Stalked (4 page)

Teitscher flushed. “That was years ago.”

“That’s right. Years ago, it was
your
partner with a dead husband on the floor. You trusted Nicole, and you were wrong. So now you’re poisoned against Maggie.”

“You should have learned the same lesson that I did,” Teitscher snapped. He thrust his long legs out of the Bronco, then stuck his head and shoulders back through the door. He wore a trench coat that wasn’t suited for the cold, and it billowed behind him like a cape. “You can’t trust anyone, Stride. Instead of covering for Maggie, maybe you should ask yourself how well you really know her.”

Stride thought about Teitscher’s words as he drove home. How well did he really know Maggie? The answer was, better than almost anyone else on the planet.

She was nothing like the quiet, conservative Chinese girl he had first met more than a decade ago. She had grown up in Shanghai and gone to the University of Minnesota at age eighteen to study criminology. When she became enmeshed in political activism on campus following the uprising in Tiananmen Square, she found herself on the wrong side of the Chinese government and decided to stay in Minnesota after graduating, rather than risk prison back home.

Stride hired her for her near-photographic memory and her razor-sharp ability to size up a crime scene. She was smarter than most cops who had been on the job for years, but she was blunt and serious, much more Chinese than American. She didn’t care about fashion or makeup, and she didn’t crack jokes. Her face never moved. When Stride teased her, she thought she had done something wrong.

But times changed, and so did Maggie.

A decade in the United States had transformed her. She was stylish and hip today, with a closet full of leather and spiked heels. Most of the time, she shopped in the girls’ department because she was so small, and she was as well turned-out as any trendy teen. In her mid-thirties, she managed to look twenty-five and pull it off. Her round bowl haircut was oddly old-fashioned, as if that were her one concession to her Chinese roots. But otherwise she was carefully made-up, right down to the diamond stud she had added last year to her thimble of a nose. Hurt like hell, she said, but she loved the glint of the jewel on her face.

She had grown into a sexy woman, but Stride had never seen her as anything but a daughter, of whom he was fiercely protective and proud. Maybe it was because he had first met her when she was barely out of her teens, at a time when he was happily married to Cindy. He mentored Maggie and watched her blossom, and soon, she fell in love with him. Cindy warned him about the huge crush that Maggie was developing, but he pretended that the attraction wasn’t there, and eventually, Maggie did the same. It was still the elephant in the room between them—invisible but something they always had to dance around.

She didn’t carry much of her past with her anymore. She was bubbly, sarcastic, funny, sharp-tongued, and foul-mouthed. It had taken years for all her rough edges to blend together. She was more like a machine in her early days, not revealing any trace of her emotions, because she thought cops didn’t do that. But Stride knew that you needed emotion to succeed in this job. You couldn’t divorce yourself from your feelings, and you couldn’t let them dominate you. It was a delicate balancing act.

He still remembered the investigation where Maggie took the first big leap, becoming someone new and whole. It was the kind of case detectives hate, the kind that haunts them. That was something Maggie didn’t understand. She was accustomed to solving cases. She figured she was smart enough that if she simply brought enough brainpower to bear, and studied all the details, she would dig her way to the truth. Usually she was right. But not always.

She and Stride had been working together for more than a year when a girl’s body was found one late August morning on the dewy grass of the golf course near Enger Park. She was nude, and the rape kit came back positive. Her head and hands had been hacked off and were never found. The coroner concluded that she was about seventeen years old, and from the bruises on what remained of her neck, she had been strangled. The only identifying marks on her body were a collage of tattoos from rock bands and video games, like Bon Jovi, Mortal Kombat, Aerosmith, and Virtua Fighter.

They tried everything to solve the case, but in the end, they weren’t even able to find out who the girl was. They reviewed thousands of missing person reports from the entire Midwest. They ran DNA from the semen found in the girl’s body and came back with nothing. They worked with a local psychiatrist on a profile that got them nowhere. They contacted hundreds of tattoo parlors. They checked video game fan clubs. They got in touch with each of the bands. Weeks went by, and the case got cold.

She was simply the Enger Park Girl, and that was who she was going to stay.

He remembered Maggie pacing back and forth in a City Hall conference room a month after they had found the body. She kept rerunning everything they had tried, looking for something they had missed, or some other angle they could pursue. Finally, her face serious and confused, she looked at Stride and asked him how they were going to solve the case. As if he had been deliberately holding back the answer.

He had to tell her the truth. Unless someone came forward with new information, they weren’t going to solve it. A murderer was going to walk away free. A young girl wasn’t going to get justice. Sometimes that was how the world worked.

It was as if the idea had never occurred to Maggie before.

She dropped down in a chair, looked him dead in the eye, puffed out her cheeks in frustration, and said without a trace of an accent, “That really sucks, boss.”

Stride and Serena lived in an area of Duluth known as Park Point, a narrow finger of land that separated the churning waters of Lake Superior from the ports where the giant cargo boats loaded and unloaded shipments of coal, taconite, and grain. They lived on the lake side, steps from the beach. He arrived home before dawn on Thursday morning, and in the windy darkness, he heard the roar of waves like an invading army on the other side of the dune. He followed the snowy trail behind their 1890s-era cottage up the slope toward the shoreline, where he was face-to-face with the muddy waves rolling onto the sand. There wasn’t much beach to be seen now, just a gray sheet of ice stretched over the sand like a boardwalk. Stripped, bare tree trunks littered the shore, washed up after months of floating with the waves.

The wild rye grass on top of the slope formed a wavy auburn wall. Snow and wet sand mingled at his feet like melted marshmallow running over chocolate ice cream. He sucked in cold, fresh air. To the west, he could see the fog-ringed lights of Duluth climbing sharply up the hillside from the lake. On his right, the Point peninsula stretched for another mile, and on the other side of the open water, a gauzy lighthouse beam circled from the Wisconsin shore. The sun would be dawning soon, but the clouds were so thick over the city that he would have to take it on faith that the sun was still up there, giving warmth.

He couldn’t escape a feeling of loss and loneliness when he came here. All of the important people from his past were long gone. He had grown up on the North Shore and in the course of his life had lost his parents and then his wife of twenty years here. He had never missed having children while Cindy was alive, but there were days when he regretted that he had no reminders of her other than fading memories. Staring at the angry waves, he thought of his father, too, who had lost his life to the lake when Stride was a teenager. He often imagined his father’s ore boat, shouldering through the deep, cold troughs, out of sight of land. You just never knew when a rogue wave could reach up and snatch someone away. They never recovered his body.

He wondered if it was true that you couldn’t go home again. That was what he was trying to do. For years, he had lived on the Point with Cindy, but he had moved away after his second marriage and always regretted it. That marriage lasted only three years and was a mistake from the beginning, which he realized when he met and fell in love with Serena. When she came back to Duluth with him from Las Vegas last year, they bought a house out on the Point again, and he was back where he had spent most of his life. He felt renewed, but his only worry was that he would spend too much of his time living in the past.

He heard the crunch of snow behind him and turned to see Serena climbing the slope. Her black hair was loose and uncombed. She had a grace and beauty about her even when her body was buried in a heavy coat and her long legs were up to their knees in drifts. She joined him without saying anything, and they stood watching the lake and feeling the brittle morning air make its way under their skin. The cold made her face flush pink. She wasn’t wearing makeup.

“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Serena told him quietly, “but Maggie could have done it.”

Stride’s face hardened into a mask, and he kicked his boots in the wet sand. “No way.”

“I’m not saying she did do it, but she’s been on an emotional roller coaster for a year. Everyone has a breaking point.”

“I know all that, but she says she’s innocent.”

“What does Abel think?”

“Teitscher? He’s already got a target painted on her chest. I’m worried what he’ll find when he starts digging.”

“Like what?”

“I think Maggie and Eric were having big problems.”

Serena showed no surprise. “She’s had three miscarriages in eighteen months, Jonny. You don’t think that plays hell with your emotions?”

“I know it does, but if their marriage was in trouble, it gives her a motive. Particularly because of Eric’s money.” He added, “Abel also thinks that Maggie is hiding something, and I think he’s right.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“No.”

Serena slung her arm through his. “Listen, Maggie asked me something a couple of months ago. I don’t know if it means anything.”

“What?”

She hesitated. “Do you really want to know? I don’t want you to feel like you have to feed all this back to Teitscher. We’re pushing the box pretty far here.”

Stride grimaced. Driving over to Maggie’s in the middle of the night, he knew instinctively that he was walking into an ethical gray area, where he had no road map. His principles were about to be stretched like elastic, and he wondered when they would snap. “Tell me.”

“She asked if you and I had ever done anything strange.”

Stride raised an eyebrow.

“Sexually,” Serena clarified.

“Did you tell her about the garden hose?”

Serena punched him. “I’m serious. It sounded like Eric was pushing her to do some weird stuff.”

“Like what?”

Serena shrugged. “She didn’t say.”

Stride chewed on this idea and didn’t reply. He didn’t like where any of this was going.

“But officially, you don’t know about this, okay?” Serena repeated. “Maggie didn’t want me to tell you.”

He nodded. “She could use your help, Serena. She’s going to need someone to investigate her side of what happened, and it can’t be me. I can’t be seen giving her any special treatment.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

Serena hadn’t joined the police force in Duluth. Stride supervised the city’s detectives, and the employment lawyers frowned on nepotism. Instead, she had obtained her state license as a private investigator and begun struggling to find work. So far, her projects mostly involved plowing through trade journals and attending industry conventions to unearth competitive intelligence for a few Duluth-based start-ups. He knew the assignments left her bored and restless. She was a cop at heart, and she missed the street.

“I’ve got a new client meeting today,” Serena added.

“Oh?”

“Dan Erickson wants to hire me.”

“
Dan
?” Stride retorted. “Why the hell does he want you?”

Serena arched her eyebrows in offense. “Excuse me?”

“You know what I mean.”

“He said my police background was a plus,” Serena said.

“Except you live with me. That should be a big minus for Dan.”

Dan Erickson was the county attorney and chief prosecutor for the region. He blamed Stride for the media fallout over a botched trial that had cost him a statewide election as attorney general. He was now widely considered damaged goods in Minnesota politics, and it was an open secret that he resented being stuck in the north woods of Duluth and was looking for a way out.

“You might want to think twice about this, Serena,” he cautioned her.

“I can’t say no. This is a big break for me.”

He heard the stubborn resolve in her voice and knew her mind was already made up.

“You can’t trust him.”

Serena shrugged. “Dan can open doors for me all over the state.” She added, “Besides, I don’t trust any of my clients.”

“Do you know what he wants?” Stride asked.

“No, he wouldn’t talk about it on the phone. He asked me not to tell you anything about it.”

“But you’re telling me anyway.”

“It’s in the box.”

They had struggled to find a way to work through the secrets they both had to share, without creating personal or professional problems for either of them. The reality was that they needed each other. Stride wanted her input on investigations because she was one of the most experienced detectives in the city, but her contributions had to be confidential and unofficial. Serena in turn wanted to get Stride’s bounce on her own assignments, without worrying that anything she told him would wind up in a police file. So they invented the box. When they wanted to share information privately with each other, it went in the box.

“He’ll make a pass at you,” Stride added, smiling.

“He makes a pass at everyone.”

“That’s Dan.”

“Why does Lauren put up with it? She’s the one with the money.”

“Dan and Lauren are all about power, not sex. If Lauren cared about Dan’s affairs, she’d have cut him loose long ago.”

“Spoken like a man,” Serena said. “So what do you think Dan wants?”