Five Minutes Alone (38 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

I put my hands out in front of me. “Calm down, Chris. There’s nothing to gain here. Put the knife down and let’s think about this.”

He doesn’t calm down. Our Taser is back with Officer England and the child toy he tripped over. Which means the best thing right now is for us to stay out of Chris’s reach. McCoy goes left and I go right, and Chris makes his decision, and goes towards McCoy.

“Chris,” I shout, but he doesn’t respond, just keeps going towards McCoy, the knife out in front of him, his elbow bent slightly. “Chris!”

But Chris isn’t listening.

I move in behind him, and he hears me and turns towards me and swings the knife. It slices towards my face and I duck back and watch it race by, and then McCoy is behind him, grabbing him around the neck in a choke hold. A moment later Chris jabs the knife over his shoulder and McCoy turns his face away, only not far enough, and I watch the knife slide into the bottom of his ear, it moves upwards, slicing in deeper. Instead of letting him go, McCoy tightens his grip as blood starts squirting out from the wound. I jump onto Chris and grab hold of his wrist and push it out to the side, blood going everywhere. I fire a punch into the underside of his jaw. His head jolts backwards and crashes into the bottom of McCoy’s chin, and the impact causes McCoy’s ear to flop out to the side where the momentum tears it away. I don’t see where it lands. He steps backwards and drags Chris, who is starting to struggle less. I grip his hand with both of mine and dig my thumbs as hard as I can into the underside of his wrist until he releases the knife, and then I punch him as hard as I can in the stomach. McCoy flips him
around and throws him face down onto the ground, puts a knee in his back, and then I pull his hands around and get the cuffs onto him.

“Goddamn it,” McCoy says, and he pushes himself a few feet away and sits down, touching his fingers to the side of his head and then looking at the blood. Chris Watkins rolls onto his side, his hands cuffed behind him, and brings his knees to his chest. He’s gasping for air. “You move one more inch and I’m going to knock your teeth out,” McCoy adds.

Chris must believe him, because he doesn’t move another inch.

“You want to help me out here?” McCoy asks.

I look around the ground where we struggled. The knife is a chef’s knife with a blade maybe eight inches long and a solid wooden handle. There’s blood all over it. It’s lying half on the sidewalk and half on the grass verge towards the road. McCoy’s ear is a few inches away from it, sitting in a small pool of blood. It looks like a mushroom in sauce.

“I’ve got it under control,” McCoy says, then nods back in the direction of the house. “Go get me some ice.”

I run back towards the house. Everybody inside is awake now, the baby is screaming and the lights are on, and Officer England is on his side with his ankle pointing ninety degrees inwards, his face red and tight with every vein in his body trying to pop through his skin. Lee is leaning over him, trying to talk him through the pain.

“Backup is on the way,” I tell both of them, then head into the kitchen. I open cupboards and find a plastic container with a lid, big enough to hold a couple of sandwiches. I fill it with ice from the freezer, and then I run back down the street to where McCoy is still sitting, part of me having expected to find he’s stabbed Watkins or at the very least cut one of his ears off too. He’s on the phone updating the officers racing to the scene. I pick up the severed ear and drop it into the bag of ice then have the urge to wipe my fingers on the lawn, and then actually do just that. I shake the container a little to make sure the ear gets completely covered, the ice rattling like dice.

“If this doesn’t go back on right,” McCoy says to Watkins, “I swear to God I’m going to cut your eyelids off.”

“I want a lawyer,” Watkins says.

“You’re going to need one,” I tell him, “because we know you killed Hailey McDonald, and right now you just tried to kill a police officer.”

“I’m not saying anything else,” he says, “just that I want a lawyer.”

“How’s England?” McCoy asks me.

“Probably rainy,” I tell him.

“Ha ha,” he says, and for a guy who just had his ear cut off, he seems extremely calm.

“His ankle is broken,” I say. “It’s on a ninety-degree angle. Looks like straightening it is going to hurt a hell of a lot more.”

“Good thing I ordered us an ambulance.”

The other police cars arrive before the ambulance does. There are just two patrol cars because the suspect is in custody. Watkins is helped into the back of one of them, and then he’s driven away, where he’ll go back to the station and insist again that he wants a lawyer. The ambulance arrives and the two paramedics start looking McCoy over, and I hand one of them the plastic container with the ear. McCoy is loaded into the back then has to wait five minutes while Officer England is loaded into the back too. Another car pulls up and another detective along with a forensic technician take some photographs of the knife, then it’s slipped into an evidence bag and then the technician and the detective walk down to the house and take some more photographs, this one of the garden where Watkins started digging. The garden trowel is still there. It’s put into the same kind of bag as the knife.

Then I’m the last one left at the scene. I thank Lee Charters for the use of his house, and he tells us to keep the container.

“Think of it as a reason to come buy your next car off me,” he says.

Then I climb into my car, and head back down to the station.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

The station has only a quarter of the lights on and ten percent of the staff. Crime may not sleep, but the people cleaning up the mess sure need to. I make myself some coffee. It’s four a.m. and I’m tired and want to go home. Watkins is in one of the interview rooms talking to a lawyer. Soon he’ll be figuring out the best way to shave off a year or two for cooperating. He just has to mentally get there, that’s all. Right now he’ll be in a different headspace. He’ll be trying to piece together a reason for why we caught him with a knife. He’ll want a way out of this, a way that doesn’t involve jail time, but that isn’t going to happen. Stephen King couldn’t come up with a reason why, at almost two in the morning, Christopher Watkins was in the yard where Ron McDonald used to live, innocently burying a knife that seven years ago was used to kill McDonald’s wife.

I give Kent a call. She answers the phone sounding sleepy and I tell her what’s happened and, still sounding sleepy, she asks how McCoy is. I tell her I haven’t heard, then I think there might be a joke in there somewhere, about not having heard and about McCoy losing an ear, but I don’t have the energy to figure it out. She tells me she’s on her way.

I drink my coffee and I pace the task-force room, and I think about how some cases are simple and some are not. We’ve just taken thirty hours to solve a case that seven years ago we couldn’t solve, and that makes it look easy. Kent arrives. She’s wearing the same clothes she wore yesterday and she makes herself a coffee and then we head to the interrogation room. Kent is carrying a video camera and a tripod. I’m about to knock on the door when it opens anyway and a man in a suit smiles at us and identifies himself as
Ernest Grey. He shakes our hands, and then asks if we can have a word in the corridor. We tell him that’s fine.

“It’s four fifteen in the morning,” he tells us. Ernest has a big, friendly smile and stands a little taller than me, he has mostly gray hair and it’s floppy and tidy except for a few strands that are hanging over his forehead. He reminds me a little of my father. “Now, tell me if we’re all on the same page here when I say we can deal with this tomorrow. This homicide you’re going to try and charge him for is already seven years old. He’s not going anywhere, the family won’t mind waiting one more day. How about we reschedule this for a more reasonable time? Only thing I’d ask is you keep my client in his own detention cell.”

I nod while he talks to us, even the bit where he said
try and charge him.
“I appreciate what you’re saying, but we’re here and ready to go,” I tell him.

Now he’s the one to nod. “Okay,” he says, “but once my client looks like he’s too tired to continue, I’m calling an end to it.”

We all step into the room. Chris sits on the other side of the table where he also sat yesterday. He’s a different beast from yesterday. His hands have blood on them. His lawyer sits next to him. Kent sets up the video camera and points it so it captures the four of us, then we sit down opposite the killer and the lawyer.

“Just before two a.m. this morning,” I say, “you entered the front yard of Lee and Nancy Charters where you were caught trying to bury the murder weapon used in—”

Ernest Grey holds up his hand. The big smile is still there. “Let me stop you a moment there, Detective, because I can see where you’re going with this.” He looks at his watch. “Two and a half hours since my client was arrested. It is the middle of the night. Can you explain to me how you were able to get the knife tested for DNA in such a quick time and at such a strange hour?”

“It hasn’t been tested,” I tell him.

His eyebrows go up. “It hasn’t? Sorry, I just thought I heard you say he was trying to bury the murder weapon. To what crime has this knife been linked?”

“Okay,” I tell him. “How about this. Chris, you want to tell us what you were doing trying to bury a knife in the yard of Lee and Nancy Charters?”

“I wasn’t trying to bury it,” he says. “I found it there.”

“You found it there?” Kent asks.

“Yes.”

“A quick question,” Ernest says, “because I think we can tidy up one of these issues right away. Can you tell me what my client said after you identified yourself as police officers?”

I don’t answer him.

“Detective?”

“I think it was pretty obvious we were police officers,” I tell him, knowing where he’s leading us. “Especially since I interviewed your client twelve hours earlier.”

“I see. So neither you nor Detective McCoy actually identified yourselves?” When I don’t answer, he carries on. “So what I hear you saying is that anybody being chased down a street at two in the morning in the dark by two men should always assume those two men are police officers, even if they don’t say anything?”

“Your client was found with a knife in his possession, which we believe we can link to the seven-year-old homicide of Hailey McDonald,” I tell him.

“Yes, so you say, and we’ll get back to that in a moment, but any charges you think you can lay against my client for assaulting a police officer I’ll have laughed out of court. You didn’t identify yourselves. Chris here was acting in self-defense. Now, I hear you’re running the shirt you found in the back of Ron McDonald’s car for DNA. That bullshit might work on people who don’t understand the law, but I do understand it, and those clothes are never coming back into evidence. Ever. Anything found from whatever DNA is found on those clothes can’t be used. This attempt to manipulate my client earlier today is nothing but the police taking advantage of somebody who can’t stand up for themselves.”

“Settle down, Mr. Grey,” Kent says. “Your client stabbed a
woman to death seven years ago and tonight he tried to do the same to a cop.”

“No, seven years ago Ron McDonald stabbed his wife, and tonight my client tried to defend himself from two men he believed were a threat.”

“Can your client explain why he was at the house?” Kent asks.

Grey looks at Watkins and nods at him, then Watkins shuffles in his chair and leans forward a little and rests his hands on the table.

“I was having an affair with Hailey,” he says. “We’d been seeing each other for a few months.”

“You were seeing her before Ron started his own affair,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Did Ron know?”

He shakes his head. “No, he suspected she was having an affair, but he never knew who with, and he didn’t really care. Especially after he met Naomi. He said their marriage was over anyway, and had been for a long time.”

“Okay,” I say. “So help me connect the dots here. How does that lead you to trying to bury a knife in the front yard of where they used to live?”

He shakes his head. “That’s not how it happened,” he says.

“So how did it happen?”

“I found the knife there.”

“Explain that to us,” I say.

“Tonight. I found it there. See, I knew you were going to search the house, right? I saw the report you left on the table yesterday. I saw—”

“That was very forgetful of you, Detective,” Grey says, then wags his finger side to side. “A man more pessimistic than me would suspect you had left it there deliberately.”

“Carry on, Chris,” Kent says.

“Well, I saw the report, and I knew you guys were thinking Hailey was having an affair, and I knew that if you searched that old house you would find evidence of it. See, she used to leave a key out for me.”

“A key?” I ask.

“Yeah. She would put it into a small plastic bag and she would hide it in the garden. That way on occasion I could call in sick at work and go to her house and let myself inside. She’d be waiting for me in the bath or the bedroom, you know, all ready for me.”

“She left you a key,” I say, “hidden in a plastic bag, buried in the garden.”

“That’s right.”

“She did that rather than leaving her door unlocked,” I say.

“Of course. Who leaves their door unlocked?”

“And she did that rather than answering the door,” I say.

“Yeah. Part of the thrill was knowing I’d walk into the bedroom and we’d get started. Plus she didn’t want people to risk seeing her naked when she answered the door. She was always naked for me.”

“Why didn’t she give you a key to keep?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I don’t know and I never asked her. I just figured maybe she was seeing other people too. Maybe she wouldn’t leave it out if there were other people coming over in case we all showed up at the same time.”

“Okay, so what happened tonight?”

“Well, I knew you guys were going to find this key if it was still there, and that it would have my fingerprints on it, and I knew you guys were going to start taking all the DNA you could from people and I figured you’d probably take fingerprints too of anybody who knew her,” he says, and again Ernest Grey is shaking his head, and he is wagging his finger back and forth in a
tsk tsk
gesture. “I just didn’t want that key to be found, because I knew you’d think whoever she’d been sleeping with was the one who killed her. So I went to where she used to hide it, and I started digging, and then I found the knife. It scared the hell out of me, because it confirmed right there and then that Ron had killed her, you know?”

“So rather than calling the police, or leaving it there, you decided to run?” I ask.

“Yeah. Because I sensed people were watching me. So then it was worse, right? Not only would people think I had done it because of
the key, but then they would be really sure I had done it because suddenly I was holding the knife. I should have left it there. I don’t know why I didn’t, but when I thought people were watching me I just ran. I took the knife with me to protect myself. Then two dudes were chasing me, so I did what I could to defend myself.”

He finishes talking and the room goes quiet. Chris is looking at Kent and he looks like he’s about to cry. “I really loved her,” he says. “I would never have done anything to hurt her.”

Nobody else talks then. I look over at Ernest Grey, and he looks composed and relaxed, but his mouth is a little tight and he knows what I’m thinking and what Kent is thinking because he just heard the same story. He’s thinking they are in a lot of trouble.

“That’s the best you can do?” I ask him.

“What?”

“Detective,” Grey says.

“That’s really the best you can come up with,” I say.

“That’s what happened,” Watkins says.

“Detective, that’s enough,” Grey says.

I start laughing. I can’t help it. I really can’t. Then Kent joins in. After the tension of the day, after McCoy losing his ear, after Hutton dying, all of that suddenly starts to disappear. I’m about to spend the rest of my life in jail, so why not get one more final laugh in if it’s there to be had? “That is the most ridiculous story I have ever heard,” I say, and I can barely get the words out. “And I’ve heard a lot of them.”

“There is no way any jury is going to buy that,” Kent says.

“He found the knife,” Grey says, “and the only thing we know that knife was used for was an act of self-defense. Even if it was used seven years ago, any DNA from my client on that knife got there when he found it tonight.”

I keep laughing.

“This interview is over,” Grey says.

“Stop laughing at me,” Chris says.

“Chris,” Grey says, and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t say anything.”

“This interview isn’t over,” I tell them, and I’m finally calming down, and so is Kent. “So far you’ve said nothing that gives us any reason not to charge you for the murder of Hailey McDonald.”

“I didn’t kill her,” Chris says, his voice rising. “I loved her.”

“You really expect us to believe the knife was buried in the exact same spot the key used to be buried in.”

“Why not?” Grey says. “If one person thought it made an ideal hiding spot, why not another? And it would explain why the key may not be there when you go back to the scene—when Ron buried the knife, he found the key. Or perhaps any one of these other men who were potentially sleeping with the victim.”

“Here’s what I think,” I say.

“No, here’s what I think,” Grey says. “You lied to my client this afternoon. You manipulated him into going to that scene because you sent that shirt out to a lab and something came back to point you in a different direction. You honed in on my client through illegal evidence, and that will get all of this thrown out in court.”

“We invited your client in for questioning in the homicide of Ron McDonald,” I tell him, “and during that questioning your client got it into his head that—”

“Because you left the folder behind!” Chris says.

“You were caught with the—” I say.

“Detectives,” Grey says, raising his voice. “The fact of the matter is you’ve apprehended my client by the use of illegal means. You have no reason to hold him.”

“We have every reason to—”

“This meeting is over,” Grey says, and he stands up. “I am instructing my client to say nothing else. I suggest we let a judge point out to you that you’re wrong. Let’s do that first thing in the morning, huh? It’d be nice to get it out of the way then that way you can do something productive with the rest of your day rather than chasing men for things they didn’t do.”

“Sit back down, Mr. Grey,” Kent says, “we’ve still got—”

“You heard my lawyer,” Watkins says. “I’ve got nothing else to say.”

“This is your last chance to help yourself,” I tell him. “You tell us what happened, and maybe you can avoid the death penalty.”

“What’s he talking about?” Watkins asks.

“He’s bullshitting you,” Grey says.

“No, we’re not,” I say. “You know it’s coming back, Chris, so what you want to ask yourself is do you want to be on our good side or on our bad side? Your lawyer can prance around and say anything he wants, but you know and I know what you did, and no jury is going to buy your story.”

“And no jury is going to have to. This is going to be dismissed,” Grey says. “All of it.”

“It’s not your lawyer getting the needle if he’s wrong,” I tell Watkins.

“The needle?”

“Or the gas, or the rope. We don’t know what it’s going to be,” Kent says. “Could be a firing squad for all we know.”