Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP

Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP

Santa Barbara County Sheriff via the Associated Press

The day begins for Randy and Evi Quaid inside Hearing Room 1 at the Immigration and Refugee Board. The room is windowless. There is a small clock on one wall. It's a few minutes after ten. A Canadian flag hangs in the corner, a coat of arms mounted beside it. Acoustic-tile ceiling. Florescent lights.

Randy Quaid sits beside his lawyer, Catherine Sas, her leopard-skin coat draped over her chair. It's November 23, and it's cold today in Vancouver, white mountains rising in the near-distance. Quaid has left his puffy red parka in his car, parked outside. A Prius. Inside with it, there's a box of proof, carried everywhere they go, just in case. Texas, California, Washington, British Columbia. Flow charts. Circles, arrows, names underscored, crossed out photographs. Satellite images. A litany of slights and wrongs, and a bag containing $8 million in photocopied checks.

The Quaids claim they brought their box with them over the border in October, after they were charged in California with felony vandalism. (They had allegedly been squatting in their former home and tore down a children's play structure to fortify their makeshift compound.) Warrants were issued for their arrest, and they were picked up in an upscale Vancouver shopping area. The Quaids immediately sought refugee status in Canada. They claimed they were being hunted by a sinister band of celebrity killers: Star Whackers, they called them.

They were released after it was determined that Evi Quaid's father was born in Canada. She's been granted permission to stay. Randy is out of jail, too, while his application makes its way through the courts. There have been many hearings like today's, and there will be many more. It will be close to two years before it's decided whether Randy Quaid will become one of Canada's most unlikely refugees.

He is a big man. Sixty years old. He's wearing a gray suit over a rumpled white shirt. He has canoes for feet. He is clean-shaven but somehow looks as though he's not. He's taking notes he's left-handed on a pink legal pad. There are piles and piles of paper on the table in front of him, evidence for and against his case for asylum. He scribbles away. Another leaf of pink paper will soon join the piles. Sas, the lawyer, tells the adjudicator that she needs more time to go through all of it.

Ben Nelms/Reuters

Evi Quaid, forty-seven, sits behind her husband in the first row of seats. She's dressed entirely in black. Black riding pants and big black boots. A black top that reveals a sliver of her glacier-white stomach. A black hat, hiding the fact that she's recently shaved her black hair into a Mohawk. Black circles around her black eyes. "I didn't sleep a wink last night," she says later. She was studying Canadian immigration law and watching the crack under the door for feet.

They will be killed in one of three ways, she says. (She does most of the talking.) She has interrupted the killers practicing. "Staging scenarios," she calls them. Dry runs, rehearsals, blocking for a gruesome play.

Their most likely end, the Quaids believe, will involve knives. Randy will be drugged in his sleep "They know he has sleep apnea," she says and Evi will be stabbed to death. Then they will put the knife in his hand. He will wake up and be locked away forever. Or he will kill himself in his terror and grief. The Star Whackers have stolen some of his songs he writes sad, introspective songs on more crumpled sheets of paper and the killers will lay one out on the nightstand or the kitchen counter. "Randy's songs read like suicide notes," Evi says. "That's how the cops will read them."

Or they will be hanged together, Randy and Evi, strung up from the rafters in a garage. Another song will surface. It will be ruled a double suicide.

Everett Collection

Or they will be found in their car, parked overlooking the steel-gray sea, and they will be found sitting, frozen, hand-in-hand, their insides brimming with a lethal dose of Demerol, administered through Evi's stolen migraine medication. "A pharmacist told me they could put one hundred times the lethal dose in a single pill," she says.

The Star Whackers could, at least. They are good at what they do. Heath Ledger. Chris Penn. David Carradine. Ronni Chasen gunned down only last week, five bullets in her chest. Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson, they'll be next. Make them seem crazy, make them seem as though they were going to fall over the edge anyway, and then give them one last little push. A breath on the backs of their necks. A patch of light on the carpet. The crunch of snow under a stranger's feet. Lindsay Lohan found in her bed with an empty bottle of pills. Another unreliable witness, dead on a pile of pillows.

"Oh, no," Evi says. "I am an expert witness."

The case against Randy Quaid is stayed for another month.

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