Forty Words for Sorrow

"I wasn't. I was just tracing Billy LaBelle's steps, for Christ's sake. We weren't working a homicide back then. We were working a routine missing kid, so don't come on like I'm Mr. Dereliction-of-Duty, all right? I think our late lamented leader Detective Sergeant Dickhead Dyson takes that title. Carl Sutherland, that's the guy's name. Carl Sutherland."

"You have a middle initial?"

"F for Fucking. Try the file, Cardinal." McLeod left the boardroom, muttering to himself.

Cardinal wasted another ten minutes riffling through folders from the previous fall. "Delorme, why don't you feed Troy's ID into the computer and see what it spits out."

"I did. We're waiting."

McLeod came back in. "Carl A. Sutherland," he said, shoving a report into Cardinal's hand. "Some asshole stuck it in the Corriveau file by mistake. If people would stop second-guessing my work for a change- and maybe stop fucking with my stuff for five minutes- maybe I could get some work done around here."

Delorme took the report over to the computer and typed the information into it. She tore a sheet from the printer. "Negative on Alan Troy. No record in local or national."

Cardinal was reading McLeod's report on his interview at the music store four months previously; it was one page, single-spaced. The first paragraph stated the positions of the two men- Troy the owner, and Sutherland the assistant manager- and how long they'd been working there. Troy had been running the place, at various locations in the city, for the past twenty-five years. Sutherland had been with him for ten, joining just before the store moved into the mall.

The second paragraph discussed Billy LaBelle. Both men knew him and were concerned (where concerned, McLeod had written) about the boy's disappearance. Sutherland was the one who actually taught him guitar. The boy had come in for his usual Wednesday evening lesson and left without incident. The next night, Billy LaBelle disappeared from the Algonquin Mall parking lot.

Cardinal stared out the boardroom window at the filthy meringue of slush in the parking lot. The snowbanks looked like slag heaps, and black puddles glittered in the sunlight. What about Katie Pine? Troy and Sutherland hadn't been asked about Katie Pine; the cases hadn't been connected then.

Delorme stepped in front of him with a sheet of computer paper. "I don't know about you, but Carl Sutherland just jumped to number one on my hit parade."

Cardinal took the printout from her. Carl Sutherland had been arrested in Toronto two years previously for public indecency.

Seeing this, Cardinal suddenly felt that he was moving through the slow, inevitable motions of a dream. Seeing this, he knew, even though no one had told him and he could not prove it, he knew that Katie Pine had been in the Troy Music Center and had met Carl Sutherland. Then the ground had opened.

Reading his thoughts, Delorme said, "We have to close the circle. We have to put her in Troy Music."

Still moving in the dream, Cardinal reached for the phone. Delorme watched him as if she, too, were caught in the dream, biting her lip.

"Mrs. Pine, it's John Cardinal." He had always hoped his next conversation with Dorothy Pine would be to tell her that her daughter's murderer was in jail. "You remember telling me Katie wanted to be in the school band?"

The dull affectless voice was barely audible. "Yeah. Don't know why she wanted to so bad."

Then Dorothy Pine went so silent, Cardinal thought the line had gone dead. "Are you still there?"

"Yeah."

"Mrs. Pine, did Katie ever take any music lessons of any kind?"

"No." She'd already told him this. She'd told McLeod, too; but Dorothy Pine was not the type to complain.

"Never took piano or guitar? No lessons at all?"

"No."

"But she wanted to be in the band, you said. She had a picture of the school band on her closet door even though she wasn't a member."

"Right."

"Mrs. Pine, I don't understand how Katie got so excited about music if she hadn't studied it. She was obsessed with the band, and she had a charm bracelet with musical instruments on it."

"I know. Found it at some music store somewheres."

There it was, the dream was in control again. It was dreaming Cardinal, and Mrs. Pine, and it was dreaming the words she was about to say. He could feel them traveling down the telephone line before he even asked the question. "Which music store did she get it from, Mrs. Pine? Can you remember the name? It's very important."

"No."

The words would come. Dorothy Pine would say them. She was going to tell him the name of the store, and it would be Troy Music Center, and they would have their man. Cardinal could feel a breeze from the phone, like the wind that arrives before the train pulls into the station.

"I don't know the name," Dorothy Pine said. "The store out in the mall there."

"Which mall, Mrs. Pine?"