Stalked (18 page)

“When?” Stride asked.

Maggie knew what he meant. She reached out and curled her fingers around the steering wheel and held on tightly. “It happened just before Thanksgiving. Eric was out of town.”

Stride remembered. She had called in sick for nearly two weeks and blamed it on the flu.

“I was asleep. He had a knife.” She brushed her hair back behind her ear and showed him a two-inch-long scar. “I’ve blocked out most of the details. I just don’t remember.”

“Jesus,” Stride murmured.

“I said no pity, boss. Not from you. Got it?”

Stride thought that her bravado was cellophane-thick.

“You know what I did first?” she went on. “You’ll love this. I laughed. It was all so fucking hilarious. This was God’s big joke. I told myself I was dreaming, that I had made it all up in my head, that there was no way this could have happened to me. Then the next thing I knew, I was pounding on the floor and wailing. I sat in the dark and cried for two days.”

He opened his mouth to say something and then shut it. There was nothing to say.

“You know what I did next?” Maggie continued. “I threw out all the food in the refrigerator. Nuts, huh? Everything. Right down to the bare shelves, and then I sprayed the whole thing down. Same in every room. I went through a dozen cans of Lysol. I didn’t want to smell anything. The place was like a hospital.”

He clenched his fists. Maggie saw him do it. “If I ever get my hands on this son of a bitch, I’ll kill him,” he said.

“I know you want to be a hero, boss, but this happened to me, not you. I’m only telling you this now because I don’t have any choice.”

“Why didn’t you come to me back then?”

She turned and stared at him. Her eyes were fierce with pride. “Because this didn’t happen to a cop. It happened to a woman. Don’t you get it? I didn’t want you or any other man to know about this. Not then. Not ever. It was bad enough telling Eric. He wanted me to report it, and I just wanted it to go away. I still do.”

“At least tell me you got help.”

“Haven’t you been listening? I didn’t want to talk to anyone. It’s killing me to talk about this now. And yeah, I know, this is rape trauma syndrome, and I was in the acute phase, and I was expressive, not controlled, and you know what? It’s all psycho bullshit. Everything I’ve told rape victims over the years is
bullshit
. This happened to
me
. If you haven’t been where I’ve been, you don’t have a fucking clue.”

He searched for the right thing to say and wound up saying the wrong thing. “I just don’t understand how you of all people would not report this.”

“You saw what happened to Tanjy. She was humiliated. Destroyed. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me.”

“It would have been different with you,” Stride insisted.

Maggie shook her head. “You can be so stupid, boss. You’re a great cop, but you can be so blind sometimes that it drives me crazy. Do you think I don’t have secrets? Do you think there aren’t things that I don’t want out in public?”

“What things?”

“That’s none of your business. The whole point is that I didn’t go public because I didn’t want to have my life ruined.”

“How can I solve this case if you won’t talk to me?” Stride asked.

Maggie dug inside the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a crumpled note. She smoothed it and handed it to Stride. There was a smeared sentence scrawled across the paper in a man’s handwriting.

I know who it is
.

“What the hell is this?” he asked.

“Eric left that for me the night he was killed. At first, I thought he was accusing me of having an affair, but that wasn’t it at all. That wasn’t what he meant.”

“Tanjy left the same message for Dan Erickson the night she disappeared.”

Maggie didn’t look surprised. “I think Eric figured out who the rapist was. When I refused to go to the police, I think he went to see Tanjy on his own. Somehow, the two of them found something that led them to the rapist. Then this guy killed them both.”

Stride recollected the chain of events in his mind. On Monday afternoon, Eric confronted Tanjy on the street in front of Java Jelly, and whatever he told her upset her deeply. Tanjy left work early, and that night, she called Lauren with a secret.
I know who it is
. Except she never got the chance to tell anyone. Someone killed her and buried her body under the ice. Two days later, Eric was killed, too.

He lowered the window on the passenger side of the truck. Snow blew in and dampened his face. He lit a cigarette, inhaled the tar into his lungs, and held it outside the window, where the smoke curled away. “Do you have any idea who Eric suspected?”

“No, but start with Tony. Eric talked to him that night. He may be able to help us.”

“Maybe Eric suspected Tony was the rapist. You and Tanjy were both patients of his.”

“Yeah, I thought about that, but Tony says Eric came to him about profiling a sexual predator, and that makes sense. Eric knew we worked with Tony on that kind of shit all the time.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Stride said. “I’ll go back over Tanjy’s police statement, too. If she wasn’t lying to us, then whoever raped her knew that Grassy Point Park was a place she took her boyfriends. At least, Mitchell Brandt says she took him there.”

“Good.”

“You’re still hiding something, Mags,” he told her. “My hands are tied if you’re not completely honest with me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not just thinking about myself. Other people could be hurt by what I say.”

“They could be hurt by what you
don’t
say.”

Their eyes connected. She knew what he meant. The rapist was still out there.

“If there’s no other way, then I’ll tell you why I couldn’t report the rape, but as far as I know, it has nothing to do with Tanjy. There has to be a different connection.”

“You know I should go to Teitscher with this. He’s chasing his tail. This could take away the cloud over you, Mags.”

She reached out and took his hand. It was the kind of intimate gesture she never made with him. She teased him. Winked at him. Insulted him. But she never touched him. “I’m asking you not to do that, Jonathan.”

He didn’t fight her. “If that’s what you want. For now.”

“I’m also trying to retrace Eric’s steps,” Maggie added. “I want to know how he found this guy.”

“What have you found out?”

Maggie’s eyes gleamed, looking like a cop’s eyes again. “Eric was in the Twin Cities the weekend before he was killed. He came back on Monday, and that’s when he went to see Tanjy. That’s when everything started.”

“You think he found something on his trip,” Stride concluded.

“Exactly. That’s why I was late. I was on the phone with people at the Saint Paul Hotel, trying to find out what Eric did while he was there. I got his invoice records from the hotel, and I checked his credit card and cell phone statements online.”

“And?”

“He called and charged a ticket to a play at the Ordway Center on Saturday night. One ticket, not two.”

“The Ordway is right across the park from the Saint Paul Hotel,” Stride said. “He probably just wanted something to do on Saturday night.”

“That’s what I thought, but I checked with the Ordway anyway and followed up with the season ticket holders who sat next to him.”

“Did they remember Eric?”

“Oh, yeah. They said he almost got kicked out of the theater.”

“Kicked out? Why?”

“He was bothering the ushers. Asking them a lot of questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.”

On Monday morning, Serena headed down the Point toward Canal Park, using the street as her path because the plows had cleared it of snow and ice. She took long, graceful strides as she ran. She wore a Lycra bodysuit, leggings, and a down vest, with mufflers over her ears and her long hair tied back in a ponytail. She did three miles in half an hour and made it to the lift bridge that towered overhead like a gray guillotine. Serena drifted to a stop and bent over, resting her hands on her knees. She took several deep breaths and then stretched her head back and stared at the sky. She took a few awkward steps, like a peacock, kicking her legs to keep them loose. She unhitched a bottle of water she kept on a Velcro strap at her waist and squirted a stream into her mouth. It was frosty cold.

She wandered out on the sidewalk into the center of the bridge. The shipping season was over, so the bridge rarely went up at this time of year. The water in the harbor on her left was frozen over, and even the narrow canal that lapped out into Lake Superior was glazed with ice. She leaned on the steel railing, staring out at the lake.

She was alone, but the sensation that someone’s eyes were on her refused to go away. The feeling even dogged her at home, where she felt as if she were sharing her life with a ghost. It reminded her of the days in Vegas when Tommy Luck was on her trail. Serena remembered being in his apartment after they arrested him and finding the wall of photographs he had secretly taken of her. Like a shrine. Some on the street. Some in her car. Some, with a telephoto, through the bedroom window of her apartment. All of them disfigured and raped, as if he was fantasizing about the real thing. She kept an eye on Tommy after that, and when he got out on parole the first time, she thought seriously about taking care of him, neat and quick, before he could nurse his obsession again. The Vegas cops would have looked the other way, but Tommy was a nobody, and she decided she didn’t want his corpse on her conscience.

It wasn’t the first time she had faced that temptation. When Serena was in Phoenix, living her year of hell with her mother and Blue Dog, she thought constantly about ways to kill them. She went to sleep at night drumming up the courage to take a knife and slit his throat while he slept, and then to do the same to her mother. Murder them, and disappear. No one would miss them, and no one would find her. Many times she went so far as to take a kitchen knife and stand in the bedroom doorway and watch them sleep, but she never crossed the threshold. Instead, she ran away to Las Vegas and didn’t look back.

Serena wondered how her life would be different now if things had gone another way.

If she had taken the kitchen knife into her mother’s bedroom.

If she had put a bullet in Tommy Luck’s head.

Her cell phone rang. She slid it out of the pocket of her vest and checked the calling number, which she didn’t recognize. “Serena Dial.”

“My name is Nicole Castro,” a woman announced. “I got your number from Archie Gale.”

“Oh?”

“He told me that you and I have something in common.” Her voice was ironic and tough, like a comedian who had done too many shows.

“What’s that?” Serena asked.

“You’re sleeping with a guy named Jonathan Stride, and my boss used to be a guy named Jonathan Stride.”

Serena didn’t laugh. “Exactly what do you want, Ms. Castro?”

“Call me Nicole. I want to talk with you about the murder of Eric Sorenson.”

“You should talk to the police.”

Nicole scoffed. “We both know that Abel already has his teeth in a suspect. Believe me, he won’t listen to anything I have to say.”

“Why’s that?”

“He used to be my partner.”

Serena stood up straight and wiped her sleeve across her forehead. “What kind of information do you have, Nicole?”

“How about we talk face-to-face about that?”

“I don’t recall Jonny mentioning you,” Serena said.

“Jonny?”

“Stride.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, I don’t suppose he thinks much about me anymore. They all want to forget me. Look, Archie said you wanted to help out on this case. So do you want my help or not?”

“If it’s a useful lead, absolutely.”

“Then come see me.”

“We could have lunch at Grandma’s,” Serena said.

Nicole’s voice was bitter. “There’s nothing I’d like more, believe me. Unfortunately, I don’t live in Duluth anymore. I’m in the Twin Cities in a town called Shakopee.”

“That’s okay. I’m driving down to the Cities tomorrow anyway. Where would you like to meet?”

“You’ll have to come to me. I’m in prison.”

Serena exhaled steam and looked around to see if anyone was watching her. The bridge railing under her fingers was cold. “I thought you said you were a cop.”

“That’s right. I used to be in the Detective Bureau in Duluth. Then I was framed for my husband’s murder. Just like Maggie.”

Grassy Point Park was a speck of green shaped like a knife hooking into the narrow channel of St. Louis Bay. It was on a dead-end road in the heart of the city’s industrial area, near ore docks and railroad tracks. The frozen harbor was on Stride’s left. He could have driven onto the ice and taken a shortcut back home around the Wisconsin peninsula. On his right, where the park ended, he saw Santa Fe railcars loaded high with rock on the other side of a barbed wire fence. The wind was fierce and cold, and the morning sky overhead was a gray shroud.

This was where Tanjy said she was taken, tied to the tall fence by the rail yard, and assaulted.

He put himself in Tanjy’s mind, imagining it was night in early November. The lights of the bridge to Superior glistened to the north. They were close enough to the water to hear waves slapping on the shore. Tanjy struggled, but there was a knife to her throat, and she didn’t make a sound. She was tied up and stripped. The loops of the fence crushed against her naked skin.

After, she was alone. Humiliated. She didn’t cry out for help. She freed herself, drove home, and washed away the shame and the evidence.

Stride shook his head. There was a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit.

When she first told Stride the story, one detail struck him as odd. After the rape, the assailant left Tanjy’s car behind, because he had another car waiting for him in the park. At the time, Stride wondered how the rapist could have left a car behind for himself and made his way out of the park and back into the city. When Tanjy admitted lying about the rape, he forgot about the anomaly. Now it was back in his mind.