By the Time You Read This

46

WHEN HE LEFT THE Crown Attorney’s office, Cardinal drove straight over to Bell’s house. He stopped the car across the street and sat looking at the dark gables outlined against an evening sky of mauve. The silver BMW parked in the driveway would seem to indicate the doctor was home, but there was no way to be sure.

Although he could employ violence when the occasion demanded it, Cardinal was not a violent man. No matter how angry he got at the thugs and wretches he was called upon to arrest, he always managed to find within himself that rational, controlling part of his mind that could rein in his feelings. Now, as he sat staring at Bell’s house, it took every ounce of control not to bust right in and beat Bell into a lingering death on a ventilator. Finally he put the car in gear and drove through the crush of evening traffic to the one place he had thought he would never set foot again.

When he got there, CompuClinic was just closing. A woman came out of the dry cleaner’s carrying an armful of plastic-shrouded clothes and got into her car. Cardinal parked and walked round the side of the building. He knew he shouldn’t be there, that he was not ready—the quivering in his hands told him that, as did the sudden swelling sensation in his throat.

Catherine’s blood had been washed away. The crime scene tape was gone, and all the little bits and pieces of computer had been swept up. You would never know a life had ended here. He circled the building, looking for entrances. Like most buildings under construction, security was not nearly as tight as it might be when the building was finished. There were two different fire exits, both closed at the moment, either of which might have been propped open by a lazy workman or a careless smoker—the alarms were almost never active at construction sites. The empty storefronts were boarded over, but some of these boards required no more than a sharp tug to come away. It took him all of ten seconds to open up a space big enough to walk through.

Inside, there was enough light coming through the glass door at the rear to see by. The space was essentially a concrete box with thick wires extruding from the walls and ceiling. Two-by-fours were stacked in a neat pile by one of the walls, and the place smelled of concrete and raw wood.

The door led to a plain hallway bright with fluorescent lights. At the end of this, a door marked Stairwell led to the basement and a freight elevator sitting empty and open. Cardinal put on leather gloves before stepping inside and pushing the button for the roof. In less than two minutes he had got himself to the rooftop without being seen, just as a killer could have done. The door to the patio was locked now, but there was a loose brick right next to it that could be used to prop it open. Probably one of the last things Catherine had touched on this earth.

He went down using the regular elevator and exited through the front lobby. He stood once more in the parking lot, staring at the place where Catherine had been. Would that image of her lying there be with him for the rest of his life? Her tan coat, her bloodied face, the smashed camera?

All the way home he tried to replace it with another image. Of course, he could recall thousands of different moments with Catherine, but he could not hold any of them in his mind long enough to erase the horror of that parking lot. The only image he could retain for more than a split second was the one of her in the photograph, looking slightly annoyed, two cameras slung across her shoulders.

Two cameras.

If it were not for that memory, that photograph, Cardinal would probably not have ventured down to Catherine’s darkroom again for months. He didn’t want to hover among her sinks and trays and strips of film as if he were the ghost. He had not even yet considered the possibility of clearing the place out. Catherine’s darkroom had to stay exactly as she had left it. She would be upset, otherwise. She would be unable to work.

Despite having held her dead body in his arms, despite the weeks-long absence, he still, somewhere in his being—everywhere in his being, it felt like—expected Catherine to come back.

The scene from Bell’s session recording was replaying in his head, this time in detective, not husband, mode.

“You know the new Gateway building just off the bypass?” The enthusiasm climbing in her voice. “I’m heading over tonight with my cameras.”

Cameras. Plural.

He opened the narrow white closet where she kept her gear. No cameras. A few black lenses, long ones, lay on the shelves, lenses for her old battered Nikon. She would have taken the smaller lenses with her. The Canon was missing.

Cameras plural.

He went to the other part of the basement, his work table where he had put Catherine’s things. Her last things. The plastic bag from the hospital containing her clothing: her watch, a bracelet, her sweatshirt, jeans and underwear. No camera.

Outside again, he checked Catherine’s car—floor, trunk, glove compartment. No camera.

When he was back in his own car heading into town, he called Ident. Collingwood kept a schedule as strict as police work would allow; he did his shift and then he was gone, like a mechanical figure on an antique clock. Arsenault seemed to have been selected for the job purely for contrast, because you never knew when you would find him in. He often worked late into the night, so much so that there was a lot of speculation at the office on his personal life, or lack thereof.

Arsenault picked up on the first ring.

Cardinal didn’t bother with preliminaries. “I need to check the boxes from Catherine’s scene,” he said, passing a pickup truck that straddled two lanes. “I need to know if there’s a camera there.”

“I can tell you that right now. Yes, there was a camera there. A Nikon. Lens smashed all to hell.”

“Just the one.”

“Yeah, John. There was just the one.” Arsenault sounded surprised.

“Is there anyone still in the evidence room? Can you sign the boxes out for me? I’m on my way in.”

“No need. They’re right here in Ident. Closed case, remember? Figured you’d ask for ‘em sooner or later, though.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Cardinal swerved around a Honda Civic and shot past Water Road. Luckily, most of the traffic was going the other way.

The station was quiet. He could hear someone, probably Szelagy, typing in his cubicle, but other than that, CID was deserted. He walked straight through to Ident. Arsenault was at his desk, tapping on his keyboard. Collingwood’s desk was dark.

“Hey, John,” Arsenault said without looking up. “Stuff’s on the counter.”

Two boxes, one large, one small, stood open on a counter that ran along one wall. Cardinal hit a switch and the counter was bathed in bright fluorescent light.

He peered into the smaller box. Catherine’s Nikon, with its shattered lens, lay among other items that clearly had belonged to her: her camera bag, and contents that may have spilled out of it—a notebook, the flat discs of filters and a couple more lenses. One of these was silver, and labelled Canon.

There was no camera in the bigger box. Cardinal stood still, thinking. The only sound was the click of Arsenault’s keyboard. Assuming Catherine had been following her custom and taking pictures with both of her cameras, that meant someone had taken the Canon: either someone who had happened onto the scene afterward or her attacker.

A thief of opportunity seemed unlikely. How many people, happening onto a dead body, are likely to steal a camera from it—a camera that was almost certainly smashed up? And if you’re going to take one camera, why not take the other? Assuming her attacker stole it, that could indicate one of two things: Catherine had been mugged for her camera, the nice shiny new Canon, and the robber had pushed her from the roof when he grabbed it; or her attacker had taken it from the scene afterward. Cardinal could think of only one good reason to do that.

The bigger box contained items that had been found near the body but were not necessarily connected to it: a cigarette pack, several butts, an Oh Henry! wrapper, a paper cup from a nearby Harvey’s. There were also many bits of electronics, junk from the computer repair centre on the ground floor. Beside the Dumpster, the driveway had been littered with stray cards, drives and chips. Collingwood and Arsenault had dutifully gathered them up and tagged them.

Each item was in a plastic Baggie, numbered and labelled with the date, the initials of the ident person who had found it, distance and clock position relative to the body. Cardinal looked at several of these through the plastic. He was no computer whiz, but he knew memory cards when he saw them. The ones he was seeing were pretty old-looking, probably from computers beyond even the ministry of CompuClinic, Inc.

He pulled another couple of items from the box: a CD drive, a pair of headphones, another tiny Baggie encasing a chip. He turned this last item over. It was a chip about the size of a postage stamp, green-coloured and ridged with tiny teeth. The other side was obscured by the label. He opened the Baggie and slid the chip out onto the counter. Pale grey lettering on the green surface of the chip spelled out the word Canon.

“Hey, Arsenault,” Cardinal said. “Do you guys have a camera that will take this chip?”

Arsenault looked up and shook his head. “Ours take memory sticks. Different shape. Why?”

“I think this is the chip from Catherine’s camera. I want to see what’s on it.”

“That Nikon’s not digital.”

“She had another camera with her. A Canon.”

“Really?” Arsenault looked up from his keyboard. “In that case, the printer will show you what’s on the chip.”

“Don’t you have to plug a camera into it?”

“Nope. It’s got a tray you can stick the chip in.”

Arsenault swivelled away from his desk and rolled his chair over to the printer. He pressed a button and a little tray with several indentations slid out. “Just drop it in there,” he said, pointing to the smallest indentation, which was square. Cardinal pressed the chip into the slot and Arsenault slid the drawer in.

“If there’s anything there, it should show up on the preview screen.” He tapped a glowing rectangle on the printer about the size of a playing card.

The rectangle turned black and the Canon logo appeared, then the first photograph. It was a high shot of the city, the lights bright pinpricks. Cardinal could make out the twin belfries of the French church in the distance. These were the last things Catherine had seen.

“You can cycle through them,” Arsenault said. “Just push the Next button.”

Cardinal hit the button and the image changed slightly: the same view, a little closer. The next picture was a different angle. Off to the right, the red warning lights glowed on the post office communications tower. There were several shots of this and then back to the French church, and Cardinal saw why she had wanted to take pictures that particular night. The orange harvest moon was just beginning to roll into view beside the church towers.

“Nice,” Arsenault said quietly.

In the next shot the moon was half hidden. And in the one after that, it was just beginning to appear between the towers. Another moment and the moon would be caught between the towers like a pumpkin. But the next shot was something else entirely.

It looked accidental, as if she had been jostled, or startled: a wall, slightly blurred, a streak of light from overhead and in the right-hand corner someone’s arm. A man’s arm. You could just see the shoulder, arm, glove and the side of his overcoat.

Cardinal hit the Next button and heard Arsenault suck in his breath.

They both stared at the image glowing before them.

“She got him,” Cardinal said quietly. “She got him cold.”

The man’s arm was raised in greeting. The light above the roof door threw a sharp shadow of his arm, raised like a warning, to the ground. Despite the shadows, he was clearly recognizable, with that wide smile and his open features like a large, friendly dog. He looked like the sort of man anyone would want for a friend or a teacher—even a doctor.