The Killing Circle

26

In the morning, I wake to find William sitting at the end of my bed.

His body shaped in the hunched, head-cocked posture of a concerned friend sitting vigil. Even his face—still densely bearded as an oven brush—could be mistaken for sympathetic, his eyes looking down on me with a still intensity. Yet these are only first impressions. And they are wrong.

William’s hands rise from the sheets. Fresh soil dropping off them in clumps. The nails ripped and weeping. Hands reaching for me.

I try to sit up. A weight on my legs prevents them from moving. The only action I’m capable of is watching.

His hands are going to kill me. They are about to do the most terrible things, not him. This is what his cracked lips seem to want to say. He is an instrument of death, but also dead himself.

I make a note of this—my first fright of the day—in my journal which I have taken to keeping by my bed at night. A chronicle of actual events and dream diary all in one. I should likely have kept separate notebooks for each, but so many passways have opened between my waking and sleeping worlds it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

Take the ballcap, for instance.

I’m plodding through my breakfast routine of coffee making and cereal pouring when I first see it. Even then, it takes a few seconds to understand what it means. A Yankees cap. Sitting on the coffee table in the living room.

I pick it up and bring it to my nose—Petra’s shampoo, still clinging to the cotton. The sliding glass doors are closed. But unlocked. And the curtains I was sure to have pulled closed the night before stand open.

I can see you.

Once I’ve closed the curtains and locked the doors, then gone round the basement and main floor to check the other doors and windows, I return to Petra’s cap, studying it as though a clue has been stitched into its fabric.

Petra wore it, now she’s thought to be dead. It was left with Angela, now she’s disappeared. And now it’s with me.

It could be you.

Ramsay already thinks (and with some good reason) that I’m involved in Petra’s death and perhaps the others from before. If he found out her ballcap was in my possession, it would be more than enough to arrest me. The first piece of hard evidence connecting me to one of the murders. The Sandman wants me to hold it in my hands and know how it feels. To know what can be done to me without ever touching me.

It’s a sin, the church says, to do the things that I do

But how can I stop until I’ve done them to you?

The Yankees cap is a promise of things to come, a show of power, a signature. But it’s also a game.

Tag. I’m it.

The next thing I know I’m being asked to leave the offices of the National Star. The lobby, to be precise. It’s as far as I get before I’m stopped trying to tiptoe by reception without a pass. When asked my intended business—Patrick Rush, here for a surprise visit to my old friend Tim Earheart—the guy behind the security desk punches my name into his terminal and a flag pops up. Quite a few flags, judging by his reddened cheeks and phone at his ear, a digit shy of completing his 911 call.

“Just tell Earheart I’m downstairs,” I tell the security guy, whose tortured face shows that while I’m in no position to be making deals, he might get into some serious trouble if he has to use his flashlight on me.

“Do as he says,” a female voice says behind me. I turn to find the Managing Editor smiling one of her death smiles. Except now she’s no longer the Managing Editor but the youngest Editor-in-Chief in the paper’s history. “Let him say hello and be on his way.”

She keeps smiling. If it were real, I’d be halfway to falling in love. But there’s absolutely no mistaking the Editor-in-Chief’s expression as warmth. As it is I’m backing away with every step she takes closer.

“Always nice to see an ex-employee going out the door,” she says.

I’m spinning out into the heat as I glimpse Tim Earheart rushing past the Editor-in-Chief. It won’t happen again on his lips.

“You can’t get fired twice, you know. Or are you trying to get me fired?” Tim says as he takes me by the arm and hauls me away from the building. Through the glass doors I can see the Editor-in-Chief still there, her hands on her slim, treadmilled hips.

I follow Tim across Front Street to stand on the narrow edge of grass between the pavement and the fence that keeps pedestrians from the tracks leading in and out of Union station below.

“I’m working,” Tim says. “We’re not all novelists you know.”

“I’ll make this short.”

“The shorter the better.”

“Can you get access to government agency databases?”

“Depends which one.”

“Children’s Aid. Foster care. Whoever does permanent guardianships.”

He puts a cigarette in his mouth but makes no move to light it. “Who’s asking?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Someone you know?”

“I know her. Not well, but I know her.”

“A kid?”

“She’s grown up now.”

“So why not give her a call?”

“I don’t know where she is.”

Tim Earheart reads me closely for the first time, and I sense that what I say next will decide how the rest of this exchange is going to go. I want Tim involved, but not involved.

“Are you going to light that thing?”

He pulls the unlit cigarette out of his lips and flicks it over the fence. “What’s her name?”

“Angela Whitmore. But that might only be her adoptive parents’ surname. Or probably not. I mean, that’s the name I know her by, but it may not be real.”

“Tracking down an adoption without the kid’s name—it’s not going to happen.”

“I don’t think it was a voluntary adoption.”

“How’s that?”

“She was taken from her natural parents. State intervention. I don’t know the specifics. One of those situations where they had to.”

“That’s something.”

I tell him whatever other details I have that might be of help, which aren’t all that many. Angela’s approximate age (late twenties to early thirties), job experience (legal secretary), possible educational background (liberal arts most likely). I end up leaving out more than I give him: her fictional journal and my thieving of its essential contents, our night together and the discovery of missing toes. Maybe later, I tell myself. Maybe, if this all turns out well, I’ll fill him in on the whole thing.

“One question,” Tim says as I shake his hand in thanks and check both ways along Front Street for a taxi.

“You want to know why I need to find this out.”

“No. I want to know what’s in it for me.”

“Nothing. Aside from a story.”

“A newspaper kind of story, or a funny-thinghappened-the-other-day kind of story?”

“Just a girl-trouble kind of story,” I tell him, with an embarrassed shake of the head. A gesture I know Tim Earheart will understand without going into the details.

Below us, another train pumps commuters and shoppers and ballgame ticketholders into the city. Tim and I look down and try to pick out individual faces in the windows. But they’re a little too far away, moving a little too fast, to see anything but a long row of silhouettes.

“I better get back,” Tim says, starting across Front Street.

“Me too,” I say in reply, and though the question occurs to both of us—Back to what?—he’s considerate enough to keep it to himself.

The first email on the Comment board at www.patrick.rush.com is from therealsandman.

Hope you liked the gift.

To cheer things up, Detective Ramsay rings with the news that he’s discovered Evelyn has not been seen by family or friends for over four years.

“Starting to add up to a lot of missing people from that group of yours,” he says. “Does that concern you?”

Is it illegal to hang up on a homicide investigator when he’s addressing you directly? If so, Ramsay can add it to the list of charges he’s tallying against me.

The phone rings again.

“This is harassment.”

“Are you not taking your pills again?”

“Tim. Thought it was someone else.”

“More girl trouble?”

“That would be nice. But no.”

“Your heart belongs to Angela Whitmore. Is that it?”

In the background, the sound of shuffled papers.

“You’ve found her,” I say.

“Not the person. But an interesting chunk of background. For one thing, turns out you were right about Children’s Aid taking her from her birth parents. ’Acute neglect’ is how the file puts it. Malnutrition, lack of basic hygiene. ’Indications of physical and emotional abuse.’ Something beyond your standard junkie-mom scenario.”

“The mother was an addict?”

“Lots of court-ordered rehab. Surprise, surprise: none of it worked.”

“You got a name?”

“Mom is Michelle Carruthers. Which makes Whitmore either an assumed name, or maybe the name of her eventual adoptive parents.”

“What about Dad?”

“No father on the scene at all, as far as the files show.”

“And I’m guessing Michelle Carruthers is six feet under.”

“Not as of a year ago. That was when she made an application to have Angela’s adoptive parents’ identities disclosed to her. They denied her, naturally.”

“No kidding.”

“Twenty-five years later and she wakes up in a trailer park on Lake Huron and goes, ’Hey, where’d my kid go?’”

“Does your file say where Angela ended up?”

“The adoptive parents’ records are kept separate from the ones I could get my hands on. They’re very particular about it.”

“So you don’t know.”

“I still have a job, Patrick.”

“Sorry.”

“You want me to stay on this? Who knows, if I grease a few more wheels—”

“No, no. This is all I was really curious about anyway. Thanks.”

“Listen, I don’t usually put my nose into friends’ personal stuff, but, given her pedigree, I’d say this Angela of yours might not be an ideal reintroduction to romance.”

“Guess I’ve never known what’s good for me.”

“Tamara was good for you.”

“Yes, she was,” I say, the mention of my wife’s name forcing something up my throat I don’t want him to hear. “I’ll let you go now, Tim. And thanks again.”

I hang up. But before I pour myself a bourbon in a coffee mug (the glasses all look too small), before I even begin to digest the news of Angela’s fatherless past, it strikes me that if Tim Earheart is as worried about me as he sounds, I’m in worse shape than I thought.

Of course I look up Michelle Carruthers. Of course I find her after a few Google searches and process-of-elimination calls—a unit address in Hilly Haven, a “mobile home estate” on Lake Huron. And of course I make the drive to see her the same day without an idea as to what I want from her, or how it could help even if I did.

Hilly Haven isn’t hilly, and what the few spindly poplars and collapsed snow fence around its perimeter might offer haven from would be hard to guess. The whole place has the appearance of an uncorrected accident: a couple dozen mobile homes arranged in rows, some sidled close, others aloof in weedy double lots, all with their backsides facing the lake.

Michelle Carruthers’ place is the smallest. A camper trailer of the kind one used to see hitched to station wagons thirty years ago. Now, knocking on its side door and hearing the muffled greeting within (“Who the fuck?”), I wonder if Angela’s mother can be convinced to step outside. It doesn’t seem possible for there to be enough room for both of us inside.

When the door opens, however, I see that the odds of the woman hunched in its frame coming outside are slight. Her papery skin. An oxygen mask attached to her face, a tank on wheels by her side.

“Sorry to disturb you. My name is Patrick Rush,” I say, putting out my hand, which her cold fingers weigh more than shake. “I’m looking for Angela.”

“Angela?”

“Your daughter, ma’am.”

“I know who she goddamn is.”

“I was just—”

“Are you her husband or something? She run away on you?”

“I’m a friend. I think she may be in trouble. That’s why I’m here. If I can find her, there’s a chance I can help her.”

After what may be a full minute’s consideration, she pushes the trailer door open wide. Pulls the oxygen mask off and lets it necklace her throat.

“You might as well come in out of the sun,” she says.

But it’s hotter inside than out. And no larger than I’d feared. A stand-up kitchen smelling of canned spaghetti. A living room crowded by a giant TV in one corner and old combination radiorecord player in the other. And at the rear, behind a half-drawn curtain, the tousled bunk where she sleeps. The only ventilation a rotating fan sitting atop a stack of LPs, though with all the windows closed, the best it can do is whisper hot air in my face.

“Have a seat,” she says, collapsing into her recliner and leaving me to crouch on to a folding chair that, even pushed against the wall, forces my knees to graze hers.

“What I’m interested in learning is any background information that might—”

“Hold on. Just hold on,” she says, putting her hands behind her head, a manoeuvre which offers me an unfortunate view of her armpits. “How’d you find me?”

“I’m a reporter. Was a reporter. We have access to information others don’t have.”

“They fire you, or you quit?”

“Pardon me?”

“You said you was a reporter. That’s the past tense, am I right?”

“They fired me. But it was for the best.”

“It’s all for the best.”

“I understand that Angela was put into the foster system when she was a child,” I continue.

“You mean was she taken from me? Yes.”

“That must have been difficult.”

“I can hardly remember it. My life was…busy then.”

“Nevertheless, I’m aware that of late you have made some efforts to locate her.”

She shows her teeth. A stretching of lips that appears more like the response to a dentist’s command than a smile.

“I’m not as old as I look,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve got much time left. So, you start looking back, and thinking, ’Well, nothing I can do about that shit now.’”

“And did you manage to contact her?”

“Nah. I’m out of the picture. Which I get, you know?”

She sits forward enough that her face slides into the light of the reading lamp behind her. All premature lines and poison spots.

“What was she like?” I say. “When she was young?”

Her hand crawls up her chest to grip the oxygen mask hanging there. “She was innocent.”

“Aren’t all children?”

“That’s what I’m saying. She was just like any other child.”

“That’s the past tense.”

She fits the mask to her face and takes a breath. The mist against the plastic obscures all her features but her eyes. And they blink at me, clouding over.

“She suffered,” she says.

“How?”

“Loneliness. She was left alone. I sure as hell weren’t in any shape to be taking care of her.”

“She liked to read.”

“She liked to write. Diaries. Piles and piles of stuff.”

“What were they about?”

“How do I know? I was just glad she had something.”

She pulls the oxygen mask from her face and I can see that she won’t hold up much longer. Just sitting and remembering draws fresh sweat to her cheeks.

“Angela’s father,” I say, glancing at the door.

“I haven’t spoken to that sonofabitch in twentyseven years.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Look in the penitentiaries. Least that’s where I hope he is.”

“What did he do?”

“What didn’t he do?”

“Was he violent?”

“Something he couldn’t control, then didn’t want to control. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Tell me.”

“What he done…what he…with his own—” she says, coughing for air it will take the rest of the day to catch. “It’s a thing I don’t even want to talk about.”

“It’s important.”

“How could anything to do with that man ever be important?”

“It might help me find your daughter.”

She looks up at me and I can see that there’s no strength left in her. But she’s still a mother. Even in her, even now, there’s the useless wish for everything to have been different.

“Killing,” she says, teeth clenched so hard I can hear the chalky scrape of bone against bone. “Little children. Girls. He killed little girls.”

Before I left Michelle Carruthers’ trailer and stumbled, sun blind, to my Toyota, she had given me Angela’s father’s name. Raymond Mull. Which rang a bell the moment she said it, though specifically from where, and specifically for what, it took until I was able to get back to Toronto and start working my computer in the Crypt to discover.

Angela’s mother was right. Raymond Mull was a killer of little girls. He was charged for the murders of two of them, in fact, a pair of thirteenyearolds who went missing almost two decades ago. Roughly the same age that Angela, if she is thirty today, would have been then.

What follows from this? Nothing, perhaps. Or possibly everything.

If Angela was a thirteen-year-old contemporary of the murdered girls, it supports the interpretation (along with her missing toes) that she actually was the narrator of her fictionalized journal. Further, given Raymond Mull’s relationship to her, it’s probably true that he was the direct inspiration for the Sandman. In her story, she even had Jacob, her foster parent, suspect as much when he stated he believed it was the girl’s father who was selecting victims. In the real world, odds are that Raymond Mull was the original terrible man who did terrible things.

What I discover next, however, suggests I wasn’t the first member of the Kensington Circle to figure this much out.

A search on the media database I still have a password for left over from my National Star days finds dozens of stories on Raymond Mull’s trial. There’s photos of him too: bearded, eyes set too close together, but otherwise his face absent of expression. He doesn’t look like Angela, but they share this. A half-thereness.

Judging from the initial reports covering Raymond Mull’s trial, his conviction was viewed as a foregone conclusion. The Crown’s evidence included work tools—saws, drills, hunting blades—found in his motel room. And he was identified by witnesses as being in the area over the preceding weeks, following students home from school, standing outside the convenience store where kids stopped for candy. His long list of previous convictions said little of worth about his character.

And yet none of this could prevent the case ending in an acquittal. The tools could render no blood samples from which to make positive DNA matches with the victims. The police argued this was only because Mull had been careful in cleaning them, and that even without blood, there was enough to connect him to the crimes. On this, the court disagreed. Without calling a single witness, the defence filed a motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds that the Crown failed in making a prima facie case. All that was left to the prosecution was to nail Mull for previous parole violations, which they did. His sentence was nine months.

Which means that, barring no other subsequent incarceration over the last eighteen years, Raymond Mull is a free man.

But what strikes me even more than this is the location where the murders took place. Whitley, Ontario. The same place where Conrad White and Evelyn drove their car off the highway.

It could just be coincidence. But I don’t believe that it was. Evelyn and Conrad White’s shared curiosity over Angela’s story had led them to Raymond Mull, to Whitley. That’s what they had been up to all the time I’d come to assume them to be having a May-December, teacher-student affair. They were searching.

If I’m right in this, the possibility that Conrad and Evelyn’s accident was in fact accidental becomes considerably harder to accept. They drove into a cliff wall. But what made them turn? At that speed, what were they driving from? Even the police found the crash “puzzling”. One solution would be if it was a double murder. If their killer was Raymond Mull.

Angela’s father. The original Sandman.