The Fields of Grief

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 back yard 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 on to 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. Catherine breathed this frosty air too.

‘When do you have to be back in New York?’ he asked Kelly.

‘Well, I told them I was gonna 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?’

Cardinal recalled a big strapping blonde girl – angry at the world and very political. She and Kelly had been inseparable in their last years of high school.

‘I would have thought Kim would have ventured out into the big bad world by now.’

‘Yeah, so would I.’

‘You sound mournful.’ Cardinal accidentally brushed against a recycling bin. A Jack Russell bounced up and down on the other side of the fence, yapping elaborate canine threats.

‘Well, we were best friends for a while, but now I’m not even sure if I should call her,’ Kelly said. ‘Kim was the smartest girl at Algonquin High – way smarter than me – head of the debating club, delegate at the junior UN, editor of the yearbook. And now it’s like she wants to be Queen of Suburbia.’

‘Not everyone wants to move to New York.’

‘I know that. But Kim’s twenty-seven and she’s already got three kids, and she owns two – two! – SUVs.’

Cardinal pointed at a driveway they were just passing: one Grand Cherokee, one Wagoneer.

‘All she can talk about is sports. Honestly, I think Kim’s life revolves around curling and hockey and ringette. I’m surprised she isn’t into bowling yet.’

‘Priorities change when you have kids.’

‘Well, I never want kids if it means you have to check your mind at the door. Kim hasn’t read a newspaper in years. All she watches on TV is Survivor and Canadian Idol and hockey. Hockey! She hated sports when we were in school. Honestly, I thought Kim and I would be friends forever, but now I’m thinking maybe I won’t call.’

‘Well, here’s an idea. You feel like making a quick trip down to Toronto?’

Kelly looked over at him. There was a fine film of sweat on her upper lip and her cheeks were flushed. ‘You’re going to Toronto? What brought this on?’

‘Something cooking at the Forensic Centre. I want to deal with it in person.’

‘This is to do with Mom?’

‘Yeah.’

For a few moments there was just the sound of their breathing – Cardinal’s breathing, anyway. Kelly didn’t seem to be having any trouble. Water Road ended in a turning circle. The two of them slowed and ran in place for a few moments. Beyond the red-brick bungalows, with their neat lawns and rows of stout yard-waste bags, the lake was deep indigo.

‘Dad,’ Kelly said, ‘Mom killed herself. She killed herself and it hurts like hell, but the truth is she was manic depressive, she was in and out of hospitals for a long time, and it’s really, ultimately, not so surprising that she wanted out.’ She touched his arm. ‘You know it wasn’t about you.’

‘Are you gonna come?’

‘Boy, you don’t mess around when you set your mind on something, do you?’ She gave it a second. ‘All right, I’ll come. But just to keep you company on the drive.’

Cardinal pointed to a path that looped away through the trees. ‘Let’s go back the scenic way.’

All the way south down Highway 11, Cardinal could not think of anything but Catherine. Although think was not the word. He felt her absence in the beauty of the hills. He felt her hovering above the highway; it had always been the road that took Cardinal away from or back to Catherine. But she had not been there this time to wave goodbye, would not be there when he came back.

Kelly fiddled with the radio dial.

‘Hey, put it back,’ Cardinal said. ‘That was the Beatles!’

‘Ugh. I can’t stand the Beatles.’

‘How can anyone hate the Beatles? That’s like hating sunshine. It’s like hating ice cream.’

‘It’s just their early stuff I can’t stand. They sound like little wind-up toys.’

Cardinal glanced over at her. Twenty-seven. His daughter was older now than Catherine had been when Kelly was born. Cardinal asked her about New York.

For the next little while Kelly told him about her latest frustrations in trying to make it as an artist. New York was a hard town to be broke in. She had to share an apartment with three other women, and they didn’t always get along. And she was obliged to work at two jobs to make ends meet: she was assisting a painter named Klaus Meier – stretching canvases for him, doing his books – and also working as a waitress three days a week. It didn’t leave a lot of time for her own painting.

‘And doing all this, you never feel the pull of suburban life? The yearning for a small town?’

‘Never. I miss Canada sometimes, though. It’s kind of hard to be friends with Americans.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Americans are the friendliest people in the world, on the surface. At first I found it almost intoxicating – they’re so much more outgoing than Canadians. And they’re not afraid to have a good time.’

‘That’s true. Canadians are more reserved.’

I’m acting, Cardinal thought. I’m not having a conversation, I’m acting like a man having a conversation. This is how it’s done: you listen, you nod, you ask a question. But I’m not here. I’m as gone as the World Trade Center. My heart is Ground Zero. He wanted to talk to Catherine about this, but Catherine was not there.

He struggled to focus.

‘Somewhere along the line Americans invented a kind of fake intimacy,’ Kelly said. ‘They’ll tell you about their divorce the first time they meet you, or their history of child abuse. I’m not kidding. I had one guy tell me how his father used to “incest” him, as he put it. That was on the first date. In the beginning I thought everyone was really trusting, but they’re not at all. They just don’t have any sense of decorum. Why are you smiling?’

‘It’s just funny, hearing you talk about decorum. Unconventional girl like you.’

‘I’m actually pretty conventional, when you get down to it. I have a feeling it’s going to be my downfall as an artist. God, look at the trees.’

The drive to Toronto took four hours. Cardinal dropped Kelly at a Second Cup on College Street where she had arranged to meet an old friend, then he headed over to the Forensic Centre on Grenville.

As a piece of architecture, the Forensic Centre is of no interest whatsoever. It’s just a slab tossed up, like so many other government buildings, in the era when poured concrete replaced brick and stone as the material of choice. Inside, it’s a collection of putty-coloured dividers, tweedy carpet, and mordant cartoons cut from newspapers and taped above people’s desks.

Cardinal had been here many times, though not to the documents section, and the very familiarity of the place unnerved him. He was drowning in the deepest agony of his life; everything should have been changed. And yet the security guards, the rattling elevator, the plain offices, desks, charts and displays were exactly as before.

‘Okay, so we got three little items here,’ Tommy Hunn said, laying them out on the laboratory counter. Unlike the building, Tommy had changed. His hair had got thinner, and his belt was hidden beneath a roll of flab, as if there were a dachshund asleep under his shirt.

‘We got one suicide note. We got one notebook in which said suicide note may or may not have been written. And we have one nasty sympathy card with a typed message inside.’

‘Why don’t we start with the sympathy card?’ Cardinal said. ‘It’s not going to be related to the other two items.’

‘Sympathy card first,’ Hunn said. He put on a pair of latex gloves, removed the card from its plastic folder and opened it. ‘“How does it feel, asshole?”’ he read in a flat monotone. ‘“Just no telling how things will turn out, is there?” Cute.’

He held the note next to the window, tilting it to catch the light.

‘Well, it’s an ink-jet printer, I can see that right off. No idiosyncrasies visible to the naked eye. Not my eye, anyway. But let’s do a little detecting.’ He held a loupe to his eye and brought the note up to his face. ‘Here we go. Printer flaw on the second line. Look at the h’s and the t’s.’

He handed Cardinal the loupe. At first Cardinal couldn’t see anything, but when his eye adjusted he could make out a pale, threadlike line running through the crossbars of the h’s and the t’s.

‘The good news is, if a printer does something like that, it does it consistently. You notice there’s no flaw through the first line of type. But if we had another page the guy printed out, it would show the same flaw on the second line.’

‘How helpful is that going to be?’ Cardinal asked.

‘Without another sample to compare it to? Not helpful at all. And the bad news is, they change the cartridge, they change the flaws. Far as we’re concerned, it’s like they’ve bought themselves a whole new printer.’

Cardinal pointed to the notebook. ‘What can you do with these?’

‘Depends what you want to know.’

‘I’d like to be sure the note was written with the same pen as the rest of the notebook. And when it was written in relation to the last entries. If you open it to the one that mentions “John’s birthday”.’

‘John’s birthday. Ha! Maybe she was addressing it to you!’ Hunn flicked through the pages, then held the notebook up to the light the way he had the card. ‘Oh, yeah. You’ve got impressions here. I can make out “Dear John”. First thing we do is stick ’em both in the comparator.’

He lifted a wide door on something labelled VSC 2000.

‘Look through the window there, when I flick the switch. I can shine several different kinds of light on the samples, see what kicks up. Ink may look identical to the human eye, but even the same make and model of pen will show differences under infrared. The chemistry of different ink batches reacts differently. I can’t tell you how many fraudulent wills I’ve busted using this gizmo. “Dear John.” Gotta love it.’

Cardinal bent over to peer through the window. The writing on the pages glowed.

‘These are identical,’ Hunn said from behind him. ‘Same pen wrote the suicide note and the birthday note.’

‘Can you tell me which one was written first?’

‘Sure. First thing we do is stick it in the humidifier.’ Hunn put the notebook into a small machine with a glass front that looked like a toaster oven. ‘Just needs a minute or so. Indentations will show up way better if the paper is humid.’

The machine beeped, and he took out the notebook. ‘Now we’ll run a little ESDA magic on it, see what we can see.’

‘A little what?’

‘E-S-D-A. Electrostatic detection apparatus.’

This was a hulk of a machine with a venting hood on top. Hunn laid the notebook down so that the single page was flat against a layer of foam. Then he spread a sheet of plastic wrap over it.

‘Underneath the foam we got a vacuum that pulls the air through. It’ll hold the document and the plastic down tight. Now I take my Corona unit – don’t worry, I’m not gonna open my pants …’

Hunn picked up a wandlike instrument and flicked a switch. ‘Little mother puts out several thousand volts,’ he said over the hum. He waved it over the plastic sheet a few times. There was no change that Cardinal could see.

‘Now I take my fairy dust …’ Hunn shook what looked like iron filings out of a small canister. ‘Actually, these are tiny glass beads covered in toner. I’m just gonna cascade ’em over my set-up here …’

He poured the black powder over the plastic that covered the notebook page. The beads slid off, leaving toner behind in the impressions. There was a flash of light.

‘Now I got us a picture,’ Hunn said, ‘and we shall see what we shall see. Have these been dusted for fingerprints?’

‘Not yet. Why?’

‘The toner’ll often pick up prints – not as good as dusting powder. They have to be pretty good prints for it to work. Take a look.’

A photograph scrolled out of a slot. Cardinal reached for it.

There was a small dark thumbprint to the left of “John’s birthday”, which now appeared in white. There was a short straight line across the whorls where Catherine had cut herself in the kitchen years ago. Catherine’s thumbprint, where she braced the notebook on her lap. She was alive. She was thinking of me, planning for my birthday, imagining a future. Cardinal coughed to cover the cry that threatened to escape his throat. The impression of the suicide note was now complete, clearly inscribed in black toner. By the time you read this …

It’s her handwriting. You know it’s her handwriting. Why are you putting yourself through this?

‘Okay,’ Cardinal said. ‘So we know the suicide note was written on top of the later page, which makes sense. The later pages should have been blank when she wrote the suicide note. But can you tell if the ink on the later page, I mean the ink of the birthday note, is on top of the impressions left from the suicide note? Or underneath them?’

‘Oh, I like a man who thinks dirty,’ Hunn said. ‘Let’s pop it under the microscope. If the white lines of the birthday note are interrupted by black, that means the indentations were made at a later time than the ink.’ Hunn peered into the microscope and adjusted the focus. ‘Nope. We got black interrupted by white – ink over indentations.’

‘So the suicide note was definitely written before the birthday note.’

‘Definitely. I’m assuming you know when the mysterious John’s birthday occurred?’

‘Yeah. Over three months ago.’

‘Hmm. Not your usual sort of suicide, then.’

‘No. Can I keep the picture you took?’

‘Oh, sure. That way the original doesn’t have to be handled so much.’ Hunn pulled the original out of the ESDA machine and put it back in its folder.

‘Do one more thing for me, Tommy?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Pour some of that fairy dust on the suicide note too.’

‘You wanna check it for earlier impressions as well? You already have the birthday thing.’

‘I’d really appreciate it. My brothers in arms up north aren’t exactly on the team on this one.’

Hunn looked at him, pale blue eyes calculating. ‘Okay, sure.’

He repeated the routine of humidifying the note, securing it under plastic, charging it. Then he poured the powder over the plastic.

‘Looks like lots of impressions from notes earlier in the notebook. We can stick it under the microscope and be certain which ones came first, if you want.’

‘Look at this,’ Cardinal said. He pulled out the photo curling from the slot. The suicide note was now in white. But there was something else at the top of the photo, in the centre, outlined in black toner.

‘Quite a bit bigger than the other one,’ Hunn said. ‘And no scar. I’m no ident man, but I’d say you’re now dealing with a very different pair of thumbs.’

A little later Hunn walked him down to the elevators, where they waited in silence a few moments. Then the bell pinged, announcing the arrival of the elevator. Cardinal got in and hit the button for the ground floor.

‘Say, listen,’ Hunn said in the tone of one who has been turning something over in his mind. ‘That stuff isn’t connected to you, is it? I mean, personally? You wouldn’t be the John in the notebook, would you?’

‘Thanks for all your help, Tommy,’ Cardinal said as the elevator doors closed between them. ‘Much appreciated.’