By the Time You Read This (6 page)

“You wanna cut in, is that it? I gotta tell ya, John, we are hellaciously backed up down here. Only thing I’m supposed to work on these days is stuff that’s five seconds from being in court.”

“Yeah, I know.”

All cops expect to have to repay any favour somewhere down the line, possibly decades later. Cardinal did not have to give Hunn any reminders.

“Why don’t you tell me what you got,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“I have a greeting card with a piece of paper glued inside. On that piece of paper there’s a message that looks like it was printed out on a computer. It’s just two sentences long, but I’m hoping you can give me some idea where it came from. Frankly, I can’t even tell if it’s ink-jet or laser.”

“Either way, it’s not going to get us very far without another printout to compare it to. It ain’t like the old days with typewriters. What else you got?”

“A suicide note.”

“Suicide. All this trouble, you’re working on a suicide? Goddam suicides burn my ass. Anyone who kills themselves is just chickenshit, far as I’m concerned.”

“Oh, yeah,” Cardinal said. “Complete cowards. No question.”

“And selfish,” Hunn went on. “There’s gotta be no more self-centred act than killing yourself. All these resources get called into play: your time, my time, doctors, nurses, ambulances, shrinks, you name it. All of this for someone that doesn’t even want to live. It’s just plain selfish.”

“Thoughtless,” Cardinal said. “Completely thoughtless.”

“That’s when they don’t succeed. When they do succeed, they leave all this grief behind. I had a friend—best friend, actually—who ate his service revolver a few years back. I’m telling you, I felt like shit for months. Why didn’t I see it coming? Why wasn’t I a better friend? But you know what? He’s the lousy friend, not me.”

“Yeah, you put your finger on it there, Tommy.”

“Suicides, man, I tell ya …”

“This one may not be a suicide.”

“All right! Different story, entirely. Now you’re engaging my attention.” Hunn put on his Godfather voice: “I’m gonna use alla my skills and alla my powers …”

“I need this fast, Tommy. Like yesterday.”

“Absolutely. Minute I get it. But if you’re thinking of using this material or any analysis I give you on it in court, you know you gotta go through Central Receiving, and Central Receiving don’t rush for nobody. God himself could come to them with a handwritten note on Satan’s letterhead and they’d tell him, ‘Get in line, bro.’”

“I can’t go through Central Receiving, Tommy. I don’t have a case number.”

“Oh, boy …”

“But you come back to me with something good and I’ll
get
a case number. Then I’ll jump through whatever hoops you need.”

There was a heavy sigh from the other end of the line. “All right, John. You’re giving me serious heartburn here, but I’ll do it.”

8

N
AUSEA WAS NOT QUITE
the word to describe what Delorme was feeling. The Toronto Sex Crimes Unit had sent her about twenty images; the package had been waiting for her when she came back from lunch. She had looked them over and was now wishing she hadn’t. The photographs provoked a reaction in her gut, as if she had received a solid blow to the belly. And then more complicated emotions set in—distress, almost panic, and yet at the same time an all but overwhelming hopelessness about the human species.

The sights and sounds of the office—the click and slam of the photocopier, McLeod bellowing at Sergeant Flower, the tapping of keyboards and the chirping of phones—all diminished around her. Delorme felt a sob gathering in her chest, which she tamped down immediately. She had experienced something similar to this inner turmoil when reading certain news accounts: beheadings in Iraq, or the civil war in Africa where armed men raided villages, raping the women and chopping the hands off all the men.

She knew the acts captured in the photographs did not compare to mass murder, but the effect on her spirit was the same: despair at the depths to which human nature could sink. Even in a place the size of Algonquin Bay you heard of such pictures, but until this moment Delorme had never seen anything like them. There had been the case of a social services administrator the previous year, a man apparently well loved by his family and friends, who had been charged with possession of child pornography. But it hadn’t been Delorme’s case, and she hadn’t seen the evidence. The man had killed himself while out on bail—apparently out of shame, even though he had been charged only with possession of the material, not with manufacturing or distributing.

The pictures on her desk, Delorme realized, were actually crime scene photos. The criminal had taken them himself in the course of committing his crime; the creation of child pornography was unique in that respect. The girl looked to be as young as seven or eight in some of them, still with puppy fat around her neck and cheeks; in others she looked closer to thirteen. She had a sweet, open face, pale blond hair, shoulder length, and eyes almost unnaturally green, the colour emphasized in several pictures by the tears that flowed from them. There were pictures in a bedroom, pictures on a couch, pictures on a boat, in a tent, a hotel room. In one of the photos, a detail had been blurred out: a hat the little girl was wearing had been reduced to a blue and white smear.

The man was careful not to show his face, and so he became a collection of disparate details. He was the hairy arm, the furry chest; he was the sticklike legs, the freckled shoulder, the butt just beginning to sag. His penis, closely featured in many shots, looked scorched and red, though whether from abuse or bad photography it was impossible to tell. Delorme, no prude and no hater of men, thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen.

It occurred to her that the man was not human; that he was mere animated flesh, a monster sprung from a madman’s lab. But the spirit-crushing truth, of course, was that he was human. He could be anybody, he could be someone Delorme knew. Not only was he human, he was also beloved by his victim; too many of the pictures showed her relaxed and grinning for it to be otherwise. He had to be either the girl’s father or someone very close to the family. That the little girl loved him, Delorme had no doubt, and it made her heart ache.

Toronto had sent two additional envelopes. The first contained exact copies of the photographs, but the girl and her abuser had been digitally removed. Now they were just unexceptional scenes: an out-of-style sofa, what looked like a hotel bed, the interior of a tent, a backyard with a grubby plastic playhouse—settings of no interest unless you knew what had transpired in them.

The third envelope contained just one picture, that of the girl wearing the hat, now enlarged into a close-up. The hat was a woollen toque, blue and white, no longer blurred. Delorme had no idea how the Toronto cops could have managed that, but she actually stopped breathing for a moment. She recognized the toque. Not all of the knitted wording was visible, but you could now clearly see ALGON … WIN … FUR. Algonquin Bay Winter Fur Carnival.

The phone rang.

“Delorme, CID.”

“Sergeant Dukovsky here. You finished throwing up yet?”

“Sergeant, you may be used to this kind of stuff, but me, I feel like moving into the forest and living off roots and berries for the rest of my life.”

“I know what you mean. And this guy is by no means the worst of what we get. These days we get pictures of
infants
, and they’re doing this stuff
live.”

“Live? I don’t understand.”

“Streaming video. Guy gets himself a webcam and abuses kids online while his brethren around the world pay to watch.”

“Oh, man.”

“Unfortunately, some of those pictures we sent you have shown up in the same chat room as the live stuff, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it gives this guy ideas.”

“Let’s hope we nail him before that. Tell me about the winter carnival hat. How did you manage to unblur it?”

“We got a couple of 64-bit propeller-heads here, going gaga over this image-processing tool. Real bleeding-edge stuff. I asked ‘em how it worked and boy did I regret it. They started blithering about filter deconvolution and Lucy-Richardson algorithms. I’m telling you, these guys eat Athlon chips right out of the bag.”

“And I thought Photoshop was cool. Interesting thing here, the name of the carnival was changed a few years back to avoid protesters. It’s no longer the
fur
carnival, it’s just the winter carnival.”

“That could be important. Only we don’t know when she got it or who from.”

“In any case, it doesn’t mean the kid lives here. The carnival draws people from all over the world.”

“Come on. Hordes of people are crossing the globe to attend the Algonquin Bay Fur Carnival?”

“Not hordes. And they don’t come for the carnival, they come for the fur auction. We get buyers from the big furriers in Paris, New York, London, places like that. We even get Russians coming to check out the competition.”

“You’re educating me here, Sergeant Delorme. I didn’t realize Algonquin Bay was such a hive of international commerce. Did you take a look at the picture on the boat—the one where there’s other boats in the background?”

Delorme shuffled the photographs, stopping when she came to the picture. It showed a cabin cruiser with lots of wooden trim, wooden floors, and comfortable-looking red seats with tuck-and-roll upholstery. The girl was lounging on one of these, wearing blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt. She was ten or eleven in this shot, grinning into the camera.

“There’s a good reason why I missed this one,” Delorme said. “It’s one of the pictures where he’s not doing anything to her. The kid looks happy.”

“Check out the background.”

“There’s a small plane with pontoons on it. And you can just make out part of its tail number. C-G-K.”

“Exactly. It’s a Cessna Skylane and the whole number is CGKMC. Took us about five minutes cross-checking those letters with Cessnas and Algonquin Bay. We get a guy named Frank Rowley. I can give you his address and phone number, too. I hope I’m impressing you here.”

“But the plane is just in the background. There’s no reason to think there’s any connection between the owner of the plane and the creep in the pictures, is there?”

“No, but it’s a start. Believe me, we’ll hand you anything we get, minute we get it. In the meantime, maybe you can focus your logical
French-Canadian
mind on those pictures, spend some quality time with them, and narrow things down.”

“What if we posted a picture of the girl—just do it like a missing-person picture? We could put her face up in the post office and hope somebody who’s seen her calls in. We’ve got to do something fast. He’s destroying this kid’s life.”

“Problem with posting a picture is, the perp is most likely gonna see it before the kid does. Pedophiles aren’t usually violent, but if he thinks she’s gonna put him away for years, he just might kill her.”

9

N
EXT MORNING
, K
ELLY CAME
into the kitchen in her running gear—black leggings, mauve sweatshirt with a tiny elephant stitched on it—and grabbed an orange off the counter. Catherine bought those oranges, Cardinal thought. Did you buy half a dozen oranges when you were about to kill yourself?

He poured his daughter a coffee. “You want some oatmeal?”

“Maybe when I come back. Don’t want to lug any extra weight around. God, you look exhausted, Dad.”

“You should talk.” Kelly’s eyes looked puffy and red. “Are you managing to sleep at all?”

“Not much. I seem to wake up every half hour,” she said, dropping bits of orange peel into the green bin. “I never realized how physical the emotions are. I wake up and my calves are locked up, and I feel like a wreck even though I haven’t done anything. I just can’t believe she’s gone. I mean, if she came in that front door right now I don’t even think I’d be surprised.”

“I found this,” Cardinal said. He held out a photograph he’d discovered buried in an album crammed with loose pictures, a black-and-white portrait of Catherine, aged about eighteen, looking very moody and artistic in a black turtleneck and silver hoop earrings.

Kelly burst into tears, and Cardinal was taken by surprise. Perhaps in an effort to ease his own grief, his daughter had been comparatively restrained, but now she wailed like a little girl. He rested a hand on her shoulder as she cried herself out.

“Wow,” she said, coming back from washing her face. “I guess I needed that.”

“That’s how she looked when we met,” Cardinal said. “I just thought she was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. The kind of person you’re only supposed to meet in movies.”

“Was she always that intense?”

“No, not at all. She made fun of herself all the time.”

“Why don’t you come running with me?” Kelly said suddenly. “It’ll make us feel better.”

“Oh, I don’t know …”

“Come on. You still run, don’t you?”

“Not as often as I used to …”

“Come on, Dad. You’ll feel better. We both will.”

Madonna Road was just off Highway 69, so they had to run along the shoulder for half a kilometre or so and then make a left onto Water Road, which skirted the edge of Trout Lake. The day was brilliant and clear, the air with a sharp autumn tang.

“Wow, smell the leaves,” Kelly said. “Those hills have every colour except blue.”

Kelly was not by nature a perky young woman; she was making an effort to cheer Cardinal up, and he was touched by it. He was indeed aware of the beauty of the day, but as they ran through the suburb, their steps seemed to beat in time with the words
Catherine’s dead, Catherine’s dead
. Cardinal felt the contradictory sensations of being both hollowed out and yet extremely heavy—as if his heart had been replaced by a ball of lead.

“When do you have to be back in New York?” he asked Kelly.

“Well, I told them I was going to take two weeks.”

“Oh, you don’t have to stay that long, you know. I’m sure you need to get back.”

“It’s fine, Dad. I want to stay.”

“How about today? You have any plans?”

“I was thinking about calling Kim Delaney, but I don’t know. You remember Kim?”

Cardinal recalled a big strapping blond girl—angry at the world and very political. She and Kelly had been inseparable in their last years of high school.

“I would have thought Kim would have ventured out into the big bad world by now.”

“Yeah, so would I.”

“You sound mournful.” Cardinal accidentally brushed against a recycling bin. A Jack Russell bounced up and down on the other side of the fence, yapping elaborate canine threats.

“Well, we were best friends for a while, but now I’m not even sure if I should call her,” Kelly said. “Kim was the smartest girl at Algonquin High—way smarter than me—head of the debating club, delegate at the junior UN, editor of the yearbook. And now it’s like she wants to be Queen of Suburbia.”

“Not everyone wants to move to New York.”

“I know that. But Kim’s twenty-seven and she’s already got three kids, and she owns two—two!—SUVs.”

Cardinal pointed at a driveway they were just passing: one Grand Cherokee, one Wagoneer.

“All she can talk about is sports. Honestly, I think Kim’s life revolves around curling and hockey and ringette. I’m surprised she isn’t into bowling yet.”

“Priorities change when you have kids.”

“Well, I never want kids if it means you have to check your mind at the door. Kim hasn’t read a newspaper in years. All she watches on TV is
Survivor
and
Canadian Idol
and hockey. Hockey! She hated sports when we were in school. Honestly, I thought Kim and I would be friends forever, but now I’m thinking maybe I won’t call.”

“Well, here’s an idea. You feel like making a quick trip down to Toronto?”

Kelly looked over at him. There was a fine film of sweat on her upper lip and her cheeks were flushed. “You’re going to Toronto? What brought this on?”

“Something cooking at the Forensic Centre. I want to deal with it in person.”

“This is to do with Mom?”

“Yeah.”

For a few moments there was just the sound of their breathing—Cardinal’s breathing, anyway. Kelly didn’t seem to be having any trouble. Water Road ended in a turning circle. The two of them slowed and ran in place for a few moments. Beyond the red brick bungalows, with their neat lawns and rows of stout yard-waste bags, the lake was deep indigo.

“Dad,” Kelly said, “Mom killed herself. She killed herself and it hurts like hell, but the truth is she was manic-depressive, she was in and out of hospitals for a long time, and it’s really, ultimately, not so surprising that she wanted out.” She touched his arm. “You know it wasn’t about you.”

“Are you gonna come?”

“Boy, you don’t mess around when you set your mind on something, do you.” She gave it a second. “All right, I’ll come. But just to keep you company on the drive.”

Cardinal pointed to a path that looped away through the trees. “Let’s go back the scenic way.”

All the way south down Highway 11, Cardinal could not think of anything but Catherine. Although
think
was not the word. He felt her absence in the beauty of the hills. He felt her hovering above the highway; it had always been the road that took Cardinal away from or back to Catherine. But she had not been there this time to wave goodbye, would not be there when he came back.

Kelly fiddled with the radio dial.

“Hey, put it back,” Cardinal said. “That was the Beatles!”

“Ugh. I can’t stand the Beatles.”

“How can anyone hate the Beatles? That’s like hating sunshine. It’s like hating ice cream.”

“It’s just their early stuff I can’t stand. They sound like little wind-up toys.”

Cardinal glanced over at her. Twenty-seven. His daughter was older now than Catherine had been when Kelly was born. Cardinal asked her about New York.

For the next little while Kelly told him about her latest frustrations in trying to make it as an artist. New York was a hard town to be broke in. She had to share an apartment with three other women, and they didn’t always get along. And she was obliged to work at two jobs to make ends meet: she was assisting a painter named Klaus Meier—stretching canvasses for him, doing his books—and also working as a waitress three days a week. It didn’t leave a lot of time for her own painting.

“And doing all this, you never feel the pull of suburban life? The yearning for a small town?”

“Never. I miss Canada sometimes, though. It’s kind of hard to be friends with Americans.”

“How’s that?”

“Americans are the friendliest people in the world, on the surface. At first I found it almost intoxicating—they’re so much more outgoing than Canadians. And they’re not afraid to have a good time.”

“That’s true. Canadians are more reserved.”

I’m acting, Cardinal thought. I’m not having a conversation, I’m
acting
like a man having a conversation. This is how it’s done: you listen, you nod, you ask a question. But I’m not here. I’m as gone as the World Trade Center. My heart is Ground Zero. He wanted to talk to Catherine about this, but Catherine was not there.

He struggled to focus.

“Somewhere along the line Americans invented a kind of fake intimacy,” Kelly said. “They’ll tell you about their divorce the first time they meet you, or their history of child abuse. I’m not kidding. I had one guy tell me how his father used to ‘incest’ him, as he put it. That was on the first date. In the beginning I thought everyone was really trusting, but they’re not at all. They just don’t have any sense of decorum. Why are you smiling?”

“It’s just funny, hearing you talk about decorum. Unconventional girl like you.”

“I’m actually pretty conventional, when you get down to it. I have a feeling it’s going to be my downfall as an artist. God, look at the trees.”

The drive to Toronto took four hours. Cardinal dropped Kelly at a Second Cup on College Street where she had arranged to meet an old friend, then he headed over to the Forensic Centre on Grenville.

As a piece of architecture, the Forensic Centre is of no interest whatsoever. It’s just a slab tossed up, like so many other government buildings, in the era when poured concrete replaced brick and stone as the material of choice. Inside, it’s a collection of putty-coloured dividers, tweedy carpet, and mordant cartoons cut from newspapers and taped above people’s desks.

Cardinal had been here many times, though not to the documents section, and the very familiarity of the place unnerved him. He was drowning in the deepest agony of his life; everything should have been changed. And yet the security guards, the rattling elevator, the plain offices, desks, charts and displays were exactly as before.

“Okay, so we got three little items here,” Tommy Hunn said, laying them out on the laboratory counter. Unlike the building, Tommy had changed. His hair had got thinner, and his belt was hidden beneath a roll of flab, as if there were a dachshund asleep under his shirt.

“We got one suicide note. We got one notebook in which said suicide note may or may not have been written. And we have one nasty sympathy card with a typed message inside.”

“Why don’t we start with the sympathy card,” Cardinal said. “It’s not going to be related to the other two items.”

“Sympathy card first,” Hunn said. He put on a pair of latex gloves, removed the card from its plastic folder and opened it. “‘How does it feel, asshole?’” he read in a flat monotone. “‘Just no telling how things will turn out, is there.’ Cute.”

He held the note next to the window, tilting it to catch the light.

“Well, it’s an ink-jet printer, I can see that right off. No idiosyncrasies visible to the naked eye. Not my eye, anyway. But let’s do a little detecting.” He held a loupe to his eye and brought the note up to his face. “Here we go. Printer flaw on the second line. Look at the
h’s
and the t’s.”

He handed Cardinal the loupe. At first Cardinal couldn’t see anything, but when his eye adjusted he could make out a pale, threadlike line running through the crossbars of the
h
‘s and the
t
‘s.