The Delicate Storm

15

WHILE THE IDENT TEAM WENT ABOUT their work in the woods, Delorme drove to Sudbury, eighty miles west of Algonquin Bay. The shimmer of ice made the passing telephone poles, the drooping wires, the angular rock cuts bright and interesting, but Delorme’s thoughts stayed mostly on that scene in the woods.

A crime of passion? Perhaps Craig Simmons had finally exploded in the rage of a jilted lover. Certainly there were no other suspects for this type of crime in Dr. Cates’s life. A man says he was watching the hockey game at home and can’t prove it. Well, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, what can you do? Dr. Choquette’s alibi still had to be checked out, but he wasn’t high on Delorme’s list. And two bodies found in the woods within a few days of each other? If Craig Simmons was ruled out, the assumption would have to be that Dr. Cates was somehow connected to the dead American. In that case, why did one get fed to the bears and not the other?

For now, there were Dr. Cates’s parents to face. Delorme had already informed them by telephone, but it was essential to see them in person. Talking to the bereaved was easily the worst aspect of working homicide, and the only one that made Delorme long for the comparative cleanliness of Special Investigations. Emotional cleanliness. At least in Special, where she had made some big cases, you didn’t have to tell anybody their daughter was dead. You didn’t have to stand in a room all but drowning in their pain.

Which, half an hour later, was exactly what Delorme was doing. On the mantelpiece across from her sat a graduation picture of Winter Cates, her smile a promise of joy and success. Her mother was hunched in a corner armchair, handkerchief clutched in her hand, a plump woman in her mid-sixties yet still with something of the peaches-and-cream face in her daughter’s photograph. Her father, a square man with a white beard and white hair combed forward in a fringe, was a professor of English literature at Laurentian University. He looked like a Roman senator.

“This Craig Simmons,” Professor Cates said. “I knew he was a mistake from the start. We both did. Winter was only sixteen when she met him, and he was handsome and athletic and a football player and all those things that sixteen-year-olds think matter. But it was obvious to any adult that there was something wrong with him. He was too intense. Too doting. He hung on to Winter, literally, all the time. They’d be standing in the foyer right there and he’d be gripping her elbow like a little old man.”

“And he’d stare at her all the time,” Mrs. Cates said softly. Her eyes were reddened, although she was not crying now. “Stare in a way that was not natural. Stare at her whenever she spoke. He’d be staring at her mouth as if her every word was life and death to him.”

“Winter was a kid,” Professor. Cates said. “She couldn’t see what was going on. I suppose she just thought he was super-romantic. But anyone with a little experience knows obsession when they see it. The shame of it is, that’s the only kind of love that gets any kind of attention these days. In books and movies, I mean. Songs. No one’s allowed to love quietly. No, no, it always has to be Sturm und Drang.”

In Delorme’s experience love usually was a matter of Sturm und Drang, but she wasn’t about to debate Professor Cates on the point.

“Craig Simmons never loved anybody but himself,” he went on. “He’s like that obsessive little creep who shot John Lennon. Or like any other maniac who can’t stand to be rejected, because they don’t really love anyone else. The other person’s feelings don’t enter into it. Do you think he cared a damn whether Winter was happy or not? He did not. We talked to her last week, and she said she was sick and tired of him. She wasn’t talking to him anymore and she wasn’t taking his calls. See, with the Craig Simmonses of this world it’s all Me, Me, Me. Capital M. Nothing else exists. And when something like a resounding no forces them to acknowledge that they do not in fact own the universe, it’s like annihilation for them and they have to strike back. Which is exactly what that bastard did.”

The professor’s voice was getting louder and louder. His wife reached over and touched his wrist, but he took no notice.

“That idiot murdered my daughter, and I want to see justice, Detective Delorme. I want to see that murdering bastard rot in prison for the rest of his life. I suppose he raped her?” The senatorial eyebrows rose as if he were making a routine inquiry.

Delorme had been dreading that question, and yet found herself unprepared for it. “There are indications, I’m afraid.”

Professor Cates spun away from her as if he had been shot. He sank to the sofa and folded over his knees. Mrs. Cates rose from her chair and sat beside him, resting her hand on his back.

“The funny thing about Craig Simmons …” Mrs. Cates spoke softly, almost inaudibly. “Everything my husband says is true. Craig did behave in that way. And yet I always had the sense that he had learned it somewhere.”

“Well, yes,” said the professor. “He learned it from the movies, from his parents, from his childhood, from God knows where—and who cares?”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant it was like he learned it the way an actor learns a part. As if he’d read somewhere that that’s the way you’re supposed to behave and by God that’s the way he was going to behave. You sensed he knew it was inappropriate, but he was doing it anyway—and that was really upsetting.”

“Did Mr. Simmons ever threaten your daughter in any way?”

Mrs. Cates looked up at the ceiling, trying to keep the tears from spilling over. “Never,” she said. “Not once.”

Professor Cates sat up so swiftly that in other circumstances it might have been comic. “What do you mean? That boy used to show up here all the time, uninvited. He’d show up to walk her to school—which would have been one thing if they had been going out together, but she had broken up with him. ‘Daddy, he’s here again,’ she’d say, and I’d have to go out and tell him to beat it. Not that it did any good. He’d be back again a week later.”

“I don’t think that’s what the detective meant by a threat, dear.”

“How many unwanted phone calls were there? Hundreds? Thousands?”

“It’s true, he used to call all the time,” Mrs. Cates said. “I felt sorry for him at first. Well, one did. He was so clearly desperate.”

“Don’t you start forgiving this bastard. Don’t you even think of forgiving him.”

“I’m not, dear. I’m just telling it the way it was. He never threatened to harm Winter. He just wanted to talk to her. To see her. It was overwhelming for a sixteen year old, as you can imagine.”

“Sometimes he’d be out there. Just sitting out there in his car.” The professor jabbed a finger in the direction of the street.

“But then years went by and he didn’t bother her,” Delorme said. “Did I understand that right? When she was at college?”

“That’s true,” Mrs. Cates said. “She never complained about him the whole time she was in Ottawa. Mind you, for most of that time he was out west. He could only visit once or twice. He was at the Mountie training depot in Regina, and then they assigned him somewhere way up north. I find it terrifying that someone like Craig Simmons is walking around as a police officer. Armed, no less.”

“And Winter agreed to see him on a friendly basis after that? After she finished her degree?”

“She felt sorry for him,” Professor Cates said. “God knows why. I never did. But one thing you must understand. Winter wanted to set up practice in Sudbury. The only reason she didn’t was because he was here. Unfortunately, Algonquin Bay wasn’t far enough away. Probably nowhere would have been.”

Delorme stayed another fifteen minutes without getting a lot more information. Professor Cates followed her out onto their glassed-in porch. The suburban scene shone around them.

“Listen,” Professor Cates said, “when do you think you’ll be arresting him?”

“We don’t have enough evidence to do that.”

“But you know he did it, right?”

“We don’t have any firm suspects at this point. Mr. Simmons’s behaviour may have been upsetting, but that doesn’t make him guilty.”

Professor Cates looked her up and down as if grading her performance. Delorme could see the F coming. “Now you just tell me one thing,” he said. “You just tell me what good is the organization you work for if you can’t lock such a man up?”

The Cateses’ suffering clung to Delorme all the way home. She tried to imagine the devastation of losing a child but knew she could not. The young doctor’s face hovered before her, and Delorme vowed again to catch the person who had stolen her future from her.

Her thoughts turned once again to the obsessive Corporal Simmons, and she found herself remembering an obsessive former boyfriend of her own, named René. She still heard from him occasionally, usually at two in the morning. He would be drunk and maudlin and half the time threatening to kill himself. Once, he had shown up on her doorstep when she was with another man. There they were, kissing on the couch, when the doorbell rings and there’s René tottering on the front steps, slamming his palms on her screen door. It had made the new boyfriend extremely nervous, and he never did come back after that. Last she’d heard, René was in Vancouver—and please God let him stay there.

Trouble was, there weren’t a lot of ideal men in Algonquin Bay, and Delorme wasn’t about to get romantically entwined with anyone in the department. It would be nice if someone like Cardinal—not Cardinal himself, needless to say—appeared on her doorstep. Cardinal was the least obsessive man she’d ever met. Talk about steadiness, Professor. You couldn’t say Cardinal was a happy man—he was a brooder, maybe even kind of depressed—but he never spoke of his wife with anything but affection. He never mentioned her illness, not once. And yet his life with her must be difficult. According to McLeod, Cardinal had raised his daughter practically on his own. The truth was, Cardinal could be a pain to work with, he could make mistakes—just look at that unfortunate Bouchard business in his past—but you could bet your life on someone like Cardinal, and he’d never let you down.

Delorme had to brake suddenly for a truck that pulled onto the highway near Sturgeon Falls. Good grief, she thought, why am I thinking about Cardinal? He sure as hell never thinks about me. She turned on the radio. A newscaster announced that another pipe bomb had gone off outside a Montreal restaurant, courtesy of the French Self-Defence League, protesting the restaurant’s English sign. Delorme switched to a French pop station—Celine Dion wailing about lost love—and resolved to banish John Cardinal from her mind.

Back at the station, Delorme put in a call to the coroner’s office up at the Ontario Hospital. She spoke first to Dr. Barnhouse, who handed the phone over to the visiting pathologist, Dr. Alain Lortie. He sounded young but confident.

“This woman died of strangulation, no question at all. We’ve got hemorrhaging in the lungs and in the eyes, not to mention a fractured hyoid bone in the throat. My guess is somebody pretty strong did it.”

“And what about rape, Doctor? We found her clothes right nearby in the woods, torn off.”

“Clothes torn off could indicate sexual violence. Vaginal bruising—and we have some here—also is usually an indicator. I’d ignore the clothes, though, because the lividity and the stage of insect activity indicate she was killed somewhere else. You wouldn’t get flies outside this time of year, so she was probably killed indoors. So tearing the clothes off seems like an afterthought. No semen on or in the body, no vaginal or anal tearing. My gut feeling is that this woman was not raped.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Can’t prove a negative, Detective. It’s just my feeling.”

“But someone made it appear like rape?”

“Looks that way.”

“What about time of death?”

“Stomach contents: two chocolate cookies, not much else.”

“Well, we know she was eating those cookies at 11:30 p.m., Monday night. She was talking to a friend on the phone.”

“Well, from where they’d got to in her digestive tract, I’d say she was killed within an hour or so of that phone call. Nothing else of interest, I’m afraid. I’ll fax you my full report.”

“Thank you so much for doing this, Doctor. I know you weren’t in town to perform autopsies.”

“Glad to help out.”

Delorme tucked the time of death away in her mental file labelled “uncontested facts” and wandered down to the pantry. There was a bulletin board next to the Coke machine, and Delorme stopped to read it, as she always did. In addition to the For Sale notices, there was a list of licence plates—numbers taken down at the Northtown Mini-mall.

The video arcade at the mini-mall had recently become something of a neighbourhood nuisance. Teenagers were hanging out until all hours, smoking dope and making a racket. Cops on the beat were instructed to take down the licence numbers of any vehicles parked near the store after eleven o’clock at night. It was meant to be a low-cost, laid-back effort at getting rid of whatever dealer was supplying the kids with their grass. The list of licence plates was posted in the pantry under the sardonic heading Algonquin Bay’s Most Wanted!

Keeping track of the plate numbers was a totally informal, off-the-books kind of operation—if you could even call it an operation. It was the sort of thing the chief could plausibly claim as an “ongoing effort” to deal with a minor problem. “We are closely monitoring the situation,” R.J. could say, and still look at himself in the mirror. In short, no one took the licence list very seriously; it was pinned to the bulletin board beside the Coke machine along with notices of exercise machines for sale and cottages for rent. Still, everyone glanced at it.

Delorme put a loonie in the Coke machine and hit the Diet Coke button, only to have the machine deliver regular Coke. She stood there sipping from the can, looking at a picture of hockey equipment for sale—a complete kid’s goalie outfit for “only” five hundred dollars. She read an ad looking for homes for six tabby kittens, and one looking for a “dirt-cheap” laptop. See Nancy Newcombe, some wag had written; Nancy Newcombe ran the evidence room.

Just as Delorme was contemplating the number of calories in the Coke, her eyes fell upon the list of licence numbers. And there it was: PAL 474, easy enough to remember. Delorme quickly flipped open her notebook to double-check. But the thing that made her blood hammer in her veins wasn’t the plate number itself but the date and time on which the beat cop had made a note of it: Monday, 11:00 p.m.

A law-abiding citizen can drive from Algonquin Bay to Mattawa in about thirty-five minutes. Delorme made it in under twenty. The Simmons cottage loomed at the end of the driveway in mauve Victorian splendour. To the gingerbread siding the frozen rain had now added a layer of crystalline icing. Craig Simmons’s Jeep was still there. In Delorme’s mind the licence plate could have been a neon sign, flashing the word guilty in letters of blazing scarlet.

Delorme rang the front doorbell, but there was no answer. She found Simmons on the far side of the boat-house, attaching a complicated-looking lock to the door. The Mattawa River, black and deep in this area, swirled and flowed behind him. He gave Delorme the briefest glance and went on with his work.

“Corporal Simmons, I have a few more questions for you.”

“She’s dead. I heard on the news. I really don’t feel like talking to you right now.”

“You’re a Mountie. You know I have to do this. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.”

Simmons looked at her with disgust. He dropped his screwdriver into a tool box with a clatter and headed up toward the house.

Delorme followed him inside. The place smelled of coffee. Simmons poured a cup and offered it to Delorme. When she declined, he took it into the living room, where he sat on the edge of a recamier couch and buried his face in his hands. Delorme tensed for another explosion. But when the corporal pulled his hands away, he just stared at them as if they held an open book. “I knew she was dead, right from the start. As soon as she went missing. Winter’s just not the type to go missing.”

“You seem to be taking it pretty calmly.”

“Calm? No, I wouldn’t say calm.”

Delorme sat on the edge of a wing chair. “Certainly calmer than the other day.”

“You think I killed Winter. And you think I’m calm because I killed her.”

Delorme shrugged. “If the shoe fits …”

“You don’t think it’s possible to be calm and yet in a great deal of pain?” Simmons sipped coffee from a delicate floral cup, an absurd cup for so muscular a man. “Can’t you understand that knowing for sure Winter’s dead is less stressful than wondering where she is? Wondering if she’s lying somewhere injured or in pain? I’m sitting here devastated, but at the same time, yes, I’m feeling less … stress, for lack of a better word.”

“I would’ve thought you’d be feeling a lot more, considering you don’t have an alibi—other than the hockey game you say you watched Monday night.”

“But I know I’m innocent, don’t I. So that’ll be bothering you more than it does me. Ever since I met Winter—that was over ten years ago now, back when we were in high school—I’ve wanted nothing more than to be with her. But it was never the same for her. Oh, she was fond of me. There were things about me she liked. But I wanted to marry her, and she would never agree. It was excruciating.”

Simmons contemplated the steam rising from his coffee. He smoothed back his fringe of pale hair. He would have been attractive, Delorme thought, if he wasn’t such a fake, such an actor.

“From the time we met, it was like I had this motor going inside me—gotta have her, gotta have her, gotta have her.” He ran the words together like a revving engine. “Day after day, year after year, my entire focus was on trying to get Winter to love me. I would do anything. When I was at the training depot out in Regina, I would sometimes fly all the way to Ottawa—it cost me a fortune!—just to be with her for one day. One day!

“And letters. I wrote her endless letters, telling her how much I loved her. I even started reading about medicine, because that’s what she was studying. Can you imagine?”

“Look, Corporal Simmons, it’s no news to me that you were hung up on Dr. Cates. That was obvious from your phone messages.”

“You know what it was like?” Simmons looked at her, and Delorme saw he didn’t really want an answer. “It was like running on high revs for ten years. More. And you know what? It’s over now. So even though I’m devastated that Winter’s gone, it’s also as if this weight has been lifted. I don’t have to try anymore. It’s over. There’s nothing I can do about it, and I don’t have to win her over anymore, and so in some weird way it’s kind of a relief.”

“Well, that’s nice for you,” Delorme said. “I’m sure Dr. Cates wouldn’t have minded dying if she knew how good it was going to make you feel. She probably would have done it a lot sooner.”

“You can’t really suspect me, Detective. I’m being more honest than most people would be in this situation.”

“Of course you are. Me, I’m very impressed. And besides, you were here watching the hockey game when she was killed, no? That’s what you said.”

“That’s what I said. And it’s the truth.”

“Then why was your Jeep Wrangler, licence number PAL 474, spotted at the Northtown Mini-mall in Algonquin Bay Monday night? Shortly before Dr. Cates was killed.”

Simmons lowered his coffee cup to the table, so slowly that it made no sound. All the colour drained from his face. Then he leaned forward and put his face once more in his hands.

“A court of law is going to have a hard time appreciating your so-called honesty, Corporal Simmons. You said you were here when Winter was murdered, but you weren’t. You were in Algonquin Bay.”

“Oh, God,” Simmons said into his hands. “Oh, merciful God.”