Five Minutes Alone (21 page)

“I’ve been thinking,” Kent says. “If this bald guy was following Dwight Smith, then it’s possible the gas station camera picked him up. We should check it out.”

I think about it for a couple of seconds. “It’s a good thought.”

The footage from the gas station was burned onto a DVD for us. It’s already been loaded up and viewed by others since yesterday, so viewing it on the computer is as simple as a few clicks of the mouse. We see Kelly Summers pull into the service station, we see Dwight Smith with the pause in his step towards hanging up a pump. We see Kelly leave and we see Smith follow, but that’s all we see, and that’s because the footage we burned is only from those angles and from that time.

“We need to widen the scope,” Kent says.

“I agree. We need all the angles, and we need to go back further, and perhaps forward. We need to run the plates of all the cars and cross-reference them against criminal records and case files. If we’re lucky we’ll find a bald guy leaning against his car at the same time Kelly Summers appeared.”

“Let’s head back to the gas station,” Kent says, standing up.

I stand up too. “Can you take care of this one by yourself? I want to check on Bridget. Just for an hour or so. How about I meet you at Kelly Summers’s in an hour and a half?”

“Sure thing, Theo. I understand. Let me know if the plan changes and I can get somebody to cover for you.”

“I’ll be there.”

We head outside and Kent drives off and I sit in one of the unmarked cars and get out a map and I look at the spot Dwight Smith was found, and I look at the address where Kelly Summers lives, then I run my finger slowly between them, transporting myself to those streets, trying to remember what’s there. There are three malls within range of this route that include supermarkets, plus at least a half dozen stand-alone supermarkets, but as best as I can tell there are only two which operate twenty-four hours.

I tap my finger on the location of supermarket number one and figure it’s as good a place as any to start.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Schroder hasn’t slept well. For a guy who had his emotions switched off by a bullet, he feels—

Feels?

Feels he should have slept better. Only he’s hardly slept at all. Every time he closed his eyes he would see Peter Crowley’s broken-in skull, would feel his hand on his arm, would hear his final
chocolate ice cream
words. So he feels guilt and he also feels pain because his arm is throbbing consistently. That damn dog might have been carrying rabies or the plague or perhaps it was HIV positive or riddled with swine flu. Once he washed the blood and dirt away there were holes not as deep or as ragged as he’d feared, but they’re still going to need treatment.

Four dead men. No, five dead men. That’s three more than were supposed to die. The police will visit Peter Crowley’s family. The daughter will remember seeing him, and she will give a description, but it won’t be a good one. She looked through him as if he wasn’t there. He doesn’t think there were any witnesses from the alleyway, and if there were, what did they see? Two men in the dark and a car with an unreadable registration license.

The plan had been to dump the brothers where they could be found—he was thinking the beach—and then the police would assume a vigilante killer was working by himself, they wouldn’t be thinking Kelly Summers and Peter Crowley were directly involved, they’d be thinking somebody was working from a list, somebody whose life had been altered by men like Dwight Smith and the Collard brothers, and they would never know where they had been killed.

They will think the same thing now—only a vigilante killer who is giving victims their five minutes. He wonders if Tate will think anything more than that, and suspects he will.

“What do you think?” he asks Warren.

If there’s one thing I know,
Warren says, or
would say
if he could,
is that flies taste really awful. No wonder you don’t eat them.

“And Tate? What about Tate?”

Tate always gets his man. You’re going to go to jail.

“I wish I hadn’t asked you a damn thing,” Schroder says.

Warren says nothing. Of course he says nothing.

Schroder drives to the nearest shopping mall and goes into one of the two pharmacies in there. He buys iodine, some gauze and bandages, and then he buys a new cell phone to replace his broken one and he drives back home. He cleans the wound, splashes iodine all over it, applies some gauze, then wraps bandaging around it. He should get stitches. He should get a rabies shot. But who the hell ever gets rabies these days? He’s never heard of it happening. He’ll keep an eye on it for infection. He takes some codeine pills and after ten minutes the pain starts to fade. He puts his original SIM card into his new phone and charges it up and copies his contact list to it.

He is back out again when his new cell phone rings. He’s at a tire store having his two tires replaced, a job that has taken fifteen minutes so far and still has another five to go, and a job that’s going to cost him three hundred dollars. He gets out the phone and looks at the display and sees it’s Tate. He moves away from the only other customer in the store, a young guy who keeps telling the man helping him that the most important feature he wants in his tires are that they look cool.

Is this it? Is Tate calling to tell him he’s figured everything out? Have they taken Kelly Summers down to the station and has she confessed? It’s possible. He told her if they took her into the station she was to say nothing except to ask for a lawyer. He told her the police have a way of trying to sweet-talk you around that. Then
he realizes it’s even probable she’s told the police everything. And really, isn’t that what he deserves for letting an innocent man die last night?

“Theo,” he says.

“Carl, it’s Bridget,” Bridget says, and for a moment he’s confused. Bridget? Bridget who? Theo’s Bridget? Why would Theo’s wife be calling him?

“How have you been?” he asks, because he knows that’s what he is supposed to ask. He hopes she’s okay—and with that thought he realizes he hasn’t become a sociopath. Of course he hasn’t. He hopes she’s okay and he hopes Theo is okay too. Plus a sociopath wouldn’t feel bad that Peter Crowley got killed. With those thoughts he realizes something else, something he thinks his mind has been trying to shield him from over the last day and a half—all of this has made him feel alive. All of this killing has made him
feel.

“There’s something wrong,” she says. “With Teddy.”

Teddy.
He forgot she always used to call Theo Teddy. Personally he thinks it’s stupid. “Tell me,” he says.

“I woke up and he’s left a note. It says that he’s gone to work and there’s a woman here to look after me, but . . . but . . . there’s no woman and no reason I need looking after, and when I try his number it doesn’t work. It says it’s disconnected. I was going to call the police station but . . . Well, you’re his friend, right?”

“Right,” he tells her.

“I can’t call him at work,” she says.

“Why not?”

She doesn’t answer him, but the line remains open. Is she still there? Did she fall asleep? Slip back into a vegetative state? “Bridget?”

“I’m still here,” she says.

“What do you want from me?”

“Am I . . . how do I put this,” she says, and spends a few more seconds not putting it any way at all, then finally she comes up with something. “Am I on the phone to Carl Schroder the cop, or am I on the phone to Carl Schroder our friend?”

You’re on the phone to neither.
“What’s this about?”

“Please, Carl, just answer the question.”

The question suggests something is wrong. It suggests she’s in trouble, the kind of trouble that can’t involve the police. Or Theo, for that matter—is that why she’s calling him? “The friend,” he says, which is the only answer he can give since he hasn’t been a cop for some time now.
She knows this, doesn’t she?

“Are you sure?” she asks, and she sounds unsure.

“Yes.”

“Can you help him?”

“Help him do what?”

“Not help him do something, but stop him from doing something. I think he’s planning on . . . hurting somebody.”

“Who?”

“I’ll tell you all about it when you get here, but please, you need to hurry.”

“Because we need to stop him from hurting somebody.”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t have time for this. But he knows Bridget, and he knows she wouldn’t be calling unless she really needed his help. He hasn’t seen her since she was released from the nursing home. Last time he spoke to her Emily was still alive.

A lot has happened in that time.

“Please,” she says. “You’re the only one who can help.”

“I’m on my way.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I drive to the supermarket. It’s one of the city’s biggest supermarkets and during the day it’s busy, and during the day on a weekend it’s even busier. I park on the edges of the parking lot, a few hundred cars between me and the front door. I maneuver my way around carts full of food, some with screaming kids sitting in them and some with parents making the kids quiet with pleas or threats or bargaining, others doing their best to pretend none of this is really happening. I remember Emily begging the same way. I used to hate shopping with her. She thought anything within reaching distance belonged to her, and the more colorful it was the more she needed it.

I use the signs hanging over the aisles to navigate my way through the supermarket, looking for the bathroom supplies. They don’t have many shower curtains, just three styles to choose from, and within those styles a couple of different colors, but none of these match the curtain I saw in Kelly Summers’s house.

When a guy working at the supermarket walks past, I ask him if they have any bright green shower curtains, and he looks at where I’m looking and says no, so then I’m a little more specific and ask him if they usually have them. Or ever have them. He says he doesn’t know, and tells me to ask at the service desk.

I head up to the service desk where a woman with huge glasses helps me, her eyes magnified to look like golf balls, and one of those balls is slicing out to the right. She tells me the shower curtains I saw are the only curtains they have.

“No bright green ones?” I ask.

“Did you see any there?”

“No, but maybe somebody just bought the last one.”

“Then you’re out of luck,” she says.

I show her my badge and she stares at it for a few seconds, then stares back at me, her golf-ball eyes taking it all in. “It’s important,” I tell her.

“Okay, Detective,” she says, then turns her back to me and picks up a phone. Sixty seconds later she has an answer. “We don’t sell green curtains,” she says. “We might have, years ago, but nothing now.”

I thank her for her time. I walk outside to find half a dozen free parking spaces all within twenty yards of the entrance. I walk across the parking lot to my car.

The next supermarket starts out with the same experience. Lots of traffic, not many spaces, and I end up parking on the edge of it all. Inside there are more screaming children, teenagers laughing loudly, elderly people will suddenly stop walking in front of me or change direction so I almost bowl a couple of them over. The layout of the supermarket is similar and I find the bathroom section, and this is where things between the last supermarket and this supermarket are different. There are only two shower curtains here to choose from. A bright green one, and a bright orange one. I pick up the bright green one. It’s the same one I saw yesterday morning.

I carry it to the service desk. I have to wait behind a woman who’s trying to return an empty bottle of wine because she didn’t like the taste, while the woman behind the counter is telling her she must have liked the taste enough to have drunk it. The debate goes on, then carries on as a different woman comes over to ask if I need any help. I show her my badge, show her the curtain, and ask if she can access on her computer when the last few of these were sold.

“I can’t,” she says, “not from down here. Let me get the manager, I’m sure he’ll be able to help.”

The manager is indeed a helpful guy. He’s in his midforties, but when he talks he sounds like a teenager, putting a raised inflection on the end of every sentence. He shakes my hand eagerly and then leads me upstairs and into his office. There are schedules and staff
photos covering one wall, awards for best supermarket and safety and health and liquor certificates and licenses across the others. He uses his computer to punch in the barcode on the back of the shower curtain I’m carrying.

“It’s not what I’d call a popular item,” he says. “We’ve sold two in the last month.”

I feel my heart skip a beat, and I suck down a deep breath and exhale calmly, not wanting my voice to break.
Please let one of them be Friday night—but is that really what I want? To see Kelly Summers buying it? Or the man that helped her? No, what I want is for Dwight Smith to have jumped in front of a train.

“Let’s see,” he says, and a moment later he has his answer. “Friday night. Or, more accurately, early Saturday morning,” he says, and bingo. It’s showtime. “Here,” he says, then taps the monitor, “they were sold just after four a.m. Both in the same purchase.”

Now my heart is making up for the skipped beat. Now it’s racing. So Dwight Smith not only pried open Kelly’s window, he made it inside. Then what happened? Was she waiting for him? Or did the bald man follow him there? Why two shower curtains and not one?

“Can you pull up the receipt? What else was bought with them?”

“Hang on,” he says.

This time it requires a few more minutes of work on his behalf, but then the receipt is displayed on the computer. “Air freshener, oils, and some scented candles. Looks like somebody was freshening up a couple of bathrooms,” he says, and I remember the strong smell of lavender. “I’ll print it out for you.”

“Thanks. Was cash used? Credit card?”

“Hang on a sec. . . . Cash,” he says.

“Okay, okay. Surveillance. You guys have cameras everywhere, right?”

“Not everywhere,” he says, smiling up at me, “but yes, we’ll have the person on camera who bought the curtain. Want to tell me what they did?”

“I can’t,” I tell him. “Can you get me footage?”

“Follow me,” he says.

I follow him out of his office and into another room, this one has a security guard sitting in it and a wall full of monitors. The guard is staring intently at them. He introduces himself as Tony Langly and shakes my hand, and he squeezes too hard as if trying to compensate for the fact he’s a security guard and not a cop. The manager tells him what we’re looking for, and Tony tells us it won’t be a problem. He loads up Friday night and takes us to within five minutes of the shower curtain being purchased. At this time of night there are only two people manning the checkouts, one person behind the service desk, and what looks like half a dozen customers at the most, all of them moving slowly. The time lines up with the receipt, revealing only one customer at the checkout.

“Is that your man?” the manager asks.

I shake my head. “No,” I tell him. “I was hoping this was going to be the guy, but this is nobody. Sorry to have wasted your time,” I tell them. “Sometimes things don’t pan out how you’d like.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Tony says, and both he and the manager look deflated.

My hands are shaking by the time I get back to the car.

It wasn’t Kelly Summers buying the shower curtains.

It was the bald man.

It was Carl Schroder.