Five Minutes Alone (27 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY

The painting of the woman in the field of daises is Kelly Summers. I didn’t notice that before. Her head is turned slightly sideways, but the expression of loss I saw in her features on Saturday is now an expression of peace.

“She painted that?” Schroder asks.

“Yeah.”

“It’s amazing,” he says. “Who do you think the woman is? Do you think that’s Summers?”

“I don’t know.”

“I tried to help her, you know. I really did.”

“I know.”

“Do you think I could have it?”

“What?”

“The painting. I would like to have it. It speaks to me somehow.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think it speaks to me?” he asks.

“No. I mean I don’t think you can have it. I’m sure her parents will want it.”

“You’re probably right.” He walks around the lounge. “We sat in here. She sat there, and I sat there,” he says, pointing to the couch and the chair. “I told her everything was going to be okay as long as she did what I told her to do.”

We go through to the bedroom. He uses a handkerchief to open up the window, and then he wipes all the places he and Smith might have touched it, and the windowsill too, even though, as he says, he did this already.

It’s eight o’clock when Rebecca Kent arrives. She takes a second look at my car and I can see her trying to figure out why I’m here,
then she looks even more confused when she steps inside and sees Schroder. Following her are two officers carrying fingerprinting tools. She tells them to start in the bedroom, then tells me that Hutton has called in sick today, and that she’s taking lead.

“How you doing, Carl?” she asks, and she reaches forward and embraces him. He hugs her back. They hold each other tight, and even though they barely worked together, the explosion they were in has bonded them.

“I’m surviving,” he says.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you,” she says.

They make small talk for a minute, the question hanging between us, and then Rebecca finally asks it. “So why are you here?”

“I was thinking about what you said last night,” I say, answering for him, “about Kelly Summers having help.”

“And?”

“And it was Carl’s case.”

“And you spoke to Carl already,” she says.

“I know. I figured it would be a good idea to bring him here to take a look around.”

“In case something sparked a memory,” Schroder says.

“A memory?”

“Theo thought I might see something that could help. Something that might make me go
ah,
and then give him a name. I told him it was a stupid idea.”

“And was it stupid?” she asks. “Or have you seen something?”

“It was stupid,” I tell her. “We looked around the house, but he didn’t see anything that could help.”

Rebecca stares at me, and then she stares at Schroder, and then she looks at Schroder’s hands. I’m pretty sure she’s noticing he’s not wearing any gloves, and that means his prints are now going to be on some surfaces.

“Your watch is broken,” she says to him.

“I don’t really have much of a use for time,” he says.

“It got broken in the explosion, didn’t it,” she says, and she holds a hand up to her face.

“Yeah.”

“Why do you still wear it?”

“Probably for the same reason you haven’t had your face fixed. It’s a reminder. It’s a piece of me now.”

Rebecca slowly nods. “I never thanked you for what you did.”

“Thanked me?”

“You promised me you would get them,” she says.

“I failed by half,” he says.

“You succeeded by half.” She stops touching her face and gives a small shrug, as if none of it really matters, not in the big scheme of life. “Well, I guess in theory it could have been a good thought,” she says, “you coming down here to look around.”

“That’s what police work is sometimes,” Schroder says. “Theories that don’t pan out.”

“I’m going to take another look around. Don’t you have somewhere else you need to be, Theo?”

I look at my watch. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“You’ve seen the papers today?”

“No.”

“Check them out,” she says. “It was good seeing you again, Carl. I hope things get better for you.”

They hug again, and then we head out to the car. It’s not until we’re driving that Schroder starts talking again.

“Do you think she knows?” he asks.

“What, Rebecca? No. How could she?”

“Because she’s a good cop. And because you shouldn’t have figured it out, and yet here we are.”

“And if I hadn’t, then your fingerprints would be coming up this morning and we’d be on our way to arresting you.”

“It would have been easier for you that way, wouldn’t it?”

He’s right. “Would you still have told the police about Quentin James?”

“No. There would have been no need. It would have been over for me and there would never have been anything you could have done. What are you going to do about Rebecca if she figures it out?”

I pull over and turn towards him. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean what you think it means. All of this,” he says, “is about second chances. These guys do horrible things and they go to jail, and then they come back and are allowed a second life. But not me. I don’t get a second chance. I give my life to this city, and what is my reward? I lose my job and I get shot in the head and then I lose my family. If I’d raped and killed some woman fifteen years ago, I’d be in a better position than I am in today. It’s not fair, not to me, and not to the guy I used to be. These guys don’t deserve a second chance, but you know who does? Me. That’s who. But that’s not going to happen.”

“Is that what all this is about? You’re pissed off?”

“Damn right I’m pissed off,” he says, and for a moment there’s some emotion there, not much, but a little bit, a bit of the Old Schroder. “But not pissed off enough to hurt people who don’t need hurting. You have to keep Rebecca heading down the wrong path. That’s all I’m saying. I would never hurt her, because of all the people who deserve second chances, she’s one of them. And so are you. You killed a guy and got to move on. Your wife came back. You’re back on the force. You’re a second-chance guy, Theo. Hell, you’re the king of second chances. Me, I’m a one-chance guy, and I’ve had it, and now I’m fucked.”

I look out the windshield and stare at the road. Up ahead a seagull is nudging a flattened hedgehog. “I’m sorry about what happened to you, I really am. And you’re right, it’s not fair, it really isn’t, but you can’t do this. You can’t take on the role of judge and executioner because the wrong people are getting hurt.”

“I’m learning,” he says.

“Learning?” I turn back towards him. “That makes it sound like it’s not over.”

He doesn’t say anything. He turns and stares out the windshield beyond the hedgehog and at a road of possibilities.

“Is it over?” I ask him.

“I have nothing else. My family has gone, and I’m okay with
that. I have no future, and I’ve accepted that. I have nothing to offer. This . . . doing this, it’s something. I can make a difference.”

“Your family hasn’t gone,” I tell him. “You just have to start talking to them.”

“I think I might walk from here, Theo,” he says, and he opens the car door.

“Carl . . . Hey, Carl,” I say, but he’s climbing out of the car. I climb out too and lean across the roof to talk to him. “I can’t let you do this.”

“Do what?”

“Carry on what you’re doing. You told me yesterday it was over.”

“A lot has changed since yesterday.”

“Nothing has changed.”

“I’ll let you know when I need your help, and you will help me, Theo.”

“No. This ends now.”

“You’re a good man, I know that, but you’ve had enough second chances, and now the way you’ve made up your own rules over the last couple of years is finally coming back to bite you in the ass. You’re either going to help me or shoot me. The way I see it, you don’t really have any other choice.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

It’s a ten-minute drive to his house, but an hour walk, and that’s okay. It gives him time to clear his head. He stops on the way to get coffee. He used to drink a lot of coffee in his old life, back when he could taste it, and this morning he decides to give it a go, a
Who knows?
going through his head, the
Who knows maybe today will be different?
He is, after all, feeling different, so he waits in line and he listens to other people ordering kinds of coffee that sound completely alien to him, and he looks at them and he thinks
Y
ou are who I am dying for? People ordering hazelnut half mocha half bullshit no sugar soy lattes?
Yes, he took a bullet for these people.

He orders a black coffee that costs five times what it should, and probably tastes half as good, and the bullet in his brain makes things process a little differently these days, but he figures that means he’s drinking a coffee worth ten percent of what he paid. There are half a dozen complimentary newspapers and none are being read as every other person in here is texting or emailing or writing a novel. He sits and looks at the front page where a half-page picture of a bald man that doesn’t look like him looks out at him. The headline is
The Five Minute Man.

For a moment his heart freezes. The café darkens a little.

In smaller print beneath the title, a byline.
Christchurch’s serial killer only wants five minutes of your time.

What the hell? How could they know what he’s calling himself? Then he realizes they don’t, that when he came up with the name he thought how the media would come up with something similar—well, it’s not just similar, it’s exactly the same.

He reads the article. It’s about Peter Crowley. The reporter has spoken to Charlotte Crowley, and he wonders how that conver
sation went to make this interview happen so quickly. Charlotte talks about her husband, about what a good man he was, about how, when they met, he used to tell her about his wife. He had told her he used to ask the police for five minutes alone with the men that hurt her.

“He didn’t get it back then,”
Charlotte is quoted as saying, “
but somebody gave it to him on Saturday. Or at least they tried to. Peter had always wanted his five minutes, and in the end it killed him. I just wish there had been another way. I just wish that at the time the police really could have given him his five minutes. He could have gotten a lot of it out of his system. Can you imagine how life would be? If the victims were allowed their revenge in a controlled environment? Then none of this would have had to happen. Maybe it would even help prevent crime. I guess that’s what they’re hoping the death penalty is going to do, right? But the death penalty is the government executing a bad guy. Don’t you think that belongs to the victim if they want it? I think the victim should be given the chance to pull the lever.”

When asked if she thought the Five Minute Man was doing a good thing, she answered “
A very good thing. I just wish he’d been better at it.
”

Peter Crowley is dead, but the man’s wife isn’t blaming Schroder for it. She’s blaming society. She’s blaming the Collard brothers. She’s blaming the justice system for letting them out, and she’s blaming the police for not doing a better job.

“Do you hate the man who did this? Would you want five minutes alone with him if you could get them?”

“I don’t know,”
she says. “
Ask me after I’ve buried my husband.”

He thinks about ways the police could have done a better job over the years. It’s true, what Charlotte Crowley said. There are cases that didn’t make it to court. Cases where the police didn’t have enough evidence to convict who they knew was guilty, or cases where evidence was dismissed. Cases where men kill and don’t need a second chance because they haven’t used up their first.

It gets Schroder thinking. Maybe this isn’t about looking up people who are out of jail and on a second chance, maybe this is
about those who got away. That’s what the Five Minute Man needs to do now, and if Charlotte Crowley were here she would agree with him. She would thank him for what he was trying, and she would ask him to do a better job next time, and if she were here he would tell her that’s exactly what he’s going to do.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

When I get back home Bridget is happy to see me. Whatever argument we were heading towards this morning is forgotten because I’m back when I said I would be. I haven’t gone running off to save the world or even just our small corner of it.

Our appointment is for eleven o’clock. We do what we did last night and not talk about it. We sit out on the porch and she reads the same book she was reading last night and I read the newspaper, the front page calling Schroder
the Five Minute Man
, and I wonder what Schroder’s take on that is. Earlier this year I worked a case where a man begged me to give him five minutes with the man who kidnapped his daughter. So I get the principle. Just like I did every time over the years, different victims and different killers, men asking me for five minutes with the man who had done this to their families, some of them just token words, some of them meaning it, some of them I don’t know what would have happened if they’d been given their time. Perhaps they’d have used it. Perhaps they’d have sat in a corner and cried.

Schroder is right. I had my five minutes with the man who killed my daughter, and then I was given a second chance. Who am I to stop other people from wanting the same?

At ten thirty we drive to the hospital. It’s another of those days where you don’t know whether to go in a T-shirt or take a jacket. We find a space in the parking lot and feed the meter and head into the lobby then take the elevator up to the third floor.

We introduce ourselves to the nurse at the appointment window who has a set of symmetrical moles on her cheeks, one with a black hair, one with a gray one, and then we wait. I figure an appointment at eleven o’clock means we’ll be going in closer to eleven
thirty, but we actually get called in at eleven twenty. I figure that puts us ten minutes ahead for the day, and I wonder what we can do with that. I wonder if it’s all going to be good news from here on out.

Doctor Forster shakes my hand and gives Bridget a small hug. Then we sit down and he sits down behind his desk, and the first thing he does is tell Bridget that she is looking well.

“I don’t feel that well,” she says.

“In what way?”

She shrugs, and then she looks at me, and then she shrugs again.

“Bridget?” Doctor Forster says, and he looks concerned.

I tighten my grip on her hand, and she tightens her grip on mine. Then she looks at Forster, and as she talks she won’t look at me at all.

“I’m changing,” she says. “I can feel it. It’s like I’m losing a little bit of myself every day.”

“It’s only normal you—”

She interrupts him. “I know, and maybe you’re right, and I hope you’re right, and I’m grateful not to be in the vegetative state anymore, I really am, but it feels like this is just a holiday from that. It feels like I’m heading back there. I don’t mean soon, not tomorrow, not next week, but I’ll be lucky to see another year.”

“We—”

She interrupts him again and shakes her head. “I can feel it happening. I know it’s happening.”

“I know you’re scared,” Forster says. “The brain, it’s a funny thing. We know so little about it. But the fact that you’re back with us, Bridget, that’s a medical mystery. We have you back, and we’re not going to let you go. We’re going to figure out what’s going on,” he says, which in some ways contradicts what he said about the brain being a mystery. It means there are no guarantees.

We chat for a little while longer, and then we all stand up and he asks a nurse to lead us into an examination room. He tells us he’ll be with us in another hour. The examination room has lots of posters on the walls, of brains and skeletons and organs, and in
here they look like a wonder of science, but these same posters on a wall in some kid’s bedroom would probably turn him into a serial killer. The nurse has a girl-next-door smile and a great bedside manner, and she uses both of these things in full force as she draws blood. She takes four vials, smiling the whole time, chatting about Christmas decorations her husband is putting up at home. When she’s finished, she hands Bridget a urine-sample jar, gives her directions to the bathroom, and asks her to fill it up.

When she’s done, she’s handed a hospital gown and asked to change, and to remove all her jewelry. Then a different nurse takes us down another corridor, and then another, and I would hate to try to get anywhere in a hurry in a place like this. Or lost. Then we’re heading into another room, this one not as brightly lit as the others. A giant metal tube is in the middle of the room. A narrow table is at the end of it, the open tube looking like a mouth and the table its tongue. I remember being in this same room after the accident, Bridget lying on that table as it slid into the machine, the CT scan taken in thirty minutes, me sitting outside the door praying she would be okay, and hoping my prayers would be heard. They weren’t. At least not back then.

I stand back as a nurse and a technician prep Bridget. They lay her down on the machine, pads holding her head and neck still, and she’s asked not to move.

“Can I stay in the room with her?” I ask, and last time they said no, and this time they say no too.

“It’s okay, Teddy,” Bridget says. “But can you give me a few minutes alone with the nurse? I need to discuss something with her.”

“Maybe I should—”

She smiles. “It’s okay, Teddy, it really is. I’ll see you on the other side.”

It makes me laugh when she says that, and I squeeze her hand, and then I head out into the corridor and make myself comfortable for thirty minutes. When it’s all done, the nurse comes out to let me know, then I head back in as Bridget is getting to her feet. She looks calm, and she tells me that everything went okay, and then
we’re led back to the examination room where she gave blood and we get to wait in there for ten minutes by ourselves, and then Doctor Forster shows up.

“How are things looking?” I ask.

“There’s still more testing to go,” he says.

For the next hour he runs through a series of tests, hearing and speech. He checks her eyes, he checks her coordination, the whole time jotting down notes. He starts tapping her with a reflex hammer, which is something I’ve only ever seen on medical dramas, and until today wasn’t even a hundred percent sure they really existed. Many of these tests, including the CT scan, Bridget had when coming out of her vegetative state a few months ago, back when I was in my coma, which gives the doctor a benchmark.

Then it gets worse. He asks Bridget to lie on her side on the examination table, and a nurse comes in, and together they prepare for a lumbar puncture. I can barely watch the anesthetic needle being put in, let alone the spinal needle he slips between her vertebrae a few minutes later. Bridget’s face tightens during the process, and she clenches her hands a few times, but she braves it out and from start to finish the procedure takes thirty minutes, and results in about an ounce and a half of fluid. By the time the needle is out, Bridget has a headache. Forster tells her to stay put for another half an hour, and then he leaves us again. I sit on a seat next to the table and think about drawing a face on an inflated rubber glove, but decide against it. We barely speak. Bridget lies with her eyes closed with a small frown on her face, the headache fading, but still there. After half an hour the same nurse who took the blood earlier comes in and tells Bridget she can get dressed, and then tells us to head down to Doctor Forster’s office when we’re ready. By the time we sit back down in his office, the circle of tests having brought us back to where we started, four hours have passed.

“First of all, there are going to be no quick answers here,” he says. “As much as I’d like to be able to take a look at these results and give you some peace of mind right now, I can’t. I have to deci
pher what we have and wait for the labs. But I have put a rush on it, and I am hoping to have more within twenty-four hours.”

“That’s fine,” Bridget says. “I’m just grateful you’re trying.”

She sounds a little defeated, and that breaks my heart, and I reach out and squeeze her hand.

“We’re going to do more than try,” Forster says. “We’re going to do our best.”

We talk for another ten minutes, and we probe away at him, and I feel the same way I feel sometimes when I’m sitting across the table from a suspect trying to learn what I can, but in the end we leave with a pair of handshakes and promises he will be in touch tomorrow, or Wednesday at the latest.

When we get back out to the car there’s a ticket on the windshield because the meter ran out two hours ago. I fold it up and pocket it, pretty sure I can find somebody to make it go away. We don’t talk much on the way home, each of us thinking our own thoughts, probably sharing some in common. I don’t think much about Schroder, I just think about the future, about Bridget, about how it’s all going to be okay.

Just like people keep saying.