"Call me Nicole. I want to talk with you about the murder of Eric Sorenson."

"You should talk to the police."

Nicole scoffed. "We both know that Abel already has his teeth in a suspect. Believe me, he won't listen to anything I have to say."

"Why's that?"

"He used to be my partner."

Serena stood up straight and wiped her sleeve across her forehead. "What kind of information do you have, Nicole?"

"How about we talk face-to-face about that?"

"I don't recall Jonny mentioning you," Serena said.

"Jonny?"

"Stride."

"Oh, yeah. Well, I don't suppose he thinks much about me anymore. They all want to forget me. Look, Archie said you wanted to help out on this case. So do you want my help or not?"

"If it's a useful lead, absolutely."

"Then come see me."

"We could have lunch at Grandma's," Serena said.

Nicole's voice was bitter. "There's nothing I'd like more, believe me. Unfortunately, I don't live in Duluth anymore. I'm in the Twin Cities in a town called Shakopee."

"That's okay. I'm driving down to the Cities tomorrow anyway. Where would you like to meet?"

"You'll have to come to me. I'm in prison."

Serena exhaled steam and looked around to see if anyone was watching her. The bridge railing under her fingers was cold. "I thought you said you were a cop."

"That's right. I used to be in the Detective Bureau in Duluth. Then I was framed for my husband's murder. Just like Maggie."

Grassy Point Park was a speck of green shaped like a knife hooking into the narrow channel of St. Louis Bay. It was on a dead-end road in the heart of the city's industrial area, near ore docks and railroad tracks. The frozen harbor was on Stride's left. He could have driven onto the ice and taken a shortcut back home around the Wisconsin peninsula. On his right, where the park ended, he saw Santa Fe railcars loaded high with rock on the other side of a barbed wire fence. The wind was fierce and cold, and the morning sky overhead was a gray shroud.

This was where Tanjy said she was taken, tied to the tall fence by the rail yard, and assaulted.

He put himself in Tanjy's mind, imagining it was night in early November. The lights of the bridge to Superior glistened to the north. They were close enough to the water to hear waves slapping on the shore. Tanjy struggled, but there was a knife to her throat, and she didn't make a sound. She was tied up and stripped. The loops of the fence crushed against her naked skin.

After, she was alone. Humiliated. She didn't cry out for help. She freed herself, drove home, and washed away the shame and the evidence.

Stride shook his head. There was a piece of the puzzle that didn't fit.

When she first told Stride the story, one detail struck him as odd. After the rape, the assailant left Tanjy's car behind, because he had another car waiting for him in the park. At the time, Stride wondered how the rapist could have left a car behind for himself and made his way out of the park and back into the city. When Tanjy admitted lying about the rape, he forgot about the anomaly. Now it was back in his mind.

The murder scene left him with the same suspicion. If Tanjy's murderer transported her to Hell's Lake in the trunk of her car, and then disposed of the car in the woods after dumping her body in the ice, where was his own car? He couldn't have walked far in the subzero weather. He also couldn't very well drive two cars at the same time. So how did he vacate the desolate woods where he left Tanjy's car?

Answer: There was someone else involved. Someone driving another car.

Maybe. Or maybe he and Abel were both thinking what the killer wanted them to think.

Stride gripped the fence with both hands. The more he imagined Tanjy's rape, the more he felt a jolt of anger and regret, thinking about Maggie. He had to control his rage and dole it out into his veins in doses, like adrenaline. In Las Vegas, when his partner got shot, he had felt the same fury that left him teetering on the edge of control.

He was angry with Maggie, too. Angry that she had let it go, destroyed evidence, failed to report a crime. He knew it was easy for him to make that judgment when he didn't live through it, but he was also angry that she had cut him out of her life by not sharing her pain with him, by not trusting him. The intimacy between them felt broken, even though he had no right to expect it from her.

He turned away from the fence when he heard a muffled symphony of noise and felt a thumping bass ricochet inside his chest. He saw a brown Lexus SUV pull into a parking place next to his Bronco. The engine cut off, and the music stopped. Tony Wells got out, clutching a venti cup of Starbucks coffee. He took several sips as he walked over to Stride. He wore a tan parka with a fur-lined hood and dress pants and shoes that were ill-suited to the snow heaped over the park grass.

"Good morning, Lieutenant."

"Thanks for coming down here, Tony." He gestured at the car and added, "Castrating pigs again, are you?"

"Oh, yes, another country music fan," Tony said with a faint smile. "Smashing Pumpkins won a Grammy for that song, you know."

"For what? Song most likely to make a listener conduct his own autopsy?"

Tony pulled his hood down and smoothed his thinning hair. "I read a study recently about some poor lab mice who were subjected to Toby Keith twenty-four hours a day for a month. They all developed cancer."

Stride laughed. It was an old argument between them.

He was probably one of the few cops in Duluth who had never seen Tony Wells professionally. The job did that to you-it stirred up rat holes and made you do things you never wanted to do, like drink, or hit your wife, or roll your car on a slick highway. Tony was good at taming the rats. Maggie and Serena both liked him. Stride had needed counseling himself once, but he never wanted to see a cop's shrink. He didn't like sharing stories with someone who knew everyone else's stories. After Cindy died, he found a therapist thirty miles away in Two Harbors and went there once a week for six months, which wasn't enough to prevent him from rebounding into a bad marriage.

"You know this is where Tanjy Powell said she was raped?" Stride asked.

He watched Tony take the measure of the area around him. Parks looked lonely in the winter, devoid of life.

"Yes."

"You know that she really was raped, don't you? She didn't make it up."

Tony worked his jaw as if something were caught between his teeth. "I'm in an uncomfortable position, Lieutenant. I want to help, but I'm not sure I can."

"Tanjy is dead," Stride reminded him. "You can't do her any harm by talking to me. You can only help me find out who did this to her."

"Tanjy was an intensely private person."

"I know she was, but I need your help, Tony. We go back a long way. I respect your loyalty, but your patient is dead. I think she'd want you to talk to me."

Stride could see that the choice was a genuine struggle for Tony. As a therapist with close ties to the police, Tony had seen them all-detectives, victims, and perpetrators-and he didn't always have a rule book to work around ethical conflicts.

"Yes, all right," Tony said finally. "I'd like to see you catch whoever did this. Tanjy deserves that."

"Thanks."

"What can I tell you?"

"Do you know who Tanjy was seeing at the time of the assault?"

"No, she never gave me a name. She was very discreet. It made therapy difficult sometimes, because she gave me so few details about her life." Tony hesitated.

"What is it?"

"Well, she did think she had a stalker. She told me she was being watched."

"Did she know who it was?"

"No, she said it was just a feeling."

"When was this?"

"Shortly before the rape."

"Did she give you any other details?"