degree into five semesters. But he was also the man who appeared in photos with key figures of the Montreal mafia. Now that she’d seen him in person, there was no denying it.

Her guess was that Mathias was using Rayan as a free agent and banking on his erasure from police records to fly under the radar and break into the Toronto crime circuit. Mathias had done something similar in Hamilton several years prior—a city with virtually no mob presence was turned into a hotbed of family activity almost overnight. Perhaps Rayan had never stopped working for Mathias but had simply been stationed elsewhere to establish a new market for the family’s expansion into Ontario, his appearance as a dedicated student nothing more than a ruse.

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