feet when she found the wallet. She picked it up and flipped it open. The driver’s licence showed an unflattering picture of Stella McQuaig. No money. Delorme put it in her pocket and shone the light down the alley again.
Beyond a row of recycling bins, she could see the legs of a homeless man.
“Police,” Delorme said. “I need to ask you some questions.”
The man didn’t move.
She went up and tapped his foot with her boot. His clothes were too good for a homeless person, and he was wearing a hood. Delorme stepped back and trained her Beretta on him. He didn’t move, and his stillness was not the stillness of the living. Delorme bent down, and in the beam of her flashlight the small black hole in his forehead glistened. His eyes were only half closed, the crooked track of a tear straying down one cheek. The lips were slightly drawn back, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of speech, exposing a sizable gap in his front teeth. When Cardinal arrived, Delorme brought him up to speed. “No wallet, no ID, but we found the ten fresh twenties he’d just taken from the victim. Also a nine-mil Browning Hi-Power with at least one good thumbprint. Clothing labels are Gap, Guess?, Hilfiger. Coroner’s been and gone.”
Cardinal went over and spoke to Collingwood and Arsenault, who were taking prints from the body. A few minutes later the wagon arrived and the removal guys loaded it in back for the trip to the Forensic Centre in Toronto.
“So what do you suppose went down?” Delorme said to Cardinal. “A vigilante?”
“How would a vigilante know the kid was going to hit this particular ATM again? We didn’t.”
“We certainly thought it was possible. Maybe it was a chance thing.”
“Pretty slim chance.”
They left Ident in charge of the scene and drove back to the station. In the silence of the deserted meeting room, Cardinal slotted the security video into the player and sat next to Delorme to watch it. Grainy, dark in some frames, washed out in others. Stella McQuaig comes up to the ATM, makes her withdrawal, puts the bills in her wallet and turns to leave. No robber. No killer. Not so much as a shadow.
“Maybe it was a freak of timing. A good-Samaritan thing,” Delorme said. Her voice sounded loud in the quiet of the empty room. “Happens to be going by and sees a woman in trouble, chases the kid into the alley. Kid pulls the gun and boom-the guy drops him first.”
“But your witness didn’t see anybody else. Didn’t hear anybody else.”
“You’re right.” Delorme picked up the remote, pressed a button, and the monitor went dark. “Also, the way he was shot in the face, it looks more like he was stopped head-on. Like the person was coming the other way down the alley. Or waiting for him.”
The fluorescent lights went out and Delorme and Cardinal both yelled out, “Hey!” The lights came back on and someone down the hall yelled back, “Sorry!”
“If the killer was waiting for him,” Cardinal said, “that would seem to indicate someone who works with him. Maybe they had a falling-out.”
“Except none of the victims has mentioned an accomplice, and there’s no other evidence of one. It would help if we had some idea who the kid was. We don’t even know if he was local. Pretty hard to make any sense of it. What? Why are you looking like that?”
“Nothing,” Cardinal said. “I was just remembering what the Russian lady said-about not having to understand people.”
“That Russian lady,” Delorme said, “has Sparky Noone’s problem.”
24
For the first time in her young life, Nikki was experiencing silence. This brand new house out in the Canadian woods didn’t creak or rattle like older houses. And no cars, no trucks, no boats, no trains or planes going by. Almost no wildlife. The other night a squirrel or something had scrabbled across the roof of her bedroom and woken her up wide-eyed and scared. She liked the quiet during the day, but at night it put her on edge. Every now and then the furnace would make a muffled whump, then a mild hiss from the air vent, then nothing. How could you relax when you could hear every little thing-the scratch of your fingernail on the pillow, a strand of hair falling across your forehead?
And the darkness. She had never known what darkness was before now. When she turned off the light in her bedroom, it was as if she had gone blind. She wanted one of those little lights you stick in a socket, but she didn’t want to ask Papa and sound like too much of a wuss. Tonight at least there was a moon, bright enough to cast shadows. She held a hand straight up and turned it, bone white in the air above the bed, and admired the shadow it cast-elegant and slim, the arm of a ballerina, the neck of a swan.
She sat up cross-legged and bunched the pillows behind her back. Smells of lavender and lemon wafted up from her feet. She held each one and rubbed with her thumbs, the soles softer and smoother than usual. Papa’s washing them had thrummed a chord deep in her chest, as if there was an instrument inside her-not harp, not organ, no instrument she had ever heard-that had been yearning to be played since the day she was born.
She picked up her watch and tilted it in the moonlight. Two a.m. She got off the bed and stood before the mirror, backed away from it until she was lit by the moon. Her silly pyjamas, blue and white striped and utterly sexless. The first gift Papa had given her, telling her how modesty was the most underrated virtue in the world, the one thing maybe the Muslims could teach us something about, whatever that meant. The pyjamas had felt stupid and clumsy and ugly at first-Nikki had been sleeping naked as long as she could remember-but she had come to love them. There was something consoling about dressing for bed, as if you were going somewhere special, somewhere private, someplace no one would bother you.
She lifted up the striped top, gathering the material with both hands. So cool and clean, the metallic glow of moonlight on her skin, the dime-sized spot of her navel. She pulled the bottoms down a little, exposing the ridge of her hips. I’m hot, she said. I’m a hottie. The ridges and planes of her face, alternately glowing and shadowed, made her look aloof, ethereal-alluring, that aching word she came across so often in the vampire novels that were her only reading. The night made her features regular and even, her eyes deep and black.
She went to the door and opened it and listened. Silence. A glow beneath the door of Papa’s room. The feel of carpet under her bare feet as she covered the short distance to the door. She raised a hand and held it an inch from the wood. For some reason it was a moment like on the diving board at the juvenile centre, knowing it wouldn’t hurt but afraid anyway.
She tapped on the door with her fingertips.
Silence.
Nikki raised her fingers to tap again, when Papa’s voice, no louder than conversational level, said to come in.
She opened the door a little and stuck her head in. Papa looked at her over the paperback he was reading, a crescent moon in flames on the cover.
“What is it, Nikki? You should be asleep.”
“I need to be with you for a little while.”
“You do? Why? What’s up?”
Nikki closed the door and crossed the room and got on the bed beside him. She curled up and laid an arm across his belly and hugged him, pressing her forehead into his ribs.
He didn’t say anything. He adjusted his elbows, but he was still holding the book up over his chest.
Nikki sent her hand straying up over his chest and belly and down between his legs. She felt the soft outline of his penis beneath her palm and rubbed it.
“Don’t.”
“I want to. Just lay still. You don’t have to say anything or do anything. I just want to suck you off.”
He dropped the book over the side of the bed and grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her hand away. She tried to put it back, but he was fast and strong.
“No.”
She looked up at him, the blue eyes frowning at her. “Please,” she said. “I want to. I want to make you feel good.”
