The interrogation room was small. From the door to the wall was barely six feet. When the door was closed, it felt as if the ceiling were coming down and the walls were squeezing against your shoulders. The fluorescent light was cold and sterile. You blinked when you looked up. You could smell each other’s sweat, farts, and belches. There was one metal desk—it barely fit inside—and one wobbly chair where the suspect sat, close to the ground. Stride sat next to Maggie on top of the desk, their hips touching. Finn squirmed in the chair, his long legs uncomfortably bent, like a spider’s.
“So what is it now?” Finn said. “I came down here like you asked. God, don’t you guys have anything else to investigate? Have all the criminals gone on vacation? Shit, it was thirty years ago.”
Stride nodded at Maggie, who read Finn his rights.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Finn exclaimed. “What the hell is this? Are you arresting me for something?”
“Not yet,” Stride said.
“Do I need a lawyer?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“Look, I was just trying to help Tish. I didn’t have to say a word. Goddamn it, Rikke was right. I never should have gotten involved in this.”
“You’re not under arrest,” Stride told him. “We just want to make sure you understand your rights. You can call a lawyer if you want. You can walk out that door. Got it? We want to clear a few things up, but that’s up to you. Of course, it’s going to be hard to clear things up if you’re not talking to us.”
Stride saw blue veins in Finn’s skull, twisting over his head like rivers.
“Yeah, sure, talk,” Finn said. “I don’t care. Can we open the door?”
“Maybe in a few minutes. This is the only room available.”
“How about some water?” Finn asked.
“This won’t take long, and then we’ll go and get some water and a little more air to breathe. Okay?”
“I just want to get this over with.”
Maggie grabbed a manila envelope from the desk. She opened it and slid out a photograph, which she handed to Finn.
“Does this look familiar?” she asked.
The photograph was a close-up of a monarch butterfly tattoo on a girl’s back, life-sized and detailed, with orange-and-black wings that looked as if they would flutter in the wind. The photo had been taken at the morgue. The girl was Mary Biggs.
“It’s a tattoo,” Finn said.
“I didn’t ask you what it was,” Maggie snapped. “I asked if it looked familiar. Have you ever seen a tattoo like this before?”
Finn turned the photograph over and refused to look at it. “No, I don’t think so.”
“No? On Saturday, May 24, you delivered a package to a man named Clark Biggs in Gary. His daughter, Mary, was in the front yard. She showed you her tattoo.” Maggie slapped the photograph. “This tattoo.”
“I don’t remember. I deliver hundreds of packages every month.”
“This girl exposed herself to you. She showed you her breasts. Does that happen every month, too?”
Finn smiled. “You’d be surprised. Women answer the door, and a lot of times, they’re not wearing much.”
“This is funny to you?” Maggie asked. “The night you delivered that package, someone was outside Mary’s bedroom window, watching her undress. He was there again the next week. And on Friday night, he was on a trail with her in Fond du Lac. Terrifying her. Terrorizing her. Mary was just a little girl inside her brain. She didn’t understand. She ran, and she fell into the river, and she drowned. A sweet, innocent girl. Dead.”
Finn’s skin was the color of dirty dishwater. He stared at his feet. “That’s too bad.”
“Is that all you can say? Let’s cut to the chase, Finn. Mary’s mother saw you. She saw the silver RAV you drive, too.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“You delivered packages to three other girls who have been peeped in their bedrooms in the last month.”
“I told you, I deliver a lot of packages.”
Maggie reached into the envelope for another sheaf of papers stapled together. She folded the first page back. “This isn’t the first time, is it, Finn? You’ve been watching girls for a long time. According to DMV records, you lived in the Uptown area of Minneapolis for three years in the late 1990s. During that time, there was a string of eleven reported incidents of a peeper targeting blond teenagers. The peepings started a month after you moved to the city. They stopped right after you left.”
“Minneapolis is a big city. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Fifteen years ago, you were fired from your job as a custodian at a school in Superior,” Maggie continued. “I talked to the woman who was the principal back then. She said there were accusations that you had been going into the locker room at inappropriate times to watch the girls.”
“Oh, come on, like I’d be the first janitor who liked to sneak a peek now and then,” Finn said. “I’m not saying I did, but what’s the big deal? The teachers all do it, too. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“We’re searching your house right now,” Maggie told him. “There are officers tearing your place apart. What are they going to find, Finn? Photos? Maps? We’re going over your car with a toothbrush, too. We’ll find something that ties you to the girls you’ve been stalking.”
Finn’s bald head glistened with sweat under the hot light. “I think I should go. I thought you wanted to talk about Laura. I’m not saying anything else about stalking or peeping or whatever the hell you think I did.”
“You can go if you want,” Stride said. “But you brought it up, so let’s talk about Laura. She had a tattoo almost identical to the one that Mary Biggs had. Did Mary’s tattoo remind you of Laura? Is that why you focused on her?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You told me you saw Laura and Cindy in the woods that night by accident. Then we find out about Mary Biggs and all these blond girls with someone panting outside their bedroom window. You know what I think, Finn? I think you were watching Laura. I think you were stalking her. Sending her threats. I think you followed her to the park that night.”
“I didn’t stalk her,” Finn replied. “I never sent her any letters.”
“There’s something else,” Stride continued. “We never released this to the media. Someone masturbated at the crime scene where Laura was beaten to death. I guess the guy was so turned on by what he had done he had to jerk off. We still have the semen, Finn. What happens next is we get a court order to sample your DNA and we match it against the semen we found at the scene. I think we’re going to get a match, Finn. I think you were at the murder scene that night.”
“I told you, I don’t remember,” Finn said.
“Then let us help your memory. Give us a DNA sample right now. Let us run the test. Don’t you want to know the truth?”
Finn looked at them, horrified. “No.”
“You told me how hard it is to live your life not knowing if you killed someone. Maybe it will unlock your memory if you find out you were really there.” Stride paused and said, “Or maybe you remember already, Finn. Maybe you know what happened that night.”
“I can’t tell you anything. It’s gone.”
Stride shook his head. “It’s not gone. It’s still inside your head. You say you saw someone attacking Laura. Trying to rape her. Are you sure it wasn’t you?”
“No! That wasn’t me. It was someone else.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who it was. I couldn’t see.”
“Then Dada broke it up. Laura ran into the woods. Are you sure you didn’t follow her?”
“No,” Finn told them. He uncrossed and recrossed his legs.
“You said you don’t remember. Isn’t it possible you did follow Laura into the woods? Toward the beach?”
“I wouldn’t do that.” His eyes darted around, looking for escape.
“That night didn’t end in the field. Someone went after Laura. Someone took the baseball bat and chased her up to the north beach. Someone killed her. Beat her to death. Hammered her until she was almost unrecognizable. If I did that, I’d probably black it out, too.”
“Oh, my God,” Finn murmured.
“Or did you just see it? You’re a watcher, right? Did you see who killed Laura? Because that’s what we need to know. We need to know what happened.”
“I don’t remember.”
Maggie leaned forward. “You remember Mary Biggs, though, don’t you? You remember what she looked like, right? Well, here’s what she looks like now.”
She spilled a stack of photographs onto the desk. Autopsy photos. She picked them up one by one and pressed them into Finn’s hands, watching him go blue, watching him swallow hard, watching his head bob back and forth like the ticking of a clock as he stared, unable to look away, at the swollen, lifeless remains of Mary Biggs, pulled from the water after she drowned.
“You killed her, Finn. You killed this wonderful girl.”
Finn squeezed his eyes shut.
“OPEN YOUR EYES!” Maggie bellowed at him. His eyelids sprang up in shock. She clutched a close-up photo of Mary’s face, her skin puffed and pale. She shoved the photo so close to Finn that Mary’s face was his whole world, and he couldn’t see anything else.
“Tell me why,” Maggie said. “Tell me why you did this to her.” Her voice softened. “Look, I know you didn’t mean to. Did you love her? Did you want a chance to tell her how you felt? But she didn’t understand. She was scared of you.”
Finn gulped air like a fish. He swallowed hard as if something were in his mouth that wouldn’t go down.
“Mary and Laura both deserved better,” Stride said quietly.
Finn was a rubber band that had been stretched until it was frayed and ready to snap. When Finn buried his face in his hands, Stride caught Maggie’s eye. They both thought the words would spill out now, like a dammed-up river seeping through sandbags and finally bursting free. He would talk. He would confess. He would throw off the anvil that had weighed on his conscience. He would seek absolution for the secrets that had made his life so miserable that he could only escape it into a numbed world of marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol.
“Let it go,” Maggie murmured.
Stride said, “It’s okay.”
Finn stared wildly at them. Tears ran from his eyes; mucus ran from his nose. He clapped a hand to his mouth, shoved them both aside with a stiff jerk of his arm, and bolted through the door, slamming it behind him. They heard the gasping, retching noise of his stomach spewing onto the marble floor of City Hall. When Stride opened the door again, the sweet stench of vomit made him cover his nose and look away.
Finn was gone.
Ten minutes later, the interrogation room still smelled of Finn’s body. Stride leaned back on the desk until his head banged against the wall. Maggie jumped off the desk, took the chair in which Finn had been sitting, and propped her feet up.
Her cell phone rang. She slid it out of her pocket and answered. Stride recognized the voice of Max Guppo, the overweight detective who had been leading the search team at Finn Mathisen’s house, along with cops from Superior. Maggie asked a few questions and then hung up. She didn’t look happy.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Come on.”
She shook her head. “They didn’t find a damn thing to link him to the peeping cases. His room looked as if it had been vacuum-cleaned of anything potentially incriminating. The computer had no hard drive, for God’s sake. Just a big hole in the tower. His shoes were all new. His clothes had been washed.”
“Rikke,” Stride said.
Maggie nodded. “She knows what he’s been doing. Maybe we can lean on her.”
“She’s been covering for Finn for thirty years. She’s not going to stop now. What about the car? The silver RAV?”
“Ditto. Cleaned and pressed. Even the tires had been hosed down.”
Stride sighed. “So where are we?”
“I think we’ll be able to make a charge of interference with privacy stick. If we can tie him to the other victims, a jury will make the leap.”
“If.”
“He had to find them somehow. We’ll track it down. Hell, he delivered to four out of the nine households where a girl was peeped. That’s a big coincidence right there.”
“Big, but still a coincidence,” Stride said. “If we can get six or seven, okay. Four’s not enough. Even with the silver RAV. He has no priors. We’ll never get the stuff from Minneapolis or his old janitorial job admitted in court. A defense lawyer can blow smoke and make a jury believe Finn is just a victim of circumstances.”
“And Mary’s murder?”
Stride shook his head. “You know that’s going nowhere. We’ll be lucky to pin the peeping charge on him. We can’t put him at the scene with Mary, and even if we could, we can’t establish what really happened.”
“At least we can charge multiple counts. He’s done it ten times that we know of. If we get the right judge, we can go for two years a count.”
Stride put a hand gently on Maggie’s leg. “I know this case means a lot to you, Mags, but you’re dreaming. With no priors? He’ll get a year for everything and be out in three months. If he sees the inside of a jail at all. That’s life.”
“That sucks.”
“I know it does.”
“What the hell do I tell Clark Biggs?”
“That we’re still working on the case. We’re not done yet. If we get the DNA test back and can prove that Finn was at the scene where Laura was murdered, we can take another run at him. Maybe he’ll confess. He might not go down for Mary’s death, but if we put him behind bars for Laura’s murder, that’s some justice.”
“If,” Maggie said, mocking him.
“Yeah, yeah.” Stride rubbed his hands over his face and felt a bone-deep tiredness throughout his body. “Think they’ve cleaned up the hallway yet?”
Maggie reached over and pushed the door open. “Nope.”
“Shit,” Stride said. “I have to wash my face.”
“Is that what guys say when they have to take a leak?”
“No, we say we have to take a leak.”
“Do most guys wash their hands after?” Maggie asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yuck.”
Stride laughed. He left the interrogation room and covered his nose against the pungent aroma of puke. The hallways were empty. It was evening, and City Hall was mostly deserted. He found the frosted glass door that led to the men’s room, opened it with his shoulder, and started a stream of cold water running in the nearest sink on the long countertop. He bent over, splashed water on his face, and rubbed his skin hard. His fingers ran through his hair, leaving it wet and disheveled.
He smelled it before he saw it.
Blood.
His eyes were closed, and when he opened them, blinking, he saw the first toilet stall reflected in the mirror, its door ajar. Twin trails of fresh blood outlined the grout in the white floor tiles in ruby red squares. Stride ran for the stall and shoved the door open, where it bounced against the wall of the stall. Finn Mathisen was sprawled on the seat, his head lolling back, his mouth open and slack. His arms dangled uselessly at his sides, and a Swiss army knife lay on the floor where it had spilled from his hand.
The blood on the tiles dripped from two jagged, vertical gashes Finn had carved into the veins on both wrists.