The Laughterhouse

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Schroder calls me as I walk down the path to my car. He tells me they still don’t have Caleb Cole in custody. I wasn’t really expecting that he would. He says there is still no sign of Ariel Chancellor. That doesn’t surprise me either. He doesn’t tell me anything that I didn’t know before leaving the station earlier.

“Just the same bullshit psychics calling us wanting their fifteen minutes. Have you learned anything new?” he asks. He sounds desperate, but not desperate enough to have given those psychics a call back. A day ago I was just a guy giving a drunk detective a lift to a crime scene. Today he’s hoping I have some answers.

“I’ve learned dog bites hurt like a bitch,” I tell him, then update him on the letters. “Hopefully they’ll give up something. I’ll be back soon,” I tell him, and climb into my car.

I don’t bother going through the letters I didn’t get to when I sat on Chancellor’s doorstep earlier. I put them all down, except for the one Harvey gave me in the end. I open the envelope and slide it out, hoping there’ll be something in it that will help end this madness.

Dear Ariel,

I know it’s been a while since I last wrote to you, and I know what you must think of me. I just want to start out by saying I’m sorry. I’ve written you some pretty nasty letters over the years, but I’m okay now. I’ve dealt with things and can see none of it was your fault. It never was, and I genuinely feel sick at ever blaming you when the blame is with others. I wish you all the best in your future. I ask that you remember Jessica and honor her memory by being the best person you can be. I see you as a daughter, maybe as a replacement daughter, I don’t know, but I do love you and do want all the best for you.

Jail is tough. I hate it here. Does it make me regret what I did? No, of course not. I still have seven years to go in here, but there are girls out there now who are sixteen or seventeen or eighteen years old who would have been dead if I hadn’t taken care of James Whitby. It’s possible you are one of those girls. Whitby was obsessed with you, and who knows what he would have done? Two more years in a hospital with Dr. Stanton and he would have been “cured” and fit for life, free to carry on with his obsessions-that’s if he had even been sentenced. If he had been placed in your neighborhood again, then what? I do have some regrets I suppose. I could have waited and killed him when he was released and hidden his body, I could have tried to have gotten away with it, but that’s in the past, and anyway, the prisons and hospitals don’t exactly let the public know when inmates are being released, or where they are being placed. I will be counting on that too, when it’s my time to be free.

Today a girl came to see me. She used to be just like you. Young, beautiful, smart, compassionate. Two years before James Whitby killed Jessica, he tried doing the same thing to her. She was the one he was supposed to go to jail for but never did. James Whitby hurt her, but so did many others by letting her down.

I know you’re angry about what happened to Jessica, so I know you’ll keep this a secret too-but the girl, she hurt that woman who defended Whitby. She has the same anger as us. That anger, that’s what is going to get me through the next seven years, and when I come out I promise I will hurt those who hurt Jessica and this girl and, to an extent, have hurt you too. I know you feel guilty at what happened (how can you not?) and I’m sorry that my shitty letters to you over the years only made you feel worse. I don’t hate you, I don’t blame you.

Having this girl coming to see me is like a sign. Revenge is all I have. I’m changing in here, I have what another inmate in here calls “the darkness” growing inside of me. He thinks by the time I’m released I’ll be capable of anything, that the darkness will have grown an appetite and will need to be fed.

I would like to see you when I come out of jail. I would like to see the person you have become. You were my daughter’s best friend and for that friendship you gave her I am truly grateful. I hope you write back to me. I would like you to come and see me one day, but understand if you won’t. I am not a monster. I would never hurt you. I’m a father, I’m hurting-I loved Jessica so much, I loved my wife, and these people took that away from me. They will hurt others too, and they must be held accountable.

I wish you all the best, and I wish you the best of lives,

Caleb

If Harvey Chancellor had handed this letter into the police, these deaths all could have been avoided. Or if Cole had started killing, we’d have made the connection immediately. Tabitha Jenkins would have been arrested and she would have gone to jail-that was the price. One woman’s imprisonment would have saved four lives, and perhaps more.

My own car isn’t equipped with the technology of patrol cars, so I can’t look up Tabitha’s address on a built-in computer, but for the last few years I’ve been in the habit of carrying a phone book in the car. I look up Tabitha’s address, and on the way there I call Harvey Chancellor.

“You could have saved a lot of lives with this,” I tell him, swerving to avoid a car speeding out of a driveway.

“I know.”

“Don’t you feel bad?”

“Hang on a second,” he says, and he goes quiet and I imagine he’s walking away from his wife, wanting to be able to talk without her listening. “I feel bad for the doctor’s kids, sure, but for the others? No. Fuck them,” he says, sounding like a different Harvey Chancellor than the one who sat opposite me in the living room sipping coffee. “Those people, they ruined her, Detective. And don’t forget your promise. I don’t want to read in the news tomorrow you’ve arrested Tabitha. You gave me your word.”

“She won’t be arrested,” I tell him. “But you should have come to us seven years ago. We could have made a deal.”

“You’d have put her in prison.”

“She put somebody in a coma!”

“And Victoria Brown helped put Jessica Cole into the ground.”

He hangs up on me. A car pulls up next to me at an intersection, the side window is wound down and the passenger leans out and vomits down the outside of the door, sees me, and gives me the finger and yells at me to fuck off before laughing hysterically. I reach Tabitha Jenkins’s house. It’s a small home in a quiet street where everybody has tidy gardens. I tuck the letter into my pocket and walk up to the door. I knock and wait and then knock and wait again. The lights are on but she isn’t answering. There’s no car in the driveway. I head over to the garage and look through the window. There’s a car parked inside. Just no signs of life. Houses come with a feeling-when I was a cop I could always tell the difference between there being nobody home and nobody answering. This house doesn’t feel empty.

I move to the living room window. I angle myself until I can see through a gap in the curtains. There are no signs of a struggle. I tap against the glass. Nothing. I move around to the back door. There are a few options aside from the wait-and-see option. I can call Schroder for backup, which takes time. I could kick down the door, but then I’m in trouble for breaking and entering. So I get out my lock pick. No harm, no foul. If I’m wrong, I lock up after me and walk away. If I’m right, then time is of the essence.

I crouch in front of the lock. It takes me a few minutes because I can’t see much. Then there’s a click and the door relaxes a little and I turn the handle. I step inside.

“Hello?”

I wish I had a gun. I have nothing. I head into the kitchen. There is blood all over the floor. Only it doesn’t quite look like blood. There’s an empty tin of tomato sauce sitting on the kitchen bench, next to a can opener. I can imagine Tabitha opening it, then getting a fright and dropping it. I move past it. There’s a knife with sauce on it in the sink. I reach for a clean one, then hesitate. If Tabitha is in the shower because she got sauce all over herself, then she’s going to scream when she sees me and I’m going to lose my job. I pick one up anyway. I keep it down by my side.

“Hello? Tabitha?”

I can’t hear a shower running. Tabitha wouldn’t sleep through the noise I’m making. Near the front door is a side table, on it a set of keys, a handbag, a cell phone.

“Tabitha?”

The sense you get as a cop when you’re about to find a dead body is kicking in. It’s the same bad feeling I got when me and Carl were the first to arrive at the slaughterhouse to find Jessica Cole. You hope one thing and get the complete opposite. Being a cop is all about that. Yet right now it’s just a feeling. Nothing here to suggest anything bad has happened. Only a set of keys and a cell phone and a handbag by the door.

There’s an open packet of cookies on the kitchen table. I have an instant flash-forward of my future, of me sitting at the table cramming cookies into my mouth as Tabitha Jenkins walks in, a pile of crumbs forming around me.

She could be asleep. Or next door. Maybe she’s gone running.

I check the living room. I check the first bedroom, which looks like a guest bedroom. The second bedroom has been turned into an office. The computer is going. There’s a spreadsheet open on the monitor. It looks like Tabitha was doing her taxes. Probably figuring like the rest of us the balance between giving the tax department its due and surviving.

Toilet. Closet. Bathroom. Nothing. I head to the master bedroom. The door is closed. I put my hand against the handle and my head against the door. I can’t hear anything. I suck in a deep breath. I have a real bad feeling about what’s going to be on the other side.