The Killing Type (11 page)

“Maybe the police killed him?” I
suggested tentatively, a joke really, just seeing whether he was
paying attention. “Maybe they strangled him and so, no
blood.”

“It wouldn’t fuckin surprise me,
anything those cocksuckers do.”

The man, it must be said, is an
idiot.

One of the most disturbing things I’ve
come across so far in the course of my research has been a short
video on the web of a man who commits suicide while he is waiting
in some room of a police station. One of the officers leaves him
seated there with a bottle of water, and for a short while it seems
like this will be a tedious little view into the dull workings of
police interrogation of a common thug. He sips some water, and he
looks a little nervous when he realizes that he has been left
alone. He pulls out the handgun that has been concealed in the
waist of his pants, and then the prosaic horror. As casually as he
has just done with the water bottle, testing its weight, bringing
it to his lips for a squirt of life’s liquid, he turns off the
safety on the handgun, puts the thing to his head just above an
ear, and shoots. Blood does not gush and the dead man now just
slumps. The two arresting policemen enter and one utters an
expletive worthy of the raver: they have forgotten to frisk (could
there be a more inappropriately silly word?) him.

I have to admit to a
perverse and persistent fascination with this little video,
encouraging me to watch and re-watch and re-re-watch the last sad
minutes of another man’s life. It is not bloodlust but rather, as
grand as this may sound, a scholar’s quest for detail, for exposure
to the worst of the worst in order to be able to write about it
with some authority and integrity. It is the casualness of this
suicide that affects me deeply, and I can extrapolate from that to
casual
murder
as
well. There are some people who can kill, literally, without a
second thought. The deed is done, the victim falls down, and the
killer moves on past on his way home to television or the arms of a
lover or who knows what.

So this is what I am left with as I
attempt to write my book: I don’t want to be so cowed or perplexed
by the facts that I simply lose the will or the desire to complete
the project. I don’t want to be intimidated or disgusted: I want to
be able to stare the details straight in the face, and then write
about the effects of bullets on flesh the same way I would write
about the history of the keyboard. I have to be able to write with
the same ease as that man in the police station shot himself, to
level everything out, to treat murder as if it were just a
collection of empty words.

I have already mentioned, several
times, that there exists a comprehensive and detailed literature on
the subject of murder and its investigation. I have pored over the
bulk of it with what I imagine is the same fervour and
determination that an athlete gives himself to his discipline.
There are days when I “play through the pain,” as I have heard it
described on the sports call-in shows, and there are other days
when I simply let the body and the mind relax. During the latter I
often feel guilty about the time I am wasting while a psycho trolls
the streets, but the guilt is mitigated somewhat by a realization
that this sort of “down time” is essential to the grander scheme.
During the play and the pain, though, I am an animal, relentless,
focussed, determined that whatever small tidbit of knowledge I
learn can only serve to help me in the end. Knowledge trumps
psychosis—I hold that firmly as my credo.

I meet Rachel, the inquisitive
librarian, at the library while she is on a break. Somewhat
distracted still by the images of blood and murder, I struggle to
shake myself down to more pedestrian concerns. She is quite
beautiful, and that helps. I can see pinks and light blues and the
hint of something darker (navy?) in the billowy folds of her dress,
which goes down past her knees. The shoes are very simple and
elegant, much better than the ones she wore the first time we met:
these are white slingbacks, with not a tincture of grime on them. I
wonder whether they are in fact brand new. Her hair is a browny
blonde, also not dirty, and there is a freshness that exudes from
her face.

We sit on comfortable leather chairs,
facing each other. She seems nervous and I set myself the minor
goal of putting her at ease.

“I have a question for you,” I
say.

“Oh?” She laughs lightly, looks down
at the floor, and then up at me as the middle finger of her left
hand starts scratching lightly at the arm of the chair.

“Everyone I meet asks me
this, so I thought I would turn the tables a little: who do
you
think is the
killer?”

She laughs out loud now, very high
pitched, and then looks around and blushes when she realizes where
she is. There is a supercilious cough from the old man standing at
one of the terminals searching the catalogue.

“Well, I don’t—you’re the expert, I
mean, you’re writing the book on this, right? So maybe you, I
guess, I mean, I guess that’s why everyone is always asking you.”
She stops, scratches more deeply.

“Sometimes someone in my position can
be so heavily involved in the details that I don’t see the obvious
facts around me. Forest and the trees, that kind of thing.” I
pause, worried for an instant that even though it is a lame cliché
metaphor, it may be incomprehensible.

“I see what you mean,” she says,
disarmingly. “I have thought about it, you know. I have to say,
too, that you’ve been somewhat of an inspiration to me—I mean in
the sense that you are obviously devoting so much time to this
cause. I felt that I had to do my bit as well.” The laugh yet
again, but deteriorating to a mere furrowed brow, as though she is
worried about something. “I think it’s someone from away, for
sure,” she says, “because I just can’t imagine that someone who
lives in Knosting could possibly do something like
this.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, and maybe I’m just
being naive. But I sort of think of the town as one big family—not
a big, always happy family with no problems or anything like that,
but a family for sure. And I can’t see that one of the family
members would kill another one. Does that sound dumb?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it
that way,
dumb
, but
I do think there is the possibility at least that one townsperson
is killing others. Partly, you know, it’s because the alternative
is even less plausible: someone from out of town coming here every
now and then to kill. I’ve also heard someone else say that maybe
it’s someone from out of town, but he’s staying here in town just
for the purpose of the killings. This one, frankly, I have trouble
believing, because—and maybe
this
is naive—I would have expected that the police
would have followed up on leads like that. You know, look at hotels
and B & Bs and that kind of thing.”

“So, what’s
your
theory?” she
asks.

I smile, a little more weakly than I
intend. “Frankly, I really don’t know. Like the police, I suppose,
I consider myself to be still in investigation mode. There may be
certain clues and the like but—”

“Clues?”

“Well, nothing solid.”

“Do you mind sharing?”

“They are too tentative right now to
give them any credence or authority or whatever. Just some hunches,
feelings, that really I would prefer not to share.”

“I understand.”

She’s fidgeting even more now, and I
start to wonder whether I have said something to upset her:
sometimes the professional detachment of a researcher toward such
emotional topics as murder can be disconcerting to people. Or
perhaps she doesn’t like me keeping secrets?

“Is everything OK?” I ask when I see
her looking at her watch.

“Yes, oh, yes, of course. I find this
all rather fascinating. I just have to head back to work in a few
minutes.”

It’s hard to tell whether this is just
an excuse to get away for whatever reason. She stands up and so I
see she means business.

“It’s been a pleasure,
Andrew.”

“Likewise.”

She reaches out to shake my hand and I
do so awkwardly as if I were concluding an interview that I didn’t
quite ace.

“Drop by and see me the next time
you’re in the library,” she says as she heads toward
information.

Chapter 12

The police find Rodney Tweed’s mangled
body at the bottom of a ravine about 30 kilometres out of town. I
hear from my contact inside the department that the sight was, in
his words, “not pretty.” Tweed landed in such a way that both his
neck and his back were broken, and the end result with arms and
legs akimbo was horrific enough, I hear, to make one investigator
turn his head away. There is more: his face was nearly completely
smashed in and his hands and arms were covered with various cuts
and bruises that suggest a struggle.

“Here’s my take on it,” my contact
tells me. “There was a fight, probably one that caught the murderer
off guard, because he had just planned to take the guy there and
throw him off. You know, just throw him off the cliff—who knows the
reason for these things? Imagine something like they were friends
or met at a bar or something, or the murderer had some kind of
grudge against the guy for some reason in the first place, and he
came up with some way to lure him up there, like maybe for a joint
or something, or he promised him a hooker or whatever—who knows?
But it didn’t go well, and a fight broke out, and the only thing
the murderer had going for him, the element of surprise, well, that
was lost now and they were both even, both fighting for their
lives, literally, and the murderer won. Or at least we think so.
Who knows? The beat-in face, that’s anger, being pissed off at the
fact that his original plan was foiled. The marks there, on the
face, they show evidence of being both from fists and feet, his
shoes: the guy tried to beat and kick him to death. And then he
threw him off the cliff.”

This description, rendered in all its
professional and colloquial glory, leaves me cold. I don’t know
whether his assessment is accurate, but the fact that it is even a
feasible explanation makes me sad about the entire project of
humanity. Still, it’s a neatly detailed story, but personally I
have my doubts about its accuracy. My contact is indeed a
professional who has seen many more murders than this one, but the
modus operandi does not strike me as authentic. I base my
assessment partly on my own research so far, but also on common
sense, and it surprises me a bit that my friend has not arrived at
exactly the same conclusion. The scenario he describes is just much
too complicated, too replete with uncontrolled variables, to be the
chosen method of a skilled serial killer. Inviting the victim
somewhere, getting into a fight, pummelling the man—it’s all too
much of a spectacle to be real, and yet I don’t have any
alternative theory. I could imagine that the facts happened—fight
first and then thrown off the cliff—and maybe it is just the actual
storyline, the motivations, that I disagree with.

I visit the crime scene after it has
been cleaned up, after police have been there and removed what they
think they need and put it all in the same kind of resealable
plastic bags that their wives pack their sandwiches in. I don’t
really know what I am looking for: nothing, really. I just want to
get a sense of the place, to feel the contrast in “vibes,” as they
call them, between the simple rural, bucolic, natural, and the
grossly urban and human. I stand at the edge of that same ravine
and I can’t help but shudder at the thought of poor Rodney, no
matter what shape he was in when he was launched, tumbling over and
over and probably hoping against all hope that he might land
safely. The wind kicks up and I step back out of fear that Nature
or God may have mistaken me for the bad guy, and so contrived to
make a little tear in the fabric of pure free will by blowing me
off the edge.

I make my way sullenly back to the
car. The wind has stopped blowing altogether (victim escapes
clutches of Prime Mover) but I think I feel the hint of rain in the
air. I decide to take another route back home, and I realize as I
ascend and then descend my fifth hill that I am in the same part of
the outskirts of the city where the disgraced police chief lives. I
slow the car down while I contemplate taking a little detour. There
really is no hesitation though: I turn off onto the familiar side
road that leads to his cottage. I continue for a couple of minutes
and eventually spot the mailbox with his name on it in perfectly
aligned gold and black letters. The little flag is up.

I park on the road and for a brief
moment wonder what exactly I think I am doing here. The rain starts
coming down lightly and I pull the zipper of my jacket up (too far:
it pinches me under the chin), thrusting my hands deep into the
pockets as if to force-hug myself for protection. There is a very
pure silence, the kind I wish I had every night, and I can’t
imagine that there is any human around. I walk down to the cottage,
take one last look around for nothing in particular, and then walk
up to the one large window on the front of the house. The curtains
are casually drawn, and when I put my face closer to the window,
the rain coming down harder now, my nose brushing up against the
glass, I see a very spare scene: a La-Z-Boy, the television on but
nobody watching, a bowl of something, potato chips perhaps, sitting
on a little dark-brown table within easy reach of whoever is
supposed to be in the recliner.