Hideout

by Jack Heath

  ‘Who was he? The dead man.’

  ‘Lionel Swaize. Recently released from jail. You ever heard the term “chomo”?’

  I nod. It’s what they call child molesters in prison.

  ‘Well, that’s what he was. You want the details?’

  I don’t. I’m not even sure what the point of this conversation is. ‘Was he married? Living with anyone?’

  ‘No. He didn’t seem to have any friends, either.’

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘His father was dead. Cirrhosis. His mother lived in a dementia ward.’

  ‘He sounds isolated,’ I say.

  ‘Very.’ There’s that near-twinkle again.

  ‘Did his victims or their families live nearby?’

  ‘Sounds like you’re looking for someone with a motive, Lux,’ Penny says. ‘Do I need to remind you that the bathroom door was locked from the inside when I arrived?’

  ‘He can’t have served much time,’ I say, ‘if he was only thirty-six.’

  ‘He got off lightly, in my opinion. Seven years, out in five. He got some good character references from friends.’

  ‘You said he didn’t have any friends.’

  ‘Maybe they were more like debtors.’

  ‘He was owed money?’

  ‘Not money. Just … social capital. He’d been supportive in his community. After providing character references, these people felt like they were square, and they disappeared. No contact with him during his sentence or, as far as I could tell, after his release.’

  ‘The neighbour who heard the shouting,’ I say. ‘Did she see anybody hanging around beforehand? Listening, waiting for the shower to start?’

  ‘She told my partner she’d seen a woman in the hall, but wasn’t sure if she was visiting him or someone else. She couldn’t provide much of a description. I quote: “Brown hair, maybe?”’

  ‘What about when she heard the shouting? Did she hear any words?’

  ‘She heard him shout, “What the hell?”’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like something you’d say if you just slipped over.’

  ‘Swaize’s TV was on quite loud. It’s possible that’s what she heard.’

  ‘Who takes a shower and leaves the TV on?’

  Penny acknowledges this point with a nod.

  ‘How’d you get into the apartment?’ I ask.

  ‘Snap gun.’

  ‘But you had to break down the bathroom door?’

  ‘Different kind of lock,’ Penny says. ‘Just a slide bolt, on the inside.’

  ‘Well, then, it seems pretty obvious what happened,’ I say.

  She gives me an amused look. ‘It does?’

  ‘Sure. After murdering Swaize, the killer put a spring inside the slide-bolt mechanism, then held the bolt in the open position with a credit card. Then they stepped out, closed the door and removed the card so the bolt slid into place, locking the door. The spring fell out and rolled down the drain, disposing of the evidence.’ I shrug. ‘I hope you didn’t waste your whole career on this case.’

  There’s a pause, and then Penny bursts out laughing. ‘Is that really what you think happened?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I think you killed him.’

  This has the desired effect. Penny’s composed expression falls away for a split second, and I see the person behind it. I get a sense of loneliness and anger, which soon settles into annoyance. ‘Oh. My son already told you.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘But it’s the obvious solution, if there really was no other way out. I don’t know how you got caught, though.’

  We look at each other for a long moment. Penny leans back in her swivel chair.

  ‘How do you know I got caught?’ she asks.

  I point to the notches on the wall. An old habit from when she was in prison, with the chomos.

  ‘Well, then,’ she says, ‘let me tell you a story.’

  CHAPTER 33

  I feed and shelter the living even as I eat the dead. What am I?

  Penny was walking around in circles at one in the morning, rocking the baby, mumbling nonsense under her breath because she had long since run out of songs. His cries occasionally subsided into unhappy little gurgles, but whenever she thought about putting him back in the crib, it was like he could read her mind—the screaming would ramp right up again.

  ‘At eight months old,’ she tells me, ‘Frederick was already painfully heavy. He would only let me carry him with my left arm. Do you know how hard it is to do everything one-handed? Every day my shoulder blades were a little further apart, my neck a little creakier. I used to limp around like a pterodactyl.’

  It wasn’t a sudden bathtub-Eureka moment—more like a rising tide. A thought that became a notion that became an idea that became a plan that became an obsession, all in the space of one sleepless night.

  She could kill someone.

  She wouldn’t, of course. But she could. Penny had been a police officer for nine years, and a damned good one. She hoped to go back to it, once she worked out what to do with the kid during the day. Mostly the criminals were dumb as rocks. It was almost offensive, how little credit they gave the police. They barely bothered to cover their tracks.

  Two years ago she had busted a car thief. Not knowing how to hotwire a car, he’d stolen the driver’s keys instead. Then he’d just driven the car around Houston like it was his. He didn’t take it to a chop shop. He didn’t change the plates. He just rolled down the window and smugly insisted that it wasn’t stolen, even when Penny pointed out that the real owner’s name and address were on a tag dangling from the keys.

  Penny would do much better. If she committed a crime—hypothetically—there would be no evidence at all.

  There was no sense risking her career on a petty crime. ‘Go big or go home,’ her husband always told her. He’d said it when ordering at the steakhouse, back when they could still afford to go to restaurants. He’d said it when they decided to have a baby. Then he’d left her alone with a two-month-old. He went big, then went home.

  What would her method be? If she did this. Which she wouldn’t, of course. Thinking about it was just a way to pass the time.

  At seven years old, Penny had started stealing tattered mystery novels out of the cabinet in her mother’s study. She had been convinced that her mother would be horrified to learn she was reading them, although when she became an actual police detective she realised how tame the books had been.

  Her favourites were the locked-room mysteries. In Blood and Water, a man stabbed himself with a knife made of ice, hoping to frame his neighbour for his murder. The ice melted before the police arrived. In The Squeaking Pulley, the killer was a child, small enough to escape through the dumb waiter. In The Black Noose, the victim appeared to have vanished into thin air, but was later discovered jammed in the chimney—the killer had tried to pull him up using a rope around his neck and he had gotten stuck halfway.

  Penny couldn’t read, these days. Reading required concentration. Concentration required sleep. The baby had taken even that from her. But she still had fond memories of those locked-room mysteries.

  That had to be her method. A dead man in a sealed room, so the police would be forced to conclude accidental death.

  It was hard to choose a victim. She knew so many lowlifes who had escaped justice in the corrupt Texas court system. But Penny didn’t want to cause any unnecessary suffering. She would pick someone with no dependents, no friends. Someone nobody would miss.

  Pretty soon, she had narrowed it down to three men. One had punched his wife and received a reduced sentence after signing up for a twelve-step program and convincing a judge that his wife had attacked him first. Another owned a small building in which hundreds of tenants lived and ate for ‘free’—provided they worked with hazardous chemicals for twelve hours a day. The third candidate was a paedophile named Lionel Swaize.

  In the end, Penny picked the paedophile, because she hadn’t been the lead investigator on that case. She had only m
et Swaize once, when raiding his apartment with a bunch of other officers. She did a mental walkthrough of the place. Where was the front door? Where was the bedroom? Had there been a lock on the bathroom door?

  There had. She was sure of it. But none of this is real, she reminded herself. These thoughts were just harmless diversions, while she waited for Frederick to sleep.

  Her baby screamed and screamed.

  Eight months later, Penny was outside Swaize’s second-storey apartment, waiting for his shower to start. His front door had been repainted. Hopefully the interior layout was the same, and the lock on the bathroom hadn’t been replaced.

  She didn’t think anything would have changed. She had been digging into Swaize’s bank records. He was living month to month. He didn’t have the money for substantial renovations.

  She was wearing her workout gear. She’d signed up with the gym across the street, with the not-untrue excuse that the police gym was full of sexist, handsy a-holes. Today, she’d used her key to get into the gym and then slipped out the fire exit at the back. As far as the security camera out front was concerned, she was still in there.

  This project had remained a game when she researched Swaize. It had remained a game when she drove past his building, checking for security cameras. It was a game when she requisitioned the snap gun for Friday’s raid on the brothel, even though today was only Wednesday. It was a game when she dropped off Frederick at her mother’s place this morning, not even really seeing him as he waved goodbye, already thinking about the murder. It was still a game when she watched Swaize pull into the parking lot, his hands still dirty from his job at the Texaco. Even now, while she waited outside his door, it could still be a game. She hadn’t done anything illegal yet.

  A woman was looking at her. A neighbour, unlocking her door with a bag of groceries under one arm. Penny turned her face away, resisting the urge to touch her Mariah Carey wig. She pulled her radio out of her backpack—from a distance it looked like one of those new cellular phones. She started a pretend conversation, affecting a thick Boston accent. ‘I’m at thirty-one, but no one’s answering. What?’ She started walking away. ‘You said thirty-one! Yeah, you did. Shoot. Okay, I’ll be right down.’

  By the time she looked back, the neighbour had disappeared back into her apartment.

  And Swaize’s shower had started.

  After that, it felt like Penny didn’t have a choice. She was sure there had been a chance to turn back at some point along the way, but not right now, when she was standing outside a paedophile’s door with a snap gun and an alibi. It wasn’t a game anymore.

  Penny slid the blade of the gun into the lock and pulled the trigger five times. There were five sharp clicks, and the door swung open.

  She needn’t have worried about renovation. Swaize’s apartment was even more of a wreck than when she’d last seen it. People’s lives after prison were rarely better than they’d been before it. Empty TV dinners were piled on the floor next to the sofa. The sagging, tattered curtains were closed, but still let in a lot of light through the tears. A cockroach crawled out of a chipped coffee mug, which was on top of a porn magazine, which rested on a cardboard box with a picture of a microwave on the side. A cheap painting of some trees hung crooked on the wall.

  As she crept towards the bathroom, the hissing of the shower got louder and louder. She could hear muttering, and a strange slapping sound—like Swaize was patting his belly in there. The oddness of this created a wave of revulsion. Later, Penny reflected that if he hadn’t been slapping himself, she wouldn’t have been so strangely sickened and she might not have gone through with it. His death was his own fault, in so many ways.

  She slowly twisted the handle, so only the little slide bolt held the door closed. She couldn’t kick it while holding the handle down. Instead, she took a deep breath, and shoulder-barged the door.

  The slide bolt didn’t break. The door stayed closed, but there was a loud thud.

  Inside the bathroom, Swaize said, ‘What the hell?’

  Panicked now, Penny barged the door again. This time it burst open. The slide bolt went flying and jingled its way across the tiles into the corner of the room. Swaize was opening the shower curtain. He was white, with skinny limbs but an inflated gut, and hairy nipples on an otherwise bare chest. When he saw her, he instinctively covered his crotch, as though that was what she was after.

  Filled with terror instead of righteous rage, Penny charged at him. They were barely a yard apart. Not much of a run-up. It didn’t matter. She tackled him, one hand on his shoulder, the other on his face. The hot water got in her eyes, so she didn’t see his head hit the wall, but she felt the impact in her palm, and heard the crack. His legs buckled, but didn’t go limp the way she had expected. Penny scrambled up and backed away as Swaize crawled around the floor of the tub as slowly as a starfish for a minute that felt like an eternity. He eventually slumped sideways and looked up at her, uncomprehending. Water droplets splashed his eyeballs. When he didn’t blink, Penny realised he was dead.

  There was a sense of unreality, like this might all be a dream, as Penny went back into the living room, wiping her palms on her spandex pants. She picked up the remote and turned on the TV. She needed something to explain the yelling. There was a documentary on, something about the giant Pacific octopus. A stern-voiced narrator was describing how the octopuses squirt their eggs into the ocean and never meet their young. The narrator got louder and louder, shouting at Penny as she turned the volume up to maximum.

  Penny realised she’d just put her fingerprints on the remote. She went to clean them off with a wet wipe from her bag but stopped herself just in time. A remote with no prints on it would be even more suspicious. She’d have to say in her report that she turned it off when she arrived.

  She walked back into the bathroom.

  Swaize had moved. Or had he? She didn’t remember him lying in that position. Perhaps he wasn’t dead.

  She put a finger to his neck. Couldn’t feel a pulse.

  She grabbed the cake of soap—it was tiny, like he’d taken it from a hotel—and rubbed it on the soles of his feet. No movement. If he was alive, he wasn’t ticklish.

  Penny had arrested some killers who shot their victims twenty times, and others who kept hitting them with a baseball bat long after they were dead. She used to think of it as bloodlust. But now she understood. There was an urge, having reached the point of no return, to make sure.

  She rubbed some soap on the floor, too, making it extra slippery, but avoided the puddle of blood growing under his head. That needed to stay undisturbed. Even a half-decent crime scene investigator would become suspicious if the puddle looked smudged.

  Penny didn’t have a sense of how long she’d spent in the apartment. It was as though time had stopped along with Swaize’s heart.

  But then there was a knock at the front door. ‘Lionel? You okay?’

  The hairs on the back of Penny’s neck stood up. Had she locked the front door behind her? She didn’t think so. Hadn’t thought of it. Planning the perfect crime had been easy in the abstract. Now she was actually here, and it was messy.

  Another knock. Probably the neighbour she’d seen before. ‘Lionel! I thought I heard yelling.’

  Penny tiptoed through the living room and into the kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled high in the sink. Festering paper towels were scattered everywhere. If the busybody came in, perhaps Penny could creep out the door behind her, while she was in the bathroom.

  But then it wouldn’t be a locked-room mystery. The neighbour would see the broken bathroom door and would immediately suspect murder. Don’t come in, Penny thought, trying to transmit her thoughts through the wall. Go away.

  No more knocking. Could the neighbour already be inside? The TV was so loud that Penny wouldn’t necessarily have heard the front door open. Or perhaps she had given up and gone away.

  Penny eased closer to the kitchen door, preparing to take a peek. She could still hear the sh
ower gushing water onto Swaize’s corpse.

  The radio in Penny’s pack crackled. Her heart leaped into her mouth.

  ‘Officer Randich, this is dispatch, do you copy? Over.’

  Penny risked a glance around the corner into the living room. No sign of the neighbour. Just the TV blaring.

  ‘Officer Randich? Over.’

  Penny went back into the kitchen, away from the TV, and held up the radio. ‘I hear you, dispatch. What’s up?’

  ‘Possible domestic disturbance at one twenty-eight Chalmers Street. Apartment thirty-one. You told me you were going somewhere near there, right?’

  ‘I said I was going to the gym on Chalmers. Needed to burn off some energy.’ She was talking too much, too fast.

  ‘Oh. If your shift is already over, I can—’

  ‘No. It’s fine. I got it. What’s the disturbance?’

  ‘A neighbour heard shouting, and the shower has been going for a suspiciously long time. She knocked on the door and no one answered.’

  ‘Is the neighbour still at the scene?’

  ‘She went back to her apartment, number thirty. That’s where she made the call. Can you check it out?’

  Penny took a deep breath. ‘On my way.’

  She snuck back out of the apartment. There was no sign of the neighbour in the corridor, but she had to move fast. Someone else might get curious, and the plan would only work if she was first on scene.

  Penny hurried downstairs and ran across the street to the gym. She gave the front entrance a wide berth, not wanting to appear on the security tapes. Once she was out of sight around the back, she pulled off the wig and scratched her itchy neck. She pulled open the fire exit and removed the playing card she had taped over the tab to prevent the door from locking.

  She had found her rhythm now. No more panicking, like in the bathroom. She was operating as smoothly as an art thief in a movie.

  As she walked back towards the door, she took note of everyone in the room, in case she was asked later. A middle-aged woman in yoga pants on the Stairmaster. A purple-faced middle-aged man on the weight bench, with a clean-cut Latino guy spotting him, maybe his trainer. A younger white man on the rowing machine.