The Killing Hour

CHAPTER TEN

Another day, another dollar. And already for Detective Inspector Bill Landry it’s going badly.

He didn’t sleep well. In fact, he’s woken up feeling more tired than before he went to bed. He got home last night with a racing mind that he tried to put at ease by having a cigarette, but halfway through the cigarette he ended up throwing up. He went to bed around one a.m., woke up at four, and has been awake since then, spending most of that time sitting at his kitchen table drinking coffee and staring at a calendar on the wall. Around seven he made himself some toast, but didn’t eat it. He poured a bowl of cereal and didn’t touch that either.

Around seven thirty he spent ten minutes hovering over the toilet fighting the waves of nausea the pills were bringing into his routine. Then he coughed for ten minutes, wondering what the hell the point of the pills was, too scared to cut them out of his life in case the coughing was worse. The mornings were when it was the worst. At seven forty-five smoke came from the bottom of his coffee machine, a few sparks too, and really he thought after last week’s news his appliances would be the ones to outlive him. In fact there was a moment where he considered pulling it apart while it was still plugged in-it’d be a way of beating cancer on his own terms. In the end he had to settle for drinking warm water, and when you’re stumbling through this world in a dozing stupor trying hard to wake up, trying hard to stay focused with both cancer and cough-fighting poison running through your system, water simply doesn’t cut it. Apparently slapping yourself hard doesn’t work either. He took the pills the doctor prescribed him, at one point one of them getting lodged in his throat and making him think everything might come to an end on his kitchen floor.

The morning has moved on since then. He spent a few minutes packing some clothes into a gym bag, along with some boots. He thinks he may need them later on. Right now he’s having the pleasure of getting caught in traffic. Every few minutes or so he tries, but fails, to stifle a yawn. Days like this he sometimes fantasizes about climbing out of his car and picking a direction to walk in and never looking back. He saw that in a movie once. It seemed like a good idea. The button that changes station on his radio is broken, so all he can do is either listen to the same station that he’s growing to hate, or nothing at all. He listens to it for a bit. There’s a piece on about bringing the death penalty back to New Zealand. There’s a chance it will be going to a referendum later this year-which is also an election year. The people of New Zealand are sick of the endless tide of criminals. And Feldman is just one more number added to that bunch. Listening to the radio, Landry realizes what he’s planning on doing is really what the government may be planning on doing anyway-except he’s just going to bring that date forward. That’s all.

Still craving coffee, he stops at a gas station, pulling in behind a shiny red sports car that immediately makes him feel jealous. He goes inside, but the machine there is out of order. He wonders if it’s a worldwide event. Then he wonders if it’s him that’s contaminating everything, if he has the Midas touch, if everything he comes into contact with is turning cancerous. He trades the idea of buying caffeine for purchasing a packet of cigarettes, even though the pack he split open last night is still mostly full.

When he gets to work somebody had taken his parking space. When he gets inside he’s sure the elevator isn’t going to work. He pushes the button and the doors open, but then he decides to use the stairs instead of risking getting caught between floors.

The fourth floor is in motion. Detectives are talking on phones, they’re doing paperwork, they’re following leads. The coffee machine works-thank God-but then he finds a crack in his mug. Of course he didn’t find that crack until coffee had leaked all over his pants.

“Goddamn it,” he says, fighting the temptation to throw the cup against the wall. The day has to get better, doesn’t it?

“How you feeling?” Schroder asks, coming over.

“Better,” he says.

“You still don’t look so good.”

Landry shrugs. He isn’t sure what to say to that. That he’s never going to look good again?

Schroder updates him on the case. They’re working on the theory that the two dead women knew their killer. “He killed them in their houses,” Schroder says. “The two girls have a history together, so it wasn’t random. He targeted these two women for a reason.”

“No idea on the reason?”

“Not yet. I’m going to run some stuff past Benson Barlow,” he says.

Landry nods. Benson Barlow is a psychiatrist who has helped them on and off over the last few months.

Schroder looks at his watch. “I’m meeting him in an hour. First I’m heading to the morgue. Want to tag along?”

No, he doesn’t. He wants to start looking for Charlie Feldman, and he doesn’t see how going to the morgue is going to advance that search. “Why not?”

“You sure you’re feeling okay? You look like you might pass out. I don’t want to get you to the morgue and then have you end up staying.”

“I’m fine,” he says.

They take the elevator downstairs. It doesn’t break down. They split up and take their own cars, Schroder leading the way. Landry puts the air-conditioning on full blast, directing it at his face, hoping it’ll combat the urge he has to fall asleep. He’s not sure how he’s going to make it through the day.

Christchurch Hospital is undergoing a series of renovations and parts of the parking lot are cut off from the public. There are cranes and bulldozers and men breaking the ground apart with pneumatic drills. They find parking spaces and the noise is deafening until they get inside.

Landry has the overwhelming sense of wasting time as he stands in the morgue. It’s a cold white room surrounded by metal tables with canvas sheets draped over them, and on those sheets are saws and pliers and forceps and knives and other tools he can’t identify, all of them for cutting, cutting, cutting, all of them the kind of thing killers like Charlie Feldman would have a wet dream over. He hates being here. It’s the first time he’s been in a morgue since learning death was comin’ a-knockin’. There’s every good chance he’ll be coming back in winter and those same tools will open him up and place his black organs on the same scales and into the same holding trays. He runs a finger along one of those trays. It’s cold and unforgiving, just like the cancer.

“Gentlemen,” a woman says, stepping into the morgue. It’s one of the medical examiners. Her name is Tracey, and for some reason Tracey has a last name he can never remember no matter how many times he hears it. Attractive and athletic, Tracey is a few years younger than him. She has blond hair that was black the last time he saw her. She gives them a smile and he smiles back and over the years he’s often thought she’d have made a great ex-wife.

“What have you got for us?”

“Just the obvious,” she says, and she hands each of them a folder. Inside are several photographs of the wounds and lots of paragraphs and diagrams of exactly how the two women died. At the front of the folder a half-page synopsis sums up those photos and diagrams. “Cause of death was exactly how it looked,” she says. “Massive heart trauma caused by metal spikes. Each one was driven in with quite some accuracy. There are some defensive wounds here, but most of what you see happened postmortem. It looks like the killer rammed these stakes into these two women, then continued to pound them in deeper with either a hammer or even his foot. Kathy McClory’s right breast was removed after death,” she says. “See these rough edges?” she asks, then points to the victim’s chest. “Looks like it was removed with a saw of some kind.”

“Any way to narrow that down, Doc?” Schroder asks.

Tracey shakes her head. “Too much of a mess,” she says. “Also, there are no hesitation marks. When the guy started cutting, there were no second thoughts. “My guess is a hacksaw, and as you guys know, there are thousands of them out there. Even if you brought the right one in I probably couldn’t match it to the wounds. Sorry.” She looks up at Landry. Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he says. “So they suffered?”

Tracey nods, and suddenly he remembers her last name. It’s Walter. Tracey Walter. “Yes. A lot. There are fingernail impressions in their palms. They were balling their hands into fists so tight their fingernails actually cut through the skin.”

She spends another ten minutes going over her findings. She asks if the breast has been found and Schroder tells her it hasn’t been, to which she nods and says, “Of course. Otherwise it would have been brought in already.”

When they get outside they stand in the parking lot for a minute, having to yell to be heard over the sound of construction. They agree on Schroder going to talk to Benson Barlow-it will be the start of him trying to build up a profile.

“You might as well go back and revisit the crime scenes,” Schroder says, which might help or it might not, but either way Landry has to start somewhere.