Forty Words for Sorrow

"Next plane isn't till morning, and I don't want to wait." Cardinal nodded toward the dark square that was Dr. Barnhouse. The coroner could be heard halfway down the block berating someone for some perceived outrage. "I'll get the scoop from Barnhouse and pick you up in half an hour. We'll pass the hearse before Gravenhurst. I want to be there when Forensic opens up that little gift."

14

MURDER is a rare event in Canada. So rare that most of the country's ten provinces are allocated only one forensic unit, usually in the province's biggest city. It's a thrifty approach- convenient, too, if you happen to be investigating a murder in Toronto or Montreal. Cardinal and Delorme had to drive over two hundred miles, a good part of it behind a convoy of lumber trucks. At the coroner's building on Grenville Street, a Sikh in a blue uniform with a white turban buzzed down to the morgue to announce their arrival.

Len Weisman met them in the hall and led them into a cramped office. He was a small, compact man, with a thatch of black wiry hair. He wore spectacles with dark, fashionable frames, a white lab coat, and- incongruously, given the medical surroundings of white tile and linoleum- leather sandals.

Before he became director of the morgue, Weisman had put in ten years as a homicide investigator. His police badge and sergeant stripes were mounted in a frame on the wall behind his desk. Surrounding this were framed citations and a photograph of Weisman shaking hands with the mayor of Toronto.

"Sit, sit," he said in a friendly way. "Make yourselves at home."

At home in a morgue, Cardinal said to himself, and wondered if Delorme was thinking the same thing. She was certainly more subdued than usual. They had passed a dead woman in the hall- barely out of her teens and parked on a gurney beside the elevators like a shopping cart. The body bag was open to her throat, and her pale face with its penumbra of yellow hair had emerged from the white plastic as if from a cocoon. Her hair was beautiful, somewhere between saffron and gold; just hours earlier she would have been brushing it avidly, with a pretty woman's mixture of pride and self-criticism.

"Coffee, anyone? Tea?" Weisman gave the impression of bounding everywhere- reaching for a door halfway across the room, lunging to open a drawer, plucking a file from a desk. "Or there's a Coke machine in the lunchroom. Sprite? Pepsi?"

Cardinal and Delorme declined.

Weisman snatched up his phone before it could escape. "I'll just check if our pathologist is ready. Patient just arrived twenty minutes ago."

Cardinal had forgotten that they called them patients in this place, as if the silent occupants of those plastic bags and metal drawers might recover.

There was a knock on the door and the pathologist came in. She was a tall woman in her thirties, with wide shoulders and prominent cheekbones that gave her face a sculpted look.

"Dr. Gant, these are Detectives Cardinal and Delorme from Algonquin Bay. Dr. Gant is our pathologist this morning. You can go with her now if you like."

They followed her to the morgue. The dead girl had been moved, and now the white tiles and linoleum might have been any clinic, anywhere. The morgue had not the slightest smell of death, just a faint chemical odor. They crossed through the main autopsy room and into a side room reserved for "stinkers." Dr. Gant handed them both surgical masks, and they put them on. When the photographer was ready, Gant put on surgical gloves and unzipped the bag. Delorme gagged.

"It's filthy," Dr. Gant observed quietly. "Where'd you find him, a coal cellar?"

"Exactly right. Coal cellar in an old sealed house. Guess he's starting to thaw out."

"All right, let's get him X-rayed first. Radiography's next door."

She declined their inexpert assistance with the trolley, wheeling the "patient" next door to radiography, where a machine with a huge steel U attached stood ready. This was run by a scruffy man in check shirt and blue jeans that revealed the cleft of his buttocks every time he bent over.

"That sack. It was wrapped around his head just like that?"

"It's a seat cushion cover, Doctor. I'm not sure why the killer covered his head like that. Remorse doesn't seem likely. And I don't think he's squeamish, either."

"Let's get someone from Chemistry here before we disturb that too much. Start with the torso, Brian."

She spoke quietly into a telephone mounted on the wall. Her voice was collegial but firm; a man would have to be either extremely busy or extremely stupid not to do her bidding.

"Aren't you going to take the plastic sheeting off first?" Delorme asked.

Dr. Gant shook her head. "We X-ray them fully clothed. That way we pick up any bullet or blade fragments that might be lodged in the clothing." She nodded toward the table. "Trousers pulled down around the ankles indicate probable sexual activity just prior to the attack."