Five Minutes Alone (11 page)

“Are you sure you can give them to me? The five minutes?”

“Yes.”

“Will it change me? Will it make me a different person?”

“Yes,” Schroder says.

“What kind of person?”

“One who does the right thing.”

“Okay,” Peter says. “Okay. Let me lock up. I’m coming with you.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

My wife ends up sleeping for three hours. A nurse drops in a couple of times to check on us, or to make sure we’re not stealing all the supplies. I kill ten minutes by inflating a rubber glove, tying off the end of it, and drawing in a face with a Sharpie. I don’t hear anything from Kent. Sometimes no news is good news, but other times no news is no news.

Bridget wakes up slowly. Her eyes open, she smiles at me, then the smile fades as she realizes the environment is different. “Teddy?”

“We’re at the mall,” I tell her. “Do you remember what happened? How you got here?”

She shakes her head, then nods a little. “It’s coming back to me,” she says. “I’m thirsty.”

I hand her some water. “Why did you come here?” I ask, and I struggle to keep the edge out of my voice. She shouldn’t have come here alone. Not yet.

She takes a mouthful of water and hangs on to the cup. “I got the bus,” she says. “I wanted to go shopping. Somehow, somehow I thought that Emily was missing, but she’s not missing, is she, Teddy. It’s worse than that, isn’t it.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her.

“I feel so stupid. And embarrassed.” She finishes the water. “I want to go home.”

I help her get to her feet. She looks at the rubber glove and smiles, so I bring it with us. We head down the hallway and downstairs and through the mall. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people still here, and I put my arm around Bridget and we weave between them out to the parking lot. I can tell she’s holding back
the tears. When we get into the car she puts on her seat belt and she looks over at me and puts a hand on my arm.

“I don’t want to be this way,” she says.

“You won’t be. I promise,” I say, breaking the cardinal rule about making promises you don’t know you can keep. “We’re going to see Doctor Forster on Monday.”

“You killed him.”

“What? No, I said we’re going to see him. I didn’t—”

She starts shaking her head. “Not Doctor Forster. The man who hurt Emily. I remember. You took him into the woods and you made him dig his grave, and you put a bullet in his head. You made him plead for his life.”

I look at her, and I feel dumfounded. We stare at each other in silence for a few seconds. “Why would you say that?”

“It happened, didn’t it.”

“Who told you?”

“You did,” she says. “I can’t remember you telling me, but I know you did. I feel it. Am I right? I can see it as if I was there.”

My heart is racing and I’ve never lied to my wife, but now seems a good time to start. “Bridget—”

“I know. You can’t tell me, in case I black out and tell somebody what happened. But that would never happen, because when things go wrong with me I go back three years, I go back to before you ever killed him. So I would never tell anybody. I’d be unable to.”

“Bridget—”

She carries on, talking quickly. “You said you used to come and see me all the time. You would hold my hand and you would tell me about your day. You thought none of it was making it through, but some of it must have. I know you’ve killed other people too. Bad people. I know the pain you’ve gone through over the last few years. But I know you’ve also done a lot of good. You’re a good person, Teddy.”

There are other people walking past the car on the way to their
own. Most of them are carrying purchases. Some are smiling and some are arguing and none of them know they’re walking past a car where a woman is telling her husband that she knows he’s a murderer. “I don’t . . . don’t know what to tell you.”

“The truth.” She squeezes my arm. “Just tell me the truth. The idea that the man who killed Emily is still out there free, that hurts, Teddy. Knowing he’s dead won’t give me closure, and if anything I wish you’d just arrested him, but the idea he’s out there . . . I can’t handle that.”

“Okay,” I tell her.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

She stares at me, but I don’t look at her, instead I grip the steering wheel and look ahead, out through the windshield, beyond the cars and the people and the asphalt, beyond the buildings and into the woods and back into the past. “It was two weeks after the accident. I made him dig his own grave. He didn’t want to, but he, you know, he did it because he had to keep delaying the inevitable. When he was done he told me he was a different person, that there was Quentin James the drinker, and there was Quentin James the man in front of me then. It was Quentin the drinker that had killed Emily, and for that he would be punished, and he would get help, and he would never drink again. He promised. He begged for his life. He said over and over how sorry he was.”

I look to Bridget. There are tears in her eyes, but they’re not falling, not yet.

“I took him out to the woods knowing what I was going to do to him, and there was no second-guessing. It felt right. Not righteous, but right.”

“And you shot him in the head.”

“Both versions of him,” I say, the conversation feeling very matter-of-fact now.

“And did you feel better, Teddy? Did it help?”

“It didn’t bring Emily back. It didn’t make you okay,” I say.

“Did it help you?”

“I don’t know.” I look back to the windshield and all that lies beyond. “I used to think that it didn’t, but now . . . now I think it helped me carry on,” I say, but what I really think is that it helped keep me alive.

“I love you,” she says.

I look back up at her. “Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“Even after what I’ve done?”

“I said it before and I’ll say it again, Teddy. You’re a good person. You did what you thought was right,” she says, which is very different from her telling me I did the right thing.

I lean over and hug her and she hugs me back for a few seconds, then pulls away. “Let’s go home,” she says.

I start the car.

“But first I want you to take me there,” she says.

“Take you where?”

“The grave.”

“Emily’s grave?”

She shakes her head. “Quentin James’s grave.”

I’m halfway to putting on my seat belt when she says that. I pause and turn back towards her. “Why?”

“Because I want to see it.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I click the buckle into place.

“Please, Teddy. I want to go there. You did what you had to do, and you had to go through it by yourself. I want to be part of it. I know you, I know it changed you, but I also know it’s a burden you’ve had to carry. Let me take some of that from you. I want to see what you saw. I want to go where you went. I want to see where you left the man that killed our daughter.”

“Bridget—”

“Please, Teddy,” she says. “Please do this for me.”

“When?”

“Now,” she says.

“Now?”

“Is there a better time?”

“I still think this is a really bad idea,” I tell her, but I put the car into gear. “Are you sure?”

“As sure as I’ve ever been of anything.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

They pass nice houses and awful houses. They pass nice cars parked on streets and falling-apart cars parked up on lawns. They enter areas where cars can be fieldstripped by neighborhood kids in just a few minutes. Then they pop out the other side of it. That’s one of the things about Christchurch—there’s not a lot of real estate between where east meets west meets rich meets poor. Their destination turns out to be a neighborhood of average houses, which surprises Schroder because he had expected Bevin and Taylor Collard to be living on a shittier street, the kind of place that wouldn’t look any worse off, say, if a bomb hit it. They’ve driven past the house twice in the last hour, and are now waiting one block away near a park, waiting for it to get darker. They don’t have a great view of the house from here, but they can see if any cars come or go.

“They stole her wedding ring,” Peter says.

For the last twenty minutes neither of them have said a word.

“When they attacked her,” Peter says. “They stole her wedding ring. The police never found it, and the brothers denied they took it, but they must have.”

“Landry never mentioned it.”

“Well they did. Do you think they still have it? They will, right? That’s why they take things like that, right? Not to sell, but as a memento. I read about it. After the attack I read all I could about these kinds of guys. Can you imagine that?” Peter asks. “You’re married, right? Can you imagine something that belongs to your wife in the drawer or pocket or cupboard of somebody who attacked her? Like a notch on a bedpost, a score, it’s sick,” he says. “This thing that happened is the worst thing possible, it’s the worst
memory my wife could have, a memory that made her kill herself, and these guys keep that ring as a souvenir. Can you imagine a little girl having to grow up knowing the men she saw rape her mother are keeping a memento? We should go in there now,” he says. “Knock on the door and start swinging.”

“What if somebody else answers?” Schroder asks. “What if there are other people in the house?”

“If somebody else answers, we just say we have the wrong house and walk away.”

“And if the right person answers and we hear others in the house?”

“Then we improvise,” Peter says. “I want to get this done.”

“We’ll get it—”

“In fact let’s start improvising now,” Peter says, “because that could be them.”

There’s a car backing out from further up the block. A dark blue sedan. It turns towards them, the lowering sun shining into the windshield, and both the driver and passenger are squinting against it. The car comes towards them, goes by them, then is gone.

“Was that them?” Schroder asks. “I couldn’t tell.”

“It was them,” Peter says, and his voice has gone hard, and Schroder knows his anger has just kicked up a notch. “So now what do we do? Break into their house and wait? Or follow them?”

Schroder starts the car. “Let’s see where they go. We can always come back.”

He does a U-turn and goes left at the next intersection the same way the brothers did, keeping a hundred yards between them. He is aware he is deviating from the plan. Is this what happens when people are planning on killing? He thinks it may be what gets them caught. The ones who don’t deviate are still out there free.

The route suggests after a few minutes that the pair is driving into town. Schroder keeps the same distance, letting other cars get between them. The drive is fifteen minutes long, and ends for the Collard brothers near a service alleyway near the heart of town, where they pull into a parking space. Schroder comes to a stop
twenty yards further away outside a bank. The bank is closed—it would have closed at five o’clock. All the shops in town will have closed around the same time. There aren’t many people on the streets, not much traffic, but in another hour or two that will change. He watches in the mirror as the brothers climb out of the car. The older one, the bigger one, is Bevin. The shorter one, the one with no hair, is Taylor. Though they’re brothers by name, the older one was adopted. It was the classic scenario where two people didn’t think they could have a child, so they adopted, and soon after found they were pregnant. It’s hard on everybody. During the rape trial, the brothers pointed out their parents wanted neither of them at that point, and that their upbringing was one full of bruises and sprains, of starvation and nights locked in closets. The parents weren’t able to defend themselves against the accusations, they’d both died in their early sixties—one of a brain tumor, the other of cancer. There were no neighbors, teachers, doctors, or friends who ever saw any signs of abuse, and Landry told him he was sure it was all bullshit.

Bevin walks to the back of the car, lifts the trunk, and at that moment the view of him is obscured. Schroder can’t see what he takes out, but then it comes into view. It’s a bag. The men both go into the alleyway.

“So now what?” Peter asks. “We go back to their house and wait for them?”

“Let’s wait a bit,” Schroder says, “and see what happens.”

“What’s down there?” Peter asks.

“Dumpsters. Rubbish. Back doors that lead into the shops and bars. Mostly bars. Mostly it’s for deliveries,” he says, but they’re also places to buy sex, drugs, and weapons. It’s all very rock and roll. Of course it’s not just rubbish and dumpsters and drugs found in places like this—but dead junkies, dead dealers, dead hookers. He thinks about the two times he’s died over the last year. The first was just before Christmas last year. He was held in a bathtub full of water by a man named Edward Hunter, his head beneath the surface, water flooding his lungs and then it was lights out—only he was revived
a few minutes later. He coughed and spluttered and life moved on. The second time was with the bullet back in June. As the doctors worked on him he was clinically dead at one point for ninety seconds. Then the coma, then coming out of the coma, and life again moved on—this time in a different direction. If anything happens to him down that alleyway he knows there’ll be no coming back from a third. There’ll be no hat trick. Dead is dead is the kind of thing that can happen in alleyways like this.

Peter’s voice goes hard again. “Let’s go down there and get this done.”

“Not yet,” Schroder says.

“Come on, there’s hardly anybody around.”

“We wait till dark.”

“It’s just that . . . shit, you know. I want to get this done.”

Schroder can hear the unspoken words to follow.
Before I lose my nerve. Before I change my mind.

“Just stay angry,” Schroder says. “And patient. By the end of the night you’ll have gotten what I promised.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

We go home first. We have to, because Bridget needs to change into better shoes for the woods. She changes outfits too. We both do. We wear jeans and shirts and light jackets. We look like weekenders who know nothing about hiking who are about to go hiking. Saturday is winding down. The malls are shutting and the fast-food restaurants are being flooded with people finishing work, and in a few hours’ time the central city will be wall-to-wall partying. We also switch cars. I don’t want to drive out there in a police car, so we use my car.

We head north and out of the city. Long open stretches of road with other traffic, long open paddocks, we pass roads promising to lead off to more of the same. I keep driving, remembering how it was last time, with Quentin James unconscious in the trunk—though he woke up at some point during the journey. With his arms and legs bound, he just couldn’t do anything about it.

After thirty minutes we take a turnoff, and then another turnoff, and then we’re heading towards the forest. I park up in a secluded area. By this stage last time Quentin James was so disoriented from the ride in the trunk that he couldn’t walk straight for the first few minutes.

“Are you sure about this?” I ask.

She squeezes my hand. “Yes.”

We get out of the car and I take Bridget’s hand and I lead her into the trees where thousands of birds are chirping, and where on occasion something rustles in the foliage, sometimes a bird, sometimes a hedgehog, but most times something unseen. Last time I took this walk I was carrying a gun and Quentin James was carrying a shovel. This isn’t the middle of nowhere—it’s close—but it was
always possible somebody could have come along three years ago and seen what was happening, or have heard the gunshot. Three years ago I cared about what happened to me—I didn’t want to go to jail—but I cared more about killing Quentin James. That was what mattered the most. It was all that mattered.

Trees are trees and I’m no tracker, but I know exactly where we are and I know exactly how to get where we’re going, the memory of three years ago working like a roadmap. We walk for ten minutes and then we come across a patch of earth that looks like any other.

“This is it,” I tell her, and she tightens her grip on my hand.

Rocks, moss, dirt, tree roots, and lots of trees. “Are you sure?” she asks.

“I’m sure.”

“So he’s down there.”

“He’s there.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He begged for his life,” I say. “He told me—”

She shakes her head. “No, I mean tell me about him. Was he married? What did he do for a living? What made him an alcoholic? Did he have children?”

Some of this stuff I’ve told her over the last few months. A lot of this stuff I didn’t know when I dragged him out of his house, but I learned it last year. I was involved in a car accident of my own. It made me aware things aren’t always as they seem. Back when I killed him, I didn’t know Quentin James’s story. Now I do.

“He was forty-eight years old. He was divorced. He had a twenty-five-year-old daughter. He used to own his own business. He was a mortgage broker, but then times were tight and he had to shut up shop. He couldn’t get another job. Everything he used to be, everything he used to have, he drank away. The drinking started when his wife left him. The drinking and driving not long after that. Time after time the police would catch him, and time after time he was fined, kept his car, and set free. He was always going to kill somebody, it was just a matter of who, where, and when.” I pause for a few seconds, letting that sink in. “We should go.”

“Give me a minute,” she says.

“Okay.”

“I mean give me a minute alone.”

I let go of her hand and walk back in the direction we came. After about twenty paces I stop. Bridget is kneeling next to the grave. She’s saying something, but I can’t hear what. I sit down on a fallen log and I stare in the distance in the direction of the car. I check my phone and see it has no signal out here. If Quentin James was still alive under the ground and his cell phone battery was still good, he’d still be unable to call for help. All the birds have stopped chirping. There is no breeze, no sound, the forest has gone quiet.

Then suddenly it all starts up again. The rustling, the natural sound of trees and wind and living things. I hear twigs breaking and footsteps and then Bridget is standing behind me with a hand on my shoulder.

“I’m okay,” she tells me.

We walk back to the car, neither of us saying anything, neither of us needing to, Bridget thinking about our daughter, me thinking about her too, and I wonder what it was my wife said to the man beneath the earth. When we get back to the car the sun has almost gone, just the edge of it poking over the horizon. We’re back into cell-phone range. There’s a message from Kent, telling me to call her back.

“How’s Bridget?” she asks, and Bridget is sitting in the car while I lean against it talking on the phone.

“She’s back to normal. She knows what’s going on.”

“Good, that’s good. And encouraging, right?”

I hear myself agreeing with her. “Yes, it’s encouraging.”

“We just got a call from the medical examiner. Want to have a guess as to what she said?”

“She thinks that Smith hated his job, couldn’t see that ever changing, so drove out to the train tracks and laid himself down on them. She thinks he didn’t kill himself in jail because back then he thought things were going to get better, and that his goal in life was to be killed by a train.”

“I’m sure she thinks all kinds of things that are beyond the scope of her job,” Kent says, “but she called us with what she knows.”

“And what is it she knows?”

“She knows that Dwight Smith was dead before he found himself on those train tracks. She isn’t sure for how long, not exactly, but she seems to think between an hour and two. That means we’re now officially dealing with a murder investigation. And as much as I hate to say it, that also means Kelly Summers is going to be our number-one suspect. Hutton wants us to go and pick her up.”

“What? Now?”

“No. It’s the end of the day, and we all figure Kelly Summers isn’t going anywhere. We’ll go take a closer look at her house in the morning, and take her in for questioning. I don’t want her to have done it, I really don’t, but what else can we do?”

I don’t answer her, and after a few seconds I realize the question isn’t rhetorical. I think she really is asking me what else can we do. Only all we can do for Kelly Summers is hope that somebody else was involved, that somebody intercepted Dwight Smith before he got to her house. If that didn’t happen, then Kelly Summers could end up going to jail for a very long time.