Prey (Jefferson Winter)

by James Carol

  ‘Come on,’ said Winter, ‘I came in quietly enough. If you don’t believe me, ask your buddies. So far I’ve been a model prisoner. No trouble whatsoever.’

  Hitchin looked at him. He started at the white hair and worked his way down past the hooded top to his worn jeans and sneakers. Then he fastened the handcuffs, went around to the other side of the table and sat back down.

  Winter waited for him to get settled. ‘What was the cook’s name?’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘The dead cook, what was he called?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because he shouldn’t be dead. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  Hitchin raised a questioning eyebrow.

  ‘Don’t get too excited. That’s not an admission of anything. Not even close.’ He hesitated. ‘Okay, I know how these things are supposed to work: you ask the questions, I answer them. On the basis of that I can understand why you might be reluctant to give me a name.’

  Hitchin was watching him from the other side of the table, eyes narrow, not saying a word.

  ‘Okay, let me make this real simple. If you answer my question, then I’ll be more than happy to answer all of yours. Whatever you want to know, just ask. You want to talk for the rest of the day, that’s absolutely fine with me. However, if you don’t answer my question, then I’m afraid I’m just going to sit here and exercise my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. You won’t get zip.’ He paused and smiled, waited until Hitchin met his eye. ‘So what do you say? It’s just one little question. Where’s the harm?’

  The detective just sat there for a moment, then flipped open his file and thumbed through the pages. There weren’t many. This investigation had just got started.

  ‘His name was Omar Harrak. He originated from Morocco and had been living here in the US for almost a decade. He was married with a couple of kids, a boy and a girl. Immigration knows all about him. He got his green card a little over four years ago. No police record, not even a traffic violation.’

  Winter closed his eyes and repeated the name under his breath a couple of times. In his mind’s eye he saw the moment when Omar was stabbed. He opened his eyes and looked over the table at Hitchin. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Quid pro quo. What were you doing in that diner in the middle of the night?’

  Winter didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and walked over to the one-way mirror, aware that Hitchin’s eyes were following every step. The fact that the detective wasn’t shouting at him to get his ass back in the chair pretty much confirmed his suspicions. He studied his reflection for a second, saw the hint of a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, then he banged hard on the glass.

  ‘Come on out Mendoza! I know you’re in there!’ He banged again, the dull boom of his fist hitting glass echoing around the room. ‘I’ll give you to the count of ten then I’m coming in there to get you. One, two, three.’

  ‘Sit down!’ Hitchin was on his feet, moving fast.

  ‘Four, five, six.’

  A heavy hand landed on his shoulder and he was dragged back to the table. Hitchin dumped him roughly into a chair then sat down and glared across the table.

  ‘I asked you a question. What were you doing in that diner?’

  Winter flashed him a tight smile then turned to look at the door. ‘Seven, eight, nine, ten,’ he whispered.

  5

  The interview-room door opened again, and this time it was Mendoza. Her long curly black hair was tied back in its usual ponytail and her olive skin still retained a memory of the long-gone summer. She looked even more pissed off than usual, which no doubt had everything to do with being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to deal with Winter.

  Mendoza walked slowly across the small room. It was almost three-thirty in the morning yet she was immaculately turned out. No creases in her jacket or pants, no creases in her blouse. Her black patent-leather shoes were shining. The left side of her jacket had been let out to accommodate her shoulder holster. The first time they met, he had her pegged as the girl who’d done the popular girls’ homework in order to fit in at high school. He’d been wrong about that. Carla Mendoza couldn’t care less what other people thought about her.

  Mendoza stopped beside Hitchin and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I can handle this from here, Sergeant.’ Her accent was pure Brooklyn, all hard syllables and menace. Even though she was a non-smoker, she sounded as though she got through a couple of packs of cigarettes a day.

  Hitchin stood up and snorted. ‘Yeah? Good luck with that.’

  Mendoza slid into the seat the detective had just vacated and waited for him to leave. ‘Why were you in the diner?’

  ‘I was getting breakfast.’

  ‘At two in the morning?’

  ‘My body clock’s all over the place at the moment. The middle of the night and it feels like the middle of the day. It’s one of the downsides of spending a large part of your life stuck in airplane cabins.’

  ‘Why O’Neal’s? It’s kind of off the beaten track.’

  ‘I found it by accident a couple of nights ago. I woke up hungry in the middle of the night, so I headed out to find something to eat. I didn’t have any real plan where I was going, I just let my feet find their own way. Because the food was so good, I came back again the next night, and the next.’

  ‘If the food was as good as you say, then why did you kill the cook?’

  ‘Omar,’ Winter corrected her. ‘His name was Omar.’

  Mendoza nodded once. ‘Okay, why did you kill Omar?’

  ‘I didn’t kill him.’

  ‘If you didn’t do it then who did?’

  Winter hesitated. This was the hard part. Omar had been stabbed right in front of him and he was still having trouble believing it was real. ‘How about I tell you what happened and we can work from there?’ he suggested.

  Mendoza settled back in her seat. ‘You’ve got thirty seconds to convince me.’

  Winter took a moment to order his thoughts, then closed his eyes and told her everything. He started at the moment he walked into the diner and went through to the point where the woman disappeared into the night. As he spoke he could see the whole thing unfolding on the back of his eyelids, every single detail. He could smell the grease. He could feel the hot air blasting out of the heater. He could hear Elvis. He finished talking and opened his eyes. It took a lot longer than thirty seconds, but Mendoza let him finish. It was clear that she didn’t like what she was hearing. She was frowning across the table, her head going slowly from side to side.

  ‘And you expect me to believe all that?’

  Winter said nothing.

  ‘You’re supposed to be on a flight to Rome.’

  ‘My flight doesn’t leave until six. And it was Paris, not Rome.’

  ‘And you’re missing the point. You know, I distinctly remember our last conversation. When I told you that it would be good if we didn’t see each other for a very long time, I meant every word.’

  ‘We’re not quite remembering this the same way. See, what I remember is the bit where you told me that you were eternally grateful for all the help I gave you in hunting down Ryan McCarthy. What was is it you said? Anything you could do, just holler?’

  ‘I did not say that I’d be “eternally grateful”. And I would never use the word “holler”.’

  ‘I know how this looks, and it’s not good. But I also know that you know that I didn’t kill Omar.’

  Mendoza shook her head. ‘What I know is that you think like a serial killer. Now, that turned out to be helpful when it came to catching Ryan McCarthy, but it’s creepy.’ She paused a second. ‘Okay, how about this? Maybe something inside your head just finally snapped and that’s why you stabbed him.’

  Winter laughed. ‘Seriously?’

  Mendoza didn’t reply.

  ‘I did not murder Omar. If I had, I would have done it very differently. For a start I wouldn’t have just been sittin
g there when the cops turned up. And I’d have an alibi. You can count on that. The other thing you could count on is that it would be one hundred per cent airtight.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to think when you go and say something like that?’ Mendoza leant forward. ‘Now, I’m sure you could probably tell me a dozen different ways how you could have killed that cook and gotten away with it. And the reason for that is you’ve thought long and hard about this. Because that’s what you do. You spend your days imagining what it’s like to be a killer. But what if it’s no longer enough just to imagine? What if you decided that it was time to get some first-hand experience? What if you finally decided to cross the line?’

  ‘His name was Omar,’ Winter said quietly. ‘And why are we wasting valuable time here? We should be out there hunting this woman down. That’s why I dragged you out of bed in the middle of the night. She’s a killer, which means our job is to catch her.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Mendoza interrupted. ‘There is no “we” here. This is your mess, Winter.’

  ‘I did not kill Omar.’

  ‘Fine. Prove it.’

  He lifted his hands up and rattled the cuffs. ‘That’s a little difficult while I’m sat here with these damn things on my wrists.’

  Mendoza settled a little deeper into her seat and folded her arms. Winter dropped his hands and laid them palm down on the table.

  ‘Okay,’ he continued, ‘the good news is that we don’t need to go looking for this woman because she’s going to find us. The last thing she said was that she’d be seeing me again real soon. So, in the meantime, we go through everything we can find on the Hartwood murders. We’ll need to contact the cops up there to see what they’ve got to say. She’s pointed us in that direction with the newspaper, so I say we see where that leads us. And we’ll need to work Omar’s murder as well. I’d be surprised if there’s any direct connection to the woman, but his family deserves answers.’

  ‘There are so many things wrong with what you’ve just said, I don’t know where to start.’ Mendoza reached for her ponytail and wrapped the strands tightly around her fingers, the tips whitening as the blood circulation was cut off. She tugged hard on the hair band to straighten it then held her left hand up in the air, the fingers curled into a fist. ‘Okay, one.’ She slowly straightened the index finger. ‘All of this is based on the assumption that your mystery woman actually exists. Right now, all we’ve got is your word for that. Two.’ The middle finger slowly unfurled. ‘Like I said, there is no “we”. Whatever the hell is going on here, it has nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Come on, Mendoza, I can’t do this chained up in here, and I can’t do this on my own. I need you. And you’ve got to admit that we make a great team.’ He smiled his widest smile. ‘Plus, she does exist.’

  ‘Winter, I’m booked on the noon flight to Vegas, and I fully intend to be on it. Not because I want to take a vacation, but because it’s an order and, unlike you, I follow orders. You want to know the truth? The thought of taking a vacation makes me feel nauseous. Even though it’s only a week, in my opinion that’s still a week too long.’

  ‘Okay, here’s an idea: since you’ve been ordered to take a vacation, why not take it in Hartwood? I’ve heard it’s beautiful up there at this time of year. You could do some walking, read a book.’ He paused and his face lit up with a grin. ‘If you get really bored you could help me investigate a six-year-old murder.’

  Mendoza actually laughed at this. She tried to keep it in, but it was out there before she could get a hold of it. ‘Jesus, you don’t quit do you?’

  ‘Admit it, this one’s got you curious. So, what do you say?’ When she didn’t reply he grinned at her again. ‘You’re tempted, I can tell.’ He held his hand up, thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart. ‘A teeny-tiny-weeny bit tempted.’

  ‘You’re wrong. Way off the mark.’

  Winter leant back in his seat, saying nothing. Mendoza was keeping her mouth shut too. For almost a whole minute they sat staring across the table at each other. It was Winter who eventually broke the silence.

  ‘Look, if we do nothing then this woman is going to kill again. You know that, and I know that.’

  ‘Assuming she exists.’

  ‘Do you really think I had anything to do with Omar’s death?’

  ‘Honestly?’ Mendoza shrugged and shook her head. ‘Right now, Winter, I don’t know what to think.’

  6

  Mendoza walked out of the interview room, leaving Winter alone. The door closed quietly behind her and for the second time that night he was forced into a situation where all he could do was watch. It was like being back in the diner again, watching through the window as the blonde walked away.

  He glanced down at the handcuffs, glanced up at his reflection in the one-way glass. Things were not going how he had imagined, and that concerned him. The way he’d seen this playing out, Mendoza had come charging to his rescue. In his fantasy she’d been pissed and cranky like always, but at least she’d got him out of these damn handcuffs and they’d got straight down to the business of looking into the Reed murders.

  Except that hadn’t happened.

  Mendoza hadn’t told him where she was going, or why. She hadn’t said anything. She’d just got up from the table and left the room. And why shouldn’t she? Winter had been on the other side of the table enough times to know how this game was played. Right now, she was watching from behind the mirror, planning her next move. And while she did that all he could do was sit here getting more pissed off and frustrated with every passing second.

  It wasn’t a complete surprise that she was acting like this. One of the first things he’d learned about Mendoza was that she didn’t take things at face value. For the most part this was a good thing, but not always. What was happening here proved that.

  Mendoza was still pretty much a mystery to him. He’d done some digging, but hadn’t come up with much. Everything he’d discovered so far was connected to her work. He hadn’t found out anything personal. Again, this highlighted how good she was at compartmentalising. She’d been careful to keep her work and personal lives separate.

  One thing that everyone seemed to agree on was that she was a good cop. Winter had first-hand experience of how thorough she was. The work she’d done on the McCarthy case had been exemplary. She’d joined the NYPD after she left college and Winter expected that she’d stay until she retired. He’d met a lot of cops over the years. Some did the job for the money and some did it because it was what they were born to do. Mendoza was born to do this. No question about it.

  He replayed Omar’s murder in his head. He was looking for something he might have missed, something that might help him to get out of here, but whichever way he approached it he came up empty-handed.

  The interview room was feeling much smaller than when he first got here, the walls beginning to close in. He wanted to stand up and pace. He wanted to go and study the mirror. He wanted to bang on it with his fist again. He wanted to do all the things that he’d observed time and again from the other side of the glass. Even though he was innocent, he was beginning to wonder. That was the effect this room was having on him, which was as it should be. This was a place designed to encourage guilt. It might say ‘interview room’ on the door, but make no mistake this was a cell, albeit one without a bed or a toilet. In fact it was worse than a cell. It was more like limbo. If things went south he was heading to hell. If they played out how they should then he would soon be a free man again. The uncertainty was like torture.

  His father had been in prison for two decades before he was executed. Winter had occasionally wondered how he’d kept going for all those years. If their roles had been reversed, he doubted he would have survived. He might have managed a couple of years, but at some point he would have taken matters into his own hands. A life without freedom was no life at all.

  The door finally opened and Mendoza came back in carrying a laptop. He expected her to sit in the same se
at as earlier. She didn’t. Instead, she put the computer down on the table and came around to his side. He gave her a quizzical look, but she wasn’t giving anything away.

  ‘Show me your hands.’

  He answered with another look, and when she didn’t respond he lifted his hands up. She produced a key and unlocked the cuffs. Winter rubbed his wrists and watched her walk back around to the chair on the other side of the table. He waited until she was seated then gave her a smile. ‘Thanks. You have no idea how good it is to have those things off. So what happened to change your mind?’

  Mendoza answered him by opening the laptop and hitting a couple of keys. She turned the computer around so that he could see the screen. The video that was playing had the low definition of a cheap CCTV camera. The picture wasn’t great, but it was good enough.

  According to the time stamp, the film had been shot at eighteen minutes after one this morning. The screen was taken up with a distorted blurry wide-angle shot of a store that was on the same street as the diner. A couple walked past, arms wrapped around each other. They were laughing and clearly having a good time. Nothing for almost a minute then a woman appeared. She was walking fast, her eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead. Nothing for another thirty seconds then the blonde walked into the shot. Because of the angle, Winter could only see part of her face, but he recognised her from the way her shoulders rolled as she walked.

  ‘That’s her,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what we figured.’

  Mendoza leant over the top of the laptop and hit another couple of keys. A new video started playing. The time on the screen had jumped forward to three minutes to two, but everything else was almost identical to the first film clip. Same street, same store, same angle. One second passed, two, three. A man walked in front of the store.

  ‘And that’s me.’

  Mendoza hit another couple of keys and a third film clip started playing. The clock in the corner of the screen had jumped forward to twenty-one after two. The woman walked past the store again, this time in the opposite direction. Mendoza hit pause, freezing her in mid-stride.