Five Minutes Alone (30 page)

Only it isn’t under McDonald at all. It’s about ten feet away against the wheel of a two-door Toyota. I turn towards the office. There is no line of sight to Rebecca. I walk over to the phone and the angle between me and the office becomes even narrower, but not narrow enough. If Rebecca looks through the doorway she’ll see me. I use my foot to slide the phone behind the wheel, and then I carry on walking around the garage floor, looking for clues, looking for a weapon, trying to figure out who has done this by being a good policeman, by being on the same page, and I am on
the same page—but not out of Hutton’s book, and Hutton is gone now anyway.

“Found anything?” Rebecca asks, coming back out.

“Nothing.”

“I looked through the receipts and the quotes, but nothing stands out, and there’s nothing from tonight anyway. I just heard the medical examiner is here. You happy to let her in or do you want to keep the scene to just us at the moment?”

“Go and tell her she can come in,” I tell her. “In fact tell everybody they can come in.”

“It wasn’t a stupid idea,” she says, “wanting to come here before all the others.”

I shrug, like it kind of was and kind of wasn’t. Rebecca moves back into the office to head outside, and as soon she does I reach beneath the Toyota and pick up the phone. I tuck it safely into my pocket, where I can feel it burning, where it will scar my skin and set fire to my jacket and fall out in front of everybody, exposing me for what I am now—an accomplice to murder.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Because it’s an industrial area, and because all the workshops and buildings closed around five or six o’clock, we can’t do any canvassing. There is nobody to ask any questions. I talk to Chris Watkins, the man who found the body. He looks shaken up, but he also looks hyped up, the way anybody would be when their boss has just been murdered. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says
Uncle Badtouch wants a kiss,
and he’s wearing jeans that have to be about forty percent torn, as if the production line included the lion’s den at the zoo. He’s in his midthirties and has an army buzz haircut and a couple of fingernail-sized moles on the side of his face.

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” he says, and he’s talking quickly, eager to get out the words, “but it sure as hell wasn’t this. I just figured he was working late and had his phone turned off, but then I also thought you know that maybe there’d been an accident, you know, things happen and all that especially when you’re around all these tools and all these cars and things have a way of going wrong. They hadn’t, not here, but that only meant it was more likely, you know? That our time was coming. Geez, poor Ron. First his wife—I mean his first wife, and now him. They must have been cursed somehow.”

“You’re the guy who came back to get his phone the night Hailey McDonald was killed, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s right,” he says, and I know it’s right because a few minutes ago I read what I could about that night and the days that followed, the bigger pieces I could remember, but not the smaller details. “I’m always forgetting my cell phone, well, you know, not always, but a lot. I’ve lost a few over the years, which means I can never buy a nice phone, you know what I mean? Like
my dad used to tell me, the more expensive something is, the more likely somebody is going to take it from you. Or, in my case, the more likely I am to lose it.”

“And tonight?”

“Yeah, yeah, tonight Naomi calls me about—”

“Naomi Williams?”

“Yeah, well no, it’s Naomi McDonald, but it used to be Williams, sure.”

“So Ron married the woman he was having an affair with?”

“Yeah, about two years ago. They’re madly in love, have been since the moment they met. Or . . . or were, I guess, now that he’s dead.”

“Okay, talk me through tonight,” I tell him.

He tells me about tonight, about the phone call from Naomi, and the whole time I can feel Schroder’s cell phone burning hotter and hotter in my pocket. Hell, I didn’t even check to see if the damn thing was switched on. It’ll be just my luck that it’ll start ringing. I reach into my pocket and fumble with it while Watkins talks, and I’m able to dig my thumbnail into the small release in the back and pop out the battery. By now there are two dozen police at the scene, and the workshop looks like an eighties Wall Street party with all the white fingerprinting powder everywhere. Kent is going through the dead man’s car, and the medical examiner is going through the dead man’s pockets, and soon she’ll be going through the dead man. I finish up with Watkins and go back inside and talk to Kent, who’s holding up a set of car keys she found in McDonald’s pocket.

“Apparently this is the same car he used to own back when his wife died,” she says. “Kind of weird. I’d have thought he’d have sold it or, better yet, a guy in his position could have torn it apart and used the parts.”

“Yeah, I know what you’re saying,” I tell her. “A big piece of evidence like that, you’d think he’d want to get rid of it. That’s not the only thing. The woman he was having an affair with who gave him the alibi? They’re married now.”

“Married?”

“Yeah. And happily, according to Watkins out there.”

“So . . .” she says, then pauses to think about it.

I run with it. “So if there was any doubt in her mind that McDonald killed his wife, then I don’t see her marrying him. If anything I see her never wanting to see him again.”

“Unless she was involved in what happened.”

“There is that,” I say. “Which means one of two things. Either she wasn’t lying about the alibi because they really were together, or she was lying about the alibi because she knew exactly what he was doing.”

“If she wasn’t lying about the alibi, then does that mean McDonald was innocent all along?” Before I can answer, she carries on. “Back then I’m guessing the general consensus was she lied for him, but believed without a doubt he was innocent.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“And you? What did you think?”

“I thought the same thing.”

We start to walk back outside. I think about the original case. I worked the case, but I wasn’t the lead. In fact I hardly contributed. I remember canvassing the neighborhood. I remember finding a witness who said they saw McDonald park his car a block away and walk to his house, then walk back. Only she used the word
sneak,
because she thought that’s what we all wanted to hear. And it was what we wanted.

“Well, I guess it’s all irrelevant,” Kent says, and we reach McDonald’s car and I don’t recognize it from all those years ago because I’ve seen a lot of cars between then and now. She pops the trunk and carries on talking. “Doesn’t matter what you believed and it doesn’t matter what you could prove. At least one person was adamant Ron McDonald was a guilty man.”

“Yeah, but you’re a step ahead of yourself,” I say. “We still don’t know this has anything to do with that case. It could be—”

“A disgruntled customer,” she says. “Yeah, you said that already.”

“Or a disgruntled husband. If he was cheating on his wife back
then, it’s possible he was cheating on his current wife now. It could be somebody found out.”

The trunk is empty and Kent pulls up the carpet to reveal the spare wheel. There’s a bolt going through it to hold it in place. She starts undoing it. “Chris Watkins said they were madly in love, right? From the moment they met?”

I nod. “Right.”

“So that means Chris knew her early on when the affair was happening. If he’s a guy who knows those kinds of things, then if you’re right it’s possible he’d know if McDonald was having an affair now.”

“Yeah, good idea,” I say. “You want to go ask him?”

“You want to take over here?”

“No problem.”

She goes and talks to Watkins, and I get the bolt out and then the spare wheel and there are no bloody clothes under it, not like last time. While I’m waiting for Kent, I call Bridget and tell her I’m still going to be another couple of hours. She tells me she’ll go to bed soon, and that her mom will sleep on the couch and her dad will head home. We have a spare bed in the house—the bedroom Emily used to have—but neither of us suggests Bridget’s mother sleeps there. That room will always be Emily’s. Although soon I guess it will belong to another little girl. For a moment I can feel the pride and excitement of being a dad again, and I think of birthday cakes and ice cream.

“You’re smiling, aren’t you,” Bridget says.

“How can you tell?”

“I can almost hear it. It suits you,” she says. “Take care of the case, get it wrapped up, and when you’re done we’ll switch your phone off and then you’re mine for a few days, deal?”

“Deal.”

I hang up and Kent comes back out and shakes her head. “Watkins has no idea if McDonald was cheating on his wife, but he said he seriously doubts it. I guess he gave me the same speech he gave you about the two of them being deeply, madly in love.”

“Let’s look through the car, then go talk to the wife.”

“Yeah, that’s going to go a lot like seeing Peter Crowley’s wife.”

“If he was having an affair, it could be she knew about it. Or suspected. Could be she’s the one who killed him.”

“You seem really stuck on this affair theory.”

I shrug. “Just a theory,” I say. “I don’t want to attribute this one to the Five Minute Man until that’s what the evidence says,” I say, but of course the evidence is burning a hole through the pocket of my jacket, trying to expose me.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

We’re both parked out on the street, with Kent parked behind me. I’m about to climb into my car when she puts a hand on my shoulder to stop me.

“I need to say something,” she says, and my heart drops and I know what’s coming. I reach into my pocket and put my hand over the cell phone, as if I can hide it even further.

“Yeah?”

“This morning at Kelly Summers’s house,” she says, and I almost breathe a sigh of relief. But I don’t because this could still be going somewhere bad.

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to say something at the time, but there were too many people around, and then it’s not like I could call you, not with you taking Bridget to the hospital today, then when you asked about the prints before Hutton had just died, and right then I decided I would let it go, but, well, suddenly I can’t.”

“You want to tell me what’s on your mind?”

“You took Schroder to a crime scene. Look, I understand why you did it. He was the primary detective on her case five years ago and Hutton is the one who asked you to get in touch with him a few days ago, and sure, maybe he’d spot something, maybe not—it seemed a long shot, a hell of a long shot because I don’t really know what it is you were expecting him to see, but sometimes long shots pay off. But come on, Tate, no gloves? You know better than that. Neither of you were wearing them.”

“You’re right,” I tell her. “I’m sorry. With all that’s going on with Bridget . . . I don’t know. I guess I was distracted,” I say, feeling sick
in the stomach that I’m using my wife as an excuse. “I know that’s no excuse, and I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“Schroder should have known better too.”

“Well if it helps I don’t think we touched anything,” I tell her.

“No, that doesn’t help. His prints showed up, so he touched some things.”

I don’t ask where. “Look, I’m really sorry.”

“I know. I just wanted to point it out because next time—”

“There won’t be a next time.”

“Next time it could have been somebody else noticing. If the superintendent had been there this morning he’d probably have put you on suspension and he probably would have kicked Carl in the balls. Anyway, I’ve said my piece, so how about we draw a line under it and move on?”

We move on, with me leading the way and Kent following. It’s a ten-minute drive to Ron McDonald’s house, but a lot of places in Christchurch are only a ten-minute drive—that’s one of the best things about Christchurch. I think about teaching my daughter to drive and wonder how many cars will be on the roads then, what they’ll look like, or if we’ll be driving around like George Jetson.

When we get to the address the door opens before we’re even halfway up the path, and an attractive dark-haired woman in a robe is coming towards us at a pace between a walk and a jog. She’s holding a phone in her left hand, and her right is being used to hold her robe closed.

“Is it true?” she asks, and somebody Chris Watkins spoke to has spoken to somebody else, maybe a chain of somebodies, and Naomi McDonald has just become a link in that chain.

“We’re sorry to have to tell you that we found your husband deceased,” Kent says.

“No,” Naomi says, and her mouth is trembling, and she drops the phone and lets go of her robe and both her hands go up to her mouth. “No.” Then she takes a few small steps backwards, then she stumbles, then she’s on the ground and crying into the grass. “No!”

It becomes routine then. We help her up and lead her inside and we ask if there’s anybody she would like us to call, and she tells us that there is, that she wants her parents, and she gives Kent the number, and while Kent calls them she also puts the kettle on and starts making cups of tea while Naomi sobs and sits on the couch and asks me over and over if I’m sure that it’s him, that it’s her husband that’s dead, and I tell her we’re sure, and she asks how it happened. I tell her I’m still not sure yet.

“When Chris went to look for him and didn’t call back and he ignored my calls, I knew something bad had happened, and now, just a minute ago . . .” she says, and she takes a deep breath and looks up at the ceiling and tries to calm herself. “She said he was dead,” she says. “On the phone, Chris’s wife, she just called and I didn’t want to believe her, but I knew.”

Kent finishes with the phone call and making the tea and then she sits next to Naomi and opposite me and we tell her how sorry we are, and then we apologize for what’s about to come next—but we need to ask her questions. We tell her we understand the timing is hard for her, that she’s in shock and in pain, but the quicker we can understand what happened the quicker we can find who did this.

“Was it the Five Minute Man?” she asks, clutching her cup of tea.

“Why do you ask that?” I ask.

“Because of what happened to Ron’s first wife.”

“Are you saying he killed her?” I ask.

She shakes her head, a sad smile on her face. “No, but that’s the thing, right? Nobody ever believed he was really innocent, but he was. You people think I made up that alibi for him, but I didn’t. The night Hailey was murdered he was with me. He’d been with me for two hours and he told her he was working on a car, but he wasn’t, you know? He was here, and the time of death your experts gave proved that, only none of you would listen. But the weird thing is this morning I saw the newspaper and I rang Ron and I told
him about the article. This guy is out there killing people, and this woman in the newspaper thinks that’s a great thing, and you know what my husband says to me? He says he better watch his back. But it was a joke, you know, a dumb joke about how he could,” she says, and she’s struggling to hang on, “could be next, but he didn’t think it, at least he didn’t, but when he said it I thought
Hey, hey, maybe he’s got something there, maybe he really should watch his back,
but I didn’t say it, you know? And the thing, the really stupid, dumb, crazy thing is that when I hung up, I thought
Great, you know, great this guy is out there because maybe he’ll get the guy who really killed Hailey.
I mean it wasn’t Ron, of course it wasn’t, and if I thought it was possible I’d never have married him, but he didn’t do it, couldn’t have done it, and that means the guy who did do it is still out there.”

I’m not quite sure what to say after that, and it seems Kent isn’t either. Naomi is staring into her cup of tea. She’s holding it, but not drinking from it.

“I know what you’re both thinking,” she says. “But what you should have been thinking all those years is who put those clothes into his car?”

“We don’t know that this has anything to do with what happened to Naomi,” Kent says. “We don’t know he was targeted by the man you read about in the newspaper.”

“It could have been a customer,” I say. “It could have been somebody trying to rob the place. They might have thought it was empty and forced their way inside and suddenly there was confrontation. Did your husband talk about any problems at work? Was there anybody he had been arguing with?”

“I thought cops weren’t supposed to believe in coincidences,” she says.

“We have to explore all angles,” I say.

Naomi shakes her head. “Well, there was nothing like you’re suggesting. Ron never argued. I mean, sure, he did with his first wife, but those two fell out of love a long time ago. That’s why he
was with me, and it’s not like it was a secret. I mean, sure, he kept it from you guys because he knew how it would look, and that only made it worse, but Hailey knew all about me. She didn’t know who I was, but she knew I existed. She’d known for about a week. She didn’t care. Not in the least.”

“I remember,” I say. The problem was that made it seem even more likely. The wife finds out, and despite what Naomi here thinks, she does care, they argue on and off for a week, and then the argument gets out of control. The same way Schroder has gotten out of control.

“I’m sure you do,” she says, “and that made him look even guiltier. Look, this is all history and really painful stuff. You guys really screwed Ron over and he didn’t deserve that, and somehow, somewhere, maybe you guys will pay for messing up, but right now that doesn’t help find who hurt him tonight, does it. So ask what you need to ask. I know you’re capable of thinking just about anything, so let’s get on with this.”

I lean forward and soften my voice. “Is it possible he was having an affair?”

“What? No, never,” she says. “Ron’s not that kind of . . .” she says, then stops as she hears the irony in what she’s about to say. “I mean, not with me. He loved me and I loved him. It was different to what he had last time. Back then he was trying to leave a loveless marriage. That’s nothing like what we have.”

“If he was cheating on you,” I say, and I feel bad for saying it, I feel like a complete bastard, but even if Schroder wasn’t holding me over a barrel I’d still have to push the point . . . though perhaps not as hard, “then it’s possible whoever he was seeing was also married. It’s possible he upset the wrong person.”

Before I even finish saying this she’s shaking her head. “No,” she says, “and if this is anything like last time, you’re going to focus all your attention on the wrong person. There is no
other woman,
and there is no other woman’s pissed off husband. What there is is a crazy person who thinks he’s doing the world a favor, but all he’s
doing is getting good people killed. I don’t know how to tell you any more clearly, but my husband wasn’t cheating on me.”

“Would you mind if we went through his personal belongings?” Kent asks. “Emails, files, bank statements, that kind of thing.”

“You won’t find any receipts for hotel rooms, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It’s not what we’re thinking,” Kent says, “but we have to allow for the fact that your husband may have known the person who attacked him. If that’s the case, we need to talk to everybody he knew. We need to know exactly what was going on in his life.”

“Nothing was going on in his life, except for the fact the police thought he murdered his wife and because they never found who really did do that, people were always so sure he’d done it. The first few years were the hardest. We’d go to the supermarket, or we’d go to the movies, and people would stare and point. And then after a few months they stopped pointing. They’d turn slightly to each other and whisper, and we knew, we always knew what they were saying. All because you gave up on finding out what really happened. So no, nothing was going on in his life except for the fact somebody out there decided not only was he guilty, but that he needed to be dealt with. I get what this guy is doing, and on some level I want to agree with it, because right now I’d love to get my hands on the person who hurt my husband, but don’t you see that the blame is not his alone? It’s also yours. And it’s the person who killed Hailey. You and he are—”

“Please, Mrs. McDonald,” Kent says.

“Let me finish,” she says, and puts up her hand, “and then you can go through our house and his computer and through every scrap of paper you can find. But you and the man that killed Hailey are equally to blame for what happened tonight. The actions of a madman and the actions of a narrow-sighted police department got my husband killed.”

A car pulls up in the driveway, two doors open and close, and then the sound of quickly approaching footsteps. “My parents are
here,” Naomi says, and a moment later the front door opens and a man and a woman both in their sixties come bursting into the lounge. Naomi tries to stand up to hug them, but she can’t make it, her mother slides in next to her and wraps her arms around her, and then Ron McDonald’s widow bursts into tears. Her father looks at us, a sad look on his face, but at least he isn’t looking at us as if we’re the enemy.

“Perhaps we can talk outside,” he says.

We follow him out to the front yard. He keeps reaching up and scratching at the moustache that’s warming the base of his nose. His hair, still mostly black, is combed to the side, the edges of it gray. He introduces himself and puts out his hand. “Bob Williams,” he says.

I introduce myself and then Kent.

“Are you sure?” he asks. “That it’s him?”

“Yes,” I tell him.

“Jesus,” he says.

“This is tough,” I tell him, “but we need to ask some questions.”

“I understand,” he says.

“Can we be frank?” I ask. “The sooner we know what’s going on, the sooner we can find out who killed Ron.”

“I’d prefer it if you were,” he says.

“Is it possible Ron was having an affair?”

“Possible?” He shrugs, and doesn’t need to give it much thought. “Sure. He’d done it before, right? I hated that my daughter got involved with a married man. But probable? No. I don’t see it.”

“You knew about the relationship before Hailey McDonald was murdered?”

He nods, then crosses his arms. “Yeah, I knew. But that’s love for you, right? Makes you do stupid things, but in some ways that’s the best part about it.”

“Did you like him?”

“Ron? Sure, he’s a likeable guy. Always been great to Naomi, always been polite to us. Respectful, helpful, exactly what you want
in the guy your daughter is involved with, but . . .” he says, then doesn’t add to it.

“But?” Kent asks.

“But no father wants their daughter involved with somebody accused of murder.”

“So you thought he did it,” I say.

He shrugs again. “Look, I’m no cop, but I did work security for thirty years, and twenty of those I was out at night patrolling areas with nothing more than a kick-ass flashlight and a radio for backup, but I have seen some pretty nasty shit. I know how the world works. I do. People break into buildings all the time. They smash windows or pry open doors and spend a minute inside while the alarm is going off taking what they can because they don’t give a shit about other people. Where Ron works, I used to work that area. In fact that’s how they met. I knew him. I knew him because I worked security on his building, and he was a good mechanic, and when Naomi’s car broke down I spoke to him about it. I even took her in there. So for me I always think that if Ron did kill his wife, then it started that day he met my daughter. It started then because he fell in love with her and out of love with the wife he had, and that can be a messy thing. Like I said, love can make you do stupid things. But murder? I didn’t know back then and I still don’t know now. Back then me and Camilla, that’s my wife, we figured he was going to jail so we didn’t have to try and talk any sense into Naomi, but then the arrest got screwed up and he didn’t even make it to trial. When it became obvious he was going to be a free man we begged her to leave him and she refused. Ron was a nice guy, sure, but could I trust him? I wanted to. I really did, because I trusted my daughter, and if she said she was with him that night then she was with him, I don’t doubt that, but still . . . I couldn’t trust him. I couldn’t be
sure.
Not one hundred percent, and that’s what you want when it comes to family. Does any of this have to do with what happened tonight?”