Blind Spot Page 18

  “I’m punching out,” he said. “Reach me at home on my cell if anything pops.”

  She remembered something: “Did you get a hold of Super Lawyer?”

  “No,” he said. “She never showed at work.”

  “You called the Milwaukee FO, then? They know we’re on it?”

  “They’re gonna work it from their end, with the local coppers.” He paused and added: “They might come up with something different.”

  “Something different.” He still doesn’t believe completely, she thought. “Fine,” she said, and snapped her cell closed.

  Thirty

  Sighing heavily, Noah Stannard reached under his glasses to rub his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He was sitting at a desk, trying to reconcile the numbers in his monthly corporate bank statement with the chicken scratches in his business checkbook. His wife had been doing his accounting for years with no problem, but suddenly it wasn’t working out. Checks were bouncing all over town. He had no idea what he really had in the bank, and he had to figure it out fast.

  Noah Stannard was a nice guy who, for a limited period of time, and only in certain areas of his life, had had it all figured out. He correctly figured he needed A’s in high school to get into a good college and had to study his ass off as an undergrad to get into pharmacy school. He figured he’d marry a woman who was pretty and a virgin when they walked down the aisle—and he did just that. He was also right when he figured that if he worked hard he’d build up his business and be able to live in a nice house and drive nice cars and take nice golf trips. Buy nice things. He even had a good read of the bedroom routine: if he ran four mornings a week and watched his diet and kept his body in shape, he’d be able to perform well enough to keep his wife happy in the sack the other three mornings a week.

  Eighteen years into his marriage, Noah Stannard realized he’d made a miscalculation. His figuring had been off, especially when it came to his wife. The sex had dried up, and every time he made a move on her in bed to restart it—rubbed his foot against her leg or stroked her shoulder with his fingers—she rolled away from him like he was a leper. She was dressing strangely. She’d wear long-sleeved shirts during the day and show up for bed in flannel pajamas. In all their years of marriage, she’d only worn oversized tee shirts—or nothing at all. She used to make fun of women who slept in flannel. Now it was as if she was trying to keep her skin from being exposed to his. He’d tried to talk about it, and she’d mumbled something about “change of life” and “hot flashes.” He’d asked her, if she was having hot flashes, then why in the hell was she dressing like she was freezing? She didn’t answer. Clammed up.

  She’d been plenty talkative during the early years of their marriage. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been listening then. He was too busy getting his lab going, paying off those student loans, sweating the mortgage. He had to admit he still wasn’t much of a listener. Something in the female voice—maybe its high pitch or its tone—made his mind wander. Chris would yap about the hospital and he’d struggle to concentrate, put a smile on his face, and nod. The second honeymoon in Hawaii over the winter hadn’t helped the marriage. If anything, it had caused her to grow more distant, more inscrutable, less talkative. He found himself tuning out the little bit that she was saying. After they got back, she started working more hours at the hospital. He figured she wanted to get away from the house. That was fine by him.

  The phone call bothered him, though. Some woman had called the house earlier in the spring and asked for Chris and then hung up. He’d pulled the number up on caller ID. He’d punched it in and got a phone in a nightclub.

  “Marquis de Sadie’s.”

  “Where are you?” he’d asked the girl who’d answered the phone.

  “Minneapolis. Warehouse District. Need directions?”

  He and Chris never went to the Warehouse District. That was for the young and the hip, and they were neither. Then he’d thought about the name of the bar and asked: “What kind of club is this?”

  The girl had laughed and hung up.

  They should’ve had kids, Noah Stannard figured. Kids would’ve made her happy. Kids would have kept her busy and tied to the house and away from his books.

  He stewed about these things while he struggled to make sense of the numbers in front of him. The business should be doing better, he thought. His relationship with oncologists all over town was fabulous. They appreciated his good work. He had a greater understanding of the disease than most pharmacists, a greater sympathy for the patients. His mother had died of breast cancer when he was a teenager. His mother-in-law had died of ovarian cancer. He’d liked his mother-in-law.

  He punched another set of numbers into the calculator and cursed. That couldn’t be right. Was he even deeper in the red than he thought? What were these cash withdrawals? They were on his bank statement, but not in his check register. He’d call the bank in the morning. He tossed the calculator down on the desk and ran his fingers through his hair. He pushed his chair back, put his feet up on top of his desk, and folded his hands on his lap.

  As he always did when he was tired, he started questioning whether running his own show was worth it. He could have signed on with a big lab, worked saner hours, and taken home a decent paycheck. He glanced at the stuff hanging on his office walls, stuff that told him a decent paycheck wouldn’t have been good enough. That oak-framed Johns Hopkins degree hadn’t come cheaply, nor had those nifty matted shots of him golfing St. Andrews, golfing Ballybunion. Half Moon Bay. The Greenbrier. No. A decent paycheck wouldn’t have been good enough.

  Stannard pulled his feet off his desk and stood up, took his jacket off the back of his chair, and pulled it on. He gathered the statements, stacking them into a pile to take the work home. She’d been going to bed earlier and earlier. He’d have plenty of time alone to figure it out. He snapped off his desk lamp and locked up his office, checking his watch as he went. Noah Stannard was a creature of habit. When he worked nights, he always made it home just in time for the start of a particular program on the Golf Channel.

  He inhaled the sharp night air as he walked to his silver Mercedes sedan, one of his favorite niceties purchased with the help of the lab. His was the only car in the parking lot, a dimly lit tar expanse that sat in front of the business complex and ran along Minnesota 110. Behind the complex was a cemetery—three hundred acres of rolling land that became dark and deserted every day at dusk. A line of fencing separated the cemetery from the road, but the chain-link stopped before it reached the back of the complex. The only thing separating the businesses from the graveyard was a band of trees and shrubs. A patch of woods.

  Stannard gave no thought to the woods or the cemetery or his own isolation as he shuffled to his sedan with an armload of paperwork and a head filled with numbers. He was preoccupied with trying to figure things out.

  Thirty-one

  Eyes closed and dressed only in her panties, she was flat on her back on her mattress. Her left arm rested alongside her body. Her right hand was curled into a ball and sat on her chest, between her breasts. So pale and cool, she could have been a corpse awaiting autopsy on a coroner’s slab.

  A jumpy corpse.

  Each time Bernadette saw Quaid strike a blow, her fist jerked away from her body, as if it were reflexively pulling away from a hot frying pan. Her breathing was shallow and quick, a frightened animal’s pant. Her lids were closed tight, but a trickle of water managed to escape from the outside corner of the left eye. Maddy’s blue eye.

  She sees Quaid holding the guy up with one hand and cranking back the other, winding up for another punch. Before Quaid can take his swing, the guy folds and goes down on the ground. Quaid stands over the man, nudging him in the side with the tip of his shoe. She wonders if the guy is dead. Hard to tell—he’s facedown in the grass. Where is this place? It’s the woods at night. Is she seeing in real time? There’s a light coming from somewhere, shining down from up high and casting strange shadows. The moon? No. Too bri
ght. The guy lifts up his head. Quaid cranks back his right foot and rams it forward. He kicks the guy in the side. Another kick. Another. The man curls into a tight ball and covers his head with his arms. Quaid’s still kicking. Kicking. Quaid picks the guy up and drags him to his feet again. Even in the dim of night and with her cloudy vision, she can see the man’s face is a mess. He’s got a triangle of raw meat where his nose used to be, a bloody hole instead of a mouth, red running down his windbreaker. There’s embroidery or printing on the jacket. Is it the guy’s name? The name of his workplace? Anything that could be a guide? Quaid yanks him by the front of the jacket, pulling him closer. She can make out the letters. Stannard Pharmaceuticals. Remember that name, she tells herself. Quaid lands another punch in the face. The guy’s head flips and flops on his neck like a newborn’s. There’s no fight left in him, no resistance. A second slug from Quaid. A third. She notices for the first time—the bastard is wearing gloves. Quaid lets go of the guy, and the man goes down on his back. Quaid turns away from the guy. Is he finished? No. He bends over and picks up two objects: a bundle of rope and an ax.

  Bernadette did something she rarely had energy for while using her curse of sight. She screamed: “No! God! An ax!”

  An instant later came pounding on her door and an alarmed male voice, calling for her by her nickname: “Cat! Cat!”

  “No!”

  Three thumps were followed by the sound of splintering wood as Garcia kicked in the door. He took two steps inside and froze. The loft was pitch-black except for a band of white spilling in from the hallway behind him. “Cat!” He turned around and fumbled along the wall next to the door, seeking a switch but feeling only Post-its. He gathered a fistful of papers in his hand and ripped them down in frustration. His eyes followed the hallway light. He could see the twisting staircase and went for it. He put one foot on the first rung, looked up, and yelled, “Cat?”

  “An ax! God, no!”

  “Jesus!” Garcia took the steps two at a time. When he got to the top, he reached into his jacket and pulled out his gun. He put his left hand ahead of him to feel around as he shuffled forward in the dark. His legs bumped the side of the mattress. He leaned over and, with his free hand, felt around.

  The surprise sensation—his warm, rough hand clamping over her bare shoulder—startled her and interrupted the private screening of the horror movie. Her right fist unfolded and released the ring. The jewelry tumbled off her body and landed on the mattress. As her eyes cleared, she spoke his name—not in surprise or relief but as a flat statement of fact, a recognition that he was there with her in her bedroom. “Tony.”

  “You’re alone?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Thought someone was chopping you up,” he said into the blackness. He holstered his Glock and sat down on the edge of the mattress.

  “Sorry I scared you.” She forgot her own nakedness and sat up. “Quaid’s taking another one. I just saw it. I have no idea who. Where. Some poor guy. In the woods. But I got the name of a company off the guy’s jacket. Maybe his employer. If we can call and find out where he’s supposed to be tonight…”

  He stood up. “Sure it wasn’t a bad dream?”

  “Dammit!” she spat. “You think I don’t know the difference between…” She realized she was about to take her boss’s head off for no good reason. The murderer’s emotions were boiling around inside of her, and she had to regain control. She took a deep breath, let it out, and said in a low voice: “No. It wasn’t a bad dream.”

  “The name of the company.”

  “Stannard Pharmaceuticals.”

  “Get dressed. I’ll make some calls from downstairs. If I get something, we’ll hit the road with it.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  He pivoted around and stumbled over something in the dark. “Where in the hell are the light switches in this attic?”

  “Don’t move. You’ll fall overboard and end up with a broken neck.”

  “Pleasant image.”

  “I’ll flip on a couple of the overheads.” Her face grew hot as she realized she wasn’t wearing a bra. She felt around the mattress, found her sweatshirt, and yanked it over her head. When trying the sight at home, she sometimes undressed to help her relax quicker and get to it easier. It had worked this time, and she decided it was worth a little embarrassment. She reached down, felt her abdomen, and was grateful she’d kept her Jockeys on. She slid off the mattress, her feet landing on a pile of clothes. She stepped into her jeans and frantically pulled them up over her hips. She had no idea what Garcia could and couldn’t see.

  “I’m waiting,” he said.

  She shuffled to the far end of the narrow space and felt the set of switches to the right of the porthole. She flipped both of them up. Her sleeping loft and the area at the bottom of the steps were illuminated by the ceiling’s recessed can lights. She turned around and saw him going down the stairs. “Be careful,” she said to his back. “Keep a hand on the railing.”

  “I’m not an old lady,” he snapped without turning around.

  She remembered the ring. She went back to the bed and found it and the plastic bag on top of the mattress. Using the plastic to shield her hand, she picked up the ring and turned the bag inside out. She crammed the package in her pants pocket.

  “The name again,” Garcia yelled from downstairs.

  “Stannard Pharmaceuticals,” she yelled back. She closed her eyes and spelled it out loud from memory.

  “Got it,” he hollered. “Hurry your ass. Grab your piece. In case this pans out.”

  “In case this pans out,” she snarled under her breath while she pulled on her socks.

  She reached for her sneakers and stopped, went back to the bed, and sat down on the edge of it. Bernadette twined her arms around her gut and bent in half. The killer’s emotions were still raging through her body like a high fever. The rush of someone else’s feelings made her weak and wobbly and confused. She was angry—not unusual when she was recovering from seeing through a murderer’s eyes—but at the same time, she wanted to bawl her eyes out. Fury and sadness. What was that about?

  When she came down the steps, she saw Garcia sitting at her kitchen table with his cell to his ear and a pen in his hand. He finished writing, closed the phone, and stuffed it in his jacket. Without making eye contact with her, he said, “We’ll take my POS. It’s parked out front.”

  The right side of her mouth curled up into a satisfied smirk. “So it panned out?”

  “Found a company by that name. Called it. Got a recording. The guy leaving the message identified himself as Noah Stannard. Called the after-hours number and Stannard’s residence. Both times, got a machine. The house message says, ‘Chris and I aren’t home.’ I assume Chris is the wife. Then tried the pharmacy again. Still got a recording. I say we go to the Stannard house, bang on the door. See if we can scare up the guy or the wife and get some info about lab employees.”

  “No,” she said. “Let’s try the pharmacy first.”

  He opened his mouth to argue with her and then closed it. He ripped the sheet of paper off the pad, crammed it inside his jacket, and got up from the table. “Ready to roll?”

  She grabbed her bomber off a chair and pulled it on. She took her gloves out of the jacket and slipped them over her fingers. “Ready.”

  Thirty-two

  Mendota Heights was a twelve-minute drive from downtown. He piloted his piece of shit—a white Pontiac Grand Am with a dented driver’s door and a primed front-left-quarter panel waiting for a paint job—onto Shepard Road. She squinted through the windshield, which had a foot-long crack snaking horizontally across the passenger’s side. With every bump in the road, the crack seemed to grow an inch toward the driver’s side. “Where’d you get this heap of yours?”

  “Police auction.” He steered around a slow-moving minivan. “It’s loaded. Faster than it should be.”

  “I can see that.”

  He was taking a left, turning ont
o Interstate 35E heading south, before Bernadette realized she had no idea what had brought him to her place that night.

  “Why’d you come over?”

  “To see if you wanted to grab a beer. I know it’s late, but I couldn’t sit still at home. Too much rattling around in my head. This case…”

  “I know what you mean.” Another question occurred to her: “How’d you get into the building? When you came up with the hot dish, too—I didn’t buzz you in that time, either. Has some guy been letting you in? My neighbor Augie is the only sign of life I’ve seen in my building.”

  Garcia frowned at her. “Augie?”

  She eyed her boss, the odd look he flashed her. Maybe Garcia and Augie had a history. Better not tell her boss too much. “August Murrick. He’s a lawyer. Bumped into him in the hallway and again at the Farmers’ Market. He said he’s had some federal drug cases. I take it you know the guy, that he’s the one who let you in.”

  “I don’t know who let me up. A couple of your neighbors. You should talk to them about letting strangers into the building, especially so late at night.” Garcia paused and then continued. “Murricks are a big family around town. They’re all lawyers and developers and financiers. Which Murrick are you talking about?”

  “Augie.”

  Garcia gave her that look again. “That’s not right. You’ve got the name wrong.”