Forfeit & Redemption
Quinn O-Rourke & Annie Besan
Private Investigators
Nineteen Seventy- Six was shaping up to be a great year for Canada’s Alberta province. Home to two professional hockey teams, a business environment that was holding firm and growing, two dynamic cities, Edmonton and Calgary, each a stone’s throw distance from the beautiful Canadian Rockies and Alberta had the Thunder, Calgary’s beloved triple A hockey team.
Tom Pelletier, the aggressive, hard hitting and high sticking Captain of the Thunder was the darling of Calgary and on the night of a celebratory dinner held at the Calgary Hotel honoring the Thunder’s first playoff series, Pelletier was less than a block away at the Thunder’s hockey rink planning to ask his girlfriend, Fiona Allbright, for her hand in marriage. Having secured a yes from Fiona, he headed to the locker room to get Fiona a present, a puppy. Returning, Fiona lay dead on the ice, her skull crushed from repeated blows by a hockey stick. Her body had been dragged to the net leaving a wide blood stain behind her. The Thunder forfeited their first game which proved to be their last. Pelletier was convicted of Fiona’s murder.
Forty years after the forfeit, Rene Bouchard, a billionaire and the principal owner of Bouchard Metals and Mining, had one desire which would haunt him until he acted on it. He wanted to clear Pelletier’s name, restore the old hockey rink, rebuild the surrounding neighborhood and resurrect the Thunder. To make his dream work, he needed to clear Pelletier of his murder conviction. Forfeits in hockey are never forgiven and rarely forgotten.
To clear Pelletier of the murder, Bouchard hired Quinn O’Rouke and his assistant Annie Besan. Money can solve a myriad of problems but can it solve a forty- year old cold case? O’Rouke and Besan didn’t like cold cases, especially old ones. The money was too good to pass up and so the private investigators accepted the task knowing that failure was more than a possibility.
