“I’m getting by. I told Rikke you were in town, and she said I was crazy. But here you are.”
“Yes, here I am,” Tish said.
“I heard about the book you’re doing.”
“That’s right.”
“I was wondering if we could have lunch or dinner sometime. You know, talk about Laura and the old days. I’d really like that.”
Tish hesitated. “Sure, why not.”
“Do you have a cell phone number or something?”
“Of course.”
“Hang on,” Finn said. He pulled a pen out of his pocket and clicked it open. Stride saw him write TISH on the back of his hand. “Shoot.”
She rattled off her number, and Finn scribbled it on his skin.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
“Okay.”
“You look really good, Tish.”
“Thanks.”
Finn retreated to his truck without saying anything to Stride. He drove away, waving to Tish through the open window as he did. Tish gave a half-wave in return.
“Old friend?” Stride asked.
“Laura’s friend more than mine.”
“He looks like he’s had a hard life.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t very good back then, either. His older sister, Rikke, was our math teacher. She asked Laura if she’d be willing to tutor him. Finn was into drugs in a big way. Very screwed up. Their parents were both dead.”
Stride nodded. “I remember Rikke Mathisen. She was one of those Nordic blond teachers, very attractive. The high school boys all had crushes on her.”
“I didn’t really like her, but Laura did,” Tish said. “I was pretty independent, but Laura still wanted a surrogate mother. I thought Rikke was being nice to Laura just to get help for Finn, and that bothered me.”
“Why?”
“You saw him. Finn had big problems. Laura wanted to rescue everyone, but she was pretty naive. I told her not to spend so much time with him.”
“Did you tell her the same thing about Peter Stanhope?” Stride asked.
“Yes, I did.”
“Except she didn’t listen.”
Tish shook her head. “She did. Laura dumped Peter. He’s lying about the two of them dating secretly.”
“We have no way to prove that.”
“We can prove it with Peter’s DNA,” Tish insisted. “If you had that, you could prove that he was stalking Laura by matching it to the note.”
Stride didn’t like what he saw in her face. “Let me give you some advice, Tish. As a cop. If you want to write a book, then write a book, but if you try to put yourself in the middle of a police investigation, you could wind up in a lot of trouble. So don’t do anything stupid.”
12
Stride checked his voice mail on the drive back to City Hall and found an urgent message waiting for him from the new county attorney for St. Louis County. He parked in his usual spot behind the building, but rather than head directly to his office in City Hall, he headed for the courthouse instead and took the elevator to the fifth floor. The glass doors to the county attorney’s office were immediately on the right as he exited the elevator.
He asked the receptionist to tell Pat Burns that he was outside.
Pat was new to the job. The previous county attorney, Dan Erickson, had resigned in the wake of a scandal during the winter. Stride and Dan had been enemies for years, and he was pleased to see him gone. The county board had taken several months to name a replacement but had finally turned to Pat Burns, who was the managing partner in the Duluth office of a large Twin Cities corporate law firm. She practiced in white-collar crime and had spent several years in the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago before moving to Minnesota. She was tough and smart.
Stride wondered why a lawyer earning a partner’s income in a corporate law firm would give up hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to prosecute rapists and child pornographers, but he knew the answer boiled down to one word. Politics. Like everyone else whose backside graced a county attorney’s chair, she had her eyes on higher office. That didn’t bother Stride, but it meant that every prosecutorial decision was viewed through the lens of fund-raising and vote-getting.
He waited twenty minutes before Pat’s door opened. She was reading from a legal-sized file folder and looked up at him over half-glasses. “Hello, Lieutenant, come on in.”
He had been here once before on a courtesy call two weeks earlier. At that point, the office still looked as it did when Dan Erickson was the county attorney. Since then, the masculine touch had been erased. Dan’s heavy furniture was gone. Pat preferred glass and Danish maple. The paint was fresh and brightened the room with a peach color. The old carpet had been ripped out and replaced with a light frieze. The whole room smelled of renovation, like a new house.
“Very nice,” he said.
“Thanks. I kept Dan’s bottle of Bombay, if that’s what you’re into. Me, I prefer chardonnay.”
“Nothing for me.”
“Do you mind if I indulge?”
“Not at all.”
“I practiced in London for two years after law school. I started out with the European habit of wine over lunch, and I’ve never been able to break it.”
She put the file folder down on her desk and took off her reading glasses. She opened a stainless refrigerator, pulled out an open bottle, and poured white wine into a small bell-shaped glass. She took a sip and then waved him toward a desert-colored microfiber sofa on the wall. Above the sofa, on a wooden shelf, was a modern steel sculpture on a cinder-block base.
He was wearing jeans, a sport coat, and black boots and felt under-dressed. Pat wore a tailored cream-colored pantsuit with a low-cut jacket and a white shell. A necklace of interlaced metallic squares dangled above the faint line of her cleavage. Her brown hair was short and coiffed, like an ocean wave breaking over her forehead. She was tall and slim, and Stride knew from her bio that she had turned forty years old in January.
Pat sat on the opposite end of the sofa and crossed her legs. She balanced her wineglass on her knee and inclined her head toward the file folder on her desk. “The widow of that golfer who got killed by lightning last month is suing the county,” she told him.
“How is that our fault?” Stride asked.
“It’s not, but a new theory of legal liability is born every day.”
“Golfers are walking lightning rods,” Stride said. “We fry one or two every summer that way.”