Five Minutes Alone (8 page)

CHAPTER TEN

His house is beginning to fill with sunlight. It’s above the trees and coming through the windows to the north. It’s drawing a line across the carpet that moves a fraction with every passing minute. Warren has gone, his web empty this morning, and he wonders whether something bigger came along and ate him, or whether he evolved, that he needed more room to grow and become a better spider. It’s lunchtime. He knows this because of the height of the sun and because he’s hungry, but not from his watch. His watch is broken. He still wears it, but the face is cracked and the hands don’t move. His watch died the same day the Old Him died.

He has work to do. But first he needs to eat. There’s food in his house only he’s not in the mood to cook. What he’s in the mood for is eating.

Food will help him think.

He walks through to the garage. The garage has no tools in it, except for a lawn mower, which, he figures, isn’t really a tool. The Old Him used to love mowing lawns. It was the only time he really felt at peace. He would move up and down the yard, emptying the catcher when it was full, and it really is the only thing in the world that would switch off his mind. At least he used to think that until he learned getting shot in the head works too.

He gets into his car and he drives with the stereo off. He doesn’t listen to music anymore. Hasn’t since the accident—not that it can really be called an accident. It’s an accident in the same sense cancer can be an accident—in the sense you don’t mean for it to happen. He used to love music. When he was fifteen he learned to play the guitar. He played it and it was just like the song said, he
played it till his fingers bled, they’d hurt like hell but he stuck with it, thinking it was the kind of thing that would impress the girls. Only it didn’t. Impressing girls took more than playing the guitar back then—you needed the right clothes and haircut and you had to be an intense, brooding asshole or have an easygoing, almost drifter-like personality, and if you didn’t have either of those then you weren’t a musician, you weren’t an artist, you were just a guy with a guitar.

He heads to a drive-through diner called
Burger Bro
and orders a triple B—which is the Big Bro Burger. The guy at the counter is wearing a T-shirt that says
Bro’s your uncle,
and when he turns around to grab the food he reveals the back of the T-shirt, on which is a picture of fries falling from the sky, a multicolored stripe cutting the horizon, and a pot at the bottom full of chicken nuggets. Beneath it the word
rainbro,
and for the first time in months, he almost smiles.

He’s too hungry to drive anywhere, and he hates eating inside fast-food restaurants, so he sits in the parking lot and eats his triple B and thinks of last night and the mess Kelly Summers made. She had asked for five minutes, and five minutes hadn’t been long enough, but ten was perfect. When she was finished, he realized he’d made a mistake. Dumping the body where nobody could find it was one thing, but they should have done the killing out there too. The only saving grace was it all happened in the bathroom. Bathrooms were easier to clean. With bathrooms you didn’t have to tear up carpets.

So killing was a learning curve. He should have known that. And next time—

Next time?

Yes,
next time.
Another important pair of words. Like
Burger Bro
and
What if.
There was going to be a next time. And after tonight there will be more next times, right up until there is a last time.

He finishes his meal and balls up the mess and tosses it into a nearby bin. He turns on the radio and listens to the one o’clock
news. The body on the train tracks is the third story and the facts are minimal.

He drives to the closest mall. You can drive for ten minutes in any direction in this city and find a mall. He buys the cheapest cell phone he can find. He uses cash. He already has a cell phone, but he wants a disposable one. Then he walks to a different phone store in the mall and buys a second prepay SIM card, then goes to the supermarket and buys a third. When he gets home he puts the phone on charge. With it still plugged in, he uses it to phone the prison where, until a few weeks ago, Dwight Smith was residing. It rings twice and then a woman answers.

“This is Detective Inspector Theodore Tate,” he says. “I need to be transferred through to somebody who can help me out with some information on an ex-convict. More specifically I’m after the names of some cellmates.”

“Just a moment,” the woman says, and she puts him on hold, and it really is just a moment because two seconds into the hold music another woman comes on the line.

He introduces himself again, and he speaks confidently, like a man who has done this before—because he has. He tells her Dwight Smith has come up in an active investigation. What investigation, she asks? Well, he tells her, it’s to do with the body found on the railway tracks.

“Was it Smith?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“What can I help you with exactly, Detective . . . ?”

“Tate,” he says. “Theodore Tate. I need to know who Smith’s cellmates were over the last five years.”

“Give me two minutes,” she says, and she takes five, and when she returns she picks right up from where she left off. “He had three. The first was Eugene Walker. They shared a cell for twelve months, then Walker was released. He was replaced by Bevin Collard,” she says, “and they were cellmates for nearly three years until Bevin was released. Then Smith had only a year with his third
cellmate before Smith himself was released. Guy’s name is Jamie Robertson.”

“Bevin Collard,” he says, and he remembers the case, and he remembers Collard had a brother. He writes the name down with a pencil. Using a pad and pencil is very old school. “You have known addresses for him?”

“No, but his parole officers will,” she says, and she gives him the details. “Would you like me to send a copy to your department?”

“That would be great.”

“Consider it done.”

He considers it done then thanks her for her time. He uses his phone to go onto the Internet. He looks up Bevin Collard and refreshes his memory. Bevin, along with his brother Taylor, were sentenced nine years ago for raping a woman by the name of Linda Crowley. The case was assigned to Detective Inspector Bill Landry. Landry told him about it. It had happened at the victim’s house. They had worn masks and they had come in on a Saturday morning while her husband was playing cricket. The brothers shaved Linda’s head and broke both of her arms and raped her in front of her six-year-old daughter, Monica. Landry said every night for a week Peter Crowley would wait for Landry after work and beg him to have five minutes alone with the men who had done this. Landry kept giving him the same answer. No. It didn’t work that way.

Bevin was released twelve months ago. His brother, Taylor, was released eighteen months ago. He rings the parole officer, identifies himself as Detective Inspector Theodore Tate. He asks for the last known address of Bevin Collard. One minute later he has it.

He taps his pencil against the pad. He’s tired. He used to take caffeine tablets in his old life. Wake-E tablets. They used to help. Then they helped a little less and he had to keep taking more. The old life ended in June with a bullet. He was tracking the Christchurch Carver. He tracked him to a church, and there was a firefight. People died, including the serial cop killer Melissa X, but not before she shot him. The Carver got away, and the Old Him got a
bullet in the head. It entered and never came out. It’s still in there, lodged down deep. It’s why, the doctors have told him, he can’t taste anything anymore. It’s why he can’t feel anything. It’s why he doesn’t care. One day that bullet will switch off his lights and he’ll be dead before he hits the ground. And that really doesn’t bother him. Why should it? Not caring is the only advantage to having a bullet stuck in his head.

The doctors told him it will happen any day. Or in a year. Or ten years. Or twenty. Was there anything they could do? No. How high were the risks if they tried to remove it? Too high. The surgery would kill him—that was almost guaranteed. Almost? Well, if he survived the cutting he would lose so much brain function he would barely be alive anyway. It was a lose-lose situation. They told him to be careful. Don’t get into a fight. Don’t crash your car. Don’t get drunk and fall over.

He reads more about Linda Crowley. Fourteen months after her attack, Linda Crowley took as many sleeping pills as she could get hold of, washed them down with a sixty-dollar bottle of red wine, and said good-bye to the world while her daughter was at school and her husband was at work. Landry told him Peter Crowley started coming to the station again after that, asking for his five minutes. He offered him money. Landry said one evening Crowley followed him home, knocked on his door, and handed him a briefcase with twenty-eight thousand, six hundred and eight dollars in it.
“It’s all I have, but it’
s yours—just give me my five minutes.”

But Landry couldn’t give them to him. He sent him home.

Landry may have said no, but the Five Minute Man can say yes.

He looks the husband up in the phone book and sees he’s still living at the same house. He remembers the name of the street because he was with Landry when they attended to the suicide. It wasn’t the same house the attack had taken place in. The Crowleys had sold that place.

He takes the SIM card out of the phone and snaps it in half, then replaces it with another. He hears a car pull up outside. He
puts the pad away and moves to the door.
This is interesting,
he thinks, and for a moment wonders if this is about the phone call he just made, because he impersonated this very man, but no, of course not—how could it be?

He opens the door. Theodore Tate walks up the path towards him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Schroder has had a rough year. He split up with his wife a few months ago, and is currently on disability because he can’t work. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve seen him, and these days he isn’t exactly what I’d call a talkative guy. He nods and, on occasion, he’ll answer if you ask him a question directly, but he’ll never take the conversation and run with it. Earlier this year he was forced to shoot a nasty old lady in cold blood to save an innocent girl. Taking a life was when Schroder stopped being Schroder. He lost his job, and I became a resident of Coma Land that same night. A few weeks later he started working for TV. He was the on-set consultant for a few crime shows, and he narrated and was in a reality show about a New Zealand psychic who looked for answers in unsolved crimes. Then the Christchurch Carver escaped and Melissa X, the Carver’s girlfriend, shot Carl in the head, and then he joined me in Coma Land for a spell. When he came back to the world of the living the dark version of Carl became something else. I’m not sure what, exactly. Something empty. Something hollow. Something that made his wife leave him.

“Hey, Carl,” I say, as I walk up the sidewalk to the front door. It’s open and he’s leaning against it.

“Hello, Theo,” he says, and he hardly ever calls me Theo. It’s always Tate. Or used to be. “Why are you here?”

“I need your help,” I tell him, skipping over the pleasantries. Carl doesn’t do pleasantries—not anymore.

He looks down at the file I’m carrying. Dwight Smith’s file. “You may as well come in.”

I follow him inside. The house is thirty or forty years old and doesn’t have a lot of personality or a lot of furniture. There are no
photos on the walls, no paintings. In the lounge there’s a sofa and two matching chairs and a TV and nothing else, except dust on the floor and cobwebs in the corners. He doesn’t offer me a drink. He sits on the sofa and I sit in one of the chairs facing him. He’s bald these days, his head shaved when the doctors saved his life, hair unable to grow back on the scar tissue left from the gunshot, so now he keeps it shaved. The scar is awful, it’s a shiny dime to the side of his head, small lines extending out from it like cracks in a mirror. It’s an inch above his right eye and halfway between that and his ear. Then there are the scars from where the doctors went to work, thin white lines from cutting, holes where drills were used, those scars will fade, but not the bullet wound itself.

“How you been?” I ask him.

“The same,” he says. “You?”

“Doing okay,” I tell him. “How are the kids?”

“Why are you here, Theo?”

“You remember Wayne Beachwood?” I ask.

“Wayne Beachwood,” he says, then he says nothing else for a few seconds, it’s as if he’s trying to access the memory, opening and closing drawers looking for the right file. “Yes, I remember him. The train guy. He’s the guy who threw . . . what was his name . . . Russell Lighter onto the train tracks.”

“Richard Lighter.”

“Richard Lighter. Beachwood had been drinking and he ran Lighter over in his car. He picked him up and threw him on the train tracks, hoping to hide any evidence, but there was a witness,” he says, all very monotone as if he’s reading from the file he found. “You’re here because of Beachwood?”

“Not quite.” I hand the file out to him, but he doesn’t take it. After a few seconds I lean further forward so I can toss it onto the couch next to him. “Do you remember Kelly Summers?”

“Yes.”

“And Dwight Smith?”

“Yes. You still haven’t told me why you are here.”

“Dwight Smith is dead,” I tell him.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?”

He shrugs. “I can’t imagine many people grieving for him. That still doesn’t tell me why you’re here, but my guess is it has something to do with Wayne Beachwood. Did Beachwood kill him in jail?”

“No,” I tell him, then I fill him in on the last two weeks of Dwight Smith’s life. His release from jail, his job pumping gas, his sudden departure from the gas station last night after spotting Kelly Summers.

“Kelly Summers is dead too?” he asks, and still without the emotion.

“Kelly is fine,” I tell him.

“I’m pleased to hear that,” he says, but he doesn’t sound pleased. He doesn’t sound anything. If anything he sounds bored.

“We think Dwight Smith was murdered,” I say, and while most of us think that, I know it for a fact. I saw the window and the shower curtain. I don’t tell him this. I’m here because Hutton wants me here.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?”

“It still doesn’t tell me why you’re here.”

“You were the investigating detective five years ago. I want to know what didn’t make it into the file. I want to know what Kelly or her family is capable of. You got to know some of her friends and family. I want to know if you think she could have done this either alone or who would have helped her.”

“So she’s a suspect,” he says.

“Possibly.”

“Kelly Summers is a victim, Theo, she’s not a killer. If Smith followed her to her house last night and forced his way inside, and she overpowered him, why not call the police?”

“Because—”

“Because what?” he asks. “There was nothing left out of the file, Theo. If Kelly killed him while defending herself, she would have
called the police, you would have shown up, you would have taken a look at what had happened whether she’d hit him with a ceramic bowl or stabbed him with a pair of kitchen scissors, and you’d have concluded that Dwight Smith, ex-con and rapist, Dwight Smith who had just broken into her house and attacked her and had been fought off, well, that Dwight Smith would have gotten what was coming. I know you. I know you wouldn’t have tried to see more to it than what was there if that’s what you’d seen, and there’s no reason Kelly Summers would suspect you’d see it any other way. There is no reason at all for Kelly Summers to have not called the police. There is no reason for her to try and hide it by putting Smith onto a set of train tracks.”

“I don’t think the train was part of the plan.”

“I don’t follow.”

My phone starts vibrating in my pocket, but I ignore it. “Smith’s car was used to transport him out there, but it ran out of gas. Whoever was driving was probably taking him somewhere to bury, where he’d never be found, but the plan changed.”

“I see,” he says.

“Does that change your opinion of Kelly Summers?”

“No,” he says.

“No?” I ask, and my phone has gone quiet.

“It’s the same thing, Theo. There’s no reason Kelly would hide what would have been a clear case of self-defense. I’m not saying Dwight Smith wasn’t murdered. It could be your theory all stacks up, but what I’m saying is something else must have happened between the gas station where Smith worked and his following of Kelly Summers. He couldn’t have made it to her house. Have you considered he jumped in front of the train?”

“We’re considering it,” I tell him.

“What did forensics find in the car? Other prints on the wheel? Hairs in the headrest?”

“Nothing. In fact forensics is sure Smith was the last person to drive it.”

“Well there you go,” Schroder says. “Look, Theo, I know it seems
unlikely he saw Kelly Summers then had the urge to kill himself, but to me it sounds like a simple case in which you’re looking for a complicated answer. Does it look like Dwight Smith drove himself to those train tracks and jumped in front of it?”

“Yes,” I say, admitting it, and I think about the window lock, the shower curtain with the fold lines. That was a brand-new curtain, and there was no packaging for it in the recycling bin. It’s possible she bought it a week ago, just as it’s possible she replaced it earlier this morning because last night she used her existing one to wrap a very dead Dwight Smith into. Just as it’s possible that lock on her window was pried up a week ago or two weeks ago and she chose not to mention it. “Everything she said sounded rehearsed.”

“It sounds to me she acted that way not because it was a performance, but because it was all genuine.”

“Maybe,” I say, and there’s no need to keep pushing. I’m glad Schroder doesn’t think she’s capable of murder. Hopefully it means nobody else thinks so too. I want Dwight Smith to have killed himself and Kelly Summers to carry on with life. My phone starts vibrating again.

“Definitely,” he says. “I hope this has been helpful.” He stands up, and I follow his cue and stand up too.

“Thanks, Carl.” I shake his hand. “I’ll come back soon and we’ll catch up some more, okay?”

“Whatever you say, Theo.” He walks me to the door. “Hang on a second.”

“Yeah?”

“The medical examiner. Who’s working the case?”

“Tracey Walter.”

“Okay,” he says, slowly nodding. “What’s she found?”

“She said she’ll know something later on today.”

“Keep me updated, would you? I’m curious.”

I get out my phone as I walk to my car and see Kent has left two messages, no doubt about the missing girl, but before I can check them she calls me back.

“How you getting on?” I ask, scared of what her answer is going to be, hoping she’ll lead with
wandering
and not
dragging.

“Listen, Theo, there’s no real easy way to say this,” she says, which are never great words to hear from anybody, let alone another cop, especially when you’re dealing with a missing child. In my mind I can see the little girl, a hand holding her arm tightly, a van door being opened, the girl crying as she’s thrown inside, and I can’t bear to think it through any further, but I do. Of course I do. It’s my job.

“Just say it.”

“The missing girl,” she says. “Tate, the missing girl is your daughter.”