His dream took him back to Minnesota. He was on the beach in front of his old house on a finger of land jutting out between Lake Superior on one side and the placid harbor water on the other. He was in a dirty plastic lounge chair, watching the lake waves crash on the shore, and his first wife, Cindy, was in a matching chair beside him. They held hands. Every hand had a different feel, and he could actually touch hers again and feel the prongs of her emerald ring scratching his skin. She didn’t talk. There was a part of him that knew it was a dream, and he wanted to listen to the sound of her voice again, which had faded in his memory over the years, but she was quiet, staring at him, loving him. Eventually, in his dream, he fell asleep, and when he awoke, he was alone on the beach. Her chair was gone. There had been children playing by the waves, running in the sand, but they were gone, too. There had been an ore boat moored out on the water, the kind of ship on which his father had worked until a winter storm washed him into the lake, but the boat was gone, too.
Stride woke up as a thermal jostled the plane, and he heard Montgomery Gentry singing “Gone” on the satellite radio. That was how the dream made him feel. Long gone.
Joanne told him they were getting ready to land, and Stride looked out to see snowy peaks looming beyond the downtown Vancouver skyline. He knew why he had dreamed of Cindy. They had been to Vancouver together once, several years earlier, when they took a cruise of the Alaskan inner passage. They had spent a weekend in the city after the cruise, and it had been magical, jogging together through the fog of Stanley Park in the early morning and eating Dungeness crab meat from the market on Granville Island on a bench by the water, surrounded by hungry gulls. He remembered thinking on that trip that he had never been quite so happy in his life. It wasn’t long after they returned that a teenaged girl named Kerry McGrath disappeared, launching one of the darkest investigations of his career. In the midst of it, his beautiful Cindy was overrun by cancer, so swiftly and appallingly that he barely recognized her in the end. He figured later that the cancer had already taken root while they were in Vancouver. He wondered what that said about life, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
Stride was anxious to see Vancouver again. He liked the city, and he wanted to face his demons, or maybe just wallow in them. When they landed, he realized it wasn’t to be. There was no car to take him to Walker Lane but rather a helicopter waiting for him after he was cleared by a customs official who met the plane. It swooped him up and took him south, away from the city, toward the gulf islands north of Victoria. He was a little nervous flying over the water, not in a floatplane but in a rock that would simply hit the water and sink if its rotors stopped turning. At least it was a calm, cloudless day. They flew for what seemed a long time, but was probably only twenty minutes, before Stride saw islands dotting the blue water below them. He saw fishing villages and large bands of oak and fir trees covering the hills and sweeping down to narrow stony beaches. As they passed over one of the smaller islands, the pilot began to descend, perilously close to the treetops. Beyond the crest, on the southern shore of the island, Stride suddenly saw a clearing where a massive estate clung to the beach. The water seemed to lap almost to the windows overlooking the sound. The house itself was Victorian in design, with numerous gables and a large main tower topped by a cone-shaped roof. The coloring was dark and gothic.
The pilot flew over the home itself and gently set the helicopter down on a concrete circle amid the rear gardens. He cut the engine, and Stride climbed out. An attendant greeted him and guided him back through a maze of topiaries and fountains into an expansive rear porch, with heavy antique furniture and ceramic tile the color of creme brulee.
“ Mr. Lane will be right with you,” the woman told him, and left him alone to wait.
Stride stood near the doors and felt the cool cross-breeze cutting across the island. He wondered what to expect from Walker Lane. All he had seen was photographs from decades ago, when Walker looked very much like his son, MJ, with unruly hair and a gangly look, like a kid whose limbs had grown too far too fast. Even then, he had been a millionaire, and over the years, he had traded the m for a b. Stride had never met a billionaire. From Walker ’s voice over the phone, he imagined the man to be tall and severe, imperially gray, wearing a sweater and cupping a glass of port.
He was right about the sweater, and that was it.
“Welcome to Canada, Detective,” Walker said, as he rolled onto the porch in a wheelchair operated from a joystick in his right hand. “I’m glad you agreed to join me here.”
Stride found himself staring. He recognized the voice, which sounded like a stormy gale, but not the man. Half of Walker ’s face was strangely rigid, as if he had lost control of it in a stroke. The man’s right eye was fixed, and it took Stride a moment to realize the eye was fake, made of glass. His nose was misshapen, broken and reconstructed. When he smiled, his teeth were pristine and perfect, and Stride guessed that those were fake, too.
“Not what you expected?” Walker asked dryly.
Stride was too surprised to answer. He extended his hand, and Walker shook it. The man’s grip, at least, was strong and tight.
“I don’t advertise my disability, Detective,” Walker added. “I hope I can count on your discretion. Most people who come here sign nondisclosure agreements. I didn’t do that with you, because I want to trust you, and I want you to trust me.”
Stride was still unsettled by Walker ’s appearance and by the fake eye that seemed astonishingly real. “I understand,” he said.
“Do you know who killed my son?” Walker asked pointedly. He sounded like the impatient man Stride had talked to on the phone.
“Yes, we do.” Stride saw surprise bloom in Walker ’s good eye, and he reached into the slim folder he carried to retrieve the police sketch. “We haven’t arrested him, but we have his face. This is the man who killed MJ.”
“Let me see it.”
Stride handed him the sketch, and Walker took it eagerly. He held it far enough away in his right hand that his eye could focus.
“Do you know him?” Stride asked.
“No.” Walker shook his head, disappointed. “He’s not familiar to me”
“I’ll leave the sketch with you.”
Walker turned the sketch over and put it in his lap. “Would you like a tour before we get down to business? Not many people get to come here, you know.”
Stride had come halfway across the continent to see the man, and he was curious about the estate, which was the kind of home he was never likely to see again. “Why not?” he said.
“Good.”
Walker spun his wheelchair around and led him from the porch into the main body of the house. For all the antique decor, it was electronically sophisticated, with every feature controlled by computers and operated from the control pad on Walker ’s chair. Windows, lights, doors, curtains, skylights, everything could be opened, closed, turned on, and turned off with a flick of the keypad. They passed from room to room, and each one felt like something out of a European palace, huge and elaborately decorated, but sterile, like a museum. Stride knew the house couldn’t be more than two or three decades old, but it felt like a relic from another century. It didn’t feel like anyone lived here.