The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  Halfway down run number four, a sixteen-year-old student so klutzy he should still have been on the bunny hill cut right in front of Keller, striking her left ski a glancing blow. She veered right, out of control, and recovered her balance after a few seconds, but not in time to avoid smashing into the wide trunk of an unforgiving Douglas fir.

  ***

  “I remember hearing the snap, feeling it in my leg,” she told Philby.

  Her hand fell onto her right thigh and she traced the thin scar where the surgeon had cut her open. She was surprised to find her heart beating faster, retelling all this. “I’ve got some steel in there now and a doctor’s note for when I go through airport metal detectors.”

  “It happens to a lot of people that way,” Philby said. “They’re prescribed painkillers for very legitimate reasons, then experience difficulty leaving them behind. There’s a bit of a revolution going on in how medicine is thinking about pain control, recognizing the physician’s responsibility for ensuring they’re not creating addiction while mitigating pain.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Keller scowled. “Knowing didn’t help me avoid it, though. I had fentanyl in the hospital and took three months of Oxycontin home with me. Even I thought the Oxy was a little much. Asked the doc to put me on T-3s.”

  Philby made a note. Tylenol mixed with codeine was made in graduated formulations. T-1 through T-4. Almost no doc would prescribe T-4s, but Keller would’ve bet there were bottles of T-3s in half the medicine cabinets in the country. They were more prevalent, more popular than Flintstone’s vitamins. Getting T-3s was as easy as going from one walk-in clinic to another complaining about back pain. Sooner or later, some doc would write you a script.

  Keller finished her sad story. How the Oxys ran out and her physician eventually refused to give her more, and how she had made the rounds in and out of walk-in clinics till she had enough T-3s to keep her high.

  “Then what happened?”

  She looked out the window, wishing again that she were in the warmth and sunshine. It’d been a long time since she’d had a good run. It would be nice to start again. “Two things,” Keller said when Philby waited for her to go on. “The T-3s weren’t enough…”

  “The second thing?”

  “A call… just after I went back to work.” A familiar, empty pain formed in Keller’s gut and pressure built behind her eyes. She massaged her forehead with one hand. “It was a five-year-old girl, scheduled to have polyps on her throat removed a week later. She woke up in distress and couldn’t breathe. She coded… went into cardiac arrest. You familiar with the lingo?”

  “Enough. Go on.”

  “She was asystole. We gave her three rounds of epi, intubated her no trouble. Nothing. Worked her all the way to the Pretty Little Clinic.” Keller saw Philby’s frown and clarified. “The Peter Lougheed Centre.”

  “That must’ve been awful.”

  “They’re all awful. But I’d run pediatric codes before, so I wasn’t sure why this one…” She reached up and tugged at her earlobe. “She had diamond studs in her ears, just old enough to want that, you know? I imagined her asking her parents for them, being proud of them. I imagined her looking at herself in the mirror wearing them.” The tears were rolling down her cheeks now. “I don’t know why that… that was the thing that did it to me.”

  She sat back and let the tears come. She’d cried any number of times in Summerview and was almost used to letting strangers watch as she did it.

  Philby whispered “I’m sorry” once, but otherwise she was silent.

  After a minute, Keller composed herself. “Sorry.”

  Philby shook her head. “The last thing you have to be sorry about is feeling things. You’re safe here.”

  Am I? Am I really? The truth is, I was safe in the haze, in the Cool Smooth. That’s where I was really safe.

  “I had a dream last night.” She told Philby about the nightmare—the house and the dead boy and trying to slot the pieces of his head back together like a bloody 3D puzzle. “I’m a mess.”

  Philby bit her lip. “You’re not alone, Ash. Everyone’s a little different, but all these things take a toll. I’ve had clients tell me about calls where a certain picture on the wall or a stuffed animal made a patient-care experience more traumatic.”

  “You treat a lot of paramedics?”

  “And police and firefighters. Not exclusively, but I have a few on my roster. After that call, what happened? Were you able to access services of any kind?”

  “We have this thing at work, Critical Incident Stress Management… Debriefing. My partner wanted to go. I didn’t. I’d tried it before. Didn’t like it much. Besides, I hurt.”

  Philby nodded, waiting for her to go on.

  Keller shrugged. “I was jittery the next day, nervous and stressed. When the tones went off for our first call I was terrified suddenly. I barely got through the shift. I knew I wouldn’t sleep that night.

  “By that time I was out of Oxys, but I had a few T-3s left. I took them with some wine and slept like a baby. Took some more in the morning. Made the day easier, you know? Just made everything”—she raised a hand and held it flat, floating back and forth as if it were out a car window—“smooth, like a calm ocean. I never took them before a shift again… I tried not to, anyway. Knowing they were waiting for me at home got me through the bad parts, most days…”

  She brought her hands up in a steeple before her face. “Then the T-3s stopped working, so I went out and found a guy who’d sell me fentanyl.”

  “You of all people know how dangerous that can be.” There was no judgment in Philby’s voice. More like curiosity.

  Keller told Philby about her precautions: licking the pills, cautious nibbles on the first of every batch, the syringe of Narcan poised over her leg.

  “Still risky, wouldn’t you say?”

  Keller’s mouth tightened into a thin line. “Not disagreeing.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m worried about the fentanyl. But what I’m really worried about is not that you were taking it to relieve your pain, it’s that you were taking it without caring what happened—”

  “Because I wanted to die?”

  Philby raised one hand in a calming gesture that halfway infuriated Keller.

  If you want me talking, don’t raise a hand when it comes out.

  “Not everyone commits suicide directly,” Philby said. “Sometimes people flirt with it by engaging in increasingly risky behaviour.”

  “You calling me a flirt?” But Keller’s voice was hard, not joking. Her stomach was churning now. It had been like this the first week at Summerview too. She thought she’d gotten used to it.

  Guess not. Should’ve downed a Pepto-Bismol along with the Red Bull.

  “You know what I mean,” Philby said. “Some people go sailing alone, free-climbing on pitches they’re not ready for.”

  “Kind of let the universe decide when they’ll tap out, huh?”

  “Yes. Like that.” It was a question, and Philby watched her closely for the answer.

  Keller sighed and shook her head. “That’s not me. I like watching the sun set. I like watching it rise too.”

  “All right.” Philby paused, still watching her, “I know when you left Summerview you were doing well and had some strategies for—”

  “Being home’s strategy enough. It feels good.”

  Philby managed a look of gentle doubt. “You’ve established a number of bad habits. A lot of those were developed at your house, right? Going home isn’t easy for most people because it’s where they felt most comfortable with their harmful behaviour. It’s easy to slip back.”

  Keller nodded as Philby glanced at the clock. Their hour was nearly up.

  Thank God. Time flies when you’re talking about offing yourself.

  “Are you finding that you’re coping well?” Philby was scrutinizing her now, ready for any tell of a lie.

  “I think I am… I will. I live on an acreage, so there’s lots
to do. Got a dog”—half a lie, but Keller had developed a considerable talent for that long ago—“who’s keeping me busy.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry we didn’t get through everything, but I don’t like to miss anything, and I see you again”—she glanced at Keller’s file—“next Thursday. I don’t want to rush you out, though. If there’s anything urgent you want to talk about”—she spread her hands—“anything…”

  Go ahead and rush me.

  But her stomach was feeling better and the throbbing in her head was less pronounced. Apparently the thought of getting out into the sunshine alone was having a salutary effect.

  “Next time you’ll want to talk about that night, yes?”

  “The rules aren’t hard and fast,” Philby said. “I think it would help to chat about that, but we don’t have to jump in. You get to decide where we go from here, but I might poke at you a bit if I think you’re avoiding something.” She smiled, and it felt genuine. “Fair?”

  Keller tamped down her irritability and smiled back. It had taken her a while to warm up to the therapists in Summerview, too. Talking about the bad shit she’d been through reminded her too much of civilians—men, usually—who, upon learning she was a paramedic, would inevitably ask, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”

  Like fucking vampires, as if what she did to help people should be fodder for their entertainment.

  “Fair,” Keller said. “I’m okay right now…” She nodded, assuring herself of it, then locked eyes with Philby. “You can ask the last couple of questions now, if you like.”

  Philby looked puzzled.

  “The ones about self-harm,” Keller said. “If I’m thinking about it now.”

  Philby leaned back, her smile more reserved this time. “Your main therapist in Summerview—”

  “Ed.” Steady Eddie. It hadn’t mattered if she shouted or swore or cried, he’d radiated continuous calm empathy throughout.

  “That’s right. He said you’re doing well, but he also said you’re very smart and intuitive. Early on, he thought you were gaming him. Telling him just what you thought he wanted to hear.”

  Eddie’s intuitive too.

  “I was, at first.”

  “You need to know that you can be completely honest with me, always.”

  “Honesty gets me a ticket back to work?”

  “Honesty gets us both working to make you healthy. That’s the most important thing. Would you agree?”

  Keller gritted her teeth. “Sure.”

  “Good. So as you’ve suggested, before we end our session, I do have to ask if you’re having any thoughts about self-harm?”

  “I have no plans to go skiing, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean.”

  There were sleeping pills, twenty days’ worth, in her medicine cabinet. But she’d known patients who’d OD’d on those and just gone to sleep (as advertised, it had to be said) for like a day and a half, then woke up having soiled the bed and developed pressure sores. Worse, she’d heard of people who’d puked into their airway and then developed anoxic brain damage, but survived to linger in a vegetative state for decades.

  Messy.

  There was a shotgun locked in a gun cabinet in the stable on the acreage—her grandpa’s, before he passed—but she didn’t really know where the key was, or even if there were shells around the house. Besides…

  Really messy.

  She could run in front of a truck…

  No. It was all wrong. She didn’t want any of that. What she did dream about sometimes was just leaving, going away. But not in the deathy kind of going away, in the hop-a-plane-to-Mexico kind. Her father had taken her down to Cabo a few times when she was a kid, and a beach sounded pretty fucking good right now.

  “I’ve no intention of hurting myself.”

  “Good.” Philby rose and proffered a business card. “This is my pager. You can reach me or one of my partners in the practice 24/7.”

  Keller took the card. “See you next Thursday.”

  Outside, she lifted her face to the sunshine, and felt her muscles relax and her heartbeat slow.

  It wasn’t anywhere near Cool Smooth, but it would have to do.

  Twenty-Four

  Arcand’s home office was a windowless room on the top floor of his three-story condo. He’d had the space hardened, for use as both a panic room and for safekeeping his secrets. There was steel in the walls and ceiling, and an industrial-strength door with a fingerprint and keypad lock. Sophie’s experience had shown him that a safe place to hide was essential in this world.

  He set the pizza box down atop a pile of others on the bookcase, then took out a slice and began eating, draining a can of Coke between bites and tossing it into the garbage basket to join the rest.

  As always before he got to work, he gazed at the bulletin board above his desk, where Sophie’s junior high yearbook photo stared back at him, smiling and eyes bright with innocent humour. Beside the photo were yellowed newspaper articles that chronicled her kidnapping, her eventual recovery, and—years later—her suicide.

  Sophie would have been almost thirty years old now. She might have had a family, children. He could have been Uncle Paul, buying her kids noisy gifts and sugar-laden treats. He imagined such impossible things every night, the torturous thoughts reminding him of his purpose. Tonight they served an additional use: whetting his appetite for revenge, for the pain he could finally inflict on those who’d inflicted so much on those he loved.

  On his desk two PCs and a Mac were arranged in an arc, with his chair centred before them. The Mac and one of the PCs were utterly clean. He used them for writing, games, and harmless internet surfing.

  The second PC—the most powerful of them—was hardened like the room around it, with multiple firewalls, a wholly separate network access, and three overly expensive antiviral programs. From the core of the computer’s bios to its modified Linux operating system, it was an attack submarine—armoured and stealthy, designed for prowling the deepest depths of the dark web in search of his sister’s rapists.

  Before this lovely gift from Ashleen Keller, he’d searched methodically for them but without any real idea of who or where they might be. He’d thought Sophie’s assailants were probably Canadian, though it was possible they’d vacationed in foreign countries where child sex tourism was common and the law turned a blind eye. Arcand routinely prowled police and airline databases, looking for correlations.

  When not engaged in electronic breaking and entering, he routinely trolled the abyssal plains of degeneracy that thrived miles below the Snapchat and cat-meme surface of the internet. He moved through drug operations, prostitution rings, illicit weapons sales, and of course the endless cesspool of pedophilia and child trafficking, searching for any clue that might lead him to the men who had destroyed his sister.

  He’d done some good along the way, too, sending dozens of anonymous emails with gigabytes of criminal evidence to various police departments around the world. But he’d never found Sophie’s tormenters. It seemed blackly ironic that the men who traded pictures of violence and depravity against children were by nature camera shy themselves. Sophie’s descriptions of a tattoo and surgical scar were all he’d had to go on.

  Until now… until Darryl Oakes was exposed and killed by Ashleen Keller.

  Arcand found autopsy photos aplenty of Oakes in the Calgary Medical Examiner’s computers, including clearer ones of the tattooed cobra spiralling around his right wrist. The headlines proclaimed that Oakes had acted alone and, indeed, it might have seemed to the police that he was both a figurative and literal dead end, but Arcand knew he had to look deeper than the police ever would, ever could.

  Every human had points of contact with others—friends, family, sweethearts, and more. Arcand raided Oakes’s whole life, riffling through them all. Names led to birth dates, social insurance numbers, phone records, schools, clubs, hobbies, and work histories—the spider web of a single human l
ife. Things thought long-erased by time, their tracks covered in multiple aging deposits of electronic strata. Arcand could peel the layers away like an onion.

  And he had, paring the man’s life down until he’d found a connection—a man who, according to Arcand’s software algorithms, had a 90 percent chance of sharing the same despicable proclivities Oakes had possessed.

  Louis Herzog.

  Arcand leaned down to the mini-fridge humming in the corner of the room and plucked out a beer. Not a Coke this time. He was celebrating now.

  Herzog was a retired university professor, and judging by his address, a wealthy one. The connection seemed tenuous at first glance. Darryl Oakes had gone to the same high school, four grades behind Herzog, but they’d belonged to two of the same clubs. Then things became more interesting. Herzog’s father had employed Oakes for a year as a gardener, then gotten him a job—again as a gardener—at a prestigious private graduate school called Harrow-Charterhouse while Herzog himself was doing his PhD. That was it.

  But then he started in on Herzog and things got even more interesting. Herzog’s computer was protected by firewalls and antiviral programs, too, but nothing military-grade, and so, ephemeral as a fog to Arcand. He brushed those defences aside and knew immediately he’d found the second man.

  But not by the pictures of child pornography that would have made a hardened cop vomit, secreted in zipped archives and cache files. Instead it was a picture of Herzog himself as an adolescent, apparently at some kind of summer camp. He was shirtless, standing with some other boys beside a pool. A scar, about three inches in size, was visible on his lower left abdomen.

  Arcand took a long swallow of his beer and pulled up his sister’s description to the police all those years ago. Reading it always left his gut churning, but he pressed on until he found what he was looking for.

  Sophie described a scar on one of her attackers, just above the groin on the left side. Elsewhere, in summaries made by one of the investigators, it was noted that appendectomy scars would appear on the lower right abdomen, followed by speculation “the witness” was mistaken, but since no suspects were ever apprehended this was never pursued.