Shadows leapt and darted in the eyeless sockets.
‘Those three warm days in December when everything melted,’ Jerry went on. ‘The body probably covers a drain, and when the ice melted, the place filled up with water. Temperature dropped again and froze it right there.’
‘It’s like she’s preserved in amber,’ Delorme said.
Barnhouse resumed. ‘No clothing on or near the remains, except for jeans of blue denim that – I already said that, didn’t I. Yes, I’m sure I did. Gross destruction of tissue in the abdominal region, all of the viscera and most major organs missing, whether due to peri-mortem trauma or postmortem animal activity impossible to say. Portions of lung are visible, upper lobes on both sides.’
‘Katie Pine,’ Cardinal said. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud. He knew it would provoke a reaction, and it came at full volume.
‘I hope you’re not telling me you recognize that poor girl from her high school yearbook. Until such time as the upper jaw may be matched with dental records, any identification is out of the question.’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Cardinal said quietly.
‘There’s no call for sarcasm, Detective. Remission or no, I’m not putting up with sarcasm.’ Barnhouse turned his baleful eye once more upon the object at their feet. ‘Extremities, those that remain, are nearly skeletonized, but I believe that’s a healed green-stick fracture in the radius of the left forearm.’ He stepped back from the edge of the depression and folded his arms belligerently in front of his chest. ‘Gentlemen – and lady – I’m going to remove myself from this investigation, which will clearly require the services of the Forensic Centre. As Lake Nipissing falls under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Provincial Police, I’m officially turning the investigation over to you, Mr Commanda.’
Jerry said, ‘If this is Katie Pine here, the investigation belongs to the city.’
‘But surely Katie Pine is one of yours? From the reserve?’
‘She was abducted from the fairground by Memorial Gardens. That makes it a city case – has been since she disappeared. Cardinal’s case.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Barnhouse insisted, ‘pending positive identification, I’m turning it over to you.’
‘Fine, Doctor,’ Jerry said. ‘John, you can run it. I know it’s Katie.’
‘You can’t possibly know. Look at the thing.’ Barnhouse pointed with his recorder. ‘Except for the clothes, it barely looks human.’
Cardinal said softly, ‘Katie Pine fractured the radius in her left arm when she was learning to skateboard.’
Five of them were scrunched in the ident van. Barnhouse had gone, and the two uniforms were waiting in the stake truck. Cardinal practically had to shout over the roar of the heater. ‘We’re going to need rope: as of now, the whole island is our perimeter. There was no blood and no sign of struggle in the shaft head, so this is probably not the murder scene, only a dump site. Even so, I don’t want any curious snowmobilers zipping through the evidence, so let’s get it good and secure.’
Delorme handed him the cellphone. ‘I’ve got Forensic. Len Weisman.’
‘Len, we’ve got a body here frozen solid in a block of ice. Adolescent, probable murder. If we cut the block of ice and ship it to you entire in a refrigerated truck, can you handle something like that?’
‘No problem. We’ve got a couple of variable coolers that go well below freezing. We can thaw it out at a controlled rate and preserve any hair and fibres for you that way.’ Surreal to hear a Toronto voice in this lunar landscape.
‘Great, Len. We’ll call with an ETA when we’re ready to roll.’ Cardinal handed the phone back to Delorme. ‘Arsenault, you’re the scene expert. How do we get her out of there?’
‘We can cut her out in a cube easy enough. Problem will be separating the cube from the concrete underneath.’
‘Get a guy from the city to cut it, they cut concrete all the time. And you can clear your calendars, everybody: we’re going to have to cull the snow.’
‘But she was killed months ago,’ Delorme said. ‘The snow won’t tell us anything.’
‘We can’t be sure of that. Anybody have a good contact at Armed Forces?’
Collingwood raised a hand.
‘Tell them we need a huge tent. Something the size of a circus tent that’ll cover the whole island – last thing we need is any more snow on the scene. Also a couple of their biggest heaters, ones they use to heat their hangars. We’ll melt the snow and see everything that’s underneath.’
Collingwood nodded. He was sitting closest to the heater, and his glove was steaming.
Securing a perimeter and arranging a twenty-four-hour watch on the island took longer than anyone expected; everything about police work takes longer than expected. In the end Cardinal did not get home until one o’clock in the morning, too keyed-up to sleep. He sat himself in the living room with two fingers of Black Velvet straight up and made notes about what he would have to do next day. The house was so cold, even the rye couldn’t warm him.
Kelly would be back in the States by now.
At the airport, Cardinal had watched his daughter heave a suitcase onto the baggage scale, and before she could even lift the next one, a young man in line behind her had picked it up and placed it on the scale for her. Well, Kelly was pretty. Cardinal had the usual father’s prejudice about his daughter’s looks, and he believed any objective person would find his daughter as lovely as he did. But having a pretty face, Cardinal knew, was like being wealthy or famous: people were always offering to do things for you.
‘You don’t have to hang around, Daddy,’ she had said as they descended the stairs to the waiting area. ‘I’m sure you have better things to do.’
Cardinal hadn’t had anything better to do.
Algonquin Bay’s airport was designed to handle about eighty travellers at a time, but it rarely had that many. A tiny coffee shop, boxes for The Algonquin Lode and the Toronto papers, and that was about it. They sat down, and Cardinal bought The Toronto Star, offering his daughter a section, which she declined. It made him feel as if he shouldn’t read either. What was the point of staying if he was just going to read the paper?
‘You’re all set for your connections, then?’ he asked. ‘You have enough time to change terminals?’
‘Tons. I have an hour and a half in Toronto.’
‘That’s not too much. Not by the time you get through US customs.’
‘They always put me straight through. Really, Daddy, I should go into smuggling.’
‘You told me you got stopped last time. Almost missed your connection.’
‘That was a fluke. The customs officer was a mean old battle-axe who wanted to give me a hard time.’
Cardinal could picture it. In some ways Kelly was becoming the kind of young woman who annoyed him – too smart, too educated, too damn confident.
‘I don’t know why they can’t have a flight directly from Toronto to New Haven.’
‘It’s not exactly the centre of the universe, sweet-heart.’
‘No, it only has one of the best colleges in the world.’
And it cost a damn fortune. When Kelly had finished her BFA at York, her painting instructor had encouraged her to apply to Yale’s graduate program. Kelly had never dreamed she would be accepted, even when she