The Ambitious City (19 page)

“You guys don’t stop, do you?”

“Fiza, we’ve got a man with a big knife who won’t stop unless we stop him. And we’ve now connected one of the bodies in the bay
to the biker murders Swetsky has been dealing with in Cayuga—though what the connection is we don’t know. When I said we needed you, I really meant it.”

Fiza laughed, long and hard, and he joined in, the knot he’d had in his stomach finally letting go.

After they hung up, he stayed outside a moment longer, watching three starlings on a telephone line chatting and shuffling to the left, then the right, as if they were dancing or perhaps deciding which had the better view of the rooftops. He was about to open the door when his cellphone rang. Without looking at the screen, he said, “Forget something?”

“It’s me, boss,” Williams said. “There’s been another one, down at Van Wagners Beach. We’re on our way now.”

“I’ll be right there.”

MacNeice went inside to put the dinner on his tab and ran out through the back door. A quick glance at his watch told him it was 10:11 p.m.

Van Wagners Beach stretched for a mile or so along the southwest shore of Lake Ontario, not far from the canal that let lake freighters in and out of Dundurn Bay. It was a scalloped beach with breakwater piles of stone reaching out into the lake every hundred yards; they kept the sand from eroding back to the nearby highway every November, when the wind whipped up the lake. It was the closest and most popular beach destination for the city of Dundurn, a summer haunt for those who couldn’t afford a cottage up north.

The sun worshippers—young families and teens—would leave when the sun fell behind the trees that lined Van Wagners Beach Road. That’s when the true romantics arrived: those who wanted to make love behind the rocks, go skinny-dipping, get drunk or just enjoy the reflected glory of the sunset at their backs as they stared out at twilight on the lake.

At nine that evening, Samora Aploon, a twenty-five-year-old medical student, finished her shift at the Burger Shack. With her textbook on thoracic surgery tucked under one arm and carrying her dinner on a plastic Shack tray, she walked down the beach to the second breakwater and sat on one of the flat rocks facing away from the building. The distance would filter the noise from the burgers-and-beer crowd that descended on the Shack every night around this time, driving loud cars and even louder motorcycles. There was still enough light for her to read at least six pages while she ate.

Samora kicked off her sandals and pushed her bare feet into the still-warm sand. Opening the textbook on the rock beside her, she laid a palm-sized flat stone—the kind she’d learned to skip across the lake when it was calm—on its pages for hands-free reading. She unwrapped her fishburger, took a sip of her ginger ale and looked along the far shore that curved around Secord on its way to Niagara. She loved the purple light of twilight, so unlike the saturated buttery colours of South Africa’s Western Cape, where she was from.

She was about to take a bite of her burger when he appeared from behind the rocks. She hadn’t heard him approach. Suddenly she saw her face reflected in the black visor as he stopped directly in front of her. Samora stood up to ask what he wanted—and that’s when he struck. The plastic cup of ginger ale flew into the rocks and ricocheted into the lazy waves, losing its top and straw, which turned in circles in the foam. She didn’t have time to let go of the fishburger. It was still clutched in her hand when two young women, whose boyfriends had gone to the Shack to pick them up some beer and fries, approached with blankets and a boom box, looking for the best place to set up for the night. Both of them stood stunned for a moment at the sight of her, slashed and bleeding into the sand, and then they screamed.

—

With five cruisers parked on the road, their light bars flashing, it wasn’t difficult to find the crime scene. A yellow tape barrier had been put up at the first breakwater and all along the treeline of the road to just beyond the third. MacNeice parked behind Vertesi’s car.

Several uniformed police were gathered around the two women and their boyfriends, all sitting on the rocks of the first breakwater. Both girls looked his way as he crossed the beach.

“Detective Superintendent.” The uniformed sergeant was first to greet MacNeice.

“What have we got here, Sergeant Matthews?”

“A young woman, Samora Aploon. She’s a foreign medical student from South Africa studying here. She was almost filleted with one stroke of a knife. No one heard or saw anything until those two started to scream.” He pointed in the direction of the two women. Someone had put a red-checked plastic tablecloth over the body. Vertesi was holding up a corner of it and both he and Williams were studying the body.

“Has anyone spoken to the Burger Shack staff?”

“They’re pretty freaked out. Aploon was very quiet, and no one saw her outside of working hours, but they all liked her.”

“Thanks, Sergeant.”

Matthews nodded and walked off towards the young women, who were now standing by the rocks in the arms of their boyfriends.

With a mixture of fatigue and rage, MacNeice walked slowly over to the cheerful red-checkered vinyl. Williams helped him remove it from the body. The knife had sliced through Samora’s T-shirt in the middle of the left breast and had gone right through the collarbone and into her neck, where it had ripped through to the spine. As the slasher completed his stroke, he’d taken off most of the left earlobe. Blood had sunk into the sand all around her,
black in the failing light. She had fallen sideways with the impact and was lying on her back, with her feet still pushed into the sand. Her stomach had been punctured four times. She was wearing black knee-length cotton shorts with a fanny pack—nothing appeared to have been disturbed. In her right hand was the burger.

MacNeice put on his latex gloves, knelt down and unzipped the fanny pack. “Loose change, some folding money—tips—a red leather wallet, keys. No cellphone. God help us.”

“Who doesn’t have a cellphone? He’s taken it,” Vertesi said.

The night on the beach seemed like it would never end; no one knew anything, had seen anything or heard anything. If Samora had screamed, it would have been impossible to separate the sound from the general mayhem of a boozy evening at the Shack. A motorcycle tearing away wouldn’t have attracted any attention either, since they were coming and going all the time.

MacNeice walked back and forth along Beach Road with his Maglite, looking for blood and oil, finding much of the latter, none of the former. But the oil was old and dried up and it was impossible to identify individual tire tracks in the loose sand and gravel of the shoulders.

It was 1:18 a.m. before the body was removed and sent to the coroner’s lab. She’d almost bled out, purpling the grey sand. “Take the tablecloth too. I don’t want the Burger Shack to have to deal with it,” MacNeice told the coroner’s retrieval team. The cheerful cloth, a dark stain now obliterating much of its checkerboard pattern, was folded neatly and laid on top of the black body bag.

MacNeice could feel the anger boiling in his men. It mirrored his own. As tired as they all were, none of them felt they could leave the scene, though there was nothing more to be accomplished by staying. Finally Williams took away the fanny pack, saying he would try to reach Samora’s next of kin. Vertesi kept looking up
and down the beach as if a suspect would suddenly appear, but at last he too said goodnight and walked off slowly towards his car.

“This is what defeat looks like,” MacNeice said to the dark stain in the sand. He knelt down and looked out over the water, trying to capture the last thing Samora had seen as she was dying.

As he headed to his Chevy, he looked for the route the tall young man had taken—the easiest for attack and retreat. Just to the left of the rock pile, so she couldn’t see him approaching, but far enough to the right that the Burger Shack staff wouldn’t notice him either. And dusk was dark enough to obscure a figure dressed in black, walking as casually as if he just wanted to skip stones across the water. He knew that he shouldn’t be so certain that the killer was the young man in the hospital videos, but he was. He just wished they had already found him, and that Samora Aploon had been able to finish her dinner, take her textbook, catch the bus and make it safely home.

When he got back to the stone cottage, he called the Deputy Chief’s voice mail to fill him in. It was 2:30 a.m. when he finally went to bed. He picked up
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
and began where he left off, with the plague ravaging London. He read for several minutes, then, distracted by images of the young woman torn apart on the beach, he rolled out of bed, checked the clock radio—2:58—went to the kitchen and poured himself a healthy shot of grappa. When he climbed into bed again, it was 3:11. He lay there doing some deep-breathing exercises and drifted slowly off to sleep.

There were photos on the wall he recognized, poorly framed and hung crookedly. He busied himself for a while, straightening the images. But a draft from the screen door kept shifting the frames, and finally he gave up and turned instead to studying them. There he was with his parents, who looked happy.

“Camp,” he said. “It was the first day of camp. I was six.”

“Yeah, I thought so—you look scared shitless,” Davey White said. Davey, dead since they were boys.

“I guess I was, a bit.”

All his great and minor moments were there—from winning an award for bravery to marrying Kate to feeding chickadees perched on his hand behind the cottage. Surprisingly, Kate’s family photos were all framed and mixed in with his. Though their parents didn’t know each other well, there they were, side by side as if they were the best of friends. “Funny seeing them together … I mean, like this—”

“Yeah, Kate hates it. You shouldn’t have done it.”

He turned quickly to catch Davey’s eyes. “You’ve seen Kate?”

“Yeah, of course. She wants to see you too—but not until you get rid of this fuckin’ shrine.”

“She’s alive? You’ve really seen her!”

“I can bring her to you, Mac. She was here today. I thought you knew that.”

He studied a grouping of four photos of Kate—at five, seven, ten and thirteen—all playing the violin, all with her eyes closed. “She once told me that she closed her eyes even when she was playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ ”

“What the fuck for, to play better?”

“No, no, that wasn’t it. She did it so people couldn’t see her—that’s what she said at the time. When I said, ‘But you’re playing right in front of them,’ do you know what she replied?”

“No.”

“ ‘They can’t see me. I’m as far away as I can get when I play. They can only see me when I open my eyes.’ ”

“Weird.”

“Maybe … but it made sense to me then, and still does.”

“So, do you want to see her?”

“Oh, Dave, I’ve been looking for her so long. I would give … everything.”

“Okay, then, take that shit down. I’ll go get her.”

Davey jumped up and walked out the screen door, letting it slap shut behind him. MacNeice watched him go down the stairs with that loose-limbed
doinka doinka doinka
walk he’d always had.

He had taken down a dozen frames or so but noticed that the wall seemed to hold even more. While he didn’t want to take the time to look at them, he did. Photos of the stone cottage, of them in Suffolk with her parents, of her playing onstage—all were familiar experiences, but new to him as photographs. He tried to recall taking them and couldn’t. There he was being promoted to detective superintendent; he knew Kate had been there, he could remember where she stood—but he couldn’t remember seeing the photograph.

On the floor, the stack of framed memories was growing, yet the wall seemed just as full as when he started. He decided the best way to deal with the situation was to put them in bags, and do it fast. He wanted Kate to come home to an empty wall. In the kitchen he opened the cupboard under the sink and took out four large black garbage bags. On the shelf he found the creamy white filler that would cover the nail holes. He congratulated himself for having all the tools necessary to erase any trace of the images, though he couldn’t remember buying the filler and concluded that he must have done it a long time ago. Curious to see if it was still usable, he took a metal barbecue skewer, unscrewed the top of the tube and was about to insert the skewer when he heard the screen door open. Davey called his name. In a panic, he dropped the tube and skewer in the sink, left the bags on the counter and ran towards the hallway.

That’s when he opened his eyes.

—

MacNeice knew better than most the deep disappointment of dreams. Davey White and Kate had been, for a moment, alive and well. When he woke up, both were long dead and gone. Davey had died in his teens after diving into a quarry and colliding with a submerged tractor, and Kate—four years ago, from cancer. They’d never met, but in the dream they were apparently good friends. And that didn’t strike him as strange, in the dream or now, lying in bed with his eyes open.

He sat up in bed and looked at the clock radio—5:16 a.m.

He rode the stationary bike hard for an hour in the dark, staring into the forest, waiting for the light. When it came, he stopped, showered and got ready for another day. After such dreams he did all he could to narrow his focus—door, doorknob, toilet seat, shower faucet, soap, shampoo; drawer, socks, underwear; closet, pants, shirt, tie, jacket on hanger. Avoid the mirror, and when you can’t, look only at the toothbrush, at the line of the razor, hands through the hair.
Avoid the eyes. The eyes hold only loss, regret, loneliness, fear
.

A
ZIZ WAS STANDING
silently at the whiteboard that held the photos and listed the known facts about the slasher murders. MacNeice had come and gone, to a brief press conference at which he and the Deputy Chief gave the reporters as much detail as they thought wise about the newest victim. Then, before the reporters could catch their breath, they released the photo of the young man from the hospital, describing him as a “person of interest,” as well as a photocopied screen capture of his motorcycle. They then issued a call for anyone with information about how to locate the man to please come forward. When he got back, Aziz was studying the images of the young man in the emergency ward. Vertesi and Williams were shooting occasional looks at her but basically letting her be.