‘What about Dr. Snow?’ Stride asked.
‘What about her?’
‘I gather you don’t like her.’
‘Oh, hell, no. Rich Southern bitch, that’s who she is. I warned him off her when they started dating, but he didn’t care. I met her exactly once. Treated me like a turd she was stepping round on the sidewalk.’
‘So what did Jay see in her?’
‘You can’t figure it out? That face, that body? Jay said she was wild in the sack. And let’s face it, the money was a big thing. Jay liked money. Everybody knew his name because of the newspaper, but he didn’t have a dime to call his own until he met her.’
‘I heard their relationship was rocky,’ Stride said.
‘Oh, yeah, the two of them could fight.’
‘Jay signed a prenup, though, right? If he walked out, he got nothing.’
‘Jay wasn’t walking out,’ Clyde said. ‘No way. Fact is, for all the shit, he loved her. Or maybe he just loved shoving it in everyone’s face, white doc with her black stud. He didn’t want a divorce. No, sir. He was never going to give her up. If anything, she was a bronco he was determined to bust.’
‘What about Dr. Snow? Did she want out of the marriage?’
‘Yeah, she offered to buy him out with a fat settlement. He didn’t want it. I told him, take the money and run, but he was stubborn. Both of them were. Neither one wanted to lose to the other, you know? Guess she finally figured out there was only one way to get rid of him.’
Stride frowned. ‘You know we haven’t found the murder weapon.’
‘So? She’s smart. She dumped it somewhere good.’
‘Dr. Snow says there was no gun in the house.’
‘She’s lying.’
‘You know that for a fact?’ Stride asked.
‘Damn right. Jay had a gun. Big fat old revolver. Had it for years.’
‘She says she made him get rid of his gun when they got married.’
‘I don’t know what Jay told her,’ Clyde said, ‘but he didn’t get rid of it. No way. He always had his gun with him. He didn’t like going to certain places in the city without a little protection.’
‘Do you know what kind of gun it was?’
‘Like I said, a revolver. Beyond that, who knows? You may not believe this, but not all black folks know about guns.’
Stride smiled. ‘Okay.’
Clyde retreated to his bulletin board again. He grabbed a photograph and brought it back and put it in Stride’s hands. ‘I want this picture back at some point, but for now, you take it. I don’t want anyone taking Janine’s word over mine about that gun. See what I mean?’
Stride studied the photograph. It was a picture of Clyde and Jay in a Duluth bar, along with half a dozen other men. Jay had his arm slung around the shoulder of his younger brother, and where his sport coat fell open, Stride could see the black grip of a revolver poking out of a shoulder holster. Clyde wasn’t lying.
‘When was this taken?’ he asked.
Clyde shrugged. ‘Last October, maybe? Not long ago. It was a bachelor party for one of the boys there. I’m telling you, I never saw Jay without his gun.’
7
Maggie sat in her Avalanche in the shadow of Ely’s Peak.
The craggy hilltop looming over the highway was dotted with trees clinging to the earth against the bitter wind. It was raw and wild, like most winter days. Duluth in the cold season was a black-and-white movie, as if all the colors of the world had been leached away. Black trees met the milky gray sky, and the white ice of the lakes blended into the snow-covered hills. Hoarfrost deadened the clustered needles of the pines, turning green to silver. Most of the time, the sun didn’t dare show its face.
She’d been up since before dawn, and she typically didn’t sleep until one or two in the morning. So far, the pace hadn’t caught up with her. All she did was work, but she didn’t really miss having a social life. Twice since she’d moved to Duluth, she’d had one-night stands, and two years earlier, she’d had a relationship that lasted three months before it crashed and burned. That was it. Most men couldn’t deal with her insane work hours. They also couldn’t deal with her attachment to Stride. Anyone who spent ten minutes listening to her talk about him knew that her feelings ran deep.
Stride had taken a chance on Maggie right out of college, when she was a stiff kid who knew a lot about books and not much about people. She was grateful for the opportunity, but she wasn’t sure when gratitude had morphed into something else. Most days, she pushed those thoughts out of her head. Stride was the boss. Cindy was his wife. End of story. It was one of those fantasies that was best left in the back of a closet somewhere.
Maggie saw a dented pick-up drawing closer on Becks Road, and she switched off her radio, which was blasting Aerosmith. The truck slowed and turned into the parking lot near the train tunnel overpass where Maggie waited. The door of the pick-up opened, and Nathan Skinner climbed out.
The two of them had never been friends. Maggie scared the hell out of most cops, despite her size. She was smarter than they were, and she had a wicked tongue. One of the newbies, Ken McCarty, said a meeting with her was like sticking a finger in boiling water. Nathan was different. He was a UMD hockey hero, with a chip on his shoulder from the day she’d met him. Politicians and business people in the city fawned over him because of his victories on the ice. He was part of the boys’ club, and he resented Maggie because she was small, young, a woman, and Chinese. To him, if you weren’t a white male with Scandinavian roots, you didn’t really belong in Duluth.
When Jay Ferris leaked a videotape of Nathan’s highway arrest near the Wisconsin Dells, Maggie wasn’t surprised by the man’s drunken rant. Nathan wasn’t really a hardcore racist, but he oozed privilege, which was the worst kind of arrogance for a cop. He thought he could do anything and say anything and never pay a price. When Stride finally fired him, she was glad to see him go.
Nathan knew it.
He wore the drab uniform of a security guard as he climbed inside her truck, but his demotion hadn’t wiped the self-satisfied grin from his face. Nothing dented Nathan’s ego. She would never have admitted it to anyone, but she felt the attraction of his physical magnetism. He was an asshole, but he was a good-looking asshole. He was still built like a college athlete, with muscles testing the seams of his uniform. He had short blond hair, and his face bore the dents of hockey sticks to his nose and chin, but the effect was to make him look tough. Which he was. He had a casual smile that didn’t hide what he wanted, and though Maggie would never have gone to bed with him, she knew lots of women who would have jumped at the chance.
‘Let’s get this over with, Nathan,’ she told him. ‘You know why you’re here.’
‘Sure, I figured you’d be calling. What a shame about Jay, huh?’ The edge in his voice made it clear that Nathan didn’t consider Jay’s death a shame at all. ‘Why meet out here in the middle of nowhere? Are you afraid people would talk if they saw us together?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself. Jay filed a report about a shooting incident near here. I’m checking it out. Besides, I figured you wouldn’t want anyone to know the police were questioning you. You don’t want your name in the papers again, do you?’
‘Oh, I don’t really care. If people think I shot Jay, they might give me a medal for it.’
‘Did you?’ she asked.
‘What, shoot him? No. Unfortunately, I don’t have much of an alibi for last Friday. Sorry.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘I was sick. Flu. I spent the evening alone in my apartment.’
‘Did you go to a doctor?’
‘No.’
‘Can anyone confirm that you were home that night?’