by Wayne Jones
But, my room! ... The important practical fact, all aesthetic concerns aside, is that no matter what the state of it, how it looks, I am able to find anything within seconds. Tenants of sparer apartments and owners of well-appointed beige mansions can generally not make such a claim. I am not professionally trained in psychology—though I do consider myself a lifelong student of human behaviour and interaction—but I have wondered about the psychological trait which manifests itself in this particular domestic habit, that is, to put it a little crudely, what this “says about me.” I ascribe it to a latent desire for order, for control as I’ve said, but in the context of an acceptance of the fact that the overall environment is unordered and uncontrollable. For the same reason I prefer public gardens and parks over the static and angular organization of squares and gridded streets. I do want the trees and the grounds to grow with a certain degree of wantonness, but not to be allowed to overtake the scene so much that a sense of order is lost.
Quade, this murder victim, was evidently a loner in the city. The police have identified no family members at all, not just in Knosting but anywhere in the vicinity, and not even any friends have stepped forward to express grief or provide information. The rumours and half-truths as reported in the various media are contradictory: on television he is a mentally ill eccentric with a small fortune in the bank, on the radio he lives in squalour and earns a subsistence income by collecting bottles on recycling nights in various neighbourhoods, and in the beloved Gazette he has never worked, has no home, and is “a complete mystery to the authorities.” I myself have not been able to glean much more than these, or to confirm one or the other, and the greyness and undependability of the supposed facts confirm the necessity of my research project and make me even more determined than I have been to find out—as grand as this might sound—the truth.
I set out the next morning on the first foray of my investigation, like a little boy with a butterfly net. I have absolutely no idea what I am doing, what to look for, how to proceed, what I might do if I found anything relevant. At the intersection where the murder took place, I stand and try to compose myself: there is something about the scene which makes me wholly uncomfortable. I hear drumming in my head, A man was killed here, like a piped-in mantra. I try to picture the whole sordid messy business, one human doing away with another, and my lack of success with that particular subtraction reminds me of my poorly developed math skills. Turning slightly, I stare up the street to where the body ended up, and that journey is even more of a strain on my poor head. I have a flash of negativity, a sudden lack of self-confidence that I will never be able to make it through this damn thing if I can’t force myself to stare hard at a few facts.
A car horn goes off, though I am not sure if it is directed at me. Perhaps in my reverie I was tending to wander into the street and rechristen it with another death. I sit on a bench and feel better almost immediately as I am provided with a solidity that I couldn’t seem to achieve on my own wobbly legs. My confidence, volatile ever since my youth, returns and I take out a notebook and begin writing a few things down. No system, none of the careful composition that my academic writings used to require: just rough notes as they come to me. I fill a few pages which in the end don’t seem to amount to anything substantive, but I am happy to have broken through the block.
I try to piece together the logistics, how a body could be killed, dragged, and mutilated, and my first conclusion is that it didn’t quite happen the way it seems. Those rough notes offer up only “possible self-mutilation” and “dragged by someone else,” both of which on reflection suggest logistics even more unbelievable than the obvious. With only the slightest turn of my body I can see the exact spot where the actual murder took place (the police were very forthcoming to the reporters). Something is shiny there and I immediately get up from what has been a comfortable perch and walk over. I bend down and extract from a slight indentation in the pavement a small triangle of metal, not more than a couple of millimetres on each side. It glints like a forbidden jewel when I place it on the tip of my right index finger. I squeeze my thumb on top of it to keep it safely in place as I return to the bench.
On closer examination I can see that one of the sides is slightly longer and more ragged than the other two. I twirl it between my fingers, accidentally drop it on the ground, retrieve and then wrap it in a tissue before putting the whole thing carefully into my trouser pocket. I take my booty back to my apartment and I am panting as I fumble with the key and then spend almost a full minute trying to get it into the lock. I take the tissue out of my pocket, confirm that I haven’t lost the triangle, and then set it delicately down on my kitchen table. First I have to verify what I think I have half-remembered from one of the newspaper reports in the last couple of days. I consult my clipping file (immaculately organized) and read through until I discover: “Police confirmed that they recovered a knife at the scene of the crime, but with its tip missing.” I file the clipping back in its trove and return to the table.
I shudder a bit now as I open up the tissue to expose this shard of metal which less than a week ago was used to mutilate a body. Revulsion strikes me first and I shake the tip from my hand like it is one of those spiders that I have been telling the landlady about to no avail. Fascination follows and I gingerly retrieve it from under the table and hold it in the palm of my hand. It has done a rough business and has wound up in my possession through an obvious police oversight, but I do feel that it deserves the kind of reverence due to all artifacts.
I sit down again and puzzle over how this tip might have gotten broken off. The possibilities remind me of my relative forensic ignorance (must remedy that with some intensive research at the library), as I am not even sure whether it is possible, say, to break off the tip of a knife on the bone of a human body. Is the sternum hard enough to do that? The only other possibility seems to be that perhaps in the thrashing the killer inadvertently dragged the knife point along the pavement and broke the tip off that way. I make a mental note—no, determined to be a better investigator, I actually write it down: “check pavement at crime scene for knife scrape.”
It does occur to me that I have evidence here and that the civic-minded thing to do would be to contact the police and give it up. Perhaps, civic-mindedness aside, that is also a legal requirement. I consider for a moment doing this, mostly because I don’t want to end up in prison nor to attract any attention that would steal my research and writing time. My other reasoning, admittedly specious on the surface, is that a piece of so-called evidence such as this will do nothing to move forward the search for the killer or help in his prosecution when he is eventually caught. The police already have the knife: what use is the tip?
I pack up my treasure and put it in the eyeglass case that I keep in the sock drawer of my dresser. I have odd feelings that I can’t quite identify or put a name to.
Chapter 3
W is for Winton, as Ms Grafton might put it if she ever gets that far in the alphabet and starts substituting proper names for the generic crime-related words she has favoured up till now.
A week ago a man named Steven Winton was discovered dead in the front seat of his red 1995 Acura Integra (“the one with the 160-horsepower VTEC engine,” as a newscast put it, appealing to which segment of the potential viewership I have no idea). He had been shot twice, or, rather, a gun had been shot into his car twice: one broke the driver’s side window, just missed the headrest, and lodged in the cushion of the back seat; the other entered the top of the left side of his head right at the border of his hairline and his forehead, proceeded down through his brain, and came out through his ear—and the puzzle is that the police can’t find that second bullet. At least, that’s the rumour I heard from the raver: the investigation is, as they say (and said), “ongoing.”
The police are starting to do the obvious math, and it’s not adding up right in a small town like this. Here’s what the chief of police said at the news conference yesterday: “We don�
�t get many murders here and so we’re going on the theory for now that these two were committed by the same person.” He looked nervous there on the dais, fidgety, perhaps not used to quite so many reporters, maybe thirty little tape recorders crowded around the base of his microphone like enthusiasts at a rally. I watched the whole thing only on television, and I could see the worry in his eyes, not just from the fact of a second murder, but from the details that he was not explaining to the masses. That is: it’s unlikely that the two victims were killed by the same person, because a serial killer—even one who kills “just” a couple of people—tends not only to use more or less the same method of killing, but also to use more tactile methods such as stabbing, and not cold and distant ones such as shooting. “Serial killers ... avoid firearms whenever possible because they are such an impersonal way to kill,” as one of the premier authorities on serial killing and mass murder puts it (Elliott Leyton in Hunting Humans).
Perhaps I am just contriving the look on the police chief’s face in my own head. Maybe he is always like that, a nervous sort, shy in crowds, more comfortable in smaller groups or in the office, doing the legwork of investigation rather than acting as a spokesperson. Maybe, as some of the ingrates used to say about me at TU, maybe I am making too much of a little thing. Still, among the skills that one learns as a scholar that are applicable even remotely to what is affectionately known as the “real world” is a keen penchant for close observation. In the literary texts which I have edited, for example, I have prided myself not only on my indefatigable research in both primary and secondary sources and my resultant comprehensive knowledge of the particular period under study, but also my attention to the details of proofreading. At Oxford University Press, some of the production editors styled me “Comma Man” for my unstinting abilities, proof after proof, and the series editor (the TU department head, in better days) touted me embarrassingly in my evaluation, recommending me without hesitation for promotion from assistant to associate professor.
How things change! I have to confess that I miss the true academic life. It feels crude some days roiling in the dregs of details about murder and the fear and upheaval it has caused in this small town. Scholarly research is a cleaner and much more humane pursuit, and the discoveries contribute to the fund of civilized knowledge. When you are writing a book about murder, discovery is a dreadful and dreary process: details about obscenities inflicted upon bodies, a widow shaking her head when the reporter asks her “How does it feel?” Sometimes the quest to dig out the facts and to marshal them into some comprehensible whole is just too tiring and depressing, even for a committed researcher such as myself. I flail around (figuratively), try to distract myself with serendipitously found games on the internet, or search out specific keywords on anything other than murder.
My background research on Mr. Winton—an orgy of activity entailing interviewing tight-lipped cops at one end and poring over positively horrific forensic science texts at the other—left me feeling dazed and pummelled. Occasionally, during the darkest moments, I wonder whether I have the stamina for this, the stomach. I remembered how much pleasure I had at Toronto U. in what now seem like outrageously innocent pursuits, ferretting out some facts about the watermarks and composition of the first edition of Samuel Johnson’s Rambler, or studying parody in the works of Swift. There were frustrations with that research, too, but they were mostly small things, such as (during one particularly memorable morning when it was raining) the absolute refusal of the curator of rare books and manuscripts to let me view some hard-to-find editions because of the mere technicality of my expired library card.
I have to resort to a child’s simple language in order to describe a few of the basic, ghastly facts about Winton’s death. First: the hole that a bullet makes when it comes out of the human body is much bigger than the one that it makes when it enters. Have you ever seen that high-speed photo of a bullet shot through an apple, the one taken by Harold E. Edgerton at MIT in 1964? The effect in a human head is even more pronounced than that: a tiny hole more or less the size of the bullet on entry, and a large “exit wound” on the other side. The reports in the media always tend to underemphasize, if not studiously avoid, this kind of information, a practice I have never quite understood. Expose people to the filthy practicalities of violence and soon the culture would not be inured and complacent, but would raise its voice and enforce justice on the perpetrators.
The letters in the Gazette tend towards anger and sadness instead of fear. The focus of most is on the widow and nine-year-old son that Winton’s murder left behind: “My heart goes out to Cecilia Winton and her little boy Jack. I just can’t comprehend what monster would do something like this. How can there possibly be a reason for this? And why haven’t the police been able to track this person down?” There was also: “Society is really starting to break down when there are killings at all, one human taking another’s life, but when that is done with apparent randomness, when there is no ‘reason,’ if one can say something that heinous, then we must truly be in the end days.” And then the topper, from Ryan, also nine: “Jack was my best friend and now I don’t get to play with him any more. My Mom and Dad, who I love very much, tell me that there are bad people in the world, people who hurt other people, but I don’t know why anyone would want to hurt Jack’s Dad because he was a really nice man and took us for walks along the lake and then bought us ice cream.”
The next day, a bright Saturday when I awaken at 10:45, but eventually deteriorating to cloud and coolness and rain by the time I have finished chores and latte—the next day I seek a kind of solace among simple people doing simple things. A man is dead, a second murder victim, but there are still fake-tanned older mothers selecting extra-old cheddar at the outdoor market. I wonder if they are as shocked as I am, as assaulted, and hope to right themselves by at least pretending to be living in a normal town on a normal day. I am not having much success: no matter how much I walk, no matter how charming a little corner I find on whatever historic bench with just the right amount of shade and dappled sunshine, I am not able to shake a pervasive nervousness, a tension which gripped me when I read the first headlines and got worse as I absorbed more and more details. A sense of longing develops, builds, subsides, rises again with added strength, a longing for simpler times as an obscure academic in a big anonymous city. I feel too exposed here among the merchant selling emu products, the farmer still in her dirty jeans and knee-high rubber boots, the father walking slowly to his illegally parked minivan with just enough berries and other goodies to suffice for dessert after the evening’s barbecue. I fear that the killer with that same gun could be headed my way, headed for this entire group. I have a frisson of realization that he may be primed now to move from one-at-a-time serial killing to mass murder, giving up the soliloquy for the crowded bloody stage. I tremble next to the display of LPs already shot through and now reduced to a dollar each.
There has been a rough choreography of extreme emotion over the past few days, on the radio and television, in the newspaper, on the street. The snippets that I’ve witnessed are mostly anger and fear, which, as any psychological quack with the slightest of B.A.’s will tell you, are both the same thing. Just as the macho man with the illiberal views and the tendency toward personal vigilantism is a weak little simp on the inside, many of those who are ranting angrily are really doing so out of fear. I do not criticize this fear, of course, but have to admit that the anger can be wearing. Sincere emotion tends to come from the deep, quiet centre of a person, and is manifested with a dignity and integrity which the media “personalities” do not even approach.
As I pass by a table of overdone turquoise jewelry, I hear my name called. I flinch that it might be the raver, but it turns out to be an attractive, husky-voiced young woman whom I can’t quite place.
“Yes, hello.”
“My name’s Rachel. From the public library, you know, the main branch. I’ve helped you with some of your research.”
&nbs
p; “Oh, yes, I recognize you now,” I lie. “Please forgive me: I guess it must be seeing you out of context.” I smile at her to indicate something friendly. I do remember now that she was in fact quite helpful, steering me away from false leads, and introducing me to sources of information that I hadn’t been aware of.
“It’s scary,” she says.
“Scary?”
“The murders.”
“Oh, yes, right. Yes. Though I guess the police ...” I let the sentence trail off, suddenly realizing that I am not quite sure what I wanted to say about that. Are the police on the verge of arresting someone? Are they incompetent?
“I don’t think they’ve caught anyone, right?” she asks, saving me.
“No, that’s what I hear on the news anyway.”
She smiles awkwardly, as if the tidbit of information, only this side of polite conversation, is somehow disturbing. A car goes by and it startles her. She squeals in a very appealing fashion.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “A little nervous, I guess. This thing has got me spooked.”
“It’s understandable,” I say. “People have been killed.”
“What do you think it’s all about? I mean, who’s doing this?” She laughs nervously.
“Well, if I knew that, my book would be very short and I would go to the police right away.” She laughs again, this time more relaxed.
“I guess maybe I just lack imagination or something,” she says. “I mean, I work in a library, and I read a lot of books, mysteries even, but I can’t even begin to imagine who the killer is, what kind of man—what kind of person, I guess—what kind of person would do something like this.”
I finally have a chance to examine her more closely as she looks around, as if for her next halting sentence, as if for the murderer, and the thing that strikes me is that she is a jumble of contrasts. An elegant black jacket, but shabby shoes; a bad haircut, but makeup applied with subtlety and meticulousness.