A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  “I can’t be. But there’s a real creep show going on inside his head, that’s for sure. Look who he was hanging out with.”

  On the drive to Archer’s house, Ben calls Detective Kent, who was one of the detectives who interviewed Simon Bower’s friends and coworkers and neighbors. Her opinion of Archer? She tells him that both she and Detective Travers thought he was a nice-enough guy, and cooperative. She tells him Archer has no criminal record. Ben tells her they’re driving there now to interview him. He asks her to try to get a warrant so they can enter the premises if he’s not home, or if he’s unwilling to let them look around. She tells him she doesn’t think they have grounds for a warrant, but says she’ll do her best. He asks her to send a couple of patrol cars to the address as backup.

  The houses in the neighborhood date back anywhere from forty to eighty years, some of them brick, some of them weatherboard, some of them bungalows, some of them statehouses. There are tidy gardens, messy gardens, overgrown gardens, sparse gardens. It’s the same kind of street Ben lives on. The same kind of street a large percentage of the population of Christchurch lives on. A whole lot of average mixed in with a whole lot of ordinary. Except for Vincent’s house. It’s the exception to the rule. He lives in a bungalow that’s around seventy, maybe eighty years old. It looks freshly painted. It has big windows so clean the only way he can tell there’s glass in them is because of the reflection. The wooden framing is white and crisp and stands out from the dark-gray weatherboard. All of it is immaculate. There’s a deck leading from the entrance that eats up half the front yard. There are flax bushes and ferns that are evenly spaced out, and the entire yard looks like a landscaper must come there twice a day. There are bark gardens and rhododendrons and yucca plants all around the edges. They drive past it and park half a block away and kill the engine and Ben can feel the tension in his body rising.

  “Let’s go have a chat,” he says.

  “We agreed to wait for backup.”

  “We can do this.”

  “I’m sure we can, and I don’t know how to say this without sounding insensitive, but not waiting for backup is what got Mitchell killed.”

  That’s not what got Mitchell killed, he thinks, but he can’t tell her that. Calling for backup hadn’t been an option for them. But if they had, Mitchell would still be alive and so would Simon Bower.

  “You’re right,” he says. “We’ll wait.”

  Backup arrives in the form of two patrol cars nine minutes later. The officers are armed. They form a hard-and-fast plan. One officer will remain on the street in case Vincent Archer isn’t home and he pulls up. One moves to the back of the house. Two stick with Vega and Ben while Ben knocks on the door.

  Nobody answers.

  “You reckon he’s not home? Or not answering?” Vega asks.

  “Not home,” Ben says.

  “We have to wait for the warrant,” Vega says.

  He walks away and calls Kent. She tells him she’s still working on it. They could go ahead and smash open the door and storm inside, but whatever they find won’t be any good to them if the warrant gets turned down. And even if he’d be able to keep his job afterward, he’d be ruining his partnership with Vega before it even began.

  “I’m going to take a look around while we wait,” he says.

  “Don’t break anything,” she says.

  He walks around the house, looking through the windows as he goes. Everything inside is as tidy as out. Some of the appliances look like they’ve just come out of the box. On the inside the house looks like it was built only a year ago. There’s a large open-plan kitchen with an island in the middle and a double-door fridge, and the cabinetry looks handmade. There’s a large lounge suite and a fireplace and no TV and some framed vintage movie posters on the walls. The carpet looks new, and there are potted plants in every room and a bookcase that takes up half a wall. Everything is neat and in its place and the bed is made and the house is full of right angles and there are no dishes anywhere.

  The room at the back of the house has the curtains pulled. Could Archer be in there sleeping? Ben moves along the window trying to find an angle to see inside, and gets one between the curtains, though he has to drag a wooden picnic bench over and climb up onto it to do so. He can see newspaper articles and photographs and lists all pinned to the wall haphazardly.

  He gets out his phone and calls Kent.

  “How you getting on?”

  “Not well,” she says.

  He describes the room he’s just seen.

  “Give me two minutes,” she says. “I’ll get it done.”

  He returns to the front door. “This is definitely our guy,” he says to Vega.

  “You saw something?”

  “A whole lot of something.”

  Kent calls him back. She gives him the okay to go ahead. He hangs up and tells Vega it’s go time. She swings the battering ram into the door. The result is devastating. The door separates from the jamb, the noise like a car being rear-ended. Splinters of wood shoot in every direction. She drops the ram and they storm into the house with their guns raised, identifying themselves loudly in case Archer is hiding. Three of them make their way from front to back, Vega and Ben clearing the lounge and kitchen and dining areas, the other officer clearing the hall, office, bedrooms, and bathroom.

  Archer isn’t here. They holster their guns. Ben pulls on a pair of latex gloves, and Vega follows him into the room at the end of the hallway, which features a display of Vincent Archer’s madness.

  “It’s a Room of Obsession,” Vega says, and Ben hasn’t heard the term before but likes it. He’ll use it in the future. The articles pinned to the walls are mostly about Simon Bower. There are articles about Andrea Walsh too, the woman Simon Bower killed whose body they still haven’t found. Articles about Erin falling from the rooftop. About the fire in the hospital. There are photographs too, none Ben recognizes from the newspaper or online, but that Vincent must have taken himself. Pictures of the building site where Mitchell died. There is a picture of Vega outside her house. There’s a photograph of Ben’s mom and dad getting into their car at a mall, a photograph of Mitchell’s mom in the garden and Mitchell’s dad washing his car. There’s a photograph of Josh and Michelle outside a school, a photograph of Josh with his grandparents, a photograph of Josh leaving the hospital. There are lists of addresses, birthdays, places frequented, anything and everything. He can barely feel his legs. He needs to sit down. The reason Erin was hurt was because of what Ben and Mitchell did to Simon Bower. What he’s looking at here is a man’s blueprint for revenge.

  He realizes he’s been holding his breath this whole time.

  He lets it out.

  In the center of all of this madness is a photograph of Ben Kirk made up of four separate pieces, printed out and pinned up in a two-by-two formation, each piece holding one-quarter of his features. It’s the photograph the media kept running with, the one that’s on his police ID. There are two things pinned to them. The first pin is holding the engagement ring he gave to Erin. Seeing it floods him with memories. They met four years ago when he was seated next to her at the cinema. She was wearing a white summer dress and her arms were tanned and her smile made his heart race. He’d gone with a friend but spoke to her during the previews. He’d made her laugh. He’d asked for her number. They’d gone to dinner the following weekend. He remembers taking the engagement ring to get sized the week before he proposed. It had belonged to his grandmother. She’d handed it down to his mom a long time ago, and his mom gave it to him when he told her he was going to ask Erin to marry him. He’d pinched a ring from Erin’s jewelry box for the sizing, and his grandmother’s was cleaned and the stone was reset and the band resized, and a few days later a chef was able to hide it inside a fortune cookie and now that ring is hanging from a pin on the wall of some messed-up crackpot’s home.

  “What is it?” Vega asks him.

  He picks up the ring. “It’s Erin’s,” he says. “It’s the
engagement ring I gave her.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Vega says.

  The ring has been tarnished by Vincent Archer’s sweat and by the toxic air in his house. Ben doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to look at it the same way again.

  “He must have kept it as a memento,” Vega says.

  Ben drops it into an evidence bag. What he does know is that it can’t stay here.

  The second item pinned to the two-by-two formation of his photograph is a list of names.

  “Look at this,” Vega says, reading a newspaper article.

  But Ben doesn’t look at it. He’s too preoccupied. He unpins the list from the wall. On the top is Erin’s name. The faint trace of a checkmark is next to it. Cleary the checkmark was made when Archer thought he had killed her, then he’d tried to erase it when he found out she was still alive.

  “It’s Ruby Carter,” Vega says, still reading the article.

  Ben doesn’t answer her. He’s focused on the second name on the list. This one has been underlined half a dozen times. Joshua Logan. He looks back at the photograph of Joshua outside his school. Not his old school, but the new one.

  “She was your case, right?” Vega asks.

  Ben looks at his watch. It’s twenty-five past three. School has been out for ten minutes.

  “I can only think of one reason why this guy would have articles of Ruby Carter pinned to his wall,” Vega says. “He killed her. Maybe both he and Simon Bower killed her. I think we should . . . Jesus, Ben, are you okay?”

  “We gotta go,” he says.

  “Go where?”

  He runs for the door. “I think Joshua Logan is in danger.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  “Hey, Josh, wait up!”

  He turns around. Olillia is waving at him from a group of students he passed outside the main gates. He hadn’t noticed her among them as they stood in a circle chatting. She says something quickly to them, then walks over to him. “You walking or catching the bus?”

  “Walking,” he says.

  “Mind if I walk with you?”

  “I’d like that,” he says, and then blushes.

  The street is full of parked cars with parents waiting to pick up students. There are other students walking and biking in all directions. His last school was different. Parents waited out front, but nobody walked or biked.

  “How are your eyes?”

  “They’re fine,” he says. “I guess I overreacted.”

  “You’ve been blind all your life, and you probably thought you were about to lose your sight again. If it’d been me I’d have been blubbing like a baby. I’m sorry about your dad, by the way.”

  The change of subject is so dramatic he isn’t sure what she means at first. He’s had so many things on his mind today his dad had slipped somewhere towards the back. “It’s tough,” he says.

  “I know,” she says. “I lost my mom. I was only five when it happened, so my only real memories are that she loved me and we made each other laugh, but sometimes when I try to picture her I can’t. She got cancer. I don’t remember her being in the hospital or anything. Just that she was always there and then . . . and then she wasn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Then we’re both sorry.” She smiles. He wonders if her family has a curse too.

  “So you live with your dad?” he asks.

  They’ve walked a block. There are clusters of students around him, some in groups, some in pairs, some by themselves. Some are piling into a bus that’s pulled over.

  “And my brother,” she says. “He’s older than me. He’s twenty, but he lives at home. He got the normal name.”

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  “Normal,” she says. “Strange name, huh?”

  “Seriously? His name is Normal?”

  “Yeah, crazy, huh? I don’t know what our parents were thinking.” Then she laughs and slaps him lightly on the arm. “No, just kidding. It’s Zach.”

  He laughs too. He’s never met anybody so weird.

  “You got brothers or sisters?” she asks.

  “It’s just me and my mom.”

  “Any pets? We have three cats. Some days I think that three cats are three too many, and other days I think I’d like more.”

  “No pets,” he says. “At least not full-time pets.”

  “They’re part-time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you mean half the day something will be a cat, and the other half it’ll be something else? Like a table?”

  “Exactly,” he says. “But sometimes they might be a couch too.”

  “Part-time dog, part-time lounge suite,” she says. “But what’s the real story?”

  “Mom is a veterinarian, and sometimes she brings kittens home, or puppies. It’s kind of like foster care, especially if they’re not well and she wants to keep an eye on them overnight. We’ll have them for a few weeks or so. Sometimes a month.”

  “Must be hard saying good-bye to them.”

  “It is,” he says. “I try to focus on the fact that they’re in better health than when they arrived, and they’re going to a good family.”

  “Do some of them die?”

  “Sometimes, yeah, but not often.”

  “That must be really sad,” she says.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Your mom must be really brave,” she says. “I’d be a mess.”

  There is a convenience store at the next corner, a black Rottweiler tied to a bike stand outside. It watches them as they walk past. It has a hungry look in its eyes. There’s graffiti on the lampposts and chewing gum on the sidewalks and he can smell fresh bread and stale cigarette smoke. They hang a right past it. Olillia is telling him the names of her cats, and of previous cats that have been in her life. He likes the sound of her voice. Up ahead is a railway crossing. It runs along the top of an embankment that forms a parabolic curve. He sees some students from his school wander off and follow the tracks to the right.

  “Out of the way, loser,” somebody yells, and he turns around to see a student from his school riding his bike on the sidewalk, coming fast towards him. He steps aside just in time. The student races up the side of the embankment as fast as he can, gets some air at the top by pulling up on the bike, then disappears down the other side.

  “You know him?” Joshua asks.

  “Levi? No, not really. I know who he is, that’s all. Kind of guy you’ll be reading about in the papers one day for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Like Scott,” he says.

  “There is one advantage,” she says. “Levi is a year ahead of us, so you’ve only got to put up with him this year.”

  They climb the embankment and stop at the top. He looks up and down the tracks. Where the tracks cross the road, there are long pieces of pavement between the rails, and of course the embankment is paved too, but beyond the road are sleepers that go as far as he can see and the embankment is made up of millions of fist-sized stones, all of them blocky and rough. There’s no sign of a train, but he can see students in each direction. The ones he watched a moment ago have paused to light cigarettes and untuck their shirts.

  “I live in that direction,” Olillia says, nodding down the tracks to the left. He knows that the trains pass a couple of neighborhoods behind his. On quiet nights if the air is still he can hear them. He also knows that on occasion people underestimate how long it takes to cross the tracks and for some reason drunk people have been known to fall asleep on them, causing horrific accidents. “Which way do you go?”

  “I’m that way too,” he says, “but I was going to take the roads. I’ve never walked down train tracks before.”

  “You should try it,” she says. “It’s cool.”

  Cool. He thinks about that word, and realizes he’s probably never done anything in his life that could be described that way. He could start by walking these tracks. Follow them in the direction of his neighborhood. It would be like an adventure, and it’s not like he can get
lost. Not really. And if he does, he can either use his phone to call his mom or use the map application to figure out where he is.

  “Well?” she asks.

  “Let’s do it,” he says.

  “Great! Where do you live?”

  He tells her. She thinks about it for a few seconds, then nods. “It’s perfect,” she says. “We walk down this section, which takes us to the road I want. Then you carry on to the next one. You’ll cut twenty minutes off your trip.”

  They walk between the rails on the sleepers. The students heading in the same direction are now too far away for him to make out anything but the color of their uniforms.

  “You ever been on a train?” she asks.

  “Never,” he says. “In fact, I’ve never even seen a train.”

  “Never?”

  “I’ve heard them, and I kind of have an idea of what they must look like. I’ve still never seen one on TV or on the Internet. Not because I’m not curious, but there are plenty of things I haven’t seen yet.”

  “I imagine there are plenty of things you’d look up online before looking up trains,” she says. “I was on one with my mom once, but I can’t—”

  The sound of approaching sirens interrupts her. They turn to see a police car racing over the crossing at the intersection behind them. It reminds him of the day Uncle Ben sped into the parking lot of the hospital, following the ambulance.

  “Geez, somebody’s in a hurry,” she says.

  “Hope nobody has been hurt,” he says, then thinks that if somebody has, hopefully it was Scott.

  They carry on walking, Olillia balancing the left rail and Joshua the right. The stones forming the sides of the embankment peter out into ankle-high grass that’s dry and patchy, and farther out are wooden fences separating all of this from the neighboring houses. Some of the fence palings are missing, some twisted and warped, and all are covered with graffiti.

  “What were you saying? About the train?” he asks.

  “Oh, yeah. I was going to say it was so long ago that I can’t remember. I only know because Zach remembers and he told me about it once. I don’t even know where we were going, or why. What was it like?” she asks. “Being blind?”