Five Minutes Alone (31 page)

“We’re not sure,” Kent says, “but it’s possible.”

“Just like it’s possible Ron worked on some guy’s car and that guy didn’t like the fact the fuel pump had to be replaced. Or possible he was having an affair. Or possible this madman I read about in the papers today is . . . Oh, shit,” he says. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

“It’s possible,” Kent says again.

“
Possible.
I guess that means I don’t get to ask any questions.”

We go through the usual questions with him then. The
Do you know of any problems he was having at work? Was he fighting with anybody?
All the kinds of things that somebody like Bob here would sum up as
getting the real measure of the man.

“There is one thing I’ll tell you, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Two years ago Ron came to me. He came to do the traditional thing and ask if it was okay if he married my daughter. I could tell he thought I was going to say no, and I probably would have, but then he said something. He said after the case got dismissed he tried to convince his lawyer to have the, hell, I don’t know the legal terms, but he wanted the ruling that the evidence that was dismissed be allowed to be used.”

“What?” I ask.

“Yeah. See, he had this theory. He knew he hadn’t done it. So that meant somebody had, right? And those were his clothes in the back of that car. He didn’t deny that, but he thought somebody else must have worn them. So he had this idea that if the clothes could be used as evidence, then the police could send them away and get them tested for DNA. He said his would be on there because they were his clothes, but that somebody else’s would be on there too. Whoever wore them. His lawyer told him it was a stupid idea, and maybe that’s because his lawyer didn’t believe him the same way nobody else seemed to. He told Ron that he was a free man, and if he let the police use that evidence then they would use it against him. The proof was in the way they were already treating him. And even if the clothes were planted, then what if the guy who planted them was careful? What then? No, that gesture would come back to
bite him in the ass. That car being searched like that, that mistake, right in that moment it was keeping him out of jail. That’s what the lawyer said. But Ron, he said that mistake made him a guilty man in the eyes of the public. It makes you think, doesn’t it? Makes you think that Ron might have been innocent all along.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

It feels like Sunday morning all over again, going through Peter Crowley’s stuff, the physical motions of searching, the same sense another good man has been killed. We get a call from the medical examiner who tells us she’ll work on the body tomorrow, that she’s still working on the four men found at Grover Hills, but what she will do tonight is retrieve the bullet inside Ron McDonald for ballistics.

“What do you think?” Kent asks me.

“The wife was convincing.”

“Really convincing,” she says. “If I’d been on this case back then, I think I would have bought her story.”

“And perhaps the jury would have too. The question is, is that all that is? A story?”

She shakes her head. “Not to her. To her it’s real. To her Ron McDonald was an innocent man. I really believe she would never have married him if she even had any doubts, and she didn’t strike me as somebody who could have been involved. We should talk to his lawyer and see if that’s true about him wanting the evidence tested.”

We agree to schedule a task-force meeting in the morning, and then we’re both in our cars and heading home. I call the station on the way and arrange for memos to be sent to the other detectives involved with the deaths over the last few days that we’re all going to be meeting at ten a.m.

The next call I make is to Schroder.

“Did you get my phone?” he asks.

“Yeah, I found it.”

“And nobody saw you?”

“Of course not. You’ll get it back, but right now I’m tired and am heading home. It’s been a long day, and that’s thanks to you.”

“If you let me do what I’ve started doing, your days can get shorter, Theo. There’ll be less bad guys around.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“No. I suppose it doesn’t. You can keep the phone,” he says. “Hell, it doesn’t even work.”

I think about that for a few seconds, and then it all slips into place. “Does the phone really have your fingerprints on it?”

“No.”

“You didn’t drop it in the struggle, did you.”

“There was no struggle. You put it there deliberately. You wanted to see whether or not I would pick it up and do as you asked.”

“That’s very pessimistic of you, Theo.”

“Am I right?”

“Yes, you are. You’re going to do a great job, Theo, and now that we’re in this together we can really make a difference in this city. I’ll give you some time to steer the investigation in a different direction, and in a few days’ time I’ll choose somebody else for us.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Good night, Theo.”

“Fuck you, Carl.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

The following morning everything goes to plan. I wake up at eight o’clock and my wife wakes up at the same time and we eat breakfast together, and then she promises me she’s going to be okay and I believe her and head to work, but on the way I call her parents anyway and ask them to give her a call every now and then to check in on her.

“I think she wants to go shopping for baby clothes,” her mother says. “She’s convinced it’s going to be a girl, but you know what? I have the feeling it’s going to be a boy.”

A boy. I realize I’d just taken Bridget’s word for the fact the baby would be a girl, even though it was nothing more than a feeling, nothing scientific at all. For the first time I consider having a son. I imagine all the cool things we can do together. I can teach him to throw a rugby ball and how to kick tires on a car.

“Have you told your parents yet?” she asks.

“Not yet,” I say, “but I will. Soon.”

I get to work at nine thirty and I already feel like I need a nap. I hide Schroder’s cell phone under the seat of my car. No official decision has been made as to whether last night’s homicide has anything to do with the weekend’s events.

“First of all,” I say, when I stand up in front of the room of people, the smell of shower gel mixing with coffee, Kent in the front row, Superintendent Dominic Stevens next to her, “I want to say what we’re all thinking, that losing Hutton is a hell of a loss. He was a good man and a good cop, and he will be missed. Sorely missed. The funeral is on Friday afternoon, and I think he’d really appreciate it if we can figure out what in the hell is going on and bring it to a stop before then.”

There’s a general murmur of agreement, and I remember Landry’s funeral earlier in the year, all these same people getting drunk at the wake, then the call came through of a homicide and everybody here staggered into taxis and showed up at the scene.

“Right, so Ron McDonald. I know some of you worked on the case back when his wife was murdered, and some of you didn’t. The decision is we’re going to take another run at the original case.”

More general murmurs that don’t sound positive or negative.

“We discovered a few things last night that put doubt on what happened seven years ago.”

“Like what?” somebody from the back row asks.

I update the room on the conversations we had with Naomi and her father. Some people in the room are slowly shaking their heads, and some are slowly nodding. I make it sound convincing, and why not? We were convinced.

“So here’s how things are going to work. Seven years ago the clothes were never tested because they weren’t considered evidence. We still have the clothes in our possession, or we did because thirty minutes ago they were shipped from our evidence warehouse to the DNA lab. It’ll take at least a month to match a DNA profile if we have that profile on record, but as you also all know it’ll only take between twenty-four and forty-eight hours to see how many DNA sources are on that shirt. They’ll be swabbing the armpits, the back of the collar. They’ll be swabbing the whole damn thing. If somebody else was wearing that shirt then we’ll know in the next day or two. So here’s what I want us to find out today. I want a list of people who had access to the car seven years ago. I also want a list of people who had access to the house. If somebody else was wearing those clothes, then how did they get them?”

“And then what?” somebody else asks, and it’s Detective Travers, a guy I’ve worked with a few times over the years. Travers is the best dressed out of all of us, often making the rest of us look like our outfits cost about five dollars. “If we find DNA on the shirt, we can’t run it against any suspects. And if you run the profile and we
find a match and find a suspect, what happens in court when we’re asked what pointed us in the direction of our suspect?”

“I know it’s complicated,” I tell the room, “and that’s why we’re not running the shirt to try and match a profile. I know it would help, and I know it seems counterproductive, but if we do find a match the case will be thrown out before it even begins. Let’s be clear, here. We’re running the shirt to see if there is more than one type of DNA on it, and nothing more. It’s to tell us if we’re on the right path. Remember, we’re looking for somebody who either believed Ron was at work that night, or knew he was having an affair and therefore wouldn’t be home. The medical examiner said there were no defensive wounds on the wife, so she was with somebody she knew and trusted. While some of us are focusing on that, some of us will talk to McDonald’s friends and family and the staff and try to figure out what happened last night,” I say, and then I tell them our affair theory. I tell them that of course we can’t rule the Five Minute Man out of the equation, but equally we can’t become narrow-minded and focus only on him. “If we do then we risk making the same mistakes we made seven years ago.”

“We don’t even know we made mistakes back then,” Travers says. “The clothes were his and this DNA test is going to prove that.”

I stare out at the room for a few seconds until the silence becomes a little uncomfortable. “I know some of you think this is a waste of time, but I really don’t think it is. We should talk to family and friends of Hailey McDonald. Find the transcripts from the interviews, go through them, then go and re-interview these people. Last time we asked those questions we were thinking her husband was a guilty man. This time ask them as if he’s innocent. And, while you’re asking them, ask yourself who would want to hurt her and frame him? Who hated her enough to see her dead, and him enough to see him in jail? Which one of those two things was the driving factor to what happened that night?

“Look, I know it seems like a lot of work, I know it seems like
we’re focusing on the wrong case here, but the two are linked. We’ll be hearing from ballistics later on this morning—that will hopefully give us a better understanding of what took place at Grover Hills, and we’ll know if McDonald was shot last night with the same gun. We’re also hoping the dead dog might help us out. The dog has traces of DNA and clothing fibers in its teeth. It bit somebody before it died, and if that somebody has a record, then we’ll get a match.”

“But not before Christmas,” somebody else says, and it’s true.

I swap places with the superintendent who gets up and picks up where I left off. He goes through my points almost in reverse order, and comes back to the first point I made about what a loss the death of Detective Hutton is. By now everybody is nodding, and later this week it will be the second police funeral of the year.

When he’s done I get back up and assign the tasks. There are a dozen detectives who are split up into pairs and sent out into the streets, some to talk to people who knew Ron McDonald, some to canvass the area where he was killed, some to interview the staff. More officers will be sent into the streets to canvass the neighborhoods of Crowley, McDonald, and Summers. McDonald’s staff have all been contacted this morning—there are eight of them—and been updated on the situation, and then asked to come down to the station for interviews, the eight of them being staggered across the day. We’re working two cases now. I tell Kent I want to interview the woman I spoke to seven years ago who identified Ron McDonald outside his house the night his wife died.

“You want to work on the old case, and not the new one?” Kent asks, when the meeting is over.

“No,” I tell her. “But I want to talk to her first because that was my part in the investigation back then, and I want to know if I did everything right.”

“For your peace of mind,” she says.

“I’m sure as hell going to need some if we messed up back then. First we have to see if she even still lives there.”

We’re looking up her address on a computer when Superintendent Dominic Stevens comes and finds me. “A word,” he says, then turns around and heads back to his office.

I follow him in there, and he nods towards the door, the meaning is clear, so I shut it. He sits down behind his desk. Opposite him is an officer, and it takes me a few seconds to realize it’s one of the officers from last night, the one who took off his shoe.

“This here is Officer Jim Williams,” he says, and that’s two Williamses in two days and if there are any more I’m going to lose track. “Why don’t you tell Detective Tate here what you just told me?”

“Yes, sir,” Williams says. He turns towards me. He is standing at attention with his hands behind him. “I was one of the officers who got the call out last night. When we got there the door was open and the lights were on, and we went through the office and the first thing we saw was the body.”

“And you took your shoe off to check for a pulse,” I tell him. “That was smart to take it off and put it into the bag. I know all this.”

He nods, but I can tell he’s happy with the compliment.

“After we called it in, we went back outside and guarded the building, which is what we were doing when you arrived. The thing is,” he says, and then he looks at Stevens who nods at him to carry on, “the thing is the blood and the body wasn’t the only thing I saw.”

“Meaning?”

“I had to sit down to get my shoe off because I had to remove it carefully. When I was taking it off I saw a cell phone on the ground. I figured it probably belonged to the victim and that it had gotten kicked over there in the struggle. Later, when everything was being logged into evidence, I saw it wasn’t there. I checked back inside, but it was gone.”

“Gone?”

“There’s no mention of it.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand,” I say, and I can feel my heart start to beat a little harder, and am I sweating? Is my heart hammering a heart shape into my shirt, the way it would in a cartoon? The shape extending out half a foot? No. No? But I think it’s about to. Schroder’s stupid test to make sure we’re both on the same page . . . Goddamn him.

“He’s saying somebody stole evidence,” Stevens says. “You’re dismissed,” he says to the officer. “And don’t breathe a word of this to anybody, you understand me?”

“I won’t,” he says. “That’s why I came straight to you. Nobody else knows.”

“Let’s keep it that way.”

“Yes, sir,” Williams says, and then he opens the door and closes it behind him.

Stevens leans back in his chair. He puts his elbows on the armrests, steeples his fingers, and touches them to his chin. “Shit, Tate, what a mess.”

I keep shaking my head. “I still don’t see it.”

“No? You think he’s lying?”

“No, it’s not that. There are plenty of reasons it could have gone missing—if it was even there in the first place.”

“So you think he’s mistaken then.”

I shrug. “It’s possible. More possible than one of us stealing it. Hell, if one of us were going to steal something, we wouldn’t choose something important to the scene. Stealing something from the office, or some tools, I mean, even that’s a stretch, but I can see that happening. Stealing a piece of crucial evidence because somebody wants a new cell phone? No.” I shake my head. “I don’t see it.”

He nods. “I’m inclined to agree with you. Things get stolen from crime scenes, Detective, but you’re right—it’s from the opposite end of the house because an officer sees a fifty-dollar note on the dresser or a camera and it’s four rooms and a hallway away from the crime, but stealing a key piece of evidence? That’s reckless and stupid. Which makes this even worse.”

“How so?”

“Because nobody on your team is that reckless or stupid. The phone wasn’t stolen because somebody wanted a new phone, Detective. It was stolen because somebody wanted to hide evidence.”

I’m still shaking my head. “That would mean they’re involved in the killing. It has to be a mistake.”

He swivels slightly in his chair, left to right, right to left, just a few degrees. “Okay. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll look into the chain of evidence. Maybe it was picked up and is sitting in the bottom of another box all forgotten about, and somebody forgot to write it down. But you’re going to do the same thing that Officer Williams is going to do, and that’s to tell nobody about this. Not even Kent. I’ll refer this internally. If the evidence was lost, then that’s sloppy police work and somebody will be reprimanded or suspended. But if somebody took it to hide what happened, well, you know what that means.”

“I know,” I say.

“If the Five Minute Man is responsible for Ron McDonald’s death, then he could be the very person who removed that phone. You’re going to have to start keeping an eye on your team, Tate. It’s possible our Five Minute Man is a cop.”

“I think you should let me talk to Kent about it. I mean, she was with me on Saturday night from the alleyway to Grover Hills—there’s no way it could be her.”

He taps his finger to his chin while he thinks about. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, I can let you do that because the last few days are set in stone, and everything you and Kent did will be examined in detail, so if she is somehow involved we’ll find out.”

“And me? Why are you telling me?”

“Because you’re leading this investigation, Detective, and that means I trust you and your abilities. I wouldn’t have given you the responsibility if I didn’t think you were up to it. Schroder always vouched for you, as did Hutton, and I’ve seen what you can do. In saying that, I also know you can walk a pretty fine line. Do you think these bad men deserve what they’re getting? Yes, I’m sure
you do. But could you be the one hurting them? I don’t see it and, as you pointed out, both you and Rebecca were working when the Grover Hills fire was set. Innocent people are being hurt, and despite what some people think you may be capable of, I know you would never allow that. So for now you and Detective Kent keep this to yourselves while you and your team are investigated, and bring me this bald-headed bastard before the media turns him into some kind of superhero vigilante.”