Stride shook his head. Broadway was a cool customer. He had the quiet arrogance of someone who was sure he held all the cards. And he was right. They had nothing on him, no leverage to make him talk.
“Off the top of your head, can you think of anyone you’d consider a suspect in this abduction?” Stride asked. “Someone we should look at right now? You must know that time is critical. If Chelsey Webster is still alive, she won’t be for long. We need to find her.”
Broadway smoothed his lapels. “I’m not insensitive to your problem, Jonathan. I really do want to help, and if I believed I knew someone who could have perpetrated this terrible crime, I’d tell you. However, in all seriousness, I can’t think of a name to give you. A person in my line of work tends to screen employees carefully. Guests, too. Any type of criminal record would get you crossed off my list.”
Stride glanced at Maggie. There wasn’t anything else to do here.
“All right... Broadway,” she said. “We’re done for now. Trust me when I tell you we’ll meet again.”
“I have no doubt. But I’m glad to have met both of you.”
They headed through the gravel lot, but Broadway called to them before they’d gone too far, and they both returned to the fence. As they waited there, Broadway removed a remote control from his pocket and pointed it at the camera mounted near the roof of the warehouse. The small red light went dark.
“One more thing,” he said. “This is a little bonus for you. Off the record, not from me, not for attribution or inclusion in any court filings. Consider it an investment in our relationship.”
“What is it?” Stride asked.
“Hundreds. Look for hundreds.”
“I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
Broadway rubbed his fingers together, the unmistakable signal for money. “The ransom was paid in hundred-dollar bills. Exclusively hundreds. You might find that helpful in locating the kidnappers. If I were you, I’d keep an eye out in town for someone passing them around.”
11
As Serena drove home that night, she passed through the Canal Park area and noticed an unusual number of people gathered on the green grass near the ship canal. October was still the tourist season, and the passage of an ore boat under the lift bridge always brought gawkers running to the piers. But this seemed to be something different. From her car, she spotted an odd display of multicolored lights flashing through the darkness in the middle of the park.
Rather than head across the bridge toward their cottage on the Point, she pulled off the street and parked her Mustang. Putting Elton on a leash, she took the dog and walked into the grassy park near the city’s marine museum. A stiff, cold breeze blew off the lake and swirled her black hair as she approached the crowd. There were at least fifty people arranged in a circle around a man perched atop a coffin that glowed with green luminescent paint. The man was on stilts that lifted him high into the air, and he wobbled unsteadily in the gusty wind. He wore a tight-fitting black bodysuit that had some kind of plastic overlay studded with lights.
As Serena watched, the lights changed colors and transformed into various designs. First, the bodysuit became a skeleton, its white bones dancing. Then, a dozen orange Halloween pumpkins illuminated all over the performer’s body. Then, a Christmas tree filled his chest, twinkling with red-and-green lights. Finally, the word DULUTH appeared on one leg, and MINNESOTA appeared on the other leg, and #1 flashed on his torso.
That won a big cheer from the crowd.
The next message had a more mercenary tone:
XMAS LIGHTSUITS, $200!
From atop the stilts, the man spotted Serena standing in the crowd. She heard him calling to her. “Hey! Detective! It’s me!”
She knew that voice. It was Curt Dickes.
Of course, it was. If a strange moneymaking scam were underway in Duluth, the odds were good that Curt was behind it. Over the years, she’d caught him peddling everything from homemade craft-beer growlers (which she suspected were poured from cans of Coors) to knockoff concert tickets and bags of marijuana. The jail had a revolving door with his name on it. He was mostly a low-level fraudster, but he was clued in to nearly every scheme on the Duluth streets, which often made him a useful source of information when she and Stride needed help.
Serena also suspected that Curt was in love with Cat. She didn’t like that at all. The two of them had hung out for years, dating back to when Cat was living on the streets and Curt was in the business of recruiting pretty teenagers to dress up Duluth parties. Cat had left that world far behind, but Curt was still in the middle of it. So if there was one person that Serena wanted out of Cat’s life forever, it was Curt Dickes.
“Come on down here, Curt,” she called, drawing a disappointed groan from the crowd.
Curt nimbly hopped down from his stilts and landed with a thump on the coffin. He began passing out business cards to people around him, and when Serena grabbed one, she saw an advertisement for curtslightsuits.com. With a sigh, she pried the rest of the cards from Curt’s hand, then beckoned him toward the water. Elton followed on the leash, his nose to the ground.
They stood by the rocks, where the whitecaps of Lake Superior erupted in spray. A few wet fall leaves blew across the grass. Whenever Curt moved, the plastic on his light suit crinkled, and the lights flashed. Tourists kept coming up to ask where they could buy one, and Serena shooed them away.
“Curtslightsuits?” she asked. “Really?”
“You bet, I’m taking orders now!” Curt replied with his usual enthusiasm. “If you want one, you should do it fast and beat the Christmas rush. I figure these things are going to sell like crazy over at Bentleyville.”
“And you’ll be delivering these orders when?” Serena asked.
He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “To be honest, my delivery time is a little uncertain. I’m still negotiating with a supplier in China.”
“Uh-huh.”
He flashed a cheerful grin that didn’t really try to hide the scam he was running. That was part of his charm and part of why Cat found him attractive. Yes, he was usually on the wrong side of the law, but he had so much fun doing it that it was actually hard to dislike him.
Curt was tall, but without much meat on his bones. He had greasy black hair that he usually wore down to his shoulders, but which was now tied into two pigtails jutting out of his head like antennae. His bodysuit didn’t show much skin, but Serena could see a tapestry of tattoos stretching from beneath the fabric onto his hands and face. He was almost thirty, but still had the boyish looks of a teenager. She thought of him like a misdemeanor version of Peter Pan.
“Shut the site down,” she told him. “Got it? I’ll be clicking over there in the morning, and I better not find it online.”