Читать книгу Last Song Sung - David A. Poulsen - Страница 9

I rang the front doorbell of Marlon Kennedy’s house a couple of minutes before ten o’clock. I’d been standing on the front step for a long minute looking around, taking in a yard and house that were remarkably unremarkable. An ordinary house in an ordinary neighbourhood, where, years before, a little girl had died a violent, terrible death.

Kennedy opened the door and stood looking at me for so long that I began to wonder if he’d forgotten I was coming. And I thought back to the night he’d attacked me — the action of a man pushed over the edge. Not a madman, I didn’t think. But mad people surely didn’t act like they were mad all the time. Did they?

Finally 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.

The last thing he went over was the scene outside the window. Across the street and five doors down was the house and yard where Faith’s body had been found. I knew the place, but this was a different view — from the side and slightly above. Kennedy had chosen his home well. The exposure to the scene was perfect: a clear view of the garage in the backyard and the alley behind it. It was there, next to that garage, where Faith’s body had been found the morning after her disappearance, naked and lying under a four-by-eight sheet of plywood.

Kennedy had been lucky to find a place that offered an unobstructed look at the two places he needed to see.

“Any questions?”

“Not about the technology,” I answered him. “I think I’ve got that figured out.”

“Yeah?”

“One thing, though. Besides me, how many times in all these years have you seen someone who maybe looked a little suspicious?”

“Count ’em on one hand.”

“I don’t know whether to admire you or feel sorry for you for doing this.”

“Well, let me put your mind at ease. I don’t give a rat’s ass which one you choose. Or what you think of me. This is what I’m going to do until I get that bastard.”

“And you really think you’ll get him?”

His shoulders slumped a little, and his voice dropped to a near whisper. “Some days I’m convinced that I’ll never see him, that he’s dead or he’s too smart or, like I said, he had cop help to get away with it and I’ll never get any closer than I am right now.” While he speaking he bent down to look through the video camera. “But there are other times when I know … I can feel it, that he’s still out there and one day he’ll walk into my camera shot and I can spring the trap. By the way, something I forgot — binoculars on that shelf over there.”

He pointed, and I looked at the shelf he was indicating, saw the binoculars.

I glanced at my watch. “You better get going.”

He nodded. “You good?”

“I’m good.”

“My bag’s down in the hall. I’ll grab it on the way out. House keys are on the table right by the front door. There’s some stuff in the fridge if you get hungry. I’ll text when I know more.”

“Listen, Marlon. I got this. Why don’t you just think about what you need to do in Nanaimo? And I want you to know I’m sorry about your wife.”

“Yeah.” He left the bedroom, and I heard him descending the stairs.

“One more thing!” he yelled from the main level of the house. “That rifle’s loaded … just so you know.”

I looked over at the rifle, a .30-06, and was still looking at it when I heard the front door close.

I walked back and forth between the two workspaces Kennedy had set up in the house. After twenty minutes of that I called Cobb, left a voice mail to say Kennedy had gone to catch his flight and all was quiet. Then I called Jill.

Though I was fairly sure I’d woken her, her voice gave no sign. I heard, “Hey, cowboy,” after she picked up. “How’s the spying going?”

“Okay,” I said. “Kennedy’s left for the airport. I’ve been checking the place out. The crazy part is that I can picture myself actually being sort of busy between watching, recording what I see, and checking the tapes to look at what I missed.”

“No, sweetheart,” Jill countered, “that’s not the crazy part. The crazy part is that you’re in a virtual stranger’s house looking for a clue into something that happened twenty-four years ago.”

“I guess,” I said.

She paused. “I’m sorry. It’s not right that I’m making light of it. I honestly feel terrible for that poor man who has given up his life for this. And I’m glad you called. I was kind of worried about you. Everything’s okay over there?”

“Everything’s fine,” I assured her. “I mean, this feels weird to me too, but I wanted to do this for the guy so he can be with his wife. And what’s weirdest of all, it feels like fishing. You sit there, you haven’t had a bite for hours, but you keep looking at your line in the water like at any second some fish is going to grab the hook, and bingo, you got ’im.”

“And you think you might see someone who could be the guy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean no, I don’t really believe that. But I also find it impossible to say I’m not going to see someone. That’s the fishing part. I guess that’s how it must be for Kennedy. Anyway, I miss you and I need to hear the voice of the young lady who lives with you … if she’s up.”

“She’s lying here right beside me. Wouldn’t go off to her own bed until we’d heard from you. I think she has a crush on you.”

I heard a “Mom!” in the background and could picture the pained expression on Kyla’s face.

She came on the line. “I don’t know why you even go out with her.” I could hear the urge to laugh in her voice.

“I do it only to get her out of the house and give you a break.”

The laugh surfaced then. We didn’t talk long, but she did tell me she’d thought about it and decided that Mr. Kennedy should not take matters into his own hands. Jill had been right about her daughter’s need to analyze.

“You’re a terrific kid, you know that? It must be about time we hit Chuck E. Cheese for a night of my beating the tar out of you in every game in the place.”

“You wish!” She laughed again.

“You know what I really wish? I wish I could give you a hug right now.”

“What you have to do is give me a think hug.”

“And I do that how?”

“You think about the hug, and I think about the hug at the same time. It’s not as good as the real thing, but it’s better than no hug at all. Wanna try?”

I wondered if Kyla and her dad used the “think hug” method — then decided it didn’t matter.

“I sure do,” I told her, and I actually closed my eyes and imagined holding her.

“Did it work?” she said after a few seconds.

“You’re a genius,” I said. “I’m not going to be around much for the next little while, so we’re going to have to rely on think hugs, lots of them.”

“Okay.”

“Have a good sleep, okay?”

“You too, Adam.”

I promised her I would, but as we ended the call I knew it would be a while before I slept.

For the next three hours, maybe a little longer, I alternated between the upstairs and downstairs locations. I spent more time on the upper level — on the stool and looking some of the time through the camera and some of the time through the binoculars at the garage and the alley behind it — two of the places Kennedy had spent something like half his life watching.

The stools were the tall kind you see in some bars and coffee places — comfortable for maybe an hour, nasty after that. The best part was the walk between the two surveillance locations when I was able to stretch and rub the numbness out of most of the lower back half of my body. I finally retrieved two of the blankets Kennedy had told me about and manufactured a couple of almost cushions, which helped. I took breaks every couple of hours to do bending and stretching exercises, a new appreciation for Kennedy’s dedication already firmly formed in my mind.

During the time I was watching from the upstairs perch, I saw one car go down the alley, just before midnight. Nothing and no one else. Sometime around 1:30 in the morning, I checked the cameras to make sure that they were working and properly aimed, that I hadn’t accidentally knocked one off target. Then I went out to the Accord, grabbed my gym bag out of the trunk, and went back inside.

I checked the kitchen, more out of curiosity than hunger. Kennedy had stocked the place pretty well before he left. I wasn’t surprised by that, except that he would have had to do the shopping between our chat that morning and my arrival that night. Another example of the man’s attention to detail.

I took a shower and, after one last look out of the main floor window at what had been the Unruh house, I headed off to my own bedroom. I glanced quickly at Kennedy’s book collection — almost all non-fiction, with a strong bent toward biography. Again, I was surprised. Being a fiction guy myself, I went to bed with the copy of Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness that I’d brought with me. I fell asleep with the light on and the book still propped on my chest, woke up a while later, and for a minute had to remind myself where I was. I shut off the light and thought for a while, mostly about the fact that I had just completed night number one of my surveillance. Just 8,999 short of Kennedy’s record.