Forty Words for Sorrow

5

SERGEANT LISE DELORME HAD been clearing the decks of Special Investigations for some time, a couple of months to be exact. There were no major cases pending, but she had thousands of little details to clear up. Final notes to make. Dispositions to update. Files to archive. She wanted everything to be shipshape for her replacement, who was due to arrive at the end of the month. But the entire morning had gone by and all she’d managed to do was clear sensitive material off her hard drive.

Delorme couldn’t wait to get going on the Pine case, even if she was in the completely weird position of having to investigate her partner. So far, it looked like Cardinal was going to keep her at arm’s length, and she couldn’t really blame him for that. She wouldn’t have trusted anyone right out of Special either.

A phone call in the middle of the night—that’s how it had started. She had thought at first it was Paul, a former boyfriend who got drunk every six months and called her at two in the morning, weepy and sentimental. It was Dyson. “Conference at the chief’s house in half an hour. His house, not his office. Get dressed and wait. Horseman’ll pick you up. Don’t want certain parties seeing your car outside his place.”

“What’s going on?” Her words were slurry with sleep.

“You’ll know soon enough. I’ve got a ticket waiting for you.”

“Tell me it’s for Florida. Someplace warm.”

“It’s your ticket out of Special.”

Delorme got dressed in three minutes flat, then sat on the edge of the sofa, nerves singing. She’d spent six years working Special, and in all that time she had never once had a midnight summons, nor ever seen the inside of the chief’s house. Ticket out of Special?

“No point asking me anything,” the young Mountie told her before she’d even opened her mouth. “I’m just the delivery girl.” A nice touch, Delorme thought, to send a woman.

Delorme had grown up revering the Mounties. The scarlet uniform, those horses—well, they went straight to a little girl’s heart. She had a vivid memory of the first time she saw them perform the Musical Ride in Ottawa, the sheer beauty of such equestrian precision. And then in high school, the glorious history, the great trek west. The North West Mounted Police, as they were then known, had ridden thousands of miles to ward off the kind of violence that was plaguing the westward expansion of the United States. They had negotiated treaties with the aboriginals, sent American raiders hightailing it back to Montana or whatever barbaric pit they had crawled out of, and established the rule of law before settlers had even had a chance to think about breaking it. The RCMP had become an icon of upstanding law enforcement around the world, a travel agent’s dream.

Delorme had bought the image wholesale; that’s what images are for, after all. When, sometime in her late teens, she had seen a photograph of a woman in that red serge uniform, Delorme had seriously considered sending away for an application.

But reality kept breaking through the image, and reality was not nearly as pretty. One officer sells secrets to Moscow, another is arrested for smuggling drugs, still another for tossing his wife off the balcony of a high-rise. And then there was the whole Security Service fiasco. The RCMP Security Service, before it had been dismantled in disgrace, had made the CIA look like geniuses.

She glanced at the fresh-faced creature in the car beside her, wearing a shapeless down coat, blond hair pulled back in a neat French braid. She had stopped for the traffic light at Edgewater and Trout Lake Road, and the street lights silvered the down on her cheek. Even in that pale wash, Delorme could see herself ten years ago. This girl too had bought the straight-arrow image and was determined to make it stick. Well, good for her, Delorme figured. Cowboys armed with brutality and incompetence may have betrayed those true-North ideals, but that didn’t make a young recruit dumb for clinging to them.

They pulled up in front of an impressive A-frame on Edgewater. It looked like something out of the Swiss Alps.

“Don’t ring the buzzer, just walk right in. Doesn’t want to wake the kids.”

Delorme showed her ID to a Mountie at the side door. “Downstairs,” he said.

Delorme walked through the basement, amid smells of Tide and Downy, then past a huge furnace into a large room of red brick and dark pine that had the leathery, smoky look of a men’s club. Fake Tudor beams criss-crossed stucco walls that were hung with hunting prints and marine art. A feeble flame flickered in the fireplace. Above this, a moose head contemplated the head of R.J. Kendall, chief of the Algonquin Bay police department.

Kendall had an open, congenial manner, perhaps partly to compensate for his small stature (Delorme was a head taller than the chief), and a big laugh that he used all the time, often accented with a backslap. He laughed too much, in Delorme’s opinion; it made him seem nervous, which perhaps he was, but she had also seen that genial manner vanish in an instant. When angered, which was thankfully not often, R.J. Kendall was a shouter and a curser. The whole department had heard him tear up one side of Adonis Dyson and down the other for undermanning the winter fur carnival, with the result that it became a noisy, rowdy affair that made the front page of the Lode for all the wrong reasons.

And yet Dyson still spoke highly of Kendall, as did most people who carried shrapnel wounds from one of his explosions. Once his anger was over, it was really over, and he usually made a gesture or two to soothe ruffled feathers. In Dyson’s case he’d gone out of his way—on TV—to give Dyson credit for downturns in robberies and assaults. It was far more than his predecessor would have done.

Dyson himself was in one of the red leather armchairs talking to someone Delorme couldn’t see. He waved a languid hand in her direction, as if midnight meetings were routine with him.

The chief jumped up to shake Delorme’s hand. He must have been in his late fifties, but he affected a boyish air, the way some powerful men do. “Sergeant Delorme. Thanks for getting here so fast. And on such short notice. Can I get you a drink? Off-hours, I think we can afford to relax a little.”

“No, thank you, sir. This time of night, it would just knock me out.”

“We’ll get right down to it, then. Someone I want you to meet. Corporal Malcolm Musgrave, RCMP.”

Watching Corporal Malcolm Musgrave emerge from the red leather chair was like watching a mountain emerge from the plains. He had his back to Delorme, so the granite block of head emerged first, pale hair trimmed to no more than a sandy bristle, then the escarpment of shoulders, vast cliff-face of chest as he turned toward her, and finally the rock formation of his handshake, dry and cool as shale. “Heard about you,” he said to Delorme. “Nice job on the mayor.”

“I’ve heard about you, too,” Delorme told him, and Dyson shot her a dark glance. Musgrave had killed two men in the line of duty. Both times there had been hearings about the use of excessive force, and both times he had got off. Delorme thought, We really get our man.

“Corporal Musgrave is with the Sudbury detachment. He’s their number two man in commercial crime.”

Delorme knew that, of course. The RCMP no longer maintained a local detachment, so Algonquin Bay fell within Sudbury’s jurisdiction. As federal police, the RCMP worked any crimes of national import: drugs at a national level, counterfeiting, commercial crime. Now and again the Algonquin Bay police would work with them on major drug busts, but as far as Delorme knew, Musgrave himself never put in an appearance.

“Corporal Musgrave has a little bedtime story for us,” the chief said. “You won’t like it.”

“Have you heard of Kyle Corbett?” Musgrave’s eyes were the palest blue Delorme had ever seen, almost transparent. It was like being scrutinized by a husky.

Yes, she had heard of Kyle Corbett. Everyone had heard of Kyle Corbett. “Big drug dealer, no? Doesn’t he control everything north of Toronto?”

“Obviously, Special Investigations keeps you off the street. Kyle Corbett cleaned up his act at least three years ago, when he discovered counterfeiting. You’re surprised. You thought when Ottawa changed to coloured bills we stumped the counterfeiters, right? Bad guys all moved on to those oh-so-boring and oh-so-easy-to-copy American bills. You’re absolutely right, they did. Then a small thing came along called a colour copier. And another little item called a scanner. And now every Tom, Dick and Harry’s going into the office on Saturday morning and printing himself a batch of phony twenties. Major headache for the Treasury. And you know what? I couldn’t care less.” Those arctic eyes sizing her up.

Delorme shrugged. “It’s not costing the taxpayer enough?”

“Good,” Musgrave said, as if she were his pupil. “Bogus Canadian currency costs businesses and individuals some five million dollars a year. Chicken feed. And like I say, it’s mostly weekend counterfeiters.”

“So why the fuss about Corbett? If you don’t care about phony money—”

“Kyle Corbett is not counterfeiting money. Kyle Corbett is counterfeiting credit cards. Suddenly we’re not talking five million dollars. Suddenly we’re talking a hundred million. And that’s not Bob’s All-Nite Esso getting hit. Or Ethel’s Kountry Kitchen. We’re talking major banks, and believe me, when Bank of Montreal and Toronto Dominion get upset, we hear about it loud and clear. Which is why our guys and your guys—not to mention the OPP’s guys—have been working a JFO for the past three years, trying to take Corbett down.”

Dyson leaned forward, apparently worried at being left out of the conversation. “Joint Forces Operation. November 1997.”

“November 1997. JFO includes our guys, Jerry Commanda with OPP, and your guys McLeod and Cardinal. We have solid information that Corbett’s happy band of brothers has a stamping machine, five thousand blanks and a very expensive supply of holograms at his club out behind Airport Road. But when the forces of righteousness swoop down, Corbett and Co. are doing nothing more exciting than playing pool and drinking Molson’s.”

The chief was now thrashing at the fire with a poker, sending sparks flying. “Tell her Episode Two.”

“August 1998. Solid intelligence puts Corbett and his merry men in West Ferris with Perfect Circle. You’ve never heard of Perfect Circle, so don’t pretend you have. Perfect Circle runs the biggest counterfeiting operation in Hong Kong. They have reciprocity with Corbett. In other words, they exchange stolen account numbers for use overseas. You buy a new Honda in Toronto with an American Express card out of Kowloon and, before anyone’s the wiser, you’ve driven it to hell and gone. And vice versa. Perfect Circle, as their name suggests, also manufacture dead-perfect holograms. They’re Asian, right? High tech is in their blood.

“Meanwhile, our two Horsemen have gone their separate ways: one’s quit to go into the private sector, the other’s doing fifteen-to-life for killing his wife.”

“Right. The high-rise guy.”

“If you’d met his wife, you’d know why. Your Detective McLeod gets wired to the Corriveau murders, and the OPP has Jerry Commanda sequestered in Ottawa on some no-doubt crucially important training course.”

“There’s no need to malign ongoing officer education,” the chief put in. “Your point is, Detective Cardinal turns out to be the single unit of law-enforcement continuity on Kyle Corbett.”

“Exactly. Drum roll, please.”

Kendall turned to Dyson. “Didn’t you tell me there were rumours about Cardinal when he worked in Toronto?”

“We did our homework, Chief. There was nothing substantial.”

Musgrave didn’t even slow down. “Age of globalization. Perfect Circle are doing the grand tour from Hong Kong to B.C. to strengthen their linkage in Vancouver. Solid information says they’re headed for Toronto, stopping off for a courtesy call in Algonquin Bay. According to this information, Corbett and the Yellow Peril have a meet set for the Pine Crest Hotel—The Pine Crest! It’s like they’re the Ladies Auxiliary or something. Perfect Circle guys arrive on time. Appointed hour rolls around, JFO stakes out the hotel. No, we did not do the musical ride. And no, we were not in full-dress uniform. This was a strictly old-clothes operation. Guess what happens?”

Delorme didn’t say anything. Corporal Musgrave was enjoying his pedagogical act; it wouldn’t do to interrupt the flow.

“Nothing happens. No Corbett. No Perfect Circle. No meeting. Once more, the combined forces of the RCMP, the OPP and the Algonquin Bay police department have come up empty. Dumb flatfoots. So stupid. Can’t get anything right.”

The chief was standing by the fireplace, poker in hand, his face in shadow. It was rare to spend more than ten minutes with R.J. and not hear that preposterous laugh of his, but hearing Musgrave’s horseman’s tale had clearly depressed him. He said in a subdued voice, “It gets worse.”

It did indeed get worse. Another piece of solid information. Another date and time. The single change: this time, Jerry Commanda was back playing left wing for the OPP. Another raid. Another zero. “This time,” Musgrave added, “Corbett files suit for harassment.”

“I remember that,” Delorme said. “I thought that was pretty funny.”

Dyson glared at her.

Musgrave shifted in his chair. It was like watching a continent change shape. “You’ve got the facts. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. You have any questions?”

“Just one,” Delorme said. “What exactly do you mean by ‘solid’?”

That was the only time the chief had laughed that night. Nobody else cracked a smile.

Now, two months later, Delorme was feeding the shredder in her Special Investigations office and hoping without much optimism that her new partner would come to trust her. As she carried a wastebasket full of shreds to the incinerator, she saw Cardinal putting on his coat. “You need me to do anything?” she asked him.

“Nope. We got a positive ID back on the dental records. I’m just going out to tell Dorothy Pine.”

“You sure you don’t want me to come?”

“No, thanks. I’ll see you later.”

Terrific, Delorme muttered to herself as she dumped the trash. He doesn’t even know I’m running a check on him, and still he doesn’t want me for a partner. Great start.