The Cold Nowhere (37 page)

‘Cindy came here with K-2 for services sometimes,’ Stride said.

‘Did you?’

‘Me? No. You know I’m not religious the way she was.’ He listened to the peaceful solitude. ‘I always thought, though, that if you had to spend eternity somewhere, this wouldn’t be a bad place.’

‘It’s just frozen ground, Jonny.’

Stride said nothing. He knew that Serena, growing up the way she did, had no belief in God. There had been a time after Cindy died when he’d felt the same way, bitter and certain that he was
alone in the world. Now, he was content not knowing whether there was any kind of guiding hand. There were moments when the universe felt random and cruel. There were other moments that felt predestined and made him feel arrogant not to believe.

Like finding Cat in his bedroom closet.

Like kissing Serena on Michaela’s porch.

He stood up from the bench. ‘Come on, you’re freezing. Let’s wait inside.’

She smiled. ‘Me in a church? God might smite me at the threshold.’

‘I’ll go in first and take the hit.’

Serena stood up and took his hand. Her long, slim fingers were cool. They walked through the graveyard to the double church doors, which led inside to the nave. Three modest stained glass windows lent colored light to the floor from the streetlight outside. Rows of empty pews lined the space. The sconce lights on the walls glowed like candles.

Halfway to the altar, Stride slid into a pew and Serena sat beside him. She took a hymnal from the bench in front of her and turned the pages. The binding was broken and worn. She closed it carefully and put it back.

‘Cat was really shaken,’ Serena said. ‘I’m sorry I did that to her. Bad idea.’

‘Maybe she needs to remember that night,’ he said. ‘That’s part of the healing.’

He thought about the drive back to his cottage. Cat had said little. There’d been no more memories or revelations. She’d stared out the window and resisted their efforts to draw her out. When they’d left her with a policewoman for the evening, she’d stretched out on her stomach in front of the fire. Her face had been far away.

‘Is any of it real?’ Serena asked. ‘Can we trust what she told us?’

‘For now, let’s assume we can. She thinks that someone else was there that night. If that’s true, whoever it was probably shot Marty.’

‘And Michaela?’

‘No, Marty definitely killed her,’ Stride said. ‘He was covered in her blood. It wouldn’t have taken much to gin him up to butcher her. Someone simply pushed him over the edge.’

‘But why?’

‘Because Michaela’s death made the whole story work. If Marty got murdered, we’d start digging into his life to find the answers. But to snap and murder Michaela? And then shoot himself? That made perfect sense. We all saw it coming.’

Stride shook his head. He’d been played. They’d all been played. They’d been given a scenario that fit their expectations, and they’d swallowed it whole. Marty was the perfect fall guy. So was Fong Dao. A home invasion and then a murder-suicide. Both crimes solved, with no one the wiser.

‘Someone walked away from that heist free and clear,’ Serena said.

‘Until that ring showed up,’ Stride said. ‘You think you’re safe for ten years and then all of a sudden there’s Margot Huizenfelt putting Marty in the middle of Rebekah Keck’s murder. Whoever it is must have been desperate to keep the connection from being exposed.’

‘Once you’ve gone that far, there’s no going back,’ Serena said. ‘Everyone involved in the home invasion was guilty of murder. Get caught, and your life is over. Kill, and stay free. The question is, who’s still out there? Did Fong and Marty work with an accomplice? Is that who we’re looking for?’

‘That assumes Fong was involved in the burglary at all,’ Stride said. ‘Maggie says she’s not so sure anymore. We
looked
for an accomplice in all of Fong’s activities back then, and we didn’t find one, so we assumed he pulled the job himself. One perp. End of story.’

‘Don’t blame yourself, Jonny.’

‘I don’t like being fooled,’ Stride said. ‘Whether Fong was guilty or not, Marty didn’t do this alone. How did he get the alarm code? How did he know that Lenny and Rebekah were out of town? He
needed a lot of information to pull this off. He needed someone close to Lenny to help him.’

‘Or Lenny,’ Serena said.

‘Yeah. Or Lenny.’

Serena said what he was thinking. ‘We have to face a nasty possibility here, Jonny. This might not be a burglary at all. The theft may simply have been a cover-up to draw the investigation away from what it really was.’

‘Murder,’ Stride said.

‘That’s right. Everybody assumed that Rebekah Keck stumbled into a home invasion and got killed, but maybe this was all about making her murder look like an accident. She comes home, Marty’s waiting for her. He shoots her and ransacks the house. A few weeks later, everything’s recovered at Fong Dao’s place, and Fong goes away for life. Meanwhile, Marty winds up in the middle of a murder-suicide that looks completely unrelated. No loose ends.’

‘You think Lenny arranged for Rebekah’s death,’ Stride said. ‘He got Marty to pull it off and then killed him.’

‘I think it’s possible. Don’t you?’

He didn’t answer. Instead, they heard a loud voice at the front of the church.

‘
You’re both wrong
.’

Leonard Keck, in a royal purple tracksuit, stood by the stained glass windows with his hands on his hips. His gray hair was a mess, and his tanned, blotchy face was angry. Behind him, Police Chief Kyle Kinnick stood in the open doorway of the church. The cold air made a draft past the chief.

Lenny marched down the aisle in his tennis shoes.

‘You are both wrong,’ he repeated. ‘I didn’t know this man Marty Gamble. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Rebekah. I loved her, and that’s the truth. I don’t care what the two of you think of me. I may be a son of a bitch, but I didn’t do this. I didn’t kill my wife.’

GRAFFITI GRAVEYARD

‘So what are the ground rules, Chief?’ Stride asked.

They stood at the back of the church. K-2 wore a black fedora and a heavy brown trench coat over his suit. His dress shoes were wet with snow. His ears jutted out from the side of his head, and the ends were pink from the cold. At the other end of the aisle, Leonard Keck sat in the front pew with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand.

‘I told him that we wouldn’t use anything he says in a prosecution against him,’ K-2 said. ‘Hence the private meeting.’

‘That ties my hands.’

‘Just be glad he didn’t bring along his lawyer, Jon.’

Stride ran his hands back through his hair. ‘What if he confesses to murder?’

‘He won’t.’

‘If he stonewalls, the deal’s off.’

‘He knows that. It cost me a hundred dollar bottle of scotch to get him here, so you owe me big.’

‘I doubt it was that easy.’

K-2 shrugged and scratched his ear. ‘Yeah, I had to threaten to call the City Council, the US Attorney, and the chair of the state Republican Party. He knows he may lose his Council seat when this gets out, but there are always second acts in politics. Particularly in Duluth. Besides, he’s rich. He can still buy all the influence he wants.’

‘You know what he’s going to tell us?’

‘Most of it.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘Bad enough, but mostly stupid. Stupid screws up more investigations than anything else. You know that.’

Stride nodded. People lied to the police the way that they lied to their doctors. They felt embarrassed. They felt guilty. They didn’t want to admit doing something foolish. He’d wasted weeks of time and watched criminals go free because of lies that had nothing to do with the real crimes.

He gestured to Serena and the two of them joined Lenny at the front of the church. The car dealer sat with his legs apart and his knees bent. Steam rose from the white coffee cup. He stared up at the altar, a frown on his face.

‘Feels odd, huh, being in a place like this,’ Lenny said. ‘Talking about sins.’

‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ Stride asked.

‘Nah, get it over with. If the Catholics are right about purgatory, I’m screwed anyway.’

He could hear the slur of the scotch in Lenny’s voice.

‘You said you didn’t arrange for Rebekah’s murder,’ Stride said. ‘Convince me.’

Lenny’s face twitched. He sipped his coffee. ‘What do you guys want? It’s not like I can prove it. All I can tell you is, I didn’t have a motive in the world to kill Rebekah. We were rich. We were happy. She was there with me when I didn’t have money, and she was there with me when I did. It’s not like I had some mistress waiting in the wings to take her place. I never got married again, because there was no one else in the world for me except her.’ He glanced between Stride and Serena. ‘You two, you’re lucky. You found each other after Stride lost his wife. I never had the same experience, and believe me, it’s not for lack of women trying to convince me otherwise.’

‘Tell us about the last trip you took,’ Serena said. ‘Who knew you were leaving town to go to the Keys?’

Lenny shrugged. ‘Who didn’t? Everybody at the dealership knew. Most of the politicos. I’m sure Rebekah told dozens of people. We weren’t trying to hide it. Hell, I told K-2, so he could arrange some extra drive-bys while we were gone. Would I do that if I was planning to stage some kind of phony robbery? Get serious.’

‘Exactly what happened on the trip?’

‘Nothing happened,’ Lenny said. ‘It was the usual convention stuff. Boring speeches and a lot of parties, booze, and shrimp. We were having a ball until Rebekah started spewing out bad lobster from both ends. She decided to go home early. I offered to go with her, but she insisted I stay and finish out the convention. I got a limo to take her back to Miami, and she flew home. By the time she got to Minneapolis, she felt good enough to drive our car back to Duluth. She made it home around midnight. That’s when she got shot.’

‘Who knew she was coming back early?’

‘Nobody except me and a few people at the convention, unless she talked to some of her friends. You’ve got her phone records, you tell me. She called me while she was driving home to say she was okay. That was the last time I spoke to her.’

‘When did you get back?’ Stride asked.

‘A day later. I got a limo to drive me home from MSP.’

‘Weren’t you concerned when you couldn’t reach Rebekah?’

Lenny shrugged. ‘I was busy with the convention. I tried a couple times and got the machine. No big deal. I figured she was doing one of her social or charity things. Or she was shopping.’

‘Can you think of any reason why someone would have wanted her dead?’ Serena asked.

‘Rebekah? No way. Was she tough? Sure. Did she have a bitchy side if you crossed her? Absolutely. I mean, hell, she was a rich Jewish housewife, what do you expect? But nobody had any reason to kill her. I’m telling you, some bastards thought we were gone, they broke in to rob me blind, and Rebekah showed up at the
wrong time. That’s what happened. If I came home with her, I’d be dead, too.’

‘Okay,’ Stride said. ‘Let’s talk about the ring.’

Lenny glanced at the front of the church, where K-2 stood with his arms crossed across his scrawny chest. The car dealer tugged on the waistband of his tracksuit. ‘What about it?’

‘You knew it was missing. Why didn’t you tell us about it?’

‘I told you, I thought I did.’

‘You’re lying. You never filed an insurance claim.’

‘It must have slipped my mind. Hell, my wife was dead. You think I was worried about insurance money?’

Stride zipped up his leather jacket. ‘We’re done, Lenny. My next stop is at the
News-Tribune
to find a reporter to write the story.’

‘Lenny!’ K-2 called from the front of the church. ‘I already told you how this has to go. If you’ve got something to say, you better say it.’

Lenny squeezed his fists together. ‘All right! Yeah, all right, I didn’t tell you about the ring. I just wanted the whole thing to go away.’

‘Were there other items of jewelry missing?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah, some big earrings. A couple bracelets and necklaces. Expensive stuff, but it’s not like I could describe it. I knew I’d given her things that weren’t in the stash you recovered.’

‘What about cash?’ Stride asked. ‘We found about five thousand dollars in cash at Fong’s apartment. Back then, you said that was all of it. Was that a lie?’

‘There was more,’ Lenny admitted. ‘A lot more.’

‘How much?’

‘Upwards of fifty thousand dollars,’ he said.

Stride exhaled in disgust. ‘Unbelievable.’

‘Why did you have that kind of cash in your house?’ Serena asked.

‘Let’s just say that in my business there are some transactions that are best handled in cash, okay?’

‘Bribes,’ Serena said.

‘Incentives. Bonuses. The fact is, if I told you people how much money was really taken back then, you’d have started asking questions that I didn’t want to answer. My political career would have been over before it started, and the IRS would have started nosing around, too.’

Stride shook his head. ‘So instead, you said nothing. You knew there had to be accomplices in your wife’s murder, and you gave them a free pass.’

‘Rebekah was dead and nothing was going to bring her back!’ Lenny retorted. ‘She would have told me to do exactly what I did. She would have said I was crazy to screw it up just to put a couple thugs behind bars.’

K-2 strolled down the church aisle toward the three of them. ‘This is all under the cone of silence, Lenny, but don’t think I’m going to forget it. If your act isn’t clean right now, you better clean it up fast. Is that crystal clear, my friend?’

‘I hear you,’ Lenny muttered. ‘Are we done? Can I go now?’

He started to get up, but Serena put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Not so fast, Mr. Keck.’

‘What? What else do you want? I’ve told you everything.’

‘We still have a problem.’

Lenny looked plaintively at K-2. ‘This is nuts. Come on, Kyle, get me out of here.’

The chief studied his friend’s face. ‘Why don’t you hear the lady out?’

Lenny scowled and laced his hands together in his lap. ‘Fine. What’s the problem?’