“So this guy had pictures of me?” Angela asked.
“I’m sorry, but yes, we think so,” Maggie told her.
“That is so creepy. I mean, like, nude pictures even?”
“We don’t know.”
“I am never opening my blinds again, you know? I can’t believe this.” She nestled her head against her mother’s shoulder.
“Where the hell is this bastard?” Angela’s father demanded. He was small, with a thin ring of black hair around his bald head. His cheeks flushed red with rage. “Is this the pervert who was on the news?”
“We’re trying to locate him right now,” Stride said. “We’d like your permission to search your backyard.”
“Do it,” he told them. “Do whatever you have to.”
Stride nodded. “Angela, can you tell us if anything happened tonight?”
The girl had been crying. She tugged at her shirt and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I got a couple hangup calls on my cell phone.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know. Sometime after midnight.”
“What did you do?”
“I turned on the light. The calls woke me up. I looked out the window, but I didn’t see anybody. It’s not like I could really see anything with all the rain, though.”
“Has this happened before?” Maggie asked.
Angela nodded. “Yeah, two or three times. Always at night. I just figured it was somebody with a wrong number, you know? I knew one of the other girls at school who got peeped, but I never thought about it happening to me.”
“Someone will come by tomorrow to take a full statement from you,” Stride said.
Maggie put a hand on the girl’s knee. “You should talk to someone, Angela. It’s natural for girls who experience something like this to be frightened. You shouldn’t deal with it alone.”
Angela shrugged and hid a little deeper inside her mother’s arms.
“We’ll get her help,” her father said.
Stride and Maggie left the family and returned to the pounding rain outside the house. Both of them switched on flashlights and swept the beams like searchlights ahead of them as they made their way to the backyard. The grass was sodden under their feet. Streams poured out of the swollen gutters. Behind the house, the lot was large and flat and dotted with evergreens. Stride could see the next street more than a hundred feet away. As he shined his flashlight through the grass, pools of standing water glistened back at him.
The room on the corner was Angela’s bedroom. The light was on, and the blinds were shut. Stride examined the grass underneath her window.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Maybe the rain washed away his footprints,” Maggie replied.
Stride shook his head. “He can’t have been this close. If he was standing here, she would have seen him.”
He examined the rest of the yard. Lightning turned the night to day for an instant. Stride saw disarray in the wet ground, twenty feet from Angela’s window. He used the flashlight to guide his footsteps to a soggy patch of mud and lawn beneath one of the fir trees, where tree roots bulged from the wet soil. In the cone of light, he saw a mess of footprints and crushed grass.
Maggie bent down and studied the overlapping tread marks. “Two different sets,” she said. “Looks like a fight.”
Stride spotted a single line of tracks leading away from the scene toward the street. He followed them with his flashlight. Where they passed through a bare patch of dirt, the prints in the mud were deep and clear.
“He was carrying someone,” Stride said, pointing to where the heel marks sank like weights into the soft earth.
“I think we’re running out of time, boss,” Maggie said.
They followed the footprints to the street, where they disappeared. Water overflowed from the sewers and poured along the curb in a river. Stride wiped rain from his eyes. He jogged to the vacant lot on the opposite side of the block to see if the footprints started again, but he couldn’t find the trail. Clark and Finn had both vanished.
Stride gestured to Maggie, pointing her to the south, while he followed the street to the north, running down the middle where the flooding was lightest. Twin rivers surged through the gutters. He used intermittent bursts of lightning to see between the houses and down the long stretches of asphalt. Each subsequent drumbeat of thunder was closer and longer. The storm was getting worse, not better, and the atmosphere felt violent around him, as if the pressure in the air were building toward an explosion. Wet cold worked its way inside his bones. Trees bowed over his head with the rotating winds, and when he stopped in the dead center of an intersection where two wide streets met, he felt small.
Another branch of lightning cut open the sky, looking like a hangman drawn by a child. Right then and there, Stride saw it. Three blocks away, glinting in the white light, was a silver RAV, parked under the sagging branches of an elm tree. He splashed through deep water. His feet sloshed inside his boots. As he got closer, he saw Maggie, sprinting for the RAV from the opposite direction. They arrived at almost the same time and slowed to study the ground around the truck. Both of them shot their flashlight beams inside the RAV, expecting to see Finn’s body slumped in back. Instead, the truck was empty.
“Finn never made it back here,” Maggie said.
“Did you spot Clark’s truck?”
She shook her head and got down on her knees. “Hang on, there’s something caught under the tire.”
Stride saw it, too. Maggie reached around beneath the chassis of the RAV and extracted something white from under the rubber of the tire. When she held it up, they saw that it was a wallet-sized photograph, dirty and wet. She illuminated it with the beam of her flashlight.
“It’s Clark and Mary Biggs,” she said.
“Do you think he left it there for us?”
Maggie shook her head. “It probably fell out of his pocket.”
“If Clark grabbed Finn, where would he take him?” Stride asked.
“I don’t know. Unless he already killed Finn and dumped the body somewhere else.”
Stride put himself in the shoes of a despondent father, confronting the man who had driven his daughter to her death. “I think if he was going to kill him, he’d have done it outside Angela’s window.”