by Giles Blunt
The office was located in an exquisitely maintained corner house on Woodrow at Sumner, with a wraparound porch and casement windows and a well-tended lawn. It looked like a set from a TV series about a happy family; all it needed was a swing set on the side lawn. Cardinal had been here several times, when Larry Carnwright had handled the sale of his house.
The receptionist informed him that Randall Wishart was representing the Schumacher property. Wishart came out and shook hands with him and led him back to an office decorated with flattering photographs of Algonquin Bay houses that the Carnwright firm had sold. This being a high-end outfit, there was also a fair bit of art around the place. A small, squat Inuit sculpture of a polar bear sat on top of a bookcase full of binders, and a large, colourful painting or print—Cardinal was never quite sure of the difference—had one wall to itself. There were also plenty of pictures of a sharp-eyed blond woman—in a skiing outfit, in a poolside lounge chair, and a professional portrait in a blue pinstripe suit. She had the startling blue eyes of the Carnwright family.
“Have a seat,” Wishart said, indicating a chair. He was handsome in a conventional way, late twenties or so, with something of the look of a politician. Not a hair out of place. “Are you here on police business or about a house?”
“Both. I have some questions about the Schumacher place out on Island Road.”
“Don’t tell me they’ve had a break-in.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Happens all the time with lake properties—well, I’m sure you know. Was there a break-in?”
“You didn’t hear the news on the radio this morning?”
“What news?”
“You’re the Schumachers’ agent, correct?”
“I guess so.”
“You’re not sure?”
Wishart smiled. “Well, this is confidential, but the Schumachers are not serious about selling. I knew that right off. I wanted to take a video of the place—it’s standard for the online listings—but they wouldn’t let me. They’re asking way above market, and I think it’s really just a ploy to get their kids to move back to Algonquin Bay. Kind of an empty-nest thing. I took them on for goodwill—if they ever really decide to sell that place, I’d love to handle it.”
“Have you been out there recently?”
Wishart pursed his lips and shook his head. “Not recently. Not for a few weeks, anyway. I’m gonna go out there and take that sign down. It’s just an invitation to trouble, obviously.”
The key was not a crucial matter—the back door of the house had been jimmied, after all—but Cardinal asked anyway.
“Yes, I have a key. I should probably return it. They’re a nice old couple, the Schumachers, but believe it or not, we do actually like to sell houses, not just put up signs.” Wishart sat forward and opened a desk drawer. He rattled around and pulled out a key and put it on his desk. “That’ll remind me to get it back to them.”
“Have you shown the house to anyone?”
“Not a soul. Had a lot of inquiries, though.”
“Phone calls? Or did you actually meet with anyone?”
“Lots of calls. The asking price put ’em off pretty quick. And a few people looked at the picture out on the veranda and came in to ask about it. That stopped soon as I added the price to the posting, though.”
“Did any of the inquiries strike you as suspicious?”
“Suspicious in what way? People are always inquiring about houses they can’t come close to affording.”
“Perhaps someone just trying to determine if the house was unoccupied at the moment? Asking after the owners’ whereabouts or habits, for example?”
“No one like that. Just people who like the idea of owning a house out on Trout Lake. No shortage of those.”
“All right. Is there anything else you can think of to tell me?”
“Well, no. I mean, it could be anybody, right? We’re talking about a break-in.”
“Actually, two people were murdered and had their heads cut off.”
Wishart went very still and blinked a few times but didn’t look away. When he spoke again, his voice was solemn. “Did I hear you right?”
“You did.”
“My God. You said they were … decapitated?”
“That’s right.”
“My God,” he said again. “But—so, are you looking for some insane individual, like a psycho of some sort?”
“Of some sort.”
“My God.”
“Just for the record, Mr. Wishart, can you tell me where you were Thursday night?”
“Thursday night? That’s easy. I was watching the game at a friend’s place. Leafs lost, of course. Troy was destroyed. He’s a serious Leafs fan. I mean serious. God, I can’t get over this.”
“Troy?”
“Troy Campbell. We went to high school together.”
“I’ll need his address. Home and work.”
“What? Oh, of course.”
Wishart gave him the addresses and Cardinal wrote them down. Then Wishart went with him to the front door, still a little stunned.
Cardinal asked him about the Acura parked outside.
“Pardon me?”
“The black Acura. It’s yours?”
“Oh. Yes. Speaking of things we can’t afford. God, I can’t get over this. It’s horrifying. Let me know if I can do anything to help.”
“You can. We need you to come down to the station to be fingerprinted.”
“Sure. Absolutely. I’ll try to get down later in the week.”
“Today, Mr. Wishart.”
—
On his way back to the office, Cardinal stopped off at the local hockey arena, which was called Memorial Gardens, although no one knew in memory of what. It was only a couple of blocks from work. Cardinal couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to a game, but even though the concession stands were not open at this hour, the smells of popcorn and caramel hadn’t changed. A janitor mopping the front lobby directed him to the security office.
A lot of security people are former police officers, or people who want to be police officers. Troy Campbell was neither. A tall man with shoulders that looked like they could support a small cathedral, Campbell was a former captain of the Algonquin Bay Trappers, the local Junior A hockey team. A photograph on the cinder-block wall showed him swooping away from a goal, stick high in the air. He still had the blond hair of the photograph, but it was thinner now, unlike the rest of him.
“What can I do for you, Detective? The only time I see police is when we have to charge some drunk for throwing bottles on the ice.” Campbell had the easy confidence of a man who is used to being the biggest in the room.
“I’m investigating a major crime, and right now I’m just nailing down a few corroborating details.”
“Nothing at the Gardens, I hope.”
“No. But I need to know where you were Thursday night.”
“Where I was.”
“That’s what I said.”
“I don’t understand. Why do I have to tell you where I was?”
“You don’t have to. But it’s pertinent to our investigation, so it depends how helpful you want to be. Or not.”
Campbell laughed. “Sorry. Don’t get me wrong. I’m just mystified. I’m glad to help. Thursday night I was here. Intramural game.”
“You were here.”
“Yeah. No, wait. Thursday? Thursday I was home. Watching the Leafs on TSN. Total, blatant robbery. You see it?”
“Leafs lost, I take it.”
“It was obscene, no other word for it. There was no way Komisarek threw the first punch. Five minutes for fighting and they go from one-nothing to a three-one loss. Ref that called it was Desrosiers. Biased much? Anybody but a French Canadian could see that fight was started by Laraque. I mean, look at the tape, for God’s sake. I’m telling you, some people think refs don’t know what they’re doing, but refs know exactly what they’re doing. They know exactly.”
“Anybody watch it with you?”
“Yeah, Randy Wishart. Buddy of mine. Ask him. I nearly threw my beer at the TV screen, and I’m not gonna tell you what I paid for that sucker.”
Cardinal got a few more details, and then thanked him for his help.
“Hey, any time. Let me give you some free tickets to the Trappers.”
“Thanks, but I really can’t. It makes me too crazy.”
“Crazy?” Campbell’s wide brow furrowed, and he rubbed a hand through his thinning blondness. “You mean cuz of all the fights?”
“The refs. It’s just too painful.”
“Well, yeah, but up here when they make a mistake, it’s cuz they’re old or blind. Montreal, it’s an outright conspiracy.”
5
WHEN CARDINAL GOT BACK to the station, Ident’s walls were covered with photographs. Images were tacked to the bulletin board, to the shelves, and taped to the windows, making their cramped quarters even more claustrophobic than usual. The pictures showed every conceivable angle on footprints and tire prints. And the arrangement didn’t make much sense to Cardinal until Paul Arsenault started explaining.
“The fresh snow gives us a pretty clear picture of who’s who,” he said. “We’ve got tire tracks from two vehicles.” He pointed to a photograph. “These were there first. We’re checking the databases, but for now we know that it’s a mid-size car, not too heavy. The second vehicle is smaller and lighter, pretty new treads. Its tracks are on top of the other car’s, but we can’t say anything more than that in terms of timing.
“Now, shoe prints. Again, the initial sorting is easy because we were able to take moulds from the shoes of the two victims. The woman’s boots—tiny triangular front, small square for the heel, size fives. The man’s are size twelve galoshes—note the shallow tread. Hers are Manolo Blahniks, his are Cole Haan—didn’t have to look those up, obviously, since they were still at the scene. Took some fibres off the tread of the man’s galoshes, but fibres, you know—that’s out of our league.
“Which leaves our headhunter. Same size, but a totally different kind of boot. Look at that: deep tread on heel and toe. We’re talking serious outdoor footwear here, and I’d say they’re pretty new. We should be able to get a make on those pretty quick.”
“Tell him about the master bedroom.” Collingwood spoke from his desk without looking at them.
“Well, we’ve got the broken window and the blood. And we’ve got clear prints from the sill and the chair. Blood type is different from the other room.
“Under the bed, even more interesting. Good layer of dust under there, and look at this. We lifted the bed out of the way to shoot these. You can see where someone’s hands were—not the kind of prints you might make pulling something out from under the bed.”
“No, looks more like someone slid under there to hide.”
“Handprints this end, facing out. And this way you’ve got leg and toe. Yeah, we think someone was hiding. Picked up some hairs from the top of the bed. A couple of them short, brown. Another one long, black. Now, I’ve met the Schumachers—they came in right away to give prints—so I know these hairs have nothing to do with them. We also know that some of the prints on the bedside tables are theirs and some of them are not. One set matches whoever broke out the window, the other set matches some we found on the front door but nowhere else—not on the table or the glasses.”
“Let me get this straight,” Cardinal said. “You’re saying we’re looking at five different people now, not just four?”
“Looks that way.”
“We’ve got all these prints but nothing that matches any criminal record?”
“Not yet. Could still happen, though. Problem for me and Bob is too much evidence, not too little. For example, we pulled a whole bunch of blue fibres off the top of the bed. No big deal, except we didn’t find any blue blankets—we photographed the linen closets and the other beds, you can see for yourself. Plus, I asked the Schumachers and they say they don’t own any blue blankets.”
“I’m still trying to get my head around five people,” Cardinal said. “One of them hiding under the bed.”
Collingwood spoke from his desk. “Tell him about the wood.”
Arsenault pointed to another photograph. A boot print. Beside it, an extreme close-up. The short dark line that appeared in the heel of the first image showed in the second image as a fragment of something. Cardinal leaned closer. When he stepped back, he bumped into Arsenault, who was holding up a small plastic Baggie with the fragment in it.
“This’ll have to go to Toronto too. It’s a splinter—not big enough for us to figure out what kind of wood, but take a sniff.” He held the Baggie open and Cardinal sniffed.
“It’s pretty faint. Gasoline? Or maybe oil?”
“Yeah, something like that. We figure maybe someone who works in a garage.”
“Really? It’s not like we had all sorts of grease stains at the scene.”
“Szelagy’s got that warehouse arson—maybe this guy is connected with that. Not that we got any boot prints from that scene.”
“I’m going to have to think about it,” Cardinal said. “We can’t just be looking for someone who wore boots in a garage.”
Loud voices and the scrape of furniture. Sounds of an altercation out front.
Cardinal left Ident and went to the front desk. Delorme was already there, along with McLeod and Dunbar, watching a street cop struggling to hold on to a man of about fifty who was handcuffed at his side.
The man was yelling over and over again, “You’re arresting the wrong guy. I’m not the one committing the crimes. Do you have any idea what they do to those animals?”
The uniformed cop wasn’t letting it ruffle him. “Act your age. You’ll get your say in court.”
“Let me go. You’re holding the wrong person, for Chrissake.” The man twisted around and kicked at the officer.
“All right, that’s it. You’re going in the cell now.”
Two other street cops took hold of the man and dragged him away, still shouting. “It’s not even real blood! It’s paint—just paint, you Neanderthal. Haven’t you ever heard of free expression?”
The Neanderthal took off his parka and tossed it on a chair while he gave his information to the duty sergeant. He looked around at the audience. “Chad Pocklington. Every year he stomps right over to the fur auction and throws paint on the cars. Every single year. Guy’s got a serious case of Noone’s.”
This was a reference to an ancient line of graffiti that had long decorated the men’s room in Algonquin Bay’s former, now demolished, police station: Sparky Noone is full of shit.
6
ONE OF THE HEADACHES OF BEING a detective in a small city is that there is no forensic science centre nearby. Almost every homicide case requires numerous trips back and forth to Toronto, and it pretty much has to be the lead investigator who does this, along with a backup to make sure there is no question about chain of evidence.
Cardinal and Delorme didn’t get away until after lunch. It being Saturday, the traffic was not too bad, but they ran into blowing snow in Muskoka and a near whiteout around Barrie, and it took more than four hours to get to the Forensic Sciences Centre in downtown Toronto. They didn’t have to stay for an autopsy; there was still no pathologist available to do one. But it took them over an hour to nudge their evidence through the central receiving process before they could get back on the road for the trip home.
That night, Cardinal ate a late dinner at his kitchen table, flipping idly through pages of the Scriver file. Some of them—thermal faxes from the eighties—had gone perfectly blank. He put his dishes in the sink and shoved the massive file back into its box. He wouldn’t be getting to it any time soon.
He sat up for a while in his underventilated living room watching the late night shows, even though he found them neither funny nor informative. He switched them off and read for a while in a self-help book about how to never get upset about anything. Delorme ha
d highly recommended it, but Cardinal found the author’s relentless optimism irritating, not least because it was expressed in exclamation marks. What use was advice that suggested you shouldn’t be upset about unsolved cases, decapitated corpses?
He went to bed sweaty and grumpy and woke in the middle of the night. The red glow of his alarm clock said 3:50. For months after Catherine’s death he had woken up every hour. But this was different. The wisp of a dream was still hanging in the darkness. He had seen himself standing by Arsenault in the ident room. They had been examining the sliver of wood in the Baggie, holding it to their noses and sniffing.
“Some kind of solvent, maybe,” Arsenault had said.
Then Cardinal had taken the Baggie from him, held it under his own nose and sniffed. “I know what it is,” he said. And that was what woke him up.
He got out of bed and went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He thought about phoning Arsenault to tell him his idea but decided not to wake him. He got dressed, put on his Kodiak boots and his North Face parka and went out.
It wasn’t as cold as it had been, maybe ten below, but Cardinal hadn’t had breakfast and it felt much colder. He set the car heater to blow onto the windshield, backed out of his parking slot and headed out through the brick gate that marked the boundary of his condominium’s property.
The government dock was less than three minutes away by car. Main West, a residential area of oversized houses and ancient trees, was deserted. Only one house had any lights on, and a car was warming up in its driveway, plumes of grey exhaust billowing from its tailpipe.
Cardinal made a right turn toward Lake Nipissing. He parked on the shoulder of the road near the wharf, switched off the car and got out. The thin layer of snow had mostly either blown away or melted on the wooden dock. Cardinal stood for a moment and sniffed. Even in the minus-ten air the oily smell of creosote was strong.
