The Devil You Know: A Novel by Elisabeth de Mariaffi Read Free Book Online

privileges.
    What about the Scarborough Rapist? I said. That’s not exactly missing girls. Still counts?
    Sidebar, Angie said. See what you can find. She turned away, then stopped and handed me what was left of the apple fritter.
    For God’s sake, she said. Save me from myself, would you?

    B asically what Angie wanted was a dead-girls feature. Which is awesome, for obvious reasons. There are two categories: solvedcases and cold cases. The cold cases are interesting but you have to watch how far down into the news file you read. As you go back in time, there’s less care for the reader’s soul. There’s a six-year-old who was killed in 1980, two years before Lianne. I know it happened but I’ve never read about her. It’s a case I’ve been encouraged to avoid. I generally catch myself just in time. I have a mental list of stories to steer clear of, as handed down to me by the therapist and my mother and David over time.
    A lot of what I did for the Free Press was background research. Statistics. The archives were my playroom. Whenever you see a feature article that has a split byline—by Walter Smith, with files from Joe Blow and Arlene Black? My job was the “with files from.” I liked to think of myself as a context provider. You end up looking at a lot of lists.
    Report Femicide, that’s a good one. Femicide started keeping track of women killed by their intimate partners—husbands, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends—after the shooting in Montreal, at the engineering school. I haven’t run a stats analysis on this, but I can tell you just by eyeballing it, having a boyfriend who hits you makes you way more likely to get killed. And if you’re going to get killed, chances are it’ll be via stabbing. Among violent ex-boyfriends, stabbing is numero uno.
    It’s more about damage than death. It’s hitting with a knife. It’s about wrecking the thing you can’t have. Death is a side effect of the wrecking.
    The ’80s had their fair share of dead girls, it turns out.

    S harin’ Morningstar Keenan in 1983. That one they found stuffed in the fridge, after a long morning on the last day of a house-to-house search. She was in the last room they saw before lunch break. One of the cops stopped to talk to a neighbor in the hall and his partner noticed that a corner of the carpet was jammed up against the fridge. He almost missed it.
    The room was empty, he said. The bed was made. I just went to open the fridge like you would. Casually.
    The door was jammed and he could only open it a few inches.
    Right away, he said. Right away I saw a garbage bag with a white shirt in it. I thought, Who keeps their laundry in the fridge? The little light didn’t go on inside, when I opened it. So I had to force it a little more, you know, and then I saw her hair.
    You can’t believe how shiny her hair was, he said.
    Sometimes I don’t stop myself in time.

    M ost of the time I was down in the basement, I was on my own. Sometimes you got another newbie reporter doing someone else’s research, or else one of the veteran columnists—newsbrats, guys who grew up writing stories. They don’t like anyone else touching their byline. Angie was only like that about her column. She’d come down here and stretch out on the cold linoleum when it was hot in the summer. The floors were speckled and smelled vaguely of bleach. In the winter there was that smell of burning dust as the heat burned through the ductwork. It wasn’t a social space. There was no library coziness. It was a warehouse for old stories.
    The door opened onto a set of work tables, set loosely in rows. Most of these held microfilm readers, but a few had computers sitting on them: boxy, plastic monitors on top and the motherboards hidden underneath, off to one side where you wouldn’t kick them by accident. The archive spanned back, far behind the desks. Rows and rows of those gray, metal shelves you expect to see at the hardware store or in the tool room at an auto body