The Delicate Storm

by Giles Blunt

  “CSIS has their own records?”

  “Criminal records they get through us or locals, same as you. But they have their own files—they’re not records because they’re usually about suspicions, not actual crimes. We’re talking security here, we’re talking paranoia, we’re talking deep murk, all right?”

  “And they got a match.”

  “Oh boy, did they get a match. Name: Miles Shackley. Current occupation: Unknown. Former occupation—get this: CIA operative in Quebec.”

  “Where in Quebec? When? How long ago was this?”

  “Tourelle says thirty years ago. Well, 1970, actually. Montreal.”

  “Thirty-three years ago. So his former occupation probably has nothing to do with his murder in Algonquin Bay, right?”

  “Probably not.”

  “When did he leave the CIA?”

  “Nineteen seventy-one, according to his jacket.”

  Cardinal had a sudden sensation of defeat. “This has all the earmarks of a dead end.”

  “I agree. Thirty years is a long time. You’re due for a change of luck on this one.”

  “So why did Squier lie about who he was? Why did CSIS want to keep Shackley’s identity a big secret?”

  “Because Calvin Squier is a pretentious little twerp with a laptop. Because he works for the most useless agency on the planet. I don’t know. All Tourelle told me was what he pulled off the header—he didn’t have access to the actual file. It tells you affiliation, location, last known date of activity and what Tourelle called a temperature level. Miles Shackley was coded Red. That’s why they watched the guy’s every move. Why Shackley is Code Red, Tourelle doesn’t know, nor does he have the clearance to find out. He’s working on that, though. Believe me, he’d love to bust one of these palmtop pinheads.”

  “So you think CSIS killed our guy?”

  “CSIS is in the incompetence business, not the murder business. Even if they did want someone killed, they aren’t going to put an agent like Squier onto it, an actual employee. They’d want at least three levels of removal. No, I think they tracked Shackley up here and, being who they are, he got killed under their noses by someone else and fed to the bears.”

  “Then why wouldn’t CSIS make use of people like us who are investigating his murder? Why would they actively mislead us?”

  “That’s a very good question, and I suggest we put it to Laptop Larry at your earliest convenience.”

  “What about a record on Shackley? Criminal or otherwise.”

  “Cardinal, what do you think I do for a living? I’ve got calls in to my U.S. contacts. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Also, while you’re broadening your cultural horizons in the capital of global degeneration, I’ve managed to procure a useful piece of information.”

  “Shackley’s real address?”

  “Bingo. New York City, 514 East Sixth Street.”

  Cardinal scribbled it down. “That’s great. I already spoke to the NYPD. They don’t seem to care what I do.”

  “Gotta be careful how you deal with those guys. They can be touchy about turf.”

  “Naturally, I was completely charming.”

  “Cardinal, I’ve worked with you. You’re not charming.”

  Hector Robles, the superintendent of 514 East Sixth Street, was a pleasant, fortyish Hispanic man who seemed to know remarkably little about Mr. Shackley. He spoke to Cardinal as they walked up a dizzying stairwell, pausing every so often to emphasize a point with a jab of the finger, a chop of the hand.

  “He never complain, you know, not like some guys. I mean, he complain all the time—about the neighbourhood, the punks, the noise, the housing project. He complain about the city, but he never complain about the building, you know. He was not a problem for me, so I didn’t pay him a lotta attention. Other people, man, I’m telling you, every five minutes they got a problem—the tap, the toilet, the plaster—like I’m their personal servant or something.”

  “How’d he get along with his neighbours? Anybody ever complain about him?”

  “Not complain exactly. But he had a couple of fights—not with neighbours, with delivery people. You know, every time they make a delivery, they push menus under every door in the building. Nobody likes it, but Shackley, he gets really crazy out of his mind about it. He have a sign on his door says No Menu, but a lotta the delivery guys don’t speak any English. And the restaurants they work for make them do it. Anyway, twice he comes charging out of his apartment, really pissed off—red in the face, face all crazy—yelling at these little Chinese guys. Shoving them hard, you know. I told him I didn’t go for that. I don’t like violence in my building.”

  “What’d he say to that?”

  “He told me to mind my own business. I was very angry. But next day he come and apologize. He say he just gets so sick of the menus on the floor and littering up the streets. They are a problem, everybody knows that, but still, he overreact.

  “Second time it happen, I didn’t see it. One of the other tenants told me he chased a guy right outside and then started punching him and choking him, until the tenant pull him off. If I had seen that, I would have call the police. Anyway, what happen to Mr. Shackley?”

  “He got eaten by bears.”

  “You kidding me. In New York?”

  “In Canada. Don’t worry, you’re safe.”

  “Bears. Madre, I thought cockroaches were bad.”

  “How long did Shackley live here?”

  “He was here when I took the job, and I been here twelve years.”

  They had reached the third floor. Cardinal followed Robles to the end of the hall. The super was pulling keys out of his pocket as he walked and peering at them nearsightedly. The door to 3B had a two-foot-square hand-lettered sign on it that said No Menus. Robles found the right key and opened the door. “You need anything else, you know where to find me.”

  Cardinal pushed the door open and stood just inside. The air smelled of dirty carpet. All places abandoned by the recently dead have a sad, despairing feel to them. Cardinal had been in many, and none of them made you feel good. But Shackley’s one-room apartment was one of the most depressing places he’d ever seen.

  He examined the cheap, painted pine desk on which stood a phone, a cracked mug full of pens and pencils, and a calendar with the previous Thursday circled—the day Shackley had flown to Toronto. The desk, indeed the entire room, was neat but dirty; grit crunched underfoot. There was a clean patch by the desk lamp about the size of a laptop. Either Shackley had taken it with him and it was now missing or Squier had got here first.

  Cardinal opened the middle drawer of the desk: more pens and pencils, bits and pieces of office supplies. He opened a side drawer, finding nothing but cheap envelopes and a roll of stamps, a half-empty pad of paper. He held the pad up to the light, but there were no traces of writing on the top sheet. The wastebasket under the desk was empty. He lifted the desk lamp, lifted the phone, lifted the mug full of pens. Nothing. A search of the underside of the desk and its drawer also yielded nothing.

  A quick search of the bathroom also yielded nothing, as did the cupboard in the kitchenette. Shackley appeared to live primarily on cereal. The cupboard contained four different boxes, the corners nibbled and frayed by mice.

  Cardinal had rarely come across a life so colourless. Of course, it could have been intentional—the kind of deep cover one reads about in spy novels—but he didn’t really think so; the despair was too convincing. He stood still and listened. Footsteps from an upstairs neighbour, high heels it sounded like. Down the hall, Van Morrison was singing hysterically. Farther off, a small dog yapped.

  Cardinal went to the file cabinet. Two drawers, mostly empty. There were a few hanging files—taxes (not done by Howard Matlock, he noted), social security forms, banking. Shackley’s only income seemed to be from social security—a few hundred dollars a month. Bills: cable TV, electricity, telephone. Cardinal pulled out the la
st three months’ phone bills. There were calls to three different numbers in the Montreal area code, Shackley’s old stomping ground. Cardinal put the phone bills in his briefcase.

  Cardinal spent the next hour going through every book, note and piece of mail he could find. Nothing. He opened the back of the television, the back of a radio and even checked the freezer. Then he stood in the middle of the room and tried to spot the one thing that didn’t belong. It took a while, but eventually his gaze fell on the grille of the ventilator shaft. It was a small rectangle just above the stove and, unlike everything else in the place it was spotlessly clean. Old building like this, Cardinal thought, you’d expect the ventilator shaft to be pretty grungy.

  He found a screwdriver, removed several screws and lifted the grille from the wall. As it came away, a clear plastic envelope trailed after it, attached by a short length of fishing line. It contained a smaller envelope. Cardinal opened it and extracted a curling photographic negative. He switched on the desk lamp and held the negative up to the light. He couldn’t discern much other than that it showed a group of people, three men and one woman. He put it into his briefcase along with the phone bills.

  Afterward, he stood outside on Sixth Street. He had finished what he had come here to do much quicker than he had anticipated. He thought about calling Kelly; he even held the phone in his hand, ready to dial. But he had hurt his daughter so much with his crisis of conscience the previous year. He had thought he was doing the right thing, deciding not to keep the rest of the Bouchard money, but Kelly had paid the price. The thought of sitting across from her in a heavy silence made his heart ache.

  He called Catherine instead. He had been operating in hunter mode all day, but the sound of her voice awoke in him something more tender. And tenderness evoked fear.

  “Catherine, I don’t want you to be scared, but it might be good if you keep a close eye on things around the house. And on our street. Has there been anything unusual that you’ve noticed?”

  “What do you mean? Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Strange phone calls. Hang-ups, maybe.”

  “No. Nothing at all. Why?”

  “Nothing. Old business that keeps resurfacing. We just need to be careful for the next little while.”

  “John, there’s something else we have to worry about. I’ll meet you at the airport.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “I’ve just come back from the hospital. Your father’s in intensive care.”

  14

  ABOUT THE TIME CARDINAL HAD TAKEN OFF for New York, Lise Delorme had finished the more prosaic task of designing and running off missing person flyers bearing Dr. Cates’s photograph. Have you seen this person? Delorme’s phone number was printed at the bottom. Szelagy was spending his morning canvassing the doctor’s neighbours in the Twickenham. Delorme left half the flyers on Szelagy’s desk, then went down to the ident section.

  Of all the rooms in the police station just then, ident was the one that was suffering the most. The entire ceiling was gone, and the officers had set up makeshift plastic tents over their desks and file cabinets. The plastic kept the dust off their equipment, and also did a neat job of preventing any circulation. What it didn’t keep out was the noise of construction above them.

  “How can you work in here?” Delorme said to Arsenault. She had to shout over the screech of a metal drill. “There’s no air.”

  “Air?” Arsenault said. “My hearing’s being destroyed and you’re worried about air?”

  Collingwood looked up at Delorme for a moment then back at his computer, imperturbable as a monk.

  Delorme and Arsenault stepped into the hall.

  “What can you give me from Dr. Cates’s office?”

  “It’s a doctor’s office—they keep it clean. I hope you weren’t expecting a zillion fingerprints or anything.”

  “One would be fine.”

  “Well, we got a lot more than that, but mostly they belong to Dr. Cates and her assistant. We’re running the rest for records, but nothing so far.”

  “And the bandage wrapper?”

  “Prints from the doctor. Nothing else.”

  “You’re breaking my heart, Paul. What about the paper from the examining table? The assistant swears it was changed Monday night, but yesterday morning it had been used.”

  “No hair, no fibre, unfortunately. But we did come up with some traces of blood. We typed it AB-negative.”

  “That’s rare, isn’t it?”

  “Pretty rare. We’ve sent it down to the Forensic Centre for DNA analysis, but you know the drill—it’s going to take a while.”

  Delorme drove through a light freezing rain to the home of Dr. Raymond Choquette. Ray Choquette had been in practice in Algonquin Bay for twenty-five years. He lived in a three-storey red brick house on Baxter, a tiny, sloping side street less than four blocks from St. Francis Hospital. Delorme could name at least three doctors off the top of her head who lived on Baxter. Her parents used to bring her to a doctor named Renaud who had lived on this street. He had been a gruff old codger, a throat specialist who always wore a reflective lamp on his forehead. He had always threatened to take Delorme’s tonsils out but died before he got the chance.

  There was a Toyota RAV4 parked by the side door of the Choquette home. With the temperature dropping, the Toyota was covered with a fine glaze of ice. Delorme parked behind it, jotting down the licence number before she got out of the car.

  When Choquette opened the door on the front porch, Delorme showed her badge and introduced herself in French.

  “You’re lucky you caught me,” Choquette replied in English. “This time tomorrow the wife and I’ll be in Puerto Rico.” He was a tall man in his mid-fifties, with a ruddy complexion that made him look jolly—which Delorme suspected he was not—and a long straight nose that made him look snobbish, which Delorme suspected he was.

  Delorme continued in English. “Dr. Choquette, do you know a woman named Winter Cates?”

  “Yes, of course I do. She’s taking over my practice. Took over, I should say. Is there some kind of trouble? Don’t tell me the place has been broken into again …”

  “I’m afraid Dr. Cates is missing.”

  “Missing? What does that mean, exactly? She hasn’t shown up for work?”

  “She hasn’t been seen or spoken to since late Monday night when she was home watching TV. Yesterday morning she missed a surgery she was scheduled to assist at, and she hasn’t shown up for her office hours either.”

  “Perhaps she had an accident. All this rain—and now it’s turning to ice.”

  “Dr. Cates is missing. Her car isn’t.”

  “Oh, dear. That sounds bad. Are you sure? I saw her just a few days ago.”

  “Do you mind if I come in and ask a few questions?”

  Dr. Choquette’s ruddy face sagged a little, but he made a show of good cheer. “By all means. Come in, come in. Anything I can do to help …”

  Choquette led Delorme into a small TV room. It was tiny, cozy, full of bookshelves stacked with English titles. Delorme had a sudden sense that Dr. Choquette was one of those Ontario French Canadians, rare these days, who attach themselves entirely to the English culture and forsake their own background. Many of the shelves contained golfing videos and trophies. Apparently he was a regular at the local tournaments. There were small trophies and large ones, golden men wielding golden clubs, plaques, cups, mugs and fixtures from various courses he had played. A photograph on the wall showed Choquette in plaid pants and yellow cardigan next to some famous golfer; Delorme wasn’t sure if it was Jack Nicklaus or the other one. Except for Tiger Woods, all golfers looked the same to her: men in funny pants.

  “I hope nothing’s happened to her,” Choquette kept saying. “I just hope she’s all right.”

  “You said you saw her recently. When was that, exactly?”

  “It was at Wal-Mart. Yes, it was at Wal-Mart, and I know that was Thursday.”

  “Did she s
eem under any particular stress to you?”

  “Not at all. She’s a chipper thing. Intrepid, is my impression—you know, nothing gets her down.”

  “Any enemies that you know about? Anyone she was afraid of? Worried about?”

  “Winter? I can’t imagine her having an enemy in the world. She’s totally gregarious. Been here six months and already she’s got more friends at the hospital than I had in my first six years. And I’ll tell you her secret: she loves to assist.”

  “Assist?”

  “In the O.R. Surgery. She let it be known right away that she liked to assist, and that’s rare.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Why?” Choquette looked at Delorme as if she were a dolt. “Because it doesn’t pay, that’s why. The Ontario government in its infinite wisdom has structured payments so that a GP is much better off seeing patients in his own practice than assisting at surgery. Spend two hours in the O.R. and you get paid the same as treating two or three patients. Obviously, you can see a lot more than two or three patients in that time. These days the Hippocratic oath may as well be a vow of poverty. Do you know what I get paid if I set your broken arm? Less than half what a vet gets paid for putting a splint on your dog. Please. Don’t get me started on that subject. All you need to know about Winter Cates is that she’s really well liked in the medical community. Totally unruffled sort, and a great sense of humour. Believe me, a sense of humour is highly prized in the O.R.”

  “It goes a long way in police work too,” Delorme said.

  More questions elicited the information that Dr. Winter Cates interned at Sick Kids, did her residency at Toronto General.

  “Dr. Cates is an attractive person,” Delorme said. “Do you know anything about her romantic life at all?”

  “There you have me. I wouldn’t know a thing. I had the impression she had someone in Sudbury, but beyond that I can’t help you. Dr. Cates loves her work, and all we ever talk about is medicine.”

  “And you sold her your practice, is that correct?”

  “Sold? No, you can’t sell a practice, not in this province, anyway. No, no. I met her down at Toronto General when she was doing her residency and, like everybody else, was totally charmed. She said she’d love to set up in Algonquin Bay, and I mulled that over. I’d been planning to retire for a decade at least. Anyway, I offered to take her on as a partner for six months and then I’d make my graceful exit. Which I have done.”