Victim Impact

by Mel Bradshaw

  The words echoed in the still house. Ted had too much voice now. He was a hair’s breadth from saying one or more things he’d be sorry for.

  He stared at the freckles on Karin’s thin, straight nose. He couldn’t admit the possibility that it was already too late. He had to look away—anywhere—at the studs of the unfinished basement wall opposite. He noted distractedly that the window in the upper part of that wall was broken. It sounded as if the operator was following a script, not trying to be an insensitive jerk. It was hard, though, and slow. Every second felt like five.

  “What happened to her?”

  “I think she’s been assaulted,” said Ted. “There’s been a break-in.”

  “Assaulted with a weapon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you see a weapon?”

  “No. Send the paramedics, please.”

  “How many assailants were there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are any of them still in the house?”

  “No.” Ted didn’t know this for sure, but was afraid no paramedics would come into a house where they ran a risk of attack. The word assaulted—which Ted had believed potent to speed help to Karin—was instead inducing caution.

  “How many assailants did you see?”

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “What makes you think she was attacked?”

  “Stuff has been stolen. She—I think she may have interrupted a burglary in progress.”

  “Does she have any injuries?”

  “I can’t see, but I’ve already told you I don’t think she’s breathing.”

  “So you can’t—”

  “Look, I need an ambulance here for my wife. And she’s carrying a child.”

  Until this instant, Ted would never have called an embryo a child. And if Karin hadn’t been pregnant? He’d have been no less desperate to save her. At the same time, he felt he had to throw anything he could at this disembodied functionary, anything to raise the stakes enough above the routine to engage her energies.

  The operator said the ambulance was on its way. Ted dashed upstairs to unlock the front door as she requested, then returned to Karin.

  “Stay on the line now while I transfer you to the police.”

  He had to answer all the same questions again. Mercifully, a kind of automatic pilot kicked in. Worse by far was seeing Karin lying there on the floor and believing that, if he took her in his arms as nature prompted, he might be injuring her spinal cord. A cocoon—so it seemed to him—protected him from thoughts that it might no longer matter. He touched the back of his fingers to Karin’s cheek as gently as he could. He could do so little. The paramedics would between them be able to lift her without twisting her neck, to immobilize her on a stretcher, and to get her safely to hospital.

  And then—but then what would become of the evidence? Maybe there was something he could do for her after all. He used his cellphone to take pictures of the way she was lying in case the police photographers didn’t show up in time. He zeroed in particularly on the way her hair stood straight out, not tousled as it would have been if she had fallen. It was as if someone had grabbed her by the hair.

  Uniformed officers of the Peel Regional Police arrived at the same time as the ambulance. Or, though Ted didn’t like to think so, perhaps the ambulance had been parked and waiting for the police cruisers. The ambulance service would have a duty to protect their personnel, the personnel a right to safe working conditions.

  The paramedics found that Karin had sustained blunt trauma to the back of her head. They pronounced her vital signs absent. Ted told them Karin was two weeks pregnant. They said they’d pass that information on to the doctors at Credit Valley Hospital, which was where they now had to take her. Ted wanted to go with her. The paramedics discouraged this impulse and so, more emphatically, did the police. Someone from the hospital would be in touch later. Ted made sure the paramedics had his cellphone number.

  “Her name is Karin Gustafson,” he said. He had to keep spelling it out. “No, mine is Boudreau.”

  Karin’s sassy little summer purse lay on the basement floor a metre or so from where he’d found her. He handed her health insurance card to the paramedics and her driver’s licence to the police to copy from.

  Meanwhile, police constables called in police sergeants, who gave orders to establish a perimeter with yellow tape and to secure the crime scene. The entire house and yard, in effect. Was there a neighbour’s house Ted could go to? The only neighbours Ted knew weren’t answering their phones, so he was asked to wait in the back of one of the cruisers.

  He hunched forward on the bench seat, hugging himself for warmth. Alone with his sensations for the first time since placing the 911 call, he found he was cold in his short-sleeved shirt, actually shivering—although nothing he could see, nothing in the way officers and onlookers were standing around on either side of the yellow tape, suggested that the temperature had dropped. Ted’s slacks beneath his thighs felt clammy with sweat, none of it absorbed by the synthetic leather upholstery. The back seats of police cruisers, he reflected, had to be moisture-proof, easy to wipe clean.

  He wished he had not asked for the police. They were only doing their job, but they were keeping him from Karin, separating what ought to be together. Ought to be, even if in fact Karin were dead.

  There, he’d admitted it. That proved he wasn’t in denial, didn’t it? And yet he couldn’t imagine that tonight’s facts would still be true tomorrow and all the tomorrows for the rest of his life. He didn’t picture the two of them back at the Bouquet Bistro next Thursday or Friday evening, preparing for a night of love. But he wasn’t yet able to picture a future weekend when that wasn’t going to happen.

  While waiting in the back of the police car, Ted listened to Markus’s message on his cellphone: “My little girl hasn’t shown up. Do you know what’s going on? It’s after eleven, by the way.” Markus had to be called. Ted watched his fingers select COTTAGE on his phone’s speed-dial menu. He didn’t know what he was going to say. He didn’t plan how to say it. My little girl. The news would hit Karin’s father hard, but he’d have to take it the way it came out.

  Markus picked up on the first ring. “Yes, Ted.”

  Ted summarized flatly how he’d found Karin and what the paramedics had said before taking her away.

  “Is she going to pull through?”

  “It doesn’t look good.”

  Markus cursed, at length. He used the pronoun it, not you. Still . . . Ted picked up the implication that he himself was in some way at fault, as he believed he was, although Markus didn’t know the real reason, was just expressing a father’s distress.

  Ted let him finish.

  “Which hospital?” said Markus, regaining control. His breathing, deep and measured, could be heard now over the phone. He wasn’t going to let himself fall apart while he was alone in Muskoka and his only child was in lying in an ER two hundred klicks away.

  Ted felt neither in control nor falling apart—more like an automaton.

  “Credit Valley,” he said.

  Markus got Ted to give him the nearest intersection and told Ted to call his cell if he heard anything in the next couple of hours.

  “I suggest you wait till morning to drive down,” said Ted.

  “I’ll come now,” said Markus and hung up.

  Plainclothes investigators were called in from the local police division. Thinking he was at last in the presence of someone with real authority, Ted made the mistake of calling them detectives. The investigators set him straight. Their inferior rank didn’t prevent their asking questions. He tried to show them the photos he’d taken with his cellphone, but rather than look at these amateur offerings, they grilled Ted on how with his wife grievously injured, he could have been cool enough to take pictures more properly left to Forensic Identification Services. He pointed out that Karin had been taken to hospital before any FIS personnel arrived. He still could see no one with a came
ra. The investigators showed surprise at his use of a short form like FIS. He told them he was a criminologist. They received the news warily, as if they thought it much more likely he was a ghoul.

  These non-detectives proceeded to ask Ted a lot of questions about his and Karin’s movements and about what signs he had found that the house had been broken into and burglarized, questions that had already been asked by the uniformed officers and were to be repeated by the detectives when they arrived.

  By this time, someone had brought Ted a cup of hot coffee, and he was feeling less chilled. He didn’t want to meet more functionaries. He just wanted to be left alone. It seemed the best way to be with Karin if he couldn’t be at her bedside. Dearest Quirk . . .

  The detectives introduced themselves as James Nelson and Tracy Rodriguez from the Major Crime Unit. They wore dress slacks, golf shirts and fanny packs. The man was tall and black, the woman well-muscled with dark, rippling hair. Both sporty—basketball and track respectively would be good fits—but not jockish. They’d got Karin’s and Ted’s names from the patrol officers, so Ted didn’t have to spell them out again.

  Ted changed his mind about being alone. These were the people, he thought, to ask if he could go to the hospital now.

  “We just need to ask you some questions first,” said Nelson, busy at the computer terminal in the front seat.

  “It shouldn’t take all that long,” said Rodriguez.

  After an initial interrogation in the close confines of the police cruiser, Nelson suggested they adjourn to an interview room at the divisional station.

  Ted refused. He was going to Karin. While the detectives were bargaining with him for more time, his cellphone rang. A Dr. Hassan at the Credit Valley Hospital already had doom in his voice while identifying himself and confirming that he had Mr. Boudreau. Still, Ted waited until the words had actually been spoken. Karin was dead.

  “I’ll be right over,” Ted blurted out, as if his prompt arrival would make possible some transplant of vitality from his body to Karin’s.

  The detectives exchanged glances. Ted was certain they had already heard, but not told him.

  “I’ll have your wife laid out in a room then,” said the doctor, “instead of being taken to the morgue right away.”

  “Which—?” The simple decency of this provision undid Ted. No more words would come.

  “Just ask at the information desk, Mr. Boudreau. Have me paged if I can be of any further help.” Dr. Hassan now plainly wanted to get on to his next patient, with luck a live one.

  Ted stammered a thank you and ended the call. The cruiser’s back seat had no inside door handle.

  “Let me out of here,” he said. “I have to call my father-in-law. I’m meeting him at the hospital.”

  “I got it.” Nelson sprang out of the front seat and opened the door.

  “We’ll have someone drive you over,” said Rodriguez, on her feet now too and beckoning the nearest uniformed officer.

  “No, thanks. I’m good to drive.”

  “We really don’t think that’s a good idea, sir. We’re sending a constable anyway. It’s no trouble.”

  “Am I under arrest?” Ted asked.

  Nelson raised his open hands. “No, sir! Which car were you planning to take?”

  Ted glanced at the Corolla in his driveway, inside the perimeter of yellow tape.

  “That vehicle is part of the scene. It can’t be driven anywhere until it’s been processed.”

  Before Nelson finished speaking, Ted had spotted an empty taxi among the onlookers’ cars and was making for it. The driver, wearing a white beard and purple turban, caught his eye and nodded.

  The two detectives kept pace at Ted’s side.

  “We understand Ms. Gustafson’s father has a local residence,” said Rodriguez. “Would you be able to spend a few days with him?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t discussed it.” Ted gave the hospital name to the driver, who slid behind his wheel.

  Nelson leaned casually against the middle of the passenger side of the cab. With him there, neither front nor rear door would open.

  “Could we have your father-in-law’s name and city phone number?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Markus—with a K—”

  Ted got no further before Nelson interrupted.

  “Not Markus Gustafson, the anger manager?”

  “You know him?”

  “I was at a workshop he did last spring.” Nelson was smiling at the memory, but quickly recovered his sense of decorum. Moving away from the taxi, he took down Markus’s contact information in his notebook as well as Ted’s cell number. “We’ll get your witness statement on tape tomorrow. We’d just ask you not to say anything to the media before that. Sorry for your loss, Mr. Boudreau. We’ll be in touch.”

  Slumped against the back seat, cellphone in his hand, Ted barely heard the cabbie’s questions as to what had happened that night at his house, questions to which he did not respond. He was trying to feel Karin’s arms wrap around him the way they had this morning, yesterday morning. She: No need to tell you not to wait up. He: Wake me. He begged Karin to deliver him from the nightmare of her death—but woke instead to the need to share the nightmare with Markus.

  When Markus answered his cell, Ted asked where he was.

  “The 400, south of Barrie. What is it?”

  “Pull off and call me back.”

  Ted’s ringtone sounded the instant he ended the call. Markus wasn’t pulling off.

  “Talk to me,” he said.

  “A doctor phoned to say Karin’s dead.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Ted didn’t argue. Lucky Markus if what he said were true. Ted’s own beliefs were cloudier, vacillating and inconsistent, painfully confused, yet profoundly despairing.

  “What kind of doctor is that?” Markus barked.

  No answer was going to help him. Still, Ted felt that sooner or later he had to say something. “An ER doctor. He sounded kind.”

  “Kind? Christ, Ted!”

  “My taxi’s just pulling into the hospital. I’ll see you when you get here.”

  At the hospital, Ted was directed to a private room, where Karin was laid out on a bed. A uniformed policeman, who had been sitting by the window, rose when Ted came in. The constable asked that Ted not touch the white bandage encircling Karin’s head, then went out to wait in the corridor.

  Alone with Karin’s body in that clinical room, Ted seemed to forget for a moment how to breathe. He put a hand out to the door frame to steady himself, then let himself slide to a sitting position on the floor. What were you supposed to do to keep from fainting? Sit with your knees up, your head down between them, he distantly recalled. He did that and didn’t faint.

  There was an armchair by the head of the bed. Ted climbed into it. After the chair got feeling safe, he tried looking again at Karin. His darling. He leaned over and kissed her cold lips. He sat by her side holding her hand in his until he had warmed it with his own. He was just starting to think he was going to keep himself together when sorrow hit him like a wave, and he bent double under its weight. A sense of loss and waste overwhelmed him. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Ted had imagined his final parting with Karin when they were both in their nineties. Whichever one of them wasted away first, it would have been too soon.

  But this—death untimely and unnatural. The killing of a woman of thirty-two, still at the height of her loveliness. Karin had so much promise unfulfilled—as artist, mother, lover. Now she lay cold with a cold embryo inside her. Because of a crime committed in her own house, where she had most right to expect shelter.

  Ted let go Karin’s hand and staggered blindly towards the door. Somewhere down the night-lit halls he found a washroom where he splashed handful after handful of cold water on his face. What was he to do? Ted had generally thought of himself as navigating life’s waters on an even keel, cool and contained. Others spoke of him this way. He simply didn’t recognize the found
ering, leaky barque he’d become. Coping mechanisms would have to be invented from scratch. Short hours ago, he’d have considered his present condition shameful. Now, though, he was too panicked to feel shame. He didn’t dare look in the mirror.

  At length, he took himself out into the summer night to find a patch of grass where he could sit and let his eyes dry under the stars. He tried to focus on what had to be done. Discouragingly, however, all he could think was that he had to break the news to his own father and mother, who had four children and no grandchildren. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

  Ted was back in the room on a stool by the window when his father-in-law arrived. It was going on two thirty a.m. A nurse had looked in at some point and turned the lights down. Ted let his eyes close. He opened them to see Markus in the doorway, his beard standing out in blond spikes while his eyes remained in the shadow of his jutting forehead. He wore blue jeans and a denim vest over an olive T. He’d once earned his bread as a performing musician and taking command of a stage still seemed second nature to him. He walked straight to the bed without acknowledging Ted.

  “What the hell!” Markus clapped a hand over the lower half of his face. Presently Ted heard him draw air in loudly through his nose.

  “Shall I leave you alone with her, Markus?”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Have a seat.” Ted indicated the armchair.

  Markus said he’d stand, and the two men stood, on opposite sides of Karin.

  “The message you got tells us she started for the cottage,” said Ted. “But she must have come back for something. I don’t know what. When she entered the house from the garage, a burglary was in progress. It looks as if, instead of running away, the intruder went to confront her. Some kind of struggle must have occurred in the back vestibule, the upshot being that she either fell down or was pushed down the cellar stairs.” Ted didn’t show Markus his photos or share his thoughts about Karin’s hair.

  “They catch the guy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Shit.” Markus sniffed again loudly and wiped his nose. “Did you ever hear of my girl hurting anyone? Because I didn’t, not ever—not once. Did you?”