Black Fly Season (2 page)

‘I don’t know it at the moment.’

They laughed.

‘That’s fine,’ Regis said. ‘You don’t have to tell us.’

‘We’ll just call you Red,’ the one called Tony said.

‘We’ll just call you Anonymous,’ the one called Bob said.

‘Anonymous Sex,’ Regis said, and they all laughed. ‘Like Tyrannosaurus Rex.’

He fingered her denim jacket.

‘This is cute.’

‘Yes, I like it.’

The one called Tony put his arm round her shoulder and ran a hand through her hair. He pulled out a piece of leaf.

‘Man, you have got the most amazing hair I’ve ever seen. Leafy, but amazing.’

‘You guys are so friendly.’

‘You’re pretty friendly yourself,’ Regis said. ‘Got some nasty bites on you, but I can fix that.’ He leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

The girl smiled and rubbed her face.

Blaine moved closer.

‘Miss, don’t you think it’s time you went home?’

‘Hey, mind your own business, Blaine.’ Regis smacked the bar, upsetting a dish of peanuts. ‘She’s not drunk, she’s just having a good time.’

‘No, you’re having a good time. She doesn’t know what kind of time she’s having.’

The girl smiled, not looking at either of them.

‘Two Creemores, three Blue, one Export!’

Blaine moved down the bar to take care of Darla. When he came back;, the redhead was on Regis’ lap.

‘Honey, I think we’re going to have to go for a ride,’ Regis said.

‘You guys are funny.’

Bob was feeling her hair now. ‘I think you should come for a ride with us,’ he said. ‘Get to know us better.’

Regis’ hand crept up her denim jacket. The girl smiled and started humming something. Regis’ hand went inside the jacket.

‘Leave her alone.’

Regis leaned back from the girl and peered down the bar at Jerry Commanda.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said leave her alone.’

‘Why don’t you mind your own business, Chingachgook?’

Jerry got down off his stool and came round the bar.

‘Do you know your name?’ he said to the girl.

‘Hey, Tonto,’ Regis said. ‘Back off.’

‘Shut up. Do you know your name?’

‘I don’t,’ the girl said. ‘Not at the moment.’

‘Do you know what day it is?’

‘Urn, no.’

Regis shifted her down off his lap and stood up. ‘I think you and me have something to discuss outside.’

Jerry ignored him. ‘Do you know where you are?’ he said to the girl.

‘Somebody told me a while ago, but I forget.’

‘Did you hear me?’ Regis said. ‘I can understand why you might not want to go back to your squaw, but that doesn’t give you the right to ‘

Jerry didn’t look at him. He just reached into his jacket and pulled out his shield and held it out an inch from the guy’s nose.

‘Oh, hey, I’m sorry, man. I didn’t realize.’

‘Do you have any ID?’ Jerry said to the girl. ‘A wallet? Credit card? Something with your name on it?’

‘No, I don’t have anything like that.’

Regis tapped Jerry on the shoulder, shifting into I’m-the-nicest-guy-in-the-world mode. ‘No hard feelings, okay? Do you think she’s all right? I’m kinda worried about her.’

‘Would you come with me, miss? I want to take you someplace safe.’

The girl shrugged. ‘Okay. Sure.’

Blaine watched Regis follow them to the exit, apologizing the whole way. It was the kind of sight that did a bartender’s heart good.

In the car, Jerry asked where she was from.

‘I don’t know. This is a nice car you have here.’

‘Where have you been staying?’

‘Staying?’

‘Yeah. I’m guessing you’re from out of town. Who are you staying with?’

‘I don’t know. That’s a nice building, is that a school?’

They passed Ecole Secondaire Algonquin and headed uphill. Jerry made a left on McGowan. ‘You have a lot of black fly bites on you. Were you out in the woods?’

‘Is that what these are?’ Her left hand rose absently and rubbed at the red blotches along her hairline. ‘They’re itchy. I have them all over my ankles, too. They kind of hurt.’

‘Were you out in the woods?’

‘Yes. This morning. I woke up there.’

‘You slept outside? Is that why you have leaves in your hair?’

‘Leaves?’ Again, the pale, freckled hand rose to her curls. No wedding ring, Jerry noticed.

‘Red, do me a favour, will you? Could you just check your pockets and see if you have any ID on you?’

She patted her pockets, felt inside. From her jeans, she pulled out some coins and a pair of nail clippers. She offered Jerry a Lifesaver, which he declined.

‘That’s all I have,’ she said.

‘No keys?’

‘No keys.’

Someone must have removed them, Jerry was pretty sure. People don’t tend to go out with no keys. He parked in a spot near the emergency entrance of City Hospital. The lights of Algonquin and Main curved away from the hill below them.

‘You know, I don’t think I need a hospital. They’re only insect bites.’

‘Let’s just see if we can find out where you left your memory, okay?’

‘Okay. You look nice. Are you an Indian?’

‘Yes. You?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t think so.’

Her response was so solemn Jerry laughed. He’d never seen anyone who looked less Indian.

In the ER, a young man behind the counter handed him a clipboard with a form on it.

‘We’re not going to be able to answer any of these questions,’ Jerry said. ‘Young lady’s got no ID and no memory.’

The young man didn’t blink, as if amnesia cases walked in every night. ‘Just fill it out for Jane Doe, and approximate the rest of the stuff. The triage nurse will be with you shortly.’

The girl sat humming tunelessly while they waited. Jerry filled out the form, writing ‘unknown’ over and over again. The room started to get busier. John Cardinal came in with a middle-aged man who looked like an assault victim. He nodded to Jerry. It was not unusual to bump into another cop in emerg; on a Friday night, you pretty much expected it. The triage nurse came over and talked to them for about three minutes, just long enough to order up a chem screen and put her on priority. Eventually, Dr Michael Fortis came out of an examining room and conferred with the nurse. Jerry went over; he’d worked with Fortis a lot.

‘Pretty slow for a Friday,’ Jerry said. ‘You sending them all to St Francis?’

‘You should have seen us an hour ago. We had two separate MVAs, cars got in arguments with moose up on Highway 11. One in the four-byfour wasn’t bad, but the guy in the Miata will be lucky if he ever walks again. Always happens this time of year. Black flies drive the moose out of the woods, and bam!’

‘I got something a little more unusual for you.’

Twenty minutes later Dr Fortis came out of an examining room, shutting the door behind him.

‘This young woman is completely disoriented in time and space. She’s also showing flattened affect and a dramatic level of amnesia. She could be a schizophrenic or bipolar off her meds. Do we know anything at all about her?’

‘Nothing,’ Jerry said. ‘She may be local, but I doubt it. She says she woke up in the woods.’

‘Yes, I saw the bites.’

An attendant handed the doctor a clipboard. He flipped a page once, twice. ‘Her chem screen. Negative for intoxicants. First thing I want to do is call the psychiatric hospital and see if any of their patients are awol. If everyone’s accounted for, I’ll call for a psych consult, but that won’t happen till morning. In the meantime, we’ll take a skull X-ray. Frankly, I don’t know what else to do.’

He opened the examining-room door and brought the girl out.

‘Who are you?’ she said to Jerry.

‘Do you remember who I am?’ Dr Fortis said.

‘Not really.’

‘I’m Dr Fortis.The kind of trouble you’re having with your memory just now is usually a symptom of trauma. I’m going to take you down the hall and take a picture.’

Jerry went back to the waiting area. It was filling up now with the usual cursing drunks, and infants wailing from colic or fly bites. He called into the city station to see if there was a missing person report on the redhead. The duty sergeant joked around with him; Jerry was with the Ontario Provincial Police, now, but he’d worked for the city before that, and the sergeant was an old friend. No missing redheads on file.

Jerry thought about what would need to be done for her. It would be a city problem, not his, but if the hospital didn’t admit the girl, they’d have to find her a place to stay, maybe the Crisis Centre. And if it turned out she was the victim of an assault, it would mean going back to the bar and finding out if anybody knew her, trying to back-track to when she came in and where she was before that. He wondered how she came to be in the woods. She wasn’t dressed for camping.

He found John Cardinal signing forms, talking to the young man behind the counter. The guy was listening, nodding attentively. Cardinal had always had the knack of making people feel that what they did was important, that how they

handled the details mattered. It was a knack that could mean the difference between making a case and blowing it. Jerry waited for him to finish.

‘I think I got a case for you,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t have enough to do.’

‘I told you never to call me here, Jerry.’

‘I know. But without you, I’m only half a cop. My life is a stony, barren place.’

‘Haven’t seen you around lately. I suppose you’ve been snorkelling down in Florida or somewhere.’

‘I wish. Been stuck in Reed’s Falls working surveillance. Came across something in town tonight, though. Bit of an anomaly.’ Jerry told him about the redhead.

‘No drugs? Sounds like she took a knock on the head.’

‘Yeah. No ID, no keys, no nothing.’

Dr Fortis came back from radiology, a worried expression on his face.

‘Something unexpected,’ he said to Jerry. ‘Come and take a look.’

‘John should probably be in on it. She’ll be a city case. You know Detective Cardinal?’

‘Of course. Come this way.’

Cardinal followed them down the hall to an office where darkened X-rays were clamped to light boards. Dr Fortis snapped on the light, and the gracile cranium and neck bones of the young woman glowed before them, front and side views.

‘I think we’ve found why our redheaded friend is in such a placid mood. In fact, we’re going to be sending her down to Toronto for surgery,’ Dr Fortis said. ‘You see here?’ He pointed to a bright spot in the middle of the lateral view.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ Cardinal said.

‘I can tell you I’m feeling pretty incompetent right about now. Totally missed it on physical examination. I can only plead the thickness and colour of her hair.’

‘Looks like a .32,’ Jerry said.

‘Entered through the right parietal region and partially severed the frontal lobes,’ Dr Fortis said. ‘Hence the flattened affect.’

‘Will that be permanent?’ Jerry said.

‘I’m no expert, but people do make amazing recoveries from these sorts of things. This is really one for the medical journals, though: self-inflicted lobotomy.’

‘Maybe not self-inflicted,’ Cardinal said. ‘Women who want to commit suicide almost never shoot themselves. They take an overdose, they use the car exhaust. We’ll get ident to do a gunshot-residue on her hand.’

‘Might not have to,’ Jerry said.

The girl was in a wheelchair at the door, still smiling, an orderly behind her.

‘We’ve got the EEG results,’ the orderly said.

Dr Fortis examined the printout.

Jerry turned to him. ‘You said the entry wound is on the right?’

‘That’s correct. The right temple.’

‘Hey, Red.’ Jerry took a pen from his pocket. ‘Catch.’

He tossed the pen over her head. A pale hand shot up and snagged it out of the air. Her left hand.

‘Well,’ Cardinal said. ‘So much for suicide.’

Algonquin Bay, with a population of 58,000 and only two small hospitals, cannot lay claim to any neurosurgeons of its own, which was why, forty-five minutes later, Cardinal was barrelling down Highway 11 toward Toronto, four hours south.

When Dr Fortis had scanned the EEG results, he had ordered the redhead put into a neck brace and shot her full of antibiotics and anti seizure medication. Then he ordered up an ambulance. ‘She appears stable,’ he said, ‘but I’m seeing some seizure activity on her readout.They’ll want to operate on her right away.’

‘I’m pretty sure she’s not a suicide attempt,’ Cardinal said, ‘but I’ll get ident to do a gunshot residue on her before we leave.’

‘We?’

‘I’m going to have to accompany her. Be there when that bullet comes out of her head.’

‘Of course. Chain of evidence and all that. Have to be quick, though. The sooner she’s in surgery the better.’

Using electric clippers, Dr Fortis shaved a small

patch of hair away from the girl’s right temple. A placid smile played across her features, but otherwise she didn’t react at all.

‘Perfectly round entrance wound,’ Cardinal noted. ‘No burn, no smudge, and no tattooing.’

‘There’s no way that gun was fired within a foot of this girl,’ Jerry said. ‘I hope you find whoever pulled the trigger. Let me know if I can be any help. I’m heading home to enjoy what’s left of my day off.’ He waved at the girl. ‘You take care, Red.’

The girl’s smile was frozen in place. The antiseizure medication was starting to take hold.

Cardinal put in a call to Detective Sergeant Daniel Chouinard at home.

‘What is it, Cardinal? I’m watching Homicide, here.’

‘I thought that was off the air.’

‘Not in my house. I own the entire first three seasons on DVD. There’s something soothing about watching cops with problems a lot worse than mine.’

Cardinal told him about the girl.

‘Well, you’ve got to go to Toronto and see that bullet come out. Is there anything else?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Good. Now, I’m going to go back and watch how those big-city cops handle things.’

Bob Collingwood from ident section arrived a few minutes later. He was the youngest detective on the squad, and by far the quietest. He took some Polaroids of the girl’s wound, and gave them to