The Delicate Storm (3 page)

3

C
ARDINAL DROVE OUT PAST
his father’s place to the northern limit of Algonquin Bay, where he made a left onto Ojibwa Road. There were only three houses on Ojibwa—two decrepit bungalows and Bressard’s brick split-level. Even in the mist it looked like any other middle-class suburban residence; there was nothing about it to tell the passerby that the owner made his living the way generations of his forefathers had, by trapping animals for their fur.

Paul Bressard himself was another matter. He was just coming out of the house as Cardinal swung into the drive, and he looked anything but suburban. Fur trappers are a breed apart, with a tendency to eccentricity, even wildness, that makes them stand out in a place as conservative as Algonquin Bay. But even among that flamboyant species Bressard was a man who made an impression. He swept down the front steps in a wide-brimmed beaver hat and a floor-length raccoon coat, even though it was too warm for either. He had a handlebar moustache that drooped past his chin and deep-set brown eyes that were so dark as to be almost black. He turned those eyes on Cardinal now and, recognizing him, broke into a grin that would have done credit to a movie star.

“You working for Natural Resources now? Coming to nail me for some out-of-season crap?”

“No, I heard you were dead, that’s all. Figured I’d stop by to make sure.”

Bressard frowned. Eyebrows the size of squirrel tails met in mid-brow.

“I hate to alarm you,” Cardinal went on. “It’s just that there’s this rumour going round that you’re deceased. Guess it could be the start of an urban legend.”

Bressard blinked exactly twice, taking this in. Then once again he flashed his movie-star grin. “You came all the way out here just to see if I was okay? I’m touched, man. I’m really, really touched. How was I suppose to be dead?”

“Story is, some guy from out of town—maybe one of those nasty tourists you take hunting—took it into his head to kill you and bury you in the woods.”

“Well, I don’t see too many tourists this time of year. And as you can see, I’m still alive.”

“I know—you’re not even missing. It’s disappointing.”

Bressard laughed.

“These rumours happen to all the greats,” Cardinal said. “At least now you can say you have something in common with Paul McCartney.”

“You kidding? I’m way better-looking than that guy. Sing better, too.” Bressard got into his Ford Explorer and rolled down the window. “You should come out to The Chinook on karaoke night. You’ll be begging for my autograph.”

Cardinal watched Bressard drive away toward town, past the edge of the woods where the trapper made his more than adequate living.

At the intersection of Algonquin and the Highway 11 bypass, Cardinal’s way was blocked by an accident. The back end of a tractor-trailer had swung round into the oncoming lane. Nobody had been killed, but the traffic moved in fits and starts while the truck was sorted out. Cardinal listened to the news while he waited. The provincial NDP leader outlined the party’s platform for the upcoming election: health-care reform, daycare subsidies for working mothers and a higher minimum wage. Unfortunately, Cardinal didn’t like the guy, even though he agreed with everything he said. Then came Premier Geoff Mantis’s rejoinder, in which he referred to his opposition as “the champions of Tax and Spend.” There was no doubt about it: the Tories had better slogan writers. They just didn’t seem to think the government should do anything for anybody. Close the hospitals, shutter the schools and
voilà
—everybody’s happy.

Then there was the weather. Fog was expected to continue over most of northern Ontario, and then they’d be in for a little rain. An expert explained why this weird warmth was not necessarily a sign of global warming but more likely just a statistical anomaly.

Cardinal’s cellphone rang.

“Cardinal.”

It was Mary Flower. She sounded excited. “Cardinal, you have to head out to Sackville Road right away—Skyway Service Centre. Delorme’s already on her way.”

“Why? What’s up?”

“They’ve found a body. Sort of.”

Cardinal turned around and headed west to Sackville Road. The fog was thinner on this side of town, not much more than a mist. Eventually he came to a bedraggled gas station.
Skyway Service Centre, Snowmobile & Outboard Repairs
. Dented shells of snowmobiles were stacked against the side of the building like multicoloured cordwood.

As he stepped out of the car, Lise Delorme was just pulling to a stop behind him.

“We can tell Wudky thanks a million, Lise. We should ask the judge to tack on an extra week to whatever damn sentence he gets.”

“Paul Bressard is not dead?”

“Paul Bressard is not only not dead, Paul Bressard is prospering.”

“Well, this should be a little more interesting.”

A big man came out of the garage in filthy overalls. He was wide at the shoulders, narrow at the hips and at one time would have been an imposing figure. But the overalls were distended in front, as if they concealed a basketball. His face was submerged in the bushy beard of a cartoon woodsman, black shot through with grey. Ivan Bergeron was one-half of the Bergeron brothers, a pair of identical twins who had dominated team sports at Algonquin High for the entire six years they attended it. That had been a little before Cardinal’s time, but he still remembered Ivan and his brother Carl as a dynamite combination on both the hockey and football teams back when he had been a freshman.

“Tell us what you found,” Cardinal said. “Then we’ll go take a look.”

“I’m in the shop,” Bergeron told them, “trying to resuscitate a ’74 Ski-Doo that should have been tossed on the junk heap twenty years ago. The dog starts barking. This is a very quiet dog, not usually a problem, and suddenly he’s barking like a maniac. I yell at him to shut up, but he keeps on yapping. Finally I come outside, and there he is in the backyard and—Why don’t you follow me? I’ll show you.”

Around the side, a two-storey house slumped against the garage as if it had lost consciousness. Bergeron led them past it to the backyard. “That’s it, right there,” he said, pointing. “I dragged the dumb-ass dog straight into the house when I saw what it was. He was expecting me to congratulate him or something, but I was like, ‘This is unreal.’”

“What time was this?” Cardinal asked.

“I don’t know—’round ten, maybe?”

“And you waited till now to call us?”

“Well, how’m I supposed to know what to do? It didn’t seem like exactly an emergency. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to think about it.”

Cardinal had seen a lot of unpleasant things in his twenty years as a cop, but he had never seen a human arm completely detached from its owner. They were standing maybe ten feet away. Ivan Bergeron showed no inclination to go closer. He planted his feet wide apart and folded his arms across his belly.

Cardinal and Delorme approached the thing.

“You guys are taking it with you, I hope.”

“Not right away,” Cardinal said. “Are you certain the dog brought it here? You didn’t actually see him, right? You came out and found him barking at it?”

“He must have dragged it in from the bush. He was rompin’ around out there for quite a while before he brung it back.”

Cardinal’s stomach was making odd manoeuvres. There was something unsettling about a part of a human being so absolutely out of place. It lay on a grubby crust of snow, pale white except for the black hair that curled thickly toward the elbow end, thinner toward the wrist. There were deep claw marks but very little blood.

“Looks like someone had an argument with a bear,” Cardinal said.

“A bear?” Delorme said. “Aren’t bears hibernating this time of year?”

“They can get confused by a warm patch,” Cardinal said. “It’s not unusual for them to wake up. And when they do, they tend to be peckish. Gonna be fun trying to ID this guy.”

“Look at the hair on the forearm,” Delorme said, pointing. “It’s grey.”

“Yeah. We’ll have to run through Missing Persons for older men. In the meantime, we’re going to have to find whatever’s left of the guy.”

“You’re gonna get that thing out of here, right?” Bergeron said again. “I find I can’t work too good with an arm on my lawn.”

In the end, Ivan Bergeron had to work with an arm on his lawn for the entire afternoon. Cardinal got on the phone and ordered up as many off-duty constables as Mary Flower could muster. Then he called the Ontario Provincial Police and arranged for thirty officers. Last, he called the fire marshall and brought another thirty firemen to help—and most important, they brought with them three cadaver dogs. Cadaver dogs have nothing to do with the Dalmatians associated with fire stations; they are German shepherds trained to sniff out corpses in burned-out buildings that are too dangerous to send a human being into.

Within an hour Cardinal had a squad of constables, augmented by firemen and OPP cops, searching the woods, a small army of men and women in blue uniforms moving slowly among glistening pines and birches. No one spoke. It was as if they were in a movie with the sound turned off.

They tramped through sodden underbrush, the earth releasing rich smells of pine and rotting leaves. Branches stung their cheeks and clung to their hair. After about ten minutes Constable Larry Burke made the next discovery, this time a leg. Once again Cardinal experienced that weird tumbling sensation. What they were looking at was a man’s leg torn at the hip, whole at the foot, with tremendous rips in the flesh of the thigh.

“Jesus,” Delorme said.

“Definitely a bear.” Cardinal pointed to the wounds. “You can see there. And there. Thing must have teeth the size of your hand.”

The fog kept things slow. It was another two hours before they found more pieces of the body: another partially eaten leg and a lower torso so chewed as to be barely recognizable; one of the cadaver dogs had growled at it underneath the trunk of a fallen tree. Presumably the bear or bears had hidden it there to finish it off later.

Later Cardinal found a bit of ear and scalp with a pair of tinted aviator glasses still attached.

“Does this distribution look random to you?” he asked Paul Arsenault, who was photographing the glasses. “Or do you think somebody could have spread the parts around?”

“You mean somebody not a bear?”

“Somebody not a bear.”

Arsenault sat back on his haunches, chewing one end of his moustache. “If there’s a pattern, I don’t think we’re going to see it from here. We need an aerial view.”

“The fog’s thinning, but we’re still not going to be able to see anything through the trees. Not even with red markers.”

Arsenault chewed the other end of his moustache. “We could put up helium balloons. My daughter had a birthday last week, and we’ve got a bunch of ’em at home.”

A constable was duly dispatched to Arsenault’s house and returned twenty minutes later with the balloons. They attached thirty yards of fishing line to each balloon, tied to a weight on the ground near each piece of evidence. Then the OPP took pictures from the air.