Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

‘Did you?’

‘Me? No. You know I’m not religious the way she was.’ He listened to the peaceful solitude. ‘I always thought, though, that if you had to spend eternity somewhere, this wouldn’t be a bad place.’

‘It’s just frozen ground, Jonny.’

Stride said nothing. He knew that Serena, growing up the way she did, had no belief in God. There had been a time after Cindy died when he’d felt the same way, bitter and certain that he was alone in the world. Now, he was content not knowing whether there was any kind of guiding hand. There were moments when the universe felt random and cruel. There were other moments that felt predestined and made him feel arrogant not to believe.

Like finding Cat in his bedroom closet.

Like kissing Serena on Michaela’s porch.

He stood up from the bench. ‘Come on, you’re freezing. Let’s wait inside.’

She smiled. ‘Me in a church? God might smite me at the threshold.’

‘I’ll go in first and take the hit.’

Serena stood up and took his hand. Her long, slim fingers were cool. They walked through the graveyard to the double church doors, which led inside to the nave. Three modest stained glass windows lent colored light to the floor from the streetlight outside. Rows of empty pews lined the space. The sconce lights on the walls glowed like candles.

Halfway to the altar, Stride slid into a pew and Serena sat beside him. She took a hymnal from the bench in front of her and turned the pages. The binding was broken and worn. She closed it carefully and put it back.

‘Cat was really shaken,’ Serena said. ‘I’m sorry I did that to her. Bad idea.’

‘Maybe she needs to remember that night,’ he said. ‘That’s part of the healing.’

He thought about the drive back to his cottage. Cat had said little. There’d been no more memories or revelations. She’d stared out the window and resisted their efforts to draw her out. When they’d left her with a policewoman for the evening, she’d stretched out on her stomach in front of the fire. Her face had been far away.

‘Is any of it real?’ Serena asked. ‘Can we trust what she told us?’

‘For now, let’s assume we can. She thinks that someone else was there that night. If that’s true, whoever it was probably shot Marty.’

‘And Michaela?’

‘No, Marty definitely killed her,’ Stride said. ‘He was covered in her blood. It wouldn’t have taken much to gin him up to butcher her. Someone simply pushed him over the edge.’

‘But why?’

‘Because Michaela’s death made the whole story work. If Marty got murdered, we’d start digging into his life to find the answers. But to snap and murder Michaela? And then shoot himself? That made perfect sense. We all saw it coming.’

Stride shook his head. He’d been played. They’d all been played. They’d been given a scenario that fit their expectations, and they’d swallowed it whole. Marty was the perfect fall guy. So was Fong Dao. A home invasion and then a murder-suicide. Both crimes solved, with no one the wiser.

‘Someone walked away from that heist free and clear,’ Serena said.

‘Until that ring showed up,’ Stride said. ‘You think you’re safe for ten years and then all of a sudden there’s Margot Huizenfelt putting Marty in the middle of Rebekah Keck’s murder. Whoever it is must have been desperate to keep the connection from being exposed.’

‘Once you’ve gone that far, there’s no going back,’ Serena said. ‘Everyone involved in the home invasion was guilty of murder. Get caught, and your life is over. Kill, and stay free. The question is, who’s still out there? Did Fong and Marty work with an accomplice? Is that who we’re looking for?’

‘That assumes Fong was involved in the burglary at all,’ Stride said. ‘Maggie says she’s not so sure anymore. We looked for an accomplice in all of Fong’s activities back then, and we didn’t find one, so we assumed he pulled the job himself. One perp. End of story.’

‘Don’t blame yourself, Jonny.’

‘I don’t like being fooled,’ Stride said. ‘Whether Fong was guilty or not, Marty didn’t do this alone. How did he get the alarm code? How did he know that Lenny and Rebekah were out of town? He needed a lot of information to pull this off. He needed someone close to Lenny to help him.’

‘Or Lenny,’ Serena said.

‘Yeah. Or Lenny.’

Serena said what he was thinking. ‘We have to face a nasty possibility here, Jonny. This might not be a burglary at all. The theft may simply have been a cover-up to draw the investigation away from what it really was.’

‘Murder,’ Stride said.

‘That’s right. Everybody assumed that Rebekah Keck stumbled into a home invasion and got killed, but maybe this was all about making her murder look like an accident. She comes home, Marty’s waiting for her. He shoots her and ransacks the house. A few weeks later, everything’s recovered at Fong Dao’s place, and Fong goes away for life. Meanwhile, Marty winds up in the middle of a murder-suicide that looks completely unrelated. No loose ends.’

‘You think Lenny arranged for Rebekah’s death,’ Stride said. ‘He got Marty to pull it off and then killed him.’

‘I think it’s possible. Don’t you?’

He didn’t answer. Instead, they heard a loud voice at the front of the church.

‘ You’re both wrong .’

Leonard Keck, in a royal purple tracksuit, stood by the stained glass windows with his hands on his hips. His gray hair was a mess, and his tanned, blotchy face was angry. Behind him, Police Chief Kyle Kinnick stood in the open doorway of the church. The cold air made a draft past the chief.

Lenny marched down the aisle in his tennis shoes.

‘You are both wrong,’ he repeated. ‘I didn’t know this man Marty Gamble. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Rebekah. I loved her, and that’s the truth. I don’t care what the two of you think of me. I may be a son of a bitch, but I didn’t do this. I didn’t kill my wife.’

‘So what are the ground rules, Chief?’ Stride asked.

They stood at the back of the church. K-2 wore a black fedora and a heavy brown trench coat over his suit. His dress shoes were wet with snow. His ears jutted out from the side of his head, and the ends were pink from the cold. At the other end of the aisle, Leonard Keck sat in the front pew with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand.

‘I told him that we wouldn’t use anything he says in a prosecution against him,’ K-2 said. ‘Hence the private meeting.’

‘That ties my hands.’

‘Just be glad he didn’t bring along his lawyer, Jon.’

Stride ran his hands back through his hair. ‘What if he confesses to murder?’

‘He won’t.’

‘If he stonewalls, the deal’s off.’

‘He knows that. It cost me a hundred dollar bottle of scotch to get him here, so you owe me big.’

‘I doubt it was that easy.’

K-2 shrugged and scratched his ear. ‘Yeah, I had to threaten to call the City Council, the US Attorney, and the chair of the state Republican Party. He knows he may lose his Council seat when this gets out, but there are always second acts in politics. Particularly in Duluth. Besides, he’s rich. He can still buy all the influence he wants.’

‘You know what he’s going to tell us?’

‘Most of it.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘Bad enough, but mostly stupid. Stupid screws up more investigations than anything else. You know that.’

Stride nodded. People lied to the police the way that they lied to their doctors. They felt embarrassed. They felt guilty. They didn’t want to admit doing something foolish. He’d wasted weeks of time and watched criminals go free because of lies that had nothing to do with the real crimes.