by Giles Blunt
“Can anyone vouch for any of that?” Cardinal said.
“I didn’t have a painting party, if that’s what you mean. Well, hang on—I was watching pay-per-view. I watched four episodes of Mad Men, one after another. The cable company will have a record, won’t they?”
“They should.”
“And I did call a friend around nine-thirty, see if he wanted to go for a beer. That was a short call, though.”
“Still,” Cardinal said, “we’ll need his details.”
“Shouldn’t you be out looking for Laura?”
Delorme sat forward on the couch. “There’s some indication your wife was attacked first, Mr. Rettig. Mr. Trent may have been trying to intervene.”
“Indication? What, like blood?”
“No. I don’t mean to make it worse than it is. She may turn up unharmed, but so far we don’t know where she is, and she hasn’t used her cellphone, her credit cards or her car.”
“You knew she was having an affair before you broke up,” Cardinal said. “That must have hurt.”
“Hurt? No, I wasn’t hurt. I was devastated.”
“Laura’s, what, thirty-seven, thirty-eight? And you’ve gotta be, what, sixty?”
“Fifty-eight. Yeah, yeah—big age difference. But we were together eight years. It’s not like anything changed or I hid anything from her. I thought she was happy. She seemed happy. Until about a year ago.”
“Age difference like that can make a guy feel pretty insecure.”
“I never did. Laura never gave me any reason. Until she met that guy.”
“That was a year ago?”
“More like eight, nine months. Then everything turned to shit pretty fast.”
“You must have been angry.”
“Who wouldn’t be? Angry was only part of it. Depressed. Humiliated. I was a lot of things. This isn’t exactly what I envisioned for myself.” He gestured at the tarps, the cramped little room. “I certainly hated this Mark character. But I never met him, never saw him, and I certainly didn’t shoot him.”
“Nobody said he was shot,” Delorme said.
“He wasn’t shot? Well, what happened?”
“We won’t know until there’s an autopsy,” Cardinal said. “How much do you weigh, Mr. Rettig?”
“How much do I weigh?”
“How much do you weigh? About one fifty?”
“About one forty-five or so. Why are you—Is this even relevant?”
“It may be.”
Delorme stood up. “Mr. Rettig, you mind if I use your bathroom? Lot of coffee this morning.”
“Go right ahead. Door on the right, just before the kitchen.”
“I realize your life is in turmoil right now,” Cardinal said, “but it’s essential we have a list of all your wife’s contacts—friends, relatives, work people—everyone.”
“Well, I’ll give you whatever I have, of course, but her laptop or phone would be a better bet for that kind of stuff.”
“Did she have any enemies that you know of?”
“Enemies? Laura’s a nurse, she doesn’t have enemies.”
“Well, you may not be aware—the man she was seeing, this Mark Trent, was married. So Mrs. Trent, for example, might not be too fond of her.”
Rettig placed his hands on the chair arms, looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Laura never told me the guy was married. That’s just so crazy. So pointless. Why leave a husband who loves you and looks after you just to … Well, you don’t need to hear it.”
“What about stalkers—old boyfriends, perhaps an angry patient? Anyone like that?”
“Not that I know of.”
Delorme reappeared in the doorway.
“All right,” Cardinal said. “Just give us all the names you can—that’s all we need for now. You understand we’re going to have to ask around about you and your wife. We’re not looking for dirt, but sometimes it can be unpleasant.”
“Just don’t get me in trouble at work. I’d like to retire on a full pension, if you don’t mind.”
“Where do you work?”
“Brunswick Geo.”
“Mining?”
“I’m just a CPA. Mostly I deal with the regulation side of things. It ain’t cheap being green.” He stood up and pointed to a wall of boxes behind Delorme. “I may have an old address book of Laura’s. In there.”
“While you’re looking,” Cardinal said, “you mind if we take a look at your car?”
“My car? Jesus.” Still, Rettig took the keys from a hook in the vestibule and handed them over.
Cardinal and Delorme went outside and checked Rettig’s Prius. There was no sign of any struggle, nor was it excessively clean. Cardinal opened the trunk. He lifted up the carpeting and said, “You find anything interesting during your convenient trip to the washroom?”
“Mr. Rettig is subject to indigestion, gas, diarrhea, constipation, headache, backache, hair loss, anxiety and insomnia.”
“You may be mixing it up with my medicine cabinet.”
“No,” Delorme said, “I’m not.”
Traffic was slow along Twickenham, owing to a water-main break. Cardinal could feel Delorme looking at him. Not saying anything, just looking. It took ten minutes to get to Algonquin, and once he’d made the turn he said, “All right, what’s going through that devious little mind of yours? You think I should have been harder on him?”
“Not really.”
“You seem tense. More than usual, I mean.”
She loosened her seatbelt and turned in the passenger seat to face him. “Let me ask you something. Do you honestly think Vernon Loach should be lead on this case?”
“Whoa. Okay. Change of pace, there. No, I don’t, Lise. You’ve got the seniority, obviously.”
“So why is he?”
“You need to ask Chouinard that.”
“Chouinard will say he’s an extremely experienced homicide investigator—”
“Which is true—”
“And the only reason he’s at constable level is because everyone, no matter how experienced, has to start out at constable level.”
“Which is also true. Loach has ten years with Toronto Homicide. It’d be dumb to waste that.”
“So you do think he should be lead.”
“No. You have the seniority, not to mention the experience.”
“So why’d Chouinard do it?”
“Well, the Toronto thing carries a lot of weight. And apparently Loach did a great job on the Montrose murder down there. Nobody thought they’d get that guy, and he nailed him. I mean, if you’re going to apply for a job, that’s the way to do it, right after you clear a case like Montrose.”
“If he’s so damn hot in the big city, why come to Algonquin Bay and start back at detective constable again?”
“Hey, I came from the Toronto force, remember?”
“When you were, what, thirty? Loach is forty-five.”
“I believe his wife is from up here originally.”
“She lived here for like a week when she was ten. Did you know he’s coaching Chouinard’s son’s hockey team?”
“Chouinard is not gonna let something like that sway him. He’s just seeing the Montrose thing. Don’t take it personally.”
“You know my record, John.”
“I do, and I agree it’s not fair.”
“Really?”
“Of course.”
“But you agree with the D.S. that Loach is some kind of super-cop? Pick of the litter?”
“Too early to say.”
“So to get taken seriously, I just have to crack a high-profile case.”
“Apparently.”
“And be male.”
Laura Lacroix did not show up for work. The entire staff of CID spent the rest of the day interviewing people who knew her. No one had any idea where she might be.
Cardinal ate dinner alone at his kitchen table. Afterward, he went over to Delorme’s place and they watched a movie together. They had b
een doing this for well over a year now, and sometimes Cardinal worried it might be a bad idea. On the other hand, there was no law against being friends with your colleague.
Delorme had rented The Mission, Jeremy Irons playing a Jesuit priest who tries to save the souls—and the lives—of the natives he has come to seventeenth-century South America to convert. When the movie ended, they sat in silence for a while watching the final credits roll.
Cardinal turned to Delorme and was halfway through saying he thought it was a pretty good movie before he realized she was crying.
He didn’t know what to do. Or if he should do anything at all. Finally he came out with “Really got to you, huh?”
Delorme shrugged. She sat forward on the couch and hid her eyes with one hand and cried harder.
“Lise …”
Cardinal went to the kitchen and found a Kleenex box and came back and tapped her knee with it. She clutched at it blindly and pulled out a handful of tissues. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose and said “God” a couple of times, shaking her head.
Cardinal said nothing.
Eventually Delorme said, “I don’t think it’s the movie.”
“No?”
“This Loach thing. Must have hit me harder than I thought. Guess I didn’t realize what kind of ego I had—until it got wounded.” She took another Kleenex from the box and blew her nose again. “And now I’m going to feel even worse for having cried in front of you.”
“Forget it, Lise. We’re friends first, colleagues second.”
“On the other hand, it could just be hormones.”
“Yeah,” Cardinal said. “I get those too.”
From the Blue Notebook
Before relating exactly what happened to the Arcosaur project, I should say a little about the terrain.
Drift Station Arcosaur (Arctic Ocean Synoptic Automatic Resource) was located on an ice island designated T-6, the T being short for “target”—a taxonomic legacy of the Cold War. We were living on what used to be part of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf until it snapped off from Ellesmere Island in the mid-fifties and itself became an island. For more than three thousand years it had been attached to Canada, but by 1986 it had circled the polar cap many times, drifting aimlessly—but always clockwise—with the Arctic gyre. It was well to the east of its starting point when we first pitched camp on it, but the grooves and furrows of the surface left no doubt as to its origin: they all ran in the same direction, what used to be east–west when the island was stationary.
Twenty kilometres long and riding ten to fifteen metres higher than the surrounding ice pack, our ice island was selected by the Polar Research Institute because it was big enough to land planes on. Every now and again we would get lodged in the ice pack, only to become mobile with the first change in wind or current, or the first hard knock from another floe. But our radio beacon made us easy to find.
(Point of history: It was thought that Robert Peary mistook an ice island like ours for actual land, which he named Crocker’s Land and put on the map. Some have hypothesized that Peary was misled by an Arctic mirage, but such mirages are commonplace and he was far too seasoned an explorer to make that mistake. Just as paleontologists like to discover species, explorers need to discover land. Crocker was Peary’s patron. In any case, some years later an exploration party perished as a result of finding nothing at his coordinates but open water.)
Three of us—Wyndham, Vanderbyl and I—had been here since April, along with a few support staff. The others joined us in July. Elongated freshwater lakes—called leads—had formed in the island’s grooves, some as long as ten kilometres, and these were a subject of intense biological research. Their blue colour is of a specific tone and brilliance I have seen nowhere else. The eyes of certain Nordic movie stars come to mind.
People who hear about Arctic research—that is, winter research—for the first time express wonder that anyone can stand the isolation, let alone the extreme temperatures. And the prospect of spending months on end in twenty-four-hour darkness they find terribly depressing. But it’s actually the Arctic summers that test one’s inner resources, at least on an ice island. Even though the temperature may never rise much above freezing, the twenty-four-hour sun turns the surface to slush, sometimes as deep as two feet, making all outdoor activity much harder. Supply planes can no longer land, dramatically increasing the isolation factor, and then there is the sun itself. If an Arctic researcher is going to snap, it will most likely occur on a summer day of blinding light, when he is exhausted from struggling to move equipment even a short distance, when he is wet (and as a result far colder than he ever was in winter) and when restful sleep is a receding memory.
But summer was still months away when Rebecca arrived. The surface was still firm’ one could still believe in solidity. I had no reason to be thrown by her simply entering the same room.
Sitting around with Wyndham after dinner one evening, I said, Before I die, I would like to taste Shackleton’s whisky. (A crate of it had been discovered beneath the floorboards of his shack.)
They won’t allow it, Wyndham said. It’ll be preserved for posterity.
He would have wanted us to have a drink.
Wrong pole. Anyway, doesn’t enter into it, what Shackleton might have wanted. Didn’t realize you were such a lush, he added with a smile.
No human being could dislike Wyndham. Even in the academic/scientific community, so rife with competition—for jobs, for grants, for recognition—so awash with rivers of bad blood, you never heard a bad word about Gord Wyndham, nor did he ever speak harshly of another human being. For that alone he was remarkable, but he was also a first-rate scientist, open-minded yet skeptical, precise, conscientious, generous.
About his family life I knew nothing first-hand, but he was always telling us about his wife, whom he found humorously, delightfully unscientific, and his two young boys, about whom he related stories as if they were anecdotes from the field. I told him he should write a monograph in the style of the old Geographical Society: Some Observations on the Curious Behaviour of Prepubescent Males in the Ottawa Valley. He spoke of them with such a charming combination of love and awe that even I, a person bored to petrifaction by people’s families, remember his stories of Phil and Milo—even those names!—with pleasure and affection.
Eleven bottles wrapped in straw and paper dating back to 1907, I said. The Nimrod expedition. A brand no longer in existence. Mackinlay’s, if I remember right.
Shame the poor guy never got to drink them himself.
And then:
The smell of Rebecca’s hair when she sits in the chair next to mine. Mint and rosemary? Thyme? Some herb or other. She ignores me, as she has been doing the whole first week of her rotation. She has been perfectly friendly to everybody else, and especially to Wyndham, but with me it’s been strict radio silence.
I lean toward her, and when she finally registers this invasion of her space and turns to face me, I look her in the eye and call her, ever so quietly, Vostok.
Vostok? She addresses the question not to me but to Wyndham, who is scribbling equations of some kind beside the remains of his scrambled eggs. Why is he calling me Vostok?
Wyndham flips his pencil around to make an erasure and recalculates some figure. Pens tend to be useless up here’ ink turns to sludge. He looks up with a startled expression and says, Vostok? Coldest place on Earth, Vostok.
I thought that was Oimyakon in Siberia.
Vostok’s the coldest uninhabited.
Rebecca looks at me again. She’s wearing a big Irish wool sweater, dark curls spilling over her shoulders. The ivory turtleneck gives her a nunlike air.
Minus 128 degrees F, I tell her. Without the wind chill.
Makes this place seem positively sweltering, Wyndham adds, chasing the last of his eggs round his plate, but Rebecca has left the room.
2
ALL THROUGH THE MORNING MEETING, Detective Sergeant Chouinard sat on the edge of his seat, tapping his ballpo
int on his legal pad. One by one the detectives summarized their interviews with the friends, relatives and co-workers of Laura Lacroix. McLeod and Szelagy had talked to people who knew Mark Trent. Cardinal had the impression Chouinard was only half listening, as if he had something he would much rather be talking about.
“Only thing we could find,” Szelagy said. “Mark Trent used to work for the We Are One charity foundation in Ottawa. Remember they had that scandal a couple of years ago? He was never charged, but people went to jail. There might be something there.”
“Let’s follow that up,” Loach said. “I can’t quite get a reading on Trent’s wife. She was so hysterical yesterday I couldn’t tell if she was faking or not. My impression is, she knew hubby was screwing around and she was none too happy about it. She’s got no alibi, and I’ll be talking to her some more. Standing on someone’s throat seems personal to me—doesn’t seem like something you do to someone involved in financial peccadilloes.”
“Is she heavy enough?” Delorme asked.
Loach nodded. “Lady’s huge.”
“Standing on the guy’s throat,” Cardinal said. “I’ve only heard of one case of that. Happened in the psychiatric hospital.”
“Good thinking.” Loach snapped his fingers. “McLeod, give ’em a call and see if anybody’s AWOL.”
“Already did,” McLeod said, and added, “Your Highness.”
“And?”
“All lunatics present and accounted for.”
“Fine. Lose the Your Highness shit.”
“Right away, Your Majesty.”
“I wasn’t thinking mental hospitals per se,” Cardinal put in. “I was thinking prisons. It’s the sort of murder you get when there are no weapons handy. Which would go against the idea it’s personal.”
Loach shrugged. “Possibly. I still like personal. Guy comes to do Trent. Woman is there and he takes advantage of the unexpected opportunity. At least then we have a motive for her.”