Forty Words for Sorrow (10 page)

15

“I
WANTED TO ASK
D
R. GANT
what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like the morgue, but I thought she’d take it funny.”

“Of course she would,” said Delorme. “So would I.”

“Young woman like that, she should be an internist—a cardiologist, maybe. Why’s she want to spend her life working with corpses?”

“Same as you, Cardinal—fighting the bad guys. I don’t see the mystery, me.”

They were in the Forensic Sciences Centre, just behind the Coroner’s building. They’d had the audio cassette dusted for prints and now they were taking the elevator to Chemistry.

Setevic was bent over a microscope. He didn’t even look up. “One hair, aside from the victim’s. Three inches long, medium brown, Caucasian, probably male.”

“And the fibre?”

“Red. Trilobal.”

“That’s our boy,” said Cardinal.

“You don’t know that.”

“The likelihood of two separate killers—both with red carpet, no less—in a place the size of Algonquin Bay? Non-existent.”

Delorme stepped in. “Todd Curry spent some time in the same place as Katie Pine—for sure you can say that much. The same car, right?”

Setevic smiled, shook his head. “You won’t nail him with this. It’s widely used in basements, patios—you name it—not just here but in the States too. I told you that when we found one on the Pine girl. Give me some credit here, okay? Assume I’m not stupid. You got something else for me? What’s in the bag?”

“We need to hear what’s on this.” Cardinal handed him the evidence bag.

Setevic peered inside. “You already dusted it?”

“Lifted one partial next door. Computer’s chewing it over, but we’re not optimistic. You happen to have a tape player handy?”

“Not a good one.”

“Doesn’t matter. We just need to know if there’s anything on here.”

Setevic took them to a cramped office he shared with two other chemists. There were scientific journals stacked on every available surface. “Sorry about the mess. We only use the place for writing reports and making the odd phone call.”

He reached into a drawer and pulled out a grimy little Aiwa. He pressed a button and a middle-aged woman’s voice was dictating a Biology report.
Sample showed proliferation of white cells, indicating advanced state of …
The voice went woozy, then stopped.

“Mandy!” Setevic called toward the door. “Mandy! Do we have any Double-A batteries?”

An assistant came in and handed him a package of four batteries. She watched him struggle to open the back of the machine, then held out a perfectly manicured hand. He handed it over and, expertly, she removed the housing, took out the old batteries and reloaded. She pressed a button and the biology report resumed at the proper speed.

“I thank you. The forces of law and order thank you.”

When Mandy closed the door behind her, he jerked his head toward it and, eyebrows raised, asked Delorme, “So, how you think I’m doing?”

“She hates you.”

“I know. Call it my Slavic charm.” He slipped in the audio tape and pressed the button. “Any idea what’s on here?”

“None. Most likely
Aerosmith Unplugged.”

The tape started.

A series of clicks. Someone blows into the microphone and taps on it, testing it
.

Delorme and Cardinal looked at each other, then immediately away. Mustn’t get too excited, Cardinal told himself. It could be anything, anyone. It could be totally unrelated. He realized he was holding his breath.

More clicks, the rustle of cloth. Then a man’s voice, angry, far from the microphone, says something indistinct
.

A girl, impossibly close, her voice quivering: “I have to go. I have to be somewhere by eight o’clock. They’ll kill me if I don’t show up.”

Heavy footsteps. Music starts up in the background—the end of a rock song. Barely audible: “… or you’ll make me very angry.”

“I can’t. I want to go now.”

Man’s voice, now too distant to record properly: “[Unintelligible] … snapshots.”

“Why do I have to wear this? I can’t breathe.”

“[garbled] … sooner you’ll be on your way.”

“I’m not taking my clothes off.”

Heavy footsteps approach the microphone. Several slaps, loud as pistol shots. Screams. Then sobs. Then muffled sobs
.

“Bastard,” Cardinal said quietly.

Delorme was looking out the window, as if the apartment building across Grenville Street were of intense interest.

Background music switches to the Rolling Stones
.

A series of distant clicks
.

“That could be the camera, maybe,” Delorme observed, still at the window.

The girl: “Please let me go now. I promise I won’t tell anyone. Take your pictures and let me go. I swear to God I’ll never tell anyone.”

“… repeat myself …”

“You’re not listening! I have to be somewhere. I have band practice. It’s really important! We have a concert in Ottawa and if I don’t show up, they’ll call the police! There’ll be all kinds of trouble! I’m trying to help you!”

[Inaudible.]

“Where? I live on the reserve. Chippewa. But my father’s a policeman. He’s with the OPP. I’m just warning you. He’s gonna go crazy.”

[Inaudible.]

“No. I don’t want to do that. I won’t.”

Footsteps approach. Fierce sounds of rustling cloth. Then the girl, barely coherent, “Please! Please! Please! I have to be at practice before eight o’clock. If I don’t—” Ripping sound, possibly duct tape. Her voice is a muffled whimper
.

Clicks continue
.

Music changes to a familiar female vocalist
.

Muffled sobs
.

More clicks
.

More clicks
.

A rustling sound
.

A man coughs, close to the microphone
.

More rustling sounds
.

Ninety seconds of silence
.

A final click as the recorder is switched off
.

The rest of side one was blank. So was side two. They listened to the entire half-hour of tape hiss to make sure. Cardinal, Delorme and Setevic in utter silence. It was a long time before anyone spoke. Cardinal’s voice sounded terribly loud, even to himself. “You got anybody in Documents who can tell us more about this?”

“Uh, no,” Setevic said, still stunned.

“Because we just listened to the murder of a young girl, and I want to know everything there is to know about this tape. Don’t you have anyone in Documents?”

“Documents? Documents people are strictly paper and handwriting. Bunco stuff. But I’ll—” Setevic coughed. Cleared his throat. He was a big man, looked like a man who could take care of himself, too, was Cardinal’s assessment; but he was still having a hard time with what they’d heard. “I’ll give you a phone number,” he said at last. “There’s a guy the OPP like to use.”

The new headquarters of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Front Street had cost a scandalous amount to build, and Cardinal could see why. The atrium, bathed in a wash of soft light from the skylight eight floors up, was like an indoor park, profuse with trees. Marble gleamed underfoot. His tax dollars at work.

Cardinal and Delorme followed a luminous receptionist to the elevator. Thin, pale men glided across the corridors. The receptionist led them past a series of studios to the end of a hallway. She opened a crimson door, and they entered a dimly lit recording studio.

A man in a houndstooth jacket was parked in front of a bank of electronic controls, a pair of headphones clamped over his head. A yellow bow tie sat primly at his neck. His crisp white shirt looked as if it had just been unwrapped. Cardinal had never seen anyone so neat.

The receptionist announced them loudly. “Your police friends, Brian.”

“Thank you. Have a seat. Be right with you.” He did not raise his voice the way most people do when wearing headphones.

Cardinal and Delorme sat down behind him on high-backed swivel chairs.

“Oohh,” Delorme said, caressing the chair. “We’re in the wrong job.”

The studio smelled strongly of new carpet—even the walls were carpeted—and the atmosphere had a pleasant hush.

For the next five minutes they watched the technician’s pale hands flutter gently over the controls—now nudging a slide up, now tweaking a dial. Lights and graphs blinked along the length of the console. The man’s face, with its serious, abstracted expression, was reflected in the glass above the console, hovering over them like a disembodied intelligence.

Over the speakers an interview droned on and on, two gravel-voiced men jawing about federalism. Delorme rolled her eyes and made a spinning gesture of tedium with her index finger. Finally the interview came to an end, and the man removed his headphones and spun around, hand extended into space. “Brian Fortier,” he said. He had a “radio” voice, deep and resonant. His hand waited in the air independently of him, and Cardinal saw that he was blind.

He shook the man’s hand, introducing himself and Delorme.

Fortier jerked a plump thumb toward the tapes. “Cleaning up some archival material for rebroadcast. That was John Diefenbaker and Norman DePoe. Don’t make them like that any more.”

“That was Diefenbaker? He turned my hometown into a nuclear arsenal when I was a kid.”

“You’re from Algonquin Bay, then.”

Delorme said, “You’re from up north too, you?”

“No, no—Ottawa Valley boy.” He said a few sentences to Delorme in French, which Cardinal did not exactly follow, but he saw Delorme instantly relax. Fortier said something that made her laugh like a girl. Cardinal had struggled with French right up to Grade 12. But there had been little call for French in Toronto, and by the time he had moved back to Algonquin Bay, he’d forgotten most of it. Have to take that extension class at Northern U., he told himself for the fortieth time; I’m such a lazy bastard.

“OPP says you have a tape for me?”

Cardinal took the tape out of the envelope. “The content does not leave this room, Mr. Fortier. Are you comfortable with that?”

“‘Investigation in progress.’ I know the drill.”

“And I’ll have to ask you to wear these latex gloves while you handle it. The tape was found in a—”

A pale hand flew up to cut him off. “Don’t tell me anything—I’ll be more use to you if I hear it fresh. Give me the gloves.”

He put on the gloves, and they watched his sheathed fingers palpate the cassette, turning it this way and that, stopping to feel and think like small independent animals. “Safety holes are covered up. Whatever’s on here, someone didn’t want it recorded over. Cassettes are all virtually identical from the outside—what make is this?”

“Denon. Thirty minutes. Chromium dioxide. We know it’s a common type, available pretty much anywhere.”

“Well, you wouldn’t find it in the smallest towns, maybe, but certainly in a place as big as Algonquin Bay. It’s not a cheap product. It’ll run you five times the cost of the bottom end, maybe more.”

“Would you classify it as a professional product?”

“A professional sound recordist—recording engineer—anybody with a passion for quality—would not use a cassette; you want a faster tape speed and the flexibility of more tracks, depending on the job of course. It’s up there: Ampex, Denon, sure. But as I say, you can get it anywhere.”

Delorme said, “He could have stolen it. Shoplifted it, no?”

“Retailers tend to keep these behind the counter—or at least near the register.” Fortier’s plump face wagged from side to side for a moment, as if he were sniffing for a lost aroma.

“What?” Cardinal said. “You’re not happy.”

“Second thoughts. I said a professional wouldn’t use a cassette. I meant a sound-recording professional. But musicians use them all the time. If I were putting a demo song on tape, for example, I’d use a high-quality cassette like this. There are so-called portable studios made for cassettes—Tascam, Fostex—the sound isn’t clean, but with pop music, clean is often beside the point, right?”

“What about stand-up comics, people like that, who want to audition?”

“Stand-ups send video. They want you to see how they look on stage. But radio announcers send cassettes to us all the time. Sure, someone like that.”

Fortier opened a cassette slot on the console and popped in the tape. Delorme and Cardinal sat watching his back as they listened to the tape from beginning to end once more. The sound was much clearer on the professional equipment, and like an image being focused ever sharper, it became clearer still as Fortier adjusted various dials and knobs. The leather of his chair creaked beneath him as he leaned this way or that, his hands hovering over the console like hummingbirds.

“Some physical deterioration there. Obviously wasn’t stored in optimum conditions.”

“To put it mildly.”

Under Fortier’s ministrations the tape hiss all but vanished. Within moments Katie Pine’s voice sounded as if she were in the room with them. Her terror in such proximity, her attempts to talk her way out, the fictitious cop father—Cardinal fought an urge to cry out. Fortier cocked his head like a spaniel, identifying sounds as they came up. “Girl’s voice: twelve or thirteen years old. That accent, she’s got to be an Indian.”