I wont be alone, Laura said.
Not alone? Serena asked. She was meeting someone?
Stride nodded in bed. Thats what she told us.
Who?
Peter Stanhope said it was him. He told the police that he and Laura were dating.
Did you believe him?
His story fit the facts, but Laura told Cindy she had broken it off with Peter because he was pressuring her for sex. Tish told me the same thing.
Unless Laura didnt want anyone to know that they were seeing each other.
Yes, thats true.
What happened next? Serena asked.
Stride listened to the waves outside the window. The old house rattled in the wind. I dont know. That was the last time I saw Laura. Something happened to her in the softball field, where her shoe was found. But thats not where she was killed. She took another trail from the field and wound up on a beach on the north side of the lake almost a mile away. Thats where Cindy found her.
So Peters bat wasnt found in the softball field where you last saw it? Serena asked.
No. It was on the beach by the body. Someone took the bat, followed the trail from the softball field to the beach, and killed Laura there. There was something else, too.
What?
No one knows about this, Stride said. It was never released to the press. I only found out when I took over the Detective Bureau and pulled the file. The police found semen near the body.
Laura had sex that night? Serena asked.
Stride shook his head. Not in the body. Near the body. In the woods near the beach where Laura was murdered. Whatever went down that night, someone was there watching. Either he killed her, or he saw who did.
WHO KILLED LAURA STARR?
By Tish Verdure
EIGHT
What do I remember about that night?
I remember the two of us alone, after Laura left to follow the trail back to the field. Me and Jonny. I know it was wrong to let her go, but back then, we were all blinded by our desires. Any one of us could have made a different decision. If we had, the night would have gone another way. I try not to dwell on it. Life happens the way its going to happen. So does death.
I remember us walking hand in hand out of the shelter of the trees. The rain came in sheets, but there was no more lightning, no more thunder, just wind and water. It sounds romantic, but it was funny, actually. We were laughing. We blinked our eyes and gulped air like fishes, as if we were breathing under a waterfall. We shivered in the cold. The wind whipped us around like dolls.
I remember saying, Lets swim.
I had to start. If Jonny had reached to remove my clothes, I would have let him, but he would never do that. I unhooked my bikini top in back, let the straps slide off my shoulders, and saw my white breasts come free in the darkness. My long,
wet hair covered them. I pushed my hair out of the way so he could see me. My pink nipples and the little bumps around them were swollen. I took his hand to make him touch me, and I showed him how, guiding his fingers with mine, caressing and rubbing the way I liked it. When we kissed again, I remember the feel of our wet, bare chests pressing together.
I remember stepping back and staring at my feet as I peeled my bikini bottoms down and feeling nervous and self-conscious when I was finally naked in front of him. I couldnt look into his eyes. I felt an urge to cover myself, which was stupid. I remember finding the courage to look up, spread my arms wide, and say, Now youve seen the whole deal.
I couldnt help but laugh. He was transfixed. His face was in awe.
Youre beautiful, he told me.
I was, but how can you not be beautiful when youre seventeen? I wasnt a model, but I was the girl he loved. I remember folding my arms over my breasts and saying, Your turn.
He had it worse than me. Guys do. I was intensely curious, without wanting to show him how much. He stalled. He fumbled with his shorts. When he got them off, his underwear was even whiter than my sun-starved breasts. It jutted out because of his erection. He looked nervous like me as he went the rest of the way, and it took him even longer to meet my eyes again.
I remember wanting to reach out and touch it, but I didnt.
Are we ready for this? he asked.
You sure look ready.
Thats not what I mean.
I know what you mean.
No, I wasnt ready. I was scared to death. I knew he was, too. But I wasnt going back.
I remember us swimming. We waded out naked into the dark lake, with the rain cascading over us. The lake bed under our feet was a slippery mix of sand and stones. The water wrapped
around us and rose up to our necks. You feel so exposed and vulnerable like that, naked and submerged, with the whole sky stretching over your head. You think strange thoughts about what might be in there with you. I remember yelping as a fish brushed my stomach, swimming between us, and then, of course, I realized it was not a fish at all, and it was a good thing Jonny couldnt see my face turn red.
I remember floating, my small breasts like little snowy peaks above the waterline. Jonny held me. His hands explored. It felt good.
I remember finally touching him and watching his eyes close and his mouth fall open.
We could have stayed out there all night, postponing what both of us really wanted to do. Out in the lake, we were in a kind of frozen world, nothing behind us, nothing ahead. The splashing rain and the whistle of the wind blocked out every other sound. There was no moon to glisten on the surface, just complete darkness. I was blind to reality. Blind to the violence I had let my sister walk into.
I remember us lying on our backs on the beach. No stars. Fog and mist rising like clouds out of the low lands. The rain no more than spatters on our skin now. Hungry mosquitoes starting to wake up, buzz, and hunt for blood. If we didnt do it now, it wouldnt be tonight.
I remember him on top of me. I felt crushed and didnt care. Our kisses were urgent. We were both clumsy. I remember my legs spread wide like wings. We were laughing and struggling. I helped him, and somewhere after the pressure and pain, somewhere after our hands, feet, and knees found their right places, we both realized that we were really doing it. There was this little pause in the middle when we caught our breath and our eyes met with a kind of amazement. Then I felt his muscles all bunch into one, and I wrapped my legs tight around him, and I watched his face as it happened.
I remember we stayed like that for a very long time. I
remember sweat and rain. When he withdrew, I showed him with my hands how to touch me, and I watched him watching me right up to the moment when our fingers working together pushed me over the top, and I closed my eyes, and it happened to me, too.
I remember thinking that in the morning, the world would be a very different place.
And God help me, it was.
PART TWO
______________
Talking to Strangers
9
___________
Maggie was already awake when the phone rang at three in the morning.
She sat with her feet propped up on a kitchen chair and a cup of oolong tea getting cold on the table beside her. She wore a flowered silk robe. Every downstairs light was blazing, making it look as if she had thrown an all-night party and forgotten to send invitations. Light was the only way to give the house any warmth at all. Maggie called it her Dark Shadows house. It reminded her of the cheesy Gothic soap opera from the 1960s she had seen in reruns. Outside, the vanilla stone towered four stories, with ornamental molding along the roof lines like an ocean wave. A hodgepodge of arches and bays made it look like a LEGO castle designed by a child. Inside, there were curious little rooms everywhere, and dusty lace hung in the windows.
As a single person, she rattled around in it. Even when she was married, she had never liked the dark way the house felt at night. Maggie liked modern, bright, open spaces, with everything made of chrome and glass. The house was on the market now, and she was waiting for an uptick in housing
sales to net her an offer. Once the house was sold, she had her eye on a downtown condo.
Maggie found herself up in the middle of the night several times a week, battling nightmares. The previous year had been the worst of her life, culminating in the murder of her husband in January and the cloud of suspicion that fell over her regarding his death. She still regretted her mistakes and secrets, which had temporarily strained the relationship between her and Stride and put not only herself but Serena in the hands of a brutal stalker. In the daylight, it was easy to forgive herself. The nights were another story.
She had a laptop in front of her, and she tapped her way through adoption Web sites. For months, she had been wondering about adopting a child, but the length and bureaucracy of the formal process intimidated her. She wasnt sure if she could wait years, only to be disappointed. She had made inquiries with a number of international adoption agencies, but their replies werent encouraging. She was a naturalized U.S. citizen but had sought asylum from China after the uprising in Tiananmen Square, which essentially ruled out the possibility of adopting a baby from China. Being Chinese, however, she faced racism from countries that had no interest in turning over a white baby to an Asian mother. Her personal characteristics also worked against her, even in the States. She was unmarried. She was over thirty-five. She worked in a job where her personal safety was always at risk. The only thing on the plus side of the ledger was that she had inherited millions of dollars from her late husbands business. Money always talked.
Maggie closed the laptop when the phone rang. It was Max Guppo.
Sorry to get you up, he said.
I was up.
You said you wanted to know as soon as he was spotted again.
The peeper?
Right. Im down in Gary. A retarded girl saw him outside her bedroom. Im here with the father. His name is Clark Biggs.
Maggie took down the address. Ill be there in an hour.
She took five minutes to shower, then pulled on a black T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of square-heeled lace-up boots. She didnt bother drying her hair, just let it fall in wet, messy bangs. A diamond stud winked from her
tiny nose. She grabbed a burgundy leather jacket from her closet as she left the house and piled into the yellow Avalanche in her driveway.
Maggie sped down the hill onto I-35 and headed through the jumble of freeway overpasses that led south out of the city. The harbor sparkled in a swath of moonlight as the clouds raced past on her left. She accelerated to eighty-five miles an hour through the industrial zone, where plumes of steam belched into the air, forming white dragons against the black sky. Lingering raindrops tapped on her windshield. She veered off the interstate at Highway 23 and followed the fifteen-mile stretch of worn-out towns that tracked the path of the St. Louis River. Low mountains loomed beyond the road, swarming with evergreens and birches. She could see green tracks carved into the hills, which turned white with snow and became ski slopes in the winter. They werent exactly black diamonds, but if you were into downhill skiing, you didnt have many alternatives in a state as flat as Minnesota.
Gary, where Clark Biggs lived, was one of the many small communities that had lost their way in the superstore generation. Its main street looked like a movie set out of the 1950s. Its brick buildings were mostly abandoned. Paint flecked away on old signs advertising Coca-Cola and Miller High Life. Between every building was an empty lot with weeds growing through cracks in the concrete. The bars were the new economic backbone of these towns, and they kept the Duluth police busy every night after midnight.
Clarks small house was west of the highway and almost directly across the street from the towns elementary school. The development butted up against a densely wooded area of parkland. Maggie drove past the development in order to scout the crime scene and found herself in a trailer park on the opposite side of the woods. The forest encroached on the mobile home community from all sides, and it wouldnt be hard to park a car unnoticed and then duck into the trees and disappear.
She did a U-turn and returned to the development where Clark Biggs lived. The streets were wide, and the lots were large and flat, occupied by one- and two-story matchbox houses with detached garages. Tall, bushy oaks offered plenty of shade. It was the kind of neighborhood where cars and trucks didnt get traded in; they simply sat on the lawn, rusting. Many of the houses had fenced yards to keep out the deer, but not the Biggs
house, which was open and all on one level. It was painted white, with a block of five concrete steps leading up to the front door. The roof was missing a few of its red shingles. The large yard featured soaring pine trees and a weeping willow, and directly behind it, the yard spilled into the forest. The grass was long.
For a peeping tom, it was a prime choice. A quiet area. First-floor windows. An easy sprint back to the woods. This was a neighborhood where the biggest worry was Dad losing his foundry job or brother Jim getting cut in a bar fight after midnight. No one thought about pulling the shades and curtains. There was no one around to watch.
