Coyotes by David Collier-Brown
It was morning, I was at work, and the phone rang. I said “Hello, Adrian here.”
“This is Detective Sergeant Collier, could you come in?”
I immediately thought, “Something bad’s happened. I wonder if they’re looking at me as a suspect.”
“Hi, Alan. If I work through lunch I can come in at four, or seven tomorrow morning if you prefer.”
“No, tomorrow’s booked up, today is best. I need you to look at something from your side of the street.”
That sounded better: it wasn’t me in the cross-hairs.
“Is it anything you can tell me about?”
Alan said “Yes. We looked at your phone trace, you’ve been nowhere near the site.
“It looks like a coyote attack on a couple of kids skinny-dipping, but there seems to be a lot of damage, and coyotes don’t normally run to packs.”
“That’s odd,” I said, “Was it one, coming back every day for more?”
“It could have been: they’ve been missing for a while. The parents were afraid it was an under-age elopement, but the farmer who owns the shoreline smelled something horrible this morning, and called us.
“I have to tell the parents next, and it’s not going to be happy news.
“Our sciences guy said that a mated pair just might go after a little kid, but not an adult-sized teen, much less two, so we’re looking at alternative explanations”
“OK.” I said, “Alternatives would be a bad thing. See you a little after four. Your office?”
“Yes, same process as usual. I’ll sign you in now.”
I popped into an unused meeting room and fired up my recorder. “Dear Diary,” I said, “Alan has something that sounds like wolves, natural or were.”
At four, I had a quiet discussion with Alan and his Inspector, and I headed home.
“Dear Diary,
Alan is afraid it was wolves. The force has brought in naturalists from UofT to help them look for any evidence of wolves or extended families of coyotes. Those are known to bring down large prey, like moose.
“Neither sounded plausible. We both wonder if we have a were problem. He wanted me to go to Algonquin and ask a pack representative about lone wolves.”
Algonquin
Barbara and I spent a nice weekend in Algonquin park, bird-watching. My wife really is a birdwatcher: she got a male Black-poll warbler in his breeding grounds.
Accidentally-on-purpose, we ran into another bird-watcher. He was the ‘corresponding secretary’ for the Algonquin pack.
Now there’s a title I haven’t heard since the 1920s, before everything turned into telephone conversations. I wonder how old he is.”
He said “It could be a lone wolf, but none of our pack has been AWOL.
“A real gray wolf wouldn’t go anywhere near people, much less a city like Toronto, but a were might see a city as a really big supply of food.
“Its trouble would be concealing the kills. It wouldn’t have left them anywhere they might be found. So this looks wrong for a lone wolf.”
“Oh bother,” I said, “now we have two blind alleys.”
& & &
Alan called, we brought each other up to speed and he said “The only lead we have is that the girl was the daughter of a prosecutor in the guns and gangs task force.
“Our undercover officers came up dry. Do you have any contacts with the gangs? His team rolled up most of the Hell’s Angels last fall.”
“Well,” I said, “I have a contact who once asked for a new identity for a biker friend. The friend was headed to BC and wanted to be squeaky-clean, so he could get a passport.”
Forgery
The contact is Daniel, who owns a bar in my neighborhood. I told him what I was doing, and he agreed to back up my cover story.
He passed the word that I was looking. “He’s good at creating fake digital footprints—bank accounts, phone records, address histories. He’s a semi-retired forger with a need to supplement his real-estate income. Contact him through me as a cut-out.”
The economy actually is in a slump, with house sales way down, which means realtor income is down too.
In reality I’m a very-non-active hacker: mostly I’m creating new identities for myself on paper and in databases. I do favors for friends, but forgery isn’t something I’d care to do for a living.
My First Lead
No-one’s interested initially, but I hung around the pub, where people can find me. Partly I’m collecting scuttlebutt.
A local outlaw motorcycle gang is loudly trying to re-form, after being literally decimated. One in every ten members have been arrested in a mass of police raids.
[Project Tandem (2006–2009), OPP]
One of the former members, let’s call him Marc, is out in the cold, and would really like to be someone else, so he can move away. He hears about me, and reaches out to Daniel.
When we meet, he asks “Can you do something that will be permanent? I’m going to move to Montreal as soon as I can. There are lots of construction jobs there I can do.”
A week and a bit later, we do the hand-off: Marc is now Tony Deschêne.
Then I do the other hand-off: “Alan, Marc now has his papers and is headed for Montreal. I got him a sim card in that name. I’ll send you the number and some other info in a text.”
Where’s Tony?
Alan calls to say that the new number is paid for, but not in use. He’s not using it in his current burner phone. That could mean he’s still in town.
Then the bad news: a “mugging gone wrong” takes out the son of a different prosecutor on the team. We might be looking at a serial revenge.
That means Marc is still on hand to be a suspect, and the different MO suggests it’s not a serial killer. Just the regular kind.
& & &
Without explicitly telling Alan what I’m up to, I ask for one of his business cards. “If I need police help, I want them to have someone to call.” and I asked for Marc’s whereabouts.
Alan told me “Don’t do anything that would threaten your relationship with the police. And for goodness sake don’t let Marc see you watching him. He’s killed twice before, I don’t want you to be the third.”
Alan’s protective instinct was getting in the way.
“Relax,” I said, “I bugged Marc’s physical phone, so I can track him from blocks away, just like you do with a cell number, except in real time. I want to be able to get information straight to you if I have to flag down a cop.”
“You can do that? We can track people, but we only get locations when the phone company rolls them up at the end of the hour.”
Barbara and Adrian’s Tail Job
After work, Barbara and I surveill Marc, by scent. When both of us are on foot, I can hang back right out of sight and still get a trace, most of the time.
When Marc uses a car, it’s way harder. Barbara drives, so I can hop out easily. Of course, I’d look suspicious if I hung my head out of the window like a dog, so we lose the scent repeatedly. But it turns out he’s following a routine.
“Alan”, I said, “He’s definitely still in town. He always follows the same route. He walks the length of first block of Old Forest Hill Road north of Eglington.”
“Thanks, we’ll see who he’s surveilling, while you’re surveilling him.”
& & &
“Adrian? Allan here. It smells like revenge, as one of the other prosecutors on the case lives on that block. I’ll set up protective surveillance from across the street before tonight. You stay well clear, I don’t want them picking you up instead of Marc.”
Red Alert
We kept an eye on Marc from a distance, to see if he would still follow the same routine.
He’s as regular as clockwork until one night he turns up Darwin, that leads toward the back of the prosecutor’s house, and disappears.
“Alan, Adrian here. Marc just disappeared up Darwin road, the next street over.”
“I’ll tell the observer and send close protection, ETA 5 minutes. Get out of there before you hear sirens.”
Well, of course I didn’t. I followed Marc’s scent trail to the prosecutor’s back yard, where he was in the process of hooking a coil of wire from one of the basement windows to some sort of device.
Oh God, there’s no time. If it’s a bomb, it’s about to go off.
I hurled him to the ground, forced his mouth closed with my hand and bit him on his right hand. Then I needed to hold him and keep him from screaming until the venom reached his brain.
It felt like hours, but it was barely a minute and a half before he stopped fighting back. I could hear the sirens getting closer the whole time.
& & &
Alan said “Thanks, they’ve captured him.” He doesn’t say how.
Then he asked, “Can you teach us the real-time phone trick? Checking phone records afterward wouldn’t have worked, here.”
“Sorry,” I said, “that’s a closely held secret. The RCMP can probably issue you a kit of your own if you ask. Just don’t tell them that someone you know has one.”
Of course, they might not, since it doesn’t exist.
* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright David Collier-Brown 2026
Image Source: Dey from Fictom.com