“I’ve heard that claim.” Leo didn’t add, “and it’s a pile of crap,” but he didn’t need to. It was obvious what he felt.
“Well, that’s pretty much it,” said Katherine. “Ed said they’re getting a subpoena to study the security tape at the casino and it would be good if you watched it too, Leo. You might recognize somebody.”
“Not necessarily. Better if it were one of Deidre’s friends. I keep telling you, I know almost nothing about her current life.”
“We might have trouble getting permission for civilians to look at that particular tape but let’s take it a step at a time. Ed said he’ll have it by tomorrow at the latest.”
“I presume they’re doing house-to-house?”
“That’s all underway. They’re starting in the area around the park.”
“I’d better go now,” said Katherine. “Can you tell Chris to pick up the phone for a minute?”
Leo handed the receiver to me and switched off the speaker phone. He walked over to the window and stood, arms folded around himself, looking out at the lake.
“Chris?”
“I’m here, Katherine.”
“Are we off speaker phone?”
“Yes.”
“How is he doing? He sounds completely on the verge.”
“Not quite but close.”
“Look, are you all right with sticking with him? I think he needs somebody with him right now.”
“Will do.”
“Keep me posted.”
We hung up. I looked over at Leo, sunk into himself staring out onto the cold waters that had so reluctantly yielded up his daughter. He realized I had finished my conversation with Katherine and he turned, walked back to the sofa, and sat down, sighing like an old man.
“If she was, quote, recently pregnant, unquote, when would she have conceived?”
“Around the end of September.”
“Did you ask her friends if she had a boyfriend?”
“I did, and according to them, she wasn’t going with anybody.”
“Were they lying?”
“I don’t think so. I had the impression they were very protective of Deidre and might have closed ranks, but that could have been because they haven’t had a chance to absorb what happened. Besides, Nora Cochrane says the same thing.”
“Deidre refused to say how she was impregnated with Joy. God knows, she might have gone on the Internet. ‘Wanted: a male to donate his sperm. Anybody with a congenital defect that will be sure to be passed on is preferred. Can be deaf, blind, crippled, mentally retarded, doesn’t matter, because God knows, those groups have been discriminated against for decades.’” He slammed his fist on the table, rattling the coffee mugs. “‘And we all know that we must make a statement to the world even if it is the innocent who suffer.’”
I put my hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Leo.”
He patted my hand, took a deep breath, and got to his feet.
“Why don’t I make us some lunch?”
I wasn’t actually hungry but he clearly wanted something to do. He strode off to the galley kitchen, leaving me feeling as if I were bobbing in the wake of a powerboat.
While he was slamming around with plates and sorting through his pots and pans, I laid out the emails and letters on the dining room table, arranging them by order of date. Then I took out my notebook and began to jot down some of my observations. Leo came back carrying two plates with a sandwich on each.
“I thought I had a can of soup but I don’t.” He grimaced at me. “I’m a bachelor, what can I say? My lady love lives in the Big Smoke so I don’t bother to cook for myself. I eat out or order in.”
It was news to me that he even had a lady love, and frankly, I felt a twinge of relief. She could take care of him.
He put the plates on the cube table. Even from where I sat, I could see that the edges of the bread were curling up. A touch on the dry side.
“It’s tuna, no mayonnaise, I’m out. Is that all right?”
“Sure.”
He picked up his sandwich, took a bite, and put it back on the plate. “Can’t eat just yet. I’ll save it for later.”
Out of politeness I began to nibble on my sandwich.
“You have a guy over the pond, don’t you, Chris?”
I nodded, speech being a little difficult at the moment as the bread was sticking to the roof of my mouth. I took a swallow of the weak coffee to wash it down.
“Long-distance relationships are hard, aren’t they? I wish Caroline would move here but she’s committed to her job. She also has a teenage son who she feels needs her to stay.”
“At least Toronto is only an hour or so away. Gill, the man I’m seeing, lives in the Hebrides.”
“Toronto? I didn’t mean Toronto. Caroline lives in New York. We met on a conference this spring. She’s a psychologist. No, I could handle Toronto, but we only get to see each other every couple of months.”
“Have you told her what has happened?”
“Not yet. She’ll want to come up here and be with me, and to tell the truth, I’d prefer to be alone for a while. I’ll call her in a couple of days.”
It wasn’t up to me to give him a lecture about maintaining good relationships but I knew how I’d feel if Gill took a few days to tell me about the most important event in his life. I wouldn’t like it one bit.
“Besides,” he continued. “Loretta, my ex, my second ex, should be here tomorrow and she’ll be enough to deal with. It’s only decent if I offer her to stay here. I have three bedrooms.”
“Right.” I could see how a new girlfriend and an ex-wife under the same roof might be a little tricky.
He leaned back against the sofa. He looked exhausted.
“We always tell the families that death was instantaneous, don’t we? Unless they insist on the truth, which is usually much uglier. I’ve often wondered why they don’t press us for more details. Now I know. My mind keeps sticking on her last moments. How afraid she must have been. You don’t strangle somebody who’s young and healthy in a few moments. She would have struggled against it, feeling consciousness slip away, she would have been wondering if this was it. If this was in fact the end of her life.”
Abruptly, he got to his feet, walked over to a cabinet and picked up a framed picture. He brought it over to me and held it out. A younger Leo was standing to the side of a fair-haired woman, attractive, smartly dressed. She was holding a baby in her arms. They were both smiling down on the child, their faces full of love.
“Deidre was only about three or four weeks old when we had the picture taken. Would you believe we didn’t know she was deaf? How could we? Her eyes weren’t focussing yet but she’d do the usual things babies do at that age. Cry, burp, fill her diapers… Loretta thought I’d be squeamish changing diapers but I wasn’t. I enjoyed making her comfortable. I liked getting her to sleep.”
“When did you learn she couldn’t hear?”
“We began to suspect something was wrong when she turned two months. She didn’t seem to follow sounds. We tried holding one of her rattles out of sight and shaking and she didn’t turn her head. We took her right away to a specialist at Toronto Sick Kids and the tests showed she was profoundly deaf.”
He took the picture from me and returned it to the shelf. “Deidre was a good mother. At least as far as I know she was. She was certainly devoted, which as we both know isn’t necessarily the same thing… Her last thoughts would probably have been about her daughter. Imagining those final moments is almost unbearable, and I can also feel in myself an overwhelming desire to find her killer and make him feel exactly the same thing. I’d like to press the life out of him slowly, so that he knows what it’s like. Then I’d revive him and then do it again… And again.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We finished our sandwiches in silence. Or rather, I should say, I half-finished my sandwich, and Leo took one bite of his and put it back on the plate.
“Are you ready to look at the letters?
” I asked.
He nodded. “How many altogether?”
“Twenty-six responses all told: fifteen email printouts, eleven letters.”
“Let’s look at the emails first. They’re not going to yield up any physical evidence but the letters might.”
We moved over to the table.
All the emails had been sent within the first week after the news broke in the media in April. Four were supportive, “good for you” sort of messages, and all of those senders identified themselves as part of the Deaf Culture. There was a sweet one from a woman who said she knew how difficult it must have been for Deidre when she discovered her child was deaf, she herself was hard of hearing now, and she wished her well. She seemed to have completely missed the point that Deidre had engineered the child’s deafness. The remaining ten responses all expressed disapproval ranging from relatively mild to strongly worded anger and disgust at what she had done. Half of those had come from women and three-quarters claimed they were writing from Christian convictions. Two were foul and used explicit sexual language but neither of these used their names.
“We can get Ray to follow up on those email addresses,” I said.
Leo was looking more and more haggard. “Why didn’t she tell me this was happening? We could have put blocks on her computer.”
“That would have been difficult. They were all going to the work address.”
“Did her supervisor know about this?”
“I’m not sure. She knew that Deidre had caused quite a stir, as she put it, and she did say there were a few phone calls, but Deidre’s friend Jessica works the reception desk so she could have fielded things for her. She said she wanted Deidre to get rid of the letters but she refused.”
I could see Leo’s jaw clench. “Why would she wallow in shit like that?”
I had no answer to that and it wasn’t really a question.
“Ready for the letters?”
“I suppose so.”
We both put on the sterile gloves and I removed the letters from the plastic bag. There were eleven altogether, and according to the dates, as with the emails, five of them were written soon after the news broke. All had been mailed locally.
“These five I put together because they were sent within a week of the news story.” Leo nodded. He knew what I was getting at. Typically people respond to the news quickly or the impulse fades. “The remaining six were mailed at regular intervals of a month apart, the most recent being October 11. I’d say they are all from the same person who also sent one in that first week. Whoever wrote them is persistent and that as we know can indicate obsession.”
“Let’s look at the first batch.” He examined the envelopes. “All of them were mailed to the OHHA.”
We went on.
Two actually had letterhead and full signatures; both expressed disapproval but were quite polite in tone. A third was supportive. “Go stick it to them, Dee,” signed Mags on pretty beige paper with flowers along the edge.
“Anybody you know?” I asked Leo.
“No.”
Of the remaining two in this initial bunch, one was typed with no signature, short and to the point. WHY? The last one was handwritten and had the c-word repeated in clumsy letters across the page.
“Obscene but typically unimaginative, wouldn’t you say?” remarked Leo.
People in the news who were in any way controversial received this kind of thing all the time. They might be boring and unimaginative to us, but to the recipient, they were often disturbing. A psychic spit in the face.
Leo put this pile to one side. “So let’s have a study of our obsessive.”
I’d arranged the letters with the earlier one on the top. It was handwritten, no signature. The lettering was in block capitals, the paper, yellow lined notepaper. The post office stamp revealed it had been mailed three days after Deidre had appeared on television.
“Hold on.”
Leo went back to the kitchen and returned with a calendar.
“The first one was mailed on April 12, which was a Monday, three days after the television interview, which was on a Friday, and six days after the newspaper article, which was Tuesday, April 6.”
This could mean the sender had been watching TV rather than reading the newspaper, but it wasn’t conclusive obviously and in itself mightn’t mean anything. However, when trying to draw up a criminal profile, these small details could add up to something significant.
The message was on an entire sheet of paper but the writer had used only the top section, double-spaced and kept within the lines.
HOW COULD YOU DO SUCH A SIN. YOU AND YOUR OFFSPRING DESERVE TO D BURN IN HELL. I HOPE YOU DO.
“Anything obvious you see right off the bat?” Leo asked.
“There’s a slightly unusual construction in ‘do such a sin.’ A more likely usage would be ‘commit such a sin.’ There is no question mark. The ‘d’ is stroked out; they could have been going to say ‘die.’ The tone is religious: ‘sin,’ ‘hell.’ ‘Offspring’ also isn’t typical. It’s an old-fashioned word. ‘Child’ or ‘daughter’ would be more common.”
Leo tapped the next envelope. “This was written a month later almost to the day. May 10, which was a Monday.”
“They’re spreading out on the page and the writing isn’t as tidy. Could be getting more agitated.”
YOU ARE SCUM OF EARTH. WHY ARE YOU HERE. I HOPE YOU GO TO HELL WHERE YOU CAN NO LONGER TORMENT OTHERS.
“The message is different in this one,” I continued. “Another religious reference but look at ‘ you can no longer torment others.’ It suggests that Deidre’s act has been weighing on the writer’s mind, or that they see Joy as being the one who is tormented, presumably by being born deaf…”
“Next is June 14, also a Monday.”
“This one is taking up most of the page and the letters are not keeping to the lines anymore.”
“Increasing disturbance?”
“Could be.”
YOU DESERVE NO SYMPATHY ONLY PUNISHMENT FOR SIN. HEDE MY WORDS. GOD WILL SMITE YOU IN HIS JUSTICE. HE LOVES ONLY THE PURE AND THAT IS NOT YOU AS WE ALL KNOW.
“‘Hede’ is misspelt, although that could be deliberate. But it’s an unusual word, old-fashioned, too. A more threatening tone. Notice the writer reverts to the plural in ‘we.’ Previously they’ve used ‘I.’ Could be a dissociation taking place, a withdrawal from committing to the first person ‘I.’”
“Number four is stamped, July 12. Monday. There was nothing in August. Five is a Wednesday, September 15, which breaks the pattern. The last one, number six, is October 11. A Monday again.”
I studied the letters. “Number four is back to being neat, all the writing kept between the lines.”
GOD SEES EVERYTHING AND YOUR SINS ARE HATEFUL TO HIM. YOU EXPECT TO BE PUNISHED.
“What do you make of that last sentence? Is it a Freudian slip, do you think?” I asked Leo.
“Could be. Is the writer unconsciously revealing that they expect to be punished or are they projecting something onto Deidre?” He shook his head. “Something that may unfortunately be true about her. She was always getting into trouble when she was in school. Negative attention is better than no attention.” He looked up at me. “I wasn’t the best father in the world, Chris. I took it personally when she lashed out at me and I withdrew from her. By the time I’d faced the truth and tried to make it up to her, it was too late. She was too bitter.”
“What about her mother?”
“Loretta was worse and I mean that in all objectivity. She would disappear for weeks, sometimes months at a time on one of her special missions, but on more than one occasion she had to come back because Deidre was in trouble. Usually she was very resentful but at least whatever it was the girl had done, it brought her mother home.” He rubbed his hand through his hair. “When Dee went to university, she seemed to have outgrown all of that hellraising and she settled down and got some good marks. I wasn’t really aware of how militant she had become u
ntil she moved back to Orillia. The pregnancy was a smack in the eye for both Loretta and me. There’s no doubt she was getting back at us. Who knows if this second pregnancy was the same deal?” For a moment, he looked devastated. “It’s a moot point now, isn’t it?”
I wondered if all psychiatrists considered that everything people did was in reaction to something else. Perhaps Deidre had strong convictions all on her own but who was I to say? Leo could be right. It had been pointed out to me by a therapist I had some sessions with that some of my own decisions were made on an unconscious level as reactions to my mother, including to some extent joining the police force. According to him, I felt a compulsive need to establish order and punish the disorderly. Hey, that’s one explanation but it sort of left out believing in justice and protection of the vulnerable from the bully boys.
“Christine…?”
I returned to the letters, trying to sink into them, trying to get a feeling for the psyche of the writer. Think of it as the language whisperer.
The fifth and sixth letter were similar in tone and content.
YOU ARE A SINFUL DAUGHTER OF EVE. YOU SHOULD NOT BRETHE THE SAME AIR AS YOUR BETTERS. YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE HIS JUST RETRIBUTION.
THINGS ARE GETTING WORSE. DO NOT TAUNT ME WHORE OF BABYLON. GOD SEES AND HIS VENGEANCE IS SWIFT.
“What’d you think? What are we dealing with?” Leo asked, a touch of impatience in his voice.
“The gender is ambiguous. On the whole, the tone sounds more like it’s coming from a woman: ‘you should not breath the same air as your betters,’ for instance. That suggests an identification with the female, as does ‘he loves only the pure and that is not you.’ On the other hand, ‘do not taunt me, whore of Babylon,’ is more male-sounding…”
“You’re hedging your bets,” interrupted Leo. “Give me something definite.”
Threat assessment isn’t a science. I understood his frustration, but you can’t scan the letter into the computer and get a readout on a graph. The letters were ambiguous, which in itself said something about the writer. We could be dealing with some poor repressed woman who has spent her life being self-righteously nasty to others in the name of God but who would faint at the first sight of blood, or we could have a man who was shifting from the fantasy life to the real and was working himself up to murder.
The K Handshape Page 9