Five Minutes Alone (15 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Schroder has two options. Find a weapon, or find a way out. Once out, he can walk through a bunch of paddocks and trees and find a road—but even that isn’t a great option, especially with Peter Crowley draped over his shoulder. It means leaving his car here, and maybe Bevin and Taylor and Buzzkill have a way of figuring out who owns the car, or maybe they don’t and they’ll call the police and then the police will figure it out. These men were kidnapped and brought out here. They could call the police right now and the world would see them as heroes.

Which really means he has only one option.

He has to kill Bevin and Taylor before their backup arrives. Taylor with no doubt the world’s biggest headache and perhaps a broken arm. Bevin with a headache too. Schroder thinks he could take them. He could walk out there and Taylor would be no match for him, and perhaps Bevin wouldn’t be much of one either.

First he has to get out of here.

He thinks about what his doctor told him. Don’t crash his car. Don’t get into a fight. One lucky punch from somebody and the bullet camping in his brain is going to switch him off. And it doesn’t even have to be that lucky a punch. He makes his way to the top floor, almost tripping on one of the stairs halfway up that’s warped and lifted a few inches, and maybe it could all end there—tripping over, hitting his head, the bullet keeping his brain company calling it a day. He begins opening doors and he uses his phone to search the rooms and there’s nothing, nothing but mattresses and beds and layers of dust. He moves to one of the windows where he can see his car and the two men.

Should he call Tate?

He considers it. What would he say? Come alone because he’s gotten himself into a situation? There is no scenario where Tate wouldn’t bring reinforcements. He will go to jail, but maybe jail won’t be a big deal. Maybe he only has a few days or a few weeks left in this world anyway. Yes, jail might not be a big deal, but despite running short on his range of emotions, the idea of his wife and children knowing he went from Coma Cop to Killer Cop kills him.

He walks the corridor. More planks of wood groan beneath him. He chooses another room, picks up a mattress, and tosses it at the window. The sound of glass shattering is magnified in the calm air, magnified by the wide-open spaces of the countryside. He sweeps the mattress back and forth to clear the glass away, it snags and catches, but gets the job done, then he reaches through and grabs the iron bars. He pushes them. He pulls them. He tries rattling them. There is no movement. One of the brothers points the flashlight at him. He ducks out of the room.

Back to the stairs and the same pieces of wood groan beneath him, the same damaged step almost making him trip. Outside the view is the same—the two brothers waiting for their friends. For Buzzkill.

The back door. If he can break the hinges, or if he can rock the door back and forth enough something might give. Five seconds of trying to budge it tells him it’s impossible, but he gives it another thirty seconds anyway. No good. The only way in and out is through the front door. Of course it is. This place was designed to keep crazy people inside.

The car that turns down the driveway a minute later is a white sedan. It comes to a stop next to his car. A guy topping six foot unfolds himself from the driver’s seat. A guy just as big does the same from the passenger seat. They’re both holding pistols.

Then one of them opens the back door, and who must surely be Buzzkill jumps out, lands on all fours, and starts barking as if its stumpy tail is on fire.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

A pair of officers follow us to the Collard house. On the way I read the file Hutton gave us, the file on what Bevin and Collard did nine years ago.

Bevin Collard had, according to him, been minding his own business while driving peacefully on the way to work. A car had cut him off. That car belonged to Peter Crowley. Bevin, according to him, honked his horn in frustration to which Peter, according to Bevin, wound down his window, gave him the finger, and called him a
fucktard.
Bevin who, according to Bevin, was insulted by the word and felt the word
tard
or
retard
was insensitive to the “special needs weirdoes you see when cousins bump uglies,” wanted to teach Peter a lesson. So he followed him home. Then he went there the following morning with his brother, Taylor. Only Peter wasn’t at home. It was Saturday and he was off playing cricket. A good way to teach Peter not to cut people off in traffic, the brothers thought, was to “make love” to his wife. That’s how they put it. They each made love to her, and why not, they asked? She certainly was a fine piece of ass.

Their account of events makes me sick. I struggle to read it out to Rebecca, just as she struggles to listen to it, and I notice that she eases off the accelerator, not much, but enough to delay our approach.

“These guys were animals,” she says.

“I know. But . . .” I say, then don’t say anything else. I shrug, and somehow that gets the message across. What is there to say? These guys have rights? That it’s our job to figure out what happened to them so we can protect them?

“I know,” she says, hearing what I’m not saying. “They spent
twelve minutes with her. Can you believe that? Within sixteen minutes they broke into her house, shaved her head and broke both her arms, and each raped her once, just leaving her on the hallway floor like a piece of garbage, like something they just used up. She couldn’t even phone for help.”

“I know,” I say, and I can see it all unfolding. It’s the policeman’s curse—you see so much bad shit that when you hear about other bad shit you know exactly how it went down, from the pleading of the victim to the dirty facial expressions of the attacker.

“All of it in front of her daughter.”

“I know,” I say, and if I ever walked in on something like that happening to my family—well, what man doesn’t think about what he would or wouldn’t do? But Peter didn’t walk in on it. The daughter would cry next to her mother for fifteen minutes before running to a neighbor for help.

The rest of the report doesn’t read any better, but I read it anyway, feeling myself getting angry as I do so. In court they used the defense that it was Peter’s actions that led them to attack his wife. The jury didn’t buy it. It didn’t help the brothers that the intersection where Peter had cut them off had a red-light camera, and the camera had caught Bevin talking on his cell phone while running the red light. It was Peter who braked hard and held his hand on the horn. It was Bevin who wound down his window and gave the finger.

“Let me ask you something,” Kent says, and she doesn’t glance at me, just keeps staring ahead at the road. She starts running a finger down the side of her face, touching the scars there, and I think it might be somewhat of a tell. I think she might do this when she’s having dark thoughts. I think she’d be a great person to play poker against. “What’s the outcome you want here?” she asks.

Are we on the same page?

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, let’s say we’re a week in the future and this case is closed, and we did everything right and found out exactly what happened, what result are you hoping to have had?”

“I’m just hoping we did the right thing.” I tell her.

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

“I do mean it. Why, what are you hoping for?”

“I’m hoping these guys killed themselves, just like Smith did.”

“He didn’t kill himself. We know that now.”

“These two guys the boys saw in the alleyway stuffing Collard into the trunk, they’re Kelly Summers’s fairy godmother. They’re who took Dwight Smith away last night, and tonight they’re making the Collard brothers disappear. Summers wasn’t involved, and I doubt Peter Crowley is involved. No reason for him to be following Smith, and no reason for Summers to go into an alleyway tonight to help Peter. It’s somebody else. A pair of somebody else.”

“The fairy godmother,” I say.

“And his fairy friend,” she says, then laughs and I laugh too.

“Be sure to call them that when we find these guys,” I say.

She keeps laughing, and it’s nice to hear her laugh. “I used to believe in fairies when I was growing up,” she says. “Maybe it’s time to start believing again.”

We reach the house. Half the streetlights don’t work, so all the houses just look like black holes against a slightly less black landscape. The Collard house is no different. We park outside and the patrol car parks behind us. The four of us walk up the pathway together, me and Kent unarmed, the two officers carrying handguns. There is no threat here—most likely just an empty house—but we still stay alert, the drugs the Collards were selling were made somewhere, and perhaps it was here. I knock on the front door figuring nobody is going to answer, and indeed nobody does.

We make our way inside, which is easy because the two officers have brought along a battering ram. The battering ram is a couple of feet long, made of steel, and can apply a few tons of kinetic energy to the lock it’s being swung into. In this case, and as often is the case, the lock survives the impact, but the door frame doesn’t, with chunks of it splintering away, wood cracking like a gunshot in the quiet street, bits of it left hanging sharp and ragged.

Nobody comes running out of any of the bedrooms. The two
officers go ahead of us, switching lights on as they go and pointing guns into the rooms. A minute later we’ve confirmed the house is empty.

We split up. Kent takes the lounge and one officer heads out to the garage while the other stays by the front door, keeping an eye on the street in case anybody else shows up. I take one of the other bedrooms. The house is impersonal. There’s no art anywhere, there isn’t a single photo on display, no pot plants, a mismatch of furniture and furnishings. I can’t even tell who owns the bedroom I’m in. It has a TV mounted to the wall, and beneath it a set of drawers with a game console and a couple of remote controls on top. The bed hasn’t been made, the sheets look like they need a wash, and the idea of touching them makes my skin crawl. I pull on a pair of latex gloves. I check under the bed. There’s an old pair of sneakers and a pile of magazines full of naked women. I open the closet and check between the clothes, I check the floor to see if it can be lifted here—a favorite hiding space for drug dealers—but the floor doesn’t budge. My heart isn’t even in it, to be honest, and probably the best we can hope to find are drugs. I’m tired and I want to be home with my wife. I see Kent walk past the doorway and head into another of the bedrooms.

I start going through the drawers. Socks. Underwear. T-shirts. I pull them out and toss them onto the bed. Next drawer is more of the same. Some jeans too, some shorts, a few wifebeaters. Then a folder, maybe a quarter of an inch thick, full of newspaper articles.

“I’ve got something,” Kent says, calling out from the bedroom across the hallway. I still don’t know whose bedroom this is. I carry the folder through to her. “Check this out,” she says.

She steps from the closet. The floorboards have been pried up. “It was already like this,” she says. “There’s nothing under there, but this will be where they hid their bag.”

“What the hell is it with criminals and floorboards?” I ask.

“Well it’s either that or the ceiling. You want to check the ceiling?” she asks.

“If there’s anything up there it’s probably just more drugs. Check
this out,” I say, and I stand next to her and start flicking through the articles in the folder. They’re articles about the attack on Linda Crowley, all cut extremely neatly from the newspapers.

“Quite the collection,” she says.

I keep flicking through, and then a small plastic bag falls out from between the articles and hits the floor. Kent scoops it up.

“It’s a ring,” she says, holding it up to the light. She twists the bag, studying the inside of it. “There’s no inscription.”

“Look at this,” I say, and it’s another newspaper article, only this one is much more recent. It’s about a woman who was attacked in a park three months ago by two men. She was pulled into a bunch of bushes, had her top pulled off, but then a guy walking his dog heard the struggle and intervened. His dog chased the two men off. There are a few articles on the attack. People were warned to keep a lookout in the area and to phone the police if they saw anything suspicious. Nobody was ever caught.

We don’t say anything to each other because there’s no need. The articles speak for themselves. Then a different story, only this one doesn’t have an intervening man with a dog. A woman was pulled into a car in a supermarket parking lot. She was driven a mile away to a park, raped, then left in the bushes. The men were wearing masks. Instead of calling the police she made her way back to the supermarket, got into her car, and drove home. She took a long hot shower, then a long hot bath, then one more long hot shower before crawling into bed. She would stay there and miss work and ignore her friends for a week until people started to come around and check on her. She told them what had happened. It was then that the police were called. By then there were no hairs, no DNA—and nobody to point the finger at.

“The Collards have been busy,” she says.

I keep going through the articles, frightened of what else I’m going to find, or what they’ve escalated to. The attack in the supermarket was one week after the failed attempt in the park. But there are no other stories in here.

“I have a plan,” Kent says, and she looks around to make sure neither of the officers can overhear her.

“Yeah?”

“How about I drop you off back home. It’s late. Then I’ll go home too. Then I’ll pick you up at eight o’clock in the morning and we can go and talk to Peter Crowley then.”

“And the Collards?”

“Fuck the Collards. None of this is going to help us find them, and even if we could, I’m not so sure I’d want to. Not yet. Tomorrow, maybe, but not now.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I tell her.

“But?”

“Does there have to be a
but
?” I ask.

“There is with you.”

“But we can’t do it,” I tell her. “We have to do our jobs, even if we don’t agree with it.” I hear the words coming out and wonder where they’re coming from, then I remember what Bridget said to me earlier.
You’re a good person. You did what you thought was right.
I have to start being a better man for Bridget. When I lost Emily, and when I thought I had lost my wife too, then I didn’t need to be a better man. I didn’t have to answer to anybody. I had nobody I could let down. “We have to be better than the people we’re investigating.”

She looks at the ring. “If these people hurt your family, what would you do?”

“My job,” I tell her. “That’s what both of us have to do, no matter where it leads. Come on, let’s go wake up Peter Crowley.”

“And if he’s not home?”

“Let’s just hope he is,” I say, because if he isn’t then he was probably one of the two men in the alleyway, which would make him the fairy godmother’s fairy friend.