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

Maggie was still quiet, but he didn’t notice her silence.

‘Speaking of Troy,’ he went on. ‘I haven’t teased you about him, have I? I think he’s got a thing for you. He was giving you the eye when we saw him.’

He waited for the usual sarcastic reply, and when he didn’t get it, he wondered if he had crossed a line with her. Their own break-up, and his reunion with Serena, were still too fresh.

He looked up and said: ‘Mags?’

Her golden face was a ball of confusion. Her bangs were in her eyes, but she didn’t blow them away.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘I got the ballistics report from the BCA on the murder weapon. The one that Serena found. The one that killed Kelly Hauswirth.’

‘Okay.’

‘They got two hits.’

‘Really? Excellent.’

Maggie was quiet again. Then she said: ‘The gun matches a bullet fired during a smash-and-grab robbery at a Chicago jewelry store more than eight years ago where a security guard was wounded. This was right before Christmas.’

‘Interesting. What was the other hit?’

His partner shook her head. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t understand it.’

‘Understand what?’ Stride asked.

‘I asked the BCA if they could run the test again. They said it was a lock. No question about it.’

‘Mags,’ he repeated. ‘What the hell are you saying?’

‘The gun that Serena recovered in the Kelly Hauswirth case,’ Maggie said. ‘That’s the gun that killed Jay Ferris.’

Serena knew that Jonny was awake. Their bedroom was dark, and they both lay atop the blankets. It was a warm night. The windows were open. She heard the trill of crickets in the bushes outside.

He’d told her about the case. Janine Snow. Jay Ferris. The investigation and trial. They’d talked about old cases before, but not that one. Typically, he only told her about cases that were unsolved, but the murder of Jay Ferris had been open-and-shut from the beginning. He’d never doubted what happened. There was only one loose end from the entire investigation — the missing gun — but even that detail hadn’t stopped a jury from convicting Janine Snow.

Except now the gun had been found. Serena had found it.

She slid her hand across the bed and laced his fingers. ‘Question,’ she murmured.

‘Okay.’

‘You said there were two hits on the gun. How come the ballistics database didn’t pick this up years ago during the original investigation?’

Jonny pushed himself up in bed. He reached over and switched on his nightstand lamp. A moth tapped against the glass. There were shadows on Jonny’s face and in his eyes.

‘It’s the usual backlog bureaucracy. The bullet from the Chicago shooting didn’t get logged for years, and when it did, they didn’t do a cross-region search. Just Illinois. Somebody didn’t want to bother sifting through false hits.’

‘Chicago,’ Serena said. ‘What’s the connection?’

‘There is no obvious connection that I can see. A jewelry store near Calumet Park on the south side of Chicago was robbed at gunpoint on December 20 almost nine years ago. That was just over a month before Jay Ferris was killed. A security guard tried to intervene and took a bullet in the thigh. The guard ID’d the perp from mug shots, and Chicago police found him a week later living with his aunt not far from Wrigley Field. He was wearing a Rolex watch he’d grabbed at the store. Real smart.’

‘But no gun.’

‘No gun. They didn’t need it to make a case. They had the guard’s ID and jewelry from the store. The shooter took a plea. In his statement, he said he’d sold the gun for cash the day after he hit the store. He didn’t know the buyer and couldn’t describe him. It was just one more gun on the Chicago streets. No one tried to track it down.’

‘And yet a month later that same gun was here in Duluth being used to shoot Jay Ferris,’ Serena said.

‘Exactly.’

‘Can you find the Chicago perp to get more details on the sale?’

‘He’s off the grid,’ Jonny replied. ‘He did three years, got out, never even bothered with a single parole meeting. There’s an outstanding warrant, but the police don’t think he’s anywhere near Chicago.’

Their bedroom door was closed, but they heard movement in the living room. Cat was up. She was a restless sleeper, and they often found her awake in the middle of the night. She’d suffered from nightmares for most of her life. When she couldn’t sleep, she turned on the television, or ate cold pizza from the refrigerator, or sat in silence on the back porch. Hearing her footsteps, Jonny looked at the door, wanting to check on her.

Serena got out of bed. She slid her nightgown over her head and then slipped a T-shirt over her bare chest. She stepped into shorts. She opened the bedroom door a crack, saw Cat sprawled on the living room floor in front of the television, and closed the door again. She draped herself across the end of the bed at Jonny’s feet.

‘So what happens next?’ she asked.

His face showed his frustration. ‘The gun has torpedoed the entire case against Janine. Archie’s filing an emergency motion for her release. The county attorney thinks he may get it. If the gun didn’t have a history, it probably wouldn’t be enough to convince a judge, but the fact that it was used in a violent crime prior to Jay’s death — and now in another murder years later — changes everything.’

‘I hate to admit it, but I agree with Archie,’ Serena said. ‘It looks like Janine never had that gun at all.’

Jonny shook his head. He was stubborn. ‘Not necessarily. The buyer in Chicago was a man, but street guns change hands all the time. Janine probably bought the gun later. Or Jay bought it for himself, and then Janine used it.’

‘And then what? You don’t murder your husband and sell the gun on the street. You get rid of it.’

‘She may have tried to get rid of it, but somebody else found it.’

‘Or somebody else shot Jay,’ Serena told him. ‘You may not like it, but that’s reality.’

He was quiet. Then he said: ‘I’m going down to Shakopee. I want to talk to Janine.’

‘She won’t tell you anything. The gun is her ticket out. She’s not going to jeopardize that.’

‘I know, but even if she won’t talk, I want to see her face when I ask her about it. Believe me, I know Cindy. I’ll know if she’s hiding something.’

Serena gave him a sad smile. ‘Cindy?’

He closed his eyes, realizing what he’d said. ‘Sorry. Janine. Freudian slip.’

She knew that the discovery of the gun had awakened ghosts for him. The murder of Jay Ferris, and the conviction of Janine Snow, didn’t exist in a vacuum. She could do the math. Jay Ferris had been killed in January. One January later, Jonny lost his wife. In between were some of the hardest days of their lives.

‘This must bring back some tough memories,’ she said.

‘Sure,’ he admitted.

‘Want to tell me about it?’

She waited to see if he would keep talking. Or if he would shut down the way he usually did.

‘You know the timing,’ he said. ‘It was a bad year.’

‘I know.’

He hesitated, and then he plunged ahead.

‘There was a shadow about Cindy in those days. She was so up and down. I thought she was angry because she thought Janine was innocent and I was trying to put her in prison. But it wasn’t just that. She was holding out on me. I was focused on the case, and all the while...’

Serena said nothing, but she knew. All the while, Cindy was dying.

She looked in his eyes for tears but didn’t see any.

‘I told you about Ross Klayman, didn’t I?’ he went on, staring at the ceiling of their bedroom. ‘The shooting at Miller Hill Mall?’