Survival

Chapter Two

Kerri set another plate of hash browns and scrambled eggs in front of Absalom Lincoln and Sandra DeVos. Absalom cooed at the unexpected boon while Sandra shook her head.

“Kerri, you shouldn’t do this. We didn’t ask for this.”

“On the house.” Kerri gave them a wicked grin, the kind she reserved for only them. “You know cops get free coffee.”

“Since when is this coffee?” Sandra asked.

“Since I decided that you keep this place safe.”

A few weeks into starting her job at Mel’s Place, there had been a homeless person who never left a booth at the front. Kerri sympathized with the man—but knew that Gerry, the supposed owner of Mel’s Place, would be livid since the man was also scaring away customers. She’d made the difficult decision to call the police and spoke to Officer Lincoln on the phone. He’d still been working his way up the ranks, not yet a detective, and he was eager to take the call. As soon as Kerri expressed her reservations—the man was homeless, with no place to go, not ostensibly violent but perhaps mentally ill—he had been immediately sympathetic. Instead of drawing weapons and making a scene, Absalom appeared with a social worker, and the three of them left together.

Ever since, Absalom (and whoever his partner was) not only received free coffee, but whatever food Kerri could give them without alerting Gerry. Since he was mostly an owner in name only and it was Kerri and Roy, the short order cook, who kept the place going, which meant a lot of food went to Absalom’s regular spot at the counter.

He lapped up the hash browns happily, talking in an animated voice about how many more carbs he needed today anyway after all the running he’d done this morning, while Sandra continued to shake her head. “I thank you for the sentiment, but unlike my partner here, my belt does not appreciate potatoes. I’m going to pass.”

“Suit yourself. You want the eggs or…?” Absalom soon took Sandra’s unwanted plate as she stood from the counter. She excused herself to the bathroom while Kerri wiped down her spot and the surrounding counter.

When the front bell rang, Kerri noticed the woman from the front booth had left. It was nearly one in the morning, when the last bus would run back into town, so she figured the woman was trying to catch a ride. It was clear she was a student, though much higher in ranking than most of the other kids who came in here for coffee to water down their hangovers. The woman’s books and computer had been open the entire time she was in her booth, utterly consumed by her work. Each time Kerri had filled her coffee cup, though, she had smiled and whispered a thank-you in a faintly French-accented voice.

Kerri walked over to collect the dishes in the booth and a few dollars in tips. Underneath a stack of napkins was a printed-off photo of Kitty Genovese. Kerri couldn’t decipher if the photo was left by accident or on purpose, but she settled the image into her back pocket either way. The woman really did remind her of Kitty, even if Kitty had met a terrible fate. Kerri hoped the woman would return for a study session, if only to reaffirm that she would not meet the same end.

“Hey, Ker,” Absalom asked. “You got a minute?”

“Sure.” Kerri dropped the dishes by Manny’s dishwasher station and headed back over to Absalom. She topped his coffee as he fidgeted with a file half in and out of his briefcase.

“I was wondering if I could get your opinion,” he began, his voice hovering in a lower register.

“Without Sandra?”

Absalom gave an uneasy smile. “You don’t know any of this.”

Kerri gave a zipper motion across her lips. “Secrets are always safe with me. I’m basically a priest at this point. Or a psychic. Probably a psychic, right? Do police still use psychics on the down-low? Or is that a seventies thing that has now faded out like hypnosis?”

Absalom rolled his eyes. Their banter was a long-standing routine, established to no doubt make Absalom feel better about soliciting her help. When she’d known exactly how to deal with the homeless man in the restaurant and then been able to suss out what kids entered the diner had fake IDs, he’d understood that she was good at reading people. She revealed she was a writer then; it was part of her job to imagine people’s actions from different perspectives and for not-so-common motivations.

“So, hit me with it,” Kerri said. “What do you have?”

“A couple really strange break-ins.”

Absalom and Sandra were part of the burglary crime unit—the “property patrol” as he dubbed it—and most of their cases were cut and dried. A house was robbed of a laptop and DVDs, all to be pawned within forty-eight hours, and then that money was used for drugs. Peterborough’s population was made up of mostly retirees dependent on social assistance, along with transient students who only lived in the area from September to April when the school year was in full swing. Then there were the long-standing, tenured professors who made the university possible and lived in the much better side of town under heavier lock and key. The summer months were the worst for petty and property crimes since the university staff with fancy houses went on vacation and the drug community became desperate without the students to prey on. The crimes were as standard as animals waking up from hibernation in early spring; a new wave of break-ins was surely coming and made even worse because of the recession. Kerri had only been able to help with one of Absalom’s cases before, when a burglar had also taken women’s underwear and clothing in addition to the typical things snatched. Absalom had been stumped because the clothing had no pawning value, so he considered the burglar a woman until Kerri saw the sentimental value in the stolen object. This wasn’t a woman—but a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend who wanted to get back with the intended target, perhaps even a stalker unknown to the resident before now. As it turned out, the victim had rejected a co-worker a week before her house was hit. When they checked his residence, the computer had been there—not pawned—and loaded with a bunch of violent pornography with the woman’s face superimposed over top.

So, when Absalom wanted Kerri’s help again, she expected another panty raid. Instead, he presented her with a house that had nothing stolen at all.

“Are you sure it’s actually nothing, or is it something that the people don’t want you to know about—like s*x toys or porn?” she asked.

“We considered that. But there’s more here. The residents don’t exactly have much shame.” Absalom gestured to the file but didn’t open it. For confidentiality, he couldn’t show her anything with information on it. Talking in hypotheticals like this was risky, too, but worth it from his vantage point. “First of all, these were students. A frat house, it seems, but I didn’t even know Peterborough had frat houses. There were porn DVDs on the shelf like they were Oscar winners. So, when I asked twice, and they still said no, nothing was stolen, I tend to believe them. And that house, like the other two on the same block, was definitely broken into. The locks were smashed. Books tossed.”

“What about insurance scam? You know, report a break-in and make it seem real to get some kind of repair damage while not actually risking losing anything?”

“Sandra thought of that. It’s a good thought. But this has happened in more than one house, and there are no commonalities among the landlords or tenants or anything like that. There wasn’t even insurance on one of the houses hit. The frat house. Also, those guys insisted there was food eaten.”

“Hmm. Like the person was living there?”

Absalom nodded.

“Yikes. Creepy.” Kerri thought back to the underwear case. The co-worker had later admitted he’d stayed in the house for a while, wearing the underwear over his face and on his body, as if he wanted to live the woman’s life. He’d probably eaten food, too. This kind of behaviour sent all her red flags flying, but she still didn’t know what she was looking at with these cases. She asked again if there was anything stolen—like underwear—but still came up negative. “So, how many places are we talking about here?”

“Since April? Maybe four. Five at most.”

“Huh. If it was in the winter, I would have figured someone was trying to avoid the cold. They broke in to keep warm. Made a mess of it but mostly done out of need rather than sadism or something creepy.”

“It could have been winter. We don’t know. One of the houses had been rented out, but the student never showed, so the break-in we found in April could have easily happened in February. There’s just no way of formally knowing.”

“Huh.” Kerri folded her arms across her chest, considering the details. “But the break-ins now are happening in the spring. So, maybe it’s a mix of necessity and…something else. Was anything else disturbed? Just books tossed? Or was there, like, maybe writing on the wall?”

Absalom shifted in his seat. He glanced to the bathroom doors where Sandra had not yet emerged. He took out a single photo, face down, and slid it across the counter. He still kept a finger over the image, pinning it down like a bug. “Be warned. This is a gory photo.”

“Oh?”

“A cat was killed at the latest crime scene. It appears to be a stray—the owners never had a cat—but it’s pretty gruesome. Do you want to see it or have me describe it to you?”

“I’d rather see it. It’s always going to be far worse in my head.”

When Kerri wrote her horror novels, she kept the monsters hidden as long as possible. Only at the very end could you reveal what was actually making the walls bang and the floorboards shake. In real life, though, you had to stare monsters in the face. It was why she and Absalom got along so well, and why Sandra—who would rather monsters never existed in the first place—would always react with anger at these events, rather than curiosity.

Absalom removed his finger from the image. Kerri took a breath as she flipped the photo over. Let the fear wash over you, she reminded herself. Don’t let it stay. A black and white cat had been completely eviscerated and hung from two clothing lines. The organs were removed and sat in a pile on the grass. Some of the meat from the cat appeared to have been sliced off. After blinking off an initial wave of nausea at the gore, Kerri grew focused.

“Is that...?” Kerri pointed to a black spot in the corner. “Is that a fireplace? A barbecue?”

“A barbecue, yes. Some of the blood was in there.”

“Oh. Oh.” Kerri placed the photo face down again, her mind reeling. She took a couple of steadying breaths. “He was hunting.”

“Hmm?”

“The person breaking into these houses, if he is doing all of them, is hunting for food. He’s trying to survive on the bare minimum—like a survivalist. He killed the cat and strung it up, not for taunting or for some sick sinister joy, but for food. He just didn’t finish what he started. Someone probably scared him away.”

Absalom wrote as Kerri spoke. He asked a couple of questions about hunting, which Kerri answered the best she could, balancing her conviction with enough personal distance. She liked Absalom, she really did, but she didn’t want him to get too far into her head or her past. After their first meeting about the underwear house, Kerri had panicked she’d revealed too much and Googled herself. She had no criminal record, so she’d not come up there if he went looking, but her proximity to crime always made her visible in other ways. She stared at the Google search with her heart in her throat—then settled into relief when nothing was there. Not even when she paired her name with her last name of Reznik did anything about her—or her father—come up. Unless someone knew too much and really went digging, her past was her past. If any of her ordeal had happened ten years later, she knew there would be no escaping the internet recognition and absolutely no way to scrub it clean.

She gestured to the other side of the diner where Jim, one of the regulars, often spoke about his hunting trips. “He’s not in right now, obviously, but he’s talked to me before about making venison jerky. He knows a lot about this kind of thing. Owns a shop even, up in Lindsay. You may want to ask him about the technique displayed in the image or ask him if anyone has come by his shop trying to learn it. My knowledge is limited on the topic, as you can see.”

“You know more than me,” Absalom said. “City boy at heart. Scarborough isn’t much for hunting, and sometimes, I don’t even see the parts of Peterborough that cater to that kind of thing. So, what is it? You hunt? A family of brothers? Grew up in the country?”

Kerri gave a thin smile. “Something like that.”

“Well, this is great,” Absalom said, writing again. “Not great great, but I was so worried I was dealing with a psychopath. Animal mutilation is always the first sign, the experts say. But I don’t want to be on a new Bernardo case. I don’t care if it would make my career. No, thank you.”

Kerri chuckled as lightheartedly as she could. “Psychopaths are rare. It’s why horror novels with them don’t really hold me. People try to make the monster into a person, thinking it’s far more lifelike. But I don’t want to be scared by something real because it’s not a fantasy then. I’d much rather read Stephen King’s scary car monster. Even if it’s a ridiculous idea, at least it’s an idea I can escape into, you know?”

“Not really.” Absalom grinned playfully. “But I’m not a horror writer. How’s your latest book coming?”

Kerri brushed off the question. She, like the woman earlier, never liked to talk about projects until they were done and the ink on the contract was sealed. Sometimes, even until the book was on the shelf. Then she knew for sure that the company wouldn’t fold or the e-book wouldn’t be delayed endlessly. Publishing nowadays offered so many more twists and turns, surprises and disappointments, than in Stephen King’s and Clive Barker’s days. Speaking too much about anything intangible really did feel like a curse.

“New book is still too new. But I think what I meant is that when I read a horror novel, I want to be scared by something, of course, but I don’t want that fear to bleed into my daily life. The monster in the pages has to be close enough to the present world that it’s terrifying—but also far enough away that when I close the book, the horror is over.”

“So, you don’t get scared when you see a Chrysler? Or whatever Christine was?”

“Absolutely not,” Kerri said, laughing. “But man, when I’m in that book, I’ll piss my pants every time I see a headlight. That’s the real fun. And Christine was a Plymouth Fury, by the way.”

“Ah, okay. Well, I can’t wait to see what you come up with next. Aliens? Ghosts? Scary lamp monsters? Whatever is there, I’m there.”

Kerri gave Absalom more coffee, and then hash browns, as a way of saying thank you. Sandra came back from the bathroom holding her phone, as if she’d been waylaid by a pending case. From the hushed tones she spoke to Absalom in, Kerri guessed that was exactly what had gone on. Kerry felt no resentment as she heard fragments of her own theory come out of Absalom’s mouth moments later. He would have been able to figure out the cat’s meaning if he had thought beyond shows like Criminal Minds. The cat was food for someone who was starving, for someone who was scavenging and squatting in abandoned student housing. Why someone would need to—instead of going to a shelter—she had no idea. But that was not her job to figure out.

As the night wound down and the flow of people into Mel’s Place decreased, she threw herself into her shift-changing tasks. As soon as six a.m. came around, Daniela would arrive and take over for the day shift. Kerri still had to clean out the coffeemaker, help Manny with the dish drying since the machine broke, and count the food in the back for the truck order. As soon as Absalom and Sandra left (with a big tip, of course), the rest of the people at the counter were truckers who didn’t need much attention. It wasn’t until Kerri took the garbage out at the back of the diner when she remembered the bloody insides of the cat, like a fracture that had yet to heal and smarted with pain at the smallest touch.

She shook her head. It’s because you smell tuna right now. That is the only reason you are thinking of it again. Garbage was always a rich, heady mix of smells it was so easy to fall back into bad memories. She told herself to stop it, but more came. The strong odour of the inside of a deer when she’d cut too deep and punctured bowels, her father yelling at her for hours because of her error, Lee stepping up and begging for the sound and smell to stop.

Kerri swallowed and pushed the memories away. She never had to go hunting ever again. She never had to go into the woods or live in a small town ever again. But whatever knowledge she’d gleaned from her father made her an incredibly good asset now—either with Jim and the rest of the hunters, with her novels, or with Absalom. She was skilled at working her way in between men with power, contorting her voice into a familiar drawl, and telling them what they already knew. Hunters and cops—while intimidating and scary in the abstract—were nothing but soft men in camouflage clothing. She knew how to handle them because at one point, she’d handled far worse in her father.

It was women, though, especially the quiet bookish types, who she couldn’t always decipher. But she wanted to. She really did.

After closing the dumpster, she took out the photo of Kitty Genovese from her back pocket. She smiled and wondered what the bookish woman would discover and if Kerri could be a part of that secret knowledge.

A loud rattle—like the sound of a paint can or the scraping of dumpster wheels—made her jump. She waited on the balls of her feet, wondering if something was trapped inside. Another cat or a rat or even...

The rattle continued.

“Hello?” Kerri asked.

Nothing. Silence.

Kerri peered around the corner of the diner. The night stretched into the morning horizon, the sun peeking over the trees. Nothing but the changing temperatures. Metal expanding, creating something else—that was all that made the noise.

Yet when Kerri wandered to the side of the diner to stare at the dawn full-on, she felt like she was being watched. There were no cars in the lot that she didn’t recognize, all truckers and Roy’s rusted Mazda 3 accounted for.

“Hello?”

Nothing again.

She spoke in Czech. She asked a question her stepmother used to teach her and Lee the language, folding a pun inside the verse to make them both smile. It was a game, a rhyme call and response. She waited for the answer.

There was nothing.

Kerri completed the answer herself. She pocketed the photo again, thinking only of her stepmother in place of Kitty. The talk of random acts of murder and burglary were just screwing with her head. She had to go back and serve coffee. To mop the floors and then go home. She needed to save all her fear for her next novel, so she could keep the real monsters at bay.