The Devil You Know: A Novel (15 page)

I
pulled the phone cord out of the wall and swapped it for the modem again. There was a mild clunking sound, the hum from the fridge kicking on. I looked over my shoulder by instinct. Down on the floor I had a loose pile of books that included my own paperback
Helter Skelter
—the ratty copy I’d bought with my mother at the St. Lawrence Flea. I’d cruised through it since, looking at photos, but
hadn’t read more than the captions. Linda Kasabian was a Manson girl who turned star witness in exchange for immunity. She’d been along for the ride the night they killed Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant and tied to a chair, along with a handful of her guests. It was Kasabian who gave the prosecution the play-by-play. She had a small face, framed by pigtails, and strong bones. I picked up the book and let the pages run through my fingers a few times, then laid it facedown on the far corner of my desk. The title shone out at me from the book’s spine and I twisted it a few degrees to make it stop.

The apartment was dark and I had to resist the urge to get up and walk around, flipping lights on and off and verifying that I was alone and no one was hiding out and waiting for my guard to fall.

David had been right, back in high school, about sleeping with a knife under my pillow. It’s no way to live.

I’ve since come up with a way of dealing with nights like that, where you’re really worried about someone knowing you’re all alone. It’s simple. Stay awake and do things until about 5:00 a.m. Think about it. All the horror stories you read in the newspaper? You never hear about anything that happened after five. It’s pretty much morning. The sun’s almost up. It’s like a rule.

Even if it’s still dark, or deep winter, criminals know the light is coming. That’s why nothing bad can ever happen to you. Five o’clock is a very safe time to sleep.

I reached forward and pulled the little chain on the lamp. The two new lists were laid out in front of me, side by side on the desk. My window faced north and there was just a streak of streetlight in the corner, keening in from the west. Reflected in the actual window, I could see the line of my jaw, my cheekbone, the glowing search window just below my face. A window in a window. The garden was quiet. I turned back to the screen.

I had so much to look for.

R
obert Cameron drove into Toronto from Creve Coeur, Missouri. That much we know for sure: he’d been hauled in for a police lineup in April of 1982 and there’s a record of it. The next day or so gets sketchy, but you can put a pretty good picture together if you cross-reference for a few hours or so, alone in your kitchen.

We know Cameron left town in a 1974 Mustang II, the gas-crisis car, and came roaring through St. Louis on the I-64. I like to imagine that under the arch he passed some other car, overturned and the undercarriage burned out. It’s a rough town now, and would have been worse back then. No one around, or showing their face, that time of day. He’d left Creve Coeur at three in the morning. He had a briefcase and a long blue Anheuser-Busch duffel bag on the passenger seat. The briefcase was full of knives. It belonged to John James McMurtry, a Cutco regional salesman from Okemos, Michigan. McMurtry was a poor drunk and an even worse fighter and Cameron had John James’s brown leather wallet tucked safe in his own breast pocket, as well.

The car he’d got in Kansas City six months previous, off a black man named Leo Delaine who owed him money. The duffel bag had some clothes in it and loose cash, not too much, no drugs.

In the trunk of the Mustang II were two glass terrariums, capped with heavy rubber lids, hole-punched for air exchange. Cameron only liked white rats.

He crossed the border at Fort Frances and slept the night in Thunder Bay, then drove down through northern Ontario in one long haul, stopping over briefly at Whitefish Falls to buy tobacco from a man who called himself Smokey Joe. Every reservation in North America has a Smokey Joe. Cameron said it was a poor alias, and Joe said: But how you gonna trace us?

The American guard at the border had waved him through, but the Canadian guard was under strict orders to follow search protocol. The week before, this same guard had allowed a curly-haired woman named Marina Dubuque onto the Canadian side with a steamer trunk of hash bricks in the back of her navy-blue Buick. She was wearing a pink headband and playing Olivia Newton-John’s
Xanadu
out the car’s eight-track speakers. The guard told this to Cameron while they were standing around waiting for the search team.

Who the fuck was she trafficking for? The PTA?

The woman had disappeared but left the car parked in the loosestrife about ten miles up the access road where a dog unit out on a training run had come upon it by pure accident. Two bikers were chopping up the drugs to fit them into saddlebags, and in the mix a patrol guard was shot twice in the shoulder.

So that’s why random checks, and that’s why there was a guard who remembered a man of Cameron’s description at all, later on when the police and reporters came around.

Cameron didn’t smell of drugs or have any on him, but the search team stripped out the trunk and the backseats, just to be sure. There was still a trace of snow on the ground. Fort Frances is far enough north that the snow stays most years till May, the guard told him. The guard had a few white rats at home himself. Pets. The wife had a blue budgie.

They cracked open the briefcase and Cameron told them he was a door-to-door knife salesman.

Really? And folks let you in the door with a bag full of knives?

Oh, yeah, Cameron said. You just got to smile. You boys all
done? He leaned into the car and bolted the backseat in tight. The guard helped him lift a lidded terrarium onto the seat.

You want an open door, Cameron said. You just got to tell folks what they want to hear.

D
o you think it’s possible to attract evil?

What do you mean? David said. He’d been experimenting with a new beard and raised his hand to rub it in a thoughtful manner. We were sitting on milk crates on my kitchen floor. It was early enough the next evening and David was trying to put together a Scandinavian bookshelf. The instructions had no words. Just pictures of the parts we were supposed to have, and arrows showing how they fit together. The screws were long and skinny and two of them had already rolled under the stove and been lost to time. I’d been in the archives all day, doing halfhearted background on an airline merger that would top the business section in the morning. Basically, an airline runs on a debt-based system and the conditional optimism of venture capitalists. Once you understand that, there’s not much else to say.

My feature research on the dead-girls weekend section was due and I still had the ’70s and ’90s to comb through. I’d told Angie that I had a thorough working knowledge of 1980 to ’85. She said I’d done an amazing quarter of a job.

I got down on my knees with a wire hanger from the dry cleaners and tried to fish out the lost screws.

Do you think that wherever he is—the guy who killed Lianne—he knows? I said. I dragged the hanger out and it brought no hardware with it. There was a greasy dust bunny wrapped around the hook. I sat up. I mean: Do you think he knows that I think about him.

If you think it, he will come, David said.

Stop that.

Or more like the Eye of Sauron?

I’m sorry I tell you anything, I said.

He’d brought in a couple of takeout coffees with him when he arrived and they were sitting on the floor next to us with the skinny wooden stir sticks pointing up and through the little holes in the lids. We had a cinnamon bun between us on a plate.

I picked my coffee up and swished it around. He rubbed at his beard again.

Good choice on the facial hair, I said. You look incredibly wise.

David fit the end cap onto the shelf with a click and set the shelf down on the ground in front of him.

I was thinking it would make me look gentlemanly, he said. But I have to shave it. I’m starting to look too much like my father.

I squinted in his direction. I guess that’s true, I said. Have you seen him lately?

Last week. Lucky me.

He brushed the screws into a neat pile with his fingers.

Want to talk about it?

Nope. He picked up his coffee and gave me a tight smile. He was asking about you, actually. How’s Evie doing? I see she’s working for the paper. . . . So lucky you, too. You’re just his type now.

Ew. Does that mean you have a new reporter stepmom?

Nah. He’s got a new girlfriend, though. She’s a year younger than me and doesn’t speak English. He met her outside the refugee center on Queen. Illegal in every possible sense of the word. Either she’s a Russian hooker, or I don’t know. I mean, this girl has a mother somewhere. So, yeah. Time to get rid of the beard.

There was a little silence between us. David started taking apart the bottom end of the shelf where he’d put a piece on backward. I picked up the pile of screws and weighed them in my hand.

They don’t know Cameron did it, I said. They can’t. They don’t know anything.

David stopped and set down the screwdriver.

Yeah they do, he said.

I mean, if they found her body out in the park, how do they know it was him?

Is this a work thing? Is that where this is coming from, all your dead-girls reading? They just know, David said. He pulled the stir stick out of his coffee and sucked on the end of it. The guy was an offender down in the States, and then they know he was up here, and he was doing weird shit, and then he disappears right after Lianne died.

But what if that’s a coincidence? I said.

Why are you doing this to yourself?

I just want to know, that’s all. What if it’s all a coincidence?

David put the stick between his teeth like it was a cigar.

Ottam’s arzor, he said. It sounded like he had a mouth full of marbles.

What’s an arzor? I said.

Occam’s Razor, David said. He put the stick down on a napkin. Occam was a monk. He said, The simplest answer is usually the correct one.

About religion.

I ripped off the outside curl of the cinnamon bun.

It’s about evidence, David said. Monks did all the science and philosophy and art and everything, so he wasn’t talking about religion. He was talking about science, about knowledge. Occam’s Razor is just that, the simplest answer is usually the correct one. David leaned back and pulled a dollar out of his pocket. He laid it out flat in his hand and pushed the hand toward me.

Look, he said. You have a dollar in your pocket. He closed up his fist and whisked it away behind his back. Later the dollar is gone, and you notice there’s a hole in your pocket. Are you going to go looking for a burglar?

What if there’s a simpler answer that we don’t see? What if there’s something really easy, really important, but we don’t know about it yet?

David tucked the money back in his pocket.

Your dollar fell out through the hole, Evie. It was lost.

He leaned in toward me and I thought he was going to try to take my hand, but he reached for the cinnamon bun instead. He tore it into pieces, into little strips, and laid them out in rows across the plate.

I’m so sorry Lianne was lost, David said. It’s a long time ago.

Nothing else Cameron did fits this profile, I said. They know all about him. He used lots of names. I reached over and pulled my printouts off my computer desk. Look, I said. I shoved the papers at him. The sheets were all still attached along thin perforated lines. David unfurled them like a road map.

Look, I said again. Armed Robbery. Assault. Assault and Battery. Vandalism. I ran my hand down the page. Pedophiles are pedophiles, David. This guy was a robber, a cheat, an asshole.

The guy cut up rats, David said. You told me that. He cut up his pets.

Yeah? I said.

That’s it. That’s how they know it’s him.

I didn’t say anything. David held a hand out to me, like he was waiting for me to cross over and join him on the path to reason.

If it was someone else, I said. Then maybe that person is already caught. Maybe that person is in jail for raping some other girl. They don’t really know anything about Cameron, I said. They know they don’t know where he is.

David flipped through the papers on the floor.

What’s this one?

I leaned over his arm.

I wanted to see his past record, I said. That’s the first time any of his names come up.

NEXIS SEARCH: ROBERT NELSON CAMERON, WADE OXFORD, ARTHUR LEWIS SAWCHUK, LEE ELLINGHAM, JOHN JAMES MCMURTRY, LEN LESTER

TORONTO, 1970

[SEARCH LIMITATION:
10 years]

MARCH 4 1970:
No charges in Kensington area raid

FREE PRESS
,
MARCH 4, 1970

Three men were detained and released Tuesday night in relation to a suspected drug raid on Brunswick Avenue. Edgar Fanning, 21, and Oral Alphonse, 20, are thought to be residents of Rochdale College on Bloor Street in Toronto. Francis Edds, 21, resides on Brunswick Avenue. 14th Division spokesman Jim Belanger declined to comment on the incident, stating only that the house is known to police. [IMAGE] [CAPTION]