Crime Machine

by Giles Blunt

  Two dark figures stood on the rocky beach of the island, Jerry Commanda and Ian McLeod. Behind them, a beautiful summer house of red cedar had replaced the homely Scriver cottage. The Schumacher property was visible across the short stretch of ice that was now churned and broken as if it had been jackhammered. Jerry Commanda was a persuasive guy, but it must have taken a star performance even by his standards to persuade Natural Resources to produce their breaker. It was nothing like a Coast Guard boat, amounting to little more than a modified outboard with a reinforced, sharpened prow, and another two weeks of winter would have rendered it useless. Progress was noisy but slow.

  At Cardinal’s request, their pilot steered the boat around the elongated tip of the island, opposite to the direction the Scrivers would have taken had they been crossing the bay to get to a movie. Cardinal tapped on the door of a squat, telephone booth–like structure in the middle of the boat and spoke to the OPP technician inside.

  “Anything yet?”

  The tech shook his head. “Just a lot of logs. Amazingly well preserved, considering there hasn’t been any logging here for at least sixty years.” Cardinal could see over his shoulder that the images were crisp and clear.

  “How deep?”

  “Ninety, ninety-five feet. It’ll get deeper real soon.”

  “Scriver senior helped map the underwater geography,” Cardinal told Delorme, “and his son worked with him a couple of summers on fish surveys and so on. They both would have known the lake very well.”

  They came around the tip of the island and the wind picked up. A slice of black water eased the way for fifty yards or so.

  The diver spoke up for the first time. “Deepest part of the lake coming up. Hundred, hundred and twenty metres. Current moves in the opposite direction, so they likely wouldn’t have searched this area back when.”

  “And they assumed the Scrivers were headed toward town,” Cardinal said.

  On the island, Jerry Commanda and Ian McLeod emerged from the trees and stood on the beach. Both folded their arms at the same moment against the wind, as if they had rehearsed.

  The booth door opened and the tech called out, “Got something.”

  Cardinal leaned in. Again he marvelled at the clarity of the image. “Delorme, you gotta see this.”

  Delorme stuck her head in. “Can we get closer?”

  “Hell, yes,” the tech said. “Closing in as we speak. It’s snagged under an outcropping. No way the old sonars would have detected it.”

  The image took on greater contrast and definition. An oar hanging over a gunwale. An outboard off the stern.

  “Two hundred and thirty feet,” the tech said. “You see what’s in that thing?”

  “Yes,” Cardinal said. “I do.”

  They helped the diver screw on his helmet. He switched on his lights, and the red LED began to flash on his tiny videocam. He climbed over the side and lowered himself into the water, and they watched him sink into darkness. He had to pause several times on the way down to adjust to the pressure.

  Cardinal’s phone rang and he took it from his inside pocket and opened it. It was Ian McLeod, wanting to know how long he was expected to hang out on a beach in the middle of goddam winter. He could see McLeod giving him the finger across the water. “Hang in there,” Cardinal said.

  “By the way—checked out Divyris’s so-called business contacts. He’s dreaming. Yes, he has been meeting with people, talking with people, hounding people, and they’re totally sick of him. Apparently he won’t take no for an answer. One guy’s threatening to sue the bastard for harassment. Are you having fun out there?”

  “Hell, yes. This’ll be in the papers tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, but in a good way?”

  Cardinal clicked off and watched the video monitor, the sunken boat coming into view.

  “Are we sure it’s the Scrivers?” Delorme said.

  “Fourteen-foot aluminum. Evinrude thirty-five on the back,” Cardinal said. He asked the tech to get the diver to scan the motor. A couple of seconds later the image changed and the motor filled the screen. Cold and depth combined make an excellent preservative, and the lettering was still visible after forty years. Evinrude thirty-five.

  When the diver turned back to the boat, Cardinal heard Delorme’s sudden intake of breath and felt his own pulse jump.

  “There are only two bodies,” Cardinal said. “Ask him to get close on the faces.”

  It took the pilot a moment to respond. “He says they don’t have any faces.” The image drifting lazily across the monitor screen confirmed this. “They don’t even have any heads.”

  “I have a feeling,” Cardinal said, “that this is not the usual disarticulation you get with drowning victims.”

  The tech shook his head. “Too deep. Too cold. Anyway, the feet would have detached first, then the hands, and as you can see, the extremities are still intact. Minus a finger or two.”

  “Forty years,” Delorme said. “Incredible.”

  No sound but the scrape of ice against their hull. Hundreds of feet below, the water was perfectly clear. The zoom lens lurched into extreme close-up, swerving from one detail to another: a jagged hole in the hull, then another, both made from the inside. The diver’s light flared off sharp edges of aluminum. Then a third gash.

  “Look at that,” Cardinal said. “The axe is still wedged in it.”

  The view swung back to the bodies, extreme close-up, the white gleam of neck bone.

  —

  Aromas of fresh coffee and pastries filled the meeting room. All the CID personnel were there, and Chouinard was so excited he had even called Police Chief R. J. Kendall to sit in on the debriefing. The mood was festive, even triumphant.

  “You’re losing me,” Chouinard said, in urgency, not anger. “Who was it dies of leukemia?”

  “Curtis Carl Winston. Eighteen-year-old brother of Martin Scriver’s girlfriend. Never did anything suspicious in his life until he joined the army—which wouldn’t be suspicious either, except for the fact he did it two months after he died.”

  “So we think Martin Scriver killed his parents and took off? He joins the army using someone else’s identity?”

  “Back then, all you needed was the name of a dead person close to your own age. He gets a few years in the military, Northern Rangers—where, incidentally, he becomes intimately familiar with the Browning HP nine-mil, their official sidearm at the time.”

  “And he keeps the name ever since?”

  “There’d be no need to change it. No one was looking for Curt Winston, and it’s not like it’s such a peculiar name there couldn’t be more than one person with it. Also, he moved to the States soon after discharge. FBI New York is pulling out all the stops for us on this. They’ve already traced Winston back to several different businesses going back to the seventies—tanneries, fur farms, always stuff connected to the fur trade. He was located for a long time near Seattle, and also just north of New York—both fur auction centres. We’re making a list of our locals who’ve been in the business for decades and we’re going to start talking to them tomorrow.”

  “Back up a minute.” Chief Kendall raised his hand as if to halt oncoming traffic. “Just because the boy’s body is not found with his parents doesn’t make him a murderer. His body could have drifted away. He could have been kidnapped. He could have been killed somewhere else.”

  Cardinal pulled a photo from the folder in front of him. “Got this from Armed Forces archives. Curtis Winston’s enlistment photo.” He handed it to the chief and reached into his briefcase and pulled out a book. “Chippewa High School yearbook, 1969. Take a look at Martin Scriver’s picture. It would have been taken about a year earlier.”

  “Fantastic,” Kendall said. “This is very good work.”

  “Martin Scriver had some problems with violence—put a hockey referee in hospital, for example. I’m thinking he lost it with his parents, possibly over something trivial, and he went crazy with the axe. We’ve got two
cases in the States where a couple and their child are murdered. And Bastov would have been a third, except the son had to miss his flight. In some screwed-up way, he could be re-enacting the crime over and over again.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I’m not saying it’s sane. Maybe to suggest there are other killers out there—killers who attack couples and their kids and chop them up. A twisted way to imply he never killed his parents, that it was the work of itinerant strangers.”

  “He’s murdering people to prove his innocence? Until today, nobody even knew for sure the Scrivers had been murdered.”

  “He did. It’s himself he’d be trying to convince.”

  Chouinard nodded at Jerry Commanda. “The lake is OPP territory. Are you guys going to boot us off?”

  “Oh no, sir. Scriver’s been a joint operation since the beginning of time. We’re happy to keep it that way. Besides, it’s totally bound up with Bastov.”

  “I take it that’s from your evidence warehouse?” Chouinard pointed at the banker’s box on the table in front of Jerry.

  Jerry tapped the top with a long index finger. “Martin Scriver’s stuff from the cottage. He left everything behind, even his wallet—probably to make it look like he was a victim. We got a toothbrush, and a hairbrush with some hairs in it could be useful for DNA. It’s at the Orillia lab. We have prints that were lifted from the cottage and from his wallet.”

  “I love this,” Chouinard said, and turned to Chief Kendall. “Don’t you love this?”

  “I’ll love it more when we have someone behind bars.”

  36

  CARDINAL WAS NOT MUCH GIVEN to parties or celebrations. But police work rarely went better than it had gone this day, so when Donna came round that night with a bottle of champagne in one hand and her notebook in the other, he was uncharacteristically effusive.

  They clinked glasses and he sat in the recliner and she sat on the end of the couch, pen poised above her notebook. She wanted to use a recording device but didn’t protest when he said no. “Learning shorthand,” she said, “is my one undeniable achievement in life.”

  Cardinal related the day’s events, beginning with his search through the ancient Scriver file. “It’s amazing,” he said. “When you get right down to it, a good file is a cop’s best friend. Routine interview, forty years ago, but the guy who did that interview made a careful note of a name. Completely peripheral—the son’s girlfriend’s brother, for God’s sake, you can’t get much more peripheral than that—and there it is, waiting for me forty years later.”

  “But it was you who thought there might be a connection,” Donna said. “Let’s not be too modest here.”

  Cardinal shrugged. “The name Winston rang a bell, that’s all.” He sat up and pulled the champagne from the ice bucket and filled her glass. “Champagne in the middle of the week. I can’t believe I’m this decadent.”

  It was making him light-headed, not his usual response to alcohol. Or perhaps it had more to do with this extremely attractive woman and her serious grey eyes. He told her about the new sonar, about the diver sinking into the black water, and about everything else, right up to the matching photographs. Then he sat back and said, “I never talk about my cases. I feel like a blabbermouth.”

  “But you’re hardly saying anything at all.” She tipped her head back in a silent laugh, exposing that pale throat, the perfect sculpture of neck and collarbone.

  The phone rang and Cardinal talked to Jerry Commanda for a few minutes, about their plan for the next day. “I got your list of the fur business lifers,” Jerry said. “You want some help interviewing them? Could generate a lead on where the guy’s holed up. Of course, if he has any sense, he’ll be long gone by now.”

  “I don’t think so,” Cardinal said. “I think he has unfinished business here. He killed Mendelsohn, and he may have come after an American reporter who’s been covering the fur business and the Bastovs for a couple of years.”

  He was looking at Donna as he spoke. She came over and knelt beside his chair and started undoing the buttons of his shirt.

  Jerry asked if the reporter was getting extra protection.

  “I’m working on that.” The heat of her fingers on his skin, undoing his belt. He grabbed her hand and held it while he finished with Jerry. “Listen, tomorrow I’m going to have the FBI’s complete file. It should arrive before ten. I’ll be taking a quick look at that and then I’m heading out to Lloyd Kreeger’s place. He’s the oldest guy on our list.”

  Jerry agreed to assign some of the others to OPP detectives and they would confer again in the afternoon.

  “What list?” Donna said when he hung up. She was still kneeling in front of him, hands on his thighs. “Who’s Lloyd Kreeger?”

  “Lloyd Kreeger is the oldest living man in the fur industry, at least around here. Also the richest. We’ve got a list of old-timers in the business who might recognize the airport security photo of our suspect. Until we get a direct lead on this guy’s whereabouts, it’s back to plod, plod, plod.”

  “You have a photo of your suspect and you weren’t going to show me?”

  “Didn’t even think of it, I got so excited about Scriver. We even have a name now. I can show you, but you can’t have a copy and you can’t tell anybody.”

  “No, that’s all right. Show me when you feel comfortable with it. Right now I’d rather just undo this belt.”

  Later, when she was putting on her clothes, Cardinal asked her to stay. “Look, the guy may have come after you before. He could try again.”

  “He chopped up a couple of people, he killed a cop and that ATM kid—do you honestly believe he’s still in the area?”

  “The OPP doesn’t. But I think he might be.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Yeah, but you also thought he was Russian mafiya.”

  “Touché.” She zipped up her jeans and pulled on her sweater.

  “Really, Donna—you might not be safe out there.”

  “All right, all right. Enough already.” A glint of anger in those grey eyes. “Sorry,” she said, and her face softened. “I’ve had bad experiences with people looking after me. I guess I overreact. Don’t get up. What are you doing?”

  “I’m walking you to your car.” Cardinal pulled on his pants and a sweater. “And don’t overreact.”

  —

  In the morning, Cardinal had Mendelsohn’s copy of the FBI file spread out on the meeting room table next to the new copy that had just arrived. Using both hands, he was turning over pages one by one, old file to the left, new file to the right.

  Also open on the desk, Mendelsohn’s tiny notebook. He had flipped through it again and found a note that he let linger in the back of his mind as he scanned the FBI files. Simultaneous crimes, the note said, from major to petty. Check. THINK! Mendelsohn’s notes were in the same emphatic voice as his speech, and Cardinal had a vivid image of the man in Morgan’s Chop House, explaining, italicizing, gesturing with his fork.

  Mendelsohn was right about the simultaneous crimes, of course. They knew the ATM robberies were committed by Winston’s young associate. But other crimes? Maybe in New York, but right now in Algonquin Bay there was nothing. As far as they knew.

  Cardinal paused, a hand on either file. Under both hands a handwritten note scrawled across an otherwise blank page: Begelman—photos to ViCap.

  Under his left hand, a file of some fifteen hundred pages. Under his right hand, the same thing—plus a manila envelope. He lifted it out from under the stack and opened it and pulled out scans of original photos. The scans were excellent, the U.S. federal government being significantly better funded than a small Ontario police department. Even the captions at the bottom of each one were sharp.

  Some were crime scene photos, courtesy of the NYPD. Nine-mil casings, headless torso, shattered computer screen. Cardinal flipped through these quickly. Then he came to a picture of a ramshackle old house partly hidden by trees, the caption Zabriskie Farm. Sea
rch following phone tip.

  Cardinal read the note on the search. They were looking for a young man named Jack, who according to the anonymous caller lived at the Zabriskie farm and seemed to know a lot about the Elmira murders. The place was occupied by a bunch of young people, most of them students at the state university located a few miles up the Hudson. Jack had come to the farm after meeting one of the students in a local bar. He’d only stayed two days, and they were glad to see him go. Photos of his room showed a bare mattress, a bare floor, a dog-eared copy of The Art of War.

  There were pictures of the residents, three on the porch steps, another couple in the kitchen. Cardinal could picture the police technique. They had no reason to arrest these people, but they wanted a record—faces to go with names—so they had taken the pictures in a casual way. It was something cops did for the sake of a complete file. There were two young women and two boys, early to mid-twenties all of them, and none looked like the vague description from the anonymous call: eighteen-year-old white male, five-ten, short hair. But Cardinal returned to the photo of the group on the porch and looked closer. He went very still and held on to it for a long time.

  —

  As far as Lise Delorme was concerned, Cardinal was behaving oddly. They had been scheduled to drive out to the Kreeger place, but instead of leaving together, he had told her to pick him up at the Highlands Lodge; he had to go out there and interview the manager again for some reason. It would have made more sense for them to just stop on the way, but he didn’t want to hear about it.

  So here she was parked in the Highlands parking lot, watching the skiers riding the hoist to the top of the escarpment. They were dressed in all manner of the latest gear, some even wearing balaclavas. The temperature was dropping and showed no sign of doing anything else for the rest of the day. Storm clouds were cascading over the hills, heading for Parry Sound, according to the radio.

  When Cardinal finally emerged, he pointed to his red Camry. Delorme got out and locked the unmarked. She went over to the Camry and opened the door. “Shouldn’t we use the company car?”