A few of the inmates, such as Catherine Cardinal, stay in the hospital from time to time until the acute phase of their difficulties is over and they can be returned safely to the community. Dr. Jonas had given Catherine a sedative and kept her overnight in Toronto. Then, feeling that the most important thing in her recovery would be proximity to her husband, he put her on a new medication and sent her up to the O.H. by ambulance. He would remain in close touch with her doctor up there.
John Cardinal sat with her now in the sunroom on the third floor. They always sat in the sunroom when he came to visit. Later, when she was better, they would go for a walk, maybe even a trip downtown. But for now it was just this overheated, glassed-in room with its vinyl couches and its view of the highway and the trees. The sun itself was hidden behind heavy cloud, and rain dripped down the windows in thick rivulets.
“They should call it the rainroom,” Cardinal said.
Catherine didn’t respond. She sat at the far end of the couch, elbows on knees, head sunk low, her face hidden by her hair, an allegory of defeat. Cardinal found his sympathy and concern warring with his frustration at not going all-out for Terri Tait. True, they had all units on alert, and there wasn’t much else he could do for her right at this moment, but there were other angles of the case that had to be pursued.
“Do you want a Coke or something?” he said. “I could go down the hall and get you one.”
Catherine gave no sign that she heard.
“They don’t think you’ll need to stay in too long this time. Maybe just a couple of weeks.”
Catherine said something.
“What was that? I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t hear.”
“Bravo, John. I said bravo. Does that do it for you?”
Cardinal stared at the cover of a celebrity magazine, headlines about Rosie O’Donnell and Julia Roberts. What am I doing here? I should be down at the station. I should be talking to ViCLAS.
“Christ,” Catherine said after a while.
She was in the hospital of her own volition, but that didn’t seem to make the experience any less bitter.
“Catherine, please try and remember this won’t last. It will be over sometime soon.”
“Sure, John.” She turned her dark eyes on him, and Cardinal could read there nothing but devastation. “Sure, it’ll be over. And then it’s going to come right back again. So how is that ‘over’? Tell me that, John. How is that ‘over’?”
“You’ve got people on your side, here, honey. They’re trying this Lamotrigine and they have every reason to think it’s going to work better than the lithium. It’s supposed to be particularly effective for people with your profile. They’re very optimistic.”
Catherine hung her head again, shaking it gently from side to side, a mute no. If there were any way to summarize this illness, at least in its depressive stage, it would be with that two-letter word, in which all the hopelessness in the universe seemed to gather.
When she was like this, every cheerful note rang hollow, every hopeful remark was suspect, every expression of tenderness a lie. But Cardinal couldn’t stop himself. “Catherine, I know it’s hard. I know it’s overwhelming. But please try and remember the reason you feel like this doesn’t have anything to do with reality. It’s just a chemical imbalance that makes you feel horrible and makes the world ugly, but it won’t last. You will feel better. I promise.”
She was crying now. Not the deep-chested sobs of relief, but only the squeezed-out tears of bitterness. With the part of him that still prayed, Cardinal prayed that he could take that pain for her. He would bear it himself for the rest of his life if that would spare her this grief.
When he got back to the squad room, Cardinal pulled the ViCLAS report from under a stack of paper and checked the summary page once more. It had come back empty on the MO, negative for links of any kind. Meaning they were dealing with a killer who, for the first time in his life, had cut somebody’s head and hands off, and shot two people, and had never done these things before. And probably had Terri Tait at his mercy right now.
He put in a call to Jack Whaley at OPP Behavioural Sciences.
“Jack. John Cardinal, here. I keep coming back to the ViCLAS report you guys gave us.”
“Your dead biker. Negative, as I recall. No hits whatsoever.”
“That’s right. But I have a strong sense that this is not the killer’s first time. Removing the victim’s extremities while he’s still alive. The scene was too prepared. The guy had his magic marks on the walls, he had the knives to cut through bone and ligaments, he had something ready to carry them away in, and something to catch the blood. This was not spur of the moment.”
“Okay, I’ve got your case up on the screen. No runs, no hits.”
“And under MO have you got the missing extremities, including the head?”
“We do.”
“And you have the hieroglyphics on the walls?”
“We do.”
“And that’s the report you sent us, right? Totally negative.”
“That’s right.”
“What happened when you ran it without the hieroglyphics?”
“I don’t know. Did we run it without the hieroglyphics?”
“Ken Szelagy put in a request that if it came back negative then to run everything the same except without the hieroglyphics.”
“Where’d he put this request?”
“Right in the form.” Cardinal flipped through the booklet. “In the comments section.”
“Oh, yeah. I got it. But there’s a problem here, John.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s one of the glitches with ViCLAS. It can’t handle ‘and/or’ searches. Everything is strictly ‘and’ around here.”
“You’re kidding me. This is a computer we’re dealing with, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. It’s also relatively new software. They’re still working out the bugs. Everyone knows we need the ‘and/or’ capability, they just haven’t been able to engineer it yet. They promise it’ll be here soon. Next generation of the software.”
“I can’t believe this never got run, Jack. We’ve got a maniac on the loose up here, and he has at least one person captive. Maybe more.” Cardinal sighed. Computers were the twin scourge and saviour of law enforcement. “Can you run the search for me without the markings on the wall?”
“I’m doing it right now. Give me a minute. It’s gonna take a few keystrokes. How’s Catherine, by the way?”
“Just fine. And Martha?”
“We split up. She finally figured out she didn’t like cops. Here we go. It’s running now.”
“This won’t give us any hits from the States, will it?”
“Nope. Strictly Canadian content, provincial and national. It’s a huge database we’ve got now, though. Better than anything south of the border. Down there, a lot of the states haven’t signed on, so you get—Oh. Here we go.”
“What? Tell me. You got something?”
“Give me a second.”
Cardinal could hear Whaley tapping away at a keyboard. Then he came back on the line. “Okay. We’re really not supposed to do this, but I just pushed the button. You should have it in your e-mail as an attachment.”
Cardinal opened up his e-mail. He clicked on New Mail, and the message popped into his inbox. He called it up and opened the attachment.
“Go to the Linkages and Analysis heading. There won’t be any analysis, but you should see—”
“I got ’em,” Cardinal said. “Okay. Take away the hieroglyphics and it looks like we’ve got three hits, all in Toronto. The first one ten years ago. That kid was found on a roof at Regent Park. I remember that—it was just after I left Toronto to move up here. I don’t recall anything about missing extremities, though.”