Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

You know how sometimes you find a quartz on the beach amid all that muddy sand? That’s Tina. She’s a shiny quartz, huddled against a wall that’s wild with spray paint. Pretty. No, make that gorgeous. Prom queen gorgeous.

You want her? You can have her. Fifty bucks, and guess where she’ll put la boca. You like? She’s sixteen.

Serena winced at Margot’s directness, but that was something she’d come to like about the woman’s writing. Margot didn’t sugarcoat. She told it as it was. Further down the page, Serena saw the passage she remembered:

Tina loves her father. Daughters like to tell stories on their fathers. She wears a ring he gave her on a chain around her neck. Sweet. It’s gaudy paste, but she won’t let you near it because you might try to steal it. If you try, watch out, because Tina is quick with a knife. Daddy taught her well.

Thing is, Daddy’s dead. He stabbed her mother a few dozen times, and when he saw what he had done, he blew a hole in his head. Tina? She was hiding. Heard the whole thing. Dad murdering Mom. Dad committing suicide. You and me, we might skip Father’s Day after something like that, but not Tina. She says he’s still looking out for her. He still talks to her sometimes, like a guardian angel.

I really hope she’s wrong about that.

Even with a fake name, the girl named Tina was clearly Catalina Mateo. There weren’t two girls with her story in Duluth. Anyone who knew her would make the connection. Three months ago, on one of her hikes through the seamy belly of the city, down near the graffiti graveyard, Margot Huizenfelt found Cat Mateo and made her the latest lost girl in her series of profiles.

If Stride was right, Margot came back to Duluth a month ago to find Cat again.

Then she vanished.

Why?

‘This has to stop.’

‘It stops when we’re safe,’ he replied. ‘Don’t you get that?’

He heard ragged breathing on the phone. Angry breathing. It was starting to worry him.

‘You said it would be over by now.’

‘It was. It should have been over ten years ago, but loose ends have a way of unraveling. Don’t blame me. I’m cleaning up the mess.’

‘Not like this. Two more people killed? What kind of monster are you?’

‘You called me. Remember? I’m handling this, which is just what you wanted. You were the one panicking. You said we had to do something. You said it was all going to come out.’

‘Maybe it’s better if it does. I can’t take it anymore.’

‘No, it’s not better. I don’t want to hear you talking like that. We are going to take this genie by the throat and cram him back into his bottle. We do whatever it takes. You got that?’

Silence.

‘ You got that? ’ he demanded.

‘Yeah, I understand.’ Then: ‘I wish I’d never met you.’

‘Real nice. I saved your ass and that’s all you can say to me?’

‘I can’t believe I let this happen. I wish I’d just-’

‘What?’ he asked. ‘You wish you’d gone to prison? Don’t waste time on fairy tales. It’s too late for that. If you see the inside of a jail cell now, it’s for the rest of your life. Remember that.’

‘We can’t stop this. The police are getting close. What happens if they make the connection?’

‘They won’t.’

‘That’s what you said before. Now we have more blood on our hands. This is driving me crazy. I can’t live with it.’

He took the menace out of his voice. He needed to be calm now. Reassuring. ‘You have to be patient for a little while longer. Soon we’ll be free, and we’ll never have to see each other again. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To forget me? To walk away from what happened?’

‘That’s what I want.’

‘So do I. Don’t worry. No one is going to make the connection, and even if they do, they’re never going to tie anything back to us. Not anymore.’

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Let me take care of it. All you have to do is keep an ear to the ground, and if you hear anything, you let me know right away. Okay?’

The reply was long in coming. Too long. ‘Okay.’

‘I’ll be in touch.’

He hung up the phone.

He didn’t like what he heard. He’d spent his whole life reading people, and he knew when they were about to crack. This was going to be a problem.

Stride recognized the tattoos on the girl’s skin and the rainbow streaks in her hair. He also remembered her frozen eyes, which were wide open and as crazy-wild in death as they’d been in her short life. Even now, she looked ready to leap to her feet and run away with a wild laugh. He hated to feel relief at any victim of a crime, but his heart felt so light that it climbed into his throat.

The dead girl on the floor of the DECC was not Cat. It was Brandy Eastman.

She lay outside the doors of the arena commissary, her head propped at an obscene angle against the wall. Her forehead was split in two, the result of a blow from a fourteen-inch pipe wrench that sat in the lake of blood underneath her skull. Nearby, outside the reach of her hands, he saw a knife, with a handle that matched the expensive Victorinox set in the house where Kim Dehne had been killed. The knife showed no evidence of blood.

‘Is this the girl who attacked you?’ Maggie asked.

‘That’s her.’

‘Looks like she planned to hide here for the weekend. Guppo found some provisions in a banquet room on the other side of the kitchen. Blanket, cigarettes, Red Bull, candy, empty BK Whopper wrapper.’

‘Are we absolutely sure the Whopper wrapper was empty when he found it?’ Stride asked.

Maggie grinned. Sergeant Guppo had a waistline the size of a snow tire. ‘So he claims.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yeah, paraphernalia from The Last Place on Earth.’

Stride frowned with disgust. The Last Place on Earth was a downtown Duluth head shop with the resilience of a radiated cockroach. The police and the City Council had tried without success to shut it down for years, and all the while the store rang up millions in sales. The owner liked to boast that urine cleaners for drug tests had bought him a vacation home in Mexico.

‘So what do you think happened?’ Stride asked.

‘It looks like Brandy came through the doors and got surprised. Someone brained her, and the blow drove her backward against the wall.’

‘Hard to surprise that girl.’

Maggie shrugged. ‘The lights were off. She would have been practically blind. She never knew what hit her.’

‘Evidence?’

‘Not much. We’ll run tests on the wrench, but I don’t think the murderer brought it from outside. We found tools near one of the truck entries.’

Stride gestured at the floor. ‘What about the knife?’

‘It’s definitely from the house where we found Kim Dehne. The butcher knife that killed her is still missing, but somebody took this blade from the same set.’

‘Is it possible that Brandy killed Kim?’ Stride asked. ‘She was crazy enough, and she had the strength, particularly if she was drugged up.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘It looks like Brandy was already holed up here at the DECC. She probably heard someone inside the building and went to check it out, and pow .’

‘Is there any sign of Cat?’ Stride asked.

‘She was here.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘One of the patrol officers spotted a girl running through the skywalk toward downtown. By the time we got somebody to the other end, the girl was gone, but the description matched Cat. That’s what led Guppo to launch a search inside the DECC, and we found Brandy. Oh, and there’s evidence of a fight inside the arena. We found blood and torn clothing.’