The Zero Night

9

Stride walked into the Public Safety Building for the first time since he’d been shot, and warning bells didn’t go off, and the world didn’t end. Passing through the maze of cubicles, he tried to act normal, as if he’d been doing this every day without the interruption of the past fourteen months. But that was impossible. Everyone saw him. Everyone stopped talking. Somehow, they could read his face and recognize that he didn’t want special attention for this moment, and they gave him space. No one came up to him, or hugged him, or cried, or called out, Welcome back.

Their reaction was much quieter and, to him, more profound. One by one, as he made his way from one end of the building to the other, they all simply nodded at him. And they smiled.

He bypassed his own office, because for now, it wasn’t his office anymore. The lieutenant’s chair belonged to Maggie. The one empty office on the floor had been occupied until recently by Abel Teitscher, who’d spent decades on the force as a smart detective but a mostly unlikable man. They’d clashed throughout Stride’s tenure, especially after Stride had returned from a short stint in Las Vegas with Serena. Abel had taken over the detective bureau during Stride’s absence, but his personality had left the staff in near revolt, and Deputy Chief Kyle Kinnick — who went by the nickname K-2 — had been more than happy to demote Abel upon Stride’s return. Abel had never forgiven the insult.

Now he was gone — finally retired after all these years.

Stride wandered into the office, which had already been stripped of anything personal. Abel’s photos and commendations had all gone with him. However, the man’s dense musk cologne had seeped into the walls and would take a long time to dissipate. There were files on the desk and case summaries scrawled in Abel’s handwriting on two whiteboards near the window. Most cops did that kind of thing by computer now, but Abel had always preferred writing out his notes on every case by hand. Stride actually liked that about him.

He sat behind the desk and looked out the window. The police had moved out of downtown a few years earlier, and now they were located high on a hill in a remote part of the city, close to the forest. Stride liked it here, liked not being among the politicians of city hall. Instinctively, like a muscle memory, he reached for a cup of coffee or a can of Coke on the desk, but of course, nothing was there. Caffeine was off the list for his postsurgery regimen.

Sitting there by himself, he thought: Now what?

He got out of the chair and went to the whiteboards and tried to decipher Abel’s handwritten scrawl. There were at least a dozen cases summarized on the two boards. Some were cold cases that Stride remembered; others were new since he’d gone on leave. Abel, efficient as ever, had written them down in chronological order, from oldest to most recent.

Stride checked Abel’s mostly empty desk and matched the tabs on the man’s investigative files to the whiteboards. Abel had left them in identical order from oldest to newest, and he’d written out a summary that he’d paper-clipped to each folder. Whatever else you could say about Abel’s prickly personality, he’d been serious about his work, and he was thorough in passing the baton to the next investigator.

He snatched the file off the top — Stan and Arlene Foster — and put his feet up as he eased back in the chair. As he read the file, he idly squeezed the leather-bound right arm of the chair like a stress ball, a habit he’d had for years. It felt comfortable; it felt natural. It took him a few seconds to realize why, and a smile broke across his face. This was his chair, more than fifteen years old, a chair that had followed him through multiple offices and in the move from downtown. Everything about it was familiar. The worn cushioning on the arms that he’d rubbed away. The scorched hole from years earlier where he’d burned the chair with an illicit late-night cigarette.

Maggie had been pretty confident he’d be coming back.

For the next hour and a half, he read Abel’s files. Cold cases had a way of staying cold, so little had changed about the open investigations he remembered. Most cases got solved in a few days or a few weeks, with nothing left to tie up before trial except some loose ends and evidence reports from the BCA in Saint Paul. But if they didn’t get answers fast, they usually didn’t get them. Sometimes they knew who did it — Stride was sure Byron Ellis had stabbed his wife and left her body in a park to make it look like a stranger homicide — but they simply had no way to prove it. Other times they had no leads, and without leads, there wasn’t much else to do. Jonah Fallon had been struck and killed while jogging on a Saturday evening in May two years earlier on a country road near Proctor. The damage left at the scene had helped them identify the type of vehicle involved in the hit-and-run, but they’d never located the car or the driver. Ray Palen was a thirty-three-year-old single accountant working for one of the region’s indie breweries. He had no history of depression, wasn’t involved in a serious relationship, and had purchased theatre tickets two hours before driving to Fish Lake. Then he vanished. No body, no blood, no evidence in the woods, nothing that indicated what had happened to him. And nothing new had been found in the fifteen months since Abel had last given him an update on the case.

“Well, well, well.”

Stride looked up as he heard the familiar voice. Maggie leaned against the office doorway, eating McDonald’s fries one by one, a sly grin on her face.

“I heard it was true, but I didn’t believe it,” she said. “Jonathan Stride in the flesh.”

“Word is, you need some help around here,” he replied.

“Who told you that?”

“I got a message from the new lieutenant.”

She came and sat down in the chair in front of the desk. Still eating fries, she put her feet up, and the two of them made a matched set. “Between you and me, I hear the new lieutenant is a real bitch.”

Stride smiled. “Yeah, that’s what everyone tells me.”

Maggie threw back her head and laughed. When she was done, she looked at him with that old warmth in her eyes. It was sort of like returning to a familiar beach you’d visited as a child and feeling as if nothing had changed. Except a lot had changed for both of them. They had a complicated history together — a history that included a brief sexual relationship that had crashed and burned — but their friendship had endured through all of the years in between. He was closer to her than almost anyone, maybe even closer than he was to Serena.

“It’s good to see you, Mags.” He added, “I’m catching up on Abel’s files, as requested.”

She waved a french fry in the air dismissively. “Oh, don’t worry about those. They’re stone-cold. They’re not going anywhere.”

“Then why did you call me back?”

She shrugged. “Because I need you here.”

“Seems like you’ve got things under control.”

“Okay, maybe I like having you around.”

“Yeah?”

“Just for eye candy,” she added.

“Mags.”

“Well, I also got a call from somebody who said that you needed to get back to work ASAP because you were driving everybody crazy.”

Stride wondered if it was Serena, but then he knew. “Cat.”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure she only went to college to get away from you.”

“So that’s why you called?” Stride asked.

“That’s why I called.”

Stride put his feet back on the floor. He leaned across the desk and stole one of Maggie’s fries, which weren’t on his postsurgery diet. “Well, I’m here. What do you want me to do?”

“I could use your help on the Gavin Webster case. It’s all hands on deck.”

“All right. Whatever you need.”

Maggie couldn’t restrain the little smirk that broke across her face. “Good. Then come on. I need to talk to a hooker.”

Her name was Shanice. They found her leaning against an abandoned building just off Superior Street in the Lincoln Park area. She was negotiating with an overweight man in a dirty white T-shirt who had a cairn terrier on a leash. When the man saw Stride and Maggie coming, he spotted them as cops immediately and beat a hasty retreat in the opposite direction.

Shanice rolled her eyes as they approached. “Well, that’s another forty bucks gone. Thanks a lot, guys.”

“Hey, Shanice,” Stride said, because all the cops knew her, and she knew all the cops.

“Hey yourself, Stride. You back in action?”

“A little relief pitching. We’ll see how it goes.”

“Hey to you, too, Lieutenant,” Shanice added with a mock salute at Maggie. “You guys getting bored up on the hill or something? How do I rate having the city’s two top cops hassling me?”

“No hassles,” Stride said. “Just a couple of questions.”

Shanice shrugged. She was as short as Maggie and chicken-bone skinny. She was only twenty years old but had been a fixture on the Duluth streets since she was fourteen. Her oval face was pretty but overly made-up, with dark pencil liner drawn around her full lips, rainbow shadow above and below her eyes, and narrow black eyebrows studded with several piercings. Thick dreadlocks hung to her waist. She wore a necklace made from purple-and-green stones, dragon earrings, and a tight T-shirt cut off just below her breasts. Below the bare expanse of her tattooed stomach, she wore frayed jeans and four-inch heels.

“Knee pads?” Maggie commented, pointing at red neoprene padding on Shanice’s legs. “Are you kidding me?”

“Girl’s gotta be practical,” Shanice replied, grinning. “I blow a knee, that’s what you call a career-ending injury. I got a wrist brace, too. Not taking any risks with that corporal tunnel shit.”

“Well, we won’t keep you away from your workouts for long,” Stride told her slyly. “This isn’t about you. It’s about Gavin Webster. Based on court records, you seem to know him pretty well.”

Shanice stuck her thumbs in the loops of her jeans. “Oh, yeah. I got Gavin on speed dial. A lot of my friends do, too.”

“Have you heard what happened?” Maggie asked.

“You mean his wife? Sure. It’s all over the city that somebody grabbed her. Feel bad for the guy. Some lawyers, they look at me like I’m something they gotta scrape off the bottom of their shoe. Not Gavin. He’s okay.”

“When did you last... need his services?” Maggie went on.

“About two weeks ago, middle of the night. When it’s that late, a lot of lawyers will just let you cool your heels in a cell until morning. Gavin came over right away, dressed in a suit like it was noon and he was going into court. Got me out, made sure I was okay, took me home. Class act, you know?”

“What are his rates like?”

Shanice gave Maggie a sideways look and ran her tongue over her teeth. “You mean, do my knee pads count as cash with him?”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

“No, not Gavin. Believe me, if I can pay somebody with jizz, I’m happy to do it. He’s cute, too, so what the hell. If he asked, I’d throw it in as a little bonus. But that’s not his thing.”

“Any of your friends tell a different story?”

“Nah. They all say Gavin’s a straight shooter.”

“We heard his wife wasn’t so sure.”

Shanice snorted. “Wives always wonder about that, and most of the time, they got good reason. But if Gavin was sampling the goods, he wasn’t doing it with me or my girlfriends. And our goods are pretty sweet.”

Stride knew Shanice well enough to believe that if she said there was no hanky-panky, there wasn’t. “What’s the word about the kidnapping? You hear any rumors about who did it?”

“Plenty of people are talking, but you ask me, they’re just pumping gas. I haven’t heard any names, and something like this, you can’t keep it quiet. If it was a brother on the streets, I’d know. This smells like a pro job. Upscale.”

“But no names?”

“If I knew, I’d tell you,” Shanice said. “Like I say, I like Gavin.”

“Could this have been personal? Did he have any enemies?”

“Nobody that I heard about. If he did, it wasn’t anybody who talked about going after him or his wife. That’s serious shit.”

“Did you ever meet Chelsey?”

“Nope, never had the pleasure.”

“Did Gavin talk about her?”

Shanice’s jaw worked up and down on a piece of gum. “Come on, Stride. Guys don’t see me and start bragging about the wife. But I saw a pic of her once. Nice. She looked like the right kind of cool and the right kind of hot.”

“Have you heard anything that might help us find her?” Stride asked. “Whoever abducted Chelsey had to take her somewhere and keep her quiet and locked up. Plus, they had to come and go for two days. Somebody must have seen something.”

“Not around here. Like I told you, you’re wasting your time in this neighborhood.”

Maggie shuffled on her feet impatiently. “What about money?”

“What about it?”

“Aren’t you surprised that Gavin was the target? Why go after a low-end lawyer like him?”

“Don’t play me for a fool, Lieutenant,” Shanice complained, focusing an icy stare on Maggie. “You want to ask if I knew about Gavin’s pot of gold? Just ask straight up, all right? Yeah, I knew. We all knew. Gavin is loaded now. His sister croaked and left him a shitload of bucks.”

“How did you hear about it? Did Gavin tell you?”

Shanice shrugged. “Somebody comes into money, word like that gets around pretty fast. Gavin had some debts and suddenly he paid them off. People notice that kind of shit. They talk.”

“Debts?” Stride asked sharply. “What kind of debts?”

“Gavin likes poker. Poker doesn’t always like him.”

“He plays?”

“Yeah. Pretty hard-core.”

“Like how much?”

“I heard he owed twenty thousand at one point. Interest on that kind of cash runs steep. I mean, broken legs kind of steep. But he wiped the slate clean a few months ago. That’s when word started going around about his sister.”

“Where does he gamble? Fond-du-Luth?”

“Oh, hell no, the Indians don’t want that kind of heat. This is off-the-books stuff. A private game, invitation only, high limit. Some real hush-hush shit.”

“We need a name and a location,” Stride said to Shanice.

“Yeah, and I need a boob job and a pair of Chucks. Guess we’re both out of luck.”

Stride dug in his pocket and extracted two twenties from his wallet. “At least we can pay you for the client you lost. Whatever you tell us, we forget where we heard it. Deal?”

Shanice licked her lips and studied the cash. Then she plucked the bills out of Stride’s hand. “I hear the game runs out of some unmarked warehouse down by the water.”

“That’s a pretty downscale location for an upscale game,” Stride said.

“Easier to keep it quiet that way.”

“Who runs it?” Maggie asked.

Shanice shook her head. “You want a lot for forty bucks, Lieutenant.”

Maggie pulled out her own wallet and produced two more twenties. “Does this help?”

The girl smiled as she pocketed the extra money. “I hear the guy behind it goes by the nickname Broadway. That’s it. I don’t know who he really is. I hear he’s from the Cities, not local. He sets up the whole thing every Friday. Sounds like it’s quite the party, too. By Saturday morning, they shut the whole thing down and the place is empty again.”

“Friday?” Stride said. “So there’s a game tonight?”

“Probably.”

“And Broadway’s the banker?”

“Yeah, that’s what I hear. I don’t know where he gets his money, and I don’t want to know. But if you need cash, Broadway is the one who will get it for you.”

Stride looked at Maggie, and he knew they were both thinking about one hundred thousand dollars in ransom money.

Cash.