As soon as he said it out loud, he realized that was what had happened.
After Amanda’s offhanded comment about mothers and daughters, Stride had found himself looking at the circumstances of Laura’s murder from an entirely new perspective. In a case with too many suspects already, he had overlooked one other person who must have been in the park that night.
“Does that really change our theory of the crime?” Serena asked. “If Rikke picked him up, that means she must have suspected all along that Finn killed Laura. So she lied to give him an alibi.”
Stride leaned back in his chair. “That’s what I thought, but it works both ways. By giving Finn an alibi, she also gives herself one.”
Maggie shook her head. “What are you saying, boss?”
“I’m saying if Rikke went to the park to pick up Finn, maybe she came upon the baseball bat lying in the field.”
“Or maybe Elvis found it,” Maggie suggested. “Maybe he was so wracked with guilt about killing Laura that he OD’d a month later.”
Stride nodded. “Yeah, I could be crazy, but Finn’s prints aren’t on the baseball bat. We’ve got prints from Peter, Dada, and Cindy, but not Finn. If he killed her, why wouldn’t his prints be on the bat? Instead, we’ve got a set of prints that we can’t identify.”
“Why would Rikke kill Laura?” Maggie asked.
“That depends on what was really going on between the two of them,” Stride told her. “Amanda said that every daughter becomes her mother sooner or later. We see it all the time in abusive relationships, right? Abuse begets abuse. Rikke admitted to us that her mother sexually molested her. The question is, did Rikke take after her mother and become an abuser herself?”
“You think that Rikke had a sexual relationship with Laura?” Maggie asked.
“I think it’s not impossible. Laura spent a lot of time there when she was struggling with her sexuality. After her breakup with Tish, maybe she was confused and vulnerable and needed someone to confide in. So she went to her favorite teacher for help. What if Rikke took advantage of her trust? We already know she got kicked out of the school district later for an affair with a student. We’ve been saying all along that Finn was insanely jealous of Laura’s relationship with Tish, but maybe we’ve got it backwards. Maybe Rikke was the one who was jealous.”
Maggie took time to think about it, but then shook her head. “Even if Rikke did seduce Laura, why would she kill her?”
“If she was abusive and obsessed, who knows what she would have done when she found out Laura was running away from her?” Stride replied. “You’re talking about a brother and sister who were raised on violence and incest. We know what it did to Finn. Do you think Rikke doesn’t have demons, too?”
“Except we know that Finn is the one who’s capable of murder,” Maggie said.
Stride had a vision of a lonely North Dakota farm, glowing faintly in the center of miles of nighttime fields. It was like being on the moon, Rikke had said. His eyes grew hard.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Do we?”
Maggie opened her mouth to protest and then clamped it shut.
“Son of a bitch,” Serena gasped. “No, we don’t.”
“I want to talk to Rikke,” Stride said, standing up. “I want to get her prints to match to the murder weapon, and I want to know what was really going on in that house.” He stood up and looked around the bookstore. “Is she still here?”
Serena shook her head. “Rikke left right after Tish. I saw her go.”
“All right, let’s see if we can catch her,” Stride said.
The three of them headed for the exit. In the parking lot, Stride turned left on the sidewalk toward his Expedition, which was parked next to Maggie’s yellow Avalanche, but he stopped when Serena took hold of his shoulder.
“Wait a minute, Jonny,” she said, pointing. “That’s Tish’s car.”
Stride recognized the Civic on the far side of the parking lot and immediately spotted the odd angle of the chassis caused by the car’s flat tire. He frowned as he studied the rest of the lot. “Where’s Tish?” he asked.
Maggie jogged over to the Civic and got down on her knees to examine the tire with a penlight on her key chain. “This was cut,” she called to them. “Somebody slashed it.”
Stride looked at Serena. “Rikke.”
The Blatnik Bridge loomed ahead of them beyond the sweeping curve of the highway, its arch illuminated against the night with blurred rows of white lights. Tish grew nervous as they neared the span, anticipating the rope of fear that would twist around her insides as they made the crossing. She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t; instead, she stared at the hump of steel as if it were a sea monster arching its giant back over the water. Her tension broadcast itself through the car.
“Is something wrong?” Rikke asked. Her voice was cool.
“It’s just bridges,” Tish said. “They scare me.”
The windows on both sides were wide open, ushering in a fierce breeze that rattled the frame of the car. They climbed the sharp angle toward the summit of the bridge, and the crisscross steel of the span rose ahead of them like the tracks of a roller coaster. Rikke drove slowly. Traffic soared up behind them, filling the car with headlights and then passing impatiently on their left at almost twice their speed. On either side of them, far below, industrial lights marked the edge of the land, and the blackness signaled the channel of Superior Bay. Tish wrapped her arms tightly across her chest. Her breathing was fast.
Rikke reached out and rested a warm hand on Tish’s thigh, and Tish flinched.
“The view is amazing,” Rikke said. “You should look.”
“I don’t want to see it.”
Rikke slowed even further as they crept skyward. Tish felt sweat on her hands, and her left arm twitched involuntarily.
“Can’t we go faster?” she asked.
“No, I love it up here,” Rikke told her. “Sometimes I think that’s the best way to die. Just let yourself drive off the edge of a bridge.”
“Don’t talk like that, it scares me.”
The car drifted toward the right shoulder, grinding on loose gravel. Tish was conscious of the three-foot ribbon of concrete stretching along the bridge deck, which was the only barrier between the car and one hundred feet of air dropping toward the water. It was inches from her window.
“It’s hard not to think about death when you know you’re dying,” Rikke said.
“Dying?”
Rikke nodded calmly. “The doctors tell me the cancer has come back. Metastasized, they call it. That’s an ugly word. I only have a few months.”