Forty Words for Sorrow

8

IT WASN’T UNTIL SUNDAY THAT Cardinal got the opportunity to review background material. He spent the entire afternoon at home with a stack of files labelled Pine, LaBelle and Fogle.

In a city of fifty-eight thousand, one missing child is a major event, two is an out-and-out sensation. Never mind Chief R.J. or the board of commissioners, never mind The Algonquin Lode or the TV news, it was the entire town that wouldn’t let you rest. Back in the fall, Cardinal could not so much as shop for groceries without being peppered with questions and advice about Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle. Everyone had an idea, everyone had a suggestion.

Of course this had its bright side: there was no lack of volunteers. In the LaBelle case the local Boy Scouts had spent an entire week treading step by step through the woods beyond the airport. But there were drawbacks too. The station phones never stopped ringing, and the small force had been overwhelmed with false leads—all of which had to be followed up sooner or later. The files filled up with stacks of supplementary reports—sups, as they were not very affectionately called—follow-ups on tips that led like a thousand false maps to dead ends.

Now, Cardinal sat with his feet to the fireplace and a fresh pot of decaf on the stove, weeding through the files, trying to winnow the stack of data into facts. From these solid facts, newly regarded, he hoped to extract one solid idea, one fragment of a theory—because so far he had none.

Armed Forces had graciously lent them a tent big enough to cover Windigo Island and two heaters formerly used to heat hangars for the local squadron of F-18s. Down on their knees like archaeologists, Cardinal and the others had culled the snow foot by square foot. That took most of the day, and then, turning up the heaters bit by bit, they had slowly melted the snow and examined the sodden carpet of pine needles and sand and rock that lay beneath. Beer cans, cigarette butts, fishing tackle, bits of plastic—they were buried in trash, none of it tied to the crime.

The lock had yielded no fingerprint.

This, then, was Cardinal’s first sad fact: their painstaking search had rendered not a single lead.

Katie Pine had disappeared on September 12. She had attended school that day, leaving just after the final bell with two friends. There was the initial report—a phone call from Dorothy Pine—and then there were the sups: Cardinal’s interview with Sue Couchie, McLeod’s interview with the other girl. The three girls had gone to the travelling fair that was set up outside Memorial Gardens. Cardinal set this among the solid facts.

The girls didn’t stay long. The last they’d seen of Katie, she’d been throwing balls at some bowling-pin targets, hoping to win a huge stuffed panda she’d liked the look of. It was almost as big as Katie, who was thirteen but looked eleven, tops.

Sue and the other girl had gone to a dark little tent to have their fortune told by Madame Rosa. When they came back to the ball-throwing attraction, Katie was gone. They looked around for her, couldn’t find her and decided she must have left without them. This was around six o’clock.

There was Cardinal’s interview with the young man who operated the ball-throwing game. No, she didn’t win the bear, and he hadn’t noticed anyone with her, hadn’t seen her leave. No one saw her leave. The ground, as Dyson said, had opened up.

Thousands of interviews, thousands of flyers later, Cardinal had learned nothing more about her disappearance. She had run away twice previously, to relatives in Mattawa. But her father’s drunken rages had driven her to it, and when he was dead, her running stopped. Dyson had not wanted to hear it.

Cardinal got up and put a dressing gown on over his clothes, stirred the fire in the wood stove and sat down again. It was only five, but it was already dark, and he had to switch on the reading lamp. The metal chain was cold to the touch.

He opened the LaBelle file. William Alexander LaBelle: twelve years old, four foot eight, eighty pounds—a very little kid. The address in Cedargrove was upper middle class. Catholic background, parochial school. Parents and relatives ruled out as possible suspects. History of running, though only once in Billy’s case. Never mind, it was enough for Dyson. “Look, Billy LaBelle is the third son in a family of high achievers. He’s not doing as well as his football-star brothers, all right? He’s not getting the grades of his high-wattage sisters. He’s thirteen and his self-esteem is in the basement. Billy LaBelle opted out, okay? The kid took a walk.”

Where the boy had taken a walk to was a matter of less certainty. Billy had disappeared on October 14, one month after Katie Pine, plucked from the Algonquin Mall, where he had been hanging out with friends. Sup reports included interviews with teachers and the three boys who had been with him at the mall. One minute he’s playing Mortal Kombat in Radio Shack (sup reports of interviews with the salesman and cashier), the next minute he says he’s going to catch the bus home. He’s the only one of the four friends who lives in Cedargrove, so he leaves by himself. No one ever sees him again. Billy LaBelle, age twelve, steps out of the Algonquin Mall and into the case files.

Dyson had given Cardinal free rein for a few weeks after Billy’s disappearance, and then the walls had closed in: no proof of murder, a history of running, other cases deserved priority. Cardinal resisted, certain that both kids had been killed, probably by the same person. Dyson on Billy LaBelle: “Christ, man, look at his problems. He’s got nothing going for him. My guess is he offed himself somewhere and he’ll turn up in the spring floating in the French River.”

But why were there no previous attempts? Why no obvious depression? Dyson had cupped his ear, feigning deafness.

Cardinal tossed the LaBelle file aside. He poured himself another cup of decaf and put another log into the wood stove. Sparks shot up like smithereens.

He opened the Fogle file, which contained little more than the top sheet—the facts from the initial report—courtesy of the Toronto police. I should have seen how things would go, Cardinal reflected, and perhaps he had. Dyson had been right: he had spent a lot of money, a lot of manpower. What else were you supposed to do when children vanished into thin air?

Margaret Fogle—at seventeen not really a child—had been the straw that broke Dyson’s back. A seventeen-year-old runaway from Toronto? Not high priority, thank you very much. Last seen in Algonquin Bay by her aunt. McLeod’s sup report with characteristic misspellings (where for were, “her parents where separated”) was in the file. The girl’s stated destination: Calgary, Alberta. “Which leaves half a continent and several hundred police forces responsible for finding her,” Dyson had pointed out. “You hear me, Cardinal? You are not the country’s sole policeman. Let the horsemen earn their keep for a change.”

All right, give him Margaret Fogle. With her out of the equation, it seemed even clearer there was a killer at work.

“Why do you keep saying that?” Dyson had fumed, not conversational any more, not avuncular. “Molesters? Perverts? They go for boys, they go for girls, but they almost never—never—go for both.”

“Laurence Knapschaefer went for both.”

“Laurence Knapschaefer. I knew you’d say Laurence Knapschaefer. Too far out for me, Cardinal.”

Laurence Knapschaefer had murdered five kids in Toronto ten years previously. Three boys, two girls. One girl got away, which was how they finally got him.

“The exception that proves the rule, that’s what Laurence Knapschaefer is. There are no bodies, therefore this is not homicide. You don’t have one scrap of evidence that it is.”

“But even that could be taken as evidence for murder.”

“What could?”

“The lack of evidence. It only bolsters my theory.” He had seen in Dyson’s cold blue gaze the doors slam shut, the bolts shoot home. But he couldn’t leave it alone, couldn’t shut up. “A runaway is seen—by bus passengers, ticket takers, hostel workers, drug dealers. A runaway is noticed. That’s how we find them. A runaway leaves clues: a note, extra clothes or money missing, warnings to friends. But a murdered child—a murdered child leaves nothing: no warning, no note, nothing. Katie Pine and Billy LaBelle left nothing.”

“Sorry, Cardinal. Your reasoning is out of Alice in Wonderland.”

Next morning Cardinal had ordered a grid search—his third in six weeks—that had come up empty. That afternoon Dyson yanked him off Pine and LaBelle. Off homicide altogether for the foreseeable future. “Bring in Arthur Wood. He’s robbing the citizenry blind.”

“I don’t believe this. Two missing children, and you’re putting me on burglaries?”

“I can’t afford you, Cardinal. This is not Toronto. If you miss the big time so much, why don’t you go back there? In the meantime, you can bring me the head of Arthur Wood.”

The Fogle file landed on top of the others.

Cardinal warmed up a tourtière he’d thawed out earlier. Catherine had wheedled the recipe out of a French Canadian friend, but McLeod had tried it once and claimed they’d stolen it from his mother. It was the sage that gave them away.

He ate in front of the television, watching the news from Sudbury. The discovery of a body on Windigo Island was the lead. Grace Legault had pulled back her hood to do her standup on the island, snowflakes winking out like stars on the lion’s mane of chestnut hair. She looked a lot taller on television.

“According to Ojibwa legend,” she began, “the windigo is the spirit of a hunter who went out in winter and got lost in the icy woods, where he was forced to live off human flesh. It’s easy to believe such a legend when you set foot on this desolate island, where yesterday afternoon the body of an unidentified adolescent was discovered by a couple of snowmobilers.”

Thanks, Grace, Cardinal said to himself. We’ll be having the “Windigo killer” next, or even “The Windigo.” Going to be a circus.

The report cut to file footage of the OPP dragging Lake Nipissing in the fall, while Legault speculated on whether the body might be that of Billy LaBelle or Katie Pine. Then they cut to Cardinal on the island acting cool and official, telling them let’s wait and see. I’m a conceited prick, he thought. I see too many movies.

Cardinal wished he could phone Catherine, but she didn’t always respond well to such calls, and she rarely called him from the hospital. I feel too embarrassed and ashamed, she told him, and it all but undid Cardinal to think that she could feel that way. Yet somewhere within that welter of feelings he was aware of a lurking anger that she could abandon him like this. He knew it was not her fault, and he tried never to blame his wife, but Cardinal was not a natural loner, and there were times when he resented being left on his own for months at a time. Then he would blame himself for being selfish.

He wrote a short note to Kelly, enclosing a cheque for five hundred dollars. With both her and Catherine gone, the house seemed way too big, he wrote, then screwed up the note and tossed it in the wastebasket. He scrawled, I know you can use this, and sealed the envelope. Daughters like their fathers to be invulnerable, and Kelly always squirmed at the least expression of feeling on his part. How strange, that someone he loved so much would never know the truth about him, never know how he had come by the money that paid for her education. How strange and how sad.

He thought about missing persons, missing kids. Dyson was right: if you crossed the country, you went through Algonquin Bay, and it was bound to get more than its fair share of runaways. Cardinal had made a separate file of top sheets from other jurisdictions: cases from Ottawa, the Maritimes, even Vancouver, that had come in over the fax within the past year.

He called the duty sergeant, horse-faced, good-hearted Mary Flower, to dig up some statistics. It wasn’t her job, but he knew Flower had a minor crush on him and she would do it. She called him back just as he was getting undressed to take a shower. Naked and goosebumped, he gripped the phone in the crook of his neck and struggled back into the sleeves of his bathrobe.

“Last ten years, you said?” Mary had a piercing nasal whine of a voice that could peel paint. “You ready?”

For the next few minutes he was scribbling numbers onto a pad. Then he hung up and called Delorme. It took her a long time to answer. “Hey, Delorme,” he said when she finally picked up. “Delorme, you awake?”

“I’m awake, John.” A lie. Fully awake, she wouldn’t have used his first name.

“Guess how many missing persons—adolescents—we had the year before last.”

“Including ones from out of town? I don’t know. Seven? Eight?”

“Twelve. An even dozen. And the year before that we had ten. Year before that, eight. Year before that, ten. Year before that, ten again. You getting my drift?”

“Ten a year, give or take.”

“Give or take exactly two. Ten each year.”

Delorme’s voice was suddenly clearer, sharper. “But you called to tell me about this past year, right?”

“This past year, the number of missing adolescents—again, including those from out of town—came to fourteen.”

Delorme gave a low whistle.

“Here’s how I see it. A guy kills a kid, Katie Pine, and discovers he’s got a thing for it. It’s the biggest thrill of his life. He grabs another kid, Billy LaBelle, and does it again. He’s on a roll, but by this time the entire city is looking for missing children. He gets smart—he starts going after older kids. Kids from out of town. He knows there won’t be the same uproar over a seventeen-year-old, an eighteen-year-old.”

“Especially if they’re from out of town.”

“You should see—open cases are from all over the map. Three from Toronto, but the rest are from hell and gone.”

“You have the files at home? I’ll come right over.”

“No, no, we can meet in the squad room.”

There was the briefest of pauses. “Jesus Christ, Cardinal. You think I’m still working Special? You think I’m investigating you? Tell me the truth.”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that,” he said sweetly, thinking, God, I’m a liar. “It’s just, I’m a married man, Lise, and you’re so all-out attractive, I don’t trust myself with you.”

There was a long pause. Then Delorme hung up.