“Correct.”
“I don’t see how that proves somebody tracked it over from the first victim.”
“It doesn’t,” Chin said. “They could have tracked it from somewhere else. Some other site of decay—a dead animal, say. A hunter, a hiker, who knows?”
“You guys are depressing me,” Arsenault said. “Are you telling me this casing doesn’t mean anything?”
“It might mean a great deal,” Chin said. “I just can’t prove it with entomology.”
“That is really a pisser,” Arsenault said. “I thought this was gonna be important.”
“Do you mind if I take a look at it?” Filbert said. “Just for a day or so?”
“What for?” Chin said. “We’ve already typed the species.”
“Let me have it for a day or so. I may be able to help.”
“Maybe it hasn’t broken the case wide open,” Arsenault said, “but this little bugger is still evidence. I’m going to have to ask you to sign a receipt for it, and I’m going to have to see the fridge where you will keep it locked up.”
Cardinal and Arsenault left soon after.
On the way to the car, Arsenault said, “What do you figure the chances are that some hiker happened by and deposited that maggot at our crime scene?”
“Slim,” Cardinal said. “Possible, but slim.”
“Murderers have been known to return to the scene of the crime. Could have gone back to retrieve something—something he lost or forgot. Hell, in Wombat’s case, with all that mutilation, the killer could have gone back for more body parts.”
“There’s another possibility,” Cardinal said.
“Oh?”
“Nishinabe Falls worked for him once. He could’ve gone back there to kill again.”
“But Toof was killed over by West Rock.”
“I meant Terri Tait.”
38
THE COMMON CONCEPTION of the addict is of a desperate person whose day is consumed with the laying of schemes to procure the next fix. Wild-eyed, hyperventilating and slick with perspiration, he curls up in some desperate corner. Under sweat-soaked sheets, a telephone clamped in hand, the junkie frantically dials the numbers of his connections. And when they won’t extend him any credit, he starts dialling friends with whom he’s lost touch years ago, to beg for a loan, repayable with interest, of course. Then come the lightning calculations of what to sell—the boom box? the CD collection?—assuming there is anything left to sell. When all the worldly goods are gone, and if the city is big enough and the addict attractive enough, it may come down to selling one’s body. Or if one lacks the kind of body for which there is a brisk market, then the addict’s fancy turns to theft. And so a spur-of-the-moment, just-happened-to-be-in-the-neighbourhood kind of visit might be bestowed upon a relative, an old friend or even an unlucky acquaintance. Then while the unwitting mark’s back is turned, the sudden scooping of a radio, a clock, a watch or some silvery memento into a starving backpack.
Many addicts do indeed find themselves driven to such measures. But the majority spend their time not thinking about how to procure the next fix. They’ve already worked out how to procure the next fix. Their lives, after all, revolve around the fix. They’ve worked the fix into their daily routines.
No, what the addict thinks about more than any other single subject is when and how he will quit. Such fantasies often involve mornings. Today, I will smoke that pipe, I will fill that vein, I will drain that bottle, and then tomorrow, first thing in the morning—or no, let’s make sure this recovery program is a sensible, workable affair this time, not like all the other attempts—next Monday. I’ll allow myself just this one more weekend, then first thing Monday morning I’ll head down to the twelve-step and get some of that beautiful, earthy wisdom they traffic in and get my head turned around. It won’t be easy, but I should be ready by Monday. Yes, that’s right. Shoot for Monday.
Thus the days and weeks go by. The addict sees himself as embarked on a course of moderation, leading to all-out cessation, followed for the rest of his life by the Zenlike clarity of abstinence. The rest of his life will unfold in a sweet—but not boring—desirelessness. There will even come a day when the sight of a little hillock of white powder will provoke no emotional response whatsoever—a needle will leave him unmoved.
So it was with Kevin Tait. His latest course of moderation had taken him from snorting to skin-popping and now back to mainlining as swiftly as if he had set his engines full speed ahead for personal obliteration. That had been the pattern with him pretty much since high school.
He knew where it came from, this hole in his being that only heroin seemed to fill. He had been orphaned at the age of ten and, even though the aunt and uncle who took him and his sister in tried their best, nothing was ever the same. It was as if the world had been pulled out from under his feet and he could never trust anything again.
It was okay for Terri; Terri had been fifteen. She had seemed to fit right in. But Kevin had become more and more unruly, and his new parents were always disciplining him: groundings, TV deprivation, docking his pocket money—it was always something. Terri was always interceding for him, trying to soften their aunt and uncle’s responses. And she was always trying to get him to behave better. It seemed like the whole pattern of their lives had been inscribed in some implacable book of fate the moment the plane carrying their parents had dived, nose first, into the ground.
Sometimes Kevin resented his older sister for apparently having come through this loss unscathed; her life looked easy and untroubled compared to his. Terri had made it through college and was gradually making her way in Vancouver’s theatre world; Kevin had dropped out, figuring a degree was irrelevant to a career in poetry. Besides, it was pretty hard to concentrate on Shakespeare and John Donne when you were panting after the next high. Shortly after he dropped out, Kevin had been arrested with enough heroin on him for ten people.
So far, he had managed to keep knowledge of his fullblown readdiction from Leon and from Red Bear. He always wore long sleeves, and he only injected himself in the middle of the night. Well, all right, sometimes he had to sneak off to the can and slip in a little booster, just to keep him compos for the rest of the day. But, except for the day Toof had been killed, he hadn’t allowed himself a fullblown fix until after midnight.
He’d done well, so far, to keep it from them—but then, dissembling is the first skill the addict learns. He knew he could not keep it up, and that meant he would have to vamoose, which he wanted to do anyway. Well, yes, that was his plan. Abstinence, not addiction, was the chart he had drawn up for the rest of his life. An abstinence that would bring with it a mental clarity he had not known since he was—what? Fourteen? Fifteen? That was what he was after. Not intoxication. He had no intention of spending the rest of his life hanging out at the Rosebud diner with the likes of Leon. Three or four months from now he’d be living on a Greek island, just like Leonard Cohen had done when he was a young poet. He’d live off souvlaki and goat’s milk while he worked on a book of poems that would capture everything he’d ever thought about and everything he knew about poetry.
He couldn’t see his way clear to actually breaking free of Red Bear and the camp until Monday. The problem was, just now he was so wired he wouldn’t be able to write a couplet, let alone the kind of complex, multi-layered works he had in mind. Come Monday, he’d be out of here. He’d already phoned the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and booked himself an appointment for Monday afternoon.