by Paul Cleave
“A few years before his wife died,” he says. “He didn’t want to retire, but he got sick. Used to smoke, you know. It’s what ruined his lungs. He gave up smoking around the same time he gave up work. Back then the doctors told him he had about two years to live, only it was his wife that died first. Five years ago they told him he’d be dead within six months. Since then they’ve been telling him three or four times a year that he’s only got two months to live, and they’ll keep telling him too for another few years yet. .”
He realizes his mistake and stops mid-sentence. He raises a hand up to his face and wipes at a couple of tears starting to flow, his hands shaking enough to be a danger to his eyes.
“You’re going to get the guy who did this, right?”
“Right.”
“What will happen to him?”
“He’ll go to jail.”
He slowly nods, but I can see he’s desperate to ask for more. “In the war, we had a way of dealing with things ourselves,” he says. “There was one guy, we don’t talk about it because. .” he says, then remembers there’s a reason nobody talks about it. “It wasn’t good for him,” he says. “I wish-Christ, I wish I could have five minutes alone with the man who did this to Herb.”
Five minutes alone with Herb’s killer isn’t going to be a fun five minutes for Bernard Walsh. Forty years ago it might have been, but not now.
“You saw what was written on his forehead?” I ask.
He nods.
“You make anything of it?”
“Herb was a caring person,” he says. “Doesn’t make sense.”
Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, but I don’t go down that path with him. I thank him for his time, and he wanders off and joins an expanding group of elderly people who are all absorbing the bad news, people who are used to seeing their friends driven out of here in a horizontal position. Tomorrow some of them won’t even remember this happened-maybe Alzheimer’s isn’t a disease, but the body’s natural coping mechanism. Witness statements will be full of descriptions of long-dead husbands and wives they haven’t seen in twenty years.
Schroder has a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand and is looking steadier as he talks to the other man who was on the porch when we arrived. The man is using his hands a lot as he talks, as if drawing pictures in the air, and Schroder has to keep moving his coffee so it doesn’t get knocked. I walk over, interested in the conversation, when Schroder’s cell phone starts to ring.
Schroder nods as he listens, and when he hangs up he’s looking pale.
The man he was talking to has wandered to the edge of the porch to chat to a younger woman, perhaps his assistant. I get the bad feeling Schroder has just been fired.
“I can drive you home,” I tell Schroder. “Forensics can still do their job, and the officers can take statements.”
“What? Oh, it’s not that.”
“No?”
He reaches down and picks up his shoes. “We’ve got another body,” he tells me, and two minutes later we’re back on the road.
CHAPTER FIVE
Caleb Cole isn’t thinking straight-either that, or he’s thinking clearer than he has in a long time. The thing he is certain of is the part of his mind that should be making this distinction died a long time ago, died around the time the rest of him started to decay. He’s been a dead man for so long he no longer knows exactly what he is. He knows what he wants-what he wants is the only thing keeping him alive. Dead. Alive. His mind would make that distinction too if he had much of a mind left.
He’s tired and covered in blood and he misses his family. It’s wrong a dead man should feel so tired. He wants all of this to be over and he hasn’t even begun. He has a long night ahead of him, and he has slowed over the years, any youth in him beaten away, stripped down and stomped on, his joints twisted, bones broken, teeth knocked out, every form of punishment rained down on him. He endured it because there was no alternative; he died and kept on enduring, the man he was back then long gone, and the new man he has become-well, sometimes he doesn’t even know if he’s still human. In the beginning that thought used to haunt him. Not anymore. When he thinks about the reasons he’s still alive, he doubts there is any humanity left in him. There couldn’t be. The things he’s done, the things he’s been through, the things he’s going to start doing-no, there’s no humanity left.
The apartment is small and all he can afford. It smells like rubber from the tire factory a few blocks away where he’s worked for the last six weeks, saving up his money so he could buy his car, his phone, using the time to do his homework and rebuild his strength. The phone he bought a week ago. The car he has owned for two days. It was the last thing he needed to get the ball rolling.
Sometimes he’d come home at night and crouch over the toilet, shuddering as he threw up into it, the smell of rubber cooked into his skin. The apartment is on a bendy road made narrow by cars parked along the sides of it, but the narrowness saves the apartment from collapsing-all it would take is one large truck to drive past and his home would be rattled from its foundations. He lives on the second storey, the complex an old state house converted into apartments, each of them small, the walls so thin you can hear your neighbor taking a leak. It’s still a castle compared to his last home, and listening to somebody take a leak is sure a hell of a lot better than having to watch. Compared to prison, where he’s been for fifteen years, this place is like a dream.
The bed shares the same room with the kitchen and the living room. The only separate room is the bathroom, which is off to the side. He has a window, the view is of a common backyard between several flats, all of it is littered with junked-out automobile parts.
He steps into the shower and washes the old man’s blood away. It’s the second time he’s had to do this. The last shower he took was at the first old man’s home, he had to clean up before driving to the second. He couldn’t exactly show up on Albert’s doorstep covered in blood and holding a six-pack of beer. He even wore one of the old man’s shirts afterward. From the second house he’s come straight home, covered in blood again but it’s too dark for anybody to notice. He soaps up, the blood is in his hair, he shampoos it out, the lather turning red.
Fifteen years ago becoming a killer felt good. Tonight he felt nothing. There was the excitement and the nerves driving there, but then-nothing. For years he’s been dreaming about these moments, thinking all that blood would help bring back some of what he’s lost, but it turns out he was wrong. He stood in that first old man’s house and felt dead inside, even after the blade had done its work. The second house was the same. This wasn’t about revenge, it wasn’t about emotion, it was about punishment.
Yet he’d done so much cutting. In those moments he had lost himself, the rage and pain of fifteen years had emerged, taking control of him, and he can remember the first stab but not the others. It wasn’t until he found himself staring down at the bodies, blood dripping from his face, that he tried to recall, just how long had he been there? How many times had his arm swung up and down? The dead man in front of him told him it was a lot. He thought then the humanity would arrive, that it would be late to the party and it would come along and cripple him. It stayed away. It didn’t even knock on the door.
These people all must pay for their mistakes, just as he has paid for his. The two tonight, it took some memory jogging on their parts to remember him. The others will remember better. The others are all younger. The police, of course, will make the connection. But he’s chosen the order carefully, and by the time they make it the night will be over and it will be too late.
He steps out of the shower. The bathroom mirror is fogged over, and that’s fine-he doesn’t want to see himself. His reflection is too painful to look at. He dries himself down and heads into the bedroom and gets dressed. Then he plays with his cell phone. He uses it to open a news website, and so far there is no mention of the two dead men.
The phone switches off to a lock screen, and he has to sl
ide his finger across it to bring it back to life. He’d never held a phone like this before. Years ago they were much bigger, a lot heavier, and if you didn’t look at the screen from the right angle you couldn’t see a damn thing. Now they’re as thin as his finger and about the same weight, and you can do anything with them. The human race seems to be only a few years away from living like Captain Kirk.
It’s creeping up toward quarter to ten. He grabs his keys, his jacket, his knife, and the flowers he bought earlier. He pauses in the doorway and glances at the apartment for only a few seconds. It’s the last time he will ever see it. It was never a home. He won’t miss it.
The City of Christchurch even at night looks the same after all these years, but it feels different. He read the news when he could-he knew the crime rate was escalating-but now he can feel it. The people in this city have changed. There are more people with shaved heads and tattoos, and people spit as they walk and bump into other and start arguments. Many drive fast cars with loud engines. It’s been a long time, but back when he was a member of this world the cars were different but the status they stood for was the same, all men with big egos and small dicks, and he suspects it’s the same now. The teenagers are the worst. Fifteen years ago you had guys driving up and down the two main streets in town, big cars that looked one step removed from a junkyard. Now the cars are louder, the colors even louder still, boys cruising all the streets of the city with fluffy dice in their windows and neon lights along the edges of the bodywork, and he doesn’t get it, he just doesn’t get it. It feels like he’s living in some kind of cartoon world with brighter colors where teenagers with shiny cars have gone completely mad.
The people he passes on the street act as if he doesn’t exist. His car is parked half a block away. It’s over a quarter of a century old and the only thing he knows about this car is that there’s something under the hood that coughs and splutters every few minutes but still manages to get him around town. The guy he bought the car from had stripped the stereo out and replaced it with a piece of plywood that he’d painted black. He drives from the bad part of town to a slightly less bad part of town, networking his way through the suburbs.
It takes twenty minutes to get to her house. Driving a car was just like riding a bike-everything came back the moment he got behind the wheel. His license expired years ago but that’s only an issue if he gets pulled over. Drivers are worse these days, no doubt about it, and there must be twice as many of them on the roads. Nobody knows how to use a traffic circle. Nobody seems to remember what a signal light is for.
He doesn’t much like her neighborhood. Back when he used to have a family he lived in a pretty good place, friendly neighbors, nice homes. His own house had four bedrooms and two storeys and room for a pool in the backyard if they wanted one. The house he’s looking at now looks like it probably has a pool forming on the floor of the living room. The roof has a couple of missing tiles and a tarpaulin is covering part of it. Maybe, just maybe, prison might have been better than this house. He parks down the road beneath a streetlight that doesn’t work. He puts his hand on the door but doesn’t pull the handle. Instead he sits in the car and stares at the house. He’s nervous. For a dead man, that’s quite an accomplishment. He isn’t real sure what his opening line is going to be to the woman inside.
Maybe he should bring her beer. It’s still in the back of the car.
He’s still debating how to deal with her when a taxi pulls up outside the house and gives two quick taps of the horn. After a moment Ariel Chancellor steps from the house, glancing at her watch as she walks quickly to the taxi, a dress so short he looks away as she climbs in. She shuts the door and talks to the taxi driver. They talk for about a minute before they pull away from the curb, and he guesses they are negotiating the fare.
Damn it, he’s missed his chance. He should have come last night, or any other night since being out of jail.
He starts the car up and begins to follow the taxi.
CHAPTER SIX
Schroder has the passenger window down, and is scraping the mud off his shoes with a penknife and flicking it outside. The rain doesn’t seem to be coming back. Traffic is backed up about a thousand feet before the scene. Media vans are cutting each other off to be the first ones to send out pictures. I don’t have authority because I’m not in a police car, so can’t flash any sirens or honk for people to get out of the way. Both of us continually swear as we inch forward. The inside of the car is cold and the seats feel damp and the backs of my legs are itchy. A passenger plane is soaring off into the distance overhead, the people onboard all with somewhere better to be. We arrive at a cordon manned by four police officers. Schroder shows them his badge and they let us through.
It’s quarter past ten and life feels like it’s rewound a few hours; similar buildings, similar groups of people standing around watching, similar dead guy to have died a similar death. The only differences are the names of the people and the place and the absence of police detectives running off to take a leak. The dead man’s double is Albert McFarlane. The role of Bernie is being played by a similar looking man in a similar suit, only this one doesn’t have badges stuck to it. More lighting is set up, a new group of onlookers, there are different people here but they’re thinking the same question-what in the hell is going on?
We step out into a night that is dropping a couple of degrees every hour. The air is completely still. There are no birds anywhere. Everybody is talking in library whispers. We move past two officers who nod at us stoically. We step up onto the porch. The deck groans softly beneath our weight. The front door is painted bright blue and is wide open. The air inside isn’t any warmer than outside. The view isn’t any prettier than the last house. In fact, it’s worse. This time the blood has been thrown up onto the ceiling fan. The fan, spinning, has whipped the droplets from the blades around the room, creating a line halfway up the wall like the ring around a bath. It looks like Morse code, lots of dots and dashes, almost like a cry for help. The dead man was stabbed so many times the blade kept throwing more blood up to the fan to redistribute, the law of physics meeting up with the law of creativity.
McFarlane looks just like Herb. Similar kind of position, similar cuts, you could string him up by his feet and he’d have the same amount of blood pour out of him. He’s been written on by the same marker across his forehead, same handwriting, only this message is different: Was it worth it?
There are a few other differences. McFarlane managed to defend himself a little, as evidenced by the lacerations on his hands. He’s attached to an oxygen machine, or was, the tube now lying on the carpet blowing air into it. The long jagged cuts down his body are easily visible because the shirt has mostly shredded away, leaving flabby skin that was pale yesterday, but today is stained red. The cuts are deep and reveal parts of this guy nobody has seen before, except maybe his heart surgeon. He looks like he was raked over by a broken beer bottle.
The retirement home is smaller than the other one but has the same feel about it, though this one isn’t really a retirement home, but a small subdivision of adjoining town houses where the youngest person looks old enough to have test-driven the wheel. The news has gotten out that it’s the second homicide of the evening, and there can be no denying the connection, and the media are spreading the story over the airwaves and the gallery of people coming down to watch the show is growing every minute. An elderly lady is walking around carrying a tray, a tea service on top of it, offering drinks of hot tea to the officers on duty.
Police tape has been strung up and only time will tell whether or not the department has enough of it in stock to get us through to tomorrow morning. Each unit, though adjoining, has its own section, with shrubs and small flax bushes and rose plants out front. We head inside. More bloody footprints, hopefully belonging to the same killer. A serial killer is bad enough, but two madmen running around with magic markers and sharp knives is worse. Some of the forensics guys from the first scene have already shown
up. They’re doing their thing, checking for prints and fibers and DNA. They’re working near the body and Schroder is talking to two people.
You didn’t care enough.
Was it worth it?
One statement. One question. I stare at a vase full of lilacs on the dining table and think about those words while watching a ladybug climb the stem, going about its day-to-day job but somewhat lost, maybe confused by the amount of light for this time of evening.
I start with the bedroom. There is fingerprint powder over plenty of surfaces. The forensic guys are working fast. Maybe they’re keen to get home or back to the other scene, or maybe they’re sensing more bodies to come their way tonight. The bed is made up and nondescript, the kind of flower-patterned duvet cover everybody’s widowed grandparent would sleep under. There’s a bookcase with a wide selection of books. A couple of potted plants, a painting of a landscape, and nothing in here to suggest why the owner angered somebody enough to stab him over and over. There are photographs on the dresser, the victim and his children, of grandchildren, photos this man would have looked at every night going through his bedtime routine. Nothing with his wife.
I put on the same pair of gloves from the last scene, only now they’re on inside out. I go through the drawers and cupboards, Schroder joining me a few minutes into the search, the smell of beer no longer as strong.
“Any theories?” he asks.
“Victim one was a lawyer,” I answer. “Maybe he upset somebody.”
“He hasn’t been a lawyer for ten years,” he says. “Why wait all that time?”
“Maybe the person he pissed off was in jail,” I say, “and just got out.”
“It’s possible, but our victim wasn’t a criminal lawyer, he was a divorce lawyer.”
“Some would find that more of a reason to want him dead,” I tell him.
