Authors: Giles Blunt
“Forty years,” Delorme said. “Incredible.”
No sound but the scrape of ice against their hull. Hundreds of feet below, the water was perfectly clear. The zoom lens lurched into extreme close-up, swerving from one detail to another: a jagged hole in the hull, then another, both made from the inside. The diver’s light flared off sharp edges of aluminum. Then a third gash.
“Look at that,” Cardinal said. “The axe is still wedged in it.”
The view swung back to the bodies, extreme close-up, the white gleam of neck bone.
—
Aromas of fresh coffee and pastries filled the meeting room. All the CID personnel were there, and Chouinard was so excited he had even called Police Chief R. J. Kendall to sit in on the debriefing. The mood was festive, even triumphant.
“You’re losing me,” Chouinard said, in urgency, not anger. “Who was it dies of leukemia?”
“Curtis Carl Winston. Eighteen-year-old brother of Martin Scriver’s girlfriend. Never did anything suspicious in his life until he joined the army—which wouldn’t be suspicious either, except for the fact he did it two months
after
he died.”
“So we think Martin Scriver killed his parents and took off? He joins the army using someone else’s identity?”
“Back then, all you needed was the name of a dead person close to your own age. He gets a few years in the military, Northern Rangers—where, incidentally, he becomes intimately familiar with the Browning HP nine-mil, their official sidearm at the time.”
“And he keeps the name ever since?”
“There’d be no need to change it. No one was looking for Curt Winston, and it’s not like it’s such a peculiar name there couldn’t be more than one person with it. Also, he moved to the States soon after discharge. FBI New York is pulling out all the stops for us on this. They’ve already traced Winston back to several different businesses going back to the seventies—tanneries, fur farms, always stuff connected to the fur trade. He was located for a long time near Seattle, and also just north of New York—both fur auction centres. We’re making a list of our locals who’ve been in the business for decades and we’re going to start talking to them tomorrow.”
“Back up a minute.” Chief Kendall raised his hand as if to halt oncoming traffic. “Just because the boy’s body is not found with his parents doesn’t make him a murderer. His body could have drifted away. He could have been kidnapped. He could have been killed somewhere else.”
Cardinal pulled a photo from the folder in front of him. “Got this from Armed Forces archives. Curtis Winston’s enlistment photo.” He handed it to the chief and reached into his briefcase and pulled out a book. “Chippewa High School yearbook, 1969. Take a look at Martin Scriver’s picture. It would have been taken about a year earlier.”
“Fantastic,” Kendall said. “This is very good work.”
“Martin Scriver had some problems with violence—put a hockey referee in hospital, for example. I’m thinking he lost it with his parents, possibly over something trivial, and he went crazy with the axe. We’ve got two cases in the States where a couple and their child are murdered. And Bastov
would have been a third, except the son had to miss his flight. In some screwed-up way, he could be re-enacting the crime over and over again.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I’m not saying it’s sane. Maybe to suggest there are other killers out there—killers who attack couples and their kids and chop them up. A twisted way to imply he never killed his parents, that it was the work of itinerant strangers.”
“He’s murdering people to prove his innocence? Until today, nobody even knew for sure the Scrivers had been murdered.”
“He did. It’s himself he’d be trying to convince.”
Chouinard nodded at Jerry Commanda. “The lake is OPP territory. Are you guys going to boot us off?”
“Oh no, sir. Scriver’s been a joint operation since the beginning of time. We’re happy to keep it that way. Besides, it’s totally bound up with Bastov.”
“I take it that’s from your evidence warehouse?” Chouinard pointed at the banker’s box on the table in front of Jerry.
Jerry tapped the top with a long index finger. “Martin Scriver’s stuff from the cottage. He left everything behind, even his wallet—probably to make it look like he was a victim. We got a toothbrush, and a hairbrush with some hairs in it could be useful for DNA. It’s at the Orillia lab. We have prints that were lifted from the cottage and from his wallet.”
“I love this,” Chouinard said, and turned to Chief Kendall. “Don’t you love this?”
“I’ll love it more when we have someone behind bars.”
C
ARDINAL WAS NOT MUCH GIVEN
to parties or celebrations. But police work rarely went better than it had gone this day, so when Donna came round that night with a bottle of champagne in one hand and her notebook in the other, he was uncharacteristically effusive.
They clinked glasses and he sat in the recliner and she sat on the end of the couch, pen poised above her notebook. She wanted to use a recording device but didn’t protest when he said no. “Learning shorthand,” she said, “is my one undeniable achievement in life.”
Cardinal related the day’s events, beginning with his search through the ancient Scriver file. “It’s amazing,” he said. “When you get right down to it, a good file is a cop’s best friend. Routine interview, forty years ago, but the guy who did that interview made a careful note of a name. Completely peripheral—the son’s girlfriend’s
brother
, for God’s sake, you can’t get much more peripheral than that—and there it is, waiting for me forty years later.”
“But it was you who thought there might be a connection,” Donna said. “Let’s not be too modest here.”
Cardinal shrugged. “The name Winston rang a bell, that’s all.” He sat up and pulled the champagne from the ice bucket and filled her glass. “Champagne in the middle of the week. I can’t believe I’m this decadent.”
It was making him light-headed, not his usual response to alcohol. Or perhaps it had more to do with this extremely attractive woman and her serious grey eyes. He told her about the new sonar, about the diver sinking into the black water, and about everything else, right up to the matching photographs. Then he sat back and said, “I never talk about my cases. I feel like a blabbermouth.”
“But you’re hardly saying anything at all.” She tipped her head back in a silent laugh, exposing that pale throat, the perfect sculpture of neck and collarbone.
The phone rang and Cardinal talked to Jerry Commanda for a few minutes, about their plan for the next day. “I got your list of the fur business lifers,” Jerry said. “You want some help interviewing them? Could generate a lead on where the guy’s holed up. Of course, if he has any sense, he’ll be long gone by now.”
“I don’t think so,” Cardinal said. “I think he has unfinished business here. He killed Mendelsohn, and he may have come after an American reporter who’s been covering the fur business and the Bastovs for a couple of years.”
He was looking at Donna as he spoke. She came over and knelt beside his chair and started undoing the buttons of his shirt.
Jerry asked if the reporter was getting extra protection.
“I’m working on that.” The heat of her fingers on his skin, undoing his belt. He grabbed her hand and held it while he finished with Jerry. “Listen, tomorrow I’m going to have the FBI’s complete file. It should arrive before ten. I’ll be taking a quick look at that and then I’m heading out to Lloyd Kreeger’s place. He’s the oldest guy on our list.”
Jerry agreed to assign some of the others to OPP detectives and they would confer again in the afternoon.
“What list?” Donna said when he hung up. She was still kneeling in front of him, hands on his thighs. “Who’s Lloyd Kreeger?”
“Lloyd Kreeger is the oldest living man in the fur industry, at least around here. Also the richest. We’ve got a list of old-timers in the business who might recognize the airport security photo of our suspect. Until we get a direct lead on this guy’s whereabouts, it’s back to plod, plod, plod.”
“You have a photo of your suspect and you weren’t going to show me?”
“Didn’t even think of it, I got so excited about Scriver. We even have a name now. I can show you, but you can’t have a copy and you can’t tell anybody.”
“No, that’s all right. Show me when you feel comfortable with it. Right now I’d rather just undo this belt.”
Later, when she was putting on her clothes, Cardinal asked her to stay. “Look, the guy may have come after you before. He could try again.”
“He chopped up a couple of people, he killed a cop and that ATM kid—do you honestly believe he’s still in the area?”
“The OPP doesn’t. But I think he might be.”
“I don’t.”
“Yeah, but you also thought he was Russian
mafiya.”
“Touché.” She zipped up her jeans and pulled on her sweater.
“Really, Donna—you might not be safe out there.”
“All right, all right. Enough already.” A glint of anger in those grey eyes. “Sorry,” she said, and her face softened. “I’ve had bad experiences with people looking after me. I guess I overreact. Don’t get up. What are you doing?”
“I’m walking you to your car.” Cardinal pulled on his pants and a sweater. “And don’t overreact.”
—
In the morning, Cardinal had Mendelsohn’s copy of the FBI file spread out on the meeting room table next to the new copy that had just arrived. Using both hands, he was turning over pages one by one, old file to the left, new file to the right.
Also open on the desk, Mendelsohn’s tiny notebook. He had flipped through it again and found a note that he let linger in the back of his mind as he scanned the FBI files.
Simultaneous crimes
, the note said,
from major to petty. Check. THINK!
Mendelsohn’s notes were in the same emphatic voice as his speech, and Cardinal had a vivid image of the man in Morgan’s Chop House, explaining, italicizing, gesturing with his fork.
Mendelsohn was right about the simultaneous crimes, of course. They knew the ATM robberies were committed by Winston’s young associate. But other crimes? Maybe in New York, but right now in Algonquin Bay there was nothing. As far as they knew.
Cardinal paused, a hand on either file. Under both hands a handwritten note scrawled across an otherwise blank page:
Begelman—photos to ViCap
.
Under his left hand, a file of some fifteen hundred pages. Under his right hand, the same thing—plus a manila envelope. He lifted it out from under the stack and opened it and pulled out scans of original photos. The scans were excellent, the U.S. federal government being significantly better funded than a small Ontario police department. Even the captions at the bottom of each one were sharp.
Some were crime scene photos, courtesy of the NYPD. Nine-mil casings, headless torso, shattered computer screen. Cardinal flipped through these quickly. Then he came to a picture of a ramshackle old house partly hidden by trees, the caption
Zabriskie Farm. Search following phone tip
.
Cardinal read the note on the search. They were looking for a young man named Jack, who according to the anonymous caller lived at the Zabriskie farm and seemed to know a lot about the Elmira murders. The place was occupied by a bunch of young people, most of them students at the state university located a few miles up the Hudson. Jack had come to the farm after meeting one of the students in a local bar. He’d only stayed two days, and they were glad to see him go. Photos of his room showed a bare mattress, a bare floor, a dog-eared copy of
The Art of War
.
There were pictures of the residents, three on the porch steps, another couple in the kitchen. Cardinal could picture the police technique. They had no reason to arrest these people, but they wanted a record—faces to go with names—so they had taken the pictures in a casual way. It was something cops did for the sake of a complete file. There were two young women and two boys, early to mid-twenties all of them, and none looked like the vague description from the anonymous call: eighteen-year-old white male, five-ten, short hair. But Cardinal returned to the photo of the group on the porch and looked closer. He went very still and held on to it for a long time.
—
As far as Lise Delorme was concerned, Cardinal was behaving oddly. They had been scheduled to drive out to the Kreeger place, but instead of leaving together, he had told her to pick him up at the Highlands Lodge; he had to
go out there and interview the manager again for some reason. It would have made more sense for them to just stop on the way, but he didn’t want to hear about it.
So here she was parked in the Highlands parking lot, watching the skiers riding the hoist to the top of the escarpment. They were dressed in all manner of the latest gear, some even wearing balaclavas. The temperature was dropping and showed no sign of doing anything else for the rest of the day. Storm clouds were cascading over the hills, heading for Parry Sound, according to the radio.
When Cardinal finally emerged, he pointed to his red Camry. Delorme got out and locked the unmarked. She went over to the Camry and opened the door. “Shouldn’t we use the company car?”
“Mine’s got better snow tires.”
She got in and he had the car moving before she had the belt done up. He took a right on Sutton, merged onto the highway and headed north. She was curious about his stop at the Highlands, and normally she wouldn’t have thought twice about asking him. But Cardinal didn’t speak or even look at her, and his mouth was set in a hard line. She was fed up lately with trying to pry answers out of him, so she made an inner vow to say exactly nothing unless spoken to.
They passed the first subdivisions, and then Trout Lake on the right.
“It’s getting so dark,” Delorme said, and then remembered she had meant to stay silent.
Cardinal didn’t respond. She couldn’t tell if he was angry or worried. He was utterly transparent about small things; whenever he was irritated or impatient, she knew instantly. But it was precisely when he was feeling the most that he became most unreadable. All those times his wife had been admitted to hospital, you never would have known from his day-today behaviour. A little quieter maybe, nothing more than that.