Honour Among Men (26 page)

Green hadn't had the dream in years. It was a flashback more than a dream, so vivid that he often woke from it bathed in sweat. It began as it always did, with a call from dispatch about a reported domestic disturbance in Alta Vista, a quiet neighbourhood of winding crescents, leafy trees and sprawling bungalows. Professors, accountants and civil servants lived there, enjoying their perennial gardens and stone patios.

It was a peaceful, starlit night in May when the call came in, and the streets were deserted. Green was wrapping up a routine canvass in a nearby apartment building on Bank Street, and he was only a few minutes away. As he listened to the agitated radio chatter back and forth between the responding officers and dispatch, he could hear a woman screaming in the background. Dispatch sent more squad cars and contacted the Tactical Unit, so soon the howl of sirens filled the quiet night.

Green radioed in as he headed towards the scene. “I'm on my way in case they need
CID
.”

When he arrived, the street was a mob scene. Cruisers blocked off the street, neighbours were hovering on front porches, shivering in their night clothes, and a dozen uniforms were deployed around the perimeter of a yard in the middle of it all. Radios barked and emergency roof lights splashed the scene with surreal red and blue.

The house at the centre of the drama was eerily still. Light
shone in the upstairs windows, but the screaming had stopped. An officer was training his binoculars on each window in turn. Green edged his way into earshot.

“No signs of activity, sir,” the officer said to his patrol sergeant, who had just arrived.

The sergeant swore softly. “Try phoning.”

The phone rang endlessly through the house without response. The Tactical Unit arrived and used a bullhorn to order everyone inside to come out. Still nothing. The unit huddled together, planning their entry as the sergeant tried to establish how many lived in the house and who slept where. He conferred in an inaudible whisper with a man Green took to be a neighbour.

Green wandered over to a group of neighbours clustered behind the barricades, who watched his approach with a mixture of excitement and shock.

“Who called 911?” he asked.

“Several of us did.” A tall, spindly man detached himself from the crowd. He was wearing striped pyjama bottoms and a terrycloth robe, which he hugged around himself. Despite it, he was trembling, and in the darkness his eyes were bright with fear. “I've already told the police what I know. Are you a reporter?”

Green shook his head. “I'm Sergeant Green with Major Crimes.”

“They're a nice couple. He's a professor, she's a teacher. Never a loud word. Their boys are a handful, but they are so patient with them. Sweet Jesus, I hope nothing bad happened.”

“What made you call 911?”

“Her screaming. It woke me up. Screaming ‘Stop! Stop!' Sweet Jesus, such an ungodly animal howl. And the chain saw was so loud.”

Green's mouth went dry. “Chain saw?”

“He has one for the brush and trees. He always keeps such a beautiful garden. And he's been helping all of us this spring,
to clear out the deadwood, you know? Oh . . . God.”

As much to keep his own wild imagination at bay as to keep the man focussed, Green stuck to the facts. “Did you see anything tonight?”

“No, just shadows rushing in front of the blinds. As if a fight was going on.”

“Do you know if there are firearms in the house?”

There was a chorus of denials from the neighbours who had clustered around. “They'd never have guns.”

“Don't believe in them?”

“And with the boys being
ADHD
and all . . .”

Green held up his hand. “How many boys are there?”

“Twins. Nice boys, just really busy, you know?” said the tall neighbour.

“And slow,” interjected a woman at his elbow, whom Green took to be his wife.

“Well, they were preemies,” he countered, “so they started off behind. They've needed a lot of help, poor little guys. They could be real trouble—used to be real trouble—before they got into the right school.”

“Jean had to fight like hell for that,” added the wife darkly, apparently much less forgiving of the boys than her husband. “Costs a fortune for the two of them. Everything she and Sam make goes towards it.”

Green jumped in again. “How old are the twins?”

Husband and wife exchanged uncertain glances. “Ten?”

“Big enough to handle a chainsaw?”

The wife nodded, but the husband looked shocked. “Oh, no. They're skinny little tykes. Behind, like I said.”

“Anyone else in the house?”

“Just Jean and Sam and the twins.” The man's eyes were big as he strained to see what the police were doing at the house.
“Sweet Jesus, I hope they're all right.”

Green thanked them and walked over to introduce himself to the patrol sergeant in charge. As they filled each other in, the tactical officers broke in the front door and disappeared inside. Green heard muffled shouts and thudding boots as the unit dispersed through the house. A few seconds later one of them shattered the glass in an upstairs window and screamed out, “Get the paramedics in here!”

More boots thumping, more shouts, and one of the tactical officers staggered out to vomit in the rose bushes by the front door. “Mother of God, it's bad,” muttered the patrol sergeant, echoing Green's thoughts. The tactical guys were a tough bunch.

The sergeant headed towards the front door, and Green scrambled to catch up. “We have to protect the scene,” he said, absurdly under the circumstances.

The officer who'd been sick straightened up at their approach. He shook his head helplessly.

“What's the situation?” the sergeant snapped.

“Bodies!” managed the man. “All in pieces. Arms, legs, heads . . . Fuck!”

“Anyone alive?”

The officer kept shaking his head in disbelief. “Don't think so. I don't even know how many there are. I counted two heads. Kids.” He began to shake all over.

The sergeant gripped his elbow and signalled to a nearby paramedic. “Go sit down, son.”

One by one the paramedics and tactical officers emerged from the house, pale as ghosts and unsteady on their feet. Green heard the same muttered disbelief over and over. “War zone in there. Blood fucking everywhere.”

The patrol sergeant looked at Green expectantly, as if to say it's your case now. Your call, and good luck. Green fought his
own dizziness and nausea as he tried to think. He needed to get his own partner over here. He had sent Sullivan home for the day, because he had three little kids and a soccer game to coach. Green kept the details to a minimum on the phone as he gave Sullivan the address. The man would know soon enough.

The call seemed to ground him, for once he hung up, he felt his training kick in. “Call Ident, the coroner and the duty inspector,” he told the patrol sergeant. “I want everyone out of the house, and the scene secured. Don't let anyone in but Ident, the coroner and myself. And I want the boots of every officer and paramedic who went into the house.”

The orders given, he pulled on gloves, steeled himself, and stepped over the threshold. He had never seen so much blood. He knew the human body contained about five litres, and he'd seen much of it spilled on the floors and walls of previous crime scenes, but nothing prepared him for this. The blood was smeared all the way up the staircase, pooled in lakes at the foot of the stairs, and sprayed in a pulsing arterial line across the walls and ceiling of the living room where the husband lay.

He stared at the ceiling, his throat gaping open and his thinning hair drenched in the blood that spread beneath his head. By his outstretched hand lay a long kitchen knife so covered in blood that it was barely recognizable.

Green barely had time to turn away before vomiting on the hardwood floor at the foot of the stairs. He leaned on the bannister a moment, rested his forehead on his arm and tried to suck fresh air into his lungs. But the air stank of death. The stench of urine and feces mingled with the coppery scent of blood and the acrid smell of gasoline. His stomach rebelled again, but this time he fought the bile down.

The rest of the downstairs was surprisingly neat and undisturbed. The small kitchen was packed with artwork and
children's toys. Yellow post-it notes were stuck on the fridge, the microwave and the cork board, containing reminders of doctors' appointments, soccer games, homework assignments and even routines for cooking and cleaning up. Pinned to the wall by the back door, which was broken open by the tactical team, was another note.
Remember to take your lunch and lock the door
. At the bottom of the note, as on the others, was
xxoox
and a happy face.

Green backed away, his breath catching, and turned to continue his systematic search of the downstairs. Everywhere he saw evidence of a neat, frugal lifestyle. Scuffed, mended furniture, homemade bookcases brimming with secondhand paperbacks, and child-like drawings on the walls. When he could no longer reasonably put it off, he took a deep breath and headed up the stairs, careful to avoid the blood on the walls and stair treads.

At the top of the stairs, the bedroom doors were ajar, spilling light into the hall. Lamps were smashed, tables overturned, and bedding strewn about. Everything was bathed in blood. He almost tripped over a cast-iron pan in the middle of the floor. Through the half open front bedroom door, he caught sight of the chainsaw, glistening red. He nudged the door back with his toe. Stepped in. And stared at the carnage.

He felt a door swing shut in his mind. Felt its refusal to grasp, to absorb, to comprehend. Aware only of his crumbling legs, the heat and salt of tears upon his cheeks. He didn't speak, didn't move.

Then, very faintly above the sound of his own ragged breath, he heard a sob. He turned. A closet door stood half open in the corner. Instinct flooded him and he dropped to a crouch behind the blood-soaked bed and unsnapped his holster.

“Police. Come out with your hands out.”

Nothing.

He edged around the bed and shoved open the closet door.

Nothing.

Then from the interior of the closet, from behind the snowsuits, the hockey gear and the boxes of Lego, a pale face emerged. Eyes huge with shock, greying hair plastered with blood, lips slack with disbelief.

“I killed him,” she whispered. “I killed him.”

Green bolted awake, as he always did, his sheets soaked with sweat. His heart hammered against his ribs as he panted to catch his breath. He drank in the reassuring shadows of his darkened bedroom; the maple tree against the window, the dresser in the corner, the glint of the mirror on the closet door. And his wife's black curls tumbling over the pillow next to him. She opened her eyes, luminous in the dark, and reached for his arm.

“The nightmare?”

He nodded, and she tightened her grip. “You haven't had that in a long time.”

“I guess it's this case and worrying about Twiggy.”

She sat up, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “Do you want some tea?”

He hesitated. When the nightmares had come every night and the visions of body parts plagued his waking hours, Sharon had been there to comfort him. To listen endlessly to his rants about mental health and legal loopholes, and to try to explain—not excuse—what Sam had done. She had known Sam during his two hospitalizations the previous winter, supported his wife's futile efforts to have him committed. She had watched him struggle in vain to get well, she had even met the two holy terrors who were his sons. They had come to the ward for visits, ricocheting off the walls, racing the length of the corridors,
bouncing off the sofas in the sunroom and spinning the chairs in the nursing station like their own personal merry-go-rounds.

“The stress alone of keeping up with them would tax a healthy parent,” she'd said. “And you factor in the loss of his job at the university due to his illness, the financial pressures of the kids' private school, the efforts to hang onto the family house . . . I think he couldn't see any other way out. He couldn't cope any more, but he couldn't leave his wife with the burden of managing them by herself.”

“And he thought killing them would be easier on her?”

She'd shaken her head, looking dissatisfied. “I can only guess, but I think in his delusional state, he thought they'd be better off dead. He felt he had to put them out of their misery.”

That was the theory proposed by the trio of forensic psychiatrists when the case finally wended its way through the legal circus. Homicide-suicide was the verdict of the coroner's inquest. Sam Calderone, in the grip of a psychotic delusion, had hacked his twin sons to pieces with a chainsaw, and while his wife hid for her life in the closet, he went downstairs and stabbed himself in the throat.

Green had his own private theory about the mad workings of Sam Calderone's mind. He had been cutting deadwood, hoping perhaps that what was left of his sons' bodies and minds would grow healthy and strong. He had not intended to die that night, he had planned to be around to witness their cure.