by Giles Blunt
“Judging by the position of the bullets,” Delorme said, “it looks like they were shot by someone sitting here.” She indicated a chair that was pulled away from the table.
“We don’t know for sure they were shot yet,” Cardinal said. “But since the rest of it is post-mortem, yeah, I could see it. He shoots the man first, possibly right in the face, and the bullet ends up in the wall behind him. Then he shoots the woman, maybe through the side of the head, and it exits this way and ends up on the floor. Then he pulls out the axe.”
Cardinal looked briefly over the living room, which was neat and undisturbed. He went down a gleaming hallway, his paper suit making swishing sounds with each step. Two of the bedrooms appeared not only undisturbed but underfurnished, as if no one lived in them. Lots of the houses in this area were vacant most of the winter, their owners having another residence in town. He checked the bathroom briefly, and finally the master bedroom.
He stood in the doorway, arms folded. One window completely smashed—outward, not inward—the chair it had been attacked with lying on its side. No other signs of violence. The bed was made up, but when Cardinal lifted the corner of the bedspread, there was only a mattress pad underneath. The closet was virtually empty, as were the dresser drawers. No sign of any suitcases.
He went to the window and looked out. Arsenault had set up so many lights, it looked like a movie set. He was on his knees, bent low over something.
Cardinal asked him how it was going. Arsenault stood up. “Fantastic. I’m taking moulds before it melts.”
“Give me the short version.”
Arsenault pointed to two sets of tracks coming up from the lake. “Those are the two boys’. The prints right by the house—up to the back door at least—are mostly ours. I’m betting all the rest are crime related. That window you’re standing in? Someone came out of there pretty hard. Cut themselves up, too—we got blood on the left hand, blood on the knee. Fairly small person. Took off that way. Comes back this way.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, there’s a whole story out here, if we can just get it down before it melts or it snows again.”
“I’ll send Collingwood out.”
He went back to the dining area. The scene didn’t get any easier to take.
Delorme held up her notebook. “Clothing labels are all American. Barneys, Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor.”
Collingwood, the younger half of Ident, was plucking invisible items from the man’s coat with a pair of tweezers.
“Hair?” Cardinal said.
Collingwood nodded. He almost never spoke.
“Arsenault needs you outside. He’s hit the motherlode.”
Delorme pulled back the sleeve from the dead man’s arm. “Rolex watches, both of them. Fur coats, expensive labels. I’d say we’re dealing with some seriously wealthy people here. Whoever killed them took their wallets but left all this stuff.”
“Idea being to hide their identities rather than get rich, maybe.” Cardinal looked around. “Where’s Dunbar?”
“He went to canvass the neighbours on either side. See if they saw anything.”
“Nearest house must be two hundred yards away. If they were even here. Not too many people live out here in winter. I don’t think it even gets ploughed this far, unless you want to pay a private contractor. Did you tell him to canvass the neighbours?”
“That was his idea.”
“Self-motivated,” Cardinal said.
“Probably just wanted to get away, like the coroner. Can’t say I blame him for that.”
“Not for that. No.”
Cardinal was beginning to feel a peculiar ache in his bones. Not from cold—the house was warming up now—but from whatever it was that emanated from the two headless beings seated at the table.
Cardinal and Delorme stayed silent for a couple of minutes. Cardinal was waiting for that big picture to develop, but at this moment it was all detail and no picture. He went to the front vestibule. He opened the door and examined the outside lock. There were scratches around the keyhole that could mean it had been picked, but he couldn’t be sure if the scratches were new.
When he came back to the living room, Delorme said, “Not much blood. Considering.”
“Considering. Pretty gory next to the chairs they’re sitting on, but nothing like what it’d be if the heads had been removed before they were dead.”
“We’ve got those.” Delorme pointed to two circular smears of blood, one near the entrance from the kitchen, one on the other side of the table. “But no drips moving away from the table, or away from the blotches. So the killer puts them into something—plastic bag or whatever—before he leaves. What did you mean before? When you looked at the house and said ‘isolation’?”
Cardinal shrugged, making the paper rustle. “That we’re probably not looking at a sudden explosion of violence.”
“We’re looking at—what—the end result of a plan?.”
“The end result of a plan. Exactly.”
Delorme went into the kitchen and there was the sound of cupboard doors opening and closing. She came back with a small green box. “No garbage bags. Just these.”
Compost bags. The dimensions were printed on the top.
“Might hold one head,” Cardinal said.
“It might. But these aren’t really leak-proof. You ever see the inside of your compost container?”
“I try not to.”
“I think he brought his own box, bag, whatever.”
“That’s why I’ve always found you to be extremely intelligent, Sergeant Delorme. You have exactly the same thoughts I do.”
Arsenault called Cardinal’s cell and asked him to come up to the road. “We’re in a hydro access about a hundred yards before the driveway.”
There were already a couple of reporters trying to get by PC Rankin, who had moved his perimeter to the far side of the access road. They yelled at Cardinal for a comment as he went by. He told them he couldn’t say anything just yet.
Snow glittered under the lights the ident team had set up. More tire tracks.
“Our runner,” Arsenault said. “We follow his trail through the woods on the west side of the drive. He comes out to the road and then it gets hard to see, but we’ve got blood—not a lot, but enough to see he hits the road, comes this way, and bingo—car.”
Cardinal and Delorme stood looking at the tire tracks.
“Much smaller car,” Cardinal said, “and there’s hardly any tread. Are we looking at a third vehicle?”
“Very good,” Arsenault said. “Could be a glamorous career waiting for you in Ident. Notice also we have four tires, four different treads, which probably means an old vehicle in pretty bad repair.”
“Tail light,” Collingwood said. He was holding up a fragment of red plastic.
“Show him the casings,” Arsenault said.
Collingwood held up a Baggie. “Found ’em at the top of the drive.”
“So we’ve got a chase that starts at the broken window and ends here?” Delorme said. She put her hands on her hips. “Got a lot to work with, anyway. Hair, fibre, ballistics, footprints, tire tracks …”
“We may have something even better,” Arsenault said.
“Oh?”
“Might have a survivor.”
4
THE NEXT DAY WAS SATURDAY, but Detective Sergeant Chouinard had cancelled everybody’s weekend and they had a morning meeting just like any other day. They began with a quick rundown of smaller cases. Szelagy was working with the fire marshal on a suspicious blaze in an old warehouse. McLeod was working on a fraud artist. Delorme had a couple of ATM robberies.
Chouinard sat at the head of the table, making the odd note and looking unhappy. “We have the fur auction in town, people, and after that the winter carnival. We need to be quick on this one, and we need to be good. Cardinal is lead investigator.”
“Cardinal’s not available,” McLeod said. “He’s too busy with Scriver.”
“Very funny. Listen, it’s not the carnival I’m worried about so much as the fur auction. It’s still a big deal in this town, and they’re expecting protesters. We’re going to have to be a presence. I’ve already talked to Staff Sergeant Flower, and there’ll be uniforms, but the chief promised the Fur Harvesters we’d have people stopping by too.”
“Harvesters,” McLeod said. “You gotta love it. What’s wrong with trappers?”
“Most of the furs come from farms these days. Listen, we’re talking millions of dollars in a tight economy, so let’s do some serving and protecting. Cardinal, where are we with Schumacher? Have we contacted any actual Schumachers yet? They’re not the victims, right?”
“No, but they seem to be away—we stopped by their town residence last night. We don’t have an ID on the victims yet. At this point, we don’t even have a best guess. We’ve got stuff from the scene that has to be run down. Partial list: blood, fingerprints, footprints, tire prints, spent rounds, hairs and fibres.”
The D.S. shifted in his seat and frowned. “Explain something to me.”
Cardinal looked at him.
“I thought we were going to have a holdback on this case. Why did I hear Detective Dunbar on CKAT this morning telling the world that the guy had a knife in his back?”
Cardinal looked at Dunbar. “Why the hell would you tell them that? What were you doing talking to the media in the first place? When did this happen?”
Dunbar winced. “I was coming back from canvassing the neighbours. He caught me off guard.”
“That’s great. And now if another corpse turns up with a knife in its back and minus a head, we’re not going to know if we’ve got a serial killer or a copycat. To say nothing about ruling out false confessions.”
“Like I say, he really caught me off guard.”
“There’s going to be a lot of press, and I want to control what goes to them. Nobody else speaks to them.”
“Cardinal’s right,” Chouinard said. “What else have we got?”
“Ident,” Cardinal said. “Maybe Arsenault can tell us the plan there.”
Arsenault took a sip from an enormous Tim Hortons mug. “We’re waiting in line for a pathologist. They’ve had three murders in Toronto since Friday and they’re short-staffed.”
“Two beheadings,” Chouinard said, “and we’re waiting in line?”
“Give ’em a call—they don’t care what I think. Preliminaries: female in mid-thirties, male in mid- to late sixties.”
Chouinard shook his head. “Damn it. We should have a holdback. We’re already all over the radio, the Lode is going to have it on the front page this afternoon, and we’ve had calls from The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the wire service. Do you have any idea how big this is? This’ll make papers in the States.”
Dunbar winced again. “Sorry, D.S.”
Arsenault flipped through his notebook. “Footprints. We have two size twelves and one size five, the woman.”
“In what? Snow?”
“Yeah. It was just a thin layer, but we managed to get great moulds. Same for the tire tracks. We’re putting all this stuff through the databases, but it’ll be a while.”
“We’re looking for a third party, too,” Cardinal said. “Someone busted out a back window and left in a big hurry. Got cut pretty bad and then took off into the woods. So that’s going to be our new holdback.”
“Not a word to anyone,” Chouinard said, “or heads will roll.” He paused a second. “I wish I hadn’t said that.”
Arsenault picked the story up. “Tracks indicate a small person, maybe around five-four, five-five, and not too heavy—maybe 120 tops. Tracks head into the trees—running—followed by some size twelves. Much bigger, heavier person. We’ve got blood from the broken window, so if there’s DNA on file we’ll nail the runner.
“Runner makes it to the road, where we found some nine-millimetre casings, so presumably size-twelve took a couple of shots at runner. Tracks pick up again at a utility road a hundred yards away. And lo and behold, another set of tire tracks. Can I go to bed now?”
“No, you may not,” Chouinard said. “But that’s damn fine scene work.”
“Of course, we don’t know for sure what relationship the runner has to the others,” Cardinal said. “Intended victim? Fellow perp in a scenario that went bad? We’re still trying to piece together what happened inside the house. Today’s agenda is almost totally Ident: they prepare fibres, blood and hairs, and I’ll take them down to T.O. later in the day. Delorme, you can come with me. In the meantime, you can track down the Schumachers, and I’ll get to work on ViCLAS.”
—
Delorme drove over to the Schumachers’ town residence on McGibbon Street. This was a good neighbourhood of old houses and neat lawns. Delorme had been through it a lot recently, because one of her ATM robberies had taken place just around the corner. And late last night she had shoved her card through the Schumachers’ mail slot, noting that there were no footprints around their house and no car in the drive. The house was a large red-brick Edwardian, nicely restored and maintained. Now there was a late-model Lexus in the driveway.
She knocked on the front door. It took a while, but a man eventually opened it. He looked about seventy-five, with a badly sunburned face. “Yes? Can I help you?”
Delorme identified herself and asked if he was Joseph Schumacher and if he owned the house at the end of Island Road.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s me.”
“Were you away yesterday, sir?”
“Yes, we were on a cruise round the Mediterranean. Just got back to Toronto last night. Flew back from there and just got in”—he looked at his watch, then back to Delorme—“half an hour ago.”
“Did you find the card we put through your mail slot?”
“Haven’t had a chance to look. I just tossed all the mail on the kitchen counter.”
A woman appeared on the staircase behind him. “What’s going on, Joseph? Why are you standing there with the door open?”
“This young lady’s from the police. Wants to ask us some questions. See, I told you we should never have joined the Hells Angels, but no, you had your own ideas.”
“Mr. Schumacher, maybe we could sit down for a couple of minutes. It seems you haven’t heard the news, and I’m afraid I have something bad to tell you.”
“What do you mean?” Mrs. Schumacher said. “Has there been an accident? This isn’t about our son, is it? His family? No, surely we’d get a phone call—”
“I don’t think it concerns your son,” Delorme said.
“Well, you’d better come into the kitchen.”
They went in and pulled out chairs from the Formica table and all three of them sat down.
“Who has keys to your house on the lake?” Delorme asked.
“Just us,” Mr. Schumacher said. “We each have a key. Far as I know, we’re the only …”
“The only ones,” his wife said. “We’re the only ones with keys.”
“And have you lent the house to anyone recently? Or rented it out?”
“No, we don’t rent it out,” Mr. Schumacher said. “No one even goes out there unless …”
“Unless we’re there,” Mrs. Schumacher said. She completed her husband’s sentences almost as if it were an act they had rehearsed together.
“Well, people went out there,” Delorme said. “We’re not sure when exactly, but within the past two days at least three people were in your house. Two of them ended up dead.”
The Schumachers looked at each other. They looked back at Delorme. Finally Mr. Schumacher said, “You’re telling us people were murdered out in our lake house?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Schumachers turned to each other again.
“I don’t know what to say,” the man said. “We’ve—this is—we lead ordinary lives. There’s never been any …”
“Discord,” the woman said. “No discord.”
“But you have to tell us,” M
r. Schumacher said. “Who are these …”
“People. Victims.”
“We don’t know,” Delorme said. “We were hoping you might be able to help.”
“But we need something to go on. We need to know what they …” Mr. Schumacher looked at his wife.
“Look like,” she said.
“The man’s in his late sixties. The woman’s in her mid-thirties. They were both dressed in expensive fur coats.”
“We don’t know anybody like that,” Mrs. Schumacher said. “Nobody who owns furs. You said the man was wearing a fur too?”
“Yes, ma’am, the man too.”
“We don’t know anybody like that. Not that I can think of.”
“But your place is for sale, no? You have a sign up. Carnwright Realty?”
“That’s right,” Mr. Schumacher said. “Carnwright’s son-in-law’s looking after it for us. Randall …”
“Randall Wishart,” Mrs. Schumacher said. “That’s right, we did give Randall a key. To be honest, we’re asking too much for the house—on purpose to discourage actual buyers. Mr. Wishart doesn’t know that, of course. We’re actually trying to prod Michael—that’s our son—to move back here and decide to buy it. He lives in the States, but he keeps saying he’s going to move back.”
“Aside from Mr. Wishart and your son, who else knows the house is empty?” Delorme said.
“Well, anybody who goes by on a snowmobile, of course,” Mrs. Schumacher said.
It was too early in the winter for snowmobiles. The ice on the lake wasn’t nearly thick enough.
—
The Violent Crime Linkage and Analysis System, ViCLAS for short, revolves around a national database that categorizes crimes, both solved and unsolved, according to MO. Most murderers not thinking to leave bits of nursery rhymes or other riddles at the scene, investigators have to rely on things like choice of weapon, victim, location and a host of other variables. But before the investigator can glean any information from the system, he or she is first required to fill out a form demanding answers to a great many questions about the current case.
When Cardinal got fed up with trying to answer them, he headed over to Carnwright Real Estate. The Carnwright family had been a force in Algonquin Bay’s housing market for three generations. Lawrence Carnwright, the current avatar, was a highly active public figure, constantly turning up on committees and associations, a handsome white-haired gent who would appear on the news when an opinion was wanted on the economic future of the city. Lately his daughter seemed to be following in his footsteps.