A Killing Spring (24 page)

“It’ll stop the bleeding,” I said. “And it’s sterile.” Suddenly I realized the problem. “Angus, nobody has ever died of humiliation from holding a Stayfree. Now do it.”

An hour later, Taylor was wearing a button that declared, “Hospitals Are Full of Helpers,” her wound was sewn up, and we were on our way to Kowloon Kitchen for Chinese take-out: Won-ton soup and a double order of Taylor’s favourite almond shrimp. The cut had been nasty, but it had also been on Taylor’s right hand, and as she was left-handed,
the injury had already become an adventure rather than a catastrophe.

The phone was ringing when we got in the door. I picked it up, and heard a man’s voice, not familiar. “Is this Joanne Kilbourn?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Regina Police, Mrs. Kilbourn. You were in last week and talked to Constable Kirszner about a missing person.”

“He didn’t think there was cause for alarm,” I said, but my heart was already starting to pound.

“He may still be right,” the voice said. “However, we just picked up the body of an unidentified female. A farmer outside Balgonie found her in one of his fields. She’s not carrying any identification, but the age and the general description seem to fit the woman you were concerned about.”

At the kitchen table, my children were laughing, doling out the won-ton soup, sniping at each other about who would get the extra shrimp.

“How soon will you know?” I said.

“That depends on you. I wonder if you could come down to Regina General and have a look.”

“Isn’t there anyone else?” I said.

“If you’d rather not come down, we can go to the media.”

I thought of Neil McCallum, having his supper, watching television and hearing about the discovery of a body that might be Kellee’s.

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

“We’ll have a uniformed officer meet you at the doors to the emergency room. Do you know the place I’m talking about?”

“Only too well,” I said. “Only too well.”

The uniformed officer who met me was female, and she was good at her job: cool and perceptive. Angus would have said her energy was very smooth. She introduced herself as Constable Marissa Desjardin, and as she walked me to the elevator, she began to explain the identification process. All I had to do, she said, was look at the body long enough to make an identification, positive or negative, then I could be on my way. It was, she added briskly, important to keep my focus and not let my imagination run away with me. As I walked beside her through the maze of surgical-green corridors, I willed myself to heed her words; nonetheless, when we came to the double doors marked “Pathology,” my heart began to pound.

Constable Desjardin gave me a reassuring smile and pointed to a room across the hall. “That’s the staff room,” she said. “Why don’t you wait in there while I make sure they’re ready for us inside?”

The staff room was small, with furnishings that were hearteningly ordinary: an old couch, a kitchen table and four chairs, a microwave oven, a small refrigerator, a sink with a
drainboard on which mugs were drying. There was an acrid smell in the air; someone had left an almost empty pot on the burner of the coffee maker. I gulped in the familiar odour hungrily. Despite Constable Desjardin’s sensible advice, my imagination was in overdrive. From the moment I’d seen the doors marked “Pathology,” I was certain the air I was breathing carried with it a whiff of the charnel house.

I didn’t have long to look around the coffee room before Marissa Desjardin was back. “All set,” she said. “We might as well get it over with.”

Hours of watching “Quincy” and other crime shows on television had prepared me for the harshly lit, sterile room behind the doors. I was even ready for the pathologist in the lab coat and for the gurney with its plastic-shrouded but unmistakable cargo. But nothing could have prepared me for the horror that was exposed when, at a signal from Constable Desjardin, the pathologist reached over and pulled back the heavy plastic sheeting. A quick glance, and I knew that the dead woman was Kellee. However, it wasn’t Kellee as I had known her. Two weeks of exposure to weather had taken its toll. Her body was swollen and her skin had blistered and split; in places, her flesh looked as if it had been eaten away. Her green wool sweater had darkened and begun to rot as if it, too, was returning to its elemental state. Only the plastic shamrock barrettes in her hair remained unchanged. They were as sunnily cheerful as they had been on the morning when Kellee had chosen them, out of all the others, to anchor her hair on her twenty-first birthday.

I turned to Constable Desjardin. “That’s her,” I said. “What happened to her skin?”

Marissa Desjardin looked away. “Insects,” she said tightly. “We’ve had an early spring.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the ruin that had once been Kellee Savage’s face. “She didn’t live long enough to feel the
insects doing that to her, did she?” I asked, and my voice was edged with hysteria.

“We won’t know exactly what happened until we have the autopsy results,” Constable Desjardin said quietly. Then she squared her shoulders. “Mrs. Kilbourn, I promise you that as soon as we know how Kellee Savage died, we’ll tell you. Now, I really do think it’s time we got out of here.”

I didn’t put up an argument. When Constable Desjardin went to get the forms I had to sign, I wandered back into the staff room. It hadn’t been five minutes since I’d left, but everything about the room now seemed surreal. On the wall beside the sink was a poster, black with bubble-gum-pink lettering. I read and reread it numbly, trying to comprehend its message:

After I’d signed the forms, Constable Desjardin gave me a quick assessing look. “I don’t think you should be driving,” she said. “I’ll take you home.”

“I’m fine,” I said, and I thought I was, but when I went to stand, my knees buckled. Marissa Desjardin leaned forward and slid a practised arm around me.

“Let’s get you some air,” she said. She steered me down another corridor and onto a ward. To our immediate left was a small room with some cleaning equipment and a window that Constable Desjardin cranked open. “Take some deep breaths,” she said.

I did as she told me and immediately felt better. After the
stale antiseptic air of the hospital, the oxygen was tonic. “I’m okay now,” I said. “It was just a shock.”

“It always is,” she said.

“Even for you?”

She smiled. “How do you think I found out about this room?”

When we got to my car in the parking lot, I handed Marissa Desjardin the keys and slid gratefully into the passenger seat. We drove in silence. I was fresh out of words, and Constable Desjardin, mercifully, was not a person who saw silence as a vacuum waiting to be filled.

She pulled up expertly in front of my house. “There’ll be a squad car picking me up here,” she said. “It shouldn’t be long.” Then she added kindly, “You did fine.”

“Do you know what happened to Kellee?” I asked.

She shook her head. “They’ll be doing the autopsy tomorrow. If you’d like, I can call you when we have the report.”

“Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”

“Mrs. Kilbourn, there’s something you might be able to help us with. You told Officer Kirszner that early in the evening of March 17, Kellee Savage called you several times from the Lazy Owl Bar at the university.”

I nodded.

“Her body was found thirty-two kilometres east of the university. Do you have any idea what she was doing out in that field?”

I thought of Kellee’s bedroom in Indian Head: the girlish pink-and-white bedspread, the Care Bear and the Strawberry Shortcake doll positioned so carefully on the pillows. “I think she was trying to go home,” I said.

Constable Desjardin sighed. “You’d be amazed at how often they are,” she said. She reached over and touched my hand. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Kellee Savage was lucky to have a teacher like you.”

I tried a smile. “Thanks,” I said. “But you couldn’t be more wrong about that.”

After the squad car came for Marissa Desjardin, I sat in the Volvo, taking deep breaths and trying to shake off the existential horror that gripped me. It was an impossible task, and when the clock on the dashboard showed that ten minutes had elapsed, I gave it up as a bad job and headed for the house. Taylor met me at the front door. She was in her nightie, and I noticed she’d pinned her “Hospitals Are Full of Helpers” button to its yoke.

“How’s your hand?” I asked.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I was brave, wasn’t I?”

I put my arm around her. “Very brave.”

She moved closer to me. “It was nice of them to give me the button, but I hate hospitals, Jo.”

“Me too,” I said. “Let’s do what we can to stay away from them for a while.”

When Taylor wandered off to find Benny and take care of his final needs of the day, I went into the kitchen. There was a note in Taylor’s careful printing on the kitchen table. “Anna Lee called.” It took me a minute to connect Anna Lee with Annalie Brinkmann, but when I did I started for the phone.

As I picked up the receiver, the memory of Kellee’s ravaged face hit me like a slap, and a wave of dizziness engulfed me. I leaned against the wall. I wasn’t hungry, but I knew I had to eat. I poured the last of the won-ton soup into a bowl and stuck it in the microwave. The soup was good, and after I ate it, I felt better. Still, I knew that all the won-ton soup in the Kowloon Kitchen couldn’t make me strong enough for the task at hand. Annalie Brinkmann would have to wait. I rinsed my bowl and put it in the dishwasher, then, with limbs that felt like lead, I walked to the phone and dialled Neil McCallum’s number.

Like many people confronted with brutal news, Neil’s first refuge was disbelief. “You could have made a mistake,” he said, “or the police could have. Everybody makes mistakes.”

When, finally, I’d convinced Neil that there was no mistake, that Kellee Savage was the woman in the photographs I’d seen, he grew quiet. “I’m going to hang up now,” he said. “I don’t want you to hear me cry.”

I didn’t try to dissuade him. Neil had announced his decision with great dignity. He knew what he was doing; besides, I was fresh out of what Emily Dickinson called “those little anodynes that deaden suffering.”

That night I couldn’t sleep. For hours, I lay between the cool sheets, watching the shifting patterns of the moonlight on my ceiling, breathing in air scented by the narcissi growing in pots in front of my open window, and wondering what kind of fate could decree that a twenty-one-year-old woman should die before she had known a lifetime of nights like this. When, at last, I drifted into sleep, the room was dark and the air had grown cold, but I still didn’t have an answer.

The first voice I heard the next morning came from my clock radio. The newsreader was intoning the final words of an all-too-familiar litany: “name withheld, pending notification of next of kin,” she said, and I knew my day had begun.

When the dogs and I set off for our run, the city was thick with fog. As we started across Albert Street, there wasn’t a car in sight. Obviously, most of Regina’s citizens were smarter than I was. While we were waiting for the light to change, I reached down and rubbed my golden retriever’s head. “Looks like we’ve got the world all to ourselves, Rosie,” I said. She looked at me with disdain; apparently, that morning, she regarded the world with as little enthusiasm as I did.

Our progress through the park was slow. There were patches of muddy leaves on the path that curved around the shoreline. The leaves were slick and we had to travel carefully to avoid a misstep. As we rounded the lake, Sadie began to whimper with weariness. I reassured her and slowed our pace even more. And so we headed home: a woman in middle age and her two old dogs, trying to find their way through the fog. It was a metaphor I could have lived without.

By the time I’d taken the dogs’ leashes off and fed them, I knew I was running on empty. It was time to shut down. I didn’t have classes that day, and there was plenty of work on my desk at the university that could just as easily be done at home.

When I looked into my closet, the prospect of selecting something to wear to the university suddenly became as daunting as a run in the Boston Marathon. Anyone I ran into that day was just going to have to take me as they found me. Unfortunately, the first person I ran into was Rosalie Norman.

When I came into the Political Science offices, she looked at my jeans and sweatshirt assessingly. “Are we having Casual Friday on Thursday this week?” she asked.

“I’ve decided to work at home today.”

Since the advent of her fatal perm, Rosalie had taken to wearing a series of hand-knitted tams. The tam
du jour
was the colour of powdered cheese and, as she framed her response to me, Rosalie tucked a wiry curl back under its protection.

“Must be nice to be able to work at home whenever you feel like it,” she said.

“I’m hoping it’ll be productive, too,” I said.

“I suppose you’ll want me to handle your calls.”

“If you don’t mind.”

“What do you want me to tell them?”

“Tell them I’ll call them tomorrow,” I said. “Or tell them to go hell, whichever you prefer.”

I walked out of the office, warmed by the pleasure of meanness. For the first time since I’d become a member of the Political Science department, I had rendered Rosalie Norman speechless.

One of the realities of university teaching is that mindless tasks are never in short supply, and it didn’t take me long to fill a file folder with work that demanded less than my complete attention. I had my jacket zipped up and I was on my way out the door when I saw Kellee’s tape-recorder on my shelf, waiting to be claimed. From the time she had asked permission to tape my lectures so she wouldn’t miss anything, I had never seen her without it. The tape-recorder had seemed an extension of Kellee, ubiquitous and imbued with her plodding, mechanical determination to complete the task at hand.