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

She sat down at their small kitchen table. Reaching over to the counter, she turned on the radio to the Duluth MPR station and listened to classical music at a volume barely louder than a whisper. It was something dreamy and soft. She listened to it along with the persistent ticking of the clock over the refrigerator.

Jonny’s old leather jacket was draped over one of the chairs. She shook her head with a smile. She’d teased him for years about getting rid of it, but Jonny never gave up anything from the past. She saw the bullet hole in the sleeve. She still remembered the night when Jonny’s mentor, a cop named Ray Wallace, had shot himself in a North Woods cabin rather than face corruption charges. Ray had shot Jonny before putting the gun in his own mouth. She remembered the call from the hospital. Remembered her husband’s ashen face. Those were the calls you feared when you were married to a cop. You woke up every morning, and you wondered if this would be the night you went to bed alone and in tears.

It was hard to imagine her life without him. And yet she lived with that perpetual shadow.

He’d brought home papers with him from the Detective Bureau. Documents. Files. Evidence. He usually did. He’d intended to work through the evening, but she’d interrupted his good intentions by straddling his lap. From there, they went to bed, and he never left. The evidence in Jay’s murder investigation was spread all over the table, and although she didn’t usually pry — well, who was she kidding? She pried all the time.

Cindy grabbed the top-most paper and turned it over. It was a photograph, taken somewhere in the Duluth woods. The picture showed the figure of a man, blurry because of the distance. He was young, scrawny, tatted, in camouflage, holding what appeared to be an assault rifle. In the first picture, he was in profile, but when she grabbed another page, she saw his eyes. She couldn’t really see details in his face, but his eyes reminded her of a shark’s. Utterly empty. Not ferocious like a wolf on the hunt. Eyes devoid of life. Eyes that saw nothing but the gray darkness of the water.

Jonny had written on a Post-it note on one of the pictures: Who is this guy?

And on another: Find him.

Cindy turned the photos face-down again. She didn’t want to stare at them anymore. Something about the man’s face left her with a hollow pit of anxiety in her stomach.

She got up from the table. She went to the hall closet and retrieved her heavy winter coat and her furry boots. She retreated to the porch at the back of the house and let herself out through the rear door. Their backyard was really nothing but a sand dune. She pushed through snow and rye grass, climbing to the top of the slope and then down to the beach by the great lake.

The city glowed on her left. White lights marked the buildings, and red lights blinked on the antenna farm high on the hillside. At her feet were boot prints, the tracks of dogs, and the parallel rails where cross-country skis had slid up and down the snow-covered shore. The lake was loud, but it was invisible behind a wall of ice taller than she was. Each winter the waves built a mountain range. It made the lake scary, because she couldn’t see it. Somehow, with every bellow of thunder, she expected a tsunami to crest the wall and wash her away.

Cindy stood there with her hands in her pockets. The few inches of skin where her legs were bare felt raw. She had the beach, the city, and the night to herself. There was something hypnotic about the noise of the wind and the waves. She thought about everything. Her mind was a grasshopper, jumping this way and that.

She thought about Jonny. She could still feel him inside her, could still feel his hands on her body afterward. They had such a familiarity with each other. He was still a little repressed about sex after all these years, but to her, it was as natural as breathing or crying. She could remember all the way back to their first time, on a summer night by a small lake in a city park. The two of them, teenagers, naked in the water. And then making love with sand on their bodies and mosquitoes biting at their skin. Magic.

That was so long ago. Funny how you took each day and put it on top of the one before, and before you even knew it, you had a lifetime.

She thought about her family. Hardly a family. Her mother, who died young, leaving them alone. Laura, taken from her that same summer night she fell in love with Jonny. Her father, a sanctimonious old hypocrite, who used God as an excuse for his meanness to everyone who was close to him. It was hard to say she didn’t miss him, but she didn’t.

She thought about Janine. They’d known each other for five years. Her friend could not take a gun and shoot her husband. She didn’t believe it. And yet Jonny always said you could never really know another person. Every individual was unfathomable, living inside their own soul, sharing it with no one else. She would never have said it aloud, but she wondered if she was being naive.

Was she wrong about Janine?

She put those doubts out of her mind. She had strength of will, which was something that her faith had given her. You could choose to be happy or unhappy. It was up to you. Jonny didn’t share her devotion to religion, but she didn’t need him for that. Her beliefs were for her and her alone.

Cindy thought about better things. Golf. It was winter now, but soon enough, she would be on an emerald-green fairway, three-wood in hand. She reflected on her clients and their problems and what she could do next to help them with their rehabilitation. There were always other things to try. She thought about country music and Jonny’s cute little crush on singer Sara Evans. She thought about her Outback, which needed a wash. She thought about Sammy’s sausage pizza. They were all the little things that meant nothing and made up a life.

And then, from nowhere, the pain came.

This was not pain. She’d experienced pain before.

This was a spike catapulted upward between her legs, lifting her off the ground, sucking a cry from her chest, driving her to the snow. If she could have died right then to obliterate the agony splitting apart her insides, she would have picked death. She had no warning as it hit. It was simply there, and then it was gone, leaving no memory, as if it had been a phantom. She found herself on her knees, sweating, trying to understand what had just happened to her.

The strange thing was, she knew.

Deep in her closet of terrors, she knew.

Howard Marlowe heard glass breaking.

It came from upstairs in the front of the house. It wasn’t a small noise, like a wine glass breaking in the sink. Something shattered, something big. He bolted to his feet from behind his desk, and he felt scared and ridiculous, wearing nothing but his white underwear. Goosebumps rose on his arms.

The empty eyes of the Easter Island statues stared at him from the poster on the wall. Do something , they told him.

Howard crept on tiptoes on the green shag carpet, as if he needed to be quiet in his own house. At the doorway, the basement hallway was cold and damp. The lights were off. He told himself that maybe he’d imagined the noise, but he could hear more glass breaking now, like rain. He reached behind the office door and grabbed a softball bat made of red aluminum. With the bat cocked over his shoulder, he stutter-stepped down the carpeted hallway to the stairway leading to the main level of the house. The wooden steps were unfinished, and the wall was unpainted plasterboard. He climbed two steps and listened.

Someone was overhead, moving around in their living room.

‘Hey!’ he shouted as loud as he could, in the deepest voice he could summon. ‘Hey, get the hell out! The police are coming! I’ve called 911!’