25
Friday morning, Delorme asked Staff Sergeant Flower to check if any tickets had been handed out in the neighbourhood of Roxwell and Clement. The boy would almost certainly have driven there, and yet there had been no suspicious cars parked in the strip mall lot, or on the street. He had gone into the alley, presumably to get to his car, which should therefore have been parked on Clement Street. So he must have parked somewhere else and they just hadn’t found the car. Twenty minutes later Sergeant Flower came back with the answer: Yes, one car had been towed. An irate citizen had called about some idiot parked in his driveway. Right in his driveway, for Pete’s sake. For this he pays taxes? Location: third house from the mall.
Delorme put in a call to the city towing service. The man who answered chose to liven up a boring job by speaking in the manner of a Marine on a vital mission.
“Clement Street?” he said when Delorme asked. “That’s an affirmative.”
“What number on Clement Street?”
“Hold on a second…” A distant clicking of a keyboard as a log was consulted. “Number twelve. That’s one- two. Number twelve Clement.”
“Could you give me the VIN number and plates on that?”
“Plates are Alpha-November-Foxtrot-Charlie-two-eight-niner.”
Delorme wrote it down, and then he gave her the much longer and even more military-sounding vehicle identification number. She thanked him and he said ten-four. She typed the VIN into the Ministry of Transport’s database. The car, a silver-grey Mazda 3, was registered to Dr. and Mrs. T. J. Walker of Barrie, Ontario. It had been reported stolen two weeks previously from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. The plates didn’t match.
Delorme took the information into Chouinard’s office and got permission to have Ident tow the car into the police garage for fuming. An hour later she put on her parka and went down to the garage. The garage door was wide open-a necessity when fuming an entire vehicle.
Even with the door open, the place reeked of superglue. Fingerprints had taken the form of ghostly white smudges all around the Mazda’s door handles, and over the dash, and on the insides of the doors. They had found prints on the radio and on the rear-view.
“Found a whole bunch of stuff that’s probably not related,” Arsenault said. “A whack of old parking slips from Barrie, couple of discs full of medical lectures, a Cat in the Hat toy. Problem number one is we don’t know what we can rule out until we get prints from Barrie. The doctor and his wife agreed to go in and get printed down there, but we don’t have them yet.”
“And what about our dead thief?”
“No matches so far.”
“Come on,” Delorme said, and gestured with a sweep of her arm at all the white dots. “In all that? A two-bit mugger maybe sixteen years old doesn’t leave a single print?”
Arsenault shook his head. “We’ve checked inside and out.”
“What about that?” Delorme pointed to a Welch’s grape soda can lying on the floor on the passenger side.
“Haven’t got to it yet.”
Collingwood picked up the can in gloved hands and took it to a small Plexiglas box. He put it inside and closed the lid and turned on the fumes. He squatted so his eyes were level with the box. After a minute he turned off the machine, opened the lid, took out the soda can and held it up to the light. He handed it to Arsenault and said, “Thumb.”
Arsenault held it up to the light and squinted at it. “Triple tenting in the arch.”
“Which means what?” Delorme said.
“It matches the prints we took off your dead ATM artist.”
“It’s a start, I guess,” Delorme said. “Too bad he doesn’t have a record.”
“We got something better than that,” Collingwood said.
An outsider would not have noticed, but Delorme had known Collingwood for going on ten years. For him to utter so many syllables in a row amounted to excitement bordering on hysteria.
“What have you got, Bob?”
He crooked a finger and she followed him over to the counter at the side of the garage. He pointed. Four white arcs of plaster were laid out, each in its own plastic bag. Interspersed with these were four more white plaster arcs, not in bags.
“You made moulds of the tires?”
Collingwood nodded.
“And the ones in plastic are from Trout Lake?”
“You got it.”
“Don’t tell me we’ve got our killer.”
“Fingerprints don’t match but the tires do. Prints on the gun at the ATM show he’s a right-hander. The Trout Lake killer is left-handed. But this car was definitely there.”
Cardinal’s first duty of the day was to apprehend Randall Wishart. “Wish I could come with you,” McLeod had said. “Hate to miss a pleasure like that.”
Cardinal drove up to Carnwright Real Estate and waited for Wishart’s client to leave. In contrast to McLeod’s sense of fun, Cardinal found the business depressing. Preventing harm to a girl like Sam Doucette was unquestionably a good thing. He could recognize that this was “serving and protecting,” as Chouinard liked to put it. But a pleasure?
When he snapped the cuffs on him, Wishart’s face turned paper white, and Cardinal thought for a moment that he might faint. He led him through the outer office under the shocked gaze of Lawrence Carnwright and their receptionist, and knew that his action, although just and necessary, was catastrophic to this family. Yes, Sam would be safer, but he took no pleasure in yanking the loosened thread of a young man’s unravelling life.
Even a lawyer of Dick Nolan’s calibre couldn’t keep Wishart from spending a day and night in jail, not with the information Cardinal had amassed from Troy Campbell and Sam Doucette. The Crown would not go for a charge of attempted murder-Campbell had never laid a hand on her-but obstruction of justice and uttering threats were not going to pose a problem.
When that was done, Cardinal went to D.S. Chouinard and asked that a safe house be provided for Sam and her mother.
Chouinard’s flat-out no was for him an unusually decisive response. “I don’t even understand why you’re asking,” he said. “Wishart wanted to shut the girl up to save his job and his marriage. But that cat is well and truly out of the bag, so he has no motive to attack her again.”
“It’s not Wishart I’m worried about. It was the killer, not Wishart, who chased her and shot at her car. And she lost her cellphone at the scene. It has her picture, her name, her address.”
“If we were sure he had her cellphone, I would not hesitate. There’s been no activity from her number.”
“No, but it’s still pinging. Which means it isn’t frozen or dead. If someone picked it up, why aren’t they using it?”
“They want to change the SIMM card. I don’t know. But I also don’t know that the killer has it. We don’t know that he caught her licence plate. But we do know that he chose not to chase her. So on the whole, I’m not inclined to think she’s in danger.”
“I don’t think that’s a bet we can afford to make.”
“Luckily, it’s not your decision.”
“Uh-huh. And what happened to serving and protecting?”
“Let me tell you something off the record, Cardinal, and I mean no disrespect, but fuck you.”
–
Cardinal brought Sam and her mother down to the station for a formal statement, which he videotaped. Sam sat across the table from him, her mother at her side. The girl had lost the passionate, excitable manner of the other night. Her words were matter-of-fact as she described Troy Campbell coming after her, but when she related how Randall had kept telling her not to go to the police, her tone became more and more depressed.
Her mother, neatly dressed in skirt and blazer, stayed quiet until Sam was finished. “A married man,” she said softly. “What could you possibly have been thinking?”
