Ogrodnik

by Gary Coffin

  “Detective Serge Amyot led the investigation. He was one of the old boys. He’d been detecting for almost thirty years, came up through the system and was very successful. I thought he was stiff with me, but I stayed out of his way and watched. I got what I wanted, and the force got what they wanted. I didn’t do a lot of investigative work, mostly just sat in meetings and performed grunt work for the other detectives, but they did put me in front of the cameras every week to give updates. When there was a perceived break in the case, Amyot would deliver the status, but those were few and short-lived. For the most part, there was nothing to report, so Amyot paraded me in front of the press to deliver the bad news.”

  “I get the feeling you didn’t like him,” Elliot asked when she paused.

  “We’re getting to that,” she replied. “As you know, Stungun went on to kill nine women in total. There was never any trace evidence left behind. Every murder had the same MO. There was no pattern in the type of women; there was no pattern in the places where they were dumped and no discernible pattern in the places they were targeted. The only pattern was that the time between the victims grew progressively longer. The time between the 8th and 9th victims was almost eight weeks, by far the longest stretch between victims.” Rivka sipped her tea.

  “And then he just stopped. The task force worked out scenarios for another three months, but there just wasn’t anything to go on. There was little evidence to start with and no new data coming in. The task force was trimmed from seventeen down to six and then, after another three months of unproductive discussion and theories with no new evidence, they disbanded the task force completely, and the case went into the unsolved bin. If there were another murder, we’d get together again, but unless new evidence came to light, the case was dead.” 

  Rivka took another sip of tea before continuing. “The day we were disbanded, we all went down to the Pub St Paul for a final pint together. We knew it was coming, but it was still a sad day. Nobody ever wants to walk away from a case, especially one this important. Although I never warmed up to Detective Amyot, I found that I liked working with a couple of the other detectives. One beer turned to two and then wine with dinner, and four hours later, we were all feeling pretty good. The conversation turned back to Stungun, and I voiced an opinion that I never had during the investigation. As the murders started piling up, Amyot had us all concentrating on the pattern of the killings. He was convinced that there was either a connection in the places where the girls were picked up or between Stungun and the victims. This was a logical conclusion and the place where every seasoned detective would look. After a certain amount of time, I thought we should have looked elsewhere. I put my theory out there in front of my colleagues to see what they would say. The idle chatter had now stopped and Amyot, who was sitting diagonally across from me, asked me in a voice that I thought to be condescending, “Where would you have suggested we look?”

  All eyes were on me now, and I wondered if I had made a mistake in voicing my opinion. “The first murder was the only one that was different. There was no torch used on the pubes. Maybe that meant the first murder wasn’t planned. It was an impulse. Maybe he slipped up on that murder, and we should have concentrated our efforts on that murder alone.”

  The silence hung in the air for a minute until Serge cleared his throat and looked at his crew. “It’s bad enough they send me a woman to babysit during the biggest case of my career, but then when she gets here, I find out she’s a carpet munching Kike! She’s on the job for a year, and now she thinks we don’t know what we’re talking about. She thinks we pooched the investigation but never said anything about it at the time. No. She waits until the unit is shut down and then tells us how we fucked it up.

  “I was completely stunned by what I just heard. My face was flushed in seconds, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I looked at the others around the table for support and saw only grins and nods.”

  “And,” Amyot continued as he swung his gaze to me, “I don’t know how many blowjobs it took you to get moved up to detective, but I vow to you here and now that you will never, ever, work within my unit again.”

  “It looked like that was something that had been on his chest for months, and he had finally gotten the chance to say it. He leaned back in his chair looking down his nose at me like I was a piece of dog shit he just wiped off his shoe.

  “I stood up, picked up the half full pitcher of beer on the table and threw it in his face and said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ The next day, I sent in my resignation.”

  “Asshole,” replied Elliot. “It sounds as though you could have filed for harassment.”

  “To what end? I saw how pervasive the old boy network is. If I’d have pressed charges, every cop in the city would have sided with him. It would have effectively been the end of my career anyway. Captain Brebouef met with me a couple of times pleading with me to stay and fight, but I’d had it.”

  “Wow. Any regrets?”

  “Only that the pitcher was half empty.”

  "Did you keep a copy of the case file from the Stungun case?” asked Elliot.

  “No, I didn’t bother because the actual data collected was so sparse. I looked at the murders so long and rehashed them in my brain so many times while lying in bed at night that I have it all memorized. I don’t have the list of people interviewed or what they said, but not one of the leads we came across panned out, so I don’t think they are material.”

  “Okay, let’s start with what you know,” said Elliot as he looked around the room. “Do you have a chalkboard or something I can write on?”

  “I have a whiteboard in the den. Will that do?” she asked.

  “Perfect,” he replied as he moved toward the den while motioning Rivka to stay where she was.

  “Can you list all nine murders, the name, and age of the victim, time and date found, location last seen or location they were expected to be and then the location where the body was discovered?” he said as he took up his position.

  Rivka listed all the victims and relevant information on the whiteboard in a tabular fashion. Elliot could tell by the way she didn’t even have to stop and think about it as she was writing that the Stungun murders had been permanently etched into her brain. He also knew that, although she would always remember them, the only way to push them down off the surface of her consciousness was to get closure on the killings and solve the murders.

  Once complete, Rivka stood back to take in the list. She had written it out exactly as she had dozens of times over the course of the investigation. Writing it out both excited and depressed her. Depressed her because in the two years she’d been off the case, she was finally at a point in her life where thoughts of the case didn’t intrude into every aspect of her daily life. Excited because this could be the break she’d been waiting for. Maybe she'd have another shot at the Stungun Killer.

  “Riv, what can you tell me about the assumptions of the investigation? Give me everything you know about the murder and the standing theories.”

  “We believe the killer, working on his own, would choose a victim and stalk her until he felt he could make a move. He hunted at night. Due to bruising on the victims, vaginal as well as on the face and arms, we can conclude he was a sizeable, strong man. He was right-handed,” Rivka closed her eyes, trying to recall exactly what their assumptions had been.

  “The profilers said he was likely ostracized during his formative years because of something in the lines of a physical deformity, a character defect or even something as benign as a lisp or a stutter. He is a loner and will prefer to stay out of the limelight, away from most people, especially in groups. He is a highly intelligent man who never realized his potential in life. He likely holds a low-level job, a job that doesn’t give him the opportunity for accomplishment that he feels he is capable of. Because of the transitory location of the murders we know, he covers a lot of territory. He might be a delivery person, a cab driver or the like and probably work
s during the night. He is a sociopath with no regard for his fellow man.”

  ”What about the MO?”

  “After getting his victim into a safe zone, he would use a Taser to stun and render them temporarily defenseless. He would bind their hands and wrists with nylon tie wraps and duct tape their mouths. He presumably would transport them to his lair in whatever vehicle he used, possibly a van or a truck, where he would rape them and then using his hands, break their necks using an over-rotation method. He would wipe them down, torch their pubes to destroy any transfer and then dump them.”

  “How do you know he tased them?”

  “Using a Taser as a stungun leaves a pair of tiny burn marks where the electrodes contact the skin. We found burn marks on all of the victims either on the back of the neck or upper shoulder area. We also found tase marks on the lower backs on victims three through nine.”

  “What was your explanation for the lower back marks?” he asked.

  “We believe the lower back tase marks were done during the rape. They, uh, we think he did it to enhance his experience.”

  “Sick bastard,” Elliot whispered as he swiveled his chair to look across the room out the front window.

  “Every murder was the same MO except for the torch on victim one and the lack of lower back Taser on the first two victims?”

  “Correct. “

  “What about connections? Were any of the victims connected?”

  “Not directly. We found many instances when a friend of one victim turned out to be the cousin of another or two of the victims went to the same hairdresser. There were dozens of these minor connections, and we chased each of them down, and every one was a dead end. The laws of the six degrees of separation make it a certainty that coincidental connections will be present in a sampling of this size.” 

  “Hence your disagreement with Amyot. Was there any analysis on the points of abduction or the dumping sites?”

  “Fey. We had mathematicians create models for geographical analysis and correlation and input them into the RCMP’s super computer. Again, lots of probability and theories but nothing concrete to go on. The only pattern was the lack of pattern. “

  “What did your profiler say about the reverse duration pattern of the kills?”

  “They said, as I’m sure you know, the usual pattern for serial killers is to have a progressively shorter duration between the kills. This is because the killer works up the courage to commit the first murder and with each subsequent murder becomes more and more confident and usually less cautious. The profiling team had never come across a serial killer whose kill durations were progressively longer like this one. The profiler thought that the killer was either killing other victims with a different MO and thus these deaths were not being attributed to Stungun or he was satisfying his urges doing something other than murder.”

  “Like what?”

  “He might be killing or torturing animals, beating someone up or even something as innocuous as stealing. It could be anything to quiet his mind, or the answer could be as simple as him travelling for a living and only being in Montreal on those dates.”

  Elliot leaned back low on the couch and stared vacantly at the whiteboard. Rivka knew he was processing and might be in this state for hours, so she quietly left and went downstairs to finish some laundry.

  Forty minutes later, in the middle of a phone call relating her recent ordeal to Stella, Rivka heard a bellow from upstairs. “Where are you?”

   Elliot was pacing back and forth in front of the whiteboard still in deep thought.

  “Well, Maven?  What have you concluded in your thought induced vacancy?”

  “I think you were on the right track when you told Amyot that you should be focusing on the first murder,” he started.

  “Remember, Amyot is a product of his environment. Detectives are taught a process for solving crimes of this nature, and that process is based on experience and assumptions. The assumptions their process is based on are: the killer will act according to other documented serial killer behaviors; the killer is not as smart as the police and will screw up eventually and get caught; and a serial killer is psychotic and kills on compulsion. None of those assumptions is valid in this case,” said Elliot waving his arms as if he were an umpire calling a man out at the plate. 

  “The question I kept asking myself is, what is the significance of the reverse duration kill pattern? That pattern goes against all known MOs for serial killers, but those established trends are based on the typical serial killer. The ones who feel a need to kill to ‘quiet an inner voice’ or ‘to satisfy an urge,’ and those feelings will intensify until he answers the voice and acts. That is not the case in these killings. We’ve already said that the killer has no regard for human life. I believe that. Following that logic, he would not get a charge out of the kill. It would be inconsequential to him whether the victim died or not. Let me ask you this: if you had just committed a murder on impulse and knew that it would eventually be traced back to you, what would you do?”

  Rivka understood the question was rhetorical and did not respond.

  “I believe our killer started killing other people, with the same MO, to throw the investigation off track. His intent was to obscure the first murder and get the police to broaden their investigation. To divide and conquer, as they say. For that to work, he would have had to strike again quickly and overload the investigative process before they delved too far into the first murder. I believe that the last eight murders were decoys meant to dilute the significance of the first murder.”

  “How do you explain the duration between killings getting longer?” Rivka asked.

  “Think about it. He was being more careful, the police were out en-force, and the entire city was looking over their shoulders. Remember, he is extremely intelligent. He wasn’t acting on impulse. He would have carefully planned every detail, and he wouldn’t risk getting caught by being careless. As the city became more and more vigilant, he responded in like and had to be more careful in his execution. How he managed to kill nine people without getting caught when the entire city was looking for him was no small feat,” Elliot continued.

  “I think your premise that he chose an intentionally random victim and then stalked her is false. There’s just too much risk in that. I think he set up a trap without knowing who it might catch so the victims weren’t intentionally random; they were naturally random, just as you might expect. “

  “Set up a trap? How?”

  “Impossible to say at this time, but I’m imagining a scenario where the victims were lured and willingly walked into a building or got into a vehicle that turned out to be his trap. Perhaps he is an engaging con man or someone who can naturally trigger a pity response. For instance, it wouldn’t be difficult to picture how a man in a wheelchair struggling to get into a doorway would attract help from a passerby.”

  Elliot picked up the whiteboard eraser and held it over the column detailing the victim dump sites. “Based on this theory, we can surmise that the dump sites were intentionally random; therefore, we will discount them.” And with that, he erased the dump site column.

  “If we look at the last known location of the victims, using the same logic, these sites are also intentionally random, except for the first victim. Our theory states that the first victim was murdered on impulse, and the killer considered that to be significant.” With that, Elliot erased all but the first victim on the last known location column.

  “Our theory also states that the victims were totally random, so we can erase the age of the victim column as well as disregard any connections there may have been between them. We’ve already explained the staggered dates of the killings, let me take those two columns off the board.”

  The board now consisted of one line, the first victim’s name, the date of her murder and her last known location. “This narrows our search a bit,” he said as he put down the eraser.

  “Start with the victim. Who was she, whe
re did she work, go to school, the bars she frequented, the grocery store she frequented, taxi cabs she called? We also need to look at the last known destination. Why was she there, how often did she go there, how did she get there, was she meeting someone, who knew she was going? “

  “I can tell you that the first victim was Rhonda Carling. Thirty-eight years old, married, no children. She did not work; her husband owns a recycling facility in East Montreal. In support of your theory, we found no connections to the other victims. They were moderately wealthy. We talked to her husband and her friends, and the marriage seemed solid. Her cell phone or email account didn’t yield any clues. She spent most of her days sleeping in, watching TV, visiting the spa, shopping, and cooking. There was no evidence of a boyfriend or jilted lover,“ Rivka recited by memory.

  “Tell me about the actual events surrounding the murder. How was she found, where was she going, how did she get there?”

  “The husband had not reported her missing, although he had been looking for her, phoning friends.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She wore the pants in that relationship, but the husband seemed to prefer it that way. It was a big joke around the office.”

  “His staff knew her? “

  “Yeah, she would stop in a few times a week to pester the husband and make a nuisance of herself. The consensus was that when she wasn’t flirting and showing off her silicone implants, she could be a bossy bitch.”

  “What about enemies? “

  “None that we found out about. We talked to the spa, the exercise club, her favorite shopping haunts and her neighbors. Same story. She liked to play the spoiled brat but was harmless and didn’t seem to have any enemies.”

  “Did you get to meet all the neighbors?”

  “I don’t think so. There were a few who were out of town, and once the other murders started piling up, I doubt if they were ever contacted again.”

  “Did you check to see if she had any work done on the house recently or maybe a phone or cable repairman had been in the house shortly before the attack?”