She miscarried in the second month.
That was when she started to doubt herself, started feeling like defective merchandise. Thoughts flitted in-maybe she could never have a baby. When you put it like that, it sounded scary. Her emotions ran away from her. In the late spring, when she got pregnant again, she spent every day worrying and wondering. Her morning sickness was intense. She was plagued by foreknowledge that she would never give birth.
She miscarried in the third month.
Something snapped in Maggie's head. She took a one-month leave and spent hours with Tony Wells, pouring out her soul, revisiting the memories of her childhood in China, and talking about Eric and Stride. When that was done, she pretended that the crisis was over. If she wasn't meant to have a baby, so be it, end of story. She was done trying to have a kid. She went back on the pill and told Eric it didn't matter. She was kidding herself.
Along the way, she and Eric grew miles apart. Their relationship had been volatile from the start. She had met Eric during a hostage crisis at his factory, and even after she talked his psycho employee into giving up his gun, they fought about it. Eric thought she took too many risks. Maggie called him a stuck-up rich son of a bitch. They slept together that first night. Six months later, they got married, but they fought whenever they weren't in bed.
She knew he had affairs. They fought about that. He was jealous of Stride and thought that she was secretly in love with him. They fought about that, too.
After the third miscarriage, and after spending a month in therapy with Tony, she tried to put things back together with Eric by throwing herself into their sexual relationship. She surprised herself with what she was willing to try. She was at her sexual peak; her hormones were crazy; she had nothing to lose. Why not? Even when Eric suggested things that made her skin crawl, she followed him to the wild side.
"Bring it on," she told him.
Nothing to lose. What a joke.
That was all before it happened. That was all prologue.
It was the week before Thanksgiving. Eric was out of the country. When she told him a few days later, he went crazy. He wanted to do something to make it better, but she refused all of his overtures, even when he pleaded with her and got angry and beat the walls. She screamed back and pushed him away and made him sleep downstairs, as far away from her as possible. She didn't want him to touch her, not ever again.
Now he never would.
Because someone came into their house and killed him. With her gun.
Think like a cop, she told herself. Solve the crime.
The caffeine in the tea wired her. She would never get back to sleep now, but she didn't want to sleep. She wanted to fight back. She had an advantage that no one, not even Stride, had in solving the case. She knew she was innocent. Everyone else had their doubts. Cops didn't trust people; they trusted facts. Facts didn't lie, dissemble, fool, mislead, imagine, pretend, or deceive. People did all of those things. She had done a lot of it herself lately.
Solve the crime.
Eric was killed with her gun. Despite the bottle of wine she had drunk near the lake, she was certain that she had left the gun on her nightstand that night as she always did. So whoever killed him had come to their bedroom first. That made sense. Whoever did this couldn't have known that she and Eric were sleeping apart. No one knew that. The gun was simply a golden opportunity. The killer must have been prepared to do it another way-his own gun, a knife, whatever. He-or she-came to the bedroom expecting to find the two of them together. Instead, Maggie was unconscious, Eric wasn't there, and the gun was an easy grab.
The killer took it, went downstairs, found Eric, shot him, and left.
Next question: Why was she still alive? She assumed that the killer couldn't risk going back upstairs after the first gunshot. If they had been in bed together, she was certain they would both be dead, but sleeping alone saved her. That meant that Eric was the target, not her, and it also meant that framing her was a crime of opportunity. No one coming into the house could have predicted the circumstances that left her in Abel's crosshairs as a suspect. That ruled out Serena's theory about a perp from Maggie's past, someone like Tommy Luck from Vegas who wound up stalking and nearly killing Serena before she put him in prison. This was all about Eric, pure and simple.
Next question: What was the motive? Something was obviously going on in Eric's life that she didn't know about. She knew she had to analyze his movements in his last few days and made a mental note to check his phone records and credit card statements to see what they revealed. Three days before the murder, for example, she knew that Eric was in the Twin Cities. Why?
Next question: What was Eric doing with Tanjy Powell, and why did Tanjy disappear? Maggie didn't think it was a coincidence that, according to Stride, Eric and Tanjy met on the street on Monday afternoon, and a few hours later, Tanjy vanished. Or that two nights later, Eric was dead. She assumed that Eric was sleeping with Tanjy, even though he had spent most of December swearing on his life that he would give up his affairs. Eric was a horndog, and Tanjy was irresistible, so maybe that was the simple answer. They were having an affair that went terribly wrong, and Tanjy killed him.
Nothing else made sense.
Unless Eric sought out Tanjy because of the rape.
Maggie thought about Eric's note to her, the one he had left for her the night he died, and wondered if she had been misreading it all along. I know who it is.
Last question: Why did Eric go to see Tony the night he was killed? Tony was Maggie's own therapist, and Eric detested psychiatry on principle. So what did he want with Tony? She could drive herself crazy thinking about the possibilities, and she didn't want to wait until the morning to get an answer. Maggie slid the chair back, got up, and took the cordless phone off its cradle and punched in Tony's number from memory.
He answered on the sixth ring. "Dr. Wells."
"Tony, it's Maggie."
"Maggie," he said drowsily. "It's late."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," she told him. "I need to ask you a question."
"Okay."
"Why did Eric come to see you on Wednesday night?"
Tony was silent. She felt as if she had added a new weight to his fleshy shoulders. When you spent your life with cops, sexual predators, and rape victims, you could let out the stress with sick humor or carry the heavy burden like a pack mule. Tony was a carrier, but that was what made him good.
Finally, he said, "Do you really want to do this now?"
"Yeah, I do."
"I told Abel it was a privileged conversation," Tony said. "I also told him if he thought you killed anyone, he needed a psychiatrist."
"Thanks."
"Are you sure you want the truth?"
"Why wouldn't I?"
"That depends on whether you're ready to discuss it," Tony said. "Eric told me something about you-something you obviously decided not to share with me. Although I really wish that you had come to me about this."
She closed her eyes. "That fucker."
"I'm sorry. I was going to tell you tomorrow."
"What did he want?"
Maggie tensed, waiting. Eric, what the hell did you do?
"He wanted my help in figuring out how you can spot a sexual predator," Tony went on. "He was planning to see someone after our meeting."
"Someone?"
"He didn't say who."
A few hours later, Eric was dead. Now Maggie knew why.
I know who it is.
18
On Sunday morning, Serena found herself among the deserted fields and open sky in the northeastern section of the city. The urban center of Duluth was clustered in a few square miles around the lake, on terraces carved into steep hills, like a miniature replica of the roller-coaster streets of San Francisco tucked into a snow globe. On the plateau above the lake, however, the land quickly leveled off and became flat and desolate. Arrow-straight highways stretched for miles. Houses were spaced far apart, with acres of land separating neighbors.