by Giles Blunt
“But there’s only one God, isn’t there?”
The brown face waggled at him.
“That is a different religion altogether. I’m teaching you a much older, much more powerful religion. In the Christian religions, yes, there is only one God. In Palo Mayombe, there are many. Into this nganga we also put the things we need in order to control the spirits. Spirit beings, you see, have no power over human beings unless it is given to them. They are vessels, drifting this way and that, until we give them power. We—that is to say, the wizards—give them life. We give them breath and we give them the power to see, the power to hear, to go places, to grasp things.” Victor flexed a claw open and shut before Raymond’s eyes.
“Where do spirits come from?”
“From living creatures. Animals. Sometimes from human beings. We take them from this world in such a way that we control them in the next. Then they do our bidding. They work for us, you see. Only wizards have this right, this power. Now be silent. Clear your mind of all fear, and just watch what I do. We will do something nice for your mother. We will ask Oggun to bring her something nice.”
Victor turned to the nganga and spread his hands like a Catholic priest over the altar. He began to speak in a language Raymond did not recognize. He knew it was not Spanish or English or French.
“Bahalo! Semtekne bakuneray pentol!” Victor turned to Raymond and spoke in an aside. “Always you must speak firmly to them. We do not beg on bended knee like the Christians and the Muslims. We tell them. We command”
Victor raised his arms over the cauldron once more.
“Bahalo! Seeno temtem bakuneray pentol!”
Victor took the hatchet from the wall, grabbed the chicken and removed its head with a single stroke. He tossed the head into the pot. The headless chicken strained at its leash, running this way and that, unaware that it was dead.
Raymond started to cry. He tried to stop himself, but he couldn’t; his entire body shook with sobs.
Victor took hold of the chicken by the feet and unclipped the leash. He held the still-struggling bird upside down over the nganga so that the hot blood squirted into the pot. He started to say more words, then turned on Raymond, gripping his shoulders: “Stop crying now, Raymond. You hear me? Stop crying.” The bony hands shook him. “If you show fear, you allow the spirits to control you. This must never happen. Stop crying now. Take a deep breath and show them you are in command.”
Raymond tried to do it, but he was hopeless that first day.
Later that week, when he came home from school, Gloria was entertaining a customer. Raymond went straight to his bedroom and tried not to hear the noises the man made, his mother’s elaborate cries of ecstasy. When the man was gone, Gloria came to her son’s room.
“Come with me,” she said. “I have a surprise for you.”
They rode the battered elevator down to the lobby. Gloria took Raymond out to the parking lot and sat him in a brand new Honda Prelude. It had a leather interior and a wonderful radio and it smelled powerfully of new car. Sunlight glittered off every surface. “How do you like Mommy’s Honda?”
Raymond touched the steering wheel.
“Isn’t it fantastic?” she said. “Uncle Victor got it for me from a friend of his.”
“Who?” Raymond asked.
“A friend. I don’t know who. It doesn’t matter who.”
She started it up and pulled onto Gerrard Street. Five minutes later they were cruising along the Gardiner Expressway. Lake Ontario flashed brilliant blue and silver in the sun. The few clouds were absurdly white. Gloria opened all the windows and the sunroof, and their hair whipped about their ears. Raymond didn’t have to ask who had given her the car. It had been Oggun. Oggun had given them this car, just as Victor had told him to.
As time went by, Raymond got braver and braver in his uncle’s temple. Over the following months and years, Victor instructed him in the art of controlling the spirits. He taught him that when you took a soul, you had to do so with the utmost pain. Really, the sacrifice had to be screaming as it died, otherwise you could not command its soul. And if you showed the slightest fear, then the spirit would end up controlling you.
He showed Raymond how you remove the claws or feet, toe by toe, so the spirit would be able to grasp, how you cut off the feet and throw them into the nganga so the spirit would be able to move about and, finally, how you look into the sacrifice’s eyes in its final agony and tell it you would come for it in hell. Then you took the brain and transferred it to the nganga, so the spirit would be able to understand your commands, would be able to think.
Raymond threw up the first few times. But eventually it was just as Uncle Victor had said; he got used to it. The fear diminished, and by the time he was fourteen he felt no fear whatsoever. Chickens, goats, dogs, cats—in the end, it made no difference. Raymond learned to master the screaming animals and to stare into their eyes as they died.
Then his uncle taught him how to summon the spirit of the creature you had sacrificed, how to make him work for you.
Time, the twenty-one-year-old Raymond learned, took on a whole new meaning when you were on the receiving end of the blade. The hot blood turned sticky on his back, and his head ached monstrously from gritting his teeth against the pain.
His uncle removed the blindfold, and Raymond had to close his eyes against the candles that blazed in rows and rows. Then Victor released the leather cuffs and sat Raymond down.
“Don’t worry,” Uncle Victor said. “The wounds will soon heal.”
Cool water splashed over his back. His uncle dabbed at him gently. “You have nothing to fear, you know. From the moment I first noticed you—that time in the hall—I looked into your eyes and I said to Gloria, ‘Your son is going to be a priest. A very powerful priest.’”
Raymond remembered, but the old man often repeated the story.
Uncle Victor rubbed ointment on the long lines he had cut into Raymond’s back. The pain began to attenuate, to become bearable.
“You will have nothing to fear, Raymond. Believe me. You are going to be the most powerful priest walking the earth. A true collector of souls.” And then Victor did an amazing thing. He knelt down and bowed his head.
25
STEPHEN P. RUSSELL HAD COME prepared—floppy straw sun hat, bright white bug shirt, Off Deep Woods insect repellent—he was ready for anything. As Algonquin Bay’s best-selling watercolourist, Stephen P. Russell prided himself on being an all-weather, all-terrain sort of man. His ancient Volvo wagon was crammed with boots, umbrella, slicker, sandals, sunblock, coffee Thermos, as well as the painterly paraphernalia of the amateur artist: easel, brushes, colours and a none-too-steady folding stool.
Stands of birches were his bread and butter, preferably birches adorned with clumps of snow or dripping with rain. He sold two or three of these works every weekend at the farmers’ market. You couldn’t live on the money it brought in, but it was a nice supplement to a pension from the Nipissing Separate School Board. He prided himself particularly on his ability to render the platinum sheen on the leaves of the silver birch, the very effect he was creating at this moment.
A steady breeze was riffling the leaves and blowing them back like the fur on a cat. A languid chorus line of Scotch pines swayed beside the birches, but the painter ignored them. These he would do with a green wash later, blurry as you please. That was the great thing about watercolours—it was easy to blur everything you didn’t want the viewer to see. Pines were not Stephen P. Russell’s strong suit.
The brushwork on the birch leaves took a lot of doing, a lot of concentration. And for some time, the painter had noticed that his concentration was flickering. Normally he could work for hours, thinking of nothing but his subject and his technique, but today he had finished his Thermos of coffee early, and now nature had to take its course.
He turned from his easel and looked behind him toward the nasty construction site. No, he would have to head the other way. He got up with difficul
ty from his stool—oh, the aches and agues of the so-called golden years!—and tottered stiffly toward the bushes.
At first he didn’t realize what it was. The thing was only in his peripheral vision, and he was seeing it through anti-bug mesh. It made him jump because he thought somebody had caught him relieving himself outdoors. It was only after he had zipped up, his face burning with embarrassment, that he turned and realized that this person had not seen anything at all.
26
THERE WAS ALREADY A SMALL CROWD of cops at the scene by the time Cardinal arrived. A pale, reedy man separated himself from the knot of people and began filling out a form that kept curling from his clipboard in the breeze. Once again, Cardinal was in luck; this time the coroner was Dr. Miles Kennan. He tore off the flimsy top sheet of the form and handed it to Cardinal.
“We’ve got an obvious victim of foul play here, Detective.” Kennan had a gentle, breathy voice. “I do hope you’ll give my regards to the forensic centre.”
“‘Cause of death,’” Cardinal read from the form, “‘gunshot and/or blunt trauma’?”
“You’ll see what I mean when you take a look,” Kennan breathed. “Either would have killed him eventually, but you’ll need a pathologist to tell you which one actually did him in.” The doctor swatted at his neck. “God, I hate blackflies.”
“Time of death?”
“You’ll have to ask the centre that one. I’d guess he’s been dead between twelve and twenty-four hours. But even that’s a very rough guess.”
“All right. Thanks, Doctor.”
Cardinal stepped under the crime scene tape. Arsenault and Collingwood were down on hands and knees, evidence bags ready. Delorme was on her cellphone, apparently on hold.
“Forensic?” Cardinal asked.
She nodded.
“Who called us?”
“Local artist. He doesn’t know anything.”
Delorme spoke into the phone. “All right, Len. Thanks.” She hung up. “I asked Weisman if someone from ballistics could stay late.”
“It’s already late.”
“Yeah, that’s what Weisman said.” Delorme shrugged. “I charmed him to death.”
“No, you didn’t. Len doesn’t charm. Do we know who we’ve got here?”
“Unfortunately, no. There’s no wallet, no ID, no nothing. He appears to be mid to late twenties, five-five, about a hundred and fifty pounds. Other than that, there’s not much to go by.”
“There was nothing at all in his pockets?”
“A ten-dollar bill, some change and a pack of matches from Duane’s Billiard Emporium.”
Cardinal stood back and looked over the scene as a whole. The brush was thick where the dirt road came to an end. Even Cardinal, no forensic expert, could see recently broken twigs and branches. And there was a lot of blood near the victim’s head. Droplets had sprayed upward against the white trunks of the birches. Definitely killed here, not just dumped.
“I can’t figure out how this went down,” Delorme said. “It’s unlikely the killer was just sitting here in a car waiting for a victim to pass by. The two of them—or maybe there were more, I guess we don’t know—but the two of them come out here for something. Then for some reason they get into an argument and the one guy kills the other.”
“A bullet in the back of the head doesn’t read like a spur-of-the-moment thing to me,” Cardinal said.
“That’s true. It’s more like an execution.”
“Tire,” Collingwood said, restricting himself as usual to a single syllable. He sat back on his haunches so they could see the white patch he was working on. Then he lifted the plaster and turned it over, revealing perfectly formed tread marks.
“Nice work,” Cardinal said. “Let’s hope it belongs to the killer’s car and not to some construction foreman.”
Arsenault was a few yards away, just getting to his feet, exclaiming dramatically at his creaking knees. He was holding up a tiny plastic vial, waggling it at Cardinal the way one waggles a stick at a dog.
“Okay, Sherlock,” Cardinal said. “What have you got?”
“Take a look, man. I don’t have words to tell you how good I am.”
Cardinal peered at the vial. It contained a tiny, papery white pocket, like a shred of popcorn hull.
“Is that a maggot casing?” Cardinal said. “Why is this a big deal?”
“Distance from the flesh,” Arsenault said. “Maggots will eventually fall off a dead body. Cheese skippers even spring off a corpse and land maybe a couple of feet away. But this little guy is eight feet away, right inside a footprint.”
“I hope you’re not telling me one of us stepped in maggots and carried them back here.”
“Nope. Footprint’s got deep treads, probably from a hiking boot. None of us is wearing hiking boots, and none of us has been up to the body and back this way. The tape’ll verify that.” He waved toward a video camera perched on a tripod, its red light throbbing.
Cardinal took in the scene again. “You’re right. And going by the tire marks, this would have been where the back of the car was. The trunk. Whoever killed him must’ve come back this way, around the back of the car and then into the driver’s seat. But why would he have a maggot casing on his shoe?”
“My question exactly,” Arsenault said. “Which is why I’m taking this little fellow to Dr. Chin in his own private limo.”
“The other day you didn’t even want to hear about Chin.”
“Obviously I’m learning under your guidance and inspiration. The guy impressed me, okay?”
Cardinal took one more look at the scene as a whole, then stepped closer to the body. He must have let out a gasp or a curse or something, because Delorme said, “Yeah. Pretty bad, isn’t it.”
The trauma to the face and head was brutal. Half the cranial vault was collapsed.
“I wonder which they did first,” Cardinal said. “Shoot him or bash his head in?”
“Does it make that much difference?” Delorme’s background was in white-collar crime; Cardinal reminded himself he had to make allowances.
“If you knock him out and then shoot him,” he said, “that’s one type of person. If you shoot him first, then bash his head in, what does that make you?”
“Either extremely vicious …” Delorme looked at him, brown eyes questioning, “or maybe the owner of a defective gun?”
“I’m betting on both.”
27
MURDER IS SO RARE IN Algonquin Bay that, when it happens, the detectives tend to stay close to the victim. Yes, they could simply ship the body down to Toronto. Yes, they could get the autopsy results by phone. Same with ballistics and other expert evidence. The problem with that approach is that it tends to take even longer than the eight hours of driving involved in a trip to Toronto and back. From her long years of work in Special Investigations, Delorme had learned that nothing counts in an investigation like face-to-face contact. Which was why she and Cardinal drove all the way to Toronto, 450 kilometres south. If Cardinal was upset about having to make the trip again so soon, he didn’t let on.
They were buzzed into the Centre of Forensic Sciences by Len Weisman himself; pretty much everyone else had left for the day, and Weisman always liked to be the first guy to look at a body.
Last time she had worked a homicide, Delorme and Arsenault had taken bets on how Weisman would react. It had been a homosexual affair turned ugly, one man killing his lover in a jealous frenzy. It was so bad they’d found footprints inside the body.
Arsenault bet that Weisman wouldn’t blink an eye.
Delorme didn’t see how any human being could look at a thing like that and not react.
When they got to the delivery dock, Weisman had unzipped the bag. He looked at the footprints in the chest cavity, put his hands on his hips and said, “What do you think? Nine-and-a-halfs?”
I hope I never get like that, Delorme thought now as she shook Weisman’s hand.
“Come in, come in. You’re late. Patien
t got here an hour ago.” Weisman always referred to the bodies as patients.
“I see you’re already dressed for the beach,” Cardinal said.
Along with his tweed jacket and his tie and his denim jeans, Weisman wore biblical-looking sandals.
“I get hot feet,” Weisman said. “It’s a circulation problem.”
He led them back to his miniature office. His desk was stacked with reports, textbooks, a tape recorder and several oranges that were fragrantly past their prime. On his desk, a computer was lit up with a toxicology website. Weisman grabbed a lab coat and shrugged himself into it as they followed him down a tiled corridor.
He held open the door for them and they entered the morgue proper, where a bearded man in a white coat was bending over the body.
“Dr. Srinigar, this is Detective Lise Delorme and Detective John Cardinal from the Algonquin Bay Police.”
Dr. Srinigar dipped forward in a slight bow. “Forgive me if I don’t shake hands. Such a long journey you’ve taken, you must be even more tired than I.” His accent was pleasantly Indian or Pakistani, Delorme wasn’t sure which. Straying out from his surgical cap, black hair streaked with grey.
“Thanks for working late, Doctor,” Cardinal said. “What can you tell us?”
“Our young patient has met with a most unfortunate end. Only twenty-seven or twenty-eight and this is his brain, here in the scale. Quite a bit heavier than the normal human brain, but only until such time as I removed a significant amount of lead. Two bullets’ worth, to be exact.”
“Do you have those bullets?”
“No, no. I sent them straight over to ballistics. I trust that was proper.”
“Extremely,” Delorme said. What a pleasure to run into good manners; it didn’t happen a lot in this line of work.
Above his mask, the doctor’s eyes were dark brown, bovine and sincere.
“At first I thought there was only one bullet wound in the antero-occipital region, but that was because there was such severe destruction via blunt force trauma. Bits of wood removed from the scalp indicate a club of some sort. Possibly a baseball bat.”