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

He understood why she felt that way. At twelve years old, Carol had walked into the garage and found her father hanging by his belt from an overhead beam. Her perfect suburban childhood had been stolen away. She was never going to let that happen again.

Howard put down his trophy with a frustrated little bang. Janine Snow stared at him from his computer monitor. Dr. Perfect.

‘Fine, we can go to the Dells if that’s what you want,’ he said with a sigh. Surrender was the easiest way to keep peace.

‘Good. It’ll be fun. We can go to that supper club you like. The one by the lake.’

‘Uh huh.’

Carol got up from the sofa. She looked pleased with herself. ‘You coming to bed?’

‘I want to work on tomorrow’s lesson plan,’ he said.

‘Howard, you teach ninth-grade history. It hasn’t changed since last year. Here’s a hint: the North won the war.

He knew that she didn’t mean to be nasty when she teased him about his job. To her, there was no shame in being an ordinary teacher in an ordinary school. Even so, her jokes bothered him. They reminded him of everything he hadn’t done with his life.

‘I’ll be up later,’ he muttered.

‘Okay, ’night.’ She wiggled her fingers at him.

Carol would be asleep when he climbed into bed. That was how it usually was. They had sex a couple times a month. She was cheerful about it, but he knew she looked at sex as more of a wifely obligation than as something she did because she enjoyed it.

His eyes went back to the photograph of Janine Snow. Blond hair, long and luscious. Icy blue eyes that made you shiver. Rich. Hands that brought people back to life. What would it be like to be someone like that?

What would it be like to be with someone like that?

Howard turned off his monitor, because her face made it impossible to think about anything else. He opened the high school textbook and tried to write questions for the test, but he couldn’t focus. Carol was right. History didn’t change. In the end, he would use the same test he’d used the year before and the year before that.

He took a pencil from his desk and threw it across his office in annoyance. It landed on the pea-green shag. He got up and paced in front of the Easter Island poster. The empty eyes of one of the giant statues stared back at him. That was the place to take a vacation, on the storm-swept shore of some desolate island, examining the clues to one of history’s great mysteries. Growing up, he’d imagined himself as a famous archaeologist, doing digs around the world.

Instead, he taught bored kids about things he’d only read about in books. He’d never done anything himself. Not really. At age thirty-two, he’d complained to the Super One manager about the annoying checker in the Express Lane who refused to ring up his groceries, and the manager had made her apologize to him. Carol had cried so hard that Howard asked her out for coffee as a way to make it up to her. One year later, they got married. Another year after that, they had their daughter Annie, who was now six. And that was that.

Nothing about his life was going to change.

He retrieved a juice box from the mini refrigerator under the bar. He stared at himself in the mirror as he sucked through the tiny straw, making dimples in his cheeks. Not a bad-looking guy, he told himself. Five-foot-ten, not tall but not short. Curly brown hair parted in the middle, but no gray yet. Long face, long chin. Clark Kent glasses, but those were fashionable again. He wore a striped Kohl’s polo shirt, and you couldn’t really see the paunch.

He went to the file cabinet and grabbed a copy of last year’s Civil War test.

This battle, fought in Maryland on September 17, 1862, is also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg.

A. Gettysburg

B. Antietam

C. Bull Run

D. Saratoga

It depressed him, after weeks of study, how many students usually chose D. Bad enough to get the wrong battle, but the wrong war? He didn’t blame them. Teaching the kids was his job, and he was decidedly mediocre at it.

Howard knew why he was depressed. Six days earlier, he’d turned forty years old. Forty — the burying place for all of your younger dreams. He was celebrating with a pity party. Welcome to the Middle Ages , Carol wrote on his birthday card, which was another joke that he didn’t find funny. He was halfway through life, and it was February, and the gray Duluth winter felt as if it would go on forever. He defied anyone not to be depressed in the face of that.

He sat down at his desk and turned on the monitor again. Janine Snow stared back at him. If you had a face like hers, if you had that kind of money, if you lived in a big house on the hill, it would never feel like winter. According to the papers, she was almost forty years old, too. She didn’t look it.

He asked the question that everyone in Duluth was asking.

Did you do it?

One week after the murder of Jay Ferris, Stride’s team still hadn’t found the gun.

‘We tore that house apart from top to bottom,’ Maggie told him. ‘I had guys tramping through the snow and climbing the cliffs on both sides. We searched every dumpster within a mile around the place. Nothing. The gun’s gone.’

Stride leaned back in the old vinyl chair. They were in the basement of City Hall in downtown Duluth, where the Detective Bureau’s investigations were headquartered. It was late, and the rest of the office was dark, but they had fluorescent lights blazing over their heads. One of the lights flickered like a strobe. The table was strewn with half-empty cans of Coke, Lays potato chip bags, and sauce-stained wrappers that smelled of Subway meatballs. File folders on every chair bulged with papers and photographs, and evidence boxes were stacked against the conference room’s walls. This was the war room for everything they knew — and didn’t know — about Jay Ferris and Janine Snow.

He stared at the ceiling and thought about the missing gun.

‘So you kill your husband,’ Stride said. ‘You have an argument, you go find a gun, you shoot him. Now there you are with his body on the floor, and you have to figure out what to do next. You don’t have much time. Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? You can’t be sure a neighbor didn’t hear the shot, and if too much time goes by before you call 911, people will wonder why.’

‘Nobody heard the shot,’ Maggie pointed out.

‘Right, but Janine doesn’t know that. She needs to get rid of the gun, and she grabs a bunch of jewelry to make it look like a robbery. Then what? Throw it all down the canyon? Someone’s bound to find it when the snow melts. Does she get in Jay’s car and drive somewhere? Maybe, but what if someone sees her on the road?’

‘So what do you think she did?’ Maggie asked.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Chances are, Janine already had a plan. She’s not the kind of woman who does anything on the spur of the moment. She probably thought about this for weeks.’

‘Or she’s innocent,’ Maggie pointed out.

‘Yeah. Or she’s innocent.’

It was possible — but Stride didn’t believe it. He’d looked into Janine’s eyes that night and seen the truth. She was guilty. She’d killed her husband.

He got up and wandered through the darkened office to the pop machine, where he bought another can of Coke. He popped it and drank most of it quickly. A noisy furnace vent rattled over his head, but it did little to warm the drafty basement. He leaned against the wall, waiting for the rush of caffeine and sugar.

Stride was almost forty, and on most days, he still felt young. His face had been weathered by the Duluth winters, but he could be boyish when he cracked his quick, easy grin. His hair was jet black, short on the sides, messy and cow-licked on top. He didn’t have perfect features. He would never be a smooth-skinned, blow-dried model. Cindy said she liked his flaws because he didn’t try to hide them. She said you could look at her husband and know exactly who he was: honorable, headstrong, brooding, and bold — a man who would give his life trying to do the right thing and who would feel every failure deep into his bones.