“I need to know what was the sidearm they carried at that time.”
“In Mobile Command?”
“And in the JTF.”
There was silence at the other end.
“I’ve stumped you,” Cardinal said.
“No, sir. Just contemplating the best way to run down this information. You know what? It’s not my department, but it may be under Logistics and Weaponry, or whatever it was called way back then. Let me see if I can go through them to pull up some stuff-or actually, the Web may be faster. Can you hang on?”
–
“This is what I don’t understand,” Delorme said. She had to speak loudly over the noise of the icebreaker’s engine. “I don’t understand what made you go to the Armed Forces in the first place. Why did you even think of checking the military?”
They were ploughing slowly through the ice surrounding the island where the Scrivers had spent their last summer. An OPP diver sat silently beside them like a lonely astronaut in a penumbra of tubes, his helmet on his lap. Sunlight flashed off the snowy surface of the lake, making their eyes water.
“It was a lucky guess,” Delorme said. “Admit it. It was an incredibly lucky guess.”
“It was Mendelsohn’s idea,” Cardinal said. “I read an entry in his notebook that said Check Canadian military weapons, and it took me a while to realize what he meant. He had two cases of beheadings where there was also a firearm involved. And in both of them, that firearm was a Browning HP. Not the same gun, but the same model. Same as with the Bastovs. Same as at the ATM. And you have to wonder how and where someone becomes so devoted to a particular weapon. It’s not like it’s the most common firearm in the world, but in the early seventies it was standard issue for the Northern Rangers.”
Two dark figures stood on the rocky beach of the island, Jerry Commanda and Ian McLeod. Behind them, a beautiful summer house of red cedar had replaced the homely Scriver cottage. The Schumacher property was visible across the short stretch of ice that was now churned and broken as if it had been jackhammered. Jerry Commanda was a persuasive guy, but it must have taken a star performance even by his standards to persuade Natural Resources to produce their breaker. It was nothing like a Coast Guard boat, amounting to little more than a modified outboard with a reinforced, sharpened prow, and another two weeks of winter would have rendered it useless. Progress was noisy but slow.
At Cardinal’s request, their pilot steered the boat around the elongated tip of the island, opposite to the direction the Scrivers would have taken had they been crossing the bay to get to a movie. Cardinal tapped on the door of a squat, telephone booth-like structure in the middle of the boat and spoke to the OPP technician inside.
“Anything yet?”
The tech shook his head. “Just a lot of logs. Amazingly well preserved, considering there hasn’t been any logging here for at least sixty years.” Cardinal could see over his shoulder that the images were crisp and clear.
“How deep?”
“Ninety, ninety-five feet. It’ll get deeper real soon.”
“Scriver senior helped map the underwater geography,” Cardinal told Delorme, “and his son worked with him a couple of summers on fish surveys and so on. They both would have known the lake very well.”
They came around the tip of the island and the wind picked up. A slice of black water eased the way for fifty yards or so.
The diver spoke up for the first time. “Deepest part of the lake coming up. Hundred, hundred and twenty metres. Current moves in the opposite direction, so they likely wouldn’t have searched this area back when.”
“And they assumed the Scrivers were headed toward town,” Cardinal said.
On the island, Jerry Commanda and Ian McLeod emerged from the trees and stood on the beach. Both folded their arms at the same moment against the wind, as if they had rehearsed.
The booth door opened and the tech called out, “Got something.”
Cardinal leaned in. Again he marvelled at the clarity of the image. “Delorme, you gotta see this.”
Delorme stuck her head in. “Can we get closer?”
“Hell, yes,” the tech said. “Closing in as we speak. It’s snagged under an outcropping. No way the old sonars would have detected it.”
The image took on greater contrast and definition. An oar hanging over a gunwale. An outboard off the stern.
“Two hundred and thirty feet,” the tech said. “You see what’s in that thing?”
“Yes,” Cardinal said. “I do.”
They helped the diver screw on his helmet. He switched on his lights, and the red LED began to flash on his tiny videocam. He climbed over the side and lowered himself into the water, and they watched him sink into darkness. He had to pause several times on the way down to adjust to the pressure.
Cardinal’s phone rang and he took it from his inside pocket and opened it. It was Ian McLeod, wanting to know how long he was expected to hang out on a beach in the middle of goddam winter. He could see McLeod giving him the finger across the water. “Hang in there,” Cardinal said.
“By the way-checked out Divyris’s so-called business contacts. He’s dreaming. Yes, he has been meeting with people, talking with people, hounding people, and they’re totally sick of him. Apparently he won’t take no for an answer. One guy’s threatening to sue the bastard for harassment. Are you having fun out there?”
“Hell, yes. This’ll be in the papers tomorrow.”
“Yeah, but in a good way?”
Cardinal clicked off and watched the video monitor, the sunken boat coming into view.
“Are we sure it’s the Scrivers?” Delorme said.
“Fourteen-foot aluminum. Evinrude thirty-five on the back,” Cardinal said. He asked the tech to get the diver to scan the motor. A couple of seconds later the image changed and the motor filled the screen. Cold and depth combined make an excellent preservative, and the lettering was still visible after forty years. Evinrude thirty- five.
When the diver turned back to the boat, Cardinal heard Delorme’s sudden intake of breath and felt his own pulse jump.
“There are only two bodies,” Cardinal said. “Ask him to get close on the faces.”
It took the pilot a moment to respond. “He says they don’t have any faces.” The image drifting lazily across the monitor screen confirmed this. “They don’t even have any heads.”
“I have a feeling,” Cardinal said, “that this is not the usual disarticulation you get with drowning victims.”
The tech shook his head. “Too deep. Too cold. Anyway, the feet would have detached first, then the hands, and as you can see, the extremities are still intact. Minus a finger or two.”
“Forty years,” Delorme said. “Incredible.”
No sound but the scrape of ice against their hull. Hundreds of feet below, the water was perfectly clear. The zoom lens lurched into extreme close-up, swerving from one detail to another: a jagged hole in the hull, then another, both made from the inside. The diver’s light flared off sharp edges of aluminum. Then a third gash.
“Look at that,” Cardinal said. “The axe is still wedged in it.”
The view swung back to the bodies, extreme close-up, the white gleam of neck bone.
–
Aromas of fresh coffee and pastries filled the meeting room. All the CID personnel were there, and Chouinard was so excited he had even called Police Chief R. J. Kendall to sit in on the debriefing. The mood was festive, even triumphant.
“You’re losing me,” Chouinard said, in urgency, not anger. “Who was it dies of leukemia?”
“Curtis Carl Winston. Eighteen-year-old brother of Martin Scriver’s girlfriend. Never did anything suspicious in his life until he joined the army-which wouldn’t be suspicious either, except for the fact he did it two months after he died.”
“So we think Martin Scriver killed his parents and took off? He joins the army using someone else’s identity?”
