Giles Blunt - Forty Words for Sorrow

"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. Cardinal's diagnosis: Ambition Deficit Disorder. "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 shafthead.

"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 were hooked up to a Honda generator were 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 was videotaping the suspended block of ice, stepping from side to side. He looked up from his Sony and said exactly one word: "Leaf."

Arsenault peered into the ice block. "A maple leaf, looks like. A piece of one, anyway."

The forests of the near north are mostly pine, poplar, and birch. "Anybody do any sailing round here?"

Arsenault said, "Me and the wife were out here for a picnic last August or so. We can do a quick survey to make sure, but if I remember right, this whole little island was jack pine and spruce. Lots of birch."

"That's what I think, too," Cardinal said, "which would tend to confirm the murder happened somewhere else."

Delorme called Forensic on the cell phone to let them know they could expect the body in approximately four hours. Then they moved the remains, ice and all, down the snowy slope of the beach and into the waiting truck.

Remains, Cardinal thought. The word was not adequate.

SERGEANT Lise Delorme had been clearing the decks of Special Investigations for some time, a couple of months to be exact. There were no major cases pending, but she had thousands of little details to clear up. Final notes to make. Dispositions to update. Files to archive. She wanted everything to be shipshape for her replacement, who was due to arrive at the end of the month. But the entire morning had gone by and all she'd managed to do was clear sensitive material off her hard drive.

Delorme couldn't wait to get going on the Pine case, even if she was in the completely weird position of having to investigate her partner. So far, it looked like Cardinal was going to keep her at arm's length, and she couldn't really blame him for that. She wouldn't have trusted anyone right out of Special, either.

A phone call in the middle of the night, that's how it had started. She had thought at first it was Paul, a former boyfriend who got drunk every six months and called her at two in the morning, weepy and sentimental. It was Dyson. "Conference at the chief's house in half an hour. His house, not his office. Get dressed and wait. Horseman'll pick you up. Don't want certain parties seeing your car outside his place."

"What's going on?" Her words were slurry with sleep.

"You'll know soon enough. I've got a ticket waiting for you."

"Tell me it's for Florida. Someplace warm."

"It's your ticket out of Special."

Delorme got dressed in three minutes flat, then sat on the edge of the sofa, nerves singing. She'd spent six years working Special, and in all that time she had never once had a midnight summons, nor ever seen the inside of the chief's house. Ticket out of Special?

"No point asking me anything," the young Mountie told her before she'd even opened her mouth, "I'm just the delivery girl." A nice touch, Delorme thought, to send a woman.

Delorme had grown up revering the Mounties. The scarlet uniform, those horses, well, they went straight to a little girl's heart. She had a vivid memory of the first time she saw them perform the Musical Ride in Ottawa, the sheer beauty of such equestrian precision. And then in high school, the glorious history, the great trek west. The Northwest Mounted Police, as they were then known, had ridden thousands of miles to ward off the kind of violence that was plaguing the westward expansion of the United States. They had negotiated treaties with the aboriginals, sent American raiders hightailing it back to Montana or whatever barbaric pit they had crawled out of, and established the rule of law before settlers had even had a chance to think about breaking it. The RCMP had become an icon of upstanding law enforcement around the world, a travel agent's dream.

Delorme had bought the image wholesale; that's what images are for, after all. When, sometime in her late teens, she had seen a photograph of a woman in that red serge uniform, Delorme had seriously considered sending away for an application.

But reality kept breaking through the image, and reality was not nearly as pretty. One officer sells secrets to Moscow, another is arrested for smuggling drugs, still another for tossing his wife off the balcony of a high-rise. And then there was the whole Security Service fiasco. The RCMP Security Service, before it had been dismantled in disgrace, had made the CIA look like geniuses.

She glanced at the fresh-faced creature in the car beside her, wearing a shapeless down coat, blond hair pulled back in a neat French braid. She had stopped for the traffic light at Edgewater and Trout Lake Road, and the streetlights silvered the down on her cheek. Even in that pale wash, Delorme could see herself ten years ago. This girl, too, had bought the straight-arrow image and was determined to make it stick. Well, good for her, Delorme figured. Cowboys armed with brutality and incompetence may have betrayed those true-North ideals, but that didn't make a young recruit dumb for clinging to them. Delorme spurred her on silently: Go get 'em.

They pulled up in front of an impressive A-frame on Edgewater. It looked like something out of the Swiss Alps.

"Don't ring the buzzer, just walk right in. Doesn't want to wake the kids."

Delorme showed her ID to a Mountie at the side door. "Downstairs," he said.

Delorme walked through the basement amid smells of Tide and Downy, then past a huge furnace into a large room of red brick and dark pine that had the leathery, smoky look of a men's club. Fake Tudor beams crisscrossed stucco walls that were hung with hunting prints and marine art. A feeble fire flickered in the fireplace. Above this, a moose head contemplated the head of R. J. Kendall, chief of the Algonquin Bay Police Department.