The Cold Nowhere

25

Steve Garske peeled off his gloves and flopped down on the sofa next to Stride. His legs jutted out like stilts. He rubbed his hands through his blond hair, leaving it with wings, and he blinked as if he were not entirely awake. He grabbed a mug of cold coffee from the end table and slugged it down.

‘It’s too early to be conscious on a Sunday morning,’ he said, glancing at Stride, whose own face was dead with exhaustion. ‘I know, I know, I get no sympathy from you.’

‘None,’ Stride said. ‘Did you have a gig with the band last night?’

‘No, just my usual insomnia. I’m still on island time. I had late rounds at St. Luke’s, too. Anyway, Cat’s fine. I cleaned the cuts with antiseptic, and I’m going to put her on a round of antibiotics just to be on the safe side.’ He added, ‘How’s the shoulder, Oh brave warrior?’

‘Hurts, but it’s getting better.’

‘We should X-ray it. Swing by tomorrow while you’re out and we’ll take a picture. In the meantime, ice it.’

‘Will do. How about her baby? Are there any risks from the fight?’

Steve shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. There’s no sign of abdominal injury. Cat says she wasn’t kicked or punched there. The baby should be fine. Even so, I want her in soon for a full check-up.’

‘Sure.’

Steve studied Stride’s living room. He ran his index finger along the wood of the end table and held it up to examine. He shook his head. ‘I’m going to get you a Swiffer. Have you dusted this place since Serena left?’

‘I don’t think of it as dust. I think of it as skin cells I might need again someday.’

‘Uh huh. It’s the brain cells I worry about.’

‘You should be worried,’ Stride replied with a smile. ‘Is Cat on the porch?’

‘Yeah, she’s working on that puzzle you’ve had sitting there all winter. You mind telling me why a man who lives in Duluth buys a jigsaw puzzle with a photo of the lift bridge? Couldn’t you find a picture of the pyramids, or Hawaii, or something like that?’

‘It was a gift.’

‘A gift? You need better friends.’

Stride chuckled. ‘This one came from a little girl, actually.’

‘I forgot, cops get gifts from grateful members of the public. Wish I could say the same. It’s not like my patients send me fruit baskets. “Hey, Steve, thanks for the pap smear.”’

‘I’ll remember that after my colonoscopy.’

‘You do that. I want some kind of tropical fruit-of-the-month club thing. Make it something with mangoes.’

‘Got it.’

‘Sounds like you had a rough night,’ Steve said.

Stride nodded. ‘The media’s all over the county attorney this morning. We’re not releasing much. I’m trying to keep Cat out of it for the time being. She couldn’t handle a media circus.’

‘Any leads?’

‘There’s a stolen car that we haven’t found yet. A black Charger. Other than that, our only lead is Cat. I need to keep her safe.’

‘She trusts you,’ Steve said. ‘Must take after her mother. There was a little bit of a crush there, right?’

‘Michaela and I were friends,’ Stride said. ‘That’s all.’

Steve gave him a sideways glance, and Stride wasn’t sure if his friend believed him. The room was dimly lit, and they were both in shadow. He glanced at the kitchen to make sure the girl hadn’t come inside from the rear porch. ‘Tell me something. When you saw Cat last year, did you talk to her about Vincent Roslak?’

‘I did. Sorry, I should have mentioned it. Brooke called last night and said that Maggie had been around, asking questions.’

‘So tell me now.’

Steve stood up from the leather sofa and winced as he rubbed his lower back, which was a perennial source of pain. He’d suffered a mean tackle on the football field in college. ‘Hang on, I need more caffeine for this. There anything left in the pot?’

‘Always.’

The doctor took his mug into Stride’s kitchen, poured the remnants down the sink, and refilled it. He disappeared through the back door toward the cottage’s screened porch and Stride heard the muffled hum of voices and his friend’s easy laughter. Steve returned to the living room and sat down on the sofa, balancing his coffee mug in his lap.

‘Cat’s already two-thirds of the way through that puzzle,’ he said.

‘Everybody says she’s smart,’ Stride said.

‘We should run some tests and see just how smart. There’s something special there. Anyway, Roslak. Some guys, they smile, and you know they’re trying to pull one over on you. He looked the part, he dressed the part, he said the right things, but you know how it is. You meet a guy, you decide in five minutes if he’s solid or not solid. Roslak wasn’t solid.’

‘How did you find out what he was doing?’

‘I got a tip at my clinic. One of my regular patients said he was sure his wife was sleeping with her shrink. He asked me if I knew the guy and whether I’d heard any dirt about him. It was Roslak.’

‘What did you do?’ Stride asked.

‘At first, nothing. I wasn’t going to risk the guy’s career over innuendo, even if it was someone I didn’t particularly like. Besides, husbands always think their wives are screwing the shrink.’

‘But?’

‘But I kept my eyes open. I saw one of the street girls for a physical, and I asked her some leading questions to see if she volunteered anything. She clammed up instead. Wouldn’t talk about Roslak. I got the same treatment from the next girl. Didn’t seem to matter what he did. The girls wanted to protect him.’

‘So how did you crack the wall of silence?’

‘I saw some of the girls immediately after therapy. There was evidence of sexual activity. Two of them finally admitted it to me. The details were pretty extreme, but the girls refused to go to the police. Instead, I worked with a friend on the state licensing board, and they basically gave Roslak a choice. Give up his license and get out of Duluth, or they’d pursue civil and criminal action against him.’

‘Did Roslak know you were the one who turned him in?’ Stride asked.

‘Oh, yeah, he knew. He didn’t take it well. He stopped by my house one evening, and it almost came to blows. I thought about calling you for a little backup, but I figured I could handle myself. In the end he left without a fight, which was what he did over his license, too. I was surprised he gave up as easily as he did, but of course we later discovered that he was sleeping with a lot of his paying patients, too. He knew it would all come out.’

‘What about Cat?’

‘She denied a relationship with him.’

‘Do you believe her?’

Steve frowned. ‘No.’

‘Roslak left town a year ago,’ Stride said, ‘and Cat claims she never saw him again. Four months later, someone murdered him in Minneapolis.’

‘Do you think there’s a connection?’

‘I would have said no, but after last night I’m not so sure. Now I’m wondering if Cat told Roslak something that got him killed. I think she told Margot Huizenfelt the same thing and that’s why she was grabbed.’

Steve’s eyebrows arched in surprise at the reporter’s name. ‘Cat knew Margot?’

‘She interviewed Cat a few months ago.’

‘So what the hell does Cat know that’s worth killing over?’

‘We’re talking about an under-age street girl. That’s lethal exposure for any man who touches her. Particularly if he’s got a wife or a public job. Margot was pushing Cat about whether she’d slept with any men with money.’

Steve said nothing but Stride could read his friend’s face. Something was wrong.

‘You look like you know something,’ Stride said. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m not sure I can say anything,’ Steve replied. ‘Patient confidentiality.’

Stride waited.

‘Obviously, I can’t name names,’ Steve went on.

‘Obviously.’

‘The thing is, I’ve noticed an odd trend at the clinic.’

‘Odd? How so?’

‘STDs,’ Steve said. ‘They’ve been showing up in places I wouldn’t expect. Like some very well-off husbands and wives. Normally I might see one case every now and then, but this is multiple cases in a short period of time. One of the men admitted that he’d had sex with a girl at UMD. Not his wife, needless to say, and she wasn’t screwing him out of the goodness of her heart. She was a paid escort, looking for tuition money.’

‘You think she saw some of your other patients?’ Stride asked.

‘No, I think it’s more than that. This isn’t about one girl. It feels organized to me. I think there may be an upscale prostitution ring operating in the city.’

*

Five minutes after Steve left, Stride heard a knock at the front door of the cottage. He noticed Steve’s coat slung over a dining room chair and assumed that his friend had come back to retrieve it.

Stride swung open the door, ready with a joke. When he did, he saw that it wasn’t Steve standing on his front porch. The smile on his face bled away, and his mind went blank. The two of them stared at each other in silence, like old friends, like old lovers, which was what they were. He didn’t know what to do, now that the moment was here, now that they were together again. Gather her into his arms. Kiss her. Or try to pretend he didn’t still love her.

Finally, she spoke first.

‘Hello, Jonny.’