Stalked

by Brian Freeman

  Back in the woods, he waited for her. The cold made him stamp his feet. It was never this cold in the South. He didn’t know how people lived here. It almost made him yearn for the soul-draining humidity of Alabama. His toes grew numb as time wore on, and finally, he saw headlights sweep across the driveway as Serena pulled in and parked. His muscles tensed. He watched her climb out and go inside the house, unaware of his presence. He slipped a receiver inside his ear and heard her footsteps and the rustle of her clothes as she removed her coat. When she got close to the bug, he heard her breathing.

  He half-wondered whether, at some level, she smelled him in the house, too, as he had smelled her inside, like a rumor at the back of her mind. A flashback, a memory.

  He slipped out from behind the trees and made his way to her car, keeping an eye on the cottage windows. Where they were lit, she couldn’t see out, but he froze when he saw her pass in front of the glass and gaze toward him. Their eyes met, as they had so many times when he was watching her. She passed into another room.

  He bent down under her car and positioned the GPS transmitter, then got up and retreated to the beach without looking back. The receiver was still in his ear. He listened to her as he retraced his route toward the van. In the bedroom, he heard her humming as she undressed. He heard the jangle of the loops on her gold belt. Nearby, the water of the shower ran. He pictured her naked body, saw her skin under his hands.

  His cell phone buzzed on his thigh. He was annoyed by the distraction and did a quick survey of the beach to confirm he was alone. He pulled out the phone and recognized the number. Reluctantly, he shut down the receiver in his ear.

  “What?” he hissed.

  “They found Tanjy’s body.”

  “So?”

  “So you told me it would take months. Maybe years.”

  He trudged step-by-step along the gray sheet of ice. The lake rumbled next to him. It was fucking cold.

  “It’s bad luck they found her, but it doesn’t change anything. Don’t worry, you’re safe.”

  “You told me you’d leave the city after this was done.”

  “I will.”

  “So why are you still here?”

  “I have unfinished business,” he snapped.

  “What business?”

  “My business. This one’s personal.”

  The silence across the night air was lethal. “Do you have any idea what’s at stake for me?”

  “That’s your problem,” he said.

  “What other schemes are you running? Tell me.”

  He breathed into the phone and saw steam evaporate like a ghost in front of his face. “You don’t want to know.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I mean, Tanjy wasn’t the only one. I decided to do some others, too.”

  He waited. It was funny how even the most arrogant, coldblooded ego could get punctured like a fat balloon by fear.

  “You’re a monster.”

  “Yeah? What does that make you? Remember, it was your idea.”

  “Who were the others?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Alpha girls don’t give up their secrets.” He laughed.

  “I want you gone. Is that clear? You’ve been well paid.”

  “I’ll decide when I’m done, not you.”

  He snapped the phone shut and turned it off.

  With his other hand, he switched on the receiver again and nestled it in his ear. He was back at the van. He slid inside, cranked the heat, and listened. His feet slowly thawed. He peeled off layers of clothes.

  Inside Serena’s house, the noise of the pipes ended. He heard her return to the bedroom and imagined her nude flesh, pink and scrubbed. Her long, wet hair. Her nipples hard and her mound glistening with moisture. With each of the others, he had imagined he was with Serena. Controlling her. Violating her. Paying her back for those ten years she had stolen from him.

  It was her turn.

  Soon.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Stride was worried. It was almost midnight, and Maggie was late.

  He was parked in the lower lot of the high school, with a vantage on the lights of downtown and the black emptiness of the lake. He had gone through two cigarettes waiting for her. Snow fell in heavy sheets, blowing over the top of the hill and swirling around him like a tornado. It was hard to look straight on into the snow. His eyes squinted, and his face scrunched up, his windburnt cheeks turning pink. Ice clumped in balls on his eyebrows. The flakes streaking toward him were nothing by themselves, but together they were a relentless army. When the wind drove them home, they were like a million knives. They could blind him, freeze him, and bury him in the same storm.

  Gauzy headlights appeared on the road above him and swung down into the lot. He recognized Maggie’s Chevy Avalanche. Maggie drove fast, and the truck weaved on the slick, steep driveway. It was a huge truck for a tiny woman, so big that she needed wooden blocks to reach the pedals. She was a terrible driver. Stride thought she drove recklessly just to spite him, because she was worse whenever he was in the truck with her.

  She parked at an angle near his Bronco and got out. She wore a leather coat that draped to her ankles and high, square-heeled boots. Her hands were shoved in her pockets. She kicked up wet snow as she came closer.

  He hadn’t seen her since he was at her house the night of the murder, and he realized how much he had missed her. He came closer, ready to hug her, but she pulled a hand out of her pocket and held it up to stop him.

  “No,” she told him. “No pity. Especially not from you.”

  The few feet between them may as well have been a canyon. “Come on, Mags. This is me. You don’t have to prove how tough you are.”

  “I sure as hell do.” She looked him up and down. “You ever heard of waiting inside your truck? You look like a goddamn snowman.”

  “I don’t mind the cold.”

  “You mean, you don’t want Serena smelling cigarette smoke inside the truck.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I’m not standing outside. Let’s get in the Avalanche.”

  They walked to opposite sides of her truck. Stride shook off as much snow as he could before climbing inside. The cab was warm, and he took off his gloves. Maggie didn’t look at him. She sat behind the driver’s seat staring at the panoramic view. He realized how strange it felt to see that she was older. There were tiny crow’s-feet beside her eyes and a few strands of gray in her jet-black hair. She would always be a twenty-something kid to him, intense and smart. That was part of the problem—for him, she never grew up. It still felt like yesterday that Maggie was a young cop complaining about the Enger Park Girl murder, chewing on the rim of a Styrofoam coffee cup and insisting they had missed something, when Stride knew they hadn’t missed anything at all. But that was a long, long time ago. It was as if he had put Maggie in a box in his mind, so that bad things never happened to her, but all the while she got older and bad things happened anyway.

  “When?” Stride asked.

  Maggie knew what he meant. She reached out and curled her fingers around the steering wheel and held on tightly. “It happened just before Thanksgiving. Eric was out of town.”

  Stride remembered. She had called in sick for nearly two weeks and blamed it on the flu.

  “I was asleep. He had a knife.” She brushed her hair back behind her ear and showed him a two-inch-long scar. “I’ve blocked out most of the details. I just don’t remember.”

  “Jesus,” Stride murmured.

  “I said no pity, boss. Not from you. Got it?”

  Stride thought that her bravado was cellophane-thick.

  “You know what I did first?” she went on. “You’ll love this. I laughed. It was all so fucking hilarious. This was God’s big joke. I told myself I was dreaming, that I had made it all up in my head, that there was no way this could have happened to me. Then the next thing I knew, I was pounding on the floor and wailing. I sat in the dark and cried for two days.”

&
nbsp; He opened his mouth to say something and then shut it. There was nothing to say.

  “You know what I did next?” Maggie continued. “I threw out all the food in the refrigerator. Nuts, huh? Everything. Right down to the bare shelves, and then I sprayed the whole thing down. Same in every room. I went through a dozen cans of Lysol. I didn’t want to smell anything. The place was like a hospital.”

  He clenched his fists. Maggie saw him do it. “If I ever get my hands on this son of a bitch, I’ll kill him,” he said.

  “I know you want to be a hero, boss, but this happened to me, not you. I’m only telling you this now because I don’t have any choice.”

  “Why didn’t you come to me back then?”

  She turned and stared at him. Her eyes were fierce with pride. “Because this didn’t happen to a cop. It happened to a woman. Don’t you get it? I didn’t want you or any other man to know about this. Not then. Not ever. It was bad enough telling Eric. He wanted me to report it, and I just wanted it to go away. I still do.”

  “At least tell me you got help.”

  “Haven’t you been listening? I didn’t want to talk to anyone. It’s killing me to talk about this now. And yeah, I know, this is rape trauma syndrome, and I was in the acute phase, and I was expressive, not controlled, and you know what? It’s all psycho bullshit. Everything I’ve told rape victims over the years is bullshit. This happened to me. If you haven’t been where I’ve been, you don’t have a fucking clue.”

  He searched for the right thing to say and wound up saying the wrong thing. “I just don’t understand how you of all people would not report this.”

  “You saw what happened to Tanjy. She was humiliated. Destroyed. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me.”

  “It would have been different with you,” Stride insisted.

  Maggie shook her head. “You can be so stupid, boss. You’re a great cop, but you can be so blind sometimes that it drives me crazy. Do you think I don’t have secrets? Do you think there aren’t things that I don’t want out in public?”

  “What things?”

  “That’s none of your business. The whole point is that I didn’t go public because I didn’t want to have my life ruined.”

  “How can I solve this case if you won’t talk to me?” Stride asked.

  Maggie dug inside the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a crumpled note. She smoothed it and handed it to Stride. There was a smeared sentence scrawled across the paper in a man’s handwriting.

  I know who it is.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  “Eric left that for me the night he was killed. At first, I thought he was accusing me of having an affair, but that wasn’t it at all. That wasn’t what he meant.”

  “Tanjy left the same message for Dan Erickson the night she disappeared.”

  Maggie didn’t look surprised. “I think Eric figured out who the rapist was. When I refused to go to the police, I think he went to see Tanjy on his own. Somehow, the two of them found something that led them to the rapist. Then this guy killed them both.”

  Stride recollected the chain of events in his mind. On Monday afternoon, Eric confronted Tanjy on the street in front of Java Jelly, and whatever he told her upset her deeply. Tanjy left work early, and that night, she called Lauren with a secret. I know who it is. Except she never got the chance to tell anyone. Someone killed her and buried her body under the ice. Two days later, Eric was killed, too.

  He lowered the window on the passenger side of the truck. Snow blew in and dampened his face. He lit a cigarette, inhaled the tar into his lungs, and held it outside the window, where the smoke curled away. “Do you have any idea who Eric suspected?”

  “No, but start with Tony. Eric talked to him that night. He may be able to help us.”

  “Maybe Eric suspected Tony was the rapist. You and Tanjy were both patients of his.”

  “Yeah, I thought about that, but Tony says Eric came to him about profiling a sexual predator, and that makes sense. Eric knew we worked with Tony on that kind of shit all the time.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Stride said. “I’ll go back over Tanjy’s police statement, too. If she wasn’t lying to us, then whoever raped her knew that Grassy Point Park was a place she took her boyfriends. At least, Mitchell Brandt says she took him there.”

  “Good.”

  “You’re still hiding something, Mags,” he told her. “My hands are tied if you’re not completely honest with me.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not just thinking about myself. Other people could be hurt by what I say.”

  “They could be hurt by what you don’t say.”

  Their eyes connected. She knew what he meant. The rapist was still out there.

  “If there’s no other way, then I’ll tell you why I couldn’t report the rape, but as far as I know, it has nothing to do with Tanjy. There has to be a different connection.”

  “You know I should go to Teitscher with this. He’s chasing his tail. This could take away the cloud over you, Mags.”

  She reached out and took his hand. It was the kind of intimate gesture she never made with him. She teased him. Winked at him. Insulted him. But she never touched him. “I’m asking you not to do that, Jonathan.”

  He didn’t fight her. “If that’s what you want. For now.”

  “I’m also trying to retrace Eric’s steps,” Maggie added. “I want to know how he found this guy.”

  “What have you found out?”

  Maggie’s eyes gleamed, looking like a cop’s eyes again. “Eric was in the Twin Cities the weekend before he was killed. He came back on Monday, and that’s when he went to see Tanjy. That’s when everything started.”

  “You think he found something on his trip,” Stride concluded.

  “Exactly. That’s why I was late. I was on the phone with people at the Saint Paul Hotel, trying to find out what Eric did while he was there. I got his invoice records from the hotel, and I checked his credit card and cell phone statements online.”

  “And?”

  “He called and charged a ticket to a play at the Ordway Center on Saturday night. One ticket, not two.”

  “The Ordway is right across the park from the Saint Paul Hotel,” Stride said. “He probably just wanted something to do on Saturday night.”

  “That’s what I thought, but I checked with the Ordway anyway and followed up with the season ticket holders who sat next to him.”

  “Did they remember Eric?”

  “Oh, yeah. They said he almost got kicked out of the theater.”

  “Kicked out? Why?”

  “He was bothering the ushers. Asking them a lot of questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  On Monday morning, Serena headed down the Point toward Canal Park, using the street as her path because the plows had cleared it of snow and ice. She took long, graceful strides as she ran. She wore a Lycra bodysuit, leggings, and a down vest, with mufflers over her ears and her long hair tied back in a ponytail. She did three miles in half an hour and made it to the lift bridge that towered overhead like a gray guillotine. Serena drifted to a stop and bent over, resting her hands on her knees. She took several deep breaths and then stretched her head back and stared at the sky. She took a few awkward steps, like a peacock, kicking her legs to keep them loose. She unhitched a bottle of water she kept on a Velcro strap at her waist and squirted a stream into her mouth. It was frosty cold.

  She wandered out on the sidewalk into the center of the bridge. The shipping season was over, so the bridge rarely went up at this time of year. The water in the harbor on her left was frozen over, and even the narrow canal that lapped out into Lake Superior was glazed with ice. She leaned on the steel railing, staring out at the lake.

  She was alone, but the sensation that someone’s eyes were on her refused to go away. The feeling even dogged her at home, where she fe
lt as if she were sharing her life with a ghost. It reminded her of the days in Vegas when Tommy Luck was on her trail. Serena remembered being in his apartment after they arrested him and finding the wall of photographs he had secretly taken of her. Like a shrine. Some on the street. Some in her car. Some, with a telephoto, through the bedroom window of her apartment. All of them disfigured and raped, as if he was fantasizing about the real thing. She kept an eye on Tommy after that, and when he got out on parole the first time, she thought seriously about taking care of him, neat and quick, before he could nurse his obsession again. The Vegas cops would have looked the other way, but Tommy was a nobody, and she decided she didn’t want his corpse on her conscience.

  It wasn’t the first time she had faced that temptation. When Serena was in Phoenix, living her year of hell with her mother and Blue Dog, she thought constantly about ways to kill them. She went to sleep at night drumming up the courage to take a knife and slit his throat while he slept, and then to do the same to her mother. Murder them, and disappear. No one would miss them, and no one would find her. Many times she went so far as to take a kitchen knife and stand in the bedroom doorway and watch them sleep, but she never crossed the threshold. Instead, she ran away to Las Vegas and didn’t look back.

  Serena wondered how her life would be different now if things had gone another way.

  If she had taken the kitchen knife into her mother’s bedroom.

  If she had put a bullet in Tommy Luck’s head.

  Her cell phone rang. She slid it out of the pocket of her vest and checked the calling number, which she didn’t recognize. “Serena Dial.”

  “My name is Nicole Castro,” a woman announced. “I got your number from Archie Gale.”

  “Oh?”

  “He told me that you and I have something in common.” Her voice was ironic and tough, like a comedian who had done too many shows.

  “What’s that?” Serena asked.

  “You’re sleeping with a guy named Jonathan Stride, and my boss used to be a guy named Jonathan Stride.”