“You tried the Ontario Provincial Police?”
“Nothing. They ran it through ViCLAS — ”
“ViCLAS?”
“Violent Crime Linking Analysis System.”
“I knew that.”
“The Orillia OPP are cutting edge. Nothing.”
“Did you try Interpol?”
“Of course. I was thorough. And imaginative — I was open to variations on the theme. But nothing, nada, rien.”
“So we wait. It’s grotesque, but that’s all we can do. Have you talked to Pope again? Or the anthropologists? How in the hell were they fooled, if Pope saw right off that the scene was a fake?”
“Forewarned is forearmed. He knew after you called what to expect. Poor Birbalsingh and Hubbard — they walked in cold. They had no reason to be skeptical. The condition of the bodies, their dress, the sealed crypt, it all seemed consistent. It was an archeological site”
“Their findings to be entered in the annals of science.”
“Does science have annals? Yeah, Morgan, I went back to talk to them both. Professor Birbalsingh was amused more than anything. And intrigued. He said when we catch the killer he’d like to talk to him. It might help in his forensic research with authentic antiquities. Dr. Hubbard was less sanguine. I asked her if she could put a trace on the clothing. She already had, and came up with nothing. It would be virtually impossible to track down unless it had been stolen from a collection, she said. More likely it was bought in one of those strange little shops in London that cater to every imaginable taste. I couldn’t argue. I’ve never been to London.”
“Is it worth getting Scotland Yard to check around?”
“I’ve already asked. The chap on the phone was absolutely charming, asked me to fax the paperwork and they’d get right on it, and wanted to know if I dated.”
“If you’re dated?”
“No, Morgan. He was flirting. It was quite flattering.”
“Desperate measures, given the Atlantic — ”
“He said I should look him up if I ever got over. Constable Stenabaugh. He sounded quite handsome.”
“You are a desperate and fickle woman.”
“Rachel and I went out to see Alexander Pope.”
She knew that would surprise him, that they went together.
“He is a lovely man,” she continued. “And he has a breathtaking home. Pre-Victorian, I don’t know what you’d call it — Georgian Colonial, neo-American Federal. You’ve got to see it; you’d love the furnishings. Some of the paint must be ten layers thick, some of the pieces he’s made himself, right down to faking the paint. We stayed for a sauna. He’s a fascinating man. Beautiful body — he must be fifty.”
He looked at her quizzically. In his brief absence she had made new friends. He would not have anticipated the relationship with Officer Naismith. Miranda was generally slow in warming to women. Her explanation was a paraphrase from the old comic strip Pogo: “we have seen the enemy and it is us.” Pope was less unexpected. What Morgan had taken as the man’s pleasantly austere asexuality, he now realized, from the tenor of Miranda’s voice, was mistaken by women for smouldering passion refined through an aura of eccentric gentility.
Strange, he thought. We can’t both be right.
“Did you ask him for a list of people who might have the skills to close in the alcove?”
“Yeah. He laughed. He told me there’s nobody, apart from himself. And, he assured me, he was working in Arlington, Texas, through the fall and winter. It checked out. He’s got a major reconstruction project down there, where they’re anxious to pay for their past — unlike post-colonials who try to obscure it. He was on the job every day, seven days a week, for a full five months.”
“And they died during that time?”
“Ellen Ravenscroft wrote the report. She was sure they died in the depths of winter. Fairly sure.”
“How could she tell?”
“Micro-organisms; decomposition tables; schedules and charts of this and that. They have their methods. Once she knew what she was looking for, it was easy.”
“Ain’t that always the way!”
“We ran chemical analyses on the plaster ingredients and paint. It was like an alchemical inversion, Morgan: old ingredients newly mixed to look old.”
“What about sexual assault?”
“Tissues were too far gone — ”
“This isn’t about sex, anyway. Not this one.”
“Wrong, Morgan. I think it is. Not the act of, maybe, but it has to be about sex. You wait and see. You don’t mount cadavers in a headless embrace without Freud in attendance.”
He smiled enigmatically.
“I thought you were in the Cayman Islands.”
“No,” he said. “No, I wasn’t.”
Miranda left for headquarters. Morgan planned to walk over to the university and talk with Hubbard and Birbalsingh. He took possession of his wingback again, settled down, and stared into the middle distance.
We wait, he thought. There are cold cases to deal with, and investigative legwork to be done for other teams, but we wait. There is no way to anticipate the killer’s next move. Will we even recognize it?
Of course, or he’s failed!
It’s bound to be different. Perhaps not a theatrical tableau, but if it doesn’t evoke the original, his genius is wasted.
To have his bodies remain undiscovered, that would have been failure. So, the sick diorama must have been set up after demolition was approved by the city. But if we’re right, spurred on by his success the killer will reach for a cumulative effect. Then he’ll have, and we’ll have, a pattern.
That’s small consolation for the deaths in the offing.
Outside, Morgan surveyed the street. He lived in the heart of the Annex, surrounded by looming Victorian houses and well-kept between-the-wars homes with verandahs. It was well past the middle of April, buds were forming on the huge silver maples along the street, and the occasional willow showed the beginnings of green. Tiny lawns had been raked of winter debris and the pavement was swept clean of the gritty detritus that had accumulated through winter in ridges by the curb. A few crocuses and hyacinths poked upwards in flowerbeds, above tulips and daffodils that were secretly breaking out of their chrysalises in the cold earth below. Cars gleamed; in the winter there was no point in keeping them washed. Windows on houses were sparkling clean. Robins squabbled in the air and squirrels raced under cars, over lawns, leapt among branches in desperate games of hide-and-go-seek.
As he walked down to Harbord Street, he conjured with images of Rapa Nui, playing them through his mind against the backdrop of his neighbourhood in the Annex. Cabbagetown had changed. Suburbia was foreign territory. High-rise condos sapped the soul. But in the Annex, Morgan felt comfortable. The smell of barbeques in summer, the grating of snow shovels in winter, the excitement of spring, the slow apprehension of autumn, cars in all seasons parked bumper to bumper — these defined the dimensions of home. At any one point in the year, he was aware of it all.
Sometimes, among the most striking moai buried to the shoulder in ravines below the quarry, great statues leaning forward, gazing over the grasslands of the island toward the Pacific, he felt a vague longing for the more familiar world against which his experience on Rapa Nui was shaped and measured. It was this merging of worlds within that made his adventure exciting and poignant. Travel is about being someplace and being away from someplace at the same time.
The moai that reached the coast were set on platforms called ahu, and they would have been given eyes of obsidian on polished coral and faced with their backs to the sea.
In his mind he could still see stone and wood tablets in the marketplace, meticulously etched with the island’s Rongorongo script by carvers who could not understand the writings of their ancestors, yet honoured the indecipherable glyphs by their scrupulous reproductions. He could see rich Polynesian complexions and luxuriant long hair, and a few mirroring variations of himself, slathered in sunscreen, shielded under the wonderfully familiar floppiness of an old Tilley hat. He could see the clean streets of Hanga Roa, the bustling village on the southwestern shore where virtually all of the island’s population live, and on the streets the occasional car and the horses and dogs and people vying for casual pre-eminence. All this mixed in a mental melange with his perceptions of Toronto in the promising spring.