The Killing Circle

which they lived.

Yet for all this, I’m certain that whatever hunted these two was the same in both cases. I’m also certain that neither is still alive. Despite what all the forensic psychiatrists and criminologists say, it seems to me that, at least some of the time, unpredictability must be as likely a motivation for murder as any other. A twist. Maybe this is what whoever is doing this likes. Not any one perversity, but the far more unsettling variance afforded by anonymity. If you don’t know why a killer does what he does, it makes him more of a threat. It also makes him harder to catch.

But it’s not the killer’s hypothetical motivation that has me convinced. It’s that I believe whatever followed me home the other night is the same shadow that followed Ronald Pevencey and Carol Ulrich. The bad man from my son’s nightmares who is now making appearances in my own.

I give Emmie the morning off and walk Sam to daycare myself. Every half-block I turn and scan the street to catch the eyes I feel upon us. Sam doesn’t ask why I stop. He just takes my gloved hand in his mitten and holds it, even as he comes within view of his friends in the fenced-in play area, a point at which he would normally run off to join them.

“See you later,” he says. And though I intend to say the same thing, an “I love you” slips out instead. But even this is permitted today.

“Ditto,” Sam says, with a punch to the elbow before stepping through the daycare’s doors.

There’s a new box of video cassettes sitting on my chair at the office. More cable freakshows and wife swaps and snuff amateur video compilations with titles like Falling from Buildings! and Animals that Kill! But it’s what I find under the box that is truly disturbing. A post-it note from the Managing Editor. Come see me. M. It’s the longest piece of correspondence I’ve ever received from her.

The Managing Editor’s office is a glassed-in box in the opposite corner of the newsroom from where I sit. But this is not why I so rarely have any contact with her. She is more a memo drafter, an executive conference attender, an advertiser luncher than a manager of human beings. She has been so successful in this position, it is rumoured that she is currently being headhunted by American TV networks. She is twenty-eight years old.

For now, however, she’s still the one who does the hiring and firing at the National Star. And I’m fully aware, as I approach her glass cube (bulletproof, it is said), that she is more inclined toward the firing than the hiring.

“Patrick. Sit,” she says when I come in, a canine command that is obeyed. She raises an index finger without looking my way, a gesture that indicates she’s in the middle of a thought that could make or break the sentence she’s halfway through. I watch her type out the words she finally harnesses—symbiotic revenue stream—and tap a button to replace her memo-in-progress with a Tahitian beach screensaver.

“I’m sure you know why you’re here,” she says, turning to face me. Her eyes do a quick scan of my person. I seem to disappoint her, as expected.

“No, I don’t, actually.”

“There’s been a complaint.”

“From a reader?”

The Managing Editor smiles at this. “No, not a reader. A real complaint. Quite real.”

“How real are we talking?”

She rolls her eyes ceilingward. A signal that she means an office high up the ladder. So high up, she dare not speak its name.

“We have to look out for our properties. Our brands. And when one of those brands is undermined from within one of our own properties…” She lets this thought go unfinished, as though where it leads is too unsavoury to even consider.

“You’re talking about the MegaStar! review.”

“It was upsetting. People were upset.”

“You don’t look upset.”

“But I am.”

“So this is serious.”

“There are certain calls from certain offices I don’t like to get.”

“Should I be calling my lawyer?”

“You have a lawyer?”

“No.”

The Managing Editor pushes a stray hair off her forehead. A brief, but distinctly female motion that, I regret to say, makes me like her a little.

“Are we clear on all this then?”

This question would be funny, given the preceding conversation, if my answer weren’t yes. She’s made herself perfectly clear.

I stop by Tim Earheart’s desk on the way back to my own. I’m not really expecting to find him there. He usually prefers to work in the reeking, greasy bunker that goes by the name of the Smoking Room. Tim doesn’t think of himself as a smoker, though he’d eat cigarettes if he couldn’t smoke them when he’s up against a deadline. Which he must be today, given the talk of a potential killer on the loose. Yet here he is. Throwing the reporter’s tools of pen, notepad, dictaphone and digital camera into the knapsack he proudly brought back with him from Afghanistan, complete with bullet hole. A prop he says has got him more “intern action” than he knows what to do with.

“She fire you?” he asks. This is the question first asked of anyone caught walking out of the Managing Editor’s office.

“Not yet. Where you off to?”

“Ward’s Island. They found one of the missing persons.”

“Which one?”

“The Ulrich woman. A dozen or so parts of her, anyway. Spread out over a hundred-foot stretch of beach.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yessir. It’s ugly.”

“They know who did it?”

“Right now all they’re saying is they’re following up on every lead. Which means they don’t have a clue.”

“He cut her up?”

“He. She. They.”

“Who would do that?”

“Somebody bad.”

“It’s insane.”

“Or not. Just got off the phone with the police profiler guy. He’s thinking there’s a point to the way the body was on display like that. Some sort of announcement.”

“Saying what?”

“How the fuck do I know? ‘I’m here,’ I guess. ‘Come and get me, assholes.”’

Tim slings the knapsack over his shoulders. Even through his aviator sunglasses you can see the excited gleam in his eyes.

“She lived near you, didn’t she?” he says.

“Sam recognized her. She had a kid about his age. They went to the same playground.”

“Creepy.”

“It is.”

“I’m going over there now on the ferry. Wanna come?”