Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

“We’re getting close,” he says, sipping at his own drink. “We’ll have court records within the hour. You read much of that?” he asks, nodding toward the file.

“Yeah. Poor bastard never had a chance in life.”

“So you read the mom’s file too?”

I nod.

“She really is a piece of work. You ever see her?”

“No.”

“I did. I picked her up a few years ago on a shoplifting charge. She got off on a technicality. She was in the supermarket drinking all the beer, so technically she never left the premises, so technically she hadn’t stolen anything, and she only left when we escorted her, which means she wasn’t choosing to leave. Thing I remember the most about her was her breath-I swear there was no way she’d been near a toothbrush in years. She was. . was a creepy woman,” he says.

“She put all of this into motion,” I tell him.

He starts to shake his head, but ends up nodding. “I guess you can see it like that,” he says. “So we have Stanton as being the doctor who got up on the stand and said Whitby could be saved, and we have another connection too.”

“The other victims?”

He nods. “Want to have a guess at who defended Whitby?”

“It has to be one of our dead lawyers.”

“Victoria Brown,” he says.

“And the other lawyer?”

“We can’t link Herbert Poole or Albert McFarlane to the case,” he says. “I can remember parts of what happened,” he adds, and so can I. He fills it in for me anyway. “I think Whitby was out after two years, and I think it wasn’t long after that he killed Cole’s daughter.”

“You got Cole’s record here?”

He hands me a folder and I open the cover. First thing to see is a photograph of Caleb Cole. It’s fifteen years old and he doesn’t really look much like the man I saw last night in the cemetery, but he looks exactly like a man I saw earlier this morning.

“Shit,” I say, staring at the photograph.

“What?”

“Is there a photo of Cole’s daughter anywhere?”

“Why?”

I stand up quickly, the chair pushing backward and nearly tipping over. “This morning in Ariel Chancellor’s house, there were pictures on the wall,” I say, talking quickly now. “Caleb was in one of them. This Caleb,” I tell him, tapping the mug shot and showing it to him. “The one before all this started.”

“The evidence is in the storage warehouse and it’s being pulled right now for Jessica Cole’s murder,” Schroder says, sounding just as excited as I am. “There’ll be photos in there. But I remember the news coverage was pretty comprehensive, so there might be some images online.”

“Where’s the nearest computer?”

We head into Schroder’s office. He moves the mouse and his computer comes to life. He sits down behind his desk and I stand behind him, watching him use the keyboard and mouse, and it only takes him a minute to find the articles we want.

There’s a photograph of Jessica Cole, the same little girl that was also in the photo I saw this morning of Ariel and Caleb. We start reading the articles and the rest of it comes back to us now, all the details.

James Whitby hadn’t become obsessed with Jessica Cole. He had become obsessed by her best friend, Ariel Chancellor. The two girls met when they were five years old at school, they had been placed next to each other in class by alphabetical order and had become best friends. On the day Whitby planned to take her, the two girls were walking home side by side. He approached them with the same story he had given Tabitha Jenkins two years earlier, and they both fell for it in the same way, desperate to help the man find his lost puppy. When they realized it was a trick, they both ran. Whitby went after Ariel, but she was able to fit between a gap in a corrugated iron fence and she kept running. That same gap had sharp edges and caught Jessica’s winter jacket and she didn’t get the chance to free herself before Whitby snapped her up as, what he would say in his confession, second prize. Ariel got home and her parents called the police. The police figured out quickly who they were looking for. After all, a convicted and released mental patient who had raped and tried to kill a girl two years earlier lived only a block away from where Jessica was abducted. He didn’t return home, and the police arrested him late that night after he went to see his mother. She stood on the doorsteps screaming at her son, calling him a rape baby, screaming that the best part of him ran off her thigh and stained the bedsheets. Her abuse is all there in black-and-white, printed by the reporters for the world to read.

Once at the station, it took twenty-four hours for Whitby to give up the location, and I remember a detective beating it out of Whitby. It was a pretty big deal. I remember we all knew the confession may not stand, that Whitby’s lawyer was going to rip our case to shreds in court. I remember the despair around the station knowing that. I remember the guilt of the detective who had gotten the information out of Whitby, his actions understandable when he was trying to save the life of a small girl, but unforgivable when that girl was found dead and the killer was looking at going free. I remember one of the detectives tipping off Caleb Cole what had happened with, I imagine, no idea of what Cole would do next. Cole never said who had told him Whitby was going to be released.

None of that was in the papers. It probably would have made it, if people had found out, but because the case never made it to trial, Whitby never had the chance to tell what had happened. He had told his lawyer, who this time wasn’t Victoria Brown, but the lawyer never went public with it after Whitby’s death. That lawyer had children. He knew we were all better off with his client in the ground. Instead he came into the station and said that unless the man who had beaten Whitby lost his job, the media was going to get a hell of a story. So the detective jumped before he was pushed and the lawyer went home satisfied.

I never saw Caleb Cole. I wasn’t there when he was taken to the morgue to identify his daughter. I wasn’t there when he stood in the station foyer shouting for vengeance. And I wasn’t there a day later when Whitby, on his way to court from the holding cells in police custody, was hit by a furniture-moving truck Caleb Cole had borrowed from his brother-in-law. The collision between truck and transport van killed the police officer driving and the second officer in the car broke both arms and permanently lost his sight in one eye. Whitby survived the crash but not what followed. Caleb dragged him out of the wreckage and to his car, which had been parked nearby. He drove him to the slaughterhouse.

Caleb Cole tore James Whitby apart.

He used a kitchen knife. Every time he put the knife into him, he dragged it up or down, creating cuts that almost tore Whitby apart. I never saw the scene. I wasn’t one of the officers who got the call to go there and help and I was thankful for it. I know there were pieces of Whitby all over the floor, things that had been sliced so badly they fell out of him. I know parts of him were scooped into a bucket. I know it was so bad the medical examiner had no idea whether Whitby had been hurt in the car collision because there just wasn’t enough left of him in once piece to tell.

And I know, thanks to the medical examiner, that if you count those wounds up it came to nineteen.

Caleb Cole drove home after Whitby was dead. He was covered in blood. His wife didn’t recognize him. She screamed when he walked in the door and their neighbors called the police. She said he looked like he’d bathed in it. She said he looked like he had stepped out of a horror movie. Cole didn’t say anything to her, he went and showered and when he came out she was sitting on the couch with the knowledge of what he had done. They held each other until the police arrived a few minutes later. He didn’t resist arrest. He pleaded guilty to everything. Four days later his wife killed herself. She had lost her daughter on a Monday, and by the weekend she had lost everything else. She didn’t leave a note. Fifteen years Cole got. He tried to kill himself twice within the first week. Then he was on suicide watch for three months, and the moment he was off it he tried to kill himself again. He didn’t try anymore after that, though others tried for him.