The Laughterhouse

by Paul Cleave

  “We’re certainly building up a picture of what happened,” Schroder says.

  “Was it the Grim Reaper?”

  “It’s Gran Reaper,” Schroder corrects her.

  “What?”

  “It’s Gran Reaper.”

  “Gran?”

  “As in Grandparent.”

  “Cute,” she says, but doesn’t sound like she means it.

  “We don’t know for sure it’s him, but it’s possible,” Schroder says.

  “Which firm does your husband work for?” I ask.

  “Goodwin, Devereux, and Barclay,” she says.

  “They interact with lawyers?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “You’d need to ask them, but I assume so.”

  “Have you heard of Herbert Poole or Albert McFarlane?” I ask.

  “Your partner asked me that already,” she says, “and the answer is no. Are they the two men killed earlier today?”

  “What can you tell me about your husband?” I ask. “Was he well liked? Having any problems? Any strange phone calls, any late-night meetings, anything at all?”

  “Brad’s a great man,” she says, frowning at me. “Nothing like that at all, and everybody likes him. Everybody. I hope you’re going to have better questions than that.”

  “What time does he normally finish work?” I ask.

  “It varies. He aims to finish at six most nights, but most times he doesn’t finish till seven or eight. Sometimes, like tonight, he doesn’t finish till much later. It’s not unusual for him to get home after midnight.”

  “And he calls first?”

  “He called around five and said he wouldn’t make it home till around eleven. He has a lot of work at the moment. One of his colleagues was arrested for murder and is in jail now,” she says, “so Brad has to take on the extra workload.”

  “So finishing late is a recent thing,” I say.

  “He would finish late in the past, maybe once or twice a month, but now it’s almost every night, and of course much later too. Midnight is about as late as it gets. I don’t complain because he’s under a lot of stress at work. I mean, it came up, sure it did, I was sick of having to take care of the house and the kids and I didn’t want to become a widow to an accountant firm, and. . and. .”

  She stops talking. The word widow has registered with her and her face is changing shape around the thought, I can see it in her features, in her eyes, she’s mapping a future with her husband no longer in it, no more phone calls, no more arguments, no more being unsure of when he’s going to arrive home. No more of anything-just an emptiness in her life that one day she may fill with somebody else or won’t.

  “He’s going to make it,” she says. “He’s. . he’s lost a lot of blood,” she says, “and the doctors. . they still don’t know if. .” she stops talking. Her friend stands up and comes over and puts an arm around her. She gives us a dirty look, like everything is our fault, like we’re being intrusive with all the questions even though we all want the same thing.

  “How long has he worked at the firm?” I ask.

  “Five years, going on six.”

  “Before then?”

  “Before then he used to work for Inland Revenue.”

  I glance at Schroder and he returns the look. The Inland Revenue thing is a problem. That means we can start throwing darts at the phone book and each time we’d find somebody with a motive. I know it means that I hate Brad Hayward, and Schroder hates him too. We’re out there putting our lives on the line every day just to give a third of our wages to the government, and it’s not like the government’s taking one-third of the risk. And if Schroder gets shot, Inland Revenue isn’t going to send flowers and wish him the best and thank him for all the tax he’s paid.

  “Any problems back then? Any threats?” I ask.

  “No, nothing,” she says, and Schroder’s cell phone goes off. He excuses himself and steps back.

  “Why’d he leave?” I ask.

  “Oh, well, he just wanted a change,” she says, her eyes looking down.

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Would he tell you if there had been any threats?” I ask.

  “Brad tells me everything.”

  I’ve never known whether girlfriends and wives really believe that.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she says.

  I don’t need to prompt her to carry on.

  “You’re thinking with all the late nights, that Brad was having an affair. Well, he wasn’t.”

  I wasn’t thinking that-at least not seriously, but now I certainly am. “Listen, Mrs. Hayward, were people suspecting your husband of having an affair? I need to know everything. Anything you hold back could be vital, it could help us find who did this.”

  “I’m not holding anything back.”

  “Why did he leave Inland Revenue?”

  “I told you, he just wanted a change,” she says, and this time she holds my eye for a few seconds before looking away and, combined with what she said about her husband being faithful, I know she’s lying to me. I’ve been doing this for too long to let somebody like Mrs. Hayward fool me. “Better money, better conditions, plus nobody wants to work for the tax department,” she says.

  I nod. That’s true. “I’m going to ring them first thing in the morning and talk to his old boss and find out anyway,” I say, “so you might as well tell me.”

  “Is this necessary?” her friend says.

  “It’s okay,” Mrs. Hayward says, and then she holds my look. “It was nothing. Just, you know, problems with another woman. She said he was harassing her when he wasn’t. Stupid stuff. She didn’t like Brad so she made up stuff about him. It was easier to move on than to follow it up. So that’s it, Mr. Policeman, and now you think Brad was cheating on me and he wasn’t, he’d never do that, he’s not the cheating kind,” she says, only I think he might be and she thinks he might be too. The late nights, the extra hours at work-you don’t have to be an accountant to see what that adds up to.

  I thank her for her time and wish her husband the best. Schroder wraps up his phone call.

  “Get anything?” he asks. “You looked like you were giving her a hard time.”

  “Her husband was having an affair. It’s probably why he was late home tonight. Maybe he was messing around with the wrong girl. Maybe that’s the connection.”

  “She tell you that?”

  “Not in as many words,” I say.

  And on that note a doctor, looking dejected, comes out from behind the doors, and before he can even say a word we all know what he’s about to say, and the two women break down and cry and the Christchurch homicide rate marches on.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  We’re not dealing with a serial killer. We’re dealing with a spree killer, and that’s not something Schroder or myself or anybody else in the department has had experience with. A serial killer takes his time. A spree killer is running around killing who he can in as quick a time as he has. You’re dealing with one victim and at the same time our perp is creating another.

  At three in the morning we leave the hospital and the city’s most current grieving widow and drive to the crime scene in our own cars. We drive past the journalists who, like vampires, never sleep and, who, like vampires, suck the life out of people. The world would be a better place if vampires were real and reporters were not.

  The neighborhood suggests accountants get paid well and there must be more of them living on the street. They probably have accountant parties every few months and swap the latest lawyer jokes and write everything off as an expense. Reporters shout questions at us and I can feel dozens of lenses zooming in on my face. We park behind a patrol car, which has somebody locked in the backseat, somebody wearing a press ID hanging around his neck and a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. Resting on the roof of the car is an expensive camera with one side scratched up and gouged from a fall.

  The house is a four-bedroom, single-
storey place with a very small front lawn. The interior smells like dinner. There are a few other detectives already here, including Detective Kent, who is talking to one of the neighbors. She gives a friendly nod toward us as we walk past. There’s blood all over the garage floor and the side of the car, Brad having fallen backward and slid against it. There are handprints on the concrete and streaks of blood. It looks like Brad tried to drag himself forward before his body gave up on him. The garage door had been left open by the killer, but nobody had seen poor Brad as he lay waiting for his wife to help him, or one of the neighbors. Well, the neighbors are here now-and plenty of them. They’re all standing outside their houses and watching, fascinated by the goings-on of death, addicted to the drama. They can’t look away. The amount of blood here means the doctors didn’t have much to work with.

  I step over the blood and through the internal doorway into the hallway. The house is ten degrees warmer than outside. There’s a heat pump still blowing warm air in the living room. It’s working hard to combat the cold air coming through the open door. There’s a big-screen TV showing a live news report. The sound has been muted, there’s a reporter at the scene and in the background I can see my car. Maybe a viewer out there will feel sorry enough to donate a later model with more working parts. The car is coming through in HD, as is the reporter, as is every line and wrinkle on her face. The camera is adding ten pounds to the reporter and twenty years to my car.

  One of the bedrooms has been turned into a study. There are photos on the wall of family with various degrees of happiness on their faces. There’s a framed poster-sized movie print on the wall with an alien holding a woman in his arms, the background full of 1950s tanks and 1950s soldiers acting the way they all did back in B movies when army tanks never solved problems but added to them. I figure nothing has changed. I switch on the computer and while it loads up I go through the drawers and the desk and start stacking things on top of it, an address book, folders containing work, a list of bank accounts and social networking sites all with passwords written next to them. The computer comes to life and I spend time going through the history folder, bank accounts, all websites this family has visited and find nothing useful. If Brad was having an affair, there isn’t any evidence of hotel room charges or flowers. The names from the address book and the shop receipts will be cross-referenced with anything found from the first two scenes.

  I head back into the garage. Brad’s keys are still hanging in the ignition. It’s a much nicer car than mine and I wonder if the wife would mind me borrowing it since I’d be using it to help find her husband’s killer. I figure if I asked I’d be adding to the body count in the morgue. I open the door and can immediately smell perfume. It’s strong, and even stronger against the passenger seat. There are some dirty blond hairs caught in the fabric of the headrest, about twice the length of the wife’s hair and a different color. I go through the glove box, the trunk, and check under the seats. There are plenty of gas receipts tossed about, two empty drink bottles, a pair of socks, and some candy bar wrappers. I close up the car and head into the bedroom. I look through the wife’s cosmetics, sniff the perfumes, and don’t find anything to match.

  “Looking for a new fragrance?” Schroder asks, holding onto his phone.

  “Can’t a man just want to smell nice?”

  “So what are you doing?”

  I tell him about the car.

  “And?”

  “And none of these match. Add that to the hairs I found, and-”

  “And somebody else was in his car.”

  “Perfume’s still strong. Had to have been tonight.”

  “Could be he dropped off a colleague,” Schroder says.

  “You spoken to his boss?”

  “Not yet. Look, Tate, this is crazy, completely fucking insane, but. . but a fourth body has just shown up,” he says, shaking his phone as if trying to rid it of the bad news.

  I feel like throwing the perfumes over my shoulder and slapping my arms against my sides, and just saying Well, I guess that’s it then, because all we’re doing is chasing some psychopath across the city and the night still has a bunch of hours left in it, and we got no way of knowing the killings are even going to stop by morning light. This time tomorrow we could be neck-deep in bodies.

  “No,” I say, shaking my head, trying to refute his statement.

  “Four bodies,” he says. “It’s like. . hell, I don’t know what it’s like.”

  “It’s like the world has gone mad.” I put down the perfume and something turns inside my stomach. “Jesus,” I say, my voice sounding weak. Four people. At least four families. Dozens and dozens of people about to have the world pulled out from under them, parents, friends, family-that’s a whole lot of pain.

  “It’d go easier if He were on the case,” he says.

  “So who’s our new victim?”

  “Her name is Victoria Brown,” he says. “She’s a lawyer and, shit, get this,” he says, shaking his head and letting me know it’s going to be bad, “but she’s been in a coma for seven years.”

  “What? Did you just say-”

  “A coma. Yeah, I know. It’s fucked up. Listen, I’m heading there now. I want you to go and talk to Brad Hayward’s boss, see what you can learn.”

  “You don’t want me to come with you?”

  “Here’s the thing. Look, Tate, I don’t want you to react badly, okay?” he says, and now my mouth goes dry.

  “Carl. .”

  “Reason I don’t want you coming with me is because you’re going to overreact. But your wife is okay.”

  I actually shake my head, the movement brief, as I pull back at the same time. “My wife? What?”

  “Our fourth victim is a patient at your wife’s nursing home, Tate, but Bridget is fine. Absolutely fine.”

  I take a step forward. “What the fuck are you telling me? Somebody tried to hurt her?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. She just happens to be at the same nursing home as our victim.”

  “I’m going there.”

  “Tate. .”

  But I move past him and race outside to my car.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  All the killing is making Caleb tired. It was always going to be a long night. He just has to stay focused. Stay strong. Stay positive. Dealing with the next victim is going to be harder, and more draining, because it’s not just one victim but four-the doctor and his wife and their two children. It’s going to be tricky. The coma victim, she was easy. No effort at all-she didn’t even know he was there. But the doctor-he’s the key. What he has planned for the doctor will be more punishment than any one man can take.

  He’s covered in blood. He doesn’t have spare clothes with him but he’ll get them soon.

  The doctor lives in an expensive neighborhood that every morning is full of maids and gardeners and children being driven to school by soccer moms in cars way too big. There aren’t any lights on in any of the windows. It’s after three o’clock already and he’s tired, so beat that he just wants to crawl into a hole somewhere and take a nap, so tired that what he wanted to do in one night might just take two, but doing everything in one night gives the police no time to figure out what’s going on. One night was the goal. Only he made a mistake following that asshole home earlier. That used up time and energy and he could have been caught. It was stupid.

  He parks right out front. There’s a bunch of different ways he can make his way inside, but there is one simpler than any other. He keeps ringing the bell until a light comes on in the hallway.

  “Who is it?” A man’s voice, sounding tired.

  Caleb hopes the wife has remained in bed. “Dr. Stanton?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s me, James, from further up the road,” Caleb says, trying to sound frantic. “It’s my daughter, we’ve had an accident. Please, please, you have to help me,” he says, and before he even finishes his sentence he can hear the locks being twisted open.

  The door swin
gs open.

  He’s never met Dr. Stanton, but he’s seen pictures from the trial seventeen years ago, when Stanton got up on his soapbox and said not everybody can be held accountable for their actions. He was wrong. He’s put on weight and his hair has gone completely gray and receded a few inches since then, and for some reason it makes Caleb happy to see that.

  Stanton looks him up and down, sees the blood, and looks shocked. “Where is she?” he asks.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” Caleb asks.

  Stanton is halfway out the door and comes to a stop. He can tell the doctor senses something, his psychiatrist radar starts pinging at the danger only a few feet away, only it’s pinging way too late.

  “Recognize you? No, no I don’t,” he answers, hesitant now. “Do you. . do you have a daughter?” he asks, his follow-up question proof he knows that something is wrong.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She died.”

  Stanton pauses. He takes a small step backward. He reaches out to put a hand on the door. “What did you say your name is again?”

  “I said it was James,” he says, “but it isn’t.”

  “Listen, James,” Stanton says, missing the point while taking another step back, “I don’t know what kind of game you’re. .”

  The sentence ends, the following word taking a different shape as Caleb’s fist connects with Stanton’s nose. Then he falls inside, cupping his face with his hands.

  Caleb follows the good doctor inside and shuts the door behind him. He tries to shake the pain out of his hand. He’s used his right when he should have used his left, instinct taking over, and now he has to pay for it. His hand is locked in a fist and it’s going to take a few moments to straighten. He puts his foot into the doctor’s stomach. He uses his good hand to reach into the waistband of his pants and pulls out his knife just as the doctor hits the floor. He looks around, they are in a foyer that leads through to a lounge to the left and what might be a living room ahead. To the right is a staircase. There is nobody around.