Blood Men: A Thriller

Then, when there is nothing left to show, it cuts to the people nearby when it happened—“we heard gunshots and ran,” “we didn’t know what to do,” “seemed unbelievable it was happening right here,” “we were almost killed.” Then come the interviews from people who were inside the bank. I recognize some of them. “They came out of nowhere,” “it was so scary,” “those poor people, my God, those poor people did nothing and got shot anyway.” A photo of a man comes up, he was the bank manager, he was fifty-six years old and had worked at that branch for nine years. It shows the bank teller whose life apparently I saved, her name is Marcy Croft and she’s twenty-four years old and has worked at the bank for nine weeks, and she’s shaking as the cameraman zooms in on her, and she says “He was going to kill me. I know that as sure as I know I’m never working here again. And that man, oh my God, that man distracted him and saved my life, and his wife, his wife . . .,” she says, and she breaks down in tears and can’t finish but the camera doesn’t break away from her, it focuses on her pain and relief and the country watches her cry for another ten seconds before it goes back to the anchor.

After the interviews a picture of my wife that I have no idea how they got—maybe from her work somewhere—comes up. Both victims have families, pain, and despair filling the spaces these people left. Then there’s me again, covered in blood, being led away from Jodie’s body. Edward Hunter, twenty-nine-year-old son of a serial killer. The anchorwoman mentions it.

The footage turns to a live feed from outside the bank. There’s still yellow crime-scene tape fluttering in the slight breeze. The spot where Jodie was killed has tape around it, and she’s been moved, and I have an image of her lying on a steel slab in a morgue, pale, grey, and blue and broken beyond repair, no longer covered by a sheet. The reporter has his sleeves rolled up, indicating he’s had a long day at work. He speaks for a bit, talking about me.

“And Jack Hunter, of course, was arrested after murdering eleven prostitutes, isn’t that right, Dan?” the anchorwoman asks, the feed going back to her, her serious face on display.

“Sure is, Kim. Of course that’s only eleven prostitutes that he admitted to.”

“Has there been any speculation that Edward Hunter may have been involved?” Anchorwoman Kim says.

“At this stage the police aren’t commenting on that, however from what I’ve learned it does seem unlikely. I think for Edward and Jodie Hunter, and for the rest of these people, it was a case of wrong place at the wrong time. As soon as we know more down here in Christchurch, we’ll let you know.”

Kim flashes her second expression at the screen, and then the image taken twenty years ago appears, of me in my school uniform by my father’s side. I almost throw the remote at the TV. The story gets to the climax—or, in this case, a punch line. The van was found. It had been stolen. No trace of the money. No trace of the people in it. The six men scattered into the city.

I turn off the TV and sit in the darkness, wide awake, angry, hurting, and alone.





chapter nine


A man walking his dog called it in. He saw the smoke and called the fire department who rushed out before the blaze could spread out of control, latching onto trees and then maybe houses in the area, but not before the van could be destroyed. The twisted and charred skeleton is still smoldering, and Schroder knows any evidence inside is gone. There’s still forensic evidence, but that’ll take weeks—and even then it may lead to nothing.

The road is hard-packed dirt leading into a pine forest. The sides of the road are breaking up in areas from tree roots, patches of it blanketed in pine needles. About two kilometers from here in one direction people go mountain biking and jogging and horse riding, and two kilometers in another direction is the ocean, but right here the world is abandoned, and the men who came here knew that. The ground hasn’t given way to any impressions from feet, or from another vehicle. The man with the dog doesn’t remember seeing any other cars coming or leaving, and there isn’t anybody else to ask. He can smell oil and gas and the branches that have blistered in the heat. Halogen lights have been set up, pointing at the van, lighting up the nearby trees and creating hundreds of shadows among them. There is no breeze at all, and every thirty seconds or so he has to swat away an insect about half the size of a fly.

Schroder can’t stop thinking about Edward Hunter. He thinks about the dad, just your normal everyday average family man. All through the trial Jack Hunter with his smiles, his neat but cheap suits, never once appearing cocky or arrogant and certainly nothing like the insane person his lawyers wanted him to be. The defense told the jury that the dad heard voices, that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, that he could barely control what he was doing, let alone remember it. They said the voices took over, and when they did there was no Jack Hunter, but something else, something inside of him that was sick and twisted and had gone undiagnosed for years. The jury didn’t buy it. The jury liked the prosecution’s story better. That story went like this: Jack Hunter loved to kill prostitutes and he hated to be caught. Jack Hunter wasn’t insane, because he got away with it for too many years. An insane man with no control over his actions would have been caught sooner. An insane man could not have covered up the crimes the way he did and lived the way he lived. The jury bought that story and Jack Hunter got life in jail. End of story.