Brian Freeman - Stalked

"What I've found isn't going to help you. It's mostly hard-core porn. Disgusting stuff, lots of bondage."

"What about local sites? People, places, businesses based around Duluth? Blogs, MySpace pages, anything like that?"

"Not that I saw."

"Did he ever visit a blog called 'The Lady in Me'? Or mention a woman called Helen Danning?"

Craig tapped the keys for a few seconds. "Doesn't look like it."

"What about online bank records?"

"Nope." Craig yawned.

"Am I keeping you up here?" Stride asked.

"It's three in the morning, man. I should be asleep."

"Yeah, things are tough all over. I already woke up a judge in the middle of the night to get a search warrant, and she's not too happy with me either. It's really too bad I yanked you out of bed just because this son of a bitch you hired has kidnapped a woman and may already have raped and killed her. So keep looking and find me something ."

"Yeah, okay, okay, sorry." Craig hunched his shoulders and went back to the keyboard.

Stride's cell phone rang, and the song taunted him. He was in a hurry and knew why. He got up and walked to the window again as he answered the call.

"Negatory on the state database," Guppo said. "He's not local."

"How about the feebs?"

"They're working on it right now. They promise it's a top priority."

"Thanks."

Stride hung up.

He straddled a chair and studied the barren apartment again. What the hell was it? There was something here, something obvious that didn't make sense, and he was missing it. He got up and checked the garbage again and looked at the scraps of food wrappers. Bacon packaging. An empty egg carton and broken eggshells. The butcher's paper from a package of ground beef, purchased at a local twenty-four-hour market. He had already sent someone to the store to see if any of the employees remembered anything about Deed. Where he went, what he drove, who he was with.

He was still missing something.

"Hey, Lieutenant," Craig called. "I think you should see this."

Stride stood over the man's shoulder. "What is it?"

"Pictures. Lots of them. Mostly of the same woman."

Craig dragged the mouse and clicked a tiny icon, and a string of thumbnail images scattered across the black screen.

"I can run them all like a slide show," Craig said.

"Do it."

The first of the pictures zoomed out to full size. Stride's heart sank. It was Serena. He recognized the area, which was downtown Saint Paul, in Rice Park near the Ordway. Another photo clicked onto the screen, and this was Serena, too. Near the Duluth courthouse. He forced himself to look at the entire collection. They were almost all of Serena, more than sixty images. Secret photos, taken from a distance. Some were near their own home, on the beach, through their windows.

This guy had been planning to take Serena for a long time.

Stride pointed at an image in the middle, which was nothing more than a flash of white light. "What's that?"

"A mistake," Craig said. "The camera probably went off accidentally."

"Pull it up again."

Craig restored the image to the screen, and Stride leaned in, staring at the photo. The blob of light was obviously the camera flash firing, but he could also make out something else, which looked like brown spots and wavy dark lines.

"What's that?" Stride asked.

Craig looked closer. "I'm not sure."

"I think it's wood."

"Too smooth for that."

"Wood paneling, I mean. Cheap stuff." Stride looked around the apartment. There was no wood paneling anywhere. He checked the bedroom and the bathroom and didn't find any panels there that matched the photo.

"Do you put wood paneling inside your vans?" he asked.

Craig shook his head.

"So where was this taken?" Stride asked, but he was talking to himself. To the air. Thinking that wherever the wood paneling was, Serena was there now. This was Deed's hidey-hole.

While he was running down a mental list of places that had fake wood siding, Guppo called back.

"Tell me you got him," Stride said.

"Yeah, but there's a problem."

"What?"

"The match is perfect," Guppo told him. "He's got records in Arizona, Texas, and Alabama. Drugs, murder, extortion, and two rape charges that were dropped when the women got cold feet."

"Sounds like our guy," Stride said. "What's the problem?"

"The problem is, he's dead."

"Say what?"

"The Alabama authorities claim he's dead. He was a witness in a narcotics trial, and two officers were escorting him back to the state CF in Holman. They ran square into a hurricane, and all three died."

"Did you say a hurricane?" Stride asked, hoping that Guppo had made a mistake and knowing that he hadn't.

"Yeah."

The dread he was feeling mutated and multiplied. Stride knew where this was going. He was there when Serena got the call last fall from the Alabama police and remembered the look of relief on her face. She felt liberated. Free.

"They found the two cops," Guppo said. "The car, too, which was a wreck. No sign of foul play, though. They figured the prisoner washed out to sea."

That was the logical conclusion, and it was wrong. He didn't wash out to sea. He escaped and headed north like a laser beam. Stride remembered how Serena described the dead man who had tortured her past. Brilliant, ruthless, charming, scheming. Exactly the kind of spider who would love to play games with his prey and then eat them. A drug dealer. A blackmailer. A rapist. A killer.

"What was his name?" Stride asked, but he already knew.

"Take your pick," Guppo told him. "William Deed, alias Billy Deed, alias B. D. Henry, alias Billy 'Dog' Ketcher, alias Blue Dog."

She was wrong. Terribly wrong. It wasn't Tommy Luck standing over her. It wasn't anyone from her days in Las Vegas at all. This was worse. This was a ghost from years ago, from her childhood, a ghost straight from hell.

"You're dead," Serena gasped.

Blue Dog grinned. "Yeah, I'm like the invisible man. I don't exist."

"The Alabama police called me," she insisted, although the evidence was in front of her eyes. "They said you were killed in a storm."

"You don't know the prison system down South. They've got so many bodies crammed into a cell that one less inside is a reason to celebrate. I'm sure they figured the storm did them a favor."

Serena was flooded by memories. Images she had locked away long ago in a dark corner of her brain broke free like rats bolting from their cages. She was in Blue Dog's apartment in Phoenix again. Fifteen years old. The summer heat was an inferno, her skin so chapped it bled when she scratched it. Cockroaches watched her from the walls. So did her mother, no better than a cockroach herself, her eyes hungry and wild from the coke. Blue Dog's eyes were black and clear; he never used drugs, he just sold. He was grinning as he took her, splitting her open like a nail violating wood. The same grin he had now.

He saw her remember. "We had some good times, huh?"

"Fuck you."

"Oh, yeah, that's the plan. I've spent the last ten years thinking about you. The thought of paying you back was about the only thing that kept me alive inside."

"I've paid the price my whole life for what you did to me," Serena told him. "That should make us even."

"Maybe, but you should have left it alone, and you didn't," Blue Dog said. "You came after me."

That was true. Serena remembered that summer ten years ago. She had to go to Phoenix to get background on a case she was working in Vegas. While she was there, her teenage memories all came back, and she wound up drinking for three days in a dive south of the city and waking up in a motel near the airport with a man she didn't know. Cockroaches were on the wall there, too. She went to a shrink who said she had unresolved issues about her mother and Blue Dog, which was like paying a hundred bucks to hear that you get wet when you walk out in the rain. That was the same therapist who asked if she ever had an orgasm with Blue Dog. The bastard.