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.’
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
