GILES BLUNT
FORTY WORDS FOR SORROW

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

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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.

5

Sergeant Lise Delorme had been clearing the decks of Special Investigations for some time, a couple of months to be exact. There were no major cases pending, but she had thousands of little details to clear up. Final notes to make. Dispositions to update. Files to archive. She wanted everything to be shipshape for her replacement, who was due to arrive at the end of the month. But the entire morning had gone by and all she’d managed to do was clear sensitive material off her hard drive.

Delorme couldn’t wait to get going on the Pine case, even if she was in the completely weird position of having to investigate her partner. So far, it looked like Cardinal was going to keep her at arm’s length, and she couldn’t really blame him for that. She wouldn’t have trusted anyone right out of Special either.

A phone call in the middle of the night – that’s how it had started. She had thought at first it was Paul, a former boyfriend who got drunk every six months and called her at two in the morning, weepy and sentimental. It was Dyson. ‘Conference at the chief’s house in half an hour. His house, not his office. Get dressed and wait. Horseman’ll pick you up. Don’t want certain parties seeing your car outside his place.’

‘What’s going on?’ Her words were slurry with sleep.

‘You’ll know soon enough. I’ve got a ticket waiting for you.’

‘Tell me it’s for Florida. Someplace warm.’

‘It’s your ticket out of Special.’

Delorme got dressed in three minutes flat, then sat on the edge of the sofa, nerves singing. She’d spent six years working Special, and in all that time she had never once had a midnight summons, nor ever seen the inside of the chief’s house. Ticket out of Special?

‘No point asking me anything,’ the young Mountie told her before she’d even opened her mouth. ‘I’m just the delivery girl.’ A nice touch, Delorme thought, to send a woman.

Delorme had grown up revering the Mounties. The scarlet uniform, those horses – well, they went straight to a little girl’s heart. She had a vivid memory of the first time she saw them perform the Musical Ride in Ottawa, the sheer beauty of such equestrian precision. And then in high school, the glorious history, the great trek west. The North West Mounted Police, as they were then known, had ridden thousands of miles to ward off the kind of violence that was plaguing the westward expansion of the United States. They had negotiated treaties with the aboriginals, sent American raiders hightailing it back to Montana or whatever barbaric pit they had crawled out of, and established the rule of law before settlers had even had a chance to think about breaking it. The RCMP had become an icon of upstanding law enforcement around the world, a travel agent’s dream.

Delorme had bought the image wholesale; that’s what images are for, after all. When, sometime in her late teens, she had seen a photograph of a woman in that red serge uniform, Delorme had seriously considered sending away for an application.

But reality kept breaking through the image, and reality was not nearly as pretty. One officer sells secrets to Moscow, another is arrested for smuggling drugs, still another for tossing his wife off the balcony of a high-rise. And then there was the whole Security Service fiasco. The RCMP Security Service, before it had been dismantled in disgrace, had made the CIA look like geniuses.

She glanced at the fresh-faced creature in the car beside her, wearing a shapeless down coat, blond hair pulled back in a neat French braid. She had stopped for the traffic light at Edgewater and Trout Lake Road, and the street lights silvered the down on her cheek. Even in that pale wash, Delorme could see herself ten years ago. This girl too had bought the straight-arrow image and was determined to make it stick. Well, good for her, Delorme figured. Cowboys armed with brutality and incompetence may have betrayed those true-North ideals, but that didn’t make a young recruit dumb for clinging to them.

They pulled up in front of an impressive A-frame on Edgewater. It looked like something out of the Swiss Alps.

‘Don’t ring the buzzer, just walk right in. Doesn’t want to wake the kids.’

Delorme showed her ID to a Mountie at the side door. ‘Downstairs,’ he said.

Delorme walked through the basement, amid smells of Tide and Downy, then past a huge furnace into a large room of red brick and dark pine that had the leathery, smoky look of a men’s club. Fake Tudor beams criss-crossed stucco walls that were hung with hunting prints and marine art. A feeble flame flickered in the fireplace. Above this, a moose head contemplated the head of R.J. Kendall, chief of the Algonquin Bay police department.

Kendall had an open, congenial manner, perhaps partly to compensate for his small stature (Delorme was a head taller than the chief), and a big laugh that he used all the time, often accented with a backslap. He laughed too much, in Delorme’s opinion; it made him seem nervous, which perhaps he was, but she had also seen that genial manner vanish in an instant. When angered, which was thankfully not often, R.J. Kendall was a shouter and a curser. The whole department had heard him tear up one side of Adonis Dyson and down the other for undermanning the winter fur carnival, with the result that it became a noisy, rowdy affair that made the front page of the Lode for all the wrong reasons.

And yet Dyson still spoke highly of Kendall, as did most people who carried shrapnel wounds from one of his explosions. Once his anger was over, it was really over, and he usually made a gesture or two to soothe ruffled feathers. In Dyson’s case he’d gone out of his way – on TV – to give Dyson credit for downturns in robberies and assaults. It was far more than his predecessor would have done.

Dyson himself was in one of the red leather armchairs talking to someone Delorme couldn’t see. He waved a languid hand in her direction, as if midnight meetings were routine with him.

The chief jumped up to shake Delorme’s hand. He must have been in his late fifties, but he affected a boyish air, the way some powerful men do. ‘Sergeant Delorme. Thanks for getting here so fast. And on such short notice. Can I get you a drink? Off-hours, I think we can afford to relax a little.’

‘No, thank you, sir. This time of night, it would just knock me out.’

‘We’ll get right down to it, then. Someone I want you to meet. Corporal Malcolm Musgrave, RCMP.’

Watching Corporal Malcolm Musgrave emerge from the red leather chair was like watching a mountain emerge from the plains. He had his back to Delorme, so the granite block of head emerged first, pale hair trimmed to no more than a sandy bristle, then the escarpment of shoulders, vast cliff-face of chest as he turned toward her, and finally the rock formation of his handshake, dry and cool as shale. ‘Heard about you,’ he said to Delorme. ‘Nice job on the mayor.’

‘I’ve heard about you, too,’ Delorme told him, and Dyson shot her a dark glance. Musgrave had killed two men in the line of duty. Both times there had been hearings about the use of excessive force, and both times he had got off. Delorme thought, We really get our man.

‘Corporal Musgrave is with the Sudbury detachment. He’s their number two man in commercial crime.’

Delorme knew that, of course. The RCMP no longer maintained a local detachment, so Algonquin Bay fell within Sudbury’s jurisdiction. As federal police, the RCMP worked any crimes of national import: drugs at a national level, counterfeiting, commercial crime. Now and again the Algonquin Bay police would work with them on major drug busts, but as far as Delorme knew, Musgrave himself never put in an appearance.

‘Corporal Musgrave has a little bedtime story for us,’ the chief said. ‘You won’t like it.’

‘Have you heard of Kyle Corbett?’ Musgrave’s eyes were the palest blue Delorme had ever seen, almost transparent. It was like being scrutinized by a husky.

Yes, she had heard of Kyle Corbett. Everyone had heard of Kyle Corbett. ‘Big drug dealer, no? Doesn’t he control everything north of Toronto?’

‘Obviously, Special Investigations keeps you off the street. Kyle Corbett cleaned up his act at least three years ago, when he discovered counterfeiting. You’re surprised. You thought when Ottawa changed to coloured bills we stumped the counterfeiters, right? Bad guys all moved on to those oh-so-boring and oh-so-easy-to-copy American bills. You’re absolutely right, they did. Then a small thing came along called a colour copier. And another little item called a scanner. And now every Tom, Dick and Harry’s going into the office on Saturday morning and printing himself a batch of phony twenties. Major headache for the Treasury. And you know what? I couldn’t care less.’ Those arctic eyes sizing her up.

Delorme shrugged. ‘It’s not costing the taxpayer enough?’

‘Good,’ Musgrave said, as if she were his pupil. ‘Bogus Canadian currency costs businesses and individuals some five million dollars a year. Chicken feed. And like I say, it’s mostly weekend counterfeiters.’

‘So why the fuss about Corbett? If you don’t care about phony money –’

‘Kyle Corbett is not counterfeiting money. Kyle Corbett is counterfeiting credit cards. Suddenly we’re not talking five million dollars. Suddenly we’re talking a hundred million. And that’s not Bob’s All-Nite Esso getting hit. Or Ethel’s Kountry Kitchen. We’re talking major banks, and believe me, when Bank of Montreal and Toronto Dominion get upset, we hear about it loud and clear. Which is why our guys and your guys – not to mention the OPP’s guys – have been working a JFO for the past three years, trying to take Corbett down.’

Dyson leaned forward, apparently worried at being left out of the conversation. ‘Joint Forces Operation. November 1997.’

‘November 1997. JFO includes our guys, Jerry Commanda with OPP, and your guys McLeod and Cardinal. We have solid information that Corbett’s happy band of brothers has a stamping machine, five thousand blanks and a very expensive supply of holograms at his club out behind Airport Road. But when the forces of righteousness swoop down, Corbett and Co. are doing nothing more exciting than playing pool and drinking Molson’s.’

The chief was now thrashing at the fire with a poker, sending sparks flying. ‘Tell her Episode Two.’

‘August 1998. Solid intelligence puts Corbett and his merry men in West Ferris with Perfect Circle. You’ve never heard of Perfect Circle, so don’t pretend you have. Perfect Circle runs the biggest counterfeiting operation in Hong Kong. They have reciprocity with Corbett. In other words, they exchange stolen account numbers for use overseas. You buy a new Honda in Toronto with an American Express card out of Kowloon and, before anyone’s the wiser, you’ve driven it to hell and gone. And vice versa. Perfect Circle, as their name suggests, also manufacture dead-perfect holograms. They’re Asian, right? High tech is in their blood.

‘Meanwhile, our two horsemen have gone their separate ways: one’s quit to go into the private sector, the other’s doing fifteen-to-life for killing his wife.’

‘Right. The high-rise guy.’

‘If you’d met his wife, you’d know why. Your Detective McLeod gets wired to the Corriveau murders, and the OPP has Jerry Commanda sequestered in Ottawa on some no-doubt crucially important training course.’

‘There’s no need to malign ongoing officer education,’ the chief put in. ‘Your point is, Detective Cardinal turns out to be the single unit of law-enforcement continuity on Kyle Corbett.’

‘Exactly. Drum roll, please.’

Kendall turned to Dyson. ‘Didn’t you tell me there were rumours about Cardinal when he worked in Toronto?’

‘We did our homework, Chief. There was nothing substantial.’

Musgrave didn’t even slow down. ‘Age of globalization. Perfect Circle are doing the grand tour from Hong Kong to BC to strengthen their linkage in Vancouver. Solid information says they’re headed for Toronto, stopping off for a courtesy call in Algonquin Bay. According to this information, Corbett and the Yellow Peril have a meet set for the Pine Crest Hotel – the Pine Crest! It’s like they’re the Ladies Auxiliary or something. Perfect Circle guys arrive on time. Appointed hour rolls around, JFO stakes out the hotel. No, we did not do the musical ride. And no, we were not in full-dress uniform. This was a strictly old-clothes operation. Guess what happens?’

Delorme didn’t say anything. Corporal Musgrave was enjoying his pedagogical act; it wouldn’t do to interrupt the flow.

‘Nothing happens. No Corbett. No Perfect Circle. No meeting. Once more, the combined forces of the RCMP, the OPP and the Algonquin Bay police department have come up empty. Dumb flatfoots. So stupid. Can’t get anything right.’

The chief was standing by the fireplace, poker in hand, his face in shadow. It was rare to spend more than ten minutes with R.J. and not hear that preposterous laugh of his, but hearing Musgrave’s horseman’s tale had clearly depressed him. He said in a subdued voice, ‘It gets worse.’

It did indeed get worse. Another piece of solid information. Another date and time. The single change: this time, Jerry Commanda was back playing left wing for the OPP. Another raid. Another zero. ‘This time,’ Musgrave added, ‘Corbett files suit for harassment.’

‘I remember that,’ Delorme said. ‘I thought that was pretty funny.’

Dyson glared at her.

Musgrave shifted in his chair. It was like watching a continent change shape. ‘You’ve got the facts. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. You have any questions?’

‘Just one,’ Delorme said. ‘What exactly do you mean by “solid”?’

That was the only time the chief had laughed that night. Nobody else cracked a smile.

Now, two months later, Delorme was feeding the shredder in her Special Investigations office and hoping without much optimism that her new partner would come to trust her. As she carried a wastebasket full of shreds to the incinerator, she saw Cardinal putting on his coat. ‘You need me to do anything?’ she asked him.

‘Nope. We got a positive ID back on the dental records. I’m just going out to tell Dorothy Pine.’

‘You sure you don’t want me to come?’

‘No, thanks. I’ll see you later.’

Terrific, Delorme muttered to herself as she dumped the trash. He doesn’t even know I’m running a check on him, and still he doesn’t want me for a partner. Great start.

6

To reach the Chippewa Reserve, you follow Main Street west past the railroad tracks and make a left just after the St Joseph’s mother house, formerly a Catholic girls’ school and now a home for retired nuns, at the junction with Highway 17. There are no signs to the Chippewa Reserve, no gates; the Ojibwa have suffered so much at the hand of the white man that to lock the door against him now would be pointless.

The most remarkable thing about entering the reserve, Cardinal often thought, is that you don’t know you’re on the reserve. One of his very first girlfriends had lived up here, and even then he hadn’t registered its status as a separate enclave. The prefab bungalows, the slightly battered cars parked in the drives, the mutts chasing each other over the snowbanks – these could belong to any lower middle-class neighbourhood in Canada. Of course the jurisdiction changed – law enforcement here was in the hands of the OPP – but you couldn’t see that. The only visible difference from any other part of Algonquin Bay was, well, the place was full of Indians, a people who for the most part moved through Canadian society – or rather, alongside it – as silent and invisible as ghosts.

A shadow nation, Cardinal thought. We don’t even know they’re there. He had stopped a hundred yards past the turnoff, and now, since the day was sunny and a seasonable minus ten, he was walking with Jerry Commanda along the side of the road toward a perfectly white bungalow.

When not encased in a down parka, Jerry was extremely thin, almost frail-looking – a deceptive morphology, because he also happened to be a four-time provincial kick-boxing champion. You never saw what Jerry did exactly, but the most recalcitrant villain, in the course of a disagreement with him, would suddenly turn up horizontal and in a highly vocal mood of compliance.

Cardinal had never been partnered with him, but McLeod had, and McLeod claimed that, had they lived two hundred years earlier, he would have probably turned on his ancestors and happily fought the white man at Jerry’s side. The detectives had held a big party for Jerry when he left, a party he did not attend, being no lover of sentiment or fuss. When he moved to OPP, he could have taken an assignment at any of the townships the provincial force covered, but he had asked to work exclusively on reserves. He got the same pay as the municipal police, except – a point on which he was infuriatingly verbose – he was exempt from income tax.

Last night, Jerry had irritated him by pretending he hadn’t been aware of Cardinal’s exile from homicide. Jerry’s sense of humour tended to be opaque. And he had a disarming habit, perhaps ingrained in him from countless hours of tripping up suspects under interrogation, of changing topics suddenly. He did so now, by asking about Catherine.

Catherine was fine, Cardinal told him, in a tone that suggested they move on to something else.

‘What about Delorme?’ Jerry asked. ‘How’re you getting along with Delorme? She can be kind of prickly.’

Cardinal told him Delorme was fine too.

‘She has a nice shape, I always thought.’

Cardinal, though it made him uncomfortable, thought so too. It was no problem having an attractive woman working in Special – with a separate office, separate cases. It was another to have her for a partner.

‘Lise is a good woman,’ Jerry said. ‘Good investigator, too. Took guts to nail the mayor the way she did. I would have chickened out. I knew she’d get tired of that white-collar stuff, though.’ He waved to an old man walking a dog across the street. ‘Of course, she could be investigating you.’

‘Thanks, Jerry. That’s just what I wanted to hear.’

‘Got our new street lights working,’ Jerry said, pointing. ‘Now we can see how homey it’s getting around here.’

‘New paint jobs, too, I notice.’

Jerry nodded. ‘My summer project. Any kid I caught drinking had to paint an entire house. Made them all white because it’s more painful. You ever try to paint a house white in the summer?’

‘No.’

‘Hurts your eyes like a bastard. The kids hate me now, but I don’t care.’

They didn’t hate him, of course. Three dark-eyed boys carrying skates and hockey sticks had been following them since Jerry came out of his house. One of them threw a snowball that hit Cardinal in the arm. He packed some snow together in gloveless hands and hurled one back, way off the mark. Must have been ten years since he’d thrown anything other than a tantrum. A skirmish ensued, Jerry taking a couple of missiles indifferently in his skinny chest.

‘Ten to one the little guy is your relative,’ Cardinal said. ‘Little smartass there.’

‘He’s my nephew. Handsome like his uncle, too.’ Jerry Commanda, all hundred and forty pounds of him, was indeed handsome.

The boys were chattering in Ojibwa, of which Cardinal, no linguist, understood not a word. ‘What are they saying?’

‘They’re saying he walks like a cop but he throws like a girl, maybe he’s a faggot.’

‘How sweet.’

‘My nephew says, “He’s probably going to arrest Jerry for stealing that fucking paint.”’ Jerry continued translating in his monotone. ‘“That’s the cop that was here last fall – the asshole that couldn’t find Katie Pine.”’

‘Jerry, you missed your calling. You should have been a diplomat.’ Later, it occurred to him that Jerry might not have been translating at all; it would have been like him.

They walked around a shiny new pickup, approaching the Pine house now.

‘I know Dorothy Pine pretty well. You want me to come with you?’

Cardinal shook his head. ‘Maybe you could stop in later, though.’

‘Okay, I’ll do that. What kind of person kills a little girl, John?’

‘They’re rare, thank God. That’s why we’ll catch him. He’ll be different from other people.’ Cardinal wished he were as certain of this as he sounded.

Asking Dorothy Pine last September for the name of her daughter’s dentist – so he could get her chart – was the hardest thing Cardinal had ever had to do. Dorothy Pine’s face, the heavy features scarred by a ferocious, burnt-out case of acne, had expressed no trace of grief. He was white, he was the law, why should she?

Until then, her only experience of the police had been their sporadic arrests of her husband, a gentle soul who used to beat her without mercy when drunk. He had gone to Toronto to find work shortly after Katie’s tenth birthday and had found instead the business end of a switchblade in a Spadina Road flophouse.

Cardinal’s finger shook a little as he rang the doorbell.

Dorothy Pine, a tiny woman who barely cleared his waist, opened the door and looked up at him and knew instantly why he had come. She had no other children; there could be only one reason.

‘Okay,’ she said, when he told her Katie’s body had been found. Just the one word, ‘Okay,’ and she started to shut the door. Case closed. Her only child was dead. Cops – let alone white cops – could be of no assistance here.

‘Mrs Pine, I wonder if you’d let me in for a few minutes. I’ve been off the case for a couple of months and I need to refresh my memory.’

‘What for? You found her now.’

‘Well, yes, but now we want to catch whoever killed her.’

He had the feeling that, had he not mentioned it, the thought of tracking down the man who had killed her daughter would never have entered Dorothy Pine’s head. All that mattered was the fact of her death. She gave a slight shrug, humouring him, and he stepped past her into the house.

The smell of bacon clung to the hallway. Although it was nearly noon, the living-room curtains were still drawn. Electric heaters had dried the air and killed the plants that hung withered on a shelf. The place was dark as a mausoleum. Death had entered this house four months ago; it had never left.

Dorothy Pine sat down on a circular footstool in front of the television, where Wile E. Coyote was noisily chasing the Road Runner. Her arms hung down between her knees, and tears plopped in miniature splashes onto the linoleum floor.

All those weeks Cardinal had tried to find the little girl – through the hundreds of interviews of classmates, friends and teachers, through the thousands of phone calls, the thousands of flyers – he had hoped that Dorothy Pine would come to trust him. She never did. For the first two weeks she telephoned daily, not only identifying herself every time but explaining why she was calling. ‘I was just wondering if you found my daughter, Katharine Pine,’ as if Cardinal might have forgotten to look. Then she’d stopped calling altogether.

Cardinal took Katie’s high-school photograph out of his pocket, the photograph they’d used to print all those flyers that had asked of bus stations and emergency wards, of shopping malls and gas stations, Have You Seen This Girl? Now the killer had answered, oh yes, he had seen this girl all right, and Cardinal slipped the photograph on top of the television.

‘Do you mind if I look at her room again?’

A shake of the dark head, a shudder in the shoulders. Another tiny splash on the linoleum floor. Husband murdered, and now her daughter too. The Inuit, it is said, have forty different words for snow. Never mind about snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation. There were not enough, not for this childless mother in her empty house.

Cardinal went down a short hallway to a bedroom. The door was open, and a yellow bear with one glass eye frowned at him from the windowsill. Under the bear’s threadbare paws lay a woven rug with a horse pattern. Dorothy Pine sold these rugs at the Hudson Bay store on Lakeshore. The store charged a hundred and twenty bucks, but he doubted if Dorothy Pine saw much of it. Outside, a chainsaw was ripping into wood, and somewhere a crow was cawing.

There was a toy bench under the windowsill. Cardinal opened it with his foot and saw that it still contained Katie’s books. Black Beauty, Nancy Drew, stories his own daughter had enjoyed as a girl. Why do we think they’re so different from us? He opened the chest of drawers – the socks and underwear neatly folded.

There was a little box of costume jewellery that played a tune when opened. It contained an assortment of rings and earrings and a couple of bracelets – one leather, one beaded. Katie had been wearing a charm bracelet the day she disappeared, Cardinal remembered. Stuck in the dresser mirror, a series of four photographs taken by a machine of Katie and her best friend making hideous faces.

Cardinal regretted leaving Delorme at the squad room to chase after Forensic. She might have seen something in Katie’s room that he was missing, something only a female would notice.

Gathering dust at the bottom of the closet were several pairs of shoes, including a patent leather pair with straps – Mary Janes? Cardinal had bought a pair for Kelly when she was seven or eight. Katie Pine’s had been bought at the Salvation Army, apparently; the price was still chalked on the sole. There were no running shoes; Katie had taken her Nikes to school the day she disappeared, carrying them in her knapsack.

Pinned to the back of the closet door was a picture of the high school band. Cardinal didn’t recall Katie being in the band. She was a math whiz. She had represented Algonquin Bay in a provincial math contest and had come in second. The plaque was on the wall to prove it.

He called out to Dorothy Pine. A moment later she came in, red-eyed, clutching a shredded Kleenex.

‘Mrs Pine, that’s not Katie in the front row of that picture, is it? The girl with the dark hair?’

‘That’s Sue Couchie. Katie used to fool around on my accordion sometimes, but she wasn’t in no band. Sue and her was best friends.’

‘I remember now. I interviewed her at the school. Said practically all they did was watch MuchMusic. Videotaped their favourite songs.’

‘Sue can sing pretty good. Katie kind of wanted to be like her.’

‘Did Katie ever take music lessons?’

‘No. She sure wanted to be in that band, though.’

They were looking at a picture of her hopes. A picture of a future that would now remain forever imaginary.

7

When he left the reserve, Cardinal made a left and headed north toward the Ontario Hospital. Advances in medication coupled with government cutbacks had emptied out whole wings of the psychiatric facility. Its morgue did double duty as the coroner’s workshop. But Cardinal wasn’t there to see Barnhouse.

‘She’s doing a lot better today,’ the ward nurse told him. ‘She’s starting to sleep at night, and she’s been taking her meds, so it’s probably just a matter of time till she levels out – that’s my opinion, anyway. Dr Singleton will be doing rounds in about an hour, if you want to talk to him.’

‘No, that’s all right. Where is she?’

‘In the sunroom. Just go through the double doors, and it’s –’

‘Thanks. I know where it is.’

Cardinal expected to find her still adrift in her oversize terry dressing gown, but instead, Catherine Cardinal was wearing the jeans and red sweater he had packed for her.

She was hunched in a chair by the window, chin in hand, staring out at the snowscape, the stand of birches at the edge of the grounds.

‘Hi, sweetheart. I was up at the reserve. Thought I’d stop in on the way back.’

She didn’t look at him. When she was ill, eye contact was agony for her. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve come to get me out of here.’

‘Not just yet, hon. We’ll have to talk to the doctor about that.’ As he got closer, he could see that the outline of her lipstick was uncertain and her eyeliner was thicker on one eye than the other. Catherine Cardinal was a sweet, pretty woman when she was well: sparrow-coloured hair, big gentle eyes and a completely silent giggle that Cardinal loved to provoke. I don’t make her laugh often enough, he often thought. I should bring more joy into this woman’s life. But by the time she had begun this latest nosedive, he had been working burglaries and was in a bad mood himself most of the time. Some help.

‘You’re looking pretty good, Catherine. I don’t think you’ll be in here too long this time.’

Her right hand never stopped moving, her index finger drawing tiny circles over and over again on the arm of the couch. ‘I know I’m a witch to live with. I would have killed me by now, but –’ She broke off, still staring out the window. ‘But that doesn’t mean my ideas are insane. It’s not as if I’m … Fuck. I’ve lost my train of thought.’

The swear word, like the obsessive circling movement of her hand, was a bad sign; Catherine didn’t swear when she was well.

‘So pathetic,’ she said bitterly. ‘Can’t even finish a sentence.’ The medication did that to her, broke her thoughts into small pieces. Perhaps that was why it worked, eventually: it short-circuited the chains of association, the obsessive ideas. Nevertheless, Cardinal could feel the hot jet of anger gushing inside his wife, blotting everything out like an artery opened in water. Both of her hands were making the obsessive circles now.

‘Kelly’s doing well,’ he said brightly. ‘Sounds practically in love with her painting teacher. She enjoyed her visit.’

Catherine looked at the floor, shaking her head slowly. Not accepting any positive remarks, thank you.

‘You’ll feel better soon,’ Cardinal said gently. ‘I just wanted to see you. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I thought we could have a chat. I don’t want to upset you.’

He could see Catherine’s thoughts growing heavier. Her head sank lower. One hand now covered her eyes like a visor.

‘Cath, honey, listen. You will feel better. I know it feels like you won’t just now. It feels like nothing will ever be right again, but we’ve got through this before and we’ll get through it again.’

People think of depression as sadness, and in its milder manifestations perhaps it is, but there could be little comparison between a tearful parting, say, or a sense of loss and these massive, devastating attacks Catherine suffered. ‘It’s as if I am invaded,’ she had told him. ‘It rolls into me like black clouds of gas. All hope is annihilated. All joy is slaughtered.’ All joy is slaughtered. He would never forget her saying that.

‘Take it easy,’ he said now. ‘Catherine? Please, hon. Take it slow, now.’ He put a hand on her knee and received not the slightest flicker of response. Her thoughts, he knew, were a turmoil of self-loathing. She had told him as much: ‘Suddenly,’ she said, ‘I can’t breathe. All the air is sucked out of the room, and I’m being crushed. And the worst thing is knowing what a misery I am to live with. I’m fastened to you like a stone, dragging you down and down and down. You must hate me. I hate me.’

But she said nothing now, just remained motionless, with her neck bent forward at a painful angle.

Three months ago Catherine had been bright and cheerful, her normal self. But gradually, as it often did in winter, her cheerfulness had ballooned into mania. She began to speak of travelling to Ottawa. It became her sole topic of conversation. Suddenly, it was vital she see the prime minister, she must talk sense into Parliament, she must tell the politicians what had to be done to save the country, save Quebec. Nothing could jog her from this obsession. It would start every morning at breakfast; it was the last thing she said at night. Cardinal thought he would go mad himself. Then Catherine’s ideas had taken on an interplanetary cast. She began to talk of NASA, of the early explorers, the colonization of space. She stayed awake for three nights running, writing obsessively in a journal. When the phone bill arrived, it listed three hundred dollars’ worth of calls to Ottawa and Houston.

Finally, on the fourth day, she had spiralled to earth like a plane with a dead engine. She remained in bed for a week with the blinds pulled down. At three o’clock one morning, Cardinal awoke when she called his name. He found her in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub. The cabinet was open, the rows of pills (none of them in themselves particularly lethal) waiting. ‘I think I’d better go to the hospital,’ was all she had said. At the time, Cardinal had thought it a good sign; she had never before asked for help.

Now, Cardinal sat next to his wife in the overheated sunroom, humbled by the magnitude of her desolation. He tried for a while longer to get her to speak, but she stayed silent. He hugged her, and it was like hugging wood. Her hair gave off a slight animal odour.

A nurse came, bearing a single pill and a paper cup of juice. When Catherine would not respond to her coaxing, the nurse left and returned with a syringe. Five minutes later Catherine was asleep in her husband’s arms.

The early days are always bad, Cardinal told himself in the elevator. In a few days the drugs will soothe her nerves enough that the relentless self-loathing will lose its power. When that happens, she will be – what? – sad and ashamed, he supposed. She’ll feel exhausted and drained and sad and ashamed, but at least she’ll be living in this world. Catherine was his California – she was his sunlight and wine and blue ocean – but a strain of madness ran through her like a fault line, and Cardinal lived in fear that one day it would topple their life beyond all hope of recovery.

8

It wasn’t until Sunday that Cardinal got the opportunity to review background material. He spent the entire afternoon at home with a stack of files labelled Pine, LaBelle and Fogle.

In a city of fifty-eight thousand, one missing child is a major event, two is an out-and-out sensation. Never mind Chief R.J. or the board of commissioners, never mind The Algonquin Lode or the TV news, it was the entire town that wouldn’t let you rest. Back in the fall, Cardinal could not so much as shop for groceries without being peppered with questions and advice about Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle. Everyone had an idea, everyone had a suggestion.

Of course this had its bright side: there was no lack of volunteers. In the LaBelle case the local Boy Scouts had spent an entire week treading step by step through the woods beyond the airport. But there were drawbacks too. The station phones never stopped ringing, and the small force had been overwhelmed with false leads – all of which had to be followed up sooner or later. The files filled up with stacks of supplementary reports – sups, as they were not very affectionately called – follow-ups on tips that led like a thousand false maps to dead ends.

Now, Cardinal sat with his feet to the fireplace and a fresh pot of decaf on the stove, weeding through the files, trying to winnow the stack of data into facts. From these solid facts, newly regarded, he hoped to extract one solid idea, one fragment of a theory – because so far he had none.

Armed Forces had graciously lent them a tent big enough to cover Windigo Island and two heaters formerly used to heat hangars for the local squadron of F-18s. Down on their knees like archaeologists, Cardinal and the others had culled the snow foot by square foot. That took most of the day, and then, turning up the heaters bit by bit, they had slowly melted the snow and examined the sodden carpet of pine needles and sand and rock that lay beneath. Beer cans, cigarette butts, fishing tackle, bits of plastic – they were buried in trash, none of it tied to the crime.

The lock had yielded no fingerprint.

This, then, was Cardinal’s first sad fact: their painstaking search had rendered not a single lead.

Katie Pine had disappeared on September 12. She had attended school that day, leaving just after the final bell with two friends. There was the initial report – a phone call from Dorothy Pine – and then there were the sups: Cardinal’s interview with Sue Couchie, McLeod’s interview with the other girl. The three girls had gone to the travelling fair that was set up outside Memorial Gardens. Cardinal set this among the solid facts.

The girls didn’t stay long. The last they’d seen of Katie, she’d been throwing balls at some bowling-pin targets, hoping to win a huge stuffed panda she’d liked the look of. It was almost as big as Katie, who was thirteen but looked eleven, tops.

Sue and the other girl had gone to a dark little tent to have their fortune told by Madame Rosa. When they came back to the ball-throwing attraction, Katie was gone. They looked around for her, couldn’t find her and decided she must have left without them. This was around six o’clock.

There was Cardinal’s interview with the young man who operated the ball-throwing game. No, she didn’t win the bear, and he hadn’t noticed anyone with her, hadn’t seen her leave. No one saw her leave. The ground, as Dyson said, had opened up.

Thousands of interviews, thousands of flyers later, Cardinal had learned nothing more about her disappearance. She had run away twice previously, to relatives in Mattawa. But her father’s drunken rages had driven her to it, and when he was dead, her running stopped. Dyson had not wanted to hear it.

Cardinal got up and put a dressing gown on over his clothes, stirred the fire in the wood stove and sat down again. It was only five, but it was already dark, and he had to switch on the reading lamp. The metal chain was cold to the touch.

He opened the LaBelle file. William Alexander LaBelle: twelve years old, four foot eight, eighty pounds – a very little kid. The address in Cedargrove was upper middle class. Catholic background, parochial school. Parents and relatives ruled out as possible suspects. History of running, though only once in Billy’s case. Never mind, it was enough for Dyson. ‘Look, Billy LaBelle is the third son in a family of high achievers. He’s not doing as well as his football-star brothers, all right? He’s not getting the grades of his high-wattage sisters. He’s thirteen and his self-esteem is in the basement. Billy LaBelle opted out, okay? The kid took a walk.’

Where the boy had taken a walk to was a matter of less certainty. Billy had disappeared on October 14, one month after Katie Pine, plucked from the Algonquin Mall, where he had been hanging out with friends. Sup reports included interviews with teachers and the three boys who had been with him at the mall. One minute he’s playing Mortal Kombat in Radio Shack (sup reports of interviews with the salesman and cashier), the next minute he says he’s going to catch the bus home. He’s the only one of the four friends who lives in Cedargrove, so he leaves by himself. No one ever sees him again. Billy LaBelle, age twelve, steps out of the Algonquin Mall and into the case files.

Dyson had given Cardinal free rein for a few weeks after Billy’s disappearance, and then the walls had closed in: no proof of murder, a history of running, other cases deserved priority. Cardinal resisted, certain that both kids had been killed, probably by the same person. Dyson on Billy LaBelle: ‘Christ, man, look at his problems. He’s got nothing going for him. My guess is he offed himself somewhere and he’ll turn up in the spring floating in the French River.’

But why were there no previous attempts? Why no obvious depression? Dyson had cupped his ear, feigning deafness.

Cardinal tossed the LaBelle file aside. He poured himself another cup of decaf and put another log into the wood stove. Sparks shot up like smithereens.

He opened the Fogle file, which contained little more than the top sheet – the facts from the initial report – courtesy of the Toronto police. I should have seen how things would go, Cardinal reflected, and perhaps he had. Dyson had been right: he had spent a lot of money, a lot of manpower. What else were you supposed to do when children vanished into thin air?

Margaret Fogle – at seventeen not really a child – had been the straw that broke Dyson’s back. A seventeen-year-old runaway from Toronto? Not high priority, thank you very much. Last seen in Algonquin Bay by her aunt. McLeod’s sup report with characteristic misspellings (where for were, ‘her parents where separated’) was in the file. The girl’s stated destination: Calgary, Alberta. ‘Which leaves half a continent and several hundred police forces responsible for finding her,’ Dyson had pointed out. ‘You hear me, Cardinal? You are not the country’s sole policeman. Let the horsemen earn their keep for a change.’

All right, give him Margaret Fogle. With her out of the equation, it seemed even clearer there was a killer at work.

‘Why do you keep saying that?’ Dyson had fumed, not conversational any more, not avuncular. ‘Molesters? Perverts? They go for boys, they go for girls, but they almost never – never – go for both.’

‘Laurence Knapschaefer went for both.’

‘Laurence Knapschaefer. I knew you’d say Laurence Knapschaefer. Too far out for me, Cardinal.’

Laurence Knapschaefer had murdered five kids in Toronto ten years previously. Three boys, two girls. One girl got away, which was how they finally got him.

‘The exception that proves the rule, that’s what Laurence Knapschaefer is. There are no bodies, therefore this is not homicide. You don’t have one scrap of evidence that it is.’

‘But even that could be taken as evidence for murder.’

‘What could?’

‘The lack of evidence. It only bolsters my theory.’ He had seen in Dyson’s cold blue gaze the doors slam shut, the bolts shoot home. But he couldn’t leave it alone, couldn’t shut up. ‘A runaway is seen – by bus passengers, ticket takers, hostel workers, drug dealers. A runaway is noticed. That’s how we find them. A runaway leaves clues: a note, extra clothes or money missing, warnings to friends. But a murdered child – a murdered child leaves nothing: no warning, no note, nothing. Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle left nothing.’

‘Sorry, Cardinal. Your reasoning is out of Alice in Wonderland.’

Next morning Cardinal had ordered a grid search – his third in six weeks – that had come up empty. That afternoon Dyson yanked him off Pine and LaBelle. Off homicide altogether for the foreseeable future. ‘Bring in Arthur Wood. He’s robbing the citizenry blind.’

‘I don’t believe this. Two missing children, and you’re putting me on burglaries?’

‘I can’t afford you, Cardinal. This is not Toronto. If you miss the big time so much, why don’t you go back there? In the meantime, you can bring me the head of Arthur Wood.’

The Fogle file landed on top of the others.

Cardinal warmed up a tourtière he’d thawed out earlier. Catherine had wheedled the recipe out of a French Canadian friend, but McLeod had tried it once and claimed they’d stolen it from his mother. It was the sage that gave them away.

He ate in front of the television, watching the news from Sudbury. The discovery of a body on Windigo Island was the lead. Grace Legault had pulled back her hood to do her standup on the island, snowflakes winking out like stars on the lion’s mane of chestnut hair. She looked a lot taller on television.

‘According to Ojibwa legend,’ she began, ‘the windigo is the spirit of a hunter who went out in winter and got lost in the icy woods, where he was forced to live off human flesh. It’s easy to believe such a legend when you set foot on this desolate island, where yesterday afternoon the body of an unidentified adolescent was discovered by a couple of snowmobilers.’

Thanks, Grace, Cardinal said to himself. We’ll be having the ‘Windigo killer’ next, or even ‘The Windigo’. Going to be a circus.

The report cut to file footage of the OPP dragging Lake Nipissing in the fall, while Legault speculated on whether the body might be that of Billy LaBelle or Katie Pine. Then they cut to Cardinal on the island acting cool and official, telling them let’s wait and see. I’m a conceited prick, he thought. I see too many movies.

Cardinal wished he could phone Catherine, but she didn’t always respond well to such calls, and she rarely called him from the hospital. I feel too embarrassed and ashamed, she told him, and it all but undid Cardinal to think that she could feel that way. Yet somewhere within that welter of feelings he was aware of a lurking anger that she could abandon him like this. He knew it was not her fault, and he tried never to blame his wife, but Cardinal was not a natural loner, and there were times when he resented being left on his own for months at a time. Then he would blame himself for being selfish.

He wrote a short note to Kelly, enclosing a cheque for five hundred dollars. With both her and Catherine gone, the house seemed way too big, he wrote, then screwed up the note and tossed it in the wastebasket. He scrawled, I know you can use this, and sealed the envelope. Daughters like their fathers to be invulnerable, and Kelly always squirmed at the least expression of feeling on his part. How strange, that someone he loved so much would never know the truth about him, never know how he had come by the money that paid for her education. How strange and how sad.

He thought about missing persons, missing kids. Dyson was right: if you crossed the country, you went through Algonquin Bay, and it was bound to get more than its fair share of runaways. Cardinal had made a separate file of top sheets from other jurisdictions: cases from Ottawa, the Maritimes, even Vancouver, that had come in over the fax within the past year.

He called the duty sergeant, horse-faced, good-hearted Mary Flower, to dig up some statistics. It wasn’t her job, but he knew Flower had a minor crush on him and she would do it. She called him back just as he was getting undressed to take a shower. Naked and goosebumped, he gripped the phone in the crook of his neck and struggled back into the sleeves of his bathrobe.

‘Last ten years, you said?’ Mary had a piercing nasal whine of a voice that could peel paint. ‘You ready?’

For the next few minutes he was scribbling numbers onto a pad. Then he hung up and called Delorme. It took her a long time to answer. ‘Hey, Delorme,’ he said when she finally picked up. ‘Delorme, you awake?’

‘I’m awake, John.’ A lie. Fully awake, she wouldn’t have used his first name.

‘Guess how many missing persons – adolescents – we had the year before last.’

‘Including ones from out of town? I don’t know. Seven? Eight?’

‘Twelve. An even dozen. And the year before that we had ten. Year before that, eight. Year before that, ten. Year before that, ten again. You getting my drift?’

‘Ten a year, give or take.’

‘Give or take exactly two. Ten each year.’

Delorme’s voice was suddenly clearer, sharper. ‘But you called to tell me about this past year, right?’

‘This past year, the number of missing adolescents – again, including those from out of town – came to fourteen.’

Delorme gave a low whistle.

‘Here’s how I see it. A guy kills a kid, Katie Pine, and discovers he’s got a thing for it. It’s the biggest thrill of his life. He grabs another kid, Billy LaBelle, and does it again. He’s on a roll, but by this time the entire city is looking for missing children. He gets smart – he starts going after older kids. Kids from out of town. He knows there won’t be the same uproar over a seventeen-year-old, an eighteen-year-old.’

‘Especially if they’re from out of town.’

‘You should see – open cases are from all over the map. Three from Toronto, but the rest are from hell and gone.’

‘You have the files at home? I’ll come right over.’

‘No, no, we can meet in the squad room.’

There was the briefest of pauses. ‘Jesus Christ, Cardinal. You think I’m still working Special? You think I’m investigating you? Tell me the truth.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing like that,’ he said sweetly, thinking, God, I’m a liar. ‘It’s just, I’m a married man, Lise, and you’re so all-out attractive, I don’t trust myself with you.’

There was a long pause. Then Delorme hung up.

9

They had the files spread out over three desks and were getting on the nerves of Ian McLeod, a red-haired, knobby, over-muscled cop with a well-nursed persecution complex. He was trying desperately to catch up on the backlog caused by the Corriveau case – a double murder at a hunting lodge. A good investigator, yes, but even on his best days McLeod was a bad-tempered, foul-mouthed hardass; Corriveau had made him just about unbearable. ‘Can you guys maybe keep it down a little? Like not shout down the entire fucking building?’

‘So sensitive these days,’ Cardinal said. ‘Have you been taking one of those New Male workshops?’

‘I’m trying to catch up on anything that isn’t Corriveau, okay? Some normal stuff. Believe it or not I had another fucking life before the Corriveau brothers decided to murder their no-good stinking father-in-law and his no-good stinking partner. I still have another life – I just don’t remember what it is right now, owing to the fact that I wake and sleep in this pathetic little butthole of a police station.’

Cardinal tuned him out. ‘None of these cases has been cleared,’ he said to Delorme. ‘Let’s divide the stack in two and run them down as fast as we can. Pretend they just landed on our desk. I mean, it doesn’t look like anything was done.’

‘I heard that,’ McLeod yelled across the room. ‘I don’t need my so-called brothers – oh, excuse me – my so-called brothers- and sisters-in-arms second-guessing me. You try chasing after runaway teenagers when His Majesty Judge Lucien ‘N-for-Numbnuts’ Thibeault has taken over your life. It’s like he considers himself personally responsible for the legal rights of Corriveau Le Prick Incorporated.’

‘Nobody was talking about you, McLeod. You’re getting paranoid in your old age.’

‘Detective John “The Undead” Cardinal tells me not to be paranoid. That’s when I really get paranoid. Meanwhile, Judge Lucien “A-for-asshole” Thibeault visits me in my dreams howling about chains of evidence and fruit of the goddam tainted tree. Fucking frogs all stick together.’

‘Watch your mouth, McLeod.’ Delorme wasn’t that big, but she had a glare that could freeze your blood.

‘I’ll say what I want, thank you very much. My mother was as French as you – except unlike you, she wasn’t a closet separatist.’

‘Oh, boy.’

‘Leave it alone,’ Cardinal said to Delorme. ‘You don’t want to talk politics with him.’

‘All I said was the Quebecois have some legitimate grievances. What the hell is he talking about?’

‘Can we not get into it, please?’

While McLeod muttered to himself over his sups, Cardinal and Delorme cleared three cases in under an hour – a simple matter of matching initial reports with follow-up faxes announcing that the subject was no longer missing. They organized the remaining cases in descending priority: two of the reports had been posted nationally, meaning there was no particular reason to think the subjects – one from Newfoundland, one from Prince Edward Island – had ever set foot in Algonquin Bay.

‘This one looks interesting.’ Delorme held up a fax photo. ‘She’s eighteen but looks thirteen. Only five feet tall and ninety pounds. She was actually seen at the bus station.’

‘Hang on to it,’ Cardinal said, as he answered the phone. ‘Criminal Investigations, Cardinal speaking.’

‘Len Weisman – yes, I’m in the morgue on a Sunday night – why? Because a certain detective of the female persuasion was making my life a living hell. Does she realize Toronto is an actual city? Does she know how many cases we get? Does she have any idea what kind of pressures we have?’

‘The victim was thirteen, Len. She was a child.’

‘And that’s the only reason I’m talking to you. Just tell your junior, next time she waits in line like everybody else. Did Chemistry section call you?’

‘Nope. All we got is Odontology, and we got that the other day.’

‘Well, Chemistry should have something for you – they kept her long enough.’

‘What can you give us, Len?’

‘Wasn’t a lot to work with – you saw the body – so I’ll cut to the chase. One finding on the limbs: the one wrist and one ankle both showed ligature marks, so she was tied up somewhere; Chemistry may have more for you on that. Star attraction? We had one eyeball, and fragments of upper lobes of the lungs. Both places, Dr Gant found signs of petechial hemorrhage. Wouldn’t have left a trace if she hadn’t been frozen. Never would’ve seen it.’

‘You’re saying she was strangled?’

‘Strangled? No, Dr Gant doesn’t say strangled. Not much neck left, you know – so no ligature marks there and no available hyoid bone. Call the doc if you want, but strangled, no, I don’t think we can go out on that particular limb. One way or another, though, this little girl suffocated.’

‘Any other findings?’

‘Talk to Setevic in Chemistry. His report says one fibre: red, trilobal. No blood, no hair – except the girl’s.’

‘Nothing else about the fibre?’

‘Talk to Setevic. Oh, there’s a note here – they found a bracelet of some kind in her jeans pocket.’

‘Day she disappeared, Katie was wearing a charm bracelet.’

‘Right. Says here it’s a charm bracelet. You’ll get it with the rest of the stuff. Is Detective Delorme there with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve never met this woman, but I’m guessing she’s good-looking. Sex appeal in the red zone?’

‘Yeah, you could say that.’ Delorme just then was squinting at a fax, creases of concentration between her brows. Cardinal tried and failed not to find it appealing. ‘You want a phone number or something, Len?’

‘Do I ever not. Her attitude is like someone used to getting her way, that’s all. In fact, put her on right now. Let me talk to her.’

Cardinal handed the phone to Delorme. She closed her eyes and listened. Gradually the skin over her cheekbones coloured; it was like watching the mercury rise in a thermometer. A moment later she placed the receiver gently on the hook. She said, ‘Okay. That’s fine. So some men they don’t react well to pressure.’

McLeod yelled from across the room, ‘I heard that, Delorme.’

10

The turnout for Katie Pine’s funeral was larger than anyone had expected. Five hundred people showed up at St Boniface, a tiny red brick church on Sumner Street, to pray over the small, closed coffin. The media were out in force. Delorme recognized Roger Gwynn and Nick Stoltz from the Lode. Nick Stoltz had got her into hot water as a teenager by snapping a picture of her and her boyfriend romantically entwined on a bench in what was then Teacher’s College Park. To him and most readers of the Lode it was simply a picture of autumn splendour, but to Delorme’s parents it meant that their daughter had not, after all, spent the evening with her friends at the sodality. She had been grounded for two weeks – a punishment that gave her boyfriend’s wandering heart time to conceive an affection for Delorme’s rival. Ever since, photographers had been assigned a place in Delorme’s personal inferno only slightly cooler than that reserved for rapists.

There was the Sudbury newswoman, with a female camera operator, Delorme noticed, and a three-hundred-pound soundman. She had seen a CBC van out front, and two pews up she recognized a reporter from The Globe and Mail who had done a piece on Delorme after she had put Algonquin Bay’s three-term mayor in prison. It’s not every day a child is found murdered on a desolate island in a frozen lake, but Delorme hadn’t figured it for national news.

The Globe reporter trained his famished newshound’s eye on Dorothy Pine, slow with grief, being led up the front steps. The reporter moved forward, but Jerry Commanda somehow managed to interpose his frame between him and the grieving mother, and when the aisle cleared, the reporter had subsided into his pew, apparently nursing a sudden abdominal spasm.

The police were here not only to pay their respects to a murdered little girl but also on the off chance the killer might show up at the funeral. Delorme was in the last pew, a good vantage point from which to see any lurkers. Cardinal was standing at the front, well off to one side, looking sombre in his black suit and – Delorme had to admit – handsome in a battered kind of way. Bruise-coloured rings under his eyes lent a soulful cast to his appearance that a romantic – and Delorme did not for one minute consider herself a romantic – might find very compelling. Fiercely loyal to his wife, Cardinal, despite her bouts with mental illness, if what Delorme heard was true. It was mentioned only infrequently in the squad room, and then in hushed tones.

As a ticket out of Special Investigations, working a homicide with the subject of her own investigation was not what Delorme would have chosen. Not a way to make friends or influence people, but then that isn’t why you go into Special Investigations in the first place.

John Cardinal seemed as uncorrupt as any cop Delorme had ever met; it was hard to give much weight to Musgrave’s worries about him. Before the funeral began, he’d chatted amiably with the old priest, whom Delorme pegged as a not too secret drinker. She hadn’t thought of Cardinal as a churchgoer. She’d never seen him in St Vincent’s, but then he’d hardly be likely to attend the French church.

The truth was, she didn’t know him well. The nature of her job kept her aloof from the rest of the force. And one thing you learn in Special: everyone has a story, and it’s never the story you expect. So she put the RCMP – Kyle Corbett business and the Toronto rumours into one compartment of her mind, and concentrated on watching those citizens of Algonquin Bay who thought it worthwhile to attend the funeral of a murdered girl.

Arsenault and Collingwood were outside, videotaping mourners and licence plates – a purely speculative endeavour, since they had neither a suspect nor a licence plate at this point.

Suppose the killer shows, Delorme wondered. Suppose he were to sit down right next to me, instead of this white-haired lady in the parrot green suit. How would I recognize him? By smell? Fangs and a long tail? Hooves? Delorme was not very experienced with murderers, but she understood that expecting a killer to look different from Cardinal or the mayor or the boy next door was complete fantasy. He could be the heavyset man in the Maple Leafs jersey – what kind of slob wears a hockey sweater to a funeral? Or he could be the Indian in the overalls that said Algonquin Plumbing on the back – why wasn’t he with the group surrounding Mrs Pine? She recognized at least three former high school classmates; the killer might be one of them. She remembered pictures from the books on serial killers – Berkowitz, Bundy, Dahmer – unremarkable men, all. No, no, Katie Pine’s killer would be different, but he wouldn’t necessarily look different.

You should be making me do more, Delorme thought to herself as she looked at Cardinal. You should be on my back night and day, getting me to chase down even the slenderest threads. We should be making Forensic’s life a misery till they cough up everything they’ve got.

Instead, Cardinal had somehow got Dyson to hand her the lowest-priority stuff in his in-box. A knight move? Keep her too busy to run her check on him? Then again, it could be just business as usual at The Great Hall of Chauvinists. Lucky for them I happen to be proud of my work in Special. I’m single and I’m still young – young enough, anyway – and I can devote every waking hour to an investigation if I want. What else do I have? she might have added on a darker day. What a thrill it had been to close in on the mayor, to nail his corrupt little friends. And Delorme had done all that herself. But Dyson and Cardinal and McLeod and the rest, sometimes she cursed their anglophone heads, the bunch of them.

‘Have to pay your dues, Delorme,’ Dyson had quacked at her this morning. She was tempted to grab the honey-glazed donut off his desk and wolf it down, just to see the expression on his face. ‘Everybody pays their dues. You don’t come onto the squad and go straight to the top, it doesn’t work that way.’

‘I’ve only been six years in Special. That counts for nothing, I suppose. I don’t want to work his damn robberies, his break-and-enters.’

‘Everybody works robberies. You will too, because A,’ and here he started counting off on those weird flat fingers of his, which always drove Delorme crazy, ‘Cardinal is heading up a major murder case and does not have time to handle anything else. B, because you are his junior on the squad. And C, because Cardinal bloody well asked me to put you on them. End of mystery, end of discussion. Look, you need an excuse to get away from him anyway, right? Get a little distance? You can hardly investigate the guy when you’re sharing an unmarked all day. In fact you could do worse than to check out his house – should the opportunity present itself.’

‘I can’t search his place without a warrant.’

‘Of course not. I merely point out that you’re partners. You will spend a lot of time together. If you should find yourself in his house – well, use your imagination. Not, I hasten to add, that I think he’s guilty.’

‘I can’t run a check when I’m clearing old cases. When am I suppose to look at the Corbett files?’

‘I have been known to approve overtime, you know. I’m not the Scrooge people like McLeod and Cardinal make me out to be.’

‘With respect, DS, why are we pursuing this now? The Pine case, surely it outweighs all this.’

‘Kyle Corbett is not just a former drug dealer and current counterfeiter. He’s a stone-cold killer, as the world will know if we ever catch the bastard. If someone’s been tipping him off, that is not a petty crime. It’s corruption, it’s aiding and abetting a murderer, and I want the guilty party off my team – if he is in fact on my team – and in jail where he belongs.’

‘Me, I think we should both be down in Toronto chasing Forensics.’

‘Forensics can do their job without our breath condensing on their necks. By the way, there’s a stack of burglaries in there that I expect you to clear by the end of the week. We all know who’s doing them, it’s just a matter of nailing the little creep.’

Snow flurries were ticking at the windowpane behind him, and the window reflected as a perfect white rhomboid on Dyson’s polished head. Oh, she wanted to smack him.

Now, a pretty Indian soloist finished her rendition of ‘Abide With Me’, and the priest stepped into the pulpit. He spoke for a few moments about the promise that was Katie Pine’s life. He spoke warmly of her intelligence and her sense of humour, and the sobbing in the front rows intensified. If it were not for his slight hesitation every time he said Katie’s name, Delorme might have thought he had actually known the girl. Holy water was sprinkled on the coffin. Incense was burned. The Twenty-Third Psalm was sung. And then the coffin was trundled to the back of the church, hoisted awkwardly by four pallbearers into a waiting hearse, and driven away to the crematorium where all that remained of Katie Pine would be transformed into smoke and ash.

Later that afternoon, Delorme carried a box of personal stuff out of her old office and dumped it on her new desk, back to back with Cardinal’s. She stared down at his things without a trace of guilt. Squad-room desks were one right next to another; anything left out was on public display. McLeod’s desk was a landfill of overstuffed manila folders, a junkyard of evidence envelopes, affidavits, sup reports – geysers of paper shooting from accordion files.

Beside it, Cardinal’s desk was by contrast a field lying fallow. The metal desktops were made to resemble, not at all convincingly, fine oak. Most of Cardinal’s, with its swirls of faux grain, lay exposed to the open air. Pinned to the corkboard above it was a copy of Dyson’s latest memo. (The new Beretta automatics: every officer expected to become a shining example with the new weapon by end of February, and let’s show the opposition what’s what in the annual contest that the Mounties, damn them, always won. Dyson did not think this could be blamed on budgetary imbalances.)

There was a picture of Cardinal’s daughter, a pretty girl with her father’s confident smile, and beside this a parking ticket. Delorme leaned over without touching anything to read the address on the parking ticket: 465 Fleming Street, right downtown, it could mean anything.

The Rolodex was open to Dorothy Pine’s number. Delorme flipped it back to A and for the next twenty minutes made her way through to F, not looking for anything definite. It was full of hastily scrawled names that meant nothing to her along with the numbers of various lawyers, probation officers and social workers that any cop would have to hand. There was Kyle Corbett, but you’d expect that. It listed three different addresses and several phone numbers, which Delorme copied into her notebook.

There was a noise from out front and Delorme turned back to face her own desk. Low voices, laughter, a slamming locker. Delorme lifted the handset on Cardinal’s phone and hit the automatic redial button. While waiting for it to pick up, she stared at a snapshot pinned next to Dyson’s memo. It was a felon, obviously – a huge man with a flat head made flatter by a brush cut. He was leaning back, apparently at ease, on a car, his weight seriously depressing the vehicle’s springs. Cops often kept pictures of their favourite collars, men who had shot them, that kind of thing.

Delorme’s reflections were interrupted by a voice she recognized. ‘Office of Forensic Medicine.’

‘Oh, sorry. Wrong number.’

Cardinal’s top drawer was open, hardly the habit of a guilty man; on the other hand, possibly the calculated gesture of a man who was very guilty indeed.

The door banged open and a voice called out, ‘Well, well. Imagine my surprise to find the Office of Special Investigations taking her own private inventory.’

‘Give me a break, McLeod. I work here now, remember?’

‘On Sundays too, apparently.’ McLeod was carrying a big cardboard box labelled Canadian Tire. He eyed her suspiciously over the top through red-rimmed lids. ‘Thought I was the only dedicated bastard in this place.’

‘You are. I was just moving some of my stuff over,’ said Delorme.

‘Fine. Welcome. Make yourself at home.’ McLeod slammed the box down on his desk. Something inside it clanked. ‘Just stay away from my desk.’

11

Cardinal called Vlatko Setevic in Forensic’s Micro section. They had taken hair and fibre from Katie Pine’s thawed-out body.

‘Quite a few fibres we found. Indoor/outdoor stuff. The kind they use in cars or basements. Fibres are red, trilobal.’

‘Can you narrow it down to makes? Ford? Chrysler?’

‘No chance. It’s very common, except for the colour.’

‘Tell me about the hair.’

‘Exactly one hair we found – other than the girl’s own. Three inches long. Brown. Probably Caucasian.’

Delorme looked disgusted when Cardinal told her the results. ‘It’s no use for anything,’ she said, ‘unless we get another body. Why do they take so long down there? Why are we still waiting for the pathologist’s report?’

Cardinal spent the next two days on the phone, chasing down the out-of-town cases: calls to originating police departments, calls to parents or others who made the initial complaints. Delorme helped out, when she wasn’t following up on old robberies. They cleared five more cases. That left two that looked like they might have finished up in Algonquin Bay: a St John’s girl who had been seen in the local bus station, and a sixteen-year-old boy from Mississauga, near Toronto.

Todd Curry had been reported missing in December. The notice was just the standard fax sent to all police departments in such cases; the photo was not high-definition. One thing caught Cardinal’s eye: the kid’s size was listed as five-four, ninety-five pounds. To a killer with a taste for runts, Todd Curry might look like prime prey.

Cardinal called the Peel regional police and established that none of the boy’s parents or friends had heard from him in the past two months. Missing Persons gave him the name of a relative in Sudbury, Clark Curry.

‘Mr Curry, this is John Cardinal, Algonquin Police.’

‘I imagine you’re calling about Todd.’

‘What makes you say that, sir?’

‘The only time I hear from the police is when Todd is in trouble. Look, I’m just his uncle, I’ve done all I can. I can’t take him back this time.’

‘We haven’t found him. We’re still trying to track him down.’

‘A Mississauga boy is being sought by the Algonquin Bay police? He’s really turning into a federal case.’

‘Has Todd contacted you since December? December twentieth, to be exact?’

‘No. He was missing all through Christmas. His parents were frantic, as you can imagine. He called me from Huntsville – this was the day he took off – called from Huntsville and says he’s on the train, can he stay with me. I told him he could, but he never arrived, and I haven’t heard anything since. You have to understand, this is one messed-up kid.’

‘In what way, sir? Drugs?’

‘Todd got his first sniff of glue when he was ten and hasn’t been the same since. Some kids can mess with drugs, other kids they get one whiff and it becomes their vocation. Todd’s one joy in life is getting high – if you can call that joy. Mind you, Dave and Edna say he’s gone completely clean, but I doubt it. I doubt it very much.’

‘Will you do me a favour, sir? Will you call me if you do hear from Todd?’ He gave Curry the number and hung up.

Cardinal hadn’t taken a train in years, although he never passed by the station without remembering the long trip out west he and Catherine had taken on their honeymoon. They had spent practically the entire trip sequestered in their narrow, rocking bed. Cardinal checked with the CNR and learned that Huntsville was still the second-last stop on the Northlander before Algonquin Bay. There was no way to tell if Todd got off in South River or Algonquin Bay. He could have stayed in Huntsville, he could’ve continued north to Temagami or even Hearst.

Cardinal took a run over to the Crisis Centre, at the corner of Station and Sumner. Algonquin Bay had no youth hostel, and sometimes runaway kids ended up in the Centre, which was just two blocks from the train station. The place was meant for domestic emergencies – mostly battered wives – but it was run by a lanky ex-priest named Ned Fellowes, and Fellowes had been known to take in the occasional stray if he had room.

Like most of the houses in the centre of town, the Crisis Centre is a two-storey, red brick affair with a roof of grey shingle, steeply pitched to slow the buildup of snow. Some workmen repairing the roof of the veranda had covered the front of the house with scaffolding. Cardinal could hear them cursing in French overhead as he rang the bell – tabarnac, ostie – taking their swear words from the Church, unlike the anglos, who wield the usual sexual lexicon. We swear by what we’re afraid of, Cardinal mused, but it was not a thought he wanted to dwell on.

‘Yes, I remember him. That’s not a good likeness, though.’ Ned Fellowes handed the fax photo back to Cardinal. ‘Stayed with us for one night, I think, around Christmastime.’

‘Can you tell me exactly what night that was?’

Fellowes led him into a small front office in what used to be a living room. A fireplace of painted brick was filled with psychology texts and social-work periodicals. Fellowes consulted a large maroon ledger, running his finger down lists of names. ‘Todd Curry. Stayed the night of December twentieth, a Friday. Left Saturday. I remember I was surprised, because he had asked to stay till the Monday. But he came in Saturday lunchtime and said he’d found a cool place to stay – an abandoned house on Main West.’

‘Main West. There’s a wreck of a place where St Claire’s used to be. Is that the one? By the Castle Hotel?’

‘I wouldn’t know. He certainly didn’t leave a forwarding address. Just wolfed down a couple of sandwiches and left.’

There was only one empty house on Main West. It was not in the downtown area, but a couple of blocks beyond it, where the street turned residential. St Claire’s convent had been torn down five years ago, exposing a brick wall with the faint outlines of a sign exhorting one to drink Northern Ale – a product of a local brewery out of business for at least three decades. After the convent, other houses had fallen one by one, making way for Country Style’s ever-expanding parking lot. Surrounded by overgrown weeds and stumps of long-dead trees, the house leaned in its corner lot like one last rotten tooth waiting to be pulled.

It made sense, Cardinal considered as he drove down Macpherson toward the lake: the place was just a block from D’Anunzio’s – a teen hangout – and a stone’s throw from the high school. A young drifter couldn’t ask for a better address. A slight humming sensation started up in Cardinal’s bloodstream.

The Castle Hotel came up on his right, and then he parked in front of a jagged, tumbledown fence tangled in shrubbery. He went to the front gate and looked through bare overhanging boughs at the place where the house used to be. He could see clear across the block to D’Anunzio’s over on Algonquin Avenue.

The acrid smell of burnt wood was strong, even though the ruins were covered with snow. They had been bulldozed off to one side in a heap. Cardinal stood with hands on hips like a man assessing the damage. A charred two-by-four pierced the thin coverlet of snow, pointing a black, accusing finger at the clouds.

12

Delorme wondered if Cardinal was making any headway. It was irritating as hell to go back to this small stuff when there was a killer out there. Wasting half the morning with paperwork on Arthur ‘Woody’ Wood, Delorme came to realize how badly she wanted to nail Katie Pine’s killer. Perhaps only a woman could want to punish a child-killer as badly. Delorme was thirty-three and had spent many hours fantasizing about having a child, even if she had to raise it herself. The idea that someone could snuff out a young life put her in a rage that she could barely control.

But was she allowed to go out and work on tracking down this sick, this disgusting, this grossly evil thing? No. She got to interview Arthur ‘Woody’ Wood, the poster boy for petty crime. Delorme had been following him along Oak Street in an unmarked car. After he sped up to make the light, she had pulled him over for ‘burning an amber’, only to see a vintage MacIntosh all-tube amplifier on the seat beside him. She had read the description to him from her notebook there on the street, right down to the serial number.

‘Okay,’ Woody said now, as she led him out of the cells. ‘Suppose by some freak of nature you get me for one little case. I can’t exactly see that putting me away for life, can you, Officer Delorme? You’re French, I guess. They tried to teach me French all the way through grade school, but I don’t know, it never stuck. Miss Bissonette – man, was she a Nazi. Are you married, by the way?’

Delorme ignored it all. ‘I hope you haven’t sold the rest of your haul, Woody. Because in addition to going to Kingston for ten years, you might have to make restitution, and then where will you be? It would be a nice gesture if you gave the stuff back. It might go easier for you.’

Engaging criminals are a rarity, and when one comes along, police tend to be overly grateful. Arthur ‘Woody’ Wood was a hopelessly amiable young man. He had unfashionably long sideburns that gave him the look of a fifties rockabilly singer. He had a bounce in his walk and a rangy slouch to his shoulders that put people at their ease – especially women, as Delorme was finding out. She was right now having an argument with her own body: no, you will not react this way to the physical attractions of this silly little thief. I won’t allow it.

As she led him toward the interview room, Woody yelled a greeting to Sergeant Flower, with whom he proceeded to carry on a lively conversation. Sergeant Flower only stopped gabbing when she registered Delorme’s high-intensity scowl. Then Woody had to say hi to Larry Burke, just coming in. Burke had apprehended him six years ago with a car radio in his fist – installing it, Woody had claimed.

‘Woody, listen to me,’ Delorme said in the interview room.

Someone had left The Toronto Star on one of the chairs, and Woody snatched it up. ‘The Leafs, man. I can’t believe this team. It’s like they have this appetite for self-destruction. This craving. So unhealthy.’

‘Woody, listen to me.’ Delorme took the paper with its two-column headline: No Leads on the Windigo Killer. ‘That bunch of burglaries down Water Road is giving me hives, okay? I’ve got you cold for the Willow Drive job, but I know you did the others too. So why don’t you save us both a lot of time and energy: confess to one, we’ll maybe forget the others.’

‘Now hold on.’

‘Confess to one, that’s all I’m saying, and I’ll see what I can do. I know you did the others too.’

‘Hold your horses, there, Officer Delorme. You don’t know I did them.’ Woody’s grin was beatific; it held no trace of guile or suspicion or malign intent. Honest men should have such grins. ‘You’re indulging in exaggeration, plain and simple. If you suspect me of some old burglary, well, I can understand that – I have been known to keep company with objects not my own, after all. But suspect is not know. You could drive a Mack truck between suspect and know.’

‘There’s another count, Woody. Suppose somebody actually saw you? Then what? Suppose somebody actually saw a blue ChevyVan pulling away from the Nipissing Motor Court?’ The proprietor of the motel hadn’t in fact got a decent look at him, but he had seen someone driving off in a van just like Woody’s. Three thousand dollars’ worth of TVs missing. No jewellery.

‘Well, if the guy saw me, I guess you’d put me in a lineup. Ms Delorme, you’re single, aren’t you?’

‘Suppose they saw your van, Woody? Suppose we have a licence plate?’

‘Well, if they give you the licence plate, I guess you better hang me for that one. You look single to me. You have the air of a single person. Officer Delorme, you ought to get married. I don’t know how I’d get through life without Martha and Truckie. Family? Children? Why, it halves the sorrows of life and doubles the pleasures. It’s the single most important thing there is. And police work involves a lot of pressures.’

‘Try and pay attention, Woody. A blue ChevyVan was seen driving away from the job on Water Road. You say you were home, but other witnesses say your van was not parked in your driveway. Add that to the one who saw your van at the scene, and what do you come up with? Ten years.’

‘How can you even say that to me? Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. Hell, you know as well as I do, nobody ever sees me. I like to go about my work undisturbed. God’s sake, ma’am, I didn’t get into this business to meet people.’

Sergeant Flower knocked on the door. ‘His wife’s here. She paid his bail.’

‘I’m going to nail you for the whole bunch, Woody. You can make a plea now, or you can make me catch you. But I’m going to nail you for the whole bunch.’

‘If I wanted to meet people, I’d be a mugger.’

One ability Delorme prided herself on was a knack for putting anything that wasn’t immediately essential out of her mind. When, later that afternoon, she drove along the winding south branch of Peninsula Road, Arthur Wood had left her thoughts entirely and she was once more in the murky waters of Corporal Musgrave’s suspicions.

The road got narrower and narrower, until tree branches heavy with snow scratched at the roof of the car. The white woods reminded her of a sleigh ride long ago. Thirteen-year-old Ray Duroc and she had lain among the heap of juvenile bodies and kissed with closed mouths until her lips were bruised. Last she heard, Ray was living on the other side of the world – Australia or New Zealand or some damn place – where the trees were green instead of white and the sun actually put out some heat.

She noted the names on the mailboxes, then a sharp left, and then she was almost past the driveway before she saw it. There was no name nailed to the tree. She parked the car on the side of the road and went down the driveway on foot. There was a big brown Mercedes at the end of the drive. Delorme didn’t even want to think what it had cost.

After Corporal Musgrave, former senior constable Joe Burnside was pure oxygen. Joe Burnside was blond, six-foot-four in his socks – where does the RCMP find this species, Delorme wondered – and happy as a clam. ‘You’re working Special? I know you. You’re the one that bagged Mayor Wells! Come in! Come in!’

Delorme shed her boots and joined him in the kitchen, where he poured her a steaming cup of coffee. She revised her estimate: six-foot-six if he’s an inch.

‘Man, you gotta get out of police work and into the money,’ he was telling her ten minutes later. They were sitting in overstuffed armchairs that faced a blinding white view of Four Mile Bay. ‘With your background? Your achievements? You’re perfect! Look at me – eight years a corporal in the Commercial Crimes Unit and now I’ve got my own business – me! Joe Burnside! Trust me, I’m the last guy I would have thought could do it and I’m telling you, I’m turning offers away. There’s more work than we can handle. And you know where it’s not going? It’s not going to the RCMP. Excuse me a second.’ He crossed to a couch where a bony old collie was curled up asleep. He bent down close to its head and yelled, loud enough for it to hurt Delorme’s ears, ‘Get offa there, you lazy-ass good-for-nothing mutt!’

The dog opened a glassy eye and regarded him calmly.

‘Deaf as a post,’ he muttered, and pulled the dog from the couch by its collar, leading it like a pony to the fireplace, where it lay down once more and returned immediately to its canine dreams. ‘Everybody says I should put him down. Well, people that don’t have dogs say put him down. They don’t cost you a dime for fifteen years, then the minute they get sick, people say kill ’em. Sorry, you want to talk business. Puts me off, though. People have no loyalty. How long you been doing white-collar?’

‘Six years.’

‘You see what’s happening? With cutbacks? I don’t know about you guys, but I’ll tell you, the Mounties are just toothless. Toothless. They’re taking everybody off white-collar and putting them on the street – you know why? Because street work is visible and white-collar isn’t. People like to see their tax dollars at work. And with the Mounties going out of business, that means someone’s gotta take up the slack. Good ol’ private enterprise. Which – I’m happy to say – is me. A two-month investigation on copyright infringement? Piracy? Forty thousand bucks. And Corporate America is happy to pay it – it’s mostly US companies that hire us. And the great thing about Americans, they don’t trust you unless you ask for a lot of money.’

He’s born again, Delorme thought, he should be a preacher. But all she said was, ‘Kyle Corbett.’

‘Ohhh,’ Burnside groaned theatrically. ‘Don’t remind me. Kyle Corbett. That one really hurt.’

‘You had the background sewn up. You had solid stuff. It was you and Jerry Commanda all the way.’

‘We had a source. Good source, too. Guy named Nicky Bell worked with Corbett for years, but happened to be facing an unrelated charge on computer porn that Corbett didn’t know about.’

‘And he gave you a time and a place.’

‘A time? A place? No, no, no, Nicky Bell was the best singer since Gordy Lightfoot. He gave us months of stuff. Me and Jerry picked that bird clean. But the big windup was gonna be at the Crystal Disco out behind Airport Road, and for that we needed one of your guys. We got John Cardinal – smart guy, but always depressed, it seemed to me.’

‘What happened then?’

The affable manner disappeared. Burnside’s face – formerly as bright and wide open as Four Mile Bay – suddenly darkened. It was like an eclipse. ‘You know what happened,’ he said. ‘Or you wouldn’t be here.’

‘You hit the club. You came up empty.’

‘Bingo.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Nothing. That’s just the point, isn’t it. Everything went right. Everything went exactly according to plan. It was like watching the insides of a Swiss watch. Except for the ending. Corbett was tipped off. You know it and I know it. But if you’re expecting me to say who I think did it, you’re barking up the wrong tree. There’s no proof of anything.’

‘What did your source tell you?’

‘Nicky? If you think anybody’s ever going to see Nicky Bell again, you’re in the wrong line of work. Wife confirmed there was a suitcase missing from his house, some clothes were gone, but I think that’s just cover. I think Kyle Corbett sent him to the bottom of Trout Lake.’

The dog was back on the couch, but Burnside didn’t seem to notice.

As Delorme was putting her boots on, he looked her up and down. She got a lot of that, but for once she didn’t think it was sexual. ‘You’re working that Windigo thing too, aren’t you? Well, I know you are.’

‘Yeah, I am. I’m moving out of Special.’

‘Windigo’s an ugly case.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘A real ugly case, Ms Delorme. But investigating your own partner, well, there’s a lot of cops – Mounties, OPP, you name it – a hell of a lot of cops would say investigating your own partner’s a lot uglier.’

‘Thanks for the coffee. I needed warming up.’ Delorme did up the snaps of her coat, put on her gloves. ‘But I never said who I was investigating.’

13

D’Anunzio’s was still a magnet for teenagers, just as it had been when Cardinal was growing up. Part fruit store, part soda fountain, at first glance D’Anunzio’s had always been an unlikely hangout. But Joe D’Anunzio, with the manners of a monk and the girth of an opera star, numbered everyone who came into his store among his friends. He looked after his soda fountain with the expertise of an old-time bartender and treated his young patrons like his old ones, letting them linger for hours in the wooden booths at the back over their Cokes and chips and chocolate bars. As kids, Cardinal and the other altar boys had always trooped over from the cathedral after mass, and later, when they had grown out of their surplices and soutanes, they would come to D’Anunzio’s instead of mass – substituting Rothmans and Player’s for the frankincense, Aero bars and ice-cream floats for the bread and wine.

Cardinal sipped his coffee and watched the kid playing the video game.

In Cardinal’s day it had been a pinball machine. Pinball was more physical, less hypothetical, and for your nickel you got lots of bells and rattles. Under the ministrations of the youth at the controls, its replacement uttered an irritating series of beeps and boops.

‘When did that house burn down, Joe?’

‘Over on Main there?’ Joe served cherry Cokes to two blond girls who had their hair cut identically: buzzed on one side, long on the other. Both sported nostril studs, which looked to Cardinal like chrome zits. In his day the girls had worn their hair long and parted in the middle, giving them – at least to Cardinal’s nostalgic eye – a gentle, soulful look. Why did these girls scar themselves with fashion?

Joe came back the length of the counter to the cash register. ‘November, I think it was. Early November. Must’ve been five or six fire trucks out there.’

‘You sure it wasn’t later? After New Year’s?’

‘Definitely not. It was before my hernia operation, and that was November tenth.’ Joe swung his girth around and poured more coffee into Cardinal’s cup. ‘How could you miss a fire like that?’

Two missing kids. And November was when Catherine had started to drift. Cardinal had had other things on his mind.

He took his coffee to the other end of the counter, near the front window. On the west side of the square, a funeral was coming out of the cathedral, four men in black suits bearing a coffin on their shoulders. They had to be freezing with no overcoats on. Across the square in the empty lot stood a man wearing a green and gold parka with matching toque. He was writing notes of some kind, his breath ragged plumes lit by the sun.

Cardinal left the soda fountain and dodged through the traffic on Algonquin. The man was filling in a form on a clipboard. Cardinal introduced himself.

‘Tom Cooper. Cooper Construction. Just certifying our lack of progress with the demolition guys. They were supposed to clear the entire mess away by Tuesday. It’s now Friday. It’s hard to find professionals in this town. I mean real professionals.’

‘Mr Cooper, I imagine a contractor keeps an eye out for lots like this. You wouldn’t happen to know of any other vacant houses on Main West?’

‘Nope. Not on Main West. Got one over on MacPherson. Another one out on Trout Lake. But in town here they don’t stay empty long.’

‘It’s just I heard there was an empty place on Main West. Empty in December, anyway. Some teenagers were hanging out there, possibly a drug thing. You hear about anywhere like that?’ Cardinal could hear the hush in his voice. Such a frail thread, this lead, the slightest weight might snap it.

Cooper pressed the clipboard under one elbow and squinted west up the street, as if an empty house might appear there. ‘Nothing on Main that I know of. Oh, but maybe you’re thinking of Timothy.’ He swung back around, seeming to pivot on his heels. ‘It’s not really a Main Street address, but it’s on the corner.’

‘The corner of Timothy and Main? By the railroad tracks?’

Cooper nodded. ‘That’s it. No way teenagers were hanging out there, though. Place is sealed tight as a drum. It’s been in probate court for over two years. Contentious family’s what I heard.’

‘Mr Cooper, thank you. You’ve been very helpful.’

‘This wouldn’t be in reference to that wretched Windigo thing, would it?’

Cooper, like everyone else in Algonquin Bay, was keeping abreast of the case. Any suspects? Was it strictly a local thing? Any chance of the Mounties coming in on it? You couldn’t blame people for being curious. Cardinal had to listen to a theory involving a satanic cult before he could get free.

He drove the half-dozen blocks to Timothy Street, taking it slow over the ridge of the railroad tracks. The northern line was mostly freights taking oil up to Cochrane and Timmins. The hoot of its whistle as it crossed Timothy woke Cardinal every night when he was a kid. A lonely sound but somehow comforting, like the cry of a loon.

The house was an old Victorian place with a wraparound veranda. The red brick above the boarded-up windows was blackened with years of railway soot, so that the building looked not just blind but black-eyed. Massive icicles were fixed to the roof corners like gargoyles. The yard, which was large by Algonquin Bay standards, was surrounded by a high hedge.

Cardinal got out of the car and stood on the snow where the front path should have been. Except for the faint hieroglyphics of bird tracks, there was not a single footprint.

The stairs to the veranda were filled in with hardpack snow. Gripping the rail, Cardinal stomped his way up and examined the front door, also boarded over. The public trustee’s seal was intact. The lock had not been tampered with. He checked the boarded-up windows, and then did the same around the side of the house.

The crossing bell started to clang, and as he checked the side door a train clattered by, a long one.

Anyone breaking into this house would be likely to go through the back: there was nothing there but the high hedge and the railroad tracks. And thieves liked basement windows. Trouble was, the basement windows were buried below the snow. Using the heel of his boot, Cardinal dug a trench along the back wall of the house.

‘Damn.’ He’d scraped the back of his leg on the thick crust of ice. About four feet from the corner he found the top of a window. After clearing away the crust, he pulled the rest of the snow away with his hands.

‘Gotcha,’ he said quietly.

The Provincial Court in Algonquin Bay is on McGinty Street. It’s a modern, plain brick building with no pretensions; it might be a school or a clinic. Perhaps in compensation for its plainness, the sign that announces it as Provincial Court, District of Nipissing, is the size of a highway billboard.

The receptionist told him Justice Paul Gagnon was in traffic court until lunch, and lunch was booked for a meeting.

‘See if he’ll squeeze me in, will you. It’s for the Katie Pine case.’ Cardinal knew Gagnon would never grant him a search warrant to pursue some runaway Mississauga youth who was now over the age of sixteen. He filled out the necessary form and, while waiting for court to get out, called in to headquarters. Delorme was out on the Woody case and was not expected back for at least another hour. Cardinal felt a twinge of guilt for leaving her out of this; she’d been upset about handling his backlog.

Justice Gagnon was a small man with very small feet and a toupee that was two shades lighter than his hair. He was a few years younger than Cardinal, a completely political animal whose robe drowned him as if he were a child. His voice was a reedy pipe.

‘Sounds pretty feeble, Detective.’ Gagnon hung his robe on a coathook and put on a camel-hair sports coat. ‘You think the person who killed Katie Pine and abducted Billy LaBelle may have stayed in the Cowart house? And you base this on information received second-hand from Ned Fellowes at the Crisis Centre – information that doesn’t even relate directly to the killer but to another missing person, this Todd Curry.’ Gagnon checked his tie in the mirror.

‘The house was broken into, your Worship. I’m sure the parties contesting the will would want that investigated anyway. But if I go through them, it’s going to take a long time and upset people who are already upset about the will.’

Gagnon’s skeptical eye fixed him in the mirror. ‘For all you know, it may be one of the family who broke in. Maybe to haul off some contested stick of furniture. Family heirloom. Who knows?’

‘The window is only about ten inches high, maybe two and half feet wide.’

‘Jewellery, then. Grandpa’s pocket watch. My point, Detective, is that you have no substantive reason to suspect a killer was there.’

‘It’s the only place I have reason to suspect the killer set foot, other than the shaft head on Windigo Island. He likes deserted buildings maybe. The Curry kid was last seen alive saying he was going to stay in an abandoned house on Main Street.’

Gagnon sat down behind a desk that dwarfed him and examined the form. ‘Detective, this address is on Timothy.’

‘It’s at the corner of Main. It looks like it’s on Main. The Curry kid was from out of town. He probably thought it was Main Street.’

Justice Gagnon looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got to run. I have a lunch with Bob Greene.’ Bob Greene was the local member of parliament, a voluble fool of the back benches.

‘Just sign the warrant, your Worship, I’ll be out of your hair. We have zero leads on Billy LaBelle, and as for Katie Pine, this is it. This is all we’ve got.’ Katie Pine was the magic number – Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle were a combination that would slip the tumblers in Gagnon’s tiny heart. Cardinal could hear the mechanism turning over: famous case equals opportunity. Opportunity seized equals advancement. Personal advancement equals justice.

The JP furrowed his toy brow, timing his resistance like a modestly talented actor. ‘If there were people living in this house, no way would I sign this. No way would I let you disrupt a sovereign household on grounds this tenuous.’

‘Believe me, your Worship, I know how tenuous this is. I wish I had something ironclad to give you, but unfortunately the killer decided not to leave his name and address next to Katie Pine’s body.’

‘That’s not a high moral tone, I hope. You’re not lecturing me, are you?’

‘God, no. If I wanted to lecture JPs I’d have been a politician.’

Justice Gagnon vanished into his overcoat as if into a fog, then re-emerged decisively from cuffs and collar. He snatched up the bible from his desk and shoved it at Cardinal. ‘Do you swear the contents in the application are true, so help you God?’

Five minutes later Cardinal was back at the Cowart place, scooping snow away in handfuls from in front of the basement window. His knees were numb as wood. The snow was stratified into alternate layers of powder and ice. Cardinal went back to the car and retrieved a shovel from the trunk.

There were crowbar marks at both ends of the two-by-four that held the plywood in place, and the nails were loose. The two-by-four came away easily, then the plywood. There was no pane of glass behind it.

Cardinal removed his down coat, and the frigid air sucked the breath out of him. He dropped to his knees and crawled backwards into the opening, lowering himself inside. Snow got under his shirt and into his pants, melting against his skin. He could feel a platform, possibly a table, under his feet. Whoever had broken in had probably put it there to ease his exit.

Cardinal pulled his coat inside after him, fought with the zipper, then stood there on the table flapping his arms and exclaiming at the cold. The few footcandles of light that squeezed through the window did little to ease the darkness.

He climbed down from the table – a laundry table, he could now see – and switched on his flashlight. It was a heavy-duty instrument that took six D-cells and on occasion had doubled as a billy club; the glass was cracked and the tube dented. It swept a white beam like a cape over the silent furnace, the washer and dryer, a tool bench he immediately envied. There was a drop saw he’d seen going at Canadian Tire for close to five hundred.

Even in the cold he could smell the stone and dust, the raw old wood, the laundry smells from the washer and dryer. He opened a door, breaking old spiderwebs with his flashlight, and found shelves of preserves – peaches, prunes, even a gallon of red peppers that looked like fresh hearts.

The stairs were new, unfinished and open. The flashlight beam revealed no obvious footprints, but Cardinal kept to the edges and took the stairs two at a time to preserve any marks he might have missed.

The door opened to the kitchen. Cardinal stood for a moment to take in the feel of the house. Cold and dark, it exuded despair. Cardinal held in check the excitement of the chase, the sense of something about to happen. He had long ago learned to distrust such feelings; they were almost always wrong. Evidence of intruders did not mean a killer had been here, or even the errant Todd Curry.

The kitchen looked untouched. A thin layer of dust covered every surface. A narrow flight of stairs was tucked in the corner with a cupboard underneath. Cardinal lifted the latch with the toe of his boot, revealing neat rows of canned food. On the wall above the cupboard, a calendar from a local sporting goods store showed a man fishing in a plaid hunter’s jacket with a little boy laughing beside him. A sudden memory of Kelly, a summer vacation, a cottage; her little girl’s excitement at catching the fish, her squeamishness at baiting the hook; how his daughter’s brassy hair had flashed against the deep blue sky. The calendar showed July, two years ago, the month the owner had died.

In the plastic garbage pail he found nothing but a crushed donut carton from Tim Hortons.

The dining room was furnished with heavy old furniture, and Cardinal, no expert in such matters, had no idea if it was antique or reproduction. The painting on the wall looked old and vaguely famous, but Cardinal was no art critic either. Kelly had been appalled one day to discover he had no idea who the Group of Seven were, stars of Canadian art history apparently. The glass doors of a cabinet displayed pretty glassware, neatly arranged. Cardinal opened a cupboard and found bottles of Armagnac and Seagram’s VO. The chair at the head of the table was the only one with arms, and the fabric was a good deal more worn than the others. Had the old man continued to eat at the place of honour long after his family had dispersed? Had he sat here, imagining his wife and children around him?

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