"Thanks, Abel."
"I'm also not saying I was wrong about Maggie, but this thing looks more complicated than I thought."
"You played it the way I would have done in your shoes," Stride told him.
"Maggie called and asked me if she could be part of the search. I probably shouldn't have done it, but I said okay."
Stride shrugged. "She would have done it anyway."
"I know."
"Better be careful, Abel, people will start saying you're soft."
"Yeah. That'll happen soon."
Teitscher left, and Stride continued studying Deed's apartment, looking for clues to the man. The apartment building was a drab high-rise near the pawn shops and gun stores on the far south end of Superior Street. Through his sixth-floor window, Deed looked out on a jigsaw puzzle of highway overpasses where the freeway broke apart into the city streets. It was cheap, anonymous, and seconds away from a quick escape.
Inside the one-bedroom apartment itself, there was little to distinguish the man. He ate chicken TV dinners, tacos, guacamole chips, and frozen chunks of walleye wrapped in aluminum foil. The kitchen reeked of fish. The apartment came furnished, and Deed had added little of his own other than a high-end PC. They found no magazines, no bank records, and no receipts. All they had was a description of the man: tall, heavy, strong, early forties, with black hair down below his neck, dark eyes, and a hawklike nose. He wore jeans and denim shirts when he wasn't wearing the Byte Patrol purple T-shirt.
Something about the apartment bothered Stride, but whatever it was waited like a ship in the fog and refused to show itself. The more he tried to focus his senses, the more the feeling became gauzy, as if he were imagining things. There was nothing to see here and nothing to find.
Stride pulled a kitchen chair next to the store owner, Craig, who was clicking the computer keys and staring at the screen through bleary eyes.
"What have you got?" Stride asked.
"Enough to fucking well put me out of business," Craig retorted. "This asshole put back doors and spyware into every computer he touched through the store."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning he could use their Internet connections to log on to their systems, paw through their hard drives, and track every fucking keystroke they made. He knew everything."
"I'm going to need names."
"Yeah, sure, I'll print you a list. They're all going to sue me."
"What else?" Stride asked.
"What else am I looking for?"
"Anything that will help us find this guy. Where he goes. Where he shops. What he does. He's got to have a hideaway somewhere."
"What I've found isn't going to help you. It's mostly hard-core porn. Disgusting stuff, lots of bondage."
"What about local sites? People, places, businesses based around Duluth? Blogs, MySpace pages, anything like that?"
"Not that I saw."
"Did he ever visit a blog called 'The Lady in Me'? Or mention a woman called Helen Danning?"
Craig tapped the keys for a few seconds. "Doesn't look like it."
"What about online bank records?"
"Nope." Craig yawned.
"Am I keeping you up here?" Stride asked.
"It's three in the morning, man. I should be asleep."
"Yeah, things are tough all over. I already woke up a judge in the middle of the night to get a search warrant, and she's not too happy with me either. It's really too bad I yanked you out of bed just because this son of a bitch you hired has kidnapped a woman and may already have raped and killed her. So keep looking and find me something."
"Yeah, okay, okay, sorry." Craig hunched his shoulders and went back to the keyboard.
Stride's cell phone rang, and the song taunted him. He was in a hurry and knew why. He got up and walked to the window again as he answered the call.
"Negatory on the state database," Guppo said. "He's not local."
"How about the feebs?"
"They're working on it right now. They promise it's a top priority."
"Thanks."
Stride hung up.
He straddled a chair and studied the barren apartment again. What the hell was it? There was something here, something obvious that didn't make sense, and he was missing it. He got up and checked the garbage again and looked at the scraps of food wrappers. Bacon packaging. An empty egg carton and broken eggshells. The butcher's paper from a package of ground beef, purchased at a local twenty-four-hour market. He had already sent someone to the store to see if any of the employees remembered anything about Deed. Where he went, what he drove, who he was with.
He was still missing something.
"Hey, Lieutenant," Craig called. "I think you should see this."
Stride stood over the man's shoulder. "What is it?"
"Pictures. Lots of them. Mostly of the same woman."
Craig dragged the mouse and clicked a tiny icon, and a string of thumbnail images scattered across the black screen.
"I can run them all like a slide show," Craig said.
"Do it."
The first of the pictures zoomed out to full size. Stride's heart sank. It was Serena. He recognized the area, which was downtown Saint Paul, in Rice Park near the Ordway. Another photo clicked onto the screen, and this was Serena, too. Near the Duluth courthouse. He forced himself to look at the entire collection. They were almost all of Serena, more than sixty images. Secret photos, taken from a distance. Some were near their own home, on the beach, through their windows.
This guy had been planning to take Serena for a long time.
Stride pointed at an image in the middle, which was nothing more than a flash of white light. "What's that?"
"A mistake," Craig said. "The camera probably went off accidentally."
"Pull it up again."
Craig restored the image to the screen, and Stride leaned in, staring at the photo. The blob of light was obviously the camera flash firing, but he could also make out something else, which looked like brown spots and wavy dark lines.
"What's that?" Stride asked.
Craig looked closer. "I'm not sure."
"I think it's wood."
"Too smooth for that."
"Wood paneling, I mean. Cheap stuff." Stride looked around the apartment. There was no wood paneling anywhere. He checked the bedroom and the bathroom and didn't find any panels there that matched the photo.
"Do you put wood paneling inside your vans?" he asked.
Craig shook his head.
"So where was this taken?" Stride asked, but he was talking to himself. To the air. Thinking that wherever the wood paneling was, Serena was there now. This was Deed's hidey-hole.
While he was running down a mental list of places that had fake wood siding, Guppo called back.
"Tell me you got him," Stride said.
"Yeah, but there's a problem."
"What?"
"The match is perfect," Guppo told him. "He's got records in Arizona, Texas, and Alabama. Drugs, murder, extortion, and two rape charges that were dropped when the women got cold feet."
"Sounds like our guy," Stride said. "What's the problem?"
"The problem is, he's dead."
"Say what?"
"The Alabama authorities claim he's dead. He was a witness in a narcotics trial, and two officers were escorting him back to the state CF in Holman. They ran square into a hurricane, and all three died."
"Did you say a hurricane?" Stride asked, hoping that Guppo had made a mistake and knowing that he hadn't.
"Yeah."
The dread he was feeling mutated and multiplied. Stride knew where this was going. He was there when Serena got the call last fall from the Alabama police and remembered the look of relief on her face. She felt liberated. Free.
"They found the two cops," Guppo said. "The car, too, which was a wreck. No sign of foul play, though. They figured the prisoner washed out to sea."
That was the logical conclusion, and it was wrong. He didn't wash out to sea. He escaped and headed north like a laser beam. Stride remembered how Serena described the dead man who had tortured her past. Brilliant, ruthless, charming, scheming. Exactly the kind of spider who would love to play games with his prey and then eat them. A drug dealer. A blackmailer. A rapist. A killer.