In the Dark aka The Watcher

by Brian Freeman

  “What do you suggest?” Stride asked.

  “I suggest you make sure you know this case inside and out. Okay? Go back over everything. Make sure you’re able to answer any question that comes up. Revisit the entire investigation, but be discreet.”

  Stride hesitated.

  “What is it?” Pat asked.

  “I have some concerns that the original investigation may have been compromised.”

  Pat nodded. “You mean Ray Wallace.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ray was before my time, but I’ve heard stories. He was a big problem.”

  “Ray was a good cop, but he crossed the line,” Stride said. “He may have leaped too quickly to a theory of the crime that exonerated Peter Stanhope. He may have made the murder weapon and the original stalker letter disappear.”

  “Well, if Ray screwed the pooch, we should know about it before Tish or someone else gets there ahead of us.”

  “Of course.”

  “One last thing,” Pat said.

  “Yes?”

  “At some point, I may pull the plug. If all we’re doing is chasing our tail, and it’s obvious we’re never going to have enough evidence to put someone on trial, then I’m going to shut this down. I’m sorry, I know this girl meant something to you and your late wife. But if we don’t find anything new, then you and Tish are both going to have to live with the idea that the case will always be unsolved.”

  WHO KILLED LAURA STARR?

  By Tish Verdure

  THIRTEEN

  July 5, 1977

  The three of us were in our living room on Tuesday afternoon. It was me, my dad, and Jonny. The house had never felt so small. I hadn’t slept at all, and the walls felt like they were closing in, and the ceiling was coming down on top of me. I couldn’t breathe. The room was baking hot and so sticky that you broke into a sweat without doing anything at all. We all sat there, not saying a word, watching the dusty stream of sunlight through the front window. Jonny held my hand, and I buried my head in his shoulder. Tears of anger and regret streamed down my dad’s face. His face was beet red. He blamed Laura for living when my mom died, and now he blamed her for dying like she did. He had lost another one.

  My dad. He was never a big man, and year by year, he seems to shrink. His dark hair, which was so full and thick when I was a little girl, is mostly gone now. His clothes don’t fit, but he won’t let me buy new ones, so his white dress shirts balloon at his shoulders. He sits in his recliner in the evenings and reads his leather Bible by the dim light. No ambition anymore. Just crushed dreams and a tug-of-war with God. I remember how he used to come home from Wahl’s in his sharp pinstriped suits, like a man on top of the world, a man going places. He was going to run that department store someday. That’s what he told Mom. Now other men have climbed over his shoulders, and Dad writes newspaper ads for white sales. At fifty, he looks sixty. You just don’t realize how one person depends on another, and when they’re not there, it’s like going off a bridge, and you’re falling and falling.

  I went to Jonny’s place. After. In the middle of the night. He answered the door, and I looked a sight, crying, dotted with blood. He called the police, because I couldn’t do it. They came and took us back there, and I led them through the woods to the body, but I couldn’t go out to the beach. I couldn’t see it again. Even the big, tough cops couldn’t believe what had been done to her. Things like that don’t happen. Not here in Duluth.

  They asked me a lot of questions in a police car parked back in the weeds and had me repeat over and over what I did and what I saw. I think they could have done that for hours, but Jonny stood up to them and insisted that they take me home. I needed to tell my dad. I needed to stand under the shower and wash away the blood. They took pictures of me first, though, flashbulbs popping in my face out there in the woods. They scraped blood from my skin. I realized that they thought maybe I had done this myself. I had killed her. I didn’t understand how anyone could think that. I told them I was innocent. I’m not sure they believed me.

  “I’m so sorry, Dad,” I murmured.

  I felt a need to take this on myself, for his sake. I never should have let her go.

  Dad didn’t look at me. “God’s punishment is a terrible thing.”

  “You know I don’t want to hear that.”

  “I told Laura she was sinning,” he said.

  I wanted to scream at him, but I didn’t. I bit my tongue. This was how he dealt with grief, how he explained awful, random things. He had become so hard and unbending over the years. As if standing straight made any difference at all when you were in the path of a tornado. As if lightning somehow distinguished between good and evil.

  Dad bowed his head and started crying again. I sighed and looked up into Jonny’s dark eyes. He kissed my head. We had both grown older overnight, in a lot of ways.

  I heard a knock on the front door. “I’ll get it,” I said.

  The man on the doorstep had bushy red hair and a matching mustache. He wore oversized wire-rimmed glasses over pale blue eyes. I figured he was in his midthirties. He was medium height, but heavy and strong, with fingers like thick pork sausages. He wore a plaid sport coat and a white dress shirt that bulged out over his belt. No tie. Open collar and a fuzz of red chest hair. He wore flared denims and muddy dress shoes. I saw splotchy stains on his shoes. I wondered if it was blood.

  “I’m Detective Inspector Ray Wallace,” he told me. “Duluth police.”

  “Come in,” I said.

  Wallace walked with a limp. He followed me into the living room, and I sat down next to Jonny again. Wallace introduced himself to my dad, who didn’t get out of his recliner. Wallace’s eyes shot around the room as he pulled out a dining room chair and sat down. You just know when somebody is smart, and Wallace was smart.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Starr,” Wallace said.

  My dad used a handkerchief to blow his nose and then folded it and replaced it in his pocket. He laid his hands on his knees and didn’t say anything.

  “I’m trying to find out exactly what happened to her, sir,” Wallace continued.

  Dad still didn’t say a word. He stared blankly into the dust.

  “I didn’t do it,” I blurted out, filling the silence.

  To a cop, that must be like lighting up a big sign that says, I did it! I did it!

  Wallace smiled with his lips, not his teeth. His mustache wriggled like a red worm. “No one is saying you did, young lady.” He looked at Jonny. “And who’s this?”

  “I’m Jon Stride. I’m Cindy’s boyfriend.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jon. Why don’t you head on home now, okay?”

  Jonny pushed himself off the sofa and shook Wallace’s hand. There was something different about him right then, something I’d never seen before, something mature and attractive. I could see them sizing each other up like men do. “If Cindy says she didn’t do it, you can take that to the bank. And I’m staying. I was there last night.”

  Wallace got a little glint in his eyes. “Suit yourself.”

  Jonny sat back down.

  I said, “It’s just that they were taking pictures, and I had blood on me because I stepped in it, and I picked up the bat because I thought I heard someone in the woods.”

  “You picked up the bat?” Wallace asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So we’ll find your fingerprints on it?”

  Oh, hell. “Yes, I guess so.”

  “Okay, that’s good to know. It’s Cindy, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get along with your sister, Cindy?”

  “Yes, of course I did.”

  “Because sisters have been known to fight from time to time.”

  “Sure, sometimes, but never anything serious.”

  My dad stirred from his gloom and interrupted. “What’s this all about, Wallace? You’re out of your head if you’re accusing my daughter.”

  Wallace adjusted his glasses on his
face with his thumb and index finger. “I’m not accusing anybody, Mr. Starr. I’m just gathering information.” He turned back to me. “Cindy, do you still have the clothes you were wearing last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you wash them?”

  “No, they’re in a basket.”

  “We’re going to need those, okay? I’ll have to take them with me.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “And shoes.”

  “I wasn’t wearing shoes.”

  “Ah.” Wallace pulled a Polaroid snapshot from his shirt pocket. “This is you last night, right?”

  “Right.”

  “There’s some blood around your hands and on your legs and feet.”

  “Yes, I know. I told you, I stepped-”

  Wallace shook his head. “It’s okay. Don’t worry. The lab people tell me whoever did this would have been drenched in blood. I mean drenched. Head to toe. Not a little around the edges.” He looked at William Starr. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t mean to be so graphic. What I’m saying is that we already concluded that it was very unlikely that Cindy was involved. But I like to see people’s faces before I draw my own conclusions.”

  “If you want to blame anyone, blame me,” Dad announced.

  Wallace shifted, and the wooden chair squealed. He looked curious. “What do you mean, sir?”

  “I mean, first it was my wife and now my daughter. They’re both dead. It doesn’t matter who held the bat. It was God who killed her.”

  “I don’t believe God kills eighteen-year-old girls,” Wallace said.

  “You’re wrong. He does it all the time. Every day. Sinners get punished.”

  “I see.” Wallace’s voice became flat and cold. “Mr. Starr, your neighbors overheard you shouting at Laura the night before she was killed.”

  I saw Dad’s fingers tighten on the Bible in his lap.

  “Yes, we argued sometimes.”

  “What was the fight about?”

  “I wanted her to stay on God’s path.”

  “But she didn’t?” Wallace asked.

  “Not always.”

  “In what way?”

  “That’s between me and Laura,” Dad snapped. “How can you ask me that when God is deciding the fate of her soul right now?”

  Wallace didn’t like that answer.

  “Mr. Starr, did you know Laura wasn’t home last night?”

  “Yes. I went to her room around ten o’clock, and she wasn’t there.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. I went to bed.”

  “Did you know where Laura had gone?”

  “No.”

  “Did you stay up to wait for her?”

  “Yes, but I fell asleep.”

  “Were you home all night?”

  “Of course, I just told you that.”

  “Did you talk to anyone?”

  “No.”

  Wallace nodded. “Mr. Starr, did you ever hit your daughter?”

  Dad bolted out of his chair, trembling. His white shirt fluttered. I hadn’t seen him move so quickly in years. “How dare you!”

  Wallace didn’t shrink. “You heard the question, sir.”

  “Never,” my dad insisted.

  “Sometimes fights get out of hand.”

  “I never touched her.”

  Wallace eyed me. It was as if, without saying it flat out, he wanted me to tell him yes or no. Pass the secret silently between us. He wanted to know if it was true, if Dad had ever struck Laura. Or me. I met his gaze.

  “My father wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  Wallace nodded. That was enough for now. I told myself that I was right, because I knew my father had never lifted a hand against me, and I didn’t believe he had ever done so to Laura. Even so, I couldn’t get Laura’s voice out of my head.

  What if Dad were abusing me? Could you kill him?

  I said nothing about that.

  Wallace kept his attention on me. “Cindy, you’ve gone over with my men what happened last night. I’m going to ask you to repeat some of it for me.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I know you’ve been through hell, and I know how hard this is for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Please tell me again exactly what you did last night and everything that happened right up until the time when the police responded to the call. Don’t leave anything out.”

  So I told him.

  Well, I told him some of it. There were things I left out. About me and Jonny that night. And other things, too. Jonny chimed in along the way, about Peter and the baseball game, about the storm, and Peter’s bat lying in the field. I could see Wallace’s mind working furiously whenever Peter Stanhope’s name came up, like part of him was with us and part of him was somewhere else. I wasn’t stupid. We were practically accusing the son of one of the richest men in the city of murder. A cop hears that, and he looks for a place to run. Wallace found that place right away. A black man in the woods.

  “So you and Laura thought someone was watching you,” he said when we were done.

  Nothing about the stalker note. Nothing about Laura and Peter dating and then breaking up because Peter was demanding sex. Nothing about the bat, or the threats against Laura he made during the game.

  “Yes.”

  “It couldn’t have been Peter Stanhope, though, right? Because he was still in the baseball field with Jon here when you heard somebody.”

  Jonny and I looked at each other. We both nodded.

  “You’re sure it was marijuana you smelled?”

  I glanced at my dad. “I’ve never used it, but I know what it smells like.”

  “Did you see this black guy that Jon talked about?”

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  Wallace looked at Jonny. “You must have seen this guy, this vagrant, in almost the same place where the girls were. Right?”

  “Within a hundred yards or so,” Jonny said.

  “Okay, tell me more about this guy with the dreadlocks.”

  “They call him Dada.”

  Wallace wet his lips with his tongue. “Whoa, whoa here, you know who this guy is? You’ve seen him before?”

  Jonny nodded. “He hangs out by the tracks in the harbor. Where the trains head south.”

  “What were you doing down in that area?”

  “It’s somewhere to go,” Jonny said.

  I knew why he went there. It was his private spot, his getaway, his place to think. Jonny told me he liked to hike down there, among the wanderers who came and went, eluding the police and the railway security. In his head, Jonny felt like a traveler, too. Homeless.

  “Okay, so who is this guy?”

  “I first saw him a month ago. He was in the woods down near Raleigh Street, where it heads out across the Arrowhead Bridge. The others are scared of him, because he’s so big. They think he’s some kind of ghost.”

  Wallace snorted. “Ghost.”

  “Most of the guys down there are a little crazy. They see someone like Dada, it’s easy to believe almost anything.”

  “Is he violent?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only seen him a couple times.”

  “Can you show me where you saw him?”

  Jonny nodded. “Yeah, I think so. He moves around, though. They all do.”

  “If he killed a girl, he probably took the first train south,” Wallace said. “My guess is he’s long gone.”

  He stood up. His right leg, the one that limped, looked stiff. He rubbed his knee, and I saw him grimace in pain.

  “I think that’s all for now,” he said. Then he looked at Jonny. “I could use your help, Jon. Do you have time to come with me?”

  Jonny looked at me, and I nodded.

  “Sure.”

  Wallace cinched up his slacks over his stomach. I was disappointed. He was leaping at the idea that some stranger did this, even though Laura had been receiving threats for months. Even though Peter Stanhope’s bat killed her.
Money talks.

  “So you’re going after this man Dada?” my dad asked.

  He believed it, too. Everyone did. No one wanted to think about the alternative, because it was too complicated. Too scary.

  “Nope,” Wallace said. “I mean, we will, but not yet.”

  I stared at him, surprised. But maybe I shouldn’t have been. After all, he was smart.

  “The first thing I want to do is get the truth out of Peter Stanhope,” Wallace said.

  14

  Ray Wallace.

  For years, he had been Stride’s best friend. His mentor on the police force. It was as if, in the restless months he spent after losing his father, he had been waiting to find someone who could give him a new direction. Later, Stride discovered that when you put someone on a pedestal, they’re almost certain to break when they fall.

  He still remembered the first question he had asked Ray when they walked out the door of Cindy’s house on July 5, 1977.

  “So what’s with the limp?”

  Ray stopped with his hand on the driver’s door of his Camaro. “Vietnam,” he said. “I took a bullet in the knee.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “Yeah, it was a bitch, but you know what? After something like that, it’s hard to get bent out of shape about any of the bad stuff that life throws at you.”

  Stride would remember that comment for years.

  Right up until the moment that Ray shot him.

  ____________________

  “I like the way you stood up for your girlfriend, Jon,” Ray said as he started the car.

  “Cindy didn’t do anything wrong,” Stride told him.

  “I think you’re right, but she’s not giving me the whole story, either.”

  “She’s not a liar.”

  “I didn’t say she was, but there’s a difference between lying and leaving out part of the truth, you know?”

  Stride was silent.

  Ray steered with one hand, with his elbow balanced on the Camaro’s open window. He sucked cold coffee under his red mustache with the other hand.

  “Do you think you’ll figure out who killed Laura?” Stride asked.