The Cold Nowhere js-6

by Brian Freeman

  ‘It’s more than three miles. You made it all this way? In the snow?’

  ‘I stole a blanket out of a car on the street,’ she said. ‘That helped.’

  Stride liked the spark of life he saw in this girl, regardless of the things she’d done. Cat was young and small, but she had courage. Serena would have said he had a weakness for women who needed rescue. ‘This man who came after you, do you know who he is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I never saw his face.’

  ‘Why do you think he’s trying to kill you?’

  ‘It’s not the first time. He’s been after me for a while.’

  ‘He has? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah, it started about three weeks ago. I was back home for a while. I’m in and out of there, you know? I slipped out my window one night, and when I came out of the woods, somebody ran after me. That was the first time. I was lucky, because a bus came by, so I hopped on. I could see him down the block behind me.’

  ‘But you didn’t recognize him.’

  ‘No, it was too dark. I’ve been bouncing around since then. I stayed with my aunt for a few days. She rents a place at the Seaway, but you know what it’s like there. They’ll rat you out for a Snickers bar. I thought someone was watching me again, so I bolted. Then last week, I was hanging out at the shelter on First Street. I took a walk in the middle of night. I do that sometimes. It was Sunday, nobody was around, but a car took off after me. He almost ran me down as I crossed near Sammy’s.’

  ‘Did you see what kind of car it was?’

  ‘No, all I saw was the lights. The engine sounded like a sports car. Anyway, I’ve been running since then. I thought maybe I’d lost him, because I didn’t see anybody all week. Until tonight.’

  Stride thought about what Cat was saying and what he saw in her face. She was scared, but he had no way of knowing if any of it was real. When you came and went on the streets, sometimes bad people found you. When you drank or did drugs, sometimes your brain took detours and got lost. It was easy to get paranoid. A string of odd incidents, even if they were all true, didn’t add up to a conspiracy.

  Cat was smart. ‘You think I’m crazy,’ she said.

  ‘No, but I do have to ask, have you been using anything? Maybe synthetics like bath salts? Those drugs can cause severe reactions, including paranoia and hallucinations.’

  ‘I’m not using,’ Cat insisted.

  ‘Never?’

  ‘I didn’t say never. I’ve tried things. I didn’t like what they did to me, so I quit. That’s the truth. I haven’t taken any of that stuff in months. It all happened, just like I said. This guy is trying to kill me.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why someone would want to hurt you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not a clue.’

  ‘Has anything out of the ordinary happened to you recently? Did you witness anything bad? Were you with someone who might not want the relationship exposed?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I mean, I can’t think of anything like that.’

  He gave her a reassuring smile. ‘We’ll figure it out. We’re going to have to sit down and go through everything you’ve done and everyone you’ve been with recently. Are you okay with that? You’ll need to be honest. You can’t hold back.’

  ‘You may not like some of it,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. It’s pretty hard to shock a cop. Anyway, I want you to get some sleep first. You’ve had a tough night. Get some rest and then we’ll go see Steve at the clinic.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Stride.’ He saw her smile for the first time, and he was right. It was as sweet and warm as the sun coming out from the clouds.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Cat?’ he said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why did you come here tonight? How did you find me?’

  The girl played with the gold chain on her neck. Her eyes got misty. ‘I looked up your address a while ago. My mother told me that if there was ever a time in my life when I needed protection, and no one was around for me, I should go to you. Find Mr. Stride, she told me. She said you’d help me.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘She died. You were there.’

  Stride was confused. He looked at Cat and saw a teenager, like any other girl. A stranger. Then he looked at her again and saw a familiar child hiding in her face. He knew her. Ten years ago, she’d been a six-year-old chasing butterflies between soaring evergreens. A six-year-old with messy hands and pumpkin pie on her mouth.

  A six-year-old cowering under the porch behind her house, her face frozen in terror.

  Cat.

  ‘You’re Catalina,’ he murmured, as he realized who she was. ‘Catalina Mateo. Michaela was your mother.’

  ‘You remember her,’ she said. ‘I knew you would.’

  Stride pushed back his chair and got up with a start. The reality struck him like a blow to the chest. He went into the living room, where it was dark and cool, and he took a loud breath, which felt ragged in his lungs. His face taunted him in the antique mirror. Short, messy black hair, swept with gray. A day of rough stubble on his chin and cheeks. The brown, brooding eyes, feeling everything, showing everything. He could feel the furrows in his weathered forehead deepen. Not wrinkles anymore — furrows. A storm washed over him. He felt his age. He sat down in the red leather armchair in the shadows, and he saw her face again. Michaela.

  He’d never gotten past the guilt of what happened to her. For a decade, she’d been his nightmare.

  And now this.

  Catalina. Cat. Michaela’s beautiful little girl, descending into the lost life of prostitution. A runaway.

  ‘Mr. Stride?’

  She stood framed in the doorway of the dining room, with the lights behind her. She came toward him tentatively. When he read her face, he knew they were both thinking about the same night. Remembering her mother.

  Cat slipped to her knees and Stride folded her into his chest and hugged her with the tenderness he would give a child. Ten years had passed, but she was still a little girl. She was fragile and warm in his arms. He wanted to change the past for her and make everything right. He wanted to restore what she’d lost, but that was beyond his power. He couldn’t undo what was done or erase his mistakes. All he could do was make a promise.

  Not to himself. Not to Cat. To Michaela. A new promise to replace the one he’d failed to keep ten years ago.

  He would rescue her daughter.

  He would save her.

  2

  The girl had vanished again. She was smart.

  He threw down the garage door with an angry jerk of his wrist, shutting out the noise of the wind. With the door closed, he stood in perfect blackness beside the snow-crusted Dodge Charger. He switched on the light, which illuminated the concrete floor, with its mud and grease. The garage was neatly organized. Metal shelves. Tools on peg boards. Chest freezer. He grabbed a plastic gasoline can and topped off the Charger’s tank. Gasoline spilled onto the wool of his gloves, raising pungent fumes. Despite the cold air in the detached garage, he felt sweat under his winter hat.

  He’d spent half an hour scouring Canal Park and the streets surrounding the city’s convention center. The girl had to be freezing. She had to be scared. There were moments when he knew she was close — he felt it — but wherever she was hiding, she kept out of sight.

  Smart.

  He gave up on the search as it got late. The Charger was stolen. It wasn’t safe to stay in the tourist area longer than necessary. He didn’t think the girl would call the police, but he knew that they patrolled the Canal Park area through the overnight hours, and he didn’t want them eyeing the Charger with suspicion. A car slowly making circles through the deserted streets attracted attention.

  He headed back to his hideaway in the forested lands north of the city. He could park the Charger, take his car from the garage’s other stall, and go back to his real life. Shed one skin, put on another.
/>   He slid open the second garage door and studied the woods outside before he made his escape. He was sheltered from the highway, and it was a lightly traveled road. No one could see him. The owners were snow birds; they wouldn’t be back for months. He had to be cautious about neighbors noticing tracks in the driveway, but few people lived year round on the lonely back roads, and the wind and snow would cover up his trail overnight. This had been his lair for a month. He would be gone long before anyone discovered it.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket, demanding attention. He knew who it was. Only one other person had the number for this phone.

  ‘She got away,’ he said, answering the call.

  There was no reply. He could hear mixed emotions in the silence. Terror. Relief. Then finally a voice: ‘Maybe we should just forget about her. Maybe it’s okay.’

  ‘It’s not okay,’ he said.

  ‘The girl doesn’t know a thing. Let her go.’

  ‘We can’t. Don’t you get it? She’s a bomb waiting to blow up in our faces.’

  He heard another long, tortured pause.

  ‘So what happens next?’

  ‘She disappeared again,’ he replied. ‘She’s on the run. You need to find out where she is.’

  ‘I already told you exactly where she was going to be tonight. You said you would handle it and you didn’t. You said it would be over by now.’

  His gloved hands squeezed into fists. He didn’t need blame. They were way past blame. He couldn’t believe that one teenage girl could put the entire scheme at risk.

  ‘Just find out where she is,’ he repeated angrily.

  ‘How do I do that?’

  ‘That’s your problem. And do it fast.’ He hung up the phone.

  He was breathing heavily. It was true; it should have been over by now. A teenage hooker had outsmarted him. He’d let her sneak through his grasp again. She should have been in his hands weeks ago; she should have been dead and forgotten. Once she was out of the way, the trail would be buried like dirt over a grave. They’d finally be safe.

  He told himself he still had time to fix this. No one was asking questions now. No one knew the girl’s secret. Even so, the clock kept ticking. A month had passed. The longer he waited, the more chance there was for things to go badly. Someone had already made the connection and, sooner or later, others would follow, as long as the girl was out there. The dominoes would fall, snaking their way back to his doorstep. He couldn’t let that happen.

  Time to go. The outside woods were deserted. The street was empty.

  Real life.

  Before he got into his car, he spotted the chest freezer on the far wall. He couldn’t help himself. He checked it again, the way he’d checked it a thousand times, lifting the lid, feeling the frost envelop his face. The body was a horrible thing, rock solid, like an alabaster statue. It was odd how he still expected the eyes to pop open, the mouth to form a scream as it gasped for air. He wasn’t a monster; he felt regret. Sometimes there was no way but the hard way.

  Some secrets couldn’t be allowed to come back to life.

  He shut the lid of the freezer, leaving the body to feel the burn of the ice. It was a tight fit but there was enough room for one more inside. The girl was small.

  3

  ‘Go with me on this,’ Maggie Bei said. She sat on Stride’s kitchen counter, kicking her legs and sipping hot coffee from a cardboard cup. ‘I think a sausage McMuffin with egg may well be the world’s perfect food.’

  Stride glanced at the clock. It wasn’t even six in the morning on Saturday, and it was still dark outside. He’d been asleep for two hours, but the noise of his partner in the kitchen had awakened him. He opened the McDonald’s bag and saw a second sausage McMuffin inside, which he took out and ate ravenously. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said.

  ‘It’s the little slice of cheese that does it. I love that. And the egg that looks like a hockey puck. I could eat these every day.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘No, some days I get those little breakfast burrito things.’ She popped the top of a can of Coke with her fingernail and handed it to him. ‘You look like you need caffeine, boss.’

  ‘You think?’ Stride said. He still wore his jeans from the previous night and the same wrinkled dress shirt. He’d kicked off his old boots, and he felt the coldness of the floor under his feet. His head throbbed, but the fizz of Coke was like aspirin.

  ‘Sorry it took me so long to get over here,’ Maggie went on. ‘The phone didn’t wake me up. Weird.’

  He wondered if that was true or if she’d chosen to ignore his call.

  The tiny Chinese cop hopped off the counter onto her big block heels and sat at his dining room table. She wore drainpipe jeans and a tight red Aerosmith T-shirt that barely covered her stomach, despite the morning chill in the cottage. She acted as if nothing had changed between the two of them but, in fact, their relationship was strained. For years, she’d shown up with breakfast two or three times a week. He’d wake up and find her reading his newspaper, eating from her McDonald’s bag.

  It had been nearly two months now since she’d appeared in his kitchen. Two months since they’d pulled the plug on their brief, misguided affair.

  ‘Long time, no see,’ he said.

  ‘You act like it’s been three years, boss. We’re together every day.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I do, but my weekends have been busy lately, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He noticed that she didn’t explain what she’d been doing, and he didn’t ask. He suspected she was seeing someone new and didn’t want him to know.

  ‘So who’s the girl?’ Maggie asked. She gestured into the living room as she chewed on hash browns. The door to the smallest bedroom in the cottage, which was in the corner facing the street, was closed. Cat had spent the remainder of the night in one of the twin beds there.

  ‘I peeked inside when I got here,’ Maggie went on. ‘She was asleep.’

  ‘So was I.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t wake you up, did I?’ She added pointedly, ‘Not anymore.’

  ‘Mags.’

  ‘I know, we said we weren’t going to talk about it. Pretend like nothing ever happened. Zip my lips.’ She pulled a red-tipped fingernail across her bright lips and winked at him. It was a joke, but with Maggie there was usually a dagger behind her jokes. ‘Anyway, she’s pretty. Who is she?’

  ‘Her name’s Cat Mateo.’

  Maggie had a near-perfect memory for details and she didn’t hesitate to pull the name out of her brain. ‘Mateo?’ she asked. ‘As in Michaela Mateo? Is there a connection?’

  ‘Her daughter,’ Stride said. ‘Cat was just a kid back then.’

  ‘I remember. Well, that explains the pretty part. She’s got good genes.’

  ‘Yes, she does.’

  ‘At least on her mother’s side. I don’t even want to think about what little pieces of Marty Gamble are swimming around inside her.’

  Stride frowned at the reminder. Marty Gamble was Catalina’s father and Michaela’s ex-husband. Cat was the only good thing to come out of their violent relationship. Stride wanted to believe that Marty had left no imprint on the teenage girl in the corner bedroom, but bad seeds had a way of spreading like weeds.

  Maggie watched his face with concern. ‘Is this going to be a problem for you, boss?’

  ‘No, why should it?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Because I was there. Because I know you.’

  That was true. Maggie probably knew Stride better than he knew himself. She probably knew him better than Serena, even though he and Serena had shared a bed for most of the past three years. Stride and Maggie had been partners for well over a decade. When he’d first met her, she was a book-smart police grad, with a stiffness born of her childhood in China. She’d done a turn-around over the years, developing a sassy mouth and a taste for hot clothes. She was the size of a doll, short and skinny, with golden skin, a diamon
d stud in her bottle-cap nose, and a bowl haircut that looked like a mop. She’d dyed her hair as red as an Easter egg a few months earlier, but her hair was black again now, hanging over her eyes. As he watched, she blew her bangs off her forehead.

  Stride was older than his partner. He was knocking on the door of fifty, and Maggie was staring at forty. Age didn’t matter. She’d had a crush on Stride ever since she met him, through his first marriage to Cindy and then his love affair with Serena, years after Cindy’s death. It was a crush that should have stayed nothing more than a crush, but sometimes life was messy.

  Five months ago, they’d made love. Neither one of them had meant for it to happen; it was a product of desperate times. The consequences had rippled through all of their lives like a rogue wave. His life. Maggie’s life. Serena’s life.

  ‘So what’s Cat’s story?’ Maggie asked.

  He explained what the girl had told him in the middle of the night. ‘She thinks she’s being stalked,’ he concluded.

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  ‘I told her I’d look into it.’

  Maggie stared at him over the steamy top of her coffee cup. ‘Sounds like a job for Guppo, boss. Or one of the street cops. Not you.’

  ‘This is personal, not official,’ Stride told her. ‘She came to me for help.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I want to have Steve Garske check her out and make sure she’s okay. Then I’ll drop in on the Charles Frederick and see what I can find out about this party last night. Maybe someone saw something.’

  ‘You want me to come with you?’

  ‘Actually, I was hoping you could run a background check. Cat’s still a minor. I know she had legal guardians back then, so where’s she supposed to be living? Has she had any arrests? I’d like anything you can find.’

  ‘You don’t trust her.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I just want to know what’s going on in her life and how she wound up here.’

  ‘She’s a sixteen-year-old hooker, boss. Hookers lie.’