Blind Spot (29 page)

“Was he alone, or with someone?”

“Alone.”

“Can you describe his demeanor? Did he seem upset or angry?”

“Not either one of those.” She pulled her hands out of her pockets. “But, hey, I don’t know him all that well. Before Saturday night, the last time I laid eyes on him was at an interfaith workshop thing across the river. Five years ago maybe. Even then, we didn’t talk. We just sort of screamed across the table at each other.”

Bernadette frowned. “What do you mean?”

“We were both speaking on capital punishment.” She tucked a band of blond-gray behind her right ear and said smugly: “I was against it, of course.”

“And he was for it.”

“You got it.”

The door to the women’s changing stall swung open, and a plump, barefoot young woman with bobbed brown hair stepped out. Behind her trailed two toddler girls. The woman’s gut was pouring out over the waistband of the jeans, and the girls were drowning in their secondhand pants. Tired pastel tee shirts topped the three. The woman looked at the reverend. “Whadya think? They’re Tommies and everything.”

Pastor Tabitha: “They look great, Jenna.”

Bernadette eyed the pastor but didn’t say anything. The trio disappeared back inside the fitting room.

The roar of a truck engine shook the building. A semi pulled up in front of the shop, the wide sides of the trailer filling the storefront windows. Pastor Tabitha pivoted around and looked through the glass. “Damnit. I told them to park in back.”

“May I call you at the hospital if I have other questions?” Bernadette said to the back of the blond-gray head.

“I guess.” She went to the coat rack, yanked a lime ski jacket off its wire hanger, and pulled it on. She put her hand on the door and looked back at Bernadette. “Gotta go.”

“Please don’t mention our conversation to anyone,” said Bernadette. “This is part of an ongoing investigation.”

“Let me ask one question.”

“I’ll answer it if I can,” said Bernadette.

“You feds can seek the death penalty, right?”

“For certain serious crimes.”

“I have no idea why you’re going after this Quaid,” said the pastor. “But wouldn’t it be poetic justice if, after all his years of lobbying for capital punishment, he ends up getting executed himself?”

Before Bernadette could respond, Pastor Tabitha was out the door, a blur of green and blond.

Bernadette went over to the women’s fitting room. She reached into her pants pocket, pulled out some folded bills, and peeled off three twenties. She said to the stall door: “Found these on the floor. Think you dropped them.” Bernadette reached over the top of the door with the cash. The money was quickly snatched.

“Yeah, I did,” said Jenna. “I did drop them. Thanks.”

“Those jeans…” Bernadette hesitated. “They do look good on you.”

“Thanks.”

Bernadette turned and, with a jingle, followed Pastor Tabitha out the door.

Bernadette drove back to Lowertown and called her boss from her place. Garcia: “What’d you get?”

“The ex-priest was there Saturday night. Pastor Tabby didn’t know why. He attended one of her masses. Services.”

“Quaid was at the hospital? Saturday night?”

She was furious that he was so surprised. She swallowed hard and said: “Yeah. Just like I said.”

“We need…”

“We need a lot before we can go after him.” She didn’t want to tell Garcia that she planned to go another round with the ring. With the help of Father Pete and Pastor Tabby, she’d accumulated some background on this guy. She wanted to take another trip through Quaid’s eyes, using her newly acquired knowledge. It wouldn’t change what she saw, but it would help her interpret it more clearly—akin to having a travel guide in a foreign city. She wouldn’t hop on that creepy tour until nightfall. “I’ve got some ideas. Let me keep working it.”

“I’m punching out,” he said. “Reach me at home on my cell if anything pops.”

She remembered something: “Did you get a hold of Super Lawyer?”

“No,” he said. “She never showed at work.”

“You called the Milwaukee FO, then? They know we’re on it?”

“They’re gonna work it from their end, with the local coppers.” He paused and added: “They might come up with something different.”

“Something different.”
He still doesn’t believe completely,
she thought. “Fine,” she said, and snapped her cell closed.

Thirty

Sighing heavily, Noah Stannard reached under his glasses to rub his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He was sitting at a desk, trying to reconcile the numbers in his monthly corporate bank statement with the chicken scratches in his business checkbook. His wife had been doing his accounting for years with no problem, but suddenly it wasn’t working out. Checks were bouncing all over town. He had no idea what he really had in the bank, and he had to figure it out fast.

Noah Stannard was a nice guy who, for a limited period of time, and only in certain areas of his life, had had it all figured out. He correctly figured he needed A’s in high school to get into a good college and had to study his ass off as an undergrad to get into pharmacy school. He figured he’d marry a woman who was pretty and a virgin when they walked down the aisle—and he did just that. He was also right when he figured that if he worked hard he’d build up his business and be able to live in a nice house and drive nice cars and take nice golf trips. Buy nice things. He even had a good read of the bedroom routine: if he ran four mornings a week and watched his diet and kept his body in shape, he’d be able to perform well enough to keep his wife happy in the sack the other three mornings a week.

Eighteen years into his marriage, Noah Stannard realized he’d made a miscalculation. His figuring had been off, especially when it came to his wife. The sex had dried up, and every time he made a move on her in bed to restart it—rubbed his foot against her leg or stroked her shoulder with his fingers—she rolled away from him like he was a leper. She was dressing strangely. She’d wear long-sleeved shirts during the day and show up for bed in flannel pajamas. In all their years of marriage, she’d only worn oversized tee shirts—or nothing at all. She used to make fun of women who slept in flannel. Now it was as if she was trying to keep her skin from being exposed to his. He’d tried to talk about it, and she’d mumbled something about “change of life” and “hot flashes.” He’d asked her, if she was having hot flashes, then why in the hell was she dressing like she was freezing? She didn’t answer. Clammed up.

She’d been plenty talkative during the early years of their marriage. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been listening then. He was too busy getting his lab going, paying off those student loans, sweating the mortgage. He had to admit he still wasn’t much of a listener. Something in the female voice—maybe its high pitch or its tone—made his mind wander. Chris would yap about the hospital and he’d struggle to concentrate, put a smile on his face, and nod. The second honeymoon in Hawaii over the winter hadn’t helped the marriage. If anything, it had caused her to grow more distant, more inscrutable, less talkative. He found himself tuning out the little bit that she was saying. After they got back, she started working more hours at the hospital. He figured she wanted to get away from the house. That was fine by him.

The phone call bothered him, though. Some woman had called the house earlier in the spring and asked for Chris and then hung up. He’d pulled the number up on caller ID. He’d punched it in and got a phone in a nightclub.

“Marquis de Sadie’s.”

“Where are you?” he’d asked the girl who’d answered the phone.

“Minneapolis. Warehouse District. Need directions?”

He and Chris never went to the Warehouse District. That was for the young and the hip, and they were neither. Then he’d thought about the name of the bar and asked: “What kind of club is this?”

The girl had laughed and hung up.

They should’ve had kids, Noah Stannard figured. Kids would’ve made her happy. Kids would have kept her busy and tied to the house and away from his books.

He stewed about these things while he struggled to make sense of the numbers in front of him. The business should be doing better, he thought. His relationship with oncologists all over town was fabulous. They appreciated his good work. He had a greater understanding of the disease than most pharmacists, a greater sympathy for the patients. His mother had died of breast cancer when he was a teenager. His mother-in-law had died of ovarian cancer. He’d liked his mother-in-law.

He punched another set of numbers into the calculator and cursed. That couldn’t be right. Was he even deeper in the red than he thought? What were these cash withdrawals? They were on his bank statement, but not in his check register. He’d call the bank in the morning. He tossed the calculator down on the desk and ran his fingers through his hair. He pushed his chair back, put his feet up on top of his desk, and folded his hands on his lap.

As he always did when he was tired, he started questioning whether running his own show was worth it. He could have signed on with a big lab, worked saner hours, and taken home a decent paycheck. He glanced at the stuff hanging on his office walls, stuff that told him a decent paycheck wouldn’t have been good enough. That oak-framed Johns Hopkins degree hadn’t come cheaply, nor had those nifty matted shots of him golfing St. Andrews, golfing Ballybunion. Half Moon Bay. The Greenbrier. No. A decent paycheck wouldn’t have been good enough.

Stannard pulled his feet off his desk and stood up, took his jacket off the back of his chair, and pulled it on. He gathered the statements, stacking them into a pile to take the work home. She’d been going to bed earlier and earlier. He’d have plenty of time alone to figure it out. He snapped off his desk lamp and locked up his office, checking his watch as he went. Noah Stannard was a creature of habit. When he worked nights, he always made it home just in time for the start of a particular program on the Golf Channel.

He inhaled the sharp night air as he walked to his silver Mercedes sedan, one of his favorite niceties purchased with the help of the lab. His was the only car in the parking lot, a dimly lit tar expanse that sat in front of the business complex and ran along Minnesota 110. Behind the complex was a cemetery—three hundred acres of rolling land that became dark and deserted every day at dusk. A line of fencing separated the cemetery from the road, but the chain-link stopped before it reached the back of the complex. The only thing separating the businesses from the graveyard was a band of trees and shrubs. A patch of woods.

Stannard gave no thought to the woods or the cemetery or his own isolation as he shuffled to his sedan with an armload of paperwork and a head filled with numbers. He was preoccupied with trying to figure things out.

Thirty-one