Free Stalked by Brian Freeman

feet. He looked down and saw a long-haired gray cat, with snow and dirt matting the ends of its fur, rubbing against his leg. Stride bent down and scratched the cat’s head and was rewarded with a purr. The cat strolled away down the length of the back porch and then disappeared inside the house through one of the windows. Stride followed him, snapping on gloves. He found a jagged hole, large enough that he could reach inside and unlock the window. He pushed it up and squeezed his body through the frame. He found himself in a dark, narrow hallway leading to the kitchen. Two cat bowls were pushed against the wall, both empty.
    “Police,” he called out. “Anyone here?”
    There was no response.
    The air in the apartment was stale, as if it had been bottled up for days. Stride checked the kitchen and smelled no remnants of food. The sink was empty. He retraced his steps and followed the hallway to the living room, where he was confronted by a two-feet-high crucifix nailed to a white wall. Below the cross, he noticed stacks of Christian sheet music on a banged-up upright piano.
    He saw a photograph of Tanjy with her parents on an end table made of taupe metal and glass. Her parents had died last winter on the Bong Bridge to Wisconsin, when a shroud of fog settled over the top of the span unexpectedly and caused a string of accidents. Stride picked up the frame and looked at the photo. Tanjy was in her late twenties, with long black hair and a slim body. Her father had been white, and her mother black, and the mocha-colored features of Tanjy’s face were in perfect proportion. She had thin, sharply angled eyebrows that made her look wicked. Her lips made dimples at the corners of her mouth when she smiled, and she had a gleam in her brown eyes that made him think she was enjoying a secret joke. Men responded to her as if she were an erotic puzzle that they wanted to unlock. When she first came to City Hall, he watched the officers in his Detective Bureau become as flustered as tongue-tied teenagers.
    Tanjy came to him with a terrible story. She had been abducted on a Wednesday night in early November from a dark parking ramp off Michigan Street. The man blindfolded and gagged her, tied her up, and drove her to Grassy Point Park, a tiny and deserted green space jutting out into Saint Louis Bay. The park was in the shadow of the arc of the Bong Bridge where her parents had died. He tied her hands and feet to the steel mesh of the barbed wire fence that separated the park from the train tracks of the seaport. When he removed her blindfold, she could see the graffiti-covered train cars and the looming black mountains of coal. He cut off her clothes until she was naked and cold, suspended on the fence, and raped her from behind. When he was done, he left her there with her car. It had all been planned out, she said; he had another car waiting for him in the park. She didn’t see the car and couldn’t give any description of the rapist. Eventually, she bit through the tape with her teeth and freed herself.
    This all happened on Wednesday, she said. It was Friday when she came to Stride to report the rape. She was cleaned up and impeccably dressed. She didn’t cry or raise her voice or show any emotion at all as she described what happened. She declined to submit to a physical examination and told them she had already visited her own clinic. It may as well have happened to someone else.
    Had Stride been inside Tanjy’s house back then, he would have noticed all of her religious icons and recognized the Christlike imagery of Tanjy crucified on the fence. That would have been his first clue that something was wrong.
    Her rape was big news in the Duluth media. Stranger rapes were rare and terrifying in the city. Two days later, though, the daily newspaper printed an interview with a young stockbroker named Mitchell Brandt, who was Tanjy’s old boyfriend. He described her obsession with rape in lurid and explicit detail—how she