By the Time You Read This

40

DELORME SLID THE FILE across the table to Cardinal. Her brown eyes, those earnest brown eyes, gave nothing away.

Cardinal opened the file and his immediate reaction was two words: “Oh, no.”

“It gets worse,” Delorme said.

If D.S. Chouinard was trying to take Cardinal’s mind off his loss by assigning him to help Delorme, he couldn’t have picked a better case. Cardinal had seen some wicked things in his decades as a policeman—disgusting, evil things—but he had never seen anything that shocked him more than the pictures he was looking at now.

He shook his head, as if to physically shake the taint from his mind. “She can’t be more than seven years old in some of these.”

“I know,” Delorme said, examining her thumbnail absently, as if she dealt with this kind of masculine evil every day. “And it goes on for years. At least until she’s thirteen.”

In the later pictures, the tears were gone. In most of them the girl wore a blank expression, like a sheep being sheared. Perhaps she was turning her mind somewhere else, trying to think of arithmetic problems, the names of rivers, anything to take her mind off what this man—her father or guardian, most likely—was taking from her. The things she would never get back.

“I don’t know about you,” Delorme said, “but me, one of the sweetest moments in my life was my first kiss. Donny Leroux. We were so young—not even teenagers yet. I think I was twelve, maybe only eleven, he was probably the same. We were in his guesthouse. His family lived out on Trout Lake, on Water Road, and they had a tiny guesthouse down by the water. Just a cabin, really, with two sets of bunk beds.

“I went with my friend Michelle Godin, and I forget who the other boy was. And somebody pulled out a bottle and started spinning it. I’d heard of spin the bottle before, but never played it. And you know, the funny thing was, I hadn’t even really thought about being kissed. It wasn’t something I was yearning for or wondering about. I must’ve been just eleven, because I sure thought about it later.

“Anyway, it ended up Donny kissed me. Just, you know, closed mouth and only for maybe a microsecond, and I’ll never forget it. Well, here it is twenty-five years later or whatever and I still remember it, the sweet thrill of it. Like tiny threads of electricity snaking all over my body, down to my toes and fingertips. Like being tickled, only from the inside, somehow.”

“Sounds like love,” Cardinal said.

“Oh, no. I thought about it and thought about it, afterward, but I didn’t want to do anything more with him. I don’t think I had the concept of dating yet, but I don’t remember particularly wanting to know him better or spend lots of time with him. It was like having seen the northern lights for the first time. You remember them, you never forget them, but you don’t build your life around them.”

“Maybe the boy felt differently.”

Delorme shrugged. “Who knows if it was the first time for him? Anyway, my point was that our mystery girl will never have that experience. The man in the picture has robbed her of that. When she kisses a boy her own age, it will be an entirely different experience.”

And that may be the least of it, Cardinal thought as he shuffled through the rest of the photographs.

“Toronto’s come up with some great stuff.” She pointed to one of the pictures, a hotel room to judge by the plain symmetry of the bed and its two night tables. “They figured out that that’s the Traveller’s Rest motel just north of Toronto.”

“I don’t know it,” Cardinal said.

“I didn’t either. But apparently if you have little kids you know it. It’s the closest inexpensive motel near WonderWorld.”

“Nice,” Cardinal said. “Takes her on a special trip and then does that to her. And they traced them to Algonquin Bay how? The plane?”

“Yeah. I talked to the owner of the plane, guy named Frank Rowley. Doesn’t look like our perp. No hair, for one thing. He’s got a wife and kid and a serious guitar habit in addition to his plane. He gave me a lot of stuff on his neighbours at the marina, but he never saw anything that made him suspicious.”

The squad room door opened and Mary Flower came in with another padded envelope.

“You wanted me to let you know the minute it got here?” she said. “It just got here.”

“More stuff from Toronto,” Delorme said. “Those guys have been working hard. They’d love to see us nab this guy.”

Delorme slit open the envelope and pulled out more photos. “No motel this time. No boat, either.”

“All the same house, looks like,” Cardinal said. “You’ve got living room, kitchen, bedroom …”

“I know. Unfortunately, none of it matches with any of the houses I saw. I tried to catch glimpses of other rooms when I could, but none of them looked like this. None of the kitchens had blue tile, for example.”

“What about these curtains?” Cardinal had pulled out a photo taken in a living room. The little girl on the couch. Behind her, the edge of a curtain that looked blue with a gold medallion motif.

“Those weren’t visible in the earlier pictures. But I’m pretty sure none of the houses had curtains like those. Of course, people change their curtains all the time.”

Cardinal shuffled through the rest of the pictures. The images draped a whole other layer of sadness over his own personal grief. This poor girl. He had little doubt that the man in the pictures was her father or stepfather—her face was too full of delight in the non-sexual pictures, too full of trust. And then to have that trust ripped from you and torn in pieces, how would you ever learn to trust again?

“Let’s arrange these with the others according to her age,” Delorme said. “You set these out and I’ll go get the others.”

Cardinal laid the photographs out on the table one by one. With each image his heart grew heavier. Leaving aside the question of how a man could lust after a child nowhere near puberty, Cardinal could not understand how he could have looked at that sweet face and betrayed the growing spirit behind it. How could you hold that little hand, receive the innocent kisses of the Cupid’s bow mouth, and then abuse her? He could not comprehend the mind of someone capable of such treachery toward a child.

From what Cardinal could see, the man appeared to be in his thirties, with long, almost shoulder-length dark hair. Although they showed everything else, none of the photographs showed his whole face. An eyebrow here, an ear there, a bit of nose. It was impossible to tell from such fragments, but he seemed to be a reasonably good-looking man, able to have a sex life in the normal way. So why plunder the childhood of a little girl in your care?

Delorme had brought the earlier pictures in and added them to the arrangement on the table.

“Well, she never looks any older than the later one on the boat,” Delorme said. “And if that was taken five years ago, it could mean a number of things. Possibly the kid got sick and tired of being his sex toy and told him to drop dead. Or maybe even told someone else.”

“I doubt it,” Cardinal said. “I’m not sure why—maybe it’s just the way she clearly loves the guy in some of the non-sexual shots—but I can’t see her turning him in. Not back then, anyway.”

“Me, I think it’s possible. Which means this guy could already be in jail.”

“It’s a happy thought …” Cardinal said.

“What? You look distracted.”

“I’m just trying to think what it means, these pictures being five years old. I read somewhere that the average family these days moves every five years.”

“Which makes it unlikely that any of the homes I visited was the actual crime scene.” She gestured at the pictures and corrected herself. “Scenes. And not only that, the family could have broken up. Seems likely, given the problems this guy has.”

“And causes.” Cardinal shook his head. “A guy like that could destroy a lot of families before he’s through.”

The two of them stood with arms folded, heads bowed like wartime strategists surveying pictures of bombed-out cities, smoking ruins. There were enough photos now to cover most of the boardroom table.

“People take furniture with them when they move,” Delorme said. “I keep hoping to recognize a chair, a table, books, something.”

“He was pretty careful to keep out any identifying features.”

“Yeah. He’s sickeningly fond of close-ups.”

“What about the sofa in this one?” Cardinal held up a picture of the girl asleep on a loveseat. It had red plush seats and interesting wooden trim.

“No. I’d have remembered a piece of furniture like that.”

“What about this?” Cardinal held up a picture that included the leg and corner of a coffee table in the Swedish modern style. “The table’s pretty distinctive.”

Delorme peered at it and shook her head. “The Ferriers had something a lot bigger, in darker wood. And Rowley’s was some kind of country look, sort of a split-log effect. He’s a real whole-wheater, that guy.”

“There’s a fireplace in this one,” Cardinal said, holding up another shot.

Delorme shrugged. “I didn’t see any fireplaces. Anyway, as you say, after five years chances are they’ve moved and the fireplace is no longer part of the picture.”

“Yeah, but the implements might be. The brass poker and shovel.”

“I didn’t see anything like that.”

“I wish I’d gone with you to the houses. Two heads are better than one, and we could have split up—you know, one of us uses the bathroom while the other takes a gander at the kitchen.”

Delorme didn’t respond. She was standing, head bowed, chin in hand, pondering the table. She reached for a photograph, put it back. Reached for it again. Cardinal and Delorme were not partners—the Algonquin Bay police service does not have partners as such, personnel are assigned to a case as needed—but he had worked with Delorme enough to know when an idea was forming behind those serious brown eyes. She would go quite still, tuned to her own private station.

She picked up another photograph and held the two together, side by side. “Look at this,” she said.

Cardinal put down the boat picture he had been looking at and came to stand beside her.

“Frank Rowley has a rug like this,” she said. “Navajo kind of thing.”

“Well, I’m no rug expert. I couldn’t tell you if that’s an expensive item that someone would be likely to hang on to.”

“It looks expensive to me. In fact, I noticed at his house, the colours were so rich. Those blacks and blues. Everything in that house is made of wood and it looked really good against the colours of that rug. But I don’t think this is the same one.”

“Why? Just because you liked the guy?”

“No, his had a repair in it. In fact, I tripped on it. It had a jagged line, like a scar running through the pattern.”

Cardinal had been scanning the other photos on the table, looking for any that might include the rug. He found one. You could hardly expect to notice the corner of rug right away, overshadowed as it was by a scene of child rape. He picked up the photo.

“You mean a jagged line like this one?”