The Calling Read Online Free PDF

fridge.”
    “This is a homicide, Inspector. I don’t know how much say we’ll have in it.”
    “When the scene is locked down, you take her to Mayfair Grace. Your people can come up for a change.”
    Spere’s Ident team arrived then and came in wearing their green latex gloves. One of them started dusting, while the other bagged the cushions from the couch. “Leave the one holding her up for now,” said Spere. He turned to Greene and Detective Inspector Micallef. “It took me forever to find a body bag at your station house. I’ll go get it from the car.”
     
    Hazel called the station house to assign three officers to a canvass and sent them out immediately. By the middle of the afternoon, they had covered both sides of Maitland Avenue and had nothing. A call to the office just after lunch had reported a late-model Buick parked on Taylor the night before, three streets over from Delia’s house, but the caller had not taken down the license-plate number and couldn’t remember whether the car was silver, blue, or black. In a peaceful town like Port Dundas, the notion of a car being “strange” wouldn’t be common. The news of a special on Folgers Coffee at the No Frills went around town like wildfire, but an unknown car on Maitland or Taylor or any of the streets around Delia Chandler’s house would never cause any concern.
    Hazel and Ray stayed on through the afternoon as the SOCO team dusted, bagged, and photographed the scene and the rest of the house. There was almost nothing to bag but the couch cushions, the meager contents of the fridge, and the slightly sticky bar of soap at the kitchen sink. They took two hundred pictures of the
scene, pictures which, later, would tell them nothing about the killer. There was no sense at all, despite the thoroughness of the search, that anything had been disturbed in or stolen from Delia Chandler’s house. Phone records showed no calls in or out after Robert Chandler’s at lunchtime, and because she was on a cable modem, there was no way to tell whether or not Delia had been on the Internet at any specific time, as the connection was permanent. Her Web history would show where she’d visited, at least, and when. Hazel had hooked her own house up with DSL, which was much the same, as her mother had bought a laptop and insisted that they get connected. “What do you want with the bloody Internet, Mother?” she’d asked her. “It’s nothing but filth and collectibles. And chat rooms—what do you need with a chat room?”
    “You sound like
my
mother,” Emily Micallef said. “I need more in my day than cooking you meals and Oprah. You should lose your hatred of technology, Hazel. You might learn something.”
    She’d acquiesced and hooked the house up, but she insisted her mother cancel her credit cards just in case. “Whatever you want, I can get you in town. I don’t want you buying garbage on the Internet.”
    Ident had taken Delia’s computer with them, but it would be a while before they reported. There had been no more calls during the day—not even to get a cat out of a tree—and when Hazel and Greene drove back to the station at six o’clock, she saw why: The streets were busy with people, people standing at street corners, smoking cigarettes and talking, people driving slowly by in their cars. She knew there was no way of keeping the news of Delia Chandler’s murder under wraps, but still, she was surprised to see this many people out in the early evening air. “What a day,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with myself right now.”
    “I’ve got a bottle of rye back at my desk.”
    “Are you ‘enabling’ me, Ray?”
    “There are times that call for a drink, Hazel, and then there are times that demand a drink. But I’ll take no for an answer, too.”
    “I wouldn’t want you to drink alone,” she said.
    “Come on then.” They turned and drove through one of the delivery alleys behind the road toward the station. “I can