Joe Victim

Schroder can feel a pulse throbbing in his forehead. He can feel adrenaline starting to pump. He feels that if he had to, he could lift a car and flip it over, even with his broken arm.

“Whose swipe card is she using?” Schroder asks, pointing at the monitor, and the moment he asks the question, he knows—he knows for sure what the answer is going to be. He should have figured it out when he was in the parking lot.

“That’s a really good question,” the guard says, because the guard doesn’t know Sally, the guard doesn’t know she worked with Joe, was one of the reasons he was caught, that she returned to studying nursing last year and now her training is at the hospital. The guard’s fingers fly across the keyboard for a few seconds. A moment later a photograph and an ID come up on the monitor, and Schroder looks at the picture of Sally, and Hutton looks at the picture of Sally, and then Schroder and Hutton look at each other.

“Shit,” Hutton says.

“I know,” Schroder says.

“Let’s go,” Hutton says, and the two men race out the door and back into the parking lot.

Chapter Seventy-Five

Joe stays mostly quiet as she gets him dressed into a new shirt. She had forgotten how his skin smelled. Forgotten how he felt. The last year without him was tough. Not the first few months. Back then she was a

“Where are we going to go?” he finally asks.

Melissa is also getting changed. She brought clothes with her last night for this. And a new wig. She’s going shoulder-length light brown. “We’re heading home,” she says. “We lay low for a bit. The police look for people who run. They’re easy to find. But we hide out and—”

“Do we really have a daughter?” he asks, “Or did I just imagine that?”

They are still in Sally’s house. She hates it here. She can’t imagine this being much better than where Joe spent his last twelve months, and she has a good imagination. The rooms feel damp. It doesn’t get a lot of sun. And she’s pissed off at Sally for not having kept the refrigerator nicely stocked. She’s hungry and there’s nothing here to eat.

“Yes,” she says. “She’s beautiful. She has your eyes.” She knew it was going to be a shock for Joe. She knew he would need time to adjust to it. Hell, she had nine months to get her head around it and even then it didn’t feel real until she was lying on Sally’s bed with a baby turning her vagina into something that resembled a gutted rabbit. So she knows he needs to come around a bit—she was just hoping he’d be a little happier along the way. “Her name is—”

“Abigail,” Joe finishes, adjusting the hat a little that she gave him so nobody will be able to clearly see his face once they leave.

“Did you mean before what you said that you’d rather go back to jail?”

“No. Of course not,” he says. “Where are we hiding out?”

“My place,” she says.

“You still live in the same place?”

“No,” she says. “I moved.”

“Before you started killing other people?” he asks.

“Something like that. Are you sure you don’t really mean what you said earlier about going back to jail?”

“Of course I’m sure. Did you have sex with those men you killed?” he asks.

“Of course not,” she says. And it’s true. But she’s not a

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Did you fuck anybody in jail?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Did somebody fuck you?”

“It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t in general population, otherwise that would have happened. There’s been nobody since you,” he tells her.

She believes him. A guy like Joe—she imagines he’d rather kill himself than become somebody’s pet. “How’s the shoulder?”

“It hurts,” he says. “A lot. But I’ll make it.”

She helps him to his feet. They make their way out of the bedroom.

“We have to go and see my mother,” Joe says.

She throws him a Why the hell would we do that glance, then follows it up. “Why would we go and do that?”

So he tells her why and she keeps him propped up by the door and listens to him as he talks. At first she thinks he’s still delusional from the medication. It’s quite the story. Fifty thousand dollars. Detective Calhoun. Jonas Jones the asshole psychic she’s seen on TV. A trip into the woods. Joe’s confidence in what he is saying becomes infectious. Then she remembers the files she saw in Schroder’s car from the TV station. It all makes sense. And fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money. She’s done well with the forty she got from Sally three months ago, and another fifty would certainly help get their new lives under way.

They should just head back to her house. Relieve the babysitter. And stay inside for the next few months. Grow Joe’s hair out. Dye it. Get him to put on some weight. Get him to look about as different as she can with what she has to work with. Get him to bond with Abigail. Then work at getting some false identities and leave the country. Difficult, yes, but not impossible. Just wait for the manhunt to die down.

“So the money was transferred into your mother’s account,” Melissa says.

“Yes.”

“That means your mother will have to go into a bank and draw it out. We can’t risk her saying the wrong thing. Too problematic.”

Joe shakes his head. “You don’t know my mother,” he says. “She doesn’t trust banks. She has a bank account purely because you can’t really get by without one, but she hates them, hates them so much she goes in there every Monday morning and draws out her benefit in cash and takes it home and hides it under her mattress. She has done for years.”

“You think she’ll have gone there this morning and drawn out the fifty thousand dollars?” she asks, and she tries to imagine it, and for some reason she pictures an old lady with a sack slung over her back with big dollar signs on it. But of course that’s not the reality. Fifty thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills is five hundred of them. That amount would fit into a handbag.

“Without a doubt,” Joe says. “It’ll be at her house under her bed just waiting for us to go and get it.”

“And you’re sure.”

“Yes,” he says.

Fifty thousand dollars—is it worth the risk?

She decides that it is.

Chapter Seventy-Six

Schroder and Hutton are leading the chase. He knows they are because when Hutton calls in the new information he’s told backup is ten minutes away. While Hutton is on the phone organizing that, Schroder is once again searching his pockets for his Wake-E pills. Nope. Definitely gone. He has a headache coming on.

“A team has just reached Raphael’s house,” Hutton says.

“And?”

“And the results are interesting. Nothing there to suggest he was working with Melissa. But plenty to suggest Raphael wasn’t exactly a Good Samaritan.”

“Yeah? What’d he do?”

“Joe’s lawyers,” Hutton says. “It looks like Raphael’s the guy who killed them.”