six years as special investigator amounts to no experience.’
‘I’m not putting her down. She did a fine job on the mayor. She did a fine job on the school-board scam. Keep her on the white-collar stuff, the sensitive stuff. I mean, who’s going to look after Special?’
‘What do you care about Special? Let me worry about Special. Delorme is a fine investigator.’
‘She has no experience at homicide. She came close to ruining an important piece of evidence last night.’
‘I don’t believe it. What the hell are you talking about?’
Cardinal told him about the Baggie. It sounded thin, even to him. But he wanted McLeod. McLeod knew how to hustle, how to keep a case in play.
There was a silence as Dyson stared at the wall just behind Cardinal. He was utterly still. Cardinal watched the snow flurries that swirled past the window. Later, he couldn’t be sure if what Dyson said next had just popped into his boss’s head or if it was a planned surprise. ‘You aren’t worried that Delorme is investigating you, are you?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Good. Then I suggest you brush up on your French.’
In the 1940s, nickel was discovered on Windigo Island, and it was mined there, on and off, for twelve years. The mine was never very productive, employing at its peak a mere forty workers, and its location in the middle of the lake made transport a problem. More than one truck plunged through the ice, and there was talk that the mine was cursed by the tormented spirit for which it was named. A lot of Algonquin Bay investors lost their money in the venture, which closed forever when more accessible lodes were discovered in Sudbury, a city eighty miles away.
The shaft was five hundred feet deep and continued laterally for another two thousand, and the Criminal Investigation Division heaved a collective sigh of relief when it was established that only the shaft head and not the shaft itself had been disturbed.
By the time Cardinal and Delorme arrived at the island, it wasn’t nearly so cold as it had been the previous night, not much below freezing. In the distance, snowmobiles buzzed among the fishing huts. Sparse snowflakes drifted down from a soiled pillow of cloud. The work of freeing the body was almost complete.
‘Ended up we didn’t have to saw right through,’ Arsenault told them. Despite the below-freezing temperature there were beads of sweat on his face. ‘Vibrations did the trick for us. Whole block came away in one piece. Moving it’s going to be a little work, though. Can’t put a crane in here without destroying the scene. Just gonna have to pull it over to the truck on a sled. Figure the runners’ll do less damage than a toboggan.’
‘Good thinking. Where’d you get the truck?’ A green five-ton with black rectangles covering its markings was backing up to the shaft head. Dr Barnhouse had reminded them in no uncertain terms that, no matter how badly they might want a refrigerated vehicle, the use of a food distribution truck for transporting a dead body would be against every health regulation known to man.
‘Kastner Chemical. They use it to transport nitrogen. Was their idea to black out the markings. They wanted it to look more respectful. I thought that was pretty classy.’
‘It was classy. Remind me to send them a thank you.’
‘Hey, John! John!’
Roger Gwynn was waving at him from behind a roped-off area. The amorphous shape beside him, face masked by a Nikon, would be Nick Stoltz. Cardinal raised a gloved hand in return. He was not really on a first-name basis with the Algonquin Lode reporter, even though they had been more or less contemporaries in high school. Gwynn was trying to get the jump on the competition, exaggerating his connections. Being a cop in your hometown had its advantages, but sometimes Cardinal felt a pang of nostalgia for the relative anonymity of Toronto. There was a small camera crew jockeying for position around Stoltz, and behind them a diminutive figure in a pink parka, its hood trimmed fetchingly with white fur. That would have to be Grace Legault from the six o’clock news. Algonquin Bay didn’t have its own station; it got its local news from Sudbury, which was eighty miles away. Cardinal had noted the CFCD van parked on the ice beside the police truck.
‘Come on, John! Give me three seconds. I need a quote!’
Cardinal took Delorme with him and introduced her.
‘I know Ms Delorme,’ Gwynn said. ‘We met when she was incarcerating His Worship. What can you tell me about this business?’
‘Adolescent dead several months. That’s it.’
‘Oh, thanks. Great copy that’ll make. What are the chances it’s that girl from the reserve?’
‘I’m not going to speculate until we hear back from Forensic in Toronto.’
‘Billy LaBelle?’
‘I’m not going to speculate.’
‘Come on, you gotta give me something. I’m freezing my ass off here.’ Gwynn was a slack, pudgy man – graceless in manner, lazy in outlook, an Algonquin Lode lifer. ‘Is it a homicide at least? Can you tell me that?’
Cardinal gestured to the Sudbury team. ‘You wanna get in here, Miss Legault? Don’t want to say all this twice.’
He gave them both the basic facts, no mention of murder or Katie Pine, and finished with assurances that when he knew more, they would know more. As a show of goodwill he handed Grace Legault his card. He didn’t catch any flicker of gratitude in her skeptical newscaster’s eyes.
‘Detective Cardinal,’ she said as he turned away, ‘do you happen to know the legend of the Windigo? What kind of creature it is?’
‘Yeah, I do,’ he said. ‘A mythical one.’ He sighed inwardly. She’s going to have a field day with that. Grace Legault was a different animal than Gwynn, no ambition deficit there.
‘You finished here?’ he asked Collingwood when he and Delorme were once more in the shaft head.
‘Five rolls of stills. Arsenault says to keep running the video, though.’
‘Arsenault’s right.’
Straps of webbing had already been slung under the ice. Now, a block and tackle that was hooked up to a Honda generator was swung into position. One for the scrapbook, Cardinal thought, as the entire block was hoisted three feet above its resting place like a translucent coffin, the wasted and torn human figure trapped inside.
Delorme murmured, ‘You think we should cover it with something?’
‘The best thing we can do for this girl,’ Cardinal said evenly, ‘is to make absolutely sure that everything Forensic finds inside that ice was there before we came on the scene.’
‘Okay,’ Delorme said. ‘Dumb idea, right?’
‘Dumb idea.’
‘Sorry.’A snowflake landed on her eyebrow and melted there. ‘It was just – seeing her like that –’
‘Forget it.’
Collingwood
