The Cold Nowhere (10 page)

William Green put down his can of beer. ‘What kind of question is that?’

‘I want to know if anyone else was around who might be a witness,’ Stride said.

‘It was the just the two of us,’ Sophie replied, ‘but by Sunday morning, Cat was gone. I wanted to take her with me to church, but her room was empty.’

‘Weren’t you concerned?’

‘I – I called her cell phone. She said she was staying with a friend. She didn’t say anything to me about someone stalking her.’

Sophie’s husband sat down and laid his burly forearms on the table. He was heavy, with a round face blooming with thick blood vessels and curly brown hair tied into a ponytail. He had a fat nose with a crooked bridge, as if it had been badly broken. He wore a Twins T-shirt and dirty sweatpants smeared with oil. Stride guessed that Green was about forty years old. He knew that the man was Marty Gamble’s cousin, but there was little family resemblance. Marty was lean and mean; Bill Green was lumpy and shifty.

‘Look, Kitty Kat loves to tell stories,’ he said. ‘Most of the time, it’s all in her head.’

‘You think she’s lying?’ Stride asked.

Green grabbed a second can of beer from the table and popped it open. ‘I’m saying, you can’t trust what that girl tells you. It’s probably the drugs.’

‘You knew she was using?’

Sophie’s pale lips dipped into a frown. Her voice was hard to hear. ‘She said she stopped, but it’s hard to know if that’s true when she runs away so often. We don’t always know where she is or what she’s doing.’

‘Did you talk to anyone about her?’

‘Oh, yes, of course. I talked to my minister. I talked to the school. I talked to her Aunt Dory and to Ms. Hahne at the shelter downtown. I even thought about calling the police, but I didn’t want to get her into trouble.’

‘Why does she run?’

William Green leaned forward with a beefy hand over the top of his beer can. ‘You know what she went through with her parents. She’s messed up. Is that so hard to figure out?’

‘Her teen years have been very hard,’ Sophie added. ‘She’s a loner. She doesn’t have many friends. She’s had nightmares as far back as I can remember. As she’s gotten older, it’s been getting worse.’

‘Did you get any psychological help for her?’

‘Ms. Hahne said she would have a counselor at the center talk to Cat,’ Sophie said.

A counselor at the center.

Stride hesitated. Like an alarm going off, he remembered a name and a darkly handsome face from a police report out of Minneapolis several months earlier. He didn’t like coincidences.

‘Do you know if she did talk to a counselor?’ he asked. ‘Did Cat tell you she was seeing anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Did she happen to mention a man named Vincent Roslak?’ he asked. ‘Or did Ms. Hahne talk about Cat seeing Roslak?’

‘No, she didn’t. Why?’

‘It’s probably nothing,’ Stride replied. ‘I just need to cover all the bases.’

Cat and Roslak. Maybe it really was nothing. He didn’t want to put the two of them together in the same space of time, because it led him down a dark road. Roslak was a counselor who had volunteered at The Praying Hands Shelter, before he lost his license and fled the city. He was charming. Seductive. Immoral.

He was also dead.

Murdered.

‘You think all of this is our fault, don’t you?’ Green demanded angrily, interrupting his thoughts. ‘Hey, listen, that girl had nobody. If it wasn’t for us, she would have been in foster care, bouncing around like a Mexican jumping bean. We gave her a home, and it cost us, let me tell you. It’s not like the state gave us any dough, and it’s not like Marty ever had any money.’

‘So why did you take her in?’ Stride asked.

‘She was family,’ Sophie told him. ‘Dory was in no shape to take her, so that left us. Besides, Bill and I always wanted kids, but we couldn’t have children of our own. Bill has a low sperm count.’

William Green exploded. ‘Fuck, Sophie! Do you have to tell everybody who walks in the goddamned door about my swimmers? Why don’t you take out an ad in the fucking newspaper?’

The man uncoiled like a spring and his fingers hardened into fists. Stride thought that if he hadn’t been there, Green would have taken out his anger on his wife’s face. Instead, the man leaped to his feet, grabbed his beer, and stomped out of the kitchen. Stride heard the front door open and then slam so hard that the walls shook.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie murmured. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything. Bill is sensitive about that.’

‘Mrs. Green, may I ask where you got that bruise on your arm?’ Stride asked.

‘What?’

‘Did your husband do that to you?’

Her eyes widened and she touched her arm tenderly. ‘No, no, I slipped on the ice.’

‘If he’s violent to you, Mrs. Green, you can get help.’

‘Oh, no. No, I’m sorry if I gave you that impression.’

‘Does he ever hit Cat?’

‘Cat? No, of course not. Bill loves Cat. You heard him, he calls her his little Kitty Kat.’

Stride didn’t think he was going to get an honest answer from her. He tried to keep his anger focused where it belonged – on William Green, not on the wife he’d intimidated into silence. He’d been in too many homes like this one to believe her denial. Maybe she was lying to protect her husband. Maybe she really didn’t know. Or maybe she was trying to convince herself, because the truth was too awful. It didn’t matter. He was as certain as he could be, watching the family dynamics, that William Green had been physically abusing Cat for years.

That was what she’d been running from. That was where it had started.

‘I’ll let myself out,’ he said.

He felt disembodied, as if he could see himself and watch what he was doing. Coldness descended on him. His muscles tensed into knots. He stepped outside into the sweet air and took a deep breath, but it failed to defuse his rage. He descended from the porch and saw the propped-open hood of the Coupe de Ville and heard the clamor of tools. He stepped inside the garage. The space was dimly lit under a curly fluorescent bulb. A static-filled FM station played Poison from a boom box.

William Green looked around the hood angrily. ‘What the—?’

The man blanched when he saw Stride. His hands were greasy, and he wiped them on an old towel. ‘What do you want?’

‘I have a message for you, Mr. Green.’

‘What? What message?’

Stride came up to him, close enough to smell beer and smoke on the man’s breath. Green stumbled backwards until he bumped against the peg board on the rear wall of the garage. Stride studied the tools and removed a hack saw from its hook and held it in his hand, running a finger over the jagged teeth of the blade. When he was angry, Stride channeled his rage into the calmness of his voice. He spoke as calmly as he ever had in his life.

‘Let me explain something to you, Mr. Green. If you ever lay a finger on Cat again, I’ll be back here. If you ever even
think
about touching her or your wife again, you better see my face in your head, because I will be back here. I will leave my badge at home, and I will come visit you in the night. Do you understand me?’

‘Hey, listen, I don’t know what—’

‘
Do you understand me?
’

Green didn’t take his eyes off the saw. ‘Yeah. Fuck, yeah.’

Stride let the saw drop from his hand and clatter to the ground. He turned around and walked through the garage and stood in the driveway until the roaring in his head subsided. When he could breathe again, he headed for the street. He realized that Cat was right and he was wrong. It would have been a mistake to bring her back here. She was better off with Kim Dehne, as far away from this house as possible. When he saw Cat, he wanted to tell her that, for the first time in a long time, things were going to be all right. He was never going to let William Green get near her again.

He looked up at Cat’s bedroom window on the side of the house. It was twelve feet from the sash to the ground, but she said she could jump it, particularly during the winter, when the snow cushioned her landing. That was her escape route. She’d used it dozens of times.

One time, three weeks ago, someone had been waiting for her.

Stride shoved his hands in his pockets and walked to the corner, where he sat on a yellow fire hydrant. He stared at the weedy cracks in the pavement and at the slope leading up toward the railroad tracks. The street looked empty, but if anyone wanted to watch Cat there were plenty of places to hide. The shaggy trees. The dead end road on the other side of 62nd Avenue. The foreclosed rambler with the broken windows.

He noticed a STOP sign that had been defaced by graffiti. Someone had painted the word ‘Me’ in drippy green letters, so now the sign said: STOP ME. The paint looked fresh. The message felt like a warning:
Stop me, stop me, stop me, stop me
.

He didn’t like it.

Stride got back into his Expedition. When he turned on the engine, warm air blew into his face. He was running out of time and daylight. He needed to find Curt Dickes and the other teenage runaway, Brandy. One of them might be able to help him figure out who was hunting Cat. And why.

He also couldn’t get another name out of his head.

Vincent Roslak.

Brooke Hahne was late.

Maggie stood outside Sammy’s Pizza downtown, across the street from The Praying Hands. Runaways, drug addicts, prostitutes and abused teens all wound up at the shelter’s door. Some kids needed medical help. Some needed tips on jobs. Some simply needed a hot meal and a safe place to sleep.

The street corner opposite The Praying Hands was deserted on Saturday afternoon. Usually, a dozen teens hung out there, but everyone recognized Maggie’s yellow Avalanche in the central Hillside area, and everyone knew she was a cop. When she showed up, the teens melted away like ice cream on an August sidewalk.

Inside the pizza joint, a cook in a greasy apron waved through the store window. She was a regular at Sammy’s. So was Stride. The restaurant had served as the weekly hangout for her, Stride, and Serena; it was the place where they talked about open cases over garlic bread and sausage pizza. They hadn’t done that since the break-up. When she ate Sammy’s pizza now, it was usually a late-night delivery to her condo. Alone. With a beer.

Serena.

Maggie hadn’t seen Serena Dial in months, since before the long winter. They weren’t friends anymore. Serena had moved out of Stride’s cottage in November and joined the sheriff’s department in the lake town of Grand Rapids an hour away. She was a name on Itasca County bulletins now. When updates about the Margot Huizenfelt case came up at the morning meeting, Serena was the contact. Other than that, she was a ghost who never showed up
in Duluth. Maggie missed her, but she had no one to blame for the split but herself.

Her affair with Stride had begun after his near-death fall from the Blatnik Bridge, which had triggered debilitating flashbacks that left him emotionally numb. Like strangers, Stride and Serena had blocked each other out, unable to talk about the rift between them. At his lowest ebb, Maggie had found Stride on the floor of his cottage, cut and bleeding, dazed and suicidal. She’d cleaned him up. She’d put her arms around him. She’d listened to him talk about feeling dead inside. When he reached for her, not as a friend but as a lover, she’d reached back.

A mistake.

Her instincts had told her to run, but she stayed. They kissed. They made love. It should have been one time, it should have been their secret, but those kinds of secrets had a way of getting out. Stride couldn’t hide the truth from Serena. It was in his face. When he told her, the fissures in all of their relationships split open like cracks in the earth. There was no going back to the way they were.

Maggie climbed the hill past the restaurant with the fire escapes of the old brick building on her left. She crossed the street through a cloud of steam belching from the sewers. Near the next corner at Second Street, she stopped where Cat had told Stride that a car tried to run her down. She noticed a parking meter with a bent frame, as if a car had struck it. It could have happened the way Cat said, with a vehicle weaving on and off the sidewalk as part of a hit-and-run. Or the meter could have been damaged like that for months. She’d banged up a few meters herself over the years.

Maggie spotted a white Kia Rio parallel parking near Sammy’s. She recognized the car and saw Brooke Hahne get out and head toward The Praying Hands. Brooke, who probably made less money than a first-year teacher, was dressed in an above-the-knee black skirt and a burgundy blouse with gold buttons. Everything she wore was second-hand, but she made thrift shop specials look good.
At thirty, she was cheerleader pretty, with long, straight blonde hair. Her high heels made her nearly six feet tall. She was as skinny as a praying mantis, which was what Duluth politicians often called her. She had a razor tongue about city budget cuts.

Brooke stopped and turned when Maggie called her name. They met on the street.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Brooke said. ‘I had a donor meeting in Grand Marais.’

‘Get the gift?’

‘Oh, sure.’

People rarely said no to Brooke. She was relentless about fundraising. She was sexy, too, which was a plus with middle-aged men who had money to burn.

Maggie had known Brooke since she’d graduated from UMD. She’d started at the front desk of The Praying Hands, doing intake for kids walking in the door, and six years later she’d taken over as the director. She knew every kid by name, and she knew their stories. The shelter was her crusade.

Brooke nodded at Maggie’s Avalanche, which was parked in front of Sammy’s. ‘Couldn’t you get a Corolla or something, babe? Every time you come down here, you scare the kids.’

‘Little cop, big truck,’ Maggie said.

‘I think you’re overcompensating.’

‘You’re not the first to say so.’

Brooke led them across the street to the shelter, where conversations froze as the two of them walked inside. No one made eye contact with Maggie. Runaway teens shared an instinctive guilt, even if they weren’t doing anything wrong. When you saw a cop, you didn’t invite attention.