CHRISTINE MORRIS

Christine is forty-two years old. She is single, never married, and is the only child of a single mother, Joan Morris.

She was born in Toronto, Ontario. Her early life with her mother was turbulent and insecure as Joan is an alcoholic and (as Christine thinks in a bitter moment) part-time whore. Joan is unusually reticent about her family and tells Christine that her parents are dead and there are no relatives she wants to stay in touch with. She is also quite evasive about who Chris’s was father until finally Christine decides Joan doesn’t know who was the “sperm donor.”

Friction between the two of them increases, and when Chris is fourteen she leaves home and moves in with her best friend’s family, the Jacksons, who become her substitute family from then on. She loves school and does well there, entering York University on a scholarship where she studies criminal science, largely because Al Jackson is a cop. There is no doubt in her mind that she wants to be a police officer, and in 1984, she joins the Toronto police force. Paula Jackson remains her best friend; she is also a police officer, although she has joined the OPP and works for the OPP Behavioural Science Centre in Orillia. Paula is married, and her daughter, Chelsea, is Christine’s goddaughter. Christine has had two “serious” love affairs in her life, but the first man died in an accident and the second moved to the United States, where she doesn’t want to follow. She has been single for a few years now and wonders if that will ever change.

Christine’s contact with her mother becomes increasingly sporadic until by the time the book begins, she has not seen her for two years. Meanwhile, Joan struggles to throw off her alcoholism, but Christine has little faith that sobriety will last.

Then Christine becomes involved in a serious incident that almost ends her career. Sent to follow up on a complaint about a baby crying ceaselessly for two days, she discovers the mother is a young crack cocaine addict and the baby has been horribly neglected. Christine tries to remove the child, the mother prevents her, and in the struggle the mother suffers a heart attack and dies. The case is investigated and Christine is exonerated, but she feels overwhelmed by the circumstances, by her own anger toward the mother (which may have caused her to treat her more roughly than necessary), by the state of the child, and by the vicious nature of the blame the woman’s family unfairly direct toward Chris. She decides to resign, but Paula talks her out of it and persuades her to apply for the position of Behavioural Science Analyst, commonly called forensic profiler, with the OPP. Chris somewhat reluctantly agrees and gets the job. She has only been in the Centre for a week, and is still shaky emotionally, when her boss decides to send her off to Edinburgh to a conference on some of the newer methods of forensic policing.

It is here that she receives a phone call from an inspector in the Northern Constabulary saying that her mother, who is now missing, seems to have been involved in a car accident that has resulted in the death of another woman. Christine has no idea Joan was even in Scotland but gets pulled into the case and discovers more than she ever dreamed of.