Brian Freeman - In the Dark aka The Watcher

“Have you thought about the job?” he asked as he sat down again.

“I have, and I’m still thinking. I hope that’s okay.”

“Of course. Take all the time you need, but not a minute more. I want you with me. You could do great work here. Plus, the compensation would be a lot more than you ever made as a detective or a PI.”

“That wouldn’t be hard,” she said wryly.

“You told me you needed to talk to me. I assume you have some questions?”

“I do, but not about the job.”

“Oh?”

“I wonder if you remember a girl named Tish Verdure,” Serena said.

Peter rocked back in his chair and pursed his lips. “Tish Verdure. I’m pretty sure there was a girl in my high school named Tish.”

“There was.”

“Well, what about her?”

“She’s back in town. She’s writing a book about the murder of Laura Starr.”

Peter’s face darkened. “I take it you’ve been hearing stories about my teenage years.”

“That’s right.”

“Stories that make you wonder if you want to work for a man like me.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Serena admitted.

Peter let his chair fall forward, and he leaned across the table. “Well, I appreciate your candor, and I’ll try to be candid, too. First of all, let’s get one thing clear. I’m not going to apologize for who I am or who I was. I was an asshole in school, and a lot of people will tell you I still am. That probably includes many of the women I’ve dated.”

“That’s pretty much what I heard.”

Peter shrugged. “I’m not surprised, but I don’t care what anyone else thinks. Look, Randall had more money than God back then, and I thought it gave me a free pass to rule the world. I was smart, but I didn’t do squat. I slept with every girl I could. I was an arrogant son of a bitch.”

“Are you trying to win points for honesty?”

“Not at all. I told you, no apologies. This is me.”

“You know that my partner is Jonathan Stride,” Serena said.

“Of course. I didn’t know Lieutenant Stride well back in school, and I don’t know him very well now. But the things I remember probably don’t give him a very high opinion of me.”

“You could say that.”

“Okay, but here’s where I draw the line. I did not kill Laura Starr.”

“Who did?”

“The police thought it was a vagrant.”

“Is that what you thought?”

“All I know is that it wasn’t me.”

“She was killed with your baseball bat.”

“That doesn’t prove a thing. The bat was lying in a field for anyone to pick up.”

Peter’s secretary knocked on the door and came in bearing a small silver coffee urn and two china cups. She poured out and left without saying a word. Serena tasted the coffee and recognized the dark flavor of Star-bucks.

“So I take it that this writer, Tish, has her sights set on me,” Peter said. “She wants to nail me for the murder.”

“You’re certainly on her list.”

“You know, bad publicity doesn’t bother me. I get my share all the time. I just hate to see old gossip used against me.”

“I’m not sure you can pass it off as gossip,” Serena said. “Stride tells me that you were a suspect. Some people think that Ray Wallace deliberately steered the investigation away from you.”

“Ray was a problematic figure as a cop. We both know that.”

“A few years later, he was forced to resign as chief of police because of a bribery scheme involving Stanhope Industries,” Serena pointed out.

“That was long after I sold the company.”

“Yes, but Ray’s relationship started with Randall. Your father.”

“All I can tell you is that if Ray helped me behind the scenes, there was no need for him to do so. I was innocent.”

Serena frowned. Peter was convincing, but selling stories to a jury was his job. “Tell me what you remember about Tish Verdure,” she said.

Peter sipped his coffee. “I remember that she and Laura were thick as thieves. Both of them blond, very cute.”

“Did you date Tish?” Serena asked.

“Sure, I took a run at her. I took a run at every blonde with great tits back then. I still do. Tish said no. Shut me down cold.”

“You?”

Peter grinned. Serena saw the cocky boy flash in his eyes. “Amazing, huh? Well, Tish was a weird girl. Laura was pretty much her only friend. No dad, and then her mother got shot. Tough life.”

Serena held up her hand. “Wait a minute, Tish’s mother was shot?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened?” she asked.

Peter pursed his lips. “She was a teller at a downtown bank. There was a robbery that went bad. The mother was a hostage who didn’t make it out.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, I don’t remember. Long before high school. Tish probably wasn’t even in her teens when it happened. I only knew about it because kids talked a lot. Everyone wondered why Tish was so closed off, and the rumor mill spread the word about her mother pretty quickly. Like I said, she was a weird girl.”

“But you asked her out anyway.”

“I was a slave to my libido,” Peter said. “Some things don’t change.”

“Who did you go after first? Tish or Laura?”

“Tish, actually.”

“And when she said no, you went after her best friend?”

“Something like that.”

Serena shook her head. “You’re right, Peter. You were an asshole back then.”

“I never said I wasn’t.”

“Did it bother you when Tish turned you down?”

“Not really.”

“I don’t imagine too many girls turned you down.”

“That’s why it didn’t bother me,” Peter said with a little smile.

“I heard Tish and Laura had a big fight that spring. Could they have been arguing about you?”

“About me? I can’t imagine why.”

“Except you were dating Laura by then, right?”

Peter stared at Serena. He took another drink of coffee. “Right.”

“So maybe Tish didn’t like Laura hanging out with you.”

“If she did, I never heard about it.”

“How did you meet Laura?”

“We were in Miss Mathisen’s geometry class together in our junior year. So was Tish.”

“Tish told us that Laura broke up with you after a couple of dates because you wanted sex and she didn’t.”

“Is that what she said? Well, she’s wrong, but it was a long time ago.”

“Is there any reason Laura would have wanted to keep your relationship a secret?”

“I have no idea, but you were a teenage girl once. Isn’t that the kind of thing that teenage girls do?”

“Sometimes.”

Serena wanted to ask more about the night Laura was killed, but she knew she had pushed Peter as far as she could. The rest was in Jonny’s hands. He was the cop, not her. Not anymore.

“I appreciate your letting me ask you all these questions,” she told him. “I’m still a detective at heart, I guess.”

“That’s why I want to hire you.”

“I know. I’ll get back to you very soon about the job.”

“I may be in touch even sooner than that,” Peter said.

“Oh?”

“I have another freelance job for you.”

“What’s that?” Serena asked.

“Well, if Tish pursues this book, it could start causing me problems in the media. They’ll drag up old lies again. I need your help.”

“What can I do?”

“You can find out who killed Laura,” Peter told her. “Or barring that, you can prove it wasn’t me.”

Tish was late.

Stride sat on a stone bench amid the rose gardens of Leif Erickson Park. He ate a roast beef sandwich and inhaled the floral aroma of thousands of red, yellow, and white roses surrounding him. Nearby, a white gazebo overlooked the lake, on a bluff adjacent to the boardwalk that followed the cliff’s edge and wound down along the shore to Canal Park. At lunchtime, with a huge blue sky overhead, the park was crowded with people picnicking in the grass and admiring the flowers.