Текст книги "Trust No One: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

WMD PLUS TWO HOURS

It’s been an hour since the argument. Ten minutes since your last drink. The online video now has over a hundred thousand hits. You’ve been called ten different types of gay and ten different types of asshole, and a hundred types of everything else. The office door is slightly ajar, which means you can hear other sounds from around the house, the last of which was the bedroom door softly shutting when Sandra went up to bed. You’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight, though you won’t have to get too used to it—you’ll be sentenced to the nursing home very soon.

This may be one of your last free moments in the office, so you’re feeling nostalgic. Some details are fuzzy, others are clear. You can remember the time Eva got stung by a bee when she was nine years old, which led to her throwing out a plushy bee toy she’d had since she was a baby, plus every one of her children’s books that had pictures of bees in them. You can remember the day your mother called with news dad had died. You can remember teaching Eva to fly a kite, how the string broke, how it disappeared on the wind and you convinced her it was going to head into space, and how every night for the following few weeks she would ask where the kite was now, and you would say it was near Mars, near Jupiter, how it was stuck on the rings of Saturn but working its way free, and she asked how you knew all this and you said NASA would call every night because they were tracking it with one of their giant telescopes. For the last few hours you’ve let multiple memories flood your brain, enjoying the process, very well aware that soon they will be walled off by the changing landscape of neurological pathways.

The video has now had more than a hundred and ten thousand hits. Hard not to wonder what it will max out at, or wonder if your publishers know about the speech, or what tomorrow will bring. So many people you know will have seen that video, from your editor to your doctor to your lawyer to the florist. Hard not to wonder what these people are all thinking of you right now.

All this wondering . . . you need a walk. You need some time apart from the Madness Journal. It’s time to sneak out the window, maybe find a bar somewhere and just . . . sit. Kind of like your dad used to do instead of coming home to the life that was making him unhappy. Maybe take a nap first.

Good news—let’s see . . . you’re still alive.

Bad news—you’re still alive.

Jerry stays on the couch while Hans goes into another room. He sips at his bottle of water while he watches the news. The story has something to do with gas prices going up, and he realizes that’s one thing he’ll never have to worry about again, and with that thought comes another one—it’s also something that Fiona Clark won’t have to worry about. A sense of recognition quickly follows, and he realizes he’s done this before—not kill somebody, that he has never done—but watched the news only to see a dead woman on the television screen, his imagination on overdrive as it fills in the blanks. Sometimes the imagination of a crime writer is a powerful thing. In fact he’d go as far as to say it’s a curse. It’s one reason he used to try and avoid the news—when he sees somebody murdered, his mind goes to the event, he pictures their last few moments, what they went through, the fear, the begging, the desperation to survive. It’s the five stages of grief on an escalated scale. His mind takes him there, but it also takes him to the moments before, those choices made on the way home when the victim could have turned left instead of right, made that green light before it turned red, if they hadn’t skipped their coffee—decisions and processes bringing them closer to death. His imagination runs the other direction too, moving forward after the crime, a mother collapsing at the news, a husband punching a wall, children confused and scared, a boyfriend begging the police to have five minutes alone with whoever did this, people being sedated the same way he had to be sedated yesterday. He scratches at his arm, the needle prick still itching from the injection.

Hans comes back with a laptop and sits next to him on the couch. He sets the laptop on the stool and drags it closer.

“I don’t think I can handle one more nail in the coffin,” Jerry says.

“We can still go to a strip bar,” Hans says.

“Let’s just get this over with.”

Within a minute Hans is pulling up stories, and there is Suzan with a z, only she isn’t Suzan with a z but Julia with a J and with a face Jerry can remember, a face he can picture when he thinks of the book he put her in, this is the woman he thinks about when he confesses to murder. Julia without a z, whose backyard he stood in thirty years ago while embracing the darkness. Blond hair and big blue eyes, athletic, his neighbor, the woman he would see jogging in the mornings, her ponytail bouncing up and down, this girl not much older than Eva is now. They read the articles. Julia had broken up with her boyfriend six weeks earlier, a guy by the name of Kyle Robinson. According to her friends, he was harassing her. He was phoning her all the time, showing up at her work, showing up at her home, he would send her flowers and, on one occasion, he placed a dozen dead roses on her doorstep. Her friends told her to contact the police, to get a restraining order, but she defended him. She said he wasn’t really that bad, even though he had hit her a few months before they broke up, just the once, if you don’t include the other time he’d pushed her hard into the wall. She thought reporting him would aggravate the situation. Then her body was found, and the boyfriend was suspect number one. It was a label he couldn’t shake, and within forty-eight hours he was arrested and charged with her murder, and a year later he was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years in jail. Eleven years into his sentence another inmate stabbed him in the throat and the boyfriend left the prison system three years early in a body bag.

“There’s nothing here to suggest anything other than the boyfriend killing her,” Jerry says.

“He always said he was innocent,” Hans says, leaning back into the couch.

“But we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you didn’t think I killed her,” Jerry says.

“You used to talk about her a lot. From the day you moved onto that street, you used to talk about how hot the girl was that lived opposite you. Talked about her all the time, right up until she died. It was not long before you met Sandra. For those few days after she was found, and before the ex was arrested, you were as nervous as hell. I figured, you know, it was just because somebody you liked was murdered and that it upset you, but I also remember wondering if she’d still be alive if I hadn’t shown you how to pick a lock.”

Jerry can’t remember any of that, then suddenly he’s talking with Sandra, they’re talking about going to the movies on a date, he’s telling her he’s a closet Trekkie and she’s asking him what else he was keeping in his closet. What did he tell her? He told her he was keeping the body of his ex-girlfriend in there. Jesus, was it more than just a joke? If he can remember that, then surely he should be able to remember Julia. Only he can’t.

“When the boyfriend was arrested, my suspicions about you disappeared, but then over the last year you started confessing to Suzan with a z and, well, I guess I’ve always figured Suzan could have been her.”

“And you said nothing.”

“Of course I said nothing. It was thirty years ago, she’s dead, the boyfriend is dead, you were in a home flicking between the real world and wherever it is your mind goes when you’re no longer in control. It’s a closed book, mate.”

“And a year ago when you found me covered in blood?”

Hans nods. “Yeah, I thought about her that night too. Of course I did. It made me wonder.”

Hans closes the lid on the laptop. The news on the TV shows cop cars and reporters and rubberneckers all standing outside a house where police tape is strung across the front. It’s the house from this morning. Hans uses the remote to turn up the volume. The police aren’t releasing the dead girl’s name. They watch the report, neither of them talking, but Jerry knows both of them are thinking the same thing—that he killed her. That he killed Julia with a J. His wife with an S. The florist with a capital B. He killed them all. Even the boyfriend who died in jail, when you think about. He killed them, and his mind, to protect him, is hiding the memories.

“How many others?” Jerry asks.

Hans doesn’t answer. He just stares ahead at the television screen where the news isn’t getting any better.

Jerry carries on. “Both solved and unsolved, solved where they got the wrong guy. It’s been thirty years since Julia Barnes, and if it’s true and all this time I’ve been writing what I know, then how many others? Five? Ten? A hundred?”

“I don’t know, Jerry. Maybe there aren’t any others.”

Jerry slowly shakes his head. He is about to tell his friend he couldn’t have done any of this, but finds he can’t say the words. Not only could he have done these things, but most likely he did. “Hans?”

“I’m sorry, buddy. We need to go to the police. I’ve indulged you long enough, but it’s time to go. Any more thoughts on the journal?”

“The police are going to pin as many unsolved homicides on me as they can, and I’m not going to know whether to believe them or not.”

“It’ll bring closure to lots of people.”

“But it could be false closure. The people who committed those crimes are going to get away with them if they’re pinned on me. They’re going to call me the Butcher of Christchurch. No, it’ll be the Cutter. They’re going to start calling me the Cutting Man.”

“They already do.”

“The meaning will be different this time.”

“We need to take you to the police station, but first you need to try and relax and think about where your journal is.”

“Did I do these things? Tell me, Hans, tell me, did I do these things?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s no doubt in your mind?”

“None.”

“Okay,” Jerry says, finally accepting he has no other choice. “Then what does the journal matter? Let’s just go to the police,” he says. “Let’s just get this over with.”

WMD PLUS ONE DAY

What do you want to hear about first, Future Jerry? The blood? The shirt? Would you rather hear about the knife? How about the phone call to Hans? Or would you rather hear it from the beginning? Yes? The beginning? As you wish.

The Wedding of Mass Destruction made the news, as things can do if they go viral. The news piece was about Jerry Grey, Alzheimer’s sufferer, whose unfortunate lapse of Alzheimer’s judgment was caught on video and has now been viewed by over one million people. Porn and providing a place to rub salt into the wounds of others at their lowest moments—those are the Internet’s two biggest contributions to the world.

The last thing you remember from yesterday is writing in your journal, hiding it away, and then having a few drinks with the plan of sneaking out the window to find somewhere to have a few more. You can remember breathing in the fresh air as you crawled out. It was so crisp it was like it was being swung by the tail and smacked into your face. You were drunk, the perfect amount of buzz where it wasn’t going to worry you how far you had to walk, or how much a drink was going to cost, or what kind of bar you ended up in. Only if any of that happened, you don’t know. What you do know is that Captain A took over sometime after you wrote in your journal, and when he let go of the controls it was six in the morning and you were sitting on the couch. Your joints were stiff and your feet were sore, and you felt like you’d walked a few miles. You were naked from the waist up. You didn’t even notice the blood at first. You made your way into the bathroom, and that’s when you saw yourself in the mirror. Jerry Grey looking very pale and tired. Jerry Grey with crows-feet around his eyes and mouth. Jerry Grey naked from the waist up but with smears of blood on his chest and arms and face.

Want to take a stab at what was going on, Henry?

Jerry was in the off position. Jerry had no clue what was going on. Jerry’s world was going to get much worse later that day, but he didn’t know it then.

You rushed upstairs and you were scared, J-Man, as scared as you’d ever been. You opened the bedroom door, and the world was swaying, and you knew if you found Sandra in there with blood all over the walls, you would scream until your throat tore, until your ears popped, you would scream yourself to death. But there was no blood. You stood for a minute watching her sleep before going back down to the office. You couldn’t find your shirt. It wasn’t in the laundry, wasn’t in the bathroom, then you thought . . . if Captain A had steered you into trouble, perhaps he had tried to cover it up? Perhaps he had hidden the evidence. You moved your desk, used the screwdriver on the floor, and found your shirt under there. It wasn’t a wedding shirt anymore, but a funeral shirt, made to look that way by the blood on it. You left it under the floor and put everything back into place. You went and closed the office window that was still open, the window you had climbed out of as Jerry Grey, but by the time you climbed back in you were somebody else. You were Captain A, but Captain A has another name, doesn’t he. He goes by Henry Cutter. And that shirt made it obvious that Henry likes to write what he knows.

You went online. You searched news websites for stories that could be connected to your night. There was nothing. You washed the blood off your face and chest at the bathroom sink. You popped a pair of antidepressants and lay on the couch with no idea what to do next. Then you ended up popping a couple more and falling asleep. Right through until noon. You woke up with a dry mouth and the sense that everything was okay, then you remembered it wasn’t. You checked your body for cuts, for bruises, for more signs of blood, but there was nothing.

It’s the knife, right? That’s what you want to know about. Of course you do. At that point it was still hidden in your jacket, just waiting to change everything, and if you had found it then you could have hidden it with the shirt, but you didn’t find it—that little surprise was for Sandra. You went out to the lounge where she was sitting on a couch in the sun reading a book.

Isn’t there a lunch we’re supposed to go to? you asked, and your voice was croaky sounding.

There was, she said. Eva and Rick were around this morning to check in on me, she said, and it was me, not us. I told them we wouldn’t be attending.

Why?

Why do you think, Jerry?

You told her you were sorry.

I know you are, she said, but it doesn’t change anything.

Sandra—

You stink of alcohol and sweat. Go and take a shower and I’ll make you some lunch.

You thought about telling her, but how could you? What could you say? You went and showered and put on some fresh clothes and came back downstairs. Sandra was in the office. There was a sandwich on your desk. She was tidying up, she was picking the jacket up, and while she was picking it up she was asking where your shirt was. Before you could lie and tell her you didn’t know, she hung the jacket over her arm. She paused. The weight told her something was in there.

Since you’re a Let’s guess what happens a third of the way through guy, then you already know it was the knife she found in there. It was loose in the pocket, blade pointing up, and she was lucky not to have cut herself. She pulled it out and held it away, the same way she does sometimes when she’s holding hair she just pulled out of the shower drain. You could both see it wasn’t one of your kitchen knives and you could both see the blood on it and you could both see the horror on each other’s face. This knife with a blade no longer than six inches, its dark wooden handle, its serrated edge, this little knife that was the biggest knife in the world.

What the hell is this, Jerry?

Seeing that knife told you that as bad as the WMD had been, you had managed to top it. It put the bloody shirt into a different context.

Jerry?

I don’t know.

You don’t know?

You were standing in the doorway with hair dripping wet even though you had gotten dressed, and then you realized all of you was dripping wet. At first you thought it was sweat, but then you realized you hadn’t dried yourself after the shower, that you had just put your clothes straight on. I don’t know.

Stop saying you don’t know. Please, Jerry, think. You need to think. Thishas blood on it, she said. It’s blood!

We don’t know that, you said, hoping it might be something else. Maybe sauce. Maybe paint. Whatever was on the knife was probably the same stuff you got on your shirt. Something that looked like blood but certainly wasn’t.

It’s blood, she said.

I don’t know, you said, and you said it a few times, over and over.

While you said it Sandra had her own words that she said over and over, and hers were, What have you done, Jerry, what have you done?

What have you done?

Sandra wants to call the police. You’ve begged her not to, after all, nothing was certain, everything was unknown. She called Eva instead and asked her how her lunch went, and asked if anybody else hadn’t shown up. Everybody was accounted for. Even Rick’s best man who had put the video online, and if you were going to stab anybody to death it would have been him.

It should have been him.

Sandra agreed she wouldn’t call the police. Not at that stage. But she would, if anything showed up on her radar.

You called Hans. You told him everything about the shirt, the knife, the blood. He said you probably just found the knife somewhere. It was actually a really simple explanation. He said the blood could be from anywhere, from a cow, a dog, or maybe it wasn’t even blood.

There’s no point in worrying about something you can’t know about, he said. Worry if you learn more, but until then, just try to act normal, he said, and you could picture him using his fingers to make quotation marks around the normal part, the same way people will be doing at your trial during their Jerry used to be normal cross-examinations.

I don’t remember any of it.

There’s nothing to remember, he said, or words to that effect. You don’t know whether he was being vague, or whether he feared the worst.

Is it possible you just found the knife somewhere, like he said?

Good news—really? You think there’s good news?

Bad news—the bloody shirt, the bloody knife, is it possible you’re more than just a dessert guy?

Jerry is getting off the couch when a photograph of him is shown on the TV, his name beneath it. The reporter says, “Jerry Grey, who became an Internet sensation last year with video of him giving a speech at his daughter’s wedding, has been linked to the crime scene by an anonymous source.” Then Internet Sensation Jerry Grey shows up on the TV calling his wife a whore, his daughter and her new husband looking shocked in the background of the slightly shaky footage, and the hit counter keeps ticking over.

Jerry Grey. Shot to fame.

Jerry Grey. Shot his wife.

Somebody will write a song or a TV movie about him.

He sits back down as the wedding footage ends and then it’s back to today’s crime scene, cops moving around in the background, somebody in a suit carrying a fat metal briefcase, somebody with a camera hanging around their neck while they reach into a bag for a different lens. Today’s field reporter has the look of a working-class man, sleeves rolled up and no tie, and that makes the news far more real, so jaw-droppingly urgent this man didn’t have time to put on a jacket or a tie or even shave. He looks into the camera and carries on talking.

“Details are sketchy, but what appears to be a murder weapon has been located, and evidence at this stage suggests a connection to the former crime writer, which in itself suggests that Grey may now be living inside one of the realities he used to create. Furthermore, a bloody shirt found yesterday at the last residence of Jerry Grey connects him to the homicide of Belinda Murray, a Christchurch florist who was murdered last year, two days before Grey went on to kill his wife. An anonymous source has stated—”

Hans switches off the TV.

Jerry gets to his feet. “Let’s go.”

“We can’t go to the police until we find your journal,” Hans says.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Jerry says.

“Of course it does. If there’s a chance—”

“Fine, then let’s not go to the police. Let’s go for option number three. I want a nice view, some good gin, and I want it to be painless. I just want to escape everything. Can we do that?”

Hans says nothing for a few seconds, then slowly nods. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

“I know exactly what I’m saying. Will you help me?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“I want to talk to Eva first,” Jerry says.

“You can’t tell her.”

“I know. I just want to hear her voice. I want to tell her I’m sorry.”

“Okay.”

Hans dials Eva’s number as they walk back through the house. Jerry remembers that Hans has always been good with numbers. If Hans ever gets his own Captain A, numbers will be the last thing to go. Eva answers the phone and Hans tells her that he’s with Jerry, and that Jerry is okay. Then he says yes and no a few times as she fires some questions at him, then he says nothing as she gives him an update of her own, by which point they’re leaning against the car in the garage.

“Okay,” Hans tells her, and then he hands Jerry the phone. He looks like he’s just heard some news that has made all of this even worse. He leaves Jerry by the car and disappears back into the house.

Jerry puts the phone up to his ear. “Eva?”

“Are you okay, Jerry?”

Despite everything, it’s good to hear her voice. “I’m sorry about your mom,” he tells her.

“I know you are,” she says, “and we can talk about that later. I’ll meet you at the police station with your lawyer, okay?”

“Sounds good,” he says, and he pictures her sitting there waiting, waiting, and he never shows up. The nice view, the sun on his face, pills and booze—that’s where he’ll be. There are worse ways to go.

“Jerry . . . there’s something you need to know.”

He breaks out in a cold sweat and almost drops the phone. Nothing good ever comes after those words.

“The shirt found yesterday, it was—”

“I know,” he tells her. “I saw it on the news.”

“What wasn’t on the news is that the police have been searching your room at the nursing home.” Hans comes back into the garage. He’s carrying two bottles of gin and has a bottle of tonic tucked under his arm. He has a sad look on his face. He climbs into the car. “They found a small envelope with jewelry in it,” Eva says, carrying on.

“Your mother’s?” he asks, and it’s Henry that answers first, using his indoor voice.

Not Sandra’s, no. Remember what you had in your hand when you switched on earlier? He reaches into his pocket and the earrings are still there.

“No, not Mom’s,” Eva says. “But they seem to think . . . it’s . . .” she says, but then she starts crying.

“Eva—”

“I can’t do this. I love you, Jerry, but I can’t do this, I’m so sorry,” she says, and then she’s gone, the line is dead, and Jerry stares at the phone willing her to return, willing for things to be different. He climbs into the car and hands the phone to Hans, who slips it into his pocket.

“She hung up on me.”

“I’m sorry, buddy.”

“The police have been searching my room and they found something.”

“She told me,” Hans says. “The pieces belong to three women, all of whom were killed on days you were found wandering in town. I’m sorry, buddy, but it really . . . well . . . I’m not sure what to say.”

Jerry closes his eyes. How many have there been?

Hans uses the remote to open the garage door. He starts the car and they back down the driveway.

“There’s more,” Hans says.

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“One of the orderlies says you told him last night you killed Laura Hunt. She was killed last week in her own home. He said he dismissed what you were saying, that he thought you’d probably seen it on the news and you got mixed up the way you’ve been doing lately. Now, of course, he sees it differently. As do the police. It was the day you were found in the library.”

If people had listened to his confession, they could have stopped the monster. But all they heard was Captain A making shit up.

“You promise you’ll stay with me till the end, right? You’ll make sure everything goes okay?”

“I promise,” Hans says.

Jerry thinks of his Eva, and the pain he is sparing her.

“The journal,” Hans says. “Are you sure about it? Are you absolutely sure you had one?”

“Without a doubt.”

“Where else could you have hidden it?”

Jerry closes his eyes. He pictures his office. He can see the floor, he can see himself prying up one of the boards with a screwdriver. “There was nowhere else.”

“If I were to sneak in there later tonight to look for it, where would I start?”

“You’d do that for me? You’d hide it if there are bad things in there?”

“I’d destroy it. But where would I look, Jerry?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s important,” Hans says.

“I know,” Jerry says, scratching at his arm harder now.

“What’s wrong with your arm?” Hans asks.

Jerry looks down to see his nails dragging across his skin. He’s been doing that a lot lately. He rolls up the sleeve of his shirt, exposing the needle mark that looks raw and inflamed. “Everything is wrong with me,” he answers. “Come on, let’s go before we miss the sunset.”

“Show me your arm,” Hans says.

“Why?”

“Because I asked.”

Jerry shows him his arm.

“They’ve been injecting you?” he asks, and they’re still in the driveway.

“Just yesterday, when we went to look for the journal. They had to give me a shot to calm me down. I told you that already. I guess my skin is a little irritated.”

“You’ve got a few other marks there,” he says.

“I don’t remember the other time.”

“They look like they’re faded injection points. They make a habit of injecting the people at the nursing home?”

“I don’t think so. Like I said, they did it yesterday because we were at the house, and—”

Hans shakes his head before interrupting him. “Let me think a moment,” he says, his voice hardening.

“Why?”

“Just shut up. Let me think.”

Jerry shuts up. He lets his friend think. He starts drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. Over and over. Thirty seconds pass. A minute. He stops drumming his fingers. He looks at Jerry.

“There is something that has been bothering me about this all along,” he says. “The nursing home is a long way out of the city. It’s a good fifteen miles. Just how do you think you covered that distance? You didn’t drive, right?”

“I don’t know for sure. I think I walked.”

“It’s a long walk.”

“It’s the only explanation.”

“Do you remember walking?”

“No.”

“So let’s say you did walk. In which case you walked aimlessly all that way to the house of somebody you had never met,” he says. “With your neighbor when you were young, and with the florist, you knew them. Why would you kill people you don’t know? How did you choose them?”

“At random,” Jerry says, because it’s the only senseless answer that makes any kind of sense.

“If it was random, why somewhere close to town? Why not somewhere on the outskirts of town? If you walked, you would have passed through dozens and dozens of other streets. A thousand homes. Two thousand. Why walk fifteen miles to the edge of town, then another five miles to the victim’s house, especially when it’s somebody completely random?”

“I don’t make those decisions,” Jerry says. “That’s Captain A.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Hans says.

“Captain A seldom does.”

Hans starts drumming his fingers again. “All that walking, and then you go up to the door of a house you’ve never seen before, and a woman you don’t know lets you in. You choose the house of a woman who somehow you know is alone. That’s what we’re saying here, right?” Before Jerry can answer, Hans carries on. “Twenty miles between where that woman died and the nursing home, and you’ve got injection marks on your arms. You can remember everything after but nothing before.”

“What are you saying?”

Hans uses the remote control to open the garage door back up. They drive inside. He unclips his seat belt and looks over at Jerry. “I’m saying there’s a reason why it seems so convenient you can’t remember killing any of these women, or breaking into their houses. I’m saying maybe you didn’t do this after all.”