‘You can go through bad times as a teenager and come out okay,’ Serena pointed out. ‘I did.’
‘Yeah, but a lot of girls don’t.’
‘That’s true.’
He felt like a father to Cat, which made him feel old. Plenty of other things made him aware of his age, too. In the eight years since he’d lost Cindy, gray had begun to win the battle over black in his hair. The leg he’d broken last summer had healed, but in the dead of winter, he sometimes found himself limping. In a few months, he’d turn fifty. There was something about the change in decade that made it harder to pretend you were young.
Life had reminded him over and over that he wasn’t bulletproof. It wasn’t such a bad thing. He’d begun to accept his mistakes and imperfections. He didn’t bang his head against every wall. He and Serena, both wounded, both alone, had found a measure of peace with each other. If they could keep it.
And Cat.
He hadn’t realized how much he needed someone like Cat in his life until he found her shivering in his bedroom closet three months earlier, on the run from a killer. Now he couldn’t imagine being without her. Which was what made her behavior so frustrating. He couldn’t protect her from everything. Not even herself.
Serena took his hand. ‘I should have trusted my instincts at the bar.’
‘How so?’
‘I knew Kelly Hauswirth didn’t belong there. I should have talked to her.’
‘You couldn’t possibly have known she was in danger, and talking to her wouldn’t necessarily have changed a thing.’
Serena shrugged. She didn’t always take her own advice about living without regrets. ‘What about the murder weapon?’ she asked.
‘The BCA is running prints and ballistics. We don’t have a report yet.’
‘And the Grand Am?’
‘Stolen from a parking lot at the convention center. No one saw anything. No prints inside. It’s a dead end.’
‘I wish I’d seen his face.’
‘Well, we may not have anything on him, but we know who she is now. That’s something.’
‘Kelly Hauswirth,’ Serena said again. ‘She looked like a Kelly. Sweet little Kelly falls in love with a guy online, and he gets her to come to Minnesota to meet him. And then — what? She realizes that the guy in the car isn’t the man she’s supposed to meet, and she tries to run?’
‘It looks that way,’ Stride said.
Serena shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Nothing about this feels right to me. I think this guy is an iceberg, Jonny.’
He knew what she meant. Most of an iceberg floated underneath the water, and it was the part you couldn’t see that you had to fear.
There was more to this murder than they understood yet.
37
Howard Marlowe typed into a Microsoft Word document on his computer:
The prosecution couldn’t put a gun in Dr. Snow’s hands, but they did put one in Jay’s hands. Was that gun the murder weapon? Most of the jurors thought so.
Not me. I think that Archibald Gale’s speculation at the trial was right. Jay lost his gun when his truck and fishing shanty went through the ice. People made a big deal of the fact that the gun wasn’t recovered during salvage, but that doesn’t mean anything. If your house floods, do you think everything stays put? No. The gun floated away. It’s buried under the silt of Superior Bay.
He studied what he’d written, and he liked it. Next came the evidence he’d uncovered in his research.
Four years ago, he’d taken a lawn mower to Jay’s brother Clyde for repair. By then, Clyde didn’t remember Howard from the jury. Howard got to know him, went out with him, and peppered him with questions over drinks. Clyde admitted after half a bottle of Captain Morgan that he was pretty sure Jay had the gun with him that afternoon in the shanty. And he admitted that he never saw his brother with the gun again after that day.
Howard passed along the information to Archibald Gale, who said what he always said. It wasn’t enough for a new trial. So the appeals came and went, and nothing happened.
Janine Snow remained in prison.
‘What are you working on?’ Carol asked Howard from the doorway of his office. She’d gone to bed early, but she had trouble sleeping most nights. ‘As if I didn’t know.’
‘The book,’ he said.
His wife folded her arms across her pajama top. Dark half-moons rimmed her eyes. ‘The book. Will it ever be done? How long is it now? 1,500 pages? No one’s going to read it.’
He didn’t take his eyes away from the monitor. ‘It’s not about whether I publish it or not. It’s a hobby.’
‘A hobby? It’s one in the morning, Howard. You spend every minute you’re awake researching and writing that book.’
‘So what? I need something to fill my summers while school’s out.’
‘Really? How about doing something with your family? How about doing something with me?’
‘We were just in Door County,’ he told her.
‘One weekend. Three days. It rained. And the only reason we went is that you tracked another white Rav to somebody in Sister Bay.’
‘I told you. It’s my hobby.’
Carol shook her head in frustration. When he looked at her, he saw how much she’d aged in the last nine years. The extra ten pounds she’d always carried had become twenty. Her face, without makeup, was pallid like beach sand. She was right that he was ignoring her. They didn’t have much in common anymore. Their intermittent sex life had dwindled to nothing; he couldn’t remember when they had last slept together. Their daughter Annie was a sullen teenager, too preoccupied with her own life to worry about them. Carol didn’t have anything else. She still worked as a checker at the Super One. She quilted. She went to church. And she nagged him about the book like a squawking parrot on his shoulder.
She didn’t understand that the case was the most important work he’d ever done in his life. It was his life. It made him feel young again. His office had become a library of evidence, all of it neatly organized and categorized by subject. The witnesses. The exhibits. The gun. The Rav. Two years ago, he’d started turning his investigative work into a book.
But a book needed an ending, which he didn’t have yet. It would end when Janine was free.
‘What did you do today?’ she asked, making the question sound like an accusation.
‘I went to a pawn shop in Grand Rapids.’
‘Every week you’re in a different pawn shop,’ she snapped. ‘You’re never going to find anything after all this time. What do you hope to accomplish?’
‘The missing jewelry is still out there,’ Howard retorted. ‘Those are expensive pieces. Sooner or later, whoever has them is going to figure they’re safe. They’ll try to sell them.’
Carol opened her mouth to shout at him, the way she usually did, but this time she held her tongue. He’d heard it all before. The jewelry wasn’t missing; it was at the bottom of a lake, where Janine had tossed it, along with the gun. He would never find it. He was wasting his time.
His wife closed her eyes. She took a long, slow breath. He realized she was crying.
‘Tell me why,’ she said.
‘I’ve told you before.’
‘Tell me again,’ she said.
He got up from the chair with a sigh. There wasn’t much room to walk in the office anymore. Too many boxes, but he knew what was in each one. He went to his wife in the doorway, but they didn’t touch. They were strangers who shared a house and a child. It had stopped bothering him long ago. Couples grew older. They grew apart. If they were lucky, they stayed friends.
‘I put her in prison,’ he explained. ‘Me.’