The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

'Excuse me,' said Greene from within the room. 'How do these people count as "whole" when they've been chopped up, cut in half and drained of blood?'

  'I didn't say they had to be in one piece, Mr Greene. If God can raise you from the dead, he can put you back together. But if you've outraged His gift in some way, you cannot be given it back.'

  Hazel put her hand on Glendinning's arm. 'So despite the states of these murder scenes, Father, our killer is keeping to a set of rules, you think?'

  'What does it matter what I think?'

  'I just want to know if you think he really believes in what he's doing.'

  Glendinning gestured with his arm minutely, enough to communicate he didn't intend to be held a moment longer. He looked around the room behind him. 'Hazel, he's as serious as cancer,' he said, and then, at last, he swept out.

  When she closed the door, Wingate gestured to Jill Yoon and she shut off her machines. 'So what we know is that he's absolutely compelled to finish this thing,' he said.

  'And Smotes is out,' said Greene. He was staring at the ceiling. 'Libera ... eos ...'

  'Don't—' said Wingate sharply.

  'You religious, Jim?' Wingate just stared at him, and Greene became aware of another pair of eyes on him. Hazel's. 'Are we getting superstitious here, people?'

  'We're trying to stay focused, Ray, that's what we're doing.' He shrugged, like staying focused was at the front of his mind. Hazel continued. 'Sevigny gave us the whole list. But I don't know if there's a backup list or anything. There could be.'

  'Understudies?' said Spere. 'If he's this fastidious, I doubt he'd have a waiting list. These were his people. Wingate's right. He needs someone now.'

  'What would you do if you were him?' she asked.

  After a minute, Greene said, 'If you run out of willing victims, there are always ...'

  'Or you take your own life,' said Wingate.

  Hazel shook her finger at them. 'No. Whatever that scene meant, in his shack in Port Hardy, he didn't go to that trouble, to all this trouble, just to blow his brains out in the Maritimes.' She fell silent a moment. 'Do you think he cares if Robert Fortnum enters the Kingdom of God? Or Ruth Maris? Did he go to these people, complete strangers, to give them the gift of life?' She looked around the room and could see the penny dropping for all of them. 'These people ... they're like a wire carrying a charge. One end of the wire is in Peter Mallick's dead heart, and the other plugs right into the heart of God. They all wake up, but that's not why he's doing it. He couldn't care less if Delia Chandler rises out of her grave. He just wants to go home and see his brother standing in the door.'

  'So he's going to finish,' said Wingate.

  'Yes,' she said. 'He's in this to be reunited with Peter. And now he has to find someone who will be to him what Smotes was willing to be. He needs a willing victim.'

  She looked around the room, waiting for someone to say out loud the terrible thing that had just occurred to her. So she wouldn't have to be alone with it.

  Once Glendinning was gone, Hazel dismissed everyone but Greene and Wingate. 'I actually wanted to talk to you about something else for a couple of minutes,' said Greene.

  'Can it wait?' said Hazel.

  'It shouldn't,' he said.

  Wingate started to leave the room, but Hazel waved him back in. 'I'm sorry, Ray, but we have to push on. Let's talk after lunch. Sit down, both of you.' The men sat. 'What's the update on Harry Nevin?'

  'He's awake, but he's not happy about it,' said Greene. 'Massive concussion, and just about every bone in his face is broken. Plus he lost about eight teeth.'

  'Jesus,' she said. 'Please tell me we sent flowers.'

  'You can thank Melanie.'

  She shook her head in wonder. 'Mallick could have killed him.'

  'I guess one thing went our way then,' he said, and he fixed his eyes on her.

  'Then there's Carl Smotes,' said Wingate to break up the brief silence. 'He's too sick to be moved. He's agreed to have someone at the house, though. There's one guy there, and a nurse.'

  'Well, I don't think it matters, anyway. Simon's not going anywhere near Newfoundland now. Our cover's blown and so is his.'

  'Do you want me to call off the RCMP then?' asked Greene.

  'No,' she said. 'Keep them on it for now. Just to be safe.' She sat down and rested her forearms on the table. 'I guess you both know about Sevigny.'

  'A little,' said Wingate. 'I hear he clocked his partner.'

  'Apparently the guy was helping himself to a little extra money and Adjutor called him on it. They were swinging at each other on the station-house steps. Partner's an Anglo though, and Sevigny's CO is Anglo too. It's half-and-half up there, but there are tensions I understand. They're probably going to suspend him.'

  Greene shrugged his shoulders. 'It's not an Anglo thing, Hazel. The guy's obviously a loose cannon. He walked in here telling us what to do with his funny accent. Higher-than-thou prick, is what I say. He's getting what he deserves.'

  'He's the one who broke this case for us,' she said. 'I just feel bad for him.'

  'Maybe Mason'll let you have him when he's served his suspension,' said Greene.

  She smiled at him. 'James, can you go see how the background check on Simon Mallick's coming?'

  Wingate stood up quickly and put his cap back on. 'I'll be at my desk.'

  She hadn't taken her eyes off Greene. 'I thought we were past this, Ray.'

  'I guess we're not.'

  'You developed new problems with me over the weekend? We're making progress, Ray. Real progress here.'

  'All you're doing is handing Mason his dynamite. After you're done here taking evidence off-site, failing to share information, claiming jurisdictions, there'll be a crater here where the station house was, with two guys standing in it holding their coffee mugs.'

  'You want to make up your mind what you're so upset about, Ray? One second there's too much competition for your coffee cup, the next you're accusing me of not reaching out. I asked for support, Raymond; I didn't get it. What would you have done?'

  'Shouted,' he said. 'I would have gone down to Barrie and hammered on Mason's door until he did what I wanted him to.'

  'You've got that power, do you?'

  Greene swept an invisible crumb off the table in front of him. 'I don't know what it's like to be a female CO, Hazel. Or a female mayor, for that matter. Maybe experience teaches you you're not going to be taken seriously, that you're going to get screwed. I'm sorry if it does. But you know, in all the years I've worked with you, you've never acted like that was true. Not until now. I don't like Mason's ways any more than you do, but that wouldn't make me careless. It might make me angry, but I'd still be using the same playbook.' She started to speak, but he went on. 'I don't like having my name on this investigation, Hazel. I don't like being a part of these methods.'

  'These methods are getting results, Raymond! Fuck! On Friday, you're telling me to have more faith in myself, and today my methods aren't good enough for you!'

  'I didn't realize on Friday what was going on here. I thought you were flailing. I thought you were lost. But I see it more clearly now. Mason gave you licence. He set you free to really do it your way.'

  She lowered her head. He was out of line, by a country mile. She was going to have to discipline him after this, but first, she realized, she had to listen. 'I've made mistakes—'

  'I'm resigning,' he said.

  She set her jaw. 'You don't have to do that.'

  'I'm resigning so you don't have to fire me.'

  'I wasn't going to fire you.'

  'Yes, you were,' he said, and he stood up. 'I'm Sunderland's source. I went to him because I thought it was wrong of you to shut him out. He talks to our constituency. At first, I really just wanted to tell him he should write about the way Mason's left us out to dry up here, but the more I talked to him, the more I thought it wasn't about Mason. He's a certain kind of animal, Mason is. You're a different one. But you changed. So I ended up talking to Sun
derland about that.'

  'A week ago.'

  He said nothing.

  'I don't know what to think now.'

  'I wanted to wait to tell you until after I thought the case was hopeless. Thinking maybe there was something I could do. Now that there isn't, I wanted you to know.'

  'You could have talked to me,' she said quietly.

  'No,' he said. 'No, I couldn't have. There were times when I could work with you, Hazel, but I could never talk to you.'

  'What were we doing in here Friday night? What was that?'

  'We were trying to save a marriage. I think we both know what that's like. It's hard.' He watched her absorbing that, watched her expression soften to disbelief. He waited for her to decide what she needed to say, but after a moment, he sensed there was nothing to come. 'I'm gonna go,' he said.

  'I accept your resignation.'

  He nodded once and turned to leave. He expected something at the door as he opened it, but, again, there was nothing.

  She'd told everyone in the station house that she needed time to think, and she'd locked her door. She opened the file cabinet so quickly that the bottle fell over and clinked and rattled against the bottom of the drawer, loud enough that she was certain it could be heard in the pen. But no figure appeared shadowed against the frosted window in her door, and she returned to her desk with the half-empty bottle in her hand. She expected no further twists in the day and told herself she might as well dip into oblivion if she felt like it.

  She'd avoided Greene as he cleared out his stuff and said nothing to anyone about what was going on, but she'd made eye contact with Wingate on her way into her office and she knew he was aware of what was happening. For the first time in two weeks, she could not focus on the case. Instead, she saw what lay beyond it: there was going to be an inquiry, and she was not going to come out of it looking at all good. In a way, this comforted her: she couldn't bear the thought of Greene's accusations standing as a private matter. They would have to come out. And then, afterward, as a matter of public record, she would have to accept that she'd been found wanting, or that she'd merely lost a friend. She couldn't think which she preferred right now.

  She poured herself a second drink, one eye trained on the door. She wanted to sleep. If possible, she wanted to sleep with someone, and not because she desired to be touched in any way, but because she was tired of being alone. During the day, her staff swarmed close with their questions, with their need to be set on the right path. But this was not human contact, and in the mornings, waking alone, she felt keenly the lack of another body. Even someone who came into her bed in the middle of the night and left before she woke would be enough, she believed. Anything to maintain a connection of some kind. She despaired she'd ever know it again.

  Before long, the bottle was empty. She put the last dram away into its hiding place, feeling the welcome but artificial warmth in her limbs. As she closed the drawer, there was a knock, and she went to open the door. It was James Wingate. He wouldn't meet her eye. 'I thought you'd want to see these,' he said. He passed a small sheaf of paper to her. 'Sevigny emailed his pictures of the crime scene. They're pretty disgusting.' He seemed to notice she was uncertain on her feet. 'Maybe you should sit down,' he said. She retreated to the safety of her desk.

  She sat and shuffled through the images, her stomach tightening. The man in the pictures was as thick as a felled redwood. He lay on a small dais-like bed and she thought she could smell his half-rotted form right off the digital image. She couldn't imagine the kind of strength it would have taken to lift the stone pillar that lay on his chest. 'I don't suppose you've heard any RCMP theories on the body? Cause of death?'

  'I thought it would be wise to keep low.'

  'Probably. You think Simon killed his own brother?'

  'It's impossible to say.'

  'And what about Peter Mallick? Did Sevigny find out anything about him?'

  'Not yet. He just sent the pictures. We can't find anything on the church from this end. We did find something, though, at the Pictou scene: there were two distinct trails of blood in Laurence's house.'

  'What?'

  'Two blood trails, in addition to the cocktail of blood they found on Laurence's face. As if she'd been anointed with it, said the forensics guy there. The two clear trails, though, one of them is hers, but the other doesn't check out with anything we have a record of. So I'm thinking she might have tried to hurt him.'

  'She changed her mind?'

  'Maybe,' he said. 'But then again, she had no defensive marks on her.'

  'It hardly matters now. We're never going to see him again. We had him for a second there. But he's gone.' She watched him fail to think of something that would give her a little hope.

  'Inspector,' he said, 'he's still out there, and what he wants hasn't changed. The way I see it—'

  'How do you see it, James?'

  'The way I see it, until he feels he's done, we still have a chance to catch him.'

  'Do you like our chances?'

  'No,' he said flatly. 'But I haven't given up.'

  She gestured to the chair and he sat. 'Ray Greene isn't crazy about the way I ran this investigation.'

  'I gathered as much.'

  'What do you think about it, James?'

  His face darkened a little. 'Your methods are a little different than I suppose I'm used to.'

  'Different good, different bad?'

  'Both. To be honest.'

  'Shit is going to rain down on this place. You know that, right?'

  'Maybe it won't.'

  'Until it does, are you still willing to work for me?'

  'Yes, Ma'am. I am.'

  'You can call me Hazel now, James. It's just us.'

  'Okay,' he said, nodding nervously.

  'So if you're still with me, then you'll take a direct order? Even if it seems a little ill-advised?'

  'There's no reason to stop now,' he said.

  She laughed. 'Good. I have a job for you.'

  It was well past dinnertime, but she had no appetite. She was hungry only for air. She put on her runners and headed toward the lake.

  It was almost the end of November now, and the trees were utterly bare. Something about this month had always seemed contingent to her, as if it were a temporary bridge between places. They'd put November up with planks and pennynails at some distant point in the past to link autumn with Christmas, but then they'd forgotten it was supposed to be replaced with something sturdier, something more lasting.

  What had she wanted out of this life, back when she was thinking about such things? Had Greene been right when he accused her of wanting an excuse to go it alone? She'd never detected the will in herself to be a hero, but that didn't mean it wasn't true. She cast her mind back to her time in the academy. She'd once been excited by the idea of playing a role in keeping order, but perhaps that meant she'd once believed in such a thing. Order. Now, after more than thirty years on the force, she knew it wasn't something worth waiting for. Order was not possible, but the dream of balance wasn't entirely vain. A balance between what you could control and the chaos that surrounded it. A balance between good and evil. A balance between what was difficult to do, and what, through repetition, you could do in your sleep. Trying to strike a balance kept things interesting. Hadn't things, at least, always been interesting?

  The truth was, though, that the police prayed for boredom. Not for order, not for balance, even, just regularity. Nothing out of the ordinary. And this year had started out looking like any other, she thought. Break-ins, car crashes, bar fights. If anyone had told her back in May when she was slapping cuffs on Mattie Barnstow for driving his VW Rabbit through his ex-wife's living-room window that it wasn't going to be the height of excitement for the year, she would never have believed them.

  Murder, she thought. And not just murder, a lunatic murder. And God invoked. And the rest of the country tied to them in it, even if they didn't know it. This was the stuff of movies, of third-hand tales
. Even as an end to it all (an unhappy end, it would appear) came closer, it seemed less and less real to her. A symptom, perhaps, of her experience with ordinary disasters. Divorce, pain, parenting an unhappy daughter. Nothing, not even a life in law enforcement, could prepare you for the wild imaginings some people, in their passionate madness, could unleash.

  It was too cold to be outside with the sun going down. She returned to the house. Her mother had eaten and was reading in her room. It was fine with Hazel that there was no one to tell her day to. It was too awful a day to speak of. She sat in front of the television numbly watching bits and pieces of a bunch of different programs. The picture and sounds seemed to reach her from far across the room.

  Sunderland's editorial the previous Thursday had called her a 'little general', and she'd realized that this was one of Greene's phrases. How could she have worked so closely with this man and never have sensed his exasperation? He'd always been capable of a sharp word here or there, but she'd always seen it as a form of camaraderie. What if she'd misread more of the people in her life as egregiously as she'd misread Ray Greene? In the last two weeks, she'd sensed the wheels coming off, but now she thought perhaps there'd never been any wheels at all. What if, for much longer than everyone but she had realized, sparks had been flying off the chassis?

  She went to bed at nine, too exhausted to wait for Wingate's call any longer. The phone would wake her. When it rang at eleven, she shot up in bed and picked up the extension on the bedside table. 'Wingate?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Well?'

  'The word "unprofessional" was used,' he said.

  'I should have it put on my letterhead. Were you able to get past that?'

  'Yeah,' he said. 'It's done.'

  20

  Wednesday 24 November, 8 a.m.

  He pushed on, through a second sleepless morning. He'd watched the sun come up over Mount Carleton, turning the hills a deep red. The road unfurled through the provincial park as he tacked north and then west, toward Saint Quentin. He turned on the radio to keep himself awake and heard music from his childhood, music his father had put on the turntable for him and Peter when they were children. The Benny Carter Orchestra. Jack Millman's All-Stars playing 'A Stranger Called the Blues'. This was music their father had loved. Simon could not remember his father's face. For a moment, he closed his eyes tight and tried to bring that beloved face back, but he could not. Their father had given Peter his frail heart, the heart that broke on him when he was thirty-nine. He listened to his father's music drifting up in this unspoiled place.