Five Minutes Alone (32 page)

CHAPTER SIXTY

I step out into the corridor and Kent is waiting for me. “What was all that about?” she asks.

“Just being reminded where my place is in the scheme of things,” I tell her, “and being told not to mess it all up.”

“Is that all?”

“No, it’s not all. Let’s go grab a coffee.”

We walk two minutes to a nearby café. We order drinks and sit outside with a view of the Avon River ahead of us, the dark water reflecting the sun. There are some ducks sitting idly on the bank sunning themselves, a couple of glue-sniffers doing the same thing. Summer is doing an impressive job of letting us know that it’s almost here.

I tell Kent about the meeting with Stevens. She starts shaking her head halfway through the story, and says
I don’t believe it
twice before I’m done. But then she does believe it.

“It confirms what I was saying yesterday,” she says. “We’re looking for a cop.”

I take the last mouthful of coffee. “I don’t know what to think.”

We head back to the station to get the car. On the way I get a call from a guy by the name of Chuck Langly. Chuck is the only guy I’ve ever met with the name Chuck, and Chuck works in ballistics, which means, if this was an IQ test, I could safely say that all Chucks work with bullets.

“I got something for you,” he says. “In fact a whole lot of somethings.”

“Shoot,” I tell him.

“That’s funny,” he says. “So we got four bodies from Grover Hills, right?”

“Right.”

“And there were three guns recovered from the scene.”

“Right.”

“Well none of the bullets in the four victims at Grover Hills came from any of those guns.”

“So we’re looking for a fourth gun,” I say.

“Exactly. And that fourth gun got used on all the victims at Grover Hills, and was also used to kill Ron McDonald.”

“That at least proves those two cases are related. Thanks, Chuck. Get that typed up and circulated, huh?”

“Will do.”

We get to the station and get the car and Kent drives and I ride shotgun and I tell her about what Chuck had to say. We drive to the neighborhood Ron McDonald used to live in until he or somebody pretending to be him killed his wife. We have no idea who’s moved into the place since then, but there’s a car parked up the driveway and in one window we can see a small statue of the Eiffel Tower, and in another one is a foot-high plushy Smurf. It’s the house opposite that we’ve come to visit, and we walk up to the door and the same woman who answered it seven years ago answers it now.

“I remember you,” Julianne Cross says, once we’re inside and sitting down in the lounge, cups of coffee in our hands. We’re surrounded by photographs of children and grandchildren, none of them hers, she tells us, but all of them children she helped raise. Julianne was a nanny for over forty years and could never have children of her own—she tells us this, just like she had told me before. “You’re the one who interviewed me back then. I heard on the news this morning that karma can be a pretty horrible thing,” she says.

“It can be,” I tell her.

“I read a lot,” she says. “And I watch a lot of TV. At my age, sometimes it’s all I feel like doing, especially when winter kicks in. Do you want to ask me what I read?”

“What do you read?” I ask.

“Crime novels, young man. And a lot of them. Both me and Barney—Barney’s my husband who passed away—used to spend two hours a night reading before we’d go to sleep, and after we retired we’d spend two hours reading in the morning too. So I know why you’re here. You’re here because seven years ago I saw Ron McDonald going into his house where he stayed for fifteen minutes and then I saw him sneaking back to his car. You want to know if any of that has changed.”

“And has it?” I ask.

“No, not in the least, sonny.”

“Can you talk me through it again?”

She talks me through it again. It’s almost the same, word for word. Julianne Cross has an excellent memory.

“How good a look at his face did you get?” I ask.

“It was good enough,” she says.

“Good enough?” Kent asks.

“It was him, if that’s what you’re asking. And just why are you asking?” she asks. “Why are you here? Something must have come up for you to be covering old ground,” she says, and then her crime-reading mind kicks in. “Are you saying he didn’t do it?”

“We think it’s possible somebody else was wearing his clothes.”

She starts nodding. “One thing that comes with old age is stubbornness,” she says. “I’m as stubborn as an ox. But the other thing that comes is wisdom, and I’m not so stubborn that I won’t admit when I’m wrong, not like most people who make it to eighty. Did I see his face? It was dark. Of course it was dark, and the streetlights lit him up every few yards, and he was wearing a hat, a baseball hat like people wear when they’re trying to look cool or hide a bad hairline. But yes, he was wearing Ron’s clothes and he looked like Ron. Yes, yes, I would still say it was him.”

“The car he parked a block away, how good a look did you get at it?” Kent asks.

“It was too far away to see a license plate, and I’m not good with cars. The best I could do back then was tell you it was dark, and that’s the best I can do now.”

I take a sip of coffee. It’s better than the stuff we had in town, but I just don’t have the room for it. “How well did you know Hailey?”

“Well enough. I’ve been in this house for nearly fifty years,” she says, “and I’ve seen other families come and go. She lived there with her husband for six or seven years before what happened happened. So I knew her in a neighborly way. We’d chat in the street, one year she helped me with my Christmas decorations. If they were having a barbecue they’d sometimes ask me and Barney over if we weren’t doing anything. They were a nice couple. After Barney died they often checked in on me. They were nice, but were they happy? I think so. There never seemed to be any chemistry there, if you know what I mean, but we never heard them fighting. They were a couple just going through the motions. It all came as a shock when he killed her.”

“So it’s safe to say you knew her fairly well,” Kent says.

“As well as a neighbor can, dear.”

“We spoke to Naomi McDonald last night. She’s the woman who—”

“Yes, I know who she is, dear.”

“She said the wife knew about the affair, and that she didn’t care. Not in the least. Did Hailey seem like the kind of person who wouldn’t care?”

She shakes her head. “No, of course not. She would have cared a lot. Unless . . .”

“Unless?” Kent asks.

She smiles at us then, takes a sip of coffee, then sets it down neatly on the table next to her. “Well, it seems to me what you’re asking is this—is it possible for a woman not to care in the least that her husband is cheating on her? Well, let’s say just for the moment that it is possible. Now, if it’s possible, then you need to ask a different question. You need to ask yourself what kind of woman wouldn’t care?”

“One who doesn’t love him,” Kent says.

“There’s that, but there’s more,” Julianne says.

“One that was in the marriage for a whole different set of reasons,” I say.

“No,” she says. “But one that has moved on. One that knows the marriage is over, one who knows that they are separating, and one that has already moved on emotionally and, perhaps, physically.”

“Was Hailey McDonald having an affair?” I ask.

“If she was, then it wouldn’t really be an affair, would it? Not in the traditional sense. Both husband and wife were separating, they were both moving on. In a way they weren’t even cheating on each other.”

I look at Kent and Kent is looking right back at me. “If it’s true,” Kent says, “then whoever she was seeing could be who killed her.”

“And if she was seeing him at their house while Ron was at work or seeing his own new girlfriend, that would give him access to the clothes.”

I stare at my coffee, taking on board the information. Does it fit? It seems to.

“We need to talk to Hailey McDonald’s friends,” I say. “If she was seeing somebody, then maybe they knew.”

“Wouldn’t they have come forward and told the police?” Kent asks.

“Not necessarily,” Julianne says, and we both look at her, and maybe with all the books she’s read we should have her on the force as a consultant. “I mean, if I had known she was having an affair, I wouldn’t have come forward. The way the courts work these days, often it’s the victim who’s put on trial. It’s disgusting. If I had known, I’d have said nothing. What would be the point? The man who killed her was in custody, and I helped put him there because I saw him. They were going to charge him with murder, they found bloody clothes in the back of his car, so why risk Hailey’s reputation when you already caught who did it? I know why he was let go, some technicality with the warrant, but that didn’t make him innocent, it just made him lucky. No need to go to the police and say
By the way, his wife was stepping out on him and let’s have the newspapers call her a whore.
”

“Can you do something for me?” I ask.

“Sure thing, sonny.”

“Think about that night. Think about it in the context that you know now. Back then Ron was a murder suspect, and that’s the narrative you saw him in when you gave your statement. Think about him now as the victim. Think about his wife having an affair, and think about it being that man that killed her while Ron was ten miles away. Think about it, and if you remember anything differently give me a call.”

“I’ll do just that,” she says, and offers us more coffee when we stand up to leave. We say thanks but no thanks.

“She really was a nice young woman,” she says as she follows us to the door. “It’s true what they say, and I know this because I’m old enough to have lived it, but you just never know what’s waiting for you around the corner. One day you’re here, and the next day you’re gone. Just like that,” she says, and she clicks her fingers, only it’s a very soft click, and I get the idea she was lucky not to have broken something.

We get outside and stand on the sidewalk and face each other.

“The cap never made sense,” I tell Kent.

“What cap?”

“Mrs. Cross said the man she saw was wearing a baseball cap, and she said that seven years ago too and it’ll be in the statement. When Schroder found those clothes in the car, it was a shirt, pants, and shoes. No socks, no underwear, and certainly no cap. The socks and underwear wouldn’t have gotten blood on them, but the cap would have. Why discard the cap separately?”

“And you never found it?”

“No. Ron had a couple of baseball caps that he hardly ever wore, and they were both tucked away in his wardrobe, but neither had blood on them. First of all, it makes no sense he would leave the bloody clothes in his car without the cap. Why discard that separately? Same goes for the murder weapon. We never did find it, but why not keep it with the bloody clothes?”

“You didn’t ask yourself this last time?”

“We did, and we figured he liked the hat and wanted to hang on to it, and that he managed to dump the knife before he dumped the
clothes. We didn’t question his stupidity at keeping his clothes in the back of his car—I mean, we tried to ask him, but his lawyer was present and by then the warrant was under question so we never got any further with it.”

“And now you think whoever it was wore a cap to try and hide their face.”

“It does seem that way, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll admit, it all does seem convincing,” she says. “The problem is it means some poor police work was done seven years ago. Where to now?”

“Let’s head back to the station and go through the original materials, and the evidence that was stored away will be there now too. We’ll make up a list of people we can speak to about Hailey. If she was having an affair, somebody might have known.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

The dog bite has gotten infected. Each hole in Schroder’s arm is bright red, but dark in the middle, greenish dark blood caught under the skin, yellow pus bubbling over the sides when he squeezes it, and he should stop squeezing it because every time he does he feels a wave of nausea come over him. His entire arm hurts like hell.

At the moment he is outside the emergency entrance to the hospital. Last night he couldn’t sleep. He sat talking to Warren about how things have gotten out of hand, asking Warren if he thought that Tate was right with his assessment. Is it possible he really is out of control? No. Yes. No. Warren was also unsure.

The doors open and a young boy with a cast on his arm walks out, alongside his dad, the boy saying he can’t wait for his friends at school to sign it. The world sways for a second, then another second, just long enough to think
This is it, this is the bullet finishing what it started,
only it’s not that at all. He hasn’t eaten in twenty-four hours and the infection is burning through him. He is about to step through the still open doors when it comes to him. The mistake he is about to make.

When he burned down Grover Hills, he should have thrown the dog in there too. The damn thing bit him. The police know it bit him. They will have alerted the hospitals and every doctor across the city. He can’t go in there. He’s on his own with this one.

And if he does have rabies?

He just has to hope that he doesn’t.

When he gets home he spends fifteen minutes in the bathroom poking and prodding the wound, making a fist while he squeezes the green and yellow holes. He wipes away anything that comes out, and then squeezes it some more. When he’s done, he splashes
iodine on it before bandaging it tightly. He opens his medicine cabinet. He needs antibiotics, but can’t get them without a prescription. He has the painkillers he was prescribed for the headaches, and he takes those, hoping they’ll at least help.

He heads into the lounge and sits back on the couch that he is really starting to like now, and he holds his arm out in front of him to study the bandaging, and so Warren can see it too, and Warren doesn’t seem concerned by it.

“It’s going to slow me down,” Schroder says.

You need slowing down,
Warren says.
You’ve seen this before. You try taking care of everything in one or two nights, you’re going to make a mistake. You’ll be like the last guy you ever arrested. Remember him? In fact you’ve already made mistakes. Two innocent people have died, and not putting that dog on the fire . . . well, that was about as dumb as dumb can be. And this is coming from somebody who eats flies. Sure, Tate is on your side, but there’s only so much you can do. You’re not really going to take him along when you kill somebody, are you?

“No. Of course not. I was just saying that.”

You say things you don’t mean?
Warren asks.

“Of course. You don’t?”

No, it’s not the spidering way. If you get caught, will you show the police where you hid Quentin James’s body?

“No.”

You won’t tell them about him at all?

“No.”

So you didn’t mean that either when you told your friend you would turn him in if he didn’t help you.

“No, I supposed I didn’t.”

People are complicated,
Warren says, before scurrying along the wall to chase shadows.

Schroder lies down on the couch. Warren moves out of his field of vision, and then out of his thoughts. It’s been a long weekend of killing bad people, and he sees no reason he can’t take a few days off before killing again. Let the arm settle down. Let the infection work its way out of his system. That gives him a few days to think
over old cases and pick somebody else. Somebody he’s never met. Somebody just out of jail seems like a good option. Somebody who is doing well, somebody who has a second chance and is now living a better life than Schroder has, a better life built on the ashes of the pain and destruction they caused.

There’s no point in burning himself out over the next week killing people, and even if he could, how many would he get through? Five or six? He needs to think about the long term. He needs to space things out and do his homework better, otherwise there will be more dog bites and more suicides. He’s done with the five-minute thing, at least done in the sense of offering it to people. Last night was the start of that. He could have gone to Hailey McDonald’s father and asked if he wanted five minutes with Ron. And the New New Him would have, but the New New Him is in the past, and now he is the Evolved Him. The Evolved Him has learned from the mistakes all the past Hims made. These people ask for their five minutes, but they don’t really want them. They like the idea of it, just not the reality. Kelly Summers liked it because she was in the moment. Smith was attacking her and she was angry. Crowley thought he wanted them, but Schroder had to push him into it.

Things will be different now. He will do all the dirty work. He’s still the Five Minute Man, only now he’s giving these people their five minutes by proxy. He can live with that, and they can live with that, and that way there are no secrets and nobody innocent can get hurt.

It’s a win-win situation. And when his arm is healed he’ll start winning again, slower than before, maybe once a week, maybe once a month, but it’ll be winning all the same. Long-term winning, and that gives him something to live for.