by Wayne Jones
Blood doesn’t keep flowing after the weapon has done its damage and the heart is no longer beating: it clots, stops. I have had the most ridiculous conversations with the raver in which—and I believe I am inferring correctly—he expected that a body would gush blood in Peckinpah fashion, like a hose let loose on the lawn, until the police arrived to plug up the holes.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, no sentiment so strongly felt by him that an expletive doesn’t make the perfect prelude. “Jesus Christ. I mean, did you see the body on the news? Hardly any blood at all. What the fuck is that all about?” The implication seemed to be that, the bullet holes notwithstanding, the man hadn’t been shot at all, that the police were covering something up, for some reason that my own less conspiratorial mind could not fathom.
“Maybe the police killed him?” I suggested tentatively, a joke really, just seeing whether he was paying attention. “Maybe they strangled him and so, no blood.”
“It wouldn’t fuckin surprise me, anything those cocksuckers do.”
The man, it must be said, is an idiot.
One of the most disturbing things I’ve come across so far in the course of my research has been a short video on the web of a man who commits suicide while he is waiting in some room of a police station. One of the officers leaves him seated there with a bottle of water, and for a short while it seems like this will be a tedious little view into the dull workings of police interrogation of a common thug. He sips some water, and he looks a little nervous when he realizes that he has been left alone. He pulls out the handgun that has been concealed in the waist of his pants, and then the prosaic horror. As casually as he has just done with the water bottle, testing its weight, bringing it to his lips for a squirt of life’s liquid, he turns off the safety on the handgun, puts the thing to his head just above an ear, and shoots. Blood does not gush and the dead man now just slumps. The two arresting policemen enter and one utters an expletive worthy of the raver: they have forgotten to frisk (could there be a more inappropriately silly word?) him.
I have to admit to a perverse and persistent fascination with this little video, encouraging me to watch and re-watch and re-re-watch the last sad minutes of another man’s life. It is not bloodlust but rather, as grand as this may sound, a scholar’s quest for detail, for exposure to the worst of the worst in order to be able to write about it with some authority and integrity. It is the casualness of this suicide that affects me deeply, and I can extrapolate from that to casual murder as well. There are some people who can kill, literally, without a second thought. The deed is done, the victim falls down, and the killer moves on past on his way home to television or the arms of a lover or who knows what.
So this is what I am left with as I attempt to write my book: I don’t want to be so cowed or perplexed by the facts that I simply lose the will or the desire to complete the project. I don’t want to be intimidated or disgusted: I want to be able to stare the details straight in the face, and then write about the effects of bullets on flesh the same way I would write about the history of the keyboard. I have to be able to write with the same ease as that man in the police station shot himself, to level everything out, to treat murder as if it were just a collection of empty words.
I have already mentioned, several times, that there exists a comprehensive and detailed literature on the subject of murder and its investigation. I have pored over the bulk of it with what I imagine is the same fervour and determination that an athlete gives himself to his discipline. There are days when I “play through the pain,” as I have heard it described on the sports call-in shows, and there are other days when I simply let the body and the mind relax. During the latter I often feel guilty about the time I am wasting while a psycho trolls the streets, but the guilt is mitigated somewhat by a realization that this sort of “down time” is essential to the grander scheme. During the play and the pain, though, I am an animal, relentless, focussed, determined that whatever small tidbit of knowledge I learn can only serve to help me in the end. Knowledge trumps psychosis—I hold that firmly as my credo.
I meet Rachel, the inquisitive librarian, at the library while she is on a break. Somewhat distracted still by the images of blood and murder, I struggle to shake myself down to more pedestrian concerns. She is quite beautiful, and that helps. I can see pinks and light blues and the hint of something darker (navy?) in the billowy folds of her dress, which goes down past her knees. The shoes are very simple and elegant, much better than the ones she wore the first time we met: these are white slingbacks, with not a tincture of grime on them. I wonder whether they are in fact brand new. Her hair is a browny blonde, also not dirty, and there is a freshness that exudes from her face.
We sit on comfortable leather chairs, facing each other. She seems nervous and I set myself the minor goal of putting her at ease.
“I have a question for you,” I say.
“Oh?” She laughs lightly, looks down at the floor, and then up at me as the middle finger of her left hand starts scratching lightly at the arm of the chair.
“Everyone I meet asks me this, so I thought I would turn the tables a little: who do you think is the killer?”
She laughs out loud now, very high pitched, and then looks around and blushes when she realizes where she is. There is a supercilious cough from the old man standing at one of the terminals searching the catalogue.
“Well, I don’t—you’re the expert, I mean, you’re writing the book on this, right? So maybe you, I guess, I mean, I guess that’s why everyone is always asking you.” She stops, scratches more deeply.
“Sometimes someone in my position can be so heavily involved in the details that I don’t see the obvious facts around me. Forest and the trees, that kind of thing.” I pause, worried for an instant that even though it is a lame cliché metaphor, it may be incomprehensible.
“I see what you mean,” she says, disarmingly. “I have thought about it, you know. I have to say, too, that you’ve been somewhat of an inspiration to me—I mean in the sense that you are obviously devoting so much time to this cause. I felt that I had to do my bit as well.” The laugh yet again, but deteriorating to a mere furrowed brow, as though she is worried about something. “I think it’s someone from away, for sure,” she says, “because I just can’t imagine that someone who lives in Knosting could possibly do something like this.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, and maybe I’m just being naive. But I sort of think of the town as one big family—not a big, always happy family with no problems or anything like that, but a family for sure. And I can’t see that one of the family members would kill another one. Does that sound dumb?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way, dumb, but I do think there is the possibility at least that one townsperson is killing others. Partly, you know, it’s because the alternative is even less plausible: someone from out of town coming here every now and then to kill. I’ve also heard someone else say that maybe it’s someone from out of town, but he’s staying here in town just for the purpose of the killings. This one, frankly, I have trouble believing, because—and maybe this is naive—I would have expected that the police would have followed up on leads like that. You know, look at hotels and B & Bs and that kind of thing.”
“So, what’s your theory?” she asks.
I smile, a little more weakly than I intend. “Frankly, I really don’t know. Like the police, I suppose, I consider myself to be still in investigation mode. There may be certain clues and the like but—”
“Clues?”
“Well, nothing solid.”
“Do you mind sharing?”
“They are too tentative right now to give them any credence or authority or whatever. Just some hunches, feelings, that really I would prefer not to share.”
“I understand.”
She’s fidgeting even more now, and I start to wonder whether I have said something to upset her: sometimes the professional detachment of a researcher toward such emotio
nal topics as murder can be disconcerting to people. Or perhaps she doesn’t like me keeping secrets?
“Is everything OK?” I ask when I see her looking at her watch.
“Yes, oh, yes, of course. I find this all rather fascinating. I just have to head back to work in a few minutes.”
It’s hard to tell whether this is just an excuse to get away for whatever reason. She stands up and so I see she means business.
“It’s been a pleasure, Andrew.”
“Likewise.”
She reaches out to shake my hand and I do so awkwardly as if I were concluding an interview that I didn’t quite ace.
“Drop by and see me the next time you’re in the library,” she says as she heads toward information.
Chapter 12
The police find Rodney Tweed’s mangled body at the bottom of a ravine about 30 kilometres out of town. I hear from my contact inside the department that the sight was, in his words, “not pretty.” Tweed landed in such a way that both his neck and his back were broken, and the end result with arms and legs akimbo was horrific enough, I hear, to make one investigator turn his head away. There is more: his face was nearly completely smashed in and his hands and arms were covered with various cuts and bruises that suggest a struggle.
“Here’s my take on it,” my contact tells me. “There was a fight, probably one that caught the murderer off guard, because he had just planned to take the guy there and throw him off. You know, just throw him off the cliff—who knows the reason for these things? Imagine something like they were friends or met at a bar or something, or the murderer had some kind of grudge against the guy for some reason in the first place, and he came up with some way to lure him up there, like maybe for a joint or something, or he promised him a hooker or whatever—who knows? But it didn’t go well, and a fight broke out, and the only thing the murderer had going for him, the element of surprise, well, that was lost now and they were both even, both fighting for their lives, literally, and the murderer won. Or at least we think so. Who knows? The beat-in face, that’s anger, being pissed off at the fact that his original plan was foiled. The marks there, on the face, they show evidence of being both from fists and feet, his shoes: the guy tried to beat and kick him to death. And then he threw him off the cliff.”
This description, rendered in all its professional and colloquial glory, leaves me cold. I don’t know whether his assessment is accurate, but the fact that it is even a feasible explanation makes me sad about the entire project of humanity. Still, it’s a neatly detailed story, but personally I have my doubts about its accuracy. My contact is indeed a professional who has seen many more murders than this one, but the modus operandi does not strike me as authentic. I base my assessment partly on my own research so far, but also on common sense, and it surprises me a bit that my friend has not arrived at exactly the same conclusion. The scenario he describes is just much too complicated, too replete with uncontrolled variables, to be the chosen method of a skilled serial killer. Inviting the victim somewhere, getting into a fight, pummelling the man—it’s all too much of a spectacle to be real, and yet I don’t have any alternative theory. I could imagine that the facts happened—fight first and then thrown off the cliff—and maybe it is just the actual storyline, the motivations, that I disagree with.
I visit the crime scene after it has been cleaned up, after police have been there and removed what they think they need and put it all in the same kind of resealable plastic bags that their wives pack their sandwiches in. I don’t really know what I am looking for: nothing, really. I just want to get a sense of the place, to feel the contrast in “vibes,” as they call them, between the simple rural, bucolic, natural, and the grossly urban and human. I stand at the edge of that same ravine and I can’t help but shudder at the thought of poor Rodney, no matter what shape he was in when he was launched, tumbling over and over and probably hoping against all hope that he might land safely. The wind kicks up and I step back out of fear that Nature or God may have mistaken me for the bad guy, and so contrived to make a little tear in the fabric of pure free will by blowing me off the edge.
I make my way sullenly back to the car. The wind has stopped blowing altogether (victim escapes clutches of Prime Mover) but I think I feel the hint of rain in the air. I decide to take another route back home, and I realize as I ascend and then descend my fifth hill that I am in the same part of the outskirts of the city where the disgraced police chief lives. I slow the car down while I contemplate taking a little detour. There really is no hesitation though: I turn off onto the familiar side road that leads to his cottage. I continue for a couple of minutes and eventually spot the mailbox with his name on it in perfectly aligned gold and black letters. The little flag is up.
I park on the road and for a brief moment wonder what exactly I think I am doing here. The rain starts coming down lightly and I pull the zipper of my jacket up (too far: it pinches me under the chin), thrusting my hands deep into the pockets as if to force-hug myself for protection. There is a very pure silence, the kind I wish I had every night, and I can’t imagine that there is any human around. I walk down to the cottage, take one last look around for nothing in particular, and then walk up to the one large window on the front of the house. The curtains are casually drawn, and when I put my face closer to the window, the rain coming down harder now, my nose brushing up against the glass, I see a very spare scene: a La-Z-Boy, the television on but nobody watching, a bowl of something, potato chips perhaps, sitting on a little dark-brown table within easy reach of whoever is supposed to be in the recliner.
I pull back and look up at where the sky would be if the rain were not coming down so blindingly. “Nothing,” I say out loud, to whom and about what topic I have no idea. I pull the collar up on my jacket, providing little increased protection but at least preventing some water from running coldly down my back. I walk around to the large yard at the rear of the place, which leads down to a picturesque-looking boat moored at a beautifully dilapidated dock. There is a ragged path leading through the overgrown grass down to the water. A flash of lightning startles me and seconds later the thunder growls in disapproval. I walk down to the boat and notice a small shed on my left, its door wide open. I stand there for a few seconds and assess the scene, though already knowing again what I will do.
Inside, there’s the same spareness as in the living room. It looks like the set in a bad movie, one where the bad guy is supposed to come and hit me on the head with something, or else startle me and engender a long, pointless chase through the woods, with only one of us coming out alive. Things are more prosaic here. I walk around quietly and examine the place both up and down, but I see nothing out of the ordinary. Some rope, a shovel, a mess of tools spilling out of the red metal box on an old wooden table. I imagine a hanging, someone splatted with that shovel, someone else stabbed with any number of possibilities in and around the toolbox. I shake off the premonitions and walk back out into the nascent darkness.
The rain has stopped and I can see that the still-ominous sky is clearing, a cloud moving, one more star showing. I hurry across the grass, past the house, and back up to the car. On a whim not unlike several others during this ill-advised escapade, I turn around and walk over to the mailbox. I lower the little flag and then look inside: it’s surprisingly stuffed. Of course, I grab the entire contents and make my way back to the car again, where I sit in relative comfort while I rifle through the poor man’s civic rights. Junk mail, bills, a solicitation for a shindig of some kind at the Knosting Entertainment Palace. I am tempted to open the one from the law firm but I do eventually come to whatever modicum of senses I still have. I bring the pile back to the mailbox and stuff it full again, though the end result is not as neat as the postman had managed: my effort is literally bulging at its seams.
On the drive back my mind is a jumble again, but I do manage at some point to wrest things back to a due consideration of poor Mr. Tweed. There is something just not right about the whole t
hing. I come to the sleuth’s only conclusion that the solution lies in some missing piece of this whole story, this puzzle: once that is known, then the optical illusion becomes the most obvious bit of representational fact imaginable. This, I have learned before and have had confirmed today, is the true trick of discovery in this gumshoe business: facts and impressions swirl and swirl until you find the secret at the centre that is animating everything.
Chapter 13
On one of those DVDs that Rachel alerted me to at the library, some self-acknowledged expert professes categorically that five is the “magic number” (a direct quote, alas) of murders at which the international media start paying attention. He had done a comprehensive survey of serial killings in the United States and Europe since the 1960s and the overall trend was that one or two or three murders garnered hardly any interest outside the host country or city unless they were particularly heinous, four was the transition point between trends, and at five murders there was a bona fide news story which merited various degrees of coverage, depending on each media outlet’s tendencies and financial capacity.
Here in Knosting, with Rodney Tweed turning the deadly odometer over to the requisite number, the facts sadly re-corroborate the research. I am up at 8:45 on Saturday morning, the phone ringing and the misdialer on the other end not having the decency to apologize but simply hanging up when he realizes I am not his “bud.” I trudge crankily into the kitchen to put on the coffee and when I return from picking up the newspapers, the pot is joyously full. I pour a cup, tincture of sugar, splash of cream, and then settle into the couch to read. I am just recovering from another poorly worded headline when a vehicle goes by fast outside on the street which is just metres from where I am seated, and then another, and then another. Happily tossing the thing aside and seeing it dangle off the arm of the sofa like a modifier in a mediocre newspaper, I get up and separate the slats of the blinds to have a look. There’s a man standing not three metres from my front door, now talking with increasing animation to two other men. I recognize the kind of trio it is: reporter, sound, and camera.