Five Minutes Alone (9 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

The man who helped Kelly Summers, the man who tried to dispose of the body, the Five Minute Man as he thinks of himself—Detective Inspector Carl Schroder as other people used to see him (the Old Him), unemployable tragic Carl Schroder as they see him now (the New New Him)—sits back on his couch and looks up to the ceiling and sees that Warren has returned.

“I thought maybe you’d been eaten,” he says.

Who would eat a spider?
Warren answers and, for a moment, Carl Schroder thinks he has gone mad. Completely mad. But of course the spider didn’t talk—they never do—and even if they were to start talking he doubts it would start with Warren.

“Tate has been a royal pain in the ass over the last few years,” he says to Warren, but Warren is too small to tell if he’s paying attention. “However, he’s also proven himself a useful investigator. He has a way of getting the job done.”

You’re going to have to watch yourself,
Warren says.

“I know. Kelly Summers may have put on an excellent performance at her house, but being questioned in your house and being questioned in an interrogation room is an entirely different thing.”

Entirely,
Warren agrees.
Just what in the hell happened?

He leans back into his couch and sighs. “I was a hundred yards from the railway line when the car gave up. I pushed the car to within twenty. I was hoping the police wouldn’t try too hard to figure out why a rapist got himself sliced and diced.”

A good thought,
Warren says.
So what, you took Smith out of the car and put him on the tracks?

“Exactly. When the train hit, pieces of Dwight Smith flew ev
erywhere. I’d tied a piece of rope onto the hand and reeled it in like a fish. I wrapped it in a piece of shower curtain to stop it dripping, then used it to leave prints around the steering wheel, the lever to move the car seat, and around the door handle.”

That’s clever,
Warren says.

“And I’m talking to a spider,” Schroder says.

No. You’re talking to yourself.

He stops talking to himself. Last night he figured a walk back into town would take him five, six, maybe seven hours. He took his gloves off and he began. After twenty minutes he buried the shower curtain on the edge of a farm. He had to—because nobody walked down motorways carrying shower curtains. It would take him another twenty minutes to get to the end of the road that would then turn onto the motorway. Ten minutes into that walk a truck pulled over and a burly guy with thick forearms and a haircut that trailed down the back of his neck offered him a lift. He reminded Schroder of a guy he’d arrested years ago, a guy who was distributing child porn, a guy who on the car ride into the station had said the best part about child porn was the kids did it for free. Schroder wanted to shoot him. Of course that was the Old Him. The New New Him would have done it.

He was dropped off in town. He caught a taxi to within a mile of Kelly Summers’s house. He paid in cash then walked the rest of the way.

Kelly had cleaned the bathroom. There was a plastic bag full of bloody rags, rags soaked in bleach, and the bathroom smelled like a hospital. She was sweating, but she was focused. She looked the same way he felt when he was mowing his lawns. He told her about the car. The plan was changing. He told her he would be back in twenty minutes. His clothes were clean—he’d been careful not to get blood on them. There was dirt on his hands, which took only a minute to clean up. He drove to the nearest twenty-four-hour supermarket. He bought a new shower curtain, and he bought some scented candles and some scented oils, and he bought some air
freshener. When he got back they sprayed the room with the air freshener, set up the candles and oils to hide the smell of bleach, and hung the new curtain.

They sat in her lounge for three hours. He thought she would be nervous, but she wasn’t. Cleaning the bathroom, she said, had felt cathartic. They rehearsed what she would say when the police showed up. He was sure she was going to be fine. Kelly Summers had a life ahead of her. She wanted that life. If she failed, the police would take her away. Dwight Smith would have beaten her, he said. Don’t let him beat you.

He took her robe and the rags and the bleach and the shower curtain packaging. By the time he left the bathroom smelled like a Christmas tree. The only thing he couldn’t do was fix the window, not in the time he had, but she would say she didn’t know about it. It would be impossible for the police to know when it happened. Kelly Summers gave him a hug where he just kept his arms hanging down by his side. She whispered into his ear, her breath warm as she thanked him over and over. When she stepped back her hands found his hands, they interlocked, this very small human chain, this circle they made, and she smiled at him.

He dumped everything in separate locations.

He thinks about Theodore Tate, and wonders how much he really knows. That’s the thing about Theo—you just never know.

He thinks about the Collard brothers, and about Peter Crowley, the man who asked Landry to have five minutes alone with them.

Tonight he is going to give that to Peter Crowley.

Tonight he sure as hell isn’t going to run out of fuel.

Tonight the New New Him will continue to evolve.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I turn the sirens on even though it’s not an emergency. Nobody is in danger. There are no lives on the line. So I turn them on to get traffic out of my way, but I don’t put my foot down. I don’t speed. Well not much. If I caused an accident I’d be toast.

I drive Kent’s car into the parking lot where, three years ago, my daughter was killed. I can still remember every second of that day, getting the call, rushing to the hospital, praying to God while the surgeons played God with my wife. Of course there was nothing that could be done for my daughter. A day later I drove to this very parking lot. There was still police tape fluttering in the wind. Staring at it I knew my future—or more accurately, I knew the future of the man who had done this to my family. I find a parking space and make my way to the management offices inside. They’re upstairs, a bunch of them leading from a corridor, and one of the doors to those offices opens and Kent comes wandering out.

“I saw you on the security camera,” she says, and of course I look up and stare into the camera as if to confirm it. She gives me a smile, a slow, sad smile where she tries to tell me everything is going to be okay.

“Is Doctor Forster here yet?” I ask. Doctor Forster is Bridget’s doctor, and when Kent was unable to get hold of me straightaway, she rang him.

“He got here about ten minutes ago. Listen, Theo, he had to sedate her. She’s sleeping at the moment.”

“What happened?”

So she tells me what happened. She walks through it step-by-step as best as she can, steps made up from eyewitness accounts, from the security guard that first tried to help her, and from Bridget’s
own accounts of what happened. There are a couple of seats in the corridor and I have to sit down as my legs threaten to collapse beneath me. Bridget had gone shopping. Nobody knows how she got here, but I imagine she caught the bus. She was walking past the cinema in the mall when she suddenly realized Emily was missing. She checked the theater, the bathrooms, the lobby, then sat on some stairs for a few minutes unsure of what to do. Then she got up and started asking people if they had seen her daughter—and showed a photograph of Emily. She was getting louder and more panicked, which drew the attention of a security guard, who then brought her to the management office. By this point she was visibly shaking, and the staff in the office along with the security guard assured her Emily was most likely wandering in the mall somewhere, and they paged her over the intercom.

Emily didn’t show up. Then the first cracks in Bridget’s story began to show. The movie she had taken Emily to was an animation that involved talking animals. And today there were no such movies like that. Still, her conviction at what had happened was strong, and obviously they were dealing with a situation that required the police, and so the police were called. When asked for my contact number, Bridget gave my cell phone, only I don’t have the same number I had three years ago because that was a work number. So the number they were trying gave them only an automatic message saying it was out of service. Then she told them I worked for the police department and asked them to call me there. It was then that one of the managers recognized my name and, having worked here the day of the accident, realized what may be happening. Before she could decide what to do with the information, the first pair of officers arrived at the scene. She briefed them, and they quickly agreed what was happening here was something medical, was something weird, they were dealing with a woman who had snapped and not with a missing girl. Then Kent arrived and then everything was confirmed. I was talking to Schroder and not answering my phone, so they called Bridget’s doctor.

Bridget didn’t recognize Rebecca Kent because three years ago
she didn’t know her, and three years ago is where Bridget’s mind was. She didn’t recognize Doctor Forster for the same reasons. It was that cold Tuesday of the accident all over again.

I follow Rebecca back into the office. It’s a big office, there are half a dozen desks in here and views out over the parking lot—and I can see the same spot where Emily was killed, and it would have been a horrific sight for whoever was up here that day. There’s a bunch of people, a water cooler, there are half a dozen calendars hanging on the wall, a couple of clocks, some plants, lots of shelving with boxes and folders on them, and along one wall a couple of couches. It’s on one of these couches that my wife is lying.

All the staff are standing, three of them have formed a semicircle near my wife and are watching her, others have split off into pairs and are talking among themselves. Rebecca holds back and I move over to Bridget, crouch next to her, and take hold of her hand. It’s warm. I stroke her hair off her forehead, then look up at Doctor Forster. He’s a good-looking guy in his fifties, dark brown hair and designer glasses, and whenever I see him I keep thinking he looks more like a TV doctor than a real doctor.

“We always knew something like this could happen,” he says.

“Is she going to be okay?”

“I think we may need to broaden our definition of what okay means,” he says. “Is she going to wake and think it’s still three years ago? I don’t know. Probably not. Will it happen again? It’s possible. This is the worst event, right?”

“Right,” I tell him, unsure how I feel about what’s happening being summed up as an
event.
“Every other time it’s only taken a few minutes to convince her, I mean, remind her I suppose, of what’s going on.”

“And it only started two weeks ago?” he asks. I had called him after the first occurrence. He scheduled more tests, which are still two weeks away.

“That’s right. She was fine up till then.”

“My suggestion is that coming to the mall triggered a full-on break, and all these people are strangers so of course she wasn’t
going to believe or trust them. Do you know why she came down here?”

“No.”

“She doesn’t drive, does she?”

“Well, she used to, of course, but not now. . . . I don’t know how she got here. I’m guessing she took a bus.”

“Here’s what I suggest. Take her home and keep a close eye on her for the rest of the weekend, then bring her in to see me on Monday. We’ll do some tests. How does that sound?”

I nod eagerly. “We’ll be there.”

We decide the best course of action is to let her sleep upstairs for a while, rather than propping her up in the car or calling an ambulance. There’s a stretcher in the nearby sick bay. We use it to carry her in there. We lay her down on the cot.

“Give her two or three hours,” Forster says, and then he shakes my hand, tells me to
hang in there
, and reminds me to call him if there are any other problems. I tell him I will, that I’ll see him on Monday, and then he’s gone, leaving me and Kent alone with my wife in the sick bay.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I step into the corridor with Kent. We’re the only people out here. She looks a little shaken, and I feel shaken, and I figure Elvis would know how to sum that up. I’m suddenly overcome with exhaustion, and I have to lean against the wall to stop myself from collapsing. Bridget was better. Life was going to be okay.

Kent puts her arms around me and embraces me. Her body is warm and smells slightly of perfume. “It’s going to be okay,” she says.

I don’t know how to answer. The truth is her words make me want to cry, and I can feel the tears coming, they’re almost here, and then they come. Nobody has hugged me like this in a very long time. The other truth is Rebecca doesn’t know if Bridget is going to be okay—she’s just doing what people do, saying what people are expected to say.

“It’s okay,” she says again as the tears spill down my face and onto her shoulder, and she keeps holding me, and the way she says it she sounds believable. We stay that way for the best part of a minute, then the tears stop falling and we pull away.

“It’s so hard for her,” I say.

“It’s hard for you too, Theo.”

I wipe at the tears. “I’m not the one who has to keep getting the news their daughter is dead. Every time I tell her, it’s like it breaks her. It’s so cruel.”

“It may not be that way for much longer,” she says. “Could be this is the last time it happens. You just have to stay hopeful. Five months ago she was in a vegetative state. Had you given up hope then?”

“No.” Which isn’t entirely true. “And I’m not giving up now. I
just . . . I . . . I don’t know. I just want her to be okay. I just want everything to be okay.”

She reaches up and runs her fingers over the side of her ruined face. “I know what you mean.”

“Thank you for helping her,” I say, “and for calling her doctor.”

She reaches out and squeezes my arm. I nod, as if receiving a message.

“So how did things go with Schroder?” she asks.

The conversation is such a shift in direction that for a moment I can’t answer her. Schroder? Oh, that Schroder. Oh, we’re working a suicide that’s actually a homicide. I hadn’t thought about it since getting here. I tell her what Schroder said, and she agrees with him. If Dwight had followed Kelly home and made his way inside, there would be no reason Kelly wouldn’t have called the police if she had killed him in self-defense.

“You keep the car,” she says. “I’ll get an officer to give me a lift back to the station and check in with Hutton.” We walk to the end of the corridor. “I guess it comes down to the ME,” she says. “Unless Smith was dead before he hit those tracks, there’s no reason not to call it how it looks. I’ll get another car and head out and talk to the brother. I’ll get Hutton to come with me. I’ll give you a call and update you when I know more.”

“Thanks, Rebecca.”

She smiles again. “She’s lucky to have you.”

I watch her disappear into the crowd of people, thinking that Bridget was never the lucky one, that that was me. I was lucky to have Bridget. I head back into the sick bay. The room is twice the size of the prison cell I had last summer. There are two cots, each draped with gray blankets, one cot empty, the other has my wife lying on top. I pull a seat over to the bed and I hold her hand and I stare at her, remembering the times I used to do this when she was in the nursing home. The room smells of disinfectant and takes me back to when I used to go to school, the one or two occasions I felt sick and had to wait in the sick bay for my mom to come and get me.

“I’ve been thinking lately about how we met,” I tell Bridget. “You remember?” I ask, sure that she would, but not as sure as I’d like to be. What if one day this thing that is wrong with her steals all of her memories? “I was a year out of police academy. Back then the biggest part of my job was walking the streets of town with a partner, watching out for bad things, mostly dealing with shoplifters, or if our shifts were at night, being called to break up drunken fights. The job wasn’t as rewarding as I thought it was going to be. I don’t know—I guess I had always figured people would appreciate us more for what we did, but instead everybody was unhappy. It just came down to degrees. There’s something I’ve never told you about the morning we met.”

I met Bridget at a coffee shop. I kept seeing her in there. Sometimes she’d be ahead of me in line, sometimes behind me, sometimes looking serious, sometimes happy, and after a few weeks we would start to exchange smiles. Then we’d make small talk.
Really
small talk. Things like
I promise I’m not following you,
and
I think I’m sixty percent coffee.
Then we introduced ourselves. At the same time the cappuccino machine was making a lot of noise and I didn’t hear her name and, for some reason, I didn’t ask right away for her to repeat herself. Later that day I saw her in town. I was in my police uniform talking to Schroder, and she came up beside me and said
Excuse me, officer, but do you drink anything other than coffee?

I told her I did. She smiled, wrote her number down on a slip of paper, and handed it to me.
If you ever feel like getting a drink and not being alone when you’re doing it, give me a call,
she said.

“The problem was,” I tell her now, “is that I never heard your name when you gave it to me, and when you gave me your number, it was just your number. You didn’t write your name down because you thought I already knew it. And from there it just became more awkward. I called you that night hoping you’d say your name when you answered the phone, but you didn’t. We went and grabbed a drink that weekend. A few nights later we saw a movie. The following weekend we went out for dinner. I still didn’t know your name, and because you were getting taxis to these places to meet
me, I had no registration plate to check, and of course I didn’t know where you lived. Not then. It was after our third date I came up with a solution. Do you remember when I started texting you in the third person as a joke? I said
Theo had a great time last night, and he was wondering if you would like to go out again this weekend?
You responded with
Bridget would love that.”

Well, Theo would love it if she woke up and everything was the way it used to be. Theo would love it if we could be okay again. Meeting Bridget was the best thing that ever happened to him.

I smile at the memory. I remember laughing when the text came in. I never wanted her to know that story. I told Schroder, and other friends, but I never wanted Bridget to know, even though I’m sure she would have laughed.

I get myself a little more comfortable, adjust my position, keep holding her hand, and stare at her while waiting for things to get better.