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

‘Or to make yourself a suspect,’ Stride said.

‘Yeah. Me, too. I get it. The fact is, I didn’t really think anyone would find out about us. We were pretty discreet. I sure didn’t think Janine would advertise it.’

Stride shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Rain plinked on the metallic roof, and drops leaked inside. A gust of wind rocked the corrugated metal. ‘She says you were in love with her.’

Nathan snorted. ‘Are you kidding? No, I wasn’t.’

‘Why would she say that?’ Stride asked.

‘Why do you think? To make it look like I had another reason to blow her husband away. I wanted her for myself. Real nice. I guess there’s no honor among cheaters.’

‘You said another reason to kill Jay,’ Stride pointed out.

‘Oh, come on, Lieutenant. You don’t need to play gotcha games with me. We both know I hated Jay Ferris. He cost me my job. He made it his business to ruin my life. So I made it my business to fuck his wife. Which I did. I already had my revenge against Jay.’

‘You don’t have much of an alibi for that night.’

‘Maybe not, but I was sick. The pizza girl will tell you that. Besides, you tested my gun. It’s clean.’

‘Is that your only handgun?’ Stride asked. ‘Archie Gale seems to think you have more.’

Nathan shrugged. ‘Okay, I’ve got others. You want to test all of them? You want to search my place? Go for it. Look, it doesn’t matter. I’m not an idiot. If I killed him — which I didn’t — I would have dropped the gun through this hole in the ice. You’d never find it. That’s probably what Janine did, too.’

‘You think she killed him?’

‘Of course she did.’

‘Did you know that Jay Ferris owned a gun?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah, Jay waved it at me when I went after him at the Saratoga.’

‘Did you ever tell Janine about Jay’s gun?’

Nathan didn’t answer right away. He rubbed his bare arms against the cold. Stride thought he was deciding whether to lie, and he realized he couldn’t trust anything that came out of Nathan’s mouth. That was true of Janine, too. It would be a he said/she said between them all the way to the courtroom.

‘Yeah, sure, I told her about it,’ Nathan said.

‘Just to be clear,’ Stride reiterated. ‘You’re saying that you told Janine that Jay carried a gun. She knew about it.’

‘I did. I joked about it once. I said we’d better be careful if Jay found out about us, in case he decided to blow us away.’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t remember. Months ago.’

‘What did Janine say?’

‘She didn’t look surprised.’

Nathan smiled. If he was a liar, he was good at it, but so was Janine. Nathan obviously realized that Stride doubted his story, so he added: ‘Janine knew how to shoot, too. I taught her. We went to a range together once. It was over in Superior, where I figured no one would see us.’ He dug in the pocket of his vest for his flip-phone. ‘I got a pic of it, actually. I took it while she was firing. It was pretty hot. She was really into it.’

He pushed several buttons on his phone and turned it around so that Stride could see the small screen. He recognized Janine Snow, ear defenders over her head, goggles over her eyes, a Smith & Wesson revolver at the end of her outstretched arms. She aimed at a target, and her face was hard and focused. When Janine Snow did anything, she did it well.

‘I’ll send you a copy of the picture,’ Nathan added.

Stride nodded. ‘Tell me more about the affair.’

‘There’s not much to tell. I met her when I was doing security at the hospital last May. I figured I’d take my chances getting her into bed. It wasn’t hard.’

‘How often did you see her?’

‘Not often. A couple times a month. She’s a busy woman.’

‘Where did you meet?’

‘Hotels at first. Then she bought her chill place, and we’d meet there.’

Stride cocked his head. ‘Her what?’

‘She keeps an apartment downtown. It’s her getaway when she doesn’t want to be home with Jay.’ Nathan read the confusion in Stride’s face, and he grinned. ‘You didn’t know about it, did you? How’d you miss that one, Lieutenant? Well, I doubt it’s under her name, so don’t kick yourself too hard.’

Nathan rattled off a downtown address, and Stride wrote it down. He knew the location, and he was angry that they hadn’t discovered the condo before now. It was only a ten-minute drive from Janine’s house on the hill. If she were looking to stash a gun and jewels after the murder, it would have been an easy place to do so. And now she’d had time to dispose of them permanently.

‘Janine says you had sex at her house once,’ Stride went on.

Nathan shook his head firmly. ‘No. Definitely not.’

‘You never went there?’

‘Never.’

‘She was very specific about it. She did a striptease for you in her bedroom, and you saw where she keeps her jewelry.’

‘Well, give that woman extra credit, she’s clever. I guess you do what it takes when you’re trying to duck a murder charge. But come on, Lieutenant. You really think she’d take the risk of her friends or neighbors seeing me at her house? No way.’

‘When did the affair end?’ Stride asked.

‘December. Not long after Thanksgiving.’

‘Who broke it off?’ Stride asked.

‘She did.’

‘Why?’

‘She didn’t give me a reason, and I didn’t ask. She just said we were done. She’s a cold fish. I didn’t really expect anything more.’

‘Did you want to keep the affair going?’

‘I didn’t care. I liked the sex, but I can get plenty of sex. I said thanks for the memories. We did it one last time, and we were over. It wasn’t emotional.’

‘Janine thinks Jay was planning to confront you about the affair.’

‘Confront me? Hell, no. Do you really think Jay Ferris would admit to my face that he knew I’d been screwing his wife? Not him. He’d never give me the satisfaction.’

‘And yet he knew what you were doing,’ Stride said. ‘He hired a detective.’

‘Okay, so he knew about the affair. I’m sure he forced Janine to dump me. It would have driven him crazy to think of me and her together, and he would have done anything to make her stop. I mean, she always said it was a control game with Jay.’

Stride’s eyes narrowed. ‘How so?’

‘That marriage was a war, and Jay wanted to win. He wanted to rule over her like some kind of king, you know? He was never going to give her up. I told her she should pay him off and divorce him, but she said he’d destroy her life before he walked away. She couldn’t escape. Those were the words she used, Lieutenant. She said Jay would have to die before he let her get away from him.’

Cindy sat with Jonny and Maggie in the basement conference room of the Detective Bureau. She had a cup of coffee in front of her, which she cradled between her palms. Jonny picked at the sprinkles on a chocolate donut, and Maggie — whose appetite belied her tiny size — wolfed down a quarter-pounder from McDonald’s. The furnace was loud through the air vents. Hours had passed since her confrontation with the man at Miller Hill Mall, but Cindy was still jittery. Her hands shook, making the coffee slosh. Her eyes darted back and forth between her husband and his Chinese partner, and the long silences made them all uncomfortable.

On the bulletin board, Maggie had thumbtacked photos from Jay Ferris’s camera of the man in camouflage with the assault rifle. Beside the photos was the sketch they’d drawn from Cindy’s description. Cindy was sure the man in the photographs was the same man she’d followed at the mall.