Forty Words for Sorrow

by Giles Blunt

  "Katie Pine," Cardinal said. He hadn't meant to say it aloud. He knew it would provoke a reaction, and it came at full volume.

  "I hope you're not telling me you recognize that poor girl from her high-school yearbook. Until such time as the upper jaw may be matched with dental records, any identification is out of the question."

  "Thank you, Doctor," Cardinal said quietly.

  "There's no call for sarcasm, Detective. Remission or no, I'm not putting up with sarcasm." Barnhouse turned his baleful eye once more upon the object at their feet. "Extremities, those that remain, are nearly skeletonized, but I believe that's a healed greenstick fracture in the radius of the left forearm." He stepped back from the edge of the depression and folded his arms belligerently in front of his chest. "Gentlemen- and lady- I'm going to remove myself from this investigation, which will clearly require the services of the Forensic Center. As Lake Nipissing falls under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Provincial Police, I'm officially turning the investigation over to you, Mister Commanda."

  Jerry said, "If this is Katie Pine, here, the investigation belongs to the city."

  "But surely Katie Pine is one of yours? From the reserve?"

  "She was abducted from the fairground by Memorial Gardens. That makes it a city case- has been since she disappeared. Cardinal's case."

  "Nevertheless," Barnhouse insisted, "pending positive identification, I'm turning it over to you."

  "Fine, Doctor," Jerry said. "John, you can run it. I know it's Katie."

  "You can't possibly know. Look at the thing. " Barnhouse pointed with his recorder. "Except for the clothes, it barely looks human."

  Cardinal said softly, "Katie Pine fractured the radius in her left arm when she was learning to skateboard."

  FIVE of them were scrunched in the ident van. Barnhouse had gone, and the two uniforms were waiting in the stake truck. Cardinal practically had to shout over the roar of the heater. "We're going to need rope: As of now, the whole island is our perimeter. There was no blood and no sign of struggle in the shafthead, so this is probably not the murder scene, only a dump site. Even so, I don't want any curious snowmobilers zipping through the evidence, so let's get it good and secure."

  Delorme handed him the cell phone. "I've got Forensic. Len Weisman."

  "Len, we've got a body here frozen solid in a block of ice. Adolescent, probable murder. If we cut the block of ice and ship it to you entire in a refrigerated truck, can you handle something like that?"

  "No problem. We've got a couple of variable coolers that go well below freezing. We can thaw it out at a controlled rate and preserve any hair and fibers for you that way." Surreal to hear a Toronto voice in this lunar landscape.

  "Great, Len. We'll call with an ETA when we're ready to roll." Cardinal handed the phone back to Delorme. "Arsenault, you're the scene expert. How do we get her out of there?"

  "We can cut her out in a cube easy enough. Problem will be separating the cube from the concrete underneath."

  "Get a guy from the city to cut it, they cut concrete all the time. And you can clear your calendars, everybody. We're going to have to cull the snow."

  "But she was killed months ago," Delorme said. "The snow won't tell us anything."

  "We can't be sure of that. Anybody have a good contact at Armed Forces?"

  Collingwood raised a hand.

  "Tell them we need a huge tent. Something the size of a circus tent that'll cover the whole island- last thing we need is any more snow on the scene. Also a couple of their biggest heaters. Ones they use to heat their hangars. We'll melt the snow and see everything that's underneath."

  Collingwood nodded. He was sitting closest to the heater, and his glove was steaming.

  3

  SECURING a perimeter and arranging a twenty-four-hour watch on the island took longer than anyone expected; everything about police work takes longer than expected. In the end, Cardinal did not get home until one o'clock in the morning, too keyed up to sleep. He sat himself in the living room with two fingers of Black Velvet straight up and made notes about what he would have to do the next day. The house was so cold, even the rye couldn't warm him.

  Kelly would be back in the States by now.

  At the airport, Cardinal had watched his daughter heave a suitcase onto the baggage scale, and before she could even lift the next one, a young man in line behind her had picked it up and placed it on the scale for her. Well, Kelly was pretty- Cardinal had the usual father's prejudice about his daughter's looks, and he believed any objective person would find his daughter as lovely as he did. But having a pretty face, Cardinal knew, was like being wealthy or famous; people were always offering to do things for you. "You don't have to hang around, Daddy," she had said as they descended the stairs to the waiting area. "I'm sure you have better things to do."

  Cardinal hadn't had anything better to do.

  Algonquin Bay 's airport was designed to handle about eighty travelers at a time, but it rarely had that many. A tiny coffee shop, boxes for The Algonquin Lode and the Toronto papers, and that was about it. They sat down, and Cardinal bought the Toronto Star, offering his daughter a section, which she declined. It made him feel as if he shouldn't read, either. What was the point of staying if he was just going to read the paper? "You're all set for your connections, then?" he asked. "You have enough time to change terminals?"

  "Tons. I have an hour and a half in Toronto."

  "That's not too much. Not by the time you get through U.S. customs."

  "They always put me straight through. Really, Daddy, I should go into smuggling."

  "You told me you got stopped last time. Almost missed your connection."

  "That was a fluke. The customs officer was a mean old battle-ax who wanted to give me a hard time."

  Cardinal could picture it. In some ways, Kelly was becoming the kind of young woman who annoyed him- too smart, too educated, too damn confident.

  "I don't know why they can't have a flight directly from Toronto to New Haven."

  "It's not exactly the center of the universe, sweetheart."

  "No, it only has one of the best colleges in the world."

  And it cost a damn fortune. When Kelly had finished her BFA at York, her painting instructor had encouraged her to apply to Yale's graduate program. Kelly had never dreamed she would be accepted, even when she put together a portfolio and hauled it down to New Haven. It had occurred to Cardinal to deny her, but not for long. It's the art school, Daddy. All the big-name painters went there. You may as well study accounting if you don't go to Yale. Cardinal had wondered if that could possibly be true. To him, Yale meant indolent snobs in tennis outfits; it meant George Bush. But painting?

  He had asked around. Quite true, he had been assured by those who would know. If one wanted to be visible in the international art scene, which really meant the U.S. art scene, an MFA from Yale was the way to go.

  "Really, Daddy, why don't you go home? You don't have to stay."

  "It's okay. I want to stay."

  The boy who had helped with Kelly's luggage had now taken up a seat facing them. If Cardinal left, the kid would be sitting next to his daughter like a shot. I'm a possessive bastard, he accused himself, nursing these miniature panics over the women in my life. He was the same way about his wife, Catherine.

  "It was good of you to come home, Kelly. Especially in the middle of term. I think it really made a difference to your mom."

  "Do you? Pretty hard to tell, she seems so out of it these days."

  "I could tell."

  "Poor Mom. Poor you. I don't know how you stand it, Daddy. I mean, I'm away most of the time, but you have to live with it."

  "Well, that's what you do. Better or worse, sickness and health. You know how it goes. "

  "A lot of people don't live by that stuff anymore. I know you do, of course. But Mom really scares me sometimes. It must be so hard for you."

  "It's a lot harder for her, Kelly."

  They sat in silence.
The boy pulled out a Stephen King novel, Cardinal pretended to read the Star, and Kelly stared out at the empty tarmac where thin flurries of snow swirled in the ground lights. Cardinal began to hope the flight would be canceled, that his daughter would have to stay home another day or two. But Kelly had lost any affection for Algonquin Bay. How can you stand this dinky little backwater? she'd said to him more than once. Cardinal had felt the same at her age, but then ten years on the Toronto police force had convinced him that the dinky little backwater where he grew up had its virtues.

  The plane finally arrived, a propeller-driven Dash 8 that seated thirty. In fifteen minutes it would be gassed up and ready to take off.

  "You have enough cash? What if you get stuck in Toronto?"

  "You worry too much, Daddy."

  She hugged him, and then he watched her wheel her carry-on through security (which consisted of two uniformed women not much older than she was) and head for the door. Cardinal moved to the window and watched her cross through the blowing snow. The boy was right behind her, damn him. But outside, brushing the snow from the windshield with his glove, Cardinal had condemned himself for being a jealous twerp, a smothering parent who couldn't let his child grow up. Cardinal was a Catholic- a lapsed Catholic- and like all Catholics lapsed or devout, he retained an almost gleeful ability to accuse himself of sin, though not necessarily the sin he had actually committed.

  Now, the whiskey sat half-finished on the coffee table. Cardinal had drifted off. He rose stiffly from his chair and went to bed. In the darkness, images came: headlights on the lake, the body fixed in ice, Delorme's face. But then he thought of Catherine. Although his wife's circumstances were at this moment anything but happy, he forced himself to imagine her laughing. Yes, they would go away somewhere together, somewhere far from police work and their private sorrows, and they would laugh.

  4

  DON (short for Adonis) Dyson was a youthful fifty, trim and wiry as a gymnast, with a gymnast's agile movements and sudden graceful gestures, but as the detectives under his command never tired of pointing out, he was no Adonis. The only thing Detective Sergeant Don Dyson had in common with the carved Adonises found in museums was a heart as cold as marble. No one knew if he had been born that way or if fifteen years as a Toronto homicide detective had added frost to an already chilly disposition. The man hadn't a single friend- on the force or off- and those who had met Mrs. Dyson claimed that she made her husband seem drippingly sentimental.

  D. S. Dyson was fussy, declamatory, bald, and calculating. He had long fingers, spatulate at the tips, of which he was inordinately vain. When he handled his letter opener or toyed with a box of paper clips, those fingers took on a dangly, spidery aspect. His bald head, trimmed with a geometrically exact circle of hair at the sides and back, was a perfect orb. Jerry Commanda loathed him, but Jerry was intolerant of authority in general, a trait Cardinal put down to his Native heritage. Delorme insisted she could use Dyson's head for a mirror to pluck her eyebrows- not that she did pluck her eyebrows.

  That same mirrory dome was tilted toward Cardinal, who was seated in a chair placed at an exact forty-five-degree angle to Dyson's desk. No doubt the detective sergeant had read somewhere that this angle was good leadership psychology. He was an exact man with exact reasons for everything he did. A honey-glazed doughnut was parked on the corner of his desk, waiting for the clock to strike exactly 10:30- not a minute earlier, not a minute later- when he would consume it along with the thermos of decaffeinated coffee parked beside it.

  At this moment, Dyson held his letter opener suspended between his outstretched palms, as if he were measuring his desk with it. When he spoke, he appeared to be addressing himself to the blade. "I never said you were wrong, you know. I never said that little girl wasn't murdered. Not in so many words."

  "No, sir. I know you didn't." Cardinal had a tendency, when irritated by authority, to become extremely polite. He fought that tendency now. "You only put me back on burglary as a spiritual exercise."

  "Do you remember what kind of expenses you were running up? This was and is the age of cutbacks. We can't pretend we're the Mounties; we can't afford it. You allocated all your investigative resources to this one case."

  "Three cases."

  "Not three, maybe two." Dyson numbered them on his flat fingers. "Katie Pine, I grant you. Billy LaBelle, maybe. Margaret Fogle, not at all."

  "D. S., with all respect, she didn't turn into a toad. She didn't vaporize."

  Again the fingers, the manicure displayed to advantage, as Dyson counted the reasons why Margaret Fogle could not be dead. "She was seventeen- far older and more streetwise than the other two. She was from Toronto, not local. She had a history of running away. For God's sake, the girl went around telling everyone who would listen that nobody-nobody- would find her this time. And she had a boyfriend to hell and gone, Vancouver or some damn place."

  " Calgary. She never got there." And she was last seen alive in our fair city, you bald blockhead. Please, God, just make him give me McLeod and let me get on with it.

  "Why are you resisting me on this, Cardinal? We live in the biggest country in the world- now that the Soviet Union has kindly dismantled itself- and three separate train lines run up and across this billion-hectare skating rink. All three of those lines intersect on our little shore. We have an airport and a bus station, and anyone going anywhere across this gigantic bloody country has to pass through our neighborhood. We get more bloody runaways than we know what to do with. Runaways, not murders. You were spending department resources on phantoms."

  "Should I go? I thought I was back on homicide," said Cardinal mildly.

  "You are. I didn't mean to go over old ground, no point in it, but Katie Pine, Cardinal." Here, he aimed a flat finger at Cardinal. "With Katie Pine there was no evidence of murder, not a shred, not at the time. I mean, except for the fact that she was a child- obviously something was wrong- there was just no evidence of murder."

  "No courtroom evidence, maybe."

  "You were coming to me with disproportionate manpower, disproportionate office resources, and overtime that was completely unjustifiable. The overtime alone was stratospheric. I wasn't the only one who thought so- the chief backed me totally on this one."

  "D. S., Algonquin Bay is not that big. A missing child, you get a million leads, everyone wanting to help. Someone pulls a knife in the movies, you have to check it out. Someone sees a young hitchhiker, you have to check it out. Everyone in town thinks they've seen Katie Pine somewhere: She's at the beach, she's at the hospital under another name, she was in a canoe in Algonquin Park. Every one of those leads had to be followed up."

  "So you told me at the time."

  "None of it was unjustified. That's got to be obvious by now."

  "It was not obvious then. No one saw Katie Pine with a stranger. No one saw her get into a car. One minute she's at the fair, the next minute she was gone."

  "I know. The ground opened."

  "The ground opened and swallowed her up, and you chose to believe- without evidence- that she was murdered. Time has proved you right; it could just as easily have proved you wrong. The one incontestable fact was that she was g-o-n-e gone. A genuine mystery."

  Well, yes, Cardinal thought, Katie Pine's disappearance had been a mystery. Sorry- I had a fantasy that policemen were occasionally called upon to solve mysteries, even in Algonquin Bay. Of course the girl was Native, and we all know how irresponsible those people can be.

  "Let's face it," Dyson said, inserting his letter opener precisely into a small scabbard and laying it neatly beside a ruler. "The girl was Indian, too. I like Indians, I really do, there's a calmness about them that's practically supernatural. They tend to be good-natured and they're extraordinarily fond of children, and I'd be the first to say Jerry Commanda was a first-rate officer, but there's no point pretending they're just like you and me."

  "God, no," said Cardinal, and meant it. "Different people entirely."

  "Re
lations scattered to hell and gone. That girl could have been anywhere from Mattawa to Sault Sainte Marie. There was no reason to be searching boarded-up mineshafts in the middle of the bloody lake."

  There had been every reason, but Cardinal didn't phrase it like that; he didn't have to. The point was nestled inside a more important one. "The thing about the Windigo mineshaft is that we did search it. We searched it the week Katie Pine disappeared. Four days after, to be exact."

  "You're telling me she may have been kept stashed away somewhere before she was killed. Held prisoner somewhere."

  "Exactly." Cardinal suppressed the urge to say more; Dyson was warming up, and it was in his interest to let him. The letter opener emerged once again from its scabbard; an errant paper clip was speared, hoisted, and transferred to a brass holder.

  "Then again," Dyson continued, "she could have been killed right away. The killer could have kept the body somewhere else before moving it to a safer place."

  "It's possible. Forensic may be able to help us with place- we're shipping the remains to Toronto as soon as the mother's been informed- but this is shaping up to be a long investigation. I'm going to need McLeod."

  "Can't have him. He's in court with Corriveau. You can have Delorme."

  "I need McLeod. Delorme has no experience."

  "You're just prejudiced because she's a woman, because she's French, and because, unlike you, she's spent most of her life in Algonquin Bay. You may have put in ten years in Toronto, but you're not going to tell me her six years as Special Investigator amounts to no experience."

  "I'm not putting her down. She did a fine job on the mayor. She did a fine job on the school-board scam. Keep her on the white-collar stuff, the sensitive stuff. I mean, who's going to look after Special?"