The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  'Do you want to go, Bob? One of the guys can take you home.'

  He stood, as if she'd told him it was time to leave, but when he did, he rose above the level of the kitchen-wall cut-out, and could see into the living room where his mother sat surrounded by policemen. He dropped back into the chair as if his legs had been kicked out from under him. 'I'd like to go out the back way, I think.'

  'Of course,' said Hazel. She put her hand on his neck and kept it there a moment, and then went out into the scene. She took PC Jenner aside and asked her to take Chandler around the back. 'Stay with him at his house for a while, okay? Even if he says he'll be fine. I'd like someone to be with him.' She led the young constable back into the kitchen. 'Bob, this is Cassie Jenner. She went to high school with your Diane, remember?'

  'Yes, yes. Hi, Cassie.'

  'I'm so sorry, Mr Chandler.'

  'She's going to run you back up home, Bob. She'll take care of you.' He rose and Jenner collected him against her, wrapping her arm over his shoulder. He was shrunken, like an old man. 'I'll come and see you and Gail tonight. I'll tell you everything we find out.'

  She watched them leave, and as soon as the door was shut, she heard Greene's voice behind her. 'He gone?'

  'Yeah,' she said.

  'Spere's here. The rest of his SOCO team's ten minutes back. You want to hear this, I think.'

  Hazel went back into the living room. Howard Spere had made it up from Mayfair in just over thirty minutes. She calculated he must have been doing 180. He was a heavy-set man in his forties with bad body odour and a habit of chewing his nails. She'd remarked to herself on more than one occasion that Detective Spere must have ingested a fair proportion of crime scenes in his career: having an oral fixation wasn't the best vice to have if your job was poking dead things. Port Dundas didn't have its own Ident unit, just three SOCO officers who hadn't had cause to use their training since they took it, and of course no forensic investigator either. The detachment processed an average of fifteen deaths a year, and it was a rare year that one of them was a homicide. The last time there'd been a murder anywhere in Westmuir was four years earlier, a barfight that turned into a stabbing. Up in Hants. Nothing else. Heart attacks, cancer, strokes, a suicide every other year, car crashes: these were death's stock in trade in the county. Spere spent most of his time in Mayfair and Barrie sticking his fingers into bullet holes and pouring plaster of Paris into footprint impressions. The last time they'd seen him in Port Dundas was 2003, and that was to interpret some tire tracks left in the mud at the scene of a restaurant supply warehouse robbery. (It had turned out to be a 2001 Chevy Malibu. They'd found it in East Milverton still full of silverware.)

  She brought herself to look at poor Delia Chandler again. Sitting tall against the back of her floral-patterned couch, a fine blue wool dress on, with a bib of nearly black blood down the front of it. Her throat had been cut in a straight line so deep that her head had stayed on only because it rested against the cushion behind it. There were epaulettes of blood on each shoulder.

  But it was not the gore that was most upsetting to Hazel. It was the look on Delia's face. Her eyes were closed, as if she were taking a pleasant nap, but her mouth was rent open in a silent cry, the tip of her tongue behind her upper teeth, its underside a pale lavender streaked with livid white lines.

  Spere was bent over, swabbing the oral cavity. Hazel's officers stood behind him awkwardly, letting him work. 'This is unusual, to say the least,' he said. 'She's upright, no signs of trauma except for the throat, nothing under her fingernails, no marks anywhere in the room, and yet she looks like she died in the middle of calling out. You gotta wonder how that happens.' He turned to take in the room. 'This exactly how you found her?'

  'I took some pictures,' said PC Fraser, the one they called 'Kraut'. His real name was Dietrich. He tolerated his nickname as a gesture of goodwill. 'But this is exactly how she was when I got here.'

  'Who got here first?'

  'I did,' said Ashton. 'With Jenner. We didn't touch a thing.'

  Seemingly satisfied, Spere turned back to the victim. 'So how do you talk with your throat cut?'

  'A good question,' said Greene.

  'Should she be that pale?' asked Hazel. 'Even if she's dead?'

  Spere stood up and took a long look at Delia Chandler's body. He snapped his latex gloves off and put them into his pocket. 'Well, that's the other thing. There's not enough blood here.'

  'What?'

  Spere telescoped his pointer and touched it to the blood on Delia Chandler's clothing. 'The blood patterns are wrong. You cut a person's carotids and you expect to see a burst pattern out vertically and laterally. There's no jetting here at all.' Hazel and Ray Greene leaned in. 'You know those old water fountains with the spigot in the middle that always had a burble of water flowing out of it? This is what happened here. Almost no pressure at all.'

  'She had cancer,' said Hazel.

  'Cancer doesn't explain this. Bleeding gums wouldn't explain this. There's almost six litres of blood in a human being. A little old lady like this, somewhat less, like five, but in any case, it tends to shoot out when you slice a person's throat.' He used the pointer to stroke the insides of Delia's arms. 'There are no cuts here, none on her wrists, and no blood anywhere else. So we won't know exactly what happened here until they unzip her in Barrie.'

  Hazel stared at the wreck of her father's old friend. What would he have said at this sight? She looked at the dead woman's feet, clad in beige hose. She wore no shoes. 'Lift her dress,' she said. Both men turned to look at her. 'Pull her dress up, Detective Spere.'

  Spere tugged a latex glove back onto his right hand and crouched down for the hem of the dress. His discoloured mackintosh pooled over the dead woman's feet. He folded the blue material upward, into Delia Chandler's lap. Her legs were still covered in her pantyhose, but after a moment, Spere noticed a small tear at the very top of her right stocking, at her pantyline.

  'What is that?' said Greene.

  Spere leaned in between Delia's legs, and carefully pushed the fabric open. Her skin was bruised purple under it, a concentrated little bruise, like an insect bite. 'It's a needle site,' he said.

  'So she's been injected?' asked Hazel.

  'It's hard to tell if she's been stuck in the saphenous vein or the femoral artery, so I don't know if the killer was putting something in or taking something out. But given that she looks like a sheet, I'm going to guess femoral.' He ran his hands lightly down her legs. 'I want to take these hose off.'

  'Do what you have to do, Howard.' She had the impulse to turn around, to give Delia Chandler her privacy. Spere gestured for help and two officers stepped forward and lifted Delia slightly off the couch so he could unroll her pantyhose and reveal the woman's legs. The skin was almost translucent.

  'What do you notice about her feet?' said Spere, touching his pointer to one of Delia's arches.

  They stared at the pale, bluish foot. 'There's almost no lividity,' said Sergeant Renald.

  'Two points, officer. You'd expect pooling along the whole perimeter of this woman's foot. But there's nothing here.' With his index finger, he traced back up to the needle site. 'This is a venipuncture, like when you donate blood.' He looked up at them again. 'He's bled her.'

  Greene was shaking his head. 'She let him do this?'

  Spere lowered the dead woman's dress. 'It's impossible to say what she permitted or not at this stage. But from the look of things, there certainly appears to have been some co-operation.' He pulled off his glove and stuck a finger into his mouth, chewing the nail thoughtfully. 'We'll know more when she gets to Barrie.'

  'I don't want her taken away from here,' said Hazel sharply. 'She was a citizen of this town for every minute of her eighty-odd years, and she'll be treated that way. Not like any old victim to be stuck in a fridge.'

  'This is a homicide, Inspector. I don't know how much say we'll have in it.'

  'When the scene is locked down, you take her to Mayfair Gr
ace. Your people can come up here for a change.'

  Spere's Ident team arrived then and came in wearing their green latex gloves. One of them started dusting, while the other bagged the cushions from the couch. 'Leave the one holding her up for now,' said Spere. He turned to Greene and Detective Inspector Micallef. 'It took me forever to find a body bag at your station house. I'll go get it from the car.'

  Hazel called the station house to assign three officers to a canvass and sent them out immediately. By the middle of the afternoon, they had covered both sides of Maitland Avenue and had nothing. A call to the office just after lunch had reported a late-model Buick parked on Taylor the night before, three streets over from Delia's house, but the caller had not taken down the licence plate number and couldn't remember whether the car was silver, blue or black. In a peaceful town like Port Dundas, the notion of a car being 'strange' wouldn't be common. The news of a special on Folgers Coffee at the No Frills went around town like wildfire, but an unknown car on Maitland or Taylor or any of the streets around Delia Chandler's house would never cause any concern.

  Hazel and Ray stayed on through the afternoon as the SOCO team dusted, bagged and photographed the scene and the rest of the house. There was almost nothing to bag but the couch cushions, the meagre contents of the fridge, and the slightly sticky bar of soap at the kitchen sink. They took two hundred pictures of the scene, pictures that, later, would tell them nothing about the killer. There was no sense at all, despite the thoroughness of the search, that anything had been disturbed in or stolen from Delia Chandler's house. Phone records showed no calls in or out after Robert Chandler's at lunchtime, and because she was on a cable modem, there was no way to tell whether or not Delia had been on the Internet at any specific time, as the connection was permanent. Her web history would show where she'd visited at least, and when. Hazel had hooked her own house up with DSL, which was much the same, as her mother had bought a laptop and insisted that they get connected. 'What do you want with the bloody Internet, Mother?' she'd asked her. 'It's nothing but filth and collectibles. And chat rooms – what do you need with a chat room?'

  'You sound like my mother,' Emily Micallef said. 'I need more in my day than cooking you meals and Oprah. You should lose your hatred of technology, Hazel. You might learn something.'

  She'd acquiesced and hooked the house up, but she insisted her mother cancel her credit cards just in case. 'Whatever you want, I can get you in town. I don't want you buying garbage on the Internet.'

  Ident had taken Delia's computer with them, but it would be a while before they reported. There had been no more calls during the day – not even to get a cat out of a tree – and when Hazel and Greene drove back to the station at six o'clock, she saw why: the streets were busy with people, people standing at street corners, smoking cigarettes and talking, people driving slowly by in their cars. She knew there was no way of keeping the news of Delia Chandler's murder under wraps, but still, she was surprised to see this many people out in the early evening air. 'What a day,' she said. 'I don't know what to do with myself right now.'

  'I've got a bottle of rye back at my desk.'

  'Are you "enabling" me, Ray?'

  'There are times that call for a drink, Hazel, and then there are times that demand a drink. But I'll take no for an answer, too.'

  'I wouldn't want you to drink alone,' she said.

  'Come on then.' They turned and drove through one of the delivery alleys behind the road toward the station. 'I can guess what the topic of conversation is back on Main Street.'

  'I doubt there's a person out there on the side-walks who didn't somehow know Delia. She worked in the funeral home until she was sixty-five. There wasn't a death in any family in this town that she wasn't a part of.'

  'Now the town's part of her death.'

  He held the station's back door open for her and went to his desk. The moment Greene appeared in the pen, though, Hazel could hear a cacophony of questions erupting from behind the counter – the station house was the last place they should have gone for peace and quiet: it was the most logical place for the local reporters to go. Hazel had an instinct that the standard arrangements with the Westmuir press were not going to hold here. The shouted questions were variations on a theme: did they have a suspect; what was the murder weapon; what was the cause of death. Greene stood empty-handed behind his open desk drawer with a blank look on his face and pushed it shut with his knee. He took a moment to collect himself and then she saw him step forward out of view. 'Detective Inspector Micallef will be making a statement here Monday morning at nine a.m. Until then, we have no comment.'

  Please act like small-town reporters, Hazel said to herself. She stepped back into the doorway of her office to avoid being seen in case any of the reporters (who knew they had that many reporters in the whole county?) had parked in back. After a couple of minutes, the footfalls in the foyer died down. Greene knocked on her door. She saw through the frosted glass that he was holding up a bottle and she told him to come in. She ran her finger around the inside of a coffee cup before putting it down on her desk.

  'Double or triple,' he said, unscrewing the cap.

  'I just want enough to keep my hands from shaking.'

  He poured her four capfuls, which she drained into the back of her throat. 'I better call my mother.'

  'You want me to go?'

  'No. Stay there. If I'm still on the line in three minutes, get up and knock on the door like it's something important.' She dialled and her mother answered on the third ring, which meant she'd made her get up and cross to the kitchen. Hazel had already told her mother to take the cordless phone with her wherever she was in the house, but the elder Micallef didn't want to be stalked by a phone. She'd already heard the news. 'Delia Chandler,' she said, as if she were trying to place the name. 'That took a long time.'

  'Don't be like that.'

  'You should be seriously considering that the killer is a woman.'

  Hazel blinked a couple of times and wrote 'killer = woman?' on a piece of paper and turned it to Greene. He looked at it and mouthed, no way.

  'You know she never apologized. Not even at your dad's funeral.'

  'Well, that would have been great timing.' Hazel heard tapping. 'What are you doing?'

  'Just writing an email.'

  'To who?'

  'I have friends, Hazel. I write to them. Don't worry about me spreading state secrets.'

  My eighty-seven-year-old mother has electronic penpals, Hazel thought. What kind of world is this? 'Is the door locked?'

  'Did you lock it?'

  'Did you unlock it, Mum?'

  'No. When will you be wanting supper?' Hazel heard a faint gonging in the background – email arriving or being sent. 'Hazel?'

  'I'll be eating here tonight. Then I'm going out to see Bob and Gail.'

  'Poor things,' said her mother. 'Eat some greens then, dear. And say hello to Raymond.'

  She hung up and held her hand up to Greene, who'd risen and was getting ready to rap on the door. 'It's fine.' He lowered his arm. 'Why "no way"?'

  'Women who kill usually do it out of passion. The crime scenes are horror-shows.'

  She realized there was a gap in Greene's knowledge of the town's secret life – somehow he didn't know what Delia Chandler had done thirty years ago when it seemed to Hazel that even the town's children were aware of it. But she thought better of mentioning it to him now lest it somehow convince him to start liking her mother for the crime. And no matter what her training told her about what kinds of people were capable of which kinds of crimes, she just couldn't see a woman doing what had been done to Delia.

  'We'll keep an open mind for now,' she said. 'But I guess I agree with you.' The phone rang again. 'Hold that position,' she said to Greene.

  It was her assistant, Melanie Cartwright, calling from her desk. 'Do you know a Carl Stratton?'

  'Must be Sandra Stratton's son.'

  'Well, he called,' said Cartwright. 'He said he was up
from Toronto for the weekend and that his mother was scared and wanted to come back to the city with him.'

  'So?'

  'He wants you to call her and tell her she's got nothing to worry about.'

  'I've got my own crone to worry about, Melanie.'

  'Do you want me to tell him that?'

  'In your own words, please.' There was a long pause on the other end of the line. 'Melanie?'

  'Do you think this guy's still out there? I mean here? In town?'

  'No,' she said. 'He did what he came to do. I'm sure he's long gone.'

  Cartwright thanked her and hung up. Hazel knew she'd already committed to memory the phrase He did what he came to do. She wasn't going to be surprised to see those very words show up eventually in the Record. Small-town hotlines.

  Greene held up the bottle. 'You okay yet?'

  'I better not, Ray.' He screwed the cap back on. 'Do me a favour and call up Bob and Gail Chandler. We should go there now.' He nodded and left, closing the door behind him. Hazel looked at the phone and then took it off the hook. The more she tried to hold the thought in her head that there was a procedure to be followed, the more she felt that something uncontainable had happened to her town, something that would resist all protocols. She felt a presence behind her, breathing on her, casting its shadow. Someone had come through town – without being seen, apparently – and carried off Delia Chandler. Who was this person? Why did he kill her the hard way, when it looked as if she'd already agreed to the easy way? Where were they going to begin?

  Robert and Gail Chandler's house was out in Hoxley. The entire way Greene stared out the window at the fall scenery and the failing light, and that suited Hazel, lost in her own thoughts. Some of the horror of the morning would have had time to sink in for Bob Chandler; she dreaded what kind of state they'd find him in.