“You’re late,” she said. “You want to talk?”
Normally, he would have pretended to be tired and let her go back to sleep, but not tonight. He’d told her about Art Leipold before, but he found himself talking about the case all over again. How personal it was. How the voices of the women got inside his soul. How much it made him question whether he was really ready to be in charge of the detective bureau.
Eventually he fell silent, but he kept thinking about what the women had gone through inside the cage. He remembered the bodies of the other victims and the details of the autopsies. He knew what they’d done to themselves. Unspeakable things. Desperation drove people to dark places.
“We never released the details publicly,” he murmured. “Some of the things the women did in the box were — disturbing. No one else needed to know.”
Serena turned around to face him. “But you know.”
“Yeah. I wish I didn’t.”
They couldn’t see each other in the darkness. All he could feel was her warmth. She put her hands on his face and kissed him softly, over and over, until he kissed her back. Then, in silence, she wrapped herself up in his body and made him forget for a while.
8
Stride found Maggie with her feet up on his desk when he arrived at police headquarters at seven in the morning. She was drinking a jumbo-size Coke through a straw and eating a Sausage McMuffin.
“Hash browns?” she asked as he sat down. She dug inside a bag on the floor and waved a little oval patty of fried potatoes at him.
“No, thanks.”
Maggie shrugged and took a large bite. Stride found it amazing that Maggie could consume McDonald’s nearly every day of her life and never put an ounce on her tiny frame. Her metabolism, even in her forties, was like the growling engine of a sports car.
He eyed the darkness outside his office window. Dawn was still almost an hour away thanks to the short winter days. The rest of the building was mostly quiet. He was halfway through his coffee and slowly starting to wake up.
“How early did you get here, Mags?” he asked.
“Not early at all,” she replied.
“How do you figure that?”
“If you never leave, it’s not early,” she explained with her mouth full.
“You were here all night again?”
“Yup.”
Stride shook his head. “This is extreme even for you, Mags. You really need to get some rest.”
Maggie shrugged without replying. Her cheeks made dimples as she sucked on the Coke. He leaned back in his chair and studied his partner’s face, which couldn’t hide her exhaustion. After so many years together, there were very few secrets between them.
“Is this about you and Troy?” he asked.
“Troy and I are done. Over. Kaput.”
“I know. And you never told me what happened between you two. You just walked in after Christmas and announced between bites of a Big Mac that the longest relationship of your life was over.”
“What’s to tell?” Maggie said. She dropped her feet back on the floor. She crushed the empty bag in her hands and shot it across the room, where it landed in Stride’s wastebasket. “I guess I’m a better shot than Haley Adams.”
“Come on, Mags. Was it an argument?”
“Nope.”
“Was there a problem with Troy’s kids?”
“Nah. I love the girls.”
“Then what?”
Maggie rolled her tongue around her teeth as if there might be a bite of McMuffin that she’d missed. “Oh, let’s not make a big deal of it, okay? On Christmas Eve, Troy asked me to marry him.”
Stride froze with his coffee cup at his lips. Then he blinked and put the cup down. He’d talked with Serena about a lot of possible reasons Maggie and Troy had broken up, but that wasn’t one of them. “He did what?”
“Yeah, it was pretty romantic for a big teddy bear like Troy. He waited until the kids went to bed. Then he opened champagne. He put on Michael Bublé, and of course I immediately turned off Michael Bublé. And the next thing I know, he had a ring in his hand and was on his knees popping the question.”
“That must have been quite a surprise.”
“It was.”
“And you said—”
“No.”
Stride sat in his chair in silence. He didn’t know how to respond.
“Needless to say, that killed the mood,” Maggie went on. “About five minutes later, I was back in my truck heading home. And that was that.”
“That was that?”
“Right.”
“Have the two of you talked?” he asked.
“No.”
“Come on, Mags. You guys really need to talk.”
“About what? I don’t want to get married, boss. Period. Remember the one time I tried it? Dead husband, me accused of murder, the damn sex club that screwed up my head?”
“I’m not sure it’s fair to generalize about marriage from your particular experience,” Stride said drily.
“Well, being married made me rich. Otherwise, there isn’t much I want to remember about it. Marriage isn’t for me. Never again. I was happy with the status quo with Troy. I wasn’t asking for anything more. But that’s not what he wanted. So it’s over, and I’m moving on.”
“And by moving on you mean not getting any sleep?” Stride asked.
“There’s no connection. I’m not obsessing about it.”
“Are you sure? It’s a big deal.”
“Look, I appreciate your concern, but I’m okay, boss. Really.”
Stride sighed and didn’t push her any further. “If you say so.”
He knew she wasn’t okay, but with Maggie you had to settle for information in dribs and drabs. She wore a suit of armor around herself and didn’t like to take it off. Plus, the two of them were still wary about getting too personal with each other. They’d been burned that way in the past.
“So did your all-nighter here result in any new information?” Stride asked.
“Actually, quite a lot,” Maggie replied. “Remember the phone we recovered from John Doe’s car? He used it to call the same Duluth number about a dozen times while he was in the city. We figured he was talking to his handler, getting instructions. The number he called is dead now, but I pulled the call logs for that phone. Every call went back to John Doe’s phone — except one.”
“What was the other call?” Stride asked.
“You’ll enjoy this. It went to Sammy’s Pizza downtown.”
Stride chuckled. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, I’m betting whoever it was made a mistake and used the wrong phone to order his pizza.”
“Can we trace the order?”
Maggie shook her head. “No, we know the date and time of the call, but the orders are written up on one-part paper receipts that go out with the pizza. Guppo’s going to be talking to their delivery drivers.”
“Okay, anything else on John Doe?” Stride asked. “Are we any closer to identifying him?”
“No, he’s still a mystery. But the Gherkin says she expects a ballistics report back on the Glock later today. See, my charm really does pay off.”
“How about Haley Adams? What have you found out about her?”
“She’s a mystery, too. Apparently Haley is a pretty little liar. She’s not a UMD student. Nobody in admissions or in the film studies department ever heard of her. And the apartment we searched? She rented it last month. It looks like she came to town when the film crew did and conned her way inside. Her whole identity is a fraud.”
“Chris Leipold thought she might have been spying for one of the tabloids,” Stride said.
“Maybe, but if she was, I doubt the National Gazette would admit it. Not when she left a telescope pointed at Dean Casperson’s bedroom. That’s an invitation to a lawsuit. And speaking of the telescope, the model she had is called a Moonraker. It costs like five thousand dollars. This girl didn’t just walk away and leave it behind. Something happened to her.”