I looked through the camera and knew that I was looking at the front yard and the front of the house that Faith Unruh had lived in at the time of her death. Three doors away and on the same side of the street. Kennedy’s house was slightly more forward on the lot it occupied, thus offering a clear and unimpeded view of what had been the Unruh home. I also noted I was looking through the branches and leaves of a couple of trees that stood outside the window.
I looked at Kennedy. “Camouflage?”
“Yeah.” He managed a tiny nod. “The neighbours might get nervous if they thought it was them I was watching. I planted those trees the first year I was here. Now I have to keep pruning them back to allow me a clear view of the house.”
He spent a few minutes telling me how he wanted the comings and goings of people from the house and the area in front of it recorded in one of the notebooks on the table.
“I’m not going to tell you about the people who live there. I don’t want you getting lazy on me. You watch, you write down everything and everyone you see, and you’ll figure it out for yourself.”
I thought that attitude a bit childish but didn’t bother to tell him that.
“You got this part?”
“What about this second camera?” I asked.
It sat on a smaller tripod, or at least one with the legs not extended. It was in the corner near the window, but not facing the window, as the other was.
“Backup. Everything here has a backup. If there’s a breakdown with one piece of equipment, I can be back up and running in seconds, minutes at the most.”
“Makes sense,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it did. I wasn’t sure that any of this made sense.
“You okay with this part?” he repeated.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“The rest is upstairs. Follow me.” He began the climb up to the second floor, and I followed. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on that level. He led the way into one of the bedrooms.
“I cleaned this up a little for you, got a bunch of my shit out of the closet. There’s a couple of extra blankets in there, if you need them. I don’t use the upstairs bathroom, so you can treat it like it’s yours. I hope it’s all okay.”
Along two of the bedroom’s walls were bookshelves. I’m not sure why, but I hadn’t expected Kennedy to be a reader. I noted that a lot of the books were hardcovers, but I didn’t look at any in detail. There’d be time for that later, or at least I hoped there would be.
“It’s fine,” I assured him. Actually, it looked more than fine. Like the rest of the house, it was neat and clean. Not that Marlon Kennedy was a neat freak; the place wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty damn good.
He led me down the narrow hall to the last bedroom on the east side of the house, and I followed him into a space that looked to be about the same size as the room he’d designated as mine for the next while. Again, there was no furniture but for one table sitting just off-centre from the middle of the room and covered with more notebooks — several piled high, the record of almost nine thousand days of surveillance. Kyla had been right. The word to describe what I was seeing was sad.
The rest of the room was a maze of recorders, computers, and video cameras. I turned to see that in one corner of the room, a high-powered rifle leaned against the wall. Kennedy noted my reaction to seeing the rifle.
“Emergency only,” he said.
“Good,” I said.
“The part you need to know about is over here.” Another high-backed stool sat in front of the window and next to another video camera on a tripod. “I’ve got everything set up, so it should pretty much run itself, but I’ll take you through any problems that could pop up.”
For the next twenty minutes I was given an intensive albeit brief seminar in video communications. He was remarkably thorough. There were two recorders so that when he was checking the tape from, for example, a time when he’d been away, another recorder was capturing the scene in real time. I got the idea that it was from this view that Kennedy thought there was a better chance of one day seeing the killer. And I had to agree. If the person who took Faith Unruh’s life was to return to the scene, my guess, like Kennedy’s, was that he would do it at the actual murder scene as opposed to the place the little girl had lived. I made a few notes, especially relating to the tapes I’d be checking when I couldn’t actually be watching the two houses. I had to admit Kennedy not only knew the equipment backwards and forwards, but he was also able to communicate what I needed to know very well. I’m not sure why, but I hadn’t expected communication to be one of Kennedy’s strengths. Maybe because that hadn’t been the case the night he’d jumped me in the laneway behind my apartment.
The last thing he went over was the scene outside the window. Across the street and five doors down was the house and yard where Faith’s body had been found. I knew the place, but this was a different view — from the side and slightly above. Kennedy had chosen his home well. The exposure to the scene was perfect: a clear view of the garage in the backyard and the alley behind it. It was there, next to that garage, where Faith’s body had been found the morning after her disappearance, naked and lying under a four-by-eight sheet of plywood.
Kennedy had been lucky to find a place that offered an unobstructed look at the two places he needed to see.
“Any questions?”
“Not about the technology,” I answered him. “I think I’ve got that figured out.”
“Yeah?”
“One thing, though. Besides me, how many times in all these years have you seen someone who maybe looked a little suspicious?”
“Count ’em on one hand.”
“I don’t know whether to admire you or feel sorry for you for doing this.”
“Well, let me put your mind at ease. I don’t give a rat’s ass which one you choose. Or what you think of me. This is what I’m going to do until I get that bastard.”
“And you really think you’ll get him?”
His shoulders slumped a little, and his voice dropped to a near whisper. “Some days I’m convinced that I’ll never see him, that he’s dead or he’s too smart or, like I said, he had cop help to get away with it and I’ll never get any closer than I am right now.” While he speaking he bent down to look through the video camera. “But there are other times when I know … I can feel it, that he’s still out there and one day he’ll walk into my camera shot and I can spring the trap. By the way, something I forgot — binoculars on that shelf over there.”
He pointed, and I looked at the shelf he was indicating, saw the binoculars.
I glanced at my watch. “You better get going.”
He nodded. “You good?”
“I’m good.”
“My bag’s down in the hall. I’ll grab it on the way out. House keys are on the table right by the front door. There’s some stuff in the fridge if you get hungry. I’ll text when I know more.”
“Listen, Marlon. I got this. Why don’t you just think about what you need to do in Nanaimo? And I want you to know I’m sorry about your wife.”
“Yeah.” He left the bedroom, and I heard him descending the stairs.
“One more thing!” he yelled from the main level of the house. “That rifle’s loaded … just so you know.”
I looked over at the rifle, a .30-06, and was still looking at it when I heard the front door close.
I walked back and forth between the two workspaces Kennedy had set up in the house. After twenty