“Surely your colleagues already determined that, Dad. Why? Do you think somebody else wrote Mom’s note for her?”

  “No, I don’t—not yet, anyway. But look. Come round this side.”

  Kelly debated whether to just go into the other room and turn on the TV. She didn’t want to encourage her father, but on the other hand, she didn’t want to do anything that would make things worse. She got up and stood behind him.

  “See, what strikes me funny about this,” Cardinal said, “is that this suicide note is not the last thing Catherine wrote in this notebook.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can see the impressions back here, earlier on. They’re very faint, but you can just make them out when you hold the notebook at the right angle. Can you see?”

  “Frankly, no.”

  “You’re not at the right angle. You have to sit down.”

  Cardinal pulled out the chair beside him and Kelly sat down. He tilted the notebook slowly back and forth.

  “Wait!” Kelly said. “I can see it now.”

  Cardinal held the notebook steady in the light. There at the top of a page of random notes was a faint impression of the words Dear John. Cardinal tilted it slightly. Lower on the page Kelly could just make out any other way … Catherine. The middle was obscured by other notes, including a reminder for Cardinal’s birthday.

  “My birthday’s in July,” he said. “Over three months ago.”

  “You think she wrote her note three months ago? I suppose it’s possible. Pretty weird to carry around a suicide note for three months, though.”

  Cardinal dropped the notebook onto the table and sat back. “On the other hand, there could be some perfectly simple explanation: she wrote it out one day, intending to … but then she changed her mind. For a while, at least. Or maybe she accidentally skipped a page in her notebook three months ago, and then, the other day, she just happened to use the first blank page in the book.”

  “Out of a concern for neatness? Seems a pretty odd time to be worried about using every page in your ninety-five-cent notebook.”

  “It does, doesn’t it.”

  “But it’s her writing. Her pen. In the long run, what difference does it make what page she wrote it on?”

  “I don’t know,” Cardinal said. “I truly don’t know.”

  Cardinal had learned long ago that a detective thrives on contacts. In the overworked and underfunded endeavours of forensic science, the slightest personal connection can help nudge a case along quicker than the average, and an actual friendship can work magic.

  Tommy Hunn had never been a friend. Tommy Hunn had been a colleague of Cardinal’s back in the early days of his career in Toronto, when he was still working Vice. In many ways Hunn had been a police force’s nightmare: excessively muscled, casually violent, cheerfully racist. He had also been a pretty good detective right up until he got caught in a bawdy house by his own squad. He could have faced charges much more serious than conduct unbecoming had not Cardinal gone to bat for him at his disciplinary hearing. He wrote letters of support for him, and later, when Hunn was looking for a new line of work, a letter of reference. Hunn had gone back to school, and eventually managed to get himself into the documents section of the Ontario Centre of Forensic Science, where he had been leading an apparently honourable life ever since.

  “Hoo, boy, it’s Cardinal the friendly ghost,” Hunn said when he answered the phone. “Got to be something really special. Otherwise, I say to myself, why wouldn’t he go through our central receiving office?”

  “I got a couple of documents for you, Tommy—maybe three. I’m hoping you can help me out.”

  “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

  NAUSEA 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

  NEXT MORNING, KELLY 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?”