Five Minutes Alone (29 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Bridget asks why I’m looking concerned. I tell her I’m worried about heading up the case. A few months ago I was in a coma, and before that I wasn’t even a cop. I’m sure it’s not going to be a popular decision. Others on the force have worked hard and longer and are better suited. But being given the case is not a promotion. It doesn’t come with more money or a better job title. It just means doing exactly what I was doing plus more, and getting all the stress that comes along with it.

“You still haven’t told me what you wanted to tell me yesterday,” I tell her.

“It can wait,” she says.

I shake my head. “No, it can’t wait,” I say, a little firmer than I should.

“Teddy—”

I put up my hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound like I was snapping. It’s just that . . . well . . . with Hutton gone there’s going to be more to do at work until this case is wrapped up, and the last thing I want to do is put in more hours there and less here, and . . . and, well, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say,” I say, which isn’t true. I know exactly what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say
Schroder tells me you know something that he can use to blackmail me.

She reaches out and grabs my hand. “The reason I went to the mall yesterday,” she says, “was to buy a pregnancy test.”

I try to answer, but don’t know how.

“I didn’t get one then, but my mom took me back yesterday. I took the test, Teddy. I’m pregnant. That’s what I had to tell the nurse today before the CT scan. Six weeks pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.”

The news is so different from anything I could have imagined her saying, and when I try to say something I still find that I can’t.

“Teddy?”

A baby? Sleepless nights. Changing nappies. A toddler walking like a drunken Bambi as they search for balance, first words, play dates, going to school, getting hit by a car and burying them before their life gets under way. But then I backtrack because that’s not going to happen, not this time, this time everything is going to be okay. So I think of playing in the backyard, of getting a cat, buying teddy bears and reading school report cards. I think of watching her playing sport at school, of pigtails, of freckles, and of one of her hands in mine as we walk down the beach, a bucket and spade in her other hand. We build sand castles and eat fish and chips and yell at the seagulls to leave us alone. I think of her friends coming around, of smiles with missing teeth, bribing her with junk food, telling her about Santa and putting crayon-scrawled pictures of cats and trees on the fridge. I think of her growing up, leaving school and going to university, of becoming her own person, making a difference in the world, I think about her being whatever it is she wants to be and her being happy doing it.

“Teddy, it’s going to be okay,” she says. “Nothing is going to happen to her.”

“Her?”

“It’s a girl,” she says, and I realize I’ve been thinking of her as a girl too.

“You’ve—” I say, but she’s already shaking her head.

“No, I haven’t been to a doctor, and it’s too early to tell, but I can tell.”

“A girl,” I say, and if I don’t do what Schroder wants me to do, how old will my daughter be when I’m executed by the government? All those things I imagine doing with her I won’t be able to do. She’ll grow up, her daddy in the newspapers for killing the man who took away the sister she never got to meet, her daddy in a court of law, her daddy being escorted by two guards and a priest on his way to the end.

“Are you happy?” Bridget asks.

I move in and hug her. I hug her tight. It’s life giving me another second chance, because I am the king of second chances. “Of course I’m happy,” I tell her. “I feel unbelievably happy.”

“It’s going to be amazing,” she says.

“I know.”

“And we’ll make sure nothing bad ever happens to her,” she says.

“I know.” And it will be amazing and we will make sure nothing bad happens to her. But already I’m scared. I’m scared of the future and all the unknown things that are out there in the world, things always searching for a way to take away the second chances I’ve been given because I didn’t deserve them.

We are still hugging when my phone rings. I don’t want to answer it, but I have to. I have to because Schroder has killed somebody and I have to clean it up, and if I can’t then the life Bridget and I are dreaming about isn’t going to happen.

Before I can apologize to Bridget she tells me to go ahead and answer it. She says it’s been an eventful day, and with the loss of Hutton she knows the next few days are going to be tough.

I look at the display and see that it’s Superintendent Dominic Stevens. Stevens is one of the reasons I got back onto the force. When I was fighting to become a cop again, he’s the one who gave me a chance. It’s because of him I’m not busking in malls or selling bits of my liver for cash.

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you,” he tells me. “I have some bad news.”

“I heard,” I tell him. “Rebecca called earlier.”

“He was a good man and he was a good cop, and over the last few months he was reaching his potential. It’s a shame,” he says, “such a shame.”

“It still doesn’t seem real,” I say, and I want to add more, but right now I can’t think what else to say.

“True, and as much as I hate doing this, and I know Hutton
would understand what I’m about to say, but we still have work to do. There’s been another homicide.”

“You’re saying we have to move on,” I tell him, because it has, after all, been five minutes.

“He’d understand,” Stevens says. “And the alternative is what?”

“I get your point,” I tell him.
“What have we got?”

So he tells me. Ron McDonald. Did I remember him? Yes. Did I remember the details of the case? Mostly. That Schroder screwed up the warrant? Yes, I remembered that, and of course it made sense to me why McDonald was picked.

“Schroder was lead detective on two out of our three cases the Five Minute Man has targeted,” he says. “The second was Landry’s case. Do you think somebody is picking victims because of who investigated them?” he asks, and I wait for him to add
Is Schroder doing this?
but he doesn’t, and that’s because Schroder isn’t a suspect, Schroder is Schroder, he was one of us, one of the good guys.

“I don’t know,” I tell him.

“Get hold of Detective Kent and meet her down at the scene.”

“Who’s there at the moment?”

“A couple of officers and the guy who found the body, but that’s about to change.”

I look at my watch. It’s eight p.m. “Okay, look, before we get half the police force down there tramping all across the scene, let me meet Kent down there first. Let us have the scene to ourselves for half an hour. Call the officers down there and tell them to wait outside.”

He says nothing.

“It might not help, but it might. Just let us spend thirty minutes looking around in some peace and quiet without other officers and forensics moving and shifting everything.”

“Okay,” he says. “It’s your call. I don’t see how giving you time down there alone is going to hurt, and maybe you will see something you wouldn’t otherwise see,” he says, and I think
hopefully the cell
phone.

“I’ll call Kent and then I’ll head right there.”

There
is a workshop on the edge of town, a place McDonald owned and operated and where he employed half a dozen staff. Business for Ron McDonald was good—but businesses that rely on bad things happening to other people are always good. Lawyers, dentists, doctors, mechanics, and cops all share that in common. It takes fifteen minutes to get there, but before I leave I call Bridget’s parents and tell them that one of my colleagues has died, and that I need to go into work. There is no argument from them—of course there isn’t—not when I’ve lost a friend.

I meet Kent out front. There are two patrol cars, one has two officers sitting in it, the other is empty. The scene is being lit up by the cars, which have their lights on and the engines still running. Standing near the main entrance are two more officers, and sitting in a white sports car is a guy talking animatedly on his cell phone, who must be the man who found the body.

We chat to the officers and get the rundown on how the body was found. We learn that the man in the sports car is Chris Watkins. We learn one of the officers stepped into the pool of blood we’re about to see to check the victim for a pulse. He holds up a plastic evidence bag with his shoe in it.

“I took it off right away, as to not risk contaminating the scene,” he says. “I hope nobody is too pissed at me for stepping in the blood, but I had to do it in case the guy could still be saved.”

“The guy in the car is who called it in?” I ask.

“He’s one of the staff here,” the officer says. “McDonald’s wife said Ron was due home around six, and when he didn’t show up she tried calling him and didn’t get an answer,” he says, glancing down at his notepad. “She rang Chris and asked if he knew anything, and he said he didn’t, but he would come down and check it out.”

“Did he call the wife?” I ask.

“Watkins called the police right away,” he says, “but he says he didn’t call the wife because he didn’t want to be the one breaking the news.”

“Well he’s breaking the news to somebody right now,” Kent says, glancing over towards the car. “He’s probably already phoned a dozen people.”

“We don’t have the right to take his cell phone off him,” the officer asks.

“Did you at least ask him for it?”

“No. I guess I should have.”

“Well go and ask for it now before the news of Ron McDonald’s death reaches his wife before we reach her, okay?” Kent says.

“Sure thing, Detective,” he says, and walks over to the car, walking with a slight limp because of the missing shoe.

I head inside with Kent. We have to walk through the office to get to the workshop. The office is full of photographs of cars and of men working on cars, of men in overalls laughing, of them sitting outside and smoking. It reminds me of the photographs at the service station Dwight Smith worked in. The staff look like a close-knit bunch. There are a couple of them on a fishing boat hooking something big, some of them standing in an army hunting pose, the kind of pose you see of men who have just brought down a big bear, only these guys are holding paintball guns, another of them go-carting.

The workshop is like any other male-dominated world I’ve had to visit where cars are the center of that world. The office with its paintball and fishing photographs is for the public, but behind that in the work area are calendars of half-naked women, large posters of rally cars and sport cars, pictures of women sitting in or draping over performance cars, pictures of women in bikinis waving checkered flags. There are large hydraulic lifts, two of them—one empty, the other with a car on top. There are long tables full of tools, tools everywhere and then even more tools, and in the middle of it all is Ron McDonald, lying on his back with his eyes open taking in none of the sights, the half-naked women maybe one of the last things he ever saw, and I figure there are worse things to see when you’re checking out.

There is a lot of blood around the dead man. He was probably still alive when he went from standing to lying, and he was probably still alive for some time after that too. The epicenter of all that mess seems to be McDonald’s abdomen. There’s a hole in the dead man’s overalls. It looks like a bullet hole. There’s a single footprint in the blood.

“So who exactly is this guy?” Kent asks.

“His name is Ron McDonald, and a while back we were pretty sure he killed his wife.”

“But?”

“But we couldn’t prove it. There was a problem with the investigation and in the end it didn’t even make it to trial. We found bloody clothes in his car, but we couldn’t use it because there was a problem with the warrant.”

“Schrodering?”
she asks.

I nod. “Yeah, that’s where the term came from,” I say, and then I fill in the details. The arrest, the alibi, the lying, the affair. After the clothes were ruled out as evidence, the case stalled, then became cold, then became dead.

“Not dead for the Five Minute Man,” she says. “Because that’s who did this, right?”

“We don’t know that yet.”

She tucks her hands into her pockets and bounces slightly on her feet. She’s staring at me. “You know what I think?”

“Tell me.”

“I think we might be looking at a cop.”

“What?”

She looks around to make sure we’re alone, and we are, except for Ron McDonald who isn’t taking any notes. “It fits, right? It’s why he’s always ahead of us. It’s gotta be somebody who has access to this kind of information, and don’t forget the woman at the prison said she was sure she was talking to a cop on the phone when you were being impersonated.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t see it.”

She takes her hands out of her pocket and tilts her palms upwards. “Why?”

Why? Yes, Tate, why exactly?
“Because we work with these people. Because they’re good people. I just don’t see it.”

“Yes, we do work with good people, but this guy thinks he’s doing a good thing. McDonald here got away with murder, but the Five Minute Man fixed that. It sounds like a cop kind of thing to do.”

“Then why now? Why not back when Hailey McDonald was murdered?”

“And that’s the question, right? Why not back then? Come on, let’s take a look around before we let everybody else in.”

“Why don’t we start with the obvious,” I say. “Go check the office and see if anybody was due to pick up a car or drop one off. We don’t know for a fact this case is related to the others. The guy, after all, was a mechanic. I’m sure lots of people have wanted to kill their mechanic.”

Rebecca walks back through to the office. I spend a few seconds standing by the pool of blood and I stare down at McDonald and I wonder how it all unfolded. It’s possible he didn’t know who he was talking to, that Schroder was a customer, a guy he didn’t recognize, and the next thing he knew he was being shot. There are no drops of blood leading to or from the body, so he was hurt where he fell, so the struggle took place here. I don’t see Schroder’s phone, and that could be because it’s not here, but it could also be because McDonald is lying on top of it.