"When?" Stride asked.
Maggie knew what he meant. She reached out and curled her fingers around the steering wheel and held on tightly. "It happened just before Thanksgiving. Eric was out of town."
Stride remembered. She had called in sick for nearly two weeks and blamed it on the flu.
"I was asleep. He had a knife." She brushed her hair back behind her ear and showed him a two-inch-long scar. "I've blocked out most of the details. I just don't remember."
"Jesus," Stride murmured.
"I said no pity, boss. Not from you. Got it?"
Stride thought that her bravado was cellophane-thick.
"You know what I did first?" she went on. "You'll love this. I laughed. It was all so fucking hilarious. This was God's big joke. I told myself I was dreaming, that I had made it all up in my head, that there was no way this could have happened to me. Then the next thing I knew, I was pounding on the floor and wailing. I sat in the dark and cried for two days."
He opened his mouth to say something and then shut it. There was nothing to say.
"You know what I did next?" Maggie continued. "I threw out all the food in the refrigerator. Nuts, huh? Everything. Right down to the bare shelves, and then I sprayed the whole thing down. Same in every room. I went through a dozen cans of Lysol. I didn't want to smell anything. The place was like a hospital."
He clenched his fists. Maggie saw him do it. "If I ever get my hands on this son of a bitch, I'll kill him," he said.
"I know you want to be a hero, boss, but this happened to me, not you. I'm only telling you this now because I don't have any choice."
"Why didn't you come to me back then?"
She turned and stared at him. Her eyes were fierce with pride. "Because this didn't happen to a cop. It happened to a woman. Don't you get it? I didn't want you or any other man to know about this. Not then. Not ever. It was bad enough telling Eric. He wanted me to report it, and I just wanted it to go away. I still do."
"At least tell me you got help."
"Haven't you been listening? I didn't want to talk to anyone. It's killing me to talk about this now. And yeah, I know, this is rape trauma syndrome, and I was in the acute phase, and I was expressive, not controlled, and you know what? It's all psycho bullshit. Everything I've told rape victims over the years is bullshit. This happened to me. If you haven't been where I've been, you don't have a fucking clue."
He searched for the right thing to say and wound up saying the wrong thing. "I just don't understand how you of all people would not report this."
"You saw what happened to Tanjy. She was humiliated. Destroyed. I didn't want the same thing to happen to me."
"It would have been different with you," Stride insisted.
Maggie shook her head. "You can be so stupid, boss. You're a great cop, but you can be so blind sometimes that it drives me crazy. Do you think I don't have secrets? Do you think there aren't things that I don't want out in public?"
"What things?"
"That's none of your business. The whole point is that I didn't go public because I didn't want to have my life ruined."
"How can I solve this case if you won't talk to me?" Stride asked.
Maggie dug inside the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a crumpled note. She smoothed it and handed it to Stride. There was a smeared sentence scrawled across the paper in a man's handwriting.
I know who it is.
"What the hell is this?" he asked.
"Eric left that for me the night he was killed. At first, I thought he was accusing me of having an affair, but that wasn't it at all. That wasn't what he meant."
"Tanjy left the same message for Dan Erickson the night she disappeared."
Maggie didn't look surprised. "I think Eric figured out who the rapist was. When I refused to go to the police, I think he went to see Tanjy on his own. Somehow, the two of them found something that led them to the rapist. Then this guy killed them both."
Stride recollected the chain of events in his mind. On Monday afternoon, Eric confronted Tanjy on the street in front of Java Jelly, and whatever he told her upset her deeply. Tanjy left work early, and that night, she called Lauren with a secret. I know who it is. Except she never got the chance to tell anyone. Someone killed her and buried her body under the ice. Two days later, Eric was killed, too.
He lowered the window on the passenger side of the truck. Snow blew in and dampened his face. He lit a cigarette, inhaled the tar into his lungs, and held it outside the window, where the smoke curled away. "Do you have any idea who Eric suspected?"
"No, but start with Tony. Eric talked to him that night. He may be able to help us."
"Maybe Eric suspected Tony was the rapist. You and Tanjy were both patients of his."
"Yeah, I thought about that, but Tony says Eric came to him about profiling a sexual predator, and that makes sense. Eric knew we worked with Tony on that kind of shit all the time."
"I'll talk to him," Stride said. "I'll go back over Tanjy's police statement, too. If she wasn't lying to us, then whoever raped her knew that Grassy Point Park was a place she took her boyfriends. At least, Mitchell Brandt says she took him there."
"Good."
"You're still hiding something, Mags," he told her. "My hands are tied if you're not completely honest with me."
"I'm sorry. I'm not just thinking about myself. Other people could be hurt by what I say."
"They could be hurt by what you don't say."
Their eyes connected. She knew what he meant. The rapist was still out there.
"If there's no other way, then I'll tell you why I couldn't report the rape, but as far as I know, it has nothing to do with Tanjy. There has to be a different connection."
"You know I should go to Teitscher with this. He's chasing his tail. This could take away the cloud over you, Mags."
She reached out and took his hand. It was the kind of intimate gesture she never made with him. She teased him. Winked at him. Insulted him. But she never touched him. "I'm asking you not to do that, Jonathan."
He didn't fight her. "If that's what you want. For now."
"I'm also trying to retrace Eric's steps," Maggie added. "I want to know how he found this guy."
"What have you found out?"
Maggie's eyes gleamed, looking like a cop's eyes again. "Eric was in the Twin Cities the weekend before he was killed. He came back on Monday, and that's when he went to see Tanjy. That's when everything started."
"You think he found something on his trip," Stride concluded.
"Exactly. That's why I was late. I was on the phone with people at the Saint Paul Hotel, trying to find out what Eric did while he was there. I got his invoice records from the hotel, and I checked his credit card and cell phone statements online."
"And?"
"He called and charged a ticket to a play at the Ordway Center on Saturday night. One ticket, not two."
"The Ordway is right across the park from the Saint Paul Hotel," Stride said. "He probably just wanted something to do on Saturday night."