He went out of the room, returning a couple of moments later with his laptop. He fired it up, tapped in a password and then another one to open a locked file, then angled the screen so she could read it. It was a list: name of the victim, nature of the crime and, where available, the name of the probable suspect.
She searched through the last column first, finding Yang’s name twice – both for driving offences, one involving alcohol. Then she went through the list of victims, only half-knowing what she was looking for, not wanting even to think it out loud lest the scarcely formed notion dissolve. She scanned the list once and then a second time and saw nothing.
‘OK, thanks,’ she said, somewhere between disappointment and relief. Well, it was a hunch, she began to tell herself. Only a few of those ever paid off.
‘You got that?’ Mario said. ‘OK, here’s the next page.’
‘The next page? I didn’t realize …’
But Mario had already pressed the button to scroll down, generating more names, more crimes, more suspects. There, in the list of victims, was a name she recognized.
Mario got to his feet, preparing to guide Madison into the next room to meet the extended Padilla clan, including his parents. But Maddy was too fast for him. She was already making for the hallway and the front door. After what she had seen, there was no time to do anything else.
Chapter 56
The American flag was flying, though it barely rippled on this windless night. The lights were on and she could hear a TV blaring, the loud laughter of a game show. She rang the bell.
There was a delay, followed by some fussing on the other side but eventually the door opened. A ruddy face looked at her, open in its surprise.
‘Why, it’s the woman of the hour.’ He called out over his shoulder. ‘Margaret! Madison Webb is here!’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘What brings California’s greatest reporter to this part of town on a Saturday night?’
The directness of the question caught Madison by surprise. She was not quite sure how to answer. Ted Norman seemed unbothered by her hesitation. ‘Come in, come in.’
He ushered Maddy through a spacious living room of armchairs and an L-shaped sofa, the mantelpiece crowded with assorted patriotic paraphernalia, a couple of trophies, a vase of silk flowers, the petals faded with dust – and lots of family photographs. It took a second for Madison to realize that the room was not empty: still and silent, facing the TV, was a woman, her hair grey and lank. She might have been Ted’s age, she might have been twenty years older. But what struck Maddy was that, though the woman’s eyes were open, she was not watching the television at all. She was simply staring straight ahead, catatonic.
‘Let’s go on through to the kitchen,’ Ted Norman said, making no mention of his wife. ‘Now what will you have to drink?’
Maddy was still looking behind her, at the human statue in the armchair. ‘Erm, nothing, thank you.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Water. Please.’
Soon they were seated at a white, circular table. It would once have been fashionable, but now it was just shabby. The surface was chipped. Much of the rest of the kitchen was in a similar state.
‘So, Ms Webb. Congratulations.’ He raised a glass, half filled with whisky. ‘One helluva story.’
‘Thank you.’ She raised her water glass to her lips, but did not drink.
‘So,’ he said again. ‘I suppose you’re here about the tracking technology. The PR guys said this would happen. “Huge opportunity,” they said. But I’m not interested in publicity. I’m just glad that our product could play a part in solving this thing. I always said it had the potential to be a tool in the crimefighters’—’
‘No, Mr Norman, that’s not why I’m here.’ She swallowed hard. ‘I’m here because I know what happened to your daughter.’
Ted Norman said nothing for a while, taking his time knocking back a second, longer swig of whisky. He drained the glass. Finally he looked at Maddy directly, allowing her to see that the flush had gone from his face. ‘No, you don’t.’
Maddy spoke gently. ‘I know that she was raped. That the suspect for the crime was a junior officer at Terminal Island. That, in fact, you believed the suspect in question was Yang Zhitong. Am I right?’
Norman shook his head. ‘I said, you don’t know what happened. Only me and Margaret know that.’
‘You mean she wasn’t raped?’
He slammed his fist down hard on the table, the glass still in his hand. It shattered on impact. Blood appeared instantly in rivulets between his fingers. ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t keep saying that word.’
Without meaning too, Maddy felt herself recoiling, her back pressing into the seat. The colour had returned to his face.
‘You people keep calling it that, using that word … and you think you understand it. You put that word on a file, you give Jennifer that label, and then it’s all squared away. Well, that’s bullshit, Miss Webb. One word does not even begin to explain what happened to my daughter. You don’t know the first thing about what happened to her.’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘He beat her first. Hard punches to her face.’ Norman simulated a punch, meeting his own jaw. The blood from his fist dripped onto his shirt: the same deep red as the silk flowers she’d passed on the mantelpiece, flowers she now realized were poppies. Eventually he reached for a napkin, which he wrapped around his hand. It darkened within seconds.
‘Then he burnt her. With cigarettes or something else, I don’t know. Then he suffocated her, long stretches of that. Then he beat her some more. Hour after hour. And all the time he was … using her. Like she was …’ He couldn’t complete the sentence, though it was clear he could see what he was describing. His eyes seemed to grow larger, as if they were engorged. ‘You see, you didn’t know any of that, did you?’
Madison shook her head, silenced by what she had heard and the fear that was spreading through her, like ink through water.
‘Oh and he was not the “suspect in question”. There was absolutely no doubt it was him, Yang Zhitong. The police knew. It’s all in a file somewhere. But you’d have to know where to look, because they’ve hidden it away, haven’t they? They’re good at that: you’ve seen that yourself, haven’t you? Good at hiding something they don’t want us – the victims – to know. That’s what they call “an inconvenient truth”. Inconvenient to the people who run this God-forsaken country.’
‘You told the police everything?’
‘Me? No. Jennifer told them. She went to the police. She forced herself to do it, describing it, describing him. Like he was doing it to her all over again.’
‘And nothing happened?’
‘Oh, plenty “happened”, Miss Webb. But the police did jack, if that’s what you mean. Lawyers and meetings and more lawyers, but jack shit. “Impossible to bring proceedings” or some bull.’
‘But you said “plenty happened”?’
‘Yes.’ His voice dipped again. ‘Plenty happened to Jennifer. And none of you know about that either.’
Maddy paused, waiting for him to continue. Eventually, she said, ‘What don’t I know?’
‘You don’t know what it did to her. How it changed her.’
Maddy told herself to stay quiet.
‘No one knows that. How it made her hate herself. How she stopped eating. She didn’t eat, she didn’t talk – like Margaret now.’ He nodded towards the living room and his wife, rendered mute and unmoving by grief. ‘All she wanted was to fill herself with that poison.’
‘Heroin?’
He gave a tiny nod. ‘I know what that does to a person. I’d seen it myself. Destroyed two friends of mine. Fine men, both of them.’
‘And no one was ever tried for her … for that crime, were they?’
‘No one.’
‘And you made lots of complaints, wrote letters to the base, to the LAPD?’ Maddy was guessing, remembering how Mario had compiled his list.
‘Like I told
you, no one wanted to know. Even my great friends in the “Grand Old Party of California”. What a joke that is. No one cared about Jennifer except us. Jennifer knew that. That’s why she … that’s why she did what she did.’
‘I looked you up. Just now, on the way here,’ Maddy said, pulling out her phone, by way of explanation. ‘You’re a veteran. Two tours in Afghanistan. I’m guessing that’s where you lost your friends to heroin.’ He closed his eyes, barely longer than a blink. But it looked like confirmation.
She went on. ‘You were in satellite comms. That’s where you got the idea for the tracker business. You supply every big car fleet in the state, including the garrison.’ She gave a tight smile, trying to convey calm, to herself as much as to him. ‘Your company would have known every time Yang got in his car. It wouldn’t have taken much for you to access that data yourself – everyone says you’re a “hands-on CEO”. You could see where he went, street by street. You probably watched him on your phone.’
Ted Norman’s expression didn’t change as he got up, went to the counter and filled a glass of water. He then opened up his wife’s handbag, looking over his shoulder to explain: ‘I need to give my wife her medicine.’ He disappeared with a portable medical kit as well as the water glass, and returned three or four minutes later.
‘In some strange way, I find it quite moving,’ Maddy began, unsure where she was heading. ‘A father who loves his daughter so much, he’s ready to go to such extreme lengths to avenge her death. You must have followed Yang for months, watching him day after day, driving where he drove, having a drink at the bar or waiting across the street. And then spotting a woman you knew he had seen or met and then killing her, just like that – just so you could frame him for her murder. And then doing it again and again, until people took notice.’
Norman’s gaze remained fixed on the table between them. His face was turning redder.
She continued. ‘And was it just random? Did you pick out my sister and the others just because they happened to be on Yang’s route?’
He said nothing, though the words seemed ready to burst out of him.
‘Is that what I’m meant to live with? That my sister died just because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time?’ She waited, each second of waiting longer than the last. Finally she slammed her fist down on the table. ‘Say something for Christ’s sake!’
‘I had nothing against your sister or any of those women. It was nothing personal.’ He looked at her. ‘It could just as easily have been you.’
With a great, almost muscular effort, Madison calmed herself and tried a different tack.
‘It must have been hard for you, having to be so near the man who had inflicted such pain on your daughter. Following him around like that, walking in his footsteps.’
‘Like you said, Miss Webb, I’m a soldier. I’m used to facing the enemy.’
‘Corps of Engineers, wasn’t it? I’m guessing that’s where you learned about cutting surveillance cameras and all the other stuff. You did a professional job.’
‘I wanted to see that man face justice.’
‘For crimes you committed.’
‘How dare you!’ He raised his bloody hand. ‘I wanted justice for the crimes he committed. For destroying my daughter.’
Maddy was undeterred. Her own blood was up now. ‘And it worked so well, didn’t it? Finally California – finally America – felt the outrage you felt, felt the anger you’d been feeling for so long. Demonstrations, rallies … at long last people were talking about getting rid of the base altogether, scrapping the Treaty. You’d woken them up! And you could use your position in the party to keep up the pressure, to make sure the candidate kept banging the drum. The timing was perfect, the lead-up to a big election. And in Yang you had the perfect target for all that rage: a sleazeball who was right at the very top, just to prove that this fish rots from the head.’
‘Maybe not so perfect,’ Norman said suddenly. ‘They’ll just throw his father overboard and it’ll be business as usual.’ He paused, as if reflecting further. ‘You publish this and even that might not happen. The man responsible for Jennifer’s death will go free – and we’ll be stuck with them here forever.’
‘No,’ Madison said, full of certainty, though in truth this was the first time she had even contemplated the possibility. ‘He’ll be tried for the … for what he did to your daughter.’
Norman raised his eyebrows in a mixture of disbelief and fury. ‘Are you kidding me? Don’t pretend you’re that naïve. You’ve seen what they do when their boys get caught. They put them on the first plane to Beijing – first class – to get a little slap on the wrist back home. “Disciplinary proceedings” they call it and it’s bullshit. Yang’ll be no different.’
‘But his case is too … it’s too well-known for that now. They can’t just let him go free.’
‘You don’t think so? Even after you prove he didn’t murder those girls, that someone else did it? Who’ll believe he did anything to Jennifer? It’ll be my word against his. And my word will be worthless.’
Maddy’s head was throbbing. ‘You said you wanted justice. Justice isn’t punishing Yang for crimes he didn’t commit.’ She waited for a reaction, but there was none. ‘He’ll die, you know. In California, for these murders, they’ll put him to death.’
Norman lifted his eyes, bloodshot and bulging with rage. ‘Am I meant to feel sorry for him, for that animal? After what he did?’
Madison sighed, trying to see through the bubbling red smog of anger and frustration and confusion that was filling her head. ‘No. I’m not asking you to feel sorry for him. I’m just trying to remind you of what you said to me. Yang should be punished for what he did to Jennifer.’ She swallowed, the motion hard in her throat. She spoke again. ‘Not for crimes you committed.’
He was staring at the table. ‘You’re so certain of everything, aren’t you, Miss Webb? So sure of yourself.’
‘I’ve just realized your biggest mistake,’ Madison said, ignoring him. Her anger was now outrunning her confusion. ‘Those women you killed were just like Jennifer.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘They had people who loved them.’
Only now did he let his eyes meet hers. They were hot red but also, she now saw, glistening and damp.
‘You want revenge too?’
Maddy paused a while, holding his gaze. She didn’t know the answer. Eventually she said, ‘I just wanted to know who killed my sister.’
He nodded at that as well. They were both silent for a while. Then he spoke. ‘It won’t mean anything to you, I know how much bullshit people talk. Especially these days: it’s all bullshit. Land of the free, Independence Day. Crap, all of it. But still, for what it’s worth: I’m sorry for what happened to your sister.’
‘That sounds like a politician’s apology, not a soldier’s.’
At that, he raised his head, as if to attention, and said, ‘I’m sorry for what I did to your sister. And for those others.’
‘Thank you,’ Maddy said, feeling a blend of relief and shock flow into her veins. She glanced at the phone on the table, a silent witness.
‘Maybe you’d like to talk to your wife, before …’ She let the sentence trail off, deciding it was best to avoid saying the word ‘police’ out loud.
‘There’s no need for that,’ Ted Norman said with a sigh. ‘Her suffering is over now.’ He reached over his shoulder, pulling his wife’s handbag off the counter and onto his lap. ‘But I saved one more.’ And suddenly, resting between the thumb, fore- and index fingers of his right hand, was a syringe and hypodermic needle, its chamber full and ready.
Chapter 57
Maddy froze in her chair, her nervous system suddenly flooded with fear. He had killed four women, he had just killed his wife and he was about to kill her. Resistance was pointless, her instinct told her that. This man was old, but he was a former soldier. He would be able to pin her down as easily as he had p
inned down her sister and the other women.
‘They’ll find you in the end,’ she managed to say, her voice a thin rasp. ‘You can’t keep running.’
‘I know that,’ he said, still calm and steady, as if they were discussing the weather or a train timetable. ‘Which is why I want you to help me.’
She desperately wanted her limbs to move, to show some sign of life. But they were ice. ‘Why would I help you? You’re a murderer.’
‘That’s exactly why you would help me. To see justice done. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Justice? Here,’ and he thrust his hand forward, ‘take it.’
It took her a long second to realize that he was holding out the syringe, offering it to her. ‘Please, take it. Do to me what I did to your sister. To Abigail.’
Hearing her name come from his lips prompted a curtain of redness, bright and hot, to fall before her eyes. He was the man who had murdered beautiful, sweet Abigail. These were the hands that had grabbed her baby sister and covered her mouth and tied her and terrified her and extinguished the life from her. This man in front of her, not some name on a police file or an online search, but him, here, now, offering his death to her like a gift. She pictured Abigail’s lifeless body, cold and still on the coroner’s slab. She pictured the bed in her apartment, the creased sheets where she once lay, the children’s exercise books, the life stolen.
Madison snatched the syringe from his grasp and, with trembling fingers, arranged it in her hand. He was right: he did deserve to die and she wanted to see it. The police and the courts and the politics were all too uncertain; she had always known that and she had seen the evidence all too clearly this week. The wheels within wheels, the bribes, the competing interests – the risk that nothing would happen, that Norman would somehow wriggle free, was too high. She should do it now, grab what was rightfully hers.
He had rolled up his sleeve, exposing his left arm. He left it there, the flesh of it just inches away from the needle in her hand. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Do it. I deserve to die.’
The 3rd Woman Page 40