In the Dark aka The Watcher

by Brian Freeman

  “I can write him a parking ticket.”

  Tish put down her coffee cup and stripped off her sunglasses. Her face was tense.

  “Do you recognize him?” Stride asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He knows we’ve spotted him.”

  The truck engine started like the growl of a tiger. The delivery truck jerked away from the curb and continued north on London Road. Tish watched it until the van disappeared behind a row of brick buildings.

  “Do you still think I’m paranoid?” she asked.

  Stride wasn’t sure. “Have you noticed the truck before?”

  “Now that I think about it, I may have seen it a number of times in the last few days.”

  “It may be nothing, but I’ll do a check with the delivery company,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I haven’t been ignoring you these past couple weeks,” he added. “I didn’t want to call until I had something more to tell you.”

  “Do you have results back on the DNA tests?”

  Stride nodded. “I got them from the lab this morning.”

  “And?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry. There was no match. We collected DNA from the flap of the envelope on the stalker letter that was sent to Laura, and we were able to get a good sample. When we ran it against the state and FBI databases, we came up empty. Whoever he is or was, he’s not in our files.”

  “Damn.”

  “It was a long shot.”

  “Let me ask you this,” Tish said. “Would Peter Stanhope’s DNA be included in a database somewhere?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “So it could be his DNA, and we just don’t know it.”

  “Sure.”

  “Can’t we get a court to compel him to provide a sample of DNA?” Tish asked.

  “Not without probable cause,” Stride said. “We would need to have something specific to tie him to the murder.”

  “Laura was killed with his bat,” she protested.

  “That might get us a DNA sample if the crime happened last week and if we still had the bat. After thirty years, no judge would grant a motion with what we have today.”

  “You mean, because Peter Stanhope has more money than God.”

  “Frankly, yes. I’m sorry, Tish, but there are certain realities to face here.”

  Tish watched the calm blue water on the lake. A light breeze rippled through her hair. “I can’t believe there’s nothing we can do. There has to be a way to get a DNA sample from Peter.”

  “There’s something else,” Stride said. “More bad news.”

  “What?”

  “This can’t go in the book.”

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “We have additional genetic material from the crime scene. There was semen found near the body. The police kept that fact secret.”

  “You still have the sample? It’s still intact?”

  Stride nodded. “I ran the DNA from the semen. It’s not the first time I’ve done that, but we add thousands of people to those databases every year. It didn’t make any difference. There was no match.”

  “Can you compare the semen to the DNA from the stalker note?” Tish asked.

  “That’s the bad news.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I did compare the two samples. The DNA on the stalker note doesn’t match the semen where Laura’s body was found.”

  “That’s not good,” Tish agreed, frowning.

  “No. Even if we could get a match to the stalker’s DNA, it means we’ve got someone else at the murder scene. The county attorney wouldn’t consider bringing charges against anyone unless we could identify the person who left that semen behind.”

  “Do you have Dada’s DNA?”

  “No.”

  “So it could have been him. We know he was in the woods that night. He could have seen whoever killed Laura.”

  “More likely, he killed her himself,” Stride reminded her. “Remember, Dada’s prints were on the bat. Besides, it’s all speculation. We don’t know who Dada was or where he went. After thirty years, he’s probably dead now. Life expectancy for vagrants like him isn’t long.”

  “Do you remember anything that might help us track him down?”

  “You know as much as I do. He was a Rasta. Dreadlocks, tam, the whole works. He probably wouldn’t look anything like that today.”

  “He wasn’t old, though, was he?” she asked.

  “No. Early twenties, maybe.”

  “So he could still be alive.”

  “You’d stand a better chance of finding Amelia Earhart.” Stride heard the cough of an engine and glanced at the street. “He’s back,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The delivery driver.”

  The same truck they had spotted earlier parked on the opposite side of London Road, near Tish’s Civic. This time, the driver’s door opened, and a man climbed down. He crossed the street and headed straight for them. He was tall and extremely thin, with pencil legs. He wore the delivery company’s uniform-short-sleeved button-down shirt, shorts, and white tennis shoes.

  “Do you recognize him?” Stride asked.

  Tish bit her lip. “No.”

  As he came closer, Stride saw signs of age and dissipation in the driver. He looked like a heavy drinker. He was in his forties, but his skin was mottled across his bald scalp, and blood vessels had popped in his cheeks and nose, leaving a rosy web. When he pulled off his sunglasses, his pale blue eyes were rimmed in red. His blond eyebrows were trimmed short. He had a long, narrow face.

  “Tish?” the driver said, ignoring Stride. “Is that you?”

  She hesitated. “Yes, it’s me.”

  “I heard you were back in town.”

  “Have we met?” she asked.

  “It’s me. Finn Mathisen. I know it’s been a long time. I don’t look like I did back then, but who does, huh? Remember, I had big curly hair?”

  “Oh, Finn, sure, I’m sorry,” Tish said. She sounded as if she really did know who he was now. “How are you?”

  “I’m getting by. I told Rikke you were in town, and she said I was crazy. But here you are.”

  “Yes, here I am,” Tish said.

  “I heard about the book you’re doing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I was wondering if we could have lunch or dinner sometime. You know, talk about Laura and the old days. I’d really like that.”

  Tish hesitated. “Sure, why not.”

  “Do you have a cell phone number or something?”

  “Of course.”

  “Hang on,” Finn said. He pulled a pen out of his pocket and clicked it open. Stride saw him write TISH on the back of his hand. “Shoot.”

  She rattled off her number, and Finn scribbled it on his skin.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “You look really good, Tish.”

  “Thanks.”

  Finn retreated to his truck without saying anything to Stride. He drove away, waving to Tish through the open window as he did. Tish gave a half-wave in return.

  “Old friend?” Stride asked.

  “Laura’s friend more than mine.”

  “He looks like he’s had a hard life.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t very good back then, either. His older sister, Rikke, was our math teacher. She asked Laura if she’d be willing to tutor him. Finn was into drugs in a big way. Very screwed up. Their parents were both dead.”

  Stride nodded. “I remember Rikke Mathisen. She was one of those Nordic blond teachers, very attractive. The high school boys all had crushes on her.”

  “I didn’t really like her, but Laura did,” Tish said. “I was pretty independent, but Laura still wanted a surrogate mother. I thought Rikke was being nice to Laura just to get help for Finn, and that bothered me.”

  “Why?”

  “You saw him. Finn had big problems. Laura wanted to rescue everyone
, but she was pretty naive. I told her not to spend so much time with him.”

  “Did you tell her the same thing about Peter Stanhope?” Stride asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Except she didn’t listen.”

  Tish shook her head. “She did. Laura dumped Peter. He’s lying about the two of them dating secretly.”

  “We have no way to prove that.”

  “We can prove it with Peter’s DNA,” Tish insisted. “If you had that, you could prove that he was stalking Laura by matching it to the note.”

  Stride didn’t like what he saw in her face. “Let me give you some advice, Tish. As a cop. If you want to write a book, then write a book, but if you try to put yourself in the middle of a police investigation, you could wind up in a lot of trouble. So don’t do anything stupid.”

  12

  Stride checked his voice mail on the drive back to City Hall and found an urgent message waiting for him from the new county attorney for St. Louis County. He parked in his usual spot behind the building, but rather than head directly to his office in City Hall, he headed for the courthouse instead and took the elevator to the fifth floor. The glass doors to the county attorney’s office were immediately on the right as he exited the elevator.

  He asked the receptionist to tell Pat Burns that he was outside.

  Pat was new to the job. The previous county attorney, Dan Erickson, had resigned in the wake of a scandal during the winter. Stride and Dan had been enemies for years, and he was pleased to see him gone. The county board had taken several months to name a replacement but had finally turned to Pat Burns, who was the managing partner in the Duluth office of a large Twin Cities corporate law firm. She practiced in white-collar crime and had spent several years in the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago before moving to Minnesota. She was tough and smart.

  Stride wondered why a lawyer earning a partner’s income in a corporate law firm would give up hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to prosecute rapists and child pornographers, but he knew the answer boiled down to one word. Politics. Like everyone else whose backside graced a county attorney’s chair, she had her eyes on higher office. That didn’t bother Stride, but it meant that every prosecutorial decision was viewed through the lens of fund-raising and vote-getting.

  He waited twenty minutes before Pat’s door opened. She was reading from a legal-sized file folder and looked up at him over half-glasses. “Hello, Lieutenant, come on in.”

  He had been here once before on a courtesy call two weeks earlier. At that point, the office still looked as it did when Dan Erickson was the county attorney. Since then, the masculine touch had been erased. Dan’s heavy furniture was gone. Pat preferred glass and Danish maple. The paint was fresh and brightened the room with a peach color. The old carpet had been ripped out and replaced with a light frieze. The whole room smelled of renovation, like a new house.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  “Thanks. I kept Dan’s bottle of Bombay, if that’s what you’re into. Me, I prefer chardonnay.”

  “Nothing for me.”

  “Do you mind if I indulge?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I practiced in London for two years after law school. I started out with the European habit of wine over lunch, and I’ve never been able to break it.”

  She put the file folder down on her desk and took off her reading glasses. She opened a stainless refrigerator, pulled out an open bottle, and poured white wine into a small bell-shaped glass. She took a sip and then waved him toward a desert-colored microfiber sofa on the wall. Above the sofa, on a wooden shelf, was a modern steel sculpture on a cinder-block base.

  He was wearing jeans, a sport coat, and black boots and felt under-dressed. Pat wore a tailored cream-colored pantsuit with a low-cut jacket and a white shell. A necklace of interlaced metallic squares dangled above the faint line of her cleavage. Her brown hair was short and coiffed, like an ocean wave breaking over her forehead. She was tall and slim, and Stride knew from her bio that she had turned forty years old in January.

  Pat sat on the opposite end of the sofa and crossed her legs. She balanced her wineglass on her knee and inclined her head toward the file folder on her desk. “The widow of that golfer who got killed by lightning last month is suing the county,” she told him.

  “How is that our fault?” Stride asked.

  “It’s not, but a new theory of legal liability is born every day.”

  “Golfers are walking lightning rods,” Stride said. “We fry one or two every summer that way.”

  “Exactly. He was on a county golf course, and the wife’s attorney says we had insufficient procedures in place to provide shelter from an inevitable and predictable threat.”

  “How about a caution sign with a picture of Ben Franklin?” Stride asked.

  “Don’t give them any ideas,” Pat replied, smiling. She added, “Anyway, let’s move on to police matters. Is Maggie making progress on the peeper case?”

  “Not so far. He hasn’t struck again since the incident involving the disabled girl in Gary a couple weeks ago. We’re keeping an unmarked vehicle near her house for several hours each night in case he comes back.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “The father thinks he peeped her once before. He may have a special interest in this girl.”

  “Keep me posted on this case,” Pat told him. “Families don’t get too upset when drug dealers kill each other, but they feel vulnerable when perverts are peering in the window at their daughters.”

  “Understood.”

  “I’d like to set up a monthly status meeting with you,” Pat added, “so we can go over outstanding cases. Okay?”

  “Of course. I’ll set it up with your assistant.”

  “I’m not trying to tread on your turf, but I like to know what’s in the pipeline. I don’t want to be surprised by headlines or get sandbagged by reporters.”

  “I understand,” Stride said. “If anything happens, either K-2 or I will call you directly to keep you in the loop.”

  K-2 was the departmental nickname for Deputy Chief Kyle Kinnick.

  “I appreciate it,” Pat said. She added, “Peter Stanhope called me this morning.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s concerned about this reporter, Tish Verdure, and the book she’s writing about an unsolved murder back in the 1970s. There was an article in today’s paper.”

  “That’s right,” Stride said.

  “This is the kind of thing I need to know about in advance, Lieutenant.” She didn’t snap at him, but her voice was cool and direct. “Particularly if someone like Peter Stanhope is involved. I don’t like to be blindsided when a major campaign contributor calls me to talk about a murder investigation, and I don’t know anything about it.”

  Stride nodded. “You’re right. I apologize. I should have called you when I first met Tish and heard about her project. Candidly, I didn’t think that-”

  Pat cut him off with a wave of her hand. “Never mind. I don’t want explanations or excuses. It’s done. I just want us to be clear for the future, okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Now you can tell me about this case. I gather you knew the victim?”

  “She was my wife’s sister.”

  “Oh, I see. I’m sorry. Tell me what happened.”

  Stride sketched out the facts of the case and retraced the investigation for her. He also told her what he knew about Tish’s book and about the DNA tests he had run in the past several weeks.

  Pat sipped her wine and listened carefully to the story. “Peter was asking if we had any plans to reopen an active investigation of this case.”

  “I don’t think we have enough evidence to do so,” Stride said. “So far, nothing changes the original theory of the crime, which is that Laura was killed by a vagrant. Tish hasn’t come up with anything to disprove or discredit that idea.”

  “But you’re running tests on physical evidence.”

  Str
ide nodded. “That’s true. If we had made a DNA match to find out who was stalking Laura, or to find out whose semen was near her body, that certainly would have changed things. We’d have new questions to ask and potentially someone with new information.”

  “Except from what you say, one of the key pieces of physical evidence is missing,” Pat said. “Namely, the murder weapon. We also don’t have any idea how to find this vagrant after thirty years, or know whether he’s even still alive. I don’t know how we would go about bringing a case against anyone under those circumstances.”

  “Agreed,” Stride said. “We’ve got a lot of suspects and a lot of reasonable doubt.”

  “That means we need to be extremely careful about allowing speculation to make its way into the media. I don’t want anyone tried in the press when we have no intention of bringing charges in court.”

  “You mean Peter Stanhope,” Stride said.

  “I mean anyone.” Pat paused. “Look, Lieutenant, I’m a practical person. You and I both know that money talks. If I could prove Peter Stanhope was guilty of something, would I throw the book at him? Absolutely. Do I want you to avoid spreading rumors about him if we can’t prove he’s guilty of anything? Absolutely. I’d say that about any suspect, but yes, I’m going to be extra careful when it comes to someone who is a friend and supporter. That’s life.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “I have no idea what Peter Stanhope was like as a teenager or a young man. All I can tell you is that my firm has been on the other side of his in litigation, and my partners spoke highly of his professionalism.”

  “Understood.”

  “So let’s set some ground rules. First, be extremely cautious with what you tell Tish Verdure. We don’t know her. She’s a journalist and potentially a loose cannon. The last thing we need is her turning this into another Martha Moxley case, all right?”

  “Fair enough.” He didn’t mention that he had just come from a meeting with Tish and that he had already shared something with her that he probably shouldn’t. The existence of semen near Laura’s body.

  Pat held up two fingers. “Second, we both know that this case could blow up in our faces no matter what we do. If Tish gets someone in the New York media to take an interest, we’re going to get hounded with queries. This could wind up on 20/20 or Cold Case. National press.”