Watch Me (Jefferson Winter 2)

by James Carol

  ‘Why bother? That place is right out in the middle of nowhere. Nobody’s going to hear him.’

  ‘And that’s the third reason. This unsub redefines overkill. This is someone who kidnapped then coerced a street bum to burn up Sam Galloway so he wouldn’t end up stinking of gasoline and barbecues. So, how long ago did the refinery shut down?’

  ‘It’s got to be twenty years. It was after I was born, but not by much.’

  ‘Good. That means there’ll be someone still living around here who used to work there. Can either of you two think of anyone?’

  Slow head shakes and frowns from the other side of the table.

  ‘Aunt Lori,’ Hannah called out. ‘You got a minute?’

  ‘Sure, honey.’

  Lori came over, a gentle cloud of perfume and coffee following in her wake. She topped up our mugs without asking.

  ‘What can I do for you, sweetheart?’

  ‘Do you know anyone who used to work at the old refinery?’

  Lori put a hand up to her mouth and sighed through her fingers. She shook her head slowly and sucked in her cheeks. ‘Sorry, I can’t help you on that one. That place closed down years ago. Anyone I can think of is dead now.’

  ‘How about Frank?’ I suggested.

  ‘He might know someone. I’ll go get him.’

  ‘Don’t bother. I need to stretch my legs.’

  I stood and headed to the counter, walked around it and peered through the hatch. The small kitchen on the other side was absolutely spotless. White porcelain and stainless steel shone under the bright lights. It reminded me of an autopsy room. The biggest difference was that it smelled better. A country song was playing quietly in the background on a small radio. Frank was over at the sink, scrubbing a pan clean. He was bald and red-faced, a large man who looked like he enjoyed his own cooking too much.

  ‘Frank,’ I called over. ‘You got a second?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He dried his hands and came across. I introduced myself and we shook through the hatch.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Do you know anyone who used to work out at the old refinery?’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You sure about that? Anyone at all?’

  Another slow head shake. ‘No one comes to mind.’

  ‘Not to worry. And thanks for your time.’

  I’d almost reached the table when Frank shouted over from the hatch. ‘Hey, Lori, is Elroy Masters still alive?’

  ‘Far as I know,’ she replied, nodding. ‘Yeah, he worked at the plant for a while. But he’s got to be in his eighties by now.’

  40

  Elroy Masters lived out on Horton Street, down at the south end of Eagle Creek. He answered the door wearing a faded red-striped dressing gown and slippers. He looked suspiciously at the three of us standing on his stoop, eyes moving slowly from left to right, like he was behind one-way glass working his way along a line-up.

  ‘The Jehovah’s are really scraping the bottom of the barrel these days,’ he finally said.

  ‘We’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mr Masters,’ replied Hannah.

  Elroy looked at her like he hadn’t seen a woman for years, as though this was the first time he’d got up close to someone with multiple piercings and a nose stud and a Death Parade T-shirt. ‘Well, whatever damn religion you’re selling, I ain’t interested, you hear. I’ve lasted this long without having Jesus in my heart, I reckon I can make it through the few years I’ve got left without his interference.’

  I laughed. ‘Talking that way in this part of the world, it’s a wonder you haven’t been struck down by lightning.’

  Elroy narrowed his eyes at me. ‘If you’re not selling religion, what the hell are you selling?’

  Taylor held up his badge. ‘Sheriff’s department.’

  Elroy put his hands up. ‘Okay, I admit it. I did it. I shot Kennedy. Surprised it took you so long to catch up with me.’

  I laughed again. I really liked this guy. He looked well into his eighties, but he was far from over the hill. He was sharp, and there was a youthful twinkle in those blue eyes. His skin was even more sun-blasted than Jasper Morgan’s, and as thick as elephant hide. He gave the impression that the universe had thrown everything it could at him, yet he’d still managed to get the upper hand.

  ‘We need your help with a case we’re working on. Do you mind if we come in?’

  ‘Sure. Knock yourselves out. It’s not like my calendar’s packed.’

  Elroy did an about-turn and we followed him down the hall. He had a spring in his step and moved like he was a couple of decades younger than he actually was. We filed into a small living room that hadn’t been decorated since the eighties. The wallpaper was grimy and fading and peeling at the edges. The house smelled of microwave meals and was in need of a good airing.

  Elroy lowered himself into the room’s only armchair and waved towards a sofa that only had enough space for two. Hannah and Taylor sat down. I dragged the coffee table over to where Elroy was and set up my laptop. An old woman appeared in the doorway. She might have been older than Elroy, then again she might have been younger. It was impossible to tell. She moved stiffly, like someone with arthritis.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me we had guests, Elroy?’ She cinched her housecoat in a little tighter and smoothed out her grey morning hair. ‘You’ll have to excuse my husband, he has no manners. My name’s Rhonda, by the way. So what can I get you folks to drink?’

  ‘Coffee with two sugars, thanks,’ I replied.

  ‘Same for me, please,’ said Hannah.

  Taylor shook his head and said he was good and Rhonda headed off to the kitchen.

  ‘So how can I help?’ Elroy asked.

  ‘You used to work at the old refinery.’

  ‘For going on ten years until they shut the place down.’

  ‘What did you do there?’

  ‘I was on the security detail.’

  ‘So you knew the layout of the place pretty well.’

  ‘Every square inch like the back of my hand.’

  I wanted to get excited, but couldn’t. Twenty years was a long time, and memory was fluid rather than absolute, even more so the older you got. We fill the cracks in our remembrances with false memories all the time. That carpet in your childhood home you swore was blue was in fact brown. The steak you had at the meal to celebrate your twenty-first birthday was actually lamb.

  I’m not immune to this phenomenon. The memories from my whole childhood had been warped by the actions of my father. I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as I remember, but there were some things that were impossible to see past.

  The laptop finished booting up and I loaded the film clip of Sam Galloway. I hit play, paused at a point where the background could be most clearly seen, then turned the computer around so Elroy could view the screen.

  ‘Take a look. Could this be the old refinery?’

  Elroy pulled a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of his dressing gown and studied the screen for a long time. When he’d finished looking he settled back into his armchair, the old springs creaking and squeaking to accommodate him. He pointed a bony finger at the screen.

  ‘That’s Sam Galloway.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I heard he got murdered.’

  Another nod.

  ‘So are you going to tell me what happened, or are you going to make me guess?’

  ‘He got doused in gasoline and set alight.’

  Elroy sucked air through his teeth and let it out again. A shake of the head. ‘That’s a hell of a way to go.’

  ‘You sound like you know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘’Nam,’ he replied, like that explained everything. ‘You see napalm used, you’re never going to forget that. And the smell. Sweet Jesus, you’re not going to forget that, either.’

  ‘You’re too old to have got caught up in the draft.’

  ‘Joined the Marines as soon as they let
me, and stayed as long as they’d have me. Got a bronze star and a set of sergeant stripes for my trouble.’

  He rolled up a sleeve of his dressing gown to reveal a bony old-man arm. Up on the left biceps was an eagle with Semper Fi on the scroll underneath. The colours had faded and spread with time, but there was no mistaking the Far Eastern influence in the artwork. Rhonda came in with our coffees, handed one to me and one to Hannah. She’d dragged a brush through her hair and thrown on a faded grey dress that might once have been white.

  ‘Did he have any family?’ Elroy asked.

  ‘A wife and three kids.’

  ‘That’s too bad. So what did he do?’

  ‘Nothing, so far as we can tell.’

  Elroy shook his head. ‘You’re not going to do something like that to another person without a damn good reason.’

  ‘Nothing so far as we can tell yet. I’m with you on this one. You don’t do something like this without a good reason.’

  He nodded to the screen. ‘It could be the refinery, but I can’t say for sure. Sorry, I know that’s not what you want to hear.’

  My heart sank. This was pretty much what I’d expected. Another long shot that hadn’t played out.

  ‘I take it you’ve got access to the refinery,’ Elroy added. ‘If we took a drive out there that might jog my memory.’

  The way he said this made me wonder what he’d actually seen on the laptop screen. The question sounded innocent but it wasn’t. He had an agenda. What that was, I wasn’t sure. Maybe something, maybe nothing, but it was worth exploring.

  ‘Yeah, we’ve got access.’

  41

  Fifteen minutes later we were in the car, heading south. Elroy was riding up front, while Taylor was squeezed in behind me. I was pushed up hard against the wheel, my seat as far forward as I could manage, but there still wasn’t enough room for him. Hannah was next to Taylor, her hand flat on the seat, their fingertips discreetly touching. She was smiling out the window, like a prisoner who’d just been paroled.

  Elroy talked all the way to the old refinery, one story after the other. Some were funny, some were crude, some were sad. He was smiling, too, clearly having a ball, and I was starting to suspect that all Elroy wanted was to get out of the house. To get out from under Rhonda’s feet. A ride in a cop car and a trip down Memory Lane would break the monotony of a life where every day probably played out exactly the same. TV dinners and arguments over which channel to watch, and regular checks of the obituaries to see if you’d lost any more friends.

  The refinery slowly came into view, a tangle of tall forgotten metalwork that appeared out of the morning haze. The metal had dulled over the years but still had enough of a shine to make it glow in the sunlight. There was something otherworldly about it.

  We got closer and the blurred shapes started to coalesce into something more solid and recognisable. The large storage tanks, the distillation units, maintenance sheds, admin blocks. The facility looked completely random, as if a giant had dropped all the parts from a great height and left them to lie where they fell. But looks could be deceptive. There was nothing random about this place. Once, this had been a complex living, breathing entity, each part reliant on all the others. Elroy fell silent and stared through the windshield, momentarily lost in his thoughts. A couple of seconds passed before he snapped back into the present.

  ‘A hell of a thing, isn’t it? I forgot how big it was.’

  ‘A hell of a thing,’ I agreed.

  ‘I’m surprised they haven’t bulldozed it into the ground by now.’

  ‘There’s no point. The land isn’t worth anything. It’s useless as agricultural land, and it’s on the wrong side of the I-20 for any developers to be interested. Then there are all the environmental issues to consider. A thousand years from now that refinery will still be here. Some of it will have probably crumbled into the dirt, but parts of it will still be standing, enough so you could work out what it once was. If mankind has managed to survive that long, you’ll have historians and archaeologists crawling all over it and classifying it as a place of national interest. They’ll be writing papers on the stupidity of a society that was so addicted to oil that it almost made itself extinct.’

  Elroy gave me the look, then laughed. ‘Whatever you say. The one thing I do know is that I ain’t giving my car up for nobody. Anyways, I won’t be around in a thousand years, so why should I give a damn?’

  I pulled up outside the main gates and got out of the car. A little after ten and the heat was already getting up. A light breeze was blowing down from the north and the air smelled of burnt sand and exhaust fumes from the nearby I-20. I pushed my sunglasses as far back as they would go and just stood there for a moment looking towards the east. The sun was a dull yellow ball battling through the haze, but it was getting brighter.

  The padlock opened as easily as it had the night before, the well-oiled parts clicking smoothly away from my pick. There were new wheel tracks cutting through the patch of dirt that I’d brushed flat, indicating that someone had been here since we left. The unsub? If it had been him, the big question was, where had he gone once he was on the other side of the gate? Alternatively, maybe he’d still been here when we left. If that was the case, then the question was, where had he been?

  I rattled the chain off and ran the gates open on their well-oiled wheels, then climbed back into the car and drove through. We passed the gatehouse with its raised barrier, and pulled up at the T-junction.

  ‘Left or right?’ I asked Elroy.

  ‘Left.’

  Even though it had been twenty years since Elroy was last here, he directed us as though it had only been a day or two. The first place he led us to was a maintenance shed that was built in the shadow of the storage tanks at the eastern end of the facility. I parked beside the rail tracks and the four of us got out.

  Elroy stared up at the massive tanks and shook his head. ‘It just seems like yesterday. Time’s a bitch, you know that? She sneaks up on you when you’re not looking and takes a great big chunk out of your ass.’

  We walked over to the shed and I knelt down and checked the dirt by the door. The wind had blown it into a series of gentle ripples, but that was the only thing that had disturbed it recently. The lock was stiff and difficult to pick, and the door opened on creaky hinges. Clearly, it had been a while since it was last used.

  Two decades, say.

  The inside of the shed was grey and gloomy. A thick layer of dust covered every surface and the sunlight struggled to penetrate the grimy windows. The floor was peppered with mouse and rat droppings. I had one flashlight, Taylor had the other. Large, heavy-duty police-issue flashlights. Club someone over the head with one of these and you’d knock them out cold. Hit them hard enough and you’d be looking at murder one.

  We played the beams across the interior. Large tins of paint were stacked up on the shelves against one wall, ladders, scaffolding and dust sheets arranged neatly alongside. One of the walls was fitted with shelves that contained boxes of tools. They’d been carefully arranged according to type and size. Hammers, monkey wrenches, screwdrivers, spanners.

  I knelt down and brushed the dust away to reveal a patch of dirt-streaked concrete. It was impossible to say if this had been poured by the same contractors who’d laid the floor in the film clip, but I wasn’t ruling it out.

  ‘Where to next?’ I asked Elroy.

  The next place was another maintenance shed, this one at the west end of the refinery. It was the same story as before. Nobody had been there in years. We left the shed and I lit a cigarette, offered the pack around. Elroy was tempted. He looked longingly at the pack then shook his head. In the end, Hannah was the only taker. Taylor gave her a dirty look. Their body language indicated that this was an on-going battle, one that Taylor was going to lose.

  I took a drag and looked to the east again. There was only a thin veil of haze left to burn away, and the sky was a glorious cloudless blue that stretched as far as the eye co
uld see. For a while, I just stood and smoked and thought things through, and tried to get inside the mind of someone who got their kicks from watching a fellow human being going up in flames.

  ‘He won’t want to be out on the perimeter. It’s too exposed. This place is like a maze, so he’s going to want to be as near the middle as possible because it’ll be harder to find him there.’

  Elroy was nodding like this made perfect sense. ‘Yeah, I can think of a couple of places.’

  The first two places he took us to were a complete bust.

  The third place was a different matter altogether.

  42

  The first thing I noticed was the car. It was a small white Nissan. Cheap to run and cheap to insure. The inside was spotless, and an air freshener dangled from the rear-view mirror.

  The second thing I noticed were the tyre tracks. They were identical to the marks left by our car, which in itself proved nothing. The police had been all over this place yesterday. So had we. Lots of vehicles had this make of tyre.

  But these tracks led all the way up to a rusting steel door, and there was more than one set, and as far as I could tell someone had been back and forth at least four times, parking in more or less the same place each time.

  It was this last detail that got the hairs tingling on the back of my neck. We were down at the bottom of a dead end that had more than enough space for four separate cars to park in four separate places. I could accept that two cars might have parked in the same space, but not four.

  The only reason for parking in the same place was because you’d been here before, and you’d worked out it was the best place for getting to the door as quickly as possible. This would be high on your list of wants if you were accompanied by a street bum who wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of being sedated, bundled into a trunk and brought here.