Mind Games Page 21

  Churko paled.

  “When our two heroes aren’t prowling the streets of Vancouver looking for people to kill, they’re surfing Nazi Web sites and going two-on-one with Jossie Markevich – by the way, you’ll want to check her out. They didn’t drive to the Skeena River, they flew there and back on Daddy’s jet. They left their truck at Boundary Bay airport Saturday morning after strangling Chauncey Wilmott.”

  I added that Churko might want to cross-reference the dates of Grundy’s parking tickets with his homophobic excursions into the city. I didn’t mention my baffling psychic experience. Churko might start wondering what was really in those pills.

  “And here’s something else – I think he tried to run me over, tried to kill me.” Churko was interested now, even nodding as I told him about the sports pickup, my scrape with death. He phoned headquarters, told his underlings he wanted eyes on Grundy and Lyall, and a twenty-four hour discreet watch of The Tides and the Simon Fraser campus.

  A sense of foreboding plagued me through the rest of the day. I spent a couple of hours conferring with detectives, puzzling through my notes, some of which were indecipherable, and trying to remember the gaps, but I remained unable to bring back … what? Something that had registered at the far periphery of awareness.

  Another day has passed. Twelve hours ago (it is about midnight now), Grundy delivered his essay to an associate professor of psychology. He and Lyall stopped to watch a football practice, then left the campus to pick up Jossie Markevich at her apartment before carrying on to The Tides. There are a couple of minor entries on her sheet, by the way, one for shoplifting, one for prostitution.

  Tonight I’m still edgy, raw-nerved, but determined to stay off the tranks. I’m hoping to stay awake all night to avoid the nightmares that drugs denied me. Tomorrow, I will prowl the market for clams and mussels and savory and Spanish onions. Tomorrow, I’ll hear Victoria’s truth.

  And that reminds me of the task I’ve been avoiding. When Comes the Darkness is on the shelf, waiting, a bookmark at the drawing-and-quartering chapter.

  The book refuses to vanish, haunts at the edge of my left visual field …

  Remembrance comes with a thud, and I feel faint.

  That is what I’d seen in Lyall’s room, at that same edge of my left vision – sitting on his bookshelves between other hardcovers: a title on a spine, the author’s name: Victoria Dare.

  The light comes flooding. The deaths in the novel, the two loopings, the stabbing. Grundy and Lyall are copycat killers.

  1 Non-prescribed medication, received in promotional mailings from pharmaceutical companies.

  2 She did telephone me, and to state the point simply, she is in a state of turmoil. She felt unable to “deal with” Tim, and begged me to put matters to him gently.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Date of Interview: Friday, October 10, 2003.

  Tim showed up today only to cancel. He was sweating profusely, having sped here by bicycle with a heavy backpack. He announced he had a train to catch – he was travelling to the Okanagan for the Thanksgiving weekend “to learn the course.”

  I urged him to spend a few minutes with me, and he reluctantly sat down. He tried to divert me when I asked about his discussion with Victoria.

  I’m concerned about how you reacted to what she said. I tried to call you early in the week …

  I got the message. Allis, I’m sorting through my thoughts, I’m not ready to talk about it.

  When does your train go?

  In two hours.

  That’s plenty of time.

  I’m a worrier, I like to be early.

  If that’s so, why do you tend to be late?

  Okay, I’m lying. I have too many things on my mind … confusing nightmares. I can’t get my head around the repeated motif of masquerade balls. What lies beneath all the gaudy costumes – the alter egos I’ve tried to disown? It’s too complex for my overtaxed mind.

  Why must you always seek complexity? The answer may be simple.

  How so?

  Think about it.

  I’m lost.

  Okay, this bicycle rally that you’re so totally absorbed in – it ends on what day?

  October thirty-first. I get it. Halloween. I unconsciously associate the rally with people dressing up. You really have a knack of … Never mind. Anyway, there’s some stuff I can’t talk about to anyone, to do with the police investigation. So I thought … maybe we can do two hours next week. Maybe we could spend the afternoon together.

  Let’s try for that. You’re still off inhibitors?

  It was ugly.

  Sure. You go ride your bike in the Okanagan hills. That’s the best thing you can do.

  As twilight falls, my train snakes through the Fraser Canyon, the rhythm of the rails soothing me, their gentle jump and bump. Darkness comes suddenly as we pass into a tunnel, then evening light returns. From a few seats down comes a tune from a banjo, musical enough but sardonic to my ears, another jest of merry Zeus.

  I nod off. I awake and return to Jung. (“Do not expect psychology to offer a valid explanation for the secret of creativity. Nobody can penetrate to the heart of nature”) I try not to listen to that banjo. My dreams haven’t lied. They’ve always led me to truth. Peter, with his banjo.

  I should have undergone my weekly head adjustment today, Allis, but I need to sort things out. I’ll be more clearheaded when we meet next. You’ll seek to reassure me that Peter and Victoria didn’t conceive a mutant. You’ll tell me I’m not missing vital chromosomes.

  We have emerged from the funnel of the Fraser River and are snaking uphill. The banjoist has, thank God, packed it away for now. A night prowl up the aisle reveals, snoring, an unkempt middle-ager. On his lap, not a banjo but a lute. Only a scattered few are in this coach, dozing or with books or crossword puzzles.

  It will be two a.m. when I get off. I have a hotel room booked in Kamloops, and in the morning I plan to bike to the starting point of the rally, in Vernon. I’ll do the most punishing leg first, the run to Arrow Lake, then down the Okanagan Valley, my trial run finishing on Thanksgiving Day.

  Huff versus Dare is set to lumber back into action in two weeks – God knows for how long. I held off telling Victoria that When Comes the Darkness inspired murder, though I will after I’m released from silence – Churko has put a clamp on the investigation. (He doesn’t know I tell you everything.)

  So this is classified information, Allis. I’ve unravelled the subterranean message that rang like a gong in my head. Grundy and Lyall are mimicking Clint Huff, the fictional mayor invented by my mother.

  I didn’t sleep last Friday night, not a wink, as I worked at the implications, though I woke Churko to demand assurance Grundy and Lyall were still under surveillance. He agreed to meet me for breakfast with Dotty at a nearby café.

  Though Dotty had read When Comes the Darkness, Churko hadn’t, and he had difficulty with my hypothesis, kept demanding to know why I’d “forgot” seeing the book on Lyall’s shelf. Unconscious observation is a concept I had difficulty explaining.

  This was my pitch: Lyall’s interest in the book was whetted by the publicity over the libel case, by the fact that Grundy’s overseer was the author’s son. He had shared the novel with Grundy. They were fascinated by the concept, orgasmic murder, and decided to experiment. What had Huff said in court? He obtains sexual release through murdering … With the first killing, they had found that release, and they sought it again, two more deaths in their pursuit of a climax they could find no other way.

  Dotty sought holes. The third fictional murder was by axe. My answer: It was still a form of butchery; they used what was handy. Grundy and Lyall targeted gay men, she reminded me, not women. However misogynous, I argued, the two men were impelled more strongly by their homophobia. This departure from the text seemed significant, though. I couldn’t grasp why.

  I pointed out that the recipe in When Comes the Darkness calls for a hanging next. “Well, they ain’t going t
o get that opportunity,” Churko vowed. No longer dismissive of my theory, he went off to buy a copy of the book.

  The investigation made significant progress over the next few days. My parking-ticket theory panned out. On the date of the Wilmott murder, the Town & Country had been ticketed near Stanley Park at 7:15 p.m.

  The pact of silence between Stairs and Sanchez has been broken. They wilted after being threatened with public mischief, with aiding and abetting by their silence. The watchman and the maid confessed to having been in her room, between the sheets, on the night of the double murder. Regularly, late in the evening, Sanchez lets Stairs in through a back door.

  But Stairs has betrayed me to DeWitt, telling him I was asking about specific dates. He hadn’t thought there was anything wrong in that – they’d been chatting one evening, and Lyall had asked a few questions. An awareness that the boss’s son is of interest to the police has finally penetrated the thickness of Stairs’s skull, but too late.

  It was Dotty who urged me to take this extended holiday – these guys were capable of anything, she said, they might evade detection, commit bloody piracy on the Altered Ego. It hadn’t escaped me that another factor had influenced Grundy to copy the script of Victoria’s novel – it was a means of taunting the author’s son, his nemesis, his trustee, his prospective jailer.

  I hadn’t intended to call Sally – we haven’t talked since I spotted her leaving Cousineau’s apartment – but since I’d prevailed upon Churko to cover my former home around the clock, I had to let her know.

  I was official and grave, biting back my despair. I gave her a resumé of recent events. I told her there’d be an unmarked police vehicle outside her house. I urged her to keep her antennae tuned for danger. I’d be spending a few days on this training run. When I ran out of pronouncements, there was a momentary silence.

  “You know,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sure. Take care.”

  I had to hang up for fear I would disassemble. A dream of her came back, her words: Even if I’m bad, you’ll always be my friend, won’t you? Once again, I found myself struggling for the courage to admit I’d lost her, that she’s better off without me. To accept is to heal. To forgive is to heal. But can I really do that? Cousineau! How insulting, how demeaning.

  When the phone rang a few minutes later, I thought, hoped, it was Sally with more to say. It was Vivian.

  “Timothy? Oh, thank God. Don’t hang up, please. If I take that polygraph, it will only get you in deeper, so I have an idea. We tell them we’re seeing each other socially. If we’re having a romance, that puts the whole thing in a different light …”

  I hung up and went for sushi.

  A moon is out, weaving ghostly patterns. The lights of a village flash by. A glimpse of a boy at a second-storey window, waving at whoever will wave back. I think of Lyall blowing the kiss. Now comes an illuminated billboard advising the wages of sin is death – it brings back the worst of my nightmares. It came after that night’s dinner of slightly tainted tuna in the sushi, complicated by withdrawal pangs.

  I’m standing in a meadow. A fortress fills the horizon, a mental hospital – I can hear the cries of the distressed from within. (No … now as I reflect, that was no meadow but a pitch-and-putt course, and the forbidding structure represented the manse of The Tides.)

  I’m frightened when I see, rising from the gloom, men in white robes smeared with blood. They’re coming toward me. I run for the nearby trees, but my flight is sluggish, and I realize my feet are tangled in rope; there are ropes everywhere, around my ankles, my wrists, my neck, and I become horribly aware that they’re meant for me, for my hanging …

  I exploded from sleep to find my sheet tangled about my neck. I stilled the tremors and took my bearings. I was in my bunk in the Altered Ego, the boat rocking silently in the wake of a passing boat.

  It was easy enough to connect the dream to the hanging death in When Comes the Darkness. But my mind was racing beyond that: I was buffeted by a deep sense that a hanging had actually occurred.

  I thought back, a week ago, to my encounter with Grundy and Lyall at The Tides. I’d picked up something from them, from the very smell of them – the hint of a fresh kill? I couldn’t get rid of the notion; it was itching at me, flitting like a bat in the dark caves of forgotten nightmares.

  I played with words from this nightmare: rope, hang, tree. Hadn’t Grundy and Lyall said something similar? Seemingly innocuous words maybe, but used because they’d been rattling about in their minds following a significant event. Then it came to me, a word association that might win the applause of Freud himself. When I surprised Grundy at The Tides, his response had been this: What are you doing in this neck of the woods? And later, Lyall DeWitt’s offhand remark: You plan to hang around much longer, Doc? Neck, hang, woods … They had committed another murder, by hanging, probably in a wooded area.

  The heat I’d sensed emanating from them came not from sexual lust but the lust of murder. That was the reason Grundy begged off seeing me that day: they’d just returned from the kill, and planned to celebrate with Löewenbräus and Jossie Markevich.

  Why had no body been found?

  I imagined Churko trying to follow my thought processes, grappling with psychoanalytic deduction, free association, the concept of sense-perception. Maybe he’d buy into it, though. He hires soothsayers.

  I told him anyway, the next morning in his office. I’d been proved right before, so he wasn’t prepared to scoff.

  “Read my mind, Doc. It’s asking, Where’s the body? Where’s the opportunity? Grundy was in school that day.”

  Investigators had already established that on that Thursday, the second day of October, he attended two hour-long classes at SFU, an eight-thirty and a ten-thirty. Lyall DeWitt was likely on campus too. He’s been allowed to audit a physical education course to fill time while he waits for Grundy. Otherwise, he usually stays in the van or drives aimlessly about.

  Churko said if I turned out to be right he’d back me to the tune of two hundred dollars in le prix de Okanagan. But I couldn’t persuade him to send search parties into the forest that surrounds the university.

  It is midnight, and our train has just pulled out of Ashcroft after taking on a young woman, now seated across the aisle, piercings and tattoos, a small pack. She has pulled out a fat novel, a romance saga. Maybe she’s off to pick fruit in the Okanagan orchards.

  Victoria hadn’t lied about that part …

  I’m sure, Allis, you’ve concluded I begged off talking about Peter because I wasn’t able to grapple with Victoria’s many versions of him – I could never be sure if she’d embroidered a rhapsodic version of her lakeside romance, but I was satisfied with that, wasn’t interested in hearing a less palatable version.

  Let’s get into it then. Let us go to the Victoria’s little house in Grandview. Saturday evening.

  I bundled my groceries into the kitchen, where Victoria was perched on a stool beside a nearly overflowing ashtray, a wreath of smoke around her. She was fidgeting, seemed anxious. (As was I: this was my second day of abstinence.)

  I had no intention of raising the issue of the copycat killings or her novel’s unintended role in them. That would put her even more on edge. Instead, I opened by asking how her romance with the mountain climber was faring.

  “We’ve gotten beyond base camp.”

  Victoria said they were planning to spend the long weekend in a mountain chalet. I wanted to meet this arts producer, to size him up. I’m trying not to judge: he may be the right man for her. If so, I don’t intend to be the pebble in the shoe of this romance.

  I found a large pot, arranged my working space.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing. I didn’t raise my son to be a cook.”

  “I think you’ll find this very interesting. What gives it uniqueness is the Pernod.”

  I fussed about, washing my hands, finding pots and utensils. Vi
ctoria chain-lit a cigarette.

  “You’ve got two packs worth of butts in that ashtray.”

  “Please don’t lecture.”

  There was no point in stalling. “Victoria, it’s time I was taught the facts of life.”

  “So says your shrink. Very attractive woman. I suspect her interest in you goes beyond the professional, by the way. She dropped a bomb on me – it seems I’ve been lying to protect myself, not you. I’m sorry, Tim, I haven’t rehearsed this very well.”

  “Like a drink?”

  “No, I’ll just get soused.”

  I opened a beer for myself. While I cooked she talked, staring at her hands, fiddling with her cigarettes, occasionally glancing at me for my reaction.

  “I thought my stories about Peter would help you feel good about yourself. I suffered so much mothering guilt, Dr. Epstein says, guilt about having brought you into the world fatherless, guilt that I wasn’t there for you a lot, guilt at working, studying, writing, when I should have been with you. There was love, there was always that, but I felt I hadn’t been a great mother. Once, some kids locked you in a trunk when I was upstairs writing. You don’t remember that, you were very little, but I was a long time finding you, and you were extremely upset. I lived with that, and I hated myself …”

  “I remember it, Victoria. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Her shoulder bag was sitting beside her, and she reached into it and produced her old diary.

  “I went back into that old trunk the other day.”

  “I thought you lost the key.”

  “I hid it from you. Some notes about my night with Peter are in here. I’m afraid that what I told you … well, I embellished the truth a little, Tim.”

  “Okay, I can handle it.” Was I being honest?

  “I was in the Okanagan, picking peaches, trying to earn enough for school – your grandparents were helping with money too. But basically, I was playing a fairly stock part for the times, hippie chick, peace and vibes, sex and drugs, rock and roll. I was discovering life, gorging on it – I was free, I was cool, I was seventeen.”