he stepped back to let me enter. I’d thought about what the place might look like during my drive from Jill’s to here. Not a long drive — that was one of the things about Faith Unruh’s death that had hit home, the close proximity of Jill and Kyla’s home to the death scene that had played out in 1991.
Now as I moved inside the house that had been the home and workplace of Marlon Kennedy for so long, I made no secret of my curiosity. I stepped to the middle of a large front hallway and looked around. To the left was what looked like the dining room — at least in Kennedy’s configuration of the house. A vintage dining room suite that was a little the worse for wear but still held charm despite its age occupied most of the space in the room.
Like the neighbourhood that surrounded it, the house, or at least this part of the house, was mundane, almost dull. Nothing to indicate that this was surveillance central for a decades-old murder. Or that the occupant of the home was living an obsession.
Only one picture in the room, on the southernmost wall. Not a painting — a large two-by-three-foot photograph of a little girl. I recognized the photo. I’d seen it before. It was the one several media outlets had used. Faith Unruh when she was eight or nine, a quizzical smile playing over full lips, soft friendly eyes. Trusting eyes … perhaps too trusting.
I surveyed the rest of the room. The wall opposite the one with the photo contained a doorway leading, I guessed, to the kitchen.
I let my gaze wander in a semicircle to the right. A larger room spread out before me. It looked to have once been a living room. While I was scanning my mind for words to describe what I was looking at, Kennedy led the way into the room.
“The business part of the place is right here in the living room on this floor and the back bedroom upstairs.” Kennedy pointed to the far end of the room.
As I stepped into that space, I noticed right away that the living part of the living room was absent. It was something like a combined study and A/V centre. Two video cameras, tape playback machines, a table with a computer at one end, notebooks and pens at the other. Latest technology and old school sharing the same surface. And it was the latest technology. I stepped to the window. One camera was on a tripod and stood maybe chest high. A stool was in place so that the watcher could sit and have the camera roughly at eye level.
“Tapes?” I asked him. “All this and you’re still using tapes.”
He shrugged. “That’s what I started with. I know there’s newer technology, but this is what I know, what I’m comfortable with. And it does the job.”
I looked through the camera and knew that I was looking at the front yard and the front of the house that Faith Unruh had lived in at the time of her death. Three doors away and on the same side of the street. Kennedy’s house was slightly more forward on the lot it occupied, thus offering a clear and unimpeded view of what had been the Unruh home. I also noted I was looking through the branches and leaves of a couple of trees that stood outside the window.
I looked at Kennedy. “Camouflage?”
“Yeah.” He managed a tiny nod. “The neighbours might get nervous if they thought it was them I was watching. I planted those trees the first year I was here. Now I have to keep pruning them back to allow me a clear view of the house.”
He spent a few minutes telling me how he wanted the comings and goings of people from the house and the area in front of it recorded in one of the notebooks on the table.
“I’m not going to tell you about the people who live there. I don’t want you getting lazy on me. You watch, you write down everything and everyone you see, and you’ll figure it out for yourself.”
I thought that attitude a bit childish but didn’t bother to tell him that.
“You got this part?”
“What about this second camera?” I asked.
It sat on a smaller tripod, or at least one with the legs not extended. It was in the corner near the window, but not facing the window, as the other was.
“Backup. Everything here has a backup. If there’s a breakdown with one piece of equipment, I can be back up and running in seconds, minutes at the most.”
“Makes sense,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it did. I wasn’t sure that any of this made sense.
“You okay with this part?” he repeated.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“The rest is upstairs. Follow me.” He began the climb up to the second floor, and I followed. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on that level. He led the way into one of the bedrooms.
“I cleaned this up a little for you, got a bunch of my shit out of the closet. There’s a couple of extra blankets in there, if you need them. I don’t use the upstairs bathroom, so you can treat it like it’s yours. I hope it’s all okay.”
Along two of the bedroom’s walls were bookshelves. I’m not sure why, but I hadn’t expected Kennedy to be a reader. I noted that a lot of the books were hardcovers, but I didn’t look at any in detail. There’d be time for that later, or at least I hoped there would be.
“It’s fine,” I assured him. Actually, it looked more than fine. Like the rest of the house, it was neat and clean. Not that Marlon Kennedy was a neat freak; the place wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty damn good.
He led me down the narrow hall to the last bedroom on the east side of the house, and I followed him into a space that looked to be about the same size as the room he’d designated as mine for the next while. Again, there was no furniture but for one table sitting just off-centre from the middle of the room and covered with more notebooks — several piled high, the record of almost nine thousand days of surveillance. Kyla had been right. The word to describe what I was seeing was sad.
The rest of the room was a maze of recorders, computers, and video cameras. I turned to see that in one corner of the room, a high-powered rifle leaned against the wall. Kennedy noted my reaction to seeing the rifle.
“Emergency only,” he said.
“Good,” I said.
“The part you need to know about is over here.” Another high-backed stool sat in front of the window and next to another video camera on a tripod. “I’ve got everything set up, so it should pretty much run itself, but I’ll take you through any problems that could pop up.”
For the next twenty minutes I was given an intensive albeit brief seminar in video communications. He was remarkably thorough. There were two recorders so that when he was checking the tape from, for example, a time when he’d been away, another recorder was capturing the scene in real time. I got the idea that it was from this view that Kennedy thought there was a better chance of one day seeing the killer. And I had to agree. If the person who took Faith Unruh’s life was to return to the scene, my guess, like Kennedy’s, was that he would do it at the actual murder scene as opposed to the place the little girl had lived. I made a few notes, especially relating to the tapes I’d be checking when I couldn’t actually be watching the two houses. I had to admit Kennedy not only knew the equipment backwards and forwards, but he was also able to communicate what I needed to know very well. I’m not sure why, but I hadn’t expected communication to be one of Kennedy’s strengths. Maybe because that hadn’t been the case the night he’d jumped me in the laneway behind my apartment.
