Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

by Brian Freeman

  One of his own cops had wound up in Jay’s crosshairs. A young police officer named Nathan Skinner had gotten drunk in the Wisconsin Dells and been pulled over on the highway. That was bad enough, but Skinner used an ugly racial epithet in the course of the arrest. It was outrageous, drunken behavior, and Stride suspended him for a month and sent him to diversity training in Minneapolis. That didn’t satisfy Jay, who beat the drum over Skinner’s arrest in his newspaper column. He made Skinner the poster boy for racism inside the city’s police ranks, and the chief finally ordered Stride to fire Skinner as a way to get the story out of the papers. Stride didn’t excuse what Skinner had done, but he didn’t think the mistake justified taking a young man’s entire career.

  Neither did most of his other cops. Jay Ferris wasn’t popular with the Duluth Police.

  Stride examined Jay’s body. The full report would come from the St. Louis County medical examiner, but he’d seen enough gunshot victims to recognize the obvious details. Powder tattooing on the forehead indicated an intermediate-range wound; the shooter had been within a couple feet of Jay when firing the shot. Based on the location of the body, the shooter had stood between Jay and the front door.

  A glass of wine lay tipped on the rug beside him, leaving its own stain of red. Another glass, smeared with lipstick, sat on a mahogany coffee table.

  ‘No gun,’ Maggie said. ‘We’re still searching.’

  ‘Search harder,’ Stride said. ‘We need that gun. Where’s Janine?’

  ‘Downstairs in her office. Archie Gale is already with her. She wouldn’t say a word until he got here. Smart.’ Maggie rolled her eyes.

  ‘I’ll talk to her.’ He added again: ‘Find the gun.’

  Stride took spiral stairs down to the next level of the house. The staircase was modern, made of chrome and stone. Janine and Jay had built the house less than a year earlier, but according to Cindy, it was Janine’s baby. Her dream. She’d worked with an architect for months on the design. The mansion on the hill was one of the perks of being a surgeon.

  Janine’s home office was about the square footage of Stride’s whole house. She had a huge and impeccably clean desk near the windows. He could see the lift bridge in Canal Park shimmering far below. An entire wall of the office was dedicated to built-in bookshelves stocked with medical volumes, and she had another wall filled with photographs of ordinary people. These were her heart patients. People whose lives she’d saved. He didn’t think it was an accident that she was waiting for the police here. She wanted to remind him who she was and how important she was to the city of Duluth.

  It also wasn’t an accident that she wasn’t alone. Archibald Gale was with her, and Gale was the northland’s leading criminal defense attorney. As Stride entered the office, Gale sprang up from the leather sofa. For a large man – 6 feet, at least 275 pounds – he was nimble on his feet. He had receding gray hair, curly and short, and blue eyes that twinkled behind tiny circular glasses. Despite the hour, he was dressed in a pressed three-piece suit, with a tie neatly knotted to pinch his thick neck.

  ‘Lieutenant!’ Gale exclaimed cheerfully, as if they were old friends. Which, to some extent, they were. They were on opposite sides of the game, but Gale was also a difficult man to dislike.

  ‘Archie,’ Stride replied. ‘Nice suit.’

  Stride’s own tie was loose at his neck, and he’d pulled an Oxford shirt out of the dirty clothes basket. He still wore his old leather jacket, which had seen more than a decade of use and had a bullet hole in one sleeve.

  ‘I was still at the office,’ Gale said. ‘Lieutenant, I believe you know Dr. Janine Snow.’

  Stride nodded at the surgeon. ‘Dr. Snow.’

  ‘Lieutenant Stride.’

  It was strange, being so formal with her. They were otherwise on a first-name basis. She’d been in his house. She had lunch or played golf with his wife a couple of times a month. They’d done community fundraisers together. Even so, she was a crime victim now. And a suspect. They both knew it.

  The first thing he noticed about Janine was that her blond hair was wet. She’d showered. That was what you did when you arrived home from a party, sick and disheveled. Or it was what you did when you had just shot your husband and you wanted to make sure your skin and hair kept no residue chemicals from firing a gun.

  He sat down on the sofa next to her, in the spot where Gale had been. The attorney leaned his wide backside on the corner of Janine’s desk and watched them with the fussy concern of a mother superior. Janine waited for Stride’s questions, and she was exactly the woman he remembered. Smart, beautiful, emotionally distant. She showed no tears. No pretense of sadness. For her, this was a practical exercise. Her husband had been murdered. Innocent or guilty, she needed to make sure that this incident didn’t steal away the rest of her life.

  ‘I’m surprised you felt the need to bring in an attorney so quickly,’ he said to her.

  ‘Oh, let’s not travel down that tired old road,’ Gale interjected before Janine could answer. ‘If you were hiking in the Alaskan wilderness for the first time, I imagine you’d want a guide, wouldn’t you, Lieutenant? There are always bears feeding in the shallows.’

  Stride shrugged. Janine knew that hiring a lawyer made her look guilty. She was savvy enough not to care.

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened tonight,’ he said.

  Janine glanced at Gale, who nodded his approval.

  ‘Cindy brought me home early from the party,’ she explained. ‘I wasn’t feeling well. In fact, we had to stop along the way for me to throw up. After she dropped me off, I talked to Jay for a while. Argued is more like it. I’m being candid with you about that.’

  ‘What did you argue about?’

  ‘Nothing of consequence. Jay and I could argue about anything, and we usually did. Mr. Gale probably wants me to pretend that everything was fine between us, but you wouldn’t believe me if I said that. I’m sure Cindy has told you that the relationship between me and Jay was strained. You knew my husband, Lieutenant. If you think he was difficult as a journalist, trust me, he was even more difficult to live with.’

  ‘How long did you argue?’ Stride asked.

  ‘I have no idea. Ten minutes? Fifteen? I had some wine.’

  ‘Even though you were feeling sick?’

  ‘Vomiting has a way of improving your outlook,’ Janine replied.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I took a shower.’

  ‘Where is the shower located in the house?’ Stride asked.

  ‘The lowest level, off the master bedroom. Jay and I have separate bathrooms. I built mine as something of a spa and retreat. Husbands have man caves. I have my bathroom.’

  ‘And when you got out?’

  ‘I noticed something strange.’

  ‘What was that?’ Stride asked.

  ‘The drawers of the jewelry case in the bedroom were open. I hadn’t left them that way. When I looked, several expensive pieces of jewelry were gone. I called for Jay but got no answer. I went back upstairs, and that was when I found him.’

  It wasn’t a convincing story, but she told it as if it were gospel.

  ‘So you’re saying that in the time you were in the shower, someone came into the house, shot and killed your husband, walked down two levels, found your bedroom, stole jewelry, and then escaped.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Janine said.

  ‘You must take long showers,’ Stride said without humor.

  ‘In fact, I do.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I didn’t time myself, Lieutenant. I sat in the spray for a long time.’

  ‘Did you hear anything? Did you hear the gunshot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you do when you found Jay’s body?’ Stride asked.

  ‘I was in shock,’ Janine replied. ‘The front door was open. I ran
to the doorway, and I heard the noise of a car on the streets below us, but that’s all. I didn’t see anyone or anything.’

  ‘What next? Take me through it.’

  ‘I confirmed that Jay was dead, although the wound made that obvious.’

  ‘And then you dialed 911?’

  Janine hesitated. ‘I believe some time passed.’

  ‘Some time? How much time?’

  ‘Again, I don’t know. There are no clocks in my house. I’m not interested in what time it is when I’m home. I sat on the sofa and stared at Jay. As I say, I was in shock. When I was myself again, I called the police.’

  ‘And Mr. Gale,’ Stride said.

  ‘Yes, that’s correct.’

  ‘Anybody else? Neighbors? Friends?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you go anywhere? Did you leave the house?’

  ‘No.’

  Some time. Time enough to hide a gun. Time enough to hide jewelry. Time enough to craft a story.

  ‘Do you own a gun, Dr. Snow?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she replied.

  ‘What about your husband?’

  ‘He used to, but I asked him to get rid of it when we got married. I didn’t like the idea of a gun in the house.’

  ‘What about enemies? Threats? Either directed at you or your husband.’

  Janine shrugged. ‘You know who Jay was. The way he was. He collected enemies like stamps.’

  ‘Where are your clothes?’ Stride asked.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The clothes you wore home from the party. Where are they?’

  ‘In the washing machine.’

  ‘You already washed your clothes?’

  ‘Having thrown up on them? Yes.’

  ‘I would have pegged you for more of a “dry-cleaning only” kind of woman, Dr. Snow.’

  ‘In Dallas? Maybe. In Duluth in January? No.’

  She spoke down to him with all the superiority and impatience of a surgeon doing rounds with her residents.

  ‘Was Jay abusive?’ Stride asked. ‘Did he ever hit you?’

  Gale broke in sharply. ‘Enough of that, Lieutenant. We’re not discussing their relationship.’

  ‘It’s all right, Archie,’ Janine added calmly. ‘No, he wasn’t physically abusive. Jay was many things, but he never touched me.’

  Stride watched her face, expecting a crack in her facade. Instead, she was calm and deliberate.

  ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’ he asked.

  ‘I think that’s everything.’

  He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Janine, if something happened between the two of you – if there was a fight, if things got out of hand – the best thing is to tell me now. We can work things out if we know the truth. Lying only makes it worse.’

  Gale opened his mouth again, but Janine held up her hand and silenced him with the tiniest smile. Her robe nudged forward, offering a small V of bare skin. Damp blond hair caressed her face. He smelled her soap and shampoo.

  ‘I’ve already told you the truth, Jonathan,’ she said. ‘I didn’t shoot my husband. It wasn’t me.’

  3

  ‘She did it,’ Carol Marlowe announced to her husband.

  Howard Marlowe didn’t hear his wife at first. His eyes were glued to the Gateway monitor on his desk, where he’d zoomed in on a photo of Janine Snow on the screen. Finally, he glanced at Carol, who’d wandered into his basement office from the laundry room in her slippers.

  ‘What?’ he said, distracted.

  ‘That rich doctor. She killed her husband. That’s what you’re looking at, aren’t you? More stories about her? You haven’t talked about anything else for days.’

  Howard shrugged defensively. Carol was right, but he wasn’t going to say so. His mouse was poised to close the window on his screen if she came closer. ‘You don’t know that she killed him. Nobody knows what happened. She says she’s innocent.’

  Carol flopped down on the threadbare sofa on the other side of the room, underneath posters of the Great Wall of China and the statues of Easter Island. Places he’d never been but had always wanted to visit. His wife pulled out an emery board and worked on her fingernails. ‘Do you think she’d admit it if she were guilty?’

  ‘No,’ he acknowledged.

  ‘Well, there you go. Everyone at Super One is talking about her. They all think she killed him.’

  Super One was a local grocery store. Carol had worked there as a checker since she was in high school. They’d met at the store when Howard tried to take fifteen items down the ten-items-or-less aisle, and Carol refused to let him through.

  He found himself getting annoyed. ‘Oh, so the detectives at the store have it figured out. I’ll call the police and tell them you cracked the case.’

  Carol rolled her eyes. ‘Come on, Howard. A mysterious stranger sneaks in while Dr. Perfect is in the shower? He blows away her husband and escapes? She must think we’re idiots.’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘It just goes to show you, a rich white doctor marrying a black man like that? Nothing good is going to come of it.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ Howard snapped. ‘That’s offensive.’

  ‘I’m just saying what everyone is thinking.’

  ‘Well, don’t say it.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Carol shrugged and kept filing her nails. The drier tumbled in another part of the basement, and he heard a zipper banging on the metal drum.

  His wife wore a long-sleeved Minnesota Vikings T-shirt and gray sweatpants. She always wore loose clothes to cover the extra ten pounds she complained about. Her mousy brown hair was pushed back behind her ears. She grabbed a tissue to blow her nose, which was a little too large for the rest of her face. Her eyes were brown, and her winter-pale skin sported a few freckles.

  ‘I booked the Dells for our vacation in July,’ she told him.

  Howard picked up his high school bowling trophy from the desk and rubbed a little dust from the base with the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Do we have to go there again? We’ve been there three years in a row.’

  ‘I love it there. So does Annie.’

  ‘Well, we’ve done it already,’ Howard complained. ‘We should go someplace else.’

  ‘Well, what about Branson?’

  Howard frowned and didn’t answer. They’d been to Branson three times, too. Everything about their lives was as predictable as an assembly line. Same vacations. Same television shows. Same meals. It was Wednesday, and Wednesday was meatloaf day. Every week, all year. For Carol, routine was like a suit of armor against change. Change was bad. Change was scary. She wanted her world to stay exactly the same.

  He understood why she felt that way. At twelve years old, Carol had walked into the garage and found her father hanging by his belt from an overhead beam. Her perfect suburban childhood had been stolen away. She was never going to let that happen again.

  Howard put down his trophy with a frustrated little bang. Janine Snow stared at him from his computer monitor. Dr. Perfect.

  ‘Fine, we can go to the Dells if that’s what you want,’ he said with a sigh. Surrender was the easiest way to keep peace.

  ‘Good. It’ll be fun. We can go to that supper club you like. The one by the lake.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  Carol got up from the sofa. She looked pleased with herself. ‘You coming to bed?’

  ‘I want to work on tomorrow’s lesson plan,’ he said.

  ‘Howard, you teach ninth-grade history. It hasn’t changed since last year. Here’s a hint: the North won the war.

  He knew that she didn’t mean to be nasty when she teased him about his job. To her, there was no shame in being an ordinary teacher in an ordinary school. Even so, her jokes bothered him. They reminded him of everything he hadn’t done with his life.

/>   ‘I’ll be up later,’ he muttered.

  ‘Okay, ’night.’ She wiggled her fingers at him.

  Carol would be asleep when he climbed into bed. That was how it usually was. They had sex a couple times a month. She was cheerful about it, but he knew she looked at sex as more of a wifely obligation than as something she did because she enjoyed it.

  His eyes went back to the photograph of Janine Snow. Blond hair, long and luscious. Icy blue eyes that made you shiver. Rich. Hands that brought people back to life. What would it be like to be someone like that?

  What would it be like to be with someone like that?

  Howard turned off his monitor, because her face made it impossible to think about anything else. He opened the high school textbook and tried to write questions for the test, but he couldn’t focus. Carol was right. History didn’t change. In the end, he would use the same test he’d used the year before and the year before that.

  He took a pencil from his desk and threw it across his office in annoyance. It landed on the pea-green shag. He got up and paced in front of the Easter Island poster. The empty eyes of one of the giant statues stared back at him. That was the place to take a vacation, on the storm-swept shore of some desolate island, examining the clues to one of history’s great mysteries. Growing up, he’d imagined himself as a famous archaeologist, doing digs around the world.

  Instead, he taught bored kids about things he’d only read about in books. He’d never done anything himself. Not really. At age thirty-two, he’d complained to the Super One manager about the annoying checker in the Express Lane who refused to ring up his groceries, and the manager had made her apologize to him. Carol had cried so hard that Howard asked her out for coffee as a way to make it up to her. One year later, they got married. Another year after that, they had their daughter Annie, who was now six. And that was that.