Joe Victim: A Thriller (4 page)

My heart skips a couple of beats and I develop some kind of tunnel vision, where the walls disappear and all I can see is Adam as he’s talking to me. But that’s not all I can see—I can see myself walk through the door of my apartment and lie down on my own bed. I see women in my future. I see other dead people too—like Adam, like Barlow, like Glen. I can’t talk. My mouth hangs open and my eyes stretch wide and I can feel a goofy smile forming and I just. Can’t. Talk.

“The charges have all been dropped,” Glen says, and his face is scrunched up like he’s been sucking on a bad piece of fruit. Or on a good piece of Adam.

“Some stupid fucking technicality,” Adam adds.

I still can’t talk. All I can do is smile.

“Let’s go,” Adam says, and he almost spits the words at me and, just like that, my prison experience is over.

Chapter Four

The days are getting shorter. Colder. Most days the forecast says tomorrow is going to snow yet it doesn’t get there, and Schroder is never sure whether to blame the weatherman or Mother Nature. Last year had a summer that felt like it wasn’t going to end, with warm days late into May. This summer was on the same track until a few weeks ago. Earlier in the year a heat wave scorched the city and took lives. In this weather it’s hard to remember those times. The good thing about the cold is that it keeps the loonies inside because it’s too miserable to be outside mugging people. Crime always has a way of being scaled back in the winter. People at work are leaving houses that feel like refrigerators and nobody really wants to break into those. So it’s a good time of the year to be a cop. Only Carl Schroder isn’t a cop anymore. Hasn’t been for over three weeks, since the night he killed that woman and his rank—along with his gun and badge and all the shitty benefits that came along with it, including the shitty pay—was taken away.

Every day since losing his job he’s still felt like a cop. It’s annoying. Every day for the first two weeks he woke up and wanted to put on the badge and ended up putting on sweatpants and a jacket and hung around the house all day helping his wife and being a better dad to his kids. Every night he went to sleep seeing the woman he shot and hating that he had to make that decision and knowing he’d make the same one again. The third week he worked. His new job doesn’t require him to shoot people.

This is now his second week on the job. The drive out to the prison is miserable. It was raining when he woke up, raining when he ate breakfast, raining when he got the phone call to come out here, and even though the forecast for tomorrow is supposed to be fine, he’s sure it’ll be raining then too. The window wipers make it all clear before the rain turns it back into a blur. There are paddocks full of cows standing in mud, sheep wearing drenched woolen jerseys, and still there are farmers out there making the circle of life happen, making food, making milk, making money, driving around in their tractors as the rain keeps on coming. The grass shoulders off the side of the road are flooded. Small shrubs are under water. Birds are flapping around in it. The window wipers are struggling to cope. Every few miles there are warning billboards about not driving tired, or speeding, or driving drunk. One says
The faster you go the bigger the mess.
Superman would disagree. The faster he went the more people he saved. He once went so fast he went back in time and fixed a lot of messes before they began. Christchurch needs somebody like him.

A truck coming toward him hits a flooded section of road, splashing water up over Schroder’s windshield—more than the wipers can immediately handle—so for two seconds he can’t see a thing, a scary two seconds when you’re driving blindly on a motorway. He puts his foot on the brake and slowly presses it down until the windscreen clears. When it does, the view doesn’t change. Just more rain, more gray sky.

He has the radio on as he drives. He’s listening to a national talk radio station. People are phoning in and the DJ is making conversation. It’s current events, and the current event people want to talk about is the death penalty. It’s been ongoing for the last few months. It’s the national debate. People are for it. Other people are against it. Emotions are strong. Those for it hate those against it. Same goes for the other side. There is no middle ground. No sitting on the fence. People can’t understand other people’s point of view. It’s dividing the country, dividing neighbors, dividing family and friends. Schroder, personally, he’s for it. He sees no problem dishing out a little of the same pain that killers have inflicted on this city. Half the people phoning in to the radio station share his opinion. Half don’t. Either way they want to be heard.

“It’s not about justice,” somebody says, a guy by the name of Stewart who is phoning in from Auckland, where, according to Stewart, the rain is of biblical proportions. “It’s about punishment,” he says, which is pretty biblical too, come to think of it.

It’s a twenty-minute drive to the prison that takes thirty-five in this weather. He hears a dozen different viewpoints. The DJ is trying to be impartial. Schroder could flick the dial and hear the same debate on about six other stations. The good news is that there is going to be a referendum. A vote is taking place. For the first time that Schroder can remember, the government is going to listen to the people. At least they are saying they will—after all, it’s an election year. The leading question to the prime minster and to those running against him is: Will the next government follow the will of the people? And the answer is yes. That means, technically, by the end of the year the death penalty could be back in place, if that’s what the people want. He wonders what direction that will take the country. Back into the dark ages? Or into a future where people aren’t killing each other as often?

Hard to know.

But depending on the vote, he may just get a chance to find out.

Schroder turns the radio off. Next week, when Joe Middleton’s trial begins, will be a nightmare. He’s heard a rumor that the prosecution is going to ask for the death penalty if indeed the death penalty becomes law. There are going to be people outside the courthouse. They’re going to be carrying signs. Pro-death. Anti-death. Victim rights. Human rights.

The prison comes up on the left. He slows down and takes the turnoff, a speeding van almost rear-ending him, and a minute later he comes to a guard post. He shows his identification to a guard with the same amount of humor as a tumor. Up ahead is the entrance. Beyond that construction workers are assembling another wing of the prison. Even in the rain they’re working, eager to get the job done, eager to make more room for more criminals. Whoever said crime doesn’t pay also should have added that crime is a billion-dollar industry with all that it touches—new prisons, lawyers, funerals, insurances. It’s the only thing booming. Another car pulls in behind him into the parking lot. He parks and sits still for a few moments, wishing he had an umbrella, but knowing he probably wouldn’t use it even if he did. He looks over at the car parking next to him. A woman, all alone. She kills the engine and he can’t see her clearly enough to know what she’s doing, but he’s been around enough women to know she’s probably putting something into her handbag or getting something out, a simple job that can take his wife five minutes to do since her handbag is like a time capsule dating back to before they met. She opens the car door. She’s pregnant. From the looks of the way she’s trying to squeeze herself out of the car, she got pregnant sometime about a year ago.

“You need a hand there?” he asks, getting out of his car, and he has to almost shout to be heard over the rain. Before he’s even finished the sentence he’s soaking wet, and so is she, only just her face and belly at this stage.

“Thank you,” she says, and she reaches up and takes his hand. Rather than him pulling her up, she almost pulls him back into the car, and he almost lets her since it’s drier in there. He strengthens his back, switches on the stomach muscles he’s slowly losing, and pulls. She stumbles forward and has to wrap her arms around him, and he almost topples, grabbing at the car door to stay balanced.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry about that,” she says, pulling away from him.

“You picked a hell of a day to visit somebody,” he says.

She laughs, a very sweet laugh that her husband or boyfriend must love hearing. “You think today is going to be any better than tomorrow?”

“Supposed to be sunny,” he says, “but maybe the snow they picked for last week might finally arrive.” He’s curious as to who she’s visiting. Maybe her boyfriend or husband is locked up out here. He doesn’t ask.

“Can you . . . I hate to ask, but would you please grab my handbag for me?”

“Sure,” he says. She steps aside and he reaches into the car and grabs her handbag off the passenger seat. “No umbrella?”

She shakes her head. “It’s only rain,” she says.

He closes the door for her. “Torrential rain,” he says, and there’s no point in hurrying now, he can’t get any wetter.

She smiles. “I like it. The rain is . . . I don’t know, romantic, I guess.” She breathes in deeply. “And that smell,” she says. “I love that smell.”

Schroder breathes in deeply. All he can smell is wet grass.

They walk up to the main doors together, the woman has her hand on her stomach the entire way, and he figures she should be keeping that hand much lower, ready to catch what is surely going to fall out of her at any second. He opens the door for her.

“You look familiar,” he says, but he can’t place her. It’s more he gets the feeling she looks like somebody he used to know. He looks at her red hair—it’s full and wavy and comes down to her shoulders and he imagines she spends a long time looking after it with hair moisturizers and shampoos. She’s wearing a light brown shade of eye shadow to match, and red lipstick too. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“Ha, I get that a lot,” she says, and they’re inside now, out of the rain. “I used to be an actress,” she says, “before this happened,” she adds, patting her stomach.

“Oh really? I’ve just gotten into the TV industry myself.”

“You’re an actor?”

He shakes his head. “A consultant. What would I have seen you in?”

“Well, this is kind of embarrassing,” she says, “but nothing much. Just shampoo ads, mostly. And some hotel ads. Often you’ll see me behind the desk, or sitting by a pool, or in the shower. My career is really taking off,” she says, giving a grin. “Though with the baby you won’t see me again for a few years, unless it’s a diaper ad. Well, I hate to be rude, but nature calls,” she says, and she pauses next to a small corridor with a sign indicating that the toilets are only a few feet away. “You have children?” she asks.

“Two,” he says. Water is starting to puddle around his feet.

“This is my first,” she says. “I think he’s going to be a practical joker. I mean, at the moment he finds it funny to have me running off to the bathroom every ten minutes. Thanks for . . . for the lift,” she says, smiling.

“Anytime.”

He walks up to the counter, on the other side of which is a very large woman. There’s a piece of Plexiglas between them. It feels like being in a bank. Last time he came out to the prison was back in summer when Theodore Tate was being released, and then all he did was wait out in the parking lot. Tate was a buddy of his who used to be a cop, but who became a criminal. Then he became a private investigator. Then a criminal again. Then a cop. Then a victim. Tate has been a lot of things, and Schroder makes a mental note to go and visit him. It’s been a few days.

“I’m here for Joe Middleton,” he says, and he hands over his ID.

Her face tightens a little at the mention of Joe’s name, and so does his. Joe Middleton. For years that slimy bastard worked among them, cleaning their floors, empting their rubbish bins, the entire time using police resources to stay ahead of the investigation. Joe Middleton. Schroder got the credit for arresting him, but the entire thing was a fuck up. They should have gotten him sooner. Too many people died. He felt responsible. A lot of them did. And so they should—they let a killer walk among them.

“He’s five minutes away,” the woman says, and Schroder knows that no matter what this woman says, that’s the way it is. She doesn’t look like somebody you’d want to mess with. She looks like she could singlehandedly run the entire complex out here. “Take a seat,” she says, and points behind him. He knows the drill. He’s waited out here before—just never as a civilian. It’s different. He doesn’t like not having a badge.

He moves over to the seats. He’s the only one here. The pregnant woman is still in the bathroom, and he remembers what it was like with his own wife, and how in the end she refused to be more than thirty seconds away from a bathroom.

He sits down, his wet clothes pushing against him. The chair is a solid plastic one-piece with metal legs. There’s a table with magazines on it. Add some coughing people and a screaming baby and it would be just like a doctor’s office. He can hear drips of water coming off him and hitting the floor. The guard looks over at him and he feels guilty about the mess he’s making. He expects that any second now the
Take a seat
woman is going to throw him some paper towels, or throw him a mop, or throw him out.

Five minutes. And then he has to face the man he arrested a year ago.

The Christchurch Carver.

The man who made a fool of them all.

Chapter Five

This must be what it’s like to win the lottery. Or what it’s like to win the lottery and not even have bought a ticket. Both guards look sick. Adam looks like he wants to punch me. Glen looks like he could do with a hug. The news sinks in and I feel my Slow Joe game face taking shape. The world that shifted off its axis twelve months ago is righting itself. What was out of whack is now in whack. Nature correcting itself. The laws of physics correcting themselves. My Slow Joe smile feels great and seems to fit a lot better than it did earlier when I was with Barlow. It’s the big smile that shows all the teeth, and if I can’t get it under control it’s going to break my mouth in half. My scar hurts as it shifts around the smile, looking for a comfortable position and not finding one, but I don’t care about the pain. Not now. I’m going to be home again. I’m going to have the chance to carry on doing the thing I love to do. Get some new pet goldfish. Buy some nice sharp knives. Get a really cool briefcase.

Adam looks at Glen, and then he starts to laugh, the muscles in his neck straining out from his shirt, and when he starts to laugh then Glen laughs too. They stare at each other for two seconds, then both look at me. “That was fucking great,” Adam says, and he’s looking at me, but talking to his boyfriend. “You see his face?”

“I didn’t think it’d work,” Glen says. “I really didn’t. Oh man, you totally picked it.”

“I told you,” Adam says. “I told you he was dumber than anybody really knew.”

“What?” I ask, but of course I know what. It’s a practical joke. In an ideal world, I’d stab these guys to death for making me look like a fool. But this isn’t an ideal world—proven by my surroundings and lack of knife. I play along with them—because to do otherwise would be to show them who I really am.

“He still doesn’t get it,” Glen says, his voice rising, trying to hold back a laugh. He sounds eager, as if excited to be making his point. Whatever that point is. “You think they’re ever going to let you out of here?” he asks, directing his question at me. “Come on, asshole, there’s somebody here who wants to see you.”

I take a step toward them. “Should I . . . should I bring my books?” I ask, and boy I’m good. Very, very good.

“Oh my God,” Adam says, and starts laughing all over. “Oh my God, he still doesn’t get it!”

“Stop being such a fucktard. Let’s go,” Glen says, and he grabs hold of my arm. There’s a dark tone in his voice, the eagerness and excitement gone. He’s on edge. He sounds like he’s ready for me to try something, or more likely he’s wanting me to try something that will give them permission to find out if a man’s skull can be crushed between a forearm and a bicep.

“I’m . . . I’m not going home?”

“You crack me up,” Adam says, and Glen agrees.

They lead me back to an identical room to the one I was in earlier with the shrink. I sit behind the desk and they don’t handcuff me and I know what that means. That means I’m going to be talking to somebody who has the ability to beat the shit out of me. The guards leave the room. I stand up and start pacing it. I’m faced with the two fundamental decisions of prison—sit down and do nothing, or pace the room you’re in. I study the concrete walls. Great architecture. A real timeless quality. I reach out and touch them. Prisons all over the world from last century to the next century are going to have these same walls. In a thousand years I doubt they will have improved on the design. The door opens up. Carl Schroder walks in. He’s soaking wet. I’ll update the weather conversationalists when I get back to my cell.

“Take a seat, Joe,” Schroder says.

I take a seat. He takes his jacket off and hangs it over the back of the chair. The front of his shirt is wet, so is the collar, but the sleeves look mostly dry. He rolls them up. He brushes a hand through his hair and flicks the water off his fingers. His hair is longer than the last time I saw him, the fringe has grown out and is plastered over his forehead. He wipes a drop of rainwater off his nose. Then he sits down. He doesn’t have anything with him. Just his jacket. His wallet and keys and phone are probably out in a tray somewhere. He stares at me and I stare at him, and then I give him the big Slow Joe grin, the one with all the teeth.

“I hear you’re having a hard time,” Schroder says.

My grin disappears. Some people it’s just wasted on. “I hear you’re the one having a hard time,” I say. “Joe hears you were fired,” I tell him, and he was fired for showing up drunk to a crime scene. I wonder if it’s people like me that were the reason for people like him to start drinking. The thing is, showing up to work drunk as a cop isn’t a fireable offense. It’s something you would be suspended over, and perhaps demoted, but getting fired? No, not when the police force is struggling to recruit enough people. Schroder was fired for something else, but I can’t imagine him sighing, leaning back, and going
Well, Joe, here’s what really happened.

“Joe must hear a lot of things,” he says. “And Joe must know there’s a real shitty future ahead of him. You’re not getting away with any of this, so at least drop the fucking act.”

“Joe likes actors. Joe likes TV shows,” I tell him.

His eyes give a half roll, then he pinches the bridge of his nose. “Look, Joe, cut the bullshit, okay? I know you have a lot of time up your sleeve these days, but I’m not here to waste mine. I’m here to make you an offer. Your trial starts in four days. You—”

“You’re no longer a cop,” I tell him. “Why are you here? How many times have you come to see me over the last year, asking about Melissa? I keep telling you—”

“That’s not why I’m here,” Schroder says, putting out his hand.

Since my arrest they’ve been offering incentives for me to talk, but at the same time they’ve been telling me I’ll never see the light of day again. “Then why are you here?” I ask.

“I want to know where Detective Calhoun is buried.”

During my time back before I was arrested, one of the victims attributed to me was a woman by the name of Daniela Walker. Only I didn’t kill her. The person who did staged the scene so it would look like she was another victim of the Christchurch Carver. It annoyed me. In fact, it annoyed me so much that I investigated her death, and found she had been killed by Detective Inspector Robert Calhoun. Calhoun had gone to talk to her at her house to try and convince her to press charges against her husband who used to beat her, and somehow Calhoun ended up beating her himself. My plan was to pin all of my killings onto him. It didn’t work out that way. It wasn’t me who killed Calhoun. I abducted him. I tied him up. But it was Melissa who drove the knife into him.

I shrug. “Is he an actor?”

“He’s a policeman. The man you filmed being killed.”

“So he is an actor then.”

His fists tighten, but only marginally. “I don’t know how it’s felt for you, but time’s been flying for me. It’s like the crime rate in Christchurch took a break. People are still partying in the streets. Since you’ve been arrested the murder rate has plummeted. I’m no longer a cop, but the city doesn’t need as many cops anymore.”

“That’s bullshit,” I tell him. I watch the news. Bad shit is still happening out there. I’m just not part of it. “What do you want?” I ask.

“Truthfully? I want to pick this chair up and crack it through your skull. But I’m here because we need each other’s help.”

“Help? You have to be kidding.”

“I didn’t come here to kid with you, Joe.”

“Why isn’t my lawyer here?”

“Because lawyers get in the way, Joe. And the help I need from you doesn’t require a lawyer.”

“I’m an innocent man,” I say. “When the trial begins, people will learn that I was sick. I’m a victim in all of this. The things they say I did—that wasn’t me. That’s not the real me. The courts don’t punish victims.”

Schroder starts to laugh. In the years I worked around him it’s the first time I have ever seen it happen. He leans back in his chair, and suddenly he starts wheezing. He seems to get caught in a cycle where the laughter makes the situation even funnier, and he starts to cry along with it. His face turns red, and when he looks up at me he starts to laugh some more. I get the feeling if I were to laugh along with him he’d put me on the floor with his knee in my back and my arm twisted and broken behind me.

His laughing slows. It stops. He wipes his face with the palm of his hands. I can’t tell what’s tears and what is rainwater.

“Oh, Jesus, Joe, that was good. That was really good. And it was really what I needed because it’s been a shitty few weeks.” He sucks in a deep breath and fires it out fast, slowly shaking his head. “
I’m innocent,
” he says, and his smile returns and for a moment I’m worried he’s going to start laughing again, but he keeps control. “I can’t believe you said that with such . . .” he seems to search for a word, and settles on “conviction. Please, you have to say that when you get up on the stand. Deliver it just like that. You’ll make a lot of people happy.”

“Why are you here, Carl?”

“Well, well, that’s a surprise. That was good, always acting like you were forgetting my first name over the years. I gotta hand it to you, you were very convincing.”

“If I wasn’t convincing, that would make you a moron,” I say, just pissed off at him now, the same way I’m getting pissed off with everybody. “Just tell me what you want.”

His smile disappears and he leans forward. He puts his arms on the table and folds them. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you.”

“If I’m the man you think I am, then I’ve already proven I’m smarter than you. But no, I’m not that man. Which proves I can’t be that smart.”

“Yeah, well, you were too smart this morning for that psych test. That zero percent rating of yours. You know what that was, don’t you? That was your ego. That was you proving to the rest of the world just how smart you thought you really were, but the results are back, Joe, and that ego of yours fucked you over.”

“Whatever,” I say, annoyed that he knows about the test. I guess word gets around, even if you’ve been fired from the force.

“Truth is, I kind of like the way you sounded when you were mentally challenged. Kind of went with your look. That’s why you pulled off that routine so well. I mean, of course you fooled us, Joe, because you played the perfect fool.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, okay, Carl? You’re trying to make fun of me, trying to put me down, what is it you want that doesn’t need my lawyer present?”

He leans back. He doesn’t interlock his fingers like the psychiatrist. Maybe he’s come to the same conclusions about psychiatrists that I have.

“You said you needed my help,” I say, prompting him, and his face twists up a little as though the words have cut him somehow. “Hell, Carl, you look pretty pale. You feeling okay?”

“Twenty thousand dollars,” he says.

I must have missed part of the conversation. “What?”

“That’s what I’m here to offer you.”

I start to laugh as hard as he did earlier, only mine is forced, not real at all, and the act doesn’t work. I end up coughing, and a few wet strands of something warm fall out of my nose and hit the desk. My eyelid locks up, and I have to reach up and close it manually to get it working again. Schroder sits there silently the whole time, just watching me, shifting occasionally to adjust his wet clothes.

“We got your DNA,” he says. “You drank and ate at your victims’ houses. You were found with Detective Calhoun’s gun. We’ve got audio tapes you made from our conference room so you knew where our investigation was at. We got a parking ticket that was once in your possession that led to a body at the top of a car parking building.”

“We? You’re a cop again now are you?”

“We’ve got your DNA everywhere, Joe. We have so much on you that—”

“You’re still saying
we,
” I point out.

“That you’re embarrassing yourself with this insanity plea,” he says, carrying on. “A guy can’t kill as many people as you did and get away with it as long as you did unless he was in complete control of himself.”

“Or unless the police force is made up of monkeys and morons,” I say. “So is this meeting over, Carl, or are you going to tell me what it is that you want that involves twenty thousand dollars?”

“Like you know, I no longer work for the police force anymore,” he tells me. “In any capacity.”

“No shit. I’m surprised you’re working at all. I saw the footage of you showing up drunk to a crime scene. It made good TV viewing. You deserved to be fired.”

“I work for a TV show now.”

“What?”

“It’s a show about psychics.”

I slowly shake my head, hoping to shake something loose in there that will help any of this make sense, but I’m missing the bits and pieces to make that happen. A psychic? Money? What the fuck? “What the hell are you on about, Carl?”

“It’s a show about psychics who help solve unsolved cases.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“They want to look at your case.”

“My case? I don’t have a case, Carl. I haven’t hurt anybody.”

Schroder nods. No doubt he expected this answer. “Okay, let me speak hypothetically here,” he says. “Let’s say you know where Detective Calhoun is.”

“I don’t. All I know is that he’s dead.”

“But we’re being hypothetical here, Joe.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I tell him. “Hyper what? Hyper pathetic? I’m not good with big words.”

He closes his eyes and pinches the top of his nose again for a few moments. “Look, Joe, this show,” he says, talking into his hand, “they’re willing to pay you twenty thousand dollars on the chance that you may know where the body is.” He pulls his hand away from his nose and interlocks his fingers with his other hand. “Giving us a location would in no way suggest your guilt. In fact both you and the show would sign waivers to say you could never discuss with anybody that you gave this information. Now, hypothetically, if we found the body, what would your guess be that there is anything the police could use to find Melissa?”

I think about it. I set fire to Detective Calhoun’s dead body, and I buried it. There’s nothing there for the cops to find, just ashes and bone and dirt, maybe a few fragments of clothing.