“I’m still waiting,” a man says.
“I have the money.”
“Money?”
“Please, I can . . .”
The line goes dead. I call the number again but he’s switched off the phone.
I keep pacing. Thinking about it.
“I know how it happened,” I say to Schroder. “Bracken planned the whole thing, and when they split the money up they gave Kingsly his share. When Bracken found him this morning he took the money. Instead of breaking it evenly among his partners, he told them whoever killed Kingsly must have taken it. That way he could keep it all. There never was any plan to pay to get my daughter back. It was a charade. He stashed Sam somewhere with no intention of me paying to get her back, but as an act so the others would think I had the money. Bracken only guessed I’d killed Kingsly because the media kept speculating that I was capable of it. I don’t even know if Sam’s alive anymore. I have all this but nobody to trade it with,” I say, and I open up the bag I found under the floor. It’s full of identical bricks of cash that I found but didn’t take last night. I don’t even know the exact amount. It’s all blood money that I don’t want, but it may still be my only chance of finding Sam. Schroder doesn’t nod or shake his head or offer anything useful. He’s watching a man falling apart. “I bet Bracken was going to kill the guy who has Sam. It would tie up a loose end and give him more money. They were going to kill me too.”
I go through the house. There’s a bedroom that’s been converted into an office, and I switch on the computer. While waiting for it to boot up, I go through the rest of the house. I check under the floor in the wardrobe where the money was hidden but there’s nothing else down there. I check other wardrobes but find nothing. Every time I walk past Bracken’s body I resist the urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him.
I sit down in front of Bracken’s computer and navigate around the desktop. It’s a clean desktop with only a few icons, and I click one open to find a folder full of porn, maybe a hundred or so video clips. I don’t watch any of them. I close the folder and go into his documents folder. Turns out Bracken is—or was—an aspiring novelist. There are a couple of manuscripts here that he’s working on. I don’t read any of them. There is a games folder, and a music
folder, and then I go through the folders on the hard drive, looking for something, for anything related either to work or to robbing a bank. I go through his emails—and it turns out that Bracken doesn’t have many friends. Even his address book is barren except for a half dozen people, half of whom share the same last name as him. I scan through the emails; mostly they’re all bad jokes that have been circulated around the world millions of times already. There are no emails at all relating to work or to robbing a bank. There aren’t any emails to or from Shane Kingsly. I spend fifteen minutes going through his computer—which is a long time when there’s a corpse leaking blood all over the living-room floor—and in the end the only thing I’ve accomplished is to waste precious time.
Out in the living room, Schroder has disappeared. He’s rolled himself out or got to his feet. I check the front door and it’s open. I step outside but there’s no sign of him. He could have jumped out fifteen minutes ago or only two, but either way the result is the same for me—the police are on their way.
I grab Bracken’s pants and find his wallet, then head out to my car. I wonder what the statistics are now for Schroder—what percentage chance he has of bouncing along to a neighbor who will help him, or one that will try to cannibalize him.
I don’t have the time to care.
It’s no longer Christmas Eve—Christmas kicked in about two minutes ago and town is full of people celebrating. The homeless and the party animals mingle and mix and I can’t help but hate all of them as they move through this world, ignorant to what some of us are going through to save our families.
The center of Christchurch is mapped around a bull’s-eye of tourist markets and street performers and of course the Cathedral, a giant church over a hundred years old that’s popular with tourists and God and graffiti artists—although these days the popular consensus is that God moved out of Christchurch, meaning that God is everywhere except here. It’s all crammed into a location known as Cathedral Square. The Cathedral is packed with people celebrating Christmas Mass. The markets are gone, and the drunk, the homeless, and the glue sniffers have to share the Square with churchgoers as they sit on steps and huddle on park benches, living in perfect harmony.
The probation offices are only a few blocks away, in a part of
town where the only clubs are strip joints, where the bouncers are bigger and the tattoos take up more real estate on their arms and necks than their counterparts at regular clubs. The building is six storeys, and probably houses other things too, maybe some law or accountancy firms. I got the address from a business card inside Bracken’s wallet. The only windows on the ground floor are the automatic doors, which at this time of night are automatically impossible to open, unless I drive right into them. The rest of the building is tile and brick and has graffiti scrawled across it, showing off the creative talents of the city’s youth.
There’s an alleyway heading up the side of the building, and I pull the car in and swing around the back. My headlights wash over a guy leaning against a Dumpster with a woman kneeling in front of him. They both look at me. The guy has vomit down the front of his shirt and the woman doesn’t look any better. They wave at my car as if trying to swat away a fly, before straightening their clothes and leaving.
At the back of the building, there are two doors about ten meters apart from each other. The accountant inside me works the numbers. The police are busy. It’s been a long day for them, and even now they’re at Bracken’s house and at my in-laws’ house and they’re dealing with dead bodies, and Schroder is trying to round up the rest of the men who robbed the bank and find my daughter while the rest of the force are at home, taking the night off. That means if an alarm goes off I probably have a minute or two longer than usual. A place like this, it’s more likely a patrol car will show up than a security firm. And in a city like this, maybe nobody will show up for an hour. Of course there’s only one statistic that matters—my daughter. I will do whatever it takes to get her back.
Bracken’s keys have a keycard hanging from them. One of the doors is the good old-fashioned lock and key, but the other door has a pad on the side of it. I swipe the card and there’s a click; I try the door and it opens. I step inside and a fluorescent light blinks on overhead, blinding at first. There’s a second door; this one with a numeric keypad. I lean back and kick near the handle. It takes five strong kicks because I have to use my left leg, and even then it jars
through to my right, the door breaking at the same time as some of the stitches in my leg. An alarm beeps somewhere.
I’m in a corridor that has every fourth light going, which is enough to see by. It winds around to the front entrance where there’s a foyer and two elevators and a flight of stairs. There’s a directory by the lift: it turns out the probation offices are on the ground floor. I’ve left bloody footprints between the door I kicked down and the elevators. I press the elevator button and wait for the doors to open and step inside. I take off my shirt and wrap it over my foot while the elevator goes nowhere. Then I open the doors and step out. I press the button and send the elevator, empty, to the top floor.
I head to the probation office, no blood trail behind me, and use Bracken’s swipe card to gain entry. The alarm keeps beeping, but still hasn’t gone off. I enter a large waiting room with a series of offices scattered around the sides and back. None of the office doors have names on them. There’s a giant reception desk in the middle of the room. I have no idea which office belongs to Bracken. The layout of the floor reminds me of my own office, which makes me think of a simple solution: I go into each office and look for family photos and drawings done by children, with the idea of eliminating the offices that do have them since Bracken doesn’t; but the idea is a bust because there aren’t any pictures anywhere. I guess probation offices aren’t the kind of place where employees want to share their personal lives with the public. It’s the type of place where one day they have a photo of their nine-year-old daughter up on the wall, and the next day they’re taking that photo to Missing Persons. I try to think about what else could make Bracken’s office stand out from any other.
Sixty seconds have passed since I entered the offices. A moment later a high-pitched scream shrieks from every corner of the building. I grab some Blu-Tack from the reception desk and ball it into my ears.
I take out Bracken’s business card and the cell phone. There are three numbers on the card, an office line, his direct line, and his cell phone number. I dial the direct line but can’t hear anything over the alarm. I head from office to office and barely manage to hear a phone ringing in the fourth one I try. There is a narrow angle of sight from the desk, past the reception area to a window leading
outside. I glance at the view every few seconds, waiting for when it changes from parking meters and bike stands to patrol cars.
I switch on the computer which offers more light, then I go through the drawers. There are too many files to go through so I pile them onto the desk. The computer loads up and by the time a desktop appears I’m too nervous to hang around. I consider tearing the computer apart and taking the hard drive, but the files are probably on a server somewhere. The alarm is still shrieking and the Blu-Tack in my ears doesn’t seem to be helping.
There’s a gym bag behind the desk. I unzip it and dump the clothes on the floor. I’m packing everything I pulled out of the drawers into the bag when a patrol car pulls up outside.
As I reach the door to the foyer and elevators, the alarm goes quiet. The rest of the lights come on and I duck behind a desk. There are footsteps in the foyer, and voices. I can’t quite hear what they’re saying, but the words I’m looking for stick out from the rest—“blood,” “elevator,” and “top floor.” The police out there know they have a lot of ground to cover, but they’ve noticed that the elevator with blood leading up to it has been sent to the top. A radio squawks, and one of them speaks into it. “Backup.” The word is clear.
Another door opens, and then there are footsteps in the stairwell. Thirty seconds later the elevator doors open and close. The accountant and the monster think things through. We figure there are two cops here already and more coming soon, so I need to act now. We figure one of them is probably at the third or fourth floor now. He’s laboring his way to the top floor while his partner rides up in comfort.
Another patrol car pulls up outside.
I untie the shirt from my foot and pull it back on. I open the door and run into the foyer, the gym bag in one hand, a stapler in the other, ready to hurl it hard in case somebody is still down here—but there’s no one. I turn toward the main door. There are two police constables walking toward it, a man and a woman. They stop dead and stare at me and I do the same, me on one side of the door, them on the other, then they race forward and one of them grabs the door.
His head has cleared in the hour or so since he died, and he likes to think that the fuckups in that time were brought about by that experience, likes to think they’re not the kind of mistakes he’d make on any other day.
Getting out of the house was easy. All Schroder had to do was caterpillar his way to the front door, get to his feet, twist his body so he could reach the door handle, and run like hell—or in this case bounce. It took him a couple of tiring minutes to reach a house that had lights on. He used his nose to ring the doorbell. It was a young couple whose kids had gone to bed; they were wrapping presents and had shared half a bottle of wine and seemed to look at Schroder with as much suspicion as anything, but he was thankful they took him in and cut the ties that held his feet. Nat’s cell phone was still in his pocket, and he used it to phone the station, and then he phoned his wife. He told her he was running late, told her it was going to be a long night, told her he was sorry, and didn’t
tell her that a short time ago she was technically a widow. She told him she was disappointed but she understood, and he should get home when he could. It was the best-case scenario—and her first Christmas present to him.
By the time the first patrol car arrived, Edward was long gone. The responding officers removed Schroder’s handcuffs.
“So where’s he gone now?” Landry asks. They’re standing in Bracken’s living room, a photographer and a couple of other officers hanging out in the corner. Others are out canvassing the neighborhood, hoping to narrow down Hunter’s destination.
“I don’t know. But Jesus, Bill, everything that’s happened—everything that Hunter did to Bracken, he was right in the end. Bracken was part of the robbery. He had somebody take Hunter’s daughter, and now we’ve got nothing.”
“Not nothing,” Landry says. “We’ve got a couple of names. That gives us a bunch of known accomplices.”
“Yeah, but in time to save Hunter’s daughter?”
“He shouldn’t have killed Bracken. He could have helped us.”
“He says he didn’t do it. Says the woman did it.”
“You believe him?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not much of an answer, Carl. Sounds more like you want to believe him but don’t.”
“Whether he did it or not, he’s gone somewhere. Something here must have tipped him off.”
“Maybe he found a name or an address.”
“Yeah, and took it with him.”
“Well, if we’re lucky, maybe he’ll succeed. Maybe he’ll get his daughter back and take another couple of bad guys off the street.”
“I don’t see it working out that way,” Schroder says.
“Sure. Would be good, though, right?”
A few more detectives arrive on the scene and join them in searching the house.
“It’s official,” Landry says, finishing up a phone call. “Our two victims today are also Bracken’s cons.”