Black Fly Season (12 page)

Cardinal kept a running log in his notebook. In addition to the usual distracting junk that

might later prove to be gold, there were several interesting items.

The first was a Swiss Army knife that Arsenault discovered on the far side of the corpse. It was between two boulders that formed rocky steps out from behind the falls. The knife was too small to be a murder weapon. It was attached to a keychain that held a silver locket.

Arsenault sprung the clasp with a gloved finger. Inside, there was a black-and-white photo of a couple who appeared to be in their mid-forties. The man was wearing a uniform, but the photo was too small to make out what kind.

‘Of course, the probabilities are that it just belongs to some camper,’ Cardinal said, but he made a note of it anyway.

‘It’s in pretty good shape,’ Arsenault said. ‘Probably hasn’t been here that long. For sure, not through the winter.’

Collingwood found a rusty railway spike.

‘What is a railway spike doing here?’ Delorme said. ‘The train tracks have to be at least two miles away - on the far side of a highway, the First Nations reserve, and a subdivision. It didn’t get here by accident.’

‘But we don’t know the killer brought it here,’ Cardinal said. ‘And why would he, anyway? It’s not sharp enough for a weapon.’

The spike was bagged and labelled.

Several sticks turned up, each about an inch thick, and all the same length, about a yard long.

They had been cut from a birch and stripped of bark. It was Delorme who found them, under a bush a little way down from the site. At first she had thought they had something to do with a campfire. They were exactly the sort of stick you might use to poke a fire, or even use for kindling. But all three of the sticks were discoloured for about half their length.

‘Could be blood,’ Collingwood said, pointing to the discoloration.

‘An expert on edged weapons might be able to tell us if that Swiss Army knife is the blade that cut the sticks,’ Arsenault said. ‘Connect the blood to the victim, sticks to the blood, knife to the sticks, the locket to a person.’

‘Arsenault’s already solved the case,’ Cardinal said. ‘We can all go home.’

‘No, it’s true,’ Arsenault said.

‘Of course,’ Cardinal said. ‘It’s good thinking.’

Collingwood put the sticks into a large paper bag.

Cardinal went back to the other side of the falls.

Lise Delorme was standing on a shelf of granite, a finger in one ear and her cell phone at the other. She spoke quietly into the phone.There was something sexy about her posture, but Cardinal could not have said exactly what.

She snapped her cell phone shut and looked up, catching Cardinal’s glance. ‘Body Removal,’ she said. ‘They’ll be here soon. Didn’t sound too enthusiastic, though.’ She pointed her phone at

the markings on the cave wall. ‘Do those mean anything to you?’

Cardinal stepped closer to the images, the strange drawings of arrows and moons. The numbered charts. ‘I don’t know. I suppose we could be dealing with a Satanist of some sort.’

‘Don’t they go in for pentagrams? I don’t see anything like that here. Big on candles, too, I believe. I’m not seeing wax on any of these rocks.’

‘Well, there’s no astrological signs, but there’s a serpent down here. God knows what the crossed hammers mean.’

‘Of course, it’s always possible these signs had nothing whatever to do with the murder. Wombat was a biker. Bikers have enemies. We’ll get a list and compare times.’

‘Good luck pinning down a time of death from that mess,’ Cardinal said, jerking a thumb toward the corpse.

Arsenault got up, brushing the knees of his pants. He held up a small vial. ‘These’ll help us nail it.’

Delorme winced at the squirming mass of maggots.

Arsenault grinned. ‘Witnesses.’

Later, Cardinal drove with Arsenault and his vials of ‘witnesses’ along Highway 11. Arsenault was wearing wraparound sunglasses. With his moustache and longish hair, they made him look more like a Viking Rider than a cop.

‘So why the hell are we using Angus Chin?’ Arsenault wanted to know.

‘Because if we take it to Toronto we’ll have to get in line like everybody else and it’ll slow things down. Besides which, Angus Chin has three postgraduate degrees in Biology, Entomology, and Parasitology and he knows what the hell he’s talking about.’

‘Yeah. But there’s reasons why we’ve never used him before. I mean, you do know about the rumours, don’t you?’

Cardinal knew about the rumours. Some individuals are born to be the subject of gossip; others ask for it. Angus Chin was both. First, there was his background - his father a Scottish merchant seaman, his mother a pharmacist from Hong Kong. In a place like Algonquin Bay, such a background was exotic if not actually suspect.

Then there were his looks. The Scottish part of Chin’s ancestry had rounded his eyes a little, and put some curl in his hair, but he insisted on wearing it in a Mandarin ponytail that hung down to his coccyx. This despite the fact that the closest he’d ever got to China was the campus of UCLA.

The rumours flew the moment he returned to Algonquin Bay after his lengthy education in Toronto and Los Angeles: he was running from a homicidal homosexual love affair, he was working for mainland China in some malign capacity, he was a doctor who had been defrocked because of unorthodox procedures.

But these were not the rumours that made Paul Arsenault turn to Cardinal and remove his ridiculous sunglasses and squint at him.

‘I’m not talking about the little rumours. I’m talking about the rumour. Capital T, capital R.’

‘Ah, yes. The big one,’ Cardinal said.

‘And you don’t care about this rumour?’ Arsenault poked Cardinal in the arm. ‘You don’t think it has any bearing on the case?’

‘All I know about the rumour is that it is a rumour. It’s not a fact, and we probably shouldn’t discuss it just before we meet the man.’

Arsenault shrugged dramatically. He put his sunglasses back on and looked straight ahead at the highway.

The big rumour revolved around Angus Chin’s interest in parasitology and the study of tape I Worms. It was whispered around town that he kept

a tapeworm for a pet. There were of course the inevitable questions: How? In God’s name, where? The answer was that Dr Chin kept his tapeworm where tapeworms live, in his intestine. He would change his diet or some other variable and study the worm’s response. Did it grow faster or slower? Fatter or thinner? And how would he measure this response? How would he get access? He would fast for two days. On the third day, he would place a lump of sugar on his tongue. The worm, sensing the presence of nourishment, would make its way up the digestive tract and eventually up the oesophagus. When the moment was right, the doctor would reach in and pull the worm from his throat - no small feat, considering the creature was said to be over five feet long.

‘Have you considered what a competent defence attorney might do with this information in the event of a trial?’ Arsenault didn’t take off his sunglasses this time. He stared at Cardinal and it was like being examined by a huge fly. He mimicked a defence attorney: ‘Dr Chin, would you tell the court - do you have any hobbies? Do you keep any pets? A tapeworm. I see. And where do you house your pet worm? In your intestine. How quaint. And is it true you take it out for walks?’

Cardinal said, ‘Chin doesn’t do court. You can’t be at the beck and call of judges and prosecutors if you’re a full-time academic’

He found a space in the parking lot and they made

their way over to the Science building. The last of the sun made the brick glow burnt orange. A fresh watery breeze blew across it from the lake, and there was the sound of wind through the trees. The campus was intensely green just now.

A group of girls emerged from the student centre, chattering at high volume and with great urgency.

‘Geez,’ Arsenault observed, ‘They get younger every year. College students actually look like children to me.’

‘They are children.’ Cardinal’s own daughter was only a couple of years out of college.

They followed signs to the biology department and after some trial and error found Dr Chin’s office. Cardinal rapped on the door.

‘If you’re looking for Dr Chin,’ a young man with very thick glasses told them, ‘he’s in Bio Lab Three, downstairs.’

Dr Chin was supervising student projects, bending over an array of Petri dishes. He was gripping a male student’s arm, shaking him, ‘Don’t rush it. Sometimes the fastest way to get your answer is to move very slowly.’

‘Dr Chin?’

He stood up and flipped his ponytail back over his shoulder. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Detective Cardinal, Algonquin Bay Police. This is Detective Arsenault from our ident section.’

‘Really. How pleasant.’

‘Can we talk someplace else?’

Chin called to an older student a few desks away, a man with rubbery features that gave him an unhealthy, boneless look. ‘Mr Filbert?’

‘This is Mr Filbert,’ Chin said. ‘It won’t hurt him to meet our local detectives. Mr Filbert is a former student of mine and now my unfortunate post-doc. I keep him around solely for the purposes of torture.’

‘You make me wash test tubes that haven’t even been used yet.’

‘Post-docs don’t wash test tubes,’ Chin said. ‘Mr Filbert is prone to exaggeration. Nevertheless, I’ll allow him to join us if he promises to behave.’

‘What about the students?’

‘They can survive without us for a few moments, I think.’

Chin led them to an adjoining lab and hung his white coat on the back of a chair. He was slender, even skinny, and at five-six or -seven, he couldn’t weigh much over one-twenty. Cardinal wondered about the tapeworm.

Chin sat down at a desk equipped with a magnifier on a flexible stand. ‘All right. Show me what you have.’

Arsenault handed the professor a vial.

Chin switched on his magnifier and held the vial under it.

‘Very interesting. You have a nice collection of maggots here. Nice work,’ he said without looking up. ‘Good label.’

‘My partner calls me Avis,’ Arsenault said. ‘I try harder.’

‘Okay, you have a body found outside. Probably in the woods. Somewhere pretty cool, right? Maybe hidden among the rocks? Near water, too, I think.’

Arsenault looked at Cardinal and back to Dr Chin. ‘You can really tell all that?’

‘Simple. You’ve got calliphora calliphoridae vomitoria. It’s common in wooded areas.’

‘Gotta love that name,’ Filbert said. ‘Did you know Linnaeus named it?’

‘Not everyone is a fly geek, Mr Filbert.’ Chin was still staring at the vial under his magnifier. ‘You also have phormia regina. That’s a blowfly that you’re going to find absolutely everywhere. But you’ve also got calliphora vicina. That tells us what, Mr Filbert?’

‘Vicina is another blowfly. It only goes places that are shady and cool.’

‘That’s why Mr Filbert gets the big grants,’ Dr Chin said. ‘Justice Department, no less. They wouldn’t give me dick, pardon my French.’

‘Justice loves DNA,’ Filbert said cryptically.

‘I’m not seeing any other species here. Is that all you have?’

Arsenault handed him three more vials. Chin examined them one after another under the Magnifier. ‘Okay, now you have cynomyopsis cadaverina. Shiny blue bottle. You only get this fly advanced stages of decay. You’ve also got rove

beetles and staph beetles, short for staphylinidae. They feed on maggots.’

‘Normally, you’d expect a lot more species than that at an outdoor site,’ Filbert said. ‘Especially in the late stages.’

‘The body was behind a waterfall,’ Cardinal said.

‘Hah!’ Chin waggled a finger. ‘The flies couldn’t find it. Couldn’t smell it. Makes perfect sense.’ He rolled his chair back from the magnifier.

‘Can you give us anything on time of death?’ Arsenault said.

‘What am I, Mr Wizard? Obviously I have to put these under a microscope to be absolutely sure what they are. And even then, for court purposes you’re going to need them to hatch. That way you nail down the species beyond a doubt. But you’ve got third instar cynomyopsis and you’ve got rove beetles, you’re looking at about fourteen days since time of death.’

‘Can you narrow it down any more than that?’

‘Come back next week, gentlemen. I’ll be able to tell you a whole lot more.’

The double doors of the lab were swinging closed behind them when Arsenault suddenly stopped. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I gotta ask.’

Before Cardinal could prevent him, Arsenault yanked open one of the doors. ‘Hey, Doc. I gotta ask you something. Rumour I heard.’

‘Arsenault,’ Cardinal said. ‘For God’s sake.’

‘What rumour would that be, Detective?’

Arsenault appeared to think a minute. ‘Is it true

the black flies always come out before Victoria Day?’

‘In this region? That’s not a rumour, Detective. That’s a fact.’

‘Well., thanks for setting me straight. It was bothering me.’

‘Very amusing,’ Cardinal said when they were out in the parking lot. ‘Really, you could sit in for Conan some time.’

‘I gotta tell Delorme,’ Arsenault said. ‘The look on your face.’

Delorme had other things on her mind.The body removal service had come and gone (with appropriate expressions of horror and disgust), and the remains of Wombat Guthrie were now in transit to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. That left the rest of the evidence to gather up.

With the help of Ken Szelagy and Bob Collingwood, she was finding gum wrappers, bits of foil, cigarette packs of various ages and conditions, a rusted Dr Pepper can, and countless cigarette butts. There were bits of Kleenex, the odd heel print, a handful of beads, and a postcard depicting the citadel at Quebec City. This Delorme retrieved from under a rock.

On the back, written in French in a feminine hand, ‘Dear Robert, Quebec is a fantastic city. Wish you were here with me. I’m missing you all the time.’

‘Hey, Bob,’ Delorme said to Collingwood. ‘This a letter from your girlfriend?’ She held it up for him to see. Collingwood, whose sense of humour had been surgically removed at birth, shook his head.