Kenny the Making of a Serial Killer 1
Date: 2017-09-08 04:00:00+00:00

Kenny

The Making of a Serial Killer

- A Trilogy -

Book 1

Patrick Laughy

Dedication

To the memory of Vancouver Police Service Dog, Duke III.

Acknowledgement

Without Suzy’s help, this book would never have been written.  My thanks to Linette and Joe who once again assisted with proofing and editing.

ISBN:978-1-927965-35-1

Copyrighted Material

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, alive or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

- September 1979 -

CHAPTER TWO

- December 1984 –

CHAPTER THREE

- September 1985 –

CHAPTER FOUR

- October 1988 -

CHAPTER FIVE

- July 1989 -

CHAPTER SIX

- March 1990 -

CHAPTER SEVEN

- September 1991 -

CHAPTER EIGHT

- December 1991 -

CHAPTER NINE

- April 1992 -

CHAPTER TEN

- September 1992 -

CHAPTER ELEVEN

- September 1994 –

CHAPTER TWELVE

- May 1995 –

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

- September 1995 -

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

- September 1996 -

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

- September 1997 -

- PREFACE -

This book is a work of fiction.

I write it from the perspective of a cop, because I was one and that has provided me with the experience and credibility to realistically describe both sides of the fictional accounts of the two main characters involved in this story.

This narrative is a description of the making of a serial killer, coupled with the background experience of the cop who eventually brings him to justice.

To help you set the stage for what is about to take place, I think it is only prudent for me to provide you with some basic facts before we begin our tale.

- What is a Serial Killer? –

What motivates him or her to kill again and again?  What, if any, are the common denominators found among serial killers?

Serial killers are not the same as, and should not be confused with, people who commit mass murder, which is described as killing numerous people in a single incident.  Nor is it the same as spree-killing, where murders are committed in two or more locations over a short time-frame.

Generally-speaking, a serial killer is a person who, suffering from abnormal psychological gratification, murders three or more people, committed as separate events usually, but not always, by a single offender acting alone.

These murders normally take place over a period of more than a month and include significant breaks or cooling off periods in between.  The average age of a serial killer at the time of the first killing was just over twenty-seven years and they are typically white males.

Female serial killers are likely to kill husbands, relatives, or people in hospitals or nursing homes where they work.  Their murders usually take place in one specific area.  Poison is frequently used on the victims; money is often the motive. Male serial killers are more likely to kill strangers. They tend to be geographically mobile, are likely to torture or mutilate when killing, and report having a driving sexual motive.

While the motivation for serial killing can include anger, thrill-seeking, financial gain, and attention seeking, psychological gratification is the usual object of the serial killer.  Most serial killings involve sexual contact with the victim.

These murders will often be attempted or carried out in a similar fashion, and the victims frequently share something in common, such as age group, appearance, gender, type or race.

There are exceptions to these tendencies however.  There have been examples of serial killers demonstrating extended bouts of sequential killings over periods of weeks or months, escalating, while having no apparent cooling off periods or a significant return to normalcy.

There are several oft found characteristics among serial killers.  One of these is the exhibition of a degree of mental illness or psychopathy which can contribute to the killings - psychotic periods, during which the killer believes that he or she is another person, someone who is compelled by other entities, to commit murder.

Psychopathic behavior common to many serial killers can include predatory behavior, the need for control, impulsivity and the absence of feelings of guilt or remorse.  It is important to keep in mind that psychopaths can seem normal and often are considered as quite charming.

Serial killers have often been abused by a family member, either emotionally or physically and frequently, sexually.  They tend to be more likely to engage in fetishism, partialism or necrophilia and have a strong tendency to experience the object of their erotic interest as a physical representation of the symbolized body.

Many young serial killers display one or more of the following tendencies in their early years: a fascination with setting fires, involvement in sadistic activity with animals, and bed-wetting.

While children, and in early adolescence, they are frequently bullied or isolated socially.  Some will become active in petty crimes and have trouble as young adults in seeking and keeping a job. A serial killer is no different from any other individual in seeking approval from parents, sexual partners and their peers, as a child.

In early life, having a loving, supportive and nurturing family or lack thereof, is of utmost importance.  Interaction with family plays an important role in a child's growth and development and is what they identify with on a regular basis.   The quality of their attachments to parents and other members of the family is critical to the future way these individuals will interact with and value other members of society.

The need for approval influences children to attempt to develop social relationships with their family and peers.  If they are rejected or neglected, they cannot achieve this end. This failure results in the lowering of their self-esteem and can lead to the creation of a fantasy world in which they are in control.

Early trauma, followed by contributing factors such as the use of pornography, alcohol or drugs, serves to fortify this situation.  It is common for a serial killer to come from a family which has experienced divorce, separation, or the lack of one or both parents.

Additionally, many serial killers have experienced emotional neglect and some type of physical or sexual abuse.  If a child receives no support from those around him or her, then he or she is unlikely to recover successfully from an earlier traumatic event.

Children who do not have the physical or mental strength to control the mistreatment they suffer often create a new reality to which they can escape.  This new reality, one of pure fantasy, then becomes their method of total control and becomes part of their daily existence. From that point on, it is from within the confines of this fantasy world that their emotional development is guided and maintained.

In this sociopathic state, the child fails to develop the normal concepts of right and wrong and the ability to experience empathy towards others is arrested. Safely ensconced and self-centered he resides in his/her own little dream world, in which they can do no wrong.  The pain of others is of no consequence.  Only the needs of one person, that of the child, matters.  It is a haven in which the child has complete control, leaving only an outer shell that walks through the real world, a world to which he or she has no desire to commit.

In every sense of the word, the child is then emotionally isolated within those safe fantasies.

A head injury or some form of brain pathology is often a predisposing factor in the development of a serial killer.  This will often occur if the individual in question has responded in a negative way to the traumatization while in the formative years, experiencing low self-esteem and developing increasingly violent fantasies.

Traumatic experiences and feelings from the past can be dissociated from conscious feelings, and the adult offender often expands an altered state of consciousness by using facilitators, such as alcohol, pornography, or drugs.

Eventually he or she commits murder as a way of regaining control and in so doing feels reinforced on a short-term basis, before low self-esteem reasserts itself.  Shortly thereafter, the divisions between fantasy and reality are lost and when that occurs, the fantasy existence can begin to morph, leading to a need to assert dominance and continue the act of serial killing.

Do not forget however, that, as adults they may well appear as normal, part of a regular family and gainfully employed.

There are several psychological phases in the development of serial killers.

The initial phase consists of a withdrawal from reality and a heightening of the senses. This phase may last anywhere from a few moments to several months and will likely begin as a prolonged fantasy.  During this time, the killer may attempt to medicate himself with alcohol or drugs.

In the next phase, the killer begins to act, identifying and stalking his first victim.  This is followed shortly thereafter by the killer working at gaining the confidence of a victim in preparation to trapping that target.

The next step is for the killer to render the victim helpless, therein allowing for a reversal of the roles in a ritual re-enactment of the disastrous experiences of the killer's childhood.  Now, finally in complete control, the killer savors his retribution.

The high from this is short-lived.  Dead, the victim no longer represents what the killer thought he or she represented.  Conversely, the horrific memories of the individual or individuals who previously tortured the serial killer in the past, remain.

For the most part serial killers fall into two main categories - organized or disorganized.

Organized serial killers usually have social and interpersonal skills that allow them to develop both personal and romantic relationships.  They have friends and lovers and often a spouse and children and tend to plan their crimes methodically.  They often abduct their victims and then murder them in one place before disposing of the bodies elsewhere.  They usually have a fair knowledge of forensics and tend to sustain a high degree of control over their crime scenes.

Organized serial killers believe that they are smarter than the authorities and will have no difficulty in getting away with their crimes.  To them the entire exercise becomes a game of cat and mouse, a game which they firmly imagine they can win.  This type follows the media coverage of his or her acts, taking pride in their accomplishments.

Disorganized serial killers are normally far more impulsive.  They often commit their murders with whatever weapon is at hand at the time and usually make no attempt to conceal the body. This type is likely to have a history of mental illness, be either under-employed or unemployed and very likely a loner, with very few, if any, real friends.

The motivation for their crimes can vary widely.  An examination of some of these variations is worth consideration.  For example, so called ‘Visionary Serial Killers’ suffer from psychotic breaks with reality.  During these breaks, they may believe they are another person or are compelled to kill by superior entities like the Devil, or God.

‘Mission-oriented Serial Killers’ are generally not psychotic.  They justify their acts as necessary to rid society of certain types of individuals that they believe to be undesirable.  They target specific groups, for example homosexuals or prostitutes.

The motive for ‘Lust Serial Killers’ is primarily sexual in nature.  The lust may be satisfied with either a living or dead victim, and fantasy plays a major part in their murders. The level of sexual gratification achieved will depend on the amount of torture and mutilation they perform on their targets. These serial killers have a psychological need to have absolute control.  Usually their victims are strangers.  They must dominate and be all powerful over their victims. The infliction of torture and ultimate death is required to satisfy their need.  These killers generally use their bare hands or sharp instruments to do the job.  They relish close contact with their victims and the time between killings often decreases while the required level of stimulation required to fulfil their need often increases with each kill.

The primary motive of a ‘Thrill Killer’ is to induce pain or terror in their victims.  They seek the rush provided by hunting and killing victims and murder only for the kill.  Their attack is usually swift and has no sexual aspect.  They can abstain from killing for long periods of time while tending to become more successful at killing over time.

Beginning in 1979, this novel is set in the west coast city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

It contains a factual depiction of one of the so-called prostitution ‘Strolls’ located in Vancouver.

There are several of these strolls, enough to satisfy most of sexual appetites one finds in large cities.  There is the ‘high track’ stroll on Seymour Street.  It is upscale and operated by pimps and organized crime, unlike the ‘low track’ stroll on the Downtown East side where you will find women who will turn a trick for the price of their next fix.

For different appetites, there is the ‘kiddie stroll’ located on Commercial Drive, which is stocked with runaway girls as young as twelve working the sex trade and ‘boy's town’, situated at the foot of Homer Street, which caters to men who are looking for sex with teenage males.

There are approximately two thousand prostitutes working the combined strolls of Vancouver.

Those involved in the sex trade are likely to be targeted by a serial killer for several reasons.

Firstly, they are usually individuals who come from the bottom end of our society.  Often these people have been forced by poverty, sexual abuse, alienation at home, bullying at school, and drug addiction, into the dead-end life of the sex-trade worker.

Unlike regular members of our society, the disappearance of one of these individuals is not treated, by either society in general or police, as being that surprising.  If one of them goes missing it seems to all concerned that this should be expected, that it is ‘par-for-the-course’.  They are rarely in regular touch with either family or friends, anyone who would be alarmed should they go missing.

Therefore, when they do go missing, it doesn’t ring the same alarm bells with law enforcement officials that it would if it happened to you.

After all, under those conditions, people move on; life is like that on the streets.

Serial killers pick up on stuff like that.  I mean, if you are thinking of killing people, you can’t find a safer hunting ground than that of the sex workers, from which to choose your victims.

In Canada, the Criminal Code was changed in 1986 to make it illegal to communicate in public for buying or selling sexual services.  Hence the existence of the strolls.  Now those interested in partaking no longer must search out a hooker; they just drive to a specific stroll location and help themselves to take-out.

Now, let’s step back a little in time and, armed with this basic understanding of the complexities of what makes a serial killer, and a clear concept of the stroll situation in Vancouver, we’ll follow one of these monsters from birth to the point where he is fully involved in his grizzly crimes.

Concurrently, we’ll experience the life of the cop who is destined to become the central figure in the effort to successfully bring the serial killer’s crimes to an end.

Before we begin I will also warn you that the novel begins sedately enough, but as it progresses it is not a story for the faint of heart.

You are headed for an adventure into the dark side.

CHAPTER ONE

- September 1979 -

When he came into the world, Kenneth Jacob Simpson wasn’t necessarily predestined to be a serial killer.  However, over time, he was to morph into one of the worst in Canadian history.

He was born to Karen Anne and Phillip Richard Simpson on September the first of 1979.

He had a big sister named Leanne.  She was two when they brought Kenneth home.

His parents were prosperous and he found himself warmly welcomed into a nurturing and privileged existence.  His mom and dad called him Kenny.

For the first few months, his sister called him ‘Kemmy’.  As she got older, she learned how to say it right.

His grandpa on his mother’s side of the family had passed away from a heart attack a year and a half before Kenny was born.  That left him with two Grammas and one Grandpa. All three of them doted on both him and Leanne.

The grandparents all came from old money.

Kenny’s dad was an engineer and he owned a company that did contract work, mostly for the government. They lived in West Vancouver, an upper-class suburb of Vancouver, in a large house on several acres situated high up on a mountain ridge overlooking the city.

They had a big in-ground swimming pool, cabanas, stables, a riding ring and a tennis court within the fenced confines of the well-landscaped property.

His mother didn’t work but she spent a good deal of her time involved with various charities and society events, as well as regularly playing tennis and riding horses.  He and Leanne had a nanny. The family also had a full-time combination cook and housekeeper who supervised an outside cleaning staff, gardeners and a pool boy, who each spent two days per week keeping the family estate in pristine condition.

By his first birthday, Kenny had a full head of blond hair, a round and endearing face accented with bright blue, inquiring eyes.  Otherwise he was of average intellect and looks. Nothing about him stood out especially.  He appeared to function and act just like any other little boy.

Despite being physically active enough, he tended to be a little overweight in those first few years.

Edith, his grandmother on his mother’s side, lived alone in one of the gracious turn-of -the-century mansions nestled in the treed, prestigious neighbourhood of Shaughnessy in Vancouver.  She had inherited it from her parents.  It was a big rambling place that required staff to keep it up, but she could afford it.  Her father had been in sugar and she still owned the controlling interest in the company her grandfather had formed in the late eighteen-hundreds.

Edith had been born into a privileged environment and raised to fulfill her station in life, with little consideration for her ever having to make her own way in the world.  Naturally she had married well.  Early in her marriage, she and her husband had purchased a villa in the south of France and Edith now spent six months of each year living there and, despite her age, still played her part in the higher level of society life, when very comfortably ensconced in either of her residences.

While she felt affection for, and enjoyed, the company of her grandchildren, she had grown up in an era where, for the most part, children were seen and not heard, cared for by staff and experienced in short visits and only when convenient.

Kenny’s father’s parents also had money, but it had not been solely inherited.  What they had been left when their parents passed had certainly entitled them to be considered as well off.  However, for the most part their wealth had come as a result of a good deal of hard work.  As a team, the couple had created a timber and sawmill empire that had grown exponentially over the years.  A few years before Kenny’s birth they had received an offer they couldn’t refuse and they’d sold their holdings off to a larger firm.

Although they were getting on in age, and didn’t need to work in view of the fact that they still held a large block of shares in the purchasing firm, they were not the retiring kind.  Instead they’d gone on to create a small tree trimming business which currently provided enough income to let them live very comfortably, without the need to draw on any of their other investments.

Just after selling off their large company, they’d purchased forty acres of forested waterfront property on Indian Arm.  The parcel of land was thickly covered by mature second-growth evergreens, here and there interspaced with the odd copse of deciduous trees.  It was in the undeveloped eastern portion of the Vancouver suburb of North Vancouver.

At the time of purchase, the property had only been accessible by boat, but a couple of years later, in conjunction with ten other owners who lived or had property on that section of the waterfront, they’d anteed up the cash required to put through a gated, private road which connected them with the populated areas of North Vancouver to the west.

Once the road had been built, they’d cleared just enough land, up on the small bluff overlooking the ocean where killer whales often frolicked and pleasure craft plied the open water, to build their dream home.

After the house was finished, his grandfather had built a chicken house and run so they would have fresh eggs and chickens to eat when the hens got too old to lay.  He’d also constructed a fair-sized piggery to produce pork, both for their personal consumption and some commercial sales.  Attached to the building where the pigs could get inside in inclement weather, was a workspace grandpa used when he butchered pigs, and a couple of big freezers to keep them in once they had been cut up and wrapped in brown paper.

That accomplished, he and grandma moved on to clearing an area at the inland border of the property, just off the private access road, creating a paved, chain-link-fence enclosure to house their new company’s small fleet of trucks and chipping equipment.  Once the yard and fence were in place grandpa built a small workshop with its own bathroom and a row of garages to house the trucks and chippers when they came in each night after work.

They had planned to leave the remainder of the land in a mostly natural state, but because they liked to keep physically active, they’d soon decided to take on the task of leveling the parcel of any grossly uneven land, while endeavouring to leave the remainder in its natural state.  They also planned to do some future landscaping around the house, along the edges of the long driveway, as natural screening between the house and the pig and chicken pens.

Some idea of how to do this without the removal of any of the old growth trees, which neither wanted to take down, held them up for a short period of time, but in the end, they decided to accomplish this by filling in and levelling all the natural depressions on the property utilizing the product from their company’s wood chipping machines. They figured they could accomplish that by slowly working their way through the standing timber wherever possible.

To simplify the work required, they’d purchased a small excavator for use on the property. Kenny’s grandfather now used the compact machine each day to spread the loads carried in by the trucks from the cleanup of the company’s various jobsites and hauled back each night by the employees to be dumped in the storage yard compound.

As he grew a little older, Kenny became very close to the pair and loved to spend time with them on the property.

He could help grandma feed both the chickens and the pigs when he and his sister visited and unlike Leanne, he watched when Gramps selected the older birds for the table, then got out the chopping block and the axe and cut their heads off.

The chickens were still alive for awhile after the axe had done its job, and they ran around like crazy, spraying blood everywhere.  His sister found the whole process kind of gross and unsettling.  She hid here eyes and cried the first time and after that she didn’t take part.  Kenny found it exciting to watch.  When it was over, he would find himself eagerly anticipating the next time the culling process would take place.

Once he was finished with the chopping job, Grandpa would take the chicken heads and legs down to the pig pen and throw them over the fence.  Kenny didn’t think the animals would eat them, but Grandpa just laughed and told him that those pigs would eat anything.

He was right.  The pigs gobbled them up.

On these visits, his grandfather would also let him help drive and work the trucks and the excavator.

They visited regularly, Grandpa and Grandma Simpson happily taking the young fellow and his sister in for weeks at a time, unlike Grandmother Edith, who only occasionally had him and his sister, accompanied by their mother, over for afternoon tea.

Grandma Simpson was his favorite grandparent. She was a practical, down to earth, no nonsense woman, but very caring and she adored him, lavishing him with love and steadfastly granting his every wish.

At this early point in his life, Kenny may have had some problems, but then what kid didn’t?

He had been born into the good life and in those first few years, he certainly gave no outward indication of becoming the monster he would eventually turn out to be.

At the time Kenny was born, Dave Richards was twenty-five years old.

He stood six-two, was strongly built, and weighed in at one hundred and ninety pounds.  He had recently graduated from the Vancouver Police Department Academy and was currently undergoing practical training under the supervision of a senior constable.

Dave wasn’t what most people would describe as handsome, but his chiselled features, thick brown hair and blue eyes, coupled with his physical bearing, often drew a second look.  He was happily married to his wife Jennifer, who was a stay-at-home mom. They had two kids, a boy, Philip who was four, and a girl, Alicia who was two.  They lived in a new three-bedroom bungalow in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, which they shared with a cat named Murphy.

Prior to joining the police force, Dave had been a member of the Canadian armed forces working as a radioman. He’d spent four years on the east coast while serving in the Navy but had never gone to sea, instead being posted to the large naval radio station situated just outside of Halifax.

Looking for employment more rewarding, and a return to the west coast where he had been born and had family, and at the suggestion of an uncle who was a member of the Vancouver force, Dave had talked it over with Jenny and they had decided he should give the police force a try.

From the day Dave applied to join the force he’d loved every second of what that meant.  He seemed to be a natural and looked forward to every day he went to work.

Everything wasn’t coming up roses of course, but he was a realist and didn’t expect that kind of perfection from life.  Dave had always been able to roll with the punches.  There were bound to be ups and downs and his new job would certainly not be everyone’s cup of tea.

That said, all and all he found the job both challenging and rewarding.  His first posting was to what was designated as District Two, one of the four police districts covering the City.  This north-eastern section of Vancouver had long ago been coined the ‘Downtown East Side’ and contained the skid road zone, most of the drug activity, and was rampant with run-down hotels, cheap flophouses and homeless - and of course the addicts, or, in police jargon, the ‘hypes’.

Eight marked police units served District two.  The eight cars were designated with call numbers seven to fourteen.  This was without doubt the toughest part of town.  All the cars in D2 were two-man units, except for car seven which was a small one-man wagon.  The city’s biggest wagon, a large and much employed two-man van, was also part of the district.

Dave was assigned to do his practical in car nine and his partner was a grizzled old veteran, by the name of Jack Edwards.  Edwards was long divorced and had been passed over for promotion numerous times.  He also had a serious drinking problem, which he managed to keep under control when on duty for the most part, with some exceptions.

Jack had long ago come to terms with the fact that he was going to stay a constable until he retired and it could be argued that he was just ‘putting in his time’. Initially that’s what Dave thought, but after they’d worked together for a few months, he changed his opinion about that.

It quickly became apparent to him that Jack lived for his job simply because he really had no other life.  The realization was a little depressing and sad when it first sank in, but eventually Dave figured it was as good a reason as any and it drifted to the back of his mind.

Jack didn’t look for trouble, but he didn’t back away from it either. He was prepared for what was necessary, and was very streetwise and a pretty good role model for a new cop.

Dave had to laugh when he related to others what had happened the first time he and his partner had climbed into a black and white.

Jack had paused at the back of their assigned unit, a seventy-six Chevy that had seen better days, and dangled the car keys in front of him.  He then spoke for the first time since their introduction in the squad room.

“I’ll be doing the driving, son.  You can sit in the front seat beside me for now, but if you even think about touching either the emergency switches or the radio mike, you’ll find yourself riding in the back so fast it will make your head spin.  We clear on that?”

Over time, it got better.

After a month of observing what went on inside the unit, Jack tossed him the keys one morning. Dave, who hadn’t been expecting it, damn near dropped them.  Jack managed a small grin.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do kid.  I’ll be watching you. Oh, and what I said before about the emergency switches and the mike still goes, for now.”

CHAPTER TWO

- December 1984 –

At the tender age of five, Kenny suffered what was unquestionably very serious trauma, both in a physical and psychological sense.  He was involved in a serious road accident and, as a result, his life changed exponentially.

When they’d set out on that fateful day Kenny, as usual, had fought against wearing his lap belt. In the end, he had only agreed to wear it if it was fastened very loosely and not restricting him too much.

Looking back on it later, he would come to realize that demanding that slackness had probably saved his life.  If the belt had been as firmly fitted as his mother had originally ordered, he would very likely have suffered the same fate as the rest of his family.

The details of the accident would repeatedly haunt him for the remainder of his life.  He would suffer routinely from flashbacks of the entire incident, haunted by horrible, detailed and highly animated recollections, which varied little over time.

The initial screech, coupled with the smell of tortured, burning rubber as his father fought to control the careening car.  The rending shriek of metal grinding against metal as the vehicle struck the guardrail.  His loss of balance as the car tilted slightly as the wheels on the driver’s side lifted clear of the pavement.  The sensation of helplessness as it scraped along the length of the extended barrier.

The sounds, sights and smells of it once again overwhelming his senses. The inability of his young mind to take it all in.  The whole thing becoming surreal. Time dragging and, from that point onward, everything happening in slow motion.

Recalling becoming physically sick as his stomach knotted up with fear.

His mother in the front beside his dad.  Both she and his older sister, who was seated next to him in the back, were screaming.  His father was frantically struggling with the steering wheel in an ineffectual attempt to bring the heavy vehicle back down onto all four wheels.  One of the guardrail posts finally succumbing to the intense pressure and snapping under the strain, shearing off and rocketing through his sister’s window.  It struck her a glancing blow on the shoulder before narrowly missing his own head as it flew past him and hurtled out through his window.

That initial impact of the thick post had been enough to shove the car back onto its wheels and when the spinning rubber had grabbed at the road surface again Kenny had been thrown up and sideways, slipping out of his belt and to his horror, following the path the post had taken, out through the shattered side window.

Kenny had come down hard on the pavement and then rolled into a lifeless ball.

Even when Kenny reached adulthood he’d often relive every little detail of the accident.  Mostly it was in nightmares, but sometimes the recall seemed to be triggered when he was fully awake, when he was under any kind of stress.

After the fact, he’d learned that at he time of the accident his head had taken a serious hit on his forehead, knocking him unconscious.  As a result, he’d been left with no first-hand recollections of the large car nosing into the next post, nor that it had then lurched upward and gone ass-over-teakettle up and over the remainder of the barrier; before becoming fully airborne and silently arcing out into the yawning emptiness of the nearly two-mile plunge to the floor of the gorge below.

Kenny had awakened in the hospital three days later.  When he did, he had no memory of anything after he’d hit his head on the road.  He had no idea of what had taken place after he’d been thrown clear of the big car.

His Simpson grandparents had been at his bedside in the hospital when he’d finally opened his eyes.  He noticed immediately that they had both been crying.

They didn’t tell him anything about the accident that day and for some reason he wasn’t inclined to ask about it.

It wasn’t until they could take him home a few days later that they told him everything. By then he’d already begun to get flashbacks and already had a fair idea of the important parts.  He no longer had a mom, dad, or a sister, and everything had changed for him.

His grandparents had taken him home from the hospital, to their large house on the water.  He’d been there several times before and he had enjoyed each stay.  It was very big and nice, but it wasn’t all fancy and fussy the way his real home had been. There was no pool, but in the summertime, he could fish and swim in the ocean under the watchful eyes of his grandfather.

This was to be his house now too.  Grandma had told him so when they’d come home from the hospital.

Shortly after they had entered the house, she and grandpa had sat him down on the long couch, in what grandpa called the parlour.  That’s when they’d told him about what had happened after he’d been knocked unconscious and told him that he would have a new life now and that he would be living with them.

When they’d got to the part about his family being dead, Kenny sensed from their hesitancy and expressions that they expected him to cry, but even when he tried very hard to make them come, the tears just wouldn’t flow.

He was mildly disappointed at his inability to be reduced to tears, but for some strange reason it just wouldn’t happen.

Maybe that would happen later, he couldn’t remember how those things worked.  Anyway, it didn’t seem all that important and he soon pushed that concern to the back of his mind.

Over the next nine months Kenny settled into his new lifestyle.  Initially he’d spent almost all his time with at least one, and often, both of his grandparents.

The nights were the worst.  That’s when the nightmares were most prevalent, especially in the first month or so.  Several times a night he would wake up, screaming, soaked in sweat and unsure of his surroundings.  They had given him the bedroom just down the hall from their own and whenever the horrific dreams woke him, one or the other would quickly enter his room to comfort him.

It was about this time that Kenny had begun to wet his bed regularly.  That really embarrassed him but he couldn’t seem to stop, no matter how hard he tried.  It began to register on him that he seemed to have less and less control of his life each day.

His grandmother told him not to worry about it, that he would grow out of it, but to Kenny that didn’t make a lot of sense.  He hadn’t wet his bed before the accident.  Heck, he had stopped that a least a couple of years back.  It didn’t make any sense to him that he was doing it again now.

These things aside, Kenny’s days were cool though.

Each morning when he got up, he would have a long bath and by the time he got back to his room to get dressed, Grandma would have changed the bed, fed their calico cat, Fluffy, and would already be clattering around in the kitchen getting breakfast together.

Once the three of them had finished the first meal of the day, he and grandpa would head out to do whatever chores needed doing, feed the chickens and pigs, stuff like that, and then hop into the little red Ford pickup and drive down the long driveway toward the main road, accompanied by the family dog, old Sam, who kept them company wherever they went.

Grandpa loved that old dog an awful lot.

When they got to the spot where the driveway met the main road, they’d swing into the yard where all the tree machinery stuff was kept overnight and then he and grandpa would park the Ford.

The last thing they did was to use a high-pressure hose to wash down the vehicles, giving special attention to the big shredding machines. Grandpa said they had to keep the blades in them clean or they wouldn’t cut properly.  Before doing that though, they’d go over to the big pile of woodchips the incoming trucks had dumped earlier and use the excavator to load the old, unlicensed, yard dump truck, and use it to haul the material that had been brought in the day before to even out low spots on the property and dump it.

Kenny loved that excavator.  Grandpa would start it up as soon as they got to the yard.  Grandpa had rigged up a small seat right beside his and Kenny would sit beside him as the big machine chugged into life.  Once it had warmed up, they would begin the job of transferring the pile of shredded material into the battered old dump truck.

They’d gouge up big scoops of the material and dump them into that old truck and when it was full, they’d pile into that noisy old thing and roar off into the bush until they found a low spot grandpa figured needed filling to make the ground flat.

Sometimes it would take several truckloads to fill a hole and once all the material from the yard had been scooped up and dumped, they’d park that old dump and get back into the excavator and then crawl out through the bush to level all the newly deposited chips.

Kenny enjoyed every minute of the work and grandpa let him pitch in all the time, even so far as to allow him to sit in his lap sometimes, to help drive the old dump or work some of the controls for the excavator.

When he wasn’t out working or playing with grandpa, Kenny liked to spend time on his own.

He’d overheard his grandparents talking about him a couple of times and Grandma was worried about him having no other kids to play with and spending too much time on his own in his bedroom.

Kenny didn’t ever say so, but he wasn’t much interested in playing with other kids.

Shortly after that though, grandpa bought him an Atari VCS, so he would have something to keep himself occupied with when he wanted to be alone.

Kenny really liked it, especially one game, the one called Battlezone, where he got to shoot other tanks and things with his tank. He liked being in control, even if it was only a game and he got very good at killing the other stuff.

It had started off alright, but ‘84 turned out to be very a bad year for Dave Richards.

During his tour with his training officer Jack, working the skids, Dave had learned a great deal about what a patrol cop was all about.

Car nine’s patrol area centered on the dregs of the city.  While consisting of only about ten square blocks, it encompassed by far much of the street level drug activity that took place in Vancouver.  Bar brawls, public drunkenness, run down rooming houses and low-level prostitution was rampant.  The majority of the city’s sudden deaths, primarily overdoses by heroin addicts, took place there, as well as the regular occurrences of knifings and deaths resulting from fights about, and for, drugs.

It was a real eye opener for a middle-class guy like Dave, who had been raised in the suburbs in a comfortable bungalow nestled on a half acre with two nurturing parents, two cars in the garage and a big brother to guide him.

During the 15 months that he spent there, Dave learned a lot about life on the other side of the tracks.  When he looked back on it, he couldn’t think of a better hands-on introduction to police work.

For policing purposes, the city of Vancouver was divided into four districts.  District 1 and 2 worked out of the main police building which was situated downtown on Main street. Districts 3 and 4 split the southern part of the city and worked out of a substation located in central south Vancouver.

Once he was elevated to the rank of fourth class constable, Dave transferred from car nine, which patrolled in District 2, to car one, which worked in District 1, in what was commonly referred to as Vancouver’s ‘west end’.  There he worked in a two-man patrol unit with another old timer, named Jim Bird.

The west end of Vancouver is full of high-rises and as far as crime went, far less dangerous than the skids.  B&E’s were the most common calls.  Those and parking complaints.  Lots of report writing.  Not a great deal of action.

Unlike his first partner Jack, Jim had only a few months left to retirement and he was just putting in time.  He would, quite successfully, avoid any radio call he could.  He didn’t have a drinking problem but, unfortunately, he suffered from narcolepsy.

He’d never bothered to advise Dave of this fact.

After the third time, the old bugger had fallen asleep behind the wheel while they were working night shift and Dave had been forced to take control and shove his foot on the brake to prevent them from piling into stationary objects, it had become readily apparent.

There was not a lot Jim was capable of, or was interested in, teaching Dave.

His short three-month stint in car one was the most boring in all of Dave’s career.

Dave had given a lot of thought to his future during the time he rode around in car one.  He’d decided that he wanted to give the Dog Squad a try.  It was an elite squad, and probably one of the most physically demanding for a young constable.

Among several other prerequisites, the department required that all potential dog masters must have at least two years on the job and have been confirmed in the rank of constable first class to apply.

Dave went on to spent two years in the Dog Squad.  Although he and his partner had been very successful at catching the bad guys during that time and the team could well have stayed longer in the squad if they had so desired, it was not recommended for anyone who was interested in future promotion to spend too much time in any one position.  It was common knowledge that a couple of years in one spot was about the maximum anyone should spend if they wished to be considered for higher rank in the future.

When Dave left the Dog Squad, he was thirty-five years of age and a confirmed first-class constable with several commendations to his credit.  He was ambitious and already had his eye on the next promotion, which would be that of the interchangeable ranks of Corporal /Detective.

His uncle, recently retired from the force, had advised him to apply for a patrol position in D3, the south-east sector of the city, to expand on his general patrol experience, and had indicated that he would put in a good word for Dave there if he wished.

Dave did that and was assigned to work car twenty-two, another two-man unit.

His new partner was a ten-year man by the name of Cliff Spencer.  Spencer had spent five years in the district and was generally accepted within the department as be a rising star.  It was a plum assignment and Dave soon settled in nicely with his easy going, but very motivated and career oriented, co-worker.

They worked the car together for just over two years and then, again at his uncle’s suggestion, Dave applied for a spot on the Youth Squad which worked out of the same sub divisional offices as both D3 and D4.  His transfer was accepted.

Two-man teams worked the youth detail and Dave was coupled with an ex-academy comrade, Ed Hamilton, who viewed the world very much as he did.  They turned out to be a very balanced and effective team.  Good cop (Dave), bad cop (Ed) personified.

A total of four teams worked the detail, and within a couple of months Dave and his partner were at the top of the heap as far as clearances were concerned.  They began to specialize in B&E’s and quickly became very good at soliciting confessions from the young perpetrators of these crimes, clearing up numerous individual reported crimes, which often went back over many years and numbered in the hundreds.  The number of recovered items they could return to the victims was the envy of the squad and got the department a good deal of positive media coverage.

An enviable pile of commendations for the duo resulted, and after two years both Dave and Ed were promoted to the interchangeable Corporal/Detective rank.

Ed was assigned to the uniformed patrol as a Corporal, but Dave managed a transfer to the elite serious crimes section, which was tasked with all Robbery and Homicide investigations undertaken by the department.  He got a new partner and was assigned to Robbery.

By 1984, career wise, Dave was flying high.  Unfortunately, in his personal life, disaster was about to strike.  In early December of that year, while they were doing some last-minute Christmas shopping, Dave’s wife Jenny and both his kids, riding in the family station wagon, were T-boned by a drunk driver.  The idiot had been traveling well over the limit and had run a red light.  He not only killed himself in the resulting crash but also took the lives of Dave’s entire immediate family.

For David, the whole world shattered.  The grief was completely overwhelming, leaving him appearing to others as little more than comatose.

Nothing was any longer important to him.  He was devastated, so deeply immersed in grief that he saw little reason to live.

CHAPTER THREE

- September 1985 –

Kenny turned six the day he started school.  For him, things seemed to go down hill from there.

He hadn’t want to leave the safety of the house and property.  He worried about meeting strange people.

He couldn’t sleep the night before he started grade one.  His stomach was churning and he couldn’t eat any breakfast the next morning either.

Grandma had done her best to settle him down, telling him he would meet a bunch of kids and have a lot of fun, but Kenny didn’t see it that way.  He said very little, keeping to himself.  It wasn’t until Grandpa had loaded him, old Sam and his lunch into the little Ford pickup to head out, that he’d ventured to talk a little about it.

Kenny had asked the old man why he had to go and Grandpa had thought for a few seconds before answering him.

“Well, Kenny, school is the place where you learn new things and get to spend time and play with other kids like yourself.  You’re getting to be a big boy now and its time you expanded your horizons a little.”

Kenny had frowned at that and Grandpa had smiled.

“Don’t worry yourself too much, son.  All kids feel pretty much the way you do on the first day of school.  It’s something new and a little scary before you get there, but it’ll give you a chance to make some friends.

“Trust me, you’ll have a lot of fun. When you look back on this day later, you’ll wonder why you were so het up about it.”

Kenny didn’t reply, but he didn’t think he was going to like it at all.

And he’d been right.

From that very first day he just didn’t fit in somehow.  He was chubby.  He didn’t feel comfortable being around a bunch of people and was very quiet.  He’d kept pretty much to himself.  After the few attempts he’d made to relate to some of the other kids, he had been cruelly rebuffed.

No matter what Grandpa said, he just wasn’t like the rest of them.

His teacher, Mrs. Palmer, was OK.  She didn’t hassle him or anything, but she was always trying to get him to take part in stuff and Kenny did not like to be singled out and made the centre of attention.

As time passed, he was often made the butt of jokes, teased and bullied by the others in his class. He stood out for several reasons, none of them positive in the eyes of his classmates.  He didn’t know how to deal with these affronts, never spoke up for himself or responded in kind.  He just did his best to avoid setting himself up for a repeat.

Kenny didn’t have a mom and dad like everyone else, just a grandpa and two grandmas.  He was overweight and not well coordinated and hopeless at games and team sports.  After those first dismal failures at trying during recess and lunch, he never again attempted to play with the other kids.

Instead he sat alone and well away from the remainder of them.

After a couple of months Mrs. Palmer sent a note home with him and after Gramma read it she and Grandpa seemed worried.  That night when Kenny went to bed, he could hear them talking quietly for a long time, on the other side of the wall.

Something about social skills.  He had no idea what that meant, but obviously they were worried about him.

The next day, when Grandpa came to pick him up from school, Sam was not in the truck but Grandma was.  She got out and held the door open for him.  Before he could say anything, she spoke.

“Hop in, Grandpa is going to take you for a burger.”

Grandpa moved off as soon as the door closed and he had his seat belt fastened. They left her standing in the parking lot waving.

Kenny didn’t have to inquire about what was going on.  It was pretty evident that Grandma was going into the school to see Mrs. Palmer about him.  Grandpa was putting a good face on it all, talking away cheerfully about their adventure out to McDonalds.

Grandpa didn’t usually do a lot of talking, so Kenny picked up on the fact that the old man was uncomfortable with what was going on, but he knew better than to ask about it.  That would just make matters worse.

So, he played along, saying he was looking forward to the burger.

That’s all it took to take the pressure off.  The strain in grandpa’s shoulders eased and the old man grinned as he ruffled Kenny’s hair with one hand.

Edith Simpson met with Mrs. Palmer in a small conference room just off the principal’s office.

She liked the woman right from the start and after the initial awkwardness of it all, the two of them settled down with a cup of tea and got right into it.

Mrs. Palmer explained her concerns about Kenny’s difficulty relating to the other children in the class, matter-of-factly telling it as she saw it and expressing her concern over the situation. Edith, having expected to hear pretty much what she was receiving from the teacher, appreciated the woman’s sincere interest in Kenny’s wellbeing.

After some discussion of the finer points of what had been happening in the class, plus Edith’s frank input as to what the boy had experienced with the loss of his immediate family in the horrific accident, they both agreed that they should perhaps seek some professional help for Kenny.

Mrs. Palmer provided some names for Edith to consider for possible counselling and promised to keep an eye on things in the classroom in the meantime.  The two of them agreed to keep in touch on a regular basis.

Two weeks later Kenny had his first appointment with a psychologist.  He and Grandma spent an hour with him and after, as a reward for the boy’s co-operation, the three of them stopped off at McDonalds, which had by this time become Kenny’s favorite place to eat.

For the first little while the appointments were weekly, as was the hamburger offer.  After a month of sessions, the psychologist advised Grandma that monthly get-togethers would suffice from then on and that she would no longer need to sit in for the entire hour.  Instead, she would only have a few minutes alone with the doctor at the end of Kenny’s sessions.

It was after that next appointment, when Granny left Kenny in the waiting room while she went in to see the doctor, that he’d given her the lowdown.

Kenny was having trouble dealing with the trauma of the accident, coupled with the loss of his parents and his happy environment.  He had lost most of his self-confidence and was beginning to isolate himself from the outside world.  He felt that he no longer had any real control of his life.

This situation could well lead to serious consequences during adolescence and adulthood; however, as he was still young, it was hopefully not irreversible.

The grandparents were doing everything right and with continuing therapy and the maintenance of a stable home life, Kenny’s prognosis for a long-term recovery was good.

After the accident, Dave went off work on compassionate leave for nearly two months.  During that time, he sold off the house because he could not stand to enter it and moved in with his parents.

Loaded up on valium, he’d managed to attend the funeral held for Jenny and the kids, but when it was over, he remembered very little about it.

For several weeks after that he really didn’t give a damn about much of anything.  Overwhelmed by the feeling of grief and loss, he simply bumbled around in a fog, lost a good deal of weight and refused to leave the protective cocoon of his parents’ house.

The Police Department was good about it.  Staff Relations told him to take as much time as he needed and not to worry about anything but getting back to normal, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

During the sixth week of leave, his old partner, Ed Hamilton began to drop in and after a few days, managed to get Dave out of the house and into a pub where they had some brews and the first real meal Dave had considered eating since the accident.  They also played a few games of pool.

Ed kept the conversation on a general plane for the first half of the evening but slowly over the next hour or so began to mention things going on in the department.  Promotions, firings, interesting cases etc.  By the time they climbed into Ed’s car to call it a night and head home, Dave had unconsciously begun to allow the shell he’d been living within to crack open slightly, just enough to begin to ask questions about other departmental goings on.

Ed was the type of guy who valued good friends and knew they were few and far between.

After he had dropped Dave off at his parents’ and on his way home, encouraged by what had transpired during the evening, he began to formulate a long-term plan aimed at getting his pal Dave out of his slump and back to work.

Within the department it was common knowledge that once Ed had something in mind there was very little that could sway him off a determined course of action.

His nickname was ‘Bulldog’, and there was good reason for that.

CHAPTER FOUR

- October 1988 -

For Kenny, three years passed by reasonably uneventfully.

He and Grandma attended the monthly sessions with the psychologist religiously.  He had managed to become less of a target in the schoolyard, had grown a few inches and lost some weight.

He still did not seek out or have any real friends, but he was no longer simply shunned out of hand by his classmates.  He remained quiet, kept his thoughts to himself and still spent a lot of time at home playing games in his bedroom.

Both Grandma and Grandpa had worked at keeping him wrapped in love and attention, a little of his self-confidence had returned and the nightmares had lessened over time.

Unfortunately, any gains he had made during that period were about to be reversed with a vengeance.

In October of nineteen eighty-eight, a few days after Kenny’s ninth birthday party, his grandfather, Gordon, passed away. The death, very traumatic for a boy of Kenny’s tender years, was compounded by where and how suddenly it had occurred.

Gordon and the boy had been doing what they enjoyed best, spreading chips and cuttings with the excavator out in the bush.  By this time Kenny had graduated to operating the machine while Grandpa sat to one side and supervised.

It was late in the day that Gordon suffered the massive heart attack.  When the old man cried out, put his right hand over his heart and slumped against him, Kenny knew something was seriously wrong.

He managed to move the bulk of his grandfather off himself so that he could shut off the machine, but when he tried to help the old man it didn’t take long for him to realize that there was nothing he could do.

He found himself immobile, staring down at the inert form for some time, studying it with growing interest.

The sight was somehow peaceful.  The situation seemed to empower him.  Out here suddenly alone, he felt in control of everything.  He didn’t want to leave Grandpa, but he knew he should go for help.

Light rain had been falling for a couple of hours and they were a long way from the house.  Dusk was settling in.

Eventually Kenny climbed down out of the machine and called old Sam to his side.  The two of them then headed back to the yard along the tracks made earlier by the heavy machine, piled into the little Ford pickup that Grandpa had recently allowed Kenny to drive, and meandered down the long driveway toward the house.

When the got there, Kenny shut the truck off, and leaving the door wide open for old Sam, went to find his grandmother.

After he’d told her what had happened, everything was kind of a blur to him.

Grandma had called for an ambulance and all three of them had got into the little truck and headed back to the road to wait for the ambulance so Kenny could lead them back to the machine.

When it arrived, the ambulance driver said they couldn’t go out of the paved area of the yard with the ambulance because it would get stuck, so the two ambulance guys grabbed a bunch of stuff and the four of them hurried off into the bush with Sam on their heels.

Once the excavator came into view, Grandma made Kenny stay back, telling him that he would have to hold old Sam while the ambulance guys saw to Grandpa.  He watched from a distance and when he saw Grandma raise her hand to her face and sink to her knees to the dirt, he knew that he wouldn’t be seeing Grandpa again.

He dropped dejectedly down on a fallen log and threw his arms around Sam’s neck.

He didn’t cry, but he did do a lot of thinking, the reoccurring theme being, ‘everyone who tells me they love me always dies.’

Once the ambulance had gone, Kenny and his grandmother answered some questions for the policeman who had been at the storage lot waiting for them when they came out of the bush.  The policeman wrote down the stuff in a notebook and then got back in his car and left.  Then he, Grandma and old Sam drove slowly back to the house, Kenny behind the wheel and Grandma crunched down in the seat beside him, crying her eyes out.

When they got back inside Kenny allowed Grandma to hug him for a few minutes and then asked if he could go to his room for awhile.  The old woman stepped back from him, did her best to stop her tears and then nodded.  Gordon’s passing had hit her very hard, but Kenny figured that she would probably come out of her funk eventually.  She seemed like she had changed, to have lost much of her self-confidence.

He left her standing forlornly in the kitchen and made his way back to his room, closed his door and fired up the Atari VCS.

Several hours later he heard the doorbell and paused his game, then got up off his bed to walk over to his closed door to listen.

He heard his grandmother speaking to someone, he thought it was a lady, and a few seconds later there was a knock on his door and he heard his Grandma.

“Kenny would you like to come out?  There is a social worker here, she’s come to help us.”

Kenny had no desire to meet some stranger but he knew a refusal would simply make matters worse.  He let out a deep sigh and opened his door.

The lady stayed for over an hour and Kenny sat sullenly through the whole thing, answering a question if asked but volunteering nothing.  The gist of the conversation between her and his grandmother was something she called ‘bereavement counselling’.

Kenny closed his mind to most of the gibberish.

By the time the woman left he had a headache.

Grandma had stopped her crying by then and she was obviously concerned about him.  She said she was going to make them dinner and he nodded and headed back to his room.  She was moving around kind of zombie-like and seemed to have lost her zest for life, quite incapable of making any major decisions.

The next morning Kenny ignored his alarm clock when it went off to get him up for school.  When his grandmother knocked and then opened his door a few minutes later, he told her that he was not feeling well and asked if he could stay home from school.

His grandmother appeared to be somewhat back to her normal self.  She nodded her head and told him that he needn’t go until he felt up to it.

Kenny managed to cocoon himself in his room, except for meals, over the next four days.  After that Grandma told him that they both had to get their lives back on track.  He would have to go back to school and they would be going to his regular session with the psychologist the next week.

The night out had brought about enough of a change in Dave to encourage Ed to push forward with his plan.

Ed took a week’s leave and, with a little help from Dave’s parents arrived with a truck full of camping gear and fishing equipment and all but kidnapped Dave.

As they pulled out of the driveway Ed grinned over at his astonished friend.

“Ever been ice fishing?”

Nine hours later they were well into northern British Columbia at a desolate lake that had taken more than a little ‘four-by-fouring’ to reach.  The tent was up and a hearty fire was flickering below a slung coffee pot.

Slowly, in increments over the next five days, Ed laid out his plan for Dave’s future.

Everyone knows that time and time alone is the best healer, but Dave needed to help the grieving process to work its way though.  He needed to get his mind on other things.

In the department, there was an opening for a cop of detective level to be paired up with a social worker in a new car that was going to be an experiment in dealing with a recent dramatic rise in domestic calls.

The department was looking for volunteers

Over the past couple of weeks Dave had repeatedly said that he didn’t want to go back to what he had been doing.

He’d said that he needed to put the past behind him and take on new things.  Well, he had to admit that this was something entirely new.

Dave’s first response to the suggestion was,

“A social worker for a partner!  You’ve got to be kidding man, a cop and a social worker, teamed up…no way.”

At the time, Ed had left it at that, but over the following days he’d kept enthusiastically nibbling away at Dave’s doubts.

“Look, No one has volunteered so far and they are working with a short time frame here.”

“This new car is supposed to roll out in two weeks and the media have been all over the idea with positive response.”

“It would be very embarrassing for the chief if it fell apart before it even got started.  It never hurts to make the chief happy.  They say he has a long memory.  A move like this sure as hell can’t but help your career man!  You said you wanted something new and completely different.  You’ve got to admit that it can’t get much different than this.”

“Besides it’s only going to run for a six-month trial.  That’s all you have to commit to.”

There was no one within a hundred miles of them and Ed, as planned, had the opportunity to bluntly use Dave as a captive audience.

The surroundings were magnificently pristine.  The quiet and isolation was restful.  The companionship was strong.  The food was simple, but cooked over an open fire, delicious.

They even caught some fish!

It took almost the whole week, but by the time they had started the drive out, Ed had worn Dave down with his never-ending keenness about the whole idea.

Two weeks later Dave arrived at the chief’s office to be briefed on the experimental unit and to meet his new partner.  An official press conference was to be held later in the day.

Dave was a little anxious about the whole thing, but the idea behind the emergency response car had taken hold of him.  He thought it had merit and it was certainly going to be completely different from everything else he done in the department before.

He was committed to the idea and becoming absorbed with it.

His grief had not disappeared, far from it, but he now had other things to think about as well.  He had been a little surprised, but pleased, to find that he could, albeit briefly, push those feelings of loss to the back of his mind if required to respond to outside influences.

The meeting went well, as he’d figured it would.

There was one exception however.  His new partner, the social worker provided by the provincial government ministry, which was co-sponsoring the experimental project, was not what he’d been picturing at all.

He had been excepting it to be a guy.

Instead it was a woman.  She was introduced as to him as Linda Carnarvon, and she smiled broadly as she firmly shook his hand.

Linda was young, he guessed in her early twenties.  She was also gorgeous.

Tall and slim, about five-ten.  An athletic build, but very nicely rounded out in all the right places.  Thick, shiny dark hair, worn long, to just past the shoulders.  Big brown eyes that seemed to sparkle and miss nothing.  A bright smile that you couldn’t ignore.

During the next hour, he also found out she was very well educated, smart, confident, outgoing and in general terms, a pleasure to be around.

The next six months went very quickly for Dave and then, when the project came to an end, and he and Linda were quietly married in a civil ceremony, much to the surprise of everyone, including him and Linda.

CHAPTER FIVE

- July 1989 -

For nine months Kenny and Grandma had been living alone in the big house.  During that time, Kenny, had slipped into the habit of calling her Granny instead of Grandma.  Granny seemed more fitting somehow.

The psychologist told Granny that Kenny’s progress had taken a backward step due to Gordon’s death.  Kenny was not responding well during their sessions.  He tended to remain aloof and withdrawn, not only when in the session, but pretty well all the time.

At home Kenny, without Gordon around to get him out working on the property, seemed to be living in his bedroom. At school, he had become sullen and uncooperative.

Granny was at her wits end as to what to do to bring the boy out of his shell, to be more active.  She was unsure of herself for the first time in her life and seemed to second guess every thought she had.

In July of eighty-nine she sat Kenny down one night and then read him a letter that had come from Gordon’s younger brother, Bob, asking if he might come and visit them.

She seemed to think it was a good idea to let him come.

At first Kenny didn’t say anything one way or the other, but in his own mind he didn’t think it would be a good idea at all.

Granny then went on to explain to him that she had good reason to allow the visit.  His other grandmother, Edith was trying to get custody of Kenny.  And that would mean that she and Kenny might be separated. And he would have to go and live with her instead.

Kenny didn’t completely understand it all, but apparently Edith had hired a lawyer and was going to go to court.  Granny told him that his other Grandmother was saying that Kenny should stay with her instead because she had the staff to help look after him and Edith was on her own.

Granny figured that if Bob did visit them, then she would have a better chance of keeping Kenny with her.  Besides that, Bob was an ex -priest who had had a breakdown and had been unable to continue in his field.  Together she and Kenny could maybe help him get better and he could spend a lot of time with Kenny, which would be a good thing.  She said it would be a positive to have a man around the house who Kenny could learn from.

Kenny didn’t like the idea of someone new coming into his life. It seemed to him that everyone who had cared for him, his parents and his sister and Gordon, had all died and left him.  He could see no advantage to having this Bob character visit.  He certainly didn’t give a damn about trying to help some stranger.

On the other hand, he did not want to be uprooted and forced to endure a new environment.  He was reasonably comfortable with the way things were with Granny.

Granny obviously wanted him to agree with the idea though, and he figured he should probably do that, if he wanted things to stay the way they were.

So, he said that he thought it might be a good idea to let Bob at least come and visit.  If he was anything like grandpa Gordon, it might be OK.

A week after they’d had that little talk, Granny got called to go to the school on the Wednesday.  When she got there, she found Kenny waiting in the principal’s office and was told that he had been stealing things from the other kids in the class and had been caught red-handed.

Kenny would neither admit nor deny the thefts, nor would he agree to return items that had gone missing but had not been recovered.

Instead, he refused to speak, sitting mute throughout the entire session.

As a result, he was suspended from school until he was prepared to admit to the thefts and had also returned any articles that were still in his possession.

As they drove home in the little red Ford pickup, Granny tried to start a conversation with Kenny but he simply sat silently in the passenger seat and stared out the window.

Two weeks later, when Bob arrived for his visit, Kenny was still suspended.

Bob, who look very much like his brother Gordon, presented agreeably.  He was well-groomed and neatly dressed in a suit and tie, and sported highly polished oxfords.   Granny was obviously impressed.

To Kenny, who over the past few years had spent a good deal of time assessing others, Bob did not seem to be a person who had suffered a breakdown.  He appeared to be confident, caring and very much in control of himself. Initially growling at the intruder, Old Sam had uncharacteristically made it clear that he didn’t like him from the get go and Kenny thought the dog probably had the right of it.

Bob had arrived with a single suitcase only, but Granny had later explained that away to Kenny, saying priests lived a very simple life.

It was apparent to Kenny that Granny was very taken with the man.  He figured that was probably because he looked like Gordon and gave the appearance of an upright, caring and amiable individual.

Kenny wasn’t so sure about that.  Nobody was that good.

He fleetingly wondered what might be beneath that polished surface.  That said, he knew he would need more than this brief initial meeting to come to any serious conclusion about the newcomer.

As was his way, Kenny kept his thoughts to himself.

Within a few days, Bob had fully ingratiated himself with Granny.

Comfortably ensconced in living quarters located in the secluded far wing of the rambling house, Kenny and Granny saw little of him in the evenings, but during the day, he seemed to have all but stepped directly into Gordon’s shoes.

Kenny didn’t particularly enjoy this interruption of his earlier environment.  He kept his thoughts to himself and while outwardly pleasant enough to the man, he figured he was losing even more of his life as Bob worked slowly but surely toward gaining the old woman’s complete confidence.

Bob seemed to be no end of help and advice, fixing little things that needed doing, helping here, there and everywhere.

Two weeks into the visit the advice was coming in a flow.  Bob advised granny that Kenny didn’t need to go back to school if he didn’t want to. He and Granny could easily home-school him, whatever that entailed.

Granny readily agreed.

When he and Granny went to the next session with the psychologist, Bob drove them in the Ford and waited for them outside. At the end, when granny went in for her short talk with the psychologist, he told her that Kenny was no longer responding to the sessions and that he felt Kenny needed to begin seeing a psychiatrist.

On the way home, they went to McDonalds for a burger, Granny having told Bob that Gordon had always taken them there.  While they ate, Granny told Bob what the psychologist had said.  Bob nodded solemnly and then said that he had had some experience along that line and wasn’t overly supportive of the idea.

Kind of talking over Kenny’s head, Bob suggested that Kenny probably only needed to build a little self-confidence and just needed some firm male bonding.  He felt that between him and Granny they could provide all the help Kenny needed to bring him out of his shell.

Granny seemed a little unsure of that, but she put the suggestion to Kenny directly, asking him if he wanted to do as the psychologist had suggested and begin sessions with a psychiatrist or instead try having just the three of them work it all out.

Kenny had no wish at all to see any more shrinks.  Not surprisingly, he voted for the second choice.

From that day forth, Kenny was home-schooled.

Bob had some definite ideas about how the three of them would work on helping Kenny.

Kenny, in his bedroom, overheard them talking one evening that week after dinner. Bob was speaking confidently and with authority; Granny was mostly listening.

“The boy needs to be a boy and learn what it means to be a man.

“You mother him too much.  Not that I blame you mind; the kid has been through a lot.  However, he’s getting older and that should stop now.  The boy is too soft.

“I’ve had a lot of experience working with troubled youth.  He should spend more time with me.  We should move him out of his current bedroom and place him in the wing where I’m staying.  That way he won’t always be running to you when he has those nightmares of his.  I can console him when he needs it.

“He needs some discipline and a male role model, a man to look up to and help harden him up a little.

“You can school him in the morning and then I’ll take him out and spend time with him for the remainder of the day, just as Gordon did.  He can show me how to work the machines and the male bonding that will naturally take place while we are working together will do him world of good.”

With everything that had been going on over the past few months, Granny was grasping at straws.

She welcomed Bob’s suggestions as if they were a gift from God.

Dave returned to Major Crime after completing his six months in the emergency response car experiment, which had gone extremely well for all concerned and was now a permanent fixture in the Patrol Division.

He had moved into Linda’s west end apartment after they got married.  It was small and they both wanted to purchase a house somewhere in the suburbs.  They were actively checking the real-estate listings.

After a four-month stint in robbery, Dave, who had impressed the upper brass both while in the trial patrol unit and as a robbery investigator, had then been selected by the chief to move over to the elite homicide section, as a replacement for a retiring detective.

Homicide had only six detective teams, and each of them were very good at their jobs.  Detectives didn’t make the grade unless their early detective work in other areas had been outstanding. Clearance rates by way of convictions were high.  Anyone who was lucky enough to be selected to one of the six positions, rarely left the post by choice.  Once into the prime job, the majority lost any interest in promotion and tended to stay put and ride it out until they retired.

The most senior members of this elite squad had worked together as partners for most of their careers and were looked upon with a fair amount of awe by the other members of the force.

As chance would have it, Dave was paired with the most senior man on the squad.  Although he only got to spend a short time with his new Homicide partner, who was near retiring at the time, during their time working together, Dave learned a lot and the two of them successfully cleared a couple of tough murders.  Dave loved the work and was more than ready to accept a new partner and continue in Homicide, but the Chief had other plans for him.

Dave was a little uneasy when the call came in for him to head upstairs.  He had no idea why he was being summoned to the top of the building.   And he had a good case of butterflies when he left the elevator and entered the boss’s secretary’s office.  Luckily, he wasn’t given a lot of time to worry about why he was there, as on his arrival, he was whisked directly into the Chief’s office where he found him and the two deputies huddled together around the circular boardroom table at the far end of the spacious room.

The three of them stopped talking as the secretary closed the door behind Dave, turned to look toward him and the Chief rose and beckoned him over.

“Grab a seat.  We have an offer for you to consider.”

The gist of the conversation that followed was that Internal Affairs appeared to be having some difficulty in dealing with some serious complaints which had been going nowhere and, would Dave be willing to accept an assignment there?

Dave heard them and took a few seconds to consider his response.  He didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but Dave who was often honest to a fault, went with his gut feeling.

“I’m not sure I would be comfortable with that.  Investigating other members of the department is not exactly what I pictured myself doing as a cop.  I really like Homicide…”

The Operations Deputy replied, “Fair enough, but we’d like you to think about it.  It takes a very special kind of man for a job like this.  You seem to be pretty well qualified for it.”

The Administration Deputy stepped in.

“It takes a guy who is not only well-liked by all ranks, but trusted as a fair player.  No one wants to work Internal; that’s probably why the unit is currently doing such a lousy job.”

They were team playing him.  The ball bounced back to the Operations Deputy.

“We’ve taken a hard look at your service record and we are all of the opinion that the other members of the department certainly think of you as both honest and fair, although we admit that in consideration of your relatively rapid rise through the ranks, there is bound to be some who feel a certain amount of jealousy and as a result may well be detractors.  That said, we think you’re smart enough to handle that type of problem, should it arise.

“And a successful stint in Internal would certainly look good to any promotional board you might find yourself facing later in your career.”

The chief dropped the clincher.

“While on your assignment in the emergency response car, you clearly demonstrated an ability to ingratiate yourself and the department when dealing with both the media and the public.  I think you would do very well acting as the spokesman for a revamped internal unit.  It wouldn’t be for more than a year or so, just long enough to get things reorganized in there.  Of course, should you agree to take it on, it would mean a promotion to Sergeant, as we would want you in a supervisory and leadership position.”

He paused for effect before continuing.

“Unless memory fails me that would make you the youngest man ever to reach the rank of Sergeant in this department.

When Dave didn’t respond, he expanded.

“While very important to the Department, Internal is a small squad.  You’d pretty well be able to call the shots and while there, you’d only have the Inspector to answer to...”

He chuckled before continuing.

“…and the three of us, of course.”

CHAPTER SIX

- March 1990 -

The custody issue regarding Kenny reached the court in early December of 1989, a couple of weeks before Christmas.

Kenny had not been briefed on the situation in any great depth but he did know that a decision as to who he would be living with in the future would depend upon the outcome of that court appearance.

Bob had arranged for a lawyer to represent Granny, and Kenny knew that the lawyer felt they didn’t have as good a case as his other Grandmother Edith did.  This knowledge depressed Kenny.

While he was not particularly happy about the current situation with Granny Gertrude seeming under Bob’s thumb, it was at least something he understood and could deal with.

The idea of being uprooted and going to live with Granny Edith had no appeal for him whatsoever.

As luck would have it, Bob had an idea of how Granny Gertrude’s position could be improved.

It was simple really.  He and Granny would marry and then, as a stable couple, they would be in a far better position to argue the provision of a better home life than their opposition, and thereby stand a much better chance of winning the custody battle for Kenny.

Granny’s lawyer had agreed with that suggestion.

Later, the deed accomplished, Bob had officially become his new grandfather.

As predicted, he and Granny won the custody of Kenny.

Christmas was a big celebration for the three of them. Bob was very pleased with the way things had worked out and as a result Kenny found everything he’d asked for under the tree that year.

After New Years had passed, life settled down and returned to normal in the rambling house.

If not particularly a happy nor well-adjusted boy, Kenny was at least more or less at peace.

The winter weather meant that he and Bob could not do much outside and that left him free to retire to his room and his Atari.  Bob had convinced Granny to give in to his pre-Christmas request for more adult-oriented games and several new ones had appeared under the tree as presents for him.

A couple of these new ones provided him with the opportunity to indulge in a good deal more violence and this made him feel far more in control when he played them, feeling a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure.

He was now able to battle with, maim, and destroy numerous characters who challenged him on the screen.  Life was relatively acceptable to Kenny.

Then that all changed.

At first Kenny didn’t really pick up on anything out of the norm.

He and Bob had headed out to do the chores together after a morning home-schooling session with Granny.  Initially, things went well.

They had some chickens to cull and Bob took him down to the pen and told him what chickens to bring out while he got the block and the axe.  Kenny was then informed that part of Bob’s program about teaching him to be a man was to have Kenny do the head chopping from now on.

Previously, Kenny had been grossed out by the sight of ‘chickens-with-their-heads-cut-off’ frantically spraying blood around, but that was not the case on this occasion.

Instead, the idea held a great deal of appeal for Kenny.  He found himself eagerly looking forward to watching the chickens running around after their heads had been removed.  Additionally, he thought that the idea of doing the cutting himself might be very stimulating.

Bob even let him toss the chicken heads and legs into the pigs after they were through and he wholeheartedly enjoyed watching the wildly grunting animals fight over the bloody scraps.

Kenny was also subconsciously aware that Bob was enjoying the activities too, or at least, enjoying watching Kenny’s reaction to it.

When they had finished with the animals, it was time to head out to the front of the property to the yard where the equipment was kept.

Bob let Kenny drive the little Ford and the old dump truck, then asked him if he would show him how the excavator worked.

Kenny showed him how to start it and work the controls but once into the operator’s seat, Bob was unsure.  He asked Kenny to sit in his lap and run thorough everything with him again.

Kenny was enjoying the feeling of kind of being the boss and he readily agreed.

He clambered up into the man’s lap, then began to run through the whole procedure again.

The guy seemed unusually dense. Kind of like he was in a fog and his mind was on something else.

Bob was kind of hugging him like, holding him steady and jostling Kenny around playfully as he explained stuff again.  Then a few minutes later he noticed that Bob’s breathing had became laboured.  A few seconds later, Bob grunted and let out a deep sigh.

Nothing was said but after Bob’s breathing had returned to normal, he lifted Kenny up and moved him over to the small seat Gordon had made for him earlier.

He then began to work the machine and Kenny offered advice as they worked and thought no more about the somewhat strange behavior that had taken place while he was in Bob’s lap.

That experience wasn’t going to be a one-off though.  The next day Bob had again asked Kenny to sit in his lap and go over the machine’s controls.  It was a repeat performance of the day before.

Two nights later Kenny had one of the reoccurring nightmares about the car crash and woke up chilled and in a sweat.  His room was dark but as he tried to settle himself down he realized that the door was slightly ajar.  After a few seconds, his eyes adjusted to the dimness and he became aware of the fact that someone was standing at the foot of his bed.

He let out a little cry of surprise and Bob spoke.  His voice was soft and reassuring.

“Having one of those bad dreams of yours, hey son?  You were moaning and I could hear you.  Nothing to worry about now.  I’m here.  It will be all right.”

Bob moved up to the side of the bed and sat down on the edge, then reached out and hugged him.  The embrace was something that Kenny was used to when he woke up from a nightmare. Granny had done it many times.  It was comforting to Kenny and he accepted it.

Bob cradled him and gently rubbed his back as he spoke.

“Nothing to worry about at all.  I’ll stay with you until you feel better.”

Eventually Kenny went back to sleep.

When he woke in the morning he felt a little strange about what had happened.  At breakfast Bob was telling Granny Gertrude how he had heard him having the nightmare and had come in to comfort him.

Granny seemed pleased.

Kenny figured all was well and dug into his food.

The next night Bob was back in Kenny’s room.  While Kenny slept, he gingerly pulled back the covers and stared at the ten-year-old for almost an hour while he leisurely masturbated.

Kenny never even knew he was there.

Two nights later Bob was back just before dawn.  He had the covers pulled back and was very lightly fondling the boy.  Kenny came half awake and then sleepily shifted his hips against the pressure on his privates.

Bob kept stroking as he smiled down at him.

“Nothing to worry about son…you got a woody is all…very normal for a young fellow like you. I can help you with that.  It will feel good and it will be our little secret, just between you and me.  It’s guy stuff; we won’t tell your grandmother.  She wouldn’t understand.

“Just close your eyes and relax.”

From that night onward, good old Bob regularly visited Kenny’s room several times a week.

Kenny found these visits strange and a little uncomfortable but felt powerless to do anything about them.

Now that Kenny had been moved away from Granny, Bob also discovered that Kenny was regularly wetting his bed.  He got very angry and told Kenny that it was a slovenly, dirty habit and that he had to stop.  Whenever Kenny wet from that point on, Bob would make him change his own bed, and wash the soiled linen.  Bob would then make him pull down his pants and proceed to use his belt on him.

Bob was careful to only demand this punishment when Granny was occupied elsewhere, and he told the boy that if he ever complained to the old woman, he would receive a much more severe punishment for his dirty ways.

From then on, Kenny tried very hard not to wet the bed.  He was afraid to go to sleep at night and fought to stay awake so he could go to the bathroom often.  He began to suffer from insomnia, lost weight and soon had dark rings below his eyes due to lack of sleep.

As time went on, good old Bob showed Kenny lots of other things that two guys could enjoy together.  Kenny was deeply confused about the whole thing.  On one hand, he hated it and wanted it to stop, on the other it did feel good at the end.

It wasn’t his decision to make of course.  He felt powerless to do anything about it.

Dave had taken the position in Internal.

Sergeant Dave Richards and his wife were now the proud owners of a two-year-old three-bedroom bungalow located on a half acre lot in Richmond, a Vancouver bedroom community suburb.

After a couple of weeks, he’d proven to his satisfaction that his initial concerns about accepting the job could reasonably be handled with a little determination and an open mind.

The Inspector in charge of the unit had had a meeting with the Chief before Dave arrived and had obviously been ordered to give him a free hand.  That went a long way toward making things easier than Dave had anticipated

It didn’t take him long to decide that the squad was in a rut, without doubt.

It consisted of the Inspector, him, a receptionist and four detectives.  He found out quickly that two of the detectives were near retirement and while they tended to appear very busy, they accomplished little, if anything.  They resented finding themselves suddenly under the supervision of a new and very young Sergeant brimming with new ideas and making changes, but this close to retirement, they had no desire to rock the boat.

Dave decided to put them on notice, letting them know that he felt they were just going through the motions and that he would be expecting them to either pull up their socks and get involved in the task at hand, or he’d transfer them out.  For the two of them, the current assignment was, or at least it had been, a cushy spot.  A good place to idle away their last months.  Neither of them wanted to be bounced.

Dave sat them down in his office together, and read them the riot act, then softened it with the comment that both had been damn good detectives earlier in their careers and that he was quite prepared to let them stay, but only if they shifted out of low gear and started to produce some results.

They heard him out, looked at each other briefly, smiled and acknowledged that they had been floating and both committed to adopting a new attitude.

Dave agreed to give them two weeks to demonstrate they were serious.

The other two detectives on the squad were younger, one in his late thirties and the second in his early fifties. He called them into his office separately, the oldest of the two first.

Dave had studied their personnel files carefully and he’d determined the shortcomings of each, well before sitting them down.  The older one had come to Internal directly from Patrol, after his promotion to Detective.  He had been a good street cop out on the road and was certainly seen as a fair guy by most of the force.  Those two things had probably been the driving force behind his selection in the first place.

That said, it hadn’t taken Dave long to figure out why he wasn’t effective in his current assignment.  The problem was that he was also very much one of the boys and had no desire to ever be thought of as anything but that, by his fellow cops.  Subsequently he had a strong, predetermined bias against finding any cop at fault.  It was clear to Dave that there was no way he should be working the Internal detail.

Dave went straight to the problem and told him his chances of promotion were going to be seriously affected by his stint in Internal if he remained, and he told him why.  Dave didn’t fault him for the fact.  He simply advised him that Internal was not for everyone and it certainly wasn’t a good spot for a man who didn’t want to hurt his fellow officers’ feelings.  His transfer would take place immediately.

The youngest Detective was another matter.

After reviewing his file, Dave was a little nonplussed.  Lots of commendations, ambitious, good street cop.  He was recently new to the squad, having been here only three months. That could be part of the problem.  More likely though, it was because the more senior guy he’d just transferred out had been his partner.

Dave figured that the older Detective had probably been holding the younger one back.

When he interviewed this detective, Dave didn’t pull any punches.  He told him how he saw it and said he wasn’t happy with what appeared to have been going on and that it had to stop.  He was prepared to give the younger detective a second chance with a new partner, but if things didn’t radically improve he would transfer him out as well.

He advised him that considering your own without a hint of bias was not an easy task for any cop, but it was what it was.  A bad cop was something no one needed, not the public and certainly not the Department.  He made it clear that if the man wanted to stay in Internal, he was going to have to be prepared to see things in that light and honestly do the investigations he was handed.

If not, Dave didn’t want him. The choice was his.

On the home front things, if a little hectic, were going well for Dave and Linda.

After doing the stint in the police unit with Dave, she’d decided it was time to work on her master’s degree in social work. That meant taking courses during the day at the University of British Columbia.  To facilitate this, she’d requested and been granted permission to work steady night shifts, and had been transferred to the after-hours Emergency Services Ministry office, which handled juvenile placements and after-hours family counselling and services.

That also meant working a good number of weekends as well as in the evenings, as that was when the normal Ministry offices were closed.

Working in Internal, Dave was nine to five Monday to Friday.

Because of their conflicting schedules, they were often living like ships passing in the night.  It wasn’t easy for them, and after a few weeks of it, Linda had offered to drop her schooling for awhile if Dave wanted her to.

Dave knew Linda well enough to know that she didn’t really want to stop her schooling and he told her that it wouldn’t be forever and they could handle it.

Despite the shift conflicts, like most newly married couples, they managed to spend quality time together and on any weekend that Linda managed to get off, they rarely got out of bed except to attend to the necessities of eating and visiting the bathroom.

Having a social worker in the family was very good for Dave; it helped him work through the grieving process.  Being able to love again was a bonus he hadn’t even seen coming.

All in all, life was pretty good.

CHAPTER SEVEN

- September 1991 -

By his twelfth birthday Kenny was living a double life.

He’d accepted his lot in his day-to-day existence because he couldn’t do anything to change it, but he blocked that part out whenever he could and instead, lived in a new and separate fantasy world, a world which allowed him to be in control where he called the shots.

He’d become a quiet, reserved and unhappy boy who had learned how to fade into the background when in the real world. He was Bob’s pawn and complied with everything the man demanded of him.  Now, when Bob came for him, he simply shut down mentally, blocking it all from his mind.

He’d also managed to expand this new commanding and forceful fictional existence, in which he could escape from the real world, a place where he was in command, where he could deliver pain, injury and death to all who challenged him.

For a couple of weeks now, he’d been considering broadening his fantasies even more.

Starting destructive fires was his first innovation.

Several suspicious blazes in the neighbourhood occurred.  Kenny had been careful to cover his tracks on those.  Days later he’d strangled and dismembered a neighbourhood cat using a butcher knife.

Each of these acts had brought him a wonderful sense of expanded power and control.  He had spontaneously ejaculated, without manual manipulation, while observing the last two fires rage and during the mutilation of the cat.

In so doing, he had found a new way to be in full control of at least part of his real life and found it a very wonderful and empowering achievement indeed.

In general, his day to day real life had changed as well.

Bob seemed to have Granny in the palm of his hand and now it was he who was making all the important decisions about what went on in the house and with the business.  He’d decided they should buy a computer for the business, and promptly went out that day and bought one, arriving back at the house with not only the new machine, but also a brand new pickup truck.

Obviously, the ex-priest had also found his way into the control of the family chequebook.

From that point on, the new truck was parked in the garage and the little old Ford was relegated to sitting out on the edge of the circular driveway.

Bob had also begun to drink heavily and was quite often drunk by evening.

Granny was now spending a lot of her time in bed, feeling poorly, and any free time she had, she spent in the kitchen.  Except for a little cooking, she had little enthusiasm for much of anything.

The old woman did worry about the boy, however, and took responsibility for his home schooling as Bob had directed.  However, when she was with what was now a barely responsive Kenny, she found herself incapable of seriously relating to him, seemingly lost in a sort of dream world and just going though the motions.

Old Sam had begun to spend most of his time following Kenny around in the house and liked to sleep in Kenny’s room at night.  By this point Kenny considered the dog his only real companion.

But that was about to change as well.

Bob eventually took note of the time the two now spent together and began to complain that the animal was not well, had begun to stink and should be put out of its misery.  A few days later he took the boy and dog out to the front of the property and told Kenny to shoot him with Gordon’s old twenty-two and then made him use the excavator to bury the corpse.

For a split-second Kenny, who was familiar with, and had used, the gun on several occasions under Gordon’s supervision, thought about turning the weapon on Bob and shooting him instead.  But Kenny wasn’t stupid.  He knew he wouldn’t get away with shooting the man, so he did as he was asked.  Did it without giving the act too much thought.

He had no real qualms about the execution and found watching the dog die and handling the dead but warm corpse strangely stimulating.

It gave him an erection.

The incident wasn’t unsettling to him, and it only served to further confirm to Kenny that anything that warmed to him was destined to die.  He thought nothing more of it, but from that day forward Kenny sank even deeper into his fantasy world and rarely left his room.

A week later Bob began chastising the boy for spending all his free time brooding in his bedroom playing stupid games and avoiding chores.  He then decided that Kenny, since he already knew how to operate the dump truck and excavator, should now take over sole responsibility for continuing the process of leveling the property.

In front of Granny, he told the boy it would do him good to get outside and get a little exercise and fresh air for a change.

Granny didn’t object; she hadn’t even responded to the comment.  At first Kenny, had wanted to rebel against the suggestion, but he quickly realized that it would allow him to get out from under from Bob’s thumb, for at least part of each day.

The next morning, after he’d take his lessons with granny, Kenny got together some rain gear and hurried out to the little Ford, and then headed to the yard.

The rest of that day went well for him.  He liked working on his own and while he was out in the bush, no one could intrude upon his fantasy world.  That first day, he’d kept at it until the sky had begun to darken with impending dusk and he was forced to accept the fact that he would soon have to return to the house and face the night ahead.

This knowledge compelled him to reluctantly release his fantasy world and face the inevitable.

He briefly considered just getting back into little Ford and running away, but lacked the self-confidence to do it.  Angry and frustrated by the unfairness of it all, he reluctantly drove the excavator back to the yard and dejectedly headed for the house.

When he arrived, Bob was sitting on the porch waiting for him.  For a few seconds Kenny just sat in the cab staring at the man through the wipers as they slowly brushed back and forth across the windshield and then, accepting the preordained, he sighed deeply, shut the Ford down and got out.

Bob stood up unsteadily and started right in.  His words were slurred and he was obviously half drunk.

“What the hell have you been playing at boy?  Where in Christ’s name have you been?  You’ve missed your dinner.  Well, now you can bloody well go without.

“Don’t just stand there gaping like an idiot, get into the house.  I have half a mind to take a belt to you.  We’ll deal with that later tonight.”

The Richards family had grown by one, a calico kitten, who they had named Murphy.

Linda was getting to the end her studies on her Master’s degree and Dave had Internal ticking over like a fine watch.

In the first six months of his posting to the new job, one of the older Detectives had come up to speed and the other, who had chosen not to change his ways, had been amicably transferred to stolen autos, where he could ride out the rest of his career in happy oblivion.

Dave had personally selected the man’s replacement and for the past year, that new member of the team seemed to be doing very well.

All four of his men where showing signs of a committed effort and, as spokesmen for the squad, Dave had managed to keep a good balance with both the media and the public.  The Chief and his two deputies were happy, and whenever he needed it he was receiving immediate support from them for any innovation he wanted to introduce.

The Chief had originally said he would be able to leave after a year, but it had taken a little longer for Dave to makes the changes he wanted, and to assure himself that these had done the job required, so he’d requested to stay with it until that had been achieved.

When he felt he had met that goal, he was asked where he wanted to go next and he’d chosen to go back to Major Crime.  There was currently an opening for a Sergeant in Homicide and he got it.

He’d no more than settled into his new office when he got called back upstairs for another meeting with the big three.

The Chief advised him that they were considering sending someone from Homicide down to the FBI academy at Quantico to take a course on Profiling and Serial Killer investigations and asked was he interested?

He was.

Three weeks later he was on the course.

The knowledge he gleaned over the term of the course completely absorbed and fascinated him.

He learned that the object of profiling criminals was to detect and classify the major personality and behavioral characteristics of an individual based upon analysis of the crime or crimes the person had committed.

This involved several steps, the first of which was referred to as ‘assimilation’, during which all information available about the crime scene, victim, and witnesses, was carefully examined.  This included victim profiles, police reports, crime scene evidence and photos, witness statements and autopsy reports.

The next phase was coined ‘classification’ and concerned integration of all the information collected into a framework which would allow the classification of the perpetrator as being either ‘organized’ or ‘disorganized’.

In the case of serial killers, once the killer had been classified, an attempt needed to be made to reconstruct the ‘behavioral sequence’ of the crime.  This required a reconstruction of the perpetrator’s ‘modus operandi’.  During this process, the profiler had to look for the offender's ‘signature,’ the thing that the perpetrator does to satisfy his or her psychological needs while committing the crime.

After further study of the ‘MO’, the offender's signature, and an evaluation of any presence of staging of the crime, the profiler then generates the profile.  This document would contain detailed information regarding the offender's demographic and family characteristics, any military background, education, and personality characteristics.  It would also suggest to the investigator an appropriate interview/interrogation technique, to be used after making the arrest.

To profile serial killers, it is first necessary to link crimes to a type of common offender. To accomplish this, the type of offender could be determined based on types of action committed at the crime scene.  It is of prime importance that this classification be reliable and be verifiable through means of observation or experiment to assign an offender to one group.

This classification also needs to meet with the assumptions of a typology.  It needs to be made according to specific types, occur together frequently, and be distinct from the characteristics specific to any another type.

The course wound up with a breakdown of how a successful serial killer investigation should be conducted, starting from the top.

Other than the assignment of knowledgeable and experienced homicide investigators to lead positions in the team, leadership must play a virtually non-existent role in the actual investigation.   Its primary task is to establish and reaffirm the primary goal of catching the killer and provide support for the investigators.

The organization of the structure or task force of an investigation, is key to its success.  Serial killers often commit their crimes in more than one law enforcement jurisdiction.  Therefore, ensuring information sharing between other agencies and jurisdictions is paramount as is the collecting of all related information into a single location where it can be organized and easily accessed by other jurisdictions who are working toward the goal of arresting an offender.  Prior to being formed the need for it should be identified as either long term, or short term.

Short term needs, like the canvassing of a neighborhood or road blocks should only be called in on a short-term basis.  When the task force's framework is expanded to include a new resource on a long-term basis, it should become permanent and not removed.

The decision of whether resources are needed short or long term must be made personally by the lead investigator.

If the investigation runs longer than eighteen months, there is a risk of burnout for individual investigators.  While it is inadvisable to add and subtract staff from a task force under most conditions, leadership must remain vigilant to ensure that individual burnout in a member is not allowed to occur.

Inter-departmental and inter-agency communication, is paramount. Fluid communication within the confines of the task force is a no-brainer but it is also important to keep uniformed street patrol cops up to date and in the loop.  This can be accomplished by having one or more of the task force team responsible for providing periodic summary briefings to patrol officers and field supervisors. Providing up to date briefings and information to officers on the street almost inevitably improves the chances or picking up solid leads in the case.

Another important activity in this type of investigation is the management of all the information that flows in to the task force from outside. The investigation of a serial killer generates a staggering amount of data.  All of it should be reviewed and analyzed. Therefore, a standardized method of documenting and distributing information must be established up front and investigators must be allowed time to complete reports at the end of each shift, after investigating leads.

CHAPTER EIGHT

- December 1991 -

Overall, conditions had improved a little for Kenny.

He enjoyed getting out of the house and away from Bob during the day by spreading the chips and shredded material out in the bush.  It allowed him to spend the entire time locked into his fantasy world.

Bob’s drinking had increased.  Not only was he normally drunk by late afternoon, he had taken to heading out to the pub for his dinner and often didn’t return to the house until the early hours of the morning.  Often, when he got back he was so drunk that he passed up the bath he normally took before he retired and instead, reeking of booze, passed out on his bed fully clothed.

Kenny did not miss his nocturnal visitor on these occasions and it made for a definite improvement when it came to the amount of abuse and beatings he had to endure, the situations that he had learned to block from his mind.

Those visits had become almost nightly, but now were usually only two or three times a week.

Granny seemed to be a little happier as well now that Bob was away for a good part of the time.  She and Kenny sporadically had a chance to regain just a little of what had been their existence before the ex-priest had come into their lives.

It wasn’t a big change of course.  By now, Granny had been browbeaten into the ground by the miserable bastard and what remained of her was only a shell of her original self.  But at least it was a small improvement.

On the other hand, by this point Kenny was spending most of his days deeply embedded inside his fantasy world.  He was also spending a lot of that time trying to figure out some way to accomplish the commission of those delicious activities without the cops ever finding out that he’d done it.

December of ninety-one was the first Christmas that Kenny never received any gifts. The celebration was ignored completely; they didn’t even have a tree.

It occurred to Kenny then that there really wasn’t much reason for him to remain in the house and he figured that at twelve years old, he might just be old enough to make it on his own.  He told himself that if things didn’t begin to improve in the next few months, he might run away and take his chances out on his own.  What the hell, cutting out had to be a better deal than the status quo.

Accomplishing that would take some careful planning and preparation on his part to pull off, and it would take time.

He would need a bunch of money.  Enough to hold him over until he found some way to make some cash on his own.  He would also have to figure out where to go, someplace where Bob couldn’t find him, because he knew only too well that the twisted, drunken bastard would come looking for him.

When he was out in the bush working, he kept an eye out for anything he could find and began to set snares for rabbits and other small animals he could catch. The first thing he now did each morning when he arrived, was to check the snares.   If he had been lucky enough to catch something overnight, he’d enthusiastically kill it very slowly, savour watching it die, and then happily dissect it with his sharp penknife, before disposing of it.

Those days were the best days for him.

Four months had passed since Kenny’s last kill and mutilation.  He was beginning to feel an overpowering compulsion to do it again.

Granny was now spending most of her days in bed.  She’d been recently diagnosed by her doctor with something called ‘multiple myeloma’ and seemed to be in a very bad way. She’d gone for several treatments and Kenny had overheard something about a remission, which was apparently likely to be temporary at best.

Kenny wasn’t much bothered by that.  It meant that he no longer had to do the homeschooling thing and he sure as hell didn’t miss that.  Bob didn’t seem to give a damn about his not taking his lessons and that was just fine with Kenny.

Kenny was curious about a couple of things though.  He’d never given any consideration to the fact that Granny might die.  But, it seemed to him that that was likely now.  If she did die, he’d be left on his own with Bob and that was a very chilling thought.  Kenny decided that he needed to find out more about this ‘multiple myeloma’ stuff, but he wasn’t sure how to do that.

He sure as hell wasn’t going to ask Bob, and Granny was being medicated and was kind of unresponsive these days, so he couldn’t very well ask her.

Eventually he decided that he might try and see if he could look it up on the computer that Bob had bought for the business.

Bob used the machine almost daily, but only in the mornings, and then only after his hangover from the night before had begun to wear off.  Kenny had no idea of how the thing worked, but he soon figured a way around that obstacle.

The computer was set up in a small alcove next to the kitchen, on a desk that overlooked the expanse of water beyond and below the house.

For over a week Kenny passed up working in the bush for as long as he could.  Instead he would get things done as quickly as he could and then drive back down the driveway toward the house for about a half mile and then park the little Ford and make his way on foot back to the house.  He’d then enter quietly and wait until Bob sat down to use the computer.  Then, ensconced safely in the recesses of the darkened room directly across the hall from the small office, he used binoculars to watch what the bastard was doing at the keyboard.

It took him while, but eventually he found an angle where he could see both the keyboard and the screen.

He concentrated on the start up procedure first and picked that up quickly.  Early on, the stuff on the screen didn’t interest him much, business stuff he figured.  But on the second day of his spying Bob eventually shifted from doing the business stuff and the content showing up on the screen changed.

Kenny couldn’t believe his eyes.  Thanks to Bob’s nocturnal visit to his bedroom, the content of the pictures that were scrolling across the screen was not particularly shocking to Kenny, but the fact that that kind of thing could be available on the machine certainly was.

After a week of watching the goings on in the small office, Kenny waited until Bob had gone out for his usual pub visit late one afternoon and then he went into the office and sat down at the computer. As usual, Bob had left the thing on and all he had to do was press the space bar to bring the screen to life.

Kenny learned all about Multiple Myeloma, although it had taken him a fair amount of time to figure out how to spell it right.  From what he read, it was obvious that Granny was not likely to be around much longer.  She was going to die soon.

A scary thought…just him and Bob in the house.

This changed things for sure.  Bob was going to have to die before Granny did.

Kenny managed to find the place were Bob was getting the kiddie porn he liked to watch, and he spent an hour having a look at what was available.

It was very appealing to him and he masturbated a couple of times before he’d finished watching.

That night in bed Kenny concentrated on what he had now coined as ‘the Bob problem’.

Later in that week Bob had inadvertently left the machine open on a sadomasochistic kiddie gay porn site.  Kenny found this new theme extremely stimulating.  He’d masturbated repeatedly, until he could no longer do it.

Then he noticed the favorites list at the top of the screen and began to explore.  Before long he was into sites that covered the same kind of material but also depicted dominance and even snuff portrayals.  He found these wildly stimulating and started adding them to his own private fantasy world, fleshing it out with glee.

He’d struck a gold mine, and things were looking up in his little private world.  By comparison, video games were bland now.  Kenny decided that he was going to be spending a lot of time sitting in front of the computer in the future.

Gone was any thought of taking off and trying to make it on his own.

The computer was in the house and he wasn’t leaving it for anything.

There were a least a few reasons for him to stay now, but the computer was the most important one for him.

Bob was the one who was going to leave, and that needed to happen very soon.

He set up a new schedule for himself.   He started to spend his days out in the bush, avoiding Bob, and doing whatever happened to be in the snares, then as soon as he heard Bob drive out on his pub date Kenny would close everything down and go back to the house, quietly go inside and close the office door behind him, before he fired up the computer.

Eyes glued to the screen, he would masturbate repeatedly, for as long as he could keep it up.  He found this new activity so enjoyable, that he sometimes even forgot to break for dinner.

Things were going so well for Dave and Linda, they decided to take ten days off over Christmas, for a much-needed break.  Linda, determined to get them some quality one-on-one time together, booked them an all-inclusive Hawaiian five-star hotel for the trip.

A less than enthusiastic Murphy, who had by this point settled in nicely and had been nicknamed ‘His Majesty’ and pretty much ruled the roost, found himself having to indoctrinate Dave’s parents in the proper procedures required for his care, for the entire ten-day stretch.

Leaving from Vancouver International during a light snow storm and landing on the big island of Hawaii to experience waves of heat radiating up off the runway and humidity you could taste, boded well for the trip, and it only got better after that.

It was the first trip to Hawaii for both.  The duo spent every second of the trip together.  They had no itinerary and took each day as it came, doing everything that appealed.  They did a lot of the usual tourist stuff, a luau, peering into volcanoes, scuba diving and snorkeling, visiting the Mauna Kea Summit, visiting a tropical botanical garden, hiking, a boat tour, museums, even a helicopter tour.

The rest of their time was spent within the confines of the hotel itself, mostly tanning, swimming, reading and sampling what the five restaurants had on offer.

They didn’t get a great deal of sleep, but then they were in love, and didn’t really seem to be suffering from the loss.

CHAPTER NINE

- April 1992 -

The dilemma of how to get rid of Bob was solved for Kenny mid-month.

By then, Kenny never went to sleep at night before he heard the garage door opening for Bob’s truck, and the usual stumbling and bumbling along the hallway that followed his entry as he drunkenly made his way down the hall and into his own room.

Kenny would lie breathlessly listening for signs of whether Bob would take a bath in preparation for a visit to Kenny’s room, or flop onto the bed fully clothed in a semi-comatose state.  If it was the latter, Kenny could relax in the blissful knowledge that he wasn’t going to be targeted that night.  If not, he would begin the process of leaving the real world and closing his mind against what was to come.

On this night, Kenny heard the garage door go up as expected, but then nothing but silence.

Kenny waited for a good half hour for the bastard to come into the house, but he didn’t.

Finally, he got out of bed, slipped into his jeans, grabbed the flashlight off his bedside table and quietly made his way though the house to the door that led out into the attached garage.

The small overhead light that automatically came on to illuminate the room for a short while when the door went up, had gone off.  The big overhead door had settled back down and was closed.

The garage was in complete darkness.

As Kenny’s eyes adjusted to the images in the dark interior he eventually made out the pickup sitting in the center of the garage.  Intrigued, he slowly made his way over to the driver’s door of the vehicle and looked inside.  It took a second before he could make out the outline of a figure slumped down across the seat.

Bob was flopped over onto his right side and appeared to have passed out.

Kenny hesitatingly eased the driver’s door open.  The interior dome light came on, leaving Kenny shitting bricks, but Bob didn’t so much as blink.

Kenny froze for a few seconds, convinced that the bastard would wake up.  But he didn’t.

He was obviously completely pissed.  He was snoring loudly, out of it.

Kenny shifted his gaze to glance over at the gas gauge.  It registered three- quarters full.

Kenny smiled and his stiff shoulders visibly relaxed.

What the hell, it’s worth a try.  He had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

He checked to confirm the truck was in park, then reached gingerly into the cab, grasped the ignition key, and holding his breath, turned it to the start position.

When the truck rumbled to life, the loud sound of the engine engaging echoed within the confined space and scared the living-bejesus out of Kenny.

It seemed loud enough to wake the dead, but even that wasn’t enough to wake Bob.  He didn’t so much as move a muscle.

Kenny’s smile broadened considerably as he carefully lowered the driver’s window, using his knuckle on the button, and oh so gently, pushed the door of the truck closed.

The small garage wouldn’t take long to fill up with the V8’s idling exhaust.

Kenny turned, walked back to the door leading to the house, and opened it.

Standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the soft glow of a nightlight further down the hallway behind him, he gave the truck one more glance and couldn’t hold back a soft chuckle.

Happy, he stepped backward into the hall with a satisfying sense of a job well done, then gently pulled the door closed behind him.

His first real kill!

Kenny whistled softly as he headed back to his room, all the while nurturing a picture of the idling truck in his mind.

Sweet dreams you twisted son of a bitch.  God, I’m going to sleep well tonight!

And he did - for the first time he could ever remember.

Kenny didn’t get out of bed until nine thirty the next morning.

Bob usually took Granny something to eat in in the mornings, so Kenny figured she’d be wondering where he was.

After he’d showered and made himself some breakfast, he made her a cup of tea, then went in to see her.  She was sitting up in bed.  After he’d given her the tea, he told her that Bob wasn’t around.  Granny hadn’t taken her morning medicine yet, and she was still with it enough to carry on a reasonable conversation.

She seemed surprised and he told her he was going to go and see if Bob’s truck was in the garage, suggesting that perhaps he was outside doing something.

Kenny had very carefully planned exactly how he was going to handle the morning.  So far, everything was going exactly as he’d figured it would.

He headed out to the garage and the second he opened the door the smell of carbon monoxide hit him.  The truck was still running.  The truck was still running, Christ, he hadn’t expected that.

Kenny reached around and hit the switch to open the overhead door, then closed the entry door and went back down the hall and then out onto the porch to cross over toward the garage.

He stood a few feet back from the open door, waiting for the noxious gas to clear enough for him to be able to breath safely, and then went inside.

He didn’t touch anything, just peered in through the open window.  He spent a good five minutes relishing the sight inside, then turned and walked back to Granny’s room to give her the news.

Granny made the call and Kenny went back outside to wait for the emergency people.  He knew he shouldn’t, but he risked going back inside for another look at his handiwork several times anyway.

What a glorious sight!

Then they arrived.

A cop car and an ambulance.

A lot of good that ambulance was going to be.

Kenny put on his best sad face and sat down on the porch steps where he could watch and enjoy all the proceedings.  He was disappointed when they brought Bob out on the stretcher and put him in the back of the ambulance.  They’d put him in a plastic bag.  Kenny would have liked to have had one final look at him.

The cop, an older guy, asked him a few questions, the answers to which he’d rehearsed carefully the night before, and when he’d finished he was certain that he’d done a good job.

‘Yes, Bob went to the pub most nights and got home late.  He and Granny went to bed as usual, and when Bob wasn’t around in the morning, Granny had asked him to check to see if the truck was in the garage. He had, then he told Granny what he’d found and she had phoned for help.’

Things proceeded smoothly after that.  Surprisingly, Granny rallied quite a bit.  She seemed almost as relieved by Bob’s death as Kenny was.

She was still weak and sickly, but she managed to get herself dressed and relatively mobile quickly.

Kenny stayed in the background while the old woman worked the phone.

Two hours later a permanent live-in nurse and a housekeeper had arrived to look after his and Granny’s needs.  She’d also arranged for him to have private tutoring five days a week.

An hour after that a representative of the law firm Granny used was sitting down with the two of them.

Kenny didn’t say anything during the discussions that took place, but he listened to what was going on.

It was during that conversation between Granny and the lawyer that Kenny found out that Bob had managed to wrangle himself into the old woman’s will and would have been the one who looked after Kenny and held the purse strings if she’d died before him.

Kenny was very pleased that he’d acted when he did.

The very thought of having to kowtow to that dirty old son-of-a-bitch until he was old enough to be on his own, was chilling.

From Kenny’s perspective, except for the tutor, which he figured he could live with, things were looking up.

Linda finished her Master’s and had been promoted to a supervisory position.  That accomplished, she’d then requested and been assigned to work the day shift, securing a permanent Monday to Friday spot, at Covenant House in Vancouver.

Covenant House, a provincial office situated in Vancouver that responded, on an ongoing basis to the needs of street kids, runaways and so-called ‘elopees’ from the various juvenile detention centers was located on Granville street in the center of downtown.  Linda felt that the services provided by the office were fulfilling a need, and she considered the posting to be both challenging and rewarding.

She was also very much looking forward to finally having weekends off.

Dave had been reassigned to Major Crime shortly after he’d returned from the Quantico course.  The Chief had then asked him to take on the task of creating procedural manuals, setting the departmental standard policy on both profilers and on future ‘Serial Killer’ task force operations.  He was to be under no specific time restraint as to how long it took to get the two manuals completed.

Dave undertook the challenge with enthusiasm.

He was given a small office space in Major Crime and was told he could set his own hours.  He’d chosen to work days, Monday to Friday, with weekends off.

Murphy, who had taken to terrorizing the available female cats in the neighbourhood on every opportunity, experienced his first visit to the vet for a clip job and for several days after that he was quite grouchy.

That eventually passed and shortly thereafter, the three of them settled into a comfortable weekly routine.

The half-acre lot they’d purchased was a part of the development of what had originally been a large orchard.  On their property, there were several fruit trees which ran in neat rows behind the house.

They redecorated the place and decided to put in a vegetable garden at the very back of their land.  They were planning what they would plant for the approaching growing season.

By this point, they had also discovered that there were good neighbours living on each side of them.

To the west was a nice Danish couple, a little older than they, who had two boys.  The wife was a stay at home mother and Linda had worked out a deal with her to do light housekeeping for her and Dave once a week.

On the east side were a couple who also had two kids, a girl and a boy.

Dave and Linda were at the point of considering having some kids of their own, but not just yet.  They were still enjoying the newness of their relationship and now, with both having weekends off, not quite ready to commit to taking on that level of responsibility.

CHAPTER TEN

- September 1992 -

There had been a new addition to Kenny’s household by the time his thirteenth birthday rolled around.

With Bob gone, Granny, who was apparently still in remission and relatively mobile for most of each day but couldn’t overdo things, had decided she needed someone who knew the business to take over the responsibility for the day to day management of the family company.

She had chosen Walter, one of the young truck drivers, to fill this new position.

The guy was only in his mid-twenties but had apparently been with them since graduation from high school and he knew the business inside out.  Additionally, according to Granny, he was apparently really into computers and capable of handling all the necessary accounts receivable, payables, and other bookkeeping that was required to do the job.

At the time, Granny had offered Walter the chance to be a live-in employee, and Walter, who had no family, had accepted.

Kenny had moved back into his old bedroom which was just down the hall in the same wing as Granny’s bedroom.  The nurse had a bedroom next to the old lady’s, and the cook/housekeeper and Walter were now quartered in the distant wing.

Kenny, who’d not been around strangers a lot over the past few years, initially found this expanded household a little daunting and restrictive.  He thought about the fact that he was eventually going to be old enough to leave the property and wanted to do so, to enable him to fulfill his fantasies.  When that time came. he would have to be able to do this with confidence.  To achieve that, he concluded that he needed to work on developing an ability to manipulate new people who came into his life in a manner that would be to his advantage.  That meant he had to work at improving his image in the eyes of others.  Resolved to work toward that end, he began to experiment on those currently living within the household, using them as guinea pigs.

As he had no real basic social skills at the start of this experiment to target and successfully manipulate others, he figured that the whole process would have to be a matter of trial and error.

To get an idea of what worked and what didn’t, he decided to take on a single person for a trial run.  He intended to concentrate his full focus on that individual over a week, trying out different approaches to see what if any worked at improving his relationship with them.  He knew he would have to take great care in his varied approaches to this person and go slowly, evaluating their responses before trying something new.  He would use all his senses to read and carefully weigh what reaction each of his actions or words had engendered.

He decided to begin his trials with Granny.

He began by adjusting his schedule to begin making regular visits to her room, starting with a couple a day and then working it up to six or seven a day by the end of the week.  Each time he visited, he would find an opportunity to inquire as to how she was feeling and then would commiserate with her whenever she responded that she felt ill.

That seemed to work well and he moved on from there by beginning to share first some, and then all; of his meals with the old woman.  Their relationship began to improve and to add icing to the cake, he also began to read to her every night before she went to sleep.

He was amazed to find that just doing these few things made a world of difference in how she was now relating to him.

That confirmed to Kenny that he was on the right track and could indeed learn how to put on a false front for others and present himself in a manner they found pleasing.  This would, of course, lead to a much better chance for him to manipulate any relationship in a manner which garnered trust and would serve him admirably in the future.

With things now going very well with Granny, it was time to shift his attention to the others in the household.

He took on the nurse next.

To date the woman had appeared to Kenny as self-absorbed, stiff, and standoffish in her crisply starched uniform.  She’d hardly spoken to him unless she’d had to.  She kept to herself and made it quite clear to anyone inquiring that her sole concern was the care of the old woman.  She had no time for other activities and that included what she termed as idle chit chat.

At first, Kenny didn’t know how he could break through that stiff exterior, but he noticed that his increased attention toward Granny had not only improved that relationship, but it had also caused just the slightest melting of the nurse’s up to now frigid persona.

Using that little chink in her armour Kenny soon picked up on the fact that the woman was starving for praise and recognition.  He began to ask her questions about Granny’s condition and often expressed to her his respect for her dedication to the old woman.  When that went down well, he took it a step further, telling her that she was probably the most important person in the house and that he was so thankful that someone of her ability and sense of calling had the responsibility of looking after his grandmother.

The change in the woman was almost instantaneous and it astonished Kenny.  He excitedly milked it for all it was worth, and within a few weeks she had begun to warm a little and open up, beginning to treat him as a confidant regarding Granny’s condition and starting to share with him her supposed expertise in maintaining the old woman’s remission.

To Kenny, this concept was all important.

He knew full well that the longer Granny lasted the better it would be for him. Once she was gone, the freedom he was now finally enjoying would be restricted due to his age.  For sure, he wanted her to last at least long enough that when she went he would be old enough to do his own thing, without further outside interference of any kind.

By the time he was ready to move on to the cook/housekeeper, Kenny was well on his way to perfecting his new assessment methods and using them to gain the good graces of others.

The housekeeper was a simple woman and in the end, all it took for Kenny to win her over was what appeared to be his supposedly sincere interest in her work and especially his complimenting of her cooking ability, something she was very proud of.

He soon had her eating out of his hand.

Kenny had saved the person he felt would probably be the most important of the householders he needed to have onside, if he was to be able to satisfy his future needs, till last.

He’d realized that he had to learn how to run the business if he intended to have the wherewithal to make it later his own.  He knew that when Granny went he would be inheriting everything.

That was assuming, of course, that she lasted long enough for him to be legally old enough to assume control of the business, investments, and money without restriction.  Therefore, a full understanding on his part of how to run the business would be paramount.

Walter would be the key to accomplishing that end.

It took a few days to figure out how to approach the guy.  Kenny carefully studied him to isolate his strong and weak points before he began to work on him.

In the end, Kenny decided that what was most important to Walter now was his new position and that he would probably respond positively to an appreciation of his accomplishments when it came to his computer ability.

That decision made, he began to hang around the office during the day when Walter was sitting at the keyboard and solicitously ask the odd question about how to operate the computer.  When that produced a positive response, he moved on to periodic enquires of how the business was run.

Walter was pleased to respond to Kenny’s attention, happy to have the kid’s companionship and to demonstrate his expertise with the computer.  Soon the questions became more complicated and shortly thereafter Kenny began to help Walter with some of the business entries.

Within a month, Kenny was doing most the entries under Walter’s mentoring.

With a better understanding of how computers worked, Kenny suggested that perhaps Walter should have a password to protect the system.  He also asked if he could become a second user on the machine so he could use it for other stuff.

Walter thought the password was a good idea.  He showed Kenny how to do it and then he set Kenny up as a second user and allowed Kenny to put in his own password, so that he could use the computer without somehow screwing up the business stuff.

Kenny was very pleased with this development. When he was alone, he could now look at what he wanted, with the knowledge that nobody else, including Walter, would be able to figure out what he’d been looking at.

Walter had various other responsibilities in the household.  He picked up groceries, made bank deposits and did spot checks on the jobsites from time to time.  When Kenny asked if he could tag along on these trips, providing of course his tutor had finished with him for the day, Walter cleared the idea with Granny.  After that, the time the two spent together began to expand exponentially.

During the month of September, Kenny figured he had come a long way toward effectively manipulating everyone around him.  From his perspective, it appeared that for them, he was turning into the golden child.  And all it took from him was a little effort to provide each member of the household what they individually seemed to require emotionally.

For the most part, his daily routine was now his to control.

The maintenance of his new persona required a minimum of time.  His evenings were his to do whatever he wanted.

There was plenty of time to make use of the computer after the work day had ended.  He’d convinced Walter to have a new lock put on the office door as a security measure and only he and Walter now had keys.

Once Walter, who had a regular girlfriend, had packed it in for the day, Kenny was free to indulge himself on the computer.

Earlier in the month, he'd also come across Bob’s very substantial stash of booze in a cabinet in the garage, and begun to partake of this bonanza when he was alone in his room or safely locked in the office.

Fortified with alcohol, he became lost in his fantasy world for hours each night.  On these occasions, he would inevitably enjoy what was on offer on the ‘net’s’ darkest of sites; preferably snuff films.

It had taken three months for Dave to complete and edit the two manuals to his satisfaction.  The Chief and his deputies had offered up a few minor changes to be made to the contents and inserting those additions and changes had taken another week to accomplish.

Twenty copies of each document were produced and then, based on the material, Dave was assigned to set up instructional courses for all the members of Major Crime.  Each of the classes had to be small, as the workload of the section was heavy and only a small number of officers could be taken out of the normal workday routine at any given time.

When September rolled around Dave had finished with the courses and had been reassigned to duties as a supervisor in the homicide section of Major Crime.

His duties consisted primarily of assigning new cases to the various detective teams and keeping tabs on their individual progress.  Most were straight forward, with an obvious perpetrator and sufficient evidence, often including a confession, to secure convictions.

When that was not the case, he would involve himself more, spending time regularly with the team assigned to those investigations.

The teams were, for the most part, well-seasoned and good at their jobs. He rarely found it necessary to advise them to try a new line of enquiry but acted primarily as a sounding board, providing specific direction only when he thought it was needed.

Dave found that he missed the street work a little but was buoyed by the fact that since his involvement with the section, clearances were up and the Chief had personally congratulated him on several occasions regarding specific cases he had actively helped put to bed.

Linda was garnering a great deal of satisfaction in fulfilling the duties of her new position.

She was really into kids.  She was a realist however.  She knew that the chances of saving very many of the sad cases that came to her attention were very slim.  Kids that had lived through the deplorable early life experiences these ones had were usually far too damaged to hope for a chance at ever participating in a normal life.  While the failures saddened her, and she was never satisfied that enough was being done, she didn’t beat herself up personally because of those realities.

Their relationship was such that both felt free to bring their work home with them and each encouraged the other to share and discuss their problem cases.  With weekends and evenings off together now, they often spent a good deal of their free time advising each other in relation to difficult cases occurring at work.

Murphy had, by this point completely forgiven them for the vet visit and in his altered state, seemed happiest lazing around home, rather than venturing outside and taking his chances with the ladies.  He had become a lump.

Over the past few weeks, Dave and Linda had been discussing introducing a more restrictive diet for him.  Had Murphy been capable of understanding what they were talking about, he’d probably have offered some negative put down of the idea, but as he didn’t, the cat found life was currently pretty good around the Richard’s household.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

- September 1994 –

The newly created guise Kenny had formulated to hide his inability to feel empathy toward others in a normal fashion was working like a charm.

He was convinced that in the eyes of the other members of the household, he now appeared to be nothing more than a typical, well-adjusted and caring fifteen-year-old.

His daily regimen had changed considerably as part of this façade and the new routine had become second nature to him.

He shared all his meals with Granny each day.

Monday to Friday he took has classes until noon.    After lunch, he went directly to the office where he and Walter would make the required business entries.  Walter let him do most of them now and rarely needed to correct anything or offer advice anymore.

Pretty well each weekday, Kenny would accompany Walter out to run whatever errands needed doing and to check on a jobsite or two.

During these site checks, Kenny would often watch the big commercial chippers chewing up the large tree branches being fed into them, while Walter was talking to the crew chief.  He was amazed at how fast and efficient they were.  Within seconds of being fed into the machines, the shredded remains of a thick branch would came blowing out of the exhaust hose in thousands of small chips and settle into the back of the attached truck.

Kenny being Kenny, it was not surprising that on these occasions it hadn’t taken him long to slip into his fantasy world as he watched the machines work.

He was soon imagining what it would be like to feed a body into one of them.

He loved the roaring and rending sound of a chipper as it worked and imagined what those whirling blades would do to human flesh.

He reckoned that you’d have to cut the body up into several pieces first, but that wouldn’t be a problem.  After awhile he got a full-blown erection just thinking about what a segmented body would look like coming out the other end.

There would be nothing left but a bloody pulp, maybe a few bone chips and teeth.

It would be awesome to watch.

Later in the week, Kenny was with Walter on a site check - in response to the crew-chief complaining about a chipper that had broken down.  To deal with the problem, he and Walter had picked up a backup chipper from the yard on the property and towed it out to the site.

They hauled it there behind the truck that Bob had bought himself earlier.  The one in which the rotten bastard had eventually died.

Kenny had fond feelings about that truck.  He loved riding in it.

After they had delivered the replacement machine, Walter hooked up the non-performing chipper and they then brought it back to the storage yard.  He and Walter pressure-washed the old machine before seeing if they could figure out what was wrong with it.

In the end, Walter concluded that it was simply worn out, and needed to be replaced.

When they got up to the house he and Walter told Granny what had happened and she authorized the purchase of a new chipper.  During the discussion between the three of them, Kenny suggested that the new one should be one that could handle larger capacity chunks of wood, as the old one had often taken too much time to shred the volume of material fed into it.

Walter had agreed with the boy and had then asked him if he wanted to come along when he went to select the new one.  Kenny readily agreed to that idea.  The two of them wandered into the office as they discussed it and once inside, Walter set Kenny to the task of surfing the web for prospective chipper dealers.

When he went to bed that night Kenny was pleased with himself.  Life was getting better for him.  His routine was set and working out well for him.  He really did feel that he was at least beginning to pretty much run his own show.

These days, he and Walter would be back at the house from their running around by five and Kenny would then join the old lady for dinner.  Once that ordeal was over with, weather permitting, he would head out to check his snares and work with the excavator for a few hours before coming back inside and reading to Granny before she went to sleep.

Then it was into the office for Kenny and an enjoyable session on the internet before he went to bed.

On the weekends Kenny would spend most of each day working outside and then, after reading to the old lady, he’d eagerly lock himself in the office for several hours of undisturbed pleasure at the keyboard.  He was getting very accomplished with the computer and was amazed at what stuff he could find on it.

For his birthday that year, among other presents, he’d received an eight-week old German Shepherd puppy from Walter.  Granny had given her support for the gift, believing that all boys should have a dog as a companion while they grew up.  She thought it would be a good company for him when he was out in the bush and that caring for the animal would give him a new sense of responsibility.

When Kenny was out on the property he still set his snares, but the bunny population on the property was thinning out.  It was beginning to be hit and miss for a catch.  Besides, he was finding that these episodes had become a little old hat now, seeming to offer only short-term stimulation for him.  The snuff films, which Kenny now watched obsessively, went a long way toward scratching the surface of the niggling new itch for heavier stuff he was feeling, but he knew that a need to experience some form of stronger stimulation was growing within him.

It had been a long time since he’d killed Bob.  For him, doing Bob had been the highlight of his life.  It had been extremely gratifying on so many levels.  He still regularly masturbated to the image of that idling truck in the dark garage, but the reliving of the experience didn’t get anywhere near to producing the level of high he’d garnered at the time of the original act.

What he really wanted was to repeat the awesome adrenaline-rush and subsequent sexual high that he’d experienced while killing that asshole, Bob.

Late in the month Dave found the time to begin to use his new profiling expertise.

Encouraged by those upstairs to begin experimenting with the process on some of the outstanding cases when he had any extra time, he began to work at applying the system to a few cases that seemed to be stonewalled for one reason or the other.

He was both surprised and pleased when he managed to achieve three promising outcomes, each pointing the way to an investigative lead, before the end of the month.

The first related to a series of robberies committed at jewelry stores.  In that case he could pinpoint a possible geographical area in relation to the robbery locations and the team working on the case used this information coupled with some other facts in the file, to set up surveillance at a likely target.  That surveillance paid off and the three perpetrators were caught in the act within a week

The second involved a peeping-tom who was working a small area in south Vancouver.  It was a small thing, but Dave found that the file held enough general information that it was worth a shot.  After working on his profile over an afternoon he was able make some headway on a probable suspect.  The team handling the case used this information to justify an interview and subsequently charged a sixteen-year-old who then copped to several offences shortly thereafter.  Being a juvenile, the kid wouldn’t do any time, but at least they had nailed him and given pause to anyone else considering wandering in the neighbourhood at night peering into windows.  And the department wouldn’t be getting the flood of calls that had been plaguing them over the past few months.

After these small successes, Dave created a profile for a rapist who was working in the west end of the city.  Using the info his profile contained, the team of detectives assigned went back through the case files on it and found themselves newly interested in an earlier interview they’d conducted.  It had been with a known convicted molester, who had been checked by a patrol unit in the general area of one of the rapes.  Although they had ‘liked him’ for the crimes after that first interview, they had dismissed him as a suspect shortly thereafter because he had come up with a reasonably solid alibi for a couple of the earlier rapes.

Armed with Dave’s info, they rechecked those two alibis in greater detail and found both had been provided by the same person, an old girlfriend.  They paid her a visit and, under a little pressure, she buckled and admitted that at the time of the earlier rapes he hadn’t in fact been with her as he’d claimed.  He had told her he was being railroaded, hadn’t done it, and asked her to do cover for him.  She burst into tears and justified the whole scenario to them by telling them that she was living with the guy at the time and that he liked to get physical.  She’d been too afraid of him to say no.

After leaving her apartment the team had gone directly to the suspect’s place of employment, picked him up and hauled his ass back downtown for another interview.

Once there, they’d left the suspect alone to sweat for an hour in one of the small, overheated and windowless interview rooms.  When they finally rejoined him, they casually dumped a thick file onto the table between them and the suspect, identified themselves, gave him the official warning and told him they were charging him with the rapes.

It took them a while to wear him down, but two hours later they came into Dave’s office and presented him with a photocopy of a signed confession, covering the entire batch of rapes.

The charges of rape that resulted cleared up four old cases, and when word got back to the Chief, he was ecstatic and came downstairs to congratulate Dave personally.

During the visit, the Chief and David discussed the profiling process a little and then out of the blue, the Chief asked him what he could do to help him expand the process to more stalled cases.

He didn’t respond for a second, then let out a deep breath and settled back into his chair before answering.

“Well, there is so much information to go through and then a study of that all has to be inter-related to produce results.  It would be a definite help if we could manage to computerize the information we compile to produce a profile.

“I’m not all that conversant with computers, but I think if the significant information already gathered on any specific investigation could be entered by a clerk, after all the reports had been visually reviewed and culled by a detective, then the whole process could be handled much more quickly and effectively.

“The detective doing the initial assessment would need to be computer-friendly, and then he could teach me the fine points of how to use the results produced by to assist in building a profile.”

The Chief thought for a moment and then shrugged.

“OK, you’ve accomplished quite a bit in a short time doing this profiling business.  If you think using a computer to sort and store information will speed things up, I’ll get one for you and send you a clerk with entry skills.  In the meantime, you select someone of detective rank that you want to add to your unit and when you got that nailed down, I’ll see to the necessary transfer.”

The Provincial Ministry, where Linda worked, had been switching over a lot of their files and records over the past couple of years to a new computer system which, according to her, was streamlining a lot of their access to information and record keeping.

Unlike Dave, who only knew the basics, Linda was very comfortable sitting at a keyboard.  She had been using them at work for some time, and it was she who had originally suggested the computerization of the investigative files.

When he got home that evening he told her what had transpired with the Chief and she congratulated him.  They went out to dinner that night to celebrate.

CHAPTER TWELVE

- May 1995 –

Life for Kenny had not changed much over the past eight months.  When around the others, his façade formed automatically now. It had become second nature to him.  He no longer had to work at it.

As far as how each of his days were spent, little had changed.  He still felt he had successfully managed to get a good hold on controlling most of his own life.

Kenny’s puppy, who he had named ‘Vicious’, because he was anything but, was now nine months old. For the first six months of its life, the dog the had spent most of its time with Walter during the day, while Kenny was in his classes, and out with them in the truck when they did their various errands.

Its nights were spent following Kenny around, and the dog slept in his room.

The dog idolized Walter, but didn’t quite hold Kenny with the same level of reverence.  That fact irritated Kenny to no end.  Not because he particularly liked the dog, but because he figured the dog’s strongest loyalty should be to him.  It was his dog after all.  Once again, he was being rejected.

Shortly after the dog’s arrival, Kenny had asked to take him out with him when he went up to the yard in the evenings, but Walter had disagreed, saying the dog was too young to be out in the bush.  It wasn’t until April that Kenny could have the dog accompany him on his daily sojourns to the far end of the property.

Kenny had been toying with an idea of how to straighten the animal out, but that meant getting the dog outside alone and until April such an opportunity had not presented itself.

About a week into the month, he had been given permission to take the dog up to the yard and the bush with him.  Kenny now had the opportunity to act out on one of the little fantasies he’d been formulating.  The goal of which was, in addition to pure enjoyment, to teach it who was really in charge.

The afternoon after he gotten permission to take ‘Vicious’ with him the two of them headed out.  When they were deep into the bush using the excavator, Kenny called the dog to him, and led him off further into the bush.  Then, using some of the fishing line he used to set up his snares, he tied the dog to a tree by one rear leg and left him.

The dog immediately tried to follow him but Kenny ignored the frantic barking and garnered a great deal of satisfaction when he was far enough away to be out of the dog’s site line, and heard the animal begin to utter a plethora of pain-filled yelps.

Kenny began to whistle and calmly climbed back into the excavator to continued to work.  He left the dog alone for almost an hour.

When he returned he found the dog laying exhausted, the tied leg extended, raw and bleeding where the fish line had cut into it as he’d struggled to be free.

Kenny was initially pleased with the results.

He stood watching the whimpering animal for a little while before he began to utter, what he thought the dog would consider to be soothing words, based on things he’d heard other members of the household use when comforting the animal, mimicking what he could remember of them, while he used wire cutters to free the injured leg.

Once freed, the dog was unable to use the leg, so Kenny picked him up and carried him back to the excavator, tossed him into the cab and leisurely made his way back to the yard.

By the time he’d arrived at the compound, he’d had time to think the whole thing through and had realized that, while the incident had certainly taught the dog who was boss, the sight of the injured leg was going to have to be explained away to those back at the house.

He loaded the dog into the little Ford pickup and sat for a few moments trying to figure out how he could rationalize the dog’s injury in a manner that it would be acceptable to them as just a horrible accident.

Completely ignoring the dogs pitiful whining as he licked the injured leg, Kenny ran through some possibilities.

He could say that the dog was running around and got caught in one of his snares, but then he would have to explain why he had set snares in the first place.  He wasn’t about to do that.

He could say he had no idea of what had caused the wound.  That the dog had wandered off and he’d had to look for him and when he found him the leg was injured.

He turned to look at the actual injury and figured, nope, that wouldn’t fly.

In the end, he decided to tell them that the dog had been playing and had tangled himself somehow in some of the heavy brush.  He had panicked and fought Kenny when he had gone to help him and, in so doing, damaged the leg.

He knew it was a little farfetched, but in the confusion of seeing the dog, he reckoned that they might not be thinking straight enough to question it.

When he got down to the house, he left the moaning dog in the truck and sat for a second preparing himself for how he should react when he went in.  He reflected on how Granny had responded when Gordon died.  He decided to mirror as much of her reaction as he could manage.

It went well.  Everybody was so concerned and worried.  They asked what had happened, of course, and, breathing heavily, he’d disjointedly given them his story.

They were so worried about the dog, Walter determined to get the dog to the vet as soon as possible, and the others tearing up and trying to soothe the dog, that they weren’t even paying much attention to Kenny.

So far so good.  It had occurred to Kenny, by this time, that the vet might not buy the story, once he examined the dog.  He hadn’t considered that angle before.

Walter was already carrying the dog to the other truck when Kenny asked, in his best pitiful voice, if he could come and hold the dog on the way to the animal hospital.

In the end, he was glad that he had decided to go with Walter and the dog.

While she was working on the dog, the vet, an older lady, asked how the injury had occurred.  Kenny, standing in the background and doing his best to look devastated, stayed mute and let Walter speak.

Walter explained to her that the dog had got his leg caught in some heavy brush.

The vet paused in her work and turned to face him, a questioning expression on her face.  Kenny bit his lip and held his breath.  The vet said it looked to her like a wire of some kind had done the damage.

Kenny mumbled out a response.  “

We have some old fences out there.  They are all broken down barbed-wire.”

It was bullshit of course, but it was the first thing that came to mind for him and he was desperate to bury the discussion quickly before it expanded.  Walter wouldn’t know one way or the other about any downed fences on the property.  He’d never even been out in the bush at the back of the property.

Kenny didn’t say a word.  The questioning-look on the vet’s face didn’t exactly disappear, but she did turn her attention back to administering to the dog.  As she cleaned the wound she spoke over her shoulder to them.

“I would have thought a smaller wire, but I suppose it could have been frayed barb.  At any rate, you two might as well go back into the waiting room while I finish up here.  You’ll be able to take him home when I’m through.  You will need to pick up a proper sized cone for the dog to wear to keep him from fussing with it until it has a chance to heal.  Talk to the receptionist and she will fix you up.  I will also be giving you a prescription to get filled, so you’ll have to stop at a pharmacy and fill it within a day or two.  Before you leave I’ll give you enough medication to keep him going for a few days.”

Kenny let out a sign of relief and, realizing that he’d been holding his breath while she spoke, gulped in some air.  The Vet saw him do it and her features softened.

“Don’t worry, son, there doesn’t appear to be anything seriously damaged.  Your dog will be running around again in a week or so.”

It was a close call and Kenny remained mute on the way home.  As he had anticipated, Walter just figured he was so quiet because he’d been really shaken up by the whole incident.  Kenny was using the time to silently thank his lucky stars and give the whole screwed up scenario a lot of thought.

He had been stupid to do what he’d done without thinking it all out carefully.  As result, he’d damn near been found out.  He’d acted on impulse and that was damn stupid.

Before Walter left for the evening, Kenny overheard him ask Granny if she was aware of any old collapsed fences on the property.  The old woman had thought for a moment and then said that she didn’t think so.  She then enquired of him as to why he had asked.

Walter had shrugged and told her that he was just curious.

Bloody amazing how gullible people were.

It had been a stupid thing to do but he seemed to have gotten away with it.

Kenny had learned a good lesson from it though.  Acting on an impulse was not a mistake he would ever make again.

On May the sixth, Linda bought a computer for David on his birthday.

The past eight months had been busy for the two of them.  Linda had been promoted again, this time to the position of Regional Manager for emergency services.  It was a big jump in both salary and responsibility abut it also meant that she would have to return to working nightshifts and Monday to Friday.

Since Dave had been told that he could set his own hours in his new position, he was able to shift over to nights as well and, as luck would have it, the change in office hours surprisingly worked out very well for him.

The Chief had been very pleased with the results of the new unit to date.

Dave was now profiling about one-third of their serious cases and results were producing solid leads, which in turn meant more evidence and further lines of investigation.

This had occasioned the Chief to authorize an expansion of his manpower.

Dave now had three civilian entry clerks and an additional detective to help with the process of assessing files and culling the vital material available, prior to its entry into the new system.  Dave asked for and was granted his request to have his old partner Ed Hamilton take up the position.  Ed was both a computer nerd and a known entity and Dave was looking forward to working with him again.

With the odd exception, the remainder of Dave’s staff remained on days, which allowed for witnesses to be interviewed more easily.

Dave, the new entry clerk and Ed, fresh out of the Drug Squad who was doing the file culling, worked nights.

Dave quickly found that he could work much more efficiently on all ongoing active files at night than he had been during the day, which seemed to be punctuated with constant interruptions.

The shift he’d chosen in the end allowed him to overlap the dayshift members of his team by one hour.  This provided him with the opportunity to interact personally with all the working detective teams in Major Crime every morning at the start of their shifts, making it possible for him to point out to them any new line of investigation he’d picked up on while he’d been reviewing the files overnight.

His supervisory responsibilities were therein simplified, more immediate, and took up far less of his time.

The new computer system for the unit had been functioning well using the software that had come with it, but both Ed and Dave were finding themselves frustrated of late with some of the many program glitches.  The system was also having difficulty handling the expanded volume demanded of it.

Linda had been spending a fair amount of time on the phone with him over the past few months helping him with some of those very glitches.  Now, with a home computer for him, she could accomplish that more comfortably, with him sitting beside her in their off time and watching what she was doing.

Programming and software improvements to the system went much faster that way.

That aside, Dave was finding himself less and less enamoured about the capabilities of the basic software program they had been using.

Linda said he was probably right, that it had not been specifically designed to accomplish what he needed it to do.  She suggested to him that she have a look at the setup and see if she could use her experience gleaned from having gone through similar problems at the Ministry.  Then, perhaps, working together, they could design something better.

They were in the middle of that exercise now, and although far from confident that any such a thing was even possible, Dave was beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

- September 1995 -

Having turned sixteen on the first of the month, Kenny had been eager to get his driver’s licence and Walter had taken him in for it.  Kenny had already been driving around the property for several years and he had been studying carefully for a couple of months to prepare himself to write the test.  He sailed through it with flying colours.

And as luck would have it, Dave wasn’t the only one who got their own personal computer for their birthday in ‘95.  Based on Walter’s recommendation, Granny got Kenny one too.

He was delighted.

From this point on he would not have to wait to spend time in the office after Walter had left for the day. Now he could nurse a drink while he accessed his stuff whenever he felt like it, night or day, and in the privacy of his own bedroom.

On the outside, he appeared to the others as a normal and well-adjusted teenage boy.  Hormones were raging rampantly as part of a normal cycle of physical development, but to consider Kenny’s reaction to these hormones in any sense as normal, would be to make a very big mistake.

There was nothing about Kenny’s sexual urges that could be in any way construed to be within the norm.

By sixteen, Kenny had reached a full understanding of what, of all the sexual fantasies he could envision, provided him with the most satisfaction.  His preferred a fantasy subject, the individual image of a sex partner that provided him with the ultimate stimulation, was that of a teenage boy, someone over whom he could demonstrate complete domination.

It was that combined representation he now envisioned whenever he fantasized about sex, which was much of any given day.  A ‘boy-next-door’ type.  Handsome, with longish hair, a reasonably athletic build and surrounded by an aura of innocence.  It didn’t have to be real innocence of course, just the appearance of innocence was acceptable.

The itch to do someone again had not gone away - anything but.  However, now having access to his own computer whenever he needed it was making it easier for him to hold it in check.

With a single exception, day-to-day life in the household was flowing smoothly.  The only glitch was the fact that Granny was going downhill.  Kenny had his doubts that the remission thing was going to last much longer.

If Granny kicked the bucket, it wasn’t going to particularly bother him, but according to her will, which she had read to him, if she died before he reached twenty-five, he would again find himself under some adult’s thumb until he reached that age.

He was actively taking two steps to prevent that.

Firstly, he had used his computer to look up multiple myeloma.  He had read everything he could find about it on the net.  Once he was confident that he had a good grasp of the subject he brought the topic up with Granny, one morning over breakfast, which she usually took in her bedroom.

Kenny waited until the nurse had left the room, leaving him and Granny alone.

At first the old woman was a little taken aback by the amount of effort he had put into his research.  She said little, and just nodded from time to time.

Kenny began to wonder how the whole thing was going down, but then he noted that her eyes were beginning to tear up. The stupid old woman was obviously filling with emotion, believing that he was seriously concerned about her health.

A sense of relief filled him.

He went on to explain to her that his research had indicated that there was a method of extending the life expectancy of people with the disease using stem cell therapy.  She responded by saying that her doctor had mentioned that, but had also indicated that such treatment was only available for individuals under fifty years of age.

Kenny had known that response would be coming and he was prepared for it.

He told her that was indeed the case under the provincial medical plan but that he had considered it carefully and found out that there was another way to get that type of therapy.  It was expensive of course, but if you had enough money, you could get it done at private clinics in the USA, regardless of age.

Granny’s features softened and she smiled.  She told him that she did have more than enough money to undertake such a process, but that would mean that she would have less to leave for him.  Besides, at her age she didn’t think it made a great deal of sense.

Kenny didn’t push it this first time.  He left it there and changed the subject.  Of course, he had a definite goal to achieve with this approach.  He needed her to last a few more years, and he was far from giving up on the idea.

At breakfast, a couple of days later he proffered his other idea.  Didn’t she think that having him unable to inherit from her until he was twenty-five was a little silly.  Didn’t she think that he would be able to handle it at nineteen, the Province’s age of majority?  Hadn’t he already demonstrated that?

He now knew the business inside out.  He was doing all the daily computer entries for Walter already and had been for some time.  He’d been all over on different job sites and knew how the operation ran.  Didn’t she think he would be mature enough at nineteen to accept the responsibility?

Granny said she would think about it.

That had satisfied Kenny for the moment, but he fully intended to work at her until he succeeded in having the will adjusted to reflect this change.

For the next month, every couple of days he raised both issues with her.  He didn’t want to get her back up by harping on them, but he was determined to wear her down.

By the end of the month Granny had been down to the States to take her first stem cell treatment and a representative of the legal firm who looked after her needs had attended at the house.  Her will had been changed to specify that his inheritance would now take place on the Province’s majority age of nineteen.

Now all Kenny had to do was to see to it that she lived until he turned nineteen.  After that he wouldn’t have to give a damn about what happened to her.  In fact, over the past few weeks, on more than one occasion, it had occurred to him that if and when that time arrived, he might just be prepared to personally assist her in making that final jump into the next world.

The new schedules adopted by Dave and Linda were working out well for them.  They still had their weekends off and because of their past experiences of working various shifts, the change over from working days to nights was no big shock.  If anything, both seemed happier on nights.

Murphy, on other hand, had initially found the switch in routine a little unsettling.  However, after a couple of weeks the cat had adjusted to it.

Both Dave and Linda had supervisory responsibilities that occasionally dragged one or the other away on their off time, but each was used to dealing with that kind of thing and rarely found it a problem.

Linda was making good money now and her little old Dodge was beginning to show its age.  She’d always wanted a red sports car, so the two of them had been shopping around for a replacement and had recently settled on a new ‘96, fire-engine-red, Audi Cabriolet.

Working the same shifts, they could go to and from work together.  When the weather was good they took the Audi and when it wasn’t, they used Dave’s pickup.  They only had a one-car garage and as Linda’s Audi had dibs on that, the pickup had been relegated to the driveway.

Over the past four months, Dave and Linda had been working together steadily during their free time to create a software program that was specifically tailored to meet the needs of his unit.  Dave laboured to determine the requirements he wanted the system to fulfill, and Linda used her programming experience to work toward producing an end-product that would accomplish the job.

The process was going well and by this point Dave was no longer a doubter.  He really had little idea of what Linda was up to when she was tapping away at the keyboard, but he’d quickly realized that the idea of building effective software to assist in his profiling was now a genuine probability.

They worked well together and the project, which was in its final stages, seemed to be bringing them even closer together.

Everything was good on the domestic front.

Linda’s new position carried a much higher level of responsibility than her last.  Running the after-hours emergency services program meant that she was no longer solely supervising the needs of street kids, although that was a major part of it.  She was now also overseeing the handling of all the after hours domestic violence and family problems as well.

She found the basic family stuff a bit frustrating, at least in the cases where just adults were involved, as it seemed that any intervention she had available rarely seemed to provide a lasting improvement.  But most cases, included kids and kids were her thing, so she gave each case everything she had.

She and Dave often discussed each other’s workload and when Dave heard about how desperate some of her so called ‘client’ situations were, he would just shake his head in wonderment that she didn’t simply burn out from the disappointment and hopelessness of it all.

When he’d expressed this opinion to her the first time, saying that it must be like banging your head repeatedly against a brick wall, she’d just laughed and told him that his was a strange comment, coming from a guy who spent most of his time trying to identify and convict the purveyors of serious crime.

Dave had smiled and agreed.

When they’d first become engaged, everyone who knew them had wondered just how well a marriage between a dedicated social worker and a cynical cop would work out, and to be honest, at the time, each of them had also had some concerns about the concept.

Interestingly, having to share their different experiences and perspectives on life was working out surprisingly well for both.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

- September 1996 -

Over the past year, Kenny had been relatively satisfied to ride out the status quo.  He had matured both mentally and physically.  Realizing that he was now playing a waiting game until he reached nineteen, he had taken great pains to learn to control his growing inner urges to branch out and begin to sample some of his now well-developed fantasy scenarios for real.

Surprisingly, the twelve months had passed relatively rapidly and uneventfully for him.  He had been careful to maintain the effective routines he’d set up in the household to ensure his ability to manipulate everyone.

That still gave him plenty of time in his bedroom, where he could enjoy a few drinks and surf his preferred sites.  He could indulge more heavily in alcohol, because he was just going to go to bed later and would not be having to interact with anyone before he did so.

When he went out with Walter now for site checks and errands, he did the driving.  He also went out on his own occasionally in the little red pickup, but only in the daytime, as Granny didn’t want him driving at night yet.

The internet gave him a good deal of satisfaction and for now that, coupled with the intermittent success of the snares, was enough to keep his needs in check.

Well, with one minor exception.

When he and Walter had gone ‘chipper’ hunting, Kenny had been determined that they would get the biggest one they could find.  As time went on, Walter had been a little surprised at how much resolve he had about it and had initially tried to get him to go for what was available at the dealership, but he was also impressed by Kenny’s commitment to get the best.

In the end, they had agreed to do it Kenny’s way.

Unfortunately, the model that Kenny wanted was not only very expensive, but also had a huge capacity and was therefore not much in demand. It was not only unavailable at the dealership, but would have to be a purchased by way of a special order and that order would have to be sent to the head office of the manufacturer and from there to the factory, where the unit would be built from scratch.

The salesmen told them that the model Kenny had chosen was nicknamed the ‘Behemoth’ and that it would take anywhere from six months to a year before it would be completed and shipped to the dealership for them to pick up.

Kenny didn’t particularity like the idea of having to wait so long for the machine but that was balanced out by just how much he relished the sound of the chipper’s nickname.

It had arrived four months ago.  That led to his only possible misstep in judgement over the year - something which could have caused him to fail to keep everything sufficiently under control until he reached nineteen and his inheritance.

It was sort of a spontaneous thing.

Both Walter and Kenny were left speechless when they first saw the chipper.  It was massive.  At first sight, Walter had taken a deep breath, and then mumbled something about the fact that they were going to have to buy a bigger truck to pull the damn thing.

That proved to be an exaggeration of course, but at the time had certainly been within the realm of possibility.

Kenny was very excited as they towed the chipper back to the property.  He kept turning in his seat to look behind at it and was grinning like an idiot.

Walter wasn’t much better.  Guys and their toys.

When they got it back to the yard, the two of then couldn’t wait to test it out.

For a month or so, they had been piling up some deadfalls gathered from around the property and within minutes of getting the new machine into the yard they had it hooked up to one of the bigger trucks, one of the ones used for holding and transporting the chipped product, and were feeding a procession of large branches into the yawning opening that led to the whirling blades.

Walter was impressed by the amount the machine could handle in one feed.  Kenny was exuberant beyond belief, not only for the capacity it could take, but by the real possibility that the ‘Behemoth’ was probably quite capable of doing exactly what he had fantasized it doing.

He couldn’t wait to find out, even if doing so might be somewhat risky.

When they were running low on stuff to feed in, Kenny asked Walter to take the small truck and go pick up some more material for the chipper so they could keep at it for a little longer.

Walter agreed, telling Kenny not to operate the machine until he got back.  Kenny replied saying that he would only carefully feed what was left on the pile while Walter was gone.

Satisfied by that, Walter grinned and nodded.  Kenny had been operating chippers since he was twelve and knew all about the rules for using them.  Nevertheless, he reminded Kenny to be sure to let go as soon as the blades grabbed, because otherwise the chipper was powerful enough to pull him in with the branch.

That done, Walter hopped into the little red Ford and drove out of the yard to collect what he could find.

Kenny waited until the pickup had left the yard and then immediately walked over to the shed.  He went behind it and quickly uncovered three rabbits that he’d hidden under a pile of leaves earlier in the week.  At the time, he had not really admitted to himself why he had not mutilated and buried these animals, as he normally would have.  It wasn’t until now that he understood that he’d saved them for the specific purpose of conducting this experiment.

He hurried back to the chipper with them and quickly fed a large branch into the machine, then threw the three rabbit carcasses into the yawning hole on top of the tail end of the branch.

The machine didn’t even hiccup when the rabbits hit the blades.

There was a wonderful red misting of the air coming out of the exhaust blower and into the trailer hooked up to the machine.  That quickly disappeared and when he looked inside the trailer after feeding in a couple more branches, he couldn’t even see any sign of bunny remains.

It was awesome.

Of course, the bunnies were small.  He would have to try bigger bodies to see how it would handle them to be sure.  But so far so good.

Oh, and then there was also the antifreeze thing too.

Early the next week, when he and Walter were in the yard, one of the drivers had been unloading containers and putting them into one of the garages.  As he was moving the last one out of the pickup, it caught on something and tumbled out of the back of the truck.  The plastic cap cracked and burst open, spilling some of its greenish contents onto the pavement.

Walter yelled at the guy and then, leaving Kenny behind, charged across to the man.

Although some distance away, Kenny overheard Walter telling the driver to be more careful and that antifreeze was poisonous to animals.  That they liked the taste of it and if they drank it, it could kill them.

At the time, Kenny had filed that little tidbit of information away into the back of his mind.  That night he got on his computer and did some checking.  Sure enough, Walter was right.

There were lots of warnings about dogs loving the stuff and dying after they lapped it up.

Kenny was delighted.

The very thought of something the size of ‘Vicious’ hitting the blades of the new chipper gave him an erection.

But he had already taken a big chance with the bunnies.  That had been risky.  He wasn’t ready to blow his image with the householders at this crucial point in time.  If anybody were to clue into something like that, his positive image would instantly shatter.

No, he had learned his lesson and he was not about to risk everything by acting on impulse again.

If he did decide to try such a chipper experiment, he would not act on impulse.  He would plan it very carefully first.

Linda had installed the new profiling software into the computer system Dave’s squad was using just over three months ago.  It was pretty good, but his team was still experiencing some minor glitches that had shown up.  With Linda’s help, they had solved most of those problems by early September and by the end of the month it was running smoothly.

Once Dave’s people got more comfortable using it, they began to apply it to a larger number of cases, almost fifty percent of the Major Crime investigations.

It was still too early to produce a statistical evaluation of how effective this tool was turning out to be when it came to the overall conviction rate, but several outstanding cases appeared to have produced some very positive results.

Predictably, these high-profile successes had produced a snowball effect in relation to how the other members of the department viewed the whole concept of profiling.  When Dave had first come up with the idea, there had been many departmental naysayers, some of them that held relatively high rank, who had openly expressed the opinion that it was good street policing, not geek computer programmers, that caught crooks.

At the time, that faction had been in the majority, but by the end of September that was turning around.

As a result, the workload had increased yet again and the Chief had provided Dave with a second civilian entry clerk and an additional detective to expand his team.

Dave had personally interviewed and selected the young new detective.

He’d been looking for someone with a good street record, someone who also demonstrated a high level of computer proficiency, and who could hopefully and effectively deal with any little problems which showed in the software Linda had designed, and on an ongoing basis, upgrade segments to improve it.

His selection process had left him with a man who had turned out to be more than capable of dealing with any glitches, with a simple call to Linda, whenever they popped up.

Although the need for this kind of tweak was occurring rarely now, when it did, it was dealt with within minutes instead of holding up the entire process for days, as it had in the past.

Linda had turned thirty on July fourth and predictably, she was becoming concerned about her biological clock ticking away.

She and Dave had been discussing having children over the past few months and had recently decided that they should try to get pregnant.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

- September 1997 -

Turning eighteen brought about several changes in Kenny’s life.

Granny played a large part in these changes.  She had been clearly going downhill again and he had begun to panic at the thought of her kicking the bucket before he made it to nineteen.

He decided he needed to persuade her to go through another stem cell treatment.  He turned to the nurse for support to assist him in convincing the old lady to make another trip to the States.

Kenny figured that the nurse had it pretty good in her current position.  She was very well paid and the job of looking after Granny wasn’t all that taxing.  That being the case, he reckoned it was in her own self-interest to support Kenny in his endeavour.

He’d managed to build up a pretty good relationship with the nurse over the past couple of years and he knew how to manipulate her.  It only took him a couple of weeks to get her on board with the idea.

By the third week in the month, Granny was headed for the States.  Kenny hoped to hell that he’d made the right decision and that the trip itself didn’t kill her.   All he needed was one more year out of her, then it wouldn’t matter.

He was on pins and needles until she was back home.

Before the old lady left, impressed by his concern for her physical wellbeing, she’d informed Kenny that he would now be receiving a regular paycheque for his work with Walter and had also relented on her restriction regarding Kenny’s not being allowed to leave the property at night.

Having some money of his own would be great and Kenny was very excited about the possibilities this would provide.  Those two things would give him an opportunity to broaden his horizons.

He was too keyed up to take advantage of this newfound freedom while Granny was in the States.  He did however spend some time surfing around on the net looking for what he could find that would allow him to satisfy some of his growing sexual needs.

By the time the old lady had returned, looking a good deal better than she had when she left, thank God, he had already selected the place where he would make his first night trip.  It was in Vancouver at a spot where teenaged boys apparently openly offered sex for money.

On the net, it was referred to as ‘boy’s town’.

Kenny was very excited about the prospect of experiencing that, but he had been working on another idea for some time and after Granny had been back home for a week and things were mostly back to normal in the household, he decided that he was ready for the next chipper test.

Over the summer they had taken to leaving the dog out over night.  For the past week, in the early evenings, Kenny had been taking ‘Vicious’ with him up to the yard when he used the excavator to empty the work trucks and fill in depressions on the property.

In the last week of the month, Walter had instructed the drivers to check their trucks for antifreeze as the weather would soon turn colder.

The next day Kenny took the dog with him as usual and once they got up to the yard, Kenny let the him roam for a bit while he went into the garage where the antifreeze was stored and helped himself to a partial jug of the stuff.

He then carried the jug out to where the trucks were parked and set it down while he looked underneath the line of vehicles until he found what he was looking for.

Under the front of the third truck he spotted a few drops of green antifreeze on the ground where it had landed when the driver had filling the radiator.  It was only a couple of drops but it was enough to fit into his plan.

He got the jug, opened it and then hunched down and reached under the truck and poured about half of the contents directly onto the spot where the drops were.  Then he called the dog over to him and let nature take its course.

Just like the net had suggested, the stupid dog loved the stuff.

Kenny stood and watched to be sure the dog would keep lapping away and he did until it was all gone except a stain of green.

He then loaded the dog into the dump truck and began his usual work to dispose of the cuttings the trucks had brought in that day.

He kept an eye on the dog and after about an hour ‘Vicious’ was beginning to react, wandering around like a drunk and drooling like crazy

Kenny had carefully memorized all the symptoms of an antifreeze poisoning and so far, everything was proving out.  A couple of hours later, he finished up and found he had to lift the listless dog into the cab of the excavator for the trip back to the yard.

The dog had begun to vomit by the time he got there.  Kenny left him in the cab lying in his own puke, while he pressure-washed the chippers, then he hauled the dog out and dumped him into the box of the little red Ford pickup.

As he was driving back down to the house he adjusted his rear-view mirror so he could keep an eye on the dog who was rolling around in the back and noticed that ‘Vicious’ had begun to piss himself.

When he was about a hundred yards from the house he stopped the truck, and lifted the dog out of the box and carried him about twenty feet into the woods and then dropped him into the brambles below a large deciduous tree.

When he arrived back to the house for dinner he was whistling happily.

The next morning the housekeeper, who usually fed the dog in the morning, put his food out as usual.  She wasn’t particularly surprised to find that the dog was not at the door.  Several times in the past, the dog had not shown up till later in the day.

Kenny was impatient, filled with eagerness to reach his final goal, but he forced himself to stick to his carefully worked out plan.

That evening, when he went out to get into the little pickup, he stood in the yard calling the dog loud enough to attract the attention of the housekeeper who came out onto the back porch. He crossed over to speak to her and asked if she had seen the dog.  She glanced down at the food bowl and shook her head and told him she hadn’t and that his food looked like it hadn’t been touched.

Kenny reacted as he figured he should, frowning and slouching his shoulders and then went into the house with the housekeeper trailing along behind him and into the office were Walter was just finishing up for the day.

The three of them talked for a few minutes and then he and Walter went back out into the yard.  Walter loudly called for the dog.  When he got no response, he turned to Kenny and shook his head.  Kenny looked as upset as he could fake it and let out a deep sigh.  Walter rested a hand on his shoulder and suggested the two of them split up and look for the dog.

Kenny readily agreed and said he’d search the area around the house if Walter went up to the yard and had a look around there.

Walter took off in his truck and Kenny watched him disappear before he headed out into the bush.  He found a nice quiet spot out behind the pig pen and settled down with his back to a tree.

About an hour later Kenny heard a horn honk and he roused himself, brushed the leaves off his butt, put on the sad face he’d ritually practiced in front of the bathroom mirror and headed back to the house.

He and Walter commiserated for a bit and then Walter told him not to be too worried, the dog would probably be back in the morning.

Kenny nodded and maintained the sad face until Walter’s pickup was out of sight, then he headed into his room.  Once inside he locked the door, dropped the façade and fixed himself a drink.  He grinned as he sat down at his keyboard.

Experience had taught him that people who were really upset didn’t have much of an appetite.  He was hungry, but as part of his plan, he intended to beg off eating dinner.  Earlier, he’d stashed a couple of sandwiches in his night table.  They would do until the morning.  Until then, as far as everyone else was concerned, he was moping because he couldn’t find the dog.  Before retiring, Kenny set his alarm so he could climb out of bed early enough to be sure to be up before anyone else was around.

When it went off, he dressed quickly and headed for the kitchen, where he wolfed down a large chunk of cheese and a glass of milk and then put on his sad face as he heard the housekeeper coming down the hall toward the kitchen.  He solemnly passed on eating any breakfast.

Most of that day Kenny, depressed face fixed in place, shuffled along and was not very responsive as he and Walter did some more searching.

It was a big property and as Kenny had expected, they had no luck.

When they got back to the house, Kenny retreated to his room, although he did later allow himself to be coerced into coming out just long enough to eat a little dinner.

The next morning Walter was too busy to help him search and Kenny, carrying a couple of sandwiches the housekeeper had prepared without being asked, headed out on his own.  He drove the little Ford pickup down the road to where he had left the dog and, after eating one of the sandwiches, he got out and walked into the bush.

The dog wasn’t quite dead but when he kicked him with his foot, he didn’t respond.  Kenny lifted him and carried him back to the road and the dropped him into the truck’s box.

He took time to leisurely eat the other sandwich and then, whistling softly to himself, he turned the truck around and headed back to the house.

Things went rapidly after he got there.  In a matter of minutes, they were headed out the driveway.

The vet, a different one this time, said it was too late to do anything.

After speaking with a somber Kenny for a few moments, the vet told him and Walter that he couldn’t be sure yet, but he thought it looked like antifreeze poisoning.  He told them the dog was suffering and should be put down.

Walter was as mad as hell as they drove back to the property and he went directly into the yard and jumped out of the cab of the truck and stomped over to where the trucks were normally parked at night.  It didn’t take him long to find the large stain left where Kenny had dumped the antifreeze.

As Kenny had hoped, that really got him furious.

Kenny watched all this carefully from the cab of the truck, but stayed mute throughout, ensuring that the sad expression on his face was prominent.

When they arrived back at the house, Kenny told them that he wanted to bury the dog by himself and, taking note of his obvious distress, they acquiesced.

He then put on a good show for them.  Gently wrapping the body in an old blanket before shifting it to the back of the little Ford pickup, and then he got in and drove slowly back down the driveway to the yard.

There he unloaded the dog and carried it around behind a shed and unceremoniously dumped it into the hollow where he had earlier stowed the dead bunnies.  He stared at it for a few moments, then kicked some leaves over it.

After that he wandered around the yard to idle away a couple of hours, before he returned to the house.

When he got there Walter called him into the office and sat him down.  Kenny, hoping he appeared suitably depressed, said little as Walter went on and on about death and how one needed to go through a period of mourning, but must get over that as soon as possible and get on with life.

At the end, Kenny quietly told him he would try.

That evening a more stable Kenny went into the office just as Walter was leaving and thanked him for the talk.  He announced that starting now, he would do his best to get over the loss of ‘Vicious’ and that he’d try to remember to stop moping.  Maybe he would go for a long walk into the bush to think about things for a bit.

Walter was pleased with the turn of events and on his way out of the house, he told the housekeeper what had transpired between him and the boy.  She’d nodded her head in understanding, saying that it was a good thing for the lad to keep himself busy now.

Kenny drove to the yard and promptly started up the ‘Behemoth’.  He fed a few branches into it and then got the dog and tossed it in with the next batch.

What a power trip!

It worked awesome, not even a hiccup as the body went through!

That done, he happily carried out his usual routine for emptying the parked trucks.

Before he went back to the house, he did an extra careful job of power-washing out all the chippers, giving special attention to the new one.

When Dave had been assigned to his latest position by the Chief, the Inspector in charge of Major Crime, Jim Henderson, had been in the doubter’s camp as far as far as the positive results of profiling went.

Thanks to the conclusive results now being produced by the new unit, that point of view appeared to have turned around several months ago.

Predictably, in the initial stages, and although it was under his direct command, Henderson had not paid a great deal of attention to the new unit.  He was an old-timer, and he hadn’t particularly welcomed the Chief’s direct involvement from upstairs in setting up the profiling unit, which Henderson took as interference in his personal bailiwick.

He hadn’t said as much publicly of course.  He was only a couple of years away from retirement and he knew better than to openly buck the Chief.  However, he was a tough old bird and once the new unit was in place, he’d made it quite clear to Dave, in a private one-on-one, that he wasn’t going to hold his breath in anticipation of wondrous results from the new unit.

With Dave working nights of late, he and the Inspector very rarely crossed paths.  That aside, there were small signs that Henderson had warmed up a bit to Dave, and had even begun giving him a receptive nod when they infrequently crossed paths, a definite improvement over the scowls Dave had previously become used to.

Additionally, Dave had heard through the grapevine that the Inspector had even begun to drop into the little office where his unit hung out during the day, occasionally sometimes spending up to a half hour chewing the fat with Dave’s minions.

Recently Dave had been both surprised and a little unnerved when he’d arrived for work one night to find a note on his desk asking him to stick around after his shift ended the next morning and drop into the Inspector’s office before he went home.

Dave had found it difficult to concentrate on his work that evening.  He kept drifting off, trying to figure out what he was in shit for.  Henderson was not the type who delivered much positive news.

At the end of his shift he tided himself up a bit and downed a coffee, then he left his office and went down the hall to the Inspector’s corner office.

Several unpleasant thoughts were raging a in his mind as he knocked at the door and a bellowed ‘It’s open’ sounded on the other side.

Dave had no more than got it open when that was followed by ‘shut it behind you and grab a chair’.

Henderson was hunched over reading.  He didn’t look up, but waved to the chairs on the far side of his desk.

Dave eased into one and sat quietly for a few moments, until the Inspector let out a sigh and leaned back as he deftly plucked the reading glasses off the tip of his nose and set them down on top of the pile of reports in front of him.

He looked at Dave briefly as if he was mentally shifting gears, and then he frowned.

“Where do you see yourself going in the department?”

Dave thought about that for a second, trying his best to figure out exactly where that remark might be heading.  Before he could answer, Henderson frowned, waved his hand and shrugged.

“Loaded question I suppose. Don’t answer it.

“I’ve been watching you lately and a thought occurred to me.  You’re doing a pretty good job with that new-fangled profiling thing.”

Dave couldn’t believe what he was hearing.  Henderson was not the kind to toss those kinds of compliments around.  His ears perked up for what was to come.

“You’ve got the Chief in your hip pocket, as I’m sure you are aware.  Now, he’s a relatively new chief, so having him on your side certainly isn’t a bad thing for your prospects.  Problem is, he’s got a lot of new ideas about changing things and I was wondering just what ambitions you may have, when he decides to promote you again.

“Reason I asked you here is because I’m going to be putting in my papers in a couple of years and like I said, I’ve been watching you.  The Chief spent most of his career in patrol.  Very little detective experience.  I can see him eventually moving you out of here and into patrol and frankly I think that would be a hell of a waste.

“That little squad of yours appears to be growing by leaps and bounds.  Seems to me that if he does have a mind to promote you again soon, you might just want to try to finagle a Staff Sergeant spot here in Major crime.  And, as I said, in a couple of years I’m out the door.  If you are as ambitious as you appear to be, and if you happened to be a proven Staff Sergeant by the time that rolls around, well with all your experience in the squad - who knows…”

He paused for a couple of seconds trying to read Dave’s reaction then continued.

“If that idea appeals to you, I could maybe put on a push for just such a slot within your unit, when it grows again.

“Anything I’ve said so far of interest to you?”

Yep…Dave was very interested.

Linda’s doctor had confirmed her pregnancy in December of ‘96 and she had given birth to a healthy boy on June third of ‘97.  They named him Shaun William.  Both were delighted and within days, their set routine had been turned upside down, but in a good way.

After the birth, Linda had taken off a few months on maternity leave coupled with built up booked overtime hours.  She’d also arranged to have her younger sister Cathy move in with them to help look after young Shaun, before she had to go back to work.

With the expanded household, they decided to do an addition onto the house, adding two new bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms.  With all that was going on, their weekends were suddenly very busy.

Murphy’s nose was out of joint.  He wasn’t particularly pleased with the upheaval bought about by these new additions to the family, however, he rolled with the punches and managed to adjust to the changes it caused.

Other books by Patrick Laughy

Murder Mysteries

The Little Black Book

Alumni

Historical Fiction

The 4th Reich series

Books 1-7

Fantasy

Atlantis-Ship of the Gods-a trilogy