"That's what I thought, but I checked with the Ordway anyway and followed up with the season ticket holders who sat next to him."
"Did they remember Eric?"
"Oh, yeah. They said he almost got kicked out of the theater."
"Kicked out? Why?"
"He was bothering the ushers. Asking them a lot of questions."
"What kind of questions?"
"I don't know, but I'd like to find out."
24
On Monday morning, Serena headed down the Point toward Canal Park, using the street as her path because the plows had cleared it of snow and ice. She took long, graceful strides as she ran. She wore a Lycra bodysuit, leggings, and a down vest, with mufflers over her ears and her long hair tied back in a ponytail. She did three miles in half an hour and made it to the lift bridge that towered overhead like a gray guillotine. Serena drifted to a stop and bent over, resting her hands on her knees. She took several deep breaths and then stretched her head back and stared at the sky. She took a few awkward steps, like a peacock, kicking her legs to keep them loose. She unhitched a bottle of water she kept on a Velcro strap at her waist and squirted a stream into her mouth. It was frosty cold.
She wandered out on the sidewalk into the center of the bridge. The shipping season was over, so the bridge rarely went up at this time of year. The water in the harbor on her left was frozen over, and even the narrow canal that lapped out into Lake Superior was glazed with ice. She leaned on the steel railing, staring out at the lake.
She was alone, but the sensation that someone's eyes were on her refused to go away. The feeling even dogged her at home, where she felt as if she were sharing her life with a ghost. It reminded her of the days in Vegas when Tommy Luck was on her trail. Serena remembered being in his apartment after they arrested him and finding the wall of photographs he had secretly taken of her. Like a shrine. Some on the street. Some in her car. Some, with a telephoto, through the bedroom window of her apartment. All of them disfigured and raped, as if he was fantasizing about the real thing. She kept an eye on Tommy after that, and when he got out on parole the first time, she thought seriously about taking care of him, neat and quick, before he could nurse his obsession again. The Vegas cops would have looked the other way, but Tommy was a nobody, and she decided she didn't want his corpse on her conscience.
It wasn't the first time she had faced that temptation. When Serena was in Phoenix, living her year of hell with her mother and Blue Dog, she thought constantly about ways to kill them. She went to sleep at night drumming up the courage to take a knife and slit his throat while he slept, and then to do the same to her mother. Murder them, and disappear. No one would miss them, and no one would find her. Many times she went so far as to take a kitchen knife and stand in the bedroom doorway and watch them sleep, but she never crossed the threshold. Instead, she ran away to Las Vegas and didn't look back.
Serena wondered how her life would be different now if things had gone another way.
If she had taken the kitchen knife into her mother's bedroom.
If she had put a bullet in Tommy Luck's head.
Her cell phone rang. She slid it out of the pocket of her vest and checked the calling number, which she didn't recognize. "Serena Dial."
"My name is Nicole Castro," a woman announced. "I got your number from Archie Gale."
"Oh?"
"He told me that you and I have something in common." Her voice was ironic and tough, like a comedian who had done too many shows.
"What's that?" Serena asked.
"You're sleeping with a guy named Jonathan Stride, and my boss used to be a guy named Jonathan Stride."
Serena didn't laugh. "Exactly what do you want, Ms. Castro?"
"Call me Nicole. I want to talk with you about the murder of Eric Sorenson."
"You should talk to the police."
Nicole scoffed. "We both know that Abel already has his teeth in a suspect. Believe me, he won't listen to anything I have to say."
"Why's that?"
"He used to be my partner."
Serena stood up straight and wiped her sleeve across her forehead. "What kind of information do you have, Nicole?"
"How about we talk face-to-face about that?"
"I don't recall Jonny mentioning you," Serena said.
"Jonny?"
"Stride."
"Oh, yeah. Well, I don't suppose he thinks much about me anymore. They all want to forget me. Look, Archie said you wanted to help out on this case. So do you want my help or not?"
"If it's a useful lead, absolutely."
"Then come see me."
"We could have lunch at Grandma's," Serena said.
Nicole's voice was bitter. "There's nothing I'd like more, believe me. Unfortunately, I don't live in Duluth anymore. I'm in the Twin Cities in a town called Shakopee."
"That's okay. I'm driving down to the Cities tomorrow anyway. Where would you like to meet?"
"You'll have to come to me. I'm in prison."
Serena exhaled steam and looked around to see if anyone was watching her. The bridge railing under her fingers was cold. "I thought you said you were a cop."
"That's right. I used to be in the Detective Bureau in Duluth. Then I was framed for my husband's murder. Just like Maggie."
Grassy Point Park was a speck of green shaped like a knife hooking into the narrow channel of St. Louis Bay. It was on a dead-end road in the heart of the city's industrial area, near ore docks and railroad tracks. The frozen harbor was on Stride's left. He could have driven onto the ice and taken a shortcut back home around the Wisconsin peninsula. On his right, where the park ended, he saw Santa Fe railcars loaded high with rock on the other side of a barbed wire fence. The wind was fierce and cold, and the morning sky overhead was a gray shroud.
This was where Tanjy said she was taken, tied to the tall fence by the rail yard, and assaulted.
He put himself in Tanjy's mind, imagining it was night in early November. The lights of the bridge to Superior glistened to the north. They were close enough to the water to hear waves slapping on the shore. Tanjy struggled, but there was a knife to her throat, and she didn't make a sound. She was tied up and stripped. The loops of the fence crushed against her naked skin.
After, she was alone. Humiliated. She didn't cry out for help. She freed herself, drove home, and washed away the shame and the evidence.
Stride shook his head. There was a piece of the puzzle that didn't fit.
When she first told Stride the story, one detail struck him as odd. After the rape, the assailant left Tanjy's car behind, because he had another car waiting for him in the park. At the time, Stride wondered how the rapist could have left a car behind for himself and made his way out of the park and back into the city. When Tanjy admitted lying about the rape, he forgot about the anomaly. Now it was back in his mind.
The murder scene left him with the same suspicion. If Tanjy's murderer transported her to Hell's Lake in the trunk of her car, and then disposed of the car in the woods after dumping her body in the ice, where was his own car? He couldn't have walked far in the subzero weather. He also couldn't very well drive two cars at the same time. So how did he vacate the desolate woods where he left Tanjy's car?
Answer: There was someone else involved. Someone driving another car.
Maybe. Or maybe he and Abel were both thinking what the killer wanted them to think.
Stride gripped the fence with both hands. The more he imagined Tanjy's rape, the more he felt a jolt of anger and regret, thinking about Maggie. He had to control his rage and dole it out into his veins in doses, like adrenaline. In Las Vegas, when his partner got shot, he had felt the same fury that left him teetering on the edge of control.
He was angry with Maggie, too. Angry that she had let it go, destroyed evidence, failed to report a crime. He knew it was easy for him to make that judgment when he didn't live through it, but he was also angry that she had cut him out of her life by not sharing her pain with him, by not trusting him. The intimacy between them felt broken, even though he had no right to expect it from her.