Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “Well, while you were looking for the photograph,” Kent says, “I’ve been thinking. You heard what Raphael was saying about the protest? What if that’s what’s going on here? What if this has nothing to do with Melissa, but everything to do with the referendum? We were told in a briefing this morning that there could be as many as five thousand people showing up outside the courthouse against this damn thing, saying it sends the country back into the dark ages. And for all we know Raphael could end up with hundreds of people in support of the referendum, maybe more, all of them saying it’s the way of the future. That’s a lot of people all trying to be heard. That’s a ripe breeding ground for somebody with explosives to make a point.”

  Schroder thinks about it. “You think Raphael knows something? You think the explosives are for somebody from his group?”

  Kent shakes her head. “His group is antiviolence,” she says. “By the very nature of their group they don’t want people being hurt.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Schroder says, “but the opposite is true too. The very nature of the group means they’re pro-violence because they want revenge. People always think the ends justify the means.”

  “Revenge, yes, but not against innocent people.”

  Schroder nods. He’s feeling tired, and confused statements like his previous one prove it. When he’s done here he’ll head home, and maybe he can get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep before the baby wakes up. “You’re right,” he says, rubbing at his eyes.

  “But people are all kinds of crazy,” she says. “Somebody in either camp may just think explosives will help make a point. Somebody might think hurting people will help the greater good.” She stares at him for a few seconds. “Are you okay, Carl?”

  Before he can tell her that he’s fine, Raphael comes back to the doorway. He’s aged a bit since he saw him last year, but he’s still a good-looking guy, the kind of guy you’d see playing the prime minister on TV. If one of the shows Schroder is consulting on ends up tackling some political plot lines, he should offer Raphael the role.

  Raphael hands them a list of names. “It’s all I could remember,” he says, and there has to be close to twenty names on it.

  “Do the names Derek Rivers or Sam Winston mean anything to you?” Kent asks, revealing names that are going to be on the news soon anyway. By the end of the day the country will know somebody is out there shooting some of its citizens—albeit not very nice citizens.

  Raphael scratches at the side of his head, his fingers disappearing into his hair. “No. Should they? Are they dead too?”

  “And you’re sure nobody stood out?” Schroder asks.

  He gives it a few more seconds of thought. Then nods. “Positive,” he says.

  “Thanks for your time,” Kent says, and they all shake hands and then she and Schroder are dashing back across the parking lot and into the shelter of his car.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It wasn’t just Schroder who showed up in the car—there was a woman with him. Melissa has seen her around. She makes it part of her job to know who’s manning the front lines of crime fighting. She doesn’t know her name, but knows she’s a recent addition. It doesn’t take a lot of wondering to figure out why Schroder is with her. The Carver case. They’ve found Tristan Walker and now they think there may be a link, and the Carver case was Schroder’s case, so now they’re asking him for help. What she can’t figure out is the connection they made to come here.

  When Schroder pulls away with the woman, Melissa takes the safety off the gun and tucks it down by the seat. She puts the trigger for the C-four back into the glove compartment. She was ready for Raphael to point at her, then for Schroder to come over, and if that’d happened, then she would have provided some ka-boom for Schroder and the woman and some bang-bang for Raphael too.

  Nobody else has come out of the hall for a few minutes now. Raphael finishes whatever it is he’s doing and comes outside. He locks up the door behind him, though Melissa can’t understand what there is inside that anybody would want to steal—the furniture wasn’t any better than the stuff you sometimes see on the side of the road with cardboard signs that say free. Maybe he’s locking the door so people won’t dump stuff inside. Maybe that’s what’s been happening and that’s where their current furniture has come from. Raphael tightens his jacket and runs over to her car.

  “That was the police,” he says.

  “Really?” she says, doing her best to sound surprised. After tonight’s performance she’s thinking she should have been an actress.

  “Somebody was murdered today,” he says.

  “Oh my God, that’s awful,” she says, and holds a hand up to her mouth. “Was it somebody you knew?”

  “Well, not that awful,” he says. “The guy was a wife beater.”

  Cue the frown and the confused look. “So why did the police come here?”

  “Because his wife was one of Middleton’s victims,” he says. “And he was going to testify at the trial.”

  “I don’t follow,” Melissa says.

  “The police think maybe somebody is targeting people involved with victims of the family. People who are testifying.”

  “That’s . . . that’s crazy,” she says, quite pleased to be hearing it, forcing herself not to smile. If that’s the connection, then she has nothing to be worried about because it really is crazy. “Is it? I mean, are we all in danger?”

  The inside of the car is getting colder by the minute. She turns on the ignition and turns on the heater. There is only one other car left in the parking lot other than hers. It must belong to Raphael. It’s a dark blue SUV with the spare wheel bolted into the back, and on that wheel is a cover that says My other car was stolen. It reminds her of a phrase she heard a while ago—Welcome to Christchurch, your car is already here.

  “I doubt it,” he says, “but they wanted a list of people who were here tonight.”

  She wants to ask if she was on that list, but doesn’t bother. Stella isn’t a name that will get them far. And if she asks, well, then that might make him suspect something.

  “I want to hear about your plan,” he says.

  “Why? So you can go to the police?”

  “No,” he says, shaking his head. “So I can help you. If I wanted to go to the police, I’d have just done it.”

  She knows that, but she asked it because she’s on an Oscar-winning performance here. “My plan is to shoot Joe before he even makes it to trial,” she says.

  “Is that it? Is that your plan?”

  “There’s more,” she says.

  “I would hope so,” he says.

  Then she says nothing. She stares at him, and after a few seconds he starts nodding. He’s figured out the next step. “But you want to know if you can trust me.”

  “Can I?”

  He stops nodding, the glow of the dashboard turning his face orange. The heater is slowly starting to warm up. “When Angela was killed,” he says, “I wanted to die. I wanted to buy a gun and put the barrel in my mouth and kiss the world good-bye. Losing her was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through,” he says, and for a moment Melissa thinks of her sister. “Soon after she died, me and my wife—well, often a marriage can’t survive that kind of thing. And ours was one that couldn’t. There wasn’t much that kept me going. But I came to realize I wasn’t the only one. Others were suffering too. I thought maybe somehow I could help them. But not a day goes by when I don’t dream about killing the man who killed my daughter. And there are other Carvers out there too. Other men taking away our little girls. This group, it’s at least something,” he says, “but the truth is if I could form a group of vigilantes to watch over the city and clean up the trash, I’d do that too. I keep seeing it, like something out of a western, you know? A group of do-gooders riding into town, you know, gunslingers. John Wayne types. Clint Eastwood types. But I can’t do that. Can’t make that happen. But what I can do is help you. I’m on borrowed time. Just waiting for
something to make a difference. Something to live for. And that something is to kill Joe. I don’t care about my life. My life ended last year. This support group is like life support for me—it keeps me ticking, it keeps me breathing—but I’m not alive, not really, I’m just holding on. Killing Joe will bring me peace, and once I have peace, then I can let go of everything around me. I can . . . I can die happy. So please, Stella, tell me you have more than just a plan. Because if you don’t, all I have are my dreams. I will do what it takes. Absolutely what it takes.”

  “Can you use a rifle?”

  “I’m sure I can figure it out. Is that the plan?”

  “When it comes down to it, are you going to be able to pull the trigger?”

  Raphael grins, the grin turns into a smile, and then he holds out his hand to tick off his points. “I have two problems,” he says. “The first problem is I want Joe to be able to see me. I want him to know who I am. So shooting him with a rifle from a distance doesn’t sound like my kind of thing. I’ll do it, if that’s all there is, but I’d rather be up close. I want to see the life drain out of his eyes. I want my daughter to be the last thing he thinks of.”

  “And the second problem?” she asks, and she knows he’s going to tell her it’s about suffering and torture. Of course it is. Suffering, torture, and a good dose of payback.

  “The second problem is I want him to suffer. A bullet in the chest means he won’t suffer for long. So if that’s your plan and there’s no way to modify it, then that’s your plan and I’m on board, but if we can—”

  She reaches out and touches him on the forearm. “Let me stop you right there,” she says, “because my plan will solve both of your problems,” she says, and this couldn’t have gone any better. It’s fate. Gotta be. It’s fate and her ability to see something in people that others can’t see. It’s come from experience. It was a steep learning curve that started the night her university professor tore her clothes off her.

  “Trial starts Monday,” he says. “Is that enough time?”

  “We have three full days,” she says. “That’s just the right amount of time we need to make sure this happens.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I’m dripping with sweat and the ski mask is making my face itch. Ski masks are a strange invention. I’ve never seen people on TV, at the Olympics, or in movies wearing ski masks covering their faces when they ski. They have woolen hats and thick jackets and gogglelike sunglasses, but they don’t look like bank robbers. Really they should be renamed robbery masks. Or rapists’ masks. But I’m wearing one at the moment, and it’s getting damper with sweat by the minute. It’s a sunny day, a non–ski-mask-wearing kind of day for most people, with blue skies and, like all sunny days, it makes me feel good. There are shapes in the few clouds up there, I see a knife, I see a woman, I see bad things happening among those clouds. I don’t need to pick the lock to the front door of the house because I have a key, and I use it to make my way inside. I make friends with the cold air spilling out of the fridge, and I make closer friends with an ice-cold beer. Not Coke, but beer, because Coke isn’t on sale. I sit down at the table and I can hear sounds coming from the bedroom, snoring mostly, the occasional creak of bedsprings as weight is shifted. Then I realize it’s no longer daytime, there are no blue skies, and it’s midnight. Time has jumped forward and I’m not sure how, that’s just the way time works when you’re dreaming. I scratch at the mask and readjust it, then I open up my briefcase and touch the blades that are in there.

  I stay in the kitchen, and after a while the snoring stops, there are footsteps, a light comes on from further up the hallway, then two minutes later a toilet is flushed. Then more footsteps and my mother comes into the kitchen where I’m still sitting.

  “Who are you?” Mom asks.

  “I’m not Joe,” I tell her, because the last thing I need is my mother thinking I’m a bad person. From there on I let my knife do the talking. It speaks to her over and over until her and me and the kitchen are all on the same page. It’s messy. It always is.

  “And that’s how it always goes?” she asks, and the she in question is sitting opposite me.

  I’m back in the interview room and back to reality. It’s Friday morning and the day started with high hopes when I looked at the books from Melissa and read her message again and again. Then there was breakfast and some eye contact with Caleb Cole before the guards came and got me. It’s interview time with my psychiatrist. My psychiatrist leans forward and steeples her fingers. It must be something they all do. Must be something that on day one in psychiatry school, the teacher shows them some grainy, black-and-white footage from the forties and makes all the students practice how to sit in a way that makes them look smart. Kind of ironic for people in this particular field not to recognize how dumb they look. Good part about my psychiatrist is she looks a lot of other things too. She looks attractive. And as good as that is, it’s also bad. It’s distracting. It’s making Joe think the kind of things that got Joe here in the first place. There’s a small recorder in front of her, storing each word to memory.

  “It doesn’t always go like that,” I tell her. “Mostly. I don’t know. I didn’t used to dream. But now I’m not so sure, because the dream feels so familiar. Like I’ve been having it my entire life. Sometimes I wake up from it certain that’s what I’ve done, that my mother is dead and that’s why I’m in here. Once I was so convinced of it I wanted to call her to make sure she was okay,” I say, though that last bit about calling isn’t true. “Sometimes I’ve poisoned her. Once I even snuck into her house dressed as a burglar and frightened her to death. The dreams always feel real.”

  I don’t add anything more, though I could. I’m not really sure what the correct answer is. The psychiatrist’s name is Alice and I’ve already forgotten her last name. Truth is I’ve kind of forgotten her first name too. It may not be Alice. It may be Ellen. Or Alison. Or even Ali-ellen. I try to keep my eyes on Ali’s face, on those smooth cheek bones, that jawline, those big beautiful blue eyes of hers. I try to stop my eyes from roaming over her body, the curves like a treasure map to a whole lot of places I’d like to uncover and plunder and carve an X into. She’s dressed in a pair of black trousers and a cream blouse that must be a bitch to get blood out of. It’s not low-cut and the trousers aren’t tight.

  There’s no need to ask her if the answer I gave her was the correct one, because she’s already told me there are no correct answers, which we all know is bullshit. She told me it wasn’t her job to say what was right or wrong, that it was her job to evaluate me and then share that information with the courts. Of course she was lying when she said that. If I told her I could remember every detail of every victim and that the reason I killed them was because I enjoyed it, that would be considered a wrong answer. There are a bunch of right answers, which will make her rubber-stamp my insanity case—I just have to figure out what they are.

  She unsteeples her fingers. “Have you always had bad thoughts about your mother?” she asks, and she wouldn’t be asking that question if she’d met my mother.

  “It depends on what you mean by bad thoughts,” I say. “We all have bad thoughts.”

  “But we all don’t dream about killing our mothers.”

  “We don’t?”

  Her eyes widen a little, and something I said must have shocked her, but I’m not sure what. “It’s not common, Joe, to have those dreams. Not at all.”

  “Oh,” I say, genuinely surprised, and it registers with her. I must act more genuinely surprised as the conversation goes on. “But they can’t be considered bad thoughts if you’re asleep, right? Nobody can control their dreams.”

  “This is true,” she says. “The women you’ve killed,” she says, and I put my hand up—the one that isn’t cuffed to the chair—and interrupt her.

  “I don’t remember any of it,” I say.

  “Yes. I know. You’ve said already. But you didn’t kill your mother and yet you dream that you did. You don
’t have dreams of other people?”

  I shake my head. “No. Never.”

  She nods. And I know what she’s thinking. She’s forming a connection between my mother and these people. She’s trying to figure out if each of these women I killed was a way for me to kill my mother without killing her, that these people were surrogate victims.

  “Tell me about your mother,” Abby-Ali says, and her voice is seductive, sultry, and I can’t figure out why they’d have sent a woman into a place like this to interview a guy like me, then realize she must have a bad-boy complex. Then I realize that isn’t it at all—a woman testifying in my defense is going to play well with the jury. They’re going to see that she spent time with me and in that process the percentage of rape and murdering that went on between us was an absolute zero. My approval rating is going to go through the roof.

  “She’s getting married,” I tell her.

  “How does that make you feel?”

  I bet asking that question was the next thing she mastered right after the hand steeple and before they learned how to sew leather elbow patches onto jackets. Remember, students, if all else fails, fall back on “How does that make you feel?” That’s what psychiatry seems to be. An if all else fails routine. Psychiatrists not comfortable with their own opinions, and having to solicit answers from their patients first.

  “Feel? It doesn’t make me feel anything,” I say.

  “It doesn’t make you feel angry?”

  “Why the hell would it make me feel angry?” I say, feeling angry, not just at Ellen, but also at my mother.

  “It might make you feel abandoned,” she says. “It could make you think that your mother is forgetting about you and your situation and moving on to a new man in her life, whereas you’ve been the only man in her life since your father died. When’s the wedding?”

  “On Monday,” I tell her.

  She nods, as if that confirms it then. “The day the trial begins.”