Blood Men (20 page)

“So you think Hunter is capable of this?” Landry asks, nodding toward Shane Kingsly as he’s carried from the house in a body bag on a stretcher.

“I don’t know.” Schroder thinks about Benson Barlow and his warning. “I hope not,” he says, “but let’s go find out.”

The knocking wakes me. I unplugged the alarm clock last night since time doesn’t really matter much these days. I get to my feet and pull back the curtain and the Christmas Eve sun is high enough to suggest it’s sometime around noon. I knew the knocking would come today, I just didn’t know when. The clothes I wore last night are gone. As is the murder weapon—or accident weapon, to be accurate. I’ve cleaned my hand up, put a fresh bandage on it, it hurts but that’s the price you have to pay, I guess. First thing the monster made me do when I got home last night was drop a glass on the kitchen floor when I was trying to take painkillers.

I pull on some jeans and a shirt. My shoulder hurts and I rub at
it. My body is stiff and sore. The knocking comes again.

I reach the door in bare feet. The house is closed up and the air is warm and stale. I open the front door and bright light floods in, the windscreen of the car parked out front reflecting a load of it into my eyes. I hold my hand up to shield them, squinting, exposing the bandage to the men standing outside.

“We have some developments,” Detective Schroder says.

“What kind of developments?” I ask, and I realize that I haven’t actually spoken out loud since leaving Sam last night at her grandparents.” My voice catches and my mouth is dry and the words are croaky, and I have to repeat the sentence.

“Mind if we come in? This is Detective Landry,” he says, and Detective Landry looks too small for his clothes and a little too tired to be working. I lead them inside and we sit in the living room. At least I do, and Landry does, but Schroder stays standing near the Christmas tree, which pisses me off. I don’t offer them a drink. It’s not a social call.

“You’ve found the men who murdered my wife?” I ask.

“We recovered some of the money at a homicide this morning,” Landry says. “Drug dealer went and got himself murdered.”

“So somebody bought drugs from him with the stolen cash?”

“That’s quick thinking,” Schroder says.

“I like that,” Landry adds. “A quick thinker.”

“But no. That’s not what we’re saying,” Schroder says. “The cash we found was from the bank. It was stained with dye and damaged.”

“I don’t follow,” I say.

Schroder explains to me what a dye pack is and it makes enough sense. The whole time I keep thinking there’s something he’s not telling me. Maybe they found something of mine at the scene. Could be a neighbor saw me—it doesn’t seem likely, it was too dark. And why isn’t he mentioning the rest of the money? The bricks of cash under the mattress weren’t ruined with dye.

“How much of the money did you find?” I ask.

“Can’t tell you that,” Schroder says.

“Was this the man that killed Jodie?”

“No,” Landry says.

“He was one of the six?” I ask.

“One of the seven,” Schroder says.

“What?”

“Six men came into the bank,” Schroder says, “but another man sat out in the car.”

“A getaway driver?”

“A wheelman,” Landry says.

“So one of them killed him?”

“Maybe.”

“Who found him?” I ask.

“Now, why would you ask that?” he asks.

“If this is somebody who was in the gang that killed my wife, maybe whoever found him is part of it.”

“They wouldn’t have phoned it in,” Schroder says. “It was his probation officer. The victim didn’t show up this morning, and his probation officer came looking for him.”

“So what are you saying? Who killed him?”

“We don’t know,” Landry says. “Doesn’t make sense that somebody would kill him, and leave all those drugs behind.”

And the money.

“Unless he was killed for a different reason,” Schroder says.

“Something more personal,” Landry says.

“Like revenge,” Schroder says, the two cops bouncing off each other now.

“But you must know his accomplices, right?” I ask. “He would have worked with these men before?”

“We’re looking into it,” Schroder says.

“I don’t understand, why have you come here to tell me this?”

“We thought it was important to keep you updated,” Schroder says.

I don’t think that’s it at all. And he knows I don’t believe him.

“You haven’t exactly told me anything, except somebody who could have been part of the robbery got killed. How do you know he was the wheelman and not one of the six in the bank?”

“Height.”

“What?”

“He was a tall man. None of the six in the bank were as tall as him. The bank crew were all average, this guy was over six foot.”

“Still doesn’t mean he drove the van,” I say.

“He drove the van,” Schroder says. “And he was part of the robbery.”

“So now what? It means you’ll have the others soon, right?”

“We have some leads,” Schroder says, and the way he says it makes me think that they have some leads on who killed Kingsly, not who robbed the bank. “What happened to your hand?”

“I dropped a glass last night,” I say, glancing over at the kitchen where I dropped the glass last night ready for this question. “I cut myself picking up the pieces. I should have gotten stitches.”

“Uh-huh. And your daughter? Where’s Sam?”

“At her grandparents’.”

“So you were here alone last night?”

“Sounds like you have something to ask me.” I say.

Schroder’s cell phone goes off. He flips it open and walks off a few meters, keeping his voice low.

“Yeah. We want to know how you can be in two places at once,” Landry says.

“What?”

“You’re going to tell us you were at home alone last night, right?”

“I was.”

“We got a description of you and your car seen outside our vic’s house last night. In fact we’re planning on having a lineup later on which you’ll be coming along to.”

“I wasn’t there,” I say, doing my best not to break out in a sweat.

“We can prove you were.”

“No. You can’t. Because I wasn’t. My wife is killed, and you come here and treat me this way? Screw you, Detective,” I say, my heart racing. “But you know what? I’m glad he’s dead. Maybe you can find whoever’s responsible and ask him to get the other six.”

“Interesting you’d put it that way,” Landry says. “See, when you say other six and not other five, that suggests you don’t think the killer was one of the gang.”

I don’t answer him. Before he can start back at me, Schroder snaps his phone closed. “There’s been a development,” he says, looking uncomfortable. “I mean, an incident.”

“What kind of incident?”

“It’s your father,” he says, and he stares at the ground for a few seconds before looking back up at me, and without him telling me, I already know what’s happened. “You’re going to need to come with us.”

The back of the car is hot even with the air-conditioning going. The only other sound is the tires traveling over the road, neither detective seemingly in a talkative mood—not like twenty minutes ago. They probably don’t know what to say. It’s an unmarked sedan, so it doesn’t look like I’ve been arrested, but it feels that way, sitting in the backseat, only the handcuffs are missing. I watch the landscape change as we head through different neighborhoods into the city, the sun beating down hard on all of it, nice areas, not-so-nice areas, other areas you’d kill yourself to avoid. We’re delayed in the beginning, a minor car accident outside the Hagley Park golf course in town bringing cars to a crawl, a golf ball sliced out of bounds and into the windscreen of a car, sending the driver into a spiral. Other people are jogging the park circuit, cherry blossom trees lining the route. I think about the cell phone I took from Kingsly last night. It was blank. No records of any incoming or outgoing calls. No text messages. It was a new phone. A disposable phone.

We park around the back of the building next to a patrol car, audience to a family of ducklings on a nearby grass shoulder who seem to have lost their mother. We take a rear entrance and enter a cold corridor with linoleum flooring and plaster walls, a few Christmas decorations hurriedly stuck up on the walls with bits of tape. None of us say anything. We walk in single file, one cop ahead of me, one behind.

A nurse with bright blue eyes greets us and frowns at me before talking to Schroder. She gives him directions to the ward and I tune out the conversation. I can’t stop looking at the patients scattered about the ground floor, people hooked up to IV drips on bags going for walks, some of them heading outside to puff on a cigarette, and I can’t see a single person in this hospital that doesn’t seem bored, this day stretching out into many others. If the hospital has air-conditioning, it must be buried somewhere, maybe in the nurses’ lounge, because it’s about forty degrees in here.

We go up a few flights, taking the elevator. The doors open into a corridor branching into different wards. Two police officers are standing outside one of the rooms. The larger of the two comes over and he must know Schroder because he nods at him and doesn’t
ask who any of us are. Landry holds back and makes a phone call. I’m left to stare at my feet.

“In the corner with the curtain drawn around him,” the officer says.

There are six beds in the room, all spaced an equal distance apart, three on each side of the room. Christchurch Hospital isn’t exactly the hub for medical advancement, but it makes do with what it has, even if most of what it has looks like it got ordered from a 1980s “Good Guide to Living” brochure. All the beds are full, but only one of them has a curtain pulled around it. There’s a gap big enough between the curtain and floor to see the feet of a doctor, and as we approach, he pulls the curtain away—
ta-da!—
revealing my dad. For the briefest second I’m sure he’s not going to be there, but of course he is, held down in his bed by tubes and a set of handcuffs connecting his right arm to the right rail.

Dad’s eyes are closed, all warmth and color gone from his face. His features have sunken, as if the near-death experience triggered an internal collapse in which his body began falling in on itself. This man is a cold-blooded killer, but he’s also my dad, and seeing him this way—well, I don’t know what I feel. He’s in jail because I killed a dog twenty years ago.

“It’s not as bad as it seems at first,” the doctor says, after Schroder tells him who we are. “One wound with a sharp object into the chest from the side. Not real close to puncturing the left lung, but if the weapon had been longer, who knows? Sounds bad—and believe me, it is bad—but it could have been a whole lot worse. The operation went about as well as it could. He’s heavily sedated still, won’t be waking up till this evening.”

“He’ll be okay?” I ask. “He’ll make a full recovery?”

“Should do,” the doctor says, nodding toward my dad. “We’ll keep him for a couple of days, and we’ll check him every few days or so after that, but yes, your dad still has the rest of his life to look forward to. Of course we’ll know more this evening once he’s woken up. The only thing to worry about at this point is infection. We’ll keep you updated,” he says, then walks off to the next patient.

“Who did this?” I ask, turning to Schroder.

“Nobody knows. A fight broke out during lunch. Inmates swarmed each other, and when they were pulled apart the guards found him,” Schroder says. “He was stabbed with a toothbrush, easy to file down, effective to use,” he says, and he sounds like he’s rattling off a sales pitch, like he makes a dollar for every filed-down toothbrush jammed into a convict. “Question is, why would somebody want him dead?”

“He killed a lot of women,” I say.

“And people have had twenty years to try and kill him in jail. Why now? Why the day after you visit him for the second time?”

I shrug.

“See, the timing is pretty suggestive, Edward. Your dad knows as much as anybody that prisons are good places for bad people to meet. I think your dad figured he could do some detective work of his own. We checked criminal records and came up with names and we’re still working that angle, and the ball’s rolling now and we’ve got some real good leads, but your dad worked it quicker from the inside. Who was he working for? Does he want those names to give to you? Or to us?”

“I have no—”

“See, Edward, it gets me thinking. It makes me think he gave you a name. And our victim last night had a stab wound in his hand, a big dirty wound similar to the one that’s on yours.”

“The only person who knows what my father was doing is my father,” I say. “And he stopped being my father twenty years ago.”

“For you, maybe. Not for him.”

“Well, maybe you can ask him when he wakes up.”

“Don’t worry, we will. First we’ll go through his cell.”

“Well, until then, if you don’t mind, I’d like to spend a minute with him. Alone.”

The detectives step away. I draw the curtain behind me for some privacy and then face my dad. It’s the third time in three days. My wife murdered last week, my father almost killed this week—what will happen next week? People say that things happen in threes. The accountant in me has always known that’s bullshit—but what if it’s true?

I try to imagine how I’d be feeling if the knife had gone in differently, ten millimeters deeper or to the left, hitting whatever it is that it missed—whether I’d be happy or sad or indifferent. I reach for my father’s hand but don’t quite make it there. I don’t want to touch him. This man isn’t even my father. He used to be, once. Then he became something else. I may have called him “Dad” over the last few days, but he wasn’t really that, not anymore. I don’t really know what he is. All those years—add up the sum of a man, and his total, a serial killer. A demon. There isn’t a single one of us who doesn’t think he got what he deserved. Including me.

There are two things separating my dad from the morgue. The first is two hospital floors of concrete and steel. The second is ten millimeters of good luck. Schroder and Landry take me down into the basement of the hospital and I don’t question it. I go along for the ride—which is a straight drop in an elevator that opens up into a corridor about a quarter of the temperature of the ones upstairs. We walk in the same order as before, with me in the middle. The corridor reminds me of the prison, concrete block with no Christmas fanfare, a painted line on the floor to follow. There’s an office door and then there’s a large set of double doors. We go through the double doors and the air gets even colder.