Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

by Brian Freeman

  Nothing about his life was going to change.

  He retrieved a juice box from the mini refrigerator under the bar. He stared at himself in the mirror as he sucked through the tiny straw, making dimples in his cheeks. Not a bad-looking guy, he told himself. Five-foot-ten, not tall but not short. Curly brown hair parted in the middle, but no gray yet. Long face, long chin. Clark Kent glasses, but those were fashionable again. He wore a striped Kohl’s polo shirt, and you couldn’t really see the paunch.

  He went to the file cabinet and grabbed a copy of last year’s Civil War test.

  This battle, fought in Maryland on September 17, 1862, is also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg.

  A. Gettysburg

  B. Antietam

  C. Bull Run

  D. Saratoga

  It depressed him, after weeks of study, how many students usually chose D. Bad enough to get the wrong battle, but the wrong war? He didn’t blame them. Teaching the kids was his job, and he was decidedly mediocre at it.

  Howard knew why he was depressed. Six days earlier, he’d turned forty years old. Forty – the burying place for all of your younger dreams. He was celebrating with a pity party. Welcome to the Middle Ages, Carol wrote on his birthday card, which was another joke that he didn’t find funny. He was halfway through life, and it was February, and the gray Duluth winter felt as if it would go on forever. He defied anyone not to be depressed in the face of that.

  He sat down at his desk and turned on the monitor again. Janine Snow stared back at him. If you had a face like hers, if you had that kind of money, if you lived in a big house on the hill, it would never feel like winter. According to the papers, she was almost forty years old, too. She didn’t look it.

  He asked the question that everyone in Duluth was asking.

  Did you do it?

  4

  One week after the murder of Jay Ferris, Stride’s team still hadn’t found the gun.

  ‘We tore that house apart from top to bottom,’ Maggie told him. ‘I had guys tramping through the snow and climbing the cliffs on both sides. We searched every dumpster within a mile around the place. Nothing. The gun’s gone.’

  Stride leaned back in the old vinyl chair. They were in the basement of City Hall in downtown Duluth, where the Detective Bureau’s investigations were headquartered. It was late, and the rest of the office was dark, but they had fluorescent lights blazing over their heads. One of the lights flickered like a strobe. The table was strewn with half-empty cans of Coke, Lays potato chip bags, and sauce-stained wrappers that smelled of Subway meatballs. File folders on every chair bulged with papers and photographs, and evidence boxes were stacked against the conference room’s walls. This was the war room for everything they knew – and didn’t know – about Jay Ferris and Janine Snow.

  He stared at the ceiling and thought about the missing gun.

  ‘So you kill your husband,’ Stride said. ‘You have an argument, you go find a gun, you shoot him. Now there you are with his body on the floor, and you have to figure out what to do next. You don’t have much time. Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? You can’t be sure a neighbor didn’t hear the shot, and if too much time goes by before you call 911, people will wonder why.’

  ‘Nobody heard the shot,’ Maggie pointed out.

  ‘Right, but Janine doesn’t know that. She needs to get rid of the gun, and she grabs a bunch of jewelry to make it look like a robbery. Then what? Throw it all down the canyon? Someone’s bound to find it when the snow melts. Does she get in Jay’s car and drive somewhere? Maybe, but what if someone sees her on the road?’

  ‘So what do you think she did?’ Maggie asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Chances are, Janine already had a plan. She’s not the kind of woman who does anything on the spur of the moment. She probably thought about this for weeks.’

  ‘Or she’s innocent,’ Maggie pointed out.

  ‘Yeah. Or she’s innocent.’

  It was possible – but Stride didn’t believe it. He’d looked into Janine’s eyes that night and seen the truth. She was guilty. She’d killed her husband.

  He got up and wandered through the darkened office to the pop machine, where he bought another can of Coke. He popped it and drank most of it quickly. A noisy furnace vent rattled over his head, but it did little to warm the drafty basement. He leaned against the wall, waiting for the rush of caffeine and sugar.

  Stride was almost forty, and on most days, he still felt young. His face had been weathered by the Duluth winters, but he could be boyish when he cracked his quick, easy grin. His hair was jet black, short on the sides, messy and cow-licked on top. He didn’t have perfect features. He would never be a smooth-skinned, blow-dried model. Cindy said she liked his flaws because he didn’t try to hide them. She said you could look at her husband and know exactly who he was: honorable, headstrong, brooding, and bold – a man who would give his life trying to do the right thing and who would feel every failure deep into his bones.

  He knew half the people in the city, thanks to his job, but he didn’t invite many people into his life. He had no siblings. His parents were dead. He’d lost his father to the lake when he was a boy, and his mother had passed away ten years ago. Since then, his world had mostly been him and Cindy, but he didn’t need anyone else. He only kept a few close friends other than his wife. His doctor and college buddy Steve Garske. And Maggie.

  Stride smiled at the idea of Maggie. As cops, as friends, they were good together. They were as close as two people could be who had never slept together. Which was something that he would never let happen.

  He returned to the conference room and sat down.

  ‘So what do you think, Mags?’

  ‘She did it,’ Maggie said, ‘but I wish we could find that gun.’

  ‘We will. In the meantime, we need to track down anyone else with a motive. I don’t want to give Archie Gale room to run when this gets to court.’

  Maggie nodded. ‘I’m meeting Nathan Skinner tomorrow. I don’t like thinking that an ex-cop could have done this, but—’

  ‘No, you’re right, talk to Nathan. Make sure he’s got an alibi. I’m meeting Jay’s brother Clyde. He wants to know why we ­haven’t already arrested Janine. What else do we have?’

  Maggie grabbed her notebook from the table, although she didn’t really need to consult it. She had one of the best mem­ories of any cop he’d ever met. ‘We’re still waiting on bank and phone records, and we’re reviewing video dumps of ATMs and store cameras in the area, in case Janine took a drive to get rid of the gun. Guppo’s going through everything we pulled from the house. Jay got a lot of hate mail because of his newspaper columns. It’s going to take a while to clear those people.’

  ‘What about the neighbors up on Skyline?’ Stride asked. ‘And their co-workers at the newspaper and the hospital?’

  ‘According to them, Jay and Janine’s marriage wasn’t good. Lots of fights. Lots of arguments. Most people didn’t understand why they were still married.’

  ‘Do we know if there was a prenup?’ Stride asked.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ Maggie told him, ‘and a good one. If Janine and Jay got a divorce, he’d walk away with squat. And their friends said that Jay was very fond of having money. If anybody had a motive to pick murder over divorce, it was Jay, not Janine.’

  Stride frowned. ‘What else?’

  ‘We got a Good Samaritan call,’ Maggie said. ‘A teenage boy and his girlfriend were heading along West 8th Street to Skyline on Friday evening. He says they passed a white SUV parked on the shoulder. He couldn’t tell me exactly where this was, but if it was close to the intersection at Skyline, it wouldn’t have been too far from the spur leading up to the doctor’s house.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘He wasn’t sure. After ten, he thought, but he didn’
t check the clock.’

  ‘Did he see anyone?’

  ‘No, he’s pretty sure it was empty.’

  ‘Pretty sure?’

  ‘Yeah. Except it was dark, so he doesn’t really know. That’s helpful, huh? He’s also pretty sure the SUV didn’t have a Minnesota plate, but not one hundred percent sure.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he knew what kind of SUV it was.’

  ‘Actually, he was very sure of that. This kid is sort of a car geek. He said it was a Toyota Rav4. He recognized the silly spare tire on the back.’

  ‘Well, there couldn’t be more than a few thousand of those in the northland,’ Stride sighed.

  ‘Yeah. It’s a needle in a haystack, but it’s worth a look, just in case Janine is telling the truth and this was a home invasion robbery. I asked our buddy Lynn Ristau on the Wisconsin side of the bridge to cross-reference white Rav owners with criminal records. She didn’t sound too happy about it. You’re going to owe her a burger at the Anchor Bar when we get the results.’

  Stride smiled. ‘Well, I already owe her. She was a big help with the bridge closure on Friday.’

  He and Maggie both turned toward the conference room door when they heard the bell of the elevator arriving in the basement. The doors slid open, and Sergeant Max Guppo waddled toward them with a laptop computer in his arms and a monster bag of Fritos tightly clamped between his teeth.

  ‘Yoogzgonnwnsds,’ he said as he shouldered into the office.

  Stride grinned at him. ‘Excuse me?’

  Guppo opened his mouth, and the Fritos dropped onto the conference table. He plugged in the laptop.

  ‘You guys are going to want to see this,’ he told them.

  Guppo was only about as tall as Maggie and shaped like a snowman. His perfectly round head had a black comb-over that routinely flew like a pirate flag at the slightest breeze. He sported a pencil mustache underneath a nose that was mashed flat against his face. He’d been a Duluth police officer even longer than Stride, and despite his girth, Guppo was one of the most versatile investigators on the team.

  ‘We found a bunch of SD photo cards in Jay’s desk at the News-Tribune,’ Guppo told them. ‘I’ve been going through the pictures he took with his camera.’

  Breathing hard, Guppo sat down, squeezing himself into one of the wheely chairs. He turned the monitor so that Stride and Maggie could see it, and then he grabbed a handful of corn chips and pushed them into his mouth until his cheeks swelled like a squirrel’s. He crunched loudly.

  Stride watched as Guppo’s thick finger scrolled through a series of photos that had been taken in parkland during the Minnesota fall, when the colors of the trees were at their peak. He recognized the wilderness not far from the ski slopes of Spirit Mountain. Leaning forward, Stride saw a man in the photographs, but the man was too distant to identify. Whoever it was wore camouflage pants and a black T-shirt. As the pictures scrolled, Stride saw that Jay had crept closer to the man in camouflage. The man looked young – probably in his twenties – and in the best of the pictures, Stride picked out details in the man’s profile. He had a shaved head, a trimmed beard, and a mass of tattoos on his neck and his bare forearms. It was difficult to estimate his height, but he looked bony and underfed. A small man.

  He also held an assault rifle in his arms.

  ‘So Jay took these photos?’ Stride asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do we know who this guy is?’

  Guppo shook his head. ‘No, it looks like he spotted Jay and took off.’

  ‘Do you know when the pictures were taken?’ Stride asked.

  ‘Last October.’

  ‘That looks like Ely’s Peak,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,’ Guppo replied. ‘The whole thing rang a bell with me, so I went back to police reports from the fall. We had a call from Jay on file from October 5. He said he’d been hiking in the woods near Ely’s Peak, and he heard gunfire. He chased the guy and took pictures, and he sent us a couple photos. We handed it off to Abel Teitscher, but he wasn’t able to identify the man in camouflage. He staked out the location for a few days, but whoever it was didn’t come back. That was the end of it. However, according to Abel’s report, Jay was right about the gunfire. There was a lot of it. He followed the trail and found hundreds of shell casings in a clearing. Somebody went on a shooting spree.’

  *

  Stride arrived home late, which wasn’t unusual.

  He lived with Cindy on a finger of land beyond the Duluth lift bridge known as the Point. They’d owned the house since they got married. It was a squat two-bedroom cottage that could have been plucked from a Monopoly board. Detached garage, sand driveway, peeling paint. The backyard butted up to the dunes of Lake Superior. Everyone told them they should move to a larger place on Miller Hill, but they loved the location on the water, and Cindy loved the timelessness of an old house. She always said you shared a place like that with everyone who’d lived and died there before you.

  He parked his Bronco in the snow and ice of their driveway. Inside, he hung his leather jacket on the hook near the front door and wandered into their tiny bedroom, which was the first door in the stubby hallway. He found Cindy in a lotus position on a throw rug on the wooden floor. Her eyes were closed, and she wore nothing but panties. She knew he was there, but she didn’t react, and he simply watched her, smiling. Cindy was a pixie, not more than 110 pounds. Her black hair, parted in the middle, draped long and perfectly straight on either side of her face, all the way past her shallow breasts with their pretty pink tips. Her face was narrow, her nose as sharp as a shark’s fin.

  He could hear the shower running in their bathroom. They didn’t have much water pressure, and it took forever to get hot water dripping into the tub.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  ‘Hey, babe,’ she replied cheerfully.

  He no longer apologized for being late or missing dinner. That was just part of their lives.

  She unfolded her legs and hopped nimbly to her feet. She came up to him, her forehead only reaching his chin, and got up on tiptoes to kiss him. Her arms slid around his waist. She had big brown eyes, with irises so large there was almost no room for the whites around them.

  ‘I’m going to hit the shower,’ she said.

  ‘Want company?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d love it, but not this week.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah, back on the red river. Big surprise.’

  He heard the frustration in her voice. They’d been trying to get pregnant for two years with no success. Cindy was rarely moody, but the first day of her period always left her feeling sorry for herself. It was taking so long that he’d begun to wonder whether God was sending them a message, but he would never say so aloud. Having children was so much a part of who Cindy was that he didn’t like to rain on her chalk painting dreams. She came from a small family. Her only sister had been murdered as a teenager. If she’d had her way, she already would have had three or four kids of her own.

  He followed her into the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth and tied her hair in a ponytail behind her back. She slid down her panties, and he watched as she climbed into the shower and pulled back the old plastic curtain.

  ‘Any progress on Jay’s murder?’ she called.

  ‘I can’t really talk to you about that.’

  ‘Why? You talk to me about all your cases.’

  ‘You took Janine home. You’ll be a witness when this goes to trial.’

  Cindy was silent in the shower for a long time. He wondered if it was the first time she realized that she was a part of this case, whether she liked it or not. Finally, her damp face poked around the side of the shower curtain. Her brow crinkled into an angry knot. ‘Assuming there is a trial,’ she told him. ‘Assuming she did it. Which she didn’t.’

  ‘Cin,’
he said, but she swept the curtain closed again with a dismissive shake.

  He left the bathroom, rather than argue with her. He was still hungry, so he went to the kitchen and cut himself a blond brownie from the pan Cindy had made over the weekend. He ate it in two bites.

  Their house had a drafty screened patio facing the lake. ­Technically, it was a three-season porch, unheated, but he sat out there throughout the winter season anyway. He didn’t bother turning on the lights. He sat in one of the chaise lounges and watched the windows. Snow flurries dotted the glass, making icy streaks. He must have dozed off, because his eyes closed, and when he opened them, Cindy lay in the other chaise beside him.

  Her eyes were open. She wore a pajama top and boxer shorts, and her tiny feet were poked into moccasins. Like him, she was unaffected by cold.

  ‘I really don’t get it,’ she murmured.

  ‘You were there with Janine—’ he began, but she shook her head.

  ‘Not that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He understood. Kids. Babies. He slid off the lounger and knelt beside her and took her hand, which was warm from the shower. ‘It’ll happen.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it will.’

  There was no point in trying to convince her. He didn’t know, and she didn’t know. Instead, he wrapped her small body up in his arms, the way he had for most of his life, since they were teenagers. At first, she was motionless, simply numb. Then her body began to shake, and she cried into his chest.

  5

  The next morning, Cindy Stride was annoyed with Cindy Stride.

  She had no time for self-pity, and she was irritated with herself for giving in to negative emotions. She got out of bed while it was still dark, leaving Jonny to sleep. Despite the cold and the slick glaze of snow on the street, she went jogging, and she returned home red-faced and refreshed. She made a pot of coffee and drank a cup, leaving the rest for her husband.