Funeral for a Friend

by Brian Freeman

  PRAISE FOR BRIAN FREEMAN

  “My discovery this year has been crime writer Brian Freeman…Fleshed-out characters, high tension, and terrifying twists put him up there with Harlan Coben in the psychological crime stratosphere.”

  Daily Mail (London)

  “[Stride] is in the company of Bosch, Thorne, Tennison,

  and Skinner, some of my other favorite detectives time

  has not mellowed.”

  Minneapolis Star Tribune

  praise for the series

  “Excellent…A cleverly constructed, page-turning plot

  and fleshed-out primary and secondary characters make

  this a winner.”

  Publishers Weekly

  (starred review) on Alter Ego

  “Freeman skillfully weaves together diverse story lines…with twists that build suspense, in this fine, character-driven addition to a strong series.”

  Booklist

  (starred review) on Goodbye to the Dead

  “If there is a way to say ‘higher’ than ‘highly recommended,’ I wish I knew it. Because this is one of those thrillers that go above and beyond.”

  Suspense Magazine

  on Goodbye to the Dead

  “Brian Freeman is masterful in setting up the pace and suspense.”

  Bookreporter

  “A fast-paced and riveting drama that I could not put down until the last sentence was read…The best book in this grippingly thrilling series.”

  Dru Ann’s Book Musing

  (Raven Award Winner) on Marathon

  Copyright © 2020 by Brian Freeman

  E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Kathryn Galloway English

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced

  or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the

  publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-982663-74-2

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-982663-73-5

  Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  For Marcia

  “No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.”

  —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  Water falling.

  Jonathan Stride lay in bed, his dark eyes wide open, his body stretched atop the sheets. His bare leg brushed the bare leg of his wife, their skin damp with a sheen of sweat. Summer heat through the open window made the bedroom a sauna of wet, scorching air. He couldn’t sleep.

  Outside the old house, nothing moved on the lazy Duluth night. Nothing in the world made a sound. Not the pond frogs. Not the crickets. Not the spruces towering over the roof. Even Lake Superior, on the other side of the dunes, couldn’t muster the energy to throw waves against the sand, and so the beach was silent.

  When Stride listened, the only thing he heard was the slow drumbeat of water, driving him crazy.

  He got out of bed and slipped a white T-shirt over his chest. In the moonlit glow of the bedroom, he watched his wife sleeping on her back in a pink nightgown, her breasts visible through the cups of lace. Her blond hair spilled in a tangle across her face. Her legs were slightly parted, one knee bent. She made an erotic sight that way, arousing him. He bent down and stroked his fingertips across her thigh.

  “Andrea,” he murmured.

  His touch failed to stir her from sleep. She didn’t move at all. She was like a wax figure, not even real.

  And still the drip, drip, drip of water filled his mind. He needed to make it stop.

  Stride went to the window and listened. There had been a torrent of rain for days, but it had stopped hours ago, and there was no longer a trickle from the gutters. He crossed to the bathroom and checked the faucet and shower, but both were dry. He returned to the bedroom, where he stood beside the closed door and held his breath.

  The dripping of water came from the other side. A place where water shouldn’t be. It was as if someone were standing there, soaking wet, each drop from their clothes making a splash on the wooden floor. He wasn’t alone. He could feel the presence of an intruder in the house, and whoever it was must have heard Stride’s footsteps walk right up to the bedroom door and stop.

  The two of them faced each other from opposite sides of the door. Invisible antagonists.

  His gaze shot to the chair in the corner of the bedroom, where he’d slung his holster and gun, as he always did. He was too far away to get to it. Instead, he reached slowly for the metal door knob and closed his fingers around it. In one smooth motion, he threw open the bedroom door. The knob rattled. The hinges squealed.

  He was wrong.

  No one was there. The drip, drip, drip of water vanished, as if he had never heard it at all. His intruder was somehow a ghost.

  Stride didn’t understand. He’d been so sure of his instincts, but the living room was hot, dark, and empty, and there had been no time for anyone to escape. At first, he assumed it was his imagination playing tricks on him. Then he knelt down and put his fingers on the floor, and they came away wet.

  He glanced over his head. A leak from the unfinished attic?

  No. The ceiling was dry.

  He shut the bedroom door behind him as quietly as he could. When he turned on the living room lights, there they were. Footprints. Wet footprints, making a trail away from the bedroom door past the red leather furniture, beckoning him. He followed. The footprints led him to the dining room, glistening on the hardwood floor. Then to the kitchen. Then to the screened rear porch, where the air was damp and thick.

  “This way.”

  Stride heard someone’s voice, but it wasn’t a voice he recognized. Or did he? There was something familiar about it.

  A voice from a long time ago.

  “This way,” the man said again.

  Stride went through the screen door and let it bang shut behind him. The door led into the small backyard that scraped along the slope of the sand dunes behind which, hidden from view like a vast beast, was Lake Superior. Nearly every day of his life, he went through that door, climbed the sandy trail, and hiked to the ribbon of beach where the waves lapped at his boots. He would stand there, soaking in the view of the huge blue lake, which constantly changed its moods like a beautiful woman. The skyline of Duluth clung to the steep hillside three miles away.

  And yet that wasn’t where he was now.

  He went through the door and found himself in a completely different place. Looking back, he saw that his house was gone.

  Instead, he now stood on a cliff of black granite, sixty feet over a raging river. The fullness of the summer forest surrounded him. He knew this place well; it was called the Deeps, where Amity Creek stampeded along Seven Bridges Road like a wild mustang, swirling in whirlpools and sucking tree limbs into its current before spitting them out in the cold water of Lake Superior. From this cliff, you could take a running leap into the water and swim in the black pool below. He’d done it himself dozens of times as a teenager. He and his best friend, Steve Garske, would shout, jump, fly through the air, crash into the water, and fight the undertow back to the surface. Over and ov
er.

  But sometimes, when the rains were heavy, the Deeps caught a body and didn’t give it back.

  Sometimes the flooded river held a body down and fed it to the lake.

  Stride stared into the rapids, which boomed like deep rolls of thunder and erupted in silver waterfalls. He was right on the cliff’s edge, where the spray made the stone slippery.

  “Don’t fall,” a voice said.

  Stride turned around.

  “Don’t fall. They’ll never find you.”

  A man stood behind him. He was short, no more than five foot six, with a skinny build. He had thinning black hair and wide, staring eyes that looked like the mask of a raccoon. His skin was pale. His hair and clothes were soaking wet. He’d been diving into the swollen creek.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  Stride heard the noise in his head again, somehow louder than the violence of the river below him. But it wasn’t water he heard. The man on the cliff had a bullet hole in the middle of his high forehead, a perfectly circular black-ringed wound that seeped a ribbon of blood down the man’s nose, around his pale lips, and onto his chin, where it dripped onto the stone like chamber music.

  Blood. That was what he’d heard all along. Blood.

  Stride’s right hand felt heavy. He lifted it and saw that a gun was in his hand, a wisp of smoke trailing from the barrel, a burnt smell in the air. He’d shot this man in the head. The wound was right there in his forehead, but the man still had his eyes open, still had a strange smile on his lips.

  “You’re dead,” Stride told the man.

  The smile on the man’s face widened and turned into a mocking, cruel laugh that went on and on.

  “You have to be dead,” Stride insisted. “I shot you.”

  But the man raised his arm and extended a bony, brittle finger at Stride’s chest.

  Stride looked down.

  His own shirt was soaked in blood. Fresh, cherry-red blood, growing and spreading into a misshapen stain. A mass of blood, the kind of loss no one should survive. And there was a bullet hole in his own chest, ripped through the fabric, right where his heart was.

  “No,” the man told him, still laughing. “You’re the one who’s dead.”

  1

  “I had the dream again,” Stride told his wife, Serena.

  She sat in the passenger seat of his Ford Expedition and twisted a few strands of long black hair between her fingers. Her eyebrows arched in a teasing way above her green eyes, and her lips bent into a little smirk. “And were you still married to you-know-who?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Should I be jealous?”

  Stride chuckled quietly because Serena knew better than anyone that his second marriage, to a woman named Andrea Jantzik, had ended badly. Meeting and falling in love with Serena had been part of their breakup, but only part. Stride and Andrea had been mismatched lovers from the beginning, two wounded people looking for things the other couldn’t give them. Their relationship hadn’t even lasted four years.

  “How many times is this?” Serena asked. “The dream, I mean.”

  “Every night for a week.”

  “Any idea why?”

  Stride didn’t answer at first. He stared through the truck window at the house across the street, where Steve Garske lived. They were parked a few blocks away from their own small cottage on the Point, which was the seven-mile narrow land barrier jutting out from downtown Duluth, creating a calm ship harbor protected from the assault of Lake Superior. Stride’s house faced the lake, whereas Steve lived on the bay side. His friend’s house was old, small, and needed work, as so many Point homes did, hammered throughout the year by floods and lake winds, frozen by bitter winter nights. A green picket fence and untrimmed hedges fronted the street. The house’s wooden siding was painted to match the forest green of the fence, but the paint had weathered. A jumble of flagstones made a driveway that led to a single garage stall at the back of the house, steps from the bay.

  “I met Steve at the Deeps when I was fifteen,” Stride said finally. “In the dream, that’s where I am. So I assume, in some way, it’s about him. I haven’t been thinking about much else this week.”

  “What about the gun? And the man you shot?”

  Stride shook his head. “I don’t know what that’s about,” he lied.

  “And Andrea?”

  “I don’t know why she’s there, either,” he lied again.

  There was something in the flicker of concern on Serena’s face that said she knew he wasn’t telling her everything. But for the moment, she didn’t challenge him on it.

  “I know how hard this is, Jonny,” Serena said. “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “No, I need to do this myself. You already said goodbye.”

  “Okay. I’ll be here.”

  She slid across the seat, turned his face toward hers with both hands, and kissed him gently. Her lips were soft, as they always were. Her eyes were sad. She ran her fingers through his wavy black-and-gray hair, doing what she could to tame it, but it was a lost cause. He caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror. The weathered lines there were deeper and darker than usual.

  “You look nice,” she told him, being kind.

  Stride wore his dress blues. He mostly did that for police ceremonies and funerals, but this day was a kind of funeral. It was the last time he would see his best friend. Steve was a doctor and a practical man about life and death, so he wanted no visitation, no church service, no wake, no gathering. When the time came, Stride would take his friend’s ashes into the north woods to be scattered. And that night, at the coffeehouse in Canal Park called Amazing Grace, Steve’s country band would play, with an empty chair on the stage.

  He got out of the truck. The sun hid behind charcoal clouds, making the July afternoon unusually cool. The bay water behind Steve’s house was motionless and slate gray. Standing on the street, he took a slow breath, trying to fight back tears. Then, drawing himself up straight to his full height, which was not quite six foot one, Stride crossed the street.

  His number two on Duluth’s detective force, Maggie Bei, was already inside. He passed her bright yellow Avalanche parked at the curb. The brand new truck replaced one that had been destroyed six months earlier, but in that short time, it was already missing its passenger-side mirror, had a crumpled rear fender, and bore the telltale dents and scrapes of Maggie’s abysmal driving skills. Stride couldn’t help but smile, even though it didn’t last more than a moment.

  Maggie met him at the door. She wore a little black dress, probably purchased in the teenage prom section at T. J. Maxx. She wasn’t much bigger than a China doll, and had her dark hair pulled tightly back behind her head. Like him, she tried and failed to hide her tears.

  “Hey, boss.”

  “Hey, Mags. How is he?”

  “The nurse thinks it’ll be tonight.”

  Stride bit down on his lip until it hurt. “Yeah.”

  “You want me to stick around?” she asked.

  “No. That’s okay. Thanks.”

  She caressed his arm briefly as she left the house. He could hear the sharp crack of her heels on the flagstones as she headed for the street. It was strange, the things that triggered memories. When his first wife, Cindy, had died, he spent the evening after the service here, in this house with Steve and Maggie, and he could remember the click of Maggie’s heels then, too, when she’d left the two men alone on the back porch at midnight. Unfairly, he knew that the sound of Maggie’s heels would always make him think of cancer.

  Stride braced himself.

  Thirty-six years. That was how long he’d known Steve Garske. They were as different as night and day: Stride, a closed-off cop who’d spent a lifetime building walls around himself, Steve, a guitar-playing family doctor who never left a room without making friends with everyone in it. At every crossroad
with the important people in Stride’s life, Steve had been there. Steve had been the one to see Cindy through the disease that took her away. He’d been the one to counsel Andrea on infertility at a time when they wanted kids. He’d been the one to see Cat Mateo, the teenage runaway who now lived with Stride and Serena, through the girl’s pregnancy and delivery.

  Steve had been best man at each of Stride’s weddings. That said it all.

  And now he was dying.

  He told Stride about it three months earlier, long after the initial diagnosis, when the outlook was terminal. He wanted no sympathy, no early grief, and so he’d kept it a secret from everyone. He’d spent the weeks since the announcement winding down his practice and finding new doctors for all of his patients. Stride and Steve had carved out one May weekend to take a last camping trip on the Gunflint Trail, and they spent three days fishing, swapping old stories, listening to Sara Evans songs, and completely ignoring the fact that they’d never do this again. When Stride dropped Steve back at his house, they exchanged a single look between them that said everything they failed to say in the woods. A look that said “thanks” and “I’m sorry” and “goodbye” and “I love you” all at the same time.

  This house.

  Stride inhaled the scent of it. Dust. Burnt coffee. Tuna fish on toast. That was Steve’s life. It had smelled the same way for years.

  Steve bought the ramshackle cottage on Park Point when he came back to Duluth after medical school and lived here ever since. It was a bachelor’s house; Steve had never married, barely even dated. He’d never needed anything more than a small house on a small lot by the water. He wasn’t addicted to material things, just medicine and music. The one change he’d made to the place over the years was to add a loft as a bedroom to give him a better view of the bay.

  That was where he was now.

  Stride climbed the stairs. As he went up, Steve’s nurse passed him going down. She gave him a weak little smile and shook her head.