Stride had come to find Ned Baer at this motel, and the owner had steered him to the Deeps. And then what? All Maggie knew was that Ned Baer had never been seen again after that evening, until his body showed up in Steve Garske’s yard with a bullet in his skull.
“When we visited you after Baer disappeared, his room was clean,” Maggie said.
“Right. So? My girls went in and cleaned it.”
“When I searched the room, I didn’t find any papers, notebooks, computer equipment, anything like that,” Maggie added. “There were just personal items. Clothes. Toiletries.”
“Then that’s all there was,” Halka snapped. “My girls wouldn’t have touched a thing, particularly because Baer was so paranoid. If the guy had papers, computers, whatever, they would have still been in the room.”
“Could someone have broken in there without you knowing about it?” Dan asked.
“What, like after the guy disappeared?”
“Exactly.”
Halka rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess. Hell, I don’t know, if somebody killed him, maybe they grabbed his key. If they took any of Baer’s stuff from his room, I wouldn’t have known about it.”
Maggie nodded. “But just to be clear, you and your staff never removed anything from Baer’s room?”
“Not a thing.” But the man suddenly looked uncomfortable, shifting back and forth on the balls of his feet. Maggie knew a lie when she saw it, and so did Dan.
“Mr. Halka?” he went on sharply. “Did you take something from Ned Baer’s room?”
“What I took wasn’t his,” Halka said, with a pained expression on his face. “It was mine. I was entitled to take it.”
“What was it?”
“My high school yearbook.”
“Your yearbook? Why did he have that?”
“When Ned found out I went to the same school as Devin Card, he asked if I still had any of my yearbooks from back then. So I let him borrow the one from senior year. He had it for a couple of weeks, and I was getting worried about ever getting it back, you know? I didn’t want him walking off with it. So one of the times that the maid went to do his room when he was gone, I went in and took it back. He never said anything about it. I figured either he didn’t notice or he didn’t care.”
“Do you still have it?” Maggie asked.
“Yeah. Sure.”
The motel owner disappeared into a back room. He was gone for a couple of minutes, and then he returned with an oversized book that had the team logo for Denfeld High School on the cover. Halka passed it to Dan, who began flipping through the pages.
“Can we take this with us?” Maggie asked.
“Yeah, but remember, I want it back.”
Dan opened the book and laid it flat on the motel counter. “There are a bunch of girls from freshman and sophomore years with circles around their photographs. Some of them have X’s through the pictures. Did you do that?”
Halka shook his head. “Nope. Pisses me off, too. Baer must have done that.”
“All cute, all blond, all the right age,” Dan said.
“He was looking for the girl,” Maggie concluded. “He had a bunch of names, and he was crossing them off as he eliminated them. He was trying to find the one who made the allegation against Devin Card.”
Dan kept flipping the pages. Then he whistled.
He picked up the yearbook from the counter so that only Maggie could see it, and he pointed at a photograph that had been circled several times, with an asterisk added to the book in a different color ink.
“Well, well, well,” Dan said. “Look who we have here.”
Maggie read the girl’s name under the picture.
Andrea Forseth.
18
“We’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” Serena told Stride, as the two of them headed down the porch steps of an old bungalow high in the hills above Denfeld High School. They were deep in the trees, under a terraced section of the cliff where the railroad tracks ran above their heads. They’d just concluded an interview with a woman named Adella Oliver, who’d gone to high school with Denise. She was on the list of names that Denise had sent to Stride of the people she remembered being with her on the party crawl.
Her story was the same as everyone else they’d interviewed.
Yes, they’d gone to a lot of parties in those days.
No, she didn’t remember any of the details.
“We’re talking about one party thirty years ago where everybody was drunk,” Serena went on. “We’ve talked to half a dozen people on Denise’s list, and nobody remembers anything.”
Stride nodded. “All we can do is cross them off one by one.”
They reached Stride’s Expedition, and Serena put a hand on his shoulder. He had the expression she recognized when he was deep inside himself, wrestling with the past. “Can I ask a question, Jonny?”
“Sure.”
“What do you hope to prove by doing this? Confirming Andrea’s story won’t change anything about Ned Baer’s murder. We already know she’s the one who made the allegations against Card. Ned was threatening to expose her, and she was desperate to stop him. She was the only other person besides you who knew he was at the Deeps. And we both know you didn’t kill him.”
“You’re right,” Stride agreed.
“But you still don’t think she did it.”
“No.”
Serena sighed. “I’m sorry, but why are you so sure? Are you just trying to convince yourself because she was your wife? The thing is, when I look at the evidence, everything points to her.”
Stride didn’t say anything right away. He went around to the driver’s side of the truck, but he waited before opening the door. It was early evening, and the sun crept toward the peak of the hillside, throwing long shadows over their bodies.
“I know it does,” he told her. “Look, you may be right. I’m thinking like an ex-husband, not a cop. But to me, it doesn’t fit. It’s too calculated for Andrea. She was running on emotion and adrenaline that day. I guess I can see her pulling the trigger, but if she killed Ned, she would have walked away and left the body where it was. On some level, I think she would have wanted me to know that she’d done it. I don’t see her calling Steve and making him think I was the one who killed Ned. That’s not her. No, she called Steve for the reason she said. She was afraid of what I’d do and she wanted Steve to stop me. And that tells me it wasn’t her.”
Serena climbed inside the truck, and so did Stride.
“Say you’re right,” she said. “Then who killed him?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m trying to figure out what really happened thirty years ago. And who knew the truth about it. Somebody had a secret they were willing to kill Baer to protect.”
Serena squinted through the windshield at the hillside neighborhood. The streets were barely better than dirt roads, with chipped asphalt riddled by cracks. The houses were spread apart, hidden on wooded lots, with lawns that were a green-and-brown mixture of grass and weeds.
“All right,” she said. “Who’s next?”
Stride consulted the list that Denise had texted him, and then he steered the Expedition onto the bumpy street. The truck jolted as they headed down the hill. Before they’d even gone half a block, Serena grabbed his arm.
“Hang on, wait a second. Stop.”
“What is it?”
“That house there. I’m curious. Is it on the list?”
She pointed at a large two-story set back from the street and almost invisible behind a row of large oak trees. The wood siding was painted an ugly shade of sea green, with windows trimmed in red and several gables on the second floor. The house was built with a sprawling front porch, and the yard backed up to the hillside below the train tracks. An old Chevy Impala sat in the driveway in front of a boxy two-car garage.