Fall from Grace (33 page)

“Although I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, that I am conceding that there is a serial killer at work. In fact, our arrest of Conlee in these two murders proves to me that we’re not dealing with just one murderer, but a bunch like Conlee. The fact that there are similarities about the murders, how they were killed and where they were found, just makes sense. Strangulation is a pretty personal and impulsive crime, and a farmer’s field on a quiet rural road is a perfect place to drop off a body of someone you’ve killed, especially those a few kilometers from the city limits and especially at night. And if you look around in any area just outside the city, you’ll find many quiet fields.”

My ears heard what Whitford said, but my mind barely registered. When he told me that even a serial killer has some sort of connection with the first victim, two disparate details that had been floating around in my brain finally connected. And disappointment filled me.

39

I found him at a car repair shop near the Westmount Mall located in the west-central part of the city, one of the spots where the blending of older neighborhoods and suburban sprawl begins. I stormed into the shop, my anger barely contained. But once I saw him at the desk, talking to a customer, I held back.

How does one take on a person they believe to be a serial killer? Do you confront him with your suspicions face-to-face, accuse him of the crimes in front of everyone to ensure that even if he isn’t charged with anything, those witnesses to your accusations will spread the word? But what would that accomplish besides the ruination of his reputation, or more likely, provide further proof that I had a tendency to become so overwhelmed with an obsession that I’d accuse someone of being a serial killer with little or no real evidence. But would it be wise to meet the person in private? If my suspicions were correct, would I become his next victim in an attempt to keep from being exposed?

I should have brought the police, I thought. But then again, the official police stance was that there wasn’t a serial killer on the loose, a contention bolstered by the fact that they had just arrested someone in connection with two of the murders. I had an inkling that Detective Whitford suspected there was a serial killer even though officially he said there wasn’t. It was one way to explain why he had let me into the tent and why he had been so helpful when he was officially ordered not to give me information. But I knew there was no way he would accept my new theory on who the killer was.

Even though instinct and hunches play a key role in a police investigation, he would need more real evidence before he would agree to come along with me to confront the person I now thought was responsible for the death of a good number of native women.

In fact, he would have tried to convince me not to take that step, that it was better if I left things alone. He would have heard me out, though. He was that kind of guy. But in the end he would have sadly shaken his head, urged me to drop this obsession and seek professional help. He would have been right, of course—throughout the drive to the auto shop, I kept telling myself that I was wrong, that it was the chemical imbalance in my brain sending me on a false path.

At the same time there was another voice in my head, and it was louder and stronger, telling me that I couldn’t ignore the connection between his name and that of the first victim. I couldn’t ignore it, and even if I came out of this looking like an idiot, that would be better than not pursuing the lead. If I let this one slide, it would hang over me forever, forcing me to second-guess myself.

I was spotted a few seconds after entering the auto shop and he smiled a great smile at me. “Hey, Leo,” he said brightly. “What a surprise. What the heck are you doing here?”

That smile and the bright tone of his voice made me cringe—did he use that smile and voice to lure his victims? Did he use his position of authority to convince them that climbing into his truck was safe?—and I hoped he didn’t see it. By this time I realized that confronting him publicly would not be wise. I would do it privately, and maybe the element of surprise would minimize any physical reaction. Even so, I figured I could handle him, considering that he was more comfortable killing people who were weaker than him. “I need to talk to you,” I said, as calmly as I could. “And in private ’cause it’s important, Francis.”

He blinked twice. I don’t know if that meant he was surprised by the request and he should be suspicious or that he was pleased I was coming to him in a time of need.

“Yeah, yeah. Sure. No problem. Can you give me a sec, I got to finish with Brian here and then we can talk.” He pointed to an office across from the entrance area of the shop. “Grab a seat in my office and I’ll be there in a jif.”

I paused, wondering if that was his way of putting me aside, because he knew that I knew, and the first chance he got, he would run. But I dismissed those thoughts because there was no way he could know I was there to accuse him of being a serial murderer. He probably thought I was there to interview him for a story or because I needed his advice as a native elder on something related to my Aboriginal background.

“Sure, no problem,” I said, trying to put an easygoing tone in my voice. “Take your time.” I turned and went to his office and stood by the door. I figured that sitting down would only give him more power when he came into the room. I wanted him to find me standing and hoped that would throw off his equilibrium.

I ignored his office, ignored the native paintings, the dreamcatchers, the certificates and photos of him with various native dignitaries and politicians, and I simply waited. I had no plan, no real idea what to say, except to ask a single question, and if the answer was the one I wanted, then I would take it from there.

In an interview between a journalist and a subject, there are usually only one or two questions that the journalist really wants an answer to. Of course, there will be a lot of Q and A in the interview, but the fate of the interview and the story usually rest on one or two questions. And it was not considered proper or smart to ask those important questions at the start. The key was to ask a good number of background questions first, establish a rapport with your subject. Then you built a momentum with the questions, each subsequent one bringing you closer to what you wanted to know, keeping in mind that you had to listen for anything that could lead to follow-up questions. When you believed the time was right, you asked the question that was key to the entire story.

But when Francis came into the room and asked me, in all sincerity, if everything was okay, I didn’t wait for the right time. I had only one question to ask him.

“Who is Lydia Alexandra?”

“Who? What?” he stammered. At first he was confused, probably because I didn’t begin with polite niceties such as, Hey, how ya doing? Weird weather, isn’t it? Or, Man, can you believe the Oilers this year? And he probably wasn’t expecting someone to confront him with the name of the person who in all probability had been his first victim. He may have even forgotten the name since he had first killed her. “What the hell are you talking about, Leo?”

“Lydia Alexandra. She was a native woman, more like a girl ’cause she was barely nineteen years old when police found her body in a field in 1988.” I slapped down an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven copy of the news story, one that I had downloaded from Infomart and printed off. “She was strangled and then dumped off, like a bag of garbage. But it didn’t end there. There were many others, but Lydia just happened to be the first one.”

I slapped down another story, the one that Brent Anderson wrote, the side piece to my story that broke the idea that a serial killer might be on the loose in Edmonton, the story listing all the women who may have been victims. Lydia Alexandra’s photo was the first one, at the top of the page. “She had the same last name as you, and even though I’m not that knowledgeable about native culture, I know that Alexandra isn’t that common a name.”

Francis gingerly picked up that copy, holding it like it was the most valuable thing in the world and stared at it. He muttered something I couldn’t make out, blinked tears from his eyes, and slumped back into his chair like a boxer collapsing onto his stool after the round in which he knows he had lost the fight.

A wave of triumph surged through me—I was right, goddamn it, I was right!—but it lasted only a second. A rush of disappointment and dismay roared through after that, so I fell into a chair, also defeated and destroyed, almost physically sick, by the knowledge that this man, this Aboriginal elder, had killed a good number of women, many of them members of his own community. Talk about sacred wound.

“Lydia,” he muttered. “Damn you, Lydia.”

I had the answer to one question; he knew Lydia. But the first question still hung in the air. “Who is Lydia Alexandria?”

It was like he had forgotten that I was there. He heard my voice and looked at me, a gaze of blank confusion for several seconds as he came back from wherever he had gone—the farmer’s field in which he’d dumped her body, or the yellow pickup truck in which he’d squeezed the life out of her—and returned to the present, only to be confronted by this strange and obviously crazy journalist that he had thought he had befriended but in the end turned out to be the Wendigo, a Cree monster that was once a normal human being but now ate human flesh, either literally or metaphorically.

“Ly—” He started to say something but the words got caught in his throat. He eyes appealed to me for help, to ground him so he could get the words out, but he got no help from me. I remained silent; if he wanted to fill that silence and tell me the story, then he would have to do it on his own. If he didn’t, I would go to Detective Whitford and tell him what I knew. I would go to Whitford even if he did tell me.

“Lydia,” he started again, this time completing the name, but the effort seemed to drain him. Several seconds passed before he finished the thought. “Was my niece.”

Whitford was right about the connection between a serial killer and his first victim. But the knowledge that my hunch had turned out to be correct wasn’t gratifying. This was even worse than I had thought; she was not only a vulnerable member of his native community, she was a member of his family. The power of that information did not give me any pleasure. “So,”—I stumbled over the words—“you killed her.”

“Yes,” he croaked, followed by a short nod. I wanted nothing more than to jump across the desk, bash the back of his head against the wall behind him, and strangle this piece of shit until every bit of his bodily fluids came pouring out of him in the agony of his death throes.

A second later he shook his head, reading the anger in my expression. “But not in the way you are thinking,” he said. “I wasn’t the one who actually killed Lydia, but I was the one who put her in that person’s path. I was the one who could have helped her, who had the chance to help her but in the end didn’t. I dismissed her as a stupid native girl who was throwing her life, her family, and her culture away with drinking, drugs, prostitution. I condemned her as someone who was giving natives a bad name with her actions, and I thought that if she had a sense of what a good native person was, she could rise above it all. I could have helped her but instead I judged her, and because of that, she was killed.”

I didn’t know which feeling was the strongest; the relief that Francis wasn’t the killer I was looking for, or the disappointment that Francis wasn’t the killer, and I had to keep on looking. But first I needed more information from Francis, I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I could turn this into a story about Lydia, about how a member of her family, an elder in her community, dismissed her as just another drunk native who needed to be judged and put away, dismissed and ignored, the way all of us in this country did. “So did she come to you for help and you told her to fuck off, or what?”

He looked at me again, a long, vacant look that said that while all Aboriginal people may have that sacred wound he had talked about, for some this wound was deeper and fresher. He shook his head. “No, she didn’t come to me, per se. Her mother, my sister, God rest her soul, asked me to talk to her. Lydia had been on the streets for a few months, hooked on drugs, boozing it up, and the only way she could keep up with her addiction was to sell her body to the lowest bidder.

“One day she ended up in the hospital and they talked about getting her clean, and since I was the wise uncle who was connected to the old Aboriginal ways, it was decided that I should talk to her and appeal to her as someone from her family but without the baggage that her mother, father, and other siblings carried. So in keeping with my image of the wise and helpful elder, I said yes and visited her at the hospital.”

“Why was she in the hospital? Had she overdosed or something like that?”

“If she had overdosed, then we could have done something to help her, we would have had evidence of a serious drug problem and could have had her committed in some way so she could have gotten the help she needed,” he said with a sigh. “But such was not the case. She had been in a traffic accident, hurt pretty bad with some broken bones and some internal injuries. Some john who had picked her up was drunk and ran his truck into a pole. Despite her injuries, she had been lucky because he had been killed.

“She was in the hospital for about six weeks, and every few days I went to see her, tried to convince her to get the help she needed, but she refused. She had friends from the street smuggle in booze and drinks for her, and one day I came to see her, she had been vomiting up blood, and while it wasn’t life threatening the doctors and the nurses were still concerned. But when I talked to her about it, she laughed and said she was sick because she had had too much to drink. Even then she was laughing about it because she was drunk.