The Zero Night

3

Serena leaned against her Mustang and waited under the porte cochere of the hotel parking lot. It was almost four in the morning, and the heavy rain showed no sign of stopping. The street through Canal Park was deserted at that early hour, but the platform of the towering lift bridge was up, giving entrance to one of the giant ore boats arriving from Lake Superior. She saw a glint of its red superstructure as it glided silently through the narrow ship canal into the inner harbor.

The hotel doors slid open with a whoosh. Maggie clomped down the wooden steps to meet her. She eyed Serena’s face with an expression that was as close to sympathy as Maggie was likely to offer. “You don’t have to be here, you know. Go home. Guppo and I can deal with this.”

Serena frowned. “Stride told you?”

“Yeah, he sent me a text.”

“Well, I don’t need the poor-poor-pitiful-me routine.”

Maggie shrugged, as if Serena had said exactly what she expected. “Look, I know how things were between you and your mother, but we’re still talking about losing a parent. No one’s prepared for that, even if they think they are. Take some time for yourself.”

“I want to work,” Serena replied curtly. “This is my call, okay? Bring me up to speed, and let me do my job.”

With a sigh of surrender, Maggie quickly summarized Gavin Webster’s story of what had happened to his wife. Serena shoved aside everything else out of her mind and focused on the kidnapping.

“A boat to collect the ransom?” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Clever. Even if Gavin had brought us in, I’m not sure we would have been able to cover that.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“Well, it’s easy enough to check if he’s telling the truth. We should be able to get camera footage from the bridge.”

“Guppo’s up there now,” Maggie said.

As if the other detective could overhear their conversation, both of their phones chimed simultaneously with incoming texts. Max Guppo had sent them a video file copied from the bridge operator’s computer. Silently, Serena and Maggie both watched it on their phones. The time stamp was at 12:13 a.m., and the video captured a wide-screen view of the inner harbor. Serena enlarged the images on the feed, which helped her make out the activity taking place near the DECC. Distantly, she saw a boat cutting a swath through the choppy water and then idling close to the pier. On land, a man got out of a car and walked toward the edge of the water, where he tossed something toward the boat. The craft was in darkness. She could see nothing of the person operating it, but seconds later, the boat sped away at high speed, throwing up a wake behind it.

“So it went down like Gavin said,” Serena observed.

“It did,” Maggie agreed. She sounded almost disappointed. “We need to find that boat ASAP.”

“That won’t be easy. It could have landed anywhere on the Wisconsin or Minnesota side of the bay.”

Maggie nodded. “I’ll call Lance Beaton and have him get the Superior cops to start searching on their side.”

“Do you think the wife is alive?” Serena asked.

“I don’t like her odds. Gavin says he talked to her at nine o’clock, but now that they have the money, they don’t have much incentive to keep her alive. If the plan really was to give her back, they would have called before now.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Maggie fished in the pocket of her trench coat and came out with a house key pinched between her fingers. “Gavin gave me the key to his place. Get over there and see what it looks like inside. I’ll send Guppo to join you, and we’ll get a forensics team to start gathering evidence. Wake up the neighbors, too. Maybe someone saw something on Tuesday evening or in the days before Chelsey was taken. If we’re really lucky, maybe one of them has an outdoor security cam that looks out on the street.”

Serena nodded. “Okay.”

“See what the neighbors have to say about Gavin and Chelsey, too,” Maggie added.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning how was their marriage.”

Serena pursed her lips. “Understood.”

She climbed into her car, but Maggie signaled her, and Serena rolled down the window. “Is there something else?”

“No, not about the case,” Maggie replied. “But if you want to talk about Samantha at any point, we can do that. I know I’m not the first person you’d usually talk to, but sometimes a frenemy is better than a friend.”

“I appreciate the thought, but I have it under control,” Serena informed her in a starchy tone. “Got it?”

“Got it.”

Serena rolled up the window. She shivered a little from the cold, then started the car and sped down Canal Park Drive toward the city. She left the radio off and drove in silence. After crossing over the freeway, she turned left on 1st Street past the quiet downtown buildings. At Mesaba, she headed sharply uphill and then took another left at a short road that led to 5th. The narrow street was terraced along the steep slope of the Observation Hill neighborhood. Its asphalt had been beaten into cracks and potholes by the freeze-and-thaw of winter weather. Rainwater poured down the shoulders.

A few blocks later, she parked outside Gavin Webster’s house. The property was on the south side of the street and overlooked the lake, which was invisible through clouds of fog and rain. It was an older house, with chocolate-colored wooden siding and a tuck-under one-car garage. Duluth was one of those rare cities where buyers could still find middle-class homes with lake views, but the neighborhood had begun to gentrify. Immediately across the street, up steep steps from the sidewalk, were several homes that had been expensively remodeled and expanded. Their picture windows looked right down on Gavin’s house.

In the rain, Serena hiked up the driveway past messy, overgrown shrubbery. The yard was small, just a little patch of lawn in the back and a picnic table and a Weber grill near the garage. Over her head was the house’s second story, where a balcony and large windows took advantage of the view.

She drew out her pistol, then used the key to unlock the lower-level door. Once she was inside, she called out loudly, “Is anyone here? This is the police.”

No one answered.

The house was quiet and cold, and the lights were off. The only sound was rainwater dripping from her clothes to the floor. She checked the garage and found a boxy yellow Volvo parked inside. Chelsey’s car. When she climbed the stairs to the upper level, she found a drafty hallway near the front door. She switched on the hall light and could see broken glass where the window by the door had been smashed inward. Gavin had obviously nailed plywood across the opening, but he’d otherwise left the scene untouched. She spotted a smear of blood on the wall, and then more blood spattered on the living room carpet. A fragment of fabric that looked like it came from the sleeve of a blouse lay there, too.

In her head, she re-created the scene. The kidnappers — one or more — had broken the window and let themselves in through the front door. Chelsey, alarmed by the noise, had come running to see what was happening. There was a fight in the foyer, Chelsey screaming and trying to escape, the kidnapper throwing her against the wall and then chasing her down as she ran.

Was she unconscious as they carried her outside?

Or did they gag her to keep her quiet?

One way or another, they’d taken her from the house. The whole abduction probably only lasted a couple of minutes.

Serena went into the living room, adjacent to the entryway. It was compact and paneled in dark wood. The room itself showed nothing unusual: old furniture with fabric worn through to the foam, black-and-white family photos hanging crookedly on the walls, and leather-bound law books crowded on a set of built-in bookshelves. And yet she felt a vibe in this room that made her uneasy. She’d had a cop mentor in Las Vegas who told her to listen to the feel of a place, not just the people in it. Where suspects and victims lived, how they lived, the things they kept, the art they put up, always left echoes of who they were. You could learn a lot from them.

The echo of this place was dark. Unhappy.

She turned her mind back to the circumstances of the crime. She thought about Gavin getting home, finding the damage, and realizing that his wife was missing. He was about to call 911 to report it — but then the kidnappers interrupted him with their ransom demands. Their timing was oddly perfect, reaching out to him before he’d had a chance to bring in the police. That didn’t feel like a coincidence.

Somehow they knew when he’d arrived home.

Maybe they were watching from the street. Or—

She eyed the stairwell that led from the lower level of the house. When she traced the line of sight from the hallway to the far side of the living room, she spotted a bushy split-leaf philodendron potted near the front window. She went to examine it. Carefully separating the leaves, she located a wireless spy camera hidden inside the plant, with a vantage on anyone climbing the stairs.

They’d been waiting for Gavin to get home. Watching. Listening. By installing the camera, the kidnappers had been able to reach Gavin while he was not thinking clearly and still in a state of shock. We have your wife. And the camera would also let them know if he disobeyed their instructions and contacted the police.

This crime had been carefully planned and executed.

Standing in the living room, Serena found her attention drawn to the black-and-white pictures hung on the wall. She examined the photographs and recognized Gavin from the times she’d faced off against him in court. The curly blond hair. The intense, Jude Law eyes and enigmatic little smile. In most of the photographs, Gavin was with a woman, and she assumed this was Chelsey. They looked happy together. Big smiles, his arm around her shoulder, her arm around his waist. But Serena had learned not to trust what she saw in pictures. Photographs were two-dimensional, and you couldn’t see inside them, which made it easy for people to show a different face to the world.

She took a close look at Chelsey Webster. The largest of the pictures had obviously been taken at a wedding. Gavin was in a tux. His wife wore auburn-colored silk, glistening like liquid on her curves. She was as tall as he was, with a statuesque figure. She had full brown hair tumbling past her shoulders, as if the 1980s had never gone out of style. Her dark eyes were cool and intelligent, and her eyebrows arched sharply. Her blush was a little too pink, her lipstick a little too red, and her teeth a little too white. But the whole effect was of someone self-assured and attractive. She was certainly past forty, but the look she gave the camera celebrated her age, rather than hid from it. She looked tough, the kind of woman who had probably put up quite a fight when they came to take her.

“Serena?”

The voice came out of nowhere, like a whisper.

She whirled around, breathing hard, but she was alone and the room was empty. She felt sweat on her palms. What she’d heard was inside her head. She knew that voice; she could call it up just by closing her eyes and listening. Smoky, deep, always slurred by whatever she’d had to drink or whatever drug she was on.

Samantha.

She wondered why the photograph of Chelsey had triggered thoughts of her mother. The two women didn’t look at all alike. And then she remembered: the wedding. Serena had gone to her first wedding when she was thirteen years old. The older brother of one of her school friends had been getting married, and Samantha had taken her. It was so exciting, wearing a long turquoise dress, putting on makeup, doing up her long black hair, wobbling on high heels.

Her father had stayed home; he knew when he was the odd man out. Instead, mother and daughter had gone together, looking like sisters. Serena remembered how much she’d liked hearing Samantha tell people the story of her name, with sparkling laughter in her voice. “Serena? Well, do you remember that television show Bewitched? Here I am, natural blond, and that girl came out of me with that jet-black hair of hers, and I just knew she’d be my evil twin. I was Samantha, so naturally she was Serena.”

Her mother.

The prettiest woman in the world. Gorgeous, with that long sunflower hair and jewellike green eyes she’d given to Serena. Graceful where a teenaged Serena had still been clumsy. They’d danced together at the wedding, at least when Samantha wasn’t dancing with other men and giving Serena winks from the floor. They’d people-watched, with Samantha whispering mean little jokes about the other women in Serena’s ear, making her giggle. They’d smoked cigarettes outside the church like bad girls. They’d swiped a bottle of white wine after Samantha flirted with the bartender, and her mother had let her drink with her until past midnight as they lay in deck chairs by the Scottsdale pool. And when that bottle was gone, she’d brought them another, and Serena had gotten drunk for the very first time.

It had been the best night of her life. The best night ever. She’d gone home sick but high as a cloud, and she remembered how much she’d loved her mother for giving her that night, and how she would do anything in the world for Samantha. She wanted nothing else from the future but to grow up exactly like her.

And in the worst way, she had.

“Serena?”

This was a real voice.

She spun toward the noise from the shadows. Automatically, she lifted her gun and pointed it at a man standing at the top of the stairs. Without even a second thought, she curled her finger around the trigger. All she could see was a threat, and all her brain could think to do was fire.

Max Guppo thrust his hands in the air at the sight of the gun. “Serena! It’s me! It’s Max!”

Serena didn’t react immediately. It took time for Max’s words to break through the fog in which she found herself. She stared through the dark room, and her mind finally came back to reality. She wasn’t in Phoenix. She wasn’t with Samantha. This was Gavin Webster’s house in Duluth, and his wife was missing.

She lowered her gun and holstered it. Her skin flushed hot with shame and fear. “Christ, Max, I’m so sorry.”

“I called to you from downstairs. Didn’t you hear me?”

“No, I didn’t hear anything. I was distracted.”

Max waddled into the living room. He was short, mostly bald, and as overinflated as a child in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. He was also a sweet, cheerful father of five daughters who’d had an innocent crush on Serena ever since she arrived in Duluth from Las Vegas. They were the best of friends.

“Are you okay?” Max asked.

“Yeah. Sure. Don’t tell Maggie, okay?”

He cocked his round head with surprise. “I’d never do that.”

“Thank you, Max.”

“The forensics team is right behind me,” he said.

Serena felt her hands trembling, and she curled her fingers into fists to steady them. “Just have them dust everything, okay? But I don’t think we’ll find any prints. Whoever did this was smart. I’m going to go wake up the neighbors and see if they can tell us anything.”

Guppo nodded, but his face showed the same worry she’d felt from Jonny and Maggie. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. I’m fine.” She looked around at the living room and saw the photos of Gavin and Chelsey staring back at her from the wall. “Right now, I just need to get out of this house.”