The Zero Night

30

Stride watched Gavin Webster’s face, which changed color in the firelight. Reflections of the flames danced in the man’s blue eyes. The lawyer was home, in the old house on Observation Hill overlooking the lake. The damaged front door had been repaired. He wore jeans and a rust-colored wool sweater with fraying cuffs and tears at the elbows. He was drinking, too. Hard stuff, straight gin.

“So you talked to Broadway?” the lawyer asked. His voice was part grief, part outrage.

“Yes.”

“So did he tell you that he gave me one hundred thousand dollars in cash to pay the ransom? Not ten thousand?”

“He did,” Stride said.

Gavin studied Stride’s impassive expression. Like a good defense lawyer, he always anticipated the prosecution’s case. “But that doesn’t prove how much cash was in the backpack when I tossed it to the man in the boat. Right?”

“Right.”

“I could have buried the rest of the money somewhere for all you know.”

“True.”

“And then there’s the missing gun,” Gavin added. “I suppose I probably tossed that in the river after I killed Hink.”

“I don’t know. Did you?”

“No, because I didn’t do it.” Gavin got up and used a poker to jostle the logs in the fireplace, causing a shower of sparks. “Let me ask you something, Stride. What’s my motive in all of your fantastic theories? Why would I want to harm my wife? I could have divorced Chelsey if I really wanted to get rid of her, and there was no way she was going to get her hands on any of that cash.”

“Divorce is still ugly,” Stride said.

“So is murder. If I’m caught, I go to prison, rather than enjoying my wealth. That seems like a risky bet to make. Besides, it’s a moot point anyway, because I loved her.” He heard what he’d said, and he corrected the tense. “Love her.”

Stride stared at Gavin as the man took a seat on the brick hearth near the fire. His skin was flushed red, and his blue eyes still had that weirdly charismatic glow. Maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe the lawyer was taunting him, but Stride knew that Gavin was right. Despite those three million dollars, he had no obvious motive to kill his wife.

If Gavin had really done it, there was something else he was trying to hide.

But what?

Stride still had one more card to play.

“We have a major search underway,” he told the lawyer. “We’ve been covering an area north of the city for most of the day.”

Concern spread across Gavin’s face. Stride couldn’t decide whether it was real or faked. “A search? You think you’ve found the location where Hink took Chelsey?”

“We don’t know yet. It’s a big area, and it will take us time to work our way through it. We have dogs following Chelsey’s scent, but the rain makes the process more difficult.”

Gavin frowned. “Where are you searching?”

“The woods near Fredenberg Lake,” Stride said, watching the lawyer’s face for any reaction.

“Fredenberg Lake? Well, I was just up in that area last—” Gavin stopped. He glanced away and shook his head with a hiss of disgust. “Of course. You know that already. That’s why you’re searching up there.”

Stride waited for Gavin to go on.

“The tow-truck driver? He’s your source?”

“That’s right.”

“What a time to get a flat tire, huh? While I’m out scouting the woods to figure out where to bury my wife’s body?”

“If that’s a joke, it’s not funny,” Stride said.

“You’re right. This isn’t funny. It’s pathetic.”

“You told us you went to visit your parents on Sunday evening,” Stride went on. “That’s the same day you were in the woods near Fredenberg Lake. You went up there on Sunday morning, and later that day, you headed off to visit your parents for a couple of days?”

“Yes. So what?”

“Then you got back to Duluth on Tuesday evening, and that’s when you discovered that Chelsey was missing?”

“Exactly.”

Stride frowned. “So far we haven’t found anyone who can confirm that Chelsey was still alive on Sunday. We can’t locate anyone who saw or talked to Chelsey on Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday.”

“I talked to her,” Gavin protested.

“Did anyone else? Did your parents?”

“No, but you can check her phone records. You’ll see that I called. Twice. Each call lasted several minutes.”

“That only means that someone answered the phone,” Stride said, “but we don’t have any way to prove it was actually your wife. It could have been Hink Miller, for example.”

Gavin nearly spit with exasperation. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Stride.”

“Your wife didn’t make any calls after Saturday afternoon. She didn’t receive any other calls. She didn’t send any emails. She didn’t use her credit cards. None of the neighbors saw her. What was she doing for those three days?”

“Chelsey enjoyed time alone in the house,” Gavin insisted. “I don’t know, maybe she enjoyed time away from me. She didn’t like to go anywhere when I was gone, because she considered it a vacation. She never told anyone that she was alone, because otherwise, people would have stopped by, invited her to dinner, forced her to make other plans. When she was alone, she liked being able to stay home and watch all the movies that I hated.”

Stride let his outburst run its course. Then he said, “She enjoyed time away from you?”

Gavin sighed. “Figure of speech. I told you, we weren’t always in sync. It happens in marriages. I’m sure you know that. Couples have ups and downs, and I admit, much of ours was down in recent months. But you can’t make the leap from there to murder.”

“Except Chelsey is missing.”

“Because someone took her!” Gavin shouted. He jumped to his feet. “Someone kidnapped her! I paid them a ransom! You can search the woods around Fredenberg Lake all you want, but you’re wasting your time. I had nothing to do with her disappearance.”

“It’s a remote location,” Stride pointed out. “So what were you doing up there?”

Gavin sat down in the chair near the fireplace and poured himself more gin. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

The lawyer sipped his drink. “Have you ever heard of geocaching?”

“It’s some kind of GPS treasure hunt, isn’t it?” Stride asked, his eyes narrowing.

“That’s right. People hide things in various locations. Urban, rural, suburban, wherever. None of it is valuable. It’s just poems, trinkets, plastic toys, whatever. They keep records of the GPS coordinates of the hiding places and post them online. Seekers try to locate the things that are hidden. There are caches everywhere. Millions of people go out looking for them.”

“Including you?”

“Including me. We all have our hobbies.”

“How long have you been doing this?” Stride asked.

“Years. A decade or more. Sunday mornings are my searching time. Some people go to church. Me, I dig around for geocaches.”

“And that’s what you were doing near Fredenberg Lake?”

“Yes.”

“Why there?” Stride asked. “I assume there must be hundreds or thousands of these geocaches around the Northland. What brought you to that particular area on Sunday morning?”

“A puzzle.”

“What do you mean? What kind of puzzle?”

“There are local clubs, Stride. Message boards. We set up games and contests with each other. It’s all anonymous, all done under secret identities. I know that may sound odd, but it’s part of the mystery. I’ve been playing a private game with one of the members for a few weeks.”

“Who?”

“I told you, I don’t know. It’s anonymous. We use private email accounts. There’s nothing sinister about it. Whoever it is doesn’t know who I am, either. He — or she, I have no idea — approached me after seeing some of my posts on the local message board. He’d hidden a medallion somewhere in the Northland, like the way they do in Saint Paul during the Winter Carnival. He invited me to look for the clues and try to find it. That’s why I was on that road near Fredenberg Lake. I was hunting for the medallion.”

“Did you find it?” Stride asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“Can I see it?”

Gavin got up and left the room. He returned a few seconds later and handed a gold plastic medallion to Stride. It was about four inches in diameter, and it was decorated with the signs of the Zodiac. There were no signs that it had been outside; it had been scrubbed clean.

“This is what you were looking for?”

“That’s right. As you can see, it’s not expensive. I mean, we always run the risk that some hiker will stumble across a cache by accident, so we never hide valuable things. These are just games.”

“I’ll need to see the emails you exchanged with this person,” Stride said.

“Sure, if that’s what you want. I doubt it’ll help, though. It’s just a generic Gmail account. The handle was Razrsharp, whatever that means.”

“Did it occur to you that this person could be the kidnapper?” Stride asked.

Gavin looked genuinely startled. “No. It didn’t. I have no reason to think that this person even knows who I am. Just like I don’t know who he is.”

“But he might know, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Who else knows about this hobby of yours?” Stride asked.

“I don’t hide it. I talk about it all the time.”

“Including at Broadway’s games?”

Gavin hesitated. “Yes.”

Stride turned the medallion over in his hands, then handed it back to Gavin.

A generic Gmail account.

It would be difficult, maybe impossible, to trace the account to its owner. Stride was also well aware that the account could belong to Gavin himself. The puzzles. The medallion. That could all have been him, anticipating every twist in the game. If the police stumbled onto a body in the woods, if anyone spotted him or remembered him, he had an explanation for why he was in the area. A mysterious, anonymous suspect to lay in front of them.

Razrsharp.

Stride stared into Gavin’s blue eyes. Those strange blue eyes stared back at him. He definitely could have done it. He was intelligent enough to develop a brilliant scheme to kidnap and kill his wife. But if he had, why?

They still didn’t have a motive.

His phone started ringing. It was Maggie.

Stride answered the phone and listened without saying anything. The call was quick. Signal was bad. He hung up the phone, and he could see a wave of anxiety cross Gavin’s face. In that moment, Stride tried to listen to his instincts, to figure out what secrets the man was keeping. Like a geocache hidden in the trees.

Innocent or guilty. They’d have an answer soon.

“We’ve found your wife, Gavin,” Stride told him. “Chelsey’s alive.”