Blood Men: A Thriller

It was almost seven o’clock in the morning by the time Schroder got home. His family was awake. They hadn’t waited up for him—his daughter had woken early because that’s what Christmas was all about, at least for the kids. His wife had let her open just one present; she was waiting for him to get home before opening the rest. He managed to stay awake for another hour before going to bed, and had got almost four hours’ sleep before his wife came in to wake him. She handed him his cell phone. He didn’t want to answer it but he had to. Witnesses had spotted Edward Hunter that morning at the cemetery where his wife was buried. They’d phoned the police because Edward was carrying his daughter around and his daughter obviously wasn’t just sleeping. Before the phone call was over, there was more news—another body had been found.

A week ago Hunter had everything—a wife, a child, a job, he had dreams, the family had Christmas, they all had a future. It makes Schroder sick to know that on any given day your entire future can change.

He makes his way back toward the interrogation room and has his hand on the door handle, the two cups of coffee balanced in his other hand, when his cell phone rings. He steps back from the door and almost drops both coffees while fumbling for the phone.

“Schroder,” he says.

“Hey, Carl. I hear it’s been a long night,” Tate says.

“You got something for me?”

“Yeah. I know who put Roger Harwick up to stabbing Jack Hunter.”

“Who?”

“You’re not going to believe it,” Tate says, but he’s wrong, because Schroder does. After all—the last twenty-four hours have been nothing but believable.





chapter sixty


I knew Sam was dead from the moment I saw her in the slaughterhouse. I knew it before I had even stepped fully into the room. Felt it, even, if that makes sense. Knew it, felt it, saw it—and then ignored it. Just pushed it out of my mind for as long as I could until somebody—and it took Schroder to do it—came along and shoved the reality back into my face.

Dad’s tears weren’t tears of joy when he saw her, they were tears of pain. Sam was more like her mother than ever because Mummy’s a ghost, and so is Sam now. It was Christmas morning and I took my dead little girl out to the cemetery to see her dead mother while those around me stared and watched, not understanding, wondering what was happening.

Schroder doesn’t make me wait long in the interrogation room—maybe five minutes in total, which I figure is pretty good of him. He comes in with a folder tucked under his arm and a couple of coffees in his hand, supported by a small cardboard tray. He sits down opposite me and slides one of the coffees over.

“You need it,” he says.

“What I need is to be with Sam.”

“Look, Eddie, this is tough—God knows you’ve gone through more than anybody deserves, but . . .”

He runs out of words. Just like that, like somebody wound him up ten minutes ago and the spring keeping him going has come to a stop.

“I want to be with Sam.”

“I know. I know you do.”

“Please.”

“Soon. Okay? Just—we just need to go over a few things first. Then I can take you to her. Okay?”

I nod.

“Tell me what happened. Do you know where your father is?”

“No idea at all,” I say, and then I fill him in on the details. I tell him about the slaughterhouse and how he can find Oliver Church out there, how Dad killed him, how I have no idea where Dad is now.

“Look, Eddie, we already know about the slaughterhouse. You got out there not long before we got there. Truth is you could be facing some serious jail time. We’ve got bodies stacking up and you’re at the center of it all.”

“I didn’t kill anybody,” I say, “except for the guy who made me drown you, and the guy I ran over—but that was an accident. I didn’t even kill Bracken. It was the woman.”

“We know. We checked the prints on the knife. There was blood on them. Location of the prints beneath the blood showed she was the one holding them when it got used. You’re sitting okay as far as that one goes, and maybe for Church too, if you can prove self-defense,” he says, “if you hear what I’m saying. You or your dad had to defend against him. But Jesus, Eddie, you helped a serial killer escape. We can’t write that one off.”

“When she killed Bracken she took away our chance of finding Sam alive.”

“Then we need to find her before your father does,” Schroder says. “There’s another thing, Eddie. Your father. It turns out he’s the one who put Harwick up to stabbing him.”

“What? What are you saying?”

“It was all a setup. He got Harwick to stab him, to hurt him enough to require hospital treatment but not enough so he’d need a morgue. He knew you’d come and get him. He played everybody. He completely played you.”

I wonder at what point Dad decided to use his daughter-in-law’s death to his advantage; whether the man knew immediately he could use the tragedy to escape. I wonder if he even cared about what happened to Jodie. I’d like to think it at least took him a few days to think it through, but for some reason I don’t think it did. For some reason I think the moment the news was broken to him about the bank robbery he knew in an instant he was going to manipulate me; that he would tell me about the darkness and the monster and would get me to become like him; that the only thing standing between him and freedom was an innocent stabbing of the kind where every major organ was missed, where he could spend the night in a hospital so understaffed that only a single nurse was seen.

“I’m sorry, Eddie.”

“You got the rest of the bank robbers?”

“We got the names. One of them we have in custody, one of them we’re still looking for.”