Fit to kill

by James Heneghan

  “Cop Shop” was the daily police information service at police headquarters, held weekday mornings.

  Wexler wiped cream cheese off his chin. “Not a thing. Kind of hard to identify someone who’s missing a head.” He bit into his bagel. His glance fell to Casey’s middle, bulging slightly over the belt of his cords. “Look, you wanna lose some weight, you buy yourself some barbells.” He propped his elbow up on the counter and offered Casey a bicep. “Feel that.”

  Casey looked into Wexler’s eyes to see if he was serious. He was. He prodded the older man’s arm gingerly with a fingertip.

  “Hard, huh? And lookit!” Wexler slapped his stomach. “Steel drum.”

  “I didn’t know you lifted weights.”

  “Four years. Work out three times a week, mornings at six, before breakfast. Try it for three hours a week, Casey, and you’ll look like me.”

  “No comment.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Exercising is hard work, Jack. I’ll have to think about it.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9

  Lunch hour. Hegel’s Bagels.

  Casey toyed with his salad, wishing it was a ham-and-egg bagel.

  Wexler consulted his Cop Shop notes. “Woman’s name was Julie Dagg, white, twenty-five, secretary. Lived at 1976 Haro with roommate Beryl Gibb, who goes by the name of Billie. Julie was on her way home from the West End Fitness Center about half an hour after it closed. That would put the time of the murder around ten thirty. Her naked body was found in the minipark next to Pearl’s Restaurant around midnight by a guy on his way home. He cut through the park and saw a dog eating-”

  “Ugh! Say no more.”

  Wexler put down his sandwich and sipped his coffee.

  “Woman was decapitated. Head missing from the scene. Marks on her wrists from handcuffs. No clothing, no id left at the scene-that’s all I got.”

  “How did they id her if she had no head and no personal papers or clothing?”

  “Fingerprints. Arrested two years ago, impaired driving charge, so they had her on file.”

  “Was she raped?”

  “Probably. Awaiting confirmation.”

  “Pretty creepy, Jack.” Casey wiped his fingers with his napkin.

  “Creepy ain’t the word for it.”

  Vancouver’s West End district was mainly residential. It occupied the center of the downtown peninsula between the office towers on the east and Stanley Park on the west. Shaped roughly like the sole of a foot, the peninsula divided into three parts. The toe was the green Stanley Park forest with its seawall. The instep was the residential West End. And the heel was the downtown business district. The whole peninsula was surrounded by the natural beauty of forest, sea and mountains. In the spring and early summer, when most of the rain had finished and snow covered the mountains, Vancouver shone like a jewel.

  Vancouver was the most beautiful place in the world as far as Matty Kayle was concerned. Not that she’d traveled much-a trip to New York with her parents when she was ten. But, to Matty, Vancouver was fresher, younger than anything she had seen. Green and beautiful and sparkling. It was like the sweet and innocent child she’d never had.

  This afternoon she felt just fine. She had been adjusted. Dr. Malley had twisted her spine, wrenched her neck, leaned on her lumbars, squeezed her cervicals and thumped her thoracics. He had manhandled her in a most agreeable way. And now she was ready for her short walk. She tried to fit one in every day.

  Matty and Albert never walked together.

  Albert was downstairs in his workshop. She could smell the paint. She slipped into her edging-toward-shabby navy winter coat.

  Her resentment of Albert’s authority in the house had grown steadily over the years. The house wasn’t his, it was Matty’s. She was the one who had lived here all her life. She was the one who held happy memories of her parents and their life together. Albert was an intruder. A fraud. He had married Matty for his own cunning purposes. He no longer-now that he ignored and mocked her and felt repugnance toward her-had any moral right to be there. He had forfeited that right when he broke his marriage vow to love and cherish and protect her.

  Love and cherish. Matty’s eyes prickled with tears. She pulled on a red tuque over her gray curls, jerked the front door closed behind her and set off at a good pace to the park.

  But the wind was cold. So after only half an hour she turned for home, walking briskly back the way she had come. The wind now blustering at her back.

  Casey, home from a sour City Hall council meeting, needed a beer. He grabbed a lager from his fridge.

  You’re too young for a coronary.

  It would do no harm to look in on the fitness center. Just a look, see what the place was like. It wasn’t as though he was ready to make a commitment of any kind.

  He changed into shorts, T-shirt, his old tracksuit and a ragged pair of runners.

  The gym wasn’t crowded. The only person he recognized was Albert Kayle, his neighbor from across the street, working hard on a rowing machine.

  He started working out cautiously. No sense in overdoing things the first time.

  A man strolled over and introduced himself as Gordon Pope. Mostly bald, with wisps of hair around his ears, Pope wore blue nylon shorts and a loose net shirt that left his narrow waist, muscular shoulders and much of his well-developed pectoral area exposed.

  The glasses he wore magnified his watery eyes, giving him an owlish, scary appearance at odds with the friendly smile. “They call me the Pope,” he explained in a high voice. “I’m the general busybody around here.”

  Casey shook his hand. “Casey,” he said.

  With his bald head, Pope looked about sixty but could have been older. He moved like a much younger man.

  “Here, Casey,” said Pope, “I want you to meet Sam Jackson. Sam’s just back from the Yucatan. Got a girlfriend down there. Sam, this is Casey.”

  Sam, a trim, gray man in an armless and ragged white T-shirt, looked like he could be anything between fifty and eighty. He crushed Casey’s hand in a killer grip. “You Irish?”

  “From Belfast, fifteen years ago,” Casey admitted, nursing his fingers behind his back.

  Another man joined them. Deeply tanned, medium height, middle-aged, his muscled chest bursting out of a similar ragged sleeveless T-shirt.

  Pope said, “This is Doc. Doc, meet Casey, striving for perfection like all of us.”

  The two men shook hands. “Hi, Casey,”

  Doc said in a gruff voice. “It’s Stanley Blunt, but everyone calls me Doc.”

  “Doc, why don’t you tell Casey the story you just told us about the finger,” said Pope.

  In the breezy manner of a stand-up comedian, Doc said to Casey, “Patient comes to see me this morning, wants his finger off-middle finger, left hand. I say no way. A finger’s a finger, once gone you never get it back. But the problem with this finger is it’s got no feeling, nerves all gone from an old injury.”

  Pope explained to Casey, “Doc’s a surgeon.”

  Stanley Blunt ignored the interruption. “You won’t take it off, Doc? this guy says to me. No, I won’t take it off, I tell him. Let me explain why I won’t take it off. No, says this guy, let me explain to you why I want it off. I’m leaving for South America a month from now in a sailboat, right? I’ll be away a year. Sailing can be rough, and I don’t want to take this finger with me. Why not? Injury, that’s why not. Or infection. Where there’s no feeling, there’s more chance of injury. I could get it cut or crushed real bad, and then what? I’m a thousand miles from the nearest hospital. I’m bleeding to death, and I don’t know it. You see what I mean, Doc? The thing’s a fuckin’ liability. I want it off. So I say to him, Okay. You convinced me. I’ll take it off.”

  “So you cut off the guy’s finger,” Pope finished for him.

  Doc nodded. “I cut off the guy’s finger.”

  “Yeee!” said Sam, shaking his head.

  “Watch your
fingers around here,” Pope advised Casey with a mirthless laugh.

  The group dispersed. Albert Kayle, finished with the rowing machine, came over. “Say, Casey! Haven’t seen you in here before.”

  “I’m only looking, Albert. Doctor thinks I should lose a few pounds.”

  “Well, you came to the right place.”

  A man of shorter-than-average height, with dark hair and eyes, Albert spoke softly, with a slight English accent.

  They exchanged a few more words, and then Albert drifted off to a cardio machine.

  People on cardio machines made Casey think of gerbils. Still, he stepped up onto a StairMaster, looking about the room as he worked. Busy place. Men and women. All ages. All shapes. Spare tires on a couple of the men made him feel better. A pretty woman dressed in black tights, black top and what looked to Casey like tiny shamrock earrings was stretching on a mat.

  “If you drop in at the same time of day, you meet the same crowd, more or less.” It was Pope again, standing close to Casey, watching the pretty woman. “Get to know people. Makes working out less of a chore.”

  “Hmm,” said Casey.

  “The road to physical perfection is an arduous one,” said Pope, still watching the woman. “Right,” said Casey.

  The woman stood and stretched her arms above her head.

  Pope shifted his attention away from the woman and looked up at Casey on the StairMaster. “Most folks work out for an hour, then sauna and shower.” He raised himself up and down on his toes. “Ain’t this Vancouver rain really something? I lived in Toronto most of my life.”

  “Hmm.” Casey found it hard to work and hold a conversation at the same time.

  “Bus driver,” said Pope. “Forty years. Retired and came out here to the wet coast.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Straight to the West End. Lived here ever since.”

  Casey’s machine put him a foot or so higher than Pope’s head. He looked down at the older man’s shoulders with their slabs of muscle moving under freckled skin.

  “You didn’t get those muscles driving a bus in Toronto.”

  Pope laughed. “I like to keep fit. What do you work at, Casey?”

  “Journalist, West End Clarion.”

  “You’re not Sebastian Casey!”

  “I am.”

  “Hey, I read your stuff all the time. You’re a funny man.”

  “Yeah?” Casey’s legs were tiring.

  “You got anything new on this lunatic who murdered that woman?”

  “Nope.”

  The pretty woman with the shamrock earrings walked by. Pope introduced them.

  “Casey, this is Emma Shaughnessy. Emma, meet Sebastian Casey, ace reporter with the Clarion.”

  “Hey, Sebastian.”

  “Call me Casey,” he said, conscious of two things, her Irish accent and his own ugly body.

  Emma Shaughnessy’s smile was warm and friendly. Her soft, dark brown hair was tied back with a black ribbon. Freckles crossed the bridge of her nose like a sprinkling of sand, and she had the pale blue eyes of her Norman-Irish ancestors.

  “Your first time here, Casey?” she asked.

  He had only come to the gym on a scouting expedition, to take a look, to get a sense of the place. But he now heard himself saying, “Just started,” as though he’d committed himself to working out in the gym for the rest of his life.

  “Emma’s a schoolteacher here in the West End,” said Pope, his magnified eyes on Emma’s chest.

  “Yeah?” said Casey. Emma Shaughnessy’s smile had caused his brain to slip into neutral. He knew he sounded like a tongue-tied fool, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  Emma jerked her chin toward Pope and said, “The Pope knows everyone’s business.”

  “I take an interest in people, you might say,” said Pope. “Casey is here because he yearns for magnificence, like all of us. Ain’t that right, Casey?”

  He knew he should be joining in with something light and humorous, but his gears had jammed. He felt fat and clumsy in front of this woman, who, as far as he could see, had already achieved perfection.

  “Keep up the good work.” Pope wandered off.

  Casey looked into Emma Shaughnessy’s blue eyes and said the only thing he could think of. “You come here often?”

  She laughed. “Three times a week.”

  “Three,” he repeated stupidly.

  She laughed again. “Usually.”

  Her eyes unmade him. She was a witch.

  She was laughing at him. He tried to think of something intelligent to say. “I don’t like these things much.” He nodded down at his StairMaster. Brilliant! he told himself.

  “Me neither. I run the seawall and the park trails instead.”

  “Seawall.” He tried to think of something interesting to say. “Park trails,” he said. If he had a gun, he would shoot himself. “The great outdoors,” he continued, hoping his brain would kick in soon or this woman would never speak to him again. An echo of this thought in the deeper recesses of his paralyzed mind made him realize that he very much wanted her to speak to him again.

  “When I use a machine,” she said, “it’s exercise. But for me, running is recreation.”

  “Is that right, now?” He sounded in his own ears like an Irish country bumpkin.

  “Feels more natural. Trees and animals instead of mirrored walls. Smell of alder, cedar and fir instead of stale sweat. Fresh air and silence. No pounding music.”

  “Music?”

  She jerked her small pointed chin at the speakers over their heads.

  “Ah!” he said. She wore no lipstick. Lips naturally pale pink. Her mouth slightly open. Tips of two very white teeth.

  “I run most mornings. Early.”

  “Maybe I’ll try it myself sometime. Get rid of some of this.” He patted his sucked-in belly.

  “I hear Belfast in your voice, am I right?”

  He nodded. “And I hear Derry in yours.”

  “Right. I came to Vancouver-”

  “Hey, Emma, could you spot me?”

  Emma turned her head in the direction of the voice. “Sure, Kevin.”

  Casey tore his eyes from Emma Shaughnessy’s face. A muscle-bound Adonis was taking her away to the free-weights area, where he had the bench press set up with weights the size of truck tires.

  “Talk to you again, Casey,” said Emma with a smile.

  Casey watched her stand behind Kevin’s bench, hands poised to assist. The horizontal Adonis, his face upturned in a grimace of pain, pushed and grunted underneath her.

  Casey felt he had done enough for a first visit. He escaped to the locker room, pulled on his sweats and headed for home.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13

  Percy Simmons, editor of the West End Clarion, was a small untidy man in late middle age. Prominent blue eyes and thick white hair contrasted with bushy dark eyebrows. His outdated clothes always appeared to need pressing. Today he was wearing flared polyester trousers, a lemon shirt with long pointed collar wings and a striped tie, discolored by an overuse of cleaning fluid. A faded brown Value Village jacket hung over the back of his chair. His way of talking made Casey feel like he was in the newsroom of the New York Times. But Percy was a good editor. Casey liked and respected him.

  Percy called Casey and Debbie Ozeroff into his office. Jack Wexler was already there. Percy massaged his thick, dark eyebrows. “It’s this murder. Everyone’s crazy with fear. Take a look at this.” He pointed to a letter on his desk.

  They read it.

  An open letter to the police. Maggoty: I am the Angel of Death. I write from the abyss. You will never discover who I am. The gutters of Vancouver will run with the blood of harlots before I am done. When she carried on her harlotry so openly and flaunted her nakedness, I turned in disgust from her. Ezekiel 23:18. And I will direct mine indignation and I will deal with her in fury. Yea, I shall cut off her very head. Thus I will put an end to her lewdness and harlotry and lea
ve her naked and bare and the nakedness of her harlotry shall be uncovered. Ezekiel 23:25.

  “Who’s Maggoty?” asked Casey.

  “MacAtee, the detective in charge of the investigation,” said Wexler.

  “And they think this is from the killer?” asked Ozeroff.

  Debbie Ozeroff was a slim, attractive woman in her fifties. Dark hair cut short in the latest blond-streaked fashion. She possessed a warm, if sometimes excitable, personality. Openly gay, she lived in the West End with her partner, Vera Taniguchi, an alternative medicine practitioner.

  Wexler said, “Looks like it. All the Lower Mainland news media were sent copies.”

  “A religious maniac,” said Ozeroff angrily, perching herself on the corner of the editor’s desk where she could talk down to him. “I was thinking, Perce, I’d like to do a piece on serial killers. You know, Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway-creeps like that who go after women. I’d do it as a-”

  “I think not, Deb,” said Percy with a sigh. “This’d be the absolutely wrong time to-” His prominent blue eyes widened. “What? You wanna scare everyone to death? You can’t call one murder the work of a serial killer. Be reasonable.”

  “Look at the letter,” said Ozeroff. “This is just his first.”

  “Cool it, Deb,” moaned Percy. “What I’m thinking is, wouldn’t it be something if we scooped the Province? Huh? You know what I’m sayin’? I’m sayin’ keep your eyes and ears open. That’s all. Ask questions. Somebody might’ve seen something. You might pick up a hot tip.”

  Ozeroff pursued her subject doggedly. “Research shows that sixty percent of all serial killers select a game preserve-that’s what they call it. They stake out an area and hunt only in that area. Like Gary Ridgway, the Green River psycho. He killed between fifty to seventy women in the Seattle-Tacoma area. Well, that’s exactly the same as our killer here in the West End, and I think-”

  “Exactly the same?” said Percy, eyes popping. “Fifty to seventy bodies? Come off it, Deb! All I’m asking is to keep a lookout, okay?”

  “You know,” Ozeroff persisted, “almost seventy-five percent of the serial killings in the whole world were committed in the United States.”