Free The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe

Delia’s arm and Wingate looked up at his new boss.
    “So he
cares?
” she said to him.
    The doctor began rolling the body back toward its hole in the wall.
     
    They drove back to Port Dundas with the radio playing quietly under their silence. Mercy was one thing, thought Hazel, but DC Wingate’s suggestion that there was actual
thoughtfulness
in the killer’s actions disturbed her. If it were true, it meant the killer was not angry, he was not fueled by a sense of injustice, or overripe with hatred. Those kinds of killers slipped up: Their passions led them. What was he doing by making it appear as if he’d killed Delia Chandler in a rage? Delia was already being killed by cancer. Was a more overt act of murder a comment on her disease? A
critique of its silent, creeping methods? And the mouth, what did this disguise?
    “What kind of ‘caring’ are we talking about here, do you think?” Hazel said.
    Wingate took his eyes off the road for the first time. The turnoff for Port Dundas was coming up on their right. “I shouldn’t have said anything,” he said. “I don’t know anything about this case yet.”
    “You know about as much as any of us, Detective. It’s okay to think aloud.”
    “He might have broken her finger by accident.”
    “Do you really think that?”
    He sat, seemingly unwilling to reply, as she took the turnoff. “No,” he said at last. “My guess is he was in complete control of the whole situation.”
    “That’s where I’m at too,” she said.
    “It’s hard to know what we’re supposed to be paying attention to,” said Wingate. “Is he there to take her blood? To murder her? To desecrate her in some way?”
    “Maybe all of it,” said Hazel. She was taking the last turn before the bridge over the Kilmartin River.
    “We are not going to know anything until we have another body. To see if he’s being consistent with his victims.” Hazel shot a look at her new detective constable. He shifted uncomfortably. “You don’t get this good on your first try,” he said.
    “You think there are other victims? Where are they?”
    “Nearby.” He cleared his throat. “Most serial killers stake out a territory and work it methodically.”
    Her jaw seemed to be stuck in a half-open position. She consciously closed her mouth and put her attention back on the road.
“There’s thinking out loud and then there’s thinking out loud, James. I wish you hadn’t said any of that.”
    “I’m sorry,” he muttered.
    “What I mean is, I hope you’re wrong.”
     
    They pulled in to the station house at three P.M . Shift change. Ray Greene was standing at the back door with a plastic bag at his feet and his arms crossed over his chest. “What’s that?” said Hazel as she locked the car.
    “Gift,” said Ray. “For you.” She took the bag from him and pulled out a box. It was a cell phone. She stared at it like it was a moon rock. “You buy twenty bucks worth of time at a go. I’m the only one with the number.”
    “I don’t want a cell phone, Ray.”
    “I know. But you need one. If you’d had a cell this afternoon, I could have called you on your way back and told you to meet me up in Chamberlain. The community police there are shitting themselves.”
    “They called
us
in? That’s East Central. We’ve got no jurisdiction there.”
    “It’s just a little office, something like three cops. I asked them why they hadn’t called the Ottawa OPS, but they’d heard about Delia Chandler and they were pretty insistent on us coming out there. They have a crime scene they described to me as ‘creative.’”
    Hazel looked over at Wingate, who was keeping his expression neutral. She wanted to tell him to be careful what he wished for. “Well, we can’t,” she said to Greene. “Tell them to call Ottawa.”
    “It’s him, Hazel.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “I don’t,” he said, and he left it at that, but the three of them stood there staring at each other. “It’s