He didn’t say anything more, because anything he said would make things worse. He’d had to remind himself years ago that not every victim was a saint.
“So they’re making a movie about you,” Lori went on with acid in her voice. “You must be pretty impressed with that.”
“Not in the least.”
“Oh, come on. It’s got to be a big ego thing.”
“There’s nothing about what happened back then that I want to remember. Three women died. You nearly died, too.”
Lori shrugged. “Well, Art Leipold hung himself. So at least one good thing came out of it.”
Stride didn’t know how to respond to such raw pain. Eleven years had gone by, but it might as well have happened yesterday.
“The actress who’s playing me keeps calling,” Lori continued. “She wants to meet me. She says she wants to know what it felt like to be in the cage. She invited me to visit her on the set tomorrow.”
“Is that why you came back here tonight?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s not like I need a reminder.”
“You don’t have to talk to Aimee Bowe,” Stride said. “On the other hand, maybe it would help to have someone else try to understand what you went through.”
“It’s not like some Hollywood blonde can spend ten minutes with me and get inside my head.”
“You’re right,” Stride said. “Nobody will ever know the truth except you.”
“Yeah. Me and the ones who died. Sad little club, huh?”
“You’re alive,” Stride pointed out softly.
Lori didn’t look at him like being alive was any prize. “My mother thinks I should talk to Aimee Bowe. She says it would be good for me. She says I’m still in the box and maybe it would help me get out. She told me to be brave. Like she has any idea what that’s like. At the first whiff of trouble, she runs away. Did you know my mom walked out on my father when I was ten years old?”
Stride shook his head. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
“She took me away from him. Moved us across the country. I never saw my father again. When he died, she didn’t even tell me about it for six months. Six months! She got married again, and she and my stepfather pretended I had brand-new parents. Like the past was nothing, you know. Like I should just forget it. Well, that’s not me. First chance I had, I got out of there and got the hell away from them. I went to business school when I was eighteen, and when I was done with that, I moved back to Duluth. I figured I’d be happy coming home. You want to guess how well that turned out?”
The venom in her voice filled Stride with sadness. He hated to see a young life destroyed, and he hated that there was nothing he could do about it. He was a fixer, but some things couldn’t be fixed.
Lori opened the truck door. “I’m leaving now.”
“I wish you’d let me take you to the hospital, Ms. Fulkerson.”
“You can’t make me, can you?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then good-bye, Lieutenant,” she retorted. She climbed down into the snow, but before she closed the door, she leaned back inside. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her voice cracked with despair. “Two hours, right?”
Stride cocked his head in puzzlement. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Two hours. The docs said I would have been dead in two hours.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
“I wish you’d been late,” she said.
*
It was after midnight by the time Stride made it back to the matchbox cottage on Park Point where he lived with Serena and Cat. The house was on the other side of the sand dunes from Lake Superior, and the lake was oddly quiet. Most of the year he heard the thunder of waves twenty-four hours a day, but sometimes the long cold of January built enough ice beyond the beach to dull the noise.
He let himself into the dark house. The first thing he did was check on Cat, who was asleep in the corner bedroom facing the street. She didn’t wake up. Her breathing was soft and regular. He stared down at her pretty face, which was lost in a tangle of chestnut hair. It was hard to be mad at her even when she did foolish things. He closed the door softly and let her sleep.
Stride took a shower and then tried to get into bed without disturbing Serena. It was impossible, because the old timbers in the floor always groaned. She murmured a drowsy greeting at him. He slipped into bed behind her, slid an arm around her waist, and kissed her neck. Those were the moments that reminded him how good it was to be married again.
“You’re late,” she said. “You want to talk?”
Normally, he would have pretended to be tired and let her go back to sleep, but not tonight. He’d told her about Art Leipold before, but he found himself talking about the case all over again. How personal it was. How the voices of the women got inside his soul. How much it made him question whether he was really ready to be in charge of the detective bureau.
Eventually he fell silent, but he kept thinking about what the women had gone through inside the cage. He remembered the bodies of the other victims and the details of the autopsies. He knew what they’d done to themselves. Unspeakable things. Desperation drove people to dark places.
“We never released the details publicly,” he murmured. “Some of the things the women did in the box were—disturbing. No one else needed to know.”
Serena turned around to face him. “But you know.”
“Yeah. I wish I didn’t.”
They couldn’t see each other in the darkness. All he could feel was her warmth. She put her hands on his face and kissed him softly, over and over, until he kissed her back. Then, in silence, she wrapped herself up in his body and made him forget for a while.
8
Stride found Maggie with her feet up on his desk when he arrived at police headquarters at seven in the morning. She was drinking a jumbo-size Coke through a straw and eating a Sausage McMuffin.
“Hash browns?” she asked as he sat down. She dug inside a bag on the floor and waved a little oval patty of fried potatoes at him.
“No, thanks.”
Maggie shrugged and took a large bite. Stride found it amazing that Maggie could consume McDonald’s nearly every day of her life and never put an ounce on her tiny frame. Her metabolism, even in her forties, was like the growling engine of a sports car.
He eyed the darkness outside his office window. Dawn was still almost an hour away thanks to the short winter days. The rest of the building was mostly quiet. He was halfway through his coffee and slowly starting to wake up.
“How early did you get here, Mags?” he asked.
“Not early at all,” she replied.
“How do you figure that?”
“If you never leave, it’s not early,” she explained with her mouth full.
“You were here all night again?”
“Yup.”
Stride shook his head. “This is extreme even for you, Mags. You really need to get some rest.”
Maggie shrugged without replying. Her cheeks made dimples as she sucked on the Coke. He leaned back in his chair and studied his partner’s face, which couldn’t hide her exhaustion. After so many years together, there were very few secrets between them.
“Is this about you and Troy?” he asked.
“Troy and I are done. Over. Kaput.”
“I know. And you never told me what happened between you two. You just walked in after Christmas and announced between bites of a Big Mac that the longest relationship of your life was over.”
“What’s to tell?” Maggie said. She dropped her feet back on the floor. She crushed the empty bag in her hands and shot it across the room, where it landed in Stride’s wastebasket. “I guess I’m a better shot than Haley Adams.”
“Come on, Mags. Was it an argument?”
“Nope.”
“Was there a problem with Troy’s kids?”
“Nah. I love the girls.”
“Then what?”
Maggie rolled her tongue around her teeth as if there might be a bite of McMuffin that she’d missed. “Oh, let’s not make a big deal of it, okay? On Christmas Eve, Troy asked me to marry him.”