The Devil's Cinema (27 page)

Ten minutes later, Johnny created an out-of-office message that automatically sent emails to his friends, bragging about the “extraordinary woman named Jen” he had met who was taking him to Costa Rica for a few months. An email of resignation was quickly sent to his boss. “I thank you for the opportunity,” Johnny wrote in conclusion, “and rest assured I would not be leaving unless the new path I've chosen was truly life-altering.”

His Facebook page also lit up with activity. In his first post in nearly a month, he wrote: “John Altinger is taking off to the Caribbean for a few months. See you all when I get back!” He changed his relationship status to “in a relationship.” Some of his friends were thrilled to hear it. “Have fun! Take lots of pictures,” replied one friend. “For a couple of months?” another asked. “Tough life!” And as if to prove that he was finished with online dating now that he had found this amazing woman, Johnny's
plentyoffish.com
account was deleted that same morning.

D
ALE RECEIVED THE SAME
email as everyone else, which added to his suspicions. He doubted Johnny would leave the country without calling his
best friend to at least make arrangements for his motorbikes to be covered and looked after. Besides, Johnny was more likely to go to Germany and visit a car factory than take a Caribbean holiday. He hated the heat. Dale typed a reply: “Who's going to pick your brother up at the airport?” It was a lie to test what Johnny's response would be, but the question remained unanswered.

Dale finally had enough of the continuing strange activity. But when he tried to file a missing persons report, an officer told him to go away. A middle-aged single man running off on a wild romantic getaway with some woman? The officer didn't think it sounded like a crime had been committed at all – some would call the guy damn lucky, actually – and it would be a waste of police resources to launch an investigation.

D
EBRA
T
EICHROEB HADN'T THOUGHT
of Johnny in a while, but reading over his email about a tropical vacation brought back memories of how she had rejected his romantic intentions. The Johnny she knew and cared about didn't do things on a whim. He planned trips months in advance. Running off on a whirlwind romance took her by surprise. But maybe he had changed.

Sitting at her computer, Debra thought about responding but didn't know what to tell him. She found it odd that he had not called her “Sunshine” the way he did when he had written to her so many times before. The tone of his email was so formal, as if all his personality had been stripped away. She considered telling him to be careful on his trip, but then she turned away from her keyboard and decided to let it be. With their history, she knew it was not her place to question his relationship decisions.

Later on, Debra noticed Johnny signed in to MSN Messenger. His new status update on the chat service confirmed how happy he had become. Words displayed beside a little icon and his name told of a life on holiday, a life of pure bliss. She could almost imagine the palm trees he was seeing, nearly taste the cocktails of coconut and lime. “I've got a one way ticket to heaven,” Johnny had written of his trip, “and I'm never coming back.”

T
HE LIT MATCH TUMBLED
out of Twitchell's hand and dropped in a free fall into the oil drum. The flame ignited an explosion that flashed in a burst of orange and yellow, shooting flames up into the sky. The air smelled of burning gasoline as light smoke billowed, carried by the wind.

Twitchell did not detect this expanding odour. He had no sense of smell. He simply stood back, watching the contents of the barrel slowly burn. He had spent a few hours loading up the barrel from his garage film studio into the back of his car. He then drove it across town to his parents' house, where he planted it in the middle of their backyard. Nearby, a grouping of full garbage bags had been piled up, each one twisted tight and sealed with duct tape. Twitchell had soaked everything in the barrel in a splashing of gas from his jerry can. As he had hoped, his parents weren't home, so he had the whole place to himself.

The yard had a single sidewalk leading from the house to a detached garage and a parked RV. Sandwiched in between was a large pad of grass, now dying as winter approached, with a blue spruce tree off in the corner and a clothesline cutting across the open expanse. Neighbours had built high fences on both sides, closing off his parents' yard from any prying eyes.

The burn lasted only a few minutes and died down as the fuel disappeared. Twitchell might have been smarter to mix some oil with the gasoline to make it burn longer, but he was a city boy and some things can't be learned on the Internet. He peeked his head over the lip of the drum to look inside. Most of the plastic from a garbage bag had melted away, but their contents were still smoldering. The fire was giving off such little heat that he couldn't have cooked a hot dog if he tried. He reached for the jerry can and poured a bit more gas into a coffee cup, then poured out the cup with his arm outstretched, twisting his face away from the drum. A whoosh of flames erupted as the cup was emptied, but again the blaze
died out quickly. He tried two more times with the same result. The barrel contents weren't continuing to burn once the fuel was spent.

A siren whined in the distance. Twitchell froze. He scanned for signs of nosy neighbours, but he couldn't see a single window that had a view of the backyard. Then he spotted the dead giveaway drifting skywards. Someone must have seen the clouds of black and grey and called the fire department. The truck's siren howled as it approached, bearing down closer on his parents' home.

Twitchell ran over to the house and grabbed the garden hose rolled up near the barbeque. He turned the tap and doused the barrel down in cold water. The steel drum hissed as steam spat off the hot surface. The paint had peeled off the bottom of the drum and exposed the raw metal. The rest of the drum had turned a very light pink, the enamelled paint transformed by the fire.

But the wail of the fire truck's siren stopped as the blaze was extinguished. The truck never appeared. Twitchell thought it could have been a massive coincidence, but it turned out the fire truck had actually been heading to a call a few blocks away.

It was a sufficient scare to put Twitchell off his mission. At this pace it would take all week to burn everything he wanted destroyed. So he pulled out a roll of garbage bags, rebagged the charred barrel contents, and loaded everything into his car to drive it back to the film studio for another day, another plan.

A
S
T
WITCHELL'S DEALINGS WITH
the barrel continued, his messy car became an issue. One day, when Jess was running late for an appointment, she jumped into her husband's Grand Am to move it out of the driveway so she could get her own car out.

She was overcome by the strong odour of gasoline and saw the car was messier than usual. In the backseat was a pair of overalls, similar to what someone would wear to cover their whole body when spray-painting. She was about to start the engine when her husband came flying out of the house, hustling toward her, looking quite concerned. She knew that he didn't like her touching his car, but his reaction this time was certainly on a heightened level.

“What are you doing?” he asked excitedly.

“I need to move your car to get out,” she said, motioning to her own car blocked in front. “Why does it smell like gas?”

“Oh. I was filling up a jerry can to put in the trunk as a precaution, but I spilled some.”

“But we already have a can of gas,” Jess said, reminding him that they had bought one recently for the new lawn mower.

“Well, this is another one.”

She was late and it was turning into one of their old fights that began with them bickering over nothing, so she dropped it. “Well, okay,” she sighed and took off down the road.

I
T WAS PROBABLY FOR
the best that Twitchell had no sense of smell. Anyone close to the burning oil drum would have noticed a very distinct scent, strong enough to curl their noses.

When the police discovered the burning barrel in the garage weeks later, it offered solid clues as to what Twitchell had been doing in his parents' backyard. Opening the barrel revealed a wet paper towel and pieces of duct tape all stuck together. Black ash was scattered throughout. When the barrel was tipped over, the contents spilled out in clumps, like nuggets of coal. There were bits of a burnt cleaning sponge, metal rivets, and a round piece of metal, possibly a ring.

The last piece of ash held a thin metal strip as long as a pencil before curving at one end. Police officers took a closer look and they all reached the same conclusion: it looked like the arm off a pair of someone's eyeglasses.

H
ANS STROLLED INTO WORK
on Tuesday afternoon to hear Johnny had quit his job via email, yet nobody seemed to know where he had gone. Hans thought back to the last email he had received from his friend – a response to his interest in car-pooling. “No car pool for me,” Johnny had written him on the weekend. “I'm taking an extended vacation. Good luck.”

Everyone at work was talking about Johnny's sudden departure. Their boss emailed him to find out where to send his final paycheque but was greeted by silence. It bothered Hans.

As the week rolled on, Hans drove past Johnny's place, parked, and walked up to his patio door. He tried to look through the glass. He could see the computer desk but little else. He was puzzled. His closest friend at work had just up and left with no explanation.

B
Y
W
EDNESDAY
, O
CTOBER
15, Dale and his friends had bothered the police enough to finally get their attention. An officer relented, agreeing to send someone down to at least take a statement. After dinner, Dale, his friend, and his friend's wife waited for the cop's arrival at the couple's house. They sat on the couch. They chatted. They discussed the strange emails and how they could never get Johnny on the phone. There had been odd moments during their search. Dale's friend had received a Facebook message from Johnny after demanding he phone Dale immediately. In reply, Johnny's excuse for not calling was that there was “terrible reception” where he was staying but not to worry. “I'll try to get in touch with Dale as soon as possible,” he had written. “But in the meantime, let him know I'm having the time of my life.”

The evening passed slowly as they waited for the police. Everyone turned sleepy. The clock ticked past midnight. The three of them checked the time more frequently, but the hours slipped away. Dale awoke at four in the morning to go to work. He realized the police had brushed him off again. It was as if Johnny's disappearance couldn't have mattered less.

R
ACING DOWN THE FREEWAY
, Twitchell had romance on his mind. Back at home his wife and child were drifting off to sleep. It was ticking past 10:00 p.m., closing in on half past the hour, but all he could think about was Traci again, not his family.

He knew this was wrong, but with everything going on in his life, he couldn't stop himself. His marriage was on the rocks anyway, he reasoned, and his activities on Friday, October 10, had lit a fire in his belly that he couldn't ignore. Traci had just invited him over to her place during an online chat. It was clear what she had in mind. Traci was a perfect escape for him and the thought that he could have her again tonight was thrilling, exhilarating.

Traci lived in a trailer in a farming town an hour's drive south of the city. Having looked up directions on his computer, Twitchell decided to take the ring road, the most direct route, which curves around the west end and joins up with the highways that lead all the way to Wetaskiwin: home of the auto mile, where “Cars Cost Less.” All of his life he had been terrible at directions so he scribbled down a few maps in black pen on sticky notes to help him get there. He stuck them in his car. The first neon-yellow Post-It led from his home in St. Albert to the highway. The second detailed what to do when he arrived in Wetaskiwin, and on the third he had written down Traci's street address and the town's strange name.

Twenty minutes into this road trip, his impatience and excitement were taking over. He hit the gas. The engine purred and his car shot forward as he veered down a hill. Other drivers were holding him back so he weaved in and out of the two southbound lanes to get ahead of them. His speed climbed in to the 100 km/h zone as he pushed his car harder, closing in rapidly on a vehicle up ahead. He was about to switch lanes again when the vehicle pulled out of the way and moved in to the right lane. Twitchell blew past it at 128 km/h. The road ahead was straight and flat. He had just crossed the river when he saw blue and red lights flashing in his rear-view mirror.

Shit. It's a cop
.

Twitchell's beat-up car crawled to a stop near an overpass. A tall and well-built man with a crew cut in a dark uniform walked up to his car. Twitchell rolled down the window.

“Licence, registration, and insurance, please,” the cop said.

Twitchell opened his messy glove box and handed him the papers, pulled out his wallet, and passed him his licence. The cop returned to his patrol car to check everything out.

His name was Bob Reiche. He was on duty as a peace officer for the Alberta Sheriffs, running patrols along the southern leg of Anthony Henday Drive, the city's ring road. And as he entered the details on his computer, he noticed Twitchell's licence plate: D
RKJEDI
. He walked back to the car and couldn't resist.

“Well the force wasn't very strong with you tonight, now was it?” Reiche said with a big grin. “Because you just blew past a fully marked patrol car.” He pointed behind him. His cruiser was all white, with “SHERIFF” and “Highway Patrol” in big blue letters on the back bumper.