Stalked

by Brian Freeman

Serena hesitated. There was a part of her that wanted to tell Dan to forget it, but she couldn’t resist the adrenaline rush. This was the kind of hands-on street work she wanted as a PI. Something that made her feel like a cop again. The money was good, too. “Hourly rate plus thirty percent,” she said.

  “Now who’s the blackmailer?” Dan asked. He smiled, put a hand on Serena’s knee, and squeezed with his fingertips.

  “Is it a deal?” she asked.

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Good.” Serena took his hand off her knee and twisted his wrist until his smile evaporated. “One other thing,” she told him pleasantly. “Touch me again, and I’ll snap off your fingers like the icicles on my roof.”

  She let go.

  “Stride must have his hands full with you,” Dan said, massaging away the pain.

  “Call me when you know about the drop,” Serena said. She picked up the envelope of cash, slid it into her pocket, and left the office.

  Downstairs, she stopped again in the park near the statue of the centurion. Something about his empty granite eyes troubled her, and she felt the oppressive weight of the gray clouds overhead. She told herself again that it was nothing, but as she stood there, the feeling came back.

  The same feeling that had followed her for weeks.

  She was being watched.

  SIX

  He knew she could feel him staring at her, the way an antelope senses a tiger stalking from the camouflage of the bush. Invisible and deadly.

  When he lifted the binoculars, her body leaped into focus, and it was as if he were standing next to her, breathing on her neck. As he watched her, she shivered. Her head wheeled in his direction, and through the binoculars, he got a chill of pleasure to have their eyes meet. His penis twitched inside his jeans, nudging its way down his leg, growing swollen and stiff.

  “Ah, fuck,” he murmured, relishing the sensation. It was especially sweet since he had spent ten years watching his manhood wither away. The guards taunted him that prison would make him shrivel up like a salted slug, and they were right. The more years he spent behind bars, the more his penis shrank. Nothing aroused him. He would beat off in his cell at night, but after a while, he could barely coax a hard-on out of his cock. He’d spit on it or rub it with soap, but it would just lay there, so tiny that his giant hand couldn’t even pull it out from his groin.

  But his organ had risen again that night in the abandoned house in Alabama during the hurricane. As he watched the cop drown in the basement, blood had surged between his legs, making him rigid. A spontaneous erection, ripe with power.

  Four months had passed since a National Guard helicopter rescued him from the roof of the farmhouse. He wore clothes he had found in an upstairs bedroom, and he had shredded his inmate’s fatigues and let them float away with all the other debris in the water. By the time the storm died away, the land around the house was a lake. The squad car was gone, and so was Deet’s body. He was just a trapped homeowner who hadn’t evacuated soon enough.

  They took him to a shelter in Birmingham along with hundreds of other refugees, but he ran away that night, stole a car, and headed north. He didn’t want to take any chance that he would be found out, or that the authorities at Holman would figure out he was on the loose. As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. He jacked a laptop and kept an eye on the Internet by hacking into wireless connections as he made his way out of the South. Several days later, he found an article in the Montgomery newspaper that reported the story. The squad car had been found wrapped around a tree ten miles from the farmhouse, and Deet’s headless body had turned up another five miles away in a different direction. All three people in the car were presumed dead, victims of the storm.

  He was a nonperson. No identity. No past.

  He could have gone anywhere, but he first had to deal with the fist of rage that beat its way through his chest. Payback for ten lost years.

  “You feel me, don’t you?” he whispered. “You know I’m here.”

  He had been laying his plans for Serena ever since he arrived in Duluth. Watching her. Stalking her. He could have taken her anytime, but he wanted the experience to linger. Every hunter knew—you don’t break the neck of the captured animal right away. Once it’s yours, you play with it for a while.

  In the meantime, he had other prey. People like Dan. Mitch. Tanjy. And the alpha girls. People with dirty secrets they were desperate to conceal.

  He remembered what the little queer in Holman had told him about the art of blackmail. If you know what someone is hiding, you can do anything you want to them, and they’ll never breathe a word. The danger in poking a hive, though, was getting stung. He could have let the games go on even longer, but something unexpected had popped up like a fish out of the water and made him speed up his plans.

  Murder. That changed everything.

  So now it was finally Serena’s turn. Time to tighten the noose around her neck.

  Through the binoculars, he watched her shrug and continue down the steps of the government plaza toward her car. He knew what was in her brain. She was telling herself that the fear scraping its fingernails along her spine was all in her imagination. She was wrong. Before he was done, she would be begging him to kill her.

  SEVEN

  City Hall was an old, drafty building, with high ceilings where the heat gathered. The floors were cold, hard marble. The chill radiated through the window in Stride’s office and left frost crystals on the glass. He leaned against the window frame and stared vacantly at the traffic on First Street below him. His arms were crossed. The creases in his forehead deepened like canyons, and he felt tightness throughout his muscles.

  He was wearing a suit and tie because reporters and politicians would be swarming the office as word got out about Maggie. Usually he dressed for the street, which was where he liked to spend his time. He couldn’t handle a job that left him permanently chained to a desk, and he did his paperwork in odd hours when the rest of the office was dark. He preferred to be out at crime scenes, doing the real work, which was mostly hard and bitter.

  He had been idealistic in his early days, which were too long ago to think about. He was like Maggie—determined to solve every crime, put away every criminal. It hadn’t taken long for him to realize that there were always victims like the Enger Park Girl, with no one to speak for them and no answers to give. The burden was all his. Every murder in this city gouged a piece out of his soul, and even when they solved the case and he watched a jury bring down a guilty verdict, there was still a scar that never went away.

  That was one of the reasons he lived by the lake. He didn’t tell many people about that part of his soul; it had taken months for him even to share it with Serena. Stride was a hard-headed realist who had no time for anything mystical, but the lake was different. When he stood by the water at night, he sometimes felt as if he were surrounded by the dead, as if the lake were where they went to become part of the mist and vapor. He could feel his father there, who had died in the lake, and he felt communion with all of the city’s dead.

  There was a knock on his office door, and he saw a silhouette behind the frosted glass.

  “Come in,” he called without leaving the window. The vanilla oak door opened and closed with a shudder. He was surprised to see who it was. “Lauren.”

  “Hello, Jonathan.”

  He felt a chill blow into his office with Lauren’s arrival.

  “You’re looking good,” he told her.

  Lauren rolled her eyes at him. She had the clothes, jewels, and laboratory-tested blond hair to match her money, and her face was as smooth as makeup and plastic surgery could make it. She was attractive, but she made no secret of the fact that Stride’s charm went nowhere with her. The two of them shared an ugly history. Lauren was the only child of a father who had made millions in commercial real estate in northern Minnesota. In Stride’s early days as a detective, he had exposed a City Hall bribery scheme connected to an eminent domain condemnation for
a huge new shopping center. Lauren’s father went to prison and died there six months later of a stroke. Lauren inherited everything, including a grudge against Stride.

  He waved her into a seat. She crossed her legs and steepled her fingers on the hem of her skirt. Her blue eyes were as fierce and intelligent as ever.

  “I’m sorry about Maggie,” she told him.

  “Sure you are.”

  “I just met Serena in Dan’s office,” she added cuttingly. “Where would she have been when you and I were in school? Playing with finger paints?”

  Stride ignored the jab. “I didn’t think you were speaking to me, Lauren.”

  “The past is the past,” she replied. “We need to move on.”

  “Really? That wasn’t your attitude last year.” Stride knew that Lauren had waged a campaign with the City Council to block K-2 from hiring him back.

  “I have more important things to worry about now.”

  “Oh?”

  “You obviously haven’t seen the news today.”

  “What did I miss?”

  “Dan and I are moving to Washington,” Lauren announced.

  “Permanently?”

  She nodded. “Dan’s been invited to be special counsel in a D.C. law firm as part of its white-collar crime practice. I’ve been out in Washington the last couple of days, scouting homes in Georgetown.”

  “So Dan’s becoming a defense lawyer,” Stride said. “I guess it’s always been about the game for him. It’s easier to switch sides that way.”

  “Yes, I know you’re only interested in truth and justice, Jonathan. Let me know when you find it.”

  He smiled, because she had a point. He was also pleased to think of Dan giving up his job as the county’s top prosecutor. He didn’t like having an enemy in that office.

  “Congratulations, that’s quite a coup,” he told her.

  “I’ve been pulling strings for a while,” Lauren admitted. “Dan doesn’t like Duluth. We only hung on here to get him into statewide office, but you erased that possibility for us, didn’t you?”

  “I think the voters had something to do with it,” Stride said. “When does the big move take place?”

  “Next month.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To say goodbye?”

  Lauren shook her head. “Gloating is just a bonus. Actually, I have to report a crime. Or what may be a crime. I don’t know.”

  Stride put aside their rivalry. “What’s going on?”

  “You know I own Silk, the dress shop on Superior.”

  Stride nodded. The store was another of her many tax dodges.

  “One of my employees is missing,” she said.

  “What’s her name?”

  Lauren smiled maliciously. “Oh, you know her very well, Jonathan. It’s Tanjy Powell.”

  Stride didn’t mean to say it out loud, but the words slipped out as he expelled a disgusted breath. “Son of a bitch.”

  “I knew you’d be pleased.”

  He wasn’t pleased at all. “Why do you think she’s missing?”

  “Tanjy left the shop early on Monday afternoon. She looked upset. According to Sonnie, my store manager, Tanjy didn’t show up on Tuesday or Wednesday, and she didn’t call. There’s no answer at her home.”

  “Why was she upset when she left?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Has she ever done this before?”

  “Sonnie says no.”

  “What about family?”

  Lauren shook her head. “Her parents are dead. She lives in the bottom half of an old Victorian in the East Hillside area. I thought you’d want to check it out, in case there’s some foul smell emanating from it. That’s what gets your blood racing, right?”

  “Give it a rest, Lauren.” He added, “My first thought is that Tanjy is playing another game with us.”

  “Why? Because last time she made a fool of you?”

  “The woman fabricated a rape charge. She had the whole city in a panic.”

  Lauren sighed. “I don’t claim to understand what goes on in her sick little brain. I’m just the messenger.”

  “I hope to hell she’s not wasting our time again,” Stride said. “The only reason we didn’t file charges was because Dan and K-2 didn’t want us to look like we were beating up on a woman with psychological problems.”

  “My fault,” Lauren admitted. “I asked them to go easy on her.”

  “You? I’m surprised you didn’t fire her.”

  “I only go after people who get in my way, Jonathan. You should know that.”

  “Meaning you didn’t want an ugly employment lawsuit.”

  “Meaning I felt sorry for her.”

  Stride didn’t believe that Lauren had ever felt sorry for anyone, but it didn’t matter either way. “I’ll check it out,” he said.

  “There’s something else,” Lauren added.

  “What?”

  “Tanjy called our home on Monday night.”

  “After she left the shop that day? Why?”

  “She wanted to talk to Dan, but he was in Saint Paul.”

  “What did she want?” Stride asked.

  “I don’t know. I called Dan from Washington on Tuesday afternoon, but he said there was no answer when he tried to call her back. Neither one of us gave it another thought until today. I took a flight back early this morning, and Sonnie told me that Tanjy was missing.”

  “Did Tanjy leave a message when you talked to her?”

  “Yes, she gave me a message for Dan, but he didn’t know what it meant.”

  “What was it?”

  Lauren shrugged. “She simply said to tell him, ‘I know who it is.’”

  EIGHT

  Abel Teitscher arrived home early Thursday afternoon, having spent ten hours supervising the crime scene where Eric Sorenson was killed. He sprinkled flakes of food into the large saltwater tank in his living room, which was stocked with a rainbow assortment of angels, puffers, dragonets, tetras, and gobies. On the rare evenings when he wasn’t working, he would pour himself a glass of brandy, turn off the lights, and sit quietly watching his fish while they traveled the illuminated aquarium. Abel was more comfortable with fish than with people.

  He lived alone in a modest house on Ninth Street north of downtown. He had been married for twenty-seven years, until he arrived home unexpectedly on a Tuesday afternoon and found his fifty-two-year-old wife being serviced by the twenty-four-year-old unemployed son of their next-door neighbor. She had been watching too many Desperate Housewives episodes. They divorced six months later, and she was now living in a rented apartment in Minneapolis. The one good thing to come out of his marriage was his daughter, Anne, but she was away at graduate school in San Diego. She was studying marine biology, which Abel was happy to attribute to years as a child sitting with her father in front of the fish tank.

  A few years ago, an all-nighter like the Sorenson murder would have taken a toll on him for days, but he was in better shape now than he had been in decades. Since the divorce, he had taken up running, putting on miles on the track at UMD during the warmer seasons and using a treadmill crammed in his bedroom during the winter. He had lost thirty pounds and was in training now for the marathon. At City Hall, they called him gaunt and skeletal, which infuriated him, because no one appreciated how hard he had worked to hone his body.

  Abel stretched out on the sofa near the fish tank and slept for thirty minutes, which was enough to refresh him. He then spent an hour running on the treadmill. The rumble of the motor and the pounding of his feet served to clear his mind. Stride accused him of not seeing the big picture on a case, but that was crap. Abel took time early in every investigation just to think. The difference was that Stride tried to rise above the facts and get inside the heads of the victim and the killer. For Abel, the big picture was about nothing except putting the pieces of the puzzle together from what was left behind. Evidence and witnesses. Things you could touch, see, and smell.

  The big pi
cture in this case led him in only one direction—to Maggie.

  He knew that having no evidence of a third party in the house didn’t mean that no one had been there, but he also knew that the logical, obvious answer at most crime scenes was usually the right one. Forget the conspiracy theories, and leave them to the defense attorneys. The fact was that Oswald killed Kennedy. Alone. Deal with it.

  Abel was prepared to turn over every rock. He had nothing against Maggie and no desire to pin the crime on her, but common sense told him that she was almost certainly the one who had pulled the trigger. That was how it always worked in these cases.

  Like Nicole. Abel had learned with Nicole that anyone is capable of anything. Even a good cop. He hadn’t wanted to believe that his partner was capable of murder, so he ignored the evidence even as it piled up. Nicole was psychologically fragile; she had just come back from paid leave after killing a mentally deranged man on the Blatnik Bridge. Nicole’s husband was having an affair, and she had threatened him with violence if he didn’t break it off. Two of Nicole’s hairs were discovered in the apartment where her husband and his girlfriend were found naked, shot to death with her husband’s gun. It was more than enough evidence to convict her.

  When the jury found her guilty, Abel finally accepted the fact that Nicole had done what every other suspect did—lie to him in order to save her neck. Stride would have to learn the same lesson.

  Stride probably thought that Abel was still angry about getting booted out of the lieutenant’s chair. Abel was upset about that, but the truth was that he didn’t miss it. K-2 was right. Abel hated supervising people and handing out assignments. He wasn’t prepared to waste his time motivating cops, who were a tough breed to motivate. They hated administration on principle. They were hemmed in by paperwork and procedure and second-guessed every time they had to make a split-second judgment. He knew all that. He was that way, too, but he had a short fuse and his own way of doing things, and if he was going to be the boss, they were going to do things his way. Except no one did.

  He was happier without the headaches. The only thing that bothered him was that the other cops loved Stride, and they barely tolerated Abel. He knew he was a loner and a hard case. He was crusty and closed-off, but no one made an effort with him the way they did with Stride.