Crime Machine

14

CARDINAL WAS HEADING INTO THE meeting room when Delorme called him over to her desk. “You have to hear this.” She switched on the speakerphone and replayed her voice mail. The synthetic voice gave the time stamp as 11:45 the night before. Then a girl’s voice.

“Hi. I don’t want to give my name, which is why I’m leaving a message instead of speaking to an actual person. I have information about the murders on Island Road. I was there. I was in the house and I heard—I heard people talking and I heard shots fired. I don’t know anything more than that except that the guy who did it did not sound Russian—the woman did, but he didn’t. I can’t come forward because—I know I shouldn’t have been in that house. I’m a thief. I steal stuff sometimes. I was looking for stuff to swipe and then I heard voices and hid. When I heard the shots, I ran. That’s all I know. Please don’t try to find me. I hope you get this.”

“What do you think?” Delorme said. “You think she’s for real?”

“She certainly sounds nervous. More than nervous.”

“We know someone ran. We know someone hid under the bed.”

“A girl burglar. She sounds, what, sixteen? Seventeen?”

“I don’t know,” Delorme said. “Could be early twenties.”

“Let’s hear it again.”

Delorme replayed the message.

“I’m not sure I buy it,” Cardinal said. “Not all of it, anyway.”

“No one knows about the runner.”

“‘I’m a thief,’” Cardinal said. “‘I steal stuff sometimes.’ Does that sound real to you?”

Delorme shrugged. “Kind of.”

“Lise, I’ve been fighting for truth, justice and the Canadian way for thirty years and I’ve never heard anyone say ‘I’m a thief.’ And a kid?”

“Maybe not a kid.”

“Someone that young? ‘I’m a thief’? Do you get a lot of thieves calling you up to confess?”

When they were all assembled in the meeting room, D.S. Chouinard issued a stern reminder that they could not afford to let other investigations slide—particularly any involving weapons or violence. “So Szelagy, for example—I’ll be expecting you to bring me a plan on your warehouse arson sometime today. Same with Delorme and the ATM robberies. The citizens of this town do not lie awake nights worrying they’re going to be attacked by Russian mobsters. They worry about being mugged taking cash out of the ATM.”

“I don’t think we should do anything else,” McLeod said, “until Cardinal has wrapped up Scriver.”

After that, the meeting turned into an ident show and tell. Arsenault manned the digital projector—he was vain about his technical virtuosity—and Collingwood manned the flip chart, writing things in wildly coloured fluorescent markers. For someone so reserved, he was surprisingly effusive with circles and arrows.

“This is a case where we have a ton of leads,” Arsenault began. “We’re practically buried in leads. With any luck they may eventually turn into evidence. We’ve got blood, hair, fibre, fingerprints, shoe prints and tire tracks. We’re running every single item through all available tests and databases. We’ve made some progress and some connections, but so far … well, you can judge for yourselves where we are. You’re gonna want to take notes.

“All right. Blood first. Since we live in the real world and not on CSI, we do not have DNA back. No surprise there. But we do have blood types. Lev and Irena Bastov are both B-negative. Blood on the windowsill and outside is Rh-positive. Schumachers are A and Rh-positive, but I don’t see Mrs. Schumacher smashing that window and diving into the snow.”

Collingwood wrote locations and blood types on the chart, Magic Marker squeaking.

“Next, hair. Irena Bastov’s hair is faux blond, brown roots. Lev Bastov’s is short, salt and pepper, mostly silver with some black at the back of his head. We didn’t find any hair at the table or on their clothes other than their own. However, in the master bedroom we found a long black hair on the window side of the bed, here.” He indicated a space between the pillow and the bedside table. “Obviously it does not belong to the Schumachers, so it would be good to know who it belongs to and how it got there. In the meantime, fingerprints. To answer the question I know you all want to ask: no, we do not have a match on any known evildoers. But there’s some interesting stuff. The last supper.”

He clicked his remote and the screen showed an image of the table where the victims and their killer had been sitting.

“Prints on the glasses belong to the Bastovs, matching the set we took from them, and the prints in their hotel room and on their passports. Far as we can tell, they don’t seem to have touched anything else at the scene. Prints on the bottle could belong to as many as three people, but you have to expect that with people in the liquor store, warehouse, et cetera.

“The thumbprint, which is right where it would be when you’re pouring—left-handed, I should point out—matches a thumbprint we lifted off the knife in the male victim’s back. This individual did not seem at all concerned about leaving prints, which makes me pessimistic about our chances of finding a record on him. Or them—we have no evidence that there was more than one killer, but this could well be the work of two or three. We have matches to that thumbprint with one on the front door knob, and partial matches on the back door, and the door to the master bedroom.”

He flashed close-ups of the vodka bottle and images of the various doors one after another. Collingwood drew circles and arrows.

“As you know, most of the house appeared undisturbed, except for the rear door, which was jimmied, and the master bedroom, where a fourth party smashed out a window and took a runner. First the window.” He clicked on an image of the broken pane, then a close-up of the sill. “We have a very good print in the blood on the sill. No matches in the databases so far. But perhaps not surprisingly, that print does match the latent we lifted off the chair that was used to smash the window. Now, here’s the interesting part. We also have a match with the bedside table on the window side of the room. Not the table itself but the bedside clock radio. All the other prints on that table belong to Mrs. Schumacher.

“As you know, our very tentative theory was that some individual fled the scene and was chased by the killer. We don’t know what said individual was doing there, but it appears they may have been hiding under the bed—we didn’t get any usable prints from under there—so that may mean a person who was at the scene in some separate capacity, maybe a break and enter. I know it seems unlikely—two separate criminal enterprises at the same time—so if you have any better ideas …”

Images of the chair and the clock radio appeared, followed by a wide angle that took in the bed, the chair, the smashed window.

Delorme spoke up. “Someone left a message on my machine last night. A young woman maybe around twenty? She claims she’s a thief and she was in the house when she heard people coming. She hid, and when she heard shots, she ran.”

The air in the room was suddenly charged. People shifted in their seats, everyone looking at Delorme.

“Why didn’t I hear about this?” Chouinard wanted to know.

“I just picked it up now,” Delorme said. “She called in the middle of the night.”

“Why’d she call you? Why not Crime Stoppers? Why not the general mailbox?”

“I don’t know. A lot of people don’t believe Crime Stoppers is anonymous. Maybe she just wanted a female.”

McLeod, uncharacteristically quiescent up to this point, came to life. “That clock radio is about thirty years old. I’ve met some desperate junkies in my time, but none of them would bother stealing that piece of crap. Even the most disadvantaged of our criminal adversaries have standards.”

Arsenault was contemplating the floor. When he looked up, he said, “She said she hid under the bed?”

Delorme shook her head. “She just said she hid.”

“Well, it kinda jibes with what we have so far …” He looked at Collingwood, who shook his head and wrote on the whiteboard: For Sale. “Yeah, exactly,” Arsenault said, and changed the image. An exterior shot of Island Road, the driveway entrance. The mailbox that said THE SCHUMACHERS, and the sign that said FOR SALE, CARNWRIGHT REAL ESTATE. “Notice there are no tracks around the For Sale sign or the mailbox. Call me anal retentive, but I decided to take prints off both of ’em anyway. Lifted a good thumb and a couple of partials off the sign. And get this: they match prints we found in the master bedroom—on the headboard of the bed.”

As circles and arrows flew from Collingwood’s marker, Arsenault changed the image to show first the bedside table, then the headboard. “We found a nice thumbprint here.” He pointed to an area near the upper left corner of the headboard. “And it doesn’t match the Schumachers or any other individuals we have so far.”

“Well, the realtor usually puts up the sign,” Chouinard said. “Have we ruled him or her out?”

“Him,” Cardinal said. “Randall Wishart over at Carnwright’s. Did he come in to get printed?”

Arsenault said no.

“I told him to.”

Dunbar sat up and cleared his throat. “I have some information that might help. I took the Schumachers out to the house.”

“Before it was cleaned up?” Chouinard said. “Who told you to do that?”

“We needed to know if anything was stolen—especially now we’ve got a self-confessed thief on the scene.”

“As of five minutes ago,” Cardinal said. “Why didn’t you clear it with me?”

“I didn’t think it would need clearing. I mean, we’re all supposed to be investigators, right?”

“We’re working a coordinated investigation. Do not go off interviewing people without telling me.” Cardinal felt the heat spreading up his neck and into his face. “I should not have to be saying this.”

“Okay, I hear you. Can I tell you what they said?”

“After they’d finished throwing up?”

“They weren’t that bad, considering. They didn’t see anything missing. Nothing. Also, I asked them about their routine for closing up the house in winter. They lock doors and windows, turn the heat down, shut the water off, all that. Main point, Mrs. Schumacher strips all the beds and puts on fresh bedspreads. They don’t have a cleaning lady, so that long black hair could be crucial.”

“Okay, that’s good stuff,” Cardinal said. “I’m still annoyed at you, but let’s move on.”

“What do we know about this Wishart?” Chouinard said. “The realtor.”

“He’s been with Carnwright just a couple of years,” Cardinal said. “He’s married to Carnwright’s daughter.”

“Laura Carnwright?” Delorme said. “She’s a high flyer. She must be on every committee in town.”

“Wishart seems like a real go-getter himself. Hasn’t been out to the Schumacher house for a few weeks. Or so he says.” Cardinal looked at Arsenault. “Do we have anything back on the tires?”

“Tread marks,” Arsenault said. He flashed a picture of the hydro utility road. “Our runner seems to have got into her car here—if it really was a her—and shots were fired, damaging her tail light. Treads on this vehicle are all different, all old and worn, and could belong to any number of subcompacts: Honda, Mazda, you name it. Same with the shards of tail light. The driveway’s more promising.”

The image changed again. “Vehicle One got there first. Or put it another way—Vehicle One was the first car there after the snowfall Thursday morning. Vehicle Two tires aren’t going to get us far. Wheel base gives us a compact, tires are the most common Goodyear snow tires, all four wheels. Vehicle One is a mid-size with Bridgestone Blizzard Grips, again all four wheels. Width and load rating would suit a range of pricier sedans: BMW, Saturn and Acura. The tires were discontinued three years ago, but you know the tire stores keep records of what they sell, and if it’s local we might get lucky.”

Chouinard pointed at Cardinal. “You didn’t happen to get what Wishart is driving, by any chance?”

“Yeah, I did. He drives an Acura TL.”

“I knew there was a reason I hired you,” Chouinard said, getting up.

“You didn’t hire me.”

“Well, somebody must have had a reason.”