Blackfly Season

by Giles Blunt

  “What about bone pain?” Letterman wanted to know. “How are you handling the bone pain, Kevin?”

  Of the physical withdrawal symptoms, bone pain was the worst. It was as if iron rods had been inserted through the marrow of all the hundreds of bones in his body, from the tiniest hinges of fingers and toes to the beams of his spine and legs, chest and arms. And now some demon was banging on them with a hammer so that they hummed and howled like tuning forks.

  Nothing helped. Not deep breathing, not trying to imagine beautiful things, not trying to concentrate on one object: that widest crack of light, for example, or that paint drip on the floor not more than a foot from his nose. Kevin was not so sure that brown stain was, in fact, paint. He didn’t want to know what it was.

  “Say, what do you suppose that brown stain is on the floor there, Kevin?”

  “I don’t know, Dave.”

  “No, really. I’m just curious. It’s not blood, is it?”

  “I don’t know, Dave.”

  “Who do you suppose that came from? I thought Guthrie was killed someplace else.”

  “I don’t know where he was killed, Dave.”

  “I guess it could be Terri’s, then.”

  “It’s not Terri’s. Terri went back to Vancouver.”

  “Hard to say, really, without more to go on. Could be hers, could be Wombat’s. I mean, that is his head in the pot there, Kevin, so I don’t know—draw your own conclusions. Those are probably his fingers as well, I imagine. Say, Kevin, do you suppose you’re going to end up in there, too? Weren’t you supposed to be a poet at one point?”

  Kevin lifted his face from the floor and tried to focus. It was hard with Letterman yammering at him, and the clatter in his bones, the sweat pouring into his eyes. He blinked hard several times and squinted. There was a tiny dark spot in the wall beneath the table, about six inches above the floor. The point of a nail.

  48

  THE ONTARIO PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL—or O.H., as it is familiarly known—sits off to the side of Highway 11 a few kilometres west of Algonquin Bay. It’s a beautiful location—long drive, wide field, enveloped in pine forest—that reflects the view of an earlier age that those who suffer from mental or emotional turmoil need more than anything to be ensconced in peaceful surroundings. Asylum.

  Advances in drugs—and tightened health care budgets—have emptied many of the O.H.’s beds. But at any given time, it still houses some three to four hundred patients. Most of these, so-called chronic care patients, will not be going home. They include the severely retarded, and those suffering from cruel and irreversible dementia. It’s not clear, in most of these cases, whether the patient is even aware of his or her present circumstances, let alone what the future will hold or, more accurately, withhold.

  A few of the inmates, such as Catherine Cardinal, stay in the hospital from time to time until the acute phase of their difficulties is over and they can be returned safely to the community. Dr. Jonas had given Catherine a sedative and kept her overnight in Toronto. Then, feeling that the most important thing in her recovery would be proximity to her husband, he put her on a new medication and sent her up to the O.H. by ambulance. He would remain in close touch with her doctor up there.

  John Cardinal sat with her now in the sunroom on the third floor. They always sat in the sunroom when he came to visit. Later, when she was better, they would go for a walk, maybe even a trip downtown. But for now it was just this overheated, glassed-in room with its vinyl couches and its view of the highway and the trees. The sun itself was hidden behind heavy cloud, and rain dripped down the windows in thick rivulets.

  “They should call it the rainroom,” Cardinal said.

  Catherine didn’t respond. She sat at the far end of the couch, elbows on knees, head sunk low, her face hidden by her hair, an allegory of defeat. Cardinal found his sympathy and concern warring with his frustration at not going all-out for Terri Tait. True, they had all units on alert, and there wasn’t much else he could do for her right at this moment, but there were other angles of the case that had to be pursued.

  “Do you want a Coke or something?” he said. “I could go down the hall and get you one.”

  Catherine gave no sign that she heard.

  “They don’t think you’ll need to stay in too long this time. Maybe just a couple of weeks.”

  Catherine said something.

  “What was that? I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t hear.”

  “Bravo, John. I said bravo. Does that do it for you?”

  Cardinal stared at the cover of a celebrity magazine, headlines about Rosie O’Donnell and Julia Roberts. What am I doing here? I should be down at the station. I should be talking to ViCLAS.

  “Christ,” Catherine said after a while.

  She was in the hospital of her own volition, but that didn’t seem to make the experience any less bitter.

  “Catherine, please try and remember this won’t last. It will be over sometime soon.”

  “Sure, John.” She turned her dark eyes on him, and Cardinal could read there nothing but devastation. “Sure, it’ll be over. And then it’s going to come right back again. So how is that ‘over’? Tell me that, John. How is that ‘over’?”

  “You’ve got people on your side, here, honey. They’re trying this Lamotrigine and they have every reason to think it’s going to work better than the lithium. It’s supposed to be particularly effective for people with your profile. They’re very optimistic.”

  Catherine hung her head again, shaking it gently from side to side, a mute no. If there were any way to summarize this illness, at least in its depressive stage, it would be with that two-letter word, in which all the hopelessness in the universe seemed to gather.

  When she was like this, every cheerful note rang hollow, every hopeful remark was suspect, every expression of tenderness a lie. But Cardinal couldn’t stop himself. “Catherine, I know it’s hard. I know it’s overwhelming. But please try and remember the reason you feel like this doesn’t have anything to do with reality. It’s just a chemical imbalance that makes you feel horrible and makes the world ugly, but it won’t last. You will feel better. I promise.”

  She was crying now. Not the deep-chested sobs of relief, but only the squeezed-out tears of bitterness. With the part of him that still prayed, Cardinal prayed that he could take that pain for her. He would bear it himself for the rest of his life if that would spare her this grief.

  When he got back to the squad room, Cardinal pulled the ViCLAS report from under a stack of paper and checked the summary page once more. It had come back empty on the MO, negative for links of any kind. Meaning they were dealing with a killer who, for the first time in his life, had cut somebody’s head and hands off, and shot two people, and had never done these things before. And probably had Terri Tait at his mercy right now.

  He put in a call to Jack Whaley at OPP Behavioural Sciences.

  “Jack. John Cardinal, here. I keep coming back to the ViCLAS report you guys gave us.”

  “Your dead biker. Negative, as I recall. No hits whatsoever.”

  “That’s right. But I have a strong sense that this is not the killer’s first time. Removing the victim’s extremities while he’s still alive. The scene was too prepared. The guy had his magic marks on the walls, he had the knives to cut through bone and ligaments, he had something ready to carry them away in, and something to catch the blood. This was not spur of the moment.”

  “Okay, I’ve got your case up on the screen. No runs, no hits.”

  “And under MO have you got the missing extremities, including the head?”

  “We do.”

  “And you have the hieroglyphics on the walls?”

  “We do.”

  “And that’s the report you sent us, right? Totally negative.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What happened when you ran it without the hieroglyphics?”

  “I don’t know. Did we run it without the hieroglyphics?”

&
nbsp; “Ken Szelagy put in a request that if it came back negative then to run everything the same except without the hieroglyphics.”

  “Where’d he put this request?”

  “Right in the form.” Cardinal flipped through the booklet. “In the comments section.”

  “Oh, yeah. I got it. But there’s a problem here, John.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s one of the glitches with ViCLAS. It can’t handle ‘and/or’ searches. Everything is strictly ‘and’ around here.”

  “You’re kidding me. This is a computer we’re dealing with, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. It’s also relatively new software. They’re still working out the bugs. Everyone knows we need the ‘and/or’ capability, they just haven’t been able to engineer it yet. They promise it’ll be here soon. Next generation of the software.”

  “I can’t believe this never got run, Jack. We’ve got a maniac on the loose up here, and he has at least one person captive. Maybe more.” Cardinal sighed. Computers were the twin scourge and saviour of law enforcement. “Can you run the search for me without the markings on the wall?”

  “I’m doing it right now. Give me a minute. It’s gonna take a few keystrokes. How’s Catherine, by the way?”

  “Just fine. And Martha?”

  “We split up. She finally figured out she didn’t like cops. Here we go. It’s running now.”

  “This won’t give us any hits from the States, will it?”

  “Nope. Strictly Canadian content, provincial and national. It’s a huge database we’ve got now, though. Better than anything south of the border. Down there, a lot of the states haven’t signed on, so you get—Oh. Here we go.”

  “What? Tell me. You got something?”

  “Give me a second.”

  Cardinal could hear Whaley tapping away at a keyboard. Then he came back on the line. “Okay. We’re really not supposed to do this, but I just pushed the button. You should have it in your e-mail as an attachment.”

  Cardinal opened up his e-mail. He clicked on New Mail, and the message popped into his inbox. He called it up and opened the attachment.

  “Go to the Linkages and Analysis heading. There won’t be any analysis, but you should see—”

  “I got ’em,” Cardinal said. “Okay. Take away the hieroglyphics and it looks like we’ve got three hits, all in Toronto. The first one ten years ago. That kid was found on a roof at Regent Park. I remember that—it was just after I left Toronto to move up here. I don’t recall anything about missing extremities, though.”

  “Probably it was a holdback at the time,” Whaley said. “To keep out the false confessions. Head, hands and feet missing, and they never cleared it. They must have been going crazy down there. Had a suspect, looks like.”

  “Raymond Beltran. Twenty-two years old at the time. No priors. But he had a grudge against the victim. He had an alibi, backed up by one Victor Vega.”

  “Old geezer. Paragon of virtue, no doubt.”

  “No doubt. Let me look at the other two.”

  Cardinal scrolled down the attachment to the next entry under Linkages, eight years previous. A body found in a shallow grave in the Rosedale Valley area of Toronto. Unidentified male. Head, hands and feet removed. No suspects.

  “I’m surprised they didn’t suspect Beltran on this one, too,” Cardinal said, “seeing how it came up just two years later. Also, Rosedale Valley Road is not all that far from Regent Park. But it looks like he wasn’t even questioned.”

  “It’s a matter of the dates, John. This one was found two years after the kid in Regent Park, but the condition of the body puts the killing eight years before the other one. Beltran wasn’t living here then; he was living in the States.”

  “The States?”

  “Florida, I think. Check the background notes.”

  Cardinal scrolled down to number three under Linkages. This one was from four years previous, also Toronto. A woman, twenty-five years old, goes missing from her Mississauga home and turns up two weeks later near Scarborough Beach minus head, hands and feet.

  “Number three is also uncleared,” Cardinal said.

  “I see that. Sort of thing could make you pessimistic. No shortage of suspects this time, I notice.”

  “Ex-boyfriend didn’t have an alibi, but they had no reason to suspect him other than the ex factor. Neighbour in the basement apartment was a known sexual predator, but not known to use a knife or weapon of any kind. They didn’t question Beltran about this one, either. The beach isn’t that far from Regent Park. Ten minutes by car.”

  “I can see why they wouldn’t question him. All they had on him was a grudge against victim number one. If they can’t make that stick, they have no link to the other two cases.”

  “You’re forgetting geography.”

  “Well, yeah, but two and a half million people share that geography.”

  There was a pause. Cardinal could hear Whaley breathing on the other end of the line.

  “I have to say, John. Looking at this, I wouldn’t link these three cases. Even MO, it’s not clear in the second case if the hands and so on were removed before death. That’s a big difference. So that leaves you geography plus MO on two cases, max. Not much there, my friend.”

  Cardinal cursed under his breath.

  “Yeah, I know how you feel.”

  “No, no. This is great stuff. I’m just trying to navigate my way around this gigantic document. I want to look at Beltran’s background. How do I get details on the suspects?”

  “You have to key in on the case number links. They’re underlined near the top of the—”

  “I got it. Thanks for all this, Jack.”

  “Listen, that electronic document you’re looking at is unofficial, all right? I’ll send you the real thing express mail. Have fun.”

  Cardinal scrolled through case notes about Raymond Beltran. No angel, this kid. Six charges on his juvenile record, and an aggravated assault had got him two years at a training school in Deep River.

  Then there were the Toronto cops’ comments about the suspect’s alibi, Victor Vega. Called himself Beltran’s uncle, but they weren’t blood relatives. Investigating officers couldn’t link him to the crime, but they noted that he seemed sullen and hostile.

  Beltran. Not a common name in Canada. Cardinal checked the ID summary. Mother, unemployed. Father, deceased. Citizenship, Canadian. Cardinal skimmed various contact summaries, and had just about given up on this angle when a comment leaped out at him: Mother says nothing has gone right for her since she emigrated from Cuba. Went from Havana to Miami in 1980. Toronto two years later. Says she gets no help from relatives in Havana.

  “Hey, Delorme.” Cardinal stopped her just as she was heading out. She paused with her hand on the doorknob. “Don’t even think about leaving. I think we just caught a break.”

  49

  “WE LIVE AND DIE BY contacts,” Chief Kendall liked to say, and Cardinal was now putting that maxim to the test. He had spent ten years on the Toronto force, and he now tapped every source and called in every favour he could think of.

  Delorme, on the other hand, had spent as little time in Toronto as possible. But one of the central realities of a cop’s life is continuing education—investigative techniques, developments in the collection of evidence, the latest in forensics, criminal psychology, agency liaison—there’s no end to the ingenuity of the people who arrange such things, and cops don’t mind going because they’re a prime source of new contacts.

  Between the two of them, Cardinal and Delorme managed to put together a considerable file on a person whose name, just a few hours previously, had been utterly unknown to them.

  Tony Glaser, probation officer: “Raymond Beltran? I came across Raymond Beltran fifteen, sixteen years ago. He was sixteen or seventeen, on probe for bashing some kid over the head with a shovel. In some ways, he was the ideal probation customer. Punctual, neat, followed all the rules. Part of the order was that he had to go back
to school full time, and he did. Went every day at nine, left at 3:30 with everyone else. Perfect attendance for two years.

  “He was quiet, polite, always told you what you wanted to know. Gave no signs whatsoever of hostility. The only negative was he wouldn’t talk. Not really talk. He’d answer questions with a single syllable if he could get away with it. A shake of the head, maybe, if he was feeling demonstrative.

  “And he behaved himself, at least on my watch. No further incidents. But a couple of things he did gave me pause. One example: We’re out for a walk one afternoon and we see this woman walking with a cat on her shoulder. I happen to mention that I have a cat at home. And Raymond asked me, ‘Have you ever seen the inside of a cat?’ Naturally I said no, and he said, ‘I have.’ I don’t know about you, but I find that remark a little unsettling.

  “When I asked him how it came about that he had seen the inside of a cat, he said they’d dissected one in biology class. I didn’t believe it. In the first place, they always use frogs or fetal pigs for that. In the second place, he was only in grade eleven. He wasn’t taking biology.

  “Another time, I was pointing out to him that his two years were nearly up. ‘Two years,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why they gave me two years for bashing Bobby Blackmore over the head. I’ve done way worse things than that, and nobody seemed upset.’ ‘Like what?’ I said. But he clammed up the way he always did and you knew there was just no getting anything more out of him. He was one of those guys you just know on first sight there’s something wrong with them. Something missing. You watch your back with Raymond Beltran, that’s all I can say. You want more background, try the Catholic Children’s Aid. The mother was a nightmare.”

  Delorme had met a protection worker named Sandra Mayhew when they had both served on a panel at a Women and Criminal Law conference in the nineties. Mayhew had been on the front lines of Toronto social work for ten years and had seen just about everything.