The Zero Night

18

In the morning, at police headquarters, Serena found herself taken off the Gavin Webster case for good. She didn’t blame Maggie for benching her. A shower, fresh clothes, and mouthwash weren’t enough to cover the aftereffects of the night. When she studied herself in the bathroom mirror, she saw what she looked like. There were dark sleepless circles under her bloodshot eyes. Her face looked pale, almost cadaverous. The fluorescent lights made her squint, her head throbbing. She wasn’t drunk anymore, but she still felt drunk, as if the poison hadn’t left her blood.

Stride wanted her to go home, but Serena knew if she left the station, she would go straight back to the bar in West Duluth and ask Jagger to keep pouring drinks for her, until she’d recaptured the bliss of letting go. That was how it always went. There was never just one zero night. Somehow she had to find a ledge to grab onto, something that would stop her from falling any further.

Maggie seemed to understand that, so she didn’t force Serena off the job entirely. Instead, while Maggie and Stride left to find Hink Miller in Superior, Serena stayed behind at police headquarters, closeted in her cubicle. She took four Advil, but it didn’t help the throbbing behind her eyes. She unwrapped and ate some dry crackers, but they tasted like dust.

Most of all, she thought about the woman she’d seen on the street. That woman had become an obsession for her.

Who was she?

It was true. Serena knew her. The face hadn’t clicked in her mind right away; she’d only noticed the blood. But she’d seen that face before. Not in person and not recently. The woman wasn’t someone she’d met, and that was what made it disorienting to see her on the street. Serena knew her only from photographs, from witness statements, from being in the woman’s house, from seeing her bank statements and credit card records.

She’d seen that woman’s face in a police file somewhere. Serena was sure of it. She had a mental block about the woman’s name and what had happened to her, but she also had the sense that there was unfinished business between them.

Who was she?

She started by reviewing cold cases. She dug out the handful of files from her desk that were unsolved and stalled, lacking new evidence. Drug cases. Missing persons. One homicide involving a homeless person on the Lakewalk. She reviewed everything she’d gathered on the open investigations, looking for a photograph that matched the woman she’d seen, but she came up empty. And it felt like she was searching in the wrong place, because she didn’t believe she would have forgotten someone who was part of her active caseload.

Next, she pulled up computer records of the other cold cases spread around the department. There were dozens of them, and even though she wasn’t the lead detective, she would have gotten updates and seen pictures of victims and suspects at Maggie’s team meetings. So maybe her mystery woman was hidden in one of those files. She went through them one by one. The Cray overdose, the Mathers home invasion, the Karpeles Museum theft, the Fallon hit-and-run, the threats sent to half a dozen local judges, the break-in at the DECC, the Palen disappearance, and more, until the brightness of the screen made her headache unbearable.

While she was in the midst of her research, Guppo stopped by her desk. He made no comment on how bad she looked — she knew Guppo always saw her through rose-colored glasses — and instead, he apologized profusely for letting the truth slip about the incident with the gun at Gavin Webster’s house. Serena kissed his cheek and told him to forget about it. Gun or no gun, she would have been kicked off the case anyway.

Then she asked for his help.

Serena described the woman she’d seen on the street and asked if the details rang a bell with Guppo from any of their old cases. Max had a good memory for faces. He huffed a little, his breath smelling like cheese popcorn, and his eyes narrowed into a squint. Then he made her repeat the details.

“You actually saw this woman?” Guppo asked.

Serena hesitated. “Yes, I did.”

She didn’t want to believe what Stride suspected. She couldn’t accept that she’d imagined the whole thing, that the image of the woman was nothing more than a drunken hallucination. But in the cold light of day, she really didn’t know anymore.

“Then no,” Guppo replied, shaking his head. “I can’t place her.”

Serena frowned. “It sounds like the description reminded you of somebody. Who?”

“Nobody you could have seen on the street,” he said with a smile.

“Please, Max. Who?”

“Nikki Candis,” Guppo replied. “Remember? Two years ago? This woman sounds exactly like her. Skinny red jeans and all. But obviously, it couldn’t be her.”

Nikki Candis.

Yes. Everything came rushing back as soon as Serena heard the name. The face. The photograph.

The body on the bed.

“Thank you, Max,” she said.

“Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

“No, you were. I appreciate it.”

Guppo heaved his sizable girth out of the chair, gave Serena a strange look as if she were an angel with a broken wing, and disappeared toward his own cubicle. As soon as he was gone, Serena opened her desk drawer.

Not the open cases. The closed cases.

Nikki Candis.

She yanked out the thin file — there hadn’t been much to investigate — and she opened the manila folder. Nikki’s photograph was right on top. The photograph they’d taken when they found her. There was no doubt about it. The hair, the face, even the clothes down to those red jeans, were all the same. They matched the picture in her head precisely.

This was definitely the woman that Serena had chased into the trees last night.

But there was also no denying the fact that Stride was right. It hadn’t been real. The image on the street, the pursuit into the woods, had been nothing but a dark fantasy dredged up by a bottle of Absolut Citron.

Nikki Candis was dead. She’d shot herself in the head.

Stride parked on the dirt road across from the house belonging to Hink Miller’s mother. The house was quiet, and there were no signs of life inside. He kept an eye on the curtains, but they didn’t move. There was a Ford Taurus parked outside the detached garage, and based on the tire tracks left in the mud, it had been driven sometime during the most recent rainstorm.

Next to him, Maggie checked her watch. Her knee twitched impatiently as they waited for the Superior Police to arrive. “Where the hell is Lance?”

“The judge needed to sign off on the warrant,” Stride reminded her. “Let’s face it, our probable cause is pretty thin.”

Maggie shook her head. “Hink’s a Gavin Webster client, and he was flashing a wallet full of hundred-dollar bills a few hours after the ransom payout. Plus he’s got a history of assault. That should be enough.”

“Depends on the judge.”

“Lance is just making us wait,” Maggie complained.

“Well, that’s possible, too,” Stride agreed with a smile. “You know Lance.”

He lowered the window of the SUV. Cool October air blew through the truck, and a few dead leaves rolled toward them down the dirt road. Through the trees on his right, he saw the monuments of a quiet cemetery. As they waited, he glanced at Maggie. They hadn’t talked about Serena or the events of the previous night or Maggie’s decision to kick her off the Webster case. And Stride hadn’t mentioned the woman on the street. He knew Serena was lucky not to be suspended entirely, but if Maggie suspected that Serena was having hallucinations, she’d demand a psych evaluation before letting her back in the building.

Maybe that was what Serena needed. Time and a couch.

Stride had gone through it himself. Over the summer, as he debated whether to return to the police, he’d visited with the department psychologist several times. She’d had to clear him to go back if that was his choice. Stride had never been a fan of sharing secrets with people closest to him, let alone with strangers, but he’d tried to overcome that. The shrink had asked about death and loss; and his late wife, Cindy; and Serena and Cat. She’d asked about being the lieutenant and about not being the lieutenant. Eventually, she’d told him that the only way he’d know if he was ready was by going back and seeing if he was ready. He’d asked her wryly how much she was billing the city for that insight.

She’d cleared him anyway.

He glanced in the rearview mirror of the SUV. Behind them, two squad cars from the Superior Police turned off Highway 35. Both vehicles pulled ahead of him and parked on the dirt road. Four cops got out: three men, one woman. Stride and Maggie got out, too, and one of the men waved a piece of paper in his hand like he’d just been awarded an Oscar.

“Got your warrant,” Lance Beaton said. “You’re welcome. It wasn’t easy. The judge didn’t like your hearsay report on the C-notes, and without that, let’s face it, you don’t have shit. But I pushed hard on the idea that we’ve got a kidnap victim who might still be alive.”

Stride watched Maggie’s face tighten with annoyance. She refrained from sarcastic retorts, which he considered an example of personal growth. They both knew the Superior detective well. Whenever they crossed the bridge from Minnesota to Wisconsin, Lance was their primary inter-departmental contact. He had a habit of taking credit on every break in every investigation. If they had to make arrests on the Superior side of the bay, news reports invariably played up the role of the Wisconsin detectives and downplayed the work done in Duluth. Stride had learned to ignore it, but Lance still managed to bring smoke curling out of Maggie’s ears.

He was not yet forty years old, with thinning brown hair and a tall, slightly underfed physique that made his uniform look baggy. He had dark, straight eyebrows and a dark, straight mustache, as if his face had been highlighted by a whiteboard marker. His gray eyes had a fixed look that Stride described as sleepy and Maggie described as vacant. He never smiled, and Stride suspected that was because he wanted the world to see him as a Very Serious Cop.

“Was Hink on your radar before today?” Stride asked Lance.

“No. He’s kept his nose clean over here, but that’s only been a few months.”

“Is there anything to tie him to the boat you found in Billings Park?”

“Negative, the boat was wiped clean,” Lance replied. “No prints, no DNA. That was all in my report.”

“Can we get on with this?” Maggie asked. She headed toward the front of the house but stopped when she saw that Lance’s feet were still rooted to the ground. The other Wisconsin cops deferred to him and didn’t move.

“What do you want us looking for in there?” Lance asked, his hands on his hips.

“First and foremost, Chelsey Webster,” Maggie replied. “And send someone around back in case Hink does a rabbit.”

Maggie didn’t give Lance a chance to overrule her. She marched for the house again, and the Wisconsin detective took long strides to keep up with her. One of the other cops headed for the rear of the house, and Stride and the remaining two cops followed Maggie and Lance. They crossed the dirt road to the weedy lawn and approached the front porch, and as they did, wind gusted across the roof. Stride saw sheer curtains blowing from inside an open window.

When the breeze reached him, he caught an odor on the air and barked, “Stop.”

Maggie looked back, her eyebrows arched. Then her nose wrinkled as she caught the smell, too. “Shit.”

They both drew their guns.

Lance’s brow furrowed. He hadn’t figured it out yet. “What the hell?”

“Body,” Maggie said.

She ran to the front door and pounded with her fist, and Stride made his way to the house’s open window. As he got closer, the smell from inside intensified. He stayed to the side of the frame and watched the thin fabric of the curtain whip in and out like a ghost. He listened for movement, but heard nothing. With his gun in his right hand, he glanced into the living room, and at first, his eyes struggled to distinguish anything but shadows. Then he saw a shape on the floor, and a moment later, he noticed a figure slumped in a chair.

“We’ve got two bodies,” he called. “A woman and a man.”

“Police!” Lance announced immediately in a loud voice. “We’re coming in!”

He signaled to one of his burly cops, and like a bull in a china shop, the cop threw his body against the door and crashed it inward in a shower of splinters. Lance went in first, gun level, and Maggie followed. Stride did the same, and a few seconds later, they were all standing with their hands covering their noses and mouths in the house’s small living room. Two other cops began a room-by-room search.

The bodies had been dead for a while. An elderly woman sat in a rocking chair, her head down on her chest. She looked as if she could be sleeping, except for the ruby-red line of dried blood that stretched around the visible portion of her neck. On the floor, Stride squatted beside a heavyset man in a large pool of blood, multiple gunshot wounds to his chest and head. Shell casings were sprinkled around the hardwood floor. The killer hadn’t bothered retrieving them.

Maggie looked down at the corpse. “Hink Miller.”

“Somebody’s been cleaning up loose ends,” Stride said. “Making sure nobody’s around to talk.”

“How long do you think they’ve been here?”

“At least twenty-four hours.”

The cop who’d broken in the door returned to the living room from upstairs. The lone woman on the Wisconsin team rejoined them at the same moment from the basement. They both shook their heads.

“There’s nobody else in the house,” the woman reported. “Also no sign that your vic was ever being held here.”

Lance waved his hand toward the front door. “I want everybody out. I need to call the medical examiner and get a forensics team over here. Until then, I don’t want anyone spoiling the scene.”

Stride saw Maggie open her mouth to protest delaying a full search, but she closed it again without complaining. They both returned outside. On the front lawn, Stride studied the house, then walked around it, looking for anything out of place. Nothing caught his attention. The killer hadn’t left obvious clues behind. When he returned to the front yard, he noticed that the side door of the detached garage was open. Maggie stood in the doorway, shining her flashlight inside. He joined her, and they examined the interior. There was winter plowing equipment and fertilizer stored there, but little else.

“Let’s check the Taurus,” Stride said.

They headed for the car that was parked outside the garage, its white paint and tires splattered with dried mud. Glancing through the windows, he saw empty food wrappers on the passenger seat and a sweatshirt crumpled on the rear floor. He opened the driver’s door, and using the cuff of his sleeve, he popped the lever that opened the trunk. When they went to the back, Stride leaned forward, taking a whiff of the interior.

“Smell that?” he said.

Maggie leaned over the trunk and frowned. “Perfume.”

“Yeah.” He took out a pen and used it to drag a small plastic bag from the back of the trunk. It was torn open at the top and filled with plastic zip ties. Then he pointed at a few reddish drops on the trunk’s shell. “That looks like blood to me.”

“Chelsey was in here,” Maggie concluded.

“That’s my bet.”

“But she’s not in the house or the garage, so where the hell is she?”

Stride nodded. “And is she still alive?”