Joe Victim: A Thriller (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“She called me the following day,” I tell my psychiatrist, and I’ve switched from Joe Escape Artist back to Joe Victim, and that’s fine, because Joe Victim gets a much prettier view. “I thought she was going to wait for the weekend, but she called me after school. First she spoke to my mother and told her she wanted me to help around her house, and in return she would pay me. My mother thought it was a great idea because it meant that was less time I would be spending around our house. So I went there and mowed her lawns. Then it turned out she wanted the garage painted, inside and out, including the roof. So that became the project for a few weeks. Only it wasn’t the only project. She kept calling me day after day to go around there until . . . well, until she grew tired of me.”

“Tired of you?”

“Tired of me.”

“Grew tired of you doing the chores?”

“Not exactly,” I say, and I look down at my cuffed wrist, at the arm of the chair, at my feet and at the floor. The view might be prettier for Joe Victim than it was staring at my lawyer ten minutes ago, but looking into the past is ugly. “She grew tired of me about two years later.”

“Joe?”

I look up at her. “Do I have to spell it out for you?” I ask her.

Slowly she’s shaking her head and she’s trying to hide the disgust on her face, but she’s not doing a great job. She pauses, taking a few breaths before continuing. “Are you trying to tell me your auntie kept your secret in exchange for sex?”

“I’m actually trying not to tell you about it,” I say. “But yeah, that’s what happened. Like she said, she was lonely. She hadn’t had a man around the house for six years.”

“She blackmailed you.”

“What else could I do? If I didn’t do what she wanted, she would go to the police. She would tell my parents. She said she would tell people I had raped her if I didn’t go along with it. So I had to keep going back. I mean, the only thing I could think of was to kill her. And no matter what you think of me, I’m not a killer. At least I don’t want to be one.”

“Was it the first time you’d ever had sex?”

“Yes.”

She keeps staring at me as if she’s about to ask me how much I enjoyed it, and if it went anything like this, followed by her taking her clothes off and bending over the table. “Tell me about it,” she says.

As much as I want her turned on, I don’t really want to tell her about my auntie. “Why?”

“Because I asked you.”

“About the sex itself?”

“Tell me about your auntie. About leading up to what happened.”

I shrug. Like it’s no big deal. Like being forced to have sex with one’s auntie is as trivial as talking about the weather, although marginally more entertaining. But it is a big deal. One that for a long time had stayed bottled up inside of me. After my auntie died and we were going through her house, after I saw the crossbow, and after mom packed everything away, I felt sick. I actually went to the cemetery she was buried in that night, and I found her grave and I took a shit on it. For me it was a form of closure. It was a way of saying good-bye to a woman who made me feel bad about myself, good about myself, and then bad about myself all over.

“I had just finished painting the roof,” I tell my psychiatrist. “It was a hot day. Back then summer was always hot days and blue skies—at least that’s how it seemed. These days we’re lucky to see blue sky twice a week,” I say, and my earlier thought was right—auntie rape is as trivial as weather watch. “I got burned pretty bad up on that roof. I’d been working for my auntie for four days. The Big Bang happened on my fifth, which was our first Saturday together. I was up on the roof and—”

“You call what happened the Big Bang?”

“What would you have me call it?”

“Carry on,” she says.

“So my auntie came outside and called me down. I went down there expecting her to tell me that suddenly the garden needed doing or a lightbulb needed changing, or that I wasn’t painting the roof as well as she wanted, and when I got inside she reminded me why I was there,” I say, and I can still remember it, can still remember the dress she was wearing, and she was wearing lots of makeup too. I can almost feel the sunburn and smell the aloe vera she would rub into my skin later that same day. She told me to sit down on the couch and I did and she handed me a drink of lemonade that she had made that tasted how I imagined cat piss would taste if you carbonated it and threw in a slice of lemon. Then she sat down next to me. She put a hand on my leg, then told me not to flinch when I flinched. Then she told me she had another job for me, and that if I said no, I’d be going to jail. She put one hand in my lap and one hand on the back of my neck and told me to kiss her. I didn’t know what to do. She pushed her face into mine and I’d never kissed a girl before, and it tasted like cigarette smoke and was wet like coffee, and I still remember that my thought was to try and bite her nose off, but before I could think how, she was straddling me. I tried falling back further into the couch, I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed her away. She said if I pushed her away again she would tell my parents what I had done and that I had raped her.”

I tell the psychiatrist this and I can feel my face going red, as if the sunburn and shame from then is finding a way back into my life.

“And in the bedroom,” the psychiatrist says, “your auntie was in control?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t really want to talk about it,” I say.

“Joe—”

“Please. Can’t we just drop it?”

“What happened afterward? When you were finished in the bedroom?” she asks.

“She sent me back outside to work on the roof.”

“Just like that? She didn’t try talking to you first?”

“A little, I guess. Mostly about my uncle. She said that I reminded her of him in many ways. I didn’t know what ways she meant and didn’t know if she meant sexually. Things had been . . . you know, pretty quick. Then she made me go back outside.”

“How did you feel?”

“Well it was hot out there and I burned some more.”

“I mean how did you feel about what your aunt had done to you?”

“I’m . . . I’m not sure.”

“Angry? Hurt?”

“I guess.”

“Excited?”

“No,” I say, but maybe just a little. Not that excited though. There’s a reason my uncle died—looking at my auntie every day couldn’t have helped his health. If my auntie had been hotter—well, that might have been quite conflicting. As it was I felt strange about the whole thing. “It happened again a few days later. Then it just kept on happening, and every time when I got home all I could smell was the cigarette smoke.”

“And this lasted two years?”

“Almost, yeah.”

“Did you try to stop it?”

“I didn’t know how,” I say.

“But you tried something, right?”

I nod. “I killed her cat,” I say.

She doesn’t look alarmed at my response. “You said earlier you hadn’t killed any animals.”

“I pretty much forgot about it,” I say, and it’s true. In this case, anyway. “There’s a lot I had forgotten about that time until you wanted to talk about it.”

“And the cat?”

I shake my head. “The cat didn’t want to talk about it.”

She doesn’t laugh. “You killed the cat, Joe. Tell me why.”

“I thought if I killed her cat it would give her something else to focus on and she wouldn’t want to keep having sex with me,” I say, “only the opposite turned out to be true. She needed me more at that point.”

“How did you kill it?”

“I drowned it in the bath,” I say, “and then I used a hair dryer to dry it out so my auntie never knew what happened. She just thought it died naturally.”

“At what point during the sexual abuse was this?” she asks.

“What the hell? I didn’t fuck the cat,” I tell her. “I just drowned it. I had to do something.”

“That’s not what I mean, Joe. I mean the abuse between you and your auntie.”

“I wasn’t abusing her,” I say. “Why are you thinking the worst? How am I going to have a fair trial if everybody keeps—”

She puts her hand up to stop me. “Listen to me, Joe. You’re misunderstanding me. Your auntie was abusing you. You were an innocent kid and she took advantage of a bad decision you had made. What I want to know is how long had she been abusing you for before the cat died, and how much longer after that did the abuse continue.”

“Oh,” I say, and yes, that makes more sense. Only . . . the
abuse
? Is that what it was? “Oh,” I repeat, relieved that she’s on my side. Everybody is on my side once they get to know me a little. But really—once you start throwing that
abuse
term around, it makes me sound like a pussy. “It was halfway in, I suppose. A year into the . . . into the . . . abuse, then a year of abuse after the cat died.”

“How did it stop?”

“She just said that she was done with me. I didn’t understand it. Just like that. I should have seen it coming. I was going around there less and less near the end. I felt . . . I don’t know. I felt something.”

“Rejected?”

“No. Relief,” I say, only she’s right, I did feel rejected, then I realize that’s just the kind of thing that might be worth sharing, the kind of thing that will make me look more fucked-up than the stable person I really am. “I mean, of course I felt rejected. I didn’t want to be having sex with my auntie, but I didn’t understand why it just stopped. Was I not good enough for her?”

“It’s not about that,” she says.

“Then what is it about?”

“You were the victim,” she says. “It was about power. It was about finding somebody she could dominate. She probably found you were becoming too confident, too grown-up. What kind of relationship did you have after that?”

“We didn’t. I actually never saw her again.”

“Not at Christmas, or other family events?”

“My dad’s funeral,” I tell her. “I guess that’s the only other time. We didn’t speak to each other. I mean, I tried, but she didn’t have time for me. She was hanging around with Gregory, who’s one of my cousins, five years younger than me. It was weird. In some way, I missed her.”

“That makes sense,” she says.

“What does?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, and she’s right, really. None of this matters. It’s just filling in time in a room slightly more pleasant than my cell until Melissa rescues me. Killing time in a room with a very pretty lady. Life should have more of those killing moments.

“It wasn’t your fault what she did to you, Joe.”

“Yes it was. If I hadn’t broken into her house—”

“She took advantage of you, Joe. She was an adult and you were a kid.”

“I know that,” I tell her. “But if I hadn’t broken into her house, then none of it would have happened. Who knows where I’d be now?”

“What do you mean by that?” she asks, leaning forward, and I sense a red flag on the horizon.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I mean, maybe that was the start of everything.”

She taps her pen against her pad. “Everything? It sounds like you’re self-analyzing, Joe.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” I say. “I just mean, you know, maybe that path led to another, which led to another.”

“Are you sure you never considered killing her?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Most people in that situation would think of it.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t,” I say, but the truth is I did. I wanted to wrap my hands around her throat every time I had to look down at her face when she was beneath me. Hell, I wanted to wrap my hands around my own throat and squeeze. And yet I missed her.

“When was the first time you killed somebody, Joe?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t remember killing anybody, and if I did, well, I don’t know when it began.”

She reaches for the recorder and switches it off. “Okay, I think that’s enough for today.”

“What’s wrong?”

“You’ve just started lying again. I’ll tell you what. You think about what it is you’re trying to achieve here, and I’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll talk again. Okay?”

“Wait.”

“We still have time tomorrow,” she says, and she stands up and knocks on the door.

“I just want to be helped,” I tell her.

“Good.”

The guard opens the door and leans in to get a good look at me. I smile back at him, the full Joe smile with all the teeth. My eyelid stretches a little and hurts. Then I show Ali the full smile too. She walks out. The guard closes the door and I stare at the walls and my eyelid sticks and I have to manually pull it down. I let the smile fall from my face and I hang my head and rest it on my arms, my face only an inch from the table, my breath forming a thin film of condensation on the surface. I haven’t thought about my auntie in a long time, and Ali is the first person I’ve ever told. I always thought therapy was about unloading burdens and sharing pain, but all it’s done is open up a lot of old wounds. I don’t want anybody to know about it.

Suddenly it’s more important than ever that Melissa gets me out of here. If this were to come out in court I don’t know how I could face the world. Even though my mum wouldn’t be there or watch the news, I think somehow she’d hear about all the things her sister did to me, and no doubt she wouldn’t believe me.

Ali better not share any of this after I’ve escaped.

Suddenly I’m glad my mom won’t be there.

I do what I’ve been doing the most of lately—I wait, and I try to be positive. I try not to think about my auntie and I try to focus on a positive future, but sometimes, in a place like this, thinking positive thoughts is just so, so hard to do.

Chapter Thirty

“This is bullshit,” Schroder says.

“I agree. This
is
bullshit,” Wellington, says. “This deal you’re bringing him, this is no good for my client.”

“You don’t even want to defend this case,” Schroder says. “So why make this difficult?”

“You’re right, I don’t want to defend him, but I’m going to do the best I can for him because that’s the job, you know that. If you killed somebody, Detective, I’d do my best to represent you too.”

“What do you mean by that?” Schroder asks.

“What do I mean by what?”

“That if I killed somebody?”

“Just how it sounds. If you killed somebody and hired me, you’d want to know I’d do all I could. If I didn’t, who would hire me again?”

“Okay,” Schroder says.

“Anyway, I’m not the one making it difficult,” Wellington says. “It’s Joe.”

Both men are still in the interview room at the prison. Schroder hates it in here. The room smells. And it’s cold. And it’s depressing. And Wellington has just made a good point.

“He’s asking for something I can’t help arrange,” Schroder says.

“And if we do arrange it,” Wellington says, “it goes against what’s best for my client. There is no way we can have a police escort to the body, and then try to convince a jury Joe had no idea where it was.”

Schroder agrees. “And there’s no way we can have a police escort, then have Jones use his psychic abilities to find the body.”

They’re going around in circles. The deal isn’t going to happen. Jonas won’t get to show off his body-finding abilities. Schroder’s not going to get his bonus. Joe won’t get his money. And Detective Inspector Robert Calhoun isn’t going to be going home. Schroder doesn’t care about the first three things, but the fourth one is important to him. It’s been important since Calhoun went missing. Important enough for him to still be in this room trying to figure out a way to make Joe’s life easier.

“How does it feel?” Wellington asks. “Working for a guy like that?”

Schroder winces at the question. The way Wellington asks it makes it pretty obvious what Wellington’s views are. It makes Schroder think everybody must be feeling the same way. Yet despite it all, Jonas is doing well for himself. Not everybody can hate him. “Probably about the same as it must feel defending Joe,” Schroder says.

Wellington slowly nods. “That bad, huh?”

“Look,” Schroder says, “I know you don’t want him to take this deal, I see that, but Detective Calhoun deserves to be returned. That’s what we have to focus on here. He was a cop, damn it, a good cop, and like any cop he deserves a proper burial, he deserves to be mourned and remembered as something other than the policeman who disappeared and never came back.”

Wellington says nothing as he takes it all in, and Schroder is reminded of how quickly this guy thinks, of how far ahead he really is.

“There has to be a way,” Schroder adds.

“There is no way,” Wellington says. “As soon as we involve the police Jones doesn’t get his deal.”

Schroder gets up and starts pacing the room. Wellington watches him. He starts running different scenarios through his head. If he were still a cop, this would be a whole lot easier. But if he were a cop, he wouldn’t be coming to Joe with a deal that gives a serial killer fifty thousand dollars. The cops aren’t going to get Calhoun’s location from Joe. They’ve tried. The prosecution has tried.

The only way to get that location is to pay him.

And the only way Joe will tell them is to show them.

And the only way Joe can show them is if it doesn’t involve the police.

And that’s just not going to happen.

“I’ll try working on him,” Wellington says. “See if he can just tell us the location. I mean, if he doesn’t tell you, he doesn’t get the money, and that’s why he’s doing this. I think he really believes he’s going to be going free after the trial.”

Schroder turns and leans against the wall. He stares at Wellington. An idea is coming to him. He just has to work at it for a few more moments. “And what do you think?”

Wellington shrugs, but then gives his view. “I think the very fact he thinks he’s going free, and the fact he thinks everybody is believing what he’s saying, may just prove he really is completely insane.”

The idea is close now. Schroder can see it stretching out ahead of him. He just has to follow the path and shore up the crossroads. He pushes himself off from the wall and sits down opposite the lawyer. “What if,” he says, then doesn’t follow it up. He’s staring at the wall, at the cinder block, but really he’s on the path and checking that the angles all line up.

Wellington doesn’t interrupt him.

“What if,” Schroder says again, and yes, yes this might work. “What if we make two deals? We stick with our deal. The people I work for pay Joe his money for the location of Detective Calhoun.”

“Okay. And what’s deal two?”

“We go to the prosecution and we ask for immunity for Joe on what happened to Detective Calhoun. We all know he didn’t kill him. He buried him, sure, and he probably set up the circumstances and no doubt he would have killed him anyway, but we have Joe on all these other homicides. Pinning Calhoun on him isn’t going to make a difference. Technically we don’t need him on this one.”

We.
He hears himself saying the word. Once a cop, always a cop. At least according to those who are no longer cops. To everybody else he’s just a pain in the ass.

“Technically,” Wellington says, nodding. “I don’t think too many people would be happy hearing that.”

“I’m not even happy saying it,” Schroder says.

“I think I can pretty much tell you the prosecution won’t go for it.”

Schroder gets up and starts pacing again. “We ask for immunity, and in exchange for it we offer to give them the location of Calhoun’s body. They still have plenty to convict Joe with, so there’s no reason for them to say no. They get Calhoun back. It’s a win-win situation. Two deals. And Joe gets his one hour of freedom in which to show them the body.”

Wellington sits still and Schroder can see him absorbing the information. He’s churning it over in his four-hundred-dollar-an-hour head. “It might work.”

“It will work,” Schroder says.

“It might. The other problem is the police aren’t going to be too keen about leaving the body where they find it for your boss to come along and take the credit.”

“First of all, he’s not my boss,” Schroder says. “And second of all, they will go for it if it means bringing home one of their own.”

Wellington almost laughs. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

Wellington shakes his head. “There is no way they’re going to go for that. This is real life, Carl, not one of your TV shows. The police aren’t a tool for Jonas Jones and the TV network.”

“I know that.”

“Then why suggest otherwise?”

“Because it’s the only way we’re going to get Calhoun back,” Schroder says.

“No,” he says. “And you know what? I’m not even going to suggest it. I go in there with that idea, and I get laughed back out. Nobody will take me seriously again. There isn’t one cop on the force who would want to help out Jonas Jones.”

“They’re not doing it for Jones,” Schroder says. “They’re doing it for Calhoun, and that’s a big difference. A really big difference. They’re doing it for Calhoun and his family. That’s the selling point to all of this.”

Wellington is still shaking his head. “And if it’s a trap?”

“It can’t be,” Schroder says. “We only brought this deal to him yesterday. I bet if we check his visitor logs we’ll find the only people he’s seen or spoken to are you, me, his psychiatrists, and his mother. There’s no way he could have set something up in that time.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not wrong,” Schroder says.

“Okay,” Wellington says. “I agree. You’re not wrong. But it’s still not going to work. Even with a small team taking him out there, there’s still a big problem you’re overlooking.”

“Yeah? And what’s that?”

“These people need to keep their mouths shut.”

“They’re cops,” Schroder says. “Keeping your mouth shut is part of the job. We just need four or five people who can be trusted to do their job.”

Wellington is still shaking his head, but Schroder can see that slowly he’s changing his mind. “We have to at least try,” Schroder says.

“Okay. I’ll go to the prosecution with it. I mean, it can’t hurt.”

“If Joe doesn’t keep his mouth shut he’ll blow it all to hell,” Schroder says, and he feels like he’s sold a part, just a little part, of himself to the devil. That’s one part to Jonas Jones and one part to Joe Middleton. Soon he’ll be out of parts.

“He’ll keep it shut,” Wellington says. “I point out the benefits to the prosecution, I point out it can’t be a trap, and I point out the good faith on my client’s part.”

“Point out what you need to,” Schroder says. “Let’s just get this done before this whole thing turns into a circus.”

Wellington taps his index finger on the surface of the table. “My daughter is a university student,” he says, and Schroder knows there are two ways this can go. Wellington is either going to say a guy with a daughter doesn’t want a guy like Joe out on the streets. Or he’s going to say something worse. He’s going to say something bad has happened to his daughter. Only he’s wrong, because Wellington doesn’t tell him either of those. Instead he says, “She phoned me an hour ago. My daughter studies law. She’s into her third year. She loves it. Wants to be like me. Wants to defend innocent people.”

“She’s going to be in for a shock,” Schroder says.

“Because there are no innocent people?”

“They’re just rare, that’s all.”

“Maybe. Maybe not as rare as you think. But you want to have a guess as to what the Canterbury University students are going to be doing on Monday?”

It doesn’t take much of a guess. “Protesting,” Schroder says.

“Yeah? What do you think, for or against the death penalty?” Wellington asks.

Schroder shrugs. “I don’t know. Half for it, half against it, I guess.”

The lawyer smiles. “Neither,” he says. “They’re planning on going just for the show. My daughter says it’s
the
talking point all over social media at the moment. Hundreds if not more students are going to treat the event as a party. There’s even a competition where the student who can get the most airtime on camera wins a bottle of vodka. So for the chance of one bottle of vodka a bunch of these kids are going to be dressing up in costumes and trying to get into every camera angle they can to get on TV, but that’s not
why
they’re going—it’s just an additional bonus. They’re going because it’s an excuse to drink and be loud and drink some more and throw up in the gutters. They’re going because they think it’s cool. Even my daughter is going. They don’t care about Joe Middleton or the justice system because all they care about is drinking. That’s their generation. It’s my daughter’s generation. Kind of makes you wonder why the hell we’re doing all of this, why we’re trying to make a safer world when that’s who we’re making it safer for.”

“I’m not sure what you want me to say,” Schroder says.

“Nothing you can say. It is what it is. But I just want to point out that if you think you can avoid this turning into a circus, then you’re probably the only genuinely insane person I’ve truly ever met.”