Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

She slid one of the other knives out of the wooden block into her hand.

‘Kim?’ she called again.

Kim didn’t reply.

Cat tiptoed down the hallway. When she reached the foyer, she stared up through the twisted iron railing of the staircase at the hallway on the second floor. She saw doors and paintings and the black windows. No one was there.

‘Kim,’ she said again, but she whispered this time.

Noise groaned from above her. The floorboards wailed, as if a nail were being pounded into a hand. Cat jumped. She wanted to close her eyes but she kept them open, staring. She listened, and in her brain, she heard a voice. It was her mother’s voice, talking in her ear as she held her.

‘ Hide under the porch ,’ her mother told her. ‘ Hide under the porch, and do not come out, no matter what you hear, no matter who it is, no matter who calls you, do not come out, do not come out. ’

That was what Cat did that terrible night. No matter how loud the screams got, she hid, and she didn’t come out.

Now, as she waited for Kim, she heard another scream, loud and long and desperate. She knew that scream. It was the sound a person made when a knife violated their body over and over and over. The sound of agony. The sound of death. This wasn’t an echo; this wasn’t a warning from her mother’s soul.

This was real. This was happening over her head.

Kim’s ragged voice cried from above her, as if from heaven.

‘ Cat, run! ’

‘Sorry, boss,’ Maggie said.

Stride saw his partner’s pixie-like silhouette in the doorway. He’d just turned out the office light and slipped on his leather jacket to go home. He leaned back, propping himself against his desk. Maggie joined him in the shadows and pulled herself up to sit beside him.

‘Sorry for what?’ he asked, but it didn’t matter what she said. They were both sorry for things that had gone wrong between them.

‘K-2. I told him more than he needed to know.’

‘Forget it.’

Stride didn’t bother turning on the light. It felt normal to be with her in the dark. Throughout the winter mornings, before sunrise, they’d talked in bed. That was when they’d made love, too, as if it were better not to see the other’s eyes too clearly.

‘We need to talk,’ Maggie said.

‘About what?’

‘Cat.’

He knew something was wrong. He could hear it in her voice.

‘It’s Saturday night, Mags. Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be doing something with Ken McCarty?’

‘I should,’ she said. ‘He’s pissed at me, but he’s a cop. I told him I found some things that bothered me and he offered to go back to Minneapolis and do some digging.’

‘Digging into what?’ Stride asked.

‘Vincent Roslak.’

Stride frowned at the name. ‘Why him?’

‘You know why.’

‘Okay, sure,’ he acknowledged. ‘Roslak had a connection to the shelter, and he was stabbed to death.’

Maggie didn’t reply right away. He felt her awkwardness, as if she suddenly had to be careful with her words. ‘I checked with Brooke at The Praying Hands. Cat saw Roslak multiple times last year.’

Stride pushed himself off the desk and wandered to the window that looked out on the woods. His shoulder throbbed. He wished he was more surprised to hear the truth. ‘So exactly what do you want Ken to do in Minneapolis?’

‘I want him to talk to the detective who’s handling the case down there. I’m betting they never interviewed Cat, and they should.’

‘There’s no evidence that Cat was involved.’

‘Maybe that’s because nobody looked at her,’ Maggie said. ‘Fifty stab wounds? That sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it?’

‘That was Marty Gamble.’

‘Yeah, and Marty’s daughter seems pretty fond of knives.’

Stride kept staring out the window. They’d both been briefed by the Minneapolis cops about Roslak’s murder. He pawed through the facts in his mind. ‘Roslak was killed last summer, right?’

‘Eight months ago. July third.’ Maggie always remembered details.

‘He left Duluth four months before his death. Closed his office, sold his house, rented a cheap apartment down in the Cities. The boys in Minneapolis don’t think he ever came back. He had no credit card receipts here in town. He severed his Duluth connections long before he was killed. If you’re a woman up here, why would you wait so long before going after him?’

‘I don’t know. I hope there’s no connection at all.’

Stride sat down at his desk. He booted up his computer and the monitor cast a ghostly glow in the dark room. He tapped the keyboard and brought up a photo of Vincent Roslak from the Star Tribune report on his murder. The psychologist was young, only thirty-four years old when he was killed. He had jet black hair, short on the sides and curly and gelled on top. He had a lean, narrow face, with long sideburns and a dark beard line. His eyes were cool blue, wolfish and smart. He had what Stride considered a snake charmer’s smile: utterly false and oddly irresistible.

‘So this is what women go for?’ Stride said.

‘I hate to tell you, but yeah.’

‘A lot of his patients wanted to keep seeing him, even after he lost his license and left town.’

‘Maybe some did,’ Maggie replied. She added after a pause, ‘Maybe Cat did.’

Stride shut off the screen, enveloping the office in darkness again. ‘She’s not a killer, Mags.’

‘You may be right, but we should find out what’s going on in that pretty little head of hers. It may not be so pretty.’

‘Okay. Do what you have to do, but step lightly.’ He got out of his chair and realized how tired he was. He ran his hands back through his hair and then shoved them in the pockets of his leather jacket. ‘It’s late. I’m going home. I need to get my shoulder into a hot shower.’

‘You want company?’ Maggie asked with a smile. As quickly as it came, her smile vanished. ‘Sorry, I’m kidding, that was a joke. A bad joke. I don’t know why that came out of my mouth.’

‘Do you want to come home with me?’ he asked. ‘To talk to Cat, I mean.’

Maggie hopped down from his desk. Her bangs fell across her eyes. ‘No, I better not.’

He wondered if she thought nature would take its course. Wine. Jokes. A fire in the fireplace. Falling into bed again, making the same mistake again. Ken was gone, and Maggie was lonely. If he admitted it to himself, he was lonely, too.

She saw him wince as he moved his arm.

‘Is it fractured?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think so. It just hurts like hell.’

‘You’re lucky that girl didn’t kill you.’

Stride shrugged. ‘Brandy’s a whack job, but I think she was telling the truth. A woman was trying to find Cat, and I’d like to know why.’

‘Do you think Cat knows who it is?’

‘Maybe. Brandy said this woman had found Cat once before. I also want to know if Cat remembers anything unusual happening in the days before the Jason Aldean concert at the DECC. That’s when this woman showed up looking for her.’

‘Jason Aldean? It was that weekend?’

‘Yeah. It was a great show. I went with Guppo. Steve had tickets that he couldn’t use.’

Maggie sucked her lower lip into a frown.

‘What?’ Stride asked. ‘Are you going to give me another lecture about country music? We can’t all be Aerosmith fans.’

‘No, no, don’t you remember? I’m thinking about that reporter from Grand Rapids, Margot Huizenfelt. She disappeared the very next day, on Sunday. It was that same weekend.’

‘Can you think of anything that might link Margot to Cat?’

‘Well, according to the background bio, Margot wrote a book called Lost Life that was all about teenage prostitution in the Midwest. And now we’ve got a mysterious woman trying to track down a teenage prostitute? That’s worth a closer look.’