The Devil's Cinema Read online

  The two of them had yet to discuss who would be the lead detective, or primary investigator, as everyone gathered in one central room. Clark recognized a southwest division detective as someone he was in police training with decades ago. There was another detective and a group of young constables and other officers he didn’t know.

  A staff sergeant chaired the briefing as they were brought up to speed on police file 08-137180. The missing man was Johnny Brian Altinger. He was thirty-eight and single, lived alone in a condo on the south side, and worked as an oilfield pipe inspector at Argus Machine, just outside city limits. He had gone on a date on the night of Friday, October 10, 2008, with a woman he had met on the online dating website plentyoffish.com. They must have hit it off like fireworks since Johnny had started writing emails and updates on his Facebook page about the amazing catch he had hooked. She was filthy rich and willing to share. In one email sent out to many of his friends, he bragged about finally finding romance and being out of the country for a couple of months. His friends passed that email on to police:

  Hey there,

  I’ve met an extraordinary woman named Jen who has offered to take me on a nice long tropical vacation. We’ll be staying in her winter home in Costa Rica, phone number to follow soon. I won’t be back in town until December 10th but I will be checking my email periodically.

  See you around the holidays,

  Johnny

  The email had been sent on Monday morning – October 13, 2008 – three days after Johnny’s date. Most of Johnny’s friends saw it as a bit impulsive but didn’t think too much about it. But his closest friend, Dale Smith, was worried. It didn’t seem like something Johnny would do, no matter how beautiful or wealthy this girl could be. Dale couldn’t get his friend on the phone, and when he went to his condo, he noticed that Johnny’s car, a sporty cherry-red Mazda 3 hatchback that was only three years old, was missing from his parking spot. Johnny hadn’t covered his two motorcycles with a tarp either, which he always did when he left for a vacation. Even if he had left in a rush, it still would have been out of character. Dale spent days calling the police before officers finally took the disappearance seriously, realizing a few things weren’t adding up. On the late evening of Friday, October 17, a week after Johnny’s date, police finally became involved and agreed to take on the missing persons report. Clark and Anstey had been called in two days later as the search so far had failed to locate him.

  Clark was listening in to this briefing, seeing that things were a little odd, but he wasn’t writing down a lot of notes in his binder. His pen dangled above his page and skipped over a lot of the detail. He wasn’t really feeling this one just yet. He looked over and saw Anstey was scribbling quite a bit, taking extensive notes.

  They were told that patrol officers had already visited Johnny’s condo and taken his desktop computer. A quick peek around on the hard drive revealed a phone list with a whole pile of names.

  Clark and Anstey wanted to cover off each angle. After all, if the missing man really was dead, it would end up on their desk anyway. It was better if such legwork was done at this stage than days later, when the homicide team would be forced to play catch-up on simple tasks.

  “We need to call everyone on this phone list,” Clark announced to the room of officers. “What if he’s just at someone’s house?” He turned to Anstey. “If he is, Mark and I can go home. That will be end of it.”

  Officers started divvying up the phone list in the room as the formal briefing ended.

  Clark elbowed Anstey. “Listen, do you want me to take this? We need to figure this out right now.” Someone had to be the primary. “If I’m taking it, I gotta be writing a lot more than I’m writing now. I’m just listening.”

  In a normal police investigation, becoming the primary investigator on a case is a mountain of paperwork. Everything has to be written down. Every detail. Every decision. If the investigation proceeds to a court case, detectives have to take the witness stand and explain the entire direction of their case under harsh cross-examination. It results in binders of information, hundreds of pages for even a simple and small file. The primary is the boss man, directing the speed and flow of information, making the major decisions, delegating tasks to other officers. It is endless work at the best of times.

  But Anstey reassured him. “No, no, I’ll take it.” Anstey didn’t mind the job at all. He found it was “tailor made” for his skills and interest in investigative work. He had been a primary with Clark, helping him a few times before, and knew they worked together well. But he didn’t realize at the time that by volunteering for such a task, he had just agreed to be responsible for the biggest homicide file he had ever seen. His investigation would soon be winding through a strange avenue of characters and motives he never imagined possible. And this police chase would see him unexpectedly choose to retire from the force early, making it his last.

  THE STATION WAS ELECTRIC. Phones rang and people shouted. Clark and Anstey found spare desks and were working the phones near southwest detectives. The buzz of a busy office bounced off the walls. Officers were constantly moving in and out of the station, starting up conversations, blurting out information as detectives asked questions. The investigation was in full swing.

  Clark scanned the names on his copy of Johnny’s phone list. The detective had grown up in the blue-collar community of Beverly, an area northeast of downtown Edmonton that became part of the big city as urban sprawl surrounded it. He became a cop and had worked patrol for years, then spent a great deal of his career as a detective in liaison with the city’s maximum security prison, charging inmates for drugs and assaults, before he was moved up to the homicide unit in police headquarters. To his surprise, as he looked over Johnny’s phone list, he recognized the name of a guard at the Edmonton Max, the federal prison, his old turf. Clark dialled the number.

  The guard picked up and said he had met Johnny through a friend, another guard at the Max, because Johnny fixed computers in his spare time. But he hadn’t seen him in months. “He’s a super nice guy,” the guard told Clark over the phone. “He’s a bit of an odd fella, a little bit different, but he has a personality to please people.” Clark asked if he thought someone could have taken advantage of Johnny. The guard thought he’d be an easy mark. “He’s not a ladies’ man. He’s more of a nerd and a loner.” Johnny had come into a lot of money recently, he said. He had bought a home before the last oil boom and sold it during the peak, making a tidy profit off exploding house prices that allowed him to purchase a new condo.

  Clark then called the other guard that his former colleague had mentioned, but the man only rehashed a lot of the detail Clark already knew. He also told Clark that Johnny was no stranger to online dating. He had been meeting girls on dating websites for years. As far as family members who might know where he is, the guard said Johnny’s mom was a real estate agent on the West Coast, where she lived with her partner. Johnny’s dad had died years ago, and he had a brother with a couple of kids. Clark said thanks and hung up the phone.

  Anstey had finished his call too. They started running ideas off of each other. Clark loved it because with every idea he came up with, Anstey had to write it down. He was keeping him busy.

  One of the constables broke up their conversation and pulled Anstey aside. Christopher Maxwell had been working on the file since the very beginning. “There’s something really wrong here,” he told Anstey. “I don’t know. What are your thoughts on this?”

  Anstey was honest. “Well, my thoughts are he’s probably with some girlfriend in Two Hills.” He shrugged, just picking a name of a random town a few hours out of the city. “I mean, I don’t believe the Costa Rica thing for a second, but it’s gotta be something like that.” He figured homicide would be off the case in a few hours.

  But Maxwell wasn’t convinced. “No, there’s something really wrong here,” he said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  Anstey thanked him for his insight as Cl
ark started shouting out questions to the officers gathered nearby. “Hey, have you guys checked the airport parkades?”

  They told him yes, a few times actually. But Anstey wanted the search expanded. Every nearby hotel, all the roads near Johnny’s place. He wanted officers to start searching parking lots.

  “What about the airlines?”

  The officers said some had been called but not all. The computer system used at the airport was archaic. A detective couldn’t just call up and ask if Johnny had boarded any flights this month. They had to check with every airline, one by one, for each day separately. It would take hours. And since it was a Sunday afternoon, the ticket booths were unstaffed. It would have to be a task put off until Monday, when they could also check with customs and officials in Costa Rica to see whether Johnny had left the country at any time since his last known sighting on Friday, October 10.

  Clark got a call from Johnny’s friend Dale and peeled off a few more details from him, including email addresses for Johnny’s mom and brother. He wrote them an email, saying the police had concerns about Johnny and needed his family to call them. He tried to be careful with his words. No need to alarm them. But Johnny’s mom was in Mexico and the news that her son was missing would jolt her away from the soft, sandy beaches of her early winter vacation.

  It was time to broaden the search and call in more help. Clark phoned the forensics office to assemble a team to visit Johnny’s condo. Maybe they could rule out anything suspicious.

  Six o’clock approached and the phone list had been exhausted with no sign of Johnny. Clark was thinking about what else they could be doing. “Okay, where exactly did this guy go missing?” He turned to whoever in the room was listening. “Where was this woman’s house?”

  A constable walked over and told him that was the strange part about this whole case. Johnny had emailed the directions his date had given him to one of his friends right before he left his condo. Patrol had followed the directions, which didn’t lead to a house at all. Instead, they led down an alley to a detached garage.

  Clark looked at the constable like he was crazy. “Well, have we looked inside the garage yet?”

  “Only briefly, not a good hard look,” the officer said.

  The garage was rented separately from the house. The tenant who was renting the garage was a man named Mark Andrew Twitchell. He had come down to the garage one night and shown a few officers what was inside. It was being used as a movie set. The guy was a local filmmaker.

  “Who else has keys?”

  “Two of his friends who are in his production crew.”

  Their names were Mike Young and Jay Howatson.

  Anstey assigned a southwest detective to start typing up a search warrant to access the garage. It would take a few hours to write and then it had to be walked downtown to be signed by a judge. Patrol officers were then asked to go door to door and inquire whether neighbours had seen Johnny’s red car or anything else that might have been suspicious.

  Clark thought their next steps seemed simple enough: three men had access to the garage where Johnny was last known to be headed, so one of them might know something. They all had to be interviewed.

  He didn’t realize, however, that southwest detectives were one step ahead of him, having been working on the file since Friday. Mark Twitchell had already come down to the station the previous night and been interviewed by a detective on night shift. He had made a video recording of the interview.

  Everyone shuffled into a cramped room to watch the video. The camera had been mounted near the ceiling of the interview room. In the footage, a tall detective with a baritone voice sat at a table. Across from him sat Mark Twitchell, relaxed and wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. He was in his late twenties, an energetic guy, clean-shaven, with a baby face, short black hair parted to the side like a schoolboy. He was really chatty. Every question the detective asked was answered. The cop had covered off what they knew so far, and Twitchell looked as stumped as the police. He didn’t know anyone named Jen and certainly never met a man named Johnny Altinger. He was a filmmaker who had been renting the garage for studio space. He was behind a Star Wars fan film, but the detective in the video hadn’t heard of it. He told the cop that the last project filmed in the garage was a psychological thriller, for which his crew had shot a few horror scenes involving a samurai sword and fake blood. The film had been completed a few weeks ago and was now in post-production.

  Clark watched the video closely and jotted down his observations. Very open and forthcoming in the interview. He kept scribbling down his thoughts on this Twitchell character, which were all positive. He summed up the filmmaker in one clear sentence: Does not come across as deceptive. Later, it occurred to Clark that if the guy was so cooperative, maybe he’d be willing to let them see inside his garage one more time.

  A STEAL OF A DEAL

  JOHNNY ALTINGER’S PLACE was on the outskirts of the city, just below the southern leg of the ring road. It was here where three officers from the forensic identification team, or Ident, gathered on the evening of Sunday, October 19, to begin a search for clues to Johnny’s whereabouts.

  Sergeant Randy Topp, Constable Nancy Allen, and Constable Gary Short had been on the third watch of the forensic unit’s police roster when Detective Clark had given them a call. Carrying a video camera, still camera, and a bunch of other gear, the team arrived at 11445 Ellerslie Road and opened the door to suite 103. The constable who had approached Detective Anstey with his concerns came down with a key provided by Johnny’s friends.

  It was their job to record and document each location just as it had been left and to gather any evidence connected to a crime. Their work was often the backbone of an investigation, with forensic team photos, video, and exhibits used as evidence in a court of law.

  Topp entered first and filmed each room of the condo. Short followed and snapped photos.

  The condo was small. A white motorcycle helmet sat on the kitchen counter, next to an empty bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and a couple of dirty plates. Beside the kitchen island were two director’s chairs made of red fabric and varnished wood.

  It was a typical single man’s lair. The living room had a long white leather couch and a huge flat-screen television. The walls were bare. In the bedroom, Johnny’s suit jacket lay crumpled on the bed, as if thrown off his body at the last moment, discarded as a step too far to impress his awaiting date.

  There wasn’t much for Allen to do. She was an exhibit handler, but there was nothing that looked like evidence of a crime to collect. She grabbed three pairs of underwear, a baseball cap from the bedroom closet, an electric razor, a deodorant stick, and a bathrobe. She’d send the articles off to the crime lab so they’d have a DNA profile for Johnny on file, if the case ever turned into anything more serious.

  But on first blush, there was nothing in the condo to suggest a crime had been committed. There were no signs of forced entry and no bloodstains. The only odd thing was Johnny’s computer desk. An officer had already removed the computer a few days earlier to get Johnny’s phone list. But an empty spot on the desk remained where a printer would normally be located. It was missing.

  BILL CLARK TOOK HIS foot off the gas as his car descended into the parkade beneath downtown police headquarters. After spending most of his Sunday on the city’s south side, he was finally heading back to the comfort of his own office. The building lay on the forgotten east side of downtown, next to a muddy, gravel parking lot that filled and emptied every weekday with commuters who lived nearly an hour away in the suburbs and refused to take a bus. The lot was the neutral zone between luxury bankers and lawyers and the gritty peep shows and prostitutes who still mingled three blocks away, near the scummiest bars in the city. The police building itself was drab: giant slabs of unpainted concrete, sparse windows, maroon tile floors, fake plants. Outside, three navy-blue flagpoles flew the colours of the Edmonton Police Service and Canada’s Maple Leaf. Across the street was the York Hotel
, where one man was famously stabbed in a bar fight but waved off a paramedic so he could sit down and finish his beer. It was that kind of neighbourhood.

  Clark rode up the elevator to the third floor, shuffling over to his crowded desk in the corner of the homicide unit. It was still early Sunday evening and he thought there was plenty of time left in the day when he learned the search warrant request had been denied. The police couldn’t provide enough evidence that a crime had been committed. Clark tried to brush it off. A patrol car had been sent to secure the garage so no potential evidence could be removed while they dug up more information for a warrant. But Clark wanted to speed up the process. He fell back on the plan to do a consensual search. He had already left messages for Twitchell’s two film production assistants to no avail. It was finally time to call the filmmaker himself.

  A deep voice answered the phone as Clark nudged his belly into his desk, phone clasped in hand. The man was polite as Clark pitched a request to search the rental property. “Will you be willing to give us access to the garage?” Clark asked with a big smile, as if the man could see it through the phone. “We just want to take a look around, just cover it off.”

  “Absolutely,” said the filmmaker. “No problem.”

  “Great. Can you meet us there? Or what works for you? We don’t want to inconvenience you. Do you want to meet us at the garage?”

  “Yeah, I’ll meet you there.”

  “How long?”

  “Give me about forty-five minutes.”

  “Oh. Where are you?”

  “I’m in St. Albert.”

  Clark realized it was a big ask. The man was in a bedroom community near the far northwestern outskirts of the city. “Why don’t you just give us the keys? I can send someone out to meet you.”

  “Tell you what, I’m actually going to my parents’ place anyway so we could meet around there?”

  “All we need is your consent, there’d be a form for you to sign. We just want to have our guys go in and have a quick look.”