Forty Words for Sorrow

10

THE TURNOUT FOR KATIE PINE’S funeral was larger than anyone had expected. Five hundred people showed up at St. Boniface, a tiny red brick church on Sumner Street, to pray over the small, closed coffin. The media were out in force. Delorme recognized Roger Gwynn and Nick Stoltz from the Lode. Nick Stoltz had got her into hot water as a teenager by snapping a picture of her and her boyfriend romantically entwined on a bench in what was then Teacher’s College Park. To him and most readers of the Lode it was simply a picture of autumn splendour, but to Delorme’s parents it meant that their daughter had not, after all, spent the evening with her friends at the sodality. She had been grounded for two weeks—a punishment that gave her boyfriend’s wandering heart time to conceive an affection for Delorme’s rival. Ever since, photographers had been assigned a place in Delorme’s personal inferno only slightly cooler than that reserved for rapists.

There was the Sudbury newswoman, with a female camera operator, Delorme noticed, and a three-hundred-pound soundman. She had seen a CBC van out front, and two pews up she recognized a reporter from The Globe and Mail who had done a piece on Delorme after she had put Algonquin Bay’s three-term mayor in prison. It’s not every day a child is found murdered on a desolate island in a frozen lake, but Delorme hadn’t figured it for national news.

The Globe reporter trained his famished newshound’s eye on Dorothy Pine, slow with grief, being led up the front steps. The reporter moved forward, but Jerry Commanda somehow managed to interpose his frame between him and the grieving mother, and when the aisle cleared, the reporter had subsided into his pew, apparently nursing a sudden abdominal spasm.

The police were here not only to pay their respects to a murdered little girl but also on the off chance the killer might show up at the funeral. Delorme was in the last pew, a good vantage point from which to see any lurkers. Cardinal was standing at the front, well off to one side, looking sombre in his black suit and—Delorme had to admit—handsome in a battered kind of way. Bruise-coloured rings under his eyes lent a soulful cast to his appearance that a romantic—and Delorme did not for one minute consider herself a romantic—might find very compelling. Fiercely loyal to his wife, Cardinal, despite her bouts with mental illness, if what Delorme heard was true. It was mentioned only infrequently in the squad room, and then in hushed tones.

As a ticket out of Special Investigations, working a homicide with the subject of her own investigation was not what Delorme would have chosen. Not a way to make friends or influence people, but then that isn’t why you go into Special Investigations in the first place.

John Cardinal seemed as uncorrupt as any cop Delorme had ever met; it was hard to give much weight to Musgrave’s worries about him. Before the funeral began, he’d chatted amiably with the old priest, whom Delorme pegged as a not too secret drinker. She hadn’t thought of Cardinal as a churchgoer. She’d never seen him in St. Vincent’s, but then he’d hardly be likely to attend the French church.

The truth was, she didn’t know him well. The nature of her job kept her aloof from the rest of the force. And one thing you learn in Special: everyone has a story, and it’s never the story you expect. So she put the RCMP–Kyle Corbett business and the Toronto rumours into one compartment of her mind, and concentrated on watching those citizens of Algonquin Bay who thought it worthwhile to attend the funeral of a murdered girl.

Arsenault and Collingwood were outside, videotaping mourners and licence plates—a purely speculative endeavour, since they had neither a suspect nor a licence plate at this point.

Suppose the killer shows, Delorme wondered. Suppose he were to sit down right next to me, instead of this white-haired lady in the parrot green suit. How would I recognize him? By smell? Fangs and a long tail? Hooves? Delorme was not very experienced with murderers, but she understood that expecting a killer to look different from Cardinal or the mayor or the boy next door was complete fantasy. He could be the heavyset man in the Maple Leafs jersey—what kind of slob wears a hockey sweater to a funeral? Or he could be the Indian in the overalls that said Algonquin Plumbing on the back—why wasn’t he with the group surrounding Mrs. Pine? She recognized at least three former high school classmates; the killer might be one of them. She remembered pictures from the books on serial killers—Berkowitz, Bundy, Dahmer—unremarkable men, all. No, no, Katie Pine’s killer would be different, but he wouldn’t necessarily look different.

You should be making me do more, Delorme thought to herself as she looked at Cardinal. You should be on my back night and day, getting me to chase down even the slenderest threads. We should be making Forensic’s life a misery till they cough up everything they’ve got.

Instead, Cardinal had somehow got Dyson to hand her the lowest-priority stuff in his in-box. A knight move? Keep her too busy to run her check on him? Then again, it could be just business as usual at The Great Hall of Chauvinists. Lucky for them I happen to be proud of my work in Special. I’m single and I’m still young—young enough, anyway—and I can devote every waking hour to an investigation if I want. What else do I have? she might have added on a darker day. What a thrill it had been to close in on the mayor, to nail his corrupt little friends. And Delorme had done all that herself. But Dyson and Cardinal and McLeod and the rest, sometimes she cursed their anglophone heads, the bunch of them.

“Have to pay your dues, Delorme,” Dyson had quacked at her this morning. She was tempted to grab the honey-glazed donut off his desk and wolf it down, just to see the expression on his face. “Everybody pays their dues. You don’t come onto the squad and go straight to the top, it doesn’t work that way.”

“I’ve only been six years in Special. That counts for nothing, I suppose. I don’t want to work his damn robberies, his break-and-enters.”

“Everybody works robberies. You will too, because A,” and here he started counting off on those weird flat fingers of his, which always drove Delorme crazy, “Cardinal is heading up a major murder case and does not have time to handle anything else. B, because you are his junior on the squad. And C, because Cardinal bloody well asked me to put you on them. End of mystery, end of discussion. Look, you need an excuse to get away from him anyway, right? Get a little distance? You can hardly investigate the guy when you’re sharing an unmarked all day. In fact you could do worse than to check out his house—should the opportunity present itself.”

“I can’t search his place without a warrant.”

“Of course not. I merely point out that you’re partners. You will spend a lot of time together. If you should find yourself in his house—well, use your imagination. Not, I hasten to add, that I think he’s guilty.”

“I can’t run a check when I’m clearing old cases. When am I suppose to look at the Corbett files?”

“I have been known to approve overtime, you know. I’m not the Scrooge people like McLeod and Cardinal make me out to be.”

“With respect, D.S., why are we pursuing this now? The Pine case, surely it outweighs all this.”

“Kyle Corbett is not just a former drug dealer and current counterfeiter. He’s a stone-cold killer, as the world will know if we ever catch the bastard. If someone’s been tipping him off, that is not a petty crime. It’s corruption, it’s aiding and abetting a murderer, and I want the guilty party off my team—if he is in fact on my team—and in jail where he belongs.”

“Me, I think we should both be down in Toronto chasing Forensics.”

“Forensics can do their job without our breath condensing on their necks. By the way, there’s a stack of burglaries in there that I expect you to clear by the end of the week. We all know who’s doing them, it’s just a matter of nailing the little creep.”

Snow flurries were ticking at the windowpane behind him, and the window reflected as a perfect white rhomboid on Dyson’s polished head. Oh, she wanted to smack him.

Now, a pretty Indian soloist finished her rendition of “Abide With Me,” and the priest stepped into the pulpit. He spoke for a few moments about the promise that was Katie Pine’s life. He spoke warmly of her intelligence and her sense of humour, and the sobbing in the front rows intensified. If it were not for his slight hesitation every time he said Katie’s name, Delorme might have thought he had actually known the girl. Holy water was sprinkled on the coffin. Incense was burned. The Twenty-Third Psalm was sung. And then the coffin was trundled to the back of the church, hoisted awkwardly by four pallbearers into a waiting hearse, and driven away to the crematorium where all that remained of Katie Pine would be transformed into smoke and ash.

Later that afternoon, Delorme carried a box of personal stuff out of her old office and dumped it on her new desk, back to back with Cardinal’s. She stared down at his things without a trace of guilt. Squad-room desks were one right next to another; anything left out was on public display. McLeod’s desk was a landfill of overstuffed manila folders, a junkyard of evidence envelopes, affidavits, sup reports—geysers of paper shooting from accordion files.

Beside it, Cardinal’s desk was by contrast a field lying fallow. The metal desktops were made to resemble, not at all convincingly, fine oak. Most of Cardinal’s, with its swirls of faux grain, lay exposed to the open air. Pinned to the cork-board above it was a copy of Dyson’s latest memo. (The new Beretta automatics: every officer expected to become a shining example with the new weapon by end of February, and let’s show the opposition what’s what in the annual contest that the Mounties, damn them, always won. Dyson did not think this could be blamed on budgetary imbalances.)

There was a picture of Cardinal’s daughter, a pretty girl with her father’s confident smile, and beside this a parking ticket. Delorme leaned over without touching anything to read the address on the parking ticket: 465 Fleming Street, right downtown, it could mean anything.

The Rolodex was open to Dorothy Pine’s number. Delorme flipped it back to A and for the next twenty minutes made her way through to F, not looking for anything definite. It was full of hastily scrawled names that meant nothing to her along with the numbers of various lawyers, probation officers and social workers that any cop would have to hand. There was Kyle Corbett, but you’d expect that. It listed three different addresses and several phone numbers, which Delorme copied into her notebook.

There was a noise from out front and Delorme turned back to face her own desk. Low voices, laughter, a slamming locker. Delorme lifted the handset on Cardinal’s phone and hit the automatic redial button. While waiting for it to pick up, she stared at a snapshot pinned next to Dyson’s memo. It was a felon, obviously—a huge man with a flat head made flatter by a brush cut. He was leaning back, apparently at ease, on a car, his weight seriously depressing the vehicle’s springs. Cops often kept pictures of their favourite collars, men who had shot them, that kind of thing.

Delorme’s reflections were interrupted by a voice she recognized. “Office of Forensic Medicine.”

“Oh, sorry. Wrong number.”

Cardinal’s top drawer was open, hardly the habit of a guilty man; on the other hand, possibly the calculated gesture of a man who was very guilty indeed.

The door banged open and a voice called out, “Well, well. Imagine my surprise to find the Office of Special Investigations taking her own private inventory.”

“Give me a break, McLeod. I work here now, remember?”

“On Sundays too, apparently.” McLeod was carrying a big cardboard box labelled Canadian Tire. He eyed her suspiciously over the top through red-rimmed lids. “Thought I was the only dedicated bastard in this place.”

“You are. I was just moving some of my stuff over,” said Delorme.

“Fine. Welcome. Make yourself at home.” McLeod slammed the box down on his desk. Something inside it clanked. “Just stay away from my desk.”