Forty Words for Sorrow

He drove the half-dozen blocks to Timothy Street, taking it slow over the ridge of the railroad tracks. The northern line was mostly freights taking oil up to Cochrane and Timmins. The hoot of its whistle as it crossed Timothy woke Cardinal every night when he was a kid. A lonely sound but somehow comforting, like the cry of a loon.

The house was an old Victorian place with a wraparound verandah. The red brick above the boarded-up windows was blackened with years of railway soot, so that the building looked not just blind but black-eyed. Massive icicles were fixed to the roof corners like gargoyles. The yard, which was large by Algonquin Bay standards, was surrounded by a high hedge.

Cardinal got out of the car and stood on the snow where the front path should have been. Except for the faint hieroglyphics of bird tracks, there was not a single footprint.

The stairs to the verandah were filled in with hardpack snow. Gripping the rail, Cardinal stomped his way up and examined the front door, also boarded over. The public trustee's seal was intact. The lock had not been tampered with. He checked the boarded-up windows, and then did the same around the side of the house.

The crossing bell started to clang, and as he checked the side door a train clattered by, a long one.

Anyone breaking into this house would be likely to go through the back: There was nothing there but the high hedge and the railroad tracks. And thieves liked basement windows. Trouble was, the basement windows were buried below the snow. Using the heel of his boot, Cardinal dug a trench along the back wall of the house.

"Damn." He'd scraped the back of his leg on the thick crust of ice. About four feet from the corner he found the top of a window. After clearing away the crust, he pulled the rest of the snow away with his hands.

"Gotcha," he said quietly.

THE Provincial Court in Algonquin Bay is on McGinty Street. It's a modern, plain-brick building with no pretensions; it might be a school or a clinic. Perhaps in compensation for its plainness, the sign that announces it as Provincial Court, District of Nipissing, is the size of a highway billboard.

The receptionist told him Justice Paul Gagnon was in traffic court until lunch, and lunch was booked for a meeting.

"See if he'll squeeze me in, will you. It's for the Katie Pine case." Cardinal knew Gagnon would never grant him a search warrant to pursue some runaway Mississauga youth who was now over the age of sixteen. He filled out the necessary form, and while he was waiting for court to get out he called in to headquarters. Delorme was out on the Woody case and was not expected back for at least another hour. Cardinal felt a twinge of guilt for leaving her out of this; she'd been upset about handling his backlog.

Justice Gagnon was a small man with very small feet and a toupee that was two shades lighter than his hair. He was a few years younger than Cardinal, a completely political animal whose robe drowned him as if he were a child. His voice was a reedy pipe.

"Sounds pretty feeble, Detective." Gagnon hung his robe on a coathook and put on a camel-hair sports coat. "You think the person who killed Katie Pine and abducted Billy LaBelle may have stayed in the Cowart house? And you base this on information received secondhand from Ned Fellowes at the Crisis Center. Information that doesn't even relate directly to the killer but to another missing person- this Todd Curry." Gagnon checked his tie in the mirror.

"The house was broken into, Your Worship. I'm sure the parties contesting the will would want that investigated anyway. But if I go through them it's going to take a long time and upset people who are already upset about the will."

Gagnon's skeptical eye fixed him in the mirror. "For all you know, it may be one of the family who broke in. Maybe to haul off some contested stick of furniture. Family heirloom. Who knows?"

"The window is only about ten inches high, maybe two and a half feet wide."

"Jewelry, then. Grampa's pocket watch. My point, Detective, is that you have no substantive reason to suspect a killer was there."

"It's the only place I have reason to suspect the killer set foot, other than the shafthead on Windigo Island. He likes deserted buildings maybe. The Curry kid was last seen alive saying he was going to stay in an abandoned house on Main Street."

Gagnon sat down behind a desk that dwarfed him and examined the form. "Detective, this address is on Timothy."

"It's at the corner of Main. It looks like it's on Main. The Curry kid was from out of town. He probably thought it was Main Street."

Justice Gagnon looked at his watch. "I've got to run. I have a lunch with Bob Greene." Bob Greene was the local member of parliament, a voluble fool of the back benches.