As an outsider I fall within the scope of their suspicions, and for this I only have myself to blame. I was a different man two years ago. A very different man.
Their questions begin to repeat after a while. The phrasing alters somewhat, but they’re only variations of the same theme — one that fast gets tiring, and one which seems to suggest there is a degree of blame here that is mine. Only there isn’t. I didn’t force the caretaker into my car. Didn’t force him to come back here. Didn’t force him to shed brain and bone matter across my furniture.
In the end I’m told to go home. I’m not sure how happy I am to do that, but I’m not sure what the alternative is either. Hang around and watch, I guess, though there isn’t much to watch. Just a bunch of guys doing the kind of tedious work that guys like me don’t have the patience for. If it was daytime there’d be a crowd of onlookers tripping over each other to sneak a peek at the corpse, but I’ve already sneaked a peek, and more — I stole from it.
‘One last thing,’ Landry calls out as I make my way to the stairwell.
I turn around but keep my hand on the stairwell door. Landry isn’t one of my biggest fans. There was a time when we were rather alike, but his life became his work while I did what I could to keep a balance. He’s the same age as me, but he hasn’t aged very well in the two years since I’ve seen him. He doesn’t look good at all. He smells of cigarette smoke and coffee.
‘What did you take?’ he asks.
‘What?’
‘Off your desk. There’s three clear spots. All that misted blood, except for three places. Two are from your hands. Which is a good thing, because it shows where you were when he pulled the trigger. But there’s something else. A much smaller patch.’
‘My keys.’
‘Doesn’t look like you took keys.’
‘There was so much going on. I don’t know. Maybe it was my
phone.’
‘Didn’t look like a phone. If I was to search you, I wouldn’t find anything else?’
‘What’s your point, Landry?’
“No point. Just curious as to what would be important enough for you to steal from a crime scene.’
‘I’m not stealing anything, and anyway it’s my office. Everything in there belongs to me.’
“Not everything,’ he says, and he looks back towards my office where the body of Bruce Alderman is being carried out in a dark canvas bag.
Outside, it’s drizzling again. It’s almost two in the morning. My car is still damp inside, but at least there’s no one in the back holding a gun. I drape one of the ambulance blankets over the driver’s seat to protect it from any blood still on my clothes, then begin the drive home. The hookers and the homeless stare at me as I pass. I could be their salvation, their next meal, their next drink, their next score.
My house isn’t anything flash, merely one of many placed slap-bang in the middle of suburbia. People live here, they spend their lives here, they make little people and pay big mortgages, and supposedly, supposedly, if they play by the rules then nothing bad happens to them. The problem is that tonight there is a van parked outside, blocking the entranceway, so I can’t just drive into the garage and walk into the house and ignore it. I pull up behind it and climb out, way too tired for any kind of confrontation.
Immediately the doors to the van open. A spotlight comes on, a man with a camera resting on his shoulder circles around from my right, and a woman with shoulder-length hair appears on my left. The bright light accentuates her heavy make-up.
“No comment,’ I say before the cameraman can settle into a comfortable position and the reporter can push the microphone into my face.
‘Casey Horwell,’ she says, ‘TVNZ news, just a few quick questions.’
‘No comment,’ I say, ‘and can you move your van? You’re blocking my driveway’
‘We have a report that Bruce Alderman, the suspect in the Burial Murders case, was killed tonight in your office.’
I wonder how long it took them to come up with a name for the case — the Burial Murders) — or whether tomorrow somebody will have come up with a better one. Casey Horwell pushes the microphone closer to my face. I recognise her from the news. Her career took a slide a year ago when she released information she should never have had, along with her own spin on what it meant, and ultimately compromised an investigation.
It resulted in an innocent man being found guilty in the court of public opinion for the rape of a young child. The night the segment aired, the man’s house was burned down with him inside it. He survived with third-degree burns, but his girlfriend didn’t.
I guess tonight Horwell is trying to pick her career back up.
“No comment,’ I say.
‘That’s not going to get you far,’ she says.
‘You need to move your van.’
‘Can you tell us about your involvement today?’
‘No.’
‘You’re no longer on the force. Why were you at the
cemetery?’
“No comment.’