Watch Me (26 page)

‘And what’s the right question?’

‘Who would put up with me?’

I laughed again, but Hannah wasn’t laughing. She was staring at me with an expression that was part pity and part sadness. It felt like she was looking right through me and finding me wanting. Before she could say anything else, I said, ‘I want to know what Dan Choat was hiding.’

‘How do you know he was hiding anything?’

‘Because everybody’s hiding something. You, me, everyone.’

‘And what are you hiding, Winter?’

Hannah was still staring, the silence between us growing more uncomfortable by the second. She wasn’t just expecting an answer, she was demanding one. I thought about the swirl of guilt that had run through my gut yesterday when she joked that I was a serial killer. And then I thought about my father lying strapped to a padded prison gurney, aiming his last words at me.
We’re the same
.

More staring. More silence.

‘Dan Choat was hiding something.’ I said finally. ‘We’re going to find out what.’

47

We started downstairs. Hannah took the kitchen while I searched the living room. I could hear her going through the cupboards in the next room. She was doing her best to keep quiet but that’s hard in a kitchen because there’s so much metal.

The living room hadn’t been changed since Choat’s mother died. Floral patterns dominated, a swirling kaleidoscope of pinks, violets, yellows and greens that would give you a headache if you stared too long. The bookcase was filled with hundreds of brightly painted porcelain animals and figurines. There wasn’t a single book because there wasn’t space for any. I ran a finger along one of the shelves. Not a speck of dust.

There was one book in the room, though. A large well-thumbed bible sat on the coffee table in easy reach of the living room’s only armchair. It had a cracked black leather cover that the years had faded to a dark green. The gold leaf had rubbed off long ago, leaving a dark shadow of the letters. The bible could easily be a hundred years old, maybe even two hundred, a family heirloom passed down through the generations.

On one wall was a reproduction of Da Vinci’s
Last Supper
. On another was a large crucifix. There was no TV, but there was a radio. A heavy Bakelite model that dated back to the early sixties. I switched it on and a hollering good-time Baptist preacher demanded to know if I’d let Jesus into my heart yet. I quickly switched it off.

Choat had made one addition to the room since his mother passed away. He’d commissioned an artist to paint his mother’s portrait. The end result was almost as horrific as the floral drapes. The picture hung above the sofa and had been positioned directly opposite the armchair.

The portrait was huge, four feet by three feet, way too big for this room. It wasn’t even remotely flattering. Choat’s mother looked as severe as the most extreme of the Old Testament prophets, ancient and desiccated. You could almost smell the fire and brimstone.

This had to have been commissioned by Choat. It was the only explanation that made sense. Usually when you commissioned a portrait you’d ask for something that made the subject look good. You’d maybe get a decade or two shaved off the age, and you’d lose the wrinkles, lines and imperfections. You would not waste money on something that looked like this.

My guess was that this was the way Choat remembered his mother, the way he thought about her, which would explain plenty. It was not the way she would have wanted to be remembered. This wasn’t the way anybody would want to be remembered.

It was easy to imagine Choat in here on his days off, listening to sermons on that old Bakelite radio and reading bible passages. I could see him dusting the ornaments while his mother gazed disapprovingly from the painting.

Was Choat gay? The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. If he was, then he’d been buried so deep in the closet he would have suffocated under all the guilt. I’d only been in the house for a short time and already I could feel the walls closing in. What must it have been like to spend your whole life living here?

I sat down in the armchair. There was a notepad beside the bible, the edges absolutely parallel. Next to the pad was a pen. This had been positioned parallel, too. Bible, pad, pen, all laid out in a neat row. The top sheet of the pad had the imprint of a single word in the middle, right where the fold would go. Lower case, no punctuation:
sorry
.

That narrative just kept unfurling, new details being added all the time. This room encouraged guilt. There was guilt written large in the pages of that big old family bible. One look at that portrait would have an innocent man confessing to sins he’d never committed.

It was easy to see how the unsub wanted the narrative to play out.

Choat had spent his last hours in here. He’d done a lot of pacing and a lot of thinking, the guilt eating him up. He might even have done some dusting. And then, when the guilt got too much, he’d sat down and written his suicide note, folded it neatly, tucked it into his shirt pocket and then driven out to the old oil refinery.

There was a grey area, though. A potential plot hole. Why would Choat murder Sam? What was the motive? Chances were that the unsub had a whole narrative strand unfurling there too. One that we hadn’t uncovered yet.

Jealousy was a possibility. I could imagine Choat being stuck here in his locked-down neat-freak life, the pressure building. He would have seen Sam swanning around town in his Ferrari, without a care, playing the big man. Sam would have been the perfect focal point for Choat’s rage. The pressure would have carried on building until he finally snapped and killed him.

I could think of a dozen other possible motives off the top of my head, but until we had more information it was just so much speculation. One thing I did know was that this unsub was too careful to leave a plot strand dangling. If anyone bothered to dig deep enough they would find something.

Hannah came in from the kitchen. She saw the portrait and stopped dead.

‘That’s really, really bad,’ she said in an awed whisper. ‘And a little bit scary. I told you he had serious mom issues.’

‘You told me. So, how did you get on?’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing, I’m afraid. Not unless it’s a crime to eat Cheerios when you reach your twenties. How about you? Did you find anything?’

‘Yes and no. I’m building up a clearer picture of Choat, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.’ The unsub had something on Choat, something embarrassing enough to use against him. Something that he could use to control him.’

Hannah nodded at the painting. ‘And that’s not embarrassing?’

‘Not embarrassing enough. I’m talking something so embarrassing that Choat would rather die than have it revealed. Something that would make him drive out to an abandoned oil refinery to meet up with the unsub.’

I led the way up to the second floor, Hannah a few steps behind. Halfway up, my cellphone trilled, making us both jump. Even though the house was empty, we’d slid into a burglar’s silence. Sneaking around like this, it was inevitable. Hannah swore under her breath when she realised what the sound was, her relief evident in every clipped syllable.

I checked my cell and saw that a text had come in from Taylor. The only reason he would text us was because he’d found something and didn’t want to call in case he was overheard.

I held the phone up. ‘It’s a text from Taylor.’

She crowded in closer to get a better look and a second later the message flashed up on the screen. It was only two words long, and it was my turn to swear.
nothing yet
. I texted back, telling him not to contact us unless he had something worth sharing, then put my phone away.

I took the main bedroom while Hannah checked out the spare room. It didn’t take me long. Hannah had searched it last night. If there had been anything worth finding, she would have found it. When it came to breaking and entering, she was a natural.

Hannah was on her hands and knees looking under the bed when I caught up with her. This room looked like it belonged to a teenager. Except that wasn’t quite right. What it actually looked like was an idealised version of a teenage boy’s room. And not a modern teenager. This was a kid from the fifties or sixties.

Models of fighter planes hung from the ceiling, handmade and hand-painted, a real labour of love. Choat had spent ages working on them. The bookcase was filled with detective and war stories, the spines cracked from use. The small desk pushed into the corner under the eaves was empty. There was a faded blue quilt on the single bed and matching faded blue drapes on the windows. What I found most interesting was what was missing from the room. There was no TV, no CD player, no music collection, no posters.

Unlike the rest of the house, this room hadn’t been cleaned recently and there was dust everywhere. My guess was that Choat had moved into his mother’s room when she died, and hadn’t been in here since. When he’d shut the door for the final time, he’d been effectively trying to close off this part of his life.

‘Come and take a look at this,’ Hannah said.

She’d got up off the floor and was standing next to the bed. She picked up a framed photograph and a box from the nightstand and handed them to me. The man in the photograph was wearing a full-dress army uniform and standing proudly to attention. There was enough of a resemblance to conclude that this was Choat’s father. The box contained a Purple Heart.

‘Anything else?’ I asked.

‘Sorry that’s it.’

I let out a long sigh.

‘Maybe he didn’t have any dark secrets, Winter. Maybe it’s exactly what it looks like. Maybe he was just a sad, lonely guy with mom issues.’

I shook my head. ‘No, there’s got to be something. Okay, here’s a scenario for you. The unsub comes here, gets Choat to write the suicide note, knocks him out, dumps him in the trunk of his car, drives him to the refinery, shoots him, arranges everything to make it look like suicide, then drives home. What’s wrong with this version of events?’

‘The Nissan. Someone had to drive it to the refinery, and it couldn’t have been the bad guy because how did he get home? You’re not going to commit a murder then hitchhike, are you?’

‘Exactly. Choat had to drive the Nissan out there, and the only reason he would have done that is if the unsub had coerced him. And before you say anything, there wasn’t a second shooter up there on the grassy knoll. This is a one-man show.’

‘Well there’s nothing here. I would have found it.’

‘I know you would have. That’s what’s so weird. I was so sure we were onto something’.

‘So what now?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

We headed outside and walked back to the car in silence, both of us thinking hard. I was still trying to figure out what would make Choat drive to the refinery. With the right leverage you could encourage anyone to do anything, you just had to work out which buttons to push. And that didn’t necessarily mean using violence. In fact, it was often better if you could avoid that.

One prop that Ted Bundy had used was an arm cast. He’d park his van at the sidewalk and pretend that he was having trouble loading something into the back. His victims would take one look at the cast and the pathetic, puppy-dog expression and actually climb into the back of the van to help him.

This unsub hadn’t used the threat of violence to get Choat to drive to the refinery. It didn’t play out. He might have been able to coerce him to go to his car, but once he got there Choat would have just driven off. The only way that would work was if the unsub had travelled in the car with him, which he couldn’t do because how did he get back from the refinery? Choat didn’t have any relatives the unsub could threaten. No lovers, either.

But there was something, some sort of leverage. There had to be. The question was what? We reached the car and I opened the door and took one last look at the house. Hannah was beside me, looking at the house, too. A sudden smile lit up her face.

‘There’s one place we didn’t look,’ she told me.

It took a second before I worked out what she was getting at. We hurried back to the house. At the top of the path we turned right instead of left. It took all of ten seconds to crack the lock on the garage.

48

The garage door opened easily. Not that I’d expected anything less. The world outside the picket fence might be a whirlwind of chaos and heading all to hell, but Dan Choat had made sure that everything on this side was running with the smooth, ordered efficiency of a Swiss watch.

For a moment we stood on the threshold. The sun was directly behind us, burning into our backs and lighting up the interior. The garage looked like it was bathed in an otherworldly glow, making the mundane and the everyday appear somehow special. There was a clear open space directly in front of us, which meant Choat had been a part of that minority group who actually kept their car in a garage. The concrete floor was whitewashed and there were no oil stains, or dirt streaks, or dust. It glowed in the sunlight, throwing off blinding reflections. Choat hadn’t just swept the floor, he’d scrubbed it until it shone.

Hannah’s expression was part bemusement, part disbelief. ‘This place is cleaner than my kitchen.’

‘Which tells us that he’s dealing with major guilt issues.’

‘And you got that from the fact that his garage is tidy? You’re good.’

‘It’s not just the garage. His mother was a religious nut who just kept piling the guilt on. It was a dynamic that existed in their relationship right from the start, but she would have gone into overdrive when her husband passed, and it would have kept going until she died. Even then Choat wasn’t free. Everywhere he looked in this house there were memories of his mother, and lurking behind the memories was all that guilt.’

I snorted a laugh and shook my head, and Hannah said, ‘What?’

‘I was just thinking how crazy this world can be at times. There’s a good chance that the unsub did the residents of Eagle Creek a massive favour when he murdered Choat. And the irony is that he doesn’t realise.’