Endgame (22 page)

T
he
police report was aided by the tape recorder found beside the bathtub with the body of the dead Asian woman. Narrated at first by a soft male voice, and later by what the police concluded was the voice of the dead woman in the bathtub, it detailed daily events on the island as well as the confessions of eleven people involved in the overdose of a young woman at a house party in Seattle's market district twenty years before.

The confessions were first- or at times second-hand accounts, given by the combined group of eleven who expired on the island. (So the police concluded, once the bodies were counted and the names and details of the individuals summed up.) As far as the police were able to determine, all confessions were given freely and of the victims' own accord. Nothing seemed to have been coerced.

From what they could tell, the first on the island to die was a Guyanese-born lawyer named Noni Embrem, age forty-eight. His confession consisted of an admission that he had once bribed a drug dealer named Newt Merton to plead no contest to manslaughter charges over the death of a Ladykillers fan after Noni promised Newt he would receive a suspended sentence. Newt accepted the bribe, but went to jail for the crime while the others went free. His death was determined to have been the result of ingesting poison in a cocktail mixed by the retreat's chef, Jack Edwards.

Second to die was Janice Sandford, a.k.a. Sarah Wynberg, forty-nine, host of the party where the young fan, Zerin Ames, had been given an overdose of ecstasy. Her confession, not caught on tape but spoken privately to a nurse, concerned the fact that she had been having sex with the dead girl's date, Spike Anthrax. As a result, no one noticed when the girl went into convulsions caused by the overdose. At the time of the trial, Wynberg denied allegations about her involvement, as well as the involvement of the others in the girl's death, claiming Ames had left the party with friends. Like Embrem, she, too, had been poisoned, in her case via medication administered by the island nurse, Sandra Goodman. Wynberg's confession was later narrated and confirmed on tape by Goodman herself.

As far as could be discerned, the likely third death was that of a forty-seven-year-old man employed to ferry the guests back and forth. He had gone by the name of Jack Edwards, though he had many aliases known to the police. Edwards's part in Ames's death occurred when he was unwittingly asked to take her to a hospital in his taxi cab. He was never formally accused in the investigation, although it was on record at the taxi company dispatch that he had dropped Ames off at the emergency ward. Edwards apparently drowned when his boat disintegrated, possibly as a result of the severity of the storm. His may have been the only natural death among the eleven, though given the circumstances of the others, the police were unwilling to rule out homicide.

A fourth guest, a real-estate agent named David, a.k.a. “Newt” Merton, forty-six, died of electrocution when he attempted to plug in a faulty fridge that had been deliberately tampered with. According to Merton's confession, both at the trial and on the island, he had supplied the drugs at the party where the girl received a bad dose of ecstasy. In his defence, Merton claimed that another dealer had tampered with his supplies in an attempt to put him out of business.

The fifth and sixth bodies belonged to rock musicians Max Hardcore and Spike Anthrax, both fifty, and both former members of the punk-rock group known as the Ladykillers. Hardcore died from a suspicious fall over a third-floor railing some time on the night of the third day; his former partner, Spike, died of a lethal injection of methamphetamines the following morning. Their parts in the death of Ames were substantiated on tape as well. Anthrax had invited the girl to the party, but quickly abandoned her for the hostess, Sarah Wynberg. He and Hardcore had apparently been the two men who took the dying Ames out to the taxi operated by Edwards. They left her with Edwards, along with a note saying she had taken an overdose of ecstasy, directing him to take her to the nearest hospital.

Although Ames made it to the hospital by cab, she was simply dropped off by Edwards, who failed to notify the on-call nurse. The note stating details of her condition was subsequently misplaced, which may have contributed to her demise. Again, this confession was not given on tape by Edwards, but by the real estate agent, David Merton, who claimed Edwards had confessed his part in the affair to him privately.

A footnote to the report stated it might be worth mentioning that, while it likely went unknown to the eleven victims, another murder occurred the same week as the island fatalities. The death of the band's former manager, Harvey Keill, fifty-four, also seems to corroborate claims made on tape by several of the victims who felt they were being targeted as revenge for the death of Zerin Ames in a way that accorded with the lyrics of a Ladykillers song, “The Twelve Days of Shagging,” in which each of the twelve days is marked by a gift of something potentially lethal.

The first of these, “a love letter full of hate,” would in fact concur with this thesis, as Keill was believed to have died from ingesting a poisonous substance mailed to him some days before the others arrived on the island. The sender was anonymous, but the envelope contained a CD with a bootleg copy of the song, in which the poison was hidden.

The eighth known death was that of Crispin LaFey, fifty-three. LaFey, who suffered from near-blindness, was a well-known and much-respected rock critic. He was reportedly writing a compendium on the history of punk rock, and had attended the Ladykillers' reunion in hopes of obtaining some first-hand accounts. He was found with a fully functional laptop at his bedside. A full pack of insulin vials lay tucked inside one of the flaps. No trace of a manuscript or any sort of notes on what occurred on the island was found on the computer, however.

LaFey's death was considered one of the larger mysteries, in that he appeared to have died of an insulin overdose, though the tape mentioned the disappearance of his insulin at a critical period. However, the islanders believed he died from poison injected by the nurse, Sandra. Traces of an unusual chemical compound were found in his body, though its makeup was not confirmed. While fully clothed when he was discovered, it was noted that one of LaFey's socks had been removed and left lying on the floor beside his bed. An additional oddity was that of an empty syringe found protruding from the door of the room occupied by the body of Spike Anthrax, directly across the hall from LaFey's.

At this point, the recorded narrative was taken over by the woman named Sami Lee, fifty-six. Her voice on the tape, as one police officer put it, “was eerie and spooky, full of malice and spite.” She could be heard calling herself “Keeper of the Ladykillers Legacy,” and seemed to have been determined to follow the events on the island to their conclusion. According to the tape, she was the last person alive, which would point to her as the obvious murderer of most, if not all, of those on the island. There were, however, several reasons to refute this, of which more was noted in a postscript.

The ninth victim was the transsexual, Verna Temple, thirty-nine. As indicated in medical records kept of everyone on the island, Temple was allergic to wasp stings. She was found dead in her bedroom with the remains of a wasps' nest on the floor. It appeared that an attempt to intervene in the wasp attack was stymied by the fact that Temple's door was locked on the inside and the key was not immediately available, for reasons as yet unknown. However, it seemed that when the last three guests broke into her room they found both the window and door locked from inside, leaving no possible explanation as to how the nest ended up in the room. It was later determined that it was pushed in through a small vent near the room's ceiling, possibly while she was asleep.

According to the taped recounting, the following morning the final three victims — Sami Lee, Sandra Goodman, and Pete Doghouse — left the house to try to attract the attention of a passing boat. At some point, Goodman, forty-four, returned to the house to retrieve materials for burning to further their effort. According to Lee's account, Goodman did not return. Pete Doghouse, forty-nine, went into the house against Lee's wishes. When Lee arrived on the scene, Doghouse claimed that he had found Goodman strangled and laid out on her bed, but denied having killed her. (She was in fact found strangled and in bed, as the police discovered.)

At this point, Lee says Doghouse attacked her. She fought him off with a carving knife, stabbing him twice in the chest and leaving his body on the beach near the cove, where he was found when the police arrived.

This is another of the instances where the taped account directly contradicted the evidence as the police discovered it. When Doghouse's body was found, there were two stab wounds to the chest, as Lee described them, but there was a third wound in his back as well. In fact, Doghouse was found lying on his back impaled on the knife, which was not discovered until his body was turned over. It was later concluded by forensics that it was this same knife that Sami Lee used to commit suicide in the bathtub, though the impossibility of cutting her wrists before stabbing Doghouse a third time, and leaving the knife in his back while returning to the bathroom — all without spilling a drop of her own blood — could not be overstated.

There was also a running narrative explaining how a series of twelve chess pieces were systematically removed, or knocked over, on a chessboard in the drawing room after each murder, up until the death of Temple. Another piece was said to have been placed on the chest of Max Hardcore after his death. On the same tape, Lee describes how she and Goodman watched Doghouse turn over the fourth-last chess piece, a white queen, while declaring he had not killed Temple. There was no mention of any pieces being moved from that point forward, though when police arrived on the scene all twelve pieces had been set upright on the board, suggesting that players could begin to engage in the next game, though with far fewer than the requisite number of pieces. Whether they were placed in this manner by Sami Lee or by an unknown person and, if so, when that was done had not been determined.

Following the deaths of Goodman and Doghouse, Lee described the final set of events from the bathtub as she slit her wrists and watched the blood flow from her veins, with the bath water running in the background. On the recording, a noise like that of a knife falling can also clearly be heard, though the knife, as explained, was found in Doghouse's back when police arrived.

Needless to say, the investigating officers found it an eerie experience listening to the entirety of the recording for anything that might indicate the presence of another person while Sami Lee lay dying, never being quite sure when she breathed her last. As well, despite her lengthy relationship with Max Hardcore, the autopsy revealed that Lee died a virgin, her hymen intact. A final note indicated that the bathroom door had been locked and bolted from inside, and that the key was found with Lee's clothing, beside the tub, when her body was discovered.

Once the final examination of the eleven bodies on the island had been made (along with Keill's, for a total of twelve), the only possible conclusion was that there had been a thirteenth person on the island, someone who remained unknown and unseen by the others, and who later changed the scenes of the crime to suit his or her purposes, whatever they may have been. The report concluded by saying the case might never be satisfactorily solved. The investigation was thus filed away with the area's other unsolved crimes some two years after the murders occurred.

J
ust
before the unexpected death of renowned rock critic Crispin LaFey, his editor at the publishing house ArtsOblete received an email from him. That email contained the entire manuscript of LaFey's long-awaited history of punk rock, entitled
Endgame
. The editor was shocked when, two days later, he learned of the death of his contracted writer. Knowing the editing process would necessarily be a long and painful one, he shelved the manuscript till he might find the strength to delve into its long-awaited treasures.

Due to a change in the press's editorship, however, the manuscript was not read for a number of years after its receipt and then only by chance, as the book had been deleted from the list of pending publications, such being the fate of many worthy manuscripts, shunted from editor to editor, before finding their final destination at the bottom of the recycling bin, never to see the light of day.

Here is the final chapter of that book in its entirety:

DEATH OF THE LADYKILLERS — Their Tragic, Final Days

I am not a cruel man, though by the end of this narrative some of you may find that hard to accept. I simply ask you to take my word for it and leave it at that. By the time this reaches your eyes, I will already have shuffled off this mortal coil and will be well beyond the reach of any complaints.

Some of you will understand what this narrative contains, but others will be shocked and even scandalized. So be it. This is an account of the last days of Spike Anthrax, Max Hardcore, and Pete Doghouse, the three remaining members of the punk-rock group Ladykillers, a group once billed as “the original bad boys of west coast punk.”

Spike and Max were, musically speaking, more like an overblown Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of their time, though I gather they believed themselves to be the Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious of the United States. In fact, they were nothing of the sort. They were, however, vile and loathsome creatures, and their reckoning had been a long time coming. Let the fearful turn back now.

The Ladykillers died as they lived: a repugnant death suited to rapists, murderers, and other human garbage. Though in my estimation they appeared to have mellowed with age, they were far short of being truly repentant for their actions, and were uniformly outraged to be fingered for a crime so far in the past they no doubt expected it would be forgotten for all time.

This will not be a long chapter in all, as the Ladykillers were of only passing importance to punk rock in particular and to rock music in general. To put it bluntly, what little talent they had consisted of ripping off other more famous bands — not just their sound and their songs, but their looks, attitudes, and media exhibitionism.

When the group met John Lydon, better known to the world as Johnny Rotten, he is reputed to have passed judgment on them with the line, “They're not punk — just spunk.” It was an anecdote guitarist Max Hardcore liked to repeat.

In fact, I doubt they even met Lydon and his gang, but for that I have no proof. What I did finally manage to acquire proof of was their involvement in the death of rock groupie Zerin Ames. Just as I am not a cruel man, I am also not given to sentiment, but since its occurrence the death of Ames has haunted me more than any other tragedy I have been associated with in my life. Know this: Ames was a sweet-tempered girl who grew up in a sheltered family in Montana and who should have led a long and happy life. Instead, she had the misfortune to meet up with the Ladykillers when she was invited — by me, sadly — to attend one of their concerts.

(A note to my editor: Of what does this aforementioned proof consist, you will ask? In this case, the personal confessions of the individuals in question, all of which are on a hidden file in my laptop computer. If anyone wants them, the password is “Shark.” You will likely find this instrument in the hands of the Puget Sound Police Force. In good writerly fashion, I have left the name of the likeliest investigating officer at the end of this missive. If in fact he turns out not to be the investigating officer, I am sure he will happily refer you to the officer in question. I found him most amenable while implementing plans for the building of my island retreat.)

But back to the narrative. If you are like me, you may feel that the Ladykillers' hit,
“The Twelve Days Of Shagging,” evinces a deplorable lack of talent and originality. It did provide, however, a unique opportunity for me to exact revenge on the twelve people responsible for the death of a young woman who had everything to look forward to in life.

London UK councillor Bernard Brook Partridge once said that groups like the Sex Pistols would be “vastly improved” by sudden death. Sadly, not even such an event could have improved the Ladykillers much, in my estimation. In defence of punk music and its many fans, however, I can say with certainty that very few of them, apart from Sid Vicious when he was high on speed, were actually violent. In fact, most were simply intent on having fun, despite their intimidating appearances.

As for a concerted ethos of violence, that was simply an expression of dislike for a status quo that kept them out when they felt, rightly or wrongly, that they had something relevant to contribute to society as a whole. It was that which most exacerbated their anger.

In England, of course, punk was a legitimate expression of lower-class, disaffected youth, while to many it sounded and looked like nothing short of a full-scale rebellion. In fact, it was a refusal to take anything seriously by those who themselves had not been taken seriously. At the time, it meant cutting through the overwhelming weight of class structure and tradition, of which England was dying a slow death. “We're here!” it shouted. “And fuck you if you don't like us, 'cause we sure as hell don't like you, either.”

Joe Strummer likened punk music to an earthquake, a natural, uncontrollable, and entirely unpredictable force of destruction. But not all the destruction was obvious. Some of it occurred behind closed doors. This was very true in North America, where punk rock was seen largely as a cultural oddity, little more than a display of bad manners, harsh sounds, and funny-looking clothing held together by safety pins, rather than a legitimate social movement.

But back to the task at hand. I had the first glimmer of my plan for revenge in August of 1999, when former Ladykiller drummer Kent Stabber died of an overdose of heroin, his drug of choice. It was an ugly death, by all accounts, though not necessarily deserved. I understood that Stabber was the one member of the group not at the party where Ames died, and so was never on my “Greatest Hits” list of people to be exterminated. What Stabber's death did was remind me that time was passing and that I needed to act if I were to exact my revenge.

The following month I purchased Shark Island from the government. It was a failed place for unnamed experiments and came with an aura of fear and mystery built into its reputation. In short, it was perfect for my plan.

I had the house built to my specifications over a period of several years and at considerable cost. It had to be built in stages so that I could pay for its progress. Never once did I consider that I might be throwing money away for the wrong reasons. In fact, the more research I did into the various individuals I intended to lure there for their final days, the more convinced did I become of the worthiness of my quest.

Of course, many will remember me as a blind critic, but back then I still had a reasonable degree of sight, which I put to use in drawing my blueprints. When the house was finally completed, I could still see well enough to know I had created my own masterpiece, as it were.

I'd already spent several years building my case against the individuals in question, learning their likes and dislikes, their medical histories and weaknesses. In short, I created files on them that the CIA might well envy.

As my house of assignation came close to being finished, I sent invitations to each of the twelve guilty, with the intention of luring them to the island. First I hired Edwards, the taxi driver and sometime criminal involved in Ames's death. Finding him was a matter of bribing a certain taxi dispatcher who had sent Edwards to the pickup that night.

Next, I hired Sandra Goodman, the former nurse who was absolved of her role in giving an overdose of medication to the dying Zerin Ames, then fresh out of prison. It was only later, on the island, that I learned of her additional connection with the drug supplier, David “Newt” Merton, in supplying him with the raw products for his “party martinis.” By the time my plan was set in motion, both Edwards and Goodman had such spotty work histories that I knew they would accept my rather lucrative invitation to join us on the island.

The only one I had worries about accepting was Harvey Keill, a lazy, predatory bastard. In fact, Harvey was the one who could have ruined things by being there, as the band members found him so odious and such an obvious and well-deserved target for dislike that I decided to dispatch him at a distance before the games could begin. I sent Harvey a letter with a CD case dusted in anthrax. A “love letter full of hate,” as it were.

The poetic justice of Noni Embrem's choice of drink struck me when I reviewed the lyrics of
“
The Twelve Days of Shagging” and discovered that the second gift listed was two “silver bullets.” I was overjoyed when Noni requested his favour­ite drink at our very first dinner on the island.

Janice Sandford, a.k.a. Sarah Wynberg, proved another easy target, with her neuroses and her insomnia. She could have been the original model for Dylan's “Just Like A Woman,” though she would only have been two years old at the time it was recorded. After Embrem's death, she lost no time asking for something to help with her headache. Sandra ably provided her with the third gift of “evil Jujubes” from the medical case I had prepared with mislabelled vials, among other things.

I knew Edwards would clear out in an effort to save his own skin once he saw the writing on the wall. While he served dinner that night, I misdirected him several times with text messages purportedly from Harvey Keill. In fact, these were sent from within the house. By then Edwards had done as I asked and stolen all remaining cellphones so that no further communication was possible. Except for my second cellphone, of course. Once Noni Embrem died, I was able to slip into his room when the others were asleep that night and retrieve his phone, which Edwards had missed.

Edwards had hidden all the others in a locked cupboard in the kitchen where I stored a quantity of oxalic acid, which I fully intended the others to find along with the cellphones, minus the batteries. This last point nearly proved Edwards's undoing, as Max Hardcore was outside smoking a joint when the otherwise redoubtable Edwards went out into the rain to toss the batteries into the cove. Max eventually decided what he had seen was not Edwards, but Keill, already on the island. This, in fact, served my purpose just as well, for it instilled fear in the others. Later, when it was clear that Harvey wasn't on the island, Max decided it was the stray dog Spike had seen on his first search of the grounds.

But back to Edwards. Despite what the others believed, he was the fourth to die, in accordance with the song's lyrics (“four oceans to drown in”), though his body was not discovered till the following day. During a break in the proceedings, I was able to sneak down to the boathouse under cover of darkness and splash a quantity of glue-destroying acid on the bottom of the boat. Since the storm had deposited a considerable amount of water in the vessel, and as Edwards was in a panic when he left, he wouldn't have realized until he was some way out into the ocean where the waves were strongest that the boat was literally disintegrating around him. I'm sure his last moments were particularly unpleasant when he realized he'd been tricked into killing himself by abandoning the others, just as he once abandoned Zerin Ames. More poetry.

David “Newt” Merton was next on my list. A near-fatal accident by one of the construction workers provided the key to his death, when I discovered how easy it was to rig an electrical receptacle to make it deadly. Newt accommodated my wishes by plugging the refrigerator back in without taking time to note that the receptacle was faulty. If he had seen the pair of rubber dish gloves on the counter where I left them when I unplugged it, he might have thought twice before grabbing the plug, but he was not particularly observant.

In his younger days, Newt was known for taking chances. He once jumped, while stoned, from the balcony of a twenty-sixth-story apartment across to another railing some four feet away, and then back again. He was a reckless, devil-may-care sort, but this was one live-wire act he didn't survive. If he'd had any decency, he would have tried his supposedly “quality” drugs himself before selling them. Zerin Ames may not have been his only victim, but we may never know of the others who suffered because of his carelessness. To him was bequeathed the gift of “five tongues of fire.”

Max always wanted to be a high-flyer, so I gave him his wish to attain the heights once more before he died. His “six bombers diving” was a short-lived flight, however. In fact, I wasn't sure if three stories would be adequate to do him in, but with his weight he hit the floor rather hard. It was unnecessary for me to go downstairs to complete the job. In fact, I had just come up from changing the chessboard once again. That was the most dangerous moment of the entire plan, for in my near-blindness I had knocked over a vase, which shattered rather loudly on the floor. Still, I accomplished what I needed to without being discovered.

With Max dead, I wanted Spike to follow soon thereafter. The poetic justice of the pair dying in close proximity was too much to resist. I simply waited till I had a chance to drug the bowl of cocaine to knock him out. (He'd used it several times and got sloppy, thinking it safe.) I then crept up behind him and stabbed him in the jugular with one of my insulin needles, the “seven crystals shining,” except that it contained a highly lethal mix of crystal meth cut with Drano. I'd had vague qualms about whether or not I would be able to see him well enough to do this, but in fact his tell-tale green hair made it easy to locate him, even when the rest of him was little more than a blurry outline to my dying eyes.

At this point, with the paranoia setting in, things got trickier. The connection between the chess game (my favourite board game) and the murders was by now all too obvious. (Pete was good at keeping the others informed, thanks to his private inner voices.) There was still some doubt about the connection to the song's lyrics, however. If the survivors had looked a little more closely at the words, it might have given them greater insight into what fate would befall them.

With my own “death” imminent, the timing of everything that followed was crucial. In the course of my investigations, I had discovered a book by a Canadian researcher who claimed that stories of zombies in the Caribbean islands were indeed based on fact. I paid a good deal to discover the right amount of the various compounds used, including the venom from a blowfish, among other ingredients designed to stop all outward signs of bodily activity for a short period of time. This required an extremely careful setup, as I first had to take a potentially lethal dosage of the drug.