Teitscher arrived at the apartment a few minutes later, and his bloodhound eyes found Stride by the window. His trench coat was wet with snow.
"Anything?" Stride asked, but when he saw Abel's face, he knew it was bad news. His heart misfired again.
Teitscher's mustache formed a frown. "We found Pete McKay's squad car in a downtown parking ramp."
"Did you check it out?"
"Yeah. Look, Lieutenant, I can't sugarcoat this. We found bloodstains in the trunk. But we're not talking about a lot of blood. No one bled out in there, okay?"
Stride needed a cigarette badly. His racing nerves made his fingers tremble. He reminded himself again not to think about Serena and not to dwell on what might be happening to her. Think about Deed. Work the case.
"So you think he switched cars," Stride said.
"Yeah. I also think Serena's alive."
Teitscher didn't explain, but Stride knew what he meant. If Serena were dead, Deed would have left her body in the trunk of the car. "Were there any cameras in the ramp?" Stride asked.
"No, but this guy has one of the purple Byte Patrol vans checked out to him. We haven't found it. We're calling everyone with an emergency ATL on the van. We've got highway patrol staking out all three of the north-south arteries-Thirty-five, Sixty-one, and One sixty-nine-in case this guy tries to head toward the Cities. The Canadian border is on alert, too."
"How about Wisconsin?"
"Yeah, we've got Wisconsin Thirty-five covered. K-2 pulled in off-shift personnel, and we're blanketing the city. The media's on it, too. I know it won't do much good until the morning news programs, but we'll have the public on the lookout tomorrow. We'll get helicopters up when it stops snowing."
Stride couldn't escape the feeling that tomorrow would be too late. "He probably has another vehicle," he said.
"Probably."
Stride shouted at the store owner, who was sifting through the material on Deed's computer. Craig was no more than thirty, wearing gray sweatpants and a red UMD sweatshirt with ratty sneakers. He looked half-asleep. He was tall and thin, with big, frizzy red hair and a lumberjack's beard. "Hey!" Stride called. "Do you know if this Deed had another car? Did you ever see him driving anything other than your van?"
Craig rubbed his eyes. "No, he kept the van overnight most of the time."
"Hiding in plain sight," Teitscher said. "Those vans are so noticeable that no one notices them."
"So maybe we'll get lucky, and he's still in it," Stride replied. "Keep me posted. Check in every half hour."
"I will. Look, Lieutenant, I know this doesn't mean shit coming from me, but I feel bad about this."
"Thanks, Abel."
"I'm also not saying I was wrong about Maggie, but this thing looks more complicated than I thought."
"You played it the way I would have done in your shoes," Stride told him.
"Maggie called and asked me if she could be part of the search. I probably shouldn't have done it, but I said okay."
Stride shrugged. "She would have done it anyway."
"I know."
"Better be careful, Abel, people will start saying you're soft."
"Yeah. That'll happen soon."
Teitscher left, and Stride continued studying Deed's apartment, looking for clues to the man. The apartment building was a drab high-rise near the pawn shops and gun stores on the far south end of Superior Street. Through his sixth-floor window, Deed looked out on a jigsaw puzzle of highway overpasses where the freeway broke apart into the city streets. It was cheap, anonymous, and seconds away from a quick escape.
Inside the one-bedroom apartment itself, there was little to distinguish the man. He ate chicken TV dinners, tacos, guacamole chips, and frozen chunks of walleye wrapped in aluminum foil. The kitchen reeked of fish. The apartment came furnished, and Deed had added little of his own other than a high-end PC. They found no magazines, no bank records, and no receipts. All they had was a description of the man: tall, heavy, strong, early forties, with black hair down below his neck, dark eyes, and a hawklike nose. He wore jeans and denim shirts when he wasn't wearing the Byte Patrol purple T-shirt.
Something about the apartment bothered Stride, but whatever it was waited like a ship in the fog and refused to show itself. The more he tried to focus his senses, the more the feeling became gauzy, as if he were imagining things. There was nothing to see here and nothing to find.
Stride pulled a kitchen chair next to the store owner, Craig, who was clicking the computer keys and staring at the screen through bleary eyes.
"What have you got?" Stride asked.
"Enough to fucking well put me out of business," Craig retorted. "This asshole put back doors and spyware into every computer he touched through the store."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning he could use their Internet connections to log on to their systems, paw through their hard drives, and track every fucking keystroke they made. He knew everything."
"I'm going to need names."
"Yeah, sure, I'll print you a list. They're all going to sue me."
"What else?" Stride asked.
"What else am I looking for?"
"Anything that will help us find this guy. Where he goes. Where he shops. What he does. He's got to have a hideaway somewhere."
"What I've found isn't going to help you. It's mostly hard-core porn. Disgusting stuff, lots of bondage."
"What about local sites? People, places, businesses based around Duluth? Blogs, MySpace pages, anything like that?"
"Not that I saw."
"Did he ever visit a blog called 'The Lady in Me'? Or mention a woman called Helen Danning?"
Craig tapped the keys for a few seconds. "Doesn't look like it."
"What about online bank records?"
"Nope." Craig yawned.
"Am I keeping you up here?" Stride asked.
"It's three in the morning, man. I should be asleep."
"Yeah, things are tough all over. I already woke up a judge in the middle of the night to get a search warrant, and she's not too happy with me either. It's really too bad I yanked you out of bed just because this son of a bitch you hired has kidnapped a woman and may already have raped and killed her. So keep looking and find me something."
"Yeah, okay, okay, sorry." Craig hunched his shoulders and went back to the keyboard.
Stride's cell phone rang, and the song taunted him. He was in a hurry and knew why. He got up and walked to the window again as he answered the call.
"Negatory on the state database," Guppo said. "He's not local."
"How about the feebs?"
"They're working on it right now. They promise it's a top priority."
"Thanks."
Stride hung up.
He straddled a chair and studied the barren apartment again. What the hell was it? There was something here, something obvious that didn't make sense, and he was missing it. He got up and checked the garbage again and looked at the scraps of food wrappers. Bacon packaging. An empty egg carton and broken eggshells. The butcher's paper from a package of ground beef, purchased at a local twenty-four-hour market. He had already sent someone to the store to see if any of the employees remembered anything about Deed. Where he went, what he drove, who he was with.
He was still missing something.
"Hey, Lieutenant," Craig called. "I think you should see this."
Stride stood over the man's shoulder. "What is it?"
"Pictures. Lots of them. Mostly of the same woman."
Craig dragged the mouse and clicked a tiny icon, and a string of thumbnail images scattered across the black screen.
"I can run them all like a slide show," Craig said.
"Do it."
The first of the pictures zoomed out to full size. Stride's heart sank. It was Serena. He recognized the area, which was downtown Saint Paul, in Rice Park near the Ordway. Another photo clicked onto the screen, and this was Serena, too. Near the Duluth courthouse. He forced himself to look at the entire collection. They were almost all of Serena, more than sixty images. Secret photos, taken from a distance. Some were near their own home, on the beach, through their windows.