Stalked

by Brian Freeman

  Stride was human. He made mistakes. He was making a mistake this time, because Stride simply didn’t understand betrayal. He had never walked in on his wife doing a reverse cowgirl on a man half her age. Hell, Abel didn’t even know what the position was called until his lawyer explained it in the divorce papers. His wife had certainly never used it on him during their years of married life.

  When he found his wife in bed with another man, Abel finally understood how an ordinary person could go over the edge. Like Nicole. Like Maggie. He had pulled his gun on the two of them and was ready to fire. The only thing that saved them was that, in the shocked silence as they all stared at one another, he could hear the gurgle of his fish tank coming from the living room. Something about the sound soothed him. Losing his fish would be worse than losing his wife, so he put the gun down and found a lawyer instead.

  Maggie should have owned fish.

  Abel shaved and showered after he was done on the treadmill and slapped cologne on his face. That was another thing the cops teased him about, that he smelled like a dapper gigolo. It wasn’t a crime. He dressed in an old brown suit and shrugged on his trench coat. The coat wasn’t warm enough for January, but since he had begun jogging regularly, he found he didn’t mind the cold.

  Time to turn over rocks.

  He began with Eric’s office. Eric owned a business called MedalSports, which was located in a drab manufacturing facility on a street near the airport, near businesses making medical supplies, aircraft parts, navigational equipment, and frozen foods. Small planes whined overhead as Abel pulled into the parking lot. The one-level building, painted chocolate-brown, had a series of loading docks, where several shipping trucks were backed up against the platforms. The parking lot was crowded.

  He found a glass door leading into the building’s office. The receptionist inside was on the phone, and he could see used tissues littering her desk. Her eyes were red-rimmed and watery. She was plump, in her late fifties, with half-glasses on a chain around her neck and gray hair peeking out from under a baseball cap. The office was chilly, and she wore a bulky red down vest. She gave him a weak smile, cupped her hand over the phone, and told him she’d be with him shortly.

  The tiny waiting room was functional, with a cheap rattan sofa, a white coffeemaker sitting on a filing cabinet next to a stack of Styrofoam cups, and a veneer coffee table stocked with sports magazines. He could hear the noise of manufacturing through the door that led to the shop floor.

  He examined several framed photographs hung on the wall that showed Eric at the Olympics fifteen years ago, in his Speedo with a bronze medal around his neck. He was a physically imposing man, at least six feet four, with a muscled, hairless chest and buzzed hair that was so blond it was almost white. The other photographs were more recent and showed Eric with a variety of medalists from the Winter Games, including freestyle skaters, slalom skiers, and bobsled teams. They were all displaying MedalSports equipment. Abel noted that Eric had kept himself in good shape and wore the same brilliant smile in all of the photographs. He had grown out his hair and swept it back like a long, flowing mane over his head.

  “He was very handsome,” the receptionist said, hanging up the phone.

  Abel grunted.

  “You’re not a reporter, are you?”

  Abel shook his head and introduced himself. The receptionist told him her name was Elaine.

  “Is it true that his wife shot him?” she asked. “That’s what the media is saying.”

  “We’re still trying to find out what happened,” Abel said. “I need you to answer a few questions for me.”

  Elaine sniffled. She grabbed another tissue, and her round cheeks puffed out as she blew her nose. “Of course.”

  “How long have you worked with Mr. Sorenson?”

  “Ever since he started the company. He was a wonderful man. He treated all of us like family.”

  Abel sighed. Everyone was a saint once they got murdered. “He sounds a little too perfect to me. No one’s perfect.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but we all loved him here.” Her voice rose defensively.

  “How about the business? How’s it going?”

  “Oh, extremely well. All of the employees got year-end bonuses. Mr. Sorenson shared the profits. He wasn’t selfish.”

  Abel nodded. “Manufacturing is a tough racket. Lots of competition. Cheap foreign labor, right? That sort of thing.”

  “No, no,” Elaine replied, shaking her head. “MedalSports makes high-end merchandise for a very targeted audience. Everything is handcrafted. We don’t compete against mass-market operations. We sell to Olympic competitors and no one else.”

  “Is there really enough business to support that?” Abel asked dubiously. “The Winter Games only come around every four years.”

  “Well, yes, but they’re practicing constantly. The athletes are involved in regional and world championship competitions, too. The right equipment gives you an edge, and we customize all our materials.”

  “Was Mr. Sorenson the sole owner?”

  “Yes, he started the business shortly after he was in the Olympics himself. He was a bronze medalist in the butterfly, you know.”

  “Did he have a lot of debt?”

  “Well, I’m no accountant. He has a line of credit with Range Bank. I never heard Mr. Sorenson express any concerns about capital or debt payments. We had record revenues last year.”

  “I’ll need the names of Mr. Sorenson’s accountant and lawyer. Do you have those?”

  Elaine nodded. “Of course.”

  She wrote them down, and Abel slipped the information into his pocket. “You were pretty quick to think his wife did it. Why is that?”

  Elaine frowned. “I was only repeating what I heard on television. I don’t know anything.”

  Abel frowned back at her. “How am I supposed to solve this crime if you dish out crap like that? I never met a secretary who didn’t know if her boss and his wife were having problems.”

  “I don’t want to be a gossip,” she retorted. Her cheeks bloomed red.

  “You’re not gossiping. Your boss was murdered.”

  Elaine struggled with her discretion and gave in. “Mr. Sorenson and his wife have had a difficult year,” she confessed in a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ve heard them arguing a lot.”

  “When was this?”

  “The worst fight was in November, a couple of months ago.”

  “What were they arguing about?”

  Elaine shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “You must have heard something. Come on, it’s not like these walls are six inches thick.”

  “It had something to do with sex,” Elaine confided, her voice dropping as she said the word sex.

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard Mrs. Sorenson shout something through the door.”

  “What did she say?”

  Elaine flushed. “This is very embarrassing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t use this kind of language, you understand. Mrs. Sorenson called him—well, she said he was a muscle-bound, yellow-headed penis.”

  Abel tried not to laugh. “What else did she say?”

  “I couldn’t hear anything more. It’s not like I was listening.”

  Of course not, Abel thought. “Maybe he was getting ready to dump her.”

  “Oh, no, no,” Elaine insisted. “He loved her, he really did.”

  “Loving her doesn’t mean being faithful, though, does it?”

  Elaine picked at her fingernails. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “You keep his schedule, you answer his calls. No way you wouldn’t know if he was cheating.”

  “Mr. Sorenson was a very attractive man,” Elaine said cautiously. “In the old days, before he was married, he dated a lot. Glamorous women. Models sometimes.”

  “And after he was married?”

  Elaine pouted as if this was no one’s business. “A man like that, women come after
him.”

  “Who? I want names.”

  “I don’t know names. Mr. Sorenson was secretive about his personal life. I didn’t pry.”

  “You sound like you’re holding out on me again, Elaine.”

  “No, I’m not. Mr. Sorenson was discreet.”

  Abel sighed. “Did other women ever come to the office for him?”

  Elaine hesitated. “Sometimes.”

  “Who?”

  “I told you, I don’t know. There’s one woman who comes by every few weeks. Tall. Red hair. She’s older, probably in her forties. They were very… friendly with each other.”

  “You never asked who she was?”

  “Well, one time she came by, and Mr. Sorenson was on the phone. When I asked for her name, she said, ‘Tell him it’s his alpha girl.’ She thought that was very funny.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Were there other women, too?”

  Elaine looked unhappy. “Yes.”

  “Did his wife know about them?”

  “You’d have to ask her. I don’t know how much she knew. Mr. Sorenson was gone a lot, and sometimes Mrs. Sorenson would call, wondering where he was. And, uh, who he was with.”

  “Did he take any personal trips recently?”

  Elaine nodded. “Yes, he was in the Twin Cities over the weekend.”

  “Doing what?”

  “He didn’t talk about it. I made reservations for him at the Saint Paul Hotel. He was gone over the weekend and came back on Monday afternoon. He seemed distracted.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. He talked about seeing a play at the Ordway, but other than that, he didn’t say anything about his trip.”

  “What happened after he got back on Monday?”

  “He wasn’t in the office for more than a few minutes before he was gone again. Then he was in on Tuesday and Wednesday, but he had the door closed almost the whole day.”

  “Did he talk to his wife yesterday?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about his calendar? What appointments did he have?”

  “He didn’t have any meetings during the day, but he had me set up an appointment for yesterday evening.”

  “He met someone last night? After-hours?”

  Elaine nodded.

  “Was it a woman?”

  “No. It was a psychiatrist named Tony Wells.”

  “Tony?” Abel asked, surprised.

  “That’s right.”

  Abel knew Tony Wells; he was the department’s primary profiler on sex crimes. He also did trauma counseling for a lot of the region’s cops and crime victims.

  “Was Mr. Sorenson seeing Tony professionally?” Abel asked.

  “Oh, no, Mr. Sorenson never saw a therapist. He was as solid as a rock. It was his wife. Mr. Sorenson told me that she had been getting counseling for months.”

  NINE

  Stride lit a cigarette as he waited on the porch at Tanjy Powell’s downstairs apartment. This was his first of the day, and it was already late afternoon. The wind mussed his wavy, salt-and-pepper hair with cold fingers. He glanced up at the sky, which was a bumpy mix of browns and blues. A few stray flurries floated in the air. After a few seconds, he turned back to the yellow door and pounded on it again with his fist, then listened carefully. There wasn’t a breath of life inside.

  According to Lauren Erickson, Tanjy hadn’t come to work since she fled the dress shop on Monday afternoon. She didn’t appear to be home either.

  He came down off the porch and looked up at the old Victorian. The windows were shuttered; no one peeked out at him. The house was a relic in need of fresh paint and new shingles. Duluth was a city of old neighborhoods and aging beauties like this one, which reflected the money and glamour of the city in its heyday, when taconite flowed like a river and filled the coffers of the entire northern region. The mining river was a trickle now, and the houses showed it. Unlike the Twin Cities to the south, which boasted new suburbs with manicured lawns, Duluth was left with its old homes and their fading glory. Stride actually preferred it that way. He didn’t mind if the floors slanted and the doors hung twisted in their frames. He hated cookie-cutter houses.

  He followed the stone foundation around to the rear and wound up in a backyard no bigger than a postage stamp. The house butted up to an alley and then to the back sides of homes on the next street. They were all in disrepair. Most of the houses here were subdivided, turned into low-rent apartments for students and nurses. A summer lounge chair was half-buried in snow. A charcoal grill sat rusting. He saw animal tracks cutting across the yard. Two windows on the wall of a one-car garage were broken. He trudged over to the garage and looked inside. The shards of glass were dirty and dull. There was no car in the garage.

  Back at the rear door of the house, he knocked and shouted, “Tanjy!”

  He pushed hard against the door with his shoulder. It was locked. He tried to see through the white shutters, but they were closed up tight.

  “Meow,” said a voice at his feet. He looked down and saw a long-haired gray cat, with snow and dirt matting the ends of its fur, rubbing against his leg. Stride bent down and scratched the cat’s head and was rewarded with a purr. The cat strolled away down the length of the back porch and then disappeared inside the house through one of the windows. Stride followed him, snapping on gloves. He found a jagged hole, large enough that he could reach inside and unlock the window. He pushed it up and squeezed his body through the frame. He found himself in a dark, narrow hallway leading to the kitchen. Two cat bowls were pushed against the wall, both empty.

  “Police,” he called out. “Anyone here?”

  There was no response.

  The air in the apartment was stale, as if it had been bottled up for days. Stride checked the kitchen and smelled no remnants of food. The sink was empty. He retraced his steps and followed the hallway to the living room, where he was confronted by a two-feet-high crucifix nailed to a white wall. Below the cross, he noticed stacks of Christian sheet music on a banged-up upright piano.

  He saw a photograph of Tanjy with her parents on an end table made of taupe metal and glass. Her parents had died last winter on the Bong Bridge to Wisconsin, when a shroud of fog settled over the top of the span unexpectedly and caused a string of accidents. Stride picked up the frame and looked at the photo. Tanjy was in her late twenties, with long black hair and a slim body. Her father had been white, and her mother black, and the mocha-colored features of Tanjy’s face were in perfect proportion. She had thin, sharply angled eyebrows that made her look wicked. Her lips made dimples at the corners of her mouth when she smiled, and she had a gleam in her brown eyes that made him think she was enjoying a secret joke. Men responded to her as if she were an erotic puzzle that they wanted to unlock. When she first came to City Hall, he watched the officers in his Detective Bureau become as flustered as tongue-tied teenagers.

  Tanjy came to him with a terrible story. She had been abducted on a Wednesday night in early November from a dark parking ramp off Michigan Street. The man blindfolded and gagged her, tied her up, and drove her to Grassy Point Park, a tiny and deserted green space jutting out into Saint Louis Bay. The park was in the shadow of the arc of the Bong Bridge where her parents had died. He tied her hands and feet to the steel mesh of the barbed wire fence that separated the park from the train tracks of the seaport. When he removed her blindfold, she could see the graffiti-covered train cars and the looming black mountains of coal. He cut off her clothes until she was naked and cold, suspended on the fence, and raped her from behind. When he was done, he left her there with her car. It had all been planned out, she said; he had another car waiting for him in the park. She didn’t see the car and couldn’t give any description of the rapist. Eventually, she bit through the tape with her teeth and freed herself.

  This all happened on Wednesday, she said. It was Friday when she came to Stride to report the rape. She was c
leaned up and impeccably dressed. She didn’t cry or raise her voice or show any emotion at all as she described what happened. She declined to submit to a physical examination and told them she had already visited her own clinic. It may as well have happened to someone else.

  Had Stride been inside Tanjy’s house back then, he would have noticed all of her religious icons and recognized the Christlike imagery of Tanjy crucified on the fence. That would have been his first clue that something was wrong.

  Her rape was big news in the Duluth media. Stranger rapes were rare and terrifying in the city. Two days later, though, the daily newspaper printed an interview with a young stockbroker named Mitchell Brandt, who was Tanjy’s old boyfriend. He described her obsession with rape in lurid and explicit detail—how she insisted that he pretend to rape her every time they were in bed, how she masturbated in the shower to rape fantasies every day, and how she posted erotic stories and poetry on the Internet that dealt with stranger rapes.

  Within days, Tanjy became a pariah. The story went national. She became the butt of jokes by Jay Leno, Saturday Night Live, cable news channels, YouTube videos, and dozens of bloggers. Her support in the city evaporated. A week later, Tanjy met Stride in a coffee shop and admitted what he already suspected. She had fabricated the entire story. There was never any rape. It was a fantasy.

  Stride wanted to file charges against her for filing a false police report, but he let it go under pressure from Dan and K-2, and the story disappeared from the headlines. Tanjy went underground.

  Stride called her several weeks later. He was still angry with her, but he was worried that she might have suffered a breakdown under the barrage of media attention. Tanjy thanked him for his call in that silken voice of hers but declined his offer of help. In a way, he was glad of that, but he learned nothing new from the call. She was as calm and emotionless as ever. The same erotic enigma.

  And now she was missing.