The Cold Nowhere (36 page)

Now here she was in front of him again. This teenager was the same little girl with whom he’d shared that awful moment. It felt like a lifetime ago.

‘You saved my life,’ she said.

‘I just found you.’

‘No, I think if you hadn’t come when you did, I’d be dead.’

‘Why do you think that?’

She frowned. ‘I don’t know, but I think it’s true.’

‘We should go, Cat,’ he said softly.

‘Another minute, okay? I need to see her room. I need to see where it happened.’

‘Maybe it would be better if you didn’t.’

‘No, I need to do this. This place won’t be here much longer. If I don’t do it now, I never will.’

‘If that’s what you want.’

He moved to join her, but Cat held up her hand. ‘Could you let me do it by myself? Alone?’

‘I don’t like leaving you here.’

‘Please. Just for a minute.’

Stride hesitated. ‘One minute.’

He was about to leave, but she called after him. ‘Stride?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you really think someone else was here that night? Is it even possible?’

He nodded. ‘Possible? Sure, it is.’

‘Wouldn’t I remember?’

‘Maybe you do. You say you dream about it. Is there someone in your dreams?’

Her face was confused. ‘In my dreams, I always think about you.’

She turned toward the hallway that led to the bedrooms. The floorboards shifted, as if they would sink through to the cold ground beneath them. He thought about following her, but instead, he backed through the open door to the porch. Serena stood at the railing, dwarfed by the forest surrounding the large lot. He came up beside her. She was right where Michaela had been so many times. Just as close. Just as attractive.

They stood next to each other in silence. There was no more sun, just shadows. April felt like December.

‘I was a little in love with Michaela,’ he admitted.

Serena gave him a sad smile. ‘Of course you were. It’s who you are.’

She slid her arms around his waist. They were face to face, an inch apart. Her eyes were two bright emeralds. She leaned into him, and he leaned into her, and they kissed, their cold lips turning soft and warm. His fingertips caressed the down on her neck. Her arms rose on his back, holding him tightly. It felt like months of ice melting. It felt like spring coming.

When their lips released each other, they stayed cheek to cheek.
He felt her breath on his face and the caress of her hair. They didn’t move or speak; they just held each other and remembered how it felt. It was like listening to the notes of a song you once knew by heart, letting it become familiar to you all over again.

They didn’t even hear Cat.

She was there in the doorway when they finally broke apart. Her face was contorted in terror, her eyes wide and white. It was the face of a lost six-year-old child.

‘Cat, what is it?’ he called to her.

Her mouth dropped open. They could hear her panicked breathing. She shook her head over and over.

‘Where’s the girl?’ she said.

He didn’t understand. ‘What?’

Her jaw worked, but no words came out. Her lips formed an ‘O’ of fear. Like a startled rabbit she bolted forward and threw her arms around Stride, nearly launching them both off the deck.

‘That’s what he said,’ she cried. ‘That’s what the man said when he came inside to kill my father.
Where’s the girl?
’

Maggie waited impatiently for the light to change at Hiawatha and 26th. She drummed her fingers on the Corvette wheel to the screaming thump of Def Leppard. Beside her, the light rail train blocked traffic. The trolley clanged south toward the airport, its chimes as placid as church bells, and when the barriers lifted at the tracks, she turned right onto the side street. She drove half a block to the house where Vincent Roslak had been stabbed to death eight months earlier.

It was a two-story concrete house that had been sub-divided into apartments. Five satellite antennas were mounted in a row on the flat roof, with wires draping down the front wall into windows. Hairline cracks ran through the concrete walls. The postage-stamp lot was fenced, and the unlocked gate hung askew. Maggie let herself in, and at the front door she pushed the buzzer for the manager’s apartment.

‘Mr. Walton?’ she said, when the man answered the door. ‘I’m Sergeant Maggie Bei. I called you about the Roslak place.’

‘Yeah, yeah, come in.’

Bennett Walton was in his late twenties, with thinning red hair and thick black glasses. He wore a long-sleeved jersey and athletic shorts. He was tall and had a basketball player’s physique, with square shoulders and knobby knees. He wore Converse sneakers with no socks, and Maggie could see his big toe sticking out the front of one of his shoes.

Walton led her into a hallway painted in dingy white. There was a staircase at the back, and they climbed to the second story.

‘So the place hasn’t been rented yet?’ she asked.

Walton shrugged. ‘Nah, nobody likes a murder scene, you know? People get creeped out.’

‘Do you own the building?’

‘My mom does. I keep the tenants from calling her night and day.’

He opened a door on his left, its loose knob rattling, and let her inside. Roslak’s apartment was a narrow studio, running the length of the house. A kitchenette was immediately on her right. Through the bay windows facing the street she could see her rented Corvette parked at the curb. The apartment was unfurnished, and it had been repainted and recarpeted.

‘You had to tear everything out?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yeah. Had to paint the ceiling downstairs, too. Blood soaked through. Pretty nasty.’

Maggie wandered toward the front of the apartment. ‘Who found the body?’

‘Me. People started complaining about the smell. It was July and really hot. When he didn’t answer, I let myself in. I nearly crapped my shorts.’

‘How was the body situated when you found it?’

‘He was on his back next to the sofa,’ Walton said, pointing at the floor. ‘Eyes open. Blood everywhere. Yuck.’

‘Did you see the knife that killed him?’

‘Nope.’

‘Any idea what he was doing when he was killed?’

‘Well, his pants were around his ankles, and his dick was hanging out. That give you any ideas?’

Maggie nodded. ‘I get it.’

‘What a way to go, huh?’ Walton told her, wincing as if someone were holding a pair of scissors to his testicles. ‘You’re getting busy, everything’s hot, and then the chick goes all
Basic Instinct
on you. Ouch.’

‘How well did you know Roslak?’ she asked.

‘I barely knew him. He paid the rent on time, that’s all I cared about.’

‘Did he have a lot of people coming and going from his place?’

‘Oh, yeah. All the time. At first, I thought, maybe he was a dealer, you know? Or a man whore. He was a sexy-looking guy, and it was mostly women coming to visit. Then somebody told me he was some kind of shrink.’

‘You see anyone regularly? Like a girlfriend?’

Walton shook his head. ‘Nope.’

‘How about a Hispanic teenager? Small, dark hair, very attractive.’

‘Like I said, I stopped paying attention. I’m a gamer. Call of Duty. If I’m home, I’m not looking out the windows.’

‘The police thought he’d been lying here for a couple days,’ she said. ‘You see anything or hear anything weird around that time? Shouting, arguments, screaming?’

‘Arguments happen all the time in this place, but the walls are thicker than you think. We don’t get a lot of noise between the apartments unless people have their windows open. It was so hot that most people had their window ACs running, and those things are really loud.’

‘I don’t see a window unit here.’

‘People yank them during the winter,’ Walton told her, ‘but this place never had one. In the heat, his body pretty much fermented, you know?’

‘Yeah.’ She dug in her pocket for a photograph of Margot Huizenfelt. ‘You ever see this woman around here?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Okay. Thanks for your help, Mr. Walton. Mind if I hang out here for a few minutes?’

‘Knock yourself out.’

Walton left her alone, but he left the apartment door open. She
stood where the body would have been found. She smelled fresh paint, and the new carpet was springy under her heels. The apartment was sterile now, but she tried to imagine a sofa against the wall, with Roslak engaged in intercourse. Pants and underwear pooled at his ankles. The girl beneath him.

Somewhere in mid-fornication, she changes her mind. Or maybe she never consented. She attacks him, stabs him, drives him backward to the floor, and keeps stabbing. He’s too surprised even to scream. His lungs fill with blood, and he can’t talk. He just dies.

The cops never found the knife. She took it with her. Did Roslak have the knife when they started? Was he threatening her with it?

Or did she have the knife all along?

Maybe it was close by. In her boot. The way Cat always kept it.

Maggie decided that she had learned one thing by coming here. Roslak’s death didn’t smell like a murderer bent on keeping a decade-old secret from being exposed. He had been up close and personal with his killer. Very close, very personal. They knew each other; they were intimate. This was about sex gone bad, suddenly and violently. It didn’t feel as if it had anything to do with a stolen ring hanging around Cat’s neck.

She opened a window facing the street. Cold air blew inside, and bare branches knocked together from the tree in the yard next door. Distantly, with the wind, she heard the light rail trolley on Hiawatha. Back then, on a blistering July day with no air conditioning, Roslak would have opened a window. If anyone were passing on the sidewalk outside, they would have heard the noises of sex rippling from the apartment. Or murder.

Maggie slid down to sit on the carpet with her hands wrapped around her knees. It was nearly dark. She sat in the deepening gloom without moving. She was convinced she’d overlooked something important. Even with no furniture, with nothing to remind her of the crime scene, the apartment spoke to her, but it was in a language she didn’t understand.

What was she missing?

Outside the apartment, she heard heavy footsteps. She assumed it was Bennett Walton coming back, but then she saw the face and burly body of Ken McCarty grinning at her from the doorway. She found it hard to muster a smile in return.

‘Hey, you,’ he said. ‘I got your text.’

‘Hey.’

Ken strolled through the apartment and slid down next to her. He sensed her bleak mood. ‘You okay? Guppo told me you rolled the Av.’

‘I’m fine.’

He nudged her in the ribs with an elbow, and her torso was tender. ‘You don’t look fine.’

‘I’m fine,’ she repeated, with a hint of irritation.

‘Okay. Just asking. Nice wheels outside.’

‘It’s a rental.’

‘Yeah, when I rent, I don’t get a Vette. Are you sticking around overnight? You want to come over to the love shack?’

‘No, Stride wants me back up north.’

‘Too bad. Did you learn anything down here?’

‘Nothing that ties Roslak’s murder to Duluth. Nothing that ties Marty Gamble to Fong Dao. I talked to Fong’s girlfriend, and she’s convinced that Fong was set up. He wasn’t involved in the Keck break-in at all.’

Ken chuckled. ‘Sure. Him and all the other innocent men with multiple burglary convictions.’

‘I know, stupid, right? The crazy thing is, I think I believe her.’

‘Maggie Bei doubting herself? That’s new.’

She shrugged. ‘I was too sure of myself in those days. Too cocky. I should have asked more questions.’

‘Sounds like twenty-twenty hindsight to me. We got a tip, we got a warrant, we nailed him. They should all be so easy.’

‘Maybe it was too easy,’ Maggie said. ‘Djemilah says the people
at St. Luke’s knew about Fong’s criminal record. Any one of them could have pointed us at him. Once we found the stash in his apartment, I was ready to close the book.’

‘Not just you. Stride was convinced, too. So was K-2.’

‘Yeah, but I sold it. I said we had our guy. I looked for an accomplice and didn’t find one, so that was that. Except obviously, I screwed up the whole case. Think about it, how could I find an accomplice in Fong’s life if Fong wasn’t even involved in the crime?’

‘Come on, don’t dump on yourself because of what this girl told you. If we convicted men based on the stories they tell their girlfriends, the jails would be empty.’

‘You’re right about that.’

‘Of course I am.’ He checked his phone and read an incoming message. ‘Anyway, duty calls, babe. I gotta run, but I’m glad you let me know you were in town. Shame you can’t stay.’

‘Yeah.’ She leaned across and kissed him. Plenty of tongue. ‘You coming this weekend?’

‘I’m practically coming now.’

‘Go,’ she said.

Ken pushed himself to his feet and left her alone in Roslak’s apartment, which was now nearly pitch black. She lingered in the darkness, thinking about Fong Dao and his conviction for murder. She’d led the raid on his apartment herself. She’d been the one who found the box, opened it, found the jewels, found the cash, found the gun. It was all laid out for her. Open and shut.

Too easy.

No matter what Ken said, and no matter what she told herself, she couldn’t shake a sick feeling in her gut. Something was wrong. Everything was wrong.

She was beginning to think she’d made a mistake ten years ago that had cost a man his life.

Stride checked his watch. ‘He’s late.’

They were miles from the heart of the city. The bone-white Catholic church building dated back to 1896, with a copper dome and cross atop its steeple. It was located on a lonely road in the township of Gnesen, in wooded land tucked among the northern lakes. A handful of graves rested in the quiet lawn surrounding the church, dwarfed by evergreens.

Serena cast her eyes around the deserted churchyard. ‘Why would he ask to meet us here?’

‘He doesn’t want anyone to see us together,’ Stride concluded.

It was dark, but there was a streetlight near the church, and the light cast shadows into the cemetery. They sat on a bench in front of a stone grotto. The rough stones were dusted with snow. Inside the cave created by the rocks, Christ clasped his hands in prayer. Behind the grotto, agitated crows hidden in the trees warned them away. Serena sat close to Stride, their bodies touching, his arm around her shoulder to keep her warm.