We park around the back of the building next to a patrol car, audience to a family of ducklings on a nearby grass shoulder who seem to have lost their mother. We take a rear entrance and enter a cold corridor with linoleum flooring and plaster walls, a few Christmas decorations hurriedly stuck up on the walls with bits of tape. None of us say anything. We walk in single file, one cop ahead of me, one behind.

A nurse with bright blue eyes greets us and frowns at me before talking to Schroder. She gives him directions to the ward and I tune out the conversation. I can’t stop looking at the patients scattered about the ground floor, people hooked up to IV drips on bags going for walks, some of them heading outside to puff on a cigarette, and I can’t see a single person in this hospital that doesn’t seem bored, this day stretching out into many others. If the hospital has air-conditioning, it must be buried somewhere, maybe in the nurses’ lounge, because it’s about forty degrees in here.

We go up a few flights, taking the elevator. The doors open into a corridor branching into different wards. Two police officers are standing outside one of the rooms. The larger of the two comes over and he must know Schroder because he nods at him and doesn’t ask who any of us are. Landry holds back and makes a phone call. I’m left to stare at my feet.

“In the corner with the curtain drawn around him,” the officer says.

There are six beds in the room, all spaced an equal distance apart, three on each side of the room. Christchurch Hospital isn’t exactly the hub for medical advancement, but it makes do with what it has, even if most of what it has looks like it got ordered from a 1980s “Good Guide to Living” brochure. All the beds are full, but only one of them has a curtain pulled around it. There’s a gap big enough between the curtain and floor to see the feet of a doctor, and as we approach, he pulls the curtain away—ta-da!—revealing my dad. For the briefest second I’m sure he’s not going to be there, but of course he is, held down in his bed by tubes and a set of handcuffs connecting his right arm to the right rail.

Dad’s eyes are closed, all warmth and color gone from his face. His features have sunken, as if the near-death experience triggered an internal collapse in which his body began falling in on itself. This man is a cold-blooded killer, but he’s also my dad, and seeing him this way—well, I don’t know what I feel. He’s in jail because I killed a dog twenty years ago.

“It’s not as bad as it seems at first,” the doctor says, after Schroder tells him who we are. “One wound with a sharp object into the chest from the side. Not real close to puncturing the left lung, but if the weapon had been longer, who knows? Sounds bad—and believe me, it is bad—but it could have been a whole lot worse. The operation went about as well as it could. He’s heavily sedated still, won’t be waking up till this evening.”

“He’ll be okay?” I ask. “He’ll make a full recovery?”

“Should do,” the doctor says, nodding toward my dad. “We’ll keep him for a couple of days, and we’ll check him every few days or so after that, but yes, your dad still has the rest of his life to look forward to. Of course we’ll know more this evening once he’s woken up. The only thing to worry about at this point is infection. We’ll keep you updated,” he says, then walks off to the next patient.

“Who did this?” I ask, turning to Schroder.

“Nobody knows. A fight broke out during lunch. Inmates swarmed each other, and when they were pulled apart the guards found him,” Schroder says. “He was stabbed with a toothbrush, easy to file down, effective to use,” he says, and he sounds like he’s rattling off a sales pitch, like he makes a dollar for every filed-down toothbrush jammed into a convict. “Question is, why would somebody want him dead?”

“He killed a lot of women,” I say.

“And people have had twenty years to try and kill him in jail. Why now? Why the day after you visit him for the second time?”

I shrug.

“See, the timing is pretty suggestive, Edward. Your dad knows as much as anybody that prisons are good places for bad people to meet. I think your dad figured he could do some detective work of his own. We checked criminal records and came up with names and we’re still working that angle, and the ball’s rolling now and we’ve got some real good leads, but your dad worked it quicker from the inside. Who was he working for? Does he want those names to give to you? Or to us?”

“I have no—”

“See, Edward, it gets me thinking. It makes me think he gave you a name. And our victim last night had a stab wound in his hand, a big dirty wound similar to the one that’s on yours.”

“The only person who knows what my father was doing is my father,” I say. “And he stopped being my father twenty years ago.”

“For you, maybe. Not for him.”

“Well, maybe you can ask him when he wakes up.”

“Don’t worry, we will. First we’ll go through his cell.”

“Well, until then, if you don’t mind, I’d like to spend a minute with him. Alone.”

The detectives step away. I draw the curtain behind me for some privacy and then face my dad. It’s the third time in three days. My wife murdered last week, my father almost killed this week—what will happen next week? People say that things happen in threes. The accountant in me has always known that’s bullshit—but what if it’s true?

I try to imagine how I’d be feeling if the knife had gone in differently, ten millimeters deeper or to the left, hitting whatever it is that it missed—whether I’d be happy or sad or indifferent. I reach for my father’s hand but don’t quite make it there. I don’t want to touch him. This man isn’t even my father. He used to be, once. Then he became something else. I may have called him “Dad” over the last few days, but he wasn’t really that, not anymore. I don’t really know what he is. All those years—add up the sum of a man, and his total, a serial killer. A demon. There isn’t a single one of us who doesn’t think he got what he deserved. Including me.

chapter twenty-nine

There are two things separating my dad from the morgue. The first is two hospital floors of concrete and steel. The second is ten millimeters of good luck. Schroder and Landry take me down into the basement of the hospital and I don’t question it. I go along for the ride—which is a straight drop in an elevator that opens up into a corridor about a quarter of the temperature of the ones upstairs. We walk in the same order as before, with me in the middle. The corridor reminds me of the prison, concrete block with no Christmas fanfare, a painted line on the floor to follow. There’s an office door and then there’s a large set of double doors. We go through the double doors and the air gets even colder.

I’ve never been to the morgue before. Never seen for real what I’ve seen in dozens of variations of crime shows and movies over the years, the stark white tiles and dull-bladed instruments, saws with archaic designs even though they’re modern, sharp edges with only one purpose in mind. Then you have to factor in the morgue guys—people sympathetic, people who seem to take each death personally, people making jokes while munching through sandwiches and pointing out the “this and that” of anatomy.

A man in his early to mid fifties walks over, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He sighs deeply. “Been a long day,” he says, and I can’t help but glance at my watch and note that it’s not even two o’clock yet. “You here to see our newest entry?”

“That him over there?” Schroder asks, and he nods toward a body on a gurney, naked and grey and looking nothing like I remember him looking last night.

“That’s him. Haven’t got to him yet. I’m running behind, what with all the Christmas suicides beginning earlier every year. I swear as soon as malls put up their trees and tinsel, people start jumping from bridges.”