Five Minutes Alone (24 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

We are two minutes into our wait, my arm still around Rebecca and her leaning against me as she stares out across the yard, when I suddenly remember that Bridget is lost. I stand up and quickly update Rebecca, then I start pacing the yard while I dial the number of the mall, which I had written yesterday in my notebook. I end up speaking to one of the managers who helped yesterday. He tells me they’ll keep an eye out for Bridget and call me as soon as they see her. I tell them I’ll be down there soon.

Then I call my father-in-law. He answers after two rings.

“Should we go down there?” he asks.

“I’m going to head down there soon,” I say.

“Soon? Why not now?”

“I—”

“Listen, Theo, I know this is hard, and I know you’ve done everything you can, and you know we love you, but this isn’t good enough. Bridget can’t be allowed to wander off like this.”

“I know,” I tell him, annoyed at him for telling me, annoyed at myself because I know he’s right, annoyed to be having this exchange right now.

“Things have to change.”

“I know. We’ll figure something out.”

“Good,” he says. “I don’t want to sound like a hard-ass, but . . . Wait, hang on a second. . . . Okay, she’s pulling into the driveway now.”

“She’s driving?”

“No. There’s somebody with . . . is that Carl? He looks different, but that’s him. Everything is okay, Theo, she’s getting out of
the car. Tell you what, I’ll call you back soon, or get her to call you soon, okay?”

“Wait? Carl is with her?”

“Yeah. I’ll call you back,” he says, then hangs up.

Carl? What in the hell is she doing with Carl?
I drop the phone into my pocket.

“Everything okay?” Kent asks.

“No,” I tell her. “I mean yes, she just showed up, but . . . but no.”

“No?”

So I talk about it, filling in the ten minutes we have to wait for Hutton. Rebecca doesn’t say much, just listens, and that’s all I need her to do. When Hutton arrives he’s trailed by a patrol car. We show him the two notes, and then he goes inside for a minute to look over the scene and comes back.

“You read the other two?” he asks.

Kent shakes her head, and I tell him no.

“There might be something important in there,” he says.

“Everything relevant she already told us,” I tell him.

He nods. “That’s kind of what I figured too. Seems like there’s no real reason to open them, but I’ll talk to her family and see if they’ll give us permission just so we know for sure.”

The medical examiner shows up then. She gets out and we don’t make a lot of conversation. She goes inside and I wait with Kent outside. The first media van arrives, a guy with big hair and chiseled features frames himself with the house as a backdrop. That means somebody has made a connection between the dead rapist and our suicide victim, and impressively quickly too, and it means Kelly’s parents might find out from their TV before they find out from us that their daughter has died. Word will get out and soon there will be more vans, more reporters, more cameras. The story will pick up speed, and for the next two or three days it’ll be the headlines. I can already see them—big block letters saying the justice system let Kelly Summers down, that it let out somebody who had attacked her and gave him the
chance to finish the job, and why wouldn’t it say that? That’s what happened.

Tracey spends ten minutes with the body then comes out and tilts her face up to the sun and she’s probably having the same
The world isn’t fair
thoughts. “Everything looks how it should be,” she says. “Certainly looks like a suicide, but I’ll confirm it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” I ask.

She sighs. “I still have to make my way through the bodies from last night.”

She disappears and a few minutes later a plain, white van shows up, and not long after that Kelly Summers is carried in a body bag into the back of it. We stand in a line between the front door and the van, not consciously, but it just happens, and we all stand silently and watch her carried, the body on a stretcher, the stretcher sagging in the middle. It’s all sad. All so very, very sad. Even the old lady across the street looks sad as she stands with her dog watching us.

“I’ll talk to her parents,” Hutton says. “It’s pretty clear-cut what happened here. The body’s gone, you might as well wind down the scene. How are things coming along with identifying the man who visited Peter Crowley?”

“We’re nowhere,” Kent says.

“For all we know there is no bald man,” I say. “I mean, we know there’s a bald guy, but we don’t know he’s involved. Could have been a friend dropping by for five minutes. Could be a different bald guy from what the kids saw in the alleyway, or no bald guy at all. Eyewitnesses get that stuff wrong all the time. We just don’t know. And going by the letter Summers left, the two incidents are unrelated,” I say, and now that I’m committed to this path I can’t back down.

“Somebody still called the prison saying they were you,” Hutton says. “Somebody targeted those brothers, and they did it by asking about Dwight Smith, so the cases are related. I’m surprised you missed the window,” he says, and is it me, or is he looking at me closer than he normally would? Is he looking for a sign I’m lying?

I look like I don’t know what he’s getting at. “The window?”

“That’s how Smith broke in. The lock has been splintered away and there are crowbar marks in the wood,” Hutton says.

“You missed that?” Kent asks me.

“Yeah, I missed it,” I say. “I was looking around, but not as thoroughly as I should have.”

“No,” Hutton says, “I guess not. And if you had, all this could be different.”

“Different how?” Kent asks.

“We’d have taken Kelly in for questioning. We would have found out what really happened, and right now she would still be alive,” Hutton says.

I don’t have an answer for that, and there’s a reason his words hurt so much. They hurt because they’re true.

“Canvass the neighborhood with the description Monica Crowley gave us,” he says. “I have it in the car.”

“You think he was here?” I ask.

“I think it’s possible. I think that if he was, Kelly Summers sure as hell wasn’t going to mention it in her letter. Head back to the station when you’re done.”

“Tate can’t,” Kent says.

“It’s okay, I can—” I say.

“Why can’t you?” Hutton says.

“His wife needs him,” Kent says. “And tomorrow he’s taking her to the specialist for tests, so he won’t be in then either.”

“I heard about that,” Hutton asks, and his concern is genuine. Hutton, just like Schroder and just like Landry, they all used to know my wife, though Hutton and Landry never came around to any of my barbecues, but they would be at others we would be invited to. “Is she okay?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him.

“Okay, take the time you need and let me know, okay?”

He starts to walk back to the car, stares at the woman with the dog, joined by others now, then turns back towards us. “With all
that’s going on, I forgot to tell you,” he says, “but we got some DNA from the dead dog.”

“You took the dog’s DNA?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “From its teeth. The vet found clothing fibers and blood. Looks like whoever attacked that dog last night was attacked first. If our guy has a record, we’ll get a match.”

“We should start checking hospitals and doctors,” Kent says.

“Already being taken care of,” Hutton says. “Faxes and emails will be sent to every doctor and hospital in the city, and I’ve sent a couple of guys to the hospital and every twenty-four-hour clinic to follow up. If the guy who got bitten isn’t one of the men who got burned up and he goes looking for help, we’ll get him.”

He leaves us then, and Sunday morning rolls on as the van with Kelly Summers rolls out of the street, me thinking about what Hutton said, not just about the DNA, but about how Kelly Summers could still be alive if I had done the right thing.

The other right thing.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The body in the woods changes everything and, for the first time since Friday night when things went wrong, things are now going right. Isn’t that what Tate keeps saying? That the world is about balance?

Now Tate is going to help him. Tate is going to steer the investigation away from Kelly Summers. Tate isn’t going to take her down to the station, because Tate is going to do what Schroder tells him to do.

He’s back in his house, back in the lounge sitting in the couch he’s starting to like a little more than he’d have thought, and he’s thinking it through. He’s in his thinking position—leaning back, one arm on the armrest, the other by his side. He’s staring slightly at the wall and slightly at the window. Warren has ventured out from his web and is currently halfway towards the window. Is he leaving?

Schroder has the radio on. He’s been listening to reports on and off during the day, trying to learn what he can about the fire at Grover Hills. The media is speculating that whatever happened there last night has something to do with the hospital’s dark past. Then the reporter says something that Schroder hadn’t thought of—that whoever is found to be responsible for the death of those last night may very well be the first person to face the death penalty.

The death penalty?

He tries to let that settle in. He doesn’t want to be arrested—he’s more certain of that than he was yesterday, but if he were arrested, would the death penalty scare him? Or does he not even care?

He doesn’t know. Anyway, isn’t he already on death row? Isn’t that what all of this is about?

Yes, but it’s more than that. It’s about giving people their five minutes. It’s about protecting Kelly Summers. With Peter Crowley dead at Grover Hills, the narrative he was trying to build has been destroyed. Tonight he would have targeted another rapist, and that would have led the police further away from Summers and Crowley—but there’s no leading them away from Crowley now. That means they’re going to take a closer look at Kelly Summers. That means he’s really going to need Tate to play ball. And he will.

He reaches for the remote and turns up the volume when the story changes, heading away from Grover Hills and to Dwight Smith, and more accurately, to Kelly Summers. Kelly Summers found dead this morning in her own home. No suspicious circumstances. Police aren’t looking for anybody.

Kelly Summers.

Saved on Friday night. Safe all day Saturday. Dead Sunday morning. Could he have done more? He suddenly feels deflated. What he does know is her suicide has made everything else pointless. He was trying to protect her, and all that’s happened is other people have died. He wonders how she did it. When she did it. He wonders if her life was seeping away, sharing a moment in time when Peter Crowley’s own life ended.

Kelly is dead. Peter is dead. All of it his fault.

This whole time they were on death row too.

What does it mean?

What in the hell does it all mean?

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

We don’t spend much longer at the scene. We go through to the bedroom and we look at the window and Kent asks me again how I missed it, and I tell her I just don’t know, that I didn’t look at every single item or surface or shape inside the house. When we leave, we leave nothing behind to show we were even there. Kelly Summers has gone, she’s left a hole in the world, but the world doesn’t know it. Right now her parents are sitting on a couch getting the news, their faces in their hands, palms wet with tears, asking over and over why this had to happen. We lock the house and we take the note she left us.

I call Bridget. She answers right away. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says.

“You didn’t have another episode?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Why were you with Schroder?”

“He came looking for you,” she says. “You know, just to catch up. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and we figured we’d go out and grab some coffee. I should have left a note, I’m sorry, and I forgot that my parents were coming by.”

“We thought something bad might have happened.”

“I know. I’m really sorry, Teddy. It just . . . you know, just slipped my mind.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her, and it is okay, because she’s fine. That’s all that matters. “So Schroder popped in just to check in on me?”

“That’s what he said. And then we had coffee. He’s a changed man, Teddy. I mean he’s still Schroder, or at least it looks like Schroder, but it’s not the same Schroder I used to know. But it
was good talking to him because I . . . well, you know, I kind of know what he’s going through. I’m not the same person I used to be either.”

“You’re getting better.”

“We both know that isn’t true.”

“It is true,” I tell her.

She doesn’t answer me.

“Honey?”

“I’m here,” she says.

“It’s all going to work out, I promise,” I say, just as I’ve told her before, just as people keep telling me.

“Okay, Teddy. I believe you,” she says, but I don’t think she does.

“I’ll be home in ten minutes. Twenty at the most.”

“It’s okay, Teddy, there’s no need. My parents are here, we’re going to go out to lunch. Why don’t you finish doing what you need to do?”

“I have finished,” I tell her.

“I know you better than anybody, and I know there’s always something else that needs chasing up. I’m fine, Teddy, I really am and, well, it’ll be nice to have lunch with my parents. Mom’s going to take me shopping, and there are some things I want to talk to them about. Just don’t come home too late, okay?”

“I love you,” I tell her.

“That’s because you have great taste in women,” she says.

When we hang up I update Kent on what’s happening. Hutton has left us a copy of the sketch that Monica Crowley helped come up with. The bald man. Carl Schroder. Only it doesn’t look like Schroder. It looks like Professor Xavier from X-Men. Monica hasn’t mentioned the bullet-wound scar. I guess we’re lucky she even noticed he was bald.

“Could be anybody,” Kent says.

“Could be,” I agree.

We take the sketch and go door-to-door. We get asked more
questions than we ask, nobody recognizing the bald man, a couple of people remembering seeing a car parked outside Kelly’s house, but not being able to identify the make or model, let alone be certain of the color. We don’t even know if it’s Dwight Smith’s car or the bald man’s car. We find the woman with the dog who called out to us earlier this morning, and she tells us she saw two strange cars parked on the street on Friday night, one was there for half an hour, one for much longer. She gives us the colors, but not the makes or models.

“It’s a real shame what happened to that girl,” she says. “I never spoke to her, but I saw her occasionally and we’d wave hello every now and then. She always had this look about her like life tossed her into the mud and trod all over her, and I guess that’s exactly what had happened. I’m eighty-two years old, I’ve survived two husbands, cancer, and once I got pneumonia on a boat and almost died, but compared to many my life has been easy. I feel so sorry for that poor girl.”

It’s heading towards four o’clock when we’re done, the malls will be shutting down and some barbecues will be firing up.

“That’s one neighborhood down,” Kent says, “still Peter Crowley’s to go.”

I look at my watch. Then I look at Kent. “It’s okay,” she says, “I can take care of it myself. I’ll update you tonight. She reaches out and touches me on the arm, then smiles at me. “Good luck with the tests tomorrow.”

We pull out of the street and head in the same direction for about a minute before turning off separate ways. I drop the car back at the station and get back into my own. When I get home my in-laws are still here, and I go inside and talk to them for five minutes, then manage to talk to Bridget alone while they start putting together a meal in the kitchen. The smells and sounds make me hungry, and for a moment I don’t want to think about death and loss. I don’t want to think about Schroder. I just want to cling to the family that I have.

I ask Bridget about Schroder, and she tells me the same thing she told me on the phone earlier, that he just came by to see how I was doing. There’s something in the way that she says it that makes me doubt her, only for a second, then I think about what Schroder said to me yesterday—that I’m always looking for things that aren’t there.

“Well I might quickly go and see him,” I tell her.

“What? Now?”

“Yeah. While your parents are still here. I need to talk to him.”

“About what?”

“About this case I’m working on.”

She looks unsure. “That’s all?”

“What else is there?” I ask, and the nagging feeling is back that she’s withholding something.

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Just try not to be too long.”

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

“What?”

“It can wait,” she says. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing bad. I’ll tell you tonight, I promise.” She kisses me on the cheek. “Try to come back soon, okay? We’ll keep some dinner warm for you.”

I head back outside. Four o’clock has become five o’clock, and it’s Sunday so the mostly empty roads reflect that. There is still three, almost four hours of sunlight left. The entire drive I work on what I’m going to say to Schroder, and by the time I get there I still haven’t narrowed down what I want to say. I sit in the car and his car is parked in the driveway, it’s a dark blue sedan and of course it is, it’s the car people kept on seeing. There is dirt smeared across the license plate, and I imagine DNA all through the trunk.

I step out of the car and I get most of the way to the front door and then he swings it open.

“Theo,” he says. “What can I do for you?”

“I know,” I tell him, then I exhale deeply, as if letting go of
a giant weight, and all the things I’d thought of saying, all the different possibilities, they disappear. “I know you killed those people.”

He looks at me, his face expressionless. “Then perhaps you should come inside.”