The Cold Nowhere (4 page)

‘Jesus,’ Maggie whispered.

He left the bedroom door open as they left. Outside, he spoke softly.

‘Something’s happening to that girl,’ he said. ‘She needs help.’

‘She needs a shrink.’ Maggie’s face was grim.

‘After what she’s been through? Wouldn’t you?’

‘It’s not just that.’

Maggie held up something in front of his eyes. It was a butcher’s knife, long and sharp, dangling from her fingers. He recognized it. It was
his
knife, taken from the wooden block in the kitchen.

‘Where did you get that?’ Stride asked.

‘It was under her pillow. It fell when she fought back.’

‘Cat had it?’ he asked.

‘That’s right. Did you know she took it?’

‘No, she must have gotten up during the night.’

‘She could have killed you with this.’

Stride didn’t say anything. Maggie handed him the knife and he stared at the blade, which had a sharp edge as deadly as a machete. She was right. It would have cut him open and run him through nearly to his spine. If Cat had attacked him, he would be on the floor now, bleeding.

Dying.

‘Be careful, boss,’ Maggie warned him. ‘I know you want to help, but you don’t know what’s going on in this girl’s head. She’s dangerous.’

A battered silver Hyundai parked on Superior Street across from the clinic in Lakeside. Its tailpipe popped like a gunshot. A short woman with dark skin and bottle blonde hair crossed toward the building in short, quick steps. She wore a down coat, torn blue jeans and black boots with high heels. Her sunglasses shielded her eyes, and she kept her head down as she came inside the waiting room.

Stride recognized her and met her at the door. ‘Dory?’

Dory Mateo, Michaela’s little sister, stripped off her sunglasses. Her eyes were bloodshot and tired; her skin was as worn as leather on old shoes. He knew she couldn’t be much more than thirty, but she looked fifteen years older.

‘I’m Jonathan Stride,’ he added.

‘I remember you,’ she replied. ‘You look the same. More gray hair, though.’

He smiled, because she was right, but he didn’t need the reminder. Her own hair was cut in a messy bob, and he saw black roots. Stride was lean and strong and over six feet tall, which made him nearly a foot taller than Dory. The Mateo women were all small.

‘Can we go outside?’ she asked. ‘I need a smoke.’

‘Sure.’

He followed her into the cold morning air. There was no sun, only slate clouds. It was Saturday morning and there was little traffic on the shop-lined street. Lakeside was a neighborhood on the north side of Duluth, a few blocks from the shore of Superior.
It was quiet, without even a bar in town for the after-work crowd. If you wanted a drink, you went elsewhere.

Dory lit a cigarette and let out a raspy cough. ‘So is Cat in trouble?’

‘Why would you say that?’ he asked.

‘A cop calls me, I figure she’s in trouble.’ She eyed the clinic. ‘Is she okay? She’s not hurt, is she?’

‘She’s fine, but I’m having a doctor check her out.’

‘What happened?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to figure out,’ Stride said. ‘When did you last see her?’

‘I don’t know. A couple weeks? She stayed with me for a few days but then she took off. She didn’t say where she was going.’

Dory’s face twitched. Stride could see that she was self-medicating. They picked up women like her off the downtown streets every night. Frostbitten. High. Often naked and beaten.

‘Cat says you rent a room at the Seaway,’ Stride said.

‘Yeah, so?’

‘Rough place.’

‘You think it’s by choice? I don’t want to be there. I had a house in the Hillside, but I lost it. Goddamn banks.’

‘You have a job?’ Stride asked.

‘Off and on. A girlfriend hooks me up for events in the Cities. You know, selling T-shirts and keychains and posters and shit like that for bands. I crash with her when I’m down there.’

‘T-shirts?’ Stride said dubiously. He doubted the merchandise was limited to clothes. Whatever a concertgoer wanted, someone was there to supply it. ‘Nothing under the table?’

‘Hey, what do you care? It’s Minneapolis, not Duluth. Anyway, I had a decent job for a while. I answered phones for a construction company until I got laid off. Since then, I take what I can get.’ Dory threw her cigarette on the ground, where it smoldered. She shivered and zipped her coat.

‘You want to go inside?’ Stride asked.

‘No, clinics freak me out.’

He gestured at a bench in the dormant garden beside the medical complex. They sat next to each other, and Dory stared at the gray sky. The wind was cold, mussing Stride’s hair. He couldn’t see much of Michaela in Dory’s face, unlike Cat, who echoed her mother like a mirror. The ten years since Michaela’s death had been hard on Dory, but she’d had a bad life long before her sister died. She’d been a chronic addict and runaway during her teen years, and Michaela had tried and failed to get Dory to reform herself.

Dory snuck a glance and saw him watching her. ‘You’re thinking about my sister,’ she said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Michaela liked you,’ she said.

‘I liked her, too.’

‘She talked about you a lot. Those pirate eyes of yours. She liked your eyes.’

He said nothing.

‘I still miss her. She never bailed on me, no matter how stupid I was. It’s not her fault I was a fuck-up. I didn’t want her help. I didn’t care about anything back then.’

‘How about now?’ Stride asked. ‘Has anything changed?’

‘I have ups and downs. Mostly downs lately.’

‘What about Cat?’

‘Hey, I’d do anything for that girl. Anything. I don’t want her to have the kind of life I’ve had.’

He thought she was sincere, not just mouthing the words. Whatever her other failings in life, Dory loved her niece, but love wasn’t necessarily enough to change anything. The two of them already shared the wrong kind of parallel lives. They’d both lost parents at a young age, and they’d both headed down bad roads as they got older.

‘Do you know she’s been hooking?’ he asked.

Dory’s face was stricken, but she nodded. ‘Yeah, I begged her not to do it. When I had money, I gave it to her. Not much, but it was something. Whenever she was with me, I made sure she stayed off the street, but I’m out of town a lot. And Cat, sometimes she just leaves and I don’t know where she is.’

‘What about the couple that took her in? Her guardians?’

‘Cat won’t say anything, but it’s not good there. I get it. It was the same for me bouncing in and out of foster homes as a teenager. I wish I could have taken her in myself back then, but you know what I was like. She was better off without me. I guess she still is.’

‘Did you try to get help for her?’

‘Sure, I did. I took her to see Brooke at the shelter downtown. Brooke’s a friend. I told Cat that if I wasn’t around, and she didn’t want to go home, she should go there. You know how it is, though. There are abusers everywhere who take advantage of these girls. And Cat, she’s so beautiful. That makes it worse. She’s a magnet with that face of hers.’

‘She won’t stay beautiful for long,’ Stride said. ‘Not if she stays in this life.’

‘You think I don’t know that? I had a sweet face, too. I know what I did to myself, you don’t need to remind me.’

‘How long has Cat been heading downhill?’ Stride asked.

Dory shrugged. ‘Two years, I suppose. Since she was fourteen. That’s when she started running away. She’d show up at my door, or I’d come back to the city and find her sleeping in my bed at the Seaway.’

‘Did she say why?’

‘No, but I figured the shit with Michaela and Marty was finally backing up on her. You can’t go through something like that and not get screwed up. Sooner or later, she had to pay the price.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘Hey, she’s still a good kid, you know? She’s not far gone like some of them. That’s why I thought Brooke could help her, but you want the truth? I’m scared to death.’

‘Drugs?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah, sometimes.’

‘Do you supply her?’

Dory leaped to her feet. He thought she was ready to slap him. ‘No! Never! You think I would do that to my own niece?’

‘I had to ask.’

‘I never give her anything!’

‘You’re not clean, Dory,’ Stride said. ‘You think I can’t tell?’

‘Yeah, okay, it’s been a shitty year, and I’m circling the drain. If that’s what you want to hear, fine. But Cat? No way. She never got so much as one fucking pill from me.’

He sat her down again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t trust me, either, but it’s the truth.’

‘Who has their hooks into her, Dory? I need a name.’

‘I don’t know. It could be anybody. Try Curt Dickes. Greasy little bastard. He’s a janitor at one of the hotels in Canal Park. Word is, he’s been fixing tourists up with the local girls. Cat mentioned him a couple times.’

‘I know Curt,’ Stride said.

He and his team knew most of the repeat offenders by name. Curt Dickes had been on his radar screen for ten years, ever since Stride caught him coming out the rear door of the Great Lakes Aquarium with half a dozen stolen stingray pups in a tank of water. The kid came from a big family of girls. He was the little brother who always got into trouble. He was mostly a petty thief and con artist, but if he’d expanded into prostitution, Stride needed to talk to him.

‘Listen, Dory,’ Stride went on, ‘Cat thinks someone is trying to kill her. Did she talk to you about that?’

‘Yeah, I didn’t know whether to believe her.’

‘Why not?’

Dory hesitated. ‘Look, Cat’s pretty scrambled upstairs. You and me, we both know why. Some days I don’t know what’s real with her and what’s not. I’m not sure she knows herself.’

‘Can you think of a reason why anyone would want to hurt her?’

‘Most guys don’t need a reason to hurt street girls,’ Dory said. ‘You know that.’

‘I want to check on some things she told me, but I don’t want her on her own when she’s done. I’m afraid she’ll take off again. Can you make sure she stays here until I get back?’

Dory looked at the clinic building and frowned, but she nodded. ‘Sure, whatever.’

He stood up to leave but Dory tugged on his sleeve. ‘Hey, Stride, can I ask you something? Why are you doing this for Cat?’

‘It’s my job.’

‘Yeah? A lot of cops would dump a girl like her at County and forget about her. Is this because of what happened to Michaela?’

‘Partly,’ he admitted.

Dory lit another cigarette and shook her head. ‘Michaela wasn’t perfect, you know. I warned her about Marty. I said he’d keep coming after her. She didn’t listen.’

‘It wasn’t her fault,’ he said.

‘Yeah, maybe not, but I blamed her for being so stupid. I blamed myself, too. If I’d had my head on straight, I could have done something to stop him. As it is …’

She closed her eyes. Her lips squeezed into a thin, pale line. He could see guilt licking at her insides like flames. He knew what that was like.

‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘Believe me, Dory, I’ll do whatever I can to protect Cat.’

Dory opened her eyes. Her face darkened, not with anger, but with sadness. ‘Like you protected her mother?’ she asked.

Stride lived in a place that never forgot the past.

Duluth was a small town masquerading as a big city, and small towns had long memories. Fewer than one hundred thousand souls lived inside its borders. It sounded like a lot, but for a native, it was nothing. When Stride dragged a middle-aged man to the drunk tank, there was a good chance it was someone who’d gone to Central High School with him. When he found a drowned child in the Lester River, he usually knew the parents. It made the job harder and the wounds more personal. He couldn’t see the people as strangers. They were neighbors and friends.

Other towns tore down the past and built on top of it. Not Duluth. The terraced streets that rose off the shore of Lake Superior still boasted Victorian homes that dated to the early part of the previous century, when shipping and mining had made the city a glamour town. The wealth of that era was long gone but the houses remained, decaying like sorrowful echoes. The same was true of the Canal Park factories near the water, even after they’d been shuttered and converted into shops and restaurants for the tourists. You could still see old industrial names etched into the building stone, like Dewitt-Seitz and Paulucci.

When something did get torn down in Duluth, people complained. Where Stride lived, out on the sliver of land known as the Point that divided the harbor from the wild waters of Superior, the shabby old lake homes were slowly disappearing, replaced by condos and hotels and new mansions. No one liked it. The house where he’d lived with his first wife for twenty years was gone. Every time he
crossed the lift bridge over the shipping canal, he remembered the homes and the faces of the people who weren’t there anymore.

He’d spent his whole life here. It was an extreme place, like a frontier outpost on the border of the Canadian wilderness. Tourists flooded the town for the brief, warm summers, but the endless winters defined the city and gave it its fierce beauty. For months the waves of the great lake made ice sculptures on the beach and the smaller lakes simply froze into roads for fishermen. Blizzards buried the empty highways, and Alberta winds swept snowdrifts up to the roof lines. Living here was harsh, but Stride couldn’t live anywhere else. When he’d tried, he always came back. This was his home.

Locals boasted that Duluth toughened anyone who survived the winters, but Stride knew that it also made you old before your time. You couldn’t fight the elements and not feel the damage to your body. You couldn’t weather the storms and not get broken. There were other, less visible scars, too. The more time he spent in Duluth, the more he learned about keeping things inside. You hung on to the pain and locked it away. You stayed closed off to the world. After a while, it became a way of life.

Serena had complained that he kept every death harbored in his soul, and she wasn’t wrong. He never forgot the people he’d left behind. To Stride, loss was like the parade of giant ore boats coming and going through the city’s ship canal. Every boat arrived weighted down with black cargo, and every boat had a name.