Stalked (43 page)

“I’m the last person she’s going to talk to,” Teitscher said. “Send Guppo. He and Nicole were as thick as thieves.”

“We need Guppo working the evidence here. I need you to do this, Abel, so suck it up.”

Abel shook his head fiercely. “This is unfuckingbelievable.”

He turned and stalked away from them, climbing back up the deep snow of the hillside toward Hank Jensen Road. His trench coat flew up behind him as if he might become airborne, and each of his strides was long and hard.

“I’d give good money to see him and Nicole together,” Guppo said.

Stride smiled. “Yeah.” He and Guppo looked up as the medical examiner investigator on the scene waved to them.

“Hey, detectives!”

Violet Gabor was a short, squat woman in her early thirties with a baseball cap turned the wrong way on her head. She was bent over the corpse, with a magnifying glass focused on the victim’s ankle.

“We got something here,” she told them.

Stride bent down. His knees were quickly wet with snow. He squinted where Violet was pointing. “I can’t see, what is it?”

“Man, you’re old,” she told him.

“I’m seasoned, Vi.”

“Roasts are seasoned,” she replied. “You’re just old. It’s a tattoo, a small one, on the back of her ankle.”

Stride saw it now. The tattoo was nestled in the skin of the victim’s ankle and appeared to be a series of letters crafted in an old-fashioned font, the kind of typeface he would expect to see written on parchment. The tiny brand was easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it or didn’t know it was there. “What does it say?”

“Near as I can tell, it says TLIM,” Violet told him. “Whatever the hell that means.”

“TLIM? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, it’s in purple ink, and the script is a little hard to read, but I’m sure that’s what it says. Why, does that mean something to you?”

“Yeah, it does.” Stride got to his feet and brushed off the snow. He added in a hushed voice, “Damn.”

He felt as if they had killed her themselves by dragging her name into it. By not finding her sooner while she was out there, unprotected, a target. His only salvation was that this time around, the killer had made a mistake. Not catching the tattoo. Not knowing the victim had a secret identity.

Stride knew whose mutilated body was lying in the snow, and it meant this wasn’t a random slaying at all. It was somehow connected to Eric’s death.

TLIM.

The Lady in Me.

It was Helen Danning.

Maggie found Serena in her hospital bed, vacantly staring at the television suspended from the ceiling. When she saw Maggie, she clicked off the screen with the remote control and offered up a weak smile. Her shoulder was bandaged. A clear tube looped around her ears and stretched across her pale, pretty face, delivering oxygen to her lungs. Her black hair was pulled back and tied behind her head. A blanket covered her body, but Maggie could see her bare arms, which were patchy with cherry-red burns.

Serena saw her looking. “Those are the minor ones,” she said.

“I know.” Maggie pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down. She sucked her upper lip between her teeth and clamped down on it. The room was uncomfortably warm. Her eyes wandered to the amber fluid in the IV bag and then to the watercolor print of Canal Park that hung on the soothing baby-blue wall. “I’m not sure what to say. Everything sounds so stupid. How are you. Are you okay. That kind of thing.”

Serena eyed the pink box in Maggie’s lap. “That for me?”

Maggie looked down. “Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Doughnuts. You want one? I’ve got old-fashioneds, crullers, and a couple of the cream-filled ones that go splurt when you bite them.”

Serena laughed and paid for it with jabs of pain. “Old-fashioned, please.”

“You want me to feed it to you?”

“No, my left arm isn’t so bad. I can do it.”

Maggie opened the box by slitting the tape with her fingernail and handed her a doughnut. Serena wolfed it down in three bites and brushed the crumbs from her lips. Maggie took a chocolate cruller for herself and put the rest of the box on the table beside Serena’s bed.

“Why no morphine drip?” Maggie asked.

“I told them to take it away.”

“Why? Burns are the worst.”

“They set it up so you can push a button and get a shot when you need it,” Serena said. “You know me. Addictive personality. I don’t want to walk out of here hooked on painkillers.”

“You need to manage the pain,” Maggie told her.

“When it gets so bad I want to cut off my legs, then I call the nurse and get a shot.”

“When did you have your last one?”

“Too long ago,” Serena admitted.

“Don’t be a martyr.”

Serena glanced at the nurse’s call button, which dangled near her right hand, but she didn’t reach for it. “I saw the news,” she said. “The Enger Park thing.”

“Stride thinks the body is Helen Danning.”

Serena arched her eyebrows. “So there’s a tie-in to Eric’s murder?”

“Could be.”

“That’s good for you.”

Maggie shrugged and nibbled on the doughnut. She licked chocolate from her fingers. “Just as long as they don’t think I did it. Beheading isn’t my style, though. I hate all that blood. I prefer a quick tap to the forehead.”

“Nice,” Serena said.

“I hate thinking about the Enger Park case all over again. I’ve carried that one around for a long time.”

“We all have cases like that.”

Maggie knew that was true, but the Enger Park Girl was different. There was something heartbreaking and lonely about the black girl out in the wet grass, not even a girl at all anymore, just a mutilated thing left there to decay. One final humiliation on top of the agony, rape, and death. She wished she could have given the girl a name and a little justice to make her human again. She also didn’t tell Serena that it was on that case that her feelings for Stride became something else, because suddenly working with him wasn’t just solving crimes, it was suffering emotionally together at the failures.

“Thanks for nailing Blue Dog,” Serena said. “I’m not sure I could deal with any of this if he was still out there.”

“It was payback for me, too,” Maggie reminded her. “He won’t bother any of us again.”

“That’s what I thought before.”

“I think even Alabama can manage to keep a one-armed murderer behind bars,” Maggie said.

Serena’s face was far away, and Maggie didn’t know where she was.

“Did he… ?” Maggie asked softly. She added, “You don’t have to tell me.”

“He never got the chance,” Serena said.

“That’s a relief. I mean, it’s one less thing to deal with.”

Serena bit her lip. “Sure.”

“Are you all right?”

“I just want this to be over. I want to get out of here.”

“Don’t push it. You need to heal. At least you’re going to be okay.”

“Yeah. That’s what they say.”

Maggie watched vulnerability bloom in Serena’s face. Her voice cracked, her chin trembled, and her eyes turned watery and scared.

“Hey,” Maggie murmured. She leaned close and stroked Serena’s hair.

“I’m sorry,” Serena said. “Real tough, huh?”

“You’re entitled.”

“I should be grateful. I’m here, I’m going to make it. Then I cough, and my lungs feel like they’re burning up, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to take a breath again without remembering. I wonder if I’ll ever run again. Hell, I wonder if I’ll ever walk again.”

The tears flowed out of her eyes now. Maggie felt angry and helpless.

“I looked at my body, too,” Serena went on. “They told me not to, but I did. Oh my God, Maggie. Oh, my God.”

“Don’t do this to yourself.”

“It’s so stupid and vain, but I don’t want Jonny ever to see me again. Not like this.”

“You’ll heal. You’ll get through this.”

Serena shook her head.

Maggie whispered. “Come on, it’s not just your body that needs time. It’s your head, too. Remember what you told me? You were right. I was in denial. I need help, and so do you. I’m going to see Tony again tomorrow. You’ll do the same thing. Anytime you need someone, I’m there for you. Stride will be, too. You know that.”

“It hurts,” Serena told her. “It hurts so much. When I think about it, it hurts even more. I don’t think it will ever stop.”

Maggie reached over and pressed the call button. Serena didn’t protest. Her mouth had fallen open in agony. Her skin tensed, making it worse, and her legs jerked under the blanket. Maggie watched Serena’s long fingers curl into fists.

“Nothing will ever be the same,” Serena murmured. “Nothing will ever be okay.”

“Shhh. Don’t talk.”

“Tell Jonny not to come. Tell him not to come.”

The nurse ran in. She already had a hypodermic of morphine in her hand; she knew what Serena needed when the bell rang and knew that she needed it quickly. Maggie watched her swab Serena’s left shoulder and then insert the needle and squeeze the plunger. The narcotic began to work almost immediately. Serena’s eyes blurred and relaxed. Her body settled gently back into the mattress. Her mouth worked, but she didn’t say anything.

Maggie and the nurse stayed until Serena was asleep and out of pain.

“How is she, really?” Maggie asked.

“This is the worst time,” the nurse replied. “The pain makes you very emotional. Don’t worry, her skin is already starting to heal. Her lungs are clearer today, and her breathing is stronger. You won’t believe how much better she is in a few days.”

At least on the outside
, Maggie thought.

The ward was dark when Stride arrived at the hospital. It was after midnight. The lights were dimmed in the rooms he passed, and he saw patients stretched out on their beds and saw a few weary caregivers sipping coffee. He smelled the harsh cleansers that were used to scrub the floors. There were kids and adults here, men and women. Some were getting better, and some were getting worse. Living and dying. It was a struggle to remind himself that Serena was going to be fine, because this was the same hospital where Cindy had finally yielded to the cancer. Being inside this place, walking these corridors again, made the memories almost too vivid to bear.

He found Serena’s room and stood at the end of the bed, watching as her chest rose calmly up and down in her sleep. He did what he had done many times years ago, take off his leather jacket, drape it over the back of the chair, and sit in the semidarkness watching the woman in his life. Back then, each day, Cindy was a little worse, and he felt as if a rat were gnawing out more of his heart whenever he saw her. He couldn’t believe then that the woman in that bed was his vibrant, beautiful wife, that she had once been the seventeen-year-old girl who had changed his life in the course of one amazing summer.

She was gone too soon, and nothing was as he planned it.

He couldn’t believe now that he had been given a second chance, and he did something he couldn’t remember doing in years. He let himself pray. He had prayed back then, too, and when God ignored his pleas, he turned his heart away and decided that there was no point ever wishing for anything again. Until now. Until this woman came into his life, someone he would literally walk through fire to save. He was grateful that she was alive and desperate for her to recover.

As he sat there, Stride reached out and softly laced his fingers with Serena’s hand on the bed. He tried not to wake her, but he felt her squeeze back with a weak touch. Her eyes blinked slowly, as if opening them were like lifting weights. She was groggy and drugged. When she saw him, her faced warmed, and he did his best not to break down. Cindy did that, too, lit up like a Christmas tree when she saw him, even when her time was short.

Serena mumbled something, and he couldn’t hear her. When she said it again, it sounded intense and important.

“Couldn’t go there,” she told him.

He leaned toward her, but he didn’t understand. “What?”

“Tried to,” she murmured in a cottony voice. “Couldn’t go there.”

Stride smiled as if he knew what she was trying to tell him.

“ ‘Cause of you,” she said.

“Don’t talk,” he said. “Let yourself sleep.”

“Still here,” she said, and her eyes closed.

Stride watched her for a while longer, until the weights on his own eyes felt like lead sinkers pulling them closed, and he slept and dreamed of a long-ago summer on the Point.

Abel Teitscher sat stiffly in the private meeting room in the women’s prison in Shakopee. He held a white Styrofoam cup with both hands and stared at the black coffee without drinking it. He was wearing a pressed gray suit, the kind of outfit he would wear to church if he ever went there. His trench coat was neatly folded on the chair next to him. His black shoes were shined. He made it a point to dress well when he visited correctional facilities, as if the suit and tie were another set of bars between him and the prisoners incarcerated there.

He hadn’t seen Nicole Castro in six years, not since she was led out of the St. Louis County courtroom after she was convicted. She had shot him daggers then with her eyes, and he looked back at her and saw a stranger. There was no morbid curiosity in his mind about what she looked like now, no desire to do anything but forget her. He never wanted to see her again, and it killed him to be here, hat in hand, coming to her for information. He knew what kind of reaction to expect.

The door unlocked loudly. A guard led her in. Abel didn’t look up, but he felt her eyes as she saw him, and the warm, stale air in the room turned frigid. She didn’t spit or scream, but she turned back to the guard and said calmly, “Get me the fuck out of here.”

“Be nice,” the guard retorted in a bass voice that boomed in the small space. He filled most of the doorway.

“I don’t want to see him. Take me back.”

“He’s a police officer, so be polite and sit your ass down and hear what he has to say.”

Nicole slouched to the chair on the opposite side of the wooden conference table and slumped down. She eyed Abel as if he were a spider and picked at the grooves in the wood with her fingernail. He didn’t look up from his coffee. The guard closed the door, locking them in. The room was absolutely silent, and they sat alone for two or three minutes without saying anything. Her contempt radiated across the table, and he sat there and stewed, letting it wash over him and wishing he could walk out.