Brian Freeman - Stalked

Nicole's anger dwindled to ashes. "Yeah."

"How's your boy?" Abel asked quietly.

"Far away. He's far away, and good for him. He's in college down south now."

"That's good."

Nicole studied her calloused hands as if they belonged to someone else. "Aerosmith," she told him. "That was my angle."

"What?"

"The Enger Park Girl had a bunch of video game and heavy metal tattoos, remember?"

"Stride and Maggie covered that lead. They talked to the bands. It didn't go anywhere."

Nicole smiled. "Yeah, but that was before all the Web shit, okay? And chat rooms and crap like that. I spent hours hanging out in chat rooms with fans of the bands. Bon Jovi, Barenaked Ladies, Aerosmith. I thought if the girl was a big fan, someone might remember her, like she was a groupie who stopped showing up after the summer of '97."

"That's a needle in a haystack. Teens come and go around the bands all the time."

"Well, it's not like I had much else to do, you know?"

"So what did you find?"

Nicole leaned forward. She was excited again, forgetting where she was. "A girl in Chicago told me about this black girl she hung out with at a bunch of Aerosmith concerts during their Nine Lives tour in the summer of '97. The black girl's name was Teena."

"Who was this girl in Chicago?"

"She never told me her name. When I told her I was a cop looking into a murder, she got freaked-out, signed off, and I never found her again."

"So?"

"So she said she was supposed to meet Teena again at their concert in Chicago, but she never showed."

Abel frowned. "That's not exactly a hot lead."

"No, but get this. This girl saw Teena for the last time at the band's Kansas City concert on August 26, 1997. She saw her getting into a car with an older white guy. She never ran into the girl again."

"August 26?" Abel asked. He saw the connection now.

"Exactly. That was two days before we found the Enger Park Girl. Okay, sure, maybe it's nothing, but it's a hell of a lot more than we ever had before. I was going to go down to Kansas City and start getting records of the ticket purchases from back then, see if I could find Teena, or see if I could find any buyers with connections to Duluth or with sheets. I was also going to start tracking down people who had been to the concert and see if anyone else could tell me about the girl or the guy she left with."

"That's a lot of legwork."

"Yeah, well, it's not like I had much else to do, and I had some things to prove to a lot of people."

Abel rocked back in his chair. "So why did you quit?"

Nicole frowned at him and gestured at the walls. "I got busy, you know?"

"Oh. Sorry."

"I'm telling you, though, I think this Teena was the Enger Park Girl, and some guy picked her up at the concert, raped and killed her, and dumped her in Duluth."

"I wish you'd told someone about this back then," Abel said.

"Like I said, I wound up with a few problems of my own."

"I'm not sure how any of this ties in to the murder of Helen Danning."

"Maybe she was an Aerosmith fan, too."

Abel shook his head. "This woman was an usher for Broadway musicals. She doesn't sound like a hard rock fan."

"Look, you know what you've got on this new case," Nicole said. "Maybe there's no connection. But do me a favor, okay? Don't let this drop. I mean, maybe you can still find something in Kansas City. Or you can track down this girl in Chicago again."

"Yeah, I spend a lot of time in heavy metal chat rooms," Abel said. "I'll fit right in."

"These fans are die-hard. If she was into Aerosmith in 1997, she's still into them now."

"So how did you find this girl six years ago?"

"I talked to my shrink," Nicole said.

Abel stared at her. "What?"

"You know Tony Wells, don't you? He's the ultimate Aerosmith fan. He gave me a bunch of Web sites. That was how I found this girl."

"You were seeing Tony," Abel repeated.

"Yeah, so? I was messed up. You know that."

It was probably nothing. Abel knew that. Nothing at all. Tony Wells saw half the detectives on the force. That was his job.

Except he knew it was everything. For a man who didn't trust anything he couldn't see, touch, and smell, Abel suddenly found himself taking a leap of faith. Seeing the big picture. He stared at Nicole and felt a well of regret so deep that he could drop into the hole for a mile and never splash into the cold water.

"Did Tony know why you wanted the information?" he asked her.

"Not at first. I told him later, when I found the lead about Teena."

"What exactly did you tell him?"

Nicole studied his furrowed face, and her eyes grew curious and hard. "Just what I told you, that I thought I had made a break in the Enger Park case. He became a consultant for us on that case, you know. He did the profile."

"Yeah," Abel said. "I remember."

"Lieutenant, you better see this," Guppo called.

Stride popped the top on a red can of Coke, which opened with a fizzy hiss. "I'm coming."

They were in the basement of City Hall at seven o'clock at night. Half the overhead fluorescent lights were dark. Guppo was in a tiny cubicle with walls that looked like gray burlap, with three computers glowing in front of him. One was a standard city-issue unit belonging to the Detective Bureau; the other two were computers taken from Eric's home and office.

Stride waited in the doorway of the cube, looking down at Guppo, who overflowed out of a small rolling chair. He didn't get any closer. Guppo was munching guacamole chips and salsa, which for him constituted a lethal weapon.

"You got something?" Stride asked.

"Oh, yeah."

Stride rubbed his eyes and watched Guppo's fat fingers tap the keyboard on the high-end laptop they had taken from Eric's company headquarters. The musty smell of the basement was in his nose. He felt strangely at home among the evening shadows.

"I was looking for 'The Lady in Me,' " Guppo said. "That was pretty much a dead end. She wiped her blog clean, and I couldn't find any cached pages that told us a thing. But the tattoo clued me in, and I went back over the sites that Eric had been visiting, looking for the TLIM acronym."

"And?"

"Voy-la," Guppo said. He clicked on a blog entry and maximized the window on the screen.

"Is this Helen's site?" Stride asked.

Guppo shook his head and crunched a handful of chips in his mouth. "It's a recovery site for Midwest rape victims," he said, spitting out mushy emerald crumbs as he talked. "You need a password to get in."

"So how did you access it?"

"I found Eric's password," Guppo said.

"How did Eric get in?"

"Looks like he joined. Family members of victims can be part of the community. His handle was Swimmer. Not tough to figure out."

"So what did you find?"

"A thread from about eighteen months ago. A college student was date raped at the University of Minnesota, and she talked about it online. Then a woman chimed in with a response and told her own story from the early 1990s."

"TLIM?"

Guppo nodded. "Right. Helen Danning."

"What did she say?" Stride asked.

"See for yourself."

Stride leaned in next to Guppo and smelled onions and peppers on the detective's warm breath. He read the blog posting on the screen:

Same date rape thing happened to me at the U in the early '90s. I went out with a grad student, and I had way too much to drink. It didn't seem like a lot at the time, and it wasn't until much, much later that I realized he probably put something in my drink. Girls, you HAVE to watch out for that kind of crap. There are PREDATORS out there. This guy was going to KILL ME, but thank God, a security guard found us in the park. The police told me it was my fault (!!!!) because of the alcohol. They never even charged this animal. TLIM.