by Giles Blunt
"What do you care about Special? Let me worry about Special. Delorme is a fine investigator."
"She has no experience at homicide. She came close to ruining an important piece of evidence last night."
"I don't believe it. What the hell are you talking about?"
Cardinal told him about the Baggie. It sounded thin, even to him. But he wanted McLeod. McLeod knew how to hustle, how to keep a case in play.
There was a silence as Dyson stared at the wall just behind Cardinal. He was utterly still. Cardinal watched the snow flurries that swirled past the window. Later, he couldn't be sure if what Dyson said next had just popped into his boss's head or if it was a planned surprise: "You aren't worried that Delorme is investigating you, are you?"
"No, sir."
"Good. Then I suggest you brush up on your French."
IN the 1940s, nickel was discovered on Windigo Island and was mined there, on and off, for twelve years. The mine was never very productive, employing at its peak a mere forty workers, and its location in the middle of the lake made transport a problem. More than one truck had plunged through the ice, and there was talk that the mine was cursed by the tormented spirit for which it was named. A lot of Algonquin Bay investors lost their money in the venture, which closed forever when more accessible lodes were discovered in Sudbury, a city eighty miles away.
The shaft was five hundred feet deep and continued laterally for another two thousand, and the Criminal Investigation Division heaved a collective sigh of relief when it was established that only the shafthead and not the shaft itself had been disturbed.
By the time Cardinal and Delorme arrived at the island, it wasn't nearly as cold as it had been the previous night, not much below freezing. In the distance, snowmobiles buzzed among the fishing huts. Sparse snowflakes drifted down from a soiled pillow of cloud. The work of freeing the body was almost complete. "Ended up we didn't have to saw right through," Arsenault told them. Despite the below-freezing temperature, there were beads of sweat on his face. "Vibrations did the trick for us. Whole block came away in one piece. Moving it's going to be a little work, though. Can't put a crane in here without destroying the scene. Just gonna have to pull it over to the truck on a sled. Figure the runners'll do less damage than a toboggan."
"Good thinking. Where'd you get the truck?" A green five-ton with black rectangles covering its markings was backing up to the shafthead. Dr. Barnhouse had reminded them in no uncertain terms that, no matter how badly they might want a refrigerated vehicle, the use of a food distribution truck for transporting a dead body would be against every health regulation known to man.
"Kastner Chemical. They use it to transport nitrogen. Was their idea to black out the markings. They wanted it to look more respectful. I thought that was pretty classy."
"It was classy. Remind me to send them a thank-you."
"Hey, John! John!"
Roger Gwynn was waving at him from behind a roped-off area. The amorphous shape beside him, face masked by a Nikon, would be Nick Stoltz. Cardinal raised a gloved hand in return. He was not really on a first-name basis with the Algonquin Lode reporter, even though they had been more or less contemporaries in high school. Gwynn was trying to get the jump on the competition, exaggerating his connections. Being a cop in your hometown had its advantages, but sometimes Cardinal felt a pang of nostalgia for the relative anonymity of Toronto. There was a small camera crew jockeying for position around Stoltz and behind them a diminutive figure in a pink parka, its hood trimmed fetchingly with white fur. That would have to be Grace Legault from the six o'clock news. Algonquin Bay didn't have its own station; it got its local news from Sudbury. Cardinal had noted the CFCD van parked on the ice beside the police truck.
"Come on, John! Give me three seconds! I need a quote!"
Cardinal took Delorme with him and introduced her. "I know Ms. Delorme," Gwynn said. "We met when she was incarcerating His Worship. What can you tell me about this business?"
"Adolescent dead several months. That's it."
"Oh, thanks. Great copy that'll make. What are the chances it's that girl from the reserve?"
"I'm not going to speculate until we hear back from Forensic in Toronto."
"Billy LaBelle?"
"I'm not going to speculate."
"Come on. You gotta give me something. I'm freezing my ass off here." Gwynn was a slack, pudgy man- graceless in manner, lazy in outlook, an Algonquin Lode lifer. Cardinal's diagnosis: Ambition Deficit Disorder. "Is it a homicide at least? Can you tell me that?"
Cardinal gestured to the Sudbury team. "You wanna get in here, Miss Legault? Don't want to say all this twice."
He gave them both the basic facts, no mention of murder or Katie Pine, and finished with assurances that when he knew more, they would know more. As a show of goodwill, he handed Grace Legault his card. He didn't catch any flicker of gratitude in her skeptical, newscaster's eyes.
"Detective Cardinal," she said, as he turned away. "Do you happen to know the legend of the Windigo? What kind of creature it is."
"Yeah, I do," he said. "A mythical one." He sighed inwardly. She's going to have a field day with that. Grace Legault was a different animal than Gwynn. No ambition deficit there.
"You finished here?" he asked Collingwood when he and Delorme were once more in the shafthead.
"Five rolls of stills. Arsenault says to keep running the video, though."
"Arsenault's right."
Straps of webbing had already been slung under the ice. Now, a block and tackle that were hooked up to a Honda generator were swung into position. One for the scrapbook, Cardinal thought, as the entire block was hoisted three feet above its resting place like a translucent coffin, the wasted and torn human figure trapped inside.
Delorme murmured, "You think we should cover it with something?"
"The best thing we can do for this girl," Cardinal said evenly, "is to make absolutely sure that everything Forensic finds inside that ice was there before we came on the scene."
"Okay," Delorme said. "Dumb idea, right?"
"Dumb idea."
"Sorry." A snowflake landed on her eyebrow and melted there. "It was just, seeing her like that-"
"Forget it."
Collingwood was videotaping the suspended block of ice, stepping from side to side. He looked up from his Sony and said exactly one word: "Leaf."
Arsenault peered into the ice block. "A maple leaf, looks like. A piece of one, anyway."
The forests of the near north are mostly pine, poplar, and birch. "Anybody do any sailing round here?"
Arsenault said, "Me and the wife were out here for a picnic last August or so. We can do a quick survey to make sure, but if I remember right, this whole little island was jack pine and spruce. Lots of birch."
"That's what I think, too," Cardinal said, "which would tend to confirm the murder happened somewhere else."
Delorme called Forensic on the cell phone to let them know they could expect the body in approximately four hours. Then they moved the remains, ice and all, down the snowy slope of the beach and into the waiting truck.
Remains, Cardinal thought. The word was not adequate.
5
SERGEANT Lise Delorme had been clearing the decks of Special Investigations for some time, a couple of months to be exact. There were no major cases pending, but she had thousands of little details to clear up. Final notes to make. Dispositions to update. Files to archive. She wanted everything to be shipshape for her replacement, who was due to arrive at the end of the month. But the entire morning had gone by and all she'd managed to do was clear sensitive material off her hard drive.
Delorme couldn't wait to get going on the Pine case, even if she was in the completely weird position of having to investigate her partner. So far, it looked like Cardinal was going to keep her at arm's length, and she couldn't really blame him for that. She wouldn't have trusted anyone right out of Special, either.
A phone call in the middle of the night,
that's how it had started. She had thought at first it was Paul, a former boyfriend who got drunk every six months and called her at two in the morning, weepy and sentimental. It was Dyson. "Conference at the chief's house in half an hour. His house, not his office. Get dressed and wait. Horseman'll pick you up. Don't want certain parties seeing your car outside his place."
"What's going on?" Her words were slurry with sleep.
"You'll know soon enough. I've got a ticket waiting for you."
"Tell me it's for Florida. Someplace warm."
"It's your ticket out of Special."
Delorme got dressed in three minutes flat, then sat on the edge of the sofa, nerves singing. She'd spent six years working Special, and in all that time she had never once had a midnight summons, nor ever seen the inside of the chief's house. Ticket out of Special?
"No point asking me anything," the young Mountie told her before she'd even opened her mouth, "I'm just the delivery girl." A nice touch, Delorme thought, to send a woman.
Delorme had grown up revering the Mounties. The scarlet uniform, those horses, well, they went straight to a little girl's heart. She had a vivid memory of the first time she saw them perform the Musical Ride in Ottawa, the sheer beauty of such equestrian precision. And then in high school, the glorious history, the great trek west. The Northwest Mounted Police, as they were then known, had ridden thousands of miles to ward off the kind of violence that was plaguing the westward expansion of the United States. They had negotiated treaties with the aboriginals, sent American raiders hightailing it back to Montana or whatever barbaric pit they had crawled out of, and established the rule of law before settlers had even had a chance to think about breaking it. The RCMP had become an icon of upstanding law enforcement around the world, a travel agent's dream.
Delorme had bought the image wholesale; that's what images are for, after all. When, sometime in her late teens, she had seen a photograph of a woman in that red serge uniform, Delorme had seriously considered sending away for an application.
But reality kept breaking through the image, and reality was not nearly as pretty. One officer sells secrets to Moscow, another is arrested for smuggling drugs, still another for tossing his wife off the balcony of a high-rise. And then there was the whole Security Service fiasco. The RCMP Security Service, before it had been dismantled in disgrace, had made the CIA look like geniuses.
She glanced at the fresh-faced creature in the car beside her, wearing a shapeless down coat, blond hair pulled back in a neat French braid. She had stopped for the traffic light at Edgewater and Trout Lake Road, and the streetlights silvered the down on her cheek. Even in that pale wash, Delorme could see herself ten years ago. This girl, too, had bought the straight-arrow image and was determined to make it stick. Well, good for her, Delorme figured. Cowboys armed with brutality and incompetence may have betrayed those true-North ideals, but that didn't make a young recruit dumb for clinging to them. Delorme spurred her on silently: Go get 'em.
They pulled up in front of an impressive A-frame on Edgewater. It looked like something out of the Swiss Alps.
"Don't ring the buzzer, just walk right in. Doesn't want to wake the kids."
Delorme showed her ID to a Mountie at the side door. "Downstairs," he said.
Delorme walked through the basement amid smells of Tide and Downy, then past a huge furnace into a large room of red brick and dark pine that had the leathery, smoky look of a men's club. Fake Tudor beams crisscrossed stucco walls that were hung with hunting prints and marine art. A feeble fire flickered in the fireplace. Above this, a moose head contemplated the head of R. J. Kendall, chief of the Algonquin Bay Police Department.
Kendall had an open, congenial manner and a big laugh that he used all the time, often accented with a backslap. He laughed too much, was Delorme's opinion; it made him seem nervous, which perhaps he was, but she had also seen that genial manner vanish in an instant. When angered, which was thankfully not often, R. J. Kendall was a shouter and a curser. The whole department had heard him tear up one side of Adonis Dyson and down the other for undermanning the winter fur carnival, with the result that it had become a noisy, rowdy affair that made the front page of the Lode for all the wrong reasons.
And yet Dyson still spoke highly of Kendall, as did most people who carried shrapnel wounds from one of his explosions. Once his anger was over, it was really over, and he usually made a gesture or two to soothe ruffled feathers. In Dyson's case, he'd gone out of his way- on TV- to give him credit for downturns in robberies and assaults. It was far more than his predecessor would have done, and Dyson noticed.
Dyson himself was in one of the red leather armchairs talking to someone Delorme couldn't see. He waved a languid hand in her direction, as if midnight meetings were routine with him.
The chief jumped up to shake Delorme's hand. He must have been in his late fifties, but he affected a boyish air, the way some powerful men do. "Sergeant Delorme. Thanks for getting here so fast. And on such short notice. Can I get you a drink? Off-hours, I think we can afford to relax a little."
"No thank you, sir. This time of night, it would just knock me out."
"We'll get right down to it, then. Someone I want you to meet. Corporal Malcolm Musgrave, RCMP."
Watching Corporal Malcolm Musgrave emerge from the red leather chair was like watching a mountain emerge from the plains. He had his back to Delorme, so the granite block of head emerged first, pale hair trimmed to no more than a sandy bristle. Then the escarpment of shoulders, vast cliff-face of chest as he turned toward her, and finally the rock formation of his handshake, dry and cool as shale. "Heard about you," he said to Delorme. "Nice job on the mayor."
"I've heard about you, too," Delorme told him, and Dyson shot her a dark glance. Musgrave had killed two men in the line of duty. Both times there had been hearings about the use of excessive force, and both times he had got off. Delorme thought: We really get our man.
"Corporal Musgrave is with the Sudbury detachment. He's their number two man in Commercial Crime."
Delorme knew that, of course. The RCMP no longer maintained a local detachment, so Algonquin Bay fell within Sudbury 's jurisdiction. As federal police, the RCMP worked any crimes of national import- drugs at a national level, counterfeiting, commercial crime. Now and again, the Algonquin Bay police would work with them on major drug busts, but, as far as Delorme knew, Musgrave himself never put in an appearance.
"Corporal Musgrave has a little bedtime story for us," the chief said. "You won't like it."
"Have you heard of Kyle Corbett?" Musgrave's eyes were the palest blue Delorme had ever seen, almost transparent. It was like being scrutinized by a husky.
Yes, she had heard of Kyle Corbett. Everyone had heard of Kyle Corbett. "Big drug dealer, no? Doesn't he control everything north of Toronto?"
"Obviously Special Investigations keeps you off the street. Kyle Corbett cleaned up his act at least three years ago when he discovered counterfeiting. You're surprised. You thought when Ottawa changed to colored bills we stumped the counterfeiters, right? Bad guys all moved on to those oh-so-boring and oh-so-easy-to-copy American bills. You're absolutely right, they did. Then a small thing came along called a color copier. And another little item called a scanner. And now every Tom, Dick, and Harry's going into the office on Saturday morning and printing himself a batch of phony twenties. Major headache for the Treasury. And you know what? I couldn't care less." Those arctic eyes sizing her up.
Delorme shrugged. "It's not costing the taxpayer enough?"
"Good," Musgrave said, as if she were his pupil. "Bogus Canadian currency costs businesses and individuals some five million dollars a year. Chicken feed. And, like I say, it's mostly weekend counterfeiters."
"So why the fuss about Corbett? If you don't care about phony money…"
"Kyle Corbett is not counterfeiting money. Kyle Corbett is counterfeiting credit cards. Suddenly we're not talking five million dollars. Suddenly we're talking a hundred millio
n. And that's not Bob's All-Nite Esso getting hit. Or Ethel's Kountry Kitchen. We're talking major banks, and believe me, when Bank of Montreal and Toronto Dominion get upset, we hear about it loud and clear. Which is why our guys and your guys- not to mention the OPP's guys- have been working a JFO for the past three years, trying to take Corbett down."
Dyson leaned forward, apparently worried at being left out of the conversation. "Joint Forces Operation. November 1997."
"November 1997. JFO includes our guys, Jerry Commanda with OPP, and your guys McLeod and Cardinal. We have solid information that Corbett's happy band of brothers has a stamping machine, five thousand blanks, and a very expensive supply of holograms at his club out behind Airport Road. But when the forces of righteousness swoop down, Corbett and Co. are doing nothing more exciting than playing pool and drinking Molsons."
The chief was now thrashing at the fire with a poker, sending sparks flying. "Tell her Episode Two."
"August 1998. Solid intelligence puts Corbett and his merry men in West Ferris with Perfect Circle. You've never heard of Perfect Circle so don't pretend you have. Perfect Circle runs the biggest counterfeiting operation in Hong Kong. They have reciprocity with Corbett. In other words, they exchange stolen account numbers for use overseas. You buy a new Honda in Toronto with an American Express card out of Kowloon, and before anyone's the wiser, you've driven it to hell and gone. And vice versa. Perfect Circle, as their name suggests, also manufacture dead-perfect holograms. They're Asian, right? High tech is in their blood.
"Meanwhile, our two Horsemen have gone their separate ways: one's quit to go into the private sector, the other's doing fifteen-to-life for killing his wife."
"Right. The high-rise guy."
"If you'd met his wife you'd know why. Your Detective McLeod gets wired to the Corriveau murders, and the OPP has Jerry Commanda sequestered in Ottawa on some no-doubt crucially important training course."
"There's no need to malign ongoing officer education," the chief put in. "Your point is, Detective Cardinal turns out to be the single unit of law-enforcement continuity on Kyle Corbett."
