Brian Freeman - In the Dark aka The Watcher

“There’s something else,” Stride continued. “We never released this to the media. Someone masturbated at the crime scene where Laura was beaten to death. I guess the guy was so turned on by what he had done he had to jerk off. We still have the semen, Finn. What happens next is we get a court order to sample your DNA and we match it against the semen we found at the scene. I think we’re going to get a match, Finn. I think you were at the murder scene that night.”

“I told you, I don’t remember,” Finn said.

“Then let us help your memory. Give us a DNA sample right now. Let us run the test. Don’t you want to know the truth?”

Finn looked at them, horrified. “No.”

“You told me how hard it is to live your life not knowing if you killed someone. Maybe it will unlock your memory if you find out you were really there.” Stride paused and said, “Or maybe you remember already, Finn. Maybe you know what happened that night.”

“I can’t tell you anything. It’s gone.”

Stride shook his head. “It’s not gone. It’s still inside your head. You say you saw someone attacking Laura. Trying to rape her. Are you sure it wasn’t you?”

“No! That wasn’t me. It was someone else.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who it was. I couldn’t see.”

“Then Dada broke it up. Laura ran into the woods. Are you sure you didn’t follow her?”

“No,” Finn told them. He uncrossed and recrossed his legs.

“You said you don’t remember. Isn’t it possible you did follow Laura into the woods? Toward the beach?”

“I wouldn’t do that.” His eyes darted around, looking for escape.

“That night didn’t end in the field. Someone went after Laura. Someone took the baseball bat and chased her up to the north beach. Someone killed her. Beat her to death. Hammered her until she was almost unrecognizable. If I did that, I’d probably black it out, too.”

“Oh, my God,” Finn murmured.

“Or did you just see it? You’re a watcher, right? Did you see who killed Laura? Because that’s what we need to know. We need to know what happened.”

“ I don’t remember .”

Maggie leaned forward. “You remember Mary Biggs, though, don’t you? You remember what she looked like, right? Well, here’s what she looks like now.”

She spilled a stack of photographs onto the desk. Autopsy photos. She picked them up one by one and pressed them into Finn’s hands, watching him go blue, watching him swallow hard, watching his head bob back and forth like the ticking of a clock as he stared, unable to look away, at the swollen, lifeless remains of Mary Biggs, pulled from the water after she drowned.

“You killed her, Finn. You killed this wonderful girl.”

Finn squeezed his eyes shut.

“OPEN YOUR EYES!” Maggie bellowed at him. His eyelids sprang up in shock. She clutched a close-up photo of Mary’s face, her skin puffed and pale. She shoved the photo so close to Finn that Mary’s face was his whole world, and he couldn’t see anything else.

“Tell me why,” Maggie said. “Tell me why you did this to her.” Her voice softened. “Look, I know you didn’t mean to. Did you love her? Did you want a chance to tell her how you felt? But she didn’t understand. She was scared of you.”

Finn gulped air like a fish. He swallowed hard as if something were in his mouth that wouldn’t go down.

“Mary and Laura both deserved better,” Stride said quietly.

Finn was a rubber band that had been stretched until it was frayed and ready to snap. When Finn buried his face in his hands, Stride caught Maggie’s eye. They both thought the words would spill out now, like a dammed-up river seeping through sandbags and finally bursting free. He would talk. He would confess. He would throw off the anvil that had weighed on his conscience. He would seek absolution for the secrets that had made his life so miserable that he could only escape it into a numbed world of marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol.

“Let it go,” Maggie murmured.

Stride said, “It’s okay.”

Finn stared wildly at them. Tears ran from his eyes; mucus ran from his nose. He clapped a hand to his mouth, shoved them both aside with a stiff jerk of his arm, and bolted through the door, slamming it behind him. They heard the gasping, retching noise of his stomach spewing onto the marble floor of City Hall. When Stride opened the door again, the sweet stench of vomit made him cover his nose and look away.

Finn was gone.

Ten minutes later, the interrogation room still smelled of Finn’s body. Stride leaned back on the desk until his head banged against the wall. Maggie jumped off the desk, took the chair in which Finn had been sitting, and propped her feet up.

Her cell phone rang. She slid it out of her pocket and answered. Stride recognized the voice of Max Guppo, the overweight detective who had been leading the search team at Finn Mathisen’s house, along with cops from Superior. Maggie asked a few questions and then hung up. She didn’t look happy.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Come on.”

She shook her head. “They didn’t find a damn thing to link him to the peeping cases. His room looked as if it had been vacuum-cleaned of anything potentially incriminating. The computer had no hard drive, for God’s sake. Just a big hole in the tower. His shoes were all new. His clothes had been washed.”

“Rikke,” Stride said.

Maggie nodded. “She knows what he’s been doing. Maybe we can lean on her.”

“She’s been covering for Finn for thirty years. She’s not going to stop now. What about the car? The silver RAV?”

“Ditto. Cleaned and pressed. Even the tires had been hosed down.”

Stride sighed. “So where are we?”

“I think we’ll be able to make a charge of interference with privacy stick. If we can tie him to the other victims, a jury will make the leap.”

“If.”

“He had to find them somehow. We’ll track it down. Hell, he delivered to four out of the nine households where a girl was peeped. That’s a big coincidence right there.”

“Big, but still a coincidence,” Stride said. “If we can get six or seven, okay. Four’s not enough. Even with the silver RAV. He has no priors. We’ll never get the stuff from Minneapolis or his old janitorial job admitted in court. A defense lawyer can blow smoke and make a jury believe Finn is just a victim of circumstances.”

“And Mary’s murder?”

Stride shook his head. “You know that’s going nowhere. We’ll be lucky to pin the peeping charge on him. We can’t put him at the scene with Mary, and even if we could, we can’t establish what really happened.”

“At least we can charge multiple counts. He’s done it ten times that we know of. If we get the right judge, we can go for two years a count.”

Stride put a hand gently on Maggie’s leg. “I know this case means a lot to you, Mags, but you’re dreaming. With no priors? He’ll get a year for everything and be out in three months. If he sees the inside of a jail at all. That’s life.”

“That sucks.”

“I know it does.”

“What the hell do I tell Clark Biggs?”

“That we’re still working on the case. We’re not done yet. If we get the DNA test back and can prove that Finn was at the scene where Laura was murdered, we can take another run at him. Maybe he’ll confess. He might not go down for Mary’s death, but if we put him behind bars for Laura’s murder, that’s some justice.”

“If,” Maggie said, mocking him.

“Yeah, yeah.” Stride rubbed his hands over his face and felt a bone-deep tiredness throughout his body. “Think they’ve cleaned up the hallway yet?”

Maggie reached over and pushed the door open. “Nope.”