Joe Victim

Chapter Seven

The prison officer has bloodshot eyes, as if every night while he sleeps the unibrow above them extends downward and scratches at them. He hands over the tray of Schroder’s belongings. Car keys, wallet, phone, coins-actually, that’s a negative on the car keys. He looks into the empty tray, then pats down his pockets.

“My keys aren’t here,” he says.

The prison officer doesn’t look impressed. He looks like he’s being accused of something. “You didn’t give me any car keys.”

“I must have.”

“Then they’d be here,” the prison officer says, his unibrow turning into a uni-V.

“That’s my point. I gave them to you and they should be here.”

“And my point is that if you did give them to me then I’d have just given them back. Maybe you dropped them. Maybe they’re hanging out of your car door. Maybe they’re in the ignition. Maybe you left them at home and walked here.”

Schroder shakes his head. “Unlikely,” he says. “To any of those.”

“No. What’s unlikely is that I’d hide them from you, or steal them. What’s unlikely is that I gave them to some guy locked up inside and told him to take a joyride. Tell you what, you go take a look outside. If they’re not there, then you come back in and we watch the security footage,” he says, and points to a camera above the desk. “I can bet you a hundred bucks right now that you didn’t hand any keys to me.”

Schroder looks up at the camera, then pats down his pockets again. Did he lock his car? Of course he did. He always does. Only this time he was distracted by the pregnant woman. Distracted enough to leave them in the ignition? Maybe. Certainly distracted enough not to notice he didn’t put them into the tray when emptying his pocket. But does he ever? When he comes here it’s just like going through security at an airport-he doesn’t really notice what he’s taking out of his pockets, all he’s focused on is making them empty.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll check outside.”

“You do that.”

Schroder follows the corridor back the way he came, past the waiting area, past the corridor to the bathrooms, past more puddles of water that have formed from other visitors. He stands at the door and puts on his jacket then heads into the rain. There’s a similar number of cars in the lot as before-some gone, some new ones. The pregnant woman’s car is gone. Probably whoever she was visiting she couldn’t visit for long, her future baby pushing against her bladder would have put an end to that. He tightens his collar.

His car is locked. His keys are lying on the ground next to where the pregnant woman’s car was. He must have been carrying them in his hand. He must have dropped them when he caught her. He feels like an idiot. Part of him thinks he ought to go back inside and apologize to the prison officer, but it’s a small part, nowhere near big enough to make him actually do it. The guy was too big a dick for that.

He gets into the car and peels the wet jacket off him and tosses it into the back next to a box full of files from the Carver case. One of the sleeves lands on top of it, so he leans back and flicks it aside, not wanting water from his jacket to soak onto the files-files he shouldn’t have. The Carver case has lived with him for the last few years-it would come home with him, it would invade the room of his house that he had turned into an office, an office he made his wife promise never to go into because the content inside would give her nightmares. In a way the file invaded his marriage too. He would work at work and he would work at home when there was spare time, of which there wasn’t much because of the kids. Then that all changed and he lost his job, and all the copies of documents and photos he’d brought home had to be returned. Only he made copies of those copies first, and it’s some of those copies that occupy the cardboard box in his car. It wasn’t his case anymore, but with the trial coming up he wanted to be prepared for whatever came his way.

What he really wanted to come his way was a chance to strangle Joe. Hell, he’s imagined his hands around his neck a thousand times. He’s imagined shooting him, stabbing him. He’s imagined setting him on fire. He’s imagined a lot of things, all of which end very badly for Joe Middleton. He’s confident many people across the city have imagined all those same things.

Honesty being the policy and all that, not a day has gone by when Schroder hasn’t hated himself too. A serial killer was in their midst. They saw him five days a week. The bastard even made him coffee. Schroder doesn’t deserve to be a cop. None of them do. How many hours does that add up to? How many minutes did Joe make fools of them all?

The drive back into town isn’t any different from the drive out here. Same view. Same animals. Same guys in tractors making more money than he’ll ever earn, but they’re getting up far earlier every morning than he’d ever want to. The rain is still persistent. It’s beating down on the car and he isn’t sure he can make it through winter. If things don’t work out well with the new job, maybe it’s time to leave the city. He could pack the family in the car and drive up to Nelson, the sunshine capital of New Zealand. He has a sister who lives up there. Nelson is the kind of place where everybody has a relative who lives there because it’s so damn nice. He could work at a vineyard. Pick grapes and make wine. Or become a tour bus driver-take people on wine-tasting tours and watch them get trashed.

Joe. Fucking Joe. Thoughts of Nelson disappear and, like always, Joe replaces them. When the trial is over maybe then he can get some closure.

There aren’t too many cars on the roads, but what traffic is there is much slower because of the weather, giving the appearance of a slight traffic jam. It worsens as he gets toward town. He has a lunch date with Detective Wilson Hutton, which he’s going to be late for. He pulls over and uses his cell phone to call his ex-colleague to give him an extra fifteen minutes, but before he can the phone rings anyway. It’s Hutton.

“I was just about to call you,” he says.

“Listen, Carl, sorry, but I’m going to have to cancel lunch,” Hutton says.

“Let me guess,” Schroder says, “another homicide?” It’s meant to be a joke, and Hutton is supposed to say no, but as soon as Schroder says it he knows it doesn’t sound like a joke at all-it’s just his bad mood coming through by suggesting the worst-case scenario, and anyway, there’s nothing funny about people dying. He already regrets saying it.

“Yeah, body was found this morning,” Hutton says.

“Ah, shit,” Schroder says.

“Well at least this time the victim was a bad guy, Carl, so don’t start feeling too bad.”

In that case Schroder doesn’t feel bad at all. The world with one less bad guy in it? Why would he?

“Details?” Schroder asks, and he stares out the window at a campaign billboard looking down over the intersection. The billboard is for the already prime minister who is hoping to do what Schroder wasn’t able to do this year-keep his job. A vote for him is a vote for the future of New Zealand, according to the poster, but doesn’t specify if that’s a better or worse future. The prime minister has the look of a confident man, even though the polls suggest he doesn’t have the right to be. The election is only a few months away. Schroder isn’t sure who he’s going to vote for-probably for the candidate who doesn’t put up as many distracting billboards at intersections.

“Sorry, Carl, you know I can’t do that.”

“Come on, Hutton. .”

“All I can tell you is that it’s bad.”

“What kind of bad?”

“Not the kind of bad you’re thinking of. Listen, I’ll tell you when I can.”

“A drink tonight?” Schroder asks.

“Why? So you can pump me for information for that TV show of yours?”

“Weren’t you the one who said they believed in psychics?”

“I’ll give you a call if I can make it,” he says. “Later, Carl,” he adds, and hangs up.

Schroder tosses his phone onto the passenger seat next to the folder with Finding the Dead sketched across the cover. He wonders what Hutton means, and how bad it can get in a city where bad things happen a lot.

Now that he’s missing lunch he heads straight in to the TV station. He swallows his pride while still maintaining the sensation of selling his soul, and steps out into the rain and heads into the building to talk with Jonas Jones.