In the Dark aka The Watcher

by Brian Freeman

  In the Dark aka The Watcher

  Brian Freeman

  Lieutenant Jonathan Stride has never forgotten the case that made him decide to join the police force. Back in the 1970s, Laura – sister of Stride's girlfriend – was murdered. The obvious suspect was a vagrant, who slipped through the hands of the police, including Stride's detective hero Roy. Now, though, Stride's looking at the case in a new light. Tish Verdure, an old friend of Laura's, has come home, and she's certain that the killer was a local boy, now an attorney with connections at the highest level. Stride's soon convinced that there was a deliberate decision to direct the investigation towards a simple solution and away from Tish's suggested perpetrator, but he's also sure that Tish is hiding a secret about the past. A secret that could have shattering consequences – including a second murder…

  Brian Freeman

  In the Dark aka The Watcher

  The fourth book in the Jonathan Stride series, 2008

  For Marcia

  That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

  Looking as if she were alive.

  – ROBERT BROWNING

  WHO KILLED LAURA STARR?

  By Tish Verdure

  PROLOGUE

  July 4, 1977

  When I arrived home near midnight, I could still hear the whistle and pop of fireworks in the neighborhood. The slashing rain had finally diminished to drizzle and fog, and the streets were alive with illegal celebrations. Starbursts opened like hazy flowers over the trees. Sparklers hissed. Bottle rockets screamed. The summer night smelled like candy and burnt-out matches as I stood in the yard and watched the rainbow of lights around me. In the next block, I heard kids whooping as if they were bloodthirsty Indians. I felt wet and wild myself.

  When I looked up, I saw that Laura’s upstairs window was dark. There were no signs of life.

  I crept into our house through the screen door and tracked damp, bare footsteps across the kitchen floor. I was quiet. I didn’t want my father to hear me and ask me questions about where I had been and what I had done tonight. My mouth could lie, but not my face. If he saw me, he would ask me about Laura, too. Where was she? Who was she with? I didn’t want to risk a repeat of last night.

  Dad and Laura. Bitter argument.

  I took the stairs two at a time, bolted into my bedroom, and locked the door behind me. I felt dreamy. Maybe this was what it was like to be on drugs. Without turning on the lights, I peeled off my soaked clothes down to my dirty skin. My thighs were bruised and sore. I was sticky down there, where some of it had leaked out. My body ached inside, but it was a good ache. A first-time ache.

  My independence day.

  Oh, God, the pill! I couldn’t forget that, not tonight. I rummaged through my underwear drawer and found the pink plastic container I kept hidden in the back. I thought about taking two, just to be sure, but that was stupid. I also thought about throwing open my bedroom window and shouting to the world: CINDY STARR IS NOT A VIRGIN! Really stupid.

  I pulled on clean panties, jumped into my pajama bottoms, and slipped a Fleetwood Mac T-shirt over my head. I didn’t take a shower or brush my teeth. I lay down on top of the blankets with my eyes wide open. No way I was going to sleep tonight. I was too full of Jonny.

  I had dropped him off at his house after we left the park. His mother was waiting up for him. She doesn’t like me, but I know what she’s been through since she lost Jonny’s dad. It was that way with my dad, three years ago, when my mom died. Mrs. Stride is terrified of losing her son, like Jonny is the last thing that reminds her of her husband. And I’m a threat. She knows I love him. We’re going to get married, I don’t know when, but we’re going to get married. I’m going to take him away from her.

  Too many things in my head!

  I sat up in bed and pushed my long hair back behind my ears on both sides. I needed to talk to someone. I don’t have a million girlfriends, because there’s always too much to do at home to be out spending time with friends. I thought about going downstairs and calling Jonny again, just to hear his voice one last time, but he was probably in bed by now, and his mother would answer, and that wouldn’t be a good thing at all.

  I decided to talk to Laura. The truth is, I don’t do that a lot.

  You have to understand that Laura and I have always been close, but not really close, you know? I’m seventeen, she’s eighteen. It’s just the two of us, but we’re like magnets that push each other apart. I’m the funny one, the athlete, the flirt, and Laura is moody, mysterious, and scared of boys. Being opposites as sisters isn’t such a good thing. You’re always looking in the mirror and thinking about what you don’t have.

  It’s been hard for Laura since Mom died. She and Dad scream at each other all the time. Mostly, they argue about God. Laura stopped going to church after Mom’s accident, like it was God’s fault that we lost her. Dad tells her she’s going to hell for turning her back on Jesus. Yeah, he really says stuff like that. Dad has always been a starched-shirt-on-Sunday Christian, even more so these past few years without Mom. He talks about God punishing him for his sins. I think it was just a drunk driver.

  Me, I found out who I was after we lost Mom. I know how that sounds, but I had to take over, do the cooking, do the cleaning, keep the house together. I decided that you have to pick a direction in life, and that’s that. I’m going to go to college, marry Jonny, become a physical therapist, and help people recover from serious injuries. You know, like Mom never got a chance to do. Laura is jealous that I’m so sure of where I’m going.

  I made up my mind to talk to her. I got out of bed and slipped down the hallway to her room. You can’t really be quiet, because the floorboards screech like witches. I tapped gently on her door.

  “Laura?”

  On most nights, the yellow lamp beside her bed glowed until very late, and I would find her with a book under her nose. Tonight there was no light under the door. When she didn’t answer, I turned the knob carefully and went inside.

  “Laura?” I said again.

  She wasn’t there. She hadn’t come home yet. I switched on the light, which made my eyes squint and blink. Her room was the way it always was. Laura was messy. Clothes on the floor. Albums stacked on her dresser by the record player. Posters of Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt, both a little crooked where they were taped on the wall. Books everywhere. Virginia Woolf. Sylvia Plath. Gail Sheehy.

  Where was she?

  I thought back to the evening in the park. Laura and I drove up there together. I was meeting Jonny after his softball game, and he and I were going down to the lake to swim. I knew tonight was going to be the first time for us. I’d been planning it for weeks.

  The thing was, before Jonny showed up, Laura was acting weird. She was saying scary stuff I didn’t understand. Then she asked me if I could keep a secret. I said sure, I could keep a secret forever if I needed to, which was true. But she never got a chance to tell me what it was. Instead, she went off by herself onto the trails. It was night. The rain was pouring down.

  I never should have let her go.

  I told myself that everything was okay. Laura had a rendezvous with a boy. Just like me and Jonny. That was why she was late tonight. I almost left her room, but then I saw something on her bed, and I realized I was wrong.

  The letter was just like the others that had arrived anonymously over the past two months. Laura told me they had stopped. Why did she lie? I unfolded the piece of paper and stared at the grainy black-and-white photograph and what was scrawled across the page in red ink and almost sank to my knees and threw up.

  As I held it in my hand, I remembered something else from the park. Before the storm broke, before Jonny found us, Laura kept saying that
someone was hiding in the woods.

  Watching her.

  I knew I had to go back.

  I flew downstairs with my car keys. I was still wearing my pajama bottoms and T-shirt. It was now past one in the morning, and most of the fireworks outside had long since burned down to scorched black patches on the grass. I drove my Dad’s Opel Manta, and the streets were empty, so I went fast through the gray glow of the fog. It took me fifteen minutes to make my way back to the wilderness refuge near Tischer Creek. I didn’t recognize any of the cars in the matted weeds. The park was sprawling, and I was sure that there were kids hiding under the cover of darkness, doing what Jonny and I had done earlier.

  I had no idea where to find her. I shouted, “Laura!”

  I thought I heard whispering. I began to get scared and feel foolish and stupid for being here on my own. I pumped my arms and ran into the center of the muddy ground we used as a softball field and spun in circles, trying to see into the trees and trails through the mist. I heard thousands of crickets chirping madly. The grass underneath my feet was spongy and wet. I almost never wore shoes during the summer.

  “Laura!”

  The dark silhouette of a heron with its giant wingspan and odd, dangling legs flew lazily over my head. I had flushed it with my shouting. It swooped toward the cool water of the lake and disappeared. I headed the same way, searching for the break in the trees that led to the south beach, where Laura and I had waited for Jonny a few hours earlier.

  I never made it that far. Thirty yards away, I came upon something in the grass.

  Laura’s shoe. A pink PF Flyer.

  I picked it up, looked around for the other shoe, and didn’t see it. I hunted in the field for anything else that belonged to her, but all I saw was cigarette butts and beer bottles. I knew I had to go into the woods to find her. Near where I was standing, holding her shoe, I saw a trail that tracked north along the lakeshore, in between the birches. Some kind of unspoken bond between sisters told me that was where she had gone.

  When I followed it, the trail swallowed me up. The moon vanished. I took careful steps, not wanting to make noise when I didn’t know what was ahead of me. I didn’t shout Laura’s name anymore. The path was covered in a crackling bed of pine. Rain dripped down through the covering crowns of trees. Wind snickered through the trees and landed like a warm, wet breath on my neck.

  Long minutes passed. I didn’t usually come this way, so the path was unfamiliar. My mind made up scary stories about what was in the woods near me. I had no idea how far I had gone or whether I should have taken one of the crisscrossing trails that led uphill away from the lake. If anyone was two feet away, I wouldn’t have known it. This was the kind of place where monsters felt real.

  I saw a pale break in the darkness ahead, where the trees thinned. There was a part of me that wanted to turn and go back. I didn’t want to see this secret place and what was hiding there.

  Somehow I knew. I just knew.

  I heard water tap-tapping on wet sand. I emerged from the woods into a clearing eighty feet across, a notch in the forest where the lake swooshed onto a ribbon of beach that bubbled toward the trees in a half-moon. Gold streaks were wavy on the lake. I could see very clearly after the darkness of the trail.

  My hand shot to my mouth and I caught myself in midscream.

  I ran.

  “Laura,” I whispered, my voice strangled.

  It was worse than anything I could have imagined. I saw the aluminum baseball bat beside her body, shiny and glistening and sticky. I smelled copper. I sank to my knees, my arms outstretched, my hands quivering in the air. My lips murmured like I was saying a prayer, and a whimper rumbled out of my chest.

  “Oh, no, no, no.”

  She was all red. Red everywhere. Like she was drowned in wine. Her beautiful golden hair was the color of garish lipstick. Crimson fangs dripped from the wings of the butterfly tattoo on her naked back. Mosquitoes littered her skin, some living, some dead, trapped in the pool and unable to fly from the feast. Her face was toward me, cheek in the mud, but there was no face anymore, no smile, no soft brown eyes, nothing that had ever been my sister. Life had been hammered out of her blow by blow. I tried to imagine the fury that had done this and couldn’t conceive of a heart so black.

  I put a tentative hand on her arm. Her skin was already unnaturally cold. My hand came away like I had dipped it in finger paints.

  That was when I heard it. Branches snapping. Movement. Breathing. Not from Laura, but from the black forest. I scooped up the baseball bat and scrambled to my feet. My fingernails dug into the leather grip. I wound up fiercely, ready to swing.

  Someone was behind me…

  PART ONE. Independence Day

  1

  Lieutenant Jonathan Stride shielded his eyes as the glass door shot a laser beam of sunlight at his face, and when he could see again, he realized that the woman who had stepped out onto the patio was his late wife, Cindy.

  For an instant, time slowed down the way it does on a long fall, while the buzz of conversation continued around him. He forgot how to breathe. The enigmatic smile he remembered from years ago was the same. When she lifted her sunglasses, her brown eyes stared back at him with a familiar glint over the heads of the others in the restaurant. She was in her late forties, as she would have been if she had lived. Small, like a fairy, but athletic and strong. Suntanned skin. An aura of intensity.

  It wasn’t her, of course.

  More than five years had passed since Cindy died of cancer as he sat beside her hospital bed. The pain of her loss had retreated to a distant ache in a corner of his soul. Even so, there were moments like this when he saw a stranger and something about her brought it all back. It didn’t take much, just the look in her eyes or the way she carried herself, to stir his memory.

  This woman was looking back at him, too. She was small but a couple of inches taller than Cindy, who had barely crossed five feet four on tiptoes. Her blond hair fell breezily around her shoulders, and her sunglasses were now tented on top of her head. Her earrings were sapphire studs. She wore a blue-flowered summer skirt that hung to her knees, baby blue heels, a white blouse, and a lightweight tan leather jacket with a braided fringe. She balanced one hand on a narrow hip as she watched him. The ties of her jacket dangled between her legs.

  He knew her from somewhere.

  “Your five seconds are up,” Serena Dial told him.

  Stride broke away. “What?”

  Serena sipped her lemonade and eyed the woman in the leather jacket as she was shown to a table on the patio. A gust of wind blew off the lake and rustled her own silky dark hair. “You get a free pass to look at any woman for up to five seconds. After that, it officially becomes flirting.”

  “She reminded me of someone,” Stride said.

  “Sure she did.”

  Serena was an ex-cop and now a private investigator. She and Stride had shared a bed for almost two years.

  Stride turned to his partner in the Detective Bureau, Maggie Bei, as if consulting an Olympic judge for a ruling. “Is this five-second thing commonly known?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” Maggie said, with a wink at Serena.

  Stride knew when he was on the losing end of an argument. “Okay, I was flirting,” he admitted.

  Serena stretched out her arm lazily and used the back of her hand to caress Stride’s cheek, which was rough with black-and-gray stubble. She sidled her long fingers through his wavy hair and leaned forward to plant a slow kiss on his lips. She tasted like citrus and sugar.

  “Most animals mark their territory by urinating,” Maggie remarked, with her mouth full of a large bite of her steak sandwich. She batted her almond-shaped eyes innocently at Serena and grinned.

  Stride laughed. “Can we get back to work?”

  “Go ahead,” Serena told him. She swiped a French fry from Maggie’s plate and bit into it while baring her teeth.

  “What’s the latest on the peeper?” Stride asked Maggie. H
e stole a sideways glance across the restaurant at the other woman and noticed that she was doing the same thing to him from over her menu.

  “He struck again on Friday night,” Maggie replied. “A sixteen-year-old girl in Fond du Lac noticed a guy in the trees outside her bedroom when she was getting undressed. She screamed, and he took off.”

  “Did she get a look at him?”

  Maggie shook her head. “She thought he was tall and skinny, but that’s it. It was dark.”

  “That’s nine incidents in the last month,” Stride said.

  “It’s summer. Time for the perverts to come out.”

  The calendar said June 1. It was late Sunday afternoon, but the sun was warm and high over the steep hillside on which the city of Duluth, Minnesota, was built. It wouldn’t be dark until after nine o’clock. After the usual long, bitter winter, the tourists were streaming back on the weekends to watch the ore boats come and go through the narrow channel that led out into Lake Superior. The Canal Park area, where the three of them sat on the rooftop patio of Grandma’s Saloon, teemed with lovers and children feeding noisy gulls by the boardwalk. As tourists and locals collided, and the weather got warmer, Stride and his team got busier. Crime was creeping up for the season, but so far, it was nothing more than the usual run of thefts, break-ins, drunks, and drugs.

  Plus a peeping tom with a fetish for blond high school girls.

  Stride had overseen the city’s Detective Bureau, which handled major crimes in Duluth, for more than a decade, and he had steeled himself to human behavior that defied all rational explanation. Sexual abuse. Meth labs. Suicide. Homicide. The peeper had shown no inclination to violence, but Stride didn’t minimize the danger of someone who liked to watch young girls undress in their bedrooms. It was a short trip through the looking glass to molestation and rape.