Forty Words for Sorrow

14

MURDER IS A RARE EVENT IN Canada. So rare that most of the country’s ten provinces are allocated only one forensics unit, usually in the province’s biggest city. It’s a thrifty approach—convenient too, if you happen to be investigating a murder in Toronto or Montreal. Cardinal and Delorme had to drive over two hundred miles, a good part of it behind a convoy of lumber trucks. At the Coroner’s Building on Grenville Street, a Sikh in a blue uniform with a white turban buzzed down to the morgue to announce their arrival.

Len Weisman met them in the hall and led them into a cramped office. He was a small, compact man with a thatch of black, wiry hair. He wore spectacles with dark, fashionable frames, a white lab coat and—incongruously, given the medical surroundings of white tile and linoleum—leather sandals.

Before he became director of the morgue, Weisman had put in ten years as a homicide investigator. His police badge and sergeant stripes were mounted in a frame on the wall behind his desk. Surrounding this were framed citations and a photograph of Weisman shaking hands with the mayor of Toronto.

“Sit, sit,” he said in a friendly way. “Make yourselves at home.”

At home in a morgue, Cardinal said to himself, and wondered if Delorme was thinking the same thing. She was certainly more subdued than usual. They had passed a dead woman in the hall—barely out of her teens and parked on a gurney beside the elevators like a shopping cart. The body bag was open to her throat and her pale face with its penumbra of yellow hair had emerged from the white plastic as if from a cocoon. Her hair was beautiful, somewhere between saffron and gold; just hours earlier she would have been brushing it avidly, with a pretty woman’s mixture of pride and self-criticism.

“Coffee, anyone? Tea?” Weisman gave the impression of bounding everywhere—reaching for a door halfway across the room, lunging to open a drawer, plucking a file from a desk. “Or there’s a Coke machine in the lunchroom. Sprite? Pepsi?”

Cardinal and Delorme declined.

Weisman snatched up his phone before it could escape. “I’ll just check if our pathologist is ready. Patient just arrived twenty minutes ago.”

Cardinal had forgotten that they called them patients in this place, as if the silent occupants of those plastic bags and metal drawers might recover.

There was a knock on the door and the pathologist came in. She was a tall woman in her thirties, with wide shoulders and prominent cheekbones that gave her face a sculpted look.

“Dr. Gant, these are Detectives Cardinal and Delorme from Algonquin Bay. Dr. Gant is our pathologist this morning. You can go with her now if you like.”

They followed her to the morgue. The dead girl had been moved, and now the white tiles and linoleum might have been any clinic, anywhere. The morgue had not the slightest smell of death, just a faint chemical odour. They crossed through the main autopsy room and into a side room reserved for “stinkers.” Dr. Gant handed them both surgical masks and they put them on. When the photographer was ready, Gant put on surgical gloves and unzipped the bag. Delorme gagged.

“It’s filthy,” Dr. Gant observed quietly. “Where’d you find him, a coal cellar?”

“Exactly right. Coal cellar in an old, sealed house. Guess he’s starting to thaw out.”

“All right, let’s get him X-rayed first. Radiography’s next door.”

She declined their inexpert assistance with the trolley, wheeling the “patient” next door to Radiography, where a machine with a huge steel U attached stood ready. This was run by a scruffy man in check shirt and blue jeans that revealed the cleft of his buttocks every time he bent over.

“That sack. It was wrapped around his head just like that?”

“It’s a seat cushion cover, Doctor. I’m not sure why the killer covered his head like that. Remorse doesn’t seem likely. And I don’t think he’s squeamish, either.”

“Let’s get someone from Chemistry here before we disturb that too much. Start with the torso, Brian.”

She spoke quietly into a telephone mounted on the wall. Her voice was collegial but firm; a man would have to be either extremely busy or extremely stupid not to do her bidding.

“Aren’t you going to take the plastic sheeting off first?” Delorme asked.

Dr. Gant shook her head. “We X-ray them fully clothed. That way we pick up any bullet or blade fragments that might be lodged in the clothing.” She nodded toward the table. “Trousers pulled down around the ankles indicate probable sexual activity just prior to the attack.”

The technician readied the machine and closed the door. Then he flipped a switch and a faint mosquito-sized whine filled the room. The bones of the feet materialized on the fluorescent screen. The beam travelled up the body, but Dr. Gant remained silent until the rib cage appeared on the screen. “Obviously massive trauma, there: fractures to the seventh, fifth and third ribs. No foreign objects so far.”

“The dark blur,” Delorme said, pointing to a round, dark spot on the screen. “It’s not a bullet, is it?”

“Probably a medal or a crucifix.”

The image changed and the bones of an arm began to appear. “Examining extremities now,” Dr. Gant noted. She pointed to a long white line that broke in two like a highway breached by an earthquake. “Defensive wounds to the left forearm, fractures of the ulna and wrist bones. Right forearm shows similar injury to the ulna … Collarbone is snapped right through.”

The head was still sheathed in its bloody cover, but now the shattered sphere of the skull appeared on the X-ray screen. “Well,” Dr. Gant said softly. “Multiple trauma there, obviously.” She spoke into an intercom. “We’re getting some kind of white line down the middle, Brian. Can you adjust it at all?”

“The image is fine, Doctor. You’ve got something in there.”

Dr. Gant moved closer to the screen. “It could be an icepick. Possibly a screwdriver blade. It must have been driven down into the top of the skull and then the handle broke off.”

Several facial bones had been broken. Dr. Gant summarized these quickly, all of them blunt-force trauma possibly caused by a hammer.

The machine was switched off and the high thin whine faded, leaving a ghost of itself in the room.

A sadness hung in the air. They were looking at a small person who had tried unsuccessfully to ward off terrible, killing blows. And the death had taken time. However bleak Todd Curry’s sixteen years may have been, however dissolute and unavailing, he hadn’t deserved to die like that.

Vlatko Setevic from Chemistry joined them. “Cops of the Great White North,” he said. “You ever get any victims that aren’t frozen?”

Setevic unrolled white paper from a reel at the end of the table. Carefully they lifted the body, still in its wrappings, and placed it on the sheet.

“Okay,” Setevic said, “let’s get the cover loosened around the head. Then I’ll take the cover off and place it on this table behind me. I have to do this gently. It’s going to take time.”

Setevic worked delicately at this task, while Dr. Gant and an assistant removed the plastic sheeting, blackened with soot and blood, from the torso. Another assistant took photographs. The plastic was tied with thin cord of the type used in venetian blinds. The inside of the sheeting was covered with a thick cracked paste of old blood. The camera flash went on and off like a strobe.

The body remained perfectly still, curled up.

“I’ve taken some hair and fibre from the outside of the seat cover,” Setevic said. “I’ll look at them next door.”

Delorme took one glance at the face and turned away.

Dr. Gant moved around the body, but did not touch it. “Left parietal region shows blunt-force trauma, a depressed fracture caused by a heavy instrument, possibly the side of a hammer. Right anterior parietal shows a circular depression about an inch in diameter, possibly caused by a hammer, hard to say. Tissue is partially peeled away from the left cheekbone, also probably by blunt force.”

“Frenzy?” Cardinal asked. “Looks like overkill to me.”

“Definitely a frenzy, judging by the ferocity of the attack. But there are aspects of control here, too, if I’m not mistaken. The wounds are fairly symmetrical, notice. Both cheekbones, both sides of the jaw, both temples. I don’t think that symmetry is accidental. And then there’s this.” She pointed to the top of the head. “You’ve got a hole in the occipital crown approximately ten millimetres in diameter, a puncture wound, judging by the puckering at the edges. That’ll be the blade we saw on the fluoroscope. You don’t drive a screwdriver into someone’s head in a frenzy.”

“True.”

“Any one of these injuries could be the cause of death, but we won’t know for sure until we do a full autopsy, and we can’t do that until he thaws out.”

“Great,” said Cardinal. “How long will that take?”

“At least twenty-four hours.”

“I hope you’re kidding me, Dr. Gant.”

“Not at all. How long does it take to thaw out a twenty-pound turkey?”

“I don’t know. Four or five hours.”

“And this patient was in a surrounding temperature of, what, minus forty? The inner organs are going to take at least twenty-four hours to thaw, possibly longer.”

“There’s something in here.” Delorme was standing to one side, peering into the body bag.

Cardinal came over and looked into the bag too. He put on a surgical glove and reached into the bag with both hands like an obstetrician. Moving slowly and holding it gingerly by the corners, he extricated the object—cracked, bloodstained and covered with soot.

“An audio cassette,” Delorme said. “It must have stuck to his clothes and it fell off when he started to thaw out.”

“Well, don’t get too excited, it’s probably blank,” Cardinal said, and dropped it into a paper evidence bag. “Let’s just hope it has prints on it.”