Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

‘Creepy enough that you think she killed him?’

‘I don’t know. She’s screwed up enough that I would say yes. Anyway, you’re not going to like it.’

‘How so?’

‘You’ll have to watch it and see.’ Ken popped a square of pizza in his mouth. ‘You know what we need for dessert? Donuts.’

‘Sick man.’

‘I miss House of Donuts.’

‘Jeez, you and Stride and your donut envy. Steve’s the same way. Is this a guy thing?’

‘Hey, we used to live on crullers after the bars closed. When they shut down, I barely had a reason to live. That’s why I moved to Minneapolis. There was nothing keeping me in a donut-free world.’

‘What about me?’

Ken rubbed her thigh with his foot. ‘If you’d greeted me like that in the old days, I never would have left.’

‘You like it down there?’ she asked.

His foot moved up her thigh, close to the mound between her legs. ‘Down where?’

‘Minneapolis, you pervert.’

‘It’s okay. I thought a bigger city would be more exciting, but there’s too much racial garbage. The minorities hate us. The leftwing freako politicians are always looking over our shoulder. Everybody thinks they know how to do the job better than we do. Pisses me off.’

‘There’s political crap everywhere,’ Maggie said.

‘Yeah, I know. My dad wants me to move to Florida. He’s got a rathole trailer in Tallahassee. Him and me, we’d probably kill each other after a month in the same town. Plus, I hate Florida. All those fucking cockroaches and that fucking humidity. Hurricanes, too. I’m staying in Minnesota for the weather.’

Maggie laughed. ‘So move back here. I could talk to Stride. We could get you on the team again.’

She noticed the anxious look on his face, and she back-pedaled. ‘Whoa, not because of me. I just mean, if you don’t like it down there, you’re not stuck.’

‘Thanks, I get it,’ Ken said. ‘I didn’t think I’d miss it the way I do. I guess when you grow up somewhere, you can’t get it out of your genes. Anyway, it’s a moot point. My mortgage is so far underwater I’d need a scuba tank to see daylight. I ain’t going nowhere.’

Maggie wondered if that was true or if that was a line to spare her feelings. She’d pushed him too fast. It was way too soon to talk about him moving back to Duluth, even if she had no ulterior motives. If he was happier up here, she wanted him to come back here, with no strings attached. The trouble was, it was hard to say you weren’t pulling romantic strings ten minutes after you’d given a man a blow job and washed his hair in the shower.

She said: Move back up here .

He heard: We’re a couple now .

Then again, maybe he was being straight with her. The housing market was on life support, and Ken was still Ken, which meant he’d probably sucked every dollar of equity out of his house to buy toys. She’d lectured him about it when he first joined the force, but Ken never changed. He was still a kid at heart, breezy and impulsive. So was she. Or that was what she told herself. She wasn’t getting old, no matter what the calendar said.

‘So Serena’s in town, huh?’ Ken asked, forcing three squares of pizza into his mouth at the same time. ‘Guppo says she’s looking good.’

‘Serena always looks good,’ Maggie replied sourly.

Ken had no way of knowing he’d pinned the tail on the wrong donkey. ‘You two pissing on each other? You mad because she walked out on Stride?’

Maggie shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

‘You want to talk about it?’

‘The last thing I want to talk about is Serena Dial.’

He held up his hands in surrender. ‘Sorry.’

Then, out of nowhere, he added: ‘So were you ever planning to tell me that you and Stride got it on this winter?’

Maggie slammed her beer on the table. ‘ Shit shit shit! Guppo?’

‘World’s roundest spy.’

She pushed her chair back so hard it fell, and she stalked to the window. She slammed a palm against the wall. ‘I was going to tell you about it.’

‘Yeah, but you didn’t.’

‘I figured you’d think you were some kind of consolation prize.’

‘Am I?’

‘No. That’s not what this is about.’

Ken swallowed his pizza and came up behind her. He wore boxers and nothing else. Maggie’s shirt was undone. He put his arms around her and fingered her breasts like they were musical instruments.

‘I really am sorry,’ she told him.

‘Relax. Fuck me again, and all is forgiven.’

Maggie spun around and slapped him hard. He reeled back in surprise, rubbing his face. His smile vanished, and he shook his head. ‘Guess that wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to say.’

‘Am I a good lay to you? Is that it?’

‘Hey, we both seem pretty happy with this arrangement.’

Maggie closed her eyes. She was suddenly furious. Furious at Ken, at Stride, at Guppo, at Serena, but mostly at herself. She prided herself on never letting her emotions get in the way of her judgment, but she felt like a fool.

‘Let’s not do this now,’ she said.

‘Fine with me.’

‘Maybe we should talk about work.’

‘Maybe we should.’

‘Show me the tape,’ she told him.

‘Whatever you say.’

*

Ken slid the unlabeled DVD into the drawer of the Blu-Ray player on Maggie’s stereo tower. ‘I spent four hours going through Roslak’s files,’ he told her. ‘There were hundreds of videos. He taped everything. I don’t think it was for any clinical purpose. I think the son of a bitch was just a voyeur.’

‘You found Cat?’

‘Yeah, she was in the pile.’

‘Why’d they never bring her in for questioning?’

Ken shrugged. ‘You think the murder of an unlicensed shrink with a rep for screwing patients gets much priority? Around the same time, we had a ten-year-old boy killed in a school bullying incident and an immigrant store owner blown away behind the counter of his shop by two gang members. Guess where the manpower went? It wasn’t Vincent Roslak.’

‘Still, it’s been eight months,’ Maggie said.

‘The case has one lead investigator, and he’s swamped. We dicked around with a judge about getting access to Roslak’s materials at all. Patient privilege, you know? We got permission to do screen captures to sort the videos by face, and we identified a couple hundred people. We’ve got names for most of them now, but we can’t even watch the tapes without consent, which means tracking down each person one at a time. The whole thing is an evidence nightmare.’

‘What about Cat?’

‘With the consent Stride faxed this morning, I was able to pull her videos. Roslak saw her at least five times. I watched all of them. Most of it doesn’t tell us much, but the last one — wow. She was hypnotized. He took her on a flashback about the night her parents died.’

‘She was six then,’ Maggie said. ‘Would her memories be accurate?’

‘Who knows? He’s the shrink, not me.’

‘Where was this? Duluth or Minneapolis?’

‘No way to be sure,’ Ken told her. ‘He’s got a white sheet as a backdrop. I didn’t see anything to identify the location.’

‘Is it dated?’

‘No.’

‘So what did she say?’

‘Take a look,’ Ken said.

He pushed the Play button. The image of Cat Mateo filled the fifty-inch screen. Ken was right; it could have been filmed anywhere. The video showed her and a white backdrop and nothing more. Cat sat on a wooden stool, facing the camera. Her eyes were closed, and her hands were folded in her lap. Her legs were pressed demurely together, like a child in church. She looked serene.

Maggie heard a voice-over behind the camera. The voice dripped with honey and concern. It was Vincent Roslak.