“Including you?”
“Including me. We all have our hobbies.”
“How long have you been doing this?” Stride asked.
“Years. A decade or more. Sunday mornings are my searching time. Some people go to church. Me, I dig around for geocaches.”
“And that’s what you were doing near Fredenberg Lake?”
“Yes.”
“Why there?” Stride asked. “I assume there must be hundreds or thousands of these geocaches around the Northland. What brought you to that particular area on Sunday morning?”
“A puzzle.”
“What do you mean? What kind of puzzle?”
“There are local clubs, Stride. Message boards. We set up games and contests with each other. It’s all anonymous, all done under secret identities. I know that may sound odd, but it’s part of the mystery. I’ve been playing a private game with one of the members for a few weeks.”
“Who?”
“I told you, I don’t know. It’s anonymous. We use private email accounts. There’s nothing sinister about it. Whoever it is doesn’t know who I am, either. He — or she, I have no idea — approached me after seeing some of my posts on the local message board. He’d hidden a medallion somewhere in the Northland, like the way they do in Saint Paul during the Winter Carnival. He invited me to look for the clues and try to find it. That’s why I was on that road near Fredenberg Lake. I was hunting for the medallion.”
“Did you find it?” Stride asked.
“Yes, I did.”
“Can I see it?”
Gavin got up and left the room. He returned a few seconds later and handed a gold plastic medallion to Stride. It was about four inches in diameter, and it was decorated with the signs of the Zodiac. There were no signs that it had been outside; it had been scrubbed clean.
“This is what you were looking for?”
“That’s right. As you can see, it’s not expensive. I mean, we always run the risk that some hiker will stumble across a cache by accident, so we never hide valuable things. These are just games.”
“I’ll need to see the emails you exchanged with this person,” Stride said.
“Sure, if that’s what you want. I doubt it’ll help, though. It’s just a generic Gmail account. The handle was Razrsharp, whatever that means.”
“Did it occur to you that this person could be the kidnapper?” Stride asked.
Gavin looked genuinely startled. “No. It didn’t. I have no reason to think that this person even knows who I am. Just like I don’t know who he is.”
“But he might know, right?”
“I suppose.”
“Who else knows about this hobby of yours?” Stride asked.
“I don’t hide it. I talk about it all the time.”
“Including at Broadway’s games?”
Gavin hesitated. “Yes.”
Stride turned the medallion over in his hands, then handed it back to Gavin.
A generic Gmail account.
It would be difficult, maybe impossible, to trace the account to its owner. Stride was also well aware that the account could belong to Gavin himself. The puzzles. The medallion. That could all have been him, anticipating every twist in the game. If the police stumbled onto a body in the woods, if anyone spotted him or remembered him, he had an explanation for why he was in the area. A mysterious, anonymous suspect to lay in front of them.
Razrsharp.
Stride stared into Gavin’s blue eyes. Those strange blue eyes stared back at him. He definitely could have done it. He was intelligent enough to develop a brilliant scheme to kidnap and kill his wife. But if he had, why?
They still didn’t have a motive.
His phone started ringing. It was Maggie.
Stride answered the phone and listened without saying anything. The call was quick. Signal was bad. He hung up the phone, and he could see a wave of anxiety cross Gavin’s face. In that moment, Stride tried to listen to his instincts, to figure out what secrets the man was keeping. Like a geocache hidden in the trees.
Innocent or guilty. They’d have an answer soon.
“We’ve found your wife, Gavin,” Stride told him. “Chelsey’s alive.”
31
Chelsey Webster lay on her back in an indentation dug out of the gully. It resembled a shallow grave. There were mounds of dirt and dead leaves piled around the hole, as if whoever had brought her here had intended to bury her, but then left her uncovered instead for the wolves to find. One of the search dogs had zeroed in on her scent — or on the aroma of urine and feces soiling her clothes — and led a police officer with a flashlight directly to her.
She wore what she must have been wearing when she’d been taken from her house. A rose-colored turtleneck. A bulky sweater. Wool slacks and heavy socks, but no shoes. All her clothes were muddy and soaking wet now from the daylong rain, but before that, they would have given her a small bit of protection while she was outside. That was probably what had kept her alive. She was gagged with an old T-shirt in her mouth and gray tape, allowing her to make nothing more than desperate whimpers. Her wrists and ankles were tightly bound with tape, too. Wherever skin showed, it was black with dirt, and her face was bruised. Her body wasn’t secured to anything, but the hole had been dug on a slope above a narrow creek. If she’d struggled enough to roll out, she could easily have drowned in the water.
Maggie knelt beside her. She squeezed Chelsey’s hand, which was ice-cold. She could feel the woman trembling. Guppo and the other cops and the dogs pressed close in around her, and Maggie waved them back to give her more space and to begin to establish a perimeter for the crime scene. She looked for injuries beyond the bruising — cuts, abrasions, broken bones, knife or gun wounds — but she didn’t see any signs of additional trauma. The woman’s face was sunken, and she looked dehydrated. In the beams of a dozen flashlights, her eyes were wide open and scared.
But she was alive.
“Mrs. Webster, my name is Lieutenant Maggie Bei with the Duluth Police. We are very, very glad to see you. Don’t worry, you’re safe now. An ambulance will be here soon. They’ll get you to a hospital so the doctors can check you out and clean you up. Rather than carry you out immediately, we’d like to wait and let the paramedics examine you to make sure you’re safe to move. But we’ll stay right here until they arrive. Do you understand?”
Slowly, with some confusion on her face, Chelsey nodded.
“My apologies for the bright lights,” Maggie went on. “You might want to close your eyes if that’s more comfortable.”
Chelsey did, and Maggie used her camera phone to take a series of pictures and videos of the scene. When she had a rough photographic record of the area, she gestured at Guppo, who handed her two thick blankets he’d retrieved from the squad car.
“Let’s see if we can keep you a little warmer while we wait, okay?” Maggie said, spreading the blankets over Chelsey’s body. “I know the tape is uncomfortable, but I don’t want to remove it myself, because your skin is probably pretty raw where you’ve been bound. Better to do that at the hospital. But I’m going to cut a slit across the tape on your mouth and see if I can get that shirt out, okay? That should help you breathe a lot easier.”
Again Chelsey nodded. Her eyes were open again, despite the harshness of the light shining down on her.
Maggie extracted a Swiss army knife from her pocket and carefully cut an opening in the tape that was stretched across Chelsey’s face. With her fingers, she gingerly nudged the flaps of the tape apart, until the gap was wide enough for her to slowly pull the sodden shirt from Chelsey’s mouth. She did it inch by inch, gauging the woman’s reaction, ready to stop if Chelsey showed any signs of pain or choking. She didn’t. The shirt itself was wet and dirty and flecked with traces of blood. When it came free, she handed it to Guppo, who deposited it in a plastic evidence bag.