“I wasn’t thinking,” Sam said. “I was feeling.” She pulled a strand of dark hair away from her forehead with thumb and forefinger and hooked it behind a perfectly formed ear.
“The story’s been all over the news,” Mrs. Doucette said to Cardinal. “I’m terrified someone’s going to come after her again.”
“We’ve talked to the local media-they’re not going to run Sam’s name or picture-but I can’t promise anything once other places get hold of it. Unfortunately, shooting someone with a crossbow isn’t a great strategy if you want to remain anonymous.”
“I know. Indian shoots white man with bow and arrow.” She turned to her daughter. “Sweetheart, you probably just set us back a hundred years-but I’m glad you did it.”
“It’s Randall I should shoot,” Sam said. “I still can’t believe it. I know it’s true and I just can’t get my head around it.”
“I hope you’re planning to keep that man in jail,” her mother said to Cardinal.
“I’ll certainly try.”
“You know, if a bear wanders into town and hurts somebody, they kill it.”
“Mother, please.”
“Bears don’t have the right to due process,” Cardinal said.
He turned the focus to the night of the murders and took Sam slowly through it, starting from when she got to Champlain’s, to Randall’s call, to the drive out to Trout Lake. She gave him every detail he asked for and volunteered many he didn’t. She emphasized again, as she had in her anonymous phone call, that the man who had spoken to the Bastovs did not have a Russian accent. As she spoke-she hadn’t put her finger on it at the time-she realized that the man might be from the South. The American South.
“Why do you say that?”
“He said you-all a couple of times. And the way he pronounced a couple of things. He said nass instead of nice. Maht instead of might. Stuff like that. It wasn’t really strong, but it sounded kinda South to me.”
“And he was trying to sell the Bastovs on buying the house?”
“He showed them the bathroom. The bedrooms. Pointed stuff out. Switched the lights on and off. He talked about the view. How he’d have to get them out there in daylight to see it. I wondered about it, because I know Randall and Mr. Carnwright are the only two men in the company.”
Sam was precise on the time the shots were fired, and detailed in her description of other sounds-the man sounded tall, fairly heavy, big boots-but she wasn’t going to be able to identify him: a glimpse in the night, a man’s form silhouetted against a lit room. She described the chase, and the bullets hitting her car.
Sam’s mother spoke up. “How are you going to protect Sam from this animal?”
Cardinal tried to repeat Chouinard’s reasoning as if he believed it himself. “Maybe you have some relatives you could stay with,” he added. “It might be good if Sam could be out of town for a while.”
“In other words you aren’t going to do anything.”
Cardinal said he could arrange to have patrol cars pass by their house as often as possible.
“That doesn’t exactly sound like ironclad security. In fact it sounds pathetic.” She turned to her daughter. “We could stay with Susanna in Dokis, I suppose.”
“Oh, great.” Sam said. “I lose my job and my school year.”
“No you won’t,” her mother said. “We’re not going to let that happen.”
Cardinal tried to remain upbeat as he drove them home. He even gave Sam his cellphone number-something he never did with witnesses-but when he dropped them off, the look on her mother’s face filled him with shame.
–
The security video finally arrived from Pearson International just as Cardinal was leaving for the day.
“Hey, Delorme,” he said, holding it up. She was shutting down her computer in the cubicle next to his. “You want to watch a video tonight?”
They drove in their separate cars to Delorme’s bungalow. The small brick house looked pretty in the snow. She had put up Christmas decorations since the last time Cardinal had visited.
Cardinal sat on the couch in front of the TV with a bowl of tortilla chips beside him, flipping channels while Delorme defrosted some chili. He caught part of a documentary on the discovery of a British frigate that had been sunk in Lake Erie in the War of 1812. A salvage team out of Toronto was testing a new sonar device that used computer technology to translate sound waves into remarkably clear images. Cardinal made a note of the salvage outfit’s name.
Delorme brought in their dinner trays and picked up the remote. The video began to play, showing a wide- angle view of parking level five that took in about a dozen vehicles. The time stamp reeled off the seconds in the lower right of the screen.
“Three weeks ago,” Delorme said. “A little more.”
“Car’s third from the left.” Cardinal pointed with his fork. “Good chili.”
“French Canadians have always made the best chili.”
A figure entered from the foreground, his back to the camera, wearing a hood. A bulky knapsack hung from his back.
“Could be our ATM kid,” Delorme said. She put her plate on the coffee table and went to sit on the rug, closer to the screen, hugging her knees to her chest like a teenager.
The figure approached the car that was deepest in shadow; his face remained completely obscured. A slim jim appeared in his hand, and with a couple of swift movements he had the lock up and the door open. There was no sound on the video, but the car alarm must have been loud in that concrete space. He got in, popped the hood and got out again. He raised the hood and shut it a moment later.
“So much for the car alarm,” Cardinal said.
“He’s fast. Must have had some good training.”
“We’re not going to be able to recognize him from this tape,” Cardinal said. “Not unless the Toronto geek squad can enhance it somehow.”
“Well, it’s got to be the same kid, even if we can’t prove it. Oh my, who have we got here?”
Another figure had entered the scene.
Cardinal pointed, outlining the man’s head and shoulders. “He looks a lot older. Way older. Just the way he moves.”
The two got in and closed the doors. The rear lights went on and then the car backed up, turned and drove out of frame.
“Back it up,” Cardinal said. “I think we got a bit of light on the older guy’s face when he turned to open the door.”
Delorme reached for the remote and froze the image for a second, and then ran it backwards. She clicked the image forward a few frames. The older figure was wearing a baseball cap that shadowed his face. He moved jerk by jerk toward the car. He opened the passenger-side door, and when he turned slightly, Delorme froze the image.
She got up on all fours to peer at the screen. Cardinal sat forward on the edge of his seat. “Definitely older.”
“They should be able to enhance that one. Maybe even use facial recognition on it.” Delorme ran the recording forward and back a few more times, but none of the frames was any better. She switched off the set and came back to the couch. “So. We’re looking for two guys. One’s a kid, the other’s in his forties or fifties?”
“That’s good,” Cardinal said. “Two guys travelling together-one of them a teenager-are going to be more noticeable than just one. First thing tomorrow we’ve got to get on the stick to Pearson. If they can match these guys up with other security shots, we may be able to get names from passport control, maybe even connect with a likely flight.”
“Do you know how many million people go through Pearson in a year?”
“That’s in a year. Look how we can narrow it down. The Bastovs are American-we can assume their killer followed them here. Assume these two guys arrived within an hour before stealing the car. They can check security tapes in the U.S. arrivals area for that hour. We may even be able to get it down to a particular gate, or close to it. But all of this makes me wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
