The Devil You Know: A Novel (27 page)

I
drew the curtains closed and undressed. I hummed while I did it, folding my jeans neatly and stepping into a pair of sweats and a worn T-shirt I like to sleep in. I went through the order of evening tasks in a way that was both practiced and showy: curtains, undress, dress, sort out the laundry, dim the lights. I smoothed the bedsheets and folded them back, then surveyed the neatness of my handiwork, hands on my hips. To the naked eye, I was very caught up in the act of getting ready for the night. I padded out to the bathroom, brushing and flossing my teeth twice, something my gums were unused to. Little bloody clots of saliva adhered to the sides of the sink and I turned the faucet on high to rinse them away. On my way back to bed I took special care not to bother looking into the kitchen.

There was a muffled quality to the dark of the apartment with the windows blacked out. The whole room had a gag on it. There was no door between the room where I slept and the hall. This is part of the charm of a bachelor apartment. Everything is open concept, even your bedroom. I opened up the curtains again and lay down and closed my eyes and listened. A little ambient streetlight lit up a square patch of floor. Propping myself on my elbows against the pillow, I scanned the room. A car went by and the sheen of its headlights drifted across the bedclothes.

Stop asking for it, I thought. I got up and went out to kitchen with a cardigan sweater over my shoulders.

Without David’s company, the overhead light turned the kitchen into a fishbowl. I was like a thing kept under glass for academic purposes, agitated and bumping around from one surface to another. I switched on the stove light and the desk lamp and turned the ceiling fixture off.

I’d walked David to my own door but not down the stairs. He gave me a thumbs-up through my bedroom window. This meant the lock downstairs had clicked tight. The house was as secure as it was going to get.

Results from the last search of Peeping Toms still gleamed on the monitor and I wiped the screen and picked up the drug raid photo. My mother’s thin face shone out at me and left me lonely. A bunch of strangers, standing around. I propped the photo so that it stood upright against the wall and fixed it there with a piece of tape. If David was right and the names were all a giant coincidence, then this photo was nothing more than an interesting find. Spoils of the job. Something I could one day put in a little frame and slip into the top of my mother’s Christmas stocking.

Either way, I needed a little break from the Lianne story. Who knew? Maybe David was right. Maybe I was too fixated. Maybe a rule of thumb is that you can only deal with one horror story at a time, and I already had the Bernardo show to deal with for work.

David had brought me a present of my own, a plastic mickey of Wild Turkey he’d stolen from a house party over the weekend. I poured a generous few fingers into the bottom of a juice glass and sipped at it neat. Half-a-hand. That’s what you call more than two fingers of liquor. Give me half-a-hand of bourbon.

I put down the glass and plugged in a search on Bernardo’s sister-in-law, the inquest into her death that the coroner’s office had announced earlier in the day. I typed in
Exhumation
and the date, then a range of dates. I was keen to see how sensitive the system was.
Angie had only filed the story a few hours before. It would appear in the morning edition.

What I found was something entirely different.

NEXIS SEARCH: EXHUMATION FEBRUARY 1993

FEBRUARY 19 1993:
THUNDER BAY CHRONICLE
,
A6

FEBRUARY 19 1993:
CALGARY HERALD
,
A4

FEBRUARY 19 1993:
TORONTO FREE PRESS
,
A18

KILLER BELIEVED FOUND IN WHITEFISH FALLS GRAVE

POLICE HOPE EXHUMATION WILL PROVE BODY IS THAT OF SUSPECTED MURDERER ROBERT CAMERON

Espanola—Toronto police believe they have finally found the man who killed 11-year-old Lianne Gagnon in May of 1982. Authorities will exhume a body from an unmarked grave on Monday to examine it for DNA and possible fingerprint and dental evidence to determine whether the man, who died here three years after Lianne was found dead, was indeed Robert Nelson Cameron.

The unidentified man was using the name Thomas Allen Hargreave when he died of complications related to cancer on August 16, 1985. He was buried under that name. Ontario’s deputy coroner, Dr. Georgina Smythe, says she has signed a warrant to exhume the body from an unmarked plot in the Anglican Cemetery in this small, northern Ontario community.

About a year ago, local RCMP alerted Metro police about the unidentified man buried here. They had been trying to put a name to him since the real Thomas Allen Hargreave surfaced at a passport office in
Alberta. He was unable to obtain a Canadian passport since all government records showed him as deceased. He told police that in 1982 his wallet was stolen in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where Cameron is known to have spent time. It’s taken Metro police cold squad about 13 months to gather enough evidence to obtain the warrant from the coroner’s office.

“There are a number of striking similarities that lead us to believe this may actually be the man (Cameron),” lead investigator Art Laidlaw said. “There’s just too many coincidences.”

Robert Nelson Cameron was a repeat offender who’d logged jail terms for armed robbery and assault in his native United States and had escaped assault and battery charges here in Canada. There’s evidence he crossed the border between Canada and the United States regularly, using a number of aliases. The man known as Thomas Hargreave was described by his former Whitefish Falls employer, Jim Loney, as “a hard ticket. He looked like hard living. He was a chain-smoker with a rotten, lousy cough all the time.” Loney’s wife, Marietta, added that the man had “smelled bad. He was rude to everyone around.” The Loneys had rented Hargreave a room and Marietta Loney refused to clean it out after he died. “We hired office cleaners all the way from the Sault,” she said.

Police found similarities between the time when Cameron disappeared from Toronto and Hargreave first arrived in Whitefish Falls, their general appearance and demeanor and most interestingly, the men’s interest in keeping rats as pets. Mrs. Loney also stated that
cleaners had found a number of odd objects in Hargreave’s room. “There was a plastic garbage bag in the freezer,” she says. “And they told me it contained two dead rats and some little girl’s clothes, a pair of shorts and some underpants.” Mrs. Loney says the items were all disposed of at the time of Hargreave’s death.

In his application for the order to exhume the body, Laidlaw said that Cameron may have kept a few pieces of Lianne’s clothing as a souvenir or trophy of the sex slaying.

Lianne Gagnon went missing May 23, 1982. Her body was found by a dog walker 12 days later, on June 4, in the heavily wooded ravine of Taylor Creek Park in Toronto’s east end. She had been raped and strangled. The search for 11-year-old Lianne galvanized and terrorized an entire city and included a door-to-door search and helicopter sweep. It was the first highly publicized child abduction case of its kind, with both television and print media asked to blanket the city with the little girl’s image. “We wanted every cop with a pair of eyes,” Laidlaw said at yesterday’s announcement. “We wanted every father.”

Police also said yesterday that Lianne’s case may have prevented other similar murders from happening, as terrified parents drew their children in close and the community was alerted to the danger that lurks on city streets.

Buried on A18, at the moment the entire newsroom was fixated on a new killer, a story that blew my mind wide open. I rocked back in my chair and stared.

T
he news that they were exhuming a suspect in northern Ontario should have got me revved. You’d think I’d be flying. Instead something inside me crumbled. I read the article four or five times, slower and slower each time, and then yanked the modem cable out of the wall and went and put my feet up. It wasn’t so much going to bed as a kind of controlled faint. Your body gets a chance to catch up and you’re overcome. All through the next day I felt hungover with it. Like I was looking at the world from behind a piece of plexiglass.

There was this little warp to my view. The sharp edges were all muffled.

Since the incident on the balcony my father had started checking on me after-hours. Not every night. He wanted to be sure I’d pick up the phone every time, which I wouldn’t do if I thought he was just trying to make me feel better. He didn’t want to be trackable.

Whatcha up to, sweetheart?

He’s a peach. Boisterous, but contained. The way you’d expect a dental professional to be. You have to make people comfortable before you can go into their mouths with a sharp stick. A little personality goes a long way, but no sense going too far.

Painting my sink, I said. I’d slept fast and hard the night before and spent most of the day trying to pull myself out of it. Anxiety jet lag.

I’d scrubbed the old sink out with bleach before the phone rang and now it was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor. A taupey base was already layered on in wavy fronds all over the bottom and sides. I had three shades of blond and one white in small, open pots on the floor next to me, plus a roll of paper towels, unfurled, and a small bag of black beach sand I’d been given as a souvenir of my ex-boyfriend’s Alaskan wedding. I meant to add the sand into the last coat, to let it set and glitter there.

I cradled the phone between my ear and my shoulder and worked with the other hand, stroking on the darkest shade with a wide, wet brush I’d found at the art store on Spadina. The paint went on thick and sultry and gorgeous.

My father asked a few questions.

This might not work, I said. Because of the painting.

One of the upstairs neighbors arrived home. The door below thudded closed and then his footfalls up the stairs toward my door and then farther up still, and their door closing the same way as he went into his apartment.

Did you get something for dinner?

I threaded some thinner, lighter lines along the dark base where the sink grew wider and more open.

I buy seven quarter-pounders on a Sunday night, I said. I put them all in the freezer and every day at 6:00 p.m. I nuke one. The one I eat on Saturday tastes no different from the first one I ate the Sunday before. The receiver slipped for a moment and I caught it with painty fingers. That’s what you were hoping to hear, right?

Now someone was coming down from upstairs. The sound on the steps quieter and more tentative. A girl leaving. Someone trying not to be heard.

My father told me a story about spaghetti he’d made. I have sauce for you, he said. With cremini. I’ll put it in the freezer and you can take it next time you’re here.

There was a pause while he waited for an answer and I thought of how to add a little skein of white to the sink. Without wrecking
the job entirely. I leaned down over it with the skinniest brush in my hand. The ends of my hair dipped into the rim. The thin coat of paint on my hair could have been botched mascara. I was waiting for the sound of the door downstairs, the girl leaving.

My father still said nothing and I leaned in closer.

Is that you? I said.

What? he said.

Hold on. Don’t say anything.

I put the brush down on a piece of paper towel and sat completely still. It was the most gentle tapping sound, out in the hall. Out at the front door.

There’s this noise, I said. It’s like a tapping noise.

Like the pipes?

I think there’s someone at the door. I set the receiver down and it rocked on the floor next to me like an open ear.

I crawled out into the hallway and sat up on my knees, listening. The noise was like something cracking, or smacking lightly against the wall. The phone still lay on its back in the kitchen, next to my paint experiment. My father was saying something to me from his end of the line. His voice was thin and distant. He sounded tiny.

Someone had left the downstairs door open. One of the guys from upstairs, when he’d come in, or else the girl or whoever it was leaving, hadn’t shut it. I hadn’t heard the door shut. The tapping stopped and then started again.

Maybe there wasn’t a girl. I’d been buoyed enough by the exhumation news that I hadn’t thought of anything else. I’d given myself permission, a whole day off.

Maybe he’d come in through their apartment and down the steps and had been sitting outside my door since then.

Stop it, I whispered. Just stop. It’s nothing. You should be embarrassed. God. Jesus. This is no way to live.

My father’s voice came louder from the next room. He must have been shouting into the phone. I slid back into the kitchen and grabbed the phone, keeping my eyes on the black windows.

I’m being stupid, I said into the phone.

Evie! Jesus, I was worried. You okay?

I’m feeling, I said. I was going to say
weird
. My throat caught. I’m scared, I said. I think there’s someone outside. There’s someone at the door.

You’re okay, my father said. You’re okay. Remember how the pipes shake a little when they heat up in winter?

No, I said. No it’s not that.

You think there’s someone there?

I stopped. I didn’t know if someone was there, or if it was the pipes, or if there was a noise at all. My ears were ringing a little. Fuck it.

I’m good, I said.

You’re good?

Why am I like this?

Maybe I’ll just come by and see, he said.

Please.