The Killing Hour

CHAPTER TWO

Detective Inspector Bill Landry is an angry man. He’s been angry for the last five days, angry at the life-changing news. Though thinking about it, it was more life ending than it was life changing. Too many cigarettes. That’s what it was. The doctor had warned him years ago. He told him it was like putting a gun to your head with a single bullet in it and pulling the trigger over and over. Eventually it was going to go off.

Five days ago he got the news that that gun would be going off within the next six months.

He’s trying hard not to think about it, but it’s always there, if not in the forefront of his thoughts, then at least lurking around the sidelines. Right now he’s standing in the bedroom of a dead woman, having just come from a different house across town that had an equally gruesome scene. It’s all he should be thinking about, but those cancer thoughts keep creeping in.

He looks at his watch, then at the red numerals on the alarm clock, then back at his watch. The two are disagreeing by two minutes. Either that, or there’s a slight rift in the bedroom and he’s two minutes into the future. He figures that would be a better superpower than the one seeming to dog the police everywhere they go-which is to be two minutes in the past. You can’t save people in the past. He watches the last number change from an eight to a nine on his watch. The woman he’s come to see has now been dead a minute longer than she should have been, and he’s one minute closer to his grave. For that matter, everybody is.

He’s struggling to stay focused. He’s hungry and tired and it’s been a long day in what is no doubt going to be a very long week. He badly wants a cigarette. Life isn’t the same unless you’re slowly ending it. He follows the shape of the dead woman’s face and locks his gaze on her milky eyes. She would agree. She would agree he needed coffee too.

There is a jingle caught in his head. Music from somewhere and he can’t figure out from where. It’s been stuck with him for the last few hours and he can’t shake it free. The kind of music you’d hear in an elevator or on a child’s toy, only he hasn’t been in any elevators today or hanging around any kids. Even if he could identify it, it wouldn’t help the music disappear. Probably he’d just get more of it stuck in there. He looks down at the woman’s hands, at her fingernails, wondering if any skin from her killer is trapped under them, wondering what she would have done differently the last time she had a manicure if she’d known how many people would be looking at them. He wonders just how much that manicure would have cost, whether she often had them, whether she was into small talk or whether she’d have held a magazine in the hand not being worked on. Life and death and the details in between all have price tags. The cost of death starts out small. Like a fifty-dollar visit to the doctor. You begin throwing good money after bad. You try to chase away the cancer or one of a hundred other diseases that riddle your body and ride it down. Sometimes it isn’t even fifty dollars. Sometimes it’s only five. Or ten. A ten-dollar investment. A knife, for example. Or a pair of garden shears. They slice through skin and flesh quicker than any disease. There are expenses no matter what savages you. New clothes to replace the bloody ones. Smaller clothes to replace the ones that no longer fit your wasting body. Booze to calm the nerves. The family of the victim shops through glossy catalogs for coffins, choosing color and craftsmanship and style, what’s in at the moment, what was so last year. The graveyard plot, prime real estate these days, adds to the bill, along with a new suit or a dress for the corpse. New clothes for the mourners. When the bad news comes from a cop rather than a doctor the expenses add up faster. One murder and the cash is flying around. Man hours. Court cases. Lawyers. News stories. People charging and making money from evil. People. . people. .

He holds a hand up to his face and pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes for a few seconds. He needs to get ahold of himself. He has to get ahold of these dark thoughts. Has to rein them in. But on the grief scale, he never made it through to acceptance. He’s stuck on anger. He doesn’t see that changing anytime soon.

The day is cooling off. It certainly needs to. The air inside the house is thick-it tastes and smells like aging fruit. He can’t turn on the air-conditioning, can’t open any windows-not allowed to do anything that will alter the temperature. The medical examiner and the forensic guys would all have fits. He moves over to the window, looks out at the slowly ebbing day and wonders if it will ever actually end. The neat backyard with its golden pebbles and expensive plants has been surrounded by yellow plastic evidence markers. With their black numbers they’re larger versions of the order disks he’s been given at pizza restaurants. He wonders if the same people make them or if they’re made to order, then that thought leads him back to an earlier one about being hungry. A pizza would be good. And a beer. And since he’s in the wishing mood, he’d like to sit on a beach somewhere and watch the sun dip into the horizon, have a few women in bikinis taking up his field of vision too.

Best he can settle for is to watch the sun as it bounces off the roof of the neighboring house. The roof is made from blue steel and the reflecting light makes the lemons on the nearby tree look purple. The people in the townhouse are standing by their windows. They’re staring at him, their eyes wide and their mouths open as they watch in awe. They’re probably thinking this is the next best thing since reality TV. Seeing them isn’t helping with the anger. He wishes he could arrest them. Wishes he could fire the guy who hasn’t got around to hanging large tarpaulins to block their view. He turns away in disgust.

The music is still stuck in his brain. He picks his way across the room, stepping carefully over and around the dried patches of blood, of which there are many, once again trying to identify where he heard that theme, and at the same time wishing he could forget it. The furniture and layout may be different, but aside from that it all looks very much the same as the crime scene he came from a little over an hour ago. Similar views, similar furniture, similar dead woman covered in blood. The room has a definite woman’s touch-two vases of flowers, dreary paintings of romantic scenes, candles on the dressing table. It’s the sort of mishmash of trinkets his own wife had lying around when she used to be his wife. His second wife was the same. The good thing about wives when they become ex-wives is they take all that crap with them. The sad thing about when they become ex-wives is when you find something under the bed or hidden in a drawer they missed packing, and it reminds you that being married was made up of good times too.

There’s a collection of makeup and hair products scattered beneath a mirror on the wall with smudges of hairspray on the glass. A hair dryer lies on the floor next to several pairs of shoes. A garbage basket full of tissues and Q-tips. A pair of slippers made to look like cartoon lion heads. A calendar showing vintage movie posters on the wall by the wardrobe. March shows a pissed-off 1933 King Kong on top of the Empire State Building, fighting off planes while holding his damsel in distress. No dates have been circled, no messages jotted down. Nothing to indicate a bad day was coming.

The medical examiner is currently tying paper bags over the dead woman’s hands and feet to protect any evidence beneath the nails. One of his kits sits nearby, containing a selection of scissors, blades, Q-tips, and needles. Small labeled vials containing specimens of hair and fibers and blood are lined up evenly inside a larger plastic tray. There’s fingerprinting powder covering different surfaces, evidence markers, plastic bags-it wasn’t this messy when he arrived. Now it’s starting to look like a whirlwind came through here. Just inside the bedroom door waiting to take the cause of that whirlwind away is a neatly folded body bag. Aside from the bedroom the house has no other signs of violence-no broken furniture, no bloodstains.

The other crime scene is the same-similar kind of house, similar neighborhood, similar amount of blood. Just two dead women and no reason why. That’s always the way.

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it,” the medical examiner says, standing up, his knees popping in the process as he moves over to stand next to Landry. His name is Sheldon. He’s in his fifties and sounds like he’s in his seventies. To Landry he seems like the kind of guy who’d yell at kids who stepped on his lawn. His dull and depressing personality could drive people to suicide-a neat trick for somebody who works with the dead.

“It does,” Landry says, knowing what’s coming.

“What the hell is wrong with people? I’ve been doing this a long time,” Sheldon says, just like Landry has heard him say on other, similar occasions, “and I can tell you this with certainty-as bad as this is, there will still be worse. It’s human nature,” he says. Both men stare at the body. Landry looks into her eyes, and then he looks down at her chest where one of her breasts has been hacked off, wondering what kind of human nature Sheldon is referring to. “A million years ago we were crawling out of the sea,” Sheldon says. “Now we have the ability to fly to the moon. Man is always trying to better himself, and killing is no different. Guys who can do this,” he says, nodding toward the dead woman, “get better and more brutal. A guy like this, well, you can tell killing these woman wasn’t enough. He wanted to put on a show. Probably wanted to put on a better show than the last guy who did something similar.”

“It’s a rat race out there,” Landry says. “Everybody wants to be better than the last person. Everybody wants to put on a show.”

“You think this was enough for him?” Sheldon asks. “Or you think he still has a point to make?”

Landry slowly nods, but doesn’t answer. He’s not nodding to say yes, it’s the nodding of a man deep in through. “I don’t know,” he says, “and I don’t want to guess.”

A forensic examiner with a hairy neck and a nervous twitch starts photographing the body, images of death being saved to a memory card. Later they’ll be put up on large screens and studied in detail. Sheldon signs off on the body and helps his assistant roll it into the body bag. Landry picks up the victim’s address book, moves to the corner of the room, and starts going through it. The names are listed alphabetically by last name. He flicks through to the F’s and reads through the names three times, looking for a specific one that isn’t there. Then he flicks through the rest of the book looking for it, getting the same result. Most of the people listed in here probably don’t even know yet what has happened. Others are crying on shoulders or into drinks, wondering why in the hell the world is such a shitty place.

Two officers start to carry the body outside, Sheldon following them. Suddenly Landry has had enough. It’s been months and months of killing. The Christchurch Carver stole all the headlines over the few years until his arrest, and he hasn’t been the only serial killer to have walked the streets of what he now thinks of as a broken city. Landry has had enough of the death. He’s sick of living two minutes in the past where he can’t do a damn thing to save people. It’s time to live in the future.

That’s the perspective his cancer has given him. In six months’ time, he won’t be able to make a lick of difference.

He puts the address book into an evidence bag then makes his way out of the room. Detective Schroder is in the hallway talking to a few other detectives. Schroder is the man leading the case. That’s what Schroder does. Last year it was Schroder who got the credit for arresting the Christchurch Carver, but it was also Schroder who got a lot of the blame for not having caught him earlier. Sometimes Landry thinks he’d like to lead a case, other times it’s the last thing he wants.

He’s going to lead this one. Only nobody else is going to know.

“You don’t look so good,” Schroder says to him.

“Something I ate.”

“You going to be okay?”

“I just need some air, that’s all,” he says, handing the evidence bag over to Schroder.

“Got anything useful?”

“Nothing,” Landry says, which isn’t quite true. In fact he actually has a whole lot of something. He has a name. And he still has those bad ideas he’s been trying to rein in.

Schroder starts to say something else, but Landry has to get outside, now. He moves quickly down the stairs and heads for the front door. He starts humming along with the music caught in his head, and it comes to him what it is when he steps outside. It’s a radio jingle, an ad for security systems. Makes sense he’d be thinking about that kind of thing. Would this woman still be dead had she heard that ad? Maybe. No broken windows. No forced entry. A security system isn’t any good if you’re opening the door to your killer.

He makes it through the front door and onto the porch. He smears some sweat away from his face with the back of his arm. Dozens of tiny insects fill the air in front of him. He swipes a hand through the little bastards and a gap appears in the middle, then the cloud reforms itself. Where death goes the insects and bugs are quick to follow. That’s the nature of nature. He tugs at his collar and rushes around to the side of the house where he squats down and gulps in the cool evening air, then it hits him, the overwhelming sensation that he’s going to be sick and there’s nothing that can hold it back. He has no time to see if anybody is watching, barely has time to even get the evidence bag out of his pocket and get it over his mouth. Last thing he can do is contaminate a crime scene. The vomiting is over within a few seconds. The bag expands and is warm. He coughs the remaining dregs into it. He looks up and sees that he’s alone. He’s thankful. He seals the bag and carries it to his car.

He still feels sick. And a little light-headed too. It’s been that way since he started taking the pills. The pills are for the coughing. The coughing is from the smoking. The pills helped for a bit, then not so much when he learned the coughing was cancer based. He still takes them-they help, but they do have side effects. He bruises easily too. And his appetite is pretty messed up.

There’s no point going back inside, not feeling like this. Best he can hope for is to not collapse and roll down the stairs. So he climbs into his car. He pulls out his phone and sends a text message to Schroder and tells him he’s not feeling well, which is true, and tells him that he’s heading home, which isn’t true.

He doesn’t mention the name he found, the name that wasn’t in the dead woman’s address book, but on a bloody pad of paper next to the body. Charlie Feldman. That pad had plenty of blood on it. It’s now inside an evidence bag inside his jacket pocket. He tries to tell himself he doesn’t know why he’s keeping that information to himself, only he actually has a pretty good idea why that may be. It’s a combination of things. Part of it is the imbalance of the world. Good people dying. Bad people getting away with things. Part of it is the anger. The anger is leading to dark thoughts. Dark thoughts that he can’t rein in. Dark thoughts and nothing to lose by seeing where they lead. Mostly it’s because he has six months to live. The cancer doesn’t care about what he does, why should he? He’s got six months to do what he can to make this city a better place. Better to make a difference in this world than spending his last six months at home, filling up his days with slow dying.

When that’s all the time you have left, he can’t see any reason not to bend the rules.