Five Minutes Alone (37 page)

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

We get out into the sun and the sun never feels as good as it does for those first few seconds when you’re stepping out of a morgue.

“That’s a good idea you had down there,” I tell Kent.

“It might lead to nothing,” she says, “but I have to tell you, I’m feeling confident. I’m going to call in and get somebody down here.”

“Make sure you get the best,” I say, but really I want Forrest Gump down here searching for prints.

I check my phone and see that I’ve been left a message from Superintendent Stevens asking me to call back right away. Which is what I do.

“You remember a guy by the name of Benson Barlow?” he asks.

I remember him. He’s a psychiatrist who helped on a few cases over the last year. Schroder worked with him a few times, and I met the guy out at Grover Hills back when we were all learning all of Grover Hills’s dark secrets. “Yeah. I remember him.”

“He thinks he can help us.”

Great. More help. Just what we need. “In what way?”

“He’s just spent the last fifteen minutes down here. He said he’s been following the case, and he watched the press conference, and somehow he’s done what shrinks do and take everything he’s learned and turned it into some kind of conjecture.”

“And?”

“And for the last fifteen minutes he’s been trying to convince us of one thing, and one thing only, and I’m somewhat inclined to believe him, especially after what we know about the missing cell phone.”

“Which is?” I ask.

“Barlow knows who our killer is,” he says, and in that moment my innards twist themselves to Hell and back, and my future heads that way too. My mouth goes dry and my tongue gets stuck to the roof of it. “You still there?” he asks.

“I’m just waiting for the reveal.”

“He thinks we’re looking for a cop. And not just any cop, but one who’s been on the force for some time. One who’s jaded, one who’s sick and tired of playing the game. He thinks it’s possible we’re looking at somebody who retired. It lines up with everything we know, including the missing cell phone, and lines up with your partner’s theory.”

“He have any suspects?”

“Suspects? That’s our job, Detective. But what I can tell you is I have a list of names of everybody at that crime scene last night, and it’s being checked as we speak against what kind of car they drive in the hopes one of them owns a Honda Accord. If it’s true, we’re going to find him, or them. And soon.”

“Lots of them could own Honda Accords,” I say. “Even my dad owns a Honda Accord.”

“Then we’ll put your dad on the list,” he says, and I’m not entirely sure that he’s joking. “How did it go with the medical examiner?”

“We’re working with something,” I tell him.

“Okay, keep me updated. I’ve already put Barlow’s profile into the mix. It might even shake things up.”

I get off the phone and Kent has gotten off the phone, and she asks me who was calling and I tell her, and I feel sick, physically sick because I know putting Barlow’s profile into the mix is sure to bring up Schroder’s name. How can it not? A bald ex-detective who drives a dark blue Honda. I grab hold of the side of the car and Kent looks over at me and asks if I’m okay.

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” she says. “You need to sit down.”

“I just need some fresh air.”

“No, what you need to do is stop acting like a tough guy and sit
down before you faint. It wasn’t that long ago you were in a coma because of a head injury, Theo.”

She gets the car unlocked and I sit down with my legs out the side and I take some deep breaths. A seagull is sitting on top of a car parked ten yards away. It stares at me with an all-knowing eye.

“I think coming out of the cold morgue and into the heat has thrown me a little,” I say.

“You want some water?”

“I’m okay, it’s passing,” I say, and it is passing. Any dizziness I felt is moving into my legs that now feel like rubber.

“I’ll be back in two minutes.”

She disappears and I play the staring game with the seagull and then Kent returns with a fresh bottle of water and hands it to me, and I drink half of it in one go. What I really need is something stronger. It’s been over a year since I last took a drink, since the night I got trashed and crashed my car. Some people can learn from an experience like that, and some people can’t.

“I’m better, I promise,” I tell her.

“Would you tell me if you weren’t?”

“Of course I would.”

“It’s been a long day, and no doubt you’re going to want to be at the house tonight for when Watkins shows up, right? How about I take you back to the station and you head home until then?”

I lift my legs into the car. “Sounds like a plan.”

Kent starts the car and the seagull disappears. She drives us out of the parking lot and into traffic. “You need me there tonight?”

“Not really. It’s all straightforward,” I say, and even I don’t need to be there, but I want to be. Of course I want to be—this is my case.

“Once I drop you off,” she says, “I’m heading back down to the morgue. I want to be there when these fingerprints get lifted from our victim. I’m hopeful,” she says. “You know, what we could do is have another pool with time slots. We could start picking times for when this case wraps up, because this thing is about to be closed.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY

I update Kent about Barlow’s theory as we drive, and then she drops me off at the station. I think about jumping into my car and speeding through the streets, racing to the morgue to get there ahead of Kent and the fingerprint technician, then using my sleeve to wipe away any prints left on Peter Crowley’s skin, especially around the eyes. But I can’t. There is only so much I can do to save Schroder and myself, and that’s not part of it. The best I
can
do is hope any prints Schroder left on the victim didn’t stick, or were wiped away during the autopsy.

I drive out to New Brighton. It’s a suburb by the beach, most of the houses looking tired in the sun, and I park in front of a liquor store and a café and I take Schroder’s cell phone and cross the road to the pier opposite. The pier is a lot of concrete and a lot of steel and it takes me a few hundred yards out over the water where some people are admiring the view and some people are fishing. I drop the phone between the bars and the big blue swallows it. Then I walk back to the car and go into the liquor store. The guy who serves me can see pretty quickly it’s not Conversational Tuesday, and I point to a hip flask of whiskey. He takes the cash, puts the bottle into a bag and adds an empty cup in there too as if he’s seen it all before and knows the drinking can’t be put off for anything more than a few more seconds. I’m flattered he doesn’t just think I’ll drink it from the bottle.

But the drinking can be put off, and not just by a few seconds. When I get home I stuff the bottle under the seat where I’d been hiding the cell phone. It’s tempting to drink it now, that way tomorrow’s
From Coma Cop to Dirty Detective
headline won’t bother me as much
.

Bridget is waiting for me at the doorstep.

“That bad?” she asks.

“That bad,” I tell her, and then I hug her tight and I close my eyes and I want to stay this way forever.

“I have something to show you.” She leads me down to Emily’s bedroom. “What do you think?”

In the bedroom is a crib. It’s the same crib we had when Emily was a baby, back before she outgrew it and we gave it to Bridget’s parents to look after on account of them having a lot more storage space. I didn’t know they still had it, and the fact they did could say a lot. It could say they had held out hope their daughter would be okay one day, and would have a normal life. Or it could just mean they never cleaned out their garage. Seeing it there brings back a lot of memories, a lot of
really good
memories.

“This is going to be her room,” she says.

I don’t say anything.

“Are you okay?”

I nod. Yes, I’m okay, but I can’t say it.

“And she’ll always have Emily to look over her.”

I keep nodding.
She’ll have Emily to look over her, but not me. I’ll be in jail.

“It’s going to be okay, Teddy,” Bridget says, and she hugs me. Hugs me tight and breathes into my neck and I wrap my arms around her and close my eyes. “Really, it’s going to be okay.”

Only it’s not going to be okay, not at all, and then there’s the voice, the voice that says
You’ve done it before, you can do it again.
And that voice is talking about the dirty work required to take things from not okay to okay, dirty work that sees me leading Schroder through the woods and giving the Five Minute Man a taste of his own medicine. Dirty work required to protect my family.

Finally I listen to the voice. Finally I let my mind go there.

You can do it again,
the voice says.

And the scary part is I’m pretty sure I can.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

At six o’clock Kent calls and says they weren’t able to pull a clean print from Peter Crowley’s body. She’s disappointed. This makes the voice and the dirty, dark images of me and Schroder in the woods disappear, and those images weren’t real anyway, and it also means for the moment that bottle hidden under the seat in my car can stay hidden. Yes, I’ve killed bad people, but Schroder isn’t bad people. He’s good people making bad mistakes. Schroder was my friend. She tells me nobody has called saying they picked up a hitchhiker on Friday night.

At eight o’clock I drop my wife off at her parents’ house, kiss her good-bye and tell her I’ll see her in the morning. I drive to the police station to switch cars because Chris Watkins would have seen my car last night when I parked outside the workshop. At eight forty-five, on my way to the house Ron McDonald used to live in, I get a phone call from Jerry Williams.

“You owe me,” he says.

“You got something for me?”

“The hair you sent over this morning from Ron McDonald is a match to the single black hair I found in the shirt.”

“That’s good,” I tell him.

“That’s not all,” he says. “We’ve got a mixed DNA profile on the shirt made up from three different profiles. Now, let me break it down for you. My guess is the shirt was washed before it was worn in commission of the crime. That shirt in the washing machine has picked up secondary DNA from other clothes and, despite what people think, DNA can survive a lot and, in this case, has survived the wash. The blood on the shirt matches the longest of the hairs we found, and is female. We have a second DNA sample
that matches Ron McDonald’s single black hair. And a third DNA sample that matches the remaining hair. This third DNA sample we found a lot of around the armpits, chest, and collar, and is also male.”

“So somebody else definitely wore that shirt.”

“Definitely? I can’t state that. For all I know somebody picked up that shirt to wipe himself down. But if I were a betting man, then yes, I would bet the farm on it. Now, if you want those profiles compared to the criminal database, that is something I can’t make go any faster.”

“What about the DNA sample sent over from the vet?”

“We’ll build up a profile tomorrow,” he says, “but we might not be able to match it to anything for three or four weeks, and that’s only if we have a matching sample in the system.”

At nine o’clock I park two doors away from the house Ron McDonald used to live in back when Hailey McDonald used to live. There isn’t a lot of life on the street. A teenage boy and a teenage girl holding hands, him leaning against a fence, her looking at him and smiling. There’s a cat nibbling at a mince pie that’s been dropped on the sidewalk, and from the trees a few dozen birds are watching it, as if they’re forming a gang to get revenge on the cat for all the family members they’ve lost. I reach the house and knock on the door and a man in his late thirties wearing a pair of glasses that look like they came from the forties answers the door.

“I’m Detective Inspector Theodore Tate,” I tell him.

“Lee Charters,” he says, and offers his hand, along with a big used-car salesman smile. “You’re the one my wife spoke to earlier today?”

“That’s me.”

He laughs. “I hear she gave you the
Don’t bullshit a used-car salesman’s wif
e line.”

“She did.”

“She tries to use it on everybody,” he says, and slaps me on the back. “Come on in. I’d offer you a beer, but I’m guessing you’d say no. I’m still going to offer anyway. My folks always said don’t take
beer from a stranger, but they never said anything about offering it.”

“No thanks,” I tell him.

“That your car I saw you pull up in?” he asks. “Or a police car?”

“Police car.”

“What do you drive?”

“Something that’s all I can afford.”

“You’d be surprised what you can afford,” he says, and hands me his card. “Why don’t you come down and see me? We give a discount for law enforcement.”

“Thanks,” I tell him, and put the card into my pocket.

“You’ve got one colleague in the lounge, and the other in the study looking out over the backyard. If you need me for anything, I’ll be in the kitchen. Nancy is still trying to get Lenny to get to sleep. Been one of those days, but you’ll meet her soon enough.” He slaps me on the shoulder again. “Let me know if you change your mind about that beer, okay?”

I head into the lounge. Detective Lance McCoy is here, a guy who I’ve worked with in the past, but not since being back on the force. We shake hands and he tells me so far there’s nothing to report, and at the other end of the house is Officer England, who I don’t think I’ve ever met. Officer England is armed with a Taser.

I look at my watch. It’s five past nine. It’s mostly dark outside, the streetlights taking more effect by the minute. I wonder who’s going to win the pool. Maybe I’ll win enough so I can put that law-enforcement discount into effect with Lee. Or hire a good lawyer.

“You look shot,” McCoy says. “I got this covered if you wanna take a break,” he says, and nods towards the chair. “It’s not like there are a hundred angles here, and it’s still pretty early.”

I tell him I’m okay, and we talk about the case, and I tell him about the DNA. After a while Lee comes out and says they’re off to bed, and I don’t end up meeting the wife of the used-car salesman. Ten thirty comes and goes, and I wonder whose name is on the board in the time slots that have slipped away.

Eleven o’clock.

Eleven thirty. I start thinking about the whiskey in my car, my car back at the station, and then I think of the beer that Lee offered me earlier. I’m fifteen yards from the kitchen, a few extra yards to the fridge. I could be there in ten seconds.

Eleven forty. Eleven fifty.

I guessed two a.m., but already I’m feeling like I’m wrong. Was I wrong? Or was I right and Watkins doesn’t have access to the murder weapon? If he did kill Hailey McDonald, there’s no reason he didn’t drive out to the pier in New Brighton and watch the water swallow that knife up. Maybe Schroder’s cell phone is sitting right next to it.

Midnight comes. Midnight goes. Kent picked twelve thirty.

But then twelve thirty comes. Her time slot hangs around for ten minutes. And then it’s gone and a new time slot arrives. I stay by the window I’ve been camping at since I got here, a window that gives me a view to the left and the right, the curtains parted just enough for the view, and nobody comes. No moving shadows. No one coming to hide a murder weapon. Did we get it wrong?

One o’clock.

“This isn’t looking so good,” McCoy says.

One thirty. Three more time slots just slipped by.

“I’m busted,” he says. “I had one twenty. You?”

“Two,” I tell him.

“Good luck,” he says.

Only my luck doesn’t hold out. At one fifty, ten minutes before the time slot I guessed, Christopher Watkins, wearing a black pair of jeans, a black shirt, and a baseball cap—perhaps the same cap he wore seven years ago—steps into view. There is a small backpack over his shoulder. He’s doing his best to keep a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view by turning his body as he steps onto the front yard. He moves quickly to a large tree on the boundary line, and stands against it, watching and waiting and listening, and this he does for a minute before becoming satisfied the street is asleep. Then he moves towards the house. He’s wearing a dark pair of gloves.

McCoy whispers into a handheld radio, letting the officer at the other end of the house know that Watkins is here, and to keep an eye out.

“How long do we give him?” McCoy asks.

“Let him place the weapon. I’d rather take him into custody when he’s unarmed.”

Watkins keeps moving. He makes his way to the garage and out of line from the lounge window. We move into the kitchen. The garage doesn’t adjoin the house, there’s a few yards between the two buildings, and from one of the kitchen windows we watch as he steps up to the side door. For a moment I think he’s going to try and enter it, but instead he crouches down. He unzips his bag and takes out a handheld garden trowel. He puts the tip of it into the earth and removes two scoops of dirt and then he stops. His body stiffens and he turns towards the kitchen. He can’t see us, surely he can’t, but can he sense us?

He runs.

“Go,” I shout, and before we get to the front door we can hear the baby at the other end of the house start crying, and at the same time the officer down there calls out a
sorry
before bursting into the lounge behind us while we get to the front door and get outside, but then there’s the sound of a squeaking toy, a
fuck it
and a thud, and a crash from behind us.

Me and McCoy get outside. “Call it in,” I say as we start running. Watkins has a thirty-yard lead and he’s carrying his backpack in his left hand and trying to loop his right hand through the strap. We hit the sidewalk fast, my old man legs okay for the moment, McCoy tugging the cell phone from his pocket. I keep the same pace as McCoy, and together we keep the same pace as Watkins, and there is nowhere for him to go, no obstacle course or minefield or train he can jump past.

The thirty yards becomes twenty-five. McCoy starts talking into the cell phone.

Then Watkins stops running. It’s almost like he hits a brick wall. He stops and turns towards us and he’s given up on trying to put
on the backpack. He’s given up on everything. He can’t outrun us. Backup is on the way. There is no flight here, but then I realize he’s not thinking about flight anymore, but about fight. He reaches into his bag and pulls out a plastic bag, and inside that plastic bag is the knife.

We come to a stop. He looks at me and then at McCoy and starts to make a decision, figuring out which one of us to attack.