Fit to kill Read online

  Fit to kill

  James Heneghan

  James Heneghan

  Fit to kill

  CHAPTER ONE

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 6

  Vancouver’s Stanley Park peninsula hunched its granite shoulders against an early November storm. Relentless rain and gale-force winds howled in from the ocean. West Enders knew that something terrible was going to happen. They stayed indoors and waited anxiously.

  Julie Dagg was an exception. Nothing could make her stay home and miss her workouts. Twenty-five years old, she watched what she ate and kept herself slim and fit with regular workouts. Tuesdays and Thursdays she practiced yoga and self-defense for two hours at the Tae Kwon Do Academy on Robson Street. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays she grunted and sweated through weight training and cardio for an hour at the West End Fitness Center on Denman.

  Tonight she’d worked mostly with free weights and was now finishing off with twenty minutes of cardio on the stationary bicycle.

  Life was good. An hour or two each day was all it took. Stay fit, look great, live longer.

  The gym, almost empty tonight because of the foul weather, would be closing soon, at 10:00 PM. Time to go home. Sauna first, then a quick shower. Her roommate Billie would be waiting for her with a nightcap. A career nurse at St. Paul’s Hospital, Billie was a lot of fun to live with. Before turning in they would watch tv together for a while. Or they might talk again about their plans for next summer’s hiking vacation in Umbria. It would be Julie’s first trip to Italy. She was looking forward to it. An image from one of Billie’s travel brochures popped into her head. A terraced vineyard under the golden light of an Umbrian sunset. Julie sighed happily.

  Peeling off her Lycra exercise togs in the change room was like shedding a skin. She relaxed in the sauna, then showered and toweled herself dry. She pulled on her warm tracksuit and raincoat and headed out onto a deserted Denman Street, gym bag swinging by her side.

  She crossed the street, almost blown off her feet in the gusting wind. Traffic lights bounced and screeched on their overhead cables.

  A man stood well back in the darkness of the Royal Bank doorway, watching her.

  Julie hurried through the rain. Her apartment was only a few blocks away, near Stanley Park. When she reached the minipark and Pearl’s Restaurant-closed Mondays-she heard heavy footsteps behind her and quickened her pace.

  The footsteps came closer. She turned her head and saw a man in a dark raincoat.

  She dropped her gym bag and ran.

  The man ran after her.

  Heart thumping with fear, she whirled around as he reached out to grab her. She ducked her head and moved into him fast. Hard kick. Knee in his crotch. Like the Tae Kwon Do Academy had taught her. He bent, gasping with pain. But he recovered before Julie could jab her apartment key in his eye.

  With a cry, he hurled himself at her, looping an arm around her neck and cutting off her air. She kicked and struggled. But it was no good-he was too strong.

  He dragged her into the bushes of the minipark.

  Terrified, heart bursting, Julie was forced down onto the ground. She couldn’t cry out or scream, for the arm locked round her neck was like an iron bar. He wound something-duct tape-around her head, sealing her mouth shut. Then he jerked her arms behind her back and snapped handcuffs onto her wrists.

  She could hardly breathe. He ripped away her clothing and pressed her body into the wet earth and dead leaves. Then he heaved and gasped above her and spilled words in her ears.

  All she knew before she died was the sound of his voice, the scream of the wind and the cold wet earth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 7

  Sebastian Casey, reporter for the West End Clarion, turned off his alarm, rolled out of bed and shuffled barefoot to the bathroom.

  Sleepy blue eyes stared back at him from the mirror as he mowed lemon stubble from his chin. Lighted by the fluorescent tube over the mirror, the thick hair on his head glowed a brick red. The eyebrows were less red-more of a burnt orange-while the hair on the rest of his body was the yellow color of turnip. As though the quality of redness in him diminished the closer it grew to the ground. He was a big man, just starting to go to fat. He rinsed off his jaw and stepped back from the mirror, regarding his white flaccid chest and the unsightly bulge about his middle. This morning he felt older than his forty years. The sight of the spare tire saddened him, but he wasn’t ambitious enough to do anything about it.

  He retrieved his copy of The Province from the hallway and carried his coffee, toast and newspaper to the kitchen table.

  He settled down to scan the front page.

  Under the Wednesday, November 8, dateline, the headline read:

  Murder in Vancouver’s West End

  Woman’s Headless Torso Found Near

  Stanley Park

  He skimmed the story. A late-night walker had discovered the naked and decapitated body of a woman, identity unknown, a block from the park.

  Casey finished his simple breakfast, rinsed the mug and plate, and barefooted it back to the bedroom. With only a narrow bed, no wall hangings, a small chest of drawers and a night table, the room was monastic in its simplicity. He made the bed, then dressed for work. Beige cords, blue cotton shirt, gray wool sweater, tweed jacket.

  He slid his window open and stepped out onto the balcony of his eighth-floor apartment. The building was old and the balcony narrow, with black wrought-iron railings. He filled his lungs with the cold morning air as he took in the black broil of sky and a street littered with leaves and branches from last night’s windstorm. He watched Albert Kayle leave his house on the opposite side of the street and step over broken branches as he set off on his morning walk. Then he watched Albert’s wife, Matty, sweeping leaves off her pathway. A nice woman, a real lady, with a quiet, dignified way of speaking. She reminded Casey of his Aunt Maeve in Belfast.

  The Kayle house was easier to see now that the big horse chestnut in its front yard was almost bare of leaves. He could see its mossy roof, front porch, steps and front door clearly through the web of black branches. Except for Matty, and a pair of squirrels bounding about in the sodden leaves, the street was deserted.

  He should get moving. An hour at the Clarion office, and then he had a doctor appointment.

  He grabbed his raincoat and his battered Irish tweed cap out of the closet, stepped out into the hallway, and locked the door. He took the elevator down to the street thinking about the news of the murder. There was a maniac out there somewhere who had decapitated a woman. The West End was no longer safe.

  While Casey was stumbling sleepily about his kitchen brewing coffee, his neighbor across the street, Matty Kayle, was eyeing her husband from across the wide Arctic tundra of their breakfast table. She thought, not for the first time, what life would be like if Albert was dead and she had her house to herself.

  It was almost 7:00 am, and Albert was reading his newspaper in sour silence and spooning milky bran flakes into his mouth. The newspaper lay flat on the table between them. She watched his lips, fleshy, greedy, glistening like the pink worms in her garden.

  She must remember to take the dahlias in before the frosts came. The rains could stop any day now. Then the frost would come.

  When had she started feeling revulsion watching her husband eat? She watched Albert’s lips, pouting in repose, wriggling in action. She tore her eyes away from his mouth and read his upside-down newspaper instead. A skill she had acquired over thirty years of silent breakfasts.

  A murder in the West End, on Haro, only a block away. She shivered. The killer chopped off her head and-what? Buried it? Took it away with him?

  Matty must have cried out, for Albert was watching her over the tops of his glasses with th
ose black eyes and that familiar sarcastic look on his face.

  “What?”

  She nodded at the paper. “A woman-”

  He blinked, staring at her, saying nothing, waiting for her to finish her sentence. As though she were a child struggling with new words. Or an Alzheimer victim like poor old Ellie Benson on Comox Street, who couldn’t even remember her own name from one day to the next.

  “Murdered!” said Matty.

  “Ah.” Albert’s upper lip curled in a pink sneer as he returned to his newspaper.

  She was born Matilda Harrison sixty-two years ago in this same Nelson Street house where she had lived all her life. Her father died when Matty was in her mid-thirties. Her mother followed him a year later. Matty then met and married Albert. Albert Kayle was thirty years old. She was thirty-seven. He had burning dark eyes and dark hair. He worked as a lineman’s assistant with the telephone company, where Matty worked in the typing pool. He proposed to her almost immediately.

  She was overwhelmed. Nobody had ever proposed to her before. They were married that same year. Matty hoped she wasn’t too old for children. She looked forward to raising a family in the house where she’d grown up and known so many happy times.

  That was twenty-five years ago. Now she was an old woman.

  She refilled Albert’s coffee mug. He didn’t look up. He was now absorbed in The Globe and Mail.

  He looked young for his age and still had most of his hair. His face, unlike Matty’s, was relatively unlined. Matty put his youthful appearance down to his regular exercise.

  Matty had never been a beauty-she was “plain,” she would be the first to admit-and had never been smart enough for college. She wondered what Albert had ever seen in her. After a few years of marriage and one miscarriage, she had discovered Albert’s true nature. His blind, red-hot anger if crossed. He bore no love or affection for her. He had married her only for the mortgage-free house. And the bit of money left her after the death of her mother.

  Albert was often out of work. There was a pattern: he would work at whatever job came along for a while, and then would be let go or fired. Then he would sit about the house for a month or so before looking for something else. Garbage pickup, road repair, gardening, swamping, janitoring-anything that came along. In his time off between jobs, he puttered about in his basement workshop making ugly rustic furniture. Or he took long naps on the livingroom sofa.

  She carried her cup to the sink and rinsed it absentmindedly, gazing out the window at the backyard. What a fine place it would have been for children to play. The children she’d never had.

  She would like to have a dog-a puppy- or even a cat. But Albert forbade animals. This was typical of him, acting as though the house were his. He took over most of the basement for his workshop, filling the house with horrid smells of varnish and paint. She never went into his workshop or his den. Both were kept locked. Only Albert had keys. Matty wasn’t welcome there.

  If she suggested that he might help with household chores, he flew into a frightening rage.

  She was safe upstairs. She had her own bedroom, thank goodness. Albert stayed away and never bothered her there.

  She put her cup away in the cupboard. Once again she gazed out the window. Tiny water globules hung like teardrops from the leaves of the hydrangeas and from the withered clematis vines near the back door. She glanced at the stove clock: 6:55. She had a chiropractor appointment at ten. For her back pain. She rubbed the small of her back. Lumbar vertebra number five, or L5 as Dr. Malley called it. Why couldn’t she have married someone like David Malley, a kind man with enough tender affection for every lonely, unloved soul in the West End? She pressed her hands around her waist to her stomach, still flat and slim. And barren.

  She came to realize much later that it wasn’t because she had been too old. Many women had babies later in life. The reason she and Albert had never had children was because he’d never loved her.

  She tidied the kitchen, rinsing out the coffeepot, putting things away, brushing Albert’s bran buds-he always spilled some- into the sink.

  She went downstairs to the basement and loaded the washing machine. The front door rattled upstairs. Albert was off for his walk. She set the timer and closed the lid. Then she went outside and started sweeping leaves and branches off the walk, debris from last night’s windstorm.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “G ’morning, Matty.”

  “G’morning, “Good morning, Casey. I’m just about to put on the kettle.”

  “Sounds like an invitation.”

  Casey sat at the kitchen table while Matty made tea. The office could wait. He liked the solid feel to this house. Its smell of furniture polish and cracked leather excited a sharp and satisfying nostalgia in him. It evoked childhood memories of his Aunt Maeve’s house in Belfast, a veritable museum of Edwardian bric-a-brac.

  Matty placed the tray on the table. “Albert’s out.”

  “Yes, I saw him set off. Y’know, I’ve always liked that coffee table of yours, Matty.” Casey nodded toward the living room. Made from a burl, a wart-like knot cut from the bole of a tree, the table was finished with what Casey guessed was probably a polymer resin. Its unique grain swirled in surreal patterns under its clear glassy surface.

  “Albert’s hobby. He spends a lot of time in his workshop. It’s a terrible thing, the murder of that poor woman,” she said, changing the subject as she poured the tea. She pointed to her newspaper on the table and sighed. “Will you be writing a report about it in your paper, Casey?”

  “Not likely. My colleague, Jack Wexler, is on the police beat. I take care of the politics and the human-interest stuff.”

  “It must be a very interesting job, being a newspaper reporter.”

  “The Clarion is only a weekly community paper, Matty, as you know. I like my job, but I don’t cover great events or important issues. Just the small stuff. A tiny brick in the huge skyscraper world of journalism is all I am.”

  “Every brick is important, Casey, if the building is to stand. Help yourself to a butter tart. I made them yesterday.”

  Casey thought again about his waistline as he helped himself to a tart.

  “So what’s the story, Doc?”

  “For an old guy of forty, you’re doing not too badly.” Tom Watterson frowned.

  “But-”

  “But?” Casey buttoned his trousers.

  “It’s the weight. Two years ago you were a few pounds over. But now?” Watterson’s black eyebrows disappeared under his untidy gray mop. “Now you’re twenty pounds over.”

  “Hmmph.”

  “Still happy at the West End Clarion?”

  “You’re asking me if I’m a contented man, Tom. You know I am. The job’s fine. So what is it you’re trying to tell me? Out with it.”

  “Exercise. That’s what you need, regular exercise. And plenty of vegetables and fruit. Cut out the cinnamon rolls and the pizza. And-” He paused. “You still living alone?”

  “I am.”

  “People live longer when they have a partner.” He smiled. “Maybe you could find a good woman.”

  “Thanks, Tom.” Casey made for the door.

  “And come back in a year. Regular checkups would do you no harm either. You’re too young for a coronary.”

  He walked to the office.

  Too young for a coronary!

  Find a good woman!

  “Hmmph!”

  This time of the day, the Clarion ’s other two reporters were usually out doing legwork. Interviews, story follow-ups, what they called “face-to-face” work. He didn’t expect to find any of them in.

  Brenda at the front desk smiled when she saw him. “Messages for you, Casey.”

  “Thanks, Brenda.” He examined the yellow slips. “Here. I brought you a Mars bar.” Which wasn’t quite true. He’d bought it for himself to eat while working on his piece about the infighting at the parks board. But chocolate didn’t exactly come under the doctor’s prescription. He
should try to shed a few of those extra pounds. Take some of Tom’s advice. The parts about eating sensibly and exercising anyway. The good woman he definitely did not need. He was a loner, always had been.

  He’d thought about jogging last summer, but had never got started somehow. He wasn’t sure if he possessed the will or motivation. It was as simple as that. Why struggle? You lived, you died. Who cared if you were a few pounds overweight?

  “Thanks, big guy,” said Brenda. “Jack’s been looking for you.”

  Jack Wexler was at his desk. Their third reporter, Debbie Ozeroff, was out. Debbie covered the arts, fashion, women’s issues and the environment. There was also a part-time photographer, Doug Duchesne, who was mostly out. The four of them shared an office the size of a jail cell. When the three reporters were all there, the place reminded Casey of the farmer’s market back home in Belfast-noise and chaos unlimited.

  Wexler stood and grabbed his jacket off the peg when he saw Casey. “Come on, it’s lunchtime. I’ll buy you a bagel.”

  Wexler was over sixty. Lately he’d been telling anyone who would listen that he couldn’t wait to retire and sell his overpriced West End condo. He and his wife Midge would buy a small place near sunny Victoria at half the price. Short and wiry, he looked much younger than his age, even with his balding pink head. He always dressed smartly. Today he wore a dark houndstooth jacket, dark green V-neck sweater over a white cotton shirt, green cords and a pair of brown oxfords. Wexler had been married for almost forty years.

  They were early, so they got two seats at the window counter of Hegel’s Bagels looking out toward the beach and seawall at English Bay. Wexler ordered coffee and a gypsy salami bagel. Casey took only a house salad and a glass of water.

  “What’s with the rabbit food?”

  Casey shrugged. “Doctor says I should lose a few. What’s on your mind, Jack? Anything new from Cop Shop on the murder?”