Forty Words for Sorrow (9 page)

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 V.O. 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?

Cardinal’s flashlight beam found a pair of sliding doors, presumably leading to the living room, but they were frozen shut. He returned to the kitchen and took the back stairs to the second floor.

Upstairs, the bedrooms showed no sign of disturbance. He lingered briefly in the master bedroom, the last one to be occupied. There was a small television on an antique dresser, which would have been easy to steal.

The bathroom cabinet contained antihistamines, laxatives, Fixodent and a gigantic bottle of Frosst 222s.

Cardinal went down the main stairway into the front den. An old piano took up most of the space. A pair of elaborate silver candelabra stood on top, surrounded by photographs of the Cowart family. A closer examination of the piano lid showed that the candelabra had been moved—the hexagonal bases had left their outlines in the dust—and the candle stubs looked fairly recent. So someone had sat at the piano by candlelight. Possibly Todd Curry. The lid of the keyboard was smudged with handprints. Cardinal shuddered; his bones ached from the cold.

The living room looked like a stage set: two armchairs, plant stand with dead plant, circular rug in front of brick fireplace. The fireplace had been used. The ashes of a log fire lay in the grate, covered with a white dusting of snow. Yes, you would need a fire. No heat, no electricity—anyone planning to stay here in December would have made a fire right away. A fire would have lit the room up. Wouldn’t they be afraid someone would see the smoke? A normal person would be, but I’m not looking for a normal person, Cardinal told himself, I’m looking for a runaway drug user and a child killer, and God knows what else.

Cardinal swung his flashlight past a mantelpiece, past a large television. Above the couch hung a dark old painting, a man in black; a Spaniard, judging by the pointy little beard. His cape was a flowing black velvet with unusual markings.

Beneath this, the couch looked as if someone had upended a gallon of paint over the back. The design in the fabric was completely obliterated. Then Cardinal leaned closer and saw that it was not paint, but blood. Blood in large quantities.

He shone his flashlight on the wall and saw now that what he had taken to be a wallpaper pattern was in fact droplets of blood—droplets flung upward, as if from someone swinging a heavy instrument. There was blood on the painting too, he now saw. Those marks on the Spaniard’s cloak.

He stood in front of the couch, sweeping the flashlight slowly from one end to the other. One of the cushions was bare, the cover having been removed. A burglar could have used the seat cover to carry booty outside, but what did the killer use it for? He didn’t bother to steal those silver candelabra, Cardinal thought, or the tiny television upstairs. He doesn’t do this for money.

Cardinal was shivering with cold—at least he thought it was the cold—and tried to figure out where he would have put the body. He hadn’t taken it outside, Cardinal was reasonably sure, and the upstairs had looked untouched. He went down to the basement, wishing fervently he had more light.

He stopped before a flimsy-looking door under the stairs. In older houses you often found coal chutes under the stairs, although nobody burned coal any more. There were drag marks in the dust.

Cardinal put the flashlight down on the floor. The beam cast his hunchbacked shadow up and down the wall as he bent to open the half door. It came back with a scrape and a clatter. He knew what would be in there. Even though he could not smell it, he knew what would be there. The cold had killed his sense of smell. He wanted to see it, then get the hell out of there and come back with a team. He picked up the flashlight and ducked into the tiny space.

Polyethylene sheeting had opened up around the body, giving it an unwrapped look, like something precious in a black gift box. The body itself, perfectly preserved by the cold, was curled up in an almost fetal position. The head was tucked between the knees in a bundle stiffened with cold and black with blood. But Cardinal recognized the fabric; it was the seat cover from the couch upstairs. Why had he covered the head? The trousers, ravelled about the shins, were black denim, the shoes black Converse high-tops. Cardinal knew the particulars by heart:
Caucasian male, last seen wearing …

Cardinal was aware of the nausea lurking in his belly, but he ignored it. Forms passed through his mind, calls he had to make: the coroner, Delorme, the lawyers for the estate, the Crown attorney. But even as these things flashed in his mind, he was taking in the physical details: the cheap watch around the thin wrist, the shrivelled and tormented genitals. Cardinal’s heart went out to the parents who would have to be informed, who would be clinging to the hope that their son was alive. Whether or not an afterlife existed, a dead person was beyond pain and shame and insult. So why did he now feel the same instinct he had criticized in Delorme—to cover the boy up?

Cardinal was taking a break outside, grateful for the cold and the snow that kept the crowd of onlookers down to a manageable size. Between the coroner, the ident boys and the body-removal service, the basement was so full of people and equipment it was impossible to move around. It was dark now, and the front yard was lit up like the CN Tower. There were cars all down the block.

A slight edginess was building inside him. He had done excellent work—no high-tech flash—but he had done good work, and had he been a better man, he told himself, and a better cop, he would have been enjoying the moment of satisfaction. He missed the honest cop he had been years ago, wished yet again he could undo the thing he had done, if only because it was spoiling this moment. If Delorme were investigating him, if she looked back far enough, she might find something. It was not likely, but it was possible; it could happen any time. Just let me finish this case, he prayed to the God he sometimes believed in; just let me finish off the man who did this to Todd Curry.

A pack of media people pressed against the crime scene tape surrounding the yard. This time it was not just Gwynn and Stoltz from the
Lode
. Not just Sudbury TV. The Toronto papers were here. The CBC again. CTV. Is it the Windigo? they all wanted to know. Cardinal had nothing to say beyond the bare particulars until next of kin had been informed. The whirr of motor drives was loud.

“Miss Legault? Can we talk a sec?” He steered her a little away from the pack.

“‘The Windigo,’” he said. “You must be proud of that one. Way they all picked up on it.”

“Oh, come on. Windigo Island? It was only a matter of time.”

“You came up with it, though. Don’t sell yourself short.”

“Two murders and it’s only February. About twice what you’d normally get in an entire year, right?”

“Not really.”

“Murders of this
type
. Obviously, we’re not talking about domestics. Look, what are the chances of a real interview? Off the record, no cameras.” Those cool newscaster’s eyes taking a reading on him. Cardinal thought of a cat watching a mouse.

“Believe it or not, things are going to be pretty hectic around here. I don’t know if—”

“Believe it or not, TV news doesn’t try to be stupid.”

“Oh, no. I would never accuse you of trying.”

Miss Legault pressed on. “So give me a break. Educate me.”

She was looking earnest now, and Cardinal had a soft spot for earnest people. Catherine was earnest. So was he, probably. “If you call Katie Pine’s killer the Windigo,” he said, “you’re only likely to get the guy’s motor running.”

“Is that a refusal?”

Cardinal pointed to the house. “Excuse me. Duty calls.”

Body Removal—two men who worked for the local funeral homes when they weren’t working for the coroner—came out of the house with the body bag and placed it in the back of the hearse. The younger of the two looked pretty shaky; he blinked in the glare like a mole.

Delorme came out a moment later. “So kind of you to call me in on this,
partner
. Such a colleague. Such a believer in teamwork.”

“I called. You were out.”

“If I was a man, you would have waited for me. If we’re not going to work together, maybe I should go back to Special. You can explain to Dyson.”

“You say that as if you left Special.”

She looked him up and down, her eyes sweeping over him like searchlights. “You sound like McLeod, you know? If you’re going to be paranoid, I can’t stop you. But me, I’m not going to get dragged into it.” She watched the hearse drive away. “They go straight to Toronto?”

Cardinal nodded.

“Arthur
maudit Wood
, I could kill that little bastard.”

“You ready to drive to Toronto?”

“Tonight? You mean to Forensic?” Excitement changed her voice instantly. She sounded like a girl.

“Next plane isn’t till morning, and I don’t want to wait.” Cardinal nodded toward the dark square that was Dr. Barnhouse. The coroner could be heard halfway down the block berating someone for some perceived outrage. “I’ll get the scoop from Barnhouse and pick you up in half an hour. We’ll pass the hearse before Gravenhurst. I want to be there when Forensic opens up that little gift.”

14

M
URDER IS A RARE EVENT IN
Canada. So rare that most of the country’s ten provinces are allocated only one forensics unit, usually in the province’s biggest city. It’s a thrifty approach—convenient too, if you happen to be investigating a murder in Toronto or Montreal. Cardinal and Delorme had to drive over two hundred miles, a good part of it behind a convoy of lumber trucks. At the Coroner’s Building on Grenville Street, a Sikh in a blue uniform with a white turban buzzed down to the morgue to announce their arrival.

Len Weisman met them in the hall and led them into a cramped office. He was a small, compact man with a thatch of black, wiry hair. He wore spectacles with dark, fashionable frames, a white lab coat and—incongruously, given the medical surroundings of white tile and linoleum—leather sandals.

Before he became director of the morgue, Weisman had put in ten years as a homicide investigator. His police badge and sergeant stripes were mounted in a frame on the wall behind his desk. Surrounding this were framed citations and a photograph of Weisman shaking hands with the mayor of Toronto.

“Sit, sit,” he said in a friendly way. “Make yourselves at home.”

At home in a morgue, Cardinal said to himself, and wondered if Delorme was thinking the same thing. She was certainly more subdued than usual. They had passed a dead woman in the hall—barely out of her teens and parked on a gurney beside the elevators like a shopping cart. The body bag was open to her throat and her pale face with its penumbra of yellow hair had emerged from the white plastic as if from a cocoon. Her hair was beautiful, somewhere between saffron and gold; just hours earlier she would have been brushing it avidly, with a pretty woman’s mixture of pride and self-criticism.

“Coffee, anyone? Tea?” Weisman gave the impression of bounding everywhere—reaching for a door halfway across the room, lunging to open a drawer, plucking a file from a desk. “Or there’s a Coke machine in the lunchroom. Sprite? Pepsi?”

Cardinal and Delorme declined.

Weisman snatched up his phone before it could escape. “I’ll just check if our pathologist is ready. Patient just arrived twenty minutes ago.”

Cardinal had forgotten that they called them patients in this place, as if the silent occupants of those plastic bags and metal drawers might recover.

There was a knock on the door and the pathologist came in. She was a tall woman in her thirties, with wide shoulders and prominent cheekbones that gave her face a sculpted look.

“Dr. Gant, these are Detectives Cardinal and Delorme from Algonquin Bay. Dr. Gant is our pathologist this morning. You can go with her now if you like.”

They followed her to the morgue. The dead girl had been moved, and now the white tiles and linoleum might have been any clinic, anywhere. The morgue had not the slightest smell of death, just a faint chemical odour. They crossed through the main autopsy room and into a side room reserved for “stinkers.” Dr. Gant handed them both surgical masks and they put them on. When the photographer was ready, Gant put on surgical gloves and unzipped the bag. Delorme gagged.

“It’s filthy,” Dr. Gant observed quietly. “Where’d you find him, a coal cellar?”

“Exactly right. Coal cellar in an old, sealed house. Guess he’s starting to thaw out.”

“All right, let’s get him X-rayed first. Radiography’s next door.”

She declined their inexpert assistance with the trolley, wheeling the “patient” next door to Radiography, where a machine with a huge steel U attached stood ready. This was run by a scruffy man in check shirt and blue jeans that revealed the cleft of his buttocks every time he bent over.

“That sack. It was wrapped around his head just like that?”

“It’s a seat cushion cover, Doctor. I’m not sure why the killer covered his head like that. Remorse doesn’t seem likely. And I don’t think he’s squeamish, either.”

“Let’s get someone from Chemistry here before we disturb that too much. Start with the torso, Brian.”

She spoke quietly into a telephone mounted on the wall. Her voice was collegial but firm; a man would have to be either extremely busy or extremely stupid not to do her bidding.

“Aren’t you going to take the plastic sheeting off first?” Delorme asked.

Dr. Gant shook her head. “We X-ray them fully clothed. That way we pick up any bullet or blade fragments that might be lodged in the clothing.” She nodded toward the table. “Trousers pulled down around the ankles indicate probable sexual activity just prior to the attack.”

The technician readied the machine and closed the door. Then he flipped a switch and a faint mosquito-sized whine filled the room. The bones of the feet materialized on the fluorescent screen. The beam travelled up the body, but Dr. Gant remained silent until the rib cage appeared on the screen. “Obviously massive trauma, there: fractures to the seventh, fifth and third ribs. No foreign objects so far.”

“The dark blur,” Delorme said, pointing to a round, dark spot on the screen. “It’s not a bullet, is it?”

“Probably a medal or a crucifix.”

The image changed and the bones of an arm began to appear. “Examining extremities now,” Dr. Gant noted. She pointed to a long white line that broke in two like a highway breached by an earthquake. “Defensive wounds to the left forearm, fractures of the ulna and wrist bones. Right forearm shows similar injury to the ulna … Collarbone is snapped right through.”

The head was still sheathed in its bloody cover, but now the shattered sphere of the skull appeared on the X-ray screen. “Well,” Dr. Gant said softly. “Multiple trauma there, obviously.” She spoke into an intercom. “We’re getting some kind of white line down the middle, Brian. Can you adjust it at all?”

“The image is fine, Doctor. You’ve got something in there.”

Dr. Gant moved closer to the screen. “It could be an icepick. Possibly a screwdriver blade. It must have been driven down into the top of the skull and then the handle broke off.”

Several facial bones had been broken. Dr. Gant summarized these quickly, all of them blunt-force trauma possibly caused by a hammer.

The machine was switched off and the high thin whine faded, leaving a ghost of itself in the room.

A sadness hung in the air. They were looking at a small person who had tried unsuccessfully to ward off terrible, killing blows. And the death had taken time. However bleak Todd Curry’s sixteen years may have been, however dissolute and unavailing, he hadn’t deserved to die like that.

Vlatko Setevic from Chemistry joined them. “Cops of the Great White North,” he said. “You ever get any victims that aren’t frozen?”

Setevic unrolled white paper from a reel at the end of the table. Carefully they lifted the body, still in its wrappings, and placed it on the sheet.

“Okay,” Setevic said, “let’s get the cover loosened around the head. Then I’ll take the cover off and place it on this table behind me. I have to do this gently. It’s going to take time.”

Setevic worked delicately at this task, while Dr. Gant and an assistant removed the plastic sheeting, blackened with soot and blood, from the torso. Another assistant took photographs. The plastic was tied with thin cord of the type used in venetian blinds. The inside of the sheeting was covered with a thick cracked paste of old blood. The camera flash went on and off like a strobe.

The body remained perfectly still, curled up.

“I’ve taken some hair and fibre from the outside of the seat cover,” Setevic said. “I’ll look at them next door.”

Delorme took one glance at the face and turned away.

Dr. Gant moved around the body, but did not touch it. “Left parietal region shows blunt-force trauma, a depressed fracture caused by a heavy instrument, possibly the side of a hammer. Right anterior parietal shows a circular depression about an inch in diameter, possibly caused by a hammer, hard to say. Tissue is partially peeled away from the left cheekbone, also probably by blunt force.”

“Frenzy?” Cardinal asked. “Looks like overkill to me.”

“Definitely a frenzy, judging by the ferocity of the attack. But there are aspects of control here, too, if I’m not mistaken. The wounds are fairly symmetrical, notice. Both cheekbones, both sides of the jaw, both temples. I don’t think that symmetry is accidental. And then there’s this.” She pointed to the top of the head. “You’ve got a hole in the occipital crown approximately ten millimetres in diameter, a puncture wound, judging by the puckering at the edges. That’ll be the blade we saw on the fluoroscope. You don’t drive a screwdriver into someone’s head in a frenzy.”

“True.”

“Any one of these injuries could be the cause of death, but we won’t know for sure until we do a full autopsy, and we can’t do that until he thaws out.”

“Great,” said Cardinal. “How long will that take?”

“At least twenty-four hours.”

“I hope you’re kidding me, Dr. Gant.”

“Not at all. How long does it take to thaw out a twenty-pound turkey?”

“I don’t know. Four or five hours.”

“And this patient was in a surrounding temperature of, what, minus forty? The inner organs are going to take at least twenty-four hours to thaw, possibly longer.”

“There’s something in here.” Delorme was standing to one side, peering into the body bag.

Cardinal came over and looked into the bag too. He put on a surgical glove and reached into the bag with both hands like an obstetrician. Moving slowly and holding it gingerly by the corners, he extricated the object—cracked, bloodstained and covered with soot.

“An audio cassette,” Delorme said. “It must have stuck to his clothes and it fell off when he started to thaw out.”

“Well, don’t get too excited, it’s probably blank,” Cardinal said, and dropped it into a paper evidence bag. “Let’s just hope it has prints on it.”