Stalked (8 page)

Elaine hesitated. “Sometimes.”

“Who?”

“I told you, I don’t know. There’s one woman who comes by every few weeks. Tall. Red hair. She’s older, probably in her forties. They were very… friendly with each other.”

“You never asked who she was?”

“Well, one time she came by, and Mr. Sorenson was on the phone. When I asked for her name, she said, ‘Tell him it’s his alpha girl.’ She thought that was very funny.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

“Were there other women, too?”

Elaine looked unhappy. “Yes.”

“Did his wife know about them?”

“You’d have to ask her. I don’t know how much she knew. Mr. Sorenson was gone a lot, and sometimes Mrs. Sorenson would call, wondering where he was. And, uh, who he was with.”

“Did he take any personal trips recently?”

Elaine nodded. “Yes, he was in the Twin Cities over the weekend.”

“Doing what?”

“He didn’t talk about it. I made reservations for him at the Saint Paul Hotel. He was gone over the weekend and came back on Monday afternoon. He seemed distracted.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He talked about seeing a play at the Ordway, but other than that, he didn’t say anything about his trip.”

“What happened after he got back on Monday?”

“He wasn’t in the office for more than a few minutes before he was gone again. Then he was in on Tuesday and Wednesday, but he had the door closed almost the whole day.”

“Did he talk to his wife yesterday?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about his calendar? What appointments did he have?”

“He didn’t have any meetings during the day, but he had me set up an appointment for yesterday evening.”

“He met someone last night? After-hours?”

Elaine nodded.

“Was it a woman?”

“No. It was a psychiatrist named Tony Wells.”

“Tony?” Abel asked, surprised.

“That’s right.”

Abel knew Tony Wells; he was the department’s primary profiler on sex crimes. He also did trauma counseling for a lot of the region’s cops and crime victims.

“Was Mr. Sorenson seeing Tony professionally?” Abel asked.

“Oh, no, Mr. Sorenson never saw a therapist. He was as solid as a rock. It was his wife. Mr. Sorenson told me that she had been getting counseling for months.”

Stride lit a cigarette as he waited on the porch at Tanjy Powell’s downstairs apartment. This was his first of the day, and it was already late afternoon. The wind mussed his wavy, salt-and-pepper hair with cold fingers. He glanced up at the sky, which was a bumpy mix of browns and blues. A few stray flurries floated in the air. After a few seconds, he turned back to the yellow door and pounded on it again with his fist, then listened carefully. There wasn’t a breath of life inside.

According to Lauren Erickson, Tanjy hadn’t come to work since she fled the dress shop on Monday afternoon. She didn’t appear to be home either.

He came down off the porch and looked up at the old Victorian. The windows were shuttered; no one peeked out at him. The house was a relic in need of fresh paint and new shingles. Duluth was a city of old neighborhoods and aging beauties like this one, which reflected the money and glamour of the city in its heyday, when taconite flowed like a river and filled the coffers of the entire northern region. The mining river was a trickle now, and the houses showed it. Unlike the Twin Cities to the south, which boasted new suburbs with manicured lawns, Duluth was left with its old homes and their fading glory. Stride actually preferred it that way. He didn’t mind if the floors slanted and the doors hung twisted in their frames. He hated cookie-cutter houses.

He followed the stone foundation around to the rear and wound up in a backyard no bigger than a postage stamp. The house butted up to an alley and then to the back sides of homes on the next street. They were all in disrepair. Most of the houses here were subdivided, turned into low-rent apartments for students and nurses. A summer lounge chair was half-buried in snow. A charcoal grill sat rusting. He saw animal tracks cutting across the yard. Two windows on the wall of a one-car garage were broken. He trudged over to the garage and looked inside. The shards of glass were dirty and dull. There was no car in the garage.

Back at the rear door of the house, he knocked and shouted, “Tanjy!”

He pushed hard against the door with his shoulder. It was locked. He tried to see through the white shutters, but they were closed up tight.

“Meow,” said a voice at his feet. He looked down and saw a long-haired gray cat, with snow and dirt matting the ends of its fur, rubbing against his leg. Stride bent down and scratched the cat’s head and was rewarded with a purr. The cat strolled away down the length of the back porch and then disappeared inside the house through one of the windows. Stride followed him, snapping on gloves. He found a jagged hole, large enough that he could reach inside and unlock the window. He pushed it up and squeezed his body through the frame. He found himself in a dark, narrow hallway leading to the kitchen. Two cat bowls were pushed against the wall, both empty.

“Police,” he called out. “Anyone here?”

There was no response.

The air in the apartment was stale, as if it had been bottled up for days. Stride checked the kitchen and smelled no remnants of food. The sink was empty. He retraced his steps and followed the hallway to the living room, where he was confronted by a two-feet-high crucifix nailed to a white wall. Below the cross, he noticed stacks of Christian sheet music on a banged-up upright piano.

He saw a photograph of Tanjy with her parents on an end table made of taupe metal and glass. Her parents had died last winter on the Bong Bridge to Wisconsin, when a shroud of fog settled over the top of the span unexpectedly and caused a string of accidents. Stride picked up the frame and looked at the photo. Tanjy was in her late twenties, with long black hair and a slim body. Her father had been white, and her mother black, and the mocha-colored features of Tanjy’s face were in perfect proportion. She had thin, sharply angled eyebrows that made her look wicked. Her lips made dimples at the corners of her mouth when she smiled, and she had a gleam in her brown eyes that made him think she was enjoying a secret joke. Men responded to her as if she were an erotic puzzle that they wanted to unlock. When she first came to City Hall, he watched the officers in his Detective Bureau become as flustered as tongue-tied teenagers.

Tanjy came to him with a terrible story. She had been abducted on a Wednesday night in early November from a dark parking ramp off Michigan Street. The man blindfolded and gagged her, tied her up, and drove her to Grassy Point Park, a tiny and deserted green space jutting out into Saint Louis Bay. The park was in the shadow of the arc of the Bong Bridge where her parents had died. He tied her hands and feet to the steel mesh of the barbed wire fence that separated the park from the train tracks of the seaport. When he removed her blindfold, she could see the graffiti-covered train cars and the looming black mountains of coal. He cut off her clothes until she was naked and cold, suspended on the fence, and raped her from behind. When he was done, he left her there with her car. It had all been planned out, she said; he had another car waiting for him in the park. She didn’t see the car and couldn’t give any description of the rapist. Eventually, she bit through the tape with her teeth and freed herself.

This all happened on Wednesday, she said. It was Friday when she came to Stride to report the rape. She was cleaned up and impeccably dressed. She didn’t cry or raise her voice or show any emotion at all as she described what happened. She declined to submit to a physical examination and told them she had already visited her own clinic. It may as well have happened to someone else.

Had Stride been inside Tanjy’s house back then, he would have noticed all of her religious icons and recognized the Christlike imagery of Tanjy crucified on the fence. That would have been his first clue that something was wrong.

Her rape was big news in the Duluth media. Stranger rapes were rare and terrifying in the city. Two days later, though, the daily newspaper printed an interview with a young stockbroker named Mitchell Brandt, who was Tanjy’s old boyfriend. He described her obsession with rape in lurid and explicit detail—how she insisted that he pretend to rape her every time they were in bed, how she masturbated in the shower to rape fantasies every day, and how she posted erotic stories and poetry on the Internet that dealt with stranger rapes.

Within days, Tanjy became a pariah. The story went national. She became the butt of jokes by Jay Leno,
Saturday Night Live
, cable news channels, YouTube videos, and dozens of bloggers. Her support in the city evaporated. A week later, Tanjy met Stride in a coffee shop and admitted what he already suspected. She had fabricated the entire story. There was never any rape. It was a fantasy.

Stride wanted to file charges against her for filing a false police report, but he let it go under pressure from Dan and K-2, and the story disappeared from the headlines. Tanjy went underground.

Stride called her several weeks later. He was still angry with her, but he was worried that she might have suffered a breakdown under the barrage of media attention. Tanjy thanked him for his call in that silken voice of hers but declined his offer of help. In a way, he was glad of that, but he learned nothing new from the call. She was as calm and emotionless as ever. The same erotic enigma.

And now she was missing.

Nothing was disturbed inside her apartment. There was no evidence of violence or trouble. His first thought was suicide, and he kept his eyes open for a note, but wherever Tanjy had gone, she hadn’t left a message behind. She also hadn’t taken much with her. Her clothes were neatly hung and folded in the closet and dresser in her bedroom. Her suitcase was there, too, but he didn’t find a purse, wallet, or keys.

Stride sat down on the end of her queen-sized bed, which had a red quilt neatly laid across the mattress and matching fringed pillows. He studied the books on the shelves near her bed—religion textbooks, a pile of romance novels, vegetarian cookbooks, and psychology books about rape. And, of course,
The Da Vinci Code
. The bed was prim and conservative, with another icon of Jesus hung over the headboard. He thought about Tanjy indulging in rape fantasies underneath the cross. Maybe that was part of the thrill, a forbidden mix of sacrifice and sacrilege.

He hunted on her rolltop desk for a date book or Palm Pilot and didn’t find one. The desk was clean and organized, with a manila folder for bills, a neon purple folder from Byte Patrol with instructions for her laptop computer, a stack of software cases, and a collection of fashion magazines like
Elle
and
Vogue
. That fit her. Tanjy worked in a high-end dress shop, and she looked like many of the models on the pages.

Stride turned on the desk lamp and picked up a small cube of notepaper to see if he could see indentations of anything Tanjy had written. He was able to make out a phone number, but when he called it on his cell phone, he found himself connected to the local Whole Foods market.

He booted up her laptop computer. She didn’t use Outlook for e-mail, which meant she probably used a Web-based service, which would make it harder to find a record of her messages. There were no appointments recorded in the online calendar. He checked her Internet favorite pages and shook his head when he found a mixture of Christian sites and hardcore pornography, including rape sites with brutal, disturbing imagery of women bound and humiliated.

When he checked her recent documents, he clicked on the first one, a Word file labeled ISLAND. The text flashed onto the screen:

The natives tied Ellen spread-eagled to stakes they had pounded in the mud. One by one, they took turns ravishing her with their pierced tongues. She begged them to stop—No! No! she cried, you can’t do this!—but they were deaf to her desperate pleas. Despite herself, she felt the most intense of orgasms welling up inside her…

Stride closed the file and checked the other documents, which were of a similar nature. He wondered again how to reconcile the calm, quiet girl in his office with the explicit, submissive fantasies filling her brain.

He shut down the computer. Nothing here gave him any clues as to why Tanjy had disappeared, or whether she had even disappeared at all. There was nothing strange about someone getting in their car and driving away. People did it all the time. Sometimes they chose not to come back.

Stride felt the house sag and heard a sharp
pop
from somewhere in the rear of the apartment. He got to his feet and stepped lightly to the bedroom door. He listened. There were cautious footfalls near the back window where he had entered the house.

“Yo, dude!” a young male voice called. “What’s up? I know you’re here.”

Stride emerged in the hallway and saw a young man in his twenties there, nervously brandishing a golf club like a weapon. The kid saw him and practically jumped.

“I’ve called the police! They’ll be here any minute!”

“They’re already here,” Stride told him, flashing his shield. “Who are you?”

“Oh, shit. Wow, I’m sorry.” He was wearing gray sweatpants, an untucked flannel shirt, huge unlaced boots, and a bulky fur hat with a turned-up flap in front and ear flaps that hung down on either side of his head as if he were a bloodhound.

I live in the land of stupid hats
, Stride thought.

“What’s your name?” Stride repeated.

“Sorry, I’m Duke. Duke Andrews.”

Even his name sounded like a dog’s. “What are you doing here?”

Duke pushed up his black-framed glasses, which were slipping down his nose. He had a wispy goatee on his chin and a string of pimples on his cheek that looked like the Big Dipper. “I live in the house next door. My bedroom looks out on the yard. I saw you go in, and I was, like, hey, could be a burglar.”