Giles Blunt - Until the Night

“Shouldn’t you be out looking for Laura?”

Delorme sat forward on the couch. “There’s some indication your wife was attacked first, Mr. Rettig. Mr. Trent may have been trying to intervene.”

“Indication? What, like blood?”

“No. I don’t mean to make it worse than it is. She may turn up unharmed, but so far we don’t know where she is, and she hasn’t used her cellphone, her credit cards or her car.”

“You knew she was having an affair before you broke up,” Cardinal said. “That must have hurt.”

“Hurt? No, I wasn’t hurt. I was devastated.”

“Laura’s, what, thirty-seven, thirty-eight? And you’ve gotta be, what, sixty?”

“Fifty-eight. Yeah, yeah-big age difference. But we were together eight years. It’s not like anything changed or I hid anything from her. I thought she was happy. She seemed happy. Until about a year ago.”

“Age difference like that can make a guy feel pretty insecure.”

“I never did. Laura never gave me any reason. Until she met that guy.”

“That was a year ago?”

“More like eight, nine months. Then everything turned to shit pretty fast.”

“You must have been angry.”

“Who wouldn’t be? Angry was only part of it. Depressed. Humiliated. I was a lot of things. This isn’t exactly what I envisioned for myself.” He gestured at the tarps, the cramped little room. “I certainly hated this Mark character. But I never met him, never saw him, and I certainly didn’t shoot him.”

“Nobody said he was shot,” Delorme said.

“He wasn’t shot? Well, what happened?”

“We won’t know until there’s an autopsy,” Cardinal said. “How much do you weigh, Mr. Rettig?”

“How much do I weigh?”

“How much do you weigh? About one fifty?”

“About one forty-five or so. Why are you-Is this even relevant?”

“It may be.”

Delorme stood up. “Mr. Rettig, you mind if I use your bathroom? Lot of coffee this morning.”

“Go right ahead. Door on the right, just before the kitchen.”

“I realize your life is in turmoil right now,” Cardinal said, “but it’s essential we have a list of all your wife’s contacts-friends, relatives, work people-everyone.”

“Well, I’ll give you whatever I have, of course, but her laptop or phone would be a better bet for that kind of stuff.”

“Did she have any enemies that you know of?”

“Enemies? Laura’s a nurse, she doesn’t have enemies.”

“Well, you may not be aware-the man she was seeing, this Mark Trent, was married. So Mrs. Trent, for example, might not be too fond of her.”

Rettig placed his hands on the chair arms, looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Laura never told me the guy was married. That’s just so crazy. So pointless. Why leave a husband who loves you and looks after you just to… Well, you don’t need to hear it.”

“What about stalkers-old boyfriends, perhaps an angry patient? Anyone like that?”

“Not that I know of.”

Delorme reappeared in the doorway.

“All right,” Cardinal said. “Just give us all the names you can-that’s all we need for now. You understand we’re going to have to ask around about you and your wife. We’re not looking for dirt, but sometimes it can be unpleasant.”

“Just don’t get me in trouble at work. I’d like to retire on a full pension, if you don’t mind.”

“Where do you work?”

“Brunswick Geo.”

“Mining?”

“I’m just a CPA. Mostly I deal with the regulation side of things. It ain’t cheap being green.” He stood up and pointed to a wall of boxes behind Delorme. “I may have an old address book of Laura’s. In there.”

“While you’re looking,” Cardinal said, “you mind if we take a look at your car?”

“My car? Jesus.” Still, Rettig took the keys from a hook in the vestibule and handed them over.

Cardinal and Delorme went outside and checked Rettig’s Prius. There was no sign of any struggle, nor was it excessively clean. Cardinal opened the trunk. He lifted up the carpeting and said, “You find anything interesting during your convenient trip to the washroom?”

“Mr. Rettig is subject to indigestion, gas, diarrhea, constipation, headache, backache, hair loss, anxiety and insomnia.”

“You may be mixing it up with my medicine cabinet.”

“No,” Delorme said, “I’m not.”

Traffic was slow along Twickenham, owing to a water-main break. Cardinal could feel Delorme looking at him. Not saying anything, just looking. It took ten minutes to get to Algonquin, and once he’d made the turn he said, “All right, what’s going through that devious little mind of yours? You think I should have been harder on him?”

“Not really.”

“You seem tense. More than usual, I mean.”

She loosened her seatbelt and turned in the passenger seat to face him. “Let me ask you something. Do you honestly think Vernon Loach should be lead on this case?”

“Whoa. Okay. Change of pace, there. No, I don’t, Lise. You’ve got the seniority, obviously.”

“So why is he?”

“You need to ask Chouinard that.”

“Chouinard will say he’s an extremely experienced homicide investigator-”

“Which is true-”

“And the only reason he’s at constable level is because everyone, no matter how experienced, has to start out at constable level.”

“Which is also true. Loach has ten years with Toronto Homicide. It’d be dumb to waste that.”

“So you do think he should be lead.”

“No. You have the seniority, not to mention the experience.”

“So why’d Chouinard do it?”

“Well, the Toronto thing carries a lot of weight. And apparently Loach did a great job on the Montrose murder down there. Nobody thought they’d get that guy, and he nailed him. I mean, if you’re going to apply for a job, that’s the way to do it, right after you clear a case like Montrose.”

“If he’s so damn hot in the big city, why come to Algonquin Bay and start back at detective constable again?”

“Hey, I came from the Toronto force, remember?”

“When you were, what, thirty? Loach is forty-five.”

“I believe his wife is from up here originally.”

“She lived here for like a week when she was ten. Did you know he’s coaching Chouinard’s son’s hockey team?”

“Chouinard is not gonna let something like that sway him. He’s just seeing the Montrose thing. Don’t take it personally.”

“You know my record, John.”

“I do, and I agree it’s not fair.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

“But you agree with the D.S. that Loach is some kind of super-cop? Pick of the litter?”

“Too early to say.”

“So to get taken seriously, I just have to crack a high-profile case.”

“Apparently.”

“And be male.”

Laura Lacroix did not show up for work. The entire staff of CID spent the rest of the day interviewing people who knew her. No one had any idea where she might be.

Cardinal ate dinner alone at his kitchen table. Afterward, he went over to Delorme’s place and they watched a movie together. They had been doing this for well over a year now, and sometimes Cardinal worried it might be a bad idea. On the other hand, there was no law against being friends with your colleague.

Delorme had rented The Mission, Jeremy Irons playing a Jesuit priest who tries to save the souls-and the lives-of the natives he has come to seventeenth-century South America to convert. When the movie ended, they sat in silence for a while watching the final credits roll.

Cardinal turned to Delorme and was halfway through saying he thought it was a pretty good movie before he realized she was crying.