Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

“A woman is here,” she says. “I. . I can’t quite see her clearly. A beautiful woman. Your wife. She. . she is sad she left you. It was sudden, sudden for both your wife and daughter.”

“Yes.”

“Some kind of accident,” she says. “I can’t. . can’t quite make it out.”

“Something like that.”

“There was a lot of pain there.”

“I miss them,” he says.

“She can hear you,” she says. “She says she misses you.”

“Can you. .”

“Wait,” she says, tightening the grips on his hands. “Wait, she is telling me something. She has to go, but there’s something she wants me to tell you. Yes, yes,” she says, nodding and listening enthusiastically, and then, “yes, I understand. I’ll tell him.”

She opens her eyes. “She’s gone,” she tells him.

“Gone?”

“Gone. But she gave me a message. She wants you to know that her pain is gone, that she and your daughter are together, that they love you, that she wants you to be happy.”

He pulls his hands away. The woman flinches, her eyes widening as she realizes she has said something wrong. “Sometimes the messages can be vague,” she tells him. “Sometimes it can take a few attempts.”

He hands over the eighty dollars she told him over the phone that it would cost and it disappears into her claw. She walks him to the front door. He didn’t see them on the way in, but on the way out there’s a set of suitcases packed next to the door, on top of them a pair of passports and a set of tickets. Later tonight or tomorrow she’s leaving the country with her husband or partner and he remembers the holiday with his wife twenty-five years ago, lots of sun and great food and nice wine and nine months after that they had a daughter.

“My wife,” he tells her, “would never want me to be happy. She blames me for what happened-she always will.”

She nods slowly, and he guesses that’s what being a psychic is all about-learning from your mistakes. He expects her to defend herself, to tell him he’s wrong and his wife does want him to be forgiven, wants him to be happy, but she says nothing and slowly closes the door.

He should have known.

The car starts up on the first try. He pulls away from the house without glancing back. Playtime is over. It’s time to move on to the next victim. She’s going to be the easiest-after all, she’s the only one on the list who’s in a coma.

My phone goes off and it’s the first I’ve realized I’ve fallen asleep on the couch, still dressed in my funeral suit. I look at my watch. It’s two o’clock. I’ve only been asleep for ten minutes. The news has ended and there’s an infomercial on TV, some new piece of must-have fitness equipment that folds down and slides under your bed so you don’t have to feel embarrassed about it when the neighbors come around. The woman displaying it has more abs than I have nutrients floating around inside my body. I check the caller ID. It’s Schroder. Either he’s ringing to tell me I can work on the case, or I can’t.

“I’ve spoken to the powers that be,” he tells me.

“And?”

“And I reminded them when it comes to serial killers, you have a knack for looking in the right places, even if you do go about it the wrong way.”

“And?”

“And they reminded me that your success rate comes with a homicide rate.”

“The first was an accident,” I say, “and the second one killed himself.” The first one is partly true and partly not true. The latter is also made up from the same parts. Schroder knows this, can’t prove it, and wouldn’t want to even if he could.

“You’re on the case,” he says. “Not as a cop, but as an official consultant.”

“That’s all I was hoping for at this point.”

“Yeah. If it goes well-hell, maybe this is your chance to get back on the force.”

“Yeah, sucks that my chance comes about by two people dying.”

“Three,” he says.

“What?”

“That’s why I’m calling you now and not in the morning, and this is why we need all the help we can get. We’ve got a third victim.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Christchurch hospital. He’s hanging on. Could go either way. Meet me there five minutes ago.”

The traffic is sparse, ninety percent of it made up of taxis ferrying the drunk. It thickens around the hospital where there’s been an accident outside the main entrance, a boy-racer has jumped the curb and knocked down a lamppost, pinning somebody inside his car. The parking lot is mostly empty and I don’t drop any coins in the meter. I head to the emergency department and it’s full of people who have fallen over drunk and hurt themselves. I call Schroder and he comes through the security doors to meet me.

“Nice shoes,” he says, looking down at my running sneakers.

“You too,” I say, looking down at his running sneakers, which, like mine, are probably the only thing he had that was dry. He’s also changed into a new shirt. “We can be shoe buddies. So, does being a consultant come with a wage?”

Schroder shrugs. “It does, but don’t ask me what it is. Hell, maybe it’ll be more than what I make.”

We head back through the doors. There’s a series of intersecting corridors and people have probably died in here looking for the right place to be. Doctors and nurses are walking about in a hurry, patients are in cubicles behind curtains, voices and tears and laughter coming from different ones.

We follow the corridor to a small foyer with chairs where two women are sitting down, one doing the crying, one doing the comforting. The first the wife, the second a neighbor or friend. We stop thirty feet short of them so we can talk without them hearing.

“It’s bad,” Schroder says. “Lots of internal damage, lots of blood loss. Doctor ten minutes ago said if the guy has a priest, now would be the time to call him.”

“What happened?”

“According to his wife he came home, parked the car, then didn’t come to bed. She got up after ten minutes to go look for him. Found him in the garage next to his car, he was holding his guts in with his fingers. He was in so much pain he couldn’t move, couldn’t even call out. By the time the ambulance arrived he was already unconscious.”

“She see anything?”

“Just her husband.” Schroder lowers his voice even though nobody can hear us. I can still smell beer on him. “Different type of victim, just the one stab wound and nothing written on him, but it’s our guy.”

“Yeah? What do you have?”

“Killer walked across the front lawn and dragged some mud with him. Matches up with the bloody footprints back at the retirement homes. I mean an exact match, right down to gaps in the tread. It’s our guy.”

“Well, if it is him, why is this scene so different?”

“Theory is he panicked and fled.”

“What else have you got?”

“From victim three, not much. From the first two he drank coffee at each of the scenes, but he’s wiped down the cups. He’s wiped down all the surfaces he may have touched, including the bathroom. So no prints. DNA, well, we got plenty of that. Just that’s not going to be any good until the results come back.”

“Jesus,” I say, “three people within, what, six, seven hours?” I nod toward another big set of doors, which lead to another corridor and operating rooms where right now our victim is on a table with somebody’s hands inside him. “What if he’s not our last?”

“Victim three is Brad Hayward,” he says. “Forty-one years old, an accountant, wife with two children, all of whom were home when it happened.”

“The kids see anything?”

“The kids were in bed.”