‘What about Dr. Snow? Did she want out of the marriage?’
‘Yeah, she offered to buy him out with a fat settlement. He didn’t want it. I told him, take the money and run, but he was stubborn. Both of them were. Neither one wanted to lose to the other, you know? Guess she finally figured out there was only one way to get rid of him.’
Stride frowned. ‘You know we haven’t found the murder weapon.’
‘So? She’s smart. She dumped it somewhere good.’
‘Dr. Snow says there was no gun in the house.’
‘She’s lying.’
‘You know that for a fact?’ Stride asked.
‘Damn right. Jay had a gun. Big fat old revolver. Had it for years.’
‘She says she made him get rid of his gun when they got married.’
‘I don’t know what Jay told her,’ Clyde said, ‘but he didn’t get rid of it. No way. He always had his gun with him. He didn’t like going to certain places in the city without a little protection.’
‘Do you know what kind of gun it was?’
‘Like I said, a revolver. Beyond that, who knows? You may not believe this, but not all black folks know about guns.’
Stride smiled. ‘Okay.’
Clyde retreated to his bulletin board again. He grabbed a photograph and brought it back and put it in Stride’s hands. ‘I want this picture back at some point, but for now, you take it. I don’t want anyone taking Janine’s word over mine about that gun. See what I mean?’
Stride studied the photograph. It was a picture of Clyde and Jay in a Duluth bar, along with half a dozen other men. Jay had his arm slung around the shoulder of his younger brother, and where his sport coat fell open, Stride could see the black grip of a revolver poking out of a shoulder holster. Clyde wasn’t lying.
‘When was this taken?’ he asked.
Clyde shrugged. ‘Last October, maybe? Not long ago. It was a bachelor party for one of the boys there. I’m telling you, I never saw Jay without his gun.’
7
Maggie sat in her Avalanche in the shadow of Ely’s Peak.
The craggy hilltop looming over the highway was dotted with trees clinging to the earth against the bitter wind. It was raw and wild, like most winter days. Duluth in the cold season was a black-and-white movie, as if all the colors of the world had been leached away. Black trees met the milky gray sky, and the white ice of the lakes blended into the snow-covered hills. Hoarfrost deadened the clustered needles of the pines, turning green to silver. Most of the time, the sun didn’t dare show its face.
She’d been up since before dawn, and she typically didn’t sleep until one or two in the morning. So far, the pace hadn’t caught up with her. All she did was work, but she didn’t really miss having a social life. Twice since she’d moved to Duluth, she’d had one-night stands, and two years earlier, she’d had a relationship that lasted three months before it crashed and burned. That was it. Most men couldn’t deal with her insane work hours. They also couldn’t deal with her attachment to Stride. Anyone who spent ten minutes listening to her talk about him knew that her feelings ran deep.
Stride had taken a chance on Maggie right out of college, when she was a stiff kid who knew a lot about books and not much about people. She was grateful for the opportunity, but she wasn’t sure when gratitude had morphed into something else. Most days, she pushed those thoughts out of her head. Stride was the boss. Cindy was his wife. End of story. It was one of those fantasies that was best left in the back of a closet somewhere.
Maggie saw a dented pick-up drawing closer on Becks Road, and she switched off her radio, which was blasting Aerosmith. The truck slowed and turned into the parking lot near the train tunnel overpass where Maggie waited. The door of the pick-up opened, and Nathan Skinner climbed out.
The two of them had never been friends. Maggie scared the hell out of most cops, despite her size. She was smarter than they were, and she had a wicked tongue. One of the newbies, Ken McCarty, said a meeting with her was like sticking a finger in boiling water. Nathan was different. He was a UMD hockey hero, with a chip on his shoulder from the day she’d met him. Politicians and business people in the city fawned over him because of his victories on the ice. He was part of the boys’ club, and he resented Maggie because she was small, young, a woman, and Chinese. To him, if you weren’t a white male with Scandinavian roots, you didn’t really belong in Duluth.
When Jay Ferris leaked a videotape of Nathan’s highway arrest near the Wisconsin Dells, Maggie wasn’t surprised by the man’s drunken rant. Nathan wasn’t really a hardcore racist, but he oozed privilege, which was the worst kind of arrogance for a cop. He thought he could do anything and say anything and never pay a price. When Stride finally fired him, she was glad to see him go.
Nathan knew it.
He wore the drab uniform of a security guard as he climbed inside her truck, but his demotion hadn’t wiped the self-satisfied grin from his face. Nothing dented Nathan’s ego. She would never have admitted it to anyone, but she felt the attraction of his physical magnetism. He was an asshole, but he was a good-looking asshole. He was still built like a college athlete, with muscles testing the seams of his uniform. He had short blond hair, and his face bore the dents of hockey sticks to his nose and chin, but the effect was to make him look tough. Which he was. He had a casual smile that didn’t hide what he wanted, and though Maggie would never have gone to bed with him, she knew lots of women who would have jumped at the chance.
‘Let’s get this over with, Nathan,’ she told him. ‘You know why you’re here.’
‘Sure, I figured you’d be calling. What a shame about Jay, huh?’ The edge in his voice made it clear that Nathan didn’t consider Jay’s death a shame at all. ‘Why meet out here in the middle of nowhere? Are you afraid people would talk if they saw us together?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself. Jay filed a report about a shooting incident near here. I’m checking it out. Besides, I figured you wouldn’t want anyone to know the police were questioning you. You don’t want your name in the papers again, do you?’
‘Oh, I don’t really care. If people think I shot Jay, they might give me a medal for it.’
‘Did you?’ she asked.
‘What, shoot him? No. Unfortunately, I don’t have much of an alibi for last Friday. Sorry.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘I was sick. Flu. I spent the evening alone in my apartment.’
‘Did you go to a doctor?’
‘No.’
‘Can anyone confirm that you were home that night?’
‘I had a Sammy’s pizza delivered,’ he said. ‘The driver will remember me. She was cute.’
‘What time was that?’
‘Too early to make a difference,’ he said. ‘I still could have gone out later and blown Jay’s head off. But I didn’t.’
‘When did you last see Jay?’ Maggie asked.
‘See him? When his face was at the other end of my fist at the Saratoga last April. After that, he took out a restraining order, so I stayed away from him. Look, my gun is in my truck. If you want to test it, feel free. I didn’t shoot him.’
‘Okay,’ Maggie said. ‘Go get it.’
Nathan looked surprised and annoyed. He climbed down from the Avalanche, kicked through snow back to his pick-up, and retrieved a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver with a wooden grip from his glove compartment. He emptied the cartridges and shoved them in his pocket. When he returned to the Avalanche, Maggie held an open evidence bag, and he put the gun inside.
‘How long do you plan to keep that?’ Nathan asked.
‘Until the test is done. Few days. Couple years. Somewhere in there.’
She shoved the evidence bag with the gun into her glove compartment, and Nathan swore under his breath. She grabbed a print-out from her dashboard of one of the photograp
hs taken from Jay’s camera. She showed the picture of the man in camouflage to Nathan.
‘Ever seen this guy around town?’ she asked.
His blue eyes squinted at the paper. ‘Nope.’
‘Either on the force or after?’
‘Like I said, no.’ Nathan checked his watch. ‘Are we done here, Maggie? I’ve got a shift starting soon. Nothing like minimum wage and no benefits. I live the glamorous life.’
‘Where do you work?’
‘Wherever they send me.’
‘Yeah, we’re done here,’ Maggie said.
Nathan stalked back to his pick-up and drove off with his tires spinning. Maggie watched the truck disappear northward toward Interstate 35. She knew the test would come back negative on Nathan’s gun. He wouldn’t have offered it up if it were the murder weapon. Even so, the streets of Duluth were a little safer with him disarmed.
She got out of her truck and swapped her clog heels for a pair of winter boots. She zipped up her burgundy jacket, which wasn’t much protection against the cold. She didn’t bother with a hat. When she shut the door, she saw the dents and scrapes tattooing the yellow paint of the Avalanche. She was a terrible driver.
Maggie climbed from the parking lot into the deep snow lining the shallow slope. Dead weeds poked out of the drifts. She crossed under power lines where a strip of land had been cleared in the woods and headed for the next line of birch trees, whose black-and-white trunks were speckled like snake skins. The dark mountain loomed above the trees like a slumbering bear. She heard a lonely train whistle below her, near the river. Her face felt blistered by the wind.
Four months earlier, Jay Ferris had been here. He’d tracked a man in camouflage with an assault rifle. Maggie had checked other police calls since then. Two other reports had come in of gunfire in this area. One was only three weeks ago. Whoever the man was, he was still around. He was more careful now, but he kept coming back.
She pushed through the trees. The snow got inside her boots and made her socks wet. She dug in her pocket for some of the photographs from Jay’s camera, and when she compared them to the landscape around her, she thought she was in the right place. She studied the ground and the trees but saw nothing unusual.
Ten more minutes passed as she climbed higher. She couldn’t feel her feet or her fingers. She was about to turn back when she glimpsed a fleck of red color winking in and out of the black-and-white forest. She waded into the thicker trees, and as she got closer, she heard the flapping of plastic. What she’d spotted was a red bullseye target laminated and nailed to the trunk of a birch. The center of the target had a jagged hole where it had been shot away with numerous bullets, and the wood of the tree underneath was splintered and broken.
She looked deeper into the forest, and she saw other red targets. Six, eight, ten of them. One by one, she tracked them, and each one bore the marks of a hunter who had used them for practice. In the snow, as she walked, she found spent shell casings, too. Dozens of them, like dirty gold cigars at her feet. Dozens became hundreds.
She didn’t like it. Not one little bit.
After a quarter-mile following the targets, she came upon the carcass of a deer in a small clearing. It was a doe, frozen and stiff in the snow, its tongue drooping from its mouth. The deer had been dead for days. Its camel fur was a mass of darkened blood, and the animal was surrounded by more spent casings. The hunter had shot it and then come upon the body and kept firing. And firing.
Maggie started counting the bullet wounds in the dead deer, but she stopped after two dozen.
Someone was very angry.
8
‘A deer?’ Stride asked.
He leaned on the metal handle of his shovel. He’d cleared eight inches of snow from his driveway on the Point, and he was sweating. A quarter-mile away, the tower of the Duluth lift bridge shimmered over the ship canal like a monster of gray metal. Lingering snow flurries spat through the lights. In February, the bridge mostly stayed anchored to the ground, so the residents of the Point enjoyed a respite for several icy weeks from getting trapped by the coming and going of cargo boats.
‘Yeah. A deer. Shot to pieces.’
Stride didn’t answer immediately. He wiped his brow with his sleeve. On the street, he spotted the sedan of his friend Steve Garske passing behind Maggie’s Avalanche. The two men waved at each other. Steve’s Chrysler kicked up slush, and as his wheels hit the metal bridge deck, the whine sounded like a pack of stinging wasps. It was nine o’clock at night. He figured that Steve, who was a musician as well as a doctor, was off to a gig with his band at Amazing Grace.
‘I’m not sure what we can do other than notify the Department of Natural Resources,’ Stride told her.
‘I did that,’ Maggie said, ‘but that’s not what bothers me.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘This wasn’t hunting. This was rage.’
Stride frowned. Hunting out of season wasn’t uncommon, and neither was the occasional hunter who used his weapon to live out a Rambo fantasy in the forest. Even so, he’d worked with Maggie long enough to trust her instincts.
‘What else did you find?’ he asked.
‘He had plastic targets scattered in an unusual pattern. The heights varied. It was what you’d expect from someone walking through a crowd, picking off targets.’ She added after a pause: ‘Human targets.’
‘That’s a big leap, Mags.’
‘I’m just telling you what it looked like to me. I mean, I know we’re all sensitive after Columbine—’
‘No, I hear you. Do we have any idea who this guy could be?’
Maggie shook her head. ‘I passed Jay’s photos around. No one recognized him. Whoever he is, he’s under the radar.’
‘Well, let’s make sure our guys keep their eyes open around town.’
‘Do you want more bad news?’ Maggie asked. ‘Jay wrote about this guy in his column.’
‘The guy in camouflage?’
‘Yeah, Jay did a column in November on gun control and the expiration of the assault weapons ban. Camo Guy was Exhibit Number One. Jay talked about gun nuts carrying military-style hardware in our parks. Talked about chasing this guy, reporting him to the cops. And naturally how the cops did squat.’
Stride leaned against the yellow Avalanche next to Maggie and lit a cigarette. He stared at the pack in his hand with disgust, then shoved it into the rear pocket of his jeans. ‘Do you think this guy is a legitimate suspect in Jay’s murder?’
‘Probably not, but if we don’t rule him out, it’s raw meat for Archie Gale. Plus, I want to find him and see what makes him tick. He worries me.’
‘Okay. We’ll let the dogs out. Speaking of Jay’s columns, what about this prescription drug addict he wrote about last summer? The woman he called Holly. Do we have any way of tracking her down? He threatened to blow up this woman’s life in his column. That’s certainly a motive if she thought he was serious.’
‘Unless he made up the whole thing,’ Maggie said.
‘Is that possible?’
‘Jay wrote that he was picking up Lipitor at a pharmacy when he saw this woman Holly. The thing is, I checked, and there weren’t any pharmacy charges on his credit card last year. His medical records don’t show that he was taking any prescription meds. He wasn’t on Lipitor. So if you ask me, Holly is a fake. He made her up to make a point about prescription drug abuse.’
‘Okay. Well, that’s one we can cross off our list.’ Stride blew smoke into the night air. ‘How’s Nathan?’
‘You know what I think about him,’ Maggie said.
‘Yes, I do. Does he have an alibi?’
‘Sort of. I found the Sammy’s driver who confirmed that she delivered a pizza to Nathan at his apartment that night. It was too early for an alibi, but she said he looked half-dead and was hacking up phlegm. He put the moves on her anyway,
which she said was pretty gross.’
‘Some things don’t change,’ Stride said. ‘How about the tip on the white Toyota Rav? The one that the kid spotted on Skyline Parkway?’
‘We’ve got a list of Rav owners in the northland who have some kind of criminal record. We’re working our way through them. So far, there’s no one that looks promising. I re-interviewed the kid, too. He admits smoking a few joints at Enger Tower that night. I’m not sure we can rely on his memory for details.’
‘Great.’
‘I’ve been backtracking through home break-in reports around the state, too, and I can’t find any MOs that look similar. The idea that this was a murder-robbery seems far-fetched. We’ve been watching pawn shops, but none of the missing jewelry has shown up.’
‘I think if we find the gun, we’ll find the jewelry, too,’ Stride said. ‘Wherever Janine hid it.’
‘I agree,’ Maggie replied, ‘but as much as I like Janine for this, we keep digging up new suspects faster than we cross them off.’
‘Like who?’
Maggie fished in the pocket of her red jacket. She pulled out an evidence bag with a handwritten piece of paper inside. ‘Guppo was going through papers from Jay’s desk. He found this. It’s a letter to Janine from last May. Jay had it in his top drawer.’
Stride glanced at the paper. The script handwriting was impeccable, but it was too dark outside to read the text. ‘What does it say?’
‘It’s from a woman named Esther Rose. Basically, she accuses Janine of murdering her husband.’
Stride’s eyebrows rose. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Esther’s husband Ira had a heart problem. He went under the knife at St. Anne’s. He didn’t make it. Janine was the surgeon. Esther blames Janine for his death, and despite some very ladylike handwriting, she makes threats like a crime boss. In fact, she says specifically that she’d like to see Janine’s husband die so that she knows how it feels.’
Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) Page 6
