by Giles Blunt
“I’m just scared, that’s all. We just ripped off a biker gang.”
“I understand. But don’t you trust me?”
“I trust you.”
Red Bear sat in the seat beside Toof, who had cast off. He put his face right up to Toof’s so that Toof drew back surprised. “Do you trust me?”
“Yeah, sure, I trust you,” Toof said. “’Course I trust you. You’re my Red Bear!”
Red Bear clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Good. Sit back and let me take the wheel.”
“Oh, come on. Lemme drive.”
“Another time.”
Toof looked disappointed but he got up and moved to the back of the boat.
Red Bear steered them toward the south side of the Manitous. The lights of Algonquin Bay brightened for a few minutes, then disappeared behind the black shoulders of the islands. The temperature had dropped, and Kevin hugged himself to keep warm. His arms were stippled with goosebumps.
After a while, Red Bear cut the motor and allowed the boat to drift, waves smacking the hull.
The buzz of a small airplane became audible. Kevin scanned the horizon, but all he could see were the outlines of moonlit clouds. The buzz grew louder. The plane dipped beneath the clouds, a four-seater at most. It came up behind them with a roar and then wafted down toward the water, wings see-sawing a little.
The pontoons skimmed the surface, then plowed up twin white furrows in the black water. Red Bear started the inboard and cruised up to the plane. There were numbers and letters on its side, but Kevin had no idea what they meant. It could be a local plane or it could be fresh in from Chicago or the Caribbean, for all he knew. The tiny door opened, and Kevin caught a glimpse of a face framed by shoulder-length dark hair, but not before he saw the shotgun.
“You Red Bear?”
“That’s me.”
“Show me your status card.”
“My what?”
“Your status card. Make it quick.”
Red Bear extracted the card from his wallet and handed it up. “Don’t take my word for anything,” he said. “You can check with Chief Whiteflint up at—”
“Up at Red Lake. Yeah, I already did that. He says you’re okay.”
“Just don’t ask me to speak any Ojibwa.”
“Doesn’t mean shit to me, either.”
There were some delicate manoeuvres while Red Bear and the man in the plane exchanged briefcases. Leon opened the new briefcase, revealing stacks of six-ounce Baggies filled with white powder.
“Test it,” Red Bear said.
Kevin pulled out one of the lower bags and poked a tiny hole in it. He took a deep breath and held it, trying to get his hands to stop shaking. He lifted a miniature heap of powder on the tip of his knife and dropped it on his tongue. The bitter taste of heroin filled his entire being. He opened up his “chemistry set” and tipped a speck of powder into a small flask. Then he broke an ampoule of clear liquid into it and swirled the mixture around for about thirty seconds. Traces of red and green appeared, then faded. He broke open a second ampoule, added it to the flask and swirled again for five seconds.
Red Bear aimed the beam of a large flashlight at the flask. The liquid had settled to one colour.
“Deep purple,” Kevin said. “We’re looking at something around eighty-percent purity. Virtually step-free.”
“You finished counting?” Red Bear called up to the plane.
The face reappeared in the window.
“I just got one question.”
“Go ahead,” Red Bear said.
“How’d you manage to take over the Viking Riders’ milk run?”
“We persuaded them that it was just better business to go along with us.”
“Uh-huh. And how’d you do that?”
“Magic,” Red Bear said.
A moment later, the plane took off, a shadow slipping across the moonlit clouds.
Red Bear piloted the boat across the bay and back to the private dock they had borrowed it from. Kevin had no idea if they had really borrowed it or if they had ripped off the boat as well as the money. Well, he supposed he could live with a rip-off, provided there was a little something in the spoon when you were done.
Red Bear got off the boat first. Then he turned to them and spread his hands like a priest giving a blessing. “Thank you, everyone. This little venture went like clockwork, and you will all be well paid. Tomorrow night we’ll have a major celebration. Really, you behaved like professionals, and I’m very proud of you all.”
“What about our Viking friend?” Kevin said.
“I can see you are still frightened, Kevin. But I have knowledge that you lack in this matter. You don’t have to worry about our Viking friend. I am going to introduce him to the wonders of the spirit world, and the Vikings won’t cause us the slightest trouble.”
“But as soon as he goes back to them he’s going to tell them everything. He’ll have to. They’ll kill him otherwise.”
“He isn’t going back to them.” Red Bear smiled benevolently into their disbelief. “After tonight, he will be working for us.”
Red Bear led the groggy Viking to his BMW and toppled him into the trunk.
A couple of weeks went by, and they didn’t hear anything more of Wombat Guthrie. Whether or not he was actually working for Red Bear, Kevin had no idea. The thing was, he was now part-owner of more grade-A heroin than he’d ever seen in his life, and he was not about to separate himself from it by getting too nosy.
Kevin smacked at a fly with the swatter. It made a big noise, but the fly just zigzagged over to the cabin window. He wondered once again where Terri was, if she really had gone all the way back to Vancouver. He thought about calling her up and apologizing, but then figured what the hell.
“She says she’s just trying to help you,” Letterman pointed out, chin on hand.
“I know, I know.”
“And she could be right about Red Bear. He’s not exactly the boy next door.”
“I realize that, Dave. I’m not eight years old. I don’t need anyone playing mommy for me. She had to be told.”
Letterman leaned forward. “You said you got off the dope. Why are you still hanging around a mountain of it? You’re a skier, is that it?”
“Oh, I’m definitely over the dope thing, Dave. It was just something I needed to go through, and I think I’ve grown tremendously. But I don’t need it any more. I’m strictly in this for the money and then I’m out that door.”
10
WHATEVER ELSE PEOPLE MIGHT say about Paul Arsenault and Bob Collingwood—and their colleagues said a lot—they were always prepared. The two-man ident team arrived on the scene behind Nishinabe Falls in hiking boots, khakis and bug shirts. Bug shirts come with a hood and veil too fine for flies to penetrate, and elastic at the cuffs. As they moved about the falls, now reaching up to examine a stain, now kneeling to collect minuscule objects, they looked like a pair of beekeepers.
The young coroner who worked beside them had contented himself with a can of Off. As it turned out, the flies weren’t bad behind the falls.
Arsenault collected servings of maggots into several vials, labelling each one. He often thought out loud as he worked, speaking to himself or to anyone who might be interested. Collingwood rarely spoke at all.
“You know, I’m no entomologist,” Arsenault said now. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the falling water. “But I got to say, there’s way fewer maggots here than I’d expect with a body this old. Got to be around two weeks, anyways. You’d expect the thing to be swarming with them, but this here could be the work of maybe a dozen flies. Handful.”
Collingwood was attaching a thermometer to a nearby rock, taking an ambient reading. He turned around and said, “Place is hard to get to.”
It took Cardinal a second to figure out what he meant: The flies wouldn’t be as likely to come across a body hidden behind a veil of water, or even catch the scent. Also, it was quite chilly amid the damp and the dark.
“I don’t know if a tattoo qualifies as a positive ID,” Delorme said. “But me, I’d say Walter ‘Wombat’ Guthrie has taken his last ride.”
Cardinal nodded. “The question is, did the other Riders do this?”
“Not their usual style, is it? All this mutilation, body out in the open?”
“No, they’d be more likely to bury him in a barrel or something so we’d never find him. I’m wondering how this is connected to our Jane Doe.”
“Maybe she saw something she shouldn’t have.”
“Could be—but what? When?”
The coroner was a physician Cardinal had never worked with before, a Dr. Rayburn, who looked like a schoolboy fairly new to shaving. He was a lot easier on the nerves than the malevolent codger they usually got. Dr. Rayburn filled out a form and tore off the top two copies, handing one to Cardinal.
“No trouble determining foul play, obviously. You can ship it straight to Grenville Street. The pathologist is going to have a field day with this one.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, you no doubt noticed the extremities are missing.”
“Yes, Doc. Even I managed to catch that.”
“Even worse, there’s a big patch of skin missing from the lower back.”
“The killer tried to skin him?”
“Alive, unfortunately. I’m not a pathologist, but it’s clear to me that a lot of the injuries were inflicted before death. If not all of them. You’ve got bleeding into the bones.”
“Can you pin down a cause?”
“You mean can I tell you which wound finished him off? I can’t, but a pathologist might be able to. Most likely bled to death before he was decapitated.”
“Bled to death?” Delorme said. “But there’s almost no blood.”
Dr. Rayburn looked at the corpse and shook his head, a student giving up on a problem. “I can’t explain that.”
“Sometimes murderers will spread plastic over a floor,” Cardinal said. “But I’ve never heard of it being done outside. Hey, Szelagy!”
The face of Ken Szelagy, a great wide Hungarian bear of a man, appeared around a sharp edge of granite wall.
“Make sure you do the ViCLAS booklet on this one,” Cardinal said. ViCLAS was a nationwide database of violent crime. The OPP had an analysis office in Orillia.
Szelagy let out a theatrical groan. “Oh, man. Do you know how many questions those ViCLAS things expect you to answer?”
“Two hundred and sixty-two,” Cardinal said. “So, the sooner, the better, right?”
“Of course. As always.”
“Ask them to run it with the hieroglyphics as part of the MO, and also without. Those could be unrelated, or they could be a one-time thing.”
They began filling many bags with evidence, although evidence is too precise a term for the ragtag items they collected. It’s a problem common with outdoor crime scenes that there are many artifacts, very few of which, if any, will end up as evidence. Matchbooks, cigarette butts, soft-drink cans, footprints, hairs, fibres—and there’s no way of telling which items will prove utterly unrelated to the crime and which may prove crucial in securing a conviction. So it all has to be painstakingly photographed, bagged and labelled. And it takes time.
Cardinal kept a running log in his notebook of their findings. In addition to the usual distracting junk that might later prove to be gold, there were several interesting items.
The first was a Swiss Army knife that Arsenault discovered on the far side of the corpse. It was between two boulders that formed rocky steps out from behind the falls. The knife was too small to be a murder weapon. It was attached to a key chain that held a silver locket.
Arsenault sprung the clasp with a gloved finger. Inside was a black-and-white photo of a couple who appeared to be in their mid-forties. The man was wearing a uniform, but the photo was too small to make out what kind.
“Of course, the probabilities are that it just belongs to some camper,” Cardinal said, but he made a note of it anyway.
“It’s in pretty good shape,” Arsenault said. “Probably hasn’t been here that long. For sure, not through the winter.”
Collingwood found a rusty railway spike.
“What is a railway spike doing here?” Delorme said. “The train tracks have to be at least two miles from here—on the far side of a highway, the First Nations reserve and a subdivision. It didn’t get here by accident.”
“But we don’t know the killer brought it here,” Cardinal said. “And why would he, anyway? It’s not sharp enough for a weapon.”
The spike was bagged and labelled.
Three sticks turned up, each about an inch thick, and all about a yard long. They had been cut from a birch and stripped of bark. It was Delorme who found them, under a bush a little way down from the site. At first she had thought they had something to do with a campfire. They were exactly the sort of stick you might use to poke a fire, or even use for kindling. But all three were discoloured for about half their length.
“Could be blood,” Collingwood said, pointing to the discoloration.
“An expert on edged weapons might be able to tell us if that Swiss Army knife is the blade that cut the sticks,” Arsenault said. “Connect the blood to the victim, sticks to the blood, knife to the sticks, the locket to a person.”
“Arsenault’s already solved the case,” Cardinal said. “We can all go home.”
“No, it’s true,” Arsenault said.
“Of course,” Cardinal said. “It’s good thinking.”
Collingwood put the sticks into a large paper bag.
Cardinal went back to the other side of the falls.
Lise Delorme was standing on a shelf of granite, a finger in one ear and her cellphone at the other. She spoke quietly into the phone. There was something sexy about her posture, but Cardinal could not have said exactly what.
She snapped her phone shut and looked up, catching Cardinal’s glance. “Body Removal,” she said. “They’ll be here soon. Didn’t sound too enthusiastic, though.” She pointed her phone at the markings on the cave wall. “Do those mean anything to you?”
Cardinal stepped closer to the images, the strange drawings of arrows and moons. The numbered charts. “I don’t know. I suppose we could be dealing with a Satanist of some sort.”
“Don’t they go in for pentagrams? I don’t see anything like that here. Big on candles, too, I believe. I’m not seeing wax on any of these rocks.”
“Well, there’s no astrological signs, but there’s a serpent down here. God knows what the crossed hammers mean.”
“Of course, it’s always possible these signs had nothing whatever to do with the murder. Wombat was a biker. Bikers have enemies. We’ll get a list and compare times.”
“Good luck pinning down a time of death from that mess,” Cardinal said, jerking a thumb toward the corpse.
Arsenault got up, brushing off the knees of his pants. He held up a small vial. “These’ll help us nail it.”
Delorme winced at the squirming mass of maggots.
Arsenault grinned. “Witnesses.”
11
LATER, CARDINAL DROVE WITH Arsenault and his vials of “witnesses” along Highway 11. Arsenault was wearing wraparound sunglasses. With his moustache and longish hair, they made him look more like a Viking Rider than a cop.
“So why the hell are we using Angus Chin?” Arsenault wanted to know.
“Because if we take it to Toronto we’ll have to get in line like everybody else and it’ll slow things down. Besides which, Angus Chin has three post-graduate degrees—in biology, entomology and parasitology—and he knows what the hell he’s talking about.”
“Yeah. But there’s reasons why we’ve never used him before. I mean, you
do know about the rumours, don’t you?”
Cardinal knew about the rumours. Some individuals are born to be the subject of gossip; others ask for it. Angus Chin was both. First, there was his background—his father a Scottish merchant seaman, his mother a pharmacist from Hong Kong. In a place like Algonquin Bay, such a background was exotic, if not actually suspect.
Then there were his looks. The Scottish part of Chin’s ancestry had rounded his eyes a little, and put some curl in his hair, but he insisted on wearing it in a mandarin ponytail that hung down to his coccyx. This despite the fact that the closest he’d ever got to China was the campus of UCLA.
The rumours began to fly the moment he returned to Algonquin Bay after his lengthy education in Toronto and Los Angeles: He was running from a homicidal homosexual love affair; he was working for mainland China in some malign capacity; he was a doctor who had been defrocked because of unorthodox procedures.
But these were not the rumours that made Paul Arsenault turn to Cardinal, remove his ridiculous sunglasses and squint at him.
“I’m not talking about the little rumours. I’m talking about The Rumour. Capital T, capital R.”
“Ah, yes. The big one,” Cardinal said.
“And you don’t care about this rumour?” Arsenault poked Cardinal in the arm. “You don’t think it has any bearing on the case?”
“All I know about The Rumour is that it is a rumour. It’s not a fact, and we probably shouldn’t be discussing it just before we meet the man.”
Arsenault shrugged dramatically. He put his sunglasses back on and looked straight ahead.
The big rumour revolved around Angus Chin’s interest in parasitology and the study of tapeworms. It was whispered around town that he kept a tapeworm as a pet. There were, of course, the inevitable questions: How? In God’s name, where? The answer was that Dr. Chin reportedly kept his tapeworm where tapeworms lived, in his intestine. He would change his diet or some other variable and study the worm’s response. Did it grow faster or slower? Fatter or thinner? And how did he measure this response? How did he get access? He would fast for two days. On the third day, he would place a lump of sugar on his tongue. The worm, sensing the presence of nourishment, would make its way up the digestive tract and eventually up the esophagus. When the moment was right, the doctor would reach in and pull the worm from his throat—no small feat, considering the creature was said to be over five feet long.