Watch Me (30 page)

I stood up, brushed myself down, then went back to the car. I got inside, fired up the engine and turned the air-conditioning to full. Then I sat there with my cellphone in my hand and counted off the seconds. I reached fifty-seven before it rang. I connected the call, pressed the phone to my ear.

‘Where are you?’

55

Hannah was waiting in the shade of the guardhouse at the refinery entrance. She stomped over, wrenched the passenger door open, got in, slammed the door shut. I pulled away from the guardhouse and drove out the gates. For a while we just sat in silence and stared at the world on the other side of the windshield. Hannah was lost in her thoughts. I was lost in mine.

‘Why did the unsub attack Taylor?’ I asked as we drove up the ramp on to the interstate.

‘Don’t you want to know how Taylor’s doing?’

‘How’s he doing?’

Hannah just glared. ‘Don’t you care what happens to him? Even a little bit?’

‘Of course I care. Taylor’s a great guy and I hope he pulls through. But there’s nothing I can do to affect that outcome, not a single goddamn thing. That one’s down to how much Taylor wants to live, and how good the surgeons are in this part of the world.’

Hannah hit me with another icy look. ‘You really are a bastard, Winter. How did you get to be so cold?’

I could still taste Taylor’s blood, and the ache in my arms would be there for the rest of the day. This had nothing to do with being cold, and everything to do with wanting to catch the guy who did this. I’d never wanted anything so badly. Call it revenge, call it whatever the hell you wanted, but someone was going to pay for this.

Unfortunately, there weren’t enough words in the world to make Hannah understand that. She was angry and she wanted someone to blame, and I was as good a target as anyone because I was there. I understood that anger because I’d felt it myself.

Hannah was still glaring. ‘I thought you were supposed to be good at this sort of thing.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve got to say, I’m not impressed. This guy’s been one step ahead of you all the way.’

‘He has,’ I agreed.

For the next few minutes I let her talk herself out. I didn’t listen to a word she said. There was no point. If she was going to be any use to me, she needed to vent. And if I was going to be any use to Taylor, I needed to let her vent without taking it personally. So I just nodded at the appropriate points and offered a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ when she paused for breath and was expecting a response.

Because Taylor
would
want me to catch this bastard. That’s the way he was wired. He didn’t do this for the glory or the backslaps or because he wanted his picture in the papers, he did this to put the bad guys away. We were the same in that respect. Kindred spirits recognised one another.

While Hannah vented, I thought things through, and the one question I kept circling back to was why had the unsub chosen to attack Taylor now? What was the trigger?

As we approached the outskirts of Eagle Creek I noticed a change in Hannah. Her anger was gradually shifting from the external to the internal. This was my cue to intervene. She’d be just as useless to me if she was beating herself up.

I hit the blinker and turned into a residential street that was filled with tidy, well-cared-for detached clapboard houses that were painted in shades of white, blue and grey. I parked at the sidewalk and killed the engine.

‘Let’s take a walk. I need to stretch my legs.’

Hannah stopped talking and looked at me. It was the first thing I’d said in a while, and it obviously wasn’t what she was expecting. I got out of the car, lit a cigarette and started walking away. The street was narrow, the houses squashed up together. It was approaching two and the shadows were short. There was very little shade and absolutely no breeze. The blue medical top was sticking to me before I’d gone even a dozen feet.

A car door slammed. Hurried footsteps behind, coming closer. Hannah fell into step beside me and I offered her the cigarette pack and lighter. She took them without a word, removed a cigarette, straightened it out and lit it.

‘It’s a beautiful day,’ I said. ‘Don’t you just love the feel of the sun on your skin?’

‘No, Winter, it’s way too hot and way too humid.’ She sighed. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I should be with Taylor.’

‘So, why did the unsub attack him?’

‘No idea. Maybe he just did it for the sheer hell of it. Maybe he did it because he could. And anyway, since when does he need a reason?’

‘Believe me, there’s a reason behind everything he does. Which leads us neatly onto question number two. Why didn’t he kill Taylor? Now, that’s the real puzzler. He’s responsible for three deaths, why not make it a fourth?’

‘Maybe he thought he had killed him. I mean, I thought he was dead when I first saw him.’

For a second Hannah looked as though she was going to lose it. She struggled to get that last sentence out. She took a deep breath and squashed her emotions down.

I shook my head. ‘There’s no way this guy would make a mistake like that. He’s into overkill, remember. His first three victims were most definitely dead. There was no grey whatsoever. It was totally black and white. Two shot in the head, one burnt alive. Believe me, if he’d wanted Taylor dead, he’d be dead. Secondly, and this is the clincher, if he wanted Taylor dead, why leave him in the recovery position? You don’t do that if your endgame is to kill someone, you do that if you want to keep someone’s airway open and make sure they don’t choke on their own blood or vomit.’

Hannah said nothing. She had a faraway look on her face, like she’d slipped back into the storeroom.

‘Hannah,’ I said, sharply. ‘I need you here.’ I softened my voice, then added, ‘Taylor needs you here.’

‘What if he dies, Winter? I don’t think I could live without him. And don’t tell me that won’t happen. I saw the way the paramedics were looking at him.’

I stopped walking and turned to face her, placed a gentle hand on her arm. ‘If he dies, then at some point you’ll want closure. The only way that’s going to happen is if we catch this asshole. You’ve chosen to be here, which means a part of you understands that. However, if you’re going to be any use to me I need you to actually be
here
. If you can’t do that, then say the word and I’ll drive you over to the hospital right now.’

For a while we just stood there in the searing heat and stared at each other. Sweat was trickling down my sides and back. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand and it came away soaked. The muscles in Hannah’s face were tight and her lips were two thin strips. There was a battle going on behind those eyes. She wanted to be with Taylor and she wanted to help me catch this bastard, but she couldn’t do both and that was tearing her apart.

‘Okay, why didn’t he kill Taylor?’ Hannah’s voice was so low I could barely hear her.

‘Because he thought we’d go to the hospital with him. If we’re at the hospital, sitting there waiting to hear if he’s going to pull through or not, then we’re not hunting him. Even if I didn’t go, he reckoned I’d be knocked off my game. Anyway that’s not the important question.’

‘So what’s the important question?’

I guided Hannah over to a patch of sidewalk where there was a modicum of shade. The temperature dropped by a couple of degrees, which was nothing when it was a hundred plus.

‘Why now? He staged Choat’s death to make it look like a suicide, and everyone seemed happy with that explanation. So everyone relaxes, lets out a great big sigh of relief. The cops have a dead bad guy and a story that makes sense. The unsub buys himself some time and space to work out what to do next. But then he goes and attacks Taylor. What’s the point in staging Choat’s suicide then going and doing that? As far as the cops are concerned I’d solved the case and I was about to head off into the sunset. The unsub should have just lain low, but he didn’t. Why?’

‘Because he knew we’d worked out it was a hoax.’

‘Exactly. But how did the unsub know we’d worked it out? We were careful. It wasn’t like we advertised the fact. The way I see it there’s only one possibility that makes sense. The car’s bugged.’

Hannah glanced over at the cop car, then looked at me like I was crazy. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Never been more serious. Either it’s hidden under the driver’s seat or under the passenger seat. The unsub will have gone in from the rear seats, though. To make it harder to find. Usually it’s only the bad guys who ride in the back of cop cars, and they don’t tend to be rummaging around under the seats looking for bugs. Everyone else travels up front. If he’d hidden the bug under the dash or in the glove box then that would increase the likelihood of it being found.’

Hannah just stared at me.

‘There is another alternative. Either you or Taylor told him, because I know I didn’t.’

‘And I can tell you for nothing that neither Taylor nor I have breathed a word.’

‘So the car’s bugged. It all comes back to Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is usually the solution. You said yourself that the unsub is one step ahead of us. If he’s listening in to our conversations then that would explain how he’s managing to do that.’

‘Okay, assuming you’re correct, why the car?’

‘It’s not just the car. He’s probably got my room at the Imperial bugged, too. But that one doesn’t count because I’ve been staying at your place.’

Hannah thought this over, then nodded to herself like she’d come to some sort of decision. ‘We can use my car.’

‘Not a good idea. If we do that then the unsub will know we’re on to him. For now, we just need to be careful what we say when we’re in the car.’

I smoked my cigarette and tried to ignore the heat while I considered my next move. Then I thought about the moves I’d already made, and the assumptions I’d made that had led us to this point. I homed in on one particular assumption, and the more I thought about it, the bigger it grew, until it was all I could think about.

Despite the fact that my skin felt like it was on fire, a cold wind was blowing through me. A house built on shifting sand was a disaster waiting to happen. Except, in this case, the disaster had already happened. The fact that Taylor was fighting for his life bore testament to that.

‘I got it all wrong,’ I whispered to myself. ‘This guy is not a serial killer.’

56

‘If he’s not a serial killer, then what is he?’

Hannah was staring at me, waiting for an answer. We were still outside, about fifty yards from the car. Far enough away so that any listening device wouldn’t pick up what we were saying. The sun was burning down furiously and my skin was melting.

‘He’s just a murderer.’

‘Just a murderer,’ Hannah echoed in a dead whisper. There was no emotion, no inflections. ‘You make it sound like he’s a grocery bagger.’

‘This is good news, Hannah. It changes everything. And it gets better, too. This isn’t a hot-blooded murderer we’re dealing with, remember, this guy premeditates, which means we’re dealing with one of the big three motives: revenge, money or belief.’

I was thinking out loud, talking at the speed of my thoughts.

‘We need to take another look at the victims. We can forget about Choat and our homeless John Doe because they were victims of circumstance. Those two can be filed away under wrong place, wrong time. Sam Galloway is a different matter, though. He was very much in the right place at the right time. All we’ve got to do is work out why Sam was murdered and we’ll have this guy nailed.’

I turned and walked quickly back to the car. For the first time since arriving in Eagle Creek I felt we had a handle on this thing. In more innocent times my father had taught me to hunt. What I remembered most was that feeling when you finally picked up the scent of your prey, the way your blood turned hot. That’s how I felt now. My blood was hot and I had the scent of prey in my nostrils.

Hannah was matching my speed step for step. Physically she was right beside me, but mentally and spiritually she was locked in her own private hell. I had a good idea what she was going through, but I wasn’t kidding myself that I knew how she felt. Grief was such a personal thing. It was different for everyone.

We reached the car. I pushed a finger against my lips and shook my head, waited until Hannah nodded that she’d got the message. Then I opened the back door and pretended to rummage around on the seat. I glanced under the driver’s seat and saw nothing, glanced under the passenger seat and saw a small black box attached to the underside. It was half the size of a cigarette pack, maybe smaller. There were no blinking lights, and it didn’t have any distinctive markings. It didn’t have
any
markings. It was just a plain black box. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I would never have found it.

I got in and started the car. Hannah was already buckled into the passenger seat. She asked a question with her eyes and I nodded to her seat. Her eyes widened with surprise and she shook her head in disbelief. I pictured a map of Eagle Creek and plotted the quickest route to McArthur Heights, then put the car into gear and pulled away from the kerb.

We shared some small talk for the first mile or so. Hannah was good. She sounded natural without sounding contrived, and she didn’t give anything away. I imagined the unsub listening in. Would he know what we were up to? I didn’t think so.

He might not know what we were up to, but he’d work out where we were going soon enough. All cop cars were fitted with tracking devices, even this far out into the middle of nowhere.

We drifted into a silence that was as natural and uncontrived as the small talk. After what had happened to Taylor, it would be understandable for Hannah to be quiet. This was something that worked in our favour, possibly the only positive in a situation that was overloaded with negatives. The less talk, the less chance there was of us giving anything away.

While I drove, I thought about Taylor lying on that dirt-streaked concrete floor and the memory of blood filled my mouth. The what-ifs pushed in on me, and I pushed them back. It would be easy to make this my fault. Way too easy, and pointless. What would it achieve? Nothing. Sinking into a pit of self-incrimination and guilt was not going to change what had happened. If anything, it would make things worse since I wouldn’t be able to do my job.