Spitting Devil

by Brian Freeman

  “I didn’t see anybody. I was pretty blitzed, you know. I shouldn’t have been driving at all. You’re not going to arrest me or anything, are you?”

  “No.”

  “I came by to pick her up this morning, and the door was open at the bottom of the steps. So I went inside, and – oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

  The young woman dissolved in tears, cupping her face in her hands. Stride knew the image that was replaying in her head. He and his partner, Maggie Bei, had been among the earliest at the crime scene after the 911 operator used two words. Dead Red. They’d found Sherry Morton in bed, like the first two victims, dead of a cruel number of deep stab wounds. She wore an expensive designer blouse with bold horizontal stripes of yellow and green.

  “I need to ask you about what Sherry was wearing when you found her,” Stride said.

  Julie wiped her face with her hands, smearing her makeup. “What? Why?”

  “Was that the blouse she wore at the party?”

  Sherry’s friend looked as if she wanted to do anything but remember, but when she did, her face screwed up in confusion. “No, she wore a Sammy’s Pizza t-shirt at the party. We both waitress there to make money.”

  “Do you recall seeing Sherry in that blouse before?”

  “No, I guess it was new.”

  Stride nodded without saying anything more. “I’m going to ask a policewoman to spend some time with you, okay? She’ll work with you on a detailed statement. This is probably going to take a while.”

  “Sure.”

  Stride squeezed her hand and climbed out of his truck, leaving his jacket around the woman’s shoulders. The wind roared up the hillside from Lake Superior and chewed at his face. He bent down to squeeze his six-foot frame under the crime scene tape, and his back complained as he straightened. With each harsh Minnesota winter, he felt his age in his bones. Fifty loomed large in front of him in the next year.

  He met Maggie Bei at the concrete steps leading down into Sherry’s underground apartment. His partner, who was no bigger than a Chinese doll, pretended to be unaffected by the Duluth cold. She wore a short-sleeved t-shirt, and she had her hands casually jammed in the pockets of her jeans. Her three-inch block heels gave her enough height to rise to Stride’s neck.

  “Makes me glad I grew my hair out,” she said, nodding her head at the apartment below them. “Bad season for redheads.”

  Maggie, who had worn a bowl cut on her black hair in all the years he’d known her, had shocked him a few weeks earlier by dying her hair Easter egg red. She freely admitted it was a failed experiment, and since then, she’d let her natural color come back with only a fringe of red as a reminder.

  He’d witnessed the transition of Maggie’s hair from red to black from inside his matchbox home on the lakeshore, where they’d been sleeping in the same bed for several weeks.

  That was another failed experiment. Stride and Maggie together. They just hadn’t admitted the truth to themselves.

  “Her friend didn’t recognize the blouse,” Stride said.

  “Yeah, the size doesn’t match either. It’s not hers.”

  “So he brought it with him and dressed her in it after he killed her. Just like the others.”

  “The blouses aren’t new,” Maggie added. “They’ve been hanging in somebody else’s closet. The sizes all match, and there’s a perfume aroma in the fabric. Very nice. French and expensive. This guy is dressing up his victims in another woman’s clothes.”

  Stride saw a flush on Maggie’s golden cheeks, and she bit her lip when the wind blew. “Aren’t you cold?”

  “I’m hot-blooded,” she told him. “You know that.”

  He saw her sharp eyes studying him for his reaction. He kept a poker face.

  “Did we get DNA?” he asked.

  Maggie nodded. “Minute traces of spatter like at the other crime scenes. The ev techs think it’s hemoptysis. Perp, not victim.”

  “So this guy is coughing up blood,” Stride said.

  “Right. He’s sick, whether he knows it or not.”

  Stride didn’t take much comfort in the blood evidence or in the possibility that the killer was sick. In whatever time the man had left, he could wreak plenty of havoc.

  “I got a call from Ken over at the News-Tribune,” Stride told her.

  “Another photo?”

  “Yeah, he got a jpeg of the victim by e-mail. So did the TV stations. It’ll be on the noon news and in the paper tomorrow, but he wanted to give me a heads up that the picture is out there. I told Ken to forward the e-mail to us.”

  “We haven’t had much luck tracing the others. Whoever he is, this guy is tech-savvy. He knows how to cover his tracks.”

  “Even so, it means taking a big risk,” Stride said. “Why send the photos? Why get the media involved?”

  “Dead Red likes to take credit,” Maggie said.

  Stride thought about the images that had been sent to the Duluth media after each murder. He remembered the faces. That was what everyone saw – the pale, pretty, murdered faces and the messy red hair. Dead Red. But you could see more than the faces in those photos. You could see each of the stolen blouses, too, enough that a woman who knew those blouses would recognize them.

  He didn’t think that was an accident or a mistake. That was what the killer wanted.

  “Maybe the photos are about more than taking credit,” Stride told Maggie. “Maybe this guy is sending somebody a message.”

  *

  Alison cracked open the window in her Prius, so she could blow smoke from her cigarette out of the car. She’d burned through half a pack since she left for work in the morning. Michael hated it when she smoked around Evan, but right now, nicotine was the only drug keeping her sane. Next to her, Evan read his comic book and hummed under his breath, oblivious to her stress. On most days, she talked to him about his schoolwork and his teachers after she picked him up, but he didn’t mind that she was silent today.

  She drove fast. She was desperate to be home.

  They lived ten miles north of downtown Duluth on forested land half a mile from a swampy lake. They’d hand-picked the lot after weeks scouring the back roads, and they’d designed the house themselves with input from a local architect. Back then, she’d said it was her dream home. Michael told her she’d earned it for putting up with his long hours for a decade as he grew his business, and for scrimping in a too-small apartment longer than any other wife would have done. This was the payback.

  For months after the house was done, she’d smiled with pride every time she marched up the flagstones beside the driveway. Her home was magnificent, with its natural oak exterior, its twelve-foot bay window fronting the woods, its towering gables on the roof line, and its mammoth rear deck overlooking the lawn that sloped toward the cattails on the lake. It was a place that would grow and change with them as they got older. In her mind, a house was never finished. That was what kept it alive. She had plans to add a pool where Evan could swim. She had plans to finish the attic, which was nothing but a labyrinth of cubbyholes and sharp nails now, into a loft and gallery where she could paint. She had plans to add a garden and fountains, making an arbor for the birds.

  That was before everything began to change.

  As the summer wound down, Michael’s technology business lost its contract with the state’s economic development arm to design and support predictive marketing software. For three years, the contract had been the largest single source of revenue in Michael’s company; then, with a swipe of the governor’s pen, it became a victim of budget cuts. In the teeth of the recession, the loss opened up a hole that the company couldn’t fill. Michael began laying off software engineers, downsizing half of his workforce. Several of the ex-employees banded together to file a lawsuit over theft of intellectual property. Others formed a start-up to compete head-to-head. The business that had finally soared after years of struggle was now teetering on bankruptcy again. Keeping it alive had become a day-to-day obsession for Michael. His
ego rose and fell with the company’s fortunes.

  Slowly, the troubles at work moved home and then spread through the walls of their bedroom. Like ants.

  Michael blamed Alison. He said she was the one who had changed. At first, she thought he was right and that the problem was in her head. She felt like a mad dog, driven crazy by a constant, yammering tone on a frequency only she could hear.

  Then the carving knife disappeared. Then the first photo showed up in the newspaper.

  “Mom, that hurts,” Evan complained.

  Alison had taken hold of her son’s hand and begun squeezing it harder than she intended. Evan was the one lifeline to which she could hold right now. He was this sane, calm, sweet little rock. Except when he lied.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him.

  She parked in their driveway and let them both into the house. She tried to remain calm so Evan didn’t see that anything was wrong, even though she was hyperventilating. Inside, the silent tone in her ears grew so loud she wanted to press both hands against the sides of her skull. She needed to go upstairs. She needed to run.

  “Why don’t you watch TV?” she suggested to Evan.

  “Okay. Can I have some pretzels and a Hershey bar?”

  “Sure.”

  Alison waited until he was settled on the couch. He started with cartoons, but she knew he would look for scary movies when she was gone. Anything with monsters.

  “I’ll be in my bedroom,” she told him.

  “Okay.”

  He didn’t care. He didn’t realize that she wanted to throw herself through the bay window and fall to the ground along with the glass.

  Alison backed out of the room. The tears burst through the dam of her face. She ran upstairs and into her bedroom, where she tore open the closet door and ripped at the collection of clothes. She opened every dresser drawer, throwing intimates, shorts, pants, socks, and nylons onto the floor, making a messy pile. She yanked dresses, blouses, and coats off hangars. She emptied the shelves. When she was done, the closet was empty, and she stumbled into the bedroom again, sinking to the floor and collapsing sideways onto her shoulder. Her red hair spilled across her face.

  It wasn’t there.

  It was gone.

  “Mom?”

  Evan stood in the doorway. His eyes were wide, and for the first time in his young life, she saw a glimmer of fear on his face as he stared at his mother.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  Alison smiled, but it must have been a twisted, horrifying smile. She couldn’t muster anything else. “I lost something,” she said.

  “What?”

  “A blouse. I lost a blouse.”

  “Oh.”

  Evan got down on his hands and knees on the bedroom floor. He pushed his glasses to the end of his nose and crawled on the carpet like a bloodhound.

  “Evan, what are you doing?” Alison asked.

  Her son raised his head and studied her seriously. “Looking for blood, Mom. I already told you. You have a spitting devil.”

  *

  “I’ll be late,” Michael told his wife in a monotone, without bothering to apologize. “I don’t know when I’ll be home.”

  He didn’t expect Alison to protest, and she didn’t.

  “I’m going to drop Evan at my sister’s place,” she replied. “I’ll catch a movie.”

  “You don’t need to wait up.”

  “I won’t.”

  She hung up on him, as if they were nothing more than roommates coordinating schedules. More and more now, they both looked for ways to run away from each other.

  Michael felt fury bubbling in his chest. He knew he had a problem with his temper, and he needed an outlet to drain the pressure. As a boy, he’d been a state championship swimmer in high school, famous for his vicious competitiveness. Back then, he could put his face down and slash at the water to work out his anger, but it was not the same at the gym, without the race, the timer, and the crowd.

  Instead, he caught his wastebasket with the toe of his shoe and kicked it into the wall, showering the office with discarded papers. It didn’t help. The plastic bucket was indestructible. He got up in disgust with himself and began to gather the trash.

  It was not supposed to be this way. This wasn’t the bargain he’d made. He’d worked hard and built a business from nothing; he’d met and wooed a beautiful woman; he’d fathered an amazing son; he’d built a mansion that was a symbol of everything he’d earned with his labor. Now he was watching his achievements slip through his fingers, taken for no reason and through no fault of his own. His life was being stolen.

  He was angry.

  “Bad day?”

  Michael saw Sonia Kraft in the doorway of his office, with an amused smile on her lips as she watched him on his knees, picking up discarded papers. She was the company’s general counsel. In the wake of the recession, her job had become as frustrating as his own. She shored up the dike of his legal woes, battling litigation and renegotiating contracts, but water kept bursting through new holes. The struggle had made them partners and friends. Over her shoulder, he saw that the rest of the office was dark. They were alone at night, trying to keep the company afloat.

  “They’re all bad,” he said, not hiding his bitterness.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He sat down again and leaned back with his feet on the desk and stared at the ceiling. Sonia took a chair opposite him and crossed her legs, dangling a high heel from her stockinged foot.

  “Alison?” she asked.

  Michael nodded.

  “Still the same?”

  “Worse,” he said.

  “That’s the last thing you need now.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Anything I can do?” she asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, I’m here for you, Michael.”

  He wasn’t blind to her meaning. He’d made a mistake by sharing his anger and loneliness with Sonia as his relationship with Alison disintegrated. It gave them a secret bond, and she’d made it clear that he could take it wherever he wanted. He was tempted. Sonia was young – barely thirty – although she was already as much a shark as any older lawyer and twice as smart. She wore above-the-knee skirts and was casual about her sexuality. Sex was a prize for smart people working hard, she said, and it didn’t need to be anything more than that.

  If he wanted her, he could have her. He’d never cheated, but he’d fielded plenty of offers. What made it different was that he was watching his world fall apart, and Alison was suddenly a piece of the wreckage, rather than his partner. He needed a release, even if it was fleeting and meaningless.

  Sonia stared at him as if she knew what he was thinking.

  “I wish I could cheer you up,” she said, “but it hasn’t been a good day for me either.”

  “No?”

  “No. We’ve had setbacks.”

  Michael closed his eyes. Sometimes God poured it on like a flood. “What?”

  “The patent litigation. It looks like someone hacked your home e-mails and gave them to the plaintiffs. You have to watch your temper, Michael. It’s not good. You said things about the judge.”

  “Can they do that? Tap my wi-fi? Is that legal?”

  “No, but they claim the material came from an anonymous source, so their hands are clean. Eventually, it would have been discoverable anyway.”

  “So what did I say?”

  “You questioned the judge’s intelligence. And his penis size. I’ve warned you about writing down anything that you don’t want thrown back in your face.”

  “Oh, hell, no,” Michael insisted. “I did not say anything like that. Someone tampered with the files.”

  “It doesn’t really matter. We can’t unring the bell with Judge Davis. It’s never good to make an enemy of the judge. He can make our lives miserable.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Carl Flaten won’t go away either.”

  “What now? I a
m so sick of that bastard.”

  “Michael. Please. He filed a complaint with the EEOC. He says that the litigation waiver he signed when we terminated him is invalid because he was sexually harassed, and he’s alleging privacy violations in our HR department related to his insurance claims.”

  “Who the hell harassed Flaten?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “He says you bullied and humiliated him.”

  Michael slammed a fist on his desk. “Fuck Carl. We paid him a settlement to go away, so make the little creep go away.”

  Sonia wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and sighed. “Enough, Michael. Don’t say things like that, and whatever you do, don’t write it down. It won’t be helpful.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. This is not like me at all.”

  “I realize that.”

  Michael felt himself spinning out of control. A blood vessel throbbed in his left eye. His muscles tightened into knots. It wasn’t the company or the lawsuits. It wasn’t Judge Davis or Carl Flaten or Sonia. It was Alison. He was falling into a whirlpool, and his wife was nowhere to be found. He was alone.

  “There are days when I want to kill someone,” he said.

  Sonia smiled. “Don’t do that.”

  She used long fingers tipped with red nails to push herself out of his chair. She was tall and sensual.

  “Your shoulders are tense,” she told him as she came around behind his desk. “I have magic fingers.”

  *

  Stride found Maggie Bei waiting for him when he arrived at his lakeside cottage at nine o’clock at night. She sat sideways in his leather chair next to the fire, with her short legs draped over the armrest. A half-empty bottle of shiraz sat on the carpet, and she twisted the stem of an empty wine glass in her hand. The red fringe of her hair fell across her eyes.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he told her. “Did you eat?”

  “You have two grapes and a hard-boiled egg in the fridge,” Maggie replied.

  “Don’t eat the egg. It’s been there a while.”

  Stride took off his leather jacket and bent down to kiss her on the lips. Day by day, he kept hoping it would feel more natural to do so, but it didn’t. The romance between them had grown awkward. Maggie felt it, too, and she rolled her eyes at him.