Stalked

by Brian Freeman

  SIXTEEN

  Serena’s body was ice-cold when she slid under the fleece blanket into bed an hour later. Frosty air breathed on her face and bare shoulders through a crack in the window. The bedroom was small, like the other matchbox rooms in the old house, which had no foundation underneath it, just wooden pilings that made the floors slant like a carnival fun house. The room had a comforting, musty smell about it, a smell of age and the sea that had long ago taken up residence deep in its timbers. She often woke up to that smell and heard odd noises in the night, as if ghosts were passing from room to room.

  She had spent much of the past year haunting antique shops along the North Shore to pick up cherry wood dressers, throw rugs, and old nautical equipment. She was surprised at how much she enjoyed the contrast to her condominium in Las Vegas, which was stark and modern, done in blacks and whites, with her photographs of bitterroot and landscapes of the jagged Mojave hills on the walls. It was an emotionless place, and that was how she wanted it then. Since meeting Jonny, though, she had been flooded by emotions, and she was getting better now at managing the demons from her past, letting them out without feeling that they could control her. That was one of the reasons she enjoyed the antique quality of this house. She wanted a sense of the past again, which she had blocked out for years. When she held a clock from the early 1900s in her hands, she could feel all the people who had owned it and touched it.

  She molded herself against Jonny in bed. She knew from his breathing that he was awake. He hadn’t said a word as she came into the bedroom, bringing the chill of the night with her, and quickly stripped. When she slid her fingers between his legs, she felt him stir.

  “Do you know how cold that hand is?” he murmured.

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  Serena kissed him. “I thought you’d be asleep.”

  “Not when you’re out on a job at midnight.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You took your gun,” he said.

  “It was just a precaution.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “I can’t say anything,” Serena said.

  “Even in the box?”

  “Not yet.”

  Stride turned his head toward her and opened his eyes. Serena could see he was troubled.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He pushed himself up in bed until he was sitting. “I found out that Eric was involved with Tanjy Powell. I had to tell Abel Teitscher about it.”

  “So you’re off the case again.”

  Stride nodded.

  “Did Abel tell you anything about the investigation?”

  “I pried a couple of things out of him,” Stride said.

  “Like what?”

  “The most intriguing thing was that Eric went to see Tony Wells the night he died,” Stride said.

  Serena propped herself on one elbow and brushed her hair back out of her face. “Tony? Why?”

  “Tony can’t say. Privilege.”

  “Was Eric getting therapy?”

  “Abel doesn’t think so.”

  “But Maggie was.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think Tony knows something about Eric’s murder?” Serena asked.

  “I do, and I think he wants to help, but he can’t talk unless Maggie says it’s okay.”

  “That’s a no-brainer if it clears her of murder.”

  “You’d think so, but the question is, what’s Maggie hiding?” Stride said. “Something’s going on that she wants to keep secret.”

  “I have an appointment with Tony tomorrow morning. Maybe I can get something out of him.”

  “Not likely. Not if it involves a patient.”

  “Tell me about Tanjy,” Serena said.

  “As far as I can tell, she left her place at ten o’clock on Monday night. She took her car, and that’s the last anyone saw of her.”

  “Did you get any hits on the car?”

  “No, we’ve got alerts on it all over the five-state area, and the media has picked up on it, too. So far, nothing. There hasn’t been any activity on her credit cards or bank accounts. Her cell phone hasn’t been used since Monday night.” He added, “I did find several calls to Eric over the last few weeks.”

  “Do you know what was going on between them?”

  “Abel thinks it was an affair.”

  “Could Tanjy have killed Eric?”

  “That was my first thought, but there isn’t any evidence that she did.”

  “Except you say she’s unstable,” Serena said. “Maybe even violent.”

  “She’s a strange girl.” He waited several beats and then added, “Look, don’t take this the wrong way. I’m just trying to understand who Tanjy was, so help me out here. Do women really fantasize about rape?”

  Serena froze. She rolled away. “That’s an ugly question.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  “You know what Blue Dog and my mother did to me in Phoenix.”

  “I know.”

  She got out of bed. The frigid air raised gooseflesh on her skin. She went to the window and pushed aside the curtains that looked out toward the trees and scrub behind the cottage. She could see her own reflection dimly in the glass. “There’s nothing even remotely erotic about rape. I don’t understand how any woman could think so.”

  “I’m with you, but I’ve seen the bulletin boards where Tanjy was posting her stories. She wasn’t the only one.”

  Serena didn’t reply. Jonny came up behind her, laying his hands on her shoulders. Instinctively, she shrugged them away.

  “I hope you don’t think I ever wanted to do it with that bastard,” she said.

  “Of course not.”

  “The first therapist I ever went to asked me that once. He asked me if I ever had an orgasm with Blue Dog.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Just to be clear, my answer was no. Then it was goodbye.”

  “I wasn’t trying to get you upset. I just need to get inside Tanjy’s head.”

  Serena turned to face him. “I’m not upset.”

  “No?”

  “I’m talking about it. A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

  He put his arms around her. She knew that he expected her to cry, but she didn’t have any tears inside. She was angry; she would never entirely escape the anger. But what happened to her when she a teenager was over. Her mother was dead. Blue Dog was dead, too. Her past was nothing but bad memories that would always be a part of who she was, but not the most important part, not the part that controlled her.

  “Come to bed,” she said.

  She led him back, and she rolled over on top of him under the blanket and made love to him quickly and silently, until they were both dewy with sweat and ready to sleep. She slid off him, and she was just drifting away when Jonny mumbled something groggily into her ear.

  “Put one word in the box,” he said.

  About Dan. About her midnight rendezvous.

  She whispered back, hoping he’d still be able to sleep, “Blackmail.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Maggie was dreaming again.

  An array of six men, naked and wearing gold masks, surrounded her bed, two on each side. They had dead eyes that reminded her of fish heads on the beach, milky skin with swollen bellies, and limp members hanging uselessly between their legs. They ogled her nude body. The two at the head of the bed parted, forming a gap in their ranks, and Eric stepped between them with her gun in his hand. He aimed it at her chest.

  “I’m sorry, Nicole,” he told her.

  A flash of fire belched from the gun barrel. Maggie looked down, expecting to see a burnt, gaping wound in her torso, but saw only her naked breasts. She raised her hands to touch herself, and then she realized that she had no hands, only bloody stumps unevenly hacked off, leaving nothing but bone and blood. She looked up at the mirror above her bed and realized she had no head, too. She was a limble
ss dead trunk, with no mouth to scream.

  Maggie screamed anyway and shocked herself awake.

  She was sprawled on the bed on top of the covers, taking loud, openmouthed breaths, like a fish. Slowly, the images faded to gray ash and sank back into her unconscious. She was alone and disoriented.

  Maggie got out of bed and went to the bedroom door. She checked the heavy chair wedged under the doorknob, then sighed and rubbed her face with her small hands. She turned and leaned against the wall, which was papered in a forest-green Victorian floral pattern, and slid down until she was seated on the floor.

  She was like a stranger to herself, acting like a victim, letting her fears win.

  When you were a cop, you didn’t admit to being afraid of the dark. The dark was full of things you had to face and overcome. For weeks, though, darkness had been her enemy. She woke up every hour from nightmares. Since Eric’s death, she had barricaded herself in her own room at night.

  That wasn’t how she wanted to live her life. She was not Abel’s ex-partner Nicole, not guilty of killing her husband, not a girl who cried on the floor and cowered in corners.

  “To hell with this,” Maggie said aloud.

  She was mad enough to fight back.

  She pushed herself to her feet and ripped the chair away from the door. It toppled onto the wooden floor with a bang. She flung the bedroom door open. The hallway and the stairs to the first floor were inky-black. Without turning on a light, she squared her shoulders and felt her way to the staircase, where she grabbed the handrail and marched downstairs. A cloud of fear wrapped around her body like a fog, but she shrugged off the sensation and went to the kitchen. When she turned on the light, the monsters scattered like roaches. The white-tiled room was bright and safe.

  Maggie made herself a mug of green tea and put a salt bagel in the toaster. She sat quietly at the butcher block table, sipping the delicate liquid and crunching on the dry bagel. Her eyes were drawn to a photograph of herself and Eric pinned under a magnet on the refrigerator, and it made her lonely. They were smiling, their faces beet-red from sunburn. The picture was from a trip to Maine eighteen months ago, the last of the good times, a little sweet memory before things began to fall apart. They were in love back then, holding hands as they climbed over rocks on the beach, telling dirty jokes to each other over lobster dinners, having let-it-all-go sex that was so crazy and loud that the neighbors in the next room at the bed-and-breakfast applauded when they were done.

  “Oh, Eric,” she murmured to herself.

  Maggie felt something wet on her cheeks, and when she touched her skin, she realized she was crying.

  She didn’t want to see his face in her mind, but there he was. She wished she could forget his booming laugh, but it rippled through her brain as if he were standing next to her. She could feel the solid strength of his swimmer’s arms, holding her. His ghost, the fleeting spirit of the days when everything seemed perfect together, made her realize what she had lost. Not just with his death, but in the chasm that had opened up between them.

  If only they could have stayed in Maine and never come back home. If only the last year had never happened.

  She got pregnant on that trip. She was nearly thirty-three years old, and once she felt a baby growing inside her, she realized how much she wanted it. She was ready for a child in her life. So was Eric. He convinced her to leave the police force, and at the time, she was happy to go. Stride was in Las Vegas with Serena, and the prospect of doing her job without him weighed on her mind.

  The pregnancy didn’t go well. She miscarried in the third month.

  That happened all the time, the doctors told her. She was anxious to try again. In the meantime, Stride came back from Vegas to take over his old job, and Maggie rejoined the force. When they were together again, she felt renewed, and when she got pregnant again in the winter, she had no intention of giving up her job or doing anything but taking a short leave and getting back on the street.

  She miscarried in the second month.

  That was when she started to doubt herself, started feeling like defective merchandise. Thoughts flitted in—maybe she could never have a baby. When you put it like that, it sounded scary. Her emotions ran away from her. In the late spring, when she got pregnant again, she spent every day worrying and wondering. Her morning sickness was intense. She was plagued by foreknowledge that she would never give birth.

  She miscarried in the third month.

  Something snapped in Maggie’s head. She took a one-month leave and spent hours with Tony Wells, pouring out her soul, revisiting the memories of her childhood in China, and talking about Eric and Stride. When that was done, she pretended that the crisis was over. If she wasn’t meant to have a baby, so be it, end of story. She was done trying to have a kid. She went back on the pill and told Eric it didn’t matter. She was kidding herself.

  Along the way, she and Eric grew miles apart. Their relationship had been volatile from the start. She had met Eric during a hostage crisis at his factory, and even after she talked his psycho employee into giving up his gun, they fought about it. Eric thought she took too many risks. Maggie called him a stuck-up rich son of a bitch. They slept together that first night. Six months later, they got married, but they fought whenever they weren’t in bed.

  She knew he had affairs. They fought about that. He was jealous of Stride and thought that she was secretly in love with him. They fought about that, too.

  After the third miscarriage, and after spending a month in therapy with Tony, she tried to put things back together with Eric by throwing herself into their sexual relationship. She surprised herself with what she was willing to try. She was at her sexual peak; her hormones were crazy; she had nothing to lose. Why not? Even when Eric suggested things that made her skin crawl, she followed him to the wild side.

  “Bring it on,” she told him.

  Nothing to lose. What a joke.

  That was all before it happened. That was all prologue.

  It was the week before Thanksgiving. Eric was out of the country. When she told him a few days later, he went crazy. He wanted to do something to make it better, but she refused all of his overtures, even when he pleaded with her and got angry and beat the walls. She screamed back and pushed him away and made him sleep downstairs, as far away from her as possible. She didn’t want him to touch her, not ever again.

  Now he never would.

  Because someone came into their house and killed him. With her gun.

  Think like a cop, she told herself. Solve the crime.

  The caffeine in the tea wired her. She would never get back to sleep now, but she didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to fight back. She had an advantage that no one, not even Stride, had in solving the case. She knew she was innocent. Everyone else had their doubts. Cops didn’t trust people; they trusted facts. Facts didn’t lie, dissemble, fool, mislead, imagine, pretend, or deceive. People did all of those things. She had done a lot of it herself lately.

  Solve the crime.

  Eric was killed with her gun. Despite the bottle of wine she had drunk near the lake, she was certain that she had left the gun on her nightstand that night as she always did. So whoever killed him had come to their bedroom first. That made sense. Whoever did this couldn’t have known that she and Eric were sleeping apart. No one knew that. The gun was simply a golden opportunity. The killer must have been prepared to do it another way—his own gun, a knife, whatever. He—or she—came to the bedroom expecting to find the two of them together. Instead, Maggie was unconscious, Eric wasn’t there, and the gun was an easy grab.

  The killer took it, went downstairs, found Eric, shot him, and left.

  Next question: Why was she still alive? She assumed that the killer couldn’t risk going back upstairs after the first gunshot. If they had been in bed together, she was certain they would both be dead, but sleeping alone saved her. That meant that Eric was the target, not her, and it also meant that framing her was a crime of opportunity. N
o one coming into the house could have predicted the circumstances that left her in Abel’s crosshairs as a suspect. That ruled out Serena’s theory about a perp from Maggie’s past, someone like Tommy Luck from Vegas who wound up stalking and nearly killing Serena before she put him in prison. This was all about Eric, pure and simple.

  Next question: What was the motive? Something was obviously going on in Eric’s life that she didn’t know about. She knew she had to analyze his movements in his last few days and made a mental note to check his phone records and credit card statements to see what they revealed. Three days before the murder, for example, she knew that Eric was in the Twin Cities. Why?

  Next question: What was Eric doing with Tanjy Powell, and why did Tanjy disappear? Maggie didn’t think it was a coincidence that, according to Stride, Eric and Tanjy met on the street on Monday afternoon, and a few hours later, Tanjy vanished. Or that two nights later, Eric was dead. She assumed that Eric was sleeping with Tanjy, even though he had spent most of December swearing on his life that he would give up his affairs. Eric was a horndog, and Tanjy was irresistible, so maybe that was the simple answer. They were having an affair that went terribly wrong, and Tanjy killed him.

  Nothing else made sense.

  Unless Eric sought out Tanjy because of the rape.

  Maggie thought about Eric’s note to her, the one he had left for her the night he died, and wondered if she had been misreading it all along. I know who it is.

  Last question: Why did Eric go to see Tony the night he was killed? Tony was Maggie’s own therapist, and Eric detested psychiatry on principle. So what did he want with Tony? She could drive herself crazy thinking about the possibilities, and she didn’t want to wait until the morning to get an answer. Maggie slid the chair back, got up, and took the cordless phone off its cradle and punched in Tony’s number from memory.

  He answered on the sixth ring. “Dr. Wells.”

  “Tony, it’s Maggie.”

  “Maggie,” he said drowsily. “It’s late.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she told him. “I need to ask you a question.”