Watch Me (27 page)

‘How so?’

‘Choat would have maybe kept going for another year or so before the guilt and pressure got too much. Best-case scenario, he would have ended up committing suicide. Worst-case, he would have gone postal and marched into the high school and shot up a load of kids.’ I stopped, thought about this, shook my head. ‘No, not a school, a church. He’d wait for Sunday to come around and then go into the busiest church in town and shoot as many people as he could before he ran out of ammunition. He would have saved the last bullet for himself, though.’

We went inside. It was stiflingly hot and there wasn’t any oxygen. Garden tools hung on the left-hand wall. A spade, hoe, fork, all positioned level and parallel. The large workbench that stretched the length of the back wall had been there for years and the wood had darkened with age. Cupboards on the bottom level, a single line of drawers above that, and then the workbench. Tools hung neatly on the wall above, ordered by type and size, screwdrivers at one end, hammers at the other.

Hannah started at the left end of the bench, while I started at the right. The plan was to search the cupboards and drawers and meet in the middle. The first drawer I tried opened smoothly and had a tray that looked like it contained every type of screw known to man, all separated into their own little partitions. The cupboard underneath contained coils of rope of varying thickness and length.

‘I think I’ve found something,’ Hannah called out from the other end of the bench.

I went over to where she was crouched down beside one of the cupboards.

‘Now, why do you think this cupboard would have a lock when none of the others do?’ she asked.

I looked along the line of cupboards and saw she was right. A small keyhole had been cut out of the door underneath the knob. I took out my leather wrap and selected the smallest pick. The lock was small and fiddly and it took a couple of attempts to crack it. I opened the door with a flourish.

The cupboard was empty.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Hannah. ‘What’s the point in having a locked cupboard that’s empty?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe he lost the key.’

‘In that case either there’d be something in here that wasn’t worth breaking the door down for, or we’d be looking at a busted lock. It’s not just the fact the cupboard’s locked, Winter, it’s the fact it’s empty. You don’t lock an empty cupboard. That’s the bit that doesn’t make sense.’

I leant into the cupboard to get a better look. There was something different about this cupboard and it took a second to work out what. It was slightly smaller than the one I’d looked in at the other end of the bench. I rapped a knuckle against the bottom shelf and heard a hollow echo. I pressed the shelf at the back and the front rocked upwards. Underneath was a stash of magazines.

Hannah pulled out the top one and held it up. There were two men dressed in leather on the front cover. One of the men was on all fours, a ball gag wedged tightly into his mouth, a studded dog collar around his neck. She flicked through the magazine, shaking her head. Her expression was difficult to read. There was no disapproval on her face, but there was a kind of sadness and some anger, too. She closed the magazine and shook it at me.

‘Nobody should die because of something like this. So what if he was gay and into S&M? It was his life.’

‘Except that’s not going to be the majority view around here. That’s why the unsub was able to use it as leverage.’

Hannah turned to face me and there was only one emotion left on her face. The anger had eclipsed everything else. ‘I hate this town. The sooner I get out, the better.’

49

We put the magazine back, repositioned the false floor and locked the cupboard. I took one last look around to make sure everything was exactly as we’d found it, then we went outside, closed the garage and headed back down the path that led through Choat’s yard. I stopped at the sidewalk and put my sunglasses on, scanned the yards on the other side of the street.

‘So what have we got?’ The question was aimed as much at myself as Hannah. ‘We’ve got a spooked unsub who’s making mistakes. We’ve got a crime scene. And last night we saved someone else from getting torched. This guy’s on the ropes and he doesn’t even know it.’

‘But we still don’t know who he is.’

‘We don’t know who he is
yet
,’ I corrected. ‘Okay, the next thing we need to do is work out exactly how and where Choat was abducted.’

I took out my cell and called Taylor. His phone rang out and went to voicemail. I left a short message asking him to find out if Choat was on duty yesterday and, if he was, to see what shift he was working. I hung up and tapped the phone against my chin.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘With crimes like these, the abduction phase is always the riskiest because the unsub needs to come out into the open. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, as soon as you do that you run the risk of being seen, which in turn increases the chance of being caught. That’s the catch 22. You can sit at home and fantasise all you want and stay safe, but if you want to be a real player then you need to get out there and find yourself a nice warm body to have some fun with. But you’re not stupid, so you do everything possible to reduce the risks.’

‘You think Choat was abducted here.’

I was still staring at the yards on the opposite side of the street. From left to right they read: young couple with kids, working couple, retirees, working couple. ‘It makes sense. He lives alone, and you saw how easily we managed to break in.’

‘But the bad guy would still need to be out in the open, even if only briefly.’

A drape opened an inch at the retirees’ house, then quickly fell back into place.

‘Exactly.’ I started walking. Hannah had caught up by the time I reached the opposite sidewalk. ‘How are you at impersonating a police officer?’

‘Can’t say it’s something I’ve ever done.’

‘It’s easy. You just need to stand there looking as intimidating as possible. And let me do the talking.’

This yard was as neat as Choat’s, and the picket fence looked like it had been whitewashed in recent memory. We walked up the path and knocked on the door. I used the midnight cop knock. Loud and insistent and impossible to ignore. Someone knocks like this and you come running, your heart thundering in your chest because you know instinctively that there’s bad news on the way. This was a knock that interfaced directly into some primal part of our programming.

The hurried footsteps in the hall were followed by the deadbolt being unlocked, then the Yale. Any protection they offered was illusory since anyone who was halfway competent with a set of picks could be inside within a couple of minutes. And if you didn’t have two minutes, you could always go in via a window. Security on windows was generally pretty substandard. The harsh reality was that if someone wanted to break into your house badly enough, they’d find a way.

The door rattled open as far as the intruder chain allowed and a woman’s ancient face peered through the gap.

‘What do you want?’

‘Just a few minutes of your time, ma’am. We’re from the sheriff’s department.’

The woman looked at us like we’d just claimed to be aliens. I didn’t blame her. We looked nothing like cops. Neither of us had cop hair, then there were the T-shirts.

‘I’ll need to see some ID.’

I patted my pockets and made a face. ‘I must have left it back in the car.’

Her eyes narrowed to slits. ‘So I’m supposed to take you at your word?’

I stood aside and nodded to the cop car, gave her a second to take in the markings. I was wishing Taylor was here. At least, I was wishing his badge was. A badge would make this situation a whole lot easier.

‘Ma’am,’ said Hannah.

The old lady’s sharp eyes zoned in on her. They were eyes that didn’t miss a thing.

‘All due respect, missy, you look even less like a cop than he does.’

‘You heard what happened to Sam Galloway? The lawyer?’

‘Yeah, I heard.’

‘Well we’ve been brought in from Shreveport to help with the investigation. The reason we’re dressed like this is because we were working undercover. As soon as we closed that case, me and my partner came rushing over here to help out. We didn’t even have time to get changed.’

‘Yeah, but you’d still have ID.’

‘Ma’am, we were working undercover, chasing down some really bad people. If they’d found ID on us they would have killed us.’

The old woman glanced past us at the car, then the door slammed shut in our faces. A couple of seconds later there was the rattle of an intruder chain being unlatched.

‘I was supposed to be doing the talking.’ I whispered.

‘You’re welcome,’ she whispered back. I raised an eyebrow and she added, ‘If I’d left it to you, Winter, we’d still be standing here at Christmas.’

The door opened and we turned to face the old woman wearing our best smiles. In the bright sunlight, the woman didn’t look as old as I’d first thought. Late sixties, early seventies. Her cheeks were sunken because she’d lost most of her teeth, making her look older, an effect that had been compounded by the gloomy hallway. She nodded to Choat’s house.

‘You think Daniel did it, don’t you? You think it was him who burnt up that lawyer?’

‘What’s your name, ma’am?’

‘Annie Dufoe. What’s yours?’

‘I’m Detective Winter.’ I nodded to Hannah. ‘And this is my colleague, Detective Hayden.’

‘Well now we’ve got all the niceties out the way, howabouts you answer my question?’

‘Yes ma’am, he’s a suspect.’

Annie nodded like everything was clicking into place, like this all made perfect sense. ‘There was always something strange about that boy. He was so quiet and polite. It wasn’t natural. Then again, it wasn’t his fault.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘A boy needs his father. I don’t know if you know this, but his daddy died when he was young.’

I nodded. ‘He was a war hero.’

‘He was, but he didn’t die in no war, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ She nodded to the garage. ‘He blew his brains out in there. It happens. Some people go to war but only a part of them makes it back, and not the good part. Lord knows, I’ve got nothing against a person enjoying a drink, but some people can take it too far. They don’t know when to quit.’

I knew exactly what she meant. I was thinking about my mother and her slow dive into the darkness at the bottom of a bottle. ‘Daniel found his father’s body, didn’t he?’

Another nod. ‘Any other kid would have run out of there screaming. They’d have run a mile in the other direction, got away as quick as they could. Not Daniel. He went and got a bucket of soapy water and scrubbed that floor clean while his daddy was turning stiff less than a foot away. His poor mother found them both in there when she got back from work. She told me later that he was just sat there with the bucket between his knees, staring into space.’

‘When did you last see Daniel?’

Annie sucked in her cheeks and squashed her lips together with her thumb and forefinger. ‘Last night. It was a little before seven. I remember because I’d just finished washing up after dinner and my stories hadn’t started on the TV. My kitchen window looks out over the street.’

‘Was it unusual for him to go out at that time of night?’

A shake of the head. ‘He worked shifts so he was always coming and going at all sorts of hours.’

‘Did you notice anything suspicious happening over there last night?’

Another shake of the head. ‘I’m generally in bed by ten. Once I’m asleep nothing can wake me.’

‘Thank you for your time, Mrs Dufoe,’ I said.

‘I hope you catch him soon.’

‘Well, until we do, you make sure that door’s locked up nice and tight.’

‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

The door slammed shut and the locks engaged one after the other. The intruder chain went on last, rattling back into place.

50

‘Smoke and mirrors.’

We were back in the car with the engine running and the air-conditioner going full blast, the temperature slowly dropping. The sun was burning through the windshield and my T-shirt was sticking to me.

‘What are you talking about?’ Hannah asked.

‘The unsub has created an illusion. However, illusions only work if the audience buys into them. The magician can’t tell an audience what to believe. All he can do is make suggestions. He can take them by the hand and invite them to go where he wants, but they have to make the decision to go with him. In this case, we have a body, a gun and a note. Put it all together and it adds up to suicide.’

‘I’m hearing a “but”.’

‘But there’s always going to be that sliver of doubt. If you make a woman disappear and then reappear in exactly the same spot you can work out a dozen ways the trick might have been executed. Maybe there’s a false panel in the box, maybe there’s a trapdoor in the stage. However, if the woman reappears on the upper balcony in defiance of the laws of time and space, then we start to believe in the magic. So, what’s the detail that turns this illusion from a run-of-the-mill parlour trick into a top level piece of magic?’

Hannah scrubbed a hand through her spiky hair, thinking hard. She shook her head. ‘Sorry. No idea.’

‘The notepad.’

She shot me a disbelieving look.

‘The notepad is a stroke of genius. That’s what connects the illusion to the real world. Without that connection we’d always be wondering, because without it everything happens on stage, or, in this case, a garage in an old abandoned refinery. It all goes back to our disappearing woman. By having her reappear on the balcony the illusionist is bridging the gap between the stage and the real world. So, how did the notepad get into Choat’s house?’

‘Maybe it belonged to Choat and the unsub found it in his house.’

I shook my head. ‘No way. The unsub took it there. If forensics bother to count the sheets of paper they’ll find that only one is missing, the one that was all neatly folded up in Choat’s pocket. So how did this play out?’

Hannah chewed at her lip and stared through the windshield at the haze rising from the road surface. I was staring too, thinking this one through.
How did it play out?
In my mind, I’d travelled back in time to yesterday.