Stalked (7 page)

“You? I’m surprised you didn’t fire her.”

“I only go after people who get in my way, Jonathan. You should know that.”

“Meaning you didn’t want an ugly employment lawsuit.”

“Meaning I felt sorry for her.”

Stride didn’t believe that Lauren had ever felt sorry for anyone, but it didn’t matter either way. “I’ll check it out,” he said.

“There’s something else,” Lauren added.

“What?”

“Tanjy called our home on Monday night.”

“After she left the shop that day? Why?”

“She wanted to talk to Dan, but he was in Saint Paul.”

“What did she want?” Stride asked.

“I don’t know. I called Dan from Washington on Tuesday afternoon, but he said there was no answer when he tried to call her back. Neither one of us gave it another thought until today. I took a flight back early this morning, and Sonnie told me that Tanjy was missing.”

“Did Tanjy leave a message when you talked to her?”

“Yes, she gave me a message for Dan, but he didn’t know what it meant.”

“What was it?”

Lauren shrugged. “She simply said to tell him, ‘I know who it is.’ ”

Abel Teitscher arrived home early Thursday afternoon, having spent ten hours supervising the crime scene where Eric Sorenson was killed. He sprinkled flakes of food into the large saltwater tank in his living room, which was stocked with a rainbow assortment of angels, puffers, dragonets, tetras, and gobies. On the rare evenings when he wasn’t working, he would pour himself a glass of brandy, turn off the lights, and sit quietly watching his fish while they traveled the illuminated aquarium. Abel was more comfortable with fish than with people.

He lived alone in a modest house on Ninth Street north of downtown. He had been married for twenty-seven years, until he arrived home unexpectedly on a Tuesday afternoon and found his fifty-two-year-old wife being serviced by the twenty-four-year-old unemployed son of their next-door neighbor. She had been watching too many
Desperate Housewives
episodes. They divorced six months later, and she was now living in a rented apartment in Minneapolis. The one good thing to come out of his marriage was his daughter, Anne, but she was away at graduate school in San Diego. She was studying marine biology, which Abel was happy to attribute to years as a child sitting with her father in front of the fish tank.

A few years ago, an all-nighter like the Sorenson murder would have taken a toll on him for days, but he was in better shape now than he had been in decades. Since the divorce, he had taken up running, putting on miles on the track at UMD during the warmer seasons and using a treadmill crammed in his bedroom during the winter. He had lost thirty pounds and was in training now for the marathon. At City Hall, they called him gaunt and skeletal, which infuriated him, because no one appreciated how hard he had worked to hone his body.

Abel stretched out on the sofa near the fish tank and slept for thirty minutes, which was enough to refresh him. He then spent an hour running on the treadmill. The rumble of the motor and the pounding of his feet served to clear his mind. Stride accused him of not seeing the big picture on a case, but that was crap. Abel took time early in every investigation just to think. The difference was that Stride tried to rise above the facts and get inside the heads of the victim and the killer. For Abel, the big picture was about nothing except putting the pieces of the puzzle together from what was left behind. Evidence and witnesses. Things you could touch, see, and smell.

The big picture in this case led him in only one direction—to Maggie.

He knew that having no evidence of a third party in the house didn’t mean that no one had been there, but he also knew that the logical, obvious answer at most crime scenes was usually the right one. Forget the conspiracy theories, and leave them to the defense attorneys. The fact was that Oswald killed Kennedy. Alone. Deal with it.

Abel was prepared to turn over every rock. He had nothing against Maggie and no desire to pin the crime on her, but common sense told him that she was almost certainly the one who had pulled the trigger. That was how it always worked in these cases.

Like Nicole. Abel had learned with Nicole that anyone is capable of anything. Even a good cop. He hadn’t wanted to believe that his partner was capable of murder, so he ignored the evidence even as it piled up. Nicole was psychologically fragile; she had just come back from paid leave after killing a mentally deranged man on the Blatnik Bridge. Nicole’s husband was having an affair, and she had threatened him with violence if he didn’t break it off. Two of Nicole’s hairs were discovered in the apartment where her husband and his girlfriend were found naked, shot to death with her husband’s gun. It was more than enough evidence to convict her.

When the jury found her guilty, Abel finally accepted the fact that Nicole had done what every other suspect did—lie to him in order to save her neck. Stride would have to learn the same lesson.

Stride probably thought that Abel was still angry about getting booted out of the lieutenant’s chair. Abel was upset about that, but the truth was that he didn’t miss it. K-2 was right. Abel hated supervising people and handing out assignments. He wasn’t prepared to waste his time motivating cops, who were a tough breed to motivate. They hated administration on principle. They were hemmed in by paperwork and procedure and second-guessed every time they had to make a split-second judgment. He knew all that. He was that way, too, but he had a short fuse and his own way of doing things, and if he was going to be the boss, they were going to do things his way. Except no one did.

He was happier without the headaches. The only thing that bothered him was that the other cops loved Stride, and they barely tolerated Abel. He knew he was a loner and a hard case. He was crusty and closed-off, but no one made an effort with him the way they did with Stride.

Stride was human. He made mistakes. He was making a mistake this time, because Stride simply didn’t understand betrayal. He had never walked in on his wife doing a reverse cowgirl on a man half her age. Hell, Abel didn’t even know what the position was called until his lawyer explained it in the divorce papers. His wife had certainly never used it on him during their years of married life.

When he found his wife in bed with another man, Abel finally understood how an ordinary person could go over the edge. Like Nicole. Like Maggie. He had pulled his gun on the two of them and was ready to fire. The only thing that saved them was that, in the shocked silence as they all stared at one another, he could hear the gurgle of his fish tank coming from the living room. Something about the sound soothed him. Losing his fish would be worse than losing his wife, so he put the gun down and found a lawyer instead.

Maggie should have owned fish.

Abel shaved and showered after he was done on the treadmill and slapped cologne on his face. That was another thing the cops teased him about, that he smelled like a dapper gigolo. It wasn’t a crime. He dressed in an old brown suit and shrugged on his trench coat. The coat wasn’t warm enough for January, but since he had begun jogging regularly, he found he didn’t mind the cold.

Time to turn over rocks.

He began with Eric’s office. Eric owned a business called MedalSports, which was located in a drab manufacturing facility on a street near the airport, near businesses making medical supplies, aircraft parts, navigational equipment, and frozen foods. Small planes whined overhead as Abel pulled into the parking lot. The one-level building, painted chocolate-brown, had a series of loading docks, where several shipping trucks were backed up against the platforms. The parking lot was crowded.

He found a glass door leading into the building’s office. The receptionist inside was on the phone, and he could see used tissues littering her desk. Her eyes were red-rimmed and watery. She was plump, in her late fifties, with half-glasses on a chain around her neck and gray hair peeking out from under a baseball cap. The office was chilly, and she wore a bulky red down vest. She gave him a weak smile, cupped her hand over the phone, and told him she’d be with him shortly.

The tiny waiting room was functional, with a cheap rattan sofa, a white coffeemaker sitting on a filing cabinet next to a stack of Styrofoam cups, and a veneer coffee table stocked with sports magazines. He could hear the noise of manufacturing through the door that led to the shop floor.

He examined several framed photographs hung on the wall that showed Eric at the Olympics fifteen years ago, in his Speedo with a bronze medal around his neck. He was a physically imposing man, at least six feet four, with a muscled, hairless chest and buzzed hair that was so blond it was almost white. The other photographs were more recent and showed Eric with a variety of medalists from the Winter Games, including freestyle skaters, slalom skiers, and bobsled teams. They were all displaying MedalSports equipment. Abel noted that Eric had kept himself in good shape and wore the same brilliant smile in all of the photographs. He had grown out his hair and swept it back like a long, flowing mane over his head.

“He was
very
handsome,” the receptionist said, hanging up the phone.

Abel grunted.

“You’re not a reporter, are you?”

Abel shook his head and introduced himself. The receptionist told him her name was Elaine.

“Is it true that his wife shot him?” she asked. “That’s what the media is saying.”

“We’re still trying to find out what happened,” Abel said. “I need you to answer a few questions for me.”

Elaine sniffled. She grabbed another tissue, and her round cheeks puffed out as she blew her nose. “Of course.”

“How long have you worked with Mr. Sorenson?”

“Ever since he started the company. He was a wonderful man. He treated all of us like family.”

Abel sighed. Everyone was a saint once they got murdered. “He sounds a little too perfect to me. No one’s perfect.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but we all loved him here.” Her voice rose defensively.

“How about the business? How’s it going?”

“Oh, extremely well. All of the employees got year-end bonuses. Mr. Sorenson shared the profits. He wasn’t selfish.”

Abel nodded. “Manufacturing is a tough racket. Lots of competition. Cheap foreign labor, right? That sort of thing.”

“No, no,” Elaine replied, shaking her head. “MedalSports makes high-end merchandise for a very targeted audience. Everything is handcrafted. We don’t compete against mass-market operations. We sell to Olympic competitors and no one else.”

“Is there really enough business to support that?” Abel asked dubiously. “The Winter Games only come around every four years.”

“Well, yes, but they’re practicing constantly. The athletes are involved in regional and world championship competitions, too. The right equipment gives you an edge, and we customize all our materials.”

“Was Mr. Sorenson the sole owner?”

“Yes, he started the business shortly after he was in the Olympics himself. He was a bronze medalist in the butterfly, you know.”

“Did he have a lot of debt?”

“Well, I’m no accountant. He has a line of credit with Range Bank. I never heard Mr. Sorenson express any concerns about capital or debt payments. We had record revenues last year.”

“I’ll need the names of Mr. Sorenson’s accountant and lawyer. Do you have those?”

Elaine nodded. “Of course.”

She wrote them down, and Abel slipped the information into his pocket. “You were pretty quick to think his wife did it. Why is that?”

Elaine frowned. “I was only repeating what I heard on television. I don’t know anything.”

Abel frowned back at her. “How am I supposed to solve this crime if you dish out crap like that? I never met a secretary who didn’t know if her boss and his wife were having problems.”

“I don’t want to be a gossip,” she retorted. Her cheeks bloomed red.

“You’re not gossiping. Your boss was murdered.”

Elaine struggled with her discretion and gave in. “Mr. Sorenson and his wife have had a difficult year,” she confessed in a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ve heard them arguing a lot.”

“When was this?”

“The worst fight was in November, a couple of months ago.”

“What were they arguing about?”

Elaine shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“You must have heard something. Come on, it’s not like these walls are six inches thick.”

“It had something to do with sex,” Elaine confided, her voice dropping as she said the word
sex
.

“How do you know?”

“I heard Mrs. Sorenson shout something through the door.”

“What did she say?”

Elaine flushed. “This is very embarrassing.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t use this kind of language, you understand. Mrs. Sorenson called him—well, she said he was a muscle-bound, yellow-headed penis.”

Abel tried not to laugh. “What else did she say?”

“I couldn’t hear anything more. It’s not like I was listening.”

Of course not
, Abel thought. “Maybe he was getting ready to dump her.”

“Oh, no, no,” Elaine insisted. “He loved her, he really did.”

“Loving her doesn’t mean being faithful, though, does it?”

Elaine picked at her fingernails. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“You keep his schedule, you answer his calls. No way you wouldn’t know if he was cheating.”

“Mr. Sorenson was a very attractive man,” Elaine said cautiously. “In the old days, before he was married, he dated a lot. Glamorous women. Models sometimes.”

“And after he was married?”

Elaine pouted as if this was no one’s business. “A man like that, women come after him.”

“Who? I want names.”

“I don’t know names. Mr. Sorenson was secretive about his personal life. I didn’t pry.”

“You sound like you’re holding out on me again, Elaine.”

“No, I’m not. Mr. Sorenson was discreet.”

Abel sighed. “Did other women ever come to the office for him?”