Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

by Brian Freeman

  ‘So you’ve got a big mansion up on the hill,’ she said, when Stride joined her. ‘Why do you buy a one-bedroom condo like this?’

  ‘Sounds like the bedroom got a lot of use,’ Stride said.

  ‘Well, yeah, it’s a nice love nest. She’s got a Tempur-Pedic mattress in there. Pretty good for rocking and rolling.’

  ‘Why didn’t we find out about this place before now?’ Stride asked.

  ‘Janine set up a corporate entity for lab referrals. Medicare reimbursement crap. The ownership is under the business name. There’s nothing to tie it to her. She hasn’t had the place long. Just since late July. You think she stashed the gun and jewels here that night?’

  ‘It would have been easy and fast,’ Stride said, ‘and it would have bought her time to get rid of them.’

  ‘Well, we haven’t found anything so far. No gun. No blood. Maybe this is just what Nathan said it was. Somewhere to unwind after surgery. No work, no papers, no husband. Nice bed when you want to bang an ex-cop.’

  Stride shook his head. ‘No, we’re missing something. There’s something else here.’

  ‘You sound pretty sure.’

  He looked around the apartment, but the walls gave up no secrets. ‘I know Janine, and I know Archie. If there wasn’t anything to find here, they would have told us about it weeks ago. Janine kept it hidden. This place is more than a love nest.’

  He realized that the private detective, as nauseating as he was, might have more answers. He returned to the hallway and interrupted the conversation between Wiley and Dan Erickson.

  ‘Hey, Wiley, when you met Dr. Snow in the parking lot across the street, did she say why she was here?’ Stride asked the detective.

  Wiley shrugged. ‘No.’

  ‘How did you find her? Did you follow her?’

  ‘I didn’t need to. She comes here a lot. Few times a week, for sure. All I had to do was wait.’

  Stride remembered what Nathan Skinner had told him. Janine was a busy woman. They only met for sex a couple times a month. And yet she was here in her secret condominium regularly.

  ‘When did you remove your camera from the bedroom?’ Stride asked.

  ‘Thanksgiving Day. After I reported what I found to Jay, he shut down the investigation. He had what he wanted, and I needed my equipment back. Holidays are good for that sort of thing. Nobody’s around to see what you’re doing.’

  ‘You must have captured video of Dr. Snow when she was here alone,’ Stride said. ‘Not just with Nathan Skinner.’

  ‘Sure. All the time.’

  ‘Was there anything unusual about the rest of the videos?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. She wasn’t in the bedroom much when Skinner wasn’t around. Jay asked me the same thing, though.’

  Stride looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘Jay wanted to see videos of his wife when she was alone,’ Wiley said.

  ‘Did he say why? Or what he was looking for?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Did you show him?’ Stride asked.

  ‘Yeah, we watched videos for another hour or so. It was just her alone.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ the detective said. ‘She came into the bedroom, had a big glass of wine with her. Undressed down to her birthday suit. She left the room and probably showered, because her hair was wet when she came back. She put on music, danced a little, took a pill, read a book on the bed for a while. That’s it.’

  ‘That was what Jay saw?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What did he do next?’

  ‘He thanked me and gave me a fat bonus. End of contract. For a guy who’d just figured out he was being cuckolded, he seemed in better spirits by the time we were done. I think I even mentioned it to him. I said, hey, aren’t you mad?’

  ‘What did Jay say?’

  ‘He laughed. He said, “I don’t get mad, Melvin, I get even.”’

  Stride returned to the apartment, which seemed to be the epicenter of all the problems between Jay and Janine. He ran his hands through his black hair and left his fingers laced on the back of his head. He wanted a cigarette.

  ‘July,’ he said to Maggie. ‘Janine bought this place in late July, right? What was going on between her and Jay that month?’

  Maggie grabbed the answer from her perfect memory. ‘She turned off the spigot on Jay’s credit cards right before the Fourth.’

  ‘And then turned it back on a couple weeks later,’ Stride said.

  ‘Yeah, so? What does that have to do with the condo?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  Stride dug in his pocket and snapped on gloves. He crossed the room and went into Janine’s bedroom, where Guppo was leading the search. He saw that his team had removed the face plate of the vent on the wall, exposing the area where Melvin Wiley had placed his spy camera. The location gave a perfect vantage on the bed.

  He thought about Janine spending time here alone several times a week. He saw the contents of Janine’s nightstand spread on plastic sheeting across the bed, and he examined the items, seeing nothing unusual. Tissues. Condoms. Makeup. A few jewelry items that didn’t match what had been taken from the house. Compact discs of Celtic music by Clannad. A Texas romance by Lorraine Heath. Nothing medical at all.

  In this place, Stride realized, she wasn’t a doctor.

  He went into the adjoining bathroom. At her mansion on the hill, Janine’s bathroom was her spa and temple, a place to escape. Not here. It was clean but small, with a toilet, medicine cabinet, sink, built-in closet, and a combination tub and shower. He checked the closet, which contained luxury bath towels and shower supplies from L’Occitane. Inside the medicine cabinet, he found a toothbrush, toothpaste, and over-the-counter medications for stomach disorders.

  Nothing special.

  And then Stride noticed the paint on the wall.

  The medicine cabinet was framed by four panels of oak trim. In two places beside the right-most panel, he saw faint scratches on the white paint. They were the kind of scratches fingernails would make. With his gloved hand, he pushed against the plasterboard and nudged one finger against the piece of oak trim.

  It popped off the wall.

  Beneath the trim was a set of hinges.

  ‘Mags,’ he called.

  She joined him in the small bathroom and whistled when she saw the hinges. Stride checked the oak trim on the opposite side of the medicine cabinet and removed the corresponding panel. Beneath it, the fringe of the cabinet was fitted into a steel rod that held it firmly in place against the wall. Two small fingerholds allowed someone to detach the entire cabinet from the rod and swing it on the hinges.

  He removed the other two panels of oak trim. Without touching the finger-holds – they’d need to dust those for prints – he pried the medicine cabinet away from the steel rod, and it opened to reveal a small compartment built into the sheetrock.

  ‘Whoa,’ Maggie said.

  Stride shook his head. The truth never made him happy, because the truth of human nature was usually dark. ‘That’s why she killed Jay,’ he said.

  18

  Stride found Janine in her surgical office at St. Anne’s. The window behind her desk faced the expanse of Lake Superior. Wherever she went, she had a view. Her home, her condominium, and her office all looked out on the lake. He wondered whether she was even conscious of it being there day after day in all its changeable glory.

  Janine waved him to a chair in front of her desk, but she wasn’t happy to see him. He could see an enlarged CT scan on the computer monitor in front of her, and she was reviewing a patient’s file. Her pretty face was intense, her normally lush blond hair tied back behind her head. This was what she did. She was a surgeon, and he was interrupting her.

  ‘It’s not a good time, Lieut
enant,’ Janine snapped. ‘I can’t afford the distraction. I have a delicate operation this afternoon.’

  ‘I know.’

  Her eyebrows flickered with annoyance. ‘Excuse me? You know?’

  ‘I checked your schedule.’

  In the blink of an eye, her mind ran through calculations. He watched concern mingle with curiosity. ‘You should run anything you need by Archie. If you have questions, talk to him, not me. You know how it works.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘So if you’ll excuse me, Lieutenant?’ she asked sharply.

  Stride didn’t get up from the chair. He felt sadness that it had come to this. Dismantling anyone’s life was a task he hated, even when he had no choice. ‘This is a unique situation, Janine. I don’t have time to get a court order, so I’m relying on you to do the right thing.’

  ‘And what do you mean by that?’ she asked.

  ‘Cancel the surgery,’ Stride told her.

  ‘Cancel it? Jonathan, I’ve been patient with you because of Cindy, but maybe you don’t realize who I am or what I do here. I don’t perform elective surgery that can be squeezed in between vacations and golf games. A man’s life is at stake. Days count. Minutes count.’

  ‘Yes, I know. That’s why I’d like this to happen without confrontation. I don’t want to alarm a patient or a patient’s family by talking to them myself, but I will if necessary.’

  ‘And say what? What’s going on? Are you planning to arrest me?’

  ‘We don’t have a formal arrest warrant yet,’ he acknowledged, ‘but it’s in process. We’ll be working with Mr. Gale on a time for you to surrender yourself. However, this decision won’t wait. You need to cancel all of the surgeries on your calendar.’

  ‘Well, unless you plan to haul me out of the hospital in cuffs, I don’t see why—’

  ‘Please, Janine,’ he interrupted her. ‘Don’t make this harder on yourself or your patients. You know why.’

  He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and removed an evidence bag that he placed on the impeccably neat desk in front of her.

  No bluff.

  Her eyes saw it, and her eyes closed. The evidence bag contained a prescription bottle of the painkiller Vicodin.

  ‘I’m sure you know where we found this,’ Stride told her. ‘This and about fifteen other bottles of Vicodin, Percocet, and Oxycontin. You’re hooked on pain pills, Dr. Snow. I can’t let you in an operating room.’

  Janine said nothing.

  She knew there was no point in protesting or denying. She knew whose fingerprints they would find all over the bottles. If she’d had the strength, she would have disposed of them weeks ago, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  ‘You may find it surprising, but doctors aren’t supermen or superwomen,’ Janine told him. ‘We’re human. After I broke my ankle last winter, I needed pain medication. I figured I could manage the risks, because I knew more about them than anyone. I was naive. By the time I realized it, it was too late.’

  She reached to pick up the bag, and Stride pulled it away.

  ‘I’m clean today,’ she added. ‘I always make sure I’m clean before I walk into the OR. It’s my rule.’

  ‘That hardly matters, even if it’s true.’

  She shrugged. He was right, and she knew it. ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘What about Ira Rose? The patient who died?’

  ‘I was clean then, too,’ she insisted. ‘My problem had nothing to do with his death. Not that anyone will care.’

  Janine was a realist about what came next. The fact of her addiction was enough to cost her everything she had. No doubt she’d lied on her malpractice insurance application, and the policy would be voided. The judgment in litigation over Ira’s death would cost her millions. Her fortune. Her house. Her license to practice medicine would soon be gone.

  Everything she lived for – gone.

  ‘Jay knew,’ Stride said. ‘He threatened to expose your addiction, right? That’s what he held over your head.’

  She didn’t answer. Her mental calculations had already shifted to the next battle of her life. Her career was over; now all that remained was guilt or innocence in a murder trial. She wouldn’t make his job easier.

  ‘You visited pharmacies all over the northland,’ he went on, ‘but the patient name on the prescriptions was the same. Holly Jorgenson. Holly. That was the name of the drug addict in Jay’s column last July. It was a threat against you, wasn’t it? A very public threat. You shut off his credit cards, and that was Jay’s way of letting you know that if you didn’t turn the money spigot on again, he’d expose your secret to the world.’

  ‘Jay,’ she said, and he could hear the depth of bitterness in her voice.

  ‘That’s when you bought the condo, too,’ Stride said. ‘Did you tell Jay you were quitting the pills? Instead, you just took your addiction underground. You found a way to keep it hidden from him.’

  She didn’t break down. She didn’t cry. There were very few tears in Janine Snow.

  ‘What about Thanksgiving?’ he asked. ‘Jay hired Melvin Wiley to follow you, but was he even thinking about an affair? Or did he suspect you were still using pills, and he wanted proof? I’m curious, what exactly did Jay say when he confronted you? Did he call his friend Tamara Fellowes at the Stanhope law firm and say that he was prepared to offer damaging information in Esther Rose’s lawsuit? Did he threaten to destroy your whole life if you didn’t give up the affair with Nathan Skinner? And what else? Did he want a slave, Janine? Did you finally realize there was no way out with Jay except to see him dead?’

  Her voice was low but calm. ‘It must be so nice to be perfect, Jonathan.’

  ‘I’m certainly not that. I’m sympathetic to your situation, Janine, but you have to make some hard choices. It’s time for you to talk to Archie about a plea. If you and Jay argued that night, if you lost control and shot him, then you’re better off admitting it. This crazy story about someone coming into the house won’t fly.’

  ‘I never lose control,’ she replied, ‘and I didn’t shoot Jay.’

  ‘No one’s going to believe you. Archie won’t be able to sell that to a jury. Were you on the pills that night? Is that why you had to stop the car with Cindy and throw up?’

  Janine picked up her office phone, as if he weren’t there. She’d already dismissed him. ‘Patty, what room is Mr. Fernandez in?’ she asked her assistant. ‘I need to speak to him and his family about the surgery today. I’m afraid we have to cancel it. And get Archie Gale on the phone for me, will you? Tell him I need to see him immediately. I’m going to be arrested soon.’

  *

  Howard Marlowe pulled into his driveway at the end of the school day.

  They were talking about the 1960s in his ninth grade Civil Rights class. Unrest. Riots. The assassination of JFK and then the Civil Rights Act of the following year. Kennedy was Howard’s hero. He wished he’d been born earlier, so he could have been alive when Kennedy was president. That was an era when people could still make a difference.

  As he got out of his car, his head was still reeling from the comment one of his students had made. Howard had shown them headlines from the day after Kennedy’s death, and one of the fourteen-year-old girls had raised her hand and asked, ‘Why was it such a big deal?’

  Someone took a rifle and killed the President of the United States.

  No big deal.

  He’d never felt so impotent and purposeless in life. He was absolutely certain that he was making no difference whatsoever with his stay on the planet. In a black mood, he grabbed the mail from the box at the end of the driveway, brought it inside, and sat down at the kitchen table. Carol was home, making dinner. Baked chicken and broccoli, because it was Monday. She whistled along to a pop song by Kelly Clarkson, as if it were a wonderful day. The anger of the break-in was b
ehind her now.

  Everything in their lives was back to normal, which was exactly what Carol wanted. Everything was the way it had always been and the way it would always be.

  It made him want to scream.

  ‘What’s in the mail?’ Carol asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Howard picked at the letters and magazines in front of him. A credit card bill from Kohl’s. A copy of People magazine. Carol liked to read it. A flier about recycling and trash collection. A brochure with coupons from the local restaurants. Five dollars off at Pizza Hut. They’d use that one.

  He pulled an official-looking envelope out from the pile. It was addressed to him from the Duluth District Court of St. Louis County.

  ‘What’s that?’ his wife asked from the sink.

  Howard was curious, and he unfolded the official letter inside. ‘It’s a summons,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  He read the notice at the top of the page.

  You are hereby notified that you have been selected to serve as a trial juror in the County District Court.

  19

  Summer came.

  In Duluth, people sometimes wondered if the ice would never melt and if the trees would stay bare skeletons forever. Spring was often no spring, just cold gray days of mud and rain. However, even Duluth seasons eventually had to bow to the calendar, and by mid-year, the city became a paradise. The months spent as nothing but a cold nowhere were forgiven and forgotten. Lake Superior shimmered, a vast sapphire sea, catching dots of ­sunlight on each wave. Blue skies met green hills. Waterfalls surged and played through the cataract down Seven Bridges Road. Tourists swarmed Canal Park, and swimmers ran through the surf and wet sand stretching along the Point. Sea brine and popcorn perfumed the air.

  Thousands of runners crowded the city for Grandma’s Mara­thon. A different festival filled up each weekend. Reggae and Blues. Tall Ships. The Blue Angels. Music floated out of the open doors of bars and clubs.