Stalked (6 page)

“Does Lauren know?”

Dan snorted. “No, and you don’t tell her a thing, okay?”

“What did you tell her about hiring me?”

“I said it was a political deal. Dirty tricks. She bought it.”

“I take it you want me to find out who’s blackmailing you.” She wondered if he had fantasies of her conducting a hit for him.

“No, I don’t care. I don’t want to know. I just want to make this go away, and I need you to be my intermediary. This man has already given me a price, and I’ve got the money right here in cash.”

Dan extracted a thick envelope from his suit pocket and deposited it on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

“He’s going to call me in the next couple days about a drop,” Dan continued. “I want you to make the payoff for me.”

“Why not do it yourself?” Serena asked.

“And risk having the media there with cameras? No thanks. I want this all done at arm’s length. Just you. No one else.”

“This is a blackmailer. He won’t be satisfied with one payoff. He’ll be back for more.”

“I’ll take that risk.”

Serena sighed. “Do you really need me to tell you this is a very bad idea?”

“Bad idea or not, I’m willing to pay a lot of money to have you handle this for me.”

“You know there’s no such thing as private investigator’s privilege. If this were to wind up with the police, I’d have to tell them what I know.”

“That’s why I don’t want it to wind up with the police.”

Serena didn’t like this. It smelled bad. “Do you have any idea who the blackmailer is?”

“No. He’s just a voice on the phone.”

“How did he get the information he has on you?”

“I don’t know that either. I have some suspicions, but it doesn’t matter now.”

“You’re sure he’s not bluffing?” Serena asked.

“He told me things on the phone. It’s no bluff.”

Serena hesitated. There was a part of her that wanted to tell Dan to forget it, but she couldn’t resist the adrenaline rush. This was the kind of hands-on street work she wanted as a PI. Something that made her feel like a cop again. The money was good, too. “Hourly rate plus thirty percent,” she said.

“Now who’s the blackmailer?” Dan asked. He smiled, put a hand on Serena’s knee, and squeezed with his fingertips.

“Is it a deal?” she asked.

“Yes, fine.”

“Good.” Serena took his hand off her knee and twisted his wrist until his smile evaporated. “One other thing,” she told him pleasantly. “Touch me again, and I’ll snap off your fingers like the icicles on my roof.”

She let go.

“Stride must have his hands full with you,” Dan said, massaging away the pain.

“Call me when you know about the drop,” Serena said. She picked up the envelope of cash, slid it into her pocket, and left the office.

Downstairs, she stopped again in the park near the statue of the centurion. Something about his empty granite eyes troubled her, and she felt the oppressive weight of the gray clouds overhead. She told herself again that it was nothing, but as she stood there, the feeling came back.

The same feeling that had followed her for weeks.

He knew she could feel him staring at her, the way an antelope senses a tiger stalking from the camouflage of the bush. Invisible and deadly.

When he lifted the binoculars, her body leaped into focus, and it was as if he were standing next to her, breathing on her neck. As he watched her, she shivered. Her head wheeled in his direction, and through the binoculars, he got a chill of pleasure to have their eyes meet. His penis twitched inside his jeans, nudging its way down his leg, growing swollen and stiff.

“Ah, fuck,” he murmured, relishing the sensation. It was especially sweet since he had spent ten years watching his manhood wither away. The guards taunted him that prison would make him shrivel up like a salted slug, and they were right. The more years he spent behind bars, the more his penis shrank. Nothing aroused him. He would beat off in his cell at night, but after a while, he could barely coax a hard-on out of his cock. He’d spit on it or rub it with soap, but it would just lay there, so tiny that his giant hand couldn’t even pull it out from his groin.

But his organ had risen again that night in the abandoned house in Alabama during the hurricane. As he watched the cop drown in the basement, blood had surged between his legs, making him rigid. A spontaneous erection, ripe with power.

Four months had passed since a National Guard helicopter rescued him from the roof of the farmhouse. He wore clothes he had found in an upstairs bedroom, and he had shredded his inmate’s fatigues and let them float away with all the other debris in the water. By the time the storm died away, the land around the house was a lake. The squad car was gone, and so was Deet’s body. He was just a trapped homeowner who hadn’t evacuated soon enough.

They took him to a shelter in Birmingham along with hundreds of other refugees, but he ran away that night, stole a car, and headed north. He didn’t want to take any chance that he would be found out, or that the authorities at Holman would figure out he was on the loose. As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. He jacked a laptop and kept an eye on the Internet by hacking into wireless connections as he made his way out of the South. Several days later, he found an article in the Montgomery newspaper that reported the story. The squad car had been found wrapped around a tree ten miles from the farmhouse, and Deet’s headless body had turned up another five miles away in a different direction. All three people in the car were presumed dead, victims of the storm.

He was a nonperson. No identity. No past.

He could have gone anywhere, but he first had to deal with the fist of rage that beat its way through his chest. Payback for ten lost years.

“You feel me, don’t you?” he whispered. “You know I’m here.”

He had been laying his plans for Serena ever since he arrived in Duluth. Watching her. Stalking her. He could have taken her anytime, but he wanted the experience to linger. Every hunter knew—you don’t break the neck of the captured animal right away. Once it’s yours, you play with it for a while.

In the meantime, he had other prey. People like Dan. Mitch. Tanjy. And the alpha girls. People with dirty secrets they were desperate to conceal.

He remembered what the little queer in Holman had told him about the art of blackmail. If you know what someone is hiding, you can do anything you want to them, and they’ll never breathe a word. The danger in poking a hive, though, was getting stung. He could have let the games go on even longer, but something unexpected had popped up like a fish out of the water and made him speed up his plans.

Murder. That changed everything.

So now it was finally Serena’s turn. Time to tighten the noose around her neck.

Through the binoculars, he watched her shrug and continue down the steps of the government plaza toward her car. He knew what was in her brain. She was telling herself that the fear scraping its fingernails along her spine was all in her imagination. She was wrong. Before he was done, she would be begging him to kill her.

City Hall was an old, drafty building, with high ceilings where the heat gathered. The floors were cold, hard marble. The chill radiated through the window in Stride’s office and left frost crystals on the glass. He leaned against the window frame and stared vacantly at the traffic on First Street below him. His arms were crossed. The creases in his forehead deepened like canyons, and he felt tightness throughout his muscles.

He was wearing a suit and tie because reporters and politicians would be swarming the office as word got out about Maggie. Usually he dressed for the street, which was where he liked to spend his time. He couldn’t handle a job that left him permanently chained to a desk, and he did his paperwork in odd hours when the rest of the office was dark. He preferred to be out at crime scenes, doing the real work, which was mostly hard and bitter.

He had been idealistic in his early days, which were too long ago to think about. He was like Maggie—determined to solve every crime, put away every criminal. It hadn’t taken long for him to realize that there were always victims like the Enger Park Girl, with no one to speak for them and no answers to give. The burden was all his. Every murder in this city gouged a piece out of his soul, and even when they solved the case and he watched a jury bring down a guilty verdict, there was still a scar that never went away.

That was one of the reasons he lived by the lake. He didn’t tell many people about that part of his soul; it had taken months for him even to share it with Serena. Stride was a hardheaded realist who had no time for anything mystical, but the lake was different. When he stood by the water at night, he sometimes felt as if he were surrounded by the dead, as if the lake were where they went to become part of the mist and vapor. He could feel his father there, who had died in the lake, and he felt communion with all of the city’s dead.

There was a knock on his office door, and he saw a silhouette behind the frosted glass.

“Come in,” he called without leaving the window. The vanilla oak door opened and closed with a shudder. He was surprised to see who it was. “Lauren.”

“Hello, Jonathan.”

He felt a chill blow into his office with Lauren’s arrival.

“You’re looking good,” he told her.

Lauren rolled her eyes at him. She had the clothes, jewels, and laboratory-tested blond hair to match her money, and her face was as smooth as makeup and plastic surgery could make it. She was attractive, but she made no secret of the fact that Stride’s charm went nowhere with her. The two of them shared an ugly history. Lauren was the only child of a father who had made millions in commercial real estate in northern Minnesota. In Stride’s early days as a detective, he had exposed a City Hall bribery scheme connected to an eminent domain condemnation for a huge new shopping center. Lauren’s father went to prison and died there six months later of a stroke. Lauren inherited everything, including a grudge against Stride.

He waved her into a seat. She crossed her legs and steepled her fingers on the hem of her skirt. Her blue eyes were as fierce and intelligent as ever.

“I’m sorry about Maggie,” she told him.

“Sure you are.”

“I just met Serena in Dan’s office,” she added cuttingly. “Where would she have been when you and I were in school? Playing with finger paints?”

Stride ignored the jab. “I didn’t think you were speaking to me, Lauren.”

“The past is the past,” she replied. “We need to move on.”

“Really? That wasn’t your attitude last year.” Stride knew that Lauren had waged a campaign with the City Council to block K-2 from hiring him back.

“I have more important things to worry about now.”

“Oh?”

“You obviously haven’t seen the news today.”

“What did I miss?”

“Dan and I are moving to Washington,” Lauren announced.

“Permanently?”

She nodded. “Dan’s been invited to be special counsel in a D.C. law firm as part of its white-collar crime practice. I’ve been out in Washington the last couple of days, scouting homes in Georgetown.”

“So Dan’s becoming a defense lawyer,” Stride said. “I guess it’s always been about the game for him. It’s easier to switch sides that way.”

“Yes, I know you’re only interested in truth and justice, Jonathan. Let me know when you find it.”

He smiled, because she had a point. He was also pleased to think of Dan giving up his job as the county’s top prosecutor. He didn’t like having an enemy in that office.

“Congratulations, that’s quite a coup,” he told her.

“I’ve been pulling strings for a while,” Lauren admitted. “Dan doesn’t like Duluth. We only hung on here to get him into statewide office, but you erased that possibility for us, didn’t you?”

“I think the voters had something to do with it,” Stride said. “When does the big move take place?”

“Next month.”

“Is that why you’re here? To say goodbye?”

Lauren shook her head. “Gloating is just a bonus. Actually, I have to report a crime. Or what may be a crime. I don’t know.”

Stride put aside their rivalry. “What’s going on?”

“You know I own Silk, the dress shop on Superior.”

Stride nodded. The store was another of her many tax dodges.

“One of my employees is missing,” she said.

“What’s her name?”

Lauren smiled maliciously. “Oh, you know her very well, Jonathan. It’s Tanjy Powell.”

Stride didn’t mean to say it out loud, but the words slipped out as he expelled a disgusted breath. “Son of a bitch.”

“I knew you’d be pleased.”

He wasn’t pleased at all. “Why do you think she’s missing?”

“Tanjy left the shop early on Monday afternoon. She looked upset. According to Sonnie, my store manager, Tanjy didn’t show up on Tuesday or Wednesday, and she didn’t call. There’s no answer at her home.”

“Why was she upset when she left?”

“I have no idea.”

“Has she ever done this before?”

“Sonnie says no.”

“What about family?”

Lauren shook her head. “Her parents are dead. She lives in the bottom half of an old Victorian in the East Hillside area. I thought you’d want to check it out, in case there’s some foul smell emanating from it. That’s what gets your blood racing, right?”

“Give it a rest, Lauren.” He added, “My first thought is that Tanjy is playing another game with us.”

“Why? Because last time she made a fool of you?”

“The woman fabricated a rape charge. She had the whole city in a panic.”

Lauren sighed. “I don’t claim to understand what goes on in her sick little brain. I’m just the messenger.”

“I hope to hell she’s not wasting our time again,” Stride said. “The only reason we didn’t file charges was because Dan and K-2 didn’t want us to look like we were beating up on a woman with psychological problems.”

“My fault,” Lauren admitted. “I asked them to go easy on her.”