The Killing Circle

reading of the charges.”

I suppose I must ask Ramsay other questions after this, because he’s telling me things. About the evidence they have on William. His background, criminal record, his aliases. The blood-spotted tools in his rented room. His membership not only in the Kensington Circle, but the ones before, the ones that Carol Ulrich and Ronald Pevencey and Jane Whirter had been a part of. How the police will keep searching for Angela and Petra and Len, and they’ll find them too, their remains anyway, because Ramsay hates nothing more than an incomplete file.

“I never really thought it was you,” Ramsay is saying now. “But you were in that circle. And you were the one with the novel with the same title as the killer’s handle. It was odd. But the evidence speaks for itself. And besides, you were just using him for material, weren’t you? A parasite—if you’ll excuse the term. But that’s you. That’s the kind of fellow you are.”

Ramsay checks his watch. He’s still early for court—the kitchen clock has just gone a quarter to nine—but he pretends he’s running late. The fun’s over at the Rush household.

He strides to the door and I follow him. And though he moves with the self-assurance of a man who has once again been proved right, I realize, with an itchy thrill, that the triumph is actually mine. Nobody’s found Petra. Even if they do, they’ll attribute my handiwork to William. And Ramsay has done me the favour of catching the Sandman before he had the chance to visit me.

He’s halfway down the front walk before he turns.

“You better hope we get a conviction,” he says.

I knew it was William. That is, it could only have been him. And yet, almost from the very beginning, I had believed that the Sandman wasn’t just a killer’s pseudonym but an actual being for whom no real name exists. Separate from humanity not just in deed but composition. A monster.

Such was the charm of Angela’s story.

As a psychological profile, William’s a classic. A kid who lost his parents in swift succession when he was only six—the mother to MS, the father to a stroke—and spent the rest of his youth being traded around from one aunt or uncle to another, from prairie town to prairie town. “Nobody looking out for him,” as Ramsay put it. “That, or they were trying to look the other way.”

The fact is, little Will was a friendless bully as early as school counsellors started files on him. A teacher beater, window smasher, playground torturer. Followed by the emergence of more explicitly criminal talents. The dismemberment of neighbourhood pets. Thefts, break-and-enters, assaults. A graduation of offences from the petty to the brutal.

Then, a couple years out of high school, William went off the grid. No new charges, no known address. As far as the police could tell, he spent the better part of his twenties rolling between the rougher parts of towns out west, renting rooms in the most forgotten quarters of Winnipeg, Portland, Lethbridge, Spokane. Odd-jobbing for money. Spending his free time on far darker pursuits.

Where William went, missing people followed. A seemingly arbitrary string of men and women with no shared characteristics or backgrounds, all cold cases with little in common other than a tall, bearded man who kept to himself, had spent some time in their towns around the time they disappeared. “Only circumstantial,” Ramsay conceded. “But I don’t believe it for a second. Not after what we found.”

And what had the police found at William’s apartment over a bankrupted butcher’s shop in the east end? The tools of the trade for a new butcher’s shop. Cleavers, saws, meat-cutting wires. Most of it encrusted with human blood. All of it off to the lab for DNA testing. But given some of the other personal items found in William’s bathtub, kitchen cabinets, even lying at the end of his bed—Carol Ulrich’s purse, Ronald Pevencey’s diary—it’s certain that the results will prove that his tools were what he used to dispose of them all.

There were also the storybooks. Do-it-yourself editions with cardboard covers. Inside, pages relating the disconnected tales of a shadow that drifted through the night, periodically stopping to carve up complete strangers who caught his eye. Written in William’s hand. And the protagonist’s name?

“Let me guess,” I’d interrupted Ramsay. “The Sandman?”

“Isn’t that copyright infringement?”

“Titles can’t be owned. Only the contents.”

“That’s too bad. I thought I might have another charge to lay against our friend.”

The police have their man. And their man is a man. Nothing supernatural about him, aside from the black magic that enables one to kill for no reason other than pleasure in the doing of it. The Sandman is a creation of fantasy. But the fantastical is not required here, it never is. All that’s needed is your off- the-rack dismemberment artist: the unloved child, the world hater, the remorseless sociopath. Check the back pages of any newspaper. There’s plenty of them.

I should be relieved. And I am. Sam can come home again. We can start on the business of making new lives.

But there is still the lone survivor’s question: Why me? Someone has to tell the story, I suppose.

And this time, it isn’t Angela’s, it’s not stolen. It’s mine.

The next day is William’s bail hearing, and though I want to go straight down to St Catharines and pick Sam up, I prevent myself with a sobering dose of fear. If the lawyer for the one they call the Sandman somehow manages to loose him on the streets this afternoon, I know where he’s most likely to visit first. Sam is safe now. One more day apart is the price for keeping him that way.

Still, the moment seems to call for some kind of celebration.

What I need to do is get out of the house.

A drive in the country.

The sign for Hilly Haven sprouts up from the horizon as a lone interruption of the flat fields. I turn in at the gate and wonder how I’m going to tell Angela’s mother that her daughter is likely dead. I suppose I don’t have to worry too much about the precise wording. Michelle Carruthers is used to receiving bad news. She’ll know before I’m halfway to telling her.

I park on the gravel lane outside her trailer, thankful for the cloud cover that veils some of Hilly Haven’s more dispiriting details. Its unwheeled tricycles, scalped dolls. The stained underwear swinging on the clotheslines.

“Nobody home.”

I turn before knocking on the trailer’s door to find a woman too old for the pig-tails that reach down to the two chocolate-smeared children at the ends of her hands. None wearing T-shirts of sufficient size to cover the bellies that peek out from over the waists of their sweatpants.

“Will Michelle be back soon?”

“Not soon.”

“Is she well?”

“You a friend of hers?”

A cop. That’s what I’d look like to her. Hilly Haven must get its share of plainclothes banging on its tin doors.

“My name is Patrick Rush. I was a friend of her daughter’s. She’s come into some trouble, I’m afraid.”

“Trouble?” the woman says, releasing the hands of the chocolatey kids.

“It’s a private matter.”

“You mean she’s dead too?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Michelle. She passed on last week.”

“Oh. I see.”

“The doctors didn’t know exactly what got her. But with her, it could have been anything.”

There is nothing more to say than this. Yet simply walking past the three of them to the car and driving off