Brian Freeman - Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

‘I think if we find the gun, we’ll find the jewelry, too,’ Stride said. ‘Wherever Janine hid it.’

‘I agree,’ Maggie replied, ‘but as much as I like Janine for this, we keep digging up new suspects faster than we cross them off.’

‘Like who?’

Maggie fished in the pocket of her red jacket. She pulled out an evidence bag with a handwritten piece of paper inside. ‘Guppo was going through papers from Jay’s desk. He found this. It’s a letter to Janine from last May. Jay had it in his top drawer.’

Stride glanced at the paper. The script handwriting was impeccable, but it was too dark outside to read the text. ‘What does it say?’

‘It’s from a woman named Esther Rose. Basically, she accuses Janine of murdering her husband.’

Stride’s eyebrows rose. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Esther’s husband Ira had a heart problem. He went under the knife at St. Anne’s. He didn’t make it. Janine was the surgeon. Esther blames Janine for his death, and despite some very ladylike handwriting, she makes threats like a crime boss. In fact, she says specifically that she’d like to see Janine’s husband die so that she knows how it feels.’

‘What do we know about Esther Rose?’ Stride asked.

‘She and Ira have a place on the North Shore. Expensive. Ira was an IP attorney in the Twin Cities, so he made a bundle. Driver’s license record shows a very proper-looking sixty-year-old lady.’

‘Not exactly your typical gun-toting killer, but I’ll talk to her,’ Stride said.

‘You might want to bring backup. Those grandmother types can surprise you.’

Stride smiled and crushed his cigarette under his foot. ‘Dan Erickson called today.’

‘Lucky you,’ Maggie said.

Dan Erickson was the St. Louis County attorney. He hadn’t been in the job long, but he’d already contracted the disease most common to county prosecutors. Ambition. Dan was politically hungry, and he saw the county attorney’s job as a stepping-stone to higher office in Minnesota. He had the suave looks of a politician — blond hair sprayed into place, dark suits and shined shoes, a Florida tan even in February. He was smooth and effective in front of juries, but Stride didn’t trust him. Dan saw every trial through the lens of how a win or loss would affect his career.

A trial for Janine Snow would be a media circus. Putting her in prison would be a publicity boon for Dan all over the state.

‘He wanted to know if we were any closer to making a case against Janine,’ Stride said.

‘What did you tell him?’

Stride shrugged. ‘Thanks to Clyde, we can put a gun in Jay’s hands. And the fact that we haven’t found Jay’s gun is bound to leave a jury wondering where it is. After all, if his gun wasn’t the murder weapon, it should have been in his house or in his truck, right?’

‘That must have made Dan happy.’

‘It did. It’s also obvious that Janine’s relationship with Jay was on the rocks. According to Clyde, Janine wanted a divorce, but Jay didn’t. So a jury might believe that she didn’t see a way out other than murder.’

‘Guppo dug up a couple more tidbits about them,’ Maggie added. ‘He’s been interviewing Jay’s friends. One of them told him that last summer, Janine got fed up with Jay’s extravagant spending. She cut him off. Shut down his credit cards without telling him. Jay was eating dinner at a downtown restaurant on July 3, and his card came back declined. There were local heavy hitters around who saw the whole thing. Jay was humiliated. And furious.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Yeah, it’s weird, though. Janine turned the credit cards back on a couple weeks later. After that, Guppo says Jay spent even more than he did before. And here’s another thing. We went through their phone records. Last December, right after Thanksgiving, Jay put in a call to an attorney at the Stanhope law firm downtown. A woman named Tamara Fellowes.’

‘What’s her practice area?’ Stride asked.

‘Family law. Including divorce.’

‘Did you talk to her?’

‘Yeah, but she’s a lawyer. She wouldn’t tell me anything.’

Stride shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Clyde insisted that Jay didn’t want a divorce. He says Janine offered to pay him off, but Jay said no.’

‘Maybe he changed his mind.’

‘Maybe, but if he did, there’s no reason for Janine to kill him,’ Stride said. He shook his head, pulled out the pack of cigarettes, but then returned it to his pocket without taking another one. ‘I’m convinced she killed him, Mags, but none of this makes any sense. What the hell was really going on between those two?’

Janine made sure she wasn’t being followed as she left the hospital.

She turned left out of the parking ramp in her Mercedes. She eyed her mirror, looking for headlights behind her, but she didn’t see anyone. It was dark, after ten o’clock. She headed for downtown, past the city’s old buildings. The Union Gospel Mission. Antique and pawn shops. Liquor stores. A Cantonese restaurant. The brick-lined streets were slick with fresh snow. On the side streets, cars nudged their way up and down the steep hills.

At Sammy’s Pizza, in the middle of downtown, she turned right. That wasn’t the direction she wanted to go, but she checked to see if anyone turned behind her. No one did. She coasted around the next corner, still watching the mirror, and then she parked and waited with her engine running. Paranoia.

No one showed up. She was alone.

Janine retraced her route to 1st Street. She continued several more blocks, then turned downhill to Michigan Street, which was more industrial than the rest of downtown. She pulled into a deserted bank parking lot and took the ramp to the open-air roof, where she parked in a corner.

She got out. Despite the darkness, big sunglasses covered much of her face. A scarf was wrapped around her chin, and she pulled the fur-lined hood of her winter coat low on her forehead. She didn’t look any different from other Minnesotans bundled against the cold, so no one would recognize her. These days, people stared at her wherever she went. She was that woman from the TV news.

The woman who shot her husband.

On the street, Janine limped in the snow. She wore calf-length black boots. Her head was down, and her hands were in her pockets. The spasms in her leg reminded her of the fall she’d taken the previous winter, in which her ankle had broken and the tendons torn. She would never lose the slight limp that dogged her steps.

She crossed under the skywalk that led to the convention center and checked the street again. When she was convinced that she wasn’t being watched, she crossed to an unmarked black steel door on a four-story brick building. Using a loose key, she opened the heavy door and let herself inside. The interior smelled of paint and dust. There was no elevator, just stairs. She climbed to the uppermost floor and pushed through another door into a carpeted hallway. She took two steps to an unmarked apartment and used another key to open it. She slipped inside and closed the door firmly behind her. The pain in her ankle was excruciating.

Janine began to breathe again. She went to the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of wine. She took it back to the living room, where the windows faced the lake. Light and snow swept the glass. In three long swallows, she finished the wine. She went to the bathroom and then returned for more. She settled into a white armchair and closed her eyes.

It had been days since she’d been here. Her getaway. She hadn’t wanted to take the chance when someone might be following her. Part of her knew the smart thing was to stay away forever, but she couldn’t. The need to be here drew her back irresistibly. Especially now. The apartment was small, clean, elegant. It wasn’t big, but she didn’t need size. She simply needed a place that no one knew about. Not Jay. Not anyone. The deed to the condo was in the name of a shell company. The correspondence went to a drop box. Only one other person knew about it, and he had no incentive to admit it to anyone.