Forty Words for Sorrow

A pale hand flew up to cut him off. "Don't tell me anything- I'll be more use to you if I hear it fresh. Give me the gloves."

He put on the gloves, and they watched his sheathed fingers palpate the cassette, turning it this way and that, stopping to feel and think like small independent animals. "Safety holes are covered up. Whatever's on here, someone didn't want it recorded over. Cassettes are all virtually identical from the outside. What make is this?"

"Denon. Thirty minutes. Chromium dioxide. We know it's a common type, available pretty much anywhere."

"Well, you wouldn't find it in the smallest towns, maybe, but certainly in a place as big as Algonquin Bay. It's not a cheap product. It'll run you five times the cost of the bottom end, maybe more."

"Would you classify it as a professional product?"

"A professional sound recordist- recording engineer, anybody with a passion for quality- would not use a cassette; you want a faster tape speed and the flexibility of more tracks- depending on the job of course. It's up there: Ampex, Denon, sure. But as I say, you can get it anywhere."

Delorme said, "He could have stolen it. Shoplifted it, no?"

"Retailers tend to keep these behind the counter- or at least near the register." Fortier's thin face wagged from side to side for a moment, as if he were sniffing for a lost aroma.

"What," Cardinal said. "You're not happy."

"Second thoughts. I said a professional wouldn't use a cassette. I meant a sound-recording professional. But musicians use them all the time. If I were putting a demo song on tape, for example, I'd use a high-quality cassette like this. There are so-called portable studios made for cassettes- Tascam, Fostex- the sound isn't clean, but with pop music, clean is often beside the point, right?"

"What about stand-up comics, people like that who want to audition?"

"Stand-ups send video. They want you to see how they look on stage. But radio announcers send cassettes to us all the time. Sure, someone like that."

Fortier opened a cassette slot on the console and popped in the tape. Delorme and Cardinal sat watching his back as they listened to the tape from beginning to end once more. The sound was much clearer on the professional equipment, and like an image being focused ever sharper, it became clearer still as Fortier adjusted various dials and knobs. The leather of his chair creaked beneath him as he leaned this way or that, his hands hovering over the console like hummingbirds.

"Some physical deterioration there. Obviously wasn't stored in optimum conditions."

"To put it mildly."

Under Fortier's ministrations, the tape hiss all but vanished. Within moments, Katie Pine's voice sounded as if she were in the room with them. Her terror in such proximity, her attempts to talk her way out, the fictitious cop father- Cardinal fought an urge to cry out. Fortier cocked his head like a spaniel, identifying sounds as they came up. "Girl's voice: twelve or thirteen years old. That accent, she's got to be an Indian."

"That's correct. What about the male?"

Fortier hit a pause button. "He's too far from the mike to place with any certainty- definitely not French, or even francophone. Ottawa Valley's out, too. Southern Ontario, though, that's possible. He doesn't have those terribly round vowels you get up North. Not a lot to work with there, I'm afraid. He's just too far from the mike."

When the tape was done, Fortier spoke quickly as if afraid he might forget something if he stopped to breathe. "First thing: This was made on a pretty good machine with a pretty good microphone."

"Begins to sound like a professional again."

Fortier shook his head impatiently. "No way. Placement of the microphone is grabbing a lot of air. Lot of noise. A professional gets as close to the source as possible."

"Can you tell us anything about the place?"

"Let me put it through again. I had it set to bring up the voices. Let me set it for the background." He lowered some of the sliders on the console and raised others. His index finger sat poised over the play button. "Just for the record, Detective: Those are the ugliest sounds I've ever heard."

"I'd be worried if you didn't think so."

Almost immediately, Fortier hit the pause button. "Something I can hear that maybe you can't: This is a small room, quite bare. Hardwood floor. I can hear the reverberation off his heels. Hardwood floor… leather soles- big heels, possibly cowboy boots."

Even Katie's voice sounded thin and far away, now. But the footsteps, the rustling of cloth, the slaps- these pressed themselves into the dark studio.

"Not much traffic outside. One car, one truck in the entire, what, fifteen minutes? You're not near a highway. It's an old house- you can hear the glass rattle in the window when the truck goes by."

"I can't," said Delorme.