In the Dark aka The Watcher

by Brian Freeman

  “Obviously, someone carried it, but not me.”

  “Do you have any idea who could have done that?”

  “No, but I already told you that someone else was in the woods.”

  “Could Laura have taken the bat with her?”

  “No, she just ran.”

  “You said you followed her,” Stride said. “What happened then?”

  Jones steepled his fingers under the folds of his chin. “First, let me ask you something. Do you still consider me a suspect?”

  “Yes.”

  “At least you’re honest.”

  “You were there. Your fingerprints are on the murder weapon. You fled the city.”

  “I’ve explained all of those things.”

  “Except I have no way of knowing if you’re telling the truth,” Stride said. “Keep going. Tell me about Laura.”

  Jones settled into the plastic-and-steel airport chair, which groaned in protest under his weight. “At first, I thought I had lost her. I thought she had made her way out of the park.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “Yes, the trail wound along the lake to another beach. I saw her there.”

  “Did you speak to her?” Stride asked.

  “Oh, no, she had no idea I was there.”

  “Was this the beach where her body was found?”

  “I assume so.”

  “But she was alive?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Did she have the bat with her?”

  “I told you, no.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I left.”

  “Just like that?” Stride asked.

  “The girl was safe. There was nothing else I could do. I wasn’t going to help her by announcing myself.”

  “We found semen at the edge of the clearing near the beach. Was it yours?”

  His eyebrows arched. “Semen? No.”

  “Did you go back to the softball field?”

  “No, I took a different trail and left the park.”

  “Did you meet anyone else? Did you see the other person you thought was in the woods?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Is that it?” Stride asked. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  “There’s nothing else.”

  Stride leaned across the small table and stared at Jones until the big man blinked uncomfortably. “You’re lying,” he said. “Why bring me all the way out here if you’re not going to tell me the whole story?”

  “Everything I’ve said is the truth,” Jones insisted.

  “The question is what you’re leaving out.”

  “What makes you think I’m leaving anything out?”

  “The girl had secrets,” Stride said. “That’s what you keep saying. I think you know something else about Laura. Something specific. I want to know what it is and why you’re covering it up. Until you tell me, you’re not getting on that plane.”

  Jones ran his tongue across his white teeth and smiled.

  “You saw something, didn’t you?” Stride asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What was it? What did you see when you found Laura on the beach?”

  “I’m not sure it will help anyone if I tell you. Least of all the girl who was killed.”

  “Let me decide that,” Stride said.

  “What I saw was innocent and beautiful. There was no violence.”

  “Tell me.”

  Jones sighed. “Laura wasn’t alone.”

  “Who was she with?”

  “I don’t know. It was no one who would have killed her. They were kissing. They were in love. You can understand why I didn’t bother intervening at that point. They didn’t want me around.”

  “What did he look like?” Stride asked. “Laura’s lover.”

  Jones shook his head. “Laura had the kind of lover you didn’t talk about back then. It wasn’t a boy, Lieutenant. It was another girl. Laura was on the beach with a blond girl about the same age. They were holding each other as if they never wanted to let go.”

  36

  Tish studied the framed photographs on the credenza in Jonathan Stride’s office in City Hall. She saw a photo of Stride with his arm around Serena, taken somewhere with a view across the Strip in Las Vegas. Beside it, she saw a picture of Cindy, with the Vancouver harbor behind her. Her hair was dark and straight. Her eyes teased the camera. Over time, Tish’s memories of Cindy had dimmed to the point where she couldn’t hear her voice in her head and couldn’t call up a picture of her face. Then a photo like this brought it all back.

  She felt her eyes misting. Behind her, she heard the noise of someone approaching, and she quickly put the photograph down, wiped her face, and pasted a smile on her lips. Stride came into the office, and she didn’t think she had fooled him. His eyes strayed to the line of photographs, and she thought they lingered on Cindy.

  He pointed at the chair in front of his desk and then took his own chair and leaned back, his jaw tight and hard. His hair was unruly, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept. Tish sat down uncomfortably. She heard the office door close and turned around to see the tiny Chinese cop, Maggie Bei, leaning against the door. She wasn’t smiling.

  “Is something wrong?” Tish asked.

  “What did you want to see me about?” Stride said.

  Tish took a deep breath. “He confessed.”

  “Who?”

  “Finn,” Tish said. “I went to see him yesterday.”

  “I thought I told you not to play cop,” Stride snapped.

  “I felt responsible for his suicide attempt. I wanted to find out why he did it. We wound up talking about Laura’s murder, and that’s when he blurted it out.”

  “Exactly what did he say?”

  “He talked about dreams he has. About seeing the blood all over her and about the bat going up and down. And then he just said it. He said it flat out. I killed her.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” Tish asked.

  “Did he use Laura’s name?” Stride asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It’s a simple question, Tish. Did Finn say he killed Laura?”

  “No, but who else would he mean?” Tish said. “What is going on?”

  “I think we’re done here,” Stride said. “Thanks for coming in.”

  Behind her, Maggie opened the office door and stood beside it.

  “We’re done? That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Are you going to arrest him?” Tish asked.

  “No.”

  “No? What more do you need? I mean, look, this isn’t what I expected. I admit that I was wrong. I was convinced Peter Stanhope was involved. But now you can match Finn’s DNA to the crime scene. He told me he was there. He told me that he killed her. This is the break we’ve needed.”

  “For your book?”

  “Not just for the book. To solve the case.”

  “The confession is useless,” Stride told her.

  “Useless? How can you say that?”

  Stride held up his hand and counted on his fingers. “One, Rikke hired a lawyer. The law says we can’t talk to Finn anymore without his lawyer present. Because I was stupid enough to talk to you about this case, a defense attorney can make a persuasive argument that you were acting as an instrument of the police in questioning Finn. Result? The confession gets tossed. Two, Finn was recently discharged from the hospital and was almost certainly under the influence of painkillers when you talked to him. So his attorneys will argue that he was not in full possession of his faculties. The confession gets tossed. Three, the fact that Finn did not use Laura’s name leaves doubt about who he was talking about. The confession gets tossed.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  Stride gestured to Maggie. “Tell her.”

  Maggie closed the door again and sat on the edge of Stride’s desk. “Serena and I did some digging into Finn’s past. His mother a
bused him. The cops think Finn snapped and bludgeoned his mother to death. With a baseball bat. They let him walk because they couldn’t prove it, and frankly, no one wanted to see him put away. Getting rid of that woman was a community service, they figured.”

  “Poor Finn,” Tish said softly.

  “You get the picture?” Maggie said. “Regardless of whether Finn said Laura’s name or not, his attorney will argue that it’s memory transference from the death of his mother. I mean, hell, he said this came to him in a dream? Who knows what his brain has concocted after years of drug and alcohol abuse?”

  “The confession gets tossed,” Stride repeated.

  Tish thought furiously. “I was there,” she insisted. “Finn wasn’t hopped up on drugs. He wasn’t talking about his mother. He was back there. In the park. With Laura.”

  “You didn’t let me continue,” Stride said. “Four, we recovered the murder weapon. The baseball bat.”

  “What?”

  “Peter Stanhope had it. Ray Wallace gave it to him as a little gift. We tested the bat, and Finn’s fingerprints are not on it.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “There are fingerprints we can’t identify, but they don’t belong to Finn,” Stride said.

  “So maybe he wore gloves.”

  “In July?”

  “What about DNA? Test the semen.”

  “Even if it matches, all that proves is that he jerked off near the murder scene.”

  “Damn it, Jonathan, he told me he killed her.”

  “Five,” Stride continued, holding up his last finger, “the confession gets tossed because the only two people who heard it are you and Finn.”

  Tish shrugged and held up her hands. “So what? What difference does that make?”

  “No one will believe you. You have no credibility.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “No one will believe you because you are a manipulative, self-serving liar.”

  Tish shot to her feet. “How dare you! What the hell are you talking about?”

  Stride stood up, too. “Don’t play games with me, Tish. I don’t appreciate it when someone twists me around her finger. I don’t appreciate it when someone toys with people who are close to me. I don’t appreciate it when someone uses me and lies to me in order to further some secret goal. What’s your motive, Tish? Why are you really here?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tish said.

  But she did. She saw it in his face. He knew.

  “I’m talking about the fact that I have one more suspect to add to the list,” Stride said. “Finn, Peter, Dada, and now you.”

  Tish looked down at his desk. She wilted back into the chair. “No, Jonathan, you’re wrong.”

  “I found Dada. Or rather, he found me. He told me that he followed Laura to the beach that night.”

  “It’s not what you think,” she said.

  “He saw you, Tish. He saw you and Laura together. You were there.”

  37

  Stride waited for her to deny it, but she didn’t.

  “Okay, you’re right,” Tish said, looking like a flower that had been left out of water. “Yes, I was there that night. I should have told you long before now, but I never wanted anyone to know. It was private. It was something for me and her. But you can’t possibly believe I would ever harm her. I loved her.”

  His voice was hoarse with anger. “You’ve lied to me over and over. You lied about where you were that night and what you were doing. You lied about remembering the fight between you and Laura. You were at the crime scene when Laura was murdered, and you never said a word about what you saw. You’ve deceived me from the outset.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve irreparably compromised this investigation.”

  “Without me, there would be no investigation,” Tish reminded him. “I’m the only reason anyone cares. If I made mistakes, they weren’t with any malice. You have to understand-”

  Stride sliced the air with his hand, cutting her off. She stared at him, scared and silent. Maggie studied the floor with her arms folded. He shoved his chair back and paced in the small space of the office, wrestling with his fury. He stared at the photographs on his credenza.

  “Did Cindy know you were there?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Tish admitted.

  “That’s why she wanted you to do the book, isn’t it? That’s why she went to you, not me.”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. He felt as if he now had to question all the years they had spent together. His wife had lied to him and kept secrets from him. He wasn’t just angry at Tish. He was angry at Cindy, too.

  “Start at the beginning,” Stride told her. “Tell me everything.”

  Tish took a slow breath. “It was a different world. You know that.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning there were things you didn’t talk about. Not to anyone. Look, it’s hard enough being a gay teenager today, even when most schools have resources and counselors. All you want to do is fit in, and you don’t. Back then, it was a secret you kept to save your life. I struggled with it, but at least I knew who I was. It was much harder for Laura. She resisted. She was scared. She was desperate to be normal.”

  “Did Laura know you were gay?” Maggie asked.

  Tish’s fingers twitched. Stride knew she was desperate for a cigarette.

  “Not at first,” she said. “We were just friends. I was attracted to her, but I didn’t do anything about it for months, because I didn’t know how Laura felt, and I didn’t want to scare her off. I mean, on some level, I was pretty sure she felt the way I did, but she was so deep in the closet that she wasn’t ready to admit it to herself. A lot of people never do.”

  “At some point you told her,” Stride concluded.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what the fight was about?” he guessed. “Is that what split you up?”

  “Yes,” Tish acknowledged. “Things were changing between us. We were touching more. It was casual, but it meant something. We’d do homework on her bed, and we’d drape our legs over each other and sort of idly caress and pretend it was nothing. We’d give each other massages after we went running. We’d sleep together, not doing anything, but sharing the same bed. It was like we were circling each other, groping toward both of us admitting what was going on.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Laura was getting very anxious about her feelings,” Tish said. “She started going out on dates with boys. Like she was trying to convince herself she was straight. I didn’t like it. I was really upset and jealous, but I didn’t let on. Most of the dates were disasters. She froze up. Peter Stanhope was the worst. He kept pressuring her for sex, and Laura didn’t want that at all, but she didn’t really understand why. It came to a point where I couldn’t stand by and do nothing. I loved her too much, and I was sure she loved me. So finally, in May of our senior year, I suggested we go camping on a Saturday night. It was just the two of us. We shared a sleeping bag, and we were talking and laughing, and my heart was just aching for her. I don’t even remember how it happened, but I kissed her. She kissed me back. Romantic kisses, not like friends. I told her I loved her. And things- happened.”

  “What went wrong?” Maggie asked.

  “It was a mistake. We went too far, too fast. Laura wasn’t ready to accept that she was gay. She rebelled against it. She rebelled against me. The next day, she hardly said a word to me. She began avoiding me. She was never home. She just shut me out of her life. I was devastated.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I had never felt so totally alone. When school was over, I ran away. I moved down to the Cities, and I tried to forget about Laura, but I couldn’t. I was still completely in love with her.”

  “Did you contact her?”

  “Yes, I wrote to her and told her where I was. I told her I was sorry. I asked if we could just be friends, nothing else,
nothing physical. That wasn’t what I wanted, and I was kidding myself to think I could be around her at that point without needing to be with her. But I would have done anything to have her back in my life.”

  “Did Laura write back?”

  “Yes. A few days later, she sent me this long, long letter. About how scared she had been. About how ashamed she was for running away from me. She said she had finally accepted the truth about who she was, and she loved me and wanted to be with me. I don’t have to tell you, I was over the moon. Ecstatic. This was going to be the real deal, our whole lives. Sure, we were naive. We were teenagers. But I’ve never loved anyone like that, ever again.”

  “Tell us about the night in the park,” Stride said.

  Tish closed her eyes. “I try not to think about that night. I’ve pushed it out of my mind.”

  “You have to tell us.”

  “It’s too awful. It was the best night of my life, and then just like that, it became the worst night of my life. I couldn’t believe God would be so cruel. So heartless.”

  “What happened?” Stride asked.

  “Laura and I talked on the phone every night. We made plans to run away. I had an old car, so I told her I would come up to Duluth and meet her. She picked July 4. She said it was her independence day. We said we’d meet on the north beach. It was going to be magical.” Tish gave a sad smile. “For a little while, it was.”

  “She found you there?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes, I came early to wait for her. She came running out of the trees. She told me what had happened in the field, that someone had attacked her. I knew all about the person who had been stalking her, and I knew how scared she was. I thought we should leave right away, but Laura didn’t want to go back into the woods yet. So we waited. And the longer we were there, the more we forgot about anything else, because we were so happy to be together again. I can’t remember how many times we said we loved each other. Being there on the beach, in the wake of the storm, was like a cocoon. We kissed. We made love. We fell asleep for a little while in the sand in each other’s arms. We never wanted to leave.”

  Stride remembered being on the opposite side of the lake on that same night, with Cindy, and feeling the same way.