Downfall

by Robert Rotenberg

  “And after that?”

  “After that?” Then she remembered what had happened when Burns walked her to the streetcar.

  “We parted. He said he had something planned for later.”

  As the words escaped her mouth, Burns burst through the crowd running at full speed. Their eyes met.

  Her father jumped in front of her. “Don’t move,” he yelled at her.

  “Daddy,” Alison said. Shocked. “What?”

  Burns ran past her and disappeared down a path at the edge of the bridge where her father had just been.

  A moment later Kennicott tore by them, steps behind Burns. A young female officer emerged from the crowd and followed him.

  Alison turned back to her dad. The look in his eyes told her everything.

  “Is he?” she asked him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He grasped her hands and squeezed them briefly, then ran after Kennicott.

  “We’re on in five,” Krevolin said. Cool and professional as ever.

  Alison lifted her mic.

  “Follow me,” she said to him, walking over to the top of the path as fast as she could.

  “This is Alison Greene,” she said when the green light went on. “Reporting live with breaking news.”

  65

  It’s a good thing he learned that downhill running technique from Angela, Kennicott thought, as he hit the end of the bridge and headed down the steep path into the Don River Valley. He could tell Burns knew the way because he was taking it so quickly.

  That was a problem. If Burns got away now, he could hide out here for a long time. The woods were thick and there were trails leading off in all directions. The guy was smart and probably had a hideout stashed away.

  Focus on your running, Kennicott told himself. Keep your knees high. Form circles not teardrops. Don’t land on your heels. Breathe. Think Jose Reyes running downhill, training for the major leagues.

  He was keeping Burns in sight and starting to gain on him. Angela would be proud.

  About halfway down into the valley, the path came to a long, flat plateau, with a man-made bench off to the side. Burns looked back over his shoulder, stumbled, and fell hard to the ground.

  “Stop! Police!” Kennicott yelled.

  Burns pulled himself back up and turned toward Kennicott.

  “Okay,” Burns yelled, putting one hand out in front of him. “Stay right there and let me talk.”

  Kennicott stopped and caught his breath. Their eyes met. They were at opposite ends of the plateau. It felt as if they were frozen in time.

  Burns made a fist and pounded his chest with it.

  “I didn’t kill those people,” he yelled across the open space between them.

  Kennicott took a deep breath.

  Burns hadn’t moved.

  “I’m not a judge, I’m not a jury,” Kennicott yelled back. “If you have a defence, you’ll have a fair trial.”

  “Fair? Nothing in the system is fair.”

  Kennicott heard footsteps coming down the path. That would be Officer Sheppard. He put one hand behind him and motioned for her to stop. That silenced her. Good. He didn’t want Burns to see her, but now she could listen and be a witness if Kennicott could get the doctor to confess.

  He had to take this slowly. Keep Burns talking.

  “We know your real last name is Waterbridge,” Kennicott said, no longer yelling.

  “So what? It’s legal to change your name.”

  “And we know that your dad runs the golf club.”

  “I despise that place. Playground for the privileged few.” Burns spit on the ground.

  He was still being a showman. But he was still talking. Time to ramp up the heat.

  “You know your way around the club, don’t you? The secret ways to get in and out. All about Hodgson and his initialled golf balls. You stole them from his car and thought you could make him the suspect by stuffing them down the mouths of the people you killed.”

  Even across the distance, Kennicott could see a flash of anger cross Burns’s face.

  “You have no proof.”

  “You hand-picked your first two victims because you had their medical records, and you knew they were both at death’s door.”

  “The system killed them, not me.”

  Kennicott didn’t react. Think of how Greene would handle this. Use the silence.

  Burns looked behind him. Kennicott thought he was going to take off and dug his feet into the ground, ready to spring into action.

  But Burns didn’t move. He looked back toward Kennicott, and now he clenched both his hands into tight fists.

  Kennicott had to make a quick decision. Should he try to wait Burns out? He could feel Burns still had something else he wanted to say. Time to play dumb, play to the man’s ego.

  “There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” Kennicott said at last. “Melissa Copeland.”

  Burns glared at him, but Kennicott could see he’d hit his mark.

  “Why did you kill her? Melissa was perfectly healthy.”

  Burns shook his head. But he was still standing there.

  Time to tie the knot.

  “She fought back, didn’t she, and broke your glasses? We discovered some of your trifocal lenses on the ground. You rode your bike across the city Monday night to the golf club and went down that path through the trees. Bad luck for you. Your special winter bike tires left a set of very distinct tracks in the mud. Detective Greene photographed your tires and forensics confirmed they were a perfect match. And your square bike lock. It’s the exact same shape as the blunt force trauma on the back of the heads of your three victims. Your little gambits of pretending these killings were just a few drunks fighting over a vodka bottle, or that Hodgson was the killer—neither of them worked.”

  Burns shook his head. He looked up at the bridge, where the demonstration that he’d orchestrated was in full swing.

  Kennicott could sense his anger turning to frustration. Today should have been Burns’s moment of triumph, but instead he was here, down in the valley, a fugitive.

  “The doctor. The nurse. They were believers. I chose them to make a sacrifice for the cause. Melissa was going to expose me and ruin it all.” He pointed up to the bridge. “The press, the politicians, no one gave a damn before I did this. Now look, the whole country, the whole world, is talking about homelessness.”

  Burns was breathing hard.

  Kennicott let Burns’s words hang in the air. He’d just confessed to three murders.

  Burns looked behind him. “I’ve gone down in this valley more times than I can count to help people,” he said.

  “Stay right there,” Kennicott said, beginning to walk toward him.

  “Never,” Burns said. “Good luck finding me.” He pivoted and ran, disappearing over the edge.

  Kennicott took off after him. He ran as fast as he could to the end of the ledge. Burns was going at full speed and approaching a fork in the path when suddenly he flew headfirst to the ground.

  “Ahh!” he screamed, clutching his leg.

  A man emerged from the bushes, with a club-like stick in his hands. He smiled up at Kennicott. It was Fraser Dent.

  “He’s not going anywhere, Detective Kennicott,” Dent said.

  “My knee,” Burns moaned. “You crushed my kneecap.”

  “Good work, Mr. Dent,” Kennicott said.

  Kennicott heard footsteps behind him. Greene and Sheppard came up beside him, and they all looked down at Burns, who was still on the ground writhing in pain. Sheppard already had a set of handcuffs out.

  Kennicott winked at Greene.

  “Officer Sheppard,” he said. “Why don’t you walk down there and make the arrest?”

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  66

  Standing in the hot sun, Alison had the top two buttons of her shirt undone. She flicked her hair back over her shoulder and held the mic up. She nodded an okay to Krevolin, who was standing below her on the courtroom steps. The gr
een light went on.

  “Good morning. We are reporting live from Ontario Court of Justice. Minutes ago Dr. Arnold Burns pled guilty to one count of first-degree murder, bringing a dramatic conclusion to the Homeless Serial Killer case that held the country in its thrall six months ago. T.O. TV News has learned that Burns’s lawyer, Phil Cutter, worked out a deal with Crown Attorney Albert Fernandez. Burns agreed to plead guilty to one of the three counts of murder that he faced. He will serve a minimum of twenty-five years in jail, not the potential seventy-five years of incarceration he faced had he been convicted of all three.”

  Krevolin panned his camera away from Alison, across the courtyard in front of the main courthouse doors. It was packed with other cameramen, reporters, and spectators. Everyone was waiting for the lawyers and the victims’ families to emerge. Alison took the few seconds she was off camera to grab a sip from her water bottle. Stay calm, she told herself. No one knew about her brief affair with Burns, except her father and grandfather. And they would never tell anyone.

  For months after his arrest, they’d never mentioned it. Alison could sense they knew she was beating herself up enough about the whole thing. How could she have been so naive? How could she have been so taken in by him? And how had she let him use her for his cause?

  One long night in February, when they were practically snowed in, she made her dad and Grandpa Y dinner. “I feel like an idiot,” she said, after her dad had cleared the dishes and they were having tea. “I let a killer into my life.”

  “You weren’t the only one he fooled,” her dad said.

  “That’s no excuse,” she said. “I’m done with relationships.”

  “Why would you let him define you?” Grandpa Y said. “You can’t let evil win.”

  After all he’d been through in his life, Grandpa Y of all people should know that. He was right.

  “Dad, I have to ask you one question,” she said. “I understand in his demented way Arnie, I mean Burns, could justify killing the first victim. The doctor was a patient at his clinic, and he knew that with his low platelet level, he was on the verge of death. And you have to admit Burns was right, no one noticed, no one cared. One homeless murder didn’t even cause a ripple.”

  “Kennicott cared,” Greene said. “He worked it the way he’d work any case.”

  “True. But the press, the politicians ignored it.”

  Wasn’t she still parroting Burns’s argument? But it was true.

  Grandpa Y shrugged. “Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” he said.

  They all laughed. He knew how to break the tension.

  “When he killed the nurse, the story exploded,” she said.

  “He knew that the murder of a homeless woman was a bigger story,” her father said. “And two former professionals who’d ended up on the street made it even better.”

  “That insured the press would lap it up, which we did. He played us all, didn’t he?”

  “He was a master manipulator.”

  “You’re pretty good at it too,” she said. “That press conference you gave when you said you didn’t have a suspect sure convinced me that you were nowhere on this case.”

  “Convinced Burns too. We were afraid that if he knew we were on his trail, he would disappear.”

  “When did you figure out about his bike and his bike lock?”

  His father blushed. She’d never seen him do that before. “The morning before his arrest. He’d parked his bike in your bike rack.”

  “I heard you come in and leave pretty quick.”

  “I photographed the tires and the bike lock. I had to go to the golf course to take some pictures of his bike tracks, and then forensics confirmed we had a match for both.”

  “Your daddy’s a detective,” Grandpa Y said. “He doesn’t miss a thing.”

  She shook her head and laughed.

  “Now I get it. That’s why Grandpa Y made me breakfast just after I heard you drive away.”

  “Your father wasn’t going to leave you alone with a man he suspected of three murders,” Grandpa Y said.

  “Thank goodness.” She put her face in her hands and covered her eyes. “But I still don’t understand one thing. Why did he kill the lawyer, Melissa Copeland? She was healthy.”

  Her father gently pulled her hands from her eyes and held them.

  “The reason is tragic. Melissa was telling people in the valley that she knew who the killer was. She was wrong. She thought it was someone else, but Burns wouldn’t have known that.”

  “Oh no.”

  “He killed her thinking she was going to expose him. His next victim would have been another sick homeless person from his clinic. There are plenty of them. Melissa just got in his way.”

  “And left her daughter without her mother. Daddy, it’s so awful…” Alison closed her eyes, her voice trailing off. She heard her father’s chair moving back and then felt his arms curl around her shoulders and hold her tight.

  67

  “The grief counsellor said this is a good idea,” Britt told Parish as they walked through the cemetery gate and started up the path. “She said I need to learn to remember Mom in my own way.”

  They were holding hands, as they had done each time on their monthly get-togethers since Melissa’s murder.

  “You know,” Parish said, “your mom was brilliant.”

  “That’s what everyone tells me,” Britt said. “Maybe that was her downfall. Maybe it would have been better if she hadn’t been quite so smart.”

  Pearls of wisdom from an eleven-year-old girl. “You might be right, but we are what we are.”

  Britt stopped in her tracks. Turned to Parish.

  “Did she really have to be that way?”

  Parish reached out to hug Britt.

  “Your mom was one of my best friends. I know she didn’t want to be ill. I know she fought against it. Try to understand, Britt, she couldn’t stop herself.”

  Britt buried her head in Parish’s shoulder.

  “I want to see it,” she said at last, pointing up the hill toward the graves.

  “I was here last week to make sure the stone was up before you came,” Parish said.

  They walked in silence. Britt was a quiet young woman. That was her survival strategy to deal with her verbose father and unpredictable mother. Parish liked that about her. They felt comfortable being together without words.

  “Down this row,” Parish said, once they’d crested the hill.

  Britt didn’t speak.

  The gravestone was simple. Hodgson, to his credit, had insisted on that. Under Melissa’s name and the dates of her birth and death, was the inscription She Cared.

  Britt knelt down and touched the stone. She reached back, took Parish’s hand, and placed it beside hers. It was a hot day, but the stone felt cool.

  “Don’t ever doubt how much she loved you,” Parish said.

  “Can I tell you something?” Britt stood quickly, a determined look on her face.

  “Anything.”

  “You won’t tell my dad?”

  “Never.” Britt was pretty. Had she already discovered boys?

  “Because I’m going to tell him myself.”

  Oh no. Was this about drugs at her young age?

  “I’m going to quit golf.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re the first person I’ve told. I have to work up the nerve to tell him.”

  “Can I ask you why?” Parish said. But she already knew the answer.

  “I don’t care about being a champion. I want to be normal.”

  Britt spoke in an angry way Parish had never heard her speak in before.

  “I know Dad is going to be mad. So will Lydia, but I don’t care what she thinks. It’s my life, and I don’t have to keep playing golf all the time. The kids at school talk about a show they’ve binged on Netflix or a great YouTube video everyone else is watching. I say I don’t have time to see it because I’ve got to go practice. Or I don’t say anything. Now Dad
wants me to go to a special golf camp this summer. All my friends are going to regular camps. I want to go to where I can sail and swim and ride horses. He’s going to be so angry when I tell him.”

  Her words spilled out in rapid fire. As if they’d been dammed up inside her for years and now they were gushing out.

  “I have to ask you a big favour,” Britt said.

  “Anything.”

  “I mean, you’re my godmother, right? If my dad kicks me out because I won’t play golf anymore, can I come live with you?”

  Parish couldn’t help smiling a little. “Your dad would never kick you out. He loves you more than anything in the world.”

  Britt frowned. “There’s something else. I’m not supposed to tell anyone this yet.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Lydia’s pregnant.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

  “But what if you are wrong, and he does kick me out after the baby is born?”

  “He won’t. But you always have a home.”

  Britt hugged her. Then pulled away.

  “I’ve got one more thing to ask you.”

  “Anything,” Parish said again.

  “You know that game you and Lydia used to play with Mom?”

  Parish had no idea what she was talking about.

  Britt put her hands up to her chest and opened her palms.

  “Oh,” Parish said, getting it. She put her hands up too. “First you clap your hands together, then your right hand to my right hand, then your left to my left, then both.”

  She clapped her hands.

  Britt did the same. And smiled.

  Parish began to sing and soon Britt joined in with her:

  I am a pretty little Dutch girl

  As pretty as pretty can be…

  68

  “I have to warn you,” Greene said to Dr. Ramos as he took his usual seat at the Caldense Bakery. He leaned over the little table and whispered, “The little croissants here are as hard as rocks.”

  “But the coffee’s good, correct?”

  “So I’ve been told. You’ll have to try it yourself.”

  She shook her head, her black hair shining in the light coming in from the window. “I’ve never dated a man who does not drink coffee.”