"You're saying she was strangled?"

"Strangled? No, Dr. Gant doesn't say strangled. Not much neck left, you know- so no ligature marks there and no available hyoid bone. Call the doc if you want, but strangled, no, I don't think we can go out on that particular limb. One way or another, though, this little girl suffocated."

"Any other findings?"

"Talk to Setevic in Chemistry. His report says one fiber: red, trilobal. No blood, no hair- except the girl's."

"Nothing else about the fiber?"

"Talk to Setevic. Oh, there's a note here- they found a bracelet of some kind in her jeans pocket."

"Day she disappeared, Katie was wearing a charm bracelet."

"Right. Says here it's a charm bracelet. You'll get it with the rest of the stuff. Is Detective Delorme there with you?"

"Yes."

"I've never met this woman, but I'm guessing she's good-looking. Sex appeal in the red zone?"

"Yeah, you could say that." Delorme just then was squinting at a fax, creases of concentration between her brows. Cardinal tried and failed not to find it appealing. "You want a phone number or something, Len?"

"Do I ever not. Her attitude is like someone used to getting her way, that's all. In fact, put her on right now. Let me talk to her."

Cardinal handed the phone to Delorme. She closed her eyes and listened. Gradually, the skin over her cheekbones colored- it was like watching the mercury rise in a thermometer. A moment later she placed the receiver gently on the hook. She said, "Okay. That's fine. So some men they don't react well to pressure."

McLeod yelled from across the room, "I heard that, Delorme."

THE turnout for Katie Pine's funeral was larger than anyone had expected. Five hundred people showed up at St. Boniface, a tiny red-brick church on Sumner Street, to pray over the small, closed coffin. The media were out in force. Delorme recognized Roger Gwynn and Nick Stoltz from the Lode, Nick Stoltz had got her into hot water as a teenager by snapping a picture of her and her boyfriend romantically entwined on a bench in what was then Teachers College Park. To him and most readers of the Lode, it was simply a picture of autumn splendor, but to Delorme's parents it meant that their daughter had not, after all, spent the evening with her friends at the sodality. She had been grounded for two weeks- a punishment that gave her boyfriend's wandering heart time to conceive an affection for Delorme's rival. Ever since, photographers had been assigned a place in Delorme's personal inferno only slightly cooler than that reserved for rapists.

There was the Sudbury newswoman, with a female camera operator, Delorme noticed, and a three-hundred-pound sound man. She had seen a CBC van out front, and two pews up, she recognized a reporter from The Globe amp; Mail who had done a piece on Delorme after she had put Algonquin Bay 's three-term mayor in prison. It's not every day a child is found murdered on a desolate island in a frozen lake, but Delorme hadn't figured it for national news.

The Globe reporter trained his famished, newshound's eye on Dorothy Pine, slow with grief, being led up the front steps. The reporter moved forward, but Jerry Commanda somehow managed to interpose his frame between him and the grieving mother, and when the aisle cleared, the reporter had subsided into his pew, apparently nursing a sudden abdominal spasm.

The police were here not only to pay their respects to a murdered little girl but also on the off-chance the killer might show up at the funeral. Delorme was in the last pew, a good vantage point from which to see any lurkers. Cardinal was standing at the front well off to one side, looking somber in his black suit and- Delorme had to admit- handsome in a battered kind of way. Bruise-colored rings under his eyes lent a soulful cast to his appearance that a romantic- and Delorme did not for one minute consider herself a romantic- might find very compelling. Fiercely loyal to his wife, Cardinal, if what Delorme heard was true, despite her bouts with mental illness. It was mentioned only infrequently in the squad room, and then in hushed tones.

As a ticket out of Special Investigations, working a homicide with the subject of her own investigation was not what Delorme would have chosen. Not a way to make friends or influence people, but then that isn't why you go into Special Investigations in the first place.

John Cardinal seemed as uncorrupt as any cop Delorme had ever met; it was hard to give much weight to Musgrave's worries about him. Before the funeral began, he'd chatted amiably with the old priest, whom Delorme pegged as a not-too-secret drinker. She hadn't thought of Cardinal as a churchgoer; she'd never seen him in St. Vincent 's, but then he'd hardly be likely to attend the French church.

The truth was, she didn't know him well. The nature of her job kept her aloof from the rest of the force. And one thing you learn in Special: Everyone has a story, and it's never the story you expect. So she put the RCMP-Kyle Corbett business and the Toronto rumors into one compartment of her mind, and concentrated on watching those citizens of Algonquin Bay who thought it worthwhile to attend the funeral of a murdered girl.

Arsenault and Collingwood were outside, videotaping mourners and license plates- a purely speculative endeavor, since they had neither a suspect nor a license plate at this point.

Suppose the killer shows, Delorme wondered. Suppose he were to sit down right next to me, instead of this white-haired lady in the parrot-green suit. How would I recognize him? By smell? Fangs and a long tail? Hooves? Delorme was not very experienced with murderers, but she understood that expecting a killer to look different from Cardinal or the mayor or the boy next door was complete fantasy. He could be the heavyset man in the Maple Leafs jersey- what kind of slob wears a hockey sweater to a funeral? Or he could be the Indian in the overalls that said Algonquin Plumbing on the back- why wasn't he with the group surrounding Mrs. Pine? She recognized at least three former high-school classmates; the killer might be one of them. She remembered pictures from the books on serial killers- Berkowitz, Bundy, Dahmer- unremarkable men, all. No, no. Katie Pine's killer would be different, but he wouldn't necessarily look different.

You should be making me do more, Delorme thought to herself, as she looked at Cardinal. You should be on my back night and day, getting me to chase down even the slenderest threads. We should be making Forensic's life a misery till they cough up everything they've got.

Instead, Cardinal had somehow got Dyson to hand her the lowest-priority stuff in his In box- his bloody burglaries and robberies. A knight move? Keep her too busy to run her check on him? Then again, it could be just business as usual at The Great Hall of Chauvinists. Lucky for them I happen to be proud of my work in Special. I'm single and I'm still young- young enough, anyway- and I can devote every waking hour to an investigation if I want. What else do I have? she might have added on a darker day. What a thrill it had been to close in on the mayor, to nail his corrupt little friends. And Delorme had done all that herself. But Dyson and Cardinal and McLeod and the rest, sometimes she cursed their anglophone heads, the bunch of them.

"Have to pay your dues, Delorme," Dyson had quacked at her this morning. She was tempted to grab the honey-glazed doughnut off his desk and wolf it down, just to see the expression on his face. "Everybody pays their dues. You don't come onto the squad and go straight to the top; it doesn't work that way."

"I've only been six years in Special. That counts for nothing, I suppose. I don't want to work his damn robberies, his break-and-enters."