To kill her. Not just to keep the secret, but to wipe her from Dan’s mind once and for all. She knew she could do it.
Tanjy. That young, stupid little fool. The irony of it all was that Tanjy was wrong, but when she saw Billy Deed pulling up in the Byte Patrol van behind them, it was too late to go back.
So Lauren told her.
“It was me, you sick bitch.”
As Tanjy turned to run, Lauren let out all her rage with one swing. Just one, that was all it took. Tanjy dropped and died. Cold-blooded? Never. She was on fire.
But there was always a price to pay. That was what her father told her. Her father knew about cutting corners, making deals with the devil. Justice always found a way to even the scales.
Like now.
At least she felt no pain. Not anymore. The doctors would say it was a rush of endorphins as the body got itself ready for death, but the peace as she drove was almost blissful.
She didn’t feel anything even as the Lexus sped past the warning flags onto one of the hot spots on the lake, didn’t feel anything as the nose of the car broke through the thinning ice and the car jerked and spun to a stop and the air bag deployed. Nothing.
She noticed that as the air bag deflated, it was stained burgundy, as if she had poured a bottle of red wine over it.
The Lexus settled lazily into the water. It was virtually soundproof, and she could barely hear the ice spindling into fragments, giving way. Near-freezing water seeped in at her feet, and she didn’t feel that either. She knew she should open the car door, but the signals from her brain didn’t travel to her limbs anymore. It occurred to her that Tanjy had come out of the lake, and now she was going into it. Balancing the scales. Body for body.
The water reached her waist. Her stomach. Her breasts. Her neck. She was floating. The car dipped below the surface, and the lake and the storm and the snow disappeared from view, and there was nothing but the cold, wet hands of the devil taking hold of her. Her lungs rebelled, as if wondering why they should die just because the rest of her was lost, but soon enough, they gave up to the inevitable, too, and she took a breath that was no breath at all.
She had a fleeting thought that the ice would close over the top of her by morning, and she wondered if anyone would ever know what happened to her. She would simply be gone.
Poor Dan. He would miss the car.
PART FOUR
THE LADY IN ME
SIXTY
The prison doctors made the police wait three days before interviewing Blue Dog. Stride himself spent a day in the hospital, treated for hypothermia and minor burns. Serena would be hospitalized for several more days, maybe weeks, as the doctors dealt with smoke inhalation and the more serious burns, mostly on her legs. She would need skin grafts where the burns were worst and for the cuts in her abdomen. It was too early to tell about the long-term pulmonary effects of the smoke. Even so, she was lucky. Lucky to be alive, lucky that the damage wasn’t more severe.
Stride stared at Blue Dog through the window before going inside, feeling his muscles clench into knots. Raw hatred coursed through his veins.
Teitscher, who was standing next to him, saw his reaction. “This is personal to you. You shouldn’t be in the room.”
“I want to be there,” Stride insisted.
He pushed the door open before Teitscher could lodge any more protests, and the two men went inside. The room was painted in institutional gray and smelled of disinfectant. The bedsheets were bleached white. Teitscher folded his arms and stood beside the bed, looking down at Blue Dog. Stride leaned against the wall and shoved his hands in his pockets.
Blue Dog’s legs were manacled to the bed frame. So was his right arm, which was inked over with tattoos. The doctors had amputated his left arm when he was brought in from the lake. He had suffered too much damage from the shotgun wound to save it. He was hooked up to intravenous drips of morphine and antibiotics. His long hair had been chopped off, leaving him with a black-and-gray buzz cut. The stubble on his chin was thick, and his skin was pale under the fluorescent light. His barrel chest was naked.
“Hey,” Stride called. “Wake up, asshole.”
Blue Dog’s bloodshot eyes blinked open, and he took note of both men in the room. He shifted, straining against his bonds, and pain shot through his body, making him grimace. He looked down at the bandaged stump on the left side of his torso.
“Hurts, huh?” Stride asked. “Good.”
“Fuck off.”
Teitscher removed a digital tape recorder from his pocket and set it on the table beside the bed. “We’re going to tape this conversation. My name is Detective Abel Teitscher, and this is Lieutenant Jonathan Stride of the Duluth police.”
“I know who you are,” Blue Dog replied. He looked at Stride. “I’m just sorry you dragged that bitch out of the fish house. I would have liked to hear her scream as the fire got her.”
Teitscher ignored him. “You were read your rights when you were arrested. Do you need them read to you again?”
“I know my rights.”
“Do you want a lawyer?”
“For what? A lawyer won’t do me any good.”
“Are you willing to talk to us?”
“What’s in it for me?” Blue Dog asked.
Teitscher shrugged. “We’ve already been in touch with the authorities in Alabama. They’re anxious to get you back to Holman. You’ll wind up on trial for the cops you killed in the hurricane, and then they’ll stick a needle in your arm. Of course, it’ll have to be your right arm.”
“Fuck you,” Blue Dog said.
“I’m just telling you how it is. Before you go back to that hellhole down south, where they are going to execute you, you have to make it through the courts up here. We’re going to put you on trial for murder, attempted murder, rape, assault, blackmail, fraud, you name it.”
“Maybe I don’t have to go back to Alabama,” Blue Dog said. “Maybe you can just keep me up here.”
Teitscher shook his head. “You mean, in a state like Minnesota where we don’t have capital punishment? Where we don’t sleep prisoners twenty to a cell? Sorry, but the fact is, no one is too anxious for you to hang around here. But it can go fast or it can go slow. You might be back in Holman in a couple of months, or the whole process might drag out, and it could be a year or more before we get around to sending you back down there. We might even need to keep you in a private cell because of your medical condition. So where would you like to spend the next year? Minnesota or Alabama?”
Blue Dog scowled. “Yeah, so, what is it you want?”
“Tell us about Lauren Erickson and Tanjy Powell.”
“Like what?”
“Did you rape Tanjy?” Teitscher asked.
“Okay, yeah. But that was Lauren’s idea.”
“I’ll bet you put the idea in her head.”
“Not me. Hey, I didn’t give a shit about Tanjy. I wanted money. I knew Lauren would pay to keep the photos of Tanjy and Dan out of the papers. Lauren was the one who turned it all around and wanted me to do her.”
“Why?” Teitscher asked.
“Punishment. Payback. Whatever you want to call it. Those photos made Lauren crazy.”
“So what went wrong?”
“Nothing went wrong. It all worked like Lauren planned. But then Tanjy called Lauren a couple of weeks ago and said she knew who raped her. Lauren freaked and called me.”
“What did you do?”
“Lauren told me to meet her at their lake house. The two of them were already going at it when I got there. Tanjy saw me pull up—she probably thought it was going to be Dan, you know? Tanjy looked like she was going to bolt, but Lauren hit her hard. Real hard. Dropped her like a bag of cement. So we put her in the trunk and took her out to the lake.”
“What about Maggie and Katrina?” Stride asked from the wall. “Were you the one who assaulted them?”
“Yeah, that was me.”
“Was that Lauren’s idea, too?”
>
“No, she didn’t know anything about it. Not until later.”
“So why did you rape them?” Stride asked.
“Why the hell not? After I did Tanjy, I realized what a rush it was. Hell, it was like fucking Serena in my head before I got to the real thing, you know?”
Stride wished that his aim on Hell’s Lake had been better, and this animal who called himself Blue Dog would already be dead.
“Plus, it was safe,” Blue Dog went on. “I knew all about the sex club from Sonia’s computer. I figured these alpha girls weren’t going to want the media dishing out the same treatment to them that Tanjy got. And I was right, too.”
“What about Eric Sorenson?” Teitscher asked.
“What about him?”
“Did you work on his computer?”
“No.”
“Did Tanjy tell him about you?”
“No.”
“Then how did he find you? How did he figure out that you raped Tanjy and Maggie?”
“He didn’t.”
Blue Dog’s words thudded like a bird against a clean window.
“What?”
“He didn’t know a thing about me.”
Teitscher and Stride stared at each other. Stride tried to make sense of his thoughts.
“Are you telling us you had nothing to do with Eric Sorenson’s murder?” Teitscher asked.
“I found out he was killed when I saw it on TV.”
“Do you know who did kill him?” Teitscher asked.
“I figured his wife popped him, like they said on the news,” Blue Dog said, laughing at Stride. “Maybe once she had some lovin’ from me, her husband didn’t cut it anymore.”
Stride lashed out. “Eric was Maggie’s husband, and you raped her. Eric found out. He confronted you that night.”
“I didn’t know this Eric guy to spit on him,” Blue Dog insisted. “You don’t believe me? Check out my alibi.”
“What alibi?” Teitscher asked.
“I was with my manager pulling an all-nighter on a corporate system in Hermantown when that guy was killed. You ask him.”
“You already told us that Tanjy knew you raped her,” Stride said.
Blue Dog grinned. “Tanjy was wrong.”
“What?”
“Lauren told me when we were dumping the body. Tanjy thought somebody else did it. Funny, huh? She made a stupid fucking mistake, and that’s what got her killed.”
“Who did she think raped her?”
“Lauren never told me.”
Stride ran his hands through his hair. Blue Dog had turned everything upside down. Just when he thought the investigation was over, he realized that the questions that started everything hadn’t been answered yet.
Who killed Eric?
And why?
“Have you ever met a woman named Helen Danning?” Stride asked.
Blue Dog shook his head. “Never heard of her.”
“You ever come across a blog called ‘The Lady in Me’ on any of the computers you were pawing through?”
“No.”
“If you’re lying to us about any of this, I’ll have you back in Holman on the next flight.”
“It’s the truth,” Blue Dog said.
Stride gestured at Teitscher, and the two men headed for the door.
“You think he’s on the level about Eric?” Teitscher asked when they were alone in the corridor.
Stride wanted to say no, but he couldn’t lie to himself. “I don’t think he’d give us an alibi if it won’t hold up.”
“You know what that means,” Teitscher said.
“Maggie didn’t do it,” Stride insisted.
“Then who did?”
“Lauren killed Tanjy. Maybe she killed Eric, too.”
Teitscher shook his head. “That’s not going to fly. Lauren was in Washington that night. I checked.”
“So maybe Blue Dog is lying. Maggie beat the hell out of him. He may want her to take the fall for the murder.”
“You know that’s not going to happen,” Teitscher said. “Look, I don’t know if Maggie did it or not. I still think there’s a good chance she did, but she’s free and clear. We’re never going to bring charges against her. There’s enough reasonable doubt for Archie Gale to drive a truck through.”
“She’ll still have a cloud over her head if we don’t find out who really killed Eric,” Stride said.
“We all have clouds.”
“This guy says Tanjy made a mistake,” Stride said. “Eric and Tanjy thought someone else was responsible for the rapes. Whoever that was, he must have killed Eric.”
Teitscher shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense, Lieutenant. If Eric was wrong, why kill him? If I accuse you of a crime you didn’t commit, why the hell would you kill me over it?”
Stride knew that was true. He was missing something.
The two men looked up as a guard opened a door at the far end of the narrow hallway, and Max Guppo ran toward them. Guppo never ran, and by the time he reached them, he was sweating in large beads on his forehead, and his big chest was heaving up and down. He bent over and broke wind loudly, and both men involuntarily took a step backward.
“Son of a bitch, Guppo,” Teitscher complained.
Stride suppressed a smile and said, “What’s going on, Max?”
Guppo took several wheezing, labored breaths. He loosened his tie and tugged his belt up over his protruding stomach. “All hell is breaking loose.”
“Over what?”
“Another body,” Guppo told them. “We’ve got a body in Enger Park. Right where we found that girl ten years ago.”
SIXTY-ONE
It was déjà vu all over again. Stride couldn’t believe it.
The victim was placed exactly where they had found the anonymous black teenager a decade earlier. He had been over this ground so many times that he could pinpoint the growth in the trees lining the fairway and the number of footsteps it took to get here from the road. The body was on its back, arms and legs spread like a da Vinci drawing. She was in a valley that was invisible from the road and sheltered from the golfers walking the straightaway toward the green. The girl back then, who was found in August, who had haunted his dreams ever since, was found because of a doctor’s errant slice.
“Two cross-country skiers came across her,” Guppo said. They were calf-deep in snow, and Guppo was looking back at the slope that led to the highway as if wondering whether he would survive the climb. It was midafternoon. The snow was done, and the sun was back, but it couldn’t manage more than a weak shine.
Stride nodded. His lips were thin and cold. “Any idea how long she’s been here?”
“She’s frozen solid, so it won’t be easy to pin down,” Guppo said. “But one of the skiers said he followed this path two days ago, and there was no body.”
“He’s sure he was in the same place?”
Guppo nodded. “He said this is his favorite route.”
“Was she killed here?” Teitscher asked.
“No, not enough blood,” Guppo said.
Stride studied the victim, or what was left of her. Like the girl ten years ago, this newest body was missing its head and hands. On the part of the neck that remained intact, he could see ligature marks to suggest that she had been strangled. She was naked, and he could see bruising in the pelvic area. In those respects, the murder was a carbon copy of the earlier crime.
A few details were different, though. It was summer then and winter now. The original victim was black, and this woman was white. The girl back then was young, no more than seventeen, and it was easy to tell from the condition of the skin that this victim was older, probably in her thirties or forties.
“Don’t hold your breath on DNA this time,” Guppo said.
Stride nodded. He had a feeling the perp was too smart to leave his calling card again. “What else have we found?”
“Not a lot. Violet’s working the body for the M.E. She’s up in her truck now. We’r
e scouring the area, but like I say, I think the perp just dumped her here.”
“What about footprints? He had to get her down here.”
Guppo pointed at a narrow track of matted snow leading down the slope. “Yeah, looks like he dragged her. We’ve got blood spots and hair all along the route back to the road. I think he took a shovel and backfilled in the snow, though. Plus, we’ve had another inch or so in the last two days.”
“Same with tire tracks?”
“Nothing on the road.”
Teitscher looked up as he heard the thumping roar of a helicopter hovering over their heads. “Who the hell leaked this to the media? It’s a damn circus.”
“Don’t blame me,” Guppo snapped. “One of the skiers called his wife, and she happens to be a secretary at KBJR. They broke it first, and the others have piled on. We’ve got reporters from the Cities up here, too. They’re all smelling a serial killer. Everyone’s asking about the original Enger Park Girl case and whether there’s a connection.”
“More likely a copycat to throw us off the scent,” Teitscher said.
Guppo shrugged. “These guys are all talking like this is something out of the next John Sandford novel.”
“Well, we’re not ruling anything in or out,” Stride said. “It’s a long time between killings if we’re talking about the same perp, but you never know. If it’s a copycat, he’s just as bad.”
“Do we have any idea at all who this woman is?” Teitscher asked. “Are there any reports of missing persons in the region that fit the profile?”
“No likely candidates except for Lauren Erickson.”
Stride shook his head. “It’s not her. Too tall.”
He figured Lauren was somewhere at the bottom of Hell’s Lake, and they would find her in the spring.
His cell phone rang, and he took a few steps away into the deeper snow to answer it. He heard Maggie’s voice. “I’m watching the news,” she said. “They’ve got you on live TV, did you know that?”
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