Crime Machine (3 page)

The top of the bandage was already showing red. Every time Sam bent her knee, that cut was going to open.

The tremors had subsided, the codeine beginning to work a little. It’s going to take a roomful of scientists, she thought, to calculate exactly how much trouble I’m in. If Mr. Gun saw the licence plate on my car, it’s probably game over. But it was dark, he was far back and he was trying to shoot me, so maybe he didn’t catch it. Presumably, when you’re shooting people, you have other things on your mind than licence plates.

And you don’t know, she told herself, you don’t know for a certainty anyway, that the man shot anybody at all. Uh-huh—then why was he trying to annihilate you?

Sam’s bedroom was tiny. She could reach her desk from the bed. She got her laptop and opened it and checked a couple of news sites, ABdaily.com and algonquinlode.com. Of course, it was too soon. They had stories about the fur auction and the winter carnival and nothing about any shootings.

She looked at her alarm clock. Call him now, she thought, wake his wife, catch him off guard, and you can kiss him goodbye. The earliest she could call would be after eight in the morning. He said his wife was at her office from eight until six every day. Randall didn’t have to be in until ten.

Lights from a passing car swept over her bedroom wall and she held her breath until they passed. She switched out the light and moved the cat over so she could lie down. Her knee throbbed. When she closed her eyes, she was right back at the Trout Lake house, crashing to the snowy ground, running through the woods. What are the chances of him finding that phone? He’s running through the dark with a gun, is he really going to notice it—probably buried in the snow? She opened her laptop again and lay on her side, checking the Web for articles on what to do if you lose your phone. There were some phones you could sync up to your computer so you could wipe out the information the moment a thief tried to access the Web with it. Not a feature that came with Sam’s. She had never even set up the password. Calm down, Sam, she said, he didn’t find it. Which means the police probably will.

The codeine was really taking hold now. She was thinking of what to say to the police and couldn’t seem to keep it straight in her mind.

—

Sam woke up in the morning with her laptop on the bed beside her. Her alarm clock said 8:30. Her mother and brother would have just left. She called Randall on their house phone. He did not sound happy that it was her, but she ignored that and spilled out the whole story.

“Randall, I’ve never been this scared in my life. I never knew what
terrified
meant until now. I really thought I was going to be dead, and I’m pretty sure there’s going to be dead people in that house.”

“You didn’t see him actually shoot anybody, though.”

“No, but he came after
me
, and he tried to kill
me
, and why would he do that unless he’d just killed
them?”

“I’m just saying it’s not like you can report a murder. All you could say was that you heard shots.”

“And that some bastard tried to kill me. There are bullet holes in my car.”

“And you said he was talking real estate? He was trying to sell them on the house?”

“He was showing them the bathroom and talking about the view.”

“That makes no sense at all. I’m the only agent on that property.”

“I wanted to call the cops soon as I got home, but I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”

“Hold on, Sam—you can’t be telling the police I was out there. Do you realize what that would do to me? How am I going to explain to Larry what I was doing on that property with an Indian girl in the middle of the night?” Larry was Lawrence Carnwright, owner operator of Carnwright Real Estate.

“Indian girl?”

“First Nations. Stay out of it, Sam. You’re talking about the destruction of my career
and
my marriage.”

“I can’t just not report it. What if there’s someone wounded out there? Someone slowly bleeding to death? What kind of person would that make me?”

“It makes you reasonable. Cool under fire. Literally. If he shot people, they’re shot and there’s nothing you can do about it, Sam. But you’ve got to think of my situation here. How are you going to explain why you were in that house? How would you even know about that house without bringing me into it? And once my name comes out, that’s it. It’s the kind of damage, once you do it, you can’t undo it.”

Sam thought about that. She ran a hand through her hair and encountered a V of pine needles. “I could just call them anonymously. I could call from a pay phone.”

“And tell them what, Sam?”

“I was out in the area and I heard shots fired and thought I should report it.”

“And you think they’re going to go out there ten hours later on the chance that someone may still be firing a gun on the tip of Island Road? They’re not going to do anything with information like that. You’d have to tell them what you told me—that you heard a couple of people and then there were shots and you’re pretty sure they’re dead. That’ll get ’em out there. And they’re gonna know, what with the isolation of the house and everything, that you were actually there in the house, and they are going to turn over every piece of evidence known to man in order to find you. They’re going to find our fingerprints, they’re going to find who knows what-all out there. You can’t do it, Sam.”

“I don’t have a criminal record and neither do you—fingerprints aren’t going to lead them anywhere.”

“Oh, God.”

“What?”

“If there’s been an actual murder out there, they’re going to be questioning me anyway. I have a key to the place. I told you, Sam, I’m not a good liar.”

“You could tell them the truth. You were out there some other day. You wanted to check the house for some reason, and that’s it—you didn’t see or hear anything suspicious. And that’s the truth, so you wouldn’t have to be nervous. You don’t have to mention me.”

“Sam, don’t call the cops. Do not phone them. I can’t be brought into this. Neither can you. I gotta go. I gotta think about this. Don’t do anything, Sam.”

“I lost my cellphone, and what if he has it? What if he saw my licence plate? What if he thinks I can identify him and he comes after me?”

“If he was that desperate to get you, he could have done it last night. He could have chased you in his car, right? But he didn’t. Because he knows you can’t identify a damn thing.”

“What if he tries to kill me to play it safe? Can you even believe I’m saying that? This is for real, Randall.”

“I gotta go. Don’t call me. If the police start checking phone records, everything’s gonna go to hell. And we better not see each other for a while.”

“Oh, don’t say that.”

“Just to be safe—we don’t want to ruin what we have, do we? This precious thing that we have together?”

“No.”

“Okay, then. I’ll call you soon.”

“I love you, Randall. I need to see you.”

“Me too. So much. I gotta go.”

A
FTER DINNER, JOHN CARDINAL SAT
at the kitchen table and only realized after some time that he’d been staring at his own reflection in the window. He got up and turned off the light and sat back down. His apartment building was on a ridge overlooking the north bay of Lake Nipissing and now, with the lights off, the frozen surface of the lake took form in the glass. The moon, not quite full, was bright enough to wash out most of the stars and lit a wide off-white track across the snow to Cardinal’s window. The tops of trees that lined the beach waved in the breeze, but he couldn’t hear them through the double glazing.

Mealtimes were still difficult. For the first six months after Catherine died, Cardinal had eaten in front of the television. He didn’t like television, but it was better than simply staring at the empty place where Catherine used to sit chatting to him about her students or her latest photography project. Finally he had come to find it intolerable, and he put the little house by Trout Lake up for sale—the house he had lived in with Catherine and his daughter for nearly twenty years. For some reason he had decided that an apartment would suit him better at this broken place in his life. An apartment was un-Catherine. It was un-Cardinal, come to that. At one time he might have thought of himself as an urban type, back when he was living
in Toronto decades ago, but not anymore. Now he was just a man whose wife had died and who had trouble seeing much value in his leftover life.

He turned the light back on and reached for the top file of a stack of manila folders foxed and acidic with age. Under the rubber band that held the folder together was a memo from the chief exhorting the investigations department to dig deep in their efforts to clear cold cases. There was nothing like clearing up an ancient mystery or bringing an elusive criminal to justice to restore the public’s faith in their local police. They were to seek especially opportunities to apply technologies, databases and techniques that had been unknown or unavailable to the original investigation. Whenever he was seeking to provoke enthusiasm where none existed, which was often, Chief R. J. Kendall was prone to oratory.
We must see ourselves as visitors from the future, travelling back to help our stymied colleagues in the past
.

R.J. had the politician’s knack of presenting a policy he had been forced to adopt as the inevitable result of his personal devotion to good works. In this case, the provocation had been the release of a national report on the clearance rates of the various local forces. Usually these were restricted to larger cities with populations above one hundred thousand. This year, some irritating bureaucrat had produced a comparison of smaller cities, and although one could offer fourteen reasons why the results were not particularly meaningful, that did nothing to assuage Chief Kendall’s outrage that the Algonquin Bay police service had been ranked just slightly above the median. The chief didn’t mention it specifically, but Cardinal knew that what really rankled with him was that Parry Sound and Sudbury, two cities of similar size, demographics and geography, were far ahead when results were averaged out over forty years. It looked bad, side by side, and even
The Globe and Mail
had mentioned it as an interesting anomaly.

Thus the Scriver case, all twenty pounds of it, on Cardinal’s kitchen table. D.S. Chouinard had had the six detectives in CID draw three cold cases each from a hat and Cardinal had drawn Oldham (probable but unprovable murder by spouse), Sloane (missing octogenarian, probable misadventure) and Scriver. When the name was read out, Cardinal’s colleagues had not made the slightest attempt to suppress their laughter.

Delorme, by contrast, had drawn Lonnie Laird, a missing teenager who had always been presumed but never proved to be a victim of Toronto
serial killer Laurence Knapschaeffer. It took Delorme exactly one trip to the Penetanguishene hospital for the criminally insane and a forty-five-minute interview with Knapschaeffer to get a signed confession from him—possibly because Delorme was a first-class investigator, or possibly (and this was the explanation Ian McLeod liked) for the simple reason that Knapschaeffer had never before had the elective attention of such a good-looking female.

Scriver was the oldest and most investigated and re-investigated case in the history of the Algonquin Bay police and their colleagues in the joint effort, the Ontario Provincial Police. It had taken place many years before Cardinal had joined the force. There was no one left on staff who had been around at the time. All of the investigators were long retired, some long deceased.

On or about July 15, 1970, the Scriver family had apparently left their Trout Lake cottage in their small outboard and had never been heard from again. Cottage door unlocked. The remains of dinner still on the table. No signs of violence.

The missing: Walt Scriver, forty-five, a researcher with the Lands and Forests Department (as the Ministry of Natural Resources was then known). His wife, Jenny Scriver, forty-three, homemaker and part-time teacher. Their eighteen-year-old son Martin, who had been home for the weekend from his summer job on a deer census. All apparent victims of a drowning accident.

Cardinal wrote in big letters on his legal pad,
Cleared—Alien Abduction
.

The buzzer rang and Cardinal went to the intercom to open the door for Lise Delorme. One of the unforeseen benefits of moving to this apartment was that he was now just a five-minute walk away from Delorme, his favourite person at work. When he had first moved in, Delorme had come round to help unroll carpets and hang curtains. Pure kindness, Cardinal figured; she would have done the same for anyone.

Now here she was at his door, tomboyish in flannel shirt and blue jeans, and clutching a DVD in one hand, a gigantic can of popcorn in the other. A less cop-like person would be hard to envision.

“Monsters,” she said, holding up the DVD. The cover had a picture of giant insects. “Or do you think it’ll be too much like work?”

Cardinal put the DVD into the machine and spent a few minutes fiddling with the remote, which never worked the same way twice.

“Man, it’s so humid in here,” Delorme said. “They still didn’t fix your ventilation?”

“Don’t get me started. Buying this place may have been one of the dumbest moves I ever made.”

Delorme was looking at the pile of folders. “Hey, congratulations. I see you solved Scriver.”

“Yeah. Turned out to be simple.”

Cardinal on his recliner, Delorme on the couch. He kept a quilt folded up on the back, because Delorme always got cold—those huge plate glass windows facing the lake. She was still in her thirties, passionate in temperament and appealing in form, and it had occurred to Cardinal more than once to reach across the small table that separated them and touch her, but he hadn’t. They had fallen into this friendship and pretty quickly it had begun to feel as if it had always been like this and always would be.

She was telling him about a hunter, the subject of two annoying grid searches, who had just been found near the Nipissing reserve, slightly frostbitten but otherwise okay. Hunters got lost two or three times a year and posed a considerable drain on department resources, not to mention on the patience of those who had to look for them. “What’s wrong with these people?” she said. “They haven’t heard of GPS?”