There appear to be no witnesses to the victim’s death. There was no evidence of a struggle, no blood or bullet wound on the victim, no clear signs of strangulation or blunt force trauma. The victim had his truck keys in his hand. Nothing at the scene suggested foul play; investigation reserved until results of autopsy.

Signed,

LYDIA BELLECOURT, RC QBPS

The band police had sent a car to pick Cathy up and she’d given permission for the autopsy to be performed on the reserve. It had its own lab – Westmuir’s chief pathologist, Dr. Jack Deacon, often just sent his tests there. The report said that Wiest had edema associated with an insect sting causing anaphylaxis and that a single sting to his face had caused his death. The toxicology had come back negative. So that was it. She called James Wingate, her detective constable, into her office and showed him the faxes.

“It was a wasp,” she said. He was standing in front of her desk, studying the report quickly. She put her finger down on the Cause of Death. It read, Anaphylaxis due to wasp sting. “My luck.”

“Why your luck?”

“No stinger. That would be proof of something at least.” She took the police report back and sorted it with the other pages. The cover sheet read, Please let me know if I can be of any further service and was signed by Bellecourt. “Did you ever meet him?”

“I’ve only been here nine months, Hazel.”

“You would have met him eventually,” she said. “You’ve probably seen his pickup a dozen times without even knowing it. One day you were going to have trouble with the wiring in your living room, or you were going to find a leak under your sink, and you’d ask someone for a name and that name would have been Henry. Everyone knew him. That’s why there were three hundred people in that church. I bet there were fifty underemployed contractors handing out their cards yesterday.”

“So he was well liked.”

“Loved.”

He continued reading the stapled fax pages and felt backwards for the seat of the chair in front of her desk. “There were no cigarettes in his pickup,” he said. He sat with a faint thud. “So he must have been stung just as he was getting out.”

“Hey, does it say pickup? It does, doesn’t it? He was driving the store’s pickup.”

“Is that a problem?”

“It kind of puts the kibosh on the cigarette-buying idea. He’d have gone down in his car.”

“Why.”

“Because he’s buying cigarettes on the sly, dummy. You don’t do that in a vehicle with your name painted on the door.”

“I’m still working on my detectivating skills.”

“But he must have gone down for a reason, right? If not cigarettes, then what?”

“Souvenirs.”

“On his way home with a load of filters?”

“Why is the pickup so important to you all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to know what he was doing down there. It would help me to know.”

He leaned over in the chair and slid his copy of the police report back onto her desk. “Why would it help you?”

“I knew him his whole life, James. But not on a daily basis – right? You see people around. But how well do you really know them?”

“That is a question for the ages,” he said, tolerantly.

“What I’m saying is, you don’t really need to know them. Not if things go the way they usually go. You just know what you know. You never have the desire or the occasion to ask if there’s anything you ought to know. But when a guy like this, at his age, and he’s found in a parking lot on an Indian reserve – ”

“In his pickup truck – ”

“Right. In his pickup truck.”

“It brings questions to mind.”

“It does.”

“And you knew him,” Wingate said.

“Yes. I knew him.”

He smiled at her and she recognized that glimmer of resignation so many of her co-workers already had. Nine months and he was already giving her that smile. “So what do you want to do, Skip?”

“I wish Jack Deacon could look at him and confirm for me that it was a wasp sting. And that it really was anaphylaxis.”

“If you have any doubts, you’d better hurry. Isn’t the funeral Thursday?”

“I know,” she said and she scowled. “I wonder if Cathy’s worried about why he was down there in the pickup. Eleven-thirty on a Saturday night. Who’d need a workman that time of night? We should find out if the souvenir shop sold filters.”

Wingate got up in front of her desk and retrieved one set of the faxes. “Souvenir filters? Let me handle this, okay? I’ll call Jack Deacon, get his opinion on the reserve hospital and their report.”

“That’s a good idea. Do that.”

“Then I’ll call this Officer Bellecourt and see if she thinks there could be any loose ends.”

“Talk to Jack first.”

“All right,” he said. “Listen, I’m sorry, Hazel. I didn’t know you knew him like that.”

“I even babysat him a couple times. My dad drove me down to Kehoe Glenn and came back afterwards to pick me up.”

“This was just a sad, tragic accident. But I’ll …,” he said, holding the reports in the air.

“Thank you, James.”

______

The rest of the day passed with no news and minimal disruption. Had Hazel known it was going to be the last such day for some time, she would have made an effort to enjoy it more. But it was hard to enjoy anything, and a dark cloud sagged over her. There were still reports to read, though, there was never any peace, not even on a Monday. She’d had to send Constable Eileen Bail down to the big warehouse clothing store to take a description of a young male shoplifter from the store manager; she had to personally look into reports that primary school kids were smoking cigarettes in the alleyway behind the Beverly Cinema; and she still had to compose an excitement-inducing text for the Port Dundas Annual Main Street BBQ, an event the OPS paid for every Labour Day as a public relations activity. Those who didn’t like it called it a stunt, and it was a stunt, but most people liked it. Sometimes Hazel thought people asked for too little. The person who’d always loved it was Ray Greene. Frankly, sometimes she wished they’d do something different.

Henry. Henry Wiest was dead. Hazel was pretty confident nothing would come of her thoroughness, but she consoled herself with the thought that Henry would have appreciated it.

The next morning, Jack’s voice floated up from the speakerphone in Hazel’s office. Wingate took notes. It turned out Deacon had not seen the autopsy report. He’d met Dr. Brett and discussed the case with him, and he’d relayed what he knew to Cathy. But, he said, he hadn’t wanted to assume privileges. So Wingate had faxed the autopsy along with Bellecourt’s report to him and arranged for Wiest’s medical records to be copied down to him in Mayfair as well. “Well, it’s interesting,” he was saying, “I’ve got the report and then I learned there were a couple of photographs as well. They didn’t send you those, now did they?”

“No.”

“Well, I decided to call this Bellecourt, and she said there were some pics of the body and the sting wound and she emailed them to me.”

“You can do that, huh?”

“Yes, Hazel. Anyway, it’s clear he was stung by something. Actually, twice. A wasp will do that. He was stung once on the face and once on the forehead, but it was hidden by his hairline.”

“So there’s at least one thing they missed,” Hazel said, leaning over.

“Not really. The tox screen is clear.”

“He was forty-six, Jack.”

“It’s sad, but it doesn’t create doubt about the cause of death for me. There’s quite a bit of pale edema around the facial wound in one of the pictures. It looks like a sting. His prostaglandins and the leukotrines were through the roof, and that’s consistent with anaphylaxis, and pre-existing atherosclerosis is a risk factor in anaphylactic deaths.”

“English, Jack,” said Hazel.