Blackfly Season

10

WHATEVER ELSE PEOPLE MIGHT say about Paul Arsenault and Bob Collingwood—and their colleagues said a lot—they were always prepared. The two-man ident team arrived on the scene behind Nishinabe Falls in hiking boots, khakis and bug shirts. Bug shirts come with a hood and veil too fine for flies to penetrate, and elastic at the cuffs. As they moved about the falls, now reaching up to examine a stain, now kneeling to collect minuscule objects, they looked like a pair of beekeepers.

The young coroner who worked beside them had contented himself with a can of Off. As it turned out, the flies weren’t bad behind the falls.

Arsenault collected servings of maggots into several vials, labelling each one. He often thought out loud as he worked, speaking to himself or to anyone who might be interested. Collingwood rarely spoke at all.

“You know, I’m no entomologist,” Arsenault said now. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the falling water. “But I got to say, there’s way fewer maggots here than I’d expect with a body this old. Got to be around two weeks, anyways. You’d expect the thing to be swarming with them, but this here could be the work of maybe a dozen flies. Handful.”

Collingwood was attaching a thermometer to a nearby rock, taking an ambient reading. He turned around and said, “Place is hard to get to.”

It took Cardinal a second to figure out what he meant: The flies wouldn’t be as likely to come across a body hidden behind a veil of water, or even catch the scent. Also, it was quite chilly amid the damp and the dark.

The coroner stepped back from the body. Arsenault made a sign to Collingwood, and they turned it over. There was a tattoo on the bicep; it had been hidden before: a helmet with horns, and underneath this a banner emblazoned VR. Viking Riders.

“I don’t know if a tattoo qualifies as a positive ID,” Delorme said. “But me, I’d say Walter ‘Wombat’ Guthrie has taken his last ride.”

Cardinal nodded. “The question is, did the other Riders do this?”

“Not their usual style, is it? All this mutilation, body out in the open?”

“No, they’d be more likely to bury him in a barrel or something so we’d never find him. I’m wondering how this is connected to our Jane Doe.”

“Maybe she saw something she shouldn’t have.”

“Could be—but what? When?”

The coroner was a physician Cardinal had never worked with before, a Dr. Rayburn, who looked like a schoolboy fairly new to shaving. He was a lot easier on the nerves than the malevolent codger they usually got. Dr. Rayburn filled out a form and tore off the top two copies, handing one to Cardinal.

“No trouble determining foul play, obviously. You can ship it straight to Grenville Street. The pathologist is going to have a field day with this one.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, you no doubt noticed the extremities are missing.”

“Yes, Doc. Even I managed to catch that.”

“Even worse, there’s a big patch of skin missing from the lower back.”

“The killer tried to skin him?”

“Alive, unfortunately. I’m not a pathologist, but it’s clear to me that a lot of the injuries were inflicted before death. If not all of them. You’ve got bleeding into the bones.”

“Can you pin down a cause?”

“You mean can I tell you which wound finished him off? I can’t, but a pathologist might be able to. Most likely bled to death before he was decapitated.”

“Bled to death?” Delorme said. “But there’s almost no blood.”

Dr. Rayburn looked at the corpse and shook his head, a student giving up on a problem. “I can’t explain that.”

“Sometimes murderers will spread plastic over a floor,” Cardinal said. “But I’ve never heard of it being done outside. Hey, Szelagy!”

The face of Ken Szelagy, a great wide Hungarian bear of a man, appeared around a sharp edge of granite wall.

“Make sure you do the ViCLAS booklet on this one,” Cardinal said. ViCLAS was a nationwide database of violent crime. The OPP had an analysis office in Orillia.

Szelagy let out a theatrical groan. “Oh, man. Do you know how many questions those ViCLAS things expect you to answer?”

“Two hundred and sixty-two,” Cardinal said. “So, the sooner, the better, right?”

“Of course. As always.”

“Ask them to run it with the hieroglyphics as part of the MO, and also without. Those could be unrelated, or they could be a one-time thing.”

They began filling many bags with evidence, although evidence is too precise a term for the ragtag items they collected. It’s a problem common with outdoor crime scenes that there are many artifacts, very few of which, if any, will end up as evidence. Matchbooks, cigarette butts, soft-drink cans, footprints, hairs, fibres—and there’s no way of telling which items will prove utterly unrelated to the crime and which may prove crucial in securing a conviction. So it all has to be painstakingly photographed, bagged and labelled. And it takes time.

Cardinal kept a running log in his notebook of their findings. In addition to the usual distracting junk that might later prove to be gold, there were several interesting items.

The first was a Swiss Army knife that Arsenault discovered on the far side of the corpse. It was between two boulders that formed rocky steps out from behind the falls. The knife was too small to be a murder weapon. It was attached to a key chain that held a silver locket.

Arsenault sprung the clasp with a gloved finger. Inside was a black-and-white photo of a couple who appeared to be in their mid-forties. The man was wearing a uniform, but the photo was too small to make out what kind.

“Of course, the probabilities are that it just belongs to some camper,” Cardinal said, but he made a note of it anyway.

“It’s in pretty good shape,” Arsenault said. “Probably hasn’t been here that long. For sure, not through the winter.”

Collingwood found a rusty railway spike.

“What is a railway spike doing here?” Delorme said. “The train tracks have to be at least two miles from here—on the far side of a highway, the First Nations reserve and a subdivision. It didn’t get here by accident.”

“But we don’t know the killer brought it here,” Cardinal said. “And why would he, anyway? It’s not sharp enough for a weapon.”

The spike was bagged and labelled.

Three sticks turned up, each about an inch thick, and all about a yard long. They had been cut from a birch and stripped of bark. It was Delorme who found them, under a bush a little way down from the site. At first she had thought they had something to do with a campfire. They were exactly the sort of stick you might use to poke a fire, or even use for kindling. But all three were discoloured for about half their length.

“Could be blood,” Collingwood said, pointing to the discoloration.

“An expert on edged weapons might be able to tell us if that Swiss Army knife is the blade that cut the sticks,” Arsenault said. “Connect the blood to the victim, sticks to the blood, knife to the sticks, the locket to a person.”

“Arsenault’s already solved the case,” Cardinal said. “We can all go home.”

“No, it’s true,” Arsenault said.

“Of course,” Cardinal said. “It’s good thinking.”

Collingwood put the sticks into a large paper bag.

Cardinal went back to the other side of the falls.

Lise Delorme was standing on a shelf of granite, a finger in one ear and her cellphone at the other. She spoke quietly into the phone. There was something sexy about her posture, but Cardinal could not have said exactly what.

She snapped her phone shut and looked up, catching Cardinal’s glance. “Body Removal,” she said. “They’ll be here soon. Didn’t sound too enthusiastic, though.” She pointed her phone at the markings on the cave wall. “Do those mean anything to you?”

Cardinal stepped closer to the images, the strange drawings of arrows and moons. The numbered charts. “I don’t know. I suppose we could be dealing with a Satanist of some sort.”

“Don’t they go in for pentagrams? I don’t see anything like that here. Big on candles, too, I believe. I’m not seeing wax on any of these rocks.”

“Well, there’s no astrological signs, but there’s a serpent down here. God knows what the crossed hammers mean.”

“Of course, it’s always possible these signs had nothing whatever to do with the murder. Wombat was a biker. Bikers have enemies. We’ll get a list and compare times.”

“Good luck pinning down a time of death from that mess,” Cardinal said, jerking a thumb toward the corpse.

Arsenault got up, brushing off the knees of his pants. He held up a small vial. “These’ll help us nail it.”

Delorme winced at the squirming mass of maggots.

Arsenault grinned. “Witnesses.”