But there were more basic things to consider: Who knew his address? Who knew Catherine was his wife? Who was in a position to pounce on this information with such alacrity? Not a drunk like Connor Plaskett (even if he had been alive), and maybe not a self-absorbed loser like Codwallader either.

  Cardinal’s address and phone number were not listed in the phone book, and the police station certainly didn’t give them out. Ever since his days on the drug squad back in Toronto, he had made it a rule to keep an eye out for people watching him, people following. If you weren’t vigilant, someone could follow you home, threaten your family. He would have known if anyone was following him.

  He sifted through the rest of the bills. There were requests from the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club and Amnesty International (Catherine’s), and others from the Hospital for Sick Children, UNICEF and March of Dimes (Cardinal’s). There were bills from Algonquin Bay Hydro, the water department, the phone company and Desmond’s Funeral Home.

  Most of these were already opened if not already paid. Cardinal examined them one by one, holding them under the gooseneck lamp beside the phone. He put on a pair of reading glasses to make sure. None of them showed the same printer flaw as the vicious sympathy cards.

  All right, maybe that was too simple. Almost all of these, with the exception of the smaller charities, would be addressed by computer. No human being would even see the bills until they came back with cheques attached. He opened the bill from the funeral home.

  Dear Mr. Cardinal,

  We at Desmond’s Funeral Home wish you to know that we sympathize with you in your time of loss.

  We also want to thank you for choosing us. We hope that our services have brought you some measure of comfort and security during one of life’s most difficult transitions.

  Our invoice is enclosed. Please remit your payment as soon as it may be convenient. And please know that if there is anything else we can do to serve your needs at this difficult time, we are always ready to help.

  With thanks, and deepest sympathy.

  It was signed by David Desmond. None of the capital letters showed any trace of the printer flaw.

  “She is such a crack baby,” Kelly said to the TV. “How could she ever get to be a nurse?”

  At the commercial break she stopped by Cardinal on her way to the kitchen. “Why don’t you come and watch, Dad?”

  “I will in a second.”

  “It’s such a pleasure to see people screw up their lives worse than you screw up your own. Although I guess you see that pretty much every day at work.”

  “I do, indeed.”

  “I’m getting myself a diet Coke. You want one?”

  “Sure.”

  Cardinal was looking at the invoice that had come enclosed with the letter from Desmond’s. One item in particular had caught his attention, and it wasn’t the price, which came as no surprise.

  Casket—Superior Walnut, Natural—$2,500.

  There was a distinct line through the capital letters.

  And lower down: Payment Received—$3,400.

  The same line through the P and the R.

  “The show’s back on,” Kelly called from the living room. “Your Coke’s in here.”

  Cardinal pulled the three cards from his briefcase. She preferred death… A line through the capital S. How she must have hated you. Same line through the capital H. He dug out a magnifying glass and squinted at the relevant letters. A match.

  Could a funeral director get tired of sympathizing with all that pain he or she saw every day of the year? Could you get sick of all the tears, the prayers, the dithering over details of services, the relentless implication that this loved one was really something special, unlike, say, the other people you buried day in and day out? He supposed that, yes, you could get sick of it, and yes, you might one day snap and start sending unsympathy cards through the mail.

  But the cover letter itself was free of flaws.

  He called David Desmond at home.

  A professional to the bone, Desmond didn’t miss a beat. “Yes, John,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I was just looking at my invoice from you.”

  “Oh, there’s no rush to pay that. You’ve already paid half of it on deposit, and I’m sure you have lots of other things on your mind.”

  “I was wondering if you prepare them yourself.”

  “Well, we write up the initial figures, of course. But later on, after the services, we hand everything over to our bookkeeping service.”

  “They seem to do a good job for you. I’ve got some rather complicated tax stuff coming up this year and I was wondering if I could get their name and address from you.”

  “Oh, certainly. It’s Beckwith and Beaulne. Hold on a second, I’ve got the card here somewhere.”

  “Which guy do you use—Beckwith or Beaulne?”

  “Neither. It’s a fellow named Roger Felt.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Why? You know Roger?”

  23

  ROGER FELT. CARDINAL HAD not thought about Roger Felt for at least five or six years. Roger Felt had been a stockbroker/financial adviser/investment analyst for the Algonquin Bay office of Fraser, Grant. He had enjoyed a reputation for being a local Midas with growth stocks.

  Like just about every other financial adviser in town, Felt’s bread and butter lay in mutual funds. He took people’s nest eggs and savings accounts and rainy day funds and put them into more or less conservative allocations of five-star funds. But he had not been satisfied with that sort of program for his own retirement planning. Too many years of reading the financial press had filled his head with profiles of financial wizards who made killings and retired with sailboats and ski mansions and houses in the south of France. You weren’t supposed to end up with a ranch-style split level in Algonquin Bay and a cottage on Mud Lake.

  And so Roger Felt had embarked on an ambitious scheme to make the big leagues. He moved his own portfolio into the riskier stocks, the testosterone market, and he started betting on margin. And when the first margin calls had come in, he rapidly paid them off with his own cash.

  Of course, this cash was also supposed to pay for his wife’s retirement, not just his own. It was meant to cover assisted living for his mother-in-law and the educations of their three kids, who were all heading off, seriatim, to university. No problem. When the market turned around, as his economic savvy told him it must, he would be so rich he could pay for all of those things with pocket money.

  Many losses and many margin calls later, Roger Felt found himself in the uncomfortable position of having drained not just his own accounts but those of his wealthiest clients. In Algonquin Bay, these “wealthiest” were not millionaires, but retirees with plump pensions and paid-off houses who had a little extra cash. Roger Felt “borrowed” liberally from their accounts to pay off his margin calls and to place bigger investments, with the intention, he later told the court, of paying everybody back—with interest, of course.

  Dreams of luxury on the Côte d’Azur began to fade, and dwindled into dreams of paying back the funds he had pilfered, dreams of restoring his own family to financial health, dreams of staying out of jail.

  It was not to be.

  One of his clients, a Mrs. Gertrude M. Lowry, wished to consolidate all her funds with another firm. When she tired of Felt’s evasions, she called the police. Cardinal got the case and, since he was no financial wizard, Delorme was soon put on it too. She had been just a few months short of an MBA when she joined the police and had spent half a dozen years chasing white-collar criminals.

  They arrested Felt on charges of fraud, misappropriation of funds and breach of fiduciary duty. He was found guilty on all three. His lawyer, Leonard Scofield, made an eloquent request for a minimum sentence that the judge received coolly. He could do little else after hearing from the parade of witnesses: men long past their prime who had been forced to go back to work, young people whose dreams of owning a house had come to nothing, angry couples who had lost their homes, and tremulous old women now working at menial jobs to keep their heads above water. Roger Felt was banished to a medium-security prison for eight years, from which he had been paroled after serving five.

  Cardinal rolled up in front of the address Desmond had given him. It turned out to be an apartment above a fabric store on Sumner. To get to the downstairs door, Cardinal had to squeeze his way through a passageway so narrow that he was forced to turn sideways.

  The door had been decorated by consecutive generations of graffiti artists, the least imaginative of whom had written I Love You in raspberry-coloured letters a foot tall. Cardinal buzzed the intercom and waited, looking around the alley with its crushed soda cans, its fly-away sandwich wrappers, even a laceless, soggy tennis shoe. All in all, a long way down from the lakeside property Roger Felt had owned when Cardinal and Delorme had arrested him. He had been swinging in a hammock with a rum and Coke in his hand at the time.

  A voice caused the intercom’s torn speaker to flap and buzz. “Who is it?”

  “Courier.”

  “Hold on, I’ll be right down.”

  Heavy footsteps on the stairs within, and then the door opened.

  Prison had done nothing good for Roger Felt’s appearance. He had always been a squarish man, not graceful, but expensive suits and a regular squash game had combined to make him look like a person you might call sir. But now he was squat and trollish. His shirt looked as if it had not been ironed for decades, and there were rings of sweat under his arms. He reeked of cigarettes, and was wheezing from the stairs.

  “Are you from Alma’s?” he said, naming a Main Street restaurant. “I’m not really expecting anything.”

  Cardinal held up his shield. “Surprise.”

  Felt peered up at him through thick lenses. “Oh, no.”

  Cardinal pushed the door open. “Mr. Felt, we have reason to believe you are in breach of your parole. I need to come in and take a look around.”

  “Let’s see a warrant first.”

  “You’re a convicted felon on parole, Mr. Felt, and I have reasonable grounds to suspect you are in breach. No warrant required.”

  Cardinal pushed his way past him and went up the dark stairwell. The door at the top opened onto a cramped, lopsided kitchen lit with one of those fluorescent rings beloved of penny-pinching landlords. A cigarette sent up coils of smoke from an ashtray. Beside it there was an adding machine, a stack of files, a battered-looking laptop and a small printer.

  Cardinal pulled a sheet of paper from its out tray.

  It was an invoice from Beckwith and Beaulne addressed to Nautilus Marine Storage and Repair. The capital Ns and Rs had lines running through them. Cardinal usually stayed pretty cool when it came to arresting criminals. But now, as Roger Felt came huffing into the kitchen, he felt a surge of rage. Immediately, some other part of his character locked this rage away. He pointed to the adding machine, the files, the columns of figures on the laptop screen.

  “The terms of your parole are that you not be employed in the financial sector. Clearly, you are performing accountancy services. May I speak to Mr. Beckwith?”

  “He isn’t here.”

  “And Mr. Beaulne?”

  “He’s not available either.”

  “Beaulne and Beckwith are fictitious entities, aren’t they?”

  “It’s just a name. It sounded good.”

  “You’re running a fictitious company, Mr. Felt. For purposes once again of duping the public.”

  “I need clients. The name sounded good. You can’t expect me to live on the income from a job in a sandwich shop.”

  “With your record of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty, I think a judge is going to be very interested in the fictitious Mr. Beaulne and Mr. Beckwith.”

  “Please don’t do that. I can’t go back to jail.”

  “Get your shoes on, Mr. Felt. That’s exactly where we’re going.”

  24

  ROGER FELT WAS BOOKED and, after being allowed to call his lawyer, was placed in a holding cell. Cardinal alerted the Crown attorney and the parole office. He wrote up his notes, finished the rest of the paperwork and carried the boxes of material he had removed from Felt’s apartment into the boardroom.

  The boardroom was the quietest and most respectable-looking place in the station. The long oak table and handsome chairs gave it the feel of the headquarters of a small but prosperous corporation. Cardinal opened the first box and lifted out the adding machine, the laptop, the printer. He opened the second box and removed stacks of files and stationery.

  Staff Sergeant Mary Flower came in. Mary was the kind of woman for whom the harsh word broad must have been originally coined. No more than five foot three, but big of chest and voice. She was protective of her uniformed brood, but if she suspected a street cop of slacking, she could deliver a reprimand so fierce that the place reeked of brimstone for weeks. Over the years she had nursed a crush on John Cardinal, a fact he had occasionally used to shameless advantage in prying favours out of the uniformed division.

  “Listen, John.” They had been colleagues long enough to be on a first-name basis when out of earshot of her troops. “You’re gonna tell me it’s none of my business, but—”

  “It’s none of your business, Mary …”

  “But it is, sorta. Because it goes to proper conduct of business in the shop, and that goes very much to my bailiwick of training the juniors. But that’s not why I’m bringing it up. I’m bringing it up because you’re a friend and I respect you enough to tell you when I think you’re making a mistake.”

  “I make lots of mistakes. Which one did you have in mind?”

  “First of all, honey, you shouldn’t be back here yet. You’re still hurting, and you’re gonna be hurting for a long time. The cop shop is no place for a broken heart.”

  “She didn’t dump me. She, uh …” Died. He would never be able to say that word. Not in connection to Catherine.

  “I know that, John. So allow yourself to admit that you’re human. Allow yourself to admit that your judgment might be off, that you might be prone to mistakes at a time like this. I’m not a detective, I’m not gonna second-guess your investigative work.”

  “He’s been breaching parole. Conditions either mean something or they don’t. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “See, right there, that doesn’t sound like you. You’re not usually an all-or-nothing, black-or-white kind of guy.

  I’m just asking you to take some time off. You’re not running on all cylinders here.”

  “You done?”

  “Momma Mary is done, honey.”

  “Good. Because I have some actual work to do.”

  It turned out that Wes Beattie was Roger Felt’s parole officer. Although they talked on the phone quite often, Cardinal had not actually seen Beattie face to face for more than a year. He had grown a big bushy beard since then, and was uncharacteristically formal in dark suit and tie.

  “Gee, Wes,” Cardinal said. “Did you arrive here in a limo?”

  “You’ve interrupted me in a night at the opera,” Beattie purred. “Thus ruining my yearly attempt at culture.”

  “Algonquin Bay doesn’t have an opera.”

  “This evening it does. The Manhattan Light Opera Company is at the Capital Centre for exactly one night, and you yanked me out of it.”

  “Felt’s lawyer’s on the way, and we’re also waiting for the crown.”

  “No point holding your breath,” Beattie said. “I’ve spoken to the crown, and he doesn’t want to pursue this unless I do, and I have to tell you, John, I really, really don’t.”

  “Roger Felt is in breach of parole, Wes. He’s running a financial operation under false pretences. He’s been sending me threatening and harassing letters—which you might want to see before you make up your mind, let alone the Crown attorney’s mind.”

  Beattie was one of those large men who seem to give off a kind of calm that is hard to resist. He stood before Cardinal, rocking gently back and forth on his heels as he listened. The whole time, he was nodding sympathetically. A parole officer—besieged by judges, criminals, victims, lawyers, not to mention highly aggrieved cops—learns to be a good listener or he goes insane.

  “Can we sit down somewhere and talk?” he said quietly. His understanding tone suddenly made Cardinal feel like a ranter.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Cardinal took him back to the boardroom, where Felt’s accounting equipment was spread out.

  Cardinal held up a sheet of letterhead. “You realize Beckwith and Beaulne is a fictitious organization?”

  “Strictly speaking, John, it isn’t. It’s a bookkeeping operation run by Roger Felt, essentially a home business. Beckwith and Beaulne is just a name—it doesn’t matter that they’re not real entities. Merrill and Lynch have been dead a long time too.”

  “Merrill and Lynch were real people who founded a company.”

  “John, you’re not going to make the fraudulent part stick. Roger does in fact provide the bookkeeping service that he promises. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “He’s doing people’s taxes for them. That involves tax advice, which is financial advice, which his conditions of release strictly prohibit.”

  “I disagree and so will the court, John. He’s not doing accounting, he’s doing bookkeeping. That’s simple record keeping and arithmetic. He has no access to accounts, no fiduciary duties. It’s a worthwhile service and an effective use of his skills.”

  “The court may see it differently.”

  “John, I ran it by a judge before I gave Roger the go-ahead. He didn’t have a problem with it. And the crown doesn’t either, which is why he isn’t here.”

  “You were out of bounds heading him off, Wes.”

  “I’m trying to do you a favour. Believe me, you don’t want this to get to court. Roger is a changed man. His crime cost him everything he had, and I mean everything. Not just his money. You saw where he’s living. His wife left him shortly after he went to jail. Two of his kids want nothing to do with him. He lost his friends, you name it.”