Cardinal sank into the couch. He noted the boxes of Kleenex discreetly placed at either end, and on the coffee table—as much Kleenex as at Desmond’s Funeral Home—and he wondered how many times Catherine had sat here and wept. Had she also talked about her disappointment in her husband—who didn’t pay her enough attention, was not kind enough or patient enough?

  “‘How she must have hated you,’” Dr. Bell read from the latest sympathy card. “‘You failed her so completely.’” He looked at Cardinal over tiny reading glasses. “What was your reaction when you read that? Your immediate reaction, I mean.”

  “That he’s right. Or she. Whoever wrote it. That it’s true I failed her and she probably hated me for it.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  The doctor’s mild eyes on him—not probing, not trying to X-ray—just waiting, bright squares of window glinting in his glasses.

  “I believe that I failed her, yes.”

  What Cardinal could not believe was that he was talking to anyone like this. He never talked to anyone like this, except Catherine. Something about Dr. Bell—an air of gentle expectation, not to mention the wiry eyebrows and all that corduroy—compelled honesty. No wonder Catherine liked him, although …

  “What?” Dr. Bell said. “You’re hesitating now.”

  “Just remembering something,” Cardinal said. “Something Catherine said to me one time just after she had seen you. I could tell she had been crying, and I asked her what was wrong. How it went. And she said, ‘I love Dr. Bell. I think he’s great. But sometimes even the best doctor has to hurt you.’”

  “You thought of that now because my question hurt.”

  Cardinal nodded.

  “There’s a common saying in psychotherapy: It has to get worse before it gets better.”

  “Yeah. Catherine told me that, too.”

  “Not that one ever intends to make a patient feel worse,” Dr. Bell said. His hands toyed with a brass object on his desk. It looked like a miniature steam engine. “But we all build up defences against certain truths about ourselves or our situations—against reality, essentially—and therapy provides a place where it’s safe to dismantle those defences. The patient does the dismantling, not the therapist, but the process is bound to be painful nevertheless.”

  “Luckily, I’m not here as a patient. I just wanted to ask you about those cards. I realize you’re not a profiler …”

  “No forensic experience at all, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s all right—this isn’t an official investigation. But I was hoping you would help by giving me your opinion on what kind of person would write these cards. They were mailed from two different locations, but they were printed by the same machine.”

  “What exactly is it that is under investigation—officially or otherwise?”

  “Catherine’s d—” Cardinal’s breath caught on the word. He still could not say that word about Catherine, even though it was more than a week now. “Catherine.”

  “You mean you don’t believe she killed herself?”

  “The coroner has made a finding of suicide, and my colleagues down at the station agree. Personally, I find it a little harder to accept, though you’ll probably tell me that’s just my defence.”

  “Oh, no, I would never say it was just a defence. I have great respect for defences, Detective. They’re what get us through the day, not to mention the night. Nor would I second-guess your expertise on matters of homicide. My own experience of Catherine makes me think it indeed highly likely she killed herself, but if evidence were to show otherwise, I would not try to argue black is white. Certainly a finding of accidental death would be much easier for me to accept. But you’re not thinking it an accident, are you.”

  “No.”

  “You’re thinking she was killed. And that whoever wrote these nasty cards was behind the killing.”

  “Let’s just say I’m pursuing several lines of inquiry at the moment. I’d be willing to pay you—I should have said that right away.”

  “Oh, no, no. I couldn’t possibly accept payment. This is not my field. I’m happy to give you my opinion, off the record, but to accept payment would imply a commercial service offered with confidence. It most assuredly is not.” Dr. Bell smiled, eyes disappearing for a moment in fur. “That’s a considerable caveat. Do you still wish me to proceed?”

  “If you would.”

  Dr. Bell rolled his shoulders and shook his head. If you were going to have tics, Cardinal supposed, they weren’t the worst ones to have. The doctor picked up the first card and adjusted his glasses. He swivelled slightly in his chair, bringing the card into the light. Then he went still, a figure in a painting.

  “All right,” he said after some time. “First of all, what is the nature of someone who writes a note like this? Essentially, you’ve got someone who is sneering at you.”

  “A friend of mine used the same word.”

  “And the author is not even sneering at you in person, he’s doing it behind your back. Or she. Rather in the way of a child who calls someone names from a safe distance. He knows you can’t retaliate. It’s a cowardly, fearful sort of attack.

  “Whereas killing someone—killing someone is very personal and face to face. Usually. To link these cards with Catherine’s possible murder, you must assume the motive in both cases is the same: the goal is to hurt you, and Catherine was just a means to that end. Somehow, in order to hurt you, the killer somehow first got hold of her suicide note—unless you’re thinking it’s not in fact her handwriting. Are you in doubt about the handwriting?”

  “For now, we’ll assume it’s genuine.”

  “Which would mean someone got hold of her suicide note. How could that be?”

  “I don’t know—at least, not yet. Please go on.”

  “He intends to hurt you by hurting her, perhaps follows her for a time. Possibly a good long time. Possibly snoops through her things and finds a suicide note she wrote on a particularly bad day. Possibly even finds it after she discarded it, who knows? In any case, he follows her on this night when she’s quite alone and pushes her off the roof, leaving the note behind to throw everyone off the scent. If that is in fact what happened, it seems to me the person capable of going through with all that—the stalking, the waiting, and then the final violence itself—is not the sort of shrinking violet who’s going to bother writing anonymous squibs. Am I making sense so far?”

  “I wish OPP Behavioural Science was this fast,” Cardinal said. “Keep going.”

  “I would say in the case of the card writer you’re looking for someone who knows you. And I emphasize you as opposed to Catherine. He’s gone to the trouble of hiding his handwriting. And you say he’s mailed the cards from two different locations.”

  Dr. Bell sank back into his chair, rocking it with one foot propped on the coffee table, then resumed as if he had not interrupted himself in the slightest.

  “I’d say this is going to be someone nervous and withdrawn. Someone who feels himself—or herself—a failure. Almost certainly unemployed. Self-esteem deep in the negative zone. Also—to judge by the first card—someone who has suffered a great loss for which you are to blame. I imagine you’ve already considered the possibility, Detective, that this is someone you nicked?”

  “Mm,” Cardinal said. “And there are a lot of those.”

  “Yes, but that ‘How does it feel.’ That rings with a very specific intent, don’t you find? Someone steps on your foot, so you stomp on his. How does it feel? How do you like it? My point being, it’s not just someone you’ve imprisoned, but perhaps someone who lost his wife as a result of that imprisonment.”

  “We don’t keep statistics, but there’s probably a lot of those too. Marriages don’t tend to thrive on imprisonment.”

  “Nor on hospitalization, though I note your own admirable exception to this.”

  Cardinal wanted to say, “I did my best, obviously it wasn’t enough,” but grief closed its bony hand around his throat. He opened his briefcase and pulled out Catherine’s suicide note, the original encased in plastic.

  Once again Dr. Bell turned toward the window light. A few pensive scratchings among his sandy and grey curls, and then he went still again.

  After a few moments he said, “That must have been painful to read.”

  “How does it read to you, Doctor? Does it sound genuine?”

  “Ah. So you do have doubts about the handwriting?”

  “Just tell me how it sounds to you, if you would.”

  “It reads exactly like Catherine. A deeply sad woman, often hopeless, but also capable of great love. I think it was that love that kept her going through depressions that by all rights should have proved lethal years earlier. Her main concern, and I heard this from her over and over again, was how it would affect you—apparently even at the end.”

  “If it was the end,” Cardinal said.

  11

  LARRY BURKE WAS NEW in CID. He’d only been out of uniform a few months, in fact, and he very much wanted to make a good impression on his colleagues. He even worried that stopping into the Country Style at the top of Algonquin for a quiet lunch might be viewed as a complete cliché, the cop in the donut shop. But the truth was he didn’t give a damn about donuts, he just liked Country Style coffee. And they were making a decent sandwich these days, when you got down to it, so why shouldn’t he eat where he liked?

  It was his favourite thing to do on his day off, stop into the Country Style with the Toronto Sun—you couldn’t beat the Sun for sports coverage—order himself a gigantic coffee and a chicken salad sandwich, and linger for a good hour and a half. Today the sunlight streamed through the windows, and Burke was actually hot, even though it was a chilly October day. Outside, the hills were scarlet and gold.

  He licked the last of the chicken salad off his fingers and took a swig of coffee. There was a bran muffin sitting there waiting for him, but he didn’t want lunch to be over too fast. The truth was, days off had become a little bleak since he and Brenda had split—or rather since Brenda had split. Burke would have happily kept their fitful romance going for another tepid year or two.

  He thought about calling her on the cell, just see how she was doing, but he didn’t want to seem pathetic. Anyway, Brenda was right: they hadn’t had much of a future.

  “Man, I don’t believe what I just saw.”

  Burke looked up from an article on the Grey Cup. The guy at the next table was staring out the window at something beyond Burke’s shoulder. Burke turned around to look, but all he could see was the parking lot, nothing much happening there.

  “He’s gone now,” the guy said. “But I swear, fella just got out of that Honda Civic was carrying a shotgun. He went into the laundromat. Looked pissed off, too.”

  “Are you sure he was carrying a gun?”

  “Hey, man, I just bagged six duck last weekend. I know a double-ought when I see one.”

  Burke’s mouth dried. He didn’t have his service firearm with him, no radio either. He flipped open his phone and hit the speed dial for the duty sergeant.

  “Hey, Mo, it’s Burke. Yeah, yeah, I know, listen. I got a report of a man carrying a firearm into the laundromat next to the Country Style top of Algonquin. I didn’t see him, but there’s a hunter two seats over who swears the guy’s carrying a shotgun.”

  He heard the sergeant hitting the radio and hung up, then he went out into the parking lot and over to the laundromat. Smells of leaves mingled with the scent of laundry detergent blowing from the building’s vents. The air was cold enough to give him goosebumps. At least, he thought it was the air.

  He didn’t hesitate. In Burke’s experience, the anticipation was the worst aspect of this sort of thing. These situations never improved. He was hoping the guy was either carrying a toy or just on his way to get his hunting rifle repaired.

  He opened the door of the laundromat and went in. A young man—thin, scrawny even, with a stalk of a neck, and prematurely balding in his, what, mid-twenties at most—was staring at a spin dryer on the far side of a row of washers, as if it displayed college football and not a spiral of laundry. At the front of the place, in a row of plastic chairs, three women were reading magazines or listening to iPods. None of them looked up.

  Under the pretence of grabbing a magazine, Burke moved toward the other side of the washers and saw that the man was indeed holding a shotgun. It dangled in a loose grip, pointing toward the floor. The guy didn’t seem aware of anyone else.

  Burke backed up a couple of steps. He tapped the first woman on the shoulder and, when she looked up from her Chatelaine, startled, he put a finger to his lips. He showed her his police ID and pointed to the door. The woman opened her mouth, but Burke again gestured with his finger to his lips. She retrieved a small knapsack from the floor and went out.

  By now the other two women were watching. Burke gestured to them as well to leave the laundromat. They both stood up, but instead of going out, one of them headed toward the dryers.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “He’s got a gun.”

  Burke took hold of her elbow and spoke quietly. “Out, now. Get out now and stay away from the windows. Don’t let anyone else in until my backup units arrive. Go. Go.”

  The woman didn’t look back; the door slammed shut behind her.

  Other people at the far end of the laundromat hadn’t heard anything over the gurgle and clatter of the machines, and the armed man sat between Burke and them. He was looking at Burke now.

  “What do you want?” he said. He had an unpleasant voice, a ducklike quack that rightly belonged to a much older man.

  Burke smiled. “Some guy next door panicked when he saw you had a weapon there. Thought I’d come in and check it out.”

  “I’m not going to hurt anybody.”

  “That’s good. But do you realize it’s an offence to carry an unsheathed firearm within city limits?”

  “What are you, a cop?”

  Burke nodded, gave another little smile. He looked up at the ceiling a moment then back at the guy. He was trying to remember what the Police College at Aylmer had taught him about eye contact with disturbed individuals. Some found it threatening, but some found it reassuring. He couldn’t remember which, so he just tried a bit of both.

  “My day off,” Burke said. “Now, hand that firearm over to me, butt first.”

  “No. I’m not going to do that.”

  The people in the back were still oblivious. If Burke could get them out, then he could leave too and keep the place empty till backup arrived. Where the hell were they, anyway?

  “Listen,” Burke said. “I’m just going to ask the other people to leave. I’m a little concerned that weapon of yours is going to go off, and we don’t want any bystanders to get hurt, do we.”

  “Fine. Get ‘em out of here. You go, too.”

  “Excuse me!” Burke had to yell over the washers. “Excuse me—sir? Ma’am?” He held up his ID, not that they would be able to make it out from where they were. “Sir? Ma’am? Police officer. I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I need you to step outside and stay clear of the building for a little bit.”

  “What the hell for?” the man said. “My stuff’s just about ready to come out of the dryer.”

  “Just step outside, sir. I need to secure this building.”

  The man grumbled, gathering up a knapsack and a bottle of iced tea. He grumbled all the way out the door, through which the woman had already made a less recalcitrant exit.

  Burke turned back to the man with the gun, almost a boy, really.

  “I’m going to ask you again. Would you hand that weapon over, please? Butt first.”

  By way of reply the man shucked a shell into the chamber. Burke’s heart fell into his shoes.

  “All right, look.” Burke raised his hands. “I’m not armed. I told you, it’s my day off. Just put the gun down, and we can have a dialogue about this.” Have a dialogue? A dialogue? Be nice if I could sound like a human being, he told himself.

  “Just go back outside,” the man said in that ducklike voice. “I’m not going to hurt anyone. Just myself.”

  “Well, at least tell me your name. I mean, we’re gonna have to identify you and all that.”

  “Perry,” the man said. “Perry Dorn.”

  “My name’s Larry,” Burke said. “Perry and Larry, how about that?” Twinning, they called that. Find some way to identify with the guy. If he lights a smoke, you light one too. If he feels like pizza, you ask if you can share it. Twinning could make a real difference, they see you as human, they see you as sympathetic. “So, where do you live, Perry?”

  “Woodruff Avenue. Three forty-one Woodruff.”

  “Oh, yeah. That building by the old CNR station? That looks like a nice place.”

  “It’s a dump.”

  “Really. You wouldn’t know from the outside.”

  “Yeah, well. It’s amazing what you don’t know from the outside.”

  “Very true,” Burke said. “That’s very true. Why don’t you tell me a little about what’s going on with you? You look like a guy with a certain amount of stamina. Guy who can take a few hits and stay on his feet. What’s going on, Perry? What’s got you down? Job? Girlfriend?”

  The man shook his head. One side of his mouth crept up a little, as if he was tasting bile.

  “If I tell you, will you go away and leave me alone?”

  “I can’t leave while you have a gun, Perry. I’d get in serious trouble if I did that. Why don’t you tell me anyway?”

  The man blinked several times. A heavy sweat had broken out on his forehead, dripping down into his eyes. It was hot in the laundromat, but not that hot.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend and I don’t have a job. Those are the givens. Let X be a student. A former student. I was going to go to McGill to do graduate work. But I didn’t want to go unless my girlfriend came with me. Let Y be my girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. She said she was going to, but then she changed her mind after I’d already been accepted and paid my tuition and had my ticket and everything. I knew something wasn’t right with this equation. Before she backed out, I knew. I knew it couldn’t possibly go that well. And I was right. I got the right answer, I just didn’t know how I got it.”