“This is no doubt about Edward Hunter?” Barlow asks.
“You’ve been listening to the news?”
“Yes. I heard what happened. He helped his father escape from the hospital, though I’m not sure why he would do such a thing. Edward despises his father.”
“Edward Hunter had his daughter kidnapped by the men who killed his wife.”
“Oh dear,” Barlow says. “Oh no, the poor girl. And Hunter helped free his dad because he thought his dad could help find her?”
“Yes.”
“And did they?”
“They found her, but it was already too late,” Schroder says.
“Too late? Oh . . . you mean . . . ,” he trails off.
“She was suffocated.”
“You have the men who did it?”
“Jack Hunter found him first. It was just one man who killed her.”
“And he killed him?”
“Yes. But first he killed a man who used to assault him in prison, and now he’s looking for the rest. We picked up Edward this
morning. He had his daughter with him. He had taken her to the cemetery to visit his wife, and then he took her to a motel to protect her. He was acting . . . well, I think he was acting like . . .”
“Like she was still alive?” Barlow asks.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“You have any idea where Jack Hunter is?”
“No. It’s why I’m here. I know you dealt with him all those years ago. Tell me, where do you think he may go?”
“I think he’ll find the men responsible for killing his grand-daughter.”
“Then where?”
“I don’t know.”
“He stopped taking his medication.”
“What?”
“When we searched his cell we found his meds. He hasn’t been taking them for days.”
“Then if he can’t find the men he’s looking for, he’ll move on to what he knows best—killing prostitutes. He’s been in jail a long time, Detective, he’ll have desires. The sickness inside him—it will have desires. The problem is twenty years ago he was living two lives, and one of them he was protecting by killing women he didn’t think anybody would notice going missing. Now he doesn’t have that family life to retreat to, or to hide things from. He may go looking for prostitutes, but it’s doubtful he’ll restrain himself to only them. Anybody is fair game to him now, Detective, because he’s on the run and he knows being free is only a temporary thing. Damn it, why did he have to stop taking his medication!”
“He stopped when Jodie Hunter was shot.”
“Yes, yes, I suppose that makes sense. Detective, don’t doubt that Jack Hunter heard voices, and he was intelligent enough to hide it, and to deal with it. He knew he had a sickness, and he knew if he stopped taking his medication that sickness, that desire, would come back. You may want to look at the man who stabbed Hunter in jail, you might find it was Hunter himself who organized it. Probably on the same day. He probably figured he could use his son to help him escape.”
“I’ll look into it,” Schroder says, not in the mood to bolster the shrink’s ego by telling him that’s exactly what happened.
“Hunter is an intelligent man, Detective, and he’s still intelligent even off the meds—the difference is that when medicated, he can be controlled. Right now—well, right now he could be anywhere doing anything. Now that you have Edward Hunter in custody, I strongly suggest you let me see him. I told you he was a danger, and last night proved that. I should see him immediately. I can help him.”
“He’s not in custody.”
“What do you mean? You said you picked him up with his daughter.”
“And then we let him go. He lost his daughter, he was betrayed by his father, we couldn’t keep him after all that. None of this is his fault.”
“You need to pick him up.”
“Why?”
“What kind of state was he in when you released him?”
“He’s a defeated man. We dropped him off at his house. He’s not going anywhere. In fact I’m tempted to put a man on him just to make sure he doesn’t kill himself.”
“He’s certainly a candidate for that, but he’s also capable of something else. Edward Hunter is a man who holds grudges, Detective, and he’s a man who can justify those grudges in different ways. He may not go after the men who killed his wife, but what about the others?”
“Others?”
“From the bank. The bank tellers, the security guard, the media, even the police—anybody who has let him down could be a target.”
“He went to the security guard’s house.”
“What? When?”
“Tuesday night. He got drunk and went there but nothing happened.”
“And you didn’t think this was important enough to let me know?”
“I just told you.”
Barlow takes his hands off his knees and leans forward. “Listen to me very carefully, Detective. You have to go and pick him up. Nothing may have happened when he went to the security guard’s house, but his daughter was alive then. This man is a time bomb. Trust me, Detective, if there’s one thing I know about, it’s time bombs, and this one is about to go off.”
It’s evening when I get home. Kids are out playing in the street, riding new bikes and new skateboards, yelling and laughing, all is good in their world, all is right and happy and I envy each one of them.
Nothing has changed at all in the house. It’s more of a tomb than ever. I walk through the rooms touching things, the walls, the furniture, running my fingers over anything in my path. I sit on Sam’s bed for a while and I sit on my bed for a while and I sit in the living room for a while. It’s like last week all over again only worse. The unbelievable thing that could never happen has happened—again. I can’t even cry. I can’t do anything. I sit in the living room with a can of beer but I don’t open it. I stare at the TV but don’t turn it on. I pick at the stitching on a cushion until it comes apart. The kids outside grow quiet. The day gets darker and they all head inside, some of them bored already with their new gifts. I get up to turn on the light and at the same time somebody knocks on my
door. I head over to it, part of me not wanting to answer it, but a bigger part hoping it’s the last bank robber, that he’s come armed and with the ability to help me join my wife and daughter.
I don’t recognize him. He’s been severely beaten and can hardly stand, but he’s managing to do so by leaning against the wall. My dad is behind him holding the shotgun. He’s still wearing the security guard’s clothes from the hospital, only now there are large bloodstains on them, mostly dry.
“I got you a Christmas present,” Dad says, and he pushes the man forward.
I look at my Christmas present, at the blood on it, the torn and bruised wrapping, and I’m sick at the sight of it. I feel no different looking at Dad.
“Please, Dad, go away. It doesn’t matter anymore. This is all over. I’ve lost everything and they’re going to put me in jail for setting you free and the truth is, the truth is . . . I just want this to be over. I want everything to be over.”
“This is the man who shot Jodie. This is the man who started it all.”
I close my eyes for a few seconds and exhale heavily, tilting my head back, focusing on the loss of Jodie and Sam. I remember the way Jodie fell forward, her face before the gun exploded, where she thought the worst thing that was going to happen to her was skinned palms and knees. I can still feel the weight of Sam in my arms, lifting her from the floor of the slaughterhouse and carrying her outside.
Then I focus on the man Dad brought me. An average-looking man I’d never have paid attention to in the past, maybe somebody who works at a gas station or repairs shoes, anything other than the man he truly is. His face has swollen up, his left eye closed, his right eye bloodshot. The edges of the duct tape covering his mouth are stained with blood. Dad pushes him again and he falls onto his knees in my hallway. His hands are tied behind him so tight they’ve turned purple. Dad steps inside and closes the door.
“I don’t care,” I say.
“Yes you do.”
Yes. You do.
“I know,” I say.
“I got one of the others,” Dad says. “I made him suffer. I made this guy suffer too. I was going to kill him when, out of nowhere, I realized how selfish that would have been. I’m sorry about what happened to Sam, son, I really am—and Jodie.”
“And this will make it better? Killing him will bring her back?”
“It’s not about bringing people back, son.”
“You think it’s about feeding the monster?”
“That’s what it’s always about.”
“For you, maybe. But not for me.”
“This is the man who shot Jodie! Damn it, son, don’t you get that? This is the man who killed your wife. This is the path he took that got your daughter killed. My granddaughter.” He takes a step back so he’s out of range from the man, reaches into his belt, and drags out a knife about half the length of his forearm and hands it over to me. “Now do something about it!”
The man on my floor doesn’t even move. There’s a shotgun pointing at him and two sets of eyes and all he has the strength to do is look down.
Do it!
the monster says.
“No.”
“It’ll help,” Dad says.
Listen to him.
“
Listen to the monster,” Dad says, struggling to keep the gun pointed ahead while holding the knife. He starts to lower it. “It’s telling you to do what I say, isn’t it.”
“This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. It’s Christmas Day. I’m going to spend it with Sam and Jodie.”
“Son . . .”
“This is the way it’s supposed to be. You, him, the monster, none of you are supposed to be here.”
I step past them and out the door. There aren’t any kids in the street now. Nobody to watch. Christmas lights are flashing from behind windows and from on top of roofs, cars are hidden away in
garages and parked up driveways and people are tucking themselves away for the night, tired from too much food, too much sun, too much running around visiting family members and chasing after children. Dad turns toward me. I wonder what Nat and Diana are doing tonight, whether their day has been broken up by small pieces of routine where, for one or two seconds out of every thousand, they forget what happened to Jodie and Sam, only to have it crash back down on them.
“It’s in the blood,” Dad says. “Don’t you feel it? We’re the same, son. We’re blood men!”
“I keep telling you, Dad, we really are nothing alike. More than you’ll ever know.”
“You’re wrong,” he says. “Listen to your voice, Edward,” he says, calling me by that name for the first time. “Take the knife. Let the voice guide you,” he says, and I take the knife from him. Killing the man inside, that’s not the way to go about bringing my family back.
There’s another way.
He’s not so sure that taking Edward Hunter into custody is the right way to go, and he’s equally unsure whether leaving him alone is the way to go. Barlow warned him a few days ago and even though Schroder didn’t dismiss the man, he certainly could have paid more attention. He can’t ignore the fact that everything that has happened since that meeting, all the deaths, part of the responsibility for that sits with him. Not this time though—he’ll pick Hunter up and, no matter how bad he feels for him, he won’t let emotion get in the way. It’s Christmas Day and he’s about to pick up a man who’s lost his wife and daughter because a psychiatrist with a comb-over and an ex-wife and a nice pool told him so.
“Jesus,” he mutters. There has to be another way. Barlow agreed that if Schroder could get Hunter into custody, he would come and speak to him tonight and try to get a read on his mental condition. As for where Jack Hunter might go, Barlow had no idea.
“Justify it as not really an arrest,” Barlow had said to him on the
way out the door, “but forced therapy. Give me two hours with him and I’ll give you some options. The alternative is to sympathize with him for everything that’s happened and do nothing, and if he kills himself or somebody else tonight then those ghosts are with you.”
Schroder is passing over the alternative and heading straight to Hunter’s house. Christmas Day isn’t exactly turning out the way he planned. Thankfully his wife has been good about it. She’s the kind of woman who puts things into perspective—and missing Christmas Day with her husband didn’t amount to much when compared to what Edward Hunter was missing.
There’s not as much traffic on the road as there was last night, but it’s still enough to hold him up as he drives through town. People in their teens and twenties are searching for somewhere to be, the bars and nightclubs catering to them. The streets are lit up with neon and fluorescents, and he can’t imagine anything worse than being nineteen years old again.
He reaches Edward’s house. There’s nothing peculiar about the way it looks, no cars parked up the driveway or out front, no broken windows, no open doors, but something about it gives him a bad feeling. Thirty seconds later that bad feeling is confirmed when he steps out of his car and sees the blood on the driveway. It leads toward the door. Two trails of it, one heading one way, the other coming back. He calls for backup. He hasn’t had great experiences of late entering people’s houses, but he goes ahead and enters this one.
“I first made the newspapers when I was nine years old. I made them in every city across the country, most of them on the first page. I even made them internationally. In them I was black and white, blurred a little, my face turned in to my father’s chest, people surrounding us. From then on I was shown on TV, in magazines, in more and more papers, always the same photo. I never wanted any of it, I tried to avoid it, but the option wasn’t mine.”
I tell her this but she doesn’t seem interested. I tell her about my mum and my sister but the words go through her. Her eyes are closed and there’s blood all over her. Twenty minutes ago her life was much different, twenty minutes ago she was settling in for the night, a pile of DVDs on the coffee table and a Christmas tree full of blazing lights. I take the car toward town, traffic is thin, everywhere is shut. I’m wearing the clothes from the bank again, the ones with Jodie’s blood on them. I picked them up on the way. This is why I
kept them, I realize now. For this moment.