The Cold Nowhere

4

A battered silver Hyundai parked on Superior Street across from the clinic in Lakeside. Its tailpipe popped like a gunshot. A short woman with dark skin and bottle blonde hair crossed toward the building in short, quick steps. She wore a down coat, torn blue jeans and black boots with high heels. Her sunglasses shielded her eyes, and she kept her head down as she came inside the waiting room.

Stride recognized her and met her at the door. ‘Dory?’

Dory Mateo, Michaela’s little sister, stripped off her sunglasses. Her eyes were bloodshot and tired; her skin was as worn as leather on old shoes. He knew she couldn’t be much more than thirty, but she looked fifteen years older.

‘I’m Jonathan Stride,’ he added.

‘I remember you,’ she replied. ‘You look the same. More gray hair, though.’

He smiled, because she was right, but he didn’t need the reminder. Her own hair was cut in a messy bob, and he saw black roots. Stride was lean and strong and over six feet tall, which made him nearly a foot taller than Dory. The Mateo women were all small.

‘Can we go outside?’ she asked. ‘I need a smoke.’

‘Sure.’

He followed her into the cold morning air. There was no sun, only slate clouds. It was Saturday morning and there was little traffic on the shop-lined street. Lakeside was a neighborhood on the north side of Duluth, a few blocks from the shore of Superior. It was quiet, without even a bar in town for the after-work crowd. If you wanted a drink, you went elsewhere.

Dory lit a cigarette and let out a raspy cough. ‘So is Cat in trouble?’

‘Why would you say that?’ he asked.

‘A cop calls me, I figure she’s in trouble.’ She eyed the clinic. ‘Is she okay? She’s not hurt, is she?’

‘She’s fine, but I’m having a doctor check her out.’

‘What happened?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to figure out,’ Stride said. ‘When did you last see her?’

‘I don’t know. A couple weeks? She stayed with me for a few days but then she took off. She didn’t say where she was going.’

Dory’s face twitched. Stride could see that she was self-medicating. They picked up women like her off the downtown streets every night. Frostbitten. High. Often naked and beaten.

‘Cat says you rent a room at the Seaway,’ Stride said.

‘Yeah, so?’

‘Rough place.’

‘You think it’s by choice? I don’t want to be there. I had a house in the Hillside, but I lost it. Goddamn banks.’

‘You have a job?’ Stride asked.

‘Off and on. A girlfriend hooks me up for events in the Cities. You know, selling T-shirts and keychains and posters and shit like that for bands. I crash with her when I’m down there.’

‘T-shirts?’ Stride said dubiously. He doubted the merchandise was limited to clothes. Whatever a concertgoer wanted, someone was there to supply it. ‘Nothing under the table?’

‘Hey, what do you care? It’s Minneapolis, not Duluth. Anyway, I had a decent job for a while. I answered phones for a construction company until I got laid off. Since then, I take what I can get.’ Dory threw her cigarette on the ground, where it smoldered. She shivered and zipped her coat.

‘You want to go inside?’ Stride asked.

‘No, clinics freak me out.’

He gestured at a bench in the dormant garden beside the medical complex. They sat next to each other, and Dory stared at the gray sky. The wind was cold, mussing Stride’s hair. He couldn’t see much of Michaela in Dory’s face, unlike Cat, who echoed her mother like a mirror. The ten years since Michaela’s death had been hard on Dory, but she’d had a bad life long before her sister died. She’d been a chronic addict and runaway during her teen years, and Michaela had tried and failed to get Dory to reform herself.

Dory snuck a glance and saw him watching her. ‘You’re thinking about my sister,’ she said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Michaela liked you,’ she said.

‘I liked her, too.’

‘She talked about you a lot. Those pirate eyes of yours. She liked your eyes.’

He said nothing.

‘I still miss her. She never bailed on me, no matter how stupid I was. It’s not her fault I was a fuck-up. I didn’t want her help. I didn’t care about anything back then.’

‘How about now?’ Stride asked. ‘Has anything changed?’

‘I have ups and downs. Mostly downs lately.’

‘What about Cat?’

‘Hey, I’d do anything for that girl. Anything. I don’t want her to have the kind of life I’ve had.’

He thought she was sincere, not just mouthing the words. Whatever her other failings in life, Dory loved her niece, but love wasn’t necessarily enough to change anything. The two of them already shared the wrong kind of parallel lives. They’d both lost parents at a young age, and they’d both headed down bad roads as they got older.

‘Do you know she’s been hooking?’ he asked.

Dory’s face was stricken, but she nodded. ‘Yeah, I begged her not to do it. When I had money, I gave it to her. Not much, but it was something. Whenever she was with me, I made sure she stayed off the street, but I’m out of town a lot. And Cat, sometimes she just leaves and I don’t know where she is.’

‘What about the couple that took her in? Her guardians?’

‘Cat won’t say anything, but it’s not good there. I get it. It was the same for me bouncing in and out of foster homes as a teenager. I wish I could have taken her in myself back then, but you know what I was like. She was better off without me. I guess she still is.’

‘Did you try to get help for her?’

‘Sure, I did. I took her to see Brooke at the shelter downtown. Brooke’s a friend. I told Cat that if I wasn’t around, and she didn’t want to go home, she should go there. You know how it is, though. There are abusers everywhere who take advantage of these girls. And Cat, she’s so beautiful. That makes it worse. She’s a magnet with that face of hers.’

‘She won’t stay beautiful for long,’ Stride said. ‘Not if she stays in this life.’

‘You think I don’t know that? I had a sweet face, too. I know what I did to myself, you don’t need to remind me.’

‘How long has Cat been heading downhill?’ Stride asked.

Dory shrugged. ‘Two years, I suppose. Since she was fourteen. That’s when she started running away. She’d show up at my door, or I’d come back to the city and find her sleeping in my bed at the Seaway.’

‘Did she say why?’

‘No, but I figured the shit with Michaela and Marty was finally backing up on her. You can’t go through something like that and not get screwed up. Sooner or later, she had to pay the price.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘Hey, she’s still a good kid, you know? She’s not far gone like some of them. That’s why I thought Brooke could help her, but you want the truth? I’m scared to death.’

‘Drugs?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah, sometimes.’

‘Do you supply her?’

Dory leaped to her feet. He thought she was ready to slap him. ‘No! Never! You think I would do that to my own niece?’

‘I had to ask.’

‘I never give her anything!’

‘You’re not clean, Dory,’ Stride said. ‘You think I can’t tell?’

‘Yeah, okay, it’s been a shitty year, and I’m circling the drain. If that’s what you want to hear, fine. But Cat? No way. She never got so much as one fucking pill from me.’

He sat her down again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t trust me, either, but it’s the truth.’

‘Who has their hooks into her, Dory? I need a name.’

‘I don’t know. It could be anybody. Try Curt Dickes. Greasy little bastard. He’s a janitor at one of the hotels in Canal Park. Word is, he’s been fixing tourists up with the local girls. Cat mentioned him a couple times.’

‘I know Curt,’ Stride said.

He and his team knew most of the repeat offenders by name. Curt Dickes had been on his radar screen for ten years, ever since Stride caught him coming out the rear door of the Great Lakes Aquarium with half a dozen stolen stingray pups in a tank of water. The kid came from a big family of girls. He was the little brother who always got into trouble. He was mostly a petty thief and con artist, but if he’d expanded into prostitution, Stride needed to talk to him.

‘Listen, Dory,’ Stride went on, ‘Cat thinks someone is trying to kill her. Did she talk to you about that?’

‘Yeah, I didn’t know whether to believe her.’

‘Why not?’

Dory hesitated. ‘Look, Cat’s pretty scrambled upstairs. You and me, we both know why. Some days I don’t know what’s real with her and what’s not. I’m not sure she knows herself.’

‘Can you think of a reason why anyone would want to hurt her?’

‘Most guys don’t need a reason to hurt street girls,’ Dory said. ‘You know that.’

‘I want to check on some things she told me, but I don’t want her on her own when she’s done. I’m afraid she’ll take off again. Can you make sure she stays here until I get back?’

Dory looked at the clinic building and frowned, but she nodded. ‘Sure, whatever.’

He stood up to leave but Dory tugged on his sleeve. ‘Hey, Stride, can I ask you something? Why are you doing this for Cat?’

‘It’s my job.’

‘Yeah? A lot of cops would dump a girl like her at County and forget about her. Is this because of what happened to Michaela?’

‘Partly,’ he admitted.

Dory lit another cigarette and shook her head. ‘Michaela wasn’t perfect, you know. I warned her about Marty. I said he’d keep coming after her. She didn’t listen.’

‘It wasn’t her fault,’ he said.

‘Yeah, maybe not, but I blamed her for being so stupid. I blamed myself, too. If I’d had my head on straight, I could have done something to stop him. As it is …’

She closed her eyes. Her lips squeezed into a thin, pale line. He could see guilt licking at her insides like flames. He knew what that was like.

‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘Believe me, Dory, I’ll do whatever I can to protect Cat.’

Dory opened her eyes. Her face darkened, not with anger, but with sadness. ‘Like you protected her mother?’ she asked.