by Paul Cleave
“I’m sorry,” Melissa says.
“Everybody is,” Fiona says. “At least they got the guy. And you?”
“My sister,” she says. “She was murdered.”
“I’m sorry,” Fiona says.
“Everybody is,” Melissa says, then smiles at the woman who smiles back and nods. “It was a long time ago,” Melissa adds, remembering her sister, the funeral, the toll it took on her family.
“This is my first time here,” Fiona says. “I don’t know anybody, and I feel somewhat nervous about being here. I had plenty of friends and family offer to come with me, but, well, I wanted to come alone. I can’t explain why that is, really. Truth is I didn’t even think I would come along, but, well,” she says, then gives a small nervous laugh, “here I am.”
“My first time too,” Melissa says, trying to think of a way to free herself from this conversation. She thinks about the gun in her pregnancy suit. She draws comfort from it.
“Do you mind if. . if I sit with you?”
Yep. She thinks about taking that gun out. “That would be nice,” she says.
People are starting to fill the seats. Some are carrying coffee. Some drag their seats a little closer together. When everybody is seated a man in his mid to late fifties goes around picking up the empty chairs and moving them beyond the circle, others dragging their seats forward to close the gaps. He has a few days’ worth of stubble and a pair of designer glasses and expensive shoes. Attractive, with good taste, gray hair-but only in the temples, the rest of it dark brown. Everybody keeps chatting among themselves until Designer Glasses takes a seat then everybody goes quiet. Melissa can’t take her eyes off him.
“Thank you again for coming along,” he says, his voice is deep and, in other circumstances, probably seductive. Melissa likes him. “I see there are a few new faces in the crowd,” he says, “and I hope the rest of us can offer you some support and companionship, and some hope too. We’re all here out of tragedy. We’re all here because we faced an incredible ugliness. For those who don’t know me, my name is Raphael.” He smiles. “My mother was an art scholar,” he adds, “hence the name,” as if Melissa should care, “and my daughter was a murder victim,” he says, “hence why I’m here.”
He delivers the line with the casualness of somebody who’s said it a hundred times.
“This support group,” he says, “was created from loss. My daughter’s name was Angela, and she was killed last year by Joe Middleton,” he says. “He took away a daughter, he took away a wife, and he took away a mother. A few of you are here because of him, and others are here because of similar men to Joe, or similar women,” he says, and there’s a moment where Melissa thinks everybody in the room is going to turn toward her, but of course that doesn’t happen. “I’m a full-time grief counselor,” he adds. “I’ve been helping people for nearly thirty years, and yet when I lost my daughter I could do nothing to help myself until I realized I needed to be with others like me. So we’re all here to help each other,” he says, smiling as he looks from face to face, spending an extra second on Melissa because there’s more of her to take in. “We’re not here to make the pain go away, because nothing can do that. We’re here to share it, to understand it. We’re here because we need to be.”
Melissa has to suppress a yawn as she looks around the room at the faces. She didn’t have time for a nap and the best she can hope for is that this won’t take long. She’s so tired she could sleep for the next twenty-four hours. Out of all these people, though, somebody will help her. She just has to invest an hour. Or however long it is these meetings go. Talking about your pain doesn’t make it go away. When her sister was killed she had to talk to a shrink every week for a year and it didn’t help an iota. All the shrink kept doing was looking at her legs.
Everybody is staring at Raphael. Lots of warm bodies for her to choose from, and she doesn’t doubt one of them has to be angry enough at Joe to shoot him.
The trick is to figure out who.
Chapter Fifteen
The first thing Schroder has to get past is the ring of media vans that have shown up. They’re blocking the end of the street, along with the local sightseers. With all the murders in Christchurch he’s surprised people still come out to watch the show, especially in this weather. There really is, he supposes, nothing quite like a good homicide. It makes for great reality and it makes for great TV. The reporters are holding up umbrellas and the camera operators are wrapped in wet weather gear and the cameras are protected by plastic linings. What the city needs-no, strike that-what humanity needs right now is a bolt of lightning, something strong and biblical to come down from the heavens and land in the middle of them all. He wonders if that’s something Jonas Jones might think he can arrange.
He can’t get the car past them. There’s no way through, and the only way he could give it a good go would be to hit them at a pace somewhere near the speed limit and scatter them all like bowling pins. He has no siren and therefore has to park on the wrong side of the crowd, with them and a lot of rain between him and the scene.
The exhaustion he was feeling in his last few months of being a cop wasn’t turned in with his gun and badge. Instead it’s been dogging him like a head cold that won’t go away. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the packet of Wake-E tablets that he always keeps within reach these days and swallows one of them, then decides to chase it with another. In five minutes the exhaustion won’t be gone, but it will be bottled inside him with all that other exhaustion he’s built up over the years.
He climbs out of the car into the rain and shoulders his way through the onlookers. The officers guarding the cordon have to take a double take as he approaches them-they know he’s no longer a cop, but they’re thinking perhaps that’s no longer the case. Before he can start explaining himself, Kent comes toward him, an umbrella keeping the rain off her. She has a quick word to the officers and then Schroder lifts the crime-scene tape and ducks under it. The house is in a quiet neighborhood, not the same house the Walker family used to live in. That place was burned down the same night Detective Calhoun went missing. Burned down, no doubt, by Joe. Since then the land was sold. This one is half the size, a single-story place that’s perhaps five years old at the most, the same color scheme from one house to the next, pale browns and grays that look washed out by the rain.
Kent holds the umbrella higher so it covers them both, just not that well. He has to take his shoes off at the door and put on a pair of nylon booties. The body is in the hallway, just inside from the front door. Hutton comes and joins them.
Schroder feels like he’s back on the job. The smells and sights and sounds all confirm he’s in an authentic crime scene and nobody is going to draw a chalk outline around anything and ask him if he thinks the dialogue could be tightened. He’s cold and wet and miserable, which completes the sense of realism. He can see down the end of the hall into the lounge. Dark brown carpet and plush sofas and warm color walls. All very homey, except for Tristan Walker himself, who is lying on his side with one hand on his chest and the other hand pinned beneath him. It’s been twelve months since he last saw Tristan Walker. Walker was staying with his parents at the time. Schroder went there to tell him they’d made an arrest.
Kent and Hutton couldn’t be more opposite. Hutton is overweight. He wasn’t that way when he joined the force, couldn’t have been because he never would have been accepted, but now the guy consumes so much sugar he has to stay out of the rain for fear of dissolving. Hutton remains on the force because he’s so large it would almost be like firing two detectives-though, ironically, it was simple for the department to fire Schroder. Back when Caleb Cole made him kill somebody.
Kent is attractive. Stunning, even. The kind of woman you look at and would give up a week of your life just to see her smile. No doubt half the guys here are in love with her.
“This is the third victim,” Kent says.
“Huh?”
“The third victim,” she r
epeats.
He lets the information settle for a few seconds. “You’re telling me you’ve got two others like this?” he asks.
Kent smiles at him. “I’m glad your mind has stayed sharp since leaving the force, Carl. That’s some quick addition.”
“You should see me with crayons,” he says. “I always stay within the lines.”
“Sounds like you’re living on the edge.” She steps around the body so they can talk to each other, the three of them forming a triangle with a dead guy in the middle.
“Victim one was last week,” Kent says. “Guy by the name of Sam Winston.”
“I read about him in the papers. He was found in an abandoned building in town. From what I read it looked like he was killed by a drug dealer.”
“That’s what we thought too. Name mean anything to you?”
Schroder shakes his head. “Should it?”
“Probably not. He used to be in the army until he was discharged five years ago. He had a pretty big drug problem, hence why we believed that was related to the way he died. He wasn’t even in the army for long. Two years. After that he spent his days being unemployed and earning unemployment checks.”
“And now you think there’s a connection.”
“It looks the same. As soon as the bullets are pulled from Walker we’ll send them to ballistics and check for a match.”
“So you only have a theory?” Schroder asks.
Hutton shakes his head. “We have a time line,” he says. “People get killed in all sorts of strange ways in this city,” he says, “but not often by guns, and here we’ve got three victims within a week all with the same gunshot pattern.”
Schroder nods. It’s too much to ignore. “No connection between Walker and Rivers?”
Kent answers the question. “We’ve got a guy who sells guns and explosives, and another guy who’s trained in using them. But no connection between them.”
“Not yet anyway,” Hutton says.
“And nothing between either of those two and Walker,” Schroder says.
“Just the way they died,” Kent says.
“Walker didn’t have a drug habit?”
“If he did, he kept it well hidden. There’s nothing here to suggest he was using.”
“So what do you want from me?” Schroder asks.
“We want you to help us with Walker,” Kent says. “You knew him. You spent time with him and his family. What would a guy like Walker have in common with Rivers and Winston?”
“I didn’t know him, I just interviewed him. Several times,” Schroder says, and that was because there were indications that Walker used to beat his wife, and indications that perhaps the wife hadn’t been killed by Joe Middleton. For a while there Walker was a suspect. But ultimately Walker had an unshakable alibi for her murder, and they came up with no other suspects.
“Come on, Carl,” Kent says, “you were the lead on the Carver investigation. You know why we’ve asked you down here.”
Schroder nods. He knows this is why he’s here. Like Hutton said, it’s all about the time line. Three killings all within a week, all within days of Joe’s trial starting. Hutton and Kent think it’s related to the Carver.
“Okay,” he says. “Tell me where you’re at.”
“We have a theory,” Hutton says.
“An ex-con, an army dropout, and Walker,” Kent says. “They were planning something together, or working with somebody who is planning something, and it involves explosives.”
“We have forensics,” Kent says. “Shell casings. We have hairs. Long hairs. Same blonde hairs at each location. No DNA, because they’re synthetic.”
“So the killer was wearing a wig,” Schroder asks.
“Seems like it,” Kent says. “And most likely a woman. Men don’t tend to wear wigs that are shoulder length. Plus the hairs were found in the lounge too. Which means if they belong to the person who shot him, then she didn’t just knock on the front door and shoot him when he answered. It means she was inside. Of course it could be two different things. They could belong to somebody who he talked with inside, and it could be somebody else who came to his door and shot him.”
“Fingerprints?”
“All over the place,” Hutton says, “and most of them we’ve ruled out. Nothing so far with any matches.”
“And you want to know if I think Melissa is involved,” Schroder says. “That’s why I’m really here. Because Joe’s trial starts next week.”
“None of the prints we’ve found so far match hers,” Kent says. “But do you think it’s possible? She’s staying hidden somehow. It only makes sense she’s using some techniques to change her appearance. Of course she’s probably wearing a wig.”
“It’s a completely different MO if it is her,” he says. “Different signature. None of these people were in uniform. None were tortured. If it’s her, why is she targeting these people?”
“Because of the time line,” Hutton says. “We’re less than a week out from Joe’s trial.”
“We’re running background checks on all of them,” Kent says. “We’re seeing what they have in common. Where their lives intersected. The problem is they may not intersect. It’s possible they don’t know each other, but they know a common denominator.”
“Okay,” Schroder says. “Okay. Let’s think about it. Think it through,” he says. “Let’s play with the idea that it’s Melissa. What reason has she got? Let’s break it down one victim at a time. Let’s start with Sam Winston,” he says. “Why work with him?” he asks, and he wonders what the scriptwriter for The Cleaner would make of this. Not realistic enough? Not fast-paced enough? Too much standing around and thinking?
“We’re still piecing it together,” Kent says.
“Okay,” Schroder says, knowing the scriptwriter would be disappointed. “Let’s focus on the timing of it all. Melissa or not, we could be dealing with somebody who’s going to make some kind of a statement. We could be looking at a courthouse bombing, or a police station bombing. We know Melissa likes killing people, but she’s more into the personal touch. I don’t see a mass bombing being her style. Her style is torturing people.”
“But if she tortured these people, we’d immediately know it was her,” Hutton says, “which would give her a good reason not to if she’s trying to hide the fact it’s her. And the only reason she’d hide that is if she has something planned that is much bigger than any of this, and explosives have a way of being used for bigger things.”
Schroder nods. It’s a good point. “What about Walker,” he says. “What’s the coroner say?”
“She says there’s three hours between the two murders,” Hutton says, “with Walker being the second one of the day.”
The three of them go quiet as they all don’t see it adding up together. There are other people walking around the scene-other cops, people looking for clues. Others are out in the street interviewing neighbors who all saw nothing. They can hear the rain on the roof, still hammering down, making a miserable night that much more miserable. Somewhere out there a dog starts barking and doesn’t want to stop.
“Who found the body?” he asks, hoping the answer isn’t going to be the kids.
“His kids,” Kent says. “Normally, he’d pick them up from school. He was late. A teacher gave them a lift home after they couldn’t get hold of him. So the teacher and the kids came by. I’m pretty sure you can figure out the rest.”
Schroder is pretty sure he can too. He’s spoken to other kids at other times who have found other murdered parents, just as other parents at other times have come home to missing or dead children. He imagines one of the children screaming, the other one shaking their father to wake him up, the teacher trying to pull them away from the body while phoning the police. He imagines those kids right now with relatives who can’t find a way to comfort them. He can’t afford to let his imagination continue down that path. It’s something he’s always had to block. Otherwise it would overwhelm him.
“So to sum up,” he says, “we don’t know if we’re dealing with Melissa, or if we’re even dealing with somebody relating to the trial or the case. Tristan Walker was going to be testifying for the prosecution, which maybe is a connection. And Rivers, well, he was in jail for twelve years and Joe is in jail now, so we need to see if there have been any cellmates in common.”
“I’ll look into the jail connection,” Hutton says.
“If it’s related to the case, it’s possible other family members of victims could be targeted too,” Schroder says, continuing to think it through. Kent and Hutton stare at him as this possibility sinks in, and the idea makes him feel sick. He glances at his watch. The day has been slipping away, most of it on the diner set for The Cleaner. He promised them that he’d be back. He has to remind himself that’s his job, not chasing down leads for a police department that fired him and no longer pays him and who will throw him onto his sword if the truth of what he did ever comes out.
“There’s a victim’s support meeting,” he says, then glances at his watch. “It’s going on now. In one room you’re going to have a whole lot of people involved with the case, people affected by Joe, some of them will also be testifying. It might be a good thing to go there. A way of speaking to most of the people involved in one sitting.”
Kent thinks it over. Hutton is doing the same thing, but his attention is probably divided by a chocolate bar he has stashed in his car somewhere.
“Okay, let’s go,” Kent says.
“Let’s?” Schroder asks.
“Yeah, you and me. I’ll even let you drive.”
Chapter Sixteen
“I have a question,” Melissa says.
She’s been here an hour now and all that’s happened is she’s gotten colder and older and bored. The new people to the group didn’t have to talk, they didn’t have to identify themselves or tell the others why they were there, didn’t have to go My name is Jed, it’s been fifteen days since my last sibling was murdered-Hi Jed. Some did, some didn’t. Mostly those who spoke were regular members, regular people, the kind of people you stood behind in a coffee shop and never thought of again. They moaned and complained and Melissa just wondered why in the hell they just don’t get on with life, like she did. Find a hobby, people! Fiona Hayward didn’t talk. She just sat silently clutching her hands, no doubt the same way she did at her husband’s funeral.
