Forty Words for Sorrow Read Online Free

dangly, spidery aspect. His bald head, trimmed with a geometrically exact circle of hair at the sides and back, was a perfect orb. Jerry Commanda loathed him, but Jerry was intolerant of authority in general, a trait Cardinal put down to his Native heritage. Delorme insisted she could use Dyson’s head for a mirror to pluck her eyebrows—not that she did pluck her eyebrows.
    That same mirrory dome was tilted toward Cardinal, who was seated in a chair placed at an exact forty-five-degree angle to Dyson’s desk. No doubt the detective sergeant had read somewhere that this angle was good leadership psychology. He was an exact man, with exact reasons for everything he did. A honey-glazed donut was parked on the corner of his desk, waiting for the clock to strike exactly ten-thirty—not a minute earlier, not a minute later—when he would consume it along with the Thermos of decaffeinated coffee beside it.
    At this moment Dyson held his letter opener suspended between his outstretched palms, as if he were measuring his desk with it. When he spoke, he appeared to be addressing himself to the blade. “I never said you were wrong, you know. I never said that little girl wasn’t murdered. Not in so many words.”
    “No, sir. I know you didn’t.” Cardinal had a tendency, when irritated, to become extremely polite. He fought that tendency now. “You only put me back on burglary as a spiritual exercise.”
    “Do you remember what kind of expenses you were running up? This was and is the age of cutbacks. We can’t pretend we’re the Mounties, we can’t afford it. You allocated all your investigative resources to this one case.”
    “Three cases.”
    “Not three, maybe two.” Dyson numbered them on his flat fingers. “Katie Pine, I grant you. Billy LaBelle, maybe. Margaret Fogle, not at all.”
    “D.S., with all respect, she didn’t turn into a toad. She didn’t vaporize.”
    Again the fingers, the manicure displayed to advantage, as Dyson counted the reasons why Margaret Fogle could not be dead. “She was seventeen—far older and more streetwise than the other two. She was from Toronto, not local. She had a history of running away. For God’s sake, the girl went around telling everyone who would listen that nobody— nobody —would find her this time. And she had a boyfriend to hell and gone, Vancouver or some damn place.”
    “Calgary. She never got there.” And she was last seen alive in our fair city, you bald blockhead. Please, God, just make him give me McLeod and let me get on with it.
    “Why are you resisting me on this, Cardinal? We live in the biggest country in the world—now that the Soviet Union has kindly dismantled itself—and three separate train lines run up and across this billion-hectare skating rink. All three of those lines intersect on our little shore. We have an airport and a bus station, and anyone going anywhere across this gigantic bloody country has to pass through our neighbourhood. We get more bloody runaways than we know what to do with. Runaways, not murders. You were spending department resources on phantoms.”
    “Should I go? I thought I was back on homicide,” said Cardinal mildly.
    “You are. I didn’t mean to go over old ground, no point in it, but Katie Pine, Cardinal—” here he aimed a flat finger at Cardinal, “—with Katie Pine there was no evidence of murder, not a shred, not at the time. I mean, except for the fact that she was a child—obviously something was wrong —there was just no evidence of murder.”
    “No courtroom evidence, maybe.”
    “You were coming to me with disproportionate manpower, disproportionate office resources, and overtime that was completely unjustifiable. The overtime alone was stratospheric. I wasn’t the only one who thought so—the chief backed me totally on this one.”
    “D.S., Algonquin Bay is not that big. A missing child, you get a million leads, everyone wanting to help. Someone pulls a knife in the movies, you have