Immoral (37 page)

He heard her clean herself up in the bathroom and watched her as she hurried to put clothes on. She didn’t say a word. When she was dressed, she hesitated in the doorway. She looked at him with an empty expression on her face, then turned and left, leaving him alone.

He was in the midst of uneasy dreams when the phone rang, startling him awake. He noticed the clock and groaned as he fumbled for the receiver. It was nine-thirty, an hour past his morning meeting.

“I’m late,” he growled into the phone. “Sue me.”

Stride expected a sarcastic barb from Maggie. Instead, after a pause, he heard a low, teasing laugh that was new to him.

“Is that Lieutenant Stride? You sound like you just woke up.”

He lay back in bed and closed his eyes. “I did just wake up. And I won’t admit to being Stride until I make a pot of coffee. So how about we call this a wrong number?”

That’s too bad. Someone named Maggie told me you give great phone sex.“

Stride laughed, confused now, but also intrigued. “Not that Maggie would know. Who the hell is this?”

“My name is Serena Dial. I’m with the Las Vegas Metro Police. Unfortunately, I have news about an old case that you’re not going to like, Lieutenant”

Las Vegas
. Stride was immediately awake. It didn’t matter that three years had passed—he knew why Serena was calling. Rachel. He heard the girl’s name in his head and saw her body again in that amazing photograph.

The silence stretched out on the phone. Finally, Stride said, “I’m guessing you have her in custody.”

“No. In the morgue.”

“Rachel’s dead?”

He didn’t understand. In his idle fantasies, when someone from Las Vegas called him, Rachel was still alive. Sometimes he imagined Rachel herself would call.

“Dead. Murdered. Dumped in the desert. I know this causes problems for you.”

Stride wondered if he was dreaming. “When?”

“Last few days, as near as we can tell,” Serena told him.

She really was alive
, Stride thought
Until now
. “Do you know what happened? Who killed her?”

“Not yet,” Serena said. “But if you can pick me up at the airport this evening, maybe we can work it together.”

“You’re coming here?”

“That’s where the trail leads, Lieutenant To Duluth.”

Maggie readily confessed to everyone who drove with her that her body wasn’t made for driving a truck. She sat on a phone book to make sure she could see over the steering wheel, and the accelerator and brake pedals had blocks to allow her feet to reach them. Before she married Eric Sorenson two years ago, she owned a miniature Geo Metro. But Eric, an ex-Olympic swimmer, didn’t fit in her small car, and so their first purchase together was a much larger vehicle, in which Eric could ride without hugging his knees on his chest.

Stride didn’t like driving with Maggie. She wasn’t the greatest driver to begin with, and the jury-rigged modifications to make her body SUV-compatible didn’t help. He also suspected she drove more recklessly with him, purely out of spite. He tried not to jam his foot into an imaginary brake or to wince audibly at the many close calls.

It was early evening on Thursday. Serena Dial’s plane from Las Vegas, via Minneapolis, was expected in half an hour. As they climbed farther from the lakeshore, heading up Miller Hill toward the Duluth airport, the air roaring between the open windows got warmer.

Maggie shook her head. The light ahead of them turned red, and she honked her horn as she sped through the intersection, not slowing down.

“She was alive the whole damn time,” Maggie said. “Archie Gale’s going to love this.”

Stride nodded wearily. “Dan won’t be happy to learn that he prosecuted a man for murdering a girl who wasn’t dead. I don’t think it’s going to give his campaign a boost.”

“Have you told him yet?” Maggie asked.

“Not yet I asked K-2 if I could hold off until tomorrow. The detective from Vegas agreed to keep it under wraps until we could tell Emily.”

Maggie frowned. “I hope Emily doesn’t fall to pieces. Imagine killing your husband for killing your daughter and then finding out he was innocent.”

Stride shrugged. “Innocent of murder, maybe. I still think Graeme was sleeping with Rachel.”

“The question is, what the hell really happened to her?”

“She had to have help disappearing,” Stride said. “No way she left town on her own. We would have picked up some trace of her. Maybe she got someone to drive her to Minneapolis. She disguised herself and hopped a bus from there. The friend drove back to Duluth and kept quiet”

“And the evidence we found at the barn? The bracelet, the blood, the footprints?”

“I know, that’s the problem. We know Rachel was at the barn that Friday night” Stride rubbed his lower lip and stared out the window at the fast food restaurants and liquor stores passing by. “Okay, what about this? Rachel gets home that night Graeme wants a rendezvous, since Emily’s out of town. He and Rachel drive to the barn, climb in the back of the van, and start steaming up the windows.”

Maggie frowned. “Why go to the barn? No one’s home, why not just do it in the bedroom?”

“Who knows? Maybe the barn was their place. Maybe Graeme didn’t tell her what he had in mind. One way or another, he gets her out there. But something goes wrong. Maybe Rachel says no this time, and that’s not what Graeme wants to hear. Or maybe they’re playing a kinky game with the knife that starts to go too far. Rachel manages to get out of the van, and he chases her. They struggle, she loses her bracelet, her shirt is torn. He wrestles her back to the van.”

“And then what?” Maggie asked. “Remember, he didn’t kill her.”

“I know. Graeme suddenly comes to his senses. He’s never gone this far before, and it scares him, like a cold shower. Or maybe it’s just like what happened with Sally. He hears another car coming and hightails it out of there. He pretends it was all a mistake, drives Rachel home, and tells her to forget the whole thing.”

Maggie jammed on the brakes as a car turned in front of them. She squealed into the left lane and roared around the other car, shooting a dirty look through the window.

“But when they get home, Rachel is scared shitless,” Maggie speculated.

“Me, too,” Stride said.

“Big baby. You taught me to drive like this, you know. So what happens next? Rachel is scared. She’s fed up.”

“Right She calls a friend and says, ‘Get me out of here.’ And she’s gone.”

“Okay,” Maggie acknowledged. “Then why not take her own car? Why not pack some clothes to take with her?”

Stride bit his lip, thinking. “Panic, maybe. She doesn’t want to be found, and the car is easy to trace. She doesn’t want to stick around another minute, even to pack. Maybe she thinks Graeme is going to try again, so she doesn’t even go in the house with him.”

Maggie turned off the main road and onto the lonelier highway leading to the airport. She immediately accelerated to seventy-five miles an hour, and the dashboard began to vibrate. “If we’re right that means someone knew that Rachel was alive. And whoever it was didn’t come forward, even with an innocent man on trial for murder.”

Stride nodded. “If Rachel told him what happened at the bam, maybe he thought Graeme was getting what he deserved.”

“And why didn’t Graeme explain what happened?”

“Graeme? Tell the truth?” Stride laughed. “Forget it. If he admitted having sex with the girl, he was toast. I’m sure Gale told him that. No one would believe his story. He was better off saying none of it happened.”

“Okay, take your theory one more step. Who’s the mysterious friend?”

“I don’t know,” Stride said. “It never seemed to me that Rachel had any friends. At least no one she would really trust.”

“Except Kevin.”

Stride nodded. “Yeah. Except Kevin. But can you picture him staying quiet? He doesn’t seem like a smooth enough liar to have pulled it off on the witness stand.”

“Well, how about Sally? We know she was hiding something. Hell, we know she went to Rachel’s house that night. And I don’t imagine she would have been unhappy to see Rachel go away forever, where she couldn’t bother Kevin anymore.”

Stride put the pieces together in his head. “That’s an interesting theory.”

“You think we should talk to her?”

“Definitely,” Stride said. “Rachel won’t be coming back to seduce Kevin, and Stoner’s out of the picture. Maybe she’ll tell the truth this time.”

Maggie turned left onto the entrance road into the Duluth airport and continued along the curving road that led up to the terminal building. The terminal was barely a football field in length, built in the shape of a triangle and dominated by a steep chocolate brown roof. Maggie pulled up to the far end of the terminal and parked, leaving her police placard on the dashboard. They proceeded through the giant revolving doors into the lower level of the terminal, which was almost empty, and took the escalator up to the second level. Country music played softly on the speakers overhead. Stride recognized Vi nee Gill’s gentle croon.

They still had a long wait before the plane arrived. He dropped a quarter in a pinball machine, a two-level model decorated with a huge-busted girl in a micro-mini pointing a gun at his face and squealing, “Hit me.” He had been pretty good at pinball in his high school days, but unlike riding a bicycle, it didn’t come right back to him. He lost the first ball straight down the middle. The second danced around at the top, winning him a few thousand points, before slipping around the graveyard corridor on the left By the third ball, he had some of his rhythm back, swiveling his hips as he banged the flippers with the heels of his hands. Maggie went and got a Coke from a vending machine and drank it as she watched him play.

“Does this cop from Vegas think someone from Duluth killed her?”

Stride shrugged without taking his eyes off the machine. “She didn’t say. She just said the trail leads here.”

“Serena Dial,” Maggie said. “She sounded sharp on the phone. I bet she’s a looker.”

“Why’s that?”

“She’s from Vegas. All the girls in Vegas are gorgeous.”

“I’ve never been there,” Stride said.

“You need to get out more, boss.”

“Well, my idea of a vacation is being alone in the woods, not surrounded by thousands of people in Coney Island.” He got distracted and almost lost the last ball, but rescued it with a nifty flip at the last second.

“Alone?” Maggie asked.

“You know what I mean.”

The building quivered as loud thunder rumbled around them, a jet engine bellowing as a plane landed on the runway outside. Stride noticed a ticket agent, chewing gum, emerge from the escalator and head toward Gate 1. He took his eyes from the machine long enough to let the silver ball slip past the flipper, ending the game.

He and Maggie headed for the gate area.

“How will we recognize her?” Maggie asked.

“We’ll wing it”

Recognizing Serena wasn’t a problem. All of the passengers on the jet were typical Minnesotans, dressed in quiet clothes, blending into their surroundings, not attracting attention. Except for Serena Dial. She stuck out from the other passengers as loudly as a piece of crystal amid a row of Burger King plastic cups. She was dressed in baby blue leather pants that clung to her long legs like a second skin. A silver chain belt looped around her waist, with the ties dangling between her legs. She wore an undersized white T-shirt that didn’t reach far enough to cover the last inch of skin on her flat stomach. Her black leather raincoat draped almost to her ankles. She had glossy black hair, loose and luscious.

“Wow,” Maggie said.

Stride couldn’t remember when he had seen a more attractive woman in his life. It occurred to him that, had Rachel grown up, she might have looked just like her.

Serena stopped at the end of the gate area and studied the people from behind her honey-colored sunglasses. She picked out Stride and Maggie immediately, and with a hint of a smile, she glided over to them. Everyone nearby followed her every move, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“You Stride?” she asked. With her heels on, she was as tall as Stride, and she looked right at him.

“That’s right.” He found himself holding eye contact with her. Flirting. “This is my partner, Maggie Bei, who spreads lies about me on the phone.”

“It’s Sorenson,” Maggie said. “He forgets I’m married.” She took note of the way Stride and Serena were looking at each other and smirked. “Apparently, he forgets that he is, too.”

Stride shot Maggie an evil glance, and she quickly stuck out her tongue at him.

“I love your uniform,” Maggie added. “Do all the chick cops in Vegas get to wear that?”

Serena stripped off her sunglasses and studied Maggie from head to toe. Her smile curled into something more wicked. “Only the chick cops with tits, sweetie.”

Maggie laughed out loud. She turned to Stride. “I like her.”

Stride took another glance at Serena’s body and didn’t try to hide his interest. He felt something electric when she looked back. “You’re in Minnesota now,” Stride told Serena. “There’s a dress code.”

“You mean boring?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, you guys don’t seem so boring,” Serena said.

Maggie laughed. “Wait until you get to know us.”

They headed out of the gate area. Heads continued to rotate in Serena’s direction as she passed by. Maggie and Stride lingered a few steps behind, and Maggie, laughing, leaned closer and whispered, “Do you two want to be alone?”

“Oh, shut up,” Stride retorted.

On the lower level, they retrieved a hard-sided blue Samsonite suitcase that matched Serena’s leather pants. Stride lifted the case off the carousel and gasped under the weight.

“Holy shit, did you bring the body with you?”

Serena laughed. “Oh, sorry, would that not be correct procedure here?”

They returned through the revolving doors. The air was still warm, but a breeze rolled in across the hills. Serena put on her sunglasses again and took a deep breath. “God, that’s great Fresh air. Feels like winter.”