Stalked by Brian Freeman Page A

before?”
    “Sonnie says no.”
    “What about family?”
    Lauren shook her head. “Her parents are dead. She lives in the bottom half of an old Victorian in the East Hillside area. I thought you’d want to check it out, in case there’s some foul smell emanating from it. That’s what gets your blood racing, right?”
    “Give it a rest, Lauren.” He added, “My first thought is that Tanjy is playing another game with us.”
    “Why? Because last time she made a fool of you?”
    “The woman fabricated a rape charge. She had the whole city in a panic.”
    Lauren sighed. “I don’t claim to understand what goes on in her sick little brain. I’m just the messenger.”
    “I hope to hell she’s not wasting our time again,” Stride said. “The only reason we didn’t file charges was because Dan and K-2 didn’t want us to look like we were beating up on a woman with psychological problems.”
    “My fault,” Lauren admitted. “I asked them to go easy on her.”
    “You? I’m surprised you didn’t fire her.”
    “I only go after people who get in my way, Jonathan. You should know that.”
    “Meaning you didn’t want an ugly employment lawsuit.”
    “Meaning I felt sorry for her.”
    Stride didn’t believe that Lauren had ever felt sorry for anyone, but it didn’t matter either way. “I’ll check it out,” he said.
    “There’s something else,” Lauren added.
    “What?”
    “Tanjy called our home on Monday night.”
    “After she left the shop that day? Why?”
    “She wanted to talk to Dan, but he was in Saint Paul.”
    “What did she want?” Stride asked.
    “I don’t know. I called Dan from Washington on Tuesday afternoon, but he said there was no answer when he tried to call her back. Neither one of us gave it another thought until today. I took a flight back early this morning, and Sonnie told me that Tanjy was missing.”
    “Did Tanjy leave a message when you talked to her?”
    “Yes, she gave me a message for Dan, but he didn’t know what it meant.”
    “What was it?”
    Lauren shrugged. “She simply said to tell him, ‘I know who it is.’ ”
     
     
     

Chapter 8
     
     
    Abel Teitscher arrived home early Thursday afternoon, having spent ten hours supervising the crime scene where Eric Sorenson was killed. He sprinkled flakes of food into the large saltwater tank in his living room, which was stocked with a rainbow assortment of angels, puffers, dragonets, tetras, and gobies. On the rare evenings when he wasn’t working, he would pour himself a glass of brandy, turn off the lights, and sit quietly watching his fish while they traveled the illuminated aquarium. Abel was more comfortable with fish than with people.
    He lived alone in a modest house on Ninth Street north of downtown. He had been married for twenty-seven years, until he arrived home unexpectedly on a Tuesday afternoon and found his fifty-two-year-old wife being serviced by the twenty-four-year-old unemployed son of their next-door neighbor. She had been watching too many
Desperate Housewives
episodes. They divorced six months later, and she was now living in a rented apartment in Minneapolis. The one good thing to come out of his marriage was his daughter, Anne, but she was away at graduate school in San Diego. She was studying marine biology, which Abel was happy to attribute to years as a child sitting with her father in front of the fish tank.
    A few years ago, an all-nighter like the Sorenson murder would have taken a toll on him for days, but he was in better shape now than he had been in decades. Since the divorce, he had taken up running, putting on miles on the track at UMD during the warmer seasons and using a treadmill crammed in his bedroom during the winter. He had lost thirty pounds and was in training now for the marathon. At City Hall, they called him gaunt and skeletal, which infuriated him, because no one appreciated how hard he had worked to hone his body.
    Abel stretched out on the sofa near the fish