Forty Words for Sorrow

by Giles Blunt

  CARDINAL was taking a break outside, grateful for the cold and the snow that kept the crowd of onlookers down to a manageable size. Between the coroner, the ident boys, and the body-removal service, the basement was so full of people and equipment it was impossible to move around. It was dark now, and the front yard was lit up like the CN Tower; there were cars all down the block.

  A slight edginess was building inside him. He had done excellent work- no high-tech flash, but he had done good work, and had he been a better man, he told himself, and a better cop, he would have been enjoying the moment of satisfaction. He missed the honest cop he had been years ago, wished yet again he could undo the thing he had done, if only because it was spoiling this moment. If Delorme was investigating him, if she looked back far enough, she might find something. It was not likely, but it was possible; it could happen anytime. Just let me finish this case, he prayed to the God he sometimes believed in, just let me finish off the man who did this to Todd Curry.

  A pack of media people pressed against the crime-scene tape surrounding the yard. This time it was not just Gwynn and Stoltz from the Lode. Not just Sudbury TV. The Toronto papers were here. The CBC again. CTV. Is it the Windigo? they all wanted to know. Cardinal had nothing to say beyond the bare particulars, until next of kin had been informed. The whir of motor drives was loud.

  "Miss Legault? Can we talk a sec?" He steered her a little away from the pack.

  "The Windigo," he said. "You must be proud of that one. Way they all picked up on it."

  "Oh, come on. Windigo Island? It was only a matter of time."

  "You came up with it, though. Don't sell yourself short."

  "Two murders and it's only February. About twice what you'd normally get in an entire year, right?"

  "Not really."

  "Murders of this type. Obviously we're not talking about domestics. Look, what are the chances of a real interview? Off the record, no cameras." Those cool newscaster's eyes taking a reading on him. Cardinal thought of a cat watching a mouse.

  "Believe it or not, things are going to be pretty hectic around here. I don't know if-"

  "Believe it or not, TV news doesn't try to be stupid."

  "Oh, no. I would never accuse you of trying."

  Miss Legault pressed on. "So give me a break. Educate me."

  She was looking earnest now, and Cardinal had a soft spot for earnest people. Catherine was earnest. So was he, probably. "If you call Katie Pine's killer the Windigo," he said, "you're only likely to get the guy's motor running."

  "Is that a refusal?"

  Cardinal pointed to the house. "Excuse me. Duty calls."

  Body Removal- two men who worked for the local funeral homes when they weren't working for the coroner- came out of the house with the body bag and placed it in the back of the hearse. The younger of the two looked pretty shaky; he blinked in the glare like a mole.

  Delorme came out a moment later. "So kind of you to call me in on this, partner. Such a colleague. Such a believer in teamwork."

  "I called. You were out."

  "If I was a man, you would have waited for me. If we're not going to work together, maybe I should go back to Special. You can explain to Dyson."

  "You say that as if you left Special."

  She looked him up and down, her eyes sweeping over him like searchlights. "You sound like McLeod, you know? If you're going to be paranoid, I can't stop you. But me, I'm not going to get dragged into it." She watched the hearse drive away. "They go straight to Toronto?"

  Cardinal nodded.

  "Arthur maudit Wood, I could kill that little bastard."

  "You ready to drive to Toronto?"

  "Tonight? You mean to Forensic?" Excitement changed her voice instantly. She sounded like a girl.

  "Next plane isn't till morning, and I don't want to wait." Cardinal nodded toward the dark square that was Dr. Barnhouse. The coroner could be heard halfway down the block berating someone for some perceived outrage. "I'll get the scoop from Barnhouse and pick you up in half an hour. We'll pass the hearse before Gravenhurst. I want to be there when Forensic opens up that little gift."

  14

  MURDER is a rare event in Canada. So rare that most of the country's ten provinces are allocated only one forensic unit, usually in the province's biggest city. It's a thrifty approach- convenient, too, if you happen to be investigating a murder in Toronto or Montreal. Cardinal and Delorme had to drive over two hundred miles, a good part of it behind a convoy of lumber trucks. At the coroner's building on Grenville Street, a Sikh in a blue uniform with a white turban buzzed down to the morgue to announce their arrival.

  Len Weisman met them in the hall and led them into a cramped office. He was a small, compact man, with a thatch of black wiry hair. He wore spectacles with dark, fashionable frames, a white lab coat, and- incongruously, given the medical surroundings of white tile and linoleum- leather sandals.

  Before he became director of the morgue, Weisman had put in ten years as a homicide investigator. His police badge and sergeant stripes were mounted in a frame on the wall behind his desk. Surrounding this were framed citations and a photograph of Weisman shaking hands with the mayor of Toronto.

  "Sit, sit," he said in a friendly way. "Make yourselves at home."

  At home in a morgue, Cardinal said to himself, and wondered if Delorme was thinking the same thing. She was certainly more subdued than usual. They had passed a dead woman in the hall- barely out of her teens and parked on a gurney beside the elevators like a shopping cart. The body bag was open to her throat, and her pale face with its penumbra of yellow hair had emerged from the white plastic as if from a cocoon. Her hair was beautiful, somewhere between saffron and gold; just hours earlier she would have been brushing it avidly, with a pretty woman's mixture of pride and self-criticism.

  "Coffee, anyone? Tea?" Weisman gave the impression of bounding everywhere- reaching for a door halfway across the room, lunging to open a drawer, plucking a file from a desk. "Or there's a Coke machine in the lunchroom. Sprite? Pepsi?"

  Cardinal and Delorme declined.

  Weisman snatched up his phone before it could escape. "I'll just check if our pathologist is ready. Patient just arrived twenty minutes ago."

  Cardinal had forgotten that they called them patients in this place, as if the silent occupants of those plastic bags and metal drawers might recover.

  There was a knock on the door and the pathologist came in. She was a tall woman in her thirties, with wide shoulders and prominent cheekbones that gave her face a sculpted look.

  "Dr. Gant, these are Detectives Cardinal and Delorme from Algonquin Bay. Dr. Gant is our pathologist this morning. You can go with her now if you like."

  They followed her to the morgue. The dead girl had been moved, and now the white tiles and linoleum might have been any clinic, anywhere. The morgue had not the slightest smell of death, just a faint chemical odor. They crossed through the main autopsy room and into a side room reserved for "stinkers." Dr. Gant handed them both surgical masks, and they put them on. When the photographer was ready, Gant put on surgical gloves and unzipped the bag. Delorme gagged.

  "It's filthy," Dr. Gant observed quietly. "Where'd you find him, a coal cellar?"

  "Exactly right. Coal cellar in an old sealed house. Guess he's starting to thaw out."

  "All right, let's get him X-rayed first. Radiography's next door."

  She declined their inexpert assistance with the trolley, wheeling the "patient" next door to radiography, where a machine with a huge steel U attached stood ready. This was run by a scruffy man in check shirt and blue jeans that revealed the cleft of his buttocks every time he bent over.

  "That sack. It was wrapped around his head just like that?"

  "It's a seat cushion cover, Doctor. I'm not sure why the killer covered his head like that. Remorse doesn't seem likely. And I don't think he's squeamish, either."

  "Let's get someone from Chemistry here before we disturb that too much. Start with th
e torso, Brian."

  She spoke quietly into a telephone mounted on the wall. Her voice was collegial but firm; a man would have to be either extremely busy or extremely stupid not to do her bidding.

  "Aren't you going to take the plastic sheeting off first?" Delorme asked.

  Dr. Gant shook her head. "We X-ray them fully clothed. That way we pick up any bullet or blade fragments that might be lodged in the clothing." She nodded toward the table. "Trousers pulled down around the ankles indicate probable sexual activity just prior to the attack."

  The technician readied the machine and closed the door. Then he flipped a switch, and a faint mosquito-sized whine filled the room. The bones of the feet materialized on the fluorescent screen. The beam traveled up the body, but Dr. Gant remained silent until the rib cage appeared on the screen. "Obviously massive trauma, there: fractures to the seventh, fifth, and third ribs. No foreign objects so far."

  "The dark blur," Delorme said, pointing to a round dark spot on the screen. "It's not a bullet, is it?"

  "Probably a medal or a crucifix."

  The image changed, and the bones of an arm began to appear. "Examining extremities, now," Dr. Gant noted. She pointed to a long white line that broke in two like a highway breached by earthquake. "Defensive wounds to the left forearm, fractures of the ulna and wrist bones. Right forearm shows similar injury to the ulna. Collarbone is snapped right through."

  The head was still sheathed in its bloody cover, but now the shattered sphere of the skull appeared on the X-ray screen. "Well," Dr. Gant said softly. "Multiple trauma there, obviously." She spoke into an intercom. "We're getting some kind of white line down the middle, Brian. Can you adjust it at all?"

  "The image is fine, Doctor. You've got something in there."

  Dr. Gant moved closer to the screen. "It could be an ice pick. Possibly a screwdriver blade. It must have been driven down into the top of the skull and then the handle broke off."

  Several facial bones had been broken. Dr. Gant summarized these quickly, all of them blunt-force trauma possibly caused by a hammer.

  The machine was switched off and the high thin whine faded, leaving a ghost of itself in the room.

  A sadness hung in the air. They were looking at a small person who had tried unsuccessfully to ward off terrible, killing blows. And the death had taken time. However bleak Todd Curry's sixteen years may have been, however dissolute and unavailing, he hadn't deserved to die like that.

  Vlatko Setevic from Chemistry joined them. "Cops of the Great White North," he said. "You ever get any victims that aren't frozen?"

  Setevic unrolled white paper from a reel at the end of the table. Carefully, they lifted the body, still in its wrappings, and placed it on the sheet.

  "Okay," Setevic said. "Let's get the cover loosened around the head. Then I'll take the cover off and place it on this table behind me. I have to do this gently. It's going to take time."

  Setevic worked delicately at this task, while Dr. Gant and an assistant removed the plastic sheeting, blackened with soot and blood, from the torso. Another assistant took photographs. The plastic was tied with thin cord of the type used in venetian blinds. The inside of the sheeting was covered with a thick cracked paste of old blood. The camera flash went on and off like a strobe.

  The body remained perfectly still, curled up.

  "I've taken some hair and fiber from the outside of the seat cover," Setevic said. "I'll look at them next door."

  Delorme took one glance at the face and turned away.

  Dr. Gant moved around the body but did not touch it. "Left parietal region shows blunt-force trauma, a depressed fracture caused by a heavy instrument, possibly the side of a hammer. Right anterior parietal shows a circular depression about an inch in diameter, possibly caused by a hammer, hard to say. Tissue is partially peeled away from the left cheekbone, also probably by blunt force."

  "Frenzy?" Cardinal asked. "Looks like overkill to me."

  "Definitely a frenzy, judging by the ferocity of the attack. But there are aspects of control here, too, if I'm not mistaken. The wounds are fairly symmetrical, notice. Both cheekbones, both sides of the jaw, both temples. I don't think that symmetry is accidental. And then there's this." She pointed to the top of the head. "You've got a hole in the occipital crown approximately ten millimeters in diameter, a puncture wound, judging by the puckering at the edges. That'll be the blade we saw on the fluoroscope. You don't drive a screwdriver into someone's head in a frenzy."

  "True."

  "Any one of these injuries could be the cause of death, but we won't know for sure until we do a full autopsy, and we can't do that until he thaws out."

  "Great," said Cardinal. "How long will that take?"

  "At least twenty-four hours."

  "I hope you're kidding me, Dr. Gant."

  "Not at all. How long does it take to thaw out a twenty-pound turkey?"

  "I don't know. Four or five hours."

  "And this patient was in a surrounding temperature of what, minus forty? The inner organs are going to take at least twenty-four hours to thaw, possibly longer."

  "There's something in here." Delorme was standing to one side, peering into the body bag.

  Cardinal came over and looked into the bag, too. He put on a surgical glove and reached into the bag with both hands like an obstetrician. Moving slowly and holding it gingerly by the corners, he extricated the object- cracked, bloodstained, and covered with soot.

  "An audiocassette," Delorme said. "It must have stuck to his clothes and it fell off when he started to thaw out."

  "Well, don't get too excited. It's probably blank," Cardinal said, and dropped it into a paper evidence bag. "Let's just hope it has prints on it."

  15

  "I wanted to ask Dr. Gant what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like the morgue, but I thought she'd take it funny."

  "Of course she would," said Delorme. "So would I."

  "Young woman like that, she should be an internist- a cardiologist, maybe. Why's she want to spend her life working with corpses?"

  "Same as you, Cardinal- fighting the bad guys. I don't see the mystery, me."

  They were in the Forensic Sciences Center, just behind the coroner's building. They'd had the audiocassette dusted for prints, and now they were taking the elevator to Chemistry.

  Setevic was bent over a microscope. He didn't even look up. "One hair, aside from the victim's. Three inches long, medium brown, Caucasian, probably male."

  "And the fiber?"

  "Red. Trilobal."

  "That's our boy," said Cardinal.

  "You don't know that."

  "The likelihood of two separate killers- both with red carpet, no less- in a place the size of Algonquin Bay? Nonexistent."

  Delorme stepped in. "Todd Curry spent some time in the same place as Katie Pine- for sure, you can say that much. The same car, right?"

  Setevic smiled, shook his head. "You won't nail him with this. It's widely used in basements, patios- you name it- not just here, but in the States, too. I told you that when we found one on the Pine girl. Give me some credit here, okay? Assume I'm not stupid. You got something else for me? What's in the bag?"

  "We need to hear what's on this." Cardinal handed him the evidence bag.

  Setevic peered inside. "You already dusted it?"

  "Lifted one partial next door. Computer's chewing it over, but we're not optimistic. You happen to have a tape player handy?"

  "Not a good one."

  "Doesn't matter. We just need to know if there's anything on here."

  Setevic took them to a cramped office he shared with two other chemists. There were scientific journals stacked on every available surface. "Sorry about the mess. We only use the place for writing reports and making the odd phone call."

  He reached into a drawer and pulled out a grimy little Aiwa. He pressed a button, and a middle-aged woman's voice was dictating a biology report. Sample showed proliferation of white cells, indicating adva
nced state of… The voice went woozy, then stopped.

  "Mandy!" Setevic called toward the door. "Mandy! Do we have any double-A batteries?"

  An assistant came in and handed him a package of four batteries. She watched him struggle to open the back of the machine, then held out a perfectly manicured hand. He handed it over and, expertly, she removed the housing, took out the old batteries and reloaded. She pressed a button, and the biology report resumed at the proper speed.

  "I thank you. The forces of law and order thank you."

  When Mandy closed the door behind her, he jerked his head toward it and, eyebrows raised, asked Delorme, "So, how you think I'm doing?"

  "She hates you."

  "I know. Call it my Slavic charm." He slipped in the audiotape and pressed the button. "Any idea what's on here?"

  "None. Most likely Aerosmith Unplugged."

  The tape started.

  A series of clicks. Someone blows into the microphone and taps on it, testing it.

  Delorme and Cardinal looked at each other, then immediately away. Mustn't get too excited, Cardinal told himself. It could be anything, anyone. It could be totally unrelated. He realized he was holding his breath.

  More clicks, the rustle of cloth. Then a man's voice, angry, far from the microphone, says something indistinct.

  A girl, impossibly close, her voice quivering: "I have to go. I have to be somewhere by eight o'clock. They'll kill me if I don't show up."

  Heavy footsteps. Music starts up in the background- the end of a rock song. Barely audible: "… or you'll make me very angry."

  "I can't. I want to go now."

  Man's voice, now too distant to record properly: "[Unintelligible]… snapshots."

  "Why do I have to wear this? I can't breathe."

  "[garbled]… sooner you'll be on your way."

  "I'm not taking my clothes off."

  Heavy footsteps approach the microphone. Several slaps, loud as pistol shots. Screams. Then sobs. Then muffled sobs.

  "Bastard," Cardinal said quietly.

  Delorme was looking out the window, as if the apartment building across Grenville Street were of intense interest.