Cold Comfort (16 page)

Varley shrugged. “Not really,” he said. “I was away at school and I…” He peered up at the ceiling, squinting, trying to recall. “Something about a chest injury not being consistent…” He gave it up, looked at Gilbert. “Look, I really don’t…at least I can’t remember. It was twenty-five years ago. There was some sort of investigation and everything was cleared.”

Back at the Days Inn, after a swim and a sauna, Gilbert called Lombardo long distance using the squad’s calling card and asked him to check the
Gerald Hayden
.

“I don’t think it’s going to pan out,” he said, “not when we have a record of Larry Varley renting the Crown Victoria.” The flicker of the TV brightened the room, tuned low to the Weather Channel. “I’m starting to think Larry Varley might be the guy.”

Paul Varley, frozen. An inconsistent injury to the chest. Cheryl Latham, frozen. And Cheryl’s bullet wound to the chest. The similarities were too striking to ignore.

“Maybe,” said Lombardo. “But let’s not jump to conclusions. We got the results back on the blood samples from Cheryl’s apartment.”

“And?”

Out on the road, Gilbert watched an oil truck rumble by.

“It’s Latham’s blood in the kitchen.”

Gilbert watched the truck as it turned the corner and disappeared behind a large mound of granite toward Ramsey Lake. So was all this up in Sudbury a blind alley? The snow was still coming down, not much, but steady. Somehow he couldn’t believe that. Not when Larry Varley was supposed to be in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere and was instead riding around in a Crown Victoria.

“Okay, so he’s still on our list,” said Gilbert. “Have you confronted him?”

“Not yet.” He heard Lombardo rustle some paper on the other end of the line. “I like to go in with a lot of evidence. Speaking of which, we got the toxicology results back as well.”

“And?”

“It’s a kicker.” Gilbert heard the papers rustle again. “They found high levels of something called Kedamine.”

“Kedamine?” said Gilbert. “What the hell is Kedamine?”

“It’s an animal tranquilizer,” said Lombardo. “Veterinarians use it to calm excitable animals. I guess Cheryl had enough in her bloodstream to put her right out.”

Dr. Dean Varley. Veterinarian. Gilbert looked at his french fries, not hungry anymore. Maybe Sudbury wasn’t a blind alley after all.

On the last day of February, the skies cleared as a fierce north wind blew through Sudbury. The temperature dropped, and, with the windchill, hovered somewhere around minus 37 Celsius. Gilbert sat in the coffee room of Sudbury Regional Police Headquarters, his hands around a warm cup of coffee. Uniforms looked at him curiously. Some nodded a greeting. Others sat at tables in groups, some speaking French, others English. Not much crime in Sudbury. Last night, they had a couple of break-ins, an auto-theft, and an Ojibwa Indian frozen to death in a snowbank clutching a bottle of White Satin. Reminded him of Toronto back in the seventies.

Guy Faucher came in holding a sheet of paper. He sat down, not looking too pleased.

“They can’t find it in the Sudbury office,” he said. “The case is old. After a while they send them out to storage.”

“They have nothing on computer?”

“Nothing before 1979.”

“Then where is it?” asked Gilbert.

“It might be in Ottawa, at the Solicitor General’s Office. They have a huge storage facility there. Or it could be in Toronto. They’re going to check.”

“How long will it take?” Gilbert again thought of Lombardo, how he might lose his job if he didn’t get a decent collar on the Latham case. “We’re under a little pressure.”

“The girl said anywhere from three weeks to six months.”

“That long?”

“Sometimes it takes a year. I guess a subpoena might hurry things along, but not by much.” Faucher slid the piece of paper across the table. “I thought this might help. It turns out we did our own investigation.”

Gilbert looked at the sheet of paper. A suspicious death report, recounting the details of Paul Varley’s death. A scrawl in the Extra Remarks section: foul play hasn’t been ruled out. Signed by a Detective Harry Blair, dated February 1971.

He followed Elm Street out past Big Nickel Road onto Route 144 into the Onaping Falls Region, where the road twisted through rock, up and down, hairpinning, coiling past old slag heaps and blackened outcroppings.

After ten miles, the bush, now far away from the sulfuric emissions, began to come back. The road sometimes dipped low through bog and marsh, where the reeds stuck up brown through the ice, and where dead spruce and birch, unable to support themselves past a certain height in the thin layer of rock-clinging soil, lay upended on frozen shores in a tangle of stumps and roots. He continued past an abandoned maple sugar bush, took a side road around a derelict mine shaft, where the corrugated steel on the head frame was practically rusted through, and finally came to a mailbox that said Blair along the bottom, lacquered pine with the letters burned right in, and a design of mallard ducks taking off up the side. Here he found a small private lane.

He drove along the private lane through a stand of copper birch, up over a hill, then down a steep grade. At the bottom, shaded by huge spruce trees, he saw a grey GMC pickup truck parked next to a log barrier. The log barrier had a dead-end sign nailed to it. He parked beside the pickup and got out of his car. So cold outside, he immediately coughed. He looked beyond the log barrier where he saw a marsh, frozen solid; beyond the marsh, a large rocky hill; and perched in and amongst the cedar and birch on the hill was a small two-storey home with smoke coming from the chimney. A low walkway extended out over the marsh, really a bridge leading to the hill the home was on. Gilbert mounted the steps and crossed the walkway. The walkway skirted the edge of a seventy-five-foot-long beaver dam; to the right the water was three feet higher than the water to the left, pinned in by the dam. He didn’t know beavers made dams that long; this was more a dike. Up ahead he heard a dog barking. In a moment a black and tan mongrel appeared. The dog trotted out over the walkway, stopped a few yards away, and continued to bark at Gilbert, not viciously, more in excitement.

“All right, Sandy, that’s enough now.”

Gilbert looked up. A man appeared at the end of the walkway, about seventy years old, dressed from head to foot in a blue snowsuit, a little Ski-Doo logo above the breast pocket, a blue toque with little red maple leafs on it pulled down over his head.

“She won’t bite you,” said the man. “We don’t get that much company out here. She’s a little excited.” The man peered at him quizzically. “You’re Detective Gilbert?”

Gilbert nodded. “I’m glad you could see me at such short notice. Harry Blair?”

“That’s what my mother called me.”

He was tall, barrel-chested, a rugged-looking man with a handlebar mustache and a large forthright nose. Gilbert was six-one; Blair had at least four inches on him.

“We might as well get you out of this cold,” said Blair, giving a cursory glance at Gilbert’s thin coat. “You’re not dressed for it. Betty’s not here right now, she works part-time at the A&P, but I’ve got some coffee brewing and I’ve baked a half dozen biscuits. You’ll like my biscuits. They’re great with maple syrup. Or eat them just plain if you like.”

Gilbert followed Blair the rest of the way across the walkway and up the hill. Sandy now nuzzled experimentally at his hand, no longer barking, tail wagging frantically.

“A nice place you got here,” said Gilbert.

“I think so,” said Blair. “I’ve had enough of town. So has Betty.”

The house itself was actually constructed of logs. Three cats sat in the living room window staring down at them. A snowmobile was parked around the side. Wood chips littered the snow near the front steps, where there was an axe, a chopping block, and small pile of firewood. If it weren’t for the huge radar dish on the roof, Gilbert might have convinced himself he’d just stepped into the nineteenth century.

They climbed the steps. Blair opened the door and they went inside. The air smelled of wood smoke.

“You can hang your coat up there,” said Blair. “Here’s the living room. You make yourself comfortable and I’ll go get coffee.”

“Thanks.”

Blair kicked off his mukluks, pulled off his snowsuit, and disappeared down the hall to the kitchen, the three cats following him. Gilbert hung up his coat and sat in the comfy green armchair by the fire. The coffee table was made from a single cross-section from the trunk of a large tree and the walls were panelled with cedar. A pipe, a pouch of pipe tobacco, and a spin-top ashtray sat on the table. Above the fireplace there hung a pair of moose antlers. A Blue Jays pennant hung from one of the antlers. Maybe someday he and Regina would retire like this. He could do without the antlers but he had no objection to cedar panelling. And the view of the marsh was soothing.

Blair came in with a tray of coffee and biscuits, and a litre tin of maple syrup. He set the tray on the table and eased himself into the other chair, grunting with the effort.

“There we go,” he said.

Gilbert opened his briefcase and took out a mimeographed copy of Blair’s decades-old report on the Paul Varley death.

“There it is,” he said.

Blair lifted the report and glanced at it.

“I was never a star when it came to cursive penmanship,” he said. He slid the report on the table. “I can hardly read this. But I remember the case well. Snowmobile accident over by Onaping. Out near Moose Lake. Had a deep snowfall the night before. Must have been twenty-five inches. And bitterly cold. Everything was buried. All the rock rounded over with snow. A lot of wind, too, a lot of drifting.” Blair shrugged, lifted a knife, sliced a biscuit in half, drenched it in maple syrup and took a bite. “You have to know your trails. They’ve marked a lot of them over the last ten years, but back then none of them were marked. Varley went head first into a boulder. I guess it looked like a small hill, with all that snow, and he thought he could take it. Or maybe he was just snow-blind by that time. He went right into it, with the girls in a small trailer hitched to the back.”

“So he was thrown forward?” said Gilbert.

“That’s what the girls told us. And by the way, I was awfully sorry to hear about Donna and Cheryl. That’s really too bad. I hope you catch your man.”

Gilbert tapped the report. “Was there any follow-up on this?”

“The inquest was satisfied,” said Blair. “Not me. It bugged the hell out of me.”

“The inconsistent injury to the chest?” said Gilbert.

“That didn’t bother me so much,” said Blair. He spooned some sugar into his coffee. “It was the one to the head that got me. The one that fractured his skull. He was wearing a helmet, heaven help him. He shouldn’t have been injured like that.”

Gilbert stared at Blair. He swallowed a few times. “I don’t know about the head injury,” he said. “I can’t get my hands on the coroner’s report.”

“His forehead,” said Blair, tapping his brow. “Varley always rode with his knee on the seat, his foot on the right runner. When he hit the boulder, the snow compacted in front of him, making a bit of a ramp. He was thrown up and over the boulder. His left leg snagged the edge of the windshield, gave his leg a bad twist, but didn’t break it. He could have walked out with the help of a stick. But then you have this head injury. Even if he wasn’t wearing a helmet, to sustain a head injury like that he would have had to be thrown directly against the boulder. And he wasn’t. He was thrown clear of the boulder. He landed in two feet of snow on the other side. Of course, when I finally got there, most of the scene was obliterated. I was hoping to find some evidence in the snow prints. But everybody had walked all over everything. So I took the girls aside one by one. Cheryl stuck with her story. She said he was thrown clear and that she had no idea how he got the head injury. She was cool. But Donna, she’s not so bright, and when I asked her about it, she fished around, looking for some explanation, said maybe he hit the boulder after all. I said, are you sure about that? She just started crying. She looked scared. I knew something wasn’t adding up. I grew convinced Cheryl had something to do with it. Even in deep snow like that they should have reached Onaping in an hour.”

“I thought it was five miles,” said Gilbert.

“Not if you cross Moose Lake,” said Blair, “which Cheryl should have done. Hell, they’d gone across Moose Lake on the way out. Why’d she decide to go around on the way back?”

“Maybe she got scared,” suggested Gilbert. “Maybe she was afraid of thin ice.”

“The ice was ten feet thick, mister. She went the long way around because she wanted to be sure. Took them five hours. When we finally got out to old Paul Varley his head was bashed and his helmet was lying on the ground, and he was frozen to death. You could see right away that the kippers were nowhere near the kettle, even though Cheryl said otherwise.”

“So that’s when they decided on an inquest.”

“I brought it to the coroner’s attention and he thought we should go ahead. Not that it did any good. Cheryl was such a sweet-looking girl. Small, petite, real girl-next-door, and no one could believe she would bludgeon her stepdad that way. The boys were real upset. Especially Larry. I guess he must have been nineteen or twenty at the time. After the inquest, you could hear him wailing in the hall. He spent a while in the hospital after that, I don’t know whether it’s because his dad died, or if it was something else.”

“But the cause of death was hypothermia.”

Blair stopped his coffee cup halfway to his lips and stared at Gilbert. “If you ask me, mister, the cause of death was Cheryl Varley. She whacked him good and hard and left him there to freeze. I worked on that case for a year. If something doesn’t add up, it doesn’t add up. Sure, the coroner ruled accidental death, but I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now. She killed him. There’s no doubt in my mind. And she as good as ruined Larry Varley’s life in the process.”

Gilbert took a biscuit and poured a little maple syrup over it. He thought of Cheryl Latham’s body lying on the Dominion Malting pier, frozen, legs curled, frost in her hair, the big gunshot wound to her chest. Was it revenge on Larry Varley’s part? Was it just coincidence that both stepdad and stepdaughter died of hypothermia, both with significant injuries to the chest, both on a cold day in February? And if so, why now, twenty-five years later? What made Larry Varley come down from Sudbury and kill his stepsister at this particular time? He bit into his biscuit and chewed thoughtfully. Was Cheryl in some way responsible for Donna’s murder? And did Donna’s murder then trigger Larry’s journey south in his rented Crown Victoria? He could see it. Larry Varley somehow stealing Kedamine from his brother’s clinic so Cheryl wouldn’t struggle, then dumping her in the trunk of his Crown Victoria and taking her down to Cherry Beach. Letting her freeze to death. Then shooting her just to make sure.