And then:
The smell of Rebecca’s hair when she sits in the chair next to mine. Mint and rosemary? Thyme? Some herb or other. She ignores me, as she has been doing the whole first week of her rotation. She has been perfectly friendly to everybody else, and especially to Wyndham, but with me it’s been strict radio silence.
I lean toward her, and when she finally registers this invasion of her space and turns to face me, I look her in the eye and call her, ever so quietly, Vostok.
Vostok? She addresses the question not to me but to Wyndham, who is scribbling equations of some kind beside the remains of his scrambled eggs. Why is he calling me Vostok?
Wyndham flips his pencil around to make an erasure and recalculates some figure. Pens tend to be useless up here’ ink turns to sludge. He looks up with a startled expression and says, Vostok? Coldest place on Earth, Vostok.
I thought that was Oimyakon in Siberia.
Vostok’s the coldest uninhabited.
Rebecca looks at me again. She’s wearing a big Irish wool sweater, dark curls spilling over her shoulders. The ivory turtleneck gives her a nunlike air.
Minus 128 degrees F, I tell her. Without the wind chill.
Makes this place seem positively sweltering, Wyndham adds, chasing the last of his eggs round his plate, but Rebecca has left the room.
2
All through the morning meeting, Detective Sergeant Chouinard sat on the edge of his seat, tapping his ballpoint on his legal pad. One by one the detectives summarized their interviews with the friends, relatives and co-workers of Laura Lacroix. McLeod and Szelagy had talked to people who knew Mark Trent. Cardinal had the impression Chouinard was only half listening, as if he had something he would much rather be talking about.
“Only thing we could find,” Szelagy said. “Mark Trent used to work for the We Are One charity foundation in Ottawa. Remember they had that scandal a couple of years ago? He was never charged, but people went to jail. There might be something there.”
“Let’s follow that up,” Loach said. “I can’t quite get a reading on Trent’s wife. She was so hysterical yesterday I couldn’t tell if she was faking or not. My impression is, she knew hubby was screwing around and she was none too happy about it. She’s got no alibi, and I’ll be talking to her some more. Standing on someone’s throat seems personal to me-doesn’t seem like something you do to someone involved in financial peccadilloes.”
“Is she heavy enough?” Delorme asked.
Loach nodded. “Lady’s huge.”
“Standing on the guy’s throat,” Cardinal said. “I’ve only heard of one case of that. Happened in the psychiatric hospital.”
“Good thinking.” Loach snapped his fingers. “McLeod, give ’em a call and see if anybody’s AWOL.”
“Already did,” McLeod said, and added, “Your Highness.”
“And?”
“All lunatics present and accounted for.”
“Fine. Lose the Your Highness shit.”
“Right away, Your Majesty.”
“I wasn’t thinking mental hospitals per se,” Cardinal put in. “I was thinking prisons. It’s the sort of murder you get when there are no weapons handy. Which would go against the idea it’s personal.”
Loach shrugged. “Possibly. I still like personal. Guy comes to do Trent. Woman is there and he takes advantage of the unexpected opportunity. At least then we have a motive for her.”
“It could be the other way around,” Cardinal said. “Guy is lusting after Laura Lacroix, is in the process of abducting her when Trent appears. Kills Trent and takes off.”
“Either way, someone had to be keeping a close eye on at least one of them,” Loach said. “We’ve still got lots of people to talk to, so keep going down your lists, and please-everyone-really lean on the idea of followers, stalkers, old boyfriends, girlfriends. Also strangers hanging around asking questions. Ident is still working the scene. With any luck, they’ll come up with something that gives us some traction.”
Szelagy and McLeod got up to leave.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Chouinard said. “Let’s not forget we have other cases to work on, people. Szelagy, you’ve got your construction site thefts. Nobody likes missing dynamite. McLeod, you’ve got the property damage over on Woodward. Delorme, what do you have on your battered woman?”
“Doesn’t want to press charges. Won’t tell me the guy’s name. Won’t even admit she’s getting beaten.”
“Talk to her again.”
“D.S., she doesn’t want to talk. You know how these women are.”
“Listen to her,” McLeod said. “If it was me said that, you’d be calling me a sexist pig.”
“For sure I would. And it would be true.”
“Enough,” Chouinard said. “And while we’re talking about battered or missing women, let’s not forget Marjorie Flint. The senator’s wife disappeared in Ottawa ten days ago and nobody has a clue where she is.” He held up an eight-by-ten photo. “You’ve all seen this. Last seen wearing a black cashmere coat, Hermes scarf, high-heel boots.”
“She have any connection to Algonquin Bay?” Loach asked.
“None. But she’s a senator’s wife. That makes her national. Keep your eyes open, people.”
As far as Lise Delorme was concerned, one of the most annoying things about Loach having been imported was that they really needed another woman in CID. Being the only female meant Delorme was automatically assigned all the sexual assaults and all the battered wife cases, and she was frankly sick of them.
When she first joined, she had looked forward to being a champion of victimized women, and indeed over the years she had had the satisfaction of locking up several abusive husbands and at least three rapists. But there had been two big shocks in store for Delorme. First was the number of cases where the woman (girl, more like it) was actually lying’ there was no assault, she was just angry and out for revenge. The saddest effect of this was that it tended to undermine the credibility of genuine victims.
The other shock was the number of women who chose not to press charges-and not only not press charges but to go back to the men who beat them, to go on living with them in the hope they would change. Delorme knew about the syndrome but she could not get over what a grip it had on women who in every other way seemed, well, rational.
Miranda Heap was forty-five and good-looking, and she ran a business services concern that so far had managed to thrive in a niche that was too small for the big-city competition to bother with. She did most of her work out of her home office, and that was where Delorme found her.
“Your face looks much better,” Delorme said.
“Yes, not so much like a raccoon now. Amazing what a little foundation can do. Would you like a coffee? I’m about due for a break.”
“No, that’s okay. I just stopped by to see how you were getting on.”
“I’m fine. Really, I think I kind of overreacted.”
“No, you didn’t. He hurt you. You should tell me his name so we can press charges.”
“He didn’t mean to hurt me. He’s just a passionate guy, that’s all. That’s part of the attraction, you know? A big part. It’s hard for you to understand because you’ve never met him.”
“Tell me his name, I’ll go meet him right now.”
Miranda laughed. “You’d probably get along great. You’re obviously passionate too.”
“Passionate is not the same as violent. Are you gonna let him keep hitting you just because he’s good in bed?”
“You’ve only seen the very worst of him. He hates that part of himself too. He’s so ashamed after. He purposely waits until he knows I’m out and then he leaves these incredibly long, heartfelt phone messages. Really. His apologies are masterpieces.”
