Kitabı oku: «Forty Words for Sorrow»
GILES BLUNT
FORTY WORDS FOR SORROW
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
1
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59
Keep Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epigraph
In Memoriam
Philip L. Blunt (1916–2000)
1
It gets dark early in Algonquin Bay. Take a drive up Airport Hill at four o’clock on a February afternoon and when you come back half an hour later, the streets of the city will glitter below you in the dark like so many runways. The forty-sixth parallel may not be all that far north; you can be much further north and still be in the United States, and even London, England, is a few degrees closer to the North Pole. But this is Ontario, Canada, we’re talking about, and Algonquin Bay in February is the very definition of winter: Algonquin Bay is snowbound, Algonquin Bay is quiet, Algonquin Bay is very, very cold.
John Cardinal was driving home from the airport where he had just watched his daughter, Kelly, board a plane bound for the United States by way of Toronto. The car still smelled of her – or at least of the scent that had lately become her trademark: Rhapsody or Ecstasy or some such. To Cardinal, wife gone and now daughter gone, it smelled of loneliness.
It was many degrees below zero outside; winter squeezed the car in its grip. The windows of the Camry were frosted up on both sides, and Cardinal had to keep scraping them with an ineffective plastic blade. He went south down Airport Hill, made a left onto the bypass, another left onto Trout Lake Road, and then he was heading north again toward home.
Home, if you could call it that with both Catherine and Kelly gone, was a tiny wooden house on Madonna Road, smallest among a crescent of cottages set like a brooch along the north shore of Trout Lake. Cardinal’s house was fully winterized, or so the real estate agent had told them, but ‘winterized’ had turned out to be a relative term. Kelly claimed you could store ice cream in her bedroom.
His drive was hidden by four-foot-high snowbanks, so Cardinal didn’t see the car blocking his way until he almost rear-ended it. It was one of the unmarkeds from work, great pale clouds of exhaust blasting out from behind. Cardinal reversed and parked across the road. Lise Delorme, the Algonquin Bay police department’s entire Office of Special Investigations, got out of the unmarked and waded through the exhaust toward him.
The department, despite ‘great strides toward employment equity’, as the bureaucrats liked to phrase it, was still a bastion of male chauvinism, and the general consensus around the place was that Lise Delorme was too – well, too something – for her job. You’re at work, you’re trying to think, you don’t need the distraction. Not that Delorme looked like a movie star; she didn’t. But there was something about the way she looked at you, McLeod liked to say – and for once McLeod was right. Delorme had a disturbing tendency to hold your gaze just a little too long, just a split second too long, with those earnest brown eyes. It was as if she’d slipped her hand inside your shirt.
In short, Delorme was a terrible thing to do to a married man. And Cardinal had other reasons to fear her.
‘I was about to give up,’ she said. Her French Canadian accent was unpredictable: one hardly noticed it most of the time, but then final consonants would disappear and sentences would sprout double subjects. ‘I tried to phone you, but there was no answer, and your machine, it’s not working.’
‘I switched it off,’ Cardinal said. ‘What the hell are you doing here, anyway?’
‘Dyson told me to come get you. They’ve found a body.’
‘Got nothing to do with me. I don’t work homicides, remember?’ Cardinal was trying to be merely factual, but even he could hear the bitterness in his voice. ‘You mind letting me through, Sergeant?’ The ‘Sergeant’ was just to nettle her. Two detectives of equal rank would normally address each other by name, except in the presence of the public or around junior officers.
Delorme was standing between her car and the snowbank. She stepped aside so Cardinal could get to his garage door.
‘Well Dyson, I think he wants you back.’
‘I don’t care. You mind backing out now, so I can plug my car in? I mean, if that’s okay with Dyson. Why’s he sending you, anyway? Since when are you working homicides?’
‘You must have heard I quit Special.’
‘No, I heard you wanted to quit Special.’
‘It’s official now. Dyson says you’ll show me the ropes.’
‘No, thanks. I’m not interested. Who’s working Special?’
‘He’s not here yet. Some guy from Toronto.’
‘Fine,’ Cardinal said. ‘Doesn’t make the slightest difference. You gonna get lost now? It’s cold, I’m tired, and I’d kind of like to eat my supper.’
‘They think it could be Katie Pine.’ Delorme scanned his face while Cardinal took this in, those solemn brown eyes watching his reaction.
Cardinal looked away, staring out into the blackness that was Trout Lake. In the distance the headlights of two snowmobiles moved in tandem across the dark. Katie Pine. Thirteen years old. Missing since September 12; he would never forget that date. Katie Pine, a good student, a math whiz from the Chippewa Reserve, a girl whom he had never met, whom he had wanted more than anything to find.
The phone began to ring inside the house, and Delorme looked at her watch. ‘That’s Dyson. He only gave me one hour.’
Cardinal went inside. He didn’t invite Delorme. He picked up the phone on the fourth ring and heard Detective Sergeant Don Dyson going on at him in his chilly quack of a voice as if they had been separated in the middle of an argument and were only now, three months later, resuming it. In a way, that was true.
‘Let’s not waste time going over old ground,’ Dyson said. ‘You want me to apologize, I apologize. There. Done. We got a body out on the Manitou Islands, and McLeod is tied up in court. Up to his ears in Corriveau. Case is yours.’
Cardinal felt the old anger burning its way into his veins. I may be a bad cop, he told himself, but not for the reasons Dyson thinks. ‘You took me off homicide, remember? I was strictly robbery and burglary material, in your book.’
‘I changed your case assignments, it’s what a detective sergeant does, remember? Ancient history, Cardinal. Water under the bridge. We’ll talk about it after you see the body.’
‘“She’s a runaway,” you said. “Katie Pine is not a homicide, she’s a runaway. Got a history of it.”’
‘Cardinal, you’re back on homicide, all right? It’s your investigation. Your whole stinking show. Not that it has to be Katie Pine, of course. Even you, Detective Has-To-Be-Right, might want to keep an open mind about identifying bodies you haven’t seen. But if you want to play I Told You So, Cardinal, you just come into my office tomorrow morning, eight o’clock. Best thing about my job is I don’t have to go out at night, and these calls always come at night.’
‘It’s my show as of this moment – if I go.’
‘That’s not my decision, Cardinal, and you know it. Lake Nipissing falls under the jurisdiction of our esteemed brothers and sisters in the Ontario Provincial Police. But even if it’s the OPP’s catch, they’re going to want us in on it. If it is Katie Pine or Billy LaBelle, they were both snatched from the city – our city – assuming they were both snatched. It’s our case either way. “If I go,” he says.’
‘I’d rather stick with burglaries, unless it’s my show as of this moment.’
‘Have the coroner toss a coin,’ Dyson snapped, and hung up.
Cardinal yelled to Delorme, who had stepped in out of the cold and was standing diffidently just inside the kitchen door. ‘Which one of the Manitous are we on?’
‘Windigo. The one with the mine shaft.’
‘So we drive, right? Will the ice take a truck?’
‘You kidding? This time of year, that ice would take a freight train.’ Delorme jerked a mittened thumb in the direction of Lake Nipissing. ‘Make sure you dress warm,’ she said. ‘That lake wind, it’s cold as hell.’
2
From the government dock to the Manitou Islands seven miles west, a plowed strip lay like a pale blue ribbon across the lake; shoreline motels had scraped it clear as an inducement to ice fishers, a prime source of revenue in winter months. It was quite safe to drive cars and even trucks in February, but it was not wise to travel more than ten or fifteen miles an hour. The four vehicles whose headlights lit the flurries of snow in bright cubist veils were moving in slow motion.
Cardinal and Delorme drove in silence in the lead car. Delorme now and again reached across to scrape at the windshield on Cardinal’s side. The frost peeled off in strips that fell in curls and melted on the dash and on their laps.
‘It’s like we’re landing on the moon.’ Her voice was barely audible above the grinding of gears and the hiss of the heater. All around them the snow fell away in shades that ranged from bone white to charcoal grey and even – in the dips and scallops of the snowbanks – deep mauve.
Cardinal glanced in the rear-view at the procession behind them: the coroner’s car, and behind that the headlights of the ident van, and then the truck.
A few more minutes and Windigo Island rose up jagged and fierce in the headlights. It was tiny, not more than three hundred square metres, and the thin margin of beach, Cardinal remembered from his summer sailing, was rocky. The wooden structure of the mine’s shaft head loomed out of the pines like a conning tower. The moon cast razor-sharp shadows that leapt and shuddered as they approached.
One by one the vehicles arrived and parked in a line, their collective lights forming a wide white rampart. Beyond that, blackness.
Cardinal and the others gathered on the ice like a lunar landing party, clumsy in their calf-high boots, their plump down coats. They shifted from foot to foot, tense with cold. They were eight: Cardinal and Delorme, Dr Barnhouse, the coroner, Arsenault and Collingwood, the scene men, Larry Burke and Ken Szelagy, patrol constables in blue parkas, and, last to arrive in yet another unmarked, Jerry Commanda from OPP. The OPP was responsible for highway patrol and provided all police services for any townships that lacked their own police force. The lakes and Indian reservations were also their responsibility, but with Jerry you didn’t worry about jurisdictional disputes.
All eight now formed into a gap-toothed circle, casting long shadows in the headlights.
Barnhouse spoke first. ‘Shouldn’t you be wearing a bell around your neck?’ This by way of greeting Cardinal. ‘I heard you were a leper.’
‘In remission,’ Cardinal said.
Barnhouse was a pugnacious little bulldog of a man, built like a wrestler with a broad back and a low centre of gravity, and perhaps in compensation he cherished a lofty self-regard.
Cardinal jerked his head toward the tall, gaunt man on the outside of the circle. ‘You know Jerry Commanda?’
‘Know him? I’m sick of him,’ Barnhouse bellowed. ‘Used to be with the city, Mr Commanda, until you decided to go native again.’
‘I’m OPP now,’ Jerry said quietly. ‘Dead body in the middle of the lake, I think you’ll want to arrange for an autopsy, won’t you, Doc?’
‘I don’t need you to tell me my job. Where’s the fine flatfoot who discovered the thing?’
Ken Szelagy stepped forward. ‘We didn’t discover it. Couple of kids found it round four o’clock. Me and Larry Burke here got the call. Soon as we saw, we made a perimeter and called it in. McLeod was in court, so we called DS Dyson and I guess he called in Detective Cardinal here.’
‘The talented Mr Cardinal,’ Barnhouse murmured ambiguously, then added: ‘Let’s proceed with flashlights for the moment. Don’t want to disturb things setting up lights and so on.’
He started toward the rocks. Cardinal was going to speak, but Jerry Commanda voiced the thought for him. ‘Let’s keep it single file, guys.’
‘I’m not a guy,’ Delorme noted tartly from the depths of her hood.
‘Yeah, well,’ Jerry said. ‘Kinda hard to tell the difference right now.’
Barnhouse gestured for Burke and Szelagy to lead the way, and for the next few minutes their boots squeaked on the hardpack. Blades of cold raked Cardinal’s face. Beyond the rocks, a distant string of lights glittered along the edge of the lake – the Chippewa Reserve, Jerry Commanda’s territory.
Szelagy and Burke waited for the others at the chain-link fence surrounding the shaft head.
Delorme nudged Cardinal with a padded elbow. She was pointing to a small object about four feet from the gate.
Cardinal said, ‘You guys touch that lock?’
Szelagy said, ‘It was like that. Figured we better leave it.’
Burke said, ‘Kids claim the lock was already broken.’
Delorme pulled a Baggie out of her pocket, but Arsenault, a scene man and, like all scene men, ever prepared, produced a small paper bag from somewhere and held it out to her. ‘Use paper. Anything wet’ll deteriorate in plastic.’
Cardinal was glad it had happened early and that someone else had stopped her. Delorme was a good investigator; she’d had to be in Special. She’d put a former mayor and several council members in prison with painstaking work she’d done entirely on her own, but it didn’t involve any scene work. She would watch from now on, and Cardinal wanted it that way.
One after another they ducked under the scene tape and followed Burke and Szelagy around to the side of the shaft head. Szelagy pointed to the loosened boards. ‘Careful going in – there’s a two-foot drop and then it’s sheer ice all the way.’
Inside the shaft head, the flashlight beams formed a shifting pool of light at their feet. Gaps in the boards made the wind moan like a stage effect.
‘Jesus,’ Delorme said quietly.
She and the others had all seen traffic fatalities, the occasional suicide and numerous drownings – none of which had prepared them for this. They were shivering, but an intense stillness settled over the group as if they were praying; no doubt some of them were. Cardinal’s own mind seemed to flee the sight before him – into the past, with the image of Katie Pine smiling in her school photograph, and into the future, with what he would have to tell her mother.
Dr Barnhouse began in a formal voice. ‘We are looking at the frozen remains of an adolescent – Damn.’ He rapped sharply at the microcassette in his gloved paw. ‘Always acts up in the cold.’ He cleared his throat and began again in a less declamatory manner. ‘We’re looking at the remains of an adolescent human – decay and animal activity preclude positive determination of sex at this time. Torso is unclothed, lower part of the body is partially clothed in denim jeans, right arm is missing, as is the left foot. Facial features are obliterated by animal activity, mandible is missing. Christ,’ he said. ‘Just a child.’
Cardinal thought he heard a tremor in Barnhouse’s voice; he would not have trusted his own. It wasn’t just the deterioration – all of them had seen worse; it was that the remains were preserved in a perfect rectangle of ice perhaps eight inches thick. Eyeless sockets stared up through the ice into the pitch dark over their heads. One of the eyes had been pulled away and lay frozen above the shoulder; the other was missing entirely.
‘Hair is detached from the skull – black, shoulder length – and pelvis shows anterior striations, which may indicate a female – it’s not possible to say without further examination, precluded at this time by the body’s being fixed in a block of ice formed by conditions peculiar to the site.’
Jerry Commanda swung his light up to the rough boards overhead and back down to the depressed concrete platform below them. ‘Roof leaks big time. You can see the ice through it.’
Others swung their lights up and looked at the stripes of ice between the boards. Shadows leapt and darted in the eyeless sockets.
‘Those three warm days in December when everything melted,’ Jerry went on. ‘The body probably covers a drain, and when the ice melted, the place filled up with water. Temperature dropped again and froze it right there.’
‘It’s like she’s preserved in amber,’ Delorme said.
Barnhouse resumed. ‘No clothing on or near the remains, except for jeans of blue denim that – I already said that, didn’t I. Yes, I’m sure I did. Gross destruction of tissue in the abdominal region, all of the viscera and most major organs missing, whether due to peri-mortem trauma or postmortem animal activity impossible to say. Portions of lung are visible, upper lobes on both sides.’
‘Katie Pine,’ Cardinal said. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud. He knew it would provoke a reaction, and it came at full volume.
‘I hope you’re not telling me you recognize that poor girl from her high school yearbook. Until such time as the upper jaw may be matched with dental records, any identification is out of the question.’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Cardinal said quietly.
‘There’s no call for sarcasm, Detective. Remission or no, I’m not putting up with sarcasm.’ Barnhouse turned his baleful eye once more upon the object at their feet. ‘Extremities, those that remain, are nearly skeletonized, but I believe that’s a healed green-stick fracture in the radius of the left forearm.’ He stepped back from the edge of the depression and folded his arms belligerently in front of his chest. ‘Gentlemen – and lady – I’m going to remove myself from this investigation, which will clearly require the services of the Forensic Centre. As Lake Nipissing falls under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Provincial Police, I’m officially turning the investigation over to you, Mr Commanda.’
Jerry said, ‘If this is Katie Pine here, the investigation belongs to the city.’
‘But surely Katie Pine is one of yours? From the reserve?’
‘She was abducted from the fairground by Memorial Gardens. That makes it a city case – has been since she disappeared. Cardinal’s case.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Barnhouse insisted, ‘pending positive identification, I’m turning it over to you.’
‘Fine, Doctor,’ Jerry said. ‘John, you can run it. I know it’s Katie.’
‘You can’t possibly know. Look at the thing.’ Barnhouse pointed with his recorder. ‘Except for the clothes, it barely looks human.’
Cardinal said softly, ‘Katie Pine fractured the radius in her left arm when she was learning to skateboard.’
Five of them were scrunched in the ident van. Barnhouse had gone, and the two uniforms were waiting in the stake truck. Cardinal practically had to shout over the roar of the heater. ‘We’re going to need rope: as of now, the whole island is our perimeter. There was no blood and no sign of struggle in the shaft head, so this is probably not the murder scene, only a dump site. Even so, I don’t want any curious snowmobilers zipping through the evidence, so let’s get it good and secure.’
Delorme handed him the cellphone. ‘I’ve got Forensic. Len Weisman.’
‘Len, we’ve got a body here frozen solid in a block of ice. Adolescent, probable murder. If we cut the block of ice and ship it to you entire in a refrigerated truck, can you handle something like that?’
‘No problem. We’ve got a couple of variable coolers that go well below freezing. We can thaw it out at a controlled rate and preserve any hair and fibres for you that way.’ Surreal to hear a Toronto voice in this lunar landscape.
‘Great, Len. We’ll call with an ETA when we’re ready to roll.’ Cardinal handed the phone back to Delorme. ‘Arsenault, you’re the scene expert. How do we get her out of there?’
‘We can cut her out in a cube easy enough. Problem will be separating the cube from the concrete underneath.’
‘Get a guy from the city to cut it, they cut concrete all the time. And you can clear your calendars, everybody: we’re going to have to cull the snow.’
‘But she was killed months ago,’ Delorme said. ‘The snow won’t tell us anything.’
‘We can’t be sure of that. Anybody have a good contact at Armed Forces?’
Collingwood raised a hand.
‘Tell them we need a huge tent. Something the size of a circus tent that’ll cover the whole island – last thing we need is any more snow on the scene. Also a couple of their biggest heaters, ones they use to heat their hangars. We’ll melt the snow and see everything that’s underneath.’
Collingwood nodded. He was sitting closest to the heater, and his glove was steaming.
3
Securing a perimeter and arranging a twenty-four-hour watch on the island took longer than anyone expected; everything about police work takes longer than expected. In the end Cardinal did not get home until one o’clock in the morning, too keyed-up to sleep. He sat himself in the living room with two fingers of Black Velvet straight up and made notes about what he would have to do next day. The house was so cold, even the rye couldn’t warm him.
Kelly would be back in the States by now.
At the airport, Cardinal had watched his daughter heave a suitcase onto the baggage scale, and before she could even lift the next one, a young man in line behind her had picked it up and placed it on the scale for her. Well, Kelly was pretty. Cardinal had the usual father’s prejudice about his daughter’s looks, and he believed any objective person would find his daughter as lovely as he did. But having a pretty face, Cardinal knew, was like being wealthy or famous: people were always offering to do things for you.
‘You don’t have to hang around, Daddy,’ she had said as they descended the stairs to the waiting area. ‘I’m sure you have better things to do.’
Cardinal hadn’t had anything better to do.
Algonquin Bay’s airport was designed to handle about eighty travellers at a time, but it rarely had that many. A tiny coffee shop, boxes for The Algonquin Lode and the Toronto papers, and that was about it. They sat down, and Cardinal bought The Toronto Star, offering his daughter a section, which she declined. It made him feel as if he shouldn’t read either. What was the point of staying if he was just going to read the paper?
‘You’re all set for your connections, then?’ he asked. ‘You have enough time to change terminals?’
‘Tons. I have an hour and a half in Toronto.’
‘That’s not too much. Not by the time you get through US customs.’
‘They always put me straight through. Really, Daddy, I should go into smuggling.’
‘You told me you got stopped last time. Almost missed your connection.’
‘That was a fluke. The customs officer was a mean old battle-axe who wanted to give me a hard time.’
Cardinal could picture it. In some ways Kelly was becoming the kind of young woman who annoyed him – too smart, too educated, too damn confident.
‘I don’t know why they can’t have a flight directly from Toronto to New Haven.’
‘It’s not exactly the centre of the universe, sweet-heart.’
‘No, it only has one of the best colleges in the world.’
And it cost a damn fortune. When Kelly had finished her BFA at York, her painting instructor had encouraged her to apply to Yale’s graduate program. Kelly had never dreamed she would be accepted, even when she put together a portfolio and hauled it down to New Haven. It had occurred to Cardinal to deny her, but not for long. It’s the art school, Daddy. All the big-name painters went there. You may as well study accounting if you don’t go to Yale. Cardinal had wondered if that could possibly be true. To him Yale meant indolent snobs in tennis outfits; it meant George Bush. But painting?
He had asked around. Quite true, he had been assured by those who would know. If one wanted to be visible in the international art scene, which really meant the US art scene, an MFA from Yale was the way to go.
‘Really, Daddy, why don’t you go home? You don’t have to stay.’
‘It’s okay. I want to stay.’
The boy who had helped with Kelly’s luggage had now taken up a seat facing them. If Cardinal left, the kid would be sitting next to his daughter like a shot. I’m a possessive bastard, he accused himself, nursing these miniature panics over the women in my life. He was the same way about his wife, Catherine.
‘It was good of you to come home, Kelly. Especially in the middle of term. I think it really made a difference to your mom.’
‘Do you? Pretty hard to tell, she seems so out of it these days.’
‘I could tell.’
‘Poor Mom. Poor you. I don’t know how you stand it, Daddy. I mean, I’m away most of the time, but you have to live with it.’
‘Well, that’s what you do. Better or worse, sickness and health. You know how it goes.’
‘A lot of people don’t live by that stuff anymore. I know you do, of course. But Mom really scares me sometimes. It must be so hard for you.’
‘It’s a lot harder for her, Kelly.’
They sat in silence. The boy pulled out a Stephen King novel; Cardinal pretended to read the Star, Kelly stared out at the empty tarmac where thin flurries of snow swirled in the ground lights. Cardinal began to hope the flight would be cancelled, that his daughter would have to stay home another day or two. But Kelly had lost any affection for Algonquin Bay. How can you stand this dinky little backwater? she’d said to him more than once. Cardinal had felt the same at her age, but then ten years on the Toronto police force had convinced him that the dinky little backwater where he grew up had its virtues.
The plane finally arrived, a propeller-driven Dash 8 that seated thirty. In fifteen minutes it would be gassed up and ready to take off.
‘You have enough cash? What if you get stuck in Toronto?’
‘You worry too much, Daddy.’
She hugged him, and then he watched her wheel her carry-on through security (which consisted of two uniformed women not much older than she was) and head for the door. Cardinal moved to the window and watched her cross through the blowing snow. The boy was right behind her, damn him. But outside, brushing the snow from the windshield with his glove, Cardinal had condemned himself for being a jealous twerp, a smothering parent who couldn’t let his child grow up. Cardinal was a Catholic – a lapsed Catholic – and like all Catholics, lapsed or devout, he retained an almost gleeful ability to accuse himself of sin, though not necessarily the sin he had actually committed.
Now, the whisky sat half finished on the coffee table. Cardinal had drifted off. He rose stiffly from his chair and went to bed. In the darkness, images came: headlights on the lake, the body fixed in ice, Delorme’s face. But then he thought of Catherine. Although his wife’s circumstances were at this moment anything but happy, he forced himself to imagine her laughing. Yes, they would go away somewhere together, somewhere far from police work and their private sorrows, and they would laugh.
4
Don (short for Adonis) Dyson was a youthful fifty, trim and wiry as a gymnast, with a gymnast’s agile movements and sudden, graceful gestures, but as the detectives under his command never tired of pointing out, he was no Adonis. The only thing Detective Sergeant Don Dyson had in common with the carved Adonises found in museums was a heart as cold as marble. No one knew if he had been born that way or if fifteen years as a Toronto homicide detective had added frost to an already chilly disposition. The man hadn’t a single friend – on the force or off – and those who had met Mrs Dyson claimed that she made her husband seem drippingly sentimental.
DS Dyson was fussy, declamatory, bald and calculating. He had long fingers, spatulate at the tips, of which he was inordinately vain. When he handled his letter opener or toyed with a box of paper clips, those fingers took on a dangly, spidery aspect. His bald head, trimmed with a geometrically exact circle of hair at the sides and back, was a perfect orb. Jerry Commanda loathed him, but Jerry was intolerant of authority in general, a trait Cardinal put down to his Native heritage. Delorme insisted she could use Dyson’s head for a mirror to pluck her eyebrows – not that she did pluck her eyebrows.
That same mirrory dome was tilted toward Cardinal, who was seated in a chair placed at an exact forty-five-degree angle to Dyson’s desk. No doubt the detective sergeant had read somewhere that this angle was good leadership psychology. He was an exact man, with exact reasons for everything he did. A honey-glazed donut was parked on the corner of his desk, waiting for the clock to strike exactly ten-thirty – not a minute earlier, not a minute later – when he would consume it along with the Thermos of decaffeinated coffee beside it.
At this moment Dyson held his letter opener suspended between his outstretched palms, as if he were measuring his desk with it. When he spoke, he appeared to be addressing himself to the blade. ‘I never said you were wrong, you know. I never said that little girl wasn’t murdered. Not in so many words.’
‘No, sir. I know you didn’t.’ Cardinal had a tendency, when irritated, to become extremely polite. He fought that tendency now. ‘You only put me back on burglary as a spiritual exercise.’
‘Do you remember what kind of expenses you were running up? This was and is the age of cutbacks. We can’t pretend we’re the Mounties, we can’t afford it. You allocated all your investigative resources to this one case.’
‘Three cases.’
‘Not three, maybe two.’ Dyson numbered them on his flat fingers. ‘Katie Pine, I grant you. Billy LaBelle, maybe. Margaret Fogle, not at all.’
‘DS, with all respect, she didn’t turn into a toad. She didn’t vaporize.’
Again the fingers, the manicure displayed to advantage, as Dyson counted the reasons why Margaret Fogle could not be dead. ‘She was seventeen – far older and more streetwise than the other two. She was from Toronto, not local. She had a history of running away. For God’s sake, the girl went around telling everyone who would listen that nobody – nobody – would find her this time. And she had a boyfriend to hell and gone, Vancouver or some damn place.’
‘Calgary. She never got there.’ And she was last seen alive in our fair city, you bald blockhead. Please, God, just make him give me McLeod and let me get on with it.
‘Why are you resisting me on this, Cardinal? We live in the biggest country in the world – now that the Soviet Union has kindly dismantled itself – and three separate train lines run up and across this billion-hectare skating rink. All three of those lines intersect on our little shore. We have an airport and a bus station, and anyone going anywhere across this gigantic bloody country has to pass through our neighbourhood. We get more bloody runaways than we know what to do with. Runaways, not murders. You were spending department resources on phantoms.’
‘Should I go? I thought I was back on homicide,’ said Cardinal mildly.
‘You are. I didn’t mean to go over old ground, no point in it, but Katie Pine, Cardinal –’ here he aimed a flat finger at Cardinal ‘– with Katie Pine there was no evidence of murder, not a shred, not at the time. I mean, except for the fact that she was a child – obviously something was wrong – there was just no evidence of murder.’
‘No courtroom evidence, maybe.’
‘You were coming to me with disproportionate manpower, disproportionate office resources, and overtime that was completely unjustifiable. The overtime alone was stratospheric. I wasn’t the only one who thought so – the chief backed me totally on this one.’
‘DS, Algonquin Bay is not that big. A missing child, you get a million leads, everyone wanting to help. Someone pulls a knife in the movies, you have to check it out. Someone sees a young hitchhiker, you have to check it out. Everyone in town thinks they’ve seen Katie Pine somewhere: she’s at the beach, she’s at the hospital under another name, she was in a canoe in Algonquin Park. Every one of those leads had to be followed up.’
‘So you told me at the time.’
‘None of it was unjustified. That’s got to be obvious by now.’
‘It was not obvious then. No one saw Katie Pine with a stranger. No one saw her get into a car. One minute she’s at the fair, the next minute she was gone.’
‘I know. The ground opened.’
‘The ground opened and swallowed her up, and you chose to believe – without evidence – that she was murdered. Time has proved you right; it could just as easily have proved you wrong. The one incontestable fact was that she was g-o-n-e gone. A genuine mystery.’
Well, yes, Cardinal thought, Katie Pine’s disappearance had been a mystery. Sorry – I had a fantasy that policemen were occasionally called upon to solve mysteries, even in Algonquin Bay. Of course, the girl was Native, and we all know how irresponsible those people can be.
‘Let’s face it,’ Dyson said, inserting his letter opener precisely into a small scabbard and laying it neatly beside a ruler. ‘The girl was Indian, too. I like Indians, I really do. There’s a calmness about them that’s practically supernatural. They tend to be good-natured and they’re extraordinarily fond of children, and I’d be the first to say Jerry Commanda was a first-rate officer. But there’s no point pretending they’re just like you and me.’
‘God, no,’ said Cardinal, and meant it. ‘Different people entirely.’
‘Relations scattered to hell and gone. That girl could have been anywhere from Mattawa to Sault Ste Marie. There was no reason to be searching boarded-up mine shafts in the middle of the bloody lake.’
There had been every reason, but Cardinal didn’t phrase it like that. He didn’t have to; the point was nestled inside a more important one. ‘The thing about the Windigo mine shaft is that we did search it. We searched it the week Katie Pine disappeared. Four days after, to be exact.’
‘You’re telling me she may have been kept stashed away somewhere before she was killed. Held prisoner somewhere.’
‘Exactly.’ Cardinal suppressed the urge to say more. Dyson was warming up, and it was in Cardinal’s interest to let him. The letter opener emerged once again from its scabbard; an errant paper clip was speared, hoisted and transferred to a brass holder.
‘Then again,’ Dyson continued, ‘she could have been killed right away. The killer could have kept the body somewhere else before moving it to a safer place.’
‘It’s possible. Forensic may be able to help us with place – we’re shipping the remains to Toronto as soon as the mother’s been informed – but this is shaping up to be a long investigation. I’m going to need McLeod.’
‘Can’t have him. He’s in court with Corriveau. You can have Delorme.’
‘I need McLeod. Delorme has no experience.’
‘You’re just prejudiced because she’s a woman, because she’s French, and because, unlike you, she’s spent most of her life in Algonquin Bay. You may have put in ten years in Toronto, but you’re not going to tell me her six years as special investigator amounts to no experience.’
‘I’m not putting her down. She did a fine job on the mayor. She did a fine job on the school-board scam. Keep her on the white-collar stuff, the sensitive stuff. I mean, who’s going to look after Special?’
‘What do you care about Special? Let me worry about Special. Delorme is a fine investigator.’
‘She has no experience at homicide. She came close to ruining an important piece of evidence last night.’
‘I don’t believe it. What the hell are you talking about?’
Cardinal told him about the Baggie. It sounded thin, even to him. But he wanted McLeod. McLeod knew how to hustle, how to keep a case in play.
There was a silence as Dyson stared at the wall just behind Cardinal. He was utterly still. Cardinal watched the snow flurries that swirled past the window. Later, he couldn’t be sure if what Dyson said next had just popped into his boss’s head or if it was a planned surprise. ‘You aren’t worried that Delorme is investigating you, are you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Good. Then I suggest you brush up on your French.’
In the 1940s, nickel was discovered on Windigo Island, and it was mined there, on and off, for twelve years. The mine was never very productive, employing at its peak a mere forty workers, and its location in the middle of the lake made transport a problem. More than one truck plunged through the ice, and there was talk that the mine was cursed by the tormented spirit for which it was named. A lot of Algonquin Bay investors lost their money in the venture, which closed forever when more accessible lodes were discovered in Sudbury, a city eighty miles away.
The shaft was five hundred feet deep and continued laterally for another two thousand, and the Criminal Investigation Division heaved a collective sigh of relief when it was established that only the shaft head and not the shaft itself had been disturbed.
By the time Cardinal and Delorme arrived at the island, it wasn’t nearly so cold as it had been the previous night, not much below freezing. In the distance, snowmobiles buzzed among the fishing huts. Sparse snowflakes drifted down from a soiled pillow of cloud. The work of freeing the body was almost complete.
‘Ended up we didn’t have to saw right through,’ Arsenault told them. Despite the below-freezing temperature there were beads of sweat on his face. ‘Vibrations did the trick for us. Whole block came away in one piece. Moving it’s going to be a little work, though. Can’t put a crane in here without destroying the scene. Just gonna have to pull it over to the truck on a sled. Figure the runners’ll do less damage than a toboggan.’
‘Good thinking. Where’d you get the truck?’ A green five-ton with black rectangles covering its markings was backing up to the shaft head. Dr Barnhouse had reminded them in no uncertain terms that, no matter how badly they might want a refrigerated vehicle, the use of a food distribution truck for transporting a dead body would be against every health regulation known to man.
‘Kastner Chemical. They use it to transport nitrogen. Was their idea to black out the markings. They wanted it to look more respectful. I thought that was pretty classy.’
‘It was classy. Remind me to send them a thank you.’
‘Hey, John! John!’
Roger Gwynn was waving at him from behind a roped-off area. The amorphous shape beside him, face masked by a Nikon, would be Nick Stoltz. Cardinal raised a gloved hand in return. He was not really on a first-name basis with the Algonquin Lode reporter, even though they had been more or less contemporaries in high school. Gwynn was trying to get the jump on the competition, exaggerating his connections. Being a cop in your hometown had its advantages, but sometimes Cardinal felt a pang of nostalgia for the relative anonymity of Toronto. There was a small camera crew jockeying for position around Stoltz, and behind them a diminutive figure in a pink parka, its hood trimmed fetchingly with white fur. That would have to be Grace Legault from the six o’clock news. Algonquin Bay didn’t have its own station; it got its local news from Sudbury, which was eighty miles away. Cardinal had noted the CFCD van parked on the ice beside the police truck.
‘Come on, John! Give me three seconds. I need a quote!’
Cardinal took Delorme with him and introduced her.
‘I know Ms Delorme,’ Gwynn said. ‘We met when she was incarcerating His Worship. What can you tell me about this business?’
‘Adolescent dead several months. That’s it.’
‘Oh, thanks. Great copy that’ll make. What are the chances it’s that girl from the reserve?’
‘I’m not going to speculate until we hear back from Forensic in Toronto.’
‘Billy LaBelle?’
‘I’m not going to speculate.’
‘Come on, you gotta give me something. I’m freezing my ass off here.’ Gwynn was a slack, pudgy man – graceless in manner, lazy in outlook, an Algonquin Lode lifer. ‘Is it a homicide at least? Can you tell me that?’
Cardinal gestured to the Sudbury team. ‘You wanna get in here, Miss Legault? Don’t want to say all this twice.’
He gave them both the basic facts, no mention of murder or Katie Pine, and finished with assurances that when he knew more, they would know more. As a show of goodwill he handed Grace Legault his card. He didn’t catch any flicker of gratitude in her skeptical newscaster’s eyes.
‘Detective Cardinal,’ she said as he turned away, ‘do you happen to know the legend of the Windigo? What kind of creature it is?’
‘Yeah, I do,’ he said. ‘A mythical one.’ He sighed inwardly. She’s going to have a field day with that. Grace Legault was a different animal than Gwynn, no ambition deficit there.
‘You finished here?’ he asked Collingwood when he and Delorme were once more in the shaft head.
‘Five rolls of stills. Arsenault says to keep running the video, though.’
‘Arsenault’s right.’
Straps of webbing had already been slung under the ice. Now, a block and tackle that was hooked up to a Honda generator was swung into position. One for the scrapbook, Cardinal thought, as the entire block was hoisted three feet above its resting place like a translucent coffin, the wasted and torn human figure trapped inside.
Delorme murmured, ‘You think we should cover it with something?’
‘The best thing we can do for this girl,’ Cardinal said evenly, ‘is to make absolutely sure that everything Forensic finds inside that ice was there before we came on the scene.’
‘Okay,’ Delorme said. ‘Dumb idea, right?’
‘Dumb idea.’
‘Sorry.’A snowflake landed on her eyebrow and melted there. ‘It was just – seeing her like that –’
‘Forget it.’
Collingwood was videotaping the suspended block of ice, stepping from side to side. He looked up from his Sony and said exactly one word: ‘Leaf.’
Arsenault peered into the ice block. ‘A maple leaf, looks like. A piece of one, anyway.’
The forests of the near north are mostly pine, poplar and birch. ‘Anybody do any sailing round here?’ Cardinal enquired.
Arsenault said, ‘Me and the wife were out here for a picnic last August or so. We can do a quick survey to make sure, but if I remember right, this whole little island was Jack pine and spruce. Lots of birch.’
‘That’s what I think too,’ Cardinal said. ‘Which would tend to confirm that the murder happened somewhere else.’
Delorme called Forensic on the cellphone to let them know they could expect the body in approximately four hours. Then they moved the remains, ice and all, down the snowy slope of the beach and into the waiting truck.
Remains, Cardinal thought. The word was not adequate.
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