Fall from Grace

by Wayne Arthurson

  “You sure? You’ll be fine?” Again, seemingly innocuous but he was wondering if this attack would push me into my old ways.

  “I’m fine, Larry. Really. I’ll be fine. I’m going to hurt for the next few days but overall I feel good about things. About the work I’ve done, about how I’m settling in here.”

  Larry nodded and for a brief second he smiled. “Good. I’ve only got two more things to say, if that’s okay with you.”

  “You’re the boss, Larry, so knock yourself out.”

  “Okay, first off. This is great work, Leo. One of the best stories I’ve read in the past few years in this goddamn place, and one of the best pieces I’ve read in my entire career. We are, that is confirmed, going to put you up for a bunch of awards this year.”

  “Thanks, Larry. That means a lot. Not the awards but what you said.” And it did. Larry was a friend, but first he was a damn good editor. High praise from him meant something.

  “Okay, now that I’ve been nice, I have to tell you that you look like shit, and in all honesty, looking at you is making me sick. So go home. Do you need a cab or anything?”

  “No. I’ll be fine.”

  “You sure? It’s no problem, I’ll pay it out of my own pocket.”

  “Thanks, Larry. But really, I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay, then. Then get the fuck out of here. You’re also scaring the entire ad sales department and we need those people working in order for guys like you and me to get paid.”

  19

  With Grace’s story written, edited, and set for Sunday’s Insight section, and the fact that I had been recently assaulted, I was given some free time. It wasn’t officially time off—I had to be in the newsroom during most of the day—but I wouldn’t be assigned anything until Monday. That is, if I didn’t come up with a story on my own. I was free to do that, but since everyone had agreed that my story was a success, and that I had gone the extra mile to get it completed, I was free just to sit on my butt, surf the Web, or read a book for a few days.

  I was quite tempted to do the book thing, sit back with my feet up and bask in the glory of a well-written piece of work, but that weird energy of the newsroom kept gnawing at me. All those people furiously working, doing phoners and typing words, made it impossible for me to do nothing. But I wasn’t keen to ask for an assignment, so I scratched an itch that had been bugging me for the last few days.

  Two people, Grace’s foster mom and Jackie, had mentioned a yellow pickup truck and the danger it may have presented to street prostitutes. To them, it seemed that somebody had been picking up prostitutes and killing them at an alarming rate, but the numbers from the police and our files didn’t match. Was the yellow pickup just a fairy tale told by prostitutes to warn of bad johns or was there really someone driving a yellow pickup and killing prostitutes?

  I pulled up those Infomart files that I had dug up, the ones of bodies found in a manner similar to Grace, and set those aside. And then in my notes, I found the name of that Mountie, the one who had been glad that Grace had been found in the EPS’s jurisdiction and not his. He had said something that I couldn’t recall but I thought I had written it in my notes. I flipped through and found it, just after Whitford’s comments about giving Grace a face.

  “‘Thank God means I get to go home and watch some hockey tonight instead of filing the paperwork on another one of these,’” was the quote I had in my notes. Like Jackie’s, I had written this comment down afterward, and it may not have been word for word what he actually said, but it was close enough. What the hell did he mean by “another one of these”? He said there had been a few similar but did those match the ones that had been printed in the paper?

  I found the number for the Strathcona detachment and when I found the Mountie I wanted and reminded him who I was, I asked him if he could give me information on those cases he had mentioned.

  “Take a while,” he said.

  “Define a while.”

  “Couple of days. Depends if we get busy.”

  “So it’s no problem.”

  “Shouldn’t think so, but you might want to check with media folks in K Division. They like to be kept aware of stuff like that. In fact they’ll offer to handle the request personally for you, but in the end, they’ll come to one of our members here to do the actual work, so I might as well get a head start on them,” he said.

  K Division was the headquarters for the RCMP. They were based in Edmonton but they oversaw all of the detachments in northern Alberta. In most parts of Canada, every major city had its own police department. Some smaller cities and towns also did, depending on their need, budget, and desires. Provinces like Quebec and Ontario also had their own provincial police: OPP for Ontario and Sûreté du Québec, respectively. The rest of the country was served by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, those famed Mounties who were descendants of the NWMP, the Northwest Mounted Police.

  In 1873, the Canadian government, barely six years old, established the NWMP to provide a government presence in the Northwest Territories, the huge tract of land west of Upper Canada (Ontario) that included what now comprises the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the area that is still called the Northwest Territories.

  With so many European settlers moving into the area, the Canadian government wanted a modicum of law and order to be present in these new lands. They had seen how the western lands of the post-Civil War United States had become the lawless Wild West that we enjoy today in movies and on TV and their mostly British backgrounds couldn’t abide such anarchy. So they decided to make sure that when people arrived to settle the Canadian west, there would already be a police presence. They also hoped that having a government presence in their open lands would make those wild Americans rethink any plans to increase the size of their country.

  Another side effect of the NWMP was to stem the flow of the “demon liquor” from Montana into southern Canada, where it was wreaking havoc among the population of Canadian Natives. So Colonel James McLeod and 150 members of the newly formed NWMP headed west and a legend was born. The RCMP still serve in Canada. Almost every single town with a population over five thousand has an RCMP detachment and the members of the detachment serve the rural and smaller communities within that area.

  The detachments are entities onto themselves, with a commander overseeing a complement of Mounties whose number depends on the size of the town and area they cover. K Division is the upper management of these detachments and provides centralized services like forensics, media relations, and support for crime too serious or important for a local detachment to deal with.

  I thanked the Mountie for his time, found a number for the media contact of K Division. When I got hold of her and told her what I was requesting from the Strathcona detachment, she also noted it would take a couple of days. Maybe more if I wanted similar information from the other detachments in the surrounding area.

  “Other detachments?” I asked, and then immediately remembered that Edmonton was surrounded by a series of detachments covering the suburban and bedroom communities, which included Sherwood Park to the east, St. Albert to the north, Leduc to the south, and Stony Plain and Spruce Grove.

  Calgary, which was the other major city over a million in Alberta, had annexed many of its bedroom communities in the sixties and seventies, places like Bowness, Forest Lawn, and Midnapore, so it was mostly one big metro area. Edmonton had let these communities remain separate from the city itself. Therefore, it was surrounded on all sides by some of the larger communities in the province. There was talk of turning the entire Capital Region into a megacity, like what had happened to Toronto and its suburbs, but the feelings of animosity between Edmonton and its surrounding communities ran deep, despite the fact that a majority of the population of the other cities worked in Edmonton and made use of many of its services.

  So there were four major detachments around Edmonton, not to mention the many rural towns within a fifty-kilometer radius. I told the fine RCMP m
edia relations consultant that it would be great if she could get me information from the other detachments.

  The info came in slowly. First, as expected, the Strathcona detachment, which covered Sherwood Park and the county around that city. My Mountie friend had compiled a list of four incidents similar to Grace’s murder. Over the next few days, one detachment at a time, more information came in. I felt a chill start to set in. And with every new list, that chill got deeper. I had spent two years living on the streets, through a couple of the toughest winters this city had to offer in the last two decades, and there were only a few cities in the world that had colder, tougher winters than Edmonton. But the chill that settled into my bones after adding the numbers from the last list to the total of cases similar to Grace’s was harsher than anything I had felt during those two years. What made it worse was that every single case was officially listed as “open.” And that meant that not a single one had been solved.

  20

  “You have to be fucking kidding me.” That was the response from Detective Whitford when I asked him, on the record, if the Edmonton Police Service was investigating the possibility that there was a serial killer on the loose in the city.

  “Is that your official response?” I asked into the phone. Like most of the other reporters on staff, I had no time to set up an appointment so that I could interview Whitford in person, so I had called him. At first, he wasn’t keen on talking to me, but the higher-ups in the EPS had liked the story I had written about Grace. They liked the fact that at no point in the story did I lay any blame on the police for Grace’s situation—although according to one of our legislature reporters, the minister responsible for Children Services was mighty ticked. The higher-ups also liked the line in which I noted that Grace’s life story would have never come to light if it hadn’t been for the assistance of some friendly members of the EPS.

  “If your paper would print the word fuck and it doesn’t annoy the shit out of our media relations, sure,” he said with sarcasm. “But the chance of that happening is about the same as the chance that a serial killer is on the loose in Edmonton.”

  “So what is the official response?”

  “The official response to your question about whether the Edmonton Police Service is investigating the possibility that there might be a serial killer on the loose in the city is, ‘No.’ We are not investigating that possibility.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because based on our evidence, there is not a serial killer on the loose on the streets of Edmonton. And I cannot stress that enough. At the moment, the Edmonton Police Service has no evidence that there is a serial killer operating within the limits of the city or within the surrounding Capital Region. And to put forward such an idea does nothing for the public good. In fact, to make such a suggestion will only hurt the public good because it can create fear where no such fear is warranted.”

  “But what about the other cases that I told you about? What about all those women apparently killed in similar fashion and found in similar locations in areas around the city?”

  “Having a number of incidents that are, on the surface, I might add, similar, does not automatically mean that a serial killer is operating. Police do not and cannot make these kinds of assumptions whenever there are crimes that may seem similar, because if we did, it would dramatically reduce our ability to undertake our investigations.”

  “How could saying that there might be a serial killer in the capital region reduce the police’s ability to do their investigations?”

  Whitford sighed. It was a sigh I recognized and used when I tried to explain how the media really worked to those outside the industry. People have so many assumptions about the newspaper business, about how reporters actually work, and I guessed it was the same with the police.

  “Okay, let’s say, just hypothetically, that police say that they are investigating the possibility that there is a serial killer. And I’m going to stress that I am being hypothetical here; I don’t want this to come back and bite me in the ass the same way letting you into the tent did, okay?” I thought he was speaking rhetorically so I didn’t respond. But he wasn’t and after a pause, he added, “I need you to say okay, Leo, to confirm that I am only speaking hypothetically.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Jesus. Okay, I understand that you are only speaking hypothetically, you are not confirming in any way that Edmonton police are admitting that there is a serial killer on the loose. How’s that? Cover your ass enough?”

  “It better. Okay, so we’ve established a hypothetical situation in which police are investigating that there is a serial killer loose. The problem with that is that now the focus has a tendency to go to one person doing all of these murders or ones that have similarities. It’s not a conscious decision or action, mind you, but it does happen. At the same time, there tends to be more pressure from superiors to solve the case, to find a suspect when a case comes up that at first seems to be part of a large case. Then, if through further investigation it doesn’t fit into that large case, unfortunately that case can be shunted aside and treated as secondary, as not as important as those that are part of the serial case.”

  “I get that, makes sense, but it also brings up another question: What do you say about criticism that police aren’t treating these murder cases that seriously because most of them involve women who are sex workers, and a good number of them Aboriginal women? Is there any truth to these kinds of suggestions, that their lifestyle and race play a role in how much importance a case is given?”

  “The lifestyle or activities of a person are completely and totally irrelevant when it comes to the importance we place on an investigation of a homicide or a missing person,” he said. “And in all honesty, Leo, I am insulted by such suggestions, whoever has made them, because as a homicide investigator, I treat all of my cases with the same dedication. I put the same amount of effort into the investigation of every single homicide that comes across my desk. I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t treat every single case with the same amount of effort as the next.”

  “What about Allanah White? Did her case get the same treatment as any other homicide case?” Allanah White was a suburban mother of two, who one day several months ago didn’t show up for work, despite the fact that her husband reported that she had left for work that morning and her car had been found parked in its regular spot at her office’s underground parking garage.

  By the end of the work day, there was a major investigation under way with search teams, sniffer dogs, helicopters buzzing the empty fields near her northeast neighborhood, and pleas from police and her husband on the TV news for any information. Her disappearance was the talk of the town and became national news a couple of days later when police, with the help of her husband, found her body in a shed in a field a couple klicks from her home.

  For the next couple of days, the police released little information, except to confirm that the body they found was Allanah’s. In the meantime, and despite the suspicions, her husband played the grieving spouse, giving interviews to anyone who would listen, crying about his loss, the suffering of his children, and stating his innocence. After a few days of quiet, police charged him with murder and he was awaiting trial. Most expected him to be convicted.

  “I don’t understand the question,” said Whitford.

  “Well, you guys seemed to have pulled out all the stops to find Allanah White, but in many of these cases I’ve told you about, the investigations seem to have been pretty perfunctory. At least when compared to what transpired in the White investigation. If you claim that every homicide investigation gets the same treatment, then how do you explain the differences in how Allanah White and these other cases were handled?”

  “First off, let me just say that I was not involved in the Allanah White investigation so I cannot and will not make any comments about it, except that prior to the discovery of her body, the Allanah White case was being treated as a
n abduction, not as a murder. Hence the search,” Whitford said, a tone of irritation rising in his voice.

  “And second, I let me reiterate that I make the same investigative effort in every single homicide case that comes across my desk. I do not discriminate based on who the victim is, where they come from, what they look like, or any other differences. Every murder is a tragedy and deserves the same amount of treatment and investigation. And to imply otherwise is an insult to me and other members of the Edmonton Police Service.”

  “Not every cop is like you. Some cops don’t have the same ethical commitment that you do, right?”

  “If you’re trying to get me to publicly criticize other members of the Edmonton Police Service, that’s not going to happen,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, all members of the Edmonton Police Service undertake their duties to the best of their abilities.”

  “Yeah, but some cops have better abilities than others,” I said, and then waited for a response. It was a typical interview technique, to make a comment but then say nothing for several seconds. Most people abhor silences during a conversation and do their best to fill them up with something. And usually, that’s where a lot of reporters get their best comments. But Whitford wasn’t a typical interview subject; as a homicide cop, he probably used the same technique to get suspects to slip up.

  My silence was returned with silence of his own and it took almost seven seconds, a long time to have no one say anything in a conversation, before I gave up. “So again, despite the similarities in these cases I have mentioned, you or anybody else in the Edmonton Police Service refuse to admit that there is a serial killer on the loose in Edmonton?” I asked, continuing the interview.

  “Sorry, Leo, I won’t use the word refuse in my answer or respond to your question in any way that will enable you to quote me in a manner that tells people the police are refusing your suggestion,” he said with a laugh. “Nice try, I’ll give you that. But I will reiterate that the Edmonton Police Service is not investigating or putting forward the idea that there is a serial killer operating in the Capital Region. And we strongly urge members of the public not to become fearful and worry about such things because in Edmonton we believe that there is not a serial killer operating.”