In the Dark aka The Watcher

36

Tish studied the framed photographs on the credenza in Jonathan Stride’s office in City Hall. She saw a photo of Stride with his arm around Serena, taken somewhere with a view across the Strip in Las Vegas. Beside it, she saw a picture of Cindy, with the Vancouver harbor behind her. Her hair was dark and straight. Her eyes teased the camera. Over time, Tish’s memories of Cindy had dimmed to the point where she couldn’t hear her voice in her head and couldn’t call up a picture of her face. Then a photo like this brought it all back.

She felt her eyes misting. Behind her, she heard the noise of someone approaching, and she quickly put the photograph down, wiped her face, and pasted a smile on her lips. Stride came into the office, and she didn’t think she had fooled him. His eyes strayed to the line of photographs, and she thought they lingered on Cindy.

He pointed at the chair in front of his desk and then took his own chair and leaned back, his jaw tight and hard. His hair was unruly, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept. Tish sat down uncomfortably. She heard the office door close and turned around to see the tiny Chinese cop, Maggie Bei, leaning against the door. She wasn’t smiling.

“Is something wrong?” Tish asked.

“What did you want to see me about?” Stride said.

Tish took a deep breath. “He confessed.”

“Who?”

“Finn,” Tish said. “I went to see him yesterday.”

“I thought I told you not to play cop,” Stride snapped.

“I felt responsible for his suicide attempt. I wanted to find out why he did it. We wound up talking about Laura’s murder, and that’s when he blurted it out.”

“Exactly what did he say?”

“He talked about dreams he has. About seeing the blood all over her and about the bat going up and down. And then he just said it. He said it flat out. I killed her.”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Tish asked.

“Did he use Laura’s name?” Stride asked.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s a simple question, Tish. Did Finn say he killed Laura? ”

“No, but who else would he mean?” Tish said. “What is going on?”

“I think we’re done here,” Stride said. “Thanks for coming in.”

Behind her, Maggie opened the office door and stood beside it.

“We’re done? That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Are you going to arrest him?” Tish asked.

“No.”

“No? What more do you need? I mean, look, this isn’t what I expected. I admit that I was wrong. I was convinced Peter Stanhope was involved. But now you can match Finn’s DNA to the crime scene. He told me he was there. He told me that he killed her. This is the break we’ve needed.”

“For your book?”

“Not just for the book. To solve the case.”

“The confession is useless,” Stride told her.

“Useless? How can you say that?”

Stride held up his hand and counted on his fingers. “One, Rikke hired a lawyer. The law says we can’t talk to Finn anymore without his lawyer present. Because I was stupid enough to talk to you about this case, a defense attorney can make a persuasive argument that you were acting as an instrument of the police in questioning Finn. Result? The confession gets tossed. Two, Finn was recently discharged from the hospital and was almost certainly under the influence of painkillers when you talked to him. So his attorneys will argue that he was not in full possession of his faculties. The confession gets tossed. Three, the fact that Finn did not use Laura’s name leaves doubt about who he was talking about. The confession gets tossed.”

“That’s crazy.”

Stride gestured to Maggie. “Tell her.”

Maggie closed the door again and sat on the edge of Stride’s desk. “Serena and I did some digging into Finn’s past. His mother abused him. The cops think Finn snapped and bludgeoned his mother to death. With a baseball bat. They let him walk because they couldn’t prove it, and frankly, no one wanted to see him put away. Getting rid of that woman was a community service, they figured.”

“Poor Finn,” Tish said softly.

“You get the picture?” Maggie said. “Regardless of whether Finn said Laura’s name or not, his attorney will argue that it’s memory transference from the death of his mother. I mean, hell, he said this came to him in a dream? Who knows what his brain has concocted after years of drug and alcohol abuse?”

“The confession gets tossed,” Stride repeated.

Tish thought furiously. “I was there,” she insisted. “Finn wasn’t hopped up on drugs. He wasn’t talking about his mother. He was back there. In the park. With Laura.”

“You didn’t let me continue,” Stride said. “Four, we recovered the murder weapon. The baseball bat.”

“What?”

“Peter Stanhope had it. Ray Wallace gave it to him as a little gift. We tested the bat, and Finn’s fingerprints are not on it.”

“That’s not possible.”

“There are fingerprints we can’t identify, but they don’t belong to Finn,” Stride said.

“So maybe he wore gloves.”

“In July?”

“What about DNA? Test the semen.”

“Even if it matches, all that proves is that he jerked off near the murder scene.”

“Damn it, Jonathan, he told me he killed her.”

“Five,” Stride continued, holding up his last finger, “the confession gets tossed because the only two people who heard it are you and Finn.”

Tish shrugged and held up her hands. “So what? What difference does that make?”

“No one will believe you. You have no credibility.”

“Excuse me?”

“No one will believe you because you are a manipulative, self-serving liar.”

Tish shot to her feet. “How dare you! What the hell are you talking about?”

Stride stood up, too. “Don’t play games with me, Tish. I don’t appreciate it when someone twists me around her finger. I don’t appreciate it when someone toys with people who are close to me. I don’t appreciate it when someone uses me and lies to me in order to further some secret goal. What’s your motive, Tish? Why are you really here?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tish said.

But she did. She saw it in his face. He knew.

“I’m talking about the fact that I have one more suspect to add to the list,” Stride said. “Finn, Peter, Dada, and now you.”

Tish looked down at his desk. She wilted back into the chair. “No, Jonathan, you’re