Five Minutes Alone (39 page)

“That’s enough,” Grey says. “My client has nothing more to say.”

“Is that right?” I ask Watkins.

Watkins nods. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Well, we are charging you with the murder of Hailey McDonald, and the attempted murder of Detective Inspector Lance McCoy,” I say, and I stand up. “If you’re finished with your lawyer, then it’s time to process you and put you in a holding cell.”

“Don’t say anything else,” Grey says, “and I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

Watkins nods, the interview is over, and it’s time for me to go home.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

Out in the parking lot I stand with Kent and we talk about the interview. A newspaper truck drives past the entrance gates and I wonder what today’s headline is going to be, but even more importantly I wonder about tomorrow’s.

“You guys never identified yourselves?” Kent asks.

“No. I mean, we would have, but he just started running, then before we knew what was going on he came at us with a knife. There was just no time.”

“Grey will say there is always time,” she says, which is kind of like her saying
You should have found time.
And she’s right. “But that story about the key and finding the knife, what do you think?”

“I think it’s insane, but sometimes a jury buys insane.”

“I’ll come get you in the morning,” she says. “About nine?”

“Sounds good.”

We part ways and I head home, and without Bridget here it reminds me of all the other times I’ve come home late at night after investigating something, the house empty, my wife in a nursing home. I actually think about calling Schroder, or even going and banging on his door. It’s five thirty and there’s something about the idea of waking him up to tell him he screwed up that I enjoy, but not enough to go and do it. If killing an innocent man isn’t enough to stop Schroder, I don’t know what is.

Yes you do.

Yes. I do.

I set my alarm for eight thirty, and when it wakes me up almost three hours later I feel like I’ve been asleep for all of five minutes and, for the briefest of moments, I wonder if I didn’t creep out to
my car during the night and grab the bottle of whiskey. It sure as hell feels that way.

I jump into the shower and wake up a little, coffee wakes me some more, then I call my wife. We talk for ten minutes and I tell her things in the case are moving along quickly, and that things may wrap up today.

“When’s Wilson’s funeral?” she asks.

“Friday.”

“Okay. I’ll stay at my parents’ today. You want to swing by and get me after work?”

“I’ll see you then.”

Kent honks the horn when she pulls up outside. I’m walking down to the car when my phone rings. It’s Detective Travers.

“I got something,” he says.

“What kind of something?”

“Where are you?” he asks, and he sounds excited.

“On the way to the station.”

“So where are you right now?”

“Standing outside my house,” I tell him, looking up and down the street in case he’s here.

“Okay. You know where Tire Man Tim’s Tires is?”

I picture the building, the location, just off the edge of town. “Yeah, I do.”

“Then you should come down here,” he says.

“Why don’t you tell me over the phone?”

“Because it would ruin the surprise.”

“I don’t like surprises,” I tell him.

“You’ll like this one,” he says, but I don’t think I will. It’s going to be Schroder caught on surveillance. It’s going to be Schroder using his name and paying with a credit card. Travers hangs up. I head to my car, open the door, and slip the hip flask of whiskey into my jacket pocket. I head over to Kent.

“Good news?” Kent asks. “Has Watkins confessed?”

“It’s something else,” I tell her. “You know where Tire Man Tim’s Tires is?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“It was Travers on the phone. He said he’s got a surprise for us.”

“It must be where the bald guy bought the tires. This is exciting!” she says and she looks as excited as I feel awful. “We’re getting close!”

I think of the hip flask. Today is all mapped out. The tires with fingerprints all over them. A new witness. The list of Honda Accords. My legs feel like jelly. I feel like I’m going to throw up.

“You still don’t look so good,” she says.

“I’m fine.”

“You sure you want to do this?”

“I said I’m fine,” I tell her, a little too forcefully.

“Whatever you say.”

I take a last look at my house as we pull away. There are people on bikes and people out walking. They’re soaking up the sun and eager to get to the other end of the day, where the five o’clock world ends. I imagine by then I’ll be in an interrogation room, only this time on the opposite side of the table.

The tire shop has orange concrete block walls, the shade dulled by the passing of time and the passing of cars, exhaust dialing the orange back, same for the big black letters spelling out the name, which are now almost gray. The big bay doors have been rolled up, and inside are rows and rows of tires and tools, one car already hoisted up a few feet with the wheels missing, a couple of guys in black uniforms moving around in there, to the side of it all an attached office with a glass front wall for customers to pay and wait and to discuss finance options. Detective Travers is waiting for us out front, and by now my legs have regained strength. He’s wearing a sharp blue shirt and sharp black pants that makes my own outfit look like somebody was once buried in it.

“We were lucky,” he says, which makes my stomach drop even more, “but not lucky enough,” he says, which goes someway to putting my stomach back into its rightful place. “This place was on the list, but at this rate we wouldn’t have gotten to it for another two days. But Tom Headman, he’s the owner—”

“Not Tim?” Kent asks.

“No, and don’t ask me why,” he says, “but that stuff about the car we released on the news yesterday was in the papers this morning, and that’s where he saw it and recognized it. He phoned it in and said he serviced a car just like it on Sunday afternoon, putting on two brand new tires. So that’s the good news. The bad news is there’s no surveillance here, and the guy paid in cash. But more good news is that the tires he replaced are still here.”

“He leave a name?” I ask.

“Yeah, he did,” he says. “And that’s the good part. You want to have a guess what his name is?”

I can feel the darkness rushing back. I can feel my legs beginning to sway. The only question is will Schroder take me down with him?

“Who?”

“It’s you,” he says. “Guy said his name was Theodore Tate.”

It takes a moment to absorb the news. Theodore Tate. Not Carl Schroder. “Same name he gave the prison officer,” I tell him. “You could have told me that on the phone.”

“I wanted to tell you in person,” he says.

I shake my head. “This is bullshit,” I tell him.

“What?”

“You’re full of shit and this isn’t my first day on the force. You wanted me down here because you want Tom to take a look at me, right? You want to make sure it wasn’t me who came in here on Sunday.”

“Now, hang on a second—”

“Fuck you, Detective,” I say.

“No, fuck you, Tate,” he says, pointing his finger at me. “You would have done the same damn thing. There’s a theory this killer is or was one of us, what was I supposed to do?”

Kent puts a hand on my shoulder and I have the urge to shake it off. “He’s right,” she says, “you would have done the same thing.”

I shake my head. I know I’m overreacting, but I’m entitled to.
I’m having a stressful time. “Let’s go and see Tom. Let’s make sure this is my first time here,” I tell him.

“Come on, Tate, don’t be—”

“Whatever,” I say, and I head towards the office.

“Howdy, Detective, I’m Tom,” a man says, a man who must be Tom, and he offers me his hand and I shake it, and then he gives me a card. “Next time you need tires,” he says, “come and see me.”

“Let me guess, you give a law-enforcement discount?”

“I give everybody a discount,” he says, “but law enforcement get the real savings.” He hands a card to Kent too. I figure Travers already has one. “You guys do a hell of a job.”

I put the card in my pocket. I feel calm again. No surveillance, no real name. Then I think about the tires that are here with Schroder’s prints all over them from when he changed them at Grover Hills, and my heart starts to race. I just have to hope he wore gloves.

“So the guy paid with cash?” I ask.

“Yep.”

“Any chance it’s still here?”

He shakes his head. “Like I told your colleague, weekends are really busy. First thing we do Monday morning is take the profits to the bank. We keep a float, but that’s always turning over. The guy paid in twenties, and those things come and go all day long. ”

“So the two tires, they’re here I’ve been told, which means they couldn’t be fixed?” I ask.

“That’s right,” Tom says. “Not just the tires, but he left one of the spare wheels here. He was driving on two of them. One I patched up and put back into his car, the other he left behind.”

“So what did he run over?”

“He hadn’t run anything over,” Tom says. “They’d been slashed. They were completely ruined. Like I said before you got here, they’re out back in the scrap pile. They’re all yours. You want me to give you a hand loading them up?”

“That’s fine,” Travers says. “There’s a fingerprint technician al
ready on the way. You just show me where they are and I’ll take care of it.”

“I’ll get Neal to show you,” he says. There’s an open doorway between the office and the workshop, and Tom calls through it to one of the two men we saw earlier, this one a kid who is all of twenty years old who’s pulling the tire off a rim. Neal looks up, sees Tom flagging him over, and then comes through. “Can you show the detective where the two slashed tires are that came in on the Honda?”

Neal starts nodding. He seems eager to please. He leads Travers back through the doorway and through the workshop.

“Did this man have to sign anything? Or touch anything?” Kent asks.

“Nothing. The guy just stood there watching the whole time. Didn’t say much other than ask for two new tires and how much were they going to be. Stood there with his hands in his pockets in the workshop and watched. I remember he was wearing a long-sleeve shirt even though it was really hot, and the sleeve was all puffed up like his arm was bandaged beneath it. Only time he took his hands out of his pocket was when he paid, and also when he answered his cell phone. I was showing another customer around at the time, but he answered the phone with his name.”

“Theodore Tate,” I say, and how close did I come just then to saying
Carl Schroder.

“Yeah, he looked at the display on his phone, and then flipped it open and said
Theo.
”

“When exactly was this?” I ask.

“I can’t give you exactly,” he says, “not on the phone call, but it wasn’t long before he paid, and the receipt here says he paid at eleven fifty-seven.

“So this guy is still impersonating you on the phone,” Kent tells me.

I nod. I think about the time line. Bridget saw him around then, didn’t she? Is it possible that instead of him impersonating me on the phone, he looked at the display and thought it was me calling?
He wasn’t saying
Theo,
as in
I’m Theo.
He was saying it because he thought it was me calling. As in
Hi, Theo.
I didn’t call him, but if Bridget called from home, it still would have been my name flashing across his phone. It was the day after I showed her where Quentin James was buried. I think the following morning something inside her misfired. I think she called Schroder wanting his help. I think for some reason she took him out to the grave because the time line in her mind had gotten scrambled. That’s how he found the body.

“How good a look did you get at the guy?” Kent asks.

“A really good look.”

“So if we put you in front of a sketch artist, you’ll be able to come up with something?”

“Sure, and it’ll be something a hell of a lot more accurate than that sketch in this morning’s paper,” he says. “I mean, that sketch doesn’t even have the scar.”

I do my best not to cringe at those words.

“What scar?” Kent asks.

“Up here,” he says, and taps the side of his head. “Looked like the guy had been shot.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

We get back into the car. The dashboard tells us the temperature is the same as what it was ten minutes ago when we got here, but I tug at the top of my shirt and try to let some air in because it feels like the day has gotten fifty degrees hotter. It feels stuffy. So stuffy I’m struggling to breathe a little.

Kent says nothing and I say nothing and Tom Headman follows us in his car as we drive back to the station. We’re more than halfway there when I break the silence.

“You can say it,” I say.

She shakes her head.

“Come on, Rebecca. You can say it.”

“I don’t want to say it.”

“Fingerprints are going to confirm it.”

“We don’t know that,” she says.

“Yes we do,” I say, because it’s over now. It was over from the moment I found Kelly Summers’s window had been forced open and said nothing. “We know we’re looking for a cop.”

“That’s just a theory.”

“We know Schroder isn’t Schroder anymore. We know he’s linked to the first two homicides. The first case was his and he knew all about Grover Hills.”

“He saved my life. If it wasn’t for him they’d still be scraping bits of me off the road.”

I don’t answer her.

“And you?” she asks. “You took him to Kelly Summers’s house. Why don’t you totally turn my world upside down and tell me you’re the one who took the cell phone?”

“That wasn’t me,” I tell her.

“Promise me it wasn’t, Tate. Please.”

“It wasn’t me. I promise,” I say, and I don’t know why the hell I’m still lying. It’s over.

“So now what?” Kent asks.

“Now we keep it to ourselves. There’s no point in making accusations until we know, right? Could be a lot of people out there who have been shot in the head. Let’s run the prints and see what the sketch looks like.”

“You’ve been to his house,” she says. “You must know what kind of car he drives.”

“I know.”

“And?”

“And it’s a dark blue Honda.”

“An Accord?”

“I think so. Let’s keep it to ourselves until we know for sure, okay?”

“And then?”

“And then we go and arrest him.”

We get to the station. We head upstairs and Stevens comes looking for us and tells us we did a good job last night. He says me and McCoy screwed up by not identifying ourselves, but aside from that he’s happy.

“He was there trying to bury the murder weapon,” he says. “That weapon is out getting tested as we speak, and nobody doubts it’s going to come back with Hailey McDonald’s DNA all over it. Don’t let his lawyer make you think this isn’t going to make it to court. By the way, guess who won the pool?”

“Who?” I ask.

“I did,” he says. “And I don’t want crap like that taking place in this building again, okay? We’re supposed to be professionals.” He stops talking and stares at me for a few seconds. “You know, Detective, you don’t look so good.”

“I’m just tired,” I say.

“Make sure you take a couple of days off when this is over, huh? We just lost one good man, and we sure as hell don’t want to lose another.”

Tom Headman steps off the elevator. He’s being escorted by another officer. He sees us and he heads over, and we put him into an interview room similar to the one we used last night, only a little bigger and somewhat more comfortable. We get him set up with the sketch artist and then we leave them to it.

We’re back in the task-force room when my phone rings.

It’s Detective Travers.

The tire has been printed.

They’ve found two sets of prints. One set will belong to Tom because he’s the one who stripped them from the rims and tossed them into the scrap heap. The second will belong to the bald man. The prints were found on the spare wheel he left behind. When he put his fingers through the holes in the rims he left good prints in the dirt and grease on the other side. Any prints on the tires were unreadable.

“We’re on our way back to run the prints,” he says. “If this guy is in the system then we’re going to have him. If he’s a cop, his prints are going to be on file. This is almost over,” he says, and he sounds like a kid at Christmas. He hangs up and I turn to Kent.

“Travers found a good set of prints,” I tell her.

“That’s great,” she says, but she doesn’t sound thrilled. Of course she doesn’t. It’s like she said—Schroder saved her life.

“I really don’t feel well,” I tell her.

“You want to go home?”

“Yeah, I think that’s best,” I say.

“I’ll drop you off.”

I shake my head. “Just give me the keys,” I say. “I’ll go home for a few hours and come back after lunch.”

She tilts her head slightly as she looks at me. “I know where you’re going,” she says.

“I’m going home.”

“If you say so,” she says. “I just hope for your sake you’re at home lying down in about forty-five minutes because that’s when all hell is going to break loose.”

“That’s where I’ll be.”

“Good luck,” she says. “I don’t know whether you’re going there to arrest him or warn him, but whatever it is, good luck.”

“Thanks.”

She hands me the keys. “Don’t crash.”

Don’t crash.
I think it might already be too late for that. I take the elevator and step out into the parking lot for the last time as a free man.