Authors: Giles Blunt
“And the footprints?”
“Like I say, we’re following up a lot of threads.”
She looked him up and down. “Maybe I was wrong. It doesn’t look like you can help me at all. Thanks for your time.”
Cardinal got into his car and switched on the ignition to warm it up. He pulled out his notebook and started jotting down a list of calls he had to make. Ms. Vaughan pulled up beside him in a tan Focus and rolled down her window.
Cardinal pressed the button on the armrest.
“You know, Detective, I bet I know more than you do at this point.”
“For instance?”
“For instance, the identities of the victims.” She flicked a strand of hair out of her eyes. Her brows were dark, and the contrast gave her eyes an added intensity. “Their names are Lev and Irena Bastov. Russian extraction, but they’re both U.S. nationals.”
“Uh-huh. And how would you know that?”
“The story I’m working on? It’s about the Russian mafia—and please don’t spread that around, because I’d kind of like to stay alive.” She drove away before her window was finished closing.
“W
E KNOW WHO THEY ARE,”
Delorme said when Cardinal arrived in the squad room. “We’ve got IDs!”
“Let me guess,” Cardinal said. “Lev and Irena Bastov.”
Delorme looked deflated. “How’d you find out?”
“Doesn’t matter. How’d
you
find out?”
“Woman up at the fur auction called in a missing person. They were staying at the Highlands Lodge. We should head up there right now.”
“Let Ident get started on their own. We’ve got the autopsy this morning. Just give me a minute and we can catch the next plane—I’m not driving on the 400 again.”
Cardinal sat at his desk without removing his coat, pulled out the business card Donna Vaughan had given him and dialed the
New York Post
. It being Sunday, there was no upper management available, but Cardinal finally got connected to an editor.
“Donna Vaughan? Yes, she used to be on staff here.”
“Why did she leave?”
“I can’t discuss anybody’s work history, Detective—too likely to end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit. I can confirm that she was on staff and that she left about a year ago, and that’s it.”
Cardinal had googled Donna Vaughan as they spoke. Several stories popped up with her byline, mostly about fashion.
“You coming or what?” Delorme was standing beside his desk, looking annoyed.
—
They caught an Air Canada flight to Toronto and arrived at the morgue a little early. Cardinal made a few calls, but Delorme just sat staring at the row of wellington boots lined up on a high shelf. A list of funeral homes and phone numbers was tacked up next to the door, and a hand-lettered sign above the sinks said
Caution: Chlorine + Ammonia = Poison!
Eventually the door opened and Dr. Elmer Spork was saying hello and introducing his assistant, a petite, intense woman named Tranh, who was about half his height. He took off his sports coat and threw on surgical scrubs and a plastic apron. He didn’t look anything like you might imagine a pathologist would look. Although he must have been fifty, he had curly blond hair and the youthful, robust air of someone who has just won a game of tennis. A memory stick dangled from a cord around his neck.
The two bodies were already laid out in the autopsy room, with the heads, which had been flown down earlier. “We put them through the X-ray this morning,” Dr. Spork said. He snapped on the light boxes, and ribcages, femurs and arm bones lit up. “As you can see, we didn’t pick up anything unusual. No blade or bullet fragments.” He snapped off the light again and went over to the male body.
“I have a dumb question,” Delorme said. “How do you know a particular head belongs to a particular body? How do you know there isn’t some other corpse somewhere minus a head?”
Dr. Spork pointed to the neck area. “Skin tone is the first thing we go by. As you see, we have a perfect match here. Also, the width of the neck. Again a perfect match. Plus, we already took blood samples from each part and we have a match in blood types. That’s not definitive, but we’ve sent the samples to the lab for DNA analysis. But the crucial thing, at least with well-preserved bone and tissue, is the matching trauma.”
He tipped the head neck-up, and Delorme’s stomach did a half turn.
One minute the body looks like a young woman, then he’s turning the head upside down without moving the trunk.
“We can pair up the damage on both sections of cervical spine,” Dr. Spork continued, “same as a broken chair leg. Severed between C5 and C6, in this case, with matching damage to 5. Obviously with decayed remains it’d be a different story.”
Dr. Spork switched on his overhead mike. He announced the date and time, case name and number, and the names of those present. “I’m sure your coroner already noted that the severing of the heads took place post mortem. There’s no bleeding into the bone.”
He examined the female first, from head to toe. He raised his voice to say, “Lividity indicates she was killed where she sat.” Then he made the Y incision and removed the organs. By the time the chest was turned inside out, the body ceased to look human and Delorme’s stomach settled down. Dr. Spork didn’t address them directly again until he had finished with the torso and extremities.
“Negative for disease or trauma,” he said. “The head, obviously, is going to be another matter. We have two bullet wounds—entry wound in the left parietal region nine millimetres in diameter, ragged exit through the right parietal approximately fifteen centimetres in diameter.”
His assistant started up the Stryker saw. Dr. Spork removed the cap of the skull with its beautiful hair. Smell of burnt bone. Dr. Spork placed the brain in a pan and dissected it with a few swift strokes. “Bullet ricocheted around in there, crossing both hemispheres and ripping a hole in the brain stem. That would have shut down pretty much all the vital organs, so that’s our cause of death.”
He turned his attention to the male, muttering into the mike, raising his voice when he had any finding of interest. Lividity again indicated death in the seated position. “Liver’s enlarged. This guy liked a drink.” A little later he held up a cross-section of heart. “Left ventricle’s virtually closed. Short of a transplant, he didn’t have a lot of time left.”
Once again the finding was death by gunshot wound to the head.
“Not much so far,” Delorme said as they got into the elevator. “Hardly worth coming down here.”
“Ah, but now we get to see Cornelius Venn,” Cardinal said. “The wizard of firearms and toolmarks. I think I’ll let you handle Mr. Venn.”
“I can’t believe we’ve got that guy for both ballistics and toolmarks. He’s such a dork. And you always make me deal with him.”
“Because you look so cute when you’re upset.”
“That’s inappropriate in so many ways I’m not even going to count them.”
“I know. I’ve been studying under McLeod.”
Outside, they breathed in deep lungfuls of cold air—even Toronto’s atmosphere could be refreshing after the morgue—and headed around the corner to the Forensic Centre.
“I don’t have anything for you.” This from Cornelius Venn, a bony little stork of a man who always spoke in a strange sub-glottal whine, as if there were a small bottle lodged in his throat. “If I did have anything for you, I would have called. That would have been the proper protocol.”
What was it with Venn? He always came on as if you had committed against him some well-known outrage, unaddressed by the proper authorities. Delorme made an effort at Buddhist serenity—otherwise she might have smacked him. “Could you just tell us what you have so far?”
“All I can say is that the heads were severed by a weighted blade. An axe or an axe-like object.”
Cardinal laughed. Venn beamed a level-four scowl at him.
“You must be able to tell more than that,” Delorme said. “You have photographs of the wounds. What do you see under the microscope?”
“Detective, are you aware of
Crown versus Toft
in New Brunswick?”
“No, Mr. Venn, I am not up to date on New Brunswick case law.”
“You should be. Rudiger Toft was convicted of stabbing a man to death five years ago, largely on toolmarks evidence. The superior court overturned the conviction, because the so-called expert had testified that the wound in question had been caused by a certain knife—i.e., a particular knife
to the exclusion of all others
, as the law books have it. Which was far beyond his actual expertise. And if you think I’m going to join him in the thin-ice club, you are grossly mistaken.”
“I’m not asking you to swear to anything. I’m just asking for what you’ve got.”
“I won’t have anything useful until you have an actual weapon for me to compare with the wounds. I can tell you that both decapitations were performed using the same blade. And it was obviously not the knife in the male victim’s back.”
“There you go, Cornelius. See, you do have something after all. Don’t sell yourself so short. And you know this how?”
“There are crush marks in the damaged tissue, which you’d only get with the weight of an axe or something similar. Striations in the neck cartilage are identical in both cases, but totally dissimilar to test markings with the knife.”
“And what about that knife?”
“It’s a Bark River Upland hunting knife. Barely used, I’d say. Fixed blade, not folding, in the so-called skinner style.”
“So the sort of thing a trapper would use?”
“Let’s not go leaping to conclusions. Yes, it is designed to field dress and skin large game. But point two, it’s also expensive, and point three, it’s a popular item with survivalists. Most trappers these days would be more likely to go for the newer drop-point style of blade.”
“So it might be the choice of an older man?”
“Leap, leap, leap, Detective. I’ll just stay on solid ground, if you don’t mind.”
“Detective Cardinal, did you have any questions for Mr. Venn?”
“No, indeed.”
“Okay. Well, I guess I have just one last one.”
“Really,” Venn said. “How pleasant.”
“Have you ever considered taking antidepressants? Zoloft? Prozac? Might make your life a lot easier.”
“Perhaps you’re unaware, Detective Delorme, that the SSRIs have the known side effect of interfering with sexual function.”
Delorme had to leave before he said any more. She checked her watch and said something about making their plane.
“Good to be out of there,” Cardinal said when they were out on the street again. “That was terrifying.”
“Yeah. Weighted blades and all.”
“No, no. The thought that Cornelius Venn has a sex life.”
S
AM DOUCETTE HAD SPENT THE
entire weekend shuttered in her room, only coming out for meals. From the first moment she had heard that word,
beheaded
, she had barely been able to move. She told her mother she had a big art project due for class—and she did work on her drawings—but she kept switching obsessively from the radio to the Web, checking the news reports for any mention of witnesses or “persons of interest.”
She picked up Pootkin, small warm bundle, but the cat squirmed away and leapt onto the windowsill and sat there whapping the wall with her tail.
Randall hadn’t called. He would have to know about the murders by now; he must know how frightened Sam was. But he didn’t call. She wanted him to put a strong arm around her shoulders, to tell her everything would be all right. She wanted a police car with two burly officers in it to park outside her house twenty-four hours a day and follow her at a not too discreet distance. She wanted a muscly bodyguard in a black turtleneck and an earpiece to walk beside her looking intimidating.
Reason told her that the best policy would be to go about her normal routine as if nothing was wrong. She opened her closet and dug out a mid-length denim coat with a woolly collar and lining. Her down coat, torn and bloodied, was jammed in the back of a shelf. She dug out a beret she hadn’t
worn this year. Her father had given it to her and she had to admit it was pretty cute. But one day Lisa Culkin had said, “Hey, you look great, Sam—just like a Girl Guide.” Which was probably why her father liked it, the serious air it imparted to his frivolous, wayward daughter who only wanted to study art and nothing, as he put it, “real.”
She grabbed her backpack and went out to the garage and looked at the back end of the Civic. Beret, backpack, different coat—it’s not me he’s going to recognize, she figured, it’s this damn car. The garage was her father’s domain—when he was home. The walls were covered with shelves full of tools, hardware, bits of lumber and parts of machines he intended to fix but never did. He also kept his hunting gear out here. Not his guns, but his tents and sleeping bags and a canoe hoisted up on ropes. There was the Vixen Excalibur crossbow he had taught her to use, his longbows, and arrows in various states of repair. His current walkabout must be just a hiking trip, because most of his hunting stuff seemed to be there.
She rooted around on the shelves and the workbench and found an open tub of Polyfilla. She had to pry the top off with a screwdriver. The stuff inside looked usable.
The how-to sites said you were supposed to fill the hole with mesh or wire wool first, but the hole was so small that didn’t seem necessary. She scooped out some of the compound and smoothed it over the damaged metal. It looked about as much like a bullet hole filled in as a bullet hole could look. It would be hard to match the paint, but she planned to bring a couple of tubes back from the college and give it a try.
The tail light was another matter. She had called the Honda dealership and they’d told her they could have the part in two days and it would cost her more than a week’s pay. They took a deposit off her credit card, which with her student credit limit left her about fifty cents’ further flexibility.
She caught the bus up to the college and spent the afternoon in drawing class. They had a nude model—a girl from the drama department with big shoulders and beautiful breasts. Sam wondered for a moment if she might be a little bit lesbian, but then she remembered Randall’s body and the things he did to her and decided it was not possible.