Blackfly Season

27

MURDER IS SO RARE IN Algonquin Bay that, when it happens, the detectives tend to stay close to the victim. Yes, they could simply ship the body down to Toronto. Yes, they could get the autopsy results by phone. Same with ballistics and other expert evidence. The problem with that approach is that it tends to take even longer than the eight hours of driving involved in a trip to Toronto and back. From her long years of work in Special Investigations, Delorme had learned that nothing counts in an investigation like face-to-face contact. Which was why she and Cardinal drove all the way to Toronto, 450 kilometres south. If Cardinal was upset about having to make the trip again so soon, he didn’t let on.

They were buzzed into the Centre of Forensic Sciences by Len Weisman himself; pretty much everyone else had left for the day, and Weisman always liked to be the first guy to look at a body.

Last time she had worked a homicide, Delorme and Arsenault had taken bets on how Weisman would react. It had been a homosexual affair turned ugly, one man killing his lover in a jealous frenzy. It was so bad they’d found footprints inside the body.

Arsenault bet that Weisman wouldn’t blink an eye.

Delorme didn’t see how any human being could look at a thing like that and not react.

When they got to the delivery dock, Weisman had unzipped the bag. He looked at the footprints in the chest cavity, put his hands on his hips and said, “What do you think? Nine-and-a-halfs?”

I hope I never get like that, Delorme thought now as she shook Weisman’s hand.

“Come in, come in. You’re late. Patient got here an hour ago.” Weisman always referred to the bodies as patients.

“I see you’re already dressed for the beach,” Cardinal said.

Along with his tweed jacket and his tie and his denim jeans, Weisman wore biblical-looking sandals.

“I get hot feet,” Weisman said. “It’s a circulation problem.”

He led them back to his miniature office. His desk was stacked with reports, textbooks, a tape recorder and several oranges that were fragrantly past their prime. On his desk, a computer was lit up with a toxicology website. Weisman grabbed a lab coat and shrugged himself into it as they followed him down a tiled corridor.

He held open the door for them and they entered the morgue proper, where a bearded man in a white coat was bending over the body.

“Dr. Srinigar, this is Detective Lise Delorme and Detective John Cardinal from the Algonquin Bay Police.”

Dr. Srinigar dipped forward in a slight bow. “Forgive me if I don’t shake hands. Such a long journey you’ve taken, you must be even more tired than I.” His accent was pleasantly Indian or Pakistani, Delorme wasn’t sure which. Straying out from his surgical cap, black hair streaked with grey.

“Thanks for working late, Doctor,” Cardinal said. “What can you tell us?”

“Our young patient has met with a most unfortunate end. Only twenty-seven or twenty-eight and this is his brain, here in the scale. Quite a bit heavier than the normal human brain, but only until such time as I removed a significant amount of lead. Two bullets’ worth, to be exact.”

“Do you have those bullets?”

“No, no. I sent them straight over to ballistics. I trust that was proper.”

“Extremely,” Delorme said. What a pleasure to run into good manners; it didn’t happen a lot in this line of work.

Above his mask, the doctor’s eyes were dark brown, bovine and sincere.

“At first I thought there was only one bullet wound in the antero-occipital region, but that was because there was such severe destruction via blunt force trauma. Bits of wood removed from the scalp indicate a club of some sort. Possibly a baseball bat.”

“Which happened first?” Delorme asked. “The bullets or the bat?”

“Oh, he was shot first. About this there can be no question. Cranial bone has been crushed into the entry wounds.”

“Was he dead when they went at him with the bat?”

“Well, one could happily argue one side or the other of that particular question. There are plenty of factors to back either opinion. But at the end of the day, I must tell you honestly that I do not know. Myself, I would venture to say that the assailant shot his victim first. The first bullet barely entered the brain. The second crashed into the right optic nerve. Balance, vision, hearing—all would have been immediately affected. Indeed, the damage is catastrophic, but with these apparently low-powered bullets, not necessarily immediate. Angle of impact indicates the victim was still standing for at least one blow of the baseball bat.”

“So maybe in frustration,” Delorme said. “When he doesn’t fall down, the guy goes at him with the bat.”

“That would be consistent with what I see here. Eminently so, Detective.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

Cardinal turned to Weisman. “Who’ve you got over in ballistics?”

“Fellow named Cornelius Venn. He’s very good. Have you worked with him before?”

“You’ll love this guy,” Cardinal said to Delorme. “I’ll let you ask the questions.”

Christian good guy, Delorme thought when she first saw Cornelius Venn, with his yellow bow tie and his sincere-looking glasses. One of those characters who appear on your front step with a bible and a grin the size of Lake Nipissing. Sort of guy who’d stop to help you fix a flat and would know the cheapest place to buy hot dogs for the cookout.

Cardinal introduced Delorme.

“Your bullets are extremely mashed up,” Venn said. “There’s only so much you can expect.”

“I’m not expecting anything,” Delorme said, “except that you’ll give it your best shot. I’m hearing good things about you.”

“Really? They’re just being pleasant, I’m sure,” Venn said. He was bent over his comparison microscope, adjusting the focus. “Everybody’s always so pleasant. What are they going to say? ‘Here’s Cornelius Venn, our worst firearms examiner’?”

Delorme wondered what Venn did in his spare time. She had a feeling it would involve machines, not people.

She glanced at Cardinal, but he just rolled his eyes.

“Ahem.” Venn coughed primly into a handkerchief, as if he were tubercular. “You have two .32-calibre bullets here. One is mashed beyond recognition and no use at all for anything.” His tone suggested they shouldn’t have bothered bringing such shoddy goods to his attention, even if they did transport them in a dead body.

“The second one is only partially destroyed, and I’m just now attempting to see if I can get something worthwhile out of it.” He adjusted a knob, turning the bullet under his lens.

“Yes, it’s not completely useless. I’ll just adjust my magnification a little to cut out some of the clutter. Later, I’ll give you a printout in a form you can understand.”

As if it’s astrophysics, Delorme thought. Guy thinks he’s working for NASA.

Venn spoke into his microscope, his voice tinny. “Six left-hand grooves.”

“Do you have enough bullet to measure them?” Delorme said.

“Your impatience will do nothing to enhance my performance, Detective.”

“It was just a question, Mr. Venn.”

He glanced up at her, the microscope’s light forming twin reflections in his glasses. “It was a question designed to put me on the defensive.”

“Actually, it was a request for information.”

“Yes, it was. Implying that I’m not intelligent enough to realize that information is what you are here for.”

Delorme glanced at Cardinal, but he gave her no help.

Venn returned to his microscope. “I’m getting a land-to-groove ratio of one-to-one-plus. Grooves are zero point five-six; lands are zero point six-oh.”

He gave no sign that any of this information was familiar.

“Colt Police Positive, right?” Cardinal said.

Venn swivelled around in his chair as if noticing Cardinal for the first time. “Among other possibilities.”

“Well, why don’t we cut to the chase and just compare it to the bullet they took out of our Jane Doe last week. Can you do that?”

“Did you bring the case number?”

Cardinal opened his briefcase and pulled out a form. He read the number and Venn went over to a shelf full of little plastic drawers, the kind home handymen use to store doodads. He pulled one out, extracted the bullet that had been taken from Terri Tait’s skull and stuck it under the left-hand lens of his microscope with a bit of beeswax.

“As you know, Detective, it could also be from a J.C. Higgins model 80.”

“Thank you for informing me,” Delorme said. “What I really want to know, though, whenever you’re ready to tell us—and don’t let me rush you or anything—is whether it’s the same gun. The lands and grooves and even the twist aren’t going to tell you that on their own, right?”

“Oh, my. Go to the top of the class,” Venn said. He adjusted the left bullet, then the right. After a moment, he said, “The thing about the Colts is, they have distinctive skid marks, the marks made when the round is chambered. In any case, I can tell you right now it’s the same gun. Take a look for yourself.”

He rolled his chair aside and Delorme bent over the eyepiece.

“Focus,” he said. His damp fingers pressed her hand on the knob. Delorme tweaked it and the image went from soft to crystal clear. The incisions and scallops in both pieces of lead lined up perfectly.

“Nice,” Delorme said. “Very nice. Thank you, Mr. Venn.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“No thanks,” Delorme said. She couldn’t help smiling, even if he was a jerk. “I think that’s it.”

“Then thank you for using the Centre of Forensic Sciences and you have a wonderful evening.”

Later, when they were back on Highway 400 heading north, Delorme said, “What’s with that Venn guy? It’s like he studied all his life to be a dork.”

“I don’t know what it is that happens to ballistics guys,” Cardinal said. “But it sure happens fast.”

People claim to do the long drive back to Algonquin Bay in under three and a half hours, but they’re lying. To get from downtown Toronto to Algonquin Bay takes four hours minimum. By the time Cardinal was heading up Trout Lake Road toward home, he was thinking he would allow himself exactly one beer before bed; he didn’t like to have more than that when Catherine was away, as it tended to depress him.

When he and Delorme had finished with ballistics, he had badly wanted to drop over to Catherine’s hotel; the Delta Chelsea was not far from the forensic centre. But he had been faced with a conundrum. If Catherine were at her best, of course, it would be no problem for him to show up. But she was treading rocky terrain, just now, feeling his protectiveness as persecution, and his showing up unannounced might be exactly the wrong move. In the end, he had decided against it, but now he wondered where she was and what she was doing. In her hotel room, he hoped, watching TV. Or on-line with her laptop, trolling eBay for bargain lenses.

His cellphone rang, and it was Larry Burke; he was on guard duty at the hospital. His voice was tight, full of nerves.

“I think you’d better get up here,” he said. “Seems our redhead friend has disappeared.”