The Laughterhouse

by Paul Cleave

  That’s not a conversation that is going to go well.

  She hands over an impression of the blade used to kill these people. She’s isolated one of the wounds and poured thick liquid into it that’s taken the shape of the wound and then hardened. It gives us the dimensions of the knife. It looks like a kitchen knife, something a chef would slice onions with, or something Hitchcock would put into the hands of a madman. Knowing what kind of weapon it is doesn’t bring us any closer to knowing who’s using it, especially when there’s a million identical knives out there, but the nineteen stab wounds does. How it does, we don’t know-not yet.

  “I’ll call you when I know more,” she says.

  Catching the elevator to the world above ground doesn’t reverse the feeling of misery and depression I caught when catching it down, it just gives it more contrast. It always takes a few minutes to shake that bleakness away. Coffee break is over and we stand in the parking lot surrounded by the dust of construction and roadwork, construction workers yelling at each other over the pounding of equipment and engine noise. The doctors and nurse are off playing doctors and nurses. The day is bright and I yawn into my hand, go to say something to Schroder, then yawn again, this time into my other hand. I don’t like to play favorites. Schroder starts to yawn too, then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small white cardboard box with Wake-E stenciled across it in orange letters.

  “Caffeine tablets,” he says, and chucks one into his mouth. “Want one?”

  I do want one, but what I don’t need is an addiction. Aside from the one to coffee. . which is one I need to break anyway. I shake my head. We walk over to our cars. Schroder looks at the addition of the broken headlight on mine, seems about to mention how it just adds character, or some other joke, but can’t come up with anything.

  “Something happened to me last year,” he says, “which could have ended me up in there,” he says, nodding back toward the doors. “Down in the morgue. Not many people know about it. I mean, I had to get checked out by some doctors, but there wasn’t any damage.”

  I want to ask him what kind of something, but I let him take his time.

  “You think it’s going to rain?” he asks, looking out at the clouds.

  I shrug. “Maybe. Ariel Chancellor sure thought so.”

  “Yeah, I think it might too,” he says, his thoughts still somewhere else.

  “You wanna talk about it?”

  “Not really,” he says. “It was just before Christmas, back when I came to see you in jail to help me out with that Hunter case. I was in a house and a perp came up behind me. I thought he was going to shoot me. I thought the last thing I was going to see was my chest all over the bathroom wall. Anyway, he didn’t shoot me, but he made Hunter push me into a bathtub full of water and keep me in there until I died.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, exactly. It gets worse too. The thing is, I did die. I was under that water and I was panicking and I’m thinking whoever the fuck said drowning is a peaceful way to die didn’t die from it, didn’t have his hands cuffed behind him and his head stuffed into a bath full of water. When you’re sucking water in instead of air, it’s the worst thing in the world. Everything burns. Everything goes dark. Then there’s just nothing. Then I was just gone. Thing is, a few minutes later Hunter pulled me out of that bathtub. He breathed life back into me and pounded on my chest until I started coughing up water. I remember lying on the bathroom floor with no idea what in the hell was going on, I remember being pissed off that somebody had just done that to me, and I remember being scared because from the three or four minutes I was dead, I remember nothing at all. All this work we put into making the world a better place, I don’t know. . I mean, I don’t really believe in God, but I like to think that there is one, you know? And for four minutes I was closer to God than I’ve ever been and got nothing. So maybe my wife is right, maybe it’s time I move on.”

  “You want me to argue with you? You want me to tell you what a loss that would be to the department? To the people of this city?”

  “Not as big a loss as it would be the next time if there’s nobody there to breathe life into me,” he says.

  “So what are you saying?”

  He looks up at the sky, then wipes a hand over his face. “I’m not saying anything,” he says. “I’m just tired, that’s all. Tired and mad and just. . just nothing. You nailed it with those nineteen stab wounds,” he says, moving on, but he’s wrong-it was Jonas who nailed it, not me, and we’d have known soon anyway; Tracey would have made the connection. How the hell did Jonas know? Even Tracey didn’t know, so nobody tipped him off.

  “Carl. .”

  “Look, Tate, I’m fine. Let’s just focus on the case. How was your visit with Ariel Chancellor?”

  “It was interesting,” I tell him, then fill him in on the details.

  “And she has no idea how she recognizes Victoria Brown?” Schroder asks when I’m done, talking loudly to be heard over a jackhammer that has just fired up.

  “That’s what I’m saying. She might have seen her on TV. We need to check if she had any high-profile cases. If she did, that could be how Chancellor knows her. If she did, maybe that high-profile case is related to what’s going on. If she didn’t, then Chancellor knows her in some other way. She was no help though, she was still high from something and drinking something and was remembering less the longer we talked. It’s looking like she was just a random prostitute Hayward picked up on his way home and has nothing to do with what’s going on.”

  “We’ll have the warrant for Brown’s caseload soon,” Schroder says, “but I can already tell you we’ve checked the news archives and found nothing with her name in it. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t had a case in the news because more often than not the media focuses on the suspect and victims and rarely mention the name of the lawyer. We’re in the process of checking court records but, like any government-run department, nobody has really heard of the word efficient. Between that and the law firm she worked for, we should have something by the end of the day, but it’s frustrating-you’d think everybody would be wanting to work together to catch this bastard.”

  “I’ll take another run at Chancellor later on today when she’s fresher. How are the criminal records panning out?”

  “Nobody recently released has been in jail for nineteen years,” he says.

  “What about nineteen months?”

  “We have something there-the list is about a hundred names long for people who have been released this year alone. But jail may have nothing to do with it,” he says.

  “All of this is revenge motivated. Where’s our guy been all these years? Why not kill these people a long time ago? Victoria Brown couldn’t have pissed him off in the last seven years, so where’s he been if not jail?”

  “Hospital? Overseas? The army?”

  “It’s jail,” I say, and Schroder nods.

  “It’s what I’m thinking too,” he says. “He just hasn’t been inside for nineteen years. It must mean something else. We’ll go through all released prisoners from across the country in the last six months and start there, and if we get nothing, we’ll work our way backward until we do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I listen to the radio on the way back from the hospital. For the last few months the media and politicians have been discussing capital punishment. Some want it brought back-it was abolished in 1961, and there is certainly an argument for its return. Some are disgusted at the thought-they say it’s murder, that it can never be justified. The debate comes and goes, always strongest during a murder investigation, strong support for each side-one of those debates where there is no middle ground, where everybody has an opinion. If they asked me, I could tell them it’s a permanent way of keeping killers off the streets. It’s actually the only way. The public is asking for a referendum-they want to be heard. But in this world the victims remain dead and the killers are set free and the people aren’t listened to. I don’t see
that ever changing. Well, maybe, if the apes really do take over.

  I stop in at a café and grab a coffee and a bagel. The woman behind the counter is in her mid-twenties and gives me a huge smile and asks how my day is going. I tell her it’s going well and I don’t tell her about the bodies I just looked at or the fact that my day started nearly thirty hours ago. I ask her how her day is, and she tells me it’s going great, but doesn’t elaborate either, which, I hope, is for different reasons. The café is quiet down the back, and I make my way to one of the booths. There’s a newspaper on the table, the Gran Reaper is the headline, but the thing with newspapers is they’re out of date before the ink even dries. I turn the paper over so the headline doesn’t have to stare at me, instead looking at the sports section where a woman in a bikini is about as thin as the surfboard she stands next to. Somebody has added a moustache and a penis in blue pen and a speech bubble with letters inside too roughly crafted to make out. I’d have thought they’d have added them to the woman and not the surfboard. I slide the paper to the opposite end of the table and take out my cell phone.

  I call my wife’s nursing home. It takes a minute for the receptionist to get Nurse Hamilton on the line.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Theo,” she says, before I get the chance to even start telling her, “but she was only missing for five minutes and she hasn’t hurt herself.”

  It turns out she doesn’t know what I’m thinking. “What? Bridget is missing?”

  “No, not is, but was.. ” she says, drawing out the was so it lasts a few seconds. “Isn’t that why you’re calling?”

  “No,” I say. “I was calling about last night, about how she kept going to the window.”

  “Oh, oh, I see. Well in-”

  “What do you mean she was missing?”

  “It was nothing, so don’t panic yourself,” she says, trying to sound casual, but I am starting to panic. “She just wandered off, that’s all. She was perfectly safe the whole time.”

  “My wife is catatonic, and she’s wandered off?” I say, and the woman who made the coffee looks over, her smile faltering. I lower my eyes and my voice. “How did she wander off?”

  “She didn’t wander far. But she did make it outside.”

  I struggle but manage to keep my voice down. “Outside? How the hell did she make it outside?”

  “Please, Theo, calm down.”

  “I am calm,” I say, staring at the surfboard’s penis. I slide the paper even further away. “But I don’t get how she made it outside.”

  “She made it outside because of what happened here last night,” Nurse Hamilton says, her voice authoritative now. “Poor Victoria, her death hasn’t been easy to deal with, Theo, not at all. You might be used to seeing that kind of thing, but I assure you, nobody here is. We’re short three staff today, Theo, three people couldn’t face coming back so soon and they probably won’t be here tomorrow or the day after either. There are still police here asking questions, so yes, there are some cracks today that things can fall though but we have her, Theo, we have Bridget and she is unharmed and that’s all that matters.”

  I close my eyes. I should be angry, but I’m not-Nurse Hamilton is right, and Nurse Hamilton isn’t the kind of woman prepared to lose an argument. The fact Bridget is okay is all that matters. In fact, how can I be angry with the fact my wife somehow made her way outside?

  “What was she doing?” I ask.

  “She was doing nothing,” she says, her tone less defensive now. “We found her outside staring at the garden pond, nothing more. We took her back inside, and she’s in her room and we’re keeping an eye on her.”

  “Was she looking at the pond? Or looking through it?”

  “I know what you’re asking, Theo, and no, she wasn’t looking at it-the sun was reflecting so brightly off the water there’s no way she could have seen a thing.”

  “I’m going to come and see her,” I say.

  “You can’t afford to get your hopes up. It’s not like this is the first time she’s walked anywhere.”

  “I know,” I tell her, rubbing at my head where there is a slight throbbing behind my right temple, “but like you say, it’s the first time she’s made her way outside. She went out there for a reason.”

  “No, Theo, it’s the first time we’ve had a homicide here and been short staffed. That’s how she got outside, and if we’d been short staffed in the past she probably would have gotten outside back then too.”

  “I’m going to call her doctor,” I say. “I know you think it’s a waste of time, but I’m thinking it couldn’t hurt to have some tests done, you know?”

  She says nothing for a few seconds, and I get the sense she’s either nodding or shaking her head. “It can hurt,” she says. “Not Bridget, but it can hurt you.”

  “If there’s a chance. .”

  “I know, trust me, I know. My job is based around knowing. Every day I deal with patients like Bridget, and I deal with their husbands and wives and loved ones. I see the pain and the hope, the tragedy of it all, that’s what my world is. Theo, you’re in that world with me, and I’m telling you this as a friend who cares about you and as a nurse who’s seen it all before, I’m telling you that you need to let go. You need to move on.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I know,” she says, “and that’s what makes you you.”

  “I’m going to call her doctor,” I tell her. “I want him to take another look at her.”

  “That’s fine, Theo. I hope he finds something that can help, I really do.”

  I hang up and run my finger up and down the handle of the coffee cup, wondering if the path I’m about to take is going to rip open all the wounds from three years ago. I haven’t moved on, but I have started to heal.

  I ask the waitress if I can borrow a phone book, then sit back down in the booth. I find the number for the hospital and ask to be put through to Dr. Forster. It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken. In the beginning I was in touch every day with more questions. I divided my time between looking for revenge on the man who did this to us, getting that revenge, and looking for answers on the Internet. Then I started calling him less, and then not at all.

  My coffee has cooled enough that I can drink half of it within a few seconds. The call goes through to an answering machine. I leave my details and ask him to call me back hoping he will-I haven’t spoken to him in over two years. I finish off my coffee and head back out onto the street.

  When I get to the station I’m a little wired on caffeine while the entire fourth floor seems to be wired on methamphetamines. People acknowledge me as I walk through them, yesterday’s comments at Landry’s wake about how I was part of the problem and not part of the solution seem to have been forgotten. One detective is imitating playing a guitar as a few of them discuss getting together to play Xbox on Friday night, while another one plays air drums.

  I find Schroder in the conference room staring up at the board. There are stacks and stacks of folders on the table next to him, at least a few hundred in total.

  “Files of everybody released from prison this year,” he says, putting his hand on them. “This pile here,” he says, and he taps the pile at least twice the size of the second biggest, “are criminals with violent prosecutions behind them.”

  “You’ve started looking?”

  “Yeah. I’m about one percent of the way through them,” he tells me.

  The thing with police work is it’s hardly ever about speeding down a street somewhere to save a life, or pulling a gun on a suspect. It’s about the mundane. Going over files. Taking and reading witness statements. It’s about cross-referencing and making connections.

  “That’s a lot of files,” I tell him.

  “You want to be a cop again, right? This is part of the job. This is the life you’ve been desperate to get back.”

  Two other detectives walk into the room, each of them with coffee in their hands, making me crave some even though I fuelled up earlie
r. The four of us sit down and start going through them. We start making piles. We don’t talk much. We just knuckle down and get the work done. The details are the same in many of them. Violent men with violent histories. Drug charges, rape charges, armed robbery charges, sprinkle in some murder too. No wonder the people of New Zealand want to be heard on their views of capital punishment.

  “We need those damn lawyer files,” I say.

  “If the law firm could bill us for the time they’d be more helpful,” Schroder says.

  The piles we’re forming are two possibilities. People it could be, people it certainly wouldn’t be, but the problem is any of the men in these folders could kill if required. Nothing stands out. After an hour we’re only a third of the way through and my pile of possibilities is the same as when I started.

  “There’s been another development,” a detective says, stepping into the room, and it’s Detective Watts, the man who had his face superglued to his desk by Landry. “We got a missing doctor,” he tells us, directing most of the dialogue at Schroder. “A psychiatrist. Nicholas Stanton. Nanny showed up this morning and found signs of a struggle. Officers went down there and have just confirmed it looks like Stanton was attacked.”

  Schroder is no longer looking at Watts. He’s looking at me, and we’re both thinking the same thing. Then, to spell it out for us anyway, Watts carries on. “Two dead lawyers, an accountant, and a school teacher. Now a missing doctor. Could be related, right?”

  Schroder keeps looking at me. Everybody in the room does. It’s as if they’re all waiting for my opinion before they react, but they’re not. They’re forming their own ideas on what this could mean.

  “Nanny means children,” I say. “How many?”

  “Three,” Watts tells us. “Stanton is separated from his wife, but he has full custody of the three children. The older two haven’t shown up to school today. Daughters, aged eleven and eight. The one-year-old is normally looked after by the nanny.”