Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

She spotted a picture of Brooke and Dory hanging from the mirror. A kitchen knife sat on the floor of the car.

‘Goddamn it, Brooke,’ she murmured.

It wasn’t hard to figure out how it started. Before Ken joined the Duluth Police, he’d been a campus cop at UMD. He knew the students and administrators; he knew the lay of the land. If someone had wanted the police to talk to one of the girls about escort trafficking on campus, Ken would have gotten the call. Keep it discreet. Keep it out of the headlines and the police logs. Just make it go away.

She wondered whether Ken simply blackmailed Brooke. Or whether he slept with her. Or both. Ken had a gift for manipulation. A girl like Brooke would have been scared to death to have a cop confronting her about turning tricks for tuition money. She would have done whatever he said. The perfect pawn.

It wasn’t even hard to figure out why Ken had risked everything for a big score. Maggie knew Ken back then. He was in love with money, but he didn’t have much. There had been rumors about his spending habits getting out of control, about debts, even about loan sharks, but when she grilled him about it, he’d promised that he had it covered. As far as she knew, he’d dug himself out, because the rumors stopped. She just never realized that his golden parachute involved Brooke, Lowball Lenny, and an ex-con named Marty Gamble.

He must have thought it was the perfect plan. It all would have worked if Rebekah Keck hadn’t come home early. If Marty hadn’t panicked and shot her. She told herself that Ken wasn’t violent, that he wouldn’t have harmed anyone if the burglary at Lenny’s hadn’t gone south in a bad way.

The trouble was, she didn’t believe it. Ken chose Marty for a reason. He could eliminate him, and no one would ever ask questions. Right from the beginning, Marty and Michaela were going to die.

Maggie stayed on the lake side of the street, hugging the trees, which swirled around her as she closed in on Stride’s house. Snow clung to the lawns and sidewalk and blew up in silver sprays under the streetlights. She looked for Ken’s car but didn’t see it, but she slid her gun into her hand anyway.

As she ducked between the trees, she saw a body near the corner of the house. Heel marks in the snow showed where the body been dragged out of view of the street. She ran closer and realized it was the policewoman she’d assigned to protect Cat. The young woman lay sprawled in the snow. Her brown hair was matted in blood where someone had struck her. She was unconscious, but Maggie checked her pulse and was relieved to find that she was still breathing.

She grabbed her phone and called for an ambulance. As she did, the woman began to revive on the wet ground. Her eyes fluttered. She groaned in pain and tried to get up. Seeing someone above her, she instinctively tried to fight, but Maggie grabbed her wrists.

‘Don’t move,’ Maggie told her. ‘It’s me. Help’s on the way.’

The policewoman settled back into the snow. Her eyes stayed open and began to focus.

‘Someone hit me from behind,’ she murmured.

‘I know. I have to check inside. I’ll be back.’

Maggie saw that Stride’s door was closed. She crouched low and led the way up the porch steps with her gun. At the door, she twisted the handle; it was unlocked. She pushed it open and slipped inside. The living room was empty. A lamp was knocked over; there had been a struggle. She eased around the doorway and cleared the first bedroom on her left, where Cat had been sleeping. From there, she quickly moved to each of the other rooms.

The house was cold and deserted. There were no more bodies, but there was no one here.

Distantly, above the howl of the wind and the roar of the lake, she heard a siren wailing down the Point as the ambulance raced closer. She dialed Stride as she ran back to the front of the house.

‘It’s me,’ she said.

‘We’re on our way downtown. Do you have her?’

‘No, they’re both gone. He’s got Brooke. And Cat, too.’

Ken McCarty waited with the headlights off. Sweat trickled down his forehead from his buzz cut, and his eyes danced back and forth to the mirror, watching for cars. It was late; they were alone. He kept his gun in his left hand, pointed across the steering wheel at Brooke. Cat squirmed in the back seat behind them, her mouth, wrists, and ankles bound with duct tape.

They sat behind the guardrails at the lift bridge. All the while, he talked. That was one thing Brooke remembered about Ken. He liked to talk. He talked about his parents, his dog, his car, his girlfriends, his stereo, his apartment, his clothes, his sunglasses, and his penis. He talked when he was threatening her. He talked when he was fucking her.

Now, when he was getting ready to shoot her, he was still talking.

‘What are the odds, huh?’ he said, his knee bouncing nervously inside the car. ‘That son of a bitch Marty Gamble swipes a ring, and he has to pick the only thing that would ever blow up in our faces. Jesus, if only I’d had more time to find the girl that night.’

‘You’d have killed Cat?’ Brooke murmured. ‘A little girl? I can’t believe even you would do that.’

‘Loose ends, Brookie. You see what happens when you have loose ends? It’s not pretty.’

‘You planned to kill Marty all along, didn’t you?’

Ken craned his neck to stare up at the bridge. The deck hovered above them at the top of the span. She wondered if they could feel it sway up there, as the wind blew through the canal. In front of them, she saw ship lights. It wouldn’t be long now. She was running out of time.

‘Hey, everybody knew that he’d go off the deep end sooner or later,’ he said. ‘I just helped it along. I took him out for a drive to celebrate Fong’s arrest and got him so drunk he could hardly walk. That’s when I started telling him about Stride and Michaela and how Stride was bragging about his affair with her. Marty would have believed anything I told him. Next thing I knew he was screaming at me to drive over there. I let him go inside and I could hear him whaling on her. When I went inside, he was sitting against the wall, and she was bleeding from like a million holes.’

In the back seat, Cat kicked viciously at Ken. The car shook with her fury. Her bound legs reared up and landed a glancing blow on his head, dizzying him. Brooke grabbed for the gun, but she was too slow. Furious, Ken spun around; he held Brooke back with a hand around her throat and pointed the gun over the seats at Cat’s face.

‘Hey! Knock it off, you little bitch! Do you have any idea how much fucking trouble you’ve caused me? One little teenage hooker! Unbelievable! Believe me, we’re going to have some fun before you disappear, baby, because I’ve earned it.’

He thumped back into his seat, breathing hard. He was losing control. The gun bounced in his hand as he drummed the steering wheel. He shouted at the bridge. ‘Come on, goddamn it! Come on!’

Brooke saw flashing lights beyond the open gap of the canal. She hoped it was a police car, but it was an ambulance, and she knew where it was heading. She wondered if the policewoman at Stride’s house was dead, if he’d killed her, if she had another victim on her conscience. How many was this now? She’d lost count.

‘For a long time, I wondered if you’d kill me,’ Brooke said.

‘I thought about it.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

Ken grinned. ‘Hey, I always liked you, Brookie. Let’s face it, you were a great fuck, too.’

He reached across the car and squeezed her breast like it was a stress ball. She winced inside at his touch, but she didn’t show him her revulsion. The sex between them had gone on for years. She never knew when he would show up or what he would do to her. Each time, she wondered if it was the last — if he would fuck her and then strangle her and make her disappear. The sight of him terrified her; the touch of his hands made her want to leap out a window and kill herself. Even so, she couldn’t say a word to anyone.