Spitting Devil (2 page)

Thirty miles.

Michael picked up the empty carton from the counter. “No juice?”

“Someone finished it and put it back.”

He held up his hands defensively. “Not me.”

“It was a spitting devil,” Evan called from the table.

“Evan, be quiet,” Alison snapped. “Finish up and brush your teeth, so your father can drop you at school.”

The boy groaned and pushed himself away from the table. He handed his dirty plate to his mother and shuffled out of the room. Alison put a steaming plate of eggs and bacon in front of her husband without saying a word. She turned to the sink and made as much noise as she could with the water and pans to cover the silence between them. It didn’t work. When she turned off the water and dried her hands, she realized that Michael was sitting at the table, his breakfast untouched, staring at her.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“For God’s sake, Alison.”

“I said, it’s nothing.”

He hesitated, and his face looked pained. “I think you should see a doctor,” he told her softly.

“What?”

“A psychiatrist.”

“Are you serious? Are you really serious?”

“You need help.”

“You have no idea what I need,” she snapped.

“I’m worried about you. If you won’t talk to me, maybe you should talk to someone else.”

“I have to go,” Alison said, gathering up her purse and shutting down the conversation. “Evan broke one of our crystal tumblers. Talk to him about it. He lied to me before.”

“Okay.”

“He’s doing that a lot.”

“Can you blame him?” he asked.

“Are you putting this on me? This is my fault?”

“I’m putting this on us, but you’re the one who kicked me out of the bedroom. You’re the one locking me out of your life. You think I need this? You think I don’t have shit of my own going on, with my whole business going down the toilet? Do you have any idea of the kind of pressure I’m under?”

She heard the roar in his voice and saw it in his eyes. Rage whistled out of him like steam from a kettle. That was the real Michael. The Michael she’d come to fear, after years of loving him unconditionally. She didn’t know how she could have been so wrong for so long.

Whenever he was in the kitchen with her now, her eyes were drawn to the butcher block beside the stove, where she kept their Wüsthof knives. The slot for the big one, the carving knife, was empty. It had been empty for weeks, ever since the first report on the news. She hadn’t said a word. Not to anyone. Not yet. It was as if they were dancing silently, with him daring her to admit what she knew.

“I know all about your pressure, Michael,” she said.

*

Dead Red.

That was the nickname his uniformed cops had given the killer when the second red-haired body was found. It was a sick shorthand, and Jonathan Stride didn’t like it. He hated elevating killers by giving them names. It made them into myths and fed their egos. He’d ordered his cops to stop, but he was too late to contain the damage. The nickname had already crept into the newspapers, and everyone in the city of Duluth knew the man’s identity now. Dead Red.

He’d struck again overnight. A third victim in two bitter months. Once again, the color of blood matched the young woman’s hair.

“I keep thinking that it could have been me,” the woman seated in Stride’s truck murmured out of the back of her throat. Her nervous breath fogged the windshield. “Sherry and I knew about those other girls. Who doesn’t, you know? So I did a dye job. I went from auburn to jet black. I figured it was a little cheap Clairol protection, but Sherry told me it was silly. She said she’d die before she dyed. We laughed about it. You know, better dead than red, right?”

Stride had seen witnesses in shock many times. You arrive at your best friend’s apartment to drive her to work, like any other day, and instead you wind up haunted for life by what you find. The smell of body and blood never entirely goes away. Murder writes on the brain in indelible ink.

He saw the woman trembling. He reached into the back seat for his leather jacket and positioned it gently over her shoulders.

“When did you last see Sherry?” Stride asked her.

“Around midnight. We were at a party at somebody’ house in Lakeside, but we were both pretty drunk, so we figured we’d leave before we threw up. I dropped her off here.”

Stride squinted through the windshield and wiped it with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. Sherry Morton’s apartment was in the basement of a century-old Victorian home on the steeply terraced streets near the university. She’d been a nursing student. Twenty-four years old. Pretty. Petite. The house with its chipped paint and loose gutters, protected by towering skeletons of oak trees, was now enveloped in crime scene tape and surrounded by police cars shedding clouds of exhaust in the frigid air. It was mid-morning under a slate gray December sky.

“Did Sherry hook up with anyone at the party?” he asked.

Sherry’s friend, Julie, shook her head. “No, I would have known if she did.”

“Did you see anyone leave at the same time as the two of you? Could someone have followed you?”

“I don’t think so. It was late, and the streets were deserted. I think I would have noticed another car behind me.”

“How about here at Sherry’s place? Did you see anyone hanging around outside?”

“I didn’t see anybody. I was pretty blitzed, you know. I shouldn’t have been driving at all. You’re not going to arrest me or anything, are you?”

“No.”

“I came by to pick her up this morning, and the door was open at the bottom of the steps. So I went inside, and – oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

The young woman dissolved in tears, cupping her face in her hands. Stride knew the image that was replaying in her head. He and his partner, Maggie Bei, had been among the earliest at the crime scene after the 911 operator used two words. Dead Red. They’d found Sherry Morton in bed, like the first two victims, dead of a cruel number of deep stab wounds. She wore an expensive designer blouse with bold horizontal stripes of yellow and green.

“I need to ask you about what Sherry was wearing when you found her,” Stride said.

Julie wiped her face with her hands, smearing her makeup. “What? Why?”

“Was that the blouse she wore at the party?”

Sherry’s friend looked as if she wanted to do anything but remember, but when she did, her face screwed up in confusion. “No, she wore a Sammy’s Pizza t-shirt at the party. We both waitress there to make money.”

“Do you recall seeing Sherry in that blouse before?”

“No, I guess it was new.”

Stride nodded without saying anything more. “I’m going to ask a policewoman to spend some time with you, okay? She’ll work with you on a detailed statement. This is probably going to take a while.”

“Sure.”

Stride squeezed her hand and climbed out of his truck, leaving his jacket around the woman’s shoulders. The wind roared up the hillside from Lake Superior and chewed at his face. He bent down to squeeze his six-foot frame under the crime scene tape, and his back complained as he straightened. With each harsh Minnesota winter, he felt his age in his bones. Fifty loomed large in front of him in the next year.

He met Maggie Bei at the concrete steps leading down into Sherry’s underground apartment. His partner, who was no bigger than a Chinese doll, pretended to be unaffected by the Duluth cold. She wore a short-sleeved t-shirt, and she had her hands casually jammed in the pockets of her jeans. Her three-inch block heels gave her enough height to rise to Stride’s neck.

“Makes me glad I grew my hair out,” she said, nodding her head at the apartment below them. “Bad season for redheads.”

Maggie, who had worn a bowl cut on her black hair in all the years he’d known her, had shocked him a few weeks earlier by dying her hair Easter egg red. She freely admitted it was a failed experiment, and since then, she’d let her natural color come back with only a fringe of red as a reminder.

He’d witnessed the transition of Maggie’s hair from red to black from inside his matchbox home on the lakeshore, where they’d been sleeping in the same bed for several weeks.

That was another failed experiment. Stride and Maggie together. They just hadn’t admitted the truth to themselves.

“Her friend didn’t recognize the blouse,” Stride said.

“Yeah, the size doesn’t match either. It’s not hers.”

“So he brought it with him and dressed her in it after he killed her. Just like the others.”

“The blouses aren’t new,” Maggie added. “They’ve been hanging in somebody else’s closet. The sizes all match, and there’s a perfume aroma in the fabric. Very nice. French and expensive. This guy is dressing up his victims in another woman’s clothes.”

Stride saw a flush on Maggie’s golden cheeks, and she bit her lip when the wind blew. “Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m hot-blooded,” she told him. “You know that.”

He saw her sharp eyes studying him for his reaction. He kept a poker face.

“Did we get DNA?” he asked.

Maggie nodded. “Minute traces of spatter like at the other crime scenes. The ev techs think it’s hemoptysis. Perp, not victim.”

“So this guy is coughing up blood,” Stride said.

“Right. He’s sick, whether he knows it or not.”

Stride didn’t take much comfort in the blood evidence or in the possibility that the killer was sick. In whatever time the man had left, he could wreak plenty of havoc.

“I got a call from Ken over at the News-Tribune,” Stride told her.

“Another photo?”

“Yeah, he got a jpeg of the victim by e-mail. So did the TV stations. It’ll be on the noon news and in the paper tomorrow, but he wanted to give me a heads up that the picture is out there. I told Ken to forward the e-mail to us.”

“We haven’t had much luck tracing the others. Whoever he is, this guy is tech-savvy. He knows how to cover his tracks.”

“Even so, it means taking a big risk,” Stride said. “Why send the photos? Why get the media involved?”

“Dead Red likes to take credit,” Maggie said.

Stride thought about the images that had been sent to the Duluth media after each murder. He remembered the faces. That was what everyone saw – the pale, pretty, murdered faces and the messy red hair. Dead Red. But you could see more than the faces in those photos. You could see each of the stolen blouses, too, enough that a woman who knew those blouses would recognize them.

He didn’t think that was an accident or a mistake. That was what the killer wanted.

“Maybe the photos are about more than taking credit,” Stride told Maggie. “Maybe this guy is sending somebody a message.”

*

Alison cracked open the window in her Prius, so she could blow smoke from her cigarette out of the car. She’d burned through half a pack since she left for work in the morning. Michael hated it when she smoked around Evan, but right now, nicotine was the only drug keeping her sane. Next to her, Evan read his comic book and hummed under his breath, oblivious to her stress. On most days, she talked to him about his schoolwork and his teachers after she picked him up, but he didn’t mind that she was silent today.

She drove fast. She was desperate to be home.

They lived ten miles north of downtown Duluth on forested land half a mile from a swampy lake. They’d hand-picked the lot after weeks scouring the back roads, and they’d designed the house themselves with input from a local architect. Back then, she’d said it was her dream home. Michael told her she’d earned it for putting up with his long hours for a decade as he grew his business, and for scrimping in a too-small apartment longer than any other wife would have done. This was the payback.

For months after the house was done, she’d smiled with pride every time she marched up the flagstones beside the driveway. Her home was magnificent, with its natural oak exterior, its twelve-foot bay window fronting the woods, its towering gables on the roof line, and its mammoth rear deck overlooking the lawn that sloped toward the cattails on the lake. It was a place that would grow and change with them as they got older. In her mind, a house was never finished. That was what kept it alive. She had plans to add a pool where Evan could swim. She had plans to finish the attic, which was nothing but a labyrinth of cubbyholes and sharp nails now, into a loft and gallery where she could paint. She had plans to add a garden and fountains, making an arbor for the birds.

That was before everything began to change.

As the summer wound down, Michael’s technology business lost its contract with the state’s economic development arm to design and support predictive marketing software. For three years, the contract had been the largest single source of revenue in Michael’s company; then, with a swipe of the governor’s pen, it became a victim of budget cuts. In the teeth of the recession, the loss opened up a hole that the company couldn’t fill. Michael began laying off software engineers, downsizing half of his workforce. Several of the ex-employees banded together to file a lawsuit over theft of intellectual property. Others formed a start-up to compete head-to-head. The business that had finally soared after years of struggle was now teetering on bankruptcy again. Keeping it alive had become a day-to-day obsession for Michael. His ego rose and fell with the company’s fortunes.

Slowly, the troubles at work moved home and then spread through the walls of their bedroom. Like ants.

Michael blamed Alison. He said she was the one who had changed. At first, she thought he was right and that the problem was in her head. She felt like a mad dog, driven crazy by a constant, yammering tone on a frequency only she could hear.

Then the carving knife disappeared. Then the first photo showed up in the newspaper.

“Mom, that hurts,” Evan complained.

Alison had taken hold of her son’s hand and begun squeezing it harder than she intended. Evan was the one lifeline to which she could hold right now. He was this sane, calm, sweet little rock. Except when he lied.

“I’m sorry,” she told him.