Victim Impact

by Mel Bradshaw

  “I put it to you,” said the questioner, “that if your views did change, we’re wasting our time this evening listening to people that don’t know what they’re talking about. And if your views were not changed by such an event, you would not be human.”

  Eliot Szabo pulled his microphone towards him.

  “It’s better to be human than inhuman. But when we’re at our most human, we’re not always at our most lucid. You pose an interesting dilemma—what’s your name?”

  “My name is Tom. What’s your answer?”

  “My answer is that if someone I loved was murdered, my views likely would change, but that the vengeful way I’d think then would be wrong and that the way I think now is right.”

  “You attach no importance,” the questioner insisted, “to people having the courage of their convictions?”

  “Sure I do, Tom. But you can’t judge the truth of an argument by the moral strength or weakness of the arguer.”

  This was the point at which Ted had to bite his tongue to keep from jumping in. He understood what Szabo was saying about the fallacy of ad hominem attacks—and yet wondered whether, if a philosophy consistently failed to stand up in the crunch, it was indeed a philosophy for human beings. Recollecting his responsibilities, he asked if Lionel Kerr would like to respond.

  “If Tom has been listening,” said Kerr, “he’ll realize that the likelihood that anyone in this room, let alone anyone on this panel, would lose a loved one to murder is negligible.”

  Ted wanted to ask if Tom himself had lost someone he loved to murder, but the boy had moved away from the mike and was nowhere to be seen.

  The panel discussion wrapped up shortly after eight to leave time for the professionals to get over to University College for the conference keynote address. The evening ended with a reception at the Faculty Club, where Ted reconnected with Lionel Kerr. Years ago, they had done a paper together on victim precipitation of assault and how within certain subcultures a disdainful look, let alone a disrespectful word, had to be considered an act of violence and a mitigation of any aggressive response. Since then Ted had done work on the ethos of criminal organizations, and he had some questions for Lionel about Daniel Wolf’s seminal study of bikers in Alberta.

  “All Niagara labels, I see.” Lionel ran his eyes over the bottles on the bar. “Which would you recommend, Ted?”

  “Karin’s the wine expert in our house. She’d steer you towards the Riesling, which seems to be dryer than the average in Europe. I find it refreshing—which is as technical as my wine vocabulary gets.”

  “That Rosie the Riveter on your panel was some hothead. You did well to keep her from running away with the show.” Lionel put the glass of straw-coloured wine to his lips. “Yes, very pleasant.”

  “She can run, but she can’t win,” said Ted. “Not in Etobicoke Southwest. The Liberals had a margin of victory of over twenty thousand votes there last time. And it would take a major cataclysm to make law and order the ballot question. The riding is divided between young families interested in affordable day care and aging baby boomers worried about the future of medicare.”

  “You’re thoroughly informed,” Lionel chuckled. “Live there?”

  “My father-in-law.”

  Kerr wore a large wristwatch, on which Ted couldn’t help reading that it was five to ten. He ought to head for the subway soon if he wanted to catch the 22:43 commuter train westbound from Union Station. Departures were only once an hour at this time of night, and he’d have to be back on campus early tomorrow morning. Before excusing himself, Ted diplomatically—though not without genuine interest—gave Lionel an opportunity to report on the progress of the investigations he was conducting in partnership with a microbiologist. Looking not for a crime gene exactly, but possibly a virus, something treatable ultimately with pharmaceuticals. Kerr’s enthusiasm, once whipped up, was hard to rein in. In the end, Ted made his train only by hailing a taxi on Spadina Avenue.

  Chapter 3

  He was one of the last to board the westbound Lakeshore GO Train during its six-minute stop at Toronto’s Union Station. Fortunately, there were no crowds to fight. The Blue Jays baseball team were looking for some payback against the Red Sox in Boston that evening, while the Canadian National Exhibition had a station of its own.

  On his way upstairs to the top level of the railcar, Ted took in the back of a lone woman in one of the aisle seats on the mezzanine or landing. These seating areas, one at either end of a car, could accommodate fifteen or seventeen passengers each. In a sparsely populated train, they could be a good place to be alone. Ted paused at first because there was something familiar about the woman’s pale grey suit jacket and blond-streaked brown hair. He stepped towards her when he saw her shoulders shake and heard from her a pair of gasping sobs.

  “It’s Ted Boudreau, Ms. Cesario. Is there anything I can do?”

  She looked up at the feel of his hand on her shoulder. Her dark eyes were brimming over, without making her eyeliner run. Ted later thought it must have been tattooed on. Her mouth was open and remarkably square, like a tragedy theatre mask. She nodded slightly and gestured to the seat beside her. Before he sat, Ted cleared from it the City Hall papers she had spread there. Meanwhile, Rose Cesario closed up the laptop she had been working on and drew an old-fashioned, lacy cloth handkerchief from her sleeve. A whiff of violet toilet water was released. Exposure of a side of her so at odds with her battleaxe image left Ted wanting to offer sympathy and not knowing what to say.

  “Look, Professor Boudreau,” she said, hoarse, but recovering her poise. “I wouldn’t want you to think it was the panel discussion that upset me.” She paused to clear her throat. “I mean, it was, but only indirectly. I’ve had plenty of experience with the rough and tumble of debate—at the municipal level—and, believe me, I’m looking forward to plenty more in Ottawa if I’m elected to the House of Commons.”

  “I understand.”

  “It was that boy, Tom.”

  “Yes?” Ted too had found the boy unsettling, though not to this degree.

  “I know him,” Rose went on. “I used to be an emergency room nurse. His mother brought him in twice with a broken arm. Said he got them playing football. Did he look like a football player to you?”

  “Not really,” said Ted, reflecting that boys often try sports they are physically unsuited for.

  “No one investigated. Then one day, it was Tom’s younger sister who was brought in—by the father this time. And believe me, he is a bruiser. That child had multiple traumas, including a severe skull fracture. All supposedly caused by a bicycle accident. She just wouldn’t wear her helmet, dad said. We couldn’t save her.”

  Neither passenger spoke. The only sound was the metal wheels clicking over the track. Black windows reflected the railcar’s relentlessly cheery fluorescent lights back inside.

  “Were police notified?” Ted asked at last.

  “The father served four years for manslaughter. Tom testified about the beatings both kids had received, but the assault charges added nothing to the sentence. The mother, Tom, and there was an even younger child—they all had to go into hiding when the father came out.”

  “That’s rough,” said Ted. Now wasn’t the time to ask what counselling the father had received as part of his sentence and what assessments had been done of his likelihood to reoffend, even though these were precisely the questions Ted’s training had ensured would be top of his mind.

  “Very rough,” Rose Cesario agreed. “Seeing Tom tonight in a public gathering made me wonder if he was safe even now. His father promised to get even with him for testifying. Also . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, seeing Tom awakened my feelings of guilt and regret that I didn’t blow the whistle before a young life was lost.”

  Ted nodded. He realized he’d been wrong to think of Rose as seizing on the crime issue purely for political gain. But then she rather spoiled the effect by climbing back on her soapbox.
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br />   “And then what Tom said . . . It’s so true! You have no right to decide how much punishment is enough until you can really put yourself in the victim’s place. Who has the right to indulge their Christian feelings of forgiveness by going easy on the killer of nine-year-old Eva? Who should be allowed to put absolving words in the mouth of the dead?”

  The train came to a stop now at Exhibition Station, and the car filled up with families and their stuffed-animal trophies from the Midway. On this last weekend of the fair, nearly everyone seemed to be a winner. The interruption gave needed time for the rhetorical temperature to drop. When the journey resumed, Ted made this remark:

  “I wonder, Ms. Cesario, whether the living have any more right to punish in the name of the dead than to forgive.”

  “Thank you for listening,” Rose Cesario said in a businesslike voice, taking her papers from Ted and stowing them in a pocket of her computer case. “I know my way is not the current academic way of thinking about crime. I don’t despair of bringing you around, but it will take something more than words. In panel discussions or in railcars.”

  At Long Branch, the politician got out, and Ted was left to glance over his own papers. He didn’t take the time to reflect on what she meant by “something more”.

  His Toyota was one of the last dozen cars in the south lot. He drove straight for the exit, diagonally over all the solid white lines. Five minutes more brought him home. He wasn’t exactly bursting with energy, but not tired either. A little lazy. The work of the evening was over, and it had gone well enough.

  He left his car in the driveway rather than taking time to open the garage. A freshening wind was tossing Karin’s rose bushes around, but there was no rain in the forecast. He further rationalized that the beat-up Corolla out front made the house look occupied. The triangular Alarm Protection Service decal in the sidelight window struck him just as forcefully as it always did when he came in by the front door after dark. The porch light, which turned on automatically at dusk, fell directly on the sign and reminded Ted that he had yet to have the alarm system reactivated and an account set up in his name. Each time, he made a resolution to rectify the situation: it had been more than two years now since the previous owners’ subscription had lapsed with the sale of the house. Karin’s cello alone was worth sixteen thousand dollars. But in the light of day, he never seemed to remember. When asked by outsiders about APS, he always pretended to be a satisfied customer, and wondered if the pretense plus the spotlit sign might not offer as much protection at no cost.

  Tonight, though, he actually scribbled a memo to himself on the palm of his left hand. A baby was coming. There was even more to protect.

  He unlocked the front door and entered briskly, as if he had a system to disarm by punching in a number code within the time permitted. The house was warmer than the night outside, though not quite as stuffy as Ted had expected. Perhaps Karin had left the central air on low. The first summer after moving in, they’d conserved energy by turning up the thermostat and just opening upstairs windows in summer. As their store of treasure grew, however, they had started closing and locking everything whenever they left the house.

  His mouth still dry from the Riesling, Ted went to the kitchen for a club soda. The light on the answering machine was flashing. Three messages. The first was from a carpet cleaning company, the second a resort on Georgian Bay. The third was puzzling.

  “Hi, Karin. It’s Daddy-o. Got your message from 400 and Finch and reckon you should be here pretty soon. If not, you’re going to miss that midnight swim. I’ve called your cell and there’s no answer, so I’m thinking you and it aren’t in the same place. Like maybe it’s in the car and you’re back in the house. Ted’s phone is turned off, so he’s no help. Clue me in if you’re staying down overnight, and I’ll stop listening to the radio station with that jolly joe that reports the traffic pileups.” The time stamp was 11:15 p.m., just before Ted had got in.

  He put down his drink and listened to the empty house. The reference to a midnight swim suggested Quirk had told her father she’d be arriving late. She usually answered her phone, even when driving, but she could have left it in the car while she stopped to grab a tea. Markus’s voice contained the hint of a smile that seemed inseparable from his soft Scandinavian accent. He wasn’t overly anxious yet. Still, the combination of circumstances was unusual enough that Ted couldn’t blame him for wondering.

  Ted crossed a vestibule cum basement stair landing between the kitchen and the garage. When he opened the door to the garage, there was Karin’s blue Honda Insight. So, after starting for the cottage, she had indeed come back. On the floor, in front of the passenger seat, lay her knapsack and in the back of the car her cello, ready to go. Ted thought first of illness. He raced back through the kitchen into the front hall and took the stairs two at a time up to their bedroom. Empty. Bed apparently unused since he had made it this morning. When Karin made the bed, she spread the duvet over the bottom sheet, while Ted left it folded at the foot, as it was now. The door to the ensuite bathroom stood open.

  “Karin? Karin!”

  He looked inside and saw nothing but an expanse of tiles, with a few water drops on the floor of the shower stall. No longer afraid of waking her, he blundered about the second floor, his senses barely registering, seeing nothing but Karin’s absence, hearing nothing but his own voice calling her name.

  Ted stopped to think in the upper hall, hands on the rail as he stared down the curving stairs to the front hall. How to explain this? Karin had for some reason aborted her trip without telling Markus. Maybe the battery in her cell had run down and, rather than get off the highway and find a public phone, she’d come straight home. When she’d pulled into the driveway, she’d happened to see one of the neighbours. And, after an exchanged word or two, accepted an invitation to go over there for a drink. “I’ll just pop the car in the garage first,” she would have said. Which neighbour? Ted knew a name or two. Karin would know more; she always did. He’d look for her address book. But wait. She would have called Markus first, wouldn’t she, if it were just a matter of a friendly nightcap? She’d have unloaded her cello. Maybe the neighbour had noticed she was unwell, rushed her to the emerg. This would be bad, but not as bad as if Quirk were still lying untended somewhere in the house.

  That’s as far as Ted got when he noticed the fresh wad of chewing gum on the dark blue stair runner. He knew immediately what this was from his research. It was a tag, a territorial marker that said, “This is no longer your space; it’s mine.”

  Ted charged down the stairs and from room to room, flicking on lights as he ran. Living room, nothing. Dining room, nothing. Family room, the same. In his study, there was a hole where his new computer had been and his disk library had been ransacked. Instantly he feared that the disk the intruder had wanted was the one in his briefcase labelled Family Photos, the one that contained the dirt on the Dark Arrows. No Karin here, though, so he didn’t stop. He was hoping now that, when she came in from the garage, she had heard that there was someone in the house and had got out again before being found. She could have run next door or to Meryl’s twenty-four hour gas bar and convenience store two streets over from the end of the crescent. Ted just had to check the basement first.

  He returned to the landing from which another door led into the garage, and a third to outside. The fourth side of this cubicle had no door but opened directly to the head of the steep, gerry-built basement stairs Karin hated. When Ted flicked on the basement light, it showed her lying at the foot of them.

  On her back on the cement basement floor, feet towards the bottom step, dressed for the cottage, eyes open, and deathly still.

  He picked up a splinter from the railing in his haste to get down to her. Her skin was cool rather than cold, but he couldn’t find a pulse. He ripped his cellphone from its pouch on his waist. Never had it taken longer to boot up.

  When the young male 911 operator asked what service Ted wanted, he said ambulance and p
olice. His voice rasped. His throat felt tight and dry.

  “Is there a medical emergency?”

  “Uh-huh,” Ted croaked. “Yes.” He started to give his address.

  “One moment, sir. I’m going to start you off with the ambulance.”

  Ambulance. The word carried hope. Ted tried to be patient, take things in order. It was going to be all right. It had to be. He bent closer to Karin.

  “Quirk, you’re going to be all right,” he stammered.

  While the 911 call was being directed, his gaze fixed on her hair. The red strands on the top of her head were pulled up, straight out from the scalp. He reached out to smooth them, but pulled his hand back. Crime scene, he thought. Don’t touch.

  He swallowed hard, managed to moisten his tongue enough to speak.

  “I have a woman here on the floor with no pulse,” he blurted out as soon as he sensed someone on the other end of the line.

  “Is she breathing?” The call taker’s voice was female. It sounded as if she’d asked this question a thousand times before.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you see her chest rising?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Can you put your face down by her mouth and feel if there’s any breath coming out?”

  Ted put his left ear to Quirk’s dear lips. Nothing. Was he just too numbed by shock to feel the puffs of air? Yes. No. He believed both at once.

  “Sir? Sir? Are you there? Do you feel any breath?”

  “None. Can you please send an ambulance? 19 Robin Hood Crescent.”

  “Is there anyone there with you?”

  “You mean—”

  “Besides the woman on the floor.”

  “No, no one else.”