“It didn’t?”
“No, the letters and photos started arriving by mail after school let out. Laura told me about it when she wrote to me in the Cities. I was scared for her.”
“Why did you bring up Peter Stanhope’s name? Do you have any reason to believe he was the one who was stalking her?”
“He was one of the last people to see her alive. I know he was a suspect in the murder.” She added, “Does your girlfriend have some kind of relationship with Peter Stanhope?”
“He’s a client,” Stride said.
He didn’t tell her that the relationship went deeper than that. Stanhope had asked Serena to be a full-time investigator at his law firm, and Serena was wrestling with the decision. Stride thought she was planning to say yes.
“Is that going to be a problem?” Tish asked.
“Peter’s rich and powerful. That’s always a problem.”
Tish shrugged. “I’m not afraid of him. Look, I know that Peter was after Laura. They dated for a while that spring. Peter was looking for another conquest. If Laura had put out, that would have been the end of it.”
“But she didn’t?” Stride asked.
“No way. Peter was hot for sex, but Laura didn’t want to do it. So she broke it off. He took it badly. You know how rich young punks like Stanhope can be. They think they can have whatever they want because their daddies have money. He wanted Laura, and he was furious when she turned him down. The letters started arriving not long after that.”
“That’s not enough to make a connection,” Stride said.
“Well, I know what Peter was like. He came after me before Laura, and I didn’t want anything to do with him. He got nasty when I told him no.”
Tish shivered as the sun sank below the crest of the hill. Long shadows accompanied a damp chill off the water.
“Listen, Tish,” Stride said. “I’m going to tell you a couple things, but like I said before, it’s off the record. Okay?”
Tish nodded unhappily.
“I need to hear you say it,” Stride said.
“Yes, this is off the record.”
“Good. You have to remember that I know this case inside and out. I lived it back then with Cindy and with Ray Wallace, who was the cop in charge of the investigation. When I took over the Detective Bureau, I went through the file page by page. I reviewed all the evidence, because I had my doubts, too. I didn’t find anything new that pointed at Peter or at anyone other than Dada, the man I confronted near the railroad tracks.”
“So what did you find?” Tish asked.
“First, there was a fingerprint report. There were prints on the baseball bat that matched Dada’s.”
“Except it was Peter Stanhope’s bat,” Tish said. “I read about that in the paper. His prints must have been on the bat, too.”
“Yes, but his prints made sense. Dada’s prints didn’t.”
“Laura was being stalked,” Tish insisted. “Someone had been pursuing her for weeks. That wasn’t a stranger. It was someone who knew her.”
Stride put a hand lightly on her shoulder. “The police knew about the stalking.”
“Are you sure?”
“Cindy told them. I was there when she told Ray. Look, Cindy thought the same thing you did-that whoever had been pursuing Laura was the one who killed her. She even had one of the notes that this guy sent her. A porn photo with a warning scrawled on it.”
“So?”
“So there weren’t any fingerprints on the photo,” Stride said. “It wasn’t helpful.”
“That was then. Don’t they have better techniques for raising prints now? Maybe there’s still something there.”
Stride nodded. “We have much more sophisticated techniques for that kind of thing, but what we don’t have is the photograph. It’s gone, along with the other crime scene photos they took back then. So’s the bat. Somewhere along the line, much of the physical evidence from the case was lost.”
“Son of a bitch!” Tish exclaimed. “Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”
“You’re talking about a case from thirty years ago. Things get misplaced.”
He didn’t tell her his own suspicion that Ray Wallace was the one who had made the evidence disappear.
Tish walked away. They were near the lighthouse at the end of the pier. She climbed the steps and leaned back against the chapped white paint of the light tower with her arms folded. Her purse was slung over her shoulder. Stride followed her up the steps.
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
Tish looked up at him. “Can I trust you?”
“What?”
“You said you don’t trust me. Can I trust you?”
“I think you can. There will always be things I have to keep confidential, but I won’t lie to you.”
Tish unzipped her purse. She slid out a small, clear plastic bag that contained a yellowed envelope. He could see block handwriting, and even without taking it in his hand, he saw the name written on the front.
LAURA STARR.
“Here,” Tish said. “Physical evidence.”
“What the hell is this?” Stride asked.
“It’s one of the stalking letters that Laura received. She sent it to me while I was living in St. Paul.”
“You’ve had the letter all this time, and you never told anyone?”
“In the old days, I didn’t think it mattered,” Tish said. “Then I put it away and forgot all about it. I was clearing out old boxes in Atlanta a few months ago when I moved out of my partner’s apartment, and that’s when I found it again. Don’t you see? This changes everything. That’s when I started thinking about the book again, because I knew I had something that could reopen the case.”
Stride did see.
The letter to Laura wasn’t a note that had been pushed through a school locker. Whoever sent it to her had put it in the mail, using a stamp and licking an envelope. Even thirty years later, that meant one thing.
DNA.
4
Clark Biggs watched his daughter squirm on the living room floor with her legs tucked underneath her. Mary picked up her colored blocks and carefully stacked ten of them one on top of the other, until she had built a rainbow tower. When she was finished, she beamed at Clark with the biggest, most beautiful smile he had ever seen, the kind that made his heart ache every time he saw it. Then she toppled the tower by blowing on it like the big bad wolf, giggled at him, and began setting up the blocks again. She could do it over and over and never tire of the game. She was like every other five-year-old girl in the world.