In the Dark aka The Watcher

by Brian Freeman

  Serena wondered, not for the first time, what she was doing here. She was a homicide detective. A private investigator. She had a hard time imagining herself working for a law firm, even though the work would not be all that different from what she did now. She would still interview victims and witnesses. She would try to find sources inside corporations to uncover things that their executives wanted to keep hidden. It was still investigative work. She worried that the job wouldn’t be as exhilarating as her time on the street, but her experiences over the winter had worn down her physical and mental willingness to put herself in constant danger. For at least a year or two, she wanted to take a step back and rethink her life.

  The opportunity had come out of the blue. Two months earlier, Peter Stanhope had read an article in the Duluth newspaper about Serena’s background as a detective in Las Vegas. He called her with a freelance assignment to uncover evidence of fraudulent billing practices at a Twin Cities hospital. Over the course of the next six weeks, Serena built relationships with two nurses and an accountant, who turned over papers that allowed Peter’s lawyers to pinpoint their discovery request and fast-track settlement negotiations. Peter was so impressed that he called Serena the following week to ask her to join the firm as a permanent employee.

  She had been confused by Stride’s reluctance when she told him about the job offer, because she knew he wanted her to find a less risky line of work. Now that she knew his background with Peter, she understood. Her own excitement had soured, too.

  A paralegal escorted Serena to Peter’s office at 10:45. The corner suite was at the rear of the building, with a sweeping view toward the lake. Like the rest of the firm, Peter’s office was decorated as if the year were 1950. On some level, Serena thought, Peter was trying to live up to his father’s legacy. It couldn’t be easy living in the shadow of an industrial giant. Serena thought it was interesting that after Randall Stanhope died, the first thing Peter had done was sell the family business.

  Peter came around his desk and shook her hand firmly. “Serena, I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “This is what’s called ‘lawyer time.’ We are perpetually late for everything except court dates. It’s an occupational hazard.”

  “That’s all right,” Serena told him.

  He gestured at the round oak conference table near the window. “Please.”

  They both sat down. Serena noticed a photograph over Peter’s shoulder of Randall Stanhope and his son, who was about ten years old in the picture, standing on the span of the aerial lift bridge over the ship canal near the Point. Peter saw her staring.

  “That’s one of the few photos of me and my father together,” he told her. “Randall didn’t spend a lot of time with me. Anyone who says those were simpler times doesn’t know how hard he worked.”

  “I’m a little surprised that you’re a lawyer now and not CEO of Stanhope Industries,” Serena said.

  “I saw the writing on the wall,” Peter replied. “The big money in steel was long gone and never coming back. Too much foreign competition. When Randall died, I figured I would let someone else run the company into the ground. Which they did.”

  “So you decided to become a lawyer?”

  “Yes, Randall’s probably turning in his grave. He hated lawyers. To me, though, litigation is the ultimate competition.” He added, “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  Peter retreated to his desk to phone his secretary.

  This meeting was only the second time that Serena had met Peter Stanhope in person. Peter didn’t hide his money. His suit was cut out of a charcoal fabric that glistened in the light. His shoes were like mirrors. He wore an amber-colored silk tie with a matching pocket square, a Tiffany watch, and silver cuff links engraved with his initials. In her heels, Serena was about two inches taller than Peter. He was handsome, though, with a stocky, muscular frame. He had a strong chin and sunburned nose, and freckles dotted his face. He wore glasses that made two tiny copper circles around his eyes. His thinning silver hair was swept straight back. Like Stride, he was in his late forties.

  Serena always found that intelligence was in the eyes, and Peter’s eyes were smart. He carried himself with polish and confidence, like someone at ease in his own skin. Even so, you couldn’t have so much wealth, or so much success, and not have arrogance ooze through in your demeanor. Every now and then, Peter smirked, and Serena saw the cocky boy peek out from his soul. She knew that lawyers were experts at wearing masks, and she wondered who the real Peter was, the savvy professional or the arrogant teenager. Probably both.

  “Have you thought about the job?” he asked as he sat down again.

  “I have, and I’m still thinking. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Of course. Take all the time you need, but not a minute more. I want you with me. You could do great work here. Plus, the compensation would be a lot more than you ever made as a detective or a PI.”

  “That wouldn’t be hard,” she said wryly.

  “You told me you needed to talk to me. I assume you have some questions?”

  “I do, but not about the job.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wonder if you remember a girl named Tish Verdure,” Serena said.

  Peter rocked back in his chair and pursed his lips. “Tish Verdure. I’m pretty sure there was a girl in my high school named Tish.”

  “There was.”

  “Well, what about her?”

  “She’s back in town. She’s writing a book about the murder of Laura Starr.”

  Peter’s face darkened. “I take it you’ve been hearing stories about my teenage years.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Stories that make you wonder if you want to work for a man like me.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Serena admitted.

  Peter let his chair fall forward, and he leaned across the table. “Well, I appreciate your candor, and I’ll try to be candid, too. First of all, let’s get one thing clear. I’m not going to apologize for who I am or who I was. I was an asshole in school, and a lot of people will tell you I still am. That probably includes many of the women I’ve dated.”

  “That’s pretty much what I heard.”

  Peter shrugged. “I’m not surprised, but I don’t care what anyone else thinks. Look, Randall had more money than God back then, and I thought it gave me a free pass to rule the world. I was smart, but I didn’t do squat. I slept with every girl I could. I was an arrogant son of a bitch.”

  “Are you trying to win points for honesty?”

  “Not at all. I told you, no apologies. This is me.”

  “You know that my partner is Jonathan Stride,” Serena said.

  “Of course. I didn’t know Lieutenant Stride well back in school, and I don’t know him very well now. But the things I remember probably don’t give him a very high opinion of me.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Okay, but here’s where I draw the line. I did not kill Laura Starr.”

  “Who did?”

  “The police thought it was a vagrant.”

  “Is that what you thought?”

  “All I know is that it wasn’t me.”

  “She was killed with your baseball bat.”

  “That doesn’t prove a thing. The bat was lying in a field for anyone to pick up.”

  Peter’s secretary knocked on the door and came in bearing a small silver coffee urn and two china cups. She poured out and left without saying a word. Serena tasted the coffee and recognized the dark flavor of Star-bucks.

  “So I take it that this writer, Tish, has her sights set on me,” Peter said. “She wants to nail me for the murder.”

  “You’re certainly on her list.”

  “You know, bad publicity doesn’t bother me. I get my share all the time. I just hate to see old gossip used against me.”

  “I’m not sure you can pass it off as gossip,” Serena said. “Stride tells me that you were a suspect. Some people think that Ray W
allace deliberately steered the investigation away from you.”

  “Ray was a problematic figure as a cop. We both know that.”

  “A few years later, he was forced to resign as chief of police because of a bribery scheme involving Stanhope Industries,” Serena pointed out.

  “That was long after I sold the company.”

  “Yes, but Ray’s relationship started with Randall. Your father.”

  “All I can tell you is that if Ray helped me behind the scenes, there was no need for him to do so. I was innocent.”

  Serena frowned. Peter was convincing, but selling stories to a jury was his job. “Tell me what you remember about Tish Verdure,” she said.

  Peter sipped his coffee. “I remember that she and Laura were thick as thieves. Both of them blond, very cute.”

  “Did you date Tish?” Serena asked.

  “Sure, I took a run at her. I took a run at every blonde with great tits back then. I still do. Tish said no. Shut me down cold.”

  “You?”

  Peter grinned. Serena saw the cocky boy flash in his eyes. “Amazing, huh? Well, Tish was a weird girl. Laura was pretty much her only friend. No dad, and then her mother got shot. Tough life.”

  Serena held up her hand. “Wait a minute, Tish’s mother was shot?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Peter pursed his lips. “She was a teller at a downtown bank. There was a robbery that went bad. The mother was a hostage who didn’t make it out.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember. Long before high school. Tish probably wasn’t even in her teens when it happened. I only knew about it because kids talked a lot. Everyone wondered why Tish was so closed off, and the rumor mill spread the word about her mother pretty quickly. Like I said, she was a weird girl.”

  “But you asked her out anyway.”

  “I was a slave to my libido,” Peter said. “Some things don’t change.”

  “Who did you go after first? Tish or Laura?”

  “Tish, actually.”

  “And when she said no, you went after her best friend?”

  “Something like that.”

  Serena shook her head. “You’re right, Peter. You were an asshole back then.”

  “I never said I wasn’t.”

  “Did it bother you when Tish turned you down?”

  “Not really.”

  “I don’t imagine too many girls turned you down.”

  “That’s why it didn’t bother me,” Peter said with a little smile.

  “I heard Tish and Laura had a big fight that spring. Could they have been arguing about you?”

  “About me? I can’t imagine why.”

  “Except you were dating Laura by then, right?”

  Peter stared at Serena. He took another drink of coffee. “Right.”

  “So maybe Tish didn’t like Laura hanging out with you.”

  “If she did, I never heard about it.”

  “How did you meet Laura?”

  “We were in Miss Mathisen’s geometry class together in our junior year. So was Tish.”

  “Tish told us that Laura broke up with you after a couple of dates because you wanted sex and she didn’t.”

  “Is that what she said? Well, she’s wrong, but it was a long time ago.”

  “Is there any reason Laura would have wanted to keep your relationship a secret?”

  “I have no idea, but you were a teenage girl once. Isn’t that the kind of thing that teenage girls do?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Serena wanted to ask more about the night Laura was killed, but she knew she had pushed Peter as far as she could. The rest was in Jonny’s hands. He was the cop, not her. Not anymore.

  “I appreciate your letting me ask you all these questions,” she told him. “I’m still a detective at heart, I guess.”

  “That’s why I want to hire you.”

  “I know. I’ll get back to you very soon about the job.”

  “I may be in touch even sooner than that,” Peter said.

  “Oh?”

  “I have another freelance job for you.”

  “What’s that?” Serena asked.

  “Well, if Tish pursues this book, it could start causing me problems in the media. They’ll drag up old lies again. I need your help.”

  “What can I do?”

  “You can find out who killed Laura,” Peter told her. “Or barring that, you can prove it wasn’t me.”

  11

  Tish was late.

  Stride sat on a stone bench amid the rose gardens of Leif Erickson Park. He ate a roast beef sandwich and inhaled the floral aroma of thousands of red, yellow, and white roses surrounding him. Nearby, a white gazebo overlooked the lake, on a bluff adjacent to the boardwalk that followed the cliff’s edge and wound down along the shore to Canal Park. At lunchtime, with a huge blue sky overhead, the park was crowded with people picnicking in the grass and admiring the flowers.

  He saw Tish park on the opposite side of London Road and get out of a navy blue Honda Civic. She waited while a package delivery truck passed her and then crossed the street to the park. She waved at Stride and followed the cobblestone path through the garden to join him.

  “Hi,” she said breathlessly, sitting down. She had no lunch with her, but she carried a white takeaway cup of coffee. She wore sunglasses, and she was dressed in a white Georgia T-shirt and gray sweatpants. She wore Nikes with no socks.

  “Hello, Tish.”

  “Sorry I’m so late. I was at the city engineer’s office, and I had to wait for their copy machine.”

  “What did you need there?” Stride asked.

  “Aerial photos of the city from the late 1970s.”

  “For the book?”

  Tish nodded. “I wanted to see exactly what the terrain looked like back then.”

  “The Duluth paper ran a story about you and your book today,” Stride said.

  “Yes, I thought it might flush out more people who remember what happened back then. There aren’t too many still around.”

  “A heads-up would have been nice,” Stride said. “I’m getting calls.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. I didn’t think about that.”

  Stride took another bite of his sandwich and didn’t reply. He saw the delivery truck that had passed Tish return down London Road in the opposite direction and pull into a no-parking zone across from them.

  “I heard about the break-in at your condo,” Stride said.

  “The cops who showed up thought it was just kids.”

  “Probably,” Stride told her. “They may have seen you move in and figured they could make a quick score. Those lakefront condos usually go to people with money.”

  Tish shrugged. “No such luck. I’m doing a spread on Duluth for a Swedish magazine, and the condo managers let me use an unsold unit for the summer. That’s one of the perks of being a travel writer.”

  “We’re still looking into the break-in, but it sounds like nothing was taken.”

  “Right, my laptop was in my car,” Tish said. She added, “I don’t think it was kids, though.”

  “No?”

  “I think someone’s trying to scare me off.”

  “Because of your book?”

  “Yes. I suppose you think that’s paranoid.”

  “A little,” Stride admitted. “It’s been thirty years, Tish.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Tell me about the life of a travel writer,” he said, changing the subject. “It sounds glamorous.”

  “Not as much as you might think. Sometimes I feel permanently homeless. Whenever I fall in love with a place, I leave.”

  “What was your favorite place?”

  Tish blew on her coffee and then took a sip. “Tibet. I love the mountains, but I couldn’t live there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Heights,” Tish said. “I hate heights. I always have. I had to cross th
is rope bridge over a canyon, and I swear they had to sedate me and pull me across on my ass with my eyes closed.”

  Stride laughed.

  “What about you?” Tish asked. “What are you afraid of?”

  “Me? I don’t know.”

  “Come on, there must be something,” Tish said. “Or do tough guys like you never get scared?”

  “I’m afraid of a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Loss.”

  She looked at him. “You mean like losing Cindy?”

  “I mean like losing anything. I hate endings, good-byes, funerals, everything like that. The ends of books. The ends of movies. The ends of vacations. I like it when things keep going, but they never do.”

  “How about you and Serena?” Tish asked.

  “What about us?”

  “Will the two of you keep going?”

  Stride frowned. “Why do you care? Do you need to flesh out our characters in your book?”

  “No, it’s not that. I think a lot about you and Cindy, so I wondered if Serena makes you happy.”

  “She does.” He was curt.

  “I’m sorry, is that too personal?”

  He shrugged. “I’m a Minnesotan. We talk about the weather and the Twins, Tish. That’s as personal as I get.”

  “Oh, I forgot,” Tish said. She added, “Beautiful day.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about those Twins?”

  “This could be their year.”

  “You’re right, this is much better,” Tish said, smiling.

  Stride winked and finished his sandwich. He crumpled the wrapper into a ball, got up, and deposited it in a wastebasket twenty yards away. He returned and sat down next to Tish again.

  “Are you expecting a package?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  He nodded at the delivery truck parked illegally fifty yards away. “The driver in that van is watching you. He was following your car when you arrived.”

  Tish stared. A face appeared in the window of the truck and then disappeared. The man had wraparound sunglasses and a shaved head.

  “Can’t you do something?” she asked.