In The Dark

Two young lovers. A sultry summer night. One brutal, cold-blooded murder. In this stunning, atmospheric thriller, In the Dark, Brian Freeman takes you deep into Detective Jonathan Stride's complicated past.

It's the case that has haunted Stride for thirty years. During the summer after his junior year of high school, he fell in love with beautiful Cindy Starr, the girl who would become his wife. But on the Fourth of July, the same night that Jonny and Cindy cemented their love, Cindy's older sister Laura was savagely murdered. The police suspected a vagrant of committing the crime, but no one was ever arrested, and the case was closed. Lieutenant Jonathan Stride shielded his eyes as the glass door shot a laser beam of sunlight at his face, and when he could see again, he realized that the woman who had stepped out onto the patio was his late wife, Cindy.

For an instant, time slowed down the way it does on a long fall, while the buzz of conversation continued around him. He forgot how to breathe. The enigmatic smile he remembered from years ago was the same. When she lifted her sunglasses, her brown eyes stared back at him with a familiar glint over the heads of the others in the restaurant. She was in her late forties, as she would have been if she had lived. Small, like a fairy, but athletic and strong. Suntanned skin. An aura of intensity.

More than five years had passed since Cindy died of cancer as he sat beside her hospital bed. The pain of her loss had retreated to a distant ache in a corner of his soul. Even so, there were moments like this when he saw a stranger and something about her brought it all back. It didn't take much, just the look in her eyes or the way she carried herself, to stir his memory.

This woman was looking back at him, too. She was small but a couple of inches taller than Cindy, who had barely crossed five feet four on tiptoes. Her blond hair fell breezily around her shoulders, and her sunglasses were now tented on top of her head. Her earrings were sapphire studs. She wore a blue-flowered summer skirt that hung to her knees, baby blue heels, a white blouse, and a lightweight tan leather jacket with a braided fringe. She balanced one hand on a narrow hip as she watched him. The ties of her jacket dangled between her legs.

He knew her from somewhere.

"Your five seconds are up," Serena Dial told him.

Stride broke away. "What?"

Serena sipped her lemonade and eyed the woman in the leather jacket as she was shown to a table on the patio. A gust of wind blew off the lake and rustled her own silky dark hair. "You get a free pass to look at any woman for up to five seconds. After that, it officially becomes flirting."

My wife would have to be there because if she wasn’t with me in a social situation, I’d be completely lost. I recently lost my Dad, and it suddenly hit me that I’ll never have another chance to talk with him again. I’d sure want to have him there, as well.

As a kid, one writer I loved reading was Robert Ludlum. I don’t write books anything like his, but as a teenager, I just loved his novels. I never got a chance to meet him before he passed away. I would love to sit down and talk with him about what he did in the thriller world. As a kid, I loved classical music, especially the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. I had the impression he was a tortured soul in creating his work. Last guest would be Erma Bombeck, who would lighten the mood. She would bring everyone back into the real world, the reality of everyday life.

"She reminded me of someone," Stride said.

Stride turned to his partner in the Detective Bureau, Maggie Bei, as if consulting an Olympic judge for a ruling. "Is this five-second thing commonly known?" he asked.

Serena stretched out her arm lazily and used the back of her hand to caress Stride's cheek, which was rough with black-and-gray stubble. She sidled her long fingers through his wavy hair and leaned forward to plant a slow kiss on his lips. She tasted like citrus and sugar.

Most animals mark their territory by urinating," Maggie remarked, with her mouth full of a large bite of her steak sandwich. She batted her almond-shaped eyes innocently at Serena and grinned.

The calendar said June 1. It was late Sunday afternoon, but the sun was warm and high over the steep hillside on which the city of Duluth, Minnesota, was built. It wouldn't be dark until after nine o'clock. After the usual long, bitter winter, the tourists were streaming back on the weekends to watch the ore boats come and go through the narrow channel that led out into Lake Superior. The Canal Park area, where the three of them sat on the rooftop patio of Grandma's Saloon, teemed with lovers and children feeding noisy gulls by the boardwalk. As tourists and locals collided, and the weather got warmer, Stride and his team got busier. Crime was creeping up for the season, but so far, it was nothing more than the usual run of thefts, break-ins, drunks, and drugs.