Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) (9 page)

She was alone. She heard the buzz of machines. The walls on either side of the narrow space were plasterboard, and the floor was dirty. A single row of fluorescent bulbs stretched along the ceiling toward a doorway lit by a red Exit sign.

She listened for his footsteps but heard nothing. She jogged to the end of the hallway, stopped, and peered carefully around the corner. He was already gone. She felt a chill, as if outside air were blowing in from somewhere. She followed the new corridor, which was built of brick and led her to a small utility room. The mechanical throb was louder. Gas and water pipes made a maze on the wall. She saw a tall steel door that ran up and down on tracks; it was closed. Another exit door had a crash bar. It led outside.

Cindy shivered, then pushed through the door into the cold air. She was outside the mall now, near the parking lot. Wind and rain slapped her face. She didn’t see him. Her shoulders sagged, but then she heard a voice behind her.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

She stifled a scream and spun around. He was there, behind a dumpster. Waiting for her. She saw no eyes, just sunglasses. Cap pulled way down. There was nothing to see, nothing to recognize, only the hard, bitter line of his mouth. Despite his small size, his body carried menace. She felt fear down to her toes.

‘Why are you following me?’ he demanded.

‘I’m not.’

‘Bullshit,’ he hissed.

‘You looked like someone I knew, but I guess not.’ She went to push past him and head back inside, but he grabbed her arm. She struggled and shouted. ‘Let me go!’

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m the wife of a cop, that’s who I am, so you better let go of me right now!’

He dropped her arm. She rubbed it and knew there would be a bruise where his fingers had clamped over her skin. For a small man, he was strong.

‘People shouldn’t go sticking their noses into other people’s business,’ he warned her. He drew back the flap of his camouflage jacket, and she saw the butt of a gun poking out of a shoulder holster. ‘Bad things happen to those kinds of people. You hear what I’m saying?’

Her mouth was dry. She didn’t say a word.

He marched past her into the parking lot at a quick, nervous pace. Her eyes followed him, but she didn’t see him get into a vehicle. When she couldn’t see him anymore, she ran back into the utility room and then to the warmth, crowds, and sweet smells of the mall.

People stared at her, and she realized that tears were streaming down her face.

14

Stride walked onto the ice of a small lake off Tree Farm Road in Midway Township. Evergreens and birches made a wreath around the shore. The rain left puddles on the frozen surface, making it slippery under his boots. Spring was coming. The locals had already pulled most of their fishing shanties off the water, but a few diehards always waited until the ice was practically slush before giving up on winter. Sometimes they waited too long.

He saw an old pick-up a hundred yards away, parked beside a tin shanty that wasn’t much bigger than an outhouse. Even at that distance, he recognized Nathan Skinner carrying provisions from the icehouse to his truck. Nathan saw him, too, and he offered Stride a mock salute.

Stride lit a cigarette and let it soothe his nerves. He kept trudging through the miserable drizzle.

He’d known Nathan for years, all the way back to his UMD hockey days. Most men in Duluth had. Nathan was a genuine star, who’d brought home an NCAA championship for the Bulldogs. People in Duluth didn’t forget that kind of thing. It was a shame that the kid had blown out his knee before he had a chance to prove himself as a pro. Nathan never claimed to be bothered about it, but Stride didn’t believe him. You couldn’t come that close to fame and money and not be bitter about missing the gold ring.

One day you’re about to be a starting forward for the Blackhawks.

The next day you’re a street cop.

And not long after that, you’re booted off the force, doing fill-in security in malls and hospitals.

Stride knew that Maggie didn’t like Nathan. He couldn’t really blame her. Nathan had the chauvinist arrogance of a man who’d had women fawning over him his whole life. Stride knew that Nathan was a sexist and probably a racist. He didn’t condone the man’s attitudes, but if you rejected every male in the white-bread northland because they didn’t understand women or blacks, then you weren’t left with much of a hiring pool. His job was to purge those attitudes and help his cops see the complex reality of the world they policed. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

He’d been reluctant to fire Nathan, partly because he thought Nathan was smart enough to have long-term potential, and partly because he didn’t like Jay whipping up public sentiment against his team. He gave in when the chief wanted Nathan gone, but he was stubborn enough to believe that with enough time and training, he still could have turned Nathan Skinner into a solid police officer.

‘Hello, Nathan,’ Stride said as he approached the pick-up.

Nathan nodded. His face was wet, his blond hair flat. ‘Lieutenant.’

Stride blew smoke into the air. ‘You should be off the ice.’

‘I’m packing up now.’

Stride nodded. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

‘I figured. I wasn’t really in a mood to be found. I can read the newspapers.’

‘Is it true?’ Stride asked. ‘The affair with Janine?’

‘Sure, it’s true.’

Nathan shrugged, as if the information were of no importance. He had a CD boombox in his hands, covered by plastic wrap, and he wedged it behind the driver’s seat of his truck. He returned to the small icehouse, and Stride followed him inside. There was barely room for the two men. A wooden chair sat next to a hole drilled in the ice, revealing murky black water below.

‘Maggie talked to you a while ago. You didn’t mention your relationship with Janine.’

‘So? I don’t think I’m under any obligation to discuss my sex life with Maggie Bei. She didn’t ask. I didn’t volunteer.’

Stride flicked his cigarette into the open water. ‘Don’t be cute.’

Nathan sat in the rickety chair and stretched out his legs. He wore blue jeans and a down vest, but his arms were bare. ‘Fine. I didn’t say anything about it, because you guys already had Janine in your sights. I didn’t feel the need to make her any more of a suspect than she was.’

‘Or to make yourself a suspect,’ Stride said.

‘Yeah. Me, too. I get it. The fact is, I didn’t really think anyone would find out about us. We were pretty discreet. I sure didn’t think Janine would advertise it.’

Stride shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Rain plinked on the metallic roof, and drops leaked inside. A gust of wind rocked the corrugated metal. ‘She says you were in love with her.’

Nathan snorted. ‘Are you kidding? No, I wasn’t.’

‘Why would she say that?’ Stride asked.

‘Why do you think? To make it look like I had another reason to blow her husband away. I wanted her for myself. Real nice. I guess there’s no honor among cheaters.’

‘You said
another
reason to kill Jay,’ Stride pointed out.

‘Oh, come on, Lieutenant. You don’t need to play gotcha games with me. We both know I hated Jay Ferris. He cost me my job. He made it his business to ruin my life. So I made it my business to fuck his wife. Which I did. I already had my revenge against Jay.’

‘You don’t have much of an alibi for that night.’

‘Maybe not, but I
was
sick. The pizza girl will tell you that. Besides, you tested my gun. It’s clean.’

‘Is that your only handgun?’ Stride asked. ‘Archie Gale seems to think you have more.’

Nathan shrugged. ‘Okay, I’ve got others. You want to test all of them? You want to search my place? Go for it. Look, it doesn’t matter. I’m not an idiot. If I killed him – which I didn’t – I would have dropped the gun through this hole in the ice. You’d never find it. That’s probably what Janine did, too.’

‘You think she killed him?’

‘Of course she did.’

‘Did you know that Jay Ferris owned a gun?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah, Jay waved it at me when I went after him at the Saratoga.’

‘Did you ever tell Janine about Jay’s gun?’

Nathan didn’t answer right away. He rubbed his bare arms against the cold. Stride thought he was deciding whether to lie, and he realized he couldn’t trust anything that came out of Nathan’s mouth. That was true of Janine, too. It would be a he said/she said between them all the way to the courtroom.

‘Yeah, sure, I told her about it,’ Nathan said.

‘Just to be clear,’ Stride reiterated. ‘You’re saying that you
told
Janine that Jay carried a gun. She knew about it.’

‘I did. I joked about it once. I said we’d better be careful if Jay found out about us, in case he decided to blow us away.’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t remember. Months ago.’

‘What did Janine say?’

‘She didn’t look surprised.’

Nathan smiled. If he was a liar, he was good at it, but so was Janine. Nathan obviously realized that Stride doubted his story, so he added: ‘Janine knew how to shoot, too. I taught her. We went to a range together once. It was over in Superior, where I figured no one would see us.’ He dug in the pocket of his vest for his flip-phone. ‘I got a pic of it, actually. I took it while she was firing. It was pretty hot. She was really into it.’

He pushed several buttons on his phone and turned it around so that Stride could see the small screen. He recognized Janine Snow, ear defenders over her head, goggles over her eyes, a Smith & Wesson revolver at the end of her outstretched arms. She aimed at a target, and her face was hard and focused. When Janine Snow did anything, she did it well.

‘I’ll send you a copy of the picture,’ Nathan added.

Stride nodded. ‘Tell me more about the affair.’

‘There’s not much to tell. I met her when I was doing security at the hospital last May. I figured I’d take my chances getting her into bed. It wasn’t hard.’

‘How often did you see her?’

‘Not often. A couple times a month. She’s a busy woman.’

‘Where did you meet?’

‘Hotels at first. Then she bought her chill place, and we’d meet there.’

Stride cocked his head. ‘Her what?’

‘She keeps an apartment downtown. It’s her getaway when she doesn’t want to be home with Jay.’ Nathan read the confusion in Stride’s face, and he grinned. ‘You didn’t know about it, did you? How’d you miss that one, Lieutenant? Well, I doubt it’s under her name, so don’t kick yourself too hard.’

Nathan rattled off a downtown address, and Stride wrote it down. He knew the location, and he was angry that they hadn’t discovered the condo before now. It was only a ten-minute drive from Janine’s house on the hill. If she were looking to stash a gun and jewels after the murder, it would have been an easy place to do so. And now she’d had time to dispose of them permanently.

‘Janine says you had sex at her house once,’ Stride went on.

Nathan shook his head firmly. ‘No. Definitely not.’

‘You never went there?’

‘Never.’

‘She was very specific about it. She did a striptease for you in her bedroom, and you saw where she keeps her jewelry.’

‘Well, give that woman extra credit, she’s clever. I guess you do what it takes when you’re trying to duck a murder charge. But come on, Lieutenant. You really think she’d take the risk of her friends or neighbors seeing me at her house? No way.’

‘When did the affair end?’ Stride asked.

‘December. Not long after Thanksgiving.’

‘Who broke it off?’ Stride asked.

‘She did.’

‘Why?’

‘She didn’t give me a reason, and I didn’t ask. She just said we were done. She’s a cold fish. I didn’t really expect anything more.’

‘Did you want to keep the affair going?’

‘I didn’t care. I liked the sex, but I can get plenty of sex. I said thanks for the memories. We did it one last time, and we were over. It wasn’t emotional.’

‘Janine thinks Jay was planning to confront you about the affair.’

‘Confront me? Hell, no. Do you really think Jay Ferris would admit to my face that he knew I’d been screwing his wife? Not him. He’d never give me the satisfaction.’

‘And yet he knew what you were doing,’ Stride said. ‘He hired a detective.’

‘Okay, so he knew about the affair. I’m sure he forced Janine to dump me. It would have driven him crazy to think of me and her together, and he would have done anything to make her stop. I mean, she always said it was a control game with Jay.’

Stride’s eyes narrowed. ‘How so?’

‘That marriage was a war, and Jay wanted to win. He wanted to rule over her like some kind of king, you know? He was never going to give her up. I told her she should pay him off and divorce him, but she said he’d destroy her life before he walked away. She couldn’t escape. Those were the words she used, Lieutenant. She said Jay would have to die before he let her get away from him.’

15

Cindy sat with Jonny and Maggie in the basement conference room of the Detective Bureau. She had a cup of coffee in front of her, which she cradled between her palms. Jonny picked at the sprinkles on a chocolate donut, and Maggie – whose appetite belied her tiny size – wolfed down a quarter-pounder from McDonald’s. The furnace was loud through the air vents. Hours had passed since her confrontation with the man at Miller Hill Mall, but Cindy was still jittery. Her hands shook, making the coffee slosh. Her eyes darted back and forth between her husband and his Chinese partner, and the long silences made them all uncomfortable.

On the bulletin board, Maggie had thumbtacked photos from Jay Ferris’s camera of the man in camouflage with the assault rifle. Beside the photos was the sketch they’d drawn from Cindy’s description. Cindy was sure the man in the photographs was the same man she’d followed at the mall.

Almost sure. She couldn’t swear to it.

‘I talked to Colin in mall security,’ Maggie said between generous bites of her hamburger. ‘I gave him Jay’s photos and the artist’s sketch, but he didn’t recognize the guy. Whoever he is, he’s not a regular visitor at the mall. Colin will pass the pics around to his team, in case somebody knows him or the guy comes back.’

Another long silence. Cindy smoothed her hair. She tried to catch Jonny’s eye, but he refused to look at her. She knew he was furious.

‘I pulled the CCTV footage, too,’ Maggie added. ‘You can’t see the guy’s face in most of the angles. When you catch a glimpse, he’s got a cap and sunglasses, so there’s nothing to help us. He’s smart.’

‘Why is he hiding?’ Cindy asked. ‘I mean, what’s he up to?’

There was no answer. Cindy went back to her coffee, which was growing cold.

Jonny got up and stood in front of the bulletin board. He stared at the man in the photos with smoky eyes. She knew her husband; he was mad, and he was focused. His black hair was messier than usual, because he rubbed it like a nervous tic when he was deep in thought.

‘So what is this really about?’ he said, mostly to himself. ‘Jay spots a guy with an assault rifle near Ely’s Peak. He takes a few pics and makes a police report. We get a couple more reports of gunfire in the same area, and the guy leaves targets behind like he’s playing soldier. And now my wife tries to be a hero, following an armed stranger who may or may not be the same guy.’

Cindy frowned. ‘I said I was sorry, Jonny.’

He didn’t look at her. Instead, he grabbed a copy of the sketch from the conference table and sat down. ‘So far, this adds up to nothing,’ he said.

‘It wasn’t nothing,’ Cindy snapped. ‘You weren’t there. You didn’t see him.’

Again, her husband acted as if she were invisible. Cindy felt her face get hot as her temper flared. She was quick to blow off steam when she got angry. ‘Are you ever going to look at me?’

Her voice was loud. Too loud. Jonny turned and stared at her, and she could feel his own anger, too. She expected him to lash out, but instead, he got up and left the conference room without speaking. His silence as he passed her had the chill of morning frost. Cindy continued to fume.

‘He’s mad because he’s scared,’ Maggie said.

Cindy tapped her foot nervously on the floor. Her anger mixed with embarrassment. ‘I know.’

Maggie finished a super-sized cup of Coke with a loud slurp. She tried and failed to cover a belch. ‘Sorry. Not to piss you off, but he’s right. What you did was pretty stupid.’

‘Don’t you think I know that?’ Cindy asked.

‘So why’d you do it?’

‘I don’t know. I thought I recognized this guy, and I just – I didn’t want him to walk away. I knew you were trying to find him.’

Maggie blew the black bangs out of her face. ‘From a police standpoint, Stride’s right. It does add up to nothing. Even so, I’d like to know who this man is. Something about him feels off.’

Cindy was pleased that Maggie shared her concerns. She liked Maggie. They were friends, but not really close friends. Maggie was hard rock, and Cindy was country, and that summed up the two of them. Jonny’s partner was almost ten years younger than she was, and ten years was a long time at their ages. Cindy worried about turning forty, and Maggie worried about turning thirty. Big difference.

There was the crush thing, too. Maggie was in love with Jonny. Love and hero worship were hard to separate when it came to cops. Jonny had mentored Maggie and coaxed her out of her shell, and she fed on it. Cindy trusted Jonny and didn’t think Maggie would ever act on her feelings, but it paid to be careful.

Like most wives, she had a keen appreciation of her husband’s strengths and weaknesses. When it came to women, Jonny felt the need to rescue them. He didn’t always understand the rush of emotions he provoked in return, and he wasn’t entirely immune to feelings of his own. There had been a case the previous year that had tested both of them. Jonny had become involved in protecting a woman named Michaela Mateo from an abusive ex-husband. Michaela was pretty and vulnerable – a dangerous combination for Jonny. Cindy could see easily enough that Michaela was attracted to her husband, and although she didn’t believe anything had happened between them, she knew that Jonny’s own feelings went deeper than he let on. When Michaela was killed, the loss cut him worse than anything she’d seen in his years with the police.

Thinking of Michaela Mateo also made her think of the woman’s young daughter. Catalina. Cat. Six years old when her parents died. Cindy had gone so far as to suggest to Jonny that they adopt the girl, because it had already become clear that her own dreams of having children weren’t likely to come true. Jonny had said no. It was too much. Too soon. It made her wonder whether, in his heart of hearts, he really wanted kids at all.

She looked up. Her husband was in the doorway of the conference room. He hadn’t said anything.

Maggie took the hint and got up and left them alone. He took a chair and put it beside her and straddled it backwards. Their arms brushed against each other. His dark eyes were distant.

‘What were you thinking?’ he said quietly.

‘I wasn’t,’ she admitted.

She knew he wanted to yell, but he didn’t. He reached for her shoulder and pulled her gently against him. She folded herself into his body and felt his strength. And his worry and relief, having her in his arms.

‘Don’t scare me like that,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry, but you realize that’s what I live with every day, don’t you?’ she murmured.

That caught him short, but he knew it was true. He didn’t let go.

‘This guy at the mall,’ she said. ‘He’s not nothing, Jonny.’

‘He hasn’t committed a crime,’ he reminded her.

‘That you know of.’

They were silent, and it could easily have disintegrated between them again. Him yelling. Her yelling. They both knew how to fight, but she didn’t want to. Not now. It wasn’t worth it.

‘Hey, I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘I got a flier from Bobbie at the travel agency. Last-minute cruise specials. How about we go to Alaska in June? We can do it cheap.’

Jonny separated himself from her and smiled. ‘A vacation? Me?’

‘Every couple of years, I get to drag you out of Duluth.’

‘I know, but why now?’

‘No reason,’ she said, which wasn’t really true. She felt strange. She felt shadows around her, and it made her want to combat them with happier things. ‘You know I’ve always wanted to do this.’

He looked as if he would protest, but this time, he gave in. ‘Okay.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Book it. Sure.’

Cindy kissed him, and she didn’t believe in peck-on-the-cheek kisses. Their kisses were always hot and hard. She liked it that way. ‘Thanks, babe,’ she said. ‘That means a lot to me.’

He stood up and took her hand. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

Cindy hesitated. ‘Janine was at the mall today, too. We were both at the clinic.’

‘You shouldn’t be talking to her.’

‘I know.’ Cindy stopped herself, but then she added: ‘She thinks you’re going to arrest her.’

Jonny didn’t comment. He shoved papers into a satchel. He didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no, but she knew him well enough to realize that his silence was a yes. He was building a cage of evidence for her friend, and soon enough, he’d put her inside it.

Maybe that was the right thing to do. Cindy wasn’t naive. Janine was probably guilty of murder. Nothing else made sense. Even so, Cindy wanted to find another explanation. She wanted to believe that Janine was innocent.

‘That guy at the mall today really creeped me out,’ she told him.

Jonny stopped and looked at her. He didn’t chastise her again. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘He threatened me,’ Cindy went on, ‘and it didn’t feel empty. He told me bad things happen to people who pry into his business. That’s what Jay Ferris did for a living, Jonny. He pried into other people’s lives. What if Jay found out who this guy was?’