“What the hell is going on?” Hazel said.

“Well, I have a theory,” said Deacon, “I already resected the ‘sting’ on his forehead, but I thought I’d wait for you to do the second.” He set the pin aside and picked up a scalpel from the tray beside the autopsy table. He set the tip of the blade above the wound and drew it down through the centre of it, splitting the skin neatly in two directly through the black mark. There was no blood at all. Hazel turned away, feeling her skin fizzing. “There you go,” she heard Deacon say.

She turned back and looked at the edge of the cut. He’d separated the incision with his fingers. “Can I swab this?” Spere asked.

“Go right ahead, but I can already tell you what it is.”

Hazel looked into the wound. The channel Deacon had split in half was about the pin’s length and its edges were as black as the exterior of the wound. “It’s a burn,” she said quietly.

“Got it in one,” said the pathologist.

“From what?”

Spere was running a Q-tip upwards from inside Henry Wiest’s cheek to the skin. He sealed it in an evidence bag.

Deacon removed his hands from the man’s skin. “You know what can cause a massive infarction, pathological signs of anaphylaxis, and a burn mark?”

“I gather a pin from a hospital bulletin board isn’t the answer.”

“No, it isn’t.” Deacon turned to Detective Spere. “Howard?”

Spere was lost in thought for a moment, a rare state for him, Hazel thought. Then he said, “He was electrocuted.”

She stood in Deacon’s office with his phone against her ear. She’d been on hold for a full minute. Finally, the friendly voice returned. “Queesik Bay Police Service.”

“Who’s your acting chief?” she asked brusquely.

“Do you mean shift chief or the commander?”

“Whoever’s top dog down there at this very moment.”

“That’s Commander LeJeune.”

“Put me through to him, please.”

She waited a moment. “LeJeune here.” It was a woman’s voice.

“This is Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef calling from the Port Dundas OPS. I need to have a face-to-face with you and one of your constables, Lydia Bellecourt.”

“What is this in reference to, Detective Inspector?”

“An investigation of yours.”

“Well, I’m just heading out for the day, but I can see you first thing. Say, eight-thirty, if that’s not too early.”

“It’s too late. I’m already in Mayfair. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

] 6 [

Keeping well within the cover of the forest, Larysa passed two days in hunger. And yet they were the best days she’d passed in recent memory. She’d been keeping the sun to her right during the mornings and letting it glide down to her left in the afternoons and evenings. Just before dusk on both days, the orange light poured through the trees sideways, just as it had when she’d been a child and her parents had let her wander in the woods near their house. Larysa knew that the sun’s light took mere minutes to reach the earth, while the light from stars could take centuries. But she liked to imagine, as she kept to the cooler, darker parts of the forest, that this pre-dusk light was the exact same that had shone on her as a girl.

It was almost Tuesday morning now. There had been no human sounds since she left Queesik, only the sounds of birds singing and squirrels scolding. Being cautious was her only option now, the only thing that was keeping her alive. By now, Bochko would be on her trail, but with any luck, he had no idea exactly where she was headed. Knowing him though, she wouldn’t be surprised if he could smell her from a hundred kilometres away.

By the late morning, the forest had begun to thin out, and she was close to where the towns of the Lake District started. She walked the shoreline of a small lake that fell to scrub and marsh around its western edge, and she felt exposed. But standing in the open, she saw that she was very close to Kehoe Glenn. That was where Henry had lived. In the distance, she saw where the highway divided and one part of it swung down over a little bridge – that swoopy feeling in her stomach every time they drove over it – and went under an archway with the name of the town on it. If she waited until nightfall, she could cross the highway and track up and around the town. But nightfall was twelve hours away and she didn’t think she had time to wait. She’d have to make some moves out in the open.

In two and a half days, she’d eaten nothing but berries and wild onions and chewed on burdock leaves. She’d been sick a couple of times, but her strength had got her this far, and it would get her the rest of the way.

When dusk began to fall, she chanced it over to the town-side of the highway and vanished into the trees below it. She hoped she hadn’t attracted any attention. She was wearing a blue T-shirt under a ratty black sweater and a pair of grey sweatpants that were too big for her, with the word CANADA in black letters down the right pantleg. Perhaps she looked like a local.

She followed the lights of the town laterally and then emerged onto a quiet, sidestreet intersection. There was a corner store there and on the other side of the road a car dealership. Everything would be easier if she had a car, but she had no idea how to steal one, and a theft would draw attention. However, outside the corner store, a bike was leaning up against a lamppost, and she saw the opportunity to get two things she needed at once. She went in, walking casually and looking down. There was a kid standing at the front counter getting the shop owner to count out candies from a bucket into a paper bag. He was taking the candies out one by one with a small pair of plastic tongs. She was quick about it: she took a bottle of water quietly out of the fridge and pushed it down the front of her pants. Then she took a pack of cookies off the shelf and stuck it up under her shirt. Then she idled in front of the magazine rack for a moment while the kid got his order tallied up on the cash register and slipped a map of the county, with all of its major towns shown in little inserts: Dublin, Kehoe Glenn, Kehoe River, Mulhouse Springs, Port Dundas, Hoxley, Hillschurch, Fort Leonard. When the kid was going for his money and she figured they’d both be distracted, she strolled out of the store, silently wheeled the kid’s bike away from the post, and then hopped on it and rode away down a cross-street as fast as she could. If there was any shouting about it, she was too far away to hear.

She rode the bike into a little gully where a stream would have been running in the spring. According to the street guide of Kehoe Glenn, she was close now to the address she’d seen on the man’s driver’s licence. She rode along the edge of the gully.

When she got to what she thought was the house, she crept silently around the front and confirmed it was number 72. Then she returned to the ravine. She wanted darkness to fall before she tried to go in; she wanted the house empty. It wasn’t empty now. There was a face in the back window, looking down, doing something. She presumed it was the lady of the house. She was talking to someone else in the room, a person Larysa couldn’t see.

She waited until nightfall, but the lights in the house stayed on until the very early hours of the morning, and when Larysa next saw the woman, there was no doubt she was alone, and that she had not slept. Perhaps she would never sleep again. Dawn gave way to daytime, and Larysa finished the stolen cookies by midday. Her water was almost gone. She tried not to fall asleep – the woman would have to leave at some point – but she dozed anyway. When she woke, the woman was still in the house.

By the time the sun had vanished for a fourth time in the west – Wednesday night – the emptiness of her stomach and the awareness that staying in one place was dangerous convinced her she had to act. She left the bike in the trees and crept up the edge of the lawn and along the red-bricked side of the house around to the corner. From here, she could see the road. She sidled along the front of the house to the door and knocked lightly. She’d carefully kept the two parts of her weapon in different pockets in the front of her pants, but now she snapped the cartridge onto the muzzle and held the device against her leg. She’d picked up a rock the size of her fist in the ravine as back-up. It was in her left hand.