Stride sat outside in his Ford Bronco, watching the crime scene investigation unfold around him. His window was rolled down, and he was smoking a cigarette. He allowed himself one a day, sometimes two. This was his third. The snow continued to fall, sticking in wet sheets to his windshield and blowing into the truck. The icy flakes landed like mosquito bites on his cheek.

He didn't like being shut out of the police activity, but he had already recused himself. When several cops came his way for instructions, he shrugged and pointed them inside Maggie's house to find Abel Teitscher. None of them was happy to realize Teitscher was in charge. That included Stride.

His cell phone rang. He felt as if he could take the pulse of his life by the country song playing on his phone. For a while, he had used "Restless" by Sara Evans as his ring tone. He had been away from Duluth then, on a brief, strange detour to Las Vegas. Now he was back home, but he had never been able to relax, no matter where he was, and he didn't know why. So he put Alabama 's "I'm in a Hurry" on his phone. As the song said, all he really needed to do with his life was live and die.

It was Serena on the other end of the phone. He and Serena shared a house and a bed, but they spent so much time with Maggie that they sometimes felt like a threesome.

"How is she?" Serena asked.

"She's hiding something," Stride said.

"You don't think she did it, do you?"

"No, but she's not being honest. That's going to hurt her."

"Who's running the investigation?"

"I talked to K-2," Stride said, using the department's nickname for Deputy Chief Kyle Kinnick. "He handed it off to Teitscher."

"Shit."

"Yeah, he wouldn't have been my choice."

"Can you help her?"

"Not much. I'm between a rock and a hard place."

"I'm not," Serena said.

"That's true, you can do whatever you want."

"Keep me posted."

Stride closed the phone.

He had been given a second chance after the death of his first wife, Cindy, five years ago. Serena was a former homicide detective from Las Vegas. They had worked a case that had roots in both cities and wound up as lovers. When the case came to an ugly end, he followed Serena back to Las Vegas, but it was obvious after only a few months that Stride was a fish out of water there. When he had a chance to get his old job back in Duluth, he jumped at it and asked Serena to come with him. She didn't offer any promises or guarantees; she was worried that she would be as much an outcast in Duluth as Stride had been in Vegas. But she had been with him here for more than a year now.

Stride glanced at the stone steps leading to Maggie's front door and saw Abel Teitscher heading his way. Strangely, he had Teitscher to thank for the opportunity to come back to Duluth. When Stride left the city, Teitscher had applied for and won the job as lieutenant overseeing the Detective Bureau. He was a solid investigator, dogged and thorough, and he had the gray hair for the job. Teitscher, in his mid-fifties, was almost a decade older than Stride, but he was a stubborn loner with no gift for leadership. The detectives on the force launched a near rebellion after a few months with Teitscher in charge, and K-2 was forced to rescind Teitscher's promotion. He used the opportunity to lure Stride back from Las Vegas to lead the squad again.

Teitscher still carried the grudge.

The older detective came around to the passenger side of Stride's Bronco and squeezed his long legs inside without being asked. They eyed each other with strained politeness.

"Hello, Abel," Stride said.

Teitscher nodded. "Lieutenant."

The older detective carried all of his years in his face. He was tall and lean, with white skin and a spider's web of wrinkles carved into his narrow cheeks. His hair was gray, clipped in a military crew cut that neatly matched his trimmed Hitler mustache. He was an obsessive runner, without an ounce of fat on his body, but he wound up looking skeletal and unhealthy, with jutting cheekbones and a protruding jawline. His wire-rimmed glasses were too large for his face.

"Have you lost your mind, Lieutenant?" Teitscher asked.

"Meaning what?"

"You contaminated a crime scene."

Stride shook his head. "I did no such thing."

"You were here for an hour with the body and the suspect before you called the police."

"I am the police," Stride reminded him.

"Not on this case. You knew damn well K-2 would yank you. What the hell were you thinking?"

"This is Maggie we're talking about. She didn't do it."

"No? You're not looking at the evidence, Lieutenant."

Stride didn't want to get into a fight, not here, not now. "Look, Abel, Maggie called me first. We've worked side-by-side for ten years. I came and talked to her. I made sure there was no one else in the house. Then I rallied the troops. End of story."

"You're a witness now. I have to interrogate you."

"Go ahead."

Teitscher shook his head. "Not now. But I want a report from you of everything that went on while you were alone in the house with her. This is on the record."

"Fine," Stride said.

"I want it by noon."

Teitscher opened the truck door, and Stride clapped a hand on his shoulder. "You're a good cop, Abel, but sometimes you get so focused on what's in front of you that you don't see the big picture."

"What does that mean?"

"This is Maggie. If she says she didn't do it, you can take that to the bank. Something else is going on here."

Teitscher leaned in close, and Stride winced at the musk of his cologne. "I'll tell you what's going on. I've got a woman inside with a dead husband and her gun on the floor. And she's lying to me. You think I can't tell?"

"If she's hiding something, it's not about the murder."

"Listen to yourself, Lieutenant," Teitscher said scornfully. "If this were anyone else, you'd practically have her in cuffs by now."

Stride knew he was right, but he also knew that Abel had his own bias, too. "Are we talking about Maggie here, or are we talking about Nicole?"

Teitscher flushed. "That was years ago."

"That's right. Years ago, it was your partner with a dead husband on the floor. You trusted Nicole, and you were wrong. So now you're poisoned against Maggie."

"You should have learned the same lesson that I did," Teitscher snapped. He thrust his long legs out of the Bronco, then stuck his head and shoulders back through the door. He wore a trench coat that wasn't suited for the cold, and it billowed behind him like a cape. "You can't trust anyone, Stride. Instead of covering for Maggie, maybe you should ask yourself how well you really know her."

Stride thought about Teitscher's words as he drove home. How well did he really know Maggie? The answer was, better than almost anyone else on the planet.

She was nothing like the quiet, conservative Chinese girl he had first met more than a decade ago. She had grown up in Shanghai and gone to the University of Minnesota at age eighteen to study criminology. When she became enmeshed in political activism on campus following the uprising in Tiananmen Square, she found herself on the wrong side of the Chinese government and decided to stay in Minnesota after graduating, rather than risk prison back home.

Stride hired her for her near-photographic memory and her razor-sharp ability to size up a crime scene. She was smarter than most cops who had been on the job for years, but she was blunt and serious, much more Chinese than American. She didn't care about fashion or makeup, and she didn't crack jokes. Her face never moved. When Stride teased her, she thought she had done something wrong.

But times changed, and so did Maggie.

A decade in the United States had transformed her. She was stylish and hip today, with a closet full of leather and spiked heels. Most of the time, she shopped in the girls' department because she was so small, and she was as well turned-out as any trendy teen. In her mid-thirties, she managed to look twenty-five and pull it off. Her round bowl haircut was oddly old-fashioned, as if that were her one concession to her Chinese roots. But otherwise she was carefully made-up, right down to the diamond stud she had added last year to her thimble of a nose. Hurt like hell, she said, but she loved the glint of the jewel on her face.