“Ray was before my time, but I’ve heard stories. He was a big problem.”

“Ray was a good cop, but he crossed the line,” Stride said. “He may have leaped too quickly to a theory of the crime that exonerated Peter Stanhope. He may have made the murder weapon and the original stalker letter disappear.”

“Well, if Ray screwed the pooch, we should know about it before Tish or someone else gets there ahead of us.”

“Of course.”

“One last thing,” Pat said.

“Yes?”

“At some point, I may pull the plug. If all we’re doing is chasing our tail, and it’s obvious we’re never going to have enough evidence to put someone on trial, then I’m going to shut this down. I’m sorry, I know this girl meant something to you and your late wife. But if we don’t find anything new, then you and Tish are both going to have to live with the idea that the case will always be unsolved.”

WHO KILLED LAURA STARR?

By Tish Verdure

THIRTEEN

July 5, 1977

The three of us were in our living room on Tuesday afternoon. It was me, my dad, and Jonny. The house had never felt so small. I hadn’t slept at all, and the walls felt like they were closing in, and the ceiling was coming down on top of me. I couldn’t breathe. The room was baking hot and so sticky that you broke into a sweat without doing anything at all. We all sat there, not saying a word, watching the dusty stream of sunlight through the front window. Jonny held my hand, and I buried my head in his shoulder. Tears of anger and regret streamed down my dad’s face. His face was beet red. He blamed Laura for living when my mom died, and now he blamed her for dying like she did. He had lost another one.

My dad. He was never a big man, and year by year, he seems to shrink. His dark hair, which was so full and thick when I was a little girl, is mostly gone now. His clothes don’t fit, but he won’t let me buy new ones, so his white dress shirts balloon at his shoulders. He sits in his recliner in the evenings and reads his leather Bible by the dim light. No ambition anymore. Just crushed dreams and a tug-of-war with God. I remember how he used to come home from Wahl’s in his sharp pinstriped suits, like a man on top of the world, a man going places. He was going to run that department store someday. That’s what he told Mom. Now other men have climbed over his shoulders, and Dad writes newspaper ads for white sales. At fifty, he looks sixty. You just don’t realize how one person depends on another, and when they’re not there, it’s like going off a bridge, and you’re falling and falling.

I went to Jonny’s place. After. In the middle of the night. He answered the door, and I looked a sight, crying, dotted with blood. He called the police, because I couldn’t do it. They came and took us back there, and I led them through the woods to the body, but I couldn’t go out to the beach. I couldn’t see it again. Even the big, tough cops couldn’t believe what had been done to her. Things like that don’t happen. Not here in Duluth.