He looked at her quizzically. In his brief absence she had made new friends. He would not have anticipated the relationship with Officer Naismith. Miranda was generally slow in warming to women. Her explanation was a paraphrase from the old comic strip Pogo: “we have seen the enemy and it is us.” Pope was less unexpected. What Morgan had taken as the man’s pleasantly austere asexuality, he now realized, from the tenor of Miranda’s voice, was mistaken by women for smouldering passion refined through an aura of eccentric gentility.
Strange, he thought. We can’t both be right.
“Did you ask him for a list of people who might have the skills to close in the alcove?”
“Yeah. He laughed. He told me there’s nobody, apart from himself. And, he assured me, he was working in Arlington, Texas, through the fall and winter. It checked out. He’s got a major reconstruction project down there, where they’re anxious to pay for their past — unlike post-colonials who try to obscure it. He was on the job every day, seven days a week, for a full five months.”
“And they died during that time?”
“Ellen Ravenscroft wrote the report. She was sure they died in the depths of winter. Fairly sure.”
“How could she tell?”
“Micro-organisms; decomposition tables; schedules and charts of this and that. They have their methods. Once she knew what she was looking for, it was easy.”
“Ain’t that always the way!”
“We ran chemical analyses on the plaster ingredients and paint. It was like an alchemical inversion, Morgan: old ingredients newly mixed to look old.”
“What about sexual assault?”
“Tissues were too far gone — ”
“This isn’t about sex, anyway. Not this one.”
“Wrong, Morgan. I think it is. Not the act of, maybe, but it has to be about sex. You wait and see. You don’t mount cadavers in a headless embrace without Freud in attendance.”
He smiled enigmatically.
“I thought you were in the Cayman Islands.”
“No,” he said. “No, I wasn’t.”
Miranda left for headquarters. Morgan planned to walk over to the university and talk with Hubbard and Birbalsingh. He took possession of his wingback again, settled down, and stared into the middle distance.
We wait, he thought. There are cold cases to deal with, and investigative legwork to be done for other teams, but we wait. There is no way to anticipate the killer’s next move. Will we even recognize it?
Of course, or he’s failed!
It’s bound to be different. Perhaps not a theatrical tableau, but if it doesn’t evoke the original, his genius is wasted.
To have his bodies remain undiscovered, that would have been failure. So, the sick diorama must have been set up after demolition was approved by the city. But if we’re right, spurred on by his success the killer will reach for a cumulative effect. Then he’ll have, and we’ll have, a pattern.
That’s small consolation for the deaths in the offing.
Outside, Morgan surveyed the street. He lived in the heart of the Annex, surrounded by looming Victorian houses and well-kept between-the-wars homes with verandahs. It was well past the middle of April, buds were forming on the huge silver maples along the street, and the occasional willow showed the beginnings of green. Tiny lawns had been raked of winter debris and the pavement was swept clean of the gritty detritus that had accumulated through winter in ridges by the curb. A few crocuses and hyacinths poked upwards in flowerbeds, above tulips and daffodils that were secretly breaking out of their chrysalises in the cold earth below. Cars gleamed; in the winter there was no point in keeping them washed. Windows on houses were sparkling clean. Robins squabbled in the air and squirrels raced under cars, over lawns, leapt among branches in desperate games of hide- and-go-seek.
As he walked down to Harbord Street, he conjured with images of Rapa Nui, playing them through his mind against the backdrop of his neighbourhood in the Annex. Cabbagetown had changed. Suburbia was foreign territory. High-rise condos sapped the soul. But in the Annex, Morgan felt comfortable. The smell of barbeques in summer, the grating of snow shovels in winter, the excitement of spring, the slow apprehension of autumn, cars in all seasons parked bumper to bumper — these defined the dimensions of home. At any one point in the year, he was aware of it all.
Sometimes, among the most striking moai buried to the shoulder in ravines below the quarry, great statues leaning forward, gazing over the grasslands of the island toward the Pacific, he felt a vague longing for the more familiar world against which his experience on Rapa Nui was shaped and measured. It was this merging of worlds within that made his adventure exciting and poignant. Travel is about being someplace and being away from someplace at the same time.
The moai that reached the coast were set on platforms called ahu, and they would have been given eyes of obsidian on polished coral and faced with their backs to the sea.
In his mind he could still see stone and wood tablets in the marketplace, meticulously etched with the island’s Rongorongo script by carvers who could not understand the writings of their ancestors, yet honoured the indecipherable glyphs by their scrupulous reproductions. He could see rich Polynesian complexions and luxuriant long hair, and a few mirroring variations of himself, slathered in sunscreen, shielded under the wonderfully familiar floppiness of an old Tilley hat. He could see the clean streets of Hanga Roa, the bustling village on the southwestern shore where virtually all of the island’s population live, and on the streets the occasional car and the horses and dogs and people vying for casual pre-eminence. All this mixed in a mental melange with his perceptions of Toronto in the promising spring.
He had gone scuba diving while he was there. The young men at their shop in the small harbour had coached him in Spanish, which he did not understand very well, and in Rapa Nui, which he understood not at all. Still, he thought he had learned the basic skills on dry land, and when they took out a couple of New Zealand women who were experienced divers, he went along and the women explained details about clearing his mask and sharing the emergency mouthpiece, so that by the time they all toppled over backward from the boat into the pellucid blue waters within sight of the town, he felt giddy but confident.
The pain in his ears as he descended surprised him. He held his nose and blew, popping the pressure as he had been told, and managed to arrive at the bottom, twenty metres down, with only modest qualms of incipient panic. He had come to rest on a patch of sand. He looked around and the others were hovering a few feet above rocky outcroppings, surrounded by curious fish. He fiddled with his buoyancy vest, shooting up, then dropping, eventually adjusting to zero, then he fluttered gently up and over the coral, forgetting his apprehension, in harmony with the exquisite undersea beauty surrounding him.
He knew nothing of nitrogen narcosis or the bends until he bought a PADI manual in English on the way home, and discovered how perilous such beauties can be. He felt a bit sheepish about being so foolhardy. He would tell Miranda, but later. He suspected he would be low-key about the entire trip. People resent the extravagant experience of people they know, admiring in strangers what they resent in their friends.
Crossing St. George, he entered the university campus proper. The Robarts Library behind him loomed as a warning to anyone seeking refuge among the more intimate quadrangles and passageways that connect the colleges that this was a formidable place. From the air, he had been told, the library had the shape of a phoenix rising. From the ground it was a slumbering leviathan, a hunkering mass of raw concrete and forbidding angles. Inside, it was a marvel of spaces and planes, with form following function like a medieval cathedral, both hiding and yielding its treasures with awesome disregard for human proportion. He was more comfortable on the meandering walkways that led past University Circle to the anthropology labs.
Joleen Chau met him at the door of the building. She recognized him immediately and commented on his tan.
“You are kind,” he said, “but it’s a layered sunburn.”
“Cuba?”
“No.” He paused, a little self-conscious. He wondered if he had chosen Rapa Nui for bragging rights. I can’t be that superficial, he thought, and responded aggressively, “Easter Island.”
“Wonderful,” she said. “Wow, are you lucky. I’ve actually applied for a postdoctoral fellowship to study the moai culture. How does a tiny isolated island mirror historical procedures in the rest of the world where social
