Stan and Arlene Foster. Double homicide, Chester Park area. No obvious motive. Business partner remains a suspect.
Letitia Cray. Overdose in suspicious circumstances, Central Hillside. Was scheduled as witness against Fred Dirkson in murder trial (Dirkson case now dropped).
Jonah Fallon. Hit-and-run, Bayview Heights neighborhood, suspect vehicle red Toyota Highlander. No leads.
Ray Palen. Missing since April. Car found near Fish Lake. No evidence of foul play, no indication of suicide.
Ginny Ellis. Homicide (stabbing), body found in Blackmer Park. Husband is principal suspect, insufficient evidence for charges.
Stride checked Abel’s mostly empty desk and matched the tabs on the man’s investigative files to the whiteboards. Abel had left them in identical order from oldest to newest, and he’d written out a summary that he’d paper-clipped to each folder. Whatever else you could say about Abel’s prickly personality, he’d been serious about his work, and he was thorough in passing the baton to the next investigator.
He snatched the file off the top — Stan and Arlene Foster — and put his feet up as he eased back in the chair. As he read the file, he idly squeezed the leather-bound right arm of the chair like a stress ball, a habit he’d had for years. It felt comfortable; it felt natural. It took him a few seconds to realize why, and a smile broke across his face. This was his chair, more than fifteen years old, a chair that had followed him through multiple offices and in the move from downtown. Everything about it was familiar. The worn cushioning on the arms that he’d rubbed away. The scorched hole from years earlier where he’d burned the chair with an illicit late-night cigarette.
Maggie had been pretty confident he’d be coming back.
For the next hour and a half, he read Abel’s files. Cold cases had a way of staying cold, so little had changed about the open investigations he remembered. Most cases got solved in a few days or a few weeks, with nothing left to tie up before trial except some loose ends and evidence reports from the BCA in Saint Paul. But if they didn’t get answers fast, they usually didn’t get them. Sometimes they knew who did it — Stride was sure Byron Ellis had stabbed his wife and left her body in a park to make it look like a stranger homicide — but they simply had no way to prove it. Other times they had no leads, and without leads, there wasn’t much else to do. Jonah Fallon had been struck and killed while jogging on a Saturday evening in May two years earlier on a country road near Proctor. The damage left at the scene had helped them identify the type of vehicle involved in the hit-and-run, but they’d never located the car or the driver. Ray Palen was a thirty-three-year-old single accountant working for one of the region’s indie breweries. He had no history of depression, wasn’t involved in a serious relationship, and had purchased theatre tickets two hours before driving to Fish Lake. Then he vanished. No body, no blood, no evidence in the woods, nothing that indicated what had happened to him. And nothing new had been found in the fifteen months since Abel had last given him an update on the case.
“Well, well, well.”
Stride looked up as he heard the familiar voice. Maggie leaned against the office doorway, eating McDonald’s fries one by one, a sly grin on her face.
“I heard it was true, but I didn’t believe it,” she said. “Jonathan Stride in the flesh.”
“Word is, you need some help around here,” he replied.
“Who told you that?”
“I got a message from the new lieutenant.”
She came and sat down in the chair in front of the desk. Still eating fries, she put her feet up, and the two of them made a matched set. “Between you and me, I hear the new lieutenant is a real bitch.”
Stride smiled. “Yeah, that’s what everyone tells me.”
Maggie threw back her head and laughed. When she was done, she looked at him with that old warmth in her eyes. It was sort of like returning to a familiar beach you’d visited as a child and feeling as if nothing had changed. Except a lot had changed for both of them. They had a complicated history together — a history that included a brief sexual relationship that had crashed and burned — but their friendship had endured through all of the years in between. He was closer to her than almost anyone, maybe even closer than he was to Serena.
“It’s good to see you, Mags.” He added, “I’m catching up on Abel’s files, as requested.”
She waved a french fry in the air dismissively. “Oh, don’t worry about those. They’re stone-cold. They’re not going anywhere.”
“Then why did you call me back?”
She shrugged. “Because I need you here.”
“Seems like you’ve got things under control.”
“Okay, maybe I like having you around.”
“Yeah?”
“Just for eye candy,” she added.
“Mags.”
“Well, I also got a call from somebody who said that you needed to get back to work ASAP because you were driving everybody crazy.”
Stride wondered if it was Serena, but then he knew. “Cat.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure she only went to college to get away from you.”
“So that’s why you called?” Stride asked.
“That’s why I called.”
Stride put his feet back on the floor. He leaned across the desk and stole one of Maggie’s fries, which weren’t on his postsurgery diet. “Well, I’m here. What do you want me to do?”
“I could use your help on the Gavin Webster case. It’s all hands on deck.”
“All right. Whatever you need.”
Maggie couldn’t restrain the little smirk that broke across her face. “Good. Then come on. I need to talk to a hooker.”
Her name was Shanice. They found her leaning against an abandoned building just off Superior Street in the Lincoln Park area. She was negotiating with an overweight man in a dirty white T-shirt who had a cairn terrier on a leash. When the man saw Stride and Maggie coming, he spotted them as cops immediately and beat a hasty retreat in the opposite direction.
Shanice rolled her eyes as they approached. “Well, that’s another forty bucks gone. Thanks a lot, guys.”
“Hey, Shanice,” Stride said, because all the cops knew her, and she knew all the cops.
“Hey yourself, Stride. You back in action?”
“A little relief pitching. We’ll see how it goes.”
“Hey to you, too, Lieutenant,” Shanice added with a mock salute at Maggie. “You guys getting bored up on the hill or something? How do I rate having the city’s two top cops hassling me?”
“No hassles,” Stride said. “Just a couple of questions.”
Shanice shrugged. She was as short as Maggie and chicken-bone skinny. She was only twenty years old but had been a fixture on the Duluth streets since she was fourteen. Her oval face was pretty but overly made-up, with dark pencil liner drawn around her full lips, rainbow shadow above and below her eyes, and narrow black eyebrows studded with several piercings. Thick dreadlocks hung to her waist. She wore a necklace made from purple-and-green stones, dragon earrings, and a tight T-shirt cut off just below her breasts. Below the bare expanse of her tattooed stomach, she wore frayed jeans and four-inch heels.
“Knee pads?” Maggie commented, pointing at red neoprene padding on Shanice’s legs. “Are you kidding me?”