The Devil's Cinema (6 page)

Clark didn't budge. “Well, what is your explanation? You haven't answered any of the questions! If you didn't do anything wrong, why wouldn't you answer those questions?”

He stopped the interrogation briefly and tried to engage Twitchell as a friend.

“What drove you to this? Obviously there's something going on behind the scenes that I don't know about. You seem like a decent guy that, hell, I'd even go have a beer with.”

Twitchell looked up for a second and then furrowed his brow, deep in concentration.

“That's the type of guy you come across as being,” Clark added, smiling. “Yet, you're involved over your head in this.”

Twitchell had seen this good cop, bad cop routine before and called Clark out on it: “Is anything that you're saying genuine or is this some sort of tactic?”

“You gotta get away from the acting part, Mark, and listen to what I'm saying.” Clark turned aggressive. “You have told me
nothing
but lies. An innocent man does not come in here and tell lies. That's
genuine
, Mark.… Everything I'm telling you in here is genuine.” He stopped for a second to let it sink in. “So get outta your film producer mode and the facade of thinking that everyone's an actor.”

Twitchell made a face and adjusted his feet.

“This is real life, all right? Real life. If you were telling me the truth, you would have one story. One story that would flow from beginning to end.” Clark waved his hand from right to left. “And you could repeat that story one hundred times with no changes.” He snapped his fingers. “Yours is soooo bad.”

Twitchell remained silent, thinking, before finally responding. “I, I just … I know we're not sitting in a movie, but it's the cop thing.”

“This is real-life stuff,” Clark said. “You gotta get away from the movies.”

“Yeah, I know.” He sighed.

“That's the problem here.” Clark pushed one last time. “You're not gonna be able to live with yourself, with this, for the rest of your life.”

Twitchell crossed his legs, tucked his head into his shoulder, and spoke softly: “You'd be surprised with what I can live with.”

Clark thought he had hit on something. He wanted a confession and moved in. “It's gonna eat at you and eat at you. It's gonna affect your family because it's affecting you. So let's get to the truth and then we can end this. The problem is you don't wanna tell me the truth.” He hit him with a rapid series of questions. “Why don't you wanna tell me the truth? Can you answer that question, Mark?”

Twitchell's armour split open. “Because I'm scared,” he stammered. “I always have this instinct to wanna be able to try to hold on to …” He let it trail off. “I don't even know what.”

Clark tried to reassure him, comfort him, get him to keep talking. “That's a perfectly natural feeling at this time. What's going through your mind right now, Mark?”

Twitchell was frowning. “Almost nothing. Anything I try to push out is like … What's it like? … It's like skating uphill.” He gave up. He reached for a tissue off the side table and blew his nose. “I'm too tired to formulate thought anymore.”

“I don't think you need to formulate thought. What I think you need to formulate is the truth. There's two sides to every story.”

“Yeah, but stories come with questions.” Twitchell grabbed another tissue. “And more answers and more stories …” He was shutting down again.

Clark was losing him. It was after six now. Twitchell was rubbing his eyes. “Life goes on,” Clark offered gently, “and we deal with those mistakes.”

“Well …” Twitchell looked miserable. “I guess my marriage is over now so I don't really have to worry about protecting her anymore.” He was ripping tiny pieces off the corner of the tissue.

“Your daughter will be taken care of.”

“Yeah.”

“Your wife's here, your mother and father. Your parents are in Edmonton, are they not?”

Twitchell mumbled yes, biting his lip.

“I can see this is eating you up.” Clark stopped and tried again. “What happened between you and John, Mark?”

Twitchell was silent. He looked down at the tissue and started twirling it in his fingers. “Ahhhh,” he groaned. “I can't even get there right now.”
He turned to Clark to offer him a solution. “I wanna get to the finish line, but at the same time I think consulting with a lawyer is gonna be really important.”

“You can do that at any time you want. I told you that right from the start.”

Twitchell stretched out his arm across the back of the couch and seemed to open up again. “Do you have any idea what it's like living with constant apprehension?”

“Can't say that I do.”

“I'd like to not feel that anymore,” he muttered, then exhaled.

“Well, this is your chance to get rid of that feeling.”

“Oh, but it brings on a whole new type.” He shot back to life with a sudden burst of energy and pulled a pen and paper off the couch cushion beside him. He slapped the paper down on a binder and placed it on his lap. “Wh, wha, okay. What's the steps in getting a lawyer because I don't have one?”

He had lost him. Clark knew it was over. Twitchell had lawyered up.

The interview trailed on for a further half-hour, but Clark couldn't get his suspect back on point. It was all pleasantries.

Clark watched as Twitchell walked out of the interview room, spoke to a lawyer on the phone down the hallway, and then decided to leave. Clark jumped to his feet and followed, escorting him out of the building. Murphy stayed behind and looked over his notes.

The pair took the elevator to the ground floor in silence. Clark was fuming. He had thrown everything at the guy all night and he didn't get a confession. As the elevator doors opened, Clark turned to Twitchell. “I know you killed that guy,” he spat. “And I'm coming to get you. It's just a matter of time.”

Twitchell stared back blankly. They walked out the main door together with wheels turning in both of their heads.

It was a chilly dawn on a Monday morning.

Clark could see his breath. “Is that your car right there?” He pointed at the Pontiac Grand Am parked on the west end of the parking lot.

“Yeah.”

“I'm seizing your car.”

Twitchell's face went pale.

Clark beamed. After all, Twitchell had given him ample justification: he admitted to having Johnny's keys in the vehicle during the interview. “I'm seizing your car and I'm taking it right now.”

“I just need to get something out of my car.”

“You're getting fuck-all out of that car.”

“I just wanna get my cell phone.”

“You get nothing.” Clark was smug. He was planning on getting a search warrant and he'd have the forensics team comb through everything inside. “You can either give me the keys or I will just call a tow truck down and we'll break in. Either way, it's gone.”

Twitchell dug the keys out of his pocket, slapped them into Clark's hands, and stormed off down the street. Clark stood there for a moment and watched him hurry toward City Hall and the downtown core.

Clark jumped in the maroon vehicle. It was a mess and smelled like gas, but he had to leave the detailed search for his colleagues in forensics. He drove the car to the police warehouse two blocks away to keep it secure.

Clark was getting a second wind. His heart was pumping. Fresh ideas rushed into his head with the crisp outside air. He was thinking twenty-four-hour surveillance. His gut was telling him this file was something big.

Another thought had him break into a dead run back to police headquarters. Clark wanted to drive up to St. Albert and seize Twitchell's house too. With a story this fishy, Clark believed his new suspect would probably be racing back there right now, planning to burn or destroy evidence as fast as he could.

A
T THE START
Of his early Monday morning shift, Acting Detective Dale Johnson passed Clark in the hallway as he walked to his desk on the other side of homicide. Clark double-backed and tapped him on the shoulder. They were in his car and speeding off to St. Albert before Johnson even had a chance to check his email.

Hungry and grumpy, hands on the wheel, Clark talked fast as Johnson listened. He was in his thirties and six months into the homicide beat, though he was coming off a stint in the gang unit, so he was no rookie. Relatively young compared to the rest of the team, Johnson had yet to develop the gruff attitude and sly expressions veteran cops like Clark liked to slide into their conversations. He was pale white and skinny, still sporting a head of red-brown hair that had begun receding on his temples. And while Clark was known for speaking his mind, sometimes even getting in trouble for it, Johnson was part of the next generation of city detectives who were far more measured in their public speaking. He was neatly dressed, wore glasses, looked far more book smarts than street smarts, more middle class than working class. But the pair shared one thing in common at this moment: both of them were excited, feeding off the energy of a new file. These were moments homicide detectives lived for.

Their car sped in the direction opposite the Monday morning traffic, weaving through each lane. By 7:45, they were pulling up to 30 Dayton Crescent on the north side of St. Albert. Clark rang the doorbell, then peeked through a window. It was a tiny home of bricks and blue siding on a corner lot. Seeing nobody inside, Clark rang the doorbell again and knocked. Johnson stood beside him, adjusting his glasses.

Finally, Clark saw movement through the curtains. A young woman with light brown hair came down the stairs and opened the front door a crack. Standing before them in pyjamas and a housecoat, Twitchell's wife, Jess, seemed hesitant.

Clark could hear a baby inside. “Oh, I apologize for that,” he said.

Jess opened the door a bit more and gave him a look.

“I'm Detective Bill Clark.” There was no easy way to say it. “We're investigating a disappearance and your husband's name has come up.”

“My husband has already called me.” She was abrupt and looking annoyed.

Clark bit his lip. “Oh, really?”

“Yeah, he called me from a lawyer's office. He told me not to talk to you guys.”

“Well that's fair, I can understand that.” He bobbed his head, thrilled they had at least beaten Twitchell back to his home. “But don't you want to know what's going on?” Clark was assessing how much to tell her. “Listen, there's a chance this guy that's missing is
dead
and your husband may have killed him.” He threw his hands up. “We're investigating and we don't know where this is going to end up.”

It took a few minutes, but she let them in.

Clark and Johnson stepped over baby toys as they walked up into the front room. Both detectives suspected Jess didn't entirely trust them, but she likely didn't believe what her husband was telling her either. Both cops darted their eyes around the house, taking it all in. They asked simple questions.
Are there any DVDs in the house? Where does your husband produce and work on his films? Where's his office? Would he keep hard drives there?
Jess told them his computer gear was in the basement office, except for a laptop, which he usually kept with him.

Clark and Johnson hurried back to the car and called Anstey, who told them they likely had enough for a warrant.

Jess was told the bad news: the police would be seizing her house. And Clark saw her shock from these unexpected circumstances suddenly spill out of her in streams of tears. She trembled. “I don't know what's going on.” She looked vacantly ahead, mumbling to herself. Both detectives knew her quiet suburban life was about to change. Her husband was now under police scrutiny and everything she had was potentially in peril because of him.

Johnson attempted to soothe the distraught young mother, offering to let her stay while police searched her home. It would take a couple of hours, maybe longer. They'd just have to watch her while the police were doing the search.

Jess shook her head. “No. I can't be here,” she said. “I'm leaving.” Her pace quickened as she gathered up her clothes and her baby's things. With her child in her arms, tears in her eyes, she fled to her mother's, never to return to that house and call it her home again.

B
ACK AT HEADQUARTERS
, A
NSTEY
hammered out search warrant requests on his computer. He had four on the go: Twitchell's car, Johnny's car, the rented garage, and Twitchell's St. Albert home. His fingers jammed up on the keyboard a few times. He was a two-fingered typist. Scanning the police notes, writing down all the information they had so far, he let out a loud whoop when he spotted the licence plate number for Twitchell's Grand Am. He'd have to tell the boys about it later.

Anstey had been a cop for three decades, a member of homicide for nearly six years. And from all that experience he knew crime, including all the motives for trying to kill someone – money, sex, jealousy, to name a few. Murder investigations seldom were the riveting whodunits of detective lore, featuring ingenious killings and elaborate deceptions. People were predictable. But already he knew this case had veered off the track murder cops were used to following and into the extraordinary. He therefore made his search warrant requests as broad as possible. Was this murder, manslaughter, assault, or kidnapping? Was Johnny alive but being held against his will? Was he seriously injured or had he been brutally murdered? He simply didn't know. But he had a wild theory. Clark and Anstey had been building on it all night, with Twitchell giving out enough hints to convince him to pursue this unusual angle. It was time to see if something so sinister, born out of urban myth, could possibly be coming true. On each warrant request, Anstey wrote that he was looking for anything related to the film industry, including records or books “pertaining to the production of graphically violent horror and pornographic films.”