The Cold Nowhere

20

Cat pushed the phone back into the hands of the ten-year-old girl, whose damp round face peered curiously at her through the flaps of the bubble-shaped tent. The tent was pitched high on the beach, above the lake’s crashing waves. Raindrops slipped down the nylon like tears.

‘Are you okay?’ the girl asked.

Cat felt as if death were following her like a dog that wouldn’t go away. ‘Go inside,’ she told the girl. ‘Right now.’

‘But Mom and Dad said I could sleep out here tonight. We’re going camping in Canada next week.’

‘Go inside!’

The frightened girl scampered with her sleeping bag and pillow into the long grass and disappeared. Alone, Cat slogged through the heavy sand to the wet fringe of the beach, which was packed down like brown sugar. Rain spat on her face. White waves thundered from the lake and shocked her ankles in a swirling bath. The gauzy lights of the city tracked the hillside to the north. Behind her, everything was dark on the finger of the Point, but then she saw a flashlight beam whip like a laser from the water to the sand.

He was two hundred yards away. He’d found her.

She kicked through the water, dodging bleached driftwood littering the beach. Above the surf line, she labored frantically through humps of sand toward the city. The lift bridge over the ship canal towered like a giant barely half a block away, and spotlights on the piers made the web of steel shimmer. The rain intensified, falling in streaks through the light and blinding her eyes. Where the beach ended, she vaulted a low concrete wall into a small square of dead grass beside the bridge, and she lost her footing, spilling into the mud. Righting herself, she slid like an awkward dancer toward the bridge deck stretching across the water. Two hundred feet of interlocking steel looked down on her.

She was alone, but when she stared back down the Point, headlights flashed to life on the street. A car engine roared. His car.

She charged across the bridge with the wind assaulting her face. Below her, choppy lake water rose and sank in troughs between the piers. She couldn’t run fast enough to escape him, but as she neared the city side a deafening alarm clanged in her ear, and she jumped. She saw an ore freighter well beyond the piers, gleaming like an electric centipede as it steered for the harbor. A voice boomed over her head, and it could have been the voice of God.

The bridge was going up.

He wasn’t going to make it across.

She skidded off the bridge onto the sidewalk on the town side. The bell clamored, warning everyone away. She looked across to the Point side and saw his headlights trapped there, but her relief died in her chest. As she watched, helpless, the car shot onto the bridge deck just before the barriers fell.

With a scream, Cat dove toward the pier. She half-ran, half-fell through the slick grass to the walkway bordering the canal. Waves jostled against the concrete, sending spray over the low wall into huge puddles. The standing water mirrored the streetlights. She splashed through the water and ducked under the bridge. The wheels of the car whined on the honeycombed metal only inches above her head.

The car cleared the bridge and hit the wet street, but she didn’t hear the squeal of its brakes. It didn’t stop; it kept going, traveling deeper into Canal Park, farther away from her.

Cat hesitated, but she didn’t stop running. She sprinted to the end of the pier and turned the corner at the brick wall of the old Paulucci factory, which led her into an empty parking lot. She listened for a car engine; she watched for lights. She saw no one. Walking briskly now, she hugged the railing overlooking the water. The narrow channel led toward the big ore boat, the Charles Frederick. She reached a pedestrian bridge and jogged to the other side, which left her in front of the sprawling DECC complex. She stayed in the shadows of the convention center and made her way toward the south end of Harbor Drive.

She felt the burn of eyes from somewhere. He was still out there.

Cat reached the south-east corner of the DECC. The open harbor was on her left. The Duluth Aquarium was immediately across the street. She bit her lip and shivered in the cold. Her feet were soaked inside her boots. The road in front of her led toward the north-south overpasses of Interstate 35. Hidden under the freeway roadbeds was the graffiti graveyard, but to make it there she would have to cross a quarter-mile in the open, fully exposed. Anyone who was watching would see her.

She saw the blinking lights of the Antenna Farm high above the city, and it made her think of home. Her real home. It felt far away. She inched along the DECC’s south wall and checked each door. The DECC had so many doors in the huge complex that at least one door was usually open on any given night. Inside, it was a maze of dark rooms and corridors in which she could hide.

She reached the next corner, which faced north toward downtown. Near the DECC’s parking ramp, a long skywalk led all the way from the entertainment complex over the freeway into the heart of the city. She raced for the main entrance, which was a row of nearly twenty glass doors. She tried each door, one after another, but they were all locked.

Until the eighteenth door. The eighteenth door was open. Cat slipped inside out of the wet night.

She’d never been here, and she could barely see in front of her. She made her way past the lobby and found herself in a long, lightless hallway lined with doors. She opened each one but saw only empty meeting rooms with barren walls. She could tuck herself into a corner of one of the rooms, but there was nowhere to escape if he found her.

Cat held her breath.

Somewhere in the building, another door opened and closed. The sound was hollow; she didn’t know if it was ahead of her or behind her. All she knew was that she wasn’t alone anymore.

Moving faster, she pushed through swinging doors into a catering facility, which was an obstacle course of shelves stacked with glassware and pots. Her arm brushed against something cool and metallic, and she panicked, lurching away. As she did, she collided with a wheeled cart, sending a column of stainless steel plate covers toppling to the floor. The clatter was ungodly loud. She bolted from the kitchen, found herself in another hallway, and ran again, spilling through double doors.

The world opened up around her.

She was on the performance floor of a large arena. The floor under her feet was varnished smooth and went on like a football field from one end to the other. Above the arena walls, dozens of steep rows of bleacher seats climbed for the ceiling. She wandered into the center of the floor, hearing the click of her heels. There was no light anywhere except the glow of emergency exit signs dotting the doorways. Crowds could have been in the seats, watching her, and she wouldn’t have seen them. She could feel them anyway, frowning at her, judging her.

She didn’t know where to go or what to do. She’d run as far as she could run. She sank to the floor and wished for everything to be over. Her mother was dead. Her father had killed her. She wanted to join them. If she could go back, she would slither out from under the porch and tramp through the packed snow to confront him. Here I am. Kill me, too.

Tears fell. Rivers of tears. Her chest heaved silently. She closed her eyes. It was just like it was in her dreams, with the disconnected voices.

Marty, no! Please! Think of Cat. Don’t do this!

Fucking whore!

Don’t do this, oh God, stop, stop, stop, no, no, no!

I’ll kill you I’ll kill you I’ll kill you I’ll kill you.

Where’s the girl?

Cat’s eyes flew open. She couldn’t breathe.

Where’s the girl? Where’s the girl?

She clapped her hands over her ears, but the gun went off in her brain, the way it had all those years ago. One loud bang, louder than the screams, and then an awful silence. A silence in which nothing would be the same, nothing good would ever come again.

Cat? Where are you, Cat? I’ll protect you.

In the empty arena, Cat scrambled to her feet. She wiped away her tears. Beyond the doors, where she’d come, someone kicked one of the metal lids strewn across the commissary floor, and the jangling noise rippled through the wall like a warning. He was coming for her.

She could make out square columns underneath the bleachers and she took cover behind one of them. Her breathing sounded loud. Her wet hair dripped on the floor, and she could hear the splashes. She squatted and reached inside her boot; the knife she’d taken was still there. She drew it out into her hand and clutched it in front of her chest.

Cat? Where are you, Cat?

‘I’m right here,’ she whispered.

*

Stride didn’t want to count the stab wounds; there were too many. Each one made a red river, flooding the ivory carpet beneath Kim Dehne. Mercifully, her eyes were closed. Her face was at peace, as if, after all the pain, she’d finally lost consciousness as the blood drained from her body. She’d slept before she died.

She looked like Michaela.

‘This is my fault,’ he murmured.

Maggie overheard. ‘That’s bullshit.’

‘I should have had a cop stay with Cat. Not a civilian like Kim. She didn’t stand a chance.’

‘Get a cop to babysit a sixteen-year-old girl? Come on. You heard K-2. There was no crime.’

‘Well, there’s a crime now,’ Stride said.

He retreated down the hallway and took the winding staircase. In the foyer, he headed outside, where the damp chill got inside his bones. Maggie followed. The night was alive with the lights of squad cars. The crime scene team came and went from their van. He leaned against the light post in the front yard.

‘Did you find a cell number for Bob Dehne?’ he asked.

‘I did. You want me to make the call?’

‘No, I should do it.’

‘Any luck finding Cat?’ Maggie asked.

‘Not yet.’

It had been two hours. They’d started the search on the Point, and then they’d widened the circle to Canal Park and the areas bordering the harbor. Bayfront Park. The railroad tracks and the ship yards. The graffiti graveyard. Lake Place, where the homeless slept. Cat had vanished.

‘So?’ Stride asked, nodding at the house. ‘Have you figured out how it went down?’

‘We’re still piecing it together,’ Maggie told him. ‘We don’t have the murder weapon or much of anything else. We got a call from a family whose daughter saw Cat on the beach, but the girl couldn’t really tell us anything.’

‘Talk to the neighbors near my place,’ Stride said. ‘This guy may have been watching my house.’

‘You think he knew that Cat was with you?’

He nodded. ‘Curt Dickes knew. The Greens knew. So did Brandy.’

Maggie’s face twisted into an uncomfortable position. ‘Not to piss you off, but are we absolutely sure a third party was involved?’

‘You mean, maybe Cat stabbed Kim and then ran?’

‘So far, the crime scene guys can’t prove someone else was there.’

‘Someone was there,’ Stride told her flatly. ‘I went up in the lift bridge. Their cameras have Cat on tape, running across the bridge, and then a car coming after her off the Point. Looks like a black Charger.’

‘You’re certain the car was chasing her?’

‘We got the plate, and the registration doesn’t match the vehicle. We’ve also got a report on a black Charger stolen from a casino parking lot in Hinckley a month ago. Does that sound like a coincidence to you?’

‘No, it doesn’t. Sorry. I’m not trying to be a bitch about this.’

Stride shrugged. ‘I put an ATL on the vehicle.’

Maggie said nothing. She looked as if she wanted an argument, but he was too exhausted to find anything else to say. ‘Do you have that cell number?’ he asked her. ‘I need to get hold of Kim’s husband.’

‘Yeah.’

She handed him a piece of paper. He took it without saying anything more and headed for his Expedition, which was parked across the street. He felt her eyes watching him go. Inside, in the silence of his truck, he made the call, but there was no answer. It was almost a relief, but all it did was postpone the tragedy. He left a message asking Bob Dehne to call him immediately.

Stride leaned his head back. He closed his eyes for only a second, but in that second weariness won out and he slept. His dreams were violent, but they fled when he awoke to someone banging on the truck window. He shook himself and realized he’d been asleep for nearly an hour.

It was Maggie. He opened the door and she stood in the rain, her golden face drained of color, her hair wet and stringy.

‘Guppo just called,’ she told him. ‘He’s at the DECC. They found the body of a teenage girl.’