Brian Freeman - Stalked

Back in the car, her phone rang again. She ran for it.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Close by."

"Are you too scared to let me see you?"

He laughed. "I know you have your gun in your hand."

Serena wheeled around and scanned the forest. She tried to find movements or shadows in the dark, but she saw only the great trees towering over her. She felt small.

"I'm leaving," she said.

She returned to her car, got in, and locked the doors behind her. She started the engine.

"I told you, I have something for you," he said.

"What is it?"

"Look in the glove compartment."

He had been in her car . "What's in there?"

"Dan's secret," he said. "Tell him I want one hundred thousand dollars this time."

"You're crazy. Nothing is worth that much."

"You'd be surprised what people will do to hide their sins."

"When do you want it?"

"Soon. I'll let you know."

She looked at her phone. She was offline.

She sped out of the rest stop, her wheels spinning in the snow. The dark highway felt like a friend compared to the cloister where she had stopped. A truck passed on the interstate, and she accelerated to catch it and fell in behind. Let it scare off the deer. Let it crush them. Even so, in the median, she saw more tracks of hoofprints, tiny and persistent, as if they were running to catch her.

She waited until she was in the heart of the city, and the woods were miles behind her, before she pulled over and looked in the glove compartment. It was after midnight. There was a slim white envelope inside that hadn't been there before. She turned on the dome light in the car and opened the envelope. A photograph was inside.

The picture was taken at night. The skin of the two people in the photograph glowed unnaturally. It took Serena a moment to figure out what she was looking at. She saw mocha-colored skin, long hair, and realized when she studied their profiles that one of the people was Tanjy Powell. She was naked. Outside, in a park. Her hands were tied to a fence, and in the blurry darkness behind her, Serena could make out railway cars. She was crying out. Or maybe she was moaning. She couldn't tell.

A man was behind Tanjy. He had a long knife poised at her throat, and his pants were at his ankles, revealing an obscene white ass. He was buried inside her. It was Dan Erickson.

Serena parked in Canal Park in the shadow of the lift bridge. Home was just three miles away, but she wasn't ready to go there yet. She sat for a long time, staring at the photograph and feeling trapped. Whoever the blackmailer was, he was enjoying the game. He could have put the photograph directly in Dan's hands and left Serena in the dark, but instead, he wanted her to be caught in the middle.

She needed to decide what to tell Jonny. If she kept the photo to herself, she ran the risk of derailing an investigation into rape and murder. This wasn't something she could put in the box, for Jonny to pretend he didn't know. If she told him, the only thing he could do was run with it. That would be the end of Dan's career.

Did the photograph show Dan raping Tanjy, or was this consensual sex between twisted lovers? Whatever the truth was, the question in Serena's mind was how far Dan would go to hide the secret. Would he kill Tanjy to keep her quiet? If he did, how did Eric fit into the puzzle?

Then there was Helen Danning at the Ordway. The coincidence of her leaving town the day after Eric's murder was too strong to ignore.

Serena put the photograph back in the glove compartment. She knew she couldn't involve Jonny yet. She had to confront Dan first and interrogate him.

She also thought about the man in shadows. The blackmailer who was tormenting Dan. He seemed to know all the secrets, all the things that people would do anything to protect. He pulled a string, and the city unraveled. Who was he, and how did he know so much about the private world of everyone around him?

At the rest stop, he knew she had a gun in her hand. He had to be hiding nearby, but there was no other car around her and no way he could have positioned himself so quickly. He had to have waited somewhere else, maybe at the rest stop on the opposite side of the highway, and then walked across the road to scout out a place to watch her.

That meant he knew she was coming. He knew where she was.

She got out of the car with a sudden realization. The ground was cold and wet, but she got down on her knees and hunted under the chassis. When she couldn't see, she retrieved a flashlight from the trunk and slid beneath the frame of the car. Her skin became blackened with grease. Fifteen minutes later, she found the small box attached magnetically to the interior side of the wheel well. She yanked it off and stood up and studied it in her dirty palm. A silver antenna poked out of one corner. She recognized the unit, because she had used it herself in her own work.

It was a GPS locating device. He had been tracking her everywhere she went.

Serena took the box to the side of the canal and dropped it into the cold, sluggish water.

Jonny was still awake when she got in. He sat in a chair in front of the fireplace with a measure of scotch poured in a shot glass. He rarely drank. Serena was an alcoholic, so they didn't keep much liquor in the house. A dusty bottle of Oban was in the back of a cabinet in the kitchen, and she had only seen him pour from it twice. Once was on the anniversary of Cindy's death. The second time was when Maggie told him about her third miscarriage.

Her clothes were wet and dirty. He eyed her as she washed the grease off her hands and then stripped down to her panties and pulled a white T-shirt over her head. She sat down on the floor beside the recliner, laid her head casually on his thigh, and watched the flames dance.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Sure."

"You're late getting back."

"I had trouble with the car."

"Uh-huh."

She knew he didn't believe her.

"What about that word you put in the box?" he continued. "Tell me more about this blackmailer."

"I can't say anything more," she said. "Not yet."

"I'd like to know what's going on with Dan."

"You know I can't tell you that."

She was glad that he didn't push her.

"You saw Nicole?" he asked.

"Yes, you were right. She's grasping at straws."

"How did she look?"

"Old."

"I'm sorry to hear it."

She told him about Helen Danning.

"I'll have Guppo run her through the system," Stride said. "Maybe she has relatives or friends who can help us find her."

"Maggie called me. She said you found something."

He nodded. "Another rape victim."

Serena lifted her head and brushed her hair back. "Who?"

"Katrina Kuli. She owns a coffee shop on Superior, not far from Silk."

"Does she have a connection to Maggie?"

"Oh, yeah."

He downed the Oban in a single shot and didn't say anything. Serena came around in front of him and leaned on his knees. "What is it?" she asked.

"Maggie was in a sex club." He recited the details without any expression on his face.

Serena sat back, and her eyes widened. "Wow."

"That's not the Maggie I know," Stride said.

"Have you talked to her about it?"

"Not yet."

"I think you should."

"I want to talk to Sonia first and find out more about this so-called club. Like whether Tanjy was involved, too. I'm betting they were all 'alpha girls,' and that's what ties the assaults together."

She heard the disappointment and disbelief rippling through his voice. "Since when do you get all judgmental on me? You always tell me you don't care what anyone else does behind closed doors."

"This is Maggie," he said.

"Okay, I know, it's like finding out your daughter's not a virgin anymore."