Crime Machine

35

AT HOME—IF YOU COULD CALL this overheated, jungle-humid apartment any kind of home—Cardinal was finding it difficult to focus. For one thing, there were three women in his head. Delorme, with that impassive look in her brown eyes, the look she had given him in the airport. A look that said he was not the man she had thought he was. And Donna Vaughan. The remembered heat, her intensity, kept reaching into his mind in a way that stirred him physically.

And Catherine. Would there ever come a time when he would close his eyes and not see Catherine’s face? Their life together flashed before him every night. And every night, as if he were an obsessive accountant gnawing at a statement that refused to balance, he found his own contribution to that life wanting. “I did my best,” he said aloud, and his words echoed off the window, the fridge, the kitchen table cluttered with the creased and dog-eared Scriver file.

He had dug Scriver out again for one reason: the name Winston. He was sure—well, almost sure—that he had come across the name in the stack of folders with their faded type, their broken rubber bands. Winston. Not exactly a rare name, but not common either. There were no Winstons listed in the Algonquin Bay telephone directory; he had checked.

Walt Scriver, his wife Jenny, their son Martin. No Winston there, and none among the many neighbours who had been interviewed, people who lived in the same block as the Scrivers in town. Out on Trout Lake they had had no neighbours. Their cottage had been located on the island at the end of Island Road. It might well have been visible from the Schumacher place, had the Schumacher place existed back then. Cardinal looked again at the black-and-white photos of the exterior. A small, unassuming cottage, in need of paint and a new porch. Large woodpile neatly stacked under the overhang, a canoe hull-side-up on a couple of sawhorses, bathing suits strung on a line. A rickety dock hanging in the water off the rocky beach. Duly noted, indeed emphasized, in the file, the Scrivers’ aluminum outboard—not there.

Cardinal’s cellphone started to vibrate and turn on the kitchen table.

“I knew you’d still be up.” Donna Vaughan.

“You want to come round a little later? Say in an hour?”

“Can’t. I have to rewrite a piece for New York magazine. I get it in tonight or it doesn’t run and I don’t get paid.”

“Russian mob?”

“Just the fur business. I filed it months ago and they’re just getting around to running it. I’m adding a sidebar about the Bastovs—and don’t worry, it won’t mention anything off the record.”

A sudden longing for her took Cardinal by surprise, but he said nothing. Uncertainty over a woman was unfamiliar terrain, untrodden since before he met Catherine. He wasn’t sure if it was longing for Donna Vaughan or just a longing to not be alone in his humid apartment with his ancient file and his dead-end ideas. Or just longing, another word for being alive.

“I have to get off the phone,” she told him, “or I’m going to get too distracted by you.”

“Good,” Cardinal said.

“I hate self-discipline. What little I have.”

“Maybe we can make up for it soon,” Cardinal said.

Interior photos showed a scene of abandoned tranquility. Dishes in the sink, three coffee mugs still on the dining room table, The Algonquin Lode open on the table. Fishing and hunting trophies on one wall, a locked gun rack, rods and tackle. A tiny rabbit-ears television in one corner, lumpy-looking furniture arranged around it. Large wood stove.

The hunting gear interested Cardinal. There was a note in the file that Mr. Scriver had been an occasional trapper, nothing too serious. Lots of guys go trapping just as a way to spend time outdoors.

The newspaper on the table was open to the movie listings. Algonquin Bay’s theatres had long ago been relegated to the shopping malls, but back then the city had had four, three on Main Street and a drive-in on Trout Lake Road. Someone had circled the ten p.m. showing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the drive-in. To make the show, the Scrivers would have had to take the boat out around 9:45, head over to the marina where they kept a parking spot, and drive to the theatre. They never got to the car.

There was no guarantee that they had in fact set out for the movies. No one in the few cottages on Island Road recalled hearing or seeing them on the water. The property was thoroughly searched. A stack of file photos showed layers of excavation. There were close-ups of bones that proved to be those of a moose long buried—something that happens to moose remains when hunters lug home more than they can chew. These dated from long before the Scrivers bought the cottage.

Their house in town had shown no signs of recent occupancy. It was the Scrivers’ summer routine to move to the cottage at the end of June and stay there until the school year started in September. And so, lacking any signs to the contrary, the Scriver case became Algonquin Bay’s most famous presumed drowning.

The lake had been searched by divers, and dragged, but no trace of the Scrivers or even their boat turned up. Mr. Scriver was a long-time employee of Lands and Forests, and the department had pulled out all the stops in the search, but even their sonar remained stubbornly silent.

Cardinal flipped through report after report. Interviews with relatives: yes, the Scrivers all got along well. Friends, neighbours, employers—all the interviews pointed to the Scrivers as a happy family. Martin, the son, fishing and hunting with his dad all the time, mother a good teacher, father a reliable employee devoted to the outdoors. Martin had caused some anxiety—thrown off the school hockey team for putting a referee in hospital, a juvenile charge of break and enter. And then there it was: supplementary report filed by one Detective René Proulx, interview with the son’s girlfriend, Cecilia Winston.

Martin Scriver had found summer employment in a deer census project north of Temiskaming. Cecilia Winston lived in the area. She was interviewed at a memorial service for the Scrivers that had taken place nearly a year after their disappearance. Inexcusable that she hadn’t been interviewed earlier. No, she had never seen any violence or anger in Martin. If anything, he was extremely protective of her in a mostly male environment. No, of course she hadn’t heard from him after the disappearance. Subject agitated and tearful. Related devastated by Martin S’s presumed demise. How it came just a week after the death of her brother (Kurt, 18. Leukemia).

Cardinal pulled the folder from his briefcase and opened it to the airport image of Curtis Carl Winston, age fifty-eight. That made him eighteen at the time of the Scrivers’ disappearance.

Cardinal spent the entire following morning on the Internet and the telephone. The Registrar General’s office confirmed that one Curtis Carl Winston of Temiskaming, Ontario, had indeed died on July 5, 1970, at the age of eighteen. The facsimile showed cause of death as leukemia. The certificate had been issued three months after the boy had died.

Cardinal called Jerry Commanda at OPP. “Jerry, there’s a private contractor called DeepTec in Toronto that does a lot of salvage in the Great Lakes. They have a new gizmo called a side-scanning sonar we’re going to need, and it’ll be way out of our budget. Can you guys swing it?”

“Why? Did Chouinard put you on the Scriver case or something?”

“As a matter of fact, he did.”

“Wow. I was actually joking.”

“There’s a connection to the Bastov murders. And if the Scrivers’ boat is on the bottom of Trout Lake, this sonar might be able to find it.”

“John, the lake is frozen.”

“Scriver was a long-time Lands and Forests guy. I’m thinking they’d be willing to help out.”

“Well, you don’t need a private contractor,” Jerry said. “Orillia HQ bought one of those units in the summer. If it’s not in use, I should be able to get it up here today.”

Things didn’t go as smoothly with the Armed Forces. Cardinal had to call many different numbers before he finally got through to an actual human being in the archives who could answer his questions, which were very few. Did they have any record of a soldier by the name of Curtis Carl Winston? Yes, they did. When had he enlisted? September 15, 1970. Mobile Command, Petawawa, until 1972, by which time he had attained the rank of corporal. He trained briefly with the U.S. Army Rangers as part of a JTF known as the Northern Rangers—specialists in survival, sabotage and CHC—combat in harsh conditions—since disbanded. Discharged in 1974.

“Thank you,” Cardinal said to the female civilian who had dug all this up for him. She sounded young, and Cardinal had an image of a girl with a laptop, an iPod and a Starbucks mug on her desk. She also sounded smart. He told her he had another question.

“I’m listening, sir.”

“I need to know what was the sidearm they carried at that time.”

“In Mobile Command?”

“And in the JTF.”

There was silence at the other end.

“I’ve stumped you,” Cardinal said.

“No, sir. Just contemplating the best way to run down this information. You know what? It’s not my department, but it may be under Logistics and Weaponry, or whatever it was called way back then. Let me see if I can go through them to pull up some stuff—or actually, the Web may be faster. Can you hang on?”

“This is what I don’t understand,” Delorme said. She had to speak loudly over the noise of the icebreaker’s engine. “I don’t understand what made you go to the Armed Forces in the first place. Why did you even think of checking the military?”

They were ploughing slowly through the ice surrounding the island where the Scrivers had spent their last summer. An OPP diver sat silently beside them like a lonely astronaut in a penumbra of tubes, his helmet on his lap. Sunlight flashed off the snowy surface of the lake, making their eyes water.

“It was a lucky guess,” Delorme said. “Admit it. It was an incredibly lucky guess.”

“It was Mendelsohn’s idea,” Cardinal said. “I read an entry in his notebook that said Check Canadian military weapons, and it took me a while to realize what he meant. He had two cases of beheadings where there was also a firearm involved. And in both of them, that firearm was a Browning HP. Not the same gun, but the same model. Same as with the Bastovs. Same as at the ATM. And you have to wonder how and where someone becomes so devoted to a particular weapon. It’s not like it’s the most common firearm in the world, but in the early seventies it was standard issue for the Northern Rangers.”

Two dark figures stood on the rocky beach of the island, Jerry Commanda and Ian McLeod. Behind them, a beautiful summer house of red cedar had replaced the homely Scriver cottage. The Schumacher property was visible across the short stretch of ice that was now churned and broken as if it had been jackhammered. Jerry Commanda was a persuasive guy, but it must have taken a star performance even by his standards to persuade Natural Resources to produce their breaker. It was nothing like a Coast Guard boat, amounting to little more than a modified outboard with a reinforced, sharpened prow, and another two weeks of winter would have rendered it useless. Progress was noisy but slow.

At Cardinal’s request, their pilot steered the boat around the elongated tip of the island, opposite to the direction the Scrivers would have taken had they been crossing the bay to get to a movie. Cardinal tapped on the door of a squat, telephone booth–like structure in the middle of the boat and spoke to the OPP technician inside.

“Anything yet?”

The tech shook his head. “Just a lot of logs. Amazingly well preserved, considering there hasn’t been any logging here for at least sixty years.” Cardinal could see over his shoulder that the images were crisp and clear.

“How deep?”

“Ninety, ninety-five feet. It’ll get deeper real soon.”

“Scriver senior helped map the underwater geography,” Cardinal told Delorme, “and his son worked with him a couple of summers on fish surveys and so on. They both would have known the lake very well.”

They came around the tip of the island and the wind picked up. A slice of black water eased the way for fifty yards or so.

The diver spoke up for the first time. “Deepest part of the lake coming up. Hundred, hundred and twenty metres. Current moves in the opposite direction, so they likely wouldn’t have searched this area back when.”

“And they assumed the Scrivers were headed toward town,” Cardinal said.

On the island, Jerry Commanda and Ian McLeod emerged from the trees and stood on the beach. Both folded their arms at the same moment against the wind, as if they had rehearsed.

The booth door opened and the tech called out, “Got something.”

Cardinal leaned in. Again he marvelled at the clarity of the image. “Delorme, you gotta see this.”

Delorme stuck her head in. “Can we get closer?”

“Hell, yes,” the tech said. “Closing in as we speak. It’s snagged under an outcropping. No way the old sonars would have detected it.”

The image took on greater contrast and definition. An oar hanging over a gunwale. An outboard off the stern.

“Two hundred and thirty feet,” the tech said. “You see what’s in that thing?”

“Yes,” Cardinal said. “I do.”

They helped the diver screw on his helmet. He switched on his lights, and the red LED began to flash on his tiny videocam. He climbed over the side and lowered himself into the water, and they watched him sink into darkness. He had to pause several times on the way down to adjust to the pressure.

Cardinal’s phone rang and he took it from his inside pocket and opened it. It was Ian McLeod, wanting to know how long he was expected to hang out on a beach in the middle of goddam winter. He could see McLeod giving him the finger across the water. “Hang in there,” Cardinal said.

“By the way—checked out Divyris’s so-called business contacts. He’s dreaming. Yes, he has been meeting with people, talking with people, hounding people, and they’re totally sick of him. Apparently he won’t take no for an answer. One guy’s threatening to sue the bastard for harassment. Are you having fun out there?”

“Hell, yes. This’ll be in the papers tomorrow.”

“Yeah, but in a good way?”

Cardinal clicked off and watched the video monitor, the sunken boat coming into view.

“Are we sure it’s the Scrivers?” Delorme said.

“Fourteen-foot aluminum. Evinrude thirty-five on the back,” Cardinal said. He asked the tech to get the diver to scan the motor. A couple of seconds later the image changed and the motor filled the screen. Cold and depth combined make an excellent preservative, and the lettering was still visible after forty years. Evinrude thirty-five.

When the diver turned back to the boat, Cardinal heard Delorme’s sudden intake of breath and felt his own pulse jump.

“There are only two bodies,” Cardinal said. “Ask him to get close on the faces.”

It took the pilot a moment to respond. “He says they don’t have any faces.” The image drifting lazily across the monitor screen confirmed this. “They don’t even have any heads.”

“I have a feeling,” Cardinal said, “that this is not the usual disarticulation you get with drowning victims.”

The tech shook his head. “Too deep. Too cold. Anyway, the feet would have detached first, then the hands, and as you can see, the extremities are still intact. Minus a finger or two.”

“Forty years,” Delorme said. “Incredible.”

No sound but the scrape of ice against their hull. Hundreds of feet below, the water was perfectly clear. The zoom lens lurched into extreme close-up, swerving from one detail to another: a jagged hole in the hull, then another, both made from the inside. The diver’s light flared off sharp edges of aluminum. Then a third gash.

“Look at that,” Cardinal said. “The axe is still wedged in it.”

The view swung back to the bodies, extreme close-up, the white gleam of neck bone.

Aromas of fresh coffee and pastries filled the meeting room. All the CID personnel were there, and Chouinard was so excited he had even called Police Chief R. J. Kendall to sit in on the debriefing. The mood was festive, even triumphant.

“You’re losing me,” Chouinard said, in urgency, not anger. “Who was it dies of leukemia?”

“Curtis Carl Winston. Eighteen-year-old brother of Martin Scriver’s girlfriend. Never did anything suspicious in his life until he joined the army—which wouldn’t be suspicious either, except for the fact he did it two months after he died.”

“So we think Martin Scriver killed his parents and took off? He joins the army using someone else’s identity?”

“Back then, all you needed was the name of a dead person close to your own age. He gets a few years in the military, Northern Rangers—where, incidentally, he becomes intimately familiar with the Browning HP nine-mil, their official sidearm at the time.”

“And he keeps the name ever since?”

“There’d be no need to change it. No one was looking for Curt Winston, and it’s not like it’s such a peculiar name there couldn’t be more than one person with it. Also, he moved to the States soon after discharge. FBI New York is pulling out all the stops for us on this. They’ve already traced Winston back to several different businesses going back to the seventies—tanneries, fur farms, always stuff connected to the fur trade. He was located for a long time near Seattle, and also just north of New York—both fur auction centres. We’re making a list of our locals who’ve been in the business for decades and we’re going to start talking to them tomorrow.”

“Back up a minute.” Chief Kendall raised his hand as if to halt oncoming traffic. “Just because the boy’s body is not found with his parents doesn’t make him a murderer. His body could have drifted away. He could have been kidnapped. He could have been killed somewhere else.”

Cardinal pulled a photo from the folder in front of him. “Got this from Armed Forces archives. Curtis Winston’s enlistment photo.” He handed it to the chief and reached into his briefcase and pulled out a book. “Chippewa High School yearbook, 1969. Take a look at Martin Scriver’s picture. It would have been taken about a year earlier.”

“Fantastic,” Kendall said. “This is very good work.”

“Martin Scriver had some problems with violence—put a hockey referee in hospital, for example. I’m thinking he lost it with his parents, possibly over something trivial, and he went crazy with the axe. We’ve got two cases in the States where a couple and their child are murdered. And Bastov would have been a third, except the son had to miss his flight. In some screwed-up way, he could be re-enacting the crime over and over again.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I’m not saying it’s sane. Maybe to suggest there are other killers out there—killers who attack couples and their kids and chop them up. A twisted way to imply he never killed his parents, that it was the work of itinerant strangers.”

“He’s murdering people to prove his innocence? Until today, nobody even knew for sure the Scrivers had been murdered.”

“He did. It’s himself he’d be trying to convince.”

Chouinard nodded at Jerry Commanda. “The lake is OPP territory. Are you guys going to boot us off?”

“Oh no, sir. Scriver’s been a joint operation since the beginning of time. We’re happy to keep it that way. Besides, it’s totally bound up with Bastov.”

“I take it that’s from your evidence warehouse?” Chouinard pointed at the banker’s box on the table in front of Jerry.

Jerry tapped the top with a long index finger. “Martin Scriver’s stuff from the cottage. He left everything behind, even his wallet—probably to make it look like he was a victim. We got a toothbrush, and a hairbrush with some hairs in it could be useful for DNA. It’s at the Orillia lab. We have prints that were lifted from the cottage and from his wallet.”

“I love this,” Chouinard said, and turned to Chief Kendall. “Don’t you love this?”

“I’ll love it more when we have someone behind bars.”