Did Bruce’s father bring Emily back here before driving her away?
Did he carry her corpse and rest her on the couch while he packed some things together? No. He would have dumped her in the
boot of his car. He wouldn’t have been careful about it.
I take my phone and step outside. The lake, the church, the
land of the dead — none of it can be seen from anywhere on this property, not unless I was to take the ladder out of the shed and climb up on the roof or scale the fence. I do the latter.
The property backs onto the cemetery. The police, the
excavations, the canvas tents and crime scene techies, these things don’t reach Alderman’s house. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to grow up in a house where the view over your back
fence was of trees and granite headstones. Surely it had to be disturbing. Surely it couldn’t have been healthy. I wonder if this environment is what made Bruce Alderman a sick man. Whether
it made Sidney Alderman a sick man. Or whether it was the loss of their mother and wife that made them so.
chapter twenty
I’m half expecting to find my house has been set on fire when I get home. Or the windows broken. Or, at the very least, to have ‘murderer’ spray-painted across the garage door and fence.
I pull into the driveway, stand next to my car and stare up and down the street. I’m looking for Sidney Alderman, but he isn’t here. Nobody is. Not even Casey Horwell. All of my neighbours are off doing whatever it is that neighbours do. Mow lawns. Pull weeds. Cook food and watch TV None of them are trying to figure out where their dead children are. I’m careful as I make my way inside. I had a gun pulled on me last night, and hours later a microphone, and I’m not eager to make either mistake twice.
I plug my cellphone back into the charger, then I bring the computer in from the car and set it up on the dining-room table.
Bridget would not be pleased. I use the Christchurch Library database of newspapers to find more articles related to the ones Bruce clipped. I take on board as much as I can from them, and from the Missing Persons reports, and as much as I can about their lives and about their deaths — not that any of the articles say they are dead. But they sure read as though the journalists were all betting heavily on it. I print out a photo of the fourth girl, then line the pictures up in a row. Their killer certainly had a fondness for a specific type of girl.
I spend two hours reading all about the missing, and it’s hard, because my mind keeps returning to Alderman and Emily.
I search the obituaries for the weeks prior to the girls’ deaths, looking for the same last names to see if there was a reason for any or all of them to attend a funeral. I come up with nothing. It’s not a busted lead at this stage because it could be they still went to funerals of people outside their families, or family members with different last names. The only way to know for sure is to start making some phone calls, but right now talking to these dead girls’ families is the last thing I feel like doing.
I set the whiteboard up, propping it up on a chair and leaning the top against a wall. I’ve got nothing but a permanent marker to draw with, but go ahead anyway, starting with a timeline. I figure that Henry Martins would have been buried two days after he died. If I add those days on to the date of his death, it matches up nicely. Henry died on a Tuesday and was buried on a Thursday.
Rachel was last seen Thursday morning, and was reported missing by her parents the following Tuesday. But then I add the other missing girls to the timeline, and find that the dates between disappearances are not that even. The first two girls went missing within a month of each other, then there was another eighteen months until the third went missing, and the last was less than a week ago. It doesn’t suggest that the murderer is escalating or slowing, and I’m not sure what that in itself suggests. Guys like this tend to start killing more often as the need overtakes the desire. Or there is something in their life that triggers the impulse to kill. I look at the timeline and wonder what made this guy kill at these particular moments. Was it simply that the right type of girl came into his localised view of the world? Or did he go hunting for women to fit his type? There has to be more to it — I write Prison? on the board, wondering if the killer could have been in jail for eighteen months. It’s common for serial killers to get arrested for an unrelated crime.