“Good,” he said. “Then it’s settled.”
“Yes it is.”
“And what about you? Did you have a good weekend?”
“Yes.”
“At the zoo?”
“And otherwise.”
“Now, what does that mean?”
“It means I might have been whoring, myself.”
“Not likely.”
“You’re sweet, Morgan.”
“But foolish?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t think she did it — that’s my judgment after two days of foolishness.” They ordered more coffee and proceeded to sort through the facts and hypotheses. “There’s no pattern,” he said
“Not yet. The pattern will become clear when she does it again.”
“Don’t hold your breath. One funny thing she said — ”
“Only one?”
“She made a point of telling me she had never been abused as a child.”
“What an odd thing to confess.”
“Yeah, over breakfast, she asked about my growing up, but it felt like an excuse to talk about herself, then she explained she’d never been abused, assaulted, molested, or in any way damaged, that she had had a thoroughly ordinary upbringing, absolutely average, absurdly normal.”
“Now, why would she want you to know all that?”
“Establishing her credentials as a psychopath manque.”
“What the hell does that mean, Morgan?”
“A failure.”
“As a psychopath?”
“Perhaps a declaration that there is nothing in her background that would drive her to murder.” He paused for effect. “Or possibly the dead opposite — something more sinister: a declaration that she takes full responsibility for what she’s been doing.”
“You’d rather it wasn’t her.”
“I’d rather it wasn’t her.”
“She’s not a nice person, Morgan. Sometimes I worry about you. Do you really think she’s innocent?”
“ An innocent, no. Innocent? Possibly.”
“I have my doubts.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Grave doubts, Morgan.”
“You’re on shaky ground, you know. Guilt isn’t generally determined by personal animosity.”
“Nor innocence by affection. It seems to me you were the one on shaky ground.”
“You cannot convict someone for having a sauna,” he said.
“Not at all. I’ve had a few myself.”
“No, no, I mean owning a sauna. This is not about you.”
“But it is, perhaps, about you, since you managed to insinuate yourself into the middle of things, so to speak.”
“I mean, she has a sauna, so does Alexander Pope. That doesn’t make them killers.”
“Morgan, I survived my sauna at Pope’s with virtue intact. Rachel and Alexander and I did not compromise anything beyond the limits of modesty. Your friend’s sauna could easily be an oven for the mummification of human remains, even a chamber of execution. And she does own a coffin-sized freezer and she does live in an isolated farmhouse and she does have the requisite talents and arcane knowledge.”
“Circumstantial. Half her neighbours could be accused of the same. All those Torontonians with country retreats.”
“But not the professional training, nor the warped personality. There’s no such thing as a normal, average, ordinary childhood, Morgan.”
No, he agreed, there is not. He said nothing.
“Look,” she said. “We could send in forensics, but I doubt we’d find much at the abattoir. She’ll have cleaned up perfectly. It’s a matter of aesthetics.”
“Maybe she’s just a normal forensic anthropologist. You know, an intellectual more at ease with the dead than the living.”
“A vampire with very big breasts.”
“I found her charming. Gracious, intelligent, sensitive, good-humoured. Any of those sound familiar?”
“Morgan, she’s fucked with your mind.”
“What a nasty expression. She charmed my mind. I would much rather think she is innocent.”
“The last thing that woman is, is innocent.”
Miranda spent the rest of Monday and most of Tuesday going over the accumulated file, looking for missed connections and anomalies. She had been dividing her time over the past couple of weeks, working on other cases that were not in her portfolio, doing background for detectives more directly involved. She responded to inquiries from outside their jurisdiction — one from the FBI and a couple from Scotland Yard. She spent time off duty looking into private schools for girls. The housekeeper who looked after Jill was returning to be with her children in Barbados before they completely grew up. She had dinner with Rachel a couple of times and neither of them mentioned their intimate encounter, although they were comfortably affectionate in each other’s company. She called Alexander Pope from police headquarters to ask him esoteric questions about plaster and paint and the concealment of bodies, and stayed on the phone for over an hour, chatting about his latest reclamation project — the restoration of an infamous abandoned church north of Toronto as a museum of some sort, or a gallery. She dropped in on Ellen Ravenscroft at the morgue and they chatted amiably, but she found little had been revealed in the tissue tests they had run; the causes of death were still deemed extreme dehydration and asphyxia, but whether from a singular cause or a sustained condition was indeterminate.
She was annoyed with her partner. He knew it and stayed out of her way. After they’d left Starbucks on Monday, he had walked with her over to headquarters, but remained outside. She disappeared into the planes of glass and pink granite, while he stood on the sidewalk, admiring the postmodern architecture of the massive edifice, acknowledging to himself the possibility that the austere obscenities of modernism were at last giving way. A police building with a stream flowing from its centre was a blow for imagination and form over function. He spent the rest of the day walking.
Tuesday he got up early, had breakfast out, and walked some more. He was looking for something and it was locked inside. Wednesday morning he called Miranda. She was already at her desk.
“You busy?” he asked.
“No. Are you coming in?”
“Meet me for lunch?”
“Sure. You name the spot. Rufalo was asking what we were up to. He didn’t come right out and say, ‘Where’s Morgan?’ but he wanted to know.”
“He’s trying to get his mind off personal problems.”
“His or yours, Morgan?”
“Must be his. Did you tell him I’m out here doggin’ some leads?”
“Something like that. I told him you were hard at work, that something would break pretty soon.”
“I hope not another murder tableau.”
“Have you heard from your friend?”
The silence on the other end of the line declared his unease. She was not sure if it was with her or with himself. He had obviously moved on from infatuation. She would find out soon enough which way. They agreed to meet at the nondescript little Italian restaurant where she and Rachel had dined two weeks before.
Morgan found himself standing on the corner of Queen and Yonge. He leaned against an opaque glass wall.
