A Door in the River Read Free Page A

Card confirmed the victim’s identity as HENRY PHILLIP WIEST , of 72 Church Road in Kehoe Glenn, Ontario. DOB June 11, 1959. Contents of the victim’s pockets were a wallet with $45 in cash, a cellphone, and a comb. All items were bagged. There was no damage to the victim’s vehicle, and there was nothing of interest in the truck except for a load of home furnace filters, and a half-drunk Tim Hortons coffee in a cup-holder. There were no personal belongings in the truck except for a folded blanket. Papers confirming victim’s ownership of the truck were found in the glove compartment. The victim’s last name is also painted on the side of the truck and refers to a well-known business in Kehoe Glenn, Wiest’s.
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 hishand. 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