by Giles Blunt
"But Eric Fraser also has a hostage- an eighteen-year-old boy- and we don't want to get that boy killed. If anyone's life comes under immediate threat, you take Fraser down. But only then. Are we clear?"
They were clear.
"All right, then." Cardinal opened the car door. "Let's get it done."
Cardinal raised the unit already staked out at the top of Pump House Drive. Nothing was happening. No movement of any kind. Gripping the wheel, he realized he was shaking. It felt like fear, but it was pure adrenaline. He breathed deeply to steady himself. He didn't want to be shaking when he pulled out the Beretta, wishing yet again that he'd put in those hours on the range.
The two lead cars plowed through the slush at the turnoff and jounced along the road toward the pump house. As planned, Larry Burke and Ken Szelagy stayed to guard the entrance.
Burke and Szelagy had been the first cops to see Katie Pine's body in the shafthead on Windigo Island, and, ever since, Burke had found it frustrating to watch Delorme and Cardinal from a distance and not be part of the action. He wanted to be a detective himself someday.
A car slowed, and a man in his fifties- an executive, Burke guessed- leaned out the window. "What's going on? What's with all the cops out here?"
Larry Burke waved him on. "Keep moving, sir. We need this area clear."
"But what's going on?"
"Just keep moving, please, sir." He gave the man a first-class, Aylmer-regulation dose of cold-cop authority, and it worked; it usually did. The man drove on.
Cardinal had asked for him and Szelagy to be in on this final stage of the case, and Burke appreciated it. Pine-Curry was the case of the century as far as Algonquin Bay was concerned. Cardinal had the pick of the force, but he asked for Burke and Szelagy, and Larry Burke cheered himself with this thought.
Another car rolled up. A woman driver, not attractive, Burke decided.
"You'll have to move along, ma'am."
The woman didn't even glance at him. Kept her eyes fixed on that downhill grade toward the pump house. "What's going on? What're all these cars doing here?"
"Police business, ma'am. Just move along, please."
To Burke's considerable irritation, the woman did not drive away. She just pulled to the side of the road and continued staring down the hill as if Christ himself were about to rise from the icy depths of Trout Lake. Burke sauntered over, rapped on her window, and pointed a gloved finger up the road. According to the Aylmer training manual, a silent gesture, if authoritative enough, will be just as effective as your voice. It wasn't.
"Move it out," Burke said, louder this time. "We need this road clear."
Although the rain had long stopped, the woman's wipers were still flapping; or rather, one of them was still flapping, there was no wiper on the passenger side. She had some kind of scaly thing happening with her face. Hell of a bandage over one ear, too. Intolerable, the way she stared beyond PC Larry Burke and down the hill, totally ignoring him. No way Larry Burke was going to let her get away with that. Larry Burke was not about to screw up now, no matter how tiny his role in this production might be. "Hey, lady!" Yelling now. "Are you deaf?"
He slammed the flat of his hand on the car roof. The woman jerked her head up, and he caught a glimpse of terrified eyes. Then she shoved it in gear, and the car lurched away. "Jesus," he said to Szelagy. "I hope they've got the highway blocked off by now. Did you see that?"
"Some people," Szelagy said. "Got a big nose for other people's business, you know? Have to stick it into everything."
Burke watched the car rattle up the road, belching clouds of black exhaust. Trout Lake and its surrounding suburbs were an affluent area. Very upscale. You'd think the dumb bitch could afford a better vehicle than a half-wrecked Pinto.
55
THE pump house had been out of use for five years and looked it. It was a low, squat, ugly building of gray stone, its windows boarded up, and its roof piled high with an entire winter's accumulation of snow- three feet deep despite the recent meltage. Icicles the size of organ pipes dripped from the corners. Its virtue- from a murderer's point of view- was isolation. There was not another house for half a mile on either side, and this distance was thick with uncut brush.
Cardinal did a fast reconnoiter and established that there was no door on the lake side, just a single set of stone steps that rose from the lake to the side door, forming a perfectly smooth diagonal under the snow and ice. Fraser's Windstar was parked near the lake. Footprints and drag marks led up to the pump house. A rusty outline showed where a padlock had hung.
Soundlessly, Cardinal moved to the door and grasped the handle. He turned it as gently as possible. It didn't budge. He shook his head to signal the others.
McLeod opened his trunk and pulled out the "boomer," sixty pounds of solid, door-smashing iron. Delorme and he each took a handle and prepared to ram the door. Cardinal would be first in with gun drawn. All this they agreed on without speaking.
What happened next became a featured point in department war stories as they were told for years to come. Delorme and McLeod had backed away for their run at the door. Cardinal had his hand up to make the one-two-three signals. He had just finished "one" and was raising his hand for "two," when Eric Fraser stepped out of the building.
He stood there, blinking in the light.
Later, there would be many theories about what made him step out just then. Going for supplies, was one theory, the call of nature was another. It didn't matter, the effect was the same.
Fraser stepped out of the building in his shirtsleeves- black hair whipping in the breeze, black jeans and black shirt vivid against the snow- stood there like an innocent man, blinking for what seemed like ten seconds but was probably less than one.
As Delorme put it later, "This pale skinny guy with little skinny arms. I would never have called him a killer, not in a million years. That guy, he looked like a boy."
Eric Fraser, killer of four people that they knew of, stood utterly still, his hands a little away from his sides.
Cardinal's voice sounded tinny to his own ears. "Are you Eric Fraser?"
Fraser spun. The Beretta was in Cardinal's hand, but Fraser was through the door before he could raise it.
Ian McLeod was first through the door after him- a bit of bravery that would put him on crutches for the next three months. The side door opened on a steep set of steel steps that led down to the pump systems. McLeod slid down it with all his weight on his ankles.
Keith London screamed from the darkness, "In here! In here! He's got a-" His shouts were cut short. Cardinal and Delorme stood at the top of the stairs, listening to McLeod's groans. Below them, the pump was a collection of deep red pipes and valves, like a colossal heart. There was a catwalk off to the right. Delorme moved along this, and Cardinal went down the steps.
"I'll be all right," McLeod said. "Get the bastard."
The gray light from the half-open door barely penetrated the dark. Cardinal could see a catwalk above the pump and, below that, another set of steel steps zigzagged like steps in a dream. Cardinal was about to make a run for these stairs when the catwalk door opened and a muzzle flash spat white and blue flame, bright as a flashbulb. Delorme was hit. She staggered back, making no sound other than the clang of her Beretta hitting the catwalk. She got as far as the outside doorway and even managed to open it a little wider. Then she sank slowly to her knees, clinging to the door on the way down, her face utterly white.
Cardinal tore up the steps three at a time, expecting at any moment another muzzle flash and a nine-millimeter hole in his skull.
He kicked open the door.
Pressed flat against the wall, Cardinal held his Beretta chest high with barrel up, as in prayer. Then he spun, crouched, and sighted along the barrel. Nothing moved. There was a door on the far side of the room. Cardinal was in what appeared to be a disused kitchen, the London kid strapped to a table, blood dripping from his head. He reached out and felt the boy's neck; the pulse was
slow, and he was breathing in ragged gasps.
A rush of footsteps on metal. Cardinal crossed the room to the other door. He stepped out just in time to see Fraser- little more than a black shape- running for the door they had come in. Cardinal aimed and fired. The bullet went wide, ricocheting off the pipes with an earsplitting whine.
Cardinal ran the length of the catwalk, hopping over the motionless Delorme, and out the door. He reached Fraser's van just as the engine caught. Cardinal threw open the passenger door just as the van started to roll downhill toward the lake. Fraser swung his pistol toward Cardinal's face.
The van hit a rock, sending Fraser's shot into the roof. Cardinal fell into the passenger seat and grappled with Fraser's gun arm as the van lumbered onto the ice.
Cardinal had Fraser's gun arm forced nearly to the floor of the van. Fraser squeezed the trigger, and the muzzle flash burned Cardinal's leg. Fraser continued to squeeze off wild shots, so that events seemed to unfold in lightning flashes.
Cardinal got his right hand round Fraser's throat, his left still clutching the killer's gun hand. Fraser's foot crushed the gas pedal. The sensation of being yanked backward as the wheels caught. Cardinal managed to kneel on Fraser's gun hand, pressing all his weight onto the wrist. His right fist smashed into the killer's cheekbone, pain shooting up his arm.
And then a horrible stillness. The van had lurched to a halt. Suddenly, it pitched forward, spilling the two men against the dash. One fact registered in Cardinal's brain like a news bulletin: The right front wheel had broken through the ice.
"The ice is cracking!" Cardinal yelled. "We're going through the ice."
Fraser's struggles, already frantic, became even wilder as the van canted forward, entering black water up to its wide flat windshield.
A brief rocking. Then the front end slid downward, and black water spilled through the vents, like daggers where it touched the skin.
Another cant forward. Darkness swallowed them.
Cardinal let go of Fraser and hauled himself over the back of the seat. The van was still slipping downward as he scrabbled for the handle.
Black water. Icy white froth.
Cardinal wrenched the door up and back and clambered out on the side of the van. The whole vehicle tipped almost gracefully over on its left. Fraser was screaming.
Cardinal balanced on the edge of the sinking vehicle. Shouts assailed him from the shore.
He jumped free, keeping arms outflung even as his legs plunged through the ice. Cold sucked the breath out of his lungs.
Then Fraser's face at the van's door. His mouth a black O, as the ice gave way under the last wheel, the water crashed in on him, and the rest of the van slipped into the black hole.
56
THE Algonquin Bay Police Department had never had so much publicity. The arrest of Dyson was still on the front page of the Lode, and now it was side by side with the death of the Windigo Killer and a photo of the jagged hole where the van had plunged through the ice.
Cardinal and Delorme and McLeod had all been treated in Emergency the night before. McLeod was in the worst shape. He was on the third floor of City Hospital with both feet up in the air, one ankle broken, the other badly sprained. The Kevlar body armor had saved both Delorme and Cardinal. "Those kinds of temperatures," the physician had told Cardinal, "you'd normally be dead. That vest conserved body heat, and you're damn lucky it did." Delorme got off with a nasty crease in her left arm. Blood loss left her feeling dizzy and weak, but a transfusion had been deemed unnecessary and she was sent home.
Cardinal had been given a couple of Valium and kept overnight for observation. He had wanted to call Catherine and tell her all the news, but the Valium had taken hold and he'd slept for sixteen hours straight, waking up with a raging thirst but otherwise fine. Now he was in the waiting room outside the ICU waiting for the okay to visit Keith London. Visitors in winter coats walked up and down the halls with forlorn-looking patients in pajamas and gowns.
Outside, the rooftops were bleached white in the blinding sunshine. But Cardinal could tell from the way the white smoke shot up from the chimneys that the temperature had dropped deep into the minus zone again.
The news came on, and Cardinal learned that Grace Legault had moved to a Toronto station, no doubt thanks to her sterling coverage of the Windigo case. The show led with the story (more shots of the pump house, the black hole in the ice). Then Cardinal was astonished to see some new reporter doing a stand-up in front of his house on Madonna Road. "Detective John Cardinal isn't home today," she began. "He's in City Hospital recovering from his near-drowning in the van that took down Windigo murderer Eric Fraser…"
Brilliant. Every creep I ever put in the slammer's going to show up at my door, including Kiki B. Don't they teach them that in journalism school or wherever the hell they get these people?
There was a quick cut to Chief Kendall in front of City Hall, R. J. telling her all the detectives involved in the Windigo case were tops in his book.
You may change your mind when you read my letter, thought Cardinal, but he was saved from further reflection on this point when the door to the ICU opened and the doctor, a red-haired woman in a rush, swiftly summed things up for Cardinal: Yes, Keith London was still unconscious; no, he was no longer in critical condition. Yes, he had sustained a significant head trauma; no, it was not possible to say if there was permanent damage. Yes, speech might be permanently impaired; no, it was too early to be any more conclusive. And yes, Cardinal could go in for a few moments and speak to the girlfriend.
Light was dim in the ICU. The half-dozen beds with their motionless patients and attendant machines seemed trapped in permanent twilight. Keith London lay at the far end of the room, under the watchful eyes of Karen Steen.
"Detective Cardinal," she said. "It's good of you to visit."
"Well, actually, I was hoping to ask Keith a few questions. Don't worry- the doctor warned me off."
"Keith hasn't said a word yet, I'm afraid. But I'm sure he will. I want him up and chatting away before his parents get here. I finally managed to reach them in Turkey. They should be here day after tomorrow."
"He looks a lot better than last time I saw him." Keith London's head was bandaged, and an oxygen tube was taped to his nostrils, yet despite this, his color looked good, his breathing strong. One slim hand lay outside the covers, and Karen Steen held it while they spoke. "The doctor seems to think he'll pull through okay," Cardinal said.
"Yes, he will, thanks to you. He wouldn't be alive if you hadn't found him. I wish I could find the words to thank you, Detective Cardinal. But there aren't words enough in the language."
"I just wish we could have found him sooner."
The ardent blue eyes searched his face. Catherine's eyes had been like that when they were courting- passionate, earnest. They still were, when she spoke of things that mattered. When she was fully herself.
"You're a very good person, aren't you," Miss Steen added. "Yes, I think you are."
Cardinal felt his face redden. He wasn't skilled at taking compliments. "It's insulting the way you duck them," Catherine had told him more than once. "It's like saying to people that if only they were more intelligent, they'd see things differently. It's rude, John. And quite juvenile."
Ms. Steen looked down at her boyfriend's slim hand and raised it impulsively to her lips, careful not to disturb the tube attached to the pale forearm. "I'm not religious anymore, Detective, but if I were, I'd be remembering you in my prayers."
"You know what I think, Miss Steen?"
Once more the frank blue eyes held him.
"I think Keith London is a very lucky young man."
THE temperature had plunged into unfathomable depths. All the way home, Cardinal had to keep scraping his windshield and the side window. He was looking forward to the outsize glass of Black Velvet whiskey he would pour himself before bed. Having been baptized beneath the ice had made him, at least in his head, a poet of warmth. Stopped for a light
at the bypass, he reveled in an extremely detailed vision of the fire that would soon be blazing in his woodstove, of the steak and fries he would cook for himself, and most particularly of that double shot of Black Velvet he planned to take to bed.
57
EXTRACTING a large heavy object from three hundred feet of water is difficult at the best of times. When the temperature is twenty below zero and the surface has been frozen, thawed, and refrozen, it doesn't get any easier. When the ice was strong enough, Natural Resources had set up a towing rig at the edge of the lake- a twelve-ton truck with several miles of steel cable spooled on its back. They paid out the cable hundreds of feet across the ice, where it was then slung over a block-and-tackle affair that had been rigged over a hole in the ice about fifteen feet wide. Above the far hills, the sun looked as pale and cold as the moon.
Twenty degrees centigrade below zero is not unusually cold for Algonquin Bay, but Cardinal's recent exposure to freezing water had sensitized him to low temperatures. He stood on a small dock below the pump house, shivering from head to foot. Delorme, with her arm in a sling, and Jerry Commanda, hands jammed in pockets, stood in front of him, breath feathering out in the stiff little breeze that kicked off the lake. Even though Cardinal was wearing long johns underneath his regular clothes and a down coat on top, he felt utterly exposed.
The Natural Resources team was gathered around the hole in the ice. In their pressurized suits, the divers looked like something out of Jules Verne, Victorian astronauts. Their helmet lamps glowed dully in the wash of late afternoon light. They tested their tethers with a couple of sharp yanks and then they stepped through the hole. Black water closed over their heads like ink.
"Better them than me," Cardinal muttered.
"It was really nice of you to test the water first, though," said Jerry Commanda. "Lot of guys wouldn't have done that."
An aroma of coffee and doughnuts strayed down the hill, and all three cops turned like dogs hearing the rattle of the food dish. A Natural Resources guy yelled at them to come and get some, and they didn't have to be told twice. Cardinal wolfed down a chocolate doughnut and burned his tongue on the coffee, but he didn't care. The heat coursed through him like a thrill.
