‘Probably not, but if we don’t rule him out, it’s raw meat for Archie Gale. Plus, I want to find him and see what makes him tick. He worries me.’
‘Okay. We’ll let the dogs out. Speaking of Jay’s columns, what about this prescription drug addict he wrote about last summer? The woman he called Holly. Do we have any way of tracking her down? He threatened to blow up this woman’s life in his column. That’s certainly a motive if she thought he was serious.’
‘Unless he made up the whole thing,’ Maggie said.
‘Is that possible?’
‘Jay wrote that he was picking up Lipitor at a pharmacy when he saw this woman Holly. The thing is, I checked, and there weren’t any pharmacy charges on his credit card last year. His medical records don’t show that he was taking any prescription meds. He wasn’t on Lipitor. So if you ask me, Holly is a fake. He made her up to make a point about prescription drug abuse.’
‘Okay. Well, that’s one we can cross off our list.’ Stride blew smoke into the night air. ‘How’s Nathan?’
‘You know what I think about him,’ Maggie said.
‘Yes, I do. Does he have an alibi?’
‘Sort of. I found the Sammy’s driver who confirmed that she delivered a pizza to Nathan at his apartment that night. It was too early for an alibi, but she said he looked half-dead and was hacking up phlegm. He put the moves on her anyway, which she said was pretty gross.’
‘Some things don’t change,’ Stride said. ‘How about the tip on the white Toyota Rav? The one that the kid spotted on Skyline Parkway?’
‘We’ve got a list of Rav owners in the northland who have some kind of criminal record. We’re working our way through them. So far, there’s no one that looks promising. I re-interviewed the kid, too. He admits smoking a few joints at Enger Tower that night. I’m not sure we can rely on his memory for details.’
‘Great.’
‘I’ve been backtracking through home break-in reports around the state, too, and I can’t find any MOs that look similar. The idea that this was a murder-robbery seems far-fetched. We’ve been watching pawn shops, but none of the missing jewelry has shown up.’
‘I think if we find the gun, we’ll find the jewelry, too,’ Stride said. ‘Wherever Janine hid it.’
‘I agree,’ Maggie replied, ‘but as much as I like Janine for this, we keep digging up new suspects faster than we cross them off.’
‘Like who?’
Maggie fished in the pocket of her red jacket. She pulled out an evidence bag with a handwritten piece of paper inside. ‘Guppo was going through papers from Jay’s desk. He found this. It’s a letter to Janine from last May. Jay had it in his top drawer.’
Stride glanced at the paper. The script handwriting was impeccable, but it was too dark outside to read the text. ‘What does it say?’
‘It’s from a woman named Esther Rose. Basically, she accuses Janine of murdering her husband.’
Stride’s eyebrows rose. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Esther’s husband Ira had a heart problem. He went under the knife at St. Anne’s. He didn’t make it. Janine was the surgeon. Esther blames Janine for his death, and despite some very ladylike handwriting, she makes threats like a crime boss. In fact, she says specifically that she’d like to see Janine’s husband die so that she knows how it feels.’
‘What do we know about Esther Rose?’ Stride asked.
‘She and Ira have a place on the North Shore. Expensive. Ira was an IP attorney in the Twin Cities, so he made a bundle. Driver’s license record shows a very proper-looking sixty-year-old lady.’
‘Not exactly your typical gun-toting killer, but I’ll talk to her,’ Stride said.
‘You might want to bring backup. Those grandmother types can surprise you.’
Stride smiled and crushed his cigarette under his foot. ‘Dan Erickson called today.’
‘Lucky you,’ Maggie said.
Dan Erickson was the St. Louis County attorney. He hadn’t been in the job long, but he’d already contracted the disease most common to county prosecutors. Ambition. Dan was politically hungry, and he saw the county attorney’s job as a stepping-stone to higher office in Minnesota. He had the suave looks of a politician — blond hair sprayed into place, dark suits and shined shoes, a Florida tan even in February. He was smooth and effective in front of juries, but Stride didn’t trust him. Dan saw every trial through the lens of how a win or loss would affect his career.
A trial for Janine Snow would be a media circus. Putting her in prison would be a publicity boon for Dan all over the state.
‘He wanted to know if we were any closer to making a case against Janine,’ Stride said.
‘What did you tell him?’
Stride shrugged. ‘Thanks to Clyde, we can put a gun in Jay’s hands. And the fact that we haven’t found Jay’s gun is bound to leave a jury wondering where it is. After all, if his gun wasn’t the murder weapon, it should have been in his house or in his truck, right?’
‘That must have made Dan happy.’
‘It did. It’s also obvious that Janine’s relationship with Jay was on the rocks. According to Clyde, Janine wanted a divorce, but Jay didn’t. So a jury might believe that she didn’t see a way out other than murder.’
‘Guppo dug up a couple more tidbits about them,’ Maggie added. ‘He’s been interviewing Jay’s friends. One of them told him that last summer, Janine got fed up with Jay’s extravagant spending. She cut him off. Shut down his credit cards without telling him. Jay was eating dinner at a downtown restaurant on July 3, and his card came back declined. There were local heavy hitters around who saw the whole thing. Jay was humiliated. And furious.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Yeah, it’s weird, though. Janine turned the credit cards back on a couple weeks later. After that, Guppo says Jay spent even more than he did before. And here’s another thing. We went through their phone records. Last December, right after Thanksgiving, Jay put in a call to an attorney at the Stanhope law firm downtown. A woman named Tamara Fellowes.’
‘What’s her practice area?’ Stride asked.
‘Family law. Including divorce.’
‘Did you talk to her?’
‘Yeah, but she’s a lawyer. She wouldn’t tell me anything.’
Stride shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Clyde insisted that Jay didn’t want a divorce. He says Janine offered to pay him off, but Jay said no.’
‘Maybe he changed his mind.’
‘Maybe, but if he did, there’s no reason for Janine to kill him,’ Stride said. He shook his head, pulled out the pack of cigarettes, but then returned it to his pocket without taking another one. ‘I’m convinced she killed him, Mags, but none of this makes any sense. What the hell was really going on between those two?’
Janine made sure she wasn’t being followed as she left the hospital.
She turned left out of the parking ramp in her Mercedes. She eyed her mirror, looking for headlights behind her, but she didn’t see anyone. It was dark, after ten o’clock. She headed for downtown, past the city’s old buildings. The Union Gospel Mission. Antique and pawn shops. Liquor stores. A Cantonese restaurant. The brick-lined streets were slick with fresh snow. On the side streets, cars nudged their way up and down the steep hills.
At Sammy’s Pizza, in the middle of downtown, she turned right. That wasn’t the direction she wanted to go, but she checked to see if anyone turned behind her. No one did. She coasted around the next corner, still watching the mirror, and then she parked and waited with her engine running. Paranoia.
No one showed up. She was alone.
Janine retraced her route to 1st Street. She continued several more blocks, then turned downhill to Michigan Street, which was more industrial than the rest of downtown. She pulled into a deserted bank parking lot and took the ramp to the open-air roof, where she parked in a corner.