'Thanks for everything,' he called to her softly. 'You too, Kasey. Please keep me posted.'
They left without saying anything more. Outside, on the front porch, Kasey leaned heavily against the railing and looked sick. 'God,' she said.
'Yeah, this is the worst part of the job,' Maggie told her.
'Do you ever get used to it?'
'Nope. I hope I never do.'
Both women climbed inside Maggie's yellow Avalanche. Maggie normally drove fast, even at night, and she punched the truck to seventy-five miles an hour on the highway. Beside her, Kasey clutched the handhold on the door. The headlights lit up the dark stretch of road through the lonely farmlands.
'Do you still want to work on the investigation?' Maggie asked.
Kasey leaned her cheek against the cold glass and stared at the fields whipping by outside the window. 'I don't know. I don't even know if I want to be a cop anymore.'
Maggie glanced sideways at Kasey's face. 'You had a rough experience that night,' she told her. 'Some people never get over it. Even tough cops.'
As she said it, Maggie thought about Stride. He was a tough cop, but she knew that he took all of his stress and grief and sucked it inside himself, where very little of it ever escaped. She remembered how lonely he had been in the months after his wife died, when his wound was greatest. She had tried to fight her way inside to rescue him, but he had pushed her away, just as he was doing to Serena now. She wondered if he knew how to ask for help.
'I keep thinking about that woman's eyes,' Kasey said.
'You can't change what happened. It's over.'
'Yeah, but I feel so guilty.'
'You have to put it behind you.'
'That's the thing. I just want to get out. I want to forget all about it.' She turned and stared at Maggie. 'Do you think I'm wrong if I quit? Would you feel like I was running away?'
'That's not my call, Kasey,' Maggie said.
'I don't know what to do,' Kasey told her. 'I can't get that guy out of my head, you know? I feel like he's haunting me. Like he's still out there.'
Under the night sky, he was barely visible, just a silhouette marching quickly through the field in the north farmlands.
He kept his hands in the pockets of his fleece jacket. His breath became a warm cloud in front of his face. He splashed through ice-glazed puddles in the indentations where tractors ploughed the spring soil, and the noise made by his boots was like glass breaking. Needles of frost made the brown grass brittle. His nose picked up the animal smell of cattle from the barn across the highway.
The field ended in a nest of trees. He slipped between the shaggy branches and tracked wet footprints across the driveway as he approached the house. It was a modest two-story farm home that showed signs of neglect. The wood siding needed fresh paint. On the sidewalk that led to the front door, two squares of concrete had buckled and cracked. Dead flowers wilted over the sides of clay pots on either side of the detached garage.
He studied the house carefully, but he knew she was gone now. Every window was black.
He made his way to the rear of the house. On the back wall, he saw three steel half-moons buried in the earth at intervals along the foundation. They were open and shallow, about two feet in depth, protecting windows that led to the basement. He stepped down inside one of the window wells and drove the toe of his boot into the glass. It shattered in shards that spilled inside to the floor below. He kicked several more times, knocking away the remaining fragments, then squatted down and squeezed his legs and torso through the tight hole. Letting go, he dropped to the concrete floor.
He slid a Maglite from his pocket and cast a narrow beam around the space. The air was cold and musty. He ducked to avoid pipes overhead and picked his way through the glass to the stairs that led to the main level of the house. The old steps squealed like mice. He took them slowly. At the door, he waited and listened, then pushed the door open and found himself in the unlit kitchen. Dirty plates were stacked in the sink. Half a pot of coffee grew cold on the counter. The butcher block table hadn't been wiped down, and he saw remnants of mashed carrots and banana strewn in front of a rickety high chair. He whiffed the air and smelled fried fish.
He moved from the dinette to the family room, which was crowded with garage sale furniture scattered over the small square of worn beige carpet. A brown tweed sofa faced the television. The coffee table in front of the sofa overflowed with magazines and dog-eared paperback books. He spotted three photo frames on top of the television, and he illuminated each of them with the beam of his flashlight. One photo showed an older couple on a desert highway; the other two showed a young man and woman. The man in the photos was burly, with blond hair and a mustache that overflowed his upper lip.
The woman had dazzling red hair.
Hello, Kasey.
He remembered her vividly as she'd looked in the field behind the dairy. Her body like a wet cat. Her eyes big and desperate. Her arms trembling and her hands looking small clapped around the big gun. He'd never dreamed she would fire. The wound in his shoulder still burned where her bullet had grazed him.
'You're a bad girl,' he said aloud. And bad girls need to be punished.
He scouted the ground level and then took the steps to the second floor. The first room in the hallway was an office with a computer desk and filing cabinets. A pale light glowed inside from a video loop repeated endlessly on the computer monitor. It was a screen saver of the Zapruder film showing the Kennedy assassination. As he watched, Kennedy took a fatal bullet in the head over and over.
Well, isn't that sick. Then he smiled at his own joke. Takes one to know one.
He rifled through the cabinets and desk drawers, pulling out months-old bank and credit card statements and cell phone bills. People never threw anything away. He flipped through a copy of the Duluth newspaper from the previous January and a February issue of Sports Illustrated. The swimsuit edition. He dug deeper, extracting file folders with tax information, which he paged through one by one. Toward the bottom of the desk drawer, he found a photograph of Kasey in a bathrobe holding her newborn son, his naked skin red and wrinkled. You look tired, darling.
But her eyes were the same. Blue. Fierce. He slipped the photograph in his pocket.
The next room was the bathroom. Kasey used bar soap that smelled like lavender. He spied threads of her red hair in the bathtub, which he picked up and twirled around his gloved finger. He imagined her stepping out of the porcelain tub, toweling her body dry, and studying her reflection. The tiny room would be humid and fragrant with her scent. When he opened her medicine cabinet, he found vitamin bottles containing fish oil and St John's Wort and prescriptions in her name for Xanax and Ambien.
Don't you sleep, Kasey? Poor baby.
He closed the cabinet and stared at his own face in Kasey's mirror. He kept his hair in a severe black crew cut. A gold earring hugged the lobe of his left ear. His right cheek was scarred and cratered from the acne he had suffered as a teenager. Looking at himself, he watched his dark, dead eyes come to life, like a doll turned on by a switch. He grinned and picked up an open tube of lipstick and scrawled a message for her on the glass. Two words to tell her who she was.
I want you to know I was here. I want you to know it's not over.
He found her bedroom at the end of the hall. The linens on the queen-sized bed were rumpled and unmade. Her closet door was ajar. He opened it and explored the contents, touching her blouses, running his fingers along the satin sleeves. On a hanger, he found a lace nightgown, which he removed and held at arm's length. It would fall barely past her thighs. The cups of the bra were sheer. He took the nightgown and draped it over the bed, as if she were lying there.