Alter Ego

Book 10: Jonathan Stride

by Brian Freeman

Genres: Mystery; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Detective Jonathan Stride returns in a brand-new thriller from internationally bestselling author Brian Freeman.

When a freak accident kills a driver on the remote roads outside Duluth, Jonathan Stride is disturbed to discover that the victim appears to be a “ghost,” with a false identity and no evidence to suggest who he really was. What’s worse, the man has a gun locked in the trunk—and it has recently been fired.

The next day Stride learns that a Duluth college student has vanished and worries that the two incidents are related. But what would have put an ordinary young woman in the crosshairs of a man who has all the hallmarks of an assassin for hire?

Stride’s investigation of the girl’s disappearance leads him onto the set of a film crew in Duluth, where a movie is being made based on a case in his own past. The actor playing Stride is Hollywood royalty, an award-winning icon who has charmed his way to the top of the box office.

But Stride soon hears whispers that his alter ego has a dark side and, in trying to expose the truth, discovers that he has made a powerful enemy who will stop at nothing to protect his reputation.

Release date: October 17, 2019

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

The man in the Australian oilskin coat and black cowboy hat didn’t realize it yet, but fate already had dealt him the thirteenth tarot card. A skeleton on a white horse rode his way, bringing death. He had ninety seconds to live.

He struggled through knee-deep snow past skeletal birches and evergreens that shook their hunched shoulders at him. The bitter, driving wind in his face was so cold, it actually burned. Under the clouds, the night was black, with no moon or stars. He used a flashlight to make his way back to the lonely highway. When he looked behind him, he saw wind and snow filling in his footsteps. Soon there would be no evidence that he’d been here at all.

An owl hooted above him. The bird was close by, but then it lifted invisibly over the high trees as if alarmed by his arrival. Its mournful calls got farther away. Owls were another harbinger of coming death, but he didn’t think about that.

He was a summer man in a winter place. It was January in the empty lands northwest of Duluth. The coat he wore would have been fine for a Florida cold front but not for the subzero temperatures here. His leather gloves were unlined. His feet inside his boots were wet from the deep snow. The cowboy hat left his ears exposed, and he wore no scarf over his face.

He’d been outside for half an hour. Skin froze in ten minutes.

The trail back to the road felt endless. He didn’t recall traveling so far on his way in, but if you were hiding something you didn’t want anyone to find, you had to look for the most remote section of the forest. Adrenaline had propelled him at first, but now he was simply numb. He was ready to get away and go back home to the South. In his imagination, warm sunshine glowed on a long stretch of sand by the still waters of the Gulf.

Sixty seconds remained.

The light of his flashlight finally glinted on his rented Chevy Impala on the shoulder of Highway 48. Its windshield was already dusted over with fresh snow. He trudged the last few steps and climbed inside. He switched on the engine and waited for warm air to blast through the vents. In the mirror, he saw his face, which was mottled white. He left his hat on. He peeled off his gloves, threw them on the seat, and struggled to bend his fingers. He kicked off his boots and rolled off his wet socks. He’d drive barefoot.

The windshield wipers pushed away the snow that had gathered while he was gone. He glanced at the woods from where he’d come and couldn’t see his trail in the darkness. A few more minutes, another inch of snow, and the white bed would look virginal again. He drove away fast, kicking up a white cloud behind him. His speed was reckless. The pavement was almost invisible in the blizzard, and the plows wouldn’t be out until morning. Even so, he wanted to put as much distance as he could between himself and the place where he’d stopped.

He grabbed his phone from the inside pocket of his coat. The signal was weak here, but he punched a single speed-dial number with his thumb. He’d used the phone only to call that one number. When he got to Minneapolis, he’d find a place to ditch the phone for good. No one would ever find it.

He heard a ringing on the other end. It was the middle of the night, but his contact was waiting for the call.

“It’s me,” he said. His numb lips slurred the words.

“Any problems?” the person on the other end asked.

“No.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m leaving town.”

“Okay. Good luck.”

That was all. He hung up the phone.

If he’d glanced out the window next to him, he might have seen the skeleton keeping pace with his car and counting off the last few seconds with the bones of its hand. Ten, nine, eight—

Headlights shone in the opposite lane. There were only two vehicles out on the snow-swept road: his Impala and a truck roaring northward toward him.

He leaned forward, squinting.

Something strange was happening. The truck’s lights blinked at him. A shadow came and went in front of them. He heard a bass horn, a thud, and a quick screech of tires. His heart pounded, but the truck passed him safely with a shudder of wind. For a millisecond, the deserted highway stretched out in front of him, just wilderness on both sides and snow swirling in his lights like thousands of flies.

He remembered that he was going home.

That was the last conscious thought of his life. In the next instant, his neck snapped and he was dead.

*

Maggie Bei of the Duluth Police zipped her down coat to her chin as she hopped from the driver’s seat of her beat-up yellow Avalanche. The jacket draped to her knees. It was bright red, making her body look like a tube of lipstick. She pulled the fleece hood over her head, but the wind chill hit her like a shovel to the face. The air temperature was twelve degrees below zero. In the wind, it felt like forty below.

“Why the hell do we live here?” she asked Sergeant Max Guppo, not hiding her crabbiness.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Guppo replied cheerfully. “A little nippy maybe.”

Guppo was as round as he was short, and he had the advantage of 250 pounds of padding on his frame. He seemed blissfully unaware of the cold, although the bulbs on his cheeks looked extra rosy tonight.

The highway around them was closed. Clouds of snow blew past the lights of the emergency vehicles. A trailer truck was parked safely on the shoulder a hundred yards to the north. The Impala, which had spun when the driver lost control, was lodged tail first in the drifts at the base of the highway shoulder. Its windshield was completely shattered.

Maggie could see the forlorn brown carcass of the deer where the first responders had dumped it in the snow after prying it from the front seat of the Impala.

“Tell me again what happened here,” she said.

“Freak accident,” Guppo replied. “The truck back there hit a deer, and the thing went airborne. Must have been like a missile. The deer landed on the Impala, went through the windshield, and took out the driver. Broke his neck, practically decapitated him. Talk about your bad luck.”

Maggie shook her head. “Yikes. Killed by a flying deer two weeks after Christmas. What do you think? Dancer? Prancer? Vixen?”

Guppo choked back a laugh. “I heard the EMTs saying they should stick a red nose on the deer before you got here.”

Maggie grinned. She had a well-earned reputation for sarcasm. When you’re a forty-year-old detective small enough to buy your clothes in the teen section—and you have to boss around twenty-something Minnesota cops who look like Paul Bunyan—you learn pretty fast to develop a smart mouth.

“Who called in the accident?” she asked.

“The truck driver. He saw the car go off the road in his mirror.”

“Is he okay?”

“Fine. The deer barely dented his truck.”

“Was he drunk?”

“The deer? I don’t think so.” Guppo laughed as Maggie’s bloodshot eyes narrowed into annoyed little slits. “No, the truck driver was sober.”

“Okay, you want to tell me why we’re here?” Maggie asked. “This looks like nothing more than a weird traffic accident. I’m guessing there must be some other reason the highway cops called us in.”

Guppo nodded. He hoisted a hard-shell plastic case in his gloved hand and set it on the hood of Maggie’s Avalanche. “The cops found this case in the snow a few feet from the wreck of the Impala. It must have been ejected through the window when the car went off the shoulder. As soon as they saw what was inside, they called me.”

Guppo popped the lid of the case. Inside, nestled in foam cushioning, was a black Glock and a spare ammunition clip.

Maggie leaned forward and gave it a whiff. “This thing’s been fired recently.”

“Yeah. And it gets more interesting. I checked the guy’s pockets after they pulled him out. He had ten thousand dollars in cash wrapped up in a tight roll. His wallet had nothing in it except a Florida driver’s license under the name James Lyons at an address in Miami. No credit cards. No other ID. I made a call to the Miami PD to check him out for me. They’re supposed to call me back.”

“Anything else?”

“He was barefoot. His boots were soaking wet and covered with pine needles. So were the legs of his pants. He’d been walking through the woods not long before the accident.”

“In the middle of the night? In a blizzard like this? I don’t like that. Have we checked the trunk of the car?”

“No, it’s buried in the snow. We won’t be able to get to it until we get a tow truck out here.”

“What about a cell phone?” Maggie asked.

“The EMTs found it on the floor of the car. The call log shows half a dozen calls to the same Duluth number. That was it, nothing else. I dialed the number. No answer.”

“And the car?”

“It was rented ten days ago at the Minneapolis airport. He also had a receipt in his pocket from a cheap place that rents efficiency apartments up on the hill in Hermantown. Paid cash. He’s been in town since he rented the car.”

Maggie shoved the hood back from her head. The wind made a mess of her black hair. She’d worn bowl-cut bangs for most of her life, but she’d been growing her hair out for six months. Her stylist had added some spiral curls. Now she looked like Lucy Liu if Lucy wore no makeup and hadn’t gotten any sleep in days.

She wandered over to the ambulance and gestured for the EMTs to open the rear doors. She clambered inside, where the body of the Impala driver lay under a sheet on a metal gurney. She drew the sheet back to study his face, which was difficult to distinguish because of the dried blood. She could make out scars and a dimpled square jaw. His blondish hair was short and shot through with gray, and it had a ridge where he’d worn a hat. He wasn’t old but probably was north of fifty.

“What were you shooting at?” she murmured. Then she stared through the back of the ambulance at the empty forest land that went on for miles. “And what were you doing out here?”

Maggie pulled the sheet back over the body and climbed out of the ambulance. She slid down the slick slope from the highway to the wreck of the Impala, which jutted into the air at a forty-five-degree angle. The front doors were cracked open; the back doors were entombed in drifts. All the windows were shattered and empty. She peered inside and saw that the front seats were covered in glass and blood. Through the back windows, she saw a cowboy hat upside down against the rear window. On the rear floor, she noticed a crumpled piece of newspaper. She reached in through the broken window to grab the paper with her gloved hand. Blood had soaked the pages. When she smoothed out the four-page sheet, she recognized an entertainment tabloid called the National Gazette. The newspaper was at least a week old.

“That’s what you were reading?” she murmured. “Really?”

She turned over the sheet and saw an article outlined with black marker. The headline read:

NEW DEAN CASPERSON THRILLER DOGGED BY WINTER WEATHER

The rest of the article was illegible, but Maggie didn’t need to read it. She knew all about the film that was being shot on location around Duluth. It was called The Caged Girl, and it was based on a series of murders that had taken place in the city more than a decade earlier. She’d lived the case; she’d been part of it. Of course, in typical Hollywood fashion, the role of the Chinese cop was now a bit part given to a redheaded bombshell. Life was unfair.

She heard the labored breathing of Max Guppo as he slipped down the snowy slope to join her beside the car. She pointed at the article in the tabloid.

Guppo read the headline, too. “You think this is about the movie?”

“Could be.”

“You going to call Stride?”

“Sure,” she replied. “Why should he get to sleep when we’re awake?”

“I’ve got something else,” Guppo added. “I just got a call back from the police in Miami.”

“And?”

“The driver’s license is for someone named James Lyons, but the real James Lyons died five years ago. Our corpse is a John Doe with a stolen identity. He’s some kind of ghost.”

In what felt like an out-of-body experience, Jonathan Stride watched himself sprint toward the hunting lodge on the shore of the small lake. He could see himself from the side, where silver sprays of snow washed across his face. His black-and-gray hair was pushed back by the wind. He could see himself from above, running along the narrow dirt road through ruts of ice. He could see his face screwed up with intensity as he neared the tiny cabin.

There, inside an eight-foot by eight-foot cage, a young woman was near death and running out of time.

It wasn’t real, of course.

None of it was real except the Duluth snow. The detective on the road was actually a Hollywood star named Dean Casperson. A camera followed Casperson on railroad tracks built beside the road. A drone filmed him from overhead as he ran. Microphones picked up the sound of his breath and the whistle of the wind. As Stride watched, Casperson reached the wooden door of the shed and ripped it open.

Cut.

End of scene.

The actor, the director, the camera operators, the sound engineers, the gaffers, the grips, the production designers, and the location manager all began to reset for the next take. The crew worked quickly. It was already midafternoon, and the natural light wouldn’t last long. Days were short in January, and time was money on a movie set.

The Caged Girl.

Inspired by actual events.

Eleven years earlier, Stride had rescued a young woman named Lori Fulkerson from a cage that was almost identical to the one on the set. It had been built by a serial killer named Art Leipold. Lori had been his fourth victim. Stride had been too late to save the three earlier women who had died while Art played his game of cat and mouse with the police.

The movie script took liberties with what had really happened when Stride rescued Lori. He hadn’t been alone. Maggie Bei and half a dozen other police officers had stormed the remote hunting lodge with him. The real cabin wasn’t anywhere near a lake; it was hidden inside a few acres of forested hunting land. But this was the movies, where reality didn’t mean a thing. The only thing that mattered was what looked good on the big screen.

Even so, the Hollywood version made Stride think about the past again.

He hadn’t even been forty years old back then. His first wife, Cindy, was still alive. It would be three more years before she died of cancer. He’d just been made the lieutenant in charge of the city’s detective bureau that summer. The audio CD that had arrived at his desk on a sticky July day was like a grim welcome to the responsibilities of his new position.

The tape was of a woman breathing raggedly, crying, and banging on the walls for freedom. She said the same four words over and over.

“Save me, Jonathan Stride.”

That was what made the case so personal. Every victim used his name.

The voice on the tape belonged to a St. Scholastica journalism student named Kristal Beech. She’d gone missing after the evening shift of her job at Maurice’s at Miller Hill Mall. Stride and his detectives had analyzed the sound recording for clues to her location. They’d done chemical analyses of the envelope, handwriting, and postage stamp. They’d delved into Kristal’s life to find out who could have taken her.

But they failed.

Kristal died of dehydration before they could find her. Stride received a photograph of her body with a message scrawled across the back:

Better luck next time.

Next time came two months later. Tanya Carter was a twenty-five-year-old waitress at Bellisio’s in Canal Park. Stride had received another CD with a message from Tanya: Save me, Jonathan Stride. As before, he and his team had no idea where she was being held and no clues about the killer’s identity. And as before, they didn’t find her.

Better luck next time.

It happened all over again just before Thanksgiving with a thirty-one-year-old publicist for a nonprofit organization named Sally Wills. The third victim.

After that, for six weeks the killer went silent, but they knew he wasn’t done. In January, during one of the city’s most bitter stretches of cold weather, the next audio CD arrived. This time the woman was Lori Fulkerson, a twenty-two-year-old bookkeeper.

The message was the same: Save me, Jonathan Stride.

The only thing that was different was that the killer finally had made a mistake. They found a small broken shard of plastic from a pen in Lori Fulkerson’s apartment. The killer must have dropped it, stepped on it, and then tried to pick up the pieces. Maybe he was hurrying because of the cold, but he missed a piece. The fragment of plastic had a partial fingerprint on it, and the fingerprint led them to Art Leipold.

From there, they’d located Art’s hunting cabin in the remote woods. That was where they found Lori Fulkerson.

“Brings it all back, doesn’t it?” said a voice at his shoulder.

Stride turned and found Chris Leipold standing next to him.

“It does,” Stride agreed.

“Is it strange to see yourself in the movies?”

Stride shrugged. “It’s not me.”

“You know what I mean,” Chris said.

“I do, but it must be worse for you.”

“Well, the movie’s not about Art. It’s about you and Lori and the other women. Definitely not Art.”

Chris was the screenwriter and executive producer behind The Caged Girl. He was also the son of the man behind the crimes, Art Leipold. Chris had been a creative writing student in Duluth during his father’s killing spree. He’d sat in court every day as a trove of DNA, fingerprint, and soil evidence made the case against Art. He’d left Minnesota for Los Angeles soon after his father was convicted to get away from the notoriety of being the son of a serial killer. On the West Coast, he’d gotten lucky. He’d written back-to-back screenplays that became indie award winners at Sundance. From that point forward, he’d been in demand.

“I wasn’t trying to make peace with my father by making the movie,” Chris went on. “I was trying to get inside the heads of people whose lives are affected by someone like him.”

“I’m not a fan of people getting inside my head,” Stride said.

“That’s not exactly news, Lieutenant.”

Stride’s lips twitched into a smile. He’d resisted Chris’s invitation to talk about the case as Chris did the research for the screenplay. He had no interest in having his life dramatized for the world to see. After nine months of playing hard to get, he’d finally relented. Stride’s new wife, Serena, had encouraged him to do it. So had Cat Mateo, the teenage girl who lived with them. When Serena and Cat teamed up, Stride found it hard to say no.

So he and Chris had spent a weekend talking about what Stride had gone through as each victim died. Along the way, they’d become friends.

Chris wasn’t a big man. He was slight, five foot six, with a narrow face and thinning sandy blond hair. He wore tiny wire-rimmed glasses over his brown eyes that made him look like a scientist rather than a writer. A decade of L.A. weather had thinned his blood. He looked cold even in a heavy down coat and a Fargo-style hat with ear flaps.

Stride, by contrast, wore only his decades-old leather jacket and a dark green wool cap that bore the word NORTH in red stitching. Fifty-one years in Duluth had made him oblivious to the frigid temperature.

“I’m glad you decided to check out the filming,” Chris went on. “I wasn’t sure we were ever going to see you out here.”

“Actually, it’s not a social call,” Stride said.

“Oh? How so?”

Stride peeled off his gloves and took a phone from his pocket. “This is hard to look at,” he warned Chris. He found a photograph and enlarged it to show the face on the screen.

Chris took a look, then winced and turned away. “Oh, man. Is that guy dead?”

“Very.”

“Who is he?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Stride said. “It’s tough to make out the details of his face in this condition, but I was wondering if you knew him or if he was connected to the film in any way.”

Chris steeled himself and took another glance at the photo. “I don’t think so. I’ve never seen him before. Why would you think he’s part of the movie?”

“He had an article about the film from the National Gazette in his car when we found him.”

Chris couldn’t hide the distaste on his face. “That rag? Well, we’ve had one of their reporters nosing around the set to drum up gossip, but the reporter’s a woman, not a man. What happened to this guy, anyway? Was he murdered?”

“We’re simply trying to identify him.”

“Well, I can ask around if you text me the photo. Maybe someone else knows him. You get a lot of hangers-on at every film set, particularly when you’ve got big-name stars.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“Meanwhile, as long as you’re here, would you like to meet your alter ego?” Chris asked.

Stride spotted Dean Casperson on the other side of the field, surrounded by an entourage. The actor was drinking from a bottle of Fiji water, and like Stride, he seemed unaffected by the cold. Their eyes met. Casperson knew who he was. The actor lifted the water bottle in a toast. He pushed his cowlick away from his eyes and gave Stride the boyish grin that every moviegoer in the world recognized.

“Sure,” Stride said. “Why not?”

*

Dean Casperson.

He’d been one of the biggest box-office draws in the world for almost forty years, ever since his scene-stealing turn in a Robert Altman film as a teenage concert violinist blinded by a blow to the head. He’d left the audience in tears. From that moment forward, he was a star who grew quickly into a legend. Over the years, Casperson had made a specialty of accepting wildly different roles with every new film. It didn’t matter whether he was a hero or a villain or whether the film was a thriller or a comedy. He was simply one of those charismatic players who made you not want to look away from the screen.

He was also one of those rare Hollywood actors who was as popular offscreen as he was in his movies. He steered clear of politics. He had an easy laugh and a humble way about him when he appeared on the nighttime talk shows. He’d been married to his high-school sweetheart, Mo, for decades. Casperson had survived three decades in the world’s most backstabbing business with a reputation as a nice guy, but that was partly because few people really knew him. He and Mo rarely ventured outside their bubble. They kept a small, tight circle of friends. They lived in Florida, not Malibu. They were careful never to let their public masks slip.

Chris Leipold waved Casperson over, and the seas parted for the actor as he crossed the field toward Stride. He carried an aura that made other people defer to him. Casperson extended his hand as the two men met.

“Lieutenant, it’s a pleasure.”

Stride shook his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Casperson. I’m sure you hear this all the time, but I’m a fan.”

In fact, Stride couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a Dean Casperson movie, but he knew that the expected thing to do with famous people was to stroke their egos. He’d met dozens of actors and singers at Duluth events over the years, and most of them were insecure about their fame.

But not Casperson.

The gleam in the actor’s eyes let Stride know that Casperson was well aware that he was being flattered. Obviously, Casperson didn’t need anyone pretending to be starstruck around him.

“That’s kind of you to say, Lieutenant, but all I do is go out and read lines that other people give me. It’s people like you that are the heroes. Police officers. Firefighters. Soldiers. You do the real work.”

Stride smiled, because he knew he was being flattered right back. He was cynical enough to wonder whether Casperson was sincere or simply practiced at saying the right things to strangers.

He sized up the man who was playing him in the movies. Casperson was smaller in real life than he appeared on the big screen. Stride was over six feet tall, and Casperson was at least four inches shorter. The actor was several years older than Stride, but he had the Hollywood ability to appear years younger than he was. At fifty-five, he could have passed for forty. Casperson’s hair was whatever color and style the movie needed it to be. In this case, it was much like Stride’s: wavy, unkempt, and laced with gray. Otherwise, the two men looked nothing like each other. Stride had a weathered face that was like a map of every winter he’d experienced. Casperson’s face featured a strong chin, a sharp nose with a bulb at the end, and arresting sky-blue eyes.

“Are you enjoying Duluth?” Stride asked.

“I am, thanks. You have some of the friendliest people around here that I’ve ever met. I guess that makes up for my balls feeling like ice cubes.”

Stride laughed. “Yeah, welcome to January. Where are you staying while you’re in town?”

“I rented a little place from one of your docs. It’s an area called Congdon Park, I think. Nice. Feels like going back in time. Several of the cast members found places over there.”

Stride doubted that any home Casperson had found in Congdon Park was a little place. More likely, it was a sprawling brick estate from the city’s glamour days in the previous century.

“We should have a drink sometime,” Casperson went on, flashing his grin again. “In fact, we’re having a party for the cast and crew this evening at one of the lakefront restaurants. You should come.”

“Thanks, but we’re in the middle of an investigation right now.”

Casperson squeezed Stride’s arm in a solid grip. “Sure, of course. The job comes first. Enough small talk; you’re a busy man. I appreciate your coming over here so quickly. We’re all worried about Haley.”

Stride cocked his head in confusion. “Who?”

“Haley. Our intern. Aren’t you here about her?”

“Sorry, I’m not.”

When Casperson realized that Stride didn’t know what he was talking about, the actor’s blue eyes shot to Chris Leipold. In that instant, Stride could see an angry flash of the man’s power. It was like watching a tiger and realizing that he could eat you whenever he wanted.

“Didn’t you call him, Chris?” Casperson asked.

Chris wilted in front of the star. “No. We’re still checking around. We didn’t want to push the panic button prematurely.”

“What’s going on?” Stride asked. “Who’s Haley?”

Casperson turned his attention back to Stride, and there was concern in his eyes. “Haley Adams. She’s a local film student who’s been interning with us. She was supposed to be working with my costar, Aimee Bowe, but Haley hasn’t shown up at the set for the last two days. That’s not like her. We’ve had people looking for her ever since, but we haven’t had any luck. She’s missing.”

“I checked the apartment in Hermantown where John Doe was staying,” Maggie told Stride as she climbed into the passenger seat of his Ford Expedition. “He was paid up for the rest of the month, but it looks like he decided to leave early. The room was empty, and we found a suitcase in the trunk when we dug the Impala out of the snowbank.”

“What was in the suitcase?” Stride asked.

“Clothes. That’s all. No personal effects.”

“Was there anything else in the trunk?”

“Like a body?” Maggie asked. “No, he didn’t make it that easy for us. No body, no blood. But I don’t think he was out in the woods doing target practice with his Glock in the middle of a winter storm.”

“Did he leave anything behind at the apartment?” Stride asked.

“Nothing. I mean nothing. We didn’t find so much as a strand of hair in the room. He bleached everything. He even cleaned the drain traps in the sink and shower. This guy was a pro. If that deer hadn’t clocked him, he would have disappeared without a trace.”

Stride frowned. They had an unidentified dead man with a gun who’d taken pains to leave no evidence behind of who he was or why he was in Duluth. John Doe had all the hallmarks of a paid assassin.

And now they had a missing girl, too.

He was parked on Third Avenue in the Central Hillside area, across the street from the apartment of Haley Adams. He wanted to know whether Haley had any connections to John Doe.

“So who was this guy?” Stride asked.

Maggie shook her head. “We still have no clue about his real identity. I had one of the uniforms drive the DNA and fingerprint samples down to the FBI office in the Cities, along with the Glock. I sweet-talked the Gherkin to see if she could expedite a search through their databases.”

Stride’s eyebrows arched. “Sweet talk? You and Gayle?”

“Hey, we’re friends now.”

He suspected that was an exaggeration. Gayle Durkin was an FBI agent and Duluth native who’d worked with his team during the marathon bombing the previous summer. Maggie, who wasn’t known for her love of the feds, had nicknamed her the Gherkin, and the name had followed Gayle ever since. Maggie thought it was funny. Gayle didn’t.

Maggie was an acquired taste for most people. She was full of sharp edges, and she had almost no life outside work. Stride had hired her nearly twenty years earlier, when she was a young, way-too-formal Chinese immigrant with a criminology degree from the University of Minnesota. She’d loosened up and developed a tart tongue over the years. She’d also nursed a romantic crush o