The Killing Type (6 page)

“Rachel, that’s a very kind offer, and
I will definitely take you up on it. If you can point me to a few
things that would save me time—well, in fact you’ve already done
that when I’ve already been at the library—but if you could do that
more, say, comprehensively, I’d be very appreciative.”

She beams again after her nervous
offer and reaches into a little leather purse that she has strung
over her shoulder.

“Here’s my card and I’ve taken the
liberty of writing my home phone number on there as well. I hope
you’ll call. I’d love to help in any way I can.”

I take the card and nod to let her
know that I will definitely call upon her.

“Well,” she says, getting up, “I
should be going.” She reaches her hand out awkwardly and at first I
think she has something else to give me until I realize that she’s
offering to shake. We do and she scurries off.

A funny thing happened as I
sipped my skim-milk café au lait later in the afternoon. I was
barely aware of the bustle all around me as I pored over a stack of
four or five books, some germane to my research and some, I
confess, not. I was right in the middle of the room and I could
sense
something
.
The guy by the window was watching me. The cute kid of the earnest
couple at the table next to me was poking through the book on
forensic science that I had laid on the empty chair at my own
table. And generally speaking, while I was concentrating on the
more horrific details of murder and mutilation, I was still aware
of orders being solicited and placed, money received and change
remitted, napkins, stirrers, and condiments taken and used at the
little station just by the cash register. Suddenly, I felt worried,
about nothing in particular. I didn’t expect the guy by the window
to lunge at me, or for the murderer who wanders the Knosting
streets to burst through the door and shamelessly choose me as his
next victim. It was nothing that specific: rather, just a feeling,
perhaps the result of too much criminal reading, or a
personalization of the civic geist. Sometimes, no matter how
dedicated one is to the task, no matter now diligent, how
committed, the base fear which afflicts a whole city cannot be
avoided.

Later, at my favourite
Cambodian restaurant, a hole in the wall where I eat weekly, I
choose the number 14 and read a section of the
Globe
while the chef works his magic
behind me. It occurs to me for the first time that I never really
hear any sounds of cooking back there, no clanking of kitchen
implements, no sizzling, dishes being clacked. I place my order, he
always repeats the number back to me, and within about five minutes
a plate of freshly prepared food is gently slid in front of me. I
enjoy the fact that most of the staff there, the nervous guy behind
the counter, the friendly but efficient waiter, the woman who
replenishes the jug of water—they all recognize me as a regular,
and, for example, don’t put a knife and fork down as they do for
others, because they know I prefer chopsticks. There are many fewer
people here this evening, and I imagine that that is because either
they are at home or in coffee shops discussing this horror, or
frankly some of them are more scared to be out on the streets now.
A neighbour whom I’ve nodded to a couple of times on leaving and
returning home approaches me.

“Nothing but bad news, I’m sure,” he
says, nodding his head down at the newspaper.

“Yes, I suppose so. Hello,
Tom. It
is
hard to
believe, isn’t it?”

He stands there a little awkwardly, as
if I’ve asked the wrong question, or muffed my line.

“Listen, I don’t mean to be forward,
but may I join you?” he eventually asks.

I have limited options, of course, and
acquiesce with a muted “Yes.”

He sits and when the waiter comes with
my food. Tom predictably orders the pad thai—the equivalent of
getting spaghetti and meatballs in an Italian restaurant—and,
selfishly on my part, I worry that the main result of his order
being out of sync with mine is that mine will be cold while I defer
eating out of courtesy.

“Please, eat,” he says, and whether he
means it or not I dig in with my chopsticks. A piece of chicken
flecked with chili, the sauce, chunks of fresh tomatoes for
contrast, the delectable rice.

“Who do you think did it?” I ask a
little simplistically, not really expecting an answer but hoping to
generate some conversation between mouthfuls.

“God, I mean—do you really think there
is someone here in town who could do something like
that?”

“Well, the alternative is not too
appealing either: a visitor, someone who just happens to be here,
or, maybe even worse, has made the trip here expressly to do
this.”

“Jesus.”

His pad thai arrives, looking rather
bland in comparison to my half-finished wonder. The meal and the
personal interaction are not quite the same after that, and I have
to admit to wolfing mine down in an effort to escape
him.

Chapter 7

Exit the third victim.

I was sitting in my stately but
comfortable wing chair when I was compelled to turn on the
television, exactly 6 pm and the news was bad: Richard Easley, of
“no fixed address” as the euphemism has it for poverty and
homelessness, was run over by a stolen car. The details are not
pretty. As far as the police can glean or reveal, Easley was struck
at the corner of Queen and Montreal, dragged a couple of blocks
east, and then simply abandoned (with the car). The killer wanted
to make it clear that this is one of his “trophies” (his language,
as quoted in the news item, not mine) and so he left a simple but
crude note in the man’s pocket: “This is the third person I’ve
killed.” The news reader, a normally stolid man whom I’ve watched
many nights before without incident, chokes at the word “third,”
clears his throat, looks down at his script, and then looks up with
determination. He quotes the rest of the note in a noticeably
quieter voice, as if he has been subdued by the facts or the
threat. I find it all a little hard to believe. I will have to do
more research to determine when a mere spree of murders becomes
bona fide serial killings, but as I have already noted, the means
and the variety of means that this person is using to carry out his
murders are very unusual.

I am drawn now, right away, to the few
good monographs I have here in my room on the topic, but instead I
put on my coat and head outside. It’s cold and the force of the
wind on my face is salutary, making me pay attention to something
other than murder. I have my hands in my pockets, my head down, the
sidewalk just repetitive slabs of bleak concrete, and by this time
I am trudging north along Bagot. The wind dies down, the
temperature moderates, and I stop, realizing that I am within
minutes of the scene of the crime. Do I want to see this? I wonder.
A car goes by and I have a mental image of poor Easley being
dragged. I wonder whether he was killed on impact (one can hope) or
whether it was the sandwiched ride between pavement and chassis
which did him in. I think of the possibility of him being struck by
the car but not really being hurt; instead, just thrust under the
bumper and alive and conscious for however many horrific seconds it
would take to be slammed to death, trapped down there, dirty,
noisy. I picture him not even holding on but just wedged up there
amid the machinery somehow so that he couldn’t escape even if he
wanted to, even if he preferred being plonked down on the hard
ground and possibly run over to being dragged to death.

I can’t really bear to be here. I turn
around and nearly run back to my room. My landlady greets me in the
foyer.

“A cold night to be out,” she says,
stating the obvious.

“Yes,” I reply.

“Did you hear about that poor man who
was run down by that car?”

“Yes. I saw the news.”

“It’s a terrible world and I don’t
know what it’s coming to when those things happen. In a small town,
too, no less. It’s a terrible world,” she repeats, and then walks
into her living room, her head down for a moment and then up again,
shaking. I walk upstairs to my room.

I feel quite comfortable as I sink
back down into the same chair where I got the bad news. I dare not
turn on the television again out of fear that something worse may
have happened, if that is even possible. I ease back into the dark
silence and think about the police chief, only a month or two on
the job, and now faced with this horror. He took over the position
quickly after the old chief, more than thirty years on the force,
was fired and left disgraced after he had been caught in a
scandal—things have been so hectic lately (murder’s like that) that
I forget all the details, but I know that he had been stealing
confiscated drugs and giving them back to a dealer, who sold them
and split the proceeds. Through some legal machination or another,
he was able to avoid jail time, but the image of him that adorned
the papers and the TV, a broken man, was sad and haunting. He was
burly and red-faced (from both embarrassment and drinking, the wags
wagged) on the first day of the investigation into his actions, but
by the end of it all he was unhealthily skinnier, soft-spoken when
he used to be categorical, deferring to reporters’ invasive probing
when he had apparently made a career out of talking over them,
cutting them off, answering the question he wanted to and not the
one they’d asked.

The old chief retreated to obscurity
after that: he sold his house and moved to his cottage by the lake,
and the truth is that nearly everyone forgot about him. Rumours
flew. Some people say that within weeks of his move, he was dead by
some circumstance (suicide, drug deal gone bad, police
retaliation), and the ridiculousness of these speculations was not
confirmed by the absence of a body. Others say that he continued a
life of crime in his forced retirement, not only dealing drugs, but
knocking over convenience stores for extra cash as well. This
rumour, of course, does not merit comment. I carried out some
interviews of a more reliable segment of the citizenry of Knosting
and environs—supplemented by personal surveillance at his
cottage—and what I gleaned was that this sad bear of a man
succeeded in his final goal, a simple fading away into the
background. He doesn’t quite feel that his entire career was
invalidated by what happened in the last few months, but some days
he wallows in sorrow, or anger, or indifference when he can muster
it.

The Easley murder sets a new low in
sheer cruelty and frankly makes me worried about the state of mind
of a man whose repertoire could include such a method. I hasten to
add: no murder is acceptable, of course, but some of them are
perpetrated with a kind of evil panache that takes one aback. Using
a car like that, for example, is an affront to all human dignity,
and a crass and disdainful poke at the police. “See,” I can hear
the murderer saying. “See, I can drive this noisy vehicle around
the streets with a man jammed under the chassis, and you can do
nothing about it.” I shudder.

I wonder how a murder such as this
even takes place. Does he pick out a person and then just plow him
over? Or, more likely perhaps, does he drive slowly around the
darker and less populated neighbourhoods, looking for a weak one
which has strayed from the herd, and then strike? I really am not
quite sure which one I find the more distressing. The radio
provides some solace this evening: no news, of course, but just the
uninterrupted strains of Mozart et al. for my savage
breast.

Later that night, somewhat
self-wounded by my own ruminations, I head out to the coffee shop
with nothing in hand, no book, no newspaper, no computer, nothing
to listen to or play with. All the way to the place I keep
picturing myself in a dimly lit, undisturbable corner, a locus from
which I can see when I might want to but hardly be noticeable
myself. I order a dark roast, the desire strong inside me for
something harsher than the day, and grab a packet of sugar and a
wooden stirrer (splintered, I notice) as I head like a guided
missile to the desired corner. I settle into the seat, shrug my
coat onto the back of it, and wait for the usually kind server to
make an exception and actually bring my coffee to me. Dear boy, he
does.

I thank him with a pinched smile and
then slouch somewhat while I watch the steam rise off the top. It
is something nice and small and I find I can focus on it for a
couple of minutes before I have to shake myself to attentiveness
again. I recognize some of the regulars in the room, the sociology
grad student with her head bent to her computer, the couple without
rings whom I’ve also seen here separately with their spouses, rings
all round. I feel a near-literal stab when the door whooshes open
and Tony walks in. Like a pimply teenager whose first date was
awkward but fascinating, I am tempted to call out to her as much as
I am to slump down right to the floor while I await her departure.
She turns around after she places her order and my eyes, formerly
drilling into the back of her head, are now communicating something
or other to her that seems like an invitation. She is at my table
in seconds.

“Listen, I know this is abrupt, and
you probably just want to be alone, but would you mind if I joined
you, even for just five or ten minutes? Tell me straight out if
not.”