Five minutes alone a thr.., p.24
Five Minutes Alone: A Thriller, page 24
“What the hell are you doing?” We turn towards an elderly woman walking her dog. She’s staring at us from the sidewalk. “I’m going to call the police.”
I go inside. It’s stuffy in here. Rebecca calls out to the woman that we are the police, and then she’s a few footsteps behind. I hear the elderly lady call out, but I don’t hear what she says. We move quickly through the house—the hallway past the kitchen, past the lounge, past the lavender smelling bathroom with the bright green shower curtain. One bedroom, two bedrooms, and it’s bedroom three where we find Kelly Summers, lying on top of her bed in a pair of silk pajamas, her skin pale white, like she laid out under the moon all night and got bleached by it. I can hear Kent fumbling for her cell phone. I check for a pulse. Kelly Summers is cold. Very cold. She looks at peace. She looks and feels like she’s been dead for most of, if not all of, the entire night.
“She almost looks happy,” Kent says, and she’s standing behind me, the phone down by her side, the call not made. “Look,” she says, and nods towards the bedside dresser. There are three envelopes there. One is addressed to her mom and dad, another to all her friends, and a third to Detective Inspector Theodore Tate and Detective Inspector Rebecca Kent.
“What did the other note say?”
“It was a warning,” she says, and she hands me the note while she picks up the letter addressed to us.
Hi Mom and Dad—
This is going to be hard to read, but I’ve done something that’s going to make you both really sad. I’m in the bedroom, but by the time you read this it’ll be too late to save me. I’ve taken a bottle of pills and soon I will be at peace. I’ve left this note here so you know what to expect once you unlock the door. Perhaps you should call somebody first. I’ve left another note inside. I love you.
Kelly xxx
I fold the note along the same creases Kelly folded. Rebecca is looking at me, a sad expression on her face, the letter to us is down by her side, but she hasn’t read it yet. “Here,” she says, and hands it to me. “You can read it first. I’m going to go and sit in the sun and call this in.”
She leaves me with Kelly Summers and Kelly Summers’s ghost and neither of them is in a talkative mood, but I am, so I do the talking.
“None of this is right,” I tell her, “but it’s the world we live in. I really hope you’re in a better place,” I say.
I open up the letter.
Detectives—
By now I’m guessing you’ve figured out what happened. I came home Friday night and within a few minutes Dwight Smith forced his way inside through the window. I used to call him Cowboy Dwight, is that on file anywhere? When I stepped out of my bathroom there he was. He pushed me back into the bathroom and pulled off my robe, and then he slipped on the wet floor and he hit his head on the edge of the bath. I didn’t know if he was dead or alive, but I was too afraid to check. I was also too afraid to go for my phone in case he came to in the time before the police arrived. I reached up and grabbed the first thing I could—which was a ceramic soap dish. I only meant to hit Cowboy Dwight once in the head to make sure he would stay unconscious, but once I started I couldn’t stop. I don’t know how many times I hit him, but it was a lot. For what he had done to me, for the years I was a prisoner in my house, for taking from me the life I wanted to have, I made him pay. I could tell you I didn’t mean for that to happen, but I think I did. I think I knew if I called the police you would come out, you would be sympathetic, but also you’d know there was a moment where I could have tried calling for help. I panicked. I dragged him out into his car. It was hard work. Heavy work. But I managed. I was determined. And the rest you know. I know what I did was wrong, but I’m glad I did it. It was like you asked me on the doorstep—you asked if I felt a sense of justice. The answer is yes. And the truth is I would have killed him over and over if I could.
Killing him isn’t the reason I’m about to do what I’m going to do—or by now will have done. It’s strange, but him being alive is the only thing that stopped me from killing myself years ago. I was too angry to die. Angry at Smith, angry at a world that allowed Smith to do that to me. I didn’t know that anger was keeping me alive until I’d killed him. There’s no reason to go on—I haven’t been happy for five years, and that’s never going to change, especially now that I’m facing jail for far longer than Smith ever did, because that’s what will have happened. You’re probably reading this and shaking your head, but it’s true, and you know it’s true even if you don’t like it. He rapes me and gets five years, I kill him and get twenty. Smith didn’t kill me five years ago, and he didn’t kill me last night, but he still took my life. I’m just glad I was able to take his, and I’m thankful to have the chance to take mine on my own terms.
Please don’t think the worst of me.
Yours,
Kelly Summers
(P.S.—just how do you sign off a letter like this? Yours sincerely? Yours faithfully? Yours peacefully? Well, I’m going to die wondering. . . .)
I’ve lost count of how many suicides I’ve seen over the years. Some of them sad, some of them not, some of them simple, some of them not. Kelly’s is one of the saddest. And what of Schroder? There is no mention of him in the note, and why?
Because he helped her. He saved her from the boogeyman. The letter isn’t an accurate version of events. Kelly Summers came home, Dwight Smith broke into her house, and Carl Schroder saved her. She doesn’t mention Smith’s car running out of gas, or how she got back into town because that stuff didn’t happen to her. She’s taken the blame for it, and by doing so she’s closed the case. Only four people on this earth will ever know what happened, and two of them are already dead.
Kent comes back inside. “Medical examiner is on the way,” she says, “and so is Hutton. You read her letter?”
“Yeah,” I say, and I hand it over to her.
“What about the other two?” she asks, and nods towards the table at the remaining letters.
I shake my head. “They’re not for us.”
“They could be important,” she says.
“Could be, but everything we need to know is in there,” I say, and point at the letter I just handed her.
“I’m going to head back outside. Is that okay?”
“I’ll follow you in a minute.”
I stay in the room with Kelly for a little while longer, and when I’m sure Kent is outside, I step into the hallway and make my way to the bathroom. The shower curtain doesn’t look as new as it did yesterday. There are beads of water running the length of the hem, some caught in the creases. I touch the edge and I close my eyes and I picture Schroder in the supermarket paying for this in cash. When I open my eyes I notice the candles and air fresheners he bought are in here too. This is the room Dwight Smith died in, and then Kelly and Schroder cleaned it up.
Outside Kent is sitting on the front porch waiting patiently. The old lady with the dog is still watching us from the other side of the road, while the dog stares over at a nearby tree, probably thinking about chasing a cat up there or taking a leak against it. I sit down next to Kent and I put my arm around her and tell her that everything is going to be okay. We sit and we wait like that for the others to arrive.
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.
