The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

'Should you be telling me this?'

  'I can trust you.'

  There was silence on the other end for a moment. 'It's late, Hazel.'

  'I know it's late, Andrew. But I figure thirty-six years of marriage entitles me to a late-night phone call once in a while. On days like this.'

  'Okay,' he said. 'Just a second.' He put the phone down on a hard surface, and Hazel strained to hear the brief conversation her ex-husband was having with his second wife, a woman he'd met two years before their marriage ended. At the time, and to this day, she could not begrudge the fact that her husband had cheated on her. It was so completely out of his character that she had been forced to see it as a necessity. By 2000, with Drury gone and all the new responsibility fallen to her, her drinking was out of hand. She'd had to shift her hours forward to accommodate her difficult mornings, and when he finally saw her in the evenings, she'd already put away a couple at the Thirsty Goose and had left him to eat dinner on his own. She'd cleaned up by 2002, the year they divorced, but by then it was too late; he'd fallen in love with a new lawyer at his company. The firm was called McMaster Pedersen Crombie – Glynnis, née Crombie, had made partner the year after the divorce – and now this Glynnis Pedersen sported what used to be her last name. She hadn't felt an ounce of anger. The sadness had never given way to it. 'We can talk now,' he said, coming back to the phone. She pictured him sitting on the bed, shirtless, his fine head of curly grey hair framing his face. She'd sometimes slept with her fingers in that hair.

  'You know, I don't think Glynnis likes me.'

  'She doesn't know you, dear. To know you is to love you.'

  'Thank you for that.'

  'So, how much have you had tonight?'

  'I'm not drunk, Andrew. I'm Percocet.'

  'Ah. So dangerously relaxed?'

  She finished the finger of Bushmills and cast a glance over at the bottle. She knew if she had one more, she'd be stepping over an edge. She looked away from it. 'Did Marty tell you she and Scott broke up?'

  'She did. I think it's a good thing. I wasn't crazy about him.'

  'I wasn't either. But she's heartbroken.'

  'Martha's strong, Hazel. She's her mother's daughter.'

  'How old is Glynnis?'

  'For God's sake.' He was laughing. 'Why don't you date, Hazel? Just go out with someone nice and have supper. Get back out there.'

  'Where am I going to find someone to date me, for the love of Pete? Should I just go out and cuff someone? Toss them into a banquette at Silvio's and hold a gun on them until they order a carafe of the house red?'

  'You can make it sound impossible, Hazel, and then it will be. There are ways.'

  'Single white divorcée, sixty-one, arresting, seeking man with clean record.' 'It would be a start.'

  'I'd like to see you sometime. For dinner.'

  'I'd like that, too,' he said.

  'I suppose Perky couldn't complain if you saw your ex-wife behind her back.'

  'I would tell her, Hazel. It wouldn't be behind her back.'

  'It was behind my back.'

  He sighed. This was territory that was well worth staying out of. But she knew that Andrew could not suppress his penchant for truthfulness, and he said, 'It could have been on the front lawn, dear. You wouldn't have noticed. For the top cop of a major township, you had your blind spots.'

  'I guess I did.'

  'I'm going to go,' he said. 'Call me during the day at my office and we'll figure out a time to have a nice lunch, okay?'

  'You're talking to me the way I talk to my mother.'

  'How is Her Honour?'

  'Trying to slim me down for some future altar. Maybe a sacrificial one, I haven't figured that out yet.'

  'Call me, Hazel.'

  'Fine.'

  'And go to bed now.'

  She hung up and stared at the phone, silenced in its cradle. That old voice there, which used to ring in this house. Her glass was empty. She got up from the couch and picked up the bottle, pretended to read the label – DISTILLED THREE TIMES it read (imagine being capable of such purity) – and then put the bottle back on top of the fridge.

  She opened the door to her mother's room and stepped in quietly to turn off the radio. In the fresh silence, she listened to her mother's soft breathing. She remembered the profound pleasure of sleeping in her parents' bed as a child, escaping a nightmare to the safety of their warmth. She'd once woken between them in the middle of the night and watched the curtains in their bedroom transform into a carousel full of children. The sensation of this sanctuary came back to her as if she had just sat up in that bed of fifty-five years ago. She smoothed the covers over her mother's back and closed the door behind her. As she turned, she saw a wave of light swim through the window of the front door and move off down the street, the sound of its source humming past. It was late to be out, but she had the urge to go back down to the main floor and look outside. The car had already vanished down the street and turned another corner. She looked across the street at the Edwardhses house – all the lights were off, although she sensed the thin glow from a light left on in an upstairs bathroom.

  She had her coat on now, although she could not remember slipping it on, and the car keys were in her hand. The night air was sweet and cool, like riverwater. Hazel got into the Crown Victoria and turned right out of her driveway. The 117 between Pember Lake and Port Dundas was not lit, and she snapped the brights up and drove the empty road. The twin cones of light drenched the trees on either side in a wash of brilliance and the leafless birches glowed in her headlights like bones standing in the earth. And then, as if her mind had wandered, she was making the turn onto the main street of Port Dundas, drifting down it under the lonesome streetlamps. A few people were still out, leaving bars or walking their dogs once more before turning in. Although what time was it? The dashboard clock said it was half past two in the morning; no one should be out with their dog now, she thought.

  She went up the hill past the station house and saw a man and a woman walking hand-in-hand past the funeral home. Her father and Delia Chandler. They gazed calmly through Hazel's windshield, and she thought she saw her father's hand rise faintly in greeting. A long thin tube trailed from under Delia's dress and skittered on the sidewalk behind her. Hazel passed them and continued to the top of the hill, where she turned left and descended again into the side streets. The one she drove down was packed on either side with black Ford Cougars, their yellow headlights steadily burning. She pulled over beside Delia's house and got out, ducked under the police tape lining the front lawn, and rang the doorbell. Delia answered and let her into the lemon tea-scented house. She was wearing a blue wool dress and stood in the living room waiting in front of Hazel with her hands folded over her belly. She passed a teacup on a saucer to Hazel, but Hazel declined. She asked if she could look around, and Delia gestured with her hand in a broad sweep. The place was spotless. She opened a couple of cupboards in the living room and kitchen. The ones in the living room were empty, but the one in the kitchen had a small campfire silently burning on the floor within. Hazel held her hands over it, but a cold draught of air lifted off the yellow flame. She closed the door on it. When she turned around, Delia was standing behind her under the single light in the kitchen ceiling, hands at her sides. Her eyes were translucent white, like raw albumen, and the damp cut across her throat hung loose. Hazel heard the susurration of air from inside the gash and then the edges of the cut began to move like a mouth. She stared at the huge wound as it stretched and pursed and thinned itself and the air behind it hissed. Shhaassahhm nuhhhh, said the tear in Delia's throat, and Hazel stepped toward the dead woman to hear better. She turned her ear in. Hazel, she heard, Hazel and then the voice began choking and Hazel righted herself to the vision of blood gushing from Delia Chandler's neck, the wound smacking and spitting.

  She woke to the sound of her own cries and lay in the bed, wet with sweat and tears pouring down her face. She sat up and switched on her bedside light and began writing
her dream down around the edge of a page from the Westmuir Record. Delia, she wrote, what are you trying to tell me?

  * * *

  Ray Greene and James Wingate stood in front of her as she pushed two of the crime-scene photos across her desk toward them. 'Everything but the mouths is a distraction. We have to focus on the mouths.'

  Greene spun the photo of Ulmer's destroyed face toward her. 'If the mouths are so important, then why did he do this?'

  'I thought about that. I think the rest of the Belladonna's killings are farther apart than Delia and Ulmer. Nothing he's done hasn't been thought through completely – he must have been worried that the same people would be investigating both of these killings. So he broke the link.' She put her finger on Delia Chandler's mouth. 'But he did this to Ulmer too – changed his mouth. Then he covered his tracks, as it were, with a hammer.' The detectives stood staring at the pictures of the two victims. 'We have to find the ones who came before now,' she said, 'the ones far enough apart that no one has linked them.' She swept the pictures back into a folder. 'James, I want you back on the phone. Find me an unsolved murder less than two weeks old in a town no bigger than Port Dundas. It should be between five and nine hundred kilometres from here.' She brought her eyes up from Delia's mouth and saw Wingate was staring at her, lost. 'Where's it eight a.m. right now?' she said.

  Greene looked at his watch. 'Uh, here Hazel.'

  'Fine. Wait an hour and start calling some stations in the western part of the province and in Manitoba.'

  Wingate left and Greene stepped back to shut the door. He turned and stood with his arms crossed, watching Hazel lower herself gingerly into her chair. 'You okay?'

  'I'm fine.'

  'You don't sleep much.'

  'I lie awake and try to figure things out.'

  'Fatigue isn't the key to unlocking the where-abouts of a serial murderer.'

  She put her hands flat on the desk and stared at her second-in-command. 'You want me to take the day off? Wander the streets and reassure people? Go find something to do, Ray. Call Howard or go through yesterday's sheets and find out if there's anything we should be following up on apart from this bastard. Okay?'

  'It's been four days, you know, Hazel. It's still early. I'm just saying—'

  'Go check the day sheets, Ray! Leave me alone.'

  * * *

  Greene went out into the pen and closed Hazel's door behind him. Cartwright had heard Hazel raise her voice and eyed him as he went past. 'I'm fine,' he said.

  'Can I ask you something?' He stopped beside her desk. 'I don't think I should be bothering the chief with this right now.'

  'So you want to bother me with it?'

  'They saw the cougar again in Kehoe River, and I don't know what to tell them down there.'

  Greene shook his head. 'What do they think we're going to be able to do? Tell Lonergan or whoever it is that's calling you that we're not the frigging Wildlife Services here!'

  Cartwright blinked at him. 'All right, Detective. And in your opinion, is that who they should be calling?'

  'That would be my opinion, Melanie. Unless that cat can ring doorbells and slit people's throats, maybe you should be referring them elsewhere.'

  'Okay. Then I'll tell Ken Lonergan it's okay with you to keep his gun at the ready just in case.' He stared at her. Sometimes Melanie was cowed by Hazel, but she wouldn't be pushed around by him he saw, and it struck him then why Hazel had hired her. She said, 'He feels it incumbent on him to protect the citizens of his town.'

  'Ken Lonergan said incumbent.'

  'He's the only one in Kehoe River with a rifle.'

  'Fine, Melanie. Give me yesterday's log. I'll kill two birds with one stone.'

  She passed him the call binder without taking her eyes off him.

  Howard Spere arrived at the station house an hour later. 'Fourteen at Delia Chandler's,' he said, tossing the sheaf of lab reports onto the conferenceroom table, 'and then fifteen from the sample taken from Michael Ulmer's hands. Neither aggregate blood sample actually contained the blood of the victim it was found on.' He fanned the lab tests out across the table. The Toronto lab had separated out fifteen separate DNA signatures from the Ulmer site. Fourteen of them matched the bloodstains on Delia Chandler's clothing; the fifteenth signature was Delia's. Ray Greene was still in Kehoe River, but Wingate and Hazel cast their eyes over the papers spread on the table.

  She picked up the lab report closest to her and pushed another one across the table to Wingate. The one she held told of an unnamed human being whose unique DNA was being painted like an autograph in a scrapbook of the dead. It was a chain, a message being passed down a wire. 'So this is it, then,' she said. 'We really have a serial killer here.'

  'It would look that way,' said Spere.

  'Before he got to Port Dundas, he managed to kill fourteen people without attracting any suspicion that anything more significant was going on than garden-variety murder,' she said. 'There are fourteen little station houses or police outposts throughout this country asking themselves why anyone would want to hurt Uncle Bob or Granny Faye. They don't know the body in their morgue has something in common with the ones in ours.' She paused for a moment. 'When we find where these other people were killed, we can't say why we're interested.'

  'Why?' said Wingate.

  'Because he's getting close to the end of his task. He's at least in Quebec, and if he's been able, to this point, to spread sixteen murders across this country without setting off alarm bells, then they've been spread widely. He must know Delia and Ulmer were too close. Like I said, that's why there's no mouth on Michael Ulmer to solidify the connection for us.'

  'Surely if he's this smart he knows we'd notice there were fifteen different blood samples on his latest victim.'

  'Then this is his first mistake,' said Hazel. 'Let's hope he makes another one.'

  She flicked an arm out toward Wingate. 'What have you found out?'

  'So far, a body in Pikangikum, north of Dryden,' he said, opening his notebook. 'It was last Tuesday, the ninth.'

  'Three days before Chandler,' said Howard Spere. Hazel pushed aside the easel from the previous afternoon and tugged down the provincial map on the wall behind the table. Pikangikum was about one hundred kilometres northwest of Red Lake, close to the Manitoba border. It was a First Nations reserve.

  'Is this the Ontario Police Services up there, or does the reserve have its own police?'

  'They've got four native officers.' Wingate looked down at his notes. 'I spoke to the senior constable there, Gordon Chencillor. The victim was an elderly band member named Joseph Atlookan ... eighty-three years old. They've ruled it a suicide now, said the victim had cut his own throat.'

  'That's what it must have looked like,' said Hazel. 'Was he dying of something before he was killed?'

  'Whoa,' said Spere. 'It's possible to cut your own throat, you know. I don't want to sound insensitive or anything, but let's say this old guy was dying of something – he is an old man living on an Indian reserve.'

  Hazel ignored him. 'What about the coroner's report, James? Are there any pictures?'

  'I'll ask. They're going to want to know why, though.'

  'Say you're investigating an apparent suicide down here on the M'njikaning Reserve. You want to check out the Atlookan death to rule out foul play.'

  'These places have their own police, Inspector – why would I be calling from Port Dundas?'

  'Use your imagination, Detective. Maybe there's been a spate of suicides on reserves close to Port Dundas and you're looking for a pattern. Just get me some details on this old man. And get Jack a blood or a tissue sample. Do whatever it takes. I bet this guy is on Delia Chandler's dress.' She picked up the phone on the table and dialled Melanie's extension. She used her other hand to wave the two men out of her room and off to work. 'Hold on,' she said to Cartwright, and covered the receiver. 'Howard, where are we on Delia's computer?'

  'Nowhere. It's a dead end. She wanted a new duvet cover,
but I guess she changed her mind and chose death instead.'

  'You're a model of compassion, Howard. Keep them looking.' He went out and she put the phone back to her ear. 'Where's Ray?' She listened a moment, then hung up and got her cell out. She stared at the buttons for a moment and then dialled. It worked. 'Ray?' she said, 'I thought you were supposed to be going over the logs.'

  'Yeah, thanks for the promotion, boss. I'm in Kehoe River trying to disarm Ken Lonergan. I was going to look over the logs on lunch.'

  'Get back here. I'm putting you in charge of all the Belladonna's movements east of Renfrew County.'

  'The rest of the country is east of Renfrew, Hazel.'

  'You'll understand in a minute. James found a dead native man about twelve hundred kilometres from here, on the Manitoba border. He's been dead exactly one week.'

  'This is the only small-town murder Wingate could find in the province?'

  'He was eighty-three, with his throat cut, Ray. Delia was on Friday, Ulmer on Sunday. The next one's going to be farther away. I want you to find it as soon as it happens. The next victim is going to be number seventeen.'

  There was no sound from the other end of the line. Then, 'What?'

  'Seventeen, Ray. And counting. The lab found fifteen different sets of genes in the blood on Ulmer's hands, and none of them were Ulmer's. But one of them was Delia's. Her clothes had the blood of fourteen people on it. But not hers. Are you getting any of this?'

  'God,' said Ray Greene, then, 'hold on.' She heard his voice from an arm's-length distance: 'Hey!' he said, and his voice sounded curious and frightened at once. 'What the Christ—' he said, and then Hazel heard the sharp report of a gunshot.

  'Ray!' she shouted. She could hear a commotion on the other end of the line, but the voices were indistinct. In the middle distance, there was the sound of another gunshot and someone roaring in pain. Her cellphone skittered across the conference-room table, and she rushed out into the pen. 'I need cars! Whoever's closest to Kehoe River!' She rushed through the bewildered room, pulling on her jacket. 'Someone get on dispatch and get to Kehoe River right now! Ray Greene's been shot—'