LITMIR.BIZ

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running long fingers through his thick hair, a pulse pounding in his temple. “I can’t believe they grilled me on where I’d been that day. And listen to my crime jargon. It might be funny if it weren’t so personal.”

      “Routine.” Belle thought about the logistics of the trip north and spread her hands. “But you were driving 69 all the way, right?” Had he stopped off at Bump Lake? She felt guilty for her suspicions.

      “I had no idea about how to get to where he was working. Why would I have cared until now? But the police say the road goes by the Burwash turn, and how can I prove I didn’t know?”

      “I see. The point is that you could have reached him without much difficulty . . . if the time frame was right.” She noticed four hummingbirds duelling at the feeder. They were aggressive little creatures, territorial and war-like. Mutt must have filled it. That a murderer could mix hummingbird nectar seemed like a grotesque joke. “They sound like they’re bluffing.”

      “It was beyond belief. They asked me some very intimate questions about our relationship. Whether anyone else was involved. Who was living in our house. A Cecilian nun from Zaire who’s taking courses in microbiology at Brock. Even the HIV/AIDS question lifted its ugly head.”

      “How awful. Why is that relevant?” Trying not to be obvious, she scrutinized Mutt. With the modern drug cocktails, no one resembled the archetypal skeletal victim any more, but another crease had etched his forehead.

      He squared his broad shoulders. “You can bet they wouldn’t have handled it this way in T.O. Bunch of rednecks.” He saw her grimace. “Sorry. I don’t mean you or any of the others I’ve met up here. Ramleau made my blood boil.”

      “He’s off the case soon.” She told him what Steve had said.

      “And this guy Steve’s a friend of yours? That’s a break.”

      Too many ideas were arriving without notice. Belle didn’t know how to interpret that comment. Did he expect special treatment? She finished the bottle of beer, touched the cool glass to her cheek. Were the police right? Did Mutt have the opportunity?

      Belle pointed at a road map he had spread out. “Show me where he was working. I know a bit about the region from my real estate travels.”

      Mutt indicated Bump Lake, several miles west of the former Burwash facility grid, deep in a swampy area with a maze of dirt roads and old logging trails tapering into savage, uncharted wilderness. “Here’s where they found his canoe floating loose and his . . . body. His truck was parked a mile back at the turnaround.”

      “So he must have portaged.” No wonder Gary had become so fit. Muscling even a light canoe was a task she couldn’t handle alone for more than a few hundred feet.

      Suddenly he gave his head a pound with the butt of his hand. “Damn. I forgot about the canoe. Gary joked that it was his woman, sleek and fast. It’s a Prospector Chestnut.”

      Belle knew that brand well. Old Town had been making them since 1910. “I have a Grumman. No mystique, but it can take a collision with a jagged rock. Anyway, we can use the truck and pick it up.” She paused. “Unless the police have it.” If it had been left in the open when the death had been thought accidental, how likely would it be that fingerprints or other forensic evidence like blood would remain? She kept quiet.

      “Those Keystone Kops again. But then I guess you don’t get much crime up here, not like down south.”

      “We kill people with roads. Sudbury has two of the worst twenty in Ontario.”

      He looked at his watch with sudden embarrassment. “Sorry, but I’m expecting a call. I’ve been in contact with a few of his fellow professors at Brock. They’re excited about getting the notes and promised to answer any questions. If I can get this project tidied up, then at least I . . .” He looked out over the lake, where a merganser skidded across the glassy surface, its mate probably in the shoreline rocks and weeds guarding their nest. “Remember that baby elk? I dreamed about it last night. We should start there.”

      The inadvertent “we” had made her a partner. She noticed a pile of periodicals on the table. One anomaly caught her eye. The Environmental Pollution Journal. It seemed well-thumbed and had strips of paper marking pages. “Pollution? I thought he was a zoologist.”

      “Scientific disciplines often overlap. One time he did a study about metal levels in fecal pellets of moose. Around the ore smelters in Sudbury, I think.”

      Once Sudbury’s core had been a wasteland the size of New York City, timber gone, vegetation scoured from roasting beds at the turn of the century and acid rain to finish the job. Soil had run from its hills, leaving black rock. Then in the Eighties, a government-industry-civilian re-greening initiative had brought rye grass and small pines back, leading to a United Nations reclamation award at the Earth Summit in Brazil.

      “So question one, where is the baby?” Suddenly she had an eerie thought. Zoologists were quirky enough to keep carcasses in the freezer. Maureen had a power-chugging monster in the basement. “You didn’t look downstairs—”

      He tapped her hand. “My first thought. It’s empty and unplugged. But I got a clue from a zoologist at Shield University. He said that Nickel City College has a dissecting room in their new tech complex. Paul Straten’s the contact name. Apparently he’s one of Ontario’s top elk researchers.”

      “I gather you haven’t reached him yet.”

      Mutt folded the map carefully. “We’re still playing phone tag.”

      That night Belle ate a frozen pizza for a change. With a whole-wheat crust, low-fat mozzarella, and topped with spinach, it sounded better than it tasted. A call to Rainbow revealed that her father indeed had been ferried to the St. Joseph Health Centre Emergency Room. Ann suggested that Belle call to check his progress before driving in.

      “He’s being seen by the doctor now,” the nurse said when Belle finally got through. “We’re full-up, but we’re going to keep him overnight, even if it’s on a gurney. Best thing is to call back in the morning.”

      “Can you get him a sandwich?”

      The woman laughed. “He’s already had three. Plus coffee, a doughnut and snacks from someone in the waiting room. He’s not allergic to peanuts, is he?”

      SEVEN

      Preoccupied by her father, Belle hadn’t slept well and was out of the starting blocks at five with no more than coffee and juice. As dawn broke, she was passing the airport, watching the plume of the Superstack in the distance, the world’s largest free-standing chimney, which supposedly scrubbed the air ninety-five per cent clean of sulphur dioxides.

      Slowing down after the Falconbridge Road railroad overpass, before she turned right into Tim’s for another java, she glanced at the large billboard warning about “The Silent Killer” and urging people with gas installations to install carbon-monoxide alarms. Hers was in the TV room. Recently when the window had been open and the van had been running outside, the unit had started beeping like gangbusters. Most houses had smoke alarms, but how many older homes added this precaution?

      At the hospital at seven a.m., she talked to the heavy-set nurse in the Emergency Room, bleary-eyed after a long shift and blowing her nose. Belle stepped back from the germfest. “Yes, he was seen by Dr. Cowl, a very sharp resident. Spotted it right off. Pemphigoid, an auto-immune disease of the elderly.”

      Not mere blisters, then. Belle put her hand on her chest, felt her heart play timpani. Her blood sugar needed a top-up. “Can they help him?” When she got to the office, she’d check the Internet for treatment options.

      The nurse smiled in reassurance. “Not to worry. A regimen of steroids, Prednisone probably, will clear him up fast. He’s a sweetie. Talked on and on about how he’d seen every film ever made.”

      Belle laughed. In nearly fifty years of working, so he had. “Then he’ll be going right back to the home?”

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