The Devil You Know: A Novel (17 page)

He was moving around. I pushed my back against the shelf and swept a slow arc of light from way down the row on my left all the way through the shelf directly in front of me. Whoever was there was just on the other side of that shelf. He could see me silhouetted between the rows of microfilm. I let the light drift to the tables and readers again. To the door. I aimed the light down and covered it with one hand. No other lights.

I started toward the door. He was only a few feet away, I was sure now. The sound of his shoes, the light skid of footsteps on the other side of the shelf. I came out of the row and started running, banging my thigh hard against the arm of Vinh’s wheelchair. It spun around and smacked me again and my light dropped to the ground, shining a path behind me, back into the stacks. Between me and where I was headed, the room turned hazy and then pure black. I could see a table and a chair in front of me. I couldn’t see the wall. I couldn’t see the door.

I felt along from table to table with my hands out in front in the dark, tripping on chair legs. If he came after me, I’d start pushing the microfilm readers down behind me, anything to put a barrier between me and him until I made it to the wall. I was crashing. I was staggering like a drunk. I was a bear in the woods and he was steady behind me. There was no rush. There was nowhere for me to go. He’d already locked the door.

My hands hit the wall and then the nubs of the light switch and I pushed them up all at once, the fluorescents flickering and spitting for a few seconds and then the room came up sudden and bright and blinding and empty.

Empty.

Just me. I scanned the place from end to end and then again. With the lights on, the vacancy of the room was stark and shiny and seasick. The ceiling stretching out high above me and the walls closing in tighter, then breathing out again. I didn’t want to sit down. Everything was the same color, the same dirty white. I put my hand on my chest and I could feel my heart moving there, through my ribs, like I’d just come off a hard bike ride. My lamp was still on the ground, shining back toward the shelves, about eighteen feet away.

Whoever had been there, he was gone.

An alarm sounded. My ear rang. The wall. The phone. There was a green phone on the wall with a curly cord, ringing.

I stood and looked at it and it rang a few more times before I picked up.

You down there? Angie’s voice.

I’m fine, I said. I’m leaving. I think I’m sick.

Get up here fast, she said. Shit just hit the fan. They arrested one guy for everything: French, Mahaffy. Scarborough Rapist. It’s the same guy. He did all of it. One guy. It was one guy.

H
e’s twenty-eight, blond, cute, boy-next-door, Angie said. I ran along beside her. He’s an accountant, for Christ’s sake. She slapped a file at me.

Of course he is, I said.

There’d been a leak a few hours earlier and she’d been sitting on the story since then, office door closed.

We’ve had guys parked out back of Task Force headquarters since this morning, Angie said. The government had put together the Green Ribbon Task Force the year before, to look after the St. Catherines murder investigation.

I sent Mike down there to look at the house, she said. You’re going to Scarborough, go knock on some doors, get the family to open up. Angie stopped short in the hall in front of the stairwell. I’m doing a press con down in Niagara. I’ll see you here at midnight. File by two. Go!

Paul Kenneth Bernardo, a twenty-eight-year-old high-school heartthrob turned chartered accountant. A guy who wore a suit, and ate at nice restaurants, and on weekends cruised around in a golden sports car looking for teenaged girls curious enough to peer in his window, blithe enough to stop and get in.

I
took the train out to Guildwood, an upscale suburb built in the late ’60s. Side-splits and chalet bungalows, big lots, lawn tractors and snowblowers. Three cars to a driveway. Bernardo’s father was also an accountant. Paul had gone to the local high school, Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate, and graduated six years before I did. He was about my age, twenty-one, when he started stalking girls home from Scarborough bus stops.

Metro police had set up a tip hotline right away and the line never stopped ringing. At one point they had 1,500 suspects on file. One guy they caught driving around in his car, hanging out near bus stops, waiting. The car was full of aerial maps of Scarborough; he knew every corner of the place.

But it wasn’t Bernardo, Angie said. It was just some sick asshole who followed the news.

Angie’s rapid-fire brief had included only the main points: the deal was sealed on DNA, there was a match between the rapist and the murder victims, police had interviewed Bernardo years ago and taken samples, but something went wrong, nothing got tested till this month. They’d been staking him out for days. There was already infighting between Metro police who’d grabbed him for the Scarborough rapes and the murder Task Force in Niagara who had wanted to hold off. There was a warrant for the arrest but no warrant for a search.

I
hit the parents’ house first. The door swung open viciously and slammed again. A brother, already used to reporters knocking:

You know about as much as I do!

I hadn’t been first. It was still early but I could imagine the steady stream of phone calls and in-person visits like mine.

There was an older man across the street in a green parka, breathing hard and leaning on a shovel. The walk was half-cleared. He watched me pick my way across the road.

Lot of action this evening? I said. He pushed at the pile of snow in front of him and shook his head.

You know this guy? he said.

I’m with the
Free Press
, I said.

It don’t make sense, the man said. He straightened up and pulled off his gloves. Jesus.

I thought of the roster of background questions I was supposed to be asking.

Have you lived here long?

He said his name was Tom Bouw. He’d lived there since the houses were built. There were no sidewalks for a long time, he said. Just dirt ditches, like in the country.

Living out here, it used to be the country. His head tilted back like he was checking the coming weather.

A quiet kid, Tom Bouw said. Never caused no trouble. Never made no commotion on the street.

He hung his shovel on a rack in the garage and went inside. For a moment I was completely alone. No traffic. Falling snow. I turned my body so that my back was to the wind and noticed a teenaged girl on her front porch, looking at me from across the road. She was standing there with one hand pressed against her face and the pose made me think of the photograph I’d found, my mother at seventeen. She was processing something, taking it all in. This girl had lived two doors down from the country’s most famous rapist. I started to walk toward her and she turned suddenly and went inside. No one answered when I knocked on the door.

Two blocks away I found a guy shoveling out the box of his pickup who said he’d gone to school with Bernardo at Wilfrid Laurier. His mother asked me inside and gave me a cup of tea while her son stamped his boots on the mat. She dug out a cardboard file box of school photos and report cards. The son was called Geoff and he had red hair and sideburns and wore a lumberjack shirt with snap buttons out in the cold. Geoff pulled a few things out of the box for me and spread them out on the living-room shag rug. We sat on the floor and I drank my tea.

In the 1982 yearbook, Paul Bernardo is on the graduate page.
Blond and clean-cut, wearing a tie and a jacket. He says the only way to get ahead in life is to Go For It.

I
was back at the paper by eleven o’clock. Angie mashed my notes in with files from the other reporter, a guy named Mike Nelligan. She’d sent him off to St. Catherines to do basically what I’d done in Scarborough. Knock on doors, get people to cough up readable copy. Files went in just after two and by two-fifteen we were lining them up along the bar downstairs. It was after last call but the door was unlocked. The closest bar to the newsroom and there’s an understanding sometimes.

Beside the door-knocking, I’d handed in a compiled list of expected charges against Bernardo to go in a box on A6. Forty-five charges so far.

FIRST-DEGREE MURDER, 2

SEXUAL ASSAULT, 9

BUGGERY, 3

ASSAULT CAUSING BODILY HARM, 2

SEXUAL ASSAULT, 1

FORCIBLE CONFINEMENT, 8

CHOKING, 3

ROBBERY, 8

ANAL INTERCOURSE, 5

AGGRAVATED SEXUAL ASSAULT, 2

SEXUAL ASSAULT CAUSING BODILY HARM, 1

SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH A FEMALE BETWEEN 14 AND 16 YEARS OF AGE, 1

The bartender lined up a row of shots and Mike sent them down the bar to where we were sitting. One at a time,
ping ping ping.

I dipped my pinky into my glass and sucked the rye off it. I was
three shots in after only twenty minutes and trying to find ways to slow myself down. Mike leaned against the bar next to where I was sitting.

Here’s a handy rule of thumb for you, I said. When you get attacked, it’ll be someone you know. So that’s comforting, right? I was explaining this to him since in a future lifetime he might have to be a girl, and if I didn’t tell him this stuff, how would he protect himself? Intimate partners = forty-five percent of assaults. Once you add in your pals, that guy who handed you a beer at the party, and creepy great-uncle Joseph, there’s almost no room left for strangers.

Mike picked up my glass and handed it to me. I lifted it in salute.

For kids, that’s still true, I said. Times about a hundred. If it seems random, it’s not. It just looks random.

I gave him an amicable little cheers. The booze was warm and softened everyone’s edges, but I could still feel them there.

Angie said she’d done a famous interview with a victim who sued the police force, because they knew a serial rapist was at work and didn’t warn the women in that neighborhood. They were waiting to catch him red-handed. Like those women were bait. In her statement to the press, she’d said: We know our rapists. They are the men we know.

The guy they arrested lived right around the corner from her, Angie said. With his wife and his eight-year-old daughter.

Now, you see? I said. This is what makes a guy like Bernardo so interesting. Bus stop girls! Random strangers! Girls he found sitting out on the curb, right in front of their parents’ houses like whiny cats locked out for the night. Girls alone. I’d emptied my glass for a fourth time and pushed it off down the bar, never to return. I’d love to find the girl Paul Bernardo took to the eighth-grade dance, I said. Now there’s an interview.

The bartender asked if I wanted another one.

Another round, Angie said. Keep them coming.

Mike’s second job had been a list of unsolveds from the last ten years. Other girls who were found raped and burned or strangled or cut up. Because maybe those were Bernardo, too. That’s the hope. Make it the devil you know.