“Nope,” Wallace said. “I mean, we will, but not yet.”

I stared at him, surprised. But maybe I shouldn’t have been. After all, he was smart.

“The first thing I want to do is get the truth out of Peter Stanhope,” Wallace said.

14
___________

Ray Wallace.

For years, he had been Stride’s best friend. His mentor on the police force. It was as if, in the restless months he spent after losing his father, he had been waiting to find someone who could give him a new direction. Later, Stride discovered that when you put someone on a pedestal, they’re almost certain to break when they fall.

He still remembered the first question he had asked Ray when they walked out the door of Cindy’s house on July 5, 1977.

“So what’s with the limp?”

Ray stopped with his hand on the driver’s door of his Camaro. “Vietnam,” he said. “I took a bullet in the knee.”

“Oh, man.”

“Yeah, it was a bitch, but you know what? After something like that, it’s hard to get bent out of shape about any of the bad stuff that life throws at you.”

Stride would remember that comment for years.

Right up until the moment that Ray shot him.

_______

“I like the way you stood up for your girlfriend, Jon,” Ray said as he started the car.

“Cindy didn’t do anything wrong,” Stride told him.

“I think you’re right, but she’s not giving me the whole story, either.”

“She’s not a liar.”

“I didn’t say she was, but there’s a difference between lying and leaving out part of the truth, you know?”

Stride was silent.

Ray steered with one hand, with his elbow balanced on the Camaro’s open window. He sucked cold coffee under his red mustache with the other hand.

“Do you think you’ll figure out who killed Laura?” Stride asked.

“I hope so. I’ll tell you right now, though, it won’t be easy. From what you say, there were a lot of people in the woods. That means a lot of suspects and a lot of crap for a defense lawyer to throw around in court. Unless someone saw something, we might never know the truth. And the fact is that truth is as slippery as ice sometimes.”

Warm summer air blew through the open windows. The car engine roared as Ray stepped on the gas.

“I have to make a stop first,” he said.

He drove along the lakeshore on London Road until he reached the Glensheen Mansion, where he turned into the mammoth estate’s main driveway. Stride saw several police vehicles parked inside. Ray shut down the engine and got out, then leaned back through the window of the Camaro.

“Wait here for a minute, okay?”

Stride saw Ray approach another detective who was standing with two or three uniformed officers in the middle of the driveway. The huge red brick mansion with its three distinctive peaks was visible through the trees. Ray lit a cigarette. Stride could hear the murmur of conversation but couldn’t make out the words. He guessed what they were talking about. A week earlier, the heiress to the Congdon mining fortune, Elisabeth Congdon, and her live-in nurse had both been found murdered inside the mansion. One suffocated, one bludgeoned. The papers said the motive was robbery, but Stride had already heard rumors floating around the city that the murders might have involved a member of Congdon’s family and an estate worth tens of millions of dollars.