Mind Games (27 page)

At my request, Greg Stairs sat on the lawn beside me, and I asked him some questions about Grundy’s behaviour, not recording much. It gave me time to recover.

I asked Stairs about the Wednesday evening of two weeks ago.

“They was definitely here,” he said, not looking at me, glancing up at Ramirez as if for confirmation.

He’d gone on duty sharp at seven p.m. He’d entered the guardhouse a few times, where he kept his log of comings and goings, otherwise he had been outside.

By now, Grundy had disappeared, doubtless to huddle with Lyall. I was too weak to endure more, too scattered, so I asked Ramirez to tell my host I’d spare him further inconvenience. I followed Stairs to the guardhouse to look at his log, a loose-leaf binder.

His notes for September 17, which I copied, were few but to the minute: at 7:07 p.m. head groundskeeper leaves for home, at 7:12 Mrs. Baumgarten leaves with party of five women, at 7:35 process server leaves summons re Chrysler Town & Country minivan. The latter was for a string of long-ignored parking tickets – Grundy, as I recalled, rips them up. That was the entire night’s traffic.

How did he know the vehicle was in the garage all night? Stairs said he was “supposed to” check the garage nightly. Was there another route out of The Tides? “There’s only the one way out of here.” Does Grundy ever go boating from the dock? “Sometimes he goes fishing, but that ain’t his cup of tea, he don’t like the slow life.”

Could they have taken another vehicle, the pickup? It was “usually” in the garage too. But it wasn’t today – I could now see it parked beside the house: ochre, high off the ground, wide tires. It was familiar somehow. In fact, it resembled the truck that swerved at me on Burrard Bridge, sending me spilling. I went into another stall, the import slow to hit, that it might not have been a mere accident. When was it? After the sleepless night in front of Cousineau’s building, I’d been in a frenzy. I was close to one now, ready to flee.

Be smart, I told myself, they only kill at night, without witnesses.

I returned to the binder, flipped a few pages back. Grundy and Lyall had checked out occasionally in the evenings, but Stairs hadn’t always diarized their returns. Few entries after
eleven p.m. Stairs may not have been a zealous employee: the guardhouse accommodated a small cot.

What was the date they returned from their Skeena trip? Why couldn’t I remember? They left Terrace on a Thursday in late August … Yes, August 28, here was an entry. “Bob and Lyall in at 9:14.” I asked Stairs if he remembered that night.

He scratched his head. “That must have been … yeah, they’d gone up north to run some rapids. Bob saved some girl from drowning, it was in the news.”

I puzzled over the entry, the arithmetic seemed wrong: they returned at 9:14? They’d have had to travel a hundred miles an hour, non-stop …

“Are you telling me they drove all the way there and back?”

“Well, as I recall, it was his dad’s treat. I imagine Mr. Grundison sent them up there in the Lear.”

“From where?”

“Local airport. Boundary.”

“Did you mention this to the police?”

“They never asked.”

I went to my taxi, reeling.

My plan was to go directly to police headquarters but that wasn’t necessary. As we turned past a dilapidated former cannery, a patrol car pulled in behind us, turned on its wigwags. My driver stopped, flustered, unsure what law he’d violated, he could have been driving his own mother, he’d been five miles under the limit.

Jack Churko slid into the back seat with me, told me he’d like a nice long chat. I suggested my office, so I could pay the driver. We carried on to the city in utter silence. I wanted Dotty to be present, and as soon as I got to my office I called her to join us.

I’ll give Churko credit, he’s a good listener – he inquired only about the bottle of pills I was playing with, fighting the need. Dotty explained they were for an erectile disorder, and asked whether Churko was interested in trying one. The
inspector glowered and went silent. The scenario I laid out seemed to depress him – it pointed him in a direction he hadn’t wanted to go, toward the good family Grundison.

At the end, I summarized: “The mother’s a lush, she’s in her room every night by five or six. The only employee who sleeps over is the maid, and after eleven o’clock she’s too busy screwing the night watchman to notice what goes on. They get together in the house, probably in her chamber. They’ll get fired if the Grundison family finds out, so they’re scared to say anything. Greg Stairs probably sleeps through the last of his shift. Essentially, his log can’t be relied on for the late hours.”

Churko paled.

“When our two heroes aren’t prowling the streets of Vancouver looking for people to kill, they’re surfing Nazi Web sites and going two-on-one with Jossie Markevich – by the way, you’ll want to check
her
out. They didn’t drive to the Skeena River, they flew there and back on Daddy’s jet. They left their truck at Boundary Bay airport Saturday morning after strangling Chauncey Wilmott.”

I added that Churko might want to cross-reference the dates of Grundy’s parking tickets with his homophobic excursions into the city. I didn’t mention my baffling psychic experience. Churko might start wondering what was really in those pills.

“And here’s something else – I think he tried to run me over, tried to kill me.” Churko was interested now, even nodding as I told him about the sports pickup, my scrape with death. He phoned headquarters, told his underlings he wanted eyes on Grundy and Lyall, and a twenty-four hour discreet watch of The Tides and the Simon Fraser campus.

A sense of foreboding plagued me through the rest of the day. I spent a couple of hours conferring with detectives, puzzling through my notes, some of which were indecipherable, and trying to remember the gaps, but I remained unable to
bring back … what? Something that had registered at the far periphery of awareness.

Another day has passed. Twelve hours ago (it is about midnight now), Grundy delivered his essay to an associate professor of psychology. He and Lyall stopped to watch a football practice, then left the campus to pick up Jossie Markevich at her apartment before carrying on to The Tides. There are a couple of minor entries on her sheet, by the way, one for shoplifting, one for prostitution.

Tonight I’m still edgy, raw-nerved, but determined to stay off the tranks. I’m hoping to stay awake all night to avoid the nightmares that drugs denied me. Tomorrow, I will prowl the market for clams and mussels and savory and Spanish onions. Tomorrow, I’ll hear Victoria’s truth.

And that reminds me of the task I’ve been avoiding.
When Comes the Darkness
is on the shelf, waiting, a bookmark at the drawing-and-quartering chapter.

The book refuses to vanish, haunts at the edge of my left visual field …

Remembrance comes with a thud, and I feel faint.

That is what I’d seen in Lyall’s room, at that same edge of my left vision – sitting on his bookshelves between other hardcovers: a title on a spine, the author’s name: Victoria Dare.

The light comes flooding. The deaths in the novel, the two loopings, the stabbing. Grundy and Lyall are copycat killers.

As twilight falls, my train snakes through the Fraser Canyon, the rhythm of the rails soothing me, their gentle jump and bump. Darkness comes suddenly as we pass into a tunnel, then evening light returns. From a few seats down comes a tune from a banjo, musical enough but sardonic to my ears, another jest of merry Zeus.

I nod off. I awake and return to Jung. (“Do not expect psychology to offer a valid explanation for the secret of creativity. Nobody can penetrate to the heart of nature”) I try not to listen to that banjo. My dreams haven’t lied. They’ve always led me to truth. Peter, with his banjo.

I should have undergone my weekly head adjustment today, Allis, but I need to sort things out. I’ll be more clearheaded when we meet next. You’ll seek to reassure me that Peter and
Victoria didn’t conceive a mutant. You’ll tell me I’m not missing vital chromosomes.

We have emerged from the funnel of the Fraser River and are snaking uphill. The banjoist has, thank God, packed it away for now. A night prowl up the aisle reveals, snoring, an unkempt middle-ager. On his lap, not a banjo but a lute. Only a scattered few are in this coach, dozing or with books or crossword puzzles.

It will be two a.m. when I get off. I have a hotel room booked in Kamloops, and in the morning I plan to bike to the starting point of the rally, in Vernon. I’ll do the most punishing leg first, the run to Arrow Lake, then down the Okanagan Valley, my trial run finishing on Thanksgiving Day.

Huff versus Dare is set to lumber back into action in two weeks – God knows for how long. I held off telling Victoria that
When Comes the Darkness
inspired murder, though I will after I’m released from silence – Churko has put a clamp on the investigation. (He doesn’t know I tell you everything.)

So this is classified information, Allis. I’ve unravelled the subterranean message that rang like a gong in my head. Grundy and Lyall are mimicking Clint Huff, the fictional mayor invented by my mother.

I didn’t sleep last Friday night, not a wink, as I worked at the implications, though I woke Churko to demand assurance Grundy and Lyall were still under surveillance. He agreed to meet me for breakfast with Dotty at a nearby café.

Though Dotty had read
When Comes the Darkness
, Churko hadn’t, and he had difficulty with my hypothesis, kept demanding to know why I’d “forgot” seeing the book on Lyall’s shelf. Unconscious observation is a concept I had difficulty explaining.

This was my pitch: Lyall’s interest in the book was whetted by the publicity over the libel case, by the fact that Grundy’s overseer was the author’s son. He had shared the novel with Grundy. They were fascinated by the concept, orgasmic murder, and decided to experiment. What had Huff said in
court?
He obtains sexual release through murdering …
With the first killing, they had found that release, and they sought it again, two more deaths in their pursuit of a climax they could find no other way.

Dotty sought holes. The third fictional murder was by axe. My answer: It was still a form of butchery; they used what was handy. Grundy and Lyall targeted gay men, she reminded me, not women. However misogynous, I argued, the two men were impelled more strongly by their homophobia. This departure from the text seemed significant, though. I couldn’t grasp why.

I pointed out that the recipe in
When Comes the Darkness
calls for a hanging next. “Well, they ain’t going to get that opportunity,” Churko vowed. No longer dismissive of my theory, he went off to buy a copy of the book.

The investigation made significant progress over the next few days. My parking-ticket theory panned out. On the date of the Wilmott murder, the Town & Country had been ticketed near Stanley Park at 7:15 p.m.