Five Minutes Alone (6 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kelly Summers is twenty-eight years old, and on Christmas Day she will turn twenty-nine. My dad’s birthday is on Christmas Day, and I know from experience that it makes shopping harder, but at least you don’t have to do it twice a year. Kelly’s hair is different from the photograph in the file, but the same as the surveillance footage. In the past it was blond and shoulder length. These days it’s black and only finger length. Today it’s sticking up in different directions because we’ve gotten her out of bed. She’s wearing loose-fitting pajamas and the kind of robe my mother would wear. I get the feeling in an hour or two she’ll look the same, that Kelly downplays how attractive she really is. She probably thinks her good looks played a part in Dwight Smith’s selection process five years ago.

“Has something happened to my parents?” she asks, her words urgent.

We both shake our heads. “No,” Kent says, and though Kelly won’t know it, I can sense Kent’s relief. The way things work out . . . we were both expecting to find Kelly Summers face down in a pool of blood. Is it possible this is one of those cases where everything turns out okay? Kelly is fine and Dwight is dead, and their worlds intersected at the service station last night, but then parted half a block later.

“What’s happened?” Kelly asks.

“Can we come in?” I ask.

She nods slowly, her face changing as she figures something out. “You’re here because of what happened to me five years ago,” she says, the words are flat, but then her voice rises a little. “You’re here because that sick son of a bitch is now saying he didn’t do it, right? Do people believe him?”

“It’s nothing like that,” Kent says. “Please, can we come inside?”

Summers looks at Kent, and I see her eyes locking onto the damaged part of Kent’s face, and as it does her hand goes up to the damage on her own. “Okay,” she says, and she stands aside and lets us in. Then she closes the door behind her and locks it as, I imagine, is her habit.

She leads us into the lounge. It’s warm in here. Warm colors, warm furniture. There’s a stereo, but there’s no TV. There’s a large painting of a field of daises, a woman in a yellow dress walking through them with her back facing the artist, her head turned slightly sideways, not quite enough to get a good look at her, but enough to see an expression on her face that immediately makes me think of loss. Both her hands are reaching out and touching the flowers as she passes them.

“It’s not my best work,” Kelly says.

“You painted this?”

She shrugs. “Used to be a hobby.”

“Used to?”

“I gave it up,” she says, but the unspoken words are there—she gave it up after her life changed.

“It’s beautiful,” I tell her.

She gives another shrug, but she seems pleased with the compliment. This is a nice room. A happy room, and the painting, even though it’s sad, contributes to that. Only thing that’s missing is the smell of coffee. Offering to make coffee is a great way to make friends with a policeman, but Kelly doesn’t seem keen to make friends.

I take my jacket off and rest it over the edge of the couch. Then I sit down on the couch next to it. Kent sits down on a chair that’s at a ninety-degree angle to it, and Summers sits opposite us, forming three points of an equilateral triangle—give or take a handful of degrees. Kelly will have to look left and right to talk to us both.

“Dwight Smith was released from jail two weeks ago,” Kent says.

Summers leans back and onto her side a little so she can pull her feet up to tuck them under her. She’s wearing stripy socks that dis
appear into her pajamas. She becomes absolutely still as she stares at Kent, and after a few seconds of being a statue, she smiles, then shakes her head. Then her smile disappears for a few seconds, then comes back. She’s trying to process something that doesn’t fit. Her mind is banging a square into a round hole.

“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Summers says, and she’s still smiling, “but you’ve got your facts wrong. He’s still got six more years to serve.”

“He was released early for good behavior,” Kent says. “It was always a possibility.”

The smile is still there on Summers’s face. But it’s the smile of somebody who isn’t feeling any warmth, or experiencing any humor. It’s how a person who doesn’t know how to smile would smile if they’d just seen somebody doing it on TV.

“No,” she says. The room goes quiet. We wait her out, knowing she’ll fill in the silence. It becomes uncomfortable. Five seconds pass. Then ten. “Somebody must have put you wrong,” she finally says. “Dwight Smith isn’t capable of good behavior. This,” she says, running her finger the length of her face that Smith sliced open with a fillet knife, “didn’t come from somebody who knows what good behavior is. Therefore you’ve made a mistake. Therefore you didn’t need to come here. Therefore somebody is wasting your time. Now, if there’s nothing else, I have a big day planned.” She uncurls her legs from beneath her and puts her stripy-socked feet onto the floor. She puts her hands on her knees and starts to push herself upwards.

“Kelly,” I say.

She shakes her head. She settles back into the couch. “No,” she says. “Don’t you dare say it. He’s in jail. They wouldn’t let him out. You wouldn’t let him out after what he did to me.”

“Kelly,” I say, “it’s going to be okay. I promise.”

“Of course it’s going to be okay, but only for six more years,” she says, “until he’s let out of jail. I have six more years of freedom, and that’s all. I know that. I know that for an absolute fact because if he had been released two weeks ago then you’d have come to see me two weeks ago to warn me. Anything less than that would have
been putting me in danger. Anything less than that would make you an accessory if he’d hurt me.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I tell her.

“Six years,” she repeats, shaking her head, and she looks close to tears. “That’s how long I have until my freedom ends. Then we swap places. I turn my house into a jail, and he gets the world.”

“People are released all the time without the public knowing about it,” I tell her. “I didn’t know about it. Detective Kent didn’t know about it. We only both found out this morning. I’m so sorry.”

“No,” she says.

“There’s more,” Kent says.

“There’s more? Well that’s great news then, isn’t it?” she asks, and now those tears are starting to spill. “Another psychopath out on the street? So now you’re here to warn me because there’s more. What more? What more could there possibly be? Are you giving him my new address? Do you have him out in the car with you right now so he can finish what he started?”

“Dwight Smith was found dead last night,” I tell her, which I imagine is not just great news for her, but spectacular. I imagine there’s not a piece of news we could deliver right now that would be any better.

“Was . . .” she starts, then stops, then searches for extra words, but doesn’t find them. She stares at her hand as if the missing words are sitting there. She breathes out heavily. “He’s dead? So you’re saying . . . you’re saying I’m free. You’re telling me I’m free?”

“Yes,” Kent says. “And that’s why we’re here. We’re hoping you can help us figure out exactly what happened.”

She nods. She’s probably imagining what
exactly what happened
means in this sense, and she’s probably hoping
exactly what happened
came with a huge dose of
the worst way possible.
“I hope he was murdered,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I mean . . . it would be a great thing if he was. I hope somebody cut his balls off and stuffed them down his throat. Thank you for coming here to tell me this,” she says, and the tears are falling freely now, tears of joy. She looks like she’s about to jump up and dance, about to hug us tightly. Now
she looks like a person who didn’t learn to smile from watching it on TV, but a person raised by clowns. “I just wish I could have . . .” she says, then stops talking. “Well, you know.”

Yes, we both know.

I can’t tell if Summers is for real, or whether she already knew. I’ve been caught out on this kind of thing before. It feels genuine. The problem is we get by in society by being able to fake genuine when we need to.

“Has he tried to contact you?” I ask.

“No, not at all. I mean, like I said, I didn’t even know he was out of jail. And he wouldn’t have been allowed to contact me anyway, right? He . . .” she says, then slowly shakes her head. “I’m so stupid. I was going to say he wouldn’t be allowed. Surely that was a condition of his release, right?”

“Right,” I say, but those conditions don’t do people much good when the person they’re most afraid of comes back into their lives at three a.m.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she says, “because there’s no way he could know where I live. He would have gone to my old house. Maybe you should check there.”

“Tell us about last night,” Kent says.

“Last night?” She nods slowly, thoughtfully. “He was killed last night,” she says.

“Yes,” Kent says.

“So really you’re here because I’m a suspect, that’s why, isn’t it? You’re here to see if I wanted him dead.” She offers a small laugh. “I wanted him dead. Of course I did. But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even know he was out of jail. None of my friends, none of my family, none of us knew. If I’d known he was out of jail I’d have bought a gun. Or I’d have left the country.”

“Smith hurt you, so it only stands to reason that some people would think you’d want to hurt him,” Kent says, with
some people
meaning us.

Kelly nods. “Should I get myself a lawyer?”

The words
That depends on whether you have something to hide
flash through my mind. No doubt they’re in Kent’s too. Words we’ve used plenty of times before. The words are a challenge. The words are saying
Just how good do you think you are?
But we don’t use them. Not to a woman like Kelly.

“That’s up to you,” Kent says.

Kelly seems unsure, and again there’s the pause as she thinks about her options. “Okay,” she says. “I have nothing to hide. I just don’t like the idea of . . . you know, being a victim once, and somehow being a victim again because somebody thinks I did something I didn’t do.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I tell her, but of course sometimes it does.

“Well, last night was last night,” she says. “Nothing different. I finished work and came straight home and, well, you know, nights can be tough for me. I don’t like going out anywhere.”

“Tough?” Kent asks, even though we know what the answer will be.

“Just tough, you know?” Kelly answers. “I got home and for some reason I was in a dark place, and when that happens I take the pills my doctor gave me, and sometimes those pills don’t work so well unless there’s some wine with them. So that’s what I did last night. I had an entire bottle and that, well, that and the pills just knocked me out. I fell asleep on the couch and woke up around four a.m. and dragged myself to bed.”

“What time did you finish work?” Kent asks.

“I don’t know exactly, but around nine thirty.”

“And you came straight home.”

“I always do,” she answers.

“You didn’t go anywhere else?” Kent asks.

Kelly shakes her head. Then she nods. “Actually, yeah, I stopped off for gas.”

“We know about the gas,” Kent says, “because you went to the same gas station that Dwight Smith worked at.”

“No,” Kelly says. “I mean . . . what?”

“He’s been working there since he got out of jail. We just came
from there now. We saw surveillance footage of you using your credit card. Dwight Smith saw you too. He watched you, and then he followed you.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Kelly says, and she puts a hand to her mouth. “He followed me?”

“Yes,” Kent says.

“He followed me home?”

“We don’t know how far he followed you,” Kent says, “but we’re hoping you could let us look around to see if he was here.”

“But he wasn’t here,” Kelly says, “at least he wasn’t here inside.”

“So we can look around?” Kent asks.

We wait for Kelly to think about it. If she says no, she’s got something to hide. If she has something to hide, then we’ll find it. Saying no will make her look like a suspect. And she should have no reason to say no.

“You want to look around my house?” she asks.

“Yes,” I tell her.

“Sure, go ahead,” she says. “I just . . . I can’t believe he followed me.”

I get up off the couch and Kent stays where she is. She will keep the conversation going while I look for any signs Dwight Smith was here. I walk around the lounge, not wanting to immediately disappear from Kelly’s view. I listen in on the conversation. It’s about work. Kelly tells Kent that most of the week she had to work late. I head to the kitchen. The conversation becomes murmurs to me. The kitchen is tidy, though not as tidy as the lounge, and standing in the kitchen reminds me of my conversation with my wife this morning, of her cooking breakfast for our dead daughter. Kelly Summers is a tidy person, but on the kitchen counter is an empty bottle of red wine, and sitting in the sink is an empty wine glass, empty except for about half an ounce.

The bathroom is clean and tidy and smells like lavender. There’s a bright green shower curtain that doesn’t fit with the rest of the décor and I imagine seeing a shower curtain like that every day would make me feel seasick. I check the medicine cabinet and find
different containers containing different pills, some names I recognize, some I don’t. Probably pills to help Kelly Summers sleep, others to help keep her numb when the dark thoughts come creeping her way.

From the hallway I take the doorway into the garage. Kelly drives a dark blue two-door car ten years old. I pop the hatch and the doors and can’t see any signs of blood. I look around the garage, but there isn’t much in the way of tools. A hammer, a couple of screwdrivers, and that’s about it. None have any blood on them. There’s a recycling bin just inside the doorway. I lift the lid. It’s only a quarter full. There are other wine bottles in here, receipts, scraps of cardboard, and paper.

I head back inside. One of the bedrooms has been turned into a study, with a computer on a desk and bookshelves lining the wall. I look through the titles. No crime fiction. No romance novels. Mostly chick lit. The kind of books my wife reads. Books where women are safe and children don’t go missing.