My dad leans back too, imitating me, but then he crosses one leg over the other and taps his fingers on his knee.

“When you were a kid I used to take you and Belinda to the park. You remember? There was a fort there you’d always play on. Had a tire with chains on it that had been turned into a swing. There was a pole you could slide down. There was bark everywhere, and bars you could climb, ropes and chains you could hang from.”

“This going anywhere?”

“There was a merry-go-round there too. You two used to play on that thing so fast that when you came to a stop and stood up, you’d fall over, dizzy as hell, clutching onto the ground as if it were moving, trying to keep it still.”

“What is this? Some kind of father–son moment that you saw on TV and are trying to emulate?”

“One day, when you were eight,” he says, “when we were there, there was a man there too, walking his dog. It got off its leash and ran over to the fort where you and Belinda were riding the merry-go-round. You came to a stop and spilled off it, and the dog, it was all excited and tried sniffing Belinda. She got scared and she ran.”

“I don’t remember.”

“It ran after her and tried to bite her, and she kept running and trying to watch the dog all at the same time, and she got off balance. She ran right into a tree and knocked herself out. Got her forehead grazed up. You remember what you said when we were carrying her back to the car?”

“Not really.”

My dad leans forward, and in a lower voice, he tells me. “You said you would kill it.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Six months after that, the dog a few houses down from us that always used to bark, you remember that dog . . . ?”

“Not really.”

“It was the same dog from the park. This big black dog with a lot of bark. That dog got itself killed.”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s a long time to be angry at an animal,” Dad says.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t think I noticed the steak was missing?” he asks, his voice low now, and I hadn’t noticed but I’ve leaned in close to him. “I told your mother I’d taken it. She never knew it was you who killed that dog. But I knew. Is that when you first heard it?”

“You’re delusional.”

“I think it probably was. You might have heard it earlier but didn’t know what it was. It would have taken a while to build up the courage. I first heard it when I was the same age,” he says. “This voice that was different from me, these thoughts that weren’t mine. They told me to do things that I didn’t want to do. I refused—in the beginning. Then I gave in, hoping it would shut the voice up. Soon the voice was the same as my own, and in the end I couldn’t even tell the difference.”

“You’re sick,” I say.

“I know. That’s what I said twenty years ago. Hell, I’m not so unreasonable that I know hearing a voice isn’t right. But right or wrong, I heard it. I don’t blame you for never coming to ask me about it, but . . .”

“I should never have come here.”

“When you killed that dog, it was because you were hearing a voice of your own.”

“I didn’t kill any dog.”

“What happened after that?” he asks. “Did you keep hearing the voice, or did it disappear? Have you been giving in to it all these years? Are there graves out there waiting to be found?”

“I’m nothing like you.” I begin to stand. He reaches across and grabs me, and before the guard can say anything he lets go. I sit back down.

“The darkness. That’s what I called it,” he says. “I know you’re listening to it, but you also have to control it. If you can’t, it will take you to places before you’re ready. It doesn’t care if you get caught—it just wants to see blood. You have to rein that voice in, need to come to an understanding with it and, if you’re hearing it now, and I’m sure you are, then you have to find a way to stop it from overtaking you.”

“I have no darkness.”

“It never goes away,” he says. “At night I can hear it whispering, but I have no outlet for it here. It’s faded some over the years, sure, but it’s still there, no denying that.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“To protect you,” he says, “from the same thing that happened to me. Please, son, let me help you.”

“I call it the monster,” I say, the words out of my mouth before I can stop them, and Dad slowly nods, and for an awful moment I think my dad is going to smile, and say something sickening, perhaps a that’s my boy, but he doesn’t. The warmth goes out of his eyes and he stops nodding.

“That’s a shame, son. It really is.”

“I never knew what else to call it. I figured you had a monster, and when you went to jail, it came to live with me. Came to live inside me.”

“Not my monster,” he says. “You proved that by killing the dog before I went to jail. You have your own darkness. I wish I could help you more, and I would, if I was out there with you. Son, word around here is that the cops have no idea who killed Jodie.”

I stare at him blankly.

“She didn’t like me much, but I could see she was a good person. She was a good wife, I bet, and certainly a great mother, and I owe her for what she did for you. What happened to her—that’s a shitty thing. A real shitty thing. Yet if you ask me, the fact the cops haven’t caught anybody, that’s a good thing.”

“What?”

“It’s a good thing, son. Think about it.”

“What are you on about? How the hell can you say that? What are you? What in the hell are you?”

My dad leans forward in his chair then slowly pushes himself up. Both guards come over. “It was good talking to you, son.” He starts to walk away.

“Fuck you!”

“No yelling,” the guard says, and puts a hand on my shoulder and I shrug it off. The Christchurch Carver looks over and watches.

Dad turns back. “Go home and think about what happened to your wife,” he says. “And take some advice from your old man . . .”

“Save it,” I say.

“It’s okay to listen to the voice,” he says, then he disappears through the doorway.

chapter fifteen

Suction Cup Guy had a real name and Suction Cup Guy was murdered. His name was Arnold Langham and his friends called him Arnie. He was a husband and a dad and his forty-two years on this earth all ended when he was tossed from the apartment building. The suction cups were attached to him, he was stripped and dressed in a trench coat, one of his fingernails found buried in the roof as he tried to fight for survival, the reason for the staging still unknown. Langham no longer lived with his wife—hadn’t lived with her since he’d beaten her up badly enough to spend three years in jail for it. The wife wasn’t a suspect because she’d taken their son and moved north and west enough to hit the next country in line with New Zealand. Other than beating up his wife, Langham doesn’t have any other criminal record—no assaults, no rapes, no breaking and entering. A couple of speeding tickets but that’s all. He worked full time on an assembly line making control boards for motorized wheelchairs. It was an active case, but the urgency had dissipated—it’s the way it was when one case you were working dealt with a wife-beater, and there was another case dealing with a group of bank robbers who killed two people while stealing what turned out to be 2.8 million in cash. It was about priorities—and at the moment the bank robbery was everybody’s priority. Suction Cup Guy would have to wait. It was a shame that for the hundreds of man-hours invested so far, all they had were transcripts of pointless interviews and a burned-out van. They didn’t even have the dye-pack-damaged money. He’d have thought any ruined money would have been dumped with the van and set on fire, but forensics—at least so far—had found no traces of it. No currency—no red ink. All he has are a lot of unanswered questions, two bodies in the ground who deserve to be put to rest, and a wife who was cold to him most of the weekend. The job was interfering with his family life. The last weekend before Christmas and he should have been spending it with his wife and daughter and their new baby boy, and at the rate the investigation is going his son will be in school and his wife will have left him before it’s over. He’s been lucky so far in that he hasn’t missed any Christmases, but he’s certainly missed plenty of other occasions; each one his wife remembers and, in times of arguments, reminds him of. Sometimes she reminds him he’s the reason they’re having children so late, and that he’s the reason they’re going to be in their sixties before the kids are old enough to move out of home.