by Giles Blunt
Cardinal sipped his coffee and watched the kid playing the video game.
In Cardinal's day it had been a pinball machine. A pinball was more physical, less hypothetical, and for your nickel you got lots of bells and rattles. Under the ministrations of the youth at the controls, its replacement uttered an irritating series of beeps and boops.
"When did that house burn down, Joe?"
"Over on Main there?" Joe served cherry Cokes to two blond girls who had their hair cut identically: buzzed on one side, long on the other. Both sported nostril studs, which looked to Cardinal like chrome zits. In his day the girls had worn their hair long and parted in the middle, giving them- at least to Cardinal's nostalgic eye- a gentle, soulful look. Why did these girls scar themselves with fashion?
Joe came back the length of the counter to the cash register. "November, I think it was. Early November. Must've been five or six fire trucks out there."
"You sure it wasn't later? After New Year's?"
"Definitely not. It was before my hernia operation, and that was November tenth." Joe swung his girth around and poured more coffee into Cardinal's cup. "How could you miss a fire like that?"
Two missing kids. And November was when Catherine had started to drift. Cardinal had had other things on his mind.
He took his coffee to the other end of the counter near the front window. On the west side of the square, a funeral was coming out of the cathedral, four men in black suits bearing a coffin on their shoulders. They had to be freezing with no overcoats on. Across the square in the empty lot stood a man wearing a green and gold parka with matching toque. He was writing notes of some kind, his breath ragged plumes lit by the sun.
Cardinal left the soda fountain and dodged through the traffic on Algonquin. The man was filling in a form on a clipboard. Cardinal introduced himself.
"Tom Cooper. Cooper Construction. Just certifying our lack of progress with the demolition guys. They were supposed to clear the entire mess away by Tuesday. It's now Friday. It's hard to find professionals in this town. I mean real professionals."
"Mr. Cooper, I imagine a contractor keeps an eye out for lots like this. You wouldn't happen to know of any other vacant houses on Main West?"
"Nope. Not on Main West. Got one over on MacPherson. Another one out on Trout Lake. But in town here they don't stay empty long."
"It's just I heard there was an empty place on Main West. Empty in December, anyway. Some teenagers were hanging out there, possibly a drug thing. You hear about anywhere like that?" Cardinal could hear the hush in his voice. Such a frail thread, this lead, the slightest weight might snap it.
Cooper pressed the clipboard under one elbow and squinted west up the street, as if an empty house might appear there. "Nothing on Main that I know of. Oh, but maybe you're thinking of Timothy." He swung back around, seeming to pivot on his heels. "It's not really a Main Street address, but it's on the corner."
"The corner of Timothy and Main? By the railroad tracks?"
Cooper nodded. "That's it. No way teenagers were hanging out there, though. Place is sealed tight as a drum. It's been in probate court for over two years. Contentious family's what I heard."
"Mr. Cooper, thank you. You've been very helpful."
"This wouldn't be in reference to that wretched Windigo thing, would it?"
Cooper, like everyone else in Algonquin Bay, was keeping abreast of the case. Any suspects? Was it strictly a local thing? Any chance of the Mounties coming in on it? You couldn't blame people for being curious. Cardinal had to listen to a theory involving a satanic cult before he could get free.
He drove the half-dozen blocks to Timothy Street, taking it slow over the ridge of the railroad tracks. The northern line was mostly freights taking oil up to Cochrane and Timmins. The hoot of its whistle as it crossed Timothy woke Cardinal every night when he was a kid. A lonely sound but somehow comforting, like the cry of a loon.
The house was an old Victorian place with a wraparound verandah. The red brick above the boarded-up windows was blackened with years of railway soot, so that the building looked not just blind but black-eyed. Massive icicles were fixed to the roof corners like gargoyles. The yard, which was large by Algonquin Bay standards, was surrounded by a high hedge.
Cardinal got out of the car and stood on the snow where the front path should have been. Except for the faint hieroglyphics of bird tracks, there was not a single footprint.
The stairs to the verandah were filled in with hardpack snow. Gripping the rail, Cardinal stomped his way up and examined the front door, also boarded over. The public trustee's seal was intact. The lock had not been tampered with. He checked the boarded-up windows, and then did the same around the side of the house.
The crossing bell started to clang, and as he checked the side door a train clattered by, a long one.
Anyone breaking into this house would be likely to go through the back: There was nothing there but the high hedge and the railroad tracks. And thieves liked basement windows. Trouble was, the basement windows were buried below the snow. Using the heel of his boot, Cardinal dug a trench along the back wall of the house.
"Damn." He'd scraped the back of his leg on the thick crust of ice. About four feet from the corner he found the top of a window. After clearing away the crust, he pulled the rest of the snow away with his hands.
"Gotcha," he said quietly.
THE Provincial Court in Algonquin Bay is on McGinty Street. It's a modern, plain-brick building with no pretensions; it might be a school or a clinic. Perhaps in compensation for its plainness, the sign that announces it as Provincial Court, District of Nipissing, is the size of a highway billboard.
The receptionist told him Justice Paul Gagnon was in traffic court until lunch, and lunch was booked for a meeting.
"See if he'll squeeze me in, will you. It's for the Katie Pine case." Cardinal knew Gagnon would never grant him a search warrant to pursue some runaway Mississauga youth who was now over the age of sixteen. He filled out the necessary form, and while he was waiting for court to get out he called in to headquarters. Delorme was out on the Woody case and was not expected back for at least another hour. Cardinal felt a twinge of guilt for leaving her out of this; she'd been upset about handling his backlog.
Justice Gagnon was a small man with very small feet and a toupee that was two shades lighter than his hair. He was a few years younger than Cardinal, a completely political animal whose robe drowned him as if he were a child. His voice was a reedy pipe.
"Sounds pretty feeble, Detective." Gagnon hung his robe on a coathook and put on a camel-hair sports coat. "You think the person who killed Katie Pine and abducted Billy LaBelle may have stayed in the Cowart house? And you base this on information received secondhand from Ned Fellowes at the Crisis Center. Information that doesn't even relate directly to the killer but to another missing person- this Todd Curry." Gagnon checked his tie in the mirror.
"The house was broken into, Your Worship. I'm sure the parties contesting the will would want that investigated anyway. But if I go through them it's going to take a long time and upset people who are already upset about the will."
Gagnon's skeptical eye fixed him in the mirror. "For all you know, it may be one of the family who broke in. Maybe to haul off some contested stick of furniture. Family heirloom. Who knows?"
"The window is only about ten inches high, maybe two and a half feet wide."
"Jewelry, then. Grampa's pocket watch. My point, Detective, is that you have no substantive reason to suspect a killer was there."
"It's the only place I have reason to suspect the killer set foot, other than the shafthead on Windigo Island. He likes deserted buildings maybe. The Curry kid was last seen alive saying he was going to stay in an abandoned house on Main Street."
Gagnon sat down behind a desk that dwarfed him and examined the form. "Detective, this address is on Timothy."
"It's at the corner of Main. It looks like it's on Main. The Curry kid was from out
of town. He probably thought it was Main Street."
Justice Gagnon looked at his watch. "I've got to run. I have a lunch with Bob Greene." Bob Greene was the local member of parliament, a voluble fool of the back benches.
"Just sign the warrant, Your Worship, I'll be out of your hair. We have zero leads on Billy LaBelle, and as for Katie Pine, this is it. This is all we've got." Katie Pine was the magic number- Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle were a combination that would slip the tumblers in Gagnon's tiny heart. Cardinal could hear the mechanism turning over: Famous case equals opportunity. Opportunity seized equals advancement. Personal advancement equals justice.
The J.P. furrowed his toy brow, timing his resistance like a modestly talented actor. "If there were people living in this house, no way would I sign this. No way would I let you disrupt a sovereign household on grounds this tenuous."
"Believe me, Your Worship, I know how tenuous this is. I wish I had something ironclad to give you, but unfortunately the killer decided not to leave his name and address next to Katie Pine's body."
"That's not a high moral tone, I hope. You're not lecturing me, are you?"
"God, no. If I wanted to lecture J.P.s I'd have been a politician."
Justice Gagnon vanished into his overcoat as if into a fog, then reemerged decisively from cuffs and collar. He snatched up the Bible from his desk and shoved it at Cardinal. "Do you swear the contents in the application are true, so help you God?"
FIVE minutes later, Cardinal was back at the Cowart place, scooping snow away in handfuls from in front of the basement window. His knees were numb as wood. The snow was stratified into alternate layers of powder and ice. Cardinal went back to the car and retrieved a shovel from the trunk.
There were crowbar marks at both ends of the two-by-four that held the plywood in place, and the nails were loose. The two-by-four came away easily, then the plywood. There was no pane of glass behind it.
Cardinal removed his down coat, and the frigid air sucked the breath out of him. He dropped to his knees and crawled backward into the opening, lowering himself inside. Snow got under his shirt and into his pants, melting against his skin. He could feel a platform, possibly a table, under his foot. Whoever had broken in had probably put it there to ease his exit.
Cardinal pulled his coat inside after him, fought with the zipper, then stood there on the table flapping his arms and exclaiming at the cold. The few foot-candles of light that squeezed through the window did little to ease the darkness.
He climbed down from the table- a laundry table, he could now see- and switched on his flashlight. It was a heavy-duty instrument that took six D-cells and on occasion had doubled as a billy club; the glass was cracked and the tube dented. It swept a white beam like a cape over the silent furnace, the washer and dryer, a tool bench he immediately envied. There was a drop saw he'd seen going at Canadian Tire for close to five hundred.
Even in the cold, he could smell the stone and dust, the raw old wood, the laundry smells from the washer and dryer. He opened a door, breaking old spiderwebs with his flashlight, and found shelves of preserves: peaches, prunes, even a gallon of red peppers that looked like fresh hearts.
The stairs were new, unfinished, and open. The flashlight beam revealed no obvious footprints, but Cardinal kept to the edges and took the stairs two at a time to preserve any marks he might have missed.
The door opened to the kitchen. Cardinal stood for a moment to take in the feel of the house. Cold and dark, it exuded despair. Cardinal held in check the excitement of the chase, the sense of something about to happen. He had long ago learned to distrust such feelings; they were almost always wrong. Evidence of intruders did not mean a killer had been here, or even the errant Todd Curry.
The kitchen looked untouched. A thin layer of dust covered every surface. A narrow flight of stairs was tucked in the corner with a cupboard underneath. Cardinal lifted the latch with the toe of his boot, revealing neat rows of canned food. On the wall above the cupboard, a calendar from a local sporting goods store showed a man fishing in a plaid hunter's jacket with a little boy laughing beside him. A sudden memory of Kelly, a summer vacation, a cottage: her little girl's excitement at catching the fish, her squeamishness at baiting the hook. How his daughter's brassy hair had flashed against the deep blue sky. The calendar showed July, two years ago, the month the owner had died.
In the plastic garbage pail he found nothing but a crushed doughnut carton from Tim Hortons.
The dining room was furnished with heavy old furniture, and Cardinal, no expert in such matters, had no idea if it was antique or reproduction. The painting on the wall looked old and vaguely famous, but Cardinal was no art critic, either. Kelly had been appalled one day to discover he had no idea who the Group of Seven were, stars of Canadian art history apparently. The glass doors of a cabinet displayed pretty glassware, neatly arranged. Cardinal opened a cupboard and found bottles of Armagnac and Seagram's V.O. The chair at the head of the table was the only one with arms, and the fabric was a good deal more worn than the others. Had the old man continued to eat at the place of honor long after his family had dispersed? Had he sat here, imagining his wife and children around him?
Cardinal's flashlight beam found a pair of sliding doors, presumably leading to the living room, but they were frozen shut. He returned to the kitchen and took the back stairs to the second floor.
Upstairs, the bedrooms showed no sign of disturbance. He lingered briefly in the master bedroom, the last one to be occupied. There was a small television on an antique dresser, which would have been easy to steal.
The bathroom cabinet contained antihistamines, laxatives, Fixodent, and a gigantic bottle of Frosst 222s.
Cardinal went down the main stairway into the front den. An old piano took up most of the space. A pair of elaborate silver candelabra stood on top, surrounded by photographs of the Cowart family. A closer examination of the piano lid showed that the candelabra had been moved, the hexagonal bases had left their outlines in the dust, and the candle stubs looked fairly recent. So someone had sat at the piano by candlelight. Possibly Todd Curry. The lid of the keyboard was smudged with hand-prints. Cardinal shuddered; his bones ached from the cold.
The living room looked like a stage set: two armchairs, plant stand with dead plant, circular rug in front of brick fireplace. The fireplace had been used. The ashes of a log fire lay in the grate, covered with a white dusting of snow. Yes, you would need a fire- no heat, no electricity. Anyone planning to stay here in December would have made a fire right away. A fire would have lit the room up. Wouldn't they be afraid someone would see the smoke? A normal person would be, but I'm not looking for a normal person, Cardinal told himself; I'm looking for a runaway drug user and a child killer, and God knows what else.
Cardinal swung his flashlight past a mantelpiece, past a large television. Above the couch hung a dark old painting, a man in black, a Spaniard, judging by the pointy little beard. His cape was a flowing black velvet with unusual markings.
Beneath this, the couch looked as if someone had upended a gallon of paint over the back. The design in the fabric was completely obliterated. Then Cardinal leaned closer and saw that it was not paint but blood. Blood in large quantities. He shone his flashlight on the wall and saw now that what he had taken to be a wallpaper pattern was in fact droplets of blood- droplets flung upward, as if from someone swinging a heavy instrument. There was blood on the painting, too, he now saw. Those marks on the Spaniard's cloak.
He stood in front of the couch, sweeping the flashlight slowly from one end to the other. One of the cushions was bare, the cover having been removed. A burglar could have used the seat cover to carry booty outside, but what did the killer use it for? He didn't bother to steal those silver candelabra, Cardinal thought, or the tiny television upstairs. He doesn't do this for money.
Cardinal was shivering with cold- at least he thought it was the cold- and tried to figure out where they would have put the body. They hadn't tak
en it outside, he was reasonably sure, and the upstairs had looked untouched. He went down to the basement, wishing fervently he had more light.
He stopped before a flimsy-looking door under the stairs. In older houses you often found coal chutes under the stairs, although nobody burned coal anymore. There were drag marks in the dust.
Cardinal put the flashlight down on the floor. The beam cast his hunchbacked shadow up and down the wall as he bent to open the half door. It came back with a scrape and a clatter. He knew what would be in there. Even though he could not smell it, he knew what would be there. The cold had killed his sense of smell. He wanted to see it, then get the hell out of there and come back with a team. He picked up the flashlight and ducked into the tiny space.
Polyethylene sheeting had opened up around the body, giving it an unwrapped look, like something precious in a black gift box. The body itself, perfectly preserved by the cold, was curled up in an almost fetal position. The head was wrapped in a bundle stiffened with cold and black with blood. But Cardinal recognized the fabric; it was the seat cover from the couch upstairs. Why had he covered the head? The trousers, raveled about the shins, were black denim, the shoes were black Converse high-tops. Cardinal knew the particulars by heart: Caucasian male, last seen wearing…
Cardinal was aware of the nausea lurking in his belly but he ignored it. Forms passed through his mind, calls he had to make: the coroner, Delorme, the lawyers for the estate, the Crown Attorney. But even as these things flashed in his mind he was taking in the physical details: the cheap watch around the thin wrist, the shriveled and tormented genitals. Cardinal's heart went out to the parents, who would have to be informed, who would be clinging to the hope that their son was alive. Whether or not there was an afterlife, a dead person moved to a place beyond pain and shame and insult. So why did he now feel the same instinct he had criticized in Delorme- to cover the boy up?
