The Fields of Grief

Of course, if you wanted to disguise your true whereabouts, there was nothing to stop you driving to Mattawa and mailing a card from there; it was right on Highway 17, little more than half an hour from Algonquin Bay.

Lise Delorme was surprised to see him. It was Sunday, and he had caught her in the middle of washing her windows. She was wearing jeans with huge rips at the knees and a paint-stained gingham shirt that looked at least twenty years old. Her house, a bungalow at the top of Rayne Street, smelled of vinegar and newsprint.

‘I’ve been meaning to wash them since August,’ she said, as if he had asked, ‘and only just got around to it.’

She made coffee. ‘Decaf for you,’ she said. ‘Obviously you haven’t been sleeping.’

‘That’s true, but there’s a reason. I mean another reason.’

Delorme brought the coffee and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies into the living room.

‘Why don’t you ask your doctor for some Valium?’ she said. ‘There’s no point making things worse with lack of sleep.’

‘Tell me what you think of this.’ He pulled the card and envelope out of a manila folder and placed them on the coffee table. They were in a clear plastic sleeve, now, the card open, the envelope address-side up.

Delorme raised an eyebrow. ‘Work? How can you be bringing me work? I thought you were off for a week or two. Hell, if I were you, I’d be gone for months.’

‘Just take a look.’

Delorme leaned over the coffee table. ‘Somebody sent you this?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh, John. I’m so sorry. It’s so sick.’

‘I’d like to know who sent it. I thought you could give me your first impressions.’

Delorme looked at the card. ‘Well, whoever it is went to the trouble of printing out this two-line message instead of writing it by hand. That tells me it’s someone who thinks you might recognize their handwriting – or at least be able to match it up.’

‘Any candidates spring to mind?’

‘Well, anyone you’ve put in jail, of course.’

‘Anyone? I’m not so sure. You know, I put Tony Capozzi away for assault a couple of months ago and, sure, he’s pissed off, but I don’t see him doing something like this.’

‘I meant guys who are doing serious time. Five years or more, maybe. There’s not so many of those.’

‘And of those, it’s got to be someone who’s sophisticated enough – and persistent enough – to find out my home address. It’s not like I’m listed in the phone book. I’m thinking maybe someone connected with Rick Bouchard’s gang.’

Rick Bouchard had been one of the world’s natural-born creeps – even by the low standards of drug dealers – until he had been killed in prison a couple of years previously. Cardinal had helped put him there for a fifteen-year stretch and Bouchard, who, unlike most criminals, had many resources and a good deal of natural intelligence, had pursued him until the day he died.

‘Possible,’ Delorme said. ‘But how likely is that? With Bouchard dead and all.’

‘They know my address, and it’s their style. Kiki B. showed up at my door with a threatening letter a couple of years ago.’

‘But Bouchard was still alive, then, and Kiki has since retired, you told me.’

‘Do guys like Kiki ever really retire?’

‘Lots of bad guys are going to know your address. There’s the Internet, for one thing. And remember that idiot reporter a few years ago did a stand-up right outside your house? That was a huge case. Who knows how many people saw that?’

‘They didn’t use that clip nationally. I checked. It was just local.’

‘Local covers a lot of territory. John …’ Delorme took his hand between her warm palms, one of the few times she had ever touched him. Her face was soft, and even through the blur of pain – perhaps because of his pain – Cardinal thought her at that moment extraordinarily beautiful. He realized she must put on an entirely different face for work, armoured for the daily sarcasm festival of the squad room. Of course, so did he, so did everyone, but he had a sudden sense of Delorme, the only woman of the group, as a dolphin in a tank full of sharks.

‘It could just as easily be some sick neighbour,’ she said. ‘Somebody with a grudge against the police. It isn’t necessarily personal.’

Cardinal picked up the plastic folder. ‘The postmark indicates Mattawa.’

‘Yeah, well … Why don’t you let this go? It isn’t going to help you. It’s not going to make you feel any better. And you’d have to go to one hell of a lot of trouble. I’m not even sure you could.’

‘I was going to ask you to do it.’

‘Me.’ She regarded him, her eyes a little less soft.

‘I can’t do it, Lise. I’m involved.’

‘I can’t investigate this. It’s not a crime to send a nasty card through the mail.’

‘“Just no telling how things will turn out,”’ Cardinal read. ‘You don’t see that as a threat? Given the circumstances?’

‘Me, I’d call it a statement. About life in general. It doesn’t contain any threat of future harm.’

‘You don’t find it ambiguous, even?’

‘No, John, I don’t. The first part is obviously nasty, but it’s not a threat. The whole thing amounts to a sneer. You can’t go investigating people for sneering.’

‘Suppose Catherine didn’t kill herself,’ Cardinal said. ‘Suppose she was actually murdered.’

‘But she wasn’t murdered. She left a note. She has a history. People who suffer from manic depression kill themselves all the time.’

‘I know that …’

‘You saw it in her own handwriting. I searched her car afterward. I found the spiral notebook she wrote it in. The pen was there, too. You recognized it right away as her handwriting.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s not like I’m an expert.’

‘No one saw or heard anything suspicious.’

‘But the building just opened. How many people live there? Five?’

‘Fifteen of the apartments have been bought. Ten of them are occupied so far.’

‘It’s a ghost town, in other words. What were the chances of anyone seeing or hearing anything?’

‘John, there were no signs of struggle. None. I searched that roof myself. No blood, no scrape marks, nothing broken, nothing cracked. The ident guys and the coroner found her position on the ground consistent with a fall.’

‘Consistent with a fall. Meaning she could have been pushed.’

‘The autopsy didn’t show anything either. Everything is consistent with suicide. Nothing points to anything else.’

‘I want to know who sent that note, Lise. Are you going to help me or not?’

‘I can’t. The moment we heard back from the pathologist, Chouinard closed the case. If there’s no case, that means there’s no case number. What do I tell people? We’re talking about my job here.’

‘All right,’ Cardinal said. ‘Forget I asked.’ He got up and retrieved his jacket from the chair. He stood in front of the window, doing up the buttons. Outside, the sky was still an otherworldly blue, and the fallen leaves made a duvet of ochre and gold.

‘John, no one wants to believe the person they love killed themselves.’

‘You missed a spot,’ Cardinal said, pointing to the window. Two little girls were playing in the leaves next door, wriggling around in them like puppies.

‘You don’t have to do this. There’s no need to find a culprit. It’s not your fault she’s dead.’

‘I know that,’ Cardinal said. ‘But maybe it’s not Catherine’s fault, either.’

7

All the next morning, Delorme couldn’t get Cardinal out of her mind. She had a stack of reports to excavate, various assault and burglary charges to follow up, and a rapist who was coming to trial the next week. Her best witness was getting cold feet, and the whole case was threatening to come apart.

And then Detective Sergeant Chouinard dropped a new one in her lap.

‘You’re gonna get a call from Toronto Sex Crimes,’ he said. ‘Looks like they’ve got something for us.’

‘Why would Toronto Sex Crimes have something for Algonquin Bay?’

‘They’re envious of our worldwide reputation, obviously. Anyway, don’t thank me. You’re not going to like this one.’

The call came half an hour later, from a Sergeant Leo Dukovsky who claimed to remember Delorme from a forensics conference in Ottawa a couple of years earlier. He’d been giving a talk on computers; Delorme had been on a panel discussing accounting.

‘Forensic accounting?’ Delorme said. ‘That would make it almost ten years ago. I must’ve done something awful for you to remember me after so long.’

‘Nope. I just remember you as a very attractive French person, with a –’

‘French-Canadian,’ Delorme corrected him. She was willing to be charmed, but there were limits.

Sergeant Dukovsky didn’t waver for a moment. ‘– with a very French name and no accent whatsoever.’

‘Why? You think we all live in the backwoods? Talk like Jean Chrétien?’

‘That’s another thing I remember about you. Kinda prickly.’

‘Maybe it’s something you bring out in people, Sergeant. Did you ever think of that?’

‘See, that’s just the kind of remark that makes a man remember you,’ Dukovsky said, ‘when he has some really nasty work to be done. Although you may end up actually liking this one. It’s going to be a lot of plodding, but the payoff – assuming there is one – could be pretty good. We’ve been monitoring child pornography on the Web for a long time now. One particular little girl keeps cropping up. She was around seven when we first started seeing her. We think she might be thirteen or fourteen by now.’

‘She’s showing up in different settings? With different abusers?’

‘No, it’s always the same guy. Naturally, he’s pretty careful to keep his face out of the pictures. But it always seems to be the same few locations. We’ve been trying to isolate elements in the background – furniture, views out windows, that kind of thing.’

‘And you think she lives in Algonquin Bay?’

‘Either lives there or visits there. We’re not a hundred per cent sure. The stuff’s already on its way to you by courier. Let us know what you think. If it is Algonquin Bay in the pictures, we’ll do everything we can to help you, but obviously the case would be yours. Now aren’t you glad I remembered you?’

But not even a phone call like that could distract her for long; John Cardinal kept invading her thoughts. His desk was right next to hers, and it was extremely unusual for him to miss a day of work. Even when his father had died, he hadn’t taken more than a day off. It might be good for the department, she figured, but it was probably on the whole a weakness rather than a strength to be incapable of leaving your work.

Delorme recognized that she herself was much the same. She got bored on her days off, and when the end of the year rolled around, she usually had a couple of weeks’ vacation pay coming to her.

She looked at the photograph of Catherine on Cardinal’s desk. She must have been at least forty-five in the photograph, but retaining more than her fair share of sexiness. It was there in the slightly sceptical gaze, the glint of wetness on the lower lip. It was easy to see how Cardinal had fallen in love. But what have you done to my friend? Delorme wanted to ask her. Why have you done this unforgivable thing? Then again, why does anybody do it? She could remember several recent cases off the top of her head: a mother of three, a social services administrator, and a teenaged boy, all dead by their own hands.

Delorme opened the notebook she had found in Catherine’s car, a small standard-issue spiral with Northern University printed on the cover. Judging by the contents, it had served as a sort of catch-all. Phone numbers and names were scrawled at odd angles alongside recipes for mushroom bisque and some kind of sauce, reminders to pick up dry cleaning or pay bills, and ideas for photographic projects: Telephone series – all shots of people on phones: pay phones, cell phones, two-way radios, kids on tin cans, everything. And another: New homeless series: portraits of homeless people, but all fixed up and dressed in good suits, point being to remove as much of their ‘otherness’ as possible. Some other way? Less contrived? On the next page she had simply written: John’s birthday.

Delorme had the pen as well. It had been in Catherine’s shoulder bag along with the notebook. A simple Paper Mate, with very pale blue ink. Delorme wrote the words personal effects on a sheet of paper and compared it with the notes. It was the same ink – as far as one could tell without a lab test.

And then there was the note itself. The handwriting appeared to be the same as that in the notebook. The minimalist J in John, the t in other crossed and looped over the h in both the notebook and the suicide note. That terrible note, and yet the handwriting did not appear to be any more emphatic or wobbly than the rest of the jottings. In fact, the note was a good deal neater, as if the decision to die had brought with it an untouchable calm. But you had a good man, a loving, loyal husband. Why did you do this terrible thing? Delorme wanted to ask her. No matter how much pain you were in. How could you?

She placed all three items in a padded envelope and sealed it.

A few hours later that envelope was open on the kitchen table of John Cardinal’s house on Madonna Road. Kelly Cardinal was watching her father carefully flip through the spiral notebook. The sight of her mother’s handwriting made Kelly’s heart liquefy in her chest. Every now and again, her father made a note in his own notebook.

‘How can you stand to look at that stuff, Dad?’

‘Why don’t you go in the other room, sweetheart? This is something I have to do.’

‘I don’t know how you can bear it.’

‘I can’t. It’s just something I have to do.’

‘But why? It’s just going to make you crazy.’

‘Actually, it’s making me feel better in a weird way. I have something to focus on other than the simple fact that Catherine’s …’

Kelly reached out and touched his sleeve. ‘Maybe that’s exactly what you should be focusing on, rather than going over her notebook. It’s not healthy, Dad. Maybe you should just lie down and cry. Scream, if you have to.’

Her father was holding the notebook under the light that hung low over the kitchen table. He tilted it this way and that, first examining a blank page, and then a page with writing on it. His concentration was irritating.

‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘I mean, not if you don’t want to. But this is interesting.’

‘What, for God’s sake? I can’t believe you’re messing with that stuff.’ Thinking, I sound like a teenager. I must be reverting under the stress.

‘As far as I can tell, this is Catherine’s handwriting.’

‘Of course it is. I can tell that, even upside down. She makes those funny loops on her t’s.’

‘And it’s written with this pen – or one just like it – on a page torn from this notebook.’

‘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 the 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 on to 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 Sciences, 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? Goddamn 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 blonde 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.