“Yeah, I think …” I started to respond, then realized I was talking to a dial tone. Kendall Mark, now known as Marlon Kennedy, had hung up. That call had removed any indecision as to where Cobb and I would be meeting in the morning. Except that now there would be three of us.
I fog-walked through the rest of the evening, even the strawberry shortcake that was, I seem to recall, pretty damned wonderful. And the movie, when I was able to concentrate at all, was okay too. Mean Girls … Lindsay Lohan. I laughed a couple of times and nodded dutifully whenever Jill and Kyla gave me their told you this would be amazing look.
After Kyla headed off to bed, a copy of Kathy Kacer’s The Night Spies in hand, Jill poured us each a glass of a Tuscan red and sat next to me on the couch.
We didn’t talk much. Often we didn’t, content to be close to one another, allowing the music — she had selected R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People — to move through and between us. During the second glass of wine I told her of Monica Brill’s visit to Cobb’s office and the search for Ellie Foster that would be our focus, at least for a while.
I showed her the lyrics of the song; she read them, shrugged, and said, “That’s going to take more concentration than I’m capable of right now.”
“Roger that.” I nodded.
“Although there is one thing I might be able to manage to concentrate on.” She placed a hand on my thigh.
“Wicked woman.” I smiled at her.
“The Eagles were singing about me.”
“That was ‘Witchy Woman,’” I pointed out.
She took my hand and began leading me down the hallway. “Like I said, they were singing about me.”
Three
The Belmont Diner is located in Marda Loop, another of the older neighbourhoods in Calgary, and one of the coolest. A movie theatre called the Marda, long since gone, gave the area its name. Cobb and I were in a booth near the back of the Belmont by 8:30 the next morning, both wondering what Kendall Mark wanted to talk about.
Cobb knew Mark much better than I did, having worked with him back when both men were detectives in the Calgary Police Service.
Kendall Mark had been one of the investigators assigned to the 1991 murder of a nine-year-old girl, Faith Unruh, in a neighbourhood not far from where Jill and Kyla now lived. I’d learned of the little girl’s murder a few months before, when one of Kyla’s friends dropped it on us at dinner one evening.
I had become fascinated, perhaps even obsessed, with the case of the young girl, who had been walking home from school with a girlfriend. When the two parted at the friend’s house about a block from the Unruh house, Faith had continued on toward home. She never arrived, and her body was found the next morning in a nearby backyard. It was determined that she had been murdered shortly after leaving her friend, meaning the killing had taken place in broad daylight in a populated residential part of the city.
Cobb had filled in some of the details of what had happened with the investigation. Police initially thought it would be relatively easy to find and apprehend the killer, given the circumstances of the murder. But that was not the case. Though officers worked hard and long for weeks, and then months, and eventually years, they had come up empty in the search for the killer. Cobb told me that the two lead investigators were never the same, the result of an emotionally charged investigation that failed.
Cobb had also told me of a third policeman, Kendall Mark, who, while not directly assigned to the case, had developed an obsession with finding Faith Unruh’s killer. He had left the force and disappeared, the belief being that the stress of the case had gotten to him and he had simply “lost it” and gone away.
My own fixation had taken me to the neighbourhood many times. I’d driven the street and alley where Faith had lived and died; I’d walked and stood near the yard her body had been found in — not in some ghoulish fascination, but simply, as I had hoped for with my visit to the site of The Depression, to get a feeling for the area and a sense of the place where the horror of Faith Unruh’s death had unfolded.
Which was how I met Kendall Mark face to face. Well, not exactly face to face. I had been jumped and taken down in the alley behind my apartment one night. The man I initially thought was a mugger turned out to be a dramatically altered Kendall Mark, who had spent the years since the murder watching the former Unruh home and the spot where her body had been found. He had set up an elaborate surveillance system with cameras and monitors, all in the hope of one day seeing the killer if and when he returned to the scene of the crime.
It was crazy, of course, the sad compulsion, the mania of a man who could not — would not — let go of the idea that he would one day confront the murderer of Faith Unruh.
The cameras were located in the house Mark had purchased not long after the murder. It sat across and just down the street from the murder location. The cameras had filmed my presence at the scene. Kendall, who had changed his name and his appearance, came close to exacting his long-awaited revenge on the person he thought had to be the killer when he mistook me for that person. I had been fortunate to survive that night.
Now Marlon Kennedy, a black man — formerly Kendall Mark, Caucasian — wanted to meet Cobb and me to talk about … something. Cobb and I had spoken with him a couple of times since the night in the alley when he’d been close to dispensing justice on the wrong person. In part, our conversations with him were designed to gain his assurance that the kind of vigilante action that had nearly ended my life wouldn’t happen again. I was fairly certain our entreaties had fallen on deaf ears. Kennedy had grudgingly agreed that he’d at least let us know before he did anything drastic, an assurance I wasn’t convinced would hold up if he once again felt that he had the killer in his grasp.
Neither Cobb nor I said much at first. We drank coffee but decided to wait on ordering breakfast until Kennedy arrived.
“Any ideas?” I said after a few minutes.
“About?”
“What he wants to talk to us about.”
Cobb shook his head. “No clue. Maybe there’s something he wants us to check out that he can’t since he’s gone underground, or maybe he just wants to throw out some ideas, although I doubt that.… Mark isn’t a real team guy. I’m not sure he ever was. Or maybe he just wants to buy us breakfast because he likes our company. So, to repeat: I have not the faintest idea why he called us.”
I nodded, drank some coffee.
Cobb said, “You?”
I shook my head. “I mean I guess it’s possible he’s got something and your little pep talk about the evils of vigilantism has him wanting to play by the rules and involve us in the apprehension of the killer.”
“Yeah, not likely.”
“I know I’ve asked you before, but do you think he’s … I don’t know …”
“Unhinged?”
I set my coffee cup down. “Well … yeah.”
“I don’t know.” Cobb spoke slowly. “I’m not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, so I can’t answer that. I’d say he’s
