Stalked (12 page)

“Men seem to fall for her hard.”

“Oh, God, yeah. It made me a little jealous. Look, I’ve been with a lot of men, and I never get any complaints, you know? But no one’s offered to bronze my pussy.”

“Nice,” Stride said.

“I’m just saying, Tanjy was in a whole other league.”

“I talked to Mitchell Brandt today,” Stride said. “Mitch is a friend of yours, right?”

“You could say that,” Sonia said with a tiny smile.

“You introduced Tanjy and Mitch?”

“It was more like Mitch saw Tanjy in the store, and I led him over to her by his cock.”

“Did he tell you about the rape stuff while they were dating?”

“Not the gory details. He just said she was an animal in bed. I was pretty surprised.”

“Mitch says she dumped him for another guy.”

Sonia smiled. “Poor Mitch. He’s never alone for long.”

“Do you know who Tanjy was seeing?”

“No, it was pretty obvious she was having a big romance, but she kept it quiet. I asked her about it a few times and got nothing.”

“Any idea why?”

“I figure he was married.”

“Was this before or after the rape charge?” Stride asked.

“Before.”

“What happened after she admitted the story was a fake?”

Sonia caressed her chin with her fingertips as she thought about it. “I think the rape thing killed the romance. There weren’t any more secret lunches. I guess the guy figured he was dating a nutcase, and he was probably worried the affair would come out.”

“So she wasn’t dating anyone lately?”

“Not that I know of.”

Stride was surprised.

“You never saw her with anyone in the store?”

Sonia shook her head. “We don’t get many men in here. Just husbands who sit and read
Esquire
while their wives try on dresses. Most of them aren’t the type to catch the eye of a girl like Tanjy.”

“She never talked about being stalked or followed?”

“Not to me.”

“Did you know Eric Sorenson?”

Sonia’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Sure. Why?”

“Did you ever see him with Tanjy?”

“No.”

“Could he have been Tanjy’s mystery man? The one she dumped Mitch Brandt for?”

“No.” Sonia tugged on one strap of her dress and played with her hair.

“You sound pretty sure.”

“I would have known if it were him, that’s all.”

“Why?”

Sonia shrugged and didn’t reply.

“How do you know Eric?” Stride asked.

“Socially.”

“Were
you
having an affair with him?”

“That’s none of your business.” Her red hair fell across her cheek. “What are you, a cop or a goddamn gossip columnist?”

“You think I like asking these questions?”

Sonia whirled away and planted herself in front of the store window. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest. “You don’t know who I am, Jon. You’ve hardly seen me in thirty years. How dare you come in here making judgments about my life. You don’t know anything about me.”

“This isn’t personal,” Stride told her.

“Well, it sure as hell sounds personal.”

“Look, there are only two things I want. I want to know where Tanjy Powell is and what happened to her. And I want to know who killed Eric Sorenson.”

“I have nothing to say about Eric.”

Stride swore under his breath. “Then tell me about Tanjy,” he said.

Sonia swiveled her head to look at him. “What about her?”

“You told Lauren that she left early on Monday.”

She tossed her hair back. “That’s right.”

“Did she say why?”

“No.”

It was like coaxing drops of wine out of an empty bottle now, trying to get her to talk. “What happened that day?” he asked.

“She took a break about three o’clock. When she came back, she was upset.”

“About what?”

“I have no idea.”

“Did she say anything?”

“No.”

Stride was frustrated. “How long was she gone?”

“Maybe half an hour.”

“Do you know where she went?”

Sonia shrugged. “When she came back, she had a cup of coffee from Katrina’s place down the street. Java Jelly.”

“Katrina?”

“Katrina Kuli. She owns the coffee shop. Talk to her, not me. Maybe she knows what the hell happened.”

Java Jelly, where Tanjy got her coffee on Monday afternoon before her disappearance, was three blocks down Superior Street from Silk. It was a twenty-something hangout and a haven for folk musicians on the weekends, with warped wood floors, mismatched antique tables, and black-and-white publicity photos taped on the walls. The ceiling was low, and black pipes wobbled on loose brackets overhead. He saw a few students using WI-FI on their laptops and nursing lattes. He smelled roasting beans and old sweat socks.

The woman working the counter was heavyset, at least two hundred pounds, with brown hair bunched into two pigtails. She wore a tie-dye shirt that let three inches of her bare stomach bulge out over the belt of her jeans. Her navel was pierced, and so was her upper lip, and she had a barbed wire tattoo wound around her neck.

“Help you?” the woman asked him. Her voice was polite but cool. She was in her early thirties and older than she looked. As a university town, Duluth had its share of ex-students who never grew out of their hippy phase.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Questions go better with a muffin, don’t you think?” she asked, wiping the counter.

“Sorry, I’m not hungry,” Stride said. He added, “I’m with the police.”

“So what? Is there some kind of no-muffin-when-I’m-on-duty rule?”

“Okay. Blueberry.”

“Yah shoooor, blooooberry, the state muffin of Minnnnnnahhhsooodddaa.” She grabbed a plate and snagged a muffin from the rack behind her with a pair of tongs.

Stride handed her money. “Are you Katrina?”

She nodded. “Katrina Kuli. I own the place, I run the place, I book the music, I bus the tables when my students don’t show up, which is half the time.”

“Cool spot,” he said.

“And
you
look like an expert on cool,” she told him, clucking her tongue. “What’s your name? Joe Friday? Bob Thursday? Tom Monday?”

“It’s Jonathan Stride.”

“Well, well.” Katrina folded her arms across her ample chest. “I see it, yes, I do see it.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Maggie Sorenson is a friend of mine,” she told him. “I’ve had to listen to a lot of stories about you.”

“I’m sure none of them was flattering.”

“You’d be surprised.” Katrina frowned as her memory caught up with her. “How is Maggie?”

“Not good.”

“I hear she’s been suspended.”

“She’s on paid leave while we investigate this thing.”

“I don’t believe she could have done what they say.”

Stride didn’t want to go down that road. “How do you know her?”

“We met in an aerobic dance class last year.”

He had a good poker face, but a twitch of his lips betrayed him, and Katrina caught it immediately.

“What, you think big girls don’t dance?” she asked.

“Not at all.”

“Let me tell you, big girls do
everything
, and we could teach lessons to some of those pretzel sticks in the girlie magazines. It ain’t how much you got, it’s what you do with it.”

He held up his palms, surrendering. “You win. Can we talk?”

“Yeah, sure.” Katrina waved a hand at a skinny boy with greasy black hair, who was slumped in a chair near the store’s fireplace with a dog-eared copy of
Ulysses
. “Billy, watch the counter for me, okay?”

The kid grunted without looking up.

Katrina led Stride to a raised platform that doubled as a matchbox stage when bands visited the shop. The chairs wobbled as they sat down, and the table shifted unsteadily on its legs when Stride put his elbows down to lean closer to Katrina. Her breath smelled like berry tea. When he was near her face, he noticed caked-on makeup covering purplish bruises on her cheekbones and neck, and a scabbed gash poking like a worm out of the collar of her shirt.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

Katrina shrugged. “Nothing.”

“That’s not nothing,” Stride told her.

“I slipped on the ice. Luckily, my tits broke the fall, or it would have been a lot worse.”

“Did you cut yourself on the ice, too?”

“I think there was a piece of glass, yeah.” She covered the gash with her hand.

“It looks like someone beat you up.”

“I don’t really care what it looks like.”

“I’m not trying to pry. I just don’t like it when husbands or boyfriends use their women as punching bags.”

“Well, I don’t have either one. Okay? Now what do you want?”

“Sonia Bezac at the dress shop sent me down here.”

Katrina’s eyes flashed with anger. “What the hell did she tell you?”

“Just that you might know something about Tanjy Powell.”

“Oh.” Katrina slumped.

“Do you know Tanjy?”

“Speaking of girlie pretzel sticks,” Katrina replied, sticking out her tongue.

“So that’s a yes.”

“Sure, I’m in Silk a lot, so I see her there. Sonnie gets me decked out when I’m headed down to the Cities for a weekend of clubbing.” She read Stride’s expression and said, “Do I have to give you my big girls speech again?”

“No.”

“Good. It’s not funny, you know, the way people treat us plus sizes. And it’s not just men. Women are the worst. Girls like Tanjy, they look at me like I’m some kind of freak.”

“You’re sure it’s not the belly button ring, the tie-dye, and the tattoo?” he said.

“Okay, yeah, I may
look
like a freak sometimes. Hell, I
am
a freak and proud of it. But put me in a short skirt on the dance floor, and I can rock it out. Some women act all disgusted. Well, fuck ‘em, I am who I am. I’m not going to walk around in a muumuu just because I was born with fat genes and I like to eat.”

“I can see why you and Maggie get along,” Stride said.

“Yeah, Maggie’s got a foul little mouth on her. I love that. For a pretzel stick, she’s not half-bad.”

“What about Tanjy?”

Katrina growled. “Now there’s a bitch. Slinks around the shop like she’s better than everyone else. Always has her face stuck in a Bible, and then you find out she likes to get tied up and nasty. Fucking hypocrite.”

“Does she come in here a lot?”

“Oh, yeah, she gets a cuppa almost every day. Treats me like I’m the hired help. And what the hell is she? Like she’s anything more than a sales-clerk herself?”

“When did you last see her?”

Katrina took hold of her pigtails and wiggled them like antennae. “I do that when I need to think. Helps focus the brain waves.” She thought for a moment and said, “I guess it was Monday.”

“Was she here with anyone else?”

“No, she came in, got a cup to go, and left.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, shit, I don’t remember. Sometime in the afternoon.”

“How did she look?”

Katrina rubbed her nose with the back of her palm. “Same as usual, I guess. Same stuck-up, bitchy attitude.”

“Was she upset? Agitated?”

“Not that I could see.”

Stride tried to puzzle out the time line. Tanjy left Silk to get coffee and came back half an hour later, visibly shaken. That evening, she disappeared. Why?

“Did you see where she went?”

“Nope.”

“Did you see her talking to anyone?”

“Negatory.”

“Did you know Maggie’s husband?” he asked.

“Eric? Yeah.”

“Did you ever see Eric and Tanjy together?”

“Nope.” Katrina stuck a fingernail in her mouth and chewed on it.

“You look nervous,” Stride said.

Katrina didn’t reply.

“Was something going on with Eric?”

“How would I know?”

“That’s not an answer.”

Katrina fidgeted in her chair. “I don’t know anything about Eric.”

“When did you last see him?” he asked.

“He was in on Monday, too,” Katrina told him.

Stride’s face hardened. “Were Eric and Tanjy together?”

“No.” She saw the disbelief in his eyes and added, “Hey, it’s true. They weren’t together. Eric came in about ten minutes after Tanjy left.”

After leaving the coffee shop, Stride headed for the branch of Range Bank across the street and asked the head of security to queue up the tapes from the bank’s ATM camera on Monday afternoon. He sat alone in a windowless office, watching the grainy tape roll. The video was in black-and-white, but Duluth in January was like a black-and-white movie anyway. He sat under the fluorescent light, not moving a muscle, watching pedestrians come and go in silence on the tape.

At five minutes after three o’clock, he watched Tanjy Powell disappear inside the door of Java Jelly. Three minutes later, she came out again with a tall cup of coffee in her hand. It was odd, seeing her again in the flesh, looking as cool and mysterious as ever. She sipped her coffee, and he could imagine the warmth of the liquid on her lips. She was dressed in a black wool coat that draped to her ankles, and she had a velvet pillbox hat nestled on her head. It was white leopard, with a matching scarf. Her raven hair flowed from under the hat and skittered across her face like streaks of chocolate skimming across the surface of espresso foam.

His view was blocked as an old man approached the ATM. His face filled the camera. Stride swore, trying to see behind him. He caught a glimpse of Tanjy turning away from the coffee shop, but in the opposite direction from Silk. He wanted to reach in and move the man out of the way.

Where was she going?

Stride fumed as nearly two minutes passed. Finally, the old man took his card and disappeared, and the camera offered an unobstructed view across Superior Street. He caught his breath. Tanjy was there, nestled against the side of a building.

Eric was with her.

He was wearing a dark suit, but no coat. His long blond hair blew wildly in the wind. The two of them were so close as to be nearly kissing. Eric spoke animatedly, clutching Tanjy’s shoulder with one hand. Suddenly, she turned away, and she stared right at the camera, as if she were looking straight at Stride across the street. Her hands flew to her mouth in a look of sheer horror.