Five minutes alone a thr.., p.40
Five Minutes Alone: A Thriller, page 40
“He leave a name?” I ask.
“Yeah, he did,” he says. “And that’s the good part. You want to have a guess what his name is?”
I can feel the darkness rushing back. I can feel my legs beginning to sway. The only question is will Schroder take me down with him?
“Who?”
“It’s you,” he says. “Guy said his name was Theodore Tate.”
It takes a moment to absorb the news. Theodore Tate. Not Carl Schroder. “Same name he gave the prison officer,” I tell him. “You could have told me that on the phone.”
“I wanted to tell you in person,” he says.
I shake my head. “This is bullshit,” I tell him.
“What?”
“You’re full of shit and this isn’t my first day on the force. You wanted me down here because you want Tom to take a look at me, right? You want to make sure it wasn’t me who came in here on Sunday.”
“Now, hang on a second—”
“Fuck you, Detective,” I say.
“No, fuck you, Tate,” he says, pointing his finger at me. “You would have done the same damn thing. There’s a theory this killer is or was one of us, what was I supposed to do?”
Kent puts a hand on my shoulder and I have the urge to shake it off. “He’s right,” she says, “you would have done the same thing.”
I shake my head. I know I’m overreacting, but I’m entitled to. I’m having a stressful time. “Let’s go and see Tom. Let’s make sure this is my first time here,” I tell him.
“Come on, Tate, don’t be—”
“Whatever,” I say, and I head towards the office.
“Howdy, Detective, I’m Tom,” a man says, a man who must be Tom, and he offers me his hand and I shake it, and then he gives me a card. “Next time you need tires,” he says, “come and see me.”
“Let me guess, you give a law-enforcement discount?”
“I give everybody a discount,” he says, “but law enforcement get the real savings.” He hands a card to Kent too. I figure Travers already has one. “You guys do a hell of a job.”
I put the card in my pocket. I feel calm again. No surveillance, no real name. Then I think about the tires that are here with Schroder’s prints all over them from when he changed them at Grover Hills, and my heart starts to race. I just have to hope he wore gloves.
“So the guy paid with cash?” I ask.
“Yep.”
“Any chance it’s still here?”
He shakes his head. “Like I told your colleague, weekends are really busy. First thing we do Monday morning is take the profits to the bank. We keep a float, but that’s always turning over. The guy paid in twenties, and those things come and go all day long. ”
“So the two tires, they’re here I’ve been told, which means they couldn’t be fixed?” I ask.
“That’s right,” Tom says. “Not just the tires, but he left one of the spare wheels here. He was driving on two of them. One I patched up and put back into his car, the other he left behind.”
“So what did he run over?”
“He hadn’t run anything over,” Tom says. “They’d been slashed. They were completely ruined. Like I said before you got here, they’re out back in the scrap pile. They’re all yours. You want me to give you a hand loading them up?”
“That’s fine,” Travers says. “There’s a fingerprint technician already on the way. You just show me where they are and I’ll take care of it.”
“I’ll get Neal to show you,” he says. There’s an open doorway between the office and the workshop, and Tom calls through it to one of the two men we saw earlier, this one a kid who is all of twenty years old who’s pulling the tire off a rim. Neal looks up, sees Tom flagging him over, and then comes through. “Can you show the detective where the two slashed tires are that came in on the Honda?”
Neal starts nodding. He seems eager to please. He leads Travers back through the doorway and through the workshop.
“Did this man have to sign anything? Or touch anything?” Kent asks.
“Nothing. The guy just stood there watching the whole time. Didn’t say much other than ask for two new tires and how much were they going to be. Stood there with his hands in his pockets in the workshop and watched. I remember he was wearing a long-sleeve shirt even though it was really hot, and the sleeve was all puffed up like his arm was bandaged beneath it. Only time he took his hands out of his pocket was when he paid, and also when he answered his cell phone. I was showing another customer around at the time, but he answered the phone with his name.”
“Theodore Tate,” I say, and how close did I come just then to saying Carl Schroder.
“Yeah, he looked at the display on his phone, and then flipped it open and said Theo.”
“When exactly was this?” I ask.
“I can’t give you exactly,” he says, “not on the phone call, but it wasn’t long before he paid, and the receipt here says he paid at eleven fifty-seven.
“So this guy is still impersonating you on the phone,” Kent tells me.
I nod. I think about the time line. Bridget saw him around then, didn’t she? Is it possible that instead of him impersonating me on the phone, he looked at the display and thought it was me calling? He wasn’t saying Theo, as in I’m Theo. He was saying it because he thought it was me calling. As in Hi, Theo. I didn’t call him, but if Bridget called from home, it still would have been my name flashing across his phone. It was the day after I showed her where Quentin James was buried. I think the following morning something inside her misfired. I think she called Schroder wanting his help. I think for some reason she took him out to the grave because the time line in her mind had gotten scrambled. That’s how he found the body.
“How good a look did you get at the guy?” Kent asks.
“A really good look.”
“So if we put you in front of a sketch artist, you’ll be able to come up with something?”
“Sure, and it’ll be something a hell of a lot more accurate than that sketch in this morning’s paper,” he says. “I mean, that sketch doesn’t even have the scar.”
I do my best not to cringe at those words.
“What scar?” Kent asks.
“Up here,” he says, and taps the side of his head. “Looked like the guy had been shot.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
We get back into the car. The dashboard tells us the temperature is the same as what it was ten minutes ago when we got here, but I tug at the top of my shirt and try to let some air in because it feels like the day has gotten fifty degrees hotter. It feels stuffy. So stuffy I’m struggling to breathe a little.
Kent says nothing and I say nothing and Tom Headman follows us in his car as we drive back to the station. We’re more than halfway there when I break the silence.
“You can say it,” I say.
She shakes her head.
“Come on, Rebecca. You can say it.”
“I don’t want to say it.”
“Fingerprints are going to confirm it.”
“We don’t know that,” she says.
“Yes we do,” I say, because it’s over now. It was over from the moment I found Kelly Summers’s window had been forced open and said nothing. “We know we’re looking for a cop.”
“That’s just a theory.”
“We know Schroder isn’t Schroder anymore. We know he’s linked to the first two homicides. The first case was his and he knew all about Grover Hills.”
“He saved my life. If it wasn’t for him they’d still be scraping bits of me off the road.”
I don’t answer her.
“And you?” she asks. “You took him to Kelly Summers’s house. Why don’t you totally turn my world upside down and tell me you’re the one who took the cell phone?”
“That wasn’t me,” I tell her.
“Promise me it wasn’t, Tate. Please.”
“It wasn’t me. I promise,” I say, and I don’t know why the hell I’m still lying. It’s over.
“So now what?” Kent asks.
“Now we keep it to ourselves. There’s no point in making accusations until we know, right? Could be a lot of people out there who have been shot in the head. Let’s run the prints and see what the sketch looks like.”
“You’ve been to his house,” she says. “You must know what kind of car he drives.”
“I know.”
“And?”
“And it’s a dark blue Honda.”
“An Accord?”
“I think so. Let’s keep it to ourselves until we know for sure, okay?”
“And then?”
“And then we go and arrest him.”
We get to the station. We head upstairs and Stevens comes looking for us and tells us we did a good job last night. He says me and McCoy screwed up by not identifying ourselves, but aside from that he’s happy.
“He was there trying to bury the murder weapon,” he says. “That weapon is out getting tested as we speak, and nobody doubts it’s going to come back with Hailey McDonald’s DNA all over it. Don’t let his lawyer make you think this isn’t going to make it to court. By the way, guess who won the pool?”
“Who?” I ask.
“I did,” he says. “And I don’t want crap like that taking place in this building again, okay? We’re supposed to be professionals.” He stops talking and stares at me for a few seconds. “You know, Detective, you don’t look so good.”
“I’m just tired,” I say.
“Make sure you take a couple of days off when this is over, huh? We just lost one good man, and we sure as hell don’t want to lose another.”
Tom Headman steps off the elevator. He’s being escorted by another officer. He sees us and he heads over, and we put him into an interview room similar to the one we used last night, only a little bigger and somewhat more comfortable. We get him set up with the sketch artist and then we leave them to it.
We’re back in the task-force room when my phone rings.
It’s Detective Travers.
The tire has been printed.
They’ve found two sets of prints. One set will belong to Tom because he’s the one who stripped them from the rims and tossed them into the scrap heap. The second will belong to the bald man. The prints were found on the spare wheel he left behind. When he put his fingers through the holes in the rims he left good prints in the dirt and grease on the other side. Any prints on the tires were unreadable.
“We’re on our way back to run the prints,” he says. “If this guy is in the system then we’re going to have him. If he’s a cop, his prints are going to be on file. This is almost over,” he says, and he sounds like a kid at Christmas. He hangs up and I turn to Kent.
“Travers found a good set of prints,” I tell her.
“That’s great,” she says, but she doesn’t sound thrilled. Of course she doesn’t. It’s like she said—Schroder saved her life.
“I really don’t feel well,” I tell her.
“You want to go home?”
“Yeah, I think that’s best,” I say.
“I’ll drop you off.”
I shake my head. “Just give me the keys,” I say. “I’ll go home for a few hours and come back after lunch.”
She tilts her head slightly as she looks at me. “I know where you’re going,” she says.
“I’m going home.”
“If you say so,” she says. “I just hope for your sake you’re at home lying down in about forty-five minutes because that’s when all hell is going to break loose.”
“That’s where I’ll be.”
“Good luck,” she says. “I don’t know whether you’re going there to arrest him or warn him, but whatever it is, good luck.”
“Thanks.”
She hands me the keys. “Don’t crash.”
Don’t crash. I think it might already be too late for that. I take the elevator and step out into the parking lot for the last time as a free man.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
I phone my wife, but there’s no answer. She must be out somewhere with her parents. I think about leaving a message, but what is there to say? Sorry, Babe, but you somehow showed Schroder where Quentin James is and now I’m going to jail? The morning is still relatively young when I get to Schroder’s house. It’s ten thirty, but it feels like afternoon already. It feels like the longest day of my life.
You know what you have to do, don’t you?
Yes. I know what I have to do. I have to give up. It’s over now.
“Theo,” Schroder says when he opens the door.
I hold up the bottle of whiskey. “Got some ice?” I ask him.
He looks me hard in the eye, looks at the whiskey, then back at me. His face softens. He sighs. “It’s over, huh?”
“It is.”
I follow him through to the kitchen. He grabs a couple of glasses and tosses a good helping of ice into each one, and an even healthier helping of whiskey on top. We sit at his kitchen table.
“How long do we have?”
“Not long. Thirty minutes maybe. Maybe not even that. Could be a little bit more.”
“You told them?”
I shake my head. “No. If I told them I wouldn’t be here.”
“Then what?”
“Benson Barlow was in yesterday. He’s convinced us we’re looking for a cop.”
“Did you try to convince them otherwise?”
“No, because your test with the cell phone came back to bite you in the ass. One of the officers saw it before I took it. So they know it’s been taken. So they know it’s a cop or somebody who’s helping a cop.”
“There are a lot of cops,” he says. “You just have to make sure that—”
“It’s too late to make sure of anything,” I say, and I pick up my glass and I swirl it around, the amber liquid inside is like gold, it’s heaven, and I take a sip and it’s strong, so strong, and so, so good. “Maybe, maybe I could have done things different yesterday, but that was yesterday.”
“And today?”
I take a bigger sip. Why did I ever give up? “And today there’s a sketch of you,” I tell him.
“There was a sketch of me yesterday too. I’ve seen it,” he says. “It looks nothing like me.”
“It’s a new sketch from a new witness and it’s being drawn right now.”
“There are no witnesses,” he says.
“Did you get the law-enforcement discount at Tim’s Tires or didn’t you tell Tom you used to be a cop?”
He takes a sip then winces as he swallows. I take another sip, and another, and it’s good, damn good, and there’s a rush here. The warmth is hitting my mind and expanding, and hello whiskey my old friend, thanks for dropping by. I take another sip, only they aren’t sips anymore. I can feel myself smiling.
“He saw you, Carl. Jesus, he got a good look at you and this,” I say, and I lean forward and tap his scar, “this may be invisible to a fifteen-year-old girl, but to Tom the Tim Tire Man or whatever the hell his name is, well, he’s telling the sketch artist right now all about it.”
“That’s . . . unfortunate,” he says.
“Ha. Yes, unfortunate. How unfortunate I killed people and how unfortunate I’m going to go to jail for it. Did you wear gloves when you took those wheels off your car, Carl?”
“No.”
“That’s what I figured,” I say. “They lifted some prints off it. They’re running them now. And they’re going to come up with your name. And even then it wouldn’t matter. They’re running a list of Honda Accords against cops or retired cops. Your name is coming up no matter what.”
“You were supposed to stop that kind of thing from happening.”
I almost choke on the whiskey then. “Are you serious? Are you going to really sit there and blame me for how this is turning out? Top me up,” I say, and slide my glass towards him. He picks the bottle up and gives me a refill. “You killed an innocent man.”
“What, Ron McDonald? Come on, Theo, we both know that’s—”
“Bullshit?” I ask. “No, what’s bullshit is you saying this is bullshit. McDonald was innocent. We messed up, Carl, and we corrected that mistake last night. We’ve arrested Christopher Watkins for it.”
“Who the hell is that?”
“He worked for Ron.”
“The guy with the rattail?”
“That’s him. He was having an affair with Hailey McDonald. We caught him last night trying to dispose of the murder weapon.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Ron was innocent all along.”
He still doesn’t say anything.
“You screwed up, Carl.”
“Shit,” he says.
“That pretty much sums it up. It’s case closed, Carl.”
Schroder finishes off his glass, tops it back up, then tops mine up too. I can’t stop asking myself why I ever gave up drinking. Right now I can’t think of a good reason ever to have given it up. It tastes too damn good and makes me feel too damn good and damn, damn, damn . . . it makes everything look quite okay, and if there’s whiskey in jail then jail won’t be too bad at all.
“So now what?” he asks.
“What do you mean So now what?”
“I mean what’s the plan?”
I shake my head. “You don’t get it, do you? There is no plan. The plan is we’re fucked. There is no plan, but to stay here and have a few drinks and wait for the police to come and arrest you. That’s the plan. Then maybe we’ll be cellmates, huh?”
“That’s not much of a plan,” Schroder says.
