Calgary Police Service used the term homicide file, sometimes abbreviated to the file.
“Anything there?”
“I’ve given it only a cursory glance. I want to spend some time on it tonight. How about I stop by in the morning and we take a look at what we’ve got?”
“Human contact. What a concept. I’ll have the coffee on.” I didn’t bother telling him about my conversation with Bert Nichol — figured that could wait until morning.
Cobb laughed. “See you then.”
I stood up and took a quick look out the upstairs window. Nothing to see but a house and backyard at peace. I ran tapes for an hour, took one last look at the Unruh home from downstairs, then did the same thing upstairs with the murder house (the name I’d decided to give it to keep them straight in my mind).
A quick glance, then I was turning away to call it a night when something brought me back to the camera — a movement, or maybe just a shadow. I grabbed the binoculars and brought them to my eyes, and while most of my being was telling me it was nothing, I couldn’t control the racing of my heart.
“Come on,” I said out loud. “Kennedy’s been watching for years, but you’re going to stumble across the killer in a few hours? Give your head a shake.”
But I stayed in place for another half hour, watching … and seeing nothing. I ran the tape back and watched it three times. Something had moved in the alley behind the garage. I was sure of it. I was almost equally sure that what I’d seen was a dog or cat, or maybe a waving tree branch caught by a gust of wind.
Almost sure.
My eyes were aching and tired from the strain of trying to see something in the blackness of the alley. I wanted to go to bed, to sleep and dream about something pleasant.
But there was a part of me that wouldn’t let it go … couldn’t let it go. What if I’d had the chance to spot the killer, but ignored it, and he went on to kill again? And again. How would I live with that?
I decided to walk across the street and have a look around. Total darkness had long since settled on the street, and I took one last long look before I left the house. Earlier I’d noticed a flashlight on the windowsill next to the rifle, and now grabbed it. I hesitated and actually considered taking the .30-06. I shook my head at that insanity — just what the neighbourhood needed, a stranger wandering the back alley with a weapon. Yeah, that would hardly draw any attention at all to the house where the street’s recluse lived.
Instead I pulled on my jacket, tucked the flashlight into a pocket, and descended the stairs. I stopped in the kitchen long enough to take a nearly empty bottle of bread and butter pickles out of the fridge. A glass jar, surely a dying breed. I dropped the last couple of pickles onto a side plate, rinsed the long, skinny jar, and stuffed it under my jacket. Not as effective as a .30-06, but possibly useful in hand-to-hand combat. So did you take a knife, a hammer, brass knuckles? No, I opted for an empty pickle jar.
As prepared as I thought I could make myself, I slipped quietly out the front door. It was just after eleven, and the street was in the process of settling for the night. Several houses were already in darkness, including the one I was headed for.
I took a minute to look at the houses where it appeared that at least one person was still up. I looked at the windows, most with curtains pulled and muffled light behind them as residents read, watched TV, tapped away at computers, or got ready for bed. No one at any of the windows was looking out on the street as a stranger crept carefully along, flashlight now in hand.
I went the opposite way down the street, turned left at the corner, then left again at the alley. The house was seven in from the corner — I’d counted while I walked down the street. I hadn’t used the flashlight at first; there was sufficient light from the street lamps to allow me to navigate. But once in the alley, by the fourth house in, darkness had pretty well encircled me, and I flicked it on.
I slowed my pace as well, listening to my breathing and the crunch of the gravel beneath my runners as I walked — convinced that anyone within a two-block radius would be able to hear both. At house number six I stopped and pointed the flashlight first one way, then the other. Saw nothing, detected no movement. Heard nothing but the distant hum of an occasional vehicle.
I tried to determine where the movement I’d seen had been. Everything looked different once I was actually in the alley. I kept my hand over the flashlight, removing it periodically and letting the beam illuminate the alley for a few seconds at a time before covering the light again. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I moved again now, slowly and carefully inching forward until I was behind the garage on which the camera was trained. I looked across the way, and between houses I could see Kennedy’s house, knowing that I would now be on the tape. I bent down close to the ground and could no longer see the window of the Kennedy house. The back fence of the property blocked my view of the house from this angle. Which meant that the camera could not now see me. And that meant that something — or someone — creeping along close to the ground would likewise not be visible from Kennedy’s roost.
The significance of my discovery, it seemed to me, was minimal. A dog or cat could move through the alley undetected. So could someone crawling along the ground. But it seemed to me people seldom slithered, snake-like, along gravelly — or any other — surfaces. Unless, of course, that someone was somehow aware that there was a camera trained on the area and that he or she could be seen if walking upright. Rather hypothetical. Rather ridiculous.
What was more likely, of course, was that it had been a small animal that I’d seen, or that animal’s shadow, thus rendering my evening’s excursion utterly unproductive.
Nevertheless, I wanted to be thorough. I again cast the beam of the flashlight around the area behind the garage. Saw nothing. Then I went over the ground in smaller pieces, moving the light and my vision back and forth across the alley … again, seeing only gravel, dirt, and a couple of garbage cans against the fence. They, too, would be invisible from Kennedy’s vantage point, and I stepped closer to them, thinking, though not with great certainty, that whatever I had seen had to have been in this general area.
The garbage cans, their grey metal shining when I splashed the light on them, were on a small wooden stand maybe a foot off the ground. I scanned the area again and saw nothing … except for a single piece of paper, clearly something that had escaped the confines of the trash bins. I picked it up and stuffed it in my pocket, if for no more reason than to avoid returning from my wild goose chase completely empty-handed.
One last look around, splaying the light first here, then there. Nothing. Not even a second scrap of paper. I made my way back up the alley to the street and retraced my steps to Kennedy’s house. Once inside, I returned the flashlight to the upstairs windowsill and out of curiosity rewound the tape to see what I had looked like prowling the lane behind the murder scene. I first saw flashes of light created by my placing my hand over the flashlight, then removing it. Then I was on the screen, moving slowly, clearly visible despite the darkness and shadows of the alley. I rewound the tape, watched it again, and was surprised to note that as dark as the alley had been, and even though I was never in the flashlight’s beam, I was recognizable — a testimony, I supposed, to the quality of Kennedy’s equipment. Watching the tape, I realized my expedition had, in fact, borne some fruit. Going down there had been useful in terms of providing a frame of reference for what I was seeing when I looked through the viewer of the camera.
And having provided at least a little justification for my nocturnal prowl, I reset the tape and headed off to bed. I was asleep in seconds, but it wasn’t a peaceful night. I woke several times, tossed and rolled
