The K Handshape (11 page)

He nodded. “Indeed, I am. The worst thing at the moment is sitting around in a state of helplessness. The more I feel as if we are making progress the easier it is.”

I removed the manila envelope from the plastic bag. “I have an extra pair of sterile gloves if you need them.”

Before we could get started, his phone rang. He checked the call display.

“It’s Katherine.” He picked up the receiver. “Hello. Yes … Yes…” he looked over at me. “She’s sitting here in front of me. I’ll put the phone on speaker.”

He put the receiver on the table and Katherine’s voice came through.

“I wanted to let you know right away that the coroner has done an autopsy. It’s Dr. Machamer, bless her speedy little socks. I’m going to have Janice send her some chocolates. She gave us top priority.” I could hear breathlessness in Katherine’s voice and it was not particularly like her to natter on. “Are you all right with me reading this out to you, Leo?”

“Of course I am.” His voice was impatient. “Please stop treating me as if I might have hysterics at any moment.”

I could tell by the short silence how much Katherine was struggling to cut him some slack. She continued. “There was no water in the lungs. Death was from strangulation. The scarf around her neck broke her hyoid bone. She was dead when she was put in the water.” We heard Katherine shuffling papers. Leo jumped in.

“What else? There’s something else, isn’t there? Was she sexually assaulted?”

“No! Nothing like that. Dr Machamer is certain there wasn’t any molestation … but she did determine that Deidre was pregnant.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Leo had gone very still. Finally he said, “I see. How far advanced was the pregnancy?”

“Very recent apparently. It’s quite possible Deidre might not have even known.”

“I see,” Leo repeated. “That could be a pivotal point, given her previous history.”

“That’s true. On the other hand, some women do know the moment they’ve conceived…” Katherine’s voice tailed off and I was struck once more by how little I really knew about her. I might be going on how private and close to his chest Leo was but all any of us knew about Katherine was that she was single, a workaholic, and lived with an elderly mother in some tony section of town. Her comment, even coming disembodied over the speaker phone, had sounded quite personal.

“I’ve heard that claim.” Leo didn’t add, “and it’s a pile of crap,” but he didn’t need to. It was obvious what he felt.

“Well, that’s pretty much it,” said Katherine. “Ed said they’re getting a subpoena to study the security tape at the casino and it would be good if you watched it too, Leo. You might recognize somebody.”

“Not necessarily. Better if it were one of Deidre’s friends. I keep telling you, I know almost nothing about her current life.”

“We might have trouble getting permission for civilians to look at that particular tape but let’s take it a step at a time. Ed said he’ll
have it by tomorrow at the latest.”

“I presume they’re doing house-to-house?”

“That’s all underway. They’re starting in the area around the park.”

“I’d better go now,” said Katherine. “Can you tell Chris to pick up the phone for a minute?”

Leo handed the receiver to me and switched off the speaker phone. He walked over to the window and stood, arms folded around himself, looking out at the lake.

“Chris?”

“I’m here, Katherine.”

“Are we off speaker phone?”

“Yes.”

“How is he doing? He sounds completely on the verge.”

“Not quite but close.”

“Look, are you all right with sticking with him? I think he needs somebody with him right now.”

“Will do.”

“Keep me posted.”

We hung up. I looked over at Leo, sunk into himself staring out onto the cold waters that had so reluctantly yielded up his daughter. He realized I had finished my conversation with Katherine and he turned, walked back to the sofa, and sat down, sighing like an old man.

“If she was, quote, recently pregnant, unquote, when would she have conceived?”

“Around the end of September.”

“Did you ask her friends if she had a boyfriend?”

“I did, and according to them, she wasn’t going with anybody.”

“Were they lying?”

“I don’t think so. I had the impression they were very protective of Deidre and might have closed ranks, but that could have been because they haven’t had a chance to absorb what happened. Besides, Nora Cochrane says the same thing.”

“Deidre refused to say how she was impregnated with Joy. God knows, she might have gone on the Internet. ‘Wanted: a male to donate his sperm. Anybody with a congenital defect that will be sure to be passed on is preferred. Can be deaf, blind,
crippled, mentally retarded, doesn’t matter, because God knows, those groups have been discriminated against for decades.’” He slammed his fist on the table, rattling the coffee mugs. “‘And we all know that we must make a statement to the world even if it is the innocent who suffer.’”

I put my hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Leo.”

He patted my hand, took a deep breath, and got to his feet.

“Why don’t I make us some lunch?”

I wasn’t actually hungry but he clearly wanted something to do. He strode off to the galley kitchen, leaving me feeling as if I were bobbing in the wake of a powerboat.

While he was slamming around with plates and sorting through his pots and pans, I laid out the emails and letters on the dining room table, arranging them by order of date. Then I took out my notebook and began to jot down some of my observations. Leo came back carrying two plates with a sandwich on each.

“I thought I had a can of soup but I don’t.” He grimaced at me. “I’m a bachelor, what can I say? My lady love lives in the Big Smoke so I don’t bother to cook for myself. I eat out or order in.”

It was news to me that he even had a lady love, and frankly, I felt a twinge of relief.
She
could take care of him.

He put the plates on the cube table. Even from where I sat, I could see that the edges of the bread were curling up. A touch on the dry side.

“It’s tuna, no mayonnaise, I’m out. Is that all right?”

“Sure.”

He picked up his sandwich, took a bite, and put it back on the plate. “Can’t eat just yet. I’ll save it for later.”

Out of politeness I began to nibble on my sandwich.

“You have a guy over the pond, don’t you, Chris?”

I nodded, speech being a little difficult at the moment as the bread was sticking to the roof of my mouth. I took a swallow of the weak coffee to wash it down.

“Long-distance relationships are hard, aren’t they? I wish Caroline would move here but she’s committed to her job. She also has a teenage son who she feels needs her to stay.”

“At least Toronto is only an hour or so away. Gill, the man I’m seeing, lives in the Hebrides.”

“Toronto? I didn’t mean Toronto. Caroline lives in New York. We met on a conference this spring. She’s a psychologist. No, I could handle Toronto, but we only get to see each other every couple of months.”

“Have you told her what has happened?”

“Not yet. She’ll want to come up here and be with me, and to tell the truth, I’d prefer to be alone for a while. I’ll call her in a couple of days.”

It wasn’t up to me to give him a lecture about maintaining good relationships but I knew how I’d feel if Gill took a few days to tell me about the most important event in his life. I wouldn’t like it one bit.

“Besides,” he continued. “Loretta, my ex, my second ex, should be here tomorrow and she’ll be enough to deal with. It’s only decent if I offer her to stay here. I have three bedrooms.”

“Right.” I could see how a new girlfriend and an ex-wife under the same roof might be a little tricky.

He leaned back against the sofa. He looked exhausted.

“We always tell the families that death was instantaneous, don’t we? Unless they insist on the truth, which is usually much uglier. I’ve often wondered why they don’t press us for more details. Now I know. My mind keeps sticking on her last moments. How afraid she must have been. You don’t strangle somebody who’s young and healthy in a few moments. She would have struggled against it, feeling consciousness slip away, she would have been wondering if this was it. If this was in fact the end of her life.”

Abruptly, he got to his feet, walked over to a cabinet and picked up a framed picture. He brought it over to me and held it out. A younger Leo was standing to the side of a fair-haired woman, attractive, smartly dressed. She was holding a baby in her arms. They were both smiling down on the child, their faces full of love.

“Deidre was only about three or four weeks old when we had the picture taken. Would you believe we didn’t know she was deaf? How could we? Her eyes weren’t focussing yet but she’d do the usual things babies do at that age. Cry, burp, fill her diapers… Loretta thought I’d be squeamish changing diapers but I wasn’t. I enjoyed making her comfortable. I liked getting her to sleep.”

“When did you learn she couldn’t hear?”

“We began to suspect something was wrong when she turned two months. She didn’t seem to follow sounds. We tried holding one of her rattles out of sight and shaking and she didn’t turn her head. We took her right away to a specialist at Toronto Sick Kids and the tests showed she was profoundly deaf.”

He took the picture from me and returned it to the shelf. “Deidre was a good mother. At least as far as I know she was. She was certainly devoted, which as we both know isn’t necessarily the same thing… Her last thoughts would probably have been about her daughter. Imagining those final moments is almost unbearable, and I can also feel in myself an overwhelming desire to find her killer and make him feel exactly the same thing. I’d like to press the life out of him slowly, so that he knows what it’s like. Then I’d revive him and then do it again… And again.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We finished our sandwiches in silence. Or rather, I should say, I half-finished my sandwich, and Leo took one bite of his and put it back on the plate.

“Are you ready to look at the letters?” I asked.

He nodded. “How many altogether?”

“Twenty-six responses all told: fifteen email printouts, eleven letters.”

“Let’s look at the emails first. They’re not going to yield up any physical evidence but the letters might.”

We moved over to the table.

All the emails had been sent within the first week after the news broke in the media in April. Four were supportive, “good for you” sort of messages, and all of those senders identified themselves as part of the Deaf Culture. There was a sweet one from a woman who said she knew how difficult it must have been for Deidre when she discovered her child was deaf, she herself was hard of hearing now, and she wished her well. She seemed to have completely missed the point that Deidre had engineered the child’s deafness. The remaining ten responses all expressed disapproval ranging from relatively mild to strongly worded anger and disgust at what she had done. Half of those had come from women and three-quarters claimed they were writing from Christian convictions. Two were foul and used explicit sexual language but neither of these used their names.

“We can get Ray to follow up on those email addresses,” I said.

Leo was looking more and more haggard. “Why didn’t she tell me this was happening? We could have put blocks on her computer.”

“That would have been difficult. They were all going to the work address.”

“Did her supervisor know about this?”

“I’m not sure. She knew that Deidre had caused quite a stir, as she put it, and she did say there were a few phone calls, but Deidre’s friend Jessica works the reception desk so she could have fielded things for her. She said she wanted Deidre to get rid of the letters but she refused.”

I could see Leo’s jaw clench. “Why would she wallow in shit like that?”

I had no answer to that and it wasn’t really a question.

“Ready for the letters?”

“I suppose so.”

We both put on the sterile gloves and I removed the letters from the plastic bag. There were eleven altogether, and according to the dates, as with the emails, five of them were written soon after the news broke. All had been mailed locally.

“These five I put together because they were sent within a week of the news story.” Leo nodded. He knew what I was getting at. Typically people respond to the news quickly or the impulse fades. “The remaining six were mailed at regular intervals of a month apart, the most recent being October 11. I’d say they are all from the same person who also sent one in that first week. Whoever wrote them is persistent and that as we know can indicate obsession.”

“Let’s look at the first batch.” He examined the envelopes. “All of them were mailed to the OHHA.”

We went on.

Two actually had letterhead and full signatures; both expressed disapproval but were quite polite in tone. A third was supportive. “Go stick it to them, Dee,” signed Mags on pretty beige paper with flowers along the edge.

“Anybody you know?” I asked Leo.

“No.”

Of the remaining two in this initial bunch, one was typed with no signature, short and to the point.
WHY?
The last one was
handwritten and had the c-word repeated in clumsy letters across the page.

“Obscene but typically unimaginative, wouldn’t you say?” remarked Leo.

People in the news who were in any way controversial received this kind of thing all the time. They might be boring and unimaginative to us, but to the recipient, they were often disturbing. A psychic spit in the face.

Leo put this pile to one side. “So let’s have a study of our obsessive.”

I’d arranged the letters with the earlier one on the top. It was handwritten, no signature. The lettering was in block capitals, the paper, yellow lined notepaper. The post office stamp revealed it had been mailed three days after Deidre had appeared on television.

“Hold on.”

Leo went back to the kitchen and returned with a calendar.

“The first one was mailed on April 12, which was a Monday, three days after the television interview, which was on a Friday, and six days after the newspaper article, which was Tuesday, April 6.”