Black Fly Season (30 page)

keep developmental timetables for all the local arthropods in our database.’

‘What he means is, I do,’ Filbert said. ‘He just takes credit for it.’

‘Mr Filbert is not a scientist at all, Detectives. He is actually an escapee from a locked facility. I’d be grateful if you’d take him with you when you go.’ Chin typed something on the keyboard, and the grid changed colour. Then a list appeared on the left-hand side and the grid filled up with numbers.

‘On the left we enter the taxa found at the site. Calliphoridae, cynomyopsis, staphylinidae, etcetera. Each has a different time of oviposition or pupaposition and different times of development. You feed the computer all the taxa you find at the site, enter their different stages of development, and really you don’t even need a computer. You just look at what number of days accounts for all the different stages. The only PMI that could account for all of these being in the same place at the same time is …’ Chin hit the enter button and the screen flashed a number range.

‘… 312 hours to 336 hours.’ Cardinal said. ‘Very impressive.’

‘Science at its most basic’ Chin looked up at them with a smile. Fluorescent lights formed bright ingots in his glasses. ‘Even Filbert understands it.’

‘Not my field, really,’ Filbert said. ‘I’m just a capillary sequencer.’

Arsenault pulled out a couple of vials and handed them to Dr Chin.

‘Another body,’ he said. ‘Can you tell us anything from these?’

‘Well, you’ve got mostly eggs here. Hardly any pupae. Fresh corpse, right?’

‘Right.’

Dr Chin tapped out one of the eggs and put it under the microscope. ‘Phormia regina you get everywhere. Boring.’ He put another egg on another slide. ‘Lucilia Illustris,’ he said, adjusting his focus. ‘Greenbottle. Likes open, dry areas.’

‘That would certainly fit,’ Cardinal said.

Dr Chin tapped out another egg on to a slide and put it under the scope. He adjusted the focus back and forth. ‘Phaenicia sericata. Also known as the sheep blowfly. This one lives in bright habitats. Early arriver, too. Likes to be first in line. Outdoors, in sunshine, I’d say we’re looking at the neighbourhood of twelve to fourteen hours post mortem.’

‘That would match the appearance of the corpse,’ Arsenault said.

‘You didn’t mention either of those species with our first victim,’ Cardinal said.

‘Heck, no. First victim was behind a waterfall and two weeks old. You’re not going to see either of these insects at that site. And vice versa. You’re not going to see cynomyopsis cadaverina on a corpse that fresh. But I don’t understand why you’re coming to me over this second victim. You’ll

get a reasonable time of death from stomach contents and body temperature.’

‘We found something else at the second site,’ Cardinal said. ‘Arsenault did.’

Arsenault produced another vial. Chin held it up to the light.

‘A single pupal casing?’

‘It wasn’t part of any masses. It was by itself eight feet away.’

‘Eight feet?’ Chin opened the vial and slid the tiny casing out on to a slide. ‘Sometimes maggots can jump quite far from the flesh,’ Chin said. ‘But this is not a cheese skipper. And your second corpse is nowhere near water, correct?’

‘That’s right. No lake or stream within at least a mile.’

‘This is a casing from a third-instar cynomyopsis. There were lots of them on your first corpse. But you’ve got nothing older than first instar on the second one, and it’s not old enough to attract myopsis. No way this casing is from your second corpse.’

‘Yes!’ Arsenault jerked his elbow down in the sports fan’s sign of victory.

‘Hold on,’ Cardinal said. ‘If I understand you correctly, this casing couldn’t be from the second victim, correct?’

‘Correct.’

‘I don’t see how that proves somebody tracked it over from the first victim.’

‘It doesn’t,’ Chin said. ‘They could have tracked

it from somewhere else. Some other site of decay - a dead animal, say. A hunter, a hiker, who knows?’

‘You guys are depressing me,’ Arsenault said. ‘Are you telling me this casing doesn’t mean anything?’

‘It might mean a great deal,’ Chin said. ‘I just can’t prove it with entomology.’

‘That is really a pisser,’ Arsenault said. ‘I thought this was gonna be important.’

‘Do you mind if I take a look at it?’ Filbert said. ‘Just for a day or so?’

‘What for?’ Chin said. ‘We’ve already typed the species.’

‘Let me have it for a day or so. I may be able to help.’

‘Maybe it hasn’t broken the case wide open,’ Arsenault said, ‘but this little bugger is still evidence. I’m going to have to ask you to sign a receipt for it, and I’m going to have to see the fridge where you will keep it locked up.’

Cardinal and Arsenault left soon after.

On the way to the car, Arsenault said, ‘What do you figure the chances are that some hiker happened by and deposited that maggot at our crime scene?’

‘Slim,’ Cardinal said. ‘Possible, but slim.’

‘Murderers have been known to return to the scene of the crime. Could have gone back to retrieve something - something he lost or forgot. Hell, in Wombat’s case, with all that mutilation,

the killer could have gone back for more body parts.’

‘There’s another possibility,’ Cardinal said.

‘Oh?’

‘Nishinabe Falls worked for him once. He could’ve gone back there to kill again.’

‘But Toof was killed over by West Rock.’

‘I meant Terri Tait.’

The common conception of the addict is of a person whose day is consumed with the laying of schemes to procure the next fix. Wild-eyed, hyperventilating, and slick with perspiration, he curls up in some desperate corner. Under sweat-soaked sheets, a telephone clamped in hand, the junkie frantically dials the numbers of his connections. And when they won’t extend him any credit, he starts dialling friends with whom he’s lost touch years ago, to beg for a loan, repayable with interest, of course. Then come the lightning calculations of what to sell - the boom box? The CD collection? assuming there is anything left to sell. When all the worldly goods are gone, and if the city is big enough and the addict attractive enough, it may come to selling one’s body. Or if one lacks the kind of body for which there is a brisk market, then the addict’s fancy turns to theft. And so a spur-of-the-moment, just-happened-to-be-in the-neighbourhood kind of visit might be bestowed upon a relative, an old friend, or even an unlucky acquaintance. Then, while the unwitting

mark’s back is turned, the sudden scooping of a radio, a clock, a watch, or some silvery memento into one’s starving backpack.

Many addicts do indeed find themselves driven to such measures. But at any given moment, the majority spend their time not in thinking about how to procure the next fix. They’ve already worked out how to procure the next fix. Their life after all, revolves around the fix. They’ve worked the fix into their daily routine.

No, what the addict thinks about more than any other single subject is when and how he will quit. Such fantasies often involve mornings. Today, I will smoke my pipe, I will fill that vein, I will drain that bottle, and then tomorrow, first thing in the morning - or no, let’s make sure this recovery program is a sensible, workable affair this time, not like all the other attempts - next Monday. I’ll allow myself just this one more weekend, then first thing Monday morning I’ll head down to the twelve-step and get some of that beautiful earthy wisdom they traffic in and get my head turned around. It won’t be easy, but I should be ready by Monday. Yes, that’s right. Shoot for Monday.

Thus the days and weeks go by. The addict sees himself as embarked on a course of moderation, leading to all-out cessation, followed for the rest of his life with the Zenlike clarity of abstinence. The rest of his life will unfold in a sweet - but not boring - desirelessness. There will even come a day when the sight of a little hillock of white powder

will provoke no emotional response whatsoever - a needle will leave him unmoved.

So it was with Kevin Tait. His latest course of moderation had taken him from snorting to skinpopping and now back to mainlining as swiftly as if he had set his engines full-speed ahead for personal obliteration. That had been the pattern with him pretty much since high school.

He knew where it came from, this hole in his being that only heroin seemed to fill. He had been orphaned at the age of ten and, even though the aunt and uncle who took him and his sister in tried their best, nothing was ever the same. It was as if the world had been pulled out from under his feet and he could never trust anything again.

It was okay for Terri; Terri had been fifteen. She had seemed to fit right in. But Kevin had become more and more unruly, and his new parents were constantly disciplining him: grounding, TV deprivation, docking his pocket money, it was always something. Terri was forever interceding for him, trying to soften their aunt and uncle’s responses. And she was always trying to get him to behave better. It seemed like the whole pattern of their lives had been inscribed in some implacable book of fate the moment the plane carrying their real parents had dived, nose-first, into the ground.

Sometimes Kevin resented his older sister for apparently having come through this loss unscathed; her life looked easy and untroubled compared to

his. Terri had made it through college and was gradually making her way in Vancouver’s theatre world; Kevin had dropped out, figuring a degree was irrelevant to a career in poetry. Besides, it was pretty hard to concentrate on Shakespeare and John Donne when you were panting after the next high. Shortly after he dropped out, Kevin had been arrested with enough heroin on him for ten people.

So far, he had managed to keep knowledge of his full-blown readdiction from Leon and from Red Bear. He always wore long sleeves and he only injected himself in the middle of the night. Well, all right, sometimes he had to sneak off to the can and slip in a little booster, just to keep him compos for the rest of the day. But, except for the day Toof had been killed, he didn’t allow himself a full-blown fix until after midnight.

He’d done well, so far, to keep it from them, but then, dissembling is the first skill the addict learns. He knew he could not keep it up, and that meant he would have to vamoose, which he wanted to do anyway. Well, yes, that was his plan. Abstinence, not addiction, was the chart he had drawn up for the rest of his life. An abstinence that would bring with it a mental clarity he had not known since he was - what? Fourteen? Fifteen? That was what he was after. Not intoxication. He had no intention of spending the rest of his life hanging out at the Rosebud Diner with the likes of Leon. Three or four months from now he’d be living on a Greek island, just like Leonard Cohen

had done way back when he was a young poet. He’d live off souvlaki and goat’s milk while he worked on a book of poems that would just capture everything he ever thought about and everything he knew about poetry.

He couldn’t see his way clear to actually breaking free of Red Bear and the camp until Monday. The problem was, just now he was so wired he wouldn’t be able to write a couplet, let alone the kind of complex, multilayered works he had in mind. Come Monday, he’d be out of here. He’d already phoned the Addiction Research & Recovery Centre in Toronto and booked himself an appointment for Monday afternoon.

But this called for careful steering. He had the money - Red Bear’s entrepreneurial skills had definitely put cash into his bank account. But first he had to get through the next few days. He had to make sure he had enough smack to get him safely through the next few nights and then down to Toronto.

Kevin’s personal inventory had run out. So had Leon’s, he happened to know. And yet, despite the dearth of competition in the area, he had managed to score himself a few crumbs downtown, just enough to see him through the afternoon, the effects of which had long worn off. He was still in good shape - actual withdrawal symptoms were a good twelve hours away - but it was definitely time to get proactive.

He had turned his light out an hour ago, and

he had been watching out the window ever since. There was nothing going on at the camp. Activity reached a peak when a soggy raccoon waddled past the leaning volleyball posts. Leon’s light had gone out over half an hour ago, and Red Bear’s cabin had gone dark soon after. Kevin put his Adidas on and opened the cabin door.

The rain showed no sign of letting up anytime soon. Just as well, really. It would keep the black flies off. Now came the easy part. He dashed round to Leon’s cabin, making a circle around back of the camp in about twenty seconds. The bush was thick here, but full of trails. A puddle disgorged its contents into his running shoe.

Now came Leon’s door. He moved silently round to the front of the cabin and here Kevin was in luck, because he had been the one assigned to getting locks put on the cabins and he had had the foresight to have extra keys made. The only one he didn’t have a key for was the motherlode and the stinking cabin out back where Red Bear killed his goats and chickens and what have you. Red Bear had had Leon take care of those locks, and then he put Leon in charge of the dope. Not that they kept all of it at the camp. The main stash was hidden somewhere Kevin didn’t know about. ‘For your own protection,’ Red Bear had assured him. ‘It’s better you don’t know.’ All they kept on hand was a few ounces, for medium-size transactions between big shipments.

Kevin knew exactly what he had to do next,

knew exactly where he had to go. There’s no one more observant than a junkie scoping out his supply. He knew where Leon kept the key. It was on a chain strung from his belt loop to the right front pocket of his jeans, along with all his other keys. He also knew where Leon kept his jeans at night. He always hung them over the back of a chair, and half the time the keys were dangling right out in plain sight.

Kevin listened at the door for a few minutes. His heart was pounding, and suddenly he very much needed to pee. There was no sound from inside. The rain had already soaked through the hood and shoulders of his sweatshirt. He had thought about wearing his leather, but he was afraid it would make too much noise. Craft, craft, saves the day.