The Killing Circle. Andrew Pyper

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       8

      Two days after the circle’s meeting at Petra’s house, the morning paper brings news of another missing person. A man this time. Ronald Pevencey, twenty-four. A hairdresser at one of the avantgarde salons on Queen who hadn’t shown up for work all week. When the police were finally alerted, they discovered that the door to his second-floor apartment was left ajar, though no evidence of forced entry or struggle within could be found. This led investigators to a relatively safe assumption. Whoever had come knocking, Ronald had let in.

      The reason authorities are announcing suspicions of foul play at all is not only based on Ronald Pevencey’s unusual absence from work, but disturbing remarks he’d recently shared with co-workers. His belief he was being followed. Here and there over the past weeks a figure seemed to be watching him. While he didn’t say whether he knew who this stalker was, one of his colleagues suspected that Ronald had a theory, and it scared the bejesus out of him. “He wanted to talk about it, but didn’t want to talk about it,” is how his confidante put it.

      The rest of the piece, which appears under the by-line of my drinking buddy Tim Earheart, has the police spokesperson bending over backwards to dismiss any speculation that there may be a serial killer at large. First off, there was nothing to indicate that either Carol Ulrich or Ronald Pevencey have been murdered. And while neither had any motive for being a runaway or suicide, there is always the possibility that they just took off for a spontaneous vacation. Postpartum depression. A crystal meth bender. It happened.

      It’s further pointed out that there is no connection between the two missing persons. A hairdresser. A stay-at-home mom. Different ages, different social circle. Carol had never set foot in the salon where Ronald worked. The only commonality is their residence within six blocks of each other. Within six blocks of us.

      If Ronald Pevencey and Carol Ulrich are both dead, odds are they met their ends by different means. Serial killers work in patterns, as the police were at pains to point out. A psychotic glitch in their software makes them seek out versions of the same victim, over and over. In this case, all the two missing persons shared was the city in which they lived.

      Yet for all this, I’m certain that whatever hunted these two was the same in both cases. I’m also certain that neither is still alive. Despite what all the forensic psychiatrists and criminologists say, it seems to me that, at least some of the time, unpredictability must be as likely a motivation for murder as any other. A twist. Maybe this is what whoever is doing this likes. Not any one perversity, but the far more unsettling variance afforded by anonymity. If you don’t know why a killer does what he does, it makes him more of a threat. It also makes him harder to catch.

      But it’s not the killer’s hypothetical motivation that has me convinced. It’s that I believe whatever followed me home the other night is the same shadow that followed Ronald Pevencey and Carol Ulrich. The bad man from my son’s nightmares who is now making appearances in my own.

      I give Emmie the morning off and walk Sam to daycare myself. Every half-block I turn and scan the street to catch the eyes I feel upon us. Sam doesn’t ask why I stop. He just takes my gloved hand in his mitten and holds it, even as he comes within view of his friends in the fenced-in play area, a point at which he would normally run off to join them.

      “See you later,” he says. And though I intend to say the same thing, an “I love you” slips out instead. But even this is permitted today.

      “Ditto,” Sam says, with a punch to the elbow before stepping through the daycare’s doors.

      There’s a new box of video cassettes sitting on my chair at the office. More cable freakshows and wife swaps and snuff amateur video compilations with titles like Falling from Buildings! and Animals that Kill! But it’s what I find under the box that is truly disturbing. A post-it note from the Managing Editor. Come see me. M. It’s the longest piece of correspondence I’ve ever received from her.

      The Managing Editor’s office is a glassed-in box in the opposite corner of the newsroom from where I sit. But this is not why I so rarely have any contact with her. She is more a memo drafter, an executive conference attender, an advertiser luncher than a manager of human beings. She has been so successful in this position, it is rumoured that she is currently being headhunted by American TV networks. She is twenty-eight years old.

      For now, however, she’s still the one who does the hiring and firing at the National Star. And I’m fully aware, as I approach her glass cube (bulletproof, it is said), that she is more inclined toward the firing than the hiring.

      “Patrick. Sit,” she says when I come in, a canine command that is obeyed. She raises an index finger without looking my way, a gesture that indicates she’s in the middle of a thought that could make or break the sentence she’s halfway through. I watch her type out the words she finally harnesses—symbiotic revenue stream—and tap a button to replace her memo-in-progress with a Tahitian beach screensaver.

      “I’m sure you know why you’re here,” she says, turning to face me. Her eyes do a quick scan of my person. I seem to disappoint her, as expected.