Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

‘No. I guess we drove for at least an hour. I don’t remember where it was, except it was right on the lake.’

‘You told Margot all of this?’

‘Yeah, I told her the story.’

Stride smiled at the girl. ‘Thank you, Cat.’

‘You think it’s important?’

‘I think if I were a reporter, I’d have turned over rocks to find out who that guy was,’ Stride said. ‘I’m betting he’s not the kind of man who would want Margot tracking him down.’

Steve Garske peeled off his gloves and flopped down on the sofa next to Stride. His legs jutted out like stilts. He rubbed his hands through his blond hair, leaving it with wings, and he blinked as if he were not entirely awake. He grabbed a mug of cold coffee from the end table and slugged it down.

‘It’s too early to be conscious on a Sunday morning,’ he said, glancing at Stride, whose own face was dead with exhaustion. ‘I know, I know, I get no sympathy from you.’

‘None,’ Stride said. ‘Did you have a gig with the band last night?’

‘No, just my usual insomnia. I’m still on island time. I had late rounds at St. Luke’s, too. Anyway, Cat’s fine. I cleaned the cuts with antiseptic, and I’m going to put her on a round of antibiotics just to be on the safe side.’ He added, ‘How’s the shoulder, Oh brave warrior?’

‘Hurts, but it’s getting better.’

‘We should X-ray it. Swing by tomorrow while you’re out and we’ll take a picture. In the meantime, ice it.’

‘Will do. How about her baby? Are there any risks from the fight?’

Steve shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. There’s no sign of abdominal injury. Cat says she wasn’t kicked or punched there. The baby should be fine. Even so, I want her in soon for a full check-up.’

‘Sure.’

Steve studied Stride’s living room. He ran his index finger along the wood of the end table and held it up to examine. He shook his head. ‘I’m going to get you a Swiffer. Have you dusted this place since Serena left?’

‘I don’t think of it as dust. I think of it as skin cells I might need again someday.’

‘Uh huh. It’s the brain cells I worry about.’

‘You should be worried,’ Stride replied with a smile. ‘Is Cat on the porch?’

‘Yeah, she’s working on that puzzle you’ve had sitting there all winter. You mind telling me why a man who lives in Duluth buys a jigsaw puzzle with a photo of the lift bridge? Couldn’t you find a picture of the pyramids, or Hawaii, or something like that?’

‘It was a gift.’

‘A gift? You need better friends.’

Stride chuckled. ‘This one came from a little girl, actually.’

‘I forgot, cops get gifts from grateful members of the public. Wish I could say the same. It’s not like my patients send me fruit baskets. “Hey, Steve, thanks for the pap smear.”’

‘I’ll remember that after my colonoscopy.’

‘You do that. I want some kind of tropical fruit-of-the-month club thing. Make it something with mangoes.’

‘Got it.’

‘Sounds like you had a rough night,’ Steve said.

Stride nodded. ‘The media’s all over the county attorney this morning. We’re not releasing much. I’m trying to keep Cat out of it for the time being. She couldn’t handle a media circus.’

‘Any leads?’

‘There’s a stolen car that we haven’t found yet. A black Charger. Other than that, our only lead is Cat. I need to keep her safe.’

‘She trusts you,’ Steve said. ‘Must take after her mother. There was a little bit of a crush there, right?’

‘Michaela and I were friends,’ Stride said. ‘That’s all.’

Steve gave him a sideways glance, and Stride wasn’t sure if his friend believed him. The room was dimly lit, and they were both in shadow. He glanced at the kitchen to make sure the girl hadn’t come inside from the rear porch. ‘Tell me something. When you saw Cat last year, did you talk to her about Vincent Roslak?’

‘I did. Sorry, I should have mentioned it. Brooke called last night and said that Maggie had been around, asking questions.’

‘So tell me now.’

Steve stood up from the leather sofa and winced as he rubbed his lower back, which was a perennial source of pain. He’d suffered a mean tackle on the football field in college. ‘Hang on, I need more caffeine for this. There anything left in the pot?’

‘Always.’

The doctor took his mug into Stride’s kitchen, poured the remnants down the sink, and refilled it. He disappeared through the back door toward the cottage’s screened porch and Stride heard the muffled hum of voices and his friend’s easy laughter. Steve returned to the living room and sat down on the sofa, balancing his coffee mug in his lap.

‘Cat’s already two-thirds of the way through that puzzle,’ he said.

‘Everybody says she’s smart,’ Stride said.

‘We should run some tests and see just how smart. There’s something special there. Anyway, Roslak. Some guys, they smile, and you know they’re trying to pull one over on you. He looked the part, he dressed the part, he said the right things, but you know how it is. You meet a guy, you decide in five minutes if he’s solid or not solid. Roslak wasn’t solid.’

‘How did you find out what he was doing?’

‘I got a tip at my clinic. One of my regular patients said he was sure his wife was sleeping with her shrink. He asked me if I knew the guy and whether I’d heard any dirt about him. It was Roslak.’

‘What did you do?’ Stride asked.

‘At first, nothing. I wasn’t going to risk the guy’s career over innuendo, even if it was someone I didn’t particularly like. Besides, husbands always think their wives are screwing the shrink.’

‘But?’

‘But I kept my eyes open. I saw one of the street girls for a physical, and I asked her some leading questions to see if she volunteered anything. She clammed up instead. Wouldn’t talk about Roslak. I got the same treatment from the next girl. Didn’t seem to matter what he did. The girls wanted to protect him.’

‘So how did you crack the wall of silence?’

‘I saw some of the girls immediately after therapy. There was evidence of sexual activity. Two of them finally admitted it to me. The details were pretty extreme, but the girls refused to go to the police. Instead, I worked with a friend on the state licensing board, and they basically gave Roslak a choice. Give up his license and get out of Duluth, or they’d pursue civil and criminal action against him.’

‘Did Roslak know you were the one who turned him in?’ Stride asked.

‘Oh, yeah, he knew. He didn’t take it well. He stopped by my house one evening, and it almost came to blows. I thought about calling you for a little backup, but I figured I could handle myself. In the end he left without a fight, which was what he did over his license, too. I was surprised he gave up as easily as he did, but of course we later discovered that he was sleeping with a lot of his paying patients, too. He knew it would all come out.’

‘What about Cat?’

‘She denied a relationship with him.’

‘Do you believe her?’

Steve frowned. ‘No.’

‘Roslak left town a year ago,’ Stride said, ‘and Cat claims she never saw him again. Four months later, someone murdered him in Minneapolis.’

‘Do you think there’s a connection?’

‘I would have said no, but after last night I’m not so sure. Now I’m wondering if Cat told Roslak something that got him killed. I think she told Margot Huizenfelt the same thing and that’s why she was grabbed.’

Steve’s eyebrows arched in surprise at the reporter’s name. ‘Cat knew Margot?’

‘She interviewed Cat a few months ago.’