The Cold Nowhere

12

Stride sat with Cat’s legal guardians, William and Sophie Green, in a tiny kitchen decorated with vinyl wallpaper that was printed with daisies. The wallpaper had bubbles at the seams. The closed-in air of the room smelled like cigarette smoke and curdled cream. He saw a neon NASCAR clock, with a picture of Dale Earnhardt, hanging over the refrigerator, but it had stopped, and it still showed the time as 9:07. A religious calendar, with an illustration of Jesus spreading his arms on a cliff-top, was opened to February, not April.

‘Is that your Coupe de Ville in the driveway?’ Stride asked William Green.

Green swigged a can of Budweiser and wiped his mouth. He looked surprised by the question. ‘Yeah. It’s an ’84. I’ve been overhauling it for months. Scrounging for parts.’

‘You’re a car guy, huh?’

‘That’s right. I fix ’em up and sell ’em. It’s a hobby.’

‘You go to the Auto Show in Minneapolis?’

Green shot an uncomfortable glance at his wife, Sophie, who stared at the kitchen table. ‘Most years, sure,’ he said.

‘That was a month ago, right?’ Stride asked. ‘Were you there?’

‘Yeah, I was. So what?’

The man’s dark eyes flamed with anger. His wife looked oblivious to the undercurrent in the conversation, but Stride wanted Green to know that he was aware of the man’s arrest for solicitation the previous month.

‘What is this about?’ Sophie asked in a thin voice.

She had wispy auburn hair and a plain face with over-done makeup. She wore a floral dress suitable for church and had a cross on a slim chain around her neck. A purplish bruise peeked out from the half-sleeve on her upper arm.

‘I’m trying to find out exactly what was going on that weekend,’ Stride explained. ‘Cat says someone chased her outside the house on Saturday night.’

‘Chased her? Who?’

‘I don’t know yet. Do you remember seeing any strangers in the neighborhood in the last few weeks?’

Sophie shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Were you and Cat the only ones in the house while your husband was away?’

William Green put down his can of beer. ‘What kind of question is that?’

‘I want to know if anyone else was around who might be a witness,’ Stride said.

‘It was the just the two of us,’ Sophie replied, ‘but by Sunday morning, Cat was gone. I wanted to take her with me to church, but her room was empty.’

‘Weren’t you concerned?’

‘I – I called her cell phone. She said she was staying with a friend. She didn’t say anything to me about someone stalking her.’

Sophie’s husband sat down and laid his burly forearms on the table. He was heavy, with a round face blooming with thick blood vessels and curly brown hair tied into a ponytail. He had a fat nose with a crooked bridge, as if it had been badly broken. He wore a Twins T-shirt and dirty sweatpants smeared with oil. Stride guessed that Green was about forty years old. He knew that the man was Marty Gamble’s cousin, but there was little family resemblance. Marty was lean and mean; Bill Green was lumpy and shifty.

‘Look, Kitty Kat loves to tell stories,’ he said. ‘Most of the time, it’s all in her head.’

‘You think she’s lying?’ Stride asked.

Green grabbed a second can of beer from the table and popped it open. ‘I’m saying, you can’t trust what that girl tells you. It’s probably the drugs.’

‘You knew she was using?’

Sophie’s pale lips dipped into a frown. Her voice was hard to hear. ‘She said she stopped, but it’s hard to know if that’s true when she runs away so often. We don’t always know where she is or what she’s doing.’

‘Did you talk to anyone about her?’

‘Oh, yes, of course. I talked to my minister. I talked to the school. I talked to her Aunt Dory and to Ms. Hahne at the shelter downtown. I even thought about calling the police, but I didn’t want to get her into trouble.’

‘Why does she run?’

William Green leaned forward with a beefy hand over the top of his beer can. ‘You know what she went through with her parents. She’s messed up. Is that so hard to figure out?’

‘Her teen years have been very hard,’ Sophie added. ‘She’s a loner. She doesn’t have many friends. She’s had nightmares as far back as I can remember. As she’s gotten older, it’s been getting worse.’

‘Did you get any psychological help for her?’

‘Ms. Hahne said she would have a counselor at the center talk to Cat,’ Sophie said.

A counselor at the center.

Stride hesitated. Like an alarm going off, he remembered a name and a darkly handsome face from a police report out of Minneapolis several months earlier. He didn’t like coincidences.

‘Do you know if she did talk to a counselor?’ he asked. ‘Did Cat tell you she was seeing anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Did she happen to mention a man named Vincent Roslak?’ he asked. ‘Or did Ms. Hahne talk about Cat seeing Roslak?’

‘No, she didn’t. Why?’

‘It’s probably nothing,’ Stride replied. ‘I just need to cover all the bases.’

Cat and Roslak. Maybe it really was nothing. He didn’t want to put the two of them together in the same space of time, because it led him down a dark road. Roslak was a counselor who had volunteered at The Praying Hands Shelter, before he lost his license and fled the city. He was charming. Seductive. Immoral.

He was also dead.

Murdered.

‘You think all of this is our fault, don’t you?’ Green demanded angrily, interrupting his thoughts. ‘Hey, listen, that girl had nobody. If it wasn’t for us, she would have been in foster care, bouncing around like a Mexican jumping bean. We gave her a home, and it cost us, let me tell you. It’s not like the state gave us any dough, and it’s not like Marty ever had any money.’

‘So why did you take her in?’ Stride asked.

‘She was family,’ Sophie told him. ‘Dory was in no shape to take her, so that left us. Besides, Bill and I always wanted kids, but we couldn’t have children of our own. Bill has a low sperm count.’

William Green exploded. ‘F*ck, Sophie! Do you have to tell everybody who walks in the goddamned door about my swimmers? Why don’t you take out an ad in the f*cking newspaper?’

The man uncoiled like a spring and his fingers hardened into fists. Stride thought that if he hadn’t been there, Green would have taken out his anger on his wife’s face. Instead, the man leaped to his feet, grabbed his beer, and stomped out of the kitchen. Stride heard the front door open and then slam so hard that the walls shook.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie murmured. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything. Bill is sensitive about that.’

‘Mrs. Green, may I ask where you got that bruise on your arm?’ Stride asked.

‘What?’

‘Did your husband do that to you?’

Her eyes widened and she touched her arm tenderly. ‘No, no, I slipped on the ice.’

‘If he’s violent to you, Mrs. Green, you can get help.’

‘Oh, no. No, I’m sorry if I gave you that impression.’

‘Does he ever hit Cat?’

‘Cat? No, of course not. Bill loves Cat. You heard him, he calls her his little Kitty Kat.’

Stride didn’t think he was going to get an honest answer from her. He tried to keep his anger focused where it belonged – on William Green, not on the wife he’d intimidated into silence. He’d been in too many homes like this one to believe her denial. Maybe she was lying to protect her husband. Maybe she really didn’t know. Or maybe she was trying to convince herself, because the truth was too awful. It didn’t matter. He was as certain as he could be, watching the family dynamics, that William Green had been physically abusing Cat for years.

That was what she’d been running from. That was where it had started.

‘I’ll let myself out,’ he said.

He felt disembodied, as if he could see himself and watch what he was doing. Coldness descended on him. His muscles tensed into knots. He stepped outside into the sweet air and took a deep breath, but it failed to defuse his rage. He descended from the porch and saw the propped-open hood of the Coupe de Ville and heard the clamor of tools. He stepped inside the garage. The space was dimly lit under a curly fluorescent bulb. A static-filled FM station played Poison from a boom box.

William Green looked around the hood angrily. ‘What the—?’

The man blanched when he saw Stride. His hands were greasy, and he wiped them on an old towel. ‘What do you want?’

‘I have a message for you, Mr. Green.’

‘What? What message?’

Stride came up to him, close enough to smell beer and smoke on the man’s breath. Green stumbled backwards until he bumped against the peg board on the rear wall of the garage. Stride studied the tools and removed a hack saw from its hook and held it in his hand, running a finger over the jagged teeth of the blade. When he was angry, Stride channeled his rage into the calmness of his voice. He spoke as calmly as he ever had in his life.

‘Let me explain something to you, Mr. Green. If you ever lay a finger on Cat again, I’ll be back here. If you ever even think about touching her or your wife again, you better see my face in your head, because I will be back here. I will leave my badge at home, and I will come visit you in the night. Do you understand me?’

‘Hey, listen, I don’t know what—’

‘Do you understand me?’

Green didn’t take his eyes off the saw. ‘Yeah. F*ck, yeah.’

Stride let the saw drop from his hand and clatter to the ground. He turned around and walked through the garage and stood in the driveway until the roaring in his head subsided. When he could breathe again, he headed for the street. He realized that Cat was right and he was wrong. It would have been a mistake to bring her back here. She was better off with Kim Dehne, as far away from this house as possible. When he saw Cat, he wanted to tell her that, for the first time in a long time, things were going to be all right. He was never going to let William Green get near her again.

He looked up at Cat’s bedroom window on the side of the house. It was twelve feet from the sash to the ground, but she said she could jump it, particularly during the winter, when the snow cushioned her landing. That was her escape route. She’d used it dozens of times.

One time, three weeks ago, someone had been waiting for her.

Stride shoved his hands in his pockets and walked to the corner, where he sat on a yellow fire hydrant. He stared at the weedy cracks in the pavement and at the slope leading up toward the railroad tracks. The street looked empty, but if anyone wanted to watch Cat there were plenty of places to hide. The shaggy trees. The dead end road on the other side of 62nd Avenue. The foreclosed rambler with the broken windows.

He noticed a STOP sign that had been defaced by graffiti. Someone had painted the word ‘Me’ in drippy green letters, so now the sign said: STOP ME. The paint looked fresh. The message felt like a warning: Stop me, stop me, stop me, stop me.

He didn’t like it.

Stride got back into his Expedition. When he turned on the engine, warm air blew into his face. He was running out of time and daylight. He needed to find Curt Dickes and the other teenage runaway, Brandy. One of them might be able to help him figure out who was hunting Cat. And why.

He also couldn’t get another name out of his head.

Vincent Roslak.