"What business?"

"My business. This one's personal."

The silence across the night air was lethal. "Do you have any idea what's at stake for me?"

"That's your problem," he said.

"What other schemes are you running? Tell me."

He breathed into the phone and saw steam evaporate like a ghost in front of his face. "You don't want to know."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"I mean, Tanjy wasn't the only one. I decided to do some others, too."

He waited. It was funny how even the most arrogant, cold-blooded ego could get punctured like a fat balloon by fear.

"You're a monster."

"Yeah? What does that make you? Remember, it was your idea."

"Who were the others?"

"It doesn't matter. Alpha girls don't give up their secrets." He laughed.

"I want you gone. Is that clear? You've been well paid."

"I'll decide when I'm done, not you."

He snapped the phone shut and turned it off.

With his other hand, he switched on the receiver again and nestled it in his ear. He was back at the van. He slid inside, cranked the heat, and listened. His feet slowly thawed. He peeled off layers of clothes.

Inside Serena's house, the noise of the pipes ended. He heard her return to the bedroom and imagined her nude flesh, pink and scrubbed. Her long, wet hair. Her nipples hard and her mound glistening with moisture. With each of the others, he had imagined he was with Serena. Controlling her. Violating her. Paying her back for those ten years she had stolen from him.

It was her turn.

Soon.

Stride was worried. It was almost midnight, and Maggie was late.

He was parked in the lower lot of the high school, with a vantage on the lights of downtown and the black emptiness of the lake. He had gone through two cigarettes waiting for her. Snow fell in heavy sheets, blowing over the top of the hill and swirling around him like a tornado. It was hard to look straight on into the snow. His eyes squinted, and his face scrunched up, his windburnt cheeks turning pink. Ice clumped in balls on his eyebrows. The flakes streaking toward him were nothing by themselves, but together they were a relentless army. When the wind drove them home, they were like a million knives. They could blind him, freeze him, and bury him in the same storm.

Gauzy headlights appeared on the road above him and swung down into the lot. He recognized Maggie's Chevy Avalanche. Maggie drove fast, and the truck weaved on the slick, steep driveway. It was a huge truck for a tiny woman, so big that she needed wooden blocks to reach the pedals. She was a terrible driver. Stride thought she drove recklessly just to spite him, because she was worse whenever he was in the truck with her.

She parked at an angle near his Bronco and got out. She wore a leather coat that draped to her ankles and high, square-heeled boots. Her hands were shoved in her pockets. She kicked up wet snow as she came closer.

He hadn't seen her since he was at her house the night of the murder, and he realized how much he had missed her. He came closer, ready to hug her, but she pulled a hand out of her pocket and held it up to stop him.

"No," she told him. "No pity. Especially not from you."

The few feet between them may as well have been a canyon. "Come on, Mags. This is me. You don't have to prove how tough you are."

"I sure as hell do." She looked him up and down. "You ever heard of waiting inside your truck? You look like a goddamn snowman."

"I don't mind the cold."

"You mean, you don't want Serena smelling cigarette smoke inside the truck."

"Right."

"Well, I'm not standing outside. Let's get in the Avalanche."

They walked to opposite sides of her truck. Stride shook off as much snow as he could before climbing inside. The cab was warm, and he took off his gloves. Maggie didn't look at him. She sat behind the driver's seat staring at the panoramic view. He realized how strange it felt to see that she was older. There were tiny crow's-feet beside her eyes and a few strands of gray in her jet-black hair. She would always be a twenty-something kid to him, intense and smart. That was part of the problem-for him, she never grew up. It still felt like yesterday that Maggie was a young cop complaining about the Enger Park Girl murder, chewing on the rim of a Styrofoam coffee cup and insisting they had missed something, when Stride knew they hadn't missed anything at all. But that was a long, long time ago. It was as if he had put Maggie in a box in his mind, so that bad things never happened to her, but all the while she got older and bad things happened anyway.

"When?" Stride asked.

Maggie knew what he meant. She reached out and curled her fingers around the steering wheel and held on tightly. "It happened just before Thanksgiving. Eric was out of town."

Stride remembered. She had called in sick for nearly two weeks and blamed it on the flu.

"I was asleep. He had a knife." She brushed her hair back behind her ear and showed him a two-inch-long scar. "I've blocked out most of the details. I just don't remember."

"Jesus," Stride murmured.

"I said no pity, boss. Not from you. Got it?"

Stride thought that her bravado was cellophane-thick.

"You know what I did first?" she went on. "You'll love this. I laughed. It was all so fucking hilarious. This was God's big joke. I told myself I was dreaming, that I had made it all up in my head, that there was no way this could have happened to me. Then the next thing I knew, I was pounding on the floor and wailing. I sat in the dark and cried for two days."

He opened his mouth to say something and then shut it. There was nothing to say.

"You know what I did next?" Maggie continued. "I threw out all the food in the refrigerator. Nuts, huh? Everything. Right down to the bare shelves, and then I sprayed the whole thing down. Same in every room. I went through a dozen cans of Lysol. I didn't want to smell anything. The place was like a hospital."

He clenched his fists. Maggie saw him do it. "If I ever get my hands on this son of a bitch, I'll kill him," he said.

"I know you want to be a hero, boss, but this happened to me, not you. I'm only telling you this now because I don't have any choice."

"Why didn't you come to me back then?"

She turned and stared at him. Her eyes were fierce with pride. "Because this didn't happen to a cop. It happened to a woman. Don't you get it? I didn't want you or any other man to know about this. Not then. Not ever. It was bad enough telling Eric. He wanted me to report it, and I just wanted it to go away. I still do."

"At least tell me you got help."

"Haven't you been listening? I didn't want to talk to anyone. It's killing me to talk about this now. And yeah, I know, this is rape trauma syndrome, and I was in the acute phase, and I was expressive, not controlled, and you know what? It's all psycho bullshit. Everything I've told rape victims over the years is bullshit. This happened to me. If you haven't been where I've been, you don't have a fucking clue."

He searched for the right thing to say and wound up saying the wrong thing. "I just don't understand how you of all people would not report this."

"You saw what happened to Tanjy. She was humiliated. Destroyed. I didn't want the same thing to happen to me."

"It would have been different with you," Stride insisted.

Maggie shook her head. "You can be so stupid, boss. You're a great cop, but you can be so blind sometimes that it drives me crazy. Do you think I don't have secrets? Do you think there aren't things that I don't want out in public?"

"What things?"

"That's none of your business. The whole point is that I didn't go public because I didn't want to have my life ruined."