Watch Me (Jefferson Winter 2)

by James Carol

  ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

  The door slammed shut and the locks engaged one after the other. The intruder chain went on last, rattling back into place.

  50

  ‘Smoke and mirrors.’

  We were back in the car with the engine running and the air-conditioner going full blast, the temperature slowly dropping. The sun was burning through the windshield and my T-shirt was sticking to me.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘The unsub has created an illusion. However, illusions only work if the audience buys into them. The magician can’t tell an audience what to believe. All he can do is make suggestions. He can take them by the hand and invite them to go where he wants, but they have to make the decision to go with him. In this case, we have a body, a gun and a note. Put it all together and it adds up to suicide.’

  ‘I’m hearing a “but”.’

  ‘But there’s always going to be that sliver of doubt. If you make a woman disappear and then reappear in exactly the same spot you can work out a dozen ways the trick might have been executed. Maybe there’s a false panel in the box, maybe there’s a trapdoor in the stage. However, if the woman reappears on the upper balcony in defiance of the laws of time and space, then we start to believe in the magic. So, what’s the detail that turns this illusion from a run-of-the-mill parlour trick into a top level piece of magic?’

  Hannah scrubbed a hand through her spiky hair, thinking hard. She shook her head. ‘Sorry. No idea.’

  ‘The notepad.’

  She shot me a disbelieving look.

  ‘The notepad is a stroke of genius. That’s what connects the illusion to the real world. Without that connection we’d always be wondering, because without it everything happens on stage, or, in this case, a garage in an old abandoned refinery. It all goes back to our disappearing woman. By having her reappear on the balcony the illusionist is bridging the gap between the stage and the real world. So, how did the notepad get into Choat’s house?’

  ‘Maybe it belonged to Choat and the unsub found it in his house.’

  I shook my head. ‘No way. The unsub took it there. If forensics bother to count the sheets of paper they’ll find that only one is missing, the one that was all neatly folded up in Choat’s pocket. So how did this play out?’

  Hannah chewed at her lip and stared through the windshield at the haze rising from the road surface. I was staring too, thinking this one through. How did it play out? In my mind, I’d travelled back in time to yesterday.

  My first thought was that the unsub had gone to Choat’s house‚ got him to write the note‚ then told him to drive over to the refinery. Once he’d got him there‚ he shot him in the head‚ put the note in his pocket and arranged everything to make it look like a suicide.

  Except that doesn’t work. If Choat had written the note at home, there was no way he would have driven himself to the refinery. He would have driven away in the opposite direction as fast as he could. But Annie Dufoe had said that Choat left just before seven. If the unsub had arrived before then‚ she would have seen him.

  Scenario number two: the unsub told Choat to meet him at the refinery. He told him if he didn’t, then he was going to share his secret with the whole world. So Choat drove over there and parked the Nissan outside the garage, and that was part one of the illusion complete. And the beauty of this was that the unsub hadn’t gone anywhere near the car. No fingerprints, no DNA, no fibres.

  Things started moving quickly after that. The unsub didn’t want to give Choat the opportunity to think. He wanted him flustered and scared. He wanted him to jump when he said jump. He ordered him to go inside at gunpoint, and one of the first things Choat would have seen was the dead homeless guy. He would have been terrified, and from that point on he would have done everything the unsub said without argument, anything to buy some time.

  So the unsub got him to write the note and then he shot him in the head.

  I was still staring straight ahead, watching the wisps of heat rising from the road, there but not really there. For all intents and purposes I was in that concrete garage again, surrounded by the smell of burnt flesh, my ears filled with the buzzing of the flies.

  The use of a large-calibre bullet was another example of overkill, but this time it was justified. If you’re serious about shooting yourself, you put the barrel in your mouth and fire upwards. If the unsub had tried to force Choat to do that, there would have been bruising around his mouth, probably a couple of broken teeth, too. If that had happened the illusion crumbles there and then.

  Shooting yourself in the side of the head is risky, because there’s an outside chance that you might survive and end up in a vegetative state, and there’s an even slimmer chance that you’re going to survive with all your faculties intact. The smaller the bullet, the more chance there is of that happening. And that’s why he’d used a large-calibre bullet.

  After killing Choat and planting the note, the unsub had headed back to the station house, where everyone was waiting for the grand reveal. And much later, at some point during the early hours, he had headed over to Choat’s house and planted the notepad, completing the illusion.

  I clicked back into the present, took a moment to go through everything in my head one more time, then ran this theory past Hannah.

  ‘The unsub caught a lucky break there,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘Admit it. If Annie Dufoe had been an insomniac, she would have seen the unsub when he came back to plant the letter. She would have been able to ID him.’

  ‘Luck doesn’t come into it. This illusion was well thought out. It wasn’t something thrown together at the last minute. This unsub is a cop, remember. He knows about surveillance. He would have taken the time to learn Choat’s habits, to learn the rhythms of Kennon Street. He would have known that Annie Dufoe was someone he needed to avoid. It took us all of two seconds to work that one out.’

  Hannah thought this over. ‘Why Choat?’

  ‘Because our guy’s into overkill. There was always a possibility that the cops might get too close for comfort, so he looked around for a scapegoat. He might not have needed one, but he wanted his bases covered. Choosing a cop was an inspired move. The police wouldn’t be expecting the killer to be one of their own, so it would send them into a state of shock and disbelief. So the unsub looked around and decided that Choat seemed a good bet. Then, when he started investigating him, he found he’d struck gold. Choat’s private life made him the perfect decoy. If things had turned out differently this case would now be closed and everyone would be happy. The unsub would have given it a couple of months for things to quieten down, then quit and moved to another part of the country where he could start killing again.’

  Hannah nodded to herself. ‘Yeah‚ that makes sense. Okay‚ where to now?’

  I smiled. ‘That one’s easy. My body clock’s telling me it’s past lunchtime. I vote we head on over to Apollo’s.’

  51

  I lit a cigarette and passed the pack to Hannah. Then I put the car into gear and eased away from the kerb. The car quickly started to get smoked up, so I cracked open a window. Any benefit from the air-conditioner was immediately lost as a wave of hot air came rolling in.

  For a while we drove and smoked. Random snippets of Mozart played inside my head. Concertos, arias, overtures. I focussed on the music and tried to block out any thoughts of the case. I was getting too close and needed some distance. Some breathing space. We finished our cigarettes and put the windows back up.

  Outside, the buildings were getting closer together. Every house had the drapes drawn or the blinds down, anything to keep the relentless heat out. I hit the blinker and stopped to let a battered Ford pick-up past, then took the next left.

  ‘Is there any way that Choat could be the killer?’ Hannah asked. ‘Any way at all? Annie Dufoe didn’t have a problem jumping to that conclusion. And I’ve got to say, I could easily imagine Choat doing something like this. If
I turned on the news right now and heard he’d been arrested for Sam Galloway’s murder it wouldn’t be a shock or a surprise.’

  ‘That’s not what you said yesterday.’

  ‘That was yesterday and this is now.’

  I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Okay, I guess I’d be a bit surprised, but only for a second, and once I’d gotten over my initial shock, I’d be a believer. It’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch out for, right?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I agreed. ‘And sometimes it’s the noisy ones. But loud or quiet, the ones you really have to watch out for are the intelligent ones. Now, they’re especially dangerous because they’re your chameleons. They blend into their environment and you don’t even know they’re there.’

  Hannah thought this over for a second.

  ‘Surely they can’t be totally invisible. Somebody must suspect something.’

  ‘Eventually. That’s how they get caught. But some killers can go for years before that happens.’

  ‘I still don’t get it.’

  I hesitated a second. ‘Okay, take my father, for example. He killed for years and nobody suspected anything. He could be outgoing when he wanted to be. He’d go to bars with his buddies. He could laugh and joke with the best of them. He definitely wasn’t your quiet neighbour. Although, that said, he was always polite and cheerful, and he’d help you out if you needed him to.’

  ‘Taylor told me about your father. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it must have been hard.’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s the thing, it wasn’t. My early childhood was pretty average. It certainly wasn’t anything worth paying a therapist to sort out.’

  ‘And how does that work? Your father was a murderer, he killed all those young women, yet you’re sat there telling me you had a normal childhood. Sorry, not buying.’

  ‘A relatively normal childhood. I don’t know what a normal childhood is. I don’t think anyone does.’

  ‘You must have suspected something, though.’

  I shook my head. ‘Nothing. Not a single thing. My mother didn’t suspect anything either. Nobody did. The first we knew about it was when the FBI arrested him.’

  ‘How could you not know?’

  ‘It’s all about compartmentalisation. Sometimes he was a father and husband, sometimes he was a math teacher, and sometimes he was a killer. What he did very well, and what helped him avoid capture for so long, was to make sure that those personas never overlapped. There was no grey whatsoever. It was all very black and white. Family man, teacher, killer.’

  ‘You said your early childhood was average. What about afterwards?’

  I thought this over for a second, remembering the nightmare that had followed my father’s arrest. At the time it seemed like it would go on for ever, but it hadn’t. Eventually I found a way out. At any rate, I found a way to live with myself, which was as much as you could hope for. Unfortunately you were never going to be completely free from something like this. Those ripples were going to be felt all the way to the grave, diminishing in intensity as time passed, but always there.

  ‘My mother never really came to terms with what my father did and we ended up moving around a lot. Going to a new school is hard at the best of times. When you’re intelligent and your father’s a serial killer, well, let’s just say that I had some interesting moments.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been easy for you.’

  I shrugged. ‘Does anyone have an easy time of it? I mean, look at you. Your father ran out on you when you were a kid and your mother died of cancer, and you’re working dawn to dusk while you chase your dream.’

  ‘Is this the point where you tell me that life’s a bitch?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, that would be a cop-out. Life can be hard, I’m not going to deny that. But it can also be beautiful and joyous and fun. You need both the highs and the lows, otherwise you’re flat-lining. That happens, you might as well be dead.’

  My cellphone trilled in my pocket. A new text had arrived. I pulled the phone out and thumbed it to life, one hand on the wheel, one eye on the road. The number wasn’t Taylor’s, or one that I recognised. I opened the text. There was no message, just a picture. It took a second to process what I was seeing. My brain caught up with itself and I jammed on the brakes. The seatbelt cut into my chest and bounced me back into my seat.

  I was vaguely aware of Hannah saying something, but couldn’t work out what. The air-conditioning was pumping hard, but that wasn’t the reason I felt so cold. This was more than being cold, this was a freezing numbness. I looked at the picture on my cellphone again, hoping I’d imagined it.

  I hadn’t.

  52

  ‘What’s going on? Why have we stopped in the middle of the road?’

  There was no disguising the panic in Hannah’s voice. She was looking to me for answers that I didn’t have. At least, I didn’t have any she’d want to hear. I glanced at my cellphone and wished this was some mistake. It wasn’t. This wasn’t an hallucination, and it wasn’t my imagination. This was as real as it got.

  ‘Talk to me, Winter.’

  I tried to find something to say, words to reassure, words to comfort, but nothing came out. I just stared at the picture on my cell, wondering how things could have gone so wrong.

  ‘Let me see that cellphone.’

  ‘You don’t want to see this.’

  My voice sounded calm, but that wasn’t how I felt. Far from it. My emotions were pinballing all over the place, swinging from one extreme to the other. Anger to impotence. Fury to uselessness. My heart was thundering in my chest and the excess of adrenaline flooding my system made me feel sick.

  Hannah snatched the cellphone and looked at the screen. Her eyes widened and the cell tumbled into her lap. She took a sharp intake of breath and her hands flew up to cover her mouth. It was almost like she was trying to push all her questions back in because then she could pretend this wasn’t happening. As soon as she started talking everything would become real. The words would turn fantasy to fact and there would be no going back.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  The question came out in a stuttering whisper.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  There’s a time for white lies, and there’s a time for black lies. If Hannah lost it now she’d be no use to me. I reached for the phone and studied the picture and did my best to pretend this was just any old crime-scene picture, but the image of Taylor’s broken body kept pulling at me. I took a deep breath and made myself focus, studying the background for clues.

  Dust on the concrete floor.

  A blank concrete wall.

  And right at the edge of the frame was the partial image of a section of scaffolding.

  ‘I know this place. It’s the first storeroom that Elroy took us to.’ I passed Hannah my cellphone. ‘Call 911. Get them to send the paramedics and the police.’

  ‘He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?’

  The combination of desperation and hope in her voice broke my heart. I nodded. Another black lie. I put the car in gear and hit the accelerator. It took ten minutes to reach the refinery, a journey that would normally take between fifteen and twenty. I drove as fast as the roads would allow, ran red lights, anything to shave a few seconds off the journey.

  Not that it made any difference. However fast I drove, however quickly we got there, Taylor would still be dead.

  The refinery gates were wide open and I drove through them at forty, the security hut and the barrier passing in a blur. I braked for the T-junction, skidded left, the car’s back end fishtailing. The perimeter road was long and straight and I hit the gas and roared through the gears. Forty, fifty, sixty. The old storage tanks were getting bigger in the windshield.

  We turned into a side road that led to a wide open area and came skidding to a halt in front of the storeroom. I wrenched open the driver’s door, jumped out and broke into a run.

  There were marks on the gr
ound from where someone had dragged something heavy into the building, disturbing the dirt and partially obliterating our footprints from earlier. There was a new set of tyre tracks, too. The patterns they made were consistent with someone performing a K-turn and then backing up as close to the entrance as possible. The door was unlocked, and it crossed my mind that this was a trap. The unsub might be in there right now, just waiting to shoot us.

  Except that didn’t fit with what we knew about this guy. He was careful. He wasn’t going to make a mistake like that. He would have known that we’d call 911. It’s what anyone would have done in this situation. It was something that had been conditioned into us from the cradle. Bad stuff happens, dial 911. He would also have known that 911 would track us through my cellphone. Ambushing us here was too risky. The paramedics and cops would be all over this place in no time. Even so, there was enough doubt to make me wish I had a gun.

  I crashed through the door, moving from the nuclear glare of the day into the twilight gloom of the storeroom. The scuff marks in the dirt ended where Taylor was lying on the floor.

  The sight of him knocked all the fight out of me. My bones turned soft and I reached for the wall to support myself. My head was pulsing in time with my racing heart. I took a couple of deep breaths and told myself that this crime scene was no different from the hundreds I’d seen over the years.

  Another lie.

  This couldn’t have been more different. The sense of detachment I got when I stepped into a crime scene was absent, the emotional distance that enabled me to do my job. I’d only known Taylor for a day, but that was long enough to make a world of difference.

  A high-pitched noise brought me back into the present. It was part screech, part scream, part sob. It sounded more animal than human. This was the sound of someone being ripped apart by grief, the raw noise of open wounds being smeared with salt. All the colour had drained from Hannah’s face and she was using the doorframe to hold herself up. She stared at me, hate blazing in her big brown eyes.