Read Online By the Time You Read This by Giles Blunt - Free Book Online Page A

muscled, casually violent, cheerfully racist. He had also been a pretty good detective right up until he got caught in a bawdy house by his own squad. He could have faced charges much more serious than conduct unbecoming had not Cardinal gone to bat for him at his disciplinary hearing. He wrote letters of support for him, and later, when Hunn was looking for a new line of work, a letter of reference. Hunn had gone back to school, and eventually managed to get himself into the documents section of the Ontario Centre of Forensic Science, where he had been leading an apparently honourable life ever since.
    “Hoo, boy, it’s Cardinal the friendly ghost,” Hunn said when he answered the phone. “Got to be something really special. Otherwise, I say to myself, why wouldn’t he go through our central receiving office?”
    “I got a couple of documents for you, Tommy—maybe three. I’m hoping you can help me out.”
    “You wanna cut in, is that it? I gotta tell ya, John, we are hellaciously backed up down here. Only thing I’m supposed to work on these days is stuff that’s five seconds from being in court.”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    All cops expect to have to repay any favour somewhere down the line, possibly decades later. Cardinal did not have to give Hunn any reminders.
    “Why don’t you tell me what you got,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
    “I have a greeting card with a piece of paper glued inside. On that piece of paper there’s a message that looks like it was printed out on a computer. It’s just two sentences long, but I’m hoping you can give me some idea where it came from. Frankly, I can’t even tell if it’s ink-jet or laser.”
    “Either way, it’s not going to get us very far without another printout to compare it to. It ain’t like the old days with typewriters. What else you got?”
    “A suicide note.”
    “Suicide. All this trouble, you’re working on a suicide? Goddam suicides burn my ass. Anyone who kills themselves is just chickenshit, far as I’m concerned.”
    “Oh, yeah,” Cardinal said. “Complete cowards. No question.”
    “And selfish,” Hunn went on. “There’s gotta be no more self-centred act than killing yourself. All these resources get called into play: your time, my time, doctors, nurses, ambulances, shrinks, you name it. All of this for someone that doesn’t even want to live. It’s just plain selfish.”
    “Thoughtless,” Cardinal said. “Completely thoughtless.”
    “That’s when they don’t succeed. When they do succeed, they leave all this grief behind. I had a friend—best friend, actually—who ate his service revolver a few years back. I’m telling you, I felt like shit for months. Why didn’t I see it coming? Why wasn’t I a better friend? But you know what? He’s the lousy friend, not me.”
    “Yeah, you put your finger on it there, Tommy.”
    “Suicides, man, I tell ya …”
    “This one may not be a suicide.”
    “All right! Different story, entirely. Now you’re engaging my attention.” Hunn put on his Godfather voice: “I’m gonna use alla my skills and alla my powers …”
    “I need this fast, Tommy. Like yesterday.”
    “Absolutely. Minute I get it. But if you’re thinking of using this material or any analysis I give you on it in court, you know you gotta go through Central Receiving, and Central Receiving don’t rush for nobody. God himself could come to them with a handwritten note on Satan’s letterhead and they’d tell him, ‘Get in line, bro.’”
    “I can’t go through Central Receiving, Tommy. I don’t have a case number.”
    “Oh, boy …”
    “But you come back to me with something good and I’ll get a case number. Then I’ll jump through whatever hoops you need.”
    There was a heavy sigh from the other end of the line. “All right, John. You’re giving me serious heartburn here, but I’ll do it.”

8
    N AUSEA WAS NOT QUITE the word to describe what Delorme was feeling. The Toronto Sex