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

Stride’s face darkened. ‘What kind of query?’

‘Homicide. Troy says there’s another victim.’

‘Why haven’t we heard about it?’

‘Because the murder didn’t take place here,’ Maggie explained. ‘They found this other woman in Amsterdam. Her throat was slit, and she was dumped in one of the canals. But guess what she was wearing? A Grandma’s Marathon T-shirt from Duluth.’

By midnight, Cat hadn’t come home. They knew she’d turned off her phone, because their text messages weren’t being delivered, and the tracking app didn’t show them where she was. The girl was deliberately pushing boundaries and buttons.

‘I don’t get it,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t understand her behavior.’

‘That’s because you were never a teenage girl,’ Serena replied with a smile.

They sat on Adirondack chairs on the front porch of the cottage. The street was quiet, and the waves of Lake Superior thundered out of sight behind them. He flicked away a hungry mosquito.

‘One minute she’s sweet and innocent,’ he said, ‘and the next she’s the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.’

‘Teenager,’ Serena said again.

‘I know, but she’s so intent on keeping the baby. And she’s not ready for it.’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘I can’t help but think...’ he began, but he cut off his words. He didn’t believe in anyone else making decisions for a woman. Even a woman who was really just a girl. He continued to believe that Cat should give up the child for adoption, but she kept insisting that she wanted to be a mother.

‘You can go through bad times as a teenager and come out okay,’ Serena pointed out. ‘I did.’

‘Yeah, but a lot of girls don’t.’

‘That’s true.’

He felt like a father to Cat, which made him feel old. Plenty of other things made him aware of his age, too. In the eight years since he’d lost Cindy, gray had begun to win the battle over black in his hair. The leg he’d broken last summer had healed, but in the dead of winter, he sometimes found himself limping. In a few months, he’d turn fifty. There was something about the change in decade that made it harder to pretend you were young.

Life had reminded him over and over that he wasn’t bulletproof. It wasn’t such a bad thing. He’d begun to accept his mistakes and imperfections. He didn’t bang his head against every wall. He and Serena, both wounded, both alone, had found a measure of peace with each other. If they could keep it.

And Cat.

He hadn’t realized how much he needed someone like Cat in his life until he found her shivering in his bedroom closet three months earlier, on the run from a killer. Now he couldn’t imagine being without her. Which was what made her behavior so frustrating. He couldn’t protect her from everything. Not even herself.

Serena took his hand. ‘I should have trusted my instincts at the bar.’

‘How so?’

‘I knew Kelly Hauswirth didn’t belong there. I should have talked to her.’

‘You couldn’t possibly have known she was in danger, and talking to her wouldn’t necessarily have changed a thing.’

Serena shrugged. She didn’t always take her own advice about living without regrets. ‘What about the murder weapon?’ she asked.

‘The BCA is running prints and ballistics. We don’t have a report yet.’

‘And the Grand Am?’

‘Stolen from a parking lot at the convention center. No one saw anything. No prints inside. It’s a dead end.’

‘I wish I’d seen his face.’

‘Well, we may not have anything on him, but we know who she is now. That’s something.’

‘Kelly Hauswirth,’ Serena said again. ‘She looked like a Kelly. Sweet little Kelly falls in love with a guy online, and he gets her to come to Minnesota to meet him. And then — what? She realizes that the guy in the car isn’t the man she’s supposed to meet, and she tries to run?’

‘It looks that way,’ Stride said.

Serena shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Nothing about this feels right to me. I think this guy is an iceberg, Jonny.’

He knew what she meant. Most of an iceberg floated underneath the water, and it was the part you couldn’t see that you had to fear.

There was more to this murder than they understood yet.

Howard Marlowe typed into a Microsoft Word document on his computer:

The prosecution couldn’t put a gun in Dr. Snow’s hands, but they did put one in Jay’s hands. Was that gun the murder weapon? Most of the jurors thought so.

Not me. I think that Archibald Gale’s speculation at the trial was right. Jay lost his gun when his truck and fishing shanty went through the ice. People made a big deal of the fact that the gun wasn’t recovered during salvage, but that doesn’t mean anything. If your house floods, do you think everything stays put? No. The gun floated away. It’s buried under the silt of Superior Bay.

He studied what he’d written, and he liked it. Next came the evidence he’d uncovered in his research.

Four years ago, he’d taken a lawn mower to Jay’s brother Clyde for repair. By then, Clyde didn’t remember Howard from the jury. Howard got to know him, went out with him, and peppered him with questions over drinks. Clyde admitted after half a bottle of Captain Morgan that he was pretty sure Jay had the gun with him that afternoon in the shanty. And he admitted that he never saw his brother with the gun again after that day.

Howard passed along the information to Archibald Gale, who said what he always said. It wasn’t enough for a new trial. So the appeals came and went, and nothing happened.

Janine Snow remained in prison.

‘What are you working on?’ Carol asked Howard from the doorway of his office. She’d gone to bed early, but she had trouble sleeping most nights. ‘As if I didn’t know.’

‘The book,’ he said.

His wife folded her arms across her pajama top. Dark half-moons rimmed her eyes. ‘The book. Will it ever be done? How long is it now? 1,500 pages? No one’s going to read it.’

He didn’t take his eyes away from the monitor. ‘It’s not about whether I publish it or not. It’s a hobby.’

‘A hobby? It’s one in the morning, Howard. You spend every minute you’re awake researching and writing that book.’

‘So what? I need something to fill my summers while school’s out.’

‘Really? How about doing something with your family? How about doing something with me ?’

‘We were just in Door County,’ he told her.

‘One weekend. Three days. It rained. And the only reason we went is that you tracked another white Rav to somebody in Sister Bay.’

‘I told you. It’s my hobby.’

Carol shook her head in frustration. When he looked at her, he saw how much she’d aged in the last nine years. The extra ten pounds she’d always carried had become twenty. Her face, without makeup, was pallid like beach sand. She was right that he was ignoring her. They didn’t have much in common anymore. Their intermittent sex life had dwindled to nothing; he couldn’t remember when they had last slept together. Their daughter Annie was a sullen teenager, too preoccupied with her own life to worry about them. Carol didn’t have anything else. She still worked as a checker at the Super One. She quilted. She went to church. And she nagged him about the book like a squawking parrot on his shoulder.

She didn’t understand that the case was the most important work he’d ever done in his life. It was his life. It made him feel young again. His office had become a library of evidence, all of it neatly organized and categorized by subject. The witnesses. The exhibits. The gun. The Rav. Two years ago, he’d started turning his investigative work into a book.