Until the Night

6

BOB COLLINGWOOD WAS REMOVING SNOW from the dead woman with a fine brush. Gradually the brittle blond hair was revealed, the fine blue veins beneath the temples, the thin lips almost as pale as the snow. Frozen eyelids oblivious to the scene man’s brush. Silent Collingwood showed no more reaction than the woman.

Cardinal looked at Delorme, her movie-star sunglasses looking back at him, fur trim of her hood a fiery halo.

“Marjorie Flint,” he said. “How does a senator’s wife end up in this godforsaken place?”

“You maybe get the feeling it wasn’t her idea?”

“Last anybody knew, she was heading home to make dinner. So how does she get from Ottawa to Algonquin Bay?” Cardinal pointed to two small peaks of snow on either side of the head and shoulders. “Bob, can we get a look at these?”

Collingwood removed the snow one thin layer at a time. A bolt and then a steel ring became visible. A chain.

Cardinal pointed to the chain. “Let’s follow that.”

Collingwood’s brush flicked at the snow, the chain appearing link by link. He could move faster now, since he was not touching the body itself. The chain was about three feet long and ended in a steel cuff, a padded cuff that encircled the woman’s wrist.

“Jesus,” Delorme said. “Why?”

The hand itself was clenched, and tightly wrapped in thin rags.

“Let’s see her other hand,” Cardinal said.

Collingwood changed position and worked with his brush. Again the blue sleeve, the cuff, the wrapped hand.

“What’s that?” Cardinal pointed to a slight rise in the snow beside the hand.

He and Delorme watched the brush, the gleam of metal as it appeared.

“Is that a Thermos?”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Collingwood said. “You believe that? She’s holding a Thermos.”

The three of them went still: Collingwood crouched, brush poised above the dead woman’s hand’ Delorme, arms crossed in front of her, chin down’ Cardinal with hands in pockets, shoulders hunched.

“I’m wondering about that jacket,” Cardinal said.

“You want me to get at the label?”

“What bothers me is it’s not the coat she was wearing.”

“The MP report listed a black cashmere coat,” Delorme said, “not a blue down jacket.”

“I don’t want to mess up your routine, Bob, so I’ll just ask if we can get a quick look at her wallet, if there’s one there, and then her boots. Then we’ll leave you to get on with it.”

Collingwood photographed the Thermos and took several exposures of the area where it seemed likely a wallet might be. He broke off some crust and started brushing, eventually reaching inside the jacket.

He extracted a wallet and handed it up.

Cardinal flipped through it, riffled the bills. “Lots of ID. And there’s at least three hundred bucks in here. Well, scene like this, robbery’s not the first thing crosses my mind.”

They waited while Collingwood cleared the snow from her feet.

“Good hiking boots,” Delorme said as the sole began to appear. “New, too.”

“The report said high-heel boots,” Cardinal said, “and I’m betting her hands weren’t wrapped in those rags when she left home, either.”

They found Paul Arsenault, the other half of the ident team, culling the snow some distance outside the scene perimeter. He was on his knees under a birch tree, working with hand implements.

“Why are you way out here?” Cardinal asked him. “I think Collingwood can probably use you about now.”

“You’re just in time,” Arsenault said. He got to his feet, holding a shard of black plastic by the edges.

“What have you got?”

“Piece of snowmobile cowling is my guess.” Arsenault flipped the plastic over. It had a slight curve to it and showed a network of surface scratches. Part of a word had snapped off, leaving only the letters rb.

“Rb,” Delorme said. “What do you suppose that used to say?”

“I don’t know,” Arsenault said. “You tell me—you’re the snowmobile maven.”

“Me? No—this is like the fourth time I’ve been out. And mine just says Ski-Doo.”

“Are you sure this is connected to the crime?”

Arsenault pointed to the trunk of the birch tree, where a gouge had peeled away the bark. “That looks pretty recent to me. The victim vanished ten days ago. Plus I checked weather patterns for the area? In the past two weeks, they’ve had freezing rain twice—once twelve days ago, once three days ago. This was between those two layers of glaze.”

“You checked the weather patterns?” Cardinal said. “You can do that on your phone?”

“I checked ’em before we got in the truck.”

Cardinal and Delorme looked at each other.

“I am good at this, you know.”

“We’ve noticed,” Delorme said. “Now all you have to do is run it through the snowmobile database.”

“Ah, yes,” Arsenault said, “the famous snowmobile database.”

Cardinal and Delorme stayed for several hours, but thorough processing of the scene was going to take days. D.S. Chouinard was demanding a command performance, and Cardinal eventually found him waiting in interview room three, a comfortless chamber the size of a jail cell.

“Why are we meeting in here?” Cardinal said.

“My office has sprung another goddam leak, and the chief has the meeting room booked.”

Cardinal sat on a plastic chair that was usually occupied by criminals.

“Let me get this straight,” Chouinard said. “We’ve got a woman chained up outdoors in minus thirty degrees, and she’s got a Thermos in her hand?”

“Smelled like coffee,” Cardinal said, “but obviously we’re going to need the lab report. Same with the traces of food we found beside her.”

“Someone chained her up outside like a dog?”

“Seems whoever did it either failed to return for some unexpected reason or just decided he wanted to make sure she died of cold, not starvation.”

“Other than the body itself, we picking up anything useful out there?”

“Arsenault’s keen on a piece of snowmobile cowling he found under the snow.”

There was a rap at the door and Delorme came in. “Why are we meeting in here?”

“Don’t ask,” Chouinard said.

Delorme sat, holding a notebook and pen on her lap. Her face was still pink from the cold.

Chouinard tapped the tip of his ballpoint on a notebook. “You rang Cardinal at five-thirty a.m. Pitch dark. Middle of winter. Call me nosy, but what were you doing out in the woods at five-thirty in the morning?”

Cardinal could feel Delorme glance at him, but he ignored it. She was on her own this time.

“I went out there on the basis of information received.”

“Cut the shit.”

“I bumped into Leonard Priest off-duty. He started opening up to me for some reason, and in the course of our conversation he mentioned that if he was going to have sexual relations with someone outdoors, he would take her to the Ice Hotel.”

Cardinal could hear in Delorme’s voice that she had rehearsed this answer. No doubt Chouinard could too.

The detective sergeant made circular motions in the air with one hand, as if erasing a blackboard. “Back up a minute. You thought Leonard Priest might be confessing? He gets through a full-blown investigation without a scratch and now, two years later, you’re thinking he killed Senator Flint’s wife, and he just happens to tell you where you’ll find the body?”

“No, I was thinking Laura Lacroix. Two years ago, Régine Choquette was abducted and killed outdoors. Leonard Priest was our number one suspect. And now it turns out Leonard Priest went out with Laura Lacroix. I thought he could be involved. You did too,” she said, looking at Cardinal.

“We got the information from Laura Lacroix’s best friend,” Cardinal said.

“I don’t know why Priest told me about the Ice Hotel—aside from the fact he talks about sex non-stop—but I thought it was worth checking out.”

“At five-thirty in the morning.”

“It was a long shot,” Delorme said. “I wanted to check it out myself in case I was wrong.”

“You were wrong. It’s Marjorie Flint on her way to the Ottawa morgue, not Laura Lacroix. You were wrong.”

“Come on, D.S.,” Cardinal said. “She just broke this case wide open.”

“This case? Last I heard, we had two cases here. Okay, Laura Lacroix’s friend says she had a fling with Leonard Priest. We still can’t even say for certain any crime was committed with her. We got no body. And how does it link Priest to Marjorie Flint? It never occurred to any of us—or to the Ottawa police, I can tell you—to question Leonard Priest about Marjorie Flint. So he tells you the Ice Hotel’s a great spot for sex—but this woman’s fully dressed, right? What’s the evidence that sex in fact took place?”

“None yet,” Delorme said. “But I’m betting the autopsy will show it.”

“Great spot for sex. Leonard Priest is not the first to notice it, by the way, from what I hear. Did you take notes at the time he told you this?”

“As soon as I got home.”

“And did you advise Mr. Priest of his rights?”

“I was off-duty, D.S.”

“Then why did you take notes?”

“Because I didn’t want to forget, obviously.”

“No, what you mean is, you took notes because it’s proper investigative procedure. And if you were investigating Mr. Priest, you were under an obligation to inform him of his Charter rights. You went to his home.” Chouinard shot a glance at Cardinal. “I assume you went with her?”

“Yeah. But he hates me. He refused to talk to us.”

“Help me out here, Delorme. Where exactly did you talk to this man?”

“At a pub. The Quiet Pint.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“I just stopped in for a glass of wine and—”

“This just gets better and better. The Quiet Pint is not a pub, it’s his pub. You show up at the man’s place of work and you start firing questions at him and you don’t advise him of his rights?”

“D.S., I wasn’t questioning him. He offered to talk to me. Was I supposed to say no, I’m not interested?”

“No, you were supposed to Charterize him.”

The D.S.’s voice had gone quiet. Cardinal began to count the seconds until the explosion.

“It was a conversation. I was off-duty.”

“And out of the blue he tells you he knows this great place to take abducted women.”

“No,” Delorme said. “It wasn’t like that.”

Don’t lose your cool, Cardinal thought. Don’t make things worse.

“He was annoyed I was there,” Delorme said. “I said it’s a free country. He said, ‘If I tell you about Laura Lacroix, will you leave?’ And I said sure. We were joking, sort of. I thought we were joking. But he told me how he met Laura Lacroix and a bit about their relationship. This guy is totally wired to sex. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff he said to me. Sex with women, sex with men, sex in public, sex outdoors … So I said, ‘If you were going to abduct someone for sexual purposes and take her somewhere, where would it be?’ ”

“And he said Deep Forest Lodge.”

“Not exactly. What he said was, ‘I don’t abduct women, but if you want to have sex outdoors, there’s no place better.’ He said it was like being in a haunted house but outside at the same time. I said that sounds horrible and he said some women like horrible.”

Chouinard was shaking his head.

“Two years ago we thought we had him for Régine Choquette,” Delorme said. “Well, we thought he was worth checking out about Laura Lacroix. We can’t get a subpoena. I had the opportunity and I asked questions and now we’ve found Marjorie Flint, D.S. We’ve found Marjorie Flint. That’s more than the RCMP and the Ottawa police could do.”

“And what’s your theory as to why he told you?”

Delorme sat back. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“It has nothing to do with, say, your physical appearance? Or how you were dressed, perhaps?”

“What did you say to me? What are you—”

“D.S.,” Cardinal said, “really.”

“What really? Don’t get all equity on me, I’m simply taking into account an officer’s appearance. A huge cop enters a room, it has an effect. A mousy cop enters a room, different effect. A highly attractive female—off-duty, at that—has another effect. Let’s not be stupid and ignore it.”

“I was wearing a grey suit that I wear to court. Hardly provocative.”

“That’s a matter of opinion. Some people find nuns pretty hot. Were you trying to turn his crank?”

“I’m not even going to answer that, D.S. And frankly, you’d better not ask it again.”

“You watch your tone, Sergeant. Don’t you try going head to head with me.”

“Most likely just coincidence,” Cardinal put in. “Why Priest told her about the Ice Hotel? It had to be coincidence.”

“Come again?” Chouinard said. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“Despite how it may look,” Cardinal said, “I don’t think Priest had anything to do with Marjorie Flint’s murder. If he did, there’s no way in hell he’s going to tell a cop where to find her. No way in hell. My guess is you’re right: Detective Delorme, through no fault of her own—did everyone hear that? through no fault of her own—gets Mr. Priest’s motor going. He was playing with her, trying to get a rise out of her. There’s no way he knew what he was stepping into. Because, like you say, nothing connects him—so far.”

“That sound credible to you?” Chouinard said to Delorme.

“Yes,” Delorme said. “But I wish it didn’t.”

“All right. Loach is running Lacroix.”

“Oh, for Christ sake,” Delorme said.

“Cardinal, you’re gonna be lead on Flint. But I—”

“D.S., Lise got this whole thing rolling. You can’t—”

“I just did.” He got up and pointed his pen at Delorme. “And you know why. You want to run an investigation for me, you learn to do it right. In the meantime, consider yourself lucky you’re still on any case at all.”