A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller) (19 page)

I sat on a park bench under an elm, stared up into the sky and watched a few late dragonflies wheel around. As I watched a few darker shapes emerged—bats, I guessed. I knew about injunctions and I couldn’t remember the last time I had received one. The conversation between the two men had reminded me of a quote by a guy named Anatole French to the effect that the law forbade the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges and to beg.

I had always liked that quote although I disagreed with it on several levels, so I sat there and rested my feet and thought about the conversation. Finally I realized that I had been unaware you could send a cease and desist order by email.

That seemed important, so I filed it away and went back to wandering.

While I was listening to a discussion about shoplifters Claire came up to me again.“You should hear this.”

I excused myself and went to a medium-sized woman with a very nice smile in a dashiki printed with gold flowers. She introduced herself as Mrs. Godiva Lightly and laughed. “My father, bless him, had a sense of humour and a profound love of James Bond films and novels. That’s how I got my name. People either love it or hate it, no middle ground.”

I smiled and she went on, “I was talking about the language of flowers and your wife said that you would want to hear this.”

Claire looked at me flatly and sipped a coffee and I turned to Lightly. “Yes. I would love to hear about, what did you call it?”

“The language of flowers. I teach history and language at the University of Winnipeg and the language of flowers is part of one course—it’s a Victorian curiosity, earlier actually, but the language was perfected by them in the English world at least. They believed that each type of flower had a meaning so you could send a bouquet promising sexual ecstasy or retribution with some degree of secrecy. Until everyone knew the language, that is.”

“Was it common knowledge?”

“Eventually, yes. Books and treatises were written on the subject. It provides fascinating glimpses into what made the English culture tick.”

“And what made it tick?”

She gestured. “Profound dissonance in the society. Apollonian prudishness on one hand with piano legs being covered and cliterodectomies being performed if a wife dared to climax while performing her middle-class duty with her eyes shut. And Dionysian excess on the other hand, with a quarter of the female population of London fucking for money, mass abuse of arsenic, cocaine, morphine and hashish, and a superabundance of nipple rings in the sweaty teats of wealthy dowagers.”

“Really?” I absorbed what she had said and then asked, “What do Apollonian and Dionysian mean?”

“Apollonian refers to the Greek sun god—it’s a kind of chaste, respectful love. Dionysian refers to the Greek god of wine and excess—physical lust and so on. This was the culture that gave us the proud Dr. Frankenstein, the vengeful Miss Havisham, the foreign Count Dracula, the enigmatic Moonstone and the illustrious Mr. Hyde. They are the peoples who raped India, invaded Afghanistan, allowed the Irish potato famine, created concentration camps in the Boer War, got involved in the Zulu wars, tried genocide against the Kalahari Bushmen and so on. All at the same time maintaining a high degree of civility. Two sides of a coin; the proper English culture and the conquest of half the world.”

“Fascinating. What about …” I closed my eyes and remembered the girl in the flower shop and the way she held her head while she recited. “What about orange lilies, amaranthus, garlic, walnuts, grass, red roses, mistletoe, japonica, chrysanthemums, spider flowers and dill?”

Lightly shrugged. “Those are easy. Orange lilies means ‘I hate you!’ Amaranthus means ‘You’ve got no balls.’ Garlic means evil, to be warded off, and walnuts mean stupidity. Red roses sing of love, the darker the colour the guiltier the love, however. Mistletoe means a kiss, of course, we still see that at Christmas but it can also ask for a quick lay. Japonica means sincere love and chrysanthemums mean the same. The spider flower is a request for eloping and dill means pure, sweet lust.”

Lightly stared off into space and then cheered up. “Oh! And grass means ‘You’re a practitioner of the French vice,’ which was what the Victorian English called homosexuality. Of course the Victorian-era French called it the English vice. ”

She beamed as though she had accomplished something. Claire and I thanked her, made our apologies and excuses and finally fled into the late night.

While we waited for a cab Claire leaned against me. “Wonderful. The Shy Man wants to make love to me and he hates you. And apparently he speaks flower.”

I hugged her close. “Could be worse.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “How so?”

I had no answer so I finally just said, lamely, “I’ll come up with something but something could be worse.”

Claire bit me and while I was getting her fingers out of my arm I figured out how to really annoy Mr. Devanter and his lovely lawyer.

I
slept for about an hour beside Claire and then I went downstairs and brewed coffee and drank two while sitting at the dining room table with the book about serial killers, a pad of paper and several pencils. When I was comfortably awake I lit a candle and put it in front of me, focussed on the flickering light and listened to the sounds of the house.

Thor, the mouse, rustled in its shavings a few feet away. Programmed to be nocturnal by millennia of being the smallest thing on the block, prey to pretty much everything. Crickets outside, carnivorous and delicious to many things but forced by the need to breed to rub legs together and sing. They balanced fucking and breathing together and the loudest bug got the most girls but also had the greatest chance of being eaten. The hum of electricity and gas and water in the walls of the house, the sounds of what amounted to a living entity: breathing, eating, maintaining a constant temperature and excreting. The buzz of cars outside. The soft press of the wind on the house, rushing across the roof and sighing away, the physical manifestation of the atmosphere and the fact that the planet spun in space at less than 1,000 miles an hour and around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour.

Motion compounding motion and sometimes conflicting.

The truth was old planes with their weak engines could stay motionless relative to the ground by flying into a strong wind. And that explorers racing to the North Pole might travel south if the currents picked up the ice sheets they were on. And that an undertow could drown a man if he wasn’t careful and didn’t understand the rules.

I wrote that down and underlined it.

Then I read the book, skimming it at first and reading in detail where necessary. A crazy cannibal motherfucker (literally) in California, an angry Black man in Texas, an angry preppy extrovert, and others. Each unique. All the same.

I poured some more coffee and thought about the Shy Man. The cops thought he was Caucasian because he preyed upon Caucasian women and because most serial killers were white.

I considered it and decided that they were probably right.

The Shy Man was probably white. I wrote it down and underlined it.

The cops thought the Shy Man was a male because of the rapes and the semen and I thought they were right about that as well. A woman could be a serial killer, although it was rare (like Eileen Wuornos), and a woman could fake the rapes with a dildo, although I hadn’t heard of it happening except in bad fiction. And a woman could introduce the sperm from someone else, although again, I had only heard of it in the cases of bad fiction.

So the Shy Man was probably a man. Underline.

The cops thought the Shy Man was solitary because they had never found signs of a second killer. I thought about pairs of killers and ran them through my mind, the Bernardos in Toronto, the Moor Killers in England, the Hillside Stranglers in Los Angeles, a few others. But in those cases the killers had all left traces and there were signs of only one killer with the Shy Man killings.

The Shy Man was probably one person.

I knew that some serial killers involved a woman; they acted like a lure to bring the victim in close and lull suspicions. The Shy Man though had attacked without subtlety, so no lures or lulls were needed that I could see.

The Shy Man was probably a man.

The cops thought the Shy Man was probably in his forties. He had started killing in the early nineties and most serial killers don’t start until they’re adults, which meant he had been in his early twenties when he started. I thought about that and agreed.

The Shy Man was probably between thirty-five and fifty.

I poured more coffee.

So the cops had a pretty good image of the Shy Man. An early-middle-aged man, white, and who worked without a partner.

I thought about the city and the notes and statistics that Dean and Brenda had given me and I realized I was talking about somewhere around 50,000 people just inside the city. And maybe another 10,000 within an hour’s drive. Way too many suspects.

From the book I knew that most serial killers had similar childhoods. They wet the bed until quite late, they started fires and they tortured animals. And I knew, from personal experience, that most serial killers liked cops and frequently had a kind of fetish about authority, so you could find them as security guards, cops, soldiers and so on.

None of that helped.

For a few seconds I wished I believed in profilers and all that other crap the television and movies feed citizens. The idea that someone could know what goes on in a psychopath’s head was ridiculous when you realized that most psychopaths didn’t know themselves. Not to say psychopaths didn’t have patterns, everyone had patterns. But there was no magic to finding those patterns.

And I wished I believed the police could actually investigate a crime.

But that never happened. Most crimes were solved because of confidential informers or cash rewards or drunken confessions or sheer, unbelievable stupidity.

A solitary psychopath like the Shy Man would be immune to most of those factors. He wouldn’t talk to anyone because of his very nature which meant there would be no confidential informers and no one to be attracted by cash rewards. In addition the citizens didn’t know a serial killer was out there which meant that there was no one looking for him. There would be no Jimmy Stewart looking out his rear window and no brother to rat out the Unabomber.

In the back of my mind I wondered about telling the press about the Shy Man. Laying everything out and letting the cards fall as they would. It was an option and I filed it away. That kind of chaos might help the situation.

The Shy Man wouldn’t confess and he wouldn’t make a single dumb mistake because he was enjoying what he was doing. He was having fun. He was planning and plotting and taking his time with his victims.

More coffee, and I thought about the basics. The Shy Man was committing crimes and crimes require certain things: motive, means and opportunity. He had to want to kill, he had to have the tools to kill and he had to have the chance to kill.

His psychopathy gave him a motive. He killed because he liked to inflict pain, probably because it aroused him and allowed him to climax. In between killings he probably fantasized and he probably kept trophies and he probably masturbated. He probably didn’t have a steady partner although that was not guaranteed; Citizen X of Russia had had a wife and family at home while he was busy killing children.

I was digressing. So the Shy Man had a motive, in fact he was the motive.

Means meant tools. He needed a gun and knives and rope. One victim had been killed with an old European 9mm parabellum full metal jacketed round fired from a pistol, possibly a Luger or Luger copy. Unfortunately there had been about a billion 9mm parabellum full metal jacketed rounds manufactured in the century plus since the calibre had been invented. And there had been about two million Lugers made, not counting Swiss, Belgian, Spanish and Chinese copies. And the knife used was a glass-bladed one, handmade or an antique, pretty hard to trace but easy to identify once found. And the rope was plain, ordinary manila rope, traced back to a job lot brought into the city in the 1970’s and probably stored in someone’s basement.

So when the cops found someone with a 9mm pistol and ammunition and a glass-bladed knife and rope in their basement they would probably have a good case for arrest and conviction. This didn’t help me because the cops were no closer to catching the fuck than ever.

Opportunity was last. Opportunity for the Shy Man meant meeting his ladies and taking them away to play. So what did they have in common?

Paris, the jeweller in 1992, the flower shop owner in 1995, lawyer and husband in 1997, a model in 1998, a waitress in 2001, he stalked but missed an accountant in 2003 but he caught her and her son in 2005, then a bank teller in 2006. I could omit the husband and son, they were incidentals, they were debris to be cleared out of the way, so that gave me seven victims.

I assumed the cops had run checks to see if they knew each other, if they had gone to the same schools and so on.

But what did they have in common? Each woman was between eighteen and forty. Each woman was white. But what else?

And, the million-dollar question, what the hell did they have in common with Claire?

I filed the question away in the hungry part of my brain and started to make breakfast.

Dawn had come.

O
n the radio (I had it turned to the right wing flake talk channel) there was an early morning interview with Illyanovitch. The guy doing the interview basically agreed with everything he said and Illyanovitch agreed with everything the interviewer said so the whole thing was kind of pathetic and pointless. What was interesting was that Illyanovitch kept coming back to the same idea, that university students would support me because they distrusted Illyanovitch even though he supported their rights to protest on bicycles as long as the parade route was filed in advance. Wasn’t that reasonable, he asked the audience.

After awhile the audience phoned in to agree with him and I turned it off.