grew slippery with his own blood. He pushed himself up and felt along the wall until it ended, and he spilled into another hallway, tunneling through a house of horrors.
'Help!'
He reached out with his spread fingers, and his hand found the bat-shaped remnants of broken glass in one of the windows. He hammered his bloody palm on the plywood nailed to the outer wall, but the stiff wood refused to yield to his panicked blows. He wailed for someone to hear him in the lonely land outside.
'Help! Oh my God, help me!'
Behind him, out of the darkness, a human hand clapped on his shoulder. Nick screamed and spun. A flashlight dazzled his eyes. He saw the shadow of someone tall and large looming over him like a bear, and he thought for an instant he'd been rescued.
'Oh, thank God,' Nick cried.
His relief was short-lived. A fist as hard and strong as a brick hit his face and snapped his head against the peaks of glass. The light in his eyes went black. Nick tasted pistachios again and realized his mouth was filled with bile. His knees buckled, but as he fell, a powerful forearm locked around his neck, choking him and jerking him off the ground.
His chest roared, bellowing for air.
His legs kicked and flailed.
As he struggled, the cold and the stench slowly disappeared and left him in a vacuum of perfect silence. He floated away from the pain and, eventually, he floated so far that he felt nothing at all. He was somewhere else entirely, listening to water drip like the ticking of seconds on a clock. He was in a cave that he had all to himself. He was exploring.
PART TWO
FRAGILE SOULS
Chapter Sixteen
On Sunday morning, the third day after Callie Glenn disappeared, frustration began to seep into the police war room in downtown Grand Rapids. Stride had seen it before. The first forty-eight hours were an adrenaline rush of urgency and determination. The phones rang incessantly. Emails flew back and forth among agencies throughout the state. Leads overwhelmed the system the way a sudden downpour overflows the sewer drains. No one complained because every contact in those precious early hours was an opportunity to break the case open.
Find a baby girl. Bring her home.
By Sunday, however, the lack of progress began to suck oxygen out of the investigation. Everyone knew that time was an enemy, and the enemy was winning. Two hours after a kidnapping, you can draw a small circle on a map and estimate the maximum area in which a missing person is likely to be found. You can set up road blocks. Canvass the region. Ten hours later, the diameter of the circle grows by hundreds of miles, bulging past the resources of the police to enclose and investigate it. Two days later, the universe of hiding places is essentially limitless.
Stride hoped that Callie Glenn was still alive somewhere within northern Minnesota, but the reality was that she could be anywhere by now.
He pored over hundreds of contact reports, hunting for a needle in a haystack. The tiny office on the third floor of the county headquarters was knee-deep in paper and littered with empty coffee cups and food wrappers. He knew that the dimensions of the search forced them to rely on a simple philosophy: do the right things, and hope they got lucky. If they were going to find Callie, someone had to remember the girl's face. Someone had to see her and make the call, and the police — wherever they were — had to make the right follow-through. He could manage the process, but Stride and the small team inside the Sheriff's Department couldn't have eyes and ears everywhere.
After an hour, he pushed the papers aside and got up and wiped the whiteboard hung on the opposite wall. His instinct was to go back to what really happened on Thursday night. Figure out
Those were the two possibilities. Someone from outside the house came and stole Callie, or someone inside the house took her away. Underneath the OUTSIDE header, he scribbled several bullet points:
Stranger or local?
Had to be Callie or could have been any baby?
Ransom or other motive?
Alive or dead?
Where is she now?
Underneath the INSIDE header, he wrote different comments:
Alive or dead?
Accident or murder?
Marcus or Micki? (Both?)
Where is she now?
Stride stared at what he had written. In the past two days, his team had reconstructed the movements of Marcus and Valerie Glenn — and their baby — over the five days leading up to the disappearance. Members of the Grand Rapids Police and the Itasca County Sheriff's Department had checked every building, house, store, and street in Grand Rapids and Duluth visited by the Glenns during that time, hoping to find a witness who remembered something or someone unusual. The follow-up was continuing, but so far they had no credible evidence of an intruder watching the Glenns or their home.
He wasn't surprised. Grand Rapids was a small town. Even Duluth was small compared to a large urban center like Minneapolis. He doubted that a stranger could identify a target and plan a kidnapping in such a tightly knit region without leaving some kind of trail for them to follow.
So maybe it wasn't a stranger. Maybe it was someone who already knew the Glenns, their baby, and their home. But if that were true, he didn't know how someone local could hope to hide a stolen baby for any length of time without being discovered. How long could you really do that? A week? A month? Sooner or later, someone would expose the secret.
Assuming that Callie was still alive. If not, it was easy to hide a body in the northern woods.
The other question was
He turned his attention to the INSIDE half of the board, which in his mind offered a simpler and more plausible explanation of the crime. Either Marcus Glenn or Migdalia Vega had used the time between ten thirty and one o'clock to make Callie disappear. He had a much easier time ascribing possible motives to either of them, and he had evidence in hand that both had been lying, or at the very least hiding important aspects of their relationship.
Stride knew he needed to talk to them again, and he chose to start with Micki. She was the weak link.
