The Laughterhouse (22 page)

We keep looking around the house, but I can’t focus, not fully, not when I keep thinking things may be changing with Bridget even though nobody else seems to think so. Forty minutes later Schroder gets the call. The warrant is ready.

Just when he hangs up Detective Kent approaches us. She smiles at us both, nods once, and says “I got some info. Nanny was pretty talkative. Erin Stanton walked out on her family six months ago. Just up and left. Apparently she was having problems with the baby. Was much worse than some of the usual postpartum stuff we hear about. Stanton tried prescribing her medication but she wouldn’t take it. He tried getting her to talk to somebody else but she wasn’t on board with the idea. She managed to find her own solution. It involved meeting some guy ten years her junior online and leaving this life behind. Stanton is still bitter about it. Nanny says she’s never seen Stanton show one iota of warmth toward the little girl. She says he loves the other two kids, he’d do anything for them, but she says he looks at the baby the same way somebody would look at a pizza they weren’t so sure they wanted. Nanny has been working here six months,” Kent says. “She got hired a week after the wife walked out. She said the house was a mess. Says without a nanny this place would fall apart. Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are no photographs of Octavia anywhere.”

“Has anybody gotten hold of the wife or the boyfriend?” Schroder asks.

“Thought you’d want to do that,” she says, and hands him her notepad. He jots down the number of the wife.

“And the boyfriend?”

“Nanny knows nothing about him, just that he’s younger
and how they met. I’ll speak to some friends and family and see what else I can learn.”

“Okay, good job,” he says, and Detective Kent smiles again at us both before heading back outside.

“What do you think?” he asks.

“I think you’re a married man,” I tell him, as we both watch her go.

“Huh. Good one, Theo. That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

I turn back toward him. “It’s starting to look possible Stanton fled his house for a reason that doesn’t extend to the other victims. No doubt he didn’t leave on his own accord, but it may have something to do with the wife or the boyfriend.”

“That’s my thinking.”

An officer comes inside, looks around and spots us, and comes over. He has a healing split lip and a fading black eye, which I guess he got from arresting somebody last week, or getting amorous with his wife when she wasn’t in the mood. Or maybe when she was.

“We’ve found a car,” he says. “Just down there,” he adds, and nods toward the cordon where the media are growing in numbers. “Right in their midst.”

“Doesn’t belong to any of them?”

“According to the owner of the house it’s parked outside, it’s been there since he woke up this morning. He doesn’t know who it belongs to. We’ve checked the neighboring houses. Nobody has seen it before. Plus, you look at this neighborhood, then you look at that car, and it doesn’t line up. So we ran the plates—belongs to a guy named Donald Shrugs. He doesn’t have a record and the car hasn’t been reported stolen.”

Donald Shrugs. Is that who we’re looking for? A sense of excitement builds quickly as Schroder turns his attention to me.

“Look, Tate, could be nothing, could be that Donald Shrugs parked it there and is sitting inside another house on the block, or it’s been stolen and he doesn’t know, or Donald Shrugs is
the man who took Stanton. Go check it out, then get it transported back to the department garage and get forensics onto it. Talk to the owner, but don’t go alone. If Shrugs is our guy, then he has three missing little girls out there. I’ll head to the doctor’s office and get my hands on his files.” He looks at his watch. “It’s one o’clock now,” he says, “should only take me ten minutes to get there. Stay in touch.”

Schroder leaves the scene and I walk with the officer toward the abandoned car. He keeps glancing over at me with a weird look on his face. Either he knows my backstory or he wants to hold hands. He keeps licking at his split lip. Even though the city has clouded over, the temperature is still getting warmer. Ariel’s prediction of rain tonight is looking way off. Somebody in the street or maybe in the next block over is cooking something on a barbecue, the smell of sizzling steaks and fried onions making my stomach rumble. The officer uses his radio and calls in for a truck. We’re told it’ll be here within thirty minutes. We have to pass through the media and they ask questions of us and we ignore them. Jonas Jones walks next to us for a few seconds, fishing for information before falling back into the crowd. We reach the car and I slow down. My heart starts to race a little.

“I’ve seen this car before,” I tell the officer.

“It was parked here when you drove past earlier.”

“No, no, it’s not that,” I say, shaking my head. “I didn’t even notice it before, there were too many people in the way.” I walk around it. It’s a beaten-up Toyota older than my own. It looks exactly like the one I jump-started last night. I put on a pair of latex gloves and try the driver’s door and it’s unlocked. The keys are still hanging in the ignition. I turn them and the engine doesn’t make a sound.

“Flat battery,” the officer says.

“And whoever left it here doesn’t need the keys anymore, including his house key,” I say.

“If he has the keys, it’s unlikely he stole it.”

The man last night in the cemetery, is this who we’re looking for? Was that Donald Shrugs? The beatings he took, are they why he is pissed off at the world? A couple of the journalists realize the car is of importance, and that realization spreads like a virus among them. Within seconds there are dozens of cameras in our faces.

“Get back, get back,” the officer says, putting his hands in the air and showing them all his palm. “Get the hell back.”

Other officers come down and start helping push the media back. A new perimeter is formed and it gives us room to take a better look at the vehicle. There’s nothing on the dash or behind the seats, and the glove compartment has a map in it and nothing else. I check the ashtray and it’s empty. There are dried blood spots on the passenger seat and plenty of them. They could have come from a weapon resting on it. Something like a knife. I look under the seats and find nothing.

The truck must have been in the area because it arrives within five minutes. A big burly guy in gray overalls steps out and walks around the car, taking a good look at it while he tugs at his handlebar moustache. He doesn’t seem the kind of guy keen to make a lot of conversation. The flatbed is angled downward, turning into a ramp, and he winches the car onto it. Then the bed is flattened out and the car secured down with hooks and ratchet straps.

I call another of the officers over, a guy around my age who I’ve seen working most of the scenes so far. “Go with him,” I tell him, and point toward the driver of the tow truck. “Make sure you keep an eye on that car.”

“Yes sir,” he says, and jumps into the cab of the truck.

“You got Shrugs’s address?” I ask the first officer.

“Yep.”

“Good,” I tell him, “then let’s go for a drive.”

At one thirty me and Officer Split-Lip meet an armed response unit two blocks from the target. If Donald Shrugs kidnapped the doctor and his family, then he’s a dangerous man. That’s what the armed backup is for. It’s to stop anybody from getting shot who doesn’t deserve to be shot. They’re just about to go in when Schroder calls.

“Got an update on Erin Stanton,” he says. “She left her husband for a guy by the name of Brian West. He’s a musician with a wife and a couple of kids that he walked out on roughly the same time. They moved to Australia two months ago so he could play in a band with a bunch of guys he used to know. They’re there now and it’s unlikely they’re involved in any of this. No reason for them to be. They’re flying in later today. Call me back once the team has gone in,” he says, and hangs up.

The man leading the team is dressed in black and is wearing a bulletproof vest and seems a lot calmer than I would be if I were about to do his job. I hang back by the cars while the
team moves forward. It only takes one minute for them to go through the house and give it an initial all-clear, then two more minutes to go through it again to make sure. I walk down to the house. It’s a brick home around forty years old with a low iron roof and large windows. The driveway is lined with cracks that have weeds pushing through, except where oil stains have killed them. I walk through the house. Nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a family home with ugly carpet but nice furniture. Some of the doors stick a little. There are toys on the floor and memos on the fridge. There are photographs on the walls and none of them contain the man from the cemetery.

I head into the lounge. There’s a cordless phone lying on the armrest of the couch. It has a digital display on it. I scroll down the menu. One of them says
Mary’s work,
and another says
Don’s work.
I dial Don’s work. It’s picked up after four rings.

“Jeff speaking.”

“Yeah, hi, Jeff, is Donald around?”

“Should be, hang on a second. . . .” He puts the phone down and I can hear footsteps, people talking, the noise of a photocopier nearby. A minute later Jeff comes back. The phone drags across the desk and is picked up. “Err, actually he’s just left. Some kind of emergency.”

“He’s been there all day?”

“Yeah, why? Who is this?”

I figure the emergency Donald left for is this. I figure one of his neighbors called him at work and told him his house has been stormed into. “Detective Inspector Theodore Tate,” I tell him. “I need you to give me Don’s cell phone number.”

“Oh, shit, has something happened? Is his family okay?”

“They’re fine,” I tell him, “but I need that number.”

He gives me the number and I write it down, then realize it was probably in the phone’s memory anyway. I hang up on Jeff while he’s mid-sentence, dial the number, and a man answers on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Donald Shrugs?”

“Is this the police?”

“It’s Detective Theo—”

“Are you at my house?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing there? You broke in? Who the hell gave you the right to break in?”

“Calm down, sir.”

“Calm down? You calm the fuck down. I’m on my way there right now and I’ve already called my lawyer. You are in so much fucking trouble, man.”

“Listen, sir, you need to calm down or you’re going to make things worse.”

“Fuck you,” he says, and he hangs up.

I head outside. I stand by the patrol cars and wait. Five minutes later a car comes speeding down the street. It stops at the cars and the door flies open and at least six officers point their guns at him and his body seems to make six different sounds, among them a high-pitched whine that comes from this throat. The anger drops out of him and he takes a step back.

“Down on the ground now,” one of the men yells at him, and that’s exactly what he does. Another man handcuffs him, then they drag him up. Somebody reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a wallet. He flicks it open and pulls out the driver’s license and hands it to me.

“I told you to calm down, Donald,” I say, looking from the license up to Donald and Donald isn’t who I helped last night. Instead Donald is an overweight guy in his late forties with a shaved head and a diamond earring in his right ear and a nose that is one size too small to fit his features.

“What are you doing in my house?”

“You own a Toyota Corolla?” I ask him.

“You have no right!” he yells, the anger coming back now that the guns have been lowered.

“The car, Donald.”

“What? No, no, I . . .” then he stops. He’s figuring something out.

“What?”

“Shit,” he says. “Listen, it’s not me,” he says. “Whatever you think I did, I didn’t do. I sold that car three days ago. It was an old backup car and we didn’t need it anymore. I put an ad in the paper and some guy came around and bought it. The paperwork is still being filed, man, but I don’t own that car anymore. I promise you.”

“You get a name from him? Any ID?”

“Just a name. James somebody. I can’t remember exactly. But I filed the papers. It’ll be on record.”

“What did James look like?”

“What? Jesus, I don’t know. Scary looking, I guess.”

“Scary how?”

Suddenly he becomes animated again. He’s eager to help, eager to get out of the handcuffs. “Oh, shit, real scary. He looked like he’d been beaten up really badly, and lots too. I didn’t even want to get into the car with him for the test drive.”

“How’d he pay?”

“Cash. It was only five hundred bucks,” he says, talking quickly.

“Uncuff him,” I say, turning toward one of the officers. “Don’t suppose you still have any of the money?”

“Why?”

“So we can fingerprint it.”

“No. It’s all gone. Five hundred bucks doesn’t last long.”

He’s got that right.

An officer uncuffs him and he starts rubbing at his wrists. “What did this guy do anyway?” he asks. “Kill somebody?”

“Thanks for your time, Donald,” I say to him, and leave him leaning against his car. I can hear him complaining to anybody who’s listening, which doesn’t seem to be anybody, so he just talks louder. I find the officer I got a lift with and convince him to let me use his car, telling him he can get a lift back to the
station with somebody else. He doesn’t seem that happy about it but doesn’t put up an argument.

I call Schroder. I tuck the phone between my shoulder and ear and drive carefully around the blockade that’s slowly being disassembled. Media vans are approaching for what for them is going to be a nonevent.

“There are hundreds of files here,” Schroder says, “any one of them could be relevant.”

“Shrugs said he sold the car to a man named James. Apparently James hasn’t filed his ownership papers,” I say. Both buyer and seller must complete ownership forms whenever a car is sold privately. “Shrugs filed his. That’ll give us a last name, assuming he used his real name, which is doubtful.”

“I’ll make the call.”