by Giles Blunt
Forty Words for Sorrow
Giles Blunt
"Intensely vivid characters, terrible crimes and a brutal deep-frozen landscape… Giles Blunt is a really tremendous crime novelist." – Lee Child
***
When four teenagers go missing in the small northern town of Algonquin Bay, the extensive police investigation comes up empty. Everyone is ready to give up except Detective John Cardinal, an all-too-human loner whose persistence only serves to get him removed from homicide. Haunted by a criminal secret in his own past and hounded by a special investigation into corruption on the force (conducted, he suspects, by his own partner), Cardinal is on the brink of losing his career – and his family. Then the mutilated body of thirteen-year-old Katie Pine is pulled out of an abandoned mineshaft. And only Cardinal is willing to consider the horrible truth: that this quiet town is home to the most vicious of killers. With the media, the provincial police and his own department questioning his every move, Cardinal follows increasingly tenuous threads towards the unthinkable. Time isn't only running out for him, but for another young victim, tied up in a basement wondering when and how his captors will kill him. Evoking the Canadian winter and the hearts of the killers and cops in icily realistic prose, Giles Blunt has produced a masterful crime novel that rivals the best of Martin Cruz Smith and introduces readers to a detective hero whose own human faults serve to fuel his unerring sense of justice.
Giles Blunt
Forty Words for Sorrow
The first book in the John Cardinal series, 2000
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The following people all read earlier versions of Forty Words and made numerous suggestions for cuts and improvements or helped in other ways: Bill Booth; Anne Collins, my editor at Random House of Canada; my wife, Janna Eggebeen; my agent, Helen Heller; Linda Sandler; Staff Sgt. Rick Sapinski of the North Bay Police Department; and my editor at Penguin Putnam, Marian Wood. I am grateful to them all.
My thanks are also due to the Writers Room in New York, where much of this book was written.
IN MEMORIAM
Philip L. Blunt
(1916-2000)
1
IT gets dark early in Algonquin Bay. Take a drive up Airport Hill at four o'clock on a February afternoon, and when you come back half an hour later the streets of the city will glitter below you in the dark like so many runways. The forty-sixth parallel may not be all that far north; you can be much farther north and still be in the United States, and even London, England, is a few degrees closer to the North Pole. But this is Ontario, Canada, we're talking about, and Algonquin Bay in February is the very definition of winter: Algonquin Bay is snowbound, Algonquin Bay is quiet, Algonquin Bay is very, very cold.
John Cardinal was driving home from the airport where he had just watched his daughter, Kelly, board a plane bound for the United States by way of Toronto. The car still smelled of her- or at least of the scent that had lately become her trademark: Rhapsody or Ecstasy or some such. To Cardinal, wife gone and now daughter gone, it smelled of loneliness.
It was many degrees below zero outside; winter squeezed the car in its grip. The windows of the Camry were frosted up on both sides, and Cardinal had to keep scraping them with an ineffective plastic blade. He went south down Airport Hill, made a left onto the bypass, another left onto Trout Lake Road, and then he was heading north again toward home.
Home, if you could call it that with both Catherine and Kelly gone, was a tiny wooden house on Madonna Road, smallest among a crescent of cottages set like a brooch along the north shore of Trout Lake. Cardinal's house was fully winterized, or so the real estate agent had told them, but "winterized" had turned out to be a relative term. Kelly claimed you could store ice cream in her bedroom.
His drive was hidden by four-foot-high snowbanks, so Cardinal didn't see the car blocking his way until he almost rear-ended it. It was one of the unmarkeds from work, great pale clouds of exhaust blasting out from behind. Cardinal reversed and parked across the road. Lise Delorme, the Algonquin Bay Police Department's entire Office of Special Investigations, got out of the unmarked and waded through the exhaust toward him.
The department, despite "great strides toward employment equity," as the bureaucrats liked to phrase it, was still a bastion of male chauvinism, and the general consensus around the place was that Lise Delorme was too- well, too something for her job. You're at work, you're trying to think, you don't need the distraction. Not that Delorme looked like a movie star; she didn't. But there was something about the way she looked at you, McLeod liked to say- and for once McLeod was right. Delorme had a disturbing tendency to hold your gaze just a little too long, just a split second too long with those earnest brown eyes. Well, it was as if she'd slipped her hand inside your shirt.
In short, Delorme was a terrible thing to do to a married man. And Cardinal had other reasons to fear her.
"I was about to give up," she said. Her French-Canadian accent was unpredictable: One hardly noticed it most of the time, but then final consonants would disappear and sentences would sprout double subjects. "I tried to phone you but there was no answer, and your machine, it's not working."
"I switched it off," Cardinal said. "What the hell are you doing here, anyway?"
"Dyson told me to come get you. They've found a body."
"Got nothing to do with me. I don't work homicides, remember?" Cardinal was trying to be merely factual, but even he could hear the bitterness in his voice. "You mind letting me through, Sergeant?" The "Sergeant" was just to nettle her. Two detectives of equal rank would normally address each other by name, except in the presence of the public or around junior officers.
Delorme was standing between her car and the snow-bank. She stepped aside so Cardinal could get to his garage door.
"Well Dyson, I think he wants you back."
"I don't care. You mind backing out now so I can plug my car in? I mean, if that's okay with Dyson. Why's he sending you, anyway? Since when are you working homicides?"
"You must have heard I quit Special."
"No, I heard you wanted to quit Special."
"It's official, now. Dyson says you'll show me the ropes."
"No, thanks. I'm not interested. Who's working Special?"
"He's not here yet. Some guy from Toronto."
"Fine," Cardinal said. "Doesn't make the slightest difference. You gonna get lost, now? It's cold, I'm tired, and I'd kind of like to eat my supper."
"They think it could be Katie Pine." Delorme scanned his face while Cardinal took this in. Those solemn brown eyes watching his reaction.
Cardinal looked away, staring out into the blackness that was Trout Lake. In the distance, the headlights of two snowmobiles moved in tandem across the dark. Katie Pine. Thirteen years old. Missing since September 12, he would never forget that date. Katie Pine, a good student, a math whiz from the Chippewa Reserve, a girl whom he had never met, whom he had wanted more than anything to find.
The phone began to ring inside the house, and Delorme looked at her watch. "That's Dyson. He only gave me one hour."
Cardinal went inside. He didn't invite Delorme. He picked up the phone on the fourth ring and heard Detective Sergeant Don Dyson going on at him in his chilly quack of a voice as if they had been separated in the middle of an argument and were only now, three months later, resuming it. In a way, that was true.
"Let's not waste time going over old ground," Dyson said. "You want me to apologize, I apologize. There. Done. We got a body out on the Manitou Islands, and McLeod is tied up in court. Up to his ears in Corriveau. Case is yours."
Cardinal felt the old anger burning its way into his veins. I may be a bad cop, he told himself, but not for the reasons Dyson thinks. "You t
ook me off homicide, remember? I was strictly robbery and burglary material, in your book."
"I changed your case assignments. It's what a detective sergeant does, remember? Ancient history, Cardinal. Water under the bridge. We'll talk about it after you see the body."
" 'She's a runaway,' you said. 'Katie Pine is not a homicide, she's a runaway. Got a history of it.' "
"Cardinal, you're back on homicide, all right? It's your investigation. Your whole stinking show. Not that it has to be Katie Pine, of course. Even you, Detective Has-to-Be-Right, might want to keep an open mind about identifying bodies you haven't seen. But if you want to play I told you so, Cardinal, you just come into my office tomorrow morning, eight o'clock. Best thing about my job is I don't have to go out at night, and these calls always come at night."
"It's my show as of this moment- if I go."
"That's not my decision, Cardinal, and you know it. Lake Nipissing falls under the jurisdiction of our esteemed brothers and sisters in the Ontario Provincial Police. But even if it's the OPP's catch, they're going to want us in on it. If it is Katie Pine or Billy LaBelle, they were both snatched from the city-our city- assuming they were both snatched. It's our case either way. 'If I go,' he says."
"I'd rather stick with burglaries, unless it's my show as of this moment."
"Have the coroner toss a coin," Dyson snapped, and hung up.
Cardinal yelled to Delorme, who had stepped in out of the cold and was standing diffidently just inside the kitchen door. "Which one of the Manitous are we on?"
"Windigo. The one with the mineshaft."
"So we drive, right? Will the ice take a truck?"
"You kidding? This time of year, that ice would take a freight train." Delorme jerked a mittened thumb in the direction of Lake Nipissing. "Make sure you dress warm," she said. "That lake wind, it's cold as hell."
2
FROM the government dock to the Manitou Islands seven miles west, a plowed strip lay like a pale blue ribbon across the lake; shoreline motels had scraped it clear as an inducement to ice fishers, a prime source of revenue in winter months. It was quite safe to drive cars and even trucks in February, but it was not wise to travel more than ten or fifteen miles an hour. The four vehicles whose headlights lit the flurries of snow in bright cubist veils were moving in slow motion.
Cardinal and Delorme drove in silence in the lead car. Delorme now and again reached across to scrape at the windshield on Cardinal's side. The frost peeled off in strips that fell in curls and melted on the dash and on their laps.
"It's like we're landing on the moon." Her voice was barely audible above the grinding of gears and the hiss of the heater. All around them the snow fell away in shades that ranged from bone white to charcoal gray and even- in the dips and scallops of the snowbanks- deep mauve.
Cardinal glanced in the rearview at the procession behind them: the coroner's car, and behind that the headlights of the ident van, and then the truck.
A few more minutes and Windigo Island rose up jagged and fierce in the headlights. It was tiny, not more than three hundred square meters, and the thin margin of beach, Cardinal remembered from his summer sailing, was rocky. The wooden structure of the mine's shafthead loomed out of the pines like a conning tower. The moon cast razor sharp shadows that leapt and shuddered as they approached.
One by one, the vehicles arrived and parked in a line, their collective lights forming a wide white rampart. Beyond that, blackness.
Cardinal and the others gathered on the ice like a lunar landing party, clumsy in their calf-high boots, their plump down coats. They shifted from foot to foot, tense with cold. They were eight, including Cardinal and Delorme: Dr. Barnhouse, the coroner; Arsenault and Collingwood, the scene men; Larry Burke and Ken Szelagy, patrol constables in blue parkas; and last to arrive in yet another unmarked, Jerry Commanda from OPP. The OPP was responsible for highway patrol and provided all police services for any townships that lacked their own police force. The lakes and Indian reservations were also their responsibility, but with Jerry you didn't worry about jurisdictional disputes.
All eight now formed into a gap-toothed circle, casting long shadows in the headlights.
Barnhouse spoke first. "Shouldn't you be wearing a bell around your neck?" This by way of greeting Cardinal. "I heard you were a leper."
"In remission," Cardinal said.
Barnhouse was a pugnacious little bulldog of a man, built like a wrestler with a broad back and a low center of gravity and perhaps in compensation cherished a lofty self-regard.
Cardinal jerked his head toward the tall gaunt man on the outside of the circle. "You know Jerry Commanda?"
"Know him? I'm sick of him," Barnhouse bellowed. "Used to be with the city, Mr. Commanda, until you decided to go native again."
"I'm OPP now," Jerry said quietly. "Dead body in the middle of the lake, I think you'll want to arrange for an autopsy, won't you, Doc?"
"I don't need you to tell me my job. Where's the fine flatfoot who discovered the thing?"
Ken Szelagy stepped forward. "We didn't discover it. Couple of kids found it round four o'clock. Me and Larry Burke here got the call. Soon as we saw, we made a perimeter and called it in. McLeod was in court so we called D. S. Dyson and I guess he called in Detective Cardinal here."
"The talented Mister Cardinal," Barnhouse murmured ambiguously, then added: "Let's proceed with flashlights for the moment. Don't want to disturb things setting up lights and so on."
He started toward the rocks. Cardinal was going to speak, but Jerry Commanda voiced the thought for him. "Let's keep it single file, guys."
"I'm not a guy," Delorme noted tartly from the depths of her hood.
"Yeah, well," Jerry said. "Kinda hard to tell the difference right now."
Barnhouse gestured for Burke and Szelagy to lead the way, and for the next few minutes their boots squeaked on the hardpack. Blades of cold raked Cardinal's face. Beyond the rocks, a distant string of lights glittered along the edge of the lake, the Chippewa Reserve, Jerry Commanda's territory.
Szelagy and Burke waited for the others at the chain-link fence surrounding the shafthead.
Delorme nudged Cardinal with a padded elbow. She was pointing to a small object about four feet from the gate.
Cardinal said, "You guys touch that lock?"
Szelagy said, "It was like that. Figured we better leave it."
Burke said, "Kids claim the lock was already broken."
Delorme pulled a Baggie out of her pocket, but Arsenault, a scene man and like all scene men ever-prepared, produced a small paper bag from somewhere and held it out to her. "Use paper. Anything wet'll deteriorate in plastic."
Cardinal was glad it had happened early and that someone else had stopped her. Delorme was a good investigator; she'd had to be in Special. She'd put a former mayor and several council members in prison with painstaking work she'd done entirely on her own, but it didn't involve any scene work. She would watch from now on, and Cardinal wanted it that way.
One after another, they ducked under the scene tape and followed Burke and Szelagy around to the side of the shafthead. Szelagy pointed to the loosened boards. "Careful going in, there's a two-foot drop and then it's sheer ice all the way."
Inside the shafthead, the flashlight beams formed a shifting pool of light at their feet. Gaps in the boards made the wind moan like a stage effect.
"Jesus," Delorme said quietly. She and the others had all seen traffic fatalities, the occasional suicide, and numerous drownings- none of which had prepared them for this. They were shivering, but an intense stillness settled over the group as if they were praying; no doubt some of them were. Cardinal's own mind seemed to flee the sight before him- into the past with the image of Katie Pine, smiling in her school photograph, and into the future with what he would have to tell her mother.
Dr. Barnhouse began in a formal voice: "We are looking at the frozen remains of an adolescent- Damn." He rapped sharply at the microcassette in his
gloved paw. "Always acts up in the cold." He cleared his throat and began again in a less declamatory manner. "We're looking at the remains of an adolescent human- decay and animal activity preclude positive determination of sex at this time. Torso is unclothed, lower part of the body is clothed in denim jeans, right arm is missing, as is the left foot. Facial features are obliterated by animal activity, mandible is missing. Christ," he said. "Just a child."
Cardinal thought he heard a tremor in Barnhouse's voice; he would not have trusted his own. It wasn't just the deterioration- all of them had seen worse: victims of hunting accidents, drowning victims- it was that the remains were preserved in a perfect rectangle of ice perhaps eight inches thick. Eyeless sockets stared up through the ice into the pitch dark over their heads. One of the eyes had been pulled away and lay frozen above the shoulder; the other was missing entirely.
"Hair is detached from the skull- black, shoulder length- and pelvis shows anterior striations which may indicate a female- it's not possible to say without further examination, precluded at this time by the body's being fixed in a block of ice formed by conditions peculiar to the site."
Jerry Commanda swung his light up to the rough boards overhead and back down to the depressed concrete platform below them. "Roof leaks big time. You can see the ice through it."
Others swung their lights up and looked at the stripes of ice between the boards. Shadows leapt and darted in the eyeless sockets.
"Those three warm days in December when everything melted," Jerry went on. "The body probably covers a drain, and when the ice melted, the place filled up with water. Temperature dropped again and froze it right there."
"It's like she's preserved in amber," Delorme said.
Barnhouse resumed. "No clothing on or near the remains, except for jeans of blue denim that- I already said that, didn't I? Yes, I'm sure I did. Gross destruction of tissue in the abdominal region, all of the viscera and most major organs missing, whether due to perimortem trauma or postmortem animal activity impossible to say. Portions of lung are visible, upper lobes on both sides."