The Killing Type

by Wayne Jones

  “I have something for you,” she says after we have ordered beers.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Get this: did you know that there was a guy with a violent past released from Knosting Penitentiary about ten days before these murders started?”

  “Actually, no, I didn’t. What do you mean by violent past?”

  “His previous crimes were domestic, you know, the same kind of shit that weak males do all the time, beating up the innocent. Disgusting and angering really, but of course nothing like murder. And not serial murder. He had a boring job or something and someone had said boo to him when he was a kid, I guess, and so he took it all out on his girlfriend.”

  “Where did you find this out? I mean, how?”

  “Just poking around in one of the databases at the library. Amazing what you can find there, all free.” She laughs lightly just as the waitress arrives with our beer.

  I sip and am reminded again how important small things are, how much pleasure I can derive from a cold, well-brewed drink. I smile as I think that perhaps this is all that I have really needed—no book, no tenure, no academic insights, just sharing a beer with someone I can talk to.

  “You’re one step ahead of me,” I say. “I’ve been thinking lately that I should try to narrow things down, take all the research I’ve done, what I know, what I’ve seen, and try to come up with a list of suspects. Sounds kind of crude, I guess.”

  “Actually, I’d think that that would be essential at some point. Sort of like writing your thesis after you’ve read all the articles.”

  The food arrives but I don’t even remember ordering. I feel distracted as a—what is the term I heard?—as a “multi-tasker,” a bad one, would feel. Don’t give myself away, extract as much information as I can, make sure she thinks that you are enjoying yourself. But I can’t concentrate on all of these tasks, and the additional problem, perhaps, is that I am enjoying myself. There is a pile of red food and a pile of yellow, some white (that must be rice), and something that approximates green. I seem to have lost my entire vocabulary along with my focus, seem to remember much less about this cuisine than a man should who has eaten so much of it.

  “So,” I say, in a manner that seems self-consciously dramatic to me, and may or may not be so in reality, “if you were the one writing the thesis, what would be the big facts that you would focus on?”

  She chews contemplatively, sips, and then pokes the air with the index finger of her spare hand. Smiling, as if the problem has been punctured, she deadpans and says: “It’s all in the letters.”

  I calm myself, and look at her incredulously: “The letters? You mean, the—you mean the letters of the victims’ n—?”

  “Check out the letters in the newspaper.”

  “What?”

  “The letters in the newspaper, the letters to the editor.”

  “The letters to the editor.”

  “Yes,” she laughs, “the letters to the editor. I’ve read them all, and saved them all, too, and re-read them, and—”

  “Aren’t they mostly just people complaining—justifiably complaining—about all the murders and the inability of the police to do anything about it?”

  “Yes, that’s true, but the letter writers make connections, draw conclusions, that the police don’t or can’t or won’t.”

  “For example?”

  She gathers a studied amount of food, some rice, some chicken, a chili, onto her chopsticks and brings it casually to her mouth. I can see a single grain of rice hanging precariously from the mound and I worry about it unaccountably. It goes in without incident.

  “Well, for example,” she says, “there’s the whole randomness of the victims, the fact that there don’t seem to be any discernible connections between them, nothing they all have in common. Age, gender, ethnicity, location—nothing. A couple of the letters have pointed that out.”

  “Sometimes there are no simple patterns in these things.”

  “Yes, but there’s always some kind of pattern, isn’t there? I mean, you should know, from your studies. Is there ever a series of serial killings where the guy just kills at random?”

  “I’m not sure it’s true to say that these are done at random.”

  “Well, can you figure out a pattern?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it yet,” I say, somewhat defensively, and not quite the whole truth, as though I’ve been caught short by a surprise quiz (“shouldn’t you know these things, young man?”). “But, you know—and not to make it sound too much like a puzzle or some difficult work of fiction or anything of that nature—but I am confident there is a pattern there somewhere. Now that you’ve pushed me a bit on it, I’ll start looking into it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” I have trouble reading her tone.

  There’s a pause which I can’t interpret: she looks around and allows her eyes to alight on various objects, as if she is an actress who has forgotten her lines, and is hoping that something on the set will jar her memory. I am just as perturbed, and am slightly shocked to discover that I have eaten no more than two or three mouthfuls. I take the opportunity to formulate various assaults on her; wear her down, I can hear my bad cop saying to me, don’t be afraid to be a little rough.

  “So, what’s your theory?” I ask.

  “My theory?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I just mentioned about the letters.”

  “No, I guess—I mean, who do you think is doing this?” It strikes me as a simple question, perhaps an obvious and cliché one even, and I am puzzled at her seeming opacity.

  “Oh, well, if you put it that way!” She pauses. “You’re serious?”

  “Well, halfway anyway.”

  “Can I say something stupid? I don’t think it’s obvious, is all. I mean, I don’t think it’s anyone who’s just gotten out of prison with a grudge, or some violent American coming over to spew his rage, or some crazy psychopath or anything like that. I picture a quiet person, like an old man or someone like that. Someone who’s lived here for years but has just now”—she makes quotation marks with her fingers—“turned.”

  “Turned,” I say.

  “Yeah, man, turned,” she says and laughs. “Seriously, though, my opinion—my theory—in case you want to give up writing and start sleuthing—my opinion is that it’s just some otherwise reputable citizen. Talk about your clichés, I guess.” She laughs again, but more lightly and uncomfortably now.

  I realize that I’m doomed, that she is either perfectly innocent, or so deviously guilty that my charms and wiles will wither fecklessly at her feet. The rest of the meal is somewhat of an effort, on my part certainly and as far as I can discern, on Tony’s part as well. Not sure why, really: I suppose that we had reached our climax, and there could be nothing but bad thereafter.

  I walk home afterwards, trying to savour and salvage the evening. Just as I am about to enter, I hear my name called from the street and I am genuinely startled: logically I realize that a killer is unlikely to call out to a victim before the deed, but of course I am not thinking quite straight. I turn around and am relieved to see a police car, its officer now heading towards me.

  “Hello, I’m Officer Carp. Not sure if you remember me, but I’m wondering if you’d have a few minutes to talk about that email. I know the timing’s probably bad, but I happened to be patrolling the neighbourhood, and I thought I’d give it a shot. Seeing you, that is.”

  “Sure. Did you want to come inside?”

  “That would be best, yes, if that’s all right with you.”

  He declines my offer of something to drink, and gets right down to business once he sits down.

  “I just wanted to ask you a few questions about that email. Now, you said that that was the one and only email you received, is that right?”

  I conclude, wisely or not, that it’s best to continue with the lie: “Yes.”

  “Have you received any other kind of communication—say, a let
ter or a package or anything like that—anything else apparently from the same person and with the same, the same tone?”

  “No, I haven’t.” Ah, glorious truth.

  “Can you think of any reason why anyone would be sending you a message like this? Why would anyone care whether you finished your book or not?”

  “Well, of course, I am not fully certain, but I think it’s a safe speculation that in spite of the bravado in the email—you know, the taunting me and all of that—in spite of that I suspect that the killer just wants to scare off any attention being paid to the murders. And perhaps it’s less of a risk to send an email to a single person like me, a writer and an amateur investigator, than to send it to the police directly. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes, I think I see what you mean.” He writes something down on a pad of paper, crosses out a word, and then writes something else. When he looks up he has a quizzical shimmer in his eyes, and I am worried that this interrogation, if I can call it that, will go on either because he doesn’t believe me or because there is something in this simple fact that he is not able to fathom.

  “Well, I think that’s all for now,” Officer Carp says, and I hope that my sigh isn’t as audible as it seems. “One thing I would like to remind you, though, and perhaps this goes without saying: please let us know if you receive any other email or any other form of communication from this person. It’s very important. I will tell you right now that we have few leads, and we have to follow up on everything no matter how remote it might be.”

  “Of course.”

  “Sorry to disturb your evening,” he says as he gets up from the chair.

  “Not at all.”

  I close the door gently behind him and I watch out the window as he gets into his car. He removes something from the glove compartment and sets it on the passenger seat in the front. The car starts and he pulls away slowly.

  I sit down in the living room with all the lights off now, and I feel unaccountably nervous or angry or depressed or some other emotion I can’t quite identify. There’s a swirl of thoughts in my head, some of Tony, some of Officer Carp: they meld, separate, and then meld again in odd ways. I see him going to visit her, and then her dressed in a police uniform coming to interrogate the two of us. Nothing is at it should be. It requires all of my self-control and rationality to dampen my anger, and I manage to convince myself that he is just doing his job, for which I should be grateful, and that his lamentably ineffectual questions were not meant to imply that I had done anything wrong or that the police are in any way dissatisfied with my actions. I wonder for a moment whether they might resent the book in some way (amateur getting to the bottom of things while they languish). As for Tony, she remains an enigma to be, tantalizing, and I make a silent vow that I will find out the truth about her.

  Chapter 18

  Someone somewhere at some time has touted the value of travel as a source of not only relief from the daily hardships and stresses of one’s regular life, but also rejuvenation, revitalization, something to make one come alive again outside of this dead and dying town. I feel engulfed in failure and danger and frustration—in fact, quite a range of negativities every day which no amount of walking along the lake or ensconcement in the library can really ease very much. I meet people randomly on the street now, especially Tony and the raver, and I never know what to say, whether to snub them and walk by while they stare slack-jawedly into my back and perhaps even mouth my name incredulously, whether to come right out and tell them not to bother me any more—or, sometimes, in moments of either lucidity or dementia, embracing them literally and figuratively, welcoming humans into my world as a method of assuagement instead of attempting to leave it all.

  But, a trip. A trip. I scour the map on my wall and immediately alight on Victoria, the appeal of the island, of distance, of mountains and more temperate weather. Before I am about to click the final button online for the reservations, I think about my meagre budget, the inadvisability of spending five hundred dollars when I have so little money and so few prospects of earning any more. I have my index finger poised a full ten seconds, fifteen, half a minute above the mouse and oh what a pitter-pat it is when I finally click and the system churns for what seems like hours before finally telling me that all is set. Tension, increased tension, and then release and relief of a sort. It seems like an auspicious beginning somehow for my six days out west.

  (The attentive reader will have noticed that I have more or less abandoned the economical manner of living on which I expounded so self-righteously earlier. The reason has been partly necessity, and partly a developing reluctance to subject myself to privations when I am in the midst of a murder investigation. A quibbler, such as I used to be in my own full-fledged academic days, might look askance at my use of “necessity” here. A trip is necessary? Of course it isn’t but all I am trying to say is that I have half decided and half just fallen into the habit of living a relatively regular life, with meals out and new clothing and, yes, the occasional trip. Another necessity-related factor—where on earth did I learn to write like this!—I might cite is my recent decision/calculation that I may not need to survive for a whole two years in this quiet little burgh after all, and so even though I have no plans to start spending wildly, yet I can land myself somewhere between normalcy and indulgence.)

  I notice myself tending toward vagueness and unconcern as we sit on the tarmac at Pearson in Toronto, waiting for the plane to go through its final checks before taking off for Victoria. The make and model of the plane, the time difference between the two cities, the duration of the flight—nothing occurs to me and nothing seems to matter very much. I am not sure whether this is a good or a bad sign.

  “Insert the flat metal fitting into the buckle,” she is saying at the front of the plane, holding the whole apparatus aloft and making me wonder for a brief moment whether it should go around my head instead of my hips. And what exactly is a “fitting” anyway? She blathers on, it goes to a French recording, the captain says something authoritative, and we are soon in the air—and I feel myself whisking away from everything on my mind.

  It’s been nearly two years since I’ve flown anywhere, and as I settle back in my seat with my feet stretched out and my arms finding a comfortable home on the armrests, I think about the many times I flew around the continent for conferences and meetings when I was at TU. The reminiscence brings a twinge of sadness for the missed variety and the stunting of my academic development, and so I literally shake the thought out of my head and sink even further back for a nap. My current line of what one might call work assails me while I am out, and I dream of knives and guns and wounds of all shapes and descriptions, women lying around on blood-soaked carpets and men being pulled from the lake.

  I awake with a start and I am not sure whether the moaning scream I heard was part of the dream or not. I turn my head tentatively toward the man next to me. He smiles and says, “You were having a good one,” and I can only furrow my brow awkwardly in response and turn back to something more pleasant than murderous terror.

  I’ve come prepared, bringing along an odd little collection called 10 by 10, that is, ten short stories by ten “up and coming exciting new writers who’ll shock your socks off,” as the blurb shouts it a little desperately. Even more interesting, especially when the pleasures of flight begin to wane, is a promising-looking new book on the history of the QWERTY keyboard, from its first use in typewriters over a hundred years ago to its continued dominance in the 21st century. I’ve read this book’s blurbs with a slight twinge of nostalgic regret, of course, as the topic reminds me of my own aborted research and the curtailment of personal development which I so unfairly endured.

  The man next to me says something and I hesitate to look over at him again for fear that he was talking to me.

  “Pardon?”

  “Business or pleasure? Why ya headed to Victoria?”

  I did not and do not want to get into any of this, and I consider making up
some bogus story as I’ve had to do several times with the raver. My hearing is bad. My English is not so good (“ya understand?”). I seem to have been dropped here through the portal of some other dimension and I have absolutely no idea what the hell you are talking about or what this clackety metal machine is doing here ten kilometres above the ground and—

  “Pleasure,” I manage. “Just taking a little time off.”

  “Hey, me too. Work can get to you, am I right? Right? Anyways, off to visit my ...” and on he goes and I stop paying attention, instead devoting all my energy to seeming like I am paying attention. It is an effort.

  “And what do you plan to do when you are in the city?” I hear him saying, and at that point, no alternative seat possible on this full flight, no means of escape, I contrive an illness (“doctors say I should limit talking to an absolute minimum”), and my last raspy half-sentence to him is an apology. He says he understands and for a brief moment I worry that he’s interpreted my situation as permission for him to do all the talking—but, no, thankfully, he returns to a magazine and after I watch him flip to an article about back pain or foie gras or the imminent Rapture or whatever it is, I sink a little lower in my seat, rest my head near the window, and start to watch the world go by.

  Victoria is one of those cities in which I’ve never felt comfortable. Nothing to do with danger, just that it feels like an undecided, unsettled city, and it leaves me a little unsettled as well. It’s a movie set in one part of town, the ocean in another part; quaint side streets with ethnic restaurants here, and deserted post-apocalyptic industrial burbs over there. Every time I go there I always feel compelled to drive somewhere else, head up the island to Tofino or make the crossing to Vancouver.

  I am outside a Thai restaurant called Thia and my eyebrows go halfway up at the crude and obvious typo before I realize that it’s intentional, a cachet by way of bad orthography. The place is well lit and charmingly decorated with a combination of Western and Asian (Asain?) pieces. I am already seated at a window table when Leonard walks up to me. I stand up and am unfortunately too distracted by the napkin that falls from my lap onto the floor to devote much effort to the hug.