The Delicate Storm

25

THE RAIN BEGAN TO FALL ONCE MORE in the early hours of the morning. It fell in large drops that tumbled through a layer of cold air hovering just above the ground. Each drop, upon impact with the previous layer of ice, was transformed instantly to more ice. The rain froze on the rooftops, it froze on the cars. It froze on the street lamps and highways. It froze on the trunks of trees and on the tiniest branches. It froze on the hydro wires, on the mailboxes and on the traffic lights. It froze on the roof of the cathedral, glazing its spire and cross. It froze on the wooden apex of the modernist synagogue and it froze on the stone arch in Ferris Park that says Gateway to the North.

Cardinal had seen many ice storms but never one like this. On Monday he drove into town with absurd slowness. The city around him had been transformed into a gigantic chandelier.

He got to work—late, of course—and found that the storm had sealed the Algonquin Bay police station not just in a carapace of ice but into a kind of muffled peace. Several people failed to show up for duty, as did the entire construction crew, and a pleasant quiet hung over the place.

Somewhere someone was whistling—probably Chouinard—and Nancy Newcombe, in charge of the evidence room, was admonishing someone to fill in the date (legibly, thank you very much) beside his or her signature. At the desk next to Cardinal, Delorme was murmuring into the phone. It was amazing to Cardinal how quietly Delorme could conduct business. It always sounded as if she were imparting secrets to a lover, but she was invariably just doing the footwork like everyone else.

Power had been restored to Airport Hill and Cunningham Road—Cardinal had made sure, first thing. But he had resisted the impulse to drive up there and check on his father. Catherine would call Stan from home; he wouldn’t resent hearing from her. Coming home had brought Cardinal a curious kind of tranquility—transient, he knew—but he savoured it as he sat in the early morning silence.

That silence was blown into tiny pieces by a voice suddenly booming out from the front counter. “Disgusting! Who ordered up this ridiculous weather? I go away for two weeks and the entire city falls apart.” This delivered at ten on the volume knob, in the window-rattling voice of Detective Ian McLeod, Cardinal’s sometime partner, elder colleague and paranoid pain in the ass.

McLeod was in his late fifties, a solid, foul-mouthed, barrel-shaped knot of muscle topped with a short frizz of greying red hair. Lately, and for reasons known only to himself, McLeod had taken to calling his colleagues Doctor. Cardinal found it faintly irritating, but most things about McLeod were irritating.

“Dr. Cardinal is doing rounds, I see. Or are you performing surgery today—extracting confessions from some hopelessly comatose criminal?”

“I wish. How was Florida?”

“Florida was wonderful. Lots of sunshine. The sun down there actually gives off some heat! Great food! But the place is crawling with Cubans and geezers. I’m telling you, coming back here, it feels fabulous to look around and see people walking unassisted—trying to, anyway. Half the Sunshine State is over eighty and the other half doesn’t speak English.”

Delorme covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “For God’s sake, McLeod, I’m trying to work here.”

“Then you got the French Canadians.” McLeod jerked his chin in Delorme’s direction. “Getting so there’s no point going away. Goddam frogs. It’s like being at work.”

McLeod settled his big frame on the chair next to Cardinal’s and demanded to know everything about their cases. Delorme was off the phone now, and they told him the story, finishing up with their trip to Montreal.

“Goddam,” McLeod said several times in a tone of wonder. And when they were finished: “I can’t get over the bears. I mean, I’ve heard of getting rid of evidence, but this is going too far.” Eventually he wandered over to his own desk, where he proceeded to bellow into the phone.

Cardinal’s phone rang. It was Musgrave on the other end.

“I have finally managed to pry some information out of the FBI,” he said. “I don’t know what those guys do for a living, but sharing information isn’t one of them.”

“They give you anything on Shackley?”

“Turns out Mr. Shackley has a record after all. Seems our former CIA hard case was nabbed for a little extortion back in ’92. Tried to put the arm on a former operative of theirs, one Diego Aguilar, who used to do cocaine runs up the Gulf coast, and who was also—only coincidentally, of course—working for the CIA. Shackley was part of the team that ran him. When Shackley hit hard times, he went to Aguilar for help. When Aguilar failed to be generous and supportive, Shackley threatened to expose his drug background. Even had copies of surveillance videotapes as backup.”

“And his victim just toughed it out? Went to the cops?”

“Better. Shackley made a slight miscalculation with this Aguilar guy. He failed to notice that the guy never stopped working for the CIA, although now it’s as a communications network consultant to Latin American countries. So he just put in a complaint to Langley, and they had the local police pick Shackley up. Did six years for that little stunt.”

Cardinal went over to Delorme’s desk and propped the FLQ snapshot on her keyboard.

“Musgrave tells me Shackley did time for trying to extort money out of a tough guy used to do work for the CIA. That gives us motive. I think he was up to his old tricks again—using this photograph—and I think this time his target was Yves Grenelle.”

“Yves Grenelle under another name, you mean.”

“Under another name and thirty years later. Presumably a French Canadian name. In fact, maybe that’s who tried to stop Rouault and Hawthorne from talking to us. Maybe it wasn’t CSIS.”

“They both said it was an older man,” Delorme said. “But Hawthorne wasn’t certain he was French Canadian.”

“Rouault was. So who does that give us?”

“Paul Bressard? But you’ve cleared him, right?”

“Bressard’s not old enough. He would have been nine or ten in 1970. Of course, there’s always Dr. Choquette. He’s certainly the right age, and he was angry at Winter Cates.”

“It’s not Dr. Choquette. He’s got several witnesses who were playing cards with him when Dr. Cates was kidnapped. Strong witnesses, too.”

“Well, Miles Shackley comes up here to blackmail Yves Grenelle, whoever he is, who’s been living under a new identity for God knows how long. He arranges a meeting, shows him what he’s got, and there’s a fight. Shackley is killed, but Grenelle is injured too.”

“If I was threatening someone with blackmail, I think I’d keep a gun on them.”

“So would I. Maybe Grenelle makes a grab for it and gets shot, but he manages to kill Shackley. He dumps the body in the woods and sinks the car. He tries to go on with his life, but he’s got a bullet in him, or he’s at least got a bad enough hole in him he can’t fix it himself.”

“He has to find a doctor, we know that. It keeps bringing us back to the same question: why pick Winter Cates?”

“That’s the tough one. She’s new in town, which narrows it down to neighbours and patients—both of which have come up clean. But this time, at least we know what the killer looked like thirty years ago. Plus we’ll have whatever Miriam Stead comes up with.”

“I know how different I looked thirty years ago: I was wearing snowsuits and Mickey Mouse ears. What about you?”

“I had hair down to my shoulders.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true. I had John Lennon hair.”

McLeod came wandering around the divider looking uncharacteristically contemplative.

“What’s up?” Cardinal said. “You look like you’ve found religion.”

“The Cates thing—you said it was made to look like rape but no rape had occurred?”

“She was naked and her clothes had been torn off, but there was no sign of penetration. That’s not conclusive, of course. Why? What’s on your mind?”

“Old case of mine. Ten years ago, maybe. Situation where a woman was murdered, found outdoors, naked, clothes all ripped, but no sign of penetration.”

“Couldn’t have been ten years ago—I’d’ve remembered.”

“Twelve, then. It was before you moved here from Toronto. Man, we busted our asses on that case and we just never got lucky. Came up with nothing. Absolutely nothing. I worked it with Turgeon.” Dick Turgeon was an old-timer who had been partnered with McLeod for years. He’d died of a heart attack exactly two weeks after his retirement party—a fact that could still elicit reams of morbid philosophy from McLeod.

“I don’t suppose you remember the name of the victim? Anything useful like that?”

“It’ll come to me. She was mid-thirties, good-looking. Hadn’t been in town more than a couple of months.” McLeod snapped his fingers. “Ferrier. That was her name.”

“Madeleine Ferrier?”

“Madeleine Ferrier. How’d you know?”

“A little coquette told us,” Delorme said. She quickly filled McLeod in on the CAT Squad’s prize informer. “According to Simone Rouault, Madeleine Ferrier was with the FLQ in 1970. She played a very minor role, did some time on a minor charge, then apparently reformed. Moved to Ontario.”

“That’s right,” McLeod said. “I remember she had some history. We tried like hell to find a connection between her murder and the FLQ, but there was nothing. Nada.”

“Well, get this,” Cardinal said. “Madeleine Ferrier was at one time crazy about Yves Grenelle.”

“I’m missing something,” McLeod said. “Why’s that important?”

“Because she wouldn’t be likely to forget his face, even after almost twenty years, which is how much time there was between her FLQ activities and her arrival in Algonquin Bay.”

Cardinal and Delorme managed to extract the Ferrier file from the archives. It was nearly three inches thick. As an unsolved homicide, it wouldn’t have been thinned out for archiving, even after twelve years. They sat at their desks, each with half of the file.

Half an hour passed in silence.

Other than the victim and the way she was killed, nothing about the case seemed to connect it to their present one. Madeleine Ferrier, aged thirty-seven, had moved to Algonquin Bay twelve years previously. A high-school teacher of French and geography, she had been in town two months when she was murdered. She was found in a wooded area between the Algonquin Mall and Trout Lake Road, naked, as McLeod had said, and strangled. Except for the torn clothes, Forensics had found no evidence of rape.

Suspects? None. She hadn’t been in town long enough to make any enemies—or any friends, for that matter. The wood she was found in was a well-travelled shortcut from the mall to her neighbourhood. Anyone could have seen her there.

Since there were no suspects, the stack of supplementary reports was huge. There had been nothing to narrow down the search. Everyone who had been in the mall that evening was interviewed. As were the proprietors of all the stores. As was every tenant in the building where she rented an apartment. Those alone formed practically a separate file.

“You know, there ought to be an index to a file this size. It would certainly make life a lot easier.”

“Right,” Cardinal said. “Unless you were the one who had to do the indexing.”

“Here’s something.” Delorme held out a sup headed “Interview with Paul Laroche.” “Paul Laroche owned the building Dr. Cates lived in, right?”

“Paul Laroche owns a lot of buildings.” Cardinal rolled his chair next to Delorme’s.

“Well, he didn’t own this one. The Willowbank Apartments on Rayne Street. It gives his occupation as real estate agent, but it’s for Mason & Barnes Real Estate. He was a small fry back then.”

“He may have been a small fry. Mason & Barnes isn’t. And this is the first name that comes up in both cases.”

They read in silence.

Paul Laroche, then aged forty-five, had told Detective Dick Turgeon he had no information about the dead woman. He had seen her in the lobby once or twice, that was it. The night she was killed, he had been at home, setting up a new stereo he had just bought. Turgeon had had no reason to question Laroche further.

Delorme’s phone rang. She listened for a moment, then clamped the phone between ear and shoulder as she typed. “Yes, I’ve got it. Yes, the attachments are there too. Thank you so much for your help. We really appreciate it.”

Cardinal rolled his chair up beside her.

“Miriam Stead,” Delorme said. “She sent everything by e-mail. It’ll be sharper than a fax.”

Delorme had clicked on an attachment and it was unfolding now on the screen.

“Wow. I hope he has better fashion sense that that,” Cardinal said.

The image showed a man in his mid-fifties, with a Bozo the clown-type corona of salt-and-pepper hair. The clown effect was not diminished by the baggy suit and fat tie.

Delorme clicked another attachment. It took a few moments to open. “Oh, boy. Now we’ve got the Kojak look.”

The same features, unsoftened by hair, now had the ruthless aspect of a shipping tycoon, or perhaps an over-the-hill hit man.

“That’s why God invented hair,” Cardinal said. “Let’s see the next one.”

Delorme clicked again. This time they didn’t even have to wait for the picture file to open all the way. They didn’t wait to see the thickening of the neck, the broadening of the shoulders. There was the close-cut, clinging hairstyle, with its flecks of grey like iron filings; that was enough to put it in the ballpark. But the to-the-life resemblance was truly to be seen in the set of the mouth, in the slightly upthrust chin and most of all in the unstoppable self-confidence of the eyes. Even before it showed the suit and tie of a man of substance, they both said, “Paul Laroche.”

“Amazing,” Delorme said. “It could have been taken last week.”