by Giles Blunt
“I haven’t stopped talking to you.”
“Is she the jealous type? Wants you all to herself?”
“There’s nothing for her to be jealous of. I haven’t even mentioned you.” Cardinal felt bad before he had even finished saying it.
Delorme looked at him, scanned his face once and looked back down at her BlackBerry. She pressed the dial button and put the phone to her ear, got up and walked over to the window.
34
Lloyd Kreeger was talking to him, but Papa was not paying a huge amount of attention. He was writing a murder story in his head. Setting pen to paper had never interested him, but he took an authorial pleasure in the orchestration of violence. His victims and perpetrators may have been real people, but they had no more knowledge of his intentions than characters in a book.
“Here’s my proposal,” Lloyd said. “Why don’t you do this?” The old man was in the rocking chair, rocking in a manner that Papa would have described as overwrought. Obsessive, even.
Papa was lying on the couch, flat on his back with his feet raised at one end. It was his belief that this posture offered certain cardiac benefits. “I had a proposal for you once, Lloyd.”
“It’s not the same. That was just a business proposition. This is-”
“What’s your idea, Lloyd?”
“You could secure me somehow in the bathroom. Leave me enough food so I wouldn’t starve. A mattress. And you could arrange it so someone was alerted two days later. Doesn’t have to be the law. Just someone who will let me out.”
Papa was outlining in his head a very different scenario. The old man lying in bed asleep. Nikki sneaks in, dead quiet, and shoots him under the jaw. Does it in such a way that it could be suicide. Of course, that would require that the weapon be left behind.
“Are you listening?” Lloyd stopped rocking. “It would give you time to get away. Lots of time. Two days, you could be in Paris, Rome, Mumbai-how’s anyone going to catch you?”
An amateur-your average spouse-killer, say-would put the gun in the deceased’s hand. No, thanks. Papa had a rule never to leave a gun behind. He was not a superstitious man, but he had an almost mystical relationship with the Browning HP nine-millimetre, and he was not about to hand one over to the enemy.
A typed suicide note? That would raise immediate suspicion. On the other hand, that could be exactly the point: make it look like some amateur was trying to make it look like suicide. Layers within layers.
“What I’m saying is, it’s not essential to kill me.”
Papa turned his gaze from the ceiling to Lloyd. “Nobody said anything about killing you.”
“You killed Henry. Why would you kill him and not me?”
“Henry made threatening remarks.”
“That’s highly unlikely. Henry was the most gentle man I ever met.”
“Maybe that’s what got him killed.”
“Well, now you’re contradicting yourself.”
“Life contradicts itself all the time. Rosy sky at dawn, lightning at noon. Snow in the middle of May. A quiet postal employee suddenly slaughters his colleagues. A mother kills her daughter. Any man who speaks the truth is going to contradict himself.”
“One minute Henry’s making threatening gestures, the next minute he’s too gentle to live. Why can’t you just admit you killed him? Clearly you’re not ashamed of it.”
“I never killed anyone.”
Papa liked the idea of the inept amateur up to a point. But what if they bought it? It was boring; there was no wit to it. Suppose Nikki were to put a different gun in his hand, some run-of-the-mill street weapon. The cops would know pretty fast that it wasn’t the murder weapon. Then it would look really amateurish.
“… could alert my lawyer two days later. You’re safely out of the country.”
“We’re not worried about getting out of the country.”
“Maybe you should be.”
“We’re not.”
What would make it really clever, what would make people sit up and take notice, would be if Nikki didn’t leave any gun. She could make it look like a suicide in every way but not leave the gun. Then-assuming the cops wouldn’t theorize that some thief came in later and stole it-they would have to know the whole scene was constructed. Designed. You go to all that trouble and then you undercut it. They couldn’t ignore that. They would know this was a crime with an author-a controlling but invisible hand-and intelligence outside it, beyond it, directing the whole thing. And yet above it.
Lloyd was still talking, trying to force alternate endings.
“Lloyd,” Papa said, “I’m not going to kill you.”
–
When Papa asked Nikki to meet with him alone, in the basement, she knew what was coming.
“You’ve been with us a while now, Nikki.”
“It doesn’t seem that long.”
“That’s good. The time’s going fast?”
Nikki shrugged.
They were each sitting in an armchair angled toward the basement fireplace. Like an old married couple, Nikki thought.
“Do you see yourself ever going back to your former life?” Papa didn’t look at her. He kept his eyes on the flames.
“Never. Hustling again? No way.”
“You want to stay with the family?”
“Well, yeah. I’ve never been this happy in my entire life.”
“To stay with the family, you have to be loyal to the family. Loyal to the family above all else.”
“I know that. I’m loyal.”
“Nothing comes before the family. Not love, not hate, not the law. The family always comes first.”
“Cool. That’s exactly how I feel.”
“Are you ready for an assignment?”
“I’m ready.”
“Mr. Kreeger is not part of the family. He is an enemy of the family. A danger to the family. As soon as we leave this place, he’ll go straight to the police and give them everything they need to put all three of us away for a very long time-possibly for life. The time will come-and it’s going to come soon-when he will have to be killed. Are you prepared to do that?”
“Oh, man, I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Well, not a hundred percent. I don’t want to get in over my head. I don’t want to make a mistake, mess everything up.”
“It’ll be for the safety of the family. Lemur was going to do it. He volunteered, in fact. But Lemur’s not with us anymore. Jack could do it, obviously. Or I could. But I’d like you to do it. That way your loyalty is proven, and you have a home for life.”
35
At home-if you could call this overheated, jungle-humid apartment any kind of home-Cardinal was finding it difficult to focus. For one thing, there were three women in his head. Delorme, with that impassive look in her brown eyes, the look she had given him in the airport. A look that said he was not the man she had thought he was. And Donna Vaughan. The remembered heat, her intensity, kept reaching into his mind in a way that stirred him physically.
And Catherine. Would there ever come a time when he would close his eyes and not see Catherine’s face? Their life together flashed before him every night. And every night, as if he were an obsessive accountant gnawing at a statement that refused to balance, he found his own contribution to that life wanting. “I did my best,” he said aloud, and his words echoed off the window, the fridge, the kitchen table cluttered with the creased and dog-eared Scriver file.
He had dug Scriver out again for one reason: the name Winston. He was sure-well, almost sure-that he had come across the name in the stack of folders with their faded type, their broken rubber bands. Winston. Not exactly a rare name, but not common either. There were no Winstons listed in the Algonquin Bay telephone directory; he had checked.
Walt Scriver, his wife Jenny, their son Martin. No Winston there, and none among the many neighbours who had been interviewed, people who lived in the same block as the Scrivers in
town. Out on Trout Lake they had had no neighbours. Their cottage had been located on the island at the end of Island Road. It might well have been visible from the Schumacher place, had the Schumacher place existed back then. Cardinal looked again at the black-and-white photos of the exterior. A small, unassuming cottage, in need of paint and a new porch. Large woodpile neatly stacked under the overhang, a canoe hull-side-up on a couple of sawhorses, bathing suits strung on a line. A rickety dock hanging in the water off the rocky beach. Duly noted, indeed emphasized, in the file, the Scrivers’ aluminum outboard-not there.
Cardinal’s cellphone started to vibrate and turn on the kitchen table.
“I knew you’d still be up.” Donna Vaughan.
“You want to come round a little later? Say in an hour?”
“Can’t. I have to rewrite a piece for New York magazine. I get it in tonight or it doesn’t run and I don’t get paid.”
“Russian mob?”
“Just the fur business. I filed it months ago and they’re just getting around to running it. I’m adding a sidebar about the Bastovs-and don’t worry, it won’t mention anything off the record.”
A sudden longing for her took Cardinal by surprise, but he said nothing. Uncertainty over a woman was unfamiliar terrain, untrodden since before he met Catherine. He wasn’t sure if it was longing for Donna Vaughan or just a longing to not be alone in his humid apartment with his ancient file and his dead-end ideas. Or just longing, another word for being alive.
“I have to get off the phone,” she told him, “or I’m going to get too distracted by you.”
“Good,” Cardinal said.
“I hate self-discipline. What little I have.”
“Maybe we can make up for it soon,” Cardinal said.
Interior photos showed a scene of abandoned tranquility. Dishes in the sink, three coffee mugs still on the dining room table, The Algonquin Lode open on the table. Fishing and hunting trophies on one wall, a locked gun rack, rods and tackle. A tiny rabbit-ears television in one corner, lumpy-looking furniture arranged around it. Large wood stove.
The hunting gear interested Cardinal. There was a note in the file that Mr. Scriver had been an occasional trapper, nothing too serious. Lots of guys go trapping just as a way to spend time outdoors.
The newspaper on the table was open to the movie listings. Algonquin Bay’s theatres had long ago been relegated to the shopping malls, but back then the city had had four, three on Main Street and a drive-in on Trout Lake Road. Someone had circled the ten p.m. showing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the drive-in. To make the show, the Scrivers would have had to take the boat out around 9:45, head over to the marina where they kept a parking spot, and drive to the theatre. They never got to the car.
There was no guarantee that they had in fact set out for the movies. No one in the few cottages on Island Road recalled hearing or seeing them on the water. The property was thoroughly searched. A stack of file photos showed layers of excavation. There were close-ups of bones that proved to be those of a moose long buried-something that happens to moose remains when hunters lug home more than they can chew. These dated from long before the Scrivers bought the cottage.
Their house in town had shown no signs of recent occupancy. It was the Scrivers’ summer routine to move to the cottage at the end of June and stay there until the school year started in September. And so, lacking any signs to the contrary, the Scriver case became Algonquin Bay’s most famous presumed drowning.
The lake had been searched by divers, and dragged, but no trace of the Scrivers or even their boat turned up. Mr. Scriver was a long-time employee of Lands and Forests, and the department had pulled out all the stops in the search, but even their sonar remained stubbornly silent.
Cardinal flipped through report after report. Interviews with relatives: yes, the Scrivers all got along well. Friends, neighbours, employers-all the interviews pointed to the Scrivers as a happy family. Martin, the son, fishing and hunting with his dad all the time, mother a good teacher, father a reliable employee devoted to the outdoors. Martin had caused some anxiety-thrown off the school hockey team for putting a referee in hospital, a juvenile charge of break and enter. And then there it was: supplementary report filed by one Detective Rene Proulx, interview with the son’s girlfriend, Cecilia Winston.
Martin Scriver had found summer employment in a deer census project north of Temiskaming. Cecilia Winston lived in the area. She was interviewed at a memorial service for the Scrivers that had taken place nearly a year after their disappearance. Inexcusable that she hadn’t been interviewed earlier. No, she had never seen any violence or anger in Martin. If anything, he was extremely protective of her in a mostly male environment. No, of course she hadn’t heard from him after the disappearance. Subject agitated and tearful. Related devastated by Martin S’s presumed demise. How it came just a week after the death of her brother (Kurt, 18. Leukemia).
Cardinal pulled the folder from his briefcase and opened it to the airport image of Curtis Carl Winston, age fifty-eight. That made him eighteen at the time of the Scrivers’ disappearance.
–
Cardinal spent the entire following morning on the Internet and the telephone. The Registrar General’s office confirmed that one Curtis Carl Winston of Temiskaming, Ontario, had indeed died on July 5, 1970, at the age of eighteen. The facsimile showed cause of death as leukemia. The certificate had been issued three months after the boy had died.
Cardinal called Jerry Commanda at OPP. “Jerry, there’s a private contractor called DeepTec in Toronto that does a lot of salvage in the Great Lakes. They have a new gizmo called a side-scanning sonar we’re going to need, and it’ll be way out of our budget. Can you guys swing it?”
“Why? Did Chouinard put you on the Scriver case or something?”
“As a matter of fact, he did.”
“Wow. I was actually joking.”
“There’s a connection to the Bastov murders. And if the Scrivers’ boat is on the bottom of Trout Lake, this sonar might be able to find it.”
“John, the lake is frozen.”
“Scriver was a long-time Lands and Forests guy. I’m thinking they’d be willing to help out.”
“Well, you don’t need a private contractor,” Jerry said. “Orillia HQ bought one of those units in the summer. If it’s not in use, I should be able to get it up here today.”
Things didn’t go as smoothly with the Armed Forces. Cardinal had to call many different numbers before he finally got through to an actual human being in the archives who could answer his questions, which were very few. Did they have any record of a soldier by the name of Curtis Carl Winston? Yes, they did. When had he enlisted? September 15, 1970. Mobile Command, Petawawa, until 1972, by which time he had attained the rank of corporal. He trained briefly with the U.S. Army Rangers as part of a JTF known as the Northern Rangers-specialists in survival, sabotage and CHC-combat in harsh conditions-since disbanded. Discharged in 1974.
“Thank you,” Cardinal said to the female civilian who had dug all this up for him. She sounded young, and Cardinal had an image of a girl with a laptop, an iPod and a Starbucks mug on her desk. She also sounded smart. He told her he had another question.
“I’m listening, sir.”
“I need to know what was the sidearm they carried at that time.”
“In Mobile Command?”
“And in the JTF.”
There was silence at the other end.
“I’ve stumped you,” Cardinal said.
“No, sir. Just contemplating the best way to run down this information. You know what? It’s not my department, but it may be under Logistics and Weaponry, or whatever it was called way back then. Let me see if I can go through them to pull up some stuff-or actually, the Web may be faster. Can you hang on?”
–
“This is what I don’t understand,” Delorme said. She had to speak loudly over the noise of the icebreaker’s engine. “I don’t understand what made you
go to the Armed Forces in the first place. Why did you even think of checking the military?”
They were ploughing slowly through the ice surrounding the island where the Scrivers had spent their last summer. An OPP diver sat silently beside them like a lonely astronaut in a penumbra of tubes, his helmet on his lap. Sunlight flashed off the snowy surface of the lake, making their eyes water.
“It was a lucky guess,” Delorme said. “Admit it. It was an incredibly lucky guess.”
“It was Mendelsohn’s idea,” Cardinal said. “I read an entry in his notebook that said Check Canadian military weapons, and it took me a while to realize what he meant. He had two cases of beheadings where there was also a firearm involved. And in both of them, that firearm was a Browning HP. Not the same gun, but the same model. Same as with the Bastovs. Same as at the ATM. And you have to wonder how and where someone becomes so devoted to a particular weapon. It’s not like it’s the most common firearm in the world, but in the early seventies it was standard issue for the Northern Rangers.”
Two dark figures stood on the rocky beach of the island, Jerry Commanda and Ian McLeod. Behind them, a beautiful summer house of red cedar had replaced the homely Scriver cottage. The Schumacher property was visible across the short stretch of ice that was now churned and broken as if it had been jackhammered. Jerry Commanda was a persuasive guy, but it must have taken a star performance even by his standards to persuade Natural Resources to produce their breaker. It was nothing like a Coast Guard boat, amounting to little more than a modified outboard with a reinforced, sharpened prow, and another two weeks of winter would have rendered it useless. Progress was noisy but slow.
At Cardinal’s request, their pilot steered the boat around the elongated tip of the island, opposite to the direction the Scrivers would have taken had they been crossing the bay to get to a movie. Cardinal tapped on the door of a squat, telephone booth-like structure in the middle of the boat and spoke to the OPP technician inside.