by Mario Bolduc
Peter looked up from the file he was reading when Roselyn came into his office at police headquarters. In his official voice, the same one he used to introduce her to his colleagues, he spoke. “To one degree or another, as leader or member of the tie-down team, your husband was involved in two hundred and thirty-four executions during his career.”
“I know that.”
He handed her a sheet of paper that she merely glanced at. Names that meant nothing to her, dates going back to 1984 when Albert received his promotion. As well, in a column to the right, the list of crimes of which these unknown men were guilty. For the first time, she understood how extensive her husband’s work was.
More executions were carried out in Texas than anywhere else in the United States, the only country in the Western world still enforcing capital punishment. And Albert Kerensky had been the greatest legal killer in the Western world during those years.
The idea made Roselyn’s head spin. She set the paper on the desk in front of her. “What are you trying to tell me?”
Peter cleared his throat. “Even if I don’t think we’ll get anywhere with this, I have to examine every possibility.”
The day before, Peter’s superior had entrusted the file to Kenneth Brownstein, one of his colleagues. After questioning Roselyn, Brownstein went to Stanford Hill with her to meet Mrs. Callaghan. Roselyn felt a little guilty when she realized the woman knew Albert’s habits better than she did. The policeman seemed not to notice.
Glenn Forrester, with whom Brownstein had already spoken, hadn’t mentioned the visit to the cemetery, or at least that was what Roselyn concluded. She decided to keep mum, as well. Glenn must have had his reasons for staying tight-lipped. She didn’t want to make trouble for him, and besides, nothing had actually happened apart from Albert’s one short sentence.
That evening Peter had promised Roselyn he would check out certain things, but without saying what they were.
And now this list.
“Do you think Albert’s disappearance is related to one of these men?” Roselyn asked.
“I have no idea. I hope not. But I can’t ignore that possibility.”
Roselyn said nothing. She could have reminded Peter that Albert had left on his own, of his own free will. He had planned his departure, as his preparations showed.
“I asked Kenneth’s assistant, Nancy, to pay particular attention to the last thirteen years,” Peter said.
“Why?”
“Starting in 1996, the families of the guilty and the victim were allowed to attend the execution. People witnessed Albert at work, if I can put it that way. Until then the executioner was just a cog in the penitentiary machine. No one knew who he was. Things changed in 1996. People could put a name and a face to the man who administered the lethal injection.”
Observers didn’t see the tie-down team at work, but the head of the team accompanied the families of the condemned man into the room to watch. For years that person was Albert Kerensky.
And now Peter seemed to be saying that a family member or friend of someone Albert had executed could have returned, looking for revenge.
Roselyn closed her eyes. Maybe Peter’s theory was the fantasy of an overzealous policeman, but the logic did hold up. If what he said was true, the conclusion could be terrible. She imagined her husband in a sordid basement where he would be made to pay for one of his executions.
“Are you all right?”
Roselyn opened her eyes. “Yes. I’m sorry. All that’s just so …”
“Again, I’m getting ahead of myself, ahead of the facts. Any moment now the phone might ring and we’ll find out that Albert’s been found safe and sound, and we’ll forget about all this. Life will go back to normal.”
But the phone didn’t ring.
Peter cleared his throat again. “I printed out the list of people who attended executions while Albert was the head of the tie-down team, and I sent it to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, as well as the National Name Check Program of the FBI in Washington. This morning the list came back to me with some troubling results. Criminals did attend several of Albert’s executions. I was able to check the files of the ones who seemed to present the greatest danger. My conclusion is that we need to look into four of them.”
Peter set out what he’d learned. First, the two younger brothers of Franklin Crispel, executed in March 2002 for the rape and murder of a young woman kidnapped in front of a cash machine in the San Antonio suburbs, were later found guilty of several counts of armed robbery, as if the execution of their brother had pushed them into crime. Six months ago Carl and Kenneth Crispel were released from a Pennsylvania penitentiary. They currently lived in Austin.
Duane Berkley broke into a house in Dallas, not knowing that the owners, a couple in their sixties, were inside. He killed them both after torturing them, wrongly believing they’d hidden a large sum of money somewhere in the house. Berkley’s wife, Colleen, was in the room when he was executed in 2004. A year later to the day, Colleen was stopped by the Huntsville police for going through a red light. In the trunk of her car was a pump action Mossberg 500 rifle.
And then there was the Keith Busby case. Busby was found guilty of murdering his girlfriend, who’d recently left him for another man — and Busby killed him, too. To the very end, Busby claimed he was innocent. Among the family members who attended the execution, there was the condemned man’s father, Cleve, who had contacts with the criminal element in Miami. He left the room that morning, shouting that the people who killed his son would pay, and pay dearly. The guards had to escort him out of the Walls Unit.
Roselyn had stopped listening. All those ruined lives made her sick. For years her husband had shrouded his job in silence, and now the true nature, the horror of his work, had become clear to her. The men Albert executed were all guilty, of that she had no doubt, no matter what they claimed. But the wounded souls they left behind continued to suffer, and not only the victims’ families. The crimes had contaminated the lives of everyone associated with them, even at a distance, the guilty party and the victims united by the same event. Roselyn now understood why Albert had wanted to distance his wife and daughter from this reality. It was his way of protecting his loved ones so they might live a normal life like any other American family. Roselyn had considered him cold and distant, but that was his way of defending himself and her.
“Again, we shouldn’t be too quick to draw conclusions,” Peter reminded her. “At any moment the phone —”
“I know.”
By the time she left the police station, Roselyn was badly in need of normality, to get her bearings back on solid ground. She was dizzy and swallowed an Aspirin in the car, then waited for it to take effect. On her way to Peter’s house, where she was staying, her phone buzzed. It was Brian Pallister from the Wildlife Artists’ Association.
“Has Albert come back?” he asked.
“No. But the police are optimistic.”
A little white lie, but what else could she say?
Still, Roselyn felt reassured. One of her friends cared about her husband. Brian was a retired architect, and time weighed on him, so he turned his interest toward amateur painting. She made a note to thank him when she returned to Houston.
“How is it going at the Four Seasons?”
“They’ve followed our recommendations. Everything’s ready for the show.”
“You know I won’t be there.”
“I understand. If ever you need anything …”
“That’s nice of you. I’ll be in touch.”
She ended the conversation just as she was turning into Peter’s driveway on his tree-lined Huntsville street.
Adrian was stretched out in front of the TV as usual. Since turning thirteen, he’d fallen into the sullen, secretive silence of teenagers. Roselyn asked him how his day had been.
“Did you find Grandpa?”
“Not yet.”
Adrian didn’t seem concerned. Roselyn envied him as she f
ixed him a plate of milk and cookies.
“Your friend, Brian, called the station,” Peter told her when he came in at the end of the afternoon.
“I know. I talked to him.”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing. I don’t want him to worry.”
“Of course.”
At first when she came to stay here, the concern, care, and warmth were welcome, but now all that attention weighed on her. Roselyn wanted to be alone with her distress, but she was forever being called on to talk, explain, and give an account of her feelings. She was exhausted.
She made dinner for Peter and Adrian, and they ate in front of the TV, but she didn’t touch her plate. She went out onto the porch that overlooked the garden that Norah once tended but that Peter had transferred to a neighbour, a secretary from the Ellis Unit who’d come here to live with her family. Sitting comfortably in a wicker chair, Roselyn tried to make sense of things. In any renovation project involving architecture, Brian had said to her one day, there always came a time when, caught between the city’s demands, budgetary constraints, and the contractors’ hidden agenda, the parties seemed to lose control of the project. When that happened, he sought out his own counsel, with no external influences, and trusted his judgment untainted by the interests of other parties. Roselyn felt like that now.
What exactly did she know about her husband’s disappearance? His departure was voluntary, or at least it appeared that way. No one had shown up at Stanford Hill Residence, a sawed-off shotgun in hand, no one had thrown Albert into a car blindfolded. He could have been the victim of someone’s call to lure him away from Huntsville. In that case, the trap would have had to be set long ago, since Albert had waited for his prescriptions to be filled before heading for the hills.
And how could anyone communicate with Albert? Through the Internet, like teenage girls seduced by cyber-predators? Albert didn’t know what the Internet was, he didn’t own a computer, and Roselyn had never seen him in the basement common room with the others, where Mrs. Callaghan had set up a small computer centre. She would have to check with her. Albert could have gone digital without informing her. Anything was possible.
And then there was that surprising visit to the cemetery with Glenn Forrester. What Albert had said to Norah, the promise he’d made her. His silence and indifference afterward that was so hard to fathom.
The more Roselyn thought about it, the more she was sure Albert had left of his own volition, but for reasons she knew nothing about. Her husband didn’t have an impulsive mind; he planned everything ahead of time, sometimes months in advance. Perhaps his decision to separate from her and live on his own at Stanford Hill was part of his scheme, the first step. He told her nothing to protect her, once again.
Protect her from what?
Roselyn had no idea. After Albert’s promise at the cemetery, it made sense that his disappearance might have something to do with their daughter. Had something happened to Norah in the past that had led her husband to set things straight now? But their daughter’s short life contained no drama, no major upset until the sickness that had laid her low.
There had to be something else that Norah had hidden from her. Roselyn was saddened when she considered that her husband and daughter could have shared a secret and kept her out of it. Norah would have never concealed something from her own mother. Sooner or later she would have broken down, let something slip, and burst into tears, making her confession.
Roselyn closed her eyes. She feared Albert’s disappearance would lead her to discover terrible things, things best hidden in the shroud of time, things that would tarnish her memories of their lives together, the three of them, a happiness she never suspected had been so fragile.
12
Nyamukazi, south of Bukoba, was a combination port and public market where merchants from the area came to buy fish directly from fishermen. A canning plant stood higher on a hill, and it was common to see refrigerated trucks from the company waiting as boats came in at the end of the day with their cargoes of Nile perch. Once their catch had been divvied up by the wholesalers, the fishermen inspected their nets and repaired them before going out again early the next morning. In the meantime, they sat on the pier in a semicircle or alone, patiently darning the mesh, commenting on the day’s events.
Max liked observing the action. It was a mix of laughter and hard work, weighing and selling fish to middlemen, the fishermen yelling jokes or insults at one another, or both at once, it was hard to tell.
But today they were all on their best behaviour. Three police vehicles were parked on the beach.
Inspector Kilonzo had set a meeting with Max near the wharf where several policemen encircled a fisherman. His fellow workers kept a healthy distance from him as if they, too, were afraid of being questioned and pushed into self-incriminating answers.
Kilonzo spotted Max and walked over to him. “We might have something.”
He escorted Max toward the group and pushed aside his officers. A man in work clothes was sitting on the edge of a boat, back bent, eyes averted. At his feet lay a net that he’d probably been repairing when the police had shown up.
“Tell him what you saw,” Kilonzo ordered, pointing at Max.
Because of engine trouble that day, not far past Bukoba, the fisherman had to quit work before anyone else. After paddling for a good hour, he came to rest on the shore south of the town.
He barely spoke English, and the little he knew he’d probably learned from the rare tourists who ventured to this side of Lake Victoria.
“What day was that?” Kilonzo asked, giving the man a cigarette that he slipped into the pocket of his coveralls.
“The day before the murder.”
This was clearly not the first time he’d told his story, and he seemed to have grown fond of it, as if he’d rehearsed his presentation in preparation for Max’s arrival.
“Go ahead, talk,” Kilonzo urged.
The fisherman had dragged his boat onto the beach and started working on his engine, trying to find the problem. That was when he noticed the four-by-four higher up, near the road. Beside it was a man with binoculars. The guy noticed the fisherman but wasn’t surprised or alarmed. A minute later he went back to his observations. In the fisherman’s opinion, he had his eye on Valéria Michieka’s house.
“Are you sure?” Kilonzo asked. “He wasn’t a tourist?”
The fisherman shrugged. “Not him.”
From the point, he went on, you could see Valéria’s place.
Once he’d fixed his engine, the fisherman headed back onto the lake without giving the event a second thought. Later, after he heard what had happened to Valéria and her daughter, despite his friends’ warnings not to, he decided to call the police.
When he was finished talking, the fisherman snapped up his net and rolled it into a ball.
Max was suddenly reminded of the men in Zanzibar who attached albino fingers to their trawl lines for a better catch. “Do you know where the four-by-four came from?”
The fisherman had no idea. But he was surprised to see the Codan satellite radio communication system that the vehicle was equipped with. That kind of equipment was rarely seen in the area, except in national parks and hunting grounds. Two years earlier the fisherman worked in Rubondo Island Park cleaning vehicles used on safaris. There, he’d been around high-end Land Rovers and Mitsubishis that were almost never seen on the Kagera roads. When he spotted the four-by-four higher up on the beach, he recognized the type right away.
“Then what happened?” Kilonzo asked.
“Nothing. The guy with the binoculars got into the vehicle and left.”
Max glanced at Kilonzo, who was delighted at this new information.
“The tire tracks outside Valéria’s house,” the inspector said. “I bet they come from that four-by-four.”
Max thought Kilonzo was a little too eager, as if, once again, his investigation had only one goal: to impress him. A scene-setting that was do
ne for his benefit. He needed convincing. The truth came second.
Three national parks lay several hours’ distance from Bukoba. Rubondo Island, where the fisherman had worked, wasn’t easy to get to. The occasional ferry and a few private boats made the trip. Most visitors preferred to arrive by plane from Mwanza or Arusha, Kilonzo explained. They were tourists or photographers looking for less frequented safaris than the usual ones in the Serengeti. The two other parks, Biharamulo and Burigi, catered to a different clientele: hunters. From Bukoba the parks could be reached by the road that met up with the Dar es Salaam highway farther south.
The witness returned to work, and Kilonzo led Max to his own vehicle. Without asking permission, the policeman sat next to him, trailed by Shembazi.
“I’ll guide you,” the inspector said.
Kilonzo motioned his men to follow, and the caravan got under way. A hell of a way to run an investigation, Max thought. But this was no time to show that he wasn’t fooled by the policeman’s antics.
A few kilometres past Nyamukazi, Max spotted a group of Chinese men wearing black suits and ties, appearing very studious, guided by a young woman showing them around a construction site. The infatuation for the Chinese had spread across the continent. They were the new saviours who would break Africa out of its doldrums.
“President Komba got on the train too late,” Kilonzo remarked. “He still thought America would save him.”
“You forget the railway between Dar es Salaam and Zambia.”
The Chinese had carried out that colossal project in the 1970s, and Valéria’s family had worked on it. That was where her big brother, Evans, first felt the pains of the disease that killed him.
“Those were the days of Julius Nyerere,” Kilonzo replied. “He broke with the West Germans and the British for ideological reasons. He opened his arms wide to Chinese aid.”
