Night Passenger

by David Stanley

  “Well,” Ashcroft said, “I’ll let you guys get on with it. Victor, I’d like to speak with you before you leave. I’ll be in the den, look in on me when you finish up here.”

  “Sure thing, Jimmy.”

  Cabot sat in a chair across a table from Thorne. He noted with displeasure that the actor’s natural height and the elevated seated position of the dining chair combined to make him significantly taller than him. Unless he tilted his head, he’d be looking at Thorne’s chest. He watched Barnes set up the video camera. The device was tiny and looked ridiculous on a tripod, but he knew it was capable of recording amazingly sharp 4K video. Thorne watched the camera being set up with growing alarm.

  “You’re recording this?”

  “It was a condition of the deal I struck with Senator Ashcroft, I assumed he told you. If you prefer, we can continue this in the presence of legal counsel. Is that what you want?”

  “You know I have immunity for defending the Ashcrofts, right?”

  “Of course. I’m just clarifying a few details for the final report, you know how it is. Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. What do you say? Can we get started?”

  The camera was bullshit but to choose the alternative would make Thorne appear guilty before he said a word. There was a tense moment as he appeared to think it over. It was a well established trope that innocent people had nothing to fear from police scrutiny, but even Cabot knew that wasn’t true. For the same reason he preferred not to talk to the press unless he had to, he knew there was no upside for an innocent person to talk to the police.

  After a beat, the actor nodded his approval. Cabot felt waves of anger radiating from Thorne and he couldn’t be happier. The camera was paying dividends already, the so-called hero was on his back foot before they even got started. Barnes indicated with a look that the camera was recording, and sat to one side out the way.

  “Witness statement with Christopher Thorne, conducted by Lieutenant Victor Cabot at the home of Senator James Ashcroft on Thursday November 12th. Case number six eight four nine seven eight. Also present, Detective Mason Barnes. A copy of this recording will be made available to Mr Thorne at his request.” Cabot paused and made a show of removing a notebook from his inside suit pocket. He turned to the first blank page, popped out the nib of his pen and looked back at Thorne. “All right, perhaps you can start by telling us why you came to be in the Santa Cruz area.”

  “My girlfriend broke up with me and I needed to get out of L.A. for a while. I came up here, seemed as good a place as any.”

  “What’s your girlfriend’s name?”

  Thorne glanced at Barnes.

  “I already gave him this information at the hospital.”

  “Let me explain something to you, Mr Thorne. Every investigator has their own way of carrying out an interview. This is essentially a conversation between you and me, and it is easier for me to start afresh as if no previous interview has taken place, than it is for me to fit in with someone else’s conversation. Do you follow? As you answer one question, it leads me to think of another and so on. If I ask only for answers I know are missing now, I will end up having to come back later when that next question comes up as a natural part of my investigation. I don’t have time for that, and I am sure you don’t either, so how about we get through this as quickly as possible?”

  Thorne nodded. “That makes sense. Her name’s Kate Bloom.”

  Cabot wrote this down, as if it were new to him.

  “She’s an actress on your TV show, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did she break up with you?”

  Thorne lifted his left hand and touched his forehead, his fingers stroking the edge of the bandaging. It appeared to Cabot as though Thorne had forgotten the bandage was there until the last second. His eyes lost focus and no answer seemed to be forthcoming.

  “Mr Thorne?”

  “Because I’m an asshole, all right? That’s why she left me.”

  Cabot said nothing for a moment and let his eyes wander over Thorne. It occurred to him that he might be watching him act. He expected some form of deceit from interviewees, but he’d never questioned someone before who lied for a living. He would need to watch a few episodes of his TV show to get a feel for Thorne’s acting ability.

  “Perhaps you can clarify something for me. I’m having difficulty understanding the connection between the two of you breaking up, and your desire to leave L.A.”

  “We live together. As far as I know, she’s still at the apartment. It’s as much her place as mine, we rent it together. I doubt either of us can afford to run it on our own, we’ll both have to leave.” Thorne shifted awkwardly in his chair, wincing in pain as he did so. “I didn’t go back there because I wanted to give her some space to cool down.”

  “You hope to save the relationship?”

  “She has a temper. Sometimes she says things she doesn’t mean. We work together, we live together, there’s no room to breathe sometimes. I understand that. I thought if I gave her time to herself she might start to miss me.”

  “All right. Why Santa Cruz?”

  “Kate used to study here. She was always talking about it, trying to get me to come and I always found some reason to put it off. I don’t know what I thought, maybe I’d understand her better. Maybe she might decide to come join me here to patch things up after she'd cooled off a little. Listen, I know how this sounds. I just didn’t want to sit in some seedy L.A. hotel a mile from my own apartment, drinking Scotch to forget her. I didn’t want to be that guy. I wanted to feel like I was doing something constructive.”

  Cabot nodded as if this made sense. In his notebook he added Kate Bloom, UCSC? It was a detail Barnes had failed to uncover, or had neglected to mention. No matter how tenuous, it was a prior connection to the area that helped explain Thorne’s presence. The story itself was pretty stupid, he thought, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the truth. He’d heard a few strange tales in his time that had checked out, this could be no different.

  “Let’s move on. You flew Delta to San Jose and picked up a rental at Enterprise, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your flight was on an open ticket. Why was that?”

  “Because I didn’t know how long I was going to be staying.”

  “No idea at all?”

  “No. I had no idea how much time Kate would need to herself. I was going to play it by ear. If things went well I could fly back without much notice.”

  “You must’ve had some idea. A couple of days? A week?”

  “Maybe a week, I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “You rented the car upfront for two weeks.”

  Thorne smiled.

  “Right. They had a deal, 14 days for the price of 8. I took it.”

  “I see. You realize you can drive here from Los Angeles without having to worry about flights, reservations or deals.”

  The smile on Thorne’s face faltered for a moment, before recovering.

  “When Kate left she took my car with her. I didn’t want to take it back, I thought that sent the wrong message. As far as I’m concerned, the more things she has around her reminding her of me, the better.”

  Cabot paused. There’d been something there, he was certain of it. A moment of panic. He couldn’t wait to see if the camera had captured it. The girlfriend might have his car right enough, but Thorne’s reaction suggested he hadn’t thought of it before now. Time had definitely been a factor in his trip to Santa Cruz, and it seemed unlikely to him that Thorne’s stated reason required any urgency. He wrote Thorne in a hurry? on his notepad and circled it. When he looked up he saw the actor was studying him closely. His left hand, the one not in a sling, was clenched. Interesting.

  “All right, Mr Thorne, how about you tell us what you did in the three days between picking up your rental and the day of shoot-out at the mall?”

  “What has any of this got to do with catching the people responsible?”

  “Perhaps nothin
g at all, but that’s for me to decide.”

  Thorne sighed and shook his head.

  “Not long after I landed my mood nosedived. I realized how futile this was. Kate had wanted to show me the area herself, by being here without her I stood to damage some future bonding moment. The trip had been a stupid idea and a huge waste of time. I had imagined it would feel like a vacation, but I hadn’t been on a vacation without her in five years. Everything felt empty and pointless. I was not in a good place. If you want a list of different things I did you’re going to be disappointed. I drove around, listened to music, and drank beer. On the second day, I went into the redwoods and got lost there for a couple of hours. It was getting dark before I found my car again. Those hours were miserable, but they were the closest I’d come to peace since I arrived. I believed I’d accepted that I’d lost her. It felt like a relief.”

  “Why do you say believed?”

  “Because when I woke the next morning I needed her back.”

  This was the first thing Thorne had said that rang true for Cabot, it reminded him of the months following the death of his wife. Some days the grief would ebb away and he would feel better; the next it would return like it had never left to crush him without warning. The actor obviously cared for this Bloom woman, that was no story, he just couldn’t make the same connections. You couldn’t win someone back if you weren’t with them. If anything, the break-up gave Thorne a reason to stay in L.A., not leave it.

  Cabot turned the page on his notebook and crossed his legs so his right ankle lay across his left knee. It was a physical signal that they were moving into a different section of the interview, that this was the important part.

  “Run me through the day of the shooting. Leave nothing out, no matter how trivial. If you picked your nose, I want to know it.”

  Thorne sighed.

  “When I woke that morning I decided to get Kate a gift. A piece of jewelry, something like that. She’d always hated statement gifts; she thought it implied ownership, or that she could be bought off, but I was desperate and felt I had nothing to lose. I’d been at the mall the night before and thought I’d try there first. When I got there, I found the place closed and the parking lot deserted. The mall didn’t open until ten and it was a little after six, so I decided to go for a walk to clear my head. I found a McDonald’s that was open and bought breakfast. I’m not sure how long I stayed there. They had free Wi-Fi and I sat on my phone checking messages and emails. My data service up here has been patchy, so I took advantage of the connection. There was nothing from Kate so I checked flight departure times thinking I might cut my losses and go back early.” Thorne paused. “You want me to jump ahead?”

  “No, this is perfect. Keep going.”

  “After leaving there, I walked down to the beach.”

  “What beach is that?”

  “Off the Esplanade, Capitola, I don’t know what it’s called.”

  Cabot nodded. “Continue.”

  “I sat on a wall down there that looks out over Monterey Bay. The clouds were huge and dark like it was going to thunder. No one else was there. I guess I sat like that for about an hour listening to music and watching the clouds roll in. It was pretty dramatic.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Cabot said, sarcastically.

  “When I got up to leave I realized how cold I’d become sitting on the wall. I considered returning to the McDonald’s for another coffee, but in the end went back to my rental and sat there with the heat turned up. I must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing it’s after ten and the parking lot has about 20 cars in it. That’s when I went inside.”

  “Just a moment. How long were you asleep?”

  Thorne shrugged. “Ten minutes?”

  Cabot made a note of this in his notepad. The report from Barnes had contained no mention of Thorne’s visit to the beach, or of him falling asleep in his rental. It wasn’t to say he hadn’t turned up this information, but if it wasn’t in his report the difference was marginal. He’d need to talk to the detective about what he left out of his reports. Thorne hadn’t appeared tired in any of the security footage he’d seen. Cabot suspected that almost everything he’d heard so far was a lie. He could check the visit to McDonalds, but that was it. Walking about town and listening to music at the beach; it was for the birds.

  All he’d heard was an unverifiable story, with no witnesses or alibi.

  The part of the story he knew would be true, was that Thorne had arrived in that parking lot hours before the mall opened. It would be true, because everything else about the story felt like it was only there to support the car being somewhere when it had no reason to be there. Thorne wouldn’t know if the car had been recorded entering the lot, or if anyone had seen the vehicle sitting there on its own, so his story was vague enough to fit in with whatever evidence might turn up.

  Thorne stating that he’d fallen asleep bothered Cabot. It was an element in the story that could be adjusted later without compromising his honesty. If he proved a discrepancy in Thorne’s timeline, it would be a simple thing for the actor to claim he must have slept longer than he originally thought or, equally, for less time. Nobody would be able to draw any conclusions from this. Unless you looked at a clock before and after sleeping, it was often difficult to tell how long you had been unconscious.

  “Tell me about the mall.”

  “I saw the tall one first. At over seven feet he was hard to miss. After I noticed his size, I noticed he was carrying what I took to be a sawed-off shotgun wrapped in a shopping bag. He was watching a man and a woman, who I know now were James and Lauren Ashcroft. I then noticed four other men watching them. They didn’t look like good guys. The Ashcrofts were walking toward me and the four men were moving along with them, two in front, two at the rear. The giant stood near the door I had just come in. It looked like a security screen, except they were all wrong for it.

  “Lauren stopped to look in the window of Victoria’s Secret. James appeared to be embarrassed and looked around like he wanted to be somewhere else. I thought he’d seen the men following him but he looked right through them like they weren’t there. Lauren went into the store and James followed. The four men nodded to each other, like they were getting ready. I put it together that it was a kidnapping. They were going to grab one or both of the couple and kidnap them. Since the giant was next to the door, I thought they’d wait until the two were near the exit, then bundle them into a van. This meant there had to be another person driving the getaway vehicle, making six people total.”

  Cabot interrupted. “That’s quite a lot to put together, isn’t it?”

  “If they were there to rob a store they wouldn’t be following the Ashcrofts, anything else you could do with one or two guys. They had enough people to take on a security detail, cops, or mall security. I guess they assumed the senator would have protection.”

  Cabot nodded. It wasn’t far off his own analysis from viewing the tapes.

  “Why did you think they’d have a van?”

  “It would have to be big enough to transport them all - even a van would be a tight fit with eight people on board. That big guy would take up a lot of space on his own.”

  He made a note of this. They still hadn’t identified the make and model of the vehicle used, never mind found it. This rankled with Cabot. People just didn’t seem to notice vans in the same way as other vehicles. He assumed the gang had dumped it and switched to cars after they got away, but there was no trace of it yet.

  “Carry on,” Cabot said.

  “I checked my pockets. I had no weapon, but I looked to see what I had anyway. It wasn’t much: a can of Coke, a screwdriver, and a reusable nylon bag. I put the screwdriver in my back pocket and the can inside the bag. The Ashcrofts had left the store and resumed their walk toward the exit. As the giant walked past me, I heard tires skidding out front and the metallic clang of a side door slamming open. This would be the getaway vehicle. I fell in behind the giant and walked with him through
the door. I needed to be sure everything was the way I pictured it before I did anything. When I saw the van in position and the driver wearing a clown mask, there were no more doubts.”

  Thorne paused to drink from a bottle of water, then continued.

  “I used the Coke can in the bag to drop the giant, then finished him with the screwdriver. I grabbed his shotgun and pointed it at the closest of the men and pulled the trigger. He went down hard. A bullet burned its way down the left side of my chest and the inside of my arm. I tried to reload the shotgun but the bag prevented it, so I used the second man’s automatic to tag one of the other men. One, maybe two shots. I don’t think it was bad but he made a break for the van, he’d had enough. I was hit again, this time in the stomach. I found myself lying on the ground, the pain was incredible. I managed to get back on my feet and saw Lauren was still in danger. I shouted at her to get down and moved toward her.

  “They were firing at us from the van now as well. We took cover behind a black sedan. I remembered I’d only got one of the two men that had been following the couple. I turned and saw him aiming a revolver straight at me so I shot him through the head. Then I got hit in my shoulder, causing me to drop the gun. My arm hung limp and useless. I pressed my back against the sedan. The car was taking a lot of hits and I could smell gasoline.

  “I reached out and grabbed the gun with my left hand. I’d tried shooting with my left a couple of times in the past, and I’d sucked each time. There were three of them left, including the guy I wounded and the driver. It didn’t look good, but I could hear sirens now. All I had to do was buy time. I saw one of them working his way toward me. He was wearing a Doors T-shirt. I’d figured him as the leader earlier. I swung out from behind the car, exposing both of us. We aimed at each other, but nothing happened. His gun jammed and my finger wouldn’t cooperate; I couldn’t make it pull the trigger. I heard him laughing through his mask as he ran back to the van for cover. I followed him with the gun, but I still couldn’t shoot. It was too late by the time I saw the driver, she shot me in the head and I went down.”