The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  'I think I'll write him later,' said Wingate.

  He'd put his cap down on the desk beside the keyboard, and Hazel picked it up and handed it to him. 'You feel like a drive?'

  'Sure. Yes.'

  'Let's go for a drive then.' She strode away from him, and he followed, but quickly doubled back to toss his toothbrush into the desk drawer.

  'I'm not invited?' said Greene.

  She called back to him over her shoulder. 'Do some work. Set an example. I'm taking the new guy to Mayfair.'

  They drove south on 41, farmers' fields on either side of them, the brown cornstalks knocked over. Detective Constable Wingate sat stiffly in the passenger seat, looking straight ahead down the highway. Silence had never bothered Hazel, but she suspected Wingate was being polite, so she asked him where he was from.

  'Toronto born and bred,' said Wingate. 'You know the city?'

  'Certain buildings.'

  'It's not easy to like unless you were brought up there.'

  'You hoping to work your way back?'

  'I just want to be wherever I can do the most good.'

  She glanced over at him. 'Okay. And what's the real answer?'

  He met her eyes, and she saw confusion in his. 'That is the real answer.'

  'You have scout badges, DC Wingate, don't you?'

  He laughed. 'You want to guess where I keep them?'

  'In a cigar box underneath your bed?'

  'My mother has them. In an envelope in her sock drawer.'

  She remembered one of the questions they asked applicants at the academy. What kind of relationship do you have with your mother? they asked the men. Because good sons made fine cops. Ray Greene had brunch with his mother every Sunday. Drove out to the Poplars to get her, and took her to Riverside House for mimosas and pancakes. That was the only other woman in his life, she realized, apart from Michelle Greene, who had nothing to worry about, if you didn't count the boredom of being married to a cop whose dull vice was playing the ponies. She tried to remember the question that had given her pause at her own interview. Thirty-two years ago now. Yes: did she want to have a family? She'd said she did, and one of the interviewers had written it down.

  'There are hardly any women your age in Port Dundas,' she said. 'Hard place for a young man to settle down.'

  'I'm not thinking about that right now,' Wingate said. 'I have enough on my plate.'

  'Did you leave a girl in Toronto?'

  'No,' he said. 'There's no one right now.'

  At the hospital, they were given their visitor tags, and Dr Jack Deacon came to collect them from the registration office. He was a man of quick gestures whose physicality communicated that at any given moment he might have to be somewhere else. But in fact he was a patient, likeable man. Hazel trusted him. 'Spere caught you up?' he asked.

  'Bare bones,' said Micallef. 'I want the whole tour.'

  Deacon brought them down to the basement and into the morgue. Wingate wiped his forefinger under his nose. 'You can put on a face mask, son, but it won't help.' The place smelled of industrial detergents and rotting meat, rather accurately. Deacon passed them each a pair of thin blue gloves.

  Delia Chandler was lying in a white body bag in a steel drawer. Deacon pulled the drawer open with a chunk and rolled a steel trolley underneath her, slid her onto it, and brought her under some lights. He unzipped her and they saw the Y of heavy stitching holding her trunk closed. The wound in her neck had also been roughly stitched shut and lathered over with surgical glue. The three of them leaned into her, and Hazel shot a look at Wingate, who seemed to be holding it together.

  'Okay, a couple of things,' said Deacon. 'We took a sample of vitreous fluid and put the time of death at five p.m. yesterday afternoon, give or take. Cause of death was acute blood poisoning. She was already dead by the time he tried to cut her head off.'

  'Do you think he was trying to remove her head?' said Wingate. 'To take it?'

  Deacon tapped the slit in Delia Chandler's throat with the back of a gloved finger. 'The cut on her throat is surgical – it goes through her windpipe and esophagus on the first cut; he goes back in a second time to deepen it all the way to the spinal cord. I think if he wanted a trophy he could have had it. Anyway, he had all the time in the world, and he didn't cut it off. Look at this.' He tapped his pointer to Delia's mouth. Wingate and Micallef shifted up the table. 'Rigor mortis has resolved now, but at the scene, her tongue was lifted up against the back of her teeth. Howard said it looked like she was hollering or something.'

  'God,' said Wingate.

  'You want to see the pictures?' Wingate nodded, and Jack Deacon opened a folder on a table beside him and drew out a sheaf of photographs. He pulled one out and handed it to Wingate. 'Rigor mortis sets in about three or four hours after death. It starts in the small muscles of the face and moves down the body and it takes about twelve hours before it's done. Then the process reverses itself and the rigor dissolves. In rare cases you might see muscles that seized up at the moment of death, but that's usually in the case of a violent death – then you get these cadaveric spasms and people gripping onto things like railings, or their killer's hair, that kind of thing. But this' – he tapped the photo repeatedly with the pointer – 'this isn't really possible. Even if you're screaming when somebody shoots you through the heart, you still fall down and your tongue tumbles out of your mouth, and three hours later, everything starts to harden up.'

  'So how did this happen?' said Hazel.

  'The only place you find faces frozen in looks of terror are in horror movies. Mostly, the dead wear expressions of drunken stupor. They don't open their mouths and touch their tongues to the back of their teeth.'

  Hazel found herself mimicking Delia's mouth. 'So what's happening here?'

  'To get her mouth to look like this, the person who killed her would have had to wait at least three hours and then hold her mouth and tongue in this position until the muscle set. He would have been standing there about forty minutes with his fingers in her mouth.'

  Hazel pulled off her gloves and Wingate did the same. 'There's one more thing,' said Jack Deacon, and he lifted one of the corpse's arms from the slab. He held the hand up for them to see. Delia Chandler's left pinkie finger was broken.

  'She put up a fight?' said Wingate.

  'There's no evidence that this is a defensive wound. And he does it before he bleeds her. There's evidence of edema – swelling.'

  Hazel looked closely at the other hand. 'Just one.'

  'Just the one.'

  'The easiest one to break,' she said, and Deacon nodded.

  The three of them stared at the hand for almost a full ten seconds.

  'Maybe he didn't want her to feel any pain,' said Wingate.

  'So he breaks her finger?'

  'To make sure she's asleep,' he said. 'Then he poisons her, puts the port in her leg and he begins.' Deacon lowered Delia's arm and Wingate looked up at his new boss.

  'So he cares?' she said to him.

  The doctor began rolling the body back toward its hole in the wall.

  * * *

  They drove back to Port Dundas with the radio playing quietly under their silence. Mercy was one thing, thought Hazel, but DC Wingate's suggestion that there was actual thoughtfulness in the killer's actions disturbed her. If it were true, it meant the killer was not angry, he was not fuelled by a sense of injustice, or overripe with hatred. Those kinds of killers slipped up: their passions led them. What was he doing by making it appear as if he'd killed Delia Chandler in a rage? Delia was already being killed by cancer. Was a more overt act of murder a comment on her disease? A critique of its silent, creeping methods? And the mouth, what did this disguise?

  'What kind of "caring" are we talking about here, do you think?' Hazel said.

  Wingate took his eyes off the road for the first time. The turnoff for Port Dundas was coming up on their right. 'I shouldn't have said anything,' he said. 'I don't know anything about this case yet.'

&nb
sp; 'You know about as much as any of us, Detective. It's okay to think aloud.'

  'He might have broken her finger by accident.'

  'Do you really think that?'

  He sat, seemingly unwilling to reply, as she took the turnoff. 'No,' he said at last. 'My guess is he was in complete control of the whole situation.'

  'That's where I'm at too,' she said.

  'It's hard to know what we're supposed to be paying attention to,' said Wingate. 'Is he there to take her blood? To murder her? To desecrate her in some way?'

  'Maybe all of it,' said Hazel. She was taking the last turn before the bridge over the Kilmartin River.

  'We're not going to know anything until we have another body. To see if he's being consistent with his victims.' Hazel shot a look at her new detective constable. He shifted uncomfortably. 'You don't get this good on your first try,' he said.

  'You think there are other victims? Where are they?'

  'Nearby.' He cleared his throat. 'Most serial killers stake out a territory and work it methodically.'

  Her jaw seemed to be stuck in a half-open position. She consciously closed her mouth and put her attention back on the road. 'There's thinking out loud and then there's thinking out loud, James. I wish you hadn't said any of that.'

  'I'm sorry,' he muttered.

  'What I mean is, I hope you're wrong.'

  * * *

  They pulled into the station house at 3 p.m. Shift change. Ray Greene was standing at the back door with a plastic bag at his feet and his arms crossed over his chest. 'What's that?' said Hazel as she locked the car.

  'Gift,' said Ray. 'For you.' She took the bag from him and pulled out a box. It was a cellphone. She stared at it like it was a moonrock. 'You buy twenty bucks' worth of time at a go. I'm the only one with the number.'

  'I don't want a cellphone, Ray.'

  'I know. But you need one. If you'd had a cell this afternoon, I could have called you on your way back and told you to meet me up in Chamberlain. The community police there are shitting themselves.'

  'They called us in? That's East Central. We've got no jurisdiction there.'

  'It's just a little office, something like three cops. I asked them why they hadn't called the Ottawa OPS, but they'd heard about Delia Chandler and they were pretty insistent on us coming out there. They have a crime scene they described to me as "creative".'

  Hazel looked over at Wingate, who was keeping his expression neutral. She wanted to tell him to be careful what he wished for. 'Well, we can't,' she said to Greene. 'Tell them to call Ottawa.'

  'It's him, Hazel.'

  'You don't know that.'

  'I don't,' he said, and he left it at that, but the three of them stood there staring at each other. 'It's about three hundred kilometres from here to Chamberlain. We could be there in two and a half hours.'

  Hazel had passed the bag with the cellphone in it to Wingate and started walking back to her car. 'What about the mouth?' Wingate asked.

  'You know that old saying, The dead don't tell tales?' said Greene. 'Well, even if they did, this guy would be telling one with a considerable speech impediment.' He followed Hazel to her car and held open a back-seat door for Wingate. 'Spere's already on his way,' he said.

  'They called Howard, too?' she said in disbelief.

  'I called him.' She was staring at him. 'He knows the Chandler scene better than anyone. I figured ...'

  'Imagine needing Howard twice in forty-eight hours,' Hazel said.

  Greene clicked his seat belt as she pulled out of the lot. 'There's a guy who loves his job again.'

  Chamberlain, 315 kilometres to the east, was at the edge of Renfrew County, an old milltown converted into a village of quaint B&Bs and knitshops. Sleepy was a good word for it. The last police event of any significance there that Hazel could remember involved a delivery van with a snapped brake cable that had crashed through the wall of the Chamberlain Opera House in 1986. It had been delivering ice cream and the Opera House stank of chocolate and strawberry for the whole season. Local playwrights revised their plays to include the odours, and the director of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown had taken the liberty of bringing his actors onstage actually licking cones.

  A murder in Chamberlain?

  Michael Ulmer's house was on a side street off the main drag, a street of well-kept lawns and freshly painted dormers. Yellow tape encircled the house. Howard Spere was standing behind a pile of leaves, smoking a cigarette. It was seven o'clock in the evening. 'Those'll kill you,' said Greene.

  'At least I'll get to choose my death.'

  Hazel introduced him to James Wingate. 'How many dead bodies you seen, Jim?' asked Spere, shaking the young man's hand.

  'I've seen a few. But never two in one day.'

  'And you're from Toronto.'

  'Fancy that,' said Greene, taking his homburg off his head. 'Let's stop breaking balls and go see the victim.'

  'Ray's a master at small talk,' said Spere, handing the three of them latex gloves. He nodded at one of his SOCO officers, and the man opened the door.

  The house was dark and close, the main floor cluttered with Salvation Army-style furniture: no two pieces matched. There was a cot against the dining-room wall, the stale sheets pulled back, the pillow stained almost brown. A fug of old cigarette smoke laced the air. A folding TV-dinner table stood in front of a La-Z-Boy chair, its surface colonized by pill bottles and moisturizing products. An extra-large box of two-ply tissues was balanced on the arm of the chair. 'Do I want to know what the tissues and the lotions have to do with each other?' said Greene.

  Hazel shot him a look. 'Dry skin and sniffles, Ray. Don't think too much.'

  They went up the stairs. A knot of Ident guys were milling about in the hallway labelling ziplock bags, packing up various bits of equipment, generally trying to stay out of one of the bedrooms. They could see camera flashes going off, and hear the high-pitched report of battery cells. 'In here, detectives,' called one of the men. They followed his voice into the master bedroom. It was much cleaner up here, the air more breathable. The blinds were drawn. There was a figure in the bed dimly lit by a bedside lamp casting a feeble yellow light.

  'What's your name, officer?'

  'Matthiessen.'

  'Do we need it so dark in here, Officer Matthiessen?' said Hazel. The man took it as an order and turned the overhead light on. Light flooded the room and the body burst into view.

  'Fucking hell,' said Greene. He stepped back instinctively.

  Wingate was the only one of the three of them who approached the bed. In it lay the ruined body of Michael Ulmer. 'What was wrong with him?'

  'Less than there is now,' said Matthiessen. 'He was taking something called Avonex, plus other things for his muscles and stuff. Detective Spere says he probably had MS.' Ray Greene finally stepped forward. 'Poor bastard.'

  'I wonder how he got up the stairs. His walker's still on the main floor,' said Wingate.

  'He carried him up the stairs?' said Greene, his brows raised. 'That's a pretty thoughtful killer.' Hazel shot a look at her new detective, and Wingate said nothing else. His theories were going to have to wait for a better moment.

  Ulmer was covered with blankets, as if he were sleeping, and there was a rise where his arms were crossed over his chest. Two huge circles of blood drenched the sheet atop his hands. 'Can you pull those back?' asked Hazel, and the officer drew away the heavy blankets. 'God.'

  Ulmer's hands were like two balloons of blood. Just with the movement of the sheets being drawn away, they shook like jellies: the killer had taken a hammer to them. But the violence done to Ulmer's hands was nothing compared to his head. His mouth had been smashed in so thoroughly that the upper half of his jaw hovered like a dome over a soupy mass of teeth and tissue. The killer had hacked at each of the victim's eyes and torn through the sockets laterally, opening up his head like a box-top on both sides of his face. Then he'd staved the man's skull in. 'He's not exactly subtle, is he?'

  'H
as Ident finished?' Hazel asked PC Matthiessen.

  'I don't know if they could ever finish, but yeah, it's been photographed and swept. We were just waiting for you to bag him.'

  'Bag him then and get him out of here. Where's the ambulance?'

  'There's a guy in the alley. We figured we'd probably want to take him out through the back.'

  'Good idea.'

  Greene snapped off his gloves with disgust and tossed them into the hall. 'Dare I ask if anyone saw anything?'

  'We spoke to some of the neighbours, and no one knows anything. But we haven't done a canvass yet.'

  'And who notified you guys?'

  'PC Degraaf took a call before lunch. He says Ulmer had a homecare appointment at eleven, but he didn't answer the door.'

  'Who was the caller?'

  'We could find that out for you.'

  'You didn't ask?' said Greene, incredulously.

  'He said Ulmer sometimes slept through his appointments.'

  'But he called the police, this man? If this was a normal occurrence, why would he call you?'

  Matthiessen shuffled his feet a little. 'I don't know. Maybe he didn't want to have to circle back and check on Ulmer again. We sent a car out at three.'

  Greene was shaking his head in disbelief. 'You didn't want to interrupt his nap, I guess.'

  'Do we have a recording of this call?' said Hazel.

  The officer looked down. 'Sorry, Chief. We're not in the habit of doing that. And it was so fast ...'

  'Who's your commanding?'

  Matthiessen leaned back a little and looked through the door. They all turned, but there was no one there. 'We're between commandings,' he said. 'Our skip retired last year. Seventy-four years old. East Central promised us a new guy by the end of the summer, but you know how things are.'

  She certainly did. Was the OPS planning on leaving every detachment north of Toronto rudder-less? There were great savings to be had in places where the population wasn't large enough to make a noise. 'So it's you and Degraaf.'

  'We have a couple of volunteers.'

  'Good Lord,' said Hazel. 'You couldn't break up a barfight here.'