Brian Freeman - Immoral

Sally shook her head. "No. Like I said, I was sure he was going to try something. But after it was over, I began to think I was just being stupid."

Maggie took one of Sally's hands. "I really need you to tell me who it was."

"I know," Sally said. "I thought about coming forward before, but-I didn't really think it was important. I guess I had just convinced myself I was crazy, you know? He didn't really mean anything."

"Now you don't think so."

"I don't know. I really don't know."

"Okay," Maggie said. "Did anyone see the two of you together? Did you recognize the car that came in behind you?"

Sally shook her head. "We were out of there so quickly."

"Tell me, Sally. I won't let him hurt you. Who was it?"

Sally bent closer and whispered a name in Maggie's ear.

Maggie immediately pulled her cell phone out of her coat and dialed Stride's number.

Stride left city hall and stopped by the hospital on Monday night, but he discovered that Emily Stoner had been released an hour earlier, accompanied by Dayton Tenby. He wasn't surprised when he heard of her suicide attempt. He knew this was the most dangerous time, right after a parent or a spouse found out the truth, after weeks or months of fruitless longing for a miracle. The reality, hitting like a wrecking ball, sometimes was too much to bear.

He chose not to visit the Stoner household that night. There was nothing more he could tell them now, and he assumed the doctors would have ordered Emily straight to bed. He had already told Graeme by phone of the one significant discovery at the barn, a piece of bloody fabric that might be linked to Rachel.

He headed for home.

The roads were thick with slush. Snow had been falling all day, piling up on the streets and in the woods surrounding the city. The search at the barn continued, but at an agonizingly slow pace. His officers worked with ice hanging from their mustaches and cold seeping into the leather of their boots. They dug, scratched, and cursed the snow. They had begun another, more ominous search, too. Working with a cluster of volunteers from the surrounding area, they began fanning out into the woods around the barn, searching for Rachel's body. They penetrated the snow with ski poles and dug down whenever they found something unusual hidden below. Using walkie-talkies, they communicated their progress to Guppo in the police van. He mapped out a new search grid on a laptop.

Stride held out little hope they would find anything. The vastness of the northern woods worked to the benefit of murderers, who had thousands of square miles of forest in which to dispose of a body. Most of the time, the victims disappeared, and that was that. Like Kerry McGrath. They were out there somewhere, either buried or simply dumped far from the nearest road, easy targets for the animals that would come and desecrate their corpses. He shuddered to think of Rachel suffering the same fate. But the scope of the land and the crush of snow made him doubtful that they would ever find anything except that one scrap of white cloth to prove that Rachel was dead.

Stride pulled out his cellular phone. He noticed the battery was nearly gone. He had forgotten to take an extra battery from his desk, but he was almost home anyway. He punched in the number for his voice mail and listened to his messages.

The first one was from Maggie, at about two o'clock in the afternoon. It was short and sweet. "You suck, boss."

He laughed, imagining how her interviews at the high school had gone.

The second message was from the lab, about an hour earlier. They had confirmed the stain on the fabric was human blood, and they had matched it to type AB, Rachel's blood type. The DNA tests were still to come.

The last message on his voice mail was at eight o'clock in the evening, only about five minutes ago. He expected it to be Maggie again, reporting in at the end of her day. But it wasn't.

"Hello, Jon," said a soft, nervous voice. "It's Andrea. I didn't really expect you to be there, but I guess I kind of wanted to hear your voice. That sounds silly, I suppose. And maybe it sounds a little silly to say I miss you. But the truth is, I do. Looks like you made quite an impression on me, huh? Anyway, the thing is, I'm still at work over at the school. I've got a pile of tests to grade, so I was working in the lab, but I was thinking a lot about us. And about Friday night. I know your time's not your own, but I hope we can see each other again soon. I'd really like that. Okay, fine, I've made a fool of myself, so what else is new? Well, give me a call sometime. Bye, Jon."

At the next intersection, Stride turned the truck around and headed back up the hill toward the high school.

He pulled into the lot, with the panorama of Duluth spread out on his left, and found a parking spot close to the building. Hurrying across the concrete, which had accumulated a couple more inches of snow since the plows had gone through, he jammed his hands in his coat pockets and blinked as the snow fell over his eyelids.

The school door was locked. Stride rapped his knuckles on the window, but no one was nearby to hear him. He swore. He pushed his face against the cold glass, peering inside. Nothing.

Stride took out his cell phone again, but he saw that his battery had gone completely dead. He swore again and trudged through the snowy grass around the side of the school. He was near the rear door when he saw Andrea emerge from a classroom door at the far end of the hallway. She was dressed in gray sweats that emphasized her long legs, athletic shoes, and a loose-fitting blue V-neck sweater. She didn't notice Stride, but instead made a beeline for a pop machine in the corridor. She fed in a bill, then retrieved a can of Diet Coke, popped it open, and took a long swig.

Stride banged on the door.

She stopped, turned around, and saw him. Her face lit up in a broad smile. She began jogging down the hall toward him, spilling her Coke and laughing as a geyser of brown liquid spurted onto the floor. She put the can on the floor, wiped her hands on her sweats, and hurried to the door. She opened it, grabbed Stride's hand, and pulled him inside. As the door crashed shut, blocking out the wind, she reached her sticky fingers around his neck and pulled him into a deep kiss. He was too surprised to respond at first, but then wrapped his arms tightly around her, and their lips explored each other.

"I'm glad you came," she said. "I don't have too much more to do. Why don't you come in and talk with me, and then we can go have a late dinner?"

"That sounds perfect," Stride said.

Her arm went around his waist as they retraced her steps to the chemistry laboratory.

"It won't take me more than another half hour. These are multiple choice tests. I don't have to think, just grade."

"How are they doing?" Stride asked.

"Oh, I've seen better," Andrea said. "The attention span gets less and less each year. It's hard to keep it exciting for them."

"Well, science was never my strong suit either."

"Really? I would have thought a detective would enjoy all the forensic details, solving scientific mysteries, that kind of thing." Andrea scanned a test as she talked, wielding a red pen to mark errors.

"I let the lab technicians do the scientific analysis," Stride said. "I worry about figuring out the art of the possible."

"What do you mean?" Andrea asked.

"Most human acts leave some kind of trail. You have to get from place to place. You have to eat, buy gas, go to the bathroom, sleep. You leave behind skin, hair, fingerprints, fluids. All of those things can be tracked, assuming you can sift through the things that everyone else leaves behind and find the person you want."

Andrea smiled. "Like it or not, Jon, that sounds a lot like the scientific process. You couldn't have slept through all of your classes."