Stalked

by Brian Freeman

  Maggie turned away, sniffled, and wiped her eyes. She felt dwarfed by the huge master bedroom and its massive mahogany furniture. On the far wall was a burgundy dresser, taller than she was; she had to stand on tiptoes to see inside the top drawer. Four hand-carved wooden posts loomed on each corner of the great empty stretch of the king-sized bed. It was too much bed for her by herself, which was how it had been for weeks. She hated even being near it.

  She took a step and her head spun. She still felt the effects of the wine she had drunk in the park. She steadied herself with a hand on her nightstand. When she looked down, she saw her shield and felt all the complex emotions that came with ten years on the job. She hadn’t expected to be working now, but there was a part of her that couldn’t leave the Detective Bureau, that wanted and needed to be with Stride. Or maybe it was because, step-by-step, the rest of her life had become a horror in the past year, and being on the job was a way to forget.

  She stared down at the nightstand again and felt unease worm its way into her stomach. Something was wrong. She mentally retraced her steps, what she had done, where she had gone, hoping she had simply made a drunken error. But she hadn’t. She had come upstairs and dropped her shield, her wallet, her gun, her keys, on the nightstand by the clock.

  Now her gun wasn’t there.

  It had been an ugly Wednesday night. Bitter cold, the way January always was. By ten o’clock, Eric hadn’t come home. Maggie had ginned up the courage to talk to him, but when he didn’t show up, she felt herself growing angry. He had been secretive and withdrawn in the week since the holidays. She couldn’t blame him for that. They had been strangers for weeks, arguing constantly. It was her fault. She was the one who had closed herself off, who had shut him out, because she couldn’t deal with everything that had happened to her.

  She grew sick of waiting for him and left the house. She took a bottle of chardonnay and a corkscrew. She bundled up in her Russian sable coat, a wedding gift that she didn’t wear often, but it was warm and made her feel like royalty. The snow hadn’t started yet, and the streets were clear. She drove down into the city, which was still festive with holiday lights, and then north along the shoreline drive until she came to a turnoff by the lake. It was deserted. She parked and opened the wine. When she got out of the truck, the wind blasted her face, but she ignored it as she followed a snowy trail to the dark, moving mass of Lake Superior. The stars winked down at her, undimmed by the glow of lights from the city to the south. The branches on the evergreens drooped with snow. Her boots sank into the drifts. Her coat hung to her midthighs, and between the fur and her boots, the cold slashed at her legs.

  There was no ice growing from the shore here; the water moved too fast. Only in the worst stretches of winter was the cold powerful enough to send a tentative sheet of ice a few hundred feet into the lake. Instead, there was nothing but angry midnight swells now, frigid whitecaps breaking on the rocks and undulating hills of water that looked like sea monsters wriggling toward the beach.

  She tipped the wine bottle to her lips and drank. It was chilled and dry. She had skipped dinner, and the wine went straight to her head. She felt sorry for herself, but with each swig of wine, she cared less and less. She stayed there for an hour, until the wine was gone and her limbs were numb. She threw the empty bottle end-over-end into the fierce waves. She thought about lying down in the snow and not getting up.

  Take off her clothes. Die of exposure.

  But no. Even though she had nothing to go home to, she knew it was time to go. She climbed unsteadily back to the parking lot and sat, thawing, inside the truck. Her mouth felt stiff. Her face was pale, and her hair was crusted with snow. She was like the Tin Man, rusted over, needing oil.

  She drove home slowly, feeling the effects of the wine. Her street was dark and quiet at one in the morning. Everyone had turned off the lights in their big houses and crawled under their goose down comforters. When she opened the garage, she saw that Eric was home, too. He would be sleeping in his office. She thought about waking him up and doing what she had planned to do, but it could wait until morning.

  She stripped off her fur coat in the hallway, not even turning on a light. There was an antique chest near the door, underneath a brass mirror. Something was sitting on the varnished wood. Eric had left it behind when he came in. It was a black ceramic coffee mug, and under it, a small folded note with her name scrawled on it in Eric’s handwriting. The mug still had remnants of coffee grounds in it.

  She unfolded the paper. Even in the dim light, she could make out the words:

  I know who it is.

  Maggie stared at the note long and hard. It was the same old song, the same tired accusation. She was angry that he still didn’t trust her. She crumpled the note into a tiny ball, shoved it into her pocket, and went upstairs to sleep.

  Where was her gun?

  She could think of only one explanation. Eric had taken it. He had come into their room and taken it off her nightstand. She had not dreamed the gunshot. Except it made no sense at all. Eric was not suicidal; he was a life force, energetic, passionate, pushing his limits. And hers.

  Maggie saw a cone of white light shoot through the bedroom. Instinctively, she crouched, then crawled to the picture window that overlooked the lake. She stood up, out of sight, and edged her face against the cold glass until she could see. The blackness in the room kept her hidden. She saw headlights on a car parked fifty yards away, and as she watched, the car accelerated, its wheels spinning in slushy snow as it did a U-turn and vanished. She couldn’t see its make or color.

  She waited, watching the street. Snow was falling outside, big wet flakes streaking the window. She stared straight down and saw footprints in the white dust, leaving a track down her driveway to the street. Already the wind and snow were making the indentations fade.

  Maggie ran for the bedroom door. Turning the knob, she hesitated, then threw it open. The hall was filled with vast shadows. She took a chance and said quietly, “Eric?” She said it again, louder.

  “Eric!”

  She heard only the oppressive silence of the house. She smelled the air and caught the stale odor of beef she had made for a dinner that went uneaten. Maggie kept close to the wall as she went downstairs. She glanced in the living room and dining room and found them empty. Her feet were bare, and the floors were cold. She tugged the robe tighter and crept up on the open door to Eric’s office. She wished she had a weapon.

  Near the doorway, she heard dripping. Slow and steady. Drops falling into a pool. Her stomach lurched. She reached around the doorway and clicked on the light, squinting as the brightness dazzled her eyes. From inside, the noise kept on: drip, drip, drip. There was a new smell, too, one with which she was very familiar.

  When she went into the office, Eric was there, limbs sprawled, blood forming creeks down his face, soaking the sheets, and splattering into red puddles on the slick floor. A gunshot wound burrowed into his forehead. She didn’t run to her husband. There was no point—he was already gone. He was one more body in the hundreds she had seen over the years. Her eyes studied the room by instinct, a detective hunting for answers. She found none, only a terrible mystery—her gun, which had been on her nightstand when she went to sleep, was now in the middle of the floor. Smoke mingled with the mineral stench of blood.

  Maggie wished she could cry. More than anything, she wanted to crumple to her knees and weep and ask God how this could have happened. But when she looked inside herself, she had nothing left. She bit her lip, stared at the man she had once loved, and knew that as bad as her life had been in the past year, it was about to get worse.

  TWO

  No footprints in the snow, Jonathan Stride thought. That was going to be a problem.

  Footprints didn’t last long in this weather. Looking down at the front yard, he could see the harsh wind already erasing his own boot prints, which he had left seconds earlier. Even so, he would have felt better if he could have used his camera phone to
take a photograph to prove that the tracks had been there.

  The tracks of an intruder. Someone other than Maggie.

  He hated thinking like that, but he knew how the investigation would go. Maggie knew it, too; she had described the scene to him on the phone. She would be the prime suspect. They had solved murders together for more than a decade, and it was almost an immutable law. If a husband got killed at home, the wife did it. And vice versa. It didn’t matter if you were a preacher, a Christian, a politician, a family man, a saint, or a cop. Your spouse gets murdered at home, you did it.

  Stride brushed snow off his heavy, black leather jacket and his jeans. He was tall, almost six feet two, and lean. He ran a hand back through his wet, wavy hair, and the silver streaks glistened amid the black. He didn’t need to ring the doorbell; it opened while he waited on the porch. Maggie stood in the doorway, looking tiny in a red silk robe. He searched her face for tearstains and didn’t see any.

  “Hey, boss,” she said.

  He looked at her, at a loss for words. “I’ll leave my boots outside,” he said finally. He slipped off his boots and took his coat off, too, and left them in a corner of the porch. As he stepped over the threshold, he bent down to study the lock on the door.

  “It wasn’t picked,” Maggie told him. “I checked.”

  “Don’t try to run the scene yourself, Mags.”

  “I know whether a lock has been picked,” she sniped at him. She bit her lower lip, and then, as if to apologize, she hugged him. She was small but strong, and she spent long seconds embracing him. “Sorry,” she murmured. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Why didn’t you call 911?” he asked, not liking the accusation in his voice.

  Maggie backed up and folded her arms together. “I know what’s coming. Cops tramping through the house. Hours of interrogations. Newspapers. Television. I didn’t want to deal with it, not right away.”

  “This is a murder investigation. Minutes count.”

  She scoffed. “Investigation? This is going to be a witch hunt. Let’s not sugarcoat it. I’m in big trouble.”

  He didn’t disagree with her. “Did you search the house?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “All right, let me look around.”

  “I told you, he’s gone.”

  “He?”

  “I’m assuming it was a he. Then again, we’re talking about Eric, so I shouldn’t assume.” She gave a sour laugh.

  Stride frowned. “I’m going to tell you something as a friend, Mags. Not as a cop. You should not say things like that. Okay? You should shut up.”

  Maggie kicked at an imaginary piece of dust on the floor. “Yeah, but I don’t want to shut up. I want to get mad. I want to scream at someone.”

  “That won’t help.”

  “No? It’ll sure make me feel better.” She saw his face and softened. “I know, I know, you’re right. Look, you shouldn’t be here. If you want to leave, that’s okay.”

  He didn’t reply, but it was true. He was on thin ice being here, because this wasn’t going to be his case. He and Maggie had been partners and friends for more than a decade, and as a result, he would be walled off from the investigation. He was the lieutenant in charge of the Detective Bureau that investigated major crimes in Duluth, at the southwestern corner of Lake Superior, where the lake narrowed like a knife point plunging into the city’s heart. Duluth was small enough that Stride played a lead role in most of the serious cases himself, but this homicide would wind up in the hands of one of his senior sergeants.

  He knew that was why Maggie wanted him here before the others arrived. She wanted him to see the scene, to talk to her, to form his own opinions. She was drafting him onto her team.

  “Make us both some coffee, okay?” he said. “I’ll check out the house.”

  Maggie screwed up her face. “You know I don’t drink coffee.”

  “You do now,” Stride told her. He added, “I could smell the alcohol on your breath when you opened the door.”

  Her face blanched as she turned away.

  Stride began in Eric’s office, but he stayed at the threshold and didn’t go inside. He saw the single gunshot wound in Eric’s forehead. His muscular body was stretched out on a burgundy leather sofa, a white blanket draped over his legs and stomach. His hairless chest was bare. His head and its long mane of blond hair lay propped on a pillow, which now cradled blood like a punch bowl. The gun was in the middle of the floor, at least ten feet away from the body. Too far to be a suicide. He looked for dirty water on the floor that might have been left by snowy boots, but whoever had done this had been careful. He had probably left his boots in the entry-way where everyone else did and then crept through the house in stockinged feet.

  Assuming anyone had been in the house at all.

  He felt nothing looking at Eric’s body—he had deadened himself to that kind of emotion years ago. Even so, he knew Eric well. Eric and Maggie had been married for more than three years, and Stride had been to their house many times. It was awkward for all of them. Stride and Maggie had a long history before Eric entered the picture. For years, Maggie had indulged a quiet crush on Stride, and he wasn’t sure it had entirely gone away. Eric knew it.

  Stride went room to room on all three levels. It took him nearly half an hour. The house was huge and ghostly for two people, full of cubbyholes with strange slanted ceilings, and secret spaces where cold breezes sneaked through the walls. It was in a neighborhood of vintage estates, clustered together a few blocks west of the north-south highway near Twenty-fourth Avenue. Once this had been an old money enclave, and now it was dominated by city professionals and entrepreneurs. Eric had owned the house for more than a decade. He was an ex–Olympic swimmer who had built a lucrative international sporting supply business, mostly serving athletes in the Winter Games. It was his kind of house, like a European castle, full of social aspiration. The outside was weathered tan brick and gables, an imposing monster from the street. Maggie hated it. When Eric went on business trips to Norway and Germany, she sometimes came down to Stride’s house on the lake and stayed with him and Serena.

  When he returned downstairs, he found Maggie in the kitchen, staring into her coffee cup. The empty stretch of azure marble counter behind her was wiped clean. “I didn’t find anything,” he told her.

  She nodded as if this wasn’t news.

  “Go over it for me again,” he said. “Like you did on the phone. Tell me what happened.”

  Maggie recited the events of the evening in a monotone. She told him about waking up, hearing the shot, seeing the car outside, and then finding Eric downstairs. She didn’t mention getting drunk, and Stride wondered what else she was leaving out.

  “How did the killer get in?” Stride asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Maggie said. “He could have been waiting outside and slipped into the garage when I came home. We don’t lock the door from the garage to the house.”

  “And your gun?”

  “Let’s just say it wouldn’t have been hard for him to come into the bedroom without waking me up.”

  “Has Eric been having problems with anyone?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How’s his business going?”

  “As far as I know, great.”

  “As far as you know?”

  “I don’t ask. I have no idea how much money he has. The bills get paid. I assume he makes more than I do, even on a cop’s lavish salary.”

  Stride smiled thinly. “Where was Eric today?”

  “I don’t know. He was in the Cities over the weekend. He got back on Monday, but I barely saw him. He didn’t come home for dinner tonight.”

  “How were things between the two of you?”

  She shrugged. “Fine.” Her voice wasn’t convincing.

  Stride waited to see if she would say something more, but she didn’t. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “C
an you think of anyone who would want to kill him?”

  “You mean, other than me?” she asked sharply. “I didn’t do this. I need to know you believe that.”

  “I do.”

  “But?” Maggie was smart. She could see that he still had questions.

  “You haven’t been yourself for weeks,” he said. “Why?”

  Maggie’s face reddened with anger. “That has nothing to do with this.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Drop it, boss. It’s none of your business.”

  “I thought we didn’t have secrets from each other.”

  “Stop treating me like a child.” She stood up, and her robe slipped. He saw more of her chest than was appropriate, but she made no effort to fix it. “I should get dressed. We better call in the dogs.”

  “You know what they’re going to ask you,” he said.

  She nodded. “Why wasn’t Eric sleeping in the bedroom with me.”

  “So?”

  Maggie shoved her hands in the pockets of her robe. “Eric had trouble sleeping. He’d go down to his office and work, and when he got tired, he’d crash out on the sofa.”

  She didn’t meet his eyes as she left the room. He knew she was lying.

  THREE

  Stride sat outside in his Ford Bronco, watching the crime scene investigation unfold around him. His window was rolled down, and he was smoking a cigarette. He allowed himself one a day, sometimes two. This was his third. The snow continued to fall, sticking in wet sheets to his windshield and blowing into the truck. The icy flakes landed like mosquito bites on his cheek.

  He didn’t like being shut out of the police activity, but he had already recused himself. When several cops came his way for instructions, he shrugged and pointed them inside Maggie’s house to find Abel Teitscher. None of them was happy to realize Teitscher was in charge. That included Stride.

  His cell phone rang. He felt as if he could take the pulse of his life by the country song playing on his phone. For a while, he had used “Restless” by Sara Evans as his ring tone. He had been away from Duluth then, on a brief, strange detour to Las Vegas. Now he was back home, but he had never been able to relax, no matter where he was, and he didn’t know why. So he put Alabama’s “I’m in a Hurry” on his phone. As the song said, all he really needed to do with his life was live and die.