When he left, Wingate said, “What are you thinking?”

“I just want him to buy a pack of cigarettes. Look around.”

“No, Hazel. I mean with this case.”

“We need to develop a blind spot to the murder and the murder weapon right now and focus on the reason Wiest was down there in the first place. I think it’s fair to assume that Wiest somehow knew this girl, and we need to find out how. That might tell us where this girl is heading and what or who she’s looking for. If she isn’t already done.”

“I don’t want to make things any more complicated than they need to be, Hazel, but you should know Willan’s office called.”

“Oh. Excellent.”

“They said they expect to be notified in the future when cross-jurisdictional resources are being used, such as police cars in a countywide hunt.”

“Well, are they for amalgamation or not? Jesus.”

“There was considerable overtime in Fort Leonard.”

“So what. Isn’t he impressed with there being a killer on the loose?”

“I think he wanted to be notified.”

“What’s the point of having moles if they don’t report back to you?”

“I think it’s about getting the right clearances for extra –”

“Oh, fuck the clearances!” she shouted, standing suddenly. “I mean, just, we almost had two bodies on our hands just now …”

“I know.”

Her chair had shot out when she stood, and she reached behind herself to pull it back into place. She sat. There was a long silence in which her outburst seemed to bounce off the walls. “So, when are you heading out?” she asked him finally.

“Sorry?”

“Your vacation, James?”

“Oh.” Silence. “After my shift.”

“Okay. I’ll keep in touch with you.”

“Are you mad at me now?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Willan’s turning into everyone’s problem, Hazel.”

“I’m not mad.”

There was more paperwork to catch up on, another whole pile of it, and Hazel started drawing the file folders down in front of herself and flipping them open. One report spoke of three kids stoned out of their gourds and jumping into the Kilmartin River from the bridge at the end of Main Street. Their names were noted here, names she recognized as the offspring of multi-generation Port Dundas families. Had her cohort been as problematic when she was a teenager? There’d been fast cars and drinking, to be sure, but she didn’t recall them taking their very lives into their hands. In the 1950s there’d been no such things as drugs, not even soft drugs, but now there was something out there that could make kids so numb to risk that they’d jump into a fast-moving river at night. But all this was going to have to be back-burnered for now.

She called Dr. Pass when she was done with the surprising amount of petty crime that had unfolded in twenty-four hours in the locality. Hearing of Emily’s lethargy, he’d told Hazel to bring her in. He’d get a rush on the tests he’d take and have an answer for them quickly. She felt relieved after speaking to him, but she knew whatever he found, it wasn’t going to be as simple as a case of the flu. She could feel it.

Cartwright knocked on her door at eleven. “Cathy Wiest is here.”

“Send her in, please.”

Cathy entered, and her colour wasn’t much better than it had been the night before, but her eyes showed she was capable of thinking straight, and that was all Hazel needed. “Sit down, Cathy.” She waited a moment, then asked Cartwright, who was standing in the doorway to see if she’d be needed, to get them both coffees. “Did you sleep?”

“On and off. I kept … waking up.”

“Yes … sorry about that. And I’m sorry you’ve had such a terribly rough ride, Cathy. I’d do anything not to have you sitting in a police station so soon after your husband’s death.”

“Who was she?”

“We don’t know yet. But it would seem from the state of your house that she was looking for something. Can you imagine what it might have been?”

“I have no idea.”

The coffees arrived, with a plate of digestive cookies, and Cartwright left them on the desk and hurried out. Hazel pushed Cathy’s coffee toward her. “I have some difficult questions to ask you, Cathy. I’m sorry.”

“I understand.”

“Let’s just get the worst of it out of the way. Is it possible, do you think, that Henry was having an affair?”

“It would never have entered my mind before. Henry was …”

“I know.”

“I’m supposed to say it’s possible, right? If that girl killed him with that thing, how could anything not be possible. But not the Henry I knew. We’ve – we’d been together for twenty years.” She was studying Hazel’s reaction. “You’re divorced, aren’t you?”

This took her aback a little. “Yes.”

“Would you have known if your husband was, if he’d been … I’m sorry. Maybe he was.”

“It’s all right, Cathy. He was. But I didn’t know because I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Would you have known if you had been?”

She thought about it. It was pertinent. “I don’t know. I think I would have noticed if he was out a lot and I didn’t know where he was. Or if something about him had changed. Did Henry seem different to you at all lately?”

“My husband was the most even-tempered person I’ve ever known.”

“Well, was he often out of the store? During the day? Did he have appointments at night?”

“Sometimes. He was called on a lot, like you know. But there was nothing ever the least bit suspicious about any of it, and half the time, I’d run into the person he’d helped in town, or they’d come into the café and sing his praises. He was always where he said he’d been.”

“What about money, Cathy. How was he with money? Was there any trouble? I mean, in general?”

“I don’t think so. We were fine. I had my own business to keep track of, and he dealt with his own, so I don’t know the details, but the store was doing very well. I know that he did his own books. They’re at the store if you want to look at them. There was no debt, we paid for almost everything with cash, although I know he claimed every last cent that came through the store. I have to admit, I had a creative accountant for the café, but nothing serious, and Henry always said your taxes were an investment. It wasn’t worth the couple thousand a year it would cost him to have a bookkeeper. Henry was on the up-and-up. Unless he was the best liar on the planet and he was having everybody on …”

Hazel made a mental note to have someone go down to the hardware store and liberate the books. Was he buying something from this girl? For her? Would his accounts show anything untoward? There was that cash in the envelope, but fifty-five hundred dollars in cash wasn’t an alarming amount of money. She wasn’t going to comment on Cathy’s last statement because anything was painful conjecture at this point, and she didn’t need to go upsetting her unnecessarily. But of course it was possible Henry Wiest was not at all what he’d seemed. There were people like that and you never knew, or you found out in a shocking concentration of events that exposed a secret. After everything his widow had gone through, Hazel was praying fervently there wouldn’t be any more surprises.

Cathy was waiting for something, and the silence was agitating her. “What are you thinking now?” she asked.

“Nothing concrete. It’s just, we have to find out what brought him down to Queesik Bay.”

For some reason, it was this statement that caused Cathy to drop her head into her hands and begin to weep. “Oh god!” she cried into her hands. “What did he do?” She looked up at Hazel and her brown hair flew back, revealing eyes silver with tears and shimmering like the sky before a lightning strike. “What on earth did he do? What kind of person was he, that he would have been mixed up with a girl, that he would have had something of hers! And she … she kills him in a parking lot?”

“Please, Cathy, please try to calm down. None of this has to mean that Henry did anything. This girl could have been crazy. It could have been a random encounter and she got your address off his driver’s license.”