The Delicate Storm (4 page)

Cardinal and Delorme were back at Skyway Service Centre redeploying searchers when a black Lexus pulled up. Cardinal recognized it and sagged inwardly. Dr. Alex Barnhouse was the kind of irritant an investigation didn’t need. A good coroner, true, but he ruffled feathers, and not just Cardinal’s.

Barnhouse rolled down his window. “Let’s get a move on, shall we? I haven’t got all day.”

Cardinal waved cheerily. “Hi there, Doc! How are you?”

“Can we get moving, please?”

“Isn’t this the most gorgeous day you’ve ever seen? The trees? The mist? Right out of a storybook, don’t you think?”

“I can’t imagine anything less relevant.”

“You’re right. Better park that beautiful Buick of yours over there and we’ll get started.”

Barnhouse got out of the car, carrying his bag. “God help us,” he said, “when the local constabulary can’t tell the difference between a Buick and a Lexus.”

“You’re being naughty,” Delorme said quietly as they headed to the backyard.

“He does tend to bring out my immature side.”

Barnhouse examined the severed arm, then followed them into the woods, black bag in hand. He barely glanced at the various body parts.

“Detective Cardinal,” he said. “It is my professional opinion that this unidentified male met with his fate in an unnatural manner. There being no clothes near the body is one such indicator. The small amount of blood is another. Given the severity of the injuries inflicted by the animal or animals, these trees and leaves should be covered with blood. They are not.”

“But that could just mean the bears killed him someplace else and dragged the body all over the place.”

Barnhouse shook his head. “The bear or bears ate him. They didn’t kill him. You can see it in the major bones. It is my opinion that some of the injuries were inflicted not by an animal but by a man or men wielding an axe or other sharp object. The bones appear to be chopped through, not yanked out. I am no expert in such matters and no doubt you will be availing yourself of the services of the Forensic Centre in Toronto.”

“What can you give us on time of death?”

“Great God, man. How can I give you anything on time of death? We haven’t even got a stomach to measure contents.”

“Well, what about this axe business? Was that inflicted after death, or before?”

“After. There’s no bleeding into the bones, which means the heart had stopped before the chopping up. And for that, I’m sure we’re all grateful.” Barnhouse scribbled on a form, tore off the top sheet and handed it to Cardinal. “Give my regards to the Forensic Centre. Now if someone will be good enough to show me the way out of here, I’ll bid you good day.”

Cardinal motioned to Larry Burke.

“This way, Doc,” Burke said. And Cardinal watched the two of them head off into the mist.

“I should be used to him by now,” Delorme said. “But I’m not.”

Cardinal’s walkie-talkie squawked and a voice said something unintelligible.

“Cardinal. Could you repeat that?”

“I said we’ve got a structure down here.” It was Arsenault’s voice. “I think you should take a look.”

“Where are you?”

“Downhill from the service centre. Follow the creek west.”

Delorme looked off into the woods, the webs of pale grey. “West? It would be nice if there was a trail.”

They found the creek and followed it, and eventually they heard voices. The dim outline of a cabin took shape. Arsenault was on his knees beside a bush, doing something with a penknife and a test tube.

“What have you got?” Cardinal asked.

“Paint scrapings. Looks like someone drove in here recently.” He jerked his thumb behind him, where there was a faint outline of tire tracks. “This could be where it went down,” he added. “I mean before the bears got to him.”

Cardinal took a closer look at the tire tracks. “You think we can get a mould out of these?”

“Nope,” Arsenault said. “Too many leaves.”

“That’s what I figured. What is this, an old logging road?”

“Yeah. Must be from eighty years ago. You can see it’s been used, though. Probably by whoever owned that wreck of a place.”

Arsenault’s ident partner, Bob Collingwood, was inside the shack.

“Gah,” Delorme said. “The smell.”

The cabin was hardly more than twelve feet square, constructed of rough-hewn lumber that did little to keep out the cold and nothing to keep out the damp. There was a fridge, a rusted cot with a stained mattress rolled up at one end, a metal counter with two sinks and an ancient cast-iron wood stove with the door hanging open on a broken hinge. The whole place smelled of decay—mildew, mould and rotting wood.

“There was no lock on it,” Arsenault said from behind her. “The door was just hanging open.”

“Hasn’t been used for a long time.” Delorme pointed at the giant cobwebs around the doorway. “Is it a trapper’s shack?”

“Totally illegal, of course,” Cardinal said. “They build them wherever they damn well want. The question is, whose trapper’s shack? There must be at least a dozen guys make their living out here.”

Collingwood was young, jug-eared, thorough and silent. Cardinal could count on one hand the number of complete sentences he had uttered in his entire career, because he tended to speak, when he spoke at all, in single words. He was pointing silently to the sinks. They were the kind with a pump handle where the taps should be. Wearing a latex glove, Collingwood stuck his finger in the drain and brought it up again, stained.

“Is that rust or blood?” Cardinal asked.

“Blood.”

“So he could have been killed here. On the other hand, it may just be animal blood.”

Delorme was kneeling in front of the wood stove. “Looks like somebody tried to burn clothes in this thing. Collingwood, have you got a drop sheet?”

Collingwood opened a leather case that contained all the tools of his craft and together they spread a thin plastic drop cloth, white so that evidence would be visible against it. They used a pair of tongs to extract the blackened mass from inside the stove. There was a pair of denims, reduced to little more than the waistband, a shirt collar, several buttons, most of a pair of shoe soles and a mass of burned, unidentifiable material.

Collingwood took an instrument from his case and measured the shoe soles. “Elevens.”

“All right,” Cardinal said. “We’ll need sizes from the waistband and the shirt collar, too, if there’s enough left to measure.”

Delorme, ever so gently, was stirring the burned matter with the tongs. “What’s this?” She said it more to herself than to the others.

She held a small lump of fused metal in the tongs. She turned it over on the drop sheet. The other side was shinier, and there was part of the incised outline of an animal.

“Looks like a loon,” she said. She looked at the two men.

Cardinal leaned over her shoulder to get a better view. “I think I know exactly what that is.”

4

T
HE NORTHERN SHORE OF
L
AKE
N
IPISSING
is one of the prettiest places in Ontario, but Lakeshore Drive, which runs along the top of the inlet that gives Algonquin Bay its name, could have been designed for the sole purpose of keeping this fact from the public. It has been a magnet for eyesores for as long as anybody can remember. On the lake side there are fast-food joints, gas stations and quaintly named but charm-free motels; across from these, car dealerships and shopping malls.

Loon Lodge was at the western edge of this ugliness. It was not actually a lodge but a dozen miniature white cabins with green shutters and country-style curtains, having been built in the fifties before the log-cabin look became the fashion. Many people in Algonquin Bay imagine such businesses are closed in winter, but in fact they have two sources of winter income. One is from ice fishermen, the dentists and insurance salesmen who take a few days off to come up north with their buddies and drink themselves into oblivion. The other is from people who want a dirt-cheap place to live, and nothing is cheaper, offseason, than a cabin on Lakeshore Drive.

Cardinal had been to Loon Lodge a few times. Every so often one of the winter residents would knock his wife’s teeth out. Or the wife would tire of her husband’s drinking and insert a steak knife neatly into his ribs. Occasionally there were drug dealers. Then in summer it was all sunburnt Americans, families on a tight budget, taking advantage of the reliably frail Canadian dollar.

Cardinal and Delorme were in the first of Loon Lodge’s white clapboard cabins, the one marked
Office
. It was four times bigger than the rental units, and the proprietor lived in it with his wife and kids. He was an egg-shaped man named Wallace. His face was puffy, with a wounded expression, as if he suffered from toothache. An equally egg-shaped and disconsolate four-year-old boy was watching cartoons in the next room. Smells of supper hung in the air, and Cardinal suddenly realized he was hungry.

Wallace pulled out a guest register, found the name and turned the book around on the counter.

“Howard Matlock,” Delorme read aloud, “312 East Ninety-first Street, New York City.”

“I wish I’d never set eyes on the guy, now,” Wallace said. “Was a really slow week last week, so I was glad as hell to see him, even though he only wanted to stay a few days.”

“Ford Escort,” Delorme read, and copied down the licence number.

“Yeah,” Wallace said. “Bright red one. Not that I’ve seen it for a couple of days.”

“What day did he arrive?” Cardinal asked.

“Thursday, I think. Yeah, Thursday. I’d just turned away a couple of Indians who wanted to rent a place. Sorry, but I don’t care how many vacancies I’ve got, I won’t rent to those people. I just got tired of cleaning up the blood and the puke. I have a reputation to maintain.”

“You better hope none of them lays a discrimination complaint on you,” Delorme said.

“People don’t understand about Indians. Put two or three of them together with a bottle of Four Aces and you got a unit that’s unrentable.”

“And what have you got now?”

“You say you took this key ring off a dead body?” He pointed to the melted mass in the Baggie that Cardinal had put on the counter.

“More or less.”

“Then I guess I got a bill that’s not paid and a tenant that’s not alive.” Wallace shook his head and cursed under his breath. “Do you have any idea how long it takes to build a reputation like Loon Lodge? It doesn’t happen overnight.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t,” Cardinal said. “Did Mr. Matlock say why he was in Algonquin Bay?”

“I’m telling you, something like this comes along and all that effort—all those extra little touches that make a motel a special place, the kind of place people want to come back to—all of it comes to nothing. I might as well take down my shingle and declare bankruptcy.”

Cardinal wondered how anyone as gloomy as Mr. Wallace would have had the optimism to open a motel in the first place, but he stuck to his original question. “Did Mr. Matlock say why he was in Algonquin Bay?”

“Ice fishing’s what he told me.”

“Little early in the year for ice fishing. Even without the warm spell.”

“That’s exactly what I said. I told him no one’s going out on that lake for at least another two weeks, even without the warm snap. He said he was well aware of that fact. Said he was only up here scoping the place out for a bunch of buddies who were planning to come up with him late February.”

“From New York?” Delorme said. “New York seems like a long way to come just to check out the ice fishing.”

Wallace shrugged. “Americans.”

He plucked a key from the rack behind the counter and they followed him outside past several cabins.

“Never seemed like much of a sport to me,” Cardinal said to Delorme. “The fish are stunned with cold. They’re starving. Where’s the skill? Sitting over a hole in a dingy little shack.”

“You’re leaving out the beer.”

“Oh, don’t leave out the beer,” Wallace said. “You wouldn’t believe the cases these guys haul out there. I keep a toboggan in each unit, supposedly for the kiddies, but do you see any hills around here? They use ’em to haul their two-fours out on the lake.”

“You say Mr. Matlock arrived on Thursday. When did you notice the car wasn’t here?”

“I guess that’d be Saturday. Two days ago. Yeah, that’s right. Because I asked him to move it Friday morning. Had it parked in the spot for number four. Not that there was anybody in number four. Anyways, it definitely wasn’t there Saturday morning. Which made me think something was up. Car’s gone, and I haven’t seen any smoke coming from the stovepipe. Knocked on the door this morning, got no answer and figured I’d give him another few hours before I started to worry I’d been stiffed.”

“Did he make any phone calls?” Cardinal asked. “Would you know if he had?”

“Long-distance I’d know about—he didn’t make any of those. I don’t keep track of local.”

“Thanks, Mr. Wallace. We’ll take it from here.”

“Fine with me.” Wallace opened the door for them. “If there’s any cash in there, I figure I’m due a hundred and forty.”

The inside of a Loon Lodge cabin hadn’t changed since the last time Cardinal had seen one. Double bed tucked in an alcove, a floral couch, and a kitchenette in the corner: mini-fridge, hot plate, aluminum sink. A memory assailed Cardinal—a shrieking woman hurling a frying pan at him when he had come to arrest her husband.

There was a table covered with yellow oilcloth beside one window. A copy of the
New York Times
lay on it. Dated five days previously, Cardinal noted, and probably acquired on the airplane.

The bed (slightly tattered chenille cover complete with the same Loon Lodge emblem that was on the key ring) was neatly made. Beside it lay a small wheeled suitcase containing enough clothes for a weekend and a paperback novel by Tom Clancy.

“Here’s his wallet,” Delorme said. She retrieved it from under the kitchen table, nearly toppling a lamp (loon emblem on the shade) in the process.

“Well, here’s a question,” Cardinal said. “The car’s gone. Why would you go out in your car and not take your wallet with you? You go out in the car, you take your licence, right?”

“Maybe whoever killed him showed up at his door.”

“Possible. And he loses his wallet in the struggle—although there isn’t much sign of a struggle in here.”

Delorme opened the wallet. “In any case, I think we can rule out robbery as a motive. There’s eighty-seven dollars here, all American. Maybe he just went out to buy a pack of cigarettes. Didn’t need his wallet.”

“He’s got cigarettes.” Cardinal pointed to a half-empty pack of Marlboros on the nightstand.

“‘Howard Matlock,’” Delorme read from one of the wallet cards in a formal voice, “‘is a certified professional accountant in the state of New York.’”

“Ice fishermen—I swear they’re all accountants.”

“He is also a member of the New York Public Library, Blockbuster Video and carries a New York driver’s licence.”

She showed Cardinal. The dead man stared out at him from the licence photo. He was wearing the same aviator glasses they had found in the woods.

They both glanced around the room.

“Except for the wallet on the floor, everything looks undisturbed,” Cardinal said. “And his room key was still in his pocket, but not his car key. Which makes me think the killer or killers made off with his car.”

“If you’re going to steal a car, why pick a Ford Escort? And if you’re covering up a car theft, chopping the body up in the woods seems a little extreme.”

“Maybe there was something incriminating in the car.”

They went through the contents of the suitcase: three store-label shirts, three pairs of Hanes underwear, three pairs of socks, two with holes in them.

“I thought accountants made decent money,” Delorme said. “But this guy looks like he wasn’t doing so well.”

On the bathroom shelf they found a roll of Tums, and travel packets of Imodium and Ex-Lax. “Obviously a Boy Scout,” Delorme said. “Prepared for anything.”

“Anything except hunting or fishing, you notice. No rod, no reel, no tackle. Nothing. I know he said he was just scoping the place out, but still.”

“Maybe he kept it in the car. When we find the car …”

They stood facing each other in the middle of the cabin. Waiting for an idea to descend, Cardinal thought. A theory.

“This is a strange one,” Delorme said. “As far as we know, Howard Matlock, visiting CPA, came up here to check out the ice fishing. While here, he goes out for a drive—without his wallet—and gets himself killed. Maybe someone tried to rob him and killed him out of frustration because he wasn’t carrying his wallet.”

“Thank you, Detective Delorme. That explains everything. Obviously, we can close this case right now.”

“All right. So it has a few holes.”

“I think we both find the ice-fishing business a little thin. And …”

“And what? You look worried.”

“I’m getting a bad feeling about this. My guru on the Toronto force used to say it takes three things to solve any case where the perpetrator isn’t readily apparent: talent, persistence and luck. Any one of those is missing, you don’t make your case. Call me egotistical, but I’m not worried about the first two.”

“Come on, Cardinal. We’ve barely started.”

“I know. The problem is, if we don’t believe Matlock came up here to check out the ice fishing, then we don’t have the first clue what he
was
doing here—or who he came to see—let alone who wanted to kill him.”

The call went out to be on the alert for Matlock’s red Ford Escort, a rental from the Avis counter at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. The search in the woods went on until dark. All the body parts that could be found were gathered together and shipped to the Forensic Centre in Toronto. The aerial photographs were developed and tacked up on the bulletin board in the ident room. The Mylar balloons glittered amid the mist and trees, but there was no pattern visible in their distribution.

Back at his desk, Cardinal spent a good two hours writing up the reports for the day and wishing he had a decent idea about how to proceed. He was tired and hungry and looking forward to being with Catherine, but he didn’t want to go home feeling that the case was at a dead end. He needed some time alone, away from the reports and the noise of his colleagues shouting to one another, to think about Howard Matlock and why this American had ended up dead in Algonquin Bay.

Down by the lake, the fog was still thick, wedged like grey batting among the cabins and the trees. The Loon Lodge vacancy sign glowed dull red. The parking lot was empty.

Cardinal opened the cabin that had been Howard Matlock’s and ducked under the yellow police tape. Inside, he flipped a switch, but the light didn’t come on; the proprietor would have turned off the power until he had another paying tenant. No heat either. Cardinal switched on his flashlight and shone it over the bed, the chair, the nightstand. Ident had been so busy with the scene in the woods that they would not be finished here until the next day at least. Howard Matlock’s personal effects were still here, right down to the half-smoked pack of Marlboros beside the loon lamp.

In the dark and the silence Cardinal tried once more to visualize what had happened here. He imagined the American sitting in the white wicker chair, watching the tiny television, when there was a knock at the door. But who would come to him, and kill him, and drive him away in his own car? Did someone follow him here from New York?

Cardinal sat on the edge of the bed. Trying to figure out this case was like trying to catch smoke. Half the time—at least in a place the size of Algonquin Bay—it was the killer himself who called cops to the scene of the crime. Now here was a genuine mystery and Cardinal didn’t have a single lead. An American citizen had come up to his town and—if he hadn’t been followed—had managed in a very short time to upset somebody enough to get himself murdered. And whoever it was didn’t just kill him, they fed him to the bears. Why?

Cardinal could feel the fine end of a theory in his mind but couldn’t quite grasp it. He stared at the closet door. It had been open earlier; now it was closed, dotted with powder where ident had gone over it for prints.