Giles Blunt: Crime Machine

“You’re losing me,” Chouinard said, in urgency, not anger. “Who was it dies of leukemia?”

“Curtis Carl Winston. Eighteen-year-old brother of Martin Scriver’s girlfriend. Never did anything suspicious in his life until he joined the army-which wouldn’t be suspicious either, except for the fact he did it two months after he died.”

“So we think Martin Scriver killed his parents and took off? He joins the army using someone else’s identity?”

“Back then, all you needed was the name of a dead person close to your own age. He gets a few years in the military, Northern Rangers-where, incidentally, he becomes intimately familiar with the Browning HP nine-mil, their official sidearm at the time.”

“And he keeps the name ever since?”

“There’d be no need to change it. No one was looking for Curt Winston, and it’s not like it’s such a peculiar name there couldn’t be more than one person with it. Also, he moved to the States soon after discharge. FBI New York is pulling out all the stops for us on this. They’ve already traced Winston back to several different businesses going back to the seventies-tanneries, fur farms, always stuff connected to the fur trade. He was located for a long time near Seattle, and also just north of New York-both fur auction centres. We’re making a list of our locals who’ve been in the business for decades and we’re going to start talking to them tomorrow.”

“Back up a minute.” Chief Kendall raised his hand as if to halt oncoming traffic. “Just because the boy’s body is not found with his parents doesn’t make him a murderer. His body could have drifted away. He could have been kidnapped. He could have been killed somewhere else.”

Cardinal pulled a photo from the folder in front of him. “Got this from Armed Forces archives. Curtis Winston’s enlistment photo.” He handed it to the chief and reached into his briefcase and pulled out a book. “Chippewa High School yearbook, 1969. Take a look at Martin Scriver’s picture. It would have been taken about a year earlier.”

“Fantastic,” Kendall said. “This is very good work.”

“Martin Scriver had some problems with violence-put a hockey referee in hospital, for example. I’m thinking he lost it with his parents, possibly over something trivial, and he went crazy with the axe. We’ve got two cases in the States where a couple and their child are murdered. And Bastov would have been a third, except the son had to miss his flight. In some screwed-up way, he could be re-enacting the crime over and over again.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I’m not saying it’s sane. Maybe to suggest there are other killers out there-killers who attack couples and their kids and chop them up. A twisted way to imply he never killed his parents, that it was the work of itinerant strangers.”

“He’s murdering people to prove his innocence? Until today, nobody even knew for sure the Scrivers had been murdered.”

“He did. It’s himself he’d be trying to convince.”

Chouinard nodded at Jerry Commanda. “The lake is OPP territory. Are you guys going to boot us off?”

“Oh no, sir. Scriver’s been a joint operation since the beginning of time. We’re happy to keep it that way. Besides, it’s totally bound up with Bastov.”

“I take it that’s from your evidence warehouse?” Chouinard pointed at the banker’s box on the table in front of Jerry.

Jerry tapped the top with a long index finger. “Martin Scriver’s stuff from the cottage. He left everything behind, even his wallet-probably to make it look like he was a victim. We got a toothbrush, and a hairbrush with some hairs in it could be useful for DNA. It’s at the Orillia lab. We have prints that were lifted from the cottage and from his wallet.”

“I love this,” Chouinard said, and turned to Chief Kendall. “Don’t you love this?”

“I’ll love it more when we have someone behind bars.”

Cardinal was not much given to parties or celebrations. But police work rarely went better than it had gone this day, so when Donna came round that night with a bottle of champagne in one hand and her notebook in the other, he was uncharacteristically effusive.

They clinked glasses and he sat in the recliner and she sat on the end of the couch, pen poised above her notebook. She wanted to use a recording device but didn’t protest when he said no. “Learning shorthand,” she said, “is my one undeniable achievement in life.”

Cardinal related the day’s events, beginning with his search through the ancient Scriver file. “It’s amazing,” he said. “When you get right down to it, a good file is a cop’s best friend. Routine interview, forty years ago, but the guy who did that interview made a careful note of a name. Completely peripheral-the son’s girlfriend’s brother, for God’s sake, you can’t get much more peripheral than that-and there it is, waiting for me forty years later.”

“But it was you who thought there might be a connection,” Donna said. “Let’s not be too modest here.”

Cardinal shrugged. “The name Winston rang a bell, that’s all.” He sat up and pulled the champagne from the ice bucket and filled her glass. “Champagne in the middle of the week. I can’t believe I’m this decadent.”

It was making him light-headed, not his usual response to alcohol. Or perhaps it had more to do with this extremely attractive woman and her serious grey eyes. He told her about the new sonar, about the diver sinking into the black water, and about everything else, right up to the matching photographs. Then he sat back and said, “I never talk about my cases. I feel like a blabbermouth.”

“But you’re hardly saying anything at all.” She tipped her head back in a silent laugh, exposing that pale throat, the perfect sculpture of neck and collarbone.

The phone rang and Cardinal talked to Jerry Commanda for a few minutes, about their plan for the next day. “I got your list of the fur business lifers,” Jerry said. “You want some help interviewing them? Could generate a lead on where the guy’s holed up. Of course, if he has any sense, he’ll be long gone by now.”

“I don’t think so,” Cardinal said. “I think he has unfinished business here. He killed Mendelsohn, and he may have come after an American reporter who’s been covering the fur business and the Bastovs for a couple of years.”

He was looking at Donna as he spoke. She came over and knelt beside his chair and started undoing the buttons of his shirt.

Jerry asked if the reporter was getting extra protection.

“I’m working on that.” The heat of her fingers on his skin, undoing his belt. He grabbed her hand and held it while he finished with Jerry. “Listen, tomorrow I’m going to have the FBI’s complete file. It should arrive before ten. I’ll be taking a quick look at that and then I’m heading out to Lloyd Kreeger’s place. He’s the oldest guy on our list.”

Jerry agreed to assign some of the others to OPP detectives and they would confer again in the afternoon.

“What list?” Donna said when he hung up. She was still kneeling in front of him, hands on his thighs. “Who’s Lloyd Kreeger?”

“Lloyd Kreeger is the oldest living man in the fur industry, at least around here. Also the richest. We’ve got a list of old-timers in the business who might recognize the airport security photo of our suspect. Until we get a direct lead on this guy’s whereabouts, it’s back to plod, plod, plod.”

“You have a photo of your suspect and you weren’t going to show me?”

“Didn’t even think of it, I got so excited about Scriver. We even have a name now. I can show you, but you can’t have a copy and you can’t tell anybody.”