Blue Suicide

Scarborough, Suburb of Toronto June 28, 2000

Wyn Rhys was an investigator for the Special Police Oversight Agency, and as such he worked the night shift, the time in which it was most likely that a crime would be committed, and if police discharged a weapon and a perpetrator was injured or killed, SPOA would be called immediately to attend the scene. Though he shared this shift with other investigators in the Greater Toronto Area, the person closest to the location of the crime was the one dispatched, and because he worked Metro, he was called often. Much of the shift was spent in SPOA’s headquarters on Bay Street, analyzing evidence from other investigations or report writing, but he was always highly alert, waiting for the call. After 4am it could be expected that whatever chaos had been perpetrated would have come to its irreversible conclusion. By that time, anyone with a grudge or a plot to unleash fresh hell was safely tucked in bed, dreaming dreams of revenge, windfall, or victory. They might rise a few hours later and tumble down the rabbit hole, but then they became the next shift’s problem, not Wyn’s.

Sometimes, instead of simply waiting for the call at his desk, Wyn would sign out one of the fleet vehicles and take long, leisurely drives around the city. As he slowly drove the residential streets, straight and unwavering as lines on a circuit board, he would smoke and think about whatever case he was working on, about other cases he’d completed, sometimes about more mundane things, like conversations with his wife. Occasionally he turned on the radio and listened to broadcasts from other, day-lit countries, but even as he half-listened, he was closely observing his surroundings, on the lookout for suspicious behaviour. Sometimes he went to high-crime neighbourhoods and surveyed the young hoods on street corners, slowing down and making his presence felt when he could sense trouble brewing. But once in a while he patrolled serene Canadian suburbia, if only to enjoy the unexpected curves and cul-de-sacs. The streetlights were far apart, casting some homes in an almost impenetrable darkness, giving the illusion of peace, of privacy. But darkness was hardly the friend of a potential victim of violent crime. And there were far fewer police officers out patrolling in suburban neighbourhoods than in urban ones, allowing for even more opportunities for the enterprising burglar or rapist.

Wyn had once been a police officer, but only as part of his training to become a criminal investigator for the London Metropolitan Police in Britain, which, in turn, had provided him the skills he needed as a police investigator in Canada. As a law enforcer, he’d been involved in one or two dodgy situations with suspects and, during the Brixton riots in 1985 had worn riot gear and pressed marauders into compact clusters for arresting. Though he never carried a deadly weapon in the UK, he had been involved in a takedown where a suspect had run out into traffic and got himself killed. The straight-backed authority of the police officer still clung to him even now as he sat in the SUV, his seat pushed as far back as possible to accommodate his above-average height, window open to the

intimate warmth of a late June night into which he exhaled Rothman’s smoke, one hand leisurely draped in the crook of the steering wheel, the other, his cigarette hand, on his knee. Mostly, nothing happened on these patrols. But on this night, something did.

It started as a keening sound in the distance and seemed to come from more than one direction, then, into the thicket of houses, blue and red and white beams glanced and ricocheted. Rounding a corner, police cruisers suddenly swung into view and streaked past. Wyn stuck his cigarette in his mouth to free up both hands and made a tight, screeching three-point turn in the middle of the broad street and followed them. From other streets other emergency vehicles came into view: fire trucks, paramedics, all converging on an urgently blinking point on a map. Technically, he was supposed to wait for a dispatch from SPOA before attending a crime scene, and he was certainly not to be present when a scene was unfolding and put himself in danger, but the police officer in him wanted a taste of the action if there was any to be had. He had no weapon, though that strangely made showing up all the more compelling.

The emergency crews had all congregated near a modest bungalow set back on a large expanse of green lawn that was fenced on all four sides. Two empty police cruisers were parked out front; likely officers had been first on the scene and had called for back-up. Wyn knew not to park onsite; he drove by at normal speed and parked around the corner, grabbed his notebook and cigarettes and checked his jacket pocket for his identification, then made his way to the residence on foot. By the activity at the scene, he knew that something very serious had transpired but the time of danger had definitely passed. He approached a police officer holding a roll of caution tape and displayed his ID. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Jesus Murphy, you guys are quick,” said the constable. But knowing that Wyn was from SPOA, he was taciturn. The cops didn’t like SPOA investigators and had several colourful

nicknames for them. Wyn had heard them all. The officer pointed to the house. “Civilian, a guy, in the basement. Shot by two officers from 42 Division.”

“Dead?”

The officer nodded curtly and began unrolling the tape. “Was he the resident, or an intruder?”

“Resident. Made the 911 call. Got a casualty in the garage.” “Any officers injured?”

The cop shook his head and focused on creating a perimeter. Wyn saw activity in the backyard near the garage and went to take a closer look. The lights from the ambulance rotated red and blue and white, ranging in long beams over the interior of the building, illuminating its dark corners in which ordinary garden implements – rakes, spades and the like – cast long, malevolent shadows. There was some shouting of “step back, step back” and hasty instructions among a huddle in the centre. Wyn was stopped by a paramedic, who tried to block his view. “No one past this point,” he ordered.

“I’m with SPOA,” said Wyn, reaching for his ID, but the paramedic shook his head.

“No way. Got a victim back here. Medical personnel only.”

Wyn, who was six and a half feet tall, craned his neck a little to see beyond the paramedic, over the bristling activity of the ER crew. A woman hung from a rope tied to a rafter, her face somewhat obscured by long, blood-draggled hair. She wore a pink pyjama top but nothing from the waist down. There were stab wounds to her abdomen and lacerations on her bare legs, likely sustained before she was asphyxiated. Three large men carefully prepared to let her down, one cutting the rope with a box cutter, the other two alongside her, bracing themselves for her descent. “Easy does it,” someone said. By her head’s mournful droop and the supplicatory way her hands rested against her thighs, she looked like a funerary monument. The police must have found vital signs, otherwise they would not have called in the paramedics, but whether or

not she was alive still he couldn’t ascertain. In the strange, circuslike glow of the flashing lights, she crumpled, limp as laundry taken from the line, into the basket of hands below.

Wyn looked away and retreated back to the driveway, trembling a little, and lit a cigarette. Despair tried to scale the walls of his dispassion, but he held firm against it by remaining focused on facts, or possible facts. The man had been shot dead by the officers who’d responded to the call, so he must have been armed and dangerous. If he was the killer, he had called the police in a panic, or out of remorse. In cases like this, the police had to be cautious that the suspect wasn’t luring them into a trap, or, on the flip side, into killing him. Officer-assisted suicide had been on the rise in the last few years.

Death was part of the job and most of the time it bothered Wyn little. On average, he had to look at a dead body every four weeks or so. He’d started out as a police officer at age twenty-one and was now thirty-sex, so he’d seen approximately one hundred and seventy corpses in his career. Far less than a paramedic, but far more than a parking-meter attendant, a lawyer, a retail salesperson or the Prime Minister. He’d been present at horrific car accidents, seen bodies bifected, decapitated, bearing the brands of flame or swollen after drowning. Once confirmed dead, the victims were left in the places fate had abandoned them to be photographed, examined, discussed. They were just part of the scene and, in the case of high-impact deaths, such as car accidents, sometimes ineradicable from it. Tissue could be embedded with glass and glass with tissue, blood could sneak under carpets and floorboards and drip through ceilings onto the heads of people residing below. In one of his examinations of a car wreck, Wyn had once discovered a finger under the back seat. The bodies he’d stepped around weren’t fathers or someone’s children, just evidence that had to be examined as one would bullet trajectories. At post-mortems he’d stood by as forensic pathologists disassembled bodies with the efficiency reserved

for unpacking a suitcase and with the same intimate knowledge of what was contained therein. Organs removed and cradled carefully, almost lovingly, before being immersed in formaldehyde solutions that turned them into murky jewels. Saws from Home Depot were deployed to the skull to remove a brain in which all recollections of childhood wonder, first love, the sensory memories of petting a cat or being kissed, were secreted and forever locked in its coils and volutes.

Finishing his cigarette and tossing it into the street, away from the scene itself, Wyn started for the house but was summoned by a youngish woman at the taped-off perimeter. She looked very anxious, almost tearful. “Are they okay?” she called to him.

Wyn came closer. “Did you call 911?” he asked, taking out his notebook.

“No. We heard an argument but then nothing – oh my god,” the woman interrupted herself, placing her hands on her temples. “They have kids. I know their kids. Oh my god. Are they okay?” She put her hands over her mouth, staring at the garage.

Wyn said, “Could you please give me their names and ages? Ma’am?” She was looking over his shoulder at the garage, but he sidestepped to block her view. “Names, please?”

“Oh my god … I don’t know. Um … Adele is the mother. Her husband is Kevin. Liam. Sean. Little boys, twins. They’re just babies. Oh my god.” This last refrain, or punctuation, was involuntary, like a hiccup. A man approached her and put his arm around her shoulders. “Are you a cop?” he asked.

Wyn showed him his ID. “Do you know the family?”

The man nodded gravely. He gave Wyn the names of the dead man and his wife. “They have three kids. We heard some arguing about an hour ago, but they argued a lot, so…” he seemed uncomfortable with his decision to not call the police himself, sooner, and jerked his chin at the building. “Are they okay?” he asked.

Wyn ignored the question. “Did you say three children?” he asked.

The woman opened her mouth and coughed, like she was about to be sick. “Three,” she said. “There’s a girl. Jennifer? Julia? I can’t remember.” She shook her head and turned to her husband, who drew her away from the scene.

Heart thrumming, Wyn returned to the site of the hanging, touched the shoulder of one of the medical personnel. “How many victims have you found?” The woman held up three fingers. “This woman, and two toddlers, drowned in the bathtub,” she said.

Somewhere on the premises was a third child.

***

He didn’t question emergency personnel on the main floor of the bungalow to confirm that it had been searched and that no other family member had been discovered; this was his own small quest. The kitchen and bathroom had been the sites of the murders, so he was careful to not intrude. At the other end of the house there was little activity. Wyn quietly checked the bedrooms. The room where the little boys had slept still smelled of talcum powder, milk, and faintly of urine, and retained some of the ambiance of their slumbering bodies. Kevin and Adele’s room was no more haphazard than any bedroom shared by a couple. The room of the third child, a daughter, was the smallest and the most tidy, straddling the boundary between childhood and young womanhood: stuffed toys on a miniature wing-backed chair, posters of pop bands on the mauve walls. The bed was unmade, though in the least disruptive way possible, the corner of the coverlet turned down to form a tidy triangle, the rest undisturbed. Wyn noticed the pillow was missing. It lay on the floor near the open closet door. He peered into the closet, holding his breath, but it was empty.

That left the basement and the room in which the father had been killed. As everyone had been occupied by the scene in the

garage and only Wyn knew of the possibility of another victim, and because he and his team were the ones in charge of the scene where the officers had deployed their weapons, no one had yet infiltrated it. Like a man under hypnosis, he moved automatically to the door to the basement and opened it. The air changed about halfway down the stairs, from warm humid to cool humid, from embrace to release. The people upstairs became just foot thump and murmur, with the occasional clatter and shout.

At the bottom of the stairs was a corridor with doors, all closed, along one side. Wyn turned on the light and the white walls glowed. There was nothing to denote violence, but he knew from experience that violence jumped out at you from clouded corners, waited, breath held, around the edges of doors. The only open door was at the end, and the darkness that seemed to encroach on the light pulsed with iniquity. The hall was carpeted, and Wyn noted how his tread was completely absorbed. The dead man may not have heard the police closing in.

As he walked he knocked at, and then opened doors into small rooms: a laundry room, an office with file boxes stacked to the ceiling, a toilet with a tiny vanity. None of the rooms had closets or beds, nowhere to hide for even the smallest child. Like the rooms upstairs, they were reassuring for their unremarkableness. As he came closer to the shadowy entrance to the last room, Wyn thought he could taste blood on the edges of his tongue, shiny metallic red. That was where the man had been killed. Perhaps it was also the locale of his last murder. There may be two bodies waiting for him. Wyn sucked the inside of his cheeks into the space between his teeth and bit down hard, hard enough to taste his own blood.

At the entrance lay a toy, a small stuffed animal. He crouched and picked it up, not certain why. It was soiled, but only by love. He put it under his nose and sniffed. Child smells of milk spit and snot rubbed deep into the nap. He put it in his pocket, then felt along the inside of the door frame for a light switch. He found it and turned it on.

The first thing he noticed was the bottoms of two pairs of feet on the floor, side by each, both barefoot. One pallid pair belonged to a man and was lax, only the heels touching. The other pair was a child’s and was pinkly upright, alert.

In three short steps he was in the room proper. It was also unremarkable: TV, sofa, toys strewn about. There was a spray of blood on the wall above the sofa and some gore. Below him he could see that the man appeared young and healthy, by his body alone, as his head had been almost completely blown off. The place where his face should have been was only a bubble of black-red, featureless, indecipherable, and because Wyn had never seen him before, he could not imagine him ever having one. His hands had been placed on his chest, one over the other. A girl between the age of eight and ten lay alongside him and mimicked the pose, her own arms folded over her breast and her eyes closed, but Wyn could hear her breathing, quick in and quick out, like any child. She wore only scant shorts and a tank top in silky fabric – pyjamas. Their heart pattern was obscured by dark splotches of blood, but Wyn was certain it wasn’t her own.

He knew he’d made virtually no sound, and perhaps should have spoken to alert the child to his presence, but he must have touched her foot with one of his, because her eyes suddenly flew open and she stared up at him in the disconcerting way sleepwalkers look at things, like she was looking through him, or over him, at something quite frightening beyond. They were black, the iris and pupil indistinguishable.

Before she could move, he quickly crouched again and touched her ankle. “You’re safe,” he said. “My name is Wyn. What’s your name?” The girl didn’t move, her black eyes didn’t blink. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. “That’s okay,” said Wyn. “You don’t have to tell me yet. Are you hurt?” The girl slowly shook her head. “I’m going to pick you up, all right? Just nod to show me you understand.” She remained motionless, so Wyn, remembering the stuffed toy,

now took it out of his pocket and placed it on her chest. Instinctively, she clutched it. She was part of the crime scene, but he couldn’t leave her in it. He should have called someone down, but he didn’t want to scare her by shouting. In this hushed room, with a dead man, it would be unseemly to move too abruptly or speak too loudly. He had to extract her from the horror as gently and carefully as he could.

Slipping one hand into the warm hollows behind her knees, he placed the other under her neck. She had long black hair, quite curly, and as Wyn lifted her head, some of it stuck to the carpet where her father’s blood had soaked through. Though lanky, she was narrow-limbed and rather light, but Wyn, cautious as he was to leave as little evidence of his own presence in the room, stumbled a little because he didn’t want to step too far back. She put her arms around his neck, one hand still clasping the toy, and he felt her breathing, soft and normal, against his collarbone. Shock, he knew, expressed itself in remarkable ways; this child was so serene, so trusting.

He looked at the scene. The lights had been off. The door had no damage, so the officers likely did not have to force their way in. The intensity of the impact of the bullet suggested the man had to have been shot at very close range. There was no weapon nearby, so he’d been unarmed. What had the girl seen? Had she been in the room when the shooting took place? Had she seen the officers open fire, heard her own father plead with them? Had she been visible to the officers, they would have removed her immediately, so all Wyn could think was that she’d been concealed somewhere (behind the sofa, maybe) and only emerged when the room became silent again.

He could tell by holding the child that she had no broken bones; indeed, she seemed completely unharmed, and had not cried out or stiffened when he lifted her. The ocean of death all around had not so much as dampened the tips of her feet. After what he had seen in the garage, he felt a surge of gratitude and relief so intense that it actually brought tears to his eyes. Alive,

he thought, over and over. He held the child tight against him and put his chin against the top of her head, on her luxurious hair, inhaling her young, biscuity scent. He was not a religious man, but this moment had a holiness to it. The girl’s heart, beating against his own, had a million more beats to mark the rest of her long, complicated life.

***

By exceptional chance, Wyn managed to talk to the involved officers before the Police Association could get a lawyer to the scene to remove them. They were both on the sofa in the living room. Their eyes had the faraway, thoughtful look Wyn recognized among people involved in a traumatic event. They were watching it unfold in front of them, over and over.

Wyn segregated them and spoke to the younger one first. Constable Jameson told him that the 911 call had come from Kevin Wolfe himself. “He was really panicked,” he said. “We thought that someone had broken into the house and attacked his family. He didn’t tell us nothing. Just to come quick.” Jameson sniffed, but it sounded more habitual, a tic in times of stress, not emotion. “We got there and the house seemed quiet, but we noticed a light on in the garage and went there first. We found the mother and called for medics right away. Called for back-up. We didn’t know what we were up against. Didn’t know about the little boys until after we took down the father. Found them in the bathtub.” He sniffed again, ran one hand under his nose. Wyn noticed a tattoo on his wrist, of a black heart. “Got him in the basement. Rec room. You know when I was a kid I used to think it was ‘wreck’ room. Like a car wreck. Sure is now.” He fumbled in his pockets and took out some cigarettes. They weren’t supposed to smoke in residents’ homes, but Wyn didn’t stop him from lighting up. “We thought it must have been a domestic when we couldn’t see evidence of a break-in. Or maybe it was the fact that when he saw us

coming to the house, he took off for the basement. I mean, we announced ourselves and everything, but he fled.”

“Did you see him before you shot him? Did you see the child?” “Lights were off in the room. No, we didn’t see the girl.

Didn’t know about her until they brought her upstairs.”

Wyn thought of the commotion among the paramedics, who’d only just emerged from the calamity of the garage and the bathroom, when they’d come upon him with the girl in the basement. He had handed her over to another large man, feeling a strange sadness, letting her go. She had stared at him, clutching the small toy. When he came upstairs, he saw the two gurneys with small bodies strapped into them in the hallway near the bathroom. White bundles. He shuddered and held his pen tighter. “You know you endangered her life, firing a gun into that room,” he said, feeling his face grow hot. “You’re lucky it hadn’t been her who opened the door. Very lucky.”

“This is bullshit. I want my lawyer,” said Jameson, moving to stand.

Wyn used the officious tack. “You have to comply with an SPOA investigation,” he warned, though, technically, involved officers could plead trauma and remove themselves from a scene, or be removed.

“Fuckin’ right I do.” Jameson lumbered away with his coffee and cigarette, the blanket that a medical officer had draped around his shoulders slipping to the floor.

***

The other officer, Constable Woloshyn, was much older and more prepared for Wyn’s questions about motive. “We didn’t know for certain that he was the suspect,” he said calmly. “We were responding to threats. He said he had a gun.”

Wyn didn’t need to check his notes, but pretended to anyway. “Your partner didn’t mention a gun. There’s no weapon at the scene.”

“Yeah, well, he did. In the heat of the moment we’re not gonna remember the same shit, right? It was a tense situation. We just saw his wife hanging from a rafter in the garage. Found the two kids–” he broke off, his voice like a saw caught in the cut. “It gets you in a state of – you know, like, shock. We were shocked. But it didn’t mean we couldn’t carry out our duty. We wanted to take him away in cuffs – you bet we did. See him brought to justice. But it didn’t work out that way.” Woloshyn didn’t make eye contact with Wyn as he spoke, choosing to look down at his hands, which were methodically reducing a Styrofoam cup to tiny specks that fell to the floor like snow.

“How many shots were fired? And by whom?” asked Wyn. Woloshyn sighed. “I shot him. Don’t hang this on the kid.

He’s just outta college.”

Wyn wrote this down. “We can tell if he discharged his weapon,” he said.

The constable finally looked at Wyn, a look that was at once pleading and disdainful. “Geez, you guys are somethin’ else. Y’know, you’re lucky we’re even talking to you. You should be talking to our lawyers,” he said, then sighed. “I’ll take the heat for it, okay? Don’t fuck him over.”

“The evidence speaks for itself,” said Wyn. “You are the more experienced officer. You should have been the one to confront the suspect. Shooting in the dark is extremely dangerous.”

Woloshyn suddenly touched the back of the sofa, behind Wyn. His fingers came away red. Wyn turned to look. They were sitting on evidence. He quickly rose. Woloshyn said, “All’s I know is, if I saw what I saw in that garage when I was in my first year of duty, I would’ve shat myself. In my opinion, that officer’s a hero.” He curled his upper lip at Wyn. “But I guess that’s not how you guys would see it.”

***

By the time Wyn had finished talking to the involved officers, an early summer dawn was breaking. Sylvia Hughes, a recently

hired Police Association lawyer, appeared at around 5am to take charge of them. Her small black eyes had launched grenades at Wyn when she learned that he’d spoken to them, which, while not expressly prohibited in the Police Services Act, was considered to be poor etiquette, given that the men were shaken up by events. Wyn would later testify that he had asked for and received permission from the involved officers to submit to questioning, thereby making their statements admissible in court. This would be the beginning of a long history of mutual mistrust between him and Sylvia. He then remained on the scene, interviewing neighbours, talking to the forensics team as they collected data from the room in the basement where Wolfe had been shot. Smoking and smoking and smoking. Drinking coffee that just kept appearing in his hand. Sometimes images of the bodies on the gurneys or the drooping head of Adele Wolfe leapt from his peripheral vision to taunt him, but he subdued them with his black pen and notebook, with facts. He filled page after page of his small notebook with his cramped, incomprehensible script. He was the only person who required the notes, so it didn’t matter that only he could read them later.

The neighbours said that Kevin Wolfe had been a young lawyer with a large firm downtown. It was a stressful job and he had a busy family life, but not extraordinary. There had been some late night arguments and tires squealing out of the driveway in the wee hours, but nothing to lead anyone to believe that Kevin had homicidal leanings or was losing his grip. He sometimes drank too much at parties and had once accused Adele of cheating on him in front of a group at a barbeque. Otherwise the family seemed all right, if a bit private. The neighbourhood was friendly; someone would have alerted the police if they had suspected that Kevin Wolfe was dangerous. About the wife and children little was learned. Adele was friendly, if a bit remote. She had her hands full with the twin boys and looked tired, much of the time. The daughter was seen on her bike frequently, riding in

circles in front of her house, supervised, usually, by her mother from the front porch, but sometimes alone.

Allan Guthrie from the city’s homicide department had arrived only twenty minutes after the bodies had been taken to the hospital, where, he reported, they’d been pronounced DOA. The boys were most definitely dead before they’d been drawn from the bathtub, where they should have remained for investigative purposes, but no one could bear the sight of them. Adele had been faintly alive when she’d been cut down, since the chair beneath her feet had not been kicked away, but she succumbed to her injuries in the ambulance. The murder of the family was Guthrie’s investigation, but he congratulated Wyn on dealing with the third child and thanked him for his help. The girl had been taken in by a neighbour pending pick up by one of her mother’s siblings.

Guthrie stood for some time smoking a cigarillo near the garage as the forensics team worked, watching them but not interfering, as the scene was delicate and any intrusion, even by a seasoned expert, could contaminate it. When the team finished, he joined Wyn as he stood in the backyard, himself smoking and ruminating in the rose-peach glow of dawn. There was no rule prohibiting Wyn from sharing his notes on the officers’ testimonies, so he briefed Guthrie on what he’d been told, particularly the words of Woloshyn about young Jameson being a hero. Guthrie listened with the same stillness evident in the way he surveyed crime scenes, taking in each detail and mentally turning it over in his hands, like a fascinating artifact. Finally he shook his head as he looked around the meticulous garden. “Y’know I’m retiring in a coupla months?” he said. “Been dreading it for years. Retirement just gives you more time to remember shit. At least at work I always have new shit to look at. This is some swan song, if this case is gonna be my last. Ever worked in homicide, investigator?”

Wyn pulled out his own cigarettes, Rothman Kings, had one in his mouth and lit before he even realized he’d decided

to smoke another. Habit. He really should quit. He was up to three packs a day. “For about ten years. But then I married and my wife didn’t fancy me working in that field. Too many unquiet dead.”

“The dead are quiet enough, which is just fine with me, even if it would make my job easier if they could talk,” said Guthrie. “But I don’t want to know what they were saying, thinking, feeling in those last hours. You guys at SPOA, at least you always know who pulled the trigger.”

“We may know, but we’re powerless to charge when we think there’s been misconduct or negligence. We can only make recommendations.” Recommendations that resulted in less than a one-percent rate of charges. To date, not one of those few charges had made it to trial, let alone a conviction.

“Yeah, and I know Henry. He doesn’t like to rile up the Police Association.” Henry Schell was the Director of SPOA, the fourth person to hold the post in less than seven years. The directorship was among the least sought-after portfolios in the provincial government for two reasons: SPOA’s mandate was difficult to reinforce – Police Chiefs routinely ignored the stipulation that they contact SPOA in the event of a death or serious injury precipitated by one of their officers. And secondly, the police union was powerful and vocal; it deemed SPOA an interference in an officer’s duty to serve and protect. Oversight was a new concept; heretofore, the police had investigated themselves.

“I’m not sure how you plan to handle this particular case,” Guthrie went on, looking at some point in the distance. “But if you recommend a charge of manslaughter, I wouldn’t stand in your way.”

This was a rather shocking admission, but Wyn wasn’t taking it at face value. Guthrie, though usually incorruptible enough, could be fishing for information from Wyn that he would share with the Chief of 42 Division later. “It would never stick,” he said only.

Guthrie kept staring into the distance, his eyes squinting against the advancing sun. “As I told ya, I’m retiring; I don’t really give a shit anymore, so I’ll say this: if that cop was off- duty, say, or was just a civilian neighbour who cornered the man in his basement, as these officers did, and killed him with a weapon, legal or not, I’d recommend a manslaughter charge. Add to that the fact that there was a kid in there with him who could have been caught in the crossfire, and you have a charge of negligence endangering life. Imagine if the guy took his kid and made off in his car and they pursued him and caused an accident. This is no different. And after seeing what Kevin Wolfe did to his family, you can bet emotions were running high when they chased him to the basement. I was down there. The man had no weapon, ’less you count Tickle Me Elmo.”

“I was told he made threats,” said Wyn.

“No judge would rule this as a case of self-defense on the part of the officers. I think you can make a case for intent to harm the suspect, due to a heightened emotional state after seeing the casualties.”

“Intent is almost impossible to prove, Al. They’ll just say they were doing their job. That’s what they always say.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a death of an unarmed, middle-class white man, not a drug-crazed thug packing heat in a back alley of Regent.” Regent Park was a notorious part of East Toronto that had a high Jamaican immigrant population and trouble with gangs. There had been a few police incidents there that had resulted in the deaths of young black men, which had aroused public condemnation.

“Ah, but what about blue suicide?” Though better known as “suicide by cop,” Wyn preferred the more poetic term.

Guthrie shrugged. “The guy may have lured the officers downstairs with the idea of provoking them to kill him. But he had to have put himself in the kind of danger – like running into traffic or jumping in front of a train – that forces a cop to disable him to save him. There was no imminent danger in that

rec room. Threats from behind a closed door to kill himself or someone else don’t cut it.”

“I know all that, Al. But we’d have to have a watertight case before recommending a manslaughter charge. The third child is key, but she may not talk, or we may not be able to access her testimony because of her age.”

“If the Crown wants to prosecute, and the charge is manslaughter, she will be assessed to determine if she’s a competent witness. She was in the room, she is a key witness,” said Guthrie.

Wyn’s eyes burned from the powerful light of the summer sun, which was drying the dew off the grass now, making it steam. The new heat intensified the smell of death in the garage. “I’m not sure I’d be comfortable putting a child on the stand, especially after all she’s been through. Don’t you think we’d have enough evidence without her testimony?”

Guthrie shook his head. “Not for a serious charge. Against a cop to boot. I’ve had to bring child witnesses into investigations plenty of times. You’d be surprised how well they remember shit. They’re also pretty fucking resilient. Kids have ways of coping, with the proper therapy and whatnot.” His voice was calm, cool. Years of this kind of work made a person this way. Indeed, it was the sort of profession that attracted people like him in the first place.

“Any idea why he didn’t kill the third child?” Wyn asked. “Why he called the police?”

“You worked in criminal investigations. We don’t care that much about motive when we’ve got a mountain of physical evidence to support a conviction. Why does anyone kill the innocent? And what mechanism makes them stop killing? If we knew the whys, Rhys, we could maybe prevent the hows and whens, and who. Frankly, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to spend any more time than I have to in the mind of a killer. In a way I’m relieved that the cops did take him down, saves the long process of convicting the bastard. I bet he’s glad to be

dead too. Won’t be haunted by the images of those poor kids and that lovely woman hanging in his garage. Wish we could say the same.”

Wyn moved to pull out his cigarettes again, then stopped himself. “You say you’re retiring, but perhaps you might consider a post-homicide career as an investigator at SPOA?” he suggested. SPOA was thought to be less stressful, and for fifty-year-old retirees who didn’t like golf, a decent-paying diversion. He could use someone like Guthrie on his side. Wyn was not exactly popular among his investigator brethren.

“Tell me something, you got any kids?” “A daughter. She’s two.”

Guthrie squinted at the sun. “Well, if you stay in this profession, might as well say goodbye to her now, ’cause you’re not gonna speak to her again ’til you retire. I’ve got a second chance with my grandkids, who seem to like old Grampa Al. I wanna travel, see some of the achievements of the human race, not the crazy stupid shit people do to each other. That family.” Guthrie shook his head, sad, but not disbelieving. “I’m done with it. You’re young,” he said, taking in Wyn’s unstreaked black hair, his still-youthful features. “But I reckon by around fifty you’ll be ready to pack it in too.”

Wyn pondered this. The image of the dead woman, the bundles on the gurneys, grotesque as they were, did not infringe on his love of this kind of work. If anything, they intensified it. He could have been like Guthrie and been a homicide detective, but he preferred dealing with the police. And finding that girl in all the chaos, lifting her out of it, holding her and feeling her breath on his neck, smelling of innocence … there was nothing in the world like it. She was a miracle. Not many professions proffered miracles.

Part I