Dead Air
Page 21
“If I want to talk, I’ll call you.”
“Sure. Can I ask you one question?”
He looked at me.
“What do you drive?”
“Why you asking?”
“Someone’s been following me. I wondered if it was you.”
“You see what this individual who’s been following you was driving?”
“A dark-blue Jetta,” I said.
The smallest hint of a smile formed around Kendall Mark’s mouth. “Well, ain’t that the goddamnedest coincidence,” he said.
FIFTEEN
I don’t have a particular routine I like to follow after a confrontation with an armed guy in a back alley. When I finally got into my apartment, I didn’t turn on lights or music and I didn’t phone Cobb or Jill. I did nothing. Not at first. I sat on the couch looking out the window and thought about what had happened to me on this night.
And I thought about how little I knew about what went on in the city I had grown up in and loved. Like every city this one had a dark side. Killers and victims. Violence and terror. Hard streets that most of us never travelled and often didn’t know about. And on those streets were unknown people — some like Kendall Mark, others like the man who killed Faith Unruh. They were out there. Unseen and anonymous.
But not Faith herself. She was not anonymous. Not as long as Kendall Mark lived and waited and watched.
Mark was not crazy. There was no trace of slathering, wild-eyed, out-of-control madman in the person who’d held me at gunpoint, at least not that I saw. A crazy person would likely have killed me before I could have offered an explanation. No, what I had seen was an obsessed former cop whose desire to avenge a horrible crime had taken over his life. Some might argue that maybe that was a form of insanity or at least a manifestation of it. Perhaps.
I meant what I’d said to him. If Cobb and I ever found anything that might be useful I’d let him know, despite the very real risk that he might do something I wouldn’t condone.
Of course, all this was likely moot, anyway. After years of trying, Mark wasn’t any closer to finding Faith’s killer and was now reduced to watching the crime scene, live and on tape, hoping that old adage about the perpetrator returning to the scene of the crime bore truth.
I poured a stouter version of rye and diet than usual, put Colleen Brown on the stereo, and sat down to let her take me away from where I was. I had a couple of her CDs but opted this time for one of her earlier works, A Peculiar Thing. But halfway through the drink and the third cut on the CD, appropriately called “A Mystery,” I couldn’t sit still any longer and grabbed my cellphone to call Cobb.
“Whaddaya got?” he growled into the phone. “My wife and I are watching a chick flick and I hate to miss a single minute.”
Normally I would have laughed, but on this night humour wasn’t working for me.
“I encountered an old friend of yours. Or at least a former colleague.”
“Who?”
“Marlon Kennedy.”
There was silence for a few seconds. “How am I supposed to know this guy?”
“It’s a new name. Used to be known as Kendall Mark.”
Silence again, not as long this time, then softly, “Damn.”
“Yeah. It wasn’t a real cordial meeting. At least not at first. He took me down in the alley behind my place, held a gun to my head. He’d seen me driving by and stopping around Faith Unruh’s house. He’s been watching the place for years. Thought I was the killer coming back to reminisce. When I convinced him I wasn’t, we chatted for a while.”
“You okay?”
“Physically, not bad. Mentally and emotionally not so hot. How is it that working with you is a can’t-miss formula for having people come at me with various forms of weaponry?”
“Sorry, pal, you can’t lay that one at my door. You did this on your own. I didn’t even know you were going anywhere near the Unruh murder scene. Which leads me to the question, Why are you doing that?”
“Yeah, that was Mark’s question, too. I told him I didn’t know, and that’s the truth. I don’t know. Anyway, how about I tell you all about it in the morning? I don’t want you to miss any more of the movie.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“And Mark is gone? You’re safe?”
“I’m safe. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
I ended the call and sipped my drink. Talking to Cobb, even briefly, had calmed me down some. And Colleen Brown’s amazing voice was working its magic.
I fell asleep on the couch, woke just after 2:00 a.m., and rolled into bed to dream of an empty house on a deserted street. But where the front windows should have been was a pair of eyes. They were unblinking and showed no emotion, gave no sense of life as they watched and watched. And waited. It was the only house on that side of the street and sat directly opposite the house Donna and I had lived in. The house that had been set ablaze by someone consumed with rage and hate. Enough to kill the only person in the house at the time of the fire.
Donna.
I awoke with a dry mouth, a headache, and the overwhelming sadness I still felt whenever I thought of Donna.
My feet weren’t yet on the floor when there was a knock at the door, gentle at first, then, as I made no move to answer it, louder and more persistent. I padded across the floor, rested my forehead against the door.
“If your name isn’t Mike or Jill, bugger off,” I said.
“Wow, that was close. I’m not Jill, so that left me only one chance. Lucky me.”
“Do you have coffee with you?”
“Don’t I always?” Cobb said, and I heard a chuckle follow the words.
“You didn’t yesterday. Just mooched my beer.” I opened the door and he crossed in front of me and set a Starbucks Coffee Traveler on the table — ninety-six ounces of Pike Place. Apparently Cobb figured the discussion of my previous evening would require the ingesting of an insane amount of caffeine. There were also doughnuts from Tim Hortons — he had been busy.
“Call it even.” He grinned but I could see he was looking at me, studying me to check for any lingering ill effects from my adventure.
“Why don’t you have a seat and enjoy several cups of coffee while I grab a shower.” I glanced at the Traveler carton.
“Didn’t want us to run short.” He grinned again.
“We should be okay.”
He crossed the room to my record collection, a series of boxes, shelves, albums, and CDs that covered a third of the living space in my already too-small apartment.
“You got any Melanie Doane?”
I was surprised. I didn’t really know Cobb’s taste in music, but I hadn’t thought it would include a Canadian Maritimes singer, even one as good as Melanie Doane. “It’s more or less alphabetical,” I told him. “The Ds should start about there.”
I pointed, then turned and headed for the bathroom.
When I returned ten minutes later, rubbing a towel over my wet hair and kicking a pair of socks along the floor in front of me, Melanie and Ron Sexsmith were workin’ it on the stereo — something from her A Thousand Nights album — and Cobb was staring at his iPad.
He looked up at me. “Been looking back. Kendall Mark disappeared three years to the day after Faith Unruh died. Cleaned out his bank account, took the easy-to-carry stuff from his apartment, and not much of that, and walked off into the sunset. As near as I can tell nobody’s seen him since.”
“Until last night.”
“Until last night.” Cobb nodded. “Of course, there was lots of talk when it happened. Everybody assumed he’d left town. A couple of his friends, guys he’d worked with — pretty capable cops — tried to find him. Nothing. How does a guy disappear in his own town and not be seen by someone in all that time?”
“Damned if I know.
He changed his name. Maybe he changed the way he looked, too. I’ve never seen the guy before, so maybe he had plastic surgery, altered himself somehow. You didn’t tell me he was black.”
Cobb’s face jerked up and he stared at me. “What?”
“I said you didn’t mention he … Oh, crap, let me guess. Kendall Mark was white.”
“As vanilla.” Cobb shook his head in disbelief.
Neither of us spoke for a while. At last I said, “Is there any chance the guy who jumped me wasn’t Kendall Mark? And if he wasn’t who the hell was he?”
“Take me through it.”
It took a while. I went slowly, not wanting to miss any details. Cobb stopped me only a couple of times to ask a question.
When I finished, Cobb said slowly, “So the guy takes you down, is ready to kill you, but backs off when you tell him you know me and that you’re fascinated by the Faith Unruh murder. When he’s finally convinced of that he lets you go.”
I nodded. “That’s about it, yeah.”
“Except that the guy’s black and Kendall Mark is white.”
“Yeah. And let’s not forget he also changed his name.”
Cobb stood up, topped up his coffee, and pointed to my cup. I shook my head and he sat back down.
“As strange as it feels that Kendall Mark, now black, suddenly surfaces after all this time, it feels even weirder to think that the guy you met up with last night could be anybody but him.”
“Maybe it’s like that book we all read in high school, what was it … Black Like Me,” I said. “You know, the one where the guy changes his skin colour to try to know what it’s like to be black.”
Cobb remained silent … thinking. “But why?” he said finally, shaking his head again. “I get going off to try to mount your own investigation. You’re obsessed. You can’t let it go. You want to be left alone so nobody can interfere. I get all that. But why change your appearance so radically? You wouldn’t have to do that.”
“Maybe you would,” I countered. “If you really wanted to disappear, leave your career, your friends, the life you’ve known and, most of all, not be found, what better way?”
“Maybe,” Cobb sounded dubious.
“And what if you thought it possible that you’d already met the killer, maybe even questioned him as part of the initial investigation or one of the follow-ups. You start hanging around the neighbourhood, and if the killer does happen to be one of the locals and sees you, he’s likely to go far away, fast. And the one thing you want, if you really believe that the killer is someday going to return to the place he did his killing, is for him to think he’s okay, that there’s no one around to bother him while he thinks back or relives it or does whatever killers returning to the crime scene do. And if he sees some black dude that’s moved into the neighbourhood, he thinks nothing of it.”
Again Cobb stayed silent. Deep in thought. Finally he nodded. “You know, that could be it. And when you think about it, maybe it’s not that crazy, after all.”
“The guy I saw last night was pretty damn scary, but he was a long way from whacko.”
Cobb took a swallow of coffee and said, “I want to hear it again, including the blue Jetta.”
I started by telling him of my own growing obsession with the case and of my recent visits, both by car and on foot, to the house where Faith Unruh lived and the yard in which she died. I went back though the various times I’d seen the blue Jetta. Then I recounted everything that had happened the night before one more time.
By the time I finished we had both refilled again, actually making progress on the coffee. Cobb said nothing at first, then, “He’s living there. Somewhere close by.”
I nodded. “Down the street a few doors.”
“Okay, we’re going to find him and at the very least warn him about putting a gun to people’s heads. If you hadn’t guessed who he was and mentioned my name for corroboration, you might be dead.”
“Maybe.” I nodded. “I’m not sure he’s interested in seeing the killer go through the justice system.”
“And that’s not good. If he goes rogue vigilante with someone he thinks is the killer and he’s wrong … yeah, we need to talk to Kendall Mark.”
I nodded agreement. “Something else. I don’t think he’s been sitting there watching the area all day every day all these years. He’s got cameras to do at least some of that. I think he’s been investigating, talking to people, trying to find new information. He says he hasn’t found anything new, but I’m not sure he would have shared it with me if he had.”
“Another reason for us to talk to him. But I think we better leave that for now and get back to our own case.”
“Larmer,” I said, sounding like I was reminding myself what case he was talking about.
He glanced at me, then reached into a briefcase he’d brought with him. He pulled out four white, letter-size sheets of paper, and after moving the coffee cups to one side, set them on the table. I noticed that at the top of each sheet was the name of one of the murdered victims.
And below that was a profile of each. Personal information — height, weight, age, education, how long they’d been in the conservative media, and other points Cobb clearly felt were pertinent.
After he had them spread out on the table he looked up at me.
“I think the key to this thing is right here.” He tapped the table. “These killings don’t feel random to me. I think there’s a connection. The killer is somehow connected to each of the victims. Or the victims may be connected to one another. And if they are and we can find that connection, I think we might be able to find the killer, or at the very least prove that Larmer isn’t that guy.”
“Find the why and you’ll often find the who,” I said.
He looked up at me with a half-smile, mouthed the word “motive,” then took a swallow of his coffee and stared at the four pieces of paper.
“Well, there’s the obvious,” I said. “Each was a right-wing media personality.”
He nodded. “True, but I think there’s more than that. If that’s all there was, then it would be random. But I don’t think the killer is content with taking out just anybody who happens to be on the right politically and earns a living by being in the media. I think each of these people were murdered for another reason besides their politics — maybe the same reason in all four killings.”
I looked again at the sheets of paper, then shook my head.
“Well, what are you thinking?” I looked at him. “You put this stuff together; you must have some thoughts about this other motive.”
He studied the pages for a few seconds and nodded. “Yeah, I have. Nothing definitive, more like questions really. Their ages, for example, all in their early to late forties. Maybe not significant, except that it makes them contemporaries.”
“True enough. None real old, none real young. So what does that mean?”
He shook his head. “Maybe something, maybe nothing. The other thing they have in common is right here. I looked over the stuff you dug up on them and it looks like all of them have been part of the political right for a pretty long time. No newbies. So if they’ve all been around for a while and all are in the same age bracket and are pretty well-known within their own circle of conservatism, doesn’t it make sense that they might have known each other?”
I wasn’t so sure. “Maybe. It’s likely they knew of each other, but did they know each other personally? Hard to say.”
“Okay, let’s look at it another way. You’re in the media; you’ve been a journalist for some time. Let’s take some of your colleagues in Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax. How likely is it that you know them?”
“Same answer. It’s possible, maybe even probable, that I’ve heard of them or their work. And I may have met some of them.”
“And if you did meet them, how would that have happened?”
Cobb was nodding, more animated now. “My thoughts exactly. It’s the same with cops. Conferences, workshops on forensics, new technologies, that kind of thing.”
It was my turn to nod. “Yeah, that might make a starting point … see if we can draw some lines that connect these four people.”
Cobb stood up. “Right. If you’re okay to work on that stuff, I’d like you to get started. I have to meet with Larmer. The good news is it’s just him and me. No Shulsky this time.”
“He might be able to help with the question of conferences and other meetings where the four victims could have met.”
Cobb nodded. “Good idea. I’ll throw it at him.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll talk to people I know in the business and see what I can find out. Trouble is, if the conferences were put on by right-wing think tanks or the like, most of my colleagues wouldn’t have been there and probably wouldn’t have even known about them. But that said, it won’t hurt to try. And, of course, there’s my ever-present friend — Google.”
Cobb nodded and stood up.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” I said. “We’ve still got several gallons of coffee to drink.”
“I’ll have to leave you to it. I’m already wired and having to piss every three, four minutes. By the way, the cops have scheduled a media briefing for 10 a.m. Friday morning.”
I didn’t bother to look at my calendar. “I’ll be there,” I said.
I was about to ask what he thought they might want to tell the waiting world, but my cellphone offered the first notes of “Takin’ Care of Business.” I looked at the screen. “Jill,” I said.
“Right, I’m out of here.” Cobb started for the door. “Tell her hi for me.”
I waved and answered the call.