Stalked

60

The prison doctors made the police wait three days before interviewing Blue Dog. Stride himself spent a day in the hospital, treated for hypothermia and minor burns. Serena would be hospitalized for several more days, maybe weeks, as the doctors dealt with smoke inhalation and the more serious burns, mostly on her legs. She would need skin grafts where the burns were worst and for the cuts in her abdomen. It was too early to tell about the long-term pulmonary effects of the smoke. Even so, she was lucky. Lucky to be alive, lucky that the damage wasn't more severe.

Stride stared at Blue Dog through the window before going inside, feeling his muscles clench into knots. Raw hatred coursed through his veins.

Teitscher, who was standing next to him, saw his reaction. "This is personal to you. You shouldn't be in the room."

"I want to be there," Stride insisted.

He pushed the door open before Teitscher could lodge any more protests, and the two men went inside. The room was painted in institutional gray and smelled of disinfectant. The bedsheets were bleached white. Teitscher folded his arms and stood beside the bed, looking down at Blue Dog. Stride leaned against the wall and shoved his hands in his pockets.

Blue Dog's legs were manacled to the bed frame. So was his right arm, which was inked over with tattoos. The doctors had amputated his left arm when he was brought in from the lake. He had suffered too much damage from the shotgun wound to save it. He was hooked up to intravenous drips of morphine and antibiotics. His long hair had been chopped off, leaving him with a black-and-gray buzz cut. The stubble on his chin was thick, and his skin was pale under the fluorescent light. His barrel chest was naked.

"Hey," Stride called. "Wake up, asshole."

Blue Dog's bloodshot eyes blinked open, and he took note of both men in the room. He shifted, straining against his bonds, and pain shot through his body, making him grimace. He looked down at the bandaged stump on the left side of his torso.

"Hurts, huh?" Stride asked. "Good."

"Fuck off."

Teitscher removed a digital tape recorder from his pocket and set it on the table beside the bed. "We're going to tape this conversation. My name is Detective Abel Teitscher, and this is Lieutenant Jonathan Stride of the Duluth police."

"I know who you are," Blue Dog replied. He looked at Stride. "I'm just sorry you dragged that bitch out of the fish house. I would have liked to hear her scream as the fire got her."

Teitscher ignored him. "You were read your rights when you were arrested. Do you need them read to you again?"

"I know my rights."

"Do you want a lawyer?"

"For what? A lawyer won't do me any good."

"Are you willing to talk to us?"

"What's in it for me?" Blue Dog asked.

Teitscher shrugged. "We've already been in touch with the authorities in Alabama. They're anxious to get you back to Holman. You'll wind up on trial for the cops you killed in the hurricane, and then they'll stick a needle in your arm. Of course, it'll have to be your right arm."

"Fuck you," Blue Dog said.

"I'm just telling you how it is. Before you go back to that hellhole down south, where they are going to execute you, you have to make it through the courts up here. We're going to put you on trial for murder, attempted murder, rape, assault, blackmail, fraud, you name it."

"Maybe I don't have to go back to Alabama," Blue Dog said. "Maybe you can just keep me up here."

Teitscher shook his head. "You mean, in a state like Minnesota where we don't have capital punishment? Where we don't sleep prisoners twenty to a cell? Sorry, but the fact is, no one is too anxious for you to hang around here. But it can go fast or it can go slow. You might be back in Holman in a couple of months, or the whole process might drag out, and it could be a year or more before we get around to sending you back down there. We might even need to keep you in a private cell because of your medical condition. So where would you like to spend the next year? Minnesota or Alabama?"

Blue Dog scowled. "Yeah, so, what is it you want?"

"Tell us about Lauren Erickson and Tanjy Powell."

"Like what?"

"Did you rape Tanjy?" Teitscher asked.

"Okay, yeah. But that was Lauren's idea."

"I'll bet you put the idea in her head."

"Not me. Hey, I didn't give a shit about Tanjy. I wanted money. I knew Lauren would pay to keep the photos of Tanjy and Dan out of the papers. Lauren was the one who turned it all around and wanted me to do her."

"Why?" Teitscher asked.

"Punishment. Payback. Whatever you want to call it. Those photos made Lauren crazy."

"So what went wrong?"

"Nothing went wrong. It all worked like Lauren planned. But then Tanjy called Lauren a couple of weeks ago and said she knew who raped her. Lauren freaked and called me."

"What did you do?"

"Lauren told me to meet her at their lake house. The two of them were already going at it when I got there. Tanjy saw me pull up-she probably thought it was going to be Dan, you know? Tanjy looked like she was going to bolt, but Lauren hit her hard. Real hard. Dropped her like a bag of cement. So we put her in the trunk and took her out to the lake."

"What about Maggie and Katrina?" Stride asked from the wall. "Were you the one who assaulted them?"

"Yeah, that was me."

"Was that Lauren's idea, too?"

"No, she didn't know anything about it. Not until later."

"So why did you rape them?" Stride asked.

"Why the hell not? After I did Tanjy, I realized what a rush it was. Hell, it was like fucking Serena in my head before I got to the real thing, you know?"

Stride wished that his aim on Hell's Lake had been better, and this animal who called himself Blue Dog would already be dead.

"Plus, it was safe," Blue Dog went on. "I knew all about the sex club from Sonia's computer. I figured these alpha girls weren't going to want the media dishing out the same treatment to them that Tanjy got. And I was right, too."

"What about Eric Sorenson?" Teitscher asked.

"What about him?"

"Did you work on his computer?"

"No."

"Did Tanjy tell him about you?"

"No."

"Then how did he find you? How did he figure out that you raped Tanjy and Maggie?"

"He didn't."

Blue Dog's words thudded like a bird against a clean window.

"What?"

"He didn't know a thing about me."

Teitscher and Stride stared at each other. Stride tried to make sense of his thoughts.

"Are you telling us you had nothing to do with Eric Sorenson's murder?" Teitscher asked.

"I found out he was killed when I saw it on TV."

"Do you know who did kill him?" Teitscher asked.

"I figured his wife popped him, like they said on the news," Blue Dog said, laughing at Stride. "Maybe once she had some lovin' from me, her husband didn't cut it anymore."

Stride lashed out. "Eric was Maggie's husband, and you raped her. Eric found out. He confronted you that night."

"I didn't know this Eric guy to spit on him," Blue Dog insisted. "You don't believe me? Check out my alibi."

"What alibi?" Teitscher asked.

"I was with my manager pulling an all-nighter on a corporate system in Hermantown when that guy was killed. You ask him."

"You already told us that Tanjy knew you raped her," Stride said.

Blue Dog grinned. "Tanjy was wrong."

"What?"

"Lauren told me when we were dumping the body. Tanjy thought somebody else did it. Funny, huh? She made a stupid fucking mistake, and that's what got her killed."

"Who did she think raped her?"

"Lauren never told me."

Stride ran his hands through his hair. Blue Dog had turned everything upside down. Just when he thought the investigation was over, he realized that the questions that started everything hadn't been answered yet.

Who killed Eric?

And why?

"Have you ever met a woman named Helen Danning?" Stride asked.

Blue Dog shook his head. "Never heard of her."

"You ever come across a blog called 'The Lady in Me' on any of the computers you were pawing through?"

"No."

"If you're lying to us about any of this, I'll have you back in Holman on the next flight."

"It's the truth," Blue Dog said.

Stride gestured at Teitscher, and the two men headed for the door.

"You think he's on the level about Eric?" Teitscher asked when they were alone in the corridor.

Stride wanted to say no, but he couldn't lie to himself. "I don't think he'd give us an alibi if it won't hold up."

"You know what that means," Teitscher said.

"Maggie didn't do it," Stride insisted.

"Then who did?"

"Lauren killed Tanjy. Maybe she killed Eric, too."

Teitscher shook his head. "That's not going to fly. Lauren was in Washington that night. I checked."

"So maybe Blue Dog is lying. Maggie beat the hell out of him. He may want her to take the fall for the murder."

"You know that's not going to happen," Teitscher said. "Look, I don't know if Maggie did it or not. I still think there's a good chance she did, but she's free and clear. We're never going to bring charges against her. There's enough reasonable doubt for Archie Gale to drive a truck through."

"She'll still have a cloud over her head if we don't find out who really killed Eric," Stride said.

"We all have clouds."

"This guy says Tanjy made a mistake," Stride said. "Eric and Tanjy thought someone else was responsible for the rapes. Whoever that was, he must have killed Eric."

Teitscher shook his head. "That doesn't make any sense, Lieutenant. If Eric was wrong, why kill him? If I accuse you of a crime you didn't commit, why the hell would you kill me over it?"

Stride knew that was true. He was missing something.

The two men looked up as a guard opened a door at the far end of the narrow hallway, and Max Guppo ran toward them. Guppo never ran, and by the time he reached them, he was sweating in large beads on his forehead, and his big chest was heaving up and down. He bent over and broke wind loudly, and both men involuntarily took a step backward.

"Son of a bitch, Guppo," Teitscher complained.

Stride suppressed a smile and said, "What's going on, Max?"

Guppo took several wheezing, labored breaths. He loosened his tie and tugged his belt up over his protruding stomach. "All hell is breaking loose."

"Over what?"

"Another body," Guppo told them. "We've got a body in Enger Park. Right where we found that girl ten years ago."

61

It was déjà vu all over again. Stride couldn't believe it.

The victim was placed exactly where they had found the anonymous black teenager a decade earlier. He had been over this ground so many times that he could pinpoint the growth in the trees lining the fairway and the number of footsteps it took to get here from the road. The body was on its back, arms and legs spread like a da Vinci drawing. She was in a valley that was invisible from the road and sheltered from the golfers walking the straightaway toward the green. The girl back then, who was found in August, who had haunted his dreams ever since, was found because of a doctor's errant slice.

"Two cross-country skiers came across her," Guppo said. They were calf-deep in snow, and Guppo was looking back at the slope that led to the highway as if wondering whether he would survive the climb. It was mid-afternoon. The snow was done, and the sun was back, but it couldn't manage more than a weak shine.

Stride nodded. His lips were thin and cold. "Any idea how long she's been here?"

"She's frozen solid, so it won't be easy to pin down," Guppo said. "But one of the skiers said he followed this path two days ago, and there was no body."

"He's sure he was in the same place?"

Guppo nodded. "He said this is his favorite route."

"Was she killed here?" Teitscher asked.

"No, not enough blood," Guppo said.

Stride studied the victim, or what was left of her. Like the girl ten years ago, this newest body was missing its head and hands. On the part of the neck that remained intact, he could see ligature marks to suggest that she had been strangled. She was naked, and he could see bruising in the pelvic area. In those respects, the murder was a carbon copy of the earlier crime.

A few details were different, though. It was summer then and winter now. The original victim was black, and this woman was white. The girl back then was young, no more than seventeen, and it was easy to tell from the condition of the skin that this victim was older, probably in her thirties or forties.

"Don't hold your breath on DNA this time," Guppo said.

Stride nodded. He had a feeling the perp was too smart to leave his calling card again. "What else have we found?"

"Not a lot. Violet's working the body for the M.E. She's up in her truck now. We're scouring the area, but like I say, I think the perp just dumped her here."

"What about footprints? He had to get her down here."

Guppo pointed at a narrow track of matted snow leading down the slope. "Yeah, looks like he dragged her. We've got blood spots and hair all along the route back to the road. I think he took a shovel and backfilled in the snow, though. Plus, we've had another inch or so in the last two days."

"Same with tire tracks?"

"Nothing on the road."

Teitscher looked up as he heard the thumping roar of a helicopter hovering over their heads. "Who the hell leaked this to the media? It's a damn circus."

"Don't blame me," Guppo snapped. "One of the skiers called his wife, and she happens to be a secretary at KBJR. They broke it first, and the others have piled on. We've got reporters from the Cities up here, too. They're all smelling a serial killer. Everyone's asking about the original Enger Park Girl case and whether there's a connection."

"More likely a copycat to throw us off the scent," Teitscher said.

Guppo shrugged. "These guys are all talking like this is something out of the next John Sandford novel."

"Well, we're not ruling anything in or out," Stride said. "It's a long time between killings if we're talking about the same perp, but you never know. If it's a copycat, he's just as bad."

"Do we have any idea at all who this woman is?" Teitscher asked. "Are there any reports of missing persons in the region that fit the profile?"

"No likely candidates except for Lauren Erickson."

Stride shook his head. "It's not her. Too tall."

He figured Lauren was somewhere at the bottom of Hell's Lake, and they would find her in the spring.

His cell phone rang, and he took a few steps away into the deeper snow to answer it. He heard Maggie's voice. "I'm watching the news," she said. "They've got you on live TV, did you know that?"

"Great."

"You've got something green on your front teeth."

"Ha-ha."

"Tell me they've got this wrong," she said. "Tell me this isn't a rerun of the Enger Park Girl."

"It's the same M.O., Mags. The scene is virtually identical."

"Shit."

Stride couldn't help but think of standing on this same ground with Maggie ten years ago on that hot August night. They had only been together for a year then. Maggie was young and smart, coming out of her shell slowly, more like a kid than a woman.

"You talk to Blue Dog?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Did you kill him?"

"I wanted to."

"What did he tell you?"

"He says he had nothing to do with Eric's death," Stride said.

"Do you believe him?"

"Unfortunately, I do. He has an alibi."

"Meaning it's back to me."

"Come on, you're off the hook, Mags. Even Abel doesn't want to charge you."

"Because they can't convict me, or because I'm innocent?"

Stride was silent.

"I thought so," Maggie said. "Look, that's not good enough, boss, you know that. I can't come back on the job if everyone still thinks I'm a murderer."

"It's not over, Mags."

"No? Abel thinks I did it, but he can't prove it. He's not going to invest a lot of energy in solving the case."

"Give me time."

"I want back in," Maggie insisted, impatience bubbling up in her voice. "I want to be with you on the scene right now. I deserve to be on that case."

"I know."

She sighed over the phone. "Look, I'm sorry, I know this isn't your fault. You've got work to do. I'm going over to see Serena, okay?"

"Thanks."

"She's probably watching you on TV, too, so why don't you moon the camera?"

"Goodbye, Mags."

He hung up the phone and rejoined Guppo and Teitscher, who were standing stiffly a few feet apart from each other. There was no love lost between them. Guppo had been among the loudest to complain during Teitscher's short tenure as lieutenant, and Teitscher knew it. It didn't help that Guppo also had a long and close relationship with Stride.

"I want to review the original case file on the Enger Park Girl," Stride said. "Who's got it now?"

Teitscher blanched. "I think it's in my desk."

"What's up with it?"

"What's up? Nothing's up. You know how it is with cold cases, Lieutenant. Every few months, you pull it out of the drawer and rifle through it to see if you get a new idea. It's not like I've got the time to work a ten-year-old file."

"Especially if the victim's just a black teenager, huh?" Guppo asked.

"Now just one goddamned minute," Teitscher exploded. "That is bullshit, and you know it."

Stride held up his hands. "Both of you, knock it off. We're not going to do this now."

"This is not about black or white," Teitscher insisted, jabbing his finger at Guppo. "This is about a case that's ice-cold."

"You're right," Stride said. "It's a cold case, and I never said it wasn't. Both of you drop it, and move on. Who was the last person to really touch the case?"

"Other than you and Maggie?" Guppo said. "It was Nicole."

Stride looked at him in surprise. "Nicole?"

"Sure, when she came back after the shooting on the bridge, you gave her half a dozen cold cases rather than put her right back on the street. The Enger Park case was one of them."

"I don't recall seeing any of Nicole's notes in the case file," Teitscher complained.

"That's a surprise?" Guppo said. "Nicole was always months behind in her paperwork."

"Well, if she was working it, we should find out if she latched onto something we've missed," Stride said. "Abel, I want you to go down and talk to her."

Teitscher's brow knitted into a maze of angry lines. "You're shitting me."

"No. Do it tomorrow. We need to move fast."

"It was six years ago. What the hell is she going to remember?"

"You won't know until you ask her."

"I'm the last person she's going to talk to," Teitscher said. "Send Guppo. He and Nicole were as thick as thieves."

"We need Guppo working the evidence here. I need you to do this, Abel, so suck it up."

Abel shook his head fiercely. "This is unfuckingbelievable."

He turned and stalked away from them, climbing back up the deep snow of the hillside toward Hank Jensen Road. His trench coat flew up behind him as if he might become airborne, and each of his strides was long and hard.

"I'd give good money to see him and Nicole together," Guppo said.

Stride smiled. "Yeah." He and Guppo looked up as the medical examiner investigator on the scene waved to them.

"Hey, detectives!"

Violet Gabor was a short, squat woman in her early thirties with a baseball cap turned the wrong way on her head. She was bent over the corpse, with a magnifying glass focused on the victim's ankle.

"We got something here," she told them.

Stride bent down. His knees were quickly wet with snow. He squinted where Violet was pointing. "I can't see, what is it?"

"Man, you're old," she told him.

"I'm seasoned, Vi."

"Roasts are seasoned," she replied. "You're just old. It's a tattoo, a small one, on the back of her ankle."

Stride saw it now. The tattoo was nestled in the skin of the victim's ankle and appeared to be a series of letters crafted in an old-fashioned font, the kind of typeface he would expect to see written on parchment. The tiny brand was easy to miss if you weren't looking for it or didn't know it was there. "What does it say?"

"Near as I can tell, it says TLIM," Violet told him. "Whatever the hell that means."

"TLIM? Are you sure?"

"Yeah, it's in purple ink, and the script is a little hard to read, but I'm sure that's what it says. Why, does that mean something to you?"

"Yeah, it does." Stride got to his feet and brushed off the snow. He added in a hushed voice, "Damn."

He felt as if they had killed her themselves by dragging her name into it. By not finding her sooner while she was out there, unprotected, a target. His only salvation was that this time around, the killer had made a mistake. Not catching the tattoo. Not knowing the victim had a secret identity.

Stride knew whose mutilated body was lying in the snow, and it meant this wasn't a random slaying at all. It was somehow connected to Eric's death.

TLIM.

The Lady in Me.

It was Helen Danning.

62

Maggie found Serena in her hospital bed, vacantly staring at the television suspended from the ceiling. When she saw Maggie, she clicked off the screen with the remote control and offered up a weak smile. Her shoulder was bandaged. A clear tube looped around her ears and stretched across her pale, pretty face, delivering oxygen to her lungs. Her black hair was pulled back and tied behind her head. A blanket covered her body, but Maggie could see her bare arms, which were patchy with cherry-red burns.

Serena saw her looking. "Those are the minor ones," she said.

"I know." Maggie pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down. She sucked her upper lip between her teeth and clamped down on it. The room was uncomfortably warm. Her eyes wandered to the amber fluid in the IV bag and then to the watercolor print of Canal Park that hung on the soothing baby-blue wall. "I'm not sure what to say. Everything sounds so stupid. How are you. Are you okay. That kind of thing."

Serena eyed the pink box in Maggie's lap. "That for me?"

Maggie looked down. "Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Doughnuts. You want one? I've got old-fashioneds, crullers, and a couple of the cream-filled ones that go splurt when you bite them."

Serena laughed and paid for it with jabs of pain. "Old-fashioned, please."

"You want me to feed it to you?"

"No, my left arm isn't so bad. I can do it."

Maggie opened the box by slitting the tape with her fingernail and handed her a doughnut. Serena wolfed it down in three bites and brushed the crumbs from her lips. Maggie took a chocolate cruller for herself and put the rest of the box on the table beside Serena's bed.

"Why no morphine drip?" Maggie asked.

"I told them to take it away."

"Why? Burns are the worst."

"They set it up so you can push a button and get a shot when you need it," Serena said. "You know me. Addictive personality. I don't want to walk out of here hooked on painkillers."

"You need to manage the pain," Maggie told her.

"When it gets so bad I want to cut off my legs, then I call the nurse and get a shot."

"When did you have your last one?"

"Too long ago," Serena admitted.

"Don't be a martyr."

Serena glanced at the nurse's call button, which dangled near her right hand, but she didn't reach for it. "I saw the news," she said. "The Enger Park thing."

"Stride thinks the body is Helen Danning."

Serena arched her eyebrows. "So there's a tie-in to Eric's murder?"

"Could be."

"That's good for you."

Maggie shrugged and nibbled on the doughnut. She licked chocolate from her fingers. "Just as long as they don't think I did it. Beheading isn't my style, though. I hate all that blood. I prefer a quick tap to the forehead."

"Nice," Serena said.

"I hate thinking about the Enger Park case all over again. I've carried that one around for a long time."

"We all have cases like that."

Maggie knew that was true, but the Enger Park Girl was different. There was something heartbreaking and lonely about the black girl out in the wet grass, not even a girl at all anymore, just a mutilated thing left there to decay. One final humiliation on top of the agony, rape, and death. She wished she could have given the girl a name and a little justice to make her human again. She also didn't tell Serena that it was on that case that her feelings for Stride became something else, because suddenly working with him wasn't just solving crimes, it was suffering emotionally together at the failures.

"Thanks for nailing Blue Dog," Serena said. "I'm not sure I could deal with any of this if he was still out there."

"It was payback for me, too," Maggie reminded her. "He won't bother any of us again."

"That's what I thought before."

"I think even Alabama can manage to keep a one-armed murderer behind bars," Maggie said.

Serena's face was far away, and Maggie didn't know where she was.

"Did he…?" Maggie asked softly. She added, "You don't have to tell me."

"He never got the chance," Serena said.

"That's a relief. I mean, it's one less thing to deal with."

Serena bit her lip. "Sure."

"Are you all right?"

"I just want this to be over. I want to get out of here."

"Don't push it. You need to heal. At least you're going to be okay."

"Yeah. That's what they say."

Maggie watched vulnerability bloom in Serena's face. Her voice cracked, her chin trembled, and her eyes turned watery and scared.

"Hey," Maggie murmured. She leaned close and stroked Serena's hair.

"I'm sorry," Serena said. "Real tough, huh?"

"You're entitled."

"I should be grateful. I'm here, I'm going to make it. Then I cough, and my lungs feel like they're burning up, and I wonder if I'll ever be able to take a breath again without remembering. I wonder if I'll ever run again. Hell, I wonder if I'll ever walk again."

The tears flowed out of her eyes now. Maggie felt angry and helpless.

"I looked at my body, too," Serena went on. "They told me not to, but I did. Oh my God, Maggie. Oh, my God."

"Don't do this to yourself."

"It's so stupid and vain, but I don't want Jonny ever to see me again. Not like this."

"You'll heal. You'll get through this."

Serena shook her head.

Maggie whispered. "Come on, it's not just your body that needs time. It's your head, too. Remember what you told me? You were right. I was in denial. I need help, and so do you. I'm going to see Tony again tomorrow. You'll do the same thing. Anytime you need someone, I'm there for you. Stride will be, too. You know that."

"It hurts," Serena told her. "It hurts so much. When I think about it, it hurts even more. I don't think it will ever stop."

Maggie reached over and pressed the call button. Serena didn't protest. Her mouth had fallen open in agony. Her skin tensed, making it worse, and her legs jerked under the blanket. Maggie watched Serena's long fingers curl into fists.

"Nothing will ever be the same," Serena murmured. "Nothing will ever be okay."

"Shhh. Don't talk."

"Tell Jonny not to come. Tell him not to come."

The nurse ran in. She already had a hypodermic of morphine in her hand; she knew what Serena needed when the bell rang and knew that she needed it quickly. Maggie watched her swab Serena's left shoulder and then insert the needle and squeeze the plunger. The narcotic began to work almost immediately. Serena's eyes blurred and relaxed. Her body settled gently back into the mattress. Her mouth worked, but she didn't say anything.

Maggie and the nurse stayed until Serena was asleep and out of pain.

"How is she, really?" Maggie asked.

"This is the worst time," the nurse replied. "The pain makes you very emotional. Don't worry, her skin is already starting to heal. Her lungs are clearer today, and her breathing is stronger. You won't believe how much better she is in a few days."

At least on the outside, Maggie thought.

The ward was dark when Stride arrived at the hospital. It was after midnight. The lights were dimmed in the rooms he passed, and he saw patients stretched out on their beds and saw a few weary caregivers sipping coffee. He smelled the harsh cleansers that were used to scrub the floors. There were kids and adults here, men and women. Some were getting better, and some were getting worse. Living and dying. It was a struggle to remind himself that Serena was going to be fine, because this was the same hospital where Cindy had finally yielded to the cancer. Being inside this place, walking these corridors again, made the memories almost too vivid to bear.

He found Serena's room and stood at the end of the bed, watching as her chest rose calmly up and down in her sleep. He did what he had done many times years ago, take off his leather jacket, drape it over the back of the chair, and sit in the semidarkness watching the woman in his life. Back then, each day, Cindy was a little worse, and he felt as if a rat were gnawing out more of his heart whenever he saw her. He couldn't believe then that the woman in that bed was his vibrant, beautiful wife, that she had once been the seventeen-year-old girl who had changed his life in the course of one amazing summer.

She was gone too soon, and nothing was as he planned it.

He couldn't believe now that he had been given a second chance, and he did something he couldn't remember doing in years. He let himself pray. He had prayed back then, too, and when God ignored his pleas, he turned his heart away and decided that there was no point ever wishing for anything again. Until now. Until this woman came into his life, someone he would literally walk through fire to save. He was grateful that she was alive and desperate for her to recover.

As he sat there, Stride reached out and softly laced his fingers with Serena's hand on the bed. He tried not to wake her, but he felt her squeeze back with a weak touch. Her eyes blinked slowly, as if opening them were like lifting weights. She was groggy and drugged. When she saw him, her faced warmed, and he did his best not to break down. Cindy did that, too, lit up like a Christmas tree when she saw him, even when her time was short.

Serena mumbled something, and he couldn't hear her. When she said it again, it sounded intense and important.

"Couldn't go there," she told him.

He leaned toward her, but he didn't understand. "What?"

"Tried to," she murmured in a cottony voice. "Couldn't go there."

Stride smiled as if he knew what she was trying to tell him.

" 'Cause of you," she said.

"Don't talk," he said. "Let yourself sleep."

"Still here," she said, and her eyes closed.

Stride watched her for a while longer, until the weights on his own eyes felt like lead sinkers pulling them closed, and he slept and dreamed of a long-ago summer on the Point.

63

Abel Teitscher sat stiffly in the private meeting room in the women's prison in Shakopee. He held a white Styrofoam cup with both hands and stared at the black coffee without drinking it. He was wearing a pressed gray suit, the kind of outfit he would wear to church if he ever went there. His trench coat was neatly folded on the chair next to him. His black shoes were shined. He made it a point to dress well when he visited correctional facilities, as if the suit and tie were another set of bars between him and the prisoners incarcerated there.

He hadn't seen Nicole Castro in six years, not since she was led out of the St. Louis County courtroom after she was convicted. She had shot him daggers then with her eyes, and he looked back at her and saw a stranger. There was no morbid curiosity in his mind about what she looked like now, no desire to do anything but forget her. He never wanted to see her again, and it killed him to be here, hat in hand, coming to her for information. He knew what kind of reaction to expect.

The door unlocked loudly. A guard led her in. Abel didn't look up, but he felt her eyes as she saw him, and the warm, stale air in the room turned frigid. She didn't spit or scream, but she turned back to the guard and said calmly, "Get me the fuck out of here."

"Be nice," the guard retorted in a bass voice that boomed in the small space. He filled most of the doorway.

"I don't want to see him. Take me back."

"He's a police officer, so be polite and sit your ass down and hear what he has to say."

Nicole slouched to the chair on the opposite side of the wooden conference table and slumped down. She eyed Abel as if he were a spider and picked at the grooves in the wood with her fingernail. He didn't look up from his coffee. The guard closed the door, locking them in. The room was absolutely silent, and they sat alone for two or three minutes without saying anything. Her contempt radiated across the table, and he sat there and stewed, letting it wash over him and wishing he could walk out.

"You look like shit," Nicole said finally. "Tell me you're dying or something."

Abel's eyes drifted away from the smoky pool of coffee and drank her in. She wasn't the young cop he remembered. "Look who's talking."

"I hear you got divorced. Found your wife humping some stud."

"You heard right."

"So what do you do now? Sit on that old sofa of yours and stare at your fish all night?"

Abel hated the fact that she was right. "I run."

"Yeah? You got a lot to run from, Abel. A whole trainload. Word is you washed out as lieutenant, too. People hated you so much they had to bring Stride back, or everyone was going to take a hike."

Abel shrugged. "You done yet?"

"I'm not even getting started."

"You can blame me all you want, but I'm not the reason you're in here. You fucked up, Nicole. I couldn't help you."

"Oh, yeah, like your help is worth shit. You helped me right into a twenty-year sentence. My son had to grow up without his momma."

"I didn't kill those people. You did."

"You know that ain't true."

Abel shook his head. It was the same song. "Please."

"Don't you sit there and shake your head at me. Not after you messed with the crime scene to lay it on me."

"Is that still the best you can come up with? I framed you? I thought after six years you'd try a new story."

"Fuck you, I'm out of here."

Nicole got up and pounded on the locked door. The guard's square face loomed behind the window, and he ignored Nicole and looked questioningly at Abel, who shook his head. The door stayed locked. Nicole swore in frustration and sat back down heavily and folded her arms.

"What the fuck do you want anyway?" she asked. "Why are you here?"

"I'm here because Stride asked me to talk to you."

"Yeah? About what?"

"About the Enger Park Girl case."

Nicole's head bobbed in surprise. "Say what?"

"You heard me."

"You want my help with a case? Are you kidding me?"

"I want to know if you found anything when you were working it as a cold case. There's nothing in the file."

"Yeah, well, paperwork was never my thing."

"So meanwhile, the case sits in my desk gathering dust."

"It's not like you ever asked me. No one did. Six years, and no one ever asked me about it. I had a good angle, too."

Nicole was always pretending she was a supercop. Most of the time, her trails were dead ends. "I'm asking now," he said grudgingly.

"Well, why should I tell you a fucking thing now? Do your own research. I'm not exactly on the job anymore."

"Another woman was murdered and dumped in the park," Abel told her.

Nicole was quiet. She drummed her legs nervously under the table. "Same M.O.? Chopped off the head and hands?"

Abel nodded.

"Damn. Another kid?"

"No, she was older. We think her name was Helen Danning. You ever come across that name?"

Nicole shook her head. She was subdued. "No."

"What was your angle?"

"You think it's the same perp?" Nicole asked. "After all this time?"

"Maybe, or maybe it's a copycat. Either way, we're trying to find out if there are any connections between the murders. If you know something, it would really help us out." He got the words out as quickly as he could, before he choked on them.

"Why'd Stride send you?"

"It wasn't my choice," Abel admitted.

"So what? You're like some virgin sacrifice Stride's giving me? Give me a chance to rag on you, and in return, I tell you what I know?"

"Something like that. The cold case is technically mine now."

"Technically, meaning you're not doing shit with it."

"Okay, sure, you're right. I don't have time to waste on cases that aren't going anywhere, because I've got plenty of new files laid on my desk every day."

"Cases where the victims are white, you mean."

"Don't put that bullshit on me. We've been down that road. You've got Guppo believing I'm a damn racist, and you know that isn't true."

"Oh, yeah, like you were so surprised when your black partner got arrested for murder. Dem colored apples don't fall far from the tree, do they?"

"Look, I didn't give up on you because you were black. I gave up on you because you were guilty."

"That's the same thing in your book, Abel. The same damn thing."

"Are you going to help me? Or am I wasting my time here?"

"What makes you think I even remember a fucking thing about the case after six years?"

Abel had said the same thing to Stride, but looking in her eyes now, he knew she did. She remembered everything. Somewhere deep down, she was still a cop. "Because you've got a kid," he said. "And you wouldn't want him ending up like that girl in the park."

Nicole's anger dwindled to ashes. "Yeah."

"How's your boy?" Abel asked quietly.

"Far away. He's far away, and good for him. He's in college down south now."

"That's good."

Nicole studied her calloused hands as if they belonged to someone else. "Aerosmith," she told him. "That was my angle."

"What?"

"The Enger Park Girl had a bunch of video game and heavy metal tattoos, remember?"

"Stride and Maggie covered that lead. They talked to the bands. It didn't go anywhere."

Nicole smiled. "Yeah, but that was before all the Web shit, okay? And chat rooms and crap like that. I spent hours hanging out in chat rooms with fans of the bands. Bon Jovi, Barenaked Ladies, Aerosmith. I thought if the girl was a big fan, someone might remember her, like she was a groupie who stopped showing up after the summer of '97."

"That's a needle in a haystack. Teens come and go around the bands all the time."

"Well, it's not like I had much else to do, you know?"

"So what did you find?"

Nicole leaned forward. She was excited again, forgetting where she was. "A girl in Chicago told me about this black girl she hung out with at a bunch of Aerosmith concerts during their Nine Lives tour in the summer of '97. The black girl's name was Teena."

"Who was this girl in Chicago?"

"She never told me her name. When I told her I was a cop looking into a murder, she got freaked-out, signed off, and I never found her again."

"So?"

"So she said she was supposed to meet Teena again at their concert in Chicago, but she never showed."

Abel frowned. "That's not exactly a hot lead."

"No, but get this. This girl saw Teena for the last time at the band's Kansas City concert on August 26, 1997. She saw her getting into a car with an older white guy. She never ran into the girl again."

"August 26?" Abel asked. He saw the connection now.

"Exactly. That was two days before we found the Enger Park Girl. Okay, sure, maybe it's nothing, but it's a hell of a lot more than we ever had before. I was going to go down to Kansas City and start getting records of the ticket purchases from back then, see if I could find Teena, or see if I could find any buyers with connections to Duluth or with sheets. I was also going to start tracking down people who had been to the concert and see if anyone else could tell me about the girl or the guy she left with."

"That's a lot of legwork."

"Yeah, well, it's not like I had much else to do, and I had some things to prove to a lot of people."

Abel rocked back in his chair. "So why did you quit?"

Nicole frowned at him and gestured at the walls. "I got busy, you know?"

"Oh. Sorry."

"I'm telling you, though, I think this Teena was the Enger Park Girl, and some guy picked her up at the concert, raped and killed her, and dumped her in Duluth."

"I wish you'd told someone about this back then," Abel said.

"Like I said, I wound up with a few problems of my own."

"I'm not sure how any of this ties in to the murder of Helen Danning."

"Maybe she was an Aerosmith fan, too."

Abel shook his head. "This woman was an usher for Broadway musicals. She doesn't sound like a hard rock fan."

"Look, you know what you've got on this new case," Nicole said. "Maybe there's no connection. But do me a favor, okay? Don't let this drop. I mean, maybe you can still find something in Kansas City. Or you can track down this girl in Chicago again."

"Yeah, I spend a lot of time in heavy metal chat rooms," Abel said. "I'll fit right in."

"These fans are die-hard. If she was into Aerosmith in 1997, she's still into them now."

"So how did you find this girl six years ago?"

"I talked to my shrink," Nicole said.

Abel stared at her. "What?"

"You know Tony Wells, don't you? He's the ultimate Aerosmith fan. He gave me a bunch of Web sites. That was how I found this girl."

"You were seeing Tony," Abel repeated.

"Yeah, so? I was messed up. You know that."

It was probably nothing. Abel knew that. Nothing at all. Tony Wells saw half the detectives on the force. That was his job.

Except he knew it was everything. For a man who didn't trust anything he couldn't see, touch, and smell, Abel suddenly found himself taking a leap of faith. Seeing the big picture. He stared at Nicole and felt a well of regret so deep that he could drop into the hole for a mile and never splash into the cold water.

"Did Tony know why you wanted the information?" he asked her.

"Not at first. I told him later, when I found the lead about Teena."

"What exactly did you tell him?"

Nicole studied his furrowed face, and her eyes grew curious and hard. "Just what I told you, that I thought I had made a break in the Enger Park case. He became a consultant for us on that case, you know. He did the profile."

"Yeah," Abel said. "I remember."

"Lieutenant, you better see this," Guppo called.

Stride popped the top on a red can of Coke, which opened with a fizzy hiss. "I'm coming."

They were in the basement of City Hall at seven o'clock at night. Half the overhead fluorescent lights were dark. Guppo was in a tiny cubicle with walls that looked like gray burlap, with three computers glowing in front of him. One was a standard city-issue unit belonging to the Detective Bureau; the other two were computers taken from Eric's home and office.

Stride waited in the doorway of the cube, looking down at Guppo, who overflowed out of a small rolling chair. He didn't get any closer. Guppo was munching guacamole chips and salsa, which for him constituted a lethal weapon.

"You got something?" Stride asked.

"Oh, yeah."

Stride rubbed his eyes and watched Guppo's fat fingers tap the keyboard on the high-end laptop they had taken from Eric's company headquarters. The musty smell of the basement was in his nose. He felt strangely at home among the evening shadows.

"I was looking for 'The Lady in Me,' " Guppo said. "That was pretty much a dead end. She wiped her blog clean, and I couldn't find any cached pages that told us a thing. But the tattoo clued me in, and I went back over the sites that Eric had been visiting, looking for the TLIM acronym."

"And?"

"Voy-la," Guppo said. He clicked on a blog entry and maximized the window on the screen.

"Is this Helen's site?" Stride asked.

Guppo shook his head and crunched a handful of chips in his mouth. "It's a recovery site for Midwest rape victims," he said, spitting out mushy emerald crumbs as he talked. "You need a password to get in."

"So how did you access it?"

"I found Eric's password," Guppo said.

"How did Eric get in?"

"Looks like he joined. Family members of victims can be part of the community. His handle was Swimmer. Not tough to figure out."

"So what did you find?"

"A thread from about eighteen months ago. A college student was date raped at the University of Minnesota, and she talked about it online. Then a woman chimed in with a response and told her own story from the early 1990s."

"TLIM?"

Guppo nodded. "Right. Helen Danning."

"What did she say?" Stride asked.

"See for yourself."

Stride leaned in next to Guppo and smelled onions and peppers on the detective's warm breath. He read the blog posting on the screen:

Same date rape thing happened to me at the U in the early '90s. I went out with a grad student, and I had way too much to drink. It didn't seem like a lot at the time, and it wasn't until much, much later that I realized he probably put something in my drink. Girls, you HAVE to watch out for that kind of crap. There are PREDATORS out there. This guy was going to KILL ME, but thank God, a security guard found us in the park. The police told me it was my fault (!!!!) because of the alcohol. They never even charged this animal. TLIM.

"The time line fits," Stride said, "but there's no way that was enough for Eric to make a connection."

"There's more," Guppo went on. "This is just the beginning of the thread. Helen talks about dropping out, how she bounced around in dead-end jobs. She never got over it. Then the other girl asks her about counseling. Check this out."

He clicked through several more entries and leaned back for Stride to see.

Counseling? Yeah, right. The real kicker is that the bastard who did this to me is now in the business of counseling rape victims! He's some shrink up in Duluth! TLIM.

"Damn it to hell," Stride murmured. "Abel was right about Tony. All this time, he's been advising us about sexual pathology."

"Yeah, he's an expert," Guppo said sourly.

"Can we prove that Eric ever saw this?"

"Oh, he saw it," Guppo said. He clicked on a new posting.

TLIM. I think this guy may still be at it. I think he raped my wife. What's his name? Swimmer.

"What was Helen's reply?" Stride asked.

Guppo shook his head. "There was no reply. TLIM didn't post anything else."

"So Eric went to find her," Stride said.

At which point, he knew, all the dominoes began to fall.

64

Tony hadn't changed.

Maggie hadn't seen him in almost two months, but his routines were always the same, no matter how much time passed. He was always in the leather armchair when she arrived, with his head down in his notes, his double chin bulging like a blowfish under his beard. He always had his black mug of coffee in one hand and a silver Cross pen in the other, which he rubbed nervously between his fingers. His eyes brooded like a sleepy dog's stare, and his trimmed eyebrows were the only part of his face that ever moved. He was so predictably bland that he had no personality of his own. He was a watcher. A mask.

Except for Aerosmith.

That was the only clue she ever had as to who Tony was. He was always playing heavy metal when she arrived, and they usually spent the first few minutes of their hour together talking about music and bands. Sometimes Mötley Crüe. Sometimes Guns N' Roses. Mostly Aerosmith. She knew it was a way to relax her enough to share the wolves that were in her brain. Today, he was playing their last big single, "Jaded," and something about the song felt nostalgic to her, as if Tony were taking a rare walk down memory lane. It was about yesterday's child. Things that were lost and not coming back.

He clicked the song off as she sat down on the sofa, and the silence felt loud. It was night, and the wall of glass overlooking the wilderness behind him was a dark mirror. The office looked like the end of the world, and where the carpet ended at the windows, you could step off and fall into the sucking gravity of a black hole.

Maggie squirmed to get comfortable. Her feet dangled above the floor, making her feel like a teenager. Tony didn't look up. He never looked up until she spoke. He just sat there, sipping his coffee, sometimes stirring it up in his mug as if there might be grounds resting on the bottom that could float around and flavor it.

"Long time," Maggie said.

Tony put the black mug to his lips and took a quiet sip. "Yes."

He deigned to look at her then, with the mug in front of his face like a muzzle.

"You heard about everything that's happened?" she asked.

He nodded, and the overhead light danced on the smooth, high scalp of his forehead. "How is Serena?"

"She'll be okay, but she'll need help."

"Of course."

He didn't push her, didn't ask questions. How are you. What are you feeling. What's on your mind. Sometimes they spent a long time not saying anything at all. He just studied her from behind his coffee mug, and she felt like a lab rat.

"I should have come to you after I was raped," Maggie said.

"Why didn't you?" Tony asked.

"I thought if I didn't tell anyone, I could make it go away. Block it out. I'm good at that."

"But not good enough."

"No," she admitted. "No one's that good."

"You caught the rapist, I hear."

"Yeah."

"Does that help?" he asked.

"I thought it would, but to be honest, it doesn't. Not really. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the shithead is out of circulation. But it's like having your house burn down and then putting out the fire."

"I understand. So what are you going to do about that?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you can't change what happened. It's already done."

"I was hoping I could mope around and feel sorry for myself for a while," Maggie said. "Eat Doritos. Watch the soaps."

Tony didn't smile.

"Actually, I'm thinking of adopting a kid," she admitted. She wondered why she was telling him that. Old habits died hard.

"Ah."

"What, ah?"

"Nothing. Go on."

"You think it's too soon?"

"What do you think?" Tony asked.

"I think it would be nice to get an answer once and a while for all the money I'm paying."

"How did you come to this decision?" he asked.

"It's not a decision. It's something I'm thinking about. I feel like that's what I'm missing in my life. Being a mother. All the bad things began to happen after the miscarriages. That's when the universe went out of whack."

"So if you become a mother, the stars will be aligned again."

"Something like that."

"You sound like you're looking for approval or disapproval."

"I am."

"From me?" Tony asked.

"No, not from you," she said. Too quickly. "I guess I'm looking for approval from myself."

"And?"

"I'm not ready to give it yet."

"Why is that?"

"I still haven't found my way out."

Tony raised his eyebrows. "What do you mean?"

Maggie sighed. "Have you ever watched a spider on a screen? He gets in through a crack in the mesh, and then he's trapped inside, and he walks around and around and around and around trying to find that same little seam where he can get out. He can do it for days. The question is, can he find it before he starves to death?"

"So what's your crack in the screen, Maggie?"

"Isn't it obvious? Eric was murdered."

Tony stopped twirling his pen and froze with his coffee mug halfway to his face. Their eyes met. "Of course."

"I need to find out who did it. I can't go on until I do."

"I thought this rapist, this escaped prisoner, was the murderer."

Maggie shook her head. "He has an alibi."

"Surely no one still thinks you did it."

"A lot of people do. They can't prove it, but it will always be out there. You can't be a cop suspected of murder."

Tony's upper lip disappeared under his mustache. "We both know that murders don't always get solved, and it's no one's fault. You can't take them all on."

"No, but this one is my river, Tony. I cross this one, or I'm stuck where I am forever. I get past it, and I can get on with my life. Anything else is like drowning."

"You seem to think I can help you."

"You were the last person to see Eric that night," she told him.

"I've already told you everything I know."

"Humor me," Maggie said. "Tell me again."

Tony drank from his black coffee mug and studied her face. "Eric told me you had been raped. He thought he knew who did it. He wanted advice from me on how to figure out if he was right. He wanted to know what kinds of questions to ask to determine if someone could be a sexual predator."

"But he didn't give you a name."

"No, I don't know who he suspected," Tony said.

"Eric didn't talk to Blue Dog," Maggie said. "That means he thought someone else assaulted me, and he was wrong. The trouble is, I still think whoever he suspected was the one who killed him. Crazy, huh?"

Tony frowned. "If Eric was wrong, why would anyone have a reason to kill him?"

"Maybe because that person had something else to hide."

The words floated like dead leaves blown in the air and never touching ground.

"We've known each other a long time, Tony," Maggie said softly. "Ever since the Enger Park case."

"Yes, that's right."

She remembered how young they all were back then. They spent hours together-Stride, Tony, and Maggie-going over evidence, looking for a pattern, building a picture of the killer. Tony was the profiler. You're dealing with a serial killer, he had told them. He's going to do this again. He's a male, probably married, probably in his forties. He has a teenage daughter, and he either abuses her or fantasizes about abusing her. I don't think cutting off the head and hands is about obscuring the victim's identity. It's about the killer's anger and guilt. He needs to erase this girl.

The profile made perfect sense, and it got them nowhere.

"The Enger Park case is back in the news," she added.

"I know."

"What's your gut say, Tony? Could we be looking at the same perp?"

"After ten years? That's a long time between crimes."

"But it does happen. I mean, serial killers sometimes wait that long."

Tony shrugged. "Yes, it depends on whether they can find some other way to resolve their pathology. Something that provides a similar sense of power or release."

"How would a rapist and murderer resolve his pathology?" she asked. "I've always wondered about that."

Tony got up and went to the mahogany bar where he kept his coffee press and poured another cup. His paunch made a bump in his sweater. He made a face as he drank. The coffee was cold. He stood in front of the glass wall, and all Maggie could see were reflections and nothing but darkness framed behind him.

"There are many ways," he told her. "It depends on the individual. The perpetrator needs to find a substitute for his deviant behavior, something that satisfies his underlying need for power and control. The BTK killer in Wichita wound up as a leader in his church, and the social status he had in that role was apparently enough to keep him from committing more murders for many years."

"That sounds too easy."

"No, it's not easy at all. Keep in mind that most of these killers want to control their violence. They live a constant, mortal struggle between good and evil. Some control their impulses all their lives. Others fail. The lucky ones find a way to cage the beast."

"What about being sort of a sexual voyeur?" Maggie suggested. "You know, being involved in rape cases, working with rape victims, that sort of thing. Could that do it?"

Tony narrowed his eyes. "Maybe."

"So being a cop could actually work, I suppose."

"It's possible."

"Or working with cops. That would do it, too."

"Like I said, anything's possible."

Maggie nodded. "You remember Nicole Castro, don't you?"

Tony took a seat behind his desk on the other side of the room. He reclined backward in his Aeron chair. "Yes."

"I didn't realize you treated her," Maggie said.

"I work with lots of cops, but I can't talk about patients."

"Right, privilege, I know."

Tony sipped his cold coffee.

"Stride came to see me this evening," Maggie went on. "Abel Teitscher was in the Cities this afternoon talking to Nicole about the Enger Park case."

"Oh?"

"It turns out Nicole thought she was close to a breakthrough on the case right before she was arrested. She said you were a big help."

"Me? I don't recall."

"She says you pointed her in the right direction. Told her to walk this way. Get it? Aerosmith? Pretty funny, huh?"

"You've lost me."

"Well, you helped her find out a lot about Aerosmith fan sites and chat rooms, and wouldn't you know, she thinks she found out who the Enger Park Girl was. She thinks it was a girl who got picked up by a bad, bad guy at an Aerosmith concert in Kansas City in 1997. That was a couple days before we found the body in the park. So Nicole figures the murderer was at the concert, too."

"Sounds like a pretty big haystack in which to find a needle," Tony said.

Maggie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, that's for sure. Nicole was optimistic. Those concerts are zoos, right? Tens of thousands of people there. But I don't need to tell you that."

"No."

Maggie turned around and squinted up at the diplomas hung on the wall behind her. "I need glasses. It kills me. Say, I'm right, you went to the University of Minnesota, didn't you? You were there in the early '90s?"

"Yes. I got my B.A. and then did my graduate work there, too."

"We were probably both there around the same time, but we never ran into each other."

"The U is like a city," Tony said.

"It sure is. Thousands of students, and you never meet more than a fraction of them. You never hear their stories. Like Helen Danning, she went to the U at the same time we did, but she dropped out and never went back to school. Too bad."

"Who's Helen Danning?" Tony asked blandly.

"She's the second Enger Park Girl," Maggie told him. "The woman we just found yesterday."

Tony stroked his beard and briefly closed his eyes. When they opened again, Maggie stared at him without blinking. Her eyes were bright and cold. She was talking to him silently. Telling him the truth. Daring him. It was as if they were connected by an invisible tether, a waxy string tied to the bottom of two foam cups, and she was whispering in his ear.

"I didn't hear that you had identified the body," Tony said.

"No, they haven't released that to the press, but it's her. The killer made a big mistake. He missed a small tattoo on her ankle."

"Oh?"

"The tattoo said TLIM. Helen kept a blog. The Lady in Me. The blog was how Eric traced her to the Ordway in St. Paul."

"Eric?"

"That's right. Eric went to see Helen Danning just before he was killed. Helen disappeared the next day. You see, we're still putting the pieces together, but we think Eric found her because of a story she posted on the Web about being sexually assaulted while she was at the U."

Tony shrugged. "Why would Eric want to talk to her about that?"

"Yeah, that's the real question, isn't it? What would lead Eric to believe that a girl named Helen Danning getting raped in college would have anything to do with me being raped fifteen years later?"

"I assume you're going to tell me."

Maggie reached inside the pocket of her jacket and slipped out a single sheet of paper. "Here's the part of the blog that Stride and I found really interesting," she said. "This is what Helen wrote. 'The real kicker is that the bastard who did this to me is now in the business of counseling rape victims! He's some shrink up in Duluth!' "

Tony stared at the glossy surface of his desk as if it were a mirror.

"So let me know where I go wrong on this, Tony," Maggie said. "Eric was trying to find out who assaulted me and Tanjy, and he wound up on this Web site for rape victims. He saw what Helen wrote, and alarm bells started going off in his head, because he knew that Tanjy and I had one thing in common. Our shrink. So Eric went to see Helen Danning to confirm exactly who she meant, exactly who this Duluth psychiatrist was who raped her back in college. But he knew what she was going to say. She told him it was you, Tony. That's why Eric came to see you the night he was killed. He wasn't there to find out how someone ordinary could be a rapist. He didn't tell you he was going to see someone else after he left. He was there to accuse you of raping me and Tanjy."

Tony looked up from his desk. "The problem with your little story is that I didn't rape you, Maggie. Or Tanjy. Even if Eric suspected something ridiculous like that, why would I care? I was innocent."

"Sure, you may have been innocent of raping me and Tanjy. But what about your DNA?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the Enger Park Girl. Teena. The girl you met at the Aerosmith concert in Kansas City. The girl you raped, killed, and dismembered. You left semen inside her, Tony. You didn't think about that back then, did you? But if we ran your DNA now, it would lead us right back to the Enger Park case. That's why you killed Eric. To make sure that didn't happen."

"Please, Maggie, I've been around the block," Tony said. "I know the standards a court would apply in granting a motion to take a DNA sample. Rumors and innuendo like that wouldn't constitute probable cause."

Maggie pointed a finger like a gun at Tony's right hand, where he was cradling his coffee mug. "But Eric didn't care about that. He just took a sample for himself. You know, I forgot all about the coffee mug. When I came back home the night Eric was killed, I was so drunk. Eric left me a note, and he put it on the counter under a black coffee mug. I didn't think twice about it. The damn thing disappeared, and I never realized it. I didn't even put it together until I saw you holding that coffee cup of yours. Same as always. Like you were daring me to notice. Eric took it from you that night, didn't he? He was going to get me to run your DNA. So you had to get that mug back."

Tony laughed. It sounded odd, laughter bubbling out of the man who never even smiled. He stared at the mug, shook his head as if it were the funniest thing in the world, and then flipped it across the room. The mug twisted in the air, and coffee streamed and splattered on the carpet, leaving a dark trail of stains. When the mug hit the floor, it bounced and rolled to a stop near the far wall.

Tony slid open the middle drawer of his desk.

"Don't," Maggie said. She knew what he was reaching for.

Tony drew out a black Glock from the drawer and cradled it in his hand.

"Take a look at the camera," she said.

He glanced at the monitor that kept an eye on his waiting room. Stride was there, his own gun in his hand, staring back up at the camera as if he knew that Tony was watching him and deciding whether to run.

"And the door," Maggie added.

Tony turned and studied the glass door that led out of the office into the field of birch trees, and Abel Teitscher was there, tall and windswept, looking back at Tony with his grizzled face. He had a gun in his hand, too.

"There are more," Maggie said. "The place is surrounded. You're not going anywhere, Tony. So just put down the gun, and let's go."

Tony held the Glock as if he were measuring its heft and how solid and heavy it felt in his hand. "You know, I was planning to kill you, too, Maggie. That night. But I didn't."

"Instead you used my gun to kill my husband and frame me," she snapped.

"Don't pretend it was such a loss. You didn't love him."

"Fuck you, that's not the point."

"Once I killed Eric, I couldn't risk going back upstairs," Tony said. "Kicking your husband out of your bed kept you alive. That's rather ironic."

"What about Nicole?" Maggie asked. "You framed her, too, didn't you?"

Tony slipped his finger around the trigger of the Glock. "Yes, we had a session together, and she told me about tracking down the girl from the concert in Kansas City. I was stunned. I knew if she looked hard enough, she'd find me."

"So why not just kill her?"

"If Nicole were killed, people would wonder why, but if she wound up in jail for murder, it would all just go away. I knew Nicole. She never wrote anything down. She was always forgetting our appointments because she didn't keep a calendar."

"So you killed her husband and his girlfriend and planted evidence against her."

"She was always leaving hair behind on that couch," Tony said. "It was actually pretty easy. It all went underground again for years until Eric started nosing around. He was raving about me raping you, raping Tanjy, about what a monster I was, about who I'd raped in the past. Can you imagine the horror? All these years, I've kept the secret, I've beat my demons down into a box. Now this fool was going to expose me over something I didn't do."

"What happened?"

"I went over there and waited until you were both home. You're right. I needed to get that mug back."

"Why wait for me?"

"This time, I wanted to kill you both," Tony explained. "I wanted the focus to be on you, not Eric. But like I say, you weren't in bed together. And the frame-up worked with Nicole, so I figured I could make it work again."

"What about Helen Danning?"

Tony shrugged. "Loose ends."

"You bastard."

"If anyone found her, the arrow was going to point straight to me. She had to go. And you know what? It was such a thrill doing it again. To stop fighting the desire and finally give in after all these years. It was like reliving my greatest triumph to lay another body out in Enger Park. It was like yelling it to you and Stride and the whole world. I'm back, baby, I'm back. I told Serena there comes a time when you have to look your past in the eye and decide who you really are. I know who I am, Maggie."

Maggie's skin shivered. She stood up. "Let's go, Tony."

"No, I don't think so."

"There's no way out." She stepped closer to the desk.

"Actually, there is. I've always known the way out. I knew one day the monster would come back, and I would have to exterminate him. I was kidding myself to think I could hold out forever."

"Tony," she said, her voice a warning.

"It's okay, Maggie. I'm a psychiatrist. I know how these things work. You know the trick to committing suicide? Speed. Hesitation is the enemy. If you put the gun in your mouth and think about it, well, you won't do it. I've had lots of people sit on my couch and tell me about it, and the fact is, if you don't pull the trigger immediately, you never will."

"Put the gun down."

"I want you to remember something, Maggie."

She didn't take her eyes off the gun. Her whole body was still, as taut as a cable spanning the towers of a bridge. She was measuring how fast she could run, how far she could jump.

"Cops like you and Stride think you can spot the monster," Tony went on. "You think if you look in someone's eyes, you can see what's in their heart. The fact is, you don't have a clue. You really don't. Everyone wears a mask."

Maggie jumped. She shouted as she took two steps and leaped across the desk, her arms outstretched like the talons of a hawk as it drops toward the earth, her fingers curled, clawing for the gun. She wasn't nearly fast enough. Tony swallowed the black barrel of the Glock and pulled the trigger, just like that, without a millisecond of hesitation, and he was already dead as she came across the desk. The explosion jangled her brain like a marble rolling around an empty bowl. She kept coming anyway, momentum carrying her, and her body spilled into Tony's as they both tumbled head over heels and landed together, and his blood, tissue, and shards of bone spattered across her skin and clothes.

Stride kicked in one door. Teitscher kicked in the other. They both thundered in, guns leveled.

"I'm okay!" Maggie screamed. She shoved Tony's fleshy corpse away from her own small body, and she stood up, spitting his blood out of her mouth and wiping her face with the back of her arm. She wobbled on her feet, but she stood over him, unable to tear her eyes away. "I'm okay."

Ten years of her life came and went with the man lying on the floor. She heard Stride say something, but didn't hear what it was. The gunshot was still roaring in her head, making her deaf. She had a vision of Eric on the floor, remembering the sprawl of his naked body, and she still didn't feel anything at all. When she finally looked up, she stared into the crazy reflections of the dark glass, and somewhere out there, she thought she saw the Enger Park Girl in the woods, not desecrated and alone, but alive and dancing. The beat she was following was an Aerosmith song. That was the way it was supposed to be, the way it should have been, with that girl out there paying no attention to her at all.

She felt Stride's arm around her.

"I'm okay," she said again.

65

Abel Teitscher stabbed a shrimp from a greasy paper plate, where it was swimming in a candy-red sauce. It was rubbery as he chewed, but his tongue relished the sweet-and-sour tang, even though it tasted burnt. He took a forkful of fried rice, too, and then washed it all down with a sip of green tea. He leaned back against the stiff frame of his old sofa and watched a school of lemon tetras race around his fish tank in streaks of shining blue.

Sinatra was singing softly on the stereo. Ring-a-ding-ding.

It was a Monday like any other Monday, and like lots of Tuesdays and Wednesdays, as well. Potsticker Palace. Old music. Bubbles whooshing in the tank. "Dad, you've got to get out more," his daughter told him when she called from San Diego, but it was easy to say that when you were living in California.

She was right, though. He was lonely. It wasn't warm enough yet for the spring crime wave to wash over the city, so he didn't have to spend his evenings closeted away in his cubicle in City Hall. Sometimes that was easier than being home.

His doorbell rang, surprising him. He twisted around and looked out the living room window and saw a dirty Ford Taurus under the streetlight that he didn't recognize. He got up, noticing the wrinkles in his untucked white dress shirt. His gray slacks were baggy, because his waist had shrunk by a couple inches in the past year, and he hadn't bothered buying new clothes. He just cinched his belt tighter.

He opened the door.

"Hello, Abel," Nicole Castro said.

They stared at each other across the threshold. He felt self-conscious standing there, wondering if he had Chinese sauce on his mouth. He wiped his face. "Hi."

"Can I come in? It's okay, I'm not going to kill you."

"Funny."

He pulled the door wide, and Nicole wandered into the living room. She was dressed in a Minnesota Vikings jersey and jeans, with a new pair of Nikes. Her gray hair was still short, a prison cut. Her hands were in her pockets. She looked as uncomfortable as he felt.

"I heard you got out," he said. "I'm happy for you."

"Yeah. Free bird, that's me."

She stood in the middle of the room, biting her lower lip.

"You want some Chinese?" he said.

"No, that's okay. It looks like cherry barf, Abel."

"Yeah, it's only so-so, but it's kind of a routine for me."

"Uh-huh."

He rubbed his own flattop steel hair and tried to think of something to say. "Look, I'm sorry, Nicole. I don't know what else I can tell you. I didn't trust you, and I was wrong."

"Actually, I came here to apologize to you."

"What the hell for?"

"For thinking you set me up all these years."

"I would never do that," Abel said.

"Yeah, well, I know that now. I guess I needed someone to blame, you know. You were a big ol' white target."

Abel sat down on the sofa and put his hands on his knees. "I didn't see the big picture. I saw the evidence, and that was it. The evidence said you were guilty, so you were. Same thing with Maggie."

"Not like you were the only one."

"You want to sit down?" he asked.

Nicole shook her head. "I can't stay. I'm driving south. My son and my momma are in Knoxville, and I'm moving down there."

"You going to join the force?"

"No way, not for me. Forget that. I don't want to put anyone in prison ever again, know what I mean? I couldn't do it. I couldn't stand the idea of being wrong. No, momma's got a restaurant, I'll probably work there."

"What kind of restaurant? Chinese?"

Nicole laughed. "That's a good one. I forgot you could be funny."

"I guess I did, too."

She looked around the living room and frowned. "What the hell are you still doing here, Abel? Ain't it about time you got yourself a life? That whore you were married to is long gone, so why hang around?"

He winced, but she was right. His ex-wife had sucker punched him, and he was still sitting here gasping for air. "I wound up in a ditch, and I was stuck for so long I figured I must like it there," he said.

"Well, go down to the pancake breakfast at church and get yourself a chicky."

Abel snorted. "I forgot how to date about forty years ago."

"I'm not talking about dating, I'm talking about getting yourself some." She grinned. Her teeth were yellowed. She was ten years younger than he was, but they could have passed for the same age. He felt responsible.

"You won't believe this, but I miss having you as a partner," Abel said.

"That's 'cause I was the only one who would put up with your shit."

He nodded. "Yeah, you're right about that."

"What say you dump that Chinese barf, and you and I go to dinner someplace, huh? Before I leave town. For old times."

"My treat," he said.

"Damn right it's your treat."

Maggie tilted a bottle of imported lager to her lips and drained the last third, then tossed it into the pile of empties on the sand. "You know what I would have paid good money to see?" she said.

Stride and Serena both looked up, and the orange glow of the bonfire reflected on their skin.

"What?" Stride asked.

Maggie began giggling. "I would have loved to see your face when your beloved Bronco sank to the bottom of that lake."

Serena laughed, too.

"Hey," Stride said. "That's not funny."

The two women laughed so hard they had to hold onto each other to avoid spilling backward off the driftwood.

"Are you kidding?" Maggie said. "I can't believe you didn't dive in after it."

"That truck was a classic."

"Oh, Jonny, it was a piece of junk," Serena said. "It had like six hundred thousand miles on it."

"It was only a hundred and seventy-five," Stride said. He finished his own beer and retrieved the bratwurst that was blackening on a skewer and dripping fat with a rich sizzle onto the circle of flames. He blew on it and bit off its head and sighed. "Oh, man, that's good."

It was the middle of the night. The three of them had stayed on the beach behind Stride's house for hours, stoking the fire pit, watching the stars, and listening to the slap of lake waves a few yards away. The March night was cool, and snow lingered in patches on the sand, but winter had loosened its grip, giving sea-blue color back to the gray sky. The sweetness in the air tasted like spring. It was the time of year when every Minnesotan in the north knew that they weren't yet safe from a late fist of icy anger descending on the arrowhead, but time was on their side.

"I haven't shown you my new trick," Serena told Maggie.

"Go for it."

Serena breathed in slowly through her nose, swelling her chest until her lungs were completely filled with air. For weeks, she had been unable to take a deep breath without a fit of coughing. Now, she held it for fifteen seconds, then thirty, then forty-five.

"Honey, that's great," Maggie said. She added, "How are the legs?"

Stride saw Serena catch his eye before responding. It was sensitive ground. He was so used to thinking of Serena as tough that it brought him up short to find her breaking into tears over how she looked. He told her over and over to be patient and that, however it worked out, it didn't matter to him at all. That got him nowhere. It mattered to her.

"I'm not going to be modeling any swimsuits this summer," Serena said, and her voice had an edge. Stride thought the thin ice holding her up might give away again, but she took another deep breath. "But I'm doing better. It stings when I walk since the last surgery, but that only lasts a few days. It doesn't feel like alligator skin anymore."

The day before, she had lingered in front of a mirror. She hadn't done that in a long time.

"What about you?" Serena asked.

"Don't you worry about me," Maggie said, lifting her arms over her head. "It's spring. My favorite time of year. The lakes melt, the rivers melt, and the bodies all come drifting ashore. I feel like a catcher in the rye."

"You're just happy to be back," Stride said. "And you're drunk."

"I am. I'm a little drunk, I'm back on the job, and I'm rich enough to buy and sell you both, so be nice to me."

"Do we want to know just how much money you've got now?" Serena asked.

"You don't. You really don't. But don't complain, because I bought the bats. I mean, I brought the brats. Whatever."

"Yeah, but I bought the beer," Stride said. "And you're on your fifth beer."

Maggie laughed again, a happy, drunken laugh, a laugh that forgot everything else in the world.

"Speaking of the spring thaw," Stride said quietly.

He was drunk, too, but when he was drunk, he brooded. He had been dwelling on the bad news all day, and now it bubbled out of him. He could never entirely escape. It was like living on the Point, in the shadow of the lake. There were long, gorgeous summer days, cool spring breezes, a watercolor pallet of fall leaves, and winter mornings where each twig on each bare tree was sheathed in a silver wrap of ice. Every moment was beautiful and fleeting, but lurking behind all of them was the mass of the lake, which took lives and didn't give them back, which was like the foggy shroud of evil that was always gathering behind him. It was impossible to outrun.

Serena, who wasn't drinking anything harder than mineral water, recognized the sadness in his tone. "What happened?"

"Tony left a calling card," he said.

"Oh, man," Maggie murmured. "What did he do?"

"I got a call from the police in Hassman," Stride said. "When the snow melted on the highway shoulder this week, they found a woman's body."

Maggie and Serena absorbed the information in silence. The wind took that moment to gust off the water.

"Do they know who it is?" Serena asked.

"They think so. A woman named Evelyn Kozlak has been missing for several weeks out of Little Falls. Turned out she was Helen Danning's college roommate and best friend. That's how Tony tracked Helen down. He knew them both at the U."

"Shit," Maggie said. She added, "And you know what really sucks? I actually liked him. I have a hard time getting past that."

"Me, too," Serena said. "He helped both of us."

"You helped yourselves," Stride told them. "Tony just happened to be in the room."

"Helen's the one I really feel bad about," Maggie said. "She wasn't part of any of this. She just wanted to live her life and be left alone. Instead, she and her friend got sucked into a hurricane. Makes me feel pretty helpless."

"We're not in prevention," Stride told her. "We're in cleanup."

Maggie stood up and brushed sand off her jeans. "On that cheery note, boys and girls, I'm going to go home and sleep for a couple hours. You two can do whatever it is you do in that bed of yours."

"You shouldn't drive," Serena told her. "Sleep in our spare bedroom."

"Thanks, but I've done that too much lately. I've got my own home, you know. At least until I sell that stinking mausoleum and get my own place. Besides, I'm not as buzzed as I look. Talking about dead bodies sobers me up. Don't worry, I'll go slow."

"I'll walk you out," Stride said.

As they left the ring of fire, Stride felt the remnants of winter chill creep back in under his clothes. Maggie seemed unaffected. She dangled her red leather jacket over her shoulder. The top two buttons on her pink blouse were undone. Stride had a flashlight, and the beam guided them along the trail through the woods. He walked with her past his house, past the used and dusty black Ford Expedition in his driveway, and out to Minnesota Avenue. The road cutting through the Point was deserted. Maggie's gleaming new Avalanche, painted in shocking yellow, was parked at the curb.

"It's good to have you back, Mags," he said, as they leaned against her truck. His fingers itched for a cigarette, but he had given them up again, and hopefully for good. Serena couldn't handle the smoke now.

"Thanks."

"You don't need the money anymore," he said. "Why come back to a job like this?"

Maggie shrugged. "It's what I do."

"You come to any decision about adopting a kid?"

"I'm still thinking about it," she admitted. "I've got to get my life put back together, and then we'll see. One step at a time."

"That would be one lucky kid," Stride said.

Maggie got up on tiptoes, ran her fingers through his wavy hair, and pulled his head down and kissed him. Her lips were soft as they moved on his mouth, and he wrapped his arms around her back and pulled her close. The kiss went on, a deep kiss, the kind of kiss he never imagined he would share with her.

She broke it off and smirked at him.

"No offense, but I've decided to stop loving you."

"Okay." As if anything was that easy.

"I have other things to do with my life, and you're in love with Serena. But it was nice to know I had a shot for a second there." She gave him one of the sarcastic, know-it-all, infuriating looks she had given him for ten years. "I did have a shot just now, didn't I?"

"Yeah, you did," he said, surprising himself.

"Leave them wanting more, that's my motto."

"Go away."

"I'll see you tomorrow, boss."

Maggie tossed her keys in her hand as she strolled around to the driver's door. He heard her whistling. He stayed where he was for a long while, because he could still feel the touch of her lips and smell her perfume, and it disoriented him. When he followed the snowy trail back to the lake and sat down in front of the fire next to Serena, he was quiet. He felt guilty.

Serena glanced at him, suppressed a grin, and stared off at the lake.

"So she kissed you, huh?" she asked.

"Are you a mind reader?"

"No, but that's not your shade of lipstick."

Stride cursed and wiped his face. "Sorry."

"It's okay."

They watched the bonfire dance. Knotty pine crackled and spit.

"Just so we're clear," Serena added, "if you ever do it again, I'll be forced to kill you both."

"Don't worry, you're my alpha girl."

"Better believe it."

Serena sidled across the sand and sat so that their legs were touching. He put his hand carefully on her thigh and caressed her skin through the loose fabric of her sweatpants, not touching too hard. She didn't stop him. Her body didn't cringe in pain, and her soul didn't pull away. When he looked at her, her eyes were closed, and she was smiling.

"This is okay?" he asked her.

"This is great."

They sat there in silence while the fire worked itself down to ash, and when it was nothing but a faint auburn glow on the ribbon of sand, they buried it with snow and hiked back over the grassy slope to their home.