And God help me, it was.
PART TWO. Talking to Strangers
9
Maggie was already awake when the phone rang at three in the morning.
She sat with her feet propped up on a kitchen chair and a cup of oolong tea getting cold on the table beside her. She wore a flowered silk robe. Every downstairs light was blazing, making it look as if she had thrown an all-night party and forgotten to send invitations. Light was the only way to give the house any warmth at all. Maggie called it her Dark Shadows house. It reminded her of the cheesy Gothic soap opera from the 1960s she had seen in reruns. Outside, the vanilla stone towered four stories, with ornamental molding along the roof lines like an ocean wave. A hodgepodge of arches and bays made it look like a LEGO castle designed by a child. Inside, there were curious little rooms everywhere, and dusty lace hung in the windows.
As a single person, she rattled around in it. Even when she was married, she had never liked the dark way the house felt at night. Maggie liked modern, bright, open spaces, with everything made of chrome and glass. The house was on the market now, and she was waiting for an uptick in housing sales to net her an offer. Once the house was sold, she had her eye on a downtown condo.
Maggie found herself up in the middle of the night several times a week, battling nightmares. The previous year had been the worst of her life, culminating in the murder of her husband in January and the cloud of suspicion that fell over her regarding his death. She still regretted her mistakes and secrets, which had temporarily strained the relationship between her and Stride and put not only herself but Serena in the hands of a brutal stalker. In the daylight, it was easy to forgive herself. The nights were another story.
She had a laptop in front of her, and she tapped her way through adoption Web sites. For months, she had been wondering about adopting a child, but the length and bureaucracy of the formal process intimidated her. She wasn’t sure if she could wait years, only to be disappointed. She had made inquiries with a number of international adoption agencies, but their replies weren’t encouraging. She was a naturalized U.S. citizen but had sought asylum from China after the uprising in Tiananmen Square, which essentially ruled out the possibility of adopting a baby from China. Being Chinese, however, she faced racism from countries that had no interest in turning over a white baby to an Asian mother. Her personal characteristics also worked against her, even in the States. She was unmarried. She was over thirty-five. She worked in a job where her personal safety was always at risk. The only thing on the plus side of the ledger was that she had inherited millions of dollars from her late husband’s business. Money always talked.
Maggie closed the laptop when the phone rang. It was Max Guppo.
“Sorry to get you up,” he said.
“I was up.”
“You said you wanted to know as soon as he was spotted again.”
“The peeper?”
“Right. I’m down in Gary. A retarded girl saw him outside her bedroom. I’m here with the father. His name is Clark Biggs.”
Maggie took down the address. “I’ll be there in an hour.”
She took five minutes to shower, then pulled on a black T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of square-heeled lace-up boots. She didn’t bother drying her hair, just let it fall in wet, messy bangs. A diamond stud winked from her tiny nose. She grabbed a burgundy leather jacket from her closet as she left the house and piled into the yellow Avalanche in her driveway.
Maggie sped down the hill onto I-35 and headed through the jumble of freeway overpasses that led south out of the city. The harbor sparkled in a swath of moonlight as the clouds raced past on her left. She accelerated to eighty-five miles an hour through the industrial zone, where plumes of steam belched into the air, forming white dragons against the black sky. Lingering raindrops tapped on her windshield. She veered off the interstate at Highway 23 and followed the fifteen-mile stretch of worn-out towns that tracked the path of the St. Louis River. Low mountains loomed beyond the road, swarming with evergreens and birches. She could see green tracks carved into the hills, which turned white with snow and became ski slopes in the winter. They weren’t exactly black diamonds, but if you were into downhill skiing, you didn’t have many alternatives in a state as flat as Minnesota.
Gary, where Clark Biggs lived, was one of the many small communities that had lost their way in the superstore generation. Its main street looked like a movie set out of the 1950s. Its brick buildings were mostly abandoned. Paint flecked away on old signs advertising Coca-Cola and Miller High Life. Between every building was an empty lot with weeds growing through cracks in the concrete. The bars were the new economic backbone of these towns, and they kept the Duluth police busy every night after midnight.
Clark’s small house was west of the highway and almost directly across the street from the town’s elementary school. The development butted up against a densely wooded area of parkland. Maggie drove past the development in order to scout the crime scene and found herself in a trailer park on the opposite side of the woods. The forest encroached on the mobile home community from all sides, and it wouldn’t be hard to park a car unnoticed and then duck into the trees and disappear.
She did a U-turn and returned to the development where Clark Biggs lived. The streets were wide, and the lots were large and flat, occupied by one- and two-story matchbox houses with detached garages. Tall, bushy oaks offered plenty of shade. It was the kind of neighborhood where cars and trucks didn’t get traded in; they simply sat on the lawn, rusting. Many of the houses had fenced yards to keep out the deer, but not the Biggs house, which was open and all on one level. It was painted white, with a block of five concrete steps leading up to the front door. The roof was missing a few of its red shingles. The large yard featured soaring pine trees and a weeping willow, and directly behind it, the yard spilled into the forest. The grass was long.
For a peeping tom, it was a prime choice. A quiet area. First-floor windows. An easy sprint back to the woods. This was a neighborhood where the biggest worry was Dad losing his foundry job or brother Jim getting cut in a bar fight after midnight. No one thought about pulling the shades and curtains. There was no one around to watch.
Maggie parked on the street, and Guppo met her outside. He was in his fifties and not much taller than Maggie, but the stretch dress pants needed to accommodate his girth could have doubled as a parachute. A few strands of greased black hair labored to stretch across his skull.
Guppo filled her in quickly.
“What about these footprints that Biggs found?” Maggie asked.
“There’s not much we can do with them,” Guppo said. “The rain mushed the prints by the time we got here.”
“Did the peeper head right into the woods?”