“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know either. I feel like we should do something. Go see her mom or something. Tell her we’re sorry.”

From the corner of her eye, Brittany saw the car approaching—Aaron Fogelman’s midnight-blue Lexus, cruising slowly toward them. The window on the passenger’s side ran down as the car came alongside them at the curb.

“Hey, Britt,” Christina said. “Need a ride?”

It wasn’t a friendly offer. There was accusation in Christina’s expression and her voice. It wasn’t hard to imagine what she thought—that Brittany had ditched them to meet up with Kyle.

Brittany hesitated. She didn’t want a ride. She didn’t want to be with those people another minute. And yet, there was a part of her that was afraid to say no. She hated herself for it, and she hated Kyle for putting her in this position.

Aaron put the car in park, got out, and looked at them across the roof. “Jesus, Hatcher, don’t you ever take a hint? Leave her alone. She doesn’t want to be with a loser like you.”

“Fuck you,” Kyle said. “I’m looking at the loser. You got your boyfriends in the car with you?”

“You’re so funny. You’re such a funny little shit,” Aaron said without a hint of humor. He came around the hood of the car, moving with a menacing swagger. His leather coat hung open, emphasizing the width of his shoulders and chest. “You’re living in quite a fantasy, faggot, drawing pictures like that one you put on Twitter.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d like that,” Kyle said.

Butterflies swarmed in Brittany’s stomach. “Kyle,” she said under her breath.

Aaron looked at her as he came forward. “Brittany, get in the car.”

Kyle stood his ground with his chin up. “You’ll have to come through me.”

“I’m gonna like kicking your ass again,” Aaron said with a nasty smile.

“You can’t do it again if you never did it in the first place,” Kyle shot back.

Brittany shrieked and jumped back as Aaron charged toward Kyle, his right arm pulled back, bare hand balled into a fist.

Much shorter, Kyle easily ducked the punch and threw one of his own. Aaron’s momentum carried him right into it, and his breath left him in a hard whooosh! as his solar plexus met Kyle’s fist. He dropped straight to his knees on the sidewalk and made a terrible alien sound as he tried to suck in a breath.

Christina screamed, “Aaron!”

One of the back doors of the Lexus opened and Eric Owen started to get out.

Kyle took a defensive stance, hands raised, knees bent, his gaze going from Eric to Aaron, who was already pushing himself to his feet.

“I’m gonna fucking kill you, Hatcher!” he said, his voice hoarse and thready.

Before anything more could happen, a maroon sedan with a flashing light on the dash pulled to the curb behind Aaron’s car, and the big detective, Knutson, got out on the passenger’s side and came toward them, an authoritative figure in a leather trench coat and a porkpie hat. Kyle’s mother sat behind the wheel of the car but made no move to get out.

“Is there a problem here?” Knutson asked.

Kyle dropped his hands. “No, sir.”

Aaron shook his head even as he pressed a hand across his stomach.

The detective gave Aaron a cold look. “Then you’ll get back in your car and move along, won’t you, son? There’s no parking on this street.”

Aaron cut Kyle a narrow-eyed, nasty look as he got back in his car. Christina shot Brittany the same look and ran up her window.

Knutson looked at Kyle and Brittany as the Lexus pulled away. “You two kids look like you need a ride somewhere.” He hiked a thumb in the direction of the car. “Get in. Let’s go.”

39

Dana Nolan was the happiest, friendliest, most generous, optimistic, talented, well-adjusted, well-loved person in the Twin Cities. To say nothing of beautiful and kind to human beings and small animals.

Kovac spoke to one after another of the young woman’s coworkers. No one had a bad word to say. No one had a story of a jealousy or an office rivalry. She had a sunny smile on the darkest day and never complained about anything, not even driving to work in the dead of winter at three in the morning.

She had been working at the station for nine months, had come to Minneapolis from a small town in Indiana, had aspirations to be a host on the Today show someday. Her relationship with her college sweetheart had ended three months past, not strong enough to hold up long distance. The breakup had been amicable, according to Dana. She lived alone—not counting her cat—because of her odd schedule.

She had many male admirers, but friends only, no one special at the moment. To the best knowledge of her many friends at work, there were no angry exes, no disgruntled would-be lovers.

Like many women in broadcasting, she had her share of weirdos who called, wrote, e-mailed the station wanting to convey their affections, but none of them had threatened anything violent. Station management was more than happy to compile a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers for further investigation.

She had voiced no concerns in the last few days about anyone bothering her or following her. She had been wrapped up in her extra assignment, reporting on the disappearance of Penelope Gray—an assignment she had lobbied hard for. She had been one of the first newscasters to report the story, and she saw the opportunity the extra exposure might provide her. According to Roxanne Volkman—the woman who had taken over that morning’s broadcast when Dana Nolan had failed to show up for work—Dana had expressed a small sense of guilt that reporting on a tragedy might, in the end, be the break that furthered her career.

The irony hung in the air like a foul odor: that her big break had probably attracted the thing that could end her career in tragedy.

Kovac took it all in with a familiar sense of déjà vu. Tragedy, loss, fear, grief, disbelief, anger. The cycle repeated itself crime after crime. The emotional undercurrent was essentially the same. Only the faces changed.

He learned as much as he could from the people Dana Nolan worked with. He looked over her messy work cubicle, finding nothing of real interest. Snapshots of family and friends. Assorted trinkets and odd keepsakes. The usual.

When he didn’t think his head could hold any more detail, he took himself outside into the cold surrealist landscape of a television station under the scrutiny of other television stations. Several competition news vans sat across the street, recording footage of their brethren’s misfortune.

Kovac dug a cigarette out of a coat pocket and lit it, taking a deep drag and watching the bitter wind take the smoke on his exhale. Hell of a world, he thought. News people reporting on news people missing because they were covering the news so people sitting in the safety of their homes could dig up some sympathy while secretly feeling glad their lives were so mundane they would never make it on the news themselves.

In need of food, he got in the car and drove away from the station. There was bound to be something nearby—fast food, a coffee shop, a convenience store.

A Holiday station.

He saw the sign as he cruised under the freeway. A left instead of a right at the bottom of the exit Dana Nolan would have taken every day to get to work.

The gas pumps and the store were busy with lunchtime customers. Kovac went inside and scoped the place out, looking for the security cameras. There were two clerks working the registers—a tall, bone-thin man who looked like his dour face was carved from ebony, and a short, doughy-looking kid with a shaved head and earrings that looked like miniature walrus tusks had been driven through his earlobes.