“Of course, the probabilities are that it just belongs to some camper,” Cardinal said, but he made a note of it anyway.
“It’s in pretty good shape,” Arsenault said. “Probably hasn’t been here that long. For sure, not through the winter.”
Collingwood found a rusty railway spike.
“What is a railway spike doing here?” Delorme said. “The train tracks have to be at least two miles from here—on the far side of a highway, the First Nations reserve and a subdivision. It didn’t get here by accident.”
“But we don’t know the killer brought it here,” Cardinal said. “And why would he, anyway? It’s not sharp enough for a weapon.”
The spike was bagged and labelled.
Three sticks turned up, each about an inch thick, and all about a yard long. They had been cut from a birch and stripped of bark. It was Delorme who found them, under a bush a little way down from the site. At first she had thought they had something to do with a campfire. They were exactly the sort of stick you might use to poke a fire, or even use for kindling. But all three were discoloured for about half their length.
“Could be blood,” Collingwood said, pointing to the discoloration.
“An expert on edged weapons might be able to tell us if that Swiss Army knife is the blade that cut the sticks,” Arsenault said. “Connect the blood to the victim, sticks to the blood, knife to the sticks, the locket to a person.”
“Arsenault’s already solved the case,” Cardinal said. “We can all go home.”
“No, it’s true,” Arsenault said.
“Of course,” Cardinal said. “It’s good thinking.”
Collingwood put the sticks into a large paper bag.
Cardinal went back to the other side of the falls.
Lise Delorme was standing on a shelf of granite, a finger in one ear and her cellphone at the other. She spoke quietly into the phone. There was something sexy about her posture, but Cardinal could not have said exactly what.
She snapped her phone shut and looked up, catching Cardinal’s glance. “Body Removal,” she said. “They’ll be here soon. Didn’t sound too enthusiastic, though.” She pointed her phone at the markings on the cave wall. “Do those mean anything to you?”
Cardinal stepped closer to the images, the strange drawings of arrows and moons. The numbered charts. “I don’t know. I suppose we could be dealing with a Satanist of some sort.”
“Don’t they go in for pentagrams? I don’t see anything like that here. Big on candles, too, I believe. I’m not seeing wax on any of these rocks.”
“Well, there’s no astrological signs, but there’s a serpent down here. God knows what the crossed hammers mean.”
“Of course, it’s always possible these signs had nothing whatever to do with the murder. Wombat was a biker. Bikers have enemies. We’ll get a list and compare times.”
“Good luck pinning down a time of death from that mess,” Cardinal said, jerking a thumb toward the corpse.
Arsenault got up, brushing off the knees of his pants. He held up a small vial. “These’ll help us nail it.”
Delorme winced at the squirming mass of maggots.
Arsenault grinned. “Witnesses.”
11
LATER, CARDINAL DROVE WITH Arsenault and his vials of “witnesses” along Highway 11. Arsenault was wearing wraparound sunglasses. With his moustache and longish hair, they made him look more like a Viking Rider than a cop.
“So why the hell are we using Angus Chin?” Arsenault wanted to know.
“Because if we take it to Toronto we’ll have to get in line like everybody else and it’ll slow things down. Besides which, Angus Chin has three post-graduate degrees—in biology, entomology and parasitology—and he knows what the hell he’s talking about.”
“Yeah. But there’s reasons why we’ve never used him before. I mean, you do know about the rumours, don’t you?”
Cardinal knew about the rumours. Some individuals are born to be the subject of gossip; others ask for it. Angus Chin was both. First, there was his background—his father a Scottish merchant seaman, his mother a pharmacist from Hong Kong. In a place like Algonquin Bay, such a background was exotic, if not actually suspect.
Then there were his looks. The Scottish part of Chin’s ancestry had rounded his eyes a little, and put some curl in his hair, but he insisted on wearing it in a mandarin ponytail that hung down to his coccyx. This despite the fact that the closest he’d ever got to China was the campus of UCLA.
The rumours began to fly the moment he returned to Algonquin Bay after his lengthy education in Toronto and Los Angeles: He was running from a homicidal homosexual love affair; he was working for mainland China in some malign capacity; he was a doctor who had been defrocked because of unorthodox procedures.
But these were not the rumours that made Paul Arsenault turn to Cardinal, remove his ridiculous sunglasses and squint at him.
“I’m not talking about the little rumours. I’m talking about The Rumour. Capital T, capital R.”
“Ah, yes. The big one,” Cardinal said.
“And you don’t care about this rumour?” Arsenault poked Cardinal in the arm. “You don’t think it has any bearing on the case?”
“All I know about The Rumour is that it is a rumour. It’s not a fact, and we probably shouldn’t be discussing it just before we meet the man.”
Arsenault shrugged dramatically. He put his sunglasses back on and looked straight ahead.
The big rumour revolved around Angus Chin’s interest in parasitology and the study of tapeworms. It was whispered around town that he kept a tapeworm as a pet. There were, of course, the inevitable questions: How? In God’s name, where? The answer was that Dr. Chin reportedly kept his tapeworm where tapeworms lived, in his intestine. He would change his diet or some other variable and study the worm’s response. Did it grow faster or slower? Fatter or thinner? And how did he measure this response? How did he get access? He would fast for two days. On the third day, he would place a lump of sugar on his tongue. The worm, sensing the presence of nourishment, would make its way up the digestive tract and eventually up the esophagus. When the moment was right, the doctor would reach in and pull the worm from his throat—no small feat, considering the creature was said to be over five feet long.
“Have you considered what a competent defence attorney might do with this information in the event of a trial?” Arsenault didn’t take off his sunglasses this time. He stared at Cardinal, and it was like being examined by a huge fly. He mimicked a defence attorney: “Dr. Chin, would you tell the court—do you have any hobbies? Do you keep any pets? A tapeworm. I see. And where do you house your pet worm? In your intestine. How quaint. And is it true you take it out for walks?”
Cardinal said, “Chin doesn’t do court. You can’t be at the beck and call of judges and prosecutors if you’re a full-time academic.”
He found a space in the parking lot and they made their way over to the science building. The last of the sun made the brick glow burnt orange. A fresh, watery breeze blew from the lake, and there was the sound of wind through the trees. The campus was intensely green just now.
A group of girls emerged from the student centre, chattering at high volume and with great urgency.
“Geez,” Arsenault observed, “they get younger every year. College students actually look like children to me.”
“They are children.” Cardinal’s own daughter was only a couple of years out of college.
They followed signs to the biology department and, after some trial and error, found Dr. Chin’s office. Cardinal rapped on the door.