Five Minutes Alone (33 page)

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

We have a list of names. People who knew Hailey McDonald. People she was friends with who could know if she was having an affair. There is momentum building. A call is patched into the task-force room and I take it. The caller identifies himself as Jerry Williams. It’s another Williams this week, and in a thousand years’ time will the rest of us have been bred into extinction? Jerry is from the DNA lab where the clothes were delivered by an officer earlier.

“You’ve run the clothes already?” I ask.

“Not yet, but it should be tomorrow.”

“Should?”

“I know,” Jerry says, “everything is a priority, and that’s the problem. But I’m actually calling to help you out. I may have something for you. We found some hairs in the clothing. We’ve got three types.”

“Three?”

“That’s what I said. What I need from you are some exemplars of the victim and the suspect so I can do some comparisons and then I can tell you which of the three is the anomaly.”

“Okay, we have samples from the victim, but not from the suspect.”

“The suspect have short hair?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“He have short hair seven years ago when this happened?”

“Yes. Short and black with some gray in the sides.”

“We got short and black in here,” he says. “But just the one. It’s buried in the collar around the back. Anywhere else on the shirt and I’d say it was transfer, maybe even from one of the officers at the scene, maybe even from you if you have black hair and were
there. But buried into the collar like that, well, that’s where you find them when you wear a shirt. Only I’d expect to find more. Because we did find more. Of the other two. So maybe this black one got stuck in there and didn’t come out in the wash. The other two are both long and both blond.”

“From two different women?”

“From two different people. Hair comes in all kinds of thicknesses and I can’t tell you if these are from a male or a female, not yet, but a couple of them have the roots and we’ll be able to run DNA and then I’ll be able to tell you for sure. Send me the victim’s hair and I’ll run it against what we have. And this short hair, you have more we can test against?”

“That won’t be a problem, Jim,” I say, and think about Ron McDonald somewhere in the morgue. “These two other strands, can you photograph them and email them to us right now?”

“It’s Jerry,” he says, “not Jim, and yes, I can do that. But it’s more than two strands. We’ve got eight in total, five from what I’m guessing are the victim’s since they’re on the front and some caught up in the blood, and three in the collar around the back with the other hair we found. Give me your email and I’ll get something to you within the next few minutes.”

I give him my work email and then we hang up, and I explain everything to Kent, and then I log in to one of the computers and a minute later an email appears in my inbox. I open it up. There are four photographs, and in two of them a plastic ruler measures the lengths of the hairs.

One is twenty-four inches long. The other is fifteen.

The other two photographs are zoomed in much closer, the hair photographed through a microscope. The longer hair has been dyed blond, Jerry has written. The shorter one is natural, more of a brown than a blond.

“Do you think another woman wore these clothes?” I ask Kent.

“Or a man with long hair.”

“What color hair did Naomi have back then?”

“Black, the same as now. These aren’t hers, but we’ll get a sample
from her too to confirm. There’s another possibility. Ron could have been cheating on both his wife and his girlfriend, and that’s who the hair belongs to. We need to widen our scope,” I tell her. “We should start with Chris Watkins. He said he knew Ron was having an affair. If Ron was having a second affair, he might know about that too.”

“We should head back to the workplace,” she says. “I think it’ll be good for both cases. If he was still sleeping around we might find evidence of it, and we might find something that was overlooked seven years ago.”

We update the superintendent and I organize for an officer to take hair from McDonald’s body to the lab, and another officer to go and get a sample from Naomi McDonald, and then we’re heading downstairs and driving to Ron McDonald’s workshop. There are some media vans, but the reporters are all chatting among themselves, no cameras pointing anywhere, everybody a little bored as if knowing the next break in this story isn’t going to happen here, but is happening somewhere unknown to somebody unknown. At least for now. Ron’s car is still parked outside.

There is music coming from nearby buildings, the sounds of machinery, people at work, things getting made and things getting repaired. The sounds of life carrying on. We park on the street. There are officers walking the area talking to people who work nearby, showing pictures of the bald man and asking what these people saw. The entire scene looks different from last night, the morning sun highlighting different angles and glaring off different surfaces, just a normal Tuesday morning with the addition of black and yellow crime-scene tape.

We head into the office where one detective is going through the computer and another is flicking through receipts and files and another is reading everything else he can get his hands on.

“The car McDonald was working on last night is a two-door Toyota,” Detective Watts says, and Watts is the other guy beside Travers who was calling things out this morning during the briefing. Watts has been on the force far longer than any of us, and
is only a year or two away from retiring. What hair he has left has been gray since I met him twenty years ago. “It’s parked up in there,” he says, nodding towards the workroom.

“I remember seeing it,” I tell him, because it’s the same car Schroder’s cell phone was placed against.

“It belongs to a guy by the name of Stephen Becker, and at the moment Becker is using a loaner car.”

“You called him?”

“Actually he called us. He heard about it on the news and is worried the repair on his car is going to be delayed. He asked if it could be returned to him today. The guy said he would get a lawyer involved if we couldn’t comply. I told him he could call all the lawyers he wants to, but he’s not getting that car back until we’re done with the scene.”

“Have forensics found any sign of forced entry?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Either the door was left unlocked, or our victim let his killer inside either as a customer or because he knew him.”

I head into the workshop with Kent where there is a pool of dried blood that isn’t as dark as some of the oil stains in various locations across the floor, but will start to get there unless it’s cleaned up. The Toyota is exactly where it was last night, and for a brief moment I can see the ghost of the cell phone down there, haunting and mocking me.

We look around, Kent looking for what happened last night, me hoping she won’t find it. Whatever happened seven years ago there won’t be any evidence of it here. Staring at tools and a bloodstained floor isn’t going to solve this—we need to talk to the people who worked here. The people who knew Hailey and Ron McDonald the best.

We walk back through the office. The detectives are still doing what they were doing. The big fishing and paintballing and go-carting photographs look over the scene, happier men in happier times, and I take a moment to look at these people, at Ron McDonald, and I think about how his actions brought death into his life.

I look at the paintballing photograph. Six men are in it, perhaps some of them still work here, perhaps some of them don’t. Arms around each other and paintball rifles pointing into the air, Ron in the middle. On the right-hand side of Ron with half his face towards the camera is Chris Watkins. Chris with his army buzz-cut hair is laughing and holding his rifle high, a man who looks victorious. I take the photograph down from the wall. I turn it over and there’s a date on the back. This picture was taken eight years ago. A year before Hailey was murdered.

I close my eyes and pinch the top of my nose with my thumb and middle finger, and tap my index finger against my forehead, over and over and over.

“Tate?”

I think it through. The long hairs. Access to the car. To clothes. Hailey McDonald having an affair.

“Tate, what is it?” Kent asks.

“Take a look,” I say, and I hand her the photograph.

“Take a look at what, exactly?”

She doesn’t see it. And then she does. She cocks her head slightly as if letting the thoughts inside jumble around, letting them shift into position as she thinks the same things I’m thinking. Which she does, because a moment later we’re both rushing out to the car and back to the station.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

There is that buzz I hear sometimes, the pumping of adrenaline through my body when I know I’m close to wrapping up a case.

“We don’t know anything for sure,” Kent says, and she moves in and around traffic.

“I know that.”

“It’s just circumstantial,” she says.

“I know that too.”

“Really this interview might rule him out just as equally as make him guilty.”

“I know. I know all this, Rebecca.”

“I know you do. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up. And remember, the hair found in the back of the shirt worn when Hailey McDonald was killed isn’t evidence. It can only tell us so much, but if we build any kind of case on it, it will be thrown out before it even reaches court.”

“True, but he doesn’t know that,” I say, and
he
is Chris Watkins, the man I spoke to last night, the man who seven years ago said he went into work to retrieve his cell phone and saw that Ron McDonald wasn’t there. Chris Watkins in the photograph with the army buzz cut, all except around the back where a rattail hangs down between his shoulders. Long blond hair, just like in the email earlier. Chris Watkins had access to Ron McDonald’s car.

“It’s still not getting us any closer to what happened last night,” Kent says.

“Yes it is.”

“How?”

“Because if it’s the Five Minute Man who did this, it changes everything.”

“In what way?”

“Because he’s out there thinking he’s doing good, right? He thinks he’s saving the people of this city from the people of this city. How do you think he’s going to react when he learns he’s killed an innocent man?”

She pauses to consider this. “That’s been your thinking all along,” she says.

“Pretty much.”

“That’s good,” she says. “You think rather than catching this guy, we can appeal to him to turn himself in.”

“Exactly,” I say, the word summing up how opposite that is to the truth—exactly opposite.

“Like I say it’s good, but you should have said something earlier,” she says. “We’re a team, remember?”

“Of course I remember. It’s like Hutton said—we’re on the same page.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it.”

My cell phone starts ringing. Kent keeps driving and I take the call. It’s Julianne Cross, the crime novel–reading witness we spoke to this morning.

“I’m very upset,” she says, and she sounds it. “I did what you asked me to do. I started going over everything I saw that night. And do you know what happened?”

“Tell me.”

“Everything changed. I began to convince myself of different things. As soon as you left I sat down and I saw it all just as I remembered, but then I saw something new too, something that felt real in that moment, but then less real the more I thought about it. The harder I thought about it, the more things from that night became something else, and now I don’t know what’s real. I’m upset because I’m worried I tried to put an innocent man in jail, and a bad man is still walking free.”

“What is it you remembered differently?” I ask. “Before you concentrated too hard and everything shifted.”

“It’s such a small thing,” she says. “But Ron, and I’m still sure it
was Ron, well, when he got to the house he didn’t let himself in. He knocked.”

“He knocked?”

“Yes. On the front door, and his wife let him in.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“When I close my eyes I can see it as plain as day. Ron walking from his parked car one block away with his hat pulled down and then knocking on the front door. Yes, yes, I’m sure he knocked. I can remember him knocking. Why would he need to knock on his own door? I suppose, maybe if he’d forgotten his keys, but he had just driven there so his keys were on him. If it really was Ron, he would have let himself in, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes,” I tell her. “Most likely he would have.”

“I made a mistake, didn’t I,” she says.

“A lot of us did. Thanks for calling me back, Mrs. Cross.”

I fill Rebecca in.

“Even if it’s not this Watkins guy, it really doesn’t look as though Ron did it,” she says.

“For seven years everybody thought he was guilty,” I say, feeling sick at the thought.

“And it took getting murdered to clear his name,” she says. “He was just trying to move on with his life.”

We reach the station. If things are going to schedule, then the Chris Watkins interview would have started only a few minutes ago. He’ll be answering a standard set of questions, and then any other questions the two detectives talking to him send his way.
How long did you know the victim? Were you friends? Were there people who hated him? Was he a good boss? What was his relationship like with the rest of the staff? Where were you last night and can somebody verify that?
He’s not a suspect, and because Chris Watkins didn’t kill Ron McDonald he won’t feel like one. He won’t be in there asking for a lawyer. He’ll be in there shooting the breeze, drinking coffee or soft drinks and feeling laid-back. He’ll talk about the phone call he got from Naomi McDonald last night asking if he knew where her husband was.

We get up to the fourth floor and we confirm Watkins is in the building and is talking to two of our guys. We figure out a plan for our interview, and we take twenty minutes to put together what we need. Then we tell Superintendent Stevens about the hairs in the shirt, the interview with Julianne Cross, and then we show him the photograph from the workshop.

“This is what you have?” he asks. “A photograph of a man with long hair? And you don’t even know the hair found on the shirt comes from a man.”

“The rest of it fits.”

“Even if we could get a warrant for a hair sample,” he says, “we can’t run it against that shirt. That shirt was ruled out.”

I tell him the same thing I told Kent. We know that, but Watkins doesn’t.

“You think you can get him to confess?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

I look at Kent, and she nods slightly at me, and then I look back at Stevens. “We think we can get him to lead us to the murder weapon.”

“How?”

“By using the clothes as leverage.”

He starts tapping his chin, nodding at the same time. “You think you can trick him?”

“I spoke to the guy last night. He didn’t seem like a criminal mastermind.”

“Clever enough to have gotten away with it if you’re right about what you’re saying.”

“Maybe. Or just lucky. If we’d tested those clothes seven years ago we might have found his DNA all over them. And if that’s true, then he’s not that clever at all.”

“So when did he place the bloody clothes into Ron’s car?”

“My guess is when Ron was at his girlfriend’s. The car was out on the street. It was dark. He took the opportunity.”

“And why not the knife?”

“Maybe the knife belonged to him. Maybe his fingerprints and DNA were all over it and he was worried it could be traced to him.”

“If you go in there now and get nothing out of him and he becomes suspicious, you’ll never get another chance without his lawyer present.”

“We know.”

He keeps nodding. “Okay, Detective, it’s your call. This is why you’re running the case. But play it easy, okay? What about Ron McDonald?”

“If we can prove Ron was an innocent man,” Kent says, “then that might change the Five Minute Man’s outlook on things.”

“You think he might turn himself in?” Stevens asks.

“Hopefully,” I say, but really what I want from Schroder is just to stop what he’s doing. We don’t have to catch him. An innocent man has died, but Schroder will pay for that soon enough anyway—the bullet in his head will see to that.

“Okay. This is good work, detectives. I hope you’re on the right path here. Keep me updated. And don’t screw this up.”