Stalked (19 page)

The murder scene left him with the same suspicion. If Tanjy’s murderer transported her to Hell’s Lake in the trunk of her car, and then disposed of the car in the woods after dumping her body in the ice, where was his own car? He couldn’t have walked far in the subzero weather. He also couldn’t very well drive two cars at the same time. So how did he vacate the desolate woods where he left Tanjy’s car?

Answer: There was someone else involved. Someone driving another car.

Maybe. Or maybe he and Abel were both thinking what the killer wanted them to think.

Stride gripped the fence with both hands. The more he imagined Tanjy’s rape, the more he felt a jolt of anger and regret, thinking about Maggie. He had to control his rage and dole it out into his veins in doses, like adrenaline. In Las Vegas, when his partner got shot, he had felt the same fury that left him teetering on the edge of control.

He was angry with Maggie, too. Angry that she had let it go, destroyed evidence, failed to report a crime. He knew it was easy for him to make that judgment when he didn’t live through it, but he was also angry that she had cut him out of her life by not sharing her pain with him, by not trusting him. The intimacy between them felt broken, even though he had no right to expect it from her.

He turned away from the fence when he heard a muffled symphony of noise and felt a thumping bass ricochet inside his chest. He saw a brown Lexus SUV pull into a parking place next to his Bronco. The engine cut off, and the music stopped. Tony Wells got out, clutching a venti cup of Starbucks coffee. He took several sips as he walked over to Stride. He wore a tan parka with a fur-lined hood and dress pants and shoes that were ill-suited to the snow heaped over the park grass.

“Good morning, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks for coming down here, Tony.” He gestured at the car and added, “Castrating pigs again, are you?”

“Oh, yes, another country music fan,” Tony said with a faint smile. “Smashing Pumpkins won a Grammy for that song, you know.”

“For what? Song most likely to make a listener conduct his own autopsy?”

Tony pulled his hood down and smoothed his thinning hair. “I read a study recently about some poor lab mice who were subjected to Toby Keith twenty-four hours a day for a month. They all developed cancer.”

Stride laughed. It was an old argument between them.

He was probably one of the few cops in Duluth who had never seen Tony Wells professionally. The job did that to you—it stirred up rat holes and made you do things you never wanted to do, like drink, or hit your wife, or roll your car on a slick highway. Tony was good at taming the rats. Maggie and Serena both liked him. Stride had needed counseling himself once, but he never wanted to see a cop’s shrink. He didn’t like sharing stories with someone who knew everyone else’s stories. After Cindy died, he found a therapist thirty miles away in Two Harbors and went there once a week for six months, which wasn’t enough to prevent him from rebounding into a bad marriage.

“You know this is where Tanjy Powell said she was raped?” Stride asked.

He watched Tony take the measure of the area around him. Parks looked lonely in the winter, devoid of life.

“Yes.”

“You know that she really was raped, don’t you? She didn’t make it up.”

Tony worked his jaw as if something were caught between his teeth. “I’m in an uncomfortable position, Lieutenant. I want to help, but I’m not sure I can.”

“Tanjy is dead,” Stride reminded him. “You can’t do her any harm by talking to me. You can only help me find out who did this to her.”

“Tanjy was an intensely private person.”

“I know she was, but I need your help, Tony. We go back a long way. I respect your loyalty, but your patient is dead. I think she’d want you to talk to me.”

Stride could see that the choice was a genuine struggle for Tony. As a therapist with close ties to the police, Tony had seen them all—detectives, victims, and perpetrators—and he didn’t always have a rule book to work around ethical conflicts.

“Yes, all right,” Tony said finally. “I’d like to see you catch whoever did this. Tanjy deserves that.”

“Thanks.”

“What can I tell you?”

“Do you know who Tanjy was seeing at the time of the assault?”

“No, she never gave me a name. She was very discreet. It made therapy difficult sometimes, because she gave me so few details about her life.” Tony hesitated.

“What is it?”

“Well, she did think she had a stalker. She told me she was being watched.”

“Did she know who it was?”

“No, she said it was just a feeling.”

“When was this?”

“Shortly before the rape.”

“Did she give you any other details?”

“No, she didn’t. Truthfully, Lieutenant, I wasn’t sure the rape really happened. She told me she only recanted to you because she couldn’t stand the public humiliation, but I wondered about that. The venue of the rape was too similar to her own fantasies. That’s not the way it works.”

“Unless that was the whole point for the rapist.”

“You mean you think she was targeted
because
of her fantasies,” Tony concluded.

“It’s a possibility.”

Tony thought about this. “I don’t see how. No one knew about them.”

“Her boyfriend knew. She made him act out rape fantasies during sex. She posted rape stories on the Web, too.”

Tony cocked his head. “True.”

“Was Grassy Point Park important to her?”

“Very.”

“Do you know why?”

“I think it was because of her parents. You can see the bridge from here, where her parents were killed in the car accident. The fact that she reen-acted rape fantasies at a place that’s visible from the bridge is significant. I suspect she was acting out her repressed sexuality in front of her parents.”

“So if she had other boyfriends, you think she would have taken them here.”

“Yes, that’s likely.”

“Do you know who else she was seeing, other than Mitchell Brandt?”

Tony shook his head. “I’m sorry, no.”

“Okay, let’s talk about Eric,” Stride said.

Tony shoved his free hand in his pocket and drank more coffee. The wind landed a kick across the harbor that made them both hunch their bodies against the frozen air.

“Now I’m really on thin ice,” Tony said.

“I know, but I’m not asking for any privileged information. Eric talked about things that had nothing to do with Maggie, right?”

“Yes, he did,” Tony acknowledged.

“What did he want to know?”

“He asked me if there were certain tells you could look for that would tip you off that someone might be a sexual predator.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Not much,” Tony said. “I told him you’d have to be a trained professional conducting an extended interview to make an assessment, and even then, there aren’t any guarantees. Most sexual predators have spent a lifetime protecting their disguises.”

“Did he tell you who he was thinking about?”

“No.”

Stride watched Tony’s brooding eyes. “Maybe he was thinking about you.”

Tony looked back at him, steady and hard. “Me?” he said evenly.

“Right now, you’re the only connection between Tanjy and Maggie. Maybe Eric thought you raped them.”

“You knew them both, too, Lieutenant,” Tony said. “Maybe he thought it was you.”

“I’m serious.”

“Yes, I know you are, so I’ll be blunt. I did not rape those women. Okay? I had nothing to fear from Eric.”

“Sorry, Tony, I had to ask.”

Tony nodded. “I knew you would. I know how the game is played. For the record, I asked Maggie for the exact date she was raped, and then I went back and dug out my calendar from last year. I was in Seattle giving a speech that night. I can give you all the details you need to verify it.”

“And Tanjy?”

“I pulled her file and cross-referenced my schedule. I had group therapy the night she was assaulted.”

“Thanks. Sometimes I have to play bad cop, you know.”

“I understand.”

“I need to know if Eric said anything else. Did he talk about his visit to the Ordway over the weekend?”

“The Ordway?” Tony asked. “No, what does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know yet.” Stride shook his head. “I’m frustrated, Tony. Try to put aside the fact that Tanjy and Maggie were both patients. Just look at the facts of the rapes as you know them. Give me some kind of profile.”

Tony scratched his beard. “I don’t have nearly enough information.”

“Neither do I, but you’ve worked with less in the past. Help me out here.”

“Well, put a big asterisk next to this. I could be steering you wrong. Whoever is doing this is likely to be very intelligent and organized. He has a huge ego and a need to control his victims. He likes to play games, like a cat toying with a mouse. He researches his victims thoroughly—picks them, studies them, gets to know everything about them, before he moves in.”

“You think there are other assaults we don’t know about?”

“It’s possible. You know as well as I do how many rapes never get reported. This perpetrator seems to choose victims who are vulnerable on sexual matters, which increases the likelihood that they won’t go to the police.”

“What do you mean, ‘vulnerable on sexual matters’?”

Tony frowned. “I mean, like Tanjy and her rape fantasies.”

“In other words, women with secrets to protect.”

“That’s right.”

“How does he find out about their secrets?”

“I don’t know. If you can find that out, you can probably identify him.”

“Does he know these women? Could he have a personal relationship with them?”

“Possibly. That’s not the typical profile, but the fact that he knows so much about the victims would lead me to think he has some connection to them.”

“Would he be acting alone?”

Wells arched his eyebrows in surprise. “That’s an odd question. Rapists almost always act alone.”

Stride knew that was true, but he still wondered about the possibility of an accomplice. “Is this man likely to strike again?”

Wells nodded. “Rapists always strike again unless they find some alternate resolution for their pathology. Some other way to address their sexual tension. I don’t think that’s likely here.”

“Why?”

“The time line is too short between assaults. Whoever is doing this is acting quickly. I’d say he’s a sociopath—no conscience, no guilt, no hesitation. Many predators
want
to stop and wage a giant internal struggle to control their violent tendencies. They can succeed for months or even years before reoffending. Not this one. He’s enjoying the game. In fact, I’d have to say that this rapist is more dangerous now than ever before.”

“Why?” Stride asked again.

“You said it yourself, Lieutenant. This man probably killed Tanjy and Eric. He’s upped the stakes. It’s not just rape now, it’s murder. He may decide that killing his victims gives him an extra thrill.”

Serena passed through a cloud of warm steam billowing out of the sewer grates as she crossed First Street downtown. The green light turned yellow, and she hurried to reach the opposite sidewalk before the five o’clock traffic roared southward. A neighborhood pizza joint was on the far corner, and she pulled open the glass door and stepped inside. The steel pizza ovens were on her left. She waved at the sweaty men in T-shirts behind the counter and took a booth for herself inside the restaurant. She unbuttoned her coat and unwound her scarf from around her neck.

She pulled her laptop computer from its case and began searching for a wireless network. A young waitress greeted her, and Serena ordered a Diet Coke. They knew her here. She and Stride had a weakness for the pizza and usually dropped in a couple of times a month. They cut the pizza in squares, and she liked to roll up each tiny piece and pop it in her mouth.

She loaded Internet Explorer on her laptop. The signal was weak. Jonny had told her about Eric’s visit to the Ordway a few days before he was killed, and she searched news stories to see if there had been any recent incidents in the Rice Park area surrounding the theater. Especially sexual assaults. She found stories about road construction, the winter carnival, and Broadway musicals, but nothing that gave her any clue as to Eric’s motive. The only way to find out was to go there in person, which was on her calendar for tomorrow.

She found a lot more when she searched for Nicole Castro. The murder trial of Abel’s ex-partner had been big news in Duluth six years earlier. She studied the photos of Nicole and saw someone not unlike herself, a cop in her late thirties, tall, athletic. Nicole was black with dark skin. Her hair was kinky and big. She had pink, puffy lips and flared nostrils, and coal-black eyes wide with defiance. In one photo, she was on the steps of the courthouse, surrounded by cops in uniform, her mouth open as she shouted at the media.

Nicole had a little boy, twelve years old. Serena wondered what had happened to him with his father dead and his mother doing twenty-five years for his murder. He was a cute kid, pretending to be tough, but you could see his heart breaking as he clung to his mother’s arm in the photo. He would be nearly nineteen now.

Serena’s cell phone rang. It was Maggie.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” Maggie said. She added after a pause, “Stride told you, right?”

“He did. I’m really sorry.”

“He couldn’t understand why I didn’t report it.”

“Men never do.”

“Even telling him now made me feel so fucking dirty,” Maggie said.

Serena understood. It wasn’t just about telling someone. It was about Maggie telling Stride. Leaving herself naked in front of him.

“Want to join me down at Sammy’s? We could talk.”

Someone slid a pepperoni pizza into one of the ovens. The tangy aroma filled the restaurant, and Serena realized she was hungry.

“I don’t want to talk anymore,” Maggie said. “I just want to catch this son of a bitch.”

“Sounds like you’re sailing that Egyptian river called Denial.”

Serena waited for Maggie to fire back, but she didn’t. “Yeah, I know, but being angry about it is better than locking myself in my bedroom. I called to tell you I have more dirt about Eric’s visit to the Ordway.”