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.
—22—
Tearing apart Saunders’s home had taken us the entirety of the day well into the evening. The house was still under guard, but it appeared we had everything we could gather: the disgusting frozen trophies, the journals, internet printouts on how to commit the perfect crime, and a bloodstained t-shirt with a small tear in the left sleeve, a tear caused by one of the rounds fired by Kara.
More than enough.
Our sights were now set on bringing Saunders in—dead or alive. I had experienced firsthand that he would not go down without a fight, and I expected that whoever found him would face the same result. Saunders alone would be the one to decide how he faced justice—in a court before a jury of his peers or in a body bag. With a number of stitches in my side and a bruise across Kara’s neck, our anger got the better of both of us.
We wanted him dead.
We left the house just before ten that night. Kara and I checked out with the officer guarding the front of the scene and were just about to get into the car when a man screaming broke the silence. The sound seemed to come from the house beside Saunders’s and Kara and I took off at a run.
The door was locked, but the screaming continued. I pushed Kara aside and was about to kick the door down when she yelled at me to stop.
My stitches.
I had forgotten. The officer guarding Saunders’s house came running, and with a single kick the door swung open. He returned to his post and Kara and I entered the house, guns drawn.
I heard sobs coming from upstairs and made my way up slowly but deliberately. I knew what I would find but I refused to think it. I reached the landing at the top of the stairs and smelled a faint but familiar odour. A few more steps and I could see into the master bedroom, to a man crying over the body of a woman propped up in her bed.
Shit.
I holstered my gun and heard Kara’s click into place as well.
“Police,” I said, and the man turned around. His eyes met mine and he dropped to the floor, head in hands. I walked up to the woman and gently touched her cold skin. She was long dead. There was nothing to be done. I turned back to the man to speak to him, but what I saw next brought me to my knees beside him.
Another message, this one written on the wall beside the door I had just come through.
“You should have killed me when you had the chance. Now I’m not the only one with blood on my hands.”
A tube of lipstick sat on the dresser below the message, the end ground down to a nub. The handwriting was exactly the same. It was him. Nausea ran through me.
This woman’s death was my fault. I should have shot him.
Why didn’t I?
Kat’s voice played through my head, “You’ll be just like him.” And at that moment, I hated her.
I fought for composure, stood up and looked at the body. So much was different. Her neck was intact—bruising in the shape of hands stood out against her pale skin. She was still dressed—a pair of yoga pants and a loose-fitting t-shirt. And with her neck intact there was no knife on the bedside table.
He knew we were on to him, he had no reason to try to cover his crime, to get rid of the evidence.
I had to leave. I couldn’t look at the facts clinically, couldn’t be in there, couldn’t… The guilt was rising and it filled me with despair. This poor broken man was a widower now because of me.
“I’m going to go out, notify London,” I managed to say. “This is their jurisdiction, their case.” Great, he’d kept it simple for us by keeping his crimes in OPP territory. Now with this one in London we’d be looking at a multi-jurisdictional task force.
Kara nodded and continued to console the husband, who couldn’t stop crying.
I made my way back down the stairs, seeing things I hadn’t noticed on my way up. There were family photos everywhere—a man, a woman, a son and a daughter. The pictures at the top of the stairs were the new ones, photos of the couple on a cruise ship, at both their children’s graduations, at their daughter’s wedding. As I walked down the stairs I stepped backwards in time—a teenaged boy with pimples standing beside his father, a large fish hanging from his hand; a young girl with braces relaxing at the beach. Each step brought more guilt, more pain.And then I saw it.
It was a picture of Link and Kasia standing on either side of Mickey Mouse, Cinderella’s Castle a majestic backdrop. Link was flanked by Kat and I stood beside Kasia, my hand on her shoulder. I started to cry and, as the tears ran down my face, the photo began to drip away. The picture of my family disappeared and the dead woman, her husband and kids stared back at me, Mickey in the middle and the castle behind them.
I ran out the door and vomited on a rose bush. The officer at Saunders’s house came to my side and asked me if I was all right.
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and dried my eyes with my hand. “He killed his neighbour, too.”
“Fuck. I’ll call it in, Detective.”
“Thanks.”
I sat down on the step and barely moved until the cavalry arrived. The only movement I made was to put my hand on my pistol as my guilt drove me toward the breaking point.
With a single shot I could redeem myself.
* * *
I was still lost in thought in the passenger seat of our car when Kara opened the door. I looked at my watch—it had been nearly two hours since I left the house.
“Link?”
I turned and looked at Kara with red-rimmed eyes.
“Are you okay?”
I couldn’t speak, I just nodded.
“I was a little worried about you when you never came back in but I figured you were out dealing with London Police.”
“She’s dead because of me.”
Kara opened her mouth to talk but I didn’t give her a chance.
“Don’t argue it, you know it’s true. I had a clean shot and I didn’t take it. She should still be alive right now.” I didn’t want to know, but a part of me had to. “What’s her name?”
“Sarah Heiser.”
I nodded for her to go on.
“Fifty-two years old. Husband is Steve, forty-nine. And their kids, Rachel, twenty-five, and Daniel, twenty-three. The kids are both living out of town now. Steve left two nights ago for a fishing trip and just got back in tonight to find her dead.”
I started to cry aga
in. Maybe I should have left her nameless and never known about her but I needed to, I needed to know what I had done.
What I had allowed to happen.
I saw her clearly in my mind, an attractive older woman, slender and tall, with long brown hair. Her face grew younger and I saw Kat staring back at me. It was too much.
“I need to go home,” I said.
“Okay. I’ll be a few minutes getting things in order. Just wait here.”
She left me, and I was alone again.
—23—
It was nearly two by the time I made it home. The kids were sound asleep, but I had to see them. Kasia was lying across her bed with the covers completely off of her and I managed to smile at the sight. I picked her up, placed her back into bed properly and covered her without her waking up. A kiss on her forehead and it was time to see Link. He was lying on his side on the far side of the bed and facing the wall. I tried to maneuver to see his face but I couldn’t find a position that wouldn’t wake him up. I wanted to roll him over but he didn’t sleep as soundly as Kasia. I had no choice but to give up.
Kat and I hadn’t spoken of our fight; we tried to make it like it hadn’t existed when I called her earlier from Saunders’s house. The tension in her voice told me that a lot was being left unsaid.
But now I needed someone to talk to. I walked into our room and to her side of the bed and gently shook her awake.
“Link? What time is it?”
“Almost two. I need to talk to you.”
“Everything’s fine. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Not about that.”
She pulled the covers off of her—she always kept them up to her chin—and I saw hand-shaped bruises around her neck. I turned away and couldn’t look at her.
“What’s wrong?”
“He killed again, Kat. Another woman is dead.”
“It’s okay, you’ll get him soon.”
I started to cry. “It’s not okay. It’s not even close to okay. She’s dead because of me.”
“Oh, Lincoln, don’t say that.”
“I should have killed him, Kat. I should have fucking killed him. Why did you have to tell me not to? All I could hear was your voice when I had my gun on him.”
I could tell she was processing it. Did she still think she was right? Did she have any regrets? Where was her God now?
“You’re not responsible for what he does. It’s not your fault.”
“I’m responsible for what I do, and I didn’t stop him when I could have. She had two kids, older now, but as far apart as Kasia and Link. There was a picture in the house, the family at Disney standing with Mickey. When I saw it, it was our picture, it was us standing there.”
Kat was crying now, our tears falling onto the sheets and mixing in one stain.
“And then I saw her, clear as day in my mind, and next thing I knew it was you I was seeing. And now…”
I still couldn’t look at her. I tried again, turning my head slightly until I could see her neck in my peripheral vision. The bruises were still there. “And now when I look at you, there are bruises on your neck, hand prints just like on hers.”
She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight against her chest, my head resting on her shoulder.
“Kat, if there’s a next time, I’m not going to hesitate.”
She squeezed me tighter and I knew she still disagreed.
* * *
I woke up a few hours later and left the house—Kara and I had decided to meet early to get started on the case. We were researching anywhere Saunders might have gone to lay low: family, friends, and coworkers, anywhere a person might be able to hide. I had to focus on getting him, it was the only thing keeping me from collapsing.
Our first step though was to go back to his house to search for address books, e-mail contacts, anything else that could point us in the right direction. After meeting at the office we took a car from the garage and made our exit, Kara driving for one of the first times. It wasn’t a chauvinistic thing by any means, I just made a horrible passenger. So many years of driving had made me unable to sit still in a passenger seat, and I would often get nauseous. But since I’d been stabbed, Kara refused to allow me to drive—my range of movement was limited by the desire not to tear my stitches out.
We found nothing at the house to help us. There were some family contacts out of town that prompted messages to police services in those areas. They would send officers to check the residences for us, getting back to us as soon as possible. But the entries for family were faded and no fresh entries had been written in. Saunders appeared to be a recluse with no close family or friends to speak of. His self-professed destiny had consumed him.
The fact that there had been nothing on the system for Saunders since his wife’s suicide in two-thousand baffled me. How could someone like him stay under the radar? I called Millhaven Penitentiary and told them who I was, what I was investigating and the urgency of the matter. Five minutes later I was on the phone with Michael, Saunders’s son.
“You the cop after my dad?”
“You know?”
“Yeah, we still get the news in here. Have you got him yet?”
“Not yet. I’m hoping you can help. We need to know where he might have gone.”
Michael laughed. “All too fucking happy to help. The guy’s a piece of shit. I always knew it. Three weeks after my mom died, he decided he was going to see his brother in the States, never came back. I was seventeen and on my own.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t bother. I’ve had enough of cops and sympathy. You guys just use it get what you want and then you throw us back in a fucking cell.”
“Still.”
“Aw, hell, it was my own damned fault. I got a chunk of my mom’s insurance money. Had to find a place to live after the bank took the house. I somehow managed to finish high school. Tried to go to college but I couldn’t cope, started drinking heavily. I found a shitty job and held that for the last eight years until I got drunk at a work party and wound up doing some stupid shit that put me in here.”
“Look, Michael, I really am sorry for you all right? You seriously got the short end of the stick.”
“Yeah,” he paused. “Well… thanks… I guess. Look, he lived at his brother’s until about a year ago, when he came back to London. I didn’t have much contact with him, a phone call here and there, a Christmas or birthday present when he’d remember or when he wasn’t locked up in a psych ward.”
“Psych ward?”
“Yeah, he fucking lost it. About three months after he left me. He was in and out for a while. I heard he did some time down there too, an assault and a DUI or something.”
“Where does your uncle live?”
“Missouri, umm, I think he’s in Pleasant Hill still.”
“Thanks, Michael.”
“Hey, Detective?”
“Yeah.”
“He came up a few months ago to visit me, was rambling about how he was going to make everything better. Said he was going to make it so my mom didn’t die in vain. It didn’t make sense so I cut the visit short.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I didn’t know what he was talking about until I saw the news. So catch the fucker, I don’t even care if you kill him.”
Even his son agreed with me. I thanked Michael again and hung up the phone.
Kara and I left Saunders’s just after noon. Our stomachs were drowning out the car radio, prompting me to suggest we get a bite to eat. We drove down Commissioners Road to Wharncliffe Road and turned north, stopping just after the next set of lights. I had frequented this place during my patrol days, taking any opportunity I could to venture into London for the best shawarmas in the area. I had introduced Kara to them after she was transferred to homicide and thereby started her love affair with the garlic laden food. Perhaps a part of me was trying to prevent another amorous moment, a moment my guilt-ridden heart could not handle right now. Garlic breath would do th
e trick.
We ate in near silence, not because we had little to discuss but that we had too much. A crowded place was suited neither to discussing a high profile investigation or a marital indiscretion. The flavourful food was a boon to us both, settling our stomachs and providing us the energy we would need for what would be another long day at the office. Lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, onions, pickled cabbage and turnip, tahini sauce, hummus and garlic sauce wrapped in a pita loaded with chicken. It was messy food but well worth the risk of dropping sauce on a clean suit. Alone in the cruiser I would wear a napkin as a bib, but I refrained today to prevent myself from being embarrassed in front of…
What was she now? She was more than my partner, my coworker but still somewhat less than a lover, a mistress, a girlfriend. It may have been semantics but there appeared to be no word for the limbo we found ourselves in.
We finished our meals and spent ample time enjoying each other’s company in silence and imagined solitude, the other diners invisible, before we left the restaurant.
Kara saw it first as we walked to the car: an older model black Chevy Blazer with a single occupant who looked a lot like our suspect. She yelled and pointed and we moved. Within seconds we were in the car, Kara driving yet again and me trying to hide the blood that was seeping through my shirt—I had torn my stitches running to the car.
Damn.
Kara took off after the vehicle, nearly causing multiple accidents as she crossed traffic and headed south. My radio was in my hand and I was relaying the directions and details to dispatch, who were notifying London Police.
Kara caught up to the vehicle after it turned right onto Commissioners Road heading west through the city. I could just make out the plate, squinting hard to see it.
“Bravo-Juliet-Sierra-Tango-three-four-eight,” I stated into the radio. Not the right plate. Dispatch provided me with the registered owner’s details including a nearby address. The plates were registered to the same make, model, colour and year as Saunders’s vehicle. He could have easily stolen the plates, switching his own for someone else’s.
“Get someone to the registered owner’s address—with lights and sirens—and see if he’s got Saunders’s plates on his car.” Not that we were going to give up the chase. I knew it was Saunders driving and Kara did too.