James Carol - The Quiet Man

He reached the sports pages without finding anything. Just to be thorough, he went through the edition for August 7. If it was a light news day they might well have used something that hadn’t made the cut the previous day. Anderton had moved on to August 7, too. Winter went from cover to cover but nothing jumped out. The book made a solid thump when he closed it. He pushed it to one side and reached for the 1997 volume. Anderton finished with hers a couple of minutes later. She closed it with a bang then went over to the shelves for the 1994 volume.

An hour later they’d covered the whole of the nineties and the tail end of the eighties. Nothing had jumped out. They’d even gone back to the volumes from 1995 through to 1997 and looked at August 8 and August 9, just in case. Still nothing. They leant back in their seats and locked eyes across the table. The only noise was the hum of the air conditioner.

‘Face it, Winter, the date might be arbitrary.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘It has to mean something.’

‘Just because you want something to be true, it doesn’t mean that it is.’ She stopped talking and grinned to herself. ‘You know, that sounds like the sort of bullshit line you’d come out with.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Look, don’t feel bad. It was a good idea.’ She stopped talking again. This time she was thinking rather than grinning. ‘If it makes you feel better, I can call one of my contacts. If she died in a traffic accident then it might not have been a big enough story to make the paper.’

‘If someone had died, it would have been in there, even if it was just a paragraph or two.’

Anderton put her hands up. ‘Hey, I’m just trying to make you feel better.’

‘I appreciate it, but don’t bother. I know how this works. Some ideas pan out, most don’t.’

‘So cynical for one so young. What happened?’

Winter laughed wryly. ‘You want to know what happened? Life happened.’

By seven that evening Winter was back in his hotel suite at the Shangri La. The TV was on, the sound muted. It was tuned to Global BC’s news channel. Charlotte Delaney was on the screen. Her lips were moving, but he couldn’t hear a word she was saying, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He poured a generous measure of Springbank and settled down on the sofa. Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 23 was playing on the room’s sound system. For a while he just sat there with his eyes closed, listening to the music and sipping from his glass. Mozart and a good single malt. Life didn’t get much better. This was his salvation. When the darkness threatened to overwhelm him this was where he came.

He could feel the frustrations creeping in, which was nothing new. Most detective work seemed to involve two sideways steps for every one forward. They’d made progress today, but the killer was still out there. The bottom line: they had thirty-six hours to catch him before the trail went cold. If that happened it would be another year before it turned hot again.

The first movement of the concerto was frenetic and playful, and made Winter itch to play. He didn’t play anywhere near as often as he should these days. His lifestyle didn’t allow for it. Guitars were portable, pianos weren’t. There was a baby grand at his house in Virginia. It was a beautiful instrument. The keys were weighted just right and the tone was incredible. He hadn’t been back there since the execution. At some point during the long drive home from California’s San Quentin prison he’d made the decision to leave the FBI. He’d quit the next day, just packed up his desk, then gone home and packed a suitcase. He’d headed to the airport with no real plan of where he was going or what he might do when he got there. And here he was, still travelling, and still not sure where he might end up next.

The second movement started playing. It was slow and melancholic and as heartrending as anything that Mozart had ever written. The piece reminded him of his mom, but from the days after the arrest rather than the days when she still knew how to smile. After the arrest things had been unbearable for her, yet she’d hung on in there. Winter had often wondered why she hadn’t killed herself.

Her funeral was the loneliest thing he’d ever witnessed. He was the only mourner, and that more than anything else brought home what his father had done to them. An instrumental version of ‘Abide With Me’ was playing through the crappy stereo system when Winter arrived at the chapel. He had traced the music to the source and pulled the plug. This had earned him a strange look from the priest, but he didn’t care. His mother had loved music. There was no way he was subjecting her to this. He hadn’t been able to save her, but at least he could spare her this final indignity.

He could still picture the coffin sitting at the front of the crematorium’s tiny chapel, the sunlight laid across the wood, pink and green and golden, tinted by the cheap stained glass. A priest had gone through the motions, reciting his lines like a bored actor, his performance wooden and lacking any real emotion. And then her body had been consigned to the flames. As soon as the coffin was out of sight, Winter had walked away, the sound of his footsteps following in his wake and echoing in his ears. He hadn’t looked back. There was no point. Whoever or whatever was in that coffin, it wasn’t his mother.

The second movement drifted to a gentle close and he opened his eyes. He drained his glass and poured another inch. Myra Hooper’s murder was still dominating the news. Right now, it was the only story in town. Winter checked his watch. Twenty-three after seven. So far, so good. The killer hadn’t struck again. Not yet, at any rate. The two-hour window between six and eight was the danger zone. If they lasted through the next thirty-seven minutes they should be okay. ‘Should’ being the operative word. If they’d learned anything from today it was that they couldn’t take anything for granted. Winter felt like he should be doing something, but what? Anderton had felt the same thing, too. In the end they’d decided to call it a day. The best thing they could do was get some rest so they could hit the ground running tomorrow.

The picture on the TV changed and Charlotte Delaney was back. She looked intense. Whatever she was saying, the future of mankind depended on it. The camera cut away and did a slow scan of the area. Winter recognised Spencer Avenue from this morning. There was still a major police presence, but the energy had changed. Earlier, everything had been charged by the newness of the situation. A little under twelve hours on and everyone was starting to get jaded. It was like everything had been dialled down a couple of notches. Cops were still milling around but without the same sense of urgency. The CSI truck didn’t look as though it had moved. The area around the tree where Anderton found the footprint had been cordoned off with crime-scene tape.

Even though it was getting late there was a bigger crowd than earlier. That was to be expected. As soon as the news of a murder got out, people gravitated toward the crime scene. What were they hoping to see? The blood? The body? Because if that was the case then they were going to be sorely disappointed. Those were the first things to get hidden away. Crime-scene tents weren’t just there to protect the evidence. It was the same mindset that encouraged people to try to see into the back of ambulances. Even though they were flying past, siren blaring, lights flashing, you still tried to peer through the dark glass to catch a glimpse of whoever was inside.

Winter still couldn’t shake the feeling that they were close to a breakthrough, and that Cody was somehow the key. Assuming he was the only one who’d been approached by the killer, what made him so special? Why single him out? An updated version of the photo composite had been created from his description, but none of the husbands had recognised this new face. Sobek included. Freeman had sent someone to the cemetery to talk to him. The fact that nobody had recognised the face in the composite was far from conclusive. Eyewitnesses were unreliable at the best of times, and, in the case of Sobek, three years had passed since Isabella was murdered. Most people struggled to remember what they’d eaten for breakfast, never mind something that happened three years ago.