Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

by Brian Freeman

  He laughed, which made him wince again. ‘That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Wow, you look good. I’m so glad you’re okay.’

  ‘You, too!’

  Al was propped up in bed. His hospital gown was tied loosely at his neck, and the bandages on his left side extended from his neck to his elbow. Otherwise, his eyes were bright. Stride saw him for the first time as a handsome young man, with his neatly trimmed hair and beard. Friendly smile. The lanky physique of a basketball player. He understood Cat’s attraction to him.

  Cat danced on the balls of her feet and stared at the floor. ‘Listen, Al, I’m sorry about all sorts of things. Lying to you. The things that Anna and I stole. I was such a jerk.’

  ‘Hey, I was a jerk, too. I just hope someday you can forgive me.’

  Cat nodded. ‘How’s your shoulder? Are you okay?’

  ‘It hurts,’ he admitted.

  ‘You heard about Anna?’

  ‘I did.’

  A nurse came into the room, and Serena touched Cat’s shoulder gently. ‘Come on, we should go and let Al rest. Trust me, I know what it’s like to get shot. It takes a lot out of you.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  She bent down and kissed Al lightly on the lips. Stride could see the kid’s face bloom with happiness. Al took Cat’s hand and didn’t want to let her go. It was a little gesture that made Stride realize that Cat had actually chosen well in finding her first real boyfriend. Al was solid. Hard-working. Not perfect, but no boy could be nineteen years old without doing stupid things. Something about the two of them made Stride smile and think about being nineteen himself. With Cindy. Back when he believed in the future.

  He was still watching them when it happened.

  The nurse undid the knot at Al’s neck to check on the bandage, and the fabric of the hospital gown slipped down, exposing his bare torso. Exposing something that didn’t belong on the chest of a healthy teenager. It took Stride a moment of shocked disbelief to understand exactly what he was seeing. Then, with the swiftness of a bullet from a decade-old gun, everything in the present and past made perfect sense.

  This innocent young man. He was the key. He was what they’d all missed back then.

  ‘Jonny?’ Serena asked, watching his face.

  The nurse retied Al’s gown, but Stride had already seen the zipper scar.

  The scar of someone who’d had heart surgery.

  59

  They found Al’s mother in the hospital cafeteria.

  She was with her three daughters, who ranged in age from ten to sixteen. When she saw Stride, Serena, and Maggie converging on their table, her lips puckered into a frown. Under her breath, she spoke to her children, and the girls picked up their trays and moved.

  She continued eating calmly as the detectives joined her. She didn’t even look up when Stride said: ‘Janine Snow operated on Al, didn’t she? She saved his life.’

  Toiana Pugh put her knife and fork back on the tray and folded her hands in her lap. She took a long breath, and a tear wept from her eye.

  ‘Yeah, she did. That woman was an angel sent from heaven. My little Sherman Aloysious was going to die. We were going to lose him. And that beautiful woman gave him back to us.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’ Stride asked.

  Anger flashed on Al’s mother’s face. ‘So you could give her more trouble? Haven’t you done enough? That woman doesn’t belong in a jail cell. She should be helping other families. Other kids.’

  Stride leaned back and ran his hands through his hair. The front legs of the chair came off the floor. He looked around at the cafeteria. Most of the people eating there were nurses in scrubs, but there were families, too. He knew what it was like to spend hours in a place like this. Waiting. Praying. Crying.

  ‘I understand,’ he told her. ‘Really, I do. But we need to know exactly what happened.’

  Toiana jabbed a finger with a long purple fingernail at him. ‘You know how many docs we talked to back then? I can’t count. No insurance? Sorry, we can’t help you. My boy could turn blue in front of them for all they cared. But not Dr. Janine. She said she’d take care of Al. We had no money, no insurance, and she said, don’t you worry about that. I’m not ashamed to say, I was on my knees crying. Seymour, too. And Dr. Janine was as good as her word. She did the surgery. She saved him. Never asked us for one penny.’

  ‘I can hardly imagine how grateful you must have felt,’ Stride said.

  ‘Grateful? That’s not half of it. We owed her everything. Seymour and me, we told her, what can we do? How do we pay you back? She said, you just make sure Al lives a good life. That’s all. But we told her, if there is anything – anything you need – you call us. No matter what.’

  There was a long silence at the table.

  Finally, Maggie said, ‘And did she call you?’

  Toiana grabbed her fork and picked at the lasagne on her plate, but she’d lost her appetite. ‘There were lots of follow-up appointments after the surgery. Dr. Janine talked about that husband of hers. What a beast he was. How trapped she was. Smart people can be the absolute worst when it comes to relationships. Here’s this amazing doc, but in her personal life, she wasn’t any different from the wives and girlfriends who end up at the shelters.’

  Or that’s what she wanted you to believe, Stride thought.

  ‘We knew things were bad,’ Toiana went on, ‘but what happened next—’

  She stopped.

  ‘Mrs. Pugh?’ Maggie murmured.

  ‘Not sure I should tell you any more.’

  ‘Do you want to talk to a lawyer?’

  ‘I don’t trust lawyers. Besides, I didn’t know a thing about what went on back then. I don’t blame Dr. Janine for what she did. Guess I don’t blame Seymour either. He felt he had a debt to pay. We owed her in ways you can’t measure.’

  They didn’t press her, but they waited.

  ‘Dr. Janine came by our house,’ she told them. ‘This was a couple weeks before Christmas. It was a surprise. She’d never been there. Said she wanted to see how Al was doing. Me, I felt like it was a visit from the queen, you know? Everybody was so excited. And then she and Seymour – they went out and sat in her car. Talked. Must have been an hour or more. She left after that, and Seymour came back inside, and that man had some kind of big burden on his shoulders. I asked him what they talked about, but he put me off. Said it was nothing. The thing is, he was never really the same man after that. Never ever. He had secrets.’

  It wasn’t hard to imagine how that conversation had gone. Janine asking for help to get rid of her husband. Seymour Pugh feeling like he had no choice but to do what she wanted. This doctor who had saved his son’s life wanted repayment in blood. A killing. A murder. And the next time Seymour Pugh was in Chicago, he bought a gun on the street.

  ‘After Jay was killed, did your husband tell you what happened?’ Stride said.

  ‘Eventually, he did. Like I said, it was after that cop came to see us. It all made sense then, how Seymour had been acting. I screamed at him until he told me the truth. Chilled my bones, that’s what it did. But would I have said no if he’d told me before he did it? I don’t know. Al was alive because of that woman.’

  ‘Did he tell you exactly how the plan worked?’

  Toiana nodded. ‘It was supposed to look like a burglary gone bad. Kill the husband, steal some jewels. Dr. Janine didn’t want him to stay long, so she said she’d put some jewelry in a bag and leave it in the mailbox for him. She had a party to go to. That was when she wanted him to do it. She knew her husband would let Seymour into the house if he said our boy was one of Dr. Janine’s patients. It was all supposed to be done before she got home, but things went wrong. I mean, you can’t fool God, can you? She didn’t pull the trigger, but she went to prison anyway. Seymour wanted to help when they arrested her. Pawn the jewelry or
something, or make sure the gun got found. I said no way. I mean, I felt bad for Dr. Janine, but I wasn’t going to let Seymour throw away our lives. He’d get caught. I knew it. And you people would put her in jail anyway. How was that going to help anybody?’

  ‘So what went wrong?’ Stride asked. ‘Janine was already back home when your husband arrived at the house.’

  ‘Seymour didn’t know that. He was real late getting there, and he thought about scrapping the whole thing, but he figured he’d better try to do it. He didn’t think he’d have the stomach to go back some other time. Her car wasn’t in the garage, so he thought she was still at the party. He figured it was safe.’

  ‘Why was he late?’ Maggie asked, and then she pounded the table. ‘The bridge.’

  Stride looked at her. ‘What?’

  ‘The bridge! The bridge was closed that night. A semi overturned. We were up there for a couple hours, remember? Seymour Pugh must have been sitting there in his white Rav. Stuck. I bet if we grab the news photos, we’ll find his car. He was supposed to be at Janine’s house hours earlier, when she was at the party, but he couldn’t get there because of the bridge. So when it finally opened up, he drove to her house. He didn’t know that Cindy had already taken Janine home.’

  Stride realized that Maggie was right. He also felt a new wave of resentment against Janine Snow, because he realized that Janine’s plan had relied on manipulating Cindy from the beginning. His own wife was supposed to be Janine’s alibi that night. The wife of the city’s chief detective – who could argue with that? Janine would ask Cindy to take her home, and they’d find Jay’s body together. Instead, Jay answered the door, alive, and the whole plan went to hell.

  Janine must have figured that Seymour got cold feet. Except when she went to take a shower, Seymour showed up after all, took the jewelry out of the mailbox, shot Jay, and disappeared. Exactly as they’d arranged weeks earlier. And he could imagine Janine’s horror, discovering the body, and realizing that her plan for the perfect murder had made her the prime suspect instead.

  ‘Where is she?’ Stride asked Maggie. ‘Where’s Janine?’

  ‘Archie has her in a suite at Fitger’s.’

  Stride stood up. ‘I think we should welcome her back to Duluth.’

  60

  ‘I thought I was going to have to apologize to her,’ Stride said, as he parked on Superior Street outside Fitger’s. ‘For being wrong about Jay’s murder. For stealing eight years of her life.’

  The three of them got out of his truck. Stride climbed the steps toward the hotel lobby with Serena and Maggie beside him. A bellman opened the door for them. The rich burgundy carpet, the grand piano, and the old-fashioned table lamps made him feel as if they were walking into the parlor of one of Duluth’s robber-­baron estates. The hotel check-in desk, nestled behind iron grillwork, was like the teller window of a bank in the Wild West.

  He saw carpeted stairs leading to the next floor. He knew where Janine would be, in one of the top-floor suites overlooking the lake.

  Serena touched his elbow. ‘Are you okay?’

  Stride shook his head. ‘This woman used Cindy. Cindy was her friend, and Janine deliberately tried to make her part of her plan to get away with murder. What’s worse is that she probably is going to get away with it. God knows what this does to double jeopardy. We convicted her of shooting Jay, but we were wrong. She never had the gun. And yet she was guilty of his murder anyway. I don’t know if we can ever put her back in prison for it.’

  He started up the stairs.

  ‘She still got eight years,’ Serena pointed out.

  ‘Eight years of what should have been life without parole,’ Stride replied. ‘This was first-degree murder. Premeditated.’

  He reached the hushed hallway of the hotel’s second floor. The Fitger’s manager, Tami, met him there, descending from the upper floors of the inn. They’d known each other for years. The petite blond’s normally ebullient face was serious. ‘Oh, Stride,’ she said. ‘That was quick.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘I only just called your office.’

  ‘We’re not here for a call,’ Stride said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We’ve got a disturbance upstairs. Screaming.’

  ‘Is it Janine Snow’s room?’ he asked immediately.

  She nodded.

  ‘Who’s up there?’

  Tami shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Archie Gale checked her in earlier this afternoon. She was shopping for a while, but for the last couple of hours, I thought she was up in her room alone.’

  ‘Stay here. We’ll check it out.’

  The three of them headed upstairs. They were on the fourth floor when they heard the gunshot.

  Stride broke into a run and took the steps of the last staircase two at a time. At the landing, he heard a second shot. He reached the fifth floor with Serena and Maggie immediately behind him. Janine’s suite was six feet away at the head of the staircase. Its door was ajar. He smelled the smoke of gunfire inside, and he drew his own gun. He listened, but the room was quiet now.

  Stride nudged the door with his boot. It was heavy. Through the crack of the opening, he could see someone standing on the far side of the room. He led the way with his gun and called: ‘Police. We’re coming in.’

  The person inside didn’t move or react. Stride opened the door the rest of the way. Inside the suite was a large living area with a sofa and coffee table decorated with fresh flowers. The dark light of the afternoon poured through a skylight. An open, empty bottle of wine sat on the table, with two glasses on either side of it.

  He thought of the bottle of wine in Janine’s house on the night Jay was killed.

  Just beyond the door, a body lay on the carpet, almost exactly where Jay’s body would have been beyond the foyer of Janine’s house. The parallel was eerie. The position of the body was the same. The hole in the man’s forehead was the same.

  Stride recognized the dead man on the floor.

  It was Howard Marlowe, the ex-juror in the murder trial who’d never given up his obsession with the case.

  Beyond the living area where Howard’s body lay, the carpet led to a king-sized four-poster bed and a fireplace. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on Lake Superior between heavy drapes. He could only see the end of the bed; the rest was blocked by a tall walnut bureau. A woman stood at the foot of the bed. He didn’t recognize her. Her shoulders were slumped. She looked to be almost fifty years old, and she wore a baggy, untucked T-shirt over blue jeans. Her gray-brown hair was pushed back behind her ears. She stared at the bed, her arms limp at her side.

  A revolver was on the carpet where she’d dropped it.

  ‘Step away from the gun, ma’am,’ Stride told her, but she didn’t move. She didn’t seem to hear him. She was in a daze as he came closer.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘My name is Carol Marlowe,’ she replied.

  Stride got close enough to see the rest of the bed, and he understood what had happened. Janine lay among the tangled sheets. Naked. Dead. The two of them – Janine and Howard – had both been shot in the head. Howard’s wife had killed them in the aftermath of their lovemaking.

  ‘That bitch ruined our lives,’ Carol murmured. ‘She took everything from me.’

  There was nothing he could say. Stride kicked the gun on the floor away from her. Maggie came up behind Howard’s wife, who offered no resistance to the handcuffs that Maggie locked around her wrists. Carol was limp as Maggie led her away, but as they reached Howard’s body, she came to life and began to wail and cry. Maggie had to physically restrain her as she fought to get to her dead husband.

  ‘Howard! Oh, God, Howard! I’m sorry!’

  The door closed. The screams continued in the hallway.

  Stride and Serena were alone with the bodies. The suit
e smelled of gunpowder and sex. The patio door was partially open, letting in sweet lake air and the humid reminder of rain.

  He checked Janine’s pulse for final confirmation, but she was gone. Her eyes were closed with a strange look of peace. Her nakedness still had beauty, and her skin was as warm as life. He felt an urge to cover her, but there was no modesty in death. She was guilty. She was innocent. She was a heroine. She was the devil. She was all of those things.

  His anger at her bled away into regret. One thing Stride never did was get emotional at crime scenes, but he felt an unexpected sense of loss. As if the universe were saying there were no such things as new beginnings. He didn’t want to believe that. Maybe the lesson was simply that you couldn’t escape the sins of your past. Sooner or later, they caught up with you.

  He couldn’t look away from the woman on the bed. The strange thing was that he couldn’t see Janine’s face without seeing Cindy in his mind, too. January 28. Almost a decade ago, when everything was different. He could see his wife in the shadows of their bedroom that night. The moonlight shined on the bare skin of her shoulder. He could smell the smoke of his own cigarette as he told her about Janine and Jay.

  They were both so young then. They didn’t know what lay ahead. How everything was about to change.

  That was then. This was now.

  61

  Stride sat on the green bench at the end of the Point. His legs were stretched out, and the rippled waters of Superior Bay lapped at his boots. Yellow wildflowers sprouted along the beach. The late-summer sun had fallen behind the western hills, leaving an orange glow in the clouds. He was alone, but if he stared deeply into the semi-darkness, he could almost imagine Cindy beside him, the way she’d been for so many years. Her legs pulled into a lotus position on the bench. Her hands on her knees, her chin tilted toward the sky. Her long black hair cascading to her hips.

  Here I am, Jonny, she would say. Don’t you see me?

  It wasn’t real, of course. It was simply another Thursday evening. Serena was out at a movie. Cat was in her room at the cottage, doing her puzzles. Life hadn’t changed at all.