“He still calls you?”
“Yeah, every day. I guess he misses me, too.”
“Curt will get over it.”
“Oh, he’s not so bad,” Cat replied breezily. “He’s funny. He makes me laugh.”
“If you want to laugh, watch Jimmy Kimmel.”
Cat stuck out her tongue at him in mock exasperation. They’d had this argument many times before, and they both knew they would never see eye to eye about Curt. Then she leaned forward, changing the subject. “Anyway, how are you? You going back to work yet?”
Stride didn’t have an answer for her. Instead, he took out his phone and played Maggie’s voice mail. Cat arched her dark eyebrows at him as she listened.
“Looks like she wants you in your old chair.”
“Looks that way.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Yeah, right,” Cat snorted.
“What does that mean?”
“I see that glint in your eyes,” she told him.
“The glint?”
“You miss it. You miss that life. You miss the police, and you’re lying if you say you don’t.”
“I really don’t,” Stride said.
Cat gave an exaggerated sigh. “Fine. Be stubborn.”
“I don’t miss it,” he insisted.
“Uh-huh. Okay. Well, one of us is right, and the other one of us is you.”
He smiled. “All right, maybe I miss it a little. But only a little.”
“Yeah, keep telling yourself that,” Cat said. “You’re going back. I know you. But keep fooling yourself if you want. I have to get to class.”
“Go.”
She got up from the table, then leaned down and kissed his cheek. “I’ll see you guys for dinner tonight. Late, as usual? Nine o’clock?”
“Sounds good.”
“We’ll order Sammy’s?”
“What else?”
“Thanks for letting me know about Samantha,” she added.
“Sure.”
Before she walked away, Cat whispered in his ear. “Hey, Stride? I’m glad to hear Serena misses me. I miss her, too. If she needs me, I’ll always be there for her. You know I will. But you know what? She needs you more.”
6
“We’ve located the boat,” Maggie announced to the detectives in the police conference room. “Lance Beaton says his cops found it abandoned at a launch in Billings Park in Superior. Based on the registration papers, we think it was stolen from a marina on our side of the water. We’re sending a forensics team to check it out, but Lance says it looks clean as a whistle. Looks like our man stole the boat, collected the ransom, and then ditched it.”
“Was he alone?” Guppo asked. “Or did he have a partner?”
Maggie shook her head. “Not sure. We don’t know whether he left a car in the park or whether someone met him there. Either way, once he was back on shore, he could have gone pretty much anywhere.”
She went to the whiteboard on the far end of the room and used magnetic clips to post several photographs of Chelsey Webster. One was from driver’s license records, and others had been printed from JPEGs that Gavin had sent her.
“Here’s our missing woman,” she said. “Chelsey Webster, forty-six years old, married to Gavin Webster for the last fourteen years. First marriage for both of them. She’s self-employed as a marketing consultant, whatever the hell that means. Gavin is supposed to be getting us a list of her clients and friends. She has no local relatives. Parents are dead, one sibling in Oregon. She went to UMD, worked at a couple of local ad agencies, then opened her own business shortly before marrying Gavin. Right now, that’s all we know about her background.”
She paced on her short legs, not saying anything for a couple of minutes. In front of her on the table was a jumbo-sized Coke from McDonald’s, and she sucked soda through the straw, making dimples in her cheeks. By now, the cops in the room were used to the way she did things. She thought on her feet, sifting through the facts, debating with herself in her head, before she was ready to talk. While the others waited for her, they checked their phones, and although it annoyed her, she’d given up complaining about it.
“Okay, we’ve got three tasks,” she went on finally. “First, find Chelsey Webster, alive or dead. For the time being, we operate on the assumption that she’s alive. We don’t know whether she’s still being held by the kidnappers or whether they’ve left her somewhere and moved on, now that they have the ransom money in hand. We’ve forwarded her picture to police around Minnesota and Wisconsin, plus the state patrol, park rangers, everybody. The chief has a press conference scheduled in an hour, and we’ll blast information to the media, too. That will generate tips from the public, but it also means we’ll be chasing a lot of dead ends.”
She eyed Guppo and Serena, who were sitting in the chairs closest to her. Guppo was eating Fritos and crunching them loudly and licking salt and corn dust off his chubby fingertips. She couldn’t recall a meeting where he wasn’t snacking on something. She also noticed Serena looking out the window toward the trees, as if she were somewhere else altogether.
“What did you two find at Gavin’s house?” she asked.
When Serena didn’t answer, Guppo took over, quickly swallowing a large mouthful of chips. “The damage and blood inside the house confirm that Chelsey was taken from there. None of the neighbors have security cameras that face the street, and no one saw or heard anything on Tuesday evening, so we don’t have descriptions of the kidnappers or their vehicle. One of the neighbors told Serena that their dog began barking right around nine o’clock. That’s probably the best bet for when the abduction actually occurred. Knowing the time helps narrow down the search, but there are so many ways out of that area that we’re not likely to pick anything up from cameras on the roads. Even so, we’ll review all the video we can find along 194, 53, Central Entrance, and 35. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Were there any reports of suspicious activity in the neighborhood in the last couple of weeks?” Maggie asked.
He shook his enormous head. “Nothing.”
“Did you ask about maintenance vans in the area? Contractors, plumbers, whatever? Something that wouldn’t necessarily attract attention if it was parked outside for a while.”
Guppo nodded. “We did, but still no luck.”
“Well, they had to know the layout of the house and the area to pull this off,” Maggie went on. “So either they had personal knowledge” — she put a little emphasis on the words personal knowledge — “or they conducted surveillance as they planned the crime.”
“Well, the camera that Serena found was hooked to the in-house Wi-Fi,” Guppo told the group. “I checked the device activity on their Wi-Fi log, and the camera started operating five days ago. The kidnappers have been watching them ever since.”
“So they were inside the house five days before the abduction?” Maggie asked.
“Right.”
“Why take the risk of planting the camera early?” Maggie asked. “Gavin or Chelsey might have discovered it.”
“Well, with the camera in place, they could see that Chelsey was home alone that night, so they knew when to make their move,” Guppo speculated.
“Was there any local storage? Can we download video that was recorded inside the house?”
Guppo shook his head. “No. The cam wasn’t configured to store data on the device itself. The feed went straight to an app.”
“Well, at least we can talk to Gavin and see what was going on at the house on the day the camera was installed. Maybe they had workers or contractors on-site for some reason.” Maggie looked at Serena. “Do you have anything to add?”