The girl: "Please let me go now. I promise I won't tell anyone. Take your pictures and let me go. I swear to God I'll never tell anyone."

"… repeat myself…"

"You're not listening! I have to be somewhere. I have band practice. It's really important! We have a concert in Ottawa and if I don't show up they'll call the police! There'll be all kinds of trouble! I'm trying to help you!" [Inaudible.]

"Where? I live on the reserve. Chippewa. But my father's a policeman. He's with the OPP. I'm just warning you. He's gonna go crazy."

[Inaudible.]

"No. I don't want to do that. I won't."

Footsteps approach. Fierce sounds of rustling cloth. Then the girl, barely coherent, "Please! Please! Please! I have to be at practice before eight o'clock. If I don't-" Ripping sound, possibly duct tape. Her voice is a muffled whimper.

Clicks continue.

Music changes to a familiar female vocalist.

Muffled sobs.

More clicks.

More clicks.

A rustling sound.

A man coughs, close to the microphone.

More rustling sounds.

Ninety seconds of silence.

A final click as the recorder is switched off.

The rest of side one was blank. So was side two. They listened to the entire half hour of tape hiss to make sure, Cardinal, Delorme, and Setevic in utter silence. It was a long time before anyone spoke. Cardinal's voice sounded terribly loud, even to himself. "You got anybody in Documents who can tell us more about this?"

"Uh, no," Setevic said, still stunned.

"Because we just listened to the murder of a young girl, and I want to know everything there is to know about this tape. Don't you have anyone in Documents?"

"Documents? Documents people are strictly paper and handwriting. Bunco stuff. But I'll-" Setevic coughed. Cleared his throat. He was a big man, looked like a man who could take care of himself, too, was Cardinal's assessment. But he was still having a hard time with what they'd heard. "I'll give you a phone number," he said at last. "There's a guy the OPP likes to use."

THE new headquarters of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Front Street had cost a scandalous amount to build, and Cardinal could see why. The atrium, bathed in a wash of soft light from the skylight eight floors up, was like an indoor park, profuse with trees. Marble gleamed underfoot. His tax dollars at work.

Cardinal and Delorme followed a luminous receptionist to the elevator. Thin pale men glided across the corridors. The receptionist led them past a series of studios to the end of a hallway. She opened a crimson door, and they entered a dimly lit recording studio.

A man in a houndstooth jacket was parked in front of a bank of electronic controls, a pair of headphones clamped over his head. A yellow bow tie sat primly at his neck. His crisp white shirt looked as if it had just been unwrapped. Cardinal had never seen anyone so neat.

The receptionist announced them loudly, "Your police friends, Brian."

"Thank you. Have a seat. Be right with you." He did not raise his voice the way most people do when wearing headphones.

Cardinal and Delorme sat down behind him on high-backed swivel chairs.

"Oohh," Delorme said, caressing the chair. "We're in the wrong job."

The studio smelled strongly of new carpet- even the walls were carpeted- and the atmosphere had a pleasant hush.

For the next five minutes they watched the technician's pale hands flutter gently over the controls- now nudging a slide up, now tweaking a dial. Lights and graphs blinked along the length of the console. The man's face, with its serious, abstracted expression, was reflected in the glass above the console, hovering over them like a disembodied intelligence.

Over the speakers an interview droned on and on, two gravel-voiced men jawing about federalism. Delorme rolled her eyes and made a spinning gesture of tedium with her index finger. Finally the interview came to an end, and the man removed his headphones and spun around, hand extended into space. "Brian Fortier," he said. He had a "radio" voice, deep and resonant. His hand waited in the air independently of him, and Cardinal saw that he was blind.

He shook the man's hand, introducing himself and Delorme.

Fortier jerked a thumb toward the tapes. "Cleaning up some archival material for rebroadcast. That was John Diefenbaker and Norman DePoe. Don't make them like that anymore."

"That was Diefenbaker? He turned my hometown into a nuclear arsenal when I was a kid."

"You're from Algonquin Bay, then."

Delorme said, "You're from up North, too, you?"

"No, no- Ottawa Valley boy." He said a few sentences to Delorme in French, which Cardinal did not exactly follow, but he saw Delorme instantly relax. Fortier said something that made her laugh like a girl. All Canadians study French into high school, and Cardinal had struggled with it right up to grade twelve. But there had been little call for French in Toronto, and by the time Cardinal had moved back to Algonquin Bay, he'd forgotten most of it. Have to take that extension class at Northern U., he told himself for the fortieth time, I'm such a lazy bastard.

"OPP says you have a tape for me?"

Cardinal took the tape out of the envelope. "The content does not leave this room, Mr. Fortier. Are you comfortable with that?"

"Investigation in Progress. I know the drill."

"And I'll have to ask you to wear these latex gloves while you handle it. The tape was found in a-"

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.