Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

  He shrugged. “I’m also a theoretical mathematician affiliated with Oxford, knee deep in honors. People have written their dissertations about me. I’ll win the Nobel if I live long enough.”

  “Ah,” I said. “A flake.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I do see the problem. None of the things about me that are impressive will impress a policeman. I’m sure you’ll come up with a brilliant solution.” He stood up. “I have got to go, now. It’s getting on turnip.”

  “Some coffee for the road?”

  He shuddered. “Thank you, no. Not my drug.”

  “What is?”

  He smiled that weird wonderful Crazy Baby smile of his. “Nitrogen and oxygen, mostly. It’s a great high.”

  “Withdrawal is a bitch, though.”

  His expression sobered and he nodded. “That it is. That it is.” He stood up. “Good night, Russell. Thank you for helping.”

  “I haven’t yet. I’m not convinced I can.”

  “Thanks for agreeing to try, then. We can do this, you know.”

  Uh huh. “Well…I know we have to try.”

  “Yes. We do.” He turned and began to leave. But he stopped in the doorway, and turned, and after a pause he said, so softly his voice sounded almost normal, “She really was special.”

  I swallowed, hard. It stung just like a hard slap, made my eyes water and everything. But only like a slap. Not like a punch to the heart. “Yes, she was. Why she chose me I’ll never understand.”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  He turned to go again, and this time I stopped him. “Zandor?”

  “Yes?”

  I felt stupid, but I went ahead anyway. Basically the story of my life. “You really think I would have done the Bunny?”

  “I know so,” he said.

  That wasn’t the way I remembered it. But I had a sneaking feeling that he was right, that the way I remembered it was bullshit. “Huh. God, I haven’t thought of her in years. I wonder what the story was with her.”

  “Oh, I can tell you that.”

  “No shit!”

  “I was out for a walk early one Sunday morning, and she drove past me on her way back to the school of nursing. All she could think about was why she was doing…what she’d just been doing.”

  “Right,” I said. “I remember now. The year after that Bill Doane dated a nurse, and he mentioned seeing a picture of the Bunny in their yearbook from the year before.” I frowned. “It never seemed to make sense. I mean, you’d think a nurse of all people would be more likely to appreciate things like hygiene, genetics—”

  “She didn’t want to be a nurse,” Zudie said.

  “No? What did she want to be?”

  “A housewife.”

  I grinned. “No, really.”

  “A farm housewife. She was daffy in love with her high school sweetheart, who was two thousand miles away at agricultural college studying to become a scientific farmer, and all she wanted to do in the world was marry him and populate his farm with fat kids. Unfortunately, he had failed to knock her up by the end of the summer, and so her parents had forced her to go off to nursing school at the other end of the country. The first week there she suddenly thought, what if I were pregnant, and just found out now? Why, her parents would have to let her drop out of nursing school and let her boyfriend make an honest woman out of her, that’s what. All she needed to do was become pregnant—”

  “Oh my God—” I began to giggle.

  “—So quickly that all concerned would readily accept her boyfriend as the father. Since there was no telling why they had failed to conceive so far—it certainly had not been from lack of trying—she had to assume at least part of the problem might lie with her. So she felt it would be good to attack the problem with maximum force, take every step she could to maximize the chances of conception…”

  I was laughing now.

  “She was prudent enough to choose a college bar, rather than some bucket of blood downtown, where the men might have been more virile but definitely would have been more volatile. And a Catholic college at that.”

  “I will be God damned.” I had control of the laughter now, but I couldn’t stop grinning. “And it worked. Right? That’s why she disappeared?”

  He nodded. “Tested positive, and she was literally on the next train smoking.”

  “Jesus.” My smile went away. “Jesus. So…if I’d—”

  “Yes. If you had made up your mind to go down and see her a week earlier than you did, you would have been one of the candidates for father of her baby.”

  “Wow.” The thought of a second human being wandering the planet burdened with my genetic shortcomings was weird. On the other hand, it would be nice to have a child somewhere who didn’t hate me yet.

  “There’s time to fix that, you know,” he said.

  “Good night, Zandor.” Enough is enough, for one night.

  “Yes, it is. Good night, Russell. Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being who you are.”

  I thought of several flip responses. Instead I said, “You’re welcome. It has not come without effort.”

  He nodded. “I know.” He turned and left.

  I watched the office door shut behind him. I sat there staring at my computer desktop for a minute or two, trying without success to take a comprehensive survey of my mental and emotional state. The only thing I was reasonably sure of was that I was alive. And had not been, for some indeterminate time.

  Finally I said aloud, “Now, that was passing strange.” I put the computer to sleep, shut off the light, and went into the house, and along the way I noticed that I was not exhausted. I was tired, very tired, I could tell I would be asleep within minutes of lying down in bed. But I was not exhausted. I realized I had been, for some indeterminate time. And was not any more.

  Tentatively I thought of Susan…and allowed myself to feel about her, as well. The familiar wave of sadness and yearning crashed over me, so intense I caught my breath and broke step. But when it had passed, I was still standing. And the yearning had receded, was now like the wave receding back into the sea, a tugging at the legs that was powerful and insistent, but endurable.

  I went to bed and as I had expected I slept at once.

  4.

  You might expect that I’d have awoken the next morning with a feeling of unreality, more than half wondering whether the whole Zudie episode had been a sustained hallucination. I didn’t. The moment I opened my eyes, I remembered everything that had happened, and didn’t doubt a second of it.

  But I didn’t think about it right away. I was distracted by how it felt to wake up. It had been a long time since I’d woken up. I’d just been regaining consciousness. This was much better. I was surprised when I got my glasses on to see by the clock on the VCR that it was 1:00 P.M.—that I had, for the first time in months, slept for eight solid continuous uninterrupted hours. The sleep had not been dreamless, but I didn’t recall any of the dreams, retaining only a general impression that none of them had been distressing. I felt good. Rested.

  Hungry.

  I had not awoken hungry in at least twenty years.

  An omelette and two cups of coffee later, I was sitting on the sun porch between the house and the office, enjoying the sunshine and the clean foresty-smelling breeze and the distant sounds of less fortunate souls laboring with things like chainsaws and mowers. And trying to think of some viable alternative to simply walking into a police station and asking to speak to a detective about some murders. When I came up empty, I tried to think of anything I could bring with me to the police station that would make my story even slightly more plausible. After a while I went into the office, fired up Netscape and sent Zudie an e-mail:

  Zandor,

  1. Did you get the sense that Allen has used that particular site before?

  2. Could there be physical evidence there of previous kills?

  3. Do you think you could spot the site from the highway?
>
  —Russell

  He responded so promptly I knew he’d been waiting to hear from me.

  Slim,

  1. yes

  2. perhaps

  3. maybe—in theory. But only if there were some way to get me there without covering the intervening distance. I couldn’t endure the journey. Racing past that many minds in quick succession…no. Sorry.

  Zudie

  I thought of suggesting we go in the middle of the night, when traffic up the coast was negligible. But how would he be able to see anything in the dark? There was no point in even asking if he’d be willing to wander around the Point Grey section of Vancouver at random, trying to spot a member of the target family from Allen’s mental picture of them. Ah, but maybe—

  Zudie,

  suppose I could get you in touch with a police sketch artist. Need not be in corpus; phone should do. Could you produce a sketch of any of the four victims? Did he picture them clearly enough?

  —Slim

  His answer was again immediate:

  Yes. I think I could do that. All four. Good one, Slim.

  That was something to go on, at least. Not much, but measurably more than nothing at all.

  So now the question was, which police station? And now that sense of unreality I’d expected to wake up with finally began to kick in.

  I did know that the question was not a simple one. Law enforcement in the Lower Mainland of B.C. is so complex a patchwork of jurisdictions that it may be the best possible commentary on how insignificant crime in Canada is: the cops can afford to run a Chinese firedrill 24/7. But I thought it was something I could at least make a start on by phone. Two hours after I began, I knew better.

  The city of Vancouver itself, or Greater Vancouver as it wishes people would call it, has its own police force—though it’s not as big as those of some of its suburbs like Surrey and Burnaby. But the whole Lower Mainland, which encompasses all three, is also the jurisdiction of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—the Mounties, or federal cops—and just where and how RCMP interfaced with VPD was a mystery to me. In the land of my birth, it was the FBI that took the biggest interest in serial killers, but whether or not the analogy held in Canada I did not know.

  I was also pretty sure that the scattered geography of the crime itself was going to complicate the assigning of jurisdiction. According to Zudie, the victims all lived in Point Grey, one of the better districts of Vancouver. But the crime was going to take place at some indeterminate point along the Sea to Sky Highway—which is over two hundred miles long (310 kilometers, to a Canadian. Or indeed, to anyone on planet Earth but an American). I did not know whether any one police agency took responsibility for the entire highway, and some of the towns along its length, such as the famous ski town Whistler, might easily have their own local heat as well.

  All this seemed to suggest that the RCMP might be the logical choice, since its mandate was unbounded. But I didn’t want it to be the RCMP. If it was, I was going to have to make my report to Corporal McKenzie, Heron Island’s sole peace officer. In the first place the most shocking crime he had dealt with in his entire tenure was the theft of a barbeque, and in the second place he was famously the clumsiest human alive, so uncoordinated that two or three times a year he knocked himself unconscious by slamming his own car door on his head. That was why he was finishing out his service on Heron Island. If he sent a file as flakey as this one over to the mainland it would be shitcanned for sure. But if I went to any other RCMP office, I would be insulting the poor old man.

  On the other hand, there was certainly little point in driving all the way into town, walking into a police station, and then being told it was an RCMP matter.

  Which police station, for that matter? I vaguely remembered hearing that there were half a dozen or more “community police stations” scattered around Vancouver, but I had no idea what that meant: whether they were real police stations like the precincts I remembered from New York, or just places for kids to meet Officer Friendly.

  I decided that I wanted if possible to get this right on the first try. It was going to be hard enough to tell this story once. So I tried to get an answer by phone.

  To avoid committing myself for as long as possible, I decided to present my question as a hypothetical one that I was asking as part of a column I was writing for The Globe and Mail. Suppose a person on one of the islands has knowledge that a man of unknown residence plans to kidnap someone in Vancouver and murder him somewhere along a 300-klick highway: how would such a tangled jurisdictional problem as this be worked out in real life? If this person were to call 911, what would he be told to do?

  Two hours later, I was fairly confident that I had set a new world’s record for pointlessly climbed telephone trees, and spoken to several of the most surly incompetent intransigent obfuscatory uncivil-unservice toads in the Lower Mainland, but those were my only accomplishments. The official media spokesperson for the police department, my first choice, was away from her desk, at two in the afternoon, and her answering robot suggested only that I try calling back during business hours. I wondered what those might be. The main administrative switchboard operator, a woman with an unmistakable honk of a voice, divided her time between giving me numbers to try that did not work, and stoutly denying that she had ever given me any such numbers. The police non-emergency operator maintained that a) only the 911 operator could answer my question, and b) I would be committing a serious criminal offense if I were to call 911 and ask it. And the community relations number I tried in desperation produced a phone machine that required me to select one of nine options, none of which applied to my situation, and declined to take a message; I wasted some time confirming to myself that the three options that came closest to matching my problem all led to other phone machines that went nowhere. For a list of ways in which technology has failed to improve life, please press one, or stay on the line for other options. Please do not hang up: your humiliation is very amusing to us.

  I managed to stop short of throwing the phone to the floor and dancing on it. I put it very gently down on its mothership, and breathed deeply until the impulse to bang my head against the wall had receded. Then I got dressed and fired up the Accord and drove down to Bug Cove and got on the ferry lineup. In half an hour the ferry arrived, and when it had finished disgorging about a hundred pedestrians and fifty or sixty vehicles, and a few dozen foot passengers had boarded, our lineup of cars rolled slowly down the hill and onto the ferry with the bored competence of something most of us had done hundreds of times. As usual there turned out to be just enough cars to fill the boat, because all us islanders knew the point at which, if you had to line up behind that, you weren’t going to get aboard for that sailing—and if some ignorant tourists got in line behind that point, someone was usually compassionate enough to tell them they were wasting their time. Unless they were loud or in some other way obnoxious.

  Most Heron Islanders make a great point of being jaded with the ferry ride. They sit in their cars and read the paper. I’ve never been able to get over it. I always get out and gawk along with the tourists. It’s one of the few times you’ll ever encounter tourists who aren’t making a sound—even the kids. That half hour ride is simply the most beautiful journey I know. Dead ahead: the lower mainland of British Columbia, a gorgeous mountainous coast covered with a thousand shades of green and capped with snow even in July. Look left, and you’re looking up the passage to Alaska, at a succession of islands and mountains that recede infinitely like a grey-scale poem. Look right, and there’s open sea, gleaming in the sun: the mouth of mighty Vancouver Harbour can be glimpsed further down the coast, and just visible on the far southern horizon is some part of the state of Washington. Turn and look behind you, and there’s Heron Island rising from the water in your wake, bursting with green growing things and happy people—and beyond it, vast Vancouver Island, which is to Heron as a whale is to a goldfish, and beyond that…well, Vladivostok, I guess. Pleasure craft are visible in a
ll directions, but not in great numbers. The sky seems huge, a cloud painter’s largest canvas. There are almost always small planes in the air, but rarely more than one or two.

  I can see I haven’t conveyed it, merely inventoried the furniture. I don’t know if the words I need exist, and if they do I don’t know them. Just let it stand that to ride a ferry to any of the Howe Sound islands is to take a magical mystery tour through a place of timeless beauty so large that no lens will ever capture it, and so poignant that no heart will ever forget it.

  Half an hour after we pulled out of Bug Cove I drove off the ferry into Horseshoe Bay—strictly a terminal town—and half an hour after that I was in downtown Vancouver, hoping for a parking space where the cars on either end of me would be more expensive than mine. I did not expect this to be a major challenge. My Accord was an ’89—so old that the last time I’d needed to replace a headlight, it had proved impossible to fasten it in place in the normal fashion, because the retaining frame was too corroded to hold a screw anymore. I’d ended up using Krazy Glue.

  In my ignorance and pitiful naivete, I had presumed that because both the Vancouver Police Department’s website and the municipal listings in the phone book gave the address of police headquarters as 2120 Cambie Street, I would find police headquarters at that address. Silly me.

  I pictured a vast brick and stone mausoleum with big white globe lights on either side of the doors; inside would be dozens of uniformed cops, benches of despairing perps, walls festooned with wanted posters, and a big U-shaped counter behind which a fat, cynical, old desk sergeant would hold court. He would be full of skeptical, probing questions, but if I gave him the right answers and persuaded him I was a serious man and not a whack job, he would pass me on to a detective. And then the hard part would begin.

  Just finding the fucking address proved to be a nontrivial problem. I won’t bore you with the details that would be necessary to make sense of this, but just take my word for it that although the address was nominally on Cambie Street, it was actually located underneath and beside the very heavily traveled Cambie Street Bridge, at a place where, perhaps God knows why, 2nd and 5th Avenues intersect. It can only be approached from one of the four points of the compass, and then only if you ignore what the map says. About the third time you drive helplessly past it, cursing and beating the steering wheel, you catch the trick.