"I don't believe our paths have crossed since your wife passed away. I'm very sorry."
Stride said nothing at all. Gale had no shame. Hidden in a sympathetic comment was a message to the jury. Maybe the lieutenant's judgment was clouded by grief. Maybe he overlooked things.
"Rachel isn't the first teenage girl to disappear in this area, is she?" Gale asked.
"No," Stride said.
The defense lawyer took off his glasses and idly slid the frame between his lips. He squinted at Stride.
"Another teenager, a girl named Kerry McGrath, disappeared a little more than one year earlier than Rachel, is that right?"
"That's right," Stride said.
"She was the same age as Rachel," Gale said.
"Yes."
"Went to the same school?"
"Yes."
"She lived within a couple miles of Rachel?"
"Yes."
Gale shook his head. "That's remarkable, isn't it, Lieutenant? Do you call that a coincidence?"
He glanced at the jury in consternation as if to say, Can you believe this guy? Is he blind?
"We found no evidence that the two cases are related," Stride said.
"And yet you considered the cases similar enough that you tried to find evidence that might implicate Mr. Stoner in Kerry's disappearance. Isn't that true?"
Stride shrugged. "We typed all physical evidence we found against both Kerry and Rachel. It's standard procedure."
"And the fact is, you found absolutely no evidence whatsoever that might point to my client's involvement in Kerry's disappearance."
"That's right," Stride acknowledged.
Gale nodded. "No blood?"
"No."
"No fibers?"
"No."
"In fact, Kerry McGrath's disappearance is still unsolved, isn't it?" Gale asked.
"Yes."
Gale spread his arms wide, his glasses dangling between the fingers of his left hand. "So here we have two teenage girls missing in very similar circumstances. Isn't it just as likely, Lieutenant, that some deranged maniac, some stranger, one of the dozens of convicted sex offenders living in northern Minnesota, abducted both Kerry McGrath and Rachel Deese? That both these girls were the victim of a serial killer? Isn't that an equally plausible theory?"
Stride shook his head. "No. That's not what the evidence tells us."
"Ah, the evidence," Gale said, smiling at the jury. "Yes, we'll get to that in a moment. But let's look at this from a different angle, Lieutenant. You don't know for sure that Kerry McGrath is dead, do you?"
"No."
"And yet you're sure that Rachel is dead."
Stride nodded. "We found additional evidence in this case."
"A drop or two of blood. A scrap of cloth."
"It was Rachel's blood. Rachel's shirt."
Gale rubbed his goatee thoughtfully. "Was there enough blood found to suggest someone bled to death?"
"No."
"There wasn't even enough blood to prove any kind of crime took place, was there?"
Stride eyed Gale calmly. "I doubt Rachel cut herself shaving."
"But you don't really know, do you? She could have reached into the toolbox, cut herself on the knife, and bled on the carpet and on her clothes. Isn't that possible?"
"Only if you take the evidence out of context. We also found blood and fiber evidence at the barn."
"But still not enough evidence to suggest someone died, isn't that right?"
"On the contrary. I think that's precisely the conclusion this evidence suggests."
Gale raised a furry gray eyebrow. "So you say. Tell me, Lieutenant, do you know how many teenagers run away from home each year?"
"Thousands."
"Tens of thousands, in fact," Gale said. "Rachel wasn't happy at home, was she?"
"No."
"In fact, Rachel fits the classic profile of most runaways, doesn't she?" Gale asked.
"I'd have to say no. Runaways don't leave behind the kind of evidence we found. Her blood. Fibers from the shirt she was wearing that night."
"But what if she didn't want people to look for her?" Gale asked.
Stride hesitated, briefly losing his cool. "What?"
"Well, if she had taken her car, as you suggest, everyone would have known that she had run away, right? You'd be looking for her all over the country. But let's say Rachel wanted to disappear, and she didn't want the family she hates or the nosy police on her trail. Couldn't she have pricked her finger and left behind a hint of physical evidence that she met with a dark end?"
Stride shook his head. "That doesn't make sense. If she was faking her death, she would have made the evidence obvious. As it was, we did look for her all over the country. We did conduct an exhaustive search. Rachel had no way of knowing we ever would have stumbled on the evidence in the van-and certainly not at the barn."
"And yet here we are." Gale straightened, studying Stride, then the jury. "Let's talk about the barn, Lieutenant. This is a place where high school kids go to do all the things their parents don't want them to do at home, right?"
"Pretty much."
"Do you have any idea how many teenagers go there in any given week?" Gale asked.
"No."
"All right. Well, do you know how often the police were called about the barn in the last year?"
Stride shook his head. "I don't know."
"Would you be surprised if I told you it was thirty-seven times?"
"No, I wouldn't."
"And would you be surprised if I told you there were eight accusations of rape involving the barn in the past five years?" Gale asked. His smooth voice took on a hard edge. His eyes became hard azure points.
"That's possible."
"More than possible. It's true, Lieutenant. This is a dangerous place, isn't it?"
"It can be," Stride acknowledged.
"You've got teenagers raping teenagers, and the police don't seem to do anything about it."
"The barn is periodically raided," Stride said. "The kids keep coming back."
"That's right, Lieutenant. Kids. This is a place where kids do bad things. Doesn't the fact that evidence of Rachel was found at the barn suggest that another teenager may have been involved?"
"We investigated that possibility and discarded it," Stride said.
"In fact, it was your first thought, wasn't it? You sent people out to the high school to question teenage boys immediately after the bracelet was found. Didn't you, Lieutenant?"
"Yes, we did," Stride said.
Gale nodded. He chewed on his glasses again and then took a long swallow from a paper cup. He dabbed at his lips with the handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow.
"What size shoe do you wear, Lieutenant?" Gale asked.
The man was good, Stride thought to himself. He wondered how Gale had found out. "Twelve."
"I see. So it could have been you who left those footprints at the barn, right?"
"Objection," Dan Erickson snapped.
Judge Kassel shook her head. "Overruled."
"I don't own a pair of shoes that match the pattern of the tread found at the barn. Whereas Graeme Stoner bought such a pair only four months prior to Rachel's disappearance. And those shoes are now missing."
"But do you know how many of that brand of shoe, in size twelve, were sold in Minnesota in the past year?"
"I don't," Stride admitted.
"It's more than two hundred. Couldn't any of those people have left the footprints?"
"Yes. But none of them is Rachel's stepfather. And they don't own a van in which we found Rachel's blood."
"But apart from those footprints that could be from you or several hundred other men, you don't have any evidence to place my client at the barn on Friday night, do you?"
"No."
"In fact, you don't know when those footprints were made, do you?"
"No."
Gale paused to let the jury focus on this exchange.
"How about the van, Lieutenant? You make a big point of finding my client's fingerprints on the knife you found in the toolbox."
"That's right."
Gale shrugged. "But it's his van and his knife. Wouldn't you expect to find his fingerprints on it?"