Until the Night (17 page)

They drove the rest of the way to his apartment building in silence. Delorme parked in his spot and handed over the keys.

“I’ll walk you home,” Cardinal said.

“Don’t be silly. It’s two minutes.”

Cardinal went with her. They walked uphill side by side, both with their hands in their pockets. A thin dusting of snow glittered in the street lights. Distant sound of a freight train heading south.

When they reached her house, Delorme stopped at the front path and started to thank him again, but Cardinal found himself speaking over her words. “I just have to say this,” he said. “I’m really happy when I’m with you. That’s all. Simple, true, and it’s not champagne talking. I’m really happy when I’m with you.”

Delorme squinted at him. Gave him the full Clint Eastwood he’d seen her use on thugs and lawyers, not to mention those colleagues whose commitment to honesty was imperfect. “What did you just say?”

“Nothing. I’ll see you Monday. You’re in Monday, right?”

“John, wait.” Her voice softened. Her hand—gloved, small—alighted on his forearm, a touch barely perceptible through his parka. “I’m just not sure I heard what you said.”

“I just said I’m happy when I’m with you, that’s all.”

“Oh, that’s all.”

“It just seems to be a fact. I guess it’s obvious. It just suddenly struck me, that’s all.”

“Oh, that’s all,” she said again. Those skeptical eyes looking up at him, those lips slightly parted.

Cardinal takes hold of her shoulders and kisses her. In the cold of the night, the sudden heat of her mouth responding to him. Her hand reaching up and coming to rest on the back of his neck. And the whole time they’re kissing, he has the feeling he’s just stepped out of an airplane at thirty thousand feet.

In the course of her police career, Delorme had come across any number of paranoids. Her egregious colleague Ian McLeod was a prime example.
But before meeting Senior Detective Vernon Loach, she had never encountered a reverse paranoid. Loach seemed to cherish the delusion that people were out to do him good behind his back.

“No, I was talking to a producer at CBC,” he was yelling to someone on the phone, possibly even his wife, poor woman. “And I think they’re going to do a whole profile on me … like an actual biography thing.”

Only if they’re developing a satire, Delorme thought, and scanned an entry in Marjorie Flint’s e-mail address list for the third time. Earlier, Loach had suggested to some unfortunate that Judge Roselyn Tate, the newest—and certainly the prettiest—member of the Superior Court, had a crush on him.

Loach was not bad-looking. Delorme could allow him that much. But he was one of those people who have regular features, a good build, a reasonable wardrobe, and no sex appeal whatsoever. Put him beside Cardinal and it was like he wasn’t even in the room—except for his ego.

She thought again about that kiss. No telling where that was going to lead; they had ventured into uncharted territory. But she was feeling an excitement she hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. It worried her a little—more than a little—and she told herself to focus on work.

She put her hands over her ears to block out Loach and tried to concentrate on the lists of contacts—names, numbers and e-mail addresses—that had once been the private property of Laura Lacroix and Marjorie Flint.

The senator’s wife had lived in Ottawa, Laura Lacroix in Algonquin Bay’ the chances of their having many people in common were slim. She did a search for 613 in Lacroix’s address book and came up with three Ottawa phone numbers: a couple named Sal and Jackie Gottlieb, Club Risqué and Leonard Priest. None of these showed among Marjorie Flint’s contacts.

Delorme worked her way through the entries one by one, marking off each one with an asterisk. Every now and then she’d get a flutter when there was a match between the two address books, but so far these had turned out to be national concerns such as Air Canada, the Bank of Montreal or Fairmont Hotels.

She tried to cheer herself up by remembering that even if she ruled out common connections, it was valuable information. Valuable, but not exciting. She kept wishing Cardinal would show up. They hadn’t spoken since the party, and over the rest of the weekend she’d found a ridiculous
anticipation building up. Sunday evening she’d called an old friend, Claire Nadeau, and told her what had happened.

Claire’s enthusiasm was complete and unhesitating—surprising, since Delorme herself was far from certain this was a positive development.

“We work together,” Delorme reminded her. “What if it doesn’t work out? It’ll be horrible.”

“Don’t be such a pessimist. Ever since the day you moved back to Algonquin Bay, you’ve been talking about this guy.”

“As a colleague, not as a—”

“Bullshit, honey. You’ve always had this tone about him, how if only he wasn’t married.”

“I have not.”

“Oh yes you have.”

“I have not.”

“Lise. Listen to your voice—you’re totally thrilled. It’s wonderful. Are you going to screw it up now by getting all negative?”

Delorme had tried to make Claire see that she was just being reasonable. Cautious. It’s not like she was twenty-one, for Pete’s sake. And yet here she was checking the clock every ten minutes.

At twelve-thirty, she put on her parka and went outside. Sunlight bouncing off the snowbanks made her eyes water. She was halfway across the parking lot when Cardinal called her name. He was at the side entrance, in shirt sleeves.

“Lise, where you headed?”

“I was just going to pick up a sandwich and bring it back. You want me to bring you something?”

“Hop in the car. We’ll pick up something on the way.”

“Way where?”

“Astor Bay. Arsenault came up with something good.”

He told her about it on the way out to Astor Bay. Arsenault had finally managed to pin down the piece of snowmobile cowling. It matched an Arctic Cat 660 Turbo model produced between 2007 and 2009.

“Turbo. That’s where the
rb
lettering came from?”

“Right.”

“And how’d he get the date range?”

“In his words? ‘Easy. They changed the font.’ ”

“Love that database.”

“Actually, it’s called Dents ‘n’ Dings. Place out on 63 sells scrap snowmobiles. He just went out there with that piece of plastic and browsed till he found a match. I’ve spent the morning going through reported snowmobile thefts.”

“Are we sure it’s stolen?”

“No, but it’s a good bet.”

“Where were you doing this?”

Cardinal looked at her. “Where?”

“You haven’t been at your desk. I didn’t even know you were in.”

There was an odd tone in Delorme’s voice. It made Cardinal a little nervous.

“I stayed in Ident,” he said. “Collingwood’s out, so I just sat at his desk and started running through what we had. Why?”

“Nothing. There must’ve been a ton of snowmobile thefts.”

“Not of that model, not in black and silver. And I focused on a week either side of the day Marjorie Flint was abducted. That gives us three possibles. Printout’s in my briefcase, top folder. I love it when footwork pays off, don’t you?”

“You’ve got True North dealership as our first stop? If you want to steal a snowmobile, why would you go to a place that’s well lit and has alarm systems and video cameras?”

“It’s closest. We’ll rule it out and move on.”

The showroom of True North, with its gleaming Yamahas and Ski-Doos, was deserted except for the manager himself. Apparently the snow-poor season was raising his stress levels. When Cardinal and Delorme identified themselves, he put on an elaborate show of being surprised to see them.

“Two weeks ago I called. Two weeks, and now you show up? Guy could’ve driven the thing out to B.C. in that time.”

Cardinal didn’t want to get into it. “Your statement of complaint says the suspect took it out for a test drive. How’d he manage that? We haven’t had any snow.”

“Actually we had about four inches two weeks ago,” Delorme said.

“Not that it stayed,” the manager added with bitterness.

“Did you get some ID before you gave him the keys?”

“Two pieces. I can show you, but one’s fake and the credit card’s stolen. Believe me, afterwards I checked.”

Cardinal pointed to the security camera above the counter. “You have the security tape?”

“We
gave
you the security tape. Two days after it happened. What’s wrong with you people?”

The initial complaint had been taken by Ian McLeod. McLeod was a good investigator, except when a case bored him, which this one clearly had.

Cardinal apologized. “There was no note of it in the file, unfortunately.”

“Typical. I
love
paying taxes, don’t you? Luckily, I kept the original. You can watch it in my office.”

He took them to his office and opened the safe. He pulled out the photo ID and handed it to them. Cardinal could see right away that a new picture had been rephotographed over the original. The manager put a disc into a player.

They watched a squarish, chunky man talking with a salesman, pointing to the window, the lot outside.

“He took the Arctic Cat, right?” Cardinal said. “Silver and black?”

“Silver and black. A 2008 model with barely a scratch on it.”

Cardinal turned to Delorme. “Did you have any questions?”

“I think we have what we need.”

It wasn’t like Delorme to be so quiet during an investigation. Cardinal found it a little unsettling. He thanked the manager and promised to be in touch if they found anything.

When they were back in the car, Delorme said, “I can’t see anyone who plans a murder of this kind putting his face on a security camera. I hope we don’t have to go visit his phony address now.”

“Let’s get Sergeant Flower on it.” Cardinal pulled out his cellphone and dialed.

Delorme shook her head.

“What? Flower loves stuff like this.”

“Loves doing it for you, maybe. If I tried that, she’d snap my head off.”

Cardinal was already speaking into the phone. He gave the address and a couple of parameters to follow, made a joke, and rang off.

He could feel Delorme getting annoyed. Whether it was at him or not, he wasn’t sure. He thought again about their kiss of the other night. Exciting, yes, but he knew they had to talk about it. Probably she did too and it was making her edgy.

He wasn’t used to being nervous with Delorme, and he was aware of his own peculiar reaction. It made him chatty, not at all his usual style, rattling on about what a great job Ident was doing, about the “snowmobile database,” about the Ottawa people running down everything they could find on that tree house. “They’ve even got some cryptography guys at the RCMP looking at the number 25, seeing if they can relate it to anything to do with Marjorie Flint. You know, it occurs to me her table number at that fundraiser was 25.”

“I’m sure that’s the key, John. Take a week off. Your work is done here.”

Cardinal glanced at her, but she kept her eyes on the oncoming traffic.

“Hey. It’s called brainstorming, Lise.”

“If you say so.”

“You’re usually the one with the hare-brained ideas—”