“That’s a shame, son. It really is.”
“I never knew what else to call it. I figured you had a monster, and when you went to jail, it came to live with me. Came to live inside me.”
“Not my monster,” he says. “You proved that by killing the dog before I went to jail. You have your own darkness. I wish I could help you more, and I would, if I was out there with you. Son, word around here is that the cops have no idea who killed Jodie.”
I stare at him blankly.
“She didn’t like me much, but I could see she was a good person. She was a good wife, I bet, and certainly a great mother, and I owe her for what she did for you. What happened to her—that’s a shitty thing. A real shitty thing. Yet if you ask me, the fact the cops haven’t caught anybody, that’s a good thing.”
“What?”
“It’s a good thing, son. Think about it.”
“What are you on about? How the hell can you say that? What are you? What in the hell are you?”
My dad leans forward in his chair then slowly pushes himself up. Both guards come over. “It was good talking to you, son.” He starts to walk away.
“Fuck you!”
“No yelling,” the guard says, and puts a hand on my shoulder and I shrug it off. The Christchurch Carver looks over and watches.
Dad turns back. “Go home and think about what happened to your wife,” he says. “And take some advice from your old man . . .”
“Save it,” I say.
“It’s okay to listen to the voice,” he says, then he disappears through the doorway.
Suction Cup Guy had a real name and Suction Cup Guy was murdered. His name was Arnold Langham and his friends called him Arnie. He was a husband and a dad and his forty-two years on this earth all ended when he was tossed from the apartment building. The suction cups were attached to him, he was stripped and dressed in a trench coat, one of his fingernails found buried in the roof as he tried to fight for survival, the reason for the staging still unknown. Langham no longer lived with his wife—hadn’t lived with her since he’d beaten her up badly enough to spend three years in jail for it. The wife wasn’t a suspect because she’d taken their son and moved north and west enough to hit the next country in line with New Zealand. Other than beating up his wife, Langham doesn’t have any other criminal record—no assaults, no rapes, no breaking and entering. A couple of speeding tickets but that’s all. He worked full time on an assembly line making control boards for motorized wheelchairs. It was an active case, but the urgency had
dissipated—it’s the way it was when one case you were working dealt with a wife-beater, and there was another case dealing with a group of bank robbers who killed two people while stealing what turned out to be 2.8 million in cash. It was about priorities—and at the moment the bank robbery was everybody’s priority. Suction Cup Guy would have to wait. It was a shame that for the hundreds of man-hours invested so far, all they had were transcripts of pointless interviews and a burned-out van. They didn’t even have the dye-pack-damaged money. He’d have thought any ruined money would have been dumped with the van and set on fire, but forensics—at least so far—had found no traces of it. No currency—no red ink. All he has are a lot of unanswered questions, two bodies in the ground who deserve to be put to rest, and a wife who was cold to him most of the weekend. The job was interfering with his family life. The last weekend before Christmas and he should have been spending it with his wife and daughter and their new baby boy, and at the rate the investigation is going his son will be in school and his wife will have left him before it’s over. He’s been lucky so far in that he hasn’t missed any Christmases, but he’s certainly missed plenty of other occasions; each one his wife remembers and, in times of arguments, reminds him of. Sometimes she reminds him he’s the reason they’re having children so late, and that he’s the reason they’re going to be in their sixties before the kids are old enough to move out of home.
There are plenty of criminals on the street who occasionally do a favor for the cops in return for some minor charges being overlooked. But this time there’s nothing. The men responsible have involved nobody else. The cash, if not damaged, hasn’t been circulating anywhere. Whoever did this knew what they were doing. They got out of the bank almost two minutes before the police arrived. Reading criminal records has led to hundreds of possibilities, but linking enough names together to form the gang that robbed the bank has been impossible. They’ve conducted almost two hundred interviews already and he wonders if any of the men who actually stormed into the bank have been spoken to. Probably. Hard to know.
Schroder is sipping at a cup of cooling coffee and has just hung up from a phone call from the prison. Turns out Edward Hunter went to see his father today. He wonders what would prompt him to do that after all these years.
There’s a knock at his office door. “Somebody here to see you,” an officer says.
“Who?”
“He says he has some information about the robbery.”
“Another psychic?” Schroder asks. Whenever there is enough media coverage of a tragic event, the psychics come out of the woodwork. Jonas Jones, an ex-used-car dealer turned “renowned” psychic investigator who appears on TV giving “serious criminal insights” to cases the police have been unable to get a handle on, has already left over a dozen messages and has been banned from going any farther than the foyer in the police station.
“Worse. A shrink.”
“Jesus.”
“You want me to send him in?”
The thing about shrinks is that sometimes they can be worse than psychics. At least the psychics will put on a show. They’ll light a few candles and pretend they’re talking to the spirit world or tuning in to some kind of vision.
“Not really, but go ahead.”
Benson Barlow is mostly bald with a serious comb-over, and Schroder wonders what other psychiatrists would say about it. In his midfifties and with a beard, the only thing missing from the shrink are elbow patches on his jacket and a pipe—but maybe that stuff he leaves in the office. After shaking hands, Schroder offers him a seat.
“The officer said you have some information about the robbery?”
“Well, in a way.”
“What exactly does ‘in a way’ mean?”
“It means I don’t actually know anything about the robbery itself, not in those kind of terms.”
Schroder wonders if everybody who has a first and last name
starting with the same letter is going to be a thorn in his side. Benson Barlow. Jonas Jones. Theodore Tate. “Then why are you here? To offer a profile?”
“Not exactly,” Barlow says, leaning forward. “Twenty years ago I was the psychiatrist who examined Jack Hunter.”
“Which one?”
“Well, both, actually.”
“And which one are you here to talk to me about? Jack Jr.?”
“Mostly, though he’s Edward now. It was one of the first things he did when he was eighteen—legally change his name, though since the age of nine he wouldn’t answer to anything other than Edward. Jack Sr. suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He heard voices and he believed he was being controlled by them. Or it. It was only the one voice, and he called it the darkness.”
“Come on, that was a line of BS they tried feeding to the jury. Nobody bought it.”
“It wasn’t bullshit, Detective. It’s a real mental illness that people genuinely suffer from. It makes them think delusional thoughts. It can make you think you’re being followed, chosen by God for a quest, it can make you think you’re being watched by your neighbor or by the media. It can make you believe you’re being controlled by an external source.”
“And Jack Hunter thought he was on a quest for God?”
“Well, no. He thought there was a real darkness living inside him that needed to see blood to stay happy.”
“Then he thought right. I don’t see what this has to do with the robbery.”
“Paranoid schizophrenia is a hereditary condition, Detective. What Jack Sr. has, there’s a chance that Edward might be struggling with the same illness—perhaps only to a minor degree, something that can be treated with medication. But considering the numerous traumas the boy went through at an early age, his current loss may compound the situation into something more serious. All those years ago when he was my patient, he told me things—things that make me worry about him. I fear for him, and for what he’s capable of.”
“What kind of things?”
“I can’t tell you what he said. Those sessions were private.”
“So you’ve come here to tell me you can’t tell me anything?”
“No. I’ve come here to tell you that Edward Hunter is potentially a danger to himself, possibly to others. Genetically, he’s like his dad. Emotionally, I think they’re the same. Edward stopped being my patient when he turned eighteen and I haven’t seen him since, but from what I’ve learned over the last few days it’s obvious he was living a very stable life in an environment he was comfortable with. But now things have changed. The death of his wife is a trigger, Detective. It’s a huge red flag and I’m telling you, there’s serious potential there for him to be a dangerous man, perhaps even as dangerous as his father.”
Schroder picks up a pencil and rolls it between his fingers. “So what is it you want me to do? I can’t go and lock him up to satisfy your suspicion of him. Why don’t you get him in for some sessions?”
“I’ve tried. I’ve been leaving messages but he won’t return them.”
Schroder doesn’t blame him. He wouldn’t return the messages either. “So what do you want?”
Barlow shrugs. “Ideally, I want Edward to get help. There are medications that can keep him under control.”
“You’re assuming he has what his dad has—and even that’s assuming his dad had anything other than a taste for blood.”
“Even so,” Barlow says, dismissing him and standing up as Schroder’s office phone starts ringing. “I’ve done my professional duty. Ethically and legally I have to warn the police if I have a patient who I believe to be a danger to others or themselves, and that’s what this is—it’s a warning.”
I listen to the lunchtime news on the way home. The guy who shoved and killed the woman in the parking lot is claiming he was on “P,” the fashionable drug with the fashionable defense for murder—meaning he’ll either get six months in jail or nine months in rehab since it really wasn’t his fault, but the drug’s fault, or the addiction’s fault, or everybody else’s fault for not reaching out and helping him sooner. Most of the sheep have been caught but four are still on the run. Maybe they’ll team up and make more sheep between them and go about robbing farms. There is more news: a security guard was killed last night and found naked in town, a primary school was burned down but nobody was hurt, then there’s sport and weather and nobody mentions the bank robbery anymore.
I get caught behind a slow-moving truck, adding about twenty minutes to my drive, the amount of exhaust fumes coming from the back of it bringing global warming twenty minutes closer to a final conclusion. I’m still angry when I get home. Angry at the news, at
the police, at the monster inside me, at the world for moving on when it should be pausing, when it should be taking a time-out to mourn my wife and to ask the big question, “Why?” over and over, why did this have to happen, why is society the way it is, why isn’t anybody doing anything about it?
I’m still angry at my dad. With twenty years between the last time I saw him and this time there should have been more to say. And why did he get me out there only to tell me it’s a good thing that the police haven’t caught the men who did this?
Don’t kid yourself, you know exactly why.
“No,” I say, and I grab a beer from the fridge.
Mostly I’m angry at myself. I didn’t go out there to share anything with him. I don’t really know why I went—certainly it wasn’t to tell him about the monster, but those words came out as if they had a life of their own. And in a way I guess that’s exactly what the monster is—a life of its own. I’ve kept hearing it over the last twenty years, small suggestions whispered to me that I’ve ignored, ideas on how to get rid of animals or people that I don’t like.
My wife has been dead four days and in the ground for less than twenty-four hours and I’m losing my mind. I sit outside and let the sun burn my face and eyes before turning away, the bright shadows and shapes moving across my vision. I go through my wallet for the business card I slid in there on Friday, and when I find it I can’t read the number on it and have to wait for a minute for my vision to settle.
“Detective Schroder,” the detective says, answering his phone.
“Hi. It’s, ah, Edward Hunter. I’m, ah, ringing to see—”
“I was just about to call you,” he says.
“Yeah? You have something?” I ask, walking outside with the phone. “You’ve caught the men who killed Jodie?”
“No. Not yet, but trust me, Edward, we’re following up some strong leads,” he says, but he doesn’t even sound like he could convince himself. “You have to be patient.”
“I have been patient.”
“I promise you, it’s still my top priority.”
“In three days it will have been a week,” I point out.
“I understand your frustration,” he says.
“I’m not so sure you do. How much did they get?”
“What?”
“How much money did they take from the bank?”
“I can’t discuss that with you.”
“Jodie was killed because of that money. Give me a break, Detective, I think I have more than a right to know how much my wife’s life was worth.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, because two people died,” I say, and the accountant in me is doing the arithmetic, “so divide that number by two and that’s how much she was worth. I want to know if she died for more or less than the price of a new car, more or less than the price of a house? Of course it depends on the house, on the car, but—”
“Look, Edward, I promise you we’re doing our best. We really are. We have everybody we can spare searching for those men.”
“Searching, not chasing,” I say. “Maybe I should do your job for you,” I say, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, having come from nowhere, certainly not from me, and I realize they’re not my words at all, but somebody else’s. No, not somebody—something.