The Delicate Storm

by Giles Blunt

  Then there was the weather. Fog was expected to continue over most of northern Ontario, and then they’d be in for a little rain. An expert explained why this weird warmth was not necessarily a sign of global warming but more likely just a statistical anomaly.

  Cardinal’s cellphone rang.

  “Cardinal.”

  It was Mary Flower. She sounded excited. “Cardinal, you have to head out to Sackville Road right away—Skyway Service Centre. Delorme’s already on her way.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “They’ve found a body. Sort of.”

  Cardinal turned around and headed west to Sackville Road. The fog was thinner on this side of town, not much more than a mist. Eventually he came to a bedraggled gas station. Skyway Service Centre, Snowmobile & Outboard Repairs. Dented shells of snowmobiles were stacked against the side of the building like multicoloured cordwood.

  As he stepped out of the car, Lise Delorme was just pulling to a stop behind him.

  “We can tell Wudky thanks a million, Lise. We should ask the judge to tack on an extra week to whatever damn sentence he gets.”

  “Paul Bressard is not dead?”

  “Paul Bressard is not only not dead, Paul Bressard is prospering.”

  “Well, this should be a little more interesting.”

  A big man came out of the garage in filthy overalls. He was wide at the shoulders, narrow at the hips and at one time would have been an imposing figure. But the overalls were distended in front, as if they concealed a basketball. His face was submerged in the bushy beard of a cartoon woodsman, black shot through with grey. Ivan Bergeron was one-half of the Bergeron brothers, a pair of identical twins who had dominated team sports at Algonquin High for the entire six years they attended it. That had been a little before Cardinal’s time, but he still remembered Ivan and his brother Carl as a dynamite combination on both the hockey and football teams back when he had been a freshman.

  “Tell us what you found,” Cardinal said. “Then we’ll go take a look.”

  “I’m in the shop,” Bergeron told them, “trying to resuscitate a ’74 Ski-Doo that should have been tossed on the junk heap twenty years ago. The dog starts barking. This is a very quiet dog, not usually a problem, and suddenly he’s barking like a maniac. I yell at him to shut up, but he keeps on yapping. Finally I come outside, and there he is in the backyard and—Why don’t you follow me? I’ll show you.”

  Around the side, a two-storey house slumped against the garage as if it had lost consciousness. Bergeron led them past it to the backyard. “That’s it, right there,” he said, pointing. “I dragged the dumb-ass dog straight into the house when I saw what it was. He was expecting me to congratulate him or something, but I was like, ‘This is unreal.’”

  “What time was this?” Cardinal asked.

  “I don’t know—’round ten, maybe?”

  “And you waited till now to call us?”

  “Well, how’m I supposed to know what to do? It didn’t seem like exactly an emergency. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to think about it.”

  Cardinal had seen a lot of unpleasant things in his twenty years as a cop, but he had never seen a human arm completely detached from its owner. They were standing maybe ten feet away. Ivan Bergeron showed no inclination to go closer. He planted his feet wide apart and folded his arms across his belly.

  Cardinal and Delorme approached the thing.

  “You guys are taking it with you, I hope.”

  “Not right away,” Cardinal said. “Are you certain the dog brought it here? You didn’t actually see him, right? You came out and found him barking at it?”

  “He must have dragged it in from the bush. He was rompin’ around out there for quite a while before he brung it back.”

  Cardinal’s stomach was making odd manoeuvres. There was something unsettling about a part of a human being so absolutely out of place. It lay on a grubby crust of snow, pale white except for the black hair that curled thickly toward the elbow end, thinner toward the wrist. There were deep claw marks but very little blood.

  “Looks like someone had an argument with a bear,” Cardinal said.

  “A bear?” Delorme said. “Aren’t bears hibernating this time of year?”

  “They can get confused by a warm patch,” Cardinal said. “It’s not unusual for them to wake up. And when they do, they tend to be peckish. Gonna be fun trying to ID this guy.”

  “Look at the hair on the forearm,” Delorme said, pointing. “It’s grey.”

  “Yeah. We’ll have to run through Missing Persons for older men. In the meantime, we’re going to have to find whatever’s left of the guy.”

  “You’re gonna get that thing out of here, right?” Bergeron said again. “I find I can’t work too good with an arm on my lawn.”

  In the end, Ivan Bergeron had to work with an arm on his lawn for the entire afternoon. Cardinal got on the phone and ordered up as many off-duty constables as Mary Flower could muster. Then he called the Ontario Provincial Police and arranged for thirty officers. Last, he called the fire marshall and brought another thirty firemen to help—and most important, they brought with them three cadaver dogs. Cadaver dogs have nothing to do with the Dalmatians associated with fire stations; they are German shepherds trained to sniff out corpses in burned-out buildings that are too dangerous to send a human being into.

  Within an hour Cardinal had a squad of constables, augmented by firemen and OPP cops, searching the woods, a small army of men and women in blue uniforms moving slowly among glistening pines and birches. No one spoke. It was as if they were in a movie with the sound turned off.

  They tramped through sodden underbrush, the earth releasing rich smells of pine and rotting leaves. Branches stung their cheeks and clung to their hair. After about ten minutes Constable Larry Burke made the next discovery, this time a leg. Once again Cardinal experienced that weird tumbling sensation. What they were looking at was a man’s leg torn at the hip, whole at the foot, with tremendous rips in the flesh of the thigh.

  “Jesus,” Delorme said.

  “Definitely a bear.” Cardinal pointed to the wounds. “You can see there. And there. Thing must have teeth the size of your hand.”

  The fog kept things slow. It was another two hours before they found more pieces of the body: another partially eaten leg and a lower torso so chewed as to be barely recognizable; one of the cadaver dogs had growled at it underneath the trunk of a fallen tree. Presumably the bear or bears had hidden it there to finish it off later.

  Later Cardinal found a bit of ear and scalp with a pair of tinted aviator glasses still attached.

  “Does this distribution look random to you?” he asked Paul Arsenault, who was photographing the glasses. “Or do you think somebody could have spread the parts around?”

  “You mean somebody not a bear?”

  “Somebody not a bear.”

  Arsenault sat back on his haunches, chewing one end of his moustache. “If there’s a pattern, I don’t think we’re going to see it from here. We need an aerial view.”

  “The fog’s thinning, but we’re still not going to be able to see anything through the trees. Not even with red markers.”

  Arsenault chewed the other end of his moustache. “We could put up helium balloons. My daughter had a birthday last week, and we’ve got a bunch of ’em at home.”

  A constable was duly dispatched to Arsenault’s house and returned twenty minutes later with the balloons. They attached thirty yards of fishing line to each balloon, tied to a weight on the ground near each piece of evidence. Then the OPP took pictures from the air.

  Cardinal and Delorme were back at Skyway Service Centre redeploying searchers when a black Lexus pulled up. Cardinal recognized it and sagged inwardly. Dr. Alex Barnhouse was the kind of irritant an investigation didn’t need. A good coroner, true, but he ruffled feathers, and not just Cardinal’s.

  Barnhouse rolled down his window. “Let’s get a move on, shall we? I h
aven’t got all day.”

  Cardinal waved cheerily. “Hi there, Doc! How are you?”

  “Can we get moving, please?”

  “Isn’t this the most gorgeous day you’ve ever seen? The trees? The mist? Right out of a storybook, don’t you think?”

  “I can’t imagine anything less relevant.”

  “You’re right. Better park that beautiful Buick of yours over there and we’ll get started.”

  Barnhouse got out of the car, carrying his bag. “God help us,” he said, “when the local constabulary can’t tell the difference between a Buick and a Lexus.”

  “You’re being naughty,” Delorme said quietly as they headed to the backyard.

  “He does tend to bring out my immature side.”

  Barnhouse examined the severed arm, then followed them into the woods, black bag in hand. He barely glanced at the various body parts.

  “Detective Cardinal,” he said. “It is my professional opinion that this unidentified male met with his fate in an unnatural manner. There being no clothes near the body is one such indicator. The small amount of blood is another. Given the severity of the injuries inflicted by the animal or animals, these trees and leaves should be covered with blood. They are not.”

  “But that could just mean the bears killed him someplace else and dragged the body all over the place.”

  Barnhouse shook his head. “The bear or bears ate him. They didn’t kill him. You can see it in the major bones. It is my opinion that some of the injuries were inflicted not by an animal but by a man or men wielding an axe or other sharp object. The bones appear to be chopped through, not yanked out. I am no expert in such matters and no doubt you will be availing yourself of the services of the Forensic Centre in Toronto.”

  “What can you give us on time of death?”

  “Great God, man. How can I give you anything on time of death? We haven’t even got a stomach to measure contents.”

  “Well, what about this axe business? Was that inflicted after death, or before?”

  “After. There’s no bleeding into the bones, which means the heart had stopped before the chopping up. And for that, I’m sure we’re all grateful.” Barnhouse scribbled on a form, tore off the top sheet and handed it to Cardinal. “Give my regards to the Forensic Centre. Now if someone will be good enough to show me the way out of here, I’ll bid you good day.”

  Cardinal motioned to Larry Burke.

  “This way, Doc,” Burke said. And Cardinal watched the two of them head off into the mist.

  “I should be used to him by now,” Delorme said. “But I’m not.”

  Cardinal’s walkie-talkie squawked and a voice said something unintelligible.

  “Cardinal. Could you repeat that?”

  “I said we’ve got a structure down here.” It was Arsenault’s voice. “I think you should take a look.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Downhill from the service centre. Follow the creek west.”

  Delorme looked off into the woods, the webs of pale grey. “West? It would be nice if there was a trail.”

  They found the creek and followed it, and eventually they heard voices. The dim outline of a cabin took shape. Arsenault was on his knees beside a bush, doing something with a penknife and a test tube.

  “What have you got?” Cardinal asked.

  “Paint scrapings. Looks like someone drove in here recently.” He jerked his thumb behind him, where there was a faint outline of tire tracks. “This could be where it went down,” he added. “I mean before the bears got to him.”

  Cardinal took a closer look at the tire tracks. “You think we can get a mould out of these?”

  “Nope,” Arsenault said. “Too many leaves.”

  “That’s what I figured. What is this, an old logging road?”

  “Yeah. Must be from eighty years ago. You can see it’s been used, though. Probably by whoever owned that wreck of a place.”

  Arsenault’s ident partner, Bob Collingwood, was inside the shack.

  “Gah,” Delorme said. “The smell.”

  The cabin was hardly more than twelve feet square, constructed of rough-hewn lumber that did little to keep out the cold and nothing to keep out the damp. There was a fridge, a rusted cot with a stained mattress rolled up at one end, a metal counter with two sinks and an ancient cast-iron wood stove with the door hanging open on a broken hinge. The whole place smelled of decay—mildew, mould and rotting wood.

  “There was no lock on it,” Arsenault said from behind her. “The door was just hanging open.”

  “Hasn’t been used for a long time.” Delorme pointed at the giant cobwebs around the doorway. “Is it a trapper’s shack?”

  “Totally illegal, of course,” Cardinal said. “They build them wherever they damn well want. The question is, whose trapper’s shack? There must be at least a dozen guys make their living out here.”

  Collingwood was young, jug-eared, thorough and silent. Cardinal could count on one hand the number of complete sentences he had uttered in his entire career, because he tended to speak, when he spoke at all, in single words. He was pointing silently to the sinks. They were the kind with a pump handle where the taps should be. Wearing a latex glove, Collingwood stuck his finger in the drain and brought it up again, stained.

  “Is that rust or blood?” Cardinal asked.

  “Blood.”

  “So he could have been killed here. On the other hand, it may just be animal blood.”

  Delorme was kneeling in front of the wood stove. “Looks like somebody tried to burn clothes in this thing. Collingwood, have you got a drop sheet?”

  Collingwood opened a leather case that contained all the tools of his craft and together they spread a thin plastic drop cloth, white so that evidence would be visible against it. They used a pair of tongs to extract the blackened mass from inside the stove. There was a pair of denims, reduced to little more than the waistband, a shirt collar, several buttons, most of a pair of shoe soles and a mass of burned, unidentifiable material.

  Collingwood took an instrument from his case and measured the shoe soles. “Elevens.”

  “All right,” Cardinal said. “We’ll need sizes from the waistband and the shirt collar, too, if there’s enough left to measure.”

  Delorme, ever so gently, was stirring the burned matter with the tongs. “What’s this?” She said it more to herself than to the others.

  She held a small lump of fused metal in the tongs. She turned it over on the drop sheet. The other side was shinier, and there was part of the incised outline of an animal.

  “Looks like a loon,” she said. She looked at the two men.

  Cardinal leaned over her shoulder to get a better view. “I think I know exactly what that is.”

  4

  THE NORTHERN SHORE OF LAKE NIPISSING is one of the prettiest places in Ontario, but Lakeshore Drive, which runs along the top of the inlet that gives Algonquin Bay its name, could have been designed for the sole purpose of keeping this fact from the public. It has been a magnet for eyesores for as long as anybody can remember. On the lake side there are fast-food joints, gas stations and quaintly named but charm-free motels; across from these, car dealerships and shopping malls.

  Loon Lodge was at the western edge of this ugliness. It was not actually a lodge but a dozen miniature white cabins with green shutters and country-style curtains, having been built in the fifties before the log-cabin look became the fashion. Many people in Algonquin Bay imagine such businesses are closed in winter, but in fact they have two sources of winter income. One is from ice fishermen, the dentists and insurance salesmen who take a few days off to come up north with their buddies and drink themselves into oblivion. The other is from people who want a dirt-cheap place to live, and nothing is cheaper, offseason, than a cabin on Lakeshore Drive.

  Cardinal had been to Loon Lodge a few times. Every so often one of the winter residents would knock his wife’s teeth out. Or the wife would tire of her husband’s drinking
and insert a steak knife neatly into his ribs. Occasionally there were drug dealers. Then in summer it was all sunburnt Americans, families on a tight budget, taking advantage of the reliably frail Canadian dollar.

  Cardinal and Delorme were in the first of Loon Lodge’s white clapboard cabins, the one marked Office. It was four times bigger than the rental units, and the proprietor lived in it with his wife and kids. He was an egg-shaped man named Wallace. His face was puffy, with a wounded expression, as if he suffered from toothache. An equally egg-shaped and disconsolate four-year-old boy was watching cartoons in the next room. Smells of supper hung in the air, and Cardinal suddenly realized he was hungry.

  Wallace pulled out a guest register, found the name and turned the book around on the counter.

  “Howard Matlock,” Delorme read aloud, “312 East Ninety-first Street, New York City.”

  “I wish I’d never set eyes on the guy, now,” Wallace said. “Was a really slow week last week, so I was glad as hell to see him, even though he only wanted to stay a few days.”

  “Ford Escort,” Delorme read, and copied down the licence number.

  “Yeah,” Wallace said. “Bright red one. Not that I’ve seen it for a couple of days.”

  “What day did he arrive?” Cardinal asked.

  “Thursday, I think. Yeah, Thursday. I’d just turned away a couple of Indians who wanted to rent a place. Sorry, but I don’t care how many vacancies I’ve got, I won’t rent to those people. I just got tired of cleaning up the blood and the puke. I have a reputation to maintain.”

  “You better hope none of them lays a discrimination complaint on you,” Delorme said.