“I’m afraid we can’t, ma’am,” said Sanders, with barely concealed impatience. “If you let boys do it, you have to let girls do it, too. You know, equality.”

“Piffle,” said the old lady. “Anyway, as Georgia and I were coming along South Drive, there was one of those vans following the girl delivering the papers, moving very slowly just behind her. I tell you I was very worried.”

“It was probably the manager for the district, ma’am—they often drive around to make sure everything is all right.”

“No, it wasn’t, young man. Because Georgia and I went right over and looked in the window at him, and stared at his license plate as well, and he speeded up and drove away. I tell you, he was one of those rapists, and you people should do something about him.”

Sanders smiled, weary of the endless politeness this sort of duty required. That was what happened—nobody had anything useful to say, but every crank wanted to tell him what was wrong with the city, the police, the neighbourhood. “Well, the young woman who was injured wasn’t delivering papers, ma’am. She was probably attacked later in the morning as well. But I’ll pass your comment along to the officers who patrol this area at that time in the morning. Thank you for your help.” He kept smiling until the door closed in his face, and he turned away. He wondered if “neighbourhoods adjacent to the ravine” could be construed as a description of Eleanor’s house. It did back onto a ravine, although it wasn’t quite the same one. Knocking on Eleanor’s door was a tempting thought. Except that he’d still have this sour-faced kid stumping along behind him. It wasn’t Sanders’ fault that the kid’s weekend leave had been canceled and his love-life thrown for a loop. That’ll teach him, he thought vindictively.

Five days later Sanders was sitting in the mobile unit, cursing its limited space and general lack of creature comforts. There wasn’t even a bloody restaurant where you could get a lousy cup of coffee closer than fifteen minutes’ brisk walk away. And what did they have? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. At least fifty suspicious-looking characters had been reported, most of them quiet, albeit odd-looking, neighbours, a few of them aged rummies who had staggered in from busier streets and neighbourhoods, or up from the haven of the ravine where they spent their nights. None of them seemed likely to have had the strength or the desire to strip, rape, beat, and slice up a girl, even a smallish one. He had painstakingly followed up on most of the leads, only to end up back at nothing. And meanwhile the female population of the city was getting edgier and edgier.

The medical report lay in front of him. Contrary to expectation, she was still alive, but only just. There had been traces of recent intercourse, which along with the patterns of bruising on her body were consistent with rape by someone with blood type O positive. Her skull had been battered by a rounded object, possibly about twenty centimeters in diameter. There was probably massive brain damage. Other than that, she had been a vigorous and healthy woman, which probably accounted for the fact that she was still alive. That, and an unusually sturdy bone structure in her head. She was injured shortly before being brought into the hospital, in the opinion of the first people who had seen her. That would seem to let out the boyfriend, thought Sanders, who was at work then. Besides, the grisly details were too much like those in the earlier deaths to make him a serious contender.

The single ray of hope lay in those gold synthetic fibers imbedded in the remains of her sweater. So far Forensic had been able to establish that it was carpeting, and of a type of fiber patented by a U.S. company and made in limited quantities under license in Canada. Some patient telephoning had found them three manufacturers that used that particular fiber—it was pricy for a synthetic and most of the domestic market for carpet that expensive was for pure wool. Sanders had discovered that commercial clients, however, liked its durable properties and its imperviousness to damage from large rug-cleaning machines, and so it found its way into expensive office broadloom. Only one manufacturer was willing to admit to producing that shade of gold, and Dubinsky, working in the comfort of their own office, with their own telephone and coffee supply, was getting lists of people to whom it had been supplied. Impatient for an answer, Sanders called for the third time that morning.

“For chrissake, Dubinsky, what in hell is going on down there? Haven’t you got anything yet?”

“Hold on,” said Dubinsky, muttering as he reached for some papers on his desk. “It’s almost impossible to get hold of anyone in those bloody offices who knows anything until ten o’clock, and it took them forever to find who had the information, but here it is. All the gold was ordered by an interior designer, who says that he got it for a small mixed-use building on Davenport Road—an antique dealer on the ground floor, and some architects on the upper floors, plus, I think, an importing company. He’ll give us the names of all the people as soon as he looks them up. There was some yardage left over, which he had been planning to put in another smaller office he was doing, but the client decided he didn’t like it once he saw the colour, so the manufacturer jobbed it off to one of the cut-rate retailers on Finch—Family Carpet, I think. They sell a lot of rugs. The chances that they’ll know who bought this piece are pretty small, but I’ll go out there and see what can be done.”

“Great,” said Sanders. “Either she was raped in the middle of the day in an office building on Davenport and carried off, no doubt under the amazed eyes of various passersby, to some vehicle and dumped in the ravine, or she was raped in the apartment of some thrifty nut who buys his rugs at a cut-rate outlet, or God knows what. Well, go out to the carpet place, and good luck.” He hung up the receiver and stared around him at the cramped walls. One more day of this and they’d be able to dismantle it, and return, empty-handed, to the Dundas Street station house. Still, he thought, maybe we should send someone to go over those offices inch by inch, just in case.

Chapter 2

April Fools’ Day and Jane Conway sat hunched over her desk and stared without seeing at the pile of Grade Nine lab reports in front of her. If only she could force herself to mark them, to get them done and out of the way. The childishly messy script and awkward diagrams of the one lying on the top of the pile depressed her. Perhaps if she put that one at the bottom and started with a slightly better-looking one? This was a stupid game to try to play with herself. She ran her fingers through her light brown hair with irritation to lift it off her face. God, how she hated Sundays! Dreary, drab, dull—the April sun poured in through her dirty windows and made her apartment look tawdry and poor. And she was tired, tired beyond belief, and felt wretched. The scene in Miss Johnson’s office kept crowding into her mind, the scene when her last thin thread of security and respectability had been neatly sliced.

It had been classic. Friday afternoon, that’s when they always give you the bad news, so you can spend the weekend digging your fingernails into your palms in rage and despair on your own time, instead of theirs. It wasn’t really that she liked teaching. She had hated that first year, and realized that most of the students disliked her, except for a few drooping masochists who licked her boots and fawned pathetically for the occasional smile or pat of approval. It was Doug, in his smugly practical way, who told her that if she hated it, she should quit at Christmas; but of course she hadn’t. She had waited until her one-year contract hadn’t been renewed, so that she could suffer through the maximum amount of humiliation over it all. Graduate school had seemed such a haven at that point. In her naiveté she had thought that no one could fire you from graduate school. They just don’t call it that. Now what was she going to do? For years she had known that she would need a safe, conservative job to balance her private self, or. . . . Already she could feel herself being sucked into the dark chaos she sensed was all around her. Dammit! They had almost promised her when she had taken this crummy fill-in appointment—five months, and having to work with someone else’s notes and ideas, with every student comparing you unfavourably with the person you were replacing—had promised that when the science department expanded next year, there would be a job for her. Now what was she going to do? But her mind refused to consider the future. When she tried to think about it, her mind shied away, dodged, turned to other things, refused to compute beyond tomorrow’s teaching load.