Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “I’ve canceled the call to AOS,” he says, “but forensics are on their way.”

  “Look at that,” Schroder says, pointing to a blood patch on the wall.

  “It’s not from the paramedic,” Hutton says. “Doesn’t fit in with the other blood patterns.”

  “It’s from Joe. He sat down here and leaned against the wall. There are plenty of blood drops leaving the ambulance, and here too,” he says, pointing at the ground. “Melissa switched vehicles.”

  “She probably had one here ready rather than stealing one,” Hutton says.

  “Exactly. Quicker and easier,” Schroder says. He looks up around the parking lot. “No cameras,” he says.

  Hutton shakes his head. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he says. “It’s part of the upgrade. Cameras are getting installed in all the entranceways, and soon in the parking lot too.”

  “Soon doesn’t help us.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but the camera at the entrance there might,” Hutton says, and points toward the public entrance. “It’s designed to see people coming and going, but it does point toward the parking lot. Maybe if we’re lucky . . .”

  Lucky. He wonders how that word is defined. Joe was lucky because he escaped. Schroder was lucky he got out of the car before it exploded. So that means there has to be a balance. For each piece of good luck there has to be bad luck. That’s the thing about Christchurch. Good luck for Joe and Melissa, bad luck for Rebecca and Jack and for Raphael too.

  “Let’s check it out.”

  “Listen, Carl—” Hutton starts.

  “Hey, look, this is a hospital, and this is a broken arm,” he says, “which means I’m going back in there anyway. You’re going in there too—no reason we can’t both go the same way.”

  “Carl—”

  “You’ve let me come this far, Wilson. No reason to stop now. All I’m asking is to look at the security footage. That’s all. Even that may lead to nothing. Then I’ll get my arm fixed, and then I’ll come into the station and maybe I can help.”

  A patrol car pulls into the parking lot. It comes to a stop next to them. Hutton goes over and talks to them about securing the ambulance, then the two of them head back into the hospital, circling their way around to the front and going into the main entrance. Hutton shows his badge to a woman behind a reception counter and tells her they need to talk to somebody about the security cameras. The woman looks excited. She’s putting two and two together and coming up with an answer that suggests all the commotion on the other side of the hospital is linked to something these two cops are looking for. She nods, tells them it’ll be just a minute, then makes a phone call. They say nothing to each other as they watch her, as if their focus can make her speed things along. It works because it takes only half the predicted time. She tells them somebody is on their way.

  That somebody is Bevan Middleton—no relation to Joe Middleton—so he tells them as he shakes Hutton’s hand and then stares at Schroder’s broken arm. As he leads them to the security office he tells them he wanted to apply for the police force, but because he’s color-blind he wasn’t allowed. “I thought it was all about the thin blue line,” he tells them. “I thought police work was going to be about shades of gray, but it’s the reds and greens that fucked me.”

  The security office is on the ground floor not far from the toilets, so the room smells of urinal cakes and disinfectant. There’s a bank of monitors on one wall, several different viewpoints across the hospital. There are a few computers on various counters, and one on the desk ahead of them, along with a flat-screen monitor that is almost as big as Schroder’s TV. Half the stuff in here is brand new, some ten years old, except for the decor, which is twenty years out of date. Schroder’s arm is good now. The shot he took has his arm humming along quite nicely, thank you very much. It has his mind humming nicely too.

  “It’s all getting upgraded,” Bevan says. “So it’s the rear parking lot you want, huh?”

  “Exactly,” Hutton says.

  The guard starts playing around with a computer keyboard. A moment later the rear entrance shows up on the big monitor ahead of them. Its focus is on the five yards leading up to the doorway. Everybody leans forward a little, straining to see what’s in the not-so-sharp distance.

  “That’s the ambulance,” Schroder says.

  “Only just,” Hutton says.

  “But it’s enough,” Schroder says.

  “Can we enhance the image?” Hutton asks.

  The guard shakes his head. “Not really.”

  Schroder knew he was going to say that. On The Cleaner they would have enhanced the image and cleaned it up and it would have been perfect. They would have enhanced a reflection off a nearby windshield to have gotten a perfect look from a different angle, to have a cell phone number scrawled across the back of somebody’s hand. He wonders what Sherlock Holmes would have made of TV technology.

  “Not even a little?” Hutton asks.

  “It is what it is,” the guard says, and he enlarges the image and the quality drops off. They can see the ambulance and the two policemen guarding it, but no detail.

  “Okay. Wind it back,” Schroder says. “Let’s see when it arrives.”

  The guard starts winding it back. Other cars come and go. The shadows get fractionally longer. The day looks as though it gets colder. People are walking around backward. Twenty-five minutes earlier a car drives backward and parks near the ambulance, two people get out and walk backward and climb into the ambulance and then the ambulance backs away. The guard lets the footage play forward at normal speed without the need for anybody to tell him. The ambulance comes in. Blurry Melissa helps Fuzzy Joe out of the back. The sight of them both—even though the detail is poor—makes his skin crawl. They get into the dark blue van. They drive away. Then nothing, just a parked ambulance and other cars and life carrying on as normal. They can’t get a plate from the van.

  “None of it helps,” Hutton says, “but we’ll put a call out. A dark blue van—hard to tell what make. I mean, it could be nothing, they may have changed cars again, but I’ll still put out the call. We might get lucky.”

  Lucky. There’s that word again.

  “Start going back,” Schroder tells the guard. “I want to see when that van first arrived.”

  The guard nods enthusiastically as if it’s the best idea in the world. He starts running the footage backward. He jumps it in five-minute intervals. An hour before the ambulance showed up the van is suddenly there. The guard jumps forward five minutes again, then starts winding it back second by second until they see Melissa walking backward and then climbing into it. He presses play.

  “Where is she going?” Schroder asks.

  “Hard to tell. She could be getting ready to circle around the entire building, and there are some more parking spaces out back for staff, but it could also be she’s heading toward the staff entrance.”

  “You got a camera over that door?” Hutton asks.

  “Sure we have, it’s been there about two years.”

  “Line it up with this footage,” Schroder says, tapping the monitor.

  The guard plays around with the controls and gets the footage in sync with the other camera. It’s the same entrance Schroder and the doctor came out earlier. They watch Melissa enter the corridor. It’s a different camera and she’s much closer so the quality is much better. The guard keeps switching cameras and they follow her through the emergency department and around to the ambulance bay. Schroder can’t believe the confidence she has, how casually she behaves as though she is meant to be there. She pauses for a few minutes and does something with her phone, though Schroder thinks she may just be pausing for time and watching her environment. Then she chats to the two paramedics he saw unconscious earlier and climbs into the back of their ambulance.

  Schroder can feel a pulse throbbing in his forehead. He can feel adrenaline starting to pump. He feels that if he had to, he could lift a car and flip it over, even with his bro
ken arm.

  “Whose swipe card is she using?” Schroder asks, pointing at the monitor, and the moment he asks the question, he knows—he knows for sure what the answer is going to be. He should have figured it out when he was in the parking lot.

  “That’s a really good question,” the guard says, because the guard doesn’t know Sally, the guard doesn’t know she worked with Joe, was one of the reasons he was caught, that she returned to studying nursing last year and now her training is at the hospital. The guard’s fingers fly across the keyboard for a few seconds. A moment later a photograph and an ID come up on the monitor, and Schroder looks at the picture of Sally, and Hutton looks at the picture of Sally, and then Schroder and Hutton look at each other.

  “Shit,” Hutton says.

  “I know,” Schroder says.

  “Let’s go,” Hutton says, and the two men race out the door and back into the parking lot.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Joe stays mostly quiet as she gets him dressed into a new shirt. She had forgotten how his skin smelled. Forgotten how he felt. The last year without him was tough. Not the first few months. Back then she was annoyed he’d been arrested, but life goes on. Then she found out she was pregnant. Then a whole bunch of hormones flooded her body. Things would make her cry, random things, but mostly stories in the newspapers that involved animals or children. Bad stories. And there were always bad stories. She developed a craving for weird food. She would eat raw potatoes. Couldn’t get enough of them. And chocolate. For a month there she was sure she was single-handedly keeping the chocolate labor force of New Zealand in work. Then those cravings left and new ones came—suddenly it was all about fruit, all about chicken and Thai food, and through it all her feelings for Joe intensified. Three months into her pregnancy she started figuring out how to help him escape. She wanted her baby to have a father—and most of all she wanted her baby. She’s always wanted one.

  “Where are we going to go?” he finally asks.

  Melissa is also getting changed. She brought clothes with her last night for this. And a new wig. She’s going shoulder-length light brown. “We’re heading home,” she says. “We lay low for a bit. The police look for people who run. They’re easy to find. But we hide out and—”

  “Do we really have a daughter?” he asks, “Or did I just imagine that?”

  They are still in Sally’s house. She hates it here. She can’t imagine this being much better than where Joe spent his last twelve months, and she has a good imagination. The rooms feel damp. It doesn’t get a lot of sun. And she’s pissed off at Sally for not having kept the refrigerator nicely stocked. She’s hungry and there’s nothing here to eat.

  “Yes,” she says. “She’s beautiful. She has your eyes.” She knew it was going to be a shock for Joe. She knew he would need time to adjust to it. Hell, she had nine months to get her head around it and even then it didn’t feel real until she was lying on Sally’s bed with a baby turning her vagina into something that resembled a gutted rabbit. So she knows he needs to come around a bit—she was just hoping he’d be a little happier along the way. “Her name is—”

  “Abigail,” Joe finishes, adjusting the hat a little that she gave him so nobody will be able to clearly see his face once they leave.

  “Did you mean before what you said that you’d rather go back to jail?”

  “No. Of course not,” he says. “Where are we hiding out?”

  “My place,” she says.

  “You still live in the same place?”

  “No,” she says. “I moved.”

  “Before you started killing other people?” he asks.

  “Something like that. Are you sure you don’t really mean what you said earlier about going back to jail?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Did you have sex with those men you killed?” he asks.

  “Of course not,” she says. And it’s true. But she’s not annoyed that he asked.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Did you fuck anybody in jail?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Did somebody fuck you?”

  “It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t in general population, otherwise that would have happened. There’s been nobody since you,” he tells her.

  She believes him. A guy like Joe—she imagines he’d rather kill himself than become somebody’s pet. “How’s the shoulder?”

  “It hurts,” he says. “A lot. But I’ll make it.”

  She helps him to his feet. They make their way out of the bedroom.

  “We have to go and see my mother,” Joe says.

  She throws him a Why the hell would we do that glance, then follows it up. “Why would we go and do that?”

  So he tells her why and she keeps him propped up by the door and listens to him as he talks. At first she thinks he’s still delusional from the medication. It’s quite the story. Fifty thousand dollars. Detective Calhoun. Jonas Jones the asshole psychic she’s seen on TV. A trip into the woods. Joe’s confidence in what he is saying becomes infectious. Then she remembers the files she saw in Schroder’s car from the TV station. It all makes sense. And fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money. She’s done well with the forty she got from Sally three months ago, and another fifty would certainly help get their new lives under way.

  They should just head back to her house. Relieve the babysitter. And stay inside for the next few months. Grow Joe’s hair out. Dye it. Get him to put on some weight. Get him to look about as different as she can with what she has to work with. Get him to bond with Abigail. Then work at getting some false identities and leave the country. Difficult, yes, but not impossible. Just wait for the manhunt to die down.

  “So the money was transferred into your mother’s account,” Melissa says.

  “Yes.”

  “That means your mother will have to go into a bank and draw it out. We can’t risk her saying the wrong thing. Too problematic.”

  Joe shakes his head. “You don’t know my mother,” he says. “She doesn’t trust banks. She has a bank account purely because you can’t really get by without one, but she hates them, hates them so much she goes in there every Monday morning and draws out her benefit in cash and takes it home and hides it under her mattress. She has done for years.”

  “You think she’ll have gone there this morning and drawn out the fifty thousand dollars?” she asks, and she tries to imagine it, and for some reason she pictures an old lady with a sack slung over her back with big dollar signs on it. But of course that’s not the reality. Fifty thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills is five hundred of them. That amount would fit into a handbag.

  “Without a doubt,” Joe says. “It’ll be at her house under her bed just waiting for us to go and get it.”

  “And you’re sure.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  Fifty thousand dollars—is it worth the risk?

  She decides that it is.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Schroder and Hutton are leading the chase. He knows they are because when Hutton calls in the new information he’s told backup is ten minutes away. While Hutton is on the phone organizing that, Schroder is once again searching his pockets for his Wake-E pills. Nope. Definitely gone. He has a headache coming on.

  “A team has just reached Raphael’s house,” Hutton says.

  “And?”

  “And the results are interesting. Nothing there to suggest he was working with Melissa. But plenty to suggest Raphael wasn’t exactly a Good Samaritan.”

  “Yeah? What’d he do?”

  “Joe’s lawyers,” Hutton says. “It looks like Raphael’s the guy who killed them.”

  “Shit,” Schroder says.

  “We’ve sent people to Joe’s mother’s house, hoping he’ll turn up there, or hoping she may offer something, but there’s no sign of her.”

  They both revert to their own thoughts. Schroder starts thinking back to the last time he saw Sally. When was that? It was last year,
not long after Joe was arrested. Within days of being given the reward money she quit her job. She went back to studying. She never stayed in touch with anybody from work, and why would she? The night they figured out who Joe was, they treated her like hell. They arrested her and put her in an interrogation room because they’d found her prints on a piece of evidence. She ended up being the reason they caught Joe. Not police work, not detective skills, but pure luck because Sally had picked up something she shouldn’t have.

  “You should give me Kent’s gun,” Hutton says.

  “You’re probably right.”

  “I know I’m right. Come on, Carl. We’re almost there. If you end up shooting somebody we’ll probably both go to jail.”

  “They’re armed,” Schroder says. “It’s only fair that I’m armed too.”

  “You think she’s still alive?” Hutton asks. “Sally?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing I can say to get that gun back from you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Just don’t fuck up. Promise me that, okay?”

  “You have my word.”

  “And don’t tell anybody I knew you had it.”

  Town races by. The neighborhoods race by. Schroder doesn’t take any of it in. Six minutes later they’re pulling into her street. They watch the numbers on the letterboxes, but then stop watching when they see the blue van up a driveway six houses ahead, exactly where the numbers were going to line up. The houses are all pretty small and look like they’ve spent thirty years being blasted by bad weather and no love. Hutton does a U-turn and drives back to the start of the block. He takes out his cell phone and reports in. Backup is still four minutes away. He tells Schroder this when he hangs up.

  “A lot can happen in four minutes,” Schroder says.

  “And a lot can happen for the worse if we go in there.”

  “We opened the ambulance before, right?” Schroder asks. This isn’t any different from that.”