The Killing Hour (10 page)

‘Walked into a door, did you?’

‘A tree.’

‘Wouldn’t be the same tree that broke into your house?’ The detective twists his head and points his thumb at the back door. ‘Who broke in?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Anything taken?’

‘No.’

‘Damaged?’

‘Just the door.’

‘Have you made a complaint?’

‘Not yet. I just got home.’

‘Would you like me to help you look through your house?’

‘I’ll be okay.’

‘You don’t seem too upset that somebody has broken into your house, Mr Feldman.’

‘I’m in shock.’

‘You sure nothing was taken?’

‘Pretty sure.’

‘If they didn’t take anything, why do it?’

‘No idea. You’d have to ask him.’

‘Him?’

‘Or them. Whoever.’

‘Take a stab at it,’ he says, his finger still tapping on the notebook. Slightly quicker now.

‘At what?’

‘At what they wanted.’

I shrug. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘Okay. So you said you just got home. From school?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I rang your school today, Mr Feldman, they said you weren’t in.’

‘I took the day off, but I had to go pick up some work. What do you want, Inspector?’

‘Where were you on Sunday night?’

‘Sunday night? Umm, let me think.’ I run my hands through my hair trying to look like I’m trying to remember. Trying to act as though Sunday night and Monday morning were no different from any other. ‘I was at my friend’s house.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Watching DVDs.’

‘What time did you leave?’

I shrug. ‘Not sure. Maybe somewhere around eleven o’clock, give or take.’

‘Where did you go when you left?’

‘Home.’

‘You came straight here.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And went straight to bed.’

‘I had a shower first.’

‘Anybody see you?’

‘My shower isn’t outside.’

‘Did you spend the night alone?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re sure you came straight home?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Uh huh. Well, I guess that pretty much sums it up,’ he says, but he doesn’t make any attempt to get up. He just sits there, staring at me, maybe pissed off because I haven’t offered him coffee, or because he thinks I’m a cold-blooded killer.

‘Good.’ I lean forward and start to stand.

‘Just two more questions.’

‘Just two?’

‘First, why haven’t you asked me why I’m here?’

I sit back down. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You didn’t ask what I’m investigating. It’s like you already knew. You just opened the door and resigned yourself to the fact that I was here to arrest you. I saw it in your face. You didn’t ask what I wanted because you thought I was here to take you into custody for murder. You didn’t go through the whole routine of trying to figure out why a detective inspector would show up on your doorstep late at night wanting to ask you questions. An innocent person would have. Or a good liar. Your problem, Mr Feldman, is that you’re neither.’

‘That’s crazy.’

He stops tapping his finger and points it at me. ‘Have you ever heard of Camelot Drive?’

I know what’s coming and can’t see a way out of it.

‘Mr Feldman? Just a yes or no will do.’

‘No,’ I answer quickly.

‘The body of a young woman was found there yesterday morning. But you know all about that, don’t you?’

‘Sure, it’s been on the news. Everybody knows about it. Does that make everybody a suspect? Unless you’ve got …’

‘Why would we think of you as a suspect?’

‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

‘But you must have done something to think that we would regard you as a suspect.’

‘Look, if you’ve got a point here other than trying to play games, then maybe you should get to it.’

‘Two o’clock,’ he says.

‘What?’

He flips open his notebook, turns a few pages and runs his finger across the notes he’s jotted down. After a few seconds he comes to a stop. ‘Two o’clock is the time your Honda Integra was spotted parked outside the victim’s house. I bet if we were to comb through it we’d find blood samples matching those of the women.’

It’s hard to believe he’s bluffing, even though the newspaper said they were looking for a dark stationwagon. Were the newspapers lying?

‘I seriously doubt that,’ I say, because I don’t know what else I can say. Perhaps the best thing is to come clean, to tell this man everything that happened. I decide not to. If Landry were sure of himself then he would be arresting me, not questioning me.

‘How do you explain your car being there?’

‘It’s a mistake.’

‘A mistake. Sure, okay, we’ll go with that for the moment. Did you know either of the women who died yesterday morning?’

I shake my head. ‘I thought you only had two more questions for me.’

‘That was until you started lying. You’ve never seen or spoken to either woman?’

Again I shake my head.

‘Let’s go back to the car. How do you think it found itself parked up Luciana Young’s driveway?’

‘I’ve no idea. I thought I’d made that pretty evident at the beginning of this conversation. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, I don’t know either of the women, I’ve never seen them before in my life, so if you have anything to back up what you’re saying then either tell me now or this discussion is over.’

Landry stands up and tucks his notebook into his pocket. ‘Just one more question, Mr Feldman.’

‘One? I doubt you’ll stop at one.’

‘We’ll see.’ He reaches into the inside of his jacket pocket. ‘It all depends on how you can justify this.’ He pulls his hand back out and produces a plastic zip-lock bag. Inside is a small pad. He holds it towards me and I reach up to take it. ‘You don’t need to hold it to read it,’ he says.

I move closer towards it. It’s the pad on which Kathy wrote my details, only that isn’t the page that’s on the top. Sherlock Landry has used a pencil to rub over the page beneath it. My name and phone number have magically appeared, and with them any chance I have of talking my way out of this.

I shift my eyes from the bag back to Landry. I say nothing, though I know the face I show him has the shocked look of a man who feels his insides have been torn out.

‘The blood on it is Kathy McClory’s,’ he says. ‘You smeared it when you removed the top page.’

But I didn’t remove it. Cyris removed it. That’s how he knew where I lived. I try to explain this but my mouth has gone dry and I feel as if somebody has poured glue down my throat. All I can do now is take my chances with the truth.

‘I think it’s in your best interests to explain at the station, where you can have a lawyer present,’ Landry says.

‘I, um, I …’

He pulls his handcuffs from behind his back. Maybe they were clipped to his belt or inside a pocket. ‘Turn around, Mr Feldman.’

‘You’re arresting me?’

‘What other choice do I have?’

‘You could arrest the right person. I didn’t kill anybody!’

‘We’ll discuss it at the station. Where you can have a lawyer present.’

‘No, no, this is all wrong. All wrong,’ I repeat.

‘Come on, Mr Feldman. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.’

They’re similar to the words I’ve been using with Jo, and on the receiving end they don’t sound good at all. I put my hands out in front of me and start waving them around in tiny circles. ‘No, no, please, wait a second, let me explain.’

‘There’ll be time for that soon.’

‘If you’ll just listen …’

‘Turn around, Mr Feldman,’ he says, raising the handcuffs. ‘Or you’ll only make things worse.’

I know he’s right. I know he’s trained to beat the hell out of people who resist arrest. I try to think of the positive side to all of this. Maybe the police will believe some of what I have to say. I turn around and put my hands behind me. A few seconds later the cold bracelets click into place.

‘What’s this?’ he asks.

I turn back and face him. He’s holding the envelope with my story inside. ‘It’s the truth.’

He tears it open and drags the loose pages out. After a quick skim through he pushes them back into the envelope. ‘A confession. That’ll make things easier.’

‘It’s not a confession. If you take the time to read it or to listen to me you’ll learn what actually happened.’

‘You can save your talking for later, Feldman. Is there anything else I should know before we leave?’ he asks.

‘Nothing.’

‘So you don’t mind if I take a look around?’

‘Actually I do.’

‘Don’t worry, I promise not to touch anything. You just take a seat there and wait.’

I sit back down, my arms pinned behind me. ‘You can’t search my house without a warrant.’

‘You say that like you think you have rights. You have no rights, Feldman. You lost those when you killed those two women.’

‘I didn’t kill anybody.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ he says, as if it’s all up to him.

He steps past me into the living room, then into the laundry. When he comes back he’s carrying my shorts, holding them on the tip of a pencil. ‘Cut yourself shaving?’

I don’t dignify him with an answer. He shakes a large plastic bag out from his pocket and places the shorts inside. When he comes across my study he spends a long minute in there. When he comes out he gives me a look I can’t read. Then he checks the room opposite. Nothing. He spends less than a minute in my bedroom. I can’t look at my watch but I guess twenty minutes have gone by since he first knocked on my door. When he comes out he says nothing. His face is clenched, his jaw pushed forward. I know he’s looked inside the box and didn’t like what he saw.

‘Time to go, Feldman.’

He keeps his hand on my back as we walk down the hallway and out to his car. My shorts in the plastic bag are tucked under his arm. His car is an unmarked, four-door sedan. The streetlight reflecting off the side windows looks like two moons. He ushers me into the back seat, twists me sideways, undoes the handcuffs and reattaches one cuff to the handgrip above the door. He pulls out another set of handcuffs and attaches my other hand to the same handgrip. It doesn’t seem like standard protocol but I guess that’s because this isn’t one of those police cars with a metal grille separating the prisoner from the driver. He does all this without saying a word and I don’t resist.

18

Sometimes the evidence points where it shouldn’t. Sometimes you go with the flow and end up looking at things in a way they shouldn’t be looked at. Other times you line up all your pieces in a row and they fit perfectly. The pad with Feldman’s name on it wasn’t a sure sign of guilt. It was still circumstantial.

But now …

Now there can be no doubt. None at all. No way of shifting all those pieces into different positions and still not getting them to match. It’s undeniable. Irrefutable. It’s like the cancer running through his body – it can’t be forgotten.

Landry changes gear and speeds up. He wishes he could keep his mind off the cancer if only for a moment, but he can’t. The cancer isn’t changing how all those pieces fit into place but it’s changing how he’s looking at them. It’s changing the way he’s looking at everything. He glances at his hands and sees them still shaking. He knows it isn’t nerves. He’s just made his last arrest, and in ten years’ time when Feldman is back on the streets, he’ll be lying in the cold ground, nine and a half years into a sentence he’ll never escape.

Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Feldman will kill again. He’ll get out of jail and carry on exactly where he left off. That’s the way the justice system works. Nobody is saying it’s perfect. They’re just saying it’s the best they’ve got. What else can they do? Execute the guy?

Execute the guy?

If only. If only that was a realistic possibility.

Why can’t it be?

If life was fair Feldman would be the one with a death sentence scheduled to start this winter, not him. Feldman would be the one with lost times and last thoughts flooding his mind. But what can he do about it? Even the scales by putting Feldman in the morgue next to Kathy McClory and Luciana Young?

He knows he’s only a step away from a range of ideas that would surely blacken his soul, yet he lets his mind go there anyway. After a career in the police force and living with cancer for a week he’s come to realise that being a cop is all about correcting God’s mistakes.

Walking through Feldman’s house made his skin crawl – no, it actually felt as if it were slipping off his body. The air was stale and tasted like decay; it made him feel his own mortality. Part of him wanted to run from the house and wash himself; another part wanted to put a bullet between Feldman’s eyes right where he stood.

The letter he found in Feldman’s pocket is a straightforward confession, albeit a somewhat distorted one. What is more convincing than the letter, other than the bloodstained pad with Feldman’s name and number, other than the bloody shorts he found in the laundry, is the cardboard box sitting on the bed and the piece of bloody paper torn from the pad next to it. Those two things were the most damning pieces of evidence.

Slowly he shakes his head. Thinking about the box makes him feel ill. What sort of man would …

Would what? Would do such a thing? It takes a certain kind of human trash to kill innocent women, and he knows from experience that such trash comes in many forms. You can’t pick these guys out of a line-up. The only way is to be alone with one of them. That’s how it was for Kathy McClory. That’s how it was for Luciana Young.

So now the law is here to protect Feldman, who has so many rights it’s sickening. He’ll be given ten years, or worse, a combination of doctors and lawyers will slap an insanity label on him that the jury will buy, he’ll be force-fed Prozac and made to share his feelings while working a job at McDonald’s as he becomes a ‘respected’ part of the community. He’ll fantasise about killing every woman who declines to have their fries upsized. The law. A courtroom. A jury. Justice. A parole board. All just a sick joke, a sick, sick joke, compounding a sick, sick act. And the punch line? The punch line? The punch line is that even if Feldman is given the maximum penalty he’ll still be free by the time he’s forty. He’ll be up and about while Kathy McClory and Luciana Young are cold and decomposing and forgotten. Feldman will still be alive because he isn’t the one who had a metal stake rammed through his heart. He isn’t the one who had to sit and listen to his doctor tell him that the chemo could only do so much and that it was time to go coffin shopping.