The Killing Type (16 page)

Here is one scenario which I
imagine this warm summer night, the first of June, while I lie
comfortably on my bed and the ceiling fan whooshes ever so lightly
over me. The murders will stop either because the police “get their
fucking act together” (thank you, oh raver) or because “this
goddamn psycho fucks off out of town or kills himself” (bis). There
will be a flood of media coverage for a couple of weeks, including
a pull-out section in the
Gazette
with a timeline, a map of where all of the murders
took place (cutie-pie graphics, the whole bloody thing reduced to a
sterile order), photos of this protest, photos of that partially
fingerprinted weapon. Then, the pause, no special reports, the
face-painted kids with ice cream back on the front page during the
busker festival. Everything is back to normal. There is the
occasional ejaculation of outrage, someone on the late news,
perhaps, earnestly reminding us not to get too comfortable again,
but eventually he starts to seem like a bit of a quack, and dear
dull mediocrity ultimately asserts herself.

I believe I will have hit my
perfect stride by then. The research will have been, say, 90
percent finished, and I will just have that tip-of-the-icepick
(which murder was that again?) bit to top it all off with.
Seriously, though, and with another metaphor: I predict that I will
simply have to tie together the disparate threads of violence and
depravity that I will have already noted. The piece that I have
forthcoming in the
Gazette
this weekend is but the most obvious of the
distillations of the plethora of facts that I have made. I also
already have pages of handwritten notes, blue ink on wide-ruled
yellow paper. A full nine hours of interviews of everyone from the
chief of police on down to the raver and other assorted lunatics
from whom I’d hoped to glean at least some insight. 322KB of
word-processed words. I am fully confident that it will not take me
long to stand back, attack it all, and have it in the form of a
highly saleable manuscript for publishers or agents. Forgive this
crudity, but I even see a bidding war, five digits easily rolling
over to six, and then, well, who knows?

I do have pure motives,
though perhaps my insistence on this throws the sincerity of that
assertion into question. Of course there is an admixture of
something negative, even evil, in all human endeavors, and my
writing initiative is no different in this regard. As I have freely
admitted already, I do want to prove to certain troglodytes at a
certain university at which I was formerly employed that I
was—and
remain
—a
scholar of distinction, a master researcher who is able to divert
his skills from the academic to the criminal, from keyboards to
killers.

“If I have anything to do with it,” my
former department head finished off with a pathetic little
flourish. I needn’t mention, perhaps, that the relationship had
deteriorated to that of angry, barely coherent boys in a
playground, or junkyard dogs scrapping over the remains of some
bloody sustenance. This dumb, callous dismissal is but one of the
panoply of reasons which motivate me, and one of the minor ones, if
I may say so. Yes, a desire to prove myself, and to prove an idiot
wrong, is part of my enervation, but mostly it is—and my apologies
if this sounds a little hokey—a sincere belief in the value of the
project. People are killed, the efficacy of the police
investigation leaves something to be desired, and the best service
that a scholarly writer can provide is, well, writing.

I am not particularly proud of this
component of my motivation, but I can say with some integrity that
the greater part of it derives from a need to try to help a city
track down an evil at its core, or at least to report succinctly on
the results, the repercussions, the lessons, yes, the facts when
hopefully this whole sorry mess is cleaned up by someone in
authority. That brother whom I saw crying on the television news
the other night, standing with his mother but now bereft of his
sister, he and others animate me in my just but modest cause. I
hardly remember his words at all, but there was a kind of
confidence and integrity in the way he said what he said. It was
brilliantly, sadly obvious that he was so devastated by the
death—“my sister, my best friend, my life,” he said—that he cared
not a whit about appearances. The tears rolled down and marked the
front of his beige shirt, but he talked on and wiped his forearm
across his face in the most distracted manner, as if he were
operating outside of intention, and it was his practical body doing
for him what his debilitated mind was no longer able to.

It is for him and some other suffering
victims that I am determined to find this killer.

Chapter 17

I call Tony and try not to sound
nervous.

“Hey,” she says, and in my current
mode of double- and triple- and multiple-guessing, I am not sure
whether she is just that casual, or whether she is pretending to be
casual, or—

“Have you ever tried the number 11?” I
ask, oh-so-sneaky me, trying to trip her with a little
mystery.

“Excuse me?”

“Number 11. The shrimp dish at the
Cambodian place.”

“Cambodian? ... Oh, the place off
Princess, the restaurant, on Wellington or somewhere around
there.”

I feel like I am reeling in a fish
(it’s the lake, seducing me to such metaphors), a little aggressive
pulling now, and then slackening the line, get her interested and
then get her caught.

“Right,” I say.

“So, you called to tell me about a
good meal you had?”

“I wouldn’t mind a repeat. I mean, are
you free tonight to check it out?”

“Tonight. I, well ... you know, that
sounds like a grand idea.”

While I walk toward the
restaurant I am planning my strategy. I still haven’t decided that
Tony is a suspect in these killings, but she will make an
interesting interview for the purposes of the book. I’ve read and
re-read enough, done the research, so that I know these killings
inside out, and I am eager to try to discover whether she is privy
to any details that only the killer could possibly know about. It
will take a deft hand to do this without revealing myself (I almost
wrote
reveling
).

Tony is waiting outside. She smiles as
I approach, and something inside me is deeply moved and somewhat
ashamed that she is obviously so happy to see me. There is no hint
of obligation or perfunctoriness in any of her gestures or her
behaviour.

“Hi,” she says as she hugs me. I am
surprised at the physical contact. I feel myself actually flinching
but when she pulls away I try to feign nonchalance, as if I am used
to this all the time, as if this is the most natural thing in the
world.

“I have something for you,” she says
after we have ordered beers.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Get this: did you know that
there was a guy with a violent past released from Knosting
Penitentiary about ten days before these murders
started?”

“Actually, no, I didn’t.
What do you mean by
violent
past
?”

“His previous crimes were
domestic, you know, the same kind of shit that weak males do all
the time, beating up the innocent. Disgusting and angering really,
but of course nothing like murder. And not serial murder. He had a
boring job or something and someone had said
boo
to him when he was a kid, I guess,
and so he took it all out on his girlfriend.”

“Where did you find this
out? I mean,
how
?”

“Just poking around in one of the
databases at the library. Amazing what you can find there, all
free.” She laughs lightly just as the waitress arrives with our
beer.

I sip and am reminded again how
important small things are, how much pleasure I can derive from a
cold, well-brewed drink. I smile as I think that perhaps this is
all that I have really needed—no book, no tenure, no academic
insights, just sharing a beer with someone I can talk
to.

“You’re one step ahead of me,” I say.
“I’ve been thinking lately that I should try to narrow things down,
take all the research I’ve done, what I know, what I’ve seen, and
try to come up with a list of suspects. Sounds kind of crude, I
guess.”

“Actually, I’d think that that would
be essential at some point. Sort of like writing your thesis after
you’ve read all the articles.”

The food arrives but I don’t
even remember ordering. I feel distracted as a—what is the term I
heard?—as a “multi-tasker,” a bad one, would feel. Don’t give
myself away, extract as much information as I can, make sure she
thinks that you are enjoying yourself. But I can’t concentrate on
all of these tasks, and the additional problem, perhaps, is that
I
am
enjoying
myself. There is a pile of red food and a pile of yellow, some
white (that must be rice), and something that approximates green. I
seem to have lost my entire vocabulary along with my focus, seem to
remember much less about this cuisine than a man should who has
eaten so much of it.

“So,” I say, in a manner that seems
self-consciously dramatic to me, and may or may not be so in
reality, “if you were the one writing the thesis, what would be the
big facts that you would focus on?”

She chews contemplatively, sips, and
then pokes the air with the index finger of her spare hand.
Smiling, as if the problem has been punctured, she deadpans and
says: “It’s all in the letters.”

I calm myself, and look at her
incredulously: “The letters? You mean, the—you mean the letters of
the victims’ n—?”

“Check out the letters in the
newspaper.”

“What?”

“The letters in the newspaper, the
letters to the editor.”

“The letters to the
editor.”

“Yes,” she laughs, “the letters to the
editor. I’ve read them all, and saved them all, too, and re-read
them, and—”

“Aren’t they mostly just
people complaining—
justifiably
complaining—about all the murders and the
inability of the police to do anything about it?”

“Yes, that’s true, but the letter
writers make connections, draw conclusions, that the police don’t
or can’t or won’t.”

“For example?”

She gathers a studied amount of food,
some rice, some chicken, a chili, onto her chopsticks and brings it
casually to her mouth. I can see a single grain of rice hanging
precariously from the mound and I worry about it unaccountably. It
goes in without incident.

“Well, for example,” she says,
“there’s the whole randomness of the victims, the fact that there
don’t seem to be any discernible connections between them, nothing
they all have in common. Age, gender, ethnicity, location—nothing.
A couple of the letters have pointed that out.”

“Sometimes there are no simple
patterns in these things.”

“Yes, but there’s
always
some
kind of
pattern, isn’t there? I mean, you should know, from your studies.
Is there ever a series of serial killings where the guy just kills
at random?”

“I’m not sure it’s true to say that
these are done at random.”

“Well, can you figure out a
pattern?”

“I hadn’t really thought
about it yet,” I say, somewhat defensively, and not quite the whole
truth, as though I’ve been caught short by a surprise quiz
(“shouldn’t you
know
these things, young man?”). “But, you know—and not to make it
sound too much like a puzzle or some difficult work of fiction or
anything of that nature—but I am confident there is a pattern there
somewhere. Now that you’ve pushed me a bit on it, I’ll start
looking into it.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” I have trouble reading
her tone.

There’s a pause which I can’t
interpret: she looks around and allows her eyes to alight on
various objects, as if she is an actress who has forgotten her
lines, and is hoping that something on the set will jar her memory.
I am just as perturbed, and am slightly shocked to discover that I
have eaten no more than two or three mouthfuls. I take the
opportunity to formulate various assaults on her; wear her down, I
can hear my bad cop saying to me, don’t be afraid to be a little
rough.

“So, what’s your theory?” I
ask.

“My theory?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I just mentioned about the
letters.”

“No, I guess—I mean, who do you think
is doing this?” It strikes me as a simple question, perhaps an
obvious and cliché one even, and I am puzzled at her seeming
opacity.

“Oh, well, if you put it that way!”
She pauses. “You’re serious?”

“Well, halfway anyway.”

“Can I say something stupid? I don’t
think it’s obvious, is all. I mean, I don’t think it’s anyone who’s
just gotten out of prison with a grudge, or some violent American
coming over to spew his rage, or some crazy psychopath or anything
like that. I picture a quiet person, like an old man or someone
like that. Someone who’s lived here for years but has just now”—she
makes quotation marks with her fingers—“turned.”