Second Sun

An Amber Alert seems prudent. See if you can get transcripts or tapes of the neighbor interviews and 911 calls to review tonight.

>Check with the neighbor on if they can remember any exact bumper stickers, and check with others about the vehicle
>Then report it as stolen or put some of the details (but leave out 1-2 stickers) in the amber alert
>See if you can get it out first to those working at rest stops and gas stations before it goes properly public.
>We're looking to make Keating think he's ahead of us, like he can escape this.

>Setup checkpoints around the province borders, park entrances. They likely are either going as far as they can, or to a pre-selected location.
>If we're lucky they've only got short term supplies, and if we're not they've prepared for this for a while now

>Red pickup you say. What's the license plate number?
>How did you know the weapon was an axe?
>Check the places in the house where an axe would be stowed. Either the axe is from this house or from outside the house.

"An Amber alert sounds like a good idea, yes," you say. "Put some details about the pickup truck in the alert, see if that helps. Did we get any descriptions of the bumper stickers, license plate, anything like that?"

"Conservative slogans, stuff about guns, that kind of thing. Neighbours think one said 'The South Will Rise'."

"In Canada?"

"Yeah, Ontario plates too. You know the type. Fetish for the American Confederacy and all that."

"Huh. The murder weapon, by the way - how do you know it was an axe?"

"Forensics called it. Wound shape and size match an ax head. No axe in the house, the shed in the back, but split wood. So there's that."

"Okay. Any chance I can get transcripts or tapes of the neighbour interviews or 911 calls to review tonight?"

"I can get you transcripts, but those will take time to compile," Mason says.

Digitized data isn't really around yet, you remind yourself, not like it will be eventually. Things move slower in 1997. "Thanks. Alright, get that Amber alert out, set up checkpoints at border crossings."

Mason checks the illuminated dial of his watch. "Newmann, your office is at CFB Borden, is that right?" CFB Borden is a military base where the Border Region CFNIS office is housed - the nerve center for CFNIS in the western half of Ontario. "You live out that way? Out near Barrie?"

"That's right."

"My wife Dorothy's at Borden, in the print lab. Maybe you've crossed paths."

"You're Dorothy Mason's husband?" you say. There's a lot of people at the Borden facility, but Dorothy Mason is well known, the deputy assistant director of the Laboratory Division. Your office is near Borden's day care, so although you've never met Mason's wife, you see Dorothy drop her daughters off most mornings in a flurry of kisses and hugs. "I think I've seen some of your kids' paintings," you say. "Katherine and Caroline, right? Their name tags are hanging on a corkboard near my office. Purple dinosaurs-"

"Barney," says Mason, smiling now, chuckling. "Everything's Barney - Katherine's room is swamped with him. So you drove in from Barrie, thereabouts? That's what... and hour, an hour and a half from here?" he says, fishing a ket card out of an envelope in his jacket pocket. He offers it to you. "We rented a block of rooms close by - don't make the trip back to Barrie tonight. You'll need to be right back here for the presser tomorrow morning."

"I'll crash for a night," you say, noting the change in Mason's demeanor. He's softened since noticing your prosthesis, since mentioning his wife.

"Distant Shores," he says, glancing skyward, though cloud cover occludes any chance of stars. "My dream as a kid was to be an astronaut. I watched a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral on TV once. It was the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen until my daughters were born."

You've seen the flares of firelight streak across the dawn sky, rockets lifting and vanishing from view. "It's always beautiful. Every time," you say.

"Get some sleep," says Mason. "We'll put out what you said. Meeting at 9 AM, then the presser."

---

A desire to put distance between yourself and that house pricks at your shoulders and spine as you pull away from Colyer Road, from Beaverton. The hotel Mason booked is a Comfort Inn, but before going there you loop through the parking lot of the local Wendy's. Nancy had been killed here, November of your Grade 10 year.

The Wendy's is as it ever was, unchanged since the last time you swung through here - a beige brick building with a drab brown metal roof, two dumpsters around back, blue, illuminated by your headlights. Nancy's body had been left between those dumpsters. You count the hours - thirty-three now, since Nicole Keating had last been seen. Nicole is seventeen, Nancy was sixteen when she died.

You drive to the hotel, thinking of your dead friend, thinking of the missing girl. Fingernails and toenails missing from the bodies of the dead. Had Rodney Keating really killed his family? Where is he now?

You keep your go bag in the trunk, two changes of clothes and a toiletries kit, ready to travel at a moment's notice. You undress in your hotel room, remove your prosthesis, remove your liner. The shower is tricky without safety bars, but once the water warms, you sit on the edge of the tub and swing your leg in, sliding down the porcelain to sit on the non-slip mat. Hot water streams over you. You wash your hair, using the full allotment of shampoo, trying to wash away the smells of decay and blood.

Without your crutches or wheelchair, you hop across the hotel carpet before slipping between the bedsheets, bundling into the comforter. With the blinds drawn and lights out, the room is pitch black. Cold. You turn over to sleep but see the bodies of women and children unspooling in bloody arcs and flowering wounds. A rising hopelessness and disgust burns acidic in your throat. You think of Nicole - still alive, please still be alive - but you don't know what Nicole looks like, so your imagination fills with the image of Nancy Wright and your mind races to axe blades biting through bone and wounds opening like mouths.

Clammy, you toss against the mattress, tangled in your sheets. You sit up and fumble in the dark for the remote control. The local channels are all reporting about the family kills in Durham County. You squint as the growing brightness of the television stabs your eyes - aerial shots of the neighbourhood roofs and footage of the blockade.

The Amber Alert was broadcast close to 5 AM. Nicole Patricia Keating, seventeen, of Beaverton, Ontario. A photo of the girl is displayed, sun-kissed and freckled, tank top and cutoffs, her straight hair the color of coal. Your breath catches at the similarities between your friend and the missing girl - casually beautiful, each with long, dark hair. You've been trained in time travel - used to reliving future events as they play out in the terra firma of the present, but this is something else, like you've caught reality repeating itself, the house, the girls, like you've seen something you're not supposed to see, the circular gears of cyclical time. Or maybe this similarity is something more rare... like a second chance. You lost Nancy, but you can still save Nicole.

You relax into bed, comforted by the knowledge that people are looking for the girl, that already someone may have seen her, might know where she is, safe, safe - but as you drift off for the scant hours of sleep that you can, you almost feel the girl's body getting cold.

---

The Past

---

Nancy Wright is dead.

You're just shy of sixteen. The Wrights invite you to stay with them at the funeral home, an exhausting honor - awkward in the reception line, Nancy lily white from concealer, laid out like she's sleeping. Nancy had always said she'd want to be buried in jeans, but they dressed her in some sort of velvet dress with a high lace collar. The collar is necessary to cover what the makeup can't of the slash across her neck. The body's stillness is so complete, so unnatural, that you almost expect your friend to sit up, to stir somehow or breathe.

Coming from the funeral home, you feel like a version of you died and is going to be buried alongside Nancy. You feel despondent, isolated, not interested in the new version of you, the you that survived. You live alone with your mom; your dad abandoned you when you were five. You're friendly enough with your mom, but she's never around, either at work or at the bar for happy hours that melt into long drunk nights.

Over time, you grow inward, escaping to your room every night alone with your expanding collection of records: the Pixies, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Misfits, punk albums from bargain bins. Just lying in bed with your headphones in the dark. Lost in soundscapes.

Your remaining years of high school are utterly wasted. Drunk on Jack and Cherry Coke or whatever someone snuck into the parking lot at lunch. You feel absent in your own skin, almost flunking out of school but not quite - ready to just live at home if you have to, ready to work for the same telemarketing company as your mom - but your track-and-field coach takes notice, pulls some strings, gets you a partial scholarship to attend the University of Ottawa.

Three years after Nancy died, you're called to testify against her killer. You sit in the Durham County Courthouse wearing your mom's work clothes, answering questions about the night your friend died - Nancy's parents listening to your testimony, Nancy's mom weeping, Nancy's killer listening stone-faced.

You never question your lack of empathy for the man who killed your best friend - a junkie, a vagrant. You want him to die, horrifically, or serve life without parole, some sort of revenge, some sort of justice. You find out about the sentencing later, the killer given twenty-eight to life, but it doesn't feel like enough. Your rage at the thought of this man living and someday perhaps gaining freedom slices through the fog of grief that suffocates you. The first semester of your second year of university, drunken weekends and dorm-room dime bags melt away to study. You declare your major as criminology, and secure an internship at the Durham County Coroner's Office per your course requirements.

At first, you're intimidated by the internship, but the coroner's office is, surprisingly, a nice place to spend an afternoon - the women there are grateful for the help and eager to spoil you, chatting with you about birth control and music as you crawl around reorganizing their filing cabinets. Dr. Minkowski, the coroner, greets you every morning but keeps a polite distance - an alcoholic, the clerks tell you, a homosexual, it's generally known, and while Minkowski's face is often glowing pink when coming back from longer lunch hours, he is always very kind. Some of your roommates had been disgusted by what you're up to, squeamish at the idea of cadavers, but you eagerly schedule your classes around your internship and find that you look forward to Thursday afternoons, when you'd drive the distance to the Durham County coroner's office.

The first time Minkowski lets you assist in an autopsy, you're nervous, but not afraid. Dressed in a lab coat and goggles and gloves like a kid playing scientist, you watch from only a few feet away as Minkowski preps the body, the deceased a sixty-three year old woman who had been found only when the family in the apartment next door began to complain about a smell. Your first whiff of human decay had taken root in you, a sickly-sweet aroma, but your curiosity overtakes your disgust. The procedure is surgical at times, scalpel incisions and dissections, and is unexpectedly brutal when Minkowski uses hedge clippers to break the rib cage open and an industrial saw to cut through the skull, the bone squealing as the room is powdered with dust. Minkowski's assistant irrigates the woman's viscera with water, running through armfuls of colon at the sink, filling the room with the smell of feces. The assistant finds a partially digested Twinkie is the woman's stomach and says "This baby would have lasted for eternity."

Minkowski lets you hold the woman's heart. You cup it in your hands carefully, like you're holding a bird with a broken wing, rather than a dead muscle. You're surprised by how heavy it is - a lot heavier than you would have thought.

"Place the muscle here, please, so I can weigh it," Minkowski instructs.

You do as he asks, setting the heart in a drip pan to drain.

"Take a look here," Minkowski says, some time later, lifting an organ from the cadaver for you to see. "This is what amounts to the cause of death. The liver. See the deeper purple color, the crushed charcoal texture. A healthy liver looks like meat you might pick up from the supermarket, smooth and pinkish. This is called cirrhosis. Basically, she drank herself to death."

The science of the morgue provides you with a center of calm. Sometimes you think about how death is an unshared intimacy. Death and loss are close companions for you, your best friend dead and your father gone. The autopsy procedures you sit in on help bring closure to your experiences with mortality. Death might still be a mystery, but people's entire existences can be summed up in file folders, in weights, in measurements.

In the summers, you work in downtown Ottawa to support yourself. One of dozens in the secretarial pool at a law office, your desk is cluttered with a boxy computer monitor and an electric typewriter, the steel shelves behind you an ocean of alphabetized manila folders. On lunches, you exchange your surroundings for the park, and criminology and forensics textbooks. A waxed-paper basket of poutine also joins you on this particular afternoon.

A man approaches you, in a sports coat and paisley tie. He takes the chair opposite you, without asking permission to join. He lifts the cover of your book, Introduction to Criminology: Theories, Methods, and Criminal Behavior, 2nd Edition.

"Have you learned why people do what they do?" he asks.