‘I had a Sammy’s pizza delivered,’ he said. ‘The driver will remember me. She was cute.’
‘What time was that?’
‘Too early to make a difference,’ he said. ‘I still could have gone out later and blown Jay’s head off. But I didn’t.’
‘When did you last see Jay?’ Maggie asked.
‘See him? When his face was at the other end of my fist at the Saratoga last April. After that, he took out a restraining order, so I stayed away from him. Look, my gun is in my truck. If you want to test it, feel free. I didn’t shoot him.’
‘Okay,’ Maggie said. ‘Go get it.’
Nathan looked surprised and annoyed. He climbed down from the Avalanche, kicked through snow back to his pick-up, and retrieved a Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum revolver with a wooden grip from his glove compartment. He emptied the cartridges and shoved them in his pocket. When he returned to the Avalanche, Maggie held an open evidence bag, and he put the gun inside.
‘How long do you plan to keep that?’ Nathan asked.
‘Until the test is done. Few days. Couple years. Somewhere in there.’
She shoved the evidence bag with the gun into her glove compartment, and Nathan swore under his breath. She grabbed a print-out from her dashboard of one of the photographs taken from Jay’s camera. She showed the picture of the man in camouflage to Nathan.
‘Ever seen this guy around town?’ she asked.
His blue eyes squinted at the paper. ‘Nope.’
‘Either on the force or after?’
‘Like I said, no.’ Nathan checked his watch. ‘Are we done here, Maggie? I’ve got a shift starting soon. Nothing like minimum wage and no benefits. I live the glamorous life.’
‘Where do you work?’
‘Wherever they send me.’
‘Yeah, we’re done here,’ Maggie said.
Nathan stalked back to his pick-up and drove off with his tires spinning. Maggie watched the truck disappear northward toward Interstate 35. She knew the test would come back negative on Nathan’s gun. He wouldn’t have offered it up if it were the murder weapon. Even so, the streets of Duluth were a little safer with him disarmed.
She got out of her truck and swapped her clog heels for a pair of winter boots. She zipped up her burgundy jacket, which wasn’t much protection against the cold. She didn’t bother with a hat. When she shut the door, she saw the dents and scrapes tattooing the yellow paint of the Avalanche. She was a terrible driver.
Maggie climbed from the parking lot into the deep snow lining the shallow slope. Dead weeds poked out of the drifts. She crossed under power lines where a strip of land had been cleared in the woods and headed for the next line of birch trees, whose black-and-white trunks were speckled like snake skins. The dark mountain loomed above the trees like a slumbering bear. She heard a lonely train whistle below her, near the river. Her face felt blistered by the wind.
Four months earlier, Jay Ferris had been here. He’d tracked a man in camouflage with an assault rifle. Maggie had checked other police calls since then. Two other reports had come in of gunfire in this area. One was only three weeks ago. Whoever the man was, he was still around. He was more careful now, but he kept coming back.
She pushed through the trees. The snow got inside her boots and made her socks wet. She dug in her pocket for some of the photographs from Jay’s camera, and when she compared them to the landscape around her, she thought she was in the right place. She studied the ground and the trees but saw nothing unusual.
Ten more minutes passed as she climbed higher. She couldn’t feel her feet or her fingers. She was about to turn back when she glimpsed a fleck of red color winking in and out of the black-and-white forest. She waded into the thicker trees, and as she got closer, she heard the flapping of plastic. What she’d spotted was a red bullseye target laminated and nailed to the trunk of a birch. The center of the target had a jagged hole where it had been shot away with numerous bullets, and the wood of the tree underneath was splintered and broken.
She looked deeper into the forest, and she saw other red targets. Six, eight, ten of them. One by one, she tracked them, and each one bore the marks of a hunter who had used them for practice. In the snow, as she walked, she found spent shell casings, too. Dozens of them, like dirty gold cigars at her feet. Dozens became hundreds.
She didn’t like it. Not one little bit.
After a quarter-mile following the targets, she came upon the carcass of a deer in a small clearing. It was a doe, frozen and stiff in the snow, its tongue drooping from its mouth. The deer had been dead for days. Its camel fur was a mass of darkened blood, and the animal was surrounded by more spent casings. The hunter had shot it and then come upon the body and kept firing. And firing.
Maggie started counting the bullet wounds in the dead deer, but she stopped after two dozen.
Someone was very angry.
8
‘A deer?’ Stride asked.
He leaned on the metal handle of his shovel. He’d cleared eight inches of snow from his driveway on the Point, and he was sweating. A quarter-mile away, the tower of the Duluth lift bridge shimmered over the ship canal like a monster of gray metal. Lingering snow flurries spat through the lights. In February, the bridge mostly stayed anchored to the ground, so the residents of the Point enjoyed a respite for several icy weeks from getting trapped by the coming and going of cargo boats.
‘Yeah. A deer. Shot to pieces.’
Stride didn’t answer immediately. He wiped his brow with his sleeve. On the street, he spotted the sedan of his friend Steve Garske passing behind Maggie’s Avalanche. The two men waved at each other. Steve’s Chrysler kicked up slush, and as his wheels hit the metal bridge deck, the whine sounded like a pack of stinging wasps. It was nine o’clock at night. He figured that Steve, who was a musician as well as a doctor, was off to a gig with his band at Amazing Grace.
‘I’m not sure what we can do other than notify the Department of Natural Resources,’ Stride told her.
‘I did that,’ Maggie said, ‘but that’s not what bothers me.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘This wasn’t hunting. This was rage.’
Stride frowned. Hunting out of season wasn’t uncommon, and neither was the occasional hunter who used his weapon to live out a Rambo fantasy in the forest. Even so, he’d worked with Maggie long enough to trust her instincts.
‘What else did you find?’ he asked.
‘He had plastic targets scattered in an unusual pattern. The heights varied. It was what you’d expect from someone walking through a crowd, picking off targets.’ She added after a pause: ‘Human targets.’
‘That’s a big leap, Mags.’
‘I’m just telling you what it looked like to me. I mean, I know we’re all sensitive after Columbine—’
‘No, I hear you. Do we have any idea who this guy could be?’
Maggie shook her head. ‘I passed Jay’s photos around. No one recognized him. Whoever he is, he’s under the radar.’
‘Well, let’s make sure our guys keep their eyes open around town.’
‘Do you want more bad news?’ Maggie asked. ‘Jay wrote about this guy in his column.’
‘The guy in camouflage?’
‘Yeah, Jay did a column in November on gun control and the expiration of the assault weapons ban. Camo Guy was Exhibit Number One. Jay talked about gun nuts carrying military-style hardware in our parks. Talked about chasing this guy, reporting him to the cops. And naturally how the cops did squat.’
Stride leaned against the yellow Avalanche next to Maggie and lit a cigarette. He stared at the pack in his hand with disgust, then shoved it into the rear pocket of his jeans. ‘Do you think this guy is a legitimate suspect in Jay’s murder?’