Marathon

by Brian Freeman

  “I know that.”

  Serena didn’t push her. The more she pushed Cat about anything, the more the girl dug in her heels. That was another way in which they were alike. Cat had to make peace with giving up her child in her own way and in her own time.

  “Was your tutoring session cancelled?” Serena asked.

  “Yeah. Everything’s cancelled. Everybody’s staying home.”

  Cat was a year behind other high school students her age—she’d be a junior in the fall, rather than a senior—but she had a flair for math, and she was already a tutor for students older than she was. When she set her mind to anything, she was whip-smart about it. The trick was keeping her focused.

  She’d had a successful year at school after giving birth to Michael. She aced every class. The one thing she hadn’t done was make friends. She’d already seen more life and death than other kids her age, which made it hard to do normal things with normal girls. She’d had a boyfriend, Al, but she’d broken up with him at the start of the school year, because she said she couldn’t handle classes and Al at the same time. Serena thought the real reason was that she was afraid of any relationship getting serious.

  The strange thing was, she knew that Cat missed her old life. Living on the street was what she knew; it was what she was good at. Without it, she didn’t know where she belonged.

  “Listen, I need your help with something,” Serena told her.

  “With what?”

  Serena handed her a mug shot of a bearded, middle-aged man. “Do you recognize him?”

  “Sure, that’s Eagle. Everybody knows Eagle.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “He’s like a lot of the older men on the street,” Cat said. “He had a normal life until his drinking took over. Eventually, he drank his way out of his marriage, his house, his job. I liked him. He was smart, like me. He was always bugging me about school. Sometimes he would make up puzzles I had to solve, and he’d quiz me until I got it right. That was when he was sober, though, which wasn’t too often.”

  “Have you seen him around the city recently?” Serena asked.

  “No. Eagle’s a hider.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “If he doesn’t want you to find him, you won’t. A lot of the homeless hang out in the same places all the time. Once you know their spot, you can usually find them there. Not Eagle. He knows how to slip into places he’s not supposed to be, and he’s usually in a different place every night. He was the one who told me how easy it is to get inside the DECC after dark because there’s almost always an open door.”

  “Does he steal to get money?” Serena asked.

  Cat gave her a thin smile. “No, he’s not one of those. Not like me. And he isn’t much for handouts, either. Usually, he’ll make a couple bucks mowing a lawn or shoveling somebody’s driveway, and then he’ll drink until the money is gone. Why are you asking about him, anyway?”

  “Eagle was in the Duluth Outdoor Company shop last week,” Serena told her. “He had some kind of episode, and they called 911, but he left before the police got there.”

  Cat frowned. “That’s weird.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, it’s just that Eagle doesn’t like going near Canal Park. He hates tourists. It bugs him the way everybody looks down on him, you know?”

  “Can you think of a reason he’d go to the shop, then?”

  “I can’t,” Cat said. “Hey, you don’t think Eagle had something to do with the bombing, do you? That’s not his style. He’s harmless.”

  “No, I don’t think that,” Serena said.

  “Then why do you care?”

  Serena kicked the sand at her feet and asked herself the same question. She had no reason to believe that Eagle’s behavior at the shop was important, but for some reason, she couldn’t let it go. When her instincts grabbed hold of something, she’d learned to listen.

  “If I want to talk to Eagle, how do I find him?” Serena asked. “Given that you say he’s pretty good at not being found.”

  Cat grinned. “You can’t find him, but I can.”

  “How?”

  “I can check in with some of my friends,” Cat said.

  Serena shook her head. “No.”

  “Hey, you can try to do it yourself, but they won’t talk to you. Not a cop.”

  “I’m not letting you go back into that world,” Serena told her.

  “Well, then, come with me. We can do it together.”

  Serena studied the girl’s face. She didn’t like the idea of Cat having anything to do with people from her old life, but she also knew that asking for Cat’s help was giving the girl something that mattered. Everybody needed a purpose in life.

  “Okay,” Serena said. “You win.”

  Cat looked pleased with herself. She knelt on the beach and let some sand slip through her fingers. A gentle wave lapped at her feet. She turned and looked back at Serena. “So what are you going to say to Eagle when we find him?”

  “I want to know why he went to the shop that day,” she replied. “Don’t worry, I’m not trying to get him into trouble.”

  “What do you think he knows?” Cat asked.

  “I have no idea. Probably nothing.”

  The girl squinted into the sunshine and shook her head. She knew Serena too well. “Come on, you must have a hunch. You always say your gut knows the truth before you do.”

  Serena bent over her and smiled. She pushed some of the loose strands of hair out of Cat’s face. “Honestly? You’re right. I don’t know why, but my gut tells me that Eagle knows who the bomber is.”

  23

  Maggie parked her Avalanche at the Cloquet airport, which was in the middle of flat fields west of town, surrounded by acres of woods. Among the handful of cars in the parking lot, she spotted an Escalade with the license plate MM.

  Michael Malville.

  She heard the whine of a small plane engine overhead. It dipped for a landing, its wings waggling in the breeze. The plane made a touchdown on the runway, but rather than slowing down, it accelerated into another takeoff and began a lazy arc into the sky. Someone was taking flight lessons.

  Maggie’s boyfriend, Troy, had his pilot’s license, so she’d spent a lot of time in small airports over the past year. It said a lot for her faith in Troy that she would climb into a plane with him, because she was deathly afraid of flying. She still screamed at every updraft, and she refused to go up into anything but cloudless skies. Even so, she’d begun to appreciate the freedom that Troy felt in the air.

  She found Michael Malville prepping a Cirrus SR22 for flight. It was a beautiful single-engine propeller plane, and it looked brand-new, with a dazzling midnight-blue coat of paint. Malville, like Troy, looked at home with his aircraft. He stopped what he was doing when he saw Maggie approaching him, and he folded his arms across his chest. His head was shaved bald and had a pink glow from too much time in the sun. He wore a red polo shirt, khaki shorts, and Ray-Ban’s over his eyes.

  “How did you find me?” Malville asked her.

  “Your wife told me you were here.”

  He opened the cockpit door and reached in to grab a silver travel mug. He took a sip of coffee and wiped his mouth. “Well, what can I do for you?”

  “For starters, you can tell me what the hell you were thinking last night when you posted that tweet,” Maggie said, letting her anger show in her voice.

  “I didn’t break any laws,” he retorted.

  “I’m not talking about laws. I’m talking about common sense. You could have called me. You could have called the tip line. You could have called 911. Instead, you had to show off and try to look like a hero for your Twitter friends.”

  “That’s not what I was doing.”

  “No? Whatever you think you were doing, you created a dangerous situation. A police officer died because of it.”

  Malville jabbed a finger at her. “Don’t you dare put that on me.”

  “Why did
you put that information out there, Mr. Malville? You’re smarter than that.”

  He stripped off his sunglasses. “Why didn’t I trust the police? Gosh, I don’t know. It’s almost as if there were something in my past that might make me believe they wouldn’t listen to me when I told them the truth.”

  “I get it. You’re still bitter about the Spitting Devil case.”

  “Damn right, I am,” he snapped. “My faith in the government, and my faith in you, are right around zero. So don’t lecture me, Sergeant. I got results. Things happened fast. If I’d called in a tip, how many days would it have been before anyone took it seriously or the information made its way through the FBI bureaucracy? In the meantime, this guy could have been on his way to another city with another bomb.”

  Maggie waited as the small plane she’d spotted earlier drifted down for another practice landing and takeoff. The noise made it impossible to talk. She didn’t blame Malville for his anger at the police, even if there was nothing she or Stride would have done differently two years earlier. You asked questions and made choices based on the best information you had. Back then, the evidence had made Malville look like a serial killer.

  “Tell me again what you saw,” Maggie said once the plane was back in the air.

  “I already told you on Saturday. A Muslim man with a backpack bumped into me when Evan and I were standing outside the Electric Fetus. He was heading toward Canal Park. That was a few minutes before the bombing. Ever since, I’ve been combing through the photos that people have posted online, to see if I could identify the guy. And I did. I found him steps away from the blast site, just seconds before it happened, with no backpack. Maybe that’s not enough for you or the FBI, but it was enough for me.”

  “If you had come to us with that information, we would have taken immediate action,” Maggie told him.

  “Well, that’s easy to say now. Look, I’m sorry about what happened to that police officer. I really am. If Rashid shot him, it just shows that I was right. Rashid is the guy. And he’s dangerous as hell.”

  “Are you absolutely certain that Khan Rashid is the man who bumped into you on Superior Street?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Because we’ve been going over photos, too, and we can’t place him on Superior with a backpack.”

  “He was there,” Malville insisted.

  “How long were you studying online photos from the marathon before you found the one you tweeted?” she asked.

  Malville hesitated. “Since I got home on Saturday.”

  “Did you sleep on Saturday night?”

  “Not much,” he admitted.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Malville, but the fact is, you were sleep-deprived, angry, and emotional, and you’d spent hours looking at thousands of faces, trying to find someone you admit you saw for no more than a split second a day earlier. Is it possible you made a mistake?”

  “I know what I saw.”

  Maggie had seen that certainty in eyewitnesses many times before. They were absolutely convinced about what they remembered. They could picture a face in their mind. They could pick a suspect out of a lineup, and they could point him out in court.

  And all too often, they’d been dead wrong.

  “I’m not laying blame on you, Mr. Malville, but this is important.”

  “Why? Why do you think I’m wrong? Because you were hoping the bomber was a white Christian, like me? I’m sorry to disappoint you. Too bad it was yet another Islamic radical.”

  “I just want to know if you’re really sure,” Maggie said.

  Malville slipped on his Ray-Ban’s and went back to his plane. “I’m one hundred percent sure, Sergeant. Khan Rashid was the man I saw. Now how about you go find him before he kills anyone else.”

  * * *

  Wade Ralston took tentative steps up and down the St. Luke’s corridor. The surgical incision in his stomach made him grimace with pain, but the nurses all said he was doing better. He was wearing street clothes again. By tomorrow, he’d be home. He could go back to work and get on with his life.

  In the hospital lounge, he saw Travis. The kid looked like death. Wade hobbled over to him and eased down onto the sofa. He took heavy breaths, waiting while the pain subsided. The room was warm, and he felt himself sweating. His jaw clenched, because seeing Travis made him angry. Angry about Joni. Angry about how things had worked out.

  “Listen, man,” Travis mumbled, as if he could read the bitterness on Wade’s face. “I feel really bad.”

  “About what?”

  “I should have saved her somehow. It doesn’t seem fair. Me being here. Joni being gone.”

  “I’m not sure who told you life was fair,” Wade said. “It’s not.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “How’s Shelly?” Wade asked.

  “She’s alive, for whatever that’s worth.”

  “You tell her about Joni?”

  Travis nodded without saying anything. His eyes welled with tears.

  “How about her legs and all? She know?”

  “Yeah. She was giving me the God crap. Jesus will take care of her. I don’t know how she can say that. Me, I just want ten minutes with the guy who did this. Ten minutes to saw off his legs, you know? I want to do something.”

  Wade stared at Travis. Big, dumb Travis, strong as an ox, handsome as one of the Hemsworth brothers. The kid was right. He should be dead. Instead, here they both were, sitting side by side on a hospital sofa.

  “You believe in God, Travis?” Wade asked.

  “Nah.”

  “Maybe you should. Maybe Shelly’s right.”

  Travis’s face screwed up in confusion. “What are you talking about, Wade?”

  “I’m saying, what are the odds that you survived the explosion? One in a million? That can’t be an accident. Gotta be a reason you walked away.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “I don’t know, but the way I see it, God saved you. You were in the path, man, and God saved you. Seems like He must have some kind of mission for you. Otherwise, you’d be on a slab, just like Joni.”

  Travis laced his big hands on top of his head. “Man, if that’s true, He picked the wrong guy. I’ve never done anything that’s worth shit in my life.”

  “Well, maybe now you’ve got another chance.”

  “A chance for what?” Travis asked.

  Wade looked around at the hospital lounge to make sure they were alone. He lowered his voice. “Just what you said, man. A chance to do something.”

  24

  Khan awoke in an empty house.

  He lay on his back on a wood floor. When he pushed himself up on his elbows, his muscles ached. So did his face, where the man at the market had struck him. He had no idea how long he’d slept. All he remembered from his dreams was the police officer’s face in the cemetery, haunting him like a dark angel.

  The hole in his head.

  The look in his dead eyes.

  He was in an unfurnished living room, and he didn’t immediately remember how he’d gotten there. Everything was unfamiliar. Hooks dangled from the walls where paintings had once been hung. Dust coated the floor, except for a slurry of dirty footprints. The thick curtains, which were closed, gave no hint of whether it was morning or night. He knew he’d missed prayers, but he didn’t know how many.

  Khan got up off the floor. Dried blood was streaked on his skin. He could feel the sting of cuts on his arms and legs. He walked to the curtains, but as he reached out to sweep them aside, he felt someone behind him. He spun, and Malik was there. His friend grabbed his wrist in a steel grip.

  “Don’t touch the curtains,” Malik said.

  “Why not?”

  “Cops are all over the neighborhood. They’re looking for you. We can’t let anyone see that we’re here.”

  Malik turned around and walked away, and Khan followed him into the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was empty. No table or chairs. No appliances on the counter. One cabinet doo
r hung open, revealing a few crumbs of food and the white dust of flour. The refrigerator was unplugged. Malik picked up a plastic bottle of Lipton iced tea, unscrewed it, and drank. He held out the bottle to Khan.

  “Want some?”

  Khan began to say no, but he realized he was thirsty. He took the bottle and drank down the rest of the warm, sweet tea. When he was done, he wiped his mouth and said, “Where are we?”

  “This house is on the end of Redwing Street across from the Ridgeview golf course.”

  “Who owns this place?”

  Malik shrugged. “Now? Some bank. One of my friends in Minneapolis works in the foreclosure department. He gave me the keys. From the outside, it looks abandoned. Long grass. I have to come and go carefully to make sure the neighbors don’t get curious.”

  Khan didn’t ask questions about Malik’s friends. He didn’t want to know who they were.

  “Does anyone else know I’m here?” Khan asked.

  “Just me.”

  “I need to call Ahdia.”

  “No. I’m sorry, Khan. That’s not possible for many reasons. I can’t have you use my phone and risk people tracking it to us. And the fact is, Ahdia’s phone is probably turned off, so that no one at the FBI can track her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Gone,” Malik said. “She and Pak disappeared last night. It’s all over the news. You are a wanted man, Khan, and so is your family.”

  “Where did she go?” Khan asked.

  “I don’t know. The good thing is, the police don’t seem to know, either. Otherwise, you can bet they would have her in a holding cell somewhere, and your boy would be with Child Protective Services. I’m trying to find out through my channels where she went. She’s probably still in the city and somewhere close by. If she escaped, it wasn’t on her own. She had help.”

  Khan thought about it. “Haq.”

  “Yes, that’s my guess,” Malik replied.

  “Call him.”

  “I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be safe for us to be in contact. And you know that Haq and I don’t exactly see eye to eye. Don’t worry, Khan. I’m sure Ahdia and Pak are safe. I’ll talk to a friend, and a friend will talk to a friend, and somewhere in the chain, I’ll find out where she is. Be patient.”