The Cold Nowhere (35 page)

She exited I-35W near the Metrodome and made her way east to the Seven Corners area. This was her old stomping-ground. She’d spent her college years at the University of Minnesota, where she was a Chinese exchange student majoring in criminology. As she drove, everything on the street reminded her of those years. The students on the sidewalks looked exactly like her, except for their cell phones and iPads. Crazed Minneapolis bicyclists still did fearless battle with the cars. She saw pro-Palestinian graffiti on the brick wall of an apartment building – different era, same politics. She passed a 24-hour greasy spoon where she’d spent hundreds of hours gobbling up American hamburgers with her nose buried in her books.

She never partied back then. She never drank. She didn’t have sex. She just studied. She would have had more fun if she’d gone to school now.

Maggie found a parking place in front of a Chinese restaurant near 19th and Riverside. The parole officer for Djemilah Jordan had told her that Fong Dao’s ex-girlfriend was now a hostess at the Lucky Pearl, and it looked like the girl had gone clean after
her stint in prison. Maggie got out and plugged the meter. The drab concrete towers of the Riverside Plaza loomed behind the low roofs of the retail strip. She smelled stir-fried beef through the vents of the restaurant, and it smelled good. She realized she was hungry.

Inside the restaurant, most of the tables were empty, except for a couple students hanging out over cold tea. It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. A black woman of about thirty, with beaded hair and a nose ring, looked up from an accounting textbook.

‘Table for one?’ the woman asked, smiling behind thick lips. She was tall and bony, and she wore a Lucky Pearl T-shirt and drainpipe orange corduroys.

‘Yeah. Way in the back, okay?’

‘Sure.’

The woman led her to a table in a dark, deserted section of the restaurant, near the door to the kitchen. Maggie felt warm steam and heard Asian voices chattering behind the swinging doors. There were fake gold masks hanging on the walls and cheaply framed posters of Tiananmen Square.

Maggie waved away the menu. ‘Give me some salt and pepper chicken wings. Do you do shrimpcake with baby bok choi?’

‘Uh huh. It’s real good.’

‘That’s what I want.’

‘You’re easy,’ the woman said, smiling.

‘I get that a lot. So are you Djemilah Jordan?’

The woman’s smile vanished. ‘Cop?’

Maggie flipped the lapel of her leather jacket to reveal her badge. ‘Duluth.’

‘Duluth? I ain’t been there in years.’

‘I know. I’ve got some questions that go way back.’

‘I’m straight now. I’m in college.’

‘So I hear. Good for you. I still have questions. Your parole
officer assured me you would be a model of cooperation.’

‘About what?’

‘First, chicken wings,’ Maggie said. ‘I’m starving.’

Djemilah disappeared behind the doors of the kitchen. She returned five minutes later with a plate of salt-and-pepper wings, steaming hot, with chunks of chopped jalapeno and pepper flakes clinging to the crispy skin. Maggie disassembled one of the wings and gnawed meat from the mini-drumstick.

‘These are great,’ she said. ‘Have a seat, Djemilah. Let’s chat.’

The woman eyed the front of the restaurant. There were no customers. She pulled out a chair and sat down, positioning herself so she could watch the door. ‘What do you want?’

‘Tell me about Fong Dao,’ Maggie said.

Djemilah frowned. ‘He’s dead.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m talking to you. You were his girlfriend back then, right?’

The woman dug into her pocket for her wallet and pulled out a wrinkled photograph and slapped it on the table. The picture showed a young boy, ten or eleven years old, with cropped black hair and a serious face. ‘That’s my son. Maybe you want to come back to my apartment and explain to him how you people killed his father.’

‘Fong was never getting out of prison,’ Maggie said. ‘I feel bad for you and your son, but when you shoot a woman in the head, your life is over. Fong did this to himself. If he had a kid, he should have known better.’

‘Fong didn’t kill that woman,’ Djemilah said.

‘I’m not here to argue with you. I just need information.’

‘Yeah? Why do you even care after all these years?’

‘Back then, we thought Fong did this all by himself. Now we think he had an accomplice. Probably more than one. We need to know who.’

‘You’re wrong.’

Maggie sighed. She had a photograph in her coat pocket, and she showed it to Djemilah. It was a close-up of the diamond and emerald ring that had hung around Cat’s neck for years. ‘You ever seen this ring before?’

‘Pretty,’ Djemilah said. ‘No, I never seen it before.’

‘It belonged to the woman who was killed in the home invasion. Ten years ago, this ring was in the possession of a man named Marty Gamble. Does that name mean anything to you? Did you or Fong know him?’

‘No.’

Maggie removed another photograph from her pocket. ‘This is Marty Gamble. Does he look familiar?’

Djemilah shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Take a good look.’

The woman picked up the photograph and studied it. ‘Never seen him. If he had the ring, then he must have killed that woman, not Fong, right? That’s what I’ve been telling you.’

‘This man worked construction in the Duluth area. Did Fong ever do anything like that to pick up extra money?’

‘Construction? No way. Fong wasn’t made for shit like that. He was small. Smaller than me.’

‘Who did Fong hang out with?’ Maggie asked.

‘He didn’t have a lot of friends. He was quiet. I liked that, you know? Me and him, we hung out alone most of the time.’

‘Where did you hang out?’

‘My place, mostly. I lived with my aunt.’

‘Did you go to bars? Did you ever go to Curly’s?’

‘Are you kidding? That’s a good way to get a bottle in the head, you know? I wasn’t into that. Neither was Fong.’

Maggie picked up another chicken wing, but she found that she was losing her appetite. Plus, her neck was throbbing, and she had a headache behind her eyes. ‘Djemilah, I’m not trying to hang
anything on you. It sounds like you and Fong were close. I’m sure he wanted to protect you. The thing is, Fong didn’t do this job alone.’

Djemilah leaned across the table. The beads in her hair clicked together. ‘He didn’t do it at all.’

‘We found jewelry and cash from the burglary at his place. Plus the gun.’

‘You guys planted it.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Come on? Seriously? That’s your story?’

‘Well, somebody did. Fong was framed. He didn’t do it.’

‘Fong did a year for half a dozen identical burglaries in the Cities before he moved to Duluth.’

‘Not with a gun,’ the woman retorted. ‘He never used a gun. He never even owned a gun. I would have known.’

‘Six months before the Keck shooting, there were two unsolved burglaries in Duluth. We found merchandise from those crimes in Fong’s apartment with his fingerprints on them.’

Djemilah sucked her lower lip between her teeth. ‘Okay, look, that summer, I found out I was pregnant. Understand? We were barely making ends meet with the two of us. So Fong, yeah, he did those couple jobs, just like you said. I didn’t know. He was looking for money to make it easier for us, and when I found out, I blew my top. I said if he ever did anything like that again, I’d kick him to the street with one of my heels up his ass. I’m telling you, you don’t want to see me mad, and I was mad. He swore he would never do it again, and he
didn’t
.’

‘So he committed the first two burglaries, but not the third?’

‘That’s the way it was.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Sounds to me like he kept you out of it when he planned the Keck job. He didn’t want you getting mad at him again.’

‘Hey, I did get mad after he was arrested! I figured he was guilty, but he swore up and down he didn’t do it, and I believed him.
Somebody set him up.’

‘Even assuming that’s true, who could have done that to him? Did he give you any names?’

Djemilah shrugged. ‘It could have been anybody. Fong had a job at the hospital, you know? People at the hospital, they all knew about his past. Doctors, nurses, staff, whoever. It was easy to blame him. Somebody gets robbed, everybody looks at the ex-con.’

‘There’s a reason for that,’ Maggie said. ‘Most of them reoffend sooner or later.’

‘Not Fong. He was done with that. And definitely not with a gun. Let me tell you something: if I thought he did what you people said, I’d spit on his grave. I wouldn’t lie for him. My life went to hell after he got locked up, and I’m only digging out now. But you people were wrong.’

Maggie held up the photograph of Marty Gamble. ‘Look again, Djemilah. This man was involved in the burglary that killed Rebekah Keck. If Fong is guilty, then he had ties to this man. If Fong is innocent, then this man knew enough to pin the crime on him. Somehow their lives intersected. Do you have any idea how they could be connected?’

The front door to the restaurant banged. Two Asian college students came inside and waved. Djemilah stood up from the table.

‘I gotta go,’ she said, ‘and the answer is no. I don’t know that man, and neither did Fong.’

The sun was nearly down.

Stride, Serena and Cat stood outside Michaela’s old house on the remote hilltop of the Antenna Farm. In the intervening years, the evergreens had soared, making the house look even smaller than it was. The paint was the same, yellow and peeling. The porch beams were warped and faded, in need of stain. The weeds in the lot were overgrown, with patches of snow clinging to the fields like white islands.

‘It looks abandoned,’ Cat said.

‘The owners lost it to foreclosure last year,’ Stride told her. ‘The bank has it now. The house will probably be torn down if the lot sells.’

‘Oh.’ She sounded sad at the prospect.

Stride’s Expedition was parked in the rutted driveway. They stood near his truck, twenty yards from the house. Cat hung back, looking afraid. Serena reached out and took her hand.

‘Have you been back here since it happened?’ she asked her.

‘No. Not once.’

‘We don’t have to do this if you’re not up to it,’ she said.

‘No, it’s okay. I want to. You said it might help.’

Cat started toward the house. Her boots cracked a puddle of thin ice like a broken window. Stride and Serena followed, letting the girl walk by herself. It had been Serena’s idea to bring Cat here, to see if the visit triggered any memories, but now he wondered if they were making a mistake.

The girl stopped and looked at Stride. ‘Was it cold?’

‘That night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bitter cold. You were freezing when I found you.’

She nodded. ‘I remember being cold.’

Cat climbed onto the porch. The loose wood sagged under her feet. Stride found himself overwhelmed by the vividness of his own memories. When he took hold of the railing, he recalled how it had felt under his hands ten years earlier when he’d stood there with Michaela. He remembered the steam making a cloud in front of her face with each breath. He felt the touch of her hand.

Serena watched him carefully, as if she knew what he was thinking.

‘Do you remember how you got under the porch?’ Serena asked Cat.

‘Mother came to my room and woke me up. She opened the window on the back of the house and lowered me into the snow. She said to hide there and not to come out until she came and got me. She made me say it over and over, that I shouldn’t come out, no matter what I heard. Over and over.’

‘Why did you have to hide?’

Cat stared at the driveway, where the truck was parked. ‘There were lights. A car. Someone was shouting.’

‘Who?’

The girl bit her fingernail. ‘My father.’

‘Are you sure it was him?’

‘Yes. He’d been drinking. I wanted to go to him and tell him not to be mad, but I – I went under the porch, like my mother said.’

‘Was he alone?’

Cat’s mouth opened and closed. Her eyes glazed over. ‘I – I don’t know.’

They let her stand in the cold. Cat put her face up against the frosty glass of the front window and peered inside. Stride stood
next to her. It was hard to see through the maze of ice crystals. Serena lingered behind them on the porch.

‘Do you want to go inside?’ he asked.

‘Can I?’

‘Sure.’

He had a key from the bank, and he undid the lock. Inside, the house was a wreck, much worse than he expected. The furniture, except for a toppled three-legged chair, had been removed or stolen, and the carpet had been ripped out. Sometime over the winter, the furnace had failed, and pipes had frozen and burst, leaching over the floor and flooding the walls. Vandals had come inside. So had animals.

‘Sorry, it’s not safe to be here,’ Stride said. ‘I didn’t realize it was so bad.’

‘Please, just a minute,’ Cat said.

She picked her way into the empty center of the floor. Stride saw ice, trash and rat droppings. Water stains made ribbons on the ceiling.

‘We should go,’ he said.

‘Please.’

He didn’t want to be here. It was too painful. He could see where the Christmas tree had been, on that night when Michaela had tried clumsily to seduce him. He could smell sugar and hear music. It was all unreal; it was all long gone.

‘Her window was open,’ Cat said.

‘What?’

‘In my mother’s bedroom. She always left the window open, even when it was cold.’

Stride remembered the crime scene and the open window. He recalled thinking that Michaela liked the night air, the way he did himself. ‘Yes, it was.’

‘The window is over the porch.’ Her lower lip quivered. ‘I heard them.’

‘I know.’

‘I heard everything, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, I think you did.’

‘I – I just don’t remember.’

‘It’s okay, Cat.’

‘You found me there? Under the porch?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘I wish I could remember that.’

He said nothing, but he was thinking that it was better if she remembered nothing at all. He’d been frantic. Heartsick. Mute with rage. He’d searched the whole house, which took no time at all. His panic had grown when he couldn’t find her. He’d gone outside and shined his flashlight under the porch, and at first he saw nothing, but when he shouldered his body all the way into the crawlspace, he found her squeezed into a corner. Her knees were tucked under her chin, eyes shut, face soaked by tears; she was paralyzed with fear. He’d eased her out and kept her in his arms, and she hadn’t said a word as he held her. She barely breathed.