The Devil You Know: A Novel (14 page)

I liked watching Emmeline. She was slim but she had a softness to her body I admired. She had gentle thoughts. David was laughing and I thought of how he’d buy her a chocolate chip cookie in the mall the next day at lunch. I envied her the softness.

Emmeline Hawco. I’d almost forgotten her name.

B
y nine o’clock that night, I’d been running practice searches for three hours in a row. The sky was full-on dark and I was a full-on Nexis expert. I wanted to pick up where I’d left off in the archives, which landed me somewhere in the early ’80s.

Lianne Gagnon went missing in 1982. Surely she deserved the same attention as every other girl. In the spirit of equality, I looked her up.

NEXIS SEARCH: LIANNE GAGNON, TORONTO, 1982

[SEARCH LIMITATION:
A1-A10]

[SEARCH LIMITATION:
23 months]

DECEMBER 10 1983:
Amateur sleuths receive top marks at Police Board awards

JUNE 4 1983:
Got a tip? Half million in rewards for tips on these killers

MAY 23 1983:
Police still hunt for killer of 11-year-old girl

AUGUST 18 1982:
Mother of slain Lianne Gagnon charged after row with police

AUGUST 4 1982:
Police set reward for capture of Lianne’s killer

AUGUST 4 1982:
$50,000 reward set in Lianne’s slaying

JULY 17 1982:
Lianne suspect fingered in Abbot murder

JULY 11 1982:
Lianne suspect wanted for parole breach

JULY 9 1982:
Lianne tip came from hostel worker

JULY 5 1982:
Toronto police search for American suspect in girl’s death

JULY 5 1982:
Warrant issued for Lianne killer

JULY 3 1982:
Suspect identified in slaying of 11-year-old Lianne Gagnon

JULY 3 1982:
Police name suspect in Lianne slaying

JULY 3 1982:
Lianne killer named

June 5 1982:
Who murdered Lianne Gagnon?

June 5 1982:
Missing girl, 11, found dead in city park

MAY 27 1982:
“Lianne, please call home”: distraught mother appeals to public for help

MAY 26 1982:
Police on the hunt for missing East York girl

MAY 25 1982:
Search widens for schoolgirl Lianne Gagnon

MAY 24 1982:
Have you seen Lianne?

MAY 24 1982:
Girl, 11, missing

You can see how quickly her own name moves from being a thing that identifies Lianne herself to a thing that identifies the guy they think killed her, Robert Cameron. There’s a subtle shift between
saying, Police Search For Lianne’s Killer, and Lianne Suspect Wanted For This Other Thing. A staff sergeant was quoted talking about other murders Cameron might have committed. A York University cheerleader named Charlene Abbot had been killed the previous fall and it’s suspected that was also him.

“We don’t know anything for sure,” the staff sergeant told reporters. “But I can say that we’ll be having a long talk with Cameron about Abbot’s death.”

That’s how sure they were that they’d find him.

I have to be honest here: I thought there’d be more. More headlines, more front-page space, more search lines. She moved from A1 to A7 in forty-eight hours. By the time the cops had sent out the dogs, she was City News, not national.

A few months after they found her body, police were called to Lianne’s parents’ place. Some tenants had called in a disturbance; the mother raged at the cops. They’d fucked it up, she said. They thought Lianne was a runaway and that’s how they treated it. They waited to see if she’d turn up for school the next day before they brought in the dogs and did a house-to-house.

You waited! You just left her there, you left her with him!

As though they’d always known where she was but had other things on the go for the first couple of days.

How could you.

By that time Cameron was long gone, maybe in Thunder Bay, maybe in the Sault. Maybe back in the States.

I don’t know if Lianne’s mother really had a breakdown or if she just needed a reason to get a captive audience with police. They talked to her on her porch and she screamed and cried and then she ran into the street and kicked in the cruiser headlights and they arrested her for that. About a year later, she packed up
the rest of the kids with their cowboy names and went to the West Coast. I don’t know where her father lives now. I remember how they used to make corn fritters, and his guitar in the kitchen at breakfast.

A woman got a civilian award the next December for drawing a great composite picture of Cameron in the first days of the investigation, when Lianne was still missing. Before they knew who he was, when he was just a collection of aliases. There were anniversary articles on the one-year mark of the day she went missing, and a new reward set for Cameron’s capture on the anniversary of the day she was found.

The next year there were new cold cases, and Lianne had become an old case, something from a previous year, a mess that no one had managed to clean up.

And just like that, she was a stat. A bad start to the new decade, to be sure.

NEXIS SEARCH: ROBERT NELSON CAMERON, ALIAS

JULY 3 1982:
Police name suspect in Lianne slaying

Cameron has a history of swapping ID when the timing suits him both here and in his native United States, where he has previously been incarcerated for armed robbery, assault, and defacing public property. Names Robert Nelson Cameron has been known to use include Wade Oxford, Arthur Lewis Sawchuk, Lee Ellingham, John James McMurtry, Len Lester.

T
he phone rang as soon as I plugged it back into the wall. I’d come across this handy list of Cameron’s aliases and copied
the names in a long row down the page—alphabetically, no less—before pulling the cable on my borrowed
Free Press
modem out of the jack. I looked over at the telephone where it was hanging on the kitchen wall and watched it ring out, as though it could tell me who was calling. I counted. Only my father lets the phone ring more than ten times. I gave in and picked up.

Your mother tells me they have you working on some pretty intense stuff, he said.

I’m working right now, actually, I said.

There was a pause while he tried to remember which number he’d reached me at, home or newsroom extension.

From home?

It’s kind of super cool, I said. I’m kind of loving it.

You have access to the whole archive like that?

No, I said. Better than that. Not just the
Free Press
but everything. All papers everywhere.

And you’re okay?

Okay how?

Okay-not-upset.

It’s just a big long list, I said. I don’t have to go interview weeping grandmothers or anything.

It’s a brutal chronology, he said. Try to remember that I know you a little bit, Evie. This is going to leave you spinning.

When I was young, my father was the parent on nightmare duty. If I woke up at three in the morning convinced that there were vampires hanging upside down in my closet, he was the guy who came running. He kept a spray bottle of water under my bed and swore it was monster repellant. Once when I was a teenager I had an irrational AIDS panic after reading a story about a sixteen-year-old party girl in Manhattan who was dying of the disease. She’d written a personal essay that ran in the Sunday
New York Times Magazine
. I had zero connection to this girl or her lifestyle, but her stupid death felt convincing and intimate.
She’d made an irreversible bad choice that spiraled and I spiraled, too, reading about it. My dad spent a couple of hours talking me down.

If you’re in the middle of an anxiety attack, he’s the medical professional you want on your side. A master of calm deductive reasoning. The legacy of this relationship is that there’s a piece of him that feels most comfortable in this role. Or, comforted by Evie in distress.

Just the opposite! I said. I sang it out. I’m good. I’m feeling sharply focused. I live in the future now.

For a moment my father didn’t say anything. Then:

Just the opposite. He said this quietly. This list is all past life.

We had a soft moment together on the telephone. Each of us in our own kitchen, not speaking but listening to the silence.

I won’t let them break my heart, I said. Promise.

M
ost of what I’d found in the Lianne files was stuff I already knew: Cameron was the only suspect, he was American, he’d disappeared right after she went missing, he was a known felon with a handful of aliases. I had the list of names now, the fake names he was best known to have used. Plus a few new things. I sketched out another list, details I hadn’t known before.

Things they found in Robert Nelson Cameron’s room:

Three pairs of track pants.

One old running shoe with no laces.

A vest and suit jacket, matching. Simpson’s price tags still attached.

Bedding, still on the bed.

A few threaded towels. Two gray ones, and one pink.

In the cupboards: Three mugs, some white CorningWare, the plates and bowls with blue and white flowers that came with the room.

A hot plate but no stove.

Plastic glasses.

Three cans of beans, two cans of chili, two Chunky soups (chicken and beef). Two cans of corn niblets.

A hardback copy of
Helter Skelter,
the Charles Manson true crime, stolen from the Leaside Public Library, one corner turned down sharply on a photo of key witness Linda Kasabian and her quote,
I’m not you, Charlie. I can’t kill anybody.

In the fridge: one pot of leftover macaroni, some milk, two potatoes.

In the crisper: one head lettuce, a few carrots, two apples. No one had been in that place for a couple of weeks. The perishable foods must have been in bad shape.

On the counter: two large terrariums, each containing one large rat and the remains of some others. Like the lettuce and macaroni in the fridge, the rats had been left on their own after Cameron split. But rats are resourceful. After a while, hunger is hunger, and a rat will eat another dying rat.

In the freezer: a few Ziploc bags with dead rats in them. Some of the rats were whole, and some of them had parts removed: ears and legs. Other bags contained just the parts.

We don’t know if Cameron was dissecting the rats, or if the rats injured one another. That was the quote from police headquarters in the
Free Press
. The contact was Staff Sergeant Phillip Lacey.

Lacey said: It’s just that most people, you know. They don’t put their dead pets in the freezer.

The clothes and bedding were all removed for testing.

They didn’t find a suitcase or a passport.