Five Minutes Alone (14 page)

“Would you? Or is that too much to ask?”

“Hmm . . .” I really look like I’m thinking about it. “Might be a bit extreme,” I say.

“Maybe just shoot them in the kneecaps? Or better yet, slice their faces open and let them heal like mine,” she says, and there is no humor in her words. Before I can answer, she puts her hand up to stop me and focuses on the phone call. I look into the back of the patrol cars and spot the one with the two kids who reported the crime. Kent nods and she says
okay
a few times, and then she writes something down on her pad. When she hangs up her mood has improved.

“I know what we’re looking for,” she says.

“And?”

“And it’s right behind you,” she says, and points to a car that is ten yards from where our car is parked. It’s a dark blue four-door sedan with a bumper sticker with a picture of a chess piece on it
that says
Bishop Takes Porn.
The car is locked. “Two, maybe three rapists in two nights. I get the feeling it’s going to be a long night.”

And I have the experience not to argue with her because she’s right. I also have enough experience to tell me there is something else going on here.

I just can’t figure out what.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Hopefully Taylor Collard is so badly hurt he’s just wandering in a random direction and they’ll find him soon. Schroder closes the trunk, then opens the door to the car. The keys are still in the ignition. If this is all about to go bad for him and Peter, he doesn’t want these two assholes being able to drive home. Those assholes at the very least can walk. He hides the keys beneath the step leading up to the veranda. He can’t feel any eyes on him. He moves inside. He knows his way around better than anybody else out here. There is no light coming from the basement, but that could just be because the iron door down there is shut.

He holds his arms out like a man who’s woken from the dead and searching for brains, stumbling forward and letting his fingers brush against the wall. The air coming from the basement feels a few degrees cooler than the rest of the building. He reaches for his cell phone. If he uses the display for light, then the Collards are going to know where he is if they are down here. If he doesn’t use it, he’s going to trip on the stairs and break his neck. So he uses it, but the display is limited, he’s lucky to see a foot in front of him. Slowly he makes his way down, ready to duck and react, but he gets there without any conflict. The cell door is open. Peter is lying facedown on the floor. He isn’t moving.

Upstairs he hears floorboards squeaking, then the front door to the building is being slammed shut. He runs up the stairs in time to hear the chain being pulled through the handle. He bangs against it as the padlock latches into place.

“Fuck you, loser,” Bevin Collard yells, his gravelly voice annoying Schroder more now than it did earlier. He rattles the doors, but it’s useless.

He heads back into the basement. He’s cautious going into the cell. If you’re in there and the door is locked behind you, then there’s no way out. Sure, the front door to the whole building is locked, but better two stories of patient rooms to move around in than a scream room the size of a jail cell. One side of Peter Crowley’s skull has been dented in. The first blow probably killed him, only there was more than one blow because there’s a line of blood on the ceiling, cast off from the second and third blow. Then he notices the beer bottle. Or pieces of it. The same one from the alleyway. Taylor must have brought it with him from the car. The first and second blow didn’t smash it, but the third one did. One of the pieces of glass was probably used to cut the plastic ties securing Bevin.

Last night didn’t go to plan, but compared to this, last night went like a dream.

He crouches next to Peter and puts a hand on his shoulder. The guy deserved his five minutes, he deserved his revenge, and this is his reward, his ultimate reward for having his wife raped, his wife dying, his reward for being angry about it.

“I’m sorry,” he tells him, but Peter doesn’t answer him. He just continues to lie facedown in a pool of his own blood. No amount of apologizing is going to undo this, but he gives it a shot. “I’m really, really sorry,” he says, and he means it. He means it because he cares. Right now he is caring a lot, and right now he doesn’t want these guys finding him and killing him. Nor does he want to go to jail.

“I’ll make them pay, I promise,” he says. “I hope that’s at least some comfort.”

He’s not sure it is, but what he does know is it’s all Peter has right now. For a man who a day ago couldn’t feel anything, he sure as hell is feeling a lot of guilt, sorrow, and anger, all in generous quantities. He thinks about it a little more. “And, well, you were the one who checked for a pulse on Taylor,” he says, and that helps alleviate some of the guilt. But not much, because why was he satisfied with Peter’s assessment? What, did he suddenly think Peter was an
expert on picking whether somebody was alive or dead? Pulses can be easy to miss, especially when you’re flustered, when you’ve just killed a guy, when you think you’re about to be caught. Pulses can be easy to miss even when you’re none of that. He knows this. It was drummed into him years ago during first-aid courses.

He realizes he hasn’t checked Peter for his pulse. He does that now, pushing two fingers into the guy’s neck, nothing, nothing, he keeps searching, nothing, nothing, then something. Faint, but there. The guilt alleviates a little more.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” he says, and he feels relief. “I promise,” he adds, but he’s been making a few promises lately he hasn’t been able to keep.

With both the brothers injured, and with the car keys hidden, the two men aren’t going anywhere. Unless they can hot-wire a car, which he figures they probably can. He wonders what their plan is, or even if they’ve figured one out yet. Hopefully they’re just stumbling around out there. Hopefully one of them has stepped into a bear trap and the other fallen into a well.

He heads back upstairs. He starts going into the rooms as he passes them, looking at the iron bars over the windows and wishing he’d taken this show into the middle of the woods instead of the goddamn scream room. He finds the kitchen. He knows there’s a door that leads from the back of the kitchen outside, but the damn thing won’t budge. It’s bolted closed or chained up, he can’t tell. He puts his shoulder into it, he kicks at it, but nothing. He searches the kitchen, but there are no tools, no utensils, no cutlery—all that stuff was stripped away years ago. In the bedrooms there are beds he can hide under or take an uncomfortable nap on, but nothing else.

He moves into an office that looks out over the driveway. Something scuttles in the corner, making him jump, and when he turns his phone towards it he sees a possum staring at him, it’s eyes reflecting the light from his phone back at him. It hisses, takes half a dozen steps towards him, then turns and runs into the corridor. Suddenly a beam of light comes through the window from outside and hits him in the face. He ducks down, but the light keeps com
ing through the window and hits the wall behind him. It doesn’t follow him. It’s the headlights from the car. There are no voices and no sense of urgency. The brothers know he’s locked in here.

He moves into the next office and stays low, then pokes his head up to peek through the window. Both men are standing less than twenty yards from him. The window is covered in grime and there’s a triangle section missing from the bottom, enough to put your fist through if you had the urge to slice up the sides of your forearm. He moves out of the office and into the first bedroom and gets the same view, a dirty window, more ivy has twisted around more iron bars, the two brothers beyond. This window is cracked, but there don’t seem to be any possums.

He goes through the ground floor, checking windows and doors, but he’s locked in here. And he has no weapon. He should have picked up the damn knife Bevin pulled on them earlier. He comes back to the office with the hole in the window. Taylor is out there holding the flashlight, his left arm hanging limply from the blow he took in the alleyway. Bevin is looking at something in his hand. A moment later he lifts that something up to the side of his head. A moment after that he talks into it.

They dumped the brother’s cell phones in the alleyway. This must be Peter’s.

Shit.

He holds his breath and concentrates and does his best to listen in, putting his ear up to the missing triangle of window. The words carry on the still air.

“Matt? It’s Bevin. Listen, I need your help. You heard of a place called Grover Hills? Yeah, yeah that’s it. You know where it is? Well look it up on a map. Listen, I need you and . . . No, listen to me, it’s important. I need you and a couple of the . . . Yeah, I know what the time is. . . . Uh huh, uh huh, well look, of course it’s important otherwise I wouldn’t be calling. I need you guys to come out here. And bring a couple of guns, okay? We’re forming a hunting party,” he says. “Uh huh, yeah, I knew you’d like the sound of that. Bring Buzzkill too. Oh, and some gas and a couple
of flares. Uh huh. Okay, sure, you can bring beer, but it’s for when we’re done, okay? Not before.”

They’re going to wait out there for him. Then they’re going to burn the place down. Or they’re going to come in looking for him. They’re going to shoot him, probably torture him a little, then set him on fire. Then they’re going to sit around popping open some beers and reliving the moment.

He figures he has fifteen or twenty minutes to figure a way out of here before Matt and Buzzkill arrive to turn him and Peter Crowley into ash and bone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

We talk to the two kids who phoned in the crime. At the same time we’re waiting for Hutton, whose return has been delayed because now he needs a warrant for the car and also for the Collard house. It seems crazy because there’s a crime in progress, but we’re okay with crazy—we’re okay with taking our time to get things right when it’s people like Bevin Collard who’s in trouble. We’re happy to take the time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, just like Hutton said out by the train tracks. If the Collards were the ones committing the crime, we’d have broken into their car already and ransacked their house.

The kids are nervous and seem to think we’re going to arrest them. One kid’s name is Danny and the other is Harry, and I wonder what their combined couple name would be, whether it’d be Darry or Hanny. Danny, the older one at fifteen, shrugs his shoulders at every question even when he knows the answer, and Harry can’t keep himself from staring at Kent’s chest. Their names make them sound like an IQ test, like
If Danny has half as much acne as Harry, and Harry has twice as much acne as Danny, then who’s taller?
In this case, Harry is taller, and Harry has glasses he has to keep pushing up as if they’re a little too loose, and Danny is wearing a leather bracelet he keeps fiddling with, and both kids are equally nervous.

“It’s just like we keep saying,” Danny says, “we didn’t see much.”

“And you saw just the one person being put in the trunk?” I ask.

Harry shakes his head, and Danny nods, two nervous boys on different pages.

“Okay. Let’s try this again,” I say. “Was it just the one person who got put into the trunk?”

“We didn’t see a whole person,” Danny says. “We just saw the bit at the end where we saw these two guys tucking somebody’s legs—”

“The rest of them was already in there,” Harry interrupts. “At least we think he was, unless the legs—”

“Were cut off,” Danny finishes, “which they could have been. And there could have been a whole pile of body parts in there. Could have been two or three people.”

“Or ten,” Harry adds.

“Are you going to tell our parents we were drinking?” Danny asks.

“If you’re helpful,” I tell them, “I promise I won’t say anything.” Which is true. It’ll be one of the officers here that will take these kids home, and they’ll be the one to tell the parents. “You’re not helpful, then we’ll take you back to the station and put you in a holding cell for the night.”

Both boys look petrified at that thought.

“What about the two men outside of the car?”

“We didn’t see much of them,” Danny says. “I mean, you’re lucky we even saw any of it. It’s pretty dark down there.”

“How far down the alleyway were they?”

“Pretty far down the end.”

“So how did you see them?” I ask.

“We were . . . I was, anyway, umm, going down there to take a leak, and so was Danny,” Harry says, and Harry finally looks away from Rebecca’s chest and it’s all Danny can do to keep making eye contact with me.

“You were going down there to buy drugs, weren’t you,” I say.

“Look, we called the police, right?” Danny says. “We did the right thing. If we hadn’t called, you’d never know we were even here. Please don’t tell my mom and dad.”

“Or mine,” Harry says, looking up at us. He’s starting to cry. “Please.”

“I promise I won’t tell them anything about it,” I say, which is just as true as not telling them about the drinking. “Tell us what happened.”

So they tell us. It was the classic case of each of their parents thinking their boy was at the other boy’s house. It’s classic because it works in the movies just as well as it works in real life. They caught the bus into town and there was a guy they knew, the older brother of a friend of theirs, who, for a ten-dollar fee, would buy them a six-pack of beer. This wasn’t their first time into town at night, and each time here they learned something new, new friends who had older brothers who could help them out. Yesterday at school they heard about a couple of guys selling drugs. So that’s why they came here. They thought it was exciting. They thought it would be an adventure. They got halfway down the alleyway when they heard the voices. Then they hid behind the dumpster and they saw the legs of somebody as he was stuffed into the trunk and the adventure was over. The best description they can give us of the car is it’s a sedan, and that it’s dark. The problem is the alleyway has such poor lighting that dark covers a bigger color spectrum than normal. It almost covers everything except white. Best description they can give of the two men is that one was bald and one wasn’t, and that they were old.

“You know, like your age,” Danny says.

We put the kids back into the patrol car. Soon they’ll be taken down to the station to talk to a sketch artist, but first their parents will be called. I imagine those kids are going to find themselves grounded for six months. Hutton has shown up. He’s brought along the Collard brothers’ file, a warrant, and a slim piece of metal that’s twenty inches long plus a hard triangle piece of foam that fits in the palm of his hand. He wedges the tip of the foam down the side of the window of the car to create a gap that widens the further down the foam goes.

“Breaking into a car always reminds me of Schroder,” Hutton says.

“Schrodering the car,” I say.

“What does that mean?” Kent asks.

“It’s a case we worked on a few years ago,” Hutton says, and he slides the thin piece of metal between the window and the door
of Bevin Collard’s car. “Schroder had gotten a warrant for a work premises. The suspect was a mechanic, so the premises was a workshop. The warrant included all the cars that were parked there and being worked on. The problem was the workshop was next to an auto body shop, and between the two buildings was a driveway. The driveway belonged to the auto body shop, but he often let the mechanic use it to park cars. Schroder didn’t realize the driveway belonged to the auto body guy. He opened the cars on it and found a pile of bloody clothes inside the back of the mechanic’s car, who was the suspect, but technically the warrant didn’t allow for the search. Our case was shot after that. The guy got away with it.”

“Shit,” Kent says. “Sounds tough.”

“Tougher than some,” Hutton says, still working with the piece of metal. Experts can pop a lock in five or ten seconds. Hutton isn’t an expert. “And not as tough as others. But whenever there’s a car involved we’re extra careful. If not for that case, what was it, six years ago?” he asks me.

I nod. “Maybe a little longer.”

“Well, if not for that case we probably would have opened this car,” he says, nodding to Bevin Collard’s car, “as soon as we saw it here. Maybe we’d already know where they are. But the law is the law, and if anybody tries to shortcut it and open a car without a warrant, we call it
Schrodering.
”

“And how does Schroder feel about that name?”

“We never told him,” Hutton says, “and we sure as hell never said it around him.”

While he works on getting the car open, we show the photographs from the files to Kyle Landry, who looks at the first one, nods, then looks at the second. He nods with that one too. “That’s definitely them. I’ve never seen them apart.”

Which means they probably weren’t apart tonight, which means they’re probably not apart right at the moment. At the same time we’re showing him the photographs, four police officers are going through the dumpsters. It’s an awful job, and one I’ve had to do in the past, and one that would make me retire early if I had to do
it again. People throw all sorts of stuff into the garbage, from pus-soaked bandages to dead mice, sometimes you’ll find a dead dog or a dead cat. Or worse.

Hutton gets the locks on the car to pop up. I’ve been at scenes like this before where cops have wagered on whether there’s going to be a body in the trunk. We check that first. All that’s in there are some plastic bags, a towing rope, and a set of jumper cables. In the front and under the seats are some soda cans and fast-food wrappers and nothing of any importance. Same for the glove compartment. Assuming the Collards don’t come wandering out a bar later on tonight, the car will be towed away and searched more thoroughly by the guys who searched Dwight Smith’s car.

“That was a waste of time,” Kent says.

“Had to be done,” I tell her.

“Go check their house,” Hutton says, and hands Kent the warrant for the house. “See what you can see.”

“Should we go speak to Peter Crowley first?” I ask.

Hutton nods as he thinks about it, then shakes his head. “No,” he says. “We don’t know the reason these guys were abducted, and if it is related to Dwight Smith, we don’t know if Peter Crowley is involved. Go to their house first. For all we know they’re sitting in front of their TV.”

“You know what kind of men leave behind their stash of drugs, right?” Kent asks, as we walk back to the car when Hutton is out of earshot.

“Dead men,” I tell her.

She nods. “What do you think the chances are of them sitting in front of their TV?”

“Zero,” I say.

We reach the car. We stand next to our doors, but we don’t climb in. We look at each other over the roof and carry on talking.

“Do you think that’s the point?” Kent asks.

“I don’t follow.”

“Hutton is sending us to the Collards’ house first, and not straight to Peter Crowley. Do you think he’s doing that because
he wants Peter to have a chance to finish what he’s doing, if he’s doing anything at all?”

“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” I say.

“I think like that all the time,” she says, and she unlocks the door. “Come on, let’s go fight the good fight and try to save these assholes.”