Five Minutes Alone (26 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

I put the shovel into the back of my car. I get in and put my seat belt on and I punch the steering wheel and I climb out and do the same loop I did earlier, only forty-five minutes later and twenty miles away.

You know what you have to do, don’t you?

But Killer Tate doesn’t want to go there. Not now.

Then when?

“Never.”

I call Bridget and tell her I’m on my way, that things haven’t panned out like I’d hoped, and she tells me she’s looking forward to seeing me. For the next ten minutes I don’t see a single car, then there are a few as I hit the highway, then more as I hit suburbia. I keep thinking about Quentin James and about what condition his body is in, how much evidence can be taken from it, how it can be linked back to me. Can it? Of course it can be. Nobody in the world had a bigger motive than me.

When I get home Bridget and her parents have eaten dinner—a pasta with pesto and salami. Bridget’s dad has gone. My dinner is being kept warm in the oven, and the thought of eating doesn’t help balance out the anger I feel towards Schroder, and actually eating doesn’t help balance out the fear of what he’s going to do.

“Are you okay?” Bridget asks, and her mom is in the lounge watching TV.

“Yeah. Just work stuff.”

“Okay. Dad’s on his way to come and pick mom up.”

I finish my pasta and Bridget’s dad shows up and we make small talk and they wish us the best of luck for tomorrow’s tests and then they’re gone. Bridget hangs out in the lounge while I clean up the
kitchen. I spend some time standing by the sink staring out the window, watching the last of the light fade from the day, thinking about Schroder, thinking about Kent, thinking about tomorrow’s tests, but most of all thinking about Quentin James and how he changed our lives. For the first time I regret what I did to him, not out of guilt, but out of fear for where it’s going to lead. He’s going to tear my family apart for the second time. The universe is resisting life getting back to normal. It gives with one hand and takes with the other. My wife is out of her vegetative state and life is good, but life is still cruel because it deceives her and tricks her with the past. I’ve been deceived and tricked by Schroder too, but then again I’m not the same man I was three years ago. In some ways I think Schroder is acting out a darker, harder version of me. Is this where I was heading? If Bridget had not come back to me, would I be doing what Schroder is doing?

When my phone rings I see it’s Kent. I spend a few seconds considering whether or not I should answer it. For now I just want the rest of the world to disappear. Especially Kent and Schroder and all that they represent.

“I quit,” I tell her when I answer it.

“Well, before you run off to sculpt your first modern art piece, I thought I’d tell you I’ve been doing some homework,” she says, “on Smith’s other cellmates.”

“And?”

“He had two other cellmates at various times during his stay there. A guy by the name of Jamie Robertson, and a guy by the name of Eugene Walker.”

“What are these guys in for?”

“Robertson was in for armed robbery,” she says, “but it’s Eugene Walker that we need to focus on. You don’t remember him?”

“No.”

“The tax guy,” she says.

“Oh shit, that guy?” I say, remembering the case and the stories that made the news and the stories that didn’t. Walker worked for the Inland Revenue Department. He would target women who had
recently become single. He would use his resources to look up their address, and knowing they were now living alone, he would target them and sexually assault them. He chose only woman with babies, and he would tell them after the attack that if they went to the police he would kill their child. For three years he did that, and nobody ever went to the police. There was a serial rapist in the city and nobody knew. Then one day he tried to attack a woman being investigated for tax fraud. A tax inspector was following the woman and was parked outside her house when he saw Walker forcing his way inside. The police never found out how many women he hurt—four came forward after his arrest, but we always suspected more.

“That was when, ten years ago? Fifteen? Must be fifteen—I hadn’t been on the force long.”

“Fifteen,” she says.

“Where is he now?”

“He got out a few years ago,” she says. “I’m still trying to get hold of his parole officer. If prison is the connection, and cellmates are connected, then it stands to reason Walker could be next. We’ll have to have officers babysit the guy. What a waste of manpower.”

“It is what it is,” I tell her, but what I really want to tell her is that what it is is a waste of time too.

“Also, Hutton is still convinced the bald guy may have been at Kelly Summers’s house. It makes sense that Kelly couldn’t have lifted that body alone, and there’s no trace of her in Smith’s car. He wants us to fingerprint her place.”

I suddenly become light-headed. “What?”

“Yeah. I know we’ll probably only find her prints and family member’s fingerprints, but if somebody did help her, and it is this bald guy, then he might have touched a bunch of surfaces.”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “It seems pretty thin.”

“Maybe,” she says. “But it’s worth a shot, right? I think we should fingerprint Peter Crowley’s house too.”

“I don’t think his family will be too thrilled with that.”

“Nothing to lose,” she says. “I’ll send a fingerprint team out to get it done.”

“When?”

“First thing in the morning. You want me to keep you updated?”

I think about Schroder’s prints all over the shower curtain, over the windowsill, all over everything. He would have wiped everything down, wouldn’t he? Yes—but it only takes one print.

“Tate? You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Want me to keep you updated?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Good luck for tomorrow,” she says, and I’m thinking the same thing.

I go back to staring out the window, thinking about life, about the paths I’ve taken. I think about all the hard work, about getting Bridget back, and I think about how easily it will disappear if they find Schroder’s prints all through Kelly Summers’s house. Somehow I have to stop that from happening.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Schroder is sitting at his kitchen table. It’s thirty or forty years old, has a hard varnish top and metal curved legs and a bunch of scratches. It cost him fifteen dollars and came with two chairs even though one is all he needs. He has a supermarket pizza, which on one bite he can’t taste, and on another he thinks there might be a hint of flavor, but then thinks it’s his memory fooling him because the third bite is back to nothing. Beside him is a piece of paper on which he’s listing his returning emotions. On the top of the list is
curiosity,
and even though he’s not really sure that can be included as an emotion, he figures there’s nobody here to argue. If he wants curiosity to be an emotion, then it’s an emotion. Beneath curiosity he has written
guilt.
Guilt is one emotion that has definitely returned. He has written
passion,
but has crossed it back out. He was confusing his desire to protect Kelly Summers as something he was passionate about, but really it was closer to guilt than passion—or more accurately, to the guilt he would have felt if he hadn’t protected her. Which he feels now.

Anger?
No.
Happiness?
No.
Sadness?
He writes
sadness
down and puts a ring around it—he isn’t sure.
Love?
No.
Hope?
No.
Joy?
No.
Disgust?
Yes.
Anticipation?
Yes. He writes that down too.
Fear?
Yes—he has a fear of being caught. Of going to jail.

Desire?

Desire.
He puts a ring around it. Then underlines it. Then sits at the table tapping his pen against the pad while staring at the word.
Desire.
Yes, he feels desire.

He comes back to
fear.
He puts a line under that one too. It’s not just a fear of being caught, but a fear of not making a difference. A fear of moving on from this world and being forgotten and, really,
hasn’t he invested too much of himself into this city for that to happen? A fear of dying. He doesn’t want to die, but it’s happening. Melissa X took care of that. If he were to die tomorrow, how would people view him in six months’ time? What would they say? That he died a hero? That he died cleaning up a city? What about in ten years? A hundred years from now nobody will be talking about him at all, and he figures when you’re dead a hundred years will go by pretty quick. A hundred years is a heartbeat compared to eternity for a dead guy. He writes
anger
back down on the page and puts a ring around it, somewhat surprised he dismissed it earlier on.

He wonders if there is anything he can do about the guilt, and decides there is. It’s all about balance, in the same way a hundred years or a thousand years can slip by unnoticed by the dead, unnoticed by oceans and landscapes. He thinks that his guilt can go unnoticed if he can flood his system with whatever the opposite of guilt is. Legally, the opposite of guilty is not guilty, but in this case the opposite of guilt is going out there, tracking down some really bad people, and killing them. The opposite of guilt is giving others their five minutes with those who have hurt them, and making sure nothing goes wrong. And nothing will go wrong, because if it does, he has Tate in his corner to help him out. Tate with his own personal demons and definitions of what justice is. Tate who feels he can judge even though he took the man who killed his daughter into the woods and killed him. Tate who two hours ago sat opposite him, getting angrier and angrier as he held the small wooden toy Schroder gave him. They had been friends once, but two hours ago all that turned to dust. And what did a dying man need with friends anyway?

Enjoyment.
He writes it down.

If, for the moment, he removed Kelly Summers’s death and Peter Crowley’s death from the guilt equation, then if he had to label what was left, wouldn’t he call that
enjoyment
? He puts a line through it, then writes
fulfillment
beneath it
.
He puts a ring around it, then a tick next to it. Fulfillment is the answer, not enjoyment. He is a man with a time bomb inside his head who two days ago
wasn’t searching for anything, didn’t care about anything. He was a man who was leaving the world to its own devices. The New New Him is all about fulfillment.

He will give others their five minutes.

There is no need to target other cellmates, or other people Dwight Smith knew—that ruse is over. Any other names he got from the prison officer are useless anyway as the police will now be keeping an eye on them.

So who?

Who does he target next?

He closes his eyes and starts thinking back over the years and he waits for a name to jump out from his past.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

We go to bed and we sit up for a while and read. Bridget is reading a novel about a boy who runs away from home to find his missing dog, and I’m reading a novel about a boy who runs away from home because his dad used to beat him up, and now he’s joined the circus and learning how to be a knife thrower while his dad comes looking for him. I can figure out where it’s going. However I can’t get into it. I’m too distracted. By life. By Schroder. By the tests tomorrow. The world is closing in on me. Even if I can somehow take care of Schroder’s fingerprints, then what? Something else will come up, of course it will. Two or three somethings. A whole handful of them. We lie in bed and we don’t talk about the tests, this unspoken thing between us, as if mentioning them will jinx them. The thing Bridget wanted to tell me today has now been put off for tomorrow, and that’s okay by me—I have enough things on my mind.

When the lights are off and we’re trying to fall asleep, all I can see is Schroder telling me he knows where Quentin James is, that from now on I answer to him, that if I didn’t want to end up in jail alongside him then I have to keep the police from knocking on his door. Then he told me he was done anyway, he had saved who he wanted to save, and that soon none of it would matter anyway. The bullet in his head, he told me, would solve all our problems soon enough.

Bridget starts snoring softly, which is something she never used to do, but it’s part of who she is now. I watch the numbers on the clock roll on, each one bringing me closer to either dealing with Schroder or helping Schroder, which is the same as me going to prison or not going to prison. By the time six a.m. comes around,
I’ve slept on and off during the night for three hours. I feel exhausted. I climb out of bed and sit on the edge with my face in my hands, thinking this could be my last day as a free man.

When six thirty comes around, I shake my wife awake. She smiles at me, and then that smile turns into a frown when she sees I’m wearing the same suit I wore yesterday. The suit I wear to save the world.

“You’re going to work?”

“Just for an hour, maybe a little longer.”

She looks at the clock, and then looks at me. “Are you serious?”

“It’s something I have to do.”

“Let somebody else do it. Today is our day, Teddy.”

“I’ll be back in time for our appointment. I promise. Hopefully I’ll even be back in time for breakfast.”

Her usual smile and her
Teddy off to save the world
response isn’t there. She looks annoyed. “Why do I always feel like your job is more important than me?”

“You shouldn’t feel that way,” I tell her, “because it isn’t.”

“You worked all day yesterday.”

“It’s just this morning. I promise, okay? There’s something I have to do.”

“You can’t call my parents this early,” she says.

“I know,” I tell her.

“You want to leave me alone,” she says.

“It won’t be for long. I don’t have a choice. If there was any other way I’d find it, but there’s not. I don’t want to go, but it’s important.”

“More important than me?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I’m doing this for you,” I tell her. “For us.”

She nods. “Want to explain how?”

“I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Okay, Teddy, but don’t be late, okay?”

I lean in and kiss her on her cheek and thankfully she doesn’t pull away. “I won’t be. I promise.”

I feel like a complete bastard as I leave my wife, but that’s a
better feeling than being in jail for ten years. Then, as I drive, a new thought hits me—under the new law I could actually face the death penalty. Would they do that to me? Would they make an example of what I have done? They’d see why I did what I did . . . but still . . . I killed a man in cold blood. The
why
doesn’t matter. It’s the outcome that matters. I put a man in the ground. The
when
doesn’t matter either. There’s talk that soon an offer will be made to every person out there wanted for murder. Turn yourself in before the end of the year. Anybody arrested after the end of the year, whether it’s for a current murder, a recent murder, or a cold case, no matter when the crime was committed, you may face the death penalty.

A few months ago me and Schroder were called the Coma Cops.

What will they call us when we’re both hanging from our necks?

It’s ten to seven when I get to Schroder’s house. The street is quiet. I knock loudly enough for him to hear, but not too loudly for the sound to wake everybody on the street. It takes him a minute to come to the door. He looks tired.

“Kill anybody else last night?” I ask him.

“What do you want, Theo?”

“I want to know how many fingerprints you left at Kelly Summers’s house, and at Peter Crowley’s house too.”

He nods. “None at Peter Crowley’s. I was careful not to touch anything. I cleaned down Kelly Summers’s house too, but it could be a problem. Are the police going to print it?”

“Yes.”

“The intent was for Dwight Smith to disappear,” he says. “I wasn’t wearing gloves. There was never meant to be a reason for them to question her, and certainly no reason for them to print the place. We cleaned up really good, but it’s impossible to know for sure. You need to figure out a way to stop the police from printing it.”

“And how do you suppose I do that?”

“You’re the cop,” he says. “It’s your job to figure that kind of thing out.”

I shake my head. “Actually, Carl, it’s your job to figure it out. You’re the killer. You’re the one who’s not meant to leave anything behind.”

“If you don’t want to end up in jail, Theo, you’ll figure out a way to stop them.”

“Well it’s your lucky day, Carl, because I already have figured it out. Put on a shirt and tie. We’re going for a ride.”