Delorme couldn’t wait to get out of the office again after her meeting with Loach and Chouinard. She could still hear them shouting at each other as she headed out the door. She drove up to the hospital and visited with Miranda Heap, who had regained consciousness. Her lips were swollen and she was groggy from the drugs, but her mind seemed perfectly clear. Perfectly clear, and perfectly made up. Did you listen to the phone messages? And you know who it is. Good. Did you get the receipts too? The photograph? Good. Son of a bitch thinks he’s going to be a judge…
Delorme paid another visit to her house and found, as Miranda had expected, that Garth Romney had left another message. Darlene has been such a bad girl, my darling…
“Yes,” Delorme said, “you have.”
Then she went back to the station and made copies of everything.
She sat across from Chouinard in his office as he leafed, grim-faced, through the receipts, shaking his head at what he was hearing through his headphones. Finally he took them off and muttered, “Garth, Garth, Garth… Misuse of funds, dereliction of duty…”
“Don’t forget assault.”
“Assault. Jesus. Tell me something, Sergeant Delorme. Tell me how it is that such seemingly intelligent people manage to get themselves into so much trouble.”
“I’d like to take this to Crown Attorney Hartman right away.”
“No, no. This is far too hot for the local. We take it to Sudbury, to the regional crown.”
“But that’ll take so long.”
“No, it won’t. Believe me, they’ll want this cleaned up fast-before Romney is actually installed as a judge. This is out of our hands, as far as jurisdiction goes-they’ll want the OPP, or actually, probably Toronto police to handle the investigation.”
“But the work’s all done.”
“I know. You’ve done it all for them. And now we know why Priest was never prosecuted.”
She told him about her interview with Fritz Reicher.
“He’s ready to testify?”
“Definitely. I’d like to arrest Priest as soon as possible. Why not tonight?”
“Hold on now. It won’t be tonight. Order of business is we get the regional crown on board first. He’s going to want to see-and hear-everything we have. He’ll want to line up an outside investigator, and then he’ll lower the boom.”
Delorme got up to leave. As she was opening the office door, Chouinard pounded his fist on the desk. “Damn.”
“What, D.S.?”
“This is good, eh? This is good. This is what we get into this business for, isn’t it.”
“I’d say so.”
He pounded the desk again. “Fantastic. Totally fucking fantastic-and you know I never swear.”
“Absolutely, D.S. I’ve always admired that about you.”
“After I sent you away so rudely,” Alison Durie said, “I went to look at some things my brother left behind. But I need to tell you a bit about him before I show you.”
Cardinal was sitting at her kitchen table, where a pot of tea was steeping. He studied her face. Wide brow, aristocratic neck, the regal manner undone by unbearable sadness.
“I flew to Yellowknife when Karson was released and brought him back here with me. He stayed for about six months.”
“How did he spend his time? Did he have a job?”
She shook her head. “My father left us some money. Karson’s share collected interest over the years. It generates enough income that he doesn’t have to take a job-provided he’s careful. He’s not a man who requires a lot of material things.”
As she spoke of her brother, she forgot about the tea and cups and spoons between them.
“He spent most of his days at the library-the university library. It broke my heart the first day he came home from an afternoon there. The joy on his face. Karson is not an effusive man, but he positively jabbered at me about advances in his field. He went back every day, got himself access to their online journals, and I saw-for a moment, anyway-something like happiness in his eyes. I know he also went because he didn’t want to be a burden to me- which was silly, because he was very helpful looking after our mother. But I’m sure he wanted to be out of my hair. And the happiness was soon gone. Prison-or perhaps not prison so much as injustice-took that capacity from him.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t get his own place, rent an apartment.”
“My brother is a man who is capable of walking across Ellesmere Island dragging a two-hundred-pound sled. Alone. He has lived entire winters with Russians, Laplanders and Inuit in places that are barely on the map and have numbers for names. He has been stranded for weeks in Good Friday Bay, saved an Inuit hunter on the pack ice of the Beaufort Sea. But eighteen years in prison? Eighteen years, Detective. Just going out on the street was disorienting. He was like a man afraid of heights stepping out onto a ledge forty floors up. He had to walk next to walls, step into doorways.
“The distances, the scale of things, were too much. Can you imagine? This is a man who has walked on icebergs the size of Manhattan. But after twenty years in prison he had to be accompanied everywhere. He needed time to find his feet, and he was intelligent enough to know it.”
“That must have been hard for you.”
“Not at all. Karson is three years older than me. I grew up absolutely adoring him. Even as a teenager, he absorbed knowledge the way the rest of us absorb pop songs. He used to speak of relativity, nuclear fission, differential calculus the way our contemporaries might speak of Led Zeppelin or the latest sitcom. That’s probably why I went into the arts-music-to avoid competing with him.”
Cardinal let her talk a little more. Then he said, “You mentioned some things you wanted to show me.”
“Yes. When you first appeared, I didn’t really listen to you. I couldn’t really hear you. I didn’t want to hear you. But I saw you waiting out there and I looked at the girl’s picture, and… Karson left some things. Nothing much-he’s always travelled light and actually doesn’t own very much-but he left a small box of things in the garage.”
“I need to see it.”
“Tell me truly, Detective-are you absolutely sure it’s Karson you want?”
Cardinal pulled out his cellphone and opened the photo Drexler had sent. He held it out for her to see. “Do you recognize the van?”
“Oh, dear God.”
“The girl’s fingerprints are all over the interior. It appears that both of them got away, but we don’t know in what vehicle and we don’t know where he’s headed. I need to see his things.”
“Yes, of course you do. It’s this way.”
She got up and put on a coat and boots and they went out the back door and through a small garden to a garage. It was brightly lit with fluorescent lights. There were gardening tools, a workbench and shelves along one wall. Oil stains on the floor spoke of a vehicle, but there was none there.
“I never come out here in winter-don’t own a car-but I let one of the neighbours use it. He used to own a small business until he had a heart attack a few years ago. I don’t know why he never sold the van. Anyway, a few weeks ago his son told me it was missing and asked if I had seen anyone in the garage. It didn’t occur to me that Karson might have taken it.”
“What kind of business?”
“A flower shop. You could still make out the logo on the van. But what I really wanted to show you…”
She pointed to the shelves along the back wall, a plastic storage container.
Cardinal prised the lid off the container and set it aside. Shirts, jeans, neatly folded. A pair of shoes. On top of these, several notebooks, the three-hole kind that schoolchildren use, with the map of Canada on the front and a blank class schedule on the back.
“I think it’s the blue one you’ll want first. Careful-the staples have been removed. Prison protocol, one assumes.”
Cardinal opened the blue notebook. The handwriting neat, controlled, easy to read. He thumbed through the
