Thinking of Michaela Mateo also made her think of the woman’s young daughter. Catalina. Cat. Six years old when her parents died. Cindy had gone so far as to suggest to Jonny that they adopt the girl, because it had already become clear that her own dreams of having children weren’t likely to come true. Jonny had said no. It was too much. Too soon. It made her wonder whether, in his heart of hearts, he really wanted kids at all.
She looked up. Her husband was in the doorway of the conference room. He hadn’t said anything.
Maggie took the hint and got up and left them alone. He took a chair and put it beside her and straddled it backwards. Their arms brushed against each other. His dark eyes were distant.
‘What were you thinking?’ he said quietly.
‘I wasn’t,’ she admitted.
She knew he wanted to yell, but he didn’t. He reached for her shoulder and pulled her gently against him. She folded herself into his body and felt his strength. And his worry and relief, having her in his arms.
‘Don’t scare me like that,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, but you realize that’s what I live with every day, don’t you?’ she murmured.
That caught him short, but he knew it was true. He didn’t let go.
‘This guy at the mall,’ she said. ‘He’s not nothing, Jonny.’
‘He hasn’t committed a crime,’ he reminded her.
‘That you know of.’
They were silent, and it could easily have disintegrated between them again. Him yelling. Her yelling. They both knew how to fight, but she didn’t want to. Not now. It wasn’t worth it.
‘Hey, I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘I got a flier from Bobbie at the travel agency. Last-minute cruise specials. How about we go to Alaska in June? We can do it cheap.’
Jonny separated himself from her and smiled. ‘A vacation? Me?’
‘Every couple of years, I get to drag you out of Duluth.’
‘I know, but why now?’
‘No reason,’ she said, which wasn’t really true. She felt strange. She felt shadows around her, and it made her want to combat them with happier things. ‘You know I’ve always wanted to do this.’
He looked as if he would protest, but this time, he gave in. ‘Okay.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Book it. Sure.’
Cindy kissed him, and she didn’t believe in peck-on-the-cheek kisses. Their kisses were always hot and hard. She liked it that way. ‘Thanks, babe,’ she said. ‘That means a lot to me.’
He stood up and took her hand. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’
Cindy hesitated. ‘Janine was at the mall today, too. We were both at the clinic.’
‘You shouldn’t be talking to her.’
‘I know.’ Cindy stopped herself, but then she added: ‘She thinks you’re going to arrest her.’
Jonny didn’t comment. He shoved papers into a satchel. He didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no, but she knew him well enough to realize that his silence was a yes. He was building a cage of evidence for her friend, and soon enough, he’d put her inside it.
Maybe that was the right thing to do. Cindy wasn’t naive. Janine was probably guilty of murder. Nothing else made sense. Even so, Cindy wanted to find another explanation. She wanted to believe that Janine was innocent.
‘That guy at the mall today really creeped me out,’ she told him.
Jonny stopped and looked at her. He didn’t chastise her again. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘He threatened me,’ Cindy went on, ‘and it didn’t feel empty. He told me bad things happen to people who pry into his business. That’s what Jay Ferris did for a living, Jonny. He pried into other people’s lives. What if Jay found out who this guy was?’
16
Ross Klayman arrived at his mother’s house after dark.
The old RCA television in the living room was on. It was always on, driving him crazy. The same sewer of reality programs. Empty-headed sluts squeezing their silicone tits into bikini tops. Rich trust-fund babies playing drinking games. Celebrities grinning for the cameras and pretending they had ordinary lives. They were destroying the country. Chipping away the foundation brick by brick, until soon they would all be living in anarchy. Unless good people tried to stop it.
‘How can you watch this filth?’ Ross asked his mother.
Jessie shrugged and didn’t answer. She was draped across the sofa in a roomy T-shirt and yellow panties. Her feet were bare. She drank from a can of Miller Lite, and she already had two empties stacked on top of each other on the coffee table, next to an empty plastic tray from a Lean Cuisine dinner. Her eyes didn’t leave the television set.
‘Where were you today?’ she asked.
‘Out.’
‘Out where?’
‘The mall.’
He sat down next to her. The television was a noisy drone in his ears. She propped her feet on his thigh.
‘Did you eat?’ she asked.
‘I had a power bar.’
‘Do you want a beer?’
‘No.’
Ross rarely drank. Alcohol was poison. It clouded his mind, and he wanted his mind sharp. If you were a soldier and hunter, your only real weapon was the clearness of your brain. Your gun was an extension of your arm, which was an extension of your mind. You had to know how to focus. To plan. To execute. The drugs that fouled other people’s heads were the enemy.
‘I’ve got a temp shift working a concert at the DECC tomorrow,’ his mother said.
‘Uh huh.’
‘Might turn into something more.’
‘Good,’ he said.
But it wouldn’t. It never did. She couldn’t hold a job.
He found himself staring at his mother’s feet. She kept her nails painted red, and a callous bulged from her big toe. He knew what she wanted, so he massaged her arches, pressing deeply with his thumbs until she twitched on the edge of discomfort. It was their evening ritual. When she worked, she spent hours standing, leaving her flat feet sore by the time she came home.
Jessie gave him a crooked, slightly drunken smile. Her red hair, streaked with gray at the roots, was pulled back tightly behind her head, framing her oval face. She had a chirpy, too-happy voice. ‘You really are the best son in the world, you know that, don’t you?’
Ross rubbed her feet without answering.
‘The scale says I’m down a pound,’ she told him.
‘Good for you.’
He didn’t think one pound would make any difference. Twenty pounds might, but that wasn’t going to happen. His mother binged on diets to lose ten pounds, and then she binged on junk food to put on fifteen. She wasn’t fat, but her panties and T-shirt were both a size too small for her current weight.
It was just the two of them. Ross and Jessie. That was the way it had been since he was eight years old, when his father took a page from a Springsteen song and went out for a drive and never came home. Fifteen years had passed since then. Jessie in and out of jobs. Ross in and out of school. They’d spent most of those years in a little apartment in Fargo. His mother worked security at a local mall, and her boss was a former high school coach confined to a wheelchair. She spent most of her time straddling his lap. Wheels didn’t turn bad people into angels.
When the boss’s wife found out about the affair, he fired Jessie. She found a bus-stop-bench lawyer who wheedled a settlement out of the mall owner, and they used the money to get out of Fargo and buy a small house in the town of Gary, southwest of Duluth. That was a year ago. Jessie took part-time security jobs when she could get them. Some months were flush. Some weren’t.
Ross had applied for jobs, but he couldn’t wash the contempt off his face at interviews, and after a while, he gave up. He spent most days hiking in the woods. Sometimes he went far north, almost to Canada, taking with him on
ly what he could carry on his back and living off the land for days at a time. That was how it was supposed to be. Man. Nature. Values.
He lifted his mother’s feet off his legs and stood up. He slipped off his camouflage jacket and hung it on a hook behind the front door. Jessie noted the shoulder holster and revolver without comment. Her own philosophy was to make sure you had a gun within reaching distance of your fingers at all times.
He went to her bedroom at the end of the hall, where the twin bed was unmade. The gun safe was on the wall. He undid the combination lock and stored the handgun in a sleeve on the door. There were six others. The safe allowed room for more than a dozen rifles, too. It was full.
With the safe open and the hardware in front of him, Ross heard a knocking on the front door.
That was the moment he’d long dreaded. The knock on the door. He thought about the woman at the mall. The cop’s wife. It seemed impossible that she could have recognized him, or that they could have tracked him down so quickly. He was a phantom in Duluth. The only one who had ever come close was the black bastard at the newspaper who’d stumbled onto his practice field. He wasn’t a problem anymore.
Even so. Be prepared.
Another knock.
‘Ross,’ his mother called.
‘Who is it?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not decent.’
Ross had no way of knowing if this was the moment. This might be the beginning of the end.
He left the safe open and crept to the doorway of the living room, where he could see windows facing the nighttime yard. No flashing lights. No cars on the street. Then fingernails tap-tapped on the glass, and he saw a girl’s face. Two girls. They called through the window to him.
‘Hey, hello!’
He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled.
Ross crossed to the front door and yanked it open. The girls jumped and giggled. They were taller than he was, both around sixteen or seventeen, probably sisters. Their hair was too long, their makeup too loud, their jeans too tight. He had no expression on his face, and he watched them catch their breath, smirk, roll their eyes, and whisper back and forth. They weren’t scared of him. They were laughing at him and could barely hide it. He felt a roaring in his head, his fury as calm as an ocean wave gathering force as it rolled toward shore.
‘Hi,’ the first girl said. She had red hair, cheap earrings. She twisted a curl around her fingers.
‘Hi,’ her sister echoed.
He said nothing at all. They were strangers, but he knew their type. These were the girls at school. These were the girls at the mall. These were the girls on television. They were all the same. They didn’t know who he was, but he wanted to shout at their painted faces: I AM GOD.
I am the Decider. I am the Bringer of Life and Death.
Kneel for your Judgment.
Unbidden, his fingers curled into fists, and his breath came faster.
‘Um,’ the first girl said.
‘We’re your neighbors across the street,’ the second girl added.
He didn’t know the neighbors, and they didn’t know him. I AM GOD. The girls peeked over his shoulder and saw Jessie on the sofa, her T-shirt riding up her stomach. They giggled again, as if looking down their noses at both of them.
Kneel.
‘Our dog’s missing,’ the first girl said.
‘Have you seen him?’ her sister asked.
He could barely hear his voice over the blood pulsing in his brain. ‘No.’
‘He’s a black Lab.’
‘We call him Ducks. He’s a hunting dog. Dad hunts ducks.’
Ross saw a tall silhouette in the house across the street. A man was at the window, peering out, keeping an eye on his girls. ‘I haven’t seen the dog.’
‘Well, if you do, could you call—’
He slammed the door in their faces. Behind the frame, he heard silence, then an explosion of laughter. Heels skipped on concrete. He closed his eyes and measured each breath, in, out, slowly, carefully. Count to ten. Relaxation washed over him. Your only real weapon is the clearness of your brain.
Ross sat down on the sofa again, and his mother presented her feet for his attention. He began to massage them again, but in no time, she gave an annoyed yelp as he squeezed too hard.
On television, two girls on a reality show discussed the penis size of a man who lived in the dormitory with them.
Disgusting.
‘Is that the dog who’s been pooping in our backyard?’ Jessie asked when the show went to a commercial.
‘Yes.’
‘He’s missing?’
‘I guess.’
Jessie’s face got a curious little look. ‘Did you take that dog along on one of your trips?’
‘No.’
‘I thought I heard barking when you went out.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘Oh. Well, whatever.’
Ross got up from the sofa. ‘I’m going to my room.’
‘Okay.’ She hugged him around the waist. ‘I told you that you were the best son ever, right?’
‘Yes.’
She wanted him to say she was the best mother in the world, but he didn’t do that.
He separated himself from her and headed to the hallway. His bedroom door was the first on the left. It was painted black, and he pulled out a key to unlock the deadbolt he’d installed. He went inside and shut the door behind him and locked it again.
*
It was the middle of the night when Jessie Klayman awoke on the sofa. Six empty beer cans were spilled across the table; the pyramid she’d built had toppled when she kicked it in her sleep. The TV was still on, and she used the remote control to switch it off. She stretched out her bare leg, fighting a cramp. Her head throbbed. When she stood up, she felt dizzy.
It was stupid to drink so much the day before a job. She hoped she could get in a few more hours of sleep before the alarm rang in the morning.
Jessie zigzagged to her bedroom, steadying herself on the wall.
As she passed Ross’s room, she saw a crack of light under the door. He was still awake. From inside, she heard what she usually did. Gunfire. Explosions. Screams. He was killing zombies or aliens or mutants or whatever else was in the silly games he liked to play. Sometimes he was up all night, fighting his wars.
17
Dan Erickson smelled blood.
Stride hadn’t known the new St. Louis County attorney for long, but he recognized Dan’s pattern. When they were close to making an arrest on a major case, Dan began taking a more personal role in the investigation, nudging the police aside and inserting himself into the news. Like most politicians, he had a radar for cameras.
Dan went to the judge personally to get the search warrant approved for Janine’s condo above Michigan Street. He also fast-tracked an immunity deal for Melvin Wiley to get the private detective talking about his surveillance of Janine Snow and Nathan Skinner. Stride wouldn’t have let Wiley off the hook so readily. The detective was guilty of breaking and entering, invasion of privacy, and blackmail, and Stride would have preferred to get the information they wanted somewhere else.
Dan didn’t see it that way.
The three men stood in the hallway outside Janine’s condo while Stride’s team conducted a search inside. Wiley drank Perrier supplied by Dan and wiped his mustache after each swig from the green bottle. He wore a Twins baseball cap, a gray sweatshirt, and blue jeans. The man’s face bore a smug grin. He was enjoying his turn in the spotlight. There was nothing a private detective liked more than having the police and prosecutors come to him for information.
Dan asked the questions himself. The county prosecutor wasn’t a tall man, but he had an undeniable presence. Cindy, who didn’t like him at all, called it charisma. He was blond and slick and knew how to connec
t with juries the way an actor would. He oozed success, confidence, and money, although the money wasn’t his own. He was married to one of the city’s most successful real estate developers, who’d bankrolled his career and his thousand-dollar suits. Dan and Lauren had an estate on the lake. A Lexus. Their eyes were on the prize. He was going places in state politics.
‘We need to stick to the facts,’ Dan told Wiley. He paced back and forth between the narrow walls of the hallway. He had the kind of hyperactive personality that couldn’t sit still. ‘Archie is going to paint you as a sleazy peeping Tom when you’re on the stand. The jury won’t like you. You better be prepared for that.’
‘It’s a hazard of the profession,’ Wiley said. ‘Nobody pays me to be liked.’
‘Tell me about the video you took in the bedroom. What exactly does it show?’
‘Like I told the doc, it shows her having sex with Nathan Skinner,’ Wiley replied. He drank more Perrier and added: ‘Me and Ferris watched it together. It doesn’t leave anything to the imagination.’
‘What was his reaction?’
‘Cold,’ Wiley said, shaking his head. ‘Ice cold. I see a lot of husbands when they face the ugly truth, you know? Most go to pieces. Big strong guys blubbering, how could she do this to me, blah blah blah. Not Ferris. He just got this frozen rage.’
‘When was this?’
‘Thanksgiving week. Late November.’
Stride thought about the timing of Wiley’s revelation. Thanksgiving week. Janine and Nathan both said that the affair ended shortly afterward. Jay also contacted a divorce lawyer named Tamara Fellowes around the same time. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots. Wiley’s video landed like a bomb in Jay’s life. It was bad enough to learn that your wife was having an affair, but even worse to know she was sleeping with someone you loathed.
Janine said he was itching to confront Nathan Skinner, but Nathan said it never happened.
Nathan said Jay would have done anything to keep Janine under his thumb, but Janine said they were headed for an amicable separation.
Who was lying?
Stride left the two men and wandered inside the apartment. It was small and furnished sparsely. Janine hadn’t spent much time decorating her secret space. His team was searching the rooms and screening surfaces for evidence of blood, in case Janine had tracked something from her house on the night of the murder. Maggie was at the apartment window, staring across Michigan Street toward Canal Park.
Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) Page 12
