Five Minutes Alone (22 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Schroder hasn’t been to Tate’s house since the whole Coma Cop thing. The Coma Cop handle is one he imagines the Old Him would have hated. He’d have complained about it to his wife, maybe to some of the guys at the station, but of course the guys at the station would have mocked him for it. They’d have come up with a nickname, they’d have pasted newspaper articles of his story to every wall in the place.

When he came out of the coma, he saw what people had been saying about him. He was so caught up in the Christchurch Carver case that it had become personal to him, that he couldn’t let it go, and ultimately it was costing him his life. Of course he was also the man who had brought down Melissa X. He was told there would be bits and pieces he would forget about that day, and in the beginning that was true, then after a few weeks of coming out of his coma it became less true. He can remember every little detail and, if he really thinks about it, he can remember the feeling of the bullet tunneling into his brain, a thud and a searing heat, he can remember the sound of a hole breaking open in his skull, the fractures from the impact radiating outwards, his head snapping back from the impact.

If he closes his eyes and sits in his quiet house, he can feel the bullet in there. He can feel it tugging at his brain, an itch he can’t scratch, a humming sound he can’t turn off, a glare he can’t look away from. It’s in there biding its time, this splinter that can’t be pulled.

He walks up the driveway to Tate’s house, feeling anxious as to what he’s going to find inside.
Anxious?
Yes. He makes a mental note—that’s another feeling that has returned. He doesn’t get to
the door before Bridget is swinging it open. This is the woman they all thought had been lost. And she has lost something, hasn’t she? A bit of the spark she used to have? He can see that immediately. And some weight too—she’s thinner than he remembers, her skin paler. She puts her arms around him and he does the same back, knowing that’s what the Old Him would have done.

When she pulls back he sees her eyes are damp, but she doesn’t look like she’s been crying. “I woke up and . . .” she says, then she doesn’t say anything else. A few moments pass and he lets them pass, knowing she’ll carry on when she’s ready. “You look different,” she says.

“It’s the new look,” he says, brushing his hand over the top of his head. “Everybody is doing it.”

“I’m not so sure it suits you,” she says, “but it’s not just that. You look, well, I was going to say older, but it’s not that either. What happened to your head?” she asks, and taps her head in the same place he has his scar.

“War wound,” he tells her, confused as to how she can’t know this.

This seems to satisfy her. “Did you tell anybody at work you were coming here?”

“No,” he says, because there is no work. There is just him sitting at home with Warren, and then of course there is him following people and ending their lives. And even though that’s work, he knows that’s not what
she
means by
work.

“Where’s your car?” she asks.

He turns back to the road and looks at the car parked there. “It’s there,” he says.

“That’s your car?”

“It’s all I can afford.”

“Don’t you drive an unmarked police car?”

“Sorry?”

“Don’t you drive an unmarked police car?”

He shakes his head. “Not in a while.”

“Oh,” she says, and she’s confused, and he’s confused too.

“What’s this about?” he asks.

She hands him a piece of paper. It’s a message from Tate.

Hey Babe, Kent is on her way to picking me up. Something has happened in town—
probably the usual bullshit. Hopefully I’ll be back before you read this. If I am, I might just read it to you over breakfast, I’ll look over your shoulder and read it out loud while you’re looking over the words—it’ll be like being in a movie. But if I’m not back before then, Kent’s sister is here to keep an eye on you. Love you!

He reads the note again. Something has happened in town. Something related to him? The alleyway?

“I don’t—”

“Who’s Kent?” she asks.

“Kent is his new partner.”

“What?” She shakes her head. “But you’re his partner.”

“Not anymore,” he says.

She’s still shaking her head. “I don’t understand. What happened? Did you have a falling out? Why wouldn’t he tell me that?”

“We didn’t have a falling out, no,” he says. “I don’t know why he didn’t tell you,” he says, but what he really means is
I don’t know what’s going on here.

“He hasn’t been telling me much since, well, since the accident,” she says.

“It’s been a tough time,” he says.

“So why aren’t you partners anymore? Something to do with your war wound?”

“We’re just moving in different directions, that’s all.”

“You’ve been promoted?”

“Something like that,” he says, and suddenly he remembers the last time he saw her back in their old lives. It had been his daughter’s birthday and Tate and Bridget and their daughter had come to the party. That day was full of smiles, and why wouldn’t it be? Emily
was alive back then, her death and the accident were in the future, and so was the bullet that separated the Old Him from the New Him. He thinks about the day he first saw her, that day in town when she handed Tate her phone number, he remembers thinking how Tate was a lucky man. Then he thinks about the wedding, her beaming smile, then he thinks about how she looked in the hospital, a day after the surgery, bandages and stitches and bruises covering every surface, dislocations and tears and broken bones beneath the surface, Tate there holding her hand, his own heart breaking for Tate’s loss, breaking for Bridget, this woman who had tried to save her daughter, but had failed. He remembers wanting her to wake up for Tate, and he remembers wanting her to never wake up for her own sake. “You said on the phone Theo is going to hurt somebody?”

“Are you sure you’re not here as a cop?”

“I promise.”

“Then, yes. I think Teddy is going to do something stupid. I can’t lose him, Carl. I can’t have Teddy go to jail.”

“At least he’s used to it,” he says.

“What does that mean?” she asks.

Something definitely isn’t right here. “Nothing. Who is Theo going to hurt?”

“The man who killed Emily,” she says. “I think he’s planning on . . . I can’t say it,” she says.

“If you want me to help you, Bridget, you need to tell me what’s happening.”

“He’s going to kill him,” she says. “I’m sure of it. He’s going to take Quentin James into the woods and he’s going to make him dig his own grave. Maybe he’s just going to scare him, I don’t know, but maybe it’ll be more than that. I’ve been trying to ring him, but his number is disconnected.”

“How did Theo find him after all this time?” he asks. Schroder, as well as many others, suspected Tate had killed him three years ago. So where has he been hiding?

“All this time? It’s only been ten days,” she says.

Now he’s even more confused. Unless . . . “Bridget, how long ago was Emily’s funeral?”

“What? Why would you ask that?”

“Please, it’s important.”

“It’s been seven days,” she says. “And I had to miss it because I was in the hospital.”

Seven days.
Suddenly it all makes sense. Bridget has gone back in time. Something to do with the head injury. She’s trying to get hold of Tate on an old number. She still thinks Schroder is a cop. It’s why he looks so different. He needs to get her inside.

But he’s curious. Too curious to let this pass. And, really, as Warren would tell him, there’s an opportunity here. “Do you know where Theo is taking him?”

“No. I mean . . . yes. Kind of,” she says.

“Kind of?”

“It’s . . . it’s hard to explain. The woods. He’s taking him into the woods.”

“How do you know?”

“I . . . I just do.”

“Do you know which set of woods?”

“No,” she says. “I mean . . . maybe. I think so. I think I could drive there. I don’t know how. I just don’t understand why his phone isn’t working. Can you try calling him?”

“Sure,” he says, and he gets out his phone and he pushes the buttons, but doesn’t hit send. He doesn’t want the call to connect. He holds it up to his ear. He gives it ten seconds, then shakes his head. “Nothing. Do you think you could drive there now?”

She nods. “I think so.”

“Let’s take my car,” he tells her. “I’ll drive, you just tell me the way.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I sit in the car with my head spinning, and lots of different paths all lie out before me, lots of possible futures for Schroder. It doesn’t make sense. Out of all the people . . . I mean . . . what the hell?

I try to think of it all as a coincidence. Schroder went shopping for a shower curtain in the small hours of the morning because he needed one, and that he bought a second as a spare. My guess is his tore his from the rings and he really wanted to take a shower at four a.m., so he drove down to the supermarket to get a new curtain. What was the alternative? Get water all over the bathroom floor? That would just be stupid. And if you tore one, only makes sense to make sure you have a spare for the next time it happens. The other supplies weren’t to hide the scent of bleach, but were to hide normal household smells. Maybe there was some meat that had gone off and he’d thrown it in the garbage. It makes sense. Perfect sense. After all, if you’re going to buy a shower curtain, it has to be some time, doesn’t it? Isn’t the middle of the night just as good as the middle of the day? I can’t imagine Schroder really doing well in big crowds, not since the shooting. He probably likes calm, quiet places. He probably likes—

“Damn it.” I punch the steering wheel. “Goddamn it.”

My cell phone rings. It’s Hutton. I suddenly feel like I’ve been caught out, that he knows where I’ve just been, and that this is going to be a test. If I give up Schroder, then what? It becomes a simple chain of events. He gets arrested. If he denies it, there’ll be a trial. If he pleads guilty, or is found guilty, then jail. And after that? With the new law coming into effect, is it possible the first person to be tried for the death penalty will be Schroder?

Yes. In fact it’s more than possible—I think it’s probable. I think
the prosecution will press for the death penalty to prove nobody is above the law, that if you do the crime you will do the time and perhaps swing for it. If they’re prepared to hang a cop, then they’re prepared to hang anybody. It will make future cases easier to plead out. Criminals are going to plead guilty and take twenty years rather than risk the noose. And will it be a noose? That’s what it used to be, back before it was outlawed in the middle of the last century. What about now? Technology may have advanced how rope is made, but it’ll still have the same effect. Will they come up with something better?

I answer my phone. “Where are you?” Hutton asks.

“On my way to talk to Kelly Summers.”

“Only now? Why so long?”

“We thought it’d be a good idea to check surveillance footage from the gas station for the bald man. Maybe he was following Summers, or following Smith.”

“Did it pan out?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Am I missing something here?” he asks.

“I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“You need to be your best, Tate. I don’t want this falling apart at trial.”

I rub at my eyes. “I know.”

“There’s been a few developments,” he says. “We sent a couple of guys out to the prison this morning to get information on Smith and the Collards. Turns out Dwight Smith and Bevin Collard were cellmates for four years.”

“So that’s the connection?”

“Looks like it. There’s something else. They said you called them yesterday.”

I try to get his words to make sense.

“Tate?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Who said I called who?”

“The prison fielded a call in the early afternoon from a man by the name of Detective Inspector Theodore Tate.”

“What?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“I never called them.”

“We know. The call was logged, along with the cell phone number the call came from. It’s a disposable phone. Impossible to trace. The woman said Theodore Tate asked about Dwight Smith, then asked who his cellmates were. She gave him some options, and he thanked her for her time. She said she’s dealt with plenty of cops before, and she was sure this guy was a cop. She never even thought twice about it, otherwise she’d never have given him the information. So then I called the probation officer for the Collard brothers, and he had the same Theodore Tate call him, and he thought the same thing and gave up the Collards’ address.”

“So somebody is impersonating me,” I say, and a slip of the tongue here would be problematic, because I’m thinking not
somebody
is impersonating me, but
Schroder
is. I wonder if that amused him, if he thought it was payback for the times I’ve impersonated him, when I knew people on the phone would be more willing to cough up information to a cop rather than a private investigator.

“Looks that way. Smith also had a couple of other cellmates over the years, so we’re in touch with their parole officers now. Could be they’re also targets, or maybe even one of them is the other dead body we have at Grover Hills.”

“Other dead body?”

“Firefighters have found two more bodies out there. They’re still inside. Looks like they were upstairs, but they’re on a section that collapsed onto the ground floor. Both of them were armed. Firefighters can see them, but can’t get to them. Not yet anyway. Theory is we’ve got the two brothers, and now Matthew Roddick and another associate. Hopefully we can get to work on dental matches later on today. The car has been pulled from the building and is back at the lab. Nothing to report except the spare wheel is missing, and where it should have been was a plastic bag with three silencers in it. If there’s any meaning to the missing wheel, then it’s a mystery, and we don’t even know it was in there to start with.”

“Has Monica Crowley showed up?”

“About twenty minutes ago. I’ll send through a composite when she’s finished with the sketch artist.”

I hang up thinking about how that sketch is going to look, and what that means for Schroder. I drive to Summers’s house, and as I drive I picture Schroder calling the prison, then calling the parole officer. He called the prison to find out Smith’s cellmate, and his next call to the parole officer suggests that’s how he picked the Collards as targets.

There’s not a lot of Sunday traffic, it’ll come, but not until closer to lunchtime when some people will take advantage of whatever sales are on at the mall, while others will try to take advantage of what is going to be a pretty warm day. I think about the best way to tell Kent who our bald man is. I picture that conversation, her asking me
Are you sure?
multiple times, then being mad that I hadn’t let her in on my shower curtain theory or told her about the window frame. I picture the conversation with Hutton, us driving back to the station and laying out the facts for him. Hutton shaking his head and saying
Are you sure, are you sure? I don’t believe it,
only he does believe, they all do in the end. The idea of arresting Schroder fills me with a sense of horror, a sense of betrayal, like arresting Schroder makes me the bad guy.

I reach Summers’s house and Kent is already here. She sees me pull up and she climbs out of her car and gets into mine.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

Guilt. Betrayal. Schroder is a killer. But he’s also my friend. “Nothing,” I tell her, and that’s the first step into madness. I feel myself taking it, I try to talk myself out of it. There’s still hope.

“You look like somebody walked over your grave,” she says.

“It’s nothing,” I tell her, taking a second step. “I’m just anxious about the tests tomorrow,” I tell her, taking steps three and four, and then I realize I took those steps on the phone to Hutton.

Are we on the same page here?

No, sir, we are not, otherwise I’d have told you everything I know.

Then what page are you on?

“You find anything in the surveillance?” I ask.

“Just other people filling their tanks with gas, and none of them are bald. If Smith was followed from the gas station, then it happened off camera. I’ll run the plates I saw and check them out, but I’m not holding my breath. So how do you want to play this? With Summers?”

“We still don’t know she’s involved,” I say, and I’m not just taking steps anymore, now I’m jumping. Now is the moment—right now—where I can fix this. There is still time. And if I don’t? What happens if we break Kelly Summers, then she tells us the bald man bought the shower curtain? They’ll retrace the same path I took earlier, they’ll go to the supermarket, and then they’ll see I already knew. What then?

Then I lose my job. Then there’ll be questions.

But it’s Schroder. Schroder who was with me the day my daughter died, who drove me to the hospital, who told me everything was going to be okay even though it wasn’t. Schroder who stood beside me while my daughter was buried. Schroder who told me months ago he knew I killed Quentin James, but was always scared I would confess it to him. Schroder who put his life on the line for this city and who got booted from the force. Schroder with a bullet in his head. Schroder who will hang if he is found out.

Schroder.

I wish I’d never gone to the supermarket. Wish I’d never noticed the fold lines in Kelly Summers’s shower curtain or the crowbar marks on her window frame. But ultimately the thing I wish for the most is that Schroder had hidden his tracks better.