The man had his forearms up to deflect the blows. “Jesus, Vic, I’m fine, stop pounding me.”

“Holy frig, I thought you were dead, I thought you were a fucking dead man.”

“I’m not! Okay? Now what is that thing?”

Wingate was kneeling over it, disentangling the end of the grappling hook from the netting. The three other men gathered behind.

It was a mannequin.

They took over one of the cells in the holding-pen hall, cells that were almost always empty, and this sometimes struck Hazel as a pity because they were nice cells, as far as cells went, with barred windows looking across Porter Street to the little picnic park, and they had passably comfortable chairs and cots. Only one of the cells had a sink and a toilet, as even the most pessimistic predictions of the men who had built this station house in 1923 did not foresee a time when more than one man too dangerous to be permitted access to the public washrooms would ever be kept in these cells at the same time. And indeed, they had been right. The cots had been added in the fifties, when the most common inmate was a drunk needing an airing out before being sent home to his wife. The predictable roster of overindulgers were still the most frequent guests in these cells. That is, when it wasn’t the officers themselves, catching fifteen minutes in the midst of a quiet shift.

For their purposes, they dragged an unused desk into the cell and covered it with a tarp. The mannequin was in a body bag, and had attracted its share of attention as it was brought from Tate and Calberson’s van into the station house. “It’s not what you think,” Hazel had said repeatedly, until everyone went back to their work. She hobbled into the cell on her cane. “Do you think we need Spere?”

“Do you?” asked Wingate.

“No,” she said, lowering herself carefully onto one of the cots. “Go get Cassie’s camera and you can take some snaps of this thing. And give her this.” She handed him her notebook. “Tell her to call the numbers Jellinek gave us for Bellocque and Paritas and get those two in. I want to know how a pair of Sunday fishermen managed to hook a mannequin weighted to the lakebed.”

“Maybe they used flies,” said Wingate. “Should I get Pat Barlow back in?”

“I want to see how their story jibes with hers before we talk to her again. Go on, get started.”

Wingate left as Calberson and Tate put the bag on the desk and unzipped it. The opened bag emitted a stench of rotting vegetation and when they tipped the putty-coloured form out, runnels of grey lakewater ran over the side of the table and onto the floor. It was a female model, tinged in places with light blooms of new algae. It was headless and without hands or feet, her sex vaguely hinted at in the rise of two small, nipple-less breasts, and a smooth pubis. Hazel could imagine the staring, painted blue eyes, the blush on the cheeks, the dark black eyelashes. After they’d freed the mannequin from the bag, Calberson fished out the five two-pound weights that had held the hollow form to the lake bottom. “Someone wanted to make sure this thing stayed down there,” he said.

“Or that it was easy to find,” said Hazel. Wingate returned with PC Jenner’s digital camera. “Get some close-ups of the extremities,” she said. “What there is of them.”

Wingate started shooting. Whoever had put this thing into the lake had gone to the trouble of sawing off the missing parts rather than detaching them at the joints that were designed for easy mixing and matching. In fact, all five joints were still intact: the cuts had been made below them. There was a sixth joint at the waist, to pose the figure in some fetching position. That was why Barlow had seen the rear end rising out of the water. Tate and Calberson stood against the wall, watching Wingate make his pictures. He flipped it over onto its belly and photographed the smooth, featureless back.

“What’s that?” asked Hazel. There was something printed right over the spot where her own back had broken down.

Wingate leaned in. “The manufacturer’s name. Verity Forms, it says. And a serial number.”

“Well, it’s something.”

“I’ll look them up after I’m done making pictures,” said Wingate.

“You going to ask them if they’re missing a mannequin?” Tate asked. “This is just someone’s idea of a prank. It’s a waste of time, and what’s more, it almost cost my partner his life.”

“The boat drifted,” said Calberson. “Calm down already.”

“This is bullshit,” said Tate, and he went out of the cell, slamming the door.

“It’s stressful,” said Calberson. “Diving. Do you need us anymore?”

“No,” said Hazel. “Thanks for everything.” When the door was shut behind them, she said, “Now we’re down to one dummy.”

“I hope you’re not talking about me,” said Wingate.

Hazel raised a sarcastic eyebrow at him.

“You didn’t think they needed to know about the story in the newspaper?”

“They’re scuba-heads, James. They don’t do well on land. What I want to do is talk to the couple on Barlow’s boat and see what they were really up to.”

“What about this Colin Eldwin?”

“Who?”

“The writer standing in the parking lot?”

“Right. Him,” said Hazel. “Fine. Get all of them in. If it’s a publicity stunt, it cost the county at least three grand; get each of them for dumping, maybe we’ll get half of it back.” She levered herself up to standing with difficulty. “But if you can get anyone in today, you’re going to have to do the interviews yourself. I’m in no shape to do anything but drink a Scotch and go to bed.”

“I’ll start on the manufacturer.”

“Your first dead end. Good luck.”

Wingate had PC Forbes take her home and then, after his lunch, he tried to raise all three people Hazel wanted him to call, with no luck. Bellocque’s number seemed disconnected, Paritas’s went to voicemail, and when he called the Eldwin number, his wife answered and told him her husband was in Toronto for the long weekend. It was a bad weekend to try to raise anyone, and with the weather the way it was (bright and warm) the likelihood of someone actually being near their phone was pretty low. Just in case any of them were known quantities, he ran the names through the Canadian Police Information Centre database, but CPIC came up empty on all three of them.

After striking out on the phone, he spent some more time alone in the cell with the plastic corpse. Its silent, ruined form was eerie; it made his stomach flip to look at it. With the head and extremities missing, it had no identifying characteristics but the tiny letters on its lower back. He wrote the name and serial number down and went out to his desk.

He wasn’t sure what the manufacturer would be able to tell him about a drowned mannequin, but maybe with some luck he’d be able to find out where a person might buy a Verity product. Was it local enough to suggest someone near Caplin had done this on purpose? Or was this just a dumb boondoggle: a discarded mannequin tangled in fishing net?

He looked up Verity Forms on the web but found nothing. He tried “Verity Mannequins,” and came up empty again. A wholesale mannequin site had an ordering number in Fresno, so he called it and the lady on the other end told him, as far as she knew, there was no “Verity Forms” manufacturing mannequins. She gave him the name of a Canadian wholesaler who told him the same thing. Wingate put down the phone and squinted at his handwritten notes. Maybe he’d transcribed the name incorrectly? Maybe it had said Vanity forms?

He went back into the holding pen and looked closely at the name. He’d not made a mistake. Maybe the serial number was actually a phone number… but it looked strange for a phone number: 419-20-028-04. He checked online and found that the 419 area code was for the northwest part of Ohio. Toledo, specifically. He dialled 419-200-2804, and a woman answered, saying “Yeah?”