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

He knew half the people in the city, thanks to his job, but he didn’t invite many people into his life. He had no siblings. His parents were dead. He’d lost his father to the lake when he was a boy, and his mother had passed away ten years ago. Since then, his world had mostly been him and Cindy, but he didn’t need anyone else. He only kept a few close friends other than his wife. His doctor and college buddy Steve Garske. And Maggie.

Stride smiled at the idea of Maggie. As cops, as friends, they were good together. They were as close as two people could be who had never slept together. Which was something that he would never let happen.

He returned to the conference room and sat down.

‘So what do you think, Mags?’

‘She did it,’ Maggie said, ‘but I wish we could find that gun.’

‘We will. In the meantime, we need to track down anyone else with a motive. I don’t want to give Archie Gale room to run when this gets to court.’

Maggie nodded. ‘I’m meeting Nathan Skinner tomorrow. I don’t like thinking that an ex-cop could have done this, but—’

‘No, you’re right, talk to Nathan. Make sure he’s got an alibi. I’m meeting Jay’s brother Clyde. He wants to know why we haven’t already arrested Janine. What else do we have?’

Maggie grabbed her notebook from the table, although she didn’t really need to consult it. She had one of the best memories of any cop he’d ever met. ‘We’re still waiting on bank and phone records, and we’re reviewing video dumps of ATMs and store cameras in the area, in case Janine took a drive to get rid of the gun. Guppo’s going through everything we pulled from the house. Jay got a lot of hate mail because of his newspaper columns. It’s going to take a while to clear those people.’

‘What about the neighbors up on Skyline?’ Stride asked. ‘And their co-workers at the newspaper and the hospital?’

‘According to them, Jay and Janine’s marriage wasn’t good. Lots of fights. Lots of arguments. Most people didn’t understand why they were still married.’

‘Do we know if there was a prenup?’ Stride asked.

‘Unfortunately, yes,’ Maggie told him, ‘and a good one. If Janine and Jay got a divorce, he’d walk away with squat. And their friends said that Jay was very fond of having money. If anybody had a motive to pick murder over divorce, it was Jay, not Janine.’

Stride frowned. ‘What else?’

‘We got a Good Samaritan call,’ Maggie said. ‘A teenage boy and his girlfriend were heading along West 8th Street to Skyline on Friday evening. He says they passed a white SUV parked on the shoulder. He couldn’t tell me exactly where this was, but if it was close to the intersection at Skyline, it wouldn’t have been too far from the spur leading up to the doctor’s house.’

‘What time was this?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘He wasn’t sure. After ten, he thought, but he didn’t check the clock.’

‘Did he see anyone?’

‘No, he’s pretty sure it was empty.’

‘Pretty sure?’

‘Yeah. Except it was dark, so he doesn’t really know. That’s helpful, huh? He’s also pretty sure the SUV didn’t have a Minnesota plate, but not one hundred percent sure.’

‘I don’t suppose he knew what kind of SUV it was.’

‘Actually, he was very sure of that. This kid is sort of a car geek. He said it was a Toyota Rav4. He recognized the silly spare tire on the back.’

‘Well, there couldn’t be more than a few thousand of those in the northland,’ Stride sighed.

‘Yeah. It’s a needle in a haystack, but it’s worth a look, just in case Janine is telling the truth and this was a home invasion robbery. I asked our buddy Lynn Ristau on the Wisconsin side of the bridge to cross-reference white Rav owners with criminal records. She didn’t sound too happy about it. You’re going to owe her a burger at the Anchor Bar when we get the results.’

Stride smiled. ‘Well, I already owe her. She was a big help with the bridge closure on Friday.’

He and Maggie both turned toward the conference room door when they heard the bell of the elevator arriving in the basement. The doors slid open, and Sergeant Max Guppo waddled toward them with a laptop computer in his arms and a monster bag of Fritos tightly clamped between his teeth.

‘Yoogzgonnwnsds,’ he said as he shouldered into the office.

Stride grinned at him. ‘Excuse me?’

Guppo opened his mouth, and the Fritos dropped onto the conference table. He plugged in the laptop.

‘You guys are going to want to see this,’ he told them.

Guppo was only about as tall as Maggie and shaped like a snowman. His perfectly round head had a black comb-over that routinely flew like a pirate flag at the slightest breeze. He sported a pencil mustache underneath a nose that was mashed flat against his face. He’d been a Duluth police officer even longer than Stride, and despite his girth, Guppo was one of the most versatile investigators on the team.

‘We found a bunch of SD photo cards in Jay’s desk at the News-Tribune ,’ Guppo told them. ‘I’ve been going through the pictures he took with his camera.’

Breathing hard, Guppo sat down, squeezing himself into one of the wheely chairs. He turned the monitor so that Stride and Maggie could see it, and then he grabbed a handful of corn chips and pushed them into his mouth until his cheeks swelled like a squirrel’s. He crunched loudly.

Stride watched as Guppo’s thick finger scrolled through a series of photos that had been taken in parkland during the Minnesota fall, when the colors of the trees were at their peak. He recognized the wilderness not far from the ski slopes of Spirit Mountain. Leaning forward, Stride saw a man in the photographs, but the man was too distant to identify. Whoever it was wore camouflage pants and a black T-shirt. As the pictures scrolled, Stride saw that Jay had crept closer to the man in camouflage. The man looked young — probably in his twenties — and in the best of the pictures, Stride picked out details in the man’s profile. He had a shaved head, a trimmed beard, and a mass of tattoos on his neck and his bare forearms. It was difficult to estimate his height, but he looked bony and underfed. A small man.

He also held an assault rifle in his arms.

‘So Jay took these photos?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘Do we know who this guy is?’

Guppo shook his head. ‘No, it looks like he spotted Jay and took off.’

‘Do you know when the pictures were taken?’ Stride asked.

‘Last October.’

‘That looks like Ely’s Peak,’ Maggie said.

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,’ Guppo replied. ‘The whole thing rang a bell with me, so I went back to police reports from the fall. We had a call from Jay on file from October 5. He said he’d been hiking in the woods near Ely’s Peak, and he heard gunfire. He chased the guy and took pictures, and he sent us a couple photos. We handed it off to Abel Teitscher, but he wasn’t able to identify the man in camouflage. He staked out the location for a few days, but whoever it was didn’t come back. That was the end of it. However, according to Abel’s report, Jay was right about the gunfire. There was a lot of it. He followed the trail and found hundreds of shell casings in a clearing. Somebody went on a shooting spree.’

Stride arrived home late, which wasn’t unusual.

He lived with Cindy on a finger of land beyond the Duluth lift bridge known as the Point. They’d owned the house since they got married. It was a squat two-bedroom cottage that could have been plucked from a Monopoly board. Detached garage, sand driveway, peeling paint. The backyard butted up to the dunes of Lake Superior. Everyone told them they should move to a larger place on Miller Hill, but they loved the location on the water, and Cindy loved the timelessness of an old house. She always said you shared a place like that with everyone who’d lived and died there before you.