Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

‘Why my parents?’

‘You have to believe me, Cat, I didn’t know what he planned to do. He said he couldn’t do the job himself. He needed an alibi. So he got your father to do the break-in. He never said he planned to kill him, but with Marty gone there wasn’t any way to tie it back to us. I just never, ever thought that anything would happen to your mother.’

‘She didn’t know?’ Cat asked quietly.

‘She knew nothing. She was just a victim. Like you.’

Cat got up. Her chair made a scraping noise on the floor. Brooke reached out for her, but Cat turned away. The girl stood at the dining room windows, looking through the slats of the blinds. This was the way it had to be. Cat couldn’t forgive her. No one could.

Brooke opened her mouth to explain, but the hiss of the wind in the living room was so loud that she thought it would drown out her voice. Cold air bled through the house, raising goose bumps on her skin. The uneven floor beneath her feet groaned. The entire cottage shook under the assault, as if they were swirling inside the cone of a tornado.

Something was wrong.

Brooke rushed into the living room, but the policewoman had vanished. The room was empty. The door to the porch was open, letting in the elements. The open door banged like a hammer on the wood of the window frame. Bang bang bang.

Brooke stared at the doorway. The darkness beyond froze her with fear. Her face swung to Cat. ‘We have to get out of here right now.’

She hunted for something she could use as a weapon, but it was already too late. When she looked back at the door, there he was, standing on the porch, blocking their escape. His easy smile was gone, and in its place was cold death. He had a gun in his hand as he walked into the house.

‘Where’s the girl?’ he said.

Stride slapped his palm against the computer monitor mounted to his dashboard. ‘Did I mention how much I hate technology?’

Serena rotated the keyboard and monitor toward herself. ‘Let me do it before you put a fist through the screen. What are you looking for?’

Stride ran his hands back through his hair. He didn’t want to believe what he suspected. ‘Bill Green says Marty beat him up in an alley near Curly’s,’ Stride said. ‘It was a couple weeks before Christmas ten years ago. I want to see if there was an incident report.’

‘Near Curly’s? That doesn’t narrow it down.’

‘Limit it to assault and gun reports,’ Stride said. ‘And check victim names against Green.’

‘What about Marty?’ Serena asked.

‘No, you won’t find him in there.’

Serena was puzzled. ‘Why not? Are you sure?’

‘I’m very sure.’

She didn’t argue, but she ran a search for both men and said, ‘There’s nothing in the system on either name in that time frame. Maybe there was no ICR.’

‘Green said the police responded. It has to be there.’

Serena took her fingers off the keyboard. ‘You want to tell me what I’m really looking for, Jonny?’

Stride felt the Expedition shudder. The wind was wild. Debris cascaded across the windshield. ‘Green said we let Marty walk,’ he said.

‘So? It sounded like a bar fight. That’s going to be a judgment call on whether the cop takes them in.’

‘Not if a gun was involved. No way we let that slide. Besides, it doesn’t matter. It was Marty Gamble .’

‘Meaning what?’ she asked.

‘Marty was on probation. He’d finally done time after he nearly killed Michaela, but he was back on the street. I was sure he was going to come after her again as soon as he had the chance. I wanted him. He was my top priority, and every one of my cops knew it. They knew his name. They knew his face. If he so much as took a leak against the side of a building I wanted him hauled in so we could get him revoked. If we could have nailed him for assault — with a handgun! — he would have been busted back for the rest of his time and probably another couple of years. The cop who brought him to me would have been a hero. I would have pinned a medal on his chest.’

‘No one did,’ Serena said.

‘No one did. Marty never hit the system.’

‘So Green’s lying. Or he never admitted that Marty was the one who beat him up.’

Stride said nothing.

Serena looked at him and her face darkened as she realized where his mind was taking him. ‘Or you had a bad cop,’ she said.

He pointed at the screen. She scrolled through the ten-year-old incident reports in silence, and he waited. It was still possible that Green had made up the story. It was still possible he’d kept quiet about Marty out of fear for his cousin’s retribution. But Stride didn’t think so. This was worse. This was one of his own. Someone inside would have known that Marty could be leveraged to do just about anything to stay out of jail. Someone inside would have known about Fong Dao’s burglary record. Someone inside would have known how to stage a murder-suicide without raising any questions.

‘December sixteen,’ Serena said. ‘There was a 911 call about an assault in progress. The time and location fit.’

‘How was it resolved?’ he asked.

‘That’s what’s odd. It came in as assault but the report was converted to drunk and disorderly, accidental injuries. No info on an assailant, no ID on the vic, definitely no gun. According to the follow-up, the vic declined medical treatment and disappeared. That’s it. Incident closed.’ She added, ‘This might not be the right report.’

‘Who responded?’ Stride asked. He thought: This was the call. Marty assaulted Bill Green. Someone buried it.

‘Do you remember your officer codes from ten years ago?’

‘No, but the table should be in the system.’

Serena clicked on the code. He watched her close her eyes. Her breath left her chest.

‘Who?’ he said softly.

‘It was Ken McCarty,’ she told him.

*

‘I’m nearly at your place,’ Maggie told Stride as she sped down the Point in the Corvette. ‘Brooke’s waiting there.’

‘Mags,’ he said.

She knew in the tone of his voice that something was very wrong.

She listened to him talk.

She listened to what he said.

She didn’t react. When he was done, she simply said, ‘Understood,’ and hung up the phone, cutting him off in mid-sentence.

Ken McCarty.

Her lover. Her friend. The baby cop she’d hired. Ken was dirty. Worse than dirty.

It was odd, how calm she felt at the news. How none of her emotions churned. She saw it for what it was; she’d been seduced and conned. There was no coincidence in Ken showing up in her office, no accident in his inviting her to dinner and charming his way into her bed. She was his pipeline. He was in town hunting for Cat, and he was using his old boss to keep tabs on what the police knew.

She’d let a bad cop, a thief and a murderer, fool her with his lies. She’d had wild sex with the very man she was hunting.

Still she felt nothing. Not anger. Not shame. She was dead inside. There was only one thing to do.

Find him.

Maggie dialed his cell phone, but the call went to voice mail. He’d turned it off to avoid the footprints of cell towers tracking him through the state. She knew what that meant. He wasn’t in Minneapolis anymore; he’d followed her north. He’d been going back and forth between the two cities for days, hiding out in a cold garage and driving a stolen black Charger.

Hunting. Killing.

He was here.

She parked south of Stride’s cottage on the bayside. When she got out, the wind cut through her burgundy jacket, but she didn’t feel the cold. She was almost in a trance. Across the street, in one of the cross-alleys that ended at the lakeside dunes, she spotted a white Kia Rio. Brooke’s car. She jogged across the street and checked it out, but the car was empty.