Brian Freeman - In the Dark aka The Watcher

“First, there was a fingerprint report. There were prints on the baseball bat that matched Dada’s.”

“Except it was Peter Stanhope’s bat,” Tish said. “I read about that in the paper. His prints must have been on the bat, too.”

“Yes, but his prints made sense. Dada’s prints didn’t.”

“Laura was being stalked,” Tish insisted. “Someone had been pursuing her for weeks. That wasn’t a stranger. It was someone who knew her.”

Stride put a hand lightly on her shoulder. “The police knew about the stalking.”

“Are you sure?”

“Cindy told them. I was there when she told Ray. Look, Cindy thought the same thing you did-that whoever had been pursuing Laura was the one who killed her. She even had one of the notes that this guy sent her. A porn photo with a warning scrawled on it.”

“So?”

“So there weren’t any fingerprints on the photo,” Stride said. “It wasn’t helpful.”

“That was then. Don’t they have better techniques for raising prints now? Maybe there’s still something there.”

Stride nodded. “We have much more sophisticated techniques for that kind of thing, but what we don’t have is the photograph. It’s gone, along with the other crime scene photos they took back then. So’s the bat. Somewhere along the line, much of the physical evidence from the case was lost.”

“Son of a bitch!” Tish exclaimed. “Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”

“You’re talking about a case from thirty years ago. Things get misplaced.”

He didn’t tell her his own suspicion that Ray Wallace was the one who had made the evidence disappear.

Tish walked away. They were near the lighthouse at the end of the pier. She climbed the steps and leaned back against the chapped white paint of the light tower with her arms folded. Her purse was slung over her shoulder. Stride followed her up the steps.

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

Tish looked up at him. “Can I trust you?”

“What?”

“You said you don’t trust me. Can I trust you?”

“I think you can. There will always be things I have to keep confidential, but I won’t lie to you.”

Tish unzipped her purse. She slid out a small, clear plastic bag that contained a yellowed envelope. He could see block handwriting, and even without taking it in his hand, he saw the name written on the front.

LAURA STARR.

“Here,” Tish said. “Physical evidence.”

“What the hell is this?” Stride asked.

“It’s one of the stalking letters that Laura received. She sent it to me while I was living in St. Paul.”

“You’ve had the letter all this time, and you never told anyone?”

“In the old days, I didn’t think it mattered,” Tish said. “Then I put it away and forgot all about it. I was clearing out old boxes in Atlanta a few months ago when I moved out of my partner’s apartment, and that’s when I found it again. Don’t you see? This changes everything. That’s when I started thinking about the book again, because I knew I had something that could reopen the case.”

Stride did see.

The letter to Laura wasn’t a note that had been pushed through a school locker. Whoever sent it to her had put it in the mail, using a stamp and licking an envelope. Even thirty years later, that meant one thing.

DNA.

Clark Biggs watched his daughter squirm on the living room floor with her legs tucked underneath her. Mary picked up her colored blocks and carefully stacked ten of them one on top of the other, until she had built a rainbow tower. When she was finished, she beamed at Clark with the biggest, most beautiful smile he had ever seen, the kind that made his heart ache every time he saw it. Then she toppled the tower by blowing on it like the big bad wolf, giggled at him, and began setting up the blocks again. She could do it over and over and never tire of the game. She was like every other five-year-old girl in the world.

Except Mary was sixteen.

To anyone looking at her, she was a typical teenager. She had a curly mop of blond hair and eyes that Clark thought of as Caribbean blue. Her face was round and bright. She was almost six feet tall, with a stocky frame. A big girl. She could have been a runner or a wrestler. It seemed so wrong and unfair that she kept growing into a pretty young woman while remaining trapped in the mind of a child. Clark lay awake nights blaming himself and God for the accident in the water. He consoled himself with the belief that Mary would be perpetually happy, perpetually innocent, without the awkwardness, pain, doubt, and self-consciousness of becoming a real teenager. It was little comfort.

“It’s bedtime, Mary,” he murmured.

She pretended not to hear him. She kept playing with her blocks and humming a tune to herself. Clark realized it was the theme song to a television show they had watched earlier in the evening. He was always amazed at the things that made it inside her brain, when so many other things did not.

“Bedtime, Mary,” he repeated without enthusiasm.

Mary stopped and frowned. Her lips turned downward like a clown’s. He laughed, and she laughed, too.

“Five more minutes,” he said.

Clark hated Sunday nights. At ten o’clock, Mary would go to bed, and he would be alone in the small house for another hour while he watched TV and poured himself a last beer. In the morning, his ex-wife, Donna, would come by the house, and they would silently make the exchange. Mary would cry and go with her, and Clark would cry and watch her go. Then he would pour coffee into a Thermos, silently wrap up a turkey sandwich for his lunch, and head off to his construction site on the Duluth harbor, knowing that the house would be empty when he returned home. Five long, lonely days awaited him. During the week, it was as if he were in a trance, waiting for that moment on Friday evening when Donna’s SUV pulled up in front of his door, and Mary ran up the sidewalk to get folded up in his arms. His beautiful girl. His baby. He lived for the weekends with her, but they were over almost as soon as they began, leaving him right back here, dreading her bedtime, feeling his soul grow cloudy at the thought of a week alone.

“Come on, honey,” he told her, his voice cracking.

Clark got off the sofa. Mary got her big bones from him. He was burly and strong. He had worked construction since he was eighteen, and after twenty years laboring outside through bitter cold and ninety-degree summers, he woke up every morning with his muscled body stiffened into knots. In his twenties, he could take a hot shower and come out refreshed and limber. Not now. Pain dogged him through his days.

Mary bounded up and held out her hand. He took it to lead her to her room. Her skin was pink and soft, and his own skin was like leather. She knew he was sad on these nights, and she tried to cheer him up by making faces. He smiled and let her think it was working, when the truth was that nothing could lift him out of depression at these moments.

“Blocks, Daddy,” she said.

“Yes, honey, I’ll take good care of your blocks. They’ll be here for you next week.”

Her bedroom was at the rear of the small house, with two windows looking out toward the woods at the back of the lot. Mary danced into the bathroom behind him to brush her teeth. It was dark, and Clark went up close to the windows and studied his reflection in the glass. Puffed-up brown pouches sagged under his eyes. His sandy hair was too long; he needed to cut it, which he usually did himself to save money. His jeans were fraying. He could poke a finger through his left pocket to his skin. He wore a NASCAR T-shirt and a camouflage baseball cap.

“Meeeeeeee!” Mary shouted, flouncing back into the room and jumping onto the squeaky frame of her bed. She slept in a twin bed that was too small for her, but she didn’t mind that her feet dangled off the end. There was barely room for Mary among the beanbag animals she collected. She wore a frilly nightgown that came to her knees. That was one thing that worried Clark whenever Mary was out in the world without him. She had no concept of sexuality, but her body said otherwise. She looked like a normal, healthy, attractive girl. She had no embarrassment, and she often stripped off her clothes and wandered around the house naked and couldn’t understand why Clark insisted she stay dressed.