“Will the two of you keep going?”
Stride frowned. “Why do you care? Do you need to flesh out our characters in your book?”
“No, it’s not that. I think a lot about you and Cindy, so I wondered if Serena makes you happy.”
“She does.” He was curt.
“I’m sorry, is that too personal?”
He shrugged. “I’m a Minnesotan. We talk about the weather and the Twins, Tish. That’s as personal as I get.”
“Oh, I forgot,” Tish said. She added, “Beautiful day.”
“Yeah.”
“How about those Twins?”
“This could be their year.”
“You’re right, this is much better,” Tish said, smiling.
Stride winked and finished his sandwich. He crumpled the wrapper into a ball, got up, and deposited it in a wastebasket twenty yards away. He returned and sat down next to Tish again.
“Are you expecting a package?” he asked her.
“What?”
He nodded at the delivery truck parked illegally fifty yards away. “The driver in that van is watching you. He was following your car when you arrived.”
Tish stared. A face appeared in the window of the truck and then disappeared. The man had wraparound sunglasses and a shaved head.
“Can’t you do something?” she asked.
“I can write him a parking ticket.”
Tish put down her coffee cup and stripped off her sunglasses. Her face was tense.
“Do you recognize him?” Stride asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“He knows we’ve spotted him.”
The truck engine started like the growl of a tiger. The delivery truck jerked away from the curb and continued north on London Road. Tish watched it until the van disappeared behind a row of brick buildings.
“Do you still think I’m paranoid?” she asked.
Stride wasn’t sure. “Have you noticed the truck before?”
“Now that I think about it, I may have seen it a number of times in the last few days.”
“It may be nothing, but I’ll do a check with the delivery company,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“I haven’t been ignoring you these past couple weeks,” he added. “I didn’t want to call until I had something more to tell you.”
“Do you have results back on the DNA tests?”
Stride nodded. “I got them from the lab this morning.”
“And?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. There was no match. We collected DNA from the flap of the envelope on the stalker letter that was sent to Laura, and we were able to get a good sample. When we ran it against the state and FBI databases, we came up empty. Whoever he is or was, he’s not in our files.”
“Damn.”
“It was a long shot.”
“Let me ask you this,” Tish said. “Would Peter Stanhope’s DNA be included in a database somewhere?”
“I doubt it.”
“So it could be his DNA, and we just don’t know it.”
“Sure.”
“Can’t we get a court to compel him to provide a sample of DNA?” Tish asked.
“Not without probable cause,” Stride said. “We would need to have something specific to tie him to the murder.”
“Laura was killed with his bat,” she protested.
“That might get us a DNA sample if the crime happened last week and if we still had the bat. After thirty years, no judge would grant a motion with what we have today.”
“You mean, because Peter Stanhope has more money than God.”
“Frankly, yes. I’m sorry, Tish, but there are certain realities to face here.”
Tish watched the calm blue water on the lake. A light breeze rippled through her hair. “I can’t believe there’s nothing we can do. There has to be a way to get a DNA sample from Peter.”
“There’s something else,” Stride said. “More bad news.”
“What?”
“This can’t go in the book.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“We have additional genetic material from the crime scene. There was semen found near the body. The police kept that fact secret.”
“You still have the sample? It’s still intact?”
Stride nodded. “I ran the DNA from the semen. It’s not the first time I’ve done that, but we add thousands of people to those databases every year. It didn’t make any difference. There was no match.”
“Can you compare the semen to the DNA from the stalker note?” Tish asked.
“That’s the bad news.”
“What do you mean?”
“I did compare the two samples. The DNA on the stalker note doesn’t match the semen where Laura’s body was found.”
“That’s not good,” Tish agreed, frowning.
“No. Even if we could get a match to the stalker’s DNA, it means we’ve got
“Do you have Dada’s DNA?”
“No.”
“So it could have been him. We know he was in the woods that night. He could have seen whoever killed Laura.”
“More likely, he killed her himself,” Stride reminded her. “Remember, Dada’s prints were on the bat. Besides, it’s all speculation. We don’t know who Dada was or where he went. After thirty years, he’s probably dead now. Life expectancy for vagrants like him isn’t long.”
“Do you remember anything that might help us track him down?”
“You know as much as I do. He was a Rasta. Dreadlocks, tam, the whole works. He probably wouldn’t look anything like that today.”
“He wasn’t old, though, was he?” she asked.
“No. Early twenties, maybe.”
“So he could still be alive.”
“You’d stand a better chance of finding Amelia Earhart.” Stride heard the cough of an engine and glanced at the street. “He’s back,” he said.
“Who?”
“The delivery driver.”
The same truck they had spotted earlier parked on the opposite side of London Road,
