Five minutes alone a thr.., p.25
Five Minutes Alone: A Thriller, page 25
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.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Schroder leads Tate inside and he sits on the couch and Tate sits opposite him in the chair and he doesn’t offer him a drink, even though part of him is telling him that’s what he should do. A beer, he imagines, is probably the right kind of beverage for what’s about to take place. But Tate doesn’t drink anymore. He wonders what Warren is thinking.
“What people am I supposed to have killed?” he asks.
“The shower curtain,” Tate says.
“What?”
“It was new. It still had the fold lines in it.”
Schroder nods. They unfolded the curtain and hung it up and he took the packaging and the receipt with him. He knows where this is going.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about the shower curtain. And in the end all that thinking led me to the supermarket it was purchased from. It was just a matter of searching for shower curtains that had been purchased in the middle of the night. I went there expecting to see either you or Kelly Summers.”
“Why me?”
“You were the detective who arrested Dwight Smith. You knew about the Collard brothers. About how to try and hide a crime on a set of train tracks. You knew about Grover Hills. I suspected,” Theo says, “but I didn’t believe it. Not until this morning when I watched you on a security monitor buying the curtain now hanging in Kelly Summers’s bathroom. You bought two of them. Did you use the second one last night?”
“I see,” he says, not answering the question. He should have used something other than a shower curtain. Or used nothing. He did what he thought was the right thing at the time.
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”
“No,” Schroder says. “There is more. First explain something to me, because there’s something I don’t understand.”
“What?”
“You saw the footage this morning. That is before you found Kelly Summers dead, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“So you had this theory about the shower curtain yesterday. That means you looked through Kelly Summers’s house. That means you would have seen the broken window latch. What that also means is you knew immediately that Kelly Summers was involved, and yet you didn’t go to the supermarket right away. You didn’t because you didn’t want to send Kelly Summers to jail. You were okay with the fact that Dwight Smith was dead. Isn’t that right?”
“I’m not okay with any of this,” Tate says, and then he gets loud. “What in the hell were you thinking, Carl?”
“It just happened,” he says. “I was trying to help her.”
“And now she’s dead.”
“So is that my fault for helping her?” he asks. “Or your fault for trying to help her get away with it?”
“What the—”
“It’s not either of those,” Schroder says. “It’s Dwight Smith’s fault. He’s the one who hurt her. He’s the reason she’s dead now. Not us. There’s no need for you to beat yourself up about it, just as there’s no need for me.”
“And Peter Crowley? Is there no need there too?”
“I wish that had also gone differently,” he says.
Tate shakes his head. “You’re unbelievable. I want you to tell me what happened on Friday night.”
“Do I need a lawyer?”
“Please, Carl, just tell me.”
“What, as one friend to another?”
“As one cop to another,” Tate says, and he looks ready to slam his hand onto the coffee table.
“I’m no longer a cop.”
“But you think you are. Deep down, you do.”
“Maybe,” he says. “You’re the only one who knows about this, aren’t you.”
Tate nods.
“Is it going to stay that way?”
“Just tell me what happened,” Tate says.
“Are you here to arrest me?”
“Just tell me.”
“Did Kelly leave a suicide note? Did she talk about Friday night and what happened?”
Tate nods. “Her version doesn’t include you.”
“I didn’t want her to die. All of this was to save her. It’s not essential that you believe that, but I would like you to. How did she do it? Pills?”
“Yes.”
“Well it’s better than what would have happened if I hadn’t shown up.”
“Is that what you think? That it makes it better?” Tate asks.
“That’s exactly what I think, and I’m pretty sure that’s what you think too, and I’m as sure as hell that Kelly thought the same thing,” he says. “I saved her and she died on her own terms, and if I hadn’t saved her she would have died horribly. You didn’t see him, Theo, and I did. Dwight Smith was ten seconds away from putting his dick into her, and probably two minutes away from putting in a knife.”
“Why didn’t you call the police? Why were you even following him?”
“It was a gift to the Old Me,” he says.
“To who?”
“To the Old Schroder.”
So he tells Tate everything about the conversation. And the realization that Dwight Smith was going to live a better life than him. He tells him about Friday night. About following Dwight Smith to Kelly Summers’s house. About climbing the fence and finding the bedroom window open and Kelly face down on the bathroom floor. “She asked me for her five minutes,” he says, when he’s done telling Tate, then sits in silence for Tate to work it out.
Only he doesn’t work it out. “Her five minutes? What five minutes?”
“Think about it.”
“I am thinking about it.”
“How many times were we asked by somebody to give them five minutes alone with—” He stops talking when Tate’s hand goes up in the air in a stopping gesture.
“I get it,” Tate says. “So Kelly asked for her five minutes alone with Dwight.”
“You can’t sit there and tell me over the years you didn’t wish you could have given that to people too. I think you’d have wanted your five minutes. In fact I’m pretty sure you’ve had them.”
“I’ve told you a hundred times I had nothing to do with Quentin James disappearing.”
“Whatever you say, Theo,” he says, and that’s okay, because Tate can believe what he wants for the moment. “The point is still the same—if you were offered five minutes with the man who hurt your family, you’d take it. That’s what Kelly Summers wanted and I had no reason to deny her.”
“So you helped her.”
“To a point, yes.”
“The same way you helped Peter Crowley?”
He sighs. He’s getting annoyed at Tate, then wonders how a man who feels nothing can get annoyed. The answer is he’s still evolving. Something inside has broken free, and though not all the emotions are there, some are. “Look, things with Peter didn’t go to plan. And I’m sorry about that. But he made a mistake and he paid the price.”
“He made a mistake because you put him into a situation you couldn’t control.”
“He wanted his five minutes.”
“I’m sure he wanted to be alive at the end of them. You went to him, right? You phoned the prison and got Collard’s information, and then went and wound Peter up. I just don’t understand why.”
“You’re right. I did phone the prison, and I did go to Peter, and I was right because he did want his five minutes,” he says, but he doesn’t say that Peter needed convincing, that he needed reminding. “We drove them out to Grover Hills, but then the Collards got away and killed Peter, and then they phoned for help. It was me or them. It was self-defense.”
“No, it’s not, because you took the Collards out there. If anything, it was self-defense on their part.”
“You can’t have it both ways, Tate. You can’t say it was self-defense for them when they had time to think about what they were doing, then not say it was self-defense for Kelly too. She wanted her five minutes and got it, and Peter wanted his and missed out, then those four men wanted their five minutes too. It’s a miracle it’s not me out there burned to a crisp. It was those guys that brought the dog and the gas and the guns. But you still haven’t told me why you’re here, Theo.”
Theo leans forward. Schroder isn’t sure if any of these answers are what his former colleague wants to hear. “And you haven’t told me why the Collard brothers. Why did you call the prison to learn about Dwight Smith’s cellmates?”
“Why does it matter? What is done is done.”
“You could face the death penalty, don’t you get that?”
“I know this is hard for you, Theo,” he says, and it would have been hard for the Old Him too. He knows what the Old Him would be saying if he was sitting where Theo is sitting, and figures it wouldn’t be that much different from what he’s hearing anyway. “It’s hard because you would have done the same thing.”
“No. I would have called the police. I wouldn’t have let Kelly deal with a man like Dwight Smith. You let it get out of hand.”
“Like you did three years ago with Quentin James?”
“I told you already that—”
Now it’s Schroder’s turn to put up his hand. “That you had nothing to do with his disappearance, yes, I know.”
“I didn’t kill Quentin James,” Tate says, “but I wanted to. But this—what you’re doing, this is wrong. You’re targeting people who have done nothing to you.”
“So that’s where you draw the line? If it’s personal then it’s okay?”
“That’s . . . you’re twisting my words,” Tate says.
“And you’re wasting our time. Look, Theo, like I said a minute ago, what is done is done. I did what I did last night to protect Kelly Summers. I didn’t want her going to jail and no matter what you say, you know she didn’t deserve to be locked away. I had her best interests at heart. I let her do what she needed to do, and then I needed to do what it took to cover it up. So I thought why not wipe out another couple of low-life degenerates and make it look like a vigilante was on the loose? It’d take the focus away from Kelly. Now it doesn’t matter, right? Kelly is dead and Peter is dead and there are no more tracks to cover, and if you arrest me then it’s hard for you to explain why you left it a day to investigate the shower curtain, and why you never told anybody this morning about the supermarket footage you saw.”
