Trust No One (31 page)

Jerry stays on the couch while Hans goes into another room. He sips at his bottle of water while he watches the news. The story has something to do with gas prices going up, and he realizes that’s one thing he’ll never have to worry about again, and with that thought comes another one—it’s also something that Fiona Clark won’t have to worry about. A sense of recognition quickly follows, and he realizes he’s done this before—not kill somebody, that he has never done—but watched the news only to see a dead woman on the television screen, his imagination on overdrive as it fills in the blanks. Sometimes the imagination of a crime writer is a powerful thing. In fact he’d go as far as to say it’s a curse. It’s one reason he used to try and avoid the news—when he sees somebody murdered, his mind goes to the event, he pictures their last few moments, what they went through, the fear, the begging, the desperation to survive. It’s the five stages of grief on an escalated scale. His mind takes him there, but it also takes him to the moments before, those choices made on the way home when the victim could have turned left instead of right, made that green light before it turned red, if they hadn’t skipped their coffee—decisions and processes bringing them closer to death. His imagination runs the other direction too, moving forward after the crime, a mother collapsing at the news, a husband punching a wall, children confused and scared, a boyfriend begging the police to have five minutes alone with whoever did this, people being sedated the same way he had to be sedated yesterday. He scratches at his arm, the needle prick still itching from the injection.

Hans comes back with a laptop and sits next to him on the couch. He sets the laptop on the stool and drags it closer.

“I don’t think I can handle one more nail in the coffin,” Jerry says.

“We can still go to a strip bar,” Hans says.

“Let’s just get this over with.”

Within a minute Hans is pulling up stories, and there is Suzan with a
z
,
only she isn’t Suzan with a
z
but Julia with a
J
and with a face Jerry can remember, a face he can picture when he thinks of the book he put her in, this is the woman he thinks about when he confesses to murder. Julia without a
z,
whose backyard he stood in thirty years ago while embracing the darkness. Blond hair and big blue eyes, athletic, his neighbor, the woman he would see jogging in the mornings, her ponytail bouncing up and down, this girl not much older than Eva is now. They read the articles. Julia had broken up with her boyfriend six weeks earlier, a guy by the name of Kyle Robinson. According to her friends, he was harassing her. He was phoning her all the time, showing up at her work, showing up at her home, he would send her flowers and, on one occasion, he placed a dozen dead roses on her doorstep. Her friends told her to contact the police, to get a restraining order, but she defended him. She said he wasn’t really that bad, even though he had hit her a few months before they broke up, just the once, if you don’t include the other time he’d pushed her hard into the wall. She thought reporting him would aggravate the situation. Then her body was found, and the boyfriend was suspect number one. It was a label he couldn’t shake, and within forty-eight hours he was arrested and charged with her murder, and a year later he was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years in jail. Eleven years into his sentence another inmate stabbed him in the throat and the boyfriend left the prison system three years early in a body bag.

“There’s nothing here to suggest anything other than the boyfriend killing her,” Jerry says.

“He always said he was innocent,” Hans says, leaning back into the couch.

“But we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you didn’t think I killed her,” Jerry says.

“You used to talk about her a lot. From the day you moved onto that street, you used to talk about how hot the girl was that lived opposite you. Talked about her all the time, right up until she died. It was not long before you met Sandra. For those few days after she was found, and before the ex was arrested, you were as nervous as hell. I figured, you know, it was just because somebody you liked was murdered and that it upset you, but I also remember wondering if she’d still be alive if I hadn’t shown you how to pick a lock.”

Jerry can’t remember any of that, then suddenly he’s talking with Sandra, they’re talking about going to the movies on a date, he’s telling her he’s a closet Trekkie and she’s asking him what else he was keeping in his closet. What did he tell her? He told her he was keeping the body of his ex-girlfriend in there. Jesus, was it more than just a joke? If he can remember that, then surely he should be able to remember Julia. Only he can’t.

“When the boyfriend was arrested, my suspicions about you disappeared, but then over the last year you started confessing to Suzan with a
z
and, well, I guess I’ve always figured Suzan could have been her.”

“And you said nothing.”

“Of course I said nothing. It was thirty years ago, she’s dead, the boyfriend is dead, you were in a home flicking between the real world and wherever it is your mind goes when you’re no longer in control. It’s a closed book, mate.”

“And a year ago when you found me covered in blood?”

Hans nods. “Yeah, I thought about her that night too. Of course I did. It made me wonder.”

Hans closes the lid on the laptop. The news on the TV shows cop cars and reporters and rubberneckers all standing outside a house where police tape is strung across the front. It’s the house from this morning. Hans uses the remote to turn up the volume. The police aren’t releasing the dead girl’s name. They watch the report, neither of them talking, but Jerry knows both of them are thinking the same thing—that he killed her. That he killed Julia with a
J.
His wife with an
S.
The florist with a capital
B.
He killed them all. Even the boyfriend who died in jail, when you think about. He killed them, and his mind, to protect him, is hiding the memories.

“How many others?” Jerry asks.

Hans doesn’t answer. He just stares ahead at the television screen where the news isn’t getting any better.

Jerry carries on. “Both solved and unsolved, solved where they got the wrong guy. It’s been thirty years since Julia Barnes, and if it’s true and all this time I’ve been writing what I know, then how many others? Five? Ten? A hundred?”

“I don’t know, Jerry. Maybe there aren’t any others.”

Jerry slowly shakes his head. He is about to tell his friend he couldn’t have done any of this, but finds he can’t say the words. Not only could he have done these things, but most likely he did. “Hans?”

“I’m sorry, buddy. We need to go to the police. I’ve indulged you long enough, but it’s time to go. Any more thoughts on the journal?”

“The police are going to pin as many unsolved homicides on me as they can, and I’m not going to know whether to believe them or not.”

“It’ll bring closure to lots of people.”

“But it could be false closure. The people who committed those crimes are going to get away with them if they’re pinned on me. They’re going to call me the Butcher of Christchurch. No, it’ll be the Cutter. They’re going to start calling me the Cutting Man.”

“They already do.”

“The meaning will be different this time.”

“We need to take you to the police station, but first you need to try and relax and think about where your journal is.”

“Did I do these things? Tell me, Hans, tell me, did I do these things?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s no doubt in your mind?”

“None.”

“Okay,” Jerry says, finally accepting he has no other choice. “Then what does the journal matter? Let’s just go to the police,” he says. “Let’s just get this over with.”

What do you want to hear about first, Future Jerry? The blood? The shirt? Would you rather hear about the knife? How about the phone call to Hans? Or would you rather hear it from the beginning? Yes? The beginning? As you wish.

The Wedding of Mass Destruction made the news, as things can do if they go viral. The news piece was about Jerry Grey, Alzheimer’s sufferer, whose unfortunate lapse of Alzheimer’s judgment was caught on video and has now been viewed by over one million people. Porn and providing a place to rub salt into the wounds of others at their lowest moments—those are the Internet’s two biggest contributions to the world.

The last thing you remember from yesterday is writing in your journal, hiding it away, and then having a few drinks with the plan of sneaking out the window to find somewhere to have a few more. You can remember breathing in the fresh air as you crawled out. It was so crisp it was like it was being swung by the tail and smacked into your face. You were drunk, the perfect amount of buzz where it wasn’t going to worry you how far you had to walk, or how much a drink was going to cost, or what kind of bar you ended up in. Only if any of that happened, you don’t know. What you do know is that Captain A took over sometime after you wrote in your journal, and when he let go of the controls it was six in the morning and you were sitting on the couch. Your joints were stiff and your feet were sore, and you felt like you’d walked a few miles. You were naked from the waist up. You didn’t even notice the blood at first. You made your way into the bathroom, and that’s when you saw yourself in the mirror. Jerry Grey looking very pale and tired. Jerry Grey with crows-feet around his eyes and mouth. Jerry Grey naked from the waist up but with smears of blood on his chest and arms and face.

Want to take a stab at what was going on, Henry?

Jerry was in the off position. Jerry had no clue what was going on. Jerry’s world was going to get much worse later that day, but he didn’t know it then.

You rushed upstairs and you were scared, J-Man, as scared as you’d ever been. You opened the bedroom door, and the world was swaying, and you knew if you found Sandra in there with blood all over the walls, you would scream until your throat tore, until your ears popped, you would scream yourself to death. But there was no blood. You stood for a minute watching her sleep before going back down to the office. You couldn’t find your shirt. It wasn’t in the laundry, wasn’t in the bathroom, then you thought . . . if Captain A had steered you into trouble, perhaps he had tried to cover it up? Perhaps he had hidden the evidence. You moved your desk, used the screwdriver on the floor, and found your shirt under there. It wasn’t a wedding shirt anymore, but a funeral shirt, made to look that way by the blood on it. You left it under the floor and put everything back into place. You went and closed the office window that was still open, the window you had climbed out of as Jerry Grey, but by the time you climbed back in you were somebody else. You were Captain A, but Captain A has another name, doesn’t he. He goes by Henry Cutter. And that shirt made it obvious that Henry likes to write what he knows.

You went online. You searched news websites for stories that could be connected to your night. There was nothing. You washed the blood off your face and chest at the bathroom sink. You popped a pair of antidepressants and lay on the couch with no idea what to do next. Then you ended up popping a couple more and falling asleep. Right through until noon. You woke up with a dry mouth and the sense that everything was okay, then you remembered it wasn’t. You checked your body for cuts, for bruises, for more signs of blood, but there was nothing.

It’s the knife, right? That’s what you want to know about. Of course you do. At that point it was still hidden in your jacket, just waiting to change everything, and if you had found it then you could have hidden it with the shirt, but you didn’t find it—that little surprise was for Sandra. You went out to the lounge where she was sitting on a couch in the sun reading a book.

Isn’t there a lunch we’re supposed to go to?
you asked, and your voice was croaky sounding.

There was,
she said.
Eva and Rick were around this morning to check in on me,
she said, and it was
me,
not
us. I told them we wouldn’t be attending.

Why?

Why do you think, Jerry?

You told her you were sorry.

I know you are,
she said,
but it doesn’t change anything.

Sandra—

You stink of alcohol and sweat. Go and take a shower and I’ll make you some lunch.

You thought about telling her, but how could you? What could you say? You went and showered and put on some fresh clothes and came back downstairs. Sandra was in the office. There was a sandwich on your desk. She was tidying up, she was picking the jacket up, and while she was picking it up she was asking where your shirt was. Before you could lie and tell her you didn’t know, she hung the jacket over her arm. She paused. The weight told her something was in there.

Since you’re a
Let’s guess what happens a third of the way through
guy, then you already know it was the knife she found in there. It was loose in the pocket, blade pointing up, and she was lucky not to have cut herself. She pulled it out and held it away, the same way she does sometimes when she’s holding hair she just pulled out of the shower drain. You could both see it wasn’t one of your kitchen knives and you could both see the blood on it and you could both see the horror on each other’s face. This knife with a blade no longer than six inches, its dark wooden handle, its serrated edge, this little knife that was the biggest knife in the world.

What the hell is this, Jerry?

Seeing that knife told you that as bad as the WMD had been, you had managed to top it. It put the bloody shirt into a different context.

Jerry?

I don’t know.

You don’t know?

You were standing in the doorway with hair dripping wet even though you had gotten dressed, and then you realized all of you was dripping wet. At first you thought it was sweat, but then you realized you hadn’t dried yourself after the shower, that you had just put your clothes straight on.
I don’t know.