"Sir?"

"Where is your head on this case, Delorme? How do you see your Cardinal at this point?"

"Do I have to answer that, Chief?"

"Certainly."

Delorme looked up at the ceiling, staring at the exposed beams.

"I'm waiting."

"To be perfectly honest, sir, I don't know. I do know there's no hard evidence against him. Nothing that would stand up to a good defense lawyer. So me, I consider him innocent until proven guilty."

"You're being legalistic. Is that out of loyalty? Are you too close to Cardinal to be objective? You can speak honestly."

"I don't know, Chief. I'm not a very introspective person."

Kendall laughed again, hard and loud, as if Delorme had told a fabulous joke, then he stopped as suddenly as he had started, and the quiet that followed was deep, like the quiet that follows the silencing of a car alarm. "You bring this guy in, you understand me? If he has been selling out to some godless thug, I want him off the force and I mean now. If he hasn't, the sooner you're off his case the better. I'm not a very introspective person, either, Sergeant Delorme. Which means without facts I tend to become bored and upset. You don't want to see me bored and upset."

"No, sir."

"So, run your little experiment. And Godspeed."

34

AN Ontario Hydro lineman named Howard Bass was repairing a transformer out on Highway 63, about five posts north of the Trout Lake marina. The job required a whole new crossbar, and Howard had been up in the cherry picker most of the morning, freezing his ass off. And, twenty feet up like that, he was catching a bad ricochet of sunlight off the snow that practically blinded him, RayBans and all. A couple of hours into the job, though, and the sun had shifted around, casting a sharp shadow of Howard and the arm of the cherry picker across the snow.

Stanley Betts, who was driving today, had strolled back to the marina to buy them both a couple of doughnuts and Cokes. He came back whistling a risquй little tune called "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl," the cat-eyed Lolita behind the counter having put him in that frame of mind.

This stretch of 63 was always busy. You had the traffic coming down from the NORAD installation, you had the people coming in from Temiskaming, and you had the residential traffic for Four Mile Bay and Peninsula Road. Stan was stranded across the highway for a good few minutes, waiting for the traffic to clear. "I'm turning into a dirty old man!" he called to Howie. "You shoulda seen the little babe at the store!"

Howie didn't turn, didn't hear him over the roar of a speeding eighteen-wheeler.

"I swear, Howie," Stan said again, when he was across the road and clear. "I'm turning into a dirty old man!"

Although cold as hell, the day was perfectly clear. The yellow arm of the cherry picker seemed to flash against the blue of the sky. Howie looked strange up there, his breath making tiny white clouds. He was gripping the edge of the box in a weird way, looking down at something.

"What the hell you staring at?" Stan followed his gaze, but he couldn't see over the six-foot ridge of roadside sludge. He clambered to the top of this and shaded his eyes. When Stan saw what Howie saw, one of the Cokes fell and burst open on his steel-toed boot, shooting a miniature brown geyser over the snow.

35

"YOU can't possibly say it's the same killer." Dyson spread his spatulate fingers fanlike and counted off his reasons. "One: the victim is in his thirties; the others were teenage or younger. Two: totally different MO. The others were beaten or strangled. Three: he was dumped where he'd be easy to find."

"Not that easy. If the Hydro guys hadn't been working on that particular transformer, it could have been months before he was found. Next time they plowed 63, the body would have been totally covered up."

"Arthur Wood was a well-known criminal. Had to have a lot of enemies."

"Woody didn't have an enemy in the world. You couldn't hope to meet a nicer guy- long as you kept your eyes on the silverware."

"Bad blood from prison, maybe. Talk to his old cellmates, talk to the guards in his wing. We don't know everything about our clientele."

"Woody was a hardworking thief. This time, he broke into the wrong house. When we find that house, we find our killer." He's going to assign it to McLeod, Cardinal could see the decision forming in Dyson's all-but-transparent dome. The letter opener stirred a furrow through the dish of paper clips. "Look," Dyson said, "you've already got enough to do."

"Yeah, but if this is the same guy, we're just going to be-"

"Let me finish, please." The voice was soft, still thoughtful. "You've got more than enough to do, as I say. But why don't we do this: You take the Woody case for the time being. It's your case so long as nothing comes up that definitely disconnects it from Our Local Maniac. Moment that happens, and I mean instantly, it's McLeod's case. Understood?"

"Understood. Thanks, Don," Cardinal said, and flushed a little. He never used the detective sergeant's first name, it was just the excitement of the moment. Before he opened the door, he turned back and said, "Sudbury TV got ahold of the thing on Margaret Fogle."

"I know. That was my fault. I apologize."

Dyson apologizing. One for the record books. "Didn't exactly help. I don't even see why it would come up."

"Grace Legault is not Roger Gwynn. That woman is not going to linger long on Sudbury's esteemed Channel Four. That's a Toronto-bound bitch if ever I saw one. Knows what she's doing. Somehow, she got ahold of a bunch of Missing Persons and- well, it doesn't matter- she caught me off guard. Obviously, I should have kept you informed. My mistake. Now I think we're done here, aren't we?"

As he came out of Dyson's office, Cardinal bumped smack into Lise Delorme. "I've been looking all over for you," she said. "Woody's wife is out front. She wants to report him missing. We'll have to take her up to the O.H. to identify the body."

"Don't jump the gun here, Lise. I don't want to tell her right away."

Delorme looked shocked. "You have to tell her. Her husband is dead, for God's sake. You can't keep that from her."

"The moment we tell her, you can forget about getting any information out of her. She'll be too upset. I'm just saying we don't tell her right away."

MARTHA Wood hung her coat on a rack in the hall and beside it her son's tiny down parka. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans- an outfit that on her tall, lean figure looked like something out of Vogue. She sat in the interview room where both cops had interviewed her husband numerous times over the years. Her toddler, like his mother, dark-haired and dark-eyed, sat quietly on the chair beside her, squeezing a plastic Yogi Bear that from time to time emitted a nasal moan.

Martha Wood twisted her wedding ring as she spoke. "When Woody left the house, he was wearing a blue V-neck sweater, Levi's 505s, and cowboy boots. They're black. Lizard skin."

"Okay. It was cold on Saturday. What kind of coat did he have on?" The body with its nine bullet wounds had been found naked. Woody's clothes might turn up somewhere else.

"A blue down parka. Shouldn't I be filling out a form or something? A Missing Persons form?"

"We're taking it all down," Cardinal assured her.

"You need his height and weight, right?"

"We have that," Delorme said.

"Oh, right. I forgot about his arrest records. It's weird, all this time I go around thinking of cops as the enemy. Now Woody's disappeared, I feel different."

"We do, too," Cardinal said. "Was Woody driving that old ChevyVan of his?" They had already put out an all-points for the van, license plates and all.