Crime Machine

3

AFTER DINNER, JOHN CARDINAL SAT at the kitchen table and only realized after some time that he’d been staring at his own reflection in the window. He got up and turned off the light and sat back down. His apartment building was on a ridge overlooking the north bay of Lake Nipissing and now, with the lights off, the frozen surface of the lake took form in the glass. The moon, not quite full, was bright enough to wash out most of the stars and lit a wide off-white track across the snow to Cardinal’s window. The tops of trees that lined the beach waved in the breeze, but he couldn’t hear them through the double glazing.

Mealtimes were still difficult. For the first six months after Catherine died, Cardinal had eaten in front of the television. He didn’t like television, but it was better than simply staring at the empty place where Catherine used to sit chatting to him about her students or her latest photography project. Finally he had come to find it intolerable, and he put the little house by Trout Lake up for sale—the house he had lived in with Catherine and his daughter for nearly twenty years. For some reason he had decided that an apartment would suit him better at this broken place in his life. An apartment was un-Catherine. It was un-Cardinal, come to that. At one time he might have thought of himself as an urban type, back when he was living in Toronto decades ago, but not anymore. Now he was just a man whose wife had died and who had trouble seeing much value in his leftover life.

He turned the light back on and reached for the top file of a stack of manila folders foxed and acidic with age. Under the rubber band that held the folder together was a memo from the chief exhorting the investigations department to dig deep in their efforts to clear cold cases. There was nothing like clearing up an ancient mystery or bringing an elusive criminal to justice to restore the public’s faith in their local police. They were to seek especially opportunities to apply technologies, databases and techniques that had been unknown or unavailable to the original investigation. Whenever he was seeking to provoke enthusiasm where none existed, which was often, Chief R. J. Kendall was prone to oratory. We must see ourselves as visitors from the future, travelling back to help our stymied colleagues in the past.

R.J. had the politician’s knack of presenting a policy he had been forced to adopt as the inevitable result of his personal devotion to good works. In this case, the provocation had been the release of a national report on the clearance rates of the various local forces. Usually these were restricted to larger cities with populations above one hundred thousand. This year, some irritating bureaucrat had produced a comparison of smaller cities, and although one could offer fourteen reasons why the results were not particularly meaningful, that did nothing to assuage Chief Kendall’s outrage that the Algonquin Bay police service had been ranked just slightly above the median. The chief didn’t mention it specifically, but Cardinal knew that what really rankled with him was that Parry Sound and Sudbury, two cities of similar size, demographics and geography, were far ahead when results were averaged out over forty years. It looked bad, side by side, and even The Globe and Mail had mentioned it as an interesting anomaly.

Thus the Scriver case, all twenty pounds of it, on Cardinal’s kitchen table. D.S. Chouinard had had the six detectives in CID draw three cold cases each from a hat and Cardinal had drawn Oldham (probable but unprovable murder by spouse), Sloane (missing octogenarian, probable misadventure) and Scriver. When the name was read out, Cardinal’s colleagues had not made the slightest attempt to suppress their laughter.

Delorme, by contrast, had drawn Lonnie Laird, a missing teenager who had always been presumed but never proved to be a victim of Toronto serial killer Laurence Knapschaeffer. It took Delorme exactly one trip to the Penetanguishene hospital for the criminally insane and a forty-five-minute interview with Knapschaeffer to get a signed confession from him—possibly because Delorme was a first-class investigator, or possibly (and this was the explanation Ian McLeod liked) for the simple reason that Knapschaeffer had never before had the elective attention of such a good-looking female.

Scriver was the oldest and most investigated and re-investigated case in the history of the Algonquin Bay police and their colleagues in the joint effort, the Ontario Provincial Police. It had taken place many years before Cardinal had joined the force. There was no one left on staff who had been around at the time. All of the investigators were long retired, some long deceased.

On or about July 15, 1970, the Scriver family had apparently left their Trout Lake cottage in their small outboard and had never been heard from again. Cottage door unlocked. The remains of dinner still on the table. No signs of violence.

The missing: Walt Scriver, forty-five, a researcher with the Lands and Forests Department (as the Ministry of Natural Resources was then known). His wife, Jenny Scriver, forty-three, homemaker and part-time teacher. Their eighteen-year-old son Martin, who had been home for the weekend from his summer job on a deer census. All apparent victims of a drowning accident.

Cardinal wrote in big letters on his legal pad, Cleared—Alien Abduction.

The buzzer rang and Cardinal went to the intercom to open the door for Lise Delorme. One of the unforeseen benefits of moving to this apartment was that he was now just a five-minute walk away from Delorme, his favourite person at work. When he had first moved in, Delorme had come round to help unroll carpets and hang curtains. Pure kindness, Cardinal figured; she would have done the same for anyone.

Now here she was at his door, tomboyish in flannel shirt and blue jeans, and clutching a DVD in one hand, a gigantic can of popcorn in the other. A less cop-like person would be hard to envision.

“Monsters,” she said, holding up the DVD. The cover had a picture of giant insects. “Or do you think it’ll be too much like work?”

Cardinal put the DVD into the machine and spent a few minutes fiddling with the remote, which never worked the same way twice.

“Man, it’s so humid in here,” Delorme said. “They still didn’t fix your ventilation?”

“Don’t get me started. Buying this place may have been one of the dumbest moves I ever made.”

Delorme was looking at the pile of folders. “Hey, congratulations. I see you solved Scriver.”

“Yeah. Turned out to be simple.”

Cardinal on his recliner, Delorme on the couch. He kept a quilt folded up on the back, because Delorme always got cold—those huge plate glass windows facing the lake. She was still in her thirties, passionate in temperament and appealing in form, and it had occurred to Cardinal more than once to reach across the small table that separated them and touch her, but he hadn’t. They had fallen into this friendship and pretty quickly it had begun to feel as if it had always been like this and always would be.

She was telling him about a hunter, the subject of two annoying grid searches, who had just been found near the Nipissing reserve, slightly frostbitten but otherwise okay. Hunters got lost two or three times a year and posed a considerable drain on department resources, not to mention on the patience of those who had to look for them. “What’s wrong with these people?” she said. “They haven’t heard of GPS?”

“Lot of macho types pride themselves on not needing it. How’s Shane?” Cardinal muted the TV as they waited for the FBI warning and the previews to finish.

Delorme hoisted the quilt around her shoulders, careful not to tip her bowl of popcorn. “We had dinner Wednesday night. It was okay.”

“You don’t sound excited.”

Delorme shrugged and transported a handful of popcorn from bowl to mouth. “I’m not.”

“I imagine you end up talking shop a lot of the time.”

Delorme made a face. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think Shane’s all that good a lawyer. Doesn’t seem to get his clients off very often.”

“That’s because of the uncanny skill of the local police.”

“I don’t think so, unfortunately.”

“Well, he must have something, or you wouldn’t keep going out with him.” It amazed Cardinal that he could talk to Delorme about her love life. It would have been unthinkable a year ago, but now it seemed natural.

“Shane is someone to have dinner with,” Delorme said. “Go to a movie with. Not much more than that.”

“That’s too bad.”

“You should talk. You don’t go out with anyone. You don’t even seem to consider it.”

Cardinal hit the remote and the MGM lion roared.

The first few minutes of the movie were amusing, even to Cardinal, though he didn’t normally like science fiction. The chubby friend of the main character had just been yanked offscreen by an extremely slimy tentacle when the phone rang.

They drove out to Trout Lake. Out past the frozen beach, past Natural Resources and the marina. Out past Madonna Road, where Cardinal and Catherine and their daughter used to live. A few more kilometres and they made a right onto Island Road, passing the Chinook roadhouse on the left. Delorme took it slow on all the hills and curves, neither of them saying anything, almost as if they were holding their breath.

Island Road, so called because when you reach the end of it, there’s just one last house and then the water of Trout Lake—ice, now—and, about half a kilometre out, a pretty island that sits at the end of this peninsula like the dot over an i.

White birches flashed by in an endless palisade. Moonlight on cedar and blue spruce. Not what you’d normally call disturbing, but when Delorme stopped at the driveway to the last house in front of the yellow strip of crime scene tape, Cardinal got a bad feeling. And not just the regular bad feeling you got at the scene of a murder. Delorme looked pale and grim, and Cardinal knew he looked the same.

They got out of the car and nodded at the young cop standing just inside the yellow tape. He introduced himself as PC Rankin and pointed with his flashlight at the left side of the driveway. “Those are my tracks,” he said. “PC Gifford’s by the house. I walked back up here and figured best to walk where no one else had. Whole mess of tracks further down.”

“Where’s your squad car?”

He pointed with a fat mitten down the curving drive.

They had driven right over tire tracks that might prove crucial later on, but Cardinal couldn’t blame them. They hadn’t known what kind of situation they were coming into.

He ducked under the tape and continued down the driveway, following the beam of his own flashlight, Delorme right behind. They walked single file to minimize any more damage, both of them looking at the tire tracks. The tread marks cast deep shadows in the snow.

The driveway was long, really its own separate road. And it had enough dips and turns that they couldn’t see the house until they reached the last crest and could look down the final slope toward the lake. It was set there in a wash of moonlight that lit the trees, the frozen lake.

Cardinal had never seen the house from this side, although he had often admired it from the lake when he was out in the boat. The owners would have a spectacular view, being at the tip of the peninsula that divided Four Mile Bay from the main body of Trout Lake. It was a long and low bungalow, constructed of brick and stone and lengths of cedar. He didn’t know who lived there. All he knew was they had a bright red canoe that was tethered to the dock all summer. Cardinal stopped and Delorme stopped too and looked at him, her breath turning to steam.

“What’s the first thing you think of when you look at this?” Cardinal waved his arm to include the woods, the lake, the island.

“Isolation.”

“Me too,” he said, and continued down toward the house. The snow squeaked with each step.

A young policewoman standing in front of the house raised her flashlight to look them over. Cardinal had noticed her around the station before.

“PC Gifford,” she said. “I know who you guys are.”

Cardinal pointed to the kludge of footprints on the stoop. “I hope none of those are yours.”

“No, but those are.” She pointed to footprints beneath the plate glass window. “I was trying to see if there were any survivors. I thought I should go in—the back door lock has been jimmied and there’s a broken window—but Staff Sarge said no, keep it secure and wait for you guys, so that’s what I did.”

“Who called it in?”

“Couple of boys out for a hike along the shore. They swear they didn’t break the lock or the window, and I believe them.”

“A hike in the pitch dark?” Delorme said.

“I know. They’re like thirteen, parents away for the weekend, and I’d guess the older brother is the world’s worst babysitter.” She said their names and that they lived on Water Road, which was on the far shore, back toward town. “I put ’em in the squad car.”

Delorme stepped up to the front window of the house, holding her flashlight to the glass.

“Take a deep breath before you look,” Gifford said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Delorme stepped back from the window, and turned away.

Cardinal went next, also holding his flashlight to the glass. The bodies were toward the back of the house, little more than silhouettes at this distance. “Jesus,” he said, and stepped back.

He started toward the back of the house, Delorme following.

“We probably should have left the car back at the road,” Gifford said. “But far as we knew, it could’ve been anything from a prank call to a hostage situation. I tried not to run over those, though.” She pointed to the tire tracks between the house and the squad car. “Those were already here.”

“Two vehicles,” Cardinal said. “Clear tracks, too.”

“Should I come with you inside?”

“We need you to stay here and make sure no one steps on that porch,” Cardinal said.

Sandy and Doug were thirteen and fourteen years old. Best friends. A lot of people might have expected them to be traumatized by what they’d seen, but Cardinal knew they’d be bright-eyed with excitement. He and Delorme took separate statements from them, the only difficulty being trying to slow them down. They had been walking along the south side of the peninsula, not on the ice but on the shore. They weren’t up to any mischief, just out for a hike around the shore. But curiosity got the better of them and they decided to take a peek in the windows of this house on the tip of the peninsula.

As soon as the boys had looked in the back window and “like finished puking our guts out,” they had called the police. Constables Gifford and Rankin had arrived, checked out the window and made them wait in the car.

Cardinal pointed his flashlight at the tracks leading from the lake to the house, the tracks leading back. “Were any of those tracks here before you went up to the house?”

The boys looked at each other and shook their heads.

“The back door lock has been jimmied and there’s a broken window,” Cardinal said. “Would you know anything about that?”

Again they shook their heads.

After a few more questions Cardinal gave them his card. “Did you tell anybody about this yet?”

“Nope,” the younger boy said.

“Good. Don’t tell anyone until tomorrow—we don’t want the bad guys to hear anything until it hits the news. You did the right thing calling it in. Wait in the car and we’ll have someone drive you home.”

The boys looked disappointed. “We’d kind of like to stay and watch the CSI guys, if that’s okay,” the older one said.

“Sorry. Can’t allow any unnecessary personnel on the scene.”

“First on the scene,” the younger one said. “We’re material witnesses!”

“Right you are, Inspector—if there’s a trial. But for now, you have to vamoose.”

As he and Delorme turned toward the back of the house, Cardinal said, “Let’s get someone to tape off the back perimeter. We don’t want any more CSI fans poking around.”

Ident arrived, and all of them—the two ident guys, Cardinal and Delorme—struggled into paper suits with rubber feet that would keep their influence on the scene to a minimum. Bunny suits, they called them.

“We’re lucky in one thing already,” Cardinal said. “We’ve got good footprints that haven’t been snowed on. Before we go in, we’re going to get photos and videos of all the tracks at the front door, the sides of the house and at the back. When we look back on this, we want to be a hundred percent sure what was here and what wasn’t.”

Paul Arsenault, the senior ident man, was switching on his video camera as he spoke, and his partner Bob Collingwood had the two young witnesses come out of the squad car and make fresh footprints, which he photographed under bright light. The boys co-operated in a state of solemn excitement.

When they had photographed everything up to the back door, Cardinal went in, followed by Delorme and the coroner.

“The heat’s off,” Cardinal said. “Owners would turn it down, not off—first big freeze, the pipes are going to burst.”

The dead, two of them, were seated at the dining room table, on opposite sides, fixed in the moonlight as if in conversation. Cardinal felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir. He turned on the lights and moved closer to the bodies, looking at one then the other. One male, one female, both hideously foreshortened, both dressed in beautiful fur coats, one sable, one mink.

“First thing,” Cardinal said, “we have a holdback.” He pointed to the knife handle sticking out of the dead man’s back. “Let’s keep the knife to ourselves for the moment.”

Various grunts of agreement from around the room. Collingwood took a few shots close up. Arsenault had remained outside to continue recording exterior evidence.

Cardinal checked the man’s pockets for ID, Delorme checked the woman’s. Nothing.

“Nobody’s pockets are that empty,” Cardinal said. “No keys, no change, no receipts.” He knelt to pull leather gloves from all four of the victims’ hands. The skin had the same hue as that of a frozen turkey. He didn’t want to look above the shoulder line on either of them, where their faces should have been. “Who are they?” Cardinal asked of the room at large. “Anybody know?”

“Ruth and Joseph Schumacher.” It was Neil Dunbar who spoke. He was coming in through the kitchen, plump in his paper hood and coveralls. “I looked them up in the reverse directory before I hopped in the car. They’ve owned the place for twenty years.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s them,” Cardinal said. Dunbar was new on the CID squad, young, and what their detective sergeant liked to call self-motivated.

Cardinal moved toward a country pine buffet with framed photographs all over it. There was a picture of a couple standing in front of the house in summer.

“The woman in the picture is wearing a simple wedding band, same with the man. These two,” Cardinal said, pointing at the four dead hands, “are a little more flashy, wouldn’t you say?”

Dunbar moved forward and peered at the hands. “That doesn’t mean it’s not them.”

“Also, her skin. This person is a lot younger than the woman in the picture.” He pointed at their feet. “The man’s wearing shoes. Why isn’t she?”

“Took ’em off at the front door,” Delorme said. “Expensive pair of leather boots for her, galoshes for him. I’d say these are not the people who broke in the back door.”

“What do you think his wingtips cost? Three hundred? More? Not a cop, obviously.”

The coroner, Dr. Beasley, was done in ten minutes. He scribbled on a form, tore off the top sheet and handed it to Cardinal. “Preliminary finding of foul play. You’re going to need everything Toronto has to offer.”

“That’s it?”

“All I can give you on time of death is more than eight hours, less than forty-eight. You’re going to have to get ’em on the table in Toronto to narrow it down. The knife in the back was post-mortem, as was the trauma to the neck.”

“That’s the fastest I’ve ever seen a coroner leave,” Delorme said when he was gone.

“Guess he didn’t like the atmosphere,” Cardinal said.

Delorme turned her attention to bullets, perhaps unconsciously keeping her back to the two dehumanized shapes. There was a slug embedded in the wall behind the male, another under the sideboard. She made out marker cards for Ident to photograph.

Collingwood was examining the corpses, going over the fur coats with the concentration of an ape grooming his mate. Cardinal was contemplating the table, trying to make sense of the set-up. Three shot glasses. A bottle of Stolichnaya.

“Judging by the position of the bullets,” Delorme said, “it looks like they were shot by someone sitting here.” She indicated a chair that was pulled away from the table.

“We don’t know for sure they were shot yet,” Cardinal said. “But since the rest of it is post-mortem, yeah, I could see it. He shoots the man first, possibly right in the face, and the bullet ends up in the wall behind him. Then he shoots the woman, maybe through the side of the head, and it exits this way and ends up on the floor. Then he pulls out the axe.”

Cardinal looked briefly over the living room, which was neat and undisturbed. He went down a gleaming hallway, his paper suit making swishing sounds with each step. Two of the bedrooms appeared not only undisturbed but underfurnished, as if no one lived in them. Lots of the houses in this area were vacant most of the winter, their owners having another residence in town. He checked the bathroom briefly, and finally the master bedroom.

He stood in the doorway, arms folded. One window completely smashed—outward, not inward—the chair it had been attacked with lying on its side. No other signs of violence. The bed was made up, but when Cardinal lifted the corner of the bedspread, there was only a mattress pad underneath. The closet was virtually empty, as were the dresser drawers. No sign of any suitcases.

He went to the window and looked out. Arsenault had set up so many lights, it looked like a movie set. He was on his knees, bent low over something.

Cardinal asked him how it was going. Arsenault stood up. “Fantastic. I’m taking moulds before it melts.”

“Give me the short version.”

Arsenault pointed to two sets of tracks coming up from the lake. “Those are the two boys’. The prints right by the house—up to the back door at least—are mostly ours. I’m betting all the rest are crime related. That window you’re standing in? Someone came out of there pretty hard. Cut themselves up, too—we got blood on the left hand, blood on the knee. Fairly small person. Took off that way. Comes back this way.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, there’s a whole story out here, if we can just get it down before it melts or it snows again.”

“I’ll send Collingwood out.”

He went back to the dining area. The scene didn’t get any easier to take.

Delorme held up her notebook. “Clothing labels are all American. Barneys, Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor.”

Collingwood, the younger half of Ident, was plucking invisible items from the man’s coat with a pair of tweezers.

“Hair?” Cardinal said.

Collingwood nodded. He almost never spoke.

“Arsenault needs you outside. He’s hit the motherlode.”

Delorme pulled back the sleeve from the dead man’s arm. “Rolex watches, both of them. Fur coats, expensive labels. I’d say we’re dealing with some seriously wealthy people here. Whoever killed them took their wallets but left all this stuff.”

“Idea being to hide their identities rather than get rich, maybe.” Cardinal looked around. “Where’s Dunbar?”

“He went to canvass the neighbours on either side. See if they saw anything.”

“Nearest house must be two hundred yards away. If they were even here. Not too many people live out here in winter. I don’t think it even gets ploughed this far, unless you want to pay a private contractor. Did you tell him to canvass the neighbours?”

“That was his idea.”

“Self-motivated,” Cardinal said.

“Probably just wanted to get away, like the coroner. Can’t say I blame him for that.”

“Not for that. No.”

Cardinal was beginning to feel a peculiar ache in his bones. Not from cold—the house was warming up now—but from whatever it was that emanated from the two headless beings seated at the table.

Cardinal and Delorme stayed silent for a couple of minutes. Cardinal was waiting for that big picture to develop, but at this moment it was all detail and no picture. He went to the front vestibule. He opened the door and examined the outside lock. There were scratches around the keyhole that could mean it had been picked, but he couldn’t be sure if the scratches were new.

When he came back to the living room, Delorme said, “Not much blood. Considering.”

“Considering. Pretty gory next to the chairs they’re sitting on, but nothing like what it’d be if the heads had been removed before they were dead.”

“We’ve got those.” Delorme pointed to two circular smears of blood, one near the entrance from the kitchen, one on the other side of the table. “But no drips moving away from the table, or away from the blotches. So the killer puts them into something—plastic bag or whatever—before he leaves. What did you mean before? When you looked at the house and said ‘isolation’?”

Cardinal shrugged, making the paper rustle. “That we’re probably not looking at a sudden explosion of violence.”

“We’re looking at—what—the end result of a plan?.”

“The end result of a plan. Exactly.”

Delorme went into the kitchen and there was the sound of cupboard doors opening and closing. She came back with a small green box. “No garbage bags. Just these.”

Compost bags. The dimensions were printed on the top.

“Might hold one head,” Cardinal said.

“It might. But these aren’t really leak-proof. You ever see the inside of your compost container?”

“I try not to.”

“I think he brought his own box, bag, whatever.”

“That’s why I’ve always found you to be extremely intelligent, Sergeant Delorme. You have exactly the same thoughts I do.”

Arsenault called Cardinal’s cell and asked him to come up to the road. “We’re in a hydro access about a hundred yards before the driveway.”

There were already a couple of reporters trying to get by PC Rankin, who had moved his perimeter to the far side of the access road. They yelled at Cardinal for a comment as he went by. He told them he couldn’t say anything just yet.

Snow glittered under the lights the ident team had set up. More tire tracks.

“Our runner,” Arsenault said. “We follow his trail through the woods on the west side of the drive. He comes out to the road and then it gets hard to see, but we’ve got blood—not a lot, but enough to see he hits the road, comes this way, and bingo—car.”

Cardinal and Delorme stood looking at the tire tracks.

“Much smaller car,” Cardinal said, “and there’s hardly any tread. Are we looking at a third vehicle?”

“Very good,” Arsenault said. “Could be a glamorous career waiting for you in Ident. Notice also we have four tires, four different treads, which probably means an old vehicle in pretty bad repair.”

“Tail light,” Collingwood said. He was holding up a fragment of red plastic.

“Show him the casings,” Arsenault said.

Collingwood held up a Baggie. “Found ’em at the top of the drive.”

“So we’ve got a chase that starts at the broken window and ends here?” Delorme said. She put her hands on her hips. “Got a lot to work with, anyway. Hair, fibre, ballistics, footprints, tire tracks …”

“We may have something even better,” Arsenault said.

“Oh?”

“Might have a survivor.”