Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) (20 page)

NOW

36

The Present

‘We finally got an ID on the victim outside the bar,’ Maggie told Stride and Serena.

She stood in the doorway of Stride’s cottage on the 3300 block of the Point. It was a July evening after dark, and the windows were all open, letting in lake air through the screens. Stride sat in his red leather armchair near the fireplace, under the mantle that was decorated with a sign that read: BELIEVE. Serena sat on the walnut steps that led up to their unfinished attic.

He reached over to the small table next to him for a cigarette before he realized that he didn’t smoke anymore. Strange. After fits and starts, it had been three years since he’d had a cigarette, but sometimes he simply forgot that he was a different man now. You are always one moment away from being who you were, so the price of maturity is constant vigilance.

‘Who was she?’ Serena asked. She wore a purple tank top and shorts, leaving her strong arms and legs bare. The skin of her long legs was mottled by scars from burns she’d suffered in a fire two years earlier. Her flowing black hair was mussed.

It had been three weeks since Serena saw a young blond woman shot and killed outside the Grizzly Bear Bar in West Duluth. She’d chased down the shooter, but he’d escaped, leaving his gun behind but with the woman’s wallet and phone lodged in his pocket. They were no closer to finding him, and the woman herself had been a Jane Doe since the murder. Nothing in her baby-blue suitcase had helped them give her a name. Until now.

‘Kelly Hauswirth,’ Maggie said. ‘Twenty-two years old. From Denver.’

‘She was a long way from home.’

‘Yeah.’ Maggie danced uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

‘You can come inside,’ Serena told her. ‘I don’t bite.’

‘I think that’s what the wolf said to Little Red Riding Hood,’ Maggie replied, but she wandered into the cottage, handed off copies of a Colorado driver’s license to the two of them, and sat down on Stride’s sofa with her feet propped on the coffee table. It was like the old days, but it wasn’t.

A palpable frost chilled the air between her and Serena. The two of them had nursed an uneasy friendship since Stride and Serena began a relationship four years earlier, but the fractures between them had split open the previous fall. In the wake of a near-fatal accident that left him struggling with flashbacks and nightmares, Stride had made the one mistake in his life that he’d always sworn to avoid. He’d slept with Maggie. Within days, Serena moved out, and he and Maggie launched a short-lived affair.

But things changed, and then they changed again. That was the way of the world. He and Serena were back together. They shared the cottage with a pregnant teenage girl named Cat Mateo, whom they’d rescued from the Duluth streets. And Maggie, who was in many ways still his best friend, was an outsider now.

‘Where’s the kid?’ Maggie asked, glancing into Cat’s empty bedroom at the front of the house.

Serena rolled her eyes. ‘Out. Again.’

‘We think she has a boyfriend,’ Stride added, ‘but she won’t tell us who it is.’

‘Welcome to parenthood,’ Maggie said.

Stride knew that Maggie didn’t trust Cat. She was also still pretending that everything was fine between her and Stride, when it clearly wasn’t.

‘Kelly Hauswirth worked at a telemarketing company in Centennial,’ Maggie went on. ‘She told her co-workers she was going on vacation. Didn’t say where or with who. Word is, she kept to herself, didn’t socialize much. It was almost two weeks before anyone reported her missing, and it took the Denver police a while to connect the disappearance to our report.’

‘What about family?’ Serena asked.

‘Her parents are in Montana. They don’t talk with her more than once a month. The Denver cops sent a pic of the body to the police in Missoula, who ran it by Mom and Dad. They confirmed it was their daughter.’

‘Do they know what Kelly was doing here in Duluth?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Nope.’

Stride studied the driver’s license photo of Kelly Hauswirth. Serena had described her as the suburban girl next door, and she was right. The woman’s blond hair was straight, her eyes wide and blue, her face round. Pretty, but not a stunner. She didn’t flirt with the camera. However, she’d left behind lace thongs and ribbed condoms in her baby-blue suitcase. The shy cheerleader type was in town for a man.

A man driving a stolen Grand Am.

A man who’d shot her in the back of the head.

‘Have the Denver police been able to trace her movements?’ he asked.

‘She charged a bus ticket from Denver to Minneapolis on her credit card. That’s nineteen hours of hell. The police talked to the drivers on the route, but no one remembered Kelly specifically.’

‘How about on the Minneapolis end?’

‘Nothing. There are no other charges on her credit card. If she took another bus to Duluth, she paid cash.’

‘She was obviously coming here to meet someone,’ Serena said.

Maggie nodded. ‘Yeah, one of her co-workers thought Kelly had hooked up with an online boyfriend. The Denver police dug into her phone records and say she was texting hot and heavy with someone, but all the details he gave her were completely fictitious. Name, location, occupation, all made up. They’re going to e-mail me a transcript. The number connected to a throwaway phone, and it hasn’t been used since the murder.’

‘He lured her,’ Stride said.

‘Looks that way. She got catfished.’

‘How’d she hook up with him?’

‘They don’t know. Probably a chat room, but they haven’t found it yet. This girl was easy prey. Very naive. The guy texted her photos of himself, but it’s really some male model you can find all over the Internet.’

Maggie held up a photograph of a twenty-something man with moptop brown hair and a trimmed, wispy beard. He wore a simple white T-shirt and had dreamy blue eyes that belonged in a boy band. He was good-looking but not threatening.

‘And that’s who she thought she was going to meet?’ Serena asked.

‘Yeah. Must have been a shock. You think you’re about to hook up with your Prince Charming. Instead, some stranger robs you and kills you.’

‘This was more than a robbery,’ Stride said. ‘Nobody goes to that much trouble to grab a wallet.’

Maggie nodded. ‘Yeah, we may have something else here. Something bad. Troy Grange called me today. He heard about our case. He thinks there may be a connection to a query he got from Interpol about security for outbound ships at the port.’

Stride’s face darkened. ‘What kind of query?’

‘Homicide. Troy says there’s another victim.’

‘Why haven’t we heard about it?’

‘Because the murder didn’t take place here,’ Maggie explained. ‘They found this other woman in Amsterdam. Her throat was slit, and she was dumped in one of the canals. But guess what she was wearing? A Grandma’s Marathon T-shirt from Duluth.’

*

By midnight, Cat hadn’t come home. They knew she’d turned off her phone, because their text messages weren’t being delivered, and the tracking app didn’t show them where she was. The girl was deliberately pushing boundaries and buttons.

‘I don’t get it,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t understand her behavior.’

‘That’s because you were never a teenage girl,’ Serena replied with a smile.

They sat on Adirondack chairs on the front porch of the cottage. The street was quiet, and the waves of Lake Superior thundered out of sight behind them. He flicked away a hungry mosquito.

‘One minute she’s sweet and innocent,’ he said, ‘and the next she’s the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.’

‘Teenager,’ Serena said again.

‘I know, but she’s so intent on keeping the baby. And she’s not ready for it.’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘I can’t help but think . . .’ he began, but he cut off his words. He didn’t believe in anyone else making decisions for a woman. Even a woman who was really just a girl. He continued to believe that Cat should give up the child for adoption, but she kept insisting that she wanted to be a mother.

‘You can go through bad times as a teenager and come out okay,’ Serena pointed out. ‘I did.’

‘Yeah, but a lot of girls don’t.’

‘That’s true.’

He felt like a father to Cat, which made him feel old. Plenty of other things made him aware of his age, too. In the eight years since he’d lost Cindy, gray had begun to win the battle over black in his hair. The leg he’d broken last summer had healed, but in the dead of winter, he sometimes found himself limping. In a few months, he’d turn fifty. There was something about the change in decade that made it harder to pretend you were young.

Life had reminded him over and over that he wasn’t bulletproof. It wasn’t such a bad thing. He’d begun to accept his mistakes and imperfections. He didn’t bang his head against every wall. He and Serena, both wounded, both alone, had found a measure of peace with each other. If they could keep it.

And Cat.

He hadn’t realized how much he needed someone like Cat in his life until he found her shivering in his bedroom closet three months earlier, on the run from a killer. Now he couldn’t imagine being without her. Which was what made her behavior so frustrating. He couldn’t protect her from everything. Not even herself.

Serena took his hand. ‘I should have trusted my instincts at the bar.’

‘How so?’

‘I knew Kelly Hauswirth didn’t belong there. I should have talked to her.’

‘You couldn’t possibly have known she was in danger, and talking to her wouldn’t necessarily have changed a thing.’

Serena shrugged. She didn’t always take her own advice about living without regrets. ‘What about the murder weapon?’ she asked.

‘The BCA is running prints and ballistics. We don’t have a report yet.’

‘And the Grand Am?’

‘Stolen from a parking lot at the convention center. No one saw anything. No prints inside. It’s a dead end.’

‘I wish I’d seen his face.’

‘Well, we may not have anything on him, but we know who she is now. That’s something.’

‘Kelly Hauswirth,’ Serena said again. ‘She looked like a Kelly. Sweet little Kelly falls in love with a guy online, and he gets her to come to Minnesota to meet him. And then – what? She realizes that the guy in the car isn’t the man she’s supposed to meet, and she tries to run?’

‘It looks that way,’ Stride said.

Serena shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Nothing about this feels right to me. I think this guy is an iceberg, Jonny.’

He knew what she meant. Most of an iceberg floated underneath the water, and it was the part you couldn’t see that you had to fear.

There was more to this murder than they understood yet.

37

Howard Marlowe typed into a Microsoft Word document on his computer:

The prosecution couldn’t put a gun in Dr. Snow’s hands, but they did put one in Jay’s hands. Was that gun the murder weapon? Most of the jurors thought so.

Not me. I think that Archibald Gale’s speculation at the trial was right. Jay lost his gun when his truck and fishing shanty went through the ice. People made a big deal of the fact that the gun wasn’t recovered during salvage, but that doesn’t mean anything. If your house floods, do you think everything stays put? No. The gun floated away. It’s buried under the silt of Superior Bay.

He studied what he’d written, and he liked it. Next came the evidence he’d uncovered in his research.

Four years ago, he’d taken a lawn mower to Jay’s brother Clyde for repair. By then, Clyde didn’t remember Howard from the jury. Howard got to know him, went out with him, and peppered him with questions over drinks. Clyde admitted after half a bottle of Captain Morgan that he was pretty sure Jay had the gun with him that afternoon in the shanty. And he admitted that he never saw his brother with the gun again after that day.

Howard passed along the information to Archibald Gale, who said what he always said. It wasn’t enough for a new trial. So the appeals came and went, and nothing happened.

Janine Snow remained in prison.

‘What are you working on?’ Carol asked Howard from the doorway of his office. She’d gone to bed early, but she had trouble sleeping most nights. ‘As if I didn’t know.’

‘The book,’ he said.

His wife folded her arms across her pajama top. Dark half-moons rimmed her eyes. ‘The book. Will it ever be done? How long is it now? 1,500 pages? No one’s going to read it.’

He didn’t take his eyes away from the monitor. ‘It’s not about whether I publish it or not. It’s a hobby.’

‘A hobby? It’s one in the morning, Howard. You spend every minute you’re awake researching and writing that book.’

‘So what? I need something to fill my summers while school’s out.’

‘Really? How about doing something with your family? How about doing something with
me
?’

‘We were just in Door County,’ he told her.

‘One weekend. Three days. It rained. And the only reason we went is that you tracked another white Rav to somebody in Sister Bay.’

‘I told you. It’s my hobby.’

Carol shook her head in frustration. When he looked at her, he saw how much she’d aged in the last nine years. The extra ten pounds she’d always carried had become twenty. Her face, without makeup, was pallid like beach sand. She was right that he was ignoring her. They didn’t have much in common anymore. Their intermittent sex life had dwindled to nothing; he couldn’t remember when they had last slept together. Their daughter Annie was a sullen teenager, too preoccupied with her own life to worry about them. Carol didn’t have anything else. She still worked as a checker at the Super One. She quilted. She went to church. And she nagged him about the book like a squawking parrot on his shoulder.

She didn’t understand that the case was the most important work he’d ever done in his life. It was his life. It made him feel young again. His office had become a library of evidence, all of it neatly organized and categorized by subject. The witnesses. The exhibits. The gun. The Rav. Two years ago, he’d started turning his investigative work into a book.

But a book needed an ending, which he didn’t have yet. It would end when Janine was free.

‘What did you do today?’ she asked, making the question sound like an accusation.

‘I went to a pawn shop in Grand Rapids.’

‘Every week you’re in a different pawn shop,’ she snapped. ‘You’re never going to find anything after all this time. What do you hope to accomplish?’

‘The missing jewelry is still out there,’ Howard retorted. ‘Those are expensive pieces. Sooner or later, whoever has them is going to figure they’re safe. They’ll try to sell them.’

Carol opened her mouth to shout at him, the way she usually did, but this time she held her tongue. He’d heard it all before. The jewelry wasn’t missing; it was at the bottom of a lake, where Janine had tossed it, along with the gun. He would never find it. He was wasting his time.

His wife closed her eyes. She took a long, slow breath. He realized she was crying.

‘Tell me why,’ she said.

‘I’ve told you before.’

‘Tell me again,’ she said.

He got up from the chair with a sigh. There wasn’t much room to walk in the office anymore. Too many boxes, but he knew what was in each one. He went to his wife in the doorway, but they didn’t touch. They were strangers who shared a house and a child. It had stopped bothering him long ago. Couples grew older. They grew apart. If they were lucky, they stayed friends.

‘I put her in prison,’ he explained. ‘Me.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘It’s my fault. I wasn’t strong enough to stand my ground. If I can prove that she’s innocent
—
’

‘She’s not innocent, Howard. She’s guilty. She’s immoral. She’s the devil.’

‘Stop that,’ he snapped.

‘She took you away from me!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

Carol laughed without a glint of humor. She spread her arms, pointing at the stacks of boxes, and her voice was wild with desperation. ‘Is all of this really more important than your marriage? Is this fantasy about her more real to you than I am?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ he said.

She put her arms around his waist and held him tightly, and he let her do it. Her head sank against his chest. It felt the way it had years earlier. When a minute had passed, he gently peeled away her hands, and then he went back to his desk.

‘Why don’t you come to bed?’ Carol murmured. An invitation.

‘I will. In just a little bit.’

She was silent, but she didn’t leave. Then his wife said: ‘I know you see her, Howard.’

He looked up nervously. ‘What?’

‘I know you visit her in prison.’

Howard wanted to deny it, but he didn’t think she was fishing for the truth. She hadn’t pulled this idea out of the air. She knew. Besides, his face was a confession, and he didn’t want to hide it from her any longer. She stared at him, and they both didn’t say a word, and then she turned and left him alone in the basement.

*

Cat lay on her back, watching the stars. Her boyfriend lay beside her. She had no idea what time it was, but she knew it was late. She’d turned off her phone, because she didn’t want Stride and Serena spying on her. They didn’t need to know that she was only fifty yards from their cottage, sprawled with Al on the beach, with the lake waves reaching almost to their bare feet.

He placed a hand on the bare skin of her swollen belly. The baby thumped from inside, and he grinned and said, ‘Cool.’

Al wasn’t the father of her child. She didn’t know the father’s name; he was just one of the men who’d paid her for sex in the bad days. Funny that the man would never know he had a child. A son. She didn’t know what she’d tell her boy about his father when the time came. Or about herself.

Cat felt Al’s fingers caressing the side of her breast, but that was as far as it went. He hadn’t pressured her for sex. Just kissing and petting. If he’d wanted sex, she would have said yes. Some boys got freaked out about being with pregnant girls, but Al said it wasn’t that. It was respect, he said. She’d told him that sex didn’t mean anything to her, not after years of doing it for money, so he said he wanted to wait until it did.

She wondered if that meant he was getting what he needed from someone else. She didn’t want to ask.

He sat up on the beach and helped her to do the same. Superior was loud. The cloudless sky shimmered with stars. She felt a strange rush of contentment, but it was shadowed by the guilt of hiding things about herself from Stride and Serena. And from Al, too. Keeping secrets was a hard habit to break. In the past, her secrets had kept her alive.

‘My buddy gave me a couple joints,’ he said. ‘You want a puff?’

‘No, thanks. I shouldn’t. But you go ahead.’

He lit one and held the smoke in his mouth. When he exhaled, sweetness surrounded her. He had a warm beer can in the sand, too, and she’d allowed herself a swallow, but nothing more.

‘Anna’s not speaking to me,’ Cat said.

Anna was the waitress at the Grizzly Bear Bar.

Al said nothing. The joint did its thing. He looked as if he were far away, on one of the stars, where all their little problems didn’t matter.

‘She’s not even reading my texts,’ Cat went on. ‘She’s pissed because I didn’t tell her I was living with two cops.’

Her boyfriend sighed as he returned to earth, as if this were a conversation he didn’t want to have. ‘Well, why didn’t you tell her?’

‘I didn’t want to scare her away.’ Cat scrunched up her pretty face in annoyance. ‘It’s not fair. Serena doesn’t want me hanging out with any of my old friends. She told Fred at the bar she’d have the place busted if he let me inside again.’

‘Sorry.’ Al added: ‘Do Stride and Serena know about me?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think they’d say you shouldn’t see me?’

‘I don’t know. Probably.’

‘Well, you’re not going to be able to hide it forever,’ he said.

‘Have you told your mother?’

He grinned, because she’d just given him a taste of his own medicine. ‘Okay. No.’

‘So there.’

He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer. She liked him a lot, even though they’d only known each other a couple of months. He was two years older than she was. His body was tall and scrawny, with long legs made for basketball. He wore his black hair trimmed to a point on his forehead, and his goatee made a wiry square against his dark skin. His voice was soft and mellow, and it made her think of distant thunder. He wore cheap, baggy clothes from Goodwill, except for his Converse sneakers, which were the one treat he allowed himself at Christmas.

She’d met him because of Anna. Anna volunteered at local churches, and every couple of months, she twisted Cat’s arm to go along with her on community projects. It wasn’t Cat’s favorite thing, but she did it to stay friends with her. In May, she’d spent a weekend painting Al’s mother’s house from top to bottom. Cat and Anna supplied the labor, and the church donated the paint. Al got them burgers at the Anchor Bar for free when they were done.

Despite working two jobs, Al never had much money. The mortgage ate up most of his paycheck, and a backlog of credit card bills took the rest. His father had died of a stroke five years earlier, which was when the debt began piling up. His mother had emphysema and couldn’t work. His younger siblings were still in school, which was where he wanted them to stay. Between his days working maintenance at the Duluth Zoo, and evenings and weekends washing dishes at the Anchor, he didn’t have much time to spend with Cat. Stolen moments like this were precious to her.

The beach was mostly deserted. A mild lake breeze rustled her perfect chestnut hair. In the dark, fifty yards north of them, she could see another couple making out under the starlight. She knew Al had to go soon, because he worked in the morning, but she wished they could stay here all night.

‘I liked your mother when Anna and I met her,’ Cat said. ‘Don’t you think she’d like me?’

‘She’d love you, but she says I don’t have time for a girlfriend.’

‘Especially not a pregnant one, huh?’

‘Oh, that’s not it. Not really. She just doesn’t want me stuck on the bottom rung like her and Dad. Mom always says God has big plans for me, and if I don’t work hard, I’ll never find out what they are.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘It’s the way I was raised, so yeah, I have to believe it. She’d whack me if I didn’t. Except God must be pretty disappointed in me.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Cat asked.

He shrugged. ‘Sometimes I do stupid shit that I really regret. I’m not worthy of big plans.’

‘Join the club,’ Cat told him.

‘You? Come on.’

‘It’s true. God doesn’t have any plans for me. I’m just a screw-up.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ he chided her. ‘You’re special. Way more special than me. Why would you say that?’

‘It’s just hormones. I go up. I go down. I’m pregnant, so it comes with the territory.’

‘Oh.’

‘Hey, can I ask you something?’ she said.

‘Sure.’

‘Do you love me? Because I kinda think I love you.’

His eyes widened. ‘Cat, I
—
’

‘Never mind. Don’t answer that. I’m sorry. Wow, that was a really dumb thing to say. I’m pressing the delete button.’

Except you couldn’t delete things like that after you said them.

Al looked unhappy with her, and Cat didn’t blame him. She thought to herself:
There I go again, screwing everything up
. She stood up awkwardly and brushed sand from her skin. Al stood up, too. He looked as if she’d punched him in the gut.

‘We should go,’ she said.

‘Cat, listen, it’s not that I
—
’

‘No, don’t say anything. Please. Forget it, I was being stupid. I just want to get out of here. You have to work, and I’m sure Stride is waiting to read me the Riot Act.’

‘I’ll come with you. I’ll explain it to him.’

‘That would just make it worse.’

‘Well, let’s go back to my car,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive you home.’

‘No, you go ahead. I’ll walk.’

‘Alone? Not a chance.’

‘It’s two houses, Al. I could shout, and Stride would hear me.’

He looked reluctant, but he allowed her to persuade him. He kissed her goodbye, which was normally magic, but she’d spoiled the moment for them. Stupid stupid stupid. He left her, his shoulders slumped, and disappeared southward along the beach. She watched him until he turned and headed for the street. She wondered if he’d call her tomorrow, or if she’d driven him away for good.

It wasn’t just talking about love before he was ready to hear it. That was a big mistake, but she was keeping other secrets, too.

She needed to tell him what she’d done.