Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) (2 page)

People from the bar ran toward her, shouting. Somewhere among them, Cat called her name over and over in fear. Serena tried to stand, but she was too dizzy, and she fell forward, tasting blood on her tongue. She was on all fours now. Her hands pushed blindly around the muddy steps, hunting for the railing to use as leverage as she stood up. She felt rocks and tree branches and bug-eaten leaves beneath her fingers, and then, finally, she brushed against the iron of the railing.

Except – no.

What she felt under the wet skin of her hand wasn’t the railing mounted beside the steps. It was something else. Something metal and lethal and still hot to the touch.

When her brain righted itself, she realized it was a gun.

THEN

1

Nine Years Ago

Cindy Stride noted the clock on the dashboard of her Subaru Outback. 9:32 p.m.

Eventually, everyone would ask her about that. Jonny would pepper her with questions, not as a husband but as a cop.
What time was it? When did you leave the party at the Radisson?
The county attorney, Dan Erickson, would interrogate her about it months later on the witness stand.
Mrs. Stride, exactly what time was it when you took the defendant back to her house that night?

She didn’t know why she noticed the time, or why she remembered it, but she did. 9:32 p.m. Friday night. January 28.

Cindy glanced at the woman in the passenger seat beside her. Dr. Janine Snow. She couldn’t look at Janine without a twinge of jealousy. If you were a short woman, you wanted to be tall. If you had black hair, you wanted to be blond. If you were a physical therapist, like Cindy, you wanted to be a surgeon.

Janine was all of those things.

‘I’m sorry to make you leave the party early,’ her friend said, with a little hint of her Texas roots in her voice. ‘I’m not feeling well, and I didn’t think I should drive myself.’

Cindy shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. I wished the chief a happy birthday. I kissed his cheek. My duty was done.’

She squinted through the windshield of her Outback. She hated driving at night, and the hillside trek to Janine’s house made her nervous. Duluth was a city that made no sense in the winter, when ice turned the steep streets into luge tracks. Janine owned a Frank Lloyd Wright-style mansion high above Skyline Parkway, with a million-dollar view and drop-offs that made you hold your breath trying to climb the slick streets to get there. With each switchback over the treetops, the glazed roads felt as if they were a stairway into the clouds.

‘Could you stop?’ Janine asked suddenly.

‘What? Why?’

‘Please. I have to throw up.’

Cindy punched the brakes, and the Outback shimmied. Janine flung open the door and fumbled with the seat belt. Sub-zero air roared into the car, making Cindy shiver. She saw Janine sway on the shoulder, where the frozen ground dipped sharply at her feet.

‘Are you okay? Be careful!’

Janine sank to her knees and vomited the contents of her stomach. She tried to stand, but her heels slipped, and she nearly fell. She clung to the car door as she dragged herself back inside. The smell of puke came with her. Her untucked lavender blouse and her Paige jeans were soiled with dirt, snow, and regurgitated remnants of banquet shrimp. She put her fists on her knees and laid her head back with closed eyes.

‘I am so sorry,’ Janine murmured.

‘It’s okay,’ Cindy replied. ‘These days, it seems like eating anything makes me sick, too.’

The wheels of the Outback churned for traction as Cindy accelerated. She had nightmares sometimes about the Duluth streets, where she kept pushing the gas but could never get up an impossibly steep hill. She peered at the cliffside over the terraced road. Icicles dripped from the rocky ledges, remnants of a brief early-month thaw. Somewhere above her was Janine’s house. The mansion’s frame butted over the hillside, as if floating on air. It was a crazy place to live. She preferred the drafty cottage that she and Jonny owned on the spit of land between Lake Superior and the inner harbor. She liked living at sea level.

Beside her, Janine’s skin was ghostly white. The annoying thing about Janine was that she could be sick and still look good. Her natural blond hair swished about her shoulders like waves of sunshine. It didn’t matter whether her hair was styled or messy; somehow it always looked right. She was the perfect weight and the perfect size, and at thirty-nine years old, she seemed to stay that way effortlessly. She had ice-blue eyes that hardly ever blinked. It was unnerving when those eyes looked at you and made you stutter like a fool, because you were standing in front of someone who was so beautifully put together.

Yes, Cindy was a little jealous of Janine Snow.

‘Where’s your husband?’ Janine asked. ‘I’m surprised he’d miss the chief’s party.’

‘Jonny and Maggie got stuck on top of the Bong Bridge coming back from Superior. A semi overturned on the ice. Shut the whole thing down. It’s a mess.’

Janine gave a thin smile. ‘So is his little Chinese partner still in love with him?’

‘Maggie? Oh, yeah. She is.’

‘Does that worry you? They spend a lot of time together.’

‘No, it doesn’t bother me. Maggie may be in love with
him
, but Jonny’s in love with me.’

Janine pursed her lips as if she wanted to say something more, but she held her tongue. She wasn’t always blessed with social graces. If anyone else had insinuated a relationship between Jonny and Maggie, Cindy would have cut them off at the knees, but she made allowances for Janine’s prickly side.

They’d been friends for five years, ever since St. Anne’s recruited Janine from Texas to a top spot in cardiac surgery at the downtown hospital. Cindy worked as a physical therapist in an adjacent building, and they’d met at the cafeteria. Janine didn’t make friends easily, particularly with other women, but Cindy took pride in the fact that she herself was impossible to dislike. The two of them soon became close. Or as close as a doctor could be to anyone else.

Janine made no secret of her Texas-sized libido, but she was one of those women who always seemed to have the wrong man in her life. She’d already been divorced twice before relocating to Duluth. One marriage was teen love, naive and doomed. One was mercenary, to pay for medical school. Through both marriages, she’d kept her own name. Snow. And like the snow, she was cold, driven, and blinding.

Two years after arriving at St. Anne’s, Janine married again. This time it was a
News-Tribune
columnist named Jay Ferris, and the two of them were from Mars and Venus. Jay was black, and Janine was white. He was an Iron Range Democrat, and Janine was a Lone Star Republican. Their differences made the attraction hotter. Janine freely admitted to Cindy that her interest in Jay was rooted more in lust than love, but after the heat between them flamed out, their passion veered to the other extreme. Cindy didn’t need to ask why Jay hadn’t accompanied his wife to the party at the Radisson. Janine and Jay never went anywhere together. Not anymore. Not for months.

Cindy turned toward Janine’s house. The last hill was the steepest of all. There were three houses perched at the summit of a dead end, built to soak up views of the city and the lake. Janine’s house was the most recent, the most modern, and the most expensive. It had flat roofs, heated to melt the snow. The back of the house, built on columns mounted into the hillside, featured a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. The rounded porte cochère extended over the semi-circular driveway like a flying saucer.

Lights were on at the house. Jay Ferris was home. The garage door was open, revealing Jay’s new Hummer and an empty space where Janine usually kept her Mercedes, which she’d left behind in the parking ramp at the Radisson.

Cindy stopped in the driveway. ‘Here you go.’

‘Do you mind coming in with me? I’m pretty unsteady.’

‘Sure.’

Cindy got out. The hilltop wind swirled her long black hair and pinked up her cheeks. She went to the other side of the Outback and helped Janine out of the car. The taller woman put an arm around Cindy’s shoulder to support herself. Janine still walked with a limp after a painful fall on the ice the previous year. Cindy didn’t understand why her friend insisted on wearing heels, but to a Texas blond, leaving her heels at home was like suggesting she go to the party naked.

‘Do you have your key?’ Cindy asked.

‘Yes.’

But Janine didn’t need her key. Through the glass door, Cindy spotted Jay Ferris coming to meet them. She noticed a visceral reaction in her friend’s body when she saw her husband. Nothing brought this strong woman low like the man she’d married. Cindy wondered how long someone could live that way before they did something about it.

‘I’ll come inside with you,’ Cindy told her.

‘No.’ Janine’s voice was hushed and shaken. ‘No, you don’t need to do that. I can handle it myself. Thank you for taking me home.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I want to throw myself into the canyon,’ she said.

‘Janine.’

‘I’m kidding. I’m fine.’

‘Come home with me. You don’t have to stay here with him.’

Janine shook her head. ‘Yes, I do.’

The front door opened. A jazz clarinet sang from hidden speakers inside. Jay had a glass of red wine in his hand. He was slim and three or four inches shorter than his wife. He wore an untucked white silk shirt and gray dress slacks. His feet were bare. He cast a withering glance at Janine and paid no attention to Cindy.

‘Look at you. Is that puke? Very nice.’

Janine squared her shoulders and pushed past him. He slammed the door without acknowledging Cindy. Through the glass, she saw Janine kick off her heels in the marble foyer. She could hear their loud voices, already arguing. Jay reached for his wife, and she watched her friend violently shake him off. Cindy thought about ringing the bell to intervene, but Janine looked back through the window and mouthed:
Go
.

Cindy returned to her Outback and steeled herself for a slow, slippery drive home. She gave a silent prayer of thanks, not for the first time, for the husband she had and the life she led.

The streets around her were empty. No one else was foolish enough to be out on a night like this. It was just one of the details they would eventually ask her to remember.

As you left the house that night, Mrs. Stride, did you see anyone else?

‘No. There was no one else there. I was alone.’

*

Cindy awoke to the smell of cigarette smoke.

Their small bedroom was dark. She didn’t know what time it was. Through the half-open window, she heard the roar of Lake Superior yards from their back door. She shivered with cold in her nightgown as she sat up in bed, and the blanket slipped down her chest. She pushed tangled hair out of her face.

Where the moon made a triangle of light on the floor, she saw the silhouette of her husband. He was tall, almost six-foot-two. Strong and fit. His black hair wavy and untamed. He’d shrugged clothes onto his lean frame when he should have been getting undressed. He put a cigarette to his mouth – a habit she hated, but which he’d been unable to quit.

The bed was cold. He hadn’t climbed in with her yet.

She said: ‘What’s up?’

He realized she was awake and sat down beside her. When he flicked his cigarette lighter, it cast a flame. She could see his eyes now. She adored his eyes. Dark, teasing, fierce, funny, and so in love whenever they looked at her.

But his eyes weren’t happy.

‘Bad news,’ Jonathan Stride said. ‘I have to go out.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Did you see Janine at the chief’s party tonight?’

‘Of course. I took her home. She wasn’t feeling well.’

Stride stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘
You
drove Janine home? What time was that? When did you leave the party at the Radisson?’

The time popped into her head. ‘9:32 p.m.’

‘Almost an hour and a half ago,’ Stride murmured. ‘Did you see Jay?’

‘Briefly, yes. Why?’

Stride kissed her forehead. He stood up again. ‘Jay’s dead. Janine called 911 a few minutes ago. She says someone shot him.’

2

‘The thing about dead husbands and dead wives is that the cases are always like a knock-knock joke,’ Maggie Bei said.

Jonathan Stride eyed his tiny Chinese partner, who stared up at him from behind her black bangs. He played along. ‘How’s that?’

‘Knock knock,’ she said.

‘Who’s there?’

‘We know.’

‘We know who?’ Stride asked.

Maggie cocked her finger like a gun. ‘Yes, we do.’

Stride smothered a laugh. Maggie was right. He was hard-pressed to remember a dead spouse at home who hadn’t been shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned by their loving husband or loving wife. The investigations typically didn’t take long to produce enough evidence to lay in front of a jury. However, Dr. Janine Snow wasn’t an ordinary suspect.

She was rich.

She was a local hero who saved lives on the operating table.

She was one of his wife’s closest friends.

Stride ran his hands back through his wavy hair and blinked to stay awake. He was tired and cold. The temperature hovered around zero, and here on the high hillside, the lake wind hit his skin like acid. They’d already spent two hours outside this evening, up on the arch of the Bong Bridge that connected Duluth to its Wisconsin twin port town, Superior. A semi had spilled over on the icy bridge deck, closing the span and stranding cars for hours. One woman freaked out at the height and began threatening to throw herself into the water. A typical January evening.

He’d barely had time for a hot shower at home when Maggie called about the murder of Jay Ferris. Now he was cold again, but in Duluth, the chill of winter never really went away. You lived your life cold. Even under a wool blanket, your bones never forgot the cold. They reminded you with a little involuntary shiver.

Stride stood with Maggie next to his Ford Bronco, which was crusted with dirt and road salt. He studied the street and the house. His team had already closed off the scene, and it was remote enough and late enough – after midnight – that news of the murder hadn’t leaked to the media yet. That wouldn’t last long, particularly given the prominence of the husband and wife involved in the crime.

The road banked sharply downward from where he was parked. The street was free of snow, but six-foot drifts had been piled on the shoulders by the plows. There were three houses here, all on the cliffside overlooking the lake, all worth in excess of a million dollars. He knew the families who owned them. Janine and Jay. Next to them, another surgeon, along with his gay partner and their three adopted children. Next to them, behind a wrought-iron gate, the owners of a successful restaurant chain located in the tourist heart of the city in Canal Park. Duluth’s upper-crust was a small community, and the chief made it a point that he and his lieutenants keep good relationships with them.

‘I want you to interview the neighbors yourself,’ he told Maggie.

‘Sure.’

‘Be polite.’

‘Me? I’m always polite.’

Stride smiled at her. Another joke. Maggie was, in fact, foul-mouthed and sarcastic. He was amazed at how much she’d changed in the few years they’d been working together. She was a whip-smart Chinese immigrant and criminology grad from the University of Minnesota, but Stride had been reluctant to hire her, because she came across as too strait-laced for his rowdy team. That didn’t last long. She loosened up, learned how to swear, and learned how to boss around colleagues who were at least a foot taller than she was. She dressed in trendy clothes from the teen racks, wore ridiculous block heels that made her sound like a clog dancer when she walked, and constantly had to blow bangs from her mop of black hair out of her eyes.

‘Come on,’ Stride said, ‘let’s go inside.’

Janine Snow’s house was three stories high, but the entrance was on the uppermost level, and the other two floors were built below them into the side of the hill. They walked up the semi-circular driveway past an open three-car garage. Gravel and salt littered the sidewalk. At the doorway, where a uniformed officer guarded the door, they donned gloves and plastic coverings over their shoes. The marbled foyer opened into a living area with a high ceiling that was decorated with African-themed paintings and abstract onyx sculptures. A triptych portrait of Malcolm X loomed over a black-and-white sofa, and the modern chairs looked uncomfortable. The living room stretched to the back of the house, where high windows overlooked the city lights and the dark mass of Lake Superior.

The view was stunning, but right now, it was overshadowed by the body of Jay Ferris, who lay sprawled on his back on a gray-striped area rug. A circular wound had burned through the middle of his forehead, and the floor under his head was matted with blood. None of the blood had stained his shirt, which was cloud-white against his black skin. Aside from the hole in his head, he was still a handsome man. Shaved scalp. Tightly cropped goatee.

‘Jay Ferris,’ he murmured. He had to be honest. He’d never liked this man.

Jay was a Duluth lifer, like Stride. He’d grown up in the city’s Lincoln Park area and tangled with the police as a teenager over drugs and theft. Even so, Jay was a smart, ambitious kid. He’d studied at UMD on a scholarship, got a journalism degree with honors, and worked his way up at the
Duluth News-Tribune
from the copy-editing desk to a gig as a daily columnist. He knew that controversy sold newspapers, and he supplied a lot of it. In a city that smoothed over its racist past, Jay was a crusader against the white-bread elite. Stride didn’t mind that – there were skeletons in any town’s closet that needed to see the light of day – but he resented the carelessness with which Jay used his bully pulpit to destroy ordinary people.

One of his own cops had wound up in Jay’s crosshairs. A young police officer named Nathan Skinner had gotten drunk in the Wisconsin Dells and been pulled over on the highway. That was bad enough, but Skinner used an ugly racial epithet in the course of the arrest. It was outrageous, drunken behavior, and Stride suspended him for a month and sent him to diversity training in Minneapolis. That didn’t satisfy Jay, who beat the drum over Skinner’s arrest in his newspaper column. He made Skinner the poster boy for racism inside the city’s police ranks, and the chief finally ordered Stride to fire Skinner as a way to get the story out of the papers. Stride didn’t excuse what Skinner had done, but he didn’t think the mistake justified taking a young man’s entire career.

Neither did most of his other cops. Jay Ferris wasn’t popular with the Duluth Police.

Stride examined Jay’s body. The full report would come from the St. Louis County medical examiner, but he’d seen enough gunshot victims to recognize the obvious details. Powder tattooing on the forehead indicated an intermediate-range wound; the shooter had been within a couple feet of Jay when firing the shot. Based on the location of the body, the shooter had stood between Jay and the front door.

A glass of wine lay tipped on the rug beside him, leaving its own stain of red. Another glass, smeared with lipstick, sat on a mahogany coffee table.

‘No gun,’ Maggie said. ‘We’re still searching.’

‘Search harder,’ Stride said. ‘We need that gun. Where’s Janine?’

‘Downstairs in her office. Archie Gale is already with her. She wouldn’t say a word until he got here. Smart.’ Maggie rolled her eyes.

‘I’ll talk to her.’ He added again: ‘Find the gun.’

Stride took spiral stairs down to the next level of the house. The staircase was modern, made of chrome and stone. Janine and Jay had built the house less than a year earlier, but according to Cindy, it was Janine’s baby. Her dream. She’d worked with an architect for months on the design. The mansion on the hill was one of the perks of being a surgeon.

Janine’s home office was about the square footage of Stride’s whole house. She had a huge and impeccably clean desk near the windows. He could see the lift bridge in Canal Park shimmering far below. An entire wall of the office was dedicated to built-in bookshelves stocked with medical volumes, and she had another wall filled with photographs of ordinary people. These were her heart patients. People whose lives she’d saved. He didn’t think it was an accident that she was waiting for the police here. She wanted to remind him who she was and how important she was to the city of Duluth.

It also wasn’t an accident that she wasn’t alone. Archibald Gale was with her, and Gale was the northland’s leading criminal defense attorney. As Stride entered the office, Gale sprang up from the leather sofa. For a large man – 6 feet, at least 275 pounds – he was nimble on his feet. He had receding gray hair, curly and short, and blue eyes that twinkled behind tiny circular glasses. Despite the hour, he was dressed in a pressed three-piece suit, with a tie neatly knotted to pinch his thick neck.

‘Lieutenant!’ Gale exclaimed cheerfully, as if they were old friends. Which, to some extent, they were. They were on opposite sides of the game, but Gale was also a difficult man to dislike.

‘Archie,’ Stride replied. ‘Nice suit.’

Stride’s own tie was loose at his neck, and he’d pulled an Oxford shirt out of the dirty clothes basket. He still wore his old leather jacket, which had seen more than a decade of use and had a bullet hole in one sleeve.

‘I was still at the office,’ Gale said. ‘Lieutenant, I believe you know Dr. Janine Snow.’

Stride nodded at the surgeon. ‘Dr. Snow.’

‘Lieutenant Stride.’

It was strange, being so formal with her. They were otherwise on a first-name basis. She’d been in his house. She had lunch or played golf with his wife a couple of times a month. They’d done community fundraisers together. Even so, she was a crime victim now. And a suspect. They both knew it.

The first thing he noticed about Janine was that her blond hair was wet. She’d showered. That was what you did when you arrived home from a party, sick and disheveled. Or it was what you did when you had just shot your husband and you wanted to make sure your skin and hair kept no residue chemicals from firing a gun.

He sat down on the sofa next to her, in the spot where Gale had been. The attorney leaned his wide backside on the corner of Janine’s desk and watched them with the fussy concern of a mother superior. Janine waited for Stride’s questions, and she was exactly the woman he remembered. Smart, beautiful, emotionally distant. She showed no tears. No pretense of sadness. For her, this was a practical exercise. Her husband had been murdered. Innocent or guilty, she needed to make sure that this incident didn’t steal away the rest of her life.

‘I’m surprised you felt the need to bring in an attorney so quickly,’ he said to her.

‘Oh, let’s not travel down that tired old road,’ Gale interjected before Janine could answer. ‘If you were hiking in the Alaskan wilderness for the first time, I imagine you’d want a guide, wouldn’t you, Lieutenant? There are always bears feeding in the shallows.’

Stride shrugged. Janine knew that hiring a lawyer made her look guilty. She was savvy enough not to care.

‘Tell me exactly what happened tonight,’ he said.

Janine glanced at Gale, who nodded his approval.

‘Cindy brought me home early from the party,’ she explained. ‘I wasn’t feeling well. In fact, we had to stop along the way for me to throw up. After she dropped me off, I talked to Jay for a while. Argued is more like it. I’m being candid with you about that.’

‘What did you argue about?’

‘Nothing of consequence. Jay and I could argue about anything, and we usually did. Mr. Gale probably wants me to pretend that everything was fine between us, but you wouldn’t believe me if I said that. I’m sure Cindy has told you that the relationship between me and Jay was strained. You knew my husband, Lieutenant. If you think he was difficult as a journalist, trust me, he was even more difficult to live with.’

‘How long did you argue?’ Stride asked.

‘I have no idea. Ten minutes? Fifteen? I had some wine.’

‘Even though you were feeling sick?’

‘Vomiting has a way of improving your outlook,’ Janine replied.

‘Then what?’

‘I took a shower.’

‘Where is the shower located in the house?’ Stride asked.

‘The lowest level, off the master bedroom. Jay and I have separate bathrooms. I built mine as something of a spa and retreat. Husbands have man caves. I have my bathroom.’

‘And when you got out?’

‘I noticed something strange.’

‘What was that?’ Stride asked.

‘The drawers of the jewelry case in the bedroom were open. I hadn’t left them that way. When I looked, several expensive pieces of jewelry were gone. I called for Jay but got no answer. I went back upstairs, and that was when I found him.’

It wasn’t a convincing story, but she told it as if it were gospel.

‘So you’re saying that in the time you were in the shower, someone came into the house, shot and killed your husband, walked down two levels, found your bedroom, stole jewelry, and then escaped.’

‘That’s correct,’ Janine said.

‘You must take long showers,’ Stride said without humor.

‘In fact, I do.’

‘How long?’

‘I didn’t time myself, Lieutenant. I sat in the spray for a long time.’

‘Did you hear anything? Did you hear the gunshot?’

‘No.’

‘What did you do when you found Jay’s body?’ Stride asked.

‘I was in shock,’ Janine replied. ‘The front door was open. I ran to the doorway, and I heard the noise of a car on the streets below us, but that’s all. I didn’t see anyone or anything.’

‘What next? Take me through it.’

‘I confirmed that Jay was dead, although the wound made that obvious.’

‘And then you dialed 911?’

Janine hesitated. ‘I believe some time passed.’

‘Some time? How much time?’

‘Again, I don’t know. There are no clocks in my house. I’m not interested in what time it is when I’m home. I sat on the sofa and stared at Jay. As I say, I was in shock. When I was myself again, I called the police.’

‘And Mr. Gale,’ Stride said.

‘Yes, that’s correct.’

‘Anybody else? Neighbors? Friends?’

‘No.’

‘Did you go anywhere? Did you leave the house?’