Foreshadowing

FORESHADOWING

“This is all my fault!”

Detective Carlos Ito looked at his partner Detective Terry Waits, and shrugged in confusion.

They had been catching up on paperwork in the bullpen, when the Desk Sergeant had called up, and said that there was a woman downstairs at the desk who needed to see a detective, ASAP. She wouldn’t tell the Sergeant why she needed to see a detective, just that it was a matter of life and death. Emphasis on the death.

They were now sitting in one of the drab, utilitarian interview rooms at Central Police Station.  Waits nodded at Ito to take point on the interview. 

The woman, who had identified herself as Shannon Berks, sat across from Ito and Waits. She was in her mid-forties and fairly normal looking except for the fact that she was sobbing almost uncontrollably.

“This is all my fault!” she wailed again.  

“Ms. Berks, can you tell me what is all your fault?” Ito prompted.

She looked between Ito and Waits, fear and desperation written on her face.  

“The deaths! They are all my fault! It needs to stop!”

“What deaths, Ms. Berks?” Ito asked, suddenly more alert.  

Waits took out her notebook and pen, even though the interview was being recorded. She used her notes to record follow-up questions and to note any discrepancies in the recollections of the interviewees that she would want to circle back to clarify. It was also a little disconcerting to those being interviewed when she would write something in her little book. On more than one occasion the person sitting across from her tried to read what she had written down. Right now she wrote the word “deaths” in her book, triple underlining the S at the end of the word.

Shannon Berks continued sobbing, ignoring Ito’s question. He waited a beat.

“How many deaths are we talking about here, Ms. Berks?” Ito repeated.

Nothing. Just the sounds of her continued sobs.

“Would you like some water, Ms. Berks?” asked Waits.

Shannon Berks nodded.

Waits exited the room, and promptly returned with a bottle of water and a box of Kleenex. She placed both in front of Shannon Berks, who grabbed multiple tissues, wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and tried to compose herself. She took a huge shuddering breath, swallowed hard, looked at Ito and Waits. The worst of the storm seemed to have passed. Or so they both silently hoped.

“So many lives, so many years.” Her eyes welled up, and both Ito and Waits were sure she was going to start to cry again. Instead she took another tissue, blew her nose, and looked off into the ether. Absently, she took a drink of water.

The three of them sat in silence. Shannon Berks sighed, and brought herself back to the present. She took another drink of water before she spoke.

“This has been going on for so many years. Sometimes I can go for a couple of months without anyone dying. Sometimes it happens every week. I’ve even caused the deaths of more than one person in a single week.”

Deaths not murder wrote Waits in her notebook.

The detectives waited for her to continue.

Shannon Berks looked at them both from across the table. Her hands were neatly folded on the table top. She seemed composed, ready to continue.

“I killed Queen Elizabeth.” Her chin started to quaver. She looked down at her hands.

Ito sat back. Waits put down her pen.

“You killed Queen Elizabeth?” asked Ito.

“Yes,” said Shannon Berks, shaking her head at the memory.

Ito took a deep breath. “How did you do that, Ms. Berks?”

Shannon Berks looked up at the detectives.

“I thought about her, and she died.”

Ito and Waits looked at each other.

“You thought about her, and she died?” Ito reiterated.

Uh-oh wrote Waits in her notebook, then MHS needed — shorthand for mental health specialist needed.

Ito maintained his professional demeanour, and asked Shannon Berks the next logical questions.

“How does that work, Ms. Berks? Were you in Scotland at the time of her death?”

Shannon Berks took a steadying breath, and shook her head no.

“Can you explain this to us, then?” asked Ito.

“What happens is I will think of a random person, and then they die. These are people I don’t think about on a regular basis. I don’t even know most of these people. They are just random people out there in the world. Their names just bounce into my brain. Usually I have no idea who they are. But then within a couple of days, they’ll be dead. Occasionally it will be someone I know of, or someone a friend or an acquaintance will know. I’ll be talking to a friend, and they’ll mention that someone in their family has died, and it’s the person I thought about." She paused "Those are the worst,” she whispered.

She took a breath, and looked at Ito and Waits. They both maintained neutral gazes, meant to neither encourage nor discourage the speaker.

“Sometimes,” she continued, “I’ll think of a name, and then I’ll read about their death in the obituaries of the newspaper.”

She looked back down at her hands. 

Ito broke the silence.  

“Ms. Berks, do you really think that you are responsible for these deaths?”

She raised her head, and looked right at him.

“It’s either that or I’m clairvoyant. Either way, I think about someone and they die.”

Ito looked at Waits.

“Excuse us for a moment, Ms. Berks,” said Ito.

Ito and Waits walked into the hall, and closed the door behind them.  

“What do you think?” asked Ito.

Waits took a moment to consider. “Well, she really seems to believe what she’s saying. And she seems lucid, so it doesn’t seem to have been a psychotic break.”

“Just a whole lot of weird,” said Ito.

“It does seem that way,” said Waits. “Let’s get some info on her.”

They walked towards their desks, and set to work. Within ten minutes they had a pretty good idea of who Shannon Berks was. Age forty-seven. Married, two kids, neither living at home. An accountant with one of the big firms, on the partner track. Same job for twenty years. No wants or warrants, no criminal record, not even a traffic violation.

Waits looked at the info. There was nothing to to support Shannon Berks’s odd behaviour.

“I’m going to call the husband,” said Ito, picking up the phone on his desk, and dialing Andre Berks number.

He explained the situation to Shannon Berk’s husband, who agreed to come down to Central Station immediately.

Ito and Waits returned to the interview room.

“Ms. Berks,” said Ito, “We’ve contacted your husband, and he’s on the way down to the station.”

Shannon Berks just nodded her head.

“Have you told your husband about …“ Ito paused, looking for the proper words.

Shannon Berks finished his sentence “About the fact that I believe that I kill people by thinking about them? Yes, he knows.”

“How does he feel about it?” asked Ito.

Shannon Berks looked up to the ceiling, contemplating her words.

“At first he was extremely skeptical. Now he’s less skeptical, once he looked at my records.”

“Your records?” asked Ito.

“Yes,” she said, reaching into her bag and removing a stack of small notebooks, banded together with elastics. They were well-worn, some with faded covers and dog-eared pages.

“I have been keeping records since I was around twenty-two. That was when I started to notice the pattern.”

She took out the top notebook from the stack, and opened it to a random page, and slid it across the table. Both detectives leaned in to examine it.

“I write down the person’s name and the date that I think about them. Then I write down the date that they die, and the cause. It’s usually happens between twenty-four and seventy-two hours after I think of the name.”

It was a small book, cheaply made, about three inches by six inches. Ito opened it and looked at the lists inside. It was filled with dates and names, each line representing the death of a person.

But, not all lines had a final date. Ito returned his attention to Shannon Berks.

“Why don’t all the names have a final date beside them,” he asked.

She looked at him, then to the book, pointing at one of the blank entries.

“Because I can’t confirm that the person died.”

She leaned over and pointed to a name without a death date.

“If I can’t confirm the death, I leave it blank.”

She looked up at him.

“But there are so many — so very, very many — that do have a death date."

Ito could see the pain on her face. Her eyes welled up, and Ito was sure she was going to start crying again.  

“Ms. Berks,” he said, “Some of these people were pretty old.” He pointed to Queen Elizabeth’s name. “She was ninety-six. It’s not really surprising that she died. She wasn’t murdered. She just died of old age.”

“I know,” she said, “But I knew that she was going to die two days before she did. It’s like I thought about her, and she died.”

She blinked rapidly, and tears streamed down her face.

“So,” said Ito, “You believe that by thinking of these people, you kill them?”

“Yes.”

Ito went back to looking at the book. On quick examination, he would say that she predicted the deaths of about seventy-five percent of the names listed.

“I don’t think that you’re killing these people, Ms. Berks. No one’s powerful enough to be able to think of a person and make them die. I think maybe you read about someone, or heard their names, and they just happen to die.”

Shannon Berks was getting agitated.

“Explain to me, then, why I knew someone named—“ she grabbed the book Ito was looking at, and randomly turned to a page in the middle of the book, “Sanjet Puntar who died in India, sixty-one hours after I thought of him, and wrote his name in the book? I did not know this person. And, he died in India. He was twenty-seven years old, and fell into a canal and died. How would I know that this person, whom I had never met, would die?”

Ito looked from the book to Shannon Berks's face.

“How did you find out about his death?” asked Ito.

“The internet, of course,” she said, and sighed. “It’s incredibly easy to backtrack someone’s death anywhere on the planet.”

“Maybe that’s what happened — you heard these people after they died, and you’re confused?”

Shannon Berks handed the books to Ito.

“These are my records. I haven’t been ‘confused’ for twenty-five years!” She tapped the open book with her finger. “These are people, real people, real people who died when I thought about them. They aren’t famous, or well-known. Most are probably just known to their families.”

“How do the people in your books die?” asked Ito.

Shannon Berks paused for a beat.  

“Many by natural causes. A few were murdered. A surprising number were suicides. Some by what is classified as ‘misadventure’ — like Sanjet Puntar who fell in a canal, or—“ her finger ran down the page, “Or Betty Wilkins from Australia, whose work lanyard got caught in a laminating machine, and chocked her to death.”

Ito and Waits looked down at the book.

“Or Benson Tries from Ireland who fell into a volcano in Costa Rico.” She paused and looked up at them.

“I could go on, but you get the picture.”

“What do you want us to to do Ms. Berks? We won’t arrest you. We’ve called your husband, and he's on the way. Would you like to speak with a mental health specialist?”

"I’m in counselling. Have been for years.”

She looked crestfallen.  

“So why did you come to us today?” asked Ito.

She turned to the last page in the book, turned it around to face Ito and Waits, and pointed to the last line.

“Because of this. I want you to stop it.”

She showed them the last name on her list.

*****

“So,” said Ito, “I guess it’s safe to say this wasn’t a suicide?”

“Nope,” said Waits, and looked up.

They were standing in the kitchen of a spacious suburban home. It was a lovely single storey home in a good neighbourhood.  Or it had been until the wheels of a jumbo jet had fallen off and crashed through the ceiling of the home they were standing in. Now there was a huge, gapping hole in the ceiling of the kitchen and family room.  

“A pair of forty inch tires makes a pretty big hole,” said Waits, examining the carnage.

“I hear the plane landed safely, though,” said Ito.

“Yeah, but the tires didn’t,” said Waits.

Pinned beneath the wheels was the body of the homeowner. All that they could see were the legs. Oddly, it reminded Ito of that scene in the Wizard of Oz when the house falls on the Wicked Witch of the East. He shook the image out of his head.

“I guess she was right,” said Ito.

“I guess she was.”

They both looked towards what was left of Shannon Berks.