‘What do we know about Esther Rose?’ Stride asked.
‘She and Ira have a place on the North Shore. Expensive. Ira was an IP attorney in the Twin Cities, so he made a bundle. Driver’s license record shows a very proper-looking sixty-year-old lady.’
‘Not exactly your typical gun-toting killer, but I’ll talk to her,’ Stride said.
‘You might want to bring backup. Those grandmother types can surprise you.’
Stride smiled and crushed his cigarette under his foot. ‘Dan Erickson called today.’
‘Lucky you,’ Maggie said.
Dan Erickson was the St. Louis County attorney. He hadn’t been in the job long, but he’d already contracted the disease most common to county prosecutors. Ambition. Dan was politically hungry, and he saw the county attorney’s job as a stepping-stone to higher office in Minnesota. He had the suave looks of a politician – blond hair sprayed into place, dark suits and shined shoes, a Florida tan even in February. He was smooth and effective in front of juries, but Stride didn’t trust him. Dan saw every trial through the lens of how a win or loss would affect his career.
A trial for Janine Snow would be a media circus. Putting her in prison would be a publicity boon for Dan all over the state.
‘He wanted to know if we were any closer to making a case against Janine,’ Stride said.
‘What did you tell him?’
Stride shrugged. ‘Thanks to Clyde, we can put a gun in Jay’s hands. And the fact that we haven’t found Jay’s gun is bound to leave a jury wondering where it is. After all, if his gun wasn’t the murder weapon, it should have been in his house or in his truck, right?’
‘That must have made Dan happy.’
‘It did. It’s also obvious that Janine’s relationship with Jay was on the rocks. According to Clyde, Janine wanted a divorce, but Jay didn’t. So a jury might believe that she didn’t see a way out other than murder.’
‘Guppo dug up a couple more tidbits about them,’ Maggie added. ‘He’s been interviewing Jay’s friends. One of them told him that last summer, Janine got fed up with Jay’s extravagant spending. She cut him off. Shut down his credit cards without telling him. Jay was eating dinner at a downtown restaurant on July 3, and his card came back declined. There were local heavy hitters around who saw the whole thing. Jay was humiliated. And furious.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Yeah, it’s weird, though. Janine turned the credit cards back on a couple weeks later. After that, Guppo says Jay spent even more than he did before. And here’s another thing. We went through their phone records. Last December, right after Thanksgiving, Jay put in a call to an attorney at the Stanhope law firm downtown. A woman named Tamara Fellowes.’
‘What’s her practice area?’ Stride asked.
‘Family law. Including divorce.’
‘Did you talk to her?’
‘Yeah, but she’s a lawyer. She wouldn’t tell me anything.’
Stride shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Clyde insisted that Jay didn’t want a divorce. He says Janine offered to pay him off, but Jay said no.’
‘Maybe he changed his mind.’
‘Maybe, but if he did, there’s no reason for Janine to kill him,’ Stride said. He shook his head, pulled out the pack of cigarettes, but then returned it to his pocket without taking another one. ‘I’m convinced she killed him, Mags, but none of this makes any sense. What the hell was really going on between those two?’
*
Janine made sure she wasn’t being followed as she left the hospital.
She turned left out of the parking ramp in her Mercedes. She eyed her mirror, looking for headlights behind her, but she didn’t see anyone. It was dark, after ten o’clock. She headed for downtown, past the city’s old buildings. The Union Gospel Mission. Antique and pawn shops. Liquor stores. A Cantonese restaurant. The brick-lined streets were slick with fresh snow. On the side streets, cars nudged their way up and down the steep hills.
At Sammy’s Pizza, in the middle of downtown, she turned right. That wasn’t the direction she wanted to go, but she checked to see if anyone turned behind her. No one did. She coasted around the next corner, still watching the mirror, and then she parked and waited with her engine running. Paranoia.
No one showed up. She was alone.
Janine retraced her route to 1st Street. She continued several more blocks, then turned downhill to Michigan Street, which was more industrial than the rest of downtown. She pulled into a deserted bank parking lot and took the ramp to the open-air roof, where she parked in a corner.
She got out. Despite the darkness, big sunglasses covered much of her face. A scarf was wrapped around her chin, and she pulled the fur-lined hood of her winter coat low on her forehead. She didn’t look any different from other Minnesotans bundled against the cold, so no one would recognize her. These days, people stared at her wherever she went. She was that woman from the TV news.
The woman who shot her husband.
On the street, Janine limped in the snow. She wore calf-length black boots. Her head was down, and her hands were in her pockets. The spasms in her leg reminded her of the fall she’d taken the previous winter, in which her ankle had broken and the tendons torn. She would never lose the slight limp that dogged her steps.
She crossed under the skywalk that led to the convention center and checked the street again. When she was convinced that she wasn’t being watched, she crossed to an unmarked black steel door on a four-story brick building. Using a loose key, she opened the heavy door and let herself inside. The interior smelled of paint and dust. There was no elevator, just stairs. She climbed to the uppermost floor and pushed through another door into a carpeted hallway. She took two steps to an unmarked apartment and used another key to open it. She slipped inside and closed the door firmly behind her. The pain in her ankle was excruciating.
Janine began to breathe again. She went to the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of wine. She took it back to the living room, where the windows faced the lake. Light and snow swept the glass. In three long swallows, she finished the wine. She went to the bathroom and then returned for more. She settled into a white armchair and closed her eyes.
It had been days since she’d been here. Her getaway. She hadn’t wanted to take the chance when someone might be following her. Part of her knew the smart thing was to stay away forever, but she couldn’t. The need to be here drew her back irresistibly. Especially now. The apartment was small, clean, elegant. It wasn’t big, but she didn’t need size. She simply needed a place that no one knew about. Not Jay. Not anyone. The deed to the condo was in the name of a shell company. The correspondence went to a drop box. Only one other person knew about it, and he had no incentive to admit it to anyone.
Janine smiled as she relaxed. She hadn’t smiled in days. And then she laughed. And then she cried. Life was a crazy, crazy business. She had no illusions that she could hide from the truth forever.
She thought about Texas. Hot, backward, wonderful, awful Texas. Twenty years ago, she’d been a teenager living outside Austin, serving drinks at a country bar to save money for college. Her first husband Donny, who was no older than she was, had looked down her blouse and fallen in love. He wasn’t particularly handsome, but he was as hard-working and loyal as a puppy. Donny adored her. She felt bad that, for herself, he was mostly a stepping-stone on her way to somewhere else. The things he wanted – a horse ranch, three kids, vacations in Orlando – simply weren’t part of her DNA. Five years later, Donny was gone with a broken heart, and Lionel took his place.
Lionel was an entrepreneur with a pot of venture capital to pay for Janine’s medical school. They were clear from day one about what they needed from each other. Lionel got a sexy, intelligent wife who could wow his board. She became an MD without a dime of debt. Who else could say that?
There was little emotion be
tween them, but Lionel understood her dreams better than most. He was the same way about his med-tech start-up. Most people didn’t have passion like that – something that consumed them and ate up every waking hour and left nothing in its place. From the time she had been a little girl, Janine Snow had been focused on only one thing. Being a doctor. Being the best surgeon that any human being had ever been. Saving lives.
And she did it.
But the price was giving up a normal life.
She spent two hours alone in the condominium above Michigan Street. Two blissful hours in absolute silence. That was what she needed. When she finally left, she was singing quietly to herself, and the shake had disappeared from her hands. The pain in her ankle was gone. Her confidence was back. She could do anything, defeat anyone, win any battle. After the dark days since Jay’s death, when she had felt nothing but despair, she was floating on air again, and she believed for a moment that she might not lose everything. She could almost see a future for herself through the storm.
Her Mercedes was where she had left it, on the top floor of the ramp. Flurries blew around it. A streetlight cast shadows. It was a pretty night. She walked with a lightness in her heart, breathing in the cold air, until she realized that someone was waiting for her.
A man appeared near her car and walked toward her. Janine froze.
‘Don’t worry, Dr. Snow,’ he called.
She didn’t move. She had no weapon and no rape alarm, and even if she did she couldn’t afford to use them. Not when it meant answering questions. Such as what she was doing downtown at that time of night.
The man seemed to know her dilemma.
‘I just want to talk to you,’ he said. He stopped ten feet away with his gloved hands in the air.
‘Who are you?’
‘My name’s Melvin Wiley.’
‘What do you want?’
‘It’s pretty cold out here,’ Wiley said in a reedy voice that was hard to hear above the wind. ‘Would you prefer to talk in your car?’
‘We’ll talk right here. If we talk at all.’
Wiley shrugged, but he wasn’t put off. He was the kind of man who didn’t get noticed in a crowd. You could pass him at the grocery store and not remember he’d been there. He wasn’t short; he wasn’t tall. He wasn’t fat or thin. He had windblown brown hair with a high forehead and a bushy mustache. He had metal glasses that could have been worn by any man on the street. He wore chocolate-brown corduroys, old sneakers, and a blue down coat that he kept half-zipped. Underneath was a flannel shirt. She decided he was in his forties.
‘What do you want?’ Janine repeated.
‘I knew your husband,’ Wiley said. ‘I did some work for Jay.’
‘What kind of work?’
‘You sure you wouldn’t be happier in your car?’ he asked.
Janine said nothing. She waited.
‘People like Jay come to me when they have questions,’ Wiley said.
‘Questions?’
‘Yeah. Typically, the question is, who’s been banging my wife?’
Janine felt the shiver in her body from her feet to her neck. ‘You’re a private detective.’
‘I call it matrimonial research. That’s funny, don’t you think? You have to have a sense of humor for this job. I used to work for the Department of Revenue, but I wanted a career where I could feel good about myself.’
He laughed at his own joke. Janine’s face was dead.
‘Most people are easy targets,’ Wiley went on. ‘You follow them for a day or two, and there they are, kissing outside the motel room or in the car. Stupid. You’re much better. Really, that’s a compliment. You were pretty good at shaking a tail for a doc. I bet it was a month before I found the place across the street. Even when I did, it looked like you were always alone. Smart, you going in the back while he went in from the front. Very smart. So I had to get creative. I put a camera in the air vent in your bedroom. That new HD technology is expensive but amazing. Once I had that in place, things got interesting.’
Janine took two steps and slapped him hard across the face. He took it without flinching and rubbed the red welt she left behind. She didn’t think it was the first time he’d been slapped.
‘Got that out of your system?’ Wiley asked. He dug in the pocket of his coat and pulled out a manila envelope. ‘Here, take a look, these are your greatest hits. I printed stills, but I’ve got video, too.’
Janine opened the envelope and slid out one page. She recognized her own bare skin. And her lover’s. The closed eyes on her face. His naked back and her legs wrapped around him.
‘You’re disgusting,’ she snapped. ‘What do you want? Money?’
‘Well, I’m feeling a little torn here, Dr. Snow. I showed Jay what I got with my camera inside your little love nest. Since the police didn’t find it, I’m guessing he destroyed what I gave him. Or maybe you did, who knows. Anyway, I figure it’s my civic duty to do something with this. Jay’s dead. I should really hand everything I found over to the police, you know? Or heck, if I was a mercenary kind of guy, I might sell it. There are tabloids that would pay big bucks for this kind of thing.’
‘How much do you want?’ Janine asked. Her voice was drained of life.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement. You might want to put me on retainer. A monthly stipend to do research for you. You’d be surprised how handy it can be to have a detective on the payroll.’
‘I’m leaving,’ Janine said.
‘Sure. No problem. Take the envelope with you. I’ve got more where those came from.’ Wiley reached into his pants and slid out a business card. ‘You think about it, Dr. Snow, and then you give me a call, okay? We’ll work something out.’
She said nothing.
Wiley strolled away, disappearing in a cloud of snow. She heard his footsteps descending the ramp. She was alone again. The lightness in her soul had turned to lead, dragging her back into a black hole. Twenty years had passed since she was a Texas blond, dreaming that she would make something of herself. Twenty years, and nothing in between seemed to matter at all.
9
Cindy slipped out of bed after midnight. Her skin was moist with sweat, and she shivered, because the house was as cold as a drafty barn. Jonny slept heavily, with a bare leg outside the blankets. He always slept like the dead after they made love. Normally, she did, too, but not tonight. She felt restless, but she wasn’t sure why.
She went to her closet and grabbed a robe, which she pulled around her naked body. Her long black hair was a mess. She padded in her little bare feet to the kitchen and switched on the light over the sink. Quietly, she unloaded the dishwasher, pushing up on tiptoes to reach some of the cabinets. There was something about an empty dishwasher that gave her a feeling of accomplishment.
She sat down at their small kitchen table. Reaching over to the counter, she turned on the radio to the Duluth MPR station and listened to classical music at a volume barely louder than a whisper. It was something dreamy and soft. She listened to it along with the persistent ticking of the clock over the refrigerator.
Jonny’s old leather jacket was draped over one of the chairs. She shook her head with a smile. She’d teased him for years about getting rid of it, but Jonny never gave up anything from the past. She saw the bullet hole in the sleeve. She still remembered the night when Jonny’s mentor, a cop named Ray Wallace, had shot himself in a North Woods cabin rather than face corruption charges. Ray had shot Jonny before putting the gun in his own mouth. She remembered the call from the hospital. Remembered her husband’s ashen face. Those were the calls you feared when you were married to a cop. You woke up every morning, and you wondered if this would be the night you went to bed alone and in tears.
It was hard to imagine her life without him. And yet she lived with that perpetual shadow.
He’d
brought home papers with him from the Detective Bureau. Documents. Files. Evidence. He usually did. He’d intended to work through the evening, but she’d interrupted his good intentions by straddling his lap. From there, they went to bed, and he never left. The evidence in Jay’s murder investigation was spread all over the table, and although she didn’t usually pry – well, who was she kidding? She pried all the time.
Cindy grabbed the top-most paper and turned it over. It was a photograph, taken somewhere in the Duluth woods. The picture showed the figure of a man, blurry because of the distance. He was young, scrawny, tatted, in camouflage, holding what appeared to be an assault rifle. In the first picture, he was in profile, but when she grabbed another page, she saw his eyes. She couldn’t really see details in his face, but his eyes reminded her of a shark’s. Utterly empty. Not ferocious like a wolf on the hunt. Eyes devoid of life. Eyes that saw nothing but the gray darkness of the water.
Jonny had written on a Post-it note on one of the pictures: Who is this guy?
And on another: Find him.
Cindy turned the photos face-down again. She didn’t want to stare at them anymore. Something about the man’s face left her with a hollow pit of anxiety in her stomach.
She got up from the table. She went to the hall closet and retrieved her heavy winter coat and her furry boots. She retreated to the porch at the back of the house and let herself out through the rear door. Their backyard was really nothing but a sand dune. She pushed through snow and rye grass, climbing to the top of the slope and then down to the beach by the great lake.
The city glowed on her left. White lights marked the buildings, and red lights blinked on the antenna farm high on the hillside. At her feet were boot prints, the tracks of dogs, and the parallel rails where cross-country skis had slid up and down the snow-covered shore. The lake was loud, but it was invisible behind a wall of ice taller than she was. Each winter the waves built a mountain range. It made the lake scary, because she couldn’t see it. Somehow, with every bellow of thunder, she expected a tsunami to crest the wall and wash her away.
Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) Page 7