The Cold Nowhere (40 page)

‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered in Cat’s ear.

Brooke studied Cat’s face. The girl could see her guilt. The truth couldn’t hide anymore, and Brooke was tired of keeping it concealed. Cat knew that Brooke had done this to her, but there was no blame in her eyes. Just a deep, beautiful sadness.

‘Sit with me,’ Cat said.

Brooke heard the policewoman calling Maggie. She heard Maggie’s voice in reply. Fifteen minutes. Maggie would be there in fifteen minutes. She felt equal parts fear and relief, because this was the beginning of the end. Soon enough, it would all be done. She’d be arrested; her life would be over. It didn’t matter. She felt liberated.

Cat took her hand. It was odd, the girl leading the woman. Cat wore a bulky wool sweater, jeans and cowboy boots. She pulled Brooke into the dining room and they sat down at two of the chairs pulled out from the table. They were inches apart. Cat leaned forward and put her hands on Brooke’s knees. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

Brooke felt tears slipping from her eyes. ‘I don’t know where to begin.’

‘Just talk.’

Just talk
. If only it were that simple. She thought about her parents. At least they were both gone; they wouldn’t suffer the shame of learning the truth. She wondered what would have been worse for them, to know that their daughter had been involved in crimes that led to murder, or to know that it had all started when she’d begun sleeping with rich men for money. Lenny had been the first, but not the only one. For a girl growing up with religious parents, she’d found it strange that she felt no qualms about selling her body. It wasn’t anyone else’s business. No one knew.

Until him.

Until he found out what she was doing.

‘I didn’t have a choice,’ Brooke murmured.

‘About what?’ Cat said.

‘He would have exposed me. I would have been kicked out of school. My parents – my parents would have known what I was doing. It sounds like nothing now, but back then it felt like the end of the world. All I had to do was get the code. The alarm code. That was it. He swore no one would get hurt. I figured, who cares if a rich bastard had some things stolen?’

‘Lenny?’

‘Yes. It was supposed to be easy and safe, but everything went wrong. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the news that night. His wife was dead. Shot. Murdered.
Because of me
. All it was supposed to be was a stupid robbery, a few thousand dollars, and instead, I was a murderer. That was it, the rest of my life ruined. It didn’t matter whether I was there. I knew they’d convict me, too.’

Brooke heard the door of the house open and the angry whistle of the wind. Maggie was here for her. She hated to face her friend, but now that she’d begun to talk, it was amazing how easily the words flowed. She’d waited a long time to unburden her soul. She remembered two years earlier when she’d spoken to inmates at the women’s correctional facility in Shakopee. It had occurred to her then that it was only a matter of time before she found herself behind those walls. She’d always known that she couldn’t hide for ever.

‘I was panicked,’ she went on, ‘but he told me it was under control. He knew someone he could set up to take the fall. I was sure that Lenny would tell the police about me, but he said he had it covered. He had some ugly pictures of Lenny with one of the other UMD girls. Sure enough, Lenny never opened his mouth. Then a few weeks later, they arrested some poor Asian boy. They found things from the burglary in his apartment. It seemed like it was all going away. I began to think no one would ever know.’

Cat bowed her head. ‘That wasn’t the end, though, was it?’

Brooke took Cat’s hands, but let them go when the girl flinched. ‘No. I’m so sorry.’

‘Why my parents?’

‘You have to believe me, Cat, I didn’t know what he planned to do. He said he couldn’t do the job himself. He needed an alibi. So he got your father to do the break-in. He never said he planned to kill him, but with Marty gone there wasn’t any way to tie it back to us. I just never, ever thought that anything would happen to your mother.’

‘She didn’t know?’ Cat asked quietly.

‘She knew nothing. She was just a victim. Like you.’

Cat got up. Her chair made a scraping noise on the floor. Brooke reached out for her, but Cat turned away. The girl stood at the dining room windows, looking through the slats of the blinds. This was the way it had to be. Cat couldn’t forgive her. No one could.

Brooke opened her mouth to explain, but the hiss of the wind in the living room was so loud that she thought it would drown out her voice. Cold air bled through the house, raising goose bumps on her skin. The uneven floor beneath her feet groaned. The entire cottage shook under the assault, as if they were swirling inside the cone of a tornado.

Something was wrong.

Brooke rushed into the living room, but the policewoman had vanished. The room was empty. The door to the porch was open, letting in the elements. The open door banged like a hammer on the wood of the window frame. Bang bang bang.

Brooke stared at the doorway. The darkness beyond froze her with fear. Her face swung to Cat. ‘We have to get out of here right now.’

She hunted for something she could use as a weapon, but it was already too late. When she looked back at the door, there he was, standing on the porch, blocking their escape. His easy smile was
gone, and in its place was cold death. He had a gun in his hand as he walked into the house.

‘Where’s the girl?’ he said.

Stride slapped his palm against the computer monitor mounted to his dashboard. ‘Did I mention how much I hate technology?’

Serena rotated the keyboard and monitor toward herself. ‘Let me do it before you put a fist through the screen. What are you looking for?’

Stride ran his hands back through his hair. He didn’t want to believe what he suspected. ‘Bill Green says Marty beat him up in an alley near Curly’s,’ Stride said. ‘It was a couple weeks before Christmas ten years ago. I want to see if there was an incident report.’

‘Near Curly’s? That doesn’t narrow it down.’

‘Limit it to assault and gun reports,’ Stride said. ‘And check victim names against Green.’

‘What about Marty?’ Serena asked.

‘No, you won’t find him in there.’

Serena was puzzled. ‘Why not? Are you sure?’

‘I’m very sure.’

She didn’t argue, but she ran a search for both men and said, ‘There’s nothing in the system on either name in that time frame. Maybe there was no ICR.’

‘Green said the police responded. It has to be there.’

Serena took her fingers off the keyboard. ‘You want to tell me what I’m really looking for, Jonny?’

Stride felt the Expedition shudder. The wind was wild. Debris cascaded across the windshield. ‘Green said we let Marty walk,’ he said.

‘So? It sounded like a bar fight. That’s going to be a judgment call on whether the cop takes them in.’

‘Not if a gun was involved. No way we let that slide. Besides, it doesn’t matter. It was
Marty Gamble
.’

‘Meaning what?’ she asked.

‘Marty was on probation. He’d finally done time after he nearly killed Michaela, but he was back on the street. I was sure he was going to come after her again as soon as he had the chance. I wanted him. He was my top priority, and every one of my cops knew it. They knew his name. They knew his face. If he so much as took a leak against the side of a building I wanted him hauled in so we could get him revoked. If we could have nailed him for assault –
with a handgun!
 – he would have been busted back for the rest of his time and probably another couple of years. The cop who brought him to me would have been a hero. I would have pinned a medal on his chest.’

‘No one did,’ Serena said.

‘No one did. Marty never hit the system.’

‘So Green’s lying. Or he never admitted that Marty was the one who beat him up.’

Stride said nothing.

Serena looked at him and her face darkened as she realized where his mind was taking him. ‘Or you had a bad cop,’ she said.

He pointed at the screen. She scrolled through the ten-year-old incident reports in silence, and he waited. It was still possible that Green had made up the story. It was still possible he’d kept quiet about Marty out of fear for his cousin’s retribution. But Stride didn’t think so. This was worse. This was one of his own. Someone inside would have known that Marty could be leveraged to do just about anything to stay out of jail. Someone inside would have known about Fong Dao’s burglary record. Someone inside would have known how to stage a murder-suicide without raising any questions.

‘December sixteen,’ Serena said. ‘There was a 911 call about an assault in progress. The time and location fit.’

‘How was it resolved?’ he asked.

‘That’s what’s odd. It came in as assault but the report was converted to drunk and disorderly, accidental injuries. No info on an assailant, no ID on the vic, definitely no gun. According to the follow-up, the vic declined medical treatment and disappeared. That’s it. Incident closed.’ She added, ‘This might not be the right report.’

‘Who responded?’ Stride asked. He thought:
This was the call. Marty assaulted Bill Green. Someone buried it.

‘Do you remember your officer codes from ten years ago?’

‘No, but the table should be in the system.’

Serena clicked on the code. He watched her close her eyes. Her breath left her chest.

‘Who?’ he said softly.

‘It was Ken McCarty,’ she told him.

*

‘I’m nearly at your place,’ Maggie told Stride as she sped down the Point in the Corvette. ‘Brooke’s waiting there.’

‘Mags,’ he said.

She knew in the tone of his voice that something was very wrong.

She listened to him talk.

She listened to what he said.

She didn’t react. When he was done, she simply said, ‘Understood,’ and hung up the phone, cutting him off in mid-sentence.

Ken McCarty.

Her lover. Her friend. The baby cop she’d hired. Ken was dirty. Worse than dirty.

It was odd, how calm she felt at the news. How none of her emotions churned. She saw it for what it was; she’d been seduced and conned. There was no coincidence in Ken showing up in her office, no accident in his inviting her to dinner and charming his
way into her bed. She was his pipeline. He was in town hunting for Cat, and he was using his old boss to keep tabs on what the police knew.

She’d let a bad cop, a thief and a murderer, fool her with his lies. She’d had wild sex with the very man she was hunting.

Still she felt nothing. Not anger. Not shame. She was dead inside. There was only one thing to do.

Find him.

Maggie dialed his cell phone, but the call went to voice mail. He’d turned it off to avoid the footprints of cell towers tracking him through the state. She knew what that meant. He wasn’t in Minneapolis anymore; he’d followed her north. He’d been going back and forth between the two cities for days, hiding out in a cold garage and driving a stolen black Charger.

Hunting. Killing.

He was here.

She parked south of Stride’s cottage on the bayside. When she got out, the wind cut through her burgundy jacket, but she didn’t feel the cold. She was almost in a trance. Across the street, in one of the cross-alleys that ended at the lakeside dunes, she spotted a white Kia Rio. Brooke’s car. She jogged across the street and checked it out, but the car was empty.

She spotted a picture of Brooke and Dory hanging from the mirror. A kitchen knife sat on the floor of the car.

‘Goddamn it, Brooke,’ she murmured.

It wasn’t hard to figure out how it started. Before Ken joined the Duluth Police, he’d been a campus cop at UMD. He knew the students and administrators; he knew the lay of the land. If someone had wanted the police to talk to one of the girls about escort trafficking on campus, Ken would have gotten the call. Keep it discreet. Keep it out of the headlines and the police logs. Just make it go away.

She wondered whether Ken simply blackmailed Brooke. Or whether he slept with her. Or both. Ken had a gift for manipulation. A girl like Brooke would have been scared to death to have a cop confronting her about turning tricks for tuition money. She would have done whatever he said. The perfect pawn.

It wasn’t even hard to figure out why Ken had risked everything for a big score. Maggie knew Ken back then. He was in love with money, but he didn’t have much. There had been rumors about his spending habits getting out of control, about debts, even about loan sharks, but when she grilled him about it, he’d promised that he had it covered. As far as she knew, he’d dug himself out, because the rumors stopped. She just never realized that his golden parachute involved Brooke, Lowball Lenny, and an ex-con named Marty Gamble.

He must have thought it was the perfect plan. It all would have worked if Rebekah Keck hadn’t come home early. If Marty hadn’t panicked and shot her. She told herself that Ken wasn’t violent, that he wouldn’t have harmed anyone if the burglary at Lenny’s hadn’t gone south in a bad way.

The trouble was, she didn’t believe it. Ken chose Marty for a reason. He could eliminate him, and no one would ever ask questions. Right from the beginning, Marty and Michaela were going to die.

Maggie stayed on the lake side of the street, hugging the trees, which swirled around her as she closed in on Stride’s house. Snow clung to the lawns and sidewalk and blew up in silver sprays under the streetlights. She looked for Ken’s car but didn’t see it, but she slid her gun into her hand anyway.

As she ducked between the trees, she saw a body near the corner of the house. Heel marks in the snow showed where the body been dragged out of view of the street. She ran closer and realized it was the policewoman she’d assigned to protect Cat. The young woman lay sprawled in the snow. Her brown hair was matted in
blood where someone had struck her. She was unconscious, but Maggie checked her pulse and was relieved to find that she was still breathing.

She grabbed her phone and called for an ambulance. As she did, the woman began to revive on the wet ground. Her eyes fluttered. She groaned in pain and tried to get up. Seeing someone above her, she instinctively tried to fight, but Maggie grabbed her wrists.