NIGHT MOVES: The Stroll Murders

by Gar Mallinson

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  There were racks inside the building holding cards that advertised things in the city with pretty pictures of cloudless blue skies and smiling people, mostly white people, and some free local newspapers. Dina took one of the newspapers and looked it over. Other young people had been on the bus, most getting on in Port Alberni. Some of them had gathered around the racks of cards and papers and were talking among themselves, their backpacks lowered to the floor. Dina listened carefully and heard about something called the Turtle. She followed three of the girls out of the terminal and up the driveway that wound around the little hill. At its top were two streets, and across one of them, a Tim Hortons coffee shop. Dina wasn’t impressed. It didn’t seem inviting with all the cars surrounding it and the bright lights and colours, not at all like the Common Loaf Bake Shop.

  When the light turned green and made beeping noises, noises like birds she’d never heard before, they all crossed the street, and she followed the girls into a strangely bright coffee shop. She lined up with the girls, not liking this place at all, and got a coffee and a bun and sat close to them so she could listen. The coffee was weak and the bun tasteless.

  When the girls left, she followed them to more beeping stoplights and across a bridge into a more commercial area with a bank on the corner. The girls went through a red-painted door and Dina followed.

  The Painted Turtle Guesthouse was clean and quiet, and Dina took a room for a week. The girls had taken dorm beds for the night. They walked up the stairs together to the second floor, and Dina went down a corridor to Room 17. It was a small room with a single bed, a dresser, a television set bolted to the wall, and a small bathroom. It would do nicely.

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  Morning found Dina on the sidewalk outside the guesthouse. She walked down one side of the main street and back up the other. She found the Serious Coffee, but didn’t like it much, although it smelled good. Farther up the street, she found the Petit Choux, a small and crowded restaurant, but it didn’t smell very interesting. She found another coffee shop called Spencer’s, and it smelled as good as the Serious Coffee one and looked good as well, so she went in and got a coffee and a sandwich, which was large and made out of real bread, not that white stuff in Tim’s. She finished her breakfast and wandered around the town some more.

  Harbour City had a much larger downtown and was busier and noisier than she was used to, but it wasn’t too bad. She found all the restaurants and decided on one called the Modern. She went in and talked to the barkeep, who sent her back to talk to the manager, a young woman in the rear sitting at one of the high tables. They talked for a bit, and Dina told her about her jobs in Tofino. The woman looked her over carefully and offered her a job on the late shift because it was harder to fill those, but only on a trial basis to see if things worked out.

  It seemed to Dina that things had worked out very well. She had a bed in a clean place, and she had a job doing something she liked, and at night too, which

  she also liked. She was pleased with this start in a strange place.

  Dina spent the rest of the morning and afternoon exploring. She found the harbour and walked the length of the seawall. She watched the seaplanes take off and land; she studied the long rows of fishing boats by the finger docks; she marvelled at the plethora of pleasure craft tied up at the public docks; and she watched the ferries wandering across the busy harbour. One of them was quite large and seemed to go out into the Salish Sea beyond one of the small, flat islands, the one that had houses on it.

  All of it, everything she’d seen, was busy and noisy, even the tailored park off the seawall. She wanted to find a place near the water that could be hers. From the commercial harbour, Dina went south past the end of the seawall, through a warren of truck trailers, warehouses, and rail yards that stretched for blocks on the flats beside the harbour. Beyond the flats was a small reservation of poorly paved streets and small, unkempt houses that ran up the gentle slope of early hills. Past the houses and the dogs and the children, and the old derelict cars and pickups, there was one final indignity: a smelly factory that sprawled along the shoreline and down to the water separating the streets of the reservation from the great trees.

  Dina continued past the factory to a narrow pebble-strewn beach punctuated by large boulders with some massive firs leaning out over the water. As she walked on, she saw a fallen tree trunk jutting out from the bank into the shallows. From there, the shoreline curved steadily outward toward the Salish Sea.

  She made for the trunk, circling the bigger rocks and clumps of fern, and sat listening quietly to the susurrations of the forest and the delicate lapping of water against stone. She had found her place, and she would escape the city’s incessant bustle whenever she could. In a single day, she thought, the city had given up somewhere to stay, a job she knew how to do, and a place where she could be whole.

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  At the Modern that night, Dina raked in some serious money and the enmity of the girl working with her. She had to share her tips, but that didn’t seem to placate the other girl. At the end of her shift, the night manager took her aside and told her she’d been moved to days, mornings to be precise, and she’d start the next day at nine, a few hours on. Dina knew she was being punished. The girl with her, she discovered the next day, was the night manager’s niece.

  Dina worked at the Modern days and wore a more modest pants and blouse outfit recommended by the day man who liked her. At night, she served drinks at a jazz bar on Front Street across from a new condo development. There she wore a uniform the place provided and for which she paid out of her earnings. She had little time to wander the city except on Wednesdays and Thursdays, her days off from the restaurant, and Thursday night, her only night off from the jazz bar.

  She was good at both jobs but better at the bar. Soon, she’d find her own place and leave the Painted Turtle for good. Maybe she’d find something in the south end close to Victoria Road. She felt drawn to the restless flavour of the nights there, the girls who waited and the men who sought them out.

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  Roberta Cannon watched the Salish Sea from two hundred feet up. It had little traffic that she could see, but what there was seemed too damned close. As they neared Vancouver Island, she could see the decks of the freighters anchored outside one of the two harbours, and the funnels of a large white ferry just passing the tip of a small, heavily forested island. It was that island and an even smaller one that created the two harbours in the dish-shaped indentation in the coastline. The larger of the two islands, the forested one, appeared to have no houses at all and created a channel that ran between the two harbours.

  As the small plane descended and arced into the channel, she watched a shoreline pass under her that was full of marinas, houses, and apartment buildings. The water seemed to reach up at the plane. She felt it touch down and heard the roar of the reverse thrust as it levelled off in the water and taxied in. It was a softer touchdown than the 747 that had brought her from Ottawa.

  She climbed down the three steps to the dock, called Alan Kim, and collected her bag. She walked the length of the dock to the terminal building, went left along the seawall as instructed, and passed the marinas and small shops. She saw a turnaround area full of taxis and one unmistakable unmarked. She shook hands with the two detectives, who looked surprised as they greeted her. She smiled.

  The one called Spence drove. She was fast, and they were at the headquarters building in minutes. Small town, Roberta thought, should be easier to find this creep in a small town. Everybody knows everybody. But since they haven’t caught him yet, he must be doing something right. The data she’d gotten suggested a thorough investigation. She couldn’t fault the forensics or anything else, except maybe the victim backgrounds.

  She followed Alan and Spence to a small conference room. She had everything she needed—whiteboard, projectors, tape decks, and coffee, thank god, coffee. The tables would do and the chairs looked comfortable fo
r police issue.

  The Violent Crimes Linkage Analysis System, VICLAS, had given her nothing, and that surprised her. Whoever this guy was, he was free and clear, so a psychopath rather than a sociopath, perhaps. No early history, at least not one that anyone knew about. And the paraphilia she couldn’t grasp. There was no evidence, but the bodies were degraded. His recipe for sexual fulfillment was still in the clouds, but she’d find it. It was there and she’d find it.

  She poured a coffee and nodded to the two detectives. “Let’s get started, then. I’m a criminal behaviour analyst, a full fellow, certified by the International Criminal Investigative Fellowship. There are only four of us at present who are fully qualified. We have two in the RCMP and the OPP have the other two. I have ten years’ experience in the behavioural unit, so I’m about the best shot you guys have.”

  She looked expectantly at the two detectives. “Serial ritual crimes like these are bloody rare, and it’s even rarer to find one as controlled as this one, so he’s going to be difficult to identify and apprehend. You better face the fact that you may never find him. I imagine the shit has already hit the fan, and it’s going to get thicker every day we spend looking for this guy. He’s not the usual impulsive offender, he doesn’t make messes he can’t control, and he doesn’t escalate. That’s worrisome. He’s likely on number three from what I understand, and there’s no apparent change in the timeline or degree of control.”

  “So we got nothin’ and you’re saying you got nothin’ either?” Spence looked at Roberta and shook her head. “So why’d you come, then?”

  “We’ve got a lot more than nothing, and I think you know that. We’ve also got the rarest of the rare, either a sociopath with iron control, or a psychopath with no criminal history, a hunting ground we haven’t yet identified, and a disposal area the size of a small country. That’s why I’m here in person. This one’s special, and we can learn a lot from the investigation. Being on site will give me a chance to help as info rolls in.

  “What we’re going to do here, what we’re doing already, is use geographic profiling to narrow the search area and identify the perp’s anchor point. Much of that search is underway already. The techs are using Dragnet, but the area is huge, so we do what we can with it. Beyond that, we do have a profile.

  “You both know that profiling is a guess, but a very educated guess based on solid science both psychological and technical. Spence, you’re obviously skeptical and about as receptive as a fundamentalist with the theory of evolution, but I’m asking you as a professional to suspend your judgement and go with the profile. Maybe when we get this guy, you’ll see how close the profile comes.

  “Okay, here we go. Given what Alan sent me, here’s the basics. Guys like this usually act alone but can pair up. I think this guy has a partner. I’ll tell you why later. Victims can be anybody in a specific group, in this case young women, usually from the same ethnic group. But in this case, that doesn’t seem to follow. What does, though, is that he’ll find his victims in an area that is of special significance to him, either one he knows well or one that contains victims who satisfy criteria that matter to him.”

  Alan and Spence both sat forward and spoke at the same time. Alan stopped and handed it to Spence.

  “We know something about that. This creep takes young women from the stroll or the surrounding area. We know that. The first girl was staying there and disappeared the next day. She was sexually active and bunking with hookers. The second one, the Asian girl, was playing around on the stroll. We’ve got another girl who was with her on two separate occasions. The third one we’re not so sure about. She’s missing and likely the third victim, and she had to have some sort of connection with the same area that we don’t understand yet. If he’s getting them from there, there’s gotta be some kind of sexual angle to this. We find that, maybe we’ve got him.”

  Roberta nodded. “That’s good stuff. That helps a lot. We know what the stroll’s about, and later I’d like to see it. So we know his ritual fantasies are locked to that kind of thing. Somehow, the disembowelling has a sexual base. The ritual arranging of the bodies reinforces that. We just don’t know what the significance is to him yet, but we will. You guys read the papers so you know about the stuff going on in Rwanda and Darfur at the moment, school girls killed and dismembered, the killers taking their eyes, breasts, hair, sexual organs, and tongues because all these parts can be used to provide greater powers. It all comes from a perverse system of beliefs. Our guy’s like that. There’s something in the rituals that gives him dominance in some way, and we need to work on that. He’s precise, so we know the rituals must be performed exactly each time, or the whole thing won’t work.”

  Roberta looked at Alan and Spence and placed her hands flat on the table. “So what do we know about him? He’s certainly intelligent, but like most successful psychopaths, he lacks empathy. People will be objects he can use or manipulate. He’ll essentially be without conscience, so the restraints we feel, he won’t.

  “If he has a job, it will likely show in the timeframe of his abductions. If they’re at night, for example, he may possess a day job he can’t leave. Given this guy, though, I suspect he’d work at something that gave him control over his time.

  “In the basic categories, he’s between twenty and thirty-five, younger rather than older. He’s Caucasian, he’s male, he’s intelligent, he lives here in town or close by, and he has no criminal history, but he will have had a strict upbringing that isolated him. He’ll be well groomed and reasonably attractive, and his demeanour will be like anyone else’s. In short, he’ll appear quite normal. He will likely keep himself close to the investigation in some way. There’ll be some satisfaction for him in our bumbling attempts to apprehend him, but it won’t be obvious.

  “What makes this guy special is his control. He isn’t showing any sign yet of breaking down. He’s what we call a poacher/stalker. He’ll always go to the same area for victims. He’ll follow them and remove them from the scene. The dirty work he does elsewhere. Over time, which we don’t have, he’ll become less stable, less controlled. The crime scenes will be messier, rituals less ordered. He’ll spend less time planning and his bloodlust will grow stronger. That should be happening now, but it isn’t. He’s unusual in that respect, and he’s going to be hard to find.”

  Spence interrupted with her usual impatience. “So what do we do that we haven’t done already? We know about the stroll, but it doesn’t help us much. We’ve got the victims’ histories, and they don’t help much either. All we really know is that he finds them on the stroll, takes them somewhere else, does god knows what to them, then dumps the bodies in the bloody woods, mutilates them, and leaves them where we can’t find them until somebody stumbles on the remains. All we got is we maybe understand him a little better.”

  “That’s a lot. Understanding him is what will show him to us. The more we know about him and his victims, the closer we get. Look, we already know where he gets them, we know where he leaves them, we know at least in part what he does to them. We know his rituals—we don’t understand them, but we know them. He’s young too, around twenty to thirty-five, and he has a partner. And here’s why.”

  Roberta stood and began pacing back and forth along the white board. She stopped and drew a thick asterisk. “The rituals he practises gain in significance and power if there is someone else to recognize their importance. That someone will have to be there when they’re performed. That someone also has to be younger and under his authority, since he alone controls. This second guy’s a follower, submissive, but a willing participant. Our psychopath is growing, coming into power. He’ll perform the rituals again and again until his power is so great he can challenge whoever he sees as more dominant than he is. It’ll go on and on.”

  She sat down again, resting her chin on her long fingers. “I doubt he’ll wait much longer to flex that power, and that may give us our one shot. He’s going to challenge someone, someone who may lie in h
is past. He may be the one whose control shaped our guy, the one authority he could not conquer. But he’s going to try now. It may not help us catch him, but I think that’s what he’ll do. He already feels superior to all of us.”

  “So how do you see going on from here?” Alan asked. “We can stake out the area, there’s enough pressure coming down, funding won’t be a problem. We can canvass friends again, we can do all that, but we’ve done it twice already. I doubt there’ll be much more to get.”

  Roberta leaned back. “You can fill the stroll with plainclothes, but they’ll be obvious to the girls, so it won’t work. It’ll just warn the guy that we know his ground. Before we go any further, we need to get everything out. Spread it out here, look at it, see if we can find links, see if anything stands out, see if we can increase our knowledge of this guy.”

  For the rest of the night, that’s what they did.

  They took one break to show Roberta the stroll and to talk to the employees of the jazz bar where Dina worked. They borrowed a pickup truck from one of the clerks and drove first to the bar on Front, where they talked to the manager and a waitress without getting any more than they had. Then they drove up and down Victoria Road a number of times.

  While they were driving, Alan told Cannon about the two private detectives. He explained how they used them to gather info from the girls who wouldn’t talk to cops. He mentioned that it was a private deal, the department didn’t know and wouldn’t approve, so it had to be on the sly. Roberta listened quietly, noticing Spence’s grimace.

  “You good with this?”

  Spence sighed and shook her head. “I don’t like doing it. I don’t think they have any place in our case, but I gotta admit, they get results we can’t. So yeah, I’m good with it. We just gotta keep it quiet is all. The boss gets even a sniff, we’re screwed.”