Dan shrugged. "Sally's father went back and checked his calendar. The whole family was in the Cities that weekend for a play. Les Miz. We confirmed the purchase."
"That's the kind of evidence a father can produce when his daughter's in trouble," Gale said.
"She didn't do it, Archie."
"Have it your way. But there's more to this story than came out in court"
The room rattled as a thunderclap shook the club. Gale studied the dark sky thoughtfully.
"With Graeme dead, we may never know," Dan said.
Gale stroked his goatee. "Oh, I wonder. Perhaps Rachel will come back and tell us the secrets herself. Like a ghost."
Stride listened to the violent rapping of the downpour on the windows and saw a glow behind his eyelids with each stroke of lightning. The oak timbers of the porch groaned under the gusts of wind. He could smell the sweet fresh air, soured by a hint of mildew in the wood.
When the thunder awakened him at four in the morning, he had taken his blankets to the porch, clicked on the space heater, and drifted in and out of a light sleep as the storm rolled overhead in waves from the west. In his bedroom, his alarm had gone off two hours ago. He didn't care. The sky outside was dark enough that it still looked like night.
The investigation and trial lingered in his mind. Stride felt no closure. He refused to believe that Stoner was innocent. That hadn't changed. But maybe he was lying to himself, trying to convince his brain that he hadn't been wrong from the beginning. He would swat his doubts away, but a few minutes later they'd be back, like mosquitoes, buzzing at his ear. Each time louder than before.
He thought about the postcard. It had been waiting in his mailbox when he came home last night. He kept looking at it every few minutes. And hearing the mosquitoes.
The floor groaned under the weight of footsteps. Stride's eyes snapped open. He craned his neck and saw Maggie standing in the doorway of the porch. Her black hair was soaked. Water dripped from her face and sleeves. She looked tiny and vulnerable.
"I see you're selling your house," she said.
The sign had gone up a few days ago. He closed his eyes again and shook his head, angry at himself. "I was going to tell you. Really, Mags."
"You're getting married, aren't you? You and the teacher?"
Stride nodded.
It had happened a week ago over dinner. He wasn't even sure, looking back on it, who had asked whom. They had started out sober and depressed and ended up, several hours later, drunk and engaged. Andrea clung to him, not wanting to let go. It was a good feeling.
"I'm sorry, Mags," he said.
She took one hand out of her pocket and pointed her index finger at him like a gun. "Are you out of your mind, boss? You're making a terrible mistake."
"I know you're upset," he said.
"Damn right I'm upset! I'm watching a friend fuck up his life. I told you not to get too serious, didn't I? Both of you rebounding from disasters. Cindy always told me you were the densest person on the planet emotionally, and I guess she was right."
"Leave Cindy out of this," Stride snapped.
"What? Like she's not in this up to your eyeballs? I'm going to say it again, boss. You're making a mistake. Don't do it."
Stride shook his head. "You and I, that would have been impossible. It would never have worked. You told me that yourself."
"You think this is about me?" Maggie asked. She stared at the ceiling, as if pleading for divine guidance. "Unbelievable."
There was an awkward silence between them. The only sounds were the roar of the storm outside and the dripping of Maggie's coat on the floor of the porch.
"Is it so wrong for two people who need each other to get together?" Stride asked.
"Yes," Maggie said. "That's wrong. It should be two people who love each other."
"Oh, come on, you're just playing word games with me."
"No, I'm not You're in love, or you're not You belong together forever, or you have no business getting married."
"I thought maybe you'd be happy for me," Stride said.
"You want me to smile and pat you on the back and tell you how great it is?" Maggie's voice grew shrill with anger. "Fuck you. I'm not going to do that I can't believe you'd ask."
Stride didn't say anything. He listened to her harsh breathing.
Maggie shook her head and sighed, gathering up her emotions like marbles spilled on the floor. "Look, if this is what you have to do, then you go and do it. But I couldn't live with myself if I didn't say my piece."
He nodded. "Okay, Mags. You've said it."
They stared at each other for a long while, which was like saying good-bye without words. Not good-bye forever, just to their relationship as it was.
"I came to tell you, it wasn't Rachel's body," Maggie said, slipping back into her cop voice, all business again. "We got the DNA tests back. It was Kerry."
Stride cursed under his breath. He thought about that sweet, innocent girl-about losing her, about losing Cindy. He was angry all over again. Angry that a killer had gotten away with murder.
And then he thought, It wasn't Rachel. He heard the mosquitoes at his ear again. Buzzing.
"I got something in the mail last night," Stride said quietly.
He inclined his head toward the picture postcard lying on the coffee table. Maggie glanced down at the photograph on the card, which showed a strangely proportioned, long-eared gray animal in the desert.
"What the hell is that?"
"A jackalope," Stride said. "Part jackrabbit, part antelope."
Maggie screwed up her face. "Huh?"
"It's a joke," Stride said. "A myth. It doesn't exist. People send postcards of jackalopes to see how gullible you are."
Maggie reached down to pick up the card.
"Edges only, please," Stride told her.
Maggie stopped, her hand frozen in the air, and gave Stride a curious look, as if she had sensed something horrible. Then she carefully picked up the postcard by the edges and turned it over. She read the message, which was scrawled in red ink, its letters dripping into streaks where rain had spattered the postcard:
He deserved to die.
"Son of a bitch," Maggie blurted out. She stared at Stride and shook her head fiercely. "This can't be from her. This can't be from Rachel. The girl is dead."
"I don't know, Mags. Just how gullible are we?"
Maggie eyed the postmark. " Las Vegas."
Stride nodded. "The city of lost souls," he said.
PART FOUR
33
Jerky Bob lived in a trailer moored off a minor road a few miles south of Las Vegas. He had arrived, as so many vagabonds in the Las Vegas valley do, out of nowhere. About a year ago, the trailer appeared, dragged perilously by a truck that waited barely long enough to unhitch it before disappearing back into the city. A day after the trailer took up permanent residence off the dusty road, a hand-scrawled sign on a wooden stake appeared near the California highway. It read:
Jerky Bob
And then below it:
New Age Gifts
Psychic Poetry
BeefJerky
Bob curtained off one end of the trailer, where the rear entrance was, put up a rickety table and cash box, and opened for business. He hung dozens of stained glass wind chimes, stuck pyramid magnets to a metal plate nailed to the wall, filled shelves with incense burners and sandalwood candles, and handwrote epic poetry that he copied on an ancient duplicating machine and tied up in scrolls with purple ribbons.
His repeat customers didn't come back for the wind chimes or the poetry, though. They came for the dried meats: beef jerky, chicken jerky, and turkey jerky, sold in flavors like teriyaki and Cajun from shoe boxes inside an old refrigerator. Most of the people who stopped were truckers. It only took a couple of them, stopping out of curiosity, to start a buzz that made its way through the trucker network of the Southwest Word got passed. Going to Vegas? Stop at Jerky Bob. They came twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which were his regular hours. If they came while he was sleeping, they simply woke him up, and he sold them jerky. He made enough money each month that, if it had stayed in his pocket, he could have moved back to the city and opened a real shop, complying with health codes and paying taxes instead of flying under the government radar.