“I turned on the light. The calls woke me up. I looked out the window, but I didn’t see anybody. It’s not like I could really see anything with all the rain, though.”
“Has this happened before?” Maggie asked.
Angela nodded. “Yeah, two or three times. Always at night. I just figured it was somebody with a wrong number, you know? I knew one of the other girls at school who got peeped, but I never thought about it happening to me.”
“Someone will come by tomorrow to take a full statement from you,” Stride said.
Maggie put a hand on the girl’s knee. “You should talk to someone, Angela. It’s natural for girls who experience something like this to be frightened. You shouldn’t deal with it alone.”
Angela shrugged and hid a little deeper inside her mother’s arms.
“We’ll get her help,” her father said.
Stride and Maggie left the family and returned to the pounding rain outside the house. Both of them switched on flashlights and swept the beams like searchlights ahead of them as they made their way to the backyard. The grass was sodden under their feet. Streams poured out of the swollen gutters. Behind the house, the lot was large and flat and dotted with evergreens. Stride could see the next street more than a hundred feet away. As he shined his flashlight through the grass, pools of standing water glistened back at him.
The room on the corner was Angela’s bedroom. The light was on, and the blinds were shut. Stride examined the grass underneath her window.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Maybe the rain washed away his footprints,” Maggie replied.
Stride shook his head. “He can’t have been this close. If he was standing here, she would have seen him.”
He examined the rest of the yard. Lightning turned the night to day for an instant. Stride saw disarray in the wet ground, twenty feet from Angela’s window. He used the flashlight to guide his footsteps to a soggy patch of mud and lawn beneath one of the fir trees, where tree roots bulged from the wet soil. In the cone of light, he saw a mess of footprints and crushed grass.
Maggie bent down and studied the overlapping tread marks. “Two different sets,” she said. “Looks like a fight.”
Stride spotted a single line of tracks leading away from the scene toward the street. He followed them with his flashlight. Where they passed through a bare patch of dirt, the prints in the mud were deep and clear.
“He was carrying someone,” Stride said, pointing to where the heel marks sank like weights into the soft earth.
“I think we’re running out of time, boss,” Maggie said.
They followed the footprints to the street, where they disappeared. Water overflowed from the sewers and poured along the curb in a river. Stride wiped rain from his eyes. He jogged to the vacant lot on the opposite side of the block to see if the footprints started again, but he couldn’t find the trail. Clark and Finn had both vanished.
Stride gestured to Maggie, pointing her to the south, while he followed the street to the north, running down the middle where the flooding was lightest. Twin rivers surged through the gutters. He used intermittent bursts of lightning to see between the houses and down the long stretches of asphalt. Each subsequent drumbeat of thunder was closer and longer. The storm was getting worse, not better, and the atmosphere felt violent around him, as if the pressure in the air were building toward an explosion. Wet cold worked its way inside his bones. Trees bowed over his head with the rotating winds, and when he stopped in the dead center of an intersection where two wide streets met, he felt small.
Another branch of lightning cut open the sky, looking like a hangman drawn by a child. Right then and there, Stride saw it. Three blocks away, glinting in the white light, was a silver RAV, parked under the sagging branches of an elm tree. He splashed through deep water. His feet sloshed inside his boots. As he got closer, he saw Maggie, sprinting for the RAV from the opposite direction. They arrived at almost the same time and slowed to study the ground around the truck. Both of them shot their flashlight beams inside the RAV, expecting to see Finn’s body slumped in back. Instead, the truck was empty.
“Finn never made it back here,” Maggie said.
“Did you spot Clark’s truck?”
She shook her head and got down on her knees. “Hang on, there’s something caught under the tire.”
Stride saw it, too. Maggie reached around beneath the chassis of the RAV and extracted something white from under the rubber of the tire. When she held it up, they saw that it was a wallet-sized photograph, dirty and wet. She illuminated it with the beam of her flashlight.
“It’s Clark and Mary Biggs,” she said.
“Do you think he left it there for us?”
Maggie shook her head. “It probably fell out of his pocket.”
“If Clark grabbed Finn, where would he take him?” Stride asked.
“I don’t know. Unless he already killed Finn and dumped the body somewhere else.”
Stride put himself in the shoes of a despondent father, confronting the man who had driven his daughter to her death. “I think if he was going to kill him, he’d have done it outside Angela’s window.”
“I’ll get more cars on the street, but we’re at a dead end.”
“What about Perch Lake Park?” Stride asked. “That’s where the girl died.”
“That was my first thought, but the parking lot was empty,” Maggie said. “I’ve got a car waiting in case he shows up.”
“What about Donna? She might know where Clark would go.”
Maggie nodded. “I’ll call her.”
She reached into her pocket for her phone, then stopped. “Wait a minute,” she said, shining a light on the picture again. “Where do you think this photograph was taken?”
Stride leaned closer. “It’s a beach somewhere around here. Probably along the Point. You can see the lake in the background.”
“We’re not too far from the Wisconsin Point, are we?”
“It’s just a few miles to the south.”
Maggie shoved the photograph in her pocket. “Clark told me that he used to take Mary out to the Point. It was one of their favorite places.”
“You think that’s where he took Finn?”
“It’s isolated, it’s close by, it reminds him of Mary.”
“That sounds like our best bet,” Stride said.
“How fast can you go?” Maggie asked.
43
Clark dragged Finn’s body one-handed through the wet sand by the belt tied around the man’s ankles. In his other hand, he dangled the baseball bat over his shoulder. As the uneven ground jolted Finn’s body, the bound man awakened and began to struggle, clawing at the mud for traction with his fingers. He spat out grass and dirt from his mouth and screamed. Clark ignored his cries, which were drowned out by the ferocious wailing of the wind and the beating of lake waves against the shore.
The beach was a long, lonely strip of sand and trees. The sky belched out rain and blinded him with a near-continuous chain of lightning flashes. Somewhere, he could smell wood burning, where electricity had blasted through bark and roots. The thunder was so near and loud that he felt the earth tremble under his feet. If he had believed in God, Clark would have believed that God was angry, but he had given up his faith long ago. He had stopped believing on that day when Mary first went into the water and came out a ghost of who she had once been.
There was no God, he realized then. No mercy.
Clark was not prepared to show any mercy tonight.
He dropped Finn in the empty center of the beach, where a fat, bleached tree trunk had washed up after months rolling and floating on the surface of the lake. It was bare and white, pockmarked with insect holes drilled into its wood. He grabbed a fistful of Finn’s shirt and propped him with his back against the tree trunk. Blood trickled down Finn’s face where brambles and rocks had scraped open his skin, but the rain quickly washed it away. Finn’s ankles strained at the belt that secured them, and his
muscles twitched with fear.
“Who are you?” Finn asked. He was practically screaming, but his voice was a whisper.
“You killed my daughter,” Clark said.
Finn gazed in horror at Clark, who was as big and broad as a bear. He read the hardness of Clark’s face and knew immediately who Clark was and what Clark planned to do. Finn’s torso slid off the tree trunk, and he crawled away, dragging his feet behind him, his body flopping like a fish on the bottom of a boat. Clark took two steps and yanked him back by the collar of his shirt. When Finn was upright again, Clark drove the head of the bat like a spear into Finn’s stomach, so hard that blood and stomach juices spewed from Finn’s mouth. When Finn took a breath, there was nothing in his lungs, and his fingers clutched the sand in panic as he gasped for air. Tears mingled with the rain on his face.
Clark thought he would take more satisfaction in Finn’s pain, but he didn’t. He was as lifeless as the huge piece of driftwood where Finn sat.
Thirty feet away, sweeping waves broke across a black mirror of surf and slid almost to Clark’s boots. Foam flew up in a white curtain that was as tall as he was. When the water receded across the slick sand, he saw glints of quartz. If he looked hard enough, he could see Mary here as a young girl, her feet slapping through the pools and streams. He could watch the summer sun as it kissed her hair. Hear her squeals of delight. Feel the strength of her damp arms as she hugged him.
“No, Daddy,” she whispered to him again. Urgently.
Clark forced her ghost away. There were some things a child didn’t understand. There were some things a father has to do. I’m sorry, baby.
He clutched the bat with both hands and held it the way a baseball player would, with tight, thick fingers on the grainy wood. Finn’s lips formed the word No, but nothing came out of his chest. Clark unleashed the bat in a fierce arc and whipped it into the meat of Finn’s shoulder. Bones cracked. Muscle tore. Finn’s body rose off the sand and landed in a sprawl four feet away. He curled his limbs together like a baby. His eyes were closed. He wailed.
Clark still felt nothing. He was impervious. Dead.
He retrieved Finn and propped him up again. The man’s collarbone jutted out from his neck like a chicken bone snapped in half. Finn’s skin was white.
“Stop,” he begged Clark. “Please stop. I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t deserve to live.”
“I know.”
Clark squatted down inches from Finn’s face. “You took away my whole life. Everything I am, everything I’ve done, it was all for that little girl. When you killed her, I died. Understand? I’m dead right now because of what you did. And what was she to you? Tell me, what right did you have to be a part of her life?”
Mucus dripped out of Finn’s nose. His lips trembled. “I never meant for anything to happen. I’m so sorry she died. I only wanted to talk to her. I never touched her.”
“You stood outside my little girl’s window,” Clark said. “Did you see her naked?”
Finn was silent.
“Answer me.”
“Yes.”
“Did you take pictures of her?”
“Yes.”
“What else?”
Finn shut his mouth again.
“Goddamn it, what else? Did you jerk off? Is that what you did while staring at my little girl?”
“Yes. Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry, yes.”
Clark stood up again with terrible purpose.
“No, no, no,” Finn screamed, but it was too late. Clark swung again, connecting with the soft side of Finn’s knee, hearing it pop as the femur and tibia tore apart. Finn held on to his leg as if he could make the pain stop by covering it up. The sounds from his throat were guttural, like an animal’s. He writhed on the ground. Clark took a heavy breath and walked away, letting the rain and wind pour over him. He wandered into the surf and let the waves splash around his legs, so fierce that they almost toppled him. God was definitely angry now. The lightning was a white strobe light, flashing in his face, knifing across half the sky.
Finn shouted. “Kill me! For God’s sake, just kill me.”
Clark heard Mary again, as if she were right there, tugging at his arm, pleading for attention. “No, Daddy, no.”
I’m sorry, baby. No mercy.
Except now the merciful thing would be to end it. There was that time when his truck had sideswiped a huge buck, and he found it in the deep weeds on the shoulder of the highway, twitching, in agony, dying slowly. He couldn’t drive away and leave it there. Donna was in the truck, and he made her stay inside and not watch. Then he retrieved a rifle from the tailgate and shot the deer in the brain.
An act of mercy.
Clark marched out of the surf. He came up behind Finn, not in front. Finn felt him there but didn’t try to turn around. Clark could see the man’s chest heaving in and out. The bald pate of Finn’s skull was like a melon balanced on the tree trunk. Clark knew it would take one swing of the bat to end it. To end both their lives. One millisecond of pain and light to put Finn, Mary, and himself out of their shared agony.
“Just do it,” Finn shouted.
Clark wrapped his fingers around the wet grip of the bat. His eyes found a misshapen mole on the back of Finn’s head and focused on it. His target. His sweet spot. He wound up and prepared to swing.
44
The Wisconsin Point was a twin sister to the Minnesota Point, separating Lake Superior from Allouez Bay with a needle of land that suffered the pummeling of waves and gales. Only an inlet of open water not even a thousand feet across separated the two splinters of beach. Unlike its Minnesota sibling, where Stride and Serena lived, the Wisconsin Point was largely undeveloped parkland, so narrow in most places that there was no room to sink a foundation. The only road leading out to the Point was a country lane called Moccasin Mike at the southeastern edge of Superior.
Stride shot through the storm on Moccasin Mike at seventy miles an hour. His windshield wipers sluiced aside the hammering rain. The road was arrow straight, but it was a roller coaster of shallow hills and dips. He didn’t see the worst of the water-filled depressions in the road until the truck was airborne and he and Maggie rose out of their seats. His breath expelled as he landed back down in moving water with a sharp jolt in his back. The truck groaned through the flooded valley and threatened to stall and float, but then the tires chewed back onto solid ground and roared up the opposite slope, cascading spray behind them.
At high speed, the truck gobbled up the two-mile stretch of highway, and Stride nearly missed the left turn to the Point. He braked hard and overcorrected, sending the rear of the Expedition into a fishtail, and then he accelerated again onto the broken asphalt. The truck lurched through a moonscape of potholes. Evergreens leaned in from the shoulders of the road, and he sheared off branches as he drove. His high beams stabbed the darkness, but all he could see was silver rain and black forest, until suddenly the truck burst free from the wilderness onto the slim peninsula and the bay opened up on his left. A roar of wind rattled the truck and threatened to spill it onto its side.
He slowed down. The thunder was a tin can banging in their ears.
“I don’t like this storm,” Stride said. “The lightning is right on top of us.”
They rocked along the uneven road for half a mile, and then Stride caught a reflection of metal in his headlights. A 1990s-era pickup truck was parked in the long grass on the right-hand shoulder by the slope that led to the lakeside beach. Clark’s truck.
He stopped the Expedition askew on the Point road. He and Maggie piled out of both sides. Maggie ran to Clark’s truck and pressed her face against the window.
“It’s empty,” she called. “They must be on the beach.”
“Call for backup.”
Stride unholstered his Glock. Maggie grabbed her phone and shouted instructions.
A muddy path only a foot wide wound between the long grass and sagging birch trees to the top of the slope. The wet ground sucke
d at Stride’s boots, and he slipped as he climbed, falling to his knees and nearly losing his gun. He had to sink his free hand in the dirt to push himself up. Maggie followed behind him, swearing as her heels got trapped. She kicked them off, leaving herself in bare feet.
They reached the crown of the hill, where the expanse of beach and lake opened up below them. Superior was a living thing, violent and huge, invading the puny finger of sand. Around them, the trees yawned and spun. Lightning popped in their eyes, and the circling beam of the Superior lighthouse flashed through the darkness out on the water.
At first, the beach looked empty.
“Where are they?” Maggie screamed, cupping her hand beside her mouth.
“I don’t see them!” The lightning broke again, and Stride pointed. “Wait, there they are!”
Fifty yards away, looking no larger than dolls, Clark Biggs and Finn Mathisen were on opposite sides of a giant trunk of driftwood. Finn lay sprawled on the ground, half his torso propped against the tree. Clark stood behind him. When the next flash of lightning illuminated the beach, they realized that Clark held a baseball bat in his hands and was preparing to swing with deadly intent at the back of Finn’s head.
“Stop!” Maggie shouted.
She might as well have been mute. Clark couldn’t hear a thing.
“Clark! Stop!”
Stride aimed his Glock into the sky and squeezed off a round. To him, with the gun by his ear, the report sounded loud, but he wasn’t sure the shot could be heard over the wind, rain, thunder, and surf. For a few long seconds, the beach was dark, and they were blind. When they could see through the next streak of light, they saw Clark, stopped, the bat poised high above his head, as he stared directly at them on top of the hill. Stride half expected him to swing, but Clark froze, hesitating at the brink.
Finn’s face was turned toward them. He was alive.
Stride stumbled down the slope to the flat stretch of wet sand and rye grass. He splashed through pooled water with Maggie on his heels and stopped ten feet from the slab of driftwood. Stride pointed his Glock at the ground, but he held it out from his body where Clark could see it. He studied Finn and saw that the man was badly hurt, his shoulder broken, his left hand pressed frantically on his disjointed knee, his face twisted in agony. He had bitten his lip so hard that it was bleeding.
In the Dark aka The Watcher Page 30
