But there had come a time when Catherine had sunk into the worst bout of depression Cardinal had ever seen. A case of the blues had lingered too long, and then she had taken to her bed and nothing Cardinal did could raise her spirits. Soon she was unable even to speak. It was as if she had been lowered into the depths in a bathysphere, the sides threatening to crumple under the stupendous pressure of her sorrows. And Dr. Jonas had been away in Hungary for a year on a teaching assignment.
Catherine had been trundled from one clinic to another and she had got no better. On the verge of despair—and hounded by Catherine’s American parents, who were possessed by a fierce love for their daughter combined with the Yankee certainty that a non-American thing was an inferior thing—Cardinal had had Catherine admitted to the renowned Tamarind Clinic in Chicago. The bills were breathtaking, so extreme that at first they had seemed a joke, then the stuff of nightmare. There was no way Cardinal could ever pay them on his salary; he and Catherine would never own a house, never get out of debt.
He had been working narcotics with the Toronto police department for several years by then. He had slammed the prison gates on dozens of cocaine and heroin dealers. Staggering sums of cash had been offered to him to look the other way; Cardinal had turned them down every time. Turned them down and locked the bad guys up. Then one night—a night he had regretted every day of his life since—his resistance had crumbled.
He and the other guys on the squad had raided the headquarters of a murderous thug named Rick Bouchard. In the barely controlled mayhem that ensued, Cardinal had come across a suitcase full of cash hidden under the floorboards of a closet. He had pocketed a few huge stacks of bills and turned the rest in as evidence. The case was made, and Bouchard was put away.
For a time, Cardinal had managed to rationalize the theft. He had paid off Catherine’s medical bills and invested the rest to finance Kelly’s education. Eventually she went to the finest art school in North America, taking a graduate course at Yale. But then Cardinal’s conscience, which had been tormenting him for years, finally broke through his wall of denial.
He wrote a letter of confession to Catherine and to Kelly. He also wrote a letter of resignation to Algonquin Bay’s police chief and gave what remained of the stolen money to a drug rehabilitation program. Delorme had intercepted that letter and talked him out of quitting the force. “You’ll just be depriving us of a fine investigator,” she had said. “It won’t help anything.” Unfortunately, Cardinal’s daughter was the one who had ended up suffering for his crime: She’d had to leave Yale before completing her graduate degree.
That had been nearly two years ago. Kelly had moved from New Haven to New York and had not spoken to him since. Well, that wasn’t quite true; there had been times when she couldn’t avoid speaking to him: She had come back to Algonquin Bay for her grandfather’s funeral. But the warmth was gone. There was a brittle tone in her voice now, as if being betrayed had somehow damaged her vocal cords.
Cardinal snatched up the phone and dialled Kelly’s number. If one of her roommates answered, she would not come to the phone. There would be a pause, and then he’d get something lame like, “I’m sorry. I thought she was here. She must have gone out.”
But it was Kelly who picked up.
“Hi, Kelly. It’s Dad.”
The pause that followed opened under Cardinal like an elevator shaft.
“Oh, hi. I actually just called to ask Mom something.”
That voice. Give me back my daughter!
“Mom’s away right now. She took her class down to Toronto.”
“When will she be back?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“Okay, I’ll call back in a couple of days.”
“Hang on a second, Kelly. How are things going?”
“Fine.”
“Any luck on the art front?” Cardinal immediately regretted the question.
“The Whitney hasn’t exactly been banging down my door, if that’s what you mean.”
Cardinal hadn’t a clue what the Whitney might be. “I just meant are you working well and are you enjoying it?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Are you making some contacts, at least? People who can help you?”
“I have to go, Dad. We’re heading out to a movie.”
“Oh. What are you going to see?”
“I don’t know. Some Gwyneth Paltrow thing.”
“Are you okay for cash? Do you need money?”
“I have a job, Dad. I can look after myself.”
“I know, but New York’s expensive. If you need help, you can always—”
“I gotta go, Dad.”
“Okay, Kelly. Okay.”
She hung up.
Cardinal put the phone down and sat staring at the wood stove.
“Smart move,” he said aloud. “Really won her over that time.”
Later, in bed, Cardinal tried to read—a true crime book Delorme had recommended—but the words kept disintegrating and getting pushed off the page by thoughts of Kelly. He hated to imagine her scrounging to make the rent in an unforgiving town like New York. On the other hand, he could understand why she would loathe the idea of asking him for money, and that understanding lodged like a sharp object somewhere in his rib cage.
Gradually his thoughts turned to Jane Doe. The redhead was roughly Kelly’s age, but seemed less sophisticated. Even innocent and unworldly. Of course, that could be a result of her brain injury. Who would want to kill her? A jealous lover? Some paranoid, possessive loser who couldn’t stand to see those sweet green eyes look at another man? It was hard to imagine how she could have got caught up with the Viking Riders.
Two images haunted Cardinal as he fell asleep: Jane Doe with her pale skin and her blazing red hair spread out against the pillow. And the X-ray of her skull, the bullet glowing in her brain.
14
RED WAS LOUNGING IN THE sunroom in her hospital pyjamas and gown, iPod blasting in her ears. She had asked the cop guarding her door not to follow her to the sunroom, but he did anyway. She could see the bulky outline of his shoulder in the doorway.
Dr. Paley had lent her the iPod, which was crammed with music he’d downloaded from the Web. He was a kind man, Dr. Paley. You could see it in his round face and his white hair and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. Dr. Paley was a creature who seemed to think only of others.
Red knew that his visits were attempts to coax her memory back. But the doctor was skilful enough, and friendly enough, that their times together did not seem at all clinical. It was as if a cheerful uncle had just stopped in to say hi. And the music was good. A band called Rocket Science belted out their hit “Run, Run, Run,” and Red couldn’t resist singing along.
Still, it was deadly being on a floor practically crawling with failed suicides. There were three teenage girls (two overdoses, one wrist-slasher), a phalanx of the pierced and pouting, who were constantly demanding to go outside and smoke, which was a real pain for everybody else because they had to have a staff member with them. The rest of the time they lay in their beds reading Teen People and looking homicidally bored.
There was a boy, too, younger than the girls, and he just cried all the time. A nurse would trundle in with sympathy and medication, and the boy would conk out for a few hours only to wake up in the middle of the night and start crying again. Red had awoken the previous night at 3 a.m., and the night before at 2, the boy’s sobs and wails wafting along the corridors like some disembodied misery out of Edgar Allan Poe. Now, why would I remember Edgar Allan Poe, Red said to herself, and not my own name?