The Killing Type (9 page)

I sit back in the chair and take the
opportunity to do absolutely nothing, a real luxury for me. A
kettle whistles shrilly in the kitchen for a few seconds and then
goes quiet. There’s a brief rattle of dishes, the fridge door opens
and closes, and finally she appears in front of me with a tray of
delights.

“Let me take that,” I say
gallantly.

“Thank you.”

She sits in a chair beside me and sets
out a cup and saucer for each of us. The pouring is a careful
operation: she tips the pot slowly with her right hand and places
the index finger of her left on the lid of the pot so that it won’t
fall off. The cups full, she sets the pot down and fans her hand
over a plate of assorted biscuits, apparently shortbread and with
some of them covered in chocolate.

“That’s so nice of you,” I say, taking
one of each and setting them on my napkin on the coffee table. We
both settle back in our chairs.

“That’s a terrible business about the
murders, though,” she says, as if the domestic comfort of our
situation demands to be counterbalanced with harsh
reality.

“Yes,” I say. “Hard to know what to
make of it. Are you OK? I mean, you’re not nervous about just going
about your daily life, are you?”

She laughs.

“Oh, no, I don’t think like that. I’m
an old lady as you can see, but I don’t worry about that kind of
thing. When the Good Lord feels that it is my time for Him to call
me home, then that will be my time. Until that happens”—she takes a
bit of a cookie, and then a sip of tea as if to emphasize her
point—“I’ll go on living my life as I always have.”

“That seems like an eminently healthy
outlook,” I tell her sincerely, sipping my own tea (it is
exquisite, I notice, and attribute that to practice).

“Tell me,” she says, her
stare more piercing than I’ve seen it in other interactions with
her. “This book you are writing, this—it is a
book
, is it?”

“Yes,” I assure her.

“Well”—she is shaking her head and her
lips are pursed—“are you managing to find anything out? Have you
come across anything that the police have not been able
to?”

“A lot of people ask me that, and I
wish I could say yes. But, no, so far, I haven’t found out
much.”

She shakes her head at that, as if she
is a bit disappointed in me. She’s not, I don’t think, but I am
feeling a bit rattled with the very fact of the multiple murders
and consequently having difficulty interpreting her
mannerisms.

“Let me tell you a little story,
Andrew, if I may.”

“Of course.”

“When I was a child, I had
faith in everything. God, of course, and my friends and the fact
that my parents would be always around, and generally that I was
living in a good and safe world. Firemen rescuing your cat from a
tree, policemen patting you on the head and letting you see inside
their cars. That kind of thing. Now, I am afraid, I don’t believe
in many of those things, and though I am not implying that you do
either, yet I have to mention one or two of them in particular. The
police, dearest Andrew, oh, the police. I have little confidence in
their ability to find criminals, to treat evidence with respect, to
treat
people
with
respect. You know the stories. Things have been good here in
Knosting only because nothing has really happened before these
murders, and so the police have had quite an easy time of it, if I
may say so. Now that a real crime has—now that real
crimes
have happened, I am
not sure they know what they are doing, or what they
should
do. You know how
they say that for murder, the killer is always the last person you
suspect? The butler did it, kind of thing? Same with the police, I
believe. I mean, they can be incompetent boobies just like anyone
else in any other profession. Especially the ones in this town. I’m
sorry, I sound bitter. I’m not really, just practical.”

She picks up her cup and takes a long
slow sip. Her smile is impenetrable: I can’t tell if she’s nervous
or guilty or pleased with herself. We both let the silence just sit
there between us, both comfortable with it—or, at least, I can
speak for myself and say that I am genuinely happy to be here in
her wordless presence.

Later that evening I meet Rachel at
the library. It’s late and not very busy on a Wednesday night and
she has told me that she will be able to devote more time to
helping me with my research. I should note here as I did perhaps
somewhat peevishly with her that I am quite familiar with how to
carry out research—methods, ethics, tools, the whole gamut. It was
the stickler in me and not the potential friend who even bristled
at the suggestion that I needed help, and moreover who insisted on
pointing out this fact. What she could show me, I explained to her,
were the various unique local resources that the library might have
about the town that could help me profile or identify a killer.
“It’s a long shot, but you could really help me there,” I said,
truthfully, but mostly to assuage any hurt feelings I may have
inadvertently caused.

She finishes with a library patron
(“just over there by the microfilm reader”) as I am walking up to
her at the desk. Her smile is weak, almost perfunctory, and my
first fear is that I have hurt her feelings.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

“Does it show that badly? I’m sorry.
It’s been tough here today.”

I pause, wondering why that would be,
and of course it’s the obvious that I have ignored in my narrow
pursuit of my immediate goal: another person, a fourth, has been
killed.

“This makes me more determined than
ever,” she says.

“Right,” I reply, a little
awkwardly.

“One of the main things I wanted to
show you is the file we keep on all the previous murders in
Knosting—I mean, the ones before these ones recently have started.”
She leads me to a large blue binder, just around the corner from
the city directories and, as she points out, generally within view
of the reference desk.

“People are weird: we’ve got this
thing security-stripped and everything, but we don’t want anyone
just walking away with it. I mean, it’s all online, too—I’ll point
you to that, if you haven’t come across it already—but it’s a bit
of a pain to be printing this whole thing out again.”

We sit down at a table and Rachel
leafs through it, narrating as she goes. It’s a collection of
clippings relating to murders dating back about fifteen years, but
also with some original research and commentary by library
staff.

“As you can see, it’s a manageable
size. We’ve been lucky—up till now—in Knosting: there haven’t been
that many murders. If my memory is right, I think we basically have
less than one a year. This latest spate is really screwing our
average.” She laughs. “Sorry, that’s not really very funny.” She
looks at me, trying to gauge I am not sure what, and I return her
gaze. She looks down and then up again when something else occurs
to her.

“Oh, I mentioned about online. This
whole binder is digitized and on our website. Just click on the
Knosting’s Past link and that should lead you right there. I guess
my idea wasn’t that the killer would be among the guys in the
binder, but who knows what kind of clues there might be there—I
don’t know, like something from the former police investigations,
or some forensic detail, or something like that.”

I now sincerely regret my finickiness
over an imagined sleight to my research abilities: this lovely,
dependable woman has already provided me with a trove that I would
not have discovered on my own, and that would have taken me a
lifetime to compile. I am impressed by her selfless dedication to
organized information, by her lack of any agenda other than
providing service to a half-patron half-acquaintance whom she
barely knows really.

“There’s more,” she says, her voice
now with the excited tone of a child rummaging through a toy store.
She stands up and is nearly rounding another bay of books before I
can muster enough sense to follow her. I arrive slightly breathless
(must do more walks along the lake) and this time she is standing
next to a bank of three computers.

“We keep a few DVDs here that are, I
guess, strictly speaking in violation of copyright, but they serve
a good purpose and I don’t think we’re costing anyone any money and
I think the networks know about it, so—anyway, enough with the
caveats. We’ve basically copied the television coverage of various
murders onto DVDs, and again I think these might be a long shot for
you, but there might be something there, who knows? And just so you
know, we haven’t always been obsessed with murder in Knosting. With
the DVD copying, we’ve done that for various civic issues: the
disagreement in town council over the sports arena, for example,
the rezoning for those condos by the lake, the big noise bylaw
debate last year. A bunch of them.”

She puts one of the discs into the
player, mutes, and skips it ahead a few tracks. It freezes a second
or two but then there’s a shot of a reporter, talking straight on
to the camera at first but then turning his head as he motions to a
house behind him.

“I remember this,” Rachel says,
turning her own head back to me. “Terrible tragedy: husband fell in
love with another woman and so he killed his wife so that he could
be with his new girlfriend. That’s the house they raised their kids
in. He was sentenced to life, I think it was.”

I am sitting in the chair beside her
like a patient, leaning in while she talks in soft, confidential
tones, while she points to the screen as if my life depended on it.
I listen raptly for only about half the time and for the rest, I am
somewhat ashamed to say, I just waft along on her cadences, up a
little, down a little. She might be telling me about murder or she
might be reciting the most mellifluous of poetry.

“Andrew?”

I am caught, of course. I hasten to
explain to the reader, though not to Rachel, that this is not
doe-eyed love, but just the understandable result of a tired
scholar having a long week and succumbing irrevocably to a soothing
voice.

“You’ve been very kind to show me all
of this,” I say, and that invisible cloud that passes across her
eyes, narrowing them, darkening them for a moment, is her
realization that I am ending the evening.

“You’re going,” she says
flatly.

“I hope that is all right—and I want
you to know that you’ve provided me with much to help me in this
investigation.”

This simple fact seems to brighten
her. “Great,” she says and smiles a sad smile.

We stand up simultaneously.

“You are all right?” I ask.

“Yes, I’m all right. Thanks. It’s just
that it hits me, you know, hits me hard when I realize what this is
all about. People dead. A murderer out there.”

“I know.” I move forward to hug her,
surprising myself as much as her, and the sentiment is successful
but the mechanics are bad. We hit noses and our arm movements are
asynchronous.

“Perhaps …”

“Yes, perhaps we could get together
some time again soon,” I suggest. “If you could spare the time, and
I promise that I won’t monopolize your time with your helping me.
Dinner, perhaps?”

“That would be fine. I mean, that
would be great.”

She waves good-bye to me as in those
old movies where the man is on the train and the devoted wife is on
the platform, her eyes to the ground in regret at first but then up
and gazing at her fading man, her arm high in the air and waving
broadly. It will be better next time.

Chapter 10

I receive another email:

I can only imagine the thoughts that
drag their rotting carcasses through the muddied mind of a failed
and desperate hack. “Oh, dear, these random senseless killings.”
“Only a maniac with a complete lack of conscience could even dream
of inflicting such pain.” “When will this madness end?” And on and
on it goes, and I don’t know whether it is the annoyance of this
blathery drivel or the complete lack of any semblance of a
challenge in dealing with you that is the more annoying. There have
been, what, four of them killed so far, and let me deflate this
much of the mystery: there will be six more, an even ten, straight
across the row, a range of decimal and literal perfection. There’s
a certain ease to systematic killing, perhaps the same comfort that
you derive from writing your books and articles with an outline in
hand first rather than just plunging in. A sense of order, however
false and factitious, can provide solace, and make you think that
you are on the right path even though you know in your heart of
hearts (“as if you have one,” I hear you muttering
pathetically)—even though you know that it’s all made
up.

One of the faults which
scholars are sometimes justly accused of is a tendency toward
over-interpretation, and so I hesitate at any detailed exegesis of
this frightening message. At what level does the truth exist? Is
there a meaning beneath the literal one? How much can we believe
about any of the factual assertions? How much can we believe or
glean about
any
level of assertion in this email?