The Laughterhouse A Thriller

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The address the probation officer gave Schroder for Caleb Cole takes me into a part of town where the streets are full of potholes and cracked sidewalks. It’s three-thirty and I have an hour and a half before meeting Dr. Forster. I swing the car around a dead dog and then another dead dog a block later; maybe they’re throwing themselves into traffic like lemmings to escape. I’m the first one to arrive, and since I’m in a patrol car, I stop at the end of the block. I don’t imagine Cole is home, but I hang back because sometimes your imagination can get you into trouble. A few minutes later Detective Kent arrives, and a minute after her comes the Armed Offenders Unit. It’s the same unit as before. They probably made it back to the station earlier and got told to hang around because things were getting interesting. They start planning their entry. They choose one of the scenarios they’ve practiced time and time again, one that involves a complicated unknown—they’re dealing with a man who may have three children and their father hostage in there. They seem disappointed they didn’t get to shoot anybody earlier, and seem hopeful things will be different this time.

“What do you think?” Detective Kent asks. “You want to bet that he’s not in there?”

I think of Cole’s keys hanging in the car he bought. “We’d both be betting on the same thing.”

Cole lives in a big house that’s a good sixty years old, which has been divided into four homes. You couldn’t throw a stone in this neighborhood and not hit somebody who’s done time in prison. This is one of those areas where ex-cons are billeted upon their release, the kind of area you want to avoid unless you’ve got tactical training, a rap sheet, or a very big gun. The armed officers split up to take different entrances. By the time the media vans appear, which is only two minutes later, the scene has already been cleared.

People are walking out onto their front yards to take a look around. They’re giving the unit grief, telling us all to f*ck off and die. A few of them I recognize from prison, a few from my time back on the force. I head into Cole’s home with Detective Kent. The door has been kicked in, the latch is hanging from the frame surrounded by toothpick-sized splinters. There isn’t much inside. A kitchen table. A worn couch.

“This place is like screwing the ugliest hooker in town,” the man commanding the unit tells me. “It only took a few minutes to get the job done and it’s going to take an hour to scrub away the feeling of being inside.”

“He’s right,” Kent says once he’s walked off. “He wrapped it up in a lot of charm, but it does feel that way.”

There are kitchen drawers but nothing else, except a pile of empty pizza boxes on the kitchen bench. No bedroom drawers. Not much in the way of cabinets.

“Hard to believe people live like this,” Kent says.

“I’ve seen much worse than this.”

“I’ve seen worse too,” she says, “but it’s still hard making sense of it.”

I check the manhole in the ceiling while Kent checks the manhole in the floor. I finish first and find her crawling out from beneath the floor in the bedroom, her hands and knees caked in dirt. She wipes her hands on the sides of her jeans.

“Nothing?” I ask.

“Just a sore neck. You?”

“Sore shoulders,” I tell her.

“Maybe we should hire a masseuse to follow us around,” she says. “Listen, I was wondering, when this is over if you wanted to . . .” she starts, but then my cell phone rings.

I grab it out of my pocket and give her the chance to finish what she was saying, but instead she nods and says “You should get that.”

It’s Schroder, just as I knew it would be because Schroder is the only person who ever calls. I update him while Kent wanders into the kitchen. I watch her check the fridge and behind it. There’s nothing here. Cole has gone and he’s not coming back, and there’s no reason for him to have hidden anything. I tell Schroder as much and ask him to put a couple of officers in the house on the off chance Cole does return. Because of the reception the neighbors gave us, I tell Schroder that the people he sends need to be armed.

“What were you saying a moment ago?” I ask Detective Kent when I get off the phone.

She smiles at me and slowly shakes her head. “Nothing important,” she says. “We might as well head back.”

When we get back Schroder has run off copies of James Whitby’s criminal record, along with his psychiatric record. I sit in the conference room reading it while Schroder fiddles with the coffee machine, trying to get it to fill his cup. The reason the courts found Whitby lacked the mental capacity to know what he was doing to Tabitha Jenkins was because he did lack the mental capacity. As a boy, Whitby had suffered severe beatings at the hands of his mother—she hit him on the head with an iron the final time before he was taken from her custody, which put him in the hospital for three weeks. The blow was so severe he never fully recovered; in fact for the first few days the doctors didn’t think he would survive, the impact having left a permanent dent in the side of his head. The mother was angry at James for not waking up. She kicked him without success. She thought he was faking. The iron was still hot at the time. She had the idea that placing the iron on his chest would wake him up. She was wrong. She gave it a good go, before moving it from his chest to his stomach to each of his thighs. It was an hour later she called an ambulance, and when the paramedics showed up she was drunk in front of the TV yelling abuse at one of the soaps. Then she yelled abuse at the paramedics for not being able to wake her son so he could finish cleaning the dishes.

It was one of those cases that fall into the “for” column in the argument that serial killers are made and not born. In the hospital they found the true extent of previous beatings—broken arms, broken fingers, arms covered in cigarette burns. Whitby did survive, and his mother was given counseling and anger-management classes, was forced to pay a series of fines, and did see the inside of a jail cell—she was sentenced to fifteen months but was released in eight. After the hospital James was sent into foster care where he set fire to his bedroom and killed the family cat and kept exposing himself to his new sister. He was sent into another home and ultimately into a government-run home for troubled kids. At school he required special-needs teaching. He was constantly in trouble for hiding in the girls’ bathrooms to watch them urinate. At seventeen school was over and he moved from the government facility into a single-bedroom flat. Within a month he became obsessed with Tabitha Jenkins.

Schroder brings me a coffee. I pick up the doctor’s file and start thumbing through it. There’s lot of medical jargon in here, all of it suggesting Whitby was an extremely troubled kid who should never have been on the streets of Christchurch in that condition. Stanton was working closely with him—there are notes here relating to Whitby’s childhood, what it was like for him growing up, his relationship with his mother. There are notes from Whitby’s attack on Tabitha Jenkins. Whitby’s thoughts come across as confused. He found it hard to explain what it was about Tabitha that made him attack her. He was attracted to her because she was beautiful, is all he’d say. Stanton had written down that he believed the attack on James with the iron when he was fourteen locked parts of his personality into that age, which was why he found himself drawn toward girls of that age or younger. When pressed on whether he knew what he was doing was wrong, Whitby said he didn’t see a problem with it, and was confused why people did.

“I still don’t get how we missed it,” I tell Schroder.

“What?”

“The prison records. I mean, we were going through them, right? If Cole was released six weeks ago, we should have seen that.”

“Right,” he says, then shrugs. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“We should have made the connection earlier. We could have . . .”

“I get it,” he says. “Okay? We should have figured it out sooner, but we didn’t. But we’ve figured it out now and that’s the main thing, right?”

“Right.” I look across at Detective Kent who is watching me with a blank look on her face. She gives a small shrug that Schroder doesn’t see, then goes back to the file she’s looking at, which is a copy of the one I’m looking at. I look down at the coffee. The cup has those stains around the rim of it that no amount of cleaning will ever remove. “The coffee still taste the same as when I used to work here?” I ask, rubbing my finger over one of those stains.

“A little better,” he says. “I think the f*cking janitor used to spit in it.”

I pick up the coffee and get it halfway to my mouth then change my mind. “It’s time I gave up anyway,” I tell him. “Any luck connecting our victims?”

“We’re getting close,” he says, sipping at his own drink. “We’ll have court records within the hour. You read much of that?” he asks, nodding toward the file.

“Yeah. Poor bastard never had a chance in life.”

“So you read the mom’s file too?”

I nod.

“She really is a piece of work. You ever see her?”

“No.”

“I did. I picked her up a few years ago on a shoplifting charge. She got off on a technicality. She was in the supermarket drinking all the beer, so technically she never left the premises, so technically she hadn’t stolen anything, and she only left when we escorted her, which means she wasn’t choosing to leave. Thing I remember the most about her was her breath—I swear there was no way she’d been near a toothbrush in years. She was . . . was a creepy woman,” he says.

“She put all of this into motion,” I tell him.

He starts to shake his head, but ends up nodding. “I guess you can see it like that,” he says. “So we have Stanton as being the doctor who got up on the stand and said Whitby could be saved, and we have another connection too.”

“The other victims?”

He nods. “Want to have a guess at who defended Whitby?”

“It has to be one of our dead lawyers.”

“Victoria Brown,” he says.

“And the other lawyer?”

“We can’t link Herbert Poole or Albert McFarlane to the case,” he says. “I can remember parts of what happened,” he adds, and so can I. He fills it in for me anyway. “I think Whitby was out after two years, and I think it wasn’t long after that he killed Cole’s daughter.”

“You got Cole’s record here?”

He hands me a folder and I open the cover. First thing to see is a photograph of Caleb Cole. It’s fifteen years old and he doesn’t really look much like the man I saw last night in the cemetery, but he looks exactly like a man I saw earlier this morning.

“Shit,” I say, staring at the photograph.

“What?”

“Is there a photo of Cole’s daughter anywhere?”

“Why?”

I stand up quickly, the chair pushing backward and nearly tipping over. “This morning in Ariel Chancellor’s house, there were pictures on the wall,” I say, talking quickly now. “Caleb was in one of them. This Caleb,” I tell him, tapping the mug shot and showing it to him. “The one before all this started.”

“The evidence is in the storage warehouse and it’s being pulled right now for Jessica Cole’s murder,” Schroder says, sounding just as excited as I am. “There’ll be photos in there. But I remember the news coverage was pretty comprehensive, so there might be some images online.”

“Where’s the nearest computer?”

We head into Schroder’s office. He moves the mouse and his computer comes to life. He sits down behind his desk and I stand behind him, watching him use the keyboard and mouse, and it only takes him a minute to find the articles we want.

There’s a photograph of Jessica Cole, the same little girl that was also in the photo I saw this morning of Ariel and Caleb. We start reading the articles and the rest of it comes back to us now, all the details.

James Whitby hadn’t become obsessed with Jessica Cole. He had become obsessed by her best friend, Ariel Chancellor. The two girls met when they were five years old at school, they had been placed next to each other in class by alphabetical order and had become best friends. On the day Whitby planned to take her, the two girls were walking home side by side. He approached them with the same story he had given Tabitha Jenkins two years earlier, and they both fell for it in the same way, desperate to help the man find his lost puppy. When they realized it was a trick, they both ran. Whitby went after Ariel, but she was able to fit between a gap in a corrugated iron fence and she kept running. That same gap had sharp edges and caught Jessica’s winter jacket and she didn’t get the chance to free herself before Whitby snapped her up as, what he would say in his confession, second prize. Ariel got home and her parents called the police. The police figured out quickly who they were looking for. After all, a convicted and released mental patient who had raped and tried to kill a girl two years earlier lived only a block away from where Jessica was abducted. He didn’t return home, and the police arrested him late that night after he went to see his mother. She stood on the doorsteps screaming at her son, calling him a rape baby, screaming that the best part of him ran off her thigh and stained the bedsheets. Her abuse is all there in black-and-white, printed by the reporters for the world to read.

Once at the station, it took twenty-four hours for Whitby to give up the location, and I remember a detective beating it out of Whitby. It was a pretty big deal. I remember we all knew the confession may not stand, that Whitby’s lawyer was going to rip our case to shreds in court. I remember the despair around the station knowing that. I remember the guilt of the detective who had gotten the information out of Whitby, his actions understandable when he was trying to save the life of a small girl, but unforgivable when that girl was found dead and the killer was looking at going free. I remember one of the detectives tipping off Caleb Cole what had happened with, I imagine, no idea of what Cole would do next. Cole never said who had told him Whitby was going to be released.

None of that was in the papers. It probably would have made it, if people had found out, but because the case never made it to trial, Whitby never had the chance to tell what had happened. He had told his lawyer, who this time wasn’t Victoria Brown, but the lawyer never went public with it after Whitby’s death. That lawyer had children. He knew we were all better off with his client in the ground. Instead he came into the station and said that unless the man who had beaten Whitby lost his job, the media was going to get a hell of a story. So the detective jumped before he was pushed and the lawyer went home satisfied.

I never saw Caleb Cole. I wasn’t there when he was taken to the morgue to identify his daughter. I wasn’t there when he stood in the station foyer shouting for vengeance. And I wasn’t there a day later when Whitby, on his way to court from the holding cells in police custody, was hit by a furniture-moving truck Caleb Cole had borrowed from his brother-in-law. The collision between truck and transport van killed the police officer driving and the second officer in the car broke both arms and permanently lost his sight in one eye. Whitby survived the crash but not what followed. Caleb dragged him out of the wreckage and to his car, which had been parked nearby. He drove him to the slaughterhouse.

Caleb Cole tore James Whitby apart.

He used a kitchen knife. Every time he put the knife into him, he dragged it up or down, creating cuts that almost tore Whitby apart. I never saw the scene. I wasn’t one of the officers who got the call to go there and help and I was thankful for it. I know there were pieces of Whitby all over the floor, things that had been sliced so badly they fell out of him. I know parts of him were scooped into a bucket. I know it was so bad the medical examiner had no idea whether Whitby had been hurt in the car collision because there just wasn’t enough left of him in once piece to tell.

And I know, thanks to the medical examiner, that if you count those wounds up it came to nineteen.

Caleb Cole drove home after Whitby was dead. He was covered in blood. His wife didn’t recognize him. She screamed when he walked in the door and their neighbors called the police. She said he looked like he’d bathed in it. She said he looked like he had stepped out of a horror movie. Cole didn’t say anything to her, he went and showered and when he came out she was sitting on the couch with the knowledge of what he had done. They held each other until the police arrived a few minutes later. He didn’t resist arrest. He pleaded guilty to everything. Four days later his wife killed herself. She had lost her daughter on a Monday, and by the weekend she had lost everything else. She didn’t leave a note. Fifteen years Cole got. He tried to kill himself twice within the first week. Then he was on suicide watch for three months, and the moment he was off it he tried to kill himself again. He didn’t try anymore after that, though others tried for him.

“Victim number two was a teacher, is it possible he taught Whitby?” I ask.

“We’ll know soon,” Schroder says. “Along with victim number one.”

“Victim number three, Hayward. It must be a safe bet the connection is with Ariel Chancellor. He simply picked the wrong moment to pick up a prostitute. Also I’m thinking, if Cole blamed Whitby’s lawyer, maybe he blamed the judge too. That makes the judge a potential target, and also might be a chance of catching Cole.”

“Good thinking,” Schroder says. “We’ll get the judge out of there and put some armed officers inside the house. Maybe we’ll catch a break and nail Cole breaking his way in.”

“Mrs. Whitby too,” I say, looking down at her mug shot, taken while her son fought for his life in a hospital room. In it her hair is sticking up at the back from where she spent a few hours slouched in the couch watching TV. Her eyes are half-closed, she’s drunk and tired, and looks like she just doesn’t give a damn about anything. “Like I said before, she set the ball rolling on all of this.”

“You should go back and talk to Ariel Chancellor,” he says. “Take Kent with you. There’s a whole lot of different questions you can ask her now that you couldn’t this morning. Maybe they’ve stayed in touch. Maybe Chancellor will be able to tell us something that can help track him down.”

“Sure,” I tell him. I head for the door.

He reaches into his pocket and grabs out the packet of Wake-E.

“You remember when we found her?” he asks.

I stop at the door and turn back. “I remember.”

“Landry was there too,” he says. “How the hell have fifteen years gone by?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m thinking, since Cole took Whitby out to the slaughterhouse,” Schroder says, “that means there’s some symmetry there. What do you think? You think he might go there again?”

I think of the snow, the blood, I think about how the slaughterhouse must look now, and I imagine Caleb Cole holed up there with the doctor and his family. If not there, then where else?

“It’s a good idea,” I tell him.

“I’ll check it out.”

“Want me to tag along?”

“I can handle it,” Schroder says, and he tosses a tablet into his mouth and I head out the door.