Immoral (2 page)

“Back up,” he said. “Kevin, give me the whole story, short and sweet, okay?”

Kevin rubbed his hand across his scalp until his blond hair stood up like naked winter trees. He squared his shoulders, which were broad and muscular. A football player.

“Rachel called me on my cell phone on Friday night and said we should come hang out with her in Canal Park,” Kevin said. “It was about eight-thirty, I guess. A shitty night. The park was almost empty. When we spotted Rachel, she was on the railing, playing around. So we ran up on the bridge to get her off there.”

“Then what?” Stride asked.

Kevin pointed to the opposite side of the bridge, to the peninsula that stretched like a narrow finger with Lake Superior on one side and Duluth harbor on the other. Stride had lived there most of his life, watching the ore ships shoulder out to sea.

“The three of us wandered down to the beach. We talked about school stuff.”

“She’s a suck-up,” Sally interjected. “She takes psychology and starts spouting all the teacher’s theories on screwed-up families. She takes English, and the teacher’s poetry is
so
wonderful. She takes math and grades papers after school.”

Stride silenced the girl with a stony stare. Sally pouted and tossed her hair defiantly. Stride nodded at Kevin to continue.

“Then we heard a ship’s horn,” he said. “Rachel said she wanted to ride the bridge while it went up.”

“They don’t let you do that,” Stride said.

“Yeah, but Rachel knows the bridge keeper. She and her dad used to hang out with him.”

“Her dad? You mean Graeme Stoner?”

Kevin shook his head. “No, her real dad. Tommy.”

Stride nodded. “Go on.”

“Well, we went back on the bridge, but Sally didn’t want to do it. She kept going to the city side. But I didn’t want Rachel up there by herself, so I stayed. And that’s where—well, that’s where she started making out with me.”

“She was playing games with you,” Sally said sharply.

Kevin shrugged. Stride watched Kevin tug at the collar around his thick neck and then caught a glimpse of the boy’s eyes. Kevin wasn’t going to say exactly what happened on the bridge, but he clearly was embarrassed and aroused thinking about it.

“We weren’t up there very long,” Kevin said. “Maybe ten minutes. When we got down, Sally—she wasn’t. . .”

“I left,” Sally said. “I went home.”

Kevin stuttered on his words. “I’m really sorry, Sal.” He reached out a hand to brush her hair, but Sally twisted away.

Before Stride could cut short the latest spat, he heard his cell phone burping out a polyphonic rendition of Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee.” He dug the phone out of his pocket and recognized the number for Maggie Bei. He flipped it open.

“Yeah, Mags?”

“Bad news, boss. The media’s got the story. They’re crawling all over us.”

Stride scowled. “Shit.” He took a few steps away from the two teenagers, noting that Sally began hissing at Kevin as soon as Stride was out of earshot. “Is Bird out there with the other jackals?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah. Leading the inquisition.”

“Well, for God’s sake, don’t talk to him. Don’t let any reporters near the Stoners.”

“No problem, we’re taped off.”

“Any other good news?” Stride asked.

“They’re playing it like this is number two,” Maggie told him. “First Kerry, now Rachel.”

“That figures. Well, I don’t like deja vu either. Look, I’ll be there in twenty minutes, okay?”

Stride slapped the phone shut. He was impatient now. Things were already moving in a direction he didn’t like. Having Rachel’s disappearance splashed over the media changed the nature of the investigation. He needed the TV and newspapers to get the girl’s face in front of the public, but Stride wanted to control the story, not have the story control him. That was impossible with Bird Finch asking questions.

“Keep going,” Stride urged Kevin.

“There’s not much else,” Kevin said. “Rachel said she was tired and wanted to go home. So I walked her to the Blood Bug.”

“The what?” Stride asked.

“Sorry. Rachel’s car. A VW Beetle, okay? She called it the Blood Bug.”

“Why?”

Kevin’s face was blank. “Because it was red, I guess.”

“Okay. You actually saw her drive off?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Sure.”

“And she specifically told you she was going home?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Could she have been lying? Could she have had another date?”

Sally laughed cruelly. “Sure she could. Probably did.”

Stride turned his dark eyes on Sally again. She hooded her eyes and looked down at her shoes, her curls falling over her forehead. “Do you know something, Sally?” Stride asked. “Did you maybe go see Rachel and tell her to lay off Kevin here?”

“No!”

“Then who do you think Rachel would have gone to see?”

“It could have been anyone,” Sally said. “She was a whore.”

“Stop it!” Kevin insisted.

“Both of you stop it,” Stride snapped. “What was Rachel wearing that night?”

“Tight black jeans, the kind you need a knife to cut yourself out of,” Sally replied. “And a white turtleneck.”

“Kevin, did you see anything in her car? Luggage? A backpack?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“You told Mr. Stoner that she made a date with you.”

Kevin bit his lip. “She asked if I wanted to see her on Saturday night. She said I could pick her up at seven, and we could go out. But she wasn’t there.”

“It was a game to her,” Sally repeated. “Did she tell you to call me on Saturday and lie to me? Because that’s what you did.”

Stride knew he wasn’t going to get any more out of these two tonight. “Listen up, both of you. This isn’t about who kissed who. A girl’s missing. A friend of yours. I’ve got to go talk to her parents, who are wondering if they’re ever going to see their daughter again, okay? So think. Is there anything else you remember from Friday night? Anything Rachel did or said? Anything that might tell us where she went when she left here or who she might have seen.”

Kevin closed his eyes, as if he were really trying to remember. “No, Lieutenant. There’s nothing.”

Sally was sullen, and Stride wondered if she was hiding something. But she wasn’t going to talk. “I have no idea what happened to her,” Sally mumbled.

Stride nodded. “All right, we’ll be in touch.”

He took another glance out at the looming blackness of the lake, beyond the narrow canal. There was nothing to see. It was as empty and hollow as his world felt now. As he pushed past the two teenagers and headed to the parking lot, he felt it again. Deja vu. It was an ugly memory.

Fourteen months had passed since the wet August evening when Kerry McGrath disappeared. Stride had reconstructed her last night so many times that he could almost see it playing in his head like a movie. If he closed his eyes, he could see her, right down to the freckle on the corner of her lips and the three slim gold earrings hugging her left earlobe. He could hear her giggle, like she had in the birthday videotape he had watched a hundred times. All along, he had kept an image of her that was so vivid, it was like she was alive.

But he knew she was dead. The bubbly girl who was so real to him was a hideous, flesh-eaten thing in the ground somewhere, in one of the deserted acres of wilderness they had never searched. He only wanted to know why and who had done it to her.

And now another teenager. Another disappearance.

As he waited at a stoplight, Stride glanced into his truck window and found himself staring into the reflection of his own shadowy brown eyes. Pirate eyes, Cindy used to say, teasing him. Dark, alert, on fire. But that was then. He had lost Kerry to a monster, and a different kind of monster had claimed Cindy at the same time. The tragedy deadened the flame behind his eyes and made him older. He could see it in his face, weathered and imperfect. A web of telltale lines furrowed across his forehead. His black hair, streaked with strands of gray, was short but unkempt, with a messy cowlick. He was forty-one and felt fifty.

Stride swung his mud-stained Bronco through potholes to the old-money neighborhood near the university where Graeme and Emily Stoner lived. Stride knew what to expect. It was eleven o’clock, normally a time when the streets would be deathly quiet on Sunday night. But not tonight. The blinking lights of squad cars and the white klieg lights of television crews lit up the street. Neighbors lingered on their lawns in small crowds of spies and gossips. Stride heard the overlapping cacophony of police radios buzzing like white noise.

Uniformed cops had cordoned off the Stoner house, keeping the reporters and the gawkers at bay. Stride pulled his Bronco beside a squad car and double-parked. The reporters all swarmed around him, barely giving him room to swing his door open. Stride shook his head and held up his hand, shielding his eyes as he squinted into the camera lights.

“Come on, guys, give me a break.”

He pushed his way through the crowd of journalists, but one man squared his body in front of Stride and flashed a signal to his cameraman.

“Do we have a serial killer on the loose here, Stride?” Bird Finch rumbled in a voice as smooth and deep as a foghorn. His real name was Jay Finch, but everyone in Minnesota knew him as Bird, a Gopher basketball star who was now the host of a shock-TV talk show in Minneapolis.

Stride, who was slightly more than six feet tall himself, craned his neck to stare up at Bird’s scowling face. The man was a giant, at least six-foot-seven, dressed impeccably in a navy double-breasted suit, with cufflinks glinting on the half inch of white shirt cuffs that jutted below his sleeve. Stride saw a university ring on the forefinger of the huge paw in which he clutched his microphone.

“Nice suit, Bird,” Stride said. “You come here straight from the opera?”

He heard several of the reporters snicker. Bird stared at Stride with coal eyes. The floodlights glinted off his bald black head.

“We’ve got some sick pervert snatching our girls off the streets of this city, Lieutenant. You promised the people of this city justice last year. We’re still waiting for it. The families of this city are waiting for it.”

“If you’re running for office, do it on someone else’s time.” Stride unhooked his shield from his jeans and held it in front of Bird’s face, jamming his other hand in front of the camera. “Now get the hell out of my way.”

Bird grudgingly inched away. Stride bumped his shoulder heavily against the reporter as he passed. The shouting continued behind him. The crowd of reporters dogged his heels, up onto the sidewalk and to the edge of the makeshift fence of yellow police tape. Stride bent down, squeezed under the tape, and straightened up. He gestured to the nearest cop, a slight twenty-two-year-old with buzzed red hair. The officer hurried eagerly up to Stride.

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

Stride leaned down and whispered in his ear. “Keep these assholes as far away as you can.”

The cop grinned. “You got it, sir.”

Stride wandered into the middle of Graeme Stoner’s manicured lawn. He waved at Maggie Bei, the senior sergeant in the Detective Bureau he supervised, who was doling out orders in clipped tones to a crowd of uniformed officers. Maggie was barely five feet tall even in black leather boots with two-inch heels. The other cops dwarfed her, but they snapped to it when she jabbed a finger in their direction.

The Stoner house was at the end of a narrow lane, shadowed by oak trees that had recently spilled most of their leaves into messy piles. The house itself was a three-story relic of the 1920s, solidly constructed for the Minnesota winters with bricks and pine. A curving walkway led from the street to a mammoth front door. On the east side of the house, overlooking a wooded gully, was a two-car detached garage, with a driveway leading to a rear alley. Stride noted a bright red Volkswagen Bug parked in the driveway, not quite blocking one of the garage stalls.

Rachel’s car. The Blood Bug.

“Welcome to the party, boss.”

Stride glanced at Maggie Bei, who had joined him on the lawn.

Maggie’s jet black hair was cut like a bowl, with bangs hanging straight down to her eyebrows. She was tiny, like a Chinese doll. Her face was pretty and expressive, with twinkling almond-shaped eyes and a mellow golden cast to her skin. She wore a burgundy leather jacket over a white Gap shirt and black jeans plucked from the teen racks. That was Maggie—stylish, hip. Stride didn’t spend much money on clothes himself. He kept resoling the cowboy boots he had worn since he traded in his uniform to join the Detective Bureau, and that was a long time ago. He still wore the same frayed jeans that he had worn through nine winters, even though coins now sprinkled the ground through a tear in his pocket. His leather jacket was similarly weather-worn. It still bore a bullet hole in the sleeve, which aligned with the scar on Stride’s muscular upper arm.

Stride shifted his gaze to the windows fronting the Stoner house and saw a man inside carrying a drink into a back room. The crystal glass caught light from the chandelier and glinted like a mirror sending a message.

“So what do we have here, Mags?” Stride asked.

“Nothing you don’t already know,” she said. “Rachel Deese, seventeen years old, senior at Duluth High School. The jock, Kevin, says he saw her Friday night around ten o’clock driving away from Canal Park. Since then, nothing. Her car is parked in the driveway, but so far no one saw her arrive home on Friday or leave here on foot or with anyone else. That was two days ago.”

Stride nodded. He took a moment to study Rachel’s Volkswagen, which was surrounded by officers doing an exhaustive search of the vehicle. It was flashy red, cute, and clean, not the kind of car a teenage girl would willingly leave behind.

“Check for bank ATMs on the route from Canal Park to the house,” Stride suggested. “Maybe we’ll get lucky with a security tape from Friday night. Let’s see if she really was heading home, like Kevin says.”

“Already being done,” Maggie informed him. She arched her eyebrow as if to say,
Am I stupid
?