Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

“We got your DNA,” he says. “You drank and ate at your victims’ houses. You were found with Detective Calhoun’s gun. We’ve got audio tapes you made from our conference room so you knew where our investigation was at. We got a parking ticket that was once in your possession that led to a body at the top of a car parking building.”

“We? You’re a cop again now are you?”

“We’ve got your DNA everywhere, Joe. We have so much on you that-”

“You’re still saying we, ” I point out.

“That you’re embarrassing yourself with this insanity plea,” he says, carrying on. “A guy can’t kill as many people as you did and get away with it as long as you did unless he was in complete control of himself.”

“Or unless the police force is made up of monkeys and morons,” I say. “So is this meeting over, Carl, or are you going to tell me what it is that you want that involves twenty thousand dollars?”

“Like you know, I no longer work for the police force anymore,” he tells me. “In any capacity.”

“No shit. I’m surprised you’re working at all. I saw the footage of you showing up drunk to a crime scene. It made good TV viewing. You deserved to be fired.”

“I work for a TV show now.”

“What?”

“It’s a show about psychics.”

I slowly shake my head, hoping to shake something loose in there that will help any of this make sense, but I’m missing the bits and pieces to make that happen. A psychic? Money? What the fuck? “What the hell are you on about, Carl?”

“It’s a show about psychics who help solve unsolved cases.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“They want to look at your case.”

“My case? I don’t have a case, Carl. I haven’t hurt anybody.”

Schroder nods. No doubt he expected this answer. “Okay, let me speak hypothetically here,” he says. “Let’s say you know where Detective Calhoun is.”

“I don’t. All I know is that he’s dead.”

“But we’re being hypothetical here, Joe.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I tell him. “Hyper what? Hyper pathetic? I’m not good with big words.”

He closes his eyes and pinches the top of his nose again for a few moments. “Look, Joe, this show,” he says, talking into his hand, “they’re willing to pay you twenty thousand dollars on the chance that you may know where the body is.” He pulls his hand away from his nose and interlocks his fingers with his other hand. “Giving us a location would in no way suggest your guilt. In fact both you and the show would sign waivers to say you could never discuss with anybody that you gave this information. Now, hypothetically, if we found the body, what would your guess be that there is anything the police could use to find Melissa?”

I think about it. I set fire to Detective Calhoun’s dead body, and I buried it. There’s nothing there for the cops to find, just ashes and bone and dirt, maybe a few fragments of clothing.

“Look, Joe, we know Melissa killed him. We know you hid the body. You have nothing to lose by telling us where he is, and a lot to gain.”

“What does the show need with the body?” I ask, but the words are barely out of my mouth before I know the answer. They want to find it. They want to put on some stage show with the dead, probably with the late Detective Calhoun, probably some psychic surrounded by candles and going into some kind of fuck-knuckle trance. Then he’ll lead them to his remains. The TV viewing public will love it. The show will gain ratings, it’ll gain attention, the psychic on the case will gain a fan base for more shows, maybe even write a book. “Wait,” I tell him. “I’ve figured it out. The psychic wants to eat him.”

“Yeah, Joe, that’s right.”

“What the hell am I going to do with twenty thousand dollars?” I ask.

“You can use it to make yourself more comfortable,” he tells me. “Money is as good in here as it is anywhere else. Hell, maybe you can use it to get yourself a better lawyer.”

“First of all, Carl, no, money is much better out there than in here. Secondly, I don’t know where this dead guy is,” I say, and before Schroder can react I raise a hand in a stopping gesture. “But maybe I’ll think about it overnight. Twenty grand isn’t going to help the thinking, though. In fact I’m having a psychic vision of my own. I’m sensing. . I’m sensing that if it were fifty grand I might be more helpful.”

“No way,” Schroder says.

“Yes way. The way I see it, Carl, Sally got paid fifty grand after you arrested me, right?” I ask, and it’s true. Last year there was a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for my capture, and somehow The Sally-the overweight, Jesus-loving maintenance worker at the police station-was given that reward. Somehow through a series of fuckups, The Sally figured out what the police couldn’t, and that led them to my door. “So if you’re going to hand money out like candy, then I want my share.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Hyper pathetically you should get me those contracts you’re talking about. Hyper pathetically for fifty thousand dollars I might take a guess as to where Detective Calhoun is.”

“So you’ll do it?”

I shrug. Hypothetically I just might.

“Clock is ticking, Joe. You have till tomorrow to decide.”

“I’ll think about it,” I tell him. “Come back tomorrow and bring the contracts.”

Schroder stands back up. He grabs his wet jacket and doesn’t put it on, just drapes it over one of his dry arms. He moves to the door and bangs on it. It’s opened and we don’t hug, he just walks out the door without even a good-bye. I wait in the room to be escorted back to my cell, my world is about waiting, and now I have something new to think about while I’m doing it-and that’s trying to figure out what kind of power fifty thousand dollars could buy in a place like this.

The fact is she had a plan. A good plan. A two-person plan. There was her, and then there was him-the second person of the two-part plan. A guy by the name of Sam Winston. Sam let her down. Maybe it was something that men with girls’ names do. Sam used to be in the army. She met him over the summer when he tried to break into her house.

She almost killed him, but she saw something in Sam, the same something others see in sick kittens and dogs with three legs, a kind something that makes you want to help. And he hadn’t been trying to break into her house, not really-it’d turned out he used to live there a few years earlier before drugs had taken away his money and chunks of his memory and sent his wife packing. He’d come back. He’d been drunk and furiously unwilling to accept that his key wasn’t fitting into the door.

That was the thing about Christchurch-it was a small world, a world full of coincidences, and people bumped into people like that every day.

Sam had been discharged from the army five years earlier. He hadn’t seen any action, unless you included getting so high that he crashed a fuel truck into the mess hall and injured half a dozen men, but nobody died as he told her proudly. Sam was angry at the world, angry at life, though he never told her exactly what it was he was angry about. He was happy to follow her around and do what she asked. He really was like a three-legged dog. A pet, really. Until he started to figure out who she was. By then they’d been planning on how to shoot Joe for a good two months. Then he got dollar signs in his eyes. She saw it happen. The news was on and the police had figured out her real name. There were pictures of her coming up on the screen and he kept looking at them and then at her, and his eyes widened as if big cash-register dollar signs were ringing off behind them.