James Carol - The Quiet Man

Anderton’s face creased with disbelief. ‘How can you say that? The guy’s a complete psycho.’

‘I agree that he’s a psychopath, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s a sadist. Not all psychopaths are cold-blooded killers. Some are, some aren’t. Psychopaths are wired differently, they think differently. It’s not uncommon for the actual murder to be a secondary consideration. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the fantasy whatsoever. A good example is your first-time rapist. Once he’s played out his fantasy he realises that he’s got a witness that needs to be disposed of, so he disposes of them. The point is that the murder was never really a part of the fantasy. He’s just tying up loose ends.’

‘So, what are you saying? That our guy’s pathologically pragmatic?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. These murders serve a purpose. The question we should be asking ourselves is what that purpose is.’

‘So what purpose do they serve?’

Without another word, Winter shut his eyes and imagined he was the person from the photo composite. Then he stepped into the zone.

*

It’s been a long day and I’ve just got home, weary after spending the day at the office. I push open the kitchen door and the bomb goes off. To start with I’m confused and disoriented, but that eventually gives way to a kind of numb realisation. At some point I’ll work out that there has been an explosion. Slowly, I’ll start piecing things together, but to do that effectively I need more information, and that information is on the other side of the kitchen door. So, I open it again. This time there’s no explosion, but I do get hit with a second wave of confusion when I see my wife lying on the floor taped to a chair. I rush over to help her, only there’s no point. She’s already dead. Confusion slowly gives way to understanding, and that understanding trails nothing but guilt in its wake. In no time that guilt becomes all-consuming, smothering me until I can’t see or hear anything else.

*

Winter opened his eyes and caught Anderton staring.

‘Where do you go to?’ she asked.

‘Do you really want to know?’

She thought this over for a second then shook her head. ‘Not really.’

‘If the husbands are a projection of the killer, who do the wives represent?’

‘Maybe he’s married. That would be the obvious answer.’

‘So, what happened to his wife?’

‘Well, she didn’t die in an explosion. I looked into every explosion that’s happened in the city over the last twenty years. There were six of them. Nine people died in total. No women. Therefore, no wife.’

‘So the way the wives die is symbolic. It doesn’t matter how they die, what’s important is that they’re killed by their husbands.’

‘Except that doesn’t work either. This doesn’t link to any unsolved homicide. That’s another angle I looked at.’

‘But what if it wasn’t a homicide? What if the death was accidental and the killer was somehow responsible? A traffic accident, for example. Maybe he crashed his car and his wife died as a result.’

Anderton looked over at the volumes of back issues. ‘So, we search for accidents involving husbands and wives. And we start by looking four years ago.’

Which again made sense, thought Winter. Because something must have triggered the murders, and that something could well have happened exactly four years ago today. With trigger events, something happened to instigate a new event. Hence the name. You pull the trigger, the gun goes bang. It was cause and effect. For every action there was an equal and opposite reaction, just like Newton worked out three centuries earlier. Anniversaries were common trigger events, and maybe that’s what had happened here. Maybe the killer’s wife had been killed in an accident. A year later, the anniversary getting closer, he snapped and killed Isabella Sobek.

It all made sense.

But.

‘What about Cody?’ Winter asked.

Anderton was moving toward the shelves again, ready to pluck one down. She stopped walking and turned to face him. ‘What about him?’

‘Where does he fit into all of this? The fact that the killer talked to him means that he’s significant. If he wasn’t, then why take that risk? Where’s the upside? But he did talk to him. And before talking to him he stalked him on Facebook. He was specifically targeted.’

‘We’re only assuming that the dog guy is the killer. As far as that goes, all we’ve got is circumstantial evidence.’

‘But if you put all that circumstantial evidence together it starts to look somewhat more substantial. We don’t have to prove any of this in court, remember? That’s Freeman’s job. All we’ve got to do is convince ourselves. And right now, I’m a believer. The dog guy’s the killer.’

Anderton didn’t say anything for a second. Winter could almost see the cogs turning inside her head. ‘If you’re right then this is a major anomaly. On the one hand we’ve got three husbands who killed their wives. On the other we’ve got a ten-year-old kid who killed his mom.’

It was Winter’s turn to fall quiet, his turn for the cogs to start whirring. It was hard to shake the feeling that something obvious was being missed. He pulled out a chair and sat down. For almost a minute he didn’t say a word. He was trying to see Cody the way that the killer had seen him. Trying to focus on the wood when there were just too many trees.

‘Is Cody an anomaly?’ he asked. ‘He’s got black hair and brown eyes. That’s two things he has in common with the husbands straight away.’

‘Yes, but he’s more than twenty years younger.’

‘And maybe that’s the whole point. Right now we’re working on the theory that the husbands represent the killer. But what if Cody is representative of him as well? Only a version that’s twenty years younger.’

Anderton opened her mouth but nothing came out. It slowly shut and a thoughtful expression came over her face. Winter wouldn’t blame her if she thought the idea was crazy. Then again, if there was one thing he’d learned it was that crazy came with the territory. The benchmark case was Richard Chase, the Vampire Killer. Chase broke into houses in Sacramento and checked the bathroom soap. His decision to kill was based on whether the bottom was gooey. If it wasn’t then he would move on to another house. He also drank his victims’ blood because he believed that his own was turning to dust. This was the world that Winter inhabited. When you’re dealing with this level of crazy, anything goes.

‘Cody’s ten,’ Anderton said, ‘and the husbands were all in their early thirties when the murders happened. That means we’re looking at the years 1995 through to 1997.’

‘If we get nothing there then we start looking at the years either side.’

‘Sounds like a plan.’

They walked over to the bookshelves. The years they were interested in were three-volume years. August was covered by the middle one. Anderton pulled down the books and Winter carried them to the table. For the whole of its history the Vancouver Sun had been a broadsheet, which made the volumes heavy and unwieldly. They sat down opposite each other and went to work. Anderton took 1995, Winter took 1996.

Because they were interested in what happened on August 5, Winter went straight to August 6. Daily newspapers were always twenty-four hours out of date. The lead for August 6, 1996 was a story about a factory closing down with the loss of two hundred jobs. Losing your job was a top-five trigger event, but Winter couldn’t see how this particular factory closure might fit with this case. He flipped to the next page. He was interested in any stories involving women who were in the twenty-four to fifty-four age group. Statistically speaking, that’s where you were most likely to find a mom with a ten-year-old kid.