Crime Machine

6

ONE OF THE HEADACHES OF BEING a detective in a small city is that there is no forensic science centre nearby. Almost every homicide case requires numerous trips back and forth to Toronto, and it pretty much has to be the lead investigator who does this, along with a backup to make sure there is no question about chain of evidence.

Cardinal and Delorme didn’t get away until after lunch. It being Saturday, the traffic was not too bad, but they ran into blowing snow in Muskoka and a near whiteout around Barrie, and it took more than four hours to get to the Forensic Sciences Centre in downtown Toronto. They didn’t have to stay for an autopsy; there was still no pathologist available to do one. But it took them over an hour to nudge their evidence through the central receiving process before they could get back on the road for the trip home.

That night, Cardinal ate a late dinner at his kitchen table, flipping idly through pages of the Scriver file. Some of them—thermal faxes from the eighties—had gone perfectly blank. He put his dishes in the sink and shoved the massive file back into its box. He wouldn’t be getting to it any time soon.

He sat up for a while in his underventilated living room watching the late night shows, even though he found them neither funny nor informative. He switched them off and read for a while in a self-help book about how to never get upset about anything. Delorme had highly recommended it, but Cardinal found the author’s relentless optimism irritating, not least because it was expressed in exclamation marks. What use was advice that suggested you shouldn’t be upset about unsolved cases, decapitated corpses?

He went to bed sweaty and grumpy and woke in the middle of the night. The red glow of his alarm clock said 3:50. For months after Catherine’s death he had woken up every hour. But this was different. The wisp of a dream was still hanging in the darkness. He had seen himself standing by Arsenault in the ident room. They had been examining the sliver of wood in the Baggie, holding it to their noses and sniffing.

“Some kind of solvent, maybe,” Arsenault had said.

Then Cardinal had taken the Baggie from him, held it under his own nose and sniffed. “I know what it is,” he said. And that was what woke him up.

He got out of bed and went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He thought about phoning Arsenault to tell him his idea but decided not to wake him. He got dressed, put on his Kodiak boots and his North Face parka and went out.

It wasn’t as cold as it had been, maybe ten below, but Cardinal hadn’t had breakfast and it felt much colder. He set the car heater to blow onto the windshield, backed out of his parking slot and headed out through the brick gate that marked the boundary of his condominium’s property.

The government dock was less than three minutes away by car. Main West, a residential area of oversized houses and ancient trees, was deserted. Only one house had any lights on, and a car was warming up in its driveway, plumes of grey exhaust billowing from its tailpipe.

Cardinal made a right turn toward Lake Nipissing. He parked on the shoulder of the road near the wharf, switched off the car and got out. The thin layer of snow had mostly either blown away or melted on the wooden dock. Cardinal stood for a moment and sniffed. Even in the minus-ten air the oily smell of creosote was strong.

He wasn’t sure what he expected to find. Even in winter the dock attracted a lot of people: joggers, dog walkers, people taking in the sunset. There wouldn’t have been any sunset last night. A layer of cloud had formed over the lake and the islands and the town. The only light on the dock came from the high lamps set every twenty yards or so.

He passed the old Chippewa Princess cruise ship that was now a restaurant in permanent dry dock. Farther up, there was a bait and souvenir shop that cast a shadow three times longer than the shop itself.

Cardinal moved slowly, keeping his eyes on the wood just in front of his feet. The dock was old, and there were soft splinters on many of the thick slats. If the Trout Lake murderer had been here, Cardinal was not likely to find the exact spot. And there was a marina out at Trout Lake he planned to check out as well.

The wharf was L-shaped. Cardinal didn’t even glance up as he made the turn. Beneath his feet the sound of ice grinding against the dock. The smell of old fish, mixing with the creosote. Light glinted on the stems of old fish hooks embedded in the wooden safety wall. It felt five degrees colder out here.

A third of the way along the foot of the L, he still hadn’t seen any damaged patches of wood that might have been more likely than others to yield splinters. He glanced up and saw people at the end of the dock. It took a second for him to realize they weren’t people.

The heads were on the wooden wall of the dock, which ran about chest high. Cardinal approached the female first. Long blond hair hung down over the wall. On the side nearest Cardinal, it was matted with congealed blood. On the left, a small-calibre bullet hole. She was facing the wide, dark expanse of the lake, as if waiting for a lover, long absent, to return across infinities of wind and night and snow.

The male was a few yards farther on, at the end of the dock wall, facing east. The back of the skull was bloody and misshapen from an exit wound. A breeze ruffled the grey hair.

“Jesus,” Cardinal breathed.

He had his hands in his pockets and kept them there as he leaned over the end of the dock to get a look at the face. The closed eyes, the meditative stillness, might have lent the features an air of repose, were it not for the bullet hole over the right eyebrow.

Cardinal walked back the way he had come, undoing his parka to dig out his phone from his inside pocket—keep it anywhere else and the cold would kill the battery. He dialed Delorme. He walked slowly as he talked, trying to calm down. Then he called Chouinard and the staff sergeant. When Delorme arrived a few minutes later, Cardinal was waiting for her by his car.

“Get ready,” he told her. “It’s even worse than the other night.”

After they got there and Delorme looked at the dead faces, she said, “What made you come out here in the middle of the night?”

“Arsenault found a sliver of wood that smelled like oil or gas. I didn’t realize till just now it was creosote. These people are likely from out of town—I thought, what do visitors do when they come here? They see the cathedral, the railway museum, the government dock. That’s about it.”

“Well, obviously the heads had to be brought here in the dark, but that splinter of wood—that was in the killer’s footprint?”

“Right.”

“Which means he went sightseeing on this dock before the murders?”

“I don’t know about sightseeing, but I’m guessing he was here, yeah. Somebody might have seen him, even if there was no one here when he came back to hang up his trophies.”

Delorme gestured toward the end of the dock. “He must have kept those things somewhere between the murders and now—they can’t have been here more than a few hours.”

“And why bring them here anyway? Why take the chance of being seen? Why set them up in those weird positions?”

“Once you start cutting people’s heads off, probably a lot of other stuff isn’t going to seem that weird,” Delorme said. “But the bullet wounds—they fit with the scene at the cottage, right? The male was sitting to the left of the killer, the female to the right. The killer pulls out his gun, shoots the male before he can even react, pow. Then he shoots the woman in the side of the head. Makes sense, no?”

“Except I wouldn’t vouch for the order they were shot in. That’s just not knowable. Not yet, anyway.”

Cardinal took a few steps back the way they had come, toward the long part of the dock. He stopped and stood with his hands in his pockets. He turned and looked out over the lake in the same direction as the dead woman. He thought about who these people might be and who their killer was. He stared across the frozen lake, beyond the patches of black ice and the dry granules of snow that skittered across them. His eyes watered from the cold. The cloud cover had shifted and the moon was out, lighting the vast bleak plain of the lake. In the distance, black on black, the silhouettes of the Manitou Islands, and above the Manitous, an even blacker sky where cold stars winked and throbbed.

Later, when there was nothing more for Cardinal to do at the scene, he walked back along the dock. It was blocked off with crime scene tape now, and even though it was Sunday morning, a crowd of reporters pressed up against it. The beheadings had made the news services across the country, and there were journalists from Ottawa and Toronto in town, as well as locals from Algonquin Bay and Sudbury.

Cardinal had been preparing a statement in his head.

“All I can tell you right now is we have found some body parts that may belong to the victims who were discovered out at Trout Lake. We don’t have any identities, and because of that, we don’t know who might have wanted to kill them. Even when we do identify them, you know the drill—you’ll have to wait until we’ve notified next of kin.”

A barrage of questions. Were the victims really American? What was the crime scene like? Had they found the heads?

“We have just as many questions as you do at this point.”

“Will you be bringing in the OPP?” They always asked this, every time there was a high-profile case, as if only a police force of province-wide heft could handle it. They always asked and it always irritated him.

“I don’t see any need for the OPP.”

They shouted more questions.

Cardinal held up his hands as if pressing back a billowing sail. “That’s all for now. When I know more, you’ll know more.”

He pushed his way past them and hurried toward his car. A woman came up behind him. She was small, her blond head just level with Cardinal’s shoulder.

“Detective, could I just talk to you for a minute?”

“Talk all you want.” He kept moving toward his car, the woman following.

“I want to ask about the other scene, not this one. It’s extremely interesting that the victims were beheaded—and the knife still in the man’s back. It’s all so theatrical, so high-profile. Aren’t you worried about copycats or false confessions?”

“I appreciate your concern,” Cardinal said. “We’ll still be able to eliminate false confessions. I can’t say any more just now.”

“And suppose, God forbid, you should get a copycat?”

Cardinal stopped and turned to face her. “Are you hard of hearing? I said I can’t talk to you. What is it with reporters?”

Her response was a single, slow blink. She had grey eyes, very wide set, that gave her a look of imperturbability. A quick smile, then: “Now that you have heads, are you able to make an ID?”

“I didn’t say heads.”

“I can do the math, Detective.”

“What paper are you with, anyway?”

She took off a leather glove, reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card and handed it to Cardinal. Donna Vaughan. New York Post. “The card’s out of date. I’m not actually with the paper anymore. I’m freelance.”

“Why is a reporter from New York interested in a murder in Algonquin Bay?”

“I think you’ll figure that out pretty quick. I’m working on a story—not for the Post, for someplace national, hopefully—a story that’s taking me all over. And I think maybe we could help each other. Did you get anywhere with the tire tracks at the Trout Lake scene?”

“We’re running down a lot of leads. It takes time.”

“And the footprints?”

“Like I say, we’re following up a lot of threads.”

She looked him up and down. “Maybe I was wrong. It doesn’t look like you can help me at all. Thanks for your time.”

Cardinal got into his car and switched on the ignition to warm it up. He pulled out his notebook and started jotting down a list of calls he had to make. Ms. Vaughan pulled up beside him in a tan Focus and rolled down her window.

Cardinal pressed the button on the armrest.

“You know, Detective, I bet I know more than you do at this point.”

“For instance?”

“For instance, the identities of the victims.” She flicked a strand of hair out of her eyes. Her brows were dark, and the contrast gave her eyes an added intensity. “Their names are Lev and Irena Bastov. Russian extraction, but they’re both U.S. nationals.”

“Uh-huh. And how would you know that?”

“The story I’m working on? It’s about the Russian mafia—and please don’t spread that around, because I’d kind of like to stay alive.” She drove away before her window was finished closing.