A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller) (13 page)

When we were done I got up to leave but I needed to know one more thing. “Quick question: do you put visitors in that abomination of a chair on purpose to make them uncomfortable and put them at a disadvantage in their dealings with you?”

The old man nodded, “Yep.”

“’Kay. Just checking.”

We left. When I got back home it was past midnight and there was a written note from Elena that she had to see me the next day at 2:00 exactly (she had underlined it twice) at the Greek coffee house.

T
he next day I got Claire to watch the kids. Then I went to the café where Elena was already sitting. I sat across the table from her and we ordered cheese Danishes and coffee and they came quickly.

“You get your order a lot quicker than I ever do.”

Elena looked preoccupied and said, “Hmmm?”

“It’s probably the gun.”

“Probably.”

She was in full cop regalia: uniform, body armour, radio, pistol, collapsible baton, Taser, spare ammunition, handcuffs and attitude. Every few minutes her radio growled and she’d hold up a finger and listen.

Elena didn’t know where to begin so I started. “Look. You wanted to talk to me. Here I am. Like you asked.”

Elena nodded and suddenly shook her head in exasperation. “Okay. I have a problem. I have a big problem. And it involves you and Claire.” She sounded very concerned.

It took me aback. “Should I call a lawyer?”

“No. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

She examined her fingernails and I saw they were bitten down, something I’d never seen. Finally she took a deep breath. “Okay. Claire got a present in the mail, right? A bracelet?”

“Yes.”

“And you went to get it appraised and got arrested.”

“Pretty much.”

She ordered more coffee and leaned in. “Osserman lied to you.”

“Cops? Lying to me? Never.”

Elena wasn’t amused. “They told you that Paris was the first? That was true. But they didn’t tell you about the others.”

My blood pressure surged and I felt a tight band around my forehead. “Others?”

“Others. Since 1992 there have been seven women that we know of. Each received some of Paris’s jewellery as a gift. There has also been one husband and one son killed. The pattern is the same in each case; the women receive phone calls, flowers, letters, dinner invitations, etc. All from a secret admirer. The tone of the communications gets progressively more strident and finally the women vanish and are found later, tortured, raped, mutilated and murdered.”

“Jesus.”

Elena stared at her cup. “We missed any connections between the first woman and the second one and we couldn’t find any connections between the second and the third.”

She took a bite of her Danish before grimacing. “The force was going through a rough time. A whole changeover of major crimes personnel, a new chief, dissent in the union, disagreements with the RCMP and so on. In 1996 someone found the connectors—the jewellery all the women had and complaints they had made to their neighbours about being stalked. Two had even called the cops and filed complaints against ‘Persons Unknown.’ Not that any of it helped them.”

I reached out and grabbed Elena’s hand. “Is Claire in danger? Right now?”

“No. She’s covered. We’ve got cops everywhere, watching and waiting. We’ve brought in RCMP plainclothes and, well, she’s covered.”

I wondered about the other women and whether they’d been covered. I also wondered how rusty I was getting not to notice cops around my house.

“Okay. Go on. So you guys found out you had a serial killer.”

The term sounded ridiculous. It was something out of Hollywood, the boogeyman, the new monster of the time.

“Yes. So we set up a system to flag any of the signs we were seeing—complaints, stalking accusations—but there were a lot of them, still are.”

I nodded and she went on, “We also started to get the pawn shops and jewellery stores to watch for the stuff that Paris made. It was unique, after all. Finally, in 1998 we found a necklace being cleaned. By the time we got to the woman’s condo though, she was gone.”

She stared into the distance.

“Dogs found her remains on the banks of the Assiniboine. We told the public she had been run over by a boat. You
see …”

I realized she was pleading with me. Her mouth opened twice and then she said, “We didn’t want to panic anyone.”

My mouth froze open and I just stared at Elena. When I could speak my voice was low and vicious, “Panic anyone? You didn’t want to panic anyone?”

Elena touched my hand and I drew it back out of her reach. “Yes. When the Nightstalker was killing in California more than thirty people died as vigilantes and scared civilians panicked and opened fire, thinking the murderer was creeping up on them. Most of the people who died were innocent spouses and children. Lots of cops think some wives and husbands used the opportunity and the fear to get rid of unwanted spouses.”

Somewhere I had heard that but the rage was still very strong inside me. “Panic. Okay. So you kept it quiet.”

She nodded, “Yeah. We found more of the jewellery. Some turned up in estate sales. Other pieces we just ran across.”

Elena looked off into the distance. “We call the killer the Shy Man. Sometimes he sends letters but they never get mean. Other times he sends a single piece of jewellery and that’s it. Other times the letters build to a crescendo and then stop and nothing happens for months, even years. Then the woman vanishes.”

I rubbed my forehead. “How many more dead?”

“Paris, we think, was the first one in 1992. Followed by a woman in 1995 who ran a flower shop in Saint James. We found her in an abandoned house, in the basement, pretty late and the coroner fucked up and claimed she had died of natural causes and that the damage had been caused by rats and insects. She was the one we didn’t catch until 1998 with better DNA testing. In 1997 there was a woman lawyer we found mutilated in her cabin in the Whiteshell. Her husband was beside her with a bullet hole in his brain and it looked like a murder/suicide. In 1998 there was a part-time model; she was the one we found in the Assiniboine. In 2001 there was a waitress we found in a minivan parked where kids neck sometimes near the zoo.”

Elena shook her head. “In 2003 we caught on to a case before the murder happened. It was an accountant, a nice woman, dated a provincial sheriff. She went to a cop Christmas party with one of Paris’s brooches and a sergeant noticed it. We went to her directly and set her up as a decoy—full coverage, all the time. Nothing happened.”

I was watching Elena. It looked like this was hurting her.

“Then, in 2005, we caught another one in time. She was a bank teller and we pulled most of the coverage off the accountant to cover her. Which was a mistake, because in the summer of that year someone broke into the accountant’s house, shot her ten-year-old son to death and took her apart. In 2006 the bank teller went on vacation to Mazatlán. There she was kidnapped from the beach and murdered on a rented catamaran a mile off shore.”

“Jesus.”

Elena smiled. “You said that. So. We know the Shy Man sometimes kills and sometimes doesn’t. And we know he can ‘date’ his ladies for up to forty-one months, that’s the longest we know about. And we know he’s Caucasian, probably, and right handed, probably. And we have finger- and footprints and DNA samples and so on.”

She smiled brightly. “Claire is probably safe.”

“Sure.”

“So don’t tell her.”

“Of course not.” The lie rolled off my tongue easily.

“I’ve got something for her though. Come with me.”

There were tears in her eyes as she paid the tab and took me around to the back of the café where her police issue Crown Vic was parked. She walked around to the trunk and opened it. Inside were neatly racked tools, a shovel, a big first aid kit and a towel, neatly folded, from a Holiday Inn. Elena opened the towel and showed me what was inside.

“They’re throwdowns.”

I knew what that meant. The three pistols she had in the towel had had their registration filed and burned off. They were meant for cops to drop if they shot an unarmed person and didn’t want to go to jail or answer a lot of stupid questions.

“Take ’em.”

She was serious. I looked at her face and then back at the guns. Two semi-autos and a revolver. I leaned into the truck and picked them up one at a time and examined them. Finally I kept the Beretta Model 21 and the Taurus revolver in .32 long.

“You can keep the Star. I’m not sure about the firing pin.”

Elena nodded and closed the trunk as I put the guns away in my pockets, first making sure the safeties were on. They were loaded with eight .25 rounds and six .32 rounds respectively and just having them made me nervous. For an ex-con those two guns, illegal, unregistered, restricted weapons with no serial numbers, represented about six years of prison.

I went home in the cop car to tell Claire my good news.

C
laire took it better than I expected.

“Really? Me? Being stalked by a serial killer?”

“Yes.”

We were walking around the neighbourhood and pulling Fred in his red wagon. Claire stopped and turned her back to me to examine a cancer growing a boll on an oak tree. I respected her privacy and when she turned back I went on.

“I wanted to tell you outside of the house. There’s a fair chance the cops have it bugged.”

“Ah.”

I couldn’t read her face. “Elena gave me two pistols for you. A .32 revolver which is fairly big and a .25 calibre Beretta you can carry on your person.”

She ran her fingers across the bark of the tree. “In my purse.”

“Never in your purse. I’ll rig something up for you. Frankly, the gun’s so damn small you can slip it into a pocket or into a wallet and no one will notice.”

“Is there an ‘or’ here about this whole situation?”

“Sure, there’s always an ‘or.’ In this case it’s ‘or we can run.’ The only problem is we’ll never be sure we’ve gotten away with it. He’s hunted the same woman for more than three years before. He might do it again.”

“Ah.” Claire turned back to me and I saw something very angry in her eyes and I was glad that it wasn’t me who started it this time. “Any suggestions?”

I thought about saying it diplomatically, then punted that idea and went for the truth. “We figure out how to antagonize him. How to make him react emotionally. We figure out what makes him tick and then we press those buttons hard. Then, when’s he’s really angry, we make him come out and play. Then I kill him.”

She smiled.

That night we pulled the drapes closed and I took some remnants of canvas and heavy thread along with a six-foot length of six-inch tensor bandage and made a holster Claire could wear all the time. It fit at the base of her spine, under her pants or skirt, and it was almost unnoticeable as long as she always wore her shirt out. Since the Beretta was so small (less than five inches long and less than an inch thick) and light, it was easy for her to get used to it.

When the holster was ready I got her to strip to underwear and a bra and put it on. Then I made her practise drawing it quickly, right hand and then left. Over and over again.

Actually, it was kind of sexy to watch.

When we had to talk we wrote it down on scraps of paper, just in case the cops had the place bugged.

While she was practising I took the opportunity to rip some seams out of one of Claire’s favourite leather jackets and insert a ten-inch plastic knitting needle down her spine. The brass tip stuck out just behind her neck and she could draw that with either hand but other than that it was unnoticeable. Since it was plastic it bent with her movements and it was flexible enough to slide easily between ribs as needed.

When I was done we headed down to the basement. We went into the corner where I filled a garbage pail with water from the tap and had her stand on a chair over it. When she was ready I had her pull the gun and fire a single shot straight down into the water.

Crack
.

It was an insignificant noise and the bullet went into the water maybe a foot before losing momentum and drifting the rest of the way.

She wrote, “
It works.
”

“
Any problems with the recoil?
”

Claire just shook her head. She had fired rifles and shotguns with her dad over the years so she was no stranger to guns. I handed her the revolver and she fired that as well.

Bang
!

Much more authoritative.

She holstered the gun and I gathered up the spent shells and bullets and put them in my pocket for disposal. Upstairs I wrote her a note to remind her, “
The Beretta is always double action so squeeze and that’s it. Seven rounds left, which is more than enough.
”

I checked Claire’s purse. She had a Mini-Mag flashlight (useful to find door locks in the dark and to give weight and a rigid surface in a punch), a nice Gerber Guardian Back-Up knife sewn into the side (great for opening letters and slitting throats as needed). She also had a whistle and a can of pepper bear spray but those were obviously for defence.

Claire watched me closely as I checked the house. Doors, windows and locks. Upstairs I turned on the internal alarm I’d built when Smiley, an ex-con friend of mine, had lived with us. If anyone came up the stairs it would trigger a light display which I put on my side of the bed.

Then I took the door off its hinges from Fred’s room and used two pieces of thread to tie it into place on the stairs. If anyone came upstairs quickly they’d break the thread and it would make a hell of a racket as they went skiing away, not lethal but loud and disorienting. Claire took Fred and his mattress into our room and put him in a corner nearest to her.

I looked around and froze, standing there. Finally Claire put her hand on my arm and led me to bed.

I didn’t dream that night.

I’m not sure I even slept.

T
he next morning I phoned Mr. Reese. His secretary had a slightly nasal east-coast accent but put me through to him as soon as she heard my name and the first thing he said was, “Call me Virgil. What do you need?”