The view was stunning, but right now, it was overshadowed by the body of Jay Ferris, who lay sprawled on his back on a gray-striped area rug. A circular wound had burned through the middle of his forehead, and the floor under his head was matted with blood. None of the blood had stained his shirt, which was cloud-white against his black skin. Aside from the hole in his head, he was still a handsome man. Shaved scalp. Tightly cropped goatee.
‘Jay Ferris,’ he murmured. He had to be honest. He’d never liked this man.
Jay was a Duluth lifer, like Stride. He’d grown up in the city’s Lincoln Park area and tangled with the police as a teenager over drugs and theft. Even so, Jay was a smart, ambitious kid. He’d studied at UMD on a scholarship, got a journalism degree with honors, and worked his way up at the Duluth News-Tribune from the copy-editing desk to a gig as a daily columnist. He knew that controversy sold newspapers, and he supplied a lot of it. In a city that smoothed over its racist past, Jay was a crusader against the white-bread elite. Stride didn’t mind that — there were skeletons in any town’s closet that needed to see the light of day — but he resented the carelessness with which Jay used his bully pulpit to destroy ordinary people.
One of his own cops had wound up in Jay’s crosshairs. A young police officer named Nathan Skinner had gotten drunk in the Wisconsin Dells and been pulled over on the highway. That was bad enough, but Skinner used an ugly racial epithet in the course of the arrest. It was outrageous, drunken behavior, and Stride suspended him for a month and sent him to diversity training in Minneapolis. That didn’t satisfy Jay, who beat the drum over Skinner’s arrest in his newspaper column. He made Skinner the poster boy for racism inside the city’s police ranks, and the chief finally ordered Stride to fire Skinner as a way to get the story out of the papers. Stride didn’t excuse what Skinner had done, but he didn’t think the mistake justified taking a young man’s entire career.
Neither did most of his other cops. Jay Ferris wasn’t popular with the Duluth Police.
Stride examined Jay’s body. The full report would come from the St. Louis County medical examiner, but he’d seen enough gunshot victims to recognize the obvious details. Powder tattooing on the forehead indicated an intermediate-range wound; the shooter had been within a couple feet of Jay when firing the shot. Based on the location of the body, the shooter had stood between Jay and the front door.
A glass of wine lay tipped on the rug beside him, leaving its own stain of red. Another glass, smeared with lipstick, sat on a mahogany coffee table.
‘No gun,’ Maggie said. ‘We’re still searching.’
‘Search harder,’ Stride said. ‘We need that gun. Where’s Janine?’
‘Downstairs in her office. Archie Gale is already with her. She wouldn’t say a word until he got here. Smart.’ Maggie rolled her eyes.
‘I’ll talk to her.’ He added again: ‘Find the gun.’
Stride took spiral stairs down to the next level of the house. The staircase was modern, made of chrome and stone. Janine and Jay had built the house less than a year earlier, but according to Cindy, it was Janine’s baby. Her dream. She’d worked with an architect for months on the design. The mansion on the hill was one of the perks of being a surgeon.
Janine’s home office was about the square footage of Stride’s whole house. She had a huge and impeccably clean desk near the windows. He could see the lift bridge in Canal Park shimmering far below. An entire wall of the office was dedicated to built-in bookshelves stocked with medical volumes, and she had another wall filled with photographs of ordinary people. These were her heart patients. People whose lives she’d saved. He didn’t think it was an accident that she was waiting for the police here. She wanted to remind him who she was and how important she was to the city of Duluth.
It also wasn’t an accident that she wasn’t alone. Archibald Gale was with her, and Gale was the northland’s leading criminal defense attorney. As Stride entered the office, Gale sprang up from the leather sofa. For a large man — 6 feet, at least 275 pounds — he was nimble on his feet. He had receding gray hair, curly and short, and blue eyes that twinkled behind tiny circular glasses. Despite the hour, he was dressed in a pressed three-piece suit, with a tie neatly knotted to pinch his thick neck.
‘Lieutenant!’ Gale exclaimed cheerfully, as if they were old friends. Which, to some extent, they were. They were on opposite sides of the game, but Gale was also a difficult man to dislike.
‘Archie,’ Stride replied. ‘Nice suit.’
Stride’s own tie was loose at his neck, and he’d pulled an Oxford shirt out of the dirty clothes basket. He still wore his old leather jacket, which had seen more than a decade of use and had a bullet hole in one sleeve.
‘I was still at the office,’ Gale said. ‘Lieutenant, I believe you know Dr. Janine Snow.’
Stride nodded at the surgeon. ‘Dr. Snow.’
‘Lieutenant Stride.’
It was strange, being so formal with her. They were otherwise on a first-name basis. She’d been in his house. She had lunch or played golf with his wife a couple of times a month. They’d done community fundraisers together. Even so, she was a crime victim now. And a suspect. They both knew it.
The first thing he noticed about Janine was that her blond hair was wet. She’d showered. That was what you did when you arrived home from a party, sick and disheveled. Or it was what you did when you had just shot your husband and you wanted to make sure your skin and hair kept no residue chemicals from firing a gun.
He sat down on the sofa next to her, in the spot where Gale had been. The attorney leaned his wide backside on the corner of Janine’s desk and watched them with the fussy concern of a mother superior. Janine waited for Stride’s questions, and she was exactly the woman he remembered. Smart, beautiful, emotionally distant. She showed no tears. No pretense of sadness. For her, this was a practical exercise. Her husband had been murdered. Innocent or guilty, she needed to make sure that this incident didn’t steal away the rest of her life.
‘I’m surprised you felt the need to bring in an attorney so quickly,’ he said to her.
‘Oh, let’s not travel down that tired old road,’ Gale interjected before Janine could answer. ‘If you were hiking in the Alaskan wilderness for the first time, I imagine you’d want a guide, wouldn’t you, Lieutenant? There are always bears feeding in the shallows.’
Stride shrugged. Janine knew that hiring a lawyer made her look guilty. She was savvy enough not to care.
‘Tell me exactly what happened tonight,’ he said.
Janine glanced at Gale, who nodded his approval.
‘Cindy brought me home early from the party,’ she explained. ‘I wasn’t feeling well. In fact, we had to stop along the way for me to throw up. After she dropped me off, I talked to Jay for a while. Argued is more like it. I’m being candid with you about that.’
‘What did you argue about?’
‘Nothing of consequence. Jay and I could argue about anything, and we usually did. Mr. Gale probably wants me to pretend that everything was fine between us, but you wouldn’t believe me if I said that. I’m sure Cindy has told you that the relationship between me and Jay was strained. You knew my husband, Lieutenant. If you think he was difficult as a journalist, trust me, he was even more difficult to live with.’