“I do.”

“You should look at yourself. We investigated this death. You arrived here with a foregone conclusion.”

“I’m not sure you’re talking about me now.”

“What I do here, what I’m doing, is standing my ground against the devil, who appears before us in the form of an intuition. Every time someone walks in here with a feeling, I want to reach for my gun. You know how much a hunch costs?”

“I know you’re going to tell me.”

“A SOCO team and a vehicle big enough to get that boat and its oars back to a clean room, the hours to rephotograph the goddamned thing, the spectroscope, the refingerprinting of latents now three years old… I’ll start at thirty thousand, but I’m being optimistic.”

“So it’s the cost that bothers you? Or the revelation that you accepted a suicide rap because it’s good for business? Are you going to ignore new evidence to keep your record?”

“I’m going to call OPS Central and tell them how you run an investigation. They might want to reopen your cases.”

“Swallowflight told me he used to let people take the boat out. To borrow it if they wanted. He’s that kind of sharing person, you know.”

Ilunga was as still as a statue, his eyes glowing white. “So what,” he said.

“So your dusters looked for the victim’s fingerprints and noted significant repeats, meaning the owner of the boat. The rest were incidentals. They were leaning toward suicide anyway and there was no chance that there were a dozen people in the boat with Cameron that night. It was a sound conclusion, suicide.”

“I see… and now you want me to fingerprint all of Ward’s Island? Get alibis for twenty people between 7 p.m. and 3 a.m. on the evening of August 4, 2002?”

“No,” she said. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Oh. You tell me what I have to do then.”

She got up from her chair. “Nothing.”

He looked at her suspiciously. “Nothing?”

“You’ll know what to do next.”

“Oh, really.”

“I’d like you to get someone to drive me back to Port Dundas. Maybe Childress, since she’s probably the only person left here who doesn’t want to push me out a window.”

“I doubt that. She still works for me.”

She approached the desk and leaned on it, getting in his face. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to show you something that will allow you to draw your own conclusions. Because you’re tired of listening to reason. Now: Childress?”

“Take the bus.”

“I’m going to need her,” Hazel said. “Jurisdictional issues, you know.” She looked at her watch. “Have her meet me at the Day’s Inn on Adelaide in half an hour.”

“How do people work with you, Micallef?” he said, his pupils tiny black dots. “You’re ungovernable.”

“The stone is never disturbed by the river,” she said, smiling sweetly.

30

Childress had driven Hazel back to Port Dundas in a frosty silence. Even when checking her blind spot on the right, Childress made an effort not to look at her. They put her up in Dianne MacDonald’s B &B and asked Dianne to let them know if it looked like the officer was planning to leave. Martha was meanwhile fuming in Glynnis and Andrew’s house, yet another storm on the horizon. But she was here, and that was all that mattered to Hazel now.

She woke up early and went into the station house. She called Jack Deacon and told him to pack Eldwin’s hand in a lot of ice and courier it down, same-day, to Twenty-one addressed to Superintendent Peter Ilunga. She instructed him to label it “EVIDENCE” and “PERISHABLE.” They had their own set of fingerprints from the hand, but she thought Ilunga deserved the chance to draw his own conclusions. It was too bad she couldn’t be there when he opened the box.

It was a quiet midweek at the detachment. She’d instructed Wingate to pick up Claire Eldwin and bring her in. It was time she knew the whole story, and Hazel wanted her in the station house to hear it. She’d been of two minds whether to tell Eldwin the full extent of the kind of trouble her husband was in, but she’d never been totally sure of the seriousness of the danger. Now she was, and Claire Eldwin had a right to know. Wingate was spending the morning writing up a full report of what they’d done in Toronto, something she deemed essential considering how far under Ilunga’s skin they were now. They might need to tell their side at some point, and having the official report was necessary. She knew Wingate’s report would be measured, accurate, and sober. When he told her Mrs. Eldwin had elected to come in under her own steam, it looked like it was going to be at least a couple of hours before she arrived and Hazel took the opportunity to have some downtime. She decided to go home for lunch and wait until Wingate called to say Eldwin was at the detachment.

The rain was, if anything, heavier here than it had been in Toronto and she dashed to the front door of the house and let herself in. It was midday quiet and still; a kind of stillness that made her nervous, given what she’d found in her hotel room the day before. It would have been nice to have some company, but her mother and Martha had gone out in the morning and the house was as empty as it sounded.

She popped two pieces of whole-wheat bread into the toaster. To make up for the healthy amount of fibre, she took a half-eaten wheel of Camembert out of the fridge and left it on the counter to temper for a few minutes.

There was nothing of interest in the mail except for a forwarded property tax bill for her house in Pember Lake. Westmuir kept reassessing the house at higher and higher levels and this year had it at $325,000. A similar house less than a kilometre away had sold for $260,000 in January. She didn’t mind paying her taxes – after all, it was tax money that paid her salary – but it made her sick that the county was helping itself to thirty percent extra with its upbeat evaluations. Too bad there wasn’t a law that you could sell your house back to Westmuir for what they claimed it was worth.

The toaster dinged and she cut three big slabs of cheese onto each piece and sat at the kitchen table. She hadn’t realized until now how tired she was. The buzziness of a week without Percocet had finally begun to die down – keeping busy had helped her ignore the jitters during the last few days – and she felt like the world around her was beginning to emit its real colours again. What a strange dream the last two months had been. Living in this house, half out of her mind in pain, depressed, hopeless at times. But now she was sitting at Glynnis Crombie’s – all right, Pedersen’s – kitchen table, in full uniform, thinking about the day ahead of her. She was escaping the immediate present, a state of mind that paid no heed to tomorrow, that hardly believed in it. She was shaking loose the bonds. It seemed to her now that days and weeks lay ahead of her, a topography of tasks and battles and puzzles and outcomes. She realized she felt calm and prepared for the first time since Christmas.

She worked her way through one melting, fragrant piece of toast and was picking up the second when she heard a sound from downstairs. She stilled her hand midway to her mouth and listened. There it was again. Something being pushed around on the floor. And now a voice. Good Christ. She put the toast back down on the plate, picked her chair up to move it silently back, and slipped her reloaded gun from its holster. No one would take it from her now, by god. At the door to the basement, she could hear more clearly now: faint bumps, gentle clattering, a murmur. A woman’s voice, she was fairly certain. She breathed shallowly by the door, her hand wrapping the knob silently, opening it into the dark stairwell. She stepped down, once, twice, stepped over the creaky third step, and then down again, but the fifth step emitted its low groan and she stopped on it, her heart pounding. The sounds from below abruptly stopped. Jesus, she thought. I should have gone around the back and come in through the door with the Glock out. There were footsteps approaching the bottom door. Fucking hell. She brought the gun up to chest height. A high-pitched hum filled her head. Below her, the door opened.