Pumpkin Eater. Jeffrey Round

the fear of harm coming to someone he loved. The unspoken What if?

      “This time, yes. Next time I’ll be more careful.”

      Trevor shook his head. “You sound like a kid who just missed being hit by a car on his bike. How do you know you’ll be more careful next time?”

      Dan wanted to say that next time he wouldn’t go tramping around the ruins of a burnt-out building without using his flashlight, or even that he wouldn’t go at night, but it was just as likely that he would eventually find himself in some sort of danger. He couldn’t avoid it forever.

      “I know because I’ve got you and Ked to think about. I wouldn’t want to lose you.”

      He reached for Trevor’s hand and pressed it against his lips. Trevor gave him a slight smile: The Bogey Man Averted. For now, at least.

      There was an intertwining of limbs as they sought each other. Before anything could be decided, fatigue took over and desire backed down. After a few minutes of cuddling and stroking, Trevor fell asleep. His grip loosened on Dan’s biceps, the fingers straying across his chest.

      Dan listened to Trevor’s breathing. His mind was still in the grip of images gleaned earlier in the evening,

       pulling him back to the discovery at the slaughterhouse. None of it made sense without knowing why his client had been targeted. Assuming the dead man was Darryl Hillary, of course. He fell asleep with those thoughts in his head and Trevor snoring softly beside him. The alarm woke him three hours later.

      Three

      The Rue Morgue

      Still wearing his dressing gown, Dan stepped onto the back patio, coffee in one hand and newspaper in the other. The sun was bright; the air hung heavy with humidity. It already felt more like 35 Celsius than the mere 29 degrees the forecasters were predicting. Another hot one.

      The paper carried an update about a sporadic series of garage fires in the city. They’d carried on through the summer. Just when you thought they were over, another popped up. Always garages, always in the middle of the night, but so far no injuries. Someone wanted to give the residents a good scare. Or maybe they simply wanted to add to the city’s growing pains, tossing panic alongside transit confusion and the cacophony of languages as different cultures were set side by side. Let the city go up in flames, Dan thought. There were more pressing issues afoot.

      He sipped from his mug and mulled over the events of the previous evening. The images presented themselves in chilling precision, from leaving his house to finally driving away from the slaughterhouse nearly two hours later, along with everything else that happened

       in between.

      A knock interrupted his reveries. He opened the door to find an eager young courier beaming at him like there was no tomorrow and he loved his job delivering packages to strangers more than anything else on earth. At least there’s one happy person in the world this morning, Dan thought. He signed the electronic pad and looked at the envelope. It was the file he’d ordered on Darryl Hillary.

      He pulled open the tetra-pack and glanced quickly over the contents. It was a thin file. Was that all a man’s life added up to when all was said and done? He set it on the hallway shelf to peruse later, if he still needed to — which he was beginning to doubt — and went back out to the porch.

      He was holding off, but the call had to be made. The hardest part of his job was letting a client know of the death of a loved one. Dan’s task was to locate people who had gone missing, not guarantee them safe passage home, especially if they were already dead before he came looking. He also knew the possibility of death must have occurred to most, if not all of the clients who hired him. There had to be long, dark nights when the knock never came at the door, when the phone failed to ring or the letter didn’t fall into the post box. There had to be empty hours sitting and wondering: What if…? At some point you would have to sit back and ask yourself: Was my missing mother, father, sister, brother, husband, wife or child still out there? It had to occur to them.

      There were plenty of times when Dan wondered how much of what his clients told him was the truth. All of it? Half? Or just the bare minimum they felt he needed to track someone down? What wasn’t he being told by the obese, balding man covered in tattoos

       asking him to find his wife? What was the story behind the anorexic-looking mother wanting him to

       locate her teenage daughter? Often the tales were notably devoid of personal details. Darryl Hillary’s severed ear, for instance. What did it signify? Had Hillary overheard something that cost him his life? Could the missing ear be a warning to future snitches to think twice before opening their mouths? What had he known? On the other hand, it might be the trademark of a gang slaying, a mutilation branding this as the work of a particular group anxious to leave their mark in more ways than one. Then again, the guy was hardly gang member material. His sister had said he was a pothead, but he was also a poet. That didn’t spell anger and violence, unless his poetry turned in the realm of gangster rappers.

      Behind all this, Dan’s greatest fear was that he might inadvertently return someone to a scenario that would lead to further harm on the missing person’s part. What if the reason for running away was to escape abuse? What if restoring someone to his or her family led to suicide or murder? What if, what if, and again what if? These were the questions that haunted him.

      Dan knew he wasn’t the only one with such thoughts weighing heavily on him. Similar doubts clouded the minds of some of the best police officers he’d met and worked with. They lived with the knowledge that locating a missing person in time could mean the difference between life and death. All too often the crucial hours slipped by because of negligence of one sort or another. Paperwork not done in time, messages not forwarded, subtler clues overlooked in favour of more obvious ones that led nowhere. Sometimes an outdated photograph meant a face wouldn’t be recognized immediately. Or it might be the neighbour not questioned soon enough to prevent a twelve-year-old from being suffocated and stuffed into a green garbage bag inside a refrigerator in a rooming house on the street where she’d vanished a week earlier. It was the stuff of nightmares come alive: lions prowling in the streets, tanks rolling down hills into your village. There was always a fear that the one thing overlooked, the simplest effort not made, or the question left unasked meant someone would die or that a killer would escape. That was not far off the truth.

      He’d talked to such cops. “There is no such thing as closure,” they’d told him. “You can dehumanize things on the surface, but not deep down. You want to cut off the feelings, but you can’t.” They talked of vics and perps, not real people. They obsessed over physical details and tried to forget the names and faces, but their own faces marked them as haunted. Dan saw it. “You have to detach yourself,” they told him. “You have to look at things objectively.” But not one ever told him they’d been successful at it.

      These bustling, over-exuberant tough guys and gals were all live-wired inside. Scarred by what they’d seen, their emotions caught in a precarious tightrope over an abyss, they walked and sometimes they fell. Like Constable Brian Lawrie, who left the force ten days after pulling the body of Sharin’ Keenan Morningstar from the refrigerator of a rooming house in the Annex. For him it was “one crime scene too many,” after being struck by how shiny her hair was when he found her stuffed in that garbage bag. Or his partner, Detective Mike Pedley, who followed the trail of her killer for years, always feeling himself just one step behind until he threw himself under the wheels of a subway train at Rosedale Station on an otherwise bright, upbeat sunny day.

      Dan knew the men and women who worked on child murder cases were a breed apart, to use a cliché still deserved in many ways. “It’s the living you have to worry about, not the dead,” they said, if only to convince themselves. They referred to human remains as “trash” in an effort to make it less hurtful. “No offence intended to the deceased,” they said. “We just can’t take it personally.” Dan understood. It was the language they used, but it was slight as far as armour went. He thought about the boy he’d been, the one who grew up tortured because he didn’t know what to feel on hearing of his own mother’s death, hating