“I don’t know what to think right now,” Leith said. “You have a name for this guy? Dion mentioned a name to Wallace, Ray Barkley. He gave a different name to Doug, but Doug can’t remember. He thought it was maybe Hutch. He said you’d know what it was.”
“Let me go through my notes,” Montgomery said. “Might as well have a seat, Dave. Note taking was never my strong point. Nor is a tidy desk.”
Leith took a chair and said nothing, hoping his silence and firmly crossed arms spoke louder than words.
Monty shuffled through papers. He said, “I have to tell you, I like Cal, but the guy’s not firing on all cylinders. The accident, I guess — well, you’ve seen it. He drifts. I don’t suggest he hears voices, but, well, I know paranoia when I see it. I sometimes think he’s fixated on me, for some reason.”
Leith cut in, because Monty’s uncalled-for psych assessment was not only annoying, but also slowing down the search. “Let’s just get that name.”
Monty flipped back through his notebook, and at last put his finger on an entry. “Starkey, Ray. Now, why didn’t I write down his address?”
Starkey, not Starsky and Hutch, Leith thought. Damn Doug Paley and his fucked-up memory palace. Then it pinged — the gravel-voiced man who had called with a hot tip just the other day. If Wallace had got the name just a degree closer, he would have twigged. “No address? How about a phone number?”
Monty snapped his fingers. “I know why I didn’t write it down. Because I knew where he lived. He pointed it out to us. Green roof. Cal was there, so he’d know as well.”
Leith cut the conversation short, leaving his chair spinning on its casters. He had the tipster’s address and phone number in his notebook, somewhere, but there was a quicker solution. He crossed the floor to his own station and seized the phone directory, leafed through it still standing, and found the name listed. He tore the page out clean and was out the door, gathering backup as he left.
* * *
Dion had abandoned the hatchet, grabbing instead the rickety kitchen chair. It was working so far, and he was keeping the animal at bay, lion-tamer style, but it wouldn’t last. The dog was a perpetual motion machine, a dedicated ball of muscles, and Dion was only a badly maintained man, already weakening under the assault. Dripping sweat, tripping in the lamplight, shouting in fright.
He was exhausted, and the monster was just warming up.
The dog’s strategy was simple: hit, hit, hit, and never relent till the prey is on its knees. Once on its knees, latch onto an artery and shred. Dion knew that to fall would be the end of him. He had to stay focused and upright. He had to keep out of corners. An object or wall met his heel, and in knee-jerk reaction, he gave a samurai yell and danced forward with his lion-tamer chair. The bluff worked until the dog caught the rhythm of the dance and came looping around, aiming for a rear attack.
Dion synchronized his turns with the dog’s circling, keeping his back covered, but the plan was unsustainable. He needed to up the tempo, spin on his heel. He had just enough strength to pull it off, and the chair legs smacked the dog with force, catching it in mid-lunge. The dog flopped to the ground with a grunt. One of the chair legs had snapped off and flown wide. The others dangled loose. Dion stopped spinning in one direction and unwound dizzily. He steadied out, trying to catch a breath before the animal could rebound. He watched the dog find its footing, shake out the blur of impact, reconnoitre.
Dion threw aside his broken chair. The dog lowered its breast to cement as though to rest, and was silent. But it wasn’t resting. Its silence was scarier than its noise. Dion grabbed the hatchet off the floor.
“Aim for the eyes,” he muttered, dry-mouthed. Bash out its brains.
The dog scrabbled its hind legs on the cement and launched, and this time Dion stayed to meet it, hatchet hooked back over his shoulder like a baseball bat aiming for a home-run shot.
The moment stretched, and he was playing softball on the detachment’s co-ed team at Kinsmen Park, more a social event than a sport, but there were points to be won, and he would swing the bat like everyone else, hitting it square occasionally, and when the ball sailed in an arc, he would sprint through the dust like his life depended on it.
Strange how it all merged, sun and fun with a basement from hell, so when the dog sprang for him, he swung with all the home-run force he could muster. His arms jolted as metal made contact with flesh, and he was still drawing parallels. Was it just the act of swinging the bat, or was it his heart slamming in the socked-in summer heat? It was Looch Ferraro shouting encouragements, and it was David Leith grabbing him and dragging him backwards as the dog spun around for the last attack.
It was all things at once. The world whirled, and he backed against Leith with the man’s arm outstretched across him, pointing at the dog as if conducting a lesson on danger. That’s the enemy, this is the cannon, here’s what you do. He watched the cannon in Leith’s fist kick hard, the explosion like applause from the bleachers. He wasn’t sure where he was supposed to turn next, as Looch and sunshine disappeared, but it didn’t matter, because Leith led the way, pulling him out of a collapse and away from the dog yelping about on cold cement, all the way to the staircase, where he was released like baggage.
He sat on the wooden step, drenched and shuddering, and it had nothing to do with baseball or the summer’s heat. He was back in a dungeon in Lynn Valley — and now that his body was given free rein to hurt, it hurt like daggers.
* * *
Relieved of Dion’s weight, Leith turned to his final task. “Jesus Christ.” The newscasts would focus on this, like it was all that mattered. The force would get flooded with complaints, maybe even death threats. He drew his shoulders up and walked back to the dog, and for a moment watched it writhe on the floor, slithering about in its own blood, fatally wounded. Whatever anybody said, however noble it was in its heart, the animal had been unloved from the time it was taken from its mother, born and bred to go down fighting, with or without cause.
Like there wasn’t enough bad shit in this world.
Doing himself and Dion and everyone else a favour, not least the dog in its pain, Leith aimed low and plugged a final bullet into the creature’s solid skull.
Two members clattered down to the stairs. The junior constable only stared at the dead dog on the floor, and the senior told Leith, “Something upstairs you gotta see, Dave.”
“Now?”
“Right now.”
Thirty-Eight
CHOKE
She was maybe in her midteens, the skinny girl found in the closet in Starkey’s bedroom. She lay in a nest of damp, putrid bedding. Nobody wanted to move her until the paramedics showed up. The member who had summoned Leith upstairs now pointed out that the small closet door was rigged with a sliding lock latch, but as found, the bolt had not been shot. Maybe because it wasn’t needed; the prisoner was too weak to flee.
Leith glanced at the latch mechanism and saw it was fairly new, cheap-looking; a nickel-plated, hardware-store kind of device. The scars to the wood looked fresh. The room was fairly shipshape. Unremarkable, except for the lock on the closet door and, next to the neatly made single bed, as pointed out to Leith, a three-inch-diameter hole in the floor.
The hole looked historical, for an old vent pipe, possibly. Large enough to drop an apple through. Hunkering down, Leith peered through the hole and got a surprisingly good view of a swath of the basement below.
The paramedics arrived to remove the girl, and the shifting of body and bedding released a reek of mould, sour milk, stale urine. The girl looked parched and greasy. Her hair was the colour of milky tea. They had found Aphid.
* * *
In the morning the girl was responding to stimuli, though not communicating. JD had found an official name for her. She had taken what little data she had for the captive — approximate age, general description — and with much tracking through compute
r systems, provincially, then nationally, then internationally, she had linked her with a fifteen-year-old possible runaway from Seattle, missing for over a year. April Quail.
Dental records and an exchange of photographs between agencies confirmed her identity. Her parents were informed, and they made arrangements to come and collect their daughter — once she had woken from her fugue and given a statement.
On the second day her parents sat with her, and her unresponsive body was introduced to liquids. In the evening she murmured a few words, and Leith expected her to soak up food like a sponge, but was told that wasn’t to happen. Re-nourishment had to take place one sip at a time.
On the morning of the third day she uttered a few unintelligible words, and in the afternoon she gave her first coherent answer to Leith’s questions, spoken in a reedy whisper: “I don’t have to tell you any fucking thing.”
Rescue a wildcat, and it might bite. Reactions to police intervention varied, in Leith’s experience. He had received nice thank-you cards, and he had received gobs of spit. More spit than cards. So he wasn’t surprised to be sworn at by this little bag of bones.
He left JD and others to give it their best shot, and spent his time at the detachment, building a case against Ray Starkey.
Starkey was responsible for Ben Stirling’s death and disposal, and April Quail was going to prove it, once they had proved April Quail and Aphid were one and the same. Leith needed April to admit she was Aphid. He needed her testimony, because Ray Starkey wasn’t talking. Starkey had listened to his lawyer and was sticking to his guns. Even with the blood in the basement that was going to prove Ben Stirling died down there, without a confession, there was nothing to tie the homeowner to culpable homicide beyond the shadow of a doubt.
On the evening of the third day Leith talked to Aphid about his own daughter, Isabelle, or Izzy, or Iz. “April is a pretty name,” he said. “What do your friends call you?”
She told him her friends didn’t call her anything, because she had no friends.
“Isn’t Gunner a friend? What does he call you?”
She clammed up, but he had made progress. He texted JD to get over here right away. It was her turn to try. She had a way with the young and scared, and he bet she would succeed where he had failed. An hour later she proved him right.
* * *
With April Quail’s damning statement in front of him, Ray Starkey confessed.
An all-or-nothing kind of accused, he went from saying nothing to answering anything Leith asked. He first described the hot day in August when a young lady had come ringing the doorbell.
“She wanted to use the phone, eh?” Starkey said. “But I know the trick. She’s looking around, scoping the place for valuables. What was I to do? I invited her inside.”
Leith could think of a few good alternatives to inviting a potential burglar into your home. He said, “Sure. And then what?”
“Girl was hungry. Homeless. Not well. I said she could stay, and I’d take care of her till she figured out what to do. She stayed.”
Starkey seemed to half-believe his own story, but Leith continued to believe April’s. As she told it, she had been scoping the joint for Gunner, eyeing the place for an easy hit. But she was a young and inexperienced burglar’s assistant, and she had been offered cash in exchange for favours, and she had taken the lure, had followed her mark down the hall, towards the dim light of a bedroom, and from there straight to hell. Pepper spray, straight in the face, and next thing she knew she was locked in a closet.
Leith reminded Starkey of this radically different tale. Consent or pepper spray? Somebody here wasn’t telling the truth.
A smarter prisoner might have tried to lie his way out of trouble, or at least develop a selective memory. But Starkey didn’t seem to know what was in his own best interests. “Well, sir, that little girl had some learning to do,” he stated. “You can’t go robbing people and not pay for what you done. I told her me keeping her was a lot better’n what the cops would do to her.”
“Uh-huh? So what was the long-term plan?”
“I treated her right. I gave her food, bathroom breaks. But figured she’s got to promise to smarten up and go straight. I told her so. She wouldn’t promise, so I said I’d have to turn her in. But still, I wanted to give her a chance, y’know.”
According to April, there was no such wheeling and dealing. Just a lot of yelling and swearing and name calling, on both sides. When she came to, tied up and locked in a closet, the old bastard just called her a whore and a thief — through the closet door — and wouldn’t let her out.
There was no sexual assault, and yes, in the beginning he had fed her and let her go to the washroom. He wasn’t that bright, she could tell, and she expected she might even have escaped. But then the event happened. The horror. The night she had heard Ben. That was maybe four days after her capture. He had come to save her, she was sure of it. He was somewhere in the house, down below, screaming. Horrible, terrible screams that shredded her heart. In the silence that followed she knew Ben was dead. She had given up then. The days dragged by, countless days, and she felt herself fading. Without Ben, she didn’t want to live. Thanks for nothing.
What if Dion hadn’t come along and saved the day? April would have faded to nothing. She would have vanished without a trace, or ended up an unsolved mystery, down in another dark hole, just like her boyfriend.
Leith’s belief, based on the scraps of information he’d gotten from various sources, was that Ben Stirling, a.k.a. Gunner, had tried to shoo April back to a better life, so when she had disappeared, he had at first thought she had done just that, shooed off. But Gunner had his doubts, had wondered about certain houses his girlfriend had been casing out for him, had worried something had happened to her. He had gone to find her, and died trying.
Starkey was not going to admit that he had meant to let the girl die. Technically, maybe he really hadn’t. But it didn’t matter, Leith knew. They were far from done talking. Next up was the death of Ben Stirling, and by the end of the night, the indictment against Ray Starkey was going to be long enough to choke him.
Thirty-Nine
GOREOPHILE
Face to face, speaking across a table about Ben Stirling’s brutal death, Starkey struck Leith as callous, but apologetic. Fearful of the consequences, but without the faintest appreciation of the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of his acts. Leith was no psychologist, but he had his own ideas about what drove the man to lock people up and watch them die — an evil twist on voyeurism.
To any healthy mind, there could be nothing sexually stimulating about watching a girl waste away to nothing, or seeing a man ripped to pieces, but maybe in Starkey’s atrophied mind, the suffering of others brought back enough sensation to qualify as an actual turn-on.
That was Leith’s theory, anyway. Starkey’s explanation was less colourful: he was only protecting his property. He hadn’t meant for anybody to die. He only put the dog down there to make sure the native kid didn’t escape, and when the savaging started, it was too late to do anything but watch.
It took some back and forthing for Leith to realize the “native kid” in Starkey’s mind was Ben Stirling. Starkey explained that he knew the man was native because he had seen him on the street, sneaking in and out of the old Harmon house. Leith wondered if Stirling’s faux hawk haircut, depicted in his autopsy photographs, had confused the killer, for in fact, there was not a drop of Indigenous blood in Ben Stirling. According to his brother, Sam, he and Ben were of Ukrainian descent.
With some prompting, Starkey admitted he had watched the kid die. He couldn’t explain why. To find out what happened next, he supposed.
That was summertime, only a few days after he had locked the girl in his closet so he could figure out what to do with her. He had come home after a bit of shopping to see a man at the back of the house flitting across the hall. Likewise, t
he man must have heard his return and hid in the basement. Starkey had run over and shut the basement door. Had some scrap lumber handy, and went about hammering boards in place to keep the thief secured.
He had meant to call the cops right off, he explained, but then got a better idea. “Buddy of mine I used to work with, Duggy Vahn, he had to go off to the States quite sudden because of a death in the family, and he wanted me to look after his pup for him while he was gone. What I had to do is go out to his place in Blueridge once a day, feed ’im, change his water, all that. Dog lives in the backyard, runs on a wire, all in chain-link. Pixie’s his name. Duggy loves that pup. But always keeps him hungry. Makes him a better watchdog that way.”
Leith sat marvelling as the story flipped on its axis. In the space of one breath, Starkey had gone from righteous homeowner making a citizen’s arrest to a premeditating monster, and without any manoeuvres on Leith’s part. Arms crossed, he waited for the man to finish nailing his own coffin shut.
So with the burglar locked in the basement, Starkey went on, he had gone and fetched Pixie from Blueridge, a pretty quick trip. Pixie was a good dog, but he could be snappy, and as a rule wore a muzzle in public. With the dog heeled at his feet, Starkey pried the boards away from the basement door, moving fast, worried that the native kid would burst out on him. But the kid stayed down below and kept quiet, probably thinking it was the police coming, probably busy inventing excuses for his trespassing. Starkey ushered the unmuzzled Pixie through and boarded the door up again. When he heard the shouts that soon became screams, he had squinted down that hole in his bedroom to watch Pixie cornering the burglar, grabbing hold.
“Not a pretty picture,” Leith suggested.
Starkey seemed to shudder at his memory of the deed, while taking no blame for it. “He screamed so loud,” he said. “Like a broad in one of those horror movies. The girl was screaming, too. Between the two of ’em I thought they’d wake the whole neighbourhood. “
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