Forty Words for Sorrow (31 page)

55

T
HE PUMPHOUSE HAD BEEN
out of use for five years and looked it. It was a low, squat, ugly building of grey stone, its windows boarded up and its roof piled high with an entire winter’s accumulation of snow—three feet deep despite the recent meltage. Icicles the size of organ pipes dripped from the corners. Its virtue—from a murderer’s point of view—was isolation. There was not another house for half a mile on either side, and this distance was thick with uncut brush.

Cardinal did a fast reconnoitre and established that there was no door on the lake side. A single set of stone steps rose from the lake to the side door, forming a perfectly smooth diagonal under the snow and ice. Fraser’s Windstar was parked near the lake. Footprints and drag marks led up to the pumphouse. A rusty outline showed where a padlock had hung.

Soundlessly, Cardinal moved to the door and grasped the handle. He turned it as gently as possible. It didn’t budge. He shook his head to signal the others.

McLeod opened his trunk and pulled out the “boomer,” sixty pounds of solid, door-smashing iron. Delorme and he each took a handle and prepared to ram the door. Cardinal would be first in, with gun drawn. All this they agreed on without speaking.

What happened next became a featured point in department war stories as they were told for years to come. Delorme and McLeod had backed away for their run at the door. Cardinal had his hand up to make the one-two-three signals. He had just finished “one” and was raising his hand for “two,” when Eric Fraser stepped out of the building.

He stood there, blinking in the light.

Later, there would be many theories about what made him step out just then. Going for supplies was one theory, the call of nature another. It didn’t matter—the effect was the same.

Fraser stepped out of the building in his shirt sleeves—black hair whipping in the breeze, black jeans and black shirt vivid against the snow—and stood there like an innocent man, blinking for what seemed like ten seconds but was probably less than one.

As Delorme put it later, “This pale, skinny guy with little skinny arms. I would never have called him a killer, not in a million years. That guy, he looked like a
boy.”

Eric Fraser, killer of four people that they knew of, stood utterly still, his hands a little away from his sides.

Cardinal’s voice sounded tinny to his own ears. “Are you Eric Fraser?”

Fraser spun. The Beretta was in Cardinal’s hand, but Fraser was through the door before he could raise it.

Ian McLeod was first through the door after him—a bit of bravery that would put him on crutches for the next three months. The side door opened on a steep set of steel steps that led down to the pump systems. McLeod slid down it with all his weight on his ankles.

Keith London screamed from the darkness, “In here! In here! He’s got a—” His shouts were cut short. Cardinal and Delorme stood at the top of the stairs, listening to McLeod’s groans. Below them, the pump was a deep red collection of pipes and valves, like a colossal heart. There was a catwalk off to the right. Delorme moved along this, and Cardinal went down the steps.

“I’ll be all right,” McLeod said. “Get the bastard.”

The grey light from the half-open door barely penetrated the dark. Cardinal could see a catwalk above the pump, and below that, another set of steel steps zigzagged like steps in a dream. Cardinal was about to make a run for these stairs when the catwalk door opened and a muzzle flash spat white and blue flame, bright as a flashbulb. Delorme was hit. She staggered back, making no sound other than the clang of her Beretta hitting the catwalk. She got as far as the outside doorway, and even managed to open it a little wider. Then she sank slowly to her knees, clinging to the door on the way down, her face utterly white.

Cardinal tore up the steps three at a time, expecting at any moment another muzzle flash and a nine-millimetre hole in his skull.

He kicked open the door.

Pressed flat against the wall, Cardinal held his Beretta chest high with barrel up, as in prayer. Then he spun, crouched and sighted along the barrel. Nothing moved. There was a door on the far side of the room. Cardinal was in what appeared to be a disused kitchen, the London kid strapped to a table, blood dripping from his head. He reached out and felt the boy’s neck: the pulse was slow, and he was breathing in ragged gasps.

A rush of footsteps on metal. Cardinal crossed the room to the other door. He stepped out just in time to see Fraser—little more than a black shape—running for the door they had come in. Cardinal aimed and fired. The bullet went wide, ricocheting off the pipes with an ear-splitting whine.

Cardinal ran the length of the catwalk, hopping over the motionless Delorme, and out the door. He reached Fraser’s van just as the engine caught. Cardinal threw open the passenger door just as the van started to roll downhill toward the lake. Fraser swung his pistol toward Cardinal’s face.

The van hit a rock, sending Fraser’s shot into the roof. Cardinal fell into the passenger seat and grappled with Fraser’s gun arm as the van lumbered onto the ice.

Cardinal had Fraser’s gun arm forced nearly to the floor of the van. Fraser squeezed the trigger, and the muzzle flash burned Cardinal’s leg. Fraser continued to squeeze off wild shots, so that events seemed to unfold in lightning flashes.

Cardinal got his right hand round Fraser’s throat, his left still clutching the killer’s gun hand. Fraser’s foot crushed the gas pedal. The sensation of being yanked backward as the wheels caught. Cardinal managed to kneel on Fraser’s gun hand, pressing all his weight onto the wrist. His right fist smashed into the killer’s cheekbone, pain shooting up his arm.

And then a horrible stillness. The van had lurched to a halt. Suddenly it pitched forward, spilling the two men against the dash. One fact registered in Cardinal’s brain like a news bulletin: the right front wheel had broken through the ice.

“The ice is cracking,” Cardinal yelled. “We’re going through the ice.”

Fraser’s struggles, already frantic, became even wilder as the van canted forward, entering black water up to its wide, flat windshield.

A brief rocking. Then the front end slid downward and black water spilled through the vents, like daggers where it touched the skin.

Another cant forward. Darkness swallowed them.

Cardinal let go of Fraser and hauled himself over the back of the seat. The van was still slipping downward as he scrabbled for the handle.

Black water. Icy white froth.

Cardinal wrenched the door up and back, and clambered out on the side of the van. The whole vehicle tipped almost gracefully over on its left. Fraser was screaming.

Cardinal balanced on the edge of the sinking vehicle. Shouts assailed him from the shore.

He jumped free, keeping arms outflung even as his legs plunged through the ice. Cold sucked the breath out of his lungs.

Then Fraser’s face at the van’s door, his mouth a black O as the ice gave way under the last wheel, the water crashed in on him, and the rest of the van slipped into the black hole.

56

T
HE
A
LGONQUIN
B
AY POLICE
department had never had so much publicity. The arrest of Dyson was still on the front page of the
Lode
, and now it was side by side with the death of the Windigo Killer and a photo of the jagged hole where the van had plunged through the ice.

Cardinal and Delorme and McLeod had all been treated in Emergency the night before. McLeod was in the worst shape. He was on the third floor of City Hospital with both feet up in the air, one ankle broken, the other badly sprained. The Kevlar body armour had saved both Delorme and Cardinal. “Those kind of temperatures,” the physician had told Cardinal, “you’d normally be dead. That vest conserved body heat, and you’re damn lucky it did.” Delorme got off with a nasty crease in her left arm. Blood loss left her feeling dizzy and weak, but a transfusion had been deemed unnecessary and she was sent home.

Cardinal had been given a couple of Valium and kept overnight for observation. He had wanted to call Catherine and tell her all the news, but the Valium had taken hold and he’d slept for sixteen hours straight, waking up with a raging thirst but otherwise fine. Now he was in the waiting room outside the ICU waiting for the okay to visit Keith London. Visitors in winter coats walked up and down the halls with forlorn-looking patients in pyjamas and gowns.

Outside, the rooftops were bleached white in the blinding sunshine. But Cardinal could tell from the way the white smoke shot up from the chimneys that the temperature had dropped deep into the minus zone again.

The news came on and Cardinal learned that Grace Legault had moved to a Toronto station, no doubt thanks to her sterling coverage of the Windigo case. The show led with the story (more shots of the pumphouse, the black hole in the ice). Then Cardinal was astonished to see some new reporter doing a stand-up in front of his house on Madonna Road. “Detective John Cardinal isn’t home today,” she began. “He’s in City Hospital recovering from his near drowning in the van that took down Windigo murderer Eric Fraser …”

Brilliant. Every creep I ever put in the slammer’s going to show up at my door, including Kiki B. Don’t they teach them that in journalism school, or wherever the hell they get these people?

There was a quick cut to Chief Kendall in front of City Hall, R.J. telling her all the detectives involved in the Windigo case were tops in his book.

You may change your mind when you read my letter, thought Cardinal, but he was saved from further reflection on this point when the door to the ICU opened and the doctor, a red-haired woman in a rush, swiftly summed things up for Cardinal. Yes, Keith London was still unconscious; no, he was no longer in critical condition. Yes, he had sustained a significant head trauma; no, it was not possible to say if there was permanent damage. Yes, speech might be permanently impaired; no, it was too early to be any more conclusive. And yes, Cardinal could go in for a few moments and speak to the girlfriend.

Light was dim in the ICU. The half-dozen beds with their motionless patients and attendant machines seemed trapped in permanent twilight. Keith London lay at the far end of the room under the watchful eyes of Karen Steen.

“Detective Cardinal,” she said. “It’s good of you to visit.”

“Well, actually, I was hoping to ask Keith a few questions. Don’t worry—the doctor warned me off.”

“Keith hasn’t said a word yet, I’m afraid. But I’m sure he will. I want him up and chatting away before his parents get here. I finally managed to reach them in Turkey. They should be here day after tomorrow.”

“He looks a lot better than last time I saw him.” Keith London’s head was bandaged, and an oxygen tube was taped to his nostrils, yet despite this, his colour looked good, his breathing strong. One slim hand lay outside the covers, and Karen Steen held it while they spoke. “The doctor seems to think he’ll pull through okay,” Cardinal said.

“Yes, he will, thanks to you. He wouldn’t be alive if you hadn’t found him. I wish I could find the words to thank you, Detective Cardinal. But there aren’t words enough in the language.”

“I just wish we could have found him sooner.”

The ardent blue eyes searched his face. Catherine’s eyes had been like that when they were courting—passionate, earnest. They still were, when she spoke of things that mattered, when she was fully herself.

“You’re a very good person, aren’t you,” Miss Steen added. “Yes, I think you are.”

Cardinal felt his face redden. He wasn’t skilled at taking compliments. “It’s insulting the way you duck them,” Catherine had told him more than once. “It’s like saying to people that if only they were more intelligent, they’d see things differently. It’s rude, John. And quite juvenile.”

Ms. Steen looked down at her boyfriend’s slim hand and raised it impulsively to her lips, careful not to disturb the tube attached to the pale forearm. “I’m not religious anymore, Detective, but if I were, I’d be remembering you in my prayers.”

“You know what I think, Miss Steen?”

Once more the frank blue eyes held him.

“I think Keith London is a very lucky young man.”

The temperatures had plunged into unfathomable depths. All the way home Cardinal had to keep scraping his windshield and the side window. He was looking forward to the outsize glass of Black Velvet whisky he would pour himself before bed. Having been baptized beneath the ice had made him, at least in his head, a poet of warmth. Stopped for a light at the bypass, he revelled in an extremely detailed vision of the fire that would soon be blazing in his wood stove, of the steak and fries he would cook for himself, and most particularly of that double shot of Black Velvet he planned to take to bed.

57

E
XTRACTING A LARGE, HEAVY
object from four hundred feet of water is difficult at the best of times. When the temperature is twenty below zero and the surface has been frozen, thawed and refrozen, it doesn’t get any easier. When the ice was strong enough, Lands and Forests had set up a towing rig at the edge of the lake—a twelve-ton truck with several miles of steel cable spooled on its back. They paid out the cable hundreds of feet across the ice, where it was then slung over a block-and-tackle affair that had been rigged over a hole about fifteen feet wide. Above the far hills, the sun looked as pale and cold as the moon.

Twenty degrees centigrade below zero is not unusually cold for Algonquin Bay, but Cardinal’s recent exposure to freezing water had sensitized him to low temperatures. He stood on a small dock below the pumphouse, shivering from head to foot. Delorme, with her arm in a sling, and Jerry Commanda, hands jammed in pockets, stood in front of him, breath feathering out in the stiff little breeze that kicked off the lake. Even though Cardinal was wearing long johns underneath his regular clothes and a down coat on top, he felt utterly exposed.

The Lands and Forests team was gathered around the hole in the ice. In their pressurized suits the divers looked like something out of Jules Verne—Victorian astronauts. Their helmet lamps glowed dully in the wash of late afternoon light. They tested their tethers with a couple of sharp yanks and then stepped through the hole. Black water closed over their heads like ink.

“Better them than me,” Cardinal muttered.

“It was really nice of you to test the water first, though,” said Jerry Commanda. “Lot of guys wouldn’t have done that.”

An aroma of coffee and donuts strayed down the hill, and all three cops turned like dogs hearing the rattle of the food dish. A Lands and Forests guy yelled at them to come and get some, and they didn’t have to be told twice. Cardinal wolfed down a chocolate donut and burned his tongue on the coffee, but he didn’t care. The heat coursed through him like a thrill.

Forty-five minutes later the sky was darkening, the hills becoming indistinct. A shout went up, and the back end of Fraser’s van emerged from the lake. Slowly the rest of the vehicle appeared, mud and water streaming from the joins of doors and windows. The team steadied it, tugging on other cables the divers had attached. The spool on the back of the twelve-ton started to turn.

The divers’ helmet lamps looked bright as headlights now, and someone told them to switch them off. The team laboured under floodlights that swayed on small tripods. Suddenly the van pitched to one side and the body of Eric Fraser slid half out of the open side door, water streaming from one black sleeve.

“Shit,” said Jerry Commanda. “Nearly dropped him in the drink again.”

Slowly, the spool creaking with every turn, the van was winched backward across the ice. Cardinal was remembering that first night when Delorme had called for him and they had travelled like explorers to view the frozen remains of what had once been a little girl. It began on ice, Cardinal thought, and it’s ending on ice.

The body was pulled from the van and laid out on the dock like a fish. The skin was grey except over the prominent bones—forehead, jaw, nose—where it was stretched to an impossible white. A coroner examined him—not Dr. Barnhouse this time, but a young man Cardinal had never worked with before. He went about his business in a calm, thorough way, without Barnhouse’s bluster.

Cardinal had always thought he would have some telling remark to make over the dead body of Eric Fraser—because, yes, it was a sight he had imagined more than once. But looking down at the frail, vanquished body, Cardinal found he had nothing at all to say. He knew what he was supposed to feel. He was supposed to feel that the monster had got off easy. He was supposed to wish the monster were still alive, so he could not escape earthly punishment. But everything about the body—the pale skin, the narrow wrists—said that this had been a human being, not a monster. So Cardinal’s feelings were a confusion of horror and pity.

No one spoke for a long time, and then it was Lise Delorme who summed the moment up. “My God,” she said in a voice barely audible. “My God, he’s so small.”

Finally, the coroner said to cover him up.

As Cardinal turned, he caught a glimpse of the first headlights rounding the bay. Soon it would be rush hour. Thank God they had managed to pull this off without too many onlookers. You always get one or two, no matter what, so as he turned from the body of Eric Fraser and headed back up the hill toward his car, Cardinal was not surprised to see a lonely figure—a short, plain woman—standing at the roadside, staring down at the activity below, clutching a handkerchief in one mittened hand as though she were grieving.