In the Dark aka The Watcher

by Brian Freeman

  “He knew you’d say no,” Maggie said.

  “Do you think so? If Ray came to me when I was a young cop and asked me to look the other way on something, do you think I wouldn’t have done it? No way I would have said no to him.”

  “Maybe that’s the point, boss.”

  “What?”

  “You were the one thing Ray was really proud of,” Maggie told him. “He wasn’t going to mess you up the way he was messed up. He didn’t want you to wind up like him.”

  Stride laid the photo down on his desk. “Maybe you’re right.” He looked up at her and added, “Why are you here so late?”

  “I saw your light.”

  “Any more news on the adoption front?”

  “Not yet. I still can’t make up my mind.”

  “You know what I think. You’re a natural.”

  Maggie shrugged and didn’t say anything more.

  “Were you on the scene in Fond du Lac?” he asked.

  Maggie took a long swallow from her can of soda. She draped her head back and stared at the ceiling. “Yeah.”

  “Did the girl make it?”

  “No. She was dead when they pulled her out of the water.”

  “How about the boy? The one on the bicycle?”

  “Lucky. His vitals are good. The docs think he’ll pull through.”

  “How are the girl’s parents?”

  Maggie shook her head. “They’re both wrecks. Mary was everything to them. Taking care of her destroyed their marriage, but they lived and breathed for that girl.”

  “I hope the mother doesn’t blame herself for leaving the girl alone,” Stride said. “It was a terrible accident. There was nothing she could have done.”

  “I’m not so sure it was an accident.”

  Stride balanced his elbows on his desk. “What do you mean?”

  “Donna Biggs thinks the peeper was there. She thinks that’s what spooked Mary and made her run. When she went into the water, he took off.”

  “Is there anything to back it up?”

  “Donna swears she saw a car parked just up the hill from where she was. She says it was a silver RAV4, which tracks with the reports of a mini-SUV near several of the peeping scenes. No one got plates, of course.”

  “That’s not much.”

  “Donna also saw a man get into the RAV when she was running up the trail after she heard Mary scream.”

  “Can she recognize him?”

  “No.”

  “Is there any physical evidence?”

  “We’ll be searching the woods between the trail and the spot where the car was parked.”

  “I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but even if you find this guy, it’s going to be a tough road to prove he was responsible for Mary’s death.”

  “If he tried to grab her, and she wound up dead as a result of his actions, we can make a manslaughter case out of that.”

  “I know, but with what evidence?” Stride asked.

  “The peeping history with the girl. The car. Any physical evidence we can find. Mary’s scream. Hell, who knows what souvenirs this guy kept? Maybe when we find him, he’ll have pictures. If I can put a few of the pieces together, Pat Burns can make a jury see the light.”

  “You sound like this case is personal,” Stride said.

  Maggie nodded. “I saw the girl when she was sleeping at her house. She was sweet. I told her father he didn’t have anything to worry about, and now the girl winds up dead. We were staking out Clark’s house and Donna’s apartment, but it looks like he outsmarted us. Donna says she stopped at this park every Friday night before she dropped Mary off at her ex-husband’s place. He must have been following them.”

  “Or the mother is wrong.”

  “I don’t think she is.”

  Stride trusted Maggie’s instincts. “Go with your gut,” he said.

  He picked up the photograph from his desk and studied it again. He was having a hard time shrugging off the past. “You know, I’ve always believed that Ray’s death was one more ripple effect from Laura’s murder,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “I think the connection between Ray and Randall Stanhope started back then,” he told her. “That’s when Ray got corrupted.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “No? After we interviewed Peter, Randall asked Ray to stay behind. Then Ray came out a while later, and the two of us went after Dada. It wasn’t until years later that I realized what must have happened.”

  “You think Ray and Randall did a deal,” Maggie concluded.

  Stride nodded. “Exactly. Ray didn’t go there with me to catch Dada. He went there to kill him.”

  It was twilight. Ray drove onto the gravel shoulder within sight of the Arrowhead Bridge. The twin spans of highway jutted like wings at the arch, leaving the passage open for one of the rust red ore boats arriving from the Soo. The water was black and windswept. The two of them got out of Ray’s Camaro and leaned against the hood near the front bumper. Cool drops of rain burst on the windshield. Ashen clouds massed overhead, inching from the high hills toward the lake.

  Ray slapped his pack of cigarettes and offered one to Stride, who took it. He coughed when the smoke hit his lungs. Ray smiled at him. The breeze rustled his red hair.

  “So this is the area where you saw Dada?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Rough area for a kid to be walking around. You should think twice about coming down here by yourself, you know?”

  “I’m all right.”

  Ray gestured down the railroad tracks. “You know those guys?”

  About a hundred yards away, Stride saw two twenty-something men in jeans, with no shirts, swigging beer and strolling across the muddy ground, kicking at stalks of wild wheat. Pyramids of taconite and stripped tree trunks rose around the tracks like mountains. One of the men finished his bottle of beer and laid it sideways on the track. When the next train came, it would shear the bottle in two. Stride had come across bottle halves all over this area. Some of the men used the bottoms as soup bowls.

  “No, I’ve never seen them.”

  Ray stubbed out his cigarette on the ground. “I’m going to talk to them.”

  “Let me come with you,” Stride said.

  “I’m sorry, Jon. If things get ugly, I can’t have a teenager in the midst of it.”

  “Except I know the area.”

  “I know you do. Right now, though, I need you to let me handle this myself. Okay?”

  Stride shrugged. “Yeah, okay. I’ll hang out here.”

  “Good.”

  Ray hitched up his pants and set out along the dirt road toward the tracks. Stride climbed onto the hood of the car and watched him go. Ray got within fifty yards of the two men before one of them looked back and spotted him. They both took off. Ray cursed loudly and chased them, but with his limp, he couldn’t run fast or far. The two men cleared a shallow hill and disappeared from sight. It was five minutes before Ray crested the same hill and was gone.

  Stride was alone. He felt the ground vibrate with the rumbling thunder of a train gathering speed out of the rail yard. A snake of red and green train cars, littered with graffiti and overflowing with iron ore, shuddered along the parallel tracks, growing closer. Stride slid down the roof of the car and crossed the asphalt highway. On the other side, a shallow slope led to a cluster of oak trees where a creek twisted lazily toward the harbor water. Stride skittered down the hill and hiked to the tracks. He waited for the train engine, which followed the coast of the water as it headed south. The train was long. Dozens of cars shouldered by him. He smelled ore dust, which was as tarry as a cigarette in his lungs. The cars banged, hummed, shimmied, and jolted.

  It took ten minutes for the entire train to pass. When the caboose wiggled past him, the giant noise diminished, getting farther away. He watched it go. He realized his skin was damp with rain.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  Stride jumped. He spun around and found Dada
behind him. A dead oak tree loomed behind the black man, and its spindly branches seemed to grow out of his head. Dada dwarfed him, and Stride wasn’t small.

  “Is he a cop?”

  Dada was six inches away, and Stride wanted to back up, but he didn’t. This close, he could see that Dada was young. Maybe twenty. He wasn’t wearing his colorful beret. His ropes of matted hair sprouted off a high forehead and dangled like wriggling worms to his chest. The whites of his eyes were stark against his dark skin. He had arched, devil-like eyebrows.

  “I said, is he a cop?”

  Dada’s voice was surprisingly smooth, almost hypnotic.

  “Yes,” Stride said.

  “Is this about that girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “They think I killed her?”

  “They want to talk to you,” Stride said.

  Dada swung a dented canteen by the silver chain on its cap, and then he lifted it to his lips and took a swallow. He wiped his scraggly beard.

  “Talk? A white girl gets killed, and a black man is seen with her, and all the police want to do is talk?”

  Rain fell harder around them. Water beaded on Dada’s head and face. Stride heard the drops slapping on the earth.

  “Did you do it?” Stride asked.

  “What do you think?”

  Stride stared at him. “No, I don’t think you did.”

  “Then get out of my way. There’s another train coming. It’s time for me to go somewhere else.”

  “I can’t do that,” Stride said.

  He felt the ground shake again with the earthquake of a train getting closer. Every minute, another long dragon left the harbor.

  “You’re brave to stand there, but you’re a fool if you think you can stop me.”

  “Just talk to him,” Stride said. “Tell him what you saw. Without you, they’re never going to solve this case.”

  “Did you know the girl?”

  “She was my girlfriend’s sister.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  A train whistle screamed. The rain sheeted down and dripped from Stride’s eyelashes.

  “That girl had secrets,” Dada said.

  He laid a paw on Stride’s shoulder and shoved him effortlessly aside. A train engine growled by behind them, dragging rusted gray boxcars. The grinding of steel wheels on the track unleashed an awful squeal. Stride had seen baby pigs castrated. It sounded like that.

  He threw himself at Dada, but it was like tackling a tree trunk. Dada angled an elbow sharply into Stride’s chest and jabbed once, like a single blow from a hammer. The air fled Stride’s lungs. He was knocked backward onto his ass and sat in the mud, struggling to breathe. Dada was steps away from the shuddering train cars. Stride scrambled to his feet and dived again, aiming low. He launched his upper body against the black man’s ankle. Dada’s foot scraped across the wet ground, and then he toppled and fell. The canteen spilled from his hand and rolled.

  “Tell me!” Stride shouted.

  Their skin was streaked in mud. The train cars clattered past them only ten feet away, deafening and huge. Stride clawed for a hold on Dada’s wrist, but Dada climbed to his feet, carrying Stride with him. Stride chopped at the man’s neck. The blow did nothing. Dada shooed him away like a fly, pushing him backward, but Stride charged again and hung on, hammering the man’s kidneys with his right fist. Dada’s knotted muscles were like a punching bag, absorbing the blows.

  “Stupid boy,” Dada said.

  He hit Stride across the mouth. His silver ring sliced Stride’s face. The punch felt like a metal shovel swung into his teeth. Stride staggered two steps and crumpled backward into the weeds. He coughed and tasted blood. When he bit down, his jaw didn’t align, and one of his molars dangled as if held by a thread. He wanted to get up, but his eyes sent his brain jumbled images of what was in front of him. Pain throbbed and beat against his skull.

  He heard something. A crack. A sharp metallic ping.

  A voice.

  “Stop!”

  It was Ray. He was shooting.

  Stride struggled to all fours. His mouth hung open, blood trailing from both sides of his lips like a vampire. He shook his head, trying to rearrange his blurred vision. When the picture cleared, he saw Dada sprinting for the train as it accelerated. On the highway, near the Camaro, Ray held his revolver in both hands and fired again.

  The bullet ricocheted off one of the boxcars.

  Dada grabbed the rung of a steel ladder and swung his big leg gracefully onto the bottom step. The last few cars in the huge centipede wriggled past. Stride saw Ray limping, trying to run, failing. The train left them both behind. Dada shrank in his eyes, lost in the growing darkness, vanishing, escaping.

  Stride crawled a few inches, felt the world spin again, and then passed out.

  “Well, you are just so cool,” Maggie told Stride with a smile.

  “It wasn’t my finest moment,” he admitted.

  “How did Ray feel about Dada getting away?”

  “In retrospect, I think he was relieved. He knew that Dada was long gone once he got on that train. We were never going to see him again. Everyone got what they wanted. Ray. Laura’s dad. Peter Stanhope and his father. They could all believe that we knew who killed Laura, and he had left town for good. It could all go away, go underground. And that’s what happened.”

  “But did Dada kill Laura?” Maggie asked.

  “Ray had the lab check Dada’s canteen for fingerprints, and they compared them with Peter’s bat. There was a match. Dada had his hands on that bat, which tracked with Peter’s story. There weren’t any other witnesses.”

  “That was enough for Ray?”

  “That was enough for everyone. Even me. Until now.”

  WHO KILLED LAURA STARR?

  By Tish Verdure

  SEVENTEEN

  I never believed the story about Dada. I couldn’t say anything, though. My dad needed closure, not an open wound. The police wouldn’t listen. They barely pretended to search for Dada around the country, because no one really wanted to find him. If he came back, questions would be asked, and the answers were better off buried with the body.

  It’s easy to believe in evil. Easy to spot it. The black devil came to town, and he picked one girl to sacrifice, and then he rode the dirty train back to the wilderness. That’s the kind of fable they used to tell us in church. People around here like to think that good and evil are as easy as black and white. Good people wear the cross. Bad people don’t. Bad people are strangers. It’s so much harder to accept that evil could be living among you. Your neighbor. Your teacher. Your friend.

  The stalker? No one wanted to know about him. Dada wasn’t the one on the school grounds, slipping vile notes into Laura’s locker. He wasn’t mailing threats to her. It didn’t matter. If Dada killed her, why look for a stalker? If Dada killed her, the city was safe again. Parents could stop holding their breath. Kids could make out in the park. That’s what we all wanted.

  So I let it go, even though I knew it was a lie. Even though I knew there was a killer among us. I didn’t know his face, but I was sure I knew who he was.

  Someday I hoped the truth would come out, but that wasn’t up to me.

  Jonny took it hard. He felt as if he had let me down. He took the blame on himself; he had let Dada escape. The doctors worked on his jaw, but his face always looked imperfect after that, slightly flawed. I liked it. It made him human. He looked older, too. Tougher. Like the scar on his face from Dada’s ring was a reminder that you could fight and lose, but you could never win if you didn’t fight at all. I began to see the man I would live with. Love. Marry.

  The strange thing is, I knew he was going to be a cop before he did. The experience with Laura, Peter, and Dada changed him. So did Ray. I never told him that I didn’t trust Ray, not ever, not for a minute. But Jonny had found someone’s footsteps to follow, the way he once expected to follow his father’s path. I always thought he wou
ld be a better cop than Ray, because Ray was in it for himself. Jonny was different. He was in it because something had been taken from him that year, and this was a way to get it back.

  Not that he ever would. When you lose some things, they’re gone for good.

  Life goes on, for better or worse, but sometimes in the silence, your mind travels back. I never really got past that summer. We never talked about it again, but I carried it with me every day. I knew he did, too.

  I never went back to the park. To the lake. I didn’t want to be reminded. Even so, there would be days when I drove along the highway that skirted the wilderness refuge, and I would stare down into the nest of trees, and I would be seventeen again. In my bare feet. The baseball bat in my hands.

  If only I could tell Jonny the truth about what happened that night.

  PART THREE. The Witness

  18

  Clark Biggs looked stiff and uncomfortable in a straight-backed wooden chair pushed against the living room wall. His hands sat limply in his lap. His eyes were fixed on a bookshelf across the room. Maggie followed his stare to a picture frame with a photograph of Clark and Mary in the backyard. They were playing in the fall leaves. Mary tossed colored oak leaves in the air, her smile big and wide, her blond curls flying. In the photograph, Maggie could see the contentment and pride hiding behind Clark’s solemn eyes. Today, that happiness had been vacuumed away, leaving his heart empty.

  “Mr. Biggs?” she asked again softly.

  He broke out of his trance. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I was asking if you had ever seen a silver RAV4 parked around the neighborhood, or whether anyone you know owns a vehicle like that.”

  “Oh.” He put his hands on his knees and studied the faded pattern in the carpet at his feet. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Neither do I,” Donna Biggs said. “I’m sorry.”

  She sat beside Maggie on Clark’s sofa. Every few seconds, she stole nervous glances at her ex-husband, as if she were struggling with her desire to comfort him. Donna’s eyes were red-ringed and moist.