Crime Machine

25

FRIDAY MORNING, DELORME ASKED Staff Sergeant Flower to check if any tickets had been handed out in the neighbourhood of Roxwell and Clement. The boy would almost certainly have driven there, and yet there had been no suspicious cars parked in the strip mall lot, or on the street. He had gone into the alley, presumably to get to his car, which should therefore have been parked on Clement Street. So he must have parked somewhere else and they just hadn’t found the car. Twenty minutes later Sergeant Flower came back with the answer: Yes, one car had been towed. An irate citizen had called about some idiot parked in his driveway. Right in his driveway, for Pete’s sake. For this he pays taxes? Location: third house from the mall.

Delorme put in a call to the city towing service. The man who answered chose to liven up a boring job by speaking in the manner of a Marine on a vital mission.

“Clement Street?” he said when Delorme asked. “That’s an affirmative.”

“What number on Clement Street?”

“Hold on a second …” A distant clicking of a keyboard as a log was consulted. “Number twelve. That’s one-two. Number twelve Clement.”

“Could you give me the VIN number and plates on that?”

“Plates are Alpha-November-Foxtrot-Charlie-two-eight-niner.”

Delorme wrote it down, and then he gave her the much longer and even more military-sounding vehicle identification number. She thanked him and he said ten-four. She typed the VIN into the Ministry of Transport’s database. The car, a silver-grey Mazda 3, was registered to Dr. and Mrs. T. J. Walker of Barrie, Ontario. It had been reported stolen two weeks previously from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. The plates didn’t match.

Delorme took the information into Chouinard’s office and got permission to have Ident tow the car into the police garage for fuming. An hour later she put on her parka and went down to the garage. The garage door was wide open—a necessity when fuming an entire vehicle.

Even with the door open, the place reeked of superglue. Fingerprints had taken the form of ghostly white smudges all around the Mazda’s door handles, and over the dash, and on the insides of the doors. They had found prints on the radio and on the rear-view.

“Found a whole bunch of stuff that’s probably not related,” Arsenault said. “A whack of old parking slips from Barrie, couple of discs full of medical lectures, a Cat in the Hat toy. Problem number one is we don’t know what we can rule out until we get prints from Barrie. The doctor and his wife agreed to go in and get printed down there, but we don’t have them yet.”

“And what about our dead thief?”

“No matches so far.”

“Come on,” Delorme said, and gestured with a sweep of her arm at all the white dots. “In all that? A two-bit mugger maybe sixteen years old doesn’t leave a single print?”

Arsenault shook his head. “We’ve checked inside and out.”

“What about that?” Delorme pointed to a Welch’s grape soda can lying on the floor on the passenger side.

“Haven’t got to it yet.”

Collingwood picked up the can in gloved hands and took it to a small Plexiglas box. He put it inside and closed the lid and turned on the fumes. He squatted so his eyes were level with the box. After a minute he turned off the machine, opened the lid, took out the soda can and held it up to the light. He handed it to Arsenault and said, “Thumb.”

Arsenault held it up to the light and squinted at it. “Triple tenting in the arch.”

“Which means what?” Delorme said.

“It matches the prints we took off your dead ATM artist.”

“It’s a start, I guess,” Delorme said. “Too bad he doesn’t have a record.”

“We got something better than that,” Collingwood said.

An outsider would not have noticed, but Delorme had known Collingwood for going on ten years. For him to utter so many syllables in a row amounted to excitement bordering on hysteria.

“What have you got, Bob?”

He crooked a finger and she followed him over to the counter at the side of the garage. He pointed. Four white arcs of plaster were laid out, each in its own plastic bag. Interspersed with these were four more white plaster arcs, not in bags.

“You made moulds of the tires?”

Collingwood nodded.

“And the ones in plastic are from Trout Lake?”

“You got it.”

“Don’t tell me we’ve got our killer.”

“Fingerprints don’t match but the tires do. Prints on the gun at the ATM show he’s a right-hander. The Trout Lake killer is left-handed. But this car was definitely there.”

Cardinal’s first duty of the day was to apprehend Randall Wishart. “Wish I could come with you,” McLeod had said. “Hate to miss a pleasure like that.”

Cardinal drove up to Carnwright Real Estate and waited for Wishart’s client to leave. In contrast to McLeod’s sense of fun, Cardinal found the business depressing. Preventing harm to a girl like Sam Doucette was unquestionably a good thing. He could recognize that this was “serving and protecting,” as Chouinard liked to put it. But a pleasure?

When he snapped the cuffs on him, Wishart’s face turned paper white, and Cardinal thought for a moment that he might faint. He led him through the outer office under the shocked gaze of Lawrence Carnwright and their receptionist, and knew that his action, although just and necessary, was catastrophic to this family. Yes, Sam would be safer, but he took no pleasure in yanking the loosened thread of a young man’s unravelling life.

Even a lawyer of Dick Nolan’s calibre couldn’t keep Wishart from spending a day and night in jail, not with the information Cardinal had amassed from Troy Campbell and Sam Doucette. The Crown would not go for a charge of attempted murder—Campbell had never laid a hand on her—but obstruction of justice and uttering threats were not going to pose a problem.

When that was done, Cardinal went to D.S. Chouinard and asked that a safe house be provided for Sam and her mother.

Chouinard’s flat-out no was for him an unusually decisive response. “I don’t even understand why you’re asking,” he said. “Wishart wanted to shut the girl up to save his job and his marriage. But that cat is well and truly out of the bag, so he has no motive to attack her again.”

“It’s not Wishart I’m worried about. It was the killer, not Wishart, who chased her and shot at her car. And she lost her cellphone at the scene. It has her picture, her name, her address.”

“If we were sure he had her cellphone, I would not hesitate. There’s been no activity from her number.”

“No, but it’s still pinging. Which means it isn’t frozen or dead. If someone picked it up, why aren’t they using it?”

“They want to change the SIMM card. I don’t know. But I also don’t know that the killer has it. We don’t know that he caught her licence plate. But we do know that he chose not to chase her. So on the whole, I’m not inclined to think she’s in danger.”

“I don’t think that’s a bet we can afford to make.”

“Luckily, it’s not your decision.”

“Uh-huh. And what happened to serving and protecting?”

“Let me tell you something off the record, Cardinal, and I mean no disrespect, but fuck you.”

Cardinal brought Sam and her mother down to the station for a formal statement, which he videotaped. Sam sat across the table from him, her mother at her side. The girl had lost the passionate, excitable manner of the other night. Her words were matter-of-fact as she described Troy Campbell coming after her, but when she related how Randall had kept telling her not to go to the police, her tone became more and more depressed.

Her mother, neatly dressed in skirt and blazer, stayed quiet until Sam was finished. “A married man,” she said softly. “What could you possibly have been thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Sam said. “I was feeling.” She pulled a strand of dark hair away from her forehead with thumb and forefinger and hooked it behind a perfectly formed ear.

“The story’s been all over the news,” Mrs. Doucette said to Cardinal. “I’m terrified someone’s going to come after her again.”

“We’ve talked to the local media—they’re not going to run Sam’s name or picture—but I can’t promise anything once other places get hold of it. Unfortunately, shooting someone with a crossbow isn’t a great strategy if you want to remain anonymous.”

“I know. Indian shoots white man with bow and arrow.” She turned to her daughter. “Sweetheart, you probably just set us back a hundred years—but I’m glad you did it.”

“It’s Randall I should shoot,” Sam said. “I still can’t believe it. I know it’s true and I just can’t get my head around it.”

“I hope you’re planning to keep that man in jail,” her mother said to Cardinal.

“I’ll certainly try.”

“You know, if a bear wanders into town and hurts somebody, they kill it.”

“Mother, please.”

“Bears don’t have the right to due process,” Cardinal said.

He turned the focus to the night of the murders and took Sam slowly through it, starting from when she got to Champlain’s, to Randall’s call, to the drive out to Trout Lake. She gave him every detail he asked for and volunteered many he didn’t. She emphasized again, as she had in her anonymous phone call, that the man who had spoken to the Bastovs did not have a Russian accent. As she spoke—she hadn’t put her finger on it at the time—she realized that the man might be from the South. The American South.

“Why do you say that?”

“He said you-all a couple of times. And the way he pronounced a couple of things. He said nass instead of nice. Maht instead of might. Stuff like that. It wasn’t really strong, but it sounded kinda South to me.”

“And he was trying to sell the Bastovs on buying the house?”

“He showed them the bathroom. The bedrooms. Pointed stuff out. Switched the lights on and off. He talked about the view. How he’d have to get them out there in daylight to see it. I wondered about it, because I know Randall and Mr. Carnwright are the only two men in the company.”

Sam was precise on the time the shots were fired, and detailed in her description of other sounds—the man sounded tall, fairly heavy, big boots—but she wasn’t going to be able to identify him: a glimpse in the night, a man’s form silhouetted against a lit room. She described the chase, and the bullets hitting her car.

Sam’s mother spoke up. “How are you going to protect Sam from this animal?”

Cardinal tried to repeat Chouinard’s reasoning as if he believed it himself. “Maybe you have some relatives you could stay with,” he added. “It might be good if Sam could be out of town for a while.”

“In other words you aren’t going to do anything.”

Cardinal said he could arrange to have patrol cars pass by their house as often as possible.

“That doesn’t exactly sound like ironclad security. In fact it sounds pathetic.” She turned to her daughter. “We could stay with Susanna in Dokis, I suppose.”

“Oh, great.” Sam said. “I lose my job and my school year.”

“No you won’t,” her mother said. “We’re not going to let that happen.”

Cardinal tried to remain upbeat as he drove them home. He even gave Sam his cellphone number—something he never did with witnesses—but when he dropped them off, the look on her mother’s face filled him with shame.

The security video finally arrived from Pearson International just as Cardinal was leaving for the day.

“Hey, Delorme,” he said, holding it up. She was shutting down her computer in the cubicle next to his. “You want to watch a video tonight?”

They drove in their separate cars to Delorme’s bungalow. The small brick house looked pretty in the snow. She had put up Christmas decorations since the last time Cardinal had visited.

Cardinal sat on the couch in front of the TV with a bowl of tortilla chips beside him, flipping channels while Delorme defrosted some chili. He caught part of a documentary on the discovery of a British frigate that had been sunk in Lake Erie in the War of 1812. A salvage team out of Toronto was testing a new sonar device that used computer technology to translate sound waves into remarkably clear images. Cardinal made a note of the salvage outfit’s name.

Delorme brought in their dinner trays and picked up the remote. The video began to play, showing a wide-angle view of parking level five that took in about a dozen vehicles. The time stamp reeled off the seconds in the lower right of the screen.

“Three weeks ago,” Delorme said. “A little more.”

“Car’s third from the left.” Cardinal pointed with his fork. “Good chili.”

“French Canadians have always made the best chili.”

A figure entered from the foreground, his back to the camera, wearing a hood. A bulky knapsack hung from his back.

“Could be our ATM kid,” Delorme said. She put her plate on the coffee table and went to sit on the rug, closer to the screen, hugging her knees to her chest like a teenager.

The figure approached the car that was deepest in shadow; his face remained completely obscured. A slim jim appeared in his hand, and with a couple of swift movements he had the lock up and the door open. There was no sound on the video, but the car alarm must have been loud in that concrete space. He got in, popped the hood and got out again. He raised the hood and shut it a moment later.

“So much for the car alarm,” Cardinal said.

“He’s fast. Must have had some good training.”

“We’re not going to be able to recognize him from this tape,” Cardinal said. “Not unless the Toronto geek squad can enhance it somehow.”

“Well, it’s got to be the same kid, even if we can’t prove it. Oh my, who have we got here?”

Another figure had entered the scene.

Cardinal pointed, outlining the man’s head and shoulders. “He looks a lot older. Way older. Just the way he moves.”

The two got in and closed the doors. The rear lights went on and then the car backed up, turned and drove out of frame.

“Back it up,” Cardinal said. “I think we got a bit of light on the older guy’s face when he turned to open the door.”

Delorme reached for the remote and froze the image for a second, and then ran it backwards. She clicked the image forward a few frames. The older figure was wearing a baseball cap that shadowed his face. He moved jerk by jerk toward the car. He opened the passenger-side door, and when he turned slightly, Delorme froze the image.

She got up on all fours to peer at the screen. Cardinal sat forward on the edge of his seat. “Definitely older.”

“They should be able to enhance that one. Maybe even use facial recognition on it.” Delorme ran the recording forward and back a few more times, but none of the frames was any better. She switched off the set and came back to the couch. “So. We’re looking for two guys. One’s a kid, the other’s in his forties or fifties?”

“That’s good,” Cardinal said. “Two guys travelling together—one of them a teenager—are going to be more noticeable than just one. First thing tomorrow we’ve got to get on the stick to Pearson. If they can match these guys up with other security shots, we may be able to get names from passport control, maybe even connect with a likely flight.”

“Do you know how many million people go through Pearson in a year?”

“That’s in a year. Look how we can narrow it down. The Bastovs are American—we can assume their killer followed them here. Assume these two guys arrived within an hour before stealing the car. They can check security tapes in the U.S. arrivals area for that hour. We may even be able to get it down to a particular gate, or close to it. But all of this makes me wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

“The victims are American. It looks like the killer or killers are American. So how did they know the Schumacher place was for sale? The sign was up, but it hasn’t been listed for some time.”

“If they knew the Bastovs were looking for a house in the area, maybe they just did a thorough search of the real estate agencies.”

“Doesn’t seem likely.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

They let the thought lie. They finished the chili and talked for a while longer about the best ways to deal with the Toronto airport. Then Delorme said, “So. How was your date the other night?”

“Date?” Cardinal said. “You mean with that reporter? That wasn’t a date.”

“Uh-huh. You seemed pretty evasive. Why be evasive if it wasn’t a date? How’d it go? Did you go out to dinner?”

“Yeah, we went to DeGroot’s.”

“DeGroot’s,” Delorme said, “is definitely a date.”

“It was not a date. And don’t look at me like that. Donna doesn’t know anybody in town—I figured why not take her out to dinner.”

“She didn’t look like a charity case to me.”

“It was an information exchange. She gave me some good stuff.”

“Did you boink her?”

“Lise. For Pete’s sake …”

“I can ask, can’t I? We’re buddies, aren’t we? If I was a guy, you’d tell me.”

“You’re not a guy, and—contrary to what you may think—men do not constantly tell each other about their sex lives. No, I didn’t boink her—what are you, twelve? And before you ask—no, I didn’t try. Jesus.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“Yes you did. How’s Shane, Lise? Did you boink Shane this week?”

Delorme laughed. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

“That’s it.” Cardinal stood up and got his coat. “Thanks for the chili. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You asked me, John.”

“Jesus, Lise.”