Five Minutes Alone (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

I’m in the middle of a dream when my cell phone goes off. The dream is in an art museum. It’s not one I’ve ever been to, but I’ve seen enough of them on TV and in movies where art gets stolen to know how they look. We’re in a room with soft lighting, the sun diffused by frosted windows. I’m with Bridget and we’re talking about how we don’t get it. We just don’t. We’re looking at sculptures made from Band-Aids, from burlap sacks, we’re looking at things that at other times we’ve seen dumped on the side of the road. That’s the thing about modern art, Bridget is telling me. Some of it looks like it was constructed in ten minutes. Some of it looks like it took a year. You either like it or you don’t, but at the very least you can talk about it.

One of the pieces is ringing. It’s a cell phone that stands the height of a man, the body constructed from strips of roofing iron, the keys themselves are the old Bakelite phones we grew up with back when phones had dials and not buttons, back when people had to watch porn on videotape because the Internet was a thing of the future. These phones are bolted on, forming a three-by-four formation of twelve phones, and I can’t tell which one is ringing. I pick them up one at a time, getting only dial tones, and each time I hang up the modern art world slips away, little by little, until there is only one phone left. My phone. My phone sitting on the bedside drawers of my bedroom that, at seven thirty on a Saturday morning, has no art and, at seven thirty on a Saturday morning, is already lit up thanks to the fact that we’re a week short of December. That also puts us a week short of summer and one month short of Christmas. I guess at any given point we’re always short of something.

Bridget is sleeping deeply. That’s how she always sleeps these
days. All twelve phones from my dream—thirteen if you include the large one they’re stuck to—could be in here ringing and she wouldn’t hear them. Every morning when I wake up before her, I wake worried she’s found her way back to the vegetative state she was in for almost three years until, six months ago, something inside her came back to life.

I already know what the phone call is going to be about. Nobody rings early with good news. The caller display says it’s Detective Inspector Rebecca Kent. My partner. We’ve been working together for the last four weeks, when we were both put back onto the force. I’d met Kent before, but never worked with her.

“I wake you?” Kent asks.

I sit up on the side of the bed. “I was dreaming about modern art.”

“Is that what you like to dream about on your days off?” she asks.

“Among other things.”

“You ever have a dream where you could afford to buy any?”

“I’m working my way up to it,” I tell her.

“Next time you’re asleep, take some bribes. Anyway, guess why I’m calling?”

I stretch back my shoulders, trying to loosen them. Something clicks. These days something always clicks. “To tell me to enjoy my weekend?”

“Strike one,” she says.

“To tell me you’ll be here in thirty minutes to pick me up?”

“Strike two,” she says. “But you were close. Change
thirty
to
twenty,
and you got yourself a home run. We’re on the team.”

“What team?” I ask.

“The suicide team.”

“We’re killing ourselves today?” I ask.

She laughs. “Aren’t we killing ourselves every day for this city?”

“True.”

“And today isn’t going to be any different. We’ve got a suicide to look at. Do you remember a guy by the name of Dwight Smith?”

I know I’ve heard the name, but it’s too early in the morning to
think back to when. Maybe if I had coffee or a better memory I’d get there. The memory has been a little patchy since the coma. I reach up to my head and feel the part of my skull that took the blow. Six months ago I was in the process of rejoining the police force when a severe head injury put me into an induced coma. I was tracking a serial killer who got the jump on me. He hit me in the head so hard with a glass jar that the jar smashed. That was the start. A month after that I took further blows, these from a different killer who disliked me equally as much. It was all those combined hits to the head that got me my ticket to Coma Town, where I spent a few months. Prior to the injury, I’d been off the force for three years.

“I’m not sure. But I’m guessing you’re about to tell me all about him.”

“You remember Kelly Summers?”

I think about it for a few seconds. “Vaguely.”

She sums up Kelly Summers’s past in a twenty-second blurb, and what Dwight Smith did to her five years ago, then tells me she’ll see me soon. “I’ve got coffee,” she says, which goes a small way to making the morning sound a little better. And it needs to get better too—because she also tells me the body is in a dozen pieces.

I walk into the bathroom. For the last few months I’ve been getting what I call
old man knees.
Every morning they’re puffy and swollen and for half an hour or so a little sore when I walk around. I’ll be forty next year, and the old man knees feel like a warning. I spend two minutes in the shower washing down the other old man body parts. When I get out I see that the bed is empty, and I can hear Bridget in the kitchen. I grab my suit out of the wardrobe wondering if I’ll ever be able to afford one that’s more than two hundred dollars, and figure that I can if I do what Kent suggested—take bribes in my dreams. I head to the kitchen and my heart breaks a little. Bridget is making breakfast. There are three bowls on the table. One for me, one for her, one for our daughter, Emily. Bridget has her hair tied back into a ponytail, where it touches just below her shoulders. It’s just as blond as it was when
we first met, and just as wavy, but she keeps it mostly tied up these days. At thirty-seven, she’s two years younger than me, but has always seemed to age at a slightly slower rate than me, and even after all we’ve been through, all her body went through after the accident, she still only looks thirty. It’s genetics, because her mom looks twenty years younger than she really is. She turns towards me and smiles, that room-warming smile of hers that I’ve seen disarm others, the smile where I’ve seen men glance to her hand to see if she’s wearing a wedding ring. I imagine it’s every man’s dream to end up with a beautiful woman, and I’m living that dream.

Toast pops up and Bridget turns towards it, then moves it onto a tray, dropping the pieces quickly because they’re hot. Then she starts buttering them, changing her grip every second. I walk over and put my arms around her from behind.

“Morning,” I say, and I kiss her neck.

“Morning,” she says, without turning around. “I’m guessing that was Schroder?” she asks.

Schroder. The bowl for Emily. This happened for the first time two weeks ago. “No,” I tell her. “It was Detective Kent.”

“Kent? I haven’t met him.”

“Her.”

“She’s new?”

“She got transferred from Auckland this year.”

She keeps buttering the toast. “Is it bad? The body that’s been found? That’s why she called, right?”

I don’t answer. I let her go and move over to the fridge and grab orange juice, then pour us each a glass. Bridget puts the knife down and turns towards me. “What’s wrong? You look so sad all of a sudden.”

“I don’t work with Schroder anymore.” I tell her the easy news, hoping she’ll remember the rest without me needing to spell it out, but knowing that it’s unlikely. When she came out of the vegetative state she spent four weeks not remembering a single thing, barely even knowing who she was. The day she came out was the same day I fell into a coma. We overlapped each other by only a few
minutes. We were like ships passing in the night. Before I slipped into my own coma, I remember the doctor telling me Bridget had woken up, that there was a problem, and I don’t remember anything else after that.

“You don’t?” she asks.

“He left the force.”

She frowns a little. “When was that?”

“Earlier this year.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Did Kent replace him? Is she your new partner?”

“And you’re making breakfast for Emily,” I tell her, deciding not to update her on Schroder. He left the force because he was fired. He was fired because he had to make an impossible decision.

She shakes her head a little and gives me a slight smile. “Of course I’m making breakfast for her. I’m taking her to the movies later this morning. It’s a shame you can’t come along. But you’re avoiding my question. Why didn’t you tell me about Kent? Is she attractive?”

Four weeks after joining the land of the living, Bridget’s memory came back. All of it—minus the few hours before and during the accident. Then two weeks ago the problems started. Small problems. Painful problems. My wife wakes up into the morning of the accident. She thinks that everything is as it was three years ago. It’s the school holidays and she’s taking Emily to the movies and Schroder is my partner and the world, to her, hasn’t moved on.

Today is the third time it has happened.

I step forward and I grab hold of her hands. She tilts her head slightly and her forehead creases. “What is it you’re about to tell me?” she asks.

“Emily isn’t here anymore,” I tell her.

Her forehead creases even more. The room smells of coffee and toast, and I can hear the clock on the kitchen wall ticking, each second dragging out longer than it should, tick . . . tick . . . tick.

“What do you mean? It’s . . .” she says, and glances at the microwave, “it’s seven forty. Where else would she . . . would she . . .”
she says, slowing down now. The cracks are about to appear. I can see her making the connection. “Oh, I’m doing one of those dumb things again,” she says, and she turns away from me. She picks the knife back up and carries on buttering the toast. “I feel stupid,” she says, her voice shaking a little.

“Bridget . . .”

She puts down the knife and carries the toast over to the table. She sits down. “She won’t even be awake for another hour. She’s never up before eight during school holidays. I don’t know why I thought I would make her breakfast so early. I just wish . . . I just wish this’d stop happening, it’s like these stupid black spots in my memory are always shifting around.”

“Bridget,” I say, and I sit down beside her and take her hands. I hold them tight. “Emily isn’t here because Emily died. She died three years ago in the same accident that hurt you.”

Her face tightens and she tries to pull her hands out of mine, but I keep hold of them. “That’s not even funny,” she says. “Why would you be so cruel? Why would—”

“Bridget—”

“Why would you say such a thing, Theodore?” she asks.

“Babe—”

“Why?” she asks, and she’s starting to cry, the cracks are getting bigger. I pull her in closer to me. “Why,” she says, and she starts sobbing, and she wraps her arms around my neck and sobs into me. “I miss her,” she says, her tears running down my neck and soaking the top of my shirt. “I miss her so much.”

“I know you do,” I tell her. “I miss her too. I’m so sorry.”

“It was my fault,” she says. “I shouldn’t have taken her, we should have stayed home, we should—”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“I don’t remember any of it,” she says, and she never will. All she remembers is what we’ve told her, that a drunk driver was going through a parking lot at a shopping mall at the same time Emily and my wife were there. A drunk driver who had already been caught multiple times, who’d lost his license and paid numerous
fines, a drunk driver that the court system kept putting back onto the street, like handing a loaded gun to a gangbanger and sending him on his merry way. That drunk driver’s name was Quentin James, and he merryed his way directly into my wife and daughter.

She knows the man who did it disappeared, but she doesn’t know I was the reason why. I dragged him out into the woods. I told her what I had done while she was in her vegetative state. I’d always told her about my days. I’d confessed my sins to her. But not now.

I hold her, and I’m still holding her when I hear a car pull up outside. Kent gives a brief toot. “I can stay,” I tell her.

“No,” she says. “I’m okay. I promise.”

“I’m so sorry,” I tell her.

“It’s not your fault,” she says, but somehow it feels like it is. I should have been able to protect my family. “I’ll be okay. You go and save the world, Teddy,” she says, and she’s the only person ever to have called me that. Not even my mom. “Go out there and stop other girls like Emily from being hurt.”

I kiss her good-bye and she walks me to the door. She waves at Detective Kent because now she remembers her, and Kent waves back.

“You look like hell,” Kent says when I get into the car.

“Tough morning.”

“It’s about to get tougher,” she says, and she puts the car into gear and Bridget is still waving at us as we pull away from the house.

CHAPTER THREE

The victim isn’t in a dozen pieces, not quite, but it’s close enough, Rebecca says, and probably doesn’t make much difference when you’re the one being put into separate bags. But that’s in the future—it’s twenty or thirty minutes away. Right now it’s just a car ride through the suburbs. The car smells of coffee. I throw my jacket into the backseat on top of Rebecca’s. For now there’s sun and no blood. Cool air and no blood. Just two people taking a drive.

We’re not quite close enough to summer for it to be warm at eight a.m., but we’ll get there. Another month we’ll be waking up and stepping into seventy-plus-degree mornings, warm winds, and after lunch skin-blistering sunshine. On the front side of December the mornings look warmer than they are. The sun is low but bright, the sky is blue, the temperature barely touching fifty. It’s that annoying weather where it looks as though you don’t need a jacket, and you’re too warm when you’re wearing one and too cold when you’re not.

Rebecca is only a little shorter than me, but far more athletic-looking, the kind of body you couldn’t stop yourself from staring at if she jogged by. Black shoulder-length hair, bright blue eyes, the kind of woman you’d follow into the pits of Hell just to see her smile. Five months ago an explosion took that away from her—explosions are well known for making pretty people a whole lot less pretty, and that’s exactly what happened to Kent. Originally from Christchurch, she was posted in Auckland, where she spent ten years on the force, but was sent back earlier in the year to fight the good Christchurch fight and to replace one of our detectives who had fallen. Then that good Christchurch fight almost killed her. It was a car bomb that nearly tore her apart. It happened right at
the beginning of the Christchurch Carver’s trial. There had been a shooting in the parking lot of the court building where the Carver was being transported, and that was part one of the distraction. Part two came a few minutes later when C-four in Schroder’s car was detonated, with Kent and Schroder running from it. Kent’s chest was hit with bits of metal and glass, puncturing a lung; her left eardrum was ruptured; and she suffered two dislocated joints. Most of that is hidden away, either internally or by her outfits, but not the scar on her face. She wears that like a badge of honor. It’s a quarter of an inch thick, and runs an
S
-shaped pattern from her right ear to the bottom of her jaw. It’s a little ragged too. It looks like a fishing hook got caught just beneath her ear, and somebody just kept tugging it until it tore around her face and came loose.

Both of us are trying to get our feet under us again. Both of us are trying to move forward.

We don’t make small talk. We’ve just spent five days working together, and now it looks like we might be working the weekend too. Kent gets right down to the details. Tells me what to expect. Tells me there isn’t a complete set for the medical examiner to take a look at. I’ve seen bodies before that have been in pieces, bodies that have been scooped up into buckets, bodies with bits missing that were never seen again. I have a good idea of what’s coming up.

On my lap is the Dwight Smith file. It makes for awful reading, but these things always do. Files on the Dwight Smiths of the world don’t come with silver linings. It wasn’t my case. I can remember aspects and have forgotten others. I remember it was the kind of case that made you want to put him into the ground. There were a lot of cases that made me feel that way—the Dwight Smiths of the world. Five years ago this particular Dwight Smith had a few shots of whiskey, smoked some weed, then dragged himself to his neighbor’s house—one Kelly Summers—at eight p.m. on a Friday night and took all of his anger at the world out on her. He was angry because he’d lost his job. He was angry because his girlfriend had left him three days earlier. He was angry because the drugs he wanted to buy were no longer in his price range. He was angry
because he’d gotten a flat tire that morning, replaced it, and gotten another flat in the afternoon. So he dragged that anger with him three doors down the street and used it to brutally rape and almost kill Kelly Summers. Something held him back from taking that extra step. It couldn’t have been a concern at crossing a line. You don’t rape somebody, cut them up, then worry about boundaries. Smith wasn’t a boundaries kind of guy. What Smith was, it turned out, was a great-behavior kind of guy, and only served half his time.

There is a photograph of Kelly Summers, a look of surrender in her eyes, the photograph taken the day after the attack. There is a ragged scar down the left side of her face. It’s swollen and purple and the stitches holding it together look too big, like the stitches used on a rag doll. Aside from being a good-behavior kind of guy, Smith was also a biter. He left bite marks all over her neck and chest.

We hit the edge of the city. Gray streets stretch in straight lines between the gray buildings, forming chessboard blocks. It’s an overcast morning. If you had to sum up Christchurch in one word, you would go with
gray.
Different shades of it everywhere you look. Except for the traffic and the people. Colorful cars, colorful outfits, the occasional splash of greenery when you pass the occasional tree. We get through town and back out the other side of it. We head west. Shops and outlet stores give way to service stations and industrial buildings that soon give way to residential areas, which then give way to paddocks and farms. We’re heading in the direction of the Christchurch prison, which always brings up bad memories. I spent four months there last summer making friends with the cinder-block walls, having been sent there after I got drunk last winter, got into my car, and ran a red light. I was working a case as a private investigator, one that was going badly, one that made me start drinking and ultimately led me to crashing my car into another one, almost killing the teenage girl driving it. It was my lowest point. It was me becoming the same as the man that had taken away my daughter. Even now I’m still ashamed by it. The bad memories remain even as the prison comes and goes and we keep driving.

Suicides are tough work. They’re sad—not homicide sad, but a different kind of sad, the kind of sad I can relate to
.
Women often take pills, but men . . . men will do anything. I’ve seen men who have half cut their heads off with power saws, men who have stabbed themselves in the throat with screwdrivers, men who have smashed hammers into their heads over and over. In the world of suicides, the hardware stores are doing well. Three years ago when my daughter died, and my wife looked like she was going to die too, those same dark thoughts whispered to me too.
Come on, Tate,
they would say.
Do the world a favor. How about you, me, and that gun of yours all take a little walk on the wild side?

Five minutes past the prison the GPS speaks up and tells Kent to take the next left. To our left and right are farms and not a hell of a lot else. Seems like a long way to drive to kill yourself. Unless sheep and cows and wheat were the last thing you wanted to see.

We take the left and two minutes later we come to the train tracks. There’s the hustle and bustle that comes along with any train-related fatality—a bunch of police cars, an ambulance, people from the railway department. No media, at least not yet. Suicides aren’t newsworthy unless there’s a connection to somebody famous. Detective Inspector Hutton is up by the tracks. The scene is about five hundred yards from one end to the other. It’s a big scene. It’s cordoned off with tape. We get out of the car and the day warms up another degree and I put my jacket on and we make our way under the tape. In the past every red-blooded guy would be looking over at Kent and offering her some kind of smile, every red-blooded guy would be trying to figure out a way to ask her out on a date. But since the explosion she walks through them like a ghost, everybody trying hard to pretend they don’t notice the scar on her face.

The train tracks make their way from east to west, or west to east if you’re a glass-half-empty kind of guy. The grass leading up towards the stony bank is dry and thin and long and patchy, the kind of dry that looks dry no matter what the season, the kind of grass that isn’t lawn, just weed, and the kind of weed that isn’t
looked after. It stops at the edge of the stones, which angle upwards, elevating the tracks above everything else by three or four feet. Some stones have oil on them, some have grease, some have bird shit. Now some have blood on them too.

Detective Inspector Wilson Q. Hutton makes his way down the bank towards us, putting his arms out to his sides for balance. There are a few things that changed while I was slumbering away in a coma, but for the most part the world carried on the path that it was on, as worlds tend to do. But not everything was the same. Six months ago Hutton was close to a hundred and fifty pounds overweight, and he looked one cheeseburger away from his heart putting it and its neighboring organs out of their misery. He was given the ultimatum—lose weight, or lose your job. By the time I saw him again a month ago, he’d lost just over a hundred pounds, and he’s still heading in the right direction. He smiles at us. He never used to smile. It suits him. And seeing him out here means there’s more to this case than we first thought.

“There are two likely scenarios,” he says. “The first is Dwight Smith sat down on the train tracks and let the train scatter him into the breeze.”

I look around and, sure enough, there are pieces of what I’m guessing is Dwight Smith, each of them with a small red flag pinned into the ground marking the spot. A quick count shows there are nine. “And the second?” I ask.

“The second is somebody put him there. Our victim raped a woman five years ago, and he was released from prison two weeks ago. It looks like suicide, sure, but the time line is a problem.”

“Because if Dwight Smith was going to kill himself, he would have done it when he entered the prison system, not when he came out,” I say.

“Exactly.” He starts playing with the waistband of his pants. They’re a little loose. Maybe he lost weight on the drive over.

“And we’re sure it’s Smith?” Kent asks.

“The pay slip in his pocket suggests it’s him, but we didn’t find a wallet or any ID. The car,” he says, nodding towards the aban
doned car parked twenty yards away, “belongs to Ben Smith, which is Dwight Smith’s younger brother.”

“So it could be Ben Smith?” I ask.

Hutton shakes his head. “When Smith got released two weeks ago, he was given employment at a gas station,” he says, “and the body we have here is wearing that uniform.”

“So it could be anybody from the gas station.”

“Could be,” Hutton says, “if they had Smith’s pay slip in their pocket and had borrowed or stolen his car. Anyway, we fingerprinted the hand we could find and an officer is heading back into town as we speak. We’ll know soon.”

“The hand you could find?” I ask.

“We’ve got everything but his right hand,” Hutton says, nodding out towards the red markers. “Either it’s there, or some stray dog has run off with it.”

“You’ve called the brother?” I ask.

“No. I’ll leave that to you,” he says, “but not until we’ve made a positive ID. Once we confirm it’s Smith, we need to interview his family, his old cellmates, we need to chat to anybody who knew him. Killing yourself in jail makes sense, killing yourself out of jail is an anomaly. For the last two weeks Smith has been pumping gas for minimum wage. He’s been keeping a low profile. Apparently the train driver didn’t even see the body. Didn’t even know he’d hit anything. It was a guy moving cows from there,” he says, pointing to a field on the other side of the tracks that we can’t quite see because of the elevation, “to here,” he says, pointing to what I imagine is the same kind of field, only on this side of the tracks, “that found it. Or at least he found the biggest part of it. Last train of the night was one thirty in the morning, a freight train heading into Christchurch. Medical examiner is on the way, and we’ve got a forensic team heading to check the front of the last few trains for blood so we can figure out which one hit him.”

Another car pulls up. It’s a guy in a suit and a bright green safety vest who must work for the railway. He gets out of the car and he looks flustered and stressed and he takes three seconds to scan the
scene and to figure out who looks like they can make a decision. He heads towards us. He doesn’t get far, as one of the police officers intercepts him. There’s a brief discussion, and a moment later the man is being escorted towards us.

I climb the stones up to the tracks, my old man knees protesting along the way. The guy in the vest reaches Hutton and Kent, and soon they’re arguing about trains and times and schedules, and of course the train line must have been shut down once the body was discovered. The guy in the vest wants to speed things along, he says the words
time is money
repeatedly, occasionally slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other for added emphasis. “This is bullshit,” Vest guy says. “You got some prick who jumps in front of a train and now I’m the one whose day is shot to hell? Tell me how that makes sense.”

So Hutton tries to tell him how that makes sense, and I’m just pleased not to be part of the argument. Trains running late is just a part of life, just as people jumping out in front of them is a part of life—that’s what I’d be saying. We used to call that spontaneous suicide. Catch the ten-oh-four from Why-the-Hell-Not to Oblivion. That could be why Dwight Smith drove out here. He came for one reason and stayed for another. Maybe Smith was a good-behavior and no-boundaries kind of guy, and Mr. Spontaneity too.

There are officers walking up and down the tracks looking for the missing hand. The point of impact is fairly obvious by the blood splatter. The train hit Smith at seventy or eighty miles per hour, and the result is that Smith’s body was turned into a salvo of flesh projectiles, blood shooting in every direction, like hitting a water balloon with a baseball bat. On the tracks the blood looks like rust and on the thick wooden sleepers it looks like oil, and on the stones it looks like blood. The bits of Smith are all close by, the bulk of it his torso, which has both legs removed from above the knee and one arm removed too. It’s covered in dirt and grease and a few broken dandelions have stuck to it, and most of it is wrapped in the uniform of the gas station he worked for. I feel sick looking at it.