The Fields of Grief. Giles Blunt
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Kelly told him about her latest frustrations in trying to make it as an artist. New York was a hard town to be broke in. She had to share an apartment with three other women, and they didn’t always get along. And she was obliged to work at two jobs to make ends meet: she was assisting a painter named Klaus Meier – stretching canvases for him, doing his books – and also working as a waitress three days a week. It didn’t leave a lot of time for her own painting.
‘And doing all this, you never feel the pull of suburban life? The yearning for a small town?’
‘Never. I miss Canada sometimes, though. It’s kind of hard to be friends with Americans.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Americans are the friendliest people in the world, on the surface. At first I found it almost intoxicating – they’re so much more outgoing than Canadians. And they’re not afraid to have a good time.’
‘That’s true. Canadians are more reserved.’
I’m acting, Cardinal thought. I’m not having a conversation, I’m acting like a man having a conversation. This is how it’s done: you listen, you nod, you ask a question. But I’m not here. I’m as gone as the World Trade Center. My heart is Ground Zero. He wanted to talk to Catherine about this, but Catherine was not there.
He struggled to focus.
‘Somewhere along the line Americans invented a kind of fake intimacy,’ Kelly said. ‘They’ll tell you about their divorce the first time they meet you, or their history of child abuse. I’m not kidding. I had one guy tell me how his father used to “incest” him, as he put it. That was on the first date. In the beginning I thought everyone was really trusting, but they’re not at all. They just don’t have any sense of decorum. Why are you smiling?’
‘It’s just funny, hearing you talk about decorum. Unconventional girl like you.’
‘I’m actually pretty conventional, when you get down to it. I have a feeling it’s going to be my downfall as an artist. God, look at the trees.’
The drive to Toronto took four hours. Cardinal dropped Kelly at a Second Cup on College Street where she had arranged to meet an old friend, then he headed over to the Forensic Centre on Grenville.
As a piece of architecture, the Forensic Centre is of no interest whatsoever. It’s just a slab tossed up, like so many other government buildings, in the era when poured concrete replaced brick and stone as the material of choice. Inside, it’s a collection of putty-coloured dividers, tweedy carpet, and mordant cartoons cut from newspapers and taped above people’s desks.
Cardinal had been here many times, though not to the documents section, and the very familiarity of the place unnerved him. He was drowning in the deepest agony of his life; everything should have been changed. And yet the security guards, the rattling elevator, the plain offices, desks, charts and displays were exactly as before.
‘Okay, so we got three little items here,’ Tommy Hunn said, laying them out on the laboratory counter. Unlike the building, Tommy had changed. His hair had got thinner, and his belt was hidden beneath a roll of flab, as if there were a dachshund asleep under his shirt.
‘We got one suicide note. We got one notebook in which said suicide note may or may not have been written. And we have one nasty sympathy card with a typed message inside.’
‘Why don’t we start with the sympathy card?’ Cardinal said. ‘It’s not going to be related to the other two items.’
‘Sympathy card first,’ Hunn said. He put on a pair of latex gloves, removed the card from its plastic folder and opened it. ‘“How does it feel, asshole?”’ he read in a flat monotone. ‘“Just no telling how things will turn out, is there?” Cute.’
He held the note next to the window, tilting it to catch the light.
‘Well, it’s an ink-jet printer, I can see that right off. No idiosyncrasies visible to the naked eye. Not my eye, anyway. But let’s do a little detecting.’ He held a loupe to his eye and brought the note up to his face. ‘Here we go. Printer flaw on the second line. Look at the h’s and the t’s.’
He handed Cardinal the loupe. At first Cardinal couldn’t see anything, but when his eye adjusted he could make out a pale, threadlike line running through the crossbars of the h’s and the t’s.
‘The good news is, if a printer does something like that, it does it consistently. You notice there’s no flaw through the first line of type. But if we had another page the guy printed out, it would show the same flaw on the second line.’
‘How helpful is that going to be?’ Cardinal asked.
‘Without another sample to compare it to? Not helpful at all. And the bad news is, they change the cartridge, they change the flaws. Far as we’re concerned, it’s like they’ve bought themselves a whole new printer.’
Cardinal pointed to the notebook. ‘What can you do with these?’
‘Depends what you want to know.’
‘I’d like to be sure the note was written with the same pen as the rest of the notebook. And when it was written in relation to the last entries. If you open it to the one that mentions “John’s birthday”.’
‘John’s birthday. Ha! Maybe she was addressing it to you!’ Hunn flicked through the pages, then held the notebook up to the light the way he had the card. ‘Oh, yeah. You’ve got impressions here. I can make out “Dear John”. First thing we do is stick ’em both in the comparator.’
He lifted a wide door on something labelled VSC 2000.
‘Look through the window there, when I flick the switch. I can shine several different kinds of light on the samples, see what kicks up. Ink may look identical to the human eye, but even the same make and model of pen will show differences under infrared. The chemistry of different ink batches reacts differently. I can’t tell you how many fraudulent wills I’ve busted using this gizmo. “Dear John.” Gotta love it.’
Cardinal bent over to peer through the window. The writing on the pages glowed.
‘These are identical,’ Hunn said from behind him. ‘Same pen wrote the suicide note and the birthday note.’
‘Can you tell me which one was written first?’
‘Sure. First thing we do is stick it in the humidifier.’ Hunn put the notebook into a small machine with a glass front that looked like a toaster oven. ‘Just needs a minute or so. Indentations will show up way better if the paper is humid.’
The machine beeped, and he took out the notebook. ‘Now we’ll run a little ESDA magic on it, see what we can see.’
‘A little what?’
‘E-S-D-A. Electrostatic detection apparatus.’
This was a hulk of a machine with a venting hood on top. Hunn laid the notebook down so that the single page was flat against a layer of foam. Then he spread a sheet of plastic wrap over it.
‘Underneath the foam we got a vacuum that pulls the air through. It’ll hold the document and the plastic down tight. Now I take my Corona unit – don’t worry, I’m not gonna open my pants …’
Hunn picked up a wandlike instrument and flicked a switch. ‘Little mother puts out several thousand volts,’ he said over the hum. He waved it over the plastic sheet a few times. There was no change that Cardinal could see.
‘Now I take my fairy dust …’ Hunn shook what looked like iron filings out of a small canister. ‘Actually, these are tiny glass beads covered in toner. I’m just gonna cascade ’em over my set-up here …’
He poured the black powder over the plastic that covered the notebook page. The beads slid off, leaving toner behind in the impressions. There was a flash of light.
‘Now