“You still keep a storage unit here in Duluth?” Stride asked.
Chris coughed phlegm into a tissue. The effort wore him out, and he laid his head back against the seat. “I keep all of Art’s crap here. That’s his whole life, crammed inside that little box. Appropriate, huh?”
Stride said nothing.
“I should have burned it long ago,” Chris went on. “Instead, I put all of it in here after the trial, and I’ve never wanted to deal with it since then. I just pay the bill month after month.”
“And now someone broke in?”
“Looks that way.”
“Is anything missing?” Stride asked.
“I haven’t gone inside. I probably didn’t need to call you, but if it involved Art, I figured you’d want to see it first. Old habits die hard.”
“Who knows you rent this unit?”
“Other than the guy who owns the complex? Nobody. That’s what makes it a little weird. The thing is, I came out here last week and spent some time going through everything. It was the same day I visited the hunting land. I don’t know, I guess I needed to face Art again.”
“Do you think someone followed you?” Stride asked.
“I can’t think of anything else.”
“Well, let’s take a look,” Stride said.
They both got out of their vehicles. Chris was slightly hunched from the flu and looked even smaller than he was. Stride checked the door to the storage unit and saw a padlock sitting in the snow, its shackle cut open. He bent down and slid up the garage door. Inside, the unit was crammed with furniture and boxes stacked on gray steel shelves. There wasn’t much room to walk. He saw paintings and framed photographs leaning against the walls on either side, and he recognized some of them from inside Art’s house.
Several of the boxes had been pulled off the shelves. They lay on the concrete floor, their lids open. A square nineteen-inch Panasonic television sat next to the boxes, its cord plugged into a power outlet on the wall. There was an old VHS player connected to the television, and its green light was on. He pushed the eject button, but the machine was empty.
“Did you leave it this way?” Stride asked.
“No, the boxes were on the shelves, and the TV wasn’t plugged in.”
“Somebody was watching something,” Stride said.
Stride squatted and pawed through the boxes on the floor. It was like an encyclopedia of Art’s career. He saw newspaper clippings of Art getting journalism awards and Art emceeing outdoor city events. There were plaques from charities and reading lists from the classes he’d taught. Stride also saw dozens of videotapes. They were archives of stories Art had done over the years. Each was neatly labeled, and Stride recognized Art’s handwriting. He took them out of the box one after another, and he remembered each of the stories from years earlier. It was like a history of his own life.
Murder-Suicide at Antenna Farm
Kerry McGrath Lakeside Disappearance Mort Greeley / Child Abduction at the Zoo Wallace Corruption Investigation
“Is anything missing?” Stride asked in a flat voice.
Chris sat silently on the cold concrete six feet away. He had another box between his legs, and he’d removed some of the contents. Stride could see gruesome memorabilia from Art’s other job as a serial killer. Newspapers with headlines about the trial. An old pair of boots that Stride knew had been found with traces of DNA from one of the victims in the box. Even a long ribbon of fabric that had been torn from a prison bedsheet. Stride was surprised Chris had kept it. It was the cell-made rope Art had used to hang himself.
“Anything missing?” he asked again.
“Only one thing that I see,” Chris replied finally. “The tape recorder.”
“What?”
“The old cassette recorder that Art used to make the victims tape their messages to you. I kept it in this box. Now it’s gone.”
32
“So who’s Troy?” Cab asked Maggie as they drove to the Central Hillside apartment that Peach Piper had rented. “I heard Serena mention him to you after the meeting.”
“Troy is my Mosquito,” Maggie explained.
“Ah. Recent breakup?”
“Christmas,” she said.
“Very recent. So what happened?”
She wiggled the fingers of her left hand. “He wanted to put a ring on that.”
“And you don’t want anything on your finger?”
“Nope.”
With only one hand on the wheel, Maggie nearly lost control of the Avalanche. The truck bumped halfway onto the sidewalk before she steered it back into the street. In the process, she breezed through a stop sign and nearly collided with a panel van coming down the steep hillside toward the lake. The back of the Avalanche fishtailed, and the van’s angry horn blared in their ears.
“I think I just saw my dead grandmother,” Cab remarked.
“You and Stride. Always with the crap about my driving.”
“Not at all. Next time I rob a bank, you’re my getaway driver. Utterly fearless. So what’s the deal with Troy? Is he a tall suave blond like yours truly?”
Maggie chuckled. “Troy’s not much taller than me and not much smaller than Guppo. He could also bench-press the two of us put together. He’s a widower with two daughters and a heart the size of Alaska. So in other words, he is nicer and sweeter than me in every possible way.”
Cab was silent for a long time. “If you hadn’t sworn to me that you wanted nothing but casual relationships, I would almost think that you were still in love with him.”
“That is not a good way to get laid tonight, Bolton,” Maggie replied sharply. “Can we drop it?”
Cab grinned. “Consider it dropped.”
Maggie spotted the apartment building ahead of them and pointed the Avalanche at it like a torpedo. She parked at a forty-five-degree angle on the street with one wheel over the curb and then swiveled her head to stare at Cab, as if daring him to say something. He was smart enough simply to smirk and keep his mouth shut.
She let them into Peach’s ground-floor apartment.
“Stride and I searched the place after she went missing,” Maggie told him. “Then Guppo did another search after we found the body. If Guppo didn’t find anything, there’s nothing to be found.”
“Well, I know how Peach thinks.”
“I get that, but John Doe got here ahead of us. He took everything.”
Cab didn’t look discouraged. He wandered around the apartment, picking things up and putting them down, as if they would give him inspiration. Peach hadn’t left behind many personal items. Near the sofa was a pair of red Crocs, and Cab turned them over with the toe of his shoe and examined the bottoms. Then he kicked them away. He saw a rubber band on the carpet and picked it up and stretched it between his hands. He went into the kitchen and opened the freezer, which contained nothing but a pint of mocha chip ice cream, a Heggies pizza, two Lean Cuisine dinners, and a package of frozen spinach. Cab opened the ice cream container and dug around inside with one of his fingers.
“You think she hid something in there?” Maggie asked.
“No, I just like mocha chip,” Cab said.
He licked away the ice cream and then took the package of spinach and popped it in the microwave and zapped it on high.
“You want some spinach, too?” Maggie asked dubiously.
“I love spinach,” he said with a little smile, “but more importantly, Peach hates it. When I first met her, I watched her pick it off a pizza at a motel in Lake Wales, Florida.”
Maggie cocked her head and did a double take. “I’ll be damned.”
She waited next to Cab while the little brick of spinach went around and around in the microwave. A few minutes later, the timer dinged, and Cab retrieved the mushy package and put it on the counter. He carefully unsealed the wrapper and opened the white plastic carton inside. Then, using the tines of two forks, he carefully picked through the green wad of spinach.
“Et voilà,” he said.