In the Dark (2 page)

 

As I held it in my hand, I remembered something else from the park. Before the storm broke, before Jonny found us, Laura kept saying that someone was hiding in the woods.

 

Watching her.

 

I knew I had to go back.

 

I flew downstairs with my car keys. I was still wearing my
pajama bottoms and T-shirt. It was now past one in the morning, and most of the fireworks outside had long since burned down to scorched black patches on the grass. I drove my Dad’s Opel Manta, and the streets were empty, so I went fast through the gray glow of the fog. It took me fifteen minutes to make my way back to the wilderness refuge near Tischer Creek. I didn’t recognize any of the cars in the matted weeds. The park was sprawling, and I was sure that there were kids hiding under the cover of darkness, doing what Jonny and I had done earlier.

 

I had no idea where to find her. I shouted, “Laura!”

 

I thought I heard whispering. I began to get scared and feel foolish and stupid for being here on my own. I pumped my arms and ran into the center of the muddy ground we used as a softball field and spun in circles, trying to see into the trees and trails through the mist. I heard thousands of crickets chirping madly. The grass underneath my feet was spongy and wet. I almost never wore shoes during the summer.

 

“Laura!”

 

The dark silhouette of a heron with its giant wingspan and odd, dangling legs flew lazily over my head. I had flushed it with my shouting. It swooped toward the cool water of the lake and disappeared. I headed the same way, searching for the break in the trees that led to the south beach, where Laura and I had waited for Jonny a few hours earlier.

 

I never made it that far. Thirty yards away, I came upon something in the grass.

 

Laura’s shoe. A pink PF Flyer.

 

I picked it up, looked around for the other shoe, and didn’t see it. I hunted in the field for anything else that belonged to her, but all I saw was cigarette butts and beer bottles. I knew I had to go into the woods to find her. Near where I was standing, holding her shoe, I saw a trail that tracked north along the lakeshore, in between the birches. Some kind of unspoken bond between sisters told me that was where she had gone.

 

When I followed it, the trail swallowed me up. The moon
vanished. I took careful steps, not wanting to make noise when I didn’t know what was ahead of me. I didn’t shout Laura’s name anymore. The path was covered in a crackling bed of pine. Rain dripped down through the covering crowns of trees. Wind snickered through the trees and landed like a warm, wet breath on my neck.

 

Long minutes passed. I didn’t usually come this way, so the path was unfamiliar. My mind made up scary stories about what was in the woods near me. I had no idea how far I had gone or whether I should have taken one of the crisscrossing trails that led uphill away from the lake. If anyone was two feet away, I wouldn’t have known it. This was the kind of place where monsters felt real.

 

I saw a pale break in the darkness ahead, where the trees thinned. There was a part of me that wanted to turn and go back. I didn’t want to see this secret place and what was hiding there.

 

Somehow I knew. I just knew.

 

I heard water tap-tapping on wet sand. I emerged from the woods into a clearing eighty feet across, a notch in the forest where the lake swooshed onto a ribbon of beach that bubbled toward the trees in a half-moon. Gold streaks were wavy on the lake. I could see very clearly after the darkness of the trail.

 

My hand shot to my mouth and I caught myself in midscream.

 

I ran.

 

“Laura,” I whispered, my voice strangled.

 

It was worse than anything I could have imagined. I saw the aluminum baseball bat beside her body, shiny and glistening and sticky. I smelled copper. I sank to my knees, my arms outstretched, my hands quivering in the air. My lips murmured like I was saying a prayer, and a whimper rumbled out of my chest.

 

“Oh, no, no, no.”

 

She was all red. Red everywhere. Like she was drowned in wine. Her beautiful golden hair was the color of garish lipstick. Crimson fangs dripped from the wings of the butterfly tattoo on her naked back. Mosquitoes littered her skin, some
living, some dead, trapped in the pool and unable to fly from the feast. Her face was toward me, cheek in the mud, but there was no face anymore, no smile, no soft brown eyes, nothing that had ever been my sister. Life had been hammered out of her blow by blow. I tried to imagine the fury that had done this and couldn’t conceive of a heart so black.

 

I put a tentative hand on her arm. Her skin was already unnaturally cold. My hand came away like I had dipped it in finger paints.

 

That was when I heard it. Branches snapping. Movement. Breathing. Not from Laura, but from the black forest. I scooped up the baseball bat and scrambled to my feet. My fingernails dug into the leather grip. I wound up fiercely, ready to swing.

 

Someone was behind me . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART ONE
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Independence Day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1
___________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lieutenant Jonathan Stride shielded his eyes as the glass door shot a laser beam of sunlight at his face, and when he could see again, he realized that the woman who had stepped out onto the patio was his late wife, Cindy.

 

For an instant, time slowed down the way it does on a long fall, while the buzz of conversation continued around him. He forgot how to breathe. The enigmatic smile he remembered from years ago was the same. When she lifted her sunglasses, her brown eyes stared back at him with a familiar glint over the heads of the others in the restaurant. She was in her late forties, as she would have been if she had lived. Small, like a fairy, but athletic and strong. Suntanned skin. An aura of intensity.

 

It wasn’t her, of course.

 

More than five years had passed since Cindy died of cancer as he sat beside her hospital bed. The pain of her loss had retreated to a distant ache in a corner of his soul. Even so, there were moments like this when he saw a stranger and something about her brought it all back. It didn’t take much, just the look in her eyes or the way she carried herself, to stir his memory.

 

This woman was looking back at him, too. She was small but a couple of inches taller than Cindy, who had barely crossed five feet four on tiptoes. Her blond hair fell breezily around her shoulders, and her sunglasses were now tented on top of her head. Her earrings were sapphire studs. She wore a blue-flowered summer skirt that hung to her knees, baby blue heels, a white blouse, and a lightweight tan leather jacket with a braided fringe. She balanced one hand on a narrow hip as she watched him. The ties of her jacket dangled between her legs.

 

He knew her from somewhere.

 

“Your five seconds are up,” Serena Dial told him.

 

Stride broke away. “What?”

 

Serena sipped her lemonade and eyed the woman in the leather jacket as she was shown to a table on the patio. A gust of wind blew off the lake and rustled her own silky dark hair. “You get a free pass to look at any woman for up to five seconds. After that, it officially becomes flirting.”

 

“She reminded me of someone,” Stride said.

 

“Sure she did.”

 

Serena was an ex-cop and now a private investigator. She and Stride had shared a bed for almost two years.

 

Stride turned to his partner in the Detective Bureau, Maggie Bei, as if consulting an Olympic judge for a ruling. “Is this five-second thing commonly known?” he asked.

 

“Absolutely,” Maggie said, with a wink at Serena.

 

Stride knew when he was on the losing end of an argument. “Okay, I was flirting,” he admitted.

 

Serena stretched out her arm lazily and used the back of her hand to caress Stride’s cheek, which was rough with black-and-gray stubble. She sidled her long fingers through his wavy hair and leaned forward to plant a slow kiss on his lips. She tasted like citrus and sugar.

 

“Most animals mark their territory by urinating,” Maggie remarked, with her mouth full of a large bite of her steak sandwich. She batted her almond-shaped eyes innocently at Serena and grinned.

 

Stride laughed. “Can we get back to work?”

 

“Go ahead,” Serena told him. She swiped a French fry from Maggie’s plate and bit into it while baring her teeth.

 

“What’s the latest on the peeper?” Stride asked Maggie. He stole a sideways
glance across the restaurant at the other woman and noticed that she was doing the same thing to him from over her menu.

 

“He struck again on Friday night,” Maggie replied. “A sixteen-year-old girl in Fond du Lac noticed a guy in the trees outside her bedroom when she was getting undressed. She screamed, and he took off.”

 

“Did she get a look at him?”

 

Maggie shook her head. “She thought he was tall and skinny, but that’s it. It was dark.”

 

“That’s nine incidents in the last month,” Stride said.

 

“It’s summer. Time for the perverts to come out.”

 

The calendar said June 1. It was late Sunday afternoon, but the sun was warm and high over the steep hillside on which the city of Duluth, Minnesota, was built. It wouldn’t be dark until after nine o’clock. After the usual long, bitter winter, the tourists were streaming back on the weekends to watch the ore boats come and go through the narrow channel that led out into Lake Superior. The Canal Park area, where the three of them sat on the rooftop patio of Grandma’s Saloon, teemed with lovers and children feeding noisy gulls by the boardwalk. As tourists and locals collided, and the weather got warmer, Stride and his team got busier. Crime was creeping up for the season, but so far, it was nothing more than the usual run of thefts, break-ins, drunks, and drugs.

 

Plus a peeping tom with a fetish for blond high school girls.

 

Stride had overseen the city’s Detective Bureau, which handled major crimes in Duluth, for more than a decade, and he had steeled himself to human behavior that defied all rational explanation. Sexual abuse. Meth labs. Suicide. Homicide. The peeper had shown no inclination to violence, but Stride didn’t minimize the danger of someone who liked to watch young girls undress in their bedrooms. It was a short trip through the looking glass to molestation and rape.

 

“He’s been stalking the south side, right?” Stride asked.

 

Maggie grunted affirmatively and pushed her black bangs out of her eyes. She was a diminutive Chinese cop who had worked side by side with Stride since he took over the major crimes unit.

 

“Yeah, all the reports have been south of Riverside,” Maggie said. “He’s crossed the bridge into Superior a couple times, too.”

 

The great lake that loomed over Stride’s shoulder narrowed into the
jagged bays and harbors of the St. Louis River as it wound southward between the cities of Duluth and Superior. On the scenic drive along the river, Duluth broke up into small towns like Riverside, Morgan Park, Gary, and Fond du Lac. None of the towns was large enough to afford its own police force, so the Duluth police stretched its enforcement coverage all the way along the river’s twisty shore.

 

“You know what it’s like down in the river towns,” Maggie said. “People leave their shades up and their windows open. For a peeper, it’s like a cat with a goldfish bowl. Lots to look at.”

 

“Do we have any leads on an ID?” Stride asked.

 

“Nothing yet. We have no description and no idea how old he is. We’re working our way through the sex offender list, but no one looks like an obvious suspect.”

 

“How about a car?”

 

“We’ve had reports of a small SUV—something like a CRV or a RAV4—near three of the peeping locations. Maybe silver, maybe gray or sand. No one in the area would claim it. That’s as close as I’ve got to a lead.”

 

“What about the victims?” Stride asked. “How does this guy find them?”

 

“The girls range in age from fourteen to nineteen,” Maggie said. “They go to different schools, and I haven’t found any overlap in their social lives. They’re all blondes, though. I don’t think this guy is just going from house to house, trying to get lucky. We’d have caught him by now if he was simply trolling through backyards. When he hits a house, he already knows there’s a girl there with the right look.”

 

“Has he made any attempts to get inside?” Serena asked.

 

Serena wasn’t a member of the Duluth police, but she was a former homicide detective from Las Vegas, in addition to being his lover. Stride considered her one of the sharpest investigators he had ever worked with. He and Maggie consulted her unofficially on most of their cases.

 

“No, he just watches,” Maggie said. “The girl’s window was open in several of the incidents, but he stayed outside.”

 

Serena stole another fry from Maggie’s plate. “Yeah, but he might be getting his courage up. Along with other things. Peeping’s a threshold crime.”

 

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Maggie said. “I want to catch this guy before
fore he moves on to bigger things.” She glanced at the opposite side of the restaurant patio and added, “By the way, boss, you’re about to understand why women adopted that five-second rule.”

 

“What do you mean?” Stride asked.

 

Then he looked up and understood.

 

The woman in the fringed leather jacket, the one who reminded him of his late wife, Cindy, was coming over.

 

 

 

 

“You’re Jonathan Stride, aren’t you?” she asked.

 

Stride pushed his chair back and stood up. He was over six feet tall, and when he looked down at the top of her head, he saw silver roots creeping into her blond hair. He took her offered hand and shook it. Her long nails dug into his palm. “Yes, that’s right.”