Giles Blunt - Forty Words for Sorrow

THE Algonquin Bay Police Department had never had so much publicity. The arrest of Dyson was still on the front page of the Lode, and now it was side by side with the death of the Windigo Killer and a photo of the jagged hole where the van had plunged through the ice.

Cardinal and Delorme and McLeod had all been treated in Emergency the night before. McLeod was in the worst shape. He was on the third floor of City Hospital with both feet up in the air, one ankle broken, the other badly sprained. The Kevlar body armor had saved both Delorme and Cardinal. "Those kinds of temperatures," the physician had told Cardinal, "you'd normally be dead. That vest conserved body heat, and you're damn lucky it did." Delorme got off with a nasty crease in her left arm. Blood loss left her feeling dizzy and weak, but a transfusion had been deemed unnecessary and she was sent home.

Cardinal had been given a couple of Valium and kept overnight for observation. He had wanted to call Catherine and tell her all the news, but the Valium had taken hold and he'd slept for sixteen hours straight, waking up with a raging thirst but otherwise fine. Now he was in the waiting room outside the ICU waiting for the okay to visit Keith London. Visitors in winter coats walked up and down the halls with forlorn-looking patients in pajamas and gowns.

Outside, the rooftops were bleached white in the blinding sunshine. But Cardinal could tell from the way the white smoke shot up from the chimneys that the temperature had dropped deep into the minus zone again.

The news came on, and Cardinal learned that Grace Legault had moved to a Toronto station, no doubt thanks to her sterling coverage of the Windigo case. The show led with the story (more shots of the pump house, the black hole in the ice). Then Cardinal was astonished to see some new reporter doing a stand-up in front of his house on Madonna Road. "Detective John Cardinal isn't home today," she began. "He's in City Hospital recovering from his near-drowning in the van that took down Windigo murderer Eric Fraser…"

Brilliant. Every creep I ever put in the slammer's going to show up at my door, including Kiki B. Don't they teach them that in journalism school or wherever the hell they get these people?

There was a quick cut to Chief Kendall in front of City Hall, R. J. telling her all the detectives involved in the Windigo case were tops in his book.

You may change your mind when you read my letter, thought Cardinal, but he was saved from further reflection on this point when the door to the ICU opened and the doctor, a red-haired woman in a rush, swiftly summed things up for Cardinal: Yes, Keith London was still unconscious; no, he was no longer in critical condition. Yes, he had sustained a significant head trauma; no, it was not possible to say if there was permanent damage. Yes, speech might be permanently impaired; no, it was too early to be any more conclusive. And yes, Cardinal could go in for a few moments and speak to the girlfriend.

Light was dim in the ICU. The half-dozen beds with their motionless patients and attendant machines seemed trapped in permanent twilight. Keith London lay at the far end of the room, under the watchful eyes of Karen Steen.

"Detective Cardinal," she said. "It's good of you to visit."

"Well, actually, I was hoping to ask Keith a few questions. Don't worry- the doctor warned me off."

"Keith hasn't said a word yet, I'm afraid. But I'm sure he will. I want him up and chatting away before his parents get here. I finally managed to reach them in Turkey. They should be here day after tomorrow."

"He looks a lot better than last time I saw him." Keith London's head was bandaged, and an oxygen tube was taped to his nostrils, yet despite this, his color looked good, his breathing strong. One slim hand lay outside the covers, and Karen Steen held it while they spoke. "The doctor seems to think he'll pull through okay," Cardinal said.

"Yes, he will, thanks to you. He wouldn't be alive if you hadn't found him. I wish I could find the words to thank you, Detective Cardinal. But there aren't words enough in the language."

"I just wish we could have found him sooner."

The ardent blue eyes searched his face. Catherine's eyes had been like that when they were courting- passionate, earnest. They still were, when she spoke of things that mattered. When she was fully herself.

"You're a very good person, aren't you," Miss Steen added. "Yes, I think you are."

Cardinal felt his face redden. He wasn't skilled at taking compliments. "It's insulting the way you duck them," Catherine had told him more than once. "It's like saying to people that if only they were more intelligent, they'd see things differently. It's rude, John. And quite juvenile."

Ms. Steen looked down at her boyfriend's slim hand and raised it impulsively to her lips, careful not to disturb the tube attached to the pale forearm. "I'm not religious anymore, Detective, but if I were, I'd be remembering you in my prayers."

"You know what I think, Miss Steen?"

Once more the frank blue eyes held him.

"I think Keith London is a very lucky young man."

THE temperature had plunged into unfathomable depths. All the way home, Cardinal had to keep scraping his windshield and the side window. He was looking forward to the outsize glass of Black Velvet whiskey he would pour himself before bed. Having been baptized beneath the ice had made him, at least in his head, a poet of warmth. Stopped for a light at the bypass, he reveled in an extremely detailed vision of the fire that would soon be blazing in his woodstove, of the steak and fries he would cook for himself, and most particularly of that double shot of Black Velvet he planned to take to bed.

EXTRACTING a large heavy object from three hundred feet of water is difficult at the best of times. When the temperature is twenty below zero and the surface has been frozen, thawed, and refrozen, it doesn't get any easier. When the ice was strong enough, Natural Resources had set up a towing rig at the edge of the lake- a twelve-ton truck with several miles of steel cable spooled on its back. They paid out the cable hundreds of feet across the ice, where it was then slung over a block-and-tackle affair that had been rigged over a hole in the ice about fifteen feet wide. Above the far hills, the sun looked as pale and cold as the moon.

Twenty degrees centigrade below zero is not unusually cold for Algonquin Bay, but Cardinal's recent exposure to freezing water had sensitized him to low temperatures. He stood on a small dock below the pump house, shivering from head to foot. Delorme, with her arm in a sling, and Jerry Commanda, hands jammed in pockets, stood in front of him, breath feathering out in the stiff little breeze that kicked off the lake. Even though Cardinal was wearing long johns underneath his regular clothes and a down coat on top, he felt utterly exposed.

The Natural Resources team was gathered around the hole in the ice. In their pressurized suits, the divers looked like something out of Jules Verne, Victorian astronauts. Their helmet lamps glowed dully in the wash of late afternoon light. They tested their tethers with a couple of sharp yanks and then they stepped through the hole. Black water closed over their heads like ink.

"Better them than me," Cardinal muttered.

"It was really nice of you to test the water first, though," said Jerry Commanda. "Lot of guys wouldn't have done that."

An aroma of coffee and doughnuts strayed down the hill, and all three cops turned like dogs hearing the rattle of the food dish. A Natural Resources guy yelled at them to come and get some, and they didn't have to be told twice. Cardinal wolfed down a chocolate doughnut and burned his tongue on the coffee, but he didn't care. The heat coursed through him like a thrill.