The Laughterhouse (39 page)

I look at Schroder whose face is blank as my car pulls up behind the first minivan and as we both step out of it. He walks off to take a leak and I walk toward the unit with the dead body. The camera operator follows neither of us, but instead focuses on the next van, more circus performers, and then a few close-ups of some of the detectives I’ve worked with over the last twenty-four hours, including a tight close-up of Detective Kent who never leaves the proximity of the minivan.

Schroder flicks off the TV and hangs his head in his hands.

“It may not be as bad as you think it’s going to be,” I tell him, but of course that’s not true—it’s going to be bad. The media is going to make sure of that.

“I should have listened to you.”

“I . . . ,” I say, but don’t know what exactly it is I want to say. What is there? I wait a few beats, then ask the question I’ve avoided for the last few minutes. “You’ve been suspended?”

He shrugs and looks over at me. “At the least,” he says, “but after seeing that I don’t see how I can keep my job,” he says. “That was Stevens on the phone earlier. He said he has no option but to suspend me. He said any further action isn’t up to him, but yeah, somebody has to fall on their sword, right? And it’s going to be me.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell him.

“Yeah, well, you don’t need to be. You’re the one who told me at the time I was fucking up. I just didn’t listen.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“What have you learned from Tabitha?”

“Carl . . .”

“What am I supposed to do? Go home and do nothing?”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe you’re right, and tomorrow we’ll know for sure, but right now we still have one missing girl and her father and no way to find them. Then tomorrow—yeah, tomorrow is a new day, huh? Remember this morning at the morgue? Remember what I said about maybe it being time to move on? Hell, could be this is for the best.”

He stands up and steps past me. I follow him to the bedroom where Tabitha is finishing up with the diaper change. Cole left behind the diaper bag.

“Tell us what happened tonight,” Schroder says.

She hands Octavia a small teddy bear, and Octavia throws it away from her and then crawls after it. Tabitha sits on the edge of the bed and starts telling us. Octavia picks up the bear, brings it back, and hands it to Tabitha. Tabitha hands it back to Octavia, who throws it again, then crawls off after it.

Tabitha tells us she was reading a book when there was a knock at the door. She answered it. Caleb Cole wanted somewhere he could stay for a day or two. She told him he couldn’t stay there.

“Did he say why he came to you for help?” Schroder asks.

“My guess is he’s desperate, and he thought Tabitha would be on his side,” I say.

Tabitha is looking at me carefully. We both know Cole came to her because of what she did to Victoria Brown. Schroder sees the look, then gives me a similar one.

“I told him to leave the girls and their dad with me, and he said no,” Tabitha says, drawing our attention back to her. She’s a confident talker, no pauses, no backtracking. “He asked if I would call the police, and I said yes. In the end we came up with a deal. He said if I took some sleeping pills, he would leave one of the children with me. He knew my girlfriend would be home tomorrow. I took the deal. It was either that, or he walked out with both children.”

“You saw him the once in jail,” Schroder says. “Why?”

She looks surprised, and I feel surprised. Sometime in the last few hours Schroder must have checked Cole’s visitation records.

“Why? It’s hard to say,” she says, “and, well,” and now the pauses are there, her comfortable way of talking a lot less comfortable. “I felt bad for him. Of course I did. He killed the man that hurt me, and I . . .” she pauses and her pause backs up what she said about it being hard to say.

“You thanked him?” Schroder asks.

“Umm . . . no . . . not really,” she says, shaking her head. Schroder raises his eyebrows at her. She carries on. “Well, okay, maybe I did. He’s suffered more than you’ll ever know,” she says.

“Tell us about his plans for Dr. Stanton,” I say. “Did he mention him much?”

She pauses, her eyes shift up and to the left, and she’s remembering something that happened. I look at Schroder and he looks at me and we both wait. It takes her a few seconds, but she gets there. “This is weird,” she says, “but the thing is, he said he isn’t planning on hurting Dr. Stanton.”

I move forward, and Schroder does the same thing. Octavia picks up the teddy bear and throws it further, then chases after it. “What makes you say that?” I ask.

She slowly starts to nod. “He said he was going to let him go. He promised he wasn’t going to hurt any of them.”

“Did he tell you what he meant by that?” Schroder asks.

She shakes her head. “I believe him too. He’s got no reason to lie. I mean, why would he? And he held up the promises he made me tonight.”

Schroder is shaking his head now too. “Doesn’t make sense,” he says.

I start nodding. We all have our heads moving, just not in the same direction or at the same speed. “I agree. There’s just no way he’s going to let Stanton go.”

“He’s going to,” she says, and she really believes it, nodding
firmly now. “Also, he said something else. He said he wanted Dr. Stanton to walk in his shoes for a while.”

“That’s why he’s pretending to kill the children,” I say.

“But when he lets him go,” Schroder says, “Stanton is going to find out he’s been lied to. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a lot of effort to go to to make the doctor think his kids are dead for only a matter of hours.”

Before now, it made sense because we thought Cole was putting Stanton through this in order to kill him. But if he lets him go . . . Schroder is right, it doesn’t line up.

I realize I’m still shaking my head. So is Schroder.

“He’s going to let him go,” Tabitha says, and she says it so calmly and so positively that it’s hard not to believe she’s right.

“And then what?” Schroder asks.

“And then, well, then I think he’s going to kill himself.”

I look at Schroder and he’s giving me the same look back.

“He told you that?” I ask.

“He said all he has to live for is justice, and once he has it, there’s nothing left. I asked him if he was going to kill himself and he said no, but he also said he won’t go back to jail.”

“And you didn’t believe him,” I say, setting up the next question for Schroder.

“No. I could tell he was lying.”

“Then what makes you so sure he’s been honest about everything else?” Schroder asks.

She looks back down at her hands. “I could just tell,” she says.

“Because in your life you’ve spent two hours with him,” Schroder says.

“I just don’t know what else to tell you,” she says, sounding frustrated.

We step back out into the hallway and Tabitha goes back to playing with Octavia. Detective Kent wanders down to join us.

“Anything useful?” she asks.

“Not much,” Schroder says, and fills her in.

“What do you think?” I ask, directing the question at both of them. “He wants to die?”

Kent shrugs. “It wouldn’t exactly be a surprise.”

“I don’t know,” Schroder says. “Let’s call Barlow and get his take on it.”

I lean against one hallway wall and Schroder leans against the other one, and suddenly I’m aware that I’ve hardly slept in two days. I feel like sinking down into the floor.

Barlow answers on the third ring. He’s still at the station, still talking to Melanie and her mother, trying to mend fences that I can’t imagine ever being mended.

“First things first, Detectives,” he says. “Good job on getting the girl back.”

“It’s not over,” I tell him.

“I know it’s not over, but you have to acknowledge a victory when you have one.”

“I’d rather celebrate when . . .”

“Yes, yes, of course, when everybody is back safe. But let yourself be proud of what has just happened here, Theo. You’ve gotten another of the girls back. Take heart in that. You need to let these moments drive you more than the dark ones.”

We update Barlow. He says nothing as we talk, just absorbing the information until we’re finished.

“Makes sense,” he says. “Whatever he has in mind, he probably figures once it’s done he has nothing left to live for. I’ve been thinking about what we spoke about earlier, about trying to use the media against him. Perhaps, if the media hasn’t reported you’ve found Octavia, we can use this situation somehow. I should know more once I read those letters.”

“Can we set up a story to lead him back to this house?” Kent asks.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Barlow asks. “But I’m not sure how.”

“I might know how,” I say. “We know he doesn’t want to hurt the kids, right?” I say.

Now Schroder is nodding faster. So is Kent and so am I. Kent was right—we should hire a masseuse to follow us around. We’re all going to have sore necks in the morning.

“Yes, yes, exactly,” Barlow says, and I can imagine him caressing his chin with his thumb and forefinger, his other hand supporting his elbow as he’s deep in thought. “I see where you’re going with this, and yes, yes, I think that if Cole believed Octavia was in danger he would either return to the house or he would call the police and tell them where she is.”

“We make something up,” I say, excited now.

“What could we say the baby could be in danger from?” Barlow asks. “Another person?”

Detective Kent shakes her head. “It’s simpler than that,” she says. “We’re gonna need Stevens to help us out, but I think I have the perfect angle.”

What was supposed to take one night or possibly two now has the potential to take three. Or even longer.

The doctor is asleep again with the help of more pills, and Caleb is envious. He wishes he could just lie down and get some sleep. His body is exhausted but his mind is buzzing and it’s all, he realizes, just becoming too much for him. He could take pills too, but he needs to stay sharp. His fingers are aching and his right shoulder is hurting like a bitch after all the lifting he’s been doing. He paces the house. It doesn’t feel like a home, it feels like a show house. It’s a shame the nice fridge in the freshly painted kitchen hasn’t been filled with fresh food. He’s not sure why, but he starts thinking about how Octavia felt in his arms. He liked the way she would rest her head on his shoulder, the way her breath would tickle his ear. He’s not sure why he misses her, all he knows is that he does. He doesn’t miss the way she smelled, and that only would have gotten worse unless he bathed her, but it was nice the way she would look at
him with eyes that didn’t judge. His own daughter used to look at him the same way.

He paces the rooms for another minute before settling back down in the bedroom with the TV plugged back in. He watches the stupid news and the stupid presenters making shit up about him. He hates that they can do that, and at the same time he knows they do have their uses—after all, it was the media that warned him earlier he needed to leave the slaughterhouse.

He stares at the TV but really he’s thinking about Mrs. Whitby. He’s thinking about what he said earlier to Tabitha, about threatening the children and making her help him. Maybe there is something in that. Not with Tabitha, but with the police. He doesn’t have long until the police find him, he knows that. A day or two at the most. He looks at the knife on the bedside table.

If he wanted to, he could pick that knife up, wake the doctor, and put an end to all of this now. Phone the police, phone the media, get them all here earlier than he wanted. It’s not that bad an idea, not really. He’s tired and can’t sleep. He can’t get the judge. He can’t get Whitby’s evil mother. They’re under guard and getting to them is going to be so fucking difficult, unless he can force somebody to help, or unless he can hide for the amount of days or weeks it would take for the police to let down their guard. So yeah, fuck it, he’s sick of waiting, why not grab that knife and put an end to all of this cutting?

He picks up the knife.

He visualizes how it will go—waking up the doctor, showing him the knife, and yeah, by God, he will do it. He’s going to fucking do it right now! He told Tabitha the doctor would be free to go, but it’s not quite that simple and certainly not that accurate.

The mother, the judge—maybe he’ll get them in another life. If James Whitby is in that next life, he’ll get the bastard there again too. In this life Caleb has been fucked by fate. His car battery dying like that, shit, that’s the reason the judge and
the mom didn’t get the ride out to the slaughterhouse along with a guided tour. Okay, that and killing that other guy. He rotates the knife in his hand, studying the handle, the blade, the sharp edge. Fate. Well, it’s not like he shouldn’t have seen it coming. When was the last time fate was any good to him?

He moves to the door. This is it. He’s really going to go through with it. He’s going to let go of everything—the anger, the hate, the disappointment. He doesn’t know whether to smile or cry or laugh, all he knows is that in ten minutes’ time everything will be okay. He’s going to leave all that shit in this life and move on.

Weeks ago he put the phone numbers of the reporters he wanted to contact into his phone. He cues up the first one and presses send. It starts to ring. He stands in the doorway staring at the doctor who is still asleep. So is Katy. All three girls will be better off with their dad no longer around.

“Hello?”

“Yes, is this . . .” he starts, but he can hear the TV from the next room, and it grabs his attention as the tone of the anchor changes.

“We have a live, urgent plea from Superintendent Dominic Stevens to Caleb Cole. Let’s cross to him now.”

“Hello?” the voice says again.

Caleb hangs up and moves into the bedroom. The camera zooms in on Superintendent Dominic Stevens who is standing in front of a podium. There are other microphones and cameras in the picture. Stevens is gripping the edges of the podium and looking down at some notes.

He coughs softly into his hands a couple of times and the room goes quiet. He looks up at the camera, straight at the lens, right at Caleb. His stare is so forceful that Caleb actually glances behind himself to make sure nobody is standing behind him.