Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  The older man holds the door open for his wife, and keeps the door open for Melissa and she smiles at him and thanks him and can’t think of anybody she’s hurt who looks like them. She steps into a hall big enough to hold a wedding reception and ugly enough to hold a twenty-first birthday party. Every wall is covered in wooden paneling. The floor inside the doorway is wet with footprints and she steps around them carefully, not wanting to fall over in front of these people and have to fake an early labor. She can see and hear the heaters in the hall blasting out hot air, but it’s still cold in here. She closes her new umbrella and leans it up against the wall where there are a dozen similar ones. She takes off her jacket and carries it over her arm. There are thirty people in here, maybe thirty-five. Some are standing around in groups of two or three and chatting with some kind of familiarity. Others are by themselves. A set of chairs form a circle at the far end of the room, and beyond the chairs is a stage where in the past she guesses bands have sung and fathers have given speeches. At the moment there are more chairs than there are people. A long table has been set up with coffee and sandwiches. She wonders if in a few years all these people will begin to socialize, if meetings in summer will be held in parks and people will bring along picnics. Happy little social groups and lifelong friends brought about by death and misery, perhaps some intermarrying and interbreeding to go along with it. Both she and Joe have contributed to that. They should be proud.

  “How far along are you?”

  The voice comes a couple of feet from her left and almost makes her jump. Melissa turns toward the woman and smiles. She doesn’t know what the hell it is with women and why they keep asking her this when they see the bump. They think it’s their Goddamn business. Women who have shared the experience of giving birth seem to think that gives them the right to talk to any pregnant stranger they want to.

  “Baby’s due next week,” she says, rubbing her stomach.

  The woman smiles. She can only be four or five years older than Melissa. She’s wearing a wedding ring and Melissa wonders if she has been pregnant or wants to be, and wonders if the man she wanted to make her pregnant is no longer in this world.

  “Boy or a girl?” she asks.

  “A surprise,” Melissa says, smiling, because it really would be a surprise. She’s wearing a wedding ring of her own and she begins to twirl it around on her finger. She’s seen married people do that too. “It’s what we both wanted.”

  “I saw you come in alone,” the woman says, and her smile disappears. “Your husband, he’s not . . . not why you’re here, is he?”

  “No, no, thank God,” Melissa answers.

  The woman nods slowly, a sad look on her face, then holds out her hand. “My name is Fiona Hayward,” she says.

  “Stella,” Melissa says, simply because it’s the name she decided to use on the way over here. She takes the woman’s hand. It’s warm. “Your husband—is he why you’re here?”

  “He was murdered nearly a month ago,” Fiona says, and her voice catches a little and her tears well up a little. “At home. Some madman followed him home and stabbed him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Melissa says.

  “Everybody is,” Fiona says. “At least they got the guy. And you?”

  “My sister,” she says. “She was murdered.”

  “I’m sorry,” Fiona says.

  “Everybody is,” Melissa says, then smiles at the woman who smiles back and nods. “It was a long time ago,” Melissa adds, remembering her sister, the funeral, the toll it took on her family.

  “This is my first time here,” Fiona says. “I don’t know anybody, and I feel somewhat nervous about being here. I had plenty of friends and family offer to come with me, but, well, I wanted to come alone. I can’t explain why that is, really. Truth is I didn’t even think I would come along, but, well,” she says, then gives a small nervous laugh, “here I am.”

  “My first time too,” Melissa says, trying to think of a way to free herself from this conversation. She thinks about the gun in her pregnancy suit. She draws comfort from it.

  “Do you mind if . . . if I sit with you?”

  Yep. She thinks about taking that gun out. “That would be nice,” she says.

  People are starting to fill the seats. Some are carrying coffee. Some drag their seats a little closer together. When everybody is seated a man in his mid to late fifties goes around picking up the empty chairs and moving them beyond the circle, others dragging their seats forward to close the gaps. He has a few days’ worth of stubble and a pair of designer glasses and expensive shoes. Attractive, with good taste, gray hair—but only in the temples, the rest of it dark brown. Everybody keeps chatting among themselves until Designer Glasses takes a seat then everybody goes quiet. Melissa can’t take her eyes off him.

  “Thank you again for coming along,” he says, his voice is deep and, in other circumstances, probably seductive. Melissa likes him. “I see there are a few new faces in the crowd,” he says, “and I hope the rest of us can offer you some support and companionship, and some hope too. We’re all here out of tragedy. We’re all here because we faced an incredible ugliness. For those who don’t know me, my name is Raphael.” He smiles. “My mother was an art scholar,” he adds, “hence the name,” as if Melissa should care, “and my daughter was a murder victim,” he says, “hence why I’m here.”

  He delivers the line with the casualness of somebody who’s said it a hundred times.

  “This support group,” he says, “was created from loss. My daughter’s name was Angela, and she was killed last year by Joe Middleton,” he says. “He took away a daughter, he took away a wife, and he took away a mother. A few of you are here because of him, and others are here because of similar men to Joe, or similar women,” he says, and there’s a moment where Melissa thinks everybody in the room is going to turn toward her, but of course that doesn’t happen. “I’m a full-time grief counselor,” he adds. “I’ve been helping people for nearly thirty years, and yet when I lost my daughter I could do nothing to help myself until I realized I needed to be with others like me. So we’re all here to help each other,” he says, smiling as he looks from face to face, spending an extra second on Melissa because there’s more of her to take in. “We’re not here to make the pain go away, because nothing can do that. We’re here to share it, to understand it. We’re here because we need to be.”

  Melissa has to suppress a yawn as she looks around the room at the faces. She didn’t have time for a nap and the best she can hope for is that this won’t take long. She’s so tired she could sleep for the next twenty-four hours. Out of all these people, though, somebody will help her. She just has to invest an hour. Or however long it is these meetings go. Talking about your pain doesn’t make it go away. When her sister was killed she had to talk to a shrink every week for a year and it didn’t help an iota. All the shrink kept doing was looking at her legs.

  Everybody is staring at Raphael. Lots of warm bodies for her to choose from, and she doesn’t doubt one of them has to be angry enough at Joe to shoot him.

  The trick is to figure out who.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The first thing Schroder has to get past is the ring of media vans that have shown up. They’re blocking the end of the street, along with the local sightseers. With all the murders in Christchurch he’s surprised people still come out to watch the show, especially in this weather. There really is, he supposes, nothing quite like a good homicide. It makes for great reality and it makes for great TV. The reporters are holding up umbrellas and the camera operators are wrapped in wet weather gear and the cameras are protected by plastic linings. What the city needs—no, strike that—what humanity needs right now is a bolt of lightning, something strong and biblical to come down from the heavens and land in the middle of them all. He wonders if that’s something Jonas Jones might think he can arrange.

  He can’t get the car past them. There’s no way through, and the only way he could give it a good go woul
d be to hit them at a pace somewhere near the speed limit and scatter them all like bowling pins. He has no siren and therefore has to park on the wrong side of the crowd, with them and a lot of rain between him and the scene.

  The exhaustion he was feeling in his last few months of being a cop wasn’t turned in with his gun and badge. Instead it’s been dogging him like a head cold that won’t go away. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the packet of Wake-E tablets that he always keeps within reach these days and swallows one of them, then decides to chase it with another. In five minutes the exhaustion won’t be gone, but it will be bottled inside him with all that other exhaustion he’s built up over the years.

  He climbs out of the car into the rain and shoulders his way through the onlookers. The officers guarding the cordon have to take a double take as he approaches them—they know he’s no longer a cop, but they’re thinking perhaps that’s no longer the case. Before he can start explaining himself, Kent comes toward him, an umbrella keeping the rain off her. She has a quick word to the officers and then Schroder lifts the crime-scene tape and ducks under it. The house is in a quiet neighborhood, not the same house the Walker family used to live in. That place was burned down the same night Detective Calhoun went missing. Burned down, no doubt, by Joe. Since then the land was sold. This one is half the size, a single-story place that’s perhaps five years old at the most, the same color scheme from one house to the next, pale browns and grays that look washed out by the rain.

  Kent holds the umbrella higher so it covers them both, just not that well. He has to take his shoes off at the door and put on a pair of nylon booties. The body is in the hallway, just inside from the front door. Hutton comes and joins them.

  Schroder feels like he’s back on the job. The smells and sights and sounds all confirm he’s in an authentic crime scene and nobody is going to draw a chalk outline around anything and ask him if he thinks the dialogue could be tightened. He’s cold and wet and miserable, which completes the sense of realism. He can see down the end of the hall into the lounge. Dark brown carpet and plush sofas and warm color walls. All very homey, except for Tristan Walker himself, who is lying on his side with one hand on his chest and the other hand pinned beneath him. It’s been twelve months since he last saw Tristan Walker. Walker was staying with his parents at the time. Schroder went there to tell him they’d made an arrest.

  Kent and Hutton couldn’t be more opposite. Hutton is overweight. He wasn’t that way when he joined the force, couldn’t have been because he never would have been accepted, but now the guy consumes so much sugar he has to stay out of the rain for fear of dissolving. Hutton remains on the force because he’s so large it would almost be like firing two detectives—though, ironically, it was simple for the department to fire Schroder. Back when Caleb Cole made him kill somebody.

  Kent is attractive. Stunning, even. The kind of woman you look at and would give up a week of your life just to see her smile. No doubt half the guys here are in love with her.

  “This is the third victim,” Kent says.

  “Huh?”

  “The third victim,” she repeats.

  He lets the information settle for a few seconds. “You’re telling me you’ve got two others like this?” he asks.

  Kent smiles at him. “I’m glad your mind has stayed sharp since leaving the force, Carl. That’s some quick addition.”

  “You should see me with crayons,” he says. “I always stay within the lines.”

  “Sounds like you’re living on the edge.” She steps around the body so they can talk to each other, the three of them forming a triangle with a dead guy in the middle.

  “Victim one was last week,” Kent says. “Guy by the name of Sam Winston.”

  “I read about him in the papers. He was found in an abandoned building in town. From what I read it looked like he was killed by a drug dealer.”

  “That’s what we thought too. Name mean anything to you?”

  Schroder shakes his head. “Should it?”

  “Probably not. He used to be in the army until he was discharged five years ago. He had a pretty big drug problem, hence why we believed that was related to the way he died. He wasn’t even in the army for long. Two years. After that he spent his days being unemployed and earning unemployment checks.”

  “And now you think there’s a connection.”

  “It looks the same. As soon as the bullets are pulled from Walker we’ll send them to ballistics and check for a match.”

  “So you only have a theory?” Schroder asks.

  Hutton shakes his head. “We have a time line,” he says. “People get killed in all sorts of strange ways in this city,” he says, “but not often by guns, and here we’ve got three victims within a week all with the same gunshot pattern.”

  Schroder nods. It’s too much to ignore. “No connection between Walker and Rivers?”

  Kent answers the question. “We’ve got a guy who sells guns and explosives, and another guy who’s trained in using them. But no connection between them.”

  “Not yet anyway,” Hutton says.

  “And nothing between either of those two and Walker,” Schroder says.

  “Just the way they died,” Kent says.

  “Walker didn’t have a drug habit?”

  “If he did, he kept it well hidden. There’s nothing here to suggest he was using.”

  “So what do you want from me?” Schroder asks.

  “We want you to help us with Walker,” Kent says. “You knew him. You spent time with him and his family. What would a guy like Walker have in common with Rivers and Winston?”

  “I didn’t know him, I just interviewed him. Several times,” Schroder says, and that was because there were indications that Walker used to beat his wife, and indications that perhaps the wife hadn’t been killed by Joe Middleton. For a while there Walker was a suspect. But ultimately Walker had an unshakable alibi for her murder, and they came up with no other suspects.

  “Come on, Carl,” Kent says, “you were the lead on the Carver investigation. You know why we’ve asked you down here.”

  Schroder nods. He knows this is why he’s here. Like Hutton said, it’s all about the time line. Three killings all within a week, all within days of Joe’s trial starting. Hutton and Kent think it’s related to the Carver.

  “Okay,” he says. “Tell me where you’re at.”

  “We have a theory,” Hutton says.

  “An ex-con, an army dropout, and Walker,” Kent says. “They were planning something together, or working with somebody who is planning something, and it involves explosives.”

  “We have forensics,” Kent says. “Shell casings. We have hairs. Long hairs. Same blonde hairs at each location. No DNA, because they’re synthetic.”

  “So the killer was wearing a wig,” Schroder asks.

  “Seems like it,” Kent says. “And most likely a woman. Men don’t tend to wear wigs that are shoulder length. Plus the hairs were found in the lounge too. Which means if they belong to the person who shot him, then she didn’t just knock on the front door and shoot him when he answered. It means she was inside. Of course it could be two different things. They could belong to somebody who he talked with inside, and it could be somebody else who came to his door and shot him.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “All over the place,” Hutton says, “and most of them we’ve ruled out. Nothing so far with any matches.”

  “And you want to know if I think Melissa is involved,” Schroder says. “That’s why I’m really here. Because Joe’s trial starts next week.”

  “None of the prints we’ve found so far match hers,” Kent says. “But do you think it’s possible? She’s staying hidden somehow. It only makes sense she’s using some techniques to change her appearance. Of course she’s probably wearing a wig.”

  “It’s a completely different MO if it is her,” he says. “Different signature. None of these people were in uniform. None were tortured. If it’s her,
why is she targeting these people?”

  “Because of the time line,” Hutton says. “We’re less than a week out from Joe’s trial.”

  “We’re running background checks on all of them,” Kent says. “We’re seeing what they have in common. Where their lives intersected. The problem is they may not intersect. It’s possible they don’t know each other, but they know a common denominator.”

  “Okay,” Schroder says. “Okay. Let’s think about it. Think it through,” he says. “Let’s play with the idea that it’s Melissa. What reason has she got? Let’s break it down one victim at a time. Let’s start with Sam Winston,” he says. “Why work with him?” he asks, and he wonders what the scriptwriter for The Cleaner would make of this. Not realistic enough? Not fast-paced enough? Too much standing around and thinking?

  “We’re still piecing it together,” Kent says.

  “Okay,” Schroder says, knowing the scriptwriter would be disappointed. “Let’s focus on the timing of it all. Melissa or not, we could be dealing with somebody who’s going to make some kind of a statement. We could be looking at a courthouse bombing, or a police station bombing. We know Melissa likes killing people, but she’s more into the personal touch. I don’t see a mass bombing being her style. Her style is torturing people.”

  “But if she tortured these people, we’d immediately know it was her,” Hutton says, “which would give her a good reason not to if she’s trying to hide the fact it’s her. And the only reason she’d hide that is if she has something planned that is much bigger than any of this, and explosives have a way of being used for bigger things.”

  Schroder nods. It’s a good point. “What about Walker,” he says. “What’s the coroner say?”