Blood Men Read online

  The warden shows up. He’s in a suit that probably cost all of a hundred bucks, and he has a neutral sick-of-the-same-shit look about him-like my dad almost getting murdered can’t muster up a single ounce of excitement in him. He’s in his midfifties and uses the facial expressions he’s learned over all those years to look at me with complete contempt. Without saying a word to me, he heads into the cell and directs his wrath at Schroder.

  “Who the hell said you could bring a civilian in here?” he asks, loud enough for most of the prisoners in the wing to hear. “Are you insane? This is an absolute breach of policy and will cost you your badge.”

  I don’t hear Schroder’s response-his voice is low and forceful, and when the warden responds his voice is low and forceful too. I try my best to listen in to what they’re saying, but can’t pick up much except a couple of names, one of which I’ve heard before. Their quiet argument goes on for a few minutes, and when the warden reemerges from the cell, he’s no happier as he storms past me, followed by the two prison guards he brought with him, cheered along the way by some of the prisoners.

  The two detectives keep searching my father’s cell as if there could be a dozen hidden compartments, and after thirty minutes they come up with nothing. In the end they walk out dejected, like they were hoping for a reason to arrest my dad all over again. We’re escorted back out the same way we came in.

  In the car Schroder lays out the facts. There are no suspects in my father’s case-except for the fifty men who piled on top of him. It seems unlikely that figure will be narrowed down, and even more unlikely they’ll try to narrow it down. When my dad wakes up he may be able to help-but until then there’s not much they can do.

  I remember what my dad said yesterday when he gave me that name. He knew he was putting himself in danger. I think after twenty years he’d had enough of this place, he’d seen his son again, he’d seen an opportunity to be a father, and that was the best he was ever going to get.

  We pass a couple of media vans going the other way, racing out toward the prison; news of my dad has already hit the city. It’ll be on the news tonight, the prison as a backdrop, and I’ll be on the news tonight and in the papers tomorrow too. They’ll probably accuse me again of killing my wife. Of course that’s just journalists being journalists, not caring if they turn my life upside down for the chance of a story. Each year the competition gets edgier and edgier, compelling them to give up their ethics-and tonight they’ll be speculating on how far the apple really fell from the serial-killer family tree.

  We reach my street and there are no media vans parked anywhere. They’ll arrive though, with their cameras and lights and makeup kits. Landry is driving. He pulls up outside of the house and I climb out.

  “Hang on a sec, Bill,” Schroder says to Landry, then follows me out. “You can make our lives a lot easier, Edward, if you tell me what you and your father discussed. You probably don’t see it, but it could go a long way toward catching the people who killed your wife.”

  “What makes you think that’s what we were talking about?”

  “Far as I can figure, there’s plenty for you two to talk about-but with the timing the way it is, it’s pretty obvious he was putting together a list of names. Look, Edward, you better think long and hard about what you want to do next,” he says. “See, it doesn’t look good for you. You go and see your father yesterday, and today one of the men who robbed that bank is dead. Then today your father gets a hit put out on him.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “I know you can’t, Edward. But you’re not seeing the big picture,” he says.

  “And what’s that?”

  “I’m not saying you killed our victim last night. We’ll know soon-there was enough blood at the scene that somebody thought they could clean up with bleach, but they didn’t get it all. We’ll run it against your father’s, check for DNA markers-that way we don’t need a warrant for your DNA. So we’ll know about you for sure, soon enough. The problem you’ve got is that I’m not the only one who thinks you were there. They tried to shut your dad up before he got more names. That means they’re going to want to shut you up too. You’re going to drown in the mess, Edward, unless you start helping us.”

  “You’re wrong,” I say, thinking about the small concrete cells, the other men inside them, and spending the next ten years there. “There’s another alternative.”

  “Oh?”

  “These people killed their own man for whatever reasons. Drugs, money, some weird gang-loyalty thing, whatever. They killed him, and that means they have no reason to come after me. They know I’m innocent.”

  “I certainly hope for your sake that’s what happened,” he says.

  I open my mouth to answer, but am not sure how. I think about Sam and I think about the cells, and I think the best solution for everybody is if I take my daughter and leave. Today. Get the hell out of this city. Out of this country.

  “The blood will tell us if you were there last night. You can save yourself a lot of pain by telling me the truth. You sure you want to play it this way?”

  I don’t answer him.

  “Then you better watch your back,” he says, then turns and heads to the car.

  chapter thirty

  I head inside. It’s a beautiful day but I close the door on it. Nat and Diana were going to take Sam to the park today, so right now they’re probably pushing her on a swing or making sure she doesn’t fall off a slide. They don’t have a cell phone. Well, they do, but they use it differently from the rest of the world-they only switch it on when they need to make a call, the rest of the time saving power, a habit I think most people in the retirement generation have. I try the cell phone now but it’s switched off.

  I try their home number on the chance they’re home, but nobody answers and they don’t have a machine. They’re at the park or the pool or the mall. When she comes home, what do I do then? Tell Schroder the truth and live the next ten years of my life the way Dad has lived the last twenty? I can’t do that, but I also can’t take the chance of Sam becoming a target. I hate the idea of leaving my wife behind, but she’ll understand. She’ll want what’s best for Sam-and what’s best for Sam is somewhere like Australia or Europe. Last night was an accident, but Schroder will never believe that. There will be no more accidents, though. The police have a name, they have a starting place now, and they’ll find the rest of the men who killed Jodie. Those men will be put away for eight or ten years and that’s the best I can hope for. There will be future robberies, future victims, but there’s nothing I can do about that.

  Making the decision to leave is hard in some ways, easy in others-but once it’s made there’s no reason to delay. I know how guilty that’s going to make me look. Damn it, I should’ve taken the money from Kingsly’s house, to make this move a whole lot easier. I move around the living room but don’t dwell on the fact that soon I’ll never see this house again, my in-laws, this festering city that took my wife. With this in mind, my neighborhood is different-darker, everything gritty, it’s now the kind of place where only one bad day separates it between suburbia and a war zone. I walk to the sidewalk and search up and down the road for the sedan I figure will be there. It’s about fifty meters away, dark grey, two shapes behind the window, too far away to see their faces. They’re going to babysit me, they’re going to report every move I make to Schroder-which means I might make it to the airport but not on board a plane.

  I drive up the street, watching the sedan in my mirror. It doesn’t move, not until I reach the intersection, then it pulls out from the curb. I go around the corner. Twenty seconds later the car comes around the corner too. I’ve never been tailed before, and I don’t know whether the driver is doing a good job or a bad one. Then I realize it all comes down to whether or not he cares about being seen. Schroder probably figures if I know the tail is there I’ll be less of a problem for them. Fewer people will die.

  I drive past an old miniature golf course that was
brand new when my dad took me for the first and only time, when I was a kid. All the shine and color has drained from the signs over the years, the Wild West theme now just looks wild, as weeds and moss gradually pull the signs down into the earth. There are a couple of cars in front, but I can’t see anybody playing through the wire-mesh fence. I still remember vividly Dad and me walking from one hole to the next, miniature water hazards and ramps all encompassed by a miniature ghost town, writing down our scores with miniature pencils. It was a simpler time back then, I guess. Smaller in a way.

  I wonder what my dad would do if he were still free and knew he was being followed. This must have happened to him too, near the end, when the noose tightened. He probably wouldn’t even have felt the pressure.

  It takes fifteen minutes to get to my in-laws.’ I pull up in the driveway and the sedan drives past. I get out and knock on the front door but nobody answers. I get my cell phone out and try calling again but still no answer. I walk around the house, through the side gate and into the backyard. I look through the windows for turned-over furniture and blood on the carpet, holding my breath as I move from one window to another, Schroder’s warning coming to life in my imagination-but there’s nothing out of place. I try the door. It’s locked. I head to the garage and put my face against the window, and when I pull back I can see the reflection of the grey sedan pulling up. It sits there with the engine running. I turn toward it. The windows are up and the sun reflects off them so I can’t see inside, not until the passenger-side window is wound down. A pale face with a sunburned nose looks at me from behind a pair of dark sunglasses.

  “Eddie Hunter?” he says, and the way he asks it makes me nervous. If these were cops, they’d know who I was. They’d know where I’ve just led them. Reporters would know too.

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  “We know who killed your wife,” he says, and my body instantly freezes. “For the right price we can tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing in this world is free,” he says. “I got something here to show you, it’ll prove what I’m saying,” he says.

  I take another step forward, a voice in my head yelling at me that this is a mistake, that I’m being lured closer. I take a step sideways, away from the car, and the barrel of a shotgun appears in the open window and fires.

  chapter thirty-one

  It’s a matter of priorities. If one of the bank tellers was an inside man, they’ll know soon enough. Schroder is confident a series of interviews will get them some answers before the day is out. Hell, maybe the whole thing will be over before Christmas Day even begins.

  He drives back to Kingsly’s house with Landry and drops him off. The plan is for Landry to get started on the interviews while Schroder goes back out to the prison. The trip there earlier didn’t net them much. They found medication in Hunter’s cell. The warden said he was given two pills to take every day. Adding up the pills they found suggests he stopped taking his meds the day of the robbery. Instead of flushing them, he was saving them. Maybe, Schroder thinks, Hunter was planning on building a stockpile to take the whole lot at once.

  When he gets back to the prison, Theodore Tate is already waiting for him. Tate used to be a cop until a few years ago, when he turned private investigator, and after both those things he became a criminal. The visiting room is empty except for Schroder and Tate and one prison guard against the far wall, hardly paying any attention. It’s been a few months since he last saw Tate. He hasn’t changed much, except his hair is shorter and he’s lost a bit of weight.

  “Thanks for doing this, Tate,” he says, sitting down opposite him.

  “I was surprised you called,” Tate says. “I mean, in the beginning I was. I thought you were calling to check up on me, to see how I was doing. It was a surprise, a nice one even. Then it turns out you wanted something.”

  “Look, Tate, I’ve been meaning to come and see you for some time now,” he says, and even though he means it, he knows he would never actually have done it. There’s nothing worse than seeing a fellow cop in jail-even if he isn’t a fellow cop anymore. “I just, you know, didn’t get around to it. You know how it is.”

  “Actually I don’t. You could educate me. We could swap places and see how it goes.”

  “I understand why you’re bitter, but it’s not my fault you’re in here.”

  “I realize that. Only sometimes it’s easier if I can blame somebody else except myself. Hell, maybe it’s even therapeutic,” he says, smiling at that last bit. “So-what’s new? How’s Christchurch? Is it still broken?”

  “It’s not broken,” Schroder says, and he really believes that. Really, absolutely, almost believes that.

  “Yeah, well, I think it’s broken no matter what side of the bars you’re on. So what is it you want, Carl?”

  “Your help. You heard about Hunter, right?”

  “Everybody heard,” Tate says.

  “You heard anything more than that? Like who stabbed him?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “I think he was stabbed because he got hold of some names.”

  “What names?”

  “I think he was putting together a list of the men who robbed the bank last week.”

  “And that got him stabbed?”

  “Giving those names to his son got him stabbed,” Schroder answers.

  “And you think the son is going to go after these people?”

  “I’m pretty sure he already has. One of the robbers was found dead this morning. The victim drove the van. Timing fits perfectly. Dad gives son a name, that guy shows up dead, the next day Dad gets stabbed. The scene this morning was pretty messy. He got killed by somebody who had no idea what they were doing. Whole thing could have been an accident, or a fluke, the way it played out.”

  “You think the son is capable of it?”

  “You tell me,” Schroder says. “You think it’s possible for a man to kill in revenge for his family?”

  “Depends on the man,” Tate says.

  “Well, this man has a father who’s a serial killer. His shrink came to see me yesterday. He thinks Jack Hunter suffers from an illness that could be passed to the son. Paranoid schizophrenia-he says it can be hereditary. Says it’s a medical thing. He told me Edward Hunter has the potential to be a real bad guy. I wasn’t so sure, not then-but now I think so.”

  “So arrest him.”

  “We will, once we have more evidence. Landry tried to bluff him out saying we had a witness, but he didn’t go for it. We have blood, though. That’ll tell us.”

  “So where do I fit into this equation of yours?”

  “Two different ways. You can find out who stabbed Hunter. That might lead us back to the bank crew. Or maybe you can get some names for us. Hunter managed it, so maybe you can manage it too.”

  “Nobody’s going to talk to me.”

  “There’s more of a chance they’ll talk to you than to me.”

  “So why am I doing this for you? Why stick my neck out like that?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “For you, maybe. Not for me. My best chance of survival in here is to keep a low profile, which is damn hard to do when there are others in here I arrested back in the day.”

  “There’s a girl in the equation. Edward Hunter has a daughter.”

  Tate slowly nods. “And you were waiting to lay that on me, figuring it would work.”

  “Did it?”

  Tate stands up and Schroder follows suit. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  chapter thirty-two

  I drop down, the shotgun exploding, and I’m back at the bank all over again, the air-conditioning replaced by real air, the houseplants replaced by bushes and trees, the six men replaced by two men in a car. A hole appears in the garage door about the same time my knees crash into the concrete.

  The car door starts to open. I have nowhere to run, I have no idea what to do. But then I realize I’m not alone, I have my monste
r with me and he knows what to do. We’re already in action. I get up and run forward, the monster leading the way, the monster in full control and now I’m the one along for the ride. We get closer to the car. To me this seems the wrong way to be going, but I’m in no position to argue. A leg comes out of the car and touches the sidewalk: jeans and a black steel-capped boot. I drop down and ram the entire weight of my body into the door, leading with my shoulder, slamming it hard on the leg. The guy inside yells out and the shotgun drops somewhere inside the car, buying me a couple of seconds. I don’t wait around. I run up the street, crossing behind the car, making it difficult for them to fire on me.

  The car hits reverse. The transmission whines loudly as the gap closes. Words of anger spill out the window as the two men swear at each other, a miscommunication passing between them. Maybe the passenger wanted to get out and take another shot, or the driver wanted to hit me with the car in the beginning. I weave across to the opposite sidewalk. The car screeches to a halt. It fishtails so the front turns toward me. The doors fly open and the two men jump out, but the driver has forgotten he’s still wearing his seat belt and he’s pulled back in, his eyes wide in confusion.