Five minutes alone a thr.., p.13
Five Minutes Alone: A Thriller, page 13
“Really? After what was done to your wife, you don’t think places like this exist?”
Peter doesn’t answer.
They head outside. The cloud cover has broken up. Without any light pollution, they can see a thousand times as many stars. Tiny pinpricks, some flickering against the night sky, an endless amount of worlds. It’s beautiful, he thinks, and for a moment, a brief moment, he thinks what it would be like to lie on the ground with his wife and stare up at them. It is, he realizes, the first time he’s missed her.
The moment doesn’t last. He pops open the trunk. Bevin has woken up, but the gag is keeping him quiet and the plastic ties are stopping any attempt of escape. Even so he’s squashed so tightly in the trunk against his dead brother he couldn’t have moved anyway. They pull him out and let him bounce off the bumper onto the ground, a grunt making it through the gag, then they pick him up and between them carry him to the scream room with the big iron door. They dump him on an old cot shoved against the wall. Collard straightens himself until he’s sitting up with his feet on the ground. His hands are still bound behind him. There’s blood dripping down them from where he’s been struggling.
Schroder hands the flashlight towards Peter. It’s solid and holds six batteries and is used by security guards to make shadows disappear and crack skulls.
“Now what?” Peter asks.
“Now you get your five minutes.”
Peter reaches out and takes the flashlight. “It isn’t how I thought it’d be.”
“It never is.”
“I mean—he looks so pathetic.”
There is something different between last night and tonight. Last night Kelly Summers was chomping at the bit to have her five minutes. Last night Summers was angry because Smith had broken into her house. He was going to rape and kill her. She was running on fear and adrenaline and the need to see justice. Most of Peter’s anger is still in the past, and any vengeance he wanted perhaps he got in the alleyway. He has to bring that anger forward.
“You’re not angry enough,” Schroder says.
“I’m angry,” Peter says.
“No,” Schroder says. “Nine years ago you were wild. Nine years ago if I’d brought you out here, you’d have made me pull over on the way just to break some of his bones and take a piss on him. I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“I want you to close your eyes for a moment.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s important. Please, just for a moment.”
Peter looks at him, then takes a few steps back from the room with Collard and closes his eyes.
“I want you to visualize what happened to your wife,” Schroder says. “I want you to imagine her naked beneath this guy, with his sweaty hands all over her, with him fucking her, with your daughter close by watching and crying and asking them to stop. I want you to think about his brother egging him on, about your wife crying, her broken arms and shaved head, about—”
“Enough,” Peter says. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“He violated your wife, he laughed and grunted and—”
“Enough.”
“Your wife prayed you would come home and save her and—”
“Enough!” Peter shouts, and this time he steps forward and shoves Schroder in the chest, and he lets it happen, taking two steps back to absorb the impact. “Go and get me the cricket bat then leave me the hell alone.”
Schroder leaves the flashlight with Peter. He takes the stairs out onto the veranda and takes another look up at the stars. The night has gotten chillier as it’s gotten closer to midnight. They still have plenty of time, but he would like to get this done soon. The sooner the bodies are found, the sooner Tate will see a pattern forming that doesn’t involve Kelly Summers. But for the pattern to stick, he’ll need a third. One is unique, two is a coincidence, but three is a pattern. The sooner he is done with this, the sooner he can figure out who he’ll choose for tomorrow night, then Kelly Summers and Peter Crowley won’t look like suspects. He heads over to the car and grabs the bat and returns to the scream room where Peter is pacing in small circles, his hands clenching and unclenching. Schroder can feel the anger radiating off him. He hands him the bat and is ready to jump back in case Peter decides blood from one man isn’t enough.
“Nobody can hear us, right?” Peter asks.
“That was one of the purposes of the room,” he says. “Close that door and nobody is going to hear a thing, not that anybody would—there’s nobody around for miles.” Peter rests the flashlight on the coffee table so it lights up Bevin Collard. Urine is dripping off the edge of the mattress onto the floor, and he’s crying. Peter takes the gag from his mouth.
“Please don’t do this,” Bevin says.
“You killed my wife.”
“It wasn’t me, it was Taylor. I tried to stop him, we just wanted to frighten her, that’s all, but your wife hit Taylor and got him mad and things. . . . Please, I’m sorry, you have to believe me I’m so sorry. . . . Things just got out of control. Shit, I’m sorry, okay?”
“Sorry doesn’t help.”
“You’re going to die here,” Schroder tells him, a little worried Collard’s act might change Peter’s mind. He needs to get this back on track. “There’s no escaping that fact. So ask yourself, do you want to die begging for your life, or do you want to die like a man?”
“Fuck you,” Bevin says, looking at Schroder. Then he looks at Peter. “Please, man, please, think about this.”
“You hurt her in front of our daughter,” Peter says, and there are tears on his face, but there’s rage there too. Mostly rage. “You raped my wife and you broke our daughter.”
“Please—”
“You’re a monster,” Peter says.
“Please—”
Peter shakes his head. “You brought this on yourself,” he says. “You’re just lucky I didn’t kill you ten years ago.”
Bevin’s screams follow Schroder up the stairs and out of the room, and they follow him onto the veranda where he sits and waits and stares out at the shapes in the darkness, and then they end when the iron door is closed. He sits down on the step and looks up at the stars. Then he looks out at the fields and the driveway and then the car. All that darkness is broken up by a single light coming from the trunk of his car. They left it open after pulling Bevin out. The light is annoying him, and the last thing they need is for the battery to die. He gets up and moves over to the car to take care of that problem, only just like last night, things aren’t going to plan.
Taylor Collard has gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I can’t get to sleep. Bridget is. She’s in bed lying on her back, both arms stretched over her head, her fingers interlocking, as if she’s dreaming about throwing a hammer in the Olympics. For a while I sat in the room watching her, but now I’m out in the lounge watching TV. Finding the Dead is on, which is a New Zealand show about psychics who hunt out sad stories and capitalize on them. At least that’s how some people see it. Others see it a different way—psychics helping where the police have failed. There are a few psychics on the show, the main one being Jonas Jones, and it’s the show Schroder worked on too. For the show to be on this late at night means it’s either a rerun or ratings are poor, but either way I find after thirty seconds of watching I feel queasy, as if Jones just entered my lounge and licked the back of my neck. I change channels, there’s a movie on about a talking rodent, and for some reason the human race feels like it can always do with one more talking-rodent movie. Before I can change channels again, my cell phone starts ringing.
I look at the time. It’s late.
“It’s Sunday,” I tell Kent.
“Only by five minutes,” she says.
“I don’t work Sundays, and I don’t work after midnight.”
“Nobody likes working on Sundays and nobody likes working after midnight, Tate. Including me. So we’re on the same page here.”
The same page. Are we?
“Okay. What have you got?”
“Drugs, blood, and a knife.”
“No body?”
“No body, but a couple of witnesses said they saw one being loaded into the trunk of a car,” she says.
I lean forward and pinch the bridge of my nose, my thumb and finger gently rubbing my eyes as I connect the dots. “Okay, and since you’re calling me this late at night, it’s connected to Kelly Summers somehow, right?”
“See? This is why you’re a great detective.”
“Give me the details.”
“The report came in, and immediately a couple of officers were sent to the scene,” she says. “A Saturday night—well, the report could be anything. Could be fake, could be some drunk kids got the details wrong, could be they saw some people overloading themselves into a car, or could be just a prank. But the cops go there and they find a knife and a bag full of cannabis, all bagged up into individual packets. The kind of thing nobody alive would leave behind.”
“So why isn’t this just some drug deal gone bad?”
“Because the drugs would have been taken. The two guys who called it in said they couldn’t make out the registration plate of the car. They were pretty drunk—but not drunk enough to ignore what they had seen. We’re lucky they even called it in. One of them is fifteen, the other sixteen, both should have been at home. They really do start young in this city, don’t they,” she says, and yes they do. Underage drinking and binge drinking are what Christchurch is becoming well known for. “So the natural thing is for the officers at the scene to get the knife fingerprinted.”
“Don’t tell me the prints belong to Dwight Smith?”
“I won’t tell you that, because they don’t. They belong to a guy by the name of Bevin Collard.”
“Bevin Collard?” I stop rubbing at my eyes, but keep them closed. “I remember him. It was one of Landry’s cases, right?”
“Right, so it’s kind of ironic because the abduction took place behind Popular Consensus. That’s the bar Landry’s brother owns,” she says, and I remember the brother and the bar because that’s where the wake for Landry was held. “The alleyway runs behind that and a bunch of others. You get the connection now?”
I get it. A dead rapist last night, and one abducted tonight. I’m starting to think somebody last night was following Dwight Smith. I think he followed him to Kelly Summers’s house, and after Dwight broke the lock on the window, but before he could go inside, he ended up being forced to drive out to the train tracks. He probably had a gun to his head or a knife to his throat the whole way. And that same person put Bevin Collard into the trunk of a car tonight.
Sometimes a shower curtain is just a shower curtain.
“Tate?”
“Yeah, I get it. So now the question is are we going to find Bevin Collard later on tonight beneath a train.”
“Honestly, Theo, I think that’s as good a place as any for him. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
“I can’t leave Bridget,” I tell her.
“I know, that’s why I’m coming to pick you up, and that’s why I’m bringing my sister with me.”
“What?”
“To look after Bridget in case she wakes up.”
“You have a sister?”
“Two of them,” she says. “And a brother. Get dressed. We’re almost at your house.”
I’m still dressed so I use what time I have to write Bridget a note in case she wakes while I’m gone, explaining that I’m gone and that Rebecca’s sister will be out in the lounge watching TV. I also put on the kettle with the hope of making a coffee to help wake me up, but I don’t get to make it before a car pulls up outside. I step out and pull the front door behind me, leaving it open about an inch. I walk down to the car where two women are climbing out. Rebecca’s sister is a shorter and younger version of Rebecca, same shoulder-length dark hair, same big blue eyes, and no doubt turns the same amount of heads Rebecca would have before the explosion.
“This is Phillipa,” Rebecca says, and I put out my hand and so does Phillipa. Her grip is warm and firm and her smile is warm and wide. I immediately like her.
“Glad you can help out,” I tell her.
“Anytime.”
“Phillipa used to be a nurse,” Kent says, “so Bridget is in good hands.”
Phillipa shrugs, dismissing the comment as if it’s no big deal. I spend thirty seconds thanking her, and telling her to help herself to anything in the fridge, then Kent tells her we’ll be back as soon as we can. Kent is in her own car, and I still have the unmarked police car at my house, so we leave hers parked on the side of the road and switch cars. Kent gets behind the wheel.
“Used to be a nurse?” I ask.
“It’s a long story,” Kent says.
“She wasn’t putting her patients to sleep, was she?”
“No,” she says, and doesn’t elaborate.
It’s a ten-minute drive into town and there’s very little traffic. Sometimes on a Friday or Saturday night the streets can be congested with boy-racers in their souped-up cars, but not this Saturday. Maybe they’re all off binging on Happy Meals and beer. We get into town where the atmosphere is electric, where there is so much body spray on the air that a lightning strike would ignite it. The streets are buzzing with energy. The alleyway has been cordoned off by two patrol cars and a station wagon, and on this side of the cordon people are taking time out from drinking and dancing to see what’s going on, all the girls wearing very little and all the guys trying their best to look sharp in mainstream clothes. I immediately feel old. I’m a granddad to all these kids, I’m twice their age, I’m to them what people turning forty were to me twenty years ago, back when I had young man’s knees. I am to them what eighty-year-old people are to me. How. The hell. Has time gone by?
We walk through the crowd. I can see people turning towards Rebecca for different reasons, on one side guys are staring at her beauty, on the other they’re staring at her scarred face. She keeps looking straight ahead.
“Where’s Hutton?” I ask the officer standing by the crime-scene tape.
“Back at the station. He’s pulling information together about Bevin Collard.”
“And the witnesses?”
He points his thumb in the direction of one of the patrol cars. “In the backseat,” he says. “Let me show you what we have.”
He walks into the alleyway and we follow. There are doors on the left and right, all of them servicing shops and bars and restaurants. From behind the ones on the right comes the base and beat as DJs deafen the crowds. There are bags of rubbish, there are dumpsters, there’s a permanent chill and a sense that ten minutes down here would shrink your will to live. The officer points his flashlight towards some spots of blood about fifteen yards before the alleyway ends.
“Knife was over here,” he says, then points the flashlight at the spot where it was found.
“Any blood on it?” I ask.
“Nothing. Just the prints,” he says.
“Security cameras?” I ask, looking up outside the doors.
“Nothing,” the officer says. “No cameras. Just the blood and the knife and the drugs and two drunk boys who saw part of it.”
One of the doors opens and a couple of guys step outside, beers in one hand and cigarettes in the other. They look at us, then quickly go back inside. I walk over to the door, but it’s already locked.
“They don’t just come out for the weed,” the officer says. The knife has been bagged and tagged, but not the drugs. They’re still here. He crouches down beside the bag they’re in and opens a side compartment. “Check this out.” He holds up a couple of small ziplock bags with pills inside them. “And look at this,” he says, then pulls out a flare, the kind of flare you put at the scene of an accident to warn other traffic. “First sign of cops and this bag was getting torched, along with all the evidence inside it.”
We head back towards the street. We cover half the distance and come to a stop next to a dumpster that somebody will go through soon enough. An officer is coming towards us, walking next to him a man I’ve only met once in my life: Bill Landry’s brother. Kyle Landry puts his hand out and I shake it, and at the same time the officer tells us that Kyle here has information that might be useful. Kyle does look a lot like his brother. Same sharp features, same grim look of determination, he looks ready to blame the world for something.
“It’s Theodore, right?” he asks.
“Right,” I tell him.
“And Rebecca,” he says, looking at Kent. “I remember you guys. Been a hell of a year for the four of you,” he says, and by the four of us he means me, Schroder, Kent, and his brother. I figure it’s a miracle only one of us is dead. The officer nods at us and I nod back, indicating we’re okay to take it from here, then he wanders back towards the street.
“Your brother was a good cop,” I tell him.
“I know,” he says. “I also know he didn’t like you much, though.”
I’m not sure how to respond to that, so I don’t, and he seems to hear what he just said then waves it away. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “That was Bill. He often had a stick up his ass for the wrong reasons.”
“Did you see something happen here?” Kent asks.
“Tonight? No. But I thought you guys might like to know this is a pretty popular place for selling drugs. People slip out of the back of the club, and of course it’s not like we can chain those doors closed because they’re fire exits, and we don’t have the resources to hire bouncers just to keep an eye on them.”
“You didn’t call the police?”
“My brother was the cop in the family,” he says, “not me. There have been people selling drugs down that alleyway for months and I just always figured somebody in the department must have heard about it by now, and just as equally figured nobody cared enough.”
