By the time you read thi.., p.32
By the Time You Read This,
p.32
He held up the tiny Baggie.
“What’s that supposed to be?”
“It’s a memory chip, Doctor. From Catherine’s camera.”
“Why should I care about that?”
“She took your picture when you came out onto the roof. She always did that—photographed whoever was around when she was taking pictures. She photographed everyone. She was essentially a shy person. Her camera was a kind of defence. You knew she took your picture and that’s why you took the camera with you when you left. You went down to where she fell and you took it away. I imagine you were too excited at the time to realize it had broken open, the chip had flown out. You must’ve been awfully disappointed when you got home and realized the camera was empty. I would have loved to have seen that moment. Better than heroin, for sure. Well, I’ve seen what’s on that chip, and your life is essentially over.”
“She was bipolar, Detective. Had been for decades. How many hospital admissions were there, all told? A dozen? Twenty?”
“I didn’t count them.”
“She would have killed herself eventually.”
“Is that what you tell yourself? Is that how you get to sleep at night?”
“Go ahead, then. Shoot me.”
“You want me to?”
“Go ahead. I’m not afraid.”
“Sorry, Doctor. No one’s going to do it for you ever again. You’re just going to have to shoot yourself.”
Cardinal lowered his gun so it was pointed at the floor.
Bell’s gun hand shook harder.
“I’ll kill you,” he said. “You know I can do it.”
“I’m not the one you want to kill, Doctor. I’m not one of your patients. One of your whiners, as you so compassionately call them. Killing me won’t stop the pain.”
With a jerk of his elbow, a marionette move in its suddenness, Bell aimed the Luger in a diagonal at his own temple.
“All these years,” Cardinal said, “it’s what you’ve really wanted, isn’t it.”
Beads of sweat sprung out on Bell’s brow. He squeezed his eyes shut. A single tear rolled down his cheek and into his beard.
“Go ahead. You don’t really want to spend the rest of your life in prison, do you?”
Hand and gun trembled. Bell’s whole body was shaking. Sweat rolled down the reddening face.
“You can’t do it, can you?”
Bell groaned, and a sob escaped from his woolly beard. The Luger dropped to the floor and tumbled down the steps. Cardinal picked it up.
“I think we’ve done some good work today, Doctor. I’d say we’ve got to the root of your problem. Now you’ll have a couple of decades in Kingston to work on it.”
52
THE DAYS GO BY, and the last of the autumn shades into winter. Mid-November now, and not a single leaf remains to fall. Every stem has closed, every branch is black and bare against the clouds. Fallen leaves have gathered along the sides of roads and in the culverts, they have gathered on porch steps and around garage doors. They have gathered on decks and cars and windowsills. It has rained, and the lawns are no longer covered in fluffy, multicoloured layers. Now the leaves are plastered in flat jagged collages on the sidewalks and on the driveways and even in the wheel wells of Algonquin Bay vehicles.
The temperature has dropped, and John Cardinal is wearing his heavy leather coat, the one with something like fur for a lining. After the beauties of October, November is dour, the pretty girl replaced by the sourpuss. Another week or two and the leather coat will be replaced by the down parka, his full Nanook, as Catherine called it.
Cardinal is coming back from a morning walk along the hiking trail that curls up the hill behind his house, a walk he has taken countless times with his wife. Delorme had called him earlier, beating herself, yet again, for jumping to conclusions about Catherine. Then she told him that Melanie Greene is now out of hospital and living at home with her mother. Her new therapist is optimistic.
Mr. and Mrs. Walcott are coming along the other side of the road, walking their horrible dog. They stop bickering when they see Cardinal, in deference to his loss.
“Supposed to snow,” Mrs. Walcott says.
Cardinal agrees with a wave and heads up the slope to his house. Smells of woodsmoke and bacon mingle with the smell of snow. Snow has been about to fall for at least a week now. It’s late this year.
He enters his house and hangs up his coat. He struggles to undo the wet laces of his boots, gets one off, and then the phone is ringing in the kitchen and he walks clump-footed, with one boot still on, laces flapping, to answer it.
It is the only person he wants to hear from right now. “Kelly, how are you? What are you doing up this early?”
“I got your message last night, but it was too late to call.
Cardinal pries the boot off his foot and takes the phone into the living room. The line is not great, full of mysterious crackles, but he sits in his favourite chair and tells his daughter that Frederick Bell’s bail has been set so high he won’t be getting out of jail pending his trial for murder in the first degree.
A moment later he can hear his daughter crying, her sobs echoing up the increasingly bad line from New York. Kelly has still not made the adjustment demanded by the knowledge that her mother was dead not by her own but by another’s hand. Bitter either way, and Cardinal wishes Kelly were with him so that he could give her a hug and tell her it was all right, that everything would be okay, even though it wasn’t and it wouldn’t.
“Kelly?”
The sobbing has stopped, but so has the crackling of static.
“Kelly?”
The line has gone dead.
Cardinal presses the Flash button and dials her number, getting only a busy signal.
Outside, the snow is falling now, small rainlike flakes that fall fast on a slant. If she were there, Catherine would be gathering up her camera, putting on her boots. The first snow always got her outside taking pictures even though they were too “calendarish,” in her opinion, to be any good. Cardinal hears a scrabbling on the roof. Taking the phone with him, he goes to the back door and opens it, surprising a squirrel in the act of chewing insulation from an air conditioning line.
“Beat it,” Cardinal says, but the squirrel just regards him with a black glistening eye. Flakes of snow are melting on his ears and tail.
Cardinal raises the phone to him and the squirrel scampers away, a black squiggle among the leaves, and then there is silence. Or near silence. A soft wind threads itself through the birches, and snow ticks on fallen leaves.
The phone rings in his hand. Cardinal answers it, and the line to New York is open once more.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Greg Dawson, of the Centre of Forensic Sciences, for details on the handling of suspect documents.
I am also grateful, once again, to Staff Sergeant (Ret.) Rick Sapinski of the North Bay police for information on police procedures. Any errors that remain are despite his generous efforts.
ALSO BY GILES BLUNT
Forty Words for Sorrow
When four teenagers go missing in the small northern town of Algonquin Bay, the extensive police investigation comes up empty. Everyone is ready to give up except Detective John Cardinal, whose persistence has only served to get him removed from Homicide. Haunted by a criminal secret in his own past, and hounded by a special investigation into corruption in the force, Cardinal is on the brink of losing his career—and his family.
When the mutilated body of thirteen-year-old Katie Pine is pulled from an abandoned mineshaft, only Cardinal is willing to consider the horrific truth: that this quiet town is home to the most vicious of serial killers….
Seal Books / ISBN: 978-0-7704-2873-0
ALSO BY GILES BLUNT
The Delicate Storm
When the dismembered corpse of an American tourist turns up half-eaten by bears near Algonquin Bay, Detective John Cardinal is assigned to the case. Without a solid lead, and with the RCMP and CSIS involved, Cardinal is forced to band together with his nemesis, Sergeant Malcolm Musgrave, to untangle the deceit and cover-ups surrounding the case. Then a well-respected local woman is found frozen under a glaze of ice in the woods, and Cardinal realizes that the two very different murders may well be connected.
Working closely with his trusted colleague, Detective Lise Delorme, to whom he feels a dangerous attraction, Cardinal fights his emotions and a relentless ice storm only to uncover a knot of lies and conspiracies that go back more than thirty years and extend to the highest reaches of Canadian intelligence.
Seal Books / ISBN: 978-0-7704-2939-3
ALSO BY GILES BLUNT
Blackfly Season
It’s spring in Algonquin Bay, and the blackflies are driving people a little mad. Detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme have a strange case on their hands—a young woman has wandered, bug-bitten, out of the Algonquin Bay bush with a gunshot wound to the head. Cardinal becomes obsessed with finding out who she is, and who is trying to kill her. When the body of a local biker, Wombat Guthrie, is found in a cave, it seems the two cases are related—and the link appears to be a drug dealer and self-proclaimed shaman who calls himself Red Bear.
Seal Books / ISBN: 978-0-7704-2933-1
Copyright © 2006 Giles Blunt
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Seal Books and colophon are trademarks of
Random House of Canada Limited.
BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS
Seal Books/published by arrangement with
Random House Canada
Random House Canada edition published 2006
Seal Books edition published November 2007
Seal Books are published by Random House of Canada Limited.
“Seal Books” and the portrayal of a seal are the property of
Random House of Canada Limited.
Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:
www.randomhouse.ca
eISBN: 978-0-307-36852-2
v3.0
Giles Blunt, By the Time You Read This
