In the Dark (5 page)

 

“Sounds nice.”

 

“It was. I did it for a long time. Then I met someone, a photographer who worked with me on a piece from Tallinn in Estonia. We fell in love. That was how I wound up in Atlanta. We both got jobs at the
Journal-Constitution
. It was great for a while, but it didn’t work out. I mean, we’re still friends, but we realized after several years that we weren’t going to make it as lovers. So I started traveling again, but my heart just hasn’t been in it. That was when I decided to take some time off. When I did, I realized I was thinking a lot about Laura.”

 

“Laura died a long time ago,” Stride said.

 

“I know, but some wounds never really heal.” Tish slid a silver chain away from her neck and let it swish against the white silk of her blouse. She fingered a slim ring that dangled on the end of the chain. “See this ring? Laura had one just like it. We got them together at the Grandstand at the State Fair. That was the summer before she died. It’s cheap, but I like to keep it with me.”

 

“You two were close?”

 

Tish nodded. “Inseparable.”

 

“So how come I don’t remember seeing the two of you at Cindy’s house?”

 

“Oh, that. You were never a teenage girl.”

 

“Meaning?”

 

“Meaning we had a fight. That was probably around the time you and Cindy got together. We didn’t talk to each other for a few weeks. It was May, not long before school let out. I went to the Cities right after that.”

 

“What was the fight about?”

 

“I don’t remember. Something stupid.”

 

This time, Stride thought she was lying.

 

“How did the two of you meet?” he asked.

 

“We were both in Rikke Mathisen’s geometry class in our junior year,” Tish said. “Laura and I sat next to each other. It was like we were kindred spirits. Laura was restless, like me. She had lost her mom, too, and her dad was a piece of shit, so she could relate to what I was going through.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry, I guess I shouldn’t have said that. He was your father-in-law.”

 

Stride shrugged. He and William Starr had never been close. The man had dealt with the tragedies of his life by taking his anger and his Puritan guilt out on everyone around him. Except Cindy. He knew better than to tangle with his youngest daughter. Cindy had pretty much run her dad’s life for the next fifteen years after his wife’s death, until William Starr succumbed to cancer. Just as Cindy would do ten years later. Stride finally understood how easy it would have been to end up like his father-in-law, when he lost his own wife in the prime of her life.

 

“I think Cindy was a little jealous of me in those days,” Tish said. “You know as well as I do that Cindy and Laura were never really the same after their mom died. Cindy took over, and Laura let her, but that’s not the same as being sisters. So when I came along, it was like I was the sister Laura had been looking for. Cindy never said anything, but I don’t think she liked it. I was always there. I slept over a lot. Laura and I shared everything. We were going to run away from Duluth together, see the big wide world, you know?”

 

“Except you moved away, and Laura didn’t,” Stride said.

 

Tish’s face clouded over. “Yeah.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“I told you, it wasn’t important.”

 

“No, you told me you didn’t remember,” Stride said.

 

Tish looked at him. “You’re right, I don’t.”

 

She was still lying.

 

“Anyway, we were past it,” Tish went on. “I wrote to her when I moved to St. Paul, and she wrote back, and we became friends again, just like before. Laura was going to join me in the Cities. She never got the chance, though. She was killed before she could get away. I guess that’s why it’s gnawed at me all these years. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. She and I were supposed to escape together. Instead, we let some silly argument come between us, and she stayed behind. And she never made it out.”

 

She made it sound as if Duluth were a war zone, and Laura had been a soldier trapped behind enemy lines.

 

“When did the stalking begin?” Stride asked.

 

“During the spring. Late April, early May.”

 

“Did Laura have any idea who was doing this to her?”

 

Tish shook her head. “No, but it must have been someone at school. Most of the notes wound up in her locker. She thought it would all go away after graduation.”

 

“It didn’t?”

 

“No, the letters and photos started arriving by mail after school let out. Laura told me about it when she wrote to me in the Cities. I was scared for her.”

 

“Why did you bring up Peter Stanhope’s name? Do you have any reason to believe he was the one who was stalking her?”

 

“He was one of the last people to see her alive. I know he was a suspect in the murder.” She added, “Does your girlfriend have some kind of relationship with Peter Stanhope?”

 

“He’s a client,” Stride said.

 

He didn’t tell her that the relationship went deeper than that. Stanhope had asked Serena to be a full-time investigator at his law firm, and Serena was wrestling with the decision. Stride thought she was planning to say yes.

 

“Is that going to be a problem?” Tish asked.

 

“Peter’s rich and powerful. That’s always a problem.”

 

Tish shrugged. “I’m not afraid of him. Look, I know that Peter was after Laura. They dated for a while that spring. Peter was looking for another conquest. If Laura had put out, that would have been the end of it.”

 

“But she didn’t?” Stride asked.

 

“No way. Peter was hot for sex, but Laura didn’t want to do it. So she
broke it off. He took it badly. You know how rich young punks like Stanhope can be. They think they can have whatever they want because their daddies have money. He wanted Laura, and he was furious when she turned him down. The letters started arriving not long after that.”

 

“That’s not enough to make a connection,” Stride said.

 

“Well, I know what Peter was like. He came after me before Laura, and I didn’t want anything to do with him. He got nasty when I told him no.”

 

Tish shivered as the sun sank below the crest of the hill. Long shadows accompanied a damp chill off the water.

 

“Listen, Tish,” Stride said. “I’m going to tell you a couple things, but like I said before, it’s off the record. Okay?”

 

Tish nodded unhappily.

 

“I need to hear you say it,” Stride said.

 

“Yes, this is off the record.”

 

“Good. You have to remember that I know this case inside and out. I lived it back then with Cindy and with Ray Wallace, who was the cop in charge of the investigation. When I took over the Detective Bureau, I went through the file page by page. I reviewed all the evidence, because I had my doubts, too. I didn’t find anything new that pointed at Peter or at anyone other than Dada, the man I confronted near the railroad tracks.”

 

“So what did you find?” Tish asked.

 

“First, there was a fingerprint report. There were prints on the baseball bat that matched Dada’s.”

 

“Except it was Peter Stanhope’s bat,” Tish said. “I read about that in the paper. His prints must have been on the bat, too.”

 

“Yes, but his prints made sense. Dada’s prints didn’t.”

 

“Laura was being stalked,” Tish insisted. “Someone had been pursuing her for weeks. That wasn’t a stranger. It was someone who knew her.”

 

Stride put a hand lightly on her shoulder. “The police knew about the stalking.”

 

“Are you sure?”

 

“Cindy told them. I was there when she told Ray. Look, Cindy thought the same thing you did—that whoever had been pursuing Laura was the one who killed her. She even had one of the notes that this guy sent her. A porn photo with a warning scrawled on it.”

 

“So?”

 

“So there weren’t any fingerprints on the photo,” Stride said. “It wasn’t helpful.”

 

“That was then. Don’t they have better techniques for raising prints now? Maybe there’s still something there.”

 

Stride nodded. “We have much more sophisticated techniques for that kind of thing, but what we don’t have is the photograph. It’s gone, along with the other crime scene photos they took back then. So’s the bat. Somewhere along the line, much of the physical evidence from the case was lost.”

 

“Son of a bitch!” Tish exclaimed. “Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”

 

“You’re talking about a case from thirty years ago. Things get misplaced.”

 

He didn’t tell her his own suspicion that Ray Wallace was the one who had made the evidence disappear.

 

Tish walked away. They were near the lighthouse at the end of the pier. She climbed the steps and leaned back against the chapped white paint of the light tower with her arms folded. Her purse was slung over her shoulder. Stride followed her up the steps.

 

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

 

Tish looked up at him. “Can I trust you?”

 

“What?”

 

“You said you don’t trust me. Can I trust you?”

 

“I think you can. There will always be things I have to keep confidential, but I won’t lie to you.”

 

Tish unzipped her purse. She slid out a small, clear plastic bag that contained a yellowed envelope. He could see block handwriting, and even without taking it in his hand, he saw the name written on the front.

 

LAURA STARR.

 

“Here,” Tish said. “Physical evidence.”

 

“What the hell is this?” Stride asked.

 

“It’s one of the stalking letters that Laura received. She sent it to me while I was living in St. Paul.”

 

“You’ve had the letter all this time, and you never told anyone?”

 

“In the old days, I didn’t think it mattered,” Tish said. “Then I put it away and forgot all about it. I was clearing out old boxes in Atlanta a few months ago when I moved out of my partner’s apartment, and that’s when
I found it again. Don’t you see? This changes everything. That’s when I started thinking about the book again, because I knew I had something that could reopen the case.”

 

Stride did see.

 

The letter to Laura wasn’t a note that had been pushed through a school locker. Whoever sent it to her had put it in the mail, using a stamp and licking an envelope. Even thirty years later, that meant one thing.

 

DNA.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4
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Clark Biggs watched his daughter squirm on the living room floor with her legs tucked underneath her. Mary picked up her colored blocks and carefully stacked ten of them one on top of the other, until she had built a rainbow tower. When she was finished, she beamed at Clark with the biggest, most beautiful smile he had ever seen, the kind that made his heart ache every time he saw it. Then she toppled the tower by blowing on it like the big bad wolf, giggled at him, and began setting up the blocks again. She could do it over and over and never tire of the game. She was like every other five-year-old girl in the world.

 

Except Mary was sixteen.

 

To anyone looking at her, she was a typical teenager. She had a curly mop of blond hair and eyes that Clark thought of as Caribbean blue. Her face was round and bright. She was almost six feet tall, with a stocky frame. A big girl. She could have been a runner or a wrestler. It seemed so wrong and unfair that she kept growing into a pretty young woman while remaining trapped in the mind of a child. Clark lay awake nights blaming himself and God for the accident in the water. He consoled himself with the belief that Mary would be perpetually happy, perpetually innocent,
without the awkwardness, pain, doubt, and self-consciousness of becoming a real teenager. It was little comfort.

 

“It’s bedtime, Mary,” he murmured.

 

She pretended not to hear him. She kept playing with her blocks and humming a tune to herself. Clark realized it was the theme song to a television show they had watched earlier in the evening. He was always amazed at the things that made it inside her brain, when so many other things did not.

 

“Bedtime, Mary,” he repeated without enthusiasm.

 

Mary stopped and frowned. Her lips turned downward like a clown’s. He laughed, and she laughed, too.

 

“Five more minutes,” he said.

 

Clark hated Sunday nights. At ten o’clock, Mary would go to bed, and he would be alone in the small house for another hour while he watched TV and poured himself a last beer. In the morning, his ex-wife, Donna, would come by the house, and they would silently make the exchange. Mary would cry and go with her, and Clark would cry and watch her go. Then he would pour coffee into a Thermos, silently wrap up a turkey sandwich for his lunch, and head off to his construction site on the Duluth harbor, knowing that the house would be empty when he returned home. Five long, lonely days awaited him. During the week, it was as if he were in a trance, waiting for that moment on Friday evening when Donna’s SUV pulled up in front of his door, and Mary ran up the sidewalk to get folded up in his arms. His beautiful girl. His baby. He lived for the weekends with her, but they were over almost as soon as they began, leaving him right back here, dreading her bedtime, feeling his soul grow cloudy at the thought of a week alone.

 

“Come on, honey,” he told her, his voice cracking.

 

Clark got off the sofa. Mary got her big bones from him. He was burly and strong. He had worked construction since he was eighteen, and after twenty years laboring outside through bitter cold and ninety-degree summers, he woke up every morning with his muscled body stiffened into knots. In his twenties, he could take a hot shower and come out refreshed and limber. Not now. Pain dogged him through his days.

 

Mary bounded up and held out her hand. He took it to lead her to her room. Her skin was pink and soft, and his own skin was like leather. She