“Can you spare me another minute?” Maggie asked.
Frowning, Sally sat down where Kevin had been. Maggie sipped her beer and kept her eyes on Sally. The girl watched her nervously. When Maggie put the mug down, she put a hand over Sally’s on the table. Sally looked at her, confused and afraid. The feisty jealous girl was gone.
“Do you want to tell me about it, Sally?” Maggie asked quietly.
Sally tried to act surprised. “I don’t understand. Tell you what?”
“Come on,” Maggie said. “Kevin’s not here anymore. Your parents aren’t around. It’s just us girls. You can tell me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Maggie gripped her hand tightly now. “Something happened to you. I mentioned the barn, and you practically fainted. You’ve been there, haven’t you? Look, I’m not judging you. But if you were out there and someone took advantage of you, I have to know.”
Sally shook her head. “It wasn’t like that.”
“You don’t need to make excuses for me. I’m a sister, okay? I know what men can be like.”
“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” Sally said. “I never thought it was anything important. I mean, I’d pretty much forgotten about it. And even when they said Rachel’s bracelet was found at the barn, well, I didn’t think there could be any connection.”
“Tell me what happened,” Maggie urged her.
Sally sighed. “I never told Kevin. I never told anyone.”
“That’s okay. You can tell me. I can help, you know?”
She watched the tangled emotions in the girl’s face. “Do you really think it could be important?” Sally asked. “It’s just too crazy.”
Maggie wanted to tear the words out of the girl’s throat, but she patiently caressed Sally’s hand and waited.
Sally’s lower lip trembled. “About six months ago, I was biking out in the countryside north of town. I drive out there sometimes and park, so I can bike on the back roads. It’s always really deserted on Sunday mornings, so I thought it would be all right.”
Maggie leaned forward. Oh, God, it wasn’t a boyfriend. It was a psycho. Damn, damn, damn. She thought about Kerry McGrath, and she tried to let her eyes communicate the message. That was stupid, girlie.
“And?” Maggie said.
“My bike busted a chain. Someone picked me up.”
“Someone?”
Sally nodded. “I mean, I knew him, so I wasn’t scared.”
“You went with him voluntarily?” Maggie asked.
“Yeah. I was miles from my car.”
“Did he try something on you?”
Sally hesitated. “Sort of. Well, no, not really. But he stopped at the barn.”
Bells began going off in Maggie’s head. She could feel goose bumps rising on her skin, the way they always did just before a case blew wide open. Finally, finally, they were going to get answers.
“What happened, Sally?”
Sally swallowed hard. She stared down at her hands folded in her lap. Suddenly, she seemed very young. It was strange, Maggie thought, how these teenagers could pretend to be so adult and mature, and then when you scratched the surface, they became children again.
“We were just talking. He told me how nice I looked. He said it was a really hot outfit I was wearing, that I was obviously in great shape. He just seemed way too—serious, I guess. It started out harmless, but after a while it got creepy.”
Maggie nodded. “Okay, what happened next?”
“Well, we were getting near the road that led to the barn. He asked me if I’d ever been there. I said no, I hadn’t. He was teasing, saying we should check and see if anyone was making out there. And then he really turned. He started heading there. I was freaking out.”
“Did you say anything?”
Sally shook her head. “I was too scared.”
“So he drove you to the barn,” Maggie said.
“Yeah. He pulled in behind it. I was ready to run. But he didn’t try anything. He just kept talking, small talk, you know. It was like he was trying to decide if he was going to make a move on me.”
“Were you afraid he was going to rape you?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t know what I thought. I mean, it was really weird.”
“But nothing actually happened.”
Sally nodded. “Another car pulled in behind us. So he took off. It was like he didn’t want to be recognized, you know? He hardly said a word to me the rest of the way, just took me back to my car and dropped me off. That was it.”
“Nothing actually happened between you?”
Sally shook her head. “No. Like I said, I was sure he was going to try something. But after it was over, I began to think I was just being stupid.”
Maggie took one of Sally’s hands. “I really need you to tell me who it was.”
“I know,” Sally said. “I thought about coming forward before, but—I didn’t really think it was important. I guess I had just convinced myself I was crazy, you know? He didn’t really mean anything.”
“Now you don’t think so.”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“Okay,” Maggie said. “Did anyone see the two of you together? Did you recognize the car that came in behind you?”
Sally shook her head. “We were out of there so quickly.”
“Tell me, Sally. I won’t let him hurt you. Who was it?”
Sally bent closer and whispered a name in Maggie’s ear.
Maggie immediately pulled her cell phone out of her coat and dialed Stride’s number.
16
Stride left city hall and stopped by the hospital on Monday night, but he discovered that Emily Stoner had been released an hour earlier, accompanied by Dayton Tenby. He wasn’t surprised when he heard of her suicide attempt. He knew this was the most dangerous time, right after a parent or a spouse found out the truth, after weeks or months of fruitless longing for a miracle. The reality, hitting like a wrecking ball, sometimes was too much to bear.
He chose not to visit the Stoner household that night. There was nothing more he could tell them now, and he assumed the doctors would have ordered Emily straight to bed. He had already told Graeme by phone of the one significant discovery at the barn, a piece of bloody fabric that might be linked to Rachel.
He headed for home.
The roads were thick with slush. Snow had been falling all day, piling up on the streets and in the woods surrounding the city. The search at the barn continued, but at an agonizingly slow pace. His officers worked with ice hanging from their mustaches and cold seeping into the leather of their boots. They dug, scratched, and cursed the snow. They had begun another, more ominous search, too. Working with a cluster of volunteers from the surrounding area, they began fanning out into the woods around the barn, searching for Rachel’s body. They penetrated the snow with ski poles and dug down whenever they found something unusual hidden below. Using walkie-talkies, they communicated their progress to Guppo in the police van. He mapped out a new search grid on a laptop.
Stride held out little hope they would find anything. The vastness of the northern woods worked to the benefit of murderers, who had thousands of square miles of forest in which to dispose of a body. Most of the time, the victims disappeared, and that was that. Like Kerry McGrath. They were out there somewhere, either buried or simply dumped far from the nearest road, easy targets for the animals that would come and desecrate their corpses. He shuddered to think of Rachel suffering the same fate. But the scope of the land and the crush of snow made him doubtful that they would ever find anything except that one scrap of white cloth to prove that Rachel was dead.
Stride pulled out his cellular phone. He noticed the battery was nearly gone. He had forgotten to take an extra battery from his desk, but he was almost home anyway. He punched in the number for his voice mail and listened to his messages.
The first one was from Maggie, at about two o’clock in the afternoon. I
t was short and sweet. “You suck, boss.”
He laughed, imagining how her interviews at the high school had gone.
The second message was from the lab, about an hour earlier. They had confirmed the stain on the fabric was human blood, and they had matched it to type AB, Rachel’s blood type. The DNA tests were still to come.
The last message on his voice mail was at eight o’clock in the evening, only about five minutes ago. He expected it to be Maggie again, reporting in at the end of her day. But it wasn’t.
“Hello, Jon,” said a soft, nervous voice. “It’s Andrea. I didn’t really expect you to be there, but I guess I kind of wanted to hear your voice. That sounds silly, I suppose. And maybe it sounds a little silly to say I miss you. But the truth is, I do. Looks like you made quite an impression on me, huh? Anyway, the thing is, I’m still at work over at the school. I’ve got a pile of tests to grade, so I was working in the lab, but I was thinking a lot about us. And about Friday night. I know your time’s not your own, but I hope we can see each other again soon. I’d really like that. Okay, fine, I’ve made a fool of myself, so what else is new? Well, give me a call sometime. Bye, Jon.”
At the next intersection, Stride turned the truck around and headed back up the hill toward the high school.
He pulled into the lot, with the panorama of Duluth spread out on his left, and found a parking spot close to the building. Hurrying across the concrete, which had accumulated a couple more inches of snow since the plows had gone through, he jammed his hands in his coat pockets and blinked as the snow fell over his eyelids.
The school door was locked. Stride rapped his knuckles on the window, but no one was nearby to hear him. He swore. He pushed his face against the cold glass, peering inside. Nothing.
Stride took out his cell phone again, but he saw that his battery had gone completely dead. He swore again and trudged through the snowy grass around the side of the school. He was near the rear door when he saw Andrea emerge from a classroom door at the far end of the hallway. She was dressed in gray sweats that emphasized her long legs, athletic shoes, and a loose-fitting blue V-neck sweater. She didn’t notice Stride, but instead made a beeline for a pop machine in the corridor. She fed in a bill, then retrieved a can of Diet Coke, popped it open, and took a long swig.
Stride banged on the door.
She stopped, turned around, and saw him. Her face lit up in a broad smile. She began jogging down the hall toward him, spilling her Coke and laughing as a geyser of brown liquid spurted onto the floor. She put the can on the floor, wiped her hands on her sweats, and hurried to the door. She opened it, grabbed Stride’s hand, and pulled him inside. As the door crashed shut, blocking out the wind, she reached her sticky fingers around his neck and pulled him into a deep kiss. He was too surprised to respond at first, but then wrapped his arms tightly around her, and their lips explored each other.
“I’m glad you came,” she said. “I don’t have too much more to do. Why don’t you come in and talk with me, and then we can go have a late dinner?”
“That sounds perfect,” Stride said.
Her arm went around his waist as they retraced her steps to the chemistry laboratory.
“It won’t take me more than another half hour. These are multiple choice tests. I don’t have to think, just grade.”
“How are they doing?” Stride asked.
“Oh, I’ve seen better,” Andrea said. “The attention span gets less and less each year. It’s hard to keep it exciting for them.”
“Well, science was never my strong suit either.”
“Really? I would have thought a detective would enjoy all the forensic details, solving scientific mysteries, that kind of thing.” Andrea scanned a test as she talked, wielding a red pen to mark errors.
“I let the lab technicians do the scientific analysis,” Stride said. “I worry about figuring out the art of the possible.”
“What do you mean?” Andrea asked.
“Most human acts leave some kind of trail. You have to get from place to place. You have to eat, buy gas, go to the bathroom, sleep. You leave behind skin, hair, fingerprints, fluids. All of those things can be tracked, assuming you can sift through the things that everyone else leaves behind and find the person you want.”
Andrea smiled. “Like it or not, Jon, that sounds a lot like the scientific process. You couldn’t have slept through all of your classes.”
“I wouldn’t have slept through yours,” he said.
She blushed and looked down at her exams again. They were silent for a while. The only sound was the scritch-scritch of Andrea’s marker on the page and the rustle of paper as she shuffled the tests. Stride let his eyes wander around the classroom, then found himself staring at Andrea, her head down, her narrow fingers nervously pushing her blonde hair back behind her ears. He could see smile lines at the edges of her mouth, like crescent moons. The sleeves of her sweater were pushed up, and he saw her bare, tapered forearms, slim but strong.
She felt his stare and looked up. They held each other with their eyes, but they didn’t say anything.
He wondered what she saw when she looked at him. He knew, because Cindy had always told him so, that women found him attractive, although he never really understood it. He didn’t have smooth, perfect features, but the look of a seaman who had squinted into too many storms. Like his father. Each time the barber cut his hair, he saw more gray littering the floor. He ached when he moved, and he felt the twinge of his bullet wound more intensely now than when he had been shot eight years ago. He was getting older, no doubt about that. But something about Andrea’s honest stare peeled away the years from his mind.
She leaned back in her chair, covering her mouth with both hands, still staring at him.
“I’m a little embarrassed,” she told him quietly.
Stride was puzzled. “Why?”
Andrea laughed and looked at him with a tiny smile. “I hope you don’t think I go around picking up men in casinos and sleeping with them.”
“Oh,” Stride said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let that happen. You were drunk. It wasn’t fair.”
“We were both drunk,” Andrea said. “And we both wanted it. You don’t have anything to feel guilty about. But the next day, I was scared. I thought I’d made a terrible mistake.”
“You didn’t,” Stride said.
“Do you want to hear something terrible?” she said. “I resented it a little when you told me your wife died.”
Stride looked at her strangely. “I don’t understand.”
“Cindy died, and there wasn’t anything you could do about it. It wasn’t about you. At least you can still feel good about yourself. That’s what my husband took from me.”
Stride shook his head. “That isn’t your fault. It’s his. He sounds like a selfish son of a bitch.”
“I know. But I still miss him. You must think I’m a fool.”
“Join the club,” Stride said. “Look, how about we go to dinner right now? I’m hungry as hell, and Briar Patch makes a one-inch steak that melts in your mouth. And the beer is ice cold.”
Andrea nodded. “I’d like that. I think I’ve had enough for the day. Let me lock these in the department office, and then we can head out.”
They walked out together into the empty hallway of the school. He heard distant sounds, like the thump of a basketball, but he didn’t see anything or anyone around them. The lights seemed dim and shadowy, and the night outside yawned in at them through the windows like a giant black creature.
They climbed the stairs to the second floor of the school and found themselves in another dark, empty hallway. Andrea unlocked the door opposite the stairs and flicked on the light switch inside. The office was crowded with metal desks and filing cabinets and bookshelves lined with science textbooks. She chose the desk closest to the window, opened the bottom drawer, and dropped the stack of tests inside. He saw a photograph of a man on the wall beside her desk, and he assumed it was her ex-hu
sband.
“All set,” she said.
They turned off the lights, and Andrea locked the door behind them.
As they headed for the stairs, Stride saw a crack of light glowing from one of the offices at the far end of the hallway.
Andrea saw him hesitate. “What’s up?”
“Probably nothing.” But he suddenly felt a wave of anxiety. It came that way after a few years, a sixth sense that something wasn’t right.
“Is that light coming from Nancy Carver’s office?” he asked.
Andrea noticed the light in the hallway for the first time. “Looks like it.”
Stride’s eyes narrowed. “This sounds odd, Andrea, but just wait here, all right? I want to check something out.”
“If you say so.”
Andrea leaned against the wall, waiting. Stride took soft steps down the hallway, approaching the point where the office light shone into the corridor. As he got closer, he confirmed what he had suspected, that the door to Nancy Carver’s office was ajar. He waited, listening, but heard no sounds from inside.
Stride coughed deliberately.
He expected to hear whoever was inside react. But the same silence pervaded the hallway.
He edged toward the doorway, close enough to peer inside and see part of the closet that served as her office. All he could see was a corner of her desk, enough to see a woman’s shoulder and arm. She seemed to be sitting in her chair, not moving.
“Hello?” he called out.
He watched, but the woman didn’t move. Stride gave the door a push. It swung open with a loud creak and thudded against the wall. He moved closer, filling the doorway.
Nancy Carver was inside, sitting motionless at her desk. As he entered, she looked up at him with hollow eyes, rimmed in red. The angry passion he had seen in her brown eyes was gone. Her cheeks were drawn. Her red hair was matted. She looked through him as if he didn’t exist.
Stride was so taken aback by her appearance that he didn’t notice for several seconds that she had a handgun lying in front of her on her desk, inches from her fingers.
“What the hell is that?” he said and leaped for the gun. He expected her to reach for it before he could get there, and point it either at herself or at him, but Nancy Carver didn’t move. She just stared at him as he scooped it up in his hand and spilled the bullets on the floor, where they rolled crazily.
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