The Arx (8 page)

She leaned forward. “As it stands, you’re the only one who cares enough and has the skills to find out what really happened. The way your investigation is shaping up I think you could use my help.”

She looked in his eyes. “I’ll help you with the case – the case that isn’t a case – on one condition.”

Frank took a drag on his cigarette. “What’s that?”

“That you accept that you need help – that you’re open-minded about the whole therapy thing. I can recommend some excellent therapists. You can take your pick.”

He shook his head. “I told you – I’ve had it with shrinks.”

“Come on, Frank.”

He said nothing.

“If you’re not willing to see an actual psychiatrist,” she said, “maybe I can help you. We can work on your issues on the side, informally, a little at a time. I won’t hound you. I won’t try to push you anywhere you don’t want to go or any faster than you want to get there.”

Frank stared into his coffee cup.

She put a hand on his sleeve. “Somehow, someday, you’re going to have to come to terms with what happened.”

Finally he nodded.

“One other thing,” she said. “If I tell you to slow down, if I think the case is getting to be too much, you’ll do as I say and take a break. Deal?”

Frank hesitated and finally said, “Deal.”

They shook hands.

She smiled. “Now where do we go from here?”

A Strange Partnership

“Remember our agreement,” Rebecca said.

Frank cringed. “I got a feeling I’m never going to forget it.”

They sat across from each other at the desk in her office. It was after hours, and Judy had gone home. The daylight was beginning to fade outside. Frank sat studying his hands, which rested on the wooden desktop. Rebecca sat with a notebook in her lap.

Frank reached out for a paper clip from the holder in front of him, then checked himself. Instead he lifted his head and glanced around the office, wishing he could be anywhere but there. His eyes came to rest on the opera posters on her wall. One in the farthest corner depicted a knight in armour with a winged helmet and a sword, standing solemnly in a boat being towed by a swan.

“Who’s that guy?” he asked, nodding at the poster.

She turned to look behind her. “That guy? That’s Lohengrin. It’s a Wagner opera.”

“He looks pretty creepy.”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “there’s a production of it at the Queen E Theatre sometime next month. You should go,” she smiled, “broaden your horizons.”

He grunted at the desktop.

She studied the image. “Actually, now that you mention it, he’s got a few parallels with you.”

Frank made a face. “How do you figure?”

She tilted her head toward the poster. “In the opera, that guy, Lohengrin, appears after a princess prays for a hero to rescue her from an evil king.”

“Is that so,” Frank laughed. “So I’m your knight in shining armour?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “I’m no princess. But you
are
battling your own personal demons to help me clear my sister’s name. Anyway there’s more. Lohengrin agrees to help the princess, but in return she has to promise not to ask about his past.”

Frank sneered and shook his head. “The shrinks have even taken over opera.”

“Yes,” she laughed, opening her notebook, “and your tactic of luring me into talking about opera to get out of a session is clever, but it won’t work.”

She flipped through the notebook and reviewed the last few pages.

“You were talking about a case you were assigned,” she said, looking up, “tracking a serial killer. If you feel like it’s getting to be too much, just say so and we can pull back, or even call it quits. Okay?”

Frank nodded. He hesitated for a long time. Rebecca was opening her mouth to say something when he finally spoke.

“The guy’s name was Eugene Mastico,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “He’d already racked up three victims before I ever saw the case. It took a while for them to figure out that the killings were connected. The victims were all young women. In the beginning Mastico wasn’t contacting anybody. I think he was waiting for the cops to figure it out. He had a long wait.”

Frank slowly rubbed his hands together. “He was a detective’s worst nightmare: narcissistic, sadistic, brilliant at manipulating the press. He sent us messages: by e-mail, phone, snail-mail; I think once he even sent us a fax.

“Of course we’d try to trace them, but they’d be redirected from some anonymous server, or sent from an Internet café and nobody remembered who was there, or from a pay-phone and nobody saw who made the call. They all had the same theme: ‘I’m going to keep on killing and you can’t stop me’.”

Frank shifted in his chair.

“Are you okay?” Rebecca said.

“Fine.”

“You’re doing great so far, keep going,” she smiled supportively.

Frank moved his hands to the arms of the chair.

“The papers mentioned a couple of times that I was leading the investigation. Mastico homed in on that and started targeting me personally. It was the same crap we’d gotten before, but now directed at me. I guess he’d researched my background. One note went on about my university degree and my graduation with honours from the Police Academy – ‘and you still can’t keep up with poor little old me!’ he said.”

“How did you feel about all this?” Rebecca asked.

Frank scowled and opened his mouth to say something.

“Don’t forget our deal,” she said.

“How can I forget when you keep reminding me?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess part of me loved it – loved being in charge and matching wits with the guy. I guess a part of me even liked being in the limelight – being mentioned in the papers. The novelty of that wore off pretty fast.

“It was like a chess game. Trouble was, it was a game where the stakes were other people’s lives – and so far Mastico was wiping the floor with me.”

Frank gripped the arms of the chair.

“I felt responsible every time they found a new victim. Hell, I
was
responsible. Mastico loved to remind me, too. He’d send us e-mails: ‘Another poor little innocent angel dead – all because Langer doesn’t measure up!’”

“I actually remember the case,” Rebecca said, sitting up straight. “There was a lot of public pressure…”

“Are you kidding?” Frank sneered. “Mastico loved to talk to the press. He loved the attention. Always the same theme – all these women were dying because the cops in general, and me in particular, were too stupid to catch him. He started tipping the press after a kill, so they’d be at the scene before us. Made us look like morons.”

Frank’s fingers started massaging the arms of the chair. “Part of me was scared shitless. I kept picturing all these new victims – all dead because of my incompetence. Part of me started believing what Mastico, and some of the press, were saying. Part of me thought maybe I wasn’t up to the job, maybe somebody else should be doing it – somebody who could catch the guy. Randall and I spent a lot of sleepless nights over it.”

“Randall?”

Frank’s muscles tightened. His breath caught in his throat.

“Are you okay?” Rebecca said.

Frank didn’t speak for several seconds. His breathing was laboured. Finally he nodded.

“Kid named Jeff Randall,” he said. “Just out of the academy. He was my partner. I guess I’d gotten a bit of a reputation. He said working with me was like a dream come true."

“How did you react to that?”

Frank’s breathing got heavier. “You mean did it give me a swelled head?” He could feel the beads of sweat forming on his forehead. “Well, yeah, I guess it did.” His knuckles whitened as his fingers dug into the arms of the chair. “Randall came along just before the Mastico case landed on my desk, so it was basically the first one he ever worked on. He was smart, dedicated…”

“Frank, we can stop if you don’t feel up to it.”

Frank ignored her and stared at a building outside the window. “He’d done a lot of criminal behaviour stuff at the academy, so he made himself pretty indispensable. He’d just gotten married. They were trying for their first…”

“That was when…” he started to say. The tips of his fingers gripped the leather arms of his chair like talons, making deep impressions. He started to tremble. The light in the room faded and the walls closed in around him. He shut his eyes.

“Frank,” he heard a voice.

“Frank,” the voice repeated. He opened his eyes. Rebecca was staring at him.

“That’s enough for now,” she said. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” he said, still shaking. “A little stressed out.”

He rose unsteadily, walked away and splashed some water on his face in the bathroom, then returned.

“Go home and get some rest, Frank,” Rebecca said. “You look beat.”

As they walked out of her office door, she paused. “If you’re feeling up to it later, why don’t you let me reward you for your effort. You can take me out to dinner.”

“
My
reward is taking
you
out to dinner?”

“You sound disappointed.”

Frank smiled. “No, come to think of it that’s a great idea.”

“By the way,” he said as they left the building, “you ever had your office swept for bugs?”

“Of course not, why?”

“You should. I know some people. I’ll give you the number.”

“I can see you’ve got expensive tastes,” Rebecca said as they strolled down Robson Street heading for the ‘Japadog’ food truck. The sidewalk was crowded with people getting late off work, or early for evening shopping. The night was warm, and the lights of the shops and cafes spilled out onto the street.

Frank smiled. “Try the ‘Terimayo’ – teriyaki sauce, mayo, and seaweed. That’s what I’m having.”

She screwed up her nose.

They got their dogs and headed for the Art Gallery.

“You know, this isn’t half bad,” Rebecca said, taking another bite of her Terimayo.

They reached the Gallery, and sat down on the broad curving staircase opening onto Robson Square.

Frank hauled a can of Canada Dry out of one jacket pocket, two plastic cups out of the other, and poured them each a drink. He held out his plastic cup, and she ‘clinked’ hers against it.

“Tell me about your wife,” she said.

He studied her in the dim light. He’d never been attracted to intelligent women, especially assertive ones, as Rebecca definitely was. He was surprised at the way his pulse quickened when he was near her.

“Would you call this a date?” he asked.

She looked up, startled. “What? I don’t know. There’s no candlelight or gypsy violins. You’re a man, I’m a woman. We’re having dinner.” She held up the remains of her Japadog. “I guess I’d have to call that a date. Anyway, you haven’t answered my question.”

“Sheila?” he smiled. “It’s a funny thing…Sheila was everything I always thought I wanted in a woman – beautiful, submissive, not overly bright…”

Rebecca rolled her eyes.

“I know, I know. I wasn’t exactly a poster boy for women’s lib. I like to think I’ve matured since then.”

“I hope so.”

“Anyway I guess in a way it’s kind of poetic justice. I think she had the same idea about me. I was the ultimate macho cop who could leap tall buildings in a single bound. She couldn’t handle the emotional problems and mood-swings I went through after the breakdown. She made sort of a half-hearted attempt to understand, but in the end it was too much for her.”

“That must have been tough.”

“Yeah, with everything else. It was just one more straw, like they say. Fact is, her leaving was the thing that bothered me the least.”

“So what bothered you the most?”

He swished the ginger ale around in his cup. “The most? Not being a cop anymore. It’s who I was. I couldn’t separate myself from it. The first few months I felt like nobody. Like I didn’t exist.”

“And now?”

“At first all I could think about was getting back there – getting my old job back, maybe even taking over the Lead Detective spot. After a while I started thinking: maybe it’s not healthy to make your job your life. Being a cop’s not like any other job, but it’s still a job. Part of me’s glad I got the chance to think about who I was outside the force.”

A scraping sound of metal against metal across the square made them both turn and look. A kid on a skateboard was practicing jumps onto a metal handrail.

She turned back to him. “What made you want to be a cop in the first place?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was there some sort of ‘ah-ha’ moment when you realized that was the career for you?”

He shrugged. “I never really thought about it – it was just always what I was going to be. My dad was a cop – not a detective, just a beat cop. Everybody always assumed I’d be one too.”