The Killing Hour

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The roads are getting thick with traffic. Landry hates traffic. Ten years ago he took his wife-no, his second wife-to London. They spent three weeks there. He didn’t like it. It was too busy. You could lose hours in traffic. You could get up in the morning and drive half of the day and only have gone a dozen miles. He remembers coming back to New Zealand and vowing he’d never complain about the traffic here. Or the rain. Only both those promises were left in the dust, along with his second marriage.

He makes it in to work, and now things are working better. His parking spot has opened up. He finds himself a coffee cup that hasn’t broken. He fills out a warrant. It’s a standard form in which he has to fill in the blanks. He writes in the address. He writes in the person of interest. The person of interest is a guy by the name of Desmond Important Person, and they want to search Desmond’s house. It’s not the guy’s real name, but he had it legally changed from Desmond Douglas seven years ago. In the years he’s been known as Desmond Important Person, he’s also seen the inside of a jail cell on three different occasions, once for burglary and twice for stealing a car. Douglas is nowhere to be seen, and unfortunately for him Luciana Young’s car happened to be parked two doors down from his house. With no other suspects on the street, Douglas has become somebody the police need to talk to. Landry knows it won’t lead anywhere-Douglas isn’t their man-but he’s happy with the distraction it will give Schroder and the others. Once he has the warrant, he can get back to doing what he hasn’t done yet-and that’s figure out where Feldman is.

The drive to the courthouse from the police station takes ten minutes. He hands the warrant off to a registrar. He tells him it’s urgent. The normal turnaround for a warrant can be half a day. He tells the registrar he needs it in five minutes. Tells him there’s a woman who’s missing. The registrar, a guy in his early twenties with too much acne and not enough hair and not enough money to buy a nice suit, tells Landry he understands and goes off to find a judge to sign it. Landry spends the time pacing the halls, staring at a whole bunch of bad people who are going to be around long after he’s gone. It takes twenty minutes for the warrant to get signed.

By the time he gets back out onto the street the traffic is so thick he actually uses his sirens just so he can clear a path through town. He switches them back off when he’s in the suburbs. At least the speeding woke him up.

Schroder and the assault team are still where Luciana’s car was parked-only the car isn’t there anymore. It’s been towed down to the station as evidence. He hands the warrant to Schroder, and then he starts coughing, and then he notices his hands are shaking. All of it is real. Schroder notices the same things.

“Look, Bill, you really do look like shit. Are you sure you shouldn’t be home?”

“Maybe you’re right,” he says, coughing into his hand to press home the point.

“We’ll search this guy’s house,” Schroder says, pointing toward Desmond Person’s house. “But, to be honest, burglary and car theft is a big step away from what happened to those two women. At the most you’ll find he probably stole the car and drove it here.”

“His file says that’s what he used to do? Steal cars and bring them home?” Landry asks.

“Well, no. But somebody brought it here.”

From there Landry drives from suburb to suburb, doing what he can to avoid traffic along the way, until finally he’s back at Charlie Feldman’s house. It’s been years since he was last on a stakeout. It was with. . hell, it was with a guy by the name of Theodore Tate, a guy who used to be a cop, but then became a private investigator and then became a real pain in the ass before ending up in jail. For the last year Landry has been convinced Tate is the kind of guy who’s done bad things for what he thinks may have been good reasons, only. .

Only shit. That’s exactly what he himself is becoming. Tate has killed people-more people than he’s let on, Landry is sure of it. Maybe Tate has cancer too.

The idea of becoming Theodore Tate is a miserable one, but one he only has to deal with for six months. Maybe less. That stakeout they went on together was at least ten years ago. Normally stakeouts were boring. They were watching a clown. Quite literally. The circus had come to town, and some poor teenager had become brain dead after buying drugs from somebody that his buddy said worked at the circus. Suspect was a guy by the name of Mortimer Dicky, also known as Beeboop the clown.

He spends a few seconds wondering if this is the right path. The Theodore Tate path. He could find and arrest Feldman and bring him into the station by himself, end his career with the people in this country loving him. And why the hell not? He deserves something other than the cancer for all his years of protecting the innocent, doesn’t he? Or he sticks with the Tate path. Make Charlie Feldman simply disappear. Magic.

He’s always been a fan of magic.

He reaches Feldman’s house. He knocks on the front door. No answer. He goes through the back gate and to the back door, which is open exactly how he left it. He goes inside. He puts on a pair of latex gloves. The living room looks the same. So does the kitchen.

But things are different when he gets down to the other end of the house.

Very different.

The kind of different that makes him clench his fists and makes him angry. The kind of different that answers the question of what he’s going to do once he finds Charlie Feldman, while at the same time dismissing the question as to whether there was any chance Feldman was innocent.

He spends ten minutes writing down every contact he can find that Feldman has. He walks back out of the house. His hands are shaking. He could probably wait inside hoping Feldman will return, but the way he can tell if a house is empty before approaching it, well, he’s not the only guy on the force with that skill. Same might go for Feldman. He doesn’t need any reason to scare the guy off. And if Feldman drives past and freaks, then he’s going to drive on, and Landry will never even know. So he decides to wait in his car.

He’s not sure if Feldman is going to come back. He must have come back during the night and he must have noticed his house had been broken into. Damn it, he should have staked the house out last night. This could have been over by now.

The day will be dark soon. He yawns again. He can’t help it. He adjusts his seat, opens a packet of peanuts, and begins calling the names on his list, starting with Feldman’s parents. He gets hold of the mother. No, their son isn’t in trouble. Yes, they’re just hoping he can assist in an investigation. No, it’s not important-something to do with one of his students who’s gotten into trouble. It turns out Feldman doesn’t even own a cell phone. The mother has no idea where Charlie may be-normally either at school or at home. Landry thanks her for her time. He can tell she’s worried. Then he hangs up.

He carries on through the address book. If he’s lucky, Feldman might just return home, or somebody might have an idea where he can start looking.