Stalked

1

Maggie awoke with a start, dreaming about sex. She wondered if she had dreamed the gunshot, too.

She lay tangled in the black sheets, her skin moist with a sheen of sweat. As she blinked, her brain tried to stutter out of the dreamworld, but the nightmare held her in its grip. Her eyes were open, but she was blind. She felt impossibly strong hands on her body, holding her down. A stench of dead fish overwhelmed her nostrils and made her want to vomit, but her mouth was clamped shut. She thumped against his flesh with her fists, but it was as if she were a fly tapping against a glass window, trying to get out and getting nowhere. He laughed at her, a mean rumble of pleasure. She screamed.

Her eyes snapped open. She was awake. Except she wasn't.

Stride was sitting on her bed. She heard herself say, "Hey, boss," making it sound seductive, which it wasn't. He was smiling at her, his eyes maddeningly dark and ironic. She opened her arms wide, and he came into them, and she was ready to taste his kiss when he crumbled into sand.

That was when she heard it. Muffled and distant. Bang.

Maggie sat up in bed. Her breaths pounded in and out of her chest. She looked at the clock on her nightstand and saw that it was three in the morning. She had been asleep for two hours, although it wasn't sleep so much as a drunken unconsciousness filled with strange dreams. That was all they had been-dreams.

Except she wondered about the gunshot. Something had awakened her. Maybe it was Eric, moving around restlessly downstairs. Or maybe it was the violent wind outside, making the timbers groan. She sat in bed silently, her ears pricked up. Snow had begun-she could see the white rain through the window-and tiny flakes of ice hissed like whispers on the glass. She listened for footsteps, but she heard nothing.

She remembered what Stride always told her. Never listen to worries that come to you in the middle of the night.

Maggie realized she was cold. The bedroom was drafty, and her skin was damp. Even in January, she slept only in panties, not liking the confines of clothes under the blankets, but it meant she often woke up freezing. She got out of bed and scrambled to the thermostat, bumping it up several degrees. Down in the bowels of the house, the furnace rumbled to life, breathing warm air into the room.

She went to her closet to grab a robe. There was a full-length mirror on the door, and Maggie stopped to look at herself in the moonlit shadows. She had spent years finding things wrong with her body. She was too short, not even five feet tall, and too skinny, with bony limbs and breasts that were like twin bunny slopes. Like a doll in her mid-thirties. Her black hair was cut as it always was, in straight bangs across her forehead. She was pretty-everyone told her that. She didn't see it. Her nose was small and pert, but her cheeks were too round. Her almond-shaped Asian eyes were so dark as to be almost black, with a few yellow flecks in an irregular pattern. Her features were too symmetrical. She could make her face do amazing things, twisting it into sarcastic expressions, making her mouth into a tiny O rimmed with cherry-red lips, like a fish gulping for air. But pretty? She didn't think so.

She held up a forearm. There were goose bumps on her honey-colored skin. She took a hand and laid it on her bare, flat stomach and watched herself in the mirror as she rubbed her abdomen in slow circles. Her vision blurred as she began to cry. She opened the door so she didn't have to look at herself anymore and slipped a silk robe off a hanger. She shrugged it on and tied it with a tight knot.

Maggie turned away, sniffled, and wiped her eyes. She felt dwarfed by the huge master bedroom and its massive mahogany furniture. On the far wall was a burgundy dresser, taller than she was; she had to stand on tiptoes to see inside the top drawer. Four hand-carved wooden posts loomed on each corner of the great empty stretch of the king-sized bed. It was too much bed for her by herself, which was how it had been for weeks. She hated even being near it.

She took a step and her head spun. She still felt the effects of the wine she had drunk in the park. She steadied herself with a hand on her night-stand. When she looked down, she saw her shield and felt all the complex emotions that came with ten years on the job. She hadn't expected to be working now, but there was a part of her that couldn't leave the Detective Bureau, that wanted and needed to be with Stride. Or maybe it was because, step-by-step, the rest of her life had become a horror in the past year, and being on the job was a way to forget.

She stared down at the nightstand again and felt unease worm its way into her stomach. Something was wrong. She mentally retraced her steps, what she had done, where she had gone, hoping she had simply made a drunken error. But she hadn't. She had come upstairs and dropped her shield, her wallet, her gun, her keys, on the nightstand by the clock.

Now her gun wasn't there.

It had been an ugly Wednesday night. Bitter cold, the way January always was. By ten o'clock, Eric hadn't come home. Maggie had ginned up the courage to talk to him, but when he didn't show up, she felt herself growing angry. He had been secretive and withdrawn in the week since the holidays. She couldn't blame him for that. They had been strangers for weeks, arguing constantly. It was her fault. She was the one who had closed herself off, who had shut him out, because she couldn't deal with everything that had happened to her.

She grew sick of waiting for him and left the house. She took a bottle of chardonnay and a corkscrew. She bundled up in her Russian sable coat, a wedding gift that she didn't wear often, but it was warm and made her feel like royalty. The snow hadn't started yet, and the streets were clear. She drove down into the city, which was still festive with holiday lights, and then north along the shoreline drive until she came to a turnoff by the lake. It was deserted. She parked and opened the wine. When she got out of the truck, the wind blasted her face, but she ignored it as she followed a snowy trail to the dark, moving mass of Lake Superior. The stars winked down at her, undimmed by the glow of lights from the city to the south. The branches on the evergreens drooped with snow. Her boots sank into the drifts. Her coat hung to her midthighs, and between the fur and her boots, the cold slashed at her legs.

There was no ice growing from the shore here; the water moved too fast. Only in the worst stretches of winter was the cold powerful enough to send a tentative sheet of ice a few hundred feet into the lake. Instead, there was nothing but angry midnight swells now, frigid whitecaps breaking on the rocks and undulating hills of water that looked like sea monsters wriggling toward the beach.

She tipped the wine bottle to her lips and drank. It was chilled and dry. She had skipped dinner, and the wine went straight to her head. She felt sorry for herself, but with each swig of wine, she cared less and less. She stayed there for an hour, until the wine was gone and her limbs were numb. She threw the empty bottle end-over-end into the fierce waves. She thought about lying down in the snow and not getting up.

Take off her clothes. Die of exposure.

But no. Even though she had nothing to go home to, she knew it was time to go. She climbed unsteadily back to the parking lot and sat, thawing, inside the truck. Her mouth felt stiff. Her face was pale, and her hair was crusted with snow. She was like the Tin Man, rusted over, needing oil.

She drove home slowly, feeling the effects of the wine. Her street was dark and quiet at one in the morning. Everyone had turned off the lights in their big houses and crawled under their goose down comforters. When she opened the garage, she saw that Eric was home, too. He would be sleeping in his office. She thought about waking him up and doing what she had planned to do, but it could wait until morning.

She stripped off her fur coat in the hallway, not even turning on a light. There was an antique chest near the door, underneath a brass mirror. Something was sitting on the varnished wood. Eric had left it behind when he came in. It was a black ceramic coffee mug, and under it, a small folded note with her name scrawled on it in Eric's handwriting. The mug still had remnants of coffee grounds in it.

She unfolded the paper. Even in the dim light, she could make out the words:

I know who it is.

Maggie stared at the note long and hard. It was the same old song, the same tired accusation. She was angry that he still didn't trust her. She crumpled the note into a tiny ball, shoved it into her pocket, and went upstairs to sleep.

Where was her gun?

She could think of only one explanation. Eric had taken it. He had come into their room and taken it off her nightstand. She had not dreamed the gunshot. Except it made no sense at all. Eric was not suicidal; he was a life force, energetic, passionate, pushing his limits. And hers.

Maggie saw a cone of white light shoot through the bedroom. Instinctively, she crouched, then crawled to the picture window that overlooked the lake. She stood up, out of sight, and edged her face against the cold glass until she could see. The blackness in the room kept her hidden. She saw headlights on a car parked fifty yards away, and as she watched, the car accelerated, its wheels spinning in slushy snow as it did a U-turn and vanished. She couldn't see its make or color.

She waited, watching the street. Snow was falling outside, big wet flakes streaking the window. She stared straight down and saw footprints in the white dust, leaving a track down her driveway to the street. Already the wind and snow were making the indentations fade.

Maggie ran for the bedroom door. Turning the knob, she hesitated, then threw it open. The hall was filled with vast shadows. She took a chance and said quietly, "Eric?" She said it again, louder.

"Eric!"

She heard only the oppressive silence of the house. She smelled the air and caught the stale odor of beef she had made for a dinner that went uneaten. Maggie kept close to the wall as she went downstairs. She glanced in the living room and dining room and found them empty. Her feet were bare, and the floors were cold. She tugged the robe tighter and crept up on the open door to Eric's office. She wished she had a weapon.

Near the doorway, she heard dripping. Slow and steady. Drops falling into a pool. Her stomach lurched. She reached around the doorway and clicked on the light, squinting as the brightness dazzled her eyes. From inside, the noise kept on: drip, drip, drip. There was a new smell, too, one with which she was very familiar.

When she went into the office, Eric was there, limbs sprawled, blood forming creeks down his face, soaking the sheets, and splattering into red puddles on the slick floor. A gunshot wound burrowed into his forehead. She didn't run to her husband. There was no point-he was already gone. He was one more body in the hundreds she had seen over the years. Her eyes studied the room by instinct, a detective hunting for answers. She found none, only a terrible mystery-her gun, which had been on her nightstand when she went to sleep, was now in the middle of the floor. Smoke mingled with the mineral stench of blood.

Maggie wished she could cry. More than anything, she wanted to crumple to her knees and weep and ask God how this could have happened. But when she looked inside herself, she had nothing left. She bit her lip, stared at the man she had once loved, and knew that as bad as her life had been in the past year, it was about to get worse.

2

No footprints in the snow, Jonathan Stride thought. That was going to be a problem.

Footprints didn't last long in this weather. Looking down at the front yard, he could see the harsh wind already erasing his own boot prints, which he had left seconds earlier. Even so, he would have felt better if he could have used his camera phone to take a photograph to prove that the tracks had been there.

The tracks of an intruder. Someone other than Maggie.

He hated thinking like that, but he knew how the investigation would go. Maggie knew it, too; she had described the scene to him on the phone. She would be the prime suspect. They had solved murders together for more than a decade, and it was almost an immutable law. If a husband got killed at home, the wife did it. And vice versa. It didn't matter if you were a preacher, a Christian, a politician, a family man, a saint, or a cop. Your spouse gets murdered at home, you did it.

Stride brushed snow off his heavy, black leather jacket and his jeans. He was tall, almost six feet two, and lean. He ran a hand back through his wet, wavy hair, and the silver streaks glistened amid the black. He didn't need to ring the doorbell; it opened while he waited on the porch. Maggie stood in the doorway, looking tiny in a red silk robe. He searched her face for tearstains and didn't see any.

"Hey, boss," she said.

He looked at her, at a loss for words. "I'll leave my boots outside," he said finally. He slipped off his boots and took his coat off, too, and left them in a corner of the porch. As he stepped over the threshold, he bent down to study the lock on the door.

"It wasn't picked," Maggie told him. "I checked."

"Don't try to run the scene yourself, Mags."

"I know whether a lock has been picked," she sniped at him. She bit her lower lip, and then, as if to apologize, she hugged him. She was small but strong, and she spent long seconds embracing him. "Sorry," she murmured. "Thanks for coming."

"Why didn't you call 911?" he asked, not liking the accusation in his voice.

Maggie backed up and folded her arms together. "I know what's coming. Cops tramping through the house. Hours of interrogations. Newspapers. Television. I didn't want to deal with it, not right away."

"This is a murder investigation. Minutes count."

She scoffed. "Investigation? This is going to be a witch hunt. Let's not sugarcoat it. I'm in big trouble."

He didn't disagree with her. "Did you search the house?" he asked.

"No."

"All right, let me look around."

"I told you, he's gone."

"He?"

"I'm assuming it was a he. Then again, we're talking about Eric, so I shouldn't assume." She gave a sour laugh.

Stride frowned. "I'm going to tell you something as a friend, Mags. Not as a cop. You should not say things like that. Okay? You should shut up."

Maggie kicked at an imaginary piece of dust on the floor. "Yeah, but I don't want to shut up. I want to get mad. I want to scream at someone."

"That won't help."

"No? It'll sure make me feel better." She saw his face and softened. "I know, I know, you're right. Look, you shouldn't be here. If you want to leave, that's okay."

He didn't reply, but it was true. He was on thin ice being here, because this wasn't going to be his case. He and Maggie had been partners and friends for more than a decade, and as a result, he would be walled off from the investigation. He was the lieutenant in charge of the Detective Bureau that investigated major crimes in Duluth, at the southwestern corner of Lake Superior, where the lake narrowed like a knife point plunging into the city's heart. Duluth was small enough that Stride played a lead role in most of the serious cases himself, but this homicide would wind up in the hands of one of his senior sergeants.

He knew that was why Maggie wanted him here before the others arrived. She wanted him to see the scene, to talk to her, to form his own opinions. She was drafting him onto her team.

"Make us both some coffee, okay?" he said. "I'll check out the house."

Maggie screwed up her face. "You know I don't drink coffee."

"You do now," Stride told her. He added, "I could smell the alcohol on your breath when you opened the door."

Her face blanched as she turned away.

Stride began in Eric's office, but he stayed at the threshold and didn't go inside. He saw the single gunshot wound in Eric's forehead. His muscular body was stretched out on a burgundy leather sofa, a white blanket draped over his legs and stomach. His hairless chest was bare. His head and its long mane of blond hair lay propped on a pillow, which now cradled blood like a punch bowl. The gun was in the middle of the floor, at least ten feet away from the body. Too far to be a suicide. He looked for dirty water on the floor that might have been left by snowy boots, but whoever had done this had been careful. He had probably left his boots in the entryway where everyone else did and then crept through the house in stockinged feet.

Assuming anyone had been in the house at all.

He felt nothing looking at Eric's body-he had deadened himself to that kind of emotion years ago. Even so, he knew Eric well. Eric and Maggie had been married for more than three years, and Stride had been to their house many times. It was awkward for all of them. Stride and Maggie had a long history before Eric entered the picture. For years, Maggie had indulged a quiet crush on Stride, and he wasn't sure it had entirely gone away. Eric knew it.

Stride went room to room on all three levels. It took him nearly half an hour. The house was huge and ghostly for two people, full of cubbyholes with strange slanted ceilings, and secret spaces where cold breezes sneaked through the walls. It was in a neighborhood of vintage estates, clustered together a few blocks west of the north-south highway near Twenty-fourth Avenue. Once this had been an old money enclave, and now it was dominated by city professionals and entrepreneurs. Eric had owned the house for more than a decade. He was an ex-Olympic swimmer who had built a lucrative international sporting supply business, mostly serving athletes in the Winter Games. It was his kind of house, like a European castle, full of social aspiration. The outside was weathered tan brick and gables, an imposing monster from the street. Maggie hated it. When Eric went on business trips to Norway and Germany, she sometimes came down to Stride's house on the lake and stayed with him and Serena.

When he returned downstairs, he found Maggie in the kitchen, staring into her coffee cup. The empty stretch of azure marble counter behind her was wiped clean. "I didn't find anything," he told her.

She nodded as if this wasn't news.

"Go over it for me again," he said. "Like you did on the phone. Tell me what happened."

Maggie recited the events of the evening in a monotone. She told him about waking up, hearing the shot, seeing the car outside, and then finding Eric downstairs. She didn't mention getting drunk, and Stride wondered what else she was leaving out.

"How did the killer get in?" Stride asked.

"I've been thinking about that," Maggie said. "He could have been waiting outside and slipped into the garage when I came home. We don't lock the door from the garage to the house."

"And your gun?"

"Let's just say it wouldn't have been hard for him to come into the bedroom without waking me up."

"Has Eric been having problems with anyone?"

"Not that I know of."

"How's his business going?"

"As far as I know, great."

"As far as you know?"

"I don't ask. I have no idea how much money he has. The bills get paid. I assume he makes more than I do, even on a cop's lavish salary."

Stride smiled thinly. "Where was Eric today?"

"I don't know. He was in the Cities over the weekend. He got back on Monday, but I barely saw him. He didn't come home for dinner tonight."

"How were things between the two of you?"

She shrugged. "Fine." Her voice wasn't convincing.

Stride waited to see if she would say something more, but she didn't. "Is there anything else you want to tell me?" he asked.

"No."

"Can you think of anyone who would want to kill him?"

"You mean, other than me?" she asked sharply. "I didn't do this. I need to know you believe that."

"I do."

"But?" Maggie was smart. She could see that he still had questions.

"You haven't been yourself for weeks," he said. "Why?"

Maggie's face reddened with anger. "That has nothing to do with this."

"Are you sure?"

"Drop it, boss. It's none of your business."

"I thought we didn't have secrets from each other."

"Stop treating me like a child." She stood up, and her robe slipped. He saw more of her chest than was appropriate, but she made no effort to fix it. "I should get dressed. We better call in the dogs."

"You know what they're going to ask you," he said.

She nodded. "Why wasn't Eric sleeping in the bedroom with me."

"So?"

Maggie shoved her hands in the pockets of her robe. "Eric had trouble sleeping. He'd go down to his office and work, and when he got tired, he'd crash out on the sofa."

She didn't meet his eyes as she left the room. He knew she was lying.

3

Stride sat outside in his Ford Bronco, watching the crime scene investigation unfold around him. His window was rolled down, and he was smoking a cigarette. He allowed himself one a day, sometimes two. This was his third. The snow continued to fall, sticking in wet sheets to his windshield and blowing into the truck. The icy flakes landed like mosquito bites on his cheek.

He didn't like being shut out of the police activity, but he had already recused himself. When several cops came his way for instructions, he shrugged and pointed them inside Maggie's house to find Abel Teitscher. None of them was happy to realize Teitscher was in charge. That included Stride.

His cell phone rang. He felt as if he could take the pulse of his life by the country song playing on his phone. For a while, he had used "Restless" by Sara Evans as his ring tone. He had been away from Duluth then, on a brief, strange detour to Las Vegas. Now he was back home, but he had never been able to relax, no matter where he was, and he didn't know why. So he put Alabama 's "I'm in a Hurry" on his phone. As the song said, all he really needed to do with his life was live and die.

It was Serena on the other end of the phone. He and Serena shared a house and a bed, but they spent so much time with Maggie that they sometimes felt like a threesome.

"How is she?" Serena asked.

"She's hiding something," Stride said.

"You don't think she did it, do you?"

"No, but she's not being honest. That's going to hurt her."

"Who's running the investigation?"

"I talked to K-2," Stride said, using the department's nickname for Deputy Chief Kyle Kinnick. "He handed it off to Teitscher."

"Shit."

"Yeah, he wouldn't have been my choice."

"Can you help her?"

"Not much. I'm between a rock and a hard place."

"I'm not," Serena said.

"That's true, you can do whatever you want."

"Keep me posted."

Stride closed the phone.

He had been given a second chance after the death of his first wife, Cindy, five years ago. Serena was a former homicide detective from Las Vegas. They had worked a case that had roots in both cities and wound up as lovers. When the case came to an ugly end, he followed Serena back to Las Vegas, but it was obvious after only a few months that Stride was a fish out of water there. When he had a chance to get his old job back in Duluth, he jumped at it and asked Serena to come with him. She didn't offer any promises or guarantees; she was worried that she would be as much an outcast in Duluth as Stride had been in Vegas. But she had been with him here for more than a year now.

Stride glanced at the stone steps leading to Maggie's front door and saw Abel Teitscher heading his way. Strangely, he had Teitscher to thank for the opportunity to come back to Duluth. When Stride left the city, Teitscher had applied for and won the job as lieutenant overseeing the Detective Bureau. He was a solid investigator, dogged and thorough, and he had the gray hair for the job. Teitscher, in his mid-fifties, was almost a decade older than Stride, but he was a stubborn loner with no gift for leadership. The detectives on the force launched a near rebellion after a few months with Teitscher in charge, and K-2 was forced to rescind Teitscher's promotion. He used the opportunity to lure Stride back from Las Vegas to lead the squad again.

Teitscher still carried the grudge.

The older detective came around to the passenger side of Stride's Bronco and squeezed his long legs inside without being asked. They eyed each other with strained politeness.

"Hello, Abel," Stride said.

Teitscher nodded. "Lieutenant."

The older detective carried all of his years in his face. He was tall and lean, with white skin and a spider's web of wrinkles carved into his narrow cheeks. His hair was gray, clipped in a military crew cut that neatly matched his trimmed Hitler mustache. He was an obsessive runner, without an ounce of fat on his body, but he wound up looking skeletal and unhealthy, with jutting cheekbones and a protruding jawline. His wire-rimmed glasses were too large for his face.

"Have you lost your mind, Lieutenant?" Teitscher asked.

"Meaning what?"

"You contaminated a crime scene."

Stride shook his head. "I did no such thing."

"You were here for an hour with the body and the suspect before you called the police."

"I am the police," Stride reminded him.

"Not on this case. You knew damn well K-2 would yank you. What the hell were you thinking?"

"This is Maggie we're talking about. She didn't do it."

"No? You're not looking at the evidence, Lieutenant."

Stride didn't want to get into a fight, not here, not now. "Look, Abel, Maggie called me first. We've worked side-by-side for ten years. I came and talked to her. I made sure there was no one else in the house. Then I rallied the troops. End of story."

"You're a witness now. I have to interrogate you."

"Go ahead."

Teitscher shook his head. "Not now. But I want a report from you of everything that went on while you were alone in the house with her. This is on the record."

"Fine," Stride said.

"I want it by noon."

Teitscher opened the truck door, and Stride clapped a hand on his shoulder. "You're a good cop, Abel, but sometimes you get so focused on what's in front of you that you don't see the big picture."

"What does that mean?"

"This is Maggie. If she says she didn't do it, you can take that to the bank. Something else is going on here."

Teitscher leaned in close, and Stride winced at the musk of his cologne. "I'll tell you what's going on. I've got a woman inside with a dead husband and her gun on the floor. And she's lying to me. You think I can't tell?"

"If she's hiding something, it's not about the murder."

"Listen to yourself, Lieutenant," Teitscher said scornfully. "If this were anyone else, you'd practically have her in cuffs by now."

Stride knew he was right, but he also knew that Abel had his own bias, too. "Are we talking about Maggie here, or are we talking about Nicole?"

Teitscher flushed. "That was years ago."

"That's right. Years ago, it was your partner with a dead husband on the floor. You trusted Nicole, and you were wrong. So now you're poisoned against Maggie."

"You should have learned the same lesson that I did," Teitscher snapped. He thrust his long legs out of the Bronco, then stuck his head and shoulders back through the door. He wore a trench coat that wasn't suited for the cold, and it billowed behind him like a cape. "You can't trust anyone, Stride. Instead of covering for Maggie, maybe you should ask yourself how well you really know her."

Stride thought about Teitscher's words as he drove home. How well did he really know Maggie? The answer was, better than almost anyone else on the planet.

She was nothing like the quiet, conservative Chinese girl he had first met more than a decade ago. She had grown up in Shanghai and gone to the University of Minnesota at age eighteen to study criminology. When she became enmeshed in political activism on campus following the uprising in Tiananmen Square, she found herself on the wrong side of the Chinese government and decided to stay in Minnesota after graduating, rather than risk prison back home.

Stride hired her for her near-photographic memory and her razor-sharp ability to size up a crime scene. She was smarter than most cops who had been on the job for years, but she was blunt and serious, much more Chinese than American. She didn't care about fashion or makeup, and she didn't crack jokes. Her face never moved. When Stride teased her, she thought she had done something wrong.

But times changed, and so did Maggie.

A decade in the United States had transformed her. She was stylish and hip today, with a closet full of leather and spiked heels. Most of the time, she shopped in the girls' department because she was so small, and she was as well turned-out as any trendy teen. In her mid-thirties, she managed to look twenty-five and pull it off. Her round bowl haircut was oddly old-fashioned, as if that were her one concession to her Chinese roots. But otherwise she was carefully made-up, right down to the diamond stud she had added last year to her thimble of a nose. Hurt like hell, she said, but she loved the glint of the jewel on her face.

She had grown into a sexy woman, but Stride had never seen her as anything but a daughter, of whom he was fiercely protective and proud. Maybe it was because he had first met her when she was barely out of her teens, at a time when he was happily married to Cindy. He mentored Maggie and watched her blossom, and soon, she fell in love with him. Cindy warned him about the huge crush that Maggie was developing, but he pretended that the attraction wasn't there, and eventually, Maggie did the same. It was still the elephant in the room between them-invisible but something they always had to dance around.

She didn't carry much of her past with her anymore. She was bubbly, sarcastic, funny, sharp-tongued, and foul-mouthed. It had taken years for all her rough edges to blend together. She was more like a machine in her early days, not revealing any trace of her emotions, because she thought cops didn't do that. But Stride knew that you needed emotion to succeed in this job. You couldn't divorce yourself from your feelings, and you couldn't let them dominate you. It was a delicate balancing act.

He still remembered the investigation where Maggie took the first big leap, becoming someone new and whole. It was the kind of case detectives hate, the kind that haunts them. That was something Maggie didn't understand. She was accustomed to solving cases. She figured she was smart enough that if she simply brought enough brainpower to bear, and studied all the details, she would dig her way to the truth. Usually she was right. But not always.

She and Stride had been working together for more than a year when a girl's body was found one late August morning on the dewy grass of the golf course near Enger Park. She was nude, and the rape kit came back positive. Her head and hands had been hacked off and were never found. The coroner concluded that she was about seventeen years old, and from the bruises on what remained of her neck, she had been strangled. The only identifying marks on her body were a collage of tattoos from rock bands and video games, like Bon Jovi, Mortal Kombat, Aerosmith, and Virtua Fighter.

They tried everything to solve the case, but in the end, they weren't even able to find out who the girl was. They reviewed thousands of missing person reports from the entire Midwest. They ran DNA from the semen found in the girl's body and came back with nothing. They worked with a local psychiatrist on a profile that got them nowhere. They contacted hundreds of tattoo parlors. They checked video game fan clubs. They got in touch with each of the bands. Weeks went by, and the case got cold.

She was simply the Enger Park Girl, and that was who she was going to stay.

He remembered Maggie pacing back and forth in a City Hall conference room a month after they had found the body. She kept rerunning everything they had tried, looking for something they had missed, or some other angle they could pursue. Finally, her face serious and confused, she looked at Stride and asked him how they were going to solve the case. As if he had been deliberately holding back the answer.

He had to tell her the truth. Unless someone came forward with new information, they weren't going to solve it. A murderer was going to walk away free. A young girl wasn't going to get justice. Sometimes that was how the world worked.

It was as if the idea had never occurred to Maggie before.

She dropped down in a chair, looked him dead in the eye, puffed out her cheeks in frustration, and said without a trace of an accent, "That really sucks, boss."

At that moment, Stride knew she had become an American. And a cop.

4

Stride and Serena lived in an area of Duluth known as Park Point, a narrow finger of land that separated the churning waters of Lake Superior from the ports where the giant cargo boats loaded and unloaded shipments of coal, taconite, and grain. They lived on the lake side, steps from the beach. He arrived home before dawn on Thursday morning, and in the windy darkness, he heard the roar of waves like an invading army on the other side of the dune. He followed the snowy trail behind their 1890s-era cottage up the slope toward the shoreline, where he was face-to-face with the muddy waves rolling onto the sand. There wasn't much beach to be seen now, just a gray sheet of ice stretched over the sand like a boardwalk. Stripped, bare tree trunks littered the shore, washed up after months of floating with the waves.

The wild rye grass on top of the slope formed a wavy auburn wall. Snow and wet sand mingled at his feet like melted marshmallow running over chocolate ice cream. He sucked in cold, fresh air. To the west, he could see the fog-ringed lights of Duluth climbing sharply up the hillside from the lake. On his right, the Point peninsula stretched for another mile, and on the other side of the open water, a gauzy lighthouse beam circled from the Wisconsin shore. The sun would be dawning soon, but the clouds were so thick over the city that he would have to take it on faith that the sun was still up there, giving warmth.

He couldn't escape a feeling of loss and loneliness when he came here. All of the important people from his past were long gone. He had grown up on the North Shore and in the course of his life had lost his parents and then his wife of twenty years here. He had never missed having children while Cindy was alive, but there were days when he regretted that he had no reminders of her other than fading memories. Staring at the angry waves, he thought of his father, too, who had lost his life to the lake when Stride was a teenager. He often imagined his father's ore boat, shouldering through the deep, cold troughs, out of sight of land. You just never knew when a rogue wave could reach up and snatch someone away. They never recovered his body.

He wondered if it was true that you couldn't go home again. That was what he was trying to do. For years, he had lived on the Point with Cindy, but he had moved away after his second marriage and always regretted it. That marriage lasted only three years and was a mistake from the beginning, which he realized when he met and fell in love with Serena. When she came back to Duluth with him from Las Vegas last year, they bought a house out on the Point again, and he was back where he had spent most of his life. He felt renewed, but his only worry was that he would spend too much of his time living in the past.

He heard the crunch of snow behind him and turned to see Serena climbing the slope. Her black hair was loose and uncombed. She had a grace and beauty about her even when her body was buried in a heavy coat and her long legs were up to their knees in drifts. She joined him without saying anything, and they stood watching the lake and feeling the brittle morning air make its way under their skin. The cold made her face flush pink. She wasn't wearing makeup.

"I know you don't want to hear this," Serena told him quietly, "but Maggie could have done it."

Stride's face hardened into a mask, and he kicked his boots in the wet sand. "No way."

"I'm not saying she did do it, but she's been on an emotional roller coaster for a year. Everyone has a breaking point."

"I know all that, but she says she's innocent."

"What does Abel think?"

"Teitscher? He's already got a target painted on her chest. I'm worried what he'll find when he starts digging."

"Like what?"

"I think Maggie and Eric were having big problems."

Serena showed no surprise. "She's had three miscarriages in eighteen months, Jonny. You don't think that plays hell with your emotions?"

"I know it does, but if their marriage was in trouble, it gives her a motive. Particularly because of Eric's money." He added, "Abel also thinks that Maggie is hiding something, and I think he's right."

"Do you know what it is?"

"No."

Serena slung her arm through his. "Listen, Maggie asked me something a couple of months ago. I don't know if it means anything."

"What?"

She hesitated. "Do you really want to know? I don't want you to feel like you have to feed all this back to Teitscher. We're pushing the box pretty far here."

Stride grimaced. Driving over to Maggie's in the middle of the night, he knew instinctively that he was walking into an ethical gray area, where he had no road map. His principles were about to be stretched like elastic, and he wondered when they would snap. "Tell me."

"She asked if you and I had ever done anything strange."

Stride raised an eyebrow.

"Sexually," Serena clarified.

"Did you tell her about the garden hose?"

Serena punched him. "I'm serious. It sounded like Eric was pushing her to do some weird stuff."

"Like what?"

Serena shrugged. "She didn't say."

Stride chewed on this idea and didn't reply. He didn't like where any of this was going.

"But officially, you don't know about this, okay?" Serena repeated. "Maggie didn't want me to tell you."

He nodded. "She could use your help, Serena. She's going to need someone to investigate her side of what happened, and it can't be me. I can't be seen giving her any special treatment."

"I'll do what I can."

Serena hadn't joined the police force in Duluth. Stride supervised the city's detectives, and the employment lawyers frowned on nepotism. Instead, she had obtained her state license as a private investigator and begun struggling to find work. So far, her projects mostly involved plowing through trade journals and attending industry conventions to unearth competitive intelligence for a few Duluth-based start-ups. He knew the assignments left her bored and restless. She was a cop at heart, and she missed the street.

"I've got a new client meeting today," Serena added.

"Oh?"

"Dan Erickson wants to hire me."

"Dan?" Stride retorted. "Why the hell does he want you?"

Serena arched her eyebrows in offense. "Excuse me?"

"You know what I mean."

"He said my police background was a plus," Serena said.

"Except you live with me. That should be a big minus for Dan."

Dan Erickson was the county attorney and chief prosecutor for the region. He blamed Stride for the media fallout over a botched trial that had cost him a statewide election as attorney general. He was now widely considered damaged goods in Minnesota politics, and it was an open secret that he resented being stuck in the north woods of Duluth and was looking for a way out.

"You might want to think twice about this, Serena," he cautioned her.

"I can't say no. This is a big break for me."

He heard the stubborn resolve in her voice and knew her mind was already made up.

"You can't trust him."

Serena shrugged. "Dan can open doors for me all over the state." She added, "Besides, I don't trust any of my clients."

"Do you know what he wants?" Stride asked.

"No, he wouldn't talk about it on the phone. He asked me not to tell you anything about it."

"But you're telling me anyway."

"It's in the box."

They had struggled to find a way to work through the secrets they both had to share, without creating personal or professional problems for either of them. The reality was that they needed each other. Stride wanted her input on investigations because she was one of the most experienced detectives in the city, but her contributions had to be confidential and unofficial. Serena in turn wanted to get Stride's bounce on her own assignments, without worrying that anything she told him would wind up in a police file. So they invented the box. When they wanted to share information privately with each other, it went in the box.

"He'll make a pass at you," Stride added, smiling.

"He makes a pass at everyone."

"That's Dan."

"Why does Lauren put up with it? She's the one with the money."

"Dan and Lauren are all about power, not sex. If Lauren cared about Dan's affairs, she'd have cut him loose long ago."

"Spoken like a man," Serena said. "So what do you think Dan wants?"

"He probably needs to dig up dirt on a political opponent."

"Yeah, that was my guess. The legislature is back in session soon."

"Just make sure he doesn't hang you out to dry," Stride said. "For Dan, everyone around him is expendable. I've been there."

"I can take care of myself."

Serena closed her eyes and lifted her chin to let the icy wind strike her face. When she did that, you didn't argue with her.

Stride knew she had survived a long time on her own and was fiercely determined to make it here without his help. He didn't bother warning her that Duluth could be as extreme and cruel in its own way as Las Vegas. All he needed to do was look at the great expanse of the lake to remember that one person alone was pretty small in this part of the world. No matter how strong you were, there were things around here that were stronger.

5

Serena climbed the steps toward the county courthouse for her meeting with Dan Erickson and felt an odd sensation dogging her again, as it had for weeks. Uneasiness settled over her, and she stopped dead in her tracks. The feeling blinked out of the gray morning like a neon sign in her head, broadcasting the same word.

Danger.

She waited on the top step of the garden with her back to the courthouse, studying the comings and goings in the government plaza. A stony-eyed statue of a centurion towered behind her, guarding the three historic buildings clustered around the park. City Hall, where Jonny worked, was on her left. The federal building was directly opposite, on her right. All three government buildings were austere monuments from the 1920s, built of sand-colored granite blocks. Cars were parked in the slush around the circular driveway, and people hurried up the sidewalk, tramping through the cold in their winter coats. No one looked at her. She surveyed the windows in the neighboring media buildings one by one, then examined the street, her eyes moving from car to car.

A television truck with a satellite dish on its roof. A purple van from a computer repair shop. A delivery truck from Twin Ports Catering. A police car.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Serena shrugged off the feeling and blamed it on the ugliness of January. It wasn't the cold that she found hardest to get used to living in Duluth. It was the deathly pallor of the city at this time of year. Days would go by, sometimes weeks, with only the same charcoal mass of clouds overhead. Winter felt like a long, cheerless twilight, full of somber faces and ominous skies. Those were the times when she felt a sharp pang of longing for the desert with its sunshine and energy.

But for all that, she liked it here.

Her old home was barren compared to this ever-changing landscape. The Duluth summer had been cool and glorious. The fall, with its palette of reds and yellows stretching for miles on the trees, had awakened a strange, uplifting sadness in her when she passed through the rain of dying leaves. Even the winter was beautiful, with something spiritual about the severity of cold and clouds that made her live inside her mind.

She liked that she stood out in this city. She was tall and athletic, with full, highlighted raven hair. In Las Vegas, she had regularly been mistaken for a showgirl, but statuesque beauties were a dime a dozen in that city. Not in Duluth. She enjoyed the stares. She liked watching men melt. It empowered her and gave her the confidence that she was up to the challenge of making a new life for herself in a new place.

She liked what being here did for Jonny, too. He was home, in a cold place, in the shadow of the lake. Serena found that her love for him had deepened and matured this past year, as she got to know him in a more intimate way. Their attraction had been electric and physical in the beginning, but the longer she lived with him, the more she had come to respect his decency and humanity. It also aroused her no end that he thought she was one of the sharpest detectives he had ever known.

But she couldn't escape the sense of unease that twisted her insides now. The sensation of eyes watching her under a microscope.

Danger.

She had learned to listen to her intuition. Back in Vegas, there had been a stretch of weeks when she got the same feeling, that something was wrong, that she was sharing her life with a secret stalker. Later, she discovered that a predator named Tommy Luck really had been watching her all that time, and she wound up with a narrow escape.

That was then, she thought, and this is now. Tommy was history. The past was behind her.

Maybe it was simply that she couldn't escape her demons so readily. She was still haunted by memories of her teenage years in Phoenix, before she ran away to Las Vegas. Her mother had descended into a life-stealing addiction to cocaine and begun living with a sadistic drug dealer named Blue Dog who used Serena as his personal whore. She had fought long and hard to get past the helplessness of those days and still saw a psychiatrist every month to help her cope. It was over, but it was never really over. It only took a strange, disconnected sensation of danger to reawaken the scared child.

I'm not fifteen anymore, she told herself.

Serena continued through the park to the courthouse. She took the antique elevators to the top floor, where Dan Erickson had his office as county attorney with windows overlooking the lake. She introduced herself to the receptionist, hung up her coat, and took a seat on the almond-colored sofa. Serena wore black dress slacks, heels, a burgundy blouse, and a black waistcoat with gold buttons. It was a conservative outfit but didn't hide her figure. She noted the sideways glance from the receptionist and wondered if the girl had pegged her as the next in the long line of Dan's conquests.

The inner door to Dan's office opened.

A woman in her forties appeared in the doorway and gave the receptionist a cold smile that barely crinkled her lips. She had wheat-colored hair crisply pulled back behind her head, leaving only a few strands free to carefully graze her forehead. She was small and elegantly thin, with ruler-straight posture that would have made a Catholic nun proud. She had a Coach purse slung over her shoulder and wore a knee-length charcoal skirt and ivory jacket. Pearls dangled on inch-long gold chains from her ear-lobes, and a matching necklace glinted discreetly in the hollow of her neck. When her lake-blue eyes latched onto Serena in the waiting room, her brows arched into perfect twin peaks. She marched over and cocked her head.

"You're Serena Dial?" she asked.

"That's right."

The woman took the measure of Serena from head to toe. "Well, good for Stride. I didn't realize you were such a gorgeous creature."

"And you are?" Serena asked.

"Lauren Erickson. Dan's wife."

"Oh, sure, of course. I'm sorry, we haven't met before."

Serena recognized her now. Lauren was in the papers regularly, tangling with the city council over zoning issues on her real estate properties. She rarely lost; it helped to have the power of the county attorney quietly behind you and enough money to grease itchy palms. She was the banker and brains behind Dan's career.

"You're from Las Vegas, aren't you?" Lauren asked.

"That's right."

Lauren clucked her tongue as if Vegas belonged to a different solar system. " Duluth must be quite a disappointment for you. No Elvis impersonators. No topless chorus lines."

Serena stood up. She was nearly a foot taller than Lauren, and the other woman's small mouth puckered with annoyance as she tilted her chin upward to look at Serena.

"I was always a fan of the Liberace museum," Serena replied, smiling.

The receptionist smirked. Lauren silenced her with a glare and nestled her expensive purse against her shoulder.

"Everyone is talking about Eric's murder," Lauren said. "I took an early flight back from D.C. this morning, and Dan called me at the airport with the news." Lauren leaned in and whispered, "Of course, I always thought Maggie might blow his head off one day."

"Why would you think that?" Serena asked.

"This is a small city. People talk."

"What do they say?"

"Oh, please. We both know that Eric had a reputation."

"So do a lot of men," Serena said. Like Dan, she thought to herself.

"Maybe so, but I own a dress shop, and my store manager says that Eric is a regular customer."

"So?"

"So not all of the dresses he buys are in petite," she said with a wink. "Get the picture?"

Serena said nothing.

"What business do you have with Dan?" Lauren asked, giving Serena a cool smile.

"I don't know."

"That's discreet, but you can tell me. Dan and I don't keep secrets."

"I'm sure that's true, but I really don't know what he wants yet."

Lauren took a long moment to consider Serena's face and apparently decided that she was telling the truth. Serena suspected that Dan had already given his wife one story, and Lauren was trolling to see if he had told Serena the same thing.

"As it happens, I'm on my way to see Stride," Lauren continued.

"Oh?"

"Yes, there's an issue involving one of my employees. She's disappeared."

"I'm sorry."

"Well, it may be nothing, but she's a little unstable."

Serena didn't reply.

"I'll leave you to Dan," Lauren said. She added with a frozen laugh, "This is almost like wife-swapping, isn't it?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Me with your boyfriend, you with my husband. That's a Vegas kind of thing, isn't it?"

"Not for me," Serena said.

"I'm glad to hear it," Lauren told her. "It's not my thing either."

Lauren was gone when Dan Erickson invited Serena into his office.

She wondered how long it would take before he touched her. It turned out to be three seconds. As he guided her toward the red leather sofa near the window, he put a hand on her shoulder and left it there too long.

"I'm sorry to keep you waiting," he apologized. "It's been a crazy day. Everyone's calling."

"That's all right."

"Do you want some coffee?" he asked.

Serena shook her head.

"I'm addicted," Dan said. "Two pots a day."

He poured himself a cup and sat down uncomfortably close to her on the sofa. Serena slid away, putting more space between them. He noticed her maneuver and grinned. Serena didn't think she had ever seen whiter teeth, and she assumed that he treated them every night to keep them glossy.

Dan was one of those men who was every bit as handsome as he believed himself to be. She could smell his ego oozing from him like cologne. He had blond hair, heavily sprayed so that not a strand moved out of place, and a blemish-free complexion with a store-bought tan. His forehead was creeping northward, and Serena imagined him frantically applying Rogaine to stem the damage. He wore a shimmering navy suit, a gold Rolex, and a thick band on his wedding finger. He wasn't tall, no more than five feet nine, but she had no doubt that women found him attractive. Serena had seen carbon copies of him for years in Las Vegas. A predator, like a hawk. Self-absorbed. A sex addict.

"How's Stride?" Dan asked. "He must be worried about Maggie."

"Of course."

"Most people around here think she did it."

"You're getting way ahead of yourself, aren't you?"

Dan shrugged. "I've already talked to Teitscher. It doesn't look good."

"Stride says she didn't do it," Serena told him.

"He would say that, wouldn't he? Stride's not objective when it comes to Maggie."

"And you are?" Serena asked. "I know the two of you had a relationship a few years ago."

"If anything, that means I know her better than Stride. When our little affair came to an end, I saw what her temper was like."

Serena frowned. "Maybe we should talk about why you wanted to see me."

"Absolutely." Dan stood up and crossed the thick gray carpeting. He made sure the door was locked. He leaned back against the office door and studied Serena. "Before we begin, it's critical that none of this gets back to Stride, okay? This is not a police matter, and I can't have it become one."

Serena nodded. "No offense, but if it's so important that Jonny not find out, why hire me?"

"Everyone tells me you're good," Dan said.

"I am, but there are others around who are good, too, who don't happen to be sleeping with a man you hate."

Dan returned to the sofa and sat down again, even closer than before. "You think I hate Stride?"

"Don't you?"

"Stride and I have had our disagreements over the years, but that's water under the bridge. I'm moving on to bigger things."

"Okay," Serena said, but she wasn't convinced.

"What's your hourly rate?" Dan asked.

She gave him a number.

"I'll pay that plus twenty percent."

Alarm bells went off in Serena's head. "Why would you want to do that?"

Dan eased back into the leather folds of the sofa and cradled his coffee mug in both hands. "Because there may be some risk involved."

"Oh?"

"That's another reason why your background as a cop is important to me. You're used to dealing with risky situations."

"Let me hear what you have to say first," Serena told him.

Dan nodded. "I'm being blackmailed."

"Then you should call the police."

"No way," he said, shaking his head. "I can't risk this information coming to light."

"Someone blackmailing the county attorney raises all sorts of issues. You know that. You ought to be talking to Stride."

"Maybe so, but that's not an option in this case."

"What does this person have on you?" she asked.

"You don't need to know that."

"That's going to make it hard to help you," Serena said. "I don't like flying blind."

"Let's just say that it's sexual in nature. Okay?"

Serena's mind flitted to Maggie's question. Have you two ever done anything… strange?

"An affair?" she asked.

"You're not a detective anymore. Forget the interrogation. It makes no difference what I did. It's enough that I was stupid and shouldn't have done it."

"Does Lauren know?"

Dan snorted. "No, and you don't tell her a thing, okay?"

"What did you tell her about hiring me?"

"I said it was a political deal. Dirty tricks. She bought it."

"I take it you want me to find out who's blackmailing you." She wondered if he had fantasies of her conducting a hit for him.

"No, I don't care. I don't want to know. I just want to make this go away, and I need you to be my intermediary. This man has already given me a price, and I've got the money right here in cash."

Dan extracted a thick envelope from his suit pocket and deposited it on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

"He's going to call me in the next couple days about a drop," Dan continued. "I want you to make the payoff for me."

"Why not do it yourself?" Serena asked.

"And risk having the media there with cameras? No thanks. I want this all done at arm's length. Just you. No one else."

"This is a blackmailer. He won't be satisfied with one payoff. He'll be back for more."

"I'll take that risk."

Serena sighed. "Do you really need me to tell you this is a very bad idea?"

"Bad idea or not, I'm willing to pay a lot of money to have you handle this for me."

"You know there's no such thing as private investigator's privilege. If this were to wind up with the police, I'd have to tell them what I know."

"That's why I don't want it to wind up with the police."

Serena didn't like this. It smelled bad. "Do you have any idea who the blackmailer is?"

"No. He's just a voice on the phone."

"How did he get the information he has on you?"

"I don't know that either. I have some suspicions, but it doesn't matter now."

"You're sure he's not bluffing?" Serena asked.

"He told me things on the phone. It's no bluff."

Serena hesitated. There was a part of her that wanted to tell Dan to forget it, but she couldn't resist the adrenaline rush. This was the kind of hands-on street work she wanted as a PI. Something that made her feel like a cop again. The money was good, too. "Hourly rate plus thirty percent," she said.

"Now who's the blackmailer?" Dan asked. He smiled, put a hand on Serena's knee, and squeezed with his fingertips.

"Is it a deal?" she asked.

"Yes, fine."

"Good." Serena took his hand off her knee and twisted his wrist until his smile evaporated. "One other thing," she told him pleasantly. "Touch me again, and I'll snap off your fingers like the icicles on my roof."

She let go.

"Stride must have his hands full with you," Dan said, massaging away the pain.

"Call me when you know about the drop," Serena said. She picked up the envelope of cash, slid it into her pocket, and left the office.

Downstairs, she stopped again in the park near the statue of the centurion. Something about his empty granite eyes troubled her, and she felt the oppressive weight of the gray clouds overhead. She told herself again that it was nothing, but as she stood there, the feeling came back.

The same feeling that had followed her for weeks.

She was being watched.

6

He knew she could feel him staring at her, the way an antelope senses a tiger stalking from the camouflage of the bush. Invisible and deadly.

When he lifted the binoculars, her body leaped into focus, and it was as if he were standing next to her, breathing on her neck. As he watched her, she shivered. Her head wheeled in his direction, and through the binoculars, he got a chill of pleasure to have their eyes meet. His penis twitched inside his jeans, nudging its way down his leg, growing swollen and stiff.

"Ah, fuck," he murmured, relishing the sensation. It was especially sweet since he had spent ten years watching his manhood wither away. The guards taunted him that prison would make him shrivel up like a salted slug, and they were right. The more years he spent behind bars, the more his penis shrank. Nothing aroused him. He would beat off in his cell at night, but after a while, he could barely coax a hard-on out of his cock. He'd spit on it or rub it with soap, but it would just lay there, so tiny that his giant hand couldn't even pull it out from his groin.

But his organ had risen again that night in the abandoned house in Alabama during the hurricane. As he watched the cop drown in the basement, blood had surged between his legs, making him rigid. A spontaneous erection, ripe with power.

Four months had passed since a National Guard helicopter rescued him from the roof of the farmhouse. He wore clothes he had found in an upstairs bedroom, and he had shredded his inmate's fatigues and let them float away with all the other debris in the water. By the time the storm died away, the land around the house was a lake. The squad car was gone, and so was Deet's body. He was just a trapped homeowner who hadn't evacuated soon enough.

They took him to a shelter in Birmingham along with hundreds of other refugees, but he ran away that night, stole a car, and headed north. He didn't want to take any chance that he would be found out, or that the authorities at Holman would figure out he was on the loose. As it turned out, he needn't have worried. He jacked a laptop and kept an eye on the Internet by hacking into wireless connections as he made his way out of the South. Several days later, he found an article in the Montgomery newspaper that reported the story. The squad car had been found wrapped around a tree ten miles from the farmhouse, and Deet's headless body had turned up another five miles away in a different direction. All three people in the car were presumed dead, victims of the storm.

He was a nonperson. No identity. No past.

He could have gone anywhere, but he first had to deal with the fist of rage that beat its way through his chest. Payback for ten lost years.

"You feel me, don't you?" he whispered. "You know I'm here."

He had been laying his plans for Serena ever since he arrived in Duluth. Watching her. Stalking her. He could have taken her anytime, but he wanted the experience to linger. Every hunter knew-you don't break the neck of the captured animal right away. Once it's yours, you play with it for a while.

In the meantime, he had other prey. People like Dan. Mitch. Tanjy. And the alpha girls. People with dirty secrets they were desperate to conceal.

He remembered what the little queer in Holman had told him about the art of blackmail. If you know what someone is hiding, you can do anything you want to them, and they'll never breathe a word. The danger in poking a hive, though, was getting stung. He could have let the games go on even longer, but something unexpected had popped up like a fish out of the water and made him speed up his plans.

Murder. That changed everything.

So now it was finally Serena's turn. Time to tighten the noose around her neck.

Through the binoculars, he watched her shrug and continue down the steps of the government plaza toward her car. He knew what was in her brain. She was telling herself that the fear scraping its fingernails along her spine was all in her imagination. She was wrong. Before he was done, she would be begging him to kill her.

7

City Hall was an old, drafty building, with high ceilings where the heat gathered. The floors were cold, hard marble. The chill radiated through the window in Stride's office and left frost crystals on the glass. He leaned against the window frame and stared vacantly at the traffic on First Street below him. His arms were crossed. The creases in his forehead deepened like canyons, and he felt tightness throughout his muscles.

He was wearing a suit and tie because reporters and politicians would be swarming the office as word got out about Maggie. Usually he dressed for the street, which was where he liked to spend his time. He couldn't handle a job that left him permanently chained to a desk, and he did his paperwork in odd hours when the rest of the office was dark. He preferred to be out at crime scenes, doing the real work, which was mostly hard and bitter.

He had been idealistic in his early days, which were too long ago to think about. He was like Maggie-determined to solve every crime, put away every criminal. It hadn't taken long for him to realize that there were always victims like the Enger Park Girl, with no one to speak for them and no answers to give. The burden was all his. Every murder in this city gouged a piece out of his soul, and even when they solved the case and he watched a jury bring down a guilty verdict, there was still a scar that never went away.

That was one of the reasons he lived by the lake. He didn't tell many people about that part of his soul; it had taken months for him even to share it with Serena. Stride was a hardheaded realist who had no time for anything mystical, but the lake was different. When he stood by the water at night, he sometimes felt as if he were surrounded by the dead, as if the lake were where they went to become part of the mist and vapor. He could feel his father there, who had died in the lake, and he felt communion with all of the city's dead.

There was a knock on his office door, and he saw a silhouette behind the frosted glass.

"Come in," he called without leaving the window. The vanilla oak door opened and closed with a shudder. He was surprised to see who it was. "Lauren."

"Hello, Jonathan."

He felt a chill blow into his office with Lauren's arrival.

"You're looking good," he told her.

Lauren rolled her eyes at him. She had the clothes, jewels, and laboratory-tested blond hair to match her money, and her face was as smooth as makeup and plastic surgery could make it. She was attractive, but she made no secret of the fact that Stride's charm went nowhere with her. The two of them shared an ugly history. Lauren was the only child of a father who had made millions in commercial real estate in northern Minnesota. In Stride's early days as a detective, he had exposed a City Hall bribery scheme connected to an eminent domain condemnation for a huge new shopping center. Lauren's father went to prison and died there six months later of a stroke. Lauren inherited everything, including a grudge against Stride.

He waved her into a seat. She crossed her legs and steepled her fingers on the hem of her skirt. Her blue eyes were as fierce and intelligent as ever.

"I'm sorry about Maggie," she told him.

"Sure you are."

"I just met Serena in Dan's office," she added cuttingly. "Where would she have been when you and I were in school? Playing with finger paints?"

Stride ignored the jab. "I didn't think you were speaking to me, Lauren."

"The past is the past," she replied. "We need to move on."

"Really? That wasn't your attitude last year." Stride knew that Lauren had waged a campaign with the City Council to block K-2 from hiring him back.

"I have more important things to worry about now."

"Oh?"

"You obviously haven't seen the news today."

"What did I miss?"

"Dan and I are moving to Washington," Lauren announced.

"Permanently?"

She nodded. "Dan's been invited to be special counsel in a D.C. law firm as part of its white-collar crime practice. I've been out in Washington the last couple of days, scouting homes in Georgetown."

"So Dan's becoming a defense lawyer," Stride said. "I guess it's always been about the game for him. It's easier to switch sides that way."

"Yes, I know you're only interested in truth and justice, Jonathan. Let me know when you find it."

He smiled, because she had a point. He was also pleased to think of Dan giving up his job as the county's top prosecutor. He didn't like having an enemy in that office.

"Congratulations, that's quite a coup," he told her.

"I've been pulling strings for a while," Lauren admitted. "Dan doesn't like Duluth. We only hung on here to get him into statewide office, but you erased that possibility for us, didn't you?"

"I think the voters had something to do with it," Stride said. "When does the big move take place?"

"Next month."

"Is that why you're here? To say goodbye?"

Lauren shook her head. "Gloating is just a bonus. Actually, I have to report a crime. Or what may be a crime. I don't know."

Stride put aside their rivalry. "What's going on?"

"You know I own Silk, the dress shop on Superior."

Stride nodded. The store was another of her many tax dodges.

"One of my employees is missing," she said.

"What's her name?"

Lauren smiled maliciously. "Oh, you know her very well, Jonathan. It's Tanjy Powell."

Stride didn't mean to say it out loud, but the words slipped out as he expelled a disgusted breath. "Son of a bitch."

"I knew you'd be pleased."

He wasn't pleased at all. "Why do you think she's missing?"

"Tanjy left the shop early on Monday afternoon. She looked upset. According to Sonnie, my store manager, Tanjy didn't show up on Tuesday or Wednesday, and she didn't call. There's no answer at her home."

"Why was she upset when she left?"

"I have no idea."

"Has she ever done this before?"

"Sonnie says no."

"What about family?"

Lauren shook her head. "Her parents are dead. She lives in the bottom half of an old Victorian in the East Hillside area. I thought you'd want to check it out, in case there's some foul smell emanating from it. That's what gets your blood racing, right?"

"Give it a rest, Lauren." He added, "My first thought is that Tanjy is playing another game with us."

"Why? Because last time she made a fool of you?"

"The woman fabricated a rape charge. She had the whole city in a panic."

Lauren sighed. "I don't claim to understand what goes on in her sick little brain. I'm just the messenger."

"I hope to hell she's not wasting our time again," Stride said. "The only reason we didn't file charges was because Dan and K-2 didn't want us to look like we were beating up on a woman with psychological problems."

"My fault," Lauren admitted. "I asked them to go easy on her."

"You? I'm surprised you didn't fire her."

"I only go after people who get in my way, Jonathan. You should know that."

"Meaning you didn't want an ugly employment lawsuit."

"Meaning I felt sorry for her."

Stride didn't believe that Lauren had ever felt sorry for anyone, but it didn't matter either way. "I'll check it out," he said.

"There's something else," Lauren added.

"What?"

"Tanjy called our home on Monday night."

"After she left the shop that day? Why?"

"She wanted to talk to Dan, but he was in Saint Paul."

"What did she want?" Stride asked.

"I don't know. I called Dan from Washington on Tuesday afternoon, but he said there was no answer when he tried to call her back. Neither one of us gave it another thought until today. I took a flight back early this morning, and Sonnie told me that Tanjy was missing."

"Did Tanjy leave a message when you talked to her?"

"Yes, she gave me a message for Dan, but he didn't know what it meant."

"What was it?"

Lauren shrugged. "She simply said to tell him, 'I know who it is.' "

8

Abel Teitscher arrived home early Thursday afternoon, having spent ten hours supervising the crime scene where Eric Sorenson was killed. He sprinkled flakes of food into the large saltwater tank in his living room, which was stocked with a rainbow assortment of angels, puffers, dragonets, tetras, and gobies. On the rare evenings when he wasn't working, he would pour himself a glass of brandy, turn off the lights, and sit quietly watching his fish while they traveled the illuminated aquarium. Abel was more comfortable with fish than with people.

He lived alone in a modest house on Ninth Street north of downtown. He had been married for twenty-seven years, until he arrived home unexpectedly on a Tuesday afternoon and found his fifty-two-year-old wife being serviced by the twenty-four-year-old unemployed son of their next-door neighbor. She had been watching too many Desperate Housewives episodes. They divorced six months later, and she was now living in a rented apartment in Minneapolis. The one good thing to come out of his marriage was his daughter, Anne, but she was away at graduate school in San Diego. She was studying marine biology, which Abel was happy to attribute to years as a child sitting with her father in front of the fish tank.

A few years ago, an all-nighter like the Sorenson murder would have taken a toll on him for days, but he was in better shape now than he had been in decades. Since the divorce, he had taken up running, putting on miles on the track at UMD during the warmer seasons and using a treadmill crammed in his bedroom during the winter. He had lost thirty pounds and was in training now for the marathon. At City Hall, they called him gaunt and skeletal, which infuriated him, because no one appreciated how hard he had worked to hone his body.

Abel stretched out on the sofa near the fish tank and slept for thirty minutes, which was enough to refresh him. He then spent an hour running on the treadmill. The rumble of the motor and the pounding of his feet served to clear his mind. Stride accused him of not seeing the big picture on a case, but that was crap. Abel took time early in every investigation just to think. The difference was that Stride tried to rise above the facts and get inside the heads of the victim and the killer. For Abel, the big picture was about nothing except putting the pieces of the puzzle together from what was left behind. Evidence and witnesses. Things you could touch, see, and smell.

The big picture in this case led him in only one direction-to Maggie.

He knew that having no evidence of a third party in the house didn't mean that no one had been there, but he also knew that the logical, obvious answer at most crime scenes was usually the right one. Forget the conspiracy theories, and leave them to the defense attorneys. The fact was that Oswald killed Kennedy. Alone. Deal with it.

Abel was prepared to turn over every rock. He had nothing against Maggie and no desire to pin the crime on her, but common sense told him that she was almost certainly the one who had pulled the trigger. That was how it always worked in these cases.

Like Nicole. Abel had learned with Nicole that anyone is capable of anything. Even a good cop. He hadn't wanted to believe that his partner was capable of murder, so he ignored the evidence even as it piled up. Nicole was psychologically fragile; she had just come back from paid leave after killing a mentally deranged man on the Blatnik Bridge. Nicole's husband was having an affair, and she had threatened him with violence if he didn't break it off. Two of Nicole's hairs were discovered in the apartment where her husband and his girlfriend were found naked, shot to death with her husband's gun. It was more than enough evidence to convict her.

When the jury found her guilty, Abel finally accepted the fact that Nicole had done what every other suspect did-lie to him in order to save her neck. Stride would have to learn the same lesson.

Stride probably thought that Abel was still angry about getting booted out of the lieutenant's chair. Abel was upset about that, but the truth was that he didn't miss it. K-2 was right. Abel hated supervising people and handing out assignments. He wasn't prepared to waste his time motivating cops, who were a tough breed to motivate. They hated administration on principle. They were hemmed in by paperwork and procedure and second-guessed every time they had to make a split-second judgment. He knew all that. He was that way, too, but he had a short fuse and his own way of doing things, and if he was going to be the boss, they were going to do things his way. Except no one did.

He was happier without the headaches. The only thing that bothered him was that the other cops loved Stride, and they barely tolerated Abel. He knew he was a loner and a hard case. He was crusty and closed-off, but no one made an effort with him the way they did with Stride.

Stride was human. He made mistakes. He was making a mistake this time, because Stride simply didn't understand betrayal. He had never walked in on his wife doing a reverse cowgirl on a man half her age. Hell, Abel didn't even know what the position was called until his lawyer explained it in the divorce papers. His wife had certainly never used it on him during their years of married life.

When he found his wife in bed with another man, Abel finally understood how an ordinary person could go over the edge. Like Nicole. Like Maggie. He had pulled his gun on the two of them and was ready to fire. The only thing that saved them was that, in the shocked silence as they all stared at one another, he could hear the gurgle of his fish tank coming from the living room. Something about the sound soothed him. Losing his fish would be worse than losing his wife, so he put the gun down and found a lawyer instead.

Maggie should have owned fish.

Abel shaved and showered after he was done on the treadmill and slapped cologne on his face. That was another thing the cops teased him about, that he smelled like a dapper gigolo. It wasn't a crime. He dressed in an old brown suit and shrugged on his trench coat. The coat wasn't warm enough for January, but since he had begun jogging regularly, he found he didn't mind the cold.

Time to turn over rocks.

He began with Eric's office. Eric owned a business called MedalSports, which was located in a drab manufacturing facility on a street near the airport, near businesses making medical supplies, aircraft parts, navigational equipment, and frozen foods. Small planes whined overhead as Abel pulled into the parking lot. The one-level building, painted chocolate-brown, had a series of loading docks, where several shipping trucks were backed up against the platforms. The parking lot was crowded.

He found a glass door leading into the building's office. The receptionist inside was on the phone, and he could see used tissues littering her desk. Her eyes were red-rimmed and watery. She was plump, in her late fifties, with half-glasses on a chain around her neck and gray hair peeking out from under a baseball cap. The office was chilly, and she wore a bulky red down vest. She gave him a weak smile, cupped her hand over the phone, and told him she'd be with him shortly.

The tiny waiting room was functional, with a cheap rattan sofa, a white coffeemaker sitting on a filing cabinet next to a stack of Styrofoam cups, and a veneer coffee table stocked with sports magazines. He could hear the noise of manufacturing through the door that led to the shop floor.

He examined several framed photographs hung on the wall that showed Eric at the Olympics fifteen years ago, in his Speedo with a bronze medal around his neck. He was a physically imposing man, at least six feet four, with a muscled, hairless chest and buzzed hair that was so blond it was almost white. The other photographs were more recent and showed Eric with a variety of medalists from the Winter Games, including freestyle skaters, slalom skiers, and bobsled teams. They were all displaying MedalSports equipment. Abel noted that Eric had kept himself in good shape and wore the same brilliant smile in all of the photographs. He had grown out his hair and swept it back like a long, flowing mane over his head.

"He was very handsome," the receptionist said, hanging up the phone.

Abel grunted.

"You're not a reporter, are you?"

Abel shook his head and introduced himself. The receptionist told him her name was Elaine.

"Is it true that his wife shot him?" she asked. "That's what the media is saying."

"We're still trying to find out what happened," Abel said. "I need you to answer a few questions for me."

Elaine sniffled. She grabbed another tissue, and her round cheeks puffed out as she blew her nose. "Of course."

"How long have you worked with Mr. Sorenson?"

"Ever since he started the company. He was a wonderful man. He treated all of us like family."

Abel sighed. Everyone was a saint once they got murdered. "He sounds a little too perfect to me. No one's perfect."

"Well, I'm sorry, but we all loved him here." Her voice rose defensively.

"How about the business? How's it going?"

"Oh, extremely well. All of the employees got year-end bonuses. Mr. Sorenson shared the profits. He wasn't selfish."

Abel nodded. "Manufacturing is a tough racket. Lots of competition. Cheap foreign labor, right? That sort of thing."

"No, no," Elaine replied, shaking her head. "MedalSports makes high-end merchandise for a very targeted audience. Everything is handcrafted. We don't compete against mass-market operations. We sell to Olympic competitors and no one else."

"Is there really enough business to support that?" Abel asked dubiously. "The Winter Games only come around every four years."

"Well, yes, but they're practicing constantly. The athletes are involved in regional and world championship competitions, too. The right equipment gives you an edge, and we customize all our materials."

"Was Mr. Sorenson the sole owner?"

"Yes, he started the business shortly after he was in the Olympics himself. He was a bronze medalist in the butterfly, you know."

"Did he have a lot of debt?"

"Well, I'm no accountant. He has a line of credit with Range Bank. I never heard Mr. Sorenson express any concerns about capital or debt payments. We had record revenues last year."

"I'll need the names of Mr. Sorenson's accountant and lawyer. Do you have those?"

Elaine nodded. "Of course."

She wrote them down, and Abel slipped the information into his pocket. "You were pretty quick to think his wife did it. Why is that?"

Elaine frowned. "I was only repeating what I heard on television. I don't know anything."

Abel frowned back at her. "How am I supposed to solve this crime if you dish out crap like that? I never met a secretary who didn't know if her boss and his wife were having problems."

"I don't want to be a gossip," she retorted. Her cheeks bloomed red.

"You're not gossiping. Your boss was murdered."

Elaine struggled with her discretion and gave in. "Mr. Sorenson and his wife have had a difficult year," she confessed in a conspiratorial whisper. "I've heard them arguing a lot."

"When was this?"

"The worst fight was in November, a couple of months ago."

"What were they arguing about?"

Elaine shook her head. "I don't know."

"You must have heard something. Come on, it's not like these walls are six inches thick."

"It had something to do with sex," Elaine confided, her voice dropping as she said the word sex.

"How do you know?"

"I heard Mrs. Sorenson shout something through the door."

"What did she say?"

Elaine flushed. "This is very embarrassing."

"Tell me."

"I don't use this kind of language, you understand. Mrs. Sorenson called him-well, she said he was a muscle-bound, yellow-headed penis."

Abel tried not to laugh. "What else did she say?"

"I couldn't hear anything more. It's not like I was listening."

Of course not, Abel thought. "Maybe he was getting ready to dump her."

"Oh, no, no," Elaine insisted. "He loved her, he really did."

"Loving her doesn't mean being faithful, though, does it?"

Elaine picked at her fingernails. "I wouldn't know about that."

"You keep his schedule, you answer his calls. No way you wouldn't know if he was cheating."

"Mr. Sorenson was a very attractive man," Elaine said cautiously. "In the old days, before he was married, he dated a lot. Glamorous women. Models sometimes."

"And after he was married?"

Elaine pouted as if this was no one's business. "A man like that, women come after him."

"Who? I want names."

"I don't know names. Mr. Sorenson was secretive about his personal life. I didn't pry."

"You sound like you're holding out on me again, Elaine."

"No, I'm not. Mr. Sorenson was discreet."

Abel sighed. "Did other women ever come to the office for him?"

Elaine hesitated. "Sometimes."

"Who?"

"I told you, I don't know. There's one woman who comes by every few weeks. Tall. Red hair. She's older, probably in her forties. They were very… friendly with each other."

"You never asked who she was?"

"Well, one time she came by, and Mr. Sorenson was on the phone. When I asked for her name, she said, 'Tell him it's his alpha girl.' She thought that was very funny."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"I have no idea."

"Were there other women, too?"

Elaine looked unhappy. "Yes."

"Did his wife know about them?"

"You'd have to ask her. I don't know how much she knew. Mr. Sorenson was gone a lot, and sometimes Mrs. Sorenson would call, wondering where he was. And, uh, who he was with."

"Did he take any personal trips recently?"

Elaine nodded. "Yes, he was in the Twin Cities over the weekend."

"Doing what?"

"He didn't talk about it. I made reservations for him at the Saint Paul Hotel. He was gone over the weekend and came back on Monday afternoon. He seemed distracted."

"Why?"

"I don't know. He talked about seeing a play at the Ordway, but other than that, he didn't say anything about his trip."

"What happened after he got back on Monday?"

"He wasn't in the office for more than a few minutes before he was gone again. Then he was in on Tuesday and Wednesday, but he had the door closed almost the whole day."

"Did he talk to his wife yesterday?"

"I don't know."

"What about his calendar? What appointments did he have?"

"He didn't have any meetings during the day, but he had me set up an appointment for yesterday evening."

"He met someone last night? After-hours?"

Elaine nodded.

"Was it a woman?"

"No. It was a psychiatrist named Tony Wells."

"Tony?" Abel asked, surprised.

"That's right."

Abel knew Tony Wells; he was the department's primary profiler on sex crimes. He also did trauma counseling for a lot of the region's cops and crime victims.

"Was Mr. Sorenson seeing Tony professionally?" Abel asked.

"Oh, no, Mr. Sorenson never saw a therapist. He was as solid as a rock. It was his wife. Mr. Sorenson told me that she had been getting counseling for months."

9

Stride lit a cigarette as he waited on the porch at Tanjy Powell's downstairs apartment. This was his first of the day, and it was already late afternoon. The wind mussed his wavy, salt-and-pepper hair with cold fingers. He glanced up at the sky, which was a bumpy mix of browns and blues. A few stray flurries floated in the air. After a few seconds, he turned back to the yellow door and pounded on it again with his fist, then listened carefully. There wasn't a breath of life inside.

According to Lauren Erickson, Tanjy hadn't come to work since she fled the dress shop on Monday afternoon. She didn't appear to be home either.

He came down off the porch and looked up at the old Victorian. The windows were shuttered; no one peeked out at him. The house was a relic in need of fresh paint and new shingles. Duluth was a city of old neighborhoods and aging beauties like this one, which reflected the money and glamour of the city in its heyday, when taconite flowed like a river and filled the coffers of the entire northern region. The mining river was a trickle now, and the houses showed it. Unlike the Twin Cities to the south, which boasted new suburbs with manicured lawns, Duluth was left with its old homes and their fading glory. Stride actually preferred it that way. He didn't mind if the floors slanted and the doors hung twisted in their frames. He hated cookie-cutter houses.

He followed the stone foundation around to the rear and wound up in a backyard no bigger than a postage stamp. The house butted up to an alley and then to the back sides of homes on the next street. They were all in disrepair. Most of the houses here were subdivided, turned into low-rent apartments for students and nurses. A summer lounge chair was half-buried in snow. A charcoal grill sat rusting. He saw animal tracks cutting across the yard. Two windows on the wall of a one-car garage were broken. He trudged over to the garage and looked inside. The shards of glass were dirty and dull. There was no car in the garage.

Back at the rear door of the house, he knocked and shouted, "Tanjy!"

He pushed hard against the door with his shoulder. It was locked. He tried to see through the white shutters, but they were closed up tight.

"Meow," said a voice at his feet. He looked down and saw a long-haired gray cat, with snow and dirt matting the ends of its fur, rubbing against his leg. Stride bent down and scratched the cat's head and was rewarded with a purr. The cat strolled away down the length of the back porch and then disappeared inside the house through one of the windows. Stride followed him, snapping on gloves. He found a jagged hole, large enough that he could reach inside and unlock the window. He pushed it up and squeezed his body through the frame. He found himself in a dark, narrow hallway leading to the kitchen. Two cat bowls were pushed against the wall, both empty.

"Police," he called out. "Anyone here?"

There was no response.

The air in the apartment was stale, as if it had been bottled up for days. Stride checked the kitchen and smelled no remnants of food. The sink was empty. He retraced his steps and followed the hallway to the living room, where he was confronted by a two-feet-high crucifix nailed to a white wall. Below the cross, he noticed stacks of Christian sheet music on a banged-up upright piano.

He saw a photograph of Tanjy with her parents on an end table made of taupe metal and glass. Her parents had died last winter on the Bong Bridge to Wisconsin, when a shroud of fog settled over the top of the span unexpectedly and caused a string of accidents. Stride picked up the frame and looked at the photo. Tanjy was in her late twenties, with long black hair and a slim body. Her father had been white, and her mother black, and the mocha-colored features of Tanjy's face were in perfect proportion. She had thin, sharply angled eyebrows that made her look wicked. Her lips made dimples at the corners of her mouth when she smiled, and she had a gleam in her brown eyes that made him think she was enjoying a secret joke. Men responded to her as if she were an erotic puzzle that they wanted to unlock. When she first came to City Hall, he watched the officers in his Detective Bureau become as flustered as tongue-tied teenagers.

Tanjy came to him with a terrible story. She had been abducted on a Wednesday night in early November from a dark parking ramp off Michigan Street. The man blindfolded and gagged her, tied her up, and drove her to Grassy Point Park, a tiny and deserted green space jutting out into Saint Louis Bay. The park was in the shadow of the arc of the Bong Bridge where her parents had died. He tied her hands and feet to the steel mesh of the barbed wire fence that separated the park from the train tracks of the seaport. When he removed her blindfold, she could see the graffiti-covered train cars and the looming black mountains of coal. He cut off her clothes until she was naked and cold, suspended on the fence, and raped her from behind. When he was done, he left her there with her car. It had all been planned out, she said; he had another car waiting for him in the park. She didn't see the car and couldn't give any description of the rapist. Eventually, she bit through the tape with her teeth and freed herself.

This all happened on Wednesday, she said. It was Friday when she came to Stride to report the rape. She was cleaned up and impeccably dressed. She didn't cry or raise her voice or show any emotion at all as she described what happened. She declined to submit to a physical examination and told them she had already visited her own clinic. It may as well have happened to someone else.

Had Stride been inside Tanjy's house back then, he would have noticed all of her religious icons and recognized the Christlike imagery of Tanjy crucified on the fence. That would have been his first clue that something was wrong.

Her rape was big news in the Duluth media. Stranger rapes were rare and terrifying in the city. Two days later, though, the daily newspaper printed an interview with a young stockbroker named Mitchell Brandt, who was Tanjy's old boyfriend. He described her obsession with rape in lurid and explicit detail-how she insisted that he pretend to rape her every time they were in bed, how she masturbated in the shower to rape fantasies every day, and how she posted erotic stories and poetry on the Internet that dealt with stranger rapes.

Within days, Tanjy became a pariah. The story went national. She became the butt of jokes by Jay Leno, Saturday Night Live, cable news channels, YouTube videos, and dozens of bloggers. Her support in the city evaporated. A week later, Tanjy met Stride in a coffee shop and admitted what he already suspected. She had fabricated the entire story. There was never any rape. It was a fantasy.

Stride wanted to file charges against her for filing a false police report, but he let it go under pressure from Dan and K-2, and the story disappeared from the headlines. Tanjy went underground.

Stride called her several weeks later. He was still angry with her, but he was worried that she might have suffered a breakdown under the barrage of media attention. Tanjy thanked him for his call in that silken voice of hers but declined his offer of help. In a way, he was glad of that, but he learned nothing new from the call. She was as calm and emotionless as ever. The same erotic enigma.

And now she was missing.

Nothing was disturbed inside her apartment. There was no evidence of violence or trouble. His first thought was suicide, and he kept his eyes open for a note, but wherever Tanjy had gone, she hadn't left a message behind. She also hadn't taken much with her. Her clothes were neatly hung and folded in the closet and dresser in her bedroom. Her suitcase was there, too, but he didn't find a purse, wallet, or keys.

Stride sat down on the end of her queen-sized bed, which had a red quilt neatly laid across the mattress and matching fringed pillows. He studied the books on the shelves near her bed-religion textbooks, a pile of romance novels, vegetarian cookbooks, and psychology books about rape. And, of course, The Da Vinci Code. The bed was prim and conservative, with another icon of Jesus hung over the headboard. He thought about Tanjy indulging in rape fantasies underneath the cross. Maybe that was part of the thrill, a forbidden mix of sacrifice and sacrilege.

He hunted on her rolltop desk for a date book or Palm Pilot and didn't find one. The desk was clean and organized, with a manila folder for bills, a neon purple folder from Byte Patrol with instructions for her laptop computer, a stack of software cases, and a collection of fashion magazines like Elle and Vogue. That fit her. Tanjy worked in a high-end dress shop, and she looked like many of the models on the pages.

Stride turned on the desk lamp and picked up a small cube of notepaper to see if he could see indentations of anything Tanjy had written. He was able to make out a phone number, but when he called it on his cell phone, he found himself connected to the local Whole Foods market.

He booted up her laptop computer. She didn't use Outlook for e-mail, which meant she probably used a Web-based service, which would make it harder to find a record of her messages. There were no appointments recorded in the online calendar. He checked her Internet favorite pages and shook his head when he found a mixture of Christian sites and hardcore pornography, including rape sites with brutal, disturbing imagery of women bound and humiliated.

When he checked her recent documents, he clicked on the first one, a Word file labeled ISLAND. The text flashed onto the screen:

The natives tied Ellen spread-eagled to stakes they had pounded in the mud. One by one, they took turns ravishing her with their pierced tongues. She begged them to stop-No! No! she cried, you can't do this!-but they were deaf to her desperate pleas. Despite herself, she felt the most intense of orgasms welling up inside her…

Stride closed the file and checked the other documents, which were of a similar nature. He wondered again how to reconcile the calm, quiet girl in his office with the explicit, submissive fantasies filling her brain.

He shut down the computer. Nothing here gave him any clues as to why Tanjy had disappeared, or whether she had even disappeared at all. There was nothing strange about someone getting in their car and driving away. People did it all the time. Sometimes they chose not to come back.

Stride felt the house sag and heard a sharp pop from somewhere in the rear of the apartment. He got to his feet and stepped lightly to the bedroom door. He listened. There were cautious footfalls near the back window where he had entered the house.

"Yo, dude!" a young male voice called. "What's up? I know you're here."

Stride emerged in the hallway and saw a young man in his twenties there, nervously brandishing a golf club like a weapon. The kid saw him and practically jumped.

"I've called the police! They'll be here any minute!"

"They're already here," Stride told him, flashing his shield. "Who are you?"

"Oh, shit. Wow, I'm sorry." He was wearing gray sweatpants, an untucked flannel shirt, huge unlaced boots, and a bulky fur hat with a turned-up flap in front and ear flaps that hung down on either side of his head as if he were a bloodhound.

I live in the land of stupid hats, Stride thought.

"What's your name?" Stride repeated.

"Sorry, I'm Duke. Duke Andrews."

Even his name sounded like a dog's. "What are you doing here?"

Duke pushed up his black-framed glasses, which were slipping down his nose. He had a wispy goatee on his chin and a string of pimples on his cheek that looked like the Big Dipper. "I live in the house next door. My bedroom looks out on the yard. I saw you go in, and I was, like, hey, could be a burglar."

"Here's a little advice, Duke. Don't try to confront burglars yourself. Let the cops handle it."

"Yeah, yeah, right, guess that was stupid." Duke tugged at the hairs on his protruding chin.

"A golf club isn't much of a match for a gun."

"I don't even golf, man. How dumb is that?"

"Do you know who lives here?" Stride asked.

Duke nodded eagerly as he bit one of his fingernails. "Oh, sure, yeah, it's that girl who was in the news, you know. The whole rape thing. Tanjy. Short for Tangerine, right? Weird name. But wow."

"Have you seen her lately?"

"Not in a couple days, no."

"Do you remember exactly when you last saw her?"

Duke didn't have to think about it. "Monday night. I saw her go out in her car right around ten o'clock."

"You sound like you keep a close eye on her."

"What?" Duke was nervous and shuffled his feet.

Stride was taller than Duke, and the kid shrank as Stride came closer. "I mean, what will I find if we go back to your place? A telescope focused on Tanjy's bedroom? That's better than binoculars for peeping, right? Leaves your hands free."

"Whoa, dude, what are you saying? No way." Duke looked at the door as if he wanted to take a running dive through it.

"Listen, you take your telescope and point it at the stars from now on, okay? I don't want to charge you as a Peeping Tom. But right now, I need to know what kinds of things you've been seeing in Tanjy's bedroom."

A small, excited grin flitted across Duke's lips. He yanked at his sweatpants. "Oh, man. It's so fresh. You wouldn't believe it."

"Try me."

"This girl, she's better than a porn star. Always sleeps in the raw. Gets herself off like every night. I should sell tickets, man. Could pay my rent and then some."

"How about visitors?"

"Nobody in the bedroom, not since I've been watching."

"Which is how long?" Stride asked.

"I moved in to my apartment in early December. Didn't take me long to realize the place had a great view."

"You have any idea where she went on Monday?"

Duke took off his hat and scratched his head. His black hair stuck up in messy wings. "No idea. I just look. I don't know her."

"Was she alone?"

"When she left? Yeah."

"Have you ever seen her with anyone else?"

"Like guys? Yeah, this one dude was over at her place around Christmas. I could see them talking on the back porch. I've seen him around a few times recently. I assume he's her new boyfriend. Lucky guy, know what I'm saying? I was hoping to catch a little bedroom action, but they must do it at his place."

"What does he look like?" Stride asked.

"Big guy. Even bigger than you. The kind of guy you expect a girl like that to go after. They don't put out for the likes of me. It messes up the gene pool. Although some of these models, they've married real ugly dudes, you know? Gives me hope. You gotta feel sorry for their kids, though. Seems like they always come out looking like the wrong half."

"Tell me more about the guy you saw." Stride had a bad feeling.

"Not much to tell," Duke replied. "Lots of muscles. Fancy dresser. Oh, and long hair, too. Long blond hair. Longer than most girls."

"And that's the guy you've seen with Tanjy?"

"That's the dude."

Stride wanted to curse out loud. Duke had just described Maggie's husband, Eric.

10

Maggie had bare feet, and her legs were pulled up to her chest with her hands laced around her knees. Her black hair was dirty. She was lost in an oversized armchair that made her look even smaller than she was. The yellow flames of the fire reflected in her eyes, which were far away and unblinking.

"You can still smell it, can't you?" she asked, whiffing the air.

Serena didn't smell anything. "What?"

"The sweat of all the cops. And the superglue from the print box. It was two days ago, and I can still smell it."

Serena thought that Maggie was imagining things but didn't want to say so. "You hungry?" she asked.

"Not much."

"I've got smoked trout in the truck."

Maggie screwed up her face. "Yuck."

"Yuck? You were the one who turned me on to that stuff."

"I've been off it lately," Maggie said.

Serena was stretched out on a sofa in Maggie's den. It was a man's room with walnut paneling and a mounted deer head staring down from the wall with two glass eyes. The furniture was black leather. A grandfather clock ticked hypnotically in the shadows. The wood fire gave off a semicircle of heat. Serena had been here for nearly an hour, but they had spoken only sporadically.

"Jonny was sorry he couldn't come," she said.

"Yeah, I'm a leper," Maggie said. "Don't get too close to me, you might catch something."

"If there's anything he can do for you behind the scenes, he'll do it," Serena said.

"What can he do? This is the Abel Teitscher show."

Serena knew that was true. "Has Abel talked to you?"

"Oh, yeah. Three hours yesterday. He treated me like I was no better than one of the drug dealers at First and Lake. He wants me up on his wall, like Bambi there. Shot and stuffed. This is like déjà vu for Abel, you know. His own partner Nicole was guilty of killing her husband, so I must be, too."

"Maybe you shouldn't be talking to him," Serena advised her.

"Yeah, I know, but what would you think about a suspect who shut up and hired a lawyer?"

"Guilty."

"Exactly. I didn't do it, so the truth can't hurt me, right? That's why I let Abel question me. Except I know I'm being an idiot. I called Archie Gale today, and he told me the same thing, so now I'm lawyered up and not saying another word."

"Abel's reporting directly to Dan," Serena said.

"Oh, great. More good news. That would be a nice going-away present for Dan and Lauren. My head on a plate."

"You know, if you want an investigator to run down leads for you, you've got one," Serena said.

Maggie smiled and whistled the Charlie's Angels theme.

"Ha-ha," Serena said.

"If you were an angel, would it be Kate, Jaclyn, or Farrah?" Maggie asked.

"Jaclyn. Cool as ice."

"Farrah," Maggie said.

"Oh, yeah, you as a blonde, that works."

Maggie flashed a toothy grin.

"Seriously, is there anything I should look into?" Serena asked.

"I'll talk to Archie and let you know. It's a different world, you know, being on the other side of the case. Anything we find out about Eric may just make it worse for me."

"Okay, what about you?" Serena asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean old cases. People you put in prison. Could someone be out for revenge?"

Maggie wrinkled her nose. "I don't think there were any perps where it was personal between us."

"Not for you anyway. Maybe for him."

"Have you ever had a perp come after you?" Maggie asked.

Serena nodded. "A couple of times. Maybe Las Vegas killers are more prone to settling scores. It's the mob influence. There was a sack of shit that I sent up for aggravated assault because he was cutting up his girlfriend. Tommy Luck. Great Vegas name, huh? Tommy got out and tried to return the favor."

"He attacked you?"

"He never got the chance," Serena said. "He was stalking me, but he got caught running a protection racket on some local dry cleaners before he could move in for the kill. They found photos of me all over his apartment. He'd cut the eyes out of most of them. Slashed me up with a knife. Smeared my body with red paint."

"What happened to him?"

"He's rotting in prison again."

"I don't think there's a Tommy Luck in my past," Maggie said.

"Then someone else must have had a motive to kill Eric."

"I'm glad you think so. Most people think all the motives point back to me. I killed him for the money. I killed him because he was having an affair. I killed him because I was having an affair." Maggie ducked her head and shoved her hair off her forehead.

Serena wasn't sure how far to push her. "Look, it doesn't take a mind reader to know you two were having problems."

"I can't talk about it. My lawyer will kill me."

"This conversation never happened, you know that. Something's been bothering you for weeks. Was it Eric? Was he involved with someone else?"

Maggie rolled her eyes. "For Eric, women were like potato chips. You can't fuck just one."

"What about you? Were you having an affair?"

Maggie had her chin on her knees. She cocked her head and gave Serena a sideways glance. "Eric thought I was."

"Oh?"

"He was convinced I was sleeping with Stride."

This was delicate ground between them.

"I know how you feel about Jonny," Serena told her softly.

"I know how he feels about you, too."

There was a trace of bitterness in her voice. They had become close friends, but Serena knew that Maggie resented how quickly Jonny had overturned his life to be with her. That was something he had never chosen to do for Maggie, even after his first wife died.

Serena was jealous, too. She sometimes felt like an outsider when the three of them were together, because Maggie shared such an easy friendship with Stride with so much history between them.

"I shouldn't be saying any of this," Maggie added. "If Eric thought I was having an affair, it gives me one more motive to blow him away."

"You weren't."

"No, but if he believed it, he might just decide to leave me, right? High and dry with no money. That's what Teitscher will think."

"Was Eric planning to leave you? Was that the problem?"

Maggie snorted. "No, that's the irony in all this. Eric said he'd do anything to make things better. He loved me, he was sorry for his mistakes, he was committed to me, he'd keep it in his pants. Sweet, huh?"

"But?"

"But I was planning to leave him. Not by killing him, Serena. I was going to divorce the bastard. I was planning to tell him that night."

"Do you want to tell me why?"

"Let's just say there were things going on that I couldn't stomach," Maggie said.

"Like what?"

Maggie shook her head. "I'm not going there."

Serena persisted. "A few months ago, you asked me about sex. I got the feeling that Eric wanted you to do things you weren't comfortable with."

"Just drop it, okay? Please?" Her voice rose.

"I'm sorry," Serena said. She added, "Are you getting help?"

"What makes you think I need help?"

"Come on, Maggie."

She shook her head. "No, I haven't talked to Tony since before Thanksgiving."

"Why not?"

"I dealt with the miscarriages. I'm okay. I'm past that part of my life now."

Serena was frustrated. "You're not past anything. You were so upset about something you were ready to get a divorce, and now someone just killed your husband."

"Sure, go see a shrink," Maggie said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. "That'll help. Give me another motive, Serena. I'm nuts. Maybe I can plead not guilty by reason of mental defect."

"That's not what I mean."

"I know." Maggie held up her hands in surrender. "I'm sorry for being a pain in the ass. I'll go see Tony again when I'm ready. I promise. But I can't face any of this right now."

11

Stride swung his Bronco into a parking place at the twenty-four/seven fitness club on Miller Hill on Saturday morning. The strip-mall building faced the street through a series of floor-to-ceiling windows, and he saw half a dozen twenty-something girls in sweats and sports bras, jogging on treadmills as they listened to their iPods. The rhythm and noise of athletic machines deafened him when he went inside. He saw chests heaving and smelled perspiration. Stride scanned the pink-flushed faces, looking for Mitchell Brandt. Brandt worked at an investment firm in downtown Duluth and made money for clients playing the stock market like a lottery. He was also Tanjy Powell's ex-boyfriend and the man who had spilled the secrets about her sexual habits to the media after she cried rape.

If Tanjy had a relationship with Eric Sorenson, Stride wanted to know more about her background, in order to figure out whether Tanjy's disappearance was somehow connected to Eric's death. Brandt probably knew Tanjy's secrets better than anyone.

Stride spotted the stockbroker at a weight training machine in the rear of the club and squeezed between the obstacle course of fitness equipment to meet him.

"Mitchell Brandt?"

Brandt continued his bench-press routine without looking at Stride. The black lead weights banged furiously as he pumped the handlebars. He was wearing a sleeveless gray T-shirt with a Minnesota Twins logo and red nylon shorts. His limbs were sculpted and strong. Sweat beaded on his skin and left a V-shaped stain at the neck of his shirt.

"Yeah, who wants to know?"

"My name is Stride. I'm with the Duluth police. We met a few months ago."

Brandt sat up, breathing heavily. He grabbed a white towel, wiped his face, and draped it around his shoulders. He was about thirty years old, with curly brown hair cut short on his scalp and an angular, closely shaved chin. His eyes were as light as oak. He considered Stride. "Yeah, I remember. What can I do for you?"

"I'd like to ask you some questions."

Brandt's face twitched. "About what?"

"Tanjy Powell," Stride said.

"Oh." Brandt relaxed and shrugged his broad shoulders. "That's kind of old news, isn't it?"

"She's missing."

"Missing? Well, I don't see how I can help you. I haven't seen Tanjy in months."

"This won't take long."

Brandt tugged at the sweaty collar of his shirt. His jaw flapped; he was chewing gum. "Okay. There's a coffee shop next door. How about you give me ten minutes to shower, and we'll meet there."

"I appreciate it."

Brandt swung his tree-trunk legs off the machine and glided toward the men's locker room. He was tall and well-built and exuded a macho I-don't-care attitude that women obviously found magnetic. Stride saw several young girls in the club casting an eye at Brandt as he left.

Stride ordered a cup of dark coffee at the shop next door, picked up a newspaper, and found a corner table to wait. Tanjy's disappearance was on the front page, but the article was short and below the fold. Stride was quoted, asking for help from people who might have seen or talked to her in the past week. He hadn't told anyone yet, including Abel, about the possible connection between Tanjy and Eric. For the time being, he had a back door to keep his hand in the investigation of Eric's murder.

Mitchell Brandt took twenty minutes to show up. He was dressed in a black silk shirt with a snug twenty-four-karat gold chain hung around his neck. He wore Dockers and black loafers and ordered a large skim latte with an extra shot of espresso. He sported enough expensive jewelry-an Omega watch, a sapphire ring on a non-wedding finger-to send the message that he had money. Before sitting down, he shook Stride's hand firmly and gave him a stockbroker's grin.

"How are you situated for investments, Lieutenant?" Brandt asked. "I'm tracking some interesting growth companies."

"Most of my assets are in a police pension."

"Well, if you want to make some real money, call me sometime. I work with a lot of the attorneys and executives in town. My clients do very, very well. I've turned people on to some hot med-tech companies down in the Cities."

"What's your secret?" Stride asked.

"I do my homework. I worked with the Byte Patrol guys here in town to build my own research software. It helps me find out everything there is to know about a business, good, bad, and ugly. I know more about these companies than most of their C levels."

"I'll keep that in mind."

Brandt sipped his latte. "So Tanjy's missing, huh? What's the deal? She drive into a lake or something?"

"What would make you think that?"

"She's not exactly stable. Sort of a New Age choirgirl stuck in the middle of a Stephen King novel."

"Meaning what?" Stride asked.

Brandt leaned in closer and lowered his voice. "Come on, Lieutenant. You read the papers back then. This is a girl who insisted I go to church with her every night and then would have me tie her to the bed and put a knife to her throat while I banged her. She's not wired right."

"So why date her?"

Brandt chuckled and fanned himself with the sports section of the paper. "Are you kidding? I'd take her back right now if she walked in the door. She's Cleopatra meets Grace Kelly. The sex was bizarre, but it was ungodly amazing. I've never seen a girl climax like she does. You saw the Meg Ryan orgasm scene in that movie, right? Imagine that times ten. Tanjy could make the house shake."

Stride finished off his coffee. The blend was dark and smoky, and there were grounds in the last swallow. He watched the horny glow in Brandt's face and found himself getting angry. "If you thought she was making up the rape story, you could have come to the police instead of telling it to the papers," Stride told him coldly.

Brandt held up his hands. "You've got it all wrong, Lieutenant. The reporters came to me. They knew about me and Tanjy before I ever opened my mouth. I swear."

"How would they know that? Did you brag about it?"

"Sure, maybe a little, but I don't think any of my friends would have ratted me out. I figured the papers got it from Tanjy herself. That would be like her, you know, to blow the whistle on herself. That's part of the whole victim thing. Look, as soon as I heard about this rape story, I knew Tanjy was faking it. I mean, it read like a replay of our sex life. She had me do her in that very spot, down in Grassy Point Park, against the fence. For all I know, that's where she takes all of her guys. But I wasn't going to spoil her fun. The only reason I talked to the reporters is that they were going to run the story anyway, and I'd come out looking like a rapist myself. That's bad for business. If it was going to be in the news, I wanted to make damn sure everyone knew this was Tanjy's idea, not mine."

Stride had a hard time imagining Tanjy reporting a rape, then giving the media a tip to expose her as a fake. "How did you meet her?"

"Sonia introduced us at the dress shop."

"Sonia?"

"Sonia Bezac. She's the manager."

Stride felt a shiver. "Sonia Bezac runs Lauren's dress shop?"

"Sure. Do you know her?"

He had an erotic flashback. "Yes, I do."

"Don't tell me you're part of-?" Brandt stopped in midsentence.

"What?"

Brandt shook his head. "Nothing, never mind."

"How do you know Sonia?" Stride asked.

"She and her husband are clients. I go in the shop sometimes to talk about investments. It's just a few doors down from my office. I met Tanjy right after Sonia hired her, and we started going out."

"Was she a client, too?"

"Tanjy doesn't have any money. Her dad was a minister, and her mom stayed at home. She got a little cash after they died, but that was all going to tuition. Tanjy never has much in her wallet, but when you look like she does, it doesn't matter. Guys will buy you anything you want."

"How long did you date?"

"About five or six months. We split up over the summer. That was a couple of months before her rape story made the news."

"Why'd you break it off? Did she get too expensive?"

Brandt looked surprised. "Me break it off? No way. She dumped me. I was having the best sex of my life, Lieutenant. Like I said, if she called me today, I'd be back over there this afternoon."

"Okay, so why did she dump you?" Stride asked.

"At the time, she said it was because I didn't want to get married."

"Why not? I thought you were hooked on the girl."

"I was, but not in a forever, roses, kids, minivan kind of way. I was happy to stay with her as long as she was greasing my pole. But marriage? No thanks. I didn't want to wake up and find her taking a cleaver to my privates someday."

"Tanjy was violent?"

"Haven't you been listening, Lieutenant? This girl was all about violence. Sex to her was violence. That was the only way she could enjoy it. This girl had bats in her belfry. I wasn't planning to be around if Satan suddenly told her to start slicing up her husband."

"You said you thought at the time that she dumped you because you didn't want to get married," Stride told Brandt. "Was there some other reason?"

Brandt nodded. "Oh, yeah. I'd never been dumped before, and it was sort of a blow to my ego, know what I mean? Girls don't usually blow me off for another guy."

"Tanjy was seeing someone else?"

"Yeah. She started having conflicts on date nights. Sonia told me Tanjy would go out for long lunches. Long like two hours. So I figured she'd found a sugar daddy. Somebody richer than me."

"Did you ask her who it was?"

"No. I didn't want to find out she tossed me over for someone fat, balding, and sixty, know what I mean? I bought the whole you-won't-marry-me line, even though it was bogus."

"You're sure it was bogus?" Stride asked.

"Well, no one put a ring on her finger, did they? Besides, the way she was sneaking around had to mean one thing. Whoever she was seeing, he was already married."

Like Eric, Stride thought.

After Stride left, Mitchell Brandt watched the detective from behind his coffee cup as he climbed into an old Ford Bronco in the parking lot. Brandt had been around cops before, and he knew the games they played. They talked with you about one thing when they really wanted something else. They baited you into saying something stupid. Sometimes, if you caught them stealing a glance when they thought you weren't looking, you could see the truth in their eyes.

Stride didn't look back as he drove away.

So maybe this really was all about Tanjy and nothing else. Brandt just didn't like the coincidence of the police tracking him down at this particular moment. Not when he was waiting for the next phone call. Not when his whole life was on the line.

Brandt slid out his black RAZR and dialed a number.

A woman answered. "This is Kathy."

"Hey there, alpha girl," Brandt said.

He pictured Kathy Lassiter, cool and hard in spiked heels, cutting off balls in the boardroom, hiding her bad girl ways behind a Brooks Brothers suit. She was a bitch, but he liked that. He enjoyed their battle for control.

"Well, hey yourself," she replied, her voice turning smoky. He imagined her red lips folding into a half-smile and her nipples puckering into pink nubs.

"Are you looking forward to next week?" he asked.

"You know I am. Are you going to be first?"

"Maybe I'll make you wait, so I can watch."

"I like that."

He grinned.

"Listen, about Infloron-" he began.

"Not on the phone."

"Yeah, I know. Understood. Sorry. I was just wondering if anyone has been nosing around. Asking you questions."

The silence drew out, but Brandt could hear the measured sound of her breathing.

"Of course not. Why?"

"I'm just making sure we're safe."

"Has someone talked to you?" The erotic undercurrent in her voice was gone. She was a corporate lawyer again, as sharp as a knife edge.

He hesitated. "No."

"Then stay cool."

"Look, if someone were to start following the paper trail, they'd wind up with me, not you."

Her voice was frozen. "So?"

"So I don't like that."

"I guess you'll have to trust me," she said.

"Yeah, right."

"I'll see you next week. You can get out your frustrations then. In the meantime, don't be stupid. Okay?"

"Sure."

Brandt hung up.

He tried to decide if Kathy Lassiter was lying to him. They used each other in and out of bed, but Brandt didn't trust Kathy. Not one little bit. He couldn't afford to trust anyone now. That was how it was when you were on the hook to a blackmailer.

12

An elderly Mexican housekeeper led Abel Teitscher to the solarium at the rear of Dan Erickson's London Road estate. A silver urn with coffee waited for him, along with a warm plate of cheese Danish and croissants. Abel awkwardly filled a china cup and blew on the coffee to cool it. He ate a piece of Danish quickly without using a plate and wiped his sticky fingers on a small paper napkin, then crumpled the napkin and shoved it in his pocket. He felt foolish, trying to balance the cup between his thumb and index finger, and feeling it quiver in his hand as if he was about to drop it and cause an embarrassing mess on the white ceramic tile.

Abel could feel the chill of the floor through the bottoms of his faded leather shoes. A wall of glass, divided into geometric patterns, looked out on a broad stretch of snow-covered lawn leading down to the lake. The mansions along the coastal road were expensive and old-school, set well back from the street behind iron gates, on large open lots that did nothing except ring up dollars on a property tax bill. Abel figured that the ground itself, just the dirt, was worth many times more than his entire house. Lauren's money, not Dan's.

He noticed a reflection in the diamond-shaped windows and turned to see Dan step down into the solarium from the main house. The county attorney had summoned Abel for an update on the investigation of Eric Sorenson's murder.

"Shit, it's like an icebox out here," Dan said. "You okay on coffee, Abel? Need a warmer-upper?"

"I'm okay."

Dan poured a cup. He was dressed in a navy blue silk robe over white pajamas, with black plush slippers on his feet. Abel could see an inch or two of bare ankles. Dan's blond hair, which was normally plastered in place with half a can of hair spray, was mussed and spiky. He hadn't shaved, and there was a yellow growth of stubble across the lower half of his face.

"Sorry I'm late," Dan said. "I was on the phone until two this morning about the new job. I can't wait to move to Washington. Nothing wrong with Duluth, but I was born in Chicago, and it'll be nice to be back in a real city again. Where Chinese food doesn't mean the lunch buffet at Potsticker Palace."

Abel grunted. He ordered takeout every Monday from the Potsticker Palace and thought it was damn good.

Dan put a croissant and two cheese Danish on a plate. "Not much for small talk, are you? That's why some people think you're a prick, Abel. Think about that. You're looking even skinnier than when I last saw you. You don't have cancer or something, do you?"

Abel felt his face growing hot. "I run, okay? Everyone else in this town piles on lard to hibernate for the winter, and meanwhile, my cholesterol is one hundred and seventy-one without taking any goddamn Lipitor."

Dan laughed. "K-2 was right. You do go ballistic about that."

The man was deliberately pushing his buttons. Abel wasn't going to miss him. He hoped that Dan went to a Chinese restaurant in Washington and choked on his broccoli stir-fry.

"No offense, but why am I here?" Abel asked impatiently. "You don't usually call me in until we're ready to make an arrest."

"Well, are we?"

"No way. We won't have anything back on the forensics for a few weeks."

"All right, tell me what you've found since we last talked." Dan sat down and chewed the end of a croissant.

"I've looked at Sorenson's finances. He had a net worth in the high seven figures and a strong cash flow at his business. He did well in the market. No litigation at the company. He hasn't dismissed an employee in two years. There's nothing suspicious in his work life."

"All of his money goes to Maggie now?" Dan asked.

"Most of it. I saw his will. There are charitable provisions and some outright gifts to two sisters and a few nieces and nephews. Nothing more than a hundred thousand dollars. The bulk of the estate winds up in his wife's hands."

"Nice nest egg for a cop. What about the happy couple?"

"Not so happy."

"What does Maggie say about their marriage?"

"She says they were fine, but she's lying. I've got reports of arguments and affairs. He wasn't sleeping in their bed. You ask me, they were headed for a divorce."

"Can we prove that?" Dan asked.

"Not at this point. I do know that Maggie was seeing a shrink. Tony Wells. Sorenson went to see Tony the night he was killed."

"Do we know why?"

"I called him. Tony says he can't say anything unless Maggie waives privilege."

"That's not likely," Dan said.

"Tony thinks Maggie is innocent, for whatever that's worth," Abel added.

"It's not worth squat. What about these affairs?"

"His secretary says Sorenson catted around. I don't have any names yet."

"What about Maggie? Is she getting any on the side?"

"I've started asking around the department, but people don't want to talk about her."

"Do you have her under surveillance?"

"Sure, that's standard M.O., but Maggie knows we're doing it. She's not stupid."

"Keep it up anyway. Twenty-four seven. I don't want anyone saying we gave her special treatment."

"K-2 already ordered it."

"If you're looking for affairs, remember that she's always had a thing for Stride," Dan reminded him.

"Everyone knows that's platonic."

"Yeah? Don't be so sure."

Abel's eyes narrowed. "Do you know something?"

"I'm just saying they spend half their lives together. Check it out."

"If you say so." Abel wasn't convinced. He didn't like Stride and didn't much like Maggie either, but that didn't mean they were heating up the sheets. Then again, he had always assumed his wife was loyal, too.

"So her husband is cheating, and she's got millions coming her way," Dan said. "Motive isn't a problem."

"Nothing's a problem. It's her gun. No one was in the house. She did it."

"You sound pretty sure. How about gun shot residue?"

"Nothing, but she's a cop. She knows how to beat that."

"Any blood spatter on her clothes?"

Abel shook his head. "We're running tests, but I didn't see anything. It was her house. She could have washed her clothes before calling us. Hell, she could have shot him in the buff and then taken a shower. Oh, and I had her take a blood test, too. She was drinking coffee, but I smelled alcohol."

"And?"

"Her blood alcohol level was point zero seven. Even if she quit drinking a few hours earlier, that's high. She must have been drunk when she did it."

"That gives Archie Gale a way to talk it down to manslaughter."

"He may be right," Abel said. "Nothing points to premeditation at this point."

"Right, the gun walked downstairs on its own, and Maggie followed to find out where it was going." Dan took a big bite out of a pastry and licked the cream cheese off his lips with his tongue. He added, "How about the conspiracy theory? Anyone get out of prison lately who might want to get back at Maggie for putting him away? Defense attorneys like Archie Gale love to blow smoke about that kind of shit."

Abel scoffed. "There's nothing like that. I've got people running down her old cases, but so far, the violent perps she put away are all still behind bars or dead. Cases don't come much more straightforward than this. Stride's the one who wants this to be some mystery, because he can't accept the fact that Maggie did it."

Dan leaned forward. "Is Stride interfering?"

"He was at the crime scene before anyone else. I don't like that, but I don't think he actually touched anything or helped her clean up."

"If he gets in the way, or sticks his nose into this, I want to know immediately."

"You personally?"

"Damn right. I wasn't in favor of bringing him back, you know. As far as I was concerned, K-2 should have kept you in the top job, but Stride and K-2 are as thick as thieves. If Stride does anything that compromises this investigation, I will personally see that his ass gets kicked out of the lieutenant's chair."

Abel didn't know how to respond to that. "I wouldn't want it back even if K-2 offered it, and he won't."

"Never say never."

Abel didn't like game-playing. He wasn't going to be a pawn. He knew Stride was permanently on Dan's shit list because of the blown election, but if Dan was burning to take him down before he left the city, he could do it on his own.

He heard the muffled ringing of Dan's cell phone. Dan reached into the pocket of his bathrobe and retrieved it.

"Erickson," Dan said into the phone.

Abel watched Dan's eyes do a nervous dance. Dan snapped his fingers and gestured at the door, and Abel was glad to take the hint. Time to go.

Whatever the call was, it was bad news.

"Hello, Dan. Do you know who this is?"

There was a moment of dead air as Dan wrenched his way from one reality to the next. Every victim was like that.

"Yes," Dan replied, his voice forced.

"Tonight's the night. Is Serena ready to make the drop?"

"Yes."

"That's good." He added, "But you know this is just a down payment, right?"

"That's not what we discussed."

"You're right, it's not, but things have changed. A lot's happened this week, Dan. You think I don't read the papers? The price has gone up."

"That's not acceptable."

He chuckled long and low. "I love lawyers. Always negotiating. You're right, Dan, why don't we just forget about it. Hand the phone to that cop who's there with you, and I can let him know what's been going on."

He waited as Dan stewed. Targets like Dan were the easy ones. They'd chew glass rather than risk public embarrassment. Or jail.

"What did you have in mind?" Dan asked finally.

He smiled. "Let's wrap up the first deal, and then I'll check in with you again. I'd hate to see your big move to Washington get tanked."

"Give me the details," Dan snapped.

"Call Serena," he instructed. "Tell her to be at the Park Hill Cemetery off Vermillion Road at ten o'clock tonight. Alone. With the money."

"Why there?"

"Let's just say I like the idea of being surrounded by dead people." He thought about the river stench of the rising waters in Alabama and added, "The truth is, Dan, I'm a ghost."

13

Stride felt sorry for the guy from Byte Patrol, who was seated in front of the store computer at Lauren Erickson's dress shop, Silk. The store manager, Sonia Bezac, jabbed her razor-sharp nail dangerously close to his eyes and wouldn't have thought twice about digging in and gouging one out. The techie had a giant physique that made his neon purple T-shirt look as if it had shrunk in the wash, but Sonia may as well have been wearing black leather and cracking a whip.

"This is the third time in a month I've had you in here," she snapped at him. "Each time you tell me it's fixed, and each time the fucking machine freezes up again."

The tech shrugged his craggy shoulders, and his neck disappeared. "Have you tried rebooting?"

Sonia threw her hands in the air. She was tall and extremely thin, with a narrow face, prominent chin, and a slightly drooping nose. With her hands over her head, and her red hair blazing like sunshine, she looked as if she were rearing back to fire off a lightning bolt. "Rebooting? Do I look like an idiot? Don't you think I would turn the goddamn thing off and on eighteen times before calling you?"

"I have to ask," the man said.

"Don't ask. Just get busy. I need my files back."

She swung away and expelled her breath loudly as if she were spitting out a gristly piece of steak. The techie caught Stride's eye and winked at him.

Sonia stopped dead when she saw Stride standing in the middle of the dress shop, watching her. He knew he looked out of place, the way any man would, surrounded by glittering evening gowns and cocktail dresses. He could see himself reflected in half a dozen mirrors. He wasn't sure how he would feel, seeing Sonia again, and it didn't help when she immediately stalked up to him, cocked her head to one side, and kissed him on the lips.

"Soft lips," she said to him. "Thirty years later, and I still remember that."

He had dated Sonia exactly once, when he was a junior in high school. Stride was wild with grief because his father had just died, and Sonia was on a quest to rob as many teenage boys as she could of their virginity. She smuggled a bottle of Stoli out of her parents' house, and the two of them spent three hours in a parking lot near Gooseberry Falls, drinking shots until they were sick. They undressed each other through a fog of alcohol but wound up vomiting on the highway shoulder before they had sex. Neither of them was in the mood after that.

A month later, Stride met Cindy, and he never went out with Sonia again. He had bumped into her in the city off and on over the course of three decades. Sonia wound up marrying a urologist named Delmar Bezac, and Stride remembered Cindy joking about whether Delmar or Sonia had seen more penises in their days.

"It's hazy to me, Sonia," he told her. "All I remember is a cold night and warm vodka. Or was it a warm night and cold vodka?"

Sonia dabbed her lips, as if checking her lipstick to make sure she wasn't smudged. "I bet you remember more than that."

"No comment."

"You became a cop. I see you in the papers all the time. You know what they say. Cops carry big guns."

Stride ignored that. "You're working for Lauren. I'm surprised."

"What, the rich bitch and the slut?"

"I didn't say that."

"Never mind, you were thinking it. This place is just a tax write-off for Lauren. I run the store."

"How's Delmar?" Stride asked. "I understand the man is a whiz with a catheter."

Sonia giggled. "You always were fucking funny."

"Is that the way you talk to your customers? Do mothers of the bride like a girl who swears a blue streak and has a temper like a cannon?"

Sonia swept her long mane of red hair out of her eyes. "I control myself with customers, thank you very much. Except for the young girls. These new brides, they pretend to be sweet little girls for their mommies, but you should hear the stories they tell me."

"Do you have kids?"

"Two. Boys, thank God. They're both away in college."

Stride looked around at the dresses hung on the white plastic bodies of the mannequins. Sonia herself wore a glittering lilac dress that clung to her long, slender lines and would have looked stylish at a symphony ball. Her makeup minimized the tracks near her eyes and lips. In her heels, she was nearly as tall as Stride. Sonia noted his eyes and spread her arms, inviting his gaze. The dress fell low across her pale, small chest, and Stride realized he could remember vividly, even so many years later, how her breasts felt in the calloused grip of his teenage hands. Her skin didn't have the taut freshness of youth anymore, but she was still attractive, and she had smoothed some of her rough edges.

"I clean up nicely, don't I?" she asked, guessing where his mind was going. "Not bad for a girl from the wrong side of the tracks."

"I can't picture you in a place like this, Sonia."

"You mean because all my prom dresses wound up with grass stains?"

"No comment again."

"You're here, so let me give you the tour." Sonia slung an arm through Stride's elbow and steered him around the shop, which was lushly carpeted in a royal blue and had track lighting illuminating the racks. One sparkling chandelier was hung in the center of the ceiling. Sonia rattled off the names of Italian designers whom Stride had never heard of and had him run his fingers along fabrics that slid off his skin like skates on fresh ice. His hands came away with glitter.

Silk was located on Superior Street in the heart of the brick-lined streets of downtown. Nearby, there were funky gift shops and coffeehouses offering tarot card readings designed to lure tourists out of Canal Park and New Age students from the university. For the lawyers and suits at the courthouse and in the banks, there were also jewelers and investment brokers. An upscale dress shop in downtown Duluth relied mostly on proms and weddings for its business. It was also the only place in town where the women of Duluth 's small upper crust, and trendy young singles with money, could find name fashions that didn't come with a zip-out hood.

"Does Lauren plan to keep the shop after she and Dan move to Washington?" he asked.

Sonia shook her head. "I'm trying to get Delmar to buy it for me."

"Good for you."

"Yeah, except Lauren is trying to screw me on the price. The woman is fucking cold-blooded, you know?"

"You don't have to tell me," Stride said.

"Oh, yeah, I saw the papers last year. She had her knives out for you. It's lucky you're still alive."

Stride smiled and didn't reply.

"I guess you're not here just to remember the good old days," Sonia said.

Stride shook his head. "Tanjy."

"Sure. I still haven't heard from her."

"Tell me about her," Stride said.

"You probably know her better than me. I mean, because of all that craziness with the fake rape in November."

"I don't feel like I know her at all," Stride admitted. "Were you the one to hire her?"

"Yeah, she was perfect for the store. She has those amazing mulatto features and a great eye for fashion."

"Did you know anything about her sex life?"

"Why, because sex is my specialty?" Sonia grinned in a way that led Stride to think she was still competing with Delmar for access to the private parts of Duluth males. "There's nothing wrong with a little sin from time to time, Jon. Maybe you should take a walk on the wild side."

Have you two ever done anything… strange?

"Meaning what?" he asked.

"Meaning not everyone is satisfied with once a week in the missionary position, you know? I may be past forty, but I'm as horny as I ever was."

"That's a scary thought."

"Why don't we have dinner, and I can tell you what I mean."

"Pass," he said.

"Well, you can't blame a girl for trying."

"Let's get back to Tanjy," Stride said. "Did you know about her rape fantasies?"

"No, around me, she's very conservative, very Christian. Maybe she has a multiple personality thing going on, who knows. Not that I'm judging what she does in bed. I sure wouldn't want to see my sex life in the papers."

"Men seem to fall for her hard."

"Oh, God, yeah. It made me a little jealous. Look, I've been with a lot of men, and I never get any complaints, you know? But no one's offered to bronze my pussy."

"Nice," Stride said.

"I'm just saying, Tanjy was in a whole other league."

"I talked to Mitchell Brandt today," Stride said. "Mitch is a friend of yours, right?"

"You could say that," Sonia said with a tiny smile.

"You introduced Tanjy and Mitch?"

"It was more like Mitch saw Tanjy in the store, and I led him over to her by his cock."

"Did he tell you about the rape stuff while they were dating?"

"Not the gory details. He just said she was an animal in bed. I was pretty surprised."

"Mitch says she dumped him for another guy."

Sonia smiled. "Poor Mitch. He's never alone for long."

"Do you know who Tanjy was seeing?"

"No, it was pretty obvious she was having a big romance, but she kept it quiet. I asked her about it a few times and got nothing."

"Any idea why?"

"I figure he was married."

"Was this before or after the rape charge?" Stride asked.

"Before."

"What happened after she admitted the story was a fake?"

Sonia caressed her chin with her fingertips as she thought about it. "I think the rape thing killed the romance. There weren't any more secret lunches. I guess the guy figured he was dating a nutcase, and he was probably worried the affair would come out."

"So she wasn't dating anyone lately?"

"Not that I know of."

Stride was surprised.

"You never saw her with anyone in the store?"

Sonia shook her head. "We don't get many men in here. Just husbands who sit and read Esquire while their wives try on dresses. Most of them aren't the type to catch the eye of a girl like Tanjy."

"She never talked about being stalked or followed?"

"Not to me."

"Did you know Eric Sorenson?"

Sonia's eyes narrowed into slits. "Sure. Why?"

"Did you ever see him with Tanjy?"

"No."

"Could he have been Tanjy's mystery man? The one she dumped Mitch Brandt for?"

"No." Sonia tugged on one strap of her dress and played with her hair.

"You sound pretty sure."

"I would have known if it were him, that's all."

"Why?"

Sonia shrugged and didn't reply.

"How do you know Eric?" Stride asked.

"Socially."

"Were you having an affair with him?"

"That's none of your business." Her red hair fell across her cheek. "What are you, a cop or a goddamn gossip columnist?"

"You think I like asking these questions?"

Sonia whirled away and planted herself in front of the store window. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest. "You don't know who I am, Jon. You've hardly seen me in thirty years. How dare you come in here making judgments about my life. You don't know anything about me."

"This isn't personal," Stride told her.

"Well, it sure as hell sounds personal."

"Look, there are only two things I want. I want to know where Tanjy Powell is and what happened to her. And I want to know who killed Eric Sorenson."

"I have nothing to say about Eric."

Stride swore under his breath. "Then tell me about Tanjy," he said.

Sonia swiveled her head to look at him. "What about her?"

"You told Lauren that she left early on Monday."

She tossed her hair back. "That's right."

"Did she say why?"

"No."

It was like coaxing drops of wine out of an empty bottle now, trying to get her to talk. "What happened that day?" he asked.

"She took a break about three o'clock. When she came back, she was upset."

"About what?"

"I have no idea."

"Did she say anything?"

"No."

Stride was frustrated. "How long was she gone?"

"Maybe half an hour."

"Do you know where she went?"

Sonia shrugged. "When she came back, she had a cup of coffee from Katrina's place down the street. Java Jelly."

"Katrina?"

"Katrina Kuli. She owns the coffee shop. Talk to her, not me. Maybe she knows what the hell happened."

14

Java Jelly, where Tanjy got her coffee on Monday afternoon before her disappearance, was three blocks down Superior Street from Silk. It was a twenty-something hangout and a haven for folk musicians on the weekends, with warped wood floors, mismatched antique tables, and black-and-white publicity photos taped on the walls. The ceiling was low, and black pipes wobbled on loose brackets overhead. He saw a few students using WI-FI on their laptops and nursing lattes. He smelled roasting beans and old sweat socks.

The woman working the counter was heavyset, at least two hundred pounds, with brown hair bunched into two pigtails. She wore a tie-dye shirt that let three inches of her bare stomach bulge out over the belt of her jeans. Her navel was pierced, and so was her upper lip, and she had a barbed wire tattoo wound around her neck.

"Help you?" the woman asked him. Her voice was polite but cool. She was in her early thirties and older than she looked. As a university town, Duluth had its share of ex-students who never grew out of their hippy phase.

"I'd like to ask you a few questions."

"Questions go better with a muffin, don't you think?" she asked, wiping the counter.

"Sorry, I'm not hungry," Stride said. He added, "I'm with the police."

"So what? Is there some kind of no-muffin-when-I'm-on-duty rule?"

"Okay. Blueberry."

"Yah shoooor, blooooberry, the state muffin of Minnnnnnahhhsooodddaa." She grabbed a plate and snagged a muffin from the rack behind her with a pair of tongs.

Stride handed her money. "Are you Katrina?"

She nodded. "Katrina Kuli. I own the place, I run the place, I book the music, I bus the tables when my students don't show up, which is half the time."

"Cool spot," he said.

"And you look like an expert on cool," she told him, clucking her tongue. "What's your name? Joe Friday? Bob Thursday? Tom Monday?"

"It's Jonathan Stride."

"Well, well." Katrina folded her arms across her ample chest. "I see it, yes, I do see it."

"You've lost me."

"Maggie Sorenson is a friend of mine," she told him. "I've had to listen to a lot of stories about you."

"I'm sure none of them was flattering."

"You'd be surprised." Katrina frowned as her memory caught up with her. "How is Maggie?"

"Not good."

"I hear she's been suspended."

"She's on paid leave while we investigate this thing."

"I don't believe she could have done what they say."

Stride didn't want to go down that road. "How do you know her?"

"We met in an aerobic dance class last year."

He had a good poker face, but a twitch of his lips betrayed him, and Katrina caught it immediately.

"What, you think big girls don't dance?" she asked.

"Not at all."

"Let me tell you, big girls do everything, and we could teach lessons to some of those pretzel sticks in the girlie magazines. It ain't how much you got, it's what you do with it."

He held up his palms, surrendering. "You win. Can we talk?"

"Yeah, sure." Katrina waved a hand at a skinny boy with greasy black hair, who was slumped in a chair near the store's fireplace with a dog-eared copy of Ulysses. "Billy, watch the counter for me, okay?"

The kid grunted without looking up.

Katrina led Stride to a raised platform that doubled as a matchbox stage when bands visited the shop. The chairs wobbled as they sat down, and the table shifted unsteadily on its legs when Stride put his elbows down to lean closer to Katrina. Her breath smelled like berry tea. When he was near her face, he noticed caked-on makeup covering purplish bruises on her cheekbones and neck, and a scabbed gash poking like a worm out of the collar of her shirt.

"What happened to you?" he asked.

Katrina shrugged. "Nothing."

"That's not nothing," Stride told her.

"I slipped on the ice. Luckily, my tits broke the fall, or it would have been a lot worse."

"Did you cut yourself on the ice, too?"

"I think there was a piece of glass, yeah." She covered the gash with her hand.

"It looks like someone beat you up."

"I don't really care what it looks like."

"I'm not trying to pry. I just don't like it when husbands or boyfriends use their women as punching bags."

"Well, I don't have either one. Okay? Now what do you want?"

"Sonia Bezac at the dress shop sent me down here."

Katrina's eyes flashed with anger. "What the hell did she tell you?"

"Just that you might know something about Tanjy Powell."

"Oh." Katrina slumped.

"Do you know Tanjy?"

"Speaking of girlie pretzel sticks," Katrina replied, sticking out her tongue.

"So that's a yes."

"Sure, I'm in Silk a lot, so I see her there. Sonnie gets me decked out when I'm headed down to the Cities for a weekend of clubbing." She read Stride's expression and said, "Do I have to give you my big girls speech again?"

"No."

"Good. It's not funny, you know, the way people treat us plus sizes. And it's not just men. Women are the worst. Girls like Tanjy, they look at me like I'm some kind of freak."

"You're sure it's not the belly button ring, the tie-dye, and the tattoo?" he said.

"Okay, yeah, I may look like a freak sometimes. Hell, I am a freak and proud of it. But put me in a short skirt on the dance floor, and I can rock it out. Some women act all disgusted. Well, fuck 'em, I am who I am. I'm not going to walk around in a muumuu just because I was born with fat genes and I like to eat."

"I can see why you and Maggie get along," Stride said.

"Yeah, Maggie's got a foul little mouth on her. I love that. For a pretzel stick, she's not half-bad."

"What about Tanjy?"

Katrina growled. "Now there's a bitch. Slinks around the shop like she's better than everyone else. Always has her face stuck in a Bible, and then you find out she likes to get tied up and nasty. Fucking hypocrite."

"Does she come in here a lot?"

"Oh, yeah, she gets a cuppa almost every day. Treats me like I'm the hired help. And what the hell is she? Like she's anything more than a sales-clerk herself?"

"When did you last see her?"

Katrina took hold of her pigtails and wiggled them like antennae. "I do that when I need to think. Helps focus the brain waves." She thought for a moment and said, "I guess it was Monday."

"Was she here with anyone else?"

"No, she came in, got a cup to go, and left."

"When was that?"

"Oh, shit, I don't remember. Sometime in the afternoon."

"How did she look?"

Katrina rubbed her nose with the back of her palm. "Same as usual, I guess. Same stuck-up, bitchy attitude."

"Was she upset? Agitated?"

"Not that I could see."

Stride tried to puzzle out the time line. Tanjy left Silk to get coffee and came back half an hour later, visibly shaken. That evening, she disappeared. Why?

"Did you see where she went?"

"Nope."

"Did you see her talking to anyone?"

"Negatory."

"Did you know Maggie's husband?" he asked.

"Eric? Yeah."

"Did you ever see Eric and Tanjy together?"

"Nope." Katrina stuck a fingernail in her mouth and chewed on it.

"You look nervous," Stride said.

Katrina didn't reply.

"Was something going on with Eric?"

"How would I know?"

"That's not an answer."

Katrina fidgeted in her chair. "I don't know anything about Eric."

"When did you last see him?" he asked.

"He was in on Monday, too," Katrina told him.

Stride's face hardened. "Were Eric and Tanjy together?"

"No." She saw the disbelief in his eyes and added, "Hey, it's true. They weren't together. Eric came in about ten minutes after Tanjy left."

After leaving the coffee shop, Stride headed for the branch of Range Bank across the street and asked the head of security to queue up the tapes from the bank's ATM camera on Monday afternoon. He sat alone in a windowless office, watching the grainy tape roll. The video was in black-and-white, but Duluth in January was like a black-and-white movie anyway. He sat under the fluorescent light, not moving a muscle, watching pedestrians come and go in silence on the tape.

At five minutes after three o'clock, he watched Tanjy Powell disappear inside the door of Java Jelly. Three minutes later, she came out again with a tall cup of coffee in her hand. It was odd, seeing her again in the flesh, looking as cool and mysterious as ever. She sipped her coffee, and he could imagine the warmth of the liquid on her lips. She was dressed in a black wool coat that draped to her ankles, and she had a velvet pillbox hat nestled on her head. It was white leopard, with a matching scarf. Her raven hair flowed from under the hat and skittered across her face like streaks of chocolate skimming across the surface of espresso foam.

His view was blocked as an old man approached the ATM. His face filled the camera. Stride swore, trying to see behind him. He caught a glimpse of Tanjy turning away from the coffee shop, but in the opposite direction from Silk. He wanted to reach in and move the man out of the way.

Where was she going?

Stride fumed as nearly two minutes passed. Finally, the old man took his card and disappeared, and the camera offered an unobstructed view across Superior Street. He caught his breath. Tanjy was there, nestled against the side of a building.

Eric was with her.

He was wearing a dark suit, but no coat. His long blond hair blew wildly in the wind. The two of them were so close as to be nearly kissing. Eric spoke animatedly, clutching Tanjy's shoulder with one hand. Suddenly, she turned away, and she stared right at the camera, as if she were looking straight at Stride across the street. Her hands flew to her mouth in a look of sheer horror.

Eric pulled her back and said something more to her. Tanjy shook her head violently. She yanked away and hurried down the street away from him. He saw Eric call after her. Once, then twice. When she was gone, Eric stood there on the frigid street, alone, looking like some kind of Norse god. He shook his head and walked toward the coffee shop and went inside. He came back out again with a cup of coffee himself and headed in the opposite direction, his head down, his hair waving behind him. He walked until he vanished out of view of the camera.

Stride let the tape go. More people wandered by. Everyone was in a rush, trying to escape from the cold.

He pulled out his cell phone. His fingers hesitated over the keys, but then he dialed.

"Abel? It's Stride. We need to talk."

15

Fifteen minutes before midnight, Serena climbed from lake level up the sharp incline that twisted like a Chinese dragon through a series of tight switchbacks. She was driving Stride's Bronco, its four-wheel drive clutching at the pavement. Her high beams illuminated the neighborhood. She was in the narrow greenway of Congdon Park, one of the richest areas of the city, on a secluded street that didn't invite visitors. Grand homes lit up like monuments as her headlights swept across them, and then they vanished again into the shadows. The gated driveways were closed and locked, alarm systems on, lights extinguished.

This was a city with almost no middle class. You were rich, or you were poor, and never the twain shall meet.

She drove slowly, unsure of her directions, and almost missed the sign pointing her toward the cemetery. She followed Vermillion Road, and a few hundred yards later, the street became a rutted dirt track. The land opened up around her. Fir trees hugged the road, and beyond them, she could see slopes glowing in the moonlight and rows of silhouetted headstones. The area was primitive and empty, as if she had left the city miles behind her.

Serena slowed the Bronco to a crawl. On a stretch of straightaway, she saw a stake jutting at an angle out of the snow on the right shoulder. A white piece of cloth was tied around the stake and hung limply in the still air. She steered off the road and killed the engine, then got out and closed the door with a quiet snick. She stopped and listened. The night was silent, except for the rumble of a train far down in the port area below her. The clouds had passed away. Overhead, she saw a jumble of constellations and a slim moon. She took stock of the park around her. On her left was a steep hillside, and she could make out graves scattered among the trees. On her right was a tattered mesh fence mostly buried in snow. The cemetery continued beyond the fence, and she could see a plowed-out section of road where mourners could drive out to the plots.

She was dressed entirely in black: black jeans, a black turtleneck that nestled against her chin, and Stride's beat-up black leather jacket that was warm and roomy. The jacket hid the holster for the Glock secured near her left shoulder. She wasn't taking any chances. Not with a blackmailer. Not in an empty cemetery at midnight. And not with an envelope bulging with ten thousand dollars in cash inside the jacket pocket.

The snow was matted down. She climbed the shoulder of the road and then stepped over the crooked section of fence. On the other side, her feet landed in wetter, deeper snow, and some of it got into her boots. She felt cold dampness soaking through her socks. She slogged through the snow and broke free onto the plowed road, where she stopped again. The trees loomed around her like sentinels. Most were evergreens, but there were a few stripped oaks, barren of leaves. She took careful steps, trying to hush her footfalls. She slipped a flashlight out of her pocket and cast the beam around, lighting up several headstones. She read the names: Boe, Beckmann, Anderson.

Serena wasn't superstitious by nature, but a sixth sense made her jump. She wasn't alone.

"Turn off the flashlight."

Something about the voice made her body melt with fear, as if she were a frightened teenager. She thought about reaching for her gun, but she soothed herself and swallowed hard. Her mouth was dry. She switched off the light, and her eyes, accustomed to the beam, went blind again.

"Come closer."

She waited until she could see. He quickly became impatient.

"Now."

Serena saw a silhouette near one of the skeletal oak trees. She drew near him, feeling the weight of the gun on her left side comfort her. Somewhere not far away, a dog bayed like a banshee. Its howl was plaintive and scared, and the sound reminded her that the rest of the world wasn't so far away. But no one was close enough to make a difference if things went bad.

She tried to make him out and narrowed her eyes, squinting. He was standing where the ground rose above her. He had a bulky coat with a fur hood pulled up over his head. His face was invisible. His arms hung down at his side, long, like ape limbs. She realized that he held things in both hands that made his arms look as if they dropped all the way to his knees. His left hand held a heavy flashlight. His right hand held a gun.

"Seen enough?" he asked.

Meaning: had she seen the gun?

He switched on the flashlight and directed the intense beam at her face. She felt a sharp pain as the light hit her pupils, and she covered her face and backed away.

"Turn that off, you son of a bitch," she snapped.

He laughed in a low, deep rumble and switched the light off.

"Let's get this over with," Serena said. "Neither one of us wants to be out here long."

"You mean you want to get back into bed with your cop lover?"

Serena let a few seconds of cold silence pass. "So you know who I am. Am I supposed to be scared?"

"I think you are."

"Big words from a blackmailer. Blackmailers are cowards. You can't let me see your face. You steal someone's secrets and pretend it makes you a big man. Stealing secrets is what little girls do."

He didn't answer right away, and then he said, "I could tell you what I do to little girls."

"What, do you dress up like them?"

"Watch your mouth," he said.

"I'm not afraid of a pissant blackmailer. Do you want the money or not?"

"Did you count it?"

"Yes."

"Ten thousand?"

"Yes."

"I hope you didn't do something stupid like mark the bills or write down the serial numbers. Or tell your cop lover about this."

"I guess you'll have to take your chances," Serena said.

"So will you. Don't forget that."

"You're taking a big risk, blackmailing someone like Dan," she told him.

"Yeah? People like Dan pay me because they keep one face for the world and one face for all the fucking games they play when no one's watching. You don't know the shit that goes down in this town. You and your cop lover, you're blind."

"So it's not just Dan," Serena concluded. "Who else are you doing this to?"

"Like I said, some people around here have dirty secrets."

Serena reached inside her jacket pocket.

"Stop," he snapped, instantly raising his gun, pointing it at her head.

"I'm getting your money."

He blinded her with the flashlight again. "Slowly. Use two fingers. Don't be stupid."

She extracted the envelope and held it up. "See?"

"Put it on the headstone and back away."

She saw a stone encrusted with dead moss near her feet. It slanted backward toward the ground. The name, partly eroded by time, read BURNS. She lay the envelope on the arched summit of the marker and backed up slowly.

"That's far enough," he called when she was another fifteen feet away. "Turn around. Get on your knees."

"No way."

"Get on your knees."

"I'm not turning my back on you."

"Just do it."

She sank to her knees in the snow. The wetness soaked through her jeans. "Make it fast."

He kept the flashlight in her face. She couldn't see a thing and had to close her eyes. She heard him slide down the low slope. The snow crunched under his boots as he came closer. Her bare hands stiffened in the cold, and she fluttered her fingers to limber them up, in case she needed to dive into her coat for her gun. He was at the headstone. She heard him ruffling through the cash in the envelope.

She waited for what he would do next. She listened carefully for any footstep that meant he was walking toward her.

"See you soon," he said.

The white light disappeared behind her eyelids. She opened her eyes, blinking, seeing nothing but aftershocks of light. She heard footsteps heading away from her. He was jogging as he retreated up the hillside. When she could finally see again, she caught only a fleeting glimpse of a moving silhouette, and then it blended into darkness with the rest of the trees.

She was alone.

Serena pushed herself to her feet and brushed the snow away. She climbed back up to the fence by the road and stepped over it again. Her breathing was loud and fast. Her pulse was galloping like a Thoroughbred. Stride's Bronco had never looked so good.

Closer by, the dog howled again. It was loose. Or maybe it was a prowling wolf, not a dog at all. She didn't want to stick around and find out.

16

Serena's body was ice-cold when she slid under the fleece blanket into bed an hour later. Frosty air breathed on her face and bare shoulders through a crack in the window. The bedroom was small, like the other matchbox rooms in the old house, which had no foundation underneath it, just wooden pilings that made the floors slant like a carnival fun house. The room had a comforting, musty smell about it, a smell of age and the sea that had long ago taken up residence deep in its timbers. She often woke up to that smell and heard odd noises in the night, as if ghosts were passing from room to room.

She had spent much of the past year haunting antique shops along the North Shore to pick up cherry wood dressers, throw rugs, and old nautical equipment. She was surprised at how much she enjoyed the contrast to her condominium in Las Vegas, which was stark and modern, done in blacks and whites, with her photographs of bitterroot and landscapes of the jagged Mojave hills on the walls. It was an emotionless place, and that was how she wanted it then. Since meeting Jonny, though, she had been flooded by emotions, and she was getting better now at managing the demons from her past, letting them out without feeling that they could control her. That was one of the reasons she enjoyed the antique quality of this house. She wanted a sense of the past again, which she had blocked out for years. When she held a clock from the early 1900s in her hands, she could feel all the people who had owned it and touched it.

She molded herself against Jonny in bed. She knew from his breathing that he was awake. He hadn't said a word as she came into the bedroom, bringing the chill of the night with her, and quickly stripped. When she slid her fingers between his legs, she felt him stir.

"Do you know how cold that hand is?" he murmured.

"Sorry."

"I'm not complaining."

Serena kissed him. "I thought you'd be asleep."

"Not when you're out on a job at midnight."

"I'm okay."

"You took your gun," he said.

"It was just a precaution."

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

"I can't say anything," Serena said.

"Even in the box?"

"Not yet."

Stride turned his head toward her and opened his eyes. Serena could see he was troubled.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

He pushed himself up in bed until he was sitting. "I found out that Eric was involved with Tanjy Powell. I had to tell Abel Teitscher about it."

"So you're off the case again."

Stride nodded.

"Did Abel tell you anything about the investigation?"

"I pried a couple of things out of him," Stride said.

"Like what?"

"The most intriguing thing was that Eric went to see Tony Wells the night he died," Stride said.

Serena propped herself on one elbow and brushed her hair back out of her face. "Tony? Why?"

"Tony can't say. Privilege."

"Was Eric getting therapy?"

"Abel doesn't think so."

"But Maggie was."

"Yeah."

"Do you think Tony knows something about Eric's murder?" Serena asked.

"I do, and I think he wants to help, but he can't talk unless Maggie says it's okay."

"That's a no-brainer if it clears her of murder."

"You'd think so, but the question is, what's Maggie hiding?" Stride said. "Something's going on that she wants to keep secret."

"I have an appointment with Tony tomorrow morning. Maybe I can get something out of him."

"Not likely. Not if it involves a patient."

"Tell me about Tanjy," Serena said.

"As far as I can tell, she left her place at ten o'clock on Monday night. She took her car, and that's the last anyone saw of her."

"Did you get any hits on the car?"

"No, we've got alerts on it all over the five-state area, and the media has picked up on it, too. So far, nothing. There hasn't been any activity on her credit cards or bank accounts. Her cell phone hasn't been used since Monday night." He added, "I did find several calls to Eric over the last few weeks."

"Do you know what was going on between them?"

"Abel thinks it was an affair."

"Could Tanjy have killed Eric?"

"That was my first thought, but there isn't any evidence that she did."

"Except you say she's unstable," Serena said. "Maybe even violent."

"She's a strange girl." He waited several beats and then added, "Look, don't take this the wrong way. I'm just trying to understand who Tanjy was, so help me out here. Do women really fantasize about rape?"

Serena froze. She rolled away. "That's an ugly question."

"I know, I'm sorry."

"You know what Blue Dog and my mother did to me in Phoenix."

"I know."

She got out of bed. The frigid air raised gooseflesh on her skin. She went to the window and pushed aside the curtains that looked out toward the trees and scrub behind the cottage. She could see her own reflection dimly in the glass. "There's nothing even remotely erotic about rape. I don't understand how any woman could think so."

"I'm with you, but I've seen the bulletin boards where Tanjy was posting her stories. She wasn't the only one."

Serena didn't reply. Jonny came up behind her, laying his hands on her shoulders. Instinctively, she shrugged them away.

"I hope you don't think I ever wanted to do it with that bastard," she said.

"Of course not."

"The first therapist I ever went to asked me that once. He asked me if I ever had an orgasm with Blue Dog."

"Son of a bitch."

"Just to be clear, my answer was no. Then it was goodbye."

"I wasn't trying to get you upset. I just need to get inside Tanjy's head."

Serena turned to face him. "I'm not upset."

"No?"

"I'm talking about it. A year ago, I wouldn't have been able to do that."

He put his arms around her. She knew that he expected her to cry, but she didn't have any tears inside. She was angry; she would never entirely escape the anger. But what happened to her when she a teenager was over. Her mother was dead. Blue Dog was dead, too. Her past was nothing but bad memories that would always be a part of who she was, but not the most important part, not the part that controlled her.

"Come to bed," she said.

She led him back, and she rolled over on top of him under the blanket and made love to him quickly and silently, until they were both dewy with sweat and ready to sleep. She slid off him, and she was just drifting away when Jonny mumbled something groggily into her ear.

"Put one word in the box," he said.

About Dan. About her midnight rendezvous.

She whispered back, hoping he'd still be able to sleep, "Blackmail."

17

Maggie was dreaming again.

An array of six men, naked and wearing gold masks, surrounded her bed, two on each side. They had dead eyes that reminded her of fish heads on the beach, milky skin with swollen bellies, and limp members hanging uselessly between their legs. They ogled her nude body. The two at the head of the bed parted, forming a gap in their ranks, and Eric stepped between them with her gun in his hand. He aimed it at her chest.

"I'm sorry, Nicole," he told her.

A flash of fire belched from the gun barrel. Maggie looked down, expecting to see a burnt, gaping wound in her torso, but saw only her naked breasts. She raised her hands to touch herself, and then she realized that she had no hands, only bloody stumps unevenly hacked off, leaving nothing but bone and blood. She looked up at the mirror above her bed and realized she had no head, too. She was a limbless dead trunk, with no mouth to scream.

Maggie screamed anyway and shocked herself awake.

She was sprawled on the bed on top of the covers, taking loud, open-mouthed breaths, like a fish. Slowly, the images faded to gray ash and sank back into her unconscious. She was alone and disoriented.

Maggie got out of bed and went to the bedroom door. She checked the heavy chair wedged under the doorknob, then sighed and rubbed her face with her small hands. She turned and leaned against the wall, which was papered in a forest-green Victorian floral pattern, and slid down until she was seated on the floor.

She was like a stranger to herself, acting like a victim, letting her fears win.

When you were a cop, you didn't admit to being afraid of the dark. The dark was full of things you had to face and overcome. For weeks, though, darkness had been her enemy. She woke up every hour from nightmares. Since Eric's death, she had barricaded herself in her own room at night.

That wasn't how she wanted to live her life. She was not Abel's ex-partner Nicole, not guilty of killing her husband, not a girl who cried on the floor and cowered in corners.

"To hell with this," Maggie said aloud.

She was mad enough to fight back.

She pushed herself to her feet and ripped the chair away from the door. It toppled onto the wooden floor with a bang. She flung the bedroom door open. The hallway and the stairs to the first floor were inky-black. Without turning on a light, she squared her shoulders and felt her way to the staircase, where she grabbed the handrail and marched downstairs. A cloud of fear wrapped around her body like a fog, but she shrugged off the sensation and went to the kitchen. When she turned on the light, the monsters scattered like roaches. The white-tiled room was bright and safe.

Maggie made herself a mug of green tea and put a salt bagel in the toaster. She sat quietly at the butcher block table, sipping the delicate liquid and crunching on the dry bagel. Her eyes were drawn to a photograph of herself and Eric pinned under a magnet on the refrigerator, and it made her lonely. They were smiling, their faces beet-red from sunburn. The picture was from a trip to Maine eighteen months ago, the last of the good times, a little sweet memory before things began to fall apart. They were in love back then, holding hands as they climbed over rocks on the beach, telling dirty jokes to each other over lobster dinners, having let-it-all-go sex that was so crazy and loud that the neighbors in the next room at the bed-and-breakfast applauded when they were done.

"Oh, Eric," she murmured to herself.

Maggie felt something wet on her cheeks, and when she touched her skin, she realized she was crying.

She didn't want to see his face in her mind, but there he was. She wished she could forget his booming laugh, but it rippled through her brain as if he were standing next to her. She could feel the solid strength of his swimmer's arms, holding her. His ghost, the fleeting spirit of the days when everything seemed perfect together, made her realize what she had lost. Not just with his death, but in the chasm that had opened up between them.

If only they could have stayed in Maine and never come back home. If only the last year had never happened.

She got pregnant on that trip. She was nearly thirty-three years old, and once she felt a baby growing inside her, she realized how much she wanted it. She was ready for a child in her life. So was Eric. He convinced her to leave the police force, and at the time, she was happy to go. Stride was in Las Vegas with Serena, and the prospect of doing her job without him weighed on her mind.

The pregnancy didn't go well. She miscarried in the third month.

That happened all the time, the doctors told her. She was anxious to try again. In the meantime, Stride came back from Vegas to take over his old job, and Maggie rejoined the force. When they were together again, she felt renewed, and when she got pregnant again in the winter, she had no intention of giving up her job or doing anything but taking a short leave and getting back on the street.

She miscarried in the second month.

That was when she started to doubt herself, started feeling like defective merchandise. Thoughts flitted in-maybe she could never have a baby. When you put it like that, it sounded scary. Her emotions ran away from her. In the late spring, when she got pregnant again, she spent every day worrying and wondering. Her morning sickness was intense. She was plagued by foreknowledge that she would never give birth.

She miscarried in the third month.

Something snapped in Maggie's head. She took a one-month leave and spent hours with Tony Wells, pouring out her soul, revisiting the memories of her childhood in China, and talking about Eric and Stride. When that was done, she pretended that the crisis was over. If she wasn't meant to have a baby, so be it, end of story. She was done trying to have a kid. She went back on the pill and told Eric it didn't matter. She was kidding herself.

Along the way, she and Eric grew miles apart. Their relationship had been volatile from the start. She had met Eric during a hostage crisis at his factory, and even after she talked his psycho employee into giving up his gun, they fought about it. Eric thought she took too many risks. Maggie called him a stuck-up rich son of a bitch. They slept together that first night. Six months later, they got married, but they fought whenever they weren't in bed.

She knew he had affairs. They fought about that. He was jealous of Stride and thought that she was secretly in love with him. They fought about that, too.

After the third miscarriage, and after spending a month in therapy with Tony, she tried to put things back together with Eric by throwing herself into their sexual relationship. She surprised herself with what she was willing to try. She was at her sexual peak; her hormones were crazy; she had nothing to lose. Why not? Even when Eric suggested things that made her skin crawl, she followed him to the wild side.

"Bring it on," she told him.

Nothing to lose. What a joke.

That was all before it happened. That was all prologue.

It was the week before Thanksgiving. Eric was out of the country. When she told him a few days later, he went crazy. He wanted to do something to make it better, but she refused all of his overtures, even when he pleaded with her and got angry and beat the walls. She screamed back and pushed him away and made him sleep downstairs, as far away from her as possible. She didn't want him to touch her, not ever again.

Now he never would.

Because someone came into their house and killed him. With her gun.

Think like a cop, she told herself. Solve the crime.

The caffeine in the tea wired her. She would never get back to sleep now, but she didn't want to sleep. She wanted to fight back. She had an advantage that no one, not even Stride, had in solving the case. She knew she was innocent. Everyone else had their doubts. Cops didn't trust people; they trusted facts. Facts didn't lie, dissemble, fool, mislead, imagine, pretend, or deceive. People did all of those things. She had done a lot of it herself lately.

Solve the crime.

Eric was killed with her gun. Despite the bottle of wine she had drunk near the lake, she was certain that she had left the gun on her nightstand that night as she always did. So whoever killed him had come to their bedroom first. That made sense. Whoever did this couldn't have known that she and Eric were sleeping apart. No one knew that. The gun was simply a golden opportunity. The killer must have been prepared to do it another way-his own gun, a knife, whatever. He-or she-came to the bedroom expecting to find the two of them together. Instead, Maggie was unconscious, Eric wasn't there, and the gun was an easy grab.

The killer took it, went downstairs, found Eric, shot him, and left.

Next question: Why was she still alive? She assumed that the killer couldn't risk going back upstairs after the first gunshot. If they had been in bed together, she was certain they would both be dead, but sleeping alone saved her. That meant that Eric was the target, not her, and it also meant that framing her was a crime of opportunity. No one coming into the house could have predicted the circumstances that left her in Abel's crosshairs as a suspect. That ruled out Serena's theory about a perp from Maggie's past, someone like Tommy Luck from Vegas who wound up stalking and nearly killing Serena before she put him in prison. This was all about Eric, pure and simple.

Next question: What was the motive? Something was obviously going on in Eric's life that she didn't know about. She knew she had to analyze his movements in his last few days and made a mental note to check his phone records and credit card statements to see what they revealed. Three days before the murder, for example, she knew that Eric was in the Twin Cities. Why?

Next question: What was Eric doing with Tanjy Powell, and why did Tanjy disappear? Maggie didn't think it was a coincidence that, according to Stride, Eric and Tanjy met on the street on Monday afternoon, and a few hours later, Tanjy vanished. Or that two nights later, Eric was dead. She assumed that Eric was sleeping with Tanjy, even though he had spent most of December swearing on his life that he would give up his affairs. Eric was a horndog, and Tanjy was irresistible, so maybe that was the simple answer. They were having an affair that went terribly wrong, and Tanjy killed him.

Nothing else made sense.

Unless Eric sought out Tanjy because of the rape.

Maggie thought about Eric's note to her, the one he had left for her the night he died, and wondered if she had been misreading it all along. I know who it is.

Last question: Why did Eric go to see Tony the night he was killed? Tony was Maggie's own therapist, and Eric detested psychiatry on principle. So what did he want with Tony? She could drive herself crazy thinking about the possibilities, and she didn't want to wait until the morning to get an answer. Maggie slid the chair back, got up, and took the cordless phone off its cradle and punched in Tony's number from memory.

He answered on the sixth ring. "Dr. Wells."

"Tony, it's Maggie."

"Maggie," he said drowsily. "It's late."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she told him. "I need to ask you a question."

"Okay."

"Why did Eric come to see you on Wednesday night?"

Tony was silent. She felt as if she had added a new weight to his fleshy shoulders. When you spent your life with cops, sexual predators, and rape victims, you could let out the stress with sick humor or carry the heavy burden like a pack mule. Tony was a carrier, but that was what made him good.

Finally, he said, "Do you really want to do this now?"

"Yeah, I do."

"I told Abel it was a privileged conversation," Tony said. "I also told him if he thought you killed anyone, he needed a psychiatrist."

"Thanks."

"Are you sure you want the truth?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

"That depends on whether you're ready to discuss it," Tony said. "Eric told me something about you-something you obviously decided not to share with me. Although I really wish that you had come to me about this."

She closed her eyes. "That fucker."

"I'm sorry. I was going to tell you tomorrow."

"What did he want?"

Maggie tensed, waiting. Eric, what the hell did you do?

"He wanted my help in figuring out how you can spot a sexual predator," Tony went on. "He was planning to see someone after our meeting."

"Someone?"

"He didn't say who."

A few hours later, Eric was dead. Now Maggie knew why.

I know who it is.

18

On Sunday morning, Serena found herself among the deserted fields and open sky in the northeastern section of the city. The urban center of Duluth was clustered in a few square miles around the lake, on terraces carved into steep hills, like a miniature replica of the roller-coaster streets of San Francisco tucked into a snow globe. On the plateau above the lake, however, the land quickly leveled off and became flat and desolate. Arrow-straight highways stretched for miles. Houses were spaced far apart, with acres of land separating neighbors.

She felt as if she would drive off the end of the world if she ever reached the horizon line. Light snow skittered and danced on the asphalt like water in a sizzling pan. For Serena, there was something big and intimidating about this place. If the desert was like a snake-quick, sneaky, and secretive-then the north land was like a bear, lumbering and huge, full of fur, fat, and muscle. Living here felt like trespassing on land reserved for giants.

She turned left on a dirt road marked with a Dead End sign and drove another mile to the wooded lot where Tony Wells kept his home. It was a 1970s-era rambler, and Maggie liked to point out that the house, like Tony, was brown. Tony's SUV, a camel-colored Lexus LX, was parked in the gravel driveway.

She pulled in behind the truck and got out of her car. It was a bitter morning, the temperature hovering around zero. She exhaled a cloud of steam. Despite the cold, she always lingered here before going inside. Partly she could roll up her day-to-day worries into a ball and leave them on the hood of the car, to be picked up later. Partly she could enjoy the solitude of this peaceful, beautiful spot. The woods were made up of young birch trees and spindly brush, a tightly knit web with a carpet of snow underneath. There was hardly an evergreen anywhere, so she could see for a surprising distance through the trees. There was one narrow trail cut into the forest and cross-country ski tracks running through the snow. Another wrinkle in the trees was made by a tiny creek, now frozen solid.

She made her way around to the side of the house. Tony had built an addition onto the back for his office, with a glass wall looking out on the woods. You entered through a side door into a windowless waiting room, decorated with Ikea furniture and drab watercolors, and then you came through to this magnificent space with a vaulted ceiling and a view that stretched forever.

Tony kept a video camera overhead, so he could see patients coming into the waiting room from his desk. Serena waved at the camera and sat down. She could hear the beat of heavy metal beyond the office door.

"Walk this way," Steven Tyler sang.

Serena laughed. Like Maggie, Tony was a fanatic for hard rock, although no one would guess it by looking at him. He was the kind of serious collector who haunted eBay to find odd paraphernalia, like a hypodermic used by one of the bad boys of Mötley Crüe to shoot up with cocaine, or a maintenance memorandum about damage to a Philadelphia arena following a Metallica concert. Both were framed and hung over the sofa, next to his three University of Minnesota diplomas. He could rattle off the stats for every album, concert tour, and Grammy by Aerosmith and took two months off each summer to follow bands around the country. The flip side was that, the rest of the year, he kept office hours seven days a week. Many of his patients were cops and victims recovering from sexual trauma, so he saw people at all hours.

It was almost impossible to get a rise out of Tony, but Serena enjoyed the challenge and tried to come up with something new at every visit. Today, she got up and did a mock 1960s rock dance in front of the camera, shaking her head so that her hair twirled and pumping her arms like pistons in a go-go move. Ten seconds later, the music cut off, and the door to the office unlocked with a soft click.

She strolled inside. Tony was seated at his big oak desk in front of the glass wall. The wilderness loomed behind him. He was writing on a yellow pad and didn't look up. "Funny," he said blandly.

Serena flopped down in a sofa on the opposite side of the room. "I thought so."

Tony got up from the desk and took a seat in a leather armchair near Serena. His eyes were bloodshot. "I suppose I'm going to get another lecture now about George Strait and Diamond Rio."

"A little steel guitar wouldn't kill you, Tony."

Tony harrumphed. He was about five feet ten, with a soft, well-fed physique. He and Serena were the same age, past thirty-five and on a downward slope toward forty. He had a professorial air about him, grave and concerned, which made his taste in music seem so unlikely. But you never could tell. She knew grandmothers who collected porn. Tony wore loose-fitting tan corduroys, a white dress shirt, and a chocolate-colored vest that matched his beard and his thinning crown of hair.

"You look tired, Tony."

His heavy eyelids drooped over his dark eyes more than usual. The bags under his eyes bulged like overpacked luggage. "Late-night phone call," he explained.

"Ah. Sorry."

"Coffee?" he asked.

"No thanks."

Tony went to a mahogany bureau with a mirrored bar. He had a coffeemaker plugged in on the bar, and he carefully poured from the pot into a black ceramic mug. He ripped open five sugar packets and emptied them into the mug and stirred.

"You want a little coffee with your sugar?" Serena asked.

"I like it sweet."

"Then why drink coffee? Have a Mountain Dew."

Tony sat down again and sipped his coffee. He reached inside his vest and withdrew a silver Cross pen, which he twirled between his fingers. "What do you want to talk about today?"

"Rape fantasies," Serena said.

Tony's face showed no surprise or disapproval. "That's a new topic for you."

"They're not mine."

"Oh?"

"I'm talking about Tanjy Powell."

He frowned. "I see."

"She's missing, you know."

"I know."

"I'd like to help Jonny figure out what happened to her."

Tony's face was pained. "I wish I could help you, but not this time."

"Why not?" Serena thought about it and then said, "Damn, is Tanjy a patient of yours, too?"

Tony sighed. "You know I can't say. But speaking hypothetically, if you were looking for a therapist in this city who specialized in mental issues related to sexual violence, who would you see?"

"I would see you, Tony, no one but you!" Serena gushed. She winked at him.

Tony said nothing at all, and his bearded face stared at her like a sleeping dog.

"As long as we're speaking hypothetically," she continued, "what can you tell me about a woman who fantasizes almost exclusively about rape?"

"That depends on the individual," he said.

"Let's say this woman is otherwise conservative and religious. Is that a contradiction?"

"Hypothetically?"

"Exactly." Serena smiled.

"No, that would be psychologically consistent," Tony said. "Rape fantasies are most common among women who are sexually repressed and have been taught that sex is wrong or a sin. They express themselves sexually through these fantasies because they don't have to feel guilty. The rape aspect removes their control. By being forced to have sex, they can enjoy it."

"That's pretty sick."

"Not really. Many professional women use these fantasies to adopt a submissive role when they have to be powerful and controlling in the rest of their lives. It can be a healthy way to relieve stress." He added, "Given your own background, of course, I understand why you would think this is abnormal."

"I can't believe men are turned on by that kind of woman."

Tony played with his pen and shook his head. "For some men, it's like the virgin and whore rolled into one. These women can be-not always, but can be-sexually explosive. They may also have a needy, vulnerable streak that appeals to some men. I don't need to tell you that men also entertain rape fantasies of their own."

"Okay, okay," Serena said, sighing. "I hear Eric came to see you on Wednesday night. What was that about?"

"Once again, I'd like to talk about it, but I can't."

"But?" Serena asked, sensing that he had more to say.

"But I'd like to get Maggie's permission to talk to the police about Eric's visit."

"Would that help her?"

"Hypothetically again, it might give them a very different idea of why Eric was killed and who killed him. And dispel this nonsense about Maggie killing him herself."

"Is Maggie reluctant to give permission for some reason?"

"Extremely reluctant."

"I'll talk to her," Serena said. "But she's stubborn, you know."

Tony finally smiled. They both knew Maggie.

"How do you feel about all this, Serena?" he asked after a pause.

"What do you mean?"

"Is it stirring up bad memories of your own past?"

Serena settled back into the sofa. She was paying for this hour; she might as well get some benefit out of it for herself. "Yeah. Jonny asked me if I ever had rape fantasies, like Tanjy, and I flew off the handle."

"What were you feeling?"

"I was pissed off. For women like Tanjy, rape is a game. For me, it was a daily ritual in Phoenix for more than a year. Blue Dog did what he wanted to me, because I was basically his slave, and mommie dearest sat there and watched, while she was as high as a kite."

"Does thinking about those experiences bring back feelings of fear? Helplessness?"

Serena thought about her midnight meeting with the blackmailer. "Sure it does."

"How have you dealt with that?"

"I tried the self-soothing technique you suggested. I literally reminded myself that those feelings came from the girl I was, not who I am today."

"Did that help?"

"It did. I was able to manage the fear."

"Good."

"I want to go back to my hypothetical fantasy girl for a minute," Serena said.

Tony was guarded. "Yes?"

"Could a woman like that be prone to violence? If she was in a sexual relationship, and her partner broke it off in a way that humiliated her, could she seek revenge?"

He rubbed his tired eyes. "You're asking me if it's possible Tanjy killed Eric?"

"I guess I am."

Tony pursed his lips and then shook his head. "I think it's unlikely Tanjy killed anyone. I'm sorry. I don't think that's what this is about."

"Do you know why she disappeared?"

"I have no idea. Truly, I don't. Obviously, I hope she's alive and well."

"So do I," Serena said. "Tanjy may be the only one who knows what really happened to Eric."

19

Sherry studied the fish house dubiously.

It was a wood-and-aluminum box not even as big as a pickup truck. She stood with her boyfriend, Josh, a hundred yards from shore in the midst of a city of dozens of similar shanties. They had walked across the lake, but plenty of people had driven cars and trucks and parked them nearby. She expected to feel the ice give under her feet, or hear the water beating at the surface to get free.

"You're sure this is safe?" she asked.

"There's probably eighteen inches of ice underneath our feet," Josh assured her.

Sherry looked out across Hell's Lake where it broadened into a wide open space beyond the trees. "Why do they have those flags way out there?"

"Well, the ice is thinner out that way," Josh said. "You can have hot spots on any lake. You know, places where the ice isn't safe. You might have underwater currents from a stream, or warm water runoff from somewhere, or simply spots where the ice has thawed and frozen a lot, and so it's got a lot of cracks in it."

"This thing's not going to sink, is it?"

"No way. Not here. I wouldn't drive my dad's Cadillac out where the flags are, but right here, we're fine. Promise."

Sherry rolled her eyes. "Let's get inside."

It was ungodly cold. She wore a white down coat with bubble sleeves, which she hated because it made her look like the Michelin tire man, but it was her only winter coat. She wore it half-zipped and sported a pink turtleneck underneath. She had a fleece band around her head, protecting her ears from the wind, but otherwise, her blond curls blew freely. She wore Guess jeans with her initials in gold spangles on the rear pocket and Uggs that kept her feet and ankles from freezing.

She hadn't adjusted to the Minnesota weather. She was a California girl, born and raised in San Jose, and she had been appalled when her dad took a job as CFO of an airplane manufacturer in Duluth. She was eighteen years old, a senior, and instead of graduating with her friends back home, she was stuck here in the icebox of the nation, trying to fit in among a crowd of teenage rednecks.

That included Josh. He was a football player, big and slow. Even so, he was six feet three and a Scandinavian beauty, and they looked good together.

Josh undid the padlock on the fish house and let them inside. It looked like a prison cell in Siberia. No windows. Pitch-black. He turned on an oil lamp that illuminated a garage sale sofa and a couple of Sam's Club wooden chairs. Inside was just as cold as outside, and the wind blew through the aluminum siding as if it wasn't there.

"Oh, man, does it get any warmer?"

"I'll get the heater going," Josh said.

Sherry shrugged off her coat. "You just want my nips to show." She followed his eyes and glanced down at her turtleneck. "Looks like you win. The headlights are on."

She rubbed her arms vigorously and stamped her feet in the small, claustrophobic shanty. She wrinkled her nose at the fishy smell. There was a large circle cut into the ice in the center of the floor. She peered down into it and saw slushy water about a foot down. It was opaque.

"How do you cut through the ice?" she asked.

"Gas auger," Josh said. He pointed at a machine that looked like an outboard motor with two feet of black screw attached, its blades pocked with rust.

"This is like a horror movie," she said. "You're not going to cut me up, are you?"

"No!"

Sherry laughed. "It was a joke. Besides, in those movies, the girl has to get naked before she gets killed, and I am not getting naked in this place." Josh looked disappointed, and she added with a wink, "Okay, maybe a little naked."

The heater beat back the cold in the fish house. Sherry watched as Josh prepared the hook end of a fishing line and unwound the line deep into the cut-out section of ice. He propped the rod on an upside-down chair and reached into his pocket for a small bell, which he tied to the line with thread.

"What's that for?" she asked.

"If a fish takes the bait, the line jerks and rings the bell." He tapped it with his hand, and the bell went ding, ding.

"Cute."

Josh unzipped his backpack and pulled out an iPod and a set of portable speakers. He put on an album by the Black Eyed Peas, and Sherry began rolling her body to Fergie's funky beat. Josh's face lit up in a sly grin, and he reached back into the pack and came out with two frosty cans of Miller Lite.

"Let the party begin," he said.

Sherry took an open can from Josh and drank down a long swallow that she thought would freeze in her throat. Holding the can with two fingers, she danced, swiveling her hips lazily and slithering her arms and fingers up and down her body. The more she danced and drank, the warmer she felt, and the more handsome Josh got.

She crooked her finger, beckoning him to the sofa. They sat down, and his hands prowled over her back. He kissed her clumsily; his tongue felt like a wet slug exploring the roof of her mouth. She felt him tentatively cup one of her breasts, and when she didn't protest, he grabbed it as if he were diving for a fumble. A low moan purred from his throat.

She pulled away and rolled her shirt up an inch at a time, revealing her flat tummy and then her pear-shaped breasts. She left the shirt propped on top of her cleavage. His eyes were so wide she thought she could see around them into his brain. She turned her attention to his belt buckle, which she undid, and then unzipped him, exposing the white fabric of his underwear. She reached inside and pulled him out.

His eyes were closed. He was on the moon.

Ding, ding.

The fishing line fluttered. The rod rocked in the chair and tumbled to the ice.

"Shit, hang on," Josh told her, swinging his legs off the sofa.

"You have got to be kidding," Sherry said.

"Help me," he said, jerking on the line, his jeans around his ankles, his shaft still ready for action.

Sherry sighed. "That's what I was trying to do." She added, "Don't let your thingy get sliced off, okay?"

He battled the fish for several minutes, until it was close to the surface.

"Take the pole," he said. "Keep it pointed up."

"That's what I was-oh, never mind." She took the fishing rod and held it while Josh grabbed a pair of gloves and reached down into the hole.

"Reel in some more line," he told her.

"What am I, Supergirl? This thing is heavy."

She cranked the reel, and the line wound in slowly. It felt as if she were pulling up a boat anchor on the other end.

"Almost got it," he said.

Suddenly, Josh yelped. He unleashed a girlish scream and fell back on his ass. His erection deflated. With his hands on the ice, he scrabbled away from the hole. "Shit!"

Something black bobbed out of the ice like a gopher in a carnival whack-a-mole game. Sherry cranked the reel and inched closer, repelled but curious. When she saw it, she screamed, too.

Matted black hair danced up and down at her feet. The smell, released out of the water, was rank; she covered her face. Invisible gases fouled the air. She watched through slitted fingers and saw a human head now, snow-white and hideously swollen, peeking above the ice. More of the body was trapped below. Mud and weeds clung to its skin. Its eyes were open but cloudy, like marbles. Its mouth was slightly open, and the splashing and sucking of the water made it sound as if it were talking. As if it were alive when it was obviously dead. The head said over and over, "Let me out, let me out, let me out, let me out."