Grave Doubts (11 page)

Miranda stared at her, wide-eyed. Another person might
have just apologized.

“You talk to me,” said Rachel. “You need to talk.”

She reached across and put her hand on the other woman’s knee. Miranda started to pull away, then placed her own hand over Rachel’s and gave it an affirming squeeze that curiously translated through Rachel’s grasp to her own knee, as if she were reassuring herself.

Miranda placed Jill at the centre of the narrative, merging public knowledge with confidential revelations; unsure, herself, about the lines between news and gossip and confession. She explained her connection to a wealthy recluse with a vintage Jag, and she explained Jill’s connection to them both. She explained how she had been transformed by ghastly circumstances from investigating detective to Jill’s guardian and the man’s executor. She described horrors inflicted and horrors endured.

“But you cannot suppress evil for wanting,” she said. “You can hide terrible things but you can’t erase them. You can’t forget just because you want to forget. You know what I mean?”

“Miranda, I do. I know exactly what you mean.”

Miranda meant to ask Rachel to go on, but instead she pursued the dead woman in the closet. That seemed more real, for the moment, paradoxically, because Rachel was willing to listen.

“She died from dehydration,” Miranda explained. “She felt her skin parch and shrivel, felt her insides decrepitate, felt her lips crack and her eyes bleed. This young woman, she was of no interest to her killer. Do you realize how rare that must be? Murder, not to end a life but to create death. It’s beyond pathological. Almost satanic.”

“Death as an act of creation! In that case, there will likely be more. Do you think so?”

They talked late into the night, then went to bed.

Miranda rolled on her side, staring at the indentation in the pillow where Rachel’s head had been. She reached over and gently rested the back of her hand in the hollow. She could smell the fresh scent that lingered in the sheets, like the smell of leaves unfurling in the morning sun. She drifted into sleep, and an hour later awakened. She would call Jill at noon, when she was home from school, and see if she wanted to go out for pizza, maybe an early movie if the homework wasn’t too heavy. They both liked movies.

chapter six
Rapa Nui

“G’morning,” said Morgan. “I’m back.”

“I didn’t know you’d been away.”

Miranda mumbled, struggling to assimilate his voice into her scattering dream. She rolled over on her back and stretched. At least it was morning.

“I’ve been up all night. It’s time you got out of bed,” he said, as if there were a logical point. “I’m still at the airport; thought I’d check in.”

“Thanks, Morgan. Where have you been?”

“Just got in from Sao Paulo.”

“That’s Brazil!”

“That’s right.”

“What were you doing there, for goodness sake?”

“Stopping over from Santiago.”

“Chile!”

“Well done.”

“What was in Chile? You are very strange.”

“Easter Island. Santiago is the jumping off point for Easter Island.”

“You’re serious. You were at Easter Island.”

“‘On,’ not ‘at.’ It’s very small.”

“Morgan, it’s too early. Meet me on, or at, Fran’s for breakfast.”

“I’ll meet you at Starbucks in an hour.”

They both knew which Starbucks — the one over from police headquarters on the corner of College and Yonge.

“So, you’ve been away?” she said when she saw him.

He rose, kissed her on both cheeks, and slumped back into his chair. He had a large cappuccino waiting for her, with the saucer on top to keep it warm. His eyes were bloodshot and his hands swollen, but he looked content, like the cat, having swallowed the canary, who endured indigestion as a reasonable price for the pleasure.

“Tell me.”

“Well,” he said, “I got on an Air Canada flight at Pearson, heading for Easter Island. When I transferred to Varig Air in Brazil, I was travelling to Isla de Pascua. In Santiago, I boarded Lan Chile for Rapa Nui. And I landed on Te pito o te henua. All the same place. It was a magical journey. Did you ever read Leacock’s
Sunshine Sketches
, where he gets on a modern train in the Metropolis, and transfers to an older train on his way to Mariposa as he travels back into another world defined by nostalgia and wit? I have just emerged from another dimension, defined by enchantment and mystery.”

“You sound slightly demented. What on earth took you… there?” Miranda gazed across the table at her partner, who was dishevelled, buoyant with enthusiasm. He was precious in her life, she wanted to tell him. She wanted to hug him and keep him invulnerable. “You are an idiot, Morgan. No one knew where you were.”

“On Rapa Nui. That’s what they call themselves, and their language, and the island.
Te pito o te henua
means navel of the world. It’s not really a name; for a thousand years they didn’t know there was anyone else on the planet. It’s a geographical declaration.”

“I wrote an essay on Thor Heyerdahl as an anthropological entrepreneur when I was in university.”

“How very cynical. You were ahead of your time.”

“Yeah, actually I wrote it in high school. ‘
Kon Tiki
: Boys at Sea.’ ‘
Aku Aku
: Boys Still at Sea.’ ‘Indiana Jones: An Autobiography.’ Whatever. Got an ‘A.’ Or should have.”

“You ever notice how people ask about your travels so they can talk about themselves?”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that.”

They sipped their coffees, each looking over the rims at the other. Miranda smiled, inhaled coffee, and, as she choked, slammed down her cup on the table. Morgan grimaced in sympathy. Her eyes watered, she tried to speak, she waved her hand to reassure witnesses that she was not about to expire. Everyone but Morgan looked away.

“Well then,” he said. “Given this opportunity to say a few words, let me fill in possible gaps in your memory of Heyerdahl. Rapa Nui is about three thousand kilometres off South America, another three thousand from Tahiti. There are almost nine hundred
moai
— that’s what the statues are called — and about three times that many people.

“Nine hundred,” she mouthed in astonishment.

“Yeah, from three feet to sixty feet tall, not all completed. Every one is unique, like a signature — you know, the same and yet each version is different. They were created over an eight-hundred-year period.”

“Sixty feet?”

“That one’s still in the quarry at Rano Raraku. I spent a
lot of time out there.”

He talked on and on, and Miranda was spellbound. Eventually, it was Morgan who exclaimed, “It’s time we get back to work.”

“I was working while you were away, you know. The world didn’t hold its breath in your absence. Things happened.”

“What?”

“Not much. Do you want a ride home? Maybe you should run up and let the superintendent know you’re back.”

“Is he still living there?”

“Just about. I think he’s taken a room on St. George. It’s a negotiating strategy. She threw him out, you know. The rumour is he was
not
having an affair.”

“No!”

“Apparently she got tired of buying the toilet paper and pepper.”

“Of course.”

“That’s my theory: if you don’t keep track of the toilet paper and pepper, you’re not sharing responsibilities, you’re just helping out.”

“I manage to run out of both on a regular basis.”

“Exactly. And she was so busy being a lawyer, a wife, a housekeeper, and society matron, and a mother, neither of them noticed he was mostly just being a cop.”

“You know all this, because…?”

“A friend of a friend has an informant who works out at her gym.”

“Ah,” he said. He forgot to tell her about Rongorongo for sale in the marketplace. He would; she’d ask. A written language no one could read; she was executor of her assailant’s estate and he had owned an incised tablet the size of a paddle blade filled with indecipherable glyphs. It was worth a small fortune, certainly more than her vintage Jaguar. Maybe she
wouldn’t ask; maybe she would assume Morgan would tell her anything new he might have learned, if he had learned anything new. They both knew he couldn’t resist.

Without asking, Morgan ambled over to the counter and ordered two more cappuccinos. Miranda followed him with her eyes, sure other women were doing the same. There was something about the way he moved — a shambling self-assurance — the way his clothes looked worn in and not worn out, the crooked smile, the way he combined intensity with nonchalance.

She looked around the Starbucks interior. There were five other women; several of them, oddly enough, were looking at her. She was glad he was home.

After they checked in with Alex Rufalo, she drove him home. When he emerged from the bathroom, clean-shaven, hair combed, wrapped in a towel, he appeared almost normal. By the time he descended from the loft after dressing, he already seemed slightly unkempt; his hair looked windblown, although God knows there wasn’t much air moving through his apartment, and his clothes, while clean, were already rumpled. All signs of exhaustion had left his face; he looked refreshed and relaxed. He sat on the blue sofa since she was comfortably ensconced in his favourite armchair

“I suppose you hung out with the police down there.”

“Carabineros. Isla de Pascua Carabineros. I met a guy called Te Ave Teao, trained in Chile but born and raised on the island. There’s no crime in Rapa Nui — nothing serious. Mostly, I kept to myself. What’s happening with our major case? I’m assuming it’s still our major case.”

“Can’t tie the victims to each other or connect either of them to the house. A lot of dead ends, so to speak. I think we’re dealing with murder for amusement — the arbitrary indulgence of an inspired psychopath.”

She was aware she was echoing a conversation she had had with Rachel. This made her wonder how much her intimacy with the young woman had been to compensate for Morgan’s absence. Perhaps that explains why we never became lovers, she thought.

“There’s no use looking for motive, then,” Morgan was saying. “Method we know. Opportunity was at the killer’s convenience. So we focus on what?”

“The entertainment factor. I know it’s grotesque, but maybe our only hope is to interpret the crime as a creative event. Morgan, we have to shift from motive to intent. The ring and the cross are no longer clues to what happened; the hidden crypt is no longer evidentiary; the colonial clothes, the mummification, the eternal embrace, these aren’t factors that will help us to explain the murder itself. Everything is turned around. Don’t you see?”

“Not yet, but I’m trying.”

“Clues and evidence won’t lead to the killer directly, since they were arranged with pathological intention to achieve an aesthetic effect.”

“All art is pathological.”

“Now that is profound.”

“But true. The artist plays life against death without a twinge of conscience. Suffering, brutality, sadness — they’re just the raw materials.”

“Joy, triumph, ecstasy — they’re raw materials, too. ‘Inferno’ is only one part of the
Divine Comedy
, Morgan. That’s why it’s divine!”

“What about Freud?”

“What
about
Freud?” she retorted — but she already knew where he was going. It was good to have Morgan back in the game.

“There’s a disjunct between the signifiers and the signified —”

“You’re switching discourses, Morgan!”

“No, I’m piggybacking Freud on Saussure. We’re trying to make a story out of signs that make no sense — we should forget the story and look for the author embedded in the mystery itself.”

“Yes,” she said. Morgan’s back.

“There’s a subtle distinction, but incredibly important. We can’t explain the psychopath’s madness by interpretation, but we can find him there, hidden among symbols and artifice, expressing his madness. It could be Freud: about issues of love and sexuality. It could be Aristotle: about hubris and achieving catharsis. It could be Beckett —”

“That’s what I said, Beckett.”

“A story about nothing but itself.”

“So we all become characters in search of an author. Holy Pirandello, Batman! It’s a challenge. When you’re inside the play, he gets to be God.”

“You said what about Beckett, to who?”

“To whom! To Rachel Naismith, my new best friend.”

“You are a fickle woman.”

Morgan got up from the sofa and moved around the room. Lack of sleep made him restless but he felt exhilarated to be working again.

“We have a cold-blooded killer with talent,” he said. “Do we have a pattern? If this is his masterwork, did he serve an apprenticeship? With whom? More to the point,
on
whom? If this is the first display of his deviant aptitude, I have the distinct and uneasy feeling it will not be his last.”

“That’s just what I’m afraid of, Morgan. Success spawning success. There’s no precedent — nothing like it at all in the States, or here. Nothing with comparable flair, or the same intellectual self-consciousness.”

“You tried the Ontario Provincial Police?”

“Nothing. They ran it through ViCLAS —”

“ViCLAS?”

“Violent Crime Linking Analysis System.”

“I knew that.”

“The Orillia OPP are cutting edge. Nothing.”

“Did you try Interpol?”

“Of course. I was thorough. And imaginative — I was open to variations on the theme. But nothing, nada, rien.”

“So we wait. It’s grotesque, but that’s all we can do. Have you talked to Pope again? Or the anthropologists? How in the hell were they fooled, if Pope saw right off that the scene was a fake?”

“Forewarned is forearmed. He knew after you called what to expect. Poor Birbalsingh and Hubbard — they walked in cold. They had no reason to be skeptical. The condition of the bodies, their dress, the sealed crypt, it all seemed consistent. It was an archeological site”

“Their findings to be entered in the annals of science.”

“Does science have annals? Yeah, Morgan, I went back to talk to them both. Professor Birbalsingh was amused more than anything. And intrigued. He said when we catch the killer he’d like to talk to him. It might help in his forensic research with authentic antiquities. Dr. Hubbard was less sanguine. I asked her if she could put a trace on the clothing. She already had, and came up with nothing. It would be virtually impossible to track down unless it had been stolen from a collection, she said. More likely it was bought in one of those strange little shops in London that cater to every imaginable taste. I couldn’t argue. I’ve never been to London.”