Immoral (6 page)

Along the way, she fell in love with Stride.

It was Cindy who broke the news to him. She had spotted Maggie’s feelings immediately and warned him he was going to break Maggie’s heart into little pieces of Chinese porcelain if he wasn’t careful.

When Cindy was gone, Maggie made her one and only play for his affections. Six months ago, when Stride was at his loneliest, Maggie had let herself into his house on a frigid spring morning and slid into bed beside him. He had awakened and never seen so much love in another person’s eyes. It was tempting, because he needed someone badly, and she was warm and willing.

But he remembered Cindy’s warning, and he thought of those little pieces of Chinese porcelain, and he said no. Last month, she thanked him. He was right, she said; it would have destroyed their friendship and never worked as a romance. He wondered if she really believed that.

“How did you enjoy your visit with the Stoners?” Maggie asked.

Stride opened the bathroom door and continued undressing, then stepped into the shower, shivering as the cold water slowly warmed. He called back to Maggie.

“The mother says there’s no chance of a suicide. What do you think?”

“Mothers never think there’s any chance of suicide,” Maggie said. “But I think if this girl wanted to blow herself away, she would have done it in front of them and made sure there was a lot of blood on their nice carpet.”

Stride smiled. Maggie had pegged Rachel already. This wasn’t a girl who would slip away to die.

“How about Mommy and Stepdaddy?” Maggie called out. “You know the rule. Family first.”

“They volunteered to take polygraphs,” Stride replied. “But we have to run the questions through His Holiness Archie Gale.”

He heard the sound of Maggie gagging. “Damn, I hate rich parents. Call the lawyer first, then the cops.”

Stride grabbed a towel and used it to dry his damp hair, then rubbed it over his body. He wrapped it loosely around his waist and returned to his bedroom.

“We have to be careful,” he said. “Check them both out, but be discreet. Graeme made it clear he knows K-2.”

“Yeah, he told me that, too. Handball every week. I can’t imagine K-2 playing handball. Not on a regulation court, anyway.”

Stride laughed. K-2—Deputy Chief Kyle Kinnick—was no taller than Maggie. Even the mayor sometimes called him “the leprechaun.”

“We got a hit on one of the ATM cameras,” Maggie added. “We got a glimpse of her car zooming by shortly after ten o’clock.”

“Score one for Kevin. Was she alone?”

“No one else is visible in the car.”

Stride donned a pair of tan Dockers, buttoned up a white shirt, and shrugged into a navy sport coat.

“Come on, I need more coffee,” he said.

Maggie followed him into the kitchen. Stride opened a window. The morning air smelled like frost, and he felt cold needles pricking his damp neck.

“Do you always need to open a window when it’s freezing outside?” Maggie complained, shivering.

Stride poured coffee and sat down at the butcher-block kitchen table. He saw Maggie glance in the sink, which was half filled with dirty dishes. She pushed aside a stack of newspapers and three days of junk mail and cleared a small spot for her mug.

“You live like this?” she asked.

Stride shrugged. “What?”

“Nothing,” Maggie said.

“Let’s keep going,” Stride said. “We think she made it home, because we’ve got her on tape heading there, and the car is parked right where it should be.”

“Nothing strange in the car. We’re running prints, but I wouldn’t expect much.”

“Next question is, did she go inside? How about her bedroom?”

Maggie shook her head. “We know what she was wearing that night. No clothes matching that description were found in her room. We talked with Emily about whether anything was missing. She wasn’t much help. Even so, the drawers were full of clothes, and Rachel had lots of personal stuff in her desk. If she left by herself, she traveled light. She wasn’t dressed for running, either—not like Kerry.”

“How about a diary?” Stride asked. “I know, I’m dreaming.”

“You’re dreaming,” Maggie said. “I checked her computer. Very few personal files. I loaded her Web browser to see if she might have been talking with some psycho on the Internet, but there was just some school-related stuff in her e-mail, and she hadn’t bookmarked any weird Web sites. We’ll run it through forensics, in case there’s stuff we can recover.”

“How about the neighbors?” Stride asked.

“A handful of people remember seeing folks out on the street that evening, but it was dark. Not many faces. A couple people saw teenage girls walking outside, but no one resembling Rachel. We had one report of an unknown car parked that night about four blocks away. The witness couldn’t remember many details—dark, maybe blue or black, four-door sedan, might have been out-of-state plates. We checked with neighbors near where the car was seen. No one claimed it, and no one had visitors from out of state.”

“Interesting,” Stride said. “Except for a few thousand tourists in town.”

“Right.”

“How about the other ways of getting out of town? Any luck there?”

Maggie shook her head. “Nothing. There were no flights out of Duluth after ten o’clock on Friday until early Saturday morning. We’ll be doing interviews with personnel at the airport this morning just in case. Ditto at the Greyhound station both here and in Wisconsin.”

“She could have hiked down to the highway and hitched,” Stride speculated.

“I thought of that. We’ve faxed her photo and info to police and highway patrols throughout the state and in the border states as well. Guppo has set up a page on our Web site. We’re asking the state police to check in on fast food joints and gas stations along the interstate. The media is all over it, thanks to Bird Finch, which at least will get her photo in front of the whole region quickly.”

Stride could imagine the phone ringing off the hook on the hotline. They had received nearly two thousand leads during the search for Kerry McGrath, placing the teenager everywhere from New Orleans to Fresno. With help from around the country, they had methodically sifted the leads by priority and tracked down each one. They all led back to the same place—nowhere.

“How about the pervs?”

Maggie sighed. “Five level-three sex offenders in the city. A few dozen ones and twos. We’ll be paying a visit to each one.”

“Okay.” Stride felt a headache squeezing his temples. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep, it was the bitter sameness. The disappearance. The search. The clues. He didn’t know if he had the strength to do it all over again, or to face the possibility of another failure. This time, too, he would go through the hell alone. Without Cindy.

“Boss?” Maggie said, as he drifted away.

Stride smiled thinly. “I’m here. Look, if this girl ran away voluntarily, she had to have help. She must have talked to someone. You direct the search today and keep me posted on the cell phone. I’ll go to the school and check out her teachers and friends. Let’s see if we can find out what made this girl tick.”

Stride had been at the school for two hours, and he needed a cigarette.

It was an expensive habit the way he indulged it. He would buy a pack, smoke one or two cigarettes, then get angry at himself and throw away the rest. A day later, he would feel the craving again and buy another pack.

The high school was prominently labeled a tobacco-free zone. He saw an exit at the rear of the main foyer, tucked between rows of fire-engine red lockers, leading to the back of the school. Stride went through a set of doors and headed for an empty soccer field across the road. He passed a teachers’ parking lot and wound along the side of a separate building labeled as a technical center.

Stride reached the corner of the building and stared down at the deserted field, which was filled incongruously with dozens of seagulls. He extracted a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, then slapped the pack until one cigarette jutted out from the others. He cupped his hands and tried to light it in the wind. It took several tries. Finally, the end of the cigarette smoldered, and he took a long drag. The smoke, filling his lungs, comforted him like an old friend. He relaxed, feeling some of the tightness escape. Then he coughed long and hard.

“Those things will kill you,” a voice said behind him.

Stride felt guilty—a high school student again, caught smoking behind the school. He turned and saw an attractive blonde woman on a short set of gray steel steps leading up to the back door of the technical center. She, too, was holding a cigarette. Stride smiled at her, acknowledging their common vice.

“At least we’ll die happy,” he said. He took a few steps closer, leaning against the railing by the stairs.

“I keep wondering whether it’s better to smoke or be an alcoholic,” the woman told him.

“Why not both?” Stride asked.

“I’ve thought about that. But I haven’t committed to either one.”

She was in her midthirties, with a red fleece jacket zipped to her neck and new, starched black slacks. She looked like an ex-cheerleader, with a trim body, athletic build, and short, layered blonde hair. Her eyes were pale blue. She had a pert face, upturned nose, and cheeks that had flushed red in the cold air.

She looked familiar. Stride told her so.

“We met last year,” she told him. “My name is Andrea. Andrea Jantzik. I’m a teacher here at the school. Kerry McGrath was one of my students. You interviewed me when you were investigating her disappearance.”

“Was Rachel one of your students, too?”

Andrea shook her head. “I think she took biology, not chemistry. Peggy, the bio teacher, was telling me about her this morning. I didn’t know who Rachel was.”

Stride dug in his pocket for the crumpled piece of paper the registrar had given him, with the listing of Rachel’s classes and grades. “You didn’t have her in an English class a year ago?”

“That would be Robin Jantzik. He teaches—taught—English here. But if you really want to talk to him, I’m afraid you’ll have to look him up with his new wife in San Francisco.”

“Husband?” Stride asked.

“Once upon a time.”

“I’m sorry,” Stride said. “Would it help if I told you that men are pigs?”

Andrea laughed. “Nothing I don’t already know.”

She had a cynical smile, which was like looking in a mirror. He recognized the walls she had built around herself, because he had done the same thing. He could see it in her face, too, as he looked closely: the frown lines creasing her lips, the deadness in her eyes, the heavy cake of makeup trying to freshen her skin. Loss had taken a toll on her, as it had on him.

“Is that when the cigarettes came back?” he asked, making a guess.

She looked surprised. “Is it that obvious?”

“I’ve been through something similar,” he told her. “A year ago. That’s when I started smoking again.”

“I thought I had kicked it a year ago,” Andrea said. “No such luck.”

“Did your husband ever mention Rachel?”

Andrea shook her head. “No. English classes are huge.”

“What about other teachers or students? Did you know anyone who might have been close to her?”

“You might want to talk to Nancy Carver. She’s a part-time counselor here. She had a lot to say about Rachel this morning in the cafeteria.”

“Like what?”

“She thought the search was a waste of time.”

“Did she say why?” Stride asked.

Andrea shook her head.

“So this woman counseled Rachel?” Stride continued.

“I don’t know. Nancy’s not a permanent employee of the school. She’s a professor up at the university and volunteers her time here working with troubled students. Girls, mostly.”

“Does she have an office in the building?”

“More like a closet, really. It’s on the second floor. But be forewarned. You carry a piece of equipment that Nancy doesn’t exactly approve of.”

Stride was puzzled. “A gun?”

“A penis.”

Stride laughed, and Andrea giggled, and soon they were both laughing loud and hard. They stared at each other, enjoying the joke and feeling the subtle attraction that came with it. It almost felt strange to laugh. He couldn’t recall how long it had been since he had relaxed enough to find humor in something. Or how long since he had shared it with a woman.

“At least you know what you’re in for,” Andrea said.

“Thanks. You’ve been very helpful, Ms. Jantzik.”

“Call me Andrea,” she said. “Or are you not allowed to do that?”

“I’m allowed. And call me Jonathan.”

“You look more like a Jon to me.”

“That works, too.”

Stride hesitated and wasn’t sure why. Then he realized that he felt an urge to say something else, to ask her to dinner, or to ask what her favorite color was, or to take the one strand of blonde hair that had fallen across her face and gently put it right. The power of the feeling suddenly overwhelmed him. Maybe it was because he had not felt even a glimmering like that in almost a year. He had been dead inside for so long that he wasn’t sure what it felt like to wake up.

“Are you okay?” Andrea asked. Her face was concerned. It was a very pretty face, he realized.

“I’m fine. Thanks again.”

He left her on the steps. The moment passed. But it never really passed.

Stride found Nancy Carver’s office tucked into a cubbyhole, almost invisible from the corridor. When he poked his head around the wall, Stride saw a narrow door, with Nancy Carver’s name etched onto a wooden block hung from a nail. The photos and brochures plastered all over the door were guaranteed to send school board members into hysterics.

There were magazine articles about the dangers of homophobia. Other articles, with graphic illustrations neatly scissored out, decried the prevalence of pornography. She had a brochure from last year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Lesbian University Women, with her name highlighted, where she had been a speaker. There were also dozens of photographs of women in camping gear in the outdoors. Stride recognized the Black Hills and some wilderness waterfalls he guessed were in Canada. The photographs were mostly of teenage girls and young college-age women. The one exception, who appeared in most of the photographs, was a tiny, sturdily built woman around forty, with cropped berry-red hair and large, thick-rimmed black glasses. In most of the photos she wore the same outfit, a green fleece sweater and stonewashed blue jeans.