The Killing Hour

by Paul Cleave

  “I already have.”

  “I need to as well.”

  “I’ll call for you.”

  She doesn’t look happy with the idea, but doesn’t try to convince me otherwise. “It makes sense that if he’s going to look for you, Charlie, he’s going to start at your house. He saw your car. Maybe he took down the license plate. Or maybe he forced one of the women to tell him who you were.”

  I start nodding. It makes sense. “We need to stake it out.”

  Staking out my own house. Considering everything else that has happened this week this new development doesn’t seem strange to me. “I guess it’s a logical progression.”

  “Oh, it definitely is, for him and for us. And that has to be our plan. That, and figuring out a way to catch him when he does show up.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  Jo pushes away her empty plate and sips more of her bad coffee. “That’s what we need to start figuring out.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Another day, another dollar. And already for Detective Inspector Bill Landry it’s going badly.

  He didn’t sleep well. In fact, he’s woken up feeling more tired than before he went to bed. He got home last night with a racing mind that he tried to put at ease by having a cigarette, but halfway through the cigarette he ended up throwing up. He went to bed around one a.m., woke up at four, and has been awake since then, spending most of that time sitting at his kitchen table drinking coffee and staring at a calendar on the wall. Around seven he made himself some toast, but didn’t eat it. He poured a bowl of cereal and didn’t touch that either.

  Around seven thirty he spent ten minutes hovering over the toilet fighting the waves of nausea the pills were bringing into his routine. Then he coughed for ten minutes, wondering what the hell the point of the pills was, too scared to cut them out of his life in case the coughing was worse. The mornings were when it was the worst. At seven forty-five smoke came from the bottom of his coffee machine, a few sparks too, and really he thought after last week’s news his appliances would be the ones to outlive him. In fact there was a moment where he considered pulling it apart while it was still plugged in-it’d be a way of beating cancer on his own terms. In the end he had to settle for drinking warm water, and when you’re stumbling through this world in a dozing stupor trying hard to wake up, trying hard to stay focused with both cancer and cough-fighting poison running through your system, water simply doesn’t cut it. Apparently slapping yourself hard doesn’t work either. He took the pills the doctor prescribed him, at one point one of them getting lodged in his throat and making him think everything might come to an end on his kitchen floor.

  The morning has moved on since then. He spent a few minutes packing some clothes into a gym bag, along with some boots. He thinks he may need them later on. Right now he’s having the pleasure of getting caught in traffic. Every few minutes or so he tries, but fails, to stifle a yawn. Days like this he sometimes fantasizes about climbing out of his car and picking a direction to walk in and never looking back. He saw that in a movie once. It seemed like a good idea. The button that changes station on his radio is broken, so all he can do is either listen to the same station that he’s growing to hate, or nothing at all. He listens to it for a bit. There’s a piece on about bringing the death penalty back to New Zealand. There’s a chance it will be going to a referendum later this year-which is also an election year. The people of New Zealand are sick of the endless tide of criminals. And Feldman is just one more number added to that bunch. Listening to the radio, Landry realizes what he’s planning on doing is really what the government may be planning on doing anyway-except he’s just going to bring that date forward. That’s all.

  Still craving coffee, he stops at a gas station, pulling in behind a shiny red sports car that immediately makes him feel jealous. He goes inside, but the machine there is out of order. He wonders if it’s a worldwide event. Then he wonders if it’s him that’s contaminating everything, if he has the Midas touch, if everything he comes into contact with is turning cancerous. He trades the idea of buying caffeine for purchasing a packet of cigarettes, even though the pack he split open last night is still mostly full.

  When he gets to work somebody had taken his parking space. When he gets inside he’s sure the elevator isn’t going to work. He pushes the button and the doors open, but then he decides to use the stairs instead of risking getting caught between floors.

  The fourth floor is in motion. Detectives are talking on phones, they’re doing paperwork, they’re following leads. The coffee machine works-thank God-but then he finds a crack in his mug. Of course he didn’t find that crack until coffee had leaked all over his pants.

  “Goddamn it,” he says, fighting the temptation to throw the cup against the wall. The day has to get better, doesn’t it?

  “How you feeling?” Schroder asks, coming over.

  “Better,” he says.

  “You still don’t look so good.”

  Landry shrugs. He isn’t sure what to say to that. That he’s never going to look good again?

  Schroder updates him on the case. They’re working on the theory that the two dead women knew their killer. “He killed them in their houses,” Schroder says. “The two girls have a history together, so it wasn’t random. He targeted these two women for a reason.”

  “No idea on the reason?”

  “Not yet. I’m going to run some stuff past Benson Barlow,” he says.

  Landry nods. Benson Barlow is a psychiatrist who has helped them on and off over the last few months.

  Schroder looks at his watch. “I’m meeting him in an hour. First I’m heading to the morgue. Want to tag along?”

  No, he doesn’t. He wants to start looking for Charlie Feldman, and he doesn’t see how going to the morgue is going to advance that search. “Why not?”

  “You sure you’re feeling okay? You look like you might pass out. I don’t want to get you to the morgue and then have you end up staying.”

  “I’m fine,” he says.

  They take the elevator downstairs. It doesn’t break down. They split up and take their own cars, Schroder leading the way. Landry puts the air-conditioning on full blast, directing it at his face, hoping it’ll combat the urge he has to fall asleep. He’s not sure how he’s going to make it through the day.

  Christchurch Hospital is undergoing a series of renovations and parts of the parking lot are cut off from the public. There are cranes and bulldozers and men breaking the ground apart with pneumatic drills. They find parking spaces and the noise is deafening until they get inside.

  Landry has the overwhelming sense of wasting time as he stands in the morgue. It’s a cold white room surrounded by metal tables with canvas sheets draped over them, and on those sheets are saws and pliers and forceps and knives and other tools he can’t identify, all of them for cutting, cutting, cutting, all of them the kind of thing killers like Charlie Feldman would have a wet dream over. He hates being here. It’s the first time he’s been in a morgue since learning death was comin’ a-knockin’. There’s every good chance he’ll be coming back in winter and those same tools will open him up and place his black organs on the same scales and into the same holding trays. He runs a finger along one of those trays. It’s cold and unforgiving, just like the cancer.

  “Gentlemen,” a woman says, stepping into the morgue. It’s one of the medical examiners. Her name is Tracey, and for some reason Tracey has a last name he can never remember no matter how many times he hears it. Attractive and athletic, Tracey is a few years younger than him. She has blond hair that was black the last time he saw her. She gives them a smile and he smiles back and over the years he’s often thought she’d have made a great ex-wife.

  “What have you got for us?”

  “Just the obvious,” she says, and she hands each of them a folder. Inside are several photographs of the wounds and lots of paragraphs and diagrams of exactly how the two women died. At the front of the folder a
half-page synopsis sums up those photos and diagrams. “Cause of death was exactly how it looked,” she says. “Massive heart trauma caused by metal spikes. Each one was driven in with quite some accuracy. There are some defensive wounds here, but most of what you see happened postmortem. It looks like the killer rammed these stakes into these two women, then continued to pound them in deeper with either a hammer or even his foot. Kathy McClory’s right breast was removed after death,” she says. “See these rough edges?” she asks, then points to the victim’s chest. “Looks like it was removed with a saw of some kind.”

  “Any way to narrow that down, Doc?” Schroder asks.

  Tracey shakes her head. “Too much of a mess,” she says. “Also, there are no hesitation marks. When the guy started cutting, there were no second thoughts. “My guess is a hacksaw, and as you guys know, there are thousands of them out there. Even if you brought the right one in I probably couldn’t match it to the wounds. Sorry.” She looks up at Landry. Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” he says. “So they suffered?”

  Tracey nods, and suddenly he remembers her last name. It’s Walter. Tracey Walter. “Yes. A lot. There are fingernail impressions in their palms. They were balling their hands into fists so tight their fingernails actually cut through the skin.”

  She spends another ten minutes going over her findings. She asks if the breast has been found and Schroder tells her it hasn’t been, to which she nods and says, “Of course. Otherwise it would have been brought in already.”

  When they get outside they stand in the parking lot for a minute, having to yell to be heard over the sound of construction. They agree on Schroder going to talk to Benson Barlow-it will be the start of him trying to build up a profile.

  “You might as well go back and revisit the crime scenes,” Schroder says, which might help or it might not, but either way Landry has to start somewhere.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The motel smells of bacon and eggs and coffee-at least for now. During the night it smelled of depraved acts she didn’t want to think about. The air is sticky and warm. The bathroom looks like it gets cleaned about as often as the place gets painted. The TV is still on, the movie that was on when Charlie left has finished, only to have been replaced by some kind of sequel that is still just as black and just as white, still with the wooden dialogue, still with the sets that look like they’ve been carved out of cardboard. She’s desperate to get away from here. More importantly she’s desperate to get away from Charlie.

  Her back is sore. At some point she’s hurt it, and she isn’t sure if it’s from the fall, the struggle, or from being tied up. It’s not damage sore, but achy sore, the kind of sore you get when you’ve been to the gym for the first time in a year. The only good thing is that she’s no longer hungry.

  More than feeling sore, more than feeling angry, she feels disappointed. She’s never felt that way in a person before. A little, perhaps, six months ago when Charlie hurt that guy at the bar, but despite all that there was something in that action that was understandable. Charlie had been defending her. Only he hadn’t been, not really, because it was a minute or more between the moment that guy put his hand up her dress and the moment that Charlie started hitting him. The problem was Charlie wouldn’t stop. He didn’t see the look in his eyes. The wild look, like that of a beast, like that of a beast that was enjoying the pain it was causing. Could she have given him another chance? She could have, and it’s something she’s thought about every day since they broke up, and something that had been on her mind a lot over the last few weeks. The irony is she was getting close to calling him and seeing if they could talk. There was still a future for them to be had.

  Not now.

  This side of Charlie is something altogether different. Much different from the man she knew, different from the man he became that night six months ago. This is a side she never thought could exist. He’s not going to let her go. He says he will, and she thinks he believes what he’s telling her, but his actions defy his words. In some ways it’s like dealing with a stranger. A stranger who she once loved, a man who has betrayed her and hurt her, and that’s why the anger and the fear are taking a backseat to the disappointment.

  It’s also why as much as she wants to believe in him, she can’t, and that means she can’t believe him either. She doesn’t know what happened last night. All she knows is Charlie has something to do with the deaths of those two women and, really, she doesn’t even know if that is true either. The only thing she knows for sure is that she has to find a way to escape.

  Convincing Charlie she wants to help was easier than she’d hoped, and she guesses that’s for a few reasons. First, he has a desire to believe her so he no longer has to be alone. Second, this Charlie isn’t as smart as the Charlie she was married to. That Charlie would have taken those two women to the police, despite what happened to that lawyer last year. If he had, those two women would still be alive. And all that aside, he should have gone to the police after he’d found them dead. That’s what any sane person would have done.

  Ergo, Charlie is no longer sane.

  And the proof is in his treatment of her. Something inside him has snapped. Which means escaping should be easy. All she has to do is gain his trust. She must take baby steps, she must build up his belief that they can be a team.

  That’s what she needs to focus on. She needs to ignore her disappointment. She can’t think about how she used to love him. She can’t think about what their future might have been like if they had stayed together. Would he have killed her too?

  Too?

  Does she really think he killed those women? Is that what he is? A killer?

  “We need to contact the police,” she says.

  “Unbelievable. I’ve already said-”

  She holds up her hand in a stopping gesture. He shuts up. “I didn’t say go to them. Now are you going to let me talk?”

  “Get to the point.”

  She tries hard not to wince when he says that. Get to the point. What a bastard.

  “You know things about Cyris, important things that the police don’t know. You said they wouldn’t know about the pasture, well, you could tell them to search there. You could tell them everything you know by writing a letter and sending it anonymously.”

  He thinks about her suggestion. She can see him working it out, seeing what the good points are and what the bad points are.

  “It’s a good idea, Charlie.”

  “Okay. Fine.”

  “There might be some stationary in the bedside drawer,” she says, “though I guess it’s unlikely.”

  He checks the drawers. Nothing. Not even a Bible.

  “You put my handbag in the car, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s in the backseat.”

  “I have a pen and paper in there.”

  “And you’re just going to sit there quietly while I go out and get it?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. The car is only a few yards away, Charlie. If I was going to start screaming I’d have done it already. Same thing about trying to escape. I could have gone out the bathroom window, but I didn’t.” Of course the reason she didn’t was because the damn thing was painted shut, and even if it hadn’t been she’s not so sure she would have gotten through it.

  “You promise to stay right there?”

  She nods. She promises. He opens the door. Daylight floods in. She can see his car. She could get up and run for it, but could she outrun him? She isn’t sure. He would tackle her, and things could go bad. She could land wrong. She could hit her head on the ground. There’s no point in risking it. Just the fact he’s gone outside without tying her up shows the baby steps she’s taking are already working. At this rate she’ll have talked her way out of here within the next hour or two.

  Charlie comes back inside. He hands her her bag. She goes through it.

  “If you’re looking for your cell phone,” he says, “it’s at your house. I didn’t want the police
to be able to trace us.”

  “That’s not what I’m looking for,” she says, only it kind of was.

  She finds the pad and it takes another half a minute to find a pen. When she gets out of this, she’s going to throw half of this stuff out. There are receipts and tissues that have been in here for months.

  He sits down on the bed and uses the bedside drawers as a writing table. He sets about going to work. She doesn’t care whether he mails it-she suggested it to see if she could get him to go outside without tying her up, and to hopefully get her phone. She also suggested it hoping that by putting words on paper he may begin to realize what he’s doing. If some of the old Charlie is still in there then maybe he’ll see the decisions he’s making are insane. Hopefully he’ll take responsibility for his actions. Hopefully some of the old Charlie will start to filter back through.

  “I don’t really know where to begin,” he says.

  “The beginning seems as good a place as any,” she says, concerned that that wasn’t obvious to him. He rubs at the bump on his forehead and winces. Is that partly the reason he’s so off the rails? A blow to the head?

  He starts writing. She watches him, the pen flowing across the page, it all seems to be rushing out in a stream. She looks at the TV, at the black-and-white vampire doing what he can to get all the hot chicks. She wonders if this horror movie was on yesterday morning because it might suggest where Charlie got some of his ideas from. The news said the two women died violently. It mentioned ritualistic killings. Did they really die by being staked through the heart as Charlie said? No-surely not. Because that would be. . what? Too horrific? She’s deluding herself if she thinks horrific things don’t happen on a daily basis on a global scale. So if that is how the women died, did Charlie do the staking? It depends. It depends on how guilty she thinks he is. Her loyalties now lie with two dead women she’s never met. She needs to get out of here. Needs to get the police. And the vampire on TV is giving her an idea on how she can do that.