By the Time You Read This (29 page)

“The woman is your wife, I believe,” he said, as Cardinal pulled the last disc from the player.

“That’s right.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Detective. I’m surprised you’re back at work so soon. It must be unbearable for you to watch this.”

“Someone has to stop Bell from killing any more patients.” Cardinal could hear the rumblings of rage in his own voice. He added, more softly, “He needs to be put away.”

Pierce leaned toward Cardinal. He hadn’t made a single note on the yellow legal pad before him. “Listen,” he whispered. “We’ve presented some difficult cases together, you and I—won most of them, too. Largely because you’re very good at organizing your cases and finding evidence to back up evidence.”

“I have Bell’s thumbprint on—”

“Let me finish. I can’t even begin to imagine what you think there is in these recordings that might lead to a criminal charge. If you were new on the force, I would be on that phone right now to Chief Kendall asking him where the hell he found you. Because you don’t have here even the semblance of a case.”

“I have his thumbprint on my wife’s suicide note. I have forensics that prove it was written months ago—back in July—and he didn’t suggest hospitalization, didn’t mention it to anyone.” Careful, he told himself, keep it calm and rational.

“Even accepting what you say at face value, that might be construed as malpractice—a civil matter—and no one would bring that case to court based on a thumbprint on a note. No one from my office.”

“We’re not talking about one case here. You saw him with Perry Dorn. The kid is completely suicidal, yet again and again he turns the conversation back to the most painful subjects: she left you, she rejected you, you gave up your future. He’s rubbing his face in it.”

“I agree with you. He appears almost sinister in some of his remarks.”

“The whole time he puts on this pseudo-warm demeanour. So kind, so concerned. Then he knifes them.”

“Hardly, Detective.”

“These people are completely vulnerable. And even when they’re not—look at Catherine.” Cardinal took a deep breath, but he could not calm the pounding in his chest. “She goes in, she’s in a good mood, she’s excited about her project, and what does he do? He says, last week you hated yourself and everything you’ve ever done. Do you find that therapeutic?”

“It’s surprising, I grant you. But a therapy session is not a casual chat. He’s not there to discuss photography, he’s there to help with depression. Perhaps in his judgment the best way to do that is to bring the patient back to the most painful subjects.”

“Look at Keswick. You remember Keswick.”

“I remember Leonard Keswick.”

“How much time was he facing? Tops.”

“Well, the law allows for as much as five years, but realistically, he was looking at eighteen months suspended.”

“Eighteen months suspended, and the man is dead.”

“Being charged with possession of child pornography is not going to be good for anyone’s self-esteem. He lost his family. He was certainly going to lose his job.”

“Exactly. And how did it come about? Look at his file. He had maybe a dozen images on his computer of teenagers having sex. How did he ever get charged in the first place? We certainly weren’t looking for him. It was an anonymous call.”

“And you’re saying Bell made that call?”

“I think so.”

“Can you prove it? Do you have the call on tape?”

“No. All it says in the file is two anonymous calls. Both from a middle-aged male. The second one claimed to actually have seen the pictures on Keswick’s computer. We wouldn’t have acted on it otherwise. Who else could it have been? This was a home computer, not at work.”

Pierce took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Without the spectacles his face looked even more like a benign creature out of Beatrix Potter, snout twitching. “At this point, you have nothing,” he said. “And if you were thinking clearly, you would know you have nothing. I can only put it down to your bereavement.”

“It’s a hands-off murder,” Cardinal said. “Murder by proxy. He knows exactly each patient’s most vulnerable point and he goes right for it. Look at Perry Dorn. Bell even suggested the venue, the laundromat. What more do you need? We can’t just sit here and do nothing. The bastard did everything but sell tickets.”

“Now you’re raving.” Pierce stood up. “Detective, my wife died two years ago. Not in the same circumstances as yours—it was a car accident, a trucker asleep at the wheel. It was out of the blue and it was not her fault and I was absolutely devastated. I stayed away from work for a month. There was no way on earth I would have been able to do my job during that time. We tend to forget how big a role the emotions play in our thinking. There is no such charge as hands-off murder, as I’m sure you know.”

“There’s criminal negligence. At the very least, criminal negligence. He asks them to write out suicide notes. You don’t think that’s reckless disregard?”

“Human error or misjudgment is not criminal negligence. You’d need him to prescribe some preposterous dose of medication, something along those lines. Notice I’m not even raising the issue of how you got hold of those discs.”

“They were sent anonymously—probably by Mrs. Bell.”

“Makes no difference. There’s nothing in them that would make a homicide charge stick.”

“Please don’t tell me the Crown Attorney’s office is going to do nothing. Are you really going to sit back and watch this guy push his patients into killing themselves? People are dying here.”

“Well,” Pierce said softly, “if you really want to nail him, you could bring them before the medical board. They’ll almost certainly give him a stern talking-to.”

45

T
HE LITTLE BRASS WHEEL
gleamed as it rotated, and the tiny engine made the puffing sounds of a miniature locomotive. Frederick Bell had used a nail clipper to trim the wick of the tiny burner below the boiler and filled it with methyl hydrate. The cylindrical boiler was so small it held less than a half cup of water. All the brass parts shimmered in the window light, and the flywheel spun.

This stationary engine was the only memento he kept of his father—or rather, the only one he kept in plain sight. It stayed on his desk, to be started up occasionally when the doctor found himself in a contemplative mood.

He was in such a mood now, contemplating Melanie Greene. Bell was almost certain he had nudged the young woman over the edge. There’s nothing like a history of sexual abuse to bring on low self-esteem and depression. Getting her to talk about it, and to admit her own ancient ambiguous feelings about it, was just the most basic psychotherapy. His master stroke, of course, was the timing of his rejection. He had seen the trust in those green eyes, the yearning for acceptance. He was fairly sure she was now in the grip of a despair so deep she would no longer reach out for help. Today was the first day she hadn’t called since their last session. But it made him edgy not to be one hundred percent sure. He couldn’t begin to savour a victory until it was beyond doubt.

Playing with the little steam engine usually calmed him. It summoned his best memories of childhood, when his father had been teaching him his beloved facts of science. The steam engine presented opportunities to talk about Boyle’s law, momentum and the history of steam power in general. At such times his father had seemed, in his boy’s eyes, to be another Alexander Graham Bell—he even had the same dark hair and beard.

Sometimes, when he worked the little steam engine, he would have a complete change of heart about his negative therapy. He would resolve to help people recover, as he had in the beginning, help pull them back from the cliff’s edge instead of nudging them over. But it would only be a matter of two or three sessions, sometimes the very first after his new resolution, before he would shift back to his previous attitude.

“I hate them,” he muttered. He pressed a tiny brass lever and the engine emitted a cheerful toot. “I just hate them.”

He held the lever down until the whistle dwindled to a hiss and the wheel stopped turning. The engine was not calming him today, and he certainly wasn’t making any resolutions. He extinguished the little blue flame and set the engine on the bookcase next to the picture of his mother, a picture of her smiling in the backyard in one of her shirtwaist dresses, her hair still swept to one side in the style of the forties. The picture had been taken by an aunt just a week before his mother swallowed the pills that killed her and left her eighteen-year-old son to make out however he could.

No, no, even reveries about early childhood would not calm him today, not while he was waiting to find out if he had rid the earth of another useless whiner. It was important work, a kind of sanitation, really, but he only got real satisfaction out of getting them to do it themselves. He was enough of a psychiatrist to know why this was so, but the self-knowledge changed nothing. This of course was the dirty little secret of psychiatry: you could come to know exactly the genesis of your particular neurosis, obsession or fetish and still be no closer to being free of it.

No, the real satisfaction was getting these snivellers to remove themselves from the face of the earth. The world was better off, and he had committed no crime. Catherine Cardinal had not been at all satisfactory in that regard. He had had to resort to heroic measures with that one, and he hadn’t been the same since. It was the first time he had actually killed someone, and that way, he knew, lay madness, incarceration, death.

He did not see himself as a violent man, but Catherine Cardinal had driven him to it. All that insistence on love and art as the saving graces of her life. What life? Going to hospital every other year for months at a time? Living on lithium? How could she not
see
that death was the only cure for her? It would destroy the game if he no longer had the patience to let them kill themselves. If he resorted to such personal interventions, the law would be bound to catch up to him. Just his luck that his first hands-on victim should be the wife of a detective.

He had been careful to remain unseen. Through that all-but-abandoned parking lot and the vacant storefronts, he had moved like a shadow within shadow. Up the freight elevator and onto the roof, and not a soul to see him. Then it was done and he had left the note at the scene and removed the evidence.

He went to the cabinet where he kept his session recordings. He wanted to watch Dorn again. All right, his exit had been too spectacular, but it had been inevitable. A young man who was determined to come to no good, Dorn: a born pisser and moaner, always conceiving these passions for women who couldn’t care less. Left untreated, he would have gone on plaguing women with unwanted adoration, and friends with tales of his misery. Cut that one off at the knees and no mistake.

The moment he opened the cabinet, he saw that discs were missing, half a dozen at least. His first thought was that a patient had somehow learned of the camera and decided to steal some. But then he realized that the patients concerned—Perry Dorn, Leonard Keswick, Catherine Cardinal—were all dead. There were two discs missing for each of them.

“Dorothy!” He went out to the hall, calling her name. “Dorothy, where are you!”

Blood pounded in his temples. The hall seemed to narrow itself into a black tunnel. Somewhere a part of him recognized rage. I’m in a rage, he thought from a distance: the tunnel vision, the pounding pulse, the quivering in my legs, are the effects of rage. He couldn’t have suppressed it now even if he had wanted to. The threshold had been crossed, the release was thrilling.

He flung open the door to the kitchen. Dorothy had her hand on the back door, about to go out. She turned, and her eyes were two dark little holes of dread. Munch’s eyes.
Dead Mother and Child
.

“I think you have something of mine,” Bell said. His words throbbed as if they had pounding pulses of their own.

Dorothy gripped the doorknob. “You’re doing something wrong,” she said evenly. “I stood by you in Manchester when people started dying. I told myself, He must be right, it must be just that he has a difficult caseload, he tries to help people who are really beyond help, and it ends up looking bad.”

“What have you done with my discs?” Bell said.

46

W
HEN HE LEFT THE
Crown Attorney’s office, Cardinal drove straight over to Bell’s house. He stopped the car across the street and sat looking at the dark gables outlined against an evening sky of mauve. The silver BMW parked in the driveway would seem to indicate the doctor was home, but there was no way to be sure.

Although he could employ violence when the occasion demanded it, Cardinal was not a violent man. No matter how angry he got at the thugs and wretches he was called upon to arrest, he always managed to find within himself that rational, controlling part of his mind that could rein in his feelings. Now, as he sat staring at Bell’s house, it took every ounce of control not to bust right in and beat Bell into a lingering death on a ventilator. Finally he put the car in gear and drove through the crush of evening traffic to the one place he had thought he would never set foot again.

When he got there, CompuClinic was just closing. A woman came out of the dry cleaner’s carrying an armful of plastic-shrouded clothes and got into her car. Cardinal parked and walked round the side of the building. He knew he shouldn’t be there, that he was not ready—the quivering in his hands told him that, as did the sudden swelling sensation in his throat.

Catherine’s blood had been washed away. The crime scene tape was gone, and all the little bits and pieces of computer had been swept up. You would never know a life had ended here. He circled the building, looking for entrances. Like most buildings under construction, security was not nearly as tight as it might be when the building was finished. There were two different fire exits, both closed at the moment, either of which might have been propped open by a lazy workman or a careless smoker—the alarms were almost never active at construction sites. The empty storefronts were boarded over, but some of these boards required no more than a sharp tug to come away. It took him all of ten seconds to open up a space big enough to walk through.

Inside, there was enough light coming through the glass door at the rear to see by. The space was essentially a concrete box with thick wires extruding from the walls and ceiling. Two-by-fours were stacked in a neat pile by one of the walls, and the place smelled of concrete and raw wood.

The door led to a plain hallway bright with fluorescent lights. At the end of this, a door marked Stairwell led to the basement and a freight elevator sitting empty and open. Cardinal put on leather gloves before stepping inside and pushing the button for the roof. In less than two minutes he had got himself to the rooftop without being seen, just as a killer could have done. The door to the patio was locked now, but there was a loose brick right next to it that could be used to prop it open. Probably one of the last things Catherine had touched on this earth.

He went down using the regular elevator and exited through the front lobby. He stood once more in the parking lot, staring at the place where Catherine had been. Would that image of her lying there be with him for the rest of his life? Her tan coat, her bloodied face, the smashed camera?

All the way home he tried to replace it with another image. Of course, he could recall thousands of different moments with Catherine, but he could not hold any of them in his mind long enough to erase the horror of that parking lot. The only image he could retain for more than a split second was the one of her in the photograph, looking slightly annoyed, two cameras slung across her shoulders.

Two cameras.

If it were not for that memory, that photograph, Cardinal would probably not have ventured down to Catherine’s darkroom again for months. He didn’t want to hover among her sinks and trays and strips of film as if
he
were the ghost. He had not even yet considered the possibility of clearing the place out. Catherine’s darkroom had to stay exactly as she had left it. She would be upset, otherwise. She would be unable to work.

Despite having held her dead body in his arms, despite the weeks-long absence, he still, somewhere in his being—everywhere in his being, it felt like—expected Catherine to come back.

The scene from Bell’s session recording was replaying in his head, this time in detective, not husband, mode.

“You know the new Gateway building just off the bypass?” The enthusiasm climbing in her voice. “I’m heading over tonight with my cameras.”

Cameras
. Plural.

He opened the narrow white closet where she kept her gear. No cameras. A few black lenses, long ones, lay on the shelves, lenses for her old battered Nikon. She would have taken the smaller lenses with her. The Canon was missing.

Cameras plural.

He went to the other part of the basement, his work table where he had put Catherine’s things. Her last things. The plastic bag from the hospital containing her clothing: her watch, a bracelet, her sweatshirt, jeans and underwear. No camera.

Outside again, he checked Catherine’s car—floor, trunk, glove compartment. No camera.

When he was back in his own car heading into town, he called Ident. Collingwood kept a schedule as strict as police work would allow; he did his shift and then he was gone, like a mechanical figure on an antique clock. Arsenault seemed to have been selected for the job purely for contrast, because you never knew when you would find him in. He often worked late into the night, so much so that there was a lot of speculation at the office on his personal life, or lack thereof.

Arsenault picked up on the first ring.

Cardinal didn’t bother with preliminaries. “I need to check the boxes from Catherine’s scene,” he said, passing a pickup truck that straddled two lanes. “I need to know if there’s a camera there.”

“I can tell you that right now. Yes, there was a camera there. A Nikon. Lens smashed all to hell.”

“Just the one.”

“Yeah, John. There was just the one.” Arsenault sounded surprised.

“Is there anyone still in the evidence room? Can you sign the boxes out for me? I’m on my way in.”

“No need. They’re right here in Ident. Closed case, remember? Figured you’d ask for ‘em sooner or later, though.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Cardinal swerved around a Honda Civic and shot past Water Road. Luckily, most of the traffic was going the other way.

The station was quiet. He could hear someone, probably Szelagy, typing in his cubicle, but other than that, CID was deserted. He walked straight through to Ident. Arsenault was at his desk, tapping on his keyboard. Collingwood’s desk was dark.

“Hey, John,” Arsenault said without looking up. “Stuff’s on the counter.”

Two boxes, one large, one small, stood open on a counter that ran along one wall. Cardinal hit a switch and the counter was bathed in bright fluorescent light.

He peered into the smaller box. Catherine’s Nikon, with its shattered lens, lay among other items that clearly had belonged to her: her camera bag, and contents that may have spilled out of it—a notebook, the flat discs of filters and a couple more lenses. One of these was silver, and labelled Canon.

There was no camera in the bigger box. Cardinal stood still, thinking. The only sound was the click of Arsenault’s keyboard. Assuming Catherine had been following her custom and taking pictures with both of her cameras, that meant someone had taken the Canon: either someone who had happened onto the scene afterward or her attacker.

A thief of opportunity seemed unlikely. How many people, happening onto a dead body, are likely to steal a camera from it—a camera that was almost certainly smashed up? And if you’re going to take one camera, why not take the other? Assuming her attacker stole it, that could indicate one of two things: Catherine had been mugged for her camera, the nice shiny new Canon, and the robber had pushed her from the roof when he grabbed it; or her attacker had taken it from the scene afterward. Cardinal could think of only one good reason to do that.

The bigger box contained items that had been found near the body but were not necessarily connected to it: a cigarette pack, several butts, an Oh Henry! wrapper, a paper cup from a nearby Harvey’s. There were also many bits of electronics, junk from the computer repair centre on the ground floor. Beside the Dumpster, the driveway had been littered with stray cards, drives and chips. Collingwood and Arsenault had dutifully gathered them up and tagged them.

Each item was in a plastic Baggie, numbered and labelled with the date, the initials of the ident person who had found it, distance and clock position relative to the body. Cardinal looked at several of these through the plastic. He was no computer whiz, but he knew memory cards when he saw them. The ones he was seeing were pretty old-looking, probably from computers beyond even the ministry of CompuClinic, Inc.

He pulled another couple of items from the box: a CD drive, a pair of headphones, another tiny Baggie encasing a chip. He turned this last item over. It was a chip about the size of a postage stamp, green-coloured and ridged with tiny teeth. The other side was obscured by the label. He opened the Baggie and slid the chip out onto the counter. Pale grey lettering on the green surface of the chip spelled out the word
Canon
.

“Hey, Arsenault,” Cardinal said. “Do you guys have a camera that will take this chip?”

Arsenault looked up and shook his head. “Ours take memory sticks. Different shape. Why?”

“I think this is the chip from Catherine’s camera. I want to see what’s on it.”

“That Nikon’s not digital.”

“She had another camera with her. A Canon.”

“Really?” Arsenault looked up from his keyboard. “In that case, the printer will show you what’s on the chip.”

“Don’t you have to plug a camera into it?”

“Nope. It’s got a tray you can stick the chip in.”

Arsenault swivelled away from his desk and rolled his chair over to the printer. He pressed a button and a little tray with several indentations slid out. “Just drop it in there,” he said, pointing to the smallest indentation, which was square. Cardinal pressed the chip into the slot and Arsenault slid the drawer in.

“If there’s anything there, it should show up on the preview screen.” He tapped a glowing rectangle on the printer about the size of a playing card.

The rectangle turned black and the Canon logo appeared, then the first photograph. It was a high shot of the city, the lights bright pinpricks. Cardinal could make out the twin belfries of the French church in the distance. These were the last things Catherine had seen.

“You can cycle through them,” Arsenault said. “Just push the Next button.”

Cardinal hit the button and the image changed slightly: the same view, a little closer. The next picture was a different angle. Off to the right, the red warning lights glowed on the post office communications tower. There were several shots of this and then back to the French church, and Cardinal saw why she had wanted to take pictures that particular night. The orange harvest moon was just beginning to roll into view beside the church towers.

“Nice,” Arsenault said quietly.

In the next shot the moon was half hidden. And in the one after that, it was just beginning to appear between the towers. Another moment and the moon would be caught between the towers like a pumpkin. But the next shot was something else entirely.

It looked accidental, as if she had been jostled, or startled: a wall, slightly blurred, a streak of light from overhead and in the right-hand corner someone’s arm. A man’s arm. You could just see the shoulder, arm, glove and the side of his overcoat.

Cardinal hit the Next button and heard Arsenault suck in his breath.

They both stared at the image glowing before them.

“She got him,” Cardinal said quietly. “She got him cold.”

The man’s arm was raised in greeting. The light above the roof door threw a sharp shadow of his arm, raised like a warning, to the ground. Despite the shadows, he was clearly recognizable, with that wide smile and his open features like a large, friendly dog. He looked like the sort of man anyone would want for a friend or a teacher—even a doctor.