Scarborough, Suburb of Toronto: 1:46am, June 28, 1997
Truth for Wyn Rhys was not an idea, but a destination. The resolution of a case he saw as a point on a map, and the facts, in the form of witness testimonies, documents, and physical evidence, were rails on which his mind could travel, like a train. Imagination had no place on the journey. It led only to other points on the map: Speculation, Hearsay, Conjecture, all of which were diversions from Truth, and, in the world of investigations, a waste of time and money. That was why he planned every case the way a traveller would compile an itinerary, the object being only to get to the destination in the quickest and most expedient manner possible. Other levels of government depended on him to do this. There was no line in his budget for layovers or sightseeing.
As an investigator for the Special Police Oversight Agency, Wyn worked the night shift, 8pm to 4am, the time in which it was most likely that a crime would be committed. Though he shared this shift with other investigators in the Greater Toronto Area, the person closest to the location of the crime was the one dispatched, and because he lived in Metro, he was called often. Much of the shift was spent in SPOA’s headquarters on Bay Street, analyzing evidence from other investigations or report writing, but he was always highly alert, waiting for the call. After 4am it could be expected that whatever chaos had been perpetrated would have come to its irreversible conclusion. By that time, anyone with a grudge or a plot to unleash fresh hell was safely tucked in bed, dreaming uncomplicated dreams of revenge, windfall, or victory. They might rise in a few hours and tumble down the rabbit hole of fate before noon, but then they became the next shift’s problem, not Wyn’s.
Sometimes, instead of simply waiting for the call at his desk, Wyn would sign out one of the fleet vehicles and take long, leisurely drives around the city. As he slowly drove along Toronto’s residential streets, straight and unwavering as lines on a circuit board, he would smoke and think about a case he was working on, about other cases he’d completed and the results of his recommendations, sometimes about more mundane things, like household conversations with his wife. Occasionally he turned on the radio and listened to broadcasts from other, day lit countries, but while thinking and half-listening, he was also closely observing his surroundings, on the lookout for suspicious behaviour. Sometimes he went to high-crime neighbourhoods and surveyed the swaggers and jabs of young hoods on street corners, slowing down and making his presence felt whenever he perceived trouble brewing. But once in a while he patrolled serene Canadian suburbia, if only to enjoy the unexpected curves and culs de sac. The streetlights were far apart, casting some homes in an almost impenetrable darkness, giving the illusion of peace, of privacy. But darkness was hardly the friend of a potential victim of violent crime. And there were far fewer police officers out patrolling in suburban neighbourhoods than in urban ones, allowing for even more opportunities for the enterprising burglar or rapist.
Wyn had once been a police officer, but only as part of his training to become a criminal investigator for the London Metropolitan Police in Britain, which, in turn, had provided him the skills he needed as a police investigator in Canada. As a law enforcer, he’d been involved in one or two dodgy situations with suspects and, during the Brixton riots in 1984, had worn riot gear and pressed marauders into compact clusters for arresting. Though he never carried a deadly weapon in the UK, he had been involved in a takedown where a suspect had run out into traffic and got himself killed, and the shock of watching the man caught and crushed, mercilessly, between two fast-moving vehicles stayed with him for several weeks afterwards. But he’d felt no responsibility for the man’s death, no guilt. Though it had been several years since he’d served on a force, the straight-backed authority of the police officer still clung to him even now as he sat in the SUV, his seat pushed as far back as possible to accommodate his above average height, window open to the intimate warmth of a late June night into which he exhaled Rothman’s smoke, one hand leisurely draped in the crook of the steering wheel, the other, his cigarette hand, on his knee. Mostly, nothing happened on these patrols. But on this night, something did.
It started as a keening sound in the distance and seemed to come from more than one direction, then, into the thicket of houses, blue and red and white beams glanced and ricocheted. Around a corner police cruisers suddenly swung into view and streaked past. Wyn stuck his cigarette into his mouth to free up his hands and made a tight, screeching three-point turn with the Jeep in the middle of the broad street and followed them. From other streets other emergency vehicles came into view: fire trucks, paramedics, all converging on a blinking urgent point on a map, and congregated near a modest bungalow set back on a large expanse of green lawn that was fenced on all four sides. Two empty police cruisers were already parked out front; likely officers had been the first on the scene and had called for backup. Wyn knew not to park onsite; he drove by at normal speed and parked around the corner, grabbed his notebook and cigarettes and checked his jacket pocket for his identification, then made his way to the residence on foot. By the activity at the scene, he knew that something very serious had transpired, perhaps was still unfolding. He approached a police officer holding a roll of caution tape and displayed his ID. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Jesus Murphy, you guys are quick,” said the constable. But knowing that Wyn was from SPOA, he was taciturn. The cops didn’t like SPOA investigators and had several colourful nicknames for them. Wyn had heard them all. The officer pointed to the house. “Armed civilian, a guy, in the basement. Shot by two officers from 43 Division.”
“Dead?”
The officer nodded curtly and began unrolling the tape.
“Was he the resident, or an intruder?”
“Resident. Made the 911 call. Got a casualty in the garage.”
“Any officers injured?”
The cop shook his head and focused on creating a perimeter. Wyn saw activity in the backyard near the garage and went to take a closer look. Lights were everywhere, ranging in long beams over the interior of the building, illuminating its dark corners from which ordinary garden implements: rakes, spades and the like cast long, malevolent shadows. There was some shouting of ‘step back, step back’ and of hasty instructions among a huddle in the centre. Wyn was stopped by a paramedic who tried to block his view inside. “No one past this point,” he ordered.
“I’m with SPOA,” said Wyn, reaching for his ID, but the paramedic shook his head.
“No way. Got a victim back here. Medical personnel only.”
Wyn, who was six and half feet tall, craned his neck a little to see beyond the paramedic, over the bristling activity of the ER crew. A woman hung from a rope tied to a rafter, her face somewhat obscured by long, blood-draggled hair. She wore a pink pyjama top but nothing from the waist down. There were stab wounds to her abdomen and lacerations on her bare legs, likely sustained before she was asphyxiated. Three large men carefully prepared to let her down, one cutting the rope with a box cutter, the other two alongside her, bracing themselves for her descent. “Careful. Easy does it,” someone said. By her head’s mournful droop and the supplicatory way her hands rested against her thighs, she looked like a funerary monument. The police must have found vital signs, otherwise they would not have called in the paramedics, but whether or not she was alive still was uncertain. She crumpled, limp as laundry taken from the line into the basket of hands below.
Wyn looked away and retreated back to the driveway, trembling a little, and lit a cigarette. Despair tried to scale the walls of his dispassion but he held firm against it by remaining focused on facts, or possible facts. Couldn’t have been an intruder; the man of the house would have been the first victim, and as he’d been shot dead by the officers who’d responded to the call, must have been armed and dangerous. The man was the killer, and had called the police in a panic, or out of remorse. In cases like this, the police had to be cautious that the suspect isn’t seeking to lure them into a trap, or, on the flip side, lure them into killing him. Officer-assisted suicide had been on the rise in the last few years.
Death was part of the job, he knew that, and most of the time it bothered Wyn little. On average, he had to look at a dead body every four weeks or so. He’d started out as a police officer at age 21 and was now 35, so he’d seen approximately 170 corpses in his career. Far less than a paramedic, but far more than a parking meter attendant, a lawyer, a retail salesperson, or the Prime Minister. He’d been present at horrific car accidents, seen bodies bifected, decapitated, bearing the brands of flame, or swollen after drowning. He’d stepped around bodies that to him were merely part of the crime scene; they weren’t fathers or someone’s child, just evidence that had to be examined in the same way as bullet trajectories. At post-mortems he’d stood by as forensic pathologists disassembled bodies with the efficiency reserved for unpacking a suitcase and with the same intimate knowledge of what was contained therein. Organs removed and cradled carefully, almost lovingly, before being immersed in formaldehyde solutions that turned them into murky jewels. Saws from Home Depot were deployed to the skull to remove a brain in which all recollections of childhood wonder, first love, the sensory memories of petting a cat or being kissed, were secreted and forever locked in its coils and volutes.
Finishing his cigarette and tossing it into the street, away from the scene itself, Wyn started for the house, but was summoned by a youngish woman at the taped-off perimeter. She looked very anxious, almost tearful. “Are they okay?” she called to him.
Wyn came closer. “Did you call 911?” he asked, taking out his notebook.
“No. We heard an argument but nothing - Oh, my god,” the woman interrupted herself, placing her hands on her temples. “They have kids. I know their kids. Oh my god. Are they okay?” She put her hands over her mouth, staring at the garage.
It was not his job to be reassuring, so Wyn simply said, “I’m very sorry but could you please give me their names and ages? Ma’am?” She was looking over his shoulder at the garage but he sidestepped to block her view. “Help me out please, if you can. Names?”
“Oh my god…I don’t know. Um…Adele is the mother. Liam. Nicholas. Little boys, twins. They’re just babies. Oh my god.” This last refrain, or punctuation, was involuntary, like a hiccough. A man approached her and put his arm around her shoulders. “Are you a cop?” he asked.
Wyn showed him his ID. “Do you know the family?”
The man, aware of the seriousness of the situation, nodded gravely. He gave Wyn the names of the dead man and his wife. “They have three kids. We heard some arguing about an hour ago, but they argued a lot, so…” he seemed uncomfortable with his decision to not call the police himself, sooner, and jerked his chin at the building. “Are they okay?” he asked.
Wyn ignored the question. “Did you say three children?” he asked.
The woman opened her mouth and coughed, like she was about to be sick. “Three,” she said. “There’s a girl. Jennifer? Julia? I can’t remember.” She shook her head and turned to her husband, who automatically put his arm around her and drew her away from the scene.
Heart thrumming, Wyn returned to the site of the hangings, touched the shoulder of one of the medical personnel. “How many victims have you found?” The woman held up three fingers. “This woman, and two toddlers, drowned in the bathtub,” she said.
Somewhere on the premises was a third child.
**
In situ. That was how everything, including bodies, had to remain when an investigative team came to the scene of an accident or a murder. In situ meant ‘in position’ and that position could mean just one or many positions, all at once, if a body had been broken or torn into pieces. Upon confirming they were dead, the victims were left in the places fate had abandoned them to be photographed, examined, discussed. They were just part of the scene and, in the case of high impact deaths, such as car accidents, sometimes ineradicable from it. Tissue could be embedded with glass and glass with tissue, blood could sneak under carpets and floorboards and drip through ceilings onto the heads of people living below. In one of his examinations of a car wreck, Wyn had once discovered a finger under the back seat.
He didn’t question emergency personnel on the main floor of the bungalow to confirm that it had been searched and that no other family member had been discovered; this was his own small quest. The kitchen and bathroom had been the sites of the murders, he could tell by the concentration of homicide experts, and did not intrude. At the other end of the house there was little activity. Wyn quietly checked the bedrooms. The room where the little boys had slept still smelled of talcum powder, milk, and faintly of urine, and retained some of the ambiance of their slumbering bodies. Kevin and Adele’s room was no more haphazard than any bedroom shared by a couple. The room of the third child, a daughter, was the smallest and the most tidy, a boundary line between childhood and young womanhood: stuffed toys on a miniature wing-backed chair, posters of pop bands on the mauve walls. The bed was unmade, though in the least disruptive way possible, the corner of the coverlet turned down to form a tidy triangle, the rest undisturbed. Wyn noticed the pillow was missing. It lay on the floor near the open closet door. He peered into the closet, holding his breath. It was empty, but he knew, as certainly as he knew an eggshell once contained albumen and a yolk, that the third child had hidden there, and only lately vacated it.
That left the basement and the room in which the father had been killed. As everyone had been more concerned about the scene in the garage and only Wyn knew of the possibility of another victim, and because he and his team were the ones in charge of the scene where the officers had deployed their weapons, no one had yet infiltrated it. Like a man under hypnosis, he moved automatically to the door to the basement and opened it to a lit stairwell. The air changed about halfway down the flight, from warm humid to cool humid, from embrace to release. The people upstairs were just foot thump and murmur, with the occasional clatter and shout.
At the bottom of the stairs was a corridor with doors, all closed along one side. Wyn turned on the light and the white walls glowed. There was nothing to denote violence, but he knew from experience that violence jumped out at you from clouded corners, waited, breath held, around the edges of doors. The only open door was at the end, and the darkness that seemed to encroach on the light pulsed with iniquity. The hall was carpeted, and Wyn noted how his tread was completely absorbed. The dead man may not have heard the police closing in on him.
As he walked he knocked at, and then opened doors into small rooms: a laundry room, an office with file boxes stacked to the ceiling, a toilet with a tiny vanity. None of the rooms had closets or beds, nowhere to hide for even the smallest child. Like the rooms upstairs, they were reassuring for their unremarkableness. As he came closer to the shadowy entrance to the last room, Wyn thought he could taste blood on the edges of his tongue, shiny metallic red. That was where the man had been killed. Perhaps it was also the locale of the last murder. It would certainly lend credence to the officers’ testimonies if they’d known about a third victim before confronting the suspect. They may have discovered him in the act. There may be two bodies waiting for him. Wyn sucked the inside of his cheeks into the space between his teeth and bit down hard, hard enough to taste his own blood.
At the entrance lay a toy, a small stuffed animal. He crouched and picked it up, not certain why. It was unsoiled, except by love. He put it under his nose and sniffed. Child smells of milk spit and snot rubbed deep into the nap. He put it in his pocket, then felt along the inside of the door frame for a light switch. He found it and turned it on.
The first thing he noticed was the bottoms of two pairs of feet on the floor, side by each, both barefoot. One pallid pair belonged to a man and was lax, only the heels touching. The other pair was a child’s and was pinkly upright, alert. Never had Wyn seen feet so eloquent. The man was dead, the child was alive.
In three short steps he was in the room proper. It was also unremarkable: tv, sofa, toys strewn about. There was a spray of blood on the wall above the sofa and some gore. Below him he could see that the man appeared young and healthy, at the prime of his life, which was unadulterated in all respects but for one: he had no face. The place where it should be was only a bubble of black-red, featureless, indecipherable. His hands had been placed on his chest, one over the other. A girl between the age of eight or ten lay alongside him and mimicked the pose, her own arms folded over her breast and her eyes closed, but Wyn could hear her breathing, quick in and quick out, like any child. She wore only scant shorts and a tank top in silky fabric – pyjamas. Their heart pattern was obscured by dark splotches of blood, but Wyn was certain it wasn’t her own. Shock, he knew, expressed itself in remarkably strange ways. Had she been in the room when the shooting took place? Had she seen the officers open fire, heard her own father plead with them? Had she been visible to the officers, they would have removed her immediately, so all Wyn could think was that she’d been concealed somewhere (behind the sofa, maybe) and only emerged when the room became silent again.
He knew he’d made virtually no sound, and perhaps should have spoken to alert the child to his presence, but he must have touched her foot with one of his, because her eyes suddenly flew open and she stared up at him in the disconcerting way sleepwalkers looked at things, like she was looking through him, or over him, at something quite frightening beyond. They were black, the iris and pupil indistinguishable. Before she could move, he quickly crouched again and touched her ankle. “You’re safe,” he said. “My name is Wyn and I’m with the police. What’s your name?”
The girl didn’t move, her black eyes didn’t blink. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. “That’s okay,” said Wyn. “You don’t have to tell me yet. Are you hurt?” The girl slowly shook her head. “I’m going to pick you up, all right? Just nod to show me you understand.” She remained motionless, so Wyn, remembering the stuffed toy, now took it out of his pocket and placed it on her chest. Instinctively, she clutched it. She was part of the crime scene, but he couldn’t leave her in it. He should have called someone down but he didn’t want to scare her by shouting. In this hushed room, with a dead man, it would be unseemly to move too abruptly or speak too loudly. He had to extract her from the horror as gently and carefully as he could. Slipping one hand into the warm hollows behind her knees, he placed the other under her neck. She had long black hair, quite curly, and as Wyn lifted her head, some of it stuck to the carpet where her father’s blood had soaked through. Though lanky, she was narrow-limbed and rather light, but Wyn, cautious as he was to leave as little evidence of his own presence in the room, stumbled because he didn’t want to step too far back. She put her arms around his neck, one hand still clasping the toy, and tucked her head under his chin, and that small, trusting movement reached into his chest and clutched his heart. He could tell by holding her that she had no broken bones; indeed, she seemed completely unharmed, and did not cry out or stiffen when he lifted her. The ocean of death all around had not so much as dampened the tips of her feet. After what he had seen in the garage, he felt a surge of gratitude and relief so intense that it actually brought tears to his eyes. Alive ,he thought, over and over. He held the child tight against him and put his chin against the top of her head, on her luxurious hair. Below the high-pitched scent of blood was the benign, untainted aroma of baking bread.
**
By exceptional chance, Wyn managed to talk to the involved officers before the police association could get a lawyer to the scene to remove them. They were both on the sofa in the living room. Their eyes had the faraway, thoughtful look Wyn recognized among people involved in a traumatic event. They were watching it unfold in front of them, over and over.
Wyn segregated them and spoke to the younger one first. Constable Jameson, told him that the 911 call had come from Kevin Wolfe himself. “He was really panicked,” he said. “We thought that someone had broken into the house and attacked his family. He didn’t tell us nothing. Just to come quick.” Jameson sniffed, but it sounded more habitual, a tic in times of stress, not emotional. “We got there and the house seemed quiet, but we noticed a light on in the garage and went there first. We found the mother and called for medics right away. Called for back-up. We didn’t know what we were up against. Didn’t know about the little boys until after we took down the father. Found them in the bathtub, both drowned.” He sniffed again, ran one hand under his nose. Wyn noticed a tattoo on his wrist, of a black heart.
When asked about the whereabouts of Kevin Wolfe at that time, Jameson was a bit vague. “Got him in the basement. Rec room. You know when I was a kid I used to think it was ‘wreck’ room. Like a car wreck. Sure is now.” He fumbled in his pockets and took out some cigarettes. They weren’t supposed to smoke in residents’ homes, but Wyn didn’t stop him from lighting up.
Now he had to ask the tough questions. “When did you know for certain that the husband was responsible for the attacks?” he asked.
The officer thought for a moment. ”I don’t know. I guess when we couldn’t see evidence of a break-in. Or maybe it was the fact that when he saw us enter the house, he took off for the basement. I mean, we announced ourselves and everything, but he fled.”
“What was going through your mind when you breached the room and confronted Wolfe?”
The officer didn’t turn his head to face Wyn, but his eyes darted in his direction, then away. “Whaddaya mean?”
“I think I made the question clear.”
“You saying that we killed him on purpose?” asked the Constable.
“I didn’t say anything of the kind.” Careful, Wyn thought. Don’t lose him. But the fragile trust between them faltered, then winked out.
“This is bullshit. I want my lawyer,” said Jameson, moving to stand. Wyn used the officious tack. “You have to comply with a SPOA investigation,” he warned, though technically involved officers could plead trauma and remove themselves from a scene, or be removed.
“Fuckin’ right I do.” Jameson lumbered away with his coffee and cigarette, the blanket that a medical officer had draped around his shoulders slipping to the floor.
**
The other officer, Constable Woloshyn, was much older and more prepared for Wyn’s questions about motive. “We didn’t know for certain that he was the suspect,” he said calmly. “We were responding to threats. He said he had a gun.”
Wyn didn’t need to check his notes, but pretended to anyway. “Your partner didn’t mention a gun.”
“Yeah, well, he did. In the heat of the moment we’re not gonna remember the same shit, right? It was a tense situation. We just saw his wife hanging from a rafter in the garage, cut up like a – “ he broke off here, his voice like a saw caught in the cut. “It gets you in a state of – you know, like shock. We were shocked. But it didn’t mean we couldn’t carry out our duty. We wanted to take him away in cuffs – you bet we did. See him brought to justice. But it didn’t work out that way.” Woloshyn also didn’t make eye contact with Wyn as he spoke, choosing to look down at his hands, which were methodically reducing a Styrofoam cup to tiny specks that fell to the floor like snow.
“Did you see anyone else in the room when you entered it?” Wyn thought of the girl, whom he’d carried upstairs to much commotion among the paramedics. The woman he’d queried at the garage was the first to take her, and Wyn recognized the same wonder and gratitude he’d felt only moments before. He’d been reluctant to relinquish the child, she was like a treasure he’d drawn up from a shipwreck. The girl – he didn’t know her name – had clung to him, briefly. Her eyes crinkled with fright as she was taken away, but she didn’t struggle.
Woloshyn frowned. “Anyone else? Like another suspect?”
“Like the third child.”
The constable closed his eyes. “No,” he said, opening them. “No, we didn’t. If we had we would’ve alerted the medics. Taken her upstairs, like you just did.”
“How many shots were fired? And by whom?” asked Wyn.
Woloshyn sighed. “I shot him. Don’t hang this on the kid. He’s just outta college.”
Wyn wrote this down. “We can tell if he discharged his weapon,” he said.
The constable finally looked at Wyn, a look that was at once pleading and disdainful. “Geez, you guys are somethin’ else. Y’know, you’re lucky we’re even talking to you. You should be talking to our lawyers,” he said, then sighed. “I’ll take the heat for it, okay? Don’t fuck him over.”
“You know I can’t do that. The evidence speaks for itself,” said Wyn.
“Evidence, yeah. Look at the evidence. All’s I know is, if I saw what I saw in that garage when I was in my first year of duty I would’ve shat myself. In my opinion, that officer’s a hero.” He curled his upper lip at Wyn. “But I guess that’s not how you guys would see it.”
**
By the time Wyn had finished talking to the involved officers, early summer dawn was breaking. Sylvia Hughes, a recently hired police association lawyer, appeared at around 5 am to take charge of them. Her small black eyes had launched grenades at Wyn when she learned that he’d spoken to them, which, while not expressly prohibited in the Police Act, was considered to be poor etiquette, given that the men were shaken up by events. Wyn would later testify that he had asked for and received permission from the involved officers to submit to questioning, thereby making their statements admissible later, during their trial. He then remained on the scene, interviewing neighbours, talking to the forensics team as they collected data from the room in the basement where Wolfe had been shot. Smoking and smoking and smoking. Drinking coffee that just kept appearing in his hand. Sometimes images of the bodies on the gurneys or the drooping head of Adele Wolfe leapt from his peripheral vision to taunt him, but he subdued them with his black pen and notebook, with facts. He took notes almost deliriously, filling page after page of his small notebook with his cramped, incomprehensible script. He was the only person who required the notes, so it didn’t matter that only he could read them later.
The neighbours said that Kevin Wolfe had been a young lawyer with a large firm downtown. It was a stressful job and he had a busy family life, but not extraordinary. There had been some late night arguments and tires squealing out of the driveway in the wee hours, but nothing to lead anyone to believe that Kevin had homicidal leanings or was losing his grip. He sometimes drank too much at parties and had once accused Adele of cheating on him in front of a group at a barbeque. Otherwise the family seemed all right, if a bit private. The neighbourhood was friendly; someone would have alerted the police if they had suspected that Kevin Wolfe was dangerous. About the wife and children little was learned. Adele was pleasant, if a bit remote, ‘distracted’, as the woman Wyn had met on the driveway put it. She had her hands full with the twin boys and looked tired, much of the time. The daughter was seen on her bike frequently, riding in circles in front of her house, supervised, usually, by her mother from the front porch, but sometimes alone.
Allan Guthrie from the city’s homicide department arrived only twenty minutes after the bodies had been taken to the hospital, where, he reported, they’d been pronounced DOA. The boys were most definitely dead before they’d been drawn from the bathtub, where they should have remained for investigative purposes, but no one could bear the sight of them. Adele had been faintly alive when she’d been cut down, since the chair beneath her feet had not been kicked away, but she succumbed to her injuries in the ambulance.
The murder of the family was Guthrie’s investigation, but he congratulated Wyn on finding the third child quickly and thanked him for his help. The girl had been taken in by a neighbour pending pick up by one of her mother’s siblings.
Guthrie stood for some time smoking a cigarello near the garage as the forensics team worked, watching them from a short distance but not interfering, as the scene was delicate and any intrusion, even by a seasoned expert, could contaminate it. When the team finished he joined Wyn as he stood in the backyard, himself smoking and ruminating in the rose-peach glow of dawn. There was no rule prohibiting Wyn from sharing his notes on the officers’ testimony, so he briefed Guthrie on what he’d been told, particularly the words of Woloshyn about young Jameson being a hero. Guthrie, listened with the same stillness evident in the way he surveyed crime scenes, taking in each detail and mentally turning it over in his hands, like a fascinating artifact. Finally he shook his head as he looked around the meticulous garden. “Y’know I’m retiring in a coupla months?” he said, not remarking on Wyn’s observations about the officers. “Been dreading it for years. Retirement just gives you more time to remember shit. At least at work I always have new shit to look at. This is some swan song, if this case is gonna be my last. Ever worked in homicide, investigator?”
Wyn pulled out his own cigarettes, Rothman Kings, had one in his mouth and lit it before he even realized he’d decided to smoke. Habit. He really should quit. He was up to three packs a day. “For about ten years. But then I married and my wife didn’t fancy me working in that field. Too many psychopaths, schizos and the unquiet dead.”
“The dead are quiet enough, which is just fine with me, even if it would make my job easier if they could talk,” said Guthrie. “But I don’t want to know what they were saying, thinking, feeling in those last hours. You guys at SPOA, at least you always know who pulled the trigger.”
“We may know that, but we’re powerless to charge when we think there’s been misconduct or negligence. We can only make recommendations.” Recommendations that resulted in less than one percent rate of charges. To date, not one of those few charges had made it to trial, let alone a conviction.
“Yeah, and I know Henry. He doesn’t like to rile up the police association.” Henry Schell was the Director of SPOA, the fourth person to hold the post in less than seven years. The Directorship was among the least sought after portfolios in the provincial government for two reasons: the first being that SPOA’s mandate was difficult to reinforce – police chiefs routinely ignored the stipulation that they contact SPOA in the event of a death or serious injury precipitated by one of their officers. The second was that the police union was powerful and vocal; they deemed SPOA an interference in their duty to serve and protect. Oversight was a new concept, heretofore, the police had investigated themselves.
“I’m not sure how you plan to handle this particular case,” Guthrie went on, looking at some point in the distance. “But if you recommend a charge of manslaughter, I wouldn’t stand in your way.”
This was a rather shocking admission, but Wyn wasn’t taking it at face value. Guthrie, though usually incorruptible enough, could be fishing for information from Wyn that he would share with the chief of 43 Division later. “Such a charge against an officer has never been considered, let alone upheld, in the entire Western hemisphere,” he said only.
Guthrie kept staring in the distance, his eyes squinting against the advancing summer sun. “As I told ya, I’m retiring in a coupla months; I don’t really give a shit anymore, so I’ll say this: if that cop was off-duty, say, or was just a civilian neighbour who cornered the man in his basement, as these officers did, and killed him with a weapon, legal or not, I’d recommend a manslaughter charge. Add to that the fact that there was a kid in there with him who could have been caught in the crossfire, and you have a charge of negligence endangering life. Imagine if the guy took his kid and made off in his car and they pursued him and caused an accident. This is no different. And after seeing what Kevin Wolfe did to his family, you can bet emotions were running high when they chased him to the basement. I was down there. The man had no weapon, ‘less you count Tickle Me Elmo.“
“I was told he made threats,” said Wyn.
“’Course that’s what they’d tell you.” Guthrie pulled out his cigarillos and lit another one. “How long’d they been left alone after the incident? Fifteen, twenty minutes?”
Wyn thought about how long it had taken to deal with the third child. “Closer to half an hour,” he said. “Enough time to collude, but I didn’t get the sense that they did. I think they were in shock.”
“Woloshyn can say what he wants about heroism; no judge would rule this as self-defense on the part of the officers. I think you can make a case for intent to harm the suspect, due to a heightened emotional state after seeing casulties.”
“That is almost impossible to prove, Al. Intent on the part of the involved officers is notoriously difficult to quantify. They’ll just say they were doing their job. That’s what they always say. That’s why no officer is ever charged with manslaughter or murder.”
“Not that extraordinary. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a death of an unarmed, middle-class white man, not a drug-crazed thug packing heat in a back alley of Regent.” Regent Park was a notorious part of East Toronto that had a high Jamaican immigrant population and trouble with gangs. There had been a few police incidents there that had resulted in the deaths of young black men, which had aroused public condemnation.
“Ah, but what about blue suicide?” Though better known as ‘suicide by cop’ Wyn preferred the more poetic term. This was a new phenomenon in law enforcement which had garnered more attention in the U.S., but Canadian forces were becoming alert to it. It was defined as an incident whereby a suspect put officers in an untenable position: either to kill the suspect or be killed, or allow an innocent bystander to become a victim. Hostage takers, for instance, might be suicidal. The concept of officer-assisted suicide was controversial because it could be used to absolve the police of misconduct. It didn’t occur to Jameson and Woloshyn to mention it, and Wyn didn’t suggest it to them.
Guthrie shrugged. “The guy may have lured the officers downstairs with the idea of provoking them to kill him. But he had to have put himself in the kind of danger – like running into traffic or jumping in front of a train - that forces a cop to disable him to save him. There was no imminent danger in that rec room. I found no weapon on or near the suspect. Threats from behind a closed door to kill himself or someone else don’t cut it.”
“I know all that, Al. But we’d have to have a watertight case before putting forth recommendations of a manslaughter charge. To my mind, the third child is key, but she may not talk, or we may not be able to access her testimony because of her age. I tried to get some information from her, but she was unresponsive.”
“You probably don’t want to bring the kid into it. Bad optics for your organization, relying on the testimony of a minor. She was in the room when her father was shot. Prove that and you’ve got a very strong case.”
Wyn sighed. His eyes burned from the powerful light of the summer sun which was drying the dew off the grass now, making it steam. The garden looked so refreshed, so benign, but the new heat intensified the smell of death in the garage. “Any idea why he didn’t kill the third child?” he asked. “Why he called the police?”
“You worked in criminal investigations. We don’t care that much about motive when we’ve got a mountain of physical evidence to support a conviction. Why does anyone kill the innocent? And what mechanism makes them stop killing? If we knew the whys, Rhys, we could maybe prevent the hows and whens, and who. Maybe she hid long enough that he had a chance to take a deep breath and look around, or maybe she talked him down. Maybe he was tired after killing the other three. It doesn’t look premeditated, so I’d guess that he was experiencing a kind of psychosis, from drugs or an untreated mental illness. Beyond that we’ll never know, and frankly, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to spend any more time than I have to in the mind of a killer. In a way I’m relieved that the cops did take him down, saves the long process of convicting the bastard. I bet he’s glad to be dead too. Won’t be haunted by the images of those poor kids and that lovely woman hanging in his garage. Wish we could say the same.”
Wyn moved to pull out his cigarettes again, then stopped himself. “You say you’re retiring, but perhaps you might consider a post-homicide career as an investigator at SPOA?” he suggested. SPOA was thought to be less stressful, and for 50-year old retirees who didn’t like golf, a decent-paying diversion. He could use someone like Guthrie on his side. Wyn was not exactly popular among his investigator brethren.
“Christ, no. I got grandkids. I wanna travel, see some of the achievements of the human race, not the crazy stupid shit people do to each other. That family,” Guthrie shook his head, sad, but not disbelieving. “I’m done with it. You’re young,” he said, taking in Wyn’s unstreaked black hair, his still youthful features. “But I reckon by around fifty you’ll be ready to pack it in too.”
Wyn disagreed. Maybe he’d be done with SPOA by fifty, but he wouldn’t give up being an investigator. He had only married three years before and he and Anna had recently become parents, but investigating was still the most satisfying thing in his life.