The Killing Circle

don’t know, I’m just so tired”). I tell her I need to see her. That I miss her.

“I’m not sure I can do that,” she says.

“We can just talk.”

“What would we talk about?”

“It wouldn’t have to be…bad things.”

“But that’s all there is.”

She goes on to tell me how she’s gotten a couple more signs from “him”. When I ask what these indications are, she goes silent. Her breath clicking in her throat.

“Maybe, if we stay together, we could protect each other,” I suggest.

“You don’t believe that.”

“I said maybe.”

“I think he wants us apart. For each of us to have our own course.”

“And if we don’t play along—”

“—he’ll separate us. Or worse. We’ve got to play this the way he wants.”

And look how well that’s turning out, I want to say. Along with another remark that comes to me too late: What do we think he wants anyway? If it is Patrick Rush feeling the profoundest regret for having used his name for the title of a ripped-off novel, then mission accomplished. Mea culpa. And if it’s just random lives he wants to get back to taking, then I’m certainly not the one standing in his way.

Random lives.

This is the puzzle that fills the next hour. Buried away down here in the Crypt, mapping out the few connections I can make in my journal.

Carol Ulrich.

Ronald Pevencey.

Jane Whirter.

And now Petra Dunn.

Not a thing common between them. But in his mind, there must have been. For the Sandman, there was nothing random about them at all. All that’s required is to think like a psychopath.

Well, I think. I’m a retired writer. How hard could it be?

Even in the four years since the Kensington Circle, the available venues for writers’ groups have multiplied. Libraries, bookshops, coffee houses—but also rehab clinics, synagogues, yoga ashrams, Alcoholics Anonymous. There is no limit to the Self-Writing Seminars, (Her)story Workshops, Focus Group Your Novel! round tables one might sign up for. And I sign up for them all. Or as many as I can. Not to learn, to exchange, to discover myself. But to retrace the steps that have delivered me here. The same journey all murderers of passion are obliged to make: a return to the scene of the crime.

With Sam safe at Stacey’s, I am free to skip from one circle to another over the sweltering remainder of the week. As I expresswayed and subwayed to the various gatherings uptown, crosstown, and out-of-town, I asked the same question. And a couple of times I got answers.

“Do these names mean anything to you?” I would inquire of my fellow circlers, and offer to them the first names (and surnames if I knew them) of each member of the Kensington Circle. By the end of the week I had confirmed what I’d suspected.

In a basement in Little Italy, I learned that William had been a participant for a time several years ago, and was going to be asked to leave (the boyhood tales of an animal-skinning sociopath too much to take) before he abruptly stopped showing up all on his own. I heard much the same thing in a Coffee Time in Scarborough, a public library in Lawrence Park, a gay bar on Jarvis Street: big scary man with too-real horror story joins writers’ club, then disappears.

And that’s not all.

There were other names I mentioned in the circles. Names of those I had never met, but were of increasing significance to my situation, nevertheless. Carol Ulrich. Ronald Pevencey. (I left out Jane Whirter, as she had lived in Vancouver for over twenty years prior to her death.) Names that some of the people I asked had heard of before. But not only because Ulrich and Pevencey were among the Sandman’s first round of victims. They were remembered because, at one time or another, both of them were participants in some of the city’s writing circles.

This is what I have, and what, if newspaper reports are to be believed, the police don’t: a connection between the Sandman’s “random” victims. They were writers. And somehow it got them killed.

23

As I walk home through the city, I take out my cell and pretend to speak to someone at the other end. It’s not the first time I’ve done this. You can be the only pedestrian not on the phone for so long before you start to feel yourself disappear. You need to text, to touch base, to screen incoming. We speed-dial, therefore we are.

This time, when I check my messages at home, I’m surprised to hear a voice I recognize. Ivan.

“I’ve had an…encounter.”

A pause so long it’s like he’s forgotten to hang up. Then he remembers.

Click.

An encounter.

I call the number he gave me as I pass a group of gigglers standing outside the sex-shop window, tapping at the glass (“What is that, Brenda?” “I dunno. Must be something you put where the sun don’t shine.”).

Ivan picks up on the first ring.

“Patrick?”

“You left a message—”

“Museum station. Tomorrow. Southbound platform. Ten a.m.”

Click.

Without looking for it, I’m now like everyone else, the millions streaming past on sidewalk and street. I’ve got plans for the weekend.

Moments after arriving home there’s a knock at the door.

“Finished your book. Very interesting,” Detective Ramsay says, once again walking past me into the living room as though the place is only nominally mine. Then, even more falsely: “Can’t wait to read whatever you’re doing next.”

“I’m retired.”

“Really?”

“Are you actually here to discuss my book?”

“It’s an investigation. We have to have something to put in the files.”

There’s a point in every conversation structured around the exchange of accusation and rebuttal—meetings with tax auditors, neighbours disgruntled over the leaves your tree sheds in their yard—where the nasty turn can be either taken or avoided. This is the point Ramsay and I have reached. And I have decided I don’t like the man.