The Killing Type (12 page)

I pull back and look up at where the
sky would be if the rain were not coming down so blindingly.
“Nothing,” I say out loud, to whom and about what topic I have no
idea. I pull the collar up on my jacket, providing little increased
protection but at least preventing some water from running coldly
down my back. I walk around to the large yard at the rear of the
place, which leads down to a picturesque-looking boat moored at a
beautifully dilapidated dock. There is a ragged path leading
through the overgrown grass down to the water. A flash of lightning
startles me and seconds later the thunder growls in disapproval. I
walk down to the boat and notice a small shed on my left, its door
wide open. I stand there for a few seconds and assess the scene,
though already knowing again what I will do.

Inside, there’s the same spareness as
in the living room. It looks like the set in a bad movie, one where
the bad guy is supposed to come and hit me on the head with
something, or else startle me and engender a long, pointless chase
through the woods, with only one of us coming out alive. Things are
more prosaic here. I walk around quietly and examine the place both
up and down, but I see nothing out of the ordinary. Some rope, a
shovel, a mess of tools spilling out of the red metal box on an old
wooden table. I imagine a hanging, someone splatted with that
shovel, someone else stabbed with any number of possibilities in
and around the toolbox. I shake off the premonitions and walk back
out into the nascent darkness.

The rain has stopped and I can see
that the still-ominous sky is clearing, a cloud moving, one more
star showing. I hurry across the grass, past the house, and back up
to the car. On a whim not unlike several others during this
ill-advised escapade, I turn around and walk over to the mailbox. I
lower the little flag and then look inside: it’s surprisingly
stuffed. Of course, I grab the entire contents and make my way back
to the car again, where I sit in relative comfort while I rifle
through the poor man’s civic rights. Junk mail, bills, a
solicitation for a shindig of some kind at the Knosting
Entertainment Palace. I am tempted to open the one from the law
firm but I do eventually come to whatever modicum of senses I still
have. I bring the pile back to the mailbox and stuff it full again,
though the end result is not as neat as the postman had managed: my
effort is literally bulging at its seams.

On the drive back my mind is
a jumble again, but I do manage at some point to wrest things back
to a due consideration of poor Mr. Tweed. There is something
just
not right
about the whole thing. I come to the sleuth’s only conclusion
that the solution lies in some missing piece of this whole story,
this puzzle: once that is known, then the optical illusion becomes
the most obvious bit of representational fact imaginable. This, I
have learned before and have had confirmed today, is the true trick
of discovery in this gumshoe business: facts and impressions swirl
and swirl until you find the secret at the centre that is animating
everything.

Chapter 13

On one of those DVDs that Rachel
alerted me to at the library, some self-acknowledged expert
professes categorically that five is the “magic number” (a direct
quote, alas) of murders at which the international media start
paying attention. He had done a comprehensive survey of serial
killings in the United States and Europe since the 1960s and the
overall trend was that one or two or three murders garnered hardly
any interest outside the host country or city unless they were
particularly heinous, four was the transition point between trends,
and at five murders there was a bona fide news story which merited
various degrees of coverage, depending on each media outlet’s
tendencies and financial capacity.

Here in Knosting, with Rodney Tweed
turning the deadly odometer over to the requisite number, the facts
sadly re-corroborate the research. I am up at 8:45 on Saturday
morning, the phone ringing and the misdialer on the other end not
having the decency to apologize but simply hanging up when he
realizes I am not his “bud.” I trudge crankily into the kitchen to
put on the coffee and when I return from picking up the newspapers,
the pot is joyously full. I pour a cup, tincture of sugar, splash
of cream, and then settle into the couch to read. I am just
recovering from another poorly worded headline when a vehicle goes
by fast outside on the street which is just metres from where I am
seated, and then another, and then another. Happily tossing the
thing aside and seeing it dangle off the arm of the sofa like a
modifier in a mediocre newspaper, I get up and separate the slats
of the blinds to have a look. There’s a man standing not three
metres from my front door, now talking with increasing animation to
two other men. I recognize the kind of trio it is: reporter, sound,
and camera.

“Fuckin police station is down that
way, I’m sure,” the sound man says, indicating north.

“Yeah,” says the camera
man.

The reporter seems unconvinced. “Let’s
just get down there wherever the damn thing is.”

They walk down the street. I
reposition myself, leaning to the left, and open the slats a little
wider. They put the equipment into the back of an SUV, get in at
three separate doors, and drive away too quickly for me to discern
their station letters. I’ve lost all interest in today’s paper now
and I have an off feeling that my appetite for reporting on the
murders will be seriously diminished by this onslaught. However, I
do maintain a sense of responsibility for the whole project—some
good will come from my investigation and book—and so I get ready
quickly so that I can go downtown to verify my worst
fears.

I exit my apartment and start walking
up the street with a feeling of hope and adventure in spite of the
media invasion (I heard at least two more vehicles while I was
shaving). The air is cool and the gawking pedestrian traffic is
light as I take a left off Johnson and head for the square in front
of city hall. I hear a muffled but strong rumbling as I approach my
destination, and as I round my final corner and finally arrive, the
sight is disgusting and spectacular and disheartening all at once.
I count at least twenty vehicles, each with a bevy of people around
them, and from many countries, too, like the worst kind of parody
of international cooperation.

In the midst of it all and just as I
am about to turn around and go right back home, returning later
when my stamina has been reinstated, I hear my name, or think I do.
I turn around and see Tony running toward me like a child to her
uncle at the fair.

“Isn’t this wild?” she
says.

“I guess I’m not surprised to see you
here.”

“Oh, now, that sounds a little
disapproving.” The woman has elicited more than I intended to
share, and I’ve been a boob as well.

“Sorry, didn’t mean it that way,” I
lie. “Just that, you know, it’s murder and we both know that we’re
both interested in this kind of thing.”

She laughs disconcertingly.

“I have a feeling,” she starts, and
there is a loud explosion of something or other to punctuate her
thought. “I have a feeling that this media presence is going to do
more for solving this damn thing than all the police officers in
all the donut shops in town.”

Flippant though her
assessment is, I contemplate its validity. I do detest the circus
that has evidently come to town (sans elephant), but I can’t argue
with throwing every resource imaginable at the problem—easing up on
the tendency to be cautious and comprehensive and systematic about
the investigation, and instead creating a mess out of which one
hopes eventually to extract one shining gem. There was a rumour
making its way around town a few weeks ago that the police (or was
it the mayor?) had engaged the services of a psychic. My first
reaction, of course, was that it was a ridiculous waste of time and
money, and even somewhat of an insult to victims whose deaths go
unresolved while civic officials fiddle around with fake powers.
But suddenly one evening I couldn’t imagine the possible harm in
trying
everything
,
no matter how valid: I abhor the chicanery of psychic powers and
divining and the rest of it, but as long as the police were not
actually diverting their efforts entirely to parading some
bescarfed charlatan around to former crimes scenes—well, who am I
to judge?

“You might be right,” I say to her,
smiling falsely and pretending to mean it.

“So, I know it might be an obvious
question, but why are you here anyway?”

“I was about to ask you the same
thing.”

There’s a pause while we both
calculate whose move this results in.

“OK, well, I know you have a nobler
cause than I do, and I feel a bit like the dumb chick at the rock
concert,” she is smart enough to say. “I mean, you can chalk it up
to research but I’m just here for the spectacle—you know, see how
crude and mean the media can really get.”

This sly girl’s forthrightness is
disarming.

“My motives may not be any better than
that.”

Unconsciously on both sides, I think,
we have proceeded to walk together alongside the metal barricade
which encloses all the vehicles and their denizens. We are exposed
to the back ends of the vehicles for the most part, the same ugly
practicality that one sees along the literal and figurative edges
of a fairground, keeping the pretty things operating.

“Good that they keep them caged up, I
guess, so that they don’t get out and maul anyone.”

I smile.

“Actually, it reminds me of my days in
the theatre,” Tony says. “Getting dressed, putting on makeup,
sprucing up, all of that. I wonder if at some point they actually
sit down and try to figure things out, or even just to come up with
some good questions?”

She’s right again, damn her. “It’s a
bit sad, isn’t it? I mean, one could imagine that if they all
knocked their heads together as well as exercised their power—the
fourth estate and all of that—then they might actually be able to
force or shame someone into doing something about this mess. Or
perhaps they might figure it out for themselves?”

“Oh, now you’re just talking crazy
talk.” She shakes her head at me faux seriously.

We continue along the long edge of the
barricade and finally round the corner, making our way toward the
water. I have a crazy temptation, lasting just a nanosecond, to run
screaming into the lake, decrying loudly the poor state of
investigative journalism just before I one-and-a-half-gainer into
the water, screaming even more loudly about the inept police before
I flop in spectacularly. There’s even more activity on this edge of
the barricade, starting with a very large man applying his own
makeup while his camera and sound operators (both women) wait
patiently, and culminating in another man actually being slapped
across the face, for what reason I am happy not to know.

“A bench?” Tony suggests, and I nod
approvingly.

The silence and solitude are genuinely
soothing as we make it to the side of the water and find an idyllic
little bench under a tree. I have to admit to being still a little
suspicious of Tony: I am fairly certain that she is not a killer,
but there is something disingenuous in her interactions with me
that I find troubling even though I cannot quite identify the
problem.

“So how goes the research for the
book?” she asks. “I haven’t seen you at the library and I’ve
wondered whether maybe you just gave up on the whole
thing.”

“Oh, not at all. I’ve changed my
schedule a little, that’s probably part of it, but I’ve also been
doing a lot of reading at home. The other thing—and this may sound
a little precious—the other thing is that I’ve just been trying to
spend some quiet time, sometimes at home, sometimes right here
along the lake or in the park, just trying to think, to try to
figure things out.” I hate the fact that she is so straightforward:
I always say too much. I feel like that caricature of a nervous
suspect whom the police have sent their most adept interrogator to
shake down, the officer showing up in civilian clothes and
seemingly distracted by the quality of the coffee at the station or
the antics of his misbehaving teenaged son, but somewhere in the
aw-shucks method he manages to extract a confession.

“I’ve been thinking about it myself,”
she says.

“Oh?”

“Yes. I’ve developed a sort of
conspiracy theory. It’s crazy, but …” She trails off and looks at
me for permission to indulge.

“Go on.”

“OK, it’s like this. The main question
is, who has benefited most from these murders?”

“Benefited?”

“Obviously not the dead
people or their families. But look at the cops and the media and
the mayor’s new, what’s he calling it,
crime agenda
now. They’re getting
attention and funding and the people are just following along like
sheep. I’m no better myself: if it takes a million dollars to find
this guy, I’m willing to pay the higher taxes or for the city to go
into debt so that we can fund it.”

I let the utter ludicrousness of her
theory settle into my already harried brain a little before I
reply.