Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

‘So what the hell does Cat know that’s worth killing over?’

‘We’re talking about an under-age street girl. That’s lethal exposure for any man who touches her. Particularly if he’s got a wife or a public job. Margot was pushing Cat about whether she’d slept with any men with money.’

Steve said nothing but Stride could read his friend’s face. Something was wrong.

‘You look like you know something,’ Stride said. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m not sure I can say anything,’ Steve replied. ‘Patient confidentiality.’

Stride waited.

‘Obviously, I can’t name names,’ Steve went on.

‘Obviously.’

‘The thing is, I’ve noticed an odd trend at the clinic.’

‘Odd? How so?’

‘STDs,’ Steve said. ‘They’ve been showing up in places I wouldn’t expect. Like some very well-off husbands and wives. Normally I might see one case every now and then, but this is multiple cases in a short period of time. One of the men admitted that he’d had sex with a girl at UMD. Not his wife, needless to say, and she wasn’t screwing him out of the goodness of her heart. She was a paid escort, looking for tuition money.’

‘You think she saw some of your other patients?’ Stride asked.

‘No, I think it’s more than that. This isn’t about one girl. It feels organized to me. I think there may be an upscale prostitution ring operating in the city.’

*

Five minutes after Steve left, Stride heard a knock at the front door of the cottage. He noticed Steve’s coat slung over a dining room chair and assumed that his friend had come back to retrieve it.

Stride swung open the door, ready with a joke. When he did, he saw that it wasn’t Steve standing on his front porch. The smile on his face bled away, and his mind went blank. The two of them stared at each other in silence, like old friends, like old lovers, which was what they were. He didn’t know what to do, now that the moment was here, now that they were together again. Gather her into his arms. Kiss her. Or try to pretend he didn’t still love her.

Finally, she spoke first.

‘Hello, Jonny.’

Serena first came into his life at the Duluth airport as she walked off the plane from Las Vegas, dressed like a Bellagio model. Baby blue leather pants, honey sunglasses, a form-fitting white T-shirt and a black raincoat so long it almost swept the floor. She wasn’t like anyone he’d ever met. His first wife, Cindy, had been small and fiery, a sprite who wore every emotion on her sleeve. Serena was as tall as Stride in her sky-high heels, and her attitude was cool and wary. She was as curvy as a showgirl, with a razor-sharp wit, but she wore a sign warning away strangers from trespassing.

Don’t come inside. Stay away.

He wore a sign like that himself. His own sign, with Cindy’s name on it, was about grief and loss. Serena’s was about a childhood wrecked by abuse. They were both damaged, both alike, for better or worse. Two half-souls.

In their first days together they worked a cold case from Duluth to Las Vegas, and along the way their attraction spilled over into sex. They fell in love. He was married then — a second marriage, a bad marriage. He and a teacher named Andrea had pretended to be in love, but when he met Serena, he realized that his marriage was a sham. When it fell apart, he moved to Las Vegas to be with Serena, but he was a fish out of water among the barren mountains and casinos. There was only one place Stride could live, and that was in Duluth, in the shadow of the lake, under the dark cover of the bitter winters.

He came home, and Serena came with him. Neither one of them really thought it would work. You couldn’t take a girl who grew up in the desert, like a saguaro, and expect her to thrive in the frozen north. They were both wrong. Serena had no roots here, but slowly, with each season, she came to feel at home in Minnesota. He’d always taken the idea of home for granted, because every street in Duluth was the sum of its memories for him. Not for Serena. To her, home meant tearing down the past and starting over.

That was what they tried to do on the Point. They ate breakfast on Sunday mornings at Amazing Grace. They made love in the middle of the night, breathlessly, invisibly. They listened to the waves of Superior on the other side of the dune. They were as close and connected as two people could be, but sometimes it was like they lived apart, behind the walls they’d built. He’d feel her pushing him away when she felt vulnerable. He would do the same thing.

Don’t come inside. Stay away.

For him, Michaela was one of those walls. He’d never mentioned her to Serena; he’d never even breathed her name. Michaela, who still haunted him. Michaela, who had been the only woman in his married life to make him wonder, even for a day, whether he could love someone other than Cindy. Michaela, whose death had made him feel every stab wound as if it had gone into his own body.

He stared at Serena in the doorway, and his first thought was: Why did I keep Michaela a secret from you?

*

‘You look great,’ he said, and she did.

She’d lost weight. Her stomach was flat and hard. Her arms looked strong. She wore a black turtleneck that hugged her skin and accentuated the swell of her full breasts. Her jeans made her legs look long and sleek. Standing atop sharp heels, she was eye to eye with him.

‘So do you,’ she said.

He invited her inside. It felt odd, because she didn’t need an invitation. She’d lived here for years. She would wander through the back door, kick off her heels, and drop grocery bags on the counter. She would join him in the living room from the shower, trailing steam, working a brush through her damp hair. The most natural thing in the world was for the two of them to be here together, but they both felt awkward.

‘I heard about Kim Dehne,’ she told him. ‘Did you talk to Bob?’

‘I finally reached him.’

‘They were a sweet couple. It’s an awful thing.’ She added, ‘The girl you found in the DECC — it wasn’t Cat Mateo, right?’

‘Cat’s fine,’ Stride said. ‘She’s on the porch out back.’

‘I got your message, and you were right. Margot knew her. I found an article she wrote, and it’s obviously about Catalina.’ Serena pulled a folded piece of paper from her back pocket and handed it to him.

As he read the article, Serena made a tour of the living room. Her eyes flitted to the walls and the furniture, and he knew she was noticing that he’d changed nothing since she left. Maggie had come and gone from the house without leaving fingerprints. Serena stopped near the attic stairs. Each wooden stair was narrower than the one above it, and at the top were two closed doors. They had talked about finishing the attic, but they had never made plans for how to use the space, so it was still a mess of spider webs and sharp nails jutting from the roof beams.

‘Steve says I need to dust,’ he told her.

‘Yeah, it could use a wipe-down, Jonny. I suppose you’re not home a lot.’

‘You know how it goes.’

‘I do.’

He finished the article and knew that Serena was right. Margot was writing about Cat. She’d done a beautiful job of capturing the girl’s broken life and of making her human rather than a shadowy other who hangs out in doorways. See this girl? She could be your daughter.

He also noticed that Margot made no reference to Cat taking a limo ride up the north shore to service a wealthy man at a vacation resort. He’d read Margot’s writings before, and she loved that kind of savage detail, particularly if it exposed the intersection of heartlessness and power. A sixteen-year-old girl with a rich lawyer or banker? The only way Margot would have skipped that anecdote was if she omitted it deliberately in order to investigate further. She was a reporter, and reporters knew the smell of scandal.