“What about our Viking friend?” Kevin said.
“I can see you are still frightened, Kevin. But I have knowledge that you lack in this matter. You don’t have to worry about our Viking friend. I am going to introduce him to the wonders of the spirit world, and the Vikings won’t cause us the slightest trouble.”
“But as soon as he goes back to them he’s going to tell them everything. He’ll have to. They’ll kill him otherwise.”
“He isn’t going back to them.” Red Bear smiled benevolently into their disbelief. “After tonight, he will be working for us.”
Red Bear led the groggy Viking to his BMW and toppled him into the trunk.
A couple of weeks went by, and they didn’t hear anything more of Wombat Guthrie. Whether or not he was actually working for Red Bear, Kevin had no idea. The thing was, he was now part-owner of more grade-A heroin than he’d ever seen in his life, and he was not about to separate himself from it by getting too nosy.
Kevin smacked at a fly with the swatter. It made a big noise, but the fly just zigzagged over to the cabin window. He wondered once again where Terri was, if she really had gone all the way back to Vancouver. He thought about calling her up and apologizing, but then figured what the hell.
“She says she’s just trying to help you,” Letterman pointed out, chin on hand.
“I know, I know.”
“And she could be right about Red Bear. He’s not exactly the boy next door.”
“I realize that, Dave. I’m not eight years old. I don’t need anyone playing mommy for me. She had to be told.”
Letterman leaned forward. “You said you got off the dope. Why are you still hanging around a mountain of it? You’re a skier, is that it?”
“Oh, I’m definitely over the dope thing, Dave. It was just something I needed to go through, and I think I’ve grown tremendously. But I don’t need it any more. I’m strictly in this for the money and then I’m out that door.”
10
WHATEVER ELSE PEOPLE MIGHT say about Paul Arsenault and Bob Collingwood—and their colleagues said a lot—they were always prepared. The two-man ident team arrived on the scene behind Nishinabe Falls in hiking boots, khakis and bug shirts. Bug shirts come with a hood and veil too fine for flies to penetrate, and elastic at the cuffs. As they moved about the falls, now reaching up to examine a stain, now kneeling to collect minuscule objects, they looked like a pair of beekeepers.
The young coroner who worked beside them had contented himself with a can of Off. As it turned out, the flies weren’t bad behind the falls.
Arsenault collected servings of maggots into several vials, labelling each one. He often thought out loud as he worked, speaking to himself or to anyone who might be interested. Collingwood rarely spoke at all.
“You know, I’m no entomologist,” Arsenault said now. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the falling water. “But I got to say, there’s way fewer maggots here than I’d expect with a body this old. Got to be around two weeks, anyways. You’d expect the thing to be swarming with them, but this here could be the work of maybe a dozen flies. Handful.”
Collingwood was attaching a thermometer to a nearby rock, taking an ambient reading. He turned around and said, “Place is hard to get to.”
It took Cardinal a second to figure out what he meant: The flies wouldn’t be as likely to come across a body hidden behind a veil of water, or even catch the scent. Also, it was quite chilly amid the damp and the dark.
The coroner stepped back from the body. Arsenault made a sign to Collingwood, and they turned it over. There was a tattoo on the bicep; it had been hidden before: a helmet with horns, and underneath this a banner emblazoned VR. Viking Riders.
“I don’t know if a tattoo qualifies as a positive ID,” Delorme said. “But me, I’d say Walter ‘Wombat’ Guthrie has taken his last ride.”
Cardinal nodded. “The question is, did the other Riders do this?”
“Not their usual style, is it? All this mutilation, body out in the open?”
“No, they’d be more likely to bury him in a barrel or something so we’d never find him. I’m wondering how this is connected to our Jane Doe.”
“Maybe she saw something she shouldn’t have.”
“Could be—but what? When?”
The coroner was a physician Cardinal had never worked with before, a Dr. Rayburn, who looked like a schoolboy fairly new to shaving. He was a lot easier on the nerves than the malevolent codger they usually got. Dr. Rayburn filled out a form and tore off the top two copies, handing one to Cardinal.
“No trouble determining foul play, obviously. You can ship it straight to Grenville Street. The pathologist is going to have a field day with this one.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, you no doubt noticed the extremities are missing.”
“Yes, Doc. Even I managed to catch that.”
“Even worse, there’s a big patch of skin missing from the lower back.”
“The killer tried to skin him?”
“Alive, unfortunately. I’m not a pathologist, but it’s clear to me that a lot of the injuries were inflicted before death. If not all of them. You’ve got bleeding into the bones.”
“Can you pin down a cause?”
“You mean can I tell you which wound finished him off? I can’t, but a pathologist might be able to. Most likely bled to death before he was decapitated.”
“Bled to death?” Delorme said. “But there’s almost no blood.”
Dr. Rayburn looked at the corpse and shook his head, a student giving up on a problem. “I can’t explain that.”
“Sometimes murderers will spread plastic over a floor,” Cardinal said. “But I’ve never heard of it being done outside. Hey, Szelagy!”
The face of Ken Szelagy, a great wide Hungarian bear of a man, appeared around a sharp edge of granite wall.
“Make sure you do the ViCLAS booklet on this one,” Cardinal said. ViCLAS was a nationwide database of violent crime. The OPP had an analysis office in Orillia.
Szelagy let out a theatrical groan. “Oh, man. Do you know how many questions those ViCLAS things expect you to answer?”
“Two hundred and sixty-two,” Cardinal said. “So, the sooner, the better, right?”
“Of course. As always.”
“Ask them to run it with the hieroglyphics as part of the MO, and also without. Those could be unrelated, or they could be a one-time thing.”
They began filling many bags with evidence, although evidence is too precise a term for the ragtag items they collected. It’s a problem common with outdoor crime scenes that there are many artifacts, very few of which, if any, will end up as evidence. Matchbooks, cigarette butts, soft-drink cans, footprints, hairs, fibres—and there’s no way of telling which items will prove utterly unrelated to the crime and which may prove crucial in securing a conviction. So it all has to be painstakingly photographed, bagged and labelled. And it takes time.
Cardinal kept a running log in his notebook of their findings. In addition to the usual distracting junk that might later prove to be gold, there were several interesting items.
The first was a Swiss Army knife that Arsenault discovered on the far side of the corpse. It was between two boulders that formed rocky steps out from behind the falls. The knife was too small to be a murder weapon. It was attached to a key chain that held a silver locket.
Arsenault sprung the clasp with a gloved finger. Inside was a black-and-white photo of a couple who appeared to be in their mid-forties. The man was wearing a uniform, but the photo was too small to make out what kind.