A Dream of Death (11 page)

I stood outside the door to Kara’s hotel room—the night
clerk had given me her room number once I flashed my badge. And I stood there
for a good ten minutes, frozen in place wondering if I should knock or just
quietly get my own room.

I filled my lungs before I raised my hand to the door and
knocked twice. A part of me hoped she wouldn’t answer, that something would
stop me from taking this next step so I wouldn’t have to try to stop myself.
Footsteps approached the door then the light behind the peephole disappeared. A
moment later I heard the lock turn.

Neither of us spoke. Our eyes met and stayed fixed, hers
shining like emeralds in the dimly lit corridor. Both of us were waiting,
waiting for someone to make the next move. In the end, it was Kara, maybe
because she was stronger or maybe because she had less to lose. With a loaded
gun in her right hand she took mine in her left. A gentle pull brought me into
the room.

“Kat kicked me out.” I moved back toward the door. “I’m
sorry, I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Stay. Please.” I saw the fear in her eyes. “Sleep on the
couch if you want, I can’t be alone. I thought it would be better but it’s not.
I can’t… I keep seeing him on top of me, the hatred in his eyes.”

I nodded.

Kara sat down on the edge of the bed. “I called Grant, asked
him to come here, take the night off. They would have given it to him. He said
he couldn’t… more like he wouldn’t. What a judge of character I was on that
one.”

I took a few steps and sat down beside her. “Everyone
handles things differently, you know that.”

“He can’t even talk to me, we’ve been together over a year.
My boyfriend can’t handle it but you’re here.”

I didn’t want to be rude but the truth needed to be said.
“I’m here because Kat kicked me out, I didn’t know where else to go.”

“That’s not the only reason, Link.” She gave a coy smile.
“You don’t have to say it. Why did she kick you out anyway, did you tell her?”

“No. We had a fight about how little I’ve been home, how
distant I’ve become, other things. I hadn’t even told her I’d been stabbed. She
had to find out from blood on my shirt. Then it turned to the kids and
religion. I swore at her and stormed out.”

Kara laughed, not the reaction I was expecting. “How the
hell did it turn to God?”

“She started pulling some holier-than-thou thing. I couldn’t
deal with it. Maybe she was right, but I just wasn’t in the mood. The religious
part wasn’t why she was pissed… it’s just all she has to hold on to.”

“You’re a good man, she’ll come around.”

“Do you want her to? Do I?”

Kara just shrugged, both of us speechless.

* * *

The couch was uncomfortable but safe. As long as I stayed on
this side of the room, this side of the imaginary line on the floor, my
marriage was safe as well. I tossed and turned before falling asleep only to
wake up with a jolt a few minutes later.

I saw him every time I closed my eyes—straddling Kara, the
rope to her throat. I felt the knife enter me and I saw him running down the
street.

I saw the shot I never took.

I shifted my focus to happier times but they would fade to
black to be quickly replaced.

I dozed off again and woke what seemed like seconds later to
Kara screaming. The blankets hit the floor and I ran to her side. There was no
one else in the room—it had just been a nightmare. I took the gun from her
hand—grabbed from the nightstand by instinct—and held her hand tight in mine,
the fingers of my other hand running through her hair. Tears flowed from her
eyes soaking the pillow beneath her.

“I can’t turn it off,” she said through her pain.

“I know, neither can I.”

“Lie with me? Please?”

I shouldn’t have, I knew I shouldn’t have. But I looked at
her, her beauty and strength contrasting with her fragility—I couldn’t leave
her on her own even if I would only be a few steps away. I climbed on to the
bed behind her and laid down on top of the comforter, a barrier between us. I
moved closer to her, lay with my front to her back and wrapped my arm around
her.

I felt her heart pounding and the wetness of sweat as it
beaded on her skin and I knew she was terrified. I just didn’t know what of.

She moved backwards closer to me, her body and mine snug to
one another. The thin comforter and two layers of clothing were all that separated
us. The thought lingered in my mind and brought with it a visceral excitement.

Kara must have noticed. She turned over to face me and our
lips met for the second time. There was nothing to stop us this time, no one to
walk in and no willpower to speak of for either of us.

We kissed like teenagers, our mouths attached to each other
for an eternity before her warm hands slid under the edge of my t-shirt and
pulled it over my head. Her fingers ran over the bandage on my side as she sat
up and removed her shirt. Her breasts gave an almost imperceptible bounce as
her shirt broke free.

Without words she told me to get off of the comforter and
pull it back to join in her in the bed. I did, and our mouths met again, our
hands joining in the fray. We caressed each other; my hands explored her
breasts, slid down the soft skin of her back and up to the ligature marks on
her neck. We had no reason to hide our wounds from each other, they had been
what had brought us together and we wore them well.

We took the next step together, our hands moving lower as we
continued our caresses. Our minds were lost in the moment and all reason had
been thrown to the wind. I no longer thought of Kat or questioned my actions, I
was lost once again and this time the feeling was to be enjoyed.

Kara broke the kiss for just a moment, her mouth moving to
my ear and a whisper escaping. It was a simple command and one I was eager to
follow. The covers were off the bed in an instant and I was above Kara looking
down at her beauty. I stared into her eyes as she guided me into her waiting
body. We reached a perfect rhythm, our bodies moving in unison as sweat rolled
of our skin and the sheets crumpled on the bed. I didn’t want to take my eyes
off of her. We would kiss for a minute then break apart again our eyes meeting
once more, permanent smiles etched upon our faces.

We were joined from our head to our feet as I pressed myself
into her with abandon until we reached a mutual point of no return. My rhythmic
movement turned into a series of unattractive spasms and jerks before our
motion ceased, our bodies separated and we lay on our backs beside each other
exhausted in every way. Not a word was shared.

Our hands clasped together and we drifted off to a restful
and dreamless sleep.

The DNA results came in shortly after Kara and I arrived at
the office in the morning. We hadn’t spoken of the previous night. Furtive
glances were enough to fill the void where words would not go. It was as if
speaking of it would cheapen it somehow. The alarm on Kara’s phone had woken us
after far too little sleep and we had showered together, a lack of time
preventing us from rekindling our physicality. I saw her then in full light,
her naked body presented to me and mine to her. She was as beautiful as I had
imagined—her petite well-built frame and lightly tanned skin made her look like
a goddess, a creature so beautiful that man was never supposed to look upon her
and live to tell the tale.

And yet, there was an adolescent awkwardness to it all. I
felt it and it seemed that she did too. I pulled myself away from my memories
and fantasies and we looked over the test results as the calendar stared back
at me: June nineteenth, twenty-eleven. Eldritch.

“What’s that?”

“Huh?”

“You said ‘eldritch’ or something.”

I must have said it aloud. “Oh, word of the day. Means
strange or unearthly.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “I can sleep well tonight now that I
know that. Can we focus on these?”

She handed me the test results.

They were conclusive. DNA on the rope had matched each of
the victims. It was the murder weapon used in each case. But in addition to DNA
hits on the rope for Kara and the four victims, there was an unidentified
female source. We had another victim out there, one that had never been found.
The lack of a male donor confirmed that the killer had been wearing gloves.

The blood didn’t trace back to anyone on its own but the
familial search yielded a hit, a twenty-seven year old inmate by the name of
Michael Saunders—serving fourteen months at Millhaven in Kingston for sexually
assaulting a coworker. As a result of his conviction a DNA sample was taken and
put on file, and now it told us to look for his father. I searched our records
for Michael and found nothing.

The next step was to log into the PIP server—the Police
Information Portal—a file-sharing system set up between numerous Canadian
police services. This allowed me to gain access to their reports and anything
on file for a person, down to a car accident or by-law ticket. I searched
through old files as Kara began checking other means to locate information on
Michael, using the Ministry of Transportation database to find a driver’s
licence, registered vehicles, any means at all to locate his father—our
suspect.

I poured through numerous police records for Michael, a
troublemaker in London since the age of sixteen. The reports led me to two
important pieces of information: Michael’s father was James Michael Saunders,
born July seventeenth, nineteen-sixty.

Our killer had a name.

I gave Kara the information and she began searching for
anything she could find on James. Meanwhile I read a report from February of two-thousand—a
suicide. Michael woke up in the morning to get ready for school and couldn’t
find his mother. He searched the house for her, wondering where she would be
when her car was still in the driveway. The last place Michael checked was the
garage, and there he found his mother, hanging from the rafters.

James had been working night shift at a local factory at the
time and was on his way home. He arrived to numerous police cars, an ambulance
and a fire truck.

And there was our missing victim—Nathalie Saunders, James’s
wife. Just to make sure, I called the Centre for Forensic Sciences and
requested a comparison of the unknown sample and Michael’s DNA. I had my answer
within an hour. It was a familial match.

The rope we had recovered, the rope used to kill four women
and that nearly killed Kara, was the rope Nathalie Saunders had hung herself
with.

The question of how James Saunders managed to keep the rope
was one I couldn’t answer. A rope used in a hanging is always seized as
evidence. The report stated that Michael had cut his mother down, sawing
through the rope with a steak knife. Had he inadvertently cut a piece off of
the rope, a piece that had not been recovered by the responding officers? Or
had the rest of the rope been left up, her DNA on it from tying it to the
rafters? James had had an airtight alibi and the coroner ruled the death a
suicide. The thought that James had killed Nathalie then hung her from a different
rope didn’t escape me but it didn’t fit the evidence.

No, his wife’s suicide was the trigger. It had festered for
years before turning him into a killer.

Kara found an address and Saunders’s driver’s licence photo.
I had barely seen him in the dark and I couldn’t be satisfied but the picture
that stared at me from the computer fit the man I had seen. Within fifteen
minutes undercover OPP and London detectives were staking out the address
located in a neighbourhood in London’s south end. Within two hours we had our
warrants—to search and seize any evidence found within the residence or the
suspect’s vehicle, a black ninty-six Chevrolet Blazer.

Kara and I left the courthouse in downtown London and drove
as fast as we could to Saunders’s address, warrants in hand. Uniformed officers
and emergency response team members had arrived to assist, and the door was
breached with a metal ram. The house was cleared first, the tactical team
sweeping the entire residence and ensuring that there was no one inside.

Now it was time to prove our case.

It couldn’t have been easier. As methodical as the killer
was at his scenes, he lacked any intelligence at his home. Books on forensics,
police investigations, true crime stories and unsolved murders lined the book
shelves, along with every season of every recent forensics and police
television show and dozens of similar movies. The top shelf was the gold mine—a
number of handwritten journals. I took one down, opened it to a random page and
read aloud.

“I hate killing women but it’s the only way to make men
realize the truth. Women are weak, they can’t protect themselves. It’s up to us
to protect them, to save them from themselves. Every woman I kill, every pure
life I take will remind men of their sacred duty: to protect the lives of those
who can’t protect themselves.”

“Arrogant prick,” Kara said as I flipped to another page.

“I have never been so sorry as tonight. The woman I killed
was pregnant, another sacred life growing within her. Her life had purpose, she
was fulfilling her role as a woman and I ended her life. Women should be held
sacred, that’s why this is hard for me to do, but if I don’t, how many more
women will needlessly kill themselves? Our lives have changed too much, women
shouldn’t be allowed to work, they should remain home to care for the children.
That way they can avoid the evils of the world and remain pure.”

“Motherfucker.”

I had never heard Kara swear like that. Her face grew red
contrasting the purple bruise on her throat she didn’t try to cover.

The diaries would give us everything we needed—they were a
confession written in the killer’s own hand detailing his every crime. We
weren’t prepared for such a monumental find but we were even less prepared for
what we found next.

I opened the fridge as I always do at crime scenes—it’s
amazing what you can learn about a person from the contents of their fridge.
Organized versus disorganized, expired or rotten versus fresh, stocked or
empty, organic, local, vegan. It was a tool of mine, one that fell deep into
the realm of pseudoscience but one I stuck with none the less.

The fridge and its contents meant nothing to me after I
opened the freezer. Sitting directly in front of my face on a package of frozen
hamburger meat were four Ziploc bags, each one containing a piece of flesh the
exact size of what had been removed from each of the victims. The imprint of a
rope identical to the murder weapon was visible through the plastic bags.

Kara saw what I was looking at and the colour in her face
shifted from red to near-green. She had seen far worse at other crime scenes,
but it wasn’t the grisly nature of our discovery that was affecting her; it was
the thought of how close she came to having her own flesh sitting in a bag in
Saunders’s freezer. Her right hand rubbed the bruise on her neck as she stared
at the bags.

I put them back and closed the door.

Saunders was nowhere to be found, his house was empty and
his car gone. A provincial alert was put out with his name and date of birth,
description, vehicle and the simple fact he was wanted on four counts of
first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder. Other charges—breaking
and entering, committing an indecency to a human body, anything else we could
hit him with—would come later.

Detectives were at work having a Canada-wide warrant issued
for Saunders’s arrest, and the borders had been notified and his passport
flagged. If he tried to leave the country, we’d find out. The man may have
escaped us for weeks but he wouldn’t be able to run for long. That night his
face would be broadcast on every news program around the continent, even
featuring on CNN. Newspapers would carry his photograph on the front page. If
we were wrong, if he wasn’t the killer, we’d pay out the libel settlement
later. In the meantime we had a killer who needed to be caught.