Immoral (47 page)

She stood up and came out from behind the desk. She stood close to Stride but didn’t look at him. Instead, she stared at photos on the wall. Of her and Stride. Of her and Robin. She kept them up even now.

He smelled tobacco. She was smoking again.

“The letter almost destroyed me, Jon,” she said. “I knew you and I were in trouble. I was already dealing with that. Or not dealing with it. And then to hear from Robin and find out what really happened—I just had to see him. I didn’t go there to see
her
, for God’s sake. That never even crossed my mind. I went to see him.”

She turned back to Stride. “You were there. You saw what he was like. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe what she’d done to him.”

“He did it to himself,” Stride said.

“No, this wasn’t his fault. Robin was always weak. I knew that about him. And Rachel saw it, too. She used him. He told me how she read his poetry and told him he was such a genius. How she made him believe they were meant for each other. But it was just another lie, and he swallowed all of it. Once Graeme was dead, she threw him out. She just cut him out of her life. She didn’t need him anymore. It was like she was ripping his heart out. He started drinking, sliding downhill. He didn’t have anything left to live for.”

“Tell me about Rachel,” he persisted.

“Yes, all right The crazy thing is, I never planned to see her. Robin told me where she worked, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t there for her. Robin and I talked for a couple of hours, if you can call it talking. He was too far gone. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“So you went to confront Rachel.”

“No, it wasn’t like that. I was heading back to the airport, coming home. But more and more, I kept thinking about Rachel and what she did to us. To me. It’s not like I consciously decided I was going there, but somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t driving to the airport. I wound up at the club. I just wanted to see her, see what she looked like. Look into her eyes. When she came out onstage, it took me a minute, but I knew. I knew it was her. And she was everything that Robin said she was. Beautiful. And cold as ice.

“That was when I realized it wasn’t enough just to see her. I needed her to look at me and admit what she’d done. So I waited in the parking lot and followed her. When I got to her apartment, I almost couldn’t go through with it What do you say to someone you’ve never met who ruined your whole life? But I thought about Robin wasting away hi that trailer, and what our lives had been like, and I got angry all over again.”

“Did she recognize you?” Stride asked.

“Oh, yeah. Right away. She laughed. She said if I’d come to take Robin back, I could have him now. And she knew all about the investigation. About me and you. She thought it was funny. ‘I caught a husband for you and a murderer for him.’ That was what she said. That we should thank her.”

Andrea began crumbling.

“I don’t know what—I mean, none of it was going the way I wanted. She had no regrets, no shame. She stared at me with those horrible green eyes like I was an insect. Something to play with and then swat away.”

Stride saw Andrea’s hands trembling. He wasn’t sure how far he could push her before she lost control entirely. “What else did she say?” he asked.

“She lied,” Andrea retorted, balling her fists. “All she did was lie.”

“Lie about what?”

“About everything! I told her she had no right to break us up. Robin loved me.” Her eyes narrowed to slits, almost reptilian. “And do you know what she said? She said Robin was going to divorce me anyway. He was so fucking easy to seduce because he could barely keep it up in bed with me. Making love to me was like humping a corpse. I couldn’t get pregnant, because there was nothing alive between my legs.”

“Son of a bitch,” Stride murmured.

“That’s when I knew. She wasn’t lying. It was all true. I’d been the one lying to myself all along. About Robin. About myself. So I stood there, with this rage bubbling over like nothing I’d ever felt before, and all she could do was smirk at me. Like my life was a joke to her. Like everything she’d taken from me meant nothing.”

“What did you do?” Stride asked quietly.

“There was a vase on the bookshelf. I grabbed it, swung it I wanted it to shatter. I wanted glass flying all over the apartment. But I didn’t let go. I hung on to it, and it hit something. My eyes were closed. I didn’t even know what I’d done. But I hit something, and then there was this heavy sound, of something falling. . .”

Stride had heard these stories too many times, from people he had arrested, from defendants pleading for mercy. He had hardened his heart to them. But not this time.

“She was dead. I couldn’t believe it, but she was dead. I had killed her.”

“Rachel’s been dead a long time,” he murmured.

Andrea stared at him, her eyes pleading. “I never expected you to be pulled back into this, Jon. You have to believe that. I never thought anyone would make the connection to Rachel.”

Stride knew there was no gray area here. If they were in court, she would be guilty. But it occurred to him that Andrea wasn’t entirely responsible. Neither was Robin. He, too, had to bear some of the blame. Maybe that was why he knew he could never give up the secret. Who would it satisfy?

“What now?” Andrea asked.

Yes, what now
? he asked himself.

“Now we both have to live with it.”

“I know what a difficult thing this is for you to do,” she whispered. “To walk away.”

“The truth is, it isn’t difficult at all. I guess that should tell me something.”

He was anxious to go now, to say good-bye, to be alone with his own guilt. But he knew he needed to tell her something, to give her something to hang on to. So that the past wasn’t entirely a lie.

“Robin knew you killed Rachel,” he told her, as he turned to leave. “He took the fall. He wanted us to blame him. That was for you, Andrea. He did it for you.”

Stride realized he had nowhere to go. He was homeless in his own hometown.

He wound up on the bridge over the canal, standing where Rachel had stood on her last night in the city. Before she went home and planted evidence in Graeme’s van. Before she stole Graeme’s shoes. Before she met Robin waiting for her on a back street and lured him to the barn to play their little game.

Chase her into the meadow. Cut her clothes. Cut her skin. Blood. Fabric. Clues.

I played right into their hands
, he thought.

Stride stared into the dark water, which barely stirred tonight under the cool lake breeze. He took hold of the railing with both hands and imagined Rachel balancing there. If a gust of wind had pitched her into the frigid canal that night his life would be very different today. Better or worse, he didn’t know.

At least he knew Rachel’s secrets. Except for one. He still didn’t know why.

Why the game. Why the bitter war between Graeme and Rachel. It surprised him that Rachel hadn’t left a clue, when she had dropped a trail of bread crumbs for everything else. Unless the cryptic postcard was her message to him.
He deserved to die
.

Stride turned and leaned against the railing, watching the cars come and go between the city and the Point. He reconstructed the timeline in his head, now that he knew Robin was the missing link. He thought about Rachel sitting in Robin’s class in September. Launching her plot.

I caught a husband for you and a murderer for him
.

He was closing in on something. He could feel the confusion in his brain clearing, like fog on the lake.

Stride heard the whine of tires striking the steel deck of the bridge. He was startled to see a red Volkswagen speeding from the Point, with a dark-haired girl behind the wheel. She grinned at him as she roared by. He had a wild thought that it might be Rachel. Even knowing she was dead, he thought she could find a way to haunt him.

But it wasn’t Rachel’s car. It wasn’t. . .

. . .the Blood Bug.

Stride suddenly could see through the fog. And he knew. Rachel had been sending him a message all along.

Eleven hundred feet in the air, atop the saucerlike crown of the Stratosphere tower, the temperature was a comfortable fifteen degrees cooler than the Strip below. When Stride stepped out onto the open-air observation platform, he felt a disconcerting vibration under his feet as the tower swayed with the turbulent air. He had never been particularly afraid of heights, but being so far up, on what felt like an exposed catwalk, was enough to make him dizzy.

“Try the tower,” Cordy had told him.

Serena once told Cordy that when she couldn’t sleep, she sometimes drove to the Stratosphere and spent a few hours staring out at the city.

In the three weeks Stride had been gone, they had talked occasionally by phone, but he still wondered if the electricity would he there when they saw each other again. He worried that the few days they had spent together would already have been eclipsed in her mind.

Looking out on the panorama of Las Vegas, he asked himself if he could come to like this town, which was so unlike anything he had known. It was hard to take a creature of the wilderness and drop him in the neon jungle. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to live in Duluth anymore. He had done his time, enough for a full pension, and this was his chance to make a break with the past. Plus, as of last week, he had learned that Maggie was pregnant and that her husband had prevailed upon her to hang up her shield. The prospect of doing his old job without her seemed empty.

He found he could walk by the edge and look down without a sense of vertigo. He followed the platform to his right, which led him on a course overlooking the eastern half of the city, free of the long stretch of glittering casinos. As he made his way to the south side, he saw the hypnotic grandeur of the Strip, jutting into the desert like a bent laser beam. At first, he saw only a dazzling ribbon of colors, devoid of detail. But the more he stared, the more he found himself focusing on individual details, like the emerald glow of the MGM Grand or the superstructure of the faux Eiffel Tower at Paris. He was so taken by the view that he spent several moments before realizing that he wasn’t alone.

Serena stood a few feet away, watching him with a smile. She wore black jeans and a white mock turtleneck. He couldn’t help but remember that Rachel was wearing almost the same outfit on the night she disappeared. With her black hair and athletic body, Serena must have looked very much as Rachel did then, atop the bridge over the canal. It gave him a little bit of sympathy, understanding how easily Robin, Graeme, Kevin, and everyone else could have been seduced by Rachel. Serena, with the same beauty, had that kind of power over him.

Why does a man do anything
? Robin asked.
A woman
.

With a quiet grace, she came and put her arms around his back and pressed her cool cheek tenderly against his face, which was flushed and warm. He reached up and stroked her dark hair. Holding her felt natural, as if they had been doing it for years. He never wanted to let go, and for a long while, it felt as if they never would. They could stand there, wrapped around each other in the breezy night, forever. The electricity was still there, as vibrant as it had been at the start.

“You came back,” she said, with a hint of surprise in her voice.

“I told you I would.”

“I know. But promises don’t always mean a lot in this city.”

He let go and studied her, becoming familiar with her face again. “You looked good on television,” he said.

Serena grinned. “You’re such a charmer.”

Two of the Minneapolis network affiliates had sent reporters to Las Vegas to do stories about Rachel’s death. They interviewed Serena and Cordy, took footage inside and out at the strip club where Rachel had worked, and did live feeds from the open spot in the desert where Robin’s trailer had been parked. The broken-down trailer had already been towed to the junk yard and its pest-ridden contents burned.

The television crews had no photograph of Jerky Bob to put on the air. Stride had seen to it that the only known photograph was lost during the investigation. So it was up to Serena to describe him, which she did. He was a vagrant. A nowhere man. There were a lot of them in Vegas, most of them mentally ill, and this one had nursed an obsession until it grew violent. Rachel had the bad luck to be the girl he couldn’t let go.

That was her story, and she was sticking to it.

“They picked up your line, you know,” Stride said. “‘Rachel Killed By ”Nowhere Man“’ That was the headline in the paper.”

“I like it.”

“So what if it isn’t true,” he murmured.

“We talked about this,” Serena said. “You had to protect her.”

He placed his hands gingerly on the shield that prevented jumpers and peered downward, feeling dizzy again at the height. Serena joined him, laying a hand on his back.

“What else could you do?” she asked.

“I know. But I’m sorry I put you in the middle of it. I made you lie for me.”

“That was my choice,” Serena told him. She saw he was ready to say more, and she put a finger over his lips. “It’s over and done, Jonny. End of story.”

“Not quite the end,” he said.

He took a breath and thought about how to tell her the rest He still blamed himself for not seeing the truth earlier, even though it would have made no difference. The deed was done.

Serena watched him, waiting.

“There’s still the relationship between Rachel and Graeme,” he said. “Something happened—something that made them blood enemies.”

“We know they were having sex,” Serena said. “Rachel wanted to stop. Graeme didn’t. I’ve been there, Jonny. If he raped her, or if he tried to, that’s enough to make a girl like Rachel get revenge.”

“Yes, it is. But Graeme got his revenge first.”

Graeme watched his hand tremble as he held a glass of brandy up to the light. He brought the drink to his lips and took a sip, hoping the alcohol would settle his nerves. The fumes filled his nose, and the brandy burned his dry throat. He swirled the liquor in the glass and took another swallow. But the quivering in his fingers refused to be quieted. He felt his desire rise
.