A Door in the River Read online

The new girl didn’t look like she could be older than twenty. She sashayed down the hall in front of them, and Hazel traded a look with Spere. “We didn’t come here to end up in the cardiac wing, Howard.”

  The girl left them at the door to Autopsy and the two of them went in. Deacon was still in his scrubs. They could see Henry Wiest lying on his back on the metal table. Deacon pulled his mask down. “I think you’ll find this interesting,” he said, offering a hand that neither of them shook. He led them back to the table.

  Hazel tried not to look at Henry’s face, but she couldn’t ignore the Y-shaped incision in his chest, which Deacon had reopened. The top of the man’s head was missing.

  “So,” said Deacon, “they left everything in the cavity –”

  “Like when you buy a chicken,” Spere said, and they both spared him a momentary glance.

  “And?” said Hazel.

  “And it was a heart attack. For sure.”

  She exhaled, and it was relief, but Deacon wasn’t done.

  “But it wasn’t a wasp sting that did it to him.”

  He beckoned them to lean down to look close up at Henry’s face. He’d been stung once high on the cheek and once under the hairline. Deacon lay a gloved fingertip just below where they could see the sting mark on his cheek. It was a black dot, as black as if it had been made with a lead pencil.

  Hazel leaned down closer and Spere nestled in beside her. “What kind of wasp leaves a black mark?” he said.

  “Watch this,” said Deacon. He had a one-centimetre pin in his hand. “I got this off of the bulletin board in the staff room.” He leaned down, and with a gloved thumb and forefinger at the edges of the mark, he gently stretched the skin. The black dot expanded and they could see a thin, bloodless tunnel about half a millimetre wide descending into the dead man’s cheek. Deacon held the pin above the hole, his pinky against the top of Wiest’s eye socket to steady himself, and then he let it go. It dropped with no resistance into the wound almost all the way to its head, like a blade into a sheath. Then he withdrew the pin and held it under the light. It was completely clean.

  “What the hell is going on?” Hazel said.

  “Well, I have a theory,” said Deacon, “I already resected the ‘sting’ on his forehead, but I thought I’d wait for you to do the second.” He set the pin aside and picked up a scalpel from the tray beside the autopsy table. He set the tip of the blade above the wound and drew it down through the centre of it, splitting the skin neatly in two directly through the black mark. There was no blood at all. Hazel turned away, feeling her skin fizzing. “There you go,” she heard Deacon say.

  She turned back and looked at the edge of the cut. He’d separated the incision with his fingers. “Can I swab this?” Spere asked.

  “Go right ahead, but I can already tell you what it is.”

  Hazel looked into the wound. The channel Deacon had split in half was about the pin’s length and its edges were as black as the exterior of the wound. “It’s a burn,” she said quietly.

  “Got it in one,” said the pathologist.

  “From what?”

  Spere was running a Q-tip upwards from inside Henry Wiest’s cheek to the skin. He sealed it in an evidence bag.

  Deacon removed his hands from the man’s skin. “You know what can cause a massive infarction, pathological signs of anaphylaxis, and a burn mark?”

  “I gather a pin from a hospital bulletin board isn’t the answer.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Deacon turned to Detective Spere. “Howard?”

  Spere was lost in thought for a moment, a rare state for him, Hazel thought. Then he said, “He was electrocuted.”

  She stood in Deacon’s office with his phone against her ear. She’d been on hold for a full minute. Finally, the friendly voice returned. “Queesik Bay Police Service.”

  “Who’s your acting chief?” she asked brusquely.

  “Do you mean shift chief or the commander?”

  “Whoever’s top dog down there at this very moment.”

  “That’s Commander LeJeune.”

  “Put me through to him, please.”

  She waited a moment. “LeJeune here.” It was a woman’s voice.

  “This is Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef calling from the Port Dundas OPS. I need to have a face-to-face with you and one of your constables, Lydia Bellecourt.”

  “What is this in reference to, Detective Inspector?”

  “An investigation of yours.”

  “Well, I’m just heading out for the day, but I can see you first thing. Say, eight-thirty, if that’s not too early.”

  “It’s too late. I’m already in Mayfair. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  ] 6 [

  Keeping well within the cover of the forest, Larysa passed two days in hunger. And yet they were the best days she’d passed in recent memory. She’d been keeping the sun to her right during the mornings and letting it glide down to her left in the afternoons and evenings. Just before dusk on both days, the orange light poured through the trees sideways, just as it had when she’d been a child and her parents had let her wander in the woods near their house. Larysa knew that the sun’s light took mere minutes to reach the earth, while the light from stars could take centuries. But she liked to imagine, as she kept to the cooler, darker parts of the forest, that this pre-dusk light was the exact same that had shone on her as a girl.

  It was almost Tuesday morning now. There had been no human sounds since she left Queesik, only the sounds of birds singing and squirrels scolding. Being cautious was her only option now, the only thing that was keeping her alive. By now, Bochko would be on her trail, but with any luck, he had no idea exactly where she was headed. Knowing him though, she wouldn’t be surprised if he could smell her from a hundred kilometres away.

  By the late morning, the forest had begun to thin out, and she was close to where the towns of the Lake District started. She walked the shoreline of a small lake that fell to scrub and marsh around its western edge, and she felt exposed. But standing in the open, she saw that she was very close to Kehoe Glenn. That was where Henry had lived. In the distance, she saw where the highway divided and one part of it swung down over a little bridge – that swoopy feeling in her stomach every time they drove over it – and went under an archway with the name of the town on it. If she waited until nightfall, she could cross the highway and track up and around the town. But nightfall was twelve hours away and she didn’t think she had time to wait. She’d have to make some moves out in the open.

  In two and a half days, she’d eaten nothing but berries and wild onions and chewed on burdock leaves. She’d been sick a couple of times, but her strength had got her this far, and it would get her the rest of the way.

  When dusk began to fall, she chanced it over to the town-side of the highway and vanished into the trees below it. She hoped she hadn’t attracted any attention. She was wearing a blue T-shirt under a ratty black sweater and a pair of grey sweatpants that were too big for her, with the word CANADA in black letters down the right pantleg. Perhaps she looked like a local.

  She followed the lights of the town laterally and then emerged onto a quiet, sidestreet intersection. There was a corner store there and on the other side of the road a car dealership. Everything would be easier if she had a car, but she had no idea how to steal one, and a theft would draw attention. However, outside the corner store, a bike was leaning up against a lamppost, and she saw the opportunity to get two things she needed at once. She went in, walking casually and looking down. There was a kid standing at the front counter getting the shop owner to count out candies from a bucket into a paper bag. He was taking the candies out one by one with a small pair of plastic tongs. She was quick about it: she took a bottle of water quietly out of the fridge and pushed it down the front of her pants. Then she took a pack of cookies off the shelf and stuck it up under her shirt. Then she idled in front of the magazine rack for a moment while the kid got his order tallied up on the cash regi
ster and slipped a map of the county, with all of its major towns shown in little inserts: Dublin, Kehoe Glenn, Kehoe River, Mulhouse Springs, Port Dundas, Hoxley, Hillschurch, Fort Leonard. When the kid was going for his money and she figured they’d both be distracted, she strolled out of the store, silently wheeled the kid’s bike away from the post, and then hopped on it and rode away down a cross-street as fast as she could. If there was any shouting about it, she was too far away to hear.

  She rode the bike into a little gully where a stream would have been running in the spring. According to the street guide of Kehoe Glenn, she was close now to the address she’d seen on the man’s driver’s licence. She rode along the edge of the gully.

  When she got to what she thought was the house, she crept silently around the front and confirmed it was number 72. Then she returned to the ravine. She wanted darkness to fall before she tried to go in; she wanted the house empty. It wasn’t empty now. There was a face in the back window, looking down, doing something. She presumed it was the lady of the house. She was talking to someone else in the room, a person Larysa couldn’t see.

  She waited until nightfall, but the lights in the house stayed on until the very early hours of the morning, and when Larysa next saw the woman, there was no doubt she was alone, and that she had not slept. Perhaps she would never sleep again. Dawn gave way to daytime, and Larysa finished the stolen cookies by midday. Her water was almost gone. She tried not to fall asleep – the woman would have to leave at some point – but she dozed anyway. When she woke, the woman was still in the house.

  By the time the sun had vanished for a fourth time in the west – Wednesday night – the emptiness of her stomach and the awareness that staying in one place was dangerous convinced her she had to act. She left the bike in the trees and crept up the edge of the lawn and along the red-bricked side of the house around to the corner. From here, she could see the road. She sidled along the front of the house to the door and knocked lightly. She’d carefully kept the two parts of her weapon in different pockets in the front of her pants, but now she snapped the cartridge onto the muzzle and held the device against her leg. She’d picked up a rock the size of her fist in the ravine as back-up. It was in her left hand.

  Someone was approaching the door and when it opened, Larysa was looking at an exhausted, sallow face. There was confusion in the woman’s eyes. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I am lost,” said Larysa.

  The woman opened the door more fully and Larysa brought the weapon up and fired it. Two long, thin darts flew out of its mouth on the ends of two wires and penetrated the woman’s blouse. She threw her head back and stiffened. A sound as long and thin as the wires rose from the woman’s lips. Then, just as suddenly, the power left her, and she crashed in a heap in the front hallway. Larysa pushed the woman’s insensate body backwards into the house and closed the door. It had been open for all of ten seconds.

  ] 7 [

  Wednesday, August 10, evening

  The Queesik Bay Police Service (QBPS) served the Queesik reserve as well as six communities between Mayfair and Fort Leonard. The band force was actually larger than Port Dundas’s, despite having a smaller catchment. They were well funded and their jurisdiction was absolute: anybody who committed a crime within band territory would be arrested and charged according to the QBPS’s own statutes. It was mind-boggling to Hazel how much independence band police had. But one thing was incontrovertible: petty crime was as rampant on the reserves as it was anywhere, but major crimes were much lower, and reoffending was rare. Sometimes when the subject of band police came up at the detachment, she couldn’t tell if the resentment she heard was because Indian police were better funded and had better resources or because they closed more cases.

  “Will you look at this?” she muttered to herself. She was sitting in the public area in front of the intake desk at the Queesik Bay Police Service in a comfortable plastic chair with excellent back support. It was an open-concept headquarters: intake was a curving desk with two elevated chairs behind it, each one containing a uniformed officer either taking calls or dealing with the public. Both officers were young men in crisp light-blue uniforms.

  The station house stood on its own beside the concentration of buildings at the heart of the reserve. There was also a hotel, a large convenience store, the social services office, a hospital, a garage, and the casino. She knew that a minor network of roads snaked off the two-lane blacktop that cut through the middle of the reserve, and that more than ten thousand people lived here. There was a community centre and a skating rink, and the Triple-A team that played in that arena a couple of times a week in the winter provided the best live sport in the county. None of the buildings were more than twenty-five years old, and from what Hazel could tell, the HQ had been built within the decade. Inside, it bustled with activity: behind intake the whole operation was visible within a generous atrium. Thick orange light poured down into it as the sun set behind the building. There were officers seated in ergonomic chairs at semi-circular desks on which sat new computers. She noticed a few officers walking around with electronic tablets in their hands, which they tapped on with plastic styluses.

  She waited ten minutes and then was shown into Commander LeJeune’s office. It was a compact room behind a glass partition, with a native woodcarving on the desk and a drum hanging on the wall. There was another officer present: this was Reserve Constable Lydia Bellecourt. Both she and LeJeune stood when Hazel entered and she shook their hands in turn. Bellecourt was a very tall, young Ojibway with astonishingly long and sleek black hair constrained beneath her cap. LeJeune gestured for them to sit, and then she handed both Bellecourt and her guest file folders on which the tabs read, “07/08/2005: Wiest, H. P. WM, DOB 06/11/1959.”

  “I know RC Bellecourt already faxed a copy of this up to your Detective Wingate, but I thought we might all need a clean copy. What with the urgency of your visit.”

  “That’s … thoughtful of you, thank you,” said Hazel, finding it hard to strike the exasperated tone she’d planned on deploying. “I do have to say, however, that although I admire the procedural efficiency, I was a little surprised that the autopsy was done on the reserve when the victim was a resident of Westmuir County.”

  “We had permission from the victim’s wife, DI Micallef.”

  “But what about us? What about the OPS? We didn’t deserve a heads-up?”

  “All of the reports were faxed to your detachment as soon as they were completed. I’m afraid paperwork can take a long time. We try to be thorough.”

  “Well, all I know is that a man is found dead on reserve property and before the body is even cold, you’ve done your autopsy and let people wander back and forth over the scene. There’s no evidence collection, no pictures of the site, and no witness statements. You have a pretty little police station, but I’m not sure you know what you’re doing in it.”

  “Oh dear, you’re quite upset, Detective Inspector,” said Commander LeJeune. “But let me reassure you, we followed all the applicable protocols in Mr. Wiest’s death. His next of kin was notified and consented to the autopsy in our jurisdiction. Normally it’s a matter of some urgency, as you know.”

  “There’s a proper hospital fifteen minutes away that could have done that and it would have been in the right jurisdiction to determine whether the death looked suspicious.”

  LeJeune had folded her hands over the report. “We have a proper hospital. One, in fact, better equipped than Mayfair General. In any case, there was no evidence of foul play, no defensive wounds, no material witnesses to his death, and no suspicious matter near the site. Therefore, there was nothing to photograph – except for the dead man’s body, which we did do, please check page three of your documentation – and no reason to canvass beyond the smoke shop. And no one in the smoke shop saw or heard anything suspicious.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Hazel, working up to the desired tone, “but when a healthy man of forty-six dies in the pa
rking lot of a native smoke stand – especially if he’s a nonsmoker – there’s a reason to canvass right there. Or do you discover bodies in the parking lots of your reserve so often that it’s normal to you?”

  The commander paused before answering. “When people die of natural causes in your town, Detective Inspector, do you start rounding up the usual suspects?”

  She’d decided for the time being to leave out what Deacon had discovered. “Your whole investigation presumes an awful lot, Commander.”

  Constable Bellecourt stepped in. “Detective Inspector, there was nothing at the scene to suggest anything more than a tragic, but accidental, loss of life. I did take names when I was on the scene and I was ready to do follow-up, but the autopsy confirmed that he’d died of a heart attack brought on by an anaphylactic reaction.”

  “Well, maybe you needed to dig a little deeper,” she said, brandishing her copy of the police report. “Henry Wiest lived in Kehoe Glenn. He was a well-known businessman in the area, owned a hardware store, and had, literally, hundreds of personal relationships through his store. No enemies, no troubles, in perfect health.” She was going to keep the information about the old gambling problem and that little packet of cash to herself for the time being. “Yet he collapses and dies in a parking lot down the road from here when he has no reason to be there. Do you think the Eagle Smoke and Souvenir Shop would have called Henry Wiest down from Kehoe Glenn to change a lightbulb?”

  “Maybe he did smoke, Detective. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Then why not stop at the first shack outside of Mayfair on his way back home? There’d have to be a dozen places to turn off on Highway 41 for cigarettes before entering the reserve, and there are four other smoke shacks before the Eagle. Maybe they were selling something special or unique.”

  “Like what?”

  “You would know that better than me, Commander.”

  LeJeune appeared to be looking at her in a pitying fashion. “Am I … missing something here, Detective?”