Five Minutes Alone (20 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

If we had more people in the city like him doing your job for you, then people like Linda would never get hurt in the first place.

Charlotte’s words stick with me as she leads us through to Peter’s study. She sits in the lounge with the kids and talks to them in flat tones while we go through Peter’s emails and bank accounts and anything else we can find, her words rattling around in my head, embedding themselves in there for good because she’s right, of course she’s right. And at the same time she’s wrong. It would be anarchy. We look for forty-five minutes and find nothing. We tell her that as we leave, and it alleviates her guilt of not helping us earlier. Her life changed last night. Never could she have thought when she woke up on Saturday morning that by Sunday morning her husband would be dead and the world would be upside down. That’s the way life works. Some people get to say good-bye—some don’t.

“We got two and a half hours before our ten a.m. meeting,” Kent says. “You want to grab a nap then meet for breakfast around nine thirty?”

“Waking up after an hour is going to hurt,” I tell her, “but it’ll hurt more if I don’t.”

“You want me to pick you up in the morning?”

“I’ll meet you there.”

She drives me back home. Her sister comes out and she smiles at me and tells me Bridget is still in the bedroom. I thank her for her help, and Kent drives away in the police car and the sister drives away in Kent’s car. I go inside and lock the door to the world behind me. Bridget is sitting up in bed reading a novel.

“You solved the case already?” she asks.

“No, but I have an hour off to recharge.”

I set the alarm and Bridget curls up next to me and I close my eyes, and the next thing I know my alarm is going off. I was right with what I told Rebecca earlier—it hurts.

Bridget isn’t in bed with me. I’ve slept sixty minutes and the feeling I have reminds me of the hangovers I got last year when I would drink away the days and the nights, the alcohol an important tool to numb away the pain of all that I had lost. I climb out of bed. I’m still dressed. I head down to the kitchen. Bridget is making toast and there are only two plates on the table.

“What time is Rebecca coming by?”

Rebecca. Not Carl.
Another good sign. I look at my watch. “She’s not. I’m meeting her in town.”

“Take a seat,” she says.

She brings over two pieces of toast and a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee. She brings over the same for herself. “You want to tell me about the case?”

Years ago I never would have. Years ago work stayed at work. It’d come home with me, it’d always be near the forefront of my thoughts, but I never shared it. I see no reason to change any of that. No reason to put bad images into Bridget’s head.

“You don’t want to know,” I tell her, which is what I used to tell her.

“Yes, I do,” she says, which is what she always used to say. “I want to be able to help you, Teddy,” she says.

“It’s fine. And, weirdly, it’s not a bad case, if that makes sense. The people showing up dead are bad people,” I say, and I take a mouthful of toast and then talk around it. “Except last night a good man died trying to hurt the men who hurt his wife.”

She nods, staring at me. “Somebody is out there killing bad people, and now good people too?”

“Last night didn’t go to plan,” I say, and take another bite. “Somebody who thinks they’re doing a good thing is doing a bad thing.”

“What are you going to do when you find him?”

“Arrest him.”

“And you think that’s the right thing to do?”

I swallow the piece of toast. I look hard at my wife. “What do you mean?”

“I know you, Teddy. I know you must be conflicted on this. I just want to make sure whatever decision you make is one you can live with.”

I let her words sink in. Before I can think of what to say, she carries on.

“Maybe we can go out tonight if you get back in time? A nice meal?”

“I’d like that.”

Just before I go I give Bridget’s parents a call and ask them to come over for the day while I’m at work. They ask me—like they always used to when they found out I was working on a weekend—why I’m working on a Sunday, and I give them the answer I always used to give them: because people die on weekends too. I tell them hopefully it’ll only be half a day. Bridget promises me she’ll be okay on her own until her folks show up.

I’m hungry again by the time I get into town. I meet Rebecca two blocks from the police station in a café called Froggies. I’m not sure what the owner’s intent was, but within days of it opening it became the go-to place for cops, and at this time of the morning—at least on a weekday—it can be almost impossible to find somewhere to sit. There’s a jukebox in the corner playing some seventies stuff—I know the songs, but can’t name them. There’s one spare booth along the back wall beneath a picture of a New York skyline, a black-and-white Empire State Building in the dead center of it. The café is warm and welcoming and smells like waffles and bacon and coffee, and what could be better? There are uniformed officers everywhere drinking coffee and trying to wake up for the morning shift, or who have finished their shift and are drinking coffee to wake up enough to drive home. There’s laughter from some tables, intense debate from others, stories about criminals being shared the same way fishermen talk about the one that got away, or the big one they caught.

We pick up a couple of menus even though I already know what I’m going to eat. So does the cook. At this time in the morning they already have a bunch of big breakfast meals prepared out back for cops on the go. Which is what we are. We order one each and two minutes later we’re eating bacon and eggs and mushrooms and tomato and hash browns and toast. I hate tomato so I pick it out and put it on Rebecca’s plate, and the whole time I can’t stop thinking about Schroder. Schroder the cop who arrested Dwight Smith. Schroder who years ago dealt with a man thrown on a set of train tracks to try and hide a crime. Schroder who knows all about Grover Hills.

Schroder the bald man.

Schroder who isn’t Schroder anymore.

I want to run it past Kent. She never worked with him, not really, just for a day or two earlier in the year when she had just been transferred to Christchurch, back when Schroder was fired. And they were together when the car exploded and almost killed them both, but that wasn’t working together, that was just being together. But she doesn’t know him. I was in the academy with him, we were on the streets together, I was with Schroder when my daughter was killed. We used to hang out on weekends during the summer, there were barbecues and beers, and we’d talk the same way other officers in this café are talking—about the ones who got away, about the ones we caught. Our wives would hang out, my daughter would run around with his daughter, we would kick in doors and storm into houses together and we fought the good fight together.

Kent starts in on her bacon, chews it for a bit, then talks with her mouth half-full. “Maybe it’s one of those
I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine.
Could be somebody was helping Peter, and Peter was supposed to help somebody. Or there’s a bunch of them building an army.”

“Do you think Kelly Summers was part of that army?”

She shrugs. “I’m just spitballing. When we know who that car
belonged to at Grover Hills we’ll be able to piece things together a little better. Come on, Tate, eat up, you’re going to make us late.”

I shovel what I can into my mouth, wanting to get my money’s worth and knowing I may not get another chance to eat today. Then we drive to the station.

The fourth floor isn’t any busier than normal. In fact it’s slower, probably because it’s a Sunday and I imagine a lot of detectives have “dead batteries” on their phones and haven’t heard the news. We stand in the task-force room, about twenty of us, half of what I was expecting. Somebody has been working in here because up on the board are photographs of the Collard brothers and Peter Crowley. On another board are photographs of Kelly Summers and Dwight Smith. The two boards are far enough apart to make me wonder if that’s because the cases are far apart—so far there’s nothing to link them other than the timing.

We chat to Hutton for a few moments and update him on our talk with Charlotte Crowley and the search of her house. Then the meeting starts. Hutton stands at the front of the room and briefs us. The fire at Grover Hills has been put out. The car has been identified, and belongs to a man by the name of Matthew Roddick. A dog found at the scene didn’t have a microchip implanted like we’d hoped and can’t be traced. Police sent to speak to Matthew Roddick found an annoyed girlfriend and no Roddick, just information that he had gotten a call in the middle of the night and had left quickly, taking his dog with him. The dog’s name is Buzzkill. The fire fighters still haven’t gained access to the remains of the building, so as of yet there is no information as to whether there are more bodies inside. A crane is at the scene and the logistics are being worked out on how to move the car without the building collapsing around it and without pulling apart the two bodies beneath it.

Matthew Roddick has a record for assault, drug possession, and armed robbery. Over the last ten years he has been in and out of jail a total of four times, adding up to seven years. Nobody is going to build a statue to remember him.

“We’ve pulled Peter Crowley’s phone records, and the call made to Matthew Roddick was made from his phone. We don’t know who made the call, or how many people we’re dealing with.”

“What’s the link between Matthew Roddick and Peter Crowley?” another detective asks, somewhere from behind me.

“That’s the thing. It doesn’t look like there’s one.”

“So why would he target Roddick?” the same person asks. “Why call him?”

“That’s what you’re going to figure out today,” Hutton says. He pauses then, shakes his head a little, and tightens his face in the way a man will do when there’s something on his mind he doesn’t want to talk about, but has to. “Before we go any further, I need to address something I shouldn’t need to, but seems I have to. I know what many of you are thinking. We’ve got a dead rapist confirmed—and we’re probably looking at two more once those bodies beneath the car turn out to be the Collard brothers. Three dead rapists and Roddick is a bad guy too, and he’s probably in that building somewhere, and you’re all thinking that the world isn’t going to mourn, and maybe you’re right, but maybe you’re wrong and there are brothers and sisters and parents and children out there who loved these men. It doesn’t matter either way. It’s our job to find who killed them, and if anybody here isn’t up to that, then you should turn in your badge now.”

Part of me expects a mass exodus, of people resigning on the spot and handing over their badge and ID. Part of me expects the shuffling sound of bodies as people squirm in their seats, looking at their hands or feet or towards the window, and that’s the part of me that’s proven correct. There’s a room full of people staying employed, all of them unsure where to look.

Hutton carries on. “We all joined the force for noble causes, and by joining we all swore to do the right thing by the law. I know some of you are thinking three dead rapists is the right thing, and that somebody out there is doing us a favor, and you have the right to think that—but none of you have the right to act on it. We’re
dealing with a vigilante. The public cannot take the law into its own hands. We will find this person, and the courts will decide his fate, and we will do this before other Peter Crowleys are dragged into it. Were these bad men? Yes, they were. Are we glad they’re dead? I’m sure some of you are. Will we drag our feet and fail to turn over every rock trying to figure out who killed them? No, we won’t. Is there anybody in this room a little unsure of what I’m saying?”

It doesn’t seem so. He lets five seconds turn into ten, ten into fifteen, and a year ago he would have been sitting down with the rest of us looking at his hands, but now he’s in control and again I keep thinking about how it suits him. He reminds me a little of the way Schroder used to be, standing at the front and taking charge, not taking any shortcuts and always following the rules.

Hutton carries on. “Good. Now, we know Dwight Smith was dead before he ended up on those train tracks, and the medical examiner says she can’t determine the cause of death. So the question is,” he says, and he looks at one board and then the other, a yard between them, “are the two cases related?”

Nobody knows for sure, but I think about the pried-open window at Kelly Summers’s house, the missing shower curtain, and most of all I think about Schroder. If I put my hand up and shared that with the class, then a third board would be added to the front of the room, this one sandwiched between the others with no room to spare, and on that board would be a photo of Schroder, taken from the last time he had his police ID updated.

“The two boys from the alleyway weren’t helpful at all with their description,” Hutton says, carrying on. “But we have another witness coming in this morning who saw a bald man at—”

“Must be Simon here,” another cop says, then pats his partner, who has a drastically receding hairline, on the shoulder. The line gets more laughter than it deserves.

Hutton ignores it. “A bald man that came to pick up Peter Crowley yesterday. Now, we don’t know this man is anything other than a friend who popped by, but Monica Crowley didn’t recognize
him. She’ll be working with a sketch artist this morning, and then you can use that to canvass the neighborhood. Hopefully somebody else spotted him.”

He tells us the fire department will be using a remote-control robot armed with a camera to look around inside Grover Hills. The car, once the bodies are stripped from beneath it, will be put on the back of a flatbed truck and driven to the lab to be examined. He says one of the bodies beneath the car had a gun in his hand or, more accurately, says the guy’s hand had melted around the gun. Then he breaks down some tasks for us. Kent and myself are given the task of going back to talk to Kelly Summers. And then the conference is over and we’re all pushing back from our chairs and desks.