Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

1

Nine Years Ago

Cindy Stride noted the clock on the dashboard of her Subaru Outback. 9:32 p.m.

Eventually, everyone would ask her about that. Jonny would pepper her with questions, not as a husband but as a cop. What time was it? When did you leave the party at the Radisson? The county attorney, Dan Erickson, would interrogate her about it months later on the witness stand. Mrs. Stride, exactly what time was it when you took the defendant back to her house that night?

She didn’t know why she noticed the time, or why she remembered it, but she did. 9:32 p.m. Friday night. January 28.

Cindy glanced at the woman in the passenger seat beside her. Dr. Janine Snow. She couldn’t look at Janine without a twinge of jealousy. If you were a short woman, you wanted to be tall. If you had black hair, you wanted to be blond. If you were a physical therapist, like Cindy, you wanted to be a surgeon.

Janine was all of those things.

‘I’m sorry to make you leave the party early,’ her friend said, with a little hint of her Texas roots in her voice. ‘I’m not feeling well, and I didn’t think I should drive myself.’

Cindy shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. I wished the chief a happy birthday. I kissed his cheek. My duty was done.’

She squinted through the windshield of her Outback. She hated driving at night, and the hillside trek to Janine’s house made her nervous. Duluth was a city that made no sense in the winter, when ice turned the steep streets into luge tracks. Janine owned a Frank Lloyd Wright-style mansion high above Skyline Parkway, with a million-dollar view and drop-offs that made you hold your breath trying to climb the slick streets to get there. With each switchback over the treetops, the glazed roads felt as if they were a stairway into the clouds.

‘Could you stop?’ Janine asked suddenly.

‘What? Why?’

‘Please. I have to throw up.’

Cindy punched the brakes, and the Outback shimmied. Janine flung open the door and fumbled with the seat belt. Sub-zero air roared into the car, making Cindy shiver. She saw Janine sway on the shoulder, where the frozen ground dipped sharply at her feet.

‘Are you okay? Be careful!’

Janine sank to her knees and vomited the contents of her stomach. She tried to stand, but her heels slipped, and she nearly fell. She clung to the car door as she dragged herself back inside. The smell of puke came with her. Her untucked lavender blouse and her Paige jeans were soiled with dirt, snow, and regurgitated remnants of banquet shrimp. She put her fists on her knees and laid her head back with closed eyes.

‘I am so sorry,’ Janine murmured.

‘It’s okay,’ Cindy replied. ‘These days, it seems like eating anything makes me sick, too.’

The wheels of the Outback churned for traction as Cindy accelerated. She had nightmares sometimes about the Duluth streets, where she kept pushing the gas but could never get up an impossibly steep hill. She peered at the cliffside over the terraced road. Icicles dripped from the rocky ledges, remnants of a brief early-month thaw. Somewhere above her was Janine’s house. The mansion’s frame butted over the hillside, as if floating on air. It was a crazy place to live. She preferred the drafty cottage that she and Jonny owned on the spit of land between Lake Superior and the inner harbor. She liked living at sea level.

Beside her, Janine’s skin was ghostly white. The annoying thing about Janine was that she could be sick and still look good. Her natural blond hair swished about her shoulders like waves of sunshine. It didn’t matter whether her hair was styled or messy; somehow it always looked right. She was the perfect weight and the perfect size, and at thirty-nine years old, she seemed to stay that way effortlessly. She had ice-blue eyes that hardly ever blinked. It was unnerving when those eyes looked at you and made you stutter like a fool, because you were standing in front of someone who was so beautifully put together.

Yes, Cindy was a little jealous of Janine Snow.

‘Where’s your husband?’ Janine asked. ‘I’m surprised he’d miss the chief’s party.’

‘Jonny and Maggie got stuck on top of the Bong Bridge coming back from Superior. A semi overturned on the ice. Shut the whole thing down. It’s a mess.’

Janine gave a thin smile. ‘So is his little Chinese partner still in love with him?’

‘Maggie? Oh, yeah. She is.’

‘Does that worry you? They spend a lot of time together.’

‘No, it doesn’t bother me. Maggie may be in love with him, but Jonny’s in love with me.’

Janine pursed her lips as if she wanted to say something more, but she held her tongue. She wasn’t always blessed with social graces. If anyone else had insinuated a relationship between Jonny and Maggie, Cindy would have cut them off at the knees, but she made allowances for Janine’s prickly side.

They’d been friends for five years, ever since St. Anne’s recruited Janine from Texas to a top spot in cardiac surgery at the downtown hospital. Cindy worked as a physical therapist in an adjacent building, and they’d met at the cafeteria. Janine didn’t make friends easily, particularly with other women, but Cindy took pride in the fact that she herself was impossible to dislike. The two of them soon became close. Or as close as a doctor could be to anyone else.

Janine made no secret of her Texas-sized libido, but she was one of those women who always seemed to have the wrong man in her life. She’d already been divorced twice before relocating to Duluth. One marriage was teen love, naive and doomed. One was mercenary, to pay for medical school. Through both marriages, she’d kept her own name. Snow. And like the snow, she was cold, driven, and blinding.

Two years after arriving at St. Anne’s, Janine married again. This time it was a News-Tribune columnist named Jay Ferris, and the two of them were from Mars and Venus. Jay was black, and Janine was white. He was an Iron Range Democrat, and Janine was a Lone Star Republican. Their differences made the attraction hotter. Janine freely admitted to Cindy that her interest in Jay was rooted more in lust than love, but after the heat between them flamed out, their passion veered to the other extreme. Cindy didn’t need to ask why Jay hadn’t accompanied his wife to the party at the Radisson. Janine and Jay never went anywhere together. Not anymore. Not for months.

Cindy turned toward Janine’s house. The last hill was the steepest of all. There were three houses perched at the summit of a dead end, built to soak up views of the city and the lake. Janine’s house was the most recent, the most modern, and the most expensive. It had flat roofs, heated to melt the snow. The back of the house, built on columns mounted into the hillside, featured a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. The rounded porte cochère extended over the semi-circular driveway like a flying saucer.

Lights were on at the house. Jay Ferris was home. The garage door was open, revealing Jay’s new Hummer and an empty space where Janine usually kept her Mercedes, which she’d left behind in the parking ramp at the Radisson.

Cindy stopped in the driveway. ‘Here you go.’

‘Do you mind coming in with me? I’m pretty unsteady.’

‘Sure.’

Cindy got out. The hilltop wind swirled her long black hair and pinked up her cheeks. She went to the other side of the Outback and helped Janine out of the car. The taller woman put an arm around Cindy’s shoulder to support herself. Janine still walked with a limp after a painful fall on the ice the previous year. Cindy didn’t understand why her friend insisted on wearing heels, but to a Texas blond, leaving her heels at home was like suggesting she go to the party naked.

‘Do you have your key?’ Cindy asked.

‘Yes.’

But Janine didn’t need her key. Through the glass door, Cindy spotted Jay Ferris coming to meet them. She noticed a visceral reaction in her friend’s body when she saw her husband. Nothing brought this strong woman low like the man she’d married. Cindy wondered how long someone could live that way before they did something about it.

‘I’ll come inside with you,’ Cindy told her.

‘No.’ Janine’s voice was hushed and shaken. ‘No, you don’t need to do that. I can handle it myself. Thank you for taking me home.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I want to throw myself into the canyon,’ she said.

‘Janine.’

‘I’m kidding. I’m fine.’

‘Come home with me. You don’t have to stay here with him.’

Janine shook her head. ‘Yes, I do.’

The front door opened. A jazz clarinet sang from hidden speakers inside. Jay had a glass of red wine in his hand. He was slim and three or four inches shorter than his wife. He wore an untucked white silk shirt and gray dress slacks. His feet were bare. He cast a withering glance at Janine and paid no attention to Cindy.

‘Look at you. Is that puke? Very nice.’

Janine squared her shoulders and pushed past him. He slammed the door without acknowledging Cindy. Through the glass, she saw Janine kick off her heels in the marble foyer. She could hear their loud voices, already arguing. Jay reached for his wife, and she watched her friend violently shake him off. Cindy thought about ringing the bell to intervene, but Janine looked back through the window and mouthed: Go.

Cindy returned to her Outback and steeled herself for a slow, slippery drive home. She gave a silent prayer of thanks, not for the first time, for the husband she had and the life she led.

The streets around her were empty. No one else was foolish enough to be out on a night like this. It was just one of the details they would eventually ask her to remember.

As you left the house that night, Mrs. Stride, did you see anyone else?

‘No. There was no one else there. I was alone.’

Cindy awoke to the smell of cigarette smoke.

Their small bedroom was dark. She didn’t know what time it was. Through the half-open window, she heard the roar of Lake Superior yards from their back door. She shivered with cold in her nightgown as she sat up in bed, and the blanket slipped down her chest. She pushed tangled hair out of her face.

Where the moon made a triangle of light on the floor, she saw the silhouette of her husband. He was tall, almost six-foot-two. Strong and fit. His black hair wavy and untamed. He’d shrugged clothes onto his lean frame when he should have been getting undressed. He put a cigarette to his mouth — a habit she hated, but which he’d been unable to quit.

The bed was cold. He hadn’t climbed in with her yet.

She said: ‘What’s up?’

He realized she was awake and sat down beside her. When he flicked his cigarette lighter, it cast a flame. She could see his eyes now. She adored his eyes. Dark, teasing, fierce, funny, and so in love whenever they looked at her.

But his eyes weren’t happy.

‘Bad news,’ Jonathan Stride said. ‘I have to go out.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Did you see Janine at the chief’s party tonight?’

‘Of course. I took her home. She wasn’t feeling well.’

Stride stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘You drove Janine home? What time was that? When did you leave the party at the Radisson?’

The time popped into her head. ‘9:32 p.m.’

‘Almost an hour and a half ago,’ Stride murmured. ‘Did you see Jay?’

‘Briefly, yes. Why?’

Stride kissed her forehead. He stood up again. ‘Jay’s dead. Janine called 911 a few minutes ago. She says someone shot him.’

2

‘The thing about dead husbands and dead wives is that the cases are always like a knock-knock joke,’ Maggie Bei said.

Jonathan Stride eyed his tiny Chinese partner, who stared up at him from behind her black bangs. He played along. ‘How’s that?’

‘Knock knock,’ she said.

‘Who’s there?’

‘We know.’

‘We know who?’ Stride asked.

Maggie cocked her finger like a gun. ‘Yes, we do.’

Stride smothered a laugh. Maggie was right. He was hard-pressed to remember a dead spouse at home who hadn’t been shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned by their loving husband or loving wife. The investigations typically didn’t take long to produce enough evidence to lay in front of a jury. However, Dr. Janine Snow wasn’t an ordinary suspect.

She was rich.

She was a local hero who saved lives on the operating table.

She was one of his wife’s closest friends.

Stride ran his hands back through his wavy hair and blinked to stay awake. He was tired and cold. The temperature hovered around zero, and here on the high hillside, the lake wind hit his skin like acid. They’d already spent two hours outside this evening, up on the arch of the Bong Bridge that connected Duluth to its Wisconsin twin port town, Superior. A semi had spilled over on the icy bridge deck, closing the span and stranding cars for hours. One woman freaked out at the height and began threatening to throw herself into the water. A typical January evening.

He’d barely had time for a hot shower at home when Maggie called about the murder of Jay Ferris. Now he was cold again, but in Duluth, the chill of winter never really went away. You lived your life cold. Even under a wool blanket, your bones never forgot the cold. They reminded you with a little involuntary shiver.

Stride stood with Maggie next to his Ford Bronco, which was crusted with dirt and road salt. He studied the street and the house. His team had already closed off the scene, and it was remote enough and late enough — after midnight — that news of the murder hadn’t leaked to the media yet. That wouldn’t last long, particularly given the prominence of the husband and wife involved in the crime.

The road banked sharply downward from where he was parked. The street was free of snow, but six-foot drifts had been piled on the shoulders by the plows. There were three houses here, all on the cliffside overlooking the lake, all worth in excess of a million dollars. He knew the families who owned them. Janine and Jay. Next to them, another surgeon, along with his gay partner and their three adopted children. Next to them, behind a wrought-iron gate, the owners of a successful restaurant chain located in the tourist heart of the city in Canal Park. Duluth’s upper-crust was a small community, and the chief made it a point that he and his lieutenants keep good relationships with them.

‘I want you to interview the neighbors yourself,’ he told Maggie.

‘Sure.’

‘Be polite.’

‘Me? I’m always polite.’

Stride smiled at her. Another joke. Maggie was, in fact, foul-mouthed and sarcastic. He was amazed at how much she’d changed in the few years they’d been working together. She was a whip-smart Chinese immigrant and criminology grad from the University of Minnesota, but Stride had been reluctant to hire her, because she came across as too strait-laced for his rowdy team. That didn’t last long. She loosened up, learned how to swear, and learned how to boss around colleagues who were at least a foot taller than she was. She dressed in trendy clothes from the teen racks, wore ridiculous block heels that made her sound like a clog dancer when she walked, and constantly had to blow bangs from her mop of black hair out of her eyes.

‘Come on,’ Stride said, ‘let’s go inside.’

Janine Snow’s house was three stories high, but the entrance was on the uppermost level, and the other two floors were built below them into the side of the hill. They walked up the semi-circular driveway past an open three-car garage. Gravel and salt littered the sidewalk. At the doorway, where a uniformed officer guarded the door, they donned gloves and plastic coverings over their shoes. The marbled foyer opened into a living area with a high ceiling that was decorated with African-themed paintings and abstract onyx sculptures. A triptych portrait of Malcolm X loomed over a black-and-white sofa, and the modern chairs looked uncomfortable. The living room stretched to the back of the house, where high windows overlooked the city lights and the dark mass of Lake Superior.

The view was stunning, but right now, it was overshadowed by the body of Jay Ferris, who lay sprawled on his back on a gray-striped area rug. A circular wound had burned through the middle of his forehead, and the floor under his head was matted with blood. None of the blood had stained his shirt, which was cloud-white against his black skin. Aside from the hole in his head, he was still a handsome man. Shaved scalp. Tightly cropped goatee.

‘Jay Ferris,’ he murmured. He had to be honest. He’d never liked this man.

Jay was a Duluth lifer, like Stride. He’d grown up in the city’s Lincoln Park area and tangled with the police as a teenager over drugs and theft. Even so, Jay was a smart, ambitious kid. He’d studied at UMD on a scholarship, got a journalism degree with honors, and worked his way up at the Duluth News-Tribune from the copy-editing desk to a gig as a daily columnist. He knew that controversy sold newspapers, and he supplied a lot of it. In a city that smoothed over its racist past, Jay was a crusader against the white-bread elite. Stride didn’t mind that — there were skeletons in any town’s closet that needed to see the light of day — but he resented the carelessness with which Jay used his bully pulpit to destroy ordinary people.

One of his own cops had wound up in Jay’s crosshairs. A young police officer named Nathan Skinner had gotten drunk in the Wisconsin Dells and been pulled over on the highway. That was bad enough, but Skinner used an ugly racial epithet in the course of the arrest. It was outrageous, drunken behavior, and Stride suspended him for a month and sent him to diversity training in Minneapolis. That didn’t satisfy Jay, who beat the drum over Skinner’s arrest in his newspaper column. He made Skinner the poster boy for racism inside the city’s police ranks, and the chief finally ordered Stride to fire Skinner as a way to get the story out of the papers. Stride didn’t excuse what Skinner had done, but he didn’t think the mistake justified taking a young man’s entire career.

Neither did most of his other cops. Jay Ferris wasn’t popular with the Duluth Police.

Stride examined Jay’s body. The full report would come from the St. Louis County medical examiner, but he’d seen enough gunshot victims to recognize the obvious details. Powder tattooing on the forehead indicated an intermediate-range wound; the shooter had been within a couple feet of Jay when firing the shot. Based on the location of the body, the shooter had stood between Jay and the front door.

A glass of wine lay tipped on the rug beside him, leaving its own stain of red. Another glass, smeared with lipstick, sat on a mahogany coffee table.

‘No gun,’ Maggie said. ‘We’re still searching.’

‘Search harder,’ Stride said. ‘We need that gun. Where’s Janine?’

‘Downstairs in her office. Archie Gale is already with her. She wouldn’t say a word until he got here. Smart.’ Maggie rolled her eyes.

‘I’ll talk to her.’ He added again: ‘Find the gun.’

Stride took spiral stairs down to the next level of the house. The staircase was modern, made of chrome and stone. Janine and Jay had built the house less than a year earlier, but according to Cindy, it was Janine’s baby. Her dream. She’d worked with an architect for months on the design. The mansion on the hill was one of the perks of being a surgeon.

Janine’s home office was about the square footage of Stride’s whole house. She had a huge and impeccably clean desk near the windows. He could see the lift bridge in Canal Park shimmering far below. An entire wall of the office was dedicated to built-in bookshelves stocked with medical volumes, and she had another wall filled with photographs of ordinary people. These were her heart patients. People whose lives she’d saved. He didn’t think it was an accident that she was waiting for the police here. She wanted to remind him who she was and how important she was to the city of Duluth.

It also wasn’t an accident that she wasn’t alone. Archibald Gale was with her, and Gale was the northland’s leading criminal defense attorney. As Stride entered the office, Gale sprang up from the leather sofa. For a large man — 6 feet, at least 275 pounds — he was nimble on his feet. He had receding gray hair, curly and short, and blue eyes that twinkled behind tiny circular glasses. Despite the hour, he was dressed in a pressed three-piece suit, with a tie neatly knotted to pinch his thick neck.

‘Lieutenant!’ Gale exclaimed cheerfully, as if they were old friends. Which, to some extent, they were. They were on opposite sides of the game, but Gale was also a difficult man to dislike.

‘Archie,’ Stride replied. ‘Nice suit.’

Stride’s own tie was loose at his neck, and he’d pulled an Oxford shirt out of the dirty clothes basket. He still wore his old leather jacket, which had seen more than a decade of use and had a bullet hole in one sleeve.

‘I was still at the office,’ Gale said. ‘Lieutenant, I believe you know Dr. Janine Snow.’

Stride nodded at the surgeon. ‘Dr. Snow.’

‘Lieutenant Stride.’

It was strange, being so formal with her. They were otherwise on a first-name basis. She’d been in his house. She had lunch or played golf with his wife a couple of times a month. They’d done community fundraisers together. Even so, she was a crime victim now. And a suspect. They both knew it.

The first thing he noticed about Janine was that her blond hair was wet. She’d showered. That was what you did when you arrived home from a party, sick and disheveled. Or it was what you did when you had just shot your husband and you wanted to make sure your skin and hair kept no residue chemicals from firing a gun.

He sat down on the sofa next to her, in the spot where Gale had been. The attorney leaned his wide backside on the corner of Janine’s desk and watched them with the fussy concern of a mother superior. Janine waited for Stride’s questions, and she was exactly the woman he remembered. Smart, beautiful, emotionally distant. She showed no tears. No pretense of sadness. For her, this was a practical exercise. Her husband had been murdered. Innocent or guilty, she needed to make sure that this incident didn’t steal away the rest of her life.

‘I’m surprised you felt the need to bring in an attorney so quickly,’ he said to her.

‘Oh, let’s not travel down that tired old road,’ Gale interjected before Janine could answer. ‘If you were hiking in the Alaskan wilderness for the first time, I imagine you’d want a guide, wouldn’t you, Lieutenant? There are always bears feeding in the shallows.’

Stride shrugged. Janine knew that hiring a lawyer made her look guilty. She was savvy enough not to care.

‘Tell me exactly what happened tonight,’ he said.

Janine glanced at Gale, who nodded his approval.

‘Cindy brought me home early from the party,’ she explained. ‘I wasn’t feeling well. In fact, we had to stop along the way for me to throw up. After she dropped me off, I talked to Jay for a while. Argued is more like it. I’m being candid with you about that.’

‘What did you argue about?’

‘Nothing of consequence. Jay and I could argue about anything, and we usually did. Mr. Gale probably wants me to pretend that everything was fine between us, but you wouldn’t believe me if I said that. I’m sure Cindy has told you that the relationship between me and Jay was strained. You knew my husband, Lieutenant. If you think he was difficult as a journalist, trust me, he was even more difficult to live with.’

‘How long did you argue?’ Stride asked.

‘I have no idea. Ten minutes? Fifteen? I had some wine.’

‘Even though you were feeling sick?’

‘Vomiting has a way of improving your outlook,’ Janine replied.

‘Then what?’

‘I took a shower.’

‘Where is the shower located in the house?’ Stride asked.

‘The lowest level, off the master bedroom. Jay and I have separate bathrooms. I built mine as something of a spa and retreat. Husbands have man caves. I have my bathroom.’

‘And when you got out?’

‘I noticed something strange.’

‘What was that?’ Stride asked.

‘The drawers of the jewelry case in the bedroom were open. I hadn’t left them that way. When I looked, several expensive pieces of jewelry were gone. I called for Jay but got no answer. I went back upstairs, and that was when I found him.’

It wasn’t a convincing story, but she told it as if it were gospel.

‘So you’re saying that in the time you were in the shower, someone came into the house, shot and killed your husband, walked down two levels, found your bedroom, stole jewelry, and then escaped.’

‘That’s correct,’ Janine said.

‘You must take long showers,’ Stride said without humor.

‘In fact, I do.’

‘How long?’

‘I didn’t time myself, Lieutenant. I sat in the spray for a long time.’

‘Did you hear anything? Did you hear the gunshot?’

‘No.’

‘What did you do when you found Jay’s body?’ Stride asked.

‘I was in shock,’ Janine replied. ‘The front door was open. I ran to the doorway, and I heard the noise of a car on the streets below us, but that’s all. I didn’t see anyone or anything.’

‘What next? Take me through it.’

‘I confirmed that Jay was dead, although the wound made that obvious.’

‘And then you dialed 911?’

Janine hesitated. ‘I believe some time passed.’

‘Some time? How much time?’

‘Again, I don’t know. There are no clocks in my house. I’m not interested in what time it is when I’m home. I sat on the sofa and stared at Jay. As I say, I was in shock. When I was myself again, I called the police.’

‘And Mr. Gale,’ Stride said.

‘Yes, that’s correct.’

‘Anybody else? Neighbors? Friends?’

‘No.’

‘Did you go anywhere? Did you leave the house?’

‘No.’

Some time. Time enough to hide a gun. Time enough to hide jewelry. Time enough to craft a story.

‘Do you own a gun, Dr. Snow?’

‘No, I don’t,’ she replied.

‘What about your husband?’

‘He used to, but I asked him to get rid of it when we got married. I didn’t like the idea of a gun in the house.’

‘What about enemies? Threats? Either directed at you or your husband.’

Janine shrugged. ‘You know who Jay was. The way he was. He collected enemies like stamps.’

‘Where are your clothes?’ Stride asked.

‘Excuse me?’

‘The clothes you wore home from the party. Where are they?’

‘In the washing machine.’

‘You already washed your clothes?’

‘Having thrown up on them? Yes.’

‘I would have pegged you for more of a “dry-cleaning only” kind of woman, Dr. Snow.’

‘In Dallas? Maybe. In Duluth in January? No.’

She spoke down to him with all the superiority and impatience of a surgeon doing rounds with her residents.

‘Was Jay abusive?’ Stride asked. ‘Did he ever hit you?’

Gale broke in sharply. ‘Enough of that, Lieutenant. We’re not discussing their relationship.’

‘It’s all right, Archie,’ Janine added calmly. ‘No, he wasn’t physically abusive. Jay was many things, but he never touched me.’

Stride watched her face, expecting a crack in her facade. Instead, she was calm and deliberate.

‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’ he asked.

‘I think that’s everything.’

He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Janine, if something happened between the two of you — if there was a fight, if things got out of hand — the best thing is to tell me now. We can work things out if we know the truth. Lying only makes it worse.’

Gale opened his mouth again, but Janine held up her hand and silenced him with the tiniest smile. Her robe nudged forward, offering a small V of bare skin. Damp blond hair caressed her face. He smelled her soap and shampoo.

‘I’ve already told you the truth, Jonathan,’ she said. ‘I didn’t shoot my husband. It wasn’t me.’

3

‘She did it,’ Carol Marlowe announced to her husband.

Howard Marlowe didn’t hear his wife at first. His eyes were glued to the Gateway monitor on his desk, where he’d zoomed in on a photo of Janine Snow on the screen. Finally, he glanced at Carol, who’d wandered into his basement office from the laundry room in her slippers.

‘What?’ he said, distracted.

‘That rich doctor. She killed her husband. That’s what you’re looking at, aren’t you? More stories about her? You haven’t talked about anything else for days.’

Howard shrugged defensively. Carol was right, but he wasn’t going to say so. His mouse was poised to close the window on his screen if she came closer. ‘You don’t know that she killed him. Nobody knows what happened. She says she’s innocent.’

Carol flopped down on the threadbare sofa on the other side of the room, underneath posters of the Great Wall of China and the statues of Easter Island. Places he’d never been but had always wanted to visit. His wife pulled out an emery board and worked on her fingernails. ‘Do you think she’d admit it if she were guilty?’

‘No,’ he acknowledged.

‘Well, there you go. Everyone at Super One is talking about her. They all think she killed him.’

Super One was a local grocery store. Carol had worked there as a checker since she was in high school. They’d met at the store when Howard tried to take fifteen items down the ten-items-or-less aisle, and Carol refused to let him through.

He found himself getting annoyed. ‘Oh, so the detectives at the store have it figured out. I’ll call the police and tell them you cracked the case.’

Carol rolled her eyes. ‘Come on, Howard. A mysterious stranger sneaks in while Dr. Perfect is in the shower? He blows away her husband and escapes? She must think we’re idiots.’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘It just goes to show you, a rich white doctor marrying a black man like that? Nothing good is going to come of it.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ Howard snapped. ‘That’s offensive.’

‘I’m just saying what everyone is thinking.’

‘Well, don’t say it.’

‘Whatever.’ Carol shrugged and kept filing her nails. The drier tumbled in another part of the basement, and he heard a zipper banging on the metal drum.

His wife wore a long-sleeved Minnesota Vikings T-shirt and gray sweatpants. She always wore loose clothes to cover the extra ten pounds she complained about. Her mousy brown hair was pushed back behind her ears. She grabbed a tissue to blow her nose, which was a little too large for the rest of her face. Her eyes were brown, and her winter-pale skin sported a few freckles.

‘I booked the Dells for our vacation in July,’ she told him.

Howard picked up his high school bowling trophy from the desk and rubbed a little dust from the base with the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Do we have to go there again? We’ve been there three years in a row.’

‘I love it there. So does Annie.’

‘Well, we’ve done it already,’ Howard complained. ‘We should go someplace else.’

‘Well, what about Branson?’

Howard frowned and didn’t answer. They’d been to Branson three times, too. Everything about their lives was as predictable as an assembly line. Same vacations. Same television shows. Same meals. It was Wednesday, and Wednesday was meatloaf day. Every week, all year. For Carol, routine was like a suit of armor against change. Change was bad. Change was scary. She wanted her world to stay exactly the same.

He understood why she felt that way. At twelve years old, Carol had walked into the garage and found her father hanging by his belt from an overhead beam. Her perfect suburban childhood had been stolen away. She was never going to let that happen again.

Howard put down his trophy with a frustrated little bang. Janine Snow stared at him from his computer monitor. Dr. Perfect.

‘Fine, we can go to the Dells if that’s what you want,’ he said with a sigh. Surrender was the easiest way to keep peace.

‘Good. It’ll be fun. We can go to that supper club you like. The one by the lake.’

‘Uh huh.’

Carol got up from the sofa. She looked pleased with herself. ‘You coming to bed?’

‘I want to work on tomorrow’s lesson plan,’ he said.

‘Howard, you teach ninth-grade history. It hasn’t changed since last year. Here’s a hint: the North won the war.

He knew that she didn’t mean to be nasty when she teased him about his job. To her, there was no shame in being an ordinary teacher in an ordinary school. Even so, her jokes bothered him. They reminded him of everything he hadn’t done with his life.

‘I’ll be up later,’ he muttered.

‘Okay, ’night.’ She wiggled her fingers at him.

Carol would be asleep when he climbed into bed. That was how it usually was. They had sex a couple times a month. She was cheerful about it, but he knew she looked at sex as more of a wifely obligation than as something she did because she enjoyed it.

His eyes went back to the photograph of Janine Snow. Blond hair, long and luscious. Icy blue eyes that made you shiver. Rich. Hands that brought people back to life. What would it be like to be someone like that?

What would it be like to be with someone like that?

Howard turned off his monitor, because her face made it impossible to think about anything else. He opened the high school textbook and tried to write questions for the test, but he couldn’t focus. Carol was right. History didn’t change. In the end, he would use the same test he’d used the year before and the year before that.

He took a pencil from his desk and threw it across his office in annoyance. It landed on the pea-green shag. He got up and paced in front of the Easter Island poster. The empty eyes of one of the giant statues stared back at him. That was the place to take a vacation, on the storm-swept shore of some desolate island, examining the clues to one of history’s great mysteries. Growing up, he’d imagined himself as a famous archaeologist, doing digs around the world.

Instead, he taught bored kids about things he’d only read about in books. He’d never done anything himself. Not really. At age thirty-two, he’d complained to the Super One manager about the annoying checker in the Express Lane who refused to ring up his groceries, and the manager had made her apologize to him. Carol had cried so hard that Howard asked her out for coffee as a way to make it up to her. One year later, they got married. Another year after that, they had their daughter Annie, who was now six. And that was that.

Nothing about his life was going to change.

He retrieved a juice box from the mini refrigerator under the bar. He stared at himself in the mirror as he sucked through the tiny straw, making dimples in his cheeks. Not a bad-looking guy, he told himself. Five-foot-ten, not tall but not short. Curly brown hair parted in the middle, but no gray yet. Long face, long chin. Clark Kent glasses, but those were fashionable again. He wore a striped Kohl’s polo shirt, and you couldn’t really see the paunch.

He went to the file cabinet and grabbed a copy of last year’s Civil War test.

It depressed him, after weeks of study, how many students usually chose D. Bad enough to get the wrong battle, but the wrong war? He didn’t blame them. Teaching the kids was his job, and he was decidedly mediocre at it.

Howard knew why he was depressed. Six days earlier, he’d turned forty years old. Forty — the burying place for all of your younger dreams. He was celebrating with a pity party. Welcome to the Middle Ages, Carol wrote on his birthday card, which was another joke that he didn’t find funny. He was halfway through life, and it was February, and the gray Duluth winter felt as if it would go on forever. He defied anyone not to be depressed in the face of that.

He sat down at his desk and turned on the monitor again. Janine Snow stared back at him. If you had a face like hers, if you had that kind of money, if you lived in a big house on the hill, it would never feel like winter. According to the papers, she was almost forty years old, too. She didn’t look it.

He asked the question that everyone in Duluth was asking.

Did you do it?

4

One week after the murder of Jay Ferris, Stride’s team still hadn’t found the gun.

‘We tore that house apart from top to bottom,’ Maggie told him. ‘I had guys tramping through the snow and climbing the cliffs on both sides. We searched every dumpster within a mile around the place. Nothing. The gun’s gone.’

Stride leaned back in the old vinyl chair. They were in the basement of City Hall in downtown Duluth, where the Detective Bureau’s investigations were headquartered. It was late, and the rest of the office was dark, but they had fluorescent lights blazing over their heads. One of the lights flickered like a strobe. The table was strewn with half-empty cans of Coke, Lays potato chip bags, and sauce-stained wrappers that smelled of Subway meatballs. File folders on every chair bulged with papers and photographs, and evidence boxes were stacked against the conference room’s walls. This was the war room for everything they knew — and didn’t know — about Jay Ferris and Janine Snow.

He stared at the ceiling and thought about the missing gun.

‘So you kill your husband,’ Stride said. ‘You have an argument, you go find a gun, you shoot him. Now there you are with his body on the floor, and you have to figure out what to do next. You don’t have much time. Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? You can’t be sure a neighbor didn’t hear the shot, and if too much time goes by before you call 911, people will wonder why.’

‘Nobody heard the shot,’ Maggie pointed out.

‘Right, but Janine doesn’t know that. She needs to get rid of the gun, and she grabs a bunch of jewelry to make it look like a robbery. Then what? Throw it all down the canyon? Someone’s bound to find it when the snow melts. Does she get in Jay’s car and drive somewhere? Maybe, but what if someone sees her on the road?’

‘So what do you think she did?’ Maggie asked.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Chances are, Janine already had a plan. She’s not the kind of woman who does anything on the spur of the moment. She probably thought about this for weeks.’

‘Or she’s innocent,’ Maggie pointed out.

‘Yeah. Or she’s innocent.’

It was possible — but Stride didn’t believe it. He’d looked into Janine’s eyes that night and seen the truth. She was guilty. She’d killed her husband.

He got up and wandered through the darkened office to the pop machine, where he bought another can of Coke. He popped it and drank most of it quickly. A noisy furnace vent rattled over his head, but it did little to warm the drafty basement. He leaned against the wall, waiting for the rush of caffeine and sugar.

Stride was almost forty, and on most days, he still felt young. His face had been weathered by the Duluth winters, but he could be boyish when he cracked his quick, easy grin. His hair was jet black, short on the sides, messy and cow-licked on top. He didn’t have perfect features. He would never be a smooth-skinned, blow-dried model. Cindy said she liked his flaws because he didn’t try to hide them. She said you could look at her husband and know exactly who he was: honorable, headstrong, brooding, and bold — a man who would give his life trying to do the right thing and who would feel every failure deep into his bones.

He knew half the people in the city, thanks to his job, but he didn’t invite many people into his life. He had no siblings. His parents were dead. He’d lost his father to the lake when he was a boy, and his mother had passed away ten years ago. Since then, his world had mostly been him and Cindy, but he didn’t need anyone else. He only kept a few close friends other than his wife. His doctor and college buddy Steve Garske. And Maggie.

Stride smiled at the idea of Maggie. As cops, as friends, they were good together. They were as close as two people could be who had never slept together. Which was something that he would never let happen.

He returned to the conference room and sat down.

‘So what do you think, Mags?’

‘She did it,’ Maggie said, ‘but I wish we could find that gun.’

‘We will. In the meantime, we need to track down anyone else with a motive. I don’t want to give Archie Gale room to run when this gets to court.’

Maggie nodded. ‘I’m meeting Nathan Skinner tomorrow. I don’t like thinking that an ex-cop could have done this, but—’

‘No, you’re right, talk to Nathan. Make sure he’s got an alibi. I’m meeting Jay’s brother Clyde. He wants to know why we haven’t already arrested Janine. What else do we have?’

Maggie grabbed her notebook from the table, although she didn’t really need to consult it. She had one of the best memories of any cop he’d ever met. ‘We’re still waiting on bank and phone records, and we’re reviewing video dumps of ATMs and store cameras in the area, in case Janine took a drive to get rid of the gun. Guppo’s going through everything we pulled from the house. Jay got a lot of hate mail because of his newspaper columns. It’s going to take a while to clear those people.’

‘What about the neighbors up on Skyline?’ Stride asked. ‘And their co-workers at the newspaper and the hospital?’

‘According to them, Jay and Janine’s marriage wasn’t good. Lots of fights. Lots of arguments. Most people didn’t understand why they were still married.’

‘Do we know if there was a prenup?’ Stride asked.

‘Unfortunately, yes,’ Maggie told him, ‘and a good one. If Janine and Jay got a divorce, he’d walk away with squat. And their friends said that Jay was very fond of having money. If anybody had a motive to pick murder over divorce, it was Jay, not Janine.’

Stride frowned. ‘What else?’

‘We got a Good Samaritan call,’ Maggie said. ‘A teenage boy and his girlfriend were heading along West 8th Street to Skyline on Friday evening. He says they passed a white SUV parked on the shoulder. He couldn’t tell me exactly where this was, but if it was close to the intersection at Skyline, it wouldn’t have been too far from the spur leading up to the doctor’s house.’

‘What time was this?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘He wasn’t sure. After ten, he thought, but he didn’t check the clock.’

‘Did he see anyone?’

‘No, he’s pretty sure it was empty.’

‘Pretty sure?’

‘Yeah. Except it was dark, so he doesn’t really know. That’s helpful, huh? He’s also pretty sure the SUV didn’t have a Minnesota plate, but not one hundred percent sure.’

‘I don’t suppose he knew what kind of SUV it was.’

‘Actually, he was very sure of that. This kid is sort of a car geek. He said it was a Toyota Rav4. He recognized the silly spare tire on the back.’

‘Well, there couldn’t be more than a few thousand of those in the northland,’ Stride sighed.

‘Yeah. It’s a needle in a haystack, but it’s worth a look, just in case Janine is telling the truth and this was a home invasion robbery. I asked our buddy Lynn Ristau on the Wisconsin side of the bridge to cross-reference white Rav owners with criminal records. She didn’t sound too happy about it. You’re going to owe her a burger at the Anchor Bar when we get the results.’

Stride smiled. ‘Well, I already owe her. She was a big help with the bridge closure on Friday.’

He and Maggie both turned toward the conference room door when they heard the bell of the elevator arriving in the basement. The doors slid open, and Sergeant Max Guppo waddled toward them with a laptop computer in his arms and a monster bag of Fritos tightly clamped between his teeth.

‘Yoogzgonnwnsds,’ he said as he shouldered into the office.

Stride grinned at him. ‘Excuse me?’

Guppo opened his mouth, and the Fritos dropped onto the conference table. He plugged in the laptop.

‘You guys are going to want to see this,’ he told them.

Guppo was only about as tall as Maggie and shaped like a snowman. His perfectly round head had a black comb-over that routinely flew like a pirate flag at the slightest breeze. He sported a pencil mustache underneath a nose that was mashed flat against his face. He’d been a Duluth police officer even longer than Stride, and despite his girth, Guppo was one of the most versatile investigators on the team.

‘We found a bunch of SD photo cards in Jay’s desk at the News-Tribune,’ Guppo told them. ‘I’ve been going through the pictures he took with his camera.’

Breathing hard, Guppo sat down, squeezing himself into one of the wheely chairs. He turned the monitor so that Stride and Maggie could see it, and then he grabbed a handful of corn chips and pushed them into his mouth until his cheeks swelled like a squirrel’s. He crunched loudly.

Stride watched as Guppo’s thick finger scrolled through a series of photos that had been taken in parkland during the Minnesota fall, when the colors of the trees were at their peak. He recognized the wilderness not far from the ski slopes of Spirit Mountain. Leaning forward, Stride saw a man in the photographs, but the man was too distant to identify. Whoever it was wore camouflage pants and a black T-shirt. As the pictures scrolled, Stride saw that Jay had crept closer to the man in camouflage. The man looked young — probably in his twenties — and in the best of the pictures, Stride picked out details in the man’s profile. He had a shaved head, a trimmed beard, and a mass of tattoos on his neck and his bare forearms. It was difficult to estimate his height, but he looked bony and underfed. A small man.

He also held an assault rifle in his arms.

‘So Jay took these photos?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘Do we know who this guy is?’

Guppo shook his head. ‘No, it looks like he spotted Jay and took off.’

‘Do you know when the pictures were taken?’ Stride asked.

‘Last October.’

‘That looks like Ely’s Peak,’ Maggie said.

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,’ Guppo replied. ‘The whole thing rang a bell with me, so I went back to police reports from the fall. We had a call from Jay on file from October 5. He said he’d been hiking in the woods near Ely’s Peak, and he heard gunfire. He chased the guy and took pictures, and he sent us a couple photos. We handed it off to Abel Teitscher, but he wasn’t able to identify the man in camouflage. He staked out the location for a few days, but whoever it was didn’t come back. That was the end of it. However, according to Abel’s report, Jay was right about the gunfire. There was a lot of it. He followed the trail and found hundreds of shell casings in a clearing. Somebody went on a shooting spree.’

Stride arrived home late, which wasn’t unusual.

He lived with Cindy on a finger of land beyond the Duluth lift bridge known as the Point. They’d owned the house since they got married. It was a squat two-bedroom cottage that could have been plucked from a Monopoly board. Detached garage, sand driveway, peeling paint. The backyard butted up to the dunes of Lake Superior. Everyone told them they should move to a larger place on Miller Hill, but they loved the location on the water, and Cindy loved the timelessness of an old house. She always said you shared a place like that with everyone who’d lived and died there before you.

He parked his Bronco in the snow and ice of their driveway. Inside, he hung his leather jacket on the hook near the front door and wandered into their tiny bedroom, which was the first door in the stubby hallway. He found Cindy in a lotus position on a throw rug on the wooden floor. Her eyes were closed, and she wore nothing but panties. She knew he was there, but she didn’t react, and he simply watched her, smiling. Cindy was a pixie, not more than 110 pounds. Her black hair, parted in the middle, draped long and perfectly straight on either side of her face, all the way past her shallow breasts with their pretty pink tips. Her face was narrow, her nose as sharp as a shark’s fin.

He could hear the shower running in their bathroom. They didn’t have much water pressure, and it took forever to get hot water dripping into the tub.

‘Hey,’ he said.

‘Hey, babe,’ she replied cheerfully.

He no longer apologized for being late or missing dinner. That was just part of their lives.

She unfolded her legs and hopped nimbly to her feet. She came up to him, her forehead only reaching his chin, and got up on tiptoes to kiss him. Her arms slid around his waist. She had big brown eyes, with irises so large there was almost no room for the whites around them.

‘I’m going to hit the shower,’ she said.

‘Want company?’ he asked.

‘I’d love it, but not this week.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, back on the red river. Big surprise.’

He heard the frustration in her voice. They’d been trying to get pregnant for two years with no success. Cindy was rarely moody, but the first day of her period always left her feeling sorry for herself. It was taking so long that he’d begun to wonder whether God was sending them a message, but he would never say so aloud. Having children was so much a part of who Cindy was that he didn’t like to rain on her chalk painting dreams. She came from a small family. Her only sister had been murdered as a teenager. If she’d had her way, she already would have had three or four kids of her own.

He followed her into the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth and tied her hair in a ponytail behind her back. She slid down her panties, and he watched as she climbed into the shower and pulled back the old plastic curtain.

‘Any progress on Jay’s murder?’ she called.

‘I can’t really talk to you about that.’

‘Why? You talk to me about all your cases.’

‘You took Janine home. You’ll be a witness when this goes to trial.’

Cindy was silent in the shower for a long time. He wondered if it was the first time she realized that she was a part of this case, whether she liked it or not. Finally, her damp face poked around the side of the shower curtain. Her brow crinkled into an angry knot. ‘Assuming there is a trial,’ she told him. ‘Assuming she did it. Which she didn’t.’

‘Cin,’ he said, but she swept the curtain closed again with a dismissive shake.

He left the bathroom, rather than argue with her. He was still hungry, so he went to the kitchen and cut himself a blond brownie from the pan Cindy had made over the weekend. He ate it in two bites.

Their house had a drafty screened patio facing the lake. Technically, it was a three-season porch, unheated, but he sat out there throughout the winter season anyway. He didn’t bother turning on the lights. He sat in one of the chaise lounges and watched the windows. Snow flurries dotted the glass, making icy streaks. He must have dozed off, because his eyes closed, and when he opened them, Cindy lay in the other chaise beside him.

Her eyes were open. She wore a pajama top and boxer shorts, and her tiny feet were poked into moccasins. Like him, she was unaffected by cold.

‘I really don’t get it,’ she murmured.

‘You were there with Janine—’ he began, but she shook her head.

‘Not that.’

‘Oh.’

He understood. Kids. Babies. He slid off the lounger and knelt beside her and took her hand, which was warm from the shower. ‘It’ll happen.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it will.’

There was no point in trying to convince her. He didn’t know, and she didn’t know. Instead, he wrapped her small body up in his arms, the way he had for most of his life, since they were teenagers. At first, she was motionless, simply numb. Then her body began to shake, and she cried into his chest.

5

The next morning, Cindy Stride was annoyed with Cindy Stride.

She had no time for self-pity, and she was irritated with herself for giving in to negative emotions. She got out of bed while it was still dark, leaving Jonny to sleep. Despite the cold and the slick glaze of snow on the street, she went jogging, and she returned home red-faced and refreshed. She made a pot of coffee and drank a cup, leaving the rest for her husband.

Jonny was still asleep when she left. He usually was, because he kept late hours. Sometimes she woke him up to have sex, but not this week. On her way to work, she stopped at the basement bakery called Amazing Grace in Canal Park, and she talked with the college kids behind the counter while she ate a cranberry-walnut muffin. They all knew her. She stuck her nose into their lives and gave them advice. The kids probably rolled their eyes when she was gone, but she didn’t care. Unlike her husband, Cindy was an extrovert who felt energized by other people.

She arrived at the clinic before everyone else, which was part of her routine. Turned on the lights. Made more coffee. She caught up on insurance paperwork at her desk. This was her peaceful time of the day, when she was alone to think. She read the newspaper for a while, and then she stared at the photographs pinned to the fabric wall of her cubicle. Jonny, of course. Their neighbor and doctor, Steve Garske. Jonny’s boss and Cindy’s friend, the deputy police chief Kyle Kinnick, looking ridiculous in his golfing outfit.

Cindy’s sister, Laura.

She only had a teenage picture of Laura, because her sister had been killed when she was just eighteen. They hadn’t been particularly close, but sometimes she found herself looking at Laura’s face and wondering what she would have been like as an adult. It wasn’t that Cindy felt alone. Not really. She had Jonny, she had tons of friends. Even so, she wished that her relationship with Laura had been stronger when they were kids.

Her morning was busy with physio appointments. She worked with a seventy-two-year-old woman recovering from a hip replacement. She taught exercises to a thirty-something man dealing with a pinched nerve in his neck. A sixteen-year-old girl who’d broken her ankle playing soccer came in for work on the weight machines and got an extended lecture from Cindy about safe sex.

At lunchtime, she wandered around the corner of 3rd Street to St. Anne’s to eat in the cafeteria, but when she spotted the cardiac wing on the hospital sign, she took an impulsive detour and headed for Janine Snow’s office. She hadn’t seen her friend since the night of the murder.

Cindy asked the receptionist to get a message to Janine, and she sat down to wait. It was a typical doctor’s office. Old magazines. Soothing paintings on the wall. Children’s books and toys. The only other people in the waiting room were a black woman and her son. The boy was around ten, and he had his face pushed against an aquarium, making nose prints as he watched the brightly colored tropical fish.

‘Sherman,’ the woman called to her son. She was probably in her late twenties but had the tired posture and foghorn cough of an older woman. When he didn’t answer, she spoke more sharply: ‘Sherman, you look at me right now.’

The boy turned away from the aquarium and folded his arms across his chest. ‘What?’

‘See if this nice woman here would like a cup of coffee.’

Cindy smiled. ‘Oh, I’m fine, thank you.’

‘No, it’s the polite thing to do,’ the woman said. ‘He has to be polite. Sherman Aloysious, what did I say?’

With an exaggerated sigh, the boy wandered to a coffee urn on a corner table and filled a Styrofoam cup. The woman winked at Cindy. ‘We named him after his grandfathers, but truth to tell, he’s not so fond of either name.’

Sherman Aloysious brought Cindy a cup of coffee, and she thanked him profusely. He was at that little-boy stage where his ears had grown faster than the rest of his head, and his skinny arms and long legs looked out of proportion. Even so, he was cute. She won him over enough to get a shy smile, and he returned to his previous job of studying the fish.

‘You here to see Dr. Janine?’ the woman asked, with a hint of concern. People who came to see Janine typically had big problems.

‘I am, but I’m not a patient. Janine’s a friend.’

‘Oh, I’m glad she has friends. Awful thing she’s going through. She’s a good woman.’

‘Yes, she is,’ Cindy said.

‘The police should just leave her alone,’ the woman announced defiantly, ‘instead of hassling her the way they are. Damn cops.’

Cindy didn’t identify herself or her husband. ‘The police have a job to do. I’m sure everyone just wants the truth to come out.’

The woman shook her head. She had a narrow face with too much eye makeup, a big pile of dark hair, and a curvy, over-padded figure. ‘Wish I could believe that’s true,’ she said, ‘but you know how it goes. Woman gets too uppity, men want to tear her down. That husband of hers is no big loss.’

‘Did you know Jay?’ Cindy asked.

She shook her head. ‘I know his type, that’s all. Think a white wife makes them God’s gift.’

‘Well, the whole thing is a tragedy,’ Cindy said.

‘You’re right about that.’

Cindy got up and crossed the small office and sat down next to the woman. ‘Is he your only child?’ she asked, nodding at the boy.

‘Lord, no, three more back home. All girls. He’s the oldest. My husband’s watching the others. Didn’t think Dr. Janine needed the whole clan running around. My boy was born with a heart problem. Started getting worse last year. We thought we were going to lose him, but Dr. Janine saved his life. Believe me, I love that woman to pieces. It makes me mad to see the police and the newspapers talking about her the way they do. Anybody says something bad about Dr. Janine around me, I’ll kick their ass.’

Near the aquarium, the boy giggled at his mother’s language. Looking at him, Cindy could see the beginnings of a zipper scar on his skin, where his loose T-shirt hung on his chest.

‘Want the truth?’ the woman went on. ‘I don’t much care whether Dr. Janine killed her husband or not. Everything that woman does for people? All the lives she saves? I say, put that man in the ground and move on. Give her a medal or something for who she is. The world needs her doing what she’s doing.’

Cindy gave the woman a weak smile but didn’t reply. The trouble was that even people who defended Janine still thought she’d pulled the trigger. This woman didn’t believe that Janine was innocent. She simply didn’t care if Janine was guilty.

‘Cindy,’ said a Texas voice. ‘This is a surprise.’

Janine stood in the doorway in a white coat over her blouse and skirt. She looked better than she had on the night of the party. She was calm, strong, a professional — not a woman suspected of murder.

‘I’m sorry to barge in on you,’ Cindy said. ‘Do you have five minutes?’

‘I suppose.’ Janine nodded at the woman next to Cindy. ‘Toiana, do you mind?’

The woman waved a hand. ‘You two friends take all the time you want. We’re just fine here.’

Janine led her into her office. Cindy had been here many times, but it felt different now, and she felt out of place. Janine sat down behind her desk and said what Cindy was thinking. ‘You probably shouldn’t be here, you know. We shouldn’t be talking. Your husband and my lawyer wouldn’t be happy with us.’

‘I don’t care,’ Cindy said. ‘Do you?’

Janine laughed, showing a little bit of her old self. ‘Not really.’

‘So how are you?’

‘Trying to go on with my life as if nothing was happening,’ Janine replied. ‘Which is impossible, of course.’

‘Sure.’ Cindy bit her lip and then said: ‘I just wanted to tell you that I believe you about Jay. I told Jonny you didn’t do it.’

‘I appreciate that. Most people seem to have their minds made up about me.’

‘You have lots of defenders.’

‘I’m not so sure. Everywhere I go now, people suddenly stop talking. I realize it’s because they were gossiping about me and Jay. And not because they think I’m innocent.’

‘That woman outside thinks you’re a saint.’

Janine didn’t look comforted. ‘Oh, patients, yes. You save a life, they love you forever. Mind you, if you fail, they hate you just as much. I’m not comfortable with it either way.’

She got up and went to the window. She put a hand on the glass, and when she took her fingers away, the warmth left behind a ghost of steam. ‘I’m not looking forward to facing a jury of my peers,’ she added. ‘I don’t have peers. I know how arrogant that sounds, but I don’t. I’m not sure an ordinary person could understand my life.’

‘It won’t come to that,’ Cindy said.

‘Yes, it will. Let’s not kid ourselves. There’s a courtroom in my future.’

‘Jonny won’t ignore evidence that exonerates you.’

‘Maybe not, but it’s hard to dislodge an idea in someone’s head, once it puts down roots.’

Cindy wanted to say something more, but Janine held up a hand to stop her. Her friend came closer. For a moment, Cindy thought Janine might hug her, but she stopped short. Janine wasn’t a physical woman in that way. She shied away from sentiment.

‘Listen, you should probably go,’ Janine told her. ‘I appreciate your coming to see me, though. Really. No one does now, if they don’t have to. I’m a pariah.’

‘I’m always here if you need me. If there’s any way I can help you, I will.’

‘Thank you.’ Janine looked at her in a strange way, as if seeing her for the first time. Cindy wondered what she saw. For a woman who was typically self-confident and happy with her life, Cindy felt a nagging sense of inferiority around Janine Snow.

‘You know, I envy you,’ Janine went on.

Cindy was so surprised that she laughed. ‘Me?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Why is that?’

Janine reached out and touched Cindy’s long hair. It was a meaningful gesture for a woman who was particular about walls and distances. ‘You’re a woman first. A wife. You’re more than your job.’

‘So are you.’

‘Oh, no,’ Janine said, shaking her head emphatically. ‘That’s not me at all. I don’t think of myself as a woman. And definitely not a wife. I’ve never been good at that. No, I made my choice a long time ago. I’m a doctor. A surgeon. That’s me. That’s what I do, it’s who I am. There’s nothing else.’

She gestured around the office as if it were her home. Her sanctuary.

‘All this,’ she said, ‘this is what I live for.’

6

‘So why isn’t that doctor in prison yet?’ Clyde Ferris asked Stride. ‘C’mon, man, if she was black, you’d have closed the book and she’d be rotting behind bars already. We both know it.’

‘The investigation is still in the early stages,’ Stride replied.

Clyde grabbed a lit cigarette from a crinkled piece of aluminum foil on the concrete floor of the garage. Both men were smoking, and the bitter smell clouded over their heads. The wooden garage door was open, letting in cold air and the noise of a truck engine on Grand Avenue. Jay Ferris’s brother sat among the disassembled parts of a rusted snow blower. He ran a small engine shop out of his house in West Duluth, repairing snow blowers during the winter and lawn mowers during the summer. The garage walls were covered with spare motor parts hung on hooks.

‘You saying she didn’t do it?’ Clyde asked. ‘Or is it just that she’s a rich white doctor, so you have to treat her like the queen?’

‘I’m saying we’re still gathering evidence, and that takes time. We have to work our way through a lot of potential suspects.’

‘Including a few cops,’ Clyde said.

Stride didn’t respond to the taunt, even though it was true. ‘Jay made a lot of enemies with the things he wrote.’

Clyde labored on an over-tight screw with a wrench that had seen a lot of seasons. He wore coveralls that were greasy with oil stains and a pair of old Converse sneakers. He was shorter and skinnier than his handsome older brother. He wore his hair in a bushy Afro that looked like a throwback to the 1980s. His beard was scraggly and untrimmed. He had a reddish birthmark on his cheek shaped like a turtle with its head and legs poked out.

‘Yeah, Jay was honest, and that scares people,’ Clyde said. ‘People around here don’t like a black man messing with their privileged little lives.’

‘I’m not sure many people in Duluth see themselves as privileged,’ Stride said.

‘Well, that’s the point, right? Jay was just telling it like it is. Like that cop of yours. Skinner. Jay knew what that boy was all about.’

‘Nathan Skinner made a mistake,’ Stride said. ‘I never said he didn’t.’

‘His mistake was getting caught. You know Skinner came after Jay after you gave him the boot, right? Took a swing at him over by the Saratoga bar?’

‘I do. Nathan was drunk. He spent a night in jail.’

Clyde spit on the floor. ‘One night.’

‘We’re talking to Nathan,’ Stride said. ‘We’re talking to everyone who might have had a grudge against Jay. Is there anyone you think wanted Jay dead?’

‘Other than that bitch of a wife? Yeah, okay, it was a long list with Jay. He pushed people’s buttons. Got everybody riled up. That was his job. Remember that column he did on suburban drug addicts last July?’

Clyde got to his feet and wiped his hands. He strolled to a bulletin board in the back of the garage. Stride could see that Clyde kept many of his brother’s newspaper columns pinned there on thumbtacks. The man pawed through yellowed clippings and grabbed one, tearing it and leaving a scrap behind on the board. He brought it to Stride.

‘Folks were talking about this one for weeks,’ Clyde said.

Stride read it, and he remembered the column.

Clyde laughed. ‘I bet half the pill poppers in town started looking over their shoulders at Walgreen’s after this column came out.’

‘Did Jay ever tell you who Holly was?’

Clyde shook his head. ‘No, he’d never spill something like that.’

‘Did you and your brother have a close relationship?’ Stride asked.

The man wiped sweat from his brow and grabbed an open can of beer from a metal shelf.

‘Me and Jay? Not so much, really. I saw him every couple of months. He had better things to do than hang out with me.’

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘Right after New Year’s. Dude almost killed me.’

Stride cocked his head. ‘How so?’

‘Jay took me ice-fishing in the harbor. Didn’t look safe to me, but Jay wanted to go. Winter started out pretty warm, remember? Next thing you know, ice started cracking, shanty started going down. We barely got out with our necks. He lost his truck and his fish house, but that was Jay. He liked risks, liked going all in. It was the same way when he was growing up. Smart as hell, way smarter than me, but all you cops knew his name because of the stupid shit he pulled. He near got thrown out of UMD half a dozen times, but they were scared he’d write about them in the college paper.’

‘Jay made something of himself,’ Stride said. ‘That wasn’t easy.’

‘Oh, sure, Jay was going places. He had the looks, the brains, the mojo.’

‘What about Dr. Snow?’ Stride asked.

‘What about her?’

‘I gather you don’t like her.’

‘Oh, hell, no. Rich Southern bitch, that’s who she is. I warned him off her when they started dating, but he didn’t care. I met her exactly once. Treated me like a turd she was stepping round on the sidewalk.’

‘So what did Jay see in her?’

‘You can’t figure it out? That face, that body? Jay said she was wild in the sack. And let’s face it, the money was a big thing. Jay liked money. Everybody knew his name because of the newspaper, but he didn’t have a dime to call his own until he met her.’

‘I heard their relationship was rocky,’ Stride said.

‘Oh, yeah, the two of them could fight.’

‘Jay signed a prenup, though, right? If he walked out, he got nothing.’

‘Jay wasn’t walking out,’ Clyde said. ‘No way. Fact is, for all the shit, he loved her. Or maybe he just loved shoving it in everyone’s face, white doc with her black stud. He didn’t want a divorce. No, sir. He was never going to give her up. If anything, she was a bronco he was determined to bust.’

‘What about Dr. Snow? Did she want out of the marriage?’

‘Yeah, she offered to buy him out with a fat settlement. He didn’t want it. I told him, take the money and run, but he was stubborn. Both of them were. Neither one wanted to lose to the other, you know? Guess she finally figured out there was only one way to get rid of him.’

Stride frowned. ‘You know we haven’t found the murder weapon.’

‘So? She’s smart. She dumped it somewhere good.’

‘Dr. Snow says there was no gun in the house.’

‘She’s lying.’

‘You know that for a fact?’ Stride asked.

‘Damn right. Jay had a gun. Big fat old revolver. Had it for years.’

‘She says she made him get rid of his gun when they got married.’

‘I don’t know what Jay told her,’ Clyde said, ‘but he didn’t get rid of it. No way. He always had his gun with him. He didn’t like going to certain places in the city without a little protection.’

‘Do you know what kind of gun it was?’

‘Like I said, a revolver. Beyond that, who knows? You may not believe this, but not all black folks know about guns.’

Stride smiled. ‘Okay.’

Clyde retreated to his bulletin board again. He grabbed a photograph and brought it back and put it in Stride’s hands. ‘I want this picture back at some point, but for now, you take it. I don’t want anyone taking Janine’s word over mine about that gun. See what I mean?’

Stride studied the photograph. It was a picture of Clyde and Jay in a Duluth bar, along with half a dozen other men. Jay had his arm slung around the shoulder of his younger brother, and where his sport coat fell open, Stride could see the black grip of a revolver poking out of a shoulder holster. Clyde wasn’t lying.

‘When was this taken?’ he asked.

Clyde shrugged. ‘Last October, maybe? Not long ago. It was a bachelor party for one of the boys there. I’m telling you, I never saw Jay without his gun.’

7

Maggie sat in her Avalanche in the shadow of Ely’s Peak.

The craggy hilltop looming over the highway was dotted with trees clinging to the earth against the bitter wind. It was raw and wild, like most winter days. Duluth in the cold season was a black-and-white movie, as if all the colors of the world had been leached away. Black trees met the milky gray sky, and the white ice of the lakes blended into the snow-covered hills. Hoarfrost deadened the clustered needles of the pines, turning green to silver. Most of the time, the sun didn’t dare show its face.

She’d been up since before dawn, and she typically didn’t sleep until one or two in the morning. So far, the pace hadn’t caught up with her. All she did was work, but she didn’t really miss having a social life. Twice since she’d moved to Duluth, she’d had one-night stands, and two years earlier, she’d had a relationship that lasted three months before it crashed and burned. That was it. Most men couldn’t deal with her insane work hours. They also couldn’t deal with her attachment to Stride. Anyone who spent ten minutes listening to her talk about him knew that her feelings ran deep.

Stride had taken a chance on Maggie right out of college, when she was a stiff kid who knew a lot about books and not much about people. She was grateful for the opportunity, but she wasn’t sure when gratitude had morphed into something else. Most days, she pushed those thoughts out of her head. Stride was the boss. Cindy was his wife. End of story. It was one of those fantasies that was best left in the back of a closet somewhere.

Maggie saw a dented pick-up drawing closer on Becks Road, and she switched off her radio, which was blasting Aerosmith. The truck slowed and turned into the parking lot near the train tunnel overpass where Maggie waited. The door of the pick-up opened, and Nathan Skinner climbed out.

The two of them had never been friends. Maggie scared the hell out of most cops, despite her size. She was smarter than they were, and she had a wicked tongue. One of the newbies, Ken McCarty, said a meeting with her was like sticking a finger in boiling water. Nathan was different. He was a UMD hockey hero, with a chip on his shoulder from the day she’d met him. Politicians and business people in the city fawned over him because of his victories on the ice. He was part of the boys’ club, and he resented Maggie because she was small, young, a woman, and Chinese. To him, if you weren’t a white male with Scandinavian roots, you didn’t really belong in Duluth.

When Jay Ferris leaked a videotape of Nathan’s highway arrest near the Wisconsin Dells, Maggie wasn’t surprised by the man’s drunken rant. Nathan wasn’t really a hardcore racist, but he oozed privilege, which was the worst kind of arrogance for a cop. He thought he could do anything and say anything and never pay a price. When Stride finally fired him, she was glad to see him go.

Nathan knew it.

He wore the drab uniform of a security guard as he climbed inside her truck, but his demotion hadn’t wiped the self-satisfied grin from his face. Nothing dented Nathan’s ego. She would never have admitted it to anyone, but she felt the attraction of his physical magnetism. He was an asshole, but he was a good-looking asshole. He was still built like a college athlete, with muscles testing the seams of his uniform. He had short blond hair, and his face bore the dents of hockey sticks to his nose and chin, but the effect was to make him look tough. Which he was. He had a casual smile that didn’t hide what he wanted, and though Maggie would never have gone to bed with him, she knew lots of women who would have jumped at the chance.

‘Let’s get this over with, Nathan,’ she told him. ‘You know why you’re here.’

‘Sure, I figured you’d be calling. What a shame about Jay, huh?’ The edge in his voice made it clear that Nathan didn’t consider Jay’s death a shame at all. ‘Why meet out here in the middle of nowhere? Are you afraid people would talk if they saw us together?’

‘Don’t flatter yourself. Jay filed a report about a shooting incident near here. I’m checking it out. Besides, I figured you wouldn’t want anyone to know the police were questioning you. You don’t want your name in the papers again, do you?’

‘Oh, I don’t really care. If people think I shot Jay, they might give me a medal for it.’

‘Did you?’ she asked.

‘What, shoot him? No. Unfortunately, I don’t have much of an alibi for last Friday. Sorry.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘I was sick. Flu. I spent the evening alone in my apartment.’

‘Did you go to a doctor?’

‘No.’

‘Can anyone confirm that you were home that night?’

‘I had a Sammy’s pizza delivered,’ he said. ‘The driver will remember me. She was cute.’

‘What time was that?’

‘Too early to make a difference,’ he said. ‘I still could have gone out later and blown Jay’s head off. But I didn’t.’

‘When did you last see Jay?’ Maggie asked.

‘See him? When his face was at the other end of my fist at the Saratoga last April. After that, he took out a restraining order, so I stayed away from him. Look, my gun is in my truck. If you want to test it, feel free. I didn’t shoot him.’

‘Okay,’ Maggie said. ‘Go get it.’

Nathan looked surprised and annoyed. He climbed down from the Avalanche, kicked through snow back to his pick-up, and retrieved a Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum revolver with a wooden grip from his glove compartment. He emptied the cartridges and shoved them in his pocket. When he returned to the Avalanche, Maggie held an open evidence bag, and he put the gun inside.

‘How long do you plan to keep that?’ Nathan asked.

‘Until the test is done. Few days. Couple years. Somewhere in there.’

She shoved the evidence bag with the gun into her glove compartment, and Nathan swore under his breath. She grabbed a print-out from her dashboard of one of the photographs taken from Jay’s camera. She showed the picture of the man in camouflage to Nathan.

‘Ever seen this guy around town?’ she asked.

His blue eyes squinted at the paper. ‘Nope.’

‘Either on the force or after?’

‘Like I said, no.’ Nathan checked his watch. ‘Are we done here, Maggie? I’ve got a shift starting soon. Nothing like minimum wage and no benefits. I live the glamorous life.’

‘Where do you work?’

‘Wherever they send me.’

‘Yeah, we’re done here,’ Maggie said.

Nathan stalked back to his pick-up and drove off with his tires spinning. Maggie watched the truck disappear northward toward Interstate 35. She knew the test would come back negative on Nathan’s gun. He wouldn’t have offered it up if it were the murder weapon. Even so, the streets of Duluth were a little safer with him disarmed.

She got out of her truck and swapped her clog heels for a pair of winter boots. She zipped up her burgundy jacket, which wasn’t much protection against the cold. She didn’t bother with a hat. When she shut the door, she saw the dents and scrapes tattooing the yellow paint of the Avalanche. She was a terrible driver.

Maggie climbed from the parking lot into the deep snow lining the shallow slope. Dead weeds poked out of the drifts. She crossed under power lines where a strip of land had been cleared in the woods and headed for the next line of birch trees, whose black-and-white trunks were speckled like snake skins. The dark mountain loomed above the trees like a slumbering bear. She heard a lonely train whistle below her, near the river. Her face felt blistered by the wind.

Four months earlier, Jay Ferris had been here. He’d tracked a man in camouflage with an assault rifle. Maggie had checked other police calls since then. Two other reports had come in of gunfire in this area. One was only three weeks ago. Whoever the man was, he was still around. He was more careful now, but he kept coming back.

She pushed through the trees. The snow got inside her boots and made her socks wet. She dug in her pocket for some of the photographs from Jay’s camera, and when she compared them to the landscape around her, she thought she was in the right place. She studied the ground and the trees but saw nothing unusual.

Ten more minutes passed as she climbed higher. She couldn’t feel her feet or her fingers. She was about to turn back when she glimpsed a fleck of red color winking in and out of the black-and-white forest. She waded into the thicker trees, and as she got closer, she heard the flapping of plastic. What she’d spotted was a red bullseye target laminated and nailed to the trunk of a birch. The center of the target had a jagged hole where it had been shot away with numerous bullets, and the wood of the tree underneath was splintered and broken.

She looked deeper into the forest, and she saw other red targets. Six, eight, ten of them. One by one, she tracked them, and each one bore the marks of a hunter who had used them for practice. In the snow, as she walked, she found spent shell casings, too. Dozens of them, like dirty gold cigars at her feet. Dozens became hundreds.

She didn’t like it. Not one little bit.

After a quarter-mile following the targets, she came upon the carcass of a deer in a small clearing. It was a doe, frozen and stiff in the snow, its tongue drooping from its mouth. The deer had been dead for days. Its camel fur was a mass of darkened blood, and the animal was surrounded by more spent casings. The hunter had shot it and then come upon the body and kept firing. And firing.

Maggie started counting the bullet wounds in the dead deer, but she stopped after two dozen.

Someone was very angry.

8

‘A deer?’ Stride asked.

He leaned on the metal handle of his shovel. He’d cleared eight inches of snow from his driveway on the Point, and he was sweating. A quarter-mile away, the tower of the Duluth lift bridge shimmered over the ship canal like a monster of gray metal. Lingering snow flurries spat through the lights. In February, the bridge mostly stayed anchored to the ground, so the residents of the Point enjoyed a respite for several icy weeks from getting trapped by the coming and going of cargo boats.

‘Yeah. A deer. Shot to pieces.’

Stride didn’t answer immediately. He wiped his brow with his sleeve. On the street, he spotted the sedan of his friend Steve Garske passing behind Maggie’s Avalanche. The two men waved at each other. Steve’s Chrysler kicked up slush, and as his wheels hit the metal bridge deck, the whine sounded like a pack of stinging wasps. It was nine o’clock at night. He figured that Steve, who was a musician as well as a doctor, was off to a gig with his band at Amazing Grace.

‘I’m not sure what we can do other than notify the Department of Natural Resources,’ Stride told her.

‘I did that,’ Maggie said, ‘but that’s not what bothers me.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘This wasn’t hunting. This was rage.’

Stride frowned. Hunting out of season wasn’t uncommon, and neither was the occasional hunter who used his weapon to live out a Rambo fantasy in the forest. Even so, he’d worked with Maggie long enough to trust her instincts.

‘What else did you find?’ he asked.

‘He had plastic targets scattered in an unusual pattern. The heights varied. It was what you’d expect from someone walking through a crowd, picking off targets.’ She added after a pause: ‘Human targets.’

‘That’s a big leap, Mags.’

‘I’m just telling you what it looked like to me. I mean, I know we’re all sensitive after Columbine—’

‘No, I hear you. Do we have any idea who this guy could be?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘I passed Jay’s photos around. No one recognized him. Whoever he is, he’s under the radar.’

‘Well, let’s make sure our guys keep their eyes open around town.’

‘Do you want more bad news?’ Maggie asked. ‘Jay wrote about this guy in his column.’

‘The guy in camouflage?’

‘Yeah, Jay did a column in November on gun control and the expiration of the assault weapons ban. Camo Guy was Exhibit Number One. Jay talked about gun nuts carrying military-style hardware in our parks. Talked about chasing this guy, reporting him to the cops. And naturally how the cops did squat.’

Stride leaned against the yellow Avalanche next to Maggie and lit a cigarette. He stared at the pack in his hand with disgust, then shoved it into the rear pocket of his jeans. ‘Do you think this guy is a legitimate suspect in Jay’s murder?’

‘Probably not, but if we don’t rule him out, it’s raw meat for Archie Gale. Plus, I want to find him and see what makes him tick. He worries me.’

‘Okay. We’ll let the dogs out. Speaking of Jay’s columns, what about this prescription drug addict he wrote about last summer? The woman he called Holly. Do we have any way of tracking her down? He threatened to blow up this woman’s life in his column. That’s certainly a motive if she thought he was serious.’

‘Unless he made up the whole thing,’ Maggie said.

‘Is that possible?’

‘Jay wrote that he was picking up Lipitor at a pharmacy when he saw this woman Holly. The thing is, I checked, and there weren’t any pharmacy charges on his credit card last year. His medical records don’t show that he was taking any prescription meds. He wasn’t on Lipitor. So if you ask me, Holly is a fake. He made her up to make a point about prescription drug abuse.’

‘Okay. Well, that’s one we can cross off our list.’ Stride blew smoke into the night air. ‘How’s Nathan?’

‘You know what I think about him,’ Maggie said.

‘Yes, I do. Does he have an alibi?’

‘Sort of. I found the Sammy’s driver who confirmed that she delivered a pizza to Nathan at his apartment that night. It was too early for an alibi, but she said he looked half-dead and was hacking up phlegm. He put the moves on her anyway, which she said was pretty gross.’

‘Some things don’t change,’ Stride said. ‘How about the tip on the white Toyota Rav? The one that the kid spotted on Skyline Parkway?’

‘We’ve got a list of Rav owners in the northland who have some kind of criminal record. We’re working our way through them. So far, there’s no one that looks promising. I re-interviewed the kid, too. He admits smoking a few joints at Enger Tower that night. I’m not sure we can rely on his memory for details.’

‘Great.’

‘I’ve been backtracking through home break-in reports around the state, too, and I can’t find any MOs that look similar. The idea that this was a murder-robbery seems far-fetched. We’ve been watching pawn shops, but none of the missing jewelry has shown up.’

‘I think if we find the gun, we’ll find the jewelry, too,’ Stride said. ‘Wherever Janine hid it.’

‘I agree,’ Maggie replied, ‘but as much as I like Janine for this, we keep digging up new suspects faster than we cross them off.’

‘Like who?’

Maggie fished in the pocket of her red jacket. She pulled out an evidence bag with a handwritten piece of paper inside. ‘Guppo was going through papers from Jay’s desk. He found this. It’s a letter to Janine from last May. Jay had it in his top drawer.’

Stride glanced at the paper. The script handwriting was impeccable, but it was too dark outside to read the text. ‘What does it say?’

‘It’s from a woman named Esther Rose. Basically, she accuses Janine of murdering her husband.’

Stride’s eyebrows rose. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Esther’s husband Ira had a heart problem. He went under the knife at St. Anne’s. He didn’t make it. Janine was the surgeon. Esther blames Janine for his death, and despite some very ladylike handwriting, she makes threats like a crime boss. In fact, she says specifically that she’d like to see Janine’s husband die so that she knows how it feels.’

‘What do we know about Esther Rose?’ Stride asked.

‘She and Ira have a place on the North Shore. Expensive. Ira was an IP attorney in the Twin Cities, so he made a bundle. Driver’s license record shows a very proper-looking sixty-year-old lady.’

‘Not exactly your typical gun-toting killer, but I’ll talk to her,’ Stride said.

‘You might want to bring backup. Those grandmother types can surprise you.’

Stride smiled and crushed his cigarette under his foot. ‘Dan Erickson called today.’

‘Lucky you,’ Maggie said.

Dan Erickson was the St. Louis County attorney. He hadn’t been in the job long, but he’d already contracted the disease most common to county prosecutors. Ambition. Dan was politically hungry, and he saw the county attorney’s job as a stepping-stone to higher office in Minnesota. He had the suave looks of a politician — blond hair sprayed into place, dark suits and shined shoes, a Florida tan even in February. He was smooth and effective in front of juries, but Stride didn’t trust him. Dan saw every trial through the lens of how a win or loss would affect his career.

A trial for Janine Snow would be a media circus. Putting her in prison would be a publicity boon for Dan all over the state.

‘He wanted to know if we were any closer to making a case against Janine,’ Stride said.

‘What did you tell him?’

Stride shrugged. ‘Thanks to Clyde, we can put a gun in Jay’s hands. And the fact that we haven’t found Jay’s gun is bound to leave a jury wondering where it is. After all, if his gun wasn’t the murder weapon, it should have been in his house or in his truck, right?’

‘That must have made Dan happy.’

‘It did. It’s also obvious that Janine’s relationship with Jay was on the rocks. According to Clyde, Janine wanted a divorce, but Jay didn’t. So a jury might believe that she didn’t see a way out other than murder.’

‘Guppo dug up a couple more tidbits about them,’ Maggie added. ‘He’s been interviewing Jay’s friends. One of them told him that last summer, Janine got fed up with Jay’s extravagant spending. She cut him off. Shut down his credit cards without telling him. Jay was eating dinner at a downtown restaurant on July 3, and his card came back declined. There were local heavy hitters around who saw the whole thing. Jay was humiliated. And furious.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Yeah, it’s weird, though. Janine turned the credit cards back on a couple weeks later. After that, Guppo says Jay spent even more than he did before. And here’s another thing. We went through their phone records. Last December, right after Thanksgiving, Jay put in a call to an attorney at the Stanhope law firm downtown. A woman named Tamara Fellowes.’

‘What’s her practice area?’ Stride asked.

‘Family law. Including divorce.’

‘Did you talk to her?’

‘Yeah, but she’s a lawyer. She wouldn’t tell me anything.’

Stride shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Clyde insisted that Jay didn’t want a divorce. He says Janine offered to pay him off, but Jay said no.’

‘Maybe he changed his mind.’

‘Maybe, but if he did, there’s no reason for Janine to kill him,’ Stride said. He shook his head, pulled out the pack of cigarettes, but then returned it to his pocket without taking another one. ‘I’m convinced she killed him, Mags, but none of this makes any sense. What the hell was really going on between those two?’

Janine made sure she wasn’t being followed as she left the hospital.

She turned left out of the parking ramp in her Mercedes. She eyed her mirror, looking for headlights behind her, but she didn’t see anyone. It was dark, after ten o’clock. She headed for downtown, past the city’s old buildings. The Union Gospel Mission. Antique and pawn shops. Liquor stores. A Cantonese restaurant. The brick-lined streets were slick with fresh snow. On the side streets, cars nudged their way up and down the steep hills.

At Sammy’s Pizza, in the middle of downtown, she turned right. That wasn’t the direction she wanted to go, but she checked to see if anyone turned behind her. No one did. She coasted around the next corner, still watching the mirror, and then she parked and waited with her engine running. Paranoia.

No one showed up. She was alone.

Janine retraced her route to 1st Street. She continued several more blocks, then turned downhill to Michigan Street, which was more industrial than the rest of downtown. She pulled into a deserted bank parking lot and took the ramp to the open-air roof, where she parked in a corner.

She got out. Despite the darkness, big sunglasses covered much of her face. A scarf was wrapped around her chin, and she pulled the fur-lined hood of her winter coat low on her forehead. She didn’t look any different from other Minnesotans bundled against the cold, so no one would recognize her. These days, people stared at her wherever she went. She was that woman from the TV news.

The woman who shot her husband.

On the street, Janine limped in the snow. She wore calf-length black boots. Her head was down, and her hands were in her pockets. The spasms in her leg reminded her of the fall she’d taken the previous winter, in which her ankle had broken and the tendons torn. She would never lose the slight limp that dogged her steps.

She crossed under the skywalk that led to the convention center and checked the street again. When she was convinced that she wasn’t being watched, she crossed to an unmarked black steel door on a four-story brick building. Using a loose key, she opened the heavy door and let herself inside. The interior smelled of paint and dust. There was no elevator, just stairs. She climbed to the uppermost floor and pushed through another door into a carpeted hallway. She took two steps to an unmarked apartment and used another key to open it. She slipped inside and closed the door firmly behind her. The pain in her ankle was excruciating.

Janine began to breathe again. She went to the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of wine. She took it back to the living room, where the windows faced the lake. Light and snow swept the glass. In three long swallows, she finished the wine. She went to the bathroom and then returned for more. She settled into a white armchair and closed her eyes.

It had been days since she’d been here. Her getaway. She hadn’t wanted to take the chance when someone might be following her. Part of her knew the smart thing was to stay away forever, but she couldn’t. The need to be here drew her back irresistibly. Especially now. The apartment was small, clean, elegant. It wasn’t big, but she didn’t need size. She simply needed a place that no one knew about. Not Jay. Not anyone. The deed to the condo was in the name of a shell company. The correspondence went to a drop box. Only one other person knew about it, and he had no incentive to admit it to anyone.

Janine smiled as she relaxed. She hadn’t smiled in days. And then she laughed. And then she cried. Life was a crazy, crazy business. She had no illusions that she could hide from the truth forever.

She thought about Texas. Hot, backward, wonderful, awful Texas. Twenty years ago, she’d been a teenager living outside Austin, serving drinks at a country bar to save money for college. Her first husband Donny, who was no older than she was, had looked down her blouse and fallen in love. He wasn’t particularly handsome, but he was as hard-working and loyal as a puppy. Donny adored her. She felt bad that, for herself, he was mostly a stepping-stone on her way to somewhere else. The things he wanted — a horse ranch, three kids, vacations in Orlando — simply weren’t part of her DNA. Five years later, Donny was gone with a broken heart, and Lionel took his place.

Lionel was an entrepreneur with a pot of venture capital to pay for Janine’s medical school. They were clear from day one about what they needed from each other. Lionel got a sexy, intelligent wife who could wow his board. She became an MD without a dime of debt. Who else could say that?

There was little emotion between them, but Lionel understood her dreams better than most. He was the same way about his med-tech start-up. Most people didn’t have passion like that — something that consumed them and ate up every waking hour and left nothing in its place. From the time she had been a little girl, Janine Snow had been focused on only one thing. Being a doctor. Being the best surgeon that any human being had ever been. Saving lives.

And she did it.

But the price was giving up a normal life.

She spent two hours alone in the condominium above Michigan Street. Two blissful hours in absolute silence. That was what she needed. When she finally left, she was singing quietly to herself, and the shake had disappeared from her hands. The pain in her ankle was gone. Her confidence was back. She could do anything, defeat anyone, win any battle. After the dark days since Jay’s death, when she had felt nothing but despair, she was floating on air again, and she believed for a moment that she might not lose everything. She could almost see a future for herself through the storm.

Her Mercedes was where she had left it, on the top floor of the ramp. Flurries blew around it. A streetlight cast shadows. It was a pretty night. She walked with a lightness in her heart, breathing in the cold air, until she realized that someone was waiting for her.

A man appeared near her car and walked toward her. Janine froze.

‘Don’t worry, Dr. Snow,’ he called.

She didn’t move. She had no weapon and no rape alarm, and even if she did she couldn’t afford to use them. Not when it meant answering questions. Such as what she was doing downtown at that time of night.

The man seemed to know her dilemma.

‘I just want to talk to you,’ he said. He stopped ten feet away with his gloved hands in the air.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name’s Melvin Wiley.’

‘What do you want?’

‘It’s pretty cold out here,’ Wiley said in a reedy voice that was hard to hear above the wind. ‘Would you prefer to talk in your car?’

‘We’ll talk right here. If we talk at all.’

Wiley shrugged, but he wasn’t put off. He was the kind of man who didn’t get noticed in a crowd. You could pass him at the grocery store and not remember he’d been there. He wasn’t short; he wasn’t tall. He wasn’t fat or thin. He had windblown brown hair with a high forehead and a bushy mustache. He had metal glasses that could have been worn by any man on the street. He wore chocolate-brown corduroys, old sneakers, and a blue down coat that he kept half-zipped. Underneath was a flannel shirt. She decided he was in his forties.

‘What do you want?’ Janine repeated.

‘I knew your husband,’ Wiley said. ‘I did some work for Jay.’

‘What kind of work?’

‘You sure you wouldn’t be happier in your car?’ he asked.

Janine said nothing. She waited.

‘People like Jay come to me when they have questions,’ Wiley said.

‘Questions?’

‘Yeah. Typically, the question is, who’s been banging my wife?’

Janine felt the shiver in her body from her feet to her neck. ‘You’re a private detective.’

‘I call it matrimonial research. That’s funny, don’t you think? You have to have a sense of humor for this job. I used to work for the Department of Revenue, but I wanted a career where I could feel good about myself.’

He laughed at his own joke. Janine’s face was dead.

‘Most people are easy targets,’ Wiley went on. ‘You follow them for a day or two, and there they are, kissing outside the motel room or in the car. Stupid. You’re much better. Really, that’s a compliment. You were pretty good at shaking a tail for a doc. I bet it was a month before I found the place across the street. Even when I did, it looked like you were always alone. Smart, you going in the back while he went in from the front. Very smart. So I had to get creative. I put a camera in the air vent in your bedroom. That new HD technology is expensive but amazing. Once I had that in place, things got interesting.’

Janine took two steps and slapped him hard across the face. He took it without flinching and rubbed the red welt she left behind. She didn’t think it was the first time he’d been slapped.

‘Got that out of your system?’ Wiley asked. He dug in the pocket of his coat and pulled out a manila envelope. ‘Here, take a look, these are your greatest hits. I printed stills, but I’ve got video, too.’

Janine opened the envelope and slid out one page. She recognized her own bare skin. And her lover’s. The closed eyes on her face. His naked back and her legs wrapped around him.

‘You’re disgusting,’ she snapped. ‘What do you want? Money?’

‘Well, I’m feeling a little torn here, Dr. Snow. I showed Jay what I got with my camera inside your little love nest. Since the police didn’t find it, I’m guessing he destroyed what I gave him. Or maybe you did, who knows. Anyway, I figure it’s my civic duty to do something with this. Jay’s dead. I should really hand everything I found over to the police, you know? Or heck, if I was a mercenary kind of guy, I might sell it. There are tabloids that would pay big bucks for this kind of thing.’

‘How much do you want?’ Janine asked. Her voice was drained of life.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement. You might want to put me on retainer. A monthly stipend to do research for you. You’d be surprised how handy it can be to have a detective on the payroll.’

‘I’m leaving,’ Janine said.

‘Sure. No problem. Take the envelope with you. I’ve got more where those came from.’ Wiley reached into his pants and slid out a business card. ‘You think about it, Dr. Snow, and then you give me a call, okay? We’ll work something out.’

She said nothing.

Wiley strolled away, disappearing in a cloud of snow. She heard his footsteps descending the ramp. She was alone again. The lightness in her soul had turned to lead, dragging her back into a black hole. Twenty years had passed since she was a Texas blond, dreaming that she would make something of herself. Twenty years, and nothing in between seemed to matter at all.

9

Cindy slipped out of bed after midnight. Her skin was moist with sweat, and she shivered, because the house was as cold as a drafty barn. Jonny slept heavily, with a bare leg outside the blankets. He always slept like the dead after they made love. Normally, she did, too, but not tonight. She felt restless, but she wasn’t sure why.

She went to her closet and grabbed a robe, which she pulled around her naked body. Her long black hair was a mess. She padded in her little bare feet to the kitchen and switched on the light over the sink. Quietly, she unloaded the dishwasher, pushing up on tiptoes to reach some of the cabinets. There was something about an empty dishwasher that gave her a feeling of accomplishment.

She sat down at their small kitchen table. Reaching over to the counter, she turned on the radio to the Duluth MPR station and listened to classical music at a volume barely louder than a whisper. It was something dreamy and soft. She listened to it along with the persistent ticking of the clock over the refrigerator.

Jonny’s old leather jacket was draped over one of the chairs. She shook her head with a smile. She’d teased him for years about getting rid of it, but Jonny never gave up anything from the past. She saw the bullet hole in the sleeve. She still remembered the night when Jonny’s mentor, a cop named Ray Wallace, had shot himself in a North Woods cabin rather than face corruption charges. Ray had shot Jonny before putting the gun in his own mouth. She remembered the call from the hospital. Remembered her husband’s ashen face. Those were the calls you feared when you were married to a cop. You woke up every morning, and you wondered if this would be the night you went to bed alone and in tears.

It was hard to imagine her life without him. And yet she lived with that perpetual shadow.

He’d brought home papers with him from the Detective Bureau. Documents. Files. Evidence. He usually did. He’d intended to work through the evening, but she’d interrupted his good intentions by straddling his lap. From there, they went to bed, and he never left. The evidence in Jay’s murder investigation was spread all over the table, and although she didn’t usually pry — well, who was she kidding? She pried all the time.

Cindy grabbed the top-most paper and turned it over. It was a photograph, taken somewhere in the Duluth woods. The picture showed the figure of a man, blurry because of the distance. He was young, scrawny, tatted, in camouflage, holding what appeared to be an assault rifle. In the first picture, he was in profile, but when she grabbed another page, she saw his eyes. She couldn’t really see details in his face, but his eyes reminded her of a shark’s. Utterly empty. Not ferocious like a wolf on the hunt. Eyes devoid of life. Eyes that saw nothing but the gray darkness of the water.

Jonny had written on a Post-it note on one of the pictures: Who is this guy?

And on another: Find him.

Cindy turned the photos face-down again. She didn’t want to stare at them anymore. Something about the man’s face left her with a hollow pit of anxiety in her stomach.

She got up from the table. She went to the hall closet and retrieved her heavy winter coat and her furry boots. She retreated to the porch at the back of the house and let herself out through the rear door. Their backyard was really nothing but a sand dune. She pushed through snow and rye grass, climbing to the top of the slope and then down to the beach by the great lake.

The city glowed on her left. White lights marked the buildings, and red lights blinked on the antenna farm high on the hillside. At her feet were boot prints, the tracks of dogs, and the parallel rails where cross-country skis had slid up and down the snow-covered shore. The lake was loud, but it was invisible behind a wall of ice taller than she was. Each winter the waves built a mountain range. It made the lake scary, because she couldn’t see it. Somehow, with every bellow of thunder, she expected a tsunami to crest the wall and wash her away.

Cindy stood there with her hands in her pockets. The few inches of skin where her legs were bare felt raw. She had the beach, the city, and the night to herself. There was something hypnotic about the noise of the wind and the waves. She thought about everything. Her mind was a grasshopper, jumping this way and that.

She thought about Jonny. She could still feel him inside her, could still feel his hands on her body afterward. They had such a familiarity with each other. He was still a little repressed about sex after all these years, but to her, it was as natural as breathing or crying. She could remember all the way back to their first time, on a summer night by a small lake in a city park. The two of them, teenagers, naked in the water. And then making love with sand on their bodies and mosquitoes biting at their skin. Magic.

That was so long ago. Funny how you took each day and put it on top of the one before, and before you even knew it, you had a lifetime.

She thought about her family. Hardly a family. Her mother, who died young, leaving them alone. Laura, taken from her that same summer night she fell in love with Jonny. Her father, a sanctimonious old hypocrite, who used God as an excuse for his meanness to everyone who was close to him. It was hard to say she didn’t miss him, but she didn’t.

She thought about Janine. They’d known each other for five years. Her friend could not take a gun and shoot her husband. She didn’t believe it. And yet Jonny always said you could never really know another person. Every individual was unfathomable, living inside their own soul, sharing it with no one else. She would never have said it aloud, but she wondered if she was being naive.

Was she wrong about Janine?

She put those doubts out of her mind. She had strength of will, which was something that her faith had given her. You could choose to be happy or unhappy. It was up to you. Jonny didn’t share her devotion to religion, but she didn’t need him for that. Her beliefs were for her and her alone.

Cindy thought about better things. Golf. It was winter now, but soon enough, she would be on an emerald-green fairway, three-wood in hand. She reflected on her clients and their problems and what she could do next to help them with their rehabilitation. There were always other things to try. She thought about country music and Jonny’s cute little crush on singer Sara Evans. She thought about her Outback, which needed a wash. She thought about Sammy’s sausage pizza. They were all the little things that meant nothing and made up a life.

And then, from nowhere, the pain came.

This was not pain. She’d experienced pain before.

This was a spike catapulted upward between her legs, lifting her off the ground, sucking a cry from her chest, driving her to the snow. If she could have died right then to obliterate the agony splitting apart her insides, she would have picked death. She had no warning as it hit. It was simply there, and then it was gone, leaving no memory, as if it had been a phantom. She found herself on her knees, sweating, trying to understand what had just happened to her.

The strange thing was, she knew.

Deep in her closet of terrors, she knew.

10

Howard Marlowe heard glass breaking.

It came from upstairs in the front of the house. It wasn’t a small noise, like a wine glass breaking in the sink. Something shattered, something big. He bolted to his feet from behind his desk, and he felt scared and ridiculous, wearing nothing but his white underwear. Goosebumps rose on his arms.

The empty eyes of the Easter Island statues stared at him from the poster on the wall. Do something, they told him.

Howard crept on tiptoes on the green shag carpet, as if he needed to be quiet in his own house. At the doorway, the basement hallway was cold and damp. The lights were off. He told himself that maybe he’d imagined the noise, but he could hear more glass breaking now, like rain. He reached behind the office door and grabbed a softball bat made of red aluminum. With the bat cocked over his shoulder, he stutter-stepped down the carpeted hallway to the stairway leading to the main level of the house. The wooden steps were unfinished, and the wall was unpainted plasterboard. He climbed two steps and listened.

Someone was overhead, moving around in their living room.

‘Hey!’ he shouted as loud as he could, in the deepest voice he could summon. ‘Hey, get the hell out! The police are coming! I’ve called 911!’

Which he hadn’t. He had no phone in the basement, and his cell phone was in their bedroom. He gripped the rubber handle of the bat with sweaty hands and took two more steps toward the closed door above him.

‘Did you hear me? Get out!’

Carol screamed from upstairs. His wife’s voice was gutted with fear. ‘Oh, my God, Howard! What’s going on? Where are you?’

He reached the top step and grabbed the handle of the plywood door. He found he couldn’t summon the courage to twist the knob. He listened and heard footsteps, barely six feet away on the other side of the flimsy piece of wood. Voices, too. More than one. The footsteps thumped, and he heard his front door open and felt the house seize with the change in air pressure. Icy drafts blew under the door and chilled his legs.

‘Howard! Howard!’

Other than the half-finished basement, their house was on one level. A hallway off the living room led to three bedrooms. Carol was trapped in one of those bedrooms, steps away from the people who had invaded his house. His six-year-old daughter was in another bedroom.

‘The police are almost here!’ he shouted. ‘You better get out!’

The noises had stopped. There were no more voices, nothing but the rush of air from the front door. He pushed an ear to the door, and when a minute of silence passed, he twisted the door knob and inched the basement door open. The lights were off, but the glow of the streetlight revealed a shower of glass on the hardwood floor like diamonds. He didn’t see anyone, but he could smell the sweaty odor that strangers had left behind. His finger flicked the light switch, and he squinted. The intruders had fled. The front door was wide open, letting in snow and wind. He took tentative steps into the middle of the room, twisting his head to check in every direction, and feeling ripples of cold and fright down his back.

Carol’s laptop was missing from the dining room table. She’d been using it there before they went to bed. The three drawers of his grandmother’s oval accent table had been pulled out and dumped. He kept almost one hundred dollars in cash there for pizza deliveries, and the money was gone. Next to the living room sofa, two of their tall casement windows had been kicked inward, leaving shards around the frames.

‘They’re gone,’ he called to his wife. ‘It’s okay.’

He grabbed the phone and dialed 911. When he hung up the phone, he realized that Carol hadn’t come out of their bedroom. He went to check on her, but the bedroom was empty. The sheets were rumpled. A flicker of concern flashed in his heart. He rushed to the closed door of the next bedroom, which belonged to Annie, and flung it open. The nightlight was on. Carol was in a rocking chair, and Annie was asleep in her arms, utterly undisturbed.

His wife’s face was a mask of tears. Her eyes were wide open and red. Mucus dripped from both nostrils. Her lower lip trembled, and she clutched their daughter so tightly that Howard was afraid she would suffocate her. He knew Carol, and he understood. The bubble had popped. The wolf had come. Carol cherished their ordinary, predictable life, and now its sanctity had been violated. Certain things, when they were taken away, never returned.

‘They’re gone,’ he repeated.

She opened her mouth and closed it. She wiped her nose on her wrist. ‘You weren’t in bed. You weren’t there.’

‘Sorry, I was working in my office. I couldn’t sleep.’

Carol leaned her cheek against Annie’s hair. ‘They could have murdered us.’

‘Carol, they were probably just kids,’ Howard told her. ‘They took your laptop.’

‘That’s what you’re concerned about? A laptop? I could have been raped! Killed! They could have taken Annie!’

‘I know. The police will be here soon. I’m going to check if anything else is missing.’

Howard left Annie’s bedroom. He returned to the icy living room and realized he would need to board up the broken windows tonight. The temperature was around zero. He went to the front door, which was still open. Looking out through the storm door, he saw footprints running across their yard in the snow. Kids, he told himself.

He closed the door.

Howard returned to his empty bedroom and slipped on sweatpants and a white T-shirt. He checked the other rooms and made sure nothing else had been taken. Just the computer and the cash. His shouts had interrupted them before they made their way deeper into the house.

Just kids.

I could have been killed.

Howard heard his wife’s voice in his head as he stood in front of the broken windows and waited for the police lights to appear on the street. He thought to himself: And what if she had been killed? What if he’d gone into the bedroom and found his wife’s body there?

Shot. Or strangled. Or stabbed.

Howard thought about Janine Snow.

That was her story, too. She took a shower, and when she came out of the bathroom, she found her husband dead on the living room floor. An intruder had come and gone. Murdered Jay Ferris. Taken jewelry from their bedroom. So she said.

It was such a long way from Howard’s little house to that mansion on the hill. He had nothing in common with a woman like Janine Snow. Except now he did. A burglary could happen to anyone. He thought about her photograph, her blond hair, her put-together look, her arrogant beauty that was so intoxicating. And then he imagined her standing over her husband’s murdered body.

No one believed her.

Howard thought: Would anyone believe him?

What if those kids had killed his wife? You’re living your life, and suddenly a random act of violence changes everything. People start tearing apart your whole world. The police. The media. Pretty soon, they find out your secrets. Things that make you look guilty, even when you’re not. Everybody had things like that. You could take anybody’s ordinary life and turn it into something dark and criminal.

Look at Howard Marlowe. He murdered his wife.

Look at Janine Snow. She murdered her husband.

He heard movement behind him. Carol stood there, arms folded across her chest. She looked like someone who’d opened a closet door and seen the devil hiding inside.

‘I want to get a gun,’ she said.

Howard cocked his head. His wife hated guns. She’d told him over and over that if you brought a gun into the house, sooner or later, it got used, and someone got killed. Accidents happen. Arguments happen. Kids play games.

No guns.

‘Are you sure about that?’ Howard asked. ‘I thought that you—’

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Carol screamed at him. He barely recognized her. ‘I’m never going through something like that again! Get me a gun, Howard! I want a gun!’

11

The North Shore home of Esther and Ira Rose had a For Sale sign in the snow. A moving van was parked in the driveway, and Stride saw two men struggling to relocate an oak china cabinet from the house to the interior of the truck. As he headed for the front door, he saw moving boxes through the picture window.

The Roses had a perfect location on the North Shore highway. Their large yard sloped toward the scenic drive, and the entire house looked out on the blue expanse of Lake Superior. Every day offered a sunrise on the water. However, Esther Rose had obviously decided to move on with her life somewhere else, after her husband died under Janine Snow’s hands on the operating table.

Esther met Stride at the door. She didn’t look like a murderer, but she also didn’t look like a woman who would send a threatening letter in exquisite penmanship — which is what she’d done. You stood there and watched Ira die. You killed him. I hope you can feel something in that cold, cold heart of yours. I hope you suffer the same fate someday — standing helpless over the dead body of someone you love.

She was in her sixties. It was mid-morning, but she could have been dressed for a country club dinner, in silk blouse, skirt and heels. She was small in stature, almost birdlike. She had no gray hair; it was well-colored to an attractive auburn and stylishly bobbed. She wore makeup and knew how to use it. The diamond ring on her finger was large and gaudy, and her earrings sparkled.

‘I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me in the midst of your move,’ Stride said.

Esther’s expression wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t unfriendly. ‘Yes, well, I know why you’re here.’

‘Do you?’

She waved him into the house. With a small gesture of her hand, she directed the moving men outside to have a cigarette in the sun. Stride followed her into the living room that overlooked the lake, and despite the scattered boxes, there were chairs in which to sit. Esther took the end of a yellow sofa that was positioned to take full advantage of the view. A rose-colored china cup sat on an end table next to her. Her knees were pressed together, and she sat with a rigid posture.

‘I assume you found my note,’ she said, looking embarrassed.

‘Yes, we did.’

Esther stared at the water. White ice hugged the shore, and the sun-dappled water beyond it was so blue that it was almost black. ‘Obviously, I regret what I said to Dr. Snow after the surgery. It was foolish to give in to my emotions that way. However, I understand your concerns, Lieutenant. I talked about wishing that she would experience the pain that I did in losing my husband. And now she has. It raises questions.’

‘Why don’t you tell me what happened,’ Stride said.

She glanced around the house with a look of sad nostalgia. Every surface had memories. ‘This was supposed to be our summer retirement home. Ira and I love — loved — Duluth. My children wish I would keep it. They still see it as a place for the family to gather. And my grandchildren love coming up here. But no. I’ll be living permanently in our condo in downtown Minneapolis now. There’s an energy and excitement to the city that helps me. I don’t need a reclusive lake getaway anymore. Being alone, with time to think — well, that’s the last thing I want now.’

‘I understand.’ Stride glanced at the mantle over the stone fireplace and saw that one photograph hadn’t been packed yet. He saw a man in a tuxedo, with curly graying hair, a leathery lined face, and jutting nose and chin. The man’s smile was white and broad. He looked happy. ‘Is that Ira?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ Esther got up and retrieved the photo, and she had a hard time looking away. ‘Ira needed heart valve replacement surgery. As you might guess, resources were not an issue for us. We could have gone to the Mayo or any of the finest hospitals in the country. But we had friends up here who expressed the highest vote of confidence in Dr. Snow. We put our trust in her. Tragically, that trust was misplaced.’

Stride was silent. He’d seen people place blame many times. For crimes. For accidents. He said softly: ‘There are risks in any surgery, aren’t there? Especially something as complex as cardiac surgery.’

‘Of course. We both knew that. But this was negligence. The surgery itself seemed to go well, but there was evidence of post-operative bleeding. The nurses saw it. Dr. Snow didn’t take it seriously. She delayed taking action. When it was clear there was a serious problem, she finally opened him up again, but by then, it was too late. Ira didn’t survive the second surgery.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

Esther placed the photograph face-down in her lap. ‘I was angry. Bitter. This woman stole our future. The surgery should have been a new beginning for Ira, and instead, it was the end. I admit, I didn’t deal with it well. I said things — I wrote things — that were inappropriate. By July, I’d calmed down. Now I let my lawyer do my talking for me.’

‘You’re suing Dr. Snow?’ Stride asked.

‘Of course. It’s not a question of money. I don’t need money. It’s about justice. It’s about making sure that no one else suffers the way Ira and I did.’ Esther stared at the lake, and then she turned back to Stride. ‘Believe me, I feel bad for Dr. Snow and what happened to her husband. No one should lose a spouse like that. Are you married, Lieutenant?’

‘I am.’

‘And is she the light of your life?’

Stride smiled. ‘She is.’

‘That’s as it should be. Ira and I were very much in love and had been for decades. Long before we had a dime to call our own. Of course, if you believe what you read in the newspaper, Dr. Snow and her husband had a much more troubled relationship. That’s a shame.’

‘Did Dr. Snow talk to you about her marriage?’ Stride asked.

Esther shook her head firmly. ‘Oh, no. Our relationship wasn’t personal. It was strictly professional. To be very candid with you, both Ira and I felt that Dr. Snow was an unusually cold woman. She had no bedside manner. If our goal had been to find someone who had a caring way about them, we certainly would have gone elsewhere. However, we choose surgeons for their hands, not their warm, fuzzy side, don’t we? We believed that she was the best.’

‘When did the surgery take place?’ Stride asked.

‘Last May. I’ve been coming to terms with it ever since. I only recently made the decision to sell this place.’

‘And how did you hear about the death of Dr. Snow’s husband?’

‘The morning news, like everyone else.’

‘Were you in Duluth?’ Stride asked.

Esther allowed herself a small smile. ‘You know, Lieutenant, you don’t need to be coy. You could come right out and ask me if I shot him. But really, do I look like a woman who would be traipsing through the streets of Duluth at night with a gun?’

‘No.’

‘No, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t in Duluth at all. I was in Minneapolis at the Guthrie seeing Lear with three friends. They’ll be happy to confirm it. We even have pictures of us together. I learned of the murder on WCCO the next day.’

‘I’ll need the names of your friends,’ Stride said.

‘Yes, of course. Does that resolve your concerns?’

‘Well, you’re obviously a wealthy woman, Mrs. Rose.’

‘True,’ she acknowledged. ‘Is that relevant?’

‘It means you have the resources to hire people to do things for you. Things you might not do yourself.’

‘Are you suggesting I hired a hitman?’ Esther asked. She giggled, genuinely amused. ‘Well, I don’t deny that I could afford it. Or at least I assume I could, since I don’t know the going rate for such things. However, women in my circumstances don’t often come into contact with hired killers. People like that don’t exactly advertise on the bulletin board at temple, do they? And Ira was a trademark attorney, not a mob lawyer. We didn’t hobnob with criminals.’

‘I understand,’ Stride said.

‘You’re welcome to review my finances, if it puts your mind at ease.’

Stride smiled as he stood up. ‘Actually, that would be helpful. Just to cross things off my list.’

‘Consider it done. You can talk to my attorney, and he’ll arrange it for you. He’s here in Duluth. Peter Stanhope.’

‘As in the Stanhope law firm?’

‘Yes, they handle all my affairs. Is there a problem?’

He sat down again and leaned forward with his hands on his knees. ‘I’m sorry. I have to ask, Mrs. Rose, did you ever have any contact with Jay Ferris yourself?’

She shrugged. ‘No, I never met him. I knew who he was, because of his newspaper columns. To be honest, he seemed like rather a vile man. Handsome enough, but without much class. Why?’

‘Jay Ferris contacted someone at the Stanhope firm not long before he was murdered. Do you know anything about that?’

‘Peter never mentioned it to me.’

‘Jay called an attorney named Tamara Fellowes. Do you know her?’

‘I don’t. As I say, I work exclusively with Peter. He owns the firm, and he handles most of my matters personally. Peter is the attorney who is suing Dr. Snow for me.’

Stride planned to call Archie Gale when he returned to his City Hall office, but he found that he didn’t need to do so. Gale was already waiting for him in a police conference room. With Janine Snow.

The attorney, looking dapper, hopped to his feet. ‘Ah, Lieutenant, sorry to barge in like this. Your assistant said you were on your way back to the office.’

‘I’m a little surprised to see you here,’ Stride admitted.

Gale cocked his head. ‘Well, Dr. Snow has something she wants to share with you.’

Stride sat down. Janine, on the other side of the table, looked chastened, which wasn’t typical for her. She stared at the table in front of her, not at Stride. Her hands were folded together. A few blond hairs strayed across her face.

‘What did you want to tell me?’ he asked.

She finally looked up, and her blue eyes were vacant. ‘It’s not something I’m proud of. Honestly, if it weren’t for a private detective threatening me with blackmail, I would have kept it to myself.’

Stride frowned. ‘What was this detective’s name?’

‘Melvin Wiley.’

‘And why was he trying to blackmail you?’

‘I was having an affair,’ Janine told him.

Stride said nothing. He looked at Janine and then at Gale. Finally, he said: ‘With whom?’

‘Someone my husband hated,’ she said. ‘And someone you know very well. A former cop named Nathan Skinner.’

12

Maggie parked on ice-covered ground and climbed down from her yellow Avalanche. A freight train clattered under the overpass of Highway 2 thirty yards away. Its cars were streaked with rust and graffiti. She was near a gritty industrial park in Superior, Wisconsin, in a residential neighborhood butting up to the train tracks. The land around her was piled high with plowed gray snow.

She saw the house she wanted to visit on the corner, protected by a soaring arborvitae that was twice the height of the roof. It was a small house, two stories, with vertical wooden siding painted in sea-foam green. A tall fence protected the yard, so she couldn’t see inside. The storm door had bars.

A white Toyota Rav was parked on the side street.

She and Guppo had already talked to more than two dozen Rav owners in the Twin Ports over the past several weeks. The interviews had produced nothing useful. There had been a white Rav parked near the base of the hill leading to Janine Snow’s house on the night of the murder, but they were no closer to discovering who owned it, or whether it had any connection at all to the death of Jay Ferris.

Maggie crossed to the house. The steps on the deck were slick with ice, and she gripped the wobbly railing to keep from falling. She knew her block heels weren’t made for winter, but she didn’t care.

A black man in his late twenties answered the door.

‘Seymour Pugh?’ Maggie asked.

He considered her with coal eyes. ‘What about it?’

‘That’s your Rav on the street, right?’

‘So?’ he asked.

She introduced herself. ‘I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.’

Pugh said nothing, but he stepped outside into the cold. Rule number one, Maggie thought: Never let cops inside your house. She took pride in the fact that she could size up a suspect as guilty or innocent within a few seconds, but Seymour Pugh’s face gave nothing away except calm distrust. That was no surprise, because he’d dealt with the police plenty of times in his life.

He was tall and skinny, wearing baggy red cargo pants and a white tank top stained with spaghetti sauce. He had a wide, flat nose with flaring nostrils and a chin that was fuzzy with long, curling hairs. His cornrows dipped below his ears. He had big hands with long fingers. His left ear sported an earring, and he wore a simple chain with a cross around his neck.

‘What’s this about?’ Pugh asked her.

‘Do you know a man named Jay Ferris?’

‘No.’

She dug in the pocket of her burgundy jacket for a photograph. ‘This is a picture of Mr. Ferris. Do you recognize him?’

‘No.’

‘He was murdered a few weeks ago. He lived in a big house up on the hill in Duluth. He wrote a newspaper column.’

‘Don’t get no paper,’ Pugh replied.

She rattled off the date of Jay’s death. ‘Do you remember what you were doing that night? It was a Friday.’

‘You’re kidding, right? One day’s like every other.’

‘Do you own a gun, Mr. Pugh?’

‘I got kids. No guns in my house. What are you talking to me for, anyway?’

‘You own a white Rav,’ Maggie said. ‘A witness spotted a white Rav not far from the house where the murder took place.’

Pugh chuckled and shook his head. ‘Yeah, how many of them trucks are there around here? Did you run through all the licenses and pick out the black faces?’

‘We picked out the people with criminal records,’ Maggie replied. ‘Jay Ferris was shot, and jewelry was taken from his home. You’ve had a series of convictions in the last decade for burglary and auto theft, Mr. Pugh.’

‘True enough. You see me using a gun in any of them?’

‘No.’

‘No, you didn’t. Nobody got hurt. And fact is, the last time I was inside was three years ago. I’m clean now. I got a job.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I drive a truck. I deliver machine parts all over the Midwest. Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas. Most days I’m hundreds of miles away from here. Hard being away from home, but it’s a living. An honest living. I got a job, a wife, kids. Jesus blessed me.’

‘Good for you.’ Maggie eyed the house, which needed work. ‘Looks like you could use some extra money, though.’

‘Yeah, and if I was breaking into rich people’s houses, I guess I could do better than this, huh?’

‘Sometimes desperate people will do just about anything,’ Maggie said.

Pugh jabbed a finger at her. He’d chewed his nails and cuticles until they were bloody. Maggie spotted movement in the front window and saw a boy’s face peering out with wide eyes. He’d pushed aside the curtain, which looked like a plastic tablecloth. A woman’s arm dragged him away.

‘Look, lady, don’t go throwing my past in my face,’ Pugh snapped. ‘Yeah, I made mistakes. I was a stupid kid. Fact is, when I stole shit, it was to put food on the table, okay? You and me may not have the same values, but don’t go thinking that means I don’t have any values. My family needs something, I make sure they get it, but I don’t steal anymore. We make do on what I earn.’

Maggie nodded. ‘Back to that Friday night,’ she said.

‘I told you, I have no idea where I was or what I was doing. Either I was on the road or I was home with my family. You can call my boss and find out. For me, Friday’s just another day on the calendar.’

‘That was the night of the multi-car crash up on the Bong Bridge. It was closed for hours. Does that help?’

‘I don’t pay attention to traffic unless I’m in it. Now, are we done?’

‘We’re done. Thanks for your time.’

Seymour Pugh retreated inside the house. Maggie heard the sound of his voice change and heard him greet his kids with the excited shout of a father. It made her smile.

She returned across the street to her Avalanche and got inside. As she headed back toward the bridge, she passed the white Rav on the street again, and she realized that this end of the investigation wasn’t going anywhere. Most cases had dead ends you had to follow. The car on the street near Janine’s house was one of those stray facts that got in the way of finding the truth.

Seymour Pugh was a white Rav owner with a criminal record, and unless he was driving a truck between here and Milwaukee that night, he had no alibi. Even so, he had no history of resorting to violence or using a gun in any of his crimes. He didn’t trust a cop showing up at his door, but she couldn’t blame him for that.

More than anything else, Maggie realized she liked him.

‘Nathan Skinner?’ Stride asked.

He saw a flush in Janine’s face as she nodded. She’d said she was embarrassed, but he also thought there was sexual arousal in her expression. Cindy had told him on more than one occasion that a man who could melt through the ice cap of Janine Snow would find a volcano underneath.

He didn’t say anything immediately. Instead, he assessed her credibility. And Archie Gale’s. Nothing came free with Gale. Nothing was given up to the police or the prosecutors without an upside for him. If Janine was freely willing to confess to an affair, there had to be a strategy behind it. Either Gale wanted credit for providing information that the police would have discovered anyway — or he wanted to cloud the facts by handing them a shiny new suspect in Jay’s murder.

Nathan Skinner.

‘You were sleeping with a man who lost his job because of your husband?’ Stride said.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, tell me how this affair came about.’

Janine regained some of her composure and arrogance. Her blue eyes met his. She moistened her lips and brushed the loose hair from her face. ‘Nathan was working overnight security at St. Anne’s last May. I often work late, and we got to know each other.’

‘You knew who he was?’

‘Yes, of course I did.’

‘And yet you engaged with him anyway,’ Stride said.

‘He approached me, not the other way around. This isn’t hard to figure out, Lieutenant. Nathan’s motives were transparent. He sought a friendship with me, because — how should I phrase this? — he was interested in screwing me as a way to get back at Jay for screwing him.’

‘I understand his motives. It’s yours I’m struggling with.’

‘Is it a blindness of handsome men that they don’t recognize it in others? You’re very attractive yourself, Lieutenant, which you obviously know. I’ve said as much to Cindy. Nathan Skinner is an extremely attractive man, too. So yes, I allowed him to seduce me.’

‘Getting into a relationship with Nathan Skinner sounds a lot more complicated than you’re letting on,’ Stride said.

Janine shrugged. ‘Last May was a difficult time for me. Jay and I were struggling. I was in severe pain much of the time because I’d broken my ankle over the winter. So to be honest, Nathan’s attentions were flattering. That was exactly what I needed at the time.’

‘Is the affair still going on?’

‘No, I broke it off in December.’

‘Why?’

Janine hesitated. ‘Jay confronted me about it. He knew. I didn’t realize he’d hired a private detective, but the fact is, these things have a way of coming out. It was just a matter of time.’

‘What was Jay’s reaction?’

‘He was upset, of course. He wanted me to break it off with Nathan, and I agreed to do so. Frankly, the affair was becoming uncomfortable for me anyway. Nathan had developed an emotional attraction. He was falling in love. For me, it was just sex. He wanted more.’

Stride listened to the monotone in her voice and didn’t like it. ‘You make this confrontation sound pretty bloodless, Dr. Snow. I find that hard to believe. I would have expected a much more volatile argument with your husband over something like this. Particularly given what he thought about Nathan Skinner.’

‘I think Jay was saving his anger for Nathan,’ Janine replied.

Stride heard the emphasis in her voice. ‘You think Jay confronted Nathan about the affair?’

‘I have no idea, but Jay didn’t take humiliations lightly.’

It was a convenient story. Impossible to prove. Easy to deny. It laid the groundwork for an explosive fight between two men who already hated each other. Jay found out about the affair. Nathan was in love with Janine and didn’t want to let her go. Situations like that had a way of ending with a man dead on the floor.

‘You said that you and Jay were struggling in your relationship,’ Stride reminded her. ‘Did you want a divorce?’

‘I don’t think that topic is part of this conversation—’ Gale began, but Janine reached over and put a hand on her attorney’s sleeve.

‘It’s all right, Archie. What’s the point in denying it? Yes, Jonathan, I wanted a divorce. Jay and I were a mistake from the beginning. It hurts to say that now, but it’s true. When we met, there was this electricity between us. I’ll be the first to acknowledge it was extremely physical. We got swept up in each other, and we got married before we came off the high. But we fell far and fast. The things that attracted us became the things we hated about each other. Jay was a person who wore his emotions on his sleeve. I’m not. He became more and more desperate to draw me out, to get a reaction.’

‘Sleeping with Nathan Skinner sounds like a reaction,’ Stride said.

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘You also cut off Jay’s credit cards without telling him last July. That sounds like a reaction, too.’

‘Okay, yes, I was being a bitch.’

‘You turned the money back on not long after. Why?’

‘I decided it was childish. We were playing tit-for-tat games. That wasn’t a way to solve our problems. The way to resolve it was to end our relationship.’ She added quickly: ‘By divorce.’

‘Jay’s brother Clyde says Jay didn’t want a divorce.’

‘Originally, yes, that’s true,’ Janine acknowledged. ‘Jay enjoyed playing the game. Frankly, I think he liked making me miserable. But eventually, he got tired of all the fighting. He wanted out, too.’

‘If the two of you divorced, Jay would have gotten nothing. Wasn’t it in his interest to stay married to you?’

Janine shook her head firmly. ‘Prenup or not, we would have come to a financial arrangement. I wasn’t trying to starve him, Lieutenant. I bought him a new Hummer when he lost his truck on the ice. We both wanted an amicable end.’

‘You’re saying Jay was willing to grant you a divorce. Despite what Clyde told me.’

‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,’ Janine insisted. ‘He consulted a divorce attorney. A woman named Tamara Fellowes.’

‘We know about his call to Ms. Fellowes. She wouldn’t tell us what she and Jay discussed, which I’m sure you know.’

‘Well, I’m telling you myself. Jay wanted to talk about divorce.’

‘Ms. Fellowes practices with the Stanhope law firm. They’re suing you, aren’t they, over the death of one of your patients? Ira Rose.’

‘Yes, that’s true. So?’

‘It’s an interesting coincidence,’ Stride said.

‘Not really. Jay and Tamara were college classmates.’

‘What’s the status of Mrs. Rose’s lawsuit against you?’ Stride asked.

Janine shrugged. ‘I have no idea. I have my own attorneys who handle those things. I felt awful about what happened to Ira Rose. Unfortunately, cardiac surgery is inherently risky. It’s become so commonplace that patients don’t always think through the seriousness of it. Much as I would like to guarantee a positive outcome every time, I’m just a human being, not a god. I don’t resent Esther for suing. It comes with the territory. Lawsuits are an unfortunate reality of the medical profession these days. My insurer will settle, and all of our health premiums will go up. That’s life without tort reform.’

Stride stared at this woman and tried to understand her. She was smart. Calm. Beautiful. Sexual. She had an answer for everything. That was what bothered him. Murder was messy, and yet she could explain away all of the questions as if they didn’t matter at all.

He didn’t believe her. Not for a minute.

‘Let’s talk about guns,’ Stride said.

‘Excuse me?’ She didn’t expect him to say that. Archie Gale leaned forward, looking concerned.

‘Guns,’ Stride said. ‘You said Jay didn’t own a gun.’

‘That’s right.’

He dug in a folder and pulled out a copy of the photograph that Clyde Ferris had given him. ‘Except here’s a photograph of Jay with a gun, Dr. Snow. The photo was taken just a few months ago.’

The color evaporated from Janine’s beautiful face.

‘Jay must have lied,’ she murmured. Her expression turned severe. ‘He didn’t get rid of the gun when I asked him to. Or he bought another without telling me. I didn’t know he had it.’

‘The bullet we pulled out of your husband’s head is consistent with the ammunition used in the revolver Jay is carrying.’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said.

‘Where is the gun in this photograph?’ Stride asked.

‘I have no idea.’

‘That’s odd, don’t you think? Jay owned a gun, he was killed with a gun — but you don’t have any idea where that gun is. It’s not in the house. It’s not in his car. It just vanishes.’ Stride spread his arms. ‘Poof.’

Gale stood up. ‘This interview is over, Lieutenant. Dr. Snow was very forthcoming about an embarrassing personal matter. We don’t have any more to say right now. Frankly, if you’re so interested in guns, the person you should be talking to is Nathan Skinner. Now there’s a man who’s extremely fond of guns. And there’s one other thing you should know with regard to your ex-employee.’

‘What’s that?’ Stride asked calmly.

Gale nodded at Janine. She took a breath, and she looked in control again. As if she were about to gain the upper hand.

‘One time, Nathan and I did it in my house,’ she said. She leaned forward and stared directly at Stride, emphasizing each word for his benefit. ‘We fucked in my house. Jay was away. I think it was a turn-on for Nathan. It was part of his revenge fantasy.’

‘And yours?’ Stride asked.

Janine smiled and didn’t answer directly. ‘The thing is, I undressed for him, Lieutenant. I did a strip-tease. I took off my jewelry for him. Do you understand? He saw exactly where I kept my valuables in my bedroom. If he wanted to steal something after shooting Jay — if he wanted to make the murder look like a robbery — he knew exactly where to go.’

13

Howard Marlowe unzipped his heavy winter coat. The warm air inside Miller Hill Mall made him sweat. He dropped heavy shopping bags from Gap, Sam Goody, and Maurice’s on the tiled floor at his feet. It was Saturday, and the mall was jammed, but he and Carol were on their own. His wife had insisted on a no-kid weekend, so Annie was staying with his mother-in-law.

‘An affair,’ Carol announced loudly, as they sat on a bench outside the mall’s Barnes & Noble store. ‘That figures.’

Howard looked at her. ‘What are you talking about?’

She pointed at an older man reading the Duluth News-Tribune. The headline screamed about Janine Snow’s relationship with Nathan Skinner.

‘Dr. Perfect was cheating,’ Carol said, shaking her head.

‘Having an affair doesn’t mean she killed her husband,’ Howard replied.

Carol’s mouth looked as if she were eating a sour candy. ‘Wow, do you have a crush on this rich bitch, or what? You can take her side all you want, but I don’t have any more sympathy for her.’

‘You didn’t have much to begin with,’ he pointed out.

Carol didn’t answer, but she shot him a resentful stare. Things had been cold between the two of them since the break-in, as if somehow the robbery had been his own fault. Bad moods generally didn’t last long with Carol, but when she was in one, it was best to leave her alone. Or let her run up a big credit card bill.

She hadn’t changed her mind about getting a gun for the house. He’d filed for a purchase permit at the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office. He had no idea what kind of gun to get, but he figured a store owner could help him. Then he needed to think about training for both of them. Maintenance. Practice at the range. He didn’t want to admit to Carol that he was terrified about the idea of actually owning a handgun.

Too often, people with guns snapped. They shot someone else, or they shot themselves. Jay Ferris owned a handgun. Without that gun in the house, would Ferris still be alive?

‘There’s a children’s author signing books at Barnes & Noble,’ his wife informed him. ‘I’m going to get a copy for Annie.’

‘Do you want me to go with you?’ he asked.

Carol shrugged without replying, which was as good as saying no. She gave him her back as she marched into the bookstore.

‘I’ll get a slice at Sbarro,’ he called after her. ‘Meet me in the food court when you’re done.’

Howard gathered up their shopping bags. There wasn’t much room to maneuver, and people bumped into him as he walked. Little kids dodged in and out of the crowds. Teenage girls from his high school classes chewed gum, blew bubbles, and waved at him, giggling. A couple of the girls carried tiny bags from Victoria’s Secret, and he wondered what they’d purchased. Panties. Sexy bra. Maybe a boyfriend would get to see them in it. Or out of it.

It depressed him to be forty.

Howard passed more stores. Suncoast. Gymboree. Wilson’s Leather. He stopped at a Rocky Mountain Chocolate kiosk and bought himself a piece of milk chocolate almond bark. After the pizza, he’d want dessert. He fumbled with his bags again as he headed for the food court, and he walked carefully, because the floor was slippery with wet boot marks.

Ahead of him, he spotted an empty storefront. A line of parents and kids stretched out the door into the mall corridor. Getting closer, he saw that the vacant space had been converted into a free weekend clinic for families, sponsored by St. Anne’s. Vaccinations. Strep tests. Flu shots. Massages. The clinic was a hive of activity. Nurses handled registration and gave out balloons to the children. A short, pretty woman with long black hair demonstrated muscle stretches to a young girl in a shoulder brace.

And in the midst of all of them — there she was.

Janine Snow.

Howard stopped. People bustled around Janine, but for him, she was the only person there, as if she were in the halo of a spotlight. She stood beside a portable curtain, talking to a patient who was invisible behind the white sheet. He’d never seen her before in the flesh. Real. Alive. She didn’t see him watching her, which was a good thing, because he found he couldn’t drag his eyes away. It made him feel like a voyeur, staring between the crowds. Others whispered as they walked by.

That’s her.

She had a magnetism that wasn’t like other people. Yes, she was beautiful and blond, with fullness and curves under her white coat, but to Howard, the attraction went deeper than that. It was her life; it was the drama of being her. She was famous, infamous, gifted, cool, erotic. She was as far removed from Howard’s own life as a distant star, and yet she was so close that he could have taken a few steps and touched her.

Somehow, after a while, she felt his stare. She looked up from her work and saw him, and their eyes met.

His physical reaction was immediate. A full erection squeezed its way into the pocket of his underwear. That wasn’t a common event at his age. Hard-ons didn’t just happen anymore. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d experienced something so intimate with a woman. She was staring at him, and he was staring back. There may as well not have been a single other soul in the mall around them.

She went back to her patient. He was nothing to her again. A stranger. Even so, they’d shared a connection. Something had passed between them. It had only lasted a moment, but it took his breath away.

‘Everyone looks at me now,’ Janine mused.

Cindy put down her clipboard and glanced at her friend, who’d spoken softly from a few feet away. Janine tilted her head toward the mall, and Cindy looked out at the crowds and saw a middle-aged man eyeing her friend like a fan stalking a celebrity. He was a little doughy, and he labored under the weight of numerous shopping bags. He had a long face with puppy-dog eyes behind old-fashioned black glasses. His coat, plaid shirt, and jeans were the uniform of a suburban husband.

When the man realized Cindy was watching him, he looked away, embarrassed, and trudged toward the mall’s food court.

‘He’s harmless,’ Cindy said.

Janine shrugged. ‘Oh, I know.’

Her friend stripped off her latex gloves and nodded at the child with her, indicating they were all done with the dreaded shot. The little boy scampered to join his parents. Cindy’s eyes followed him, and she felt the same old yearning that dogged her whenever she saw a mother and child together. As if she’d missed something in her life. Janine didn’t seem similarly affected. When her time with a patient was over, that person disappeared from her consciousness. Cindy didn’t understand it, but she’d seen it in doctors over and over.

‘You want some lemonade?’ she asked her friend.

‘Sure.’

Cindy filled two Dixie Cups from a large plastic pitcher near the check-in desk. She drank one and then refilled it, and she ate a stale butter cookie. They’d already been on their feet for hours, and she was exhausted.

‘Here you go,’ she said, handing a cup to Janine.

‘Thanks.’ Janine sipped pink lemonade and eyed the gawkers in the mall. ‘It’s odd. I’ve been saving lives for years, and no one had a clue who I was. Now people think I shot my husband, and I’m recognized everywhere.’

‘Duluth is still a small town,’ Cindy said.

‘Yes, that’s what Archie says. He told me to come here today. He said it would humanize me if people saw me giving shots to little kids. I guess my compassion is just a legal strategy. She lowered her voice further and added: ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’

Cindy looked at her, confused. ‘No.’

‘Archie is already thinking about the jury pool.’

Cindy was shocked, but she realized that Janine was right. Archie knew that trials were shaped months in advance by the public perception of a defendant. Initial prejudices, good or bad, were hard to overcome. Janine’s lawyer wanted the people of Duluth to see her as a doctor. A healer. Not a rich, cold adulterer who could point a gun at her husband and pull the trigger.

‘I’ll be back in a minute, okay?’ Cindy said. ‘I need to splash some water on my face.’

She retreated to a bathroom at the back of the empty store. It was handicapped-accessible and smelled of pine disinfectant. She left the door open and didn’t bother turning on the light. She washed her hands, then her face, and she dried her skin with paper towels from the dispenser.

As she stared at her dark reflection in the mirror, it happened again.

Pain, like a lightning bolt between her legs.

Cindy couldn’t hold back a loud cry. She grabbed the porcelain sink, riding the wave, squeezing her eyes shut. Nausea rose in her throat, and she was ready to bolt for the toilet. Her body felt as if it were being torn in two. She wanted to scream again, but as quickly as it had come, the wave crested and washed away. She breathed slowly and deeply, relaxing. Her body was clammy with sweat.

Opening her eyes, she saw Janine watching her closely from the bathroom doorway.

‘Is everything okay?’ Janine asked. ‘I heard you cry out.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Are you feeling all right?’

Cindy brightened her smile. ‘Sure. It’s just stomach cramps.’

Patients lied to doctors all the time, and doctors knew it. Janine didn’t believe her. ‘The pain looked sharp. Has this been happening a lot?’

‘Every now and then.’

‘Have you seen your doctor?’ Janine asked. ‘Because you should.’

‘I will. I’m due for a physical in a couple months. Right now, I’m too busy.’

Janine frowned. ‘Too busy’ was every patient’s excuse.

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ Cindy added, which was a stupid thing to say to a doctor when you weren’t a doctor yourself. Her gut told her it was something, but she wasn’t ready to face whatever it might be.

‘Take a break,’ Janine told her. ‘Go sit in the food court for a while.’

‘Yeah, maybe I will.’ Cindy changed the subject and added: ‘I’m sure Archie’s just covering his ass about the jury pool.’

‘That’s sweet, but no.’ Janine looked behind her to make sure they were alone. ‘Your husband can put a gun in my hand now. That idiot, Jay, hiding his gun from me. It doesn’t matter that the police can’t find it. Jay had a gun, so the jury will assume I killed him with it.’

Cindy stared at her friend. ‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘It’s reality. The fact is, they don’t need much more than that to convict me. Archie already sat me down and told me the facts of life. Jay and I were alone in the house. We hated each other. My story of what happened is unlikely at best. That’s enough to get most jurors to a guilty verdict right there.’

‘If something else happened, Jonny will find out what,’ Cindy insisted.

Janine smiled. ‘If.’

Cindy flushed. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘I do.’ Janine opened her purse and closed it. She nodded at the toilet. ‘Well, I need to use the facilities, and you need to sit down and take a break.’

‘Okay.’

It was awkward between them.

Cindy left and heard Janine close and lock the bathroom door behind her. She threaded through the mall crowds to the food court, where she got in line and bought herself a grape Mister Misty at Dairy Queen. She found a table and hummed along with an Alan Jackson song playing as background noise. The skylight over her head let in gray afternoon light. She felt better. As she sipped her frozen drink, trying to avoid brain freeze, she people-watched. Old men and women drinking coffee. Children playing tag. Teens in packs, boys eyeing girls, girls eyeing boys. She saw the man who’d been watching Janine at the clinic, and his wife had joined him now. She talked at him, and it looked as if her words sailed through her husband’s head without stopping.

Cindy’s drink was nearly gone, and she was feeling the sugar buzz, when she spotted someone else. She wasn’t sure why her eyes were drawn to him, but once she saw him, she couldn’t look away.

He was a young man, maybe in his early twenties. Not tall. Not buff. A skinny kid. He wore a camouflage jacket and blue jeans, and his hands were shoved in his jacket pockets. He had a navy blue wool cap pulled low down his forehead, and he sported wraparound reflective sunglasses. He stood fifteen feet away, leaning against a column near Burger King. He studied everything in the mall without seeming to study anything at all. His head barely moved, but over the course of ten minutes, he shifted positions periodically so that he surveyed the entire food court. Every restaurant. Every table. Every entrance and exit.

She didn’t know him, but he looked familiar. She’d seen him before.

Where?

She wracked her brain but couldn’t place him, but then he withdrew a tatted hand from his jacket pocket and removed his sunglasses in order to rub his eyes with his sleeve. When he was done, she found herself staring dead-on into those eyes, and she realized who he was. She’d seen his face in photographs on her kitchen table. Photographs that were part of the evidence that Jonny had gathered while investigating the murder of Jay Ferris.

A young man in camouflage in the woods, carrying an assault weapon. A young man with gray, lifeless eyes that reminded her of a shark seeing only the black water.

It was him. This was the man that Jonny was looking for.

She realized she was still staring at him. So did he. The young man put his sunglasses on and stalked away, melting into the crowd of the mall. Acting on instinct, she leaped to her feet and followed him. She spotted his camouflaged back, marching like a soldier. Pushing past people, who parted to let him through. Bumping into others without apologizing. He kept his chin tilted down. Cameras wouldn’t catch him. He was small, but he walked quickly, and she had to hurry to keep him in sight.

He looked back. He saw her.

She pretended to be window-shopping, but she didn’t think he was fooled. He turned sharply right and yanked open a door labeled For Employees Only. The door shut, and he disappeared.

Cindy hurried to the same door and stopped with her fingers clenched around the metal handle. People came and went around her, oblivious to her anxiety. She looked for a mall security guard but saw no one to help her. In seconds, the man would be gone. She hesitated — what was she doing? — but then she opened the door herself, finding an empty, unfinished corridor ahead of her. She stepped inside and let the door close, shutting out most of the noise of the mall.

She was alone. She heard the buzz of machines. The walls on either side of the narrow space were plasterboard, and the floor was dirty. A single row of fluorescent bulbs stretched along the ceiling toward a doorway lit by a red Exit sign.

She listened for his footsteps but heard nothing. She jogged to the end of the hallway, stopped, and peered carefully around the corner. He was already gone. She felt a chill, as if outside air were blowing in from somewhere. She followed the new corridor, which was built of brick and led her to a small utility room. The mechanical throb was louder. Gas and water pipes made a maze on the wall. She saw a tall steel door that ran up and down on tracks; it was closed. Another exit door had a crash bar. It led outside.

Cindy shivered, then pushed through the door into the cold air. She was outside the mall now, near the parking lot. Wind and rain slapped her face. She didn’t see him. Her shoulders sagged, but then she heard a voice behind her.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

She stifled a scream and spun around. He was there, behind a dumpster. Waiting for her. She saw no eyes, just sunglasses. Cap pulled way down. There was nothing to see, nothing to recognize, only the hard, bitter line of his mouth. Despite his small size, his body carried menace. She felt fear down to her toes.

‘Why are you following me?’ he demanded.

‘I’m not.’

‘Bullshit,’ he hissed.

‘You looked like someone I knew, but I guess not.’ She went to push past him and head back inside, but he grabbed her arm. She struggled and shouted. ‘Let me go!’

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m the wife of a cop, that’s who I am, so you better let go of me right now!’

He dropped her arm. She rubbed it and knew there would be a bruise where his fingers had clamped over her skin. For a small man, he was strong.

‘People shouldn’t go sticking their noses into other people’s business,’ he warned her. He drew back the flap of his camouflage jacket, and she saw the butt of a gun poking out of a shoulder holster. ‘Bad things happen to those kinds of people. You hear what I’m saying?’

Her mouth was dry. She didn’t say a word.

He marched past her into the parking lot at a quick, nervous pace. Her eyes followed him, but she didn’t see him get into a vehicle. When she couldn’t see him anymore, she ran back into the utility room and then to the warmth, crowds, and sweet smells of the mall.

People stared at her, and she realized that tears were streaming down her face.

14

Stride walked onto the ice of a small lake off Tree Farm Road in Midway Township. Evergreens and birches made a wreath around the shore. The rain left puddles on the frozen surface, making it slippery under his boots. Spring was coming. The locals had already pulled most of their fishing shanties off the water, but a few diehards always waited until the ice was practically slush before giving up on winter. Sometimes they waited too long.

He saw an old pick-up a hundred yards away, parked beside a tin shanty that wasn’t much bigger than an outhouse. Even at that distance, he recognized Nathan Skinner carrying provisions from the icehouse to his truck. Nathan saw him, too, and he offered Stride a mock salute.

Stride lit a cigarette and let it soothe his nerves. He kept trudging through the miserable drizzle.

He’d known Nathan for years, all the way back to his UMD hockey days. Most men in Duluth had. Nathan was a genuine star, who’d brought home an NCAA championship for the Bulldogs. People in Duluth didn’t forget that kind of thing. It was a shame that the kid had blown out his knee before he had a chance to prove himself as a pro. Nathan never claimed to be bothered about it, but Stride didn’t believe him. You couldn’t come that close to fame and money and not be bitter about missing the gold ring.

One day you’re about to be a starting forward for the Blackhawks.

The next day you’re a street cop.

And not long after that, you’re booted off the force, doing fill-in security in malls and hospitals.

Stride knew that Maggie didn’t like Nathan. He couldn’t really blame her. Nathan had the chauvinist arrogance of a man who’d had women fawning over him his whole life. Stride knew that Nathan was a sexist and probably a racist. He didn’t condone the man’s attitudes, but if you rejected every male in the white-bread northland because they didn’t understand women or blacks, then you weren’t left with much of a hiring pool. His job was to purge those attitudes and help his cops see the complex reality of the world they policed. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

He’d been reluctant to fire Nathan, partly because he thought Nathan was smart enough to have long-term potential, and partly because he didn’t like Jay whipping up public sentiment against his team. He gave in when the chief wanted Nathan gone, but he was stubborn enough to believe that with enough time and training, he still could have turned Nathan Skinner into a solid police officer.

‘Hello, Nathan,’ Stride said as he approached the pick-up.

Nathan nodded. His face was wet, his blond hair flat. ‘Lieutenant.’

Stride blew smoke into the air. ‘You should be off the ice.’

‘I’m packing up now.’

Stride nodded. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

‘I figured. I wasn’t really in a mood to be found. I can read the newspapers.’

‘Is it true?’ Stride asked. ‘The affair with Janine?’

‘Sure, it’s true.’

Nathan shrugged, as if the information were of no importance. He had a CD boombox in his hands, covered by plastic wrap, and he wedged it behind the driver’s seat of his truck. He returned to the small icehouse, and Stride followed him inside. There was barely room for the two men. A wooden chair sat next to a hole drilled in the ice, revealing murky black water below.

‘Maggie talked to you a while ago. You didn’t mention your relationship with Janine.’

‘So? I don’t think I’m under any obligation to discuss my sex life with Maggie Bei. She didn’t ask. I didn’t volunteer.’

Stride flicked his cigarette into the open water. ‘Don’t be cute.’

Nathan sat in the rickety chair and stretched out his legs. He wore blue jeans and a down vest, but his arms were bare. ‘Fine. I didn’t say anything about it, because you guys already had Janine in your sights. I didn’t feel the need to make her any more of a suspect than she was.’

‘Or to make yourself a suspect,’ Stride said.

‘Yeah. Me, too. I get it. The fact is, I didn’t really think anyone would find out about us. We were pretty discreet. I sure didn’t think Janine would advertise it.’

Stride shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Rain plinked on the metallic roof, and drops leaked inside. A gust of wind rocked the corrugated metal. ‘She says you were in love with her.’

Nathan snorted. ‘Are you kidding? No, I wasn’t.’

‘Why would she say that?’ Stride asked.

‘Why do you think? To make it look like I had another reason to blow her husband away. I wanted her for myself. Real nice. I guess there’s no honor among cheaters.’

‘You said another reason to kill Jay,’ Stride pointed out.

‘Oh, come on, Lieutenant. You don’t need to play gotcha games with me. We both know I hated Jay Ferris. He cost me my job. He made it his business to ruin my life. So I made it my business to fuck his wife. Which I did. I already had my revenge against Jay.’

‘You don’t have much of an alibi for that night.’

‘Maybe not, but I was sick. The pizza girl will tell you that. Besides, you tested my gun. It’s clean.’

‘Is that your only handgun?’ Stride asked. ‘Archie Gale seems to think you have more.’

Nathan shrugged. ‘Okay, I’ve got others. You want to test all of them? You want to search my place? Go for it. Look, it doesn’t matter. I’m not an idiot. If I killed him — which I didn’t — I would have dropped the gun through this hole in the ice. You’d never find it. That’s probably what Janine did, too.’

‘You think she killed him?’

‘Of course she did.’

‘Did you know that Jay Ferris owned a gun?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah, Jay waved it at me when I went after him at the Saratoga.’

‘Did you ever tell Janine about Jay’s gun?’

Nathan didn’t answer right away. He rubbed his bare arms against the cold. Stride thought he was deciding whether to lie, and he realized he couldn’t trust anything that came out of Nathan’s mouth. That was true of Janine, too. It would be a he said/she said between them all the way to the courtroom.

‘Yeah, sure, I told her about it,’ Nathan said.

‘Just to be clear,’ Stride reiterated. ‘You’re saying that you told Janine that Jay carried a gun. She knew about it.’

‘I did. I joked about it once. I said we’d better be careful if Jay found out about us, in case he decided to blow us away.’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t remember. Months ago.’

‘What did Janine say?’

‘She didn’t look surprised.’

Nathan smiled. If he was a liar, he was good at it, but so was Janine. Nathan obviously realized that Stride doubted his story, so he added: ‘Janine knew how to shoot, too. I taught her. We went to a range together once. It was over in Superior, where I figured no one would see us.’ He dug in the pocket of his vest for his flip-phone. ‘I got a pic of it, actually. I took it while she was firing. It was pretty hot. She was really into it.’

He pushed several buttons on his phone and turned it around so that Stride could see the small screen. He recognized Janine Snow, ear defenders over her head, goggles over her eyes, a Smith & Wesson revolver at the end of her outstretched arms. She aimed at a target, and her face was hard and focused. When Janine Snow did anything, she did it well.

‘I’ll send you a copy of the picture,’ Nathan added.

Stride nodded. ‘Tell me more about the affair.’

‘There’s not much to tell. I met her when I was doing security at the hospital last May. I figured I’d take my chances getting her into bed. It wasn’t hard.’

‘How often did you see her?’

‘Not often. A couple times a month. She’s a busy woman.’

‘Where did you meet?’

‘Hotels at first. Then she bought her chill place, and we’d meet there.’

Stride cocked his head. ‘Her what?’

‘She keeps an apartment downtown. It’s her getaway when she doesn’t want to be home with Jay.’ Nathan read the confusion in Stride’s face, and he grinned. ‘You didn’t know about it, did you? How’d you miss that one, Lieutenant? Well, I doubt it’s under her name, so don’t kick yourself too hard.’

Nathan rattled off a downtown address, and Stride wrote it down. He knew the location, and he was angry that they hadn’t discovered the condo before now. It was only a ten-minute drive from Janine’s house on the hill. If she were looking to stash a gun and jewels after the murder, it would have been an easy place to do so. And now she’d had time to dispose of them permanently.

‘Janine says you had sex at her house once,’ Stride went on.

Nathan shook his head firmly. ‘No. Definitely not.’

‘You never went there?’

‘Never.’

‘She was very specific about it. She did a striptease for you in her bedroom, and you saw where she keeps her jewelry.’

‘Well, give that woman extra credit, she’s clever. I guess you do what it takes when you’re trying to duck a murder charge. But come on, Lieutenant. You really think she’d take the risk of her friends or neighbors seeing me at her house? No way.’

‘When did the affair end?’ Stride asked.

‘December. Not long after Thanksgiving.’

‘Who broke it off?’ Stride asked.

‘She did.’

‘Why?’

‘She didn’t give me a reason, and I didn’t ask. She just said we were done. She’s a cold fish. I didn’t really expect anything more.’

‘Did you want to keep the affair going?’

‘I didn’t care. I liked the sex, but I can get plenty of sex. I said thanks for the memories. We did it one last time, and we were over. It wasn’t emotional.’

‘Janine thinks Jay was planning to confront you about the affair.’

‘Confront me? Hell, no. Do you really think Jay Ferris would admit to my face that he knew I’d been screwing his wife? Not him. He’d never give me the satisfaction.’

‘And yet he knew what you were doing,’ Stride said. ‘He hired a detective.’

‘Okay, so he knew about the affair. I’m sure he forced Janine to dump me. It would have driven him crazy to think of me and her together, and he would have done anything to make her stop. I mean, she always said it was a control game with Jay.’

Stride’s eyes narrowed. ‘How so?’

‘That marriage was a war, and Jay wanted to win. He wanted to rule over her like some kind of king, you know? He was never going to give her up. I told her she should pay him off and divorce him, but she said he’d destroy her life before he walked away. She couldn’t escape. Those were the words she used, Lieutenant. She said Jay would have to die before he let her get away from him.’

15

Cindy sat with Jonny and Maggie in the basement conference room of the Detective Bureau. She had a cup of coffee in front of her, which she cradled between her palms. Jonny picked at the sprinkles on a chocolate donut, and Maggie — whose appetite belied her tiny size — wolfed down a quarter-pounder from McDonald’s. The furnace was loud through the air vents. Hours had passed since her confrontation with the man at Miller Hill Mall, but Cindy was still jittery. Her hands shook, making the coffee slosh. Her eyes darted back and forth between her husband and his Chinese partner, and the long silences made them all uncomfortable.

On the bulletin board, Maggie had thumbtacked photos from Jay Ferris’s camera of the man in camouflage with the assault rifle. Beside the photos was the sketch they’d drawn from Cindy’s description. Cindy was sure the man in the photographs was the same man she’d followed at the mall.

Almost sure. She couldn’t swear to it.

‘I talked to Colin in mall security,’ Maggie said between generous bites of her hamburger. ‘I gave him Jay’s photos and the artist’s sketch, but he didn’t recognize the guy. Whoever he is, he’s not a regular visitor at the mall. Colin will pass the pics around to his team, in case somebody knows him or the guy comes back.’

Another long silence. Cindy smoothed her hair. She tried to catch Jonny’s eye, but he refused to look at her. She knew he was furious.

‘I pulled the CCTV footage, too,’ Maggie added. ‘You can’t see the guy’s face in most of the angles. When you catch a glimpse, he’s got a cap and sunglasses, so there’s nothing to help us. He’s smart.’

‘Why is he hiding?’ Cindy asked. ‘I mean, what’s he up to?’

There was no answer. Cindy went back to her coffee, which was growing cold.

Jonny got up and stood in front of the bulletin board. He stared at the man in the photos with smoky eyes. She knew her husband; he was mad, and he was focused. His black hair was messier than usual, because he rubbed it like a nervous tic when he was deep in thought.

‘So what is this really about?’ he said, mostly to himself. ‘Jay spots a guy with an assault rifle near Ely’s Peak. He takes a few pics and makes a police report. We get a couple more reports of gunfire in the same area, and the guy leaves targets behind like he’s playing soldier. And now my wife tries to be a hero, following an armed stranger who may or may not be the same guy.’

Cindy frowned. ‘I said I was sorry, Jonny.’

He didn’t look at her. Instead, he grabbed a copy of the sketch from the conference table and sat down. ‘So far, this adds up to nothing,’ he said.

‘It wasn’t nothing,’ Cindy snapped. ‘You weren’t there. You didn’t see him.’

Again, her husband acted as if she were invisible. Cindy felt her face get hot as her temper flared. She was quick to blow off steam when she got angry. ‘Are you ever going to look at me?’

Her voice was loud. Too loud. Jonny turned and stared at her, and she could feel his own anger, too. She expected him to lash out, but instead, he got up and left the conference room without speaking. His silence as he passed her had the chill of morning frost. Cindy continued to fume.

‘He’s mad because he’s scared,’ Maggie said.

Cindy tapped her foot nervously on the floor. Her anger mixed with embarrassment. ‘I know.’

Maggie finished a super-sized cup of Coke with a loud slurp. She tried and failed to cover a belch. ‘Sorry. Not to piss you off, but he’s right. What you did was pretty stupid.’

‘Don’t you think I know that?’ Cindy asked.

‘So why’d you do it?’

‘I don’t know. I thought I recognized this guy, and I just — I didn’t want him to walk away. I knew you were trying to find him.’

Maggie blew the black bangs out of her face. ‘From a police standpoint, Stride’s right. It does add up to nothing. Even so, I’d like to know who this man is. Something about him feels off.’

Cindy was pleased that Maggie shared her concerns. She liked Maggie. They were friends, but not really close friends. Maggie was hard rock, and Cindy was country, and that summed up the two of them. Jonny’s partner was almost ten years younger than she was, and ten years was a long time at their ages. Cindy worried about turning forty, and Maggie worried about turning thirty. Big difference.

There was the crush thing, too. Maggie was in love with Jonny. Love and hero worship were hard to separate when it came to cops. Jonny had mentored Maggie and coaxed her out of her shell, and she fed on it. Cindy trusted Jonny and didn’t think Maggie would ever act on her feelings, but it paid to be careful.

Like most wives, she had a keen appreciation of her husband’s strengths and weaknesses. When it came to women, Jonny felt the need to rescue them. He didn’t always understand the rush of emotions he provoked in return, and he wasn’t entirely immune to feelings of his own. There had been a case the previous year that had tested both of them. Jonny had become involved in protecting a woman named Michaela Mateo from an abusive ex-husband. Michaela was pretty and vulnerable — a dangerous combination for Jonny. Cindy could see easily enough that Michaela was attracted to her husband, and although she didn’t believe anything had happened between them, she knew that Jonny’s own feelings went deeper than he let on. When Michaela was killed, the loss cut him worse than anything she’d seen in his years with the police.

Thinking of Michaela Mateo also made her think of the woman’s young daughter. Catalina. Cat. Six years old when her parents died. Cindy had gone so far as to suggest to Jonny that they adopt the girl, because it had already become clear that her own dreams of having children weren’t likely to come true. Jonny had said no. It was too much. Too soon. It made her wonder whether, in his heart of hearts, he really wanted kids at all.

She looked up. Her husband was in the doorway of the conference room. He hadn’t said anything.

Maggie took the hint and got up and left them alone. He took a chair and put it beside her and straddled it backwards. Their arms brushed against each other. His dark eyes were distant.

‘What were you thinking?’ he said quietly.

‘I wasn’t,’ she admitted.

She knew he wanted to yell, but he didn’t. He reached for her shoulder and pulled her gently against him. She folded herself into his body and felt his strength. And his worry and relief, having her in his arms.

‘Don’t scare me like that,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry, but you realize that’s what I live with every day, don’t you?’ she murmured.

That caught him short, but he knew it was true. He didn’t let go.

‘This guy at the mall,’ she said. ‘He’s not nothing, Jonny.’

‘He hasn’t committed a crime,’ he reminded her.

‘That you know of.’

They were silent, and it could easily have disintegrated between them again. Him yelling. Her yelling. They both knew how to fight, but she didn’t want to. Not now. It wasn’t worth it.

‘Hey, I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘I got a flier from Bobbie at the travel agency. Last-minute cruise specials. How about we go to Alaska in June? We can do it cheap.’

Jonny separated himself from her and smiled. ‘A vacation? Me?’

‘Every couple of years, I get to drag you out of Duluth.’

‘I know, but why now?’

‘No reason,’ she said, which wasn’t really true. She felt strange. She felt shadows around her, and it made her want to combat them with happier things. ‘You know I’ve always wanted to do this.’

He looked as if he would protest, but this time, he gave in. ‘Okay.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Book it. Sure.’

Cindy kissed him, and she didn’t believe in peck-on-the-cheek kisses. Their kisses were always hot and hard. She liked it that way. ‘Thanks, babe,’ she said. ‘That means a lot to me.’

He stood up and took her hand. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

Cindy hesitated. ‘Janine was at the mall today, too. We were both at the clinic.’

‘You shouldn’t be talking to her.’

‘I know.’ Cindy stopped herself, but then she added: ‘She thinks you’re going to arrest her.’

Jonny didn’t comment. He shoved papers into a satchel. He didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no, but she knew him well enough to realize that his silence was a yes. He was building a cage of evidence for her friend, and soon enough, he’d put her inside it.

Maybe that was the right thing to do. Cindy wasn’t naive. Janine was probably guilty of murder. Nothing else made sense. Even so, Cindy wanted to find another explanation. She wanted to believe that Janine was innocent.

‘That guy at the mall today really creeped me out,’ she told him.

Jonny stopped and looked at her. He didn’t chastise her again. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘He threatened me,’ Cindy went on, ‘and it didn’t feel empty. He told me bad things happen to people who pry into his business. That’s what Jay Ferris did for a living, Jonny. He pried into other people’s lives. What if Jay found out who this guy was?’

16

Ross Klayman arrived at his mother’s house after dark.

The old RCA television in the living room was on. It was always on, driving him crazy. The same sewer of reality programs. Empty-headed sluts squeezing their silicone tits into bikini tops. Rich trust-fund babies playing drinking games. Celebrities grinning for the cameras and pretending they had ordinary lives. They were destroying the country. Chipping away the foundation brick by brick, until soon they would all be living in anarchy. Unless good people tried to stop it.

‘How can you watch this filth?’ Ross asked his mother.

Jessie shrugged and didn’t answer. She was draped across the sofa in a roomy T-shirt and yellow panties. Her feet were bare. She drank from a can of Miller Lite, and she already had two empties stacked on top of each other on the coffee table, next to an empty plastic tray from a Lean Cuisine dinner. Her eyes didn’t leave the television set.

‘Where were you today?’ she asked.

‘Out.’

‘Out where?’

‘The mall.’

He sat down next to her. The television was a noisy drone in his ears. She propped her feet on his thigh.

‘Did you eat?’ she asked.

‘I had a power bar.’

‘Do you want a beer?’

‘No.’

Ross rarely drank. Alcohol was poison. It clouded his mind, and he wanted his mind sharp. If you were a soldier and hunter, your only real weapon was the clearness of your brain. Your gun was an extension of your arm, which was an extension of your mind. You had to know how to focus. To plan. To execute. The drugs that fouled other people’s heads were the enemy.

‘I’ve got a temp shift working a concert at the DECC tomorrow,’ his mother said.

‘Uh huh.’

‘Might turn into something more.’

‘Good,’ he said.

But it wouldn’t. It never did. She couldn’t hold a job.

He found himself staring at his mother’s feet. She kept her nails painted red, and a callous bulged from her big toe. He knew what she wanted, so he massaged her arches, pressing deeply with his thumbs until she twitched on the edge of discomfort. It was their evening ritual. When she worked, she spent hours standing, leaving her flat feet sore by the time she came home.

Jessie gave him a crooked, slightly drunken smile. Her red hair, streaked with gray at the roots, was pulled back tightly behind her head, framing her oval face. She had a chirpy, too-happy voice. ‘You really are the best son in the world, you know that, don’t you?’

Ross rubbed her feet without answering.

‘The scale says I’m down a pound,’ she told him.

‘Good for you.’

He didn’t think one pound would make any difference. Twenty pounds might, but that wasn’t going to happen. His mother binged on diets to lose ten pounds, and then she binged on junk food to put on fifteen. She wasn’t fat, but her panties and T-shirt were both a size too small for her current weight.

It was just the two of them. Ross and Jessie. That was the way it had been since he was eight years old, when his father took a page from a Springsteen song and went out for a drive and never came home. Fifteen years had passed since then. Jessie in and out of jobs. Ross in and out of school. They’d spent most of those years in a little apartment in Fargo. His mother worked security at a local mall, and her boss was a former high school coach confined to a wheelchair. She spent most of her time straddling his lap. Wheels didn’t turn bad people into angels.

When the boss’s wife found out about the affair, he fired Jessie. She found a bus-stop-bench lawyer who wheedled a settlement out of the mall owner, and they used the money to get out of Fargo and buy a small house in the town of Gary, southwest of Duluth. That was a year ago. Jessie took part-time security jobs when she could get them. Some months were flush. Some weren’t.

Ross had applied for jobs, but he couldn’t wash the contempt off his face at interviews, and after a while, he gave up. He spent most days hiking in the woods. Sometimes he went far north, almost to Canada, taking with him only what he could carry on his back and living off the land for days at a time. That was how it was supposed to be. Man. Nature. Values.

He lifted his mother’s feet off his legs and stood up. He slipped off his camouflage jacket and hung it on a hook behind the front door. Jessie noted the shoulder holster and revolver without comment. Her own philosophy was to make sure you had a gun within reaching distance of your fingers at all times.

He went to her bedroom at the end of the hall, where the twin bed was unmade. The gun safe was on the wall. He undid the combination lock and stored the handgun in a sleeve on the door. There were six others. The safe allowed room for more than a dozen rifles, too. It was full.

With the safe open and the hardware in front of him, Ross heard a knocking on the front door.

That was the moment he’d long dreaded. The knock on the door. He thought about the woman at the mall. The cop’s wife. It seemed impossible that she could have recognized him, or that they could have tracked him down so quickly. He was a phantom in Duluth. The only one who had ever come close was the black bastard at the newspaper who’d stumbled onto his practice field. He wasn’t a problem anymore.

Even so. Be prepared.

Another knock.

‘Ross,’ his mother called.

‘Who is it?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not decent.’

Ross had no way of knowing if this was the moment. This might be the beginning of the end.

He left the safe open and crept to the doorway of the living room, where he could see windows facing the nighttime yard. No flashing lights. No cars on the street. Then fingernails tap-tapped on the glass, and he saw a girl’s face. Two girls. They called through the window to him.

‘Hey, hello!’

He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled.

Ross crossed to the front door and yanked it open. The girls jumped and giggled. They were taller than he was, both around sixteen or seventeen, probably sisters. Their hair was too long, their makeup too loud, their jeans too tight. He had no expression on his face, and he watched them catch their breath, smirk, roll their eyes, and whisper back and forth. They weren’t scared of him. They were laughing at him and could barely hide it. He felt a roaring in his head, his fury as calm as an ocean wave gathering force as it rolled toward shore.

‘Hi,’ the first girl said. She had red hair, cheap earrings. She twisted a curl around her fingers.

‘Hi,’ her sister echoed.

He said nothing at all. They were strangers, but he knew their type. These were the girls at school. These were the girls at the mall. These were the girls on television. They were all the same. They didn’t know who he was, but he wanted to shout at their painted faces: I AM GOD.

I am the Decider. I am the Bringer of Life and Death.

Kneel for your Judgment.

Unbidden, his fingers curled into fists, and his breath came faster.

‘Um,’ the first girl said.

‘We’re your neighbors across the street,’ the second girl added.

He didn’t know the neighbors, and they didn’t know him. I AM GOD. The girls peeked over his shoulder and saw Jessie on the sofa, her T-shirt riding up her stomach. They giggled again, as if looking down their noses at both of them.

Kneel.

‘Our dog’s missing,’ the first girl said.

‘Have you seen him?’ her sister asked.

He could barely hear his voice over the blood pulsing in his brain. ‘No.’

‘He’s a black Lab.’

‘We call him Ducks. He’s a hunting dog. Dad hunts ducks.’

Ross saw a tall silhouette in the house across the street. A man was at the window, peering out, keeping an eye on his girls. ‘I haven’t seen the dog.’

‘Well, if you do, could you call—’

He slammed the door in their faces. Behind the frame, he heard silence, then an explosion of laughter. Heels skipped on concrete. He closed his eyes and measured each breath, in, out, slowly, carefully. Count to ten. Relaxation washed over him. Your only real weapon is the clearness of your brain.

Ross sat down on the sofa again, and his mother presented her feet for his attention. He began to massage them again, but in no time, she gave an annoyed yelp as he squeezed too hard.

On television, two girls on a reality show discussed the penis size of a man who lived in the dormitory with them.

Disgusting.

‘Is that the dog who’s been pooping in our backyard?’ Jessie asked when the show went to a commercial.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s missing?’

‘I guess.’

Jessie’s face got a curious little look. ‘Did you take that dog along on one of your trips?’

‘No.’

‘I thought I heard barking when you went out.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Oh. Well, whatever.’

Ross got up from the sofa. ‘I’m going to my room.’

‘Okay.’ She hugged him around the waist. ‘I told you that you were the best son ever, right?’

‘Yes.’

She wanted him to say she was the best mother in the world, but he didn’t do that.

He separated himself from her and headed to the hallway. His bedroom door was the first on the left. It was painted black, and he pulled out a key to unlock the deadbolt he’d installed. He went inside and shut the door behind him and locked it again.

It was the middle of the night when Jessie Klayman awoke on the sofa. Six empty beer cans were spilled across the table; the pyramid she’d built had toppled when she kicked it in her sleep. The TV was still on, and she used the remote control to switch it off. She stretched out her bare leg, fighting a cramp. Her head throbbed. When she stood up, she felt dizzy.

It was stupid to drink so much the day before a job. She hoped she could get in a few more hours of sleep before the alarm rang in the morning.

Jessie zigzagged to her bedroom, steadying herself on the wall.

As she passed Ross’s room, she saw a crack of light under the door. He was still awake. From inside, she heard what she usually did. Gunfire. Explosions. Screams. He was killing zombies or aliens or mutants or whatever else was in the silly games he liked to play. Sometimes he was up all night, fighting his wars.

17

Dan Erickson smelled blood.

Stride hadn’t known the new St. Louis County attorney for long, but he recognized Dan’s pattern. When they were close to making an arrest on a major case, Dan began taking a more personal role in the investigation, nudging the police aside and inserting himself into the news. Like most politicians, he had a radar for cameras.

Dan went to the judge personally to get the search warrant approved for Janine’s condo above Michigan Street. He also fast-tracked an immunity deal for Melvin Wiley to get the private detective talking about his surveillance of Janine Snow and Nathan Skinner. Stride wouldn’t have let Wiley off the hook so readily. The detective was guilty of breaking and entering, invasion of privacy, and blackmail, and Stride would have preferred to get the information they wanted somewhere else.

Dan didn’t see it that way.

The three men stood in the hallway outside Janine’s condo while Stride’s team conducted a search inside. Wiley drank Perrier supplied by Dan and wiped his mustache after each swig from the green bottle. He wore a Twins baseball cap, a gray sweatshirt, and blue jeans. The man’s face bore a smug grin. He was enjoying his turn in the spotlight. There was nothing a private detective liked more than having the police and prosecutors come to him for information.

Dan asked the questions himself. The county prosecutor wasn’t a tall man, but he had an undeniable presence. Cindy, who didn’t like him at all, called it charisma. He was blond and slick and knew how to connect with juries the way an actor would. He oozed success, confidence, and money, although the money wasn’t his own. He was married to one of the city’s most successful real estate developers, who’d bankrolled his career and his thousand-dollar suits. Dan and Lauren had an estate on the lake. A Lexus. Their eyes were on the prize. He was going places in state politics.

‘We need to stick to the facts,’ Dan told Wiley. He paced back and forth between the narrow walls of the hallway. He had the kind of hyperactive personality that couldn’t sit still. ‘Archie is going to paint you as a sleazy peeping Tom when you’re on the stand. The jury won’t like you. You better be prepared for that.’

‘It’s a hazard of the profession,’ Wiley said. ‘Nobody pays me to be liked.’

‘Tell me about the video you took in the bedroom. What exactly does it show?’

‘Like I told the doc, it shows her having sex with Nathan Skinner,’ Wiley replied. He drank more Perrier and added: ‘Me and Ferris watched it together. It doesn’t leave anything to the imagination.’

‘What was his reaction?’

‘Cold,’ Wiley said, shaking his head. ‘Ice cold. I see a lot of husbands when they face the ugly truth, you know? Most go to pieces. Big strong guys blubbering, how could she do this to me, blah blah blah. Not Ferris. He just got this frozen rage.’

‘When was this?’

‘Thanksgiving week. Late November.’

Stride thought about the timing of Wiley’s revelation. Thanksgiving week. Janine and Nathan both said that the affair ended shortly afterward. Jay also contacted a divorce lawyer named Tamara Fellowes around the same time. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots. Wiley’s video landed like a bomb in Jay’s life. It was bad enough to learn that your wife was having an affair, but even worse to know she was sleeping with someone you loathed.

Janine said he was itching to confront Nathan Skinner, but Nathan said it never happened.

Nathan said Jay would have done anything to keep Janine under his thumb, but Janine said they were headed for an amicable separation.

Who was lying?

Stride left the two men and wandered inside the apartment. It was small and furnished sparsely. Janine hadn’t spent much time decorating her secret space. His team was searching the rooms and screening surfaces for evidence of blood, in case Janine had tracked something from her house on the night of the murder. Maggie was at the apartment window, staring across Michigan Street toward Canal Park.

‘So you’ve got a big mansion up on the hill,’ she said, when Stride joined her. ‘Why do you buy a one-bedroom condo like this?’

‘Sounds like the bedroom got a lot of use,’ Stride said.

‘Well, yeah, it’s a nice love nest. She’s got a Tempur-Pedic mattress in there. Pretty good for rocking and rolling.’

‘Why didn’t we find out about this place before now?’ Stride asked.

‘Janine set up a corporate entity for lab referrals. Medicare reimbursement crap. The ownership is under the business name. There’s nothing to tie it to her. She hasn’t had the place long. Just since late July. You think she stashed the gun and jewels here that night?’

‘It would have been easy and fast,’ Stride said, ‘and it would have bought her time to get rid of them.’

‘Well, we haven’t found anything so far. No gun. No blood. Maybe this is just what Nathan said it was. Somewhere to unwind after surgery. No work, no papers, no husband. Nice bed when you want to bang an ex-cop.’

Stride shook his head. ‘No, we’re missing something. There’s something else here.’

‘You sound pretty sure.’

He looked around the apartment, but the walls gave up no secrets. ‘I know Janine, and I know Archie. If there wasn’t anything to find here, they would have told us about it weeks ago. Janine kept it hidden. This place is more than a love nest.’

He realized that the private detective, as nauseating as he was, might have more answers. He returned to the hallway and interrupted the conversation between Wiley and Dan Erickson.

‘Hey, Wiley, when you met Dr. Snow in the parking lot across the street, did she say why she was here?’ Stride asked the detective.

Wiley shrugged. ‘No.’

‘How did you find her? Did you follow her?’

‘I didn’t need to. She comes here a lot. Few times a week, for sure. All I had to do was wait.’

Stride remembered what Nathan Skinner had told him. Janine was a busy woman. They only met for sex a couple times a month. And yet she was here in her secret condominium regularly.

‘When did you remove your camera from the bedroom?’ Stride asked.

‘Thanksgiving Day. After I reported what I found to Jay, he shut down the investigation. He had what he wanted, and I needed my equipment back. Holidays are good for that sort of thing. Nobody’s around to see what you’re doing.’

‘You must have captured video of Dr. Snow when she was here alone,’ Stride said. ‘Not just with Nathan Skinner.’

‘Sure. All the time.’

‘Was there anything unusual about the rest of the videos?’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary. She wasn’t in the bedroom much when Skinner wasn’t around. Jay asked me the same thing, though.’

Stride looked up. ‘What?’

‘Jay wanted to see videos of his wife when she was alone,’ Wiley said.

‘Did he say why? Or what he was looking for?’

‘Nope.’

‘Did you show him?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah, we watched videos for another hour or so. It was just her alone.’

‘What did you see?’

‘Nothing much,’ the detective said. ‘She came into the bedroom, had a big glass of wine with her. Undressed down to her birthday suit. She left the room and probably showered, because her hair was wet when she came back. She put on music, danced a little, took a pill, read a book on the bed for a while. That’s it.’

‘That was what Jay saw?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did he do next?’

‘He thanked me and gave me a fat bonus. End of contract. For a guy who’d just figured out he was being cuckolded, he seemed in better spirits by the time we were done. I think I even mentioned it to him. I said, hey, aren’t you mad?’

‘What did Jay say?’

‘He laughed. He said, “I don’t get mad, Melvin, I get even.”’

Stride returned to the apartment, which seemed to be the epicenter of all the problems between Jay and Janine. He ran his hands through his black hair and left his fingers laced on the back of his head. He wanted a cigarette.

‘July,’ he said to Maggie. ‘Janine bought this place in late July, right? What was going on between her and Jay that month?’

Maggie grabbed the answer from her perfect memory. ‘She turned off the spigot on Jay’s credit cards right before the Fourth.’

‘And then turned it back on a couple weeks later,’ Stride said.

‘Yeah, so? What does that have to do with the condo?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

Stride dug in his pocket and snapped on gloves. He crossed the room and went into Janine’s bedroom, where Guppo was leading the search. He saw that his team had removed the face plate of the vent on the wall, exposing the area where Melvin Wiley had placed his spy camera. The location gave a perfect vantage on the bed.

He thought about Janine spending time here alone several times a week. He saw the contents of Janine’s nightstand spread on plastic sheeting across the bed, and he examined the items, seeing nothing unusual. Tissues. Condoms. Makeup. A few jewelry items that didn’t match what had been taken from the house. Compact discs of Celtic music by Clannad. A Texas romance by Lorraine Heath. Nothing medical at all.

In this place, Stride realized, she wasn’t a doctor.

He went into the adjoining bathroom. At her mansion on the hill, Janine’s bathroom was her spa and temple, a place to escape. Not here. It was clean but small, with a toilet, medicine cabinet, sink, built-in closet, and a combination tub and shower. He checked the closet, which contained luxury bath towels and shower supplies from L’Occitane. Inside the medicine cabinet, he found a toothbrush, toothpaste, and over-the-counter medications for stomach disorders.

Nothing special.

And then Stride noticed the paint on the wall.

The medicine cabinet was framed by four panels of oak trim. In two places beside the right-most panel, he saw faint scratches on the white paint. They were the kind of scratches fingernails would make. With his gloved hand, he pushed against the plasterboard and nudged one finger against the piece of oak trim.

It popped off the wall.

Beneath the trim was a set of hinges.

‘Mags,’ he called.

She joined him in the small bathroom and whistled when she saw the hinges. Stride checked the oak trim on the opposite side of the medicine cabinet and removed the corresponding panel. Beneath it, the fringe of the cabinet was fitted into a steel rod that held it firmly in place against the wall. Two small fingerholds allowed someone to detach the entire cabinet from the rod and swing it on the hinges.

He removed the other two panels of oak trim. Without touching the finger-holds — they’d need to dust those for prints — he pried the medicine cabinet away from the steel rod, and it opened to reveal a small compartment built into the sheetrock.

‘Whoa,’ Maggie said.

Stride shook his head. The truth never made him happy, because the truth of human nature was usually dark. ‘That’s why she killed Jay,’ he said.

18

Stride found Janine in her surgical office at St. Anne’s. The window behind her desk faced the expanse of Lake Superior. Wherever she went, she had a view. Her home, her condominium, and her office all looked out on the lake. He wondered whether she was even conscious of it being there day after day in all its changeable glory.

Janine waved him to a chair in front of her desk, but she wasn’t happy to see him. He could see an enlarged CT scan on the computer monitor in front of her, and she was reviewing a patient’s file. Her pretty face was intense, her normally lush blond hair tied back behind her head. This was what she did. She was a surgeon, and he was interrupting her.

‘It’s not a good time, Lieutenant,’ Janine snapped. ‘I can’t afford the distraction. I have a delicate operation this afternoon.’

‘I know.’

Her eyebrows flickered with annoyance. ‘Excuse me? You know?’

‘I checked your schedule.’

In the blink of an eye, her mind ran through calculations. He watched concern mingle with curiosity. ‘You should run anything you need by Archie. If you have questions, talk to him, not me. You know how it works.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘So if you’ll excuse me, Lieutenant?’ she asked sharply.

Stride didn’t get up from the chair. He felt sadness that it had come to this. Dismantling anyone’s life was a task he hated, even when he had no choice. ‘This is a unique situation, Janine. I don’t have time to get a court order, so I’m relying on you to do the right thing.’

‘And what do you mean by that?’ she asked.

‘Cancel the surgery,’ Stride told her.

‘Cancel it? Jonathan, I’ve been patient with you because of Cindy, but maybe you don’t realize who I am or what I do here. I don’t perform elective surgery that can be squeezed in between vacations and golf games. A man’s life is at stake. Days count. Minutes count.’

‘Yes, I know. That’s why I’d like this to happen without confrontation. I don’t want to alarm a patient or a patient’s family by talking to them myself, but I will if necessary.’

‘And say what? What’s going on? Are you planning to arrest me?’

‘We don’t have a formal arrest warrant yet,’ he acknowledged, ‘but it’s in process. We’ll be working with Mr. Gale on a time for you to surrender yourself. However, this decision won’t wait. You need to cancel all of the surgeries on your calendar.’

‘Well, unless you plan to haul me out of the hospital in cuffs, I don’t see why—’

‘Please, Janine,’ he interrupted her. ‘Don’t make this harder on yourself or your patients. You know why.’

He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and removed an evidence bag that he placed on the impeccably neat desk in front of her.

No bluff.

Her eyes saw it, and her eyes closed. The evidence bag contained a prescription bottle of the painkiller Vicodin.

‘I’m sure you know where we found this,’ Stride told her. ‘This and about fifteen other bottles of Vicodin, Percocet, and Oxycontin. You’re hooked on pain pills, Dr. Snow. I can’t let you in an operating room.’

Janine said nothing.

She knew there was no point in protesting or denying. She knew whose fingerprints they would find all over the bottles. If she’d had the strength, she would have disposed of them weeks ago, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

‘You may find it surprising, but doctors aren’t supermen or superwomen,’ Janine told him. ‘We’re human. After I broke my ankle last winter, I needed pain medication. I figured I could manage the risks, because I knew more about them than anyone. I was naive. By the time I realized it, it was too late.’

She reached to pick up the bag, and Stride pulled it away.

‘I’m clean today,’ she added. ‘I always make sure I’m clean before I walk into the OR. It’s my rule.’

‘That hardly matters, even if it’s true.’

She shrugged. He was right, and she knew it. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘What about Ira Rose? The patient who died?’

‘I was clean then, too,’ she insisted. ‘My problem had nothing to do with his death. Not that anyone will care.’

Janine was a realist about what came next. The fact of her addiction was enough to cost her everything she had. No doubt she’d lied on her malpractice insurance application, and the policy would be voided. The judgment in litigation over Ira’s death would cost her millions. Her fortune. Her house. Her license to practice medicine would soon be gone.

Everything she lived for — gone.

‘Jay knew,’ Stride said. ‘He threatened to expose your addiction, right? That’s what he held over your head.’

She didn’t answer. Her mental calculations had already shifted to the next battle of her life. Her career was over; now all that remained was guilt or innocence in a murder trial. She wouldn’t make his job easier.

‘You visited pharmacies all over the northland,’ he went on, ‘but the patient name on the prescriptions was the same. Holly Jorgenson. Holly. That was the name of the drug addict in Jay’s column last July. It was a threat against you, wasn’t it? A very public threat. You shut off his credit cards, and that was Jay’s way of letting you know that if you didn’t turn the money spigot on again, he’d expose your secret to the world.’

‘Jay,’ she said, and he could hear the depth of bitterness in her voice.

‘That’s when you bought the condo, too,’ Stride said. ‘Did you tell Jay you were quitting the pills? Instead, you just took your addiction underground. You found a way to keep it hidden from him.’

She didn’t break down. She didn’t cry. There were very few tears in Janine Snow.

‘What about Thanksgiving?’ he asked. ‘Jay hired Melvin Wiley to follow you, but was he even thinking about an affair? Or did he suspect you were still using pills, and he wanted proof? I’m curious, what exactly did Jay say when he confronted you? Did he call his friend Tamara Fellowes at the Stanhope law firm and say that he was prepared to offer damaging information in Esther Rose’s lawsuit? Did he threaten to destroy your whole life if you didn’t give up the affair with Nathan Skinner? And what else? Did he want a slave, Janine? Did you finally realize there was no way out with Jay except to see him dead?’

Her voice was low but calm. ‘It must be so nice to be perfect, Jonathan.’

‘I’m certainly not that. I’m sympathetic to your situation, Janine, but you have to make some hard choices. It’s time for you to talk to Archie about a plea. If you and Jay argued that night, if you lost control and shot him, then you’re better off admitting it. This crazy story about someone coming into the house won’t fly.’

‘I never lose control,’ she replied, ‘and I didn’t shoot Jay.’

‘No one’s going to believe you. Archie won’t be able to sell that to a jury. Were you on the pills that night? Is that why you had to stop the car with Cindy and throw up?’

Janine picked up her office phone, as if he weren’t there. She’d already dismissed him. ‘Patty, what room is Mr. Fernandez in?’ she asked her assistant. ‘I need to speak to him and his family about the surgery today. I’m afraid we have to cancel it. And get Archie Gale on the phone for me, will you? Tell him I need to see him immediately. I’m going to be arrested soon.’

Howard Marlowe pulled into his driveway at the end of the school day.

They were talking about the 1960s in his ninth grade Civil Rights class. Unrest. Riots. The assassination of JFK and then the Civil Rights Act of the following year. Kennedy was Howard’s hero. He wished he’d been born earlier, so he could have been alive when Kennedy was president. That was an era when people could still make a difference.

As he got out of his car, his head was still reeling from the comment one of his students had made. Howard had shown them headlines from the day after Kennedy’s death, and one of the fourteen-year-old girls had raised her hand and asked, ‘Why was it such a big deal?’

Someone took a rifle and killed the President of the United States.

No big deal.

He’d never felt so impotent and purposeless in life. He was absolutely certain that he was making no difference whatsoever with his stay on the planet. In a black mood, he grabbed the mail from the box at the end of the driveway, brought it inside, and sat down at the kitchen table. Carol was home, making dinner. Baked chicken and broccoli, because it was Monday. She whistled along to a pop song by Kelly Clarkson, as if it were a wonderful day. The anger of the break-in was behind her now.

Everything in their lives was back to normal, which was exactly what Carol wanted. Everything was the way it had always been and the way it would always be.

It made him want to scream.

‘What’s in the mail?’ Carol asked.

‘I don’t know.’

Howard picked at the letters and magazines in front of him. A credit card bill from Kohl’s. A copy of People magazine. Carol liked to read it. A flier about recycling and trash collection. A brochure with coupons from the local restaurants. Five dollars off at Pizza Hut. They’d use that one.

He pulled an official-looking envelope out from the pile. It was addressed to him from the Duluth District Court of St. Louis County.

‘What’s that?’ his wife asked from the sink.

Howard was curious, and he unfolded the official letter inside. ‘It’s a summons,’ he said.

‘For what?’

He read the notice at the top of the page.

19

Summer came.

In Duluth, people sometimes wondered if the ice would never melt and if the trees would stay bare skeletons forever. Spring was often no spring, just cold gray days of mud and rain. However, even Duluth seasons eventually had to bow to the calendar, and by mid-year, the city became a paradise. The months spent as nothing but a cold nowhere were forgiven and forgotten. Lake Superior shimmered, a vast sapphire sea, catching dots of sunlight on each wave. Blue skies met green hills. Waterfalls surged and played through the cataract down Seven Bridges Road. Tourists swarmed Canal Park, and swimmers ran through the surf and wet sand stretching along the Point. Sea brine and popcorn perfumed the air.

Thousands of runners crowded the city for Grandma’s Marathon. A different festival filled up each weekend. Reggae and Blues. Tall Ships. The Blue Angels. Music floated out of the open doors of bars and clubs.

The length of the summer days almost made time hover in place, as perfect and fragile as a hummingbird. A Duluth summer felt as if it could be endless, not gone with the puff of a cold breeze. And yet everyone knew that perfection was a tease. The warmth was brief. July. August. Each sunset came with a little warning label to enjoy the moment while it lasted.

Stride lounged in a deck chair on the sand dune behind their house on their first night back from Alaska. Cindy sat beside him, nearly asleep. He wore sunglasses on the bright evening, which gave the lake a midnight glow. People jogged, and dogs ran along the sand in front of them. He was exhausted from the long flight back and the drive north from the Twin Cities, but he couldn’t recall a time when he’d felt so content with his life.

They’d had the perfect vacation. Luxurious food. Wine. Glaciers calving in front of them. Floatplanes over the remote wilderness. Hours spent in bed on a sea day, making love to the rough rhythm of the waves. Stride, who didn’t do vacations well as a rule, had set aside Duluth and the job for seven whole days. Cindy called it nothing short of a miracle.

Even so, he was happy to be home. To be in Duluth in the summertime. To feel a lake breeze, to hold Cindy’s hand, to drink cold beer from a bottle. His wife was quiet, and he knew a little part of her was sad to be back to reality, but he didn’t mind the ebb and flow of the world. He knew you could never predict the moments that would linger in your memory, but he thought this was one.

‘Favorite port?’ Cindy murmured, revisiting the trip.

‘Juneau.’

‘Favorite meal?’

‘That Chinese restaurant we ate at before we sailed from Vancouver. With the noodles. What was it called?

‘Hon.’

‘Yeah, that one,’ he said.

‘Favorite day overall?’

He nudged his sunglasses up to his forehead and let her see his eyes, and he just grinned. She laughed.

‘Sea day,’ she concluded.

‘Definitely.’

They were quiet for a while. The lake breathed waves in and out. As dusk spread shadows, the crowds on the beach thinned. Someone started a bonfire, and they could smell the wood and feel the smoke in their eyes. An ore boat glided through the nearby ship canal and rolled toward the open water. Stride wanted a cigarette, but he didn’t take one.

‘The trial starts next week,’ Cindy said.

‘I know.’

Back to reality.

The murder trial of State of Minnesota, Plaintiff, vs. Janine Snow, Defendant, was scheduled to begin on Monday. Stride knew that Dan Erickson planned to call Cindy as his first witness, and the idea of testifying weighed on his wife. She’d put it out of her mind during their trip to Alaska, but it was back as the clock ticked closer.

‘You’ll do fine,’ he told her, which was as much as he could say. His own testimony would follow hers. She would probably be off the stand in an hour; he would spend most of the day there. Then in the days to follow, Dan would build his house of cards witness by witness, and Archie would try to blow it down.

Eventually, Cindy said: ‘Do you think she’ll be convicted?’

Stride hesitated. Saying nothing would have been better, but he couldn’t remain completely silent. ‘You can never tell with juries.’

That was true. Jurors were a strange lot. Impossible to read or predict, always able to surprise. Dan said that trial attorneys were storytellers for a jury of children, and the lawyer with the best bedtime story won.

Stride respected the difficulty of what jurors had to do. They were asked to set aside a lifetime of bias, but they were also human beings, filled with prejudice and empathy. They were asked to evaluate nothing but the evidence in front of them, and yet they had to share a courtroom day after day with the man or woman whose fate they held in their hands. You couldn’t vote guilty in a felony murder case if you didn’t believe that the person behind the table ten feet away was capable of a terrible crime.

The state didn’t have to establish a motive. The defendant didn’t need a reason to cause the death of another person. Even so, every investigator and every prosecutor knew that jurors craved the why.

Why did respected surgeon Janine Snow murder her husband, Jay Ferris?

Because she was living under the threat of Jay stealing away the only thing she cared about. Her career.

‘You never found that man,’ Cindy pointed out.

‘No.’ Stride knew who she meant. They’d been unable to identify the man who’d threatened her at Miller Hill Mall. He was a ghost. ‘Guppo saw a man matching his description at the marathon, but he wasn’t able to get close. The guy disappeared before Guppo got there. But we haven’t stopped looking for him.’

‘It’s been months,’ she said. ‘If you haven’t found him by now...’

He didn’t answer, because he didn’t want to argue with her. Arguing only ruined the perfect day. She felt the same way, because she squeezed his fingers with her small hand and then pulled his fist to her mouth and kissed it.

‘Sorry,’ Cindy said.

‘That’s okay.’

They sat, and the evening got darker, and the wind grew a little bite off the water. It was time to go inside, to go to bed. She got up first. By then, she was mostly a shadow. She leaned down over his deck chair, with her long hair falling across him, and she kissed his lips. A hard kiss. A Cindy kiss.

‘I’m glad we went to Alaska,’ she said.

‘Me too.’

‘Nobody can ever take that away from us.’

He thought that was a strange thing for her to say, but he let it go, because it was a beautiful summer night, full of love and life. You don’t question such things. Even so, something in her voice made him shiver and think of winter.

20

Juror #5.

That was Howard Marlowe’s identifying number. He stood along with thirteen other men and women — twelve jurors, two alternates — to swear their oaths to the court. With that, the trial began.

The judge, the Honorable Jeffrey R. Edblad, spoke directly to the jury, and Howard tried to concentrate on his words. Edblad had short gray hair, black glasses, and a rounded face. If he hadn’t been a lawyer and a judge, Howard figured he could have been a teacher. He was calm, and he spoke slowly and deliberately, like a father offering words of wisdom to a teenager about to take the car out for the first time. I’ll be fair, I’ll be gentle, but I’ll be firm.

Members of the jury, you will hear testimony from witnesses in this trial. It will be up to you to evaluate their credibility and decide how much weight to give what they say. I’m asking you to be patient and listen carefully to each witness and not to come to any conclusions until you have heard all of the evidence.

Howard felt restless. It was hard to come down from the adrenaline high of being here. His eyes flicked around the courtroom, which was smaller than he expected. He and his fellow jurors were seated in blue cushioned chairs inside the jury box. The two counsel tables were placed side by side, barely six feet away from them. He thought it strange to see the prosecutor and defense attorney seated next to each other, like colleagues rather than adversaries. Judge Edblad’s platform, inside a wooden enclosure at the front of the courtroom, was only slightly elevated. There were tables and computers for the clerk and court reporter. Everyone was close together.

The room was narrow but very tall, with twenty-five-foot walls broken up by dark wood panels and white stone blocks. The chambered ceiling featured sculpted trim painted in gold and green. One set of double-wide doors led in and out to the marble hallway of the courthouse. Behind the counsel tables, a few rows of spectator benches were completely filled by the media.

You should rely on your own judgment and common sense to evaluate the testimony of each witness. You will need to decide for yourself whether they are sincere, whether you believe them, whether what they say is reasonable or unreasonable.

His fellow jurors looked as ordinary as he did. Eight women. Six men. Twelve of them white, plus one black man and one black woman. The youngest juror couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. The oldest, a woman in a blue dress with her hands in her lap, was at least seventy. Howard was seated at the end of the front row, closest to the counsel tables. The lone black woman, who was in her mid-thirties and wore a burgundy pants suit, sat next to him. She had a pleasant smile.

While this trial is going on, there are things you shouldn’t do. Remember, you aren’t investigators or detectives, so you shouldn’t go looking for information about this case. Your family and friends are likely to be curious about what you’re doing, but you should not discuss the case with anyone else. You shouldn’t read articles about it in the newspaper or online or watch news reports.

Janine Snow was directly in front of him.

She was seated at the end of the counsel table beside her attorney, Archibald Gale. If she’d reached out her hand, if Howard had reached out his hand, they could have touched. She wore a light blue suit with a rose blouse underneath. Styled blond hair, each strand in place. An expressionless, enigmatic face. He could see her blue eyes as she watched the judge. She kept her hands folded primly in front of her. He was close enough to her that he could see the small birth mark near her mouth and the pale pink shade of her lipstick. As beautiful as she was, she wasn’t completely ageless. He could see tiny creases in her skin, hiding discreetly under her makeup.

He knew he was staring and that he should drag his eyes away. She must have felt him studying her, because her head swiveled slightly, and their eyes met. It felt to him just as it had in the mall that day. There was something intimate and extremely erotic about it. Her eyes didn’t smile or beg him for mercy; she simply answered his own stare, human to human, woman to man. He looked down at his lap, embarrassed.

He hadn’t lied in the juror interviews. Not really. He’d acknowledged that he was aware of the case, but that was true of anyone in Duluth. No, he hadn’t formed a conclusion about Dr. Snow’s guilt or innocence, and that was true. For everything he’d read about the murder, and for all the time he’d tried to divine the truth in pictures of her face, he really had no idea if she killed her husband. He was an ordinary man with no connection to anyone involved in the crime. The perfect juror.

‘Mr. Erickson,’ Judge Edblad said, ‘do you wish to make your opening statement?’

‘Thank you, your honor,’ Dan Erickson said, standing up.

The county attorney remained behind the counsel table, but he spoke directly to the jury. Howard listened as the prosecutor laid out the elements of the case and what they would need to decide. The legal questions. The evidence questions. It all began here.

‘This trial is about a relationship that went badly wrong,’ Erickson told them. ‘It’s about a marriage where the wife wanted out and her husband refused to let her go. This wife — the defendant, Janine Snow — saw only one way to be free of her husband. Only one way to escape. Murder. That’s the story of this case. And the witnesses and physical evidence we show you in the next few days will make the details of that story very clear. When we’re done, you will conclude beyond any reasonable doubt that, on January 28 of this year, Janine Snow shot her husband, Jay Ferris, in the head and intentionally caused his death.’

Erickson was serious and confident. He didn’t smile; he wasn’t their buddy. He wore an expensive suit, not an everyman suit, as if he wanted Howard and the other jurors to believe that he was just a little smarter than they were, knew just a little more, had been down this road enough times that you could trust whatever he said.

‘Most of what happened on January 28 isn’t in dispute,’ Erickson continued. ‘We have an eyewitness who saw the defendant and Mr. Ferris together, and we have the defendant’s own statement to the police that night. She was alone in the house with her husband on the night of the murder. They argued. Minutes later, Jay Ferris lay dead of a gunshot wound to his head in the living room of their house. Not in dispute.

‘So what led these two people to that terrible moment? Multiple witnesses will testify that the defendant wanted to end her marriage but that her husband was determined not to grant her a divorce. That the relationship between them was volatile and that each tried to inflict psychological damage on the other. That the defendant’s husband, Jay Ferris, knew about his wife’s addiction to prescription pain medications and was threatening to expose this information and destroy her medical career. He held her whole future in his hands, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the situation Janine Snow faced on January 28. That’s why she used a gun to murder her husband.

‘Did the defendant know how to fire a gun? Yes, she did. We’ll show you a photograph of her firing a gun similar in kind to the gun used to murder Jay Ferris.

‘Did the defendant have access to a gun? Yes, she did. You’ll hear a witness testify that the defendant knew that her husband owned a gun and that she concealed that knowledge from the police. Her husband’s gun has since disappeared.

‘Did the defendant take steps to conceal whether she fired a gun on January 28? Yes, she did. By her own statement to the police, she took a shower and washed her clothes that night before the police arrived. So she made it impossible to run chemical tests on her body and her clothes that would have confirmed that she had fired a gun.

‘This story isn’t hard to understand, ladies and gentlemen. You won’t need anything more than your common sense to know what happened that night. Janine Snow caused the death of Jay Ferris.’

Howard felt the blank slate of his judgment fill with suspicion as Erickson spoke. Judge Edblad had already warned them that nothing an attorney said was evidence, and yet if the evidence revealed what Erickson promised, it was hard not to believe that the case was exactly as he stated.

Then Archibald Gale stood up.

He was warm where Dan Erickson was cool. He was like Santa Claus in a two-piece suit, with his curly hair, peppery beard, and twinkling eyes. He reminded them that Janine, sitting in that chair beside him, was innocent, and that the entire burden of proof rested with the state. With each sentence, delivered with a sad shake of his head, he cast doubt on that proof.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, pay attention to what you do not hear from the state in this case. You will not hear any evidence that Dr. Snow owned a gun, because there is no such evidence.

‘You will not hear any evidence that Dr. Snow fired a gun that night, because there is no such evidence.

‘You will not hear any evidence about the gun used to murder Jay Ferris, because that gun was never found. Think about that. Whoever killed Mr. Ferris took the gun away from the crime scene. On that basis alone, it’s reasonable for you to doubt that Dr. Snow could have committed this crime. But there’s more.’

Gale took a sip of water.

‘You will learn that Jay Ferris wrote things in his job as a columnist at the Duluth News-Tribune that offended people. Outraged them. Cost them their jobs. It’s reasonable to wonder whether one of those people killed him.

‘You will learn that an unknown vehicle was parked in the neighborhood not far from Jay Ferris’s house on the night of the murder and that the police never located this vehicle or who was driving it. It’s reasonable to wonder whether that person killed him.

‘You will learn that Jay Ferris took pictures of an armed man while hiking in a park near Duluth and that the police never identified this man or interviewed him about his whereabouts on the night of the murder. It’s reasonable to wonder whether that dangerous man killed him.’

And so it went on.

By the time Archibald Gale sat down, Howard was back to where he’d started. A blank slate. He had no idea about Janine’s guilt or innocence. All he could do was stare at her face and wonder. This time, her face wasn’t a photograph on the computer screen in the basement of his house. She was real. She was so close that he could smell her perfume.

She was waiting for him to decide.

‘Mr. Erickson,’ Judge Edblad said, ‘call your first witness, please.’

21

Cindy felt physically ill on the witness stand.

At the counsel table, Janine offered her the tiniest of smiles. They were still friends. There were no hard feelings, even though Cindy was the first witness, pounding in the first nail.

Dan Erickson stood up to address her. Cindy knew exactly the kind of man he was. Inside the courtroom, he played his role, leading the jury down the path he wanted them to follow. Outside the courtroom, he was vain, self-absorbed, and manipulative. He was good-looking, and he knew it. He was married, but his eyes and hands wandered over every pretty woman he met.

He took her through introductions. Established who she was. And who her husband was.

‘Mrs. Stride, where were you on the evening of January 28 of this year?’

‘I was at a birthday party for Deputy Police Chief Kyle Kinnick at the Radisson Hotel.’

‘Was the defendant there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was the defendant’s husband Jay Ferris there?’

‘No.’

‘During the party, did you speak to the defendant?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Did you see her consume any alcohol?’

Cindy hesitated. ‘Yes.’

‘How much?’

‘I don’t know exactly. She was drinking white wine. She had several glasses.’

‘Did the defendant subsequently ask if you would drive her home?’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘And do you remember exactly what time it was when you drove her home?’

‘I remember that the clock in my car read 9:32 p.m. It’s not far. We would have reached Janine’s house just a few minutes later.’

‘When you arrived at the defendant’s house, did you accompany her to her front door?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘At that time, did you see Jay Ferris, the defendant’s husband?’

‘Yes, he came to the door and opened it.’

‘He was alive?’

Cindy smiled faintly. ‘Yes, obviously.’

‘Did you see or hear anyone else in the house?’

‘No.’

‘Were there any other cars in the driveway or parked near the house?’

‘No.’

‘What happened next?’

‘Janine went inside with Jay. He closed the door. I left.’

‘Before you left, could you hear any part of the conversation between the defendant and her husband?’

‘I heard loud voices. It sounded like an argument.’

‘Would you characterize this as a heated argument?’

‘I guess so, yes.’

‘Was there physical contact between them?’

‘Yes, Jay grabbed her wrist, and Janine pushed him away.’

‘Did you see or hear anything else?’

‘No, I left after that.’

‘As you left the house that night, Mrs. Stride, did you see anyone else?’

‘No. There was no one else there. I was alone.’

‘What about other cars?’

‘Mine was the only car.’

‘Did you see anything that raised your suspicions?’

‘No.’

‘Thank you, Mrs. Stride. Now is it fair to say you consider the defendant a friend?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Do you see her regularly on social occasions?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Has the defendant ever shared any information with you about her perspectives on the state of her marriage?’

‘She told me that she considered her marriage to be a mistake,’ Cindy acknowledged.

‘Did she express an intent to seek a divorce?’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘On more than one occasion?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mrs. Stride, in December of last year, did you ask the defendant about the status of a possible divorce from Mr. Ferris?’

Cindy didn’t want to say it. She’d known the next question was coming. They’d gone over all of it in her statement to the police. Even so, she hated having to say it out loud, in a courtroom, with the jury listening. With Janine listening.

‘Yes. We had lunch, and I asked if she was going ahead with a divorce.’

‘What did she say?’

Cindy opened her mouth, but her throat was too dry to speak. She reached for the water and drank.

‘Mrs. Stride? How did the defendant answer that question when you asked her if she was proceeding with a divorce?’

‘She said no.’

‘Do you remember her exact words?’

‘She said, “I wish I could, but Jay has me trapped.”’

Archibald Gale stood up to conduct the cross-examination.

‘Mrs. Stride, while you were driving Dr. Snow home from the party on January 28, did you stop the car at any point?’

‘Yes. Janine wasn’t feeling well. I stopped, and she got out and threw up.’

‘So she was a mess?’ Gale asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Mrs. Stride, if you threw up on the side of the road, what would you do when you got home?’

Cindy smiled. ‘I’d take a shower.’

‘And what would you do with your clothes?’

‘I’d put them in the washing machine.’

‘Thank you. Now when you arrived at Dr. Snow’s residence and you saw Jay Ferris, did he have a gun?’

‘No.’

‘He wasn’t waving one in the air?’

Another smile. She saw the jurors smiling, too. ‘No.’

‘What about Dr. Snow? Did she have a gun at the party?’

‘No, not that I saw. I mean, she had a purse, but it was tiny. It would have been noticeable if something as big as a gun were inside.’

‘Okay. And you say you left Dr. Snow’s house at approximately 9:45 p.m., is that about right?’

‘Yes, that would be about right. A couple minutes on either side of that.’

‘You have no idea what happened at the house after you left, do you?’

‘No.’

‘If a car drove up to the house thirty seconds after you turned onto Skyline Parkway, you would have no way of knowing that, is that right?’

‘That’s true.’

‘Thank you. Mrs. Stride, did Dr. Snow ever threaten her husband in your presence?’

‘No.’

‘Did she ever tell you that she wished she could kill him? Or that she wished he was dead?’

‘No, nothing like that.’

‘Did she ever seem desperate to you about her marital situation?’

‘Janine? Desperate? No.’

‘Thank you, Mrs. Stride,’ Gale said. He began to sit down, but then he stopped. ‘Oh, I’m very sorry, could you tell the jury — did you have a frightening experience at Miller Hill Mall this spring?’

Dan stood up immediately. ‘Objection, your honor. This line of questioning is outside the scope of direct examination, and it’s not relevant to the case.’

Judge Edblad waited. ‘Mr. Gale?’

‘Your honor, the incident I’m asking about arose because of the witness’s relationship with Lieutenant Stride of the Duluth Police — a relationship that Mr. Erickson inquired about under direct examination. In addition, the incident arose because of Lieutenant Stride’s investigation into this specific case, which certainly makes it relevant.’

‘I’m overruling the objection,’ the judge replied.

Gale continued to Cindy: ‘You can answer the question.’

‘I — yes, I did,’ Cindy said.

‘Please tell us what happened.’

‘I followed a man at the mall, and he confronted and threatened me. He had a gun.’

‘What was the nature of his threat?’

‘He said I shouldn’t stick my nose into his business. He said bad things happened to people who did that. And then he showed me a gun.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Gale said. ‘What a terrifying experience for you. Please tell the jury, Mrs. Stride, why did you follow this man in the first place?’

Cindy felt herself flushing. ‘I believed that he was a man that my husband, Lieutenant Stride, was looking for.’

‘Why did you believe that?’

‘I saw a set of photographs in a stack of evidence that Jonny — that Lieutenant Stride left on our kitchen table. The photos showed a man in the woods carrying an assault rifle, and there was a note about trying to find him. This looked like the same man.’

‘This stack of evidence that the Lieutenant brought home to study, do you know what case it was part of?’

‘Yes, it was evidence connected to the murder of Jay Ferris,’ Cindy said.

Gale nodded as he sat down. ‘Thank you, Mrs. Stride.’

‘Mrs. Stride, how long did you look at these photographs?’ Dan Erickson asked on his redirect examination.

‘A few seconds, I guess.’

‘Ten seconds? Twenty? Thirty?’

‘Closer to ten,’ Cindy admitted.

‘Were these crisp, clear, high-resolution photos?’

‘No, they were blurry.’

‘And how long after you saw these photographs did you follow this stranger at the mall?’

‘Several days.’

‘You saw a couple of blurry pictures for maybe ten seconds, and days later, you saw someone that you thought might be the same man — do I have that right?

‘Yes,’ Cindy said.

‘Can you say for sure that this was the same man, Mrs. Stride?’

‘Not for sure, no.’

‘Thank you, Mrs. Stride. That’s all.’

22

Stride had sat in the same witness chair in the same courtroom many times before. Testifying in court was one of the few tasks for which he wore a suit. He owned only two suits, and today he wore the navy blue one, freshly dry-cleaned. He’d tried to tame his restless hair, and he’d shaved. Appearances mattered. Trials were about evidence, but they were also about perceptions. Finding facts meant deciding whom to believe. Whom to trust.

Dan guided him through a review of his experience, including nearly twenty years with the Duluth Police and nearly ten in charge of the Detective Bureau. Stride talked about his background in felony investigations, including dozens of homicide cases. It was all prologue.

‘Lieutenant, were you called to the home of the defendant on the evening of January 28 of this year?’ Dan asked finally.

‘Yes, I was.’

‘Is this house located in the city of Duluth in St. Louis County?’

‘Yes, it is.’ Stride gave the specific address and described the location of the house. Dan introduced a map of the area enlarged on foam core, and Stride pointed out the residence and described the access in and out — specifically, that Janine’s home was located on a dead-end street at the summit of a sharp hill.

‘What did you find inside the house?’ Dan asked.

‘We found the body of Jay Ferris,’ Stride said. ‘He had a single gunshot wound to the forehead.’

‘Can you tell us exactly where the body was located?’

‘There’s a large marble foyer inside the front door that leads to the living room. The body of Mr. Ferris was located in the living room, approximately ten feet from the edge of the foyer.’

Dan introduced photographs of the crime scene and an enlarged floor plan of the house. Stride identified the photos and matched them with positions on the floor plan for the jury. He also pointed out the wine glass found near Jay’s body and the other lipstick-smeared wine glass on the coffee table. He noted a pair of stiletto heels belonging to Janine that had been left on the floor of the foyer.

‘Did you find a gun near the body or in the house?’

‘No, we conducted a search of the area but did not locate the murder weapon.’

‘During your investigation, did you determine whether the victim, Jay Ferris, held a Minnesota permit to carry a handgun?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Did the defendant make a statement to you about whether her husband in fact owned a handgun?’

‘She claimed that Mr. Ferris used to own a handgun but that she made him get rid of it when they got married,’ Stride said.

‘Did you nonetheless uncover physical evidence during your investigation that Mr. Ferris continued to own a handgun long after his marriage to the defendant?’

‘Yes, Mr. Ferris’s brother provided us with a photograph that showed a gun in his possession.’ Dan introduced the photo of Jay and Clyde Ferris, and an enlargement showed a close-up of the portion of the gun visible in the holster.

‘Were you able to confirm when this photograph was taken?’

‘Yes, it was taken last October 27, three months prior to the murder.’

‘Were you able to locate this gun during your investigation?’ Dan asked.

‘No, we weren’t.’

‘Thank you, Lieutenant. Now when you arrived at the house that night, was the defendant present?’

‘Yes, Dr. Snow was there, along with her counsel, Mr. Gale.’

‘And did Dr. Snow make a statement to you with her counsel present?’

‘She did. Dr. Snow told us that she was dropped off at her house that evening by my wife. This was about 9:45 p.m. She told us that she had some wine with her husband, and they argued. She said she then left her husband to take a shower. Her bathroom is adjacent to her bedroom, two floors down from the living room. She was in the shower for a long time, she said, but she couldn’t tell us exactly how long. When she got out of the shower, she said she noticed that two drawers in a jewelry box in her bedroom were open, and several expensive items were missing. She told us that she went back upstairs and found her husband’s body.’

‘At that point, did the defendant tell you that she called 911?’ Dan asked.

‘No, she said that some time passed before she called the police.’

‘What did the defendant claim to be doing during this time?’

‘She said that she simply stared at her husband’s body,’ Stride said.

‘How much time passed between Dr. Snow’s arrival at her house that evening and the call to police?’

‘Approximately one hour. The actual 911 call was received at 10:47 p.m. A patrol car was at the scene within ten minutes.’

‘And do we have any way of knowing exactly when during that hour the shooting occurred?’

‘No.’

‘Lieutenant, based on the evidence gathered in this investigation, and based on your extensive experience in these kinds of crimes, did you form an opinion about the truthfulness of the defendant’s statement?’

‘Yes, I concluded that her statement was not supported by the evidence.’

‘Please explain how you reached that conclusion,’ Dan said.

Stride took a pointer and referred to the floor plans of Janine Snow’s house. ‘Dr. Snow alleged that her husband was killed as part of a home invasion and robbery. However, there was no sign of forced entry, and the door between the garage and the house was locked. So Mr. Ferris would have had to let an intruder inside voluntarily. Then the shooter would have needed to murder Mr. Ferris, proceed down two flights of stairs and along a hallway to the defendant’s bedroom, remove jewelry from her jewelry box, and return upstairs and escape.’

‘And this all would have had to happen in the time the defendant was in the shower?’

‘According to her statement, yes.’

‘Did you find other evidence to discredit the theory that an intruder came into the house?’ Dan asked.

‘Yes, there was no evidence of a fight or of defensive actions by Mr. Ferris. In addition, there was no physical evidence of an intruder in the house. The walkway to the front door was wet and dusted with dirt and gravel. Traces of snowmelt, dirt, and gravel were found in the marble foyer, but we didn’t find any “tracked” dirt on the living room carpet, on the stairs, or in the defendant’s bedroom.’

‘In your experience, Lieutenant, are persons who commit homicide and armed robbery typically gracious enough to remove their shoes before invading a house?’

Stride suppressed a smile. ‘No.’

‘Lieutenant, let’s look at other possible explanations for the events that night. Did you run any chemical tests to determine whether the defendant fired a gun on the night of the murder?’

Stride shook his head. ‘No. That would be standard procedure, but in this case, the defendant told us that she had taken a shower, which would have erased reliable evidence of chemical residue on her hands, body, and hair. She also washed the clothes she was wearing, which would have accomplished the same thing. In light of that, running gunshot residue tests would have been unrevealing.’

‘You didn’t find the murder weapon, Lieutenant,’ Dan went on, ‘so it must have been removed from the house?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Did the defendant have time to hide a gun and jewelry outside the house before she contacted the police?’

‘Yes, she did,’ Stride said. ‘We conducted exercises in which a policewoman put clothes in the washing machine, showered, and then drove from the defendant’s house to separate locations to secrete evidence and then drove back to the house. We ran that exercise several times, and in no instance did it take longer than thirty minutes. Sometimes, it took less than twenty minutes. So yes, she had time.’

‘Now did you tell us that the defendant admitted to arguing with Mr. Ferris on the night of the murder?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she say what the argument was about?’

‘No, but she said they argued about everything.’

‘Did she give other indications of trouble in their marriage?’

‘Yes, in a later statement, she admitted to an affair with a former police officer named Nathan Skinner.’

‘Did you subsequently interview Mr. Skinner?’ Dan asked.

‘I did.’

‘And did he provide you with any physical evidence related to the defendant’s knowledge of handguns?’

‘Yes, he provided me with a photograph of Dr. Snow at a gun range, where she is in the process of firing a revolver.’

Dan introduced the photograph of Janine at the range, which was presented to the jury. More than anything else, Stride knew that the real impact of the photograph was Janine’s expression. Confident. Assured. Almost aroused. She knew how to fire a gun, and she liked it.

‘Based on your interview with Nathan Skinner, did you also learn that the defendant owned property in addition to the home where she resided with Mr. Ferris?’

‘Yes, we discovered that she owns an apartment on Michigan Street in downtown Duluth.’

‘Did you conduct a search of this apartment?’

‘We did. We discovered a cache of prescription pain medications. There were nearly five hundred pills in fifteen bottles, made up of medicines such as Percocet, Oxycontin, and Vicodin.’

‘Did the defendant subsequently admit to you that these pills belonged to her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were the prescriptions in her name?’

‘No, the prescriptions were all in the name of Holly Jorgenson. She acknowledged that this was a fictitious patient she created to obtain pills for herself illegally.’

‘Lieutenant, did you find that fictitious patient name significant?’

‘Yes, the defendant’s husband, Jay Ferris, published a column in the Duluth News-Tribune last July about a prescription drug addict named Holly. The column threatened public exposure of this information.’

‘If Mr. Ferris had exposed his wife’s addiction and criminal behavior, would there have been consequences for the defendant?’ Dan asked.

At that question, Archie Gale intervened. ‘Objection. This calls for a conclusion outside the witness’s expertise.’

‘Sustained,’ Judge Edblad ruled.

Dan wasn’t deterred. ‘Has the evidence you uncovered regarding the defendant’s abuse of prescription pain medications now become public?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And to your knowledge, have there been consequences to the defendant in relation to her behavior?’ Dan asked.

Stride nodded. ‘Yes, according to a statement by the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice last month, she has voluntarily surrendered her medical license.’

He stared at Janine Snow as he said this, and so did the jury. For the first time he could remember, he saw genuine emotion in her face. It was as if her world had already crumbled around her, and nothing else in the courtroom mattered. A tear slipped from one blue eye, and a moment later, she was crying silently.

Gale began to question Stride.

‘Lieutenant, you did not recover the murder weapon in this case, is that right? It is still missing?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Did any of Dr. Snow’s neighbors report seeing her leave the house between 9:45 p.m. and the arrival of the police an hour later?’

‘No.’

‘Did you find evidence suggesting that Mr. Ferris’s Hummer had been driven between 9:45 p.m. and the arrival of the police an hour later?’

‘I’m not sure what evidence would be available to confirm that,’ Stride said.

‘Well, did you check the hood of the Hummer?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Was the engine warm?’

‘No,’ Stride admitted. He added quickly: ‘However, this was almost an hour after I arrived on the scene. The temperatures were below zero.’

‘Lieutenant, did your department receive a report about an unidentified Toyota Rav4 parked near Dr. Snow’s house on the evening of the murder?’

‘We received a report from a teenage driver who thought he remembered passing a Rav4 parked on West 8th Street that evening. The teenager later acknowledged using marijuana that night, so we considered his recollections to be suspect.’

‘Did the driver say he saw the Rav parked there after ten o’clock?’

‘He thought so, but he didn’t check the clock.’

‘Is the corner of West 8th and Skyline within a couple hundred yards of Dr. Snow’s house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you talk to residents on 8th Street?’

‘Yes, we did.’

‘Did any of those residents own a Rav4 or have visitors who owned a Rav4?’

‘No.’

‘Were you able to identify who owned this Rav4?’

‘No.’

‘Thank you, Lieutenant. You testified that you were unable to locate a revolver allegedly owned by Jay Ferris, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘You allege that Mr. Ferris owned a revolver because of a photograph supplied by the victim’s brother Clyde Ferris, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did Clyde Ferris make a statement to you that his brother routinely carried his gun with him?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Did Clyde Ferris also make a statement to you that he went ice-fishing with his brother in early January, less than a month before Jay Ferris was murdered?’

Stride hesitated. ‘Yes, he did.’

‘Were you able to independently confirm that this outing took place?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you confirm this?’

‘I got a copy of a report filed by Jay Ferris with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.’

‘Did the report indicate that due to thin ice, Jay Ferris lost his truck and his fishing shanty into the water of Superior Bay at that time?’

‘Yes,’ Stride said, and he knew where Gale was going now.

‘Lieutenant, isn’t it possible that the gun allegedly owned by Mr. Ferris — which his brother said he routinely had with him — could have been lost in his truck or in his fishing shanty when they went through the ice?’

‘It’s possible,’ Stride acknowledged, ‘although the truck and shanty were both salvaged once the ice came off the bay in the spring. The gun wasn’t found.’

‘Would it have been possible for the gun to be lost in the bay when those items flooded and sank?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Thank you, Lieutenant. You also testified about an affair between Dr. Snow and a former colleague of yours named Nathan Skinner, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘You discovered this affair because the defendant brought it to your attention, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did Jay Ferris have a history of animosity with Nathan Skinner?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘In fact, Nathan Skinner was fired from the Duluth Police because of columns written by Jay Ferris, is that right? Columns in which he cited Nathan Skinner’s use of vile racial slurs?’

‘In part, yes.’

‘Did Nathan Skinner assault Jay Ferris after he lost his job?’

‘Yes, there was one such incident.’

‘During the course of your investigation, did you find evidence that Jay Ferris had discovered the affair between his wife and Nathan Skinner?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it reasonable to conclude that this information would have upset Mr. Ferris?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Mr. Ferris’s wife was sleeping with a man whom Mr. Ferris described in his columns as a racist, and you don’t think he would have been upset?’

‘I can’t speculate about Mr. Ferris’s reaction,’ Stride said.

‘Did you interview Nathan Skinner when you learned about his relationship with Dr. Snow?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Did Nathan Skinner admit to being angry at Jay Ferris?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Did Nathan Skinner have a verifiable alibi after 9:45 p.m. on the night of the murder?’

‘We confirmed he was at his apartment for part of the evening, but we couldn’t specifically confirm that he was there after 9:45 p.m.’

‘Thank you, Lieutenant.’ Gale put down one set of papers on the counsel table, and he picked up another folder. ‘Can you tell the court, please, did Jay Ferris file a police report last October 5 regarding an individual with a gun?’

‘Yes, he reported seeing an individual using an assault rifle in the woods near Ely’s Peak.’

‘Mr. Ferris took photographs of this man, did he not?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘Were you able to identify this individual?’

‘No. The photographs weren’t clear enough.’

‘However, your wife believes that she saw this individual in Miller Hall Mall and that he was carrying a handgun, doesn’t she?’

‘My wife followed a man who was similar in appearance to the man in the photographs. We don’t know if it was the same man.’

‘Did he threaten her?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘But you still haven’t identified this man, have you?’ Gale asked.

‘No,’ Stride admitted, ‘we haven’t.’

23

Heather Hubble was a photographer.

Cindy had worked with Heather the previous year following a fall she’d taken while shooting the ice caves of the Apostle Islands. Cindy had seen her twice a week for three months, and during that time, she’d poked into Heather’s life story with her usual curiosity. She learned about Heather’s five-year-old daughter, Lissa, and about the short-lived affair that had produced her. She found out that Heather’s parents didn’t approve of her vegan, out-in-the-woods lifestyle. She pegged Heather as one of the fringe loners dotting the northland, not bothering anyone and not wanting to be bothered.

Heather lived on a dirt road half a mile off the North Shore highway. Dense trees made the small home almost invisible, and the driveway was rutted with mud. It was the kind of house that would have been built decades earlier as a three-season getaway, but Heather lived in it year round. The cabin had been handed down by her grandfather, and it needed work. Fresh paint. Repairs to the roof and the deck. New windows. Cindy knew that Heather didn’t have much money for maintenance.

‘Hi, Cindy,’ Heather said with surprise when she answered the door. ‘What are you doing in the middle of nowhere?’

Cindy smiled. ‘I need your help.’

‘Sure, come on in.’

The small living room smelled of berries from two lit candles. With the windows open, a warm summer breeze made music on wind chimes hung from the ceiling. The house was messy, cluttered with old furniture and children’s toys. Nature photographs in cheap frames adorned the walls, leaving almost no open space. The photographs were good; Heather had a gift.

Heather cleared space on a plaid recliner for Cindy to sit. There were holes worn in the arms, with white fluff poking out from the fabric like drift from a cottonwood. Heather herself flopped down in a rocking chair and bounced back and forth. She wore shorts and a loose green tank top. Her sandy blond hair was shoulder-length, and her pale, freckled skin had no makeup. She was almost thirty, which sounded young to Cindy now. Once upon a time, it had felt old.

‘Where’s Lissa?’ Cindy asked.

Heather rolled her eyes and grinned. ‘My parents took her on vacation with them. Disney World. She’s going to come back with princess dresses and Mickey Mouse earrings. I’m not sure how I managed to raise a girly girl. That must be her father’s DNA coming through. He was always pretty impressed with how he looked.’

‘How’s the photo business?’ Cindy asked.

‘Not bad. Summer is wedding season. Brides are hell, but their daddies pay good money.’

‘And your back? It’s okay?’

‘Yeah, thanks. All the PT really helped. I’ve been pretty good about keeping up with the exercises, and yoga keeps me limber, too.’

‘Good.’

‘What’s going on with you?’ Heather asked. ‘You need some portraits done? Glamour shots for the hubby?’

Cindy laughed. ‘I think that would make Jonny blush. Actually, I have an odd favor to ask. I talked to Kon at Lake Superior Magazine, and she said you took a ton of photos at Grandma’s Marathon this year.’

‘Oh, yeah. Lots.’

‘Do you have many crowd shots?’

‘Sure. Crowd shots. Runners. I staked out several spots along the route, and I got onto the roof above the Canal Park shops so that I could get pics as people hit the finish line.’

‘I’d like to see them,’ Cindy said. ‘Are they all digital?’

‘Yeah, but you’re talking about hundreds of photos. What are you looking for?’

She started to give Heather a brief explanation about the man in Jay Ferris’s photographs, but the explanation got longer when she realized that Heather knew nothing about the murder or the trial. Heather didn’t get the newspaper, and her awareness of current events didn’t extend beyond an occasional report on the MPR classical music station. Cindy gave her the background of the case and then explained about the man she’d followed in the mall who’d eluded the police efforts to find him.

‘One of Jonny’s sergeants thinks he saw this guy in the marathon crowds,’ Cindy went on.

‘And you thought maybe I snapped him?’ Heather asked.

‘Exactly.’

‘That’s one needle in a pretty big haystack. Thousands of people cram the marathon route.’

‘I know.’

Heather shrugged. She went to a rolltop desk in the corner of the living room and dug inside several cubbyhole drawers. Finally, she withdrew a USB flash drive, which she deposited in Cindy’s hand.

‘Here you go,’ she said. ‘That’s a backup drive of all of my marathon pics. Knock yourself out.’

24

‘You lied to get on to that jury, didn’t you?’ Carol Marlowe asked.

Howard’s head snapped up at the dinner table. He put down a square of Sammy’s pizza and stared at his wife. Their six-year-old, Annie, chewed a strand of spaghetti that dangled from her mouth and watched with wide eyes.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

‘Did you tell them you’re obsessed with that doctor?’ Carol asked.

‘No, I didn’t, because that’s not true.’

‘Oh, really? You think so? I’ve got a good mind to call the judge. How many articles about Dr. Perfect would they find if they searched your computer?’

‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ he protested. ‘So I read some things about the case. Everybody in town did the same thing. I can still be objective.’

‘Sure you can.’ His wife cut a square of pizza in half and stabbed it with a fork. ‘Annie, stop playing with your spaghetti.’

Howard went back to his dinner in silence. Carol was jealous. She resented that he was in the midst of something big — that he had a starring role in a drama that was consuming the city. He didn’t believe she’d follow through with her threat about calling the judge, but the thought of it made him nervous. If they looked, yes, they’d find articles about the case on his computer. And pictures of Janine Snow he’d gathered around the web. He’d be kicked off the jury, which was the thing he feared most. This was the event of his life.

‘So what’s your plan, Howard?’ Carol continued, not letting the subject drop. ‘Do you have some fantasy of rescuing her? Will you be the one to convince the jury to let her off, and she’ll be grateful to you forever?’

‘That’s crazy,’ Howard said. ‘I’m doing what the judge said. I’m keeping an open mind until I hear all the evidence. Now would you drop it, please? I’m not allowed to talk about the case, so stop asking me about it.’

‘Open mind,’ his wife muttered. ‘You think she’s innocent. You’ve said so from the beginning. Did you tell the judge that?’

‘I never said anything like that!’ he protested. ‘I’ve always said I don’t know what happened. You’re the one who convicted her from day one. You and your friends at the grocery store. What is it about her that drives you crazy, Carol? Is it that she’s everything you’re not?’

The words were out of his mouth before he could take them back, and the implication hung in the air, as toxic as poison. Janine Snow was rich, successful, and beautiful. Carol Marlowe was none of those things. His wife went from angry to hurt in the blink of an eye. She pushed back her chair, which toppled behind her, and stood up with the rigidity of a statue. He wanted to apologize, but he didn’t. She stalked to their bedroom in silence and slammed the door, making the house shudder.

‘Oh, hell,’ he hissed.

Annie leaned over and whispered, ‘That’s a bad word, Daddy.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Is Mommy mad?’

‘I guess so.’ He added: ‘Are you done with your dinner? You can go watch television.’

Annie hopped out of the chair. He cleaned up the dishes, and then he sat in the living room by himself. The smart thing to do was go to their bedroom and apologize, but he knew it would just prompt more anger and more yelling. He didn’t have the strength for another fight with Carol.

Howard left the house to clear his head. It was dusk in the neighborhood, but it was summer, and he heard the noise of kids squealing in the nearby yards. He sat in his Chrysler in the driveway with the windows rolled down. Humidity made his neck sticky. Bugs flew inside. He smelled the overgrown lilac bushes on the side of their house.

He thought: Carol’s wrong. She didn’t understand what was at stake. She didn’t realize how hard he was trying to do the right thing. Block out everything he knew about the case. Ignore the attraction he felt to Janine Snow and the fascination he felt for who she was. Listen to nothing but the evidence.

There had been more witnesses at the trial.

They’d heard from a ballistics expert who talked about the bullet recovered from Jay Ferris’s brain and about the gun Jay wore in the photograph provided by his brother. Yes, the two were consistent. No, they couldn’t be matched without the gun itself. Yes, it was one of the most common guns sold in the country.

They’d heard from the private detective. Melvin Wiley. Yes, Jay knew about the affair and had witnessed Janine’s prescription drug use on the videos. Yes, he’d sworn to get even with his wife.

They’d heard from an attorney named Tamara Fellowes. Yes, she worked for a law firm that was suing Janine Snow over the death of a patient. Yes, she knew Jay Ferris, and yes, Jay had called her in December. No, she would not discuss the contents of the conversation, but she did testify about what she’d heard in the background of the call — a woman’s voice screaming at Jay.

‘Don’t do this to me, you bastard! Don’t you dare do this!’

Did she recognize the voice?

Yes, it was Dr. Janine Snow.

Howard backed onto the street and drove. He headed east out of his Piedmont Heights neighborhood and soon found himself on Skyline Parkway, with the green fairways of the golf course on his left and the steep pitch of the hillside on his right. The Enger Tower loomed above him. He turned at Hank Jensen Drive and made his way up to the parking lot at the base of the monument. There were other cars there, from people enjoying the summer evening. In a Ford Taurus, two teenagers groped each other, kissing, their clothes askew. When the girl saw Howard watching them, she extended her middle finger. He looked away.

Everything made him think of the trial.

A teenage boy had driven here with his girlfriend on January 28, just like the boy and girl in the Taurus. They passed a Rav4 on the way to the tower but couldn’t say exactly when or where.

Howard left the parking lot and kept driving. It was as if he were on autopilot, not setting a course. He was back on Skyline Parkway, and moments later, his LeBaron drifted to a stop at a spur road that climbed sharply up the cliffside to his left. At the summit of the road was the mansion belonging to Janine Snow. He knew he shouldn’t be here, but he turned the wheel and drove slowly to the top of the hill.

There was Janine’s house. He recognized it from the television reports and from the photographs at the trial. What an amazing place, like a palace built on the roof of the world. Lights were on. She was home, the defendant out on bail. There were no cars around. He wondered if she was alone. Just her, sitting amid the ruins of her perfect life. And Howard only a few feet away.

Judge Edblad had told them: You are not investigators.

Even so, he couldn’t restrain his imagination. He sat in the car with the engine running, and he realized that this was the very place where everything had happened. On January 28, inside that door, behind the glass windows, Jay Ferris had been murdered. If Howard had been here then, he would have heard the shot.

What would he have seen? A stranger running away?

Or Janine Snow pulling out of the garage in her husband’s Hummer to hide a gun?

Howard realized that what he wanted more than anything was to hear the story from Janine’s own mouth. He wished he could talk to her, look into her eyes, and listen to her answer every question. The frustrating thing was that he knew he never would. She wouldn’t take the stand. Defendants hardly ever testified. She was the one person who really knew the truth, and he would never hear her say what it was.

Somehow, his car engine turned off, and his door opened.

He didn’t think it was him getting out and walking toward the house. It was someone else. He felt his feet on the walkway, heading toward the front door. That was what a stranger would have done, coming to murder Jay Ferris. If there was a stranger.

Howard stood at the door. Janine’s door. He felt dizzy. His finger quivered; he wanted to stab the doorbell. If he did, she would come. He’d see her appear behind the glass. She would open the door — and that would be the end of everything.

He would have crossed a line from which there was no going back. Wheels would be set in motion. Attorneys would talk, and he would be called in front of the judge, and he would be admonished and dismissed, and one of the two alternates sitting in the jury box would take his place.

Howard Marlowe would be just Howard Marlowe again. A footnote in the newspaper, soon forgotten.

Carol would laugh at him.

He felt as if he were awakening from a bad dream. He turned and ran back to his Chrysler, needing to escape before he was seen. Before the police spotted him. Or the media. No one could know he’d ever been here. He got into his LeBaron and shot down the steep street.

Janine watched him go.

She sat in her office, where the security camera at her front door fed video to her computer. She’d installed the camera months ago when she had a parade of unwanted visitors coming to her house after the headlines brought notoriety.

She recognized him, of course. Juror #5. He was the one who sat closest to her in court. She hadn’t missed the fact that he liked to watch her. He tried to be discreet about it, but she caught his wandering glances in her direction. At first, she’d written it off as curiosity, but now she realized it was something more. She’d understood men all her life, much better than she ever understood women. This man was in love with her.

She knew she was attractive. Men had fallen for her since she was a high school girl in Texas growing up fast. This was different. Since the murder, men had sent her e-mails, proposals of marriage, and naked pictures. All types of men, married and unmarried, black and white, old and young, from across the country. For the stalkers, she’d become an object of fascination. And now, it seemed, one of those stalkers had made his way onto her jury.

He was an ordinary man. Physically, he was neither attractive nor repellent. If she’d met him on the street, she would have stared through him as if he didn’t exist. In other circumstances, the only way a man like that would have come into her circle was as a patient, but circumstances were different.

She was tempted. All she would have had to do was go to the door. Call to him through the speaker. Invite him into her home. She could have taken his hand and fulfilled his fantasy with a night unlike any he’d ever experienced. Sex meant nothing to her, but she knew it would have meant everything to him. For the price of giving up her body, she would have asked only one thing.

Hang the jury.

He would have done it, too.

Instead, she let him go.

Janine knew she should call Archie to have Juror #5 swiftly and quietly removed from the case, but she didn’t do that. He might yet be her salvation. She wondered if a man who was in love with her could really believe that she would shoot her husband in cold blood.

25

‘Mr. Skinner,’ Dan asked at trial when Nathan was sworn, ‘did you engage in a sexual relationship with the defendant, Janine Snow?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘How did this affair begin?’

‘Last spring I was doing part-time night security at the hospital where Janine practices. We got to know each other. One thing led to another.’

Nathan Skinner cocked his head with a little smile, as if it were simply nature’s way that two attractive people would fall into bed together. His magnetism would be felt by the women on the jury. Stride realized that Nathan was on his best behavior. Dan had probably counseled him to keep his ego and arrogance in check.

‘How long were the two of you involved?’

‘The relationship began in May. It ended in early December.’

‘Who ended it?’ Dan asked.

‘Janine. I think Jay found out and forced her to break it off.’

Archie Gale stood up. ‘Objection — speculative.’

‘Sustained,’ Judge Edblad ruled.

‘Mr. Skinner, were you acquainted with Jay Ferris?’

‘We knew each other, but neither of us would say we were friends.’

‘Can you explain?’

Nathan sighed, as if the dispute were nothing but a rueful part of his past. ‘I used to be employed by the Duluth Police. Unfortunately, I was on a vacation in the Wisconsin Dells and got pulled over by the local cops while I was very, very drunk. It was stupid. Stupid to be driving while drunk — and stupid to say the things I did to the police. I used offensive racial language that I really regret. As I say, I was drunk.’

‘What happened next?’

‘Mr. Ferris got a tip about my arrest, which was filmed by a dashboard cam on the police vehicle. He wrote a column about it — several columns, actually — calling for my dismissal from the Duluth Police. Ultimately, I lost my job.’

‘When was this?’

‘This was back in February of last year.’

‘Do you blame Mr. Ferris for being fired?’ Dan asked.

‘Back then? Sure. I was mad at him and mad at the world. I even took a swing at him in a club a couple weeks later. I felt like he was trying to make an example of me, but you know what? He was right. I deserved it. Like I said, I was stupid.’

If Nathan was acting, Stride was impressed with his performance.

‘Was your affair with the defendant an act of revenge against Jay Ferris?’ Dan asked.

‘I guess it started that way. After a while, though, we enjoyed each other’s company. I think Janine needed someone to talk to.’

‘Objection — speculative,’ Gale interrupted.

‘Sustained.’

‘During the course of your relationship, did the defendant offer her impression of her marriage to Jay Ferris?’

‘Yes, she told me she wanted a divorce.’

‘Did she express any opinion to you about the likelihood of obtaining a divorce?’

‘She said it would never happen.’

‘How exactly did she phrase it?’

‘She said Jay wanted to own her like a slave. She said she didn’t believe she would ever be able to get away from him while he was still alive.’

Murmurs rippled through the courtroom, and Judge Edblad quieted the crowd. Dan waited.

‘Mr. Skinner, did you ever have a conversation with the defendant about guns?’ Dan asked.

‘Yes, I told her that I knew Jay owned a gun.’

‘How did you know that?’

‘When I had the altercation with Jay, he showed it to me.’

‘Did the defendant express surprise at the news that Jay owned a gun?’

‘No.’

‘Did you say anything else to her about it?’

‘Yes, I said she should be careful in case Jay found out about us.’

Stride waited for the bomb to drop and for a new wave of whispers through the courtroom. Gale, who knew exactly what was coming, waited for it, too. Stride thought he saw a ghost of a smile on Dan’s lips.

‘What did the defendant say?’ Dan asked.

‘She said maybe she should get a gun, too,’ Nathan said. ‘She asked me if I knew how she could get one off the books.’

Archie Gale stood up, well aware that he had a disaster on his hands.

‘Mr. Skinner, how much money do you make in your current job?’ Gale asked.

‘Objection — relevance,’ Dan interjected.

‘Your honor, Mr. Skinner has testified that he lost his job with the Duluth Police because of the actions of Mr. Ferris. It’s relevant to know the specific impact this had on his financial situation.’

‘The objection is overruled,’ Judge Edblad announced.

‘I make minimum wage,’ Nathan said, and some of his casual confidence seeped into bitterness. He didn’t like to be humiliated.

‘Did you lose your house to foreclosure because of your loss of income?’ Gale went on.

‘Yes.’ It was more like a hiss.

‘Do you have substantial credit card debt?’

‘I don’t know about substantial—’

‘More than fifteen thousand dollars?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is your current financial situation directly attributable to your dismissal from the Duluth Police?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘So is it fair to say you hated Jay Ferris for what he did to you?’

‘I suppose so, but that was a long time ago.’

‘The economic consequences are still very real to you today, though, aren’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘You testified that you got to know Dr. Snow because you were doing part-time security work at her hospital, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you ask to be assigned to work at St. Anne’s?’

‘I–I don’t remember.’

‘Shall I call your boss and subpoena your employment records so we can confirm it?’ Gale asked.

‘Okay. Yes, I heard about an opening there, and I asked to get it.’

‘Why?’

Nathan was silent.

‘Mr. Skinner,’ Gale went on, ‘did you go after that position with the specific goal of seducing Dr. Snow into an affair?’

‘It may have crossed my mind,’ Nathan admitted.

The body language from Janine Snow at the counsel table was eloquent. She oozed scorn. It was easy to see similar reactions on the faces of the women on the jury. For all his attractiveness, there was a dark side to Nathan Skinner.

‘Mr. Skinner, were you interviewed by the police shortly after the murder of Jay Ferris?’

‘Yes.’ His voice was clipped. Impatient. He wanted to be done and off the stand.

‘Did you say anything to the police at that time about your affair with Dr. Snow?’

‘No.’

‘Did you believe the police would consider you to be a suspect in the murder of Jay Ferris if they found out that you’d been having an affair with the victim’s wife?’

‘I figured I was a suspect anyway,’ Nathan said, and then he winced.

‘Okay, and as a suspect, would it be in your interest to deflect police attention to someone else?’

‘I didn’t do that.’

‘When you were first interviewed, did you say anything to the police about Dr. Snow asking you how she could get a gun?’

‘No.’

‘You only told this story after Dr. Snow informed the police of your relationship, is that right?’

‘Yes, but it’s true.’

‘Did anyone else overhear this conversation?’ Gale asked.

‘No, but Janine knows what she said.’

‘Mr. Skinner, is there anyone who can verify your whereabouts after 9:45 p.m. on the night of January 28?’

‘No.’

‘Were you drinking that night?’

‘I — yeah, I guess.’

‘How much did you drink?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Do you own a revolver, Mr. Skinner?’

‘I gave my gun to the police. They tested it. It was clean.’

‘Is that the only handgun you own?’

‘They tested all of them. Clean as a whistle.’

‘How many handguns do you own, Mr. Ferris?’

‘Eight.’

‘Eight guns,’ Gale murmured. ‘Mr. Skinner, did you make a statement to Lieutenant Stride that if you had committed this murder, you would have simply dropped the murder weapon through the ice? That the police would never find it?’

‘Yeah, I did, but it was a joke—’

‘That’s all, Mr. Skinner. Thank you.’

26

‘I found him,’ Cindy told Stride.

It was late, and he was surprised that she was still up. He’d spent most of the day at the trial and then caught up on the job in the basement of City Hall until nearly midnight. His wife sat at their small kitchen table with a laptop open in front of her. Only the light over the sink was on. She wore a nightgown, and her feet were bare. The house with its open windows was warm and humid, and he smelled old coffee. A stiff wind made the lake roar like a lion not far from their back door.

Stride sat down across from her. Like him, she was nearly forty, and yet in his eyes, she could have been seventeen. She was the same teenager he’d met in school. He could barely remember what his life was like before she came into it. School, college, career — all that time, it was him and her together.

‘I found him,’ Cindy repeated, pushing a photograph toward him across the table.

‘Who?’

‘The guy at the mall.’

Stride studied the photograph and saw a crowd shot taken downtown during Grandma’s Marathon. His wife had circled a man with a black marker, and he held the page close and squinted at the face. She’d enlarged the photograph, but the image was crisp and clear. The man was overdressed for the warm June day in a camouflage jacket.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.

‘I know a photographer who covered the marathon. I’ve spent the last six hours analyzing every one of her pictures.’

She passed him the original photograph, before she’d zoomed in on the crowd. The picture had been taken from a second-floor window near the corner of Lake Avenue and Superior Street, facing northeast. Swarms of runners filled the street in the center of the frame; they were the jubilant, exhausted ones, within two miles of the finish line in Canal Park. Crowds twenty deep on the sidewalk cheered them on. Cindy had drawn an arrow to show the man in the original photo. He was little more than a stick figure standing by a lamp post in a brick-lined park well behind the flood of people.

The crowd watched the runners.

He watched the crowd.

Stride’s eyes snapped back and forth between the two pictures. ‘You’re certain this is him?’

His wife nodded. ‘I don’t know if this is the guy in Jay’s photos, but it’s definitely the man I followed at the mall. No question about it. I haven’t forgotten him, Jonny.’

‘I know.’

He studied the man and understood the aura of repressed violence that Cindy talked about. Maybe it was bravado, maybe it wasn’t. He focused on the people around the man and spotted a heavy-set redheaded woman seated on a bench no more than ten feet from the lamp post. She wore a lanyard and fluorescent vest that marked her as race security, but her face was turned away from the camera.

‘Did you find him in other photos?’ he asked.

‘Two more,’ Cindy said. ‘I haven’t printed them, but I can pull them up on the screen.’

She used the laptop touch screen and pushed the computer across the table to Stride. He zoomed in on the photograph, and he could see the man in camouflage in his original spot. The redheaded woman had stood up and was brushing shoulders with him. They were talking, and they didn’t look like strangers. Her face was clearly visible. He didn’t recognize her, but the marathon brought in plenty of private security on race day.

‘What do you think?’ Cindy asked. ‘Will these pictures help you find him?’

‘I don’t know about him, but we should definitely be able to find her.’ He stabbed a finger at the security guard in the photograph. ‘I’ll put Maggie on it in the morning.’

‘Good,’ Cindy replied, sounding relieved.

He watched a small smile of triumph bloom on his wife’s face. She got up from the table and stretched her arms over her head. Her white nightgown climbed up her thighs. He knew she’d had a long day, but he didn’t remember when he’d seen her so tired. He reached for her hand and squeezed it.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

‘Sure. Never better.’

‘This was smart of you,’ he said. ‘Nice work.’

She didn’t say anything, but he knew she appreciated the compliment.

‘You coming to bed?’ she asked him.

‘Soon.’

‘I’ll probably be asleep.’

‘That’s okay.’ He added: ‘You know I took you seriously about this guy, right?’

‘No, I wasn’t sure of that, but it’s nice to hear.’

He kept holding her hand.

‘The trial’s winding down,’ he said. ‘Dan rested the prosecution case today. Unless Janine testifies, they’ll probably wrap up the case tomorrow.’

‘Do you think she’ll testify?’

Stride shook his head. ‘No, Dan doesn’t think Gale will give him a shot at cross-examining her.’

‘And then?’

‘And then we wait for the jury.’

Cindy frowned. Her eyes were on the man at the marathon. ‘I wish you could find this guy first.’

27

Maggie ate a Sausage McMuffin in her Avalanche near the harbor on the Point. It was barely past dawn, but the July day promised to be hot and bright. As usual, she’d only slept for about four hours, and then she’d gone to the drive-through for breakfast. If there was one part of American culture to which Maggie was addicted, it was McDonald’s. She couldn’t get enough French fries and quarter-pounders, and somehow, none of it ever padded her girly frame.

Through her binoculars, Maggie spied Troy Grange on a Zodiac heading back to the harbor.

Everyone in Duluth law enforcement knew Troy. He was solid. Good values. Hard worker. People liked him. He could have been a cop, but he liked working on and near the water, so he signed on as a health and safety inspector with the company that handled security for the Duluth Port. Sooner or later, Maggie figured, he’d be running the whole department.

Thanks to his reputation, Troy also had an annual part-time job coordinating safety issues during Grandma’s Marathon. As a result, he knew everyone who worked security along the twenty-six-mile course.

She crumpled her paper wrappers into a ball and climbed down from her truck. Troy, docking the Zodiac, saw her and waved, and she waved back. He was a couple years older than she was and only a few inches taller. He was a weightlifter in his spare time, with a beefy, muscular frame. His skull was shaved smooth, and he had a face that wouldn’t win him a cover spread in GQ: an oversized, lumpy nose; a couple of broad chins; and florid cheekbones that pushed out from his face like a pair of red jawbreakers.

Troy wasn’t anyone’s idea of cute, but Maggie had a little bit of a thing for him. She liked nice guys. Stride. Troy. Apparently, she also liked married guys, because Troy and his wife Trisha had been married for five years and had recently had their first child, Emma. He was off-limits. Maggie didn’t spend a lot of time on self-reflection, but sometimes she wondered if she was doomed to have crushes on men she couldn’t have.

‘Sergeant,’ Troy announced as he bounded onto dry land. ‘I don’t usually get a welcoming committee.’

‘Hey, Troy.’

Troy, like Maggie, was an early riser, and he toured the dock areas from the water several mornings a week. His philosophy of security was that the best way to stop trouble was to make sure it never happened. He also liked seeing things with his own eyes, which was why he didn’t delegate basic tasks like reviewing the port facilities.

‘So what’s the McPoison this morning?’ he asked with a grin. ‘Hotcakes? One of those new McGriddle things?’

Maggie shook her head. People in Duluth knew way too much about her daily routines. ‘Sausage McMuffin with Egg, thank you very much.’

‘I don’t suppose you brought me one,’ Troy said.

‘And ruin your organic body? I wouldn’t dream of it.’

Troy chuckled. ‘Well, it doesn’t seem to hurt yours, Sergeant.’

She’d told him for two years to call her Maggie, but Troy stayed formal around cops. For him, it was a respect thing, even though they were friends. Part of her also wondered whether it was his way of keeping extra distance between them. She liked to think that her sex appeal didn’t go completely unnoticed.

‘How are Trisha and Emma?’ she asked.

‘Neither one getting much sleep.’

‘Well, sleep is overrated.’

‘I told Trisha that,’ Troy said, ‘and then I had to duck when she threw a shoe at me.’

Maggie laughed. She slid a copy of the photograph that Stride had given her from a back pocket, then passed it to Troy. ‘Listen, I’m hoping you can help us. This is a crowd pic from Grandma’s. See the redhead in the security uniform? I was hoping you know who she is.’

Troy glanced at it and handed the page back. ‘Sure. Jessie Klayman.’

‘What about the guy she’s standing next to? The hard case in the camo jacket?’

He took another look at the photograph. ‘No, sorry, him I don’t know.’

‘What’s the story with Jessie?’ Maggie asked.

‘She’s a temp. Moved to Duluth from Fargo about a year ago. She did mall security there. I’ve brought her in a few times on low-priority overflow work. Nothing sensitive. Between you and me, I don’t see her as full-time material. She’s not particularly reliable, and if I had to guess, there’s an alcohol issue.’

‘She looks about forty,’ Maggie said.

‘Yeah, that sounds right. I haven’t spent a lot of time with her. She’s nice enough, but I get tired of hearing about guns.’

‘Guns?’

‘Oh, yeah, she’s a bad-to-the-bone gun collector. Always going to shows around the country. She must have an armory at home by now.’

Maggie frowned. ‘Including assault rifles?’

‘Definitely. She brags about the hardware. No anti-government or militia crap. I wouldn’t hire her if I got a whiff of that. I think she’s just your run-of-the-mill gun nut.’

‘Where does she live?’ Maggie asked.

‘She’s got a little place in Gary. I’m sure I have her address.’ Troy dug a notebook from his pocket and riffled through the pages. ‘Here you go,’ he said, rattling off the number and street.

Maggie wrote it down. ‘Thanks. And you’re sure you don’t know the guy with her?’

Troy looked at the photograph again, taking more time. ‘He’s not familiar to me, but I know that Jessie’s got a kid. If you ask me, there’s some resemblance in the faces. The eyes and nose look similar. Maybe that’s her son.’

28

By noon, the case was theirs.

Closing statements were done, and for Howard, they were no more than a regurgitation of what he’d already heard. The judge read them instructions on the law and gave them verdict forms. One count of murder in the second degree — guilty or not guilty. There were no more witnesses, no more attorneys, no more exhibits, just the twelve of them together in the jury room. Twelve strangers.

Howard sat nervously at the conference table. The room was no more than a drab meeting space immediately behind the courtroom. Twelve chairs barely fit around the table. There was a leather sofa and a cabinet with a mini-refrigerator, microwave, and coffee maker. An old-fashioned clock ticked off the minutes above the microwave.

He realized they didn’t want the jury getting too comfortable. Do your work, make a decision, and go home.

The black woman who’d sat next to him throughout the trial chose a seat next to him again. Every day, she wore a different pants suit; today it was cream-colored, with lace stitching on the collar. She spoke first. ‘Let’s go around the table and introduce ourselves, okay?’

So they did. Some gave just their names. Some talked about what they did for a living. The woman in the pants suit said that her name was Eleanor and that she worked as a secretary in a small accountant’s office and had three children. She had a calmness about her, friendly but direct. Her dark skin was mottled. Her hair was short and neat.

‘We need to pick a foreman,’ a man at the other end of the table announced when they’d finished introductions. Howard tried to remember the man’s name and thought that it was Bruce. He was the only juror in a tie, and he’d made a point of bragging that he managed a downtown hotel. He was in his sixties, with a gray mustache and a comb-over.

Eleanor said, ‘Well, who among us would be willing to be the foreman? Maybe we should start there.’

Bruce raised his hand immediately. Eleanor stared at the man thoughtfully, and then she raised her hand, too. It was just the two of them. No one else volunteered. Eleanor suggested they each talk about how the foreman could help the group, and when they did, Bruce talked about his management experience, and Eleanor simply said she wanted to respect the process and deliver a fair result.

They passed notepaper around the conference table, and when they’d voted, Eleanor was named foreman by a vote of 10 to 2. Bruce didn’t look happy with the outcome.

‘We have four questions to answer,’ Eleanor reminded them as they began their deliberations. ‘I think we can decide three of them easily enough. Can we take a vote as to whether the state proved that Jay Ferris was dead?’

They did. All agreed.

‘And let’s also vote as to whether the death took place in St. Louis County in the state of Minnesota?’

The same result.

‘Finally — and if any of you disagree, we can postpone this question — can we vote that whoever killed Jay Ferris did so with an intent to murder him? My own opinion is that if you point a gun at someone’s head and pull the trigger, your intent is pretty clear. But that’s just me.’

They voted, and they agreed that intent had been established.

‘That’s progress,’ Eleanor announced with a smile. ‘That leaves us with one question, and it’s the big one. We have to decide whether the state proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Janine Snow caused the death of Jay Ferris. I think it’s important that we review all the evidence carefully regardless of what any of us is thinking at this particular moment. Right? But I also think it would be useful for each of us to share our preliminary opinion, recognizing that our opinion might change as we look at the facts. Okay?’

Howard felt his body tense. Sweat gathered on his neck. This was the moment he’d anticipated, but he had no idea what to say.

Reasonable doubt. The judge had told them: Reasonable doubt is just what it sounds like. It’s doubt based in reason and common sense. The state does not have to prove its case beyond all doubt. Some doubt always exists about most things in life.

‘Let’s go around the room,’ Eleanor said.

Answer yes or no, she told them. Answer yes if you think the state proved its case. Yes if you’re ready to declare Janine Snow guilty of murder.

The juror on the other side of Eleanor answered first. ‘Yes.’

And another. ‘Yes.’

One juror declined to answer. So did the next. And then:

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

Howard stared at their faces. They made it look so easy. They’d sat in the same courtroom as him, and the case was already clear in their minds. They’d looked into Janine’s face and seen a killer there.

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

Don’t be influenced by emotion or passion, the judge had said. The only thing you should look at are the facts of the case.

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

The vote around the table reached Howard. There hadn’t been a single person to vote no. Not a single person with doubt. Only two jurors had declined to vote openly, and the rest had made up their minds.

Guilty.

‘I–I’m not sure,’ Howard said. ‘I guess I have to say no.’

There was silence in the room. Howard felt their eyes on him, and his skin burned with embarrassment. Did they know? Did they know how he felt about Janine? Don’t be influenced by emotion or passion.

‘Fine,’ Eleanor said. ‘My own vote is yes. Howard, could you tell us about the doubts you have? That may help us think through the evidence.’

Howard tried to organize his thoughts. Yes, he had doubt. Was it reasonable doubt? He didn’t know. Part of him wanted to believe there was no way that Janine could have pulled the trigger. Part of him wanted to rescue her. Another part of him, the cold part, heard Carol’s voice from months earlier. She did it.

‘They didn’t prove that Janine fired a gun,’ Howard pointed out. ‘Or that she even had a gun.’

The hotel manager Bruce said acidly: ‘Janine?’

Howard flushed. ‘The defendant.’

‘I think we should call her Dr. Snow,’ Eleanor suggested. ‘She’s the defendant, but she’s also a human being, and we’re deciding how she’s going to spend the rest of her life. Let’s not forget that.’

‘They couldn’t prove Dr. Snow fired a gun because she took a shower,’ Bruce retorted. ‘How convenient is that? She just happened to be doing the one thing that would erase evidence of her firing a gun.’

Several jurors grumbled their agreement.

Another woman spoke up. ‘Plus, we saw a photograph of her firing a gun. For me, that’s a big thing. You’re either a gun person, or you’re not. I wouldn’t have a clue how to fire a gun. Dr. Snow knew.’

‘Nathan Skinner also testified that Dr. Snow asked him how to get a gun,’ Bruce pointed out. ‘On the QT.’

‘That’s true, but do we believe Nathan Skinner?’ Eleanor asked. ‘He’s an important witness, but I’m not sure I find him credible.’

‘Maybe Skinner killed Ferris,’ Howard suggested. ‘Maybe he’s trying to frame Dr. Snow.’

Bruce shook his head. ‘That’s crazy.’

‘Why?’ Howard asked. ‘Skinner has no alibi for the time of the murder.’

‘We saw phone records,’ Bruce replied. ‘From early December to January 28, Skinner didn’t call Snow. He didn’t call Ferris. They didn’t call him. There was no contact at all. So all of a sudden, seven weeks after she breaks off the affair, Skinner goes over there with a gun? I don’t think so. Plus, we heard testimony from the pizza girl who said Ferris was in his apartment the night of the murder, sick as a dog, watching a hockey game. The game started at 9:00 p.m. What do you think? Before the third period, he suddenly got it in his head to drive to Ferris’s place and shoot him? Sorry, I don’t buy it.’

Howard said nothing. The other jurors nodded their heads.

‘All right, but what about Skinner’s testimony that Dr. Snow asked him about getting a gun?’ Eleanor said. ‘I just don’t think I believe him about that. They were lovers. Frankly, if she wanted a gun, he would have gotten her one. And he didn’t do that.’

Bruce pursed his lips and shrugged. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I guess I’m with you on that.’

‘Let’s focus on what we do know,’ Eleanor went on. ‘In her statement to the police, Dr. Snow admitted that she was home when the murder occurred. She admitted arguing with her husband, which was confirmed by testimony from Cindy Stride. Mrs. Stride also testified that Dr. Snow wanted to get a divorce, but she couldn’t because she felt trapped.’

‘Feeling trapped doesn’t mean she killed her husband,’ Howard insisted.

‘She’s a pill junkie!’ Bruce barked. ‘Ferris was holding it over her head. You bet she was trapped. And she only had one way out. Bang!’

There was silence again. The twelve of them looked at each other, and Howard felt all of them looking at him. The man with doubt. The only man who wasn’t ready to throw Janine into the fire.

29

Stride pulled up to the gravel driveway of Jessie Klayman’s house in the town of Gary. It was on Dickson Street, near where the road dead-ended. The house was single-level, with a detached garage and wooden steps leading to the front door. The large yard was mostly scrub grass and weeds, and in back, the lot butted up to a line of trees. He saw two cars in the driveway, a green Dodge Neon and a rusted Pontiac Firebird.

He got out on one side of his Bronco, and Maggie got out on the other.

‘Know where we are?’ she asked, pointing down the street to 108th. ‘Turn left there and left again on Becks—’

‘Ely’s Peak,’ Stride said.

‘Yeah.’

He studied the small house. He’d walked up ordinary driveways to ordinary houses too many times to take it lightly. The outside never told him what was happening inside. ‘Stay alert,’ he said.

They headed for the front door, where he pressed the doorbell and heard the chime. Thirty seconds passed before a woman answered. She pushed the storm door open and smiled, but her eyes were wary. If this woman worked security, she knew how to recognize cops.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked. Her voice had the overexcited trill of a bird at dawn.

‘Are you Jessie Klayman?’ Stride asked. When the woman nodded, he said, ‘My name’s Jonathan Stride, and this is Maggie Bei. We’re with the Duluth Police.’ He showed her his badge, but she hardly looked at it.

‘Yeah, I figured,’ the woman replied, smoothing her dyed-red hair with dyed-red fingernails. She was pudgy and short, and she wore a form-fitting Twins T-shirt with jean shorts. ‘What’s up?’

‘We just have a couple questions for you. May we come inside?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

She waved them into her living room. A game show blared from the television. The room smelled of beer. So did Jessie’s breath. Stride saw the kitchen adjacent to the living room, where dirty dishes mingled with empty Budweiser cans. There was no air conditioning, and the shadowy interior was warm with stale air that hung in the room.

‘You were on the security team during the marathon last month, weren’t you?’ Maggie asked her.

‘Yeah.’

‘We’re trying to identify the man who’s standing next to you in this picture.’

Jessie took the photograph from Maggie with two thick fingers. The glib smile on her face wavered. ‘Why are you looking for him?’

‘Do you know him?’ Stride asked.

‘Has he done something?’

‘Ms. Klayman, is this your son?’ Maggie asked. ‘Troy Grange thought it was.’

She sat down on the old sofa. An empty bag of Doritos was on the coffee table in front of her. ‘Okay, yeah, that’s Ross. So what?’

‘Is he here?’ Stride asked.

‘No.’

Stride eyed the hallway that led to the bedrooms. ‘Does your son live with you?’

‘Yes. What is this about?’

‘We’d just like to talk to him. Do you know when he’ll be back?’

‘No, he went for a walk. Do you think Ross has done something wrong? Because he hasn’t. He’s a great kid.’

Maggie withdrew another photograph from her pocket. This one was a blurry picture taken by Jay Ferris near Ely’s Peak, showing a man in camouflage aiming an assault rifle. ‘What about this photograph?’ she asked. ‘Is this Ross?’

Jessie studied it. ‘I don’t know. I can’t make out the face.’

‘Do you or Ross own a rifle like this?’

She shrugged. ‘We have guns. They’re all legal.’

‘Including a Bushmaster rifle?’ Maggie persisted.

‘Yeah, so what? I told you, they’re all legal.’

‘What about handguns?’

‘Yeah, we have some. Sure. I don’t have to remind you guys about the Second Amendment, do I? A person would have to be nuts not to carry a gun in this day and age. No offense to cops, but I don’t have time to wait for a patrol car to mosey over here if someone breaks into my house.’

‘Would you mind if we take a look at Ross’s room?’ Maggie asked.

Jessie folded her arms across her ample chest. The chirrup in her voice rose higher. ‘Actually, I do mind. You come in here asking all these questions about my son, and you won’t tell me what’s going on.’

Stride exchanged a glance with Maggie. ‘Well, thank you very much for your time, Ms. Klayman. We’d appreciate it if you or Ross could give us a call when he’s back. We need to meet with him in person.’

She shrugged. ‘Okay, but it’s a waste of time. He hasn’t done anything.’

Stride and Maggie let themselves out of the small house and returned to his Bronco. He turned on the engine, and a song by Sara Evans began playing on the stereo. ‘Born to Fly’. He put the truck in park but kept his foot on the brake.

‘You think it’s the same guy?’ Maggie asked him. ‘That Jay Ferris spotted Ross Klayman at Ely’s Peak?’

‘Probably, but I don’t think we’ll be able to prove it. We don’t have enough for a warrant to test their guns.’

‘The jury’s already out. Do we need to tell Dan about this?’

‘Yeah, I’ll tell him, for what it’s worth,’ Stride said. ‘It’s up to him whether he wants to disclose it to Gale. I don’t think this changes anything at all with regard to the case.’

Maggie glanced at the house, where Jessie Klayman stood at her front door, watching them. When the woman turned away, Maggie slid sunglasses over her face. ‘You don’t have any doubts about the case, boss?’

‘What, that Janine killed Jay?’ Stride asked. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘None at all?’

‘No reasonable doubt,’ he said. ‘That’s the only thing that matters.’

An hour later, Jessie jumped as she felt a hand tickling the back of her neck. She spun around and saw Ross standing behind the sofa. His lips folded into a grin. He could always sneak up on her.

‘You scared the crap out of me!’ she exclaimed.

‘Sorry.’

He wore an army hat, with the brim pulled low, and wraparound shades. A black tank top left his shoulders and skinny arms bare, exposing his tattoo of a skeleton dressed for combat. His skin glowed with sweat from the heat of the day, and he smelled of pine. He wore camouflage pants and heavy trail boots.

Jessie went back to her game show. ‘The police were here for you,’ she told him.

Ross didn’t say anything. She turned and saw her son staring down at her from behind his shades. The grin was gone. His mouth had no expression. She saw a twitch ripple through his bones.

‘Did you hear me?’ she said. ‘The police were asking about you.’

‘I heard you. What did they want?’

‘I don’t know. They didn’t say.’

‘What did you tell them?’ he asked.

She heard accusation in his voice, which annoyed her.

‘What do you think I told them? Nothing. I said they should leave us alone.’

Ross went to the living room window and pushed aside the curtain to watch the empty street outside. He did that a lot, as if he were waiting for someone who never showed up. She heard the muffled engine of a lawn mower in the neighborhood. Typical summer day.

‘I’m sure it’s no big deal,’ she went on. ‘Somebody probably saw you practicing with the Bushmaster and got freaked.’

‘They said that?’ he asked, his back to her.

‘They had a picture. You with a rifle. It was blurry, so I said it could have been anybody. It was you, though.’

She got up from the sofa. The credits rolled on the game show. She wasn’t sure why she watched; it was people earning money by knowing stupid things. She’d tried to get on a show herself once, but they never wrote back to her. It didn’t matter. They had enough money to live.

Jessie came up behind her son, wrapped her arms around his waist, and laid her head against his back. ‘You’re so tense,’ she said.

He said nothing.

‘I’m going to take a shower,’ she told him. ‘A cool one. It’s so hot.’

Still he didn’t answer, and she didn’t let go.

‘Love me?’ she asked.

A long time passed, but finally he said: ‘Yes.’

That was all she needed to hear.

30

The vote was 11–1.

They’d all declared themselves now, even the two jurors who had originally been undecided. Howard remained the hold-out. They’d spent three hours in deliberation. He’d begun to see impatience in their faces, especially Bruce, who acted as if Howard were standing between him and a steak dinner and a bottle of wine. Eleanor, the foreman, remained calm as the others grumbled.

‘Howard, you understand that reasonable doubt is a different thing from having no doubt, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I get that,’ Howard said.

‘No one’s asking you to change your opinion simply because we feel differently,’ she went on, ‘but I want to make sure we’re all looking at the evidence the same way.’

Howard pushed his water glass in circles around the wooden table. He stared down, rather than looking up. ‘I just don’t see it the way the rest of you do.’

He got up and went to the lone window in the jury room that looked out on the city. He didn’t want to sit with the rest of them. He felt isolated, and being on his own made him more stubborn. They couldn’t tell him how to vote. They couldn’t convince him that the beautiful woman whose face was always in his head had taken a gun and put a bullet through her husband’s brain.

‘Howard?’ Eleanor said. ‘Let me ask you a couple questions, okay?’

‘Fine.’

‘Do you believe that Dr. Snow felt trapped in her marriage and didn’t see a way out?’

‘Lots of people are unhappy in their marriage!’ Howard snapped. ‘They don’t take a gun and shoot their spouse. It doesn’t work like that.’

Bruce opened his mouth, but Eleanor held up her hand sharply to silence him. ‘Howard, yes, of course, that’s true, but Jay Ferris is dead. Someone did shoot him. And my question to you was — do you believe that Dr. Snow felt trapped? Did the state establish that to your satisfaction?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, sure. I’m not arguing about that.’

‘Okay. Do you also believe that Jay Ferris was dangling a threat over Dr. Snow’s head regarding her addiction to pain pills?’

Howard remembered the newspaper column. Holly. The prescription drugs in the condo. He imagined the pressure Janine had been under. As a surgeon. As a wife. Nowhere to turn, no way to escape, except for the drugs. He’d been on morphine once, when he’d had his appendix removed as a teenager. He knew its allure, the way it could make your whole body float on a cloud.

‘Yes. I think he was.’

‘So let’s think about this,’ Eleanor said quietly. ‘Dr. Snow wanted out of her marriage, but her husband knew a secret that would have destroyed her life and career. Regardless of whether you’re convinced she did kill him, do you believe that she would have seen Jay’s death as a way out of her problem?’

How lonely it must have been, Howard thought. To have everything and nothing at the same time. With Jay alive, she was in a cage. With Jay gone, she would be free.

‘Yes, she probably did,’ Howard said.

‘Fine. Good. If we’re all on the same page about that, then let’s think about the night that Jay Ferris was killed. We know that Dr. Snow was in the house. We know that she and her husband argued. A few minutes later, he was dead. The state wants us to go one step further and believe that Dr. Snow killed him.’

‘I’m just not convinced that she did—’

Eleanor stopped him with a smile. ‘Hang on, Howard. Let’s think about what we have to believe to conclude that there isn’t sufficient proof that Dr. Snow killed him. Okay? We have to believe that someone else chose that same foggy, slippery night to go to her house. If it was someone bent on robbery, as Dr. Snow contends, then we have to believe that they saw the lights on and a car in the garage and still decided to proceed with their plan. We have to believe that they either knocked or rang the doorbell — because there was no forced entry — and that Jay Ferris let them inside. This person then shot Ferris in the head, went downstairs without tracking any outside dirt or debris in the house, found jewelry in the bedroom, removed it, went back upstairs, and left. We have to believe that this all happened during the exact period of time when Dr. Snow was in the shower. We also have to believe that whoever did this either chose not to dispose of the jewelry despite committing murder to get it or somehow sold these distinctive, expensive pieces of jewelry without any of the sales coming to light. Okay? Howard, have I said anything that you disagree with?’

He shrugged. It sounded ridiculous when she put it like that, but she was right. ‘No, that’s true.’

‘Well, my question is this: Do you believe that is a reasonable theory of what happened? Anything is possible, but is that a credible alternative in the absence of evidence? Because we see this case differently. We see a successful woman with a terrible secret. She’s home alone with her husband. They argue, and she shoots him. Then she showers and washes her clothes to destroy evidence, and she takes the gun and some jewelry and hides them to make it look like a robbery. That’s what we think the evidence shows, Howard. Eleven of us believe there is no reasonable doubt that that is what actually happened.’

Howard returned to the jury table and sat down. He took the glass of water and drained it empty.

‘What about the Rav4?’ he asked.

‘The witness who saw the car is unreliable about the time and location,’ Eleanor said. ‘It makes it hard to take the story at face value. And really, a car parked on a nearby street? Is that enough to create doubt?’

‘There was a man with a gun,’ Howard added. ‘Ferris took pictures of him in the park.’

Eleanor nodded. ‘He did, but it’s clear that Ferris never even knew who this man was. Why would this person suddenly get it in his head to kill Jay Ferris? And really, Howard, isn’t it stretching coincidence to think that it happened during the exact time Dr. Snow was in the shower?’

Howard wanted to give her an answer. He wanted to keep defending Janine. Carol was right: he dreamed of rescuing her. He’d stared at her face on his computer for months, until he could remember every feature of her eyes, her hair, and her skin. She excited him, interested him, and aroused him in a way no other woman ever had. And now she needed him. She needed him to remain strong in the face of eleven people who were ready to condemn her. She needed him to have faith that the evidence was not what it appeared to be.

Doubt.

But was it really doubt?

He looked at the facts the others saw and knew the truth. Yes, Janine did it. He was grasping for reasons to believe otherwise, but she did it. Even so, could he really be the one to convict her? She deserved better than Jay Ferris. She was a hero. A life-saver. A beautiful woman. If she saw no other way to escape that despicable man, could he really call it a crime?

They would poll the jury. They always did. They would ask each of them to verify their verdict to the court. He would have to say it out loud. He would have to say it in front of her, so that she knew he’d betrayed her.

Could he do that?

Eleanor was watching him. So were the others. It was as if she could see tectonic plates shifting inside his mind.

‘Let’s take another vote,’ Eleanor said quietly. ‘Guilty or not guilty.’

And so it began. He listened to each voice, man and woman, old and young. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. They went around the room, and each one announced their decision, free of doubt, free of hesitation. They weren’t burdened by what they were doing to her. They weren’t shamed by the thought of a good woman brought to this moment by a bad man.

Guilty.

Guilty.

On and on.

As it had each time, it came down to him. He sat in silence, while they waited for him. He tried to open his mouth, but despite the water, he was dry. His voice caught in his throat. He thought the world was spinning; he wanted to throw up.

‘Howard?’ Eleanor asked him.

He needed to speak. Guilty or not guilty.

He saw Janine’s face. Her blue eyes. The curve of her lips. There was one person between her and her fate. Himself. Him and his strength. If he surrendered, there was no one.

Eleanor met his eyes.

‘Howard?’

31

Miller Hill Mall was a blur.

It was a summer afternoon. Sun burned through the skylights, making orange reflections on the cool squares of tile. Cindy heard Rick Springfield singing through the overhead speakers, but young laughter drowned out most of his music. The food court was thick with teenagers. Girls giggled and screamed. Boys with newly changed voices shouted. They ran and pushed around her table.

So many people. Duluth was a small city, but it had always felt busy to her. Normally she thrived on dense crowds, but recently she’d found herself enjoying remote, empty spaces. Alaska was like that. She and Jonny had flown over glaciers and forests where there was nothing human at all, only thousands of miles without civilization, untouched and unspoiled. It was a place, like the Canadian wilderness to the north of them, owned by the animals and the earth, not the people. The loneliness and sheer size of it made her feel small, but sometimes small was a good thing. She didn’t mind being small.

She smelled caramel corn mixing with the garlic of tomato sauce and the sweetness of baking bread. The air conditioning couldn’t keep up with the heat of the day, and she felt warm in her long-sleeve red blouse and jeans. Her black hair felt like a coat on her shoulders, so she pushed it back.

Her plate of Chinese food wouldn’t go down. She picked at it, but she had no appetite. Instead, she drank Aquafina from a plastic bottle.

She kept thinking about Janine. She didn’t begrudge her friend her weaknesses as a human being. Some people dealt with pressure by taking pills. Some people drank. Some people didn’t deal with it at all. In the end, it was the same. The shame of it was knowing that Janine had a gift, and her gift was wasted now. She remembered meeting a young mother and her son in Janine’s office, a little boy with a zipper scar on his chest and his whole life in front of him because of what Janine had done for him. His was one story among hundreds of patients who owed their lives to her.

And yet what did it do to someone to know that people lived or died because of you? Cindy knew what it had done to Janine. It had made her an addict. Maybe it had made her a killer, too. She’d been so jealous of Janine’s coolness that she didn’t realize how many cracks riddled the ice queen.

She found herself watching the young people in the mall. They always made her smile. Every generation had to make the same mistakes, had to get it wrong before getting it right. They blundered on, innocent, happy, foolish. She saw a boy and girl at a table near her. Both of them looked to be about sixteen. Definitely dating. They shared a Blizzard from Dairy Queen with two spoons, and they leaned across and kissed.

That had been her and Jonny ages ago. Two teenagers in love. Cindy tried not to be too obvious about watching them, but something about their cute preoccupation with each other made it hard to look away. Mooning eyes. Whispers. Touches.

The boy checked his watch, made a noise like, ‘Oh, no!’ He had to go. He slung his backpack onto his arm, kissed the girl again, kissed her several times more, and then jogged to the exit with a wave. He disappeared into the parking lot. The girl was on her own, missing him already. Maybe it would last, and maybe it wouldn’t. It would be a summer romance, or, like her and Jonny, it would be a lifetime thing.

Cindy wondered what the girl’s name was, and almost on cue, another teenager shouted and waved. ‘Hey, Laura!’

Laura. Her own sister’s name. There were always little twists of fate like that.

Laura, the girl in the mall, had golden brown hair with bangs. The shape of her eyes made Cindy think that the girl had Asian blood in her. She wore a white T-shirt, which slid off one scrawny shoulder. Her lipstick was pale and pink. She twisted a cheap ring around one finger, and Cindy figured that the boy had given it to her. Laura pulled a book from her purse and began reading. One of the Harry Potter series. That was the craze. Laura popped gum in her mouth as she read, chewed, blew a bubble, popped it. When she saw Cindy watching her, she gave her a big, bright smile, and Cindy smiled back.

You saw people, and then you never saw them again. Have a nice life, Laura.

Watching the young girl, Cindy finally decided she’d been putting something off for too long. She grabbed her phone and dialed and held a hand over her ear. Steve Garske was her doctor, and she expected to get his nurse, but she got the man himself. Steve and Jonny were old friends. Tall, gangly, sweet, heck of a guitar player. His clinic was small, and if no one was around, he answered his own phone.

‘Appointment time, Steve,’ Cindy said.

‘You want me to figure out my own calendar system?’ Steve asked in dismay. ‘Okay, hang on. How about next week? Thursday?’

‘Perfect.’ She wrote down the date and time and felt better.

Then Steve said: ‘Everything okay?’

If everything was okay, you answered right away, and when she didn’t, his voice slid down an octave. ‘Cin?’

‘I–I don’t know.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Well, there’s pain sometimes.’ She lowered her voice and cupped a hand in front of her mouth. ‘Sharp pain between my legs. I’ve been nauseated, too. Throwing up.’

‘When did this start?’

‘Winter.’

She expected the lecture. You’re only calling me now? You let this go on and did nothing? He didn’t need to chastise her, because she’d said all those things to herself. ‘Well, I’ll see you in a few days,’ he told her. ‘We’ll check it out.’

‘Thanks. Nothing to Jonny about this, right?’

‘Of course.’

She hung up. Tears welled in her eyes. She stared at the young girl in the mall, Laura. The girl with her sister’s name. She tried to make herself smile again, watching this sweet teenager who was in love and learning about sex and reading about boy wizards. What a great life.

‘Verdict,’ someone said.

Cindy looked up. There was a buzz around her. People were talking. They were crowding toward an electronics store with televisions in the window.

She heard it again.

‘There’s a verdict.’

Stride and Maggie walked shoulder to shoulder through the narrow underground tunnel that led from City Hall to the County Courthouse building. The concrete block walls were painted bright white, and so was the ceiling, which was lit with fluorescent tubes. Utility cables ran in a twisted knot beside them.

Maggie’s short legs worked double-time to keep up with Stride. ‘That was quick,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect a decision so soon.’

‘It was an easy case,’ he replied. ‘Archie blew smoke, but that wasn’t enough. The jury saw through it.’

‘So you think it’s guilty?’

‘I do.’

They emerged through the door into the courthouse basement. They took the steps to the lobby, where reporters crowded into the corridor. It looked like election night. Stride hung back, not wanting to give interviews. He saw Dan Erickson deflecting questions, too, as he squeezed through the sea of people. Politicians knew not to brag until it was a done deal.

Archie Gale kept reporters away from Janine. His face was sober. He knew he’d lost. Janine didn’t look at the floor the way so many defendants did, about to learn their fate. She looked straight ahead into the cameras that flashed in her face, and when she spotted Stride near the head of the steps, her head tilted in an almost imperceptible salute. She was under no illusions.

‘She’s a cool one,’ Maggie murmured.

‘Yes, she is.’

He’d been in this situation many times before. Most of the time, justice won out. Even so, he took no pleasure in it. Every murder had many victims. He had sympathy for Janine Snow and the pressure cooker of her life and the systematic way that her husband had made it worse. She’d snapped. Even smart, beautiful people snapped.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get up to the courtroom.’

‘Hang on,’ Maggie replied.

Her phone was ringing.

She answered and tried to listen above the din. He watched her face and grew concerned. She grabbed his arm, tugging him back to the stairs. When they were out of view of the reporters in the lobby, she waved him urgently downward, and they both jogged to the basement. At the tunnel door, she shoved her phone in her pocket.

‘Gunfire,’ she said. ‘We need to get out there.’

‘Where?’

‘Dickson Street, boss. In Gary. Neighbors report multiple shots.’

‘Is it—?’

She nodded as she ripped open the door, and they both sprinted into the tunnel. ‘It’s Jessie Klayman’s house.’

32

The Pontiac Firebird that had been parked in the driveway was gone. Otherwise, the house looked as it had two hours earlier when they interviewed Jessie Klayman. Two police cars had Dickson Street closed at 108th, and two more were parked at the dead end. An ambulance waited behind the barricade. The handful of neighbors on the street had been warned to stay inside and away from windows.

Stride called the phone inside the house. No one answered.

‘We think Ross is gone,’ Maggie said. ‘Guppo talked to two teenagers who live across the street. They said he usually drives the Firebird.’

‘Did they see him go?’

‘No, but he may have headed out the back. There’s a dirt road behind the house that leads through the trees to Gary Street.’

‘Get his photo out around the city. The car and license, too.’

‘In process,’ Maggie said.

They wore their vests. Through binoculars, Stride examined the small house and saw no movement at the windows. All the curtains were closed. So was the door to the detached garage. Overhead, the sun was bright in their eyes.

‘We’ve got two officers staking out the back of the lot,’ Maggie said. ‘There’s no activity.’

‘Okay, let’s check it out.’

They used a neighbor’s lawn to approach the house from the east. There were no windows on the east wall other than at the basement level, where there was a door and a look-out window. The detached garage was on their left. As they cleared the neighbor’s house, Stride saw one of his officers in position at the rear of the Klayman lot near the tree line. The cop gave a thumbs up; the rear of the house was secure.

Stride had his gun in his hand. So did Maggie. Guppo and three other cops followed twenty yards behind them.

They reached the Klayman driveway. The house was built against a slope, and a two-level retaining wall and garden led to the front yard. Jessie Klayman kept stone nymphs among the weeds. Stride climbed the first level of the retaining wall at the corner of the brick basement. The windows of the living room were above their heads, and another window at ground level looked into the basement.

No activity.

He pulled himself up to the front lawn. Crossing under the living room windows, he took the wooden steps to the door and pounded sharply with his fist. ‘Jessie! Ross! Police!’

There was no answer. Looking through the storm door, he saw that the front door was wide open. The room where they’d sat with Jessie was empty, but the television was still on. He shouted again and heard nothing but the laughter of a TV sitcom. The living room showed no sign of disturbance.

Stride opened the screen door and went inside. Maggie followed.

‘Jessie!’ he called again. ‘It’s Lieutenant Stride.’

They cleared the kitchen and the living room, which were both deserted. He used the remote control to switch off the television, restoring silence to the house, except for the rattle of the rotating floor fan. It was dim inside with the curtains closed. He pointed at the hallway, where he could see entrances to two bedrooms.

The first door was painted black, but it was open, and an overhead light was on. He nudged around the threshold into the bedroom, and the interior took his breath away. Maggie entered behind him.

‘Oh, shit,’ she said.

There was no bed, just a mattress on the floor. The walls, like the door, were painted black. The glass of the windows had been covered over with black plastic garbage bags duct-taped to the frame. A television sat on an old microwave stand in front of the mattress, and dozens of video games were strewn across the carpet. Gold ammunition littered the floor like popcorn. At least thirty bullet-ridden paper targets were thumbtacked to the wall, along with bizarre posters: a skeleton wearing a Nazi uniform; a naked girl with the head of a jackal and gun barrels for nipples; a skinless zombie in a diaper with blood spurting out of his face; and a Las Vegas casino street littered with torsos and severed limbs.

Across the entire wall, Ross had spray-painted in five-foot red letters: I AM GOD.

‘Jesus, who is this kid?’ Stride murmured.

But they knew who he was. They’d seen him before, in other cities, in schools, in workplaces.

Stride had made mistakes in his life. He’d arrested people who turned out to be innocent. He’d left cases unsolved. He’d failed to protect people he’d sworn to protect. This was different. This time, he’d missed a threat that Maggie had seen too clearly. That his wife had seen. He knew there was no bright line between social misfit and mass murderer, but he hadn’t seen this one coming.

Ross Klayman was out there somewhere. He was going to kill.

‘Where are the guns?’ Maggie asked. ‘Troy said Jessie had guns.’

They investigated the next bedroom, which was Jessie’s room. The gun locker was there, open and empty. No rifles. No handguns. No ammunition. Ross had taken everything when he left the house. If Troy was right, then Ross had an arsenal with him.

Stride saw Guppo in the doorway behind him.

‘Alert everybody, Max. Canal Park. Downtown. The mall. The DECC. He’s going to show up somewhere.’

Guppo turned away, already pulling out his walkie-talkie.

‘Boss,’ Maggie called. Her voice told him the story.

She was in Jessie’s bathroom. Stride joined her there, already aware of what he was going to find. The bathroom was still humid and damp from the shower. The plastic curtain had been shunted aside. Jessie Klayman was sprawled on her back in the tub. She was naked, and her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. Wet strands of red hair lay like veins across her face. The blood all over her body, on the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling, on the porcelain tub, matched her hair.

Ross had shot his mother at least thirty times.

Guilty.

Cindy stood in a crowd around the window of an electronics store, watching the live news report on local television. The crawl at the bottom of the screen announced the jury verdict. Janine Snow had been found guilty of second-degree intentional murder in the death of her husband, Jay Ferris.

She’d expected it, but she wasn’t prepared for the finality of the result. It was hard to draw a line in her mind from that bitter January night to this hot summer afternoon. She’d driven Janine home. Her friend. She’d watched her go inside with her husband. Minutes later, Jay was dead, and now, months later, her friend had been convicted of his murder. Cindy had been there when it all began.

The reporters speculated about the sentence. The statute called for punishment in cases of intentional second-degree murder of not more than forty years. The sentencing guidelines suggested twenty-five years for a defendant with no criminal history. Archie Gale was on television, vowing an appeal and proposing a sharp downward adjustment in the jail time. Regardless, everyone expected the judge to sentence Dr. Janine Snow to at least twenty years at the women’s correctional facility in Shakopee, Minnesota.

Twenty years.

From the beginning, Jonny had said she was guilty. So had Maggie. So had everyone in the city, who’d convicted her in the court of public opinion from day one. And now a jury of twelve Minnesotans had agreed.

Cindy listened to the mutterings of the people around here. The sentiments all sounded the same — that it had ended the way it had to end. She wondered if it was schadenfreude, that joy in watching the downfall of someone who had climbed high. The television showed a picture of Janine in a white surgical coat, blond hair perfect, body perfect. A miracle worker. A millionaire. A murderer.

Dan Erickson appeared on the screen, lecturing about justice applying to everyone, taking no pleasure in the tragedy.

Jay’s brother Clyde came next, expressing satisfaction with the verdict but reminding everyone that a conviction wouldn’t bring his brother back to life. Which was true. If Janine had done this thing, no matter her motive, no matter the circumstances, then she had to pay the price.

The reporters talked about the jury and their willingness to convict without the discovery of the murder weapon. They interviewed the foreman, a woman named Eleanor, who praised the eleven people who served with her and the careful job they’d done. She expressed sorrow for victim and killer alike, but she said the verdict was the only reasonable conclusion that anyone could draw from the facts as they were presented to them.

Cindy tried to imagine herself on that jury. Would she have voted to convict? And to her surprise, she realized: Yes.

She heard her phone ringing and slid it out of her purse. Jonny was calling. She assumed he’d been in the courtroom when the verdict was read, and now he wanted to mend fences with her. They’d argued about it for months. It wasn’t in her nature to accept that she was wrong and Jonny was right. He was a stubborn man, but he had a stubborn wife, too.

‘Okay, I’m sorry,’ she said as she answered the phone. ‘You win.’

Jonny simply said: ‘Where are you?’

‘What?’

‘Cindy, where are you?’

‘I’m at Miller Hill Mall. I’m watching the news about—’

‘Get out of there,’ he interrupted.

‘Why?’

‘Cindy, get out of there right now. I don’t want you in any public place.’

‘What is going on—’ she began, but then she stopped.

Her words hung in the air. So did the noise of the mall. The music overhead. The laughter. The television in the store window. She found herself staring at a pretty woman in her thirties who’d been shopping at Aéropostale. She clutched a big bag in her hand. She smiled, joking to a friend, mouth open as if she were singing a karaoke song. That was who she was at that moment, but a moment later, the bag fell from her hand. The light vanished from her eyes. She threw her arms in the air and staggered forward, and dots of red spattered over her body the way rocks made splashes in the lake.

The noise caught up to Cindy’s ears. Staccato explosions of gunfire rocked back and forth between the walls. Dust blew, tile shattered, and smoke clouded the air. Her fingers loosened; her phone fell.

The pretty woman near her slumped to the ground. So did another woman. Then an older man.

As they dropped, as the people scattered around her, she saw him coming.

Everyone screamed. Everyone ran.

33

Howard sat with Carol in his car across the street from the courthouse. A crowd lingered on the steps. Some of the jurors had stayed behind to answer media questions, but he didn’t want to be interviewed. If he started talking, he’d say the wrong thing. An hour had passed, and already he regretted what he’d done.

He’d said it the first time in the jury room: ‘Guilty.’

And then again in the courtroom: ‘Guilty.’

Janine had watched him as the judge polled the jurors. Her eyes burned him. It was as if she knew. He expected her to reach out a hand, to touch him with her cool fingers, to whisper: ‘Don’t betray me.’

But he had. He squeezed his eyes shut, said the word, and cast her away like all the others. He was weak. When he looked again, she hadn’t looked away. He thought he saw the tiniest of sad smiles on her face. Forgiveness.

‘You did the right thing, Howard.’

It was Carol talking.

He stared at his wife in the driver’s seat of his LeBaron. She’d picked him up in white sweatpants and a Dells T-shirt. She looked at him like a hero, and he realized she was proud of him. He’d just sent a woman to prison, and she thought it was the greatest thing he’d ever done.

‘I know it was hard,’ Carol went on. ‘If you want the truth, I wasn’t sure you could do it. You’re a softy at heart, Howard. I mean, that’s a good thing most of the time, but it takes guts to convict somebody of murder, even when you know darn well she’s guilty.’

‘Let’s just go home,’ he murmured.

She nodded at the reporters near the courthouse flagpole. ‘Don’t you want to go answer some questions? I know this was a big thing for you. You’ve earned a little fame for being part of it. I can wait here.’

‘No, I don’t want to talk to anybody.’

Carol started the engine. Then she turned it off and took his hand. ‘Hey, listen, I’m sorry. I know I’ve been a bitch lately. You were in a tough spot, and I wasn’t being supportive.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t care about that.’

‘Well, let me make it up to you. We’ve got the Dells coming up in a couple weeks. That’ll be fun. We can get Annie a pizza and rent her a movie one night, and you and me can fool around, huh? It’s been way too long.’

He summoned a smile. ‘Sure.’

‘Anyway, I’m glad this is over,’ Carol said. ‘No more Dr. Perfect. We can go back to living our lives. Just you, me, and Annie. It’s about time, right? I’m ready for things to be exactly the way they were.’

Howard didn’t answer, because that was his worst fear. He didn’t want to go back to his old life. He didn’t want to be normal again. He hated the idea of things being exactly the way they were.

‘Wow,’ Carol said.

‘What?’

She lowered the window. ‘Don’t you hear it? Listen to all those sirens. Something big’s going on.’

From her hiding place inside a leather goods store, Cindy could see bodies in the corridor of the mall, dead where they’d fallen. The tiled floor and columns bore wild streaks of blood. Smears. Handprints. She smelled the discharge that comes with death, mixing like spoiled roses with the sugary aroma of the food court and the leather jackets dangling in front of her. Just as incongruously, the overhead music continued to play happy pop songs. Britney Spears. ‘Oops!... I Did It Again’. The crowd noise that typically drowned out the music had emptied into a muffled chorus of people crying and praying.

Shopping bags spilled their contents onto the floor where they’d been dropped. Swimsuits. Strappy heels. Bottles of lotion. Stuffed animals. She saw cell phones, too, abandoned in the melee. One by one, they began to ring, forlornly, before going to voice mail. Word had spread instantaneously around the city.

Those who could reach exterior exits had escaped, but there were dozens more, like her, trapped in stores. At least ten people huddled near her, hiding behind clothes racks, their arms wrapped tightly around their knees, their faces buried in the crook of their legs. It was as if, by not looking up, they could make themselves invisible. As if the shark eyes of the gunman would pass over them. Or maybe they just couldn’t bear to see the end when it came.

She didn’t think five minutes had passed, but their imprisonment felt like hours.

He hunted them methodically from store to store. She couldn’t see him, but he wasn’t far. He fired and moved, fired and moved, fired and moved, like a soldier occupying a beachhead. Seconds of silence stretched out between assaults, giving her faint hope, but then a new hailstorm rained down not fifty feet away — gunfire, store windows shattering, victims screaming, individual bullets that could only be kill shots directed at those who had nowhere to run. And then his boots making new footfalls. Tap knock tap knock.

He worked his way toward them. They didn’t have much time. Each assault was a little closer, a little louder.

Cindy saw a fifty-something woman pressed against the wall of the leather store, like a prisoner lined up for a firing squad. The woman’s sanity had flecked away, scattering into confetti. Her jaw was slack. Cindy tried to catch the woman’s eye and give her a smile of encouragement, but there was nothing but faraway panic in the woman’s face. She was a rabbit facing the open jaws of a fox.

And then she began to talk to herself. The noise was jarring.

‘Nicky, come in from the rain,’ the woman murmured. ‘Are you cold, Nicky? Come in from the rain.’

What she said made no sense. Her words came out as a whisper, but then she spoke more, and each time, her volume got louder. ‘Hide in the barn, Nicky... don’t be afraid of the spiders... hide in the barn.’

Her voice sounded like a child, far younger than she was.

‘I smell apples. Isn’t that funny? Apples!’

Cindy gestured urgently with her hands to make the woman stop. Others in the store hissed for silence. The woman didn’t hear them; she simply stood at the wall, shaking uncontrollably, retreating into some long-ago memory.

‘Climb up here with me, Nicky. Be careful! Don’t fall!’

Another voice murmured from a hiding place: ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’

And then another whisper, in rage and fear: ‘Shut up, you stupid bitch, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.’

But the woman was nearly shouting now. Turning them into targets.

‘Crows. I hear crows, Nicky. LISTEN TO ALL THE CROWS.’

Cindy felt around her pockets, but she knew she’d dropped her phone. Even so, she had to do something; she couldn’t wait. She spotted a lost phone just outside the doorway of the store, maybe three feet into the mall corridor. She leaned beyond the rack of coats where she was hiding, far enough to see through the store window. The gunman, wherever he was, wasn’t in view. She broke cover, crawling for the doorway, and stopped in its shelter.

‘NICKY, COME IN FROM THE RAIN.’

The phone was just out of Cindy’s reach. She listened for the warning alarm of the killer’s boots but heard nothing to give away his location. Maybe he’d fled. Maybe he’d gone down another corridor of the mall, hunting for new victims.

Or maybe he was waiting for her outside the store.

Cindy took a breath and dove. She scooped up the phone and rolled back into the protection of the doorway. It took no more than two seconds. Her body tensed, waiting for gunfire, waiting for the window to shatter into popcorn above her. Nothing happened, but the silence almost felt more ominous than the noise of bullets. Her chest hammered as if she’d just done her morning run.

She punched the numbers for Jonny’s cell phone. It rang, but he didn’t answer, and she realized he wouldn’t recognize the caller ID on the phone. When the call went to voice mail, she left a hushed one-sentence message — ‘It’s me, answer the next call’ — and then she tried again, hoping he’d pick up.

Finally, on the fourth try, he did. His words tumbled in a rush.

‘This is Jonathan Stride, who is this?’

‘It’s me,’ Cindy whispered, keeping the phone close to her mouth and her eyes on the store window. The mall filled her senses. She could hear water gurgling somewhere — a fountain. Britney was done singing; now it was Bono and U2. ‘With Or Without You’. She felt cold tile under her knees, and her arms were sticky with someone else’s blood she’d dragged into the store. She smelled leather and death.

‘Cindy! Where are you? What’s going on?’

‘I’m hiding at Wilson’s. You need to get in here right now. He’s killing everybody he comes across.’

‘Can you see him? Do you know where he is?’

‘No, but he’s close. He was firing inside one of the stores near us just a couple minutes ago. People are dying, Jonny.’

‘HIDE IN THE BARN, NICKY.’

‘What the hell is that?’ he asked.

‘There’s a woman freaking out in here. You need to hurry.’

‘Get in the back of the store and hide. We’re moving on all of the entrances right now. We’ll be there in less than sixty seconds.’

‘NICKY, LISTEN TO THE CROWS.’

Cindy waited desperately for the clatter of doors and guns as the police stormed the mall, but instead, like the rattle of bones in a cemetery, she heard the solitary march of boots again. His boots, clapping the floor in a sing-song rhythm. Tap knock tap knock. He was heading for the leather store.

He was almost here.

‘We don’t have sixty seconds, Jonny,’ she said calmly.

‘Hide! We’re coming!’

She shut off the phone. There was no panic now for her and no terror. If he loomed over her, if he fired, she would be dead in seconds; she knew that. It didn’t matter. Calmness ruled. Calmness became her. Sixty seconds became fifty. She glanced at the store, draped in jackets and purses, and saw the frozen shapes of the others sheltered there. At the back, behind the sales counter, she could buy time for herself. A few seconds, but that was all she needed.

Jonny was coming.

Fifty seconds became forty.

She willed herself to move and save herself, but then everything changed for her. On the opposite side of the mall, she saw the doorway of a Victoria’s Secret store. Models of crazy perfection wore almost nothing in the window posters, but the spatter on the glass made them look as if they were covered in blood. In the doorway of the store, standing up, terrified, was a teenage girl.

It was the girl who had innocently sat in the food court, making out with her boyfriend. The sweet half-Asian girl reading about Harry Potter. The girl with her sister’s name. The girl with an entire amazing life ahead of her.

Laura.

That girl — Laura — stood paralyzed no more than twenty feet away. She stared at Cindy, and Cindy stared back at her. Laura wore a skirt that left her long legs bare, and her knees practically knocked against each other. She wore heels that weren’t meant for running, but she was going to run. Her pretty oval eyes darted back and forth, looking for escape. She was a deer by the highway with a truck coming, startled, ready to bolt.

The exit door wasn’t far away. Laura thought she could make it, but Cindy knew she couldn’t.

Tap knock tap knock.

Cindy spread her fingers wide on both hands and pushed the air, as if she could shove Laura back into the store, as if she could make the girl turn around and hide. She shook her head frantically, needing her to understand. She mouthed the word over and over: No! No! No! No!

Forty seconds became thirty-five. Time slowed down until she could almost see the world drift to a stop.

Don’t run! Don’t run!

Laura ran.

The teenager took six steps in her gangly heels before the bullet took her down. She wailed, her head flung back. Red bloomed on perfect peach skin, and her leg caved under her. She toppled, her shoulder struck the floor, and she squirmed on her back, clutching her thigh.

Tap knock tap knock.

There he was. He marched into view, a soldier all in camouflage, a warrior armed with an assault rifle and ammunition slung over his chest. He had a handgun outstretched at the end of his right arm. He came for Laura, the wounded animal, to deliver the killing shot. Laura wriggled away and cried and begged. He was ten feet from her.

Thirty seconds.

Every other thought in Cindy’s brain went away. Every thought of herself and Jonny vanished. Cindy knew only one thing: Teenagers weren’t supposed to die. Her sister wasn’t supposed to die.

The girl on the floor of the mall was not going to die.

Cindy charged. She took off like a sprinter and crossed the space between her and the gunman in one breath. He heard her coming, he felt her coming, and as he turned, bringing the gun with him, she launched herself into the air. She was small, but so was he, and they collided heavily, both crumpling to the tile. She was on top of him, but he hit her hard with the side of the gun, and the impact made her limp.

Twenty seconds.

Somewhere in her mind were the shouting and the thunder of the police. Somewhere close by was Jonny. But not close enough.

He pushed her off him as if she were nothing but a toy. He rolled onto her chest, crushing her, holding her down. She smelled the sourness of his breath and saw his tattoos glowing with sweat. She grabbed his forearm, but he was stronger, and so she bucked her head forward and sank her teeth into his wrist, tearing away skin. He howled. The gun fell. In rage, in pain, he clapped her forehead with the heel of his hand, and her skull shot back against the stone floor.

Circles of burning light burst like ripples in her head, and each ripple dizzied her. There was no more time, no more countdown of seconds, just a merry-go-round that wouldn’t stop. She was vaguely aware of him above her, aware of a velcro pocket ripped open, of another gun in his hand. His knees were on either side of her chest. She struck him, but her hand was like a mosquito, easily brushed away.

Footsteps pounded. Chaos. Noise. Voices.

The gun was in her face.

Bullets rang from the police, but no bullets touched him, as if he were shielded. She saw his lips bend into something like a smile. The end was near, but so much could happen at the finish. The barrel touched her cheek, like a kiss. His finger caressed the trigger. More bullets came, more guttural shouts, but the tumult was meaningless. There were only two people in the mall. Him and her.

He leaned down and whispered.

‘I am God,’ he told her.

Then in a single smooth motion, he shoved the barrel of the gun into his own mouth and blew off the back of his head.

34

Janine had never given much thought to walls. As a rule, she didn’t like them. She preferred to stare through windows. Her office had large windows, and so did her house, and there was something about the openness of the view that made her feel free. Which she wasn’t. Not anymore. She realized as she looked around the drab holding cell that walls were about to become a big part of her life, and she would need to make peace with them.

Clothes, too. The uniform of prisoners at the women’s correctional facility in Shakopee consisted of jeans, a denim shirt, and sneakers. She had no need of fashion anymore. She’d already decided to donate her wardrobe to charity for sale at an auction. The executive from the American Heart Association told her they’d make a lot of money that way. He looked sheepish about admitting that people would bid astronomical sums to own the clothes of a surgeon-turned-murderer. Janine wondered who those strange people were, and whether they would actually wear her clothes in public.

Archie waited for her to regain her focus. She found herself mostly unable to think since the verdict. Even knowing the likely outcome, she really hadn’t taken time to consider what it meant for her. And now, with all these changes in front of her, she found she could barely concentrate. She was being carried along by a river, and it would take her wherever it wanted.

‘The appeal process will continue,’ Archie said. He looked calm, but there was no jovial smile and no jokes today. He wore his pressed, tailored suit, which reminded her that he was part of a club — the outside world — of which she was no longer a member. She didn’t hold it against him.

‘On what grounds?’ she asked.

‘There are always grounds. We’ll analyze the transcript. Technicalities may seem like small things, but they can loom large on appeal.’

She allowed herself a smile. ‘And really, Archie, how often does this bear fruit?’

He rubbed his salt-and-pepper goatee. He didn’t bury the truth for her under false hope. ‘Not often.’

‘No. I didn’t think so.’

‘This Ross Klayman incident may change things, however,’ Archie said.

Janine thought about the mall, where she’d often walked and shopped. She thought about Cindy wrestling a gunman and saving a teenager’s life. A hero. From time to time, Cindy had talked about being jealous of Janine and about how physical therapists helped people but they didn’t really save people. Which was all wrong, in Janine’s view. She wondered if Cindy felt differently about herself today.

‘What a terrible thing,’ Janine said. ‘What makes a man do something like that?’

‘I don’t think there are any answers to that question. Even so, the fact that Jay saw this man with a gun — and that Klayman did this—’

‘Ross Klayman didn’t kill Jay. Let’s not kid ourselves.’

Archie studied her with his sharp blue eyes. ‘You don’t know that for sure, Janine. Do you?’

She got the message. It’s not about reality. It’s about the law. ‘I just don’t want to exploit this tragedy.’

‘It’s not exploitation. It’s a reasonable question given the facts and given Klayman’s behavior.’

‘I hear you, Archie,’ she said. ‘Now can we get back to the real world?’

The lawyer nodded. ‘Judge Edblad will probably announce a sentence at the hearing next month. The guidelines call for a sentence between twenty-two and thirty years, and given your history and the lack of aggravating factors, I think we can expect a sentence on the lower end. I’ll argue for a downward departure from the guidelines but, candidly, I don’t expect it.’ Archie hesitated. ‘Here’s something for you to consider, Janine. A confession and statement of remorse might get sympathy from the court.’

She smiled sweetly. ‘Even if I didn’t shoot him, Archie?’

They stared at each other for a long time before her lawyer shook his head. It was one of the only times she’d been able to see inside his mind. He thought she was guilty. ‘No,’ Archie replied. ‘I can’t advise you to say something that isn’t true.’

‘Well then. What does all of that mean in terms of time in prison?’

‘You can typically expect to serve at least two-thirds of your sentence before being considered for supervised release. So if the sentence is twenty-five years, that would be almost seventeen years of time in Shakopee.’

Some of her coolness faltered. She hadn’t dwelt on the reality, but seventeen years was a lot of reality. The prime of life gone. She would no longer be young or beautiful at the end. She would be a felon in her mid-fifties with little money left and no profession. It was almost harder to imagine stepping back onto the street than spending the years behind the prison walls.

‘Seventeen years,’ she murmured.

Archie was silent. No doubt he’d seen this drama play out many times before.

‘What will it be like?’ she asked.

‘Prison life is mostly about routine and rules,’ he replied.

‘How exciting.’

‘You can have visitors.’

‘There’s no one to visit me,’ she said.

He had no answer for that one. She had no parents. No siblings. No friends who would travel to see her. And no husband, obviously.

‘Do I have to worry about my physical safety?’ she went on.

‘In general, no, but there are always risks. Most of the inmates are non-violent offenders, but Shakopee is the only women’s prison in the state. Women who commit violent crimes go there, too.’

‘Like me,’ Janine pointed out.

Archie heard the sarcasm in her voice. He leaned across the table and took her hands. He played the grandfather now. ‘Listen, Janine, I won’t pretend that this is anything but what it is. Hard. Long. Painful. That said, it is not the end of your life. As impossible at it may seem right now, you’ll have to find a way to embrace it.’

‘Embrace it,’ Janine said. She smoothed her blond hair. ‘What would that look like, do you suppose?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Well, you’re honest, Archie. The fact is, I’m a doctor. That’s all I am. It’s my whole life. I never wanted to be anything else. And now I can’t be that anymore. So what do you suggest I do?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know. However, you’re not the only doctor in prison. Some find other ways to use their professional knowledge. Others decide to explore a completely different side of themselves.’

‘You’re assuming I have one,’ Janine said.

Archie waited. Then he said: ‘Are you a danger to yourself?’

‘You mean suicide?’

‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’

‘No, Archie. That’s the good thing about being an incorrigible narcissist. We can’t imagine depriving the world of our presence.’

‘I’m serious,’ he said.

‘So am I.’

Archie tried to see if there was any real threat behind the jokes, but smarter men than he had tried and failed to decipher the riddle of Janine Snow. She took pride in that.

‘You’re wrong,’ she told him.

‘About what?’

‘This is the end. It’s like death, really. People go away, and we go on with our lives. That’s what’s going to happen to me. I’ll go away, and people will forget about me. I hate that.’

‘That’s not true. How many lives have you saved? Those people and their families aren’t going to forget you. I imagine many of them still thank you in their prayers every night.’

She shook her head. ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that. It’s a waste of time. Patients are always sending me gifts, knitting me sweaters, lighting candles for me. I wish they’d stop and accept it for what it is. Some debts aren’t meant to be repaid. It’s better not to try.’

He didn’t have an answer for her. Instead, he gathered his papers and stood up. ‘I’ll be in touch as I know more,’ he said.

‘Of course.’

Janine’s eyes traveled from wall to wall. She wasn’t any closer to accepting them. Each time she looked, it seemed as if the walls had pushed inward, making the space around her smaller.

‘So what would it take?’ she asked. ‘To throw out the conviction.’

‘The appeal process—’

‘Not the appeal,’ she said. ‘I’m not talking about legal loopholes. I mean, what would it take to really prove that I didn’t shoot Jay? Enough for a judge to release me.’

Archie looked down at her, trying to gauge if she was serious. After all, he still believed that she was the one who pulled the trigger. ‘Honestly?’ he asked. ‘The gun. And the jewelry. In someone else’s hands.’

Howard sat in Judge Edblad’s office. He’d dressed in a tie again, the way he had during the trial. His collar was moist where his neck sweated. The office in the courthouse was formal, with an oak desk and a flag, but he also saw pictures of the judge with his family and posters on the walls from Disney World. It was strange to think of the judge as a human being.

‘Mr. Marlowe,’ Judge Edblad said, entering the office from the corridor and taking a seat across from him at the conference table. He wore a suit, not the robe he’d worn in the courtroom. ‘My clerk said you wanted to talk to me.’

‘Yes.’

Howard tried to go on. He’d rehearsed the words, and now they left him. He didn’t know what to say.

‘Well, what can I do for you?’

‘It’s about the trial of Dr. Snow. I’m having second thoughts.’

‘Second thoughts? In what way?’

‘I voted with the others to convict her. I said she was guilty, but now I’m not sure.’

The judge tented his fingers on the table. He didn’t roll his eyes or tell Howard that he was a fool. There was a patience about the man that Howard liked. ‘Why is that?’ he asked.

‘I just — I just wonder if she really did it. And now with the news of that killer in the mall—’

‘That was a horrifying incident,’ the judge agreed. ‘If the police uncover any evidence to suggest that Mr. Klayman could have murdered Mr. Ferris, then Dr. Snow’s attorney will certainly file a motion to throw out her conviction. However, that’s not anything you need to concern yourself with.’

‘I know. I’m just having doubts.’

‘I understand. I’d like you to answer a few questions for me. Did any of the other jurors pressure you to vote to convict? Were you subject to any threats or intimidation?’

‘Oh, no. I mean, I was the only hold-out at first, but they didn’t pressure me. Eleanor was good. She talked me through the evidence. In the end, I thought I was doing the right thing, but now I don’t know.’

‘So when I asked you in the courtroom to confirm that you shared in the unanimous verdict, did you answer fully and truthfully that you were voting guilty?’

‘Yes—’

Judge Edblad nodded. ‘You made a difficult decision, Mr. Marlowe. Now you’re having second thoughts about it. It’s not uncommon. We call it buyer’s remorse. Unfortunately, in the absence of any actual misconduct in the jury room, it doesn’t constitute sufficient grounds to void the verdict.’

Howard tensed. ‘Except — except I want to change my vote.’

‘It’s too late. The trial is over.’

‘What if I talk to Mr. Gale?’ Howard asked.

‘You can certainly do that. I’ll inform him of our conversation, too, as well as Mr. Erickson. However, a juror changing his mind after the fact isn’t enough for a new trial. I’m sorry.’

Howard stood up. He felt crushed. ‘I see. I’m sorry to bother you, your honor.’

‘It isn’t a problem, Mr. Marlowe. Being a juror is a weighty responsibility. Everyone in this courthouse understands and respects that. You did your civic duty, and now you can go on with your life.’

The judge stood up, too, and walked Howard to his office door. He clapped him on the shoulder, showed him out, and shut the door behind him. Howard could see the jury room in front of him, where the deliberations had taken place. It was empty. He wanted to go inside, sit down again, and change the past.

Go on with your life.

That was what Carol had said, too. We can go back to living our lives.

They all wanted him to forget about Janine, but Howard couldn’t do that.

35

Cindy sat on the green bench at the end of the Point in the midst of a small patch of sand by the bay. She checked her watch, but Jonny was late. He usually was. She’d gotten used to it over the years.

This was Jonny’s place, where he went to stare at the calm waters. As teenagers, they’d first talked about marriage here, in that awkward way that young lovers grope toward their future. When Jonny’s mother died, they’d come here to talk about the good and bad of her life. Now it seemed like the right place for them to talk about other things.

It was dusk. The August days were getting shorter, stealing away the sunlight. Long shadows filled the park behind her. At her feet, crowns of golden alexanders swayed as the breeze blew, and the bay ripples gurgled at the beach. As warm as it was, she shivered. There were moments late in every summer where you got the first kiss of fall, a little finger up your spine that reminded you of what lay ahead.

She’d visited the teenager from the mall that afternoon. Laura. The girl was home now, out of the hospital and recovering nicely from the bullet she’d taken in her leg. Reporters had wanted to talk to both of them and take pictures, and Cindy had given them a firm no. She didn’t want publicity. She’d spent half an hour with Laura and her parents, and they’d fallen over themselves to thank her, which made her uncomfortable. She didn’t want thanks or tears. The only thing she wanted was for Laura to go on and live her life. The ups and downs. The happiness. The sadness. She’d hugged the girl at the end and whispered: ‘Don’t let this be who you are.’

Which was easier said than done, she knew. That moment in the mall would be the seminal moment of the girl’s life. She’d have nightmares. She’d be in therapy for years. She’d wonder why she was spared when others died. That was okay. You couldn’t ask those questions and wrestle with the answers if you weren’t alive.

She and Jonny hadn’t talked about it. They’d agreed to put it aside in a box. She knew he wanted to ask her how she could have taken such a crazy risk with their future, but he couldn’t. Not when he would have done exactly the same thing at the same moment. But that was his job. For her, it was a choice, but in the moment, she felt as if she had no choice at all.

Cindy heard the engine of his Bronco and saw him pull into the dirt of the parking lot beside her Outback. He got out and smiled at her and crushed a cigarette in the sand. He mussed his wild black hair. God, he was handsome. That was what she’d thought years ago, when she’d met him in school, this intense, brooding teenager who was obsessed with doing the right thing. Whatever that might be. Now he was in the prime of his life, and she didn’t think he’d ever looked better than he did at that moment. Cocky and confident, wounded and deep. He was such a strange, wonderful mix, this man of hers.

He sat down beside her on the bench and stretched out his long legs. His boots were dusty. He had a can of Coke in his hand, and he took a drink and then offered it to her.

‘You think I want your spit, Jonny?’ she asked.

He laughed, but she took the can anyway and finished it.

Together they watched the dying light on the bay. They didn’t talk for a while. He held her hand, and their skin was damp and warm. The evening was alive with summer sounds — insects in the bushes, the whine of a floatplane overhead, the pop of illegal firecrackers on the lakeside over the dunes.

Finally, she said: ‘Do you know anything more?’

Jonny nodded.

‘Did he...’ she asked.

That had been the question in her mind since it happened. Did Ross Klayman kill Jay Ferris? Her mind had spun out theories in which Ross was guilty. Jay spotted him somewhere. Found him. Followed him. Ross had eliminated the one man who could stand in the way of his planned rampage.

Which meant that her friend, Janine, was innocent.

‘No,’ Jonny told her.

He didn’t give her any room for doubt. She felt a wave of disappointment, but not any sense of surprise. ‘Are you sure? You sound sure.’

‘The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension tested every handgun we found in Klayman’s car that could have been used in the murder. None of them matched.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, does it? He could have gotten rid of the weapon.’

Jonny shook his head. ‘There’s more. We went over Jessie’s credit card bills. There was a charge from a gun show in Arkansas on January 28. The Arkansas police talked to several of the vendors, and they all knew Jessie and Ross. They confirmed that Ross was with his mother at that show. He was a thousand miles away from Duluth when Jay was killed, Cin. He didn’t do it.’

‘Oh.’

And that was that. Ross Klayman didn’t do it. Janine did.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘No, you were right all along. I was wrong.’

‘You weren’t wrong about Ross Klayman,’ Jonny said flatly. ‘Nine people died. Thirty more were wounded. Maybe if we’d found him earlier, we could have stopped him. I feel responsible.’

She squeezed his hand hard. ‘Don’t you ever do that to yourself, Jonathan Stride. Do you hear me? It’s not your fault.’

‘No?’

‘No. It’s not.’

‘I’m having a hard time accepting that.’

‘Mentally ill people don’t wear signs,’ she said.

He shrugged. He knew it was true, but she knew it wouldn’t stop him from beating himself up.

They were silent again.

Then he looked at her. ‘You never told me what he said to you. Just before he killed himself.’

‘Who, Klayman? Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘I don’t remember.’

He didn’t push her, and she was glad. She was lying, and he knew it, but maybe he realized that some moments couldn’t be shared with anyone. If she closed her eyes, she could picture his face and hear his voice. I am God. The strange thing was, as he said it, she almost believed him. Not that she thought God was cruel or uncaring. And yet cruel things happened.

Cindy realized she couldn’t put it off any longer. She’d told Jonny to meet her here for a reason. Not anywhere else. Here.

‘Listen,’ she said, dragging the words out of her chest. ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about.’

She’d gone over and over in her head about how to tell him, but she still didn’t know what to say. How do you break that news to your husband? She’d had an appointment with Steve Garske. And it wasn’t good.

‘Something’s not...’ she began. Something’s not right. With me. Something’s very wrong. Something bad.

‘Hang on,’ Jonny said. His phone was ringing. When he answered, she recognized Maggie’s voice on the line, which had a strange kind of intimacy. It was odd how Maggie was always coming between them. She’d never really thought about it like that, and it wasn’t fair, because Maggie represented the job. The job came first. It always did.

He hung up.

‘A teenage girl has gone missing in Lakeside,’ he said. ‘She went jogging, and she never came home.’

‘What’s her name?’ Cindy asked. She always wanted to know the name. Victims were never faceless or nameless to her.

‘Kerry McGrath.’

‘Well, go,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry.’

She shook her head. There wasn’t any call for apology. She knew the life.

‘What did you want to tell me?’ he asked.

‘It can wait.’

He got up from the bench and headed across the sand for his Bronco. She watched him go. Hands in his pockets. Boots leaving footprints. That body she knew so well, with its muscles, furrows, and scars. His head cocked, watching the lazy turns of a hawk in the dark of the Duluth sky.

Suddenly, she ran after him with a sense of urgency. He heard her coming and turned around in surprise, and she swept her arms behind his waist and lifted herself up on her toes to kiss him. She gave him a long, hard, wet Cindy kiss that went on and on. You could feel kisses like that all the way down to your toes, and you could close your eyes and remember them like candy on your lips.

They were the kind of kisses you never forgot, no matter what happened next.