The Calling (7 page)

'No,' he said. 'There's no one right now.'

At the hospital, they were given their visitor tags,
and Dr Jack Deacon came to collect them from the
registration office. He was a man of quick gestures
whose physicality communicated that at any given
moment he might have to be somewhere else. But
in fact he was a patient, likeable man. Hazel trusted
him. 'Spere caught you up?' he asked.

'Bare bones,' said Micallef. 'I want the whole
tour.'

Deacon brought them down to the basement
and into the morgue. Wingate wiped his forefinger
under his nose. 'You can put on a face mask, son,
but it won't help.' The place smelled of industrial
detergents and rotting meat, rather accurately.
Deacon passed them each a pair of thin blue gloves.

Delia Chandler was lying in a white body bag in
a steel drawer. Deacon pulled the drawer open with
a chunk and rolled a steel trolley underneath her,
slid her onto it, and brought her under some lights.
He unzipped her and they saw the Y of heavy
stitching holding her trunk closed. The wound in
her neck had also been roughly stitched shut
and lathered over with surgical glue. The three of
them leaned into her, and Hazel shot a look at
Wingate, who seemed to be holding it together.

'Okay, a couple of things,' said Deacon. 'We took
a sample of vitreous fluid and put the time of death
at five p.m. yesterday afternoon, give or take.
Cause of death was acute blood poisoning. She was
already dead by the time he tried to cut her head
off.'

'Do you think he was trying to remove her head?'
said Wingate. 'To take it?'

Deacon tapped the slit in Delia Chandler's
throat with the back of a gloved finger. 'The cut on
her throat is surgical – it goes through her windpipe
and esophagus on the first cut; he goes back in a
second time to deepen it all the way to the spinal
cord. I think if he wanted a trophy he could have
had it. Anyway, he had all the time in the world,
and he didn't cut it off. Look at this.' He tapped his
pointer to Delia's mouth. Wingate and Micallef
shifted up the table. 'Rigor mortis has resolved
now, but at the scene, her tongue was lifted up
against the back of her teeth. Howard said it looked
like she was hollering or something.'

'God,' said Wingate.

'You want to see the pictures?' Wingate nodded,
and Jack Deacon opened a folder on a table beside
him and drew out a sheaf of photographs. He pulled
one out and handed it to Wingate. 'Rigor mortis
sets in about three or four hours after death. It
starts in the small muscles of the face and moves
down the body and it takes about twelve hours
before it's done. Then the process reverses itself
and the rigor dissolves. In rare cases you might see
muscles that seized up at the moment of death, but
that's usually in the case of a violent death – then
you get these cadaveric spasms and people gripping
onto things like railings, or their killer's hair, that
kind of thing. But this' – he tapped the photo
repeatedly with the pointer – 'this isn't really
possible. Even if you're screaming when somebody
shoots you through the heart, you still fall down
and your tongue tumbles out of your mouth, and
three hours later, everything starts to harden up.'

'So how did this happen?' said Hazel.

'The only place you find faces frozen in looks of
terror are in horror movies. Mostly, the dead wear
expressions of drunken stupor. They don't open
their mouths and touch their tongues to the back
of their teeth.'

Hazel found herself mimicking Delia's mouth.
'So what's happening here?'

'To get her mouth to look like this, the person
who killed her would have had to wait at least
three hours and then hold her mouth and tongue
in this position until the muscle set. He would have
been standing there about forty minutes with his
fingers in her mouth.'

Hazel pulled off her gloves and Wingate did the
same. 'There's one more thing,' said Jack Deacon,
and he lifted one of the corpse's arms from the slab.
He held the hand up for them to see. Delia
Chandler's left pinkie finger was broken.

'She put up a fight?' said Wingate.

'There's no evidence that this is a defensive
wound. And he does it before he bleeds her.
There's evidence of edema – swelling.'

Hazel looked closely at the other hand. 'Just one.'

'Just the one.'

'The easiest one to break,' she said, and Deacon
nodded.

The three of them stared at the hand for almost
a full ten seconds.

'Maybe he didn't want her to feel any pain,' said
Wingate.

'So he breaks her finger?'

'To make sure she's asleep,' he said. 'Then he
poisons her, puts the port in her leg and he begins.'
Deacon lowered Delia's arm and Wingate looked
up at his new boss.

'So he
cares
?' she said to him.

The doctor began rolling the body back toward
its hole in the wall.

* * *

They drove back to Port Dundas with the radio
playing quietly under their silence. Mercy was one
thing, thought Hazel, but DC Wingate's suggestion
that there was actual
thoughtfulness
in the killer's
actions disturbed her. If it were true, it meant the
killer was not angry, he was not fuelled by a sense
of injustice, or overripe with hatred. Those kinds of
killers slipped up: their passions led them. What
was he doing by making it appear as if he'd killed
Delia Chandler in a rage? Delia was already being
killed by cancer. Was a more overt act of murder a
comment on her disease? A critique of its silent,
creeping methods? And the mouth, what did this
disguise?

'What kind of "caring" are we talking about
here, do you think?' Hazel said.

Wingate took his eyes off the road for the first
time. The turnoff for Port Dundas was coming up
on their right. 'I shouldn't have said anything,' he
said. 'I don't know anything about this case yet.'

'You know about as much as any of us, Detective.
It's okay to think aloud.'

'He might have broken her finger by accident.'

'Do you really think that?'

He sat, seemingly unwilling to reply, as she
took the turnoff. 'No,' he said at last. 'My guess is
he was in complete control of the whole situation.'

'That's where I'm at too,' she said.

'It's hard to know what we're supposed to be
paying attention to,' said Wingate. 'Is he there to
take her blood? To murder her? To desecrate her in
some way?'

'Maybe all of it,' said Hazel. She was taking the
last turn before the bridge over the Kilmartin
River.

'We're not going to know anything until we
have another body. To see if he's being consistent
with his victims.' Hazel shot a look at her new
detective constable. He shifted uncomfortably.
'You don't get this good on your first try,' he said.

'You think there are other victims? Where are
they?'

'Nearby.' He cleared his throat. 'Most serial
killers stake out a territory and work it methodically.'

Her jaw seemed to be stuck in a half-open
position. She consciously closed her mouth and put
her attention back on the road. 'There's thinking
out loud and then there's thinking out loud, James.
I wish you hadn't said any of that.'

'I'm sorry,' he muttered.

'What I mean is, I hope you're wrong.'

* * *

They pulled into the station house at 3 p.m. Shift
change. Ray Greene was standing at the back door
with a plastic bag at his feet and his arms crossed
over his chest. 'What's that?' said Hazel as she
locked the car.

'Gift,' said Ray. 'For you.' She took the bag from
him and pulled out a box. It was a cellphone. She
stared at it like it was a moonrock. 'You buy twenty
bucks' worth of time at a go. I'm the only one with
the number.'

'I don't want a cellphone, Ray.'

'I know. But you need one. If you'd had a cell this
afternoon, I could have called you on your way
back and told you to meet me up in Chamberlain.
The community police there are shitting
themselves.'

'They called
us
in? That's East Central. We've
got no jurisdiction there.'

'It's just a little office, something like three cops.
I asked them why they hadn't called the Ottawa
OPS, but they'd heard about Delia Chandler and
they were pretty insistent on us coming out there.
They have a crime scene they described to me as
"creative".'

Hazel looked over at Wingate, who was keeping
his expression neutral. She wanted to tell him
to be careful what he wished for. 'Well, we can't,'
she said to Greene. 'Tell them to call Ottawa.'

'It's him, Hazel.'

'You don't know that.'

'I don't,' he said, and he left it at that, but the
three of them stood there staring at each other. 'It's
about three hundred kilometres from here to
Chamberlain. We could be there in two and a half
hours.'

Hazel had passed the bag with the cellphone in
it to Wingate and started walking back to her car.
'What about the mouth?' Wingate asked.

'You know that old saying, The dead don't tell
tales?' said Greene. 'Well, even if they did, this guy
would be telling one with a considerable speech
impediment.' He followed Hazel to her car and
held open a back-seat door for Wingate. 'Spere's
already on his way,' he said.

'They called Howard, too?' she said in disbelief.

'I called him.' She was staring at him. 'He
knows the Chandler scene better than anyone. I
figured ...'

'Imagine needing Howard twice in forty-eight
hours,' Hazel said.

Greene clicked his seat belt as she pulled out of
the lot. 'There's a guy who loves his job again.'

Chamberlain, 315 kilometres to the east, was at the
edge of Renfrew County, an old milltown converted
into a village of quaint B&Bs and knitshops.
Sleepy was a good word for it. The last police event
of any significance there that Hazel could remember
involved a delivery van with a snapped brake
cable that had crashed through the wall of the
Chamberlain Opera House in 1986. It had been
delivering ice cream and the Opera House stank of
chocolate and strawberry for the whole season.
Local playwrights revised their plays to include the
odours, and the director of
You're a Good Man,
Charlie Brown
had taken the liberty of bringing his
actors onstage actually licking cones.

A murder in Chamberlain?

Michael Ulmer's house was on a side street off
the main drag, a street of well-kept lawns and
freshly painted dormers. Yellow tape encircled the
house. Howard Spere was standing behind a pile of
leaves, smoking a cigarette. It was seven o'clock in
the evening. 'Those'll kill you,' said Greene.

'At least I'll get to choose my death.'

Hazel introduced him to James Wingate. 'How
many dead bodies you seen, Jim?' asked Spere,
shaking the young man's hand.

'I've seen a few. But never two in one day.'

'And you're from
Toronto
.'

'Fancy that,' said Greene, taking his homburg off
his head. 'Let's stop breaking balls and go see the
victim.'

'Ray's a master at small talk,' said Spere, handing
the three of them latex gloves. He nodded at one
of his SOCO officers, and the man opened the
door.

The house was dark and close, the main floor
cluttered with Salvation Army-style furniture: no
two pieces matched. There was a cot against the
dining-room wall, the stale sheets pulled back,
the pillow stained almost brown. A fug of old
cigarette smoke laced the air. A folding TV-dinner
table stood in front of a La-Z-Boy chair, its surface
colonized by pill bottles and moisturizing products.
An extra-large box of two-ply tissues was balanced
on the arm of the chair. 'Do I want to know what
the tissues and the lotions have to do with each
other?' said Greene.

Hazel shot him a look. 'Dry skin and sniffles,
Ray. Don't think too much.'

They went up the stairs. A knot of Ident guys
were milling about in the hallway labelling ziplock
bags, packing up various bits of equipment, generally
trying to stay out of one of the bedrooms. They
could see camera flashes going off, and hear the
high-pitched report of battery cells. 'In here,
detectives,' called one of the men. They followed his
voice into the master bedroom. It was much cleaner
up here, the air more breathable. The blinds were
drawn. There was a figure in the bed dimly lit by a
bedside lamp casting a feeble yellow light.

'What's your name, officer?'

'Matthiessen.'

'Do we need it so dark in here, Officer
Matthiessen?' said Hazel. The man took it as an
order and turned the overhead light on. Light
flooded the room and the body burst into view.

'Fucking hell,' said Greene. He stepped back
instinctively.

Wingate was the only one of the three of them
who approached the bed. In it lay the ruined body
of Michael Ulmer. 'What was wrong with him?'

'Less than there is now,' said Matthiessen. 'He
was taking something called Avonex, plus other
things for his muscles and stuff. Detective Spere
says he probably had MS.' Ray Greene finally
stepped forward. 'Poor bastard.'

'I wonder how he got up the stairs. His walker's
still on the main floor,' said Wingate.

'He carried him up the stairs?' said Greene, his
brows raised. 'That's a pretty thoughtful killer.'
Hazel shot a look at her new detective, and
Wingate said nothing else. His theories were going
to have to wait for a better moment.

Ulmer was covered with blankets, as if he were
sleeping, and there was a rise where his arms were
crossed over his chest. Two huge circles of blood
drenched the sheet atop his hands. 'Can you pull
those back?' asked Hazel, and the officer drew away
the heavy blankets. '
God
.'

Ulmer's hands were like two balloons of blood.
Just with the movement of the sheets being drawn
away, they shook like jellies: the killer had taken a
hammer to them. But the violence done to Ulmer's
hands was nothing compared to his head. His
mouth had been smashed in so thoroughly that the
upper half of his jaw hovered like a dome over a
soupy mass of teeth and tissue. The killer had
hacked at each of the victim's eyes and torn
through the sockets laterally, opening up his head
like a box-top on both sides of his face. Then he'd
staved the man's skull in. 'He's not exactly subtle,
is he?'