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

‘What’s her name?’ Cindy asked. She always wanted to know the name. Victims were never faceless or nameless to her.

‘Kerry McGrath.’

‘Well, go,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry.’

She shook her head. There wasn’t any call for apology. She knew the life.

‘What did you want to tell me?’ he asked.

‘It can wait.’

He got up from the bench and headed across the sand for his Bronco. She watched him go. Hands in his pockets. Boots leaving footprints. That body she knew so well, with its muscles, furrows, and scars. His head cocked, watching the lazy turns of a hawk in the dark of the Duluth sky.

Suddenly, she ran after him with a sense of urgency. He heard her coming and turned around in surprise, and she swept her arms behind his waist and lifted herself up on her toes to kiss him. She gave him a long, hard, wet Cindy kiss that went on and on. You could feel kisses like that all the way down to your toes, and you could close your eyes and remember them like candy on your lips.

They were the kind of kisses you never forgot, no matter what happened next.

The Present

‘We finally got an ID on the victim outside the bar,’ Maggie told Stride and Serena.

She stood in the doorway of Stride’s cottage on the 3300 block of the Point. It was a July evening after dark, and the windows were all open, letting in lake air through the screens. Stride sat in his red leather armchair near the fireplace, under the mantle that was decorated with a sign that read: BELIEVE. Serena sat on the walnut steps that led up to their unfinished attic.

He reached over to the small table next to him for a cigarette before he realized that he didn’t smoke anymore. Strange. After fits and starts, it had been three years since he’d had a cigarette, but sometimes he simply forgot that he was a different man now. You are always one moment away from being who you were, so the price of maturity is constant vigilance.

‘Who was she?’ Serena asked. She wore a purple tank top and shorts, leaving her strong arms and legs bare. The skin of her long legs was mottled by scars from burns she’d suffered in a fire two years earlier. Her flowing black hair was mussed.

It had been three weeks since Serena saw a young blond woman shot and killed outside the Grizzly Bear Bar in West Duluth. She’d chased down the shooter, but he’d escaped, leaving his gun behind but with the woman’s wallet and phone lodged in his pocket. They were no closer to finding him, and the woman herself had been a Jane Doe since the murder. Nothing in her baby-blue suitcase had helped them give her a name. Until now.

‘Kelly Hauswirth,’ Maggie said. ‘Twenty-two years old. From Denver.’

‘She was a long way from home.’

‘Yeah.’ Maggie danced uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

‘You can come inside,’ Serena told her. ‘I don’t bite.’

‘I think that’s what the wolf said to Little Red Riding Hood,’ Maggie replied, but she wandered into the cottage, handed off copies of a Colorado driver’s license to the two of them, and sat down on Stride’s sofa with her feet propped on the coffee table. It was like the old days, but it wasn’t.

A palpable frost chilled the air between her and Serena. The two of them had nursed an uneasy friendship since Stride and Serena began a relationship four years earlier, but the fractures between them had split open the previous fall. In the wake of a near-fatal accident that left him struggling with flashbacks and nightmares, Stride had made the one mistake in his life that he’d always sworn to avoid. He’d slept with Maggie. Within days, Serena moved out, and he and Maggie launched a short-lived affair.

But things changed, and then they changed again. That was the way of the world. He and Serena were back together. They shared the cottage with a pregnant teenage girl named Cat Mateo, whom they’d rescued from the Duluth streets. And Maggie, who was in many ways still his best friend, was an outsider now.

‘Where’s the kid?’ Maggie asked, glancing into Cat’s empty bedroom at the front of the house.

Serena rolled her eyes. ‘Out. Again.’

‘We think she has a boyfriend,’ Stride added, ‘but she won’t tell us who it is.’

‘Welcome to parenthood,’ Maggie said.

Stride knew that Maggie didn’t trust Cat. She was also still pretending that everything was fine between her and Stride, when it clearly wasn’t.

‘Kelly Hauswirth worked at a telemarketing company in Centennial,’ Maggie went on. ‘She told her co-workers she was going on vacation. Didn’t say where or with who. Word is, she kept to herself, didn’t socialize much. It was almost two weeks before anyone reported her missing, and it took the Denver police a while to connect the disappearance to our report.’

‘What about family?’ Serena asked.

‘Her parents are in Montana. They don’t talk with her more than once a month. The Denver cops sent a pic of the body to the police in Missoula, who ran it by Mom and Dad. They confirmed it was their daughter.’

‘Do they know what Kelly was doing here in Duluth?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Nope.’

Stride studied the driver’s license photo of Kelly Hauswirth. Serena had described her as the suburban girl next door, and she was right. The woman’s blond hair was straight, her eyes wide and blue, her face round. Pretty, but not a stunner. She didn’t flirt with the camera. However, she’d left behind lace thongs and ribbed condoms in her baby-blue suitcase. The shy cheerleader type was in town for a man.

A man driving a stolen Grand Am.

A man who’d shot her in the back of the head.

‘Have the Denver police been able to trace her movements?’ he asked.

‘She charged a bus ticket from Denver to Minneapolis on her credit card. That’s nineteen hours of hell. The police talked to the drivers on the route, but no one remembered Kelly specifically.’

‘How about on the Minneapolis end?’

‘Nothing. There are no other charges on her credit card. If she took another bus to Duluth, she paid cash.’

‘She was obviously coming here to meet someone,’ Serena said.

Maggie nodded. ‘Yeah, one of her co-workers thought Kelly had hooked up with an online boyfriend. The Denver police dug into her phone records and say she was texting hot and heavy with someone, but all the details he gave her were completely fictitious. Name, location, occupation, all made up. They’re going to e-mail me a transcript. The number connected to a throwaway phone, and it hasn’t been used since the murder.’

‘He lured her,’ Stride said.

‘Looks that way. She got catfished.’

‘How’d she hook up with him?’

‘They don’t know. Probably a chat room, but they haven’t found it yet. This girl was easy prey. Very naive. The guy texted her photos of himself, but it’s really some male model you can find all over the Internet.’

Maggie held up a photograph of a twenty-something man with moptop brown hair and a trimmed, wispy beard. He wore a simple white T-shirt and had dreamy blue eyes that belonged in a boy band. He was good-looking but not threatening.

‘And that’s who she thought she was going to meet?’ Serena asked.

‘Yeah. Must have been a shock. You think you’re about to hook up with your Prince Charming. Instead, some stranger robs you and kills you.’

‘This was more than a robbery,’ Stride said. ‘Nobody goes to that much trouble to grab a wallet.’

Maggie nodded. ‘Yeah, we may have something else here. Something bad. Troy Grange called me today. He heard about our case. He thinks there may be a connection to a query he got from Interpol about security for outbound ships at the port.’