“Did the Down’s woman say anything about him being masked?”
“No, she said he looked like one of her teachers, whatever that means. The woman has a long history of being seductive and then saying some man asked her to expose herself. The case was not taken to the police for this reason but the institute does have it on record along with nine other incidents this particular girl reported.”
“Is that it for the lodges?”
“Yes, but Deidre went with somebody she knew. Torres lives two blocks away; he walks his dog. Why would she suspect him if he offered her a ride home? He was also walking Lily at the end of my street after I found that note in my mailbox. He gets around, that man does. And … one more thing. There is a doghouse outside in Doris’s backyard. Having the dog gives him a reason to be out on the streets at all hours but he could leave her in the kennel when he goes inside to do his prowling.”
“I’ve just thought of something else,” said Ed. “Remember he told us that he saw an officer writing out a ticket for Taylor’s camper van? We have been unable to find any record of a parking ticket being issued so I assume he made it up. I’m wondering what he was trying to conceal.”
“Where he was. I saw Deidre’s bed; it’s pretty narrow. It’s fairly certain that Taylor visited her a few weeks ago. She wanted another sperm donor. He’s a tall guy and I sort of doubt he would have stayed the night with the two of them in that bed. What if he left the house in the wee hours and Mr. Torres saw him? Sylvio wouldn’t want to admit he was on the streets at that hour, so he made up a story about the ticket. Directed us toward Taylor quite nicely.”
“Clever sod, isn’t he?” said Jamie.
“And ruthless. My guess is that Deidre was only one of various people he was keeping an eye on. I am convinced he targets the vulnerable and or the disabled.”
“But Deidre was a strong young woman,” protested David.
“She was, but in his eyes she was disabled. He might have thought she’d be weaker than she was. And perhaps he hates what he’d see as deformity, but at the same time he is excited by it.”
“Do you think he wrote the letters?” David asked.
“I’d bet a month’s wages on it. It’s just too much of a coincidence that Miss Bentley was using yellow paper when he had a temp job in the building. Maybe he liked the look of it, professional and all that.”
“We’ll get a search warrant,” said Katherine. “Does he have a vehicle?”
“Yes, he owns a 1999 green Ford van.”
Ed laced his hands behind his head. “It’s time to have a talk with Mr. Torres. And a look into that van of his. Do you want to come, Chris?”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
We were there within ten minutes. Mrs. Pereira was as dour as ever in her black dress and tightly drawn grey hair. She regarded us with thinly disguised hostility, not anxiety, which I thought would be a more normal response.
“He no here. What you want?”
“We’d like to talk to him.”
“What about?”
Mrs. Pereira was the kind of woman who projected such sour energy, it was hard not to respond in kind. Whatever had happened in her life had turned her as bitter as absinthe. Ed was the one who was speaking to her but she didn’t look at him, addressing her answers to me. She struck me as one of those women who are on the edge of madness most of their lives. Not certifiable but mad nonetheless: for whom the world is a place of danger, where people can never be trusted, and the only way to handle it is to keep your own den as small and tightly controlled as possible. She was a woman it would be easy to hate and I wondered if that was what happened to her son. A hatred he then acted out on other, more vulnerable women.
I forced myself to smile. “Is Sylvio out walking Lily?”
“Yes. Why should he no walk her?”
“Where does he usually go?”
“I don’t know. He walk dog, not me. She his dog.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Pereira.” Ed handed her his card, which she handled as if it had been dropped in shit. He nodded at me and we went outside.
“Whew, nasty old bat, isn’t she? What shall we do? Wait until he gets back?”
“I suppose that’s all we can do but frankly I’d like to find him right now before he finds somebody else.”
“So far he’s only worked at night, Chris.”
“True, but he’s accelerating. If we assume he’s the one who killed Deidre and molested Doris, that’s only two days apart.”
“I’ll put out an all car alert.”
“Good idea. Let’s have a look out back and see if he’s taken his van. If not, we can impound it.”
We went around to the parking lot at the rear of the building. The spot that said Reserved For Superintendent was empty.
“Shit, Ed. I might be getting as paranoid as Mrs. Pereira but I’m getting more queasy by the minute.”
“Me too. It must be catching. Well, there’s nothing to stop you and I doing a bit of prowling ourselves. Orillia isn’t that big a place and so far we’ve no reason to think he knows he’s under suspicion.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
We drove around the streets for the next hour and darkness fell. The alert was out but so far nobody had sighted the man or his van. First off, I’d phoned Avril Bentley and told her to warn every residence on her list to call the police immediately if anyone answering Torres’s description was seen in the vicinity. And make sure all supers knew this was serious and to be extra-vigilant. I put the fear of God up her proper British behind.
“Do you want to go to Tim Hortons for a coffee?” Ed asked me.
“Sure. Who knows, Torres might be sitting in there having a donut and make our life easier.”
He wasn’t but it helped both of us to take a break. Ed treated me to another coconut-sprinkled donut. We sipped our coffees quietly for a few moments.
“Ed, let’s think the unthinkable. Our man is out there on the prowl and we don’t know where he’s going to strike next. Let’s assume he’s following the same MO. He targets vulnerable women and he has used his line of work to get into the buildings and to alleviate suspicion, which means he is probably in his coveralls. Not to mention trailing around with a cute little dog. Remember Ted Bundy was superb at allaying suspicion. A supposedly broken arm, and if I remember correctly, he also used a dog once.”
I fished in my briefcase and took out the precious list from Reliable Cleaning Services. “He’s targeted two buildings where he was working previously as a temp. Let’s see.” I scanned the list. “He worked for a couple of days over on John Street at a home for the mentally handicapped. That was in September.” I stuffed the last piece of donut into my mouth. “Let’s go and check it out. There are five other places that house seniors. Some of them have underground parking, which may be where he’s put his van and why we can’t find it.”
Activity was better than sitting around worrying, and although I didn’t hold out much hope I could feel my pulse beating faster.
Our first two stops yielded us nothing. I was beginning to wonder if Torres had done a flit on us. We checked back constantly with the officer who was stationed outside the apartment building but he hadn’t shown up there.
Finally, we pulled up in front of the Oak Tree Residence. A discreet sign on the front lawn announced what it was but the house itself was one of the grand old mansions left over from a time when Orillia was a town of rich merchants who wanted the world to know how successful they were. At a guess it would house about twenty people. Not the best place for somebody to move around unnoticed the way Torres had been able to in the more institutional seniors’ residences.
“Let’s check out the back first,” I said to Ed.
We left the car and walked around the building, which at the moment was ablaze with light. I could see into most of the rooms where it seemed the residents, some of them in wheelchairs, were sitting in front of television sets. Some were alone, others with a minder beside them. In a l
arge dining room downstairs, two women in white aprons were setting the tables for dinner.
At the rear of the building was a small paved yard and in the far corner was an overhang of evergreens, which created a deep pool of shadow. The single light on the building didn’t extend this far but I could just make out the shape of a van, colour indistinguishable in the gloom. I touched Ed’s arm and whispered.
“We’ve got him. That’s his van.”
“Do you think he’s in there? I can’t see a damn thing.”
Even as he said that, I detected a slight movement from the front seat.
“He’s there all right.”
Ed pulled out his cellphone. “I’ll get back up.”
Torres must have noticed us because I heard the car engine growl into life. It was an old enough model that the lights didn’t come on automatically and all I saw was a dark shape suddenly hurtling toward us. There wasn’t really anywhere to go. The house was on one side of us, the fence on the other. Ed leaped one way and I the other and the van raced past, missing us by inches. I could see Torres, and sitting up beside him, gazing curiously out of the window, was his dog, Lily. The van made the turn onto the driveway, with tires squealing like some Hollywood chase scene.
He would have got away but he’d misjudged his speed and the sharpness of the turn. The van swayed, stood up on two tires, and skidded into the side of the house. Torres threw open the door and jumped out. Ed and I were both scrambling; an adrenaline rush leaves you exhausted within minutes but we both ran like hell toward him. Neither of us was armed but Ed has a good voice and he bellowed.
“Stop. We’re police. Stop right now.”
Torres turned around stumbled and then sat down ignominiously in the driveway, his hands raised.
“Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me.”
Panting, Ed stood over him.
“One move from you, you fucker, and I’ll kick your balls in.”
Under oath, I would never admit I heard that, but in truth he said it for me. Within minutes we heard the wail of cruisers and uniformed officers poured out of their cars. Torres was safely handcuffed, read his rights, and taken off to one of the cars. As he walked away, Ed called out. “Officer Johnson, will you tell the prisoner to zip up his fly. It’s come undone.”
So that’s what he was doing. I’d suspected as much.
EPILOGUE
We were able to get a search warrant immediately and I accompanied Ed and the forensic officers to Torres’s apartment. Mrs. Pereira was hysterical and even though we had taken the precaution of bringing along her parish priest, she did everything she could to physically prevent us entering Torres’s room. Finally, Ed was forced to have her restrained and removed temporarily from the premises. Torres didn’t own a computer but I wasn’t the least surprised to find dozens of porn magazines stashed under his bed. I’ve yet to see a case of rape where the rapist hadn’t fed on a steady diet of pornography. He’d also made copies of all his “correspondence,” which was extensive. They were in fact neatly pasted into a scrapbook. He was proud of them. Deidre was only one of the recipients. The other letters were to people in the news who in some way had drawn his ire, mostly by breaking some moral code. The note he’d put in my mailbox was something of an anomaly, but I’d bet he got off on thinking he was inducing fear. The room was small and stuffy but the feeling of breathing in foul air was more psychological than physical.
Finally, Ed, me, a legal aid lawyer who couldn’t hide her dislike for her client, and Torres all came together in the interview room at the police station. Torres made our job easy. After a brief denial — “I was just walking Lily” — he collapsed and made a complete confession. I wish I could say it was because he was seized by conscience but I can’t. He was full of the rationalizations and selfcentredness that was so characteristic of men like him. He told us he made a habit of parking somewhere outside of places where he might be able to see handicapped people or elderly people. And yes, he admitted he did masturbate in his van while he watched. Yes, he had taken it further on several occasions, taking advantage of his job as super to gain access to the buildings. He swore he didn’t intend to hurt anybody, and according to him, he was gentle with all the women. There were several more that we didn’t know about, including two young residents at the Huronia Institute, both of whom were confined to wheelchairs. They hadn’t reported him.
I asked him about the sexual assault on Doris Bryant and he answered eagerly. After all he’d had nobody to share his experience with before this. Although he wept every so often, I thought it was pity for himself only. Rather like Sigmund Forgach, he was initially concerned about his mother and what she would say.
“Will she have to be told what the charges are?” he asked.
I stifled back a sarcastic retort. “We could just pretend you haven’t paid Lily’s dog licence, if you like.”
All of this outpouring had taken about two hours. We took a break, then returned. Torres’s counsel met my eyes as we went in. She was too professional to say anything but it was clear from her expression what her feelings were. She would have been only too happy to get a different brief.
He was across from me, his arms on the table, hands clasped as if in prayer.
“Why don’t you tell us in your own words what happened on Tuesday night?”
His eyes welled up with tears and mucus ran from his nose. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “I didn’t intend to hurt her. I was just driving around when I saw her walking away from the park. It was a miserable night so I thought she’d appreciate a lift. To tell the truth, I didn’t notice it was Deidre at first. I just thought … I just thought she was another young girl who should have been at home. She recognized me and Lily and got in no problem. It was then that I realized who she was. She was the one who had deliberately made her child deaf to suit her whim.”
At this point, Torres looked angry. He became lost in his thoughts for a few minutes. I didn’t hurry him. Then he went on.
“I drove her in the direction of the Narrows away from the town centre. I don’t know why exactly, I thought I’d try to talk to her. Get her to see how wrong she’d been. It was impossible. She didn’t understand what I was saying and when she saw we weren’t going to her house, she became alarmed and wanted me to let her out … I had to hold her in the car or she would have jumped out. She struggled and she actually hit me … I don’t really remember what happened after that. All I wanted to do was talk to her and she was fighting like a wildcat … Her scarf got sort of caught in the seat belt and she started to choke … Before I could do anything to stop it, she died. Right before my eyes…”
A long pause now. Given what I’d seen of the scarf, so tight it was biting into Deidre’s neck, I didn’t believe him for a minute that the strangulation was an accident.
“What happened then?” I prompted him.
“I panicked, I suppose. I thought if I put her in the lake I’d be able to get far away from the scene. Maybe it would look like suicide. So I drove back to the park, filled her pockets with stones, and put her in the water. Then I went home.”
“You came back in the morning?”
“I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to know what was happening. I didn’t expect to see you there and her father. Poor man, she’s brought him a lot of grief.” He looked at me from underneath his eyelids. “I tried to help, didn’t I? “
His tone was “I was a good boy, wasn’t I?”
I didn’t answer.
That was it. He was charged and remanded over until magistrate’s court the following day.
The following week was hectic. I told Leo about Torres’s confession and he looked stricken. “A few more minutes and he might have missed her.” Then he rubbed at his arms as if they were covered in mire. “And to think I actually had that man’s coat on my body.”
I took Chelsea to visit Joy and she was wonderful with her. We went to a park and they ran around and played on the slide till their no
ses were getting red with the cold. Nora had told Joy as best as she could about her mother’s death. She herself had agreed to stay on at the house for the foreseeable future and I thought Joy was as settled as she could be. Loretta had to fly out to the east coast but Leo was visiting every day and getting to know his grandchild.
Ahmed moved out.
Paula’s biopsy came back positive and we’re getting ready to deal with the onslaught of chemotherapy treatment.
On Friday, Gill phoned me just as I was reading over the statements of the kids involved in the drug bust.
“Give me your opinion first then I’ll tell you what has happened.”
“Is this a trick question? Is my reputation on the line?”
“Yes.”
“Here goes then. I think that the girl, Janet, is telling the truth about what happened, as are the other two lads. But I’d say Angus definitely has something to hide. He’s the one I’d lean on.”
“Angus, huh?”
“Oh come on Gill, out with it. Am I right or not?”
He laughed. “Absolutely right. On all counts. And you did that with your coloured pencils?”
“Cut it out.”
“Right then. What has happened is that Angus Neil had made a clean breast of it. He was devastated about what happened to Janet, who is recovering nicely by the way. He confessed he has been dealing in cannabis for some time. He has a job at the grocery store and every two weeks, a boat comes in from the mainland. He unloads the groceries and transports them to the shop. Get this. In a box of Cadbury Tray chocolate that is marked for him, he will find his weed, all ground up and ready to go. It’s in a false bottom apparently. He just declares the box to be damaged and nobody questions it. Then he had a system worked out with the other boys to put their dope in a hollow tree on the school playing field. They put in their money then later on pick up the dope.
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