The Delicate Storm

by Giles Blunt

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “What were you saying?”

  “I said Kelly called a while ago. Are you sure you’re all right? What was that card about?”

  Cardinal stuffed the card in his pocket. “Nothing. Garbage. Funny how Kelly always manages to call when I’m out. She must have someone watching the house.”

  “Don’t say that, John. She asked after you. I really don’t think Kelly’s capable of holding a grudge. Not against you, anyway.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She’s found a new place. Sharing an apartment in the East Village. She says it’s very funky but livable.”

  “God knows why she wants to live in New York in the first place. You couldn’t pay me enough money to live there. Toronto was bad enough.”

  Cardinal went into the bathroom and ran the shower as hot as he could stand it, then turned it gradually colder. The sting of the water restored his spirits a little, but his mind still kept going back to the events of a dozen years ago. He had crossed a line, and when he tried to go back—back to the last point where he had been his real self, his full self—it turned out not to be a line at all, but a chasm.

  Cardinal forced himself to think of the present, of the farce at Loon Lodge. He remembered that just before he had been attacked, a thought had been forming in his mind. Then, as he was rinsing off, the thought came back to him. It had been about Wudky.

  He dried off, wrapped himself in a thick dressing gown and went out into the living room to use the phone.

  “Delorme? It’s Cardinal.”

  “Cardinal, do you know what time it is? Believe it or not, I do have a life.”

  “No, you don’t. I’ve been thinking about Wudky. You know he told us Paul Bressard got himself murdered and buried in the woods?”

  “Wudky is retarded. Everybody knows he’s retarded. I’m surprised you bothered to check his story out.”

  “But look at what we’ve got. We’ve got an American chewed up in the woods, right? Near an old trapper’s shack, right? And Paul Bressard is a trapper.”

  “Right. And Wudky said Paul Bressard got murdered, and Wudky was wrong.”

  “And why? Because Wudky is the world’s dumbest criminal. And why else? Because Wudky had had a lot to drink the night he heard that story. But suppose Wudky got it backwards? Suppose Paul Bressard killed a tourist and did away with him in the woods? That would make more sense, wouldn’t it? Maybe he even killed him accidentally and tried to cover it up.”

  “Me, I don’t think feeding a guy to the bears is accidental. Even just to cover up.”

  “But it’s the sort of thing that would occur to a trapper. Someone who knows exactly where the bears are.”

  “I guess. Yeah, you could be on to something.”

  “Are you just saying that to get me off the phone?”

  “No. But I thought you already talked to Bressard.”

  “I did. And he seemed completely innocent. But then, I was just checking to see if he was alive.”

  “Maybe we should talk to him again. Oh, sorry—maybe you and Malcolm Musgrave should talk to him. Matlock was American. That means working with the Horsemen.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  Cardinal went back to the bathroom and dried his hair. He had an idea now. A direction. When he went into the bedroom, Catherine was under the covers, fast asleep. Beside her, an oversize library book called New York and New Yorkers lay open to a picture of the East Village.

  Cardinal got into bed beside her and turned out the light. He listened to the rhythm of her breathing, the sound of peace, love and security. And then he thought again about the card.

  5

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT DANIEL CHOUINARD was still trying to rid his office of his predecessor’s ghost. D.S. Dyson, aside from being a crook, had been a supernaturally neat man, and so Chouinard felt it necessary to keep his office in a state of turmoil. Half-installed blinds hung from the windows at alarming angles, law books and procedural manuals tilted in precarious towers on the floor, and the bookshelves formed a lean-to against the wall. On his desk lay a hammer, a variety of screwdrivers and a tablet of white foolscap on which it was his habit to take illegible notes.

  When the position of detective sergeant had become available, it had been offered to Cardinal. He was one of the more senior detectives, after all, and had cleared some of the highest-profile cases in Algonquin Bay’s history. But Cardinal had turned the job down, even though it would have meant more money and regular hours. At the time, he had been on the brink of quitting the force—Delorme had stopped him at the last minute—and felt he didn’t deserve any promotion. Also, there was the undeniable fact that being detective sergeant was a desk job. Cardinal just couldn’t see it. Being out on the street, dealing with real people, was the best thing about police work, the only thing that made him feel useful.

  The only factor that made Cardinal hesitate at all was fear that the job would go to Ian McLeod. McLeod, who was away on vacation at the moment, had a knack for sowing discord that would have made him an out-and-out disaster. In the end Chief Kendall had offered the job to Daniel Chouinard, who had been a detective long enough to understand the needs of the CID staff. He had suffered along with the rest of the squad under the unpredictable D.S. Dyson, and he had solid organizational skills. Most important of all, he knew every one of the eight detectives well enough to know whose strengths would balance out whose weaknesses.

  When he’d heard about the appointment, McLeod had declared it was simply because Chouinard was French Canadian: it made the department look strongly bilingual, which it was not. But nobody else found any reason to be upset with Daniel Chouinard. The worst that could be said of him was that he was bland—especially for a French Canadian. All right, he was boring. He was so boring you could really only define him by what he lacked—such as any sense of irony or for that matter any sense of humour. He had no axe to grind, no political ambitions and no major psychological problems. He was given neither to tantrums nor to vendettas. The man didn’t even have an accent. Despite the messy office, the new D.S. was just, well, reasonable. Sometimes unbearably reasonable.

  “Let me sum things up,” Chouinard said. Delorme and Cardinal were on their feet in the at-ease position, owing to Chouinard’s chairs being covered with stacks of acoustic tile. “We have an American male in his late fifties or early sixties found in the woods where he was eaten by a bear.”

  “Murdered by persons unknown and then eaten by a bear,” Delorme corrected him.

  “The fact that he’s American means we have to bring in the Mounties; anything international is their turf. Which means we’ll be working with Malcolm Musgrave. So, I don’t think we need Delorme on this just now.”

  “Actually,” Cardinal said, “Delorme’s the best possible person to work with Musgrave. They’ve worked together before and they get along fine. That’s bound to speed things up.”

  “Maybe,” Chouinard said. “But I don’t want too many cooks on this.”

  “D.S., I want to be in on it,” Delorme said. “I’d be happy to work with Musgrave.”

  “Sorry. Cardinal, you’re the more senior officer and you should be the one to coordinate with the esteemed sergeant.”

  “Really, D.S., I don’t think I should be working with Musgrave right now.”

  “Why? Is he annoyed with you? Why would a Mountie stationed in Sudbury be annoyed with a detective in Algonquin Bay?”

  “You’re forgetting he sicced the entire department on me last year.”

  “Oh, now that’s not fair,” Chouinard said in his reasonable way. “He had good grounds to think there was a leak in our department and it turned out he was right. He just had the wrong man, that’s all.”

  “A minor detail,” Cardinal said. “Can’t imagine why it bothered me.” What was bothering him even more, just then, was that a young Mountie had snatched his gun away the night before.

  Chouinard was silent for a few moments, his soft features moving
ever so slightly, as if he were working out several equations. Then, as if the calculations had become a physical problem, he swivelled around in his chair and shifted several law books from one windowsill to another, carefully examining the spine of each before setting it down. When he turned around again, his expression was more cheerful.

  “So there’s bad blood between you and the Horsemen,” he said. “That’s a shame. But the truth of the matter is that we’re never going to have a better opportunity to smooth things out with our colleagues in scarlet. So you work with the Mounties—make sure you give them everything, understand—and you and Musgrave will be on excellent terms in no time. That’ll be good for the case, and also for the long-term interests of the department.”

  “But, D.S., I don’t think you realize how bad the communication problem is between Musgrave and me.”

  “All the more reason. You’re the one who has the problem. Therefore, there’s no one better qualified to repair it, is there?”

  Although it should have been first on his agenda, Cardinal put off calling Musgrave. Instead, he called the Toronto Centre for Forensic Sciences, where he spoke to Vlatko Setevic in Chemistry. Two things about Vlatko you could count on. He was an absolute workaholic, first into the office, last out, and never happy unless he had cleared his desk. The other thing was his unpredictable moods. Vlatko had been in Canada since the sixties and had been an even-tempered sort until Yugoslavia came apart in the nineties. Since that time his disposition had taken a decided turn toward the stormy. Sometimes he could be funny, other times he could be a bastard; you just never knew what you were going to get. Cardinal asked him about the paint sample they had sent and braced himself for heavy weather.

  “Paint sample? I didn’t get any paint sample. Not from Algonquin Bay.”

  “You better have or there’s going to be serious trouble. Are you telling me you guys never—”

  A big Slavic laugh blew over the line from Toronto. “Relax, detective. I was joking. I got your precious paint sample right here.”

  “Hilarious, Vlatko. Sense of humour like that, you could be on Royal Canadian Air Farce.”

  “So tense, you northern guys. Take up yoga, maybe—you’ll get centred, feel calmer, be one with the universe.”

  “My wife says the same thing. What have you got for us?”

  “It’s kind of lucky, actually. The paint matches so-called walnut brown that Ford started using on its Explorers last year. New batch. So you’re looking for this year’s Explorer—Explorer with bad scratch.”

  “You’re doing my heart good, Vlatko. Keep going.”

  “In another way, you’re also unlucky. In Canada alone? Ford sold thirty-five thousand Explorers, give or take.”

  “Let me guess. The most popular colour?”

  “Of course. Walnut brown.”

  When it couldn’t be put off any longer, Cardinal called the Sudbury detachment. The civilian who answered informed him that Musgrave was out of town. Cardinal put down the phone with relief, only to have it ring in his hand. It was Musgrave.

  “You and I have to talk,” the sergeant said without preliminaries. “About a certain individual named Howard Matlock.”

  It turned out he was already in Algonquin Bay, at the Federal Building a few blocks away on MacPherson. At one time the RCMP had maintained a detachment there, but the Mounties lived in the age of cutbacks like everyone else and now their closest headquarters was in Sudbury, eighty miles away.

  Cardinal drove over to the Federal Building and parked in a space marked Post Office Vehicles Only. He found Musgrave in an office furnished with nothing but a metal desk, a phone and three plastic chairs in primary colours.

  The sergeant had the self-confidence of a man who can rely on always being the biggest, toughest male in the room. He was V-shaped, and looked like he’d been carved out of the Precambrian Shield. Throw a rock at him, Cardinal figured, and there was a good chance the rock would shatter.

  “Sit,” Musgrave said, gesturing at the chairs. “I want you to know I have no bad feelings about last year.”

  “That’s big of you. Considering you nearly screwed me out of my job.”

  “Look at it objectively. I was just following procedure.”

  “I’ll tell you something about procedure.” Cardinal had been rehearsing in the car. “The murder of a foreign citizen on Canadian soil may fall under the jurisdiction of the RCMP, but that doesn’t give you carte blanche to trample over a local investigation. If you want to examine a crime scene in my bailiwick, you call me. If you want background on the case, ask me. Don’t send your flunkies unannounced into my turf or next time they’ll end up in my jail.”

  Musgrave regarded him with a cool blue gaze. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Listen, Cardinal. You have a dead American citizen. An American. As you say, that makes it an RCMP matter. How long were you going to wait before you told me about it?”

  “If I had my way, I’d never tell you. You’re an unpleasant person. But the law being what it is, I called you this morning, just before you called me.”

  “Uh-huh. Then why do I hear about it from our Ottawa division first?” Musgrave threw a copy of the fax at him. It was just a small item, one of a number in a bulleted list. American Howard Matlock found murdered in Algonquin Bay.

  Cardinal stared at the page. How could Mountie headquarters have got hold of it so fast? And if the kid who had taken his gun away wasn’t with Musgrave, who was he?

  There was a rap on the door.

  Musgrave nodded at it. “Someone you’re going to want to meet.”

  Cardinal looked up from the fax.

  “Detective John Cardinal, this is Calvin Squier. Detective Cardinal is with Algonquin Bay police. Mr. Squier is an intelligence officer with CSIS.”

  Standing in the doorway in a sport coat and tie, the blond young man looked like a teenager trying on his father’s clothes. Nothing about him indicated he could take your gun away from you in a darkened cabin.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Squier said, and put out a hand that was pale as a veal chop.

  “Likewise,” Cardinal managed to say. He felt a blush rising from under his collar and travelling up his neck.

  “Great job you did on the Windigo killer,” Squier said. “Read up on you this morning.”

  “You’re with CSIS?”

  “Canadian Security Intelligence Service,” Musgrave said.

  “I know who they are, thanks.”

  “That’s right. I’ve been with them five years.”

  “They must have hired you when you were nine.” Cardinal sat down on a sky-blue chair that creaked like a new shoe. He turned to Musgrave. “What’s the deal here?”

  “I’ll let him tell you.”

  Squier opened his briefcase and set a silvery laptop on the desk. He unfolded it so that the screen was visible to all of them and pushed a button; it sprang to life with a chime. He pulled a small object the size of a lipstick from his pocket and pointed. A graphic appeared, showing the command structure of NORAD—North American Aerospace Defence.

  “As you may know,” Squier said, “NORAD is a joint operation of the U.S. and Canada that was developed during the Cold War to keep us safe from Russian invaders.” He clicked his remote and the graphic changed to Joint Command Installations. “Each country built what they called a ground environment—basically a three-storey office building inside a mountain. The Americans have theirs at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. We have ours in Algonquin Bay, out by Trout Lake.”

  “I grew up here,” Cardinal said. “You really don’t need to be telling me this.”

  “I’d like to do this right, if you’ll just be patient,” Squier said. “Besides, Sergeant Musgrave didn’t grow up here.”

  “Sergeant Musgrave would like to get on with it,” Musgrave said. “Assume we know about the CADS base.”

  “Okay. The Cold War may be o
ver, but the Canadian Air Defence System is still in place. There are still a hundred and fifty people inside that mountain. They still have their eyes on radar screens. And those radar screens still light up with any object coming into Canadian airspace.”

  “They’re closing the place down, I heard,” Cardinal put in. “Algonquin Bay doesn’t even have an air base any more.”

  “They may move it. But it’s not going to close, believe me.” A muffled twitter interrupted them. “Sorry,” Squier said, and reached into his jacket pocket. “Forgot to turn it off.”

  He aimed the remote at the screen again and it changed to a radar readout. White objects shaped like planes throbbed in the upper right corner. “CADS monitors all incoming traffic. This is just a simulation, of course, showing regular commercial traffic. With the end of the Cold War, the CADS base has found new things to do. They keep an eye out for drug flights, for example. Recently they were instrumental in stopping twenty million dollars’ worth of heroin, simply by relaying data on a suspicious Cessna to an RCMP drug squad.”

  A click of the remote and the screen changed again. An object that did not look like a plane entered the screen from the upper left side. It glowed red and began to flash with a throaty beep. “Post–September 11, the most important part of the CADS mandate—at least as far as my outfit is concerned—is anti-terrorism. This could be anything from a hijacked aircraft to a rogue missile. That’s what we have on the screen now.”

  “Simulated, of course,” Musgrave said pointedly.

  “Oh, yes,” Squier said. “There’s no way on God’s green earth I could be walking around with a real CADS readout. Now, I know you’re wondering why I’m here, so I’ll get right to it. Friday morning CSIS got a call from the CADS base. Their security unit caught a man with a pair of binoculars up on the hill. Apparently, he didn’t seem to be doing anything much. They questioned him, and he said he was a tourist, a birdwatcher. It’s not like he’s wearing a turban. They didn’t have enough to hold him or even to call in you guys.” He nodded at Cardinal. “So they checked his ID and told him to vamoose, basically.