“Got your warrant,” Lance Beaton said. “You’re welcome. It wasn’t easy. The judge didn’t like your hearsay report on the C-notes, and without that, let’s face it, you don’t have shit. But I pushed hard on the idea that we’ve got a kidnap victim who might still be alive.”
Stride watched Maggie’s face tighten with annoyance. She refrained from sarcastic retorts, which he considered an example of personal growth. They both knew the Superior detective well. Whenever they crossed the bridge from Minnesota to Wisconsin, Lance was their primary inter-departmental contact. He had a habit of taking credit on every break in every investigation. If they had to make arrests on the Superior side of the bay, news reports invariably played up the role of the Wisconsin detectives and downplayed the work done in Duluth. Stride had learned to ignore it, but Lance still managed to bring smoke curling out of Maggie’s ears.
He was not yet forty years old, with thinning brown hair and a tall, slightly underfed physique that made his uniform look baggy. He had dark, straight eyebrows and a dark, straight mustache, as if his face had been highlighted by a whiteboard marker. His gray eyes had a fixed look that Stride described as sleepy and Maggie described as vacant. He never smiled, and Stride suspected that was because he wanted the world to see him as a Very Serious Cop.
“Was Hink on your radar before today?” Stride asked Lance.
“No. He’s kept his nose clean over here, but that’s only been a few months.”
“Is there anything to tie him to the boat you found in Billings Park?”
“Negative, the boat was wiped clean,” Lance replied. “No prints, no DNA. That was all in my report.”
“Can we get on with this?” Maggie asked. She headed toward the front of the house but stopped when she saw that Lance’s feet were still rooted to the ground. The other Wisconsin cops deferred to him and didn’t move.
“What do you want us looking for in there?” Lance asked, his hands on his hips.
“First and foremost, Chelsey Webster,” Maggie replied. “And send someone around back in case Hink does a rabbit.”
Maggie didn’t give Lance a chance to overrule her. She marched for the house again, and the Wisconsin detective took long strides to keep up with her. One of the other cops headed for the rear of the house, and Stride and the remaining two cops followed Maggie and Lance. They crossed the dirt road to the weedy lawn and approached the front porch, and as they did, wind gusted across the roof. Stride saw sheer curtains blowing from inside an open window.
When the breeze reached him, he caught an odor on the air and barked, “Stop.”
Maggie looked back, her eyebrows arched. Then her nose wrinkled as she caught the smell, too. “Shit.”
They both drew their guns.
Lance’s brow furrowed. He hadn’t figured it out yet. “What the hell?”
“Body,” Maggie said.
She ran to the front door and pounded with her fist, and Stride made his way to the house’s open window. As he got closer, the smell from inside intensified. He stayed to the side of the frame and watched the thin fabric of the curtain whip in and out like a ghost. He listened for movement, but heard nothing. With his gun in his right hand, he glanced into the living room, and at first, his eyes struggled to distinguish anything but shadows. Then he saw a shape on the floor, and a moment later, he noticed a figure slumped in a chair.
“We’ve got two bodies,” he called. “A woman and a man.”
“Police!” Lance announced immediately in a loud voice. “We’re coming in!”
He signaled to one of his burly cops, and like a bull in a china shop, the cop threw his body against the door and crashed it inward in a shower of splinters. Lance went in first, gun level, and Maggie followed. Stride did the same, and a few seconds later, they were all standing with their hands covering their noses and mouths in the house’s small living room. Two other cops began a room-by-room search.
The bodies had been dead for a while. An elderly woman sat in a rocking chair, her head down on her chest. She looked as if she could be sleeping, except for the ruby-red line of dried blood that stretched around the visible portion of her neck. On the floor, Stride squatted beside a heavyset man in a large pool of blood, multiple gunshot wounds to his chest and head. Shell casings were sprinkled around the hardwood floor. The killer hadn’t bothered retrieving them.
Maggie looked down at the corpse. “Hink Miller.”
“Somebody’s been cleaning up loose ends,” Stride said. “Making sure nobody’s around to talk.”
“How long do you think they’ve been here?”
“At least twenty-four hours.”
The cop who’d broken in the door returned to the living room from upstairs. The lone woman on the Wisconsin team rejoined them at the same moment from the basement. They both shook their heads.
“There’s nobody else in the house,” the woman reported. “Also no sign that your vic was ever being held here.”
Lance waved his hand toward the front door. “I want everybody out. I need to call the medical examiner and get a forensics team over here. Until then, I don’t want anyone spoiling the scene.”
Stride saw Maggie open her mouth to protest delaying a full search, but she closed it again without complaining. They both returned outside. On the front lawn, Stride studied the house, then walked around it, looking for anything out of place. Nothing caught his attention. The killer hadn’t left obvious clues behind. When he returned to the front yard, he noticed that the side door of the detached garage was open. Maggie stood in the doorway, shining her flashlight inside. He joined her, and they examined the interior. There was winter plowing equipment and fertilizer stored there, but little else.
“Let’s check the Taurus,” Stride said.
They headed for the car that was parked outside the garage, its white paint and tires splattered with dried mud. Glancing through the windows, he saw empty food wrappers on the passenger seat and a sweatshirt crumpled on the rear floor. He opened the driver’s door, and using the cuff of his sleeve, he popped the lever that opened the trunk. When they went to the back, Stride leaned forward, taking a whiff of the interior.
“Smell that?” he said.
Maggie leaned over the trunk and frowned. “Perfume.”
“Yeah.” He took out a pen and used it to drag a small plastic bag from the back of the trunk. It was torn open at the top and filled with plastic zip ties. Then he pointed at a few reddish drops on the trunk’s shell. “That looks like blood to me.”
“Chelsey was in here,” Maggie concluded.
“That’s my bet.”
“But she’s not in the house or the garage, so where the hell is she?”
Stride nodded. “And is she still alive?”
19
In May two years earlier, Serena had been called to a house in Proctor by uniformed officers responding to a 911 emergency. Outside, she’d found a fifteen-year-old girl named Delaney Candis sitting on the front porch in a state of shock. Inside, Serena had found Delaney’s mother, Nikki, in bed, dead of a gunshot wound to her temple, a long-barreled Smith & Wesson revolver clutched in her hand. As death investigations went, it appeared open-and-shut. Suicide.
The question for Serena was why her drunken mind had conjured Nikki Candis outside the bar. Why her? She might have expected to see a vision of Samantha. Or Deidre. Or someone else from her teenage years, taunting her as she slipped back into her alcoholic past. Instead, her mind had resurrected a suicide victim, one of dozens she’d investigated in her career, from a case that had no real mystery.