Curt danced uncertainly in the hallway, trying to make up his mind, and then he backed up and threw his shoulder against the door. He nearly broke a bone, but the door held. The next time, he bent his leg and kicked, and the lock shuddered. He kicked again, and the wood splintered away from the lock and the door flew open.
He rushed inside the apartment and swore. “Holy shit!”
A body lay on the floor, a pillow covering its head. The pillow had a burnt hole in it; feathers covered half the surfaces in the living room where they’d been blown into the air, and a river of blood seeped from under the pillow. He went over and used two fingers to peel the pillow back and saw what was left of Wyatt Miller’s face.
“What the fuck! Oh shit!”
Curt felt his stomach doing somersaults as he backed away from the corpse. “Colly!” he screamed, trying not to throw up. “Colly! Jesus!”
He ran into her bedroom, expecting to find another body. Expecting to find his girlfriend murdered on the floor. Another gunshot. More blood. What he found was even worse.
Nearly every inch of Colleen’s bedroom was covered with photographs thumb-tacked to the walls. The photographs were all of Cat. Cat inside, outside, Cat with her son, Cat in her bedroom. And across the pictures was the same message scrawled over and over in green marker, spilling from the pictures onto the walls.
I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.
Curt covered his mouth with both hands and smelled his hot breath speeding in and out of his lungs.
“Oh, shit,” he mumbled. “Oh, fuck. Colly, you crazy bitch.”
34
ZZ Top.
Maggie didn’t bother taking off her raincoat or turning on the light in her office at police headquarters. She crossed the room and dropped down in the chair, and then she dug through the file on her desk for the information on Ned Baer’s Colorado editor. When she located Debbi King’s phone number, she grabbed her cell phone and dialed.
“Ms. King?” she said, when the woman answered. “This is Sergeant Maggie Bei with the Duluth Police. We talked about Ned Baer a couple of days ago.”
“Yes, of course, Sergeant. Do you have news for me?”
“About his death? Not yet. But I do have a few more questions.”
“Of course. Anything.”
“This will sound like a strange question, but I remember you telling us that you met Ned backstage at a ZZ Top concert in San Jose one summer when you were in college. He was a roadie for the band that year. Is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Maggie could hear puzzlement in her voice. “Do you remember what year that was?”
King hesitated. “Well, hang on, let me think. That was the summer after my junior year at San Jose State.”
She rattled off the year, and Maggie wrote down the numbers on the notepad in front of her. It was the year she’d expected the woman to say. That was the same year Denise Forseth had left home to join the Air Force. The same year that the party crawl happened. The same year Andrea Forseth had been raped on the second floor of a house in West Duluth. There were no coincidences.
“Tell me what you remember about Ned back then.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you said he didn’t date much, had an inferiority complex, no personal life. Was that true when you first met him?”
“I guess so, yes.”
“Was he a jealous type? Did he resent men who had better luck with women?”
“I don’t understand what this has to do with anything, Sergeant.”
“I know, Ms. King, but please just answer my question.”
“Okay. Yes, Ned could be very bitter about things like that. That was one of the less attractive sides of his personality.”
“One more question. Before Ned came out to do the investigation into Devin Card, did he mention whether he’d ever been to Duluth?”
“In fact, he told me a couple of times that he’d never visited Duluth before. Now what is this about, Sergeant?”
“When I can tell you more, I’ll be in touch,” Maggie replied.
She hung up the phone.
The next thing she did was run a Google search to track down a Wikipedia listing of concert dates for the ZZ Top tour thirty years earlier. Everything in the world was online. She ran through the tour dates for that summer, and there it was.
August 21.
Duluth, Minnesota. The DECC Arena.
Ned Baer had lied to his editor. He’d been in Duluth when he was a roadie for the band. He’d been in Duluth the exact same night that Andrea had been raped.
No coincidences.
“Hello, Maggie. Working late?”
She looked up and saw the trim figure of Dan Erickson in her doorway, with the lights of police headquarters glowing behind him. He came into her dark office, sat down across from her, and put his glistening leather shoes on her desk. She was soaking wet from being outside in the storm, but Dan was dry and perfect. He gave her his usual cocky grin.
“Was that Debbi King you were talking to? What’s going on? Did you learn something new?”
“There was no witness,” Maggie told him.
“What?”
Maggie got up from her chair and leaned on the corner of her desk next to Dan, not caring that her wet hair dripped on his shoes. “Ned told Stride that he had an anonymous witness who saw Devin and Andrea go upstairs together. He didn’t. He was the witness.”
“What the hell are you saying?”
She explained everything she’d discovered. Her conversation with Adam Halka. The stranger from the ZZ Top concert tour tagging along on the party crawl. That same stranger — jumpy and weird — hauling Adam out of the party and crashing his father’s car on his way home because he was so upset.
“It was Ned Baer,” Maggie insisted. “He was there. He was at that same party. Think about it. Here’s this guy who’s a stranger in town, drunk, sexually frustrated, bitter, angry. He sees Devin and Andrea making out, and he’s wild with jealousy. They go upstairs, but then Devin comes back alone. So he figures he has a golden opportunity. He goes upstairs and finds the girl passed out on the bed. The room is dark. He assaults her. Ned Baer is the one who raped Andrea.”
“You’ll never prove that.”
“Maybe not, but it makes sense. It fits. Years later, Ned reads the story about the rape accusation against Devin Card, and he realizes that he knows all about it. All the details match with what happened that night. He knows that he was the one up in that bedroom, not Devin. For years, he’s been worried about the rape being exposed, but instead, he finds out that Andrea thought it was someone else the whole time! She was so drunk that she never realized that Devin left and a stranger came up to the room and took his place.”
Dan frowned, but Maggie knew that frown. He knew she was right.
“As a journalist, Ned figures this is a gift wrapped story,” she went on. “He knows details about the assault that nobody else does. He knows when the party happened. He knows what the girl looked like. He’s got a head start in trying to find her. That’s why he was able to locate Andrea when none of the other reporters could.”
Dan pursed his lips. “You really think you’re right about this?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Devin’s innocent? Ned’s the one who actually raped her?”
“Right. Ned was all set to destroy Devin’s career for a crime he committed himself.”
“Twisted son of a bitch.” Dan stood up and grabbed a tissue from her desk and wiped off each of his shoes individually. Then he stood uncomfortably close to her, the way he always did.
“We still have a problem,” he said.