Nausea was not quite the word to describe what Delorme was feeling. The Toronto Sex Crimes Unit had sent her about twenty images; the package had been waiting for her when she came back from lunch. She had looked them over and was now wishing she hadn’t. The photographs provoked a reaction in her gut, as if she had received a solid blow to the belly. And then more complicated emotions set in – distress, almost panic, and yet at the same time an all but overwhelming hopelessness about the human species.
The sights and sounds of the office – the click and slam of the photocopier, McLeod bellowing at Sergeant Flower, the tapping of keyboards and the chirping of phones – all diminished around her. Delorme felt a sob gathering in her chest, which she tamped down immediately. She had experienced something similar to this inner turmoil when reading certain news accounts: beheadings in Iraq, or the civil war in Africa where armed men raided villages, raping the women and chopping the hands off all the men.
She knew the acts captured in the photographs did not compare to mass murder, but the effect on her spirit was the same: despair at the depths to which human nature could sink. Even in a place the size of Algonquin Bay you heard of such pictures, but until this moment Delorme had never seen anything like them. There had been the case of a social services administrator the previous year, a man apparently well loved by his family and friends, who had been charged with possession of child pornography. But it hadn’t been Delorme’s case, and she hadn’t seen the evidence. The man had killed himself while out on bail – apparently out of shame, even though he had been charged only with possession of the material, not with manufacturing or distributing.
The pictures on her desk, Delorme realized, were actually crime-scene photos. The criminal had taken them himself in the course of committing his crime; the creation of child pornography was unique in that respect. The girl looked to be as young as seven or eight in some of them, still with puppy fat around her neck and cheeks; in others she looked closer to thirteen. She had a sweet, open face, pale blonde hair, shoulder length, and eyes almost unnaturally green, the colour emphasized, in several pictures, by the tears that flowed from them. There were pictures in a bedroom, pictures on a couch, pictures on a boat, in a tent, a hotel room. In one of the photos, a detail had been blurred out; a hat the little girl was wearing had been reduced to a blue and white smear.
The man was careful not to show his face, and so he became a collection of disparate details. He was the hairy arm, the furry chest; he was the sticklike legs, the freckled shoulder, the butt just beginning to sag. His penis, closely featured in many shots, looked scorched and red, though whether from abuse or bad photography it was impossible to tell. Delorme, no prude and no hater of men, thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen.
It occurred to her that the man was not human; that he was mere animated flesh, a monster sprung from a madman’s lab. But the spirit-crushing truth, of course, was that he was human. He could be anybody, he could be someone Delorme knew. Not only was he human, he was also beloved by his victim; too many of the pictures showed her relaxed and grinning for it to be otherwise. He had to be either the girl’s father or someone very close to the family. That the little girl loved him, Delorme had no doubt, and it made her heart ache.
Toronto had sent two additional envelopes. The first contained exact copies of the photographs, but the girl and her abuser had been digitally removed. Now they were just unexceptional scenes: an out-of-style sofa, what looked like a hotel bed, the interior of a tent, a back yard with a grubby plastic playhouse – settings of no interest unless you knew what had transpired in them.
The third envelope contained just one picture, that of the girl wearing the hat, now enlarged into a close-up. The hat was a woollen toque, blue and white, no longer blurred. Delorme had no idea how the Toronto cops could have managed that, but she actually stopped breathing for a moment. She recognized the toque. Not all of the knitted wording was visible, but you could now clearly see ALGON…WIN…FUR. Algonquin Bay Winter Fur Carnival.
The phone rang.
‘Delorme, CID.’
‘Sergeant Dukovsky here. You finished throwing up yet?’
‘Sergeant, you may be used to this kind of stuff, but me, I feel like moving into the forest and living off roots and berries for the rest of my life.’
‘I know what you mean. And this guy is by no means the worst of what we get. These days we get pictures of infants, and they’re doing this stuff live.’
‘Live? I don’t understand.’
‘Streaming video. Guy gets himself a webcam and abuses kids online while his brethren around the world pay to watch.’
‘Oh, man.’
‘Unfortunately, some of those pictures we sent you have shown up in the same chat room as the live stuff, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it gives this guy ideas.’
‘Let’s hope we nail him before that. Tell me about the winter carnival hat. How did you manage to unblur it?’
‘We got a couple of 64-bit propeller-heads here, going gaga over this image-processing tool. Real bleeding-edge stuff. I asked ’em how it worked and boy did I regret it. They started blithering about filter deconvolution and Lucy-Richardson algorithms. I’m telling you, these guys eat Athlon chips right out of the bag.’
‘And I thought Photoshop was cool. Interesting thing here, the name of the carnival was changed a few years back to avoid protesters. It’s no longer the fur carnival, it’s just the winter carnival.’
‘That could be important. Only we don’t know when she got it or who from.’
‘In any case, it doesn’t mean the kid lives here. The carnival draws people from all over the world.’
‘Come on. Hordes of people are crossing the globe to attend the Algonquin Bay Fur Carnival?’
‘Not hordes. And they don’t come for the carnival, they come for the fur auction. We get buyers from the big furriers in Paris, New York, London, places like that. We even get Russians coming to check out the competition.’
‘You’re educating me here, Sergeant Delorme. I didn’t realize Algonquin Bay was such a hive of international commerce. Did you take a look at the picture on the boat – the one where there’s other boats in the background?’
Delorme shuffled the photographs, stopping when she came to the picture. It showed a cabin cruiser with lots of wooden trim, wooden floors, and comfortable-looking red seats with tuck-and-roll upholstery. The girl was lounging on one of these, wearing blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt. She was ten or eleven in this shot, grinning into the camera.
‘There’s a good reason why I missed this one,’ Delorme said. ‘It’s one of the pictures where he’s not doing anything to her. The kid looks happy.’
‘Check out the background.’
‘There’s a small plane with pontoons on it. And you can just make out part of its tail number. C-G-K.’
‘Exactly. It’s a Cessna Skylane and the whole number is CGKMC. Took us about five minutes cross-checking those letters with Cessnas and Algonquin Bay. We get a guy named Frank Rowley. I can give you his address and phone number, too. I hope I’m impressing you here.’
‘But the plane is just in the background. There’s no reason to think there’s any connection between the owner of the plane and the creep in the pictures, is there?’
‘No, but it’s a start. Believe me, we’ll hand you anything we get, minute we get it. In the meantime, maybe you can focus your logical French-Canadian mind on those pictures, spend some quality time with them, and narrow things down.’
‘What if we posted a picture of the girl – just do it like a missing-person picture? We could put her face up in the post office and hope somebody who’s seen her calls in. We’ve got to do something fast. He’s