Five Minutes Alone (7 page)

The master bedroom has a painting that must also be one of Kelly’s as it matches the one in the lounge, different flowers and a different woman, again she’s just turned far enough away to make her expression readable. Or perhaps to hide the scar. There’s a white duvet cover with light blue edges, most of it blank except for a couple of flowers and leaves in the corners. The curtains are drawn, and I pull them aside. The lock on one of the windows has been torn out. I slide it open and can see pry marks on the opposite side. Somebody dug a crowbar or a large screwdriver into it and forced the window open.

Dwight Smith came here last night.

I bring to mind the photographs I saw of Kelly Summers a few hours ago. I recall some of the facts that were in that file. He raped her and bit her and cut her.

Are we on the same page?

I close the window and put the curtain back into place. In the lounge the conversation is still going on. I lean in the doorway and watch.

“When Smith was in jail, he never wrote to you? Never tried to call?” Kent asks.

“Not that I know of. Like I said, I moved five years ago. I couldn’t go back into that place. Nothing ever got forwarded on, but come to think of it, I didn’t leave a forwarding address, so maybe he did try writing.” She looks up at me. “Can you tell me how he died?”

“Not at this stage,” I tell her.

“Did he die badly?”

We don’t know, so we can’t tell her. We know he most likely did.

We wrap up the interview and Kelly Summers walks us to the door.

“For the first time in five years,” she says, “I finally feel . . . not safe, no,
safe
is the wrong word, but I feel something. Relief, I suppose.”

“Justice?” I ask her. “Do you feel a sense of justice?”

She smiles at me. “Thank you for coming by, detectives,” she says, and the interview is over.

CHAPTER NINE

Kent starts the car and a cat rushes out from the bushes under the neighbor’s house, across the road and past the front of us. “What did you think?” she asks.

Are we on the same page?

Yes, we are. Only we’re not. Otherwise I’d be telling Kent about the window that was pried open. I’d be telling her about the recently purchased shower curtain with all the heavily creased fold lines. All depends on whether it was purchased before the train dismantled Dwight Smith, or after. Shower curtains are like rugs and drop cloths and tarpaulins—good for wrapping a body on the go.

“Hard to tell,” I tell her.

“Something didn’t feel right,” she says. “It felt like everything was a performance. You know what I mean?”

Yes, I know what she means. Kelly’s questions when she opened the door. The way her smile kept dropping away when we told her Dwight Smith had been released from jail. “Yeah, I do. That sums it up pretty well. But isn’t that how genuine people behave too?”

“If she killed him she couldn’t have done it by herself,” Kent says. “Rage can be a great equalizer when it comes to strength, but I don’t see it here. Way too much lifting and moving for somebody Kelly’s size.”

“They say you can lift a car if your baby is pinned beneath it.”

“Yeah, and maybe that’s true,” she says, “but that’s what, one second? Two? Say five seconds at the most. Pure adrenaline. But that’s not what helps people transport and dump a body. That takes strength and determination.”

“I agree,” I say.

“Of course this could all be for nothing. For all we know Smith
threw himself under that train. Maybe somebody threw him and it wasn’t Kelly. But if it was, she had help.”

I think about that. I can imagine if she’d gone looking for help a volunteer army made up of family and friends all would have put their hands up. At least in theory. What about when it came down to it? Would they be there for the messy bits?

“Let’s go talk to Smith’s brother,” Kent says.

We hit the edge of town and a lot more traffic and Kent has to slow down. Over the next few weeks traffic will only get worse as Christmas gets closer. Already some shops have their decorations up. Santa is ready to take your hard-earned cash, Santa with a welcoming wave, Santa beating the economy. It’s been four years since I last enjoyed Christmas. It was back when my daughter was alive. I remember running around trying to find some talking animal doll she had her heart set on, the problem was other kids all across the country had their hearts set on them too and they were sold out everywhere. The following two Christmases I went and visited my wife in her nursing home, and last Christmas I spent in jail.

As we drive I feel a ball of guilt in my stomach. If the investigation comes back to Kelly Summers, I can say I didn’t notice the broken lock or the pry marks. Will the others believe me? Probably not. But what can they do?

I call Hutton and update him on everything except the broken lock and the new shower curtain. “There’s something else,” he tells me. “The car has been dusted for prints. All we’ve found are Smith’s and his brother’s, and also his brother’s wife’s. Nobody else had access to the vehicle, and it doesn’t look like anybody else drove it. The seat is at the right distance from the pedals, so if Smith didn’t drive the car himself then the driver was either the right height or slotted the seat back into place, and the driver must have worn gloves and not put his hands on the wheel where any normal driver would put them, that way he didn’t smudge away Smith’s prints. There are some foreign hairs around the footwell and pedals, the kind of hairs that get caught up in shoes and trans
ferred, but we’ll have to get a sample from Kelly Summers and compare them to rule her out.”

“She’s a suspect? Even though you’re sure Smith drove the car out there himself?”

“He was following her,” Hutton says. “And there’s more. The car was out of gas.”

I take a few seconds to absorb that fact, and I say it back to him. “Out of gas.”

“The fuel indicator is one more thing that doesn’t work on that car. It’s stuck around halfway. My guess is Smith always figured how much gas there was by the odometer. So a stuck needle means no fuel warning. The car ran out of gas exactly where we found it.”

“So Smith miscalculated,” I say, “and he was on his way to somewhere else.”

“Except Smith wouldn’t miscalculate,” Hutton says, “not driving that far out of the city. He’d have made sure he had enough gas. After all, he worked at a gas station and he could have topped up. You said there was forty dollars in his wallet, right?”

“Right,” I say.

Hutton carries on. “That train track couldn’t have been the destination he had in mind. It’s possible, I suppose, he was going somewhere, forgot about the fuel because, as you say, he was distracted by seeing Kelly Summers. I think the next thing now is to wait until the medical examiner has taken a look. Why don’t you go and see her now? I know it’s early, but she might have something.”

We change direction and drive to the hospital, and it’s lunchtime by the time we get there. There is construction taking place, the same construction that’s been taking place for almost the last two years. In fact construction has taken so long the mushroom cloud of dust around the hospital will probably take another week to settle once the machinery and workmen are gone. At the moment big machines are tearing into existing concrete and metal, and in ten years it’ll happen all over again to make things even bigger. There’s a dedicated parking space around the back for the
police to use. There are a couple of nurses sharing a cigarette, standing so the sun falls on their faces. We step through a back entrance and have to sign a visitor log, and then catch an elevator that doesn’t play any elevator music as it takes us down. I can’t imagine a morgue being upstairs.

Tracey Walter, the medical examiner, meets us when the doors open. Her hair has been dyed red. Last time I saw her it was black, and the time before that it was brown. I guess she’s searching for a look and can’t quite decide what it is. Perhaps she’s waiting for somebody to tell her. Like always she’s looking lean and gaunt, a long-distance runner’s body that looks ready to spring into action at any sign of a zombie uprising.

“How you doing, Rebecca?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” Kent says, which is always what she says, and I know she’s not
fine,
but I just hope she’s at least a good percentage of that.

“And you, Theo? How’s Bridget?”

“She’s doing good. You know, not a hundred percent, but she’s come a long way.”

“That’s good,” she says. “But what’s not so good is you guys are here about six hours ahead of schedule.”

“I know.” I try to look apologetic. “And I’m sorry. Have you managed to take a look?”

She sighs, and I’ve been through this with her before, just like every homicide detective has been through it with every medical examiner when they’re in a hurry, the same way Captain Kirk would pester his chief engineer to work miracles in the least possible amount of time.

We move deeper into the morgue. I’m thankful to be wearing my jacket. The room has cinder-block walls, one of them dedicated to sliding drawers with square fridge doors on the front, bodies lying inside them. There are surfaces full of fluids and trays and sharp-looking tools. There are people lying on tables, people who have been victim to bad luck and bad health, people who have
died for no other reason than their clock ran out. It’s easy to tell Dwight Smith apart from these people. One look at him and the line
This was no boating accident
pops into my mind, followed up by
We need a bigger morgue.
The train made a jigsaw puzzle out of him. My stomach rolls a little and for a second, a brief second, I’m scared its contents are going to make an appearance.

The head has been separated from the body, a rough tear where the two once joined, bits of bone and flesh and muscle blending into a mess, topped off with grease and dirt and small leaves stuck to the blood and what looks like a dead moth. There’s a wristwatch on the left wrist that will now be right only twice a day, only Dwight Smith isn’t going to know when. The other arm is lying next to Dwight about where it would be if it were still attached, only it isn’t, and the same goes for the hand. Same for the legs.

The hardest thing to look at is the head. It doesn’t even look like a head. I don’t know what the hell it looks like. There’s blood and hair and flesh, but it doesn’t look like it was ever human. It looks like one of the train wheels pushed it down, but instead of running right over it, it was pinched out into the air. It’s partly separated, the skull cleaved open around the top, and inside is all the dark matter that once gave Dwight Smith some very sick thoughts. I can’t see his eyes and don’t know if they’re in there somewhere, or whether they popped like grapes. I can make out the mouth only because I know where it ought to be. Kent keeps one arm folded across her chest while raising a hand to her face. She cups a fist over her mouth.

“Not hard to tell he was hit by a train,” Tracey says.

I nod. I can’t talk. I’m thinking Dwight Smith is going to replace my modern art dreams, or perhaps he will show up as an exhibit.

I take a few shallow breaths. “Was he dead before the train hit him?”

Tracey moves one of the severed arms a few inches, and it seems needless and I suspect she’s doing it because she knows how I feel,
and is punishing me for showing up early. The bloody stump makes a wet sucking sound as it peels away from the table. I keep expecting her to try and jam it into place, as if there’s enough blood and goo to make it stick, as if she can pop it onto the nub of bone the same way I used to reattach the arms onto Emily’s dolls.

“Like I told Hutton earlier, it’ll be tonight. I’ll call you later on today, okay?”

“We were really hoping—” I say.

She puts her hand up to interrupt me. “Don’t,” she says. “Okay? It’ll get done when it’ll get done. You’ve wasted your time coming here. Accept it, and move on.”

So we accept it and we move on. We ride the elevator back up. It’s another one of those trips I’m seeing in reverse. Same security guard. Same two nurses standing outside, only now they’re no longer smoking. They’re sitting on a bench, one sending a text message, the other reading a magazine. Compared to the morgue it feels like the day just warmed up forty degrees.

I call Hutton as Kent starts driving. He answers on the first ring. I update him, which isn’t an update at all since we learned nothing.

“Okay,” he says. “Listen, I’ve had an idea. Why don’t you go and speak to Carl Schroder?”

I almost shake my head. I haven’t seen Schroder in a while. He’s different now. Difficult to talk to. Difficult to be around. After the explosion that almost killed Kent, Schroder tried tracking the Carver himself. He found him too—but for his efforts, Schroder took a bullet to the head and the Carver escaped. It almost killed him, and for a while we were both in comas at the same time. That’s when the media called us the Coma Cops, even though Schroder wasn’t technically a cop anymore.

“Schroder? Why?”

“He arrested Dwight Smith, and he’s the one who helped Kelly Summers and, well, I want his take on this.”

“His take?” I ask, but I can’t imagine he’ll have much of a take. These days he doesn’t have much of a take on anything.

“Yeah. I want to know what he thinks Kelly Summers is capable of.”

“I thought we were waiting to see what the medical examiner said.”

“And we are. But like you just said, we won’t know anything till later today. But you know what these things are like—there are things that happen that don’t make it into the files.”

He’s right. There are things that don’t make it into files. No doubt in this case among the things that didn’t make it were the threats by Summers’s family.

“Okay. I’ll talk to him.”

“I want you to go by yourself,” he says. “We’ve had a report,” he says, and goes on to tell me that a call has just come through—there’s a report of a missing nine-year-old girl from one of the local malls. No details yet, just that of a security guard dealing with a hysterical woman whose well-behaved daughter has disappeared. It’s the kind of call that makes your heart sink even though ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s nothing more than the girl having wandered off. But it’s that other one time in a hundred we’re all frightened of.

“It’s the weekend and we’re short on manpower with half the force still looking for the Christchurch Carver, and hell, to be honest, a missing nine-year-old girl is always going to trump a dead rapist, so I want you guys to split up. Drop Kent off at the mall, then go talk to Schroder.”

We hang up and I explain the situation to Kent, who nods as she listens, then changes direction. We pull up at a set of lights. The light is green, but the traffic isn’t moving. It’s the same shade of green as the shower curtain in Kelly Summers’s bathroom. There is one car ahead of us, and there are L-plates in the back window. The learner driver has stalled the car. After a few seconds he gets it started, the car hops forward a few feet, and then he stalls it again. He goes through this process one more time and then the light turns red. Then both doors open. A young teenager climbs out and moves around to the other side of the car, where his father is also
climbing out. They swap places. The car starts up. The lights turn green. The car drives smoothly through the intersection then pulls over. We drive past.

Kent gets out at the mall and I walk around the car and climb into the driver’s seat, offering an assurance I’ll either join her later on the case, or pick her up.

“Good luck,” I tell her.

“Hopefully I won’t need it. Hopefully the little girl has just wandered off into a shop somewhere.”

Hopefully the little girl has just wandered and hasn’t been dragged. There’s a world of difference between the two.